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.