THERE ARE CLEARLY very good explanations as to why the directors of A German Life allow their subject Brunhilde Pomsel to speak without interruption. For reasons of aesthetics alone, it makes good sense to focus the viewer's attention solely upon her, rather than punctuate our audio and visual impressions with interventions from interlocutors, including the four directors themselves. Moreover, it is generally not difficult to divine what she has been asked. Including her interviewers’ voices might indeed have come across as redundant and perhaps distracting. Yet even when there is some enigma about her vis-à-vis, or doubt about what has been asked, one can make the case convincingly that this is precisely what keeps the viewer intellectually engaged. It magnifies the puzzle that Pomsel already presents. And given her sometimes painfully slow cadences, one certainly cannot claim to be swept up in the narrative such that one is deprived of sufficient time for contemplation. Quite the contrary: keeping the camera focused exclusively on Pomsel, often in very confining close-ups, and subjecting the audience to her unhurried elocution and extended silences indeed possesses both an aesthetic and ideological justification, for these may be the very techniques that enable the film to function as critique. On both counts, then, the decision seems sensible.

But this is not quite the directors’ explanation. When Florian Weigensamer explains the directors’ decision to feature Pomsel exclusively, and to bracket out the questions, he instead highlights the filmmakers’ aim to present her as if she were speaking freely, on her own. In other words, bracketing out the questions gives the viewers the illusion that she is spontaneously reflecting on her past, without any prodding or prompting. The film, however, does not shy away from sourcing other kinds of interpolated material: each and every one of the thirteen intercut films is meticulously labeled with a citation appearing on an otherwise blank screen and for a considerable length of time. Each of these excerpted films is a rich topic in its own right and is presented as a counterpoint to Pomsel's musings.

A GERMAN LIFE (2016) is a feature-length documentary consisting primarily of an interview with Brunhilde Pomsel, who was hired at the Third Reich's Propaganda Ministry in 1942 and worked as a secretary in Joseph Goebbels's office until 1945. In May of that year, after the German surrender, Pomsel was taken prisoner by the Soviet Army and was interned for five years in camps, including Buchenwald, Hohenschönhausen, and Sachsenhausen. Following her release, she returned to work in broadcasting until her retirement in 1971.

The film's four directors, Christian Krönes, Olaf Müller, Roland Schrotthofer, and Florian Weigensamer, interviewed Pomsel. She is rendered in high-contrast black and white, and she frequently looks directly into the camera while recounting her memories. At the time the interview was conducted, she was 103 years old, and she lived three more years, which was long enough to attend a screening of A German Life at the Munich Film Festival in 2016. When she passed away on January 27, 2017, she was living in a rest home in Munich.

Although Pomsel appears extraordinarily alert and coherent during the film's interviews, the dense pattern of wrinkles crisscrossing her face reveals her advanced age. The directors chose to highlight this feature, zooming in closer rather than pulling away, possibly because they found themselves entranced by Pomsel as an image of living history. She knows that the decisions she made during the war were opportunistic, but does not act like someone who regrets her choices, and she makes few apologies. She is no revisionist, but she is not particularly concerned with working through the Nazi past. It is difficult to believe that she was as unaware as she claims to have been, and her account is sometimes undercut by its many contradictory positions, most notably that in her capacity as secretary she typed thousands of documents for Goebbels, but that she knew nothing about the fate of the Jews. The directors also include archival propaganda footage at regular intervals in the film, underscoring the unmistakably and relentlessly ideological atmosphere in which she worked.

Introduction: Tabori, History, and the Holocaust

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE REMAINS a conundrum to some, an oxymoron to others. Can it at once give free rein to the imagination—as art presumably must do—and at the same time do historical justice to the genocide against the Jews? During the postwar period, when the Holocaust was as yet not well understood—and sometimes not even fully acknowledged—there was palpable anxiety about the role of art and its ability to represent what was to many unrepresentable. Art was frequently freighted with the responsibility of history (or historiography), at a time when there was widespread uncertainty about fixing the Holocaust within history. Like Bernhard Schlink's protagonist from Der Vorleser, the beleaguered Michael Berg, we were confronted with an impossible set of demands—above all to remember, and commemorate, what we can never really know or understand. It is not difficult to grasp, then, why no piece of Holocaust literature has ever been deemed wholly successful. George Tabori's The Cannibals (1968) is symptomatic of this dilemma.

The play attempts two apparently contradictory goals: the first, as many appreciative critics observe, is to “correct” or redirect a Holocaust discourse that was itself still in its infancy. By presenting a strikingly dissonant depiction of Jewish concentration-camp inmates—and thereby proudly breaking a taboo on the portrayal of victims—Tabori entered the field of Holocaust history, whether he intended to or not.

NEXUS 4 ENCOMPASSES a rich variety of film, theater, and literature central to German Jewish Studies. We open the volume with two scholarly articles. The first, by Ritchie Robertson, revisits the topic of Kafka and childhood. The major contribution of this essay may, in our estimation, lie in the way in which Robertson contextualizes Kafka within competing discourses about childhood at the turn of the twentieth century. He places Kafka (both his fictional and nonfictional texts) within the conceptual framework dominated by Augustine and Rousseau on the one hand, and by Freud and Ellen Key, on the other. So rich is this aspect of the article that scholars concerned with childhood and literature more generally (memoir included)—even those with little interest in Kafka—will benefit from this contribution. While focusing ultimately on the story Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse (Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse- People), Robertson diagnoses divergent positions on childhood within Kafka's oeuvre, reflecting both the author's evolving perspective and his fundamental ambivalence vis-à-vis childhood. Robertson conceives of the piece as a kind of scholarly gateway for future investigation.

With her contribution, Eva Revesz returns our attention to Steven Spielberg's 1993 Schindler's List, a hugely influential film with a dual reception career: embraced by popular culture and by numerous journalistic critics, the film was simultaneously subjected to a vigorous array of scholarly critique. Schindler's List made not just filmic but also cultural history: it raised consciousness about the Holocaust and survivors, and helped to change the course of that genocide's commemoration worldwide. And it was this film that prompted Spielberg to spearhead the ambitious international effort to record the stories of all living survivors. In this sense, Schindler's List begat a rich trove of testimonial and documentary footage curated by the USC Shoah Foundation that is available digitally in a number of libraries around the world.

Revesz's is a frankly revisionist view—at least with respect to the scholarly reception. She finds more value in the film than many of us were willing to acknowledge in the mid-1990s, when, to be fair, we may have unrealistically thirsted for the “perfect” Holocaust story.

MARTIN BUBER, philosopher of dialogue and champion of the German- Jewish symbiosis, initially refused to return to Germany in a public capacity after the Holocaust. Yet in the 1950s Buber did return: accepting two important peace prizes and lecturing to university audiences across the country. For this he was roundly criticized by fellow Jews, yet welcomed by the Germans. Why did he change his mind? Buber's decision to return to German soil was not a publicity stunt, not an act of self-promotion, not callousness or stupidity, and not an attempt to confront the past. Rather, Abigail Gillman argues, Buber returned out of sheer philosophical conviction to fight for the future, to reach out to humanists, to encourage like-minded people to fight for human truth in the face of Cold War ideology, to visualize what they have in common, to learn to say “We.” As Abby writes: “Buber denied on many occasions that he was the bearer of a teaching or gospel (Lehre). He did not return to be in a conversation (im Gespräch sein), he went to Germany to be the conversation (ein Gespräch sein). To be the conversation is to carry out one's role as a divinely created being, spoken into existence; to carry the vox humanus across so many hostile borders, even across the abyss of the Holocaust.” In an elegant analysis of Buber's speeches, Abby traces the development of Buber's message to postwar Germany, uncovering and explicating an important and—until now—unrecognized dimension of Buber's postwar philosophy. This is German Jewish Studies scholarship at its best: Abby has broken new ground and laid the framework for future research, for a new type of “dialogue” in the Buberian sense, encouraging us through her own nuanced language and thought to conceptualize a new Zwischen, a new “Between,” in German Jewish Studies, and to think about a philosophical message that has broad implications for a world badly in need of saying “We” today.

WE OPEN THIS VOLUME with a double celebration. Egon Schwarz was a founder, perhaps the principal one, of German Jewish Studies in the United States, long before it was known as such. In fact, when he looks back on the beginnings of our field of research, as he does in the first piece of this volume, he first uses the term that was common at the time, namely “exile studies.” Only gradually did it become clear that Jews would comprise a particularly important group of German exile authors, playwrights, filmmakers, actors, artists, and others, such that exile studies of the postwar period would in part metamorphose into what we now know as German Jewish Studies. Of course the field has since expanded to include myriad German-Jewish interactions of other times and places as well. But at its birth, and long afterward, it was indeed Jewish exiles from Nazi Germany who defined the field.

It therefore seemed to us to make eminent sense to name the first prize for the best essay in German Jewish Studies to appear inNexusafter Schwarz himself. After all, it may well have been his Harvard course on German Jewish literature that was the first of its kind, and one we now take for granted in the curriculum. Schwarz is himself a refugee from Nazi occupied Europe—that is surely more accurate than “émigré”—and his own life story is tightly entwined with the rise of German Jewish Studies, which, as he reminds us in the pages that follow, includes Austrian studies as well. In fact, and this is something Schwarz never tires of recounting, it was the eminent Harvard Germanist Bernhard Blume who helped young Egon get a start in this country as a teacher of German. We are pleased to present here Schwarz's award speech, which he gave at Duke University in 2015, in both German and English.

Abby Gillman, the first recipient of the Egon Schwarz Prize, is our second cause for celebration. Her remarkable essay on Martin Buber 's postwar return to Germany illustrates an equally important moment for German Jewish Studies, namely the overt and sometimes agonizing interaction of Jews with the politics and culture of the postwar Germanys— usually, but not always, the Federal Republic.