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4 - Feminist Rage: Ruth Klüger in the New Millennium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2024

Helen Finch
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Summary

Ruth Klüger's Lifetime of Interrogating the Taboo

Toward the end of weiter leben (1992), Ruth Kluger's groundbreaking feminist memoir of her “Holocaust girlhood remembered,” Kluger describes her first experience of publishing literary witness to the Holocaust. In the summer of 1945, while living as a displaced person in Germany, the thirteen-year-old Kluger sent the two poems that she had composed while in Auschwitz to a recently founded newspaper. Kluger had hoped to be taken seriously as an author of lyric poetry, written in German for a German audience. Instead, she found to her horror that the newspaper had only published two verses of her poems. These were framed with belittling copy and a sentimentalizing illustration:

Statt einer bescheidenen Spalte fand ich eine halbe Seite, die von mir handelte. In der Mitte die Photographie eines Stucks meines Begleitbriefes, den man vorerst sorgfältig zerrisen hatte, so daß die unregelmäßigen Ränder, zusammen mit der ungeübten Kinderhandschrift einer, die nicht viel in der Schule gewesen war, den Eindruck einer Art Flaschenpost erwecken konnten. Dazu eine Zeichnung, ein verlumptes, verschrecktes Kind darstellend, das zu allem Übel noch zufällig eine gewisse Ähnlichkeit mit mir aufwies. Nur zwei Strophen meiner Gedichte standen da, und die waren eingebettet in einen weinerlichen, händeringenden Text, Mitleid heischen vom kinderliebenden Publikum.

[Instead of a modest column I found half a page that dealt with me. In the middle was a photo of my cover letter, which had been carefully ripped, so that the jagged edges, together with the awkward handwriting of a girl who hadn't spent much time in school, evoked the impression of an emergency SOS, a kind of message in a bottle. To make matters worse, they had added a drawing of a ragged, terrorized child, who accidentally happened to look a little like me. What I minded most was that they had eviscerated my poetic output without asking, omitting one poem altogether and printing only two stanzas of the other, and these two were embedded in a maudlin, hand-wringing text, in effect asking the public for pity.]

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2023

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