I open this chapter with a question raised by Austrian survivor Fred Wander (1917–2006) in both versions of his autobiography, the first published in 1996 as Das gute Leben: Erinnerungen (The Good Life: A Memoir), and the second, revised and with the longer title Das gute Leben oder Von der Fröhlichkeit im Schrecken (The Good Life or On Joy in Horror), published in 2006. This question underlies all literary testimony to the Holocaust. “A book about concentration camps? What use is that?” Wander's assertion that “they would always run up against this question” might seem to suggest that for writers of the Holocaust this question is in many ways ahistorical. Such a reading of Wander's question would seem to return the Holocaust to the realm of the metaphysical, a sacralized tragedy that raises existential, rather than political, questions. These questions preoccupied the Austrian-Jewish survivor Wander for his entire writing life, in multiple contexts. Wander was born as Fritz Rosenblatt in Austria in 1917, fled from the Anschluss to France in 1938, was captured and deported to Auschwitz and Buchenwald among many other camps, and subsequently chose to spend almost thirty years in the German Democratic Republic before returning to Austria in 1983 (DgLa, 99; DgLb, 127).