The focus of this contribution is on the intricacies of the use of the Jewish diary as a genre and a source in Holocaust Studies. We will show how from a historical point of view, the diary can be ...seen as a factitious - albeit highly subjective - egodocument, whereas in Literary Studies, the textual and narrative structure as well as the identity construction of the writing subject are highlighted. In order to gauge the methodological tension between these two perspectives, special attention will be paid to German-Jewish Holocaust diaries, specifically those by Victor Klemperer in Dresden and Willy Cohn in Breslau.
From Archive to Print Petzal, Monica
European Judaism,
03/2023, Letnik:
56, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Monica Petzal is an artist, curator and writer with a particular interest in her German-Jewish background. Trained as a painter and art historian, she became a printmaker in mid-career, enabling her ...to explore more fully a rich family archive of images, texts and objects. In this article she explores the connection between the writing of Victor Klemperer and her maternal family in Dresden before the Second World War, her family archive and the artwork produced for two exhibitions, Indelible Marks--The Dresden Project in 2013-14 and Dissent and Displacement in 2020.
Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent
Times Steven E. Aschheim The way three prominent
German-Jewish intellectuals confronted Nazism, as revealed by their intimate
writings. ...Through an examination of the remarkable diaries and
letters of three extraordinary and distinctive German-Jewish thinkers -- Gershom
Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Victor Klemperer -- Steven E. Aschheim illuminates what
these intimate writings reveal about their evolving identities and world views as
they wrestled with the meaning of being both German and Jewish in Hitler's Third
Reich. In recounting how their personal and private selves responded to the public
experiences these writers faced, their letters and diaries provide a striking
composite portrait. Scholem, a scholar of Jewish mysticism and the spiritual
traditions of Judaism; Arendt, a political and social philosopher; and Klemperer, a
professor of literature and philology, were all highly articulate German-Jewish
intellectuals, shrewd observers, and acute analysts of the pathologies and special
contours of their times. From their intimate writings Aschheim constructs a
revealing history from within that sheds new light on the complexity and
drama of the 20th-century European and Jewish experience. Steven
E. Aschheim holds the Vigevani Chair of European Studies and teaches in the
Department of History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is author of Brothers
and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness,
1800--1923; The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890--1990; and Culture and
Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other
Crises. Published in association with Hebrew Union College--Jewish
Institute of Religion, Cincinnati May 2001 120 pages, 5
1/2 x 8 1/2, index cloth 0-253-33891-3 $19.95 s /
To what extent do Victor Klemperer's diaries from the years of Nazi rule in Germany have referential value for conveying factual detail about how a German who has been classified as Jewish survived ...anti-Semitism and the war, and to what extent does their significance lie in their relationality, i.e. their accounts of the interactions Klemperer has with those around him? Against the background of Aleida Assmann's ideas on the limits of 'positivist historiography' and a rapprochement between history and memory, this analysis shows how Klemperer captures the detail of everyday life, while being acutely aware of his limited access to reliable information about what is going on around him. In his accounts of experiences at the hands of non-Jewish Germans and his processing of those experiences he also conveys the complex reality that must be grasped by anyone attempting to summarize popular attitudes to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.
Focusing predominantly on middle-aged, middle-class urban men, this article analyzes the spatial experiences of German Jews in Nazi Germany, dealing with their exclusion from different kinds of ...public spaces, their turn to closed Jewish spaces, and their withdrawal into private spaces. This process had a major impact on the bourgeois Jewish habitus that developed during the emancipation era. In the spirit of the spatial turn in social studies (following Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau), the article demonstrates how the shrinking of lived physical space yielded parallel mental processes. The discussion is based on close reading of diaries, predominantly those of Victor Klemperer and Willy Cohn, along with additional primary sources.
Victor Klemperer argued in LTI that the Nazis used language to produce a fanatical but servile population incapable of critical thought and highly susceptible to mass suggestion. Critics have ...questioned Klemperer's underlying assumptions about language, and evidence from the book itself tends to contradict his claim that the LTI or language of the Third Reich "reigned supreme." Although he seemed to deny the fundamental equivalence of Nazi and Communist discourse, his diaries and even some passages in LTI indicate that Klemperer, a postwar convert to the KPD, regarded Soviet and East German Communist language as disconcertingly similar to the LTI.
Lindenberger looks at the bombing of a Nazi anti-Soviet exhibit in Berlin on May 18, 1942, by communist, largely Jewish resistance fighters. The attack elicited violent reprisals. Lindenberger ...wonders about the political appropriateness and ethical legitimacy of the attack, where reprisals could have been anticipated.
In this article the ‘Third Reich’ diaries of Victor Klemperer, a ‘non‐Aryan’ professor of Romance languages at Dresden, are seen as a major literary achievement. Klemperer’s well‐written and incisive ...account brings to life the authentic record of the experiences of a victim of Hitler’s tyranny. We learn how the noose is more and more tightened around his throat and that of his ‘Aryan’ wife, whose steadfastness alone enabled him to survive, and how the Klemperers were able to escape the Gestapo only when in February 1945 an Allied air raid destroyed Dresden. The story of their high‐risk flight, too, is described. Klemperer’s attitude to his tribulations, to National Socialism, to Zionism, to the German people and to his fellow‐sufferers, is analysed, as is his academic career and achievement, for which Curriculum Vitae, his autobiography, and other diaries provide the relevant information. Klemperer’s transition from extreme nationalism to cosmopolitanism is examined, as is his firm conviction that Hitler’s racist ideology was absurd and that he was German to the core because of his commitment to German culture. His post‐1945 attempts to eradicate the National Socialist heritage and to resume academic work are depicted.
‘Keine Feder und keine Zunge kann das Elend ... beschreiben’
The purpose of this article is to explore how memory is constructed in Victor Klemperer’s diaries. In the diaries, Klemperer describes his fate as well as the fate of other Jews who did not emigrate ...during the years 1933–1945. The concrete details of everyday life in the Third Reich only serve to highlight the plight of the besieged poet writing at the end of the days, not knowing whether he will complete his masterpiece or whether he will be executed beforehand. In Klemperer’s diaries normality and horror are continually juxtaposed with one another. The holocaust is thus transformed from a small repertoire of horrifying narratives to a seemingly countless number of actions and movements, some conforming to the principal narratives and others, curiously enough, defying the well known narratives of Auschwitz and extermination. These narratives constitute important source material describing the mentality of the Jewish identity in Germany.
