Language:
English
Year of publication:
1999
Titel der Quelle:
Auto/Biography Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
14,1 (1999) 93-107
Keywords:
Klüger, Ruth,
;
Holocaust survivors
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives
Abstract:
The extreme and the everyday are at once held together and kept forever apart in a mode of representation and historical cognition which Rothberg calls traumatic realism. Examines this view as applied to Ruth Klüger's memoir "weiter leben" (1992) and to examples from the Auschwitz memoirs of Charlotte Delbo. This is a subgenre of Holocaust autobiography that seeks to provide access to a previously unknowable past. This approach challenges the way we think about the camps, stressing distinctions between them and opposing our efforts to "homogenize" or banalize them. Traumatic realism aims at a new form of documentation that mediates the tension between the extreme and the everyday and that forces readers to acknowledge their relationship to post-Holocaust culture.
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