eJournals

Band 54 Heft 1 Harald Höbus ch, J oseph D. O ’ Neil (Hr sg.) C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k Die Zeitschrift erscheint jährlich in 4 Heften von je etwa 96 Seiten Abonnementpreis pro Jahrgang: € 135,00 (print)/ € 172,00 (print & online)/ € 142,00 (e-only) Vorzugspreis für private Leser € 101,00 (print); Einzelheft € 45,00 (jeweils zuzüglich Versandkosten). Bestellungen nimmt Ihre Buchhandlung oder der Verlag entgegen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, Postfach 25 60, D-72015 Tübingen, Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97 11 · eMail: info@narr.de Aufsätze - in deutscher oder englischer Sprache - bitte einsenden als Anlage zu einer Mail an hhoebu@uky.edu oder bessdawson@uky.edu (Prof. Harald Höbusch oder Prof. Rebeccah Dawson, Division of German Studies, 1055 Patterson Office Tower, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, USA). Typoskripte sollten nach den Vorschriften des MLA Style Manual (2008) eingerichtet sein. Sonstige Mitteilungen bitte an hhoebu@uky.edu © 2022 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten/ All Rights Strictly Reserved Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 0010-1338 Inhalt Introduction: Austrian and German Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Laura A. Detre und Joseph W. Moser � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3 (Re-)Writing Austria’s Modern Jewish History Using Émigré and Survivor Memoirs and Other “Memory Texts” Tim Corbett � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 7 Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics in Story of a Life and The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping Abigail Gillman � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 31 Inge Deutschkron’s Memoir Ich trug den gelben Stern (1978): Reportage as Counternarrative to the Americanization of the Holocaust Marjanne E. Goozé � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 59 Diversity of Perspectives in Holocaust Memoir: Bruno Schwebel’s As Luck Would Have It Laura A. Detre � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 73 Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): An Austrian Historian’s Personal Eyewitness Account of Surviving the Holocaust in Exile in Hungary Joseph W. Moser � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 83 Verzeichnis der Autorinnen und Autoren � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 97 BAND 54 • Heft 1 Gastherausgeber: in: Laura A. Detre und Joseph W. Moser Introduction: Austrian and German Holocaust Survivor Memoirs 3 Introduction: Austrian and German Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Laura A� Detre und Joseph W� Moser West Chester University This special issue of Colloquia Germanica is derived from four panels on “Austrian and German Holocaust Survivor Memoirs” from the 2018 German Studies Association Conference in Pittsburgh, PA. These panels brought together twelve papers exploring a variety of themes on this specific genre of autobiographical writing, raising issues related to what could be learned about the Holocaust from survivors who grew up speaking German as well as how these texts fit into Holocaust and German Studies in general. This special issue focuses on memoirs written by Austrians and Germans in the broad contextual understanding that the authors had been German speakers before the Holocaust, which resulted in geographical displacement for some survivors� Autobiographical accounts of surviving the Holocaust are both important in terms of learning about the events of this period and complex in their contextual, geographic, and linguistic varieties. Some memoirs have received more attention than others� Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (1947) and Elie Wiesel’s Night (1958 French edition; 1960 English translation) were some of the earliest and most recognized memoirs and have long since become standard works of world literature; they are among the most widely read Holocaust memoirs� Both texts were important in teaching the world about the horrors of Auschwitz and the systematic factory-style murder of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis. The focus in this special issue on memoirs by survivors, however, is to go beyond some of the most recognized texts and provide new insights into a very large corpus of writing. All memoirs are essentially as unique and different as the individuals who survived the Holocaust, but the memoirs in this special issue have in common that their authors were native speakers of German. There was no common path to survival, but rather a series of lucky circumstances, most of which still involved unspeakably traumatic experiences, that led to a person’s survival. The majority of Jews under Nazi control during WW II were murdered. The odds of surviving were excruciatingly low, especially if they were not able to escape 4 Laura A� Detre und Joseph W� Moser from territories under Nazi control� Survival was the exception and not the rule for Jews in the Holocaust, and thus all survivor narratives are exceptional. As texts, autobiographies in general and Holocaust memoirs in particular straddle the boundaries of literature, oral history, and even historical monographs. Memoirs have been written in many different languages and countries, as the Holocaust affected Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe, and many survivors emigrated to countries outside of Europe, from where many memoirs were written as well. The age, gender, and national origins of the survivors influenced the memoirs, as did the many different coping mechanisms of dealing with the traumatic past� Survivors who wrote memoirs may have in common their desire to share their experiences, and this separates them from survivors who for many different reasons could not confront this trauma. Nonetheless, every survivor was an individual who had different abilities and talents to write about the past. Five selected papers from the GSA panel series were the basis for the articles included in this special issue. Tim Corbett’s article “(Re-)Writing Austria’s Modern Jewish History Using Émigré and Survivor Memoirs and Other ‘Memory-Texts’” opens this special issue by giving an historical overview of Austrian Holocaust survivor memoirs. As a historian, Corbett analyzes these memory texts as tools for historical research and how they have contributed to a better understanding of Jewish Austrian history. Corbett gives a detailed account of how many memoirs have been written by Austrian Holocaust survivors and he examines how motivations and personal contexts changed from one survivor to the other. His article is followed by four articles that each examine one specific memoir� Abigail Gillman, in her article “Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics in Story of a Life and The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping,” examines Aharon Appelfeld’s challenges in writing about the Holocaust� For one, Appelfeld was still a child at the time who was not able to complete elementary school, and his communication while hiding in the forests of Ukraine was mostly nonverbal. After a difficult series of events that brought him to Naples and then to Israel/ Palestine, he had to learn Hebrew within the context of 1950s Israel, a new country trying to unite a disparate population with a new language, which for Appelfeld was initially an impediment to communication. German was Appelfeld’s mother tongue, although his mother was murdered by the Germans. For him, Hebrew became a stepmother language. Gilman demonstrates that Appelfeld was torn between his old Austrian identity and his identity as an Israeli author writing in Hebrew, challenging both Israel’s national construct of new Israelis as well as notions that Jews who emigrated to Israel had broken all ties with Europe� Introduction: Austrian and German Holocaust Survivor Memoirs 5 Marjanne Goozé’s article “Inge Deutschkron’s Memoir Ich trug den gelben Stern (1978): Reportage as Counternarrative to the Americanization of the Holocaust” looks at an early Holocaust memoir that chronicles her survival of hiding underground in Berlin. There is no doubt that gender influences the way in which survivors experienced the Holocaust and also how they told their life’s story� Goozé demonstrates that Deutschkron’s memoir avoids the archetypes of the innocent and optimistic victim and early on presents a counterpoint to the male concentration camp prisoner. This is particularly remarkable as the experiences of Holocaust survivors in the late 1970s were still dominated by male writers and primarily by survivors of the death camps� Very few people managed to survive hiding underground in Nazi Germany, although Berlin as a large and anonymous metropolis offered a more manageable context. Most people who managed to survive in hiding were women as they were less conspicuous in wartime and could not physically be identified as Jews on account of circumcision. Claus Räfle’s 2017 film Die Unsichtbaren: Wir wollen leben chronicles the survival of Jews hiding in Berlin, but Inge Deutschkron’s memoir in 1978 comes much earlier, when there were fewer Holocaust memoirs and before there was a general understanding of how vast this field really was. Laura Detre’s contribution explores the “Diversity of Perspectives in Holocaust Memoir: Bruno Schwebel’s As Luck Would Have It�” Schwebel and his family fled Vienna both because of their Jewishness and their connections to the socialist movement� His 2004 autobiography focused on this dual identity as both a religious and political refugee and how the family found a new home in Mexico with the help of many brave individuals� Schwebel wrote with a sense that this history needed to be captured before the individuals who experienced the Holocaust were no longer able to relate their stories and documents what is clearly a child’s perspective, focusing on his family and friends and, in a minimal way, contextualizing these events. Rather than documenting the terrors of the Holocaust, which every refugee experienced to greater or lesser extents, Schwebel tells a story about displacement and anxiety, but with an underlying sense that, so long as his family remained intact and they had connections to people who could assist their flight, all would be well. Detre focuses on how Schwebel’s youth at the time of these events as well as his family’s political affiliation caused him to interpret the persecution he faced in a fundamentally different way from the authors of many memoirs that came before his. Joseph Moser’s article “Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): An Austrian Historian’s Personal Eyewitness Account of Surviving the Holocaust in Exile in Hungary” is an analysis of his father’s memoir of surviving the Holocaust in Hungary with the help of Raoul Wallenberg� Jonny Moser’s autobiography extends beyond Wallenberg’s work in Budapest to a history of the Holo- 6 Laura A� Detre und Joseph W� Moser caust in Hungary and shows in great historical detail the anti-Semitic legislation in wartime Hungary - an ally of Nazi Germany - that targeted foreign Jewish refugees in particular. Before the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, foreign Jews were interned in work camps under terrible conditions, suffering from hunger and typhus without much support. As a historian, Jonny Moser’s memoir guides his readers through a detailed account of domestic Hungarian politics at the time that shaped his family’s survival in Hungary. At times, Moser’s memoir is more of an historical monograph than oral history of literature, as he emphasized the greater historical context over personal issues� This special issue aims to provide a greater understanding of Holocaust memoirs by German-language native speakers and show the large variety of contexts in which autobiographies of Holocaust survivors were written. It is a vast topic, and the memoirs are as unique as the survivors who wrote them, but every memoir brings us closer to a better understanding of the Holocaust. Works Cited Die Unsichtbaren: Wir wollen leben. Dir. Claus Räfle. Tobis Home Entertainment, 2017. Film� Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Touchstone, 1996. Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1982. (Re-)Writing Austria’s Modern Jewish History Using Émigré and Survivor Memoirs and Other “Memory Texts” 1 Tim Corbett Independent Scholar Abstract: Hundreds of thousands of Jewish Austrians - defined first in the broader, Habsburg sense of “Austria” and later in the narrower, republican sense - migrated abroad in the first half of the twentieth century, 130,000 alone fleeing Vienna under National Socialism. This diverse collective, often with roots all over Central Europe and with extremely eclectic religious, economic, cultural, linguistic, educational, professional, and other backgrounds, were nevertheless united through the common experience of having once been Austrians, many having been driven violently from their homes to settle across the world. Thousands of these individuals recorded their experiences and the memories of their Austrian past in a wide array of “memory texts,” including hundreds of memoirs, published and unpublished. This paper outlines this eclectic corpus of Jewish Austrian memory texts, focusing predominantly on the Austrian Heritage Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York and the broader Jewish Austrian experience of cultural genesis, genocide, survival, and rebirth in the twentieth century recounted therein� It closes with a range of new questions that allow for the parameters in which scholarship has conceived of Jewish Austrian history and culture to date to be substantially augmented or even revised� Keywords: Austrian Heritage Collection, Leo Baeck Institute, Collective Memory, Jewish Austrian Culture, Exile Memoirs As the pioneering Jewish gender historian Paula Hyman remarked, “the experience of most Jews - women and Jewish men who did not reach leadership ranks - was not necessarily subsumed in statements by those who represented them in public records” (4—5), meaning that Jewish histories that relied on 8 Tim Corbett official documents - the bread and butter of traditional, community-oriented historiography - were characterized from the outset by a severe imbalance in perspectives and by colossal lacunae regarding both “ordinary” and “outsider” experiences� 2 My research to date has focused primarily on an unusual and unique type of source, namely Jewish gravestones, as a means to essentially retell the longue durée history of Jews in Vienna from a far broader sociocultural perspective than has often been undertaken in historiography to date. Gravestones, so I have argued, “reveal the construction of a form of collective communal memory and its modification and/ or contestation by individuals, families and collectives who formed a part of this community” (Corbett, “A ‘Capable Wife’ or a ‘Woman of Valor’? ” 79), both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective (i.e., the shape of communal memory at a given moment in time or its development over a longer period of time)� 3 The eulogistic inscriptions on gravestones are by nature both brief and highly selective, yet few other source types are so fundamentally democratic, constituting individual “memory texts” of an incomparably broad cross section of a particular community (I will discuss the term “memory text” a little later). Gravestones thus allow for collective histories and the role of large numbers of individuals and subaltern groupings therein to be fundamentally reconceived and rewritten. Among numerous other source types that complement the analysis of Jewish gravestones, I have frequently drawn on memoirs by Jewish Austrians, penned mostly in the aftermath of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Cemeteries feature strikingly in many post-Holocaust memoirs, as immediate sites of personal memory and cultural heritage in the Viennese cityscape, but moreover metonymically: as emblems of Europe’s destroyed Jewish culture and, certainly in some earlier memoirs, of the irredeemable loss of a Jewish past and the hopelessness of any Jewish future on the European continent� 4 Given the relative lack of formal theories and systematic methodologies in this field, my analysis of gravestones as memory texts is moreover informed by theoretical approaches drawn from textual analysis and/ or focusing on more conventional textual sources, such as memoirs. Albert Lichtblau, in an early, in-depth example of a work of Jewish Austrian history based on memoirs, noted that studies drawing on even a generous number of such texts cannot possibly be representative of the collective biographies of some 1.3 million people - this figure referring to the Jewish inhabitants of Cisleithania, the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy before 1918, who formed the focal point of Lichtblau’s study. However, he continued that a selection of memory texts - in his case 34 extracts from interviews, memoirs, autobiographies, diaries and similar texts - can offer a cross-sectional impression of the variability of both individual stories and broader sociocultural transformations spanning generations: “Sie können zu sprachlichen Gedenk- (Re-)Writing Austria’s Modern Jewish History 9 stätten für ein Volk, für Verlorenes, für einzelne Menschen, für Orte, Gebräuche, Traditionen und Mentalitäten werden”; Lichtblau consequently called such memory texts “Sprachmonumente des kollektiven Gedächtnisses” (Als hätten wir dazugehört 124)� Collective source bases relating to largely non-hegemonic individual and collective memories, such as gravestones and memoirs, offer a rich and fruitful new approach into the broad sociocultural history of Jews in modern Austria, enabling a paradigmatic shift in our very conception of “Jewish Austrian” history� As Michael Brenner summarized a general tendency in Jewish studies of late, they enable historiographic analyses to shift the focus “from one Jewish community to many Jewish cultures” and allow for the writing of “not a Jewish history but rather many Jewish histories” (204—05; my emphasis)� As Dan Diner explained in the introduction to a recent encyclopedia of Jewish history, scholarship needs to distinguish far more stringently between “Judentum” ( Judaism) as a bundle of religious traditions, “räumlich und ethnisch diverser Judenheiten” ( Jewries) as collectives often conceived in ethnic, communal, or familial terms, and “einzelner staatsbürgerlich emanzipierter, sich dem kollektiv entfremdender jüdischer Personen bzw. Personen jüdischer Herkunft, einzelner Juden” ( Jews), with this latter category in particular offering the greatest diversity in makeup, experience, and outlook (x). Such a distinction, put simply, allows for hegemonic narratives to be complicated and top-down collective histories to be rewritten. A more eclectic and cross-sectional perspective enables a greater focus on the kaleidoscopic variability of individual experiences and the relationship between individuals, smaller collectives, and hegemonic collectives as a whole - in our case the vast collective subsumed under the term “Austrian Jewry” in various chronological, geographical, and cultural contexts - and thereby helps overcome the simplistic narratives, generalizations, and one-size-fits-all models that all too often dominate in historiography, such as the tenacious narrative of an ostensible, and ostensibly failed, Jewish “assimilation” in the German-speaking world. 5 This paper is intended as an exploratory survey of a very general question: namely how the memoirs of Jewish Austrians, mostly émigrés and survivors of the Holocaust outside of Austria as well as “rémigrés” (returnees) or immigrants to Austria after the Holocaust, serve to augment, revise, or even to write anew the modern history of Jews in Austria and to locate the “Jewish experience” - to put it misleadingly in singular form - within modern Austrian history generally, particularly in the era of cultural genesis, genocide, survival, and rebirth reaching from the early twentieth into the early twenty-first centuries. It is not intended to offer a theoretical discussion on the use of memoirs as a historical source, but rather to demonstrate the fecundity of this particular source pool 10 Tim Corbett and its promise for future insights into the already well-trodden field of modern Jewish Austrian history� 6 To begin with, I will outline who is included under the deceptively straightforward-seeming label of “Jewish Austrians,” an exercise that in itself already highlights the complexity of this research area as well as its potential to complicate our understanding of both “Jewish” and “Austrian” cultural histories and their entanglement in modern Central Europe� I will then outline the three largest extant corpuses of “memory texts” relating to Jewish Austrian émigré, survivor, and “rémigré” communities after 1945: those in the USA, those in Palestine/ Israel, and those in the Second Austrian Republic. This will be followed by a basic definition of what I have so far been calling “memory texts” - ego-documents, memoirs, interviews, and more - before I outline the specific corpus under discussion here, in particular the memoirs held in the Austrian Heritage Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute, and demonstrate the breadth and diversity of the thousands of sources contained therein� I will then move on to an overview of key studies conducted to date and the theoretical and methodological questions arising from these, before concluding with a sketch of the many research questions, themes, and potential insights that arise from this matrix of memory texts� The collective of “Austrian Jewry” around 1900, when it was defined at its broadest in terms of the Austrian (Cisleithanian) half of the Dual Monarchy, comprised some 1.3 million people, who, together with a similar number of Jews living in the Hungarian half of the monarchy (Transleithania), made up a good fifth of the world’s Jewish population. The porous definition of “Austrian Jewry” already becomes evident here, when this category (whether one conceives of Jews in religious, cultural, or ethnic terms) included Bohemians, Moravians, Galicians, Bukovinians, and, a sub-category in its own right, Viennese. At this time, Vienna, home to almost fifteen percent of Cisleithanian Jewry and reflecting a kaleidoscope of the various Jewries of the empire from among whom its Jewish population originated, numbered along with Budapest, Warsaw, and New York as one of the world’s largest Jewish metropolises (Lichtblau, Als hätten wir dazugehört 43, 48). Even the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire into new “nation states” (which were anything but nationally homogenous) such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, and of course the Austrian Republic by no means meant an end to the identification with “Austria” - often still conceived in the broader, multicultural Habsburg sense - by Jews who may no longer even have been “Austrian” citizens in the new, narrow republican sense. 7 The same is true for countless tens or even hundreds of thousands of Jews who left Austria (however defined) for the USA before and during World War II, of whom many penned the memoirs that are the focus of this paper� 8 (Re-)Writing Austria’s Modern Jewish History 11 About 175,000 Jews - self-defined, as attested by their membership in their respective Jewish community organizations - were living in Austria by the “Anschluss” in 1938, the majority of whom, over ninety percent, lived in Vienna. 9 A further 25,000 Austrians, give or take, were classified as “Jewish” according to the Nuremberg Laws, a result of mixed marriages and their offspring, conversions, and formal departures (“Austritte”) from the official Jewish community organizations� 10 This latter point in particular is important to bear in mind when outlining the field of modern “Jewish” culture in Austria. As the Vienna-born art historian Ernst Gombrich, who was himself persecuted as a “Jew” under National Socialism and lived out the rest of his life in the United Kingdom, put it: “Jude ist, wer sich als Jude fühlt, und kein anderer” (85). Gombrich thereby cautioned against unwittingly adopting Nazi definitions of who belonged to the Jewish collective - an issue that is still often acutely under-reflected in Jewish historiography. That being said, and as becomes evident in many of the memoirs under discussion here, the experience of persecution and genocide perpetrated by the Nazis fundamentally reshaped individual attitudes towards one’s own “Jewishness,” not least of all through the newfound sense of belonging to a “Schicksalsgemeinschaft” in the wake of the Holocaust, which continues reverberating today, in subsequent generations. About two thirds of those Austrians who defined themselves or were defined by the Nazis as Jews, some 130,000 people, managed to flee abroad. Of those remaining in Austria or in other territories caught up by the Nazi war machinery, as many as 66,500 were murdered in the Holocaust. 11 Jews, or those defined as such by the Nuremberg Laws, therefore made up the majority of the estimated 200,000 Austrians generally who went into exile in the years 1934 to 1945 (this figure including those who emigrated during the short-lived “Austrofascist” dictatorship from 1934 to 1938, which is often eclipsed in historiography by the cataclysm of the Holocaust which followed) (Eppel 1, 7). About 30,000 of the Jewish Austrian émigrés fled to the USA, making this the single greatest destination for this demographic, followed by Palestine (since 1948 Israel) with about 15,000 Jewish Austrian émigrés (Embacher 85). The primary focus of this paper is on the broad segment of Jewish Austrians who ended up in the USA. This reflects the overwhelming shift of the center of gravity of the “Jewish world” from Europe to America in the early to mid-twentieth century, as evinced in the preponderance of memoirs - published and unpublished - by Jewish Austrians in the USA, which are primarily held at the Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) in New York. The LBI was founded in 1955, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, in order to preserve and study the “history and culture of German-speaking Jews,” reflecting the widespread and tenacious conflation through the latter half of the twentieth century of “Austrian” and “German” 12 Tim Corbett Jews, despite their obviously very different geographic, not to mention sociocultural, backgrounds, as well as a lack of critical engagement with what the terms “Austrian” and “German” actually mean in any given context� 12 Yet, despite this conflation, the LBI - then and now the flagship institution for German-speaking Jewish history and culture - actually held very little material on Austrian Jews (however defined) until as late as the 1990s. This changed dramatically with the creation of the Austrian Heritage Collection, which is outlined in detail below. Beyond its centrality to the post-Holocaust history of Austrian-born Jews, my focus on this first corpus in the USA, in particular focusing on New York City as one of the major immigration hubs for Jewish Austrians fleeing from the Nazis, is also conditioned by pragmatic considerations, such as my own linguistic concentration on primarily Germanand English-language sources� By contrast, the second corpus, namely the memory texts of Jewish Austrians who emigrated to Palestine/ Israel, including the collections of the LBI in Jerusalem, includes a sizeable Hebrew-language component. However, the choice of focus on the USA also reflects important contentual and contextual considerations: The motivations for Jewish Austrians to emigrate to what was then Mandatory Palestine, their experiences there, and the circumstances surrounding the lives they built for themselves in the later State of Israel open up a field of questions and concerns that go entirely beyond the scope of the corpus of memoirs under consideration here. Nevertheless, there is undoubtedly ample potential for future comparative studies drawing on both corpuses, particularly by scholars with a better grasp of Hebrew and a research focus on modern Israeli history. The third corpus of memoirs, finally, relates to Jewish Austrians who remained in, returned, or were new immigrants to the Second Austrian Republic after 1945. While I will not exhaustively discuss this group and the appertaining corpus of memoirs in this paper, it is worth outlining nevertheless (and it does form a comparative aspect of my ongoing research)� Estimates of the number of rémigrés - those who had gone into exile but returned after the defeat of National Socialism - range from 4,500 to 15,000, the reason for this enormous margin being that many of these people persecuted as Jews had not been members of the formal Jewish community organizations before 1945 and/ or did not register thereafter. As Jacqueline Vansant noted in her trailblazing work on rémigré memoirs, this very obscurity of numbers “underscores the diversity of the Jewish population within Austria as well as the problematic nature of the label ‘Jewish’” (13). The Jewish “community” - to again use a singular term misleadingly - that established itself in Austria after 1945 was in key respects not identical with, perhaps not even directly the successor to, the much larger community that had gone before it and was destroyed during the Holocaust� 13 As Ruth Beckermann, a prolific Austrian film director and herself the child of (Re-)Writing Austria’s Modern Jewish History 13 Holocaust survivors, remarked in a kind of “memoir” penned during the volatile post-Waldheim years, the majority of the small present-day Jewish community, who as before are concentrated mainly in Vienna, are descended either from Eastern European displaced persons or from rémigrés from Palestine/ Israel (9)� Notably, very few Jewish Austrians who fled to the USA during National Socialism decided to return to Austria after 1945. Despite enormous fluctuations over the years due to immigration, emigration, and refugee movements, the new community in Vienna has never exceeded a number of about 10,000 people (at least those formally registered with the community organization) and as such was for a long time actually considerably smaller than the “Austria-in-exile” community living in the USA. The Austrian-born contingent of this latter group is by now sadly dying out: An article published in 2002 cited a number of 4,000 Jewish Austrian émigrés living in the New York City area alone, but, given the age of this demographic, this number can be presumed to have dwindled rapidly in the intervening years - someone who had only just been born when World War II broke out in 1939 would be over 80 at the time this paper is published (Klösch 235). This fact in itself underlines the growing historiographic importance of the corpus of memoirs the wartime generations left behind. Meanwhile, the enormous imbalance between the Jewish Austrian communities existing in the latter half of the twentieth century in the USA and in the Second Republic respectively makes a comparison of their respective corpuses of memory texts - of the “old” Austrians in the USA, with roots going back to the Habsburg Empire, and of the “new” Austrians in the Second Republic, who often do not have roots in Austria reaching beyond the Holocaust - especially revealing of the interrelated discourses on “Jewishness” and “Austrianness” and the transformations of both these interrelated mental and cultural landscapes through the ruptures of the twentieth century. Specifically, and that is the key argument of this paper, the juxtaposition of the individual memoirs and of the corpuses as a whole reveals not only the plurality of Jewish Austrian “cultures” through the twentieth century, but also the generational malleability of the very concepts of “Jewish” and “Austrian” through the ruptures of this era� This paper is historiographic in nature and empirical in approach, and thus in no way intends to intervene in discussions of literary genre. Nevertheless, a distinction of terminology is helpful in approaching the diverse corpus of “memory texts” that I will be discussing in more detail shortly. To this end, a survey article by Anke Stephan, which provides both a concise typology of various “ego-documents” and a useful trove of further bibliographic references, amply suffices for our brief survey. “Ego-documents,” meaning texts or documents generally relating to an individual, are not necessarily self-authored. 14 Tim Corbett This broad category therefore includes both institutionally compiled official documentation, itself a substantial source type in our context when considering the copious official documentation of émigrés, deportees, and victims of the Holocaust, as well as “Selbstzeugnisse,” the latter constituting “eine Unter-Kategorie der Ego-Dokumente,” which are “immer autobiographischer Natur. Zu ihnen gehören Autobiographien, Memoiren, Tagebücher, Briefe oder Zeitzeugeninterviews” (Stephan 3)� Autobiographies and memoirs, as a further sub-category, and the most relevant in our context, constitute “literarische Gattungen mit spezifischen Strukturen. Sie nehmen eine Zwitterstellung zwischen Faktenbericht und literarischem Kunstwerk ein.” The two are often distinguished in literary analyses (by virtue of the respective emphasis on either the subject’s personal life or their broader social environment), but such a distinction - as Stephan herself says - is not overly useful in our historiographic context, not least of all because “[v]iele Texte lassen sich nicht eindeutig der einen oder anderen Gattung zuordnen, sondern stellen Mischformen dar” (5—6; emphasis in the original). (Lichtblau, in his key work cited above, bypassed this discussion altogether by using the generic term “Lebensgeschichten.”) These texts, in any case, share the common characteristic that their authors regard themselves as “Chronistinnen und Chronisten der Zeit […] Die Gliederung der eigenen Lebensabschnitte entlang politischer Ereignisse ist daher ein wichtiges Strukturmerkmal” (Stephan 9; emphasis in the original). These texts are thus often structured along ostensibly “objective” historical timelines, yet they absolutely do not constitute objective sources of historical events, even in cases where they present themselves precisely as such. Much rather, these retrospective, interpretative texts serve the reconstruction of “Wertesysteme, Normen, Mentalitäten und Weltbilder” (Stephan 12) that abounded in a given temporal and cultural context and/ or of a given demographic - in our case amongst the broad Jewish Austrian collective in the first half of the twentieth century� A final sub-category that needs to be distinguished in its own right consists of oral history interviews, a source type with its own unique methodology, which moreover constitutes “die einzige Quellengattung […] die erst durch das Interesse der Forschenden produziert wird” (Stephan 15; emphasis in the original), as interviews tend to be structured around the questions and contentual prioritizations of the interviewer, rather than the interviewee. What all these source types share in common, nevertheless, aside from their relation to individual life stories, is that “Erlebtes durch neu gewonnene Erkenntnisse und veränderte Lebensumstände ständig umgeformt und an neue Lebenssituationen und Selbstbilder angepasst [wird]” (19—20). In other words, memory, and the construction of a usable personal narrative of the past, often plays a larger role than does the (Re-)Writing Austria’s Modern Jewish History 15 devotion to historical veracity or “objective” facts. This is a key point to bear in mind when it comes to discussing the use of this source type in historiography, which I collectively call “memory texts” to emphasize the role of memory in shaping heterogeneous narratives of the past� A plethora of works were already penned during the interwar period that could, and should, be included in a corpus of Jewish Austrian memory texts of the twentieth century� 14 Yet it was the Holocaust, with all its broader ramifications - in particular the mass exodus of Jews from Europe - that spawned an enormous corpus of extremely diverse memory texts, mostly taking the form of personal memoirs. These were moreover significantly authored by a much broader demographic, not just by famous literati. The majority of these are today held in the collections of the LBI in New York� Through the initiative of Albert Lichtblau, who at that time was just beginning his research into Jewish Austrian memoirs at the LBI that would lead to the publication of his trailblazing study of “österreichisch-jüdische Lebensgeschichten” discussed above, the LBI began expanding the Austrian dimension of its collections, actively soliciting materials, including memoirs and other ego-documents, from surviving Jewish Austrians or their descendants around the world� 15 So, for example, the newsletter of the Jewish community organization in Vienna published an ad in 1995 calling for anyone from the former lands of the Habsburg Empire, not just from the Austrian Republic, to submit memoirs, or even to write memoirs specifically, to be made available for research in New York, under the rubric: “Damit es nicht verloren geht…” (“Österreichische Memoiren gesucht”). This reflects not only the profoundly late creation of the bulk of this corpus of collective memory - a significant point when it comes to interpreting these texts, as both solicited and deeply retrospective “memory texts” - but also the enduring understanding, at least among Jewish Austrians themselves, of the Habsburg Jewish context as being simultaneously part and parcel of “Austrian” Jewish history and culture� The LBI’s initiative led to the creation in 1996 of the Austrian Heritage Collection (AHC). This name designates both an ongoing cooperative project between the LBI and the Austrian Verein Gedenkdienst, “whose specific goal is to document the history of Austrian-Jewish émigrés who fled to the USA during the Nazi years,” and a broader bundle of individual collections of ego-documents which emerged from this project and which is held at the LBI� 16 Today, the “Austrian” collections - again in the broader historical sense of the term - make up a good thirty percent of the total archive and library holdings of the LBI, reflecting a dramatic shift since the 1990s in the perception and reception of German-speaking Jewries in Central and Eastern Europe outside the narrower remit of a “national German” context� 16 Tim Corbett The primary focus of the AHC, in particular of the ongoing project run by the Gedenkdienst, is on oral history, with over 500 interviews with Jewish Austrians having been recorded to date, many of which are available digitally online through the catalog of the Center for Jewish History in New York (of which the LBI is a constituent part)� 17 By 2010, the AHC had elicited responses to a short initial survey from over 3,500 people born between 1880 and 1939, the vast majority (almost 3,000) having been born between 1910 and 1929. Of these respondents, 97 percent lived in the US, 87 percent of whom were born in Vienna, reflecting the predominance in these life stories of both Vienna in the past and the USA, particularly the New York metropolitan area, in the present. The circa 500 in-depth interviews that have been conducted to date were drawn from this pool of respondents. The gender balance was fairly even in both stages, the initial survey and the interviews, while the project canvassed actively for interviews with underrepresented groups, for example the much smaller number of Jewish Austrians from the federal states outside of Vienna� 18 A further stage in the process of locating and surveying the surviving Jewish Austrians in exile, predominantly in the USA, involved the solicitation of any and all ego-documents to be stored at the AHC and made available for future research. While this latter aspect is not quantified in the scant, interview-focused publications on the topic, I have identified hundreds of individual collections of Jewish Austrians contained at the LBI beyond the collection of digitized AHC interviews. These broader collections include anything from personal photographs, ID cards and passports, emigration documents and the like through to my key interest here: a great number of “memoirs” of the most various types� The Stephan Shiffers Collection, to cite an example chosen at random, includes both a transcript of an oral interview conducted with Shiffers in 2001 as well as a written “auto-biographical essay” he penned in 1996 by request for the AHC. In another randomly selected example, the Herta Pollak Collection does not contain a self-authored, purpose-written memoir, but it does contain both the long and short questionnaires conducted by the AHC as well as Pollak’s original “Heimatschein” (proof of Austrian citizenship before 1938), three “autobiographic letters” (which in style and intent come close to memoirs), a professional certificate belonging to her husband Leopold Pollak, inflation money and theater programs from the interwar period, her husband’s birth certificate, her parents’ 1915 wedding photograph, and a 1919 family photograph. Her digital AHC interview from 1998 is also available separately online� 19 The AHC - an evidently broad and rich collection of memory texts - today constitutes the largest single collection pertaining to Jewish Austrian émigrés, “und darüber hinaus eine der größten Sammlungen zur Exilgeschichte überhaupt” (Klösch 238). Since 2017, a growing number of AHC interviews - both videos and transcripts (Re-)Writing Austria’s Modern Jewish History 17 along with infographic data - are moreover being made publicly available on an interactive website called the “Austrian Heritage Archive,” which promises to become a primary resource for scholars working with oral histories of Jewish Austrians in the future� 20 A large part of the broad corpus of Jewish Austrian memory texts of the twentieth century consists of written memoirs, a fraction of which have been published with varying degrees of public reception, all of which emerged in a variety of contexts. Many of these memoirs were written from the 1990s onwards in response to direct requests from the LBI and through the AHC project, such as the above-mentioned autobiography by Stephan Shiffers. He opened immediately by self-reference to the act of remembering and the tendentiousness of memory generally: “Today, fifty-four days before my eighty-seventh birthday, I am telling you happenings and conditions of my past life, among them fortyfour [sic] days as prisoner of the Nazis in Dachau, Bavaria. Please consider therefore, [sic] that some important details might have been forgotten, while minor incidents from my childhood are indelibly impregnated in my memory” (Shiffers n. pag.). Some memoirs were written explicitly for or on the request of children and grandchildren, including a children’s book, To Sail a Ship of Treasures, published in 1984 by the Vienna-born illustrator and children’s book author Lisl Weil, which attempts to explain her story of persecution and emigration to a younger audience. The preface “invites the reader to treasure the memories of life, whether it has been a long or a short one,” and the book closes with the sentiment: “Good or sad, everything one remembers is important. Our memories help make us the people we are” (Weil n� pag�)� Some memoirs emerged in the context of public lectures, often penned by academics, such as John Emanuel Ullmann’s The Jews of Vienna: A Somewhat Personal Memoir, which was based on a lecture delivered at Hofstra University, where Ullmann was a professor of management, on 23 November 1992. As the subtitle suggests, Ullmann here wove his family history into the general narrative of Vienna’s past, for his family’s “own good times came and went with what happened to the city. If I speak a lot of them tonight,” he continued, “it is also because that is one way of showing you Jewish life in Vienna in a personal way, rather than giving you only a historical survey, with lots of dates and numbers” (Ullmann 2)� In a strikingly early example of memoirs arising from such public academic contexts, Harvard University in 1940 invited submissions for an essay competition entitled “Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach dem 30� Januar 1933.” Despite the misleading title (a case in point of the conflation of German and Austrian Jews), a whopping 39 of the 263 submissions, about 15 percent, were written by individuals from Vienna. 21 For example, the 44-page essay of 18 Tim Corbett this title by Philipp Flesch, a World War I veteran born in Vienna in 1896, opens with his family’s history in Central Europe reaching back at least until the seventeenth century, through which Flesch wished to emphasize the longevity of his ancestral ties to “Deutschland” (sic! ), while in fact revealing their roots across Habsburg Central Europe - in Vienna, Moravia, and Hungary (Flesch 1). Some of the memoirs in the collection, published or unpublished, are as short as a few pages, others are hundreds of pages long. They are sometimes prosaic, sometimes highly literary, constructed in the form of a novel or even a scholarly treatise. Frederic Morton, for example, who was born Fritz Mandelbaum in Vienna in 1924, covered both these bases: His 1979 work A Nervous Splendour, which significantly coincided with the publication of Carl Schorske’s groundbreaking Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, offers a novelesque history of belle époque Vienna in the year 1888� Reading like an impossible melodrama featuring a cast of familiar figures, from Emperor Franz Joseph and Crown Prince Rudolf to Gustav Klimt, Arnold Schönberg, Anton Bruckner, Theodor Herzl, Arthur Schnitzler, and others, the story culminates in the birth of another notorious “memoirist” of Viennese culture a year later: Adolf Hitler� Morton thereby also predated by almost twenty years the first scholarly treatise to locate Hitler’s ideology in his fin-de-siècle Viennese past, Brigitte Hamann’s Hitlers Wien. In 2009, Morton also published a more conventional autobiography, Runaway Waltz, reflecting more explicitly on his personal background� An even more scholarly take on the memoir genre is the 248-page unpublished manuscript Memoirs & Reminiscences by the geographer Eric Fischer, in which his passage to America functions metonymically for the passing of the European age� The authors of these memoirs span multiple generations, including individuals from a wide variety of educational, economic, cultural, political, and religious backgrounds, both men and women. Even some of the unpublished memoirs, which as such may have escaped the scrutiny of all but the most specialized of scholars working with the AHC, were written by individuals who were not just “participant observers” (as the part-Viennese historian Eric Hobsbawm called his generation), but were actively and deeply involved in the political events and turmoil of their place and time� 22 A prominent example of this latter case is the 1972 memoir Wien 1938/ 39 by Bukovinian-born Charles Kapralik, who ran the foreign currency office of the Vienna Jewish community organization as it was forced to administer its own dissolution after 1938. This is therefore a unique insider account of this crucial aspect of the history not only of Jews in Vienna, but also of the Holocaust generally� On the flipside, even such eyewitness accounts by important functionaries can be astonishingly taciturn when it comes to historical detail, so for example the undated and unpublished Selbstbiographie by Isidor Klaber. Briefly appoint- (Re-)Writing Austria’s Modern Jewish History 19 ed by Adolf Eichmann as leader of the same coerced Jewish community organization in 1938 before being replaced by Josef Löwenherz, Klaber’s memoir focuses on his personal past and merely skirts over the “Hitlerzeit, die ich nicht schildern will,” closing laconically from his new perspective in exile in Palestine: “Es waren nun Jahre des Krieges, der Untergrundbewegung, illegale Einwanderung, alles wurde von uns miterlebt. Der Junge in der Haganah, beim Militär, die Eltern in begreiflicher Sorge Tag für Tag. Die Wohnung in Jaffa-Nähe. Nachrichten vom Untergang der Unseren durch Hitler. Unsere Hilflosigkeit! ” (Klaber 14). Klaber’s successor to the ill-fated job, Josef Löwenherz, incidentally spawned an entire collection at the LBI - but which only shows up in the catalog under the name “Joseph Loewenherz�” Dozens of memoirs of Jewish Austrians have been published over the years, the library of the LBI constituting the most comprehensive repository of published works relating to Jewish Austrian history in the world, complementing the unpublished archival holdings of the AHC� Some published memoirs have in fact become international bestsellers, perhaps the most famous example from Vienna, certainly in scholarly and/ or German-speaking circles, being the comparatively late (1992) autobiography by the recently deceased Holocaust survivor Ruth Klüger, weiter leben. Klüger here paradigmatically underlined the inaccessibility and incommunicability of the Holocaust, and thereby the related problems of representation and memory in its aftermath, as encapsulated in the recurring trope of barbed wire: “Eine Wand ist immer zwischen den Generationen, hier aber Stacheldraht, alter, rostiger Stacheldraht” (weiter leben 72)� The issue of intergenerational discourse raised here is moreover exemplary of the explicitly dialogic nature of Klüger’s work as a whole, which engages both its readership and the historiography on the Holocaust generally, as was the subject of a monograph comparing Klüger’s work to that of Primo Levi. 23 Her work finally also offers an outspoken - and deeply critical - engagement with the gendered dimension of the Holocaust� Both the gendered dimension as well as the dialogic nature of this exceptionally rich memoir are characteristically expressed in the following sardonic remark, introduced in mid-sentence parentheses: “wer rechnet schon mit männlichen Lesern? Die lesen nur von anderen Männern Geschriebenes” (weiter leben 82)� The above-cited study of dialogue in weiter leben is indicative of the degree to which such memory texts have furthermore become the focus of scholarly discourse, mostly in the field of literary studies, but increasingly also of historiography, in recent years. The impact of some of these memoirs has in turn led to their authors being invited to contribute to academic works on Jewish Austrian history and culture. George Clare, who was born Georg Klaar in Vienna in 1920, the author of the family autobiography Last Waltz in Vienna (1982), was 20 Tim Corbett for example interviewed for the trailblazing publication Eine zerstörte Kultur in 1990. Here, he reflected critically on the development of Viennese culture since 1938/ 45 and appealed directly to a broad audience: “Freunde, Historiker, ehemalige Landsleute - begraben wir den ‘Herrn Karl’ [a reference to the famous literary creation of Helmut Qualtinger and Carl Merz]: kein gutes Wort soll ihn begleiten. Wenn das geschieht, dann wäre Wien nicht länger fremd” (Clare, “Letzter Walzer in Wien“ 356)� Such memoirs have of course also been used as sources in the growing scholarly research on Jewish Austrian history and the Holocaust in recent years� 24 Conversely, some works of historical scholarship contain explicitly autobiographical elements, if their authors had personal or familial ties to Austria. Thomas Weyr, for example, who was born in Vienna in 1927, explicitly thematized his childhood memories in his work on the history of Vienna under National Socialism, reflecting for example on how the makeup of his school, the Döblinger Gymnasium, where “full, half, and quarter Jews” made up about a third of the student body, reflected the interweaving of cultures in this secular, upper-middle-class suburb before National Socialism (Weyr 82)� Some memoirs emerged in contexts entirely unrelated to their Jewish Austrian authors’ backgrounds or their experiences of persecution and flight, for example the autobiography of the neuroscientist Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory, which he was invited to write upon receipt of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000. Even this work, however, contributes profoundly to the complex picture of Jewish Austrian history and the memory and impact thereof reaching into the twenty-first century. As Kandel, who was forced to flee Vienna with his family at only nine years of age, and whose work has revolutionized our understanding of the physiological mechanism of memory, outlined in the preface: “In the course of writing mine [his autobiography], I saw more clearly than before how my interest in the nature of memory was rooted in my childhood experiences in Vienna” (xiv)� The postwar scope of Jewish Austrian memory texts far exceeds these more specific types of autobiographies and memoirs. Poetry by émigrés has been cited as a specific - and rich - type of memory text relating to the experience of exile and the relationship of the authors to Austria and to the German language generally. A succinct case in point is the layers of personal reflection on identity, culture, and belonging folded into just two lines in a 1943 poem written in New York by the Viennese-born World War I veteran Ernst Waldinger: “Ich bin ein Sohn der deutschen Sprache nur, Ich bin kein Deutscher, wohl ist mir darum.” 25 A further sub-genre of memory texts could include biographies not by, but about Jewish Austrians, such as Tom Segev’s exemplary work on the life of Simon Wiesenthal. Though this work was not authored by Wiesenthal himself, (Re-)Writing Austria’s Modern Jewish History 21 was in fact written after Wiesenthal’s death, and thus does not constitute an ego-document as such, it draws on copious amounts of personal papers from, among other places, the Simon Wiesenthal Archive in Vienna, and thus contains many citations and reflections pertinent to a discussion of Jewish Austrian memory of the twentieth century through the example of one of its most famous protagonists� Consider the following scene from Wiesenthal’s ninetieth birthday celebration at the Hotel Imperial on the Ringstraße and the light it casts on Holocaust memory and survival: “Although he had always been a secular person, he insisted that the meal be a kosher one; the idea that the hotel that once hosted Adolf Hitler was serving a kosher meal to guests honouring Simon Wiesenthal enchanted him” (Segev 409). Even more indirectly, one could here include works such as the 2010 international bestseller The Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, the British-born descendant of a prominent part-Viennese family, and as such reflecting transgenerational memories and interpretations of the Jewish Austrian past� This survey must include a brief discussion of some of the historiography emerging after the Holocaust, not just to give due credit to the studies existing to date, but also because the genealogy of these works evinces an evolution in the disciplinary, methodological, and contentual use of these various memory texts in scholarship� One of the earliest scholarly studies to use such texts was in fact a sociological study based on the life stories of rémigrés to Austria, Christoph Reinprecht’s Zurückgekehrt (1992)� Aside from its contentual novelty, Reinprecht also made a significant interpretative contribution to the field, certainly predating comparable trends in historiographic research on Jewish Austrian culture, by pointing out that “Jewishness” as a category of identification - the primary category for many of the subjects of interest here after 1945 - though largely imposed from without, became the pivotal factor around which individual patterns of communication, relations, and belonging were negotiated, both within the Jewish “community” and within Austrian society more broadly� Not until the following decade would scholars such as Klaus Hödl and Lisa Silverman adopt a similar approach in historiographical studies: With the development of the concept of “Jewish difference” as a fluid category of negotiated belonging and as a performance of belonging, akin to gender or class, scholars have recently been breaking with outdated yet tenacious essentialist narratives of Jewish “identity” such as that of a Jewish “assimilation” into an essentially “non-Jewish,” implicitly unchanging, hegemonic Austrian (or worse German) “Leitkultur�” 26 The 2000s saw a progression in this trend of memoir-based studies of Jewish Austrian history from a variety of perspectives, including the above-cited work on rémigré memoirs by Jacqueline Vansant from 2001, a foundational study in 22 Tim Corbett this field, particularly regarding the context of the Second Republic, albeit from more of a literary and biographical and less of a historiographic perspective� In 2008, Michaela Raggam-Blesch published a work on Jewish women’s history in fin-de-siècle Vienna that was based almost entirely on the by now extensive AHC. The origins of this latter work in a research project at the Center for Jewish History in New York demonstrated both the growing comprehension of Jewish Austrian history as a field in its own right within Jewish studies, significantly separate from “German” Jewish history and located increasingly in the context of the former Habsburg Empire, and the potential of these sources held at the LBI for opening new research areas within the field, in this case pertaining to Jewish women’s and gender studies� Following the trend set by Klaus Hödl, Raggam-Blesch’s study was moreover notable for introducing a more critical engagement not only with the source materials, but also with the concepts underlying the field - in her case problematizing “Jewishness” much in the same way that she problematized gender� Raggam-Blesch’s critical distinction of the appertaining memory texts, similar to those cited by Anke Stephan above, and her emphasis on the tension between the recounting of the past and the insertion of interpretation and meaning-making in the present, not to mention the hidden acts of obfuscation and outright concealment inherent in such memory texts, goes a long way to informing the use of the memoirs under discussion here� As Manès Sperber, the Galician-born essayist in exile, was quoted saying in Lichtblau’s early work, memoirs may not even reflect memories as such, already one stage removed from the actual events of the past, but may in fact be “Erinnerungen an Erinnerungen.” 27 In other words, the writing of memoirs - which in this context often occurred only decades after the events recounted and was often prompted by third parties, as in the case of the AHC - consists of the present retrieval of past memories that themselves were formulated perhaps half a century ago, following the events being remembered: a complicated mnemonic convolution. However, as memories become textualized in the form of memoirs, and these corpuses of memoirs in turn become canonized in historiography, they can blur the lines between recognizably personal, individual, “communicative” memories and the general “collective” or “cultural” memory of entire eras� 28 By inference, historians run the risk of citing memories and narratives drawn from memoirs as historical fact, or of adopting collective narratives canonized in memoir corpuses as “objective” historical accounts of the past� Conversely, these precise tensions between the individual and the collective, as between chosen and conferred identities, and thereby the problems inherent in using memoirs of individual Jews to write a “Jewish” history, equally point to the ways in which these memoirs can augment or even revise historical think- (Re-)Writing Austria’s Modern Jewish History 23 ing about Jews and Jewish culture in Austria - if the inherent complexity and subjectivity of the individual memoirs is placed center stage, and not merely glossed over� A broad corpus of memory texts such as the Austrian Heritage Collection could well offer an opportunity for the “more anarchical and comprehensive” approach to the examination of memory-making called for by Alon Confino over twenty years ago (Cofino 1402). Rather than constituting a priori a form of “collective” memory, memoir corpuses should in fact be approached as a form of “collected” memories, “an aggregate of individual memories,” characterized by diversity, ambivalence, and contrasts (Kansteiner 186). Seen in this light, the historiographic use of memoirs can avoid the pitfalls of subsuming these sources under an ostensible “collective” history and thereby actually obliterating those experiences that do not support the collective narrative� A whole range of questions can and should be applied to each memory text chosen from this vast corpus: Who was the author? What motivated them to write about their memories of Austria, their emigration, and/ or their experiences during the Holocaust? What are the key themes in their texts, and are there any glaring omissions? How “literary” are these texts, how ostensibly “factual”? In what sense does the author’s background, experience, generation, age, gender etc. inform the reading of their text? In what language was the text written, for which audience, was it published, and if so, in what context? An entirely different set of questions emerges when one places these texts in relation to one another: In what ways are the backgrounds, motivations etc. of the authors comparable or different? How are the similarities or differences related to characteristics of the authors such as generation, experience, gender, and so on? How does the view towards themes, context, and historical interpretation change in relation to issues such as the text’s creation date or whether or not it was published? Approached like this, our vast and eclectic corpus of memory texts reveals, to summarize very briefly, an astonishing array of insights into the history of Jewish Austrians over the last century. These texts share in common that the individual narratives are mostly structured in relation to specific historical events and/ or eras - evincing the blurring of classic genres of “autobiography” and “memoir” or even “eyewitness accounts” as outlined by Anke Stephan above� Categories of belonging - such as Jewishness, gender, class, or broader political and cultural belongings - are often framed retrospectively, for example reflecting on life in Habsburg society from the vantage point of a new life in the USA, looking back through the prism of the Holocaust� Language is here a not inconsiderable issue, reflecting the authors’ self-conception, their relationship to their Austrian past and to their American (or other) present, while translations of memory texts from one language to another in some cases constitute entirely 24 Tim Corbett new editions intended for entirely different audiences. 29 Often, incidental or even marginalized topics come to the fore in these mostly non-elite sources: The generally understudied era of Austrofascist rule in the mid-1930s, to cite just one example, could be entirely reconceived from a “Jewish” perspective through the use of these memoirs� 30 Generational shifts are key here, with some memoirists, such as Ruth Klüger, having being born into fascism and antisemitism, while other, older memoirists, such as Eric Fischer, reflect as far back as the “German Wars” of the 1860s and interpret what followed accordingly. The issue of generational difference itself is sometimes explicitly discussed in these sources (as in Klüger’s barbed wire), at other times not, another key example of the caution that needs to be exercised when assessing the “objective” historical veracity of individual experiences, for example - an often discussed example - regarding the extent and aggressiveness of antisemitism in Austrian society before 1938� The contextual scope of the sources naturally goes far beyond Austria, including reflections on the exile condition generally and on new home cities or homelands, such as most prolifically New York and the USA. Of course, as the variability of the individual collections of the AHC already suggests, these sources shed even more insights when they are placed in relation to other existing ego-documents pertaining to one and the same individual, such as photographs, newspaper reports, gravestones, appearances in scholarly literature, and more� Anecdotes and discussions of other people and/ or the citation of other people’s memories form a further, almost intertextual, certainly interpersonal level of memory construction in this source pool� Explicit engagements with the audience, with some of these memoirs even addressing the reader, form yet another level of interor metatextuality. As such, this corpus itself constitutes a more or less explicit engagement with memory as a whole and/ or with historiography by contrast to personal memory� The corpus of memory texts outlined here opens up a plethora of thematic contexts: identity, culture, “Jewishness,” but also “Austrianness” (not to mention later “Americanness”) are central issues, while Jewishness in particular breaks down further into issues of religion, culture, practice, heritage, heredity, discrimination, persecution, and more. The personal narratives often revolve around particular historical events: the late Habsburg Empire, World War I, life in the crownlands or later federal states versus Vienna, revolution and republic, Red Vienna, fascism and National Socialism, not to mention the “Anschluss,” November Pogrom, and the Holocaust - each constitutes a particular lieu de memoire allowing for the experience of Jewish Austrians to be grasped in its kaleidoscopic plurality, whether from a synchronic perspective (focusing on (Re-)Writing Austria’s Modern Jewish History 25 one particular moment, such as World War I) or as a diachronic development (in its broadest from the Habsburg Empire through to the twenty-first century). With projects such as the Austrian Heritage Collection in recent years generating a vast array of new memory texts, a veritable corpus of sources relating to modern Jewish Austrian history, but given that the historiographic engagement with this textual heritage - the highly qualitative studies published to date notwithstanding - is still in its infancy, these sources of thousands upon thousands of Jewish Austrian life stories promise rich and exciting new insights into this already much-discussed field of modern history, which as a result should show no sign of stagnation in the foreseeable future� Notes 1 I am indebted to Jacqueline Vansant for her critical suggestions on an early draft of this text, to Philipp Rohrbach for sharing his insider knowledge of the Austrian Heritage Collection, and to Joseph Moser for his invitation to contribute to this special volume� Research for this article was made possible by a generous grant from the Edith Saurer Fonds� 2 This point was made with specific regard to the historiography of Jews in Vienna by Beller (18)� 3 This article was both a specific thematic take on the broad topic of Jewish Viennese sepulchral culture and a kind of pilot study for a comprehensive book on the history of Vienna’s Jewish cemeteries, entitled Die Grabstätten meiner Väter: Die jüdischen Friedhöfe in Wien. 4 For an early and characteristic example, see the published reflection by Pick. 5 See Corbett et al. 6 I am not going to reiterate here the substantial and well-known roster of historiographies on Jews in Austria, the Habsburg Empire, and Central Europe� Still the most comprehensive overview of the history of Jews in Austria to date is Brugger et al., Geschichte der Juden in Österreich, while an overview of recent developments in the field, from a variety of perspectives but with a focus on cultural history, can be gleaned from Silverman and Holmes� 7 A groundbreaking new work in this respect, which argues against the long-dominant nationalist historiographies that a sense of “Austrian” identity and loyalty to the Habsburg “state” was a powerful and lasting force generally in modern Central Europe, not only amongst Jews, is Judson, The Habsburg Empire� 8 Despite the difficulty of determining exact numbers from the census data of the US State Department, Lichtblau showed that, even before the Holocaust, 26 Tim Corbett the USA was the numerically greatest destination for Jews emigrating from Austria and, conversely, that the Habsburg Empire was the second-greatest country of origin of Jewish immigrants in the USA, after the Russian Empire (Lichtblau, Als hätten wir dazugehört 56)� 9 On these figures, see Brugger et al. 501—05, 525. 10 On the sociological background to this circumstance, see Oxaal 58. 11 See the current estimates of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance at www�doew�at/ erforschen/ projekte/ datenbankprojekte/ namentliche-erfassung-der-oesterreichischen-holocaustopfer� Web� 24 Jan� 2019� 12 See www�lbi�org/ � Web� 24 Jan� 2019� 13 See the seminal work on the new community by Adunka, especially 17. 14 A well-known example is Wassermann, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude, published in 1921. To be sure, Wassermann was a Bavarian-born German citizen, yet he spent the majority of his life in Austria, where he died and was buried, and interwar Vienna features prominently in his autobiography. This is a case in point of the diversity and complexity of both the memoirs included in our corpus and their authors, as well as of the porousness of the definition of “Jewish Austrians” throughout the twentieth century. One could even include explicitly fictional literature here, such as Joseph Roth’s 1927 novella Die Flucht ohne Ende, which was, however, tellingly subtitled “Ein Bericht,” as well as Roth’s extensive essayistic oeuvre from the 1930s, compiled in Volumes 3 and 4 of Kesten, Joseph Roth Werke� 15 See Lichtblau, “Community-orientiertes Arbeiten konkret”. 16 See www�lbi�org/ collections/ austrian-heritage-collection/ � Web� 12 Oct� 2020� 17 These can be accessed by searching either generally with the term “Austrian Heritage Collection,” which brings up a list of almost 500 relevant collections, or using the specific name of an individual collection, at www.cjh. org/ � Web� 12 Oct� 2020� 18 See Lichtblau, “Community-orientiertes Arbeiten konkret” 139—140, 143. See also Klösch 237� 19 The individual URLs are too long to reproduce here, but each of these examples can be found by searching on the above-cited CJH catalog using the name of the collection, the individual, and/ or the item in question. 20 See austrianheritagearchive�at� Web� 12 Oct� 2020� 21 As indicated in Hecht et al. 144, footnote 15. 22 Hobsbawm used this expression self-referentially in his autobiography, Interesting Times (xiii)� 23 Bianchi, Shoah und Dialog bei Primo Levi und Ruth Klüger� (Re-)Writing Austria’s Modern Jewish History 27 24 For example the German edition of Trahan, Geisterbeschwörung, which was one of numerous memoirs cited extensively in Hecht et al., Topographie der Shoah� 25 Cited in Herz-Kestranek et al� 499� 26 See in particular Hödl, Wiener Juden - jüdische Wiener, and Silverman, Becoming Austrians� 27 Cited in Lichtblau, Als hätten wir dazugehört 129� Emphasis in the original� 28 I am drawing here on the well-established distinction between “communicative” and “cultural” memory outlined by Assmann (13)� 29 For example the English-language edition of Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben, entitled Still Alive, which is not so much a translation of the German original as an “American edition” in the fullest sense� 30 I offered an example of such a reappraisal in Corbett, “Once ‘the Only True Austrians’�” Works Cited Adunka, Evelyn. Die vierte Gemeinde: Die Wiener Juden in der Zeit von 1945 bis heute� Vienna: Philo, 2000. Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1999. Beckermann, Ruth. Unzugehörig: Österreicher und Juden nach 1945. Vienna: Löcker, 1989� Beller, Steven. “Knowing Your Elephant: Why Jewish Studies Is Not the Same as Judaistik, and Why That Is a Good Thing.” Jüdische Studien: Reflexionen zu Theorie und Praxis eines wissenschaftlichen Feldes. Ed. Klaus Hödl. Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2003� Bianchi, Aglaia. Shoah und Dialog bei Primo Levi und Ruth Klüger� Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014. Brenner, Michael. Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History� Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010. Brugger, Eveline, Martha Keil, Albert Lichtblau, Christoph Lind, and Barbara Staudinger� Geschichte der Juden in Österreich. Vienna: Ueberreuter, 2006. Clare, George. Last Waltz in Vienna: The Destruction of a Family 1842-1942� London: Pan, 1982. ---� “Letzter Walzer in Wien: Ein Nachtrag�” Eine zerstörte Kultur: Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus in Wien seit dem 19.-Jahrhundert. Ed. Gerhard Botz, Ivar Oxaal and Michael Pollak. Buchloe: Obermayer, 1990. Confino, Alon. “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method.” The American Historical Review 102�5 (1997): 1386—1403� 28 Tim Corbett Corbett, Tim. “A ‘Capable Wife’ or a ‘Woman of Valor’? Reading Gendered Discourses and the Commemoration of Women in Vienna’s Jewish Cemeteries�” Nashim 32 (2018): 77—101� ---� Die Grabstätten meiner Väter: Die jüdischen Friedhöfe in Wien. Vienna: Böhlau, 2021. ---� “Once ‘the Only True Austrians’: Mobilising Jewish Memory of the First World War for Belonging in the New Austrian Nation, 1929-1938.” Ed. Edward Madigan and Gideon Reuveni� The Jewish Experience of the First World War� London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 255—76. Corbett, Tim, Klaus Hödl, Caroline Kita, Susanne Korbel, and Dirk Rupnow. “Migration, Integration, and Assimilation: Reassessing Key Concepts in ( Jewish) Austrian History�” Journal of Austrian Studies 54�1 (2021): 1—28� Diner, Dan, ed. Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur. Vol. 1. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011� Embacher, Helga. Neubeginn ohne Illusionen: Juden in Österreich nach 1945� Vienna: Picus, 1995. Eppel, Peter. Österreicher im Exil: USA, 1938-1945. Vol. 1. Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1995. Fischer, Eric. Memoirs & Reminiscences [1898-1985]. 1942. ME 348. Leo Baeck Institute, New York City� Flesch, Philipp. Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach dem 30. Januar 1933� 1984� ME 132. Leo Baeck Institute, New York City. Gombrich, Ernst. “‘Niemand hat je gefragt, wer jetzt gerade ein Jude oder ein Nichtjude war’: Ein Interview von Hermine Koebl�” Eine zerstörte Kultur: Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus in Wien seit dem 19.-Jahrhundert� Ed� Gerhard Botz et al� Vienna: Czernin, 2002. 85—94. Hamann, Brigitte. Hitlers Wien: Lehrjahre eines Diktators. Munich: Piper, 1996. Hecht, Dieter, Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, and Michaela Raggam-Blesch. Topographie der Shoah: Gedächtnisorte des zerstörten jüdischen Wien. Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2015. Herz-Kestranek, Miguel, Konstantin Kaiser, and Daniela Strigl, eds. In welcher Sprache träumen Sie? Österreichische Lyrik des Exils und des Widerstands. Vienna: Theodor Kramer, 2007. Hobsbawm, Eric. Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life. London: Abacus, 2002. Hödl, Klaus. Wiener Juden - jüdische Wiener: Identität, Gedächtnis und Performanz im 19.-Jahrhundert. Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2006. Hyman, Paula. Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1995. Judson, Pieter. The Habsburg Empire: A New History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016� Kandel, Eric. In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind� New York: Norton, 2006. Kansteiner, Wulf. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies�” History and Theory 41�2 (2002): 179—97� Kapralik, Charles. Wien 1938/ 39. 1972. ME 352. Leo Baeck Institute, New York City. (Re-)Writing Austria’s Modern Jewish History 29 Kesten, Hermann, ed. Joseph Roth. Werke. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1976. Klaber, Isidor. Selbstbiographie [1892-1940]. N.d. ME 1451. Leo Baeck Institute, New York City� Klösch, Christian. “The Austrian Heritage Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute: Ein wissenschaftliches Projekt zur Dokumentation von Lebensgeschichten vertriebener ÖsterreicherInnen in den USA.” Jenseits des Schlussstrichs: Gedenkdienst im Diskurs über Österreichs nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit� Ed� Martin Horvath et al� Vienna: Löcker, 2002. Klüger, Ruth. weiter leben: Eine Jugend. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992. ---� Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New York: The Feminist Press, 2001. Lichtblau, Albert. “Community-orientiertes Arbeiten konkret: Die Austrian Heritage Collection in New York�”“Nach Amerika nämlich! ” Jüdische Migrationen in die Amerikas des 19. und 20.-Jahrhundert. Ed. Ulla Kriebernegg et al. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012. Lichtblau, Albert, ed. Als hätten wir dazugehört: Österreichisch-jüdische Lebensgeschichten aus der Habsburgermonarchie. Vienna: Böhlau, 1999. Morton, Frederic. A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/ 1889. Boston: Little, 1979. ---� Runaway Waltz: A Memoir from Vienna to New York. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005� “Österreichische Memoiren gesucht.” Die Gemeinde 20 Dec� 1995: 34� Oxaal, Ivar. “Die Juden im Wien des jungen Hitler: Historische und soziologische Aspekte�” Eine zerstörte Kultur: Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus in Wien seit dem 19.-Jahrhundert. Ed. Gerhard Botz et al. Vienna: Czernin, 2002. 47—64. Pick, Robert. “The Vienna of the Departed: The Tale the Old Cemetery Tells.” Commentary 16 (1953): 153—57� Raggam-Blesch, Michaela. Zwischen Ost und West: Identitätskonstruktionen jüdischer Frauen in Wien. Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2008. Reinprecht, Christoph. Zurückgekehrt: Identität und Bruch in der Biographie österreichischer Juden. Vienna: Braumüller, 1992. Roth, Joseph. Die Flucht ohne Ende: Ein Bericht. Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1927. Schorske, Carl. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Knopf, 1979. Shiffers, Stephan. Autobiography. 1996. ME 1470. Leo Baeck Institute, New York City. Segev, Tom. Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends. London: Jonathan Cape, 2010. Silverman, Lisa. Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars� Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Silverman, Lisa, and Deborah Holmes. “Jewish Difference in the Austrian Context: Introduction�” Austrian Studies 24 (2016): 1—12� Stephan, Anke. “Erinnertes Leben: Autobiographien, Memoiren und Oral-History-Interviews als historische Quellen.” Digitales Handbuch zur Geschichte und Kultur Russlands und Osteuropas 10 (2007): n� pag� Open Access LMU� Web� 12 Oct� 2020� Trahan, Elisabeth. Geisterbeschwörung: Eine jüdische Jugend im Wien der Kriegsjahre� Trans. Elfriede Potyka. Vienna: Picus, 1996. Ullmann, John Emanuel. The Jews of Vienna: A Somewhat Personal Memoir� 1993� AR 10682. Leo Baeck Institute, New York City. 30 Tim Corbett Vansant, Jacqueline. Reclaiming Heimat: Trauma and Mourning in Memoirs by Jewish Austrian Reémigrés. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001. Waal, Edmund de. The Hare with the Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance� London: Vintage, 2011. Wassermann, Jakob. Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude. Berlin: Fischer, 1921. Weil, Lisl. To Sail a Ship of Treasures. New York: Atheneum, 1984. Weyr, Thomas. The Setting of the Pearl: Vienna under Hitler. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics in Story of a Life and The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping Abigail Gillman Boston University Abstract : Israeli author Aharon (Erwin) Appelfeld, born in Bukovina in 1932, survived the Holocaust as a child in hiding. He arrived in Palestine as a teenager and went on to become a celebrated author of over twenty books� On many occasions, he stated that his poetics—his relationship to words; his mode of observing the world (hitbonenut); and his laconic literary style—had been shaped in early childhood and did not change in the course of his life� Appelfeld’s memoir The Story of a Life (1999), and his novel The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping (2010), are centrally preoccupied with the enigma, and the necessity, of his child-like style. The former work, an episodic anti-memoir, depicts children’s modes of observing, experiencing, and remembering, as inherently valuable and artistic. The latter work, an autofictional novel, follows a teenage survivor named Erwin as he matures into a Hebrew writer. Only after he is wounded in war can he begin to reconnect with the world of his childhood, with the Hebrew language, with literature, and ultimately, with his innate, creative idiom. The memoir and the novel represent two interlocking chapters in the story of Appelfeld’s poetics� Keywords : Aharon Appelfeld, Holocaust Memoir, Holocaust Fiction, Child Survivor, Hebrew Literature, Austrian-Jewish Literature 32 Abigail Gillman Nur so kann geschrieben werden, nur in einem solchen Zusammenhang. (Franz Kafka, diary entry of 23 September 1912) 1 This is the way you are supposed to write. (Aharon Appelfeld, The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, 2010) On April 6, 2011, at age seventy-nine, Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld was a guest speaker in Vienna, at an event hosted by the Jüdisches Museum Wien and other organizations� 2 At that time, Appelfeld’s international status (and his national acclaim) were at their peak� 3 The event featured the author in conversation with journalist Dr. Doris Appel, and a reading from the German translation of his memoir by an actor from the Burgtheater� 4 The event’s title, “’Ich bin ein Europäer geblieben’” (in quotation marks), though perhaps a direct quote from the author, was provocative, given the trajectory of the author’s life. A child survivor of the Holocaust who emigrated to Palestine in 1946, he became an Israeli, Hebrew author of twenty or more books, including short stories, novellas, and novels. The Museum’s podcast about Appelfeld’s Vienna sojourn, still available on YouTube, concludes with the author’s own words. 5 With his round face, twinkling eyes, melodious voice, and Czernowitzer accent, Appelfeld quips, “Mit achtzig Jahren kann man ein richtiger Schriftsteller sein; alles bevor sind wir noch Kinder” (At eighty, one can be considered a bona fide writer; everything before that - we’re still children)� Appelfeld can’t suppress a wink and a chuckle, however, because a writer who claims he is a child at age seventy-nine is not likely to become a bona fide writer at eighty. Why does this world-renowned Israeli author of over twenty books in Hebrew characterize himself as “still European,” still a child? Why the playful reluctance to assume the mantle of a bona fide writer? These attributes actually capture something essential about his poetics and his literary persona, which were shaped by biography, aesthetics, romanticism, and war. Appelfeld’s affinity for childhood is well known, and it has many facets. The author set the large majority of his works in the Central European landscapes of youth, and in Israel, where he emigrated as a teenager. Appelfeld’s prose style bears a child’s handprints. He and his characters speak with an unfiltered eye and naive sensibility, using simple words and unspoken gestures, avoiding analysis and psychology� And Appelfeld maintained on many occasions that his literary style was shaped by a mode of perception acquired in earliest childhood, which he frequently associated with his mother. Moreover, he extended these conditions of his art to “all art,” as in the following 2011 conversation with Shachaf Dekel: Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 33 To draw from within the child’s visions; small glowing details that illuminated your life when you were a child; that is the basis of all art. The child’s eyes; what he saw when he was a child� Later in life our vision “spoils”; it spoils because mental and rational elements get involved; different elements that damage the primary vision of the child. It is important for every artist to preserve the inner child. The moment he loses his inner child he becomes a historian, a philosopher, an anthropologist. He is no longer an artist� 6 To these fundamental aspects of Appelfeld’s persona, one must add the Holocaust� Appelfeld was born in Czernowitz in 1932� Between the ages of seven and fourteen, he experienced his mother’s murder (not directly witnessed, but overheard); the ghetto in Transnistria; a death march with his father to a concentration camp; years of hiding alone in the forests pretending to be a gentile child, at the mercy of peasants and the “underworld”; further wanderings after the war which involved stints in the Red Army, in a monastery, and a displaced persons camp in Naples; and ultimately, the journey with other Jewish orphans to Palestine� He began publishing in the early 1960s� (His father also survived the war, and they were eventually reunited in Israel.) In fiction he returns again and again to the Carpathian Mountains and the landscapes of Austria-Hungary and Central Europe, before, during, and after World War II. His characters, whom he notes are projections or extensions of the author and his family members, usually speak German, Yiddish or Ruthenian. Throughout his career, he eschewed the label of Holocaust writer� But the war is nowhere and everywhere in his work; most stories and novels circle around the Holocaust without describing it directly. Moreover, Appelfeld wrote only reluctantly in an autobiographical mode; apparently, he wrote about his life because his Israeli readers and critics became impatient with a writer whom they supported and celebrated but who never wrote about them, about Israeli history national matters, society in the present. In 1999 he published the memoir Sippur Hayyim (The Story of a Life, 2004). The memoir became widely translated, even winning France’s Prix Medici for best foreign novel; its appearance brought new attention to earlier works, as well as new translations.-The following year, Appelfeld published a second memoir in the guise of a coffee-table-format volume about the Israeli cafés where he did his writing, Od Ha-yom Gadol (Table for One: Under the Light of Jerusalem, 2005). The effort to connect Appelfeld’s biography to his poetics normally begins with the account of the first thirteen years that the author himself repeated on many occasions. I quote from Nurith Aviv’s documentary film Mi-Safah liSafah (From Language to Language, 2011): I was born in the city of Czernowitz� My mother tongue is German� I spoke Yiddish with my Grandparents, Ruthenian with the household help, and when I was born, the 34 Abigail Gillman Rumanians took over, so we spoke Rumanian. This lasted until age eight. When WW II broke out, this ‘idyll’ of speaking German was destroyed at once. We were forced into the ghetto. Then, we were transferred into a camp. They separated [me] from my father; they killed my mother at the beginning of the war� I remained alone� I decided to escape from the camp. I was blond and looked like a Ukrainian boy. The underworld adopted me, and I spent most of the war there. In 1946 I went to Israel. At age thirteen I emigrated to Palestine. Without education, without parents, in truth, without a language. I knew many languages, but all the languages together were not enough for communicating. We were like stutterers. We spoke the language of the body, not the mouth. Each one tried to express himself with what he had. Little by little, with great effort, we acquired Hebrew… Appelfeld’s understated narrative glosses over the unimaginable ruptures he must have experienced. The passage contains an example of what I imagine he meant by “stuttering.” The information “they killed my mother at the beginning of the war” is related only after the fact (as is also the case in Story of a Life)� Even as this account tracks the young author’s journey from “language to language” - from German, and the polyglossia of Czernowitz, to the language of the body, to Hebrew - it barely scratches the surface with regard to his relationship to language as such� A counternarrative about language runs through his corpus: Appelfeld maintains that his relationship to words began in early life and did not change during or even after the war. Consider these statements, the first of which comes about two-thirds of the way into Story of a Life. “During the late 1950s, I gave up my ambition to become an Israeli writer (sofer eretzisraeli) and made every effort to become what I really was (alternately: what I really am) 7 : an émigré, a refugee, a man who carries within him the child of war, who finds talking difficult and tries to speak with a minimum amount of words” (Story 124). But a few chapters earlier, Appelfeld suggests a different genesis to his laconic style. “Speech does not come easy to me, and it’s no wonder; we didn’t speak during the war. It was as though every disaster defied utterance: there was nothing to say… The hunger for bread, the thirst for water, the fear of death - all this made words superfluous. There’s really no need for them” (Story 102—03). And just a few pages later, one finds the extraordinary statement that the essential attitudes shaping his poetics preceded the war, and have not changed over time� My poetics had been formed at the start of my life [AG: note the use of past perfect tense]; by this I mean everything that I saw and absorbed from my parents’ home and throughout the long war. It was then that my attitude toward people, toward beliefs, toward emotions, and toward words, was molded. This relationship has not changed over the years� (Story 106) Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 35 Taken together, these claims express the conviction that the writer’s reticent style is not a barrier to expression, not a handicap, but an essential part of him. They foreground an attitude towards words that remained constant over a lifetime. Consider his self-description from 1980: “I am a craftsman of self-effacing words, the hiding, the shy words […] my work consists of nuances. It is hard to translate. It requires reading and listening, very strenuous listening, because it contains whispers, screams which turned into whispers” (Fuchs 61, 63). A shy, self-effacing, whispering language evokes the child in hiding, always watching, trying to be invisible� It is a language which contains far more than meets the eye, and the ear. Which demands careful listening. Which is hard to translate, because already translated, calibrated, muffled, muted; “screams turned into whispers.” Such writing may be childlike, but it is hardly simple. This essay proposes a new approach to the well-researched, complex topic of childhood and writing in Appelfeld’s oeuvre� 8 It argues that the multifaceted preoccupation with childhood, exemplified in two late works which, to my knowledge, have never been studied together at length, is fundamentally about creating the necessity for his writing and his poetics� What is at stake is his own attempt to articulate, or perhaps to forge, the connection between the screams and the whispers; between a childhood which was destroyed, and the life of writing which followed; and to articulate also how that which was stolen remains a part of him and, indeed, the ultimate “source.” What is at stake is being able to identify the moment when you knew, “This is the way I am supposed to write” - the magical phrase Franz Kafka recorded in his diary following the night of September 11-12, 1912. Indeed, as we will see, Kafka supplies an important source of continuity. Appelfeld’s references to Kafka date back to one of the author’s first essays, “Edut” (testimony), in which he calls Franz Kafka his “redeemer”: the one who showed him how to move forward as a writer� 9 In the novel The Man who Never Stopped Sleeping, Kafka’s epiphany appears, not in the mouth of the young protagonist, but of his father, upon discovering Kafka’s writing for the first time, “one year before the war.” The rapport between childhood and writing propels the two works which I take up in this essay: the memoir The Story of a Life (2004; Hebrew Sippur Hayyim, 1999), and the autofictional novel The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping (2017; Hebrew Ha-Ish Shelo Pasak Lishon, 2010)� Both memoir and Bildungsroman are predicated upon the organic ripening of the self over a lifetime� For this child survivor, it is the very constituting (memoir), or imagining (novel), of the integrated child-adult writer, that form the central plots. These two works supplement each other in a singular respect: the novel provides a fictional resolution, or overcoming and healing of, the “perpetual struggle” described in the 36 Abigail Gillman memoir. Simply put, the memoir illustrates the problem, the novel, the solution. The memoirist’s ineptitude contrasts dramatically with the novelist’s ingenuity. The Story of a Life strings together episodes from all seven decades of the author’s life, as well as reflections on the war, language, Judaism, and Israel. But the work is overwhelmingly preoccupied with childhood, and with capturing the child’s mode of observation, immediacy of experience, and pure relationship to time and memory. Children - not just the author as child, but many others - are central protagonists in most chapters. The memoir as a whole, I argue, seems written to justify Appelfeld’s attachment to childhood even as he matures through its pages; it illustrates not becoming a bona fide writer. Of critical importance: in the very first pages, the author describes his technique as a memoirist with the plain Hebrew verb l’chaber, which means to join, connect, attach, and secondarily, to compose, to write. 10 Chibbur (the noun form of l’chaber) carries even greater significance in the late novel The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, the plot of which covers a far shorter time period than the memoir (1946-1948). “Sleeping boy,” as a young survivor named Erwin is nicknamed, arrives at a displaced persons camp in Naples, Italy, and soon sails to Palestine with the Youth Aliyah. A short stint as a soldier leads to a debilitating injury. During his convalescence, his development takes a new form: Erwin, instructed to change his name to Aharon, becomes a writer, drawing courage and inspiration from conversations with the living and dead (in dreams), and from diverse literary encounters, to put pen to paper. The breakthrough is the beginning of a memoir which occupies the book’s penultimate chapter (circling back to where Story of a Life begins.) The Bildungsroman, in essence, culminates in, evolves into memoir, narrating the complicated process by which the child becomes who he is, namely, the kind of writer determined to retain the simple words and naive vision of childhood� In her 2005 book, Emily Miller Budick writes, “Anyone interested in the ‘creative laboratory’ in which Appelfeld produced his fiction over the last forty years will find the autobiography a goldmine” (153). This is equally true of the works written subsequent to Story of a Life. But the autobiographical aspects of the late novel The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping also provoke a reconsideration of the memoir� 11 Israeli scholar Yigal Schwartz, an expert on Appelfeld and editor of many of his works, called the novel a “lens onto hidden chapters in the story of [his] life.” 12 I propose that the novel is an expansive, imaginative treatment of a period of the author’s life which the memoir compresses into two brief chapters, perhaps even into a single paragraph: “The years 1946-1950 were years of verbiage; when life is full of ideology, words and clichés abound. Everyone talked. Sometimes it seemed to me that everyone had attended a school for preachers (beit sefer l’dibbur) - only I hadn’t studied there” (Story 123)� It is Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 37 this stretch of time to which the autofictional novel gives detailed, imaginative expression, in recounting the tale of a young Austrian refugee, orphaned in the war, who prepares to take his first steps as a Hebrew writer, and endowing that process with the aura, the telos, of literary Bildung. Remaining asleep, remaining a child, remaining a European, are parallel expressions of that trajectory. This book is not a summary, but an attempt (and perhaps a desperate attempt) to integrate the different parts of my life and to reconnect them (l’chaber) to the wellsprings of their being. The reader should not expect a sequential and precise account in this story of a life� (Story ix) Appelfeld’s memoir is born of a modest desire to integrate the parts into a whole. Many chapters are fragmentary; others are reflective, essay-like; some are polished pearls. Chronology is more or less retained, but only rarely are years and dates included. The book begins with scant scenes from early childhood, into the war years. The middle chapters contain metacommentary about the initial struggle to become a writer, including also excerpts from Appelfeld’s diary. The final ten chapters depict formative encounters from his university studies and beyond. What the reader grasps is a chain of impressions, memorable experiences, and significant conversations strung together by way of recurring motifs. Some patterns emerge; for instance, within the first half of the book, many chapters begin with a calm or happy beginning and end in muted horror. In many chapters, a memorable personality takes center-stage. There are many ellipses (a feature of what Appelfeld calls “stuttering”). He initially skips over the war years, but recounts episodes from the war later on. An undeniable agenda is to rectify the “invisibility” of children during the war. Their persons, experiences and perspectives, are not simply a constant theme, but form a kind of deep, symbolic language within this disjointed narrative. The following section is not intended to summarize, but to follow this red thread how childhood is a part of the work’s texture� The narrative opens with the question, “At what point does my memory begin? ” (Story 3). In the tradition of Proust and Rousseau, or of Austrian memoirist Elias Canetti, memory originates in a symbolic Erlebnis involving language, family, and food, triggered by a German word that is “too long and hard to pronounce,” namely “Erdbeeren” (strawberries). Appelfeld recollects how he and his parents shared a bowl of strawberries served ritually with sugar and cream on a blissful summer day in the country. The basket of fruit seems bottomless; “there was nothing to worry about, the basket is still full, even if we go on eating all night long, it won’t get any emptier” (Story 4). But all too soon, the leftover strawberries rot in the pantry. In a similar melancholic tone, the chapter proceeds to describe the summer vacations spent with his mother at the home of 38 Abigail Gillman religious, Yiddish-speaking Jews, in the country in the Carpathian Mountains - an Edenic topos which recurs throughout Appelfeld’s fiction and nonfiction. But this too ends ominously, with the reunion with the father, causing the son’s inexplicable outburst of tears which bring a harsh scolding� In sharp contrast, chapter two is a self-contained short story. It begins: “My mother’s uncle, Uncle Felix, was a tall man, strong and quiet” (Story 17)� Uncle Felix was a wealthy Jewish landowner, an intellectual, collector of modernist art, and a serious Jew, who put on tefillin and studied a page of Talmud each day. In these brief pages, we follow the child’s experience of this large man as he is felled, like a great tree. He is forced to relinquish everything - his wife dies, he must give away the Modiglianis and Mondrians, the books and the musical instruments, and ultimately abandon his estate. But he never loses his dignity, taking care to bury the dead to protect their corpses from wild animals. The chapter ends with a devastating image: when Uncle Felix died of typhus during the death march, father could not find a shovel to bury him, so “we laid him upon a pile of hay” (Story 25)� Chapter three reports conversations during a happy train ride with his mother in the summer of 1937, ending with a joyful reunion with his father at the end; here it is only insinuated that this was the last of those summer trips� But the next chapter opens, “Nineteen thirty-eight was a bad year” (Story 32); he describes his maternal grandfather’s death, and the traditional burial and mourning rites which provoked quarrelling between his parents. Still, none of this prepares the reader for the abrupt beginning of the fifth chapter: “In the ghetto, children and madmen were friends” (Story 39). With no school, and with the closing of the mental hospital, these two populations were left to their own devices, both at the mercy of false helpers and assistance which came too little and too late. The child sees those “madmen” just before they are deported, and adult Jews tossing them bread and apples which they try in vain to catch as they stand, smiling. He speaks for the madmen - confirming their friendship: “We don’t need your food now. A little attention, a little love, would have gone a long way…” (Story 41)� These first five chapters depict the vestiges of a happy childhood being swallowed up by foreboding, death, and war. They invite comparison with the memorable opening of a very different kind of memoir by another Austrian, Ruth Klüger, born just one year before Appelfeld: “Der Tod, nicht Sex war das Geheimnis, worüber die Erwachsenen tuschelten, wovon man mehr gern gehört hätte” (weiter leben 7). But rather than expose the veneer of secrecy, as Klüger goes on to do, Appelfeld largely retains the child’s vantage point, leaving many mysteries intact. Klüger would likely have agreed with the view that “During the war, children were ignored. Children were like the straw on which everyone Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 39 trod” (Story 47), though Appelfeld and Klüger take starkly different approaches to remedying their invisibility� Adults in charge of children are either devoted or destructive� Chapter six memorializes the “Janusz Korczak” of his town: Gustav Gotesman, director of the Institute for the Blind. Gotesman, who taught his pupils through music, remained with them to the very end� As in many chapters (and in Appelfeld’s fictional works) the story ends with its characters being “swallowed” 13 into the cattle cars - though only after Gotesman and his children take a final glorious walk through the town, stopping and singing to the cheers of the townspeople. In the next scenario, a nameless woman tries to extricate herself from a young boy who simply will not let go, until “Tina,” as he calls her, is forced to pick him up; both are “immediately swallowed up” in the freight car. In chapter fourteen, which begins “the war spawned many strange children,” we read about Amalia and Chico, singers and performers in the displaced persons camp in Italy, and the “impresario” who “managed” their performances� Another chapter describes the gruesome fates of children caged with German Shepherds in Kalchund� In chapter thirteen, Erwin asks a traditional Jew he meets in the Atlit transit camp to teach him how to pray, because he “loves to pray,” and he learns the Hebrew alphabet (Story 82); beatings are also part of these first Hebrew lessons. Chapter sixteen is devoted to a curious adult-child dyad whom he meets on the ship to Palestine: an older man and an angelic girl named Helga, an amputee, whom this man apparently has adopted. When pressed to tell their story, neither the man nor Helga say anything more than “it rained�” With classic Appelfeldian Anspruchslosigkeit, the narrative portrays Helga and her caretaker with neither judgment nor analysis. As in the stories of the child and Tina, or Gotesman and his charges, Appelfeld depicts adults and children as interdependent, dyadic. By the same logic, in the first half of the book, the perspectives of the narrating adult subject, the witnessing child, and the myriad characters being described, subtly merge� The book’s final ten chapters are devoted to the author’s mentors and teachers after the war, first among them the memorable, the fierce “poet Y.S.” who taught the orphans Yiddish poetry and music, and also Hasidic tales, “pitting himself” against the youth leaders who came from Palestine, and protecting the youth even with physical violence from the smugglers who tried to seduce and kidnap them. (Y.S. is identified as Slobodkin in The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping.) Other professors and writers who mentor him in Israel include the famous literary scholar Dov Sadan, the first head of Yiddish Studies at Hebrew University, who taught Appelfeld that Hebrew and Yiddish were “twin sisters” - a critical, even heretical idea, at the time (Story 113); the philosopher Martin Buber; the Nobel-Prize-winning author Shmuel Yosef Agnon - an essential role 40 Abigail Gillman model, together with poet Uri Zvi Greenberg - and Gershom Scholem, scholar of mysticism, who declared, upon the publication of his first novella, “Appelfeld, you’re a writer” (Story 155). On yet another variation of the theme, in the memoir’s final four chapters, Appelfeld occupies the role of the adult in charge of other children� During the Yom Kippur War he tells his life story to soldiers as an army educator, and in the exquisite chapter twenty-nine, he describes in detail a futile, “stuttering” attempt to talk about the war with the son of a good friend� The memoir ends with a poignant, detailed portrait of the New Life Club, created in Israel by survivors from Galicia and Bukovina in the 1950s. The chapter traces how the author experienced the Club in different decades of his life; how it shut down; and what remains. As the memoir closes, and narrated time veers closer and closer to narrative time, the book’s surprising telos becomes clear: the adult narrator has become less, not more, articulate, than the young child savoring strawberries and cream. The adult writer conveys that he understands just as little about his own story as he did at the outset - or perhaps, that understanding is not necessary, since the main thing is simply to have arrived. Speaking in the plural “we,” he returns to a state of invisibility: “The steam from the coffee and the haze of the cigarette smoke enveloped us for years and brought us to where we are today” (Story 198)� Children are not only the main characters in Story of a Life; the work as a whole strives to imitate or recapture the child’s vantage point, and to narrate the fleeting encounters between children and adults, for the most part and crucially without analysis, reflection, judgment. Moreover, in the middle section (chapters 18-21), Appelfeld explicitly identifies their special mode of observing as the basis of his poetics - contemplation, and not recollection, which is an adult preoccupation. The work begins, “The pages before you are segments of contemplation (hitbonenut) and memory” (Story v), but it is the former term which becomes central� Hitbonenut, translated as observation, contemplation, or gazing, is often lost in translation. 14 Emily Miller Budick captures the term’s etymological nuance, as well as its significance as the “dominant register of his own relation to the world and the basic mode of his fictional representations”: “That word is, in Hebrew, hibonenut, which means observation, reflection, contemplation, and insight. Related to the kabbalistic concept binah [wisdom, understanding], the word is also laden with mystical connotation, suggesting meditation as well” (Budick xi). As Budick notes, Appelfeld describes a mode of intense observation, but from a distance, from the outside, that takes everything in but “does not impose”; a form of understanding which enables self-forgetfulness, even survival. This observant child becomes the writer who records images and gestures rather than facts and dates� Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 41 In chapter one, before recounting the memory of the Erdbeeren, Appelfeld recollects an earlier scene occurring even before age four, in his childhood room. “Snow is falling, and fleecy soft flakes are slowly coming down from the sky with sound so faint that you cannot hear it� For hours I sit and gaze in wonder (mitbonen), until I merge with the white flow and drift off to sleep” (Story 3; Sippur 9). Such “gazing” precedes language and memory, just as the account of observing and merging with the falling snow precedes the “clearer, distinct memory” which follows. A few paragraphs later, the word recurs in a memory of the family’s trips to the forests, the Carpathian Mountains, and the River Prut. “I see us climb a hill, sit on top of it, and gaze around (mitbonenim) […] Nothing spoken - no phrases - remain in my memory from those distant days, only Mother’s gaze (mabateha). It was filled with so much softness and tender solicitude (hitbonenut) that I feel it to this very day” (Story 5; Sippur 10). This mode of observation, imbibed from the mother, is a preconscious, nonverbal mother tongue� Appelfeld ascribes to hitbonenut extraordinary spiritual power and physical resilience. Far more than simply a mental mode of perception, it enabled him to connect with his new surroundings and with his roots, to forget his suffering, but also (paradoxically) to retain his individuality, apart from the masses. 15 I survived the war not because I was strong or because I had fought for my existence� […] Danger made me into a child who was attentive to his surroundings, but not into a strong child� I would sit for hours in the forest and observe (mitbonen) the underbrush, or sit by the side of the stream and watch the current� Contemplation (hitbonenut) made me forget about the hunger and the fear, and visions of home would return to me. […] These hours of grace preserved me from spiritual extinction at the time, and afterward as well, when I travelled through Europe after the war and during my years in the youth village. I would sit in contemplation, wrapping myself in sights and sounds, connecting with my previous life, and feeling happy not to be just another one of the anonymous thousands who surrounded me� (Story 139) Of his years in the army: There are a few noteworthy aspects of observation: when you observe (mitbonen), you’re on the outside, a little higher up, and distant. From this perspective you can understand that whoever’s shouting at you is perhaps really shouting at his father or his mother. […] Through observation, you can shake off some of your sadness and self-pity. The more you observe, the less pain you feel. (Story 134) Increasingly, Appelfeld valorizes hitbonenut as an alternative to memory (the prerogative of adults); in fact, his very first assertion is that to write about the war entailed listening to his body, rather than to his memory (Story vii)� He re- 42 Abigail Gillman peats often that children experienced the war in their bodies: “I was not myself, but like a small creature that has a burrow, or more precisely, a few burrows” (Story vi)� Adults who survived could relate to the Holocaust as an eclipse of reality; others forced it into a category - social, theological, historical; still others cast it as an experience that cannot be expressed in words� But children who grew up during those years knew only what was before their eyes� Children did not enter the war with abstract knowledge of good and evil; they learned about it by observing adults’ body language. They learned that there were two kinds of people: protectors and predators; noble adults who helped children and bad adults who ignored or preyed on them. Paradoxically, in such a world, where adults were, of necessity, reduced to a single dimension (good or bad), children developed into complex and discerning beings, with uncanny powers of discernment. From an earlier essay: “They knew man as a beast of prey, not metaphorically, but as a physical reality with his full stature and clothing, his way of standing and sitting, his way of caressing his own child and of beating a Jewish child” (Appelfeld, qtd. in Lang 91). These last phrases encapsulate a key element of Appelfeld’s narrative technique� Chapter fifteen - the midpoint of Story of a Life - begins with the mature writer’s meditation about remembering, and the opposing of the recollective abilities of adults and children� While the adults spoke about what had come before , for children the Holocaust was now and always. While the adults fled from themselves and from their memories, repressing them and building up a new life in place of the previous one, the children had no previous life, or, if they had, it was now effaced. The Holocaust was the black milk, as the poet said, that they sucked morning, noon, and night (Beyond Despair 36—37)� Someone who was an adult during the war took in and remembered places and individuals, and at the end of the war he could sit and recall them, or talk about them. […] With us children, however, it was not names that were sunk into memory, but something completely different. For a child, memory is a reservoir that doesn’t empty. It’s replenished over the years, clarified. It’s not a chronological recollection, but overflowing and changing, if I may put it that way. (Story 91—92) In describing a child’s memory as “a reservoir that doesn’t empty,” Appelfeld characteristically completes a thought with a figure, to illustrate the very point that children remember “something completely different” which even he, as an adult, cannot directly name. Children’s memories are not anchored in chronology or geography, but rather ebb and flow and transform in the manner of Bergson’s durée. But the chapter ends in a different key, with a discrete memory about the brutal march in the mud he endured with his father across the Ukraine, which he frames in a rare moment of self-consciousness as “a fragment Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 43 about a forced march that I’ve been trying to describe, without success, for years” (Story 92)� Finally, in The Story of a Life and in lectures, Appelfeld makes the stunning claim that children who lived through the war were the first to give it artistic expression, and moreover, that they were uniquely able to do so. It seems to be based on his personal experience: the very first artists (performers, singers, jugglers) whom he encountered in the camp in Naples were children� And in one of his lectures, he makes another kind of leap: “I have discussed the children because it was from them, in the course of time, that artistic expression arose” (Beyond Despair 38). Ultimately, these formulations express the fundamental Appelfeldian idea that the child survivor’s immediate and unmediated experience became the condition of artistic expression: “Schwarze Milch der Frühe / wir trinken sie abends wir trinken sie morgens und mittags wir trinken sie nachts / wir trinken und trinken…” The artist’s refusal to describe events in chronological order, or facts, or even “the past,” but rather, places and people to whom he was in one way or another connected, is stated most clearly in the closing lines of chapter twenty (and of the book’s middle section): I do not pretend to be a messenger, a chronicler of the war, or a know-it-all. I feel attached (mitchaber) to the places I have lived in, and I write about them. I don’t feel that I write about the past. Pure and unadulterated, the past is no more than good raw material for literature� Literature is an enduring present - not in a journalistic sense, but as an attempt to bring time into an ongoing present. (Story 125; Sippur 114) Neither powers of contemplation, nor the lived experiences, could pave a direct path to becoming a writer� What was missing was language� Appelfeld borrows the title of one of Kafka’s first stories, “description of a struggle” (Beschreibung eines Kampfes) to describe the process of acquiring language� His Kampf began when he arrived in Palestine and found himself mute� A sense of the futility of words had taken over already during the war� Words did not help one understand. The senses were what provided you with correct information� (Story 104) In 1944, the Russians recaptured the Ukraine. I was twelve years old. A woman survivor who noticed me and saw how lost I was, bent down and asked, “What have you been through, boy? ” “Nothing,” I replied. (Story 91) The idea that words were superfluous, that there is quite literally “nothing to say” about what he had been through, might be labelled a symptom of trauma. 44 Abigail Gillman But the psychological diagnosis does not suffice. Appelfeld’s shy words challenge readers to imagine what “nothing” connotes� The struggle, as detailed in chapters eighteen and nineteen of Story of a Life, begins when the youth who was raised speaking one language composed of four languages, German, Yiddish, Ruthenian, and Rumanian, suddenly has no language, “like a stone” (Story 111)� In a departure from the previous chapters Appelfeld uses his diary from that period to jar his memory: it is “stuttering and impoverished, and yet, at the same time, it is full to bursting.” (What follows is my own English rendering of the next sentences, which corrects a mistake in the English version): 16 What is not there: longing, guilt, sketches that are drawn from observation (sartutei hitbonenut), and sexual yearning. Beyond all this, there’s a desperate attempt to connect (l’chaber) precious childhood memories with a new life. This was a perpetual struggle […] also to safeguard that core of myself that was being asked to be something he didn’t want to be and couldn’t be. But above all, I fought to acquire the language and to adopt it as my own tongue� (Story 116) Appelfeld describes a period of “stuttering,” at a point when Hebrew, “which promised to be my mother tongue, was nothing more than a stepmother” (Story 111). Stuttering is the linguistic correlation to limbo. “Quite obviously, I was neither here nor there” (Story 111). Although Appelfeld “overcomes” muteness, he also makes clear that the stuttering did not disappear with the acquisition of Hebrew. This facet of the new language would enable him to connect past and present, and to plant new roots - two constant metaphors for memory and creativity. “I’ve carried with me my mistrust of words from those years. A fluent stream of words awakens suspicion within me. I prefer stuttering, for in stuttering, I hear the friction and the disquiet, the effort to purge impurities from the words, the desire to offer something from inside you” (Story 103)� Upon arriving in Israel, Appelfeld shunned “conceptual expression,” “generalizations,” and “externalization upon externalization” (Beyond Despair 14)� In the turbulent period of the 1940s during which the State of Israel was created, Appelfeld kept his distance from ideological expression. He realized he could not avoid writing about the war. At the same time, he understood early on that “memoir” or “autobiography” were not options. Neither memoirs, nor the “comprehensive factual material, including historical, social, psychological background,” could “bring this dreadful experience into the circle of life” (Beyond Despair xiv). The goal of writing is not to testify or to comprehend, but to allow his experiences to infuse the present, to inform life - and in that way, to restore the survivor a continuous self� Only through art could this be done� Only Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 45 as an artist could he “freely” deal with the Holocaust; “only art has the power of redeeming suffering from the abyss” (Ramras-Rauch xv). The struggle for expression dominates the account of his first four years in Israel, 1946-1950, when Appelfeld lived in a youth village. In those years, the national mandate was to transform a polyglot mass of Jewish refugees and survivors who had lost everything into strong, productive “new Hebrews.” The pedagogical methods to which these new immigrants were subjected were not primarily designed to produce artists. “The attitude at that time regarding language was overwhelmingly functional: ‘Build up your vocabulary and you’ve got a language! ’ This approach tried to uproot you from your world and implant you in a world you could barely grasp” (Story 117). The impediment was not his unfamiliarity with Hebrew per se, but an attitude towards language as such, and a compulsory method of acquiring new words which only intensified his displacement and self-alienation� From the moment I arrived in Israel, I hated the people who forced me to speak Hebrew, and with the death of my mother tongue, my hostility toward them only increased. […] Let me be clear. We acquired the rudiments of Hebrew quite quickly, and by the end of [the] first year we could even read the newspaper. But there was little joy in this acquisition. It was like being trapped in a protracted military tour of duty that would last for many years and for which I immediately had to adopt the soldiers’ language� But at the end of my service (which would be equivalent to the end of the war), I would return to my mother tongue. There was, of course, an inescapable dilemma: that language had been German - the language of those who murdered my mother� 17 How does one go back to speaking in a language drenched in the blood of Jews? This dilemma, in all its severity, did not detract from the feeling that my German was not the language of those Germans but the language of my mother, and it was as clear as daylight that if I met up with her I’d speak to her in the language that we had spoken together since I was a small child� (Story 111—12) In this transitional period, neither German nor Hebrew are viable. German, the mother tongue, is the language of his mother’s murderers. But speaking Hebrew feels like a duty to be discharged� Appelfeld’s “inescapable dilemma” recalls the “impossibilities” that Franz Kafka articulated one generation earlier. 18 Like Kafka, and inspired by Kafka, Appelfeld finds a different way: “it was as clear as daylight that if I met up with her I’d speak to her in the language we had spoken together since I was a small child.” The condition of writing is the certainty that regardless of which language he chooses, he will be able to communicate with his mother. This is precisely the solution that Appelfeld imaginatively works through years later (in the Freudian sense of durcharbeiten) in The Man Who 46 Abigail Gillman Never Stopped Sleeping, above all by inventing or imagining the protagonist’s numerous conversations with his mother (and father) while dreaming� Mother and I were walking without speaking� Mother’s silences were among the wonders of her self-expression. […] Mother was sitting by my side, as she did when I was sick. I told her that splitting rocks wasn’t trivial work. When she heard this, she narrowed her eyes and said, “You’re using incomprehensible words�” “Me? ” “You appear to be using a secret language.” I became confused and I didn’t know how to reply. Finally, I realized that I was mixing words from home with new words, so I tried to separate them. I wanted to tell her about all my adventures since I had been parted from her� I knew I had a lot to tell her, but it seemed beyond my power, like a pile of broken stones that I had to load onto my back� “Mother,” I said, “I can’t right now.” “No matter,” she said. (Man 53—54) The manual labor of inventing a new language proceeds by fits and starts. Ultimately, Erwin dreams that his mother gives him permission to speak in Hebrew. The resolution, I emphasize, is not simply about trading a mother tongue for a step-mother tongue, German for Hebrew. The new language incorporates the child’s powers of observation, and the survivor’s need to connect; the muteness, stuttering, and struggle that marked his teenage years; and the will to make great literature, because only literature would bring the story of this life into the “ongoing present.” The mother’s “secret language” describes Appelfeld’s idiom. Rather than view him simply as a reticent writer, or a traumatized one, one must attend to the paratactic phrasings and rhythms of the Hebrew Bible; the melodies of Yiddish literature and Hasidic tales written in pre-modern Hebrew; the syntax Franz Kafka and Shmuel Yosef Agnon, his German and Hebrew muses. All of this lends his writing a parabolic quality. Appelfeld’s prose, no less than biblical style, is “fraught with background,” in Erich Auerbach’s phrase. “Since the war I have been trapped in a continuous slumber” (Man 3; my translation)� 19 The opening sentence of the novel The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping continues the mood created by the smoke and haze surrounding the survivors in the final line of The Story of a Life, published eleven years earlier. This opening sentence also repeats almost verbatim a line from the preface to the memoir: “For many years I was trapped in the slumber of forgetting” (Sippur 7), or in Aloma Halter’s translation, “For many years I was sunk deep within the slumber of oblivion” (Story viii). Notably, in the later work, in which sleeping becomes a central trope, the term oblivion is dropped; sleep acquires other connotations. This is the first way in which the novel solves the dilemma described in the memoir. There is also a chronological discrepancy between these texts: Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 47 The Story of a Life locates the struggle to become a writer as occurring “during the late 1950s,” but Appelfeld sets the novel The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping in the late 1940s, synchronizing Erwin’s coming of age with the period of Israel’s War of Independence. Moreover, in The Story of a Life, Aharon enlists in the army, but he is not found fit for fighting, only for service. In The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, Erwin does get to fight, and he is injured in his first battle - a plot twist which changes everything� The novel begins as a classic Zionist coming-of-age tale. The protagonist Erwin starts out in a DP camp and makes his way with a group of other teenagers to a youth village in Palestine. His constant need to sleep, which seems to connote the weakness of the diaspora Jew and/ or the trauma of the survivor, sets him apart from the others. Still, the new immigrant trains to be a farmer and defender of the land, and watches proudly as his weak youth’s body begins to transform into that of a strong, suntanned fighter. But the Zionist plot is short-circuited approximately midway through the novel, when Erwin, now Aharon, is seventeen. His life changes course when he is injured in his very first combat mission and suffers paralysis. The injury, followed by many surgeries and a long struggle to “connect” his legs to his body, sets in motion a radically different struggle - to become a Hebrew writer. As he describes the turning point, “our lives were cut in two” like a piece of paper torn in half (Man 109). Before, he did the planting; after, words are “planted” inside him, enabling his inner life to flower, or in his image, to prevent his inner world from being extinguished (olam hapnimi lo cavah). In the initial plot, Erwin is guided by Ephraim - the native-born troop leader who trains the group of refugee boys and builds them into soldiers. In the second plot, his guide is a surgeon, the German-speaking Dr. Winter, who supervises his recovery, and who bears resemblance to his uncle and other family members. When he recovers, instead of returning to the kibbutz, he opts to live in solitude in a city apartment full of books, bequeathed to him by an elderly man from his native Galicia, where he pursues the creative life� Bodily injury - perhaps an allusion to Kafka’s illness - makes writing possible. Immediately after he is injured, Erwin begins to obsessively recollect his father’s writing: “For as long as I could remember, Father wrote at night” (Man 115). Erwin’s development progresses in fits and starts, though the chapters are imbued with the telos and hopeful arc of a Bildungsroman� Like the modernist Bildungsroman (Franco Moretti), it is short on action and long on conversation with both the living and the dead, with mentors, other adult survivors, teachers, doctors, and his peers. Dreamed conversations with his parents, about life, literature, language, play a central role. The recovery process, which Erwin describes in child-like terms as “reattaching his legs to his body,” becomes a trope 48 Abigail Gillman for his gradual and protracted struggle to connect his inner life with Hebrew, and through Hebrew, with his own creative idiom. It is that struggle, recounted in condensed form in the memoir, which the novel elaborates on a micro level, with pathos, and at a painstakingly slow pace. In one powerful scene, Erwin prints the names of his family members and town in Hebrew characters for the first time, and apologizes for “clothing” the names of his dear ones in a foreign alphabet� 20 Of great importance are an extended period of reading and obsessive copying verses out of the Hebrew Bible. Though his peers fail to grasp the purpose of this practice, he intuits that copying is the best preparation for writing (and this in a period when copying biblical verses was a form of school punishment). The novel culminates with his first, long-awaited attempts at creative writing - some poems, fragments of prose, and a complete chapter. 21 In all of these ways, Appelfeld’s novel constructs the period of struggle as one of Bildung. Through fiction, in other words, Appelfeld imagines events and conversations which made that self-acceptance possible: which enable him to become what he was; to move from muteness to speech; from the loss of languages to Hebrew; and through Hebrew, to develop his own poetics - to find the words to express how the world of his childhood, including his Jewish and European heritages, remain living sources of inspiration. The Hebrew word chibbur (connection, written composition) is used to refer to the joining of past and present; images and thoughts with a new alphabet and language; the reading self with books (l’hitchaber); and Erwin’s legs with his body. This term too gets lost in translation. The inability to walk becomes the central metaphor for a spiritual uprooting� Erwin’s struggles to forge connections, physical, spiritual, emotional and literary, analogize one another. The multiple connections he seeks are, at different times, present or absent; real or imagined; true or erroneous. In these examples translator Jeffrey M. Green renders chibbur alternately as “connect,” “make part of,” and “rejoin.” In the refugee camp in Naples, Erwin joyfully reunites with his parents’ friend Dr. Weingarten. But one day, Dr. Weingarten falls ill, and Erwin learns he has been transferred to a hospital� “I stood in the empty courtyard in front of the infirmary without moving. I now realized that Dr. Weingarten had connected me to my true world with many fine threads” (Man 49). The inner connection becomes realized only through loss, once Weingarten has left him. In the second half of the novel: “I tried to cleave to the Hebrew letters, and the effort cost me deeply� It was hard for me to make them part of my thoughts and without that close connection, everything was chaotic, falling into the depths of darkness” (Man 139)� And in an extraordinary passage describing one of many dreams about his father, Erwin tries to connect, or align, his father’s efforts to succeed as a writer with his own struggle to learn to walk� Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 49 That night I saw my father sitting at his desk and writing. It seemed to me that his efforts and my efforts to rejoin (l’chaber) my legs to my body were shared� I wanted to call out to him� We’ll both do it, but I realized that this was erroneous. There was no connection (eyn kesher) between his writing and my injury� “Will my legs be reattached (yitchabru) to my body? ” I asked Father fearfully� “I have no doubt,” he replied as he raised his big eyes to mine. “But the doctors…,” I said, and the words stuck in my throat� (Man 120-1; Ha-ish 102) The mere fantasy of a connection between the father’s writing and the son’s efforts to reconnect his legs to his body begins to empower Erwin to take the next steps� To become a writer requires establishing a connection with the father, or in other words, constructing his own patrimony. In order to obtain the parents’ blessing, he must synchronize his postwar life in Palestine with his parents’ lives before the war� How does a son who is a war orphan establish his own literary patrimony? Through flashbacks, memories, and dreams. Erwin’s father was a failed writer. Initially, Erwin doesn’t remember his father writing in the evenings; he only recalls that he played chess in the cafes� But other memories begin to surface during conversations with his father’s close friend Dr� Weingarten, and he begins to recall his father writing tirelessly in the evenings and sending out multiple manuscripts, all of which were rejected and sent back. An epiphany comes when Dr� Weingarten tells him that this same father who couldn’t get published in the prewar years found a new voice and a new role in the labor camp, retelling stories by Kafka and Kleist as well as his own. For a year and a half, he served as a kind of Shahrazade, telling stories at night to keep people’s spirits from sinking (v’lo naflu b’rucham). Erwin, one might say, is inspired both by his father’s failures in the prewar years and his success during the war. Because in an inverted world, which has become a hell, the father’s stories and voice resound “as a voice from on high” (Man 39). In a striking phrase, the stories began to be read as “parables to be deciphered in the future” (amru shgam sipurav hem meshalim she-od atidim lehitpaneach) (Man 39; Ha-ish 37)� Appelfeld also writes parables: tales told in a childlike voice in the tradition of religious tales, texts with unspoken meanings which will become revealed when world history catches up with literature� But obtaining this information about his father’s eventual success does not simply inspire mimetic desire� Appelfeld’s plot is subtle� Erwin must experience something akin to his father’s professional fiasco: the failure the novelist contrives is the failure of the boys’ first military mission as soldiers. The chapter closes with the words “the big operation […] had failed” (Man 109)� Erwin has been injured, as has the troop leader Ephraim. But the life-changing event is 50 Abigail Gillman described only in passing - in a stutter. 22 Only after this injury does the urgency to become a writer, to follow in his father’s footsteps, take hold. From this point on, Erwin uses a childlike expression for his condition, saying that his legs were detached from his body. The loss of his legs enables him to identify with the father, the failed writer; he has the illusion that they are united in a common effort (ma’amatz meshutaf)� And he becomes aware that his wounded state connects with his father’s wound - by way of Kafka. The series of dreamed conversations between Erwin and his father, and the real conversations with Dr. Winter, recall the surreal dialogues in Franz Kafka’s “Ein Landarzt” (A Country Doctor); Erwin is alternately the sick patient whose wound may or may not be curable, and the country doctor, who is himself paralyzed, trying to “do the impossible” for everyone� Erwin constructs a literary genealogy that picks up where his father’s literary pursuits left off. In the course of the novel, Erwin learns, reads and copies from a series of texts: the Hebrew Bible, in particular Psalms, Samuel, and Genesis 22 (the Aqedah); stories of Franz Kafka and S.Y. Agnon; and Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. Imitation has always been an essential part of artistic development, but copying suits Erwin’s humble personality� He not only develops his own taste and sense of literary style; he also imbibes from these texts and from his teachers a hermeneutic which Appelfeld prescribes to his readers in turn� In a memory dated “about a year before the outbreak of the war,” Erwin recalls his father’s reaction upon reading a booklet by a “little-known author named Franz Kafka.” “That’s exactly the way you have write to write today,” he finally said. “Do you feel an affinity with his writing? ” Mother asked cautiously. “He’s my brother, dear, my big brother, who broke through the barriers by storm. Now we know who we are and what our place is in this world.” All that day, the thin book never left father’s hands. (Man 197, Ha-ish 165) In preceding chapters, Erwin had been reading and copying from Psalms 102, from Agnon’s story Tehila, and from Psalm 102� Galician-born Hebrew author Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1887-1970), about whom Appelfeld writes in the memoir, had lived in Germany from 1912-1924. Agnon, who also wrote in parabolic style, blends European Jewish life, Jewish texts, and European modernist techniques in his work. Agnon’s style holds great appeal; however, Erwin notes, “this enchanting melody wasn’t mine” (Man 215)� Despite the strong personal connection, and despite their common Austrian heritage, the Holocaust separates them definitively. But Franz Kafka, who had been his father’s muse, plays a more complicated role. A few chapters later, Erwin opens up a book by Kafka and recalls his father’s words; he quotes and copies out the first lines from “Ein Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 51 Landarzt” (in Hebrew Rofeh K’fari)� 23 After copying, he remarks, “I read it over and over. I had never heard a story in this rhythm… the facts knock against each other.” The rhythm of “Ein Landarzt” is not that of The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping. But it does recall the style of other works by Appelfeld such as The Immortal Bartfuss or For all my Sins� Even more than Kafka’s story does the Hebrew Bible become Erwin’s style guide. The Aqedah (Genesis 22) - like the novel - describes a trial of a father and a son who are bound by a “common effort” which they face together, mostly in silence. The tale of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah becomes a parable of Erwin’s experience during and after the war, and implicitly also of his quest for patrimony� The Aqedah (Genesis 22) and “Ein Landarzt” serve as the novel’s most important intertexts, and both inspire Erwin’s own writing in profound and complicated ways� Engaging with those stories shapes Erwin’s understanding of literature as such, and the type of literature he will write (and the type which Aharon Appelfeld did write). In turn, The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping helps us to see that Kafka’s modernist parable and the biblical parable share central motifs: fathers and sons; doctors and patients; the struggle to help others, and to let oneself be helped; sacrifice and suffering. Though the biblical Abraham’s ma’asiut, his diligence, contrasts sharply with the Country Doctor’s ambivalence, in both texts, the adult self and the child are bound together as a dyad facing a trial, and in both, the adult sacrifices, or is unable to care for, his son. In both stories, as in Appelfeld’s novel, the sick or sacrificed child, who seeks healing, proves stronger than the adult. Both stories function as important stepping stones in this narrator’s quest to become a writer in his own right: a project which entails first conjuring, and ultimately leaving behind, the paternal legacy. Kafka and the Bible shape the Appelfeldian idiom, as do the “secret content” (Hebrew: Tochen sodi; Man 77) and the mother’s “secret language�” Erwin also learns about such pregnant texts from his Bible teacher Slobotsky (referred to in the memoir only as Y�S�)� 24 “It seemed that the words Slobotsky presented to us were carved out, each word individually, and laden with secret content. I felt something similar when I saw for the first time the blue of the inner Carpathians� I was so astonished that I wept” (Man 77)� Reading a text laden with secrets is another form of contemplation. “’The Bible must be read attentively,’ [Slobotsky] sometimes said. ‘Many secrets are hidden in it. (…) History and Geography have their place, but the secrets are more important than they are’” (Man 78)� Copying these texts allows Erwin to further engage with language’s hidden power� Hitbonenut becomes an exercise in literary expression� Why associate the hidden meanings in the Bible with the blue of the inner Carpathian Mountains? The association highlights the departure from both a 52 Abigail Gillman Jewish religious approach and a Zionist approach to the Bible. When Erwin reads the Aqedah, he ponders the famously understated style of Genesis 22, and suggests it was written in such a way “perhaps so that we could hear the silence between [the words]” (Man 158) - a phrase which recalls Appelfeld’s description of his own prose as “self-effacing words.” Erwin concludes: it would be best to wait “patiently” for it to be decoded; this is exactly what was said of the stories his father told during the war. The Bible, like his father’s stories during, and about, the war, and like all parables, require time and patience to decode, as their deeper truth and meaning emerge over time: “…it didn’t seem to be a story with a moral, because what was the moral? Rather, it was intended to seep into one’s cells, and there it would wait patiently until it was deciphered” (Man 158). Erwin learned this kind of reading from Slobodsky, who used his hands and facial expressions to explain words: “Sometimes it seemed he was trying to convey the meaning of the sentences to us without the mediation of explanations” (Man 76)� Erwin returns to the Aqedah in a kind of coda to chapter 43, expressing his dissatisfaction with the conclusion of the story, when God credits and rewards Abraham for fearing God and not withholding his son� “What could Abraham say to himself? I’ve succeeded… What could he say to his son? Thank you for standing with me… Your courage is greater than mine” (Man 163—64)� Erwin concludes: no. The story purposefully ends in silence, without further commentary by the players or the narrator. As such, it must stand on its own and not be resolved through banal commentary� Appelfeld’s coda concludes: The episode was a dark tangle that led to another tangle (svach afel she’gorer svach acher), so it was better for Abraham just to go to Beersheba with the donkeys and not say anything� Any talk about a test like that would be stupid� Abraham obeyed the command and did what he did. There was no doubt that he would be tormented by it all his life� And so the story falls silent there� (Man 164; Ha-ish 138) Scripture commands silence on the part of the reader� Another famous child survivor, Elie Wiesel, wrote and lectured on Abraham’s and Isaac’s trial numerous times throughout his life, and about his own trials in the death camps with his father, most famously, in Night� In contrast to Elie Wiesel’s approach to the Aqedah, which entailed an endless, fertile rewriting, researching, and reimagining, this author suggests that only silence does justice to Abraham’s suffering; anything more is “violence.” Anything more prevents the story from being what it is: a “dark tangle that leads to another tangle�” This formulation recalls Franz Kafka’s parable “Prometheus”: attempts to pile on legend and myth and interpretation risk ending in banality. (The translator appears to miss Appelfeld’s allusion to Genesis 22: 13: he uses “tangle” to ren- Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 53 der the Hebrew svach, the biblical term for the bush in which the ram’s horns are caught.) Appelfeld’s resistance to interpretation, his preference for seeing just the tangles, contrasts with the long tradition of the uses and abuses of the Aqedah in Jewish and especially in Israeli history and literature, discussed in great detail by Yael Feldman’s Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative (2010). Appelfeld opts to bequeath this hermeneutic, a “shy,” nonintrusive, and patient mode of reading, to his readers. How did Appelfeld become the writer he was meant to be? The memoir and the novel represent two late chapters in the narrative of Appelfeld’s writing life - a narrative comprised of fictional and nonfictional texts, interviews, and essays throughout his corpus. They offer numerous insights into the stages and strategies, as well as the important mentors, thanks to whom his singular voice emerged. The coming-of-age story described in the novel expands upon a few paragraphs in the memoir, and pulls together disparate themes and statements scattered throughout that earlier work, into a full-fledged novel plot. The plot begins with a violent symbolic break with the Zionist coming-of-age story. The struggle to write entails blending the mode of perceptive observation, inherited from the mother, with a paternal ability to tell tales and compose parables during wartime - stories whose meaning may only become clear at some future time. He names further precursors, including Kafka, Agnon, Hesse, and the Bible. The intricate process of shaping a “secret” literary style out of all of the above and more is encoded in the task of making connections� A final word about sleep. 25 The novel titled The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping begins, “since the war I have been trapped in a continuous slumber” (my translation). Both in the original Hebrew and in English, the title and the first sentence distinguish “sleep” from “slumber�” Where the title uses a commonplace verb “to sleep” (lishon), the Hebrew noun for “slumber” (tardemah) alludes to the sleep God imposes on the first human being in Genesis 2, in order to create his companion. The trope of sleeping does not only signify amnesia, escape, and healing, but also the writer’s gestation and birth. The tardemah, the continuous sleep of the first line of The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping, has the same function as the steam and the smoke in the final sentence of The Story of a Life. In that final chapter, Appelfeld joins his voice to those of “the silent ones, those who barely uttered a word. The steam from the coffee and the haze of the cigarette smoke enveloped us for years and brought us to where we are today” (Story 198). Smoke, like sleep, surrounded, protected, and carried the young survivor forward in time and space. Fittingly, Smoke became the title of Appelfeld’s first collection of short stories (Hebrew: Ashan)� 26 54 Abigail Gillman Notes 1 Kafka 294. 2 The event took place at Vienna’s Hauptbücherei; co-organizers were the Rauriser Literaturtage and the Institut für Judaistik (University of Vienna). 3 Stillman 20� 4 Robert Reinagl. The memoir in German is Geschichte eines Lebens (Rowohlt, 2005)� 5 „Ich bin ein Europäer geblieben“ Aharon Appelfeld im Gespräch mit Doris Appel. https: / / youtu.be/ NpsUNXI4jn0 6 Dekel, “Aharon Appelfeld interview.” 7 The lack of the copula in Hebrew [am, was] creates the ambiguity. 8 Inhabiting or adopting the persona of the inner child is not only about returning to the self as “other” - a strategy Naomi B. Sokoloff has studied in Appelfeld, and across modern Jewish fiction. 9 Masot beguf rishon [Essays in the First Person] 15. It further recalls another moving statement, that he travels always with a book of Hasidic tales in one pocket and a book by Franz Kafka in the other - a phrase that in itself alludes to the famous saying by a Hasidic Rebbe Simcha Bunim that he carried two notes with him at all times: in one pocket, “For my sake the world was created,” and in the other, “I am but dust and ashes.” For Appelfeld, Kafka and the Hasidic storytellers were spiritual guides, but also style guides. Style expresses spirit, and spirit shapes style. I thank Stephen Dowden for this insight� 10 In the original, the image is “to attach (l’chaber) the different branches of my life to the roots of their growth,” evoking a solid image of life as a tree, rather than a well� Lilach Lachman notes that l’chaber can also be vocalized lachvor, “to be part of a community” (private conversation). 11 Important analyses include Budick 153—80, Hess 75—102, Band- 469—74, and Band’s “Foreword” to Schwartz, Aharon Appelfeld (xi—xvi)� See also Schwartz’s second book on Appelfeld, Ma’amin beli kenesiyah [Believer without a Church]. 12 Back cover, Aharon Appelfeld, Ha-ish Shelo Pasak Lishon. 13 On such swallowing scenes, see Schwartz, Aharon Appelfeld 74� 14 The root (b-n-h) הנב also means “to build.” Appelfeld quotes the Zionist slogan in these chapters: “We had come to Israel, as the saying went, ‘to build, and to be rebuilt’” (Story 116; Sippur 107). That Hitbonenut shares this root adds a level of irony; The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping replaces national self-building and nation-building with artistic Bildung� Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 55 15 “We would sit for hours and observe. Hunger, thirst, and weakness made us observant creatures. Rather than the murderers, we observed their victims, in their weakness and in their heroism […]. They were stamped upon us the way childhood is stamped upon the matrix of one’s flesh” (Appelfeld, qtd. in Lang 91)� 16 The translation misses the fact that the opening question, followed in Hebrew by a colon, is rhetorical. “What it does not have is longing, guilt, sketches that are drawn from observation, or sexual yearning. Beyond all this, there’s a desperate attempt to connect precious childhood memories with a new life” (Story 116; Sippur 107)� 17 In Hebrew, the dilemma is even more poignant. “My mother’s tongue/ mother tongue, so to speak, was German, the language of my mother’s murderers” (Sippur 103)� 18 Letter of Franz Kafka to Max Brod, June 1921 (The Basic Kafka 292)� 19 Jeffrey M. Green translates, “At the end of the war, I became immersed in constant slumber�” 20 “For the first time I saw the names of my family, my city, and my grandparents’ villages in Hebrew letters. The names gleamed in my notebook, as though garbed in clothing that wasn’t theirs� For a moment I was sorry I had clothed my dear ones in strange garments, and I was about to erase the list” (Man 81—82)� 21 Rina Dudai and Yigal Schwartz have verified that these are in fact early texts by Appelfeld� 22 “Everything began to quiet down within minutes, but for the ones who were hit - including me - our lives were cut in two: the seventeen and a half years before the shots and then the life after them” (Man 108-9)� 23 “Ein Landarzt” opens with a doctor who urgently needs to get to a patient ten miles away on a snowy evening� He has everything prepared for the journey, has his bag of medical instruments, but there is no horse; his horse had died the night before. The opening lines resonate with the plot of the novel as a whole, since they describe paralysis and urgency. Though not strictly a father-son story, the patient whom the doctor is trying to help is a young boy suffering from an incurable wound. (In fact, as Marcel Kring has pointed out in his recent study of the Landarzt cycle, those first lines were most probably inspired by a book of Polish Jewish legends�) No sooner does he reach the patient than the doctor finds himself torn impossibly between the task at hand, his work, and the young girl Rosa who is being raped back at the homestead. The narrative has a dream-like, surreal quality, wherein the doctor is thwarted by the various people who call upon him, “demanding the impossible from a doctor,” not the least of which is the boy-patient 56 Abigail Gillman himself, who cries, “doctor let me die,” but also accuses him of failing to help him� 24 See Chapter 21� 25 The trope of sleeping requires a study of its own. In the conceptual terms of Yigal Schwartz, whereby the novels are structured in counterpoint, with retardative elements - which hold the protagonist back - interwoven with proleptic or forward-looking elements, sleeping and dreams are setbacks, and at the same time, triggers of healing and advancement. The tension is somehow magically aufgehoben. That which reconnects him to the past is at the same time that which sets him on a different course and nurtures him on that course� Moreover, Erwin experiences different kinds of sleeping. First is the state of sleep that in the novel’s very first sentence tells us he has been in since the end of the war through the travels that brought him “here,” that is, to Napoli. (I’m reminded of the first sentence of Yehoshua’s The Lover (HaMeahev): “And in the last war we lost a lover.”) The novel begins in a state of postwar sleep. He is literally carried along by refugees. Later on, he describes a different kind of sleep born of physical exhaustion, sheyna sgura during his hakhshara, “miad nofel el toch sheyna sgura, she’ayn bah lo marot v’lo chezionot” (Man 29)� But the more important sleep for our purposes is sheyna ptucha, sleep which opens up the psyche to numerous dreams that are embedded as realistic conversations and events within the novel. These are not the surreal, Freudian dreams of Asya in Yehoshua’s HaMeahev, but they do contain mar’ot v’chezionot. Needless to say, sleep is a multivalent metaphor� It is a reaction to trauma; anaesthesia; an intense somatic coping mechanism, like the train travel in the novel Iron Tracks� Sleep enables withdrawal from the outer life; Erwin will “ask for a sleep day” when he needs it. He is in control of sleep. It also provides communication with the dead, dreams in which feelings come to the surface� As long as he is sleeping he is somehow unable to mourn what he has lost� 26 On Smoke, see Nili Gold’s unpublished paper, “Appelfeld’s Text of Enigma.” Works Cited Appelfeld, Aharon. Ashan [Smoke]: Stories. Jerusalem: Achshav Press, 1962. ---� Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth. Trans. Jeffrey M. Green. New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1993. ---� Ha-ish Shelo Pasak Lishon. Ed. Yigal Schwartz. Tel Aviv: Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, 2010. Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics 57 ---� Masot b’guf rishon [Essays in the First Person]. Tel Aviv: WZO, 1979. ---� The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping. Trans. Jeffrey M. Green. New York: Schocken Books, 2017. ---� Sippur Hayyim. Ed. Yigal Schwartz. Jerusalem: Keter Publishers, 1999. ---� The Story of a Life. Trans. Aloma Halter. New York: Schocken Books, 2004. ---� A Table for One. Under the Light of Jerusalem. Jerusalem: Toby Press, 2005. Band, Arnold J. “Agnon and Appelfeld.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 103�4 (2013): 469—74� Ben-Horin, Michal. “The Sound of the Unsayable: Jewish Secular Culture in Arnold Schönberg and Aharon Appelfeld�” Religions 10�5 (2019): 334� Ben-Mordechai, Yitzhak, and Iris Parush, eds. Between Frost and Smoke. Beer-Sheva: Ben Gurion U of the Negev, 1997. Bindefeld, Nicole, and Irène Kaganski. “Réflexions dialoguées autour du ‘rêver’ chez Appelfeld dans ‘Le garcon qui voulait dormir’�” Le Coq-héron 225�2 (2016): 20—28� Budick, Emily Miller. Aharon Appelfeld’s Fiction: Acknowledging the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005. Dekel, Shachaf. “Aharon Appelfeld interview.” youtube.com. YouTube, 15 Apr. 2015. Web� 12 Dec� 2020� Dudai, Rina. “From Excess to Origin: Traversing Time Zones as an Act of Redemption in The Man who Never Stopped Sleeping by Aharon Appelfeld�” Yod. Revue des Études Hébraïque et Juives 19 (2014): n� pag� From Language to Language [Misafa l’safa]. Dir. Nurith Aviv. First Run / Icarus Films, 2005� Film� Fuchs, Esther. Encounters with Israeli Authors. Ann Arbor: Micah Publications, 1982. Gold, Nili. “Appelfeld’s Text of Enigma.” N.d. TS. Hess, Tamar S. Self as Nation. Contemporary Hebrew Autobiography. Waltham: Brandeis UP, 2016. Kafka, Franz. Tagebücher 1910-1923. New York: Schocken, 1948. ---� The Basic Kafka. New York: Pocket Books, 1979. Klüger, Ruth. weiter leben: Eine Jugend. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992. Lang, Berel, Ed. Writing and the Holocaust. New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1988� Ramras-Rauch, Gila. Aharon Appelfeld. The Holocaust and Beyond. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Schwartz, Yigal. Aharon Appelfeld. From Individual Lament to Tribal Eternity. Trans� Jeffrey M. Green. Hanover and London: UP of New England / Brandeis UP, 2001. ---. “A Preacher without a Pulpit, a Believer without a Church.” Twenty-four Readings of the Works of Aharon Appelfeld� Ed� Avidov Lipsker and Avi Sagi� Ramat Gan: Bar- Ilan UP, 2011. 383—404. ---� “Le’at (Slowly): The Orchestration of a Motif in Appelfeld’s Fiction.” Trans. Hannah Adelman Komy Ofir. Yod: Revue des Études Hébraïque et Juives 19 (2014)-: n. pag. ---� Ma’amin beli kenesiyah [Believer without a Church]. Or Yehudah: Dvir, 2009. 58 Abigail Gillman Sokoloff, Naomi B. Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction� Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Stillman, Dinah Assouline. “Encounters with Aharon Appelfeld.”-World Literature Today 84.6 (2010): 20—23.- Inge Deutschkron’s Memoir Ich trug den gelben Stern (1978): Reportage as Counternarrative to the Americanization of the Holocaust Marjanne E� Goozé University of Georgia Abstract : This essay considers Inge Deutschkron’s German-language Holocaust memoir Ich trug den gelben Stern. The paper examines details recounted of her life in Berlin under Hitler, her accomplishments as a journalist and author, and her approach to relating her experiences. The memoir documents important information about survival underground and the history of the persecution of German Jews. Written before the advent of memory culture, the book engages readers as a counternarrative to the Americanization of the Holocaust and other archetypes of the innocent and optimistic victim or the male concentration camp prisoner. Deutschkron’s work offers an intricate narrative of survival underground by a writer whose socialist politics, German nationality, female gender, and journalistic narrative style may not always accord with American or even German expectations of an authentic Holocaust narrative but is for just these reasons deserving of increased attention. Keywords : Inge Deutschkron, Holocaust Memoir, Berlin, Survival Underground, Otto Weidt, 1933-1945 In 1978 Inge Deutschkron, who was born in 1922 and is a Jewish-German survivor of the Holocaust, published her memoir, Ich trug den gelben Stern� 1 In the memoir, Deutschkron’s profession as a journalist reveals itself as she relates her personal story embedded within a detailed history of the Holocaust in Germany, and especially in Berlin. This examination of her book will investigate how Deutschkron’s memoir both conforms with and distinguishes itself from what may be seen as the genre of personal narratives of the Holocaust. The first part of the essay provides details of Deutschkron’s story of her life in Berlin under 60 Marjanne E� Goozé Hitler, considers her accomplishments as a writer, and analyzes her approach to relating her experiences. The second part of the essay offers reasons why the book, still read in Germany, has not become known in the United States or received extensive scholarly attention. Inge Deutschkron and her mother, Ilse, survived the Third Reich with the help of friends, eventually going underground in Berlin, as what were called U-Boote. After the war, she worked for the Social Democrats in Berlin, but due to East German politics and her desire to be reunited with her father, she moved to London on 2 August 1946. She tried to resume her education, but soon broke it off due to lack of finances. She worked as a secretary for the Socialist International in London, continuing her family’s connections to socialist movements. Desiring to return to Berlin eventually, she delayed her trip and traveled first to India, Burma, Nepal, and then to Israel. In 1955 she returned not to Berlin, but to the capital of West Germany, Bonn, where she began recounting her experiences for German radio, newspapers, and magazines. In 1958 she began writing for Maariv, an Israeli newspaper, in 1960 becoming its Germany correspondent� From West Germany she reported on the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials� Deutschkron became an Israeli citizen in 1966 and moved there in 1972, continuing to work for Maariv until 1987. Deutschkron appears very briefly in Claude Lanzmann’s film, Shoah, mostly as a disembodied voice speaking in English about the deportations of Jews in Berlin. However, there are over three hours of out-takes from Lanzmann filmed in 1977 and 1981 available online through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Israeli memorial museum Yad Vashem� 2 A short version of her story in English is available online through Yad Vashem� 3 In these interviews she speaks of her life from 1933 until she and her mother went underground in 1943. Also, she has been a frequent speaker in Germany about her experiences� In January 2013 she gave an address to the German parliament at the age of 91� Her story was further broadcast by Volker Ludwig und Detlef Michel who wrote a play in 1989 for the Berlin youth theater, Grips, based on her memoir called, Ab Heute heißt du Sara� It continues to be performed, most recently in March 2019. 4 Deutschkron has published numerous books, including reflections on her life in Israel, her experiences after the war, and, importantly, about Otto Weidt, a blind gentile who employed blind and deaf-mute Jewish workers in his brush and broom factory, and for whom she worked for a time. In 2000 she published a continuation of her first memoir: Mein Leben nach dem Überleben: Die Fortsetzung von Ich trug den gelben Stern. Another memoir, Überleben als Verpflichtung, provides a short biography, but concentrates on her life in Germany after the war. In her first memoir, Ich trug den gelben Stern, she recounts working in a broom and brush factory for blind workers led by Otto Weidt. In 2008 she Inge Deutschkron’s Memoir Ich trug den gelben Stern (1978) 61 wrote a book with Lucas Ruegenberg focusing on Weidt, Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt: Ein Ort der Menschlichkeit im Dritten Reich� A children’s companion book preceded it, also written by the two: Papa Weidt� Deutschkron has established a foundation to promote the teaching of the Holocaust, with an emphasis as well on gentile helpers like Weidt. She has written repeatedly on non-Jewish helpers� 5 In 2014, she cooperated on a docu-drama film on Weidt: Ein blinder Held: Die Liebe des Otto Weidt, directed by Kai Christiansen. Dramatic scenes of Weidt, his Jewish love Alice Licht, and the other workers are accompanied by an interview with Deutschkron� One book arises from her work as an Israeli correspondent in Germany, Israel und die Deutschen: Das besondere Verhältnis� Her autobiographical books remain popular in Germany. It should be noted, however, that Ich trug den gelben Stern has not received critical attention in Germany in the way that Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben: Eine Jugend has been analyzed by Germanists. However, Deutschkron’s memoir remains in print and is taught in schools. Unfortunately, her writing is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. Her memoir, translated into English in 1990 and published by a Germany-based publisher, as Outcast: A Jewish Girl in Wartime Berlin, has received almost no critical or popular attention in the U.S. It has long been out of print, but has been recently reissued as an on-demand e-book and through Amazon Digital Services� Deutschkron’s Holocaust memoir was one of the first published by a Jewish-German written in German. Personal accounts by non-German survivors began to be published right after the war and have continued to appear, but narratives by Jewish-Germans were not known in Germany� 6 Her memoir appeared before the impactful American TV miniseries Holocaust was broadcast in West Germany in 1979. The miniseries initiated intense public discussions of the Holocaust in West Germany. Her memoir, however, falls outside of any influence of American Holocaust productions and offers a non-melodramatic documentation of her experience� Deutschkron’s perspective as a journalist clearly dominates the structure and style of the narrative. As this essay will show, Deutschkron’s emphasis on placing her story within a precise historical narrative, backed up by dates and statistics, leads to a narrative that may seem lacking in pathos, in spite of the highly dramatic nature of her story. It was not written especially to tug at the heartstrings of readers, but to document her harrowing experience, situating her individual story within the larger of the Jews of Berlin� In the first half of the book, Deutschkron relates both her own personal history and includes historical background information about the rise of Jewish persecution from 1933 to 1941� Her contribution to Holocaust narratives here is significant, since as a German her story begins with Hitler’s rise to power rather than with the war and the invasion of other countries� Deutschkron’s memoir 62 Marjanne E� Goozé lends insight into reactions to Hitler’s early policies� She bolsters her narrative by providing exact dates for historical events such as the 1 April 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses (11)� She includes in the book sixteen explanatory footnotes and statistics. When discussing the November 9 pogrom, she includes a footnote from a 1968 book, quoting a New York Times article stating the number of synagogues burnt down and stores plundered (36)� Deutschkron links her own biography to exact historical events in the body of her narrative too - noting how her schooling ended the day Hitler closed Jewish schools on 2 April 1939 (61). Yet, she also mentions events of which she could have had no knowledge at the time, such as what happened to Alice Licht, Otto Weidt’s beloved, who was sent to Auschwitz (131). The frequently cited historical and statistical information serves two functions. First, it puts her own story of survival into historical context, broadening the perspective to include Jews seeking visas to emigrate and those deported to death camps (see, for example, 46 and 151—52). Second, the documented information asserts the authenticity of her story, insisting on the accuracy of her memories� Deutschkron wrote this autobiography before the advent of memory culture and our understanding of the need to assess Holocaust testimonies on the basis of confluence of the evidence. While individual memories might be faulty at times when it comes to exact details, multiple sources, including testimonies, can provide a collective of evidence. So, when she makes an error about the probable tattoo given to deportees from Berlin to the Lodz ghetto, a small detail not generally known to her readers, this mistake cannot undermine the veracity of her story (89). As a journalist, she would probably be unhappy about the error� Deutschkron makes an emphatic argument for truth, implicitly challenging Holocaust deniers without ever saying so. This gives the book both emphatic and quite dispassionate qualities� Even in 1978, Deutschkron anticipated German readers’ skepticism. She embeds her personal narrative within a factual history of the Holocaust as a defensive strategy. The two threads of personal experience and outside sources come together when she mentions how she and her mother learned of murders by gas when surreptitiously listening to the BBC (100) or when a neighbor’s son reports of treatment of Jews in the East (103)� Only rarely does the narrator assume a reflective stance from the time of her writing. In the opening chapter she speculates: “Wer hätte mir damals erklären können, was 1933 in Deutschland vor sich ging? Warum Menschen wegen ihrer Rassenzugehörigkeit, ihres Glaubens oder ihrer politischen Überzeugung verfolgt, erniedrigt und gepeinigt wurden? Habe ich es später verstanden? Ich glaube nicht” (15). When the Gestapo searched their home in 1934, she sat and read a book, writing later: “Wenn ich daran denke, schäme ich mich noch heute, damals ‘versagt’ zu haben” (21)� Rather than viewing initial Jewish-German re- Inge Deutschkron’s Memoir Ich trug den gelben Stern (1978) 63 sponses from an outsider’s perspective, she includes herself among those unable to comprehend the beginnings of the Holocaust� She tries to explain to her readers why more German Jews did not emigrate with Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933 by explaining their loyalty to what they perceived as a humanistic German culture: Später begriff ich, daß sie sich ihrer Selbsttäuschung bewußt waren, wenn sie zusammensaßen und über Heine sprachen, Goethe zitierten und Diskussionen um Kant und Hegel führten, so als sei ihre Welt völlig in Ordnung. Damals erschien mir dies Verhalten unheimlich. Ich fühlte mich dort zu Hause, wo man der Wirklichkeit näher war� Dieser Wirklichkeit konnte man sonst nirgends entgehen� (67) Here she does blame the cultural elite for distancing themselves from politics, while she, brought up in a socialist family, was more engaged in “Wirklichkeit.” Only after the November pogrom of 1938 did the realization of their situation set in for many: “Zögernd begannen die deutschen Juden, die Wirklichkeit zu begreifen. Für viele war es zu spät, denn die Auswanderungsmöglichkeiten wurden immer geringer. [. . .] Für die deutschen Juden, auch die deutschesten unter ihnen, wurden die Geschehnisse des 9. November zum Alarmsignal” (42— 43)� Her own parents also tried to emigrate too late; only her father was able to escape to England (41)� In August 1939 she and her mother had acquired jobs as domestics in Glasgow (53), but the outbreak of the war prevented them from leaving Germany (55)� She describes her own and other Jews’ response to the beginning of the war: “Wir lebten damals wie in Trance” (64)� With the help of socialist and Jewish friends, she and her mother found work and lived in Berlin where they went underground in 1943; they began living illegally� At this point the nature of the narrative changes somewhat, becoming more emotionally compelling� Deutschkron’s determination in documenting historical facts retreats a bit as her relation of her own story gains prominence� She recounts the near constant moving from hiding place to hiding place, the need to have jobs to earn money, and being bombed out in Berlin. Noticeably absent is a detailed account of her relationship with an older man, Hans Rosenthal, who in the end could not separate himself from his mother with whom he lived (78). Rosenthal was an engineer at Osram, but also a “Materialverwalter” for the Jewish community (78)� She notes that at the height of the war he was able to move around Berlin and visit her (110, 162), and in her opinion was the last Jew not in a mixed marriage to wear the Judenstern in Berlin (120)� At the end of the war, their relationship dissolved and he desired to immigrate to the United States where his brother lived (193—94)� While the Allied victory allowed her and her mother to reclaim their real identities after they had acquired false papers several times, Deutschkron suf- 64 Marjanne E� Goozé fered from the trauma of the Holocaust and their two years in hiding. The end of the war was greeted with joy, but she could not imagine what a normal life might be like (178)� As the reality of the Holocaust and her own experiences became clear, she writes: “Freuen konnte ich mich nicht mehr” (181). As she learned further details of the Holocaust, her grief overcame her: “Ich weinte haltlos, und immer wieder von neuem überfiel mich eine entsetzliche, hoffnungslose Trauer” (182). In these passages at the close of the memoir, Deutschkron reveals the depth of her feelings to the reader, but only when writing about the time after liberation. Although she began to work in the Soviet zone of Berlin for the “Zentralverwaltung für Volksbildung” (188), she had no illusions about the Soviet occupation, mentioning how she and her mother hid from the soldiers and that her mother survived an attempted rape (181). In the end, her family’s SPD (Social Democratic Party) background and her lack of faith in the Soviet functionaries caused her to leave her job (191)� Soon thereafter, she and her mother joined her father, who had escaped to England. At the end of the war she could not feel at home in Germany, writing: “Ich fühlte mich in Deutschland fremd, unsicher und allein” (197). Although Deutschkron usually maintains a nuanced and analytical approach to the experiences of German Jews, she repeats the mistaken trope that Jews went like lambs to the slaughter (197). In her conclusion, she connects her attachment to Israel as being a bulwark against mass murder of Jews� It is perhaps surprising then that as a journalist and renowned memoirist Deutschkron spent long periods in West Germany, speaking and writing in German, as well as working for an Israeli newspaper. Indeed, documenting her experiences and reporting for Israelis from West Germany became her life’s work� The second part of my essay will discuss how Deutschkron’s memoir distinguishes itself from our understanding of a “typical” Holocaust memoir and why it should be given greater critical consideration� Deutschkron’s book can be seen as a counternarrative to what scholars such as Hilene Flanzbaum and the contributors to her book call “the Americanization of the Holocaust�” I would argue that this Americanization impacts general German perceptions as well, although not necessarily academic ones. This so-called Americanization began with the 1952 play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, based on the diary of Anne Frank and the widespread teaching of her diary in American schools� It continued most prominently with the American miniseries Holocaust in 1978, Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993), and the establishment of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, planned during the 1980s and opened in 1993. In the case of representational and many autobiographical works, certain values Inge Deutschkron’s Memoir Ich trug den gelben Stern (1978) 65 prevail that may express American ideologies more than historical facts. These works are forward-looking and draw clear lines between good and evil persons� Based upon a popular reading of the perceptions of Anne Frank, an optimistic outlook on the goodness of humanity is required� From Holocaust the miniseries, which does not shy away from the horrors of genocide as many American representations do, there is a clear delineation of good and evil persons. Schindler’s List points to righteous gentiles, innocent but powerless Jews, and Germans of unmitigated evil. Needless to say, all of these works and many others, such as the film Defiance, contain an element of romance as well. In addition to dramatized and fictionalized accounts, Holocaust memoirs have also participated in the memory boom of the two last decades, but the memoirs that infiltrate book clubs and even university courses frequently prefer victims who are unquestionably “good,” claim a strong Jewish identity, and evoke sympathy or even empathy, while the German perpetrators are “evil.” Also, there must be some sort of “happy end” where the survivor or victim exhibits a positive attitude. While Inge Deutschkron was clearly a victim of Nazi persecution, the memoir is complicated by multiple factors that prohibit its inclusion in the American canon of Holocaust memoirs. First, Deutschkron did not experience the horrors of ghettos or camps, but survived underground. Some may not consider her as an “authentic” survivor. In her essay, “Questions of Authenticity,” Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi comments upon how scholars have created a hierarchy of both testimonies and experiences, where those who perished or were closest to those murdered by the Einsatzgruppen or in the death camps are deemed the most authentic victims (56—62)� Survivors who like Deutschkron were never imprisoned fall next to last in this hierarchy; the last are those who emigrated before the start of the war. So, while her story of survival as a U-Boot, going underground with her mother, and living precariously with none or false papers in Berlin is harrowing, it does not present the expected story of a concentration camp - especially of an Auschwitz experience� I would contend that her memoir equally deserves our attention because it contributes to our understanding of the breadth of different experiences. Deutschkron without apology portrays her parents as committed socialists who are often helped by others who share their politics. The American reading public has been generally very uncomfortable with socialism� Deutschkron’s first experiences of persecution came through the discrimination against her father primarily as a socialist and then as a Jew� She shared her political views with her father, working after the war for left-wing causes. She was raised in a highly secular environment and begins her memoir with her mother informing her when she was ten years old: 66 Marjanne E� Goozé “Du bist Jüdin,” hörte ich die Stimme meiner Mutter. “Du mußt den anderen zeigen, daß du deshalb nicht geringer bist als sie�” Was war das, eine “Jüdin? ” (9) Her secular upbringing and the lives of her parents, however, soon threw them into a Jewish milieu as jobs were lost and she had to attend Jewish schools. The survival of Deutschkron and her mother, who were constantly on the run in Berlin, seeking shelter and employment, was highly dependent on their socialist connections� Although she and her mother had to move many times after they went underground and took numerous jobs, including working in a laundry, they were often able to rely on socialist friends. As avowed socialists, her parents made her “selbstbewußt und stolz” (10)� As those who do not practice their religion, she and her family complicate American expectations that persecution is based solely on being Jewish, rather than on political factors as well� Her story does not accommodate an American master narrative that ties together ideals of freedom with those of free market capitalism in the face of the Cold War� Other complicating factors are that Germans are not all depicted as National Socialists and Jewish cooperation is mentioned. As previously noted, she criticizes Berlin Jews who lingered too long in Germany when they had a chance to emigrate� Deutschkron further makes clear how Jews aided the Gestapo in compiling lists of those to be deported (91) and in hunting down those in hiding (129)� She and her mother are assisted in surviving underground with false papers and jobs by benevolent German helpers. For example, in 1941 she went to work as a secretary under a false name and age for Otto Weidt (70). Deutschkron, furthermore, does not ignore German perpetrators and bystanders� She can be quite harsh in remarking on how non-Jewish Germans made an effort not to know what was happening to their Jewish neighbors (76) or showing how they were complicit in the theft of their property. Yet overall, her tone lacks overt anger or bitterness, something that American readers might expect. Notably, her German nationality complicates the presumed oppositional binary of “Germans” and “Jews�” In memoirs and diaries by non-German Jews such as Elie Wiesel’s Night, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, The Journal of Hélène Berr, or the Diary of David Sierakowiak, the Germans are a foreign enemy. Although these writers do not refrain from criticizing their own countrymen or Jews who collaborate, they maintain a clear distinction between the Germans and themselves. For Deutschkron, this delineation is not possible because she and her family have long roots in Germany� Her name - for which she is chastised by Nazi officials - contains within it the word “Deutsch” - German. At the time of the writing of the memoir she is well aware of her parents’ and other Inge Deutschkron’s Memoir Ich trug den gelben Stern (1978) 67 German Jews’ love for a Germany that did not love them back� Deutschkron informs readers how German Jews who were ordered to make lists of their possessions prior to deportation did so as good Germans “ohne Widerstand” (93) and how the Jewish-German “Ordner” carried the removals out, using the defensive phrase of perpetrators: “Sie taten ihre Pflicht” (94). Most significantly, she is writing in German, the language of the perpetrators. Another reason perhaps why the memoir has not become popular in the U�S� is the gender of the author and how she expresses her gender� As Ruth Klüger contends in her memoir weiter leben, National Socialism is the province of men - “ob man für oder gegen ihn gewesen ist: reine Männersache“ (Klüger 10). Men’s stories are perceived as the ones that count. The only early work by a female that gains both popular and critical acclaim is Anne Frank’s diary� It was characterized, especially in its initial editions, as that of a young, virginal girl - the ultimate innocent victim -with the title: Diary of a Young Girl� While Frank’s remarkable diary, which she prepared for publication before being arrested, is a work worthy of scholarly attention, its popularization and the ways in which it has become idolized as representing the voice of the ultimate innocent victim detracts from the more complicated and reflective memoirs of women like Klüger and Deutschkron. As a diary by a girl who did not survive, Frank’s diary holds a more privileged position in the perceived hierarchy of Holocaust testimonies over memoirs written decades later. This is because of both its contemporaneous recording and its author’s death� Generally, those considered the most powerful and iconic memoirs not only take place in Auschwitz or another camp, but also only reflect the male experience. As we know, men and women were separated in the camps and had different experiences� Filmmakers like Claude Lanzmann focus on male experiences� Scholars Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer have criticized Lanzmann’s treatment of women in his Shoah film, noting how Deutschkron and other women are marginalized. After filming more than three hours of interviews, she appears for about ninety seconds in a nine-hour film, mostly as a voice-over. Hirsch and Spitzer observe how she only appears once and never returns, as most men do: “Inge Deutschkron is little more than a disembodied voice: her narrative is largely presented in voice-over as scenes of Berlin and departing trains occupy the space of the screen; her face and name appear only at the very end of her brief account” (Hirsch and Spitzer 6)� With time, more female testimonies have appeared, including those in Steven Spielberg’s Shoah testimony project now housed at the University of Southern California as the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Project. The question remains if they will be given the same weight by historians and non-female readers as male-centered accounts� 68 Marjanne E� Goozé Deutschkron also points out that gender did not protect Jewish women of their class from demanding physical labor. Her mother worked the night shift in a radio battery factory. She tells a story of how gender norms aided her, but then resulted in a kind of sexual assault� She used female fashion to her advantage when she walked the long distance to and from her work at the notorious IG Farben plant in high heels, standing for ten hours, and deliberately injuring her knees. In order to be reassigned she had to see the factory doctor, who did not examine her knee, but who assaulted her by forcing her to submit to a gynecological exam - something she had never before experienced (71—73)� Deutschkron also speaks frankly of the threat of rape by Soviet soldiers� As apparently German women, she and her mother were subject to victimization by the victors� The final two reasons are the most significant in assessing her memoir and its reception� Deutschkron herself reveals how she survived by sometimes entering what Primo Levi terms the ambiguous “grey zone” of morality� 7 While it is clear that luck plays a large role in her and her mother’s survival, Deutschkron also explains how she was aided through two connections: through a Dr� Cohen and her boyfriend Hans Rosenthal. She had worked as a maid for a Dr. Cohen, who through his position within the Jewish community had arranged for her to get a job at Weidt’s factory, instead of having to work under much harsher conditions� While initially this plan was betrayed and she had to work for IG Farben for a while, she eventually was sent to Weidt’s. Most significantly, Dr. Cohen replaces her name on a deportation list with someone else’s� She states: “Die Jüdische Gemeinde hatte offenbar den Namen einer anderen Person auf die Liste setzen müssen” (92). This is the gravest of moral dilemmas found in the memoir, mostly because this incident is recounted without any reflection from the time of the composition of the work� Her advantage imperiled the life of another. Because the lists were compiled by the officials of the Jewish community on the orders of the Gestapo and because every Jew known to be in Berlin was eventually put on the list, Deutschkron as a recipient of this benefit may not be judged as directly causing the demise of another, but she is not completely innocent either� She accepted the favor� She also felt “entsetzlich schuldig” for acquiring false papers during the last months of the war, mentioning this when she sees a man in a bomb shelter wearing the star (173). Although she and her mother managed at times to work, find food and shelter with no identity papers or forged ones, in February 1945 they pretended to arrive in Berlin as Ella and Inge Richter, refugees from the East - as ethnic Germans whose papers were lost. With these official papers and the accompanying ration coupons, she writes: “Wir fühlten uns als Richters mit entsprechenden Dokumenten sicherer als jemals in den Jahren der Inge Deutschkron’s Memoir Ich trug den gelben Stern (1978) 69 Illegalität” (175)� Her legal position reversed itself with the end of the war; she dug up her buried identification card as the Jewish Inge Deutschkron (179). Later knowledge about the scope of the Holocaust only added to her trauma (182)� Deutschkron’s moral dilemmas and personal trauma need to be considered within the context of her entire life story� Readers should keep in mind that Deutschkron spent all of her professional life working at the nexus of West German and Israeli relations and repeatedly recounting her experiences� At the end of the book, while detailing her later life and how she came to work in Germany and later live in Israel, she sums up how she perceived the writing process as highly emotional and describes the power of her memories: Das ist die nüchterne Feststellung zum Abschluß eines Berichtes, den ich keineswegs in einer distanzierten Rückschau auf meine Berliner Jahre, die für mich Kindheit und Jugend umfassen, schreiben konnte. Die Erinnerung an alles, was mir damals an Gutem und Bösem widerfuhr, ist unabhängig von meinen Aufzeichnungen so stark und lebendig geblieben, daß ich auch heute nicht ohne Gemütsbewegung daran denken kann. Es ist darum kein Zufall, daß ich es erst dreißig Jahre später unternahm, meine Erlebnisse niederzuschreiben, und es hier in Israel tat. Es hört sich sicher banal an, wenn ich sage, daß Israel mir eine Heimat geworden ist. Tatsache ist, daß es mir das gibt, was ich noch nie in meinem Leben zuvor gekannt habe: Sicherheit und Geborgenheit, Gefühle, die sich nur entwickeln können, wenn man der Umwelt ohne Hemmungen und ohne Furcht begegnen kann� (196) Although the reader may at times perceive her narration as somewhat cold and dry, Deutschkron did not perceive it this way herself. At the end of the book she reveals the emotional toll the writing process took on her. Only after thirty years and while not living in Germany could she, who as a journalist wrote all the time, tell her own story. She concludes by claiming that Israel has become her home, offering her a previously unknown sense of security and peace, while her postwar time in Germany offered her only insecurity. Interestingly, her life and certainly her writing career have centered themselves in Germany after the publication of the memoir written in German for a German audience. Deutschkron’s story is an important one precisely because it does not immediately tug overtly at the heartstrings� It provides important information about survival underground and of the history of the persecution of German Jews� As a counternarrative to the archetypes of the innocent and optimistic victim or the male concentration camp prisoner, Deutschkron’s work offers an intricate narrative of survival among complex mature individuals, whose politics, nationality, outlook, gender, and narrative style may not accord with American expectations of an authentic Holocaust narrative. Yet for these very reasons, such a story is deserving of our attention. 70 Marjanne E� Goozé Notes 1 Page references in parenthesis, unless otherwise noted, refer to: Inge Deutschkron� Ich trug den gelben Stern. Munich: DTV, 1985. Original publication: Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1978. 2 In these interviews with Deutschkron she recounts much of what is in the memoir� 3 See Deutschkron, “Testimony.” 4 See the GRIPS program announcement at http: / / www.grips-theater.de/ programm/ spielplan/ produktion/ 19. 5 See, for instance: Sie blieben im Schatten. This book also includes a chapter on Otto Weidt. 6 I am not considering Anne Frank as a Jewish-German writer� Although she was born in Germany, she went to school in the Netherlands and wrote her diary in Dutch� 7 Primo Levi devotes a chapter to this concept of moral ambiguity in his book The Drowned and the Saved� Works Cited Berr, Hélène. The Journal of Hélène Berr. Trans� David Bellos� New York: Weinstein Books, 2008. Defiance. Dir. Edward Zwick. Bedford Falls Productions, 2008. Film. Deutschkron, Inge. “From the Testimony of Inge Deutschkron about Hiding in Berlin Throughout the War.” yadvashem.org. Yad Vashem Shoah Resource Center, n.d. Web. 13 Oct� 2020� ---� Ich trug den gelben Stern. Munich: DTV, 1985. ---� Israel und die Deutschen: Das besondere Verhältnis. Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1983. ---� Mein Leben nach dem Überleben: Die Fortsetzung von Ich trug den gelben Stern� Munich: DTV, 2000. ---� Outcast: A Jewish Girl in Wartime Berlin� Trans� Jean Steinberg� New York: Fromm Intl., 1990. ---� Sie blieben im Schatten: Ein Denkmal für “stille Helden�” Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1996� ---� Überleben als Verpflichtung: Den Nazi-Mördern entkommen. Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 2010. Deutschkron, Inge, and Lukas Ruegenberg. Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt: Ein Ort der Menschlichkeit im Dritten Reich. Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 2008. ---� Papa Weidt: Er bot den Nazis die Stirn. Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 1999. Ein blinder Held - Die Liebe des Otto Weidt. Dir. Kai Christiansen. Vincent TV GmbH, 2014� Film� Inge Deutschkron’s Memoir Ich trug den gelben Stern (1978) 71 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. “Questions of Authenticity.” Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust� Ed� Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes� New York: Modern Language Association, 2004. 52—67. Flanzbaum, Hilene, ed. The Americanization of the Holocaust� Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. Goodrich, Frances, and Albert Hackett. The Diary of Anne Frank� New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1986. Hirsch, Marianne, and Leo Spitzer. “Gendered Translations: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah�” Gendering War Talk. Ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. 3—19. Holocaust. Dir. Marvin J. Chomsky. National Broadcasting Corp., 1978. Television. Klüger, Ruth. weiter leben: Eine Jugend. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992. Lanzmann, Claude. “Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection. Interview with Inge Deutschkron�” collections.ushmm.org. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1985� Web� 13 Oct� 2020� Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Random House, 1988. ---� Survival in Auschwitz. Trans. Stuart J. Woolf. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Ludwig, Volker, and Detlef Michel. Ab heute heißt du Sara. Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 2008� Schindler’s List. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Amblin Entertainment, 1993. Film. Shoah� Dir� Claude Lanzmann� New Yorker Films� 1985� Film� Sierakowiak, Dawid. The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto. Ed. Alan Adelson. Trans. Kamil Turowski. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Diversity of Perspectives in Holocaust Memoir: Bruno Schwebel’s As Luck Would Have It 73 Diversity of Perspectives in Holocaust Memoir: Bruno Schwebel’s As Luck Would Have It Laura A� Detre Independent Historian In the early 2000s, the Mexican broadcaster and artist Bruno Schwebel began to recount his life story. Schwebel, who had migrated to Mexico via France with his family in the 1940s, was looking back at a remarkable life and felt compelled, as many Holocaust survivors before him, to explain how he came to be the person he was and he did so in the form of an autobiography� Schwebel’s memoir is part of a relatively new movement to broaden the scope of Holocaust narrative. In the early years of scholarship on the Shoah, most of the stories historians relied on were those of Jewish adults, largely male, who were persecuted and eventually sent to camps because of their religion. In recent years, historians have widened their focus to include the accounts of individuals, such Abstract : Toward the end of his life, the Mexican broadcaster Bruno Schwebel recounted his life story in the form of an autobiography� Schwebel’s memoir is part of a relatively new movement to broaden the scope of Holocaust narratives� Historians have widened their focus to include the accounts of individuals, such as women and children, who were not considered central to our understanding of Nazi persecution initially. Ruth Klüger’s ground-breaking autobiography, Still Alive, represents this shift toward a more inclusive understanding the Holocaust and Schwebel’s book is in that same vein� He recounts his early life in the working-class Viennese neighborhood of Brigittenau and his father’s involvement in the Social Democratic party. It was both this political affiliation and his father’s Jewish origins that imperiled Schwebel and his family, and they are a dual focus in his autobiography� Keywords : Bruno Schwebel, Refugee, Social Democrats, Child Holocaust Survivor, Mexico, Holocaust Memoir 74 Laura A� Detre as women and children, who were not considered central to our understanding of Nazi persecution initially. Ruth Klüger’s groundbreaking autobiography Still Alive represents an important work in this shift toward a more inclusive way of understanding the Holocaust and Schwebel’s book is in that same vein� He recounts his early life in the working-class Viennese neighborhood of Brigittenau, growing up in a Gemeindebau and deeply immersed in politics through his father’s involvement in the Social Democratic Party� It was both this political affiliation and his father’s Jewish origins that imperiled Schwebel and his family and they are a dual focus in his autobiography. The book is also interesting because, although Schwebel was nearing the end of his life when he wrote the text, the events he relays occurred in his childhood and teenaged years. This perspective is vital to historians and it paints a fuller picture of life for victims of the Nazi regime, showing us how the fears of various groups differed and how characteristics such as age, religion, and political allegiance shaped the opportunities individuals and families had for survival� First-person narratives have long been the genre most commonly associated with Holocaust literature. In fact, many authors and scholars of the Shoah have inveighed against the fictionalization of Nazi persecution of Jews and other minority groups, arguing that it trivialized the factual accounts of this period to use them to create imaginary worlds. Consequently, much of our understanding of this history comes from autobiographical writing and those texts reflect the specific personal experiences of the authors. Because of the nature of genocide, some people were more likely to survive Nazi persecution and be able to tell their own stories than were others. Consequently, many of the earliest Holocaust memoirs published were written by young people, old enough to avoid immediate death in camps but young and healthy enough to survive the brutal life within. Though not strictly speaking a memoir, Elie Wiesel’s Night is a good example of this kind of writing and has shaped generations of school children’s ideas of the Shoah� Wiesel’s story has come to represent the classic Holocaust narrative - deportation by train, ghettoization, life in Auschwitz, and eventually liberation after a period of extreme deprivation and abject terror. Today though, we recognize that the history of the Holocaust is far more complicated than this and that victimhood had many forms� In the immediate post-Shoah, individuals were really only considered survivors if they had spent time in a small number of death camps. This marginalized many people, whose experiences were harrowing, but took place outside of that particular network of horrors� Schwebel’s life story would not have put him in that narrow category of Holocaust survivors a few decades earlier, as his family successfully found exile, first in France and then in Mexico, and never experienced an internment camp. Fortunately, today we take a broader view of what the Shoah was and we Diversity of Perspectives in Holocaust Memoir: Bruno Schwebel’s As Luck Would Have It 75 have come to understand the multiplicity of ways in which the discriminatory policies of the Nazi regime affected people’s lives. There has also been a shift in the tone of Holocaust memoirs in the decades since they were first written. As Ştefan Ionescu noted in his essay on Holocaust writing in Romania, memoirs produced in the mid-twentieth century generally focused more closely on the mechanics of the Holocaust and factual details of the author’s experiences attempting to survive the Shoah. By the end of the 1980s there was a transition to memoir writing that placed a greater emphasis on daily life and the individuals who attempted to help the authors to survive this terror (Ionescu 369). This was true even in places where there was less government control over publication and, to some extent, it is a natural consequence of readers’ ignorance of the mechanics of the Shoah. Readers first needed to understand that death camps existed before they could come to terms with the many individual experiences of this terror� Bruno Schwebel’s writing fits this pattern. He wrote little about the abject horror of the Holocaust. There are mentions of relatives who did not survive, but these are mostly wistful longings for lost grandparents, rather than gruesome descriptions of the mechanics of death. Even when he acknowledges the peril his immediate family faced, he plays down the threat, choosing not to focus on the potential for death. For example, he writes about his family being separated in September of 1939 when his father was sent to the Vélodrome d’Hiver and then to the internment camp at Meslay du Maine. Meanwhile, the Schwebel children were sent to a children’s home run by the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) and their mother worked as a cook nearby� It was not until 24 July 1940 that the family would be reunited in Montauban, in southern France (Schwebel, Luck 74). The fact that the Schwebel family was able to reunite and eventually travel to Mexico together is remarkable, and Bruno Schwebel recognized that but did not write about this period in a lurid way� His intention is not to terrify but to inform� He also admits that his memory of this period is less than perfect� As a preface to his chapter on life at the OSE school he notes that he relied on Ernst Papaneck’s 1975 book Out of the Fire for details about the operation of the school, and later he admits that he does not know how his mother managed to follow her sons and that he has no recollection as to whether she travelled with them to Montmorency or if she came from Paris later (Schwebel, Luck 60)� Are these gaps due to the passage of time, the inevitable failings of an aging memory, or the fact that Schwebel was eleven years old when these events transpired? It is difficult to know but his admission that he does not recall details humanizes him. These stories also reinforce that, from Schwebel’s point of view, this book is first and foremost the story of a loving family that overcame persecution and built a new life in a place they came to love� It is not a horror story� In part he can accomplish this because 76 Laura A� Detre the Schwebel’s were fortunate and their support network successfully helped them avoid a death camp and the systematic demise of their family, but it is also a stylistic choice not to emphasize grotesque and violent imagery� The question of Schwebel’s age at the time of these events is central to understanding this text� An important change in the nature of Holocaust memoirs that deserves attention reflects the passage of time and the rise of what Susan Rubin Suleiman called “The 1.5 Generation.” Suleiman identified children who experienced the events of the Holocaust as having distinctly different experiences from their parents and other adult relatives. In her essay, she raised important issues for future scholars working with such texts, such as how do we define who was a child in the Holocaust and is there anything beyond the broad persecution of all European Jews that binds these individuals together as a generation? She notes that there are multiple ways to define generations and that when we talk about children and the Holocaust, we could be talking about people born in the wide range between the final year of World War I and then end of the Second World War in 1945 (Suleiman 283)� Suleiman went on to observe that the mode of survival is important for understanding a child survivor’s relationship to the Holocaust� A teenager who experienced a death camp may have described their feelings about survival in fundamentally different terms from those of someone who was a young child hiding in an attic (Suleiman 286). For this project, her most important observation is that the 1.5 generation’s understanding of their own experiences are deeply informed by many factors, including but not limited to age, social class, and the experiences of family members (Suleiman 289). In the case of Bruno Schwebel, he was old enough to have meaningful recollections of persecution� He was also deeply aware of his family’s status within both Austrian and Mexican society and wrote in detail about his working-class origins. Finally, the survival of his immediate family, both parents and his brother, is central to his story as well. Suleiman ended her essay by noting that every individual’s experience was different and valuable and making an argument for the central role that literary narratives should play in our understanding of the events of the Shoah (Suleiman 291)� Bruno Schwebel’s memoir should fundamentally be viewed as a work of literature. He attempts to recall historical events with as much accuracy as can be expected decades later, but all memoir writing is a literary exercise in the sense that the author controls the narrative� Schwebel did not write in a vacuum and was conscious of his audience as he crafted this work. In fact, there are multiple versions of this text, produced at different times with different goals� Schwebel was aware of his cross-cultural existence and he published his autobiography in the languages that most affected him. He wrote in Spanish for a Mexican readership and that text, entitled De Viena a México - La otra suerte, Diversity of Perspectives in Holocaust Memoir: Bruno Schwebel’s As Luck Would Have It 77 was published by his alma mater, the Instituto Politénico Nacional, in 2006. The German-language version of his life story was published by the Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft in 2004 and was titled Das andere Glück. Erinnerungen und Erzählungen. The American translator of the version cited in this work noted that Schwebel was closely involved in the process of creating the English-language version of his book and they used elements from the Spanish text to create an authentic voice (Schwebel, Luck 222). The idea that a memoir would have a unique character in one language versus another is not new. The writer and scholar Ruth Klüger produced memoirs that are virtually separate works in English and in German. These linguistic and cultural differences illustrate that memoirs do more than just document fact. The production of a memoir is a literary pursuit, and the choices a memoirist makes, from what topics to write about to word choice, influence the final product. Readers and scholars who use memoirs to understand the past need to be cognizant of this� Schwebel’s age may be fairly typical for Holocaust memoirists today, and our broader definition of survivorship has generated great interest in stories of exilees, but in a few respects his story is unlike most previous texts. The book focuses heavily on his father’s connection to the Social Democratic Party of Austria rather than religion� While his family’s Jewishness (his father was Jewish by birth and his mother by conversion) would have been enough to imperil them, they were more actively persecuted by both the Austrofascists and later the Nazis because of Theodor Schwebel’s position within the party. When Bruno was born in 1928, the Schwebels lived in the Janecek-Hof Gemeindebau in Vienna’s 20 th district. Theodor Schwebel had joined the Social Democrats in the aftermath of World War I, seeing the party as the only genuine option for Jews to participate in the political sphere� Interwar Austrian politics presented a complex landscape for Jews to negotiate, as new political parties were founded and their attitudes toward minorities were becoming clearer. In many respects, the period of Red Vienna was a hopeful time when anything seemed possible, but it was also when the horrors to come were planted and nurtured� As Rob McFarland and his coauthors point out in their essay on Jewish life in these years, there were a multiplicity of socialist parties in 1919, some of which were explicitly Jewish institutions. The Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP), the predecessor to today’s SPÖ, generally believed that Jews needed to acculturate to German-speaking, Catholic culture in Vienna, and that meant they should be less overtly religious. Over time, many of the Jewish socialist institutions came under the umbrella of the larger, more politically powerful party and made demands in exchange for their loyalty� At the same time that this consolidation occurred, conservative bourgeois parties complained that the SDAP was overrun with Jews, many of whom did not personally identify as Jewish but who 78 Laura A� Detre came from Jewish origins (McFarland et al� 191)� For families like the Schwebels there was no perfect political organization with which they could affiliate but the SDAP was the best available option� This political affiliation was the reason Schwebel’s father lost his job after the 1934 Civil War. Schwebel reports the events of February 12 in his memoir, noting that he and his brother returned to the family apartment after hearing explosions nearby. They were sequestered to their room that evening while a group of socialists met in the family’s living room. After their loss in February, leading to the creation of the Corporate State in May of 1934, the Social Democrats were outlawed and members like Theodor Schwebel, who worked for the League of Farm and Forestry Workers, lost their jobs. Schwebel’s uncle Oskar, who lived in Neulengbach, between Vienna and St. Pölten, was also active in the Social Democratic Party and was charged with high treason by the Austrofascist government for his role in the Civil War� It is clear from Schwebel’s retelling of this family history that this political affiliation was not a secondary consideration. As he states, “my father’s contribution in support of the organized working class, its long road from exploitation to active resistance and the consolidation of rights during the 1920s, may have been insignificant. But I am proud of his work even though it is little known” (Schwebel, Luck 29). After the Anschluss, when it was no longer safe for a Jewish family, especially one with outlawed politics, to remain in Austria, it would be the socialists who arranged for the Schwebel family to leave, first finding temporary refuge in France and then eventually permanent relocation in Mexico� Schwebel is very clear in his text that, even as a child, he was aware of the important role that various Social Democrats played in their exile� He writes lovingly about Marianne Pollak and the Rote Falken group that she organized for the children of Social Democrats residing in Paris in 1938 (Schwebel, Luck 56). Pollak, who was in her forties during this time, was also a committed socialist who had dedicated her career to the movement and found herself exiled after the Civil War, first to Brussels, then Paris, and eventually London. She and her husband, also a party official, returned to Vienna in September 1945 and she served in the Nationalrat from 1945 to 1959� Schwebel used this story about the Rote Falken and Pollak’s involvement with the children of this displaced community to illustrate how central their political affiliation was to their experience. Even at the OSE children’s home in Montmorency, where the Schwebel children were separated from their father and not in the direct care of their mother, politics were important. The children in the home were divided into three groups, Orthodox Jews for whom religious practice played a central role in their daily lives, “Cubans,” who were the children of the St. Louis, that ill-fated ship destined for Cuba, and Robinsonians, the group to which the Schwebels belonged. These were children of Diversity of Perspectives in Holocaust Memoir: Bruno Schwebel’s As Luck Would Have It 79 socialist refugees, not all of whom were Jewish (Schwebel, Luck 63)� Schwebel had lived in a family where politics were more central to their identity than was religion and that continued for him in exile� Ultimately, the Schwebels were able to get the proper papers to travel to Mexico because of Gilberto Bosques, the Mexican Consul General in Marseilles. Bosques had been instructed by the Cardenas government to assist refugees in France, and his staff issued approximately 40,000 visas, mostly to Spanish citizens fleeing the Franco regime and to Jews escaping Nazi-controlled Europe� In 1997 Bruno Schwebel wrote a testimonial on Bosques for the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation in which he states unequivocally that “if it hadn’t been for the anti-fascist position of the Mexican government, as well as the personal initiative of Mr� Bosques to save the largest number of people possible whose lives were threatened by fascism, my family and I probably would not have survived” (Schwebel, “Bruno Schwebel” n. pag.). Schwebel also notes that, upon their arrival in Mexico, they were greeted by Bundists who took care of them for the first few weeks after their arrival in the country (Schwebel, Luck 107)� Both the Austrian Civil War of 1934 and the following Corporate State under Austrofascist rule are topics to which historians have not given enough attention. The suppression of the Social Democrats after the failure of 12 February 1934 not only removes their voices from the country’s politics, but disproportionately affects Jews, many of whom shared Theodor Schwebel’s view that the Social Democrats were their only viable political option� Despite the threats that they faced under both Austrofascism and Nazism, some very dedicated Social Democrats literally kept their movement alive by helping the vulnerable to find refuge. Much like that of the future Chancellor of Austria, Bruno Kreisky, the Schwebel family’s survival was possible in large part because of this devoted group of men and women, both in Europe and Mexico. Like other refugees fleeing Nazi-dominated Europe, the Schwebel’s debated the merits of returning to the country of their birth. They did not reject their Austrianness and were clearly refugees upon arrival in North America, not immigrants who had sought out this new life. Nonetheless, by the end of the war and the stabilization of Europe in the 1950s, Mexico was their home. Schwebel’s parents tried their hands at various business opportunities, including chocolate maker and seamstress, but eventually ran various delicatessens, selling Central European specialties, such as gefilte fish and deli sandwiches� Schwebel observed that his father was never really suited to this work, having been a musician and an office worker in Europe. After his father’s death in 1975, Schwebel’s mother did return to Vienna on occasion, but she ultimately chose to live in Mexico to be close to her sons and their children� Schwebel himself was presented with the option of return to Austria at least twice as a young 80 Laura A� Detre man, immediately after the end of the war in 1945 and again in 1953 when he received his qualifications. When discussing this question of remigration, Schwebel was clearly of two minds. “Just as I had at the end of the war, I thought again about returning to Austria. That homesickness I had felt eight years ago was undiminished, and I had begun to analyze the anger with which I looked at my fellow countrymen though I was far from having overcome it. But no, I had put down roots by now, I felt good, and a splendid future lay ahead of me” (Schwebel, Luck 191)� Bruno Schwebel did go on to have a long and illustrious career in Mexico� He worked for the Mexican broadcaster Televisa from early in its history until his retirement in 1998� While at Televisa he had jobs that varied from camera operator, to producer to actor (he had a recurring role as a priest in the telenovela Gente bien, which also featured a brief appearance by a not yet famous Salma Hayek)� Schwebel was also a chess champion and an accomplished painter� He was an active participant in Mexican culture and not content to remain on the sidelines of society, waiting to return to a mythical homeland, and he wrote frankly about the fact that the things he accomplished in Mexico would probably not have been possible for him in Austria. This discussion of his post-Shoah life is, perhaps, the biggest difference between Schwebel’s book and many of those that came earlier. Unlike the earliest Holocaust memoirs, he did not limit himself to discussing anti-Semitism in Europe or his family’s flight to safety. Approximately half of the text is devoted to his life in Mexico, a place he clearly grew to love� He is also frank about the fact that this migration to Mexico was particularly hard on his parents, who had fewer opportunities in their new home than he did� In that respect his writing is reminiscent of Ruth Klüger’s. Both were children in Vienna when the Nazis turned their world upside down. They both tell their stories of survival and of family relationships, although Schwebel only reports positive feelings toward his parents� And we know that both Schwebel and Klüger build enviable careers in North America. Their personalities and the details of their stories are widely disparate, but their ages are close and consequently there are significant comparisons to be made between both of their narratives� Another figure whose life experience and writing are similar to Schwebel’s is the novelist Aharon Appelfeld� Both men experienced this period as children, Schwebel being almost four years older than Appelfeld. They also wrote explicitly about how the Holocaust and its associated displacement and death impacted their view of family� Another factor that joins these two writers is their post-Holocaust life as immigrants, bound to a natal culture in which they could or would no longer participate. Of course, the fundamental difference between these two men’s life stories was the fate of their families� Appelfeld’s mother was murdered and he was separated from his father for many years, to Diversity of Perspectives in Holocaust Memoir: Bruno Schwebel’s As Luck Would Have It 81 be reunited after the two had independently migrated to Israel. Schwebel’s immediate family survived as a unit and was able to rebuild their lives in Mexico� Perhaps the most important thing to remember when contemplating the writings of child Holocaust survivors is that they should, as with all human beings, be treated as individuals whose experiences and personalities form their work. Klüger, Appelfeld, and Schwebel all recorded family histories surrounding the same period and events put into motion by the rise of anti-Semitism in the mid-twentieth century, but they were fundamentally different people. As scholars we can look at their works as a collective resource for understanding this tumultuous history, but none of these texts can replace the other. Some, like Appelfeld’s works, are highly dependent on what Dana Mihăilescu called “the predominance of somatic embodied memories” (Mihăilescu 6). This contrast with memoirists such as Jonny Moser, whose autobiography Wallenbergs Laufbursche is filled with detailed historical facts about both the persecution of Jews in Hungary as well as the more comprehensive sociopolitical state of the country in the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. Schewebel’s writing falls firmly between these two in terms of recounting facts versus feelings and perhaps this is because he was also between them chronologically� Having been born in 1928, making him older than Appelfeld but younger than Moser, Schwebel was old enough to recall details of life outside of his family home in the years leading to their escape to Mexico. Also, as the Schwebels were involved with politics to a greater extent than the average family, it is reasonable to guess that stories about the SDAP were discussed at home and perhaps recounted years after the events. In both his introduction and conclusion, Schwebel discussed his feelings about visiting Austria in the twenty-first century. He pointed out the contrasts between the prosperous, modern country, full of hope and comfort foods. For him, visiting the places of his childhood was simultaneously enjoyable and discomfiting. Much like the eponymous character in Robert Schindel’s 1992 novel Gebürtig, Schwebel wrote fondly about visiting the sites of his childhood and seeing positive change from when he lived in Vienna, but also said “I cannot ignore the fact that anti-Semitism, which is said to have deep roots in the Austrian soil, is still in evidence even though there are indications that those roots are losing some of their strength” (Schwebel, Luck 198). Schwebel died in 2011, before Austria’s recent shift toward right-wing politics and the general increase in extremism throughout Europe, so one can legitimately ask if he would feel positive about the country’s future today� But it is clear from his writing that he was proud of the life that he built in his adopted home and hoped that his memoir could help young people to learn from the experiences of the past� 82 Laura A� Detre Works Cited Ionescu, Ştefan. “The Boom of Testimonies after Communism: The Voices of the Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Romania 1989-2005�” Studia Hebraica 5 (2005): 357—80� McFarland, Rob, George Spitaler, and Ingo Zechner, eds. The Red Vienna Sourcebook. Rochester: Camden House, 2020. Mihăilescu, Dana. “Holocaust Child Survivors’ Memoirs as Reflected in Appelfeld’s The Story of a Life” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17�3 (2015): n� pag� Moser, Jonny. Wallenbergs Laufbursche: Jugenderinnerungen 1938-1945� Vienna: Picus Verlag, 2006. Schwebel, Bruno. As Luck Would Have It: My Exile in France and Mexico. Recollections and Stories. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2008. ---� “Bruno Schwebel and his family�” raoulwallenberg.net. The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, 1 May 1997. Web. 20 Dec. 2020. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child Survivors and the Holocaust�” American Imago 59�3 (2002): 277—95� Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): An Austrian Historian’s Personal Eyewitness Account of Surviving the Holocaust in Exile in Hungary Joseph W� Moser West Chester University Jonny Moser’s (1925-2011) autobiography Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006) was published fairly late, both in the author’s lifetime and after a significant number of Holocaust memoirs had already been published. This is remarkable, since Moser was actually one of the earliest Holocaust historians in Austria, and in fact his small book Die Judenverfolgung in Österreich 1938-1945, which appeared forty years before his autobiography, was the first book on the Holocaust in Austria, long before scholarship had devoted much interest in this Abstract : Jonny Moser’s (1925-2011) autobiography Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006) deals with an almost forgotten chapter of Austrian-Jewish history: the expulsion of Burgenland’s Jews within the first months following the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938. The Mosers lived as illegal immigrants in Hungary until they were discovered by the authorities at the end of 1941, when the family was transferred to a labor camp for foreign Jews in Eastern Hungary. After they were released from the labor camp in spring 1944 and following the German invasion, they just barely escaped being deported to Auschwitz. They finally met Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who issued them Swedish Schutzpässe, which helped them survive the final war months in Budapest. As a nineteen-year-old errand boy for Wallenberg, Jonny Moser got to know Wallenberg better and Moser remained for the rest of his life one of the most important witnesses of Wallenberg’s work� Moser returned with his parents and sister to Vienna in the summer of 1945, where he remained for the rest of his life� Keywords : Burgenland Jews, Holocaust in Austria, Raoul Wallenberg, Holocaust in Budapest, Holocaust Memoir 84 Joseph W� Moser topic� As a founding member of the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, Moser was a pioneer of Holocaust research in Austria. He also maintained his own personal collection of documents relating to deportations of Jews from Vienna that were being discarded by Vienna’s Israelitische Kultusgemeinde in the 1960s, because there simply was no interest in remembering the process of deporting Jews from Vienna. In the 1960s, he corresponded with Benjamin Murmelstein in Rome about the deportations of Jews from Vienna and about the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Murmelstein had been the deputy chairman of the Jewish Council of Elders after the Anschluss, and was essentially Eichmann’s Jewish henchman in Vienna� 1 In that sense, Moser was at the cutting edge of Holocaust research at the time, since Claude Lanzmann interviewed Murmelstein in 1975 as one of the first eyewitnesses for his documentary Shoah, even though the footage was not included in Shoah and was not released until 2013 in the film Le dernier des injustes / The Last of the Unjust, because the topic of Murmelstein working for the Nazis to deport Jews was too complex a topic until recently� Moser also visited and corresponded with H�G� Adler in London in 1968, who had published Theresienstadt 1941-1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft (1960). Many early Holocaust researchers, including Claude Lanzmann and Raul Hilberg, visited Moser in Vienna, as well as many others� He was considered an expert on the demographics of the Holocaust in Austria, because of his collection of documents and personal research, and he was also considered to be a significant eyewitness in remembering Raoul Wallenberg’s work in Budapest, since he and his family were saved by Wallenberg and he worked for Wallenberg as an errand boy. As his son, I remember many visits from researchers who still in the early 1980s would visit my father simply to ask if he thought that Wallenberg could still be alive in Soviet captivity� My father disliked this question, as it was completely speculative and did not relate to his work as an historian� The publication of Jonny Moser’s autobiography was not possible until after his retirement from running a Tabak-Trafik (tobacco store) in Vienna in 1997. Although he was considered a pioneer in Holocaust research, he lacked an institutional affiliation that would have afforded him the resources to live from his research. When he set about to write his autobiography, he worked like an historian would and he focused on facts that could be proven, trying not to be labeled as just another oral history of the Holocaust. Consequently, his autobiography does not incorporate personal emotions, but rather it tries to chronicle what happened� He explains the history of the expulsion of the Jews from Burgenland and what life was like in Vienna 1938-1940, as well as his survival in exile in Hungary� Moser kept a diary that he started in July 1944 and he was able to save it� Earlier writings did not survive as everything had been taken from his Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): Surviving the Holocaust in Hungary 85 family when they were about to be deported from Budapest to Auschwitz� His autobiography follows his detailed notes from 1944 and is supported by research on the Holocaust in Hungary, in which he describes how constantly changing domestic Hungarian politics vis-à-vis the Germans and the Jews influenced his story of survival� Unlike Ruth Klüger’s autobiography weiter leben (1992) / Still Alive (2001), which in addition to her detailed account of surviving Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, also describes her complex relationship with her mother and father, Moser’s autobiography almost purposefully avoids such personal stories� He felt uncomfortable writing about personal issues, which he may have seen as petty, although some readers would have appreciated a more personal approach to his narrative. Instead, he wrote like an historian. Unlike many Holocaust survivors, who did not want to be confronted with the details of their suffering after the war, Jonny Moser coped with the trauma by studying the Holocaust as an academic discipline long before it had received broad attention from historians, and he was very concerned with historical accuracy. Writing Wallenbergs Laufbursche was the culmination of a lifetime’s work of trying to understand what had happened. It was not his final publication, as he finished a manuscript on the first deportations of Jews from Vienna to Nisko in fall 1939, based on his collection of primary sources� Jonny Moser passed away in 2011 and his sons published the manuscript in 2012� 2 Wallenbergs Laufbursche deals with an almost forgotten part of Austrian-Jewish history: the expulsion of Burgenland’s Jews in the first months following the Nazis’ takeover of Austria in March 1938. The surprisingly quick looting of his parents’ general store in Parndorf by local Nazis as well as the attempted deportation of Parndorf Jews across the open border with Hungary during Passover (of all times! ) were formative events for the twelve-year-old boy� Jonny Moser’s father, who had converted to Judaism in 1921, was issued a so-called Ariernachweis identifying his religion as being Jewish, a curiosity of the time, but it allowed him to sue the mayor of Parndorf as well as the Eisenstadt Gestapo chief Otto Koch for looting into their own pockets. In order to remove his father as a potential witness in the upcoming trial, the Gestapo sent his father to Hungary, and Jonny Moser along with his mother and sister were also illegally smuggled by the Gestapo into Hungary in October 1940. In Budapest, they lived as illegal immigrants until they had to come out of hiding in late 1941 hoping for a Hungarian exit permit to use their visa to the U.S., which then became impossible just days later with the bombing of Pearl Harbor after which Hungary declared war on the U.S. The family was sent to a Hungarian labor camp for foreign Jews in Ricse, in Eastern Hungary. After being released from the labor camp in spring 1944 and the German invasion of Hungary, the family just barely managed to 86 Joseph W� Moser remove themselves in Békásmegyer (a suburb of Budapest) from being deported to Auschwitz. Meeting the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who issued them Swedish Schutzpässe in early August 1944, helped them survive the final year of the war in Budapest� As an eighteen-year-old Jonny Moser got to know Wallenberg, and he was thus one of the most important witnesses of Wallenberg’s rescue efforts in Budapest. Together with his parents and his sister, Moser returned from their exile in Hungary to Vienna already in June 1945, though one must understand this as a new beginning, because the Mosers never returned to live in their former hometown in Burgenland� As a Germanist, I am particularly interested in the genesis of my father’s autobiography, which to some extent I was allowed to observe when I was a child, and which can be substantiated through my father’s notes from the years 1944 and 1945. In contrast to many Holocaust survivors, Jonny Moser spent his whole life dealing with the history of the Holocaust, which in his notes from 1944/ 45 he already termed as the “Judenverfolgung” (persecution of the Jews) in an essay with the title “Die Budapester Judenverfolgung�” In this multipage text he deals with the time from 15 October 1944 to 15 January 1945, during which the Nyilas (Arrow Cross Guards - Hungarian Nazis) murdered Jews in the streets of Budapest� Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): Surviving the Holocaust in Hungary 87 This notebook gave Moser an opportunity to deal with the reality in Budapest, which he recorded with great detail. The red notebook (on the left in the picture) deals with events from 1944 to 1945. The black one on the right was purchased in Vienna in June 1945 for RM 1�50 (the receipt is still in the book) and it describes the three return trips from Budapest to Vienna, until they could take up permanent residence there again� Jonny Moser wanted to remember and not repress anything; it was a coping mechanism for him� In the red notebook there is also a chronology of the years 1945 to 1938 going backwards, and there are corrections for the years 1942 to 1938, where he updated events to their correct dates. It appears that he must have spoken with his parents and sister about these events, and thus made corrections� He had a memory like a calendar and he collected calendars his whole life long. This chronology helped him decades later to write his autobiography with an eye to precise dates. Even though about fifty years passed between his notes from 1945 and his work on his autobiography in the years 1997-2006, the events from the time of the Holocaust were always at the center of his life. Therefore, when I was in elementary school in Vienna in the early 1980s, I knew more about the Holocaust than most adults, regardless of whether they were Jewish or not. The ignorance of many Austrians about their country’s history before the election of Kurt Waldheim as the country’s president in 1986 was always a big topic of conversation at home� Before my father passed away in 2011, I was only allowed to touch his notebook once, after the publication of his autobiography. I had asked him for it for a few hours, so I could read it and ask him questions. He really just gave it to me for a few hours before he asked to have it back. His notes are written in a legible script and besides the chronology there are also literary writings and short essays about the present in Budapest. Detailed drawings of the places, at which he stayed or was detained during the Holocaust are particularly interesting� 88 Joseph W� Moser For example, there is a drawing of the brick factory in Békásmegyer, on the regional rail line to Szentendre, from where Budapest Jews were deported to Auschwitz from 2 to 8 July 1944� Moser’s family just barely escaped being sent on the last train to Auschwitz, because while the Nazis were loading the train my father told Franz Novak, who was in charge of the SS-Sondereinsatz-kommando Eichmann in Budapest, that they were not Jewish. Novak liked Moser’s Burgenland German dialect and so he and his family could return to Budapest to check their identity at the police jail at Mosonyi utca 9� When they returned to Békásmegyer, the brick factory was deserted, and they had escaped the last transports from Hungary to Auschwitz� My father had no notes from the time before summer 1944, because the Nazis took everything away from them just before they were moved to the brick factory in Békásmegyer. From 15 May to 1 July 1944, the Hungarian authorities had locked them up in the Tsuk factory on the Danube island Csepel just south of Budapest (a map of which can be seen on the left of the picture above). This was the time of the first heavy Allied air raids and some Hungarians believed that buildings that were inhabited by Jews would not be bombed� During these Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): Surviving the Holocaust in Hungary 89 weeks, they were locked up in this industrial area above ground with a large group of Jews. They would not have survived a direct hit. They were lucky that the Tsuk factory was hit in the night of 1 to 2 July, when they were already aboard a Danube ship upstream through the eerie blacked out city of Budapest on the way to Békásmegyer� Jonny Moser wrote that some Hungarian anti-Semites saw themselves confirmed that the Allies only bombed buildings that had no Jews in them. Following the incarceration in the Tsuk factory, my father was afraid all his life of being locked up� Our apartment in Vienna was never locked at night, as the fear of break-ins was less significant than the fear of not being able to evacuate quickly in the case of an emergency� Although he had lost all papers from before summer 1944, he made drawings of the places in which he had spent time before. For example, he made a drawing of the Hungarian concentration camp for foreign Jews in Ricse, Eastern Hungary, as well as the Zsidókorház ( Jewish hospital) in Budapest’s Szábolcs utca 39, in which he had spent time recovering from pleuritis� A key turning point in Jonny Moser’s life was meeting Raoul Wallenberg at the residence of the Molnárs at Budapest’s Minerva utca 1a, which was right next door to the Swedish embassy. On 12 August 1944, my father and his sister Herma visited the Molnárs, a well-to-do family that was Jewish according to Nazi racial law, and who did charity work and had helped them before. Mici Molnár was a member of the Zwack family and housed all her relatives in her basement at the time. The Zwacks are well known for the herbal liqueur Unicum. The Molnárs were happy to see him and my aunt, because following the deportations to Auschwitz, they were quite surprised to see these two impoverished foreign Jews. They asked them to stay for the day and wait for Wallenberg to return who had moved in upstairs, as it was conveniently located to the Swedish embassy and provided the Molnárs with some security� When Wallenberg arrived around 10 p. m., he asked them if they had any personal connections to Sweden. My father did not see any, but Herma was quite alert and made up the story that they had once received toys made in Sweden. That was good enough a reason for Wallenberg to issue Schutzpässe to them and their parents� 90 Joseph W� Moser Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): Surviving the Holocaust in Hungary 91 My father’s pass is number 151, my grandparents’ passes were not preserved. It was one of the first passes that Wallenberg issued five days after meeting my aunt and father on August 17. Wallenberg signed the pass on the left bottom corner� What is remarkable about their Schutzpässe is that they were some of the few that received a German transit visa stamped on the back on 21 November 1944, as well as the Hungarian exit permit. They decided not to travel to Sweden, however, due to the chaos of the final months of the war in Nazi Germany, but they belonged to a small group of Schutzpass holders who were issued these official travel permits by the Nazis. The Swastika stamps on the German transit visa impressed the Hungarian Nazis who usually did not respect the Swedish Schutzpässe� The Mosers experienced the liberation by the Red Army on the Pest side of the city, which was liberated two months before Buda, as the Red Army advanced from the East and was stalled for a few weeks at the Danube in Budapest, while the German troops hunkered down on the Buda side� 92 Joseph W� Moser Here you see a drawing of the cellars that had been connected during the war to provide escape routes during air raids. This is where Moser and his family were liberated by the Red Army. In the front you can see the Kalvin tér, which my father erroneously spelled with a C. The Üllöi utca is a broad arterial road that leads from downtown Pest out of the city towards the southeast. They were exposed to significant fighting in this strategically important area, and needed to seek shelter, as the Soviets advanced block by block. My father described in detail in his notes as well as in his autobiography how the front advanced through these cellars. The front part of the block was completely destroyed in the war and not rebuilt until the late 1990s� Interestingly, the notebook also contains a small note from Frau von Ráso, on which she is asking the then eighteen-year-old to be at a certain address in the morning� He was supposed to help to get beds for the children’s home that Wallenberg organized. Margit von Rásó, née Zwack, and Mici Molnár’s sister, was also staying in the Molnár’s villa at the time. The note is a reminder today of how my father took care of errands for Wallenberg and his other aides� The title word Laufbursche expresses a certain modesty in my father’s autobiography, because at the time he did a lot more than would have been expected from a regular errand boy. As a penniless refugee from Austria, he was always ready and willing to serve and he even dared to go into the lion’s den, when, following the Arrow Cross coup on 15 October 1944, he would still deliver diplomatic notes to the Hungarian foreign ministry, which was actually quite dangerous for a Jew. He asked for a car with a driver, who would pull up in front of the ministry and wait for him. This seemed to impress the Arrow Cross Guards, and he would raise his right hand to greet them entering the building. They consequently did not suspect him for being a Jew. He also accompanied Wallenberg, Per Anger and Vilmos Langfelder on 23 November 1944 to the Austrian border at Hegyeshalom to save Jews, who had walked on a death march led by the Nazis from Budapest to the then German border. In Hegyeshalom, he helped Wallenberg distribute blank Schutzpässe to people and then load them onto waiting trucks that would take them back to Budapest. This scene was also featured in the 1984 TV-movie Raoul Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story, in which Wallenberg was played by Richard Chamberlain. The Austrian edition of the German TV guide Hörzu interviewed my father when the movie was shown on Austrian TV and published the scene in Hegyeshalom and a picture of my father with the heading “Mitarbeiter (co-worker) of Wallenberg�” 3 Co-worker may be saying too much, but he really witnessed too much of Wallenberg’s work to just be described as a regular errand boy� Jonny Moser’s autobiography differs from other Holocaust autobiographies, because as a historian he took great care in writing a chronology of the historic Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): Surviving the Holocaust in Hungary 93 events, which contributed to his survival and that of his family. He supported his testimony not only with his personal notes, but also with archival research, which he pursued for decades alongside his day job as a tobacco store owner in Vienna’s second district and his passionate work as a SPÖ Bezirksrat for Vienna’s first district for over thirty-two years. Additionally, he read all the secondary literature on Wallenberg and Hungary’s political history in 1940-1945, and thus provided his readers with a detailed account of the complex changes that occurred in Hungary� He felt that it was important for his readers to understand that the pro-German, primarily anti-Semitic prime ministers under Admiral Miklós Horthy’s regency, had quite differencing political stances on the impending genocide of the country’s Jews. The interchange between complete collaboration with the German Nazis and hesitant reluctance on the part of Hungarian politicians stalled genocidal actions, which contributed to saving many Jews in Budapest. Horthy, however, did not stop the deportations to Auschwitz until over 400,000 rural Hungarian Jews had been sent to their deaths, but without Horthy’s decision to ultimately stop the deportations, even fewer of Budapest’s Jews would have survived. The murderous Arrow Cross gangs only started killing people in the streets of Budapest after Horthy had been deposed on 15 October 1944, just under three months before Pest was liberated by the Red Army. Many policemen and officials who were loyal to Horthy had been weary of the war since July 1944, and they were no longer interested in supporting the agendas of the German Nazi occupiers and their Hungarian henchmen. This also contributed to my family’s survival, as Horthy loyalist police and military officers freed Jews from Arrow Cross gangs. My father and his family experienced this in December 1944, after they had been captured by a group of Arrow Cross men. The complexity of the history of the Holocaust in Budapest and Hungary should not be underestimated� My father’s manuscript was edited down for publication, and most of what was cut from the text was his extensive historical context. As a historian, he believed that one could not understand his personal survival without this context, and he was right in the sense that only few people understand Hungarian domestic policy in 1940-1945; however, today one can even look up the basics of this history on Wikipedia in German or English� At times his book is more of a monograph than an autobiography, but then the one does not mutually exclude the other� It is important to recognize that the historical context for surviving the Holocaust in Hungary is different from that in Germany, Austria, or Poland, since the deportations to Auschwitz did not start until May 1944, less than a year before the liberation. The Hungarian authorities as supposedly sovereign members of the Axis, while supportive of anti-Semitic legislation, were ambivalently complicit in the deportations to Auschwitz� It is this ambiv- 94 Joseph W� Moser alence that contributed to more Jews surviving than in Poland. The situation in Hungary runs parallel to the one in Romania, where Romanian authorities were of mixed minds� Mirjam Korber’s diary Deportiert: Jüdische Überlebensschicksale aus Rumänien 1941-1944: Ein Tagebuch (1992) chronicles here family’s survival after being deported from Southern Bucovina by the Romanian authorities to Transnistria. Korber’s diary, unlike Moser’s diary, beside giving detailed account of the suffering in Transnistria, also incorporates the daily struggles of being a teenager� Her diary was published alongside with essays that explained the Romanian context. Every survivor had different ideas of what to write in a journal at the time and what to share later in life� Memoirs are deeply personal accounts and one has to recognize that every survivor had a different way of expressing the struggles in those difficult days. Jonny Moser’s narrative focuses on his teenage years 1938-1945, but he was not able to discuss what it was like being a teenager then� It seemed too trivial to him, but it is as simple as a difference in personality, as to how much a Holocaust survivor wanted to discuss personal matters not relating to the persecution. His memoir focuses on his father Josef Moser as well, while his mother Katharina and sister Herma are somewhat marginalized. Of course, in the camps, men were separated from women, which may have contributed to him being less aware of what his mother and sister were doing� But then he also does not mention that after his father had died, he took care of his mother in her final months in 1953 when she was suffering from a long terminal illness. While he had differences of opinion with his sister Herma, he still entertained a dialogue with her and her husband Wilhelm Krell, who was the managing director of the Jewish community in Vienna until 1971. The three regularly discussed the topic of the Holocaust, when only few wanted to talk about it in the first decades after the war. His autobiography ends on 28 July 1945, when the family had permanently relocated to Vienna. “Wir waren wieder zurück in Österreich, konnten neu beginnen“ (360), reads the last sentence of his book. Only the epilogue by Eleonore Lappin and Albert Lichtblau give any indication of Jonny Moser’s postwar life, which was actually quite interesting as well, but for him it stood in the shadows of his difficult survival in the days of the Holocaust. Notes 1 Doron Rabinovici examined the ambiguous relationship of Vienna’s Jewish community leadership during the Nazi period in his book Instanzen der Ohnmacht, first published in 1998. He writes extensively about Benjamin Murmelstein (157—71)� Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): Surviving the Holocaust in Hungary 95 2 Jonny Moser� Nisko: Die ersten Judendeportationen� Ed� Joseph W� Moser and James Moser. Vienna: Edition Steinbauer, 2012. 3 See the title page of the Austrian Hörzu magazine, 10-16 November 1984. Works Cited Adler, H.G. Theresienstadt 1941-1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft. Geschichte Soziologie Psychologie. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1960. Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story. Dir. Lamont Johnson. Paramount Television, 1985. Television� Klüger, Ruth. Still Alive. New York: The Feminist Press, 2001. ---� weiter leben. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1992. Korber, Mirjam. Deportiert: Jüdische Überlebensschicksale aus Rumänien 1941-1944: Ein Tagebuch. Trans. Andrei Hoisie. Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre Verlag, 1993. Moser, Jonny. Demographie der jüdischen Bevölkerung Österreichs 1938-1945� Vienna: Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, 1999. ---� Die Judenverfolgung in Österreich 1938-1945. Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1966. ---� Nisko: Die ersten Judendeportationen� Ed� Joseph W� Moser and James Moser� Vienna: Edition Steinbauer, 2012. ---� Wallenbergs Laufbursche: Jugenderinnerungen 1938-1945. Vienna: Picus Verlag, 2006� Rabinovici, Doron. Instanzen der Ohnmacht: Wien 1938-1945. Der Weg zum Judenrat� Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 2000. Shoah. Dir. Claude Lanzmann. BBC / Historia / Les Films Aleph / Ministère de Culture de la Republique Française, 1985. Television. Verzeichnis der Autorinnen und Autoren Dr. Tim Corbett Freischaffender Historiker, Wien tim_corbett@hotmail.co.uk Abigail Gillman Professor of Hebrew, German and Comparative Literature World Languages & Literatures Department Boston University 745 Commonwealth Avenue-- 6th floor Boston, MA 02215 Dr� Marjanne E� Gooze 192 Wakefield Trace Athens GA 30605 Dr� Joseph W� Moser Department of Languages and Cultures 137 Mitchell Hall West Chester University West Chester, PA 19383 Dr� Laura A� Detre Independent Historian. West Chester, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. lauraadetre@gmail.com BUCHTIPP Katharina Bock Philosemitische Schwärmereien Jüdische Figuren in der dänischen Erzählliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts Beiträge zur Nordischen Philologie 1. Auflage 2021, 264 Seiten €[D] 78,00 ISBN 978-3-7720-8747-9 eISBN 978-3-7720-5747-2 Dieser Band untersucht anhand ausgewählter dänischer Prosa im 19. Jahrhundert die Ambivalenz philosemitischer Literatur. Es wird gezeigt, wie bestehende Vorstellungen über Juden und Jüdinnen einerseits literarisch entlarvt und gebrochen werden, und wie andererseits jüdische Figuren weiterhin Projektionsfläche und christliches Phantasma bleiben. Philosemitismus wird als spezifisch literarisches Phänomen betrachtet, indem gefragt wird, welche Erzählmöglichkeiten sich durch die jüdischen Figuren im Text eröffnen und was diese Figuren literarisch so attraktiv macht. Obwohl die untersuchten Texte zumeist um das Thema Religion kreisen, interessieren sie sich kaum für das Judentum ihrer jüdischen Figuren. Vielmehr dienen die Juden und Jüdinnen dazu, das Christentum aufzuwerten und zu erneuern. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97 0 \ Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97 11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de ISSN 0010-1338 Themenheft: Austrian and German Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Gastherausgeber: innen: Laura A. Detre und Joseph W. Moser Laura A. Detre und Joseph W. Moser: Introduction: Austrian and German Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Tim Corbett: (Re-)Writing Austria’s Modern Jewish History Using Émigré and Survivor Memoirs and Other “Memory Texts” Abigail Gillman: Screams Turned into Whispers: Aharon Appelfeld’s Poetics in Story of a Life and The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping Marjanne E. Goozé: Inge Deutschkron’s Memoir Ich trug den gelben Stern (1978): Reportage as Counternarrative to the Americanization of the Holocaust Laura A. Detre: Diversity of Perspectives in Holocaust Memoir: Bruno Schwebel’s As Luck Would Have It Joseph W. Moster: Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): An Austrian Historian’s Personal Eyewitness Account of Surviving the Holocaust in Exile in Hungary narr.digital