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Conclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2024

Helen Finch
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Summary

In this book I have analyzed a disparate set of literary texts by four German-Jewish survivor-witnesses to the Holocaust. I have argued that they form a significant corpus that bears testimony to the neglected history of feeling in the postwar era, a history that runs counter to, and in tension with, German narratives of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. I noted that, despite the very different circumstances under which these survivors wrote their testimony, and the very different genres in which they wrote, certain themes and styles stand out, which I have termed characteristic of a “metatestimonial” mode of poetics. These may include an emotive writing style that not only archives negative feelings but also mobilizes them as an uncomfortable force for social critique. They also include transnational and cross-historical attempts to contextualize the writers’ experiences in the Holocaust, often written at a time when such comparisons were tabooed. They include attempts to connect to and continue traditions of narration that have been disrupted by the Holocaust, be that the modernism espoused by Adler, the attempts to connect to oral forms of Jewish ghetto narrative practiced by Wander and Hilsenrath, or the attempt to reanimate a lost tradition in Jewish and female writing in Kluger's work. And finally, they are marked with the traces of trauma, no matter how long after the painful events they are published. The texts are marked by a traumatic temporality, where the narrating survivor-subject is constantly returned to the time of persecution, leading to narratives that are non-linear, fragmented and at times incoherent. Hence, I argued, literary life writing after the Holocaust is always untimely. I have argued that this untimeliness demonstrates the facile nature of a linear narrative of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

As I argued at the beginning of this book, the four survivor-authors did not view themselves as a cohort. As we have seen in the close readings of the texts, the biographies, poetics, politics, and reception of the four authors were also very different. It was not my intention in this text to blur the important distinctions between these four highly original writers, their very different transnational life trajectories, and their distinctive critiques of the continuities between Nazi past and postwar present.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Conclusion
  • Helen Finch, University of Leeds
  • Book: German-Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
  • Online publication: 10 January 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781800109940.006
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  • Conclusion
  • Helen Finch, University of Leeds
  • Book: German-Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
  • Online publication: 10 January 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781800109940.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Conclusion
  • Helen Finch, University of Leeds
  • Book: German-Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
  • Online publication: 10 January 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781800109940.006
Available formats
×