Modern Judaism

I

Ruth Klüger's Weiterleben: Eine Jugend (1992) is one of the first narratives of a series of testimonials of the last members of the generation of Holocaust survivors, which began to appear toward the end of the twentieth century.¹ The author was born in 1931 in Vienna, where her first years of socialization were already marked by a rapidly growing discrimination against the city's Jewish population. In 1942 she was deported together with her mother to Theresienstadt and eventually to Auschwitz, whose death machinery she survived by shear luck and her determination to live. At the age of sixteen, she emigrated to the United States, where she eventually became a professor of German literature. In the late 1980s she returned to Göttingen in Germany as the director of an American study abroad program. After her recovery from serious injuries stemming from a traffic accident, she decided to write down the recollections of her youth and her reflections on life. Her dedication, "To my Göttinger friends. A German book" (p. 284), at the very end of her memoirs clearly indicates that they were primarily written for a German audience.²

Klüger's narrative is structured by a literary subtext, which surfaces twice, thereby framing the account in a subtle but substantive manner. It makes its first appearance in the labor camps, when Ruth's mother asked one of the "friendly foreman" (p. 160) to bring her daughter a book, since she loves to read. To her surprise, the man does bring her some reading material the next day; it is a torn textbook, and the author can no longer remember any of the texts with the exception of the "Easter Walk" from Goethe's Faust, which includes the famous line: "River and brooks are freed from ice" (p. 161).³ The young girl was immediately touched by these lines and their evocative imagery. For her they resonated with both the end of the exceptionally [End Page 189] cold winter and the beginning withdrawal of the German army from the advancing allies. Faust's intimation of spring, "and hope grows green throughout the dale" (p. 161), was a hermetic harbinger of the coming liberation. The second reference to Goethe's epic poem occurs when the author begins to recover from her accident injuries in Göttingen several decades later. Here she associates the process of healing with Faust's "Healing Sleep" (p. 276) at the beginning of the second part of Goethe's verse drama, and Klüger's joyous recognition of her recovery again resonates with lines from Faust's "Easter Walk": "The ice is melting, the chain, it comes asunder" (p. 276). Thus, the emblematic masterpiece of German literature figures also as a key narrative for both the author's liberation from the death camps and her recovery from her life-threatening injuries. In addition, the Faustian frame adumbrates the concept of Germany as a nation of Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers), as Madame de Stael's De l'Allemagne (1810) had defined and popularized it during the nineteenth century. However, through its Faustian Pact with ultimate Evil in the twentieth century, the country of famous Dichter und Denker had become one of infamous Richter und Henker (judges and henchmen).⁴

This transformation of lofty humanism into humanity's profoundest catastrophe can be described as a verkehrte Welt, a world turned upside down. A seminal trope in the genesis of the gothic novel in German Romanticism, it became a ghastly reality in Nazi Germany. Not surprisingly, Klüger's experiences of the Holocaust are marked in various ways by this verkehrte Welt phenomenon. The author introduces the term herself, when she remembers her arrival in Auschwitz. Baffled by her observation that prisoners who had lower numbers seemed to act superior because they had lived longer in Auschwitz, she begins to wonder about the (in)sanity of these temporary survivors and sums up her amazement with the non sequitur "verkehrte Welt" (p. 114). Throughout the years of her stays in concentration...