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In this groundbreaking study of Francophone Jewish poetry of the Shoah, Gary D. Mole engages with an extensive corpus of poetry by more than forty poets, all of whom were active after the war in France, Belgium, Switzerland, or Quebec but who came originally from Eastern Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East. Some were adolescents or adults during the war, either in hiding, interned or deported, first-hand witnesses to the Nazi persecution of European Jews. Others were hidden children, survivors writing of their buried traumatic experiences many years later. And a second-generation born after the war became postmemory proxy witnesses. Broadly chronological in approach, the book places the poetry in its various social, political, and historical contexts, underlines the specific geographical locations of the authors, and offers close thematic, formal, stylistic, and linguistic readings of the selected texts, highlighting some of the major aesthetic and ethical problems raised. Lucidly written, this book throws critical light, for scholars and nonspecialists, on a rich and unjustly neglected corpus, arguing convincingly for its inclusion in current debates on French-language literary representations of the Shoah and more widely in what is commonly referred to as'Holocaust Poetry.''Voices of Pain, Cries of Silence is a comprehensive, lucid, and erudite study of Francophone Jewish poetry of the Holocaust. Unlike the work of English-language Holocaust poets, French-language verse has been until now largely ignored. By ensuring that Francophone Jewish poets are finally heard, Voices of Pain, Cries of Silence constitutes an important scholarly intervention in the study of Holocaust literature.'—Helena Duffy, Professor of French, University of Wrocław, Poland'An astonishing, comparative, comprehensive, and powerful scan of the various forms of poetic writing in French about the Shoah, never presented in this scope before, by authors belonging to a large variety of national and cultural backgrounds, providing the foundation of texts to be considered in future scholarship on poetry of the Shoah in other languages.'—Thomas Nolden, Professor of Comparative Literary Studies, Wellesley College, Mass

Nach dem „Zivilisationsbruch'Auschwitz hatten alle Versuche, sich in deutscher Sprache dieser lange tabuisierten Vergangenheit zu stellen, gegen Vorbehalte und Misstrauen zu kämpfen, und sie mussten zuerst ihre Form finden, die das Unsagbare doch auszudrücken erlaubte. Dass es unmöglich sei, über Auschwitz zu sprechen, und doch genau das bis heute unermüdlich zu tun sei, ist eine noch immer aktuelle Forderung. Forschungsarbeiten zu den Versuchen, sich mit der Shoah literarisch zu befassen, gibt es inzwischen in großer Zahl, und das entstandene recht differenzierte Bild vermag deutlich die historischen, ästhetischen und politischen Akzente in der sehr komplexen deutschsprachigen Shoah-Literatur nachzuzeichnen. Die literarische Auseinandersetzung (und erst recht die historische) sowie die Diskussion darüber sind aber kein Phänomen einer nun abgeschlossenen Vergangenheit. Die literarische Auseinandersetzung mit Auschwitz ist weiterhin Thema deutschsprachiger Literatur.

The author's starting point is the interweaving of forgiveness and resentment in the works of Jewish writers after the Holocaust, most especially Hannah Arendt and Jean Améry, to make sense of the catastrophe and to point to a way forward for both victims and perpetrators. The insights of these two writers and of several Jewish novelists and poets, including Bruno Schulz, Paul Celan, and Aharon Appelfeld, are used to develop accounts of forgiveness and resentment in other cases of mass atrocity around the world. The author offers a critical rereading of primary sources that aim to separate resentment from nonviolent resistance, and forgiveness from reconciliation. Forgiveness and resentment are not, as they might first appear, mutually exclusive. Together with Arendt, Améry, and Walter Benjamin, it is argued that it is through the interaction between them that victims of mass atrocity become agents of personal and cultural change. Together, forgiveness and resentment interrupt the present, reframe the past, and shape the future. They can reduce the chasm that separates memory and trust by fashioning new connections between identity and alterity, which can open paths to truly ethical coexistence for victims and perpetrators, and their descendants.

This book examines the interrelationships between trauma, time, and narrative in the novel The Journey (1962) by the scholar, novelist, poet, and Holocaust survivor H. G. Adler. Drawing on Paul Ricœur's philosophy of time and studies of time in literature, Julia Menzel analyzes how Adler's novel depicts the experience of time as a dimension of Holocaust victims'trauma. She explores the aesthetic temporality of The Journey and presents a new interpretation of the literary text, which she conceives of as a modern “Zeit-Roman” (time novel). Die Studie untersucht die Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Trauma, Zeit und Erzählung in dem Roman Eine Reise (1962) des Wissenschaftlers, Schriftstellers, Dichters und Holocaust-Überlebenden H. G. Adler. Unter Bezugnahme auf Paul Ricœurs Zeitphilosophie und die literaturwissenschaftliche Zeitforschung analysiert Julia Menzel, wie Adlers Roman traumatische Zeiterfahrungen der Opfer des Holocaust zur Darstellung bringt. Sie erkundet die ästhetische Eigenzeit von Eine Reise und eröffnet eine neue Lesart des literarischen Texts, den sie als modernen Zeit-Roman begreift.

Entgegen einer weit verbreiteten Annahme gab es in der DDR eine Reihe von literarischen Auseinandersetzungen mit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung, die sich der offiziellen sozialistischen Geschichtsdeutung verweigerten. Im Gegensatz zur Holocaustliteratur der Bundesrepublik wurden diese in der Forschung bislang jedoch kaum betrachtet. Die Studie macht erstmalig das Spektrum der Autoren sichtbar, die unter den restriktiven Bedingungen der staatlichen Erinnerungspolitik der DDR und ihres Literatursystems die Shoah literarisch zu fassen versuchten. Die Analyse paradigmatischer Texte von jüdischen und nichtjüdischen Autoren wie Stephan Hermlin, Jurek Becker und Franz Fühmann hinsichtlich inhaltlicher und ästhetischer, gesellschaftspolitischer und individuell-biographischer Dimensionen und Kontexte zeigt: Die Shoah-Literatur der DDR erweist sich als anschlussfähig an trans- und internationale Fragen im Umgang mit dem Holocaust.

This first sustained exploration of W.G. Sebald's engagement with Jews and Jewishness provides new insights into controversial tropes and stereotypes in his narrative prose.German writer W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) has been hailed, together with Primo Levi, as the'prime speaker of the Holocaust,'a breathtaking claim that casts Levi, survivor of Auschwitz, and Sebald, progeny of the German perpetrator generation, in an unlikely pairing that confirms Sebald's status as the preeminent German writer concerned with the Jewish experience in recent history. Recipient of a Koret Jewish Book Award for his'extraordinary evocation of the last century's greatest trauma,'Sebald has been widely valorized for restoring individuality to the Jewish victims he portrays.Sebald's Jews challenges Sebald's position as the moral conscience of a nation struggling to repair the German-Jewish relationship. It argues that despite the varied and quasi-documentary life stories of the Jews who people his narrative prose, and despite his intentions, Sebald's elaborate figural writing fashions Jewish characters as tropes for the conflicts that troubled his generation, allegories that vitiate Jewish individuality and evoke age-old and malign Jewish stereotypes. The book provides new insights into Sebald's ambiguous engagement with Jewishness by revising the notion that he restores individuality to Jewish lives and avoids the generalized treatment of Jews he excoriated in the writing of his German peers. The study reflects a shift in Sebald research that reassesses his revered position by examining controversial aspects of his oeuvre. It provides a much-needed broadening of Sebald scholarship.

How can genocide be witnessed through imaginative literature? How can the Holocaust affect readers who were not there?Reading the work of major figures such as Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Avrom Sutzkever, Ida Fink, Wladyslaw Szlengel, Itzhak Katzenelson, and Czeslaw Milosz, Poesis in Extremis poses fundamental questions about how prose and poetry are written under extreme conditions, either in real time or immediately after the Holocaust. Framed by discussion of literary testimony, with Wiesel's literary memoir Night as an entry point, this innovative study explores the blurred boundary of fact and fiction in Holocaust literature. It asks whether there is a poetics of the Holocaust and what might be the criteria for literary witnessing. Wartime writing in particular tests the limits of “poesis in extremis” when poets faced their own annihilation and wrote in the hope that their words, like a message in a bottle, would somehow reach readers. Through Poesis in Extremis, Daniel Feldman and Efraim Sicher probe the boundaries of Holocaust literature, as well as the limits of representation.

Anna Langfus a contribué à un renouvellement majeur de la littérature de la Shoah, qui, avant ses publications, était largement dominée par le récit du témoin. Elle est l'auteure de pièces de théâtre et de trois romans : Le Sel et le soufre (1960), Les Bagages de sable (1962), lauréat du prix Goncourt, et Saute, Barbara (1965). Bien qu'ayant vécu les horreurs du génocide, elle n'a pas exprimé sa souffrance par l'autobiographie. Dans son œuvre elle explore, sans pathos, la tragédie des survivants atteints par ce qu'elle appelle « la maladie de la guerre ». Ce livre étudie, entre autres, la spécificité des textes de Langfus. Ecrits à une époque où prévalait l'ethos de la victimisation, de la repentance et parfois du manichéisme, ils nous invitent à tenir à distance toute idéalisation ou fausse consolation. Anna Langfus participated in a major renewal of Holocaust literature which had been mainly testimonial and witness-focused prior to her publications. She is the author of theater plays and of three novels: Le Sel et le soufre (1960), Les Bagages de sable (1962), awarded with the Prix Goncourt, and Saute, Barbara (1965). She experienced the horrors of the Holocaust, but she refused to express her grief through autobiography. Through her work she explores, without pathos, the tragedy of those who survived, and what Anna Langfus herself calls “la maladie de la guerre”: the war disease. This books examines, among other issues, the specificity of Langfus's texts. Written at a time when an ethos of victimization, repentance, and sometimes Manichaeism was dominant, Langfus's they urge us to keep any form of idealization or false consolation at a distance.

This book highlights the need for a shift from thinking in terms of memories of traumatic events, to changeable modes of remembrance. The call for a fundamental change in approaches to commemorative remembrance is exemplified in literature written by the internationally acclaimed writer, Etgar Keret. Considered the most influential Israeli voice of his generation, Keret's storytelling is in congruence with postmodern thinking. Through transferring remembrance of the Holocaust from stagnant Holocaust commemoration—museums and commemorative ceremonies—to unconventional settings, such as youngsters playing soccer or being forced to venture outdoors in a COVID-19 pandemic environment, Keret's storytelling ushers in a unique approach to coping with remembrance of historical catastrophes. The book is a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in pursuing the subjects of Etgar Keret's artistry, and literature written in a post modern, post Holocaust milieu about personal and collective traumatic remembrance.

Erinnern und Erzählen sind biologisch wie psychologisch unverzichtbar für den Menschen. Zwangsläufig wird dabei Faktisches mit Fiktivem vermischt. In der Literatur bieten mit fiktiven Mitteln gestaltete Erzählungen bestimmte erweiterte Möglichkeiten der Konstruktion von Geschichten. Sie bedienen teilweise auch andere Anliegen, z.B. Leser:innen empathisch zu erreichen. Daher gibt es von 1933 an bis heute trotz aller kritischen Diskurse ein anhaltendes Bedürfnis, auch in Romanen über den Holocaust zu erzählen. Ihr zentraler Erzählgegenstand sind meist Extremerfahrungen und deren traumatische Auswirkungen. Das Buch zeigt auf, wie vielstimmig und erzählerisch unterschiedlich, aber auch wie bedeutsam diese Werke der Holocaust- und Lagerliteratur sind.

The Bildungsroman in a Genocidal Age argues that the humanist ideal of Bildung, the cultivation of the potentialities of the self through self-reflection, travel, and varied social intercourse, has been revitalized in an age of genocidal violence. It examines the Bildungsroman as a flourishing intermedial genre encompassing contemporary historical fiction, historical feature films, and children's and YA literature. Analysing a number of highly influential novels and films about the Holocaust and World War II (WWII), the book argues that the narrative strategies of the Bildungsroman, which includes a swerve away from'home'and its parochialism and moral certainties, has contributed to shaping audience perceptions of traumatic histories and their ethical implications in the twenty-first century. The Bildungsroman in a Genocidal Age examines some of the most keenly discussed, and controversial historical fictions of recent decades including The Remains of the Day (1989), The Kindly Ones (2006, English trans. 2009), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), and Margarethe von Trotta's biopic Hannah Arendt (2012). It argues that in portraying a protagonist who defers or refuses a prescribed social destiny, these novels and films are sensitive to the'Eichmann problematic'of the'banality of evil'as formulated by Hannah Arendt. These Bildungsromane, the study suggests, are designed to address the problem of the social reproduction of normative, unimaginative, and conformist mindsets that can enable totalitarian politics and genocidal policies.

«Dr. Laima Vincė Sruoginis, an established author, academic, and lifelong part of the North American Lithuanian diaspora, courageously faces Lithuania's difficult historical legacy in her ground-breaking book. She researched her community's refugee ancestors, drawing both from personal interviews and dusty academic sources, confronting uncomfortable truths.» (Philip S. Shapiro, President, Remembering Litvaks, Inc.) As World War II ended, refugees fled Soviet-occupied Lithuania, finding shelter in the displaced persons camps of Europe. By 1949, most had emigrated to North America. They brought with them opposing narratives about the Nazi occupation (1941–1944) when 95 percent of Lithuania's Jewish community was annihilated. Trauma narratives were passed down to the second and third generations through collective memory. Through postmemory, cultural memory, and trauma theory, Vanished Lands analyzes literary works by North American Jewish and Lithuanian writers who speak over the silence of decades, seeking answers.

The Witness and the Body in Auschwitz: Early Literary Accounts of the Camp Experience examines bodily descriptions from early testimonies of concentration camp survivors focusing on questions related to meanings of corporeality, as well as to Holocaust researchers, and links the discourse of the body with a social cartography of the Auschwitz camp complex. The heart of the book is comprised of memory-based texts written by survivors in the early years after the war. The early texts discussed were written in Polish and while some became internationally recognized, others, remain virtually unknown, especially outside of Poland. These early memoirs and literary works help navigate the space of the Auschwitz camp complex from the perspective of the victims'based on their experiences and decipher those areas devoid of narratives, spaces of “total annihilation.” Literary accounts and early testimonies allow us to map the space of the camp differently than through the documents produced by the Nazi-perpetrators. Such a social cartography also includes specific gendered differences and allows Karwowska to critically analyze sensitive questions related to the body, gender, and sexuality of a prisoner.

Experimentelle Texte über Holocaust und Nationalsozialismus fallen durch ein Forschungsraster. Durch ihre sperrige Form entziehen sie sich den Kategorien der memory studies – wegen ihrer brisanten Thematik sind sie ungeeignet für das rein formale Erkenntnisinteresse der klassischen Narratologie. Getragen von der Idee, dass Erzählformen selbst erzählen, verfolgt diese Untersuchung zwei Ziele. Zunächst wird eine allgemeine Typologie experimentellen Erzählens entworfen. Darauf folgen Analysen von Erzähltexten der Gegenwartsliteratur: Heldenfriedhof von Thomas Harlan, Morbus Kitahara von Christoph Ransmayr, Nahe Jedenew von Kevin Vennemann, Harlem Holocaust von Maxim Biller und Frühling von Thomas Lehr. Im Mittelpunkt stehen dabei die Funktionen experimentellen Erzählens mit Blick auf den ‚Undarstellbarkeitstopos‘ in seinen verschiedenen Variationen.

Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature offers fresh approaches to understanding how grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators treat their traumatic legacies. The contributors to this volume present a two-fold perspective: that the past continues to live in the lives of the third generation and that artistic responses to trauma assume a variety of genres, including film, graphic novels, and literature. This generation is acculturated yet set apart from their peers by virtue of their traumatic inheritance. The chapters raise several key questions: How is it possible to negotiate the difference between what Daniel Mendelson terms proximity and distance? How can the post-post-memorial generation both be faithful to Holocaust memory and embrace a message of hope? Can this generation play a constructive educational role? And, finally, why should society care? At a time when the lessons and legacies of Auschwitz are either banalized or under assault, the authors in this volume have a message which ideally should serve to morally center those who live after the event.

The title of this monograph, ‘Polish-Jewish Re-Remembering', refers to the post-1989, thirty-year-long process of reviving attention to Polish-Jewish relations in historical, cultural, and literary studies, including the impact of Jews on the development of Polish culture, their presence in Polish social life, and the relationships between Jews and non-Jews in Poland. The book consists of four parts: the first focuses on Polish, Jewish and Polish-Jewish Literature (dealing mainly with pre-1939 literary works); the second, on the post-war literary output of the Polish-Jewish writer Arnold Słucki (1920–1972); the third, on Polish-Israeli literary images in the works of writers who were active in Israel (1948–2018); and the fourth, on recent (after 2000) Polish Holocaust literature.

Literature and Justice in Mid Twentieth Century Britain: Crime and War Crimes examines how ideas about crime, criminality, and judicial procedure that had developed in a domestic context influenced the representation and understanding of war crimes trials, victims of war crimes, and war criminals in post-Second World War Britain. The representation of Belsen concentration camp and the subsequent British-run trial of its personnel are a particular focal point. Drawing on a range of source material including life-writing, journalism, and detective fiction, as well as criminological and sociological works from this period, this book explains why the fate of the Jews and other victims of the Nazis was sometimes brought starkly into focus and sometimes marginalised in public discourse at this period. What remain are glimpses of the events now called the Holocaust, but glimpses that can be as powerful and as meaningful as more direct or explicit representations.

This study investigates six German Jewish writers'negotiation of Jewish-German-Communist identity in post-Holocaust East Germany.This study investigates the negotiation of Jewish-German-Communist identity in post-Holocaust Germany, specifically East Germany. After an introduction to the political-historical context, it highlights the conflicted writings of six East German Jewish writers: Anna Seghers (1900-1983), Stefan Heym (1913-2001), Stephan Hermlin (1915-1997), Jurek Becker (1937-1997), Peter Edel (1921-1983), and Fred Wander (1917-2006). All were Holocaust survivors. All lost family members in the Holocaust. All were important writers who played a leading role in East German cultural life, and all were loyal citizens and committed socialists, although their definitions of and maneuvers regarding Party loyalty differed greatly. Good soldiers, they viewed their writing as contributing to the social-political revolution taking place in East Germany. Informed by Holocaust and trauma studies, as well as psychology and deconstruction, this study looks for moments when Party discipline falters and other, repressed, thoughts and emotions surface, decentering the works. Some recurring questions addressed include: What is the image of Germans? Do the works evidence revenge fantasies? How does the negotiation of ostensibly mutually exclusive identities play out? Is there acknowledgment of the insufficiency of Communist theory to explain antisemitism, as well as recognition of Stalinist or other forms of Communist antisemitism? Although these writers ultimately established themselves in East Germany, attaining positions of privilege and even power, their best works nonetheless evince an acute sense of endangerment and vulnerability; they are documents both created and marked by trauma.

This book discusses the issues underlying contemporary Holocaust fiction. Using Gillian Rose's theory of Holocaust piety, it argues that, rather than enhancing our understanding of the Holocaust, contemporary fiction has instead become overly focused on gratuitous representations of bodies in pain. The book begins by discussing the locations and imagery which have come to define our understanding of the Holocaust, before then highlighting how this gradual simplification has led to an increasing sense of emotional distance from the historical past. Holocaust fiction, the book argues, attempts to close this emotional and temporal distance by creating an emotional connection to bodies in pain. Using different concepts relating to embodied experience – from Sonia Kruks'notion of feeling-with to Alison Landsberg's prosthetic memory – the book analyses several key examples of Holocaust literature and film to establish whether fiction still possesses the capacity to approach the Holocaustimpiously.

«In this insightful book, Stephanie Homer interrogates how different genre conventions (memoir, autobiographical fiction and novels) influence the representation of the Kindertransport. Her theoretical approach is sophisticated, her selection of texts judicious and representative. Homer's contribution to the study of the reception history of the Kindertransport is important and timely.» (Bill Niven, Professor of Contemporary German History, Nottingham Trent University) «An immensely valuable intervention into studies of Kindertransport representations, this book invites readers into the ambiguities of memory. With clarity and confidence, the book explores the liberating creative potential of autobiographical fiction and polyphonic fictional voices which have reimagined the places and perspectives on Kindertransport as a migratory experience and literary compulsion. The book makes an important contribution to our understanding of Kindertransport literature as a genuinely transnational genre of witnessing and re-witnessing.» (Dr Simone Gigliotti, Senior Lecturer in Holocaust Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London) With the dwindling number of Kindertransportees alive today, the living memory of this rescue operation is being transformed into cultural memory, a trend noticeable in the publication of popular Kindertransport fiction since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This change in memory invites the following questions: how is the child refugee's experience remembered, represented and reimagined in literature? And, consequently, what understanding of the Kindertransport is being transmitted to the following generations? Drawing on understandings of genre, narratology and empathy, this book examines works in English, German and Dutch from three literary genres: memoirs and autobiographical fiction by Kindertransportees and recent fiction by authors with no first-hand experience of the Kindertransport. This study exposes the various conventions, tensions and reader expectations attached to each genre and how these influence the author's construction of the text and, in turn, the nature of the representation. This topical research engages in debates at the heart of current discussions on Holocaust and Kindertransport memory, such as the limits of representability, the «unspeakability» of trauma, and issues of ethics and aesthetics in a post-survivor era.

In Making German Jewish Literature Anew, Katja Garloff traces the emergence of a new Jewish literature in Germany and Austria from 1990 to the present. The rise of new generations of authors who identify as both German and Jewish, and who often sustain additional affiliations with places such as France, Russia, or Israel, affords a unique opportunity to analyze the foundational moments of diasporic literature. Making German Jewish Literature Anew is structured around a series of founding gestures: performing authorship, remaking memory, and claiming places. Garloff contends that these founding gestures are literary strategies that reestablish the very possibility of a German Jewish literature several decades after the Holocaust.Making German Jewish Literature Anew offers fresh interpretations of second-generation authors such as Maxim Biller, Doron Rabinovici, and Barbara Honigmann as well as of third-generation authors, many of whom come from Eastern European and/or mixed-religion backgrounds. These more recent writers include Benjamin Stein, Lena Gorelik, and Katja Petrowskaja. Throughout the book, Garloff asks what exactly marks a given text as Jewish—the author's identity, intended audience, thematic concerns, or stylistic choices—and reflects on existing definitions of Jewish literature.

Addressing the question of why many Latin American fiction authors are writing about Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust now, this book charts the evolution of Latin American literary production from the 19th Century, through the late 20th century'Boom', to the present day. Containing texts from Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, it analyses work by some of the most well-known contemporary writers including Roberto Bolaño, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Jorge Volpi, Lucía Puenzo, Patricio Pron and Michel Laub; as well as notable precursors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes and Ricardo Piglia. Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust in Contemporary Latin American Fiction argues that these authors find Nazism relevant to thinking through some of the most urgent contemporary challenges we face: from racism, to the unequal division of wealth and labour between the Global'North'and'South'; and, of course, the general failure of democracy to eliminate fascism.

This volume collects original essays on Hungarian-German playwright and screenwriter George Tabori (1914–2007) and his remarkable contributions to the stage. Tabori, a Jewish refugee and a truly transnational author, was best known for his work in New York theater that irreverently explored the Jewish experience, particularly the Holocaust. Although his illustrious career spanned a century, two continents, several languages, and a variety of literary genres, Tabori's work has received scant attention in American letters, in spite of its significance for U.S. theater and Holocaust studies. Until Tabori, most dramas about the Holocaust were either rooted in American domestic realism, striving to create a strong empathetic connection between the audience and Holocaust victims, or featured an unembellished documentary style. Tabori staked out a third position, beyond realism and documentation. The volume brings together the voices of international scholars to provide a comprehensive introduction to Tabori's theater as well as in-depth analyses of his work, discussing all of his major plays. Individual essays address Tabori's postdramatic theater in relation to sacrificial ritual, performance studies, and post-humanist approaches to the contemporary stage, as well as performance aspects of his productions, questions of ethics and aesthetics raised by his theater, and his plays'relation to Holocaust representation in popular culture.

This book is a groundbreaking study of one of the greatest science fiction writers, the Polish master Stanisław Lem. It offers a new direction in research on his oeuvre and corrects several errors commonly appearing in his biographies. The author painstakingly recreates the context of Lem's early life and his traumatic experiences during the Second World War due to his Jewish background, and then traces these through original and brilliant readings of his fiction and non-fiction. She considers language, worldbuilding, themes, motifs and characterization as well as many buried allusions to the Holocaust in Lem's published and archival work, and uses these fragments to capture a different side of Lem than previously known. The book discusses various issues concerning the writer's life, such as his upbringing in a Jewish, Zionist-minded family, the extensive relations between the Lem family and the elite of Lviv at that time, details of the Lem family killed during the German occupation and attempts to reconstruct what happened to Lem's parents and to the writer himself after escaping the ghetto.Part of the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, this English translation of the Polish original, which has already been considered a milestone in Lem studies, offers a fresh perspective on the writer and his work. It will be an important intervention for scholars and researchers of Jewish studies, Holocaust literature, science fiction studies, English literature, world war studies, minority studies, popular culture, history and cultural studies.

O livro examina contos e romances judaico-brasileiros publicados entre 1986 e 2016 que, através de uma estética de pós-memória, de realismo traumático e de embaçamento dos géneros literários, tratam da memória e do impacto da Destruição na vida dos judeus e das judias nascidas no Brasil. A análise literária cultural é realizada dentro do quadro de filiações e afiliações dos textos, demostrando que a literatura pós-Holocausto emergente do Brasil oferece espaço para uma perlaboração polimórfica do legado da violência sistémica no Ocidente.

Die Literatur von Überlebenden der Shoah zeichnet sich oft durch einen kühlen, sachlichen Ton und eine luzide Nüchternheit aus. Welche Bedeutung kommt diesen Stilmerkmalen in der literarischen Auseinandersetzung der Autorinnen und Autoren mit den eigenen Erlebnissen zu? Wie lassen sich die erzählerischen und essayistischen Strategien zusammenführen? Bianca Patricia Pick legt in ihrer Untersuchung der autobiographischen und fiktionalen Texte der jüdischen Verfolgten Albert Drach, Jean Améry, Edgar Hilsenrath, Imre Kertész und Ruth Klüger ein Hauptaugenmerk auf die Deutungskategorie der Distanz als Schreibverfahren, das Züge des Sarkastischen, Grotesken, des Ressentiments und des Protokolls annimmt.

Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, Austria, Italy and Israel: “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” as a Historical Quest offers an account on post-war coming-to-terms with the Holocaust tragedy in some European countries, such as Germany, Austria, and Italy. The subject has attracted more attention in recent years, since the long transition to liberal democracy seems to have put an end to the main theme of the memory of the Second World War. The main point of the volume is the making of a new generational memory after the “end of history”. What is to be done after the making of a globalised world? What about the memorialisation of the last century?

La tragédie de l'Holocauste surgit dans les oeuvres de Romain Gary, Georges Perec et Patrick Modiano sous la forme d'une interrogation tourmentée des origines. Pourtant, ils abordent ces thèmes chacun d'une manière singulière, en raison d'un vécu historique différent : celui de héros de la Résistance pour Gary, d'« enfant caché » pour Perec et de « fils de collabo » pour Modiano. Identité et mémoire se rejoignent ainsi dans des récits qui mettent continuellement en jeu les pierres angulaires du moi, se reconstruisant et se déconstruisant, sans jamais se définir de façon définitive. En ce sens, le ressassement identitaire des trois auteurs peut être lu dans la réécriture d'une série de motifs autobiographiques, d'origine traumatique, mais aussi en relation avec la création d'une posture d'auteur, d'un nom d'auteur et d'un corpus littéraire, jouant sur les notes d'une variation esthétique essentielle.

Examines how German-Jewish writers from Eastern Europe who migrated to Germany during or after the Cold War have widened European cultural memory to include the traumas of the Gulag.Preserving the memory of the Holocaust as a moral and ethical limit case is key to the European Union's attempt to construct a pan-European identity. But with the Eastern expansion of the EU, new member states have challenged the Holocaust's singularity, calling for the traumas of the Stalinist Gulag to be acknowledged much more explicitly. Thus even though Europe has been unified politically, it is divided by its diverging perceptions of the past. Jessica Ortner argues that German-Jewish writers from Eastern Europe and the GDR who migrated to Germany as refugees during or after the Cold War have responded critically to the need to widen European cultural memory to include the traumatic experiences of the East. The writers focused on include Katja Petrowskaja, Olga Grjasnowa, Lena Gorelik, Vladimir Vertlib, and Barbara Honigmann. A central focus of the book is the'traveling of memories'from Eastern Europe and the GDR to (Western) Germany and Austria. Introducing the term'literature of mnemonic migration,'Ortner asserts that these authors'writings negotiate the mnemonic divide between East and West. They criticize the normative memory politics of both Germany and the Soviet Union and address not only the politically explosive question of how to remember both National Socialism and Communism but also the status of Jews in contemporary Germany.

Examines textual representations of the consciousness of men responsible for committing Holocaust crimes. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction examines texts that portray the inner experience of Holocaust perpetrators and thus transform them from archetypes of evil into complex psychological and moral subjects. Employing relevant methodological tools of narrative theory, Erin McGlothlin analyzes these unsettling depictions, which manifest a certain tension regarding the ethics of representation and identification. Such works, she asserts, endeavor to make transparent the mindset of their violent subjects, yet at the same time they also invariably contrive to obfuscate in part its disquieting character. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfictioncontains two parts. The first focuses on portraits of real-life perpetrators in nonfictional interviews and analyses from the 1960s and 1970s. These works provide a nuanced perspective on the mentality of the people who implemented the Holocaust via the interventional role of the interviewer or interpreter in the perpetrators'performances of self-disclosure. In part two, McGlothlin investigates more recent fictional texts that imagine the perspective of their invented perpetrator-narrators. Such works draw readers directly into the perpetrator's experience and at the same time impede their access to the perpetrator's consciousness by retarding their affective connection. Demonstrating that recent fiction featuring perpetrators as narrators employs strategies derived from earlier nonfictional portrayals, McGlothlin establishes not only a historical connection between these two groups of texts, whereby nonfictional engagement with real-life perpetrators gradually gives way to fictional exploration, but also a structural and aesthetic one. The book bespeaks new modes of engagement with ethically fraught questions raised by our increasing willingness to consider the events of the Holocaust from the perspective of the perpetrator. Students, scholars, and readers of Holocaust studies and literary criticism will appreciate this closer look at a historically taboo topic.

This book is a case study into the affective history of Holocaust drama offering a new perspective on the impact of The Diary of Anne Frank, the pivotal 1950s play that was a turning point in Holocaust consciousness. Despite its overwhelming success, criticism of the Broadway makeover has been harsh, suggesting that the alleged Americanization would not do justice to the violence of the Holocaust or Anne Frank's budding Jewishness. This study revisits these issues by focusing on the play's European appropriation delving into the emotional intensity with which the play was produced and received. The core of the exploration is a history of the Dutch staging in ethnographic detail, based on unique archival material such as correspondence with Otto Frank, prompt books, original tapes, blueprints of the set and oral history. The microhistory of the first Dutch performance of the stage adaptation of Anne Frank's diary examines the staging in the context of the postwar hesitant development of publicly voiced Holocaust consciousness. Influenced by memory studies and affect theory, the emphasis is on the emotional impact of the drama on both the members of the cast and the audience and will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater and performance studies, memory studies, cultural history, Jewish studies, Holocaust studies and contemporary European history.

The essays in Shadows in the City of Light explore the significance of Paris in the writing of five influential French writers—Sarah Kofman, Patrick Modiano, George Perec, Henri Raczymow, and Irene Nemirovsky—whose novels and memoirs capture and probe the absences of deported Paris Jews. These writers move their readers through wartime and postwar cityscapes of Paris, walking them through streets and arrondissments where Jews once resided, looking for traces of the disappeared. The city functions as more than a backdrop or setting. Its streets and buildings and monuments remind us of the exhilarating promise of the French Revolution and what it meant for Jews dreaming of equality. But the dynamic space of Paris also reminds us of the Holocaust and its aftermath. The shadowed paths traced by these writers raise complicated questions about ambivalence, absence, memory, secularity, and citizenship. In their writing, the urban landscape itself bears witness to the absent Jews, and what happened to them.For the writers treated in this volume, neither their Frenchness nor their Jewishness is a fixed point. Focusing on Paris's dual role as both a cultural hub and a powerful symbol of hope and conflict in Jewish memory, the contributors address intersections and departures among these writers. Their complexity of thought, artistry, and depth of vision shape a new understanding of the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish and French identity, on literature and literary forms, and on the development of Jewish secular culture in Western Europe.

In No One's Witness Syd Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi holocaust survivor Paul Celan—“No one / bears witness for the / witness”—to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing. Drawing on black studies, continental philosophy, queer theory, experimental poetics, and work by several writers and artists, Zolf asks what it means to witness from the excessive, incalculable position of No One. In a fragmentary and recursive style that enacts the monstrous speech it pursues, No One's Witness demonstrates the necessity of confronting the Nazi holocaust in relation to transatlantic slavery and its afterlives. Thinking along with black feminist theory's notions of entangled swarm, field, plenum, chorus, No One's Witness interrogates the limits and thresholds of witnessing, its dangerous perhaps. No One operates outside the bounds of the sovereign individual, hauntologically informed by the fleshly no-thingness that has been historically ascribed to blackness and that blackness enacts within, apposite to, and beyond the No One. No One bears witness to becomings beyond comprehension, making and unmaking monstrous forms of entangled future anterior life.

“Literature of the Holocaust” courses, whether taught in high schools or at universities, necessarily cover texts from a broad range of international contexts. Instructors are required, regardless of their own disciplinary training, to become comparatists and discuss all works with equal expertise. This books offers analyses of the ways in which representations of the Holocaust—whether in text, film, or material culture—are shaped by national context, providing a valuable pedagogical source in terms of both content and methodology. As memory yields to post-memory, nation of origin plays a larger role in each re-telling, and the chapters in this book explore this notion covering well-known texts like Night (Hungary), Survival in Auschwitz (Italy), MAUS (United States), This Way to the Gas (Poland), and The Reader (Germany), while also introducing lesser-known representations from countries like Argentina or Australia.

Blick ins BuchDieses Buch präsentiert und analysiert literarische Träume der Shoah aus einer wissenspoetischen Perspektive. Ob in unmittelbarer Nähe zu den Konzentrationslagern oder aus der Distanz heraus entstanden; ob von Überlebenden selbst oder von den Nachgeborenen verfasst: Indem Christiane Solte-Gresser Traumnotate, Träume in Autobiographien und Traumfiktionen zueinander in Beziehung setzt, wird ein eindrückliches Spektrum an Erzählweisen sichtbar, mit denen sich bekannte wie bislang kaum beachtete Autorinnen und Autoren über den Traum schreibend der Shoah annähern. Die Vieldeutigkeit und Widersprüchlichkeit des Traums, sein unsicherer Wirklichkeitsstatus, die übermächtigen sinnlichen und leiblichen Wahrnehmungen im Traumerleben und der ästhetische Eigensinn, der des Nachts Erfahrungen und Reflexionen in beunruhigende Bilder verdichtet, machen den Traum zu einem Erzählverfahren, mit dem die Grenzen des Darstellbaren ausgelotet werden. So lassen sich die erzählten Shoah-Träume auch als eine kritische Reflexion über das vieldiskutierte Problem der ›Unsagbarkeit‹ lesen. In ihnen scheint ein Wissen aufgehoben, das geborgen und weitergegeben werden will – und das auf anderem Wege kaum zugänglich oder vermittelbar ist.

Der Generationenbegriff hat sich in der literaturwissenschaftlichen Shoah-Forschung als Analysekategorie etabliert. Seit der Jahrhundertwende rückt vor allem die sogenannte dritte Generation in den Fokus der Aufmerksamkeit, die in dieser Studie unabhängig von Geburtsjahrgängen oder familiärer Abstammung der Autor:innen als Gruppe literarischer Werke über die Shoah und ihre Nachwirkungen umgedeutet, allein aus textuellen Kriterien abgeleitet sowie durch die exemplarische Analyse deutscher und US-amerikanischer Erzählungen konkretisiert wird. Die komparatistisch angelegte Untersuchung zeigt auf, wie die Texte der so definierten dritten Generation die mediale Vermitteltheit sowie (Un-)Möglichkeit einer authentischen Rekonstruktion der traumatischen Shoah-Vergangenheit selbstreflexiv problematisieren und dabei verhandeln, wie sich die historischen Ereignisse auch ohne Zeugen und trotz zunehmender zeitlicher Distanz vergegenwärtigen lassen.

Die Erforschung der Holocaustliteratur hat Hochkonjunktur. Was aber ist unter dem Begriff eigentlich zu verstehen? Wo ist seine Verwendung sinnvoll, wo stößt sie an Grenzen? Bislang wurde der Terminus weitgehend unreflektiert benutzt, Versuche einer Konzeptualisierung haben in Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft kaum stattgefunden. Insofern beschreitet der vorliegende Band neue Wege. Die Beiträge lassen anhand unterschiedlicher methodischer Näherungen und auf der Grundlage exemplarischen Textmaterials ein umfassendes Bild von der Reichweite und den Grenzen des Begriffs Holocaustliteratur als eines literaturwissenschaftlichen Konzepts entstehen. Dabei wird hinterfragt, wo Funktionalität und Sinnhaftigkeit einer solchen Begrifflichkeit, insbesondere mit Blick auf immer neue und in der zeitgenössischen Literatur vielfältiger werdende Formen der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Genozid, zu verorten sind. Die Beiträge bringen eine wichtige Erkenntnis klar zum Vorschein: Die literaturwissenschaftliche Erforschung der Holocaustliteratur kommt ohne präzise Definition ihres Untersuchungsgegenstandes nicht aus, doch impliziert eine solche Definition keineswegs, dass es sich dabei um ein starres System handelt. Vielmehr erweist sich die Holocaustliteratur als ein in all seinen strukturellen wie funktionalen Facetten veränderliches Phänomen der Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte, das aufgrund seiner thematischen Breite und der Vielfalt ästhetischer Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten zu immer neuen Lektüren und Relektüren einlädt.

Beyond MAUS. The Legacy of Holocaust Comics collects 16 contributions that shed new light on the representation of the Holocaust. While MAUS by Art Spiegelman has changed the perspectives, other comics and series of drawings, some produced while the Holocaust happened, are often not recognised by a wider public. A plethora of works still waits to be discovered, like early caricatures and comics referring to the extermination of the Jews, graphic series by survivors or horror stories from 1950s comic books. The volume provides overviews about the depictions of Jews as animals, the representation of prisoner societies in comics as well as in depth studies about distorted traces of the Holocaust in Hergé's Tintin and in Spirou, the Holocaust in Mangas, and Holocaust comics in Poland and Israel, recent graphic novels and the use of these comics in schools. With contributions from different disciplines, the volume also grants new perspectives on comic scholarship.

In diesem Buch wird das Rezeptionsverhalten von Zuschauer(inne)n erforscht, welche Amateurtheaterprojekte zu ‚Holocaust und Nationalsozialismus‘ besuchen. Die Studie ist qualitativ angelegt, indem Interviews mit Hilfe der Grounded Theory ausgewertet werden. Es wird der Frage nachgegangen, welcher Personenkreis von Amateurtheaterprojekten angesprochen wird, wie diese Projekte von den Theaterbesucher(inne)n wahrgenommen werden und welche Wirkungen die Rezipient(inn)en während und nach dem Theaterbesuch an sich feststellen. Es kann herausgearbeitet werden, dass die in dieser Arbeit untersuchten Projekte eine intellektuelle Auseinandersetzung mit ‚schwieriger‘ Geschichte fokussieren. Die in den Amateurtheaterprojekten gewählte theatrale Darstellungsweise spricht tendenziell ein ‚bildungsnahes‘ Publikum an, das bereits über Vorwissen zur Thematik verfügt und bereit ist, sich während und nach dem Theaterbesuch aktiv mit ‚Holocaust und Nationalsozialismus‘ auseinanderzusetzen. Hierzu hat die Autorin ein Rezeptionsmodell herausgearbeitet, das die intellektuelle Auseinandersetzung mit ‚schwieriger‘ Geschichte umfasst.

Die Autorinnen und Autoren dieses Bandes gehen der Frage nach, ob ob das Gedächtnis an Genozid, Verfolgung und strukturelle Gewalt zu einer Solidarität zwischen unterschiedlichen Opfergruppen beitragen kann, und welche die epistemologischen und ethischen Grenzen und Möglichkeiten einer solchen'Ko-Erinnerung'sind. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf dem neuen Shoahgedenken in einem Jahrhundert, in dem sich schon jetzt erhebliche geo- und biopolitische Änderungen ankündigen, aber auch ältere Texte werden einer Relektüre unterzogen.Dieser Sammelband enthält literaturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu den Texten von Esther Dischereit, Norbert Gstrein, Nino Haratischwili, Edgar Hilsenrath, Yael Ronen, Vikram Seth, Vladimir Vertlib und Peter Weiss sowie thematisch fokussierte Beiträge zu Tropen, Konzepten und Diskursen der Erinnerung.

This volume engages with memory of the Holocaust as expressed in literature, film, and other media. It focuses on the cultural memory of the second and third generations of Holocaust survivors, while also taking into view those who were children during the Nazi period. Language loss, language acquisition, and the multiple needs of translation are recurrent themes for all of the authors discussed. By bringing together authors and scholars (often both) from different generations, countries, and languages, and focusing on transgenerational and translational issues, this book presents multiple perspectives on the subject of Holocaust memory, its impact, and its ongoing worldwide communication.

Holocaust Narratives: Trauma, Memory and Identity Across Generations analyzes individual multi-generational frameworks of Holocaust trauma to answer one essential question: How do these narratives change to not only transmit the trauma of the Holocaust – and in the process add meaning to what is inherently an event that annihilates meaning – but also construct the trauma as a connector to a past that needs to be continued in the present? Meaningless or not, unspeakable or not, unknowable or not, the trauma, in all its impossibilities and intractabilities, spawns literary and scholarly engagement on a large scale. Narrative is the key connector that structures trauma for both individual and collective.

Hilsenraths Shoah-Literatur hat von jeher provoziert – die rezeptionsästhetische Wirkung bezieht ihre Sprengkraft zum großen Teil aus der Einbindung von Sexualität. Erstmals beschäftigt sich nun eine literaturwissenschaftliche Arbeit mit der Funktion der tabubehafteten, bisweilen als pornografisch diskreditierten Verschränkung von Sexualität und Shoah. Zunächst werden Hilsenraths Werke eingebettet in den Kontext einer Shoah-Literatur, welche ebenfalls Sexualität auf sprachlicher und narrativer Ebene nutzt. Zweitens erfolgt eine Betrachtung der Werke unter dezidiert genderorientierter Perspektive. Drittens wird die Korrelation von Sexualität und Shoah analysiert, um die stete Funktionsgebundenheit der Sexualität aufzuzeigen: So dient diese beispielsweise dazu, Macht- und Gewaltverhältnisse zu zementieren oder die Versehrtheit der Figuren herauszustellen. Hilsenrath's literature of the Shoah has always been provocative – the reception-aesthetic effect can be mostly referred to the involvement of sexuality. For the first time, an academic paper focuses on the function of this tabooed and even pornographic discredited connection between sexuality and Shoah. Firstly, Hilsenrath's works are situated in the context of the literature of the Shoah which also makes use of sexuality on a linguistic and narrative level. Secondly, the works are being analysed under a decided gender-oriented perspective. Thirdly, the correlation of sexuality and Shoah are being analysed in order to show the consistent function of sexuality. Thus, sexuality serves to foster power and violence or to depict the vulnerability of the protagonists.

The book deals with the issue of the Holocaust in the Polish literature for children and adolescents. Drawing upon some of the leading Polish authors of the twentieth and the twentieth-first centuries, the author reveals the historical, ideological, and cultural entanglement of their works. The main focus of the book is to search for reasons behind the outpouring of interest in the Holocaust noticed in the most recent Polish literature for younger readers. Among these reasons, the author lists the Polish local and historical context, the new approach to issues traditionally seen as taboo, the development of memory and postmemory narratives, and the postmodern shift from a discursive totality and universalist explanations.

Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust argues that humor performs political, cultural, and social functions in the wake of horror. Co-editors David Slucki, Gabriel N. Finder, and Avinoam Patt have assembled an impressive list of contributors who examine what is at stake in deploying humor in representing the Holocaust. Namely, what are the boundaries? Clearly, there have been comedy and laughter in the decades since. However, the extent to which humor can be ethically deployed in representing and discussing the Holocaust is not as clear. This book comes at an important moment in the trajectory of Holocaust memory. As the generation of survivors continues to dwindle, there is great concern among scholars and community leaders about how memories and lessons of the Holocaust will be passed to future generations. Without survivors to tell their stories, to serve as constant reminders of what they experienced, how will future generations understand and relate to the Shoah? Laughter After is divided into two sections:'Aftermath'and'Breaking Taboos.'The contributors to this volume examine case studies from World War II to the present day in considering and reconsidering what role humor can play in the rehabilitation of survivors, of Jews and of the world more broadly. More recently, humor has been used to investigate the role that Holocaust memory plays in contemporary societies, while challenging memorial conventions around the Holocaust and helping shape the way we think about the past. In a world in which Holocaust memory is ubiquitous, even if the Holocaust itself is inadequately understood, it is perhaps not surprising that humor that invokes the Holocaust has become part of the memorial landscape. This book seeks to uncover how and why such humor is deployed, and what the factors are that shape its production and reception. Laughter After will appeal to a number of audiences—from students and scholars of Jewish and Holocaust studies to academics and general readers with an interest in media and performance studies.

Der Band bietet zwei Zugänge zur Literatur der Shoah: Er widmet sich einzelnen Autoren und neuen Forschungsperspektiven. Mit H. G. Adler und Thomas Harlan stellt er zunächst zwei wenig beachtete Schriftsteller vor. Von Adler, einem Überlebenden der Shoah aus Prag, sind noch immer nicht alle Werke publiziert – darunter eine bedeutende Korrespondenz aus der Nachkriegszeit. Harlan setzte sich zeitlebens mit dem Genozid an den europäischen Juden auseinander – nicht zuletzt, weil sein Vater, Veit Harlan, den Massenmord durch seine Filme ideologisch vorbereitet hatte. Intensiv diskutiert wurde dagegen über Peter Weiss'spätes Hauptwerk Die Ästhetik des Widerstands. Unter dem Aspekt der Ko-Erinnerung an die Shoah wird es neu perspektiviert. Der zweite Schwerpunkt entwirft und vertieft neue theoretische Orientierungen der Holocaust Studies. Mit Hilfe von Konzepten wie Ko-Erinnerung, Tabu und Transnationalität tragen die Studien zur Neuvermessung des Forschungsgebiets bei. Neben dem Stellenwert der Übersetzungen für die Rezeption der Shoah-Literatur in Deutschland wird auch der konstitutiv transnationale Charakter dieser Literatur herausgearbeitet. Ein grundsätzlicher Blick auf den Zusammenhang von Sprache und Diktatur beschließt den Band.

Dans Témoignage et littérature d'après Auschwitz, Fransiska Louwagie offre des études critiques provenant de deux centres de gravité de la littérature de la Shoah et des camps nazis : les œuvres des témoins-survivants et celles des générations suivantes. Le livre explore les œuvres d'écrivains majeurs et parfois moins connus, comme celles de Robert Antelme, André Schwarz-Bart, Piotr Rawicz, Jorge Semprun et Imre Kertész, d'une part, et celles de Georges Perec, Raymond Federman, Gérard Wajcman, Henri Raczymow et Michel Kichka, de l'autre. En consacrant à chaque auteur une étude critique approfondie, Fransiska Louwagie fait pleinement droit à l'individualité des œuvres, tout en dégageant des perspectives transversales sur les questions éthiques et esthétiques qui sous-tendent le témoignage et la littérature d'après Auschwitz. In Témoignage et littérature d'après Auschwitz, Fransiska Louwagie brings together two key areas of Holocaust literature, offering a rich analysis of both testimony and second generation writing. The book explores the works of major and sometimes lesser-known writers such as Robert Antelme, André Schwarz-Bart, Piotr Rawicz, Jorge Semprun, Imre Kertész, Georges Perec, Raymond Federman, Gérard Wajcman, Henri Raczymow and Michel Kichka. By devoting an in-depth critical study to each of these writers, the book draws out the individual specificity of their works, while also developing broader insights into the ethical and aesthetic questions that underlie acts of witnessing and writing ‘after Auschwitz'.