Pathos and Anti-Pathos: Ruptured Affections in the Writing of the Shoah 9783110758580, 9783110757743

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Tom Vanassche Pathos and Anti-Pathos

Media and Cultural Memory/ Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung

Edited by Astrid Erll · Ansgar Nünning Editorial Board Aleida Assmann · Mieke Bal · Vita Fortunati · Richard Grusin · Udo Hebel Andrew Hoskins · Wulf Kansteiner · Alison Landsberg · Claus Leggewie Jeffrey Olick · Susannah Radstone · Ann Rigney · Michael Rothberg Werner Sollors · Frederik Tygstrup · Harald Welzer

Volume 36

Tom Vanassche

Pathos and Anti-Pathos Ruptured Affections in the Writing of the Shoah

This book is a slightly revised edition of a doctoral dissertation, entitled “Ruptured Affections. The Pathos of Anti-Pathos in Shoah Literature and Historiography”, submitted at the Philologische Fakultät of the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.

ISBN 978-3-11-075774-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-075858-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-075870-2 ISSN 1613-8961 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022945193 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Felix Nussbaum, Self-portrait with Mask, 1928. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37880025, https://www.tumblr.com/search/Felix+Nussbaum. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements The book you are holding in your hand is a slightly revised version of my PhD thesis “Ruptured Affections. The Pathos of Anti-Pathos in Shoah Literature and Historiography”, which was submitted to the Philological Faculty of the University of Freiburg in December 2019 and defended, online, in April 2021. I would like to express my gratitude to Michaela Holdenried (Freiburg) and Stephan Packard (Cologne), who accompanied this research project from outline to monograph. Their questions were critical yet guiding, their feedback always constructive, their support relentless. Their insights extend beyond this book and their patience seems endless. I owe them a lot, intellectually and personally. Moreover, their research colloquia proved to be stimulating environments of inquiry and discussion: I owe more to the participants than they may realise. My thanks extend to Christopher Meid (Freiburg) for kindly writing the required third examiner’s report. I also wish to thank Monika Fludernik, the Director of the DFG-funded Graduiertenkolleg 1767 “Factual and Fictional Narration” (Freiburg). The Graduate School offered a comfortable research environment and provided endless intellectual stimuli in the guise of colloquia, conferences and workshops, both in Freiburg and beyond, and was most generous in its financial support towards the publication costs. Many thanks are also due to Gunther Martens (Ghent), who has been a mentor since my student days. He and the other members of the German literature department at Ghent University have always been very hospitable whenever I was around and have always offered a spare desk whenever one was to be found. His continued interest in my project is the biggest compliment he could give. Every author knows how solitary writing can be. But I have been lucky to have shared many a lunch and even more coffee breaks with my colleagues. I am even luckier that many of these colleagues have become friends over the years, and I appreciate their friendship as much as their professional prowess. I would like to particularly thank the following persons for their encouragements, insights and support: Sissy Bräuer, Sophie Figueredo-Hardy, Thorsten Glückhardt, Nikola Keller, Sebastian Kleinschmidt, Vera Podskalsky and Annika Wirth. I hope this book goes some way in offering the answers to your important questions. A special word of thanks goes to Daniela Henke, whose generosity, both in matters of intellectual exchange and friendship, is unmatched. Beyond Freiburg and Ghent, I profited from the wisdom of many scholars. I owe a particular intellectual debt to Catherine Gilbert (Newcastle), Erin McGlothhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110758580-001

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Acknowledgements

lin (St Louis), Susanne Knittel (Utrecht), and Jan Süselbeck (Trondheim). I am happy to have made the acquaintance of Frédéric Crahay, Henri Goldberg and Daniel Weyssow, whose academic and pedagogical activities at the Fondation Auschwitz (Brussels) contribute to the fight against historical amnesia. I am also grateful to Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, who were so kind to offer this book an intellectual home in the Media and Cultural Memory series, and to Myrto Aspioti and Stella Diedrich for their professionalism and patience. But let us not forget the many librarians, technical and administrative staff members and student volunteers, who all too often remain anonymous, but without whose relentless efforts no research could be conducted, no conferences organised, no books written. Thank you. To my friends outside of academia: thank you for providing much-needed breaks, for laughter and joy and banter, for temporary forgetting. You know who you are. My final words of thanks go to my brother and my sister, but foremost to my parents, who have always provided me with a safe haven – mentally and materially. Without their support and love, this ship would not have come into port – it might never have left in the first place.

Contents List of abbreviations

XI

A note on translations and transliterations

XIII

Introduction: Setting the stage  The pathos of anti-pathos 3 . Pathos, rhetoric and their ‘anti’s 6 19 . The corpus . Matters of terminology (I): events, metaphors, ideological implications 25 30 . Matters of terminology (II): theory of fiction . The Shoah and fiction: a troubled relation 33 . Methodological premises: models of memory 41 . The cover of this book: Felix Nussbaum’s Selbstbildnis mit Maske 48 (1928, Self-portrait with Mask) 

Describing emotions: Metaphorical oppositions and their ambiguities 50 . The temperamental metaphor 50 .. A (brief) genealogy of cool 50 53 .. The Great War and after .. Cold perpetrators 57 64 . Empathy et al.: the spatial metaphor .. Empathy, sympathy and (over)identification: more terminological decisions 64 .. Metaphors of distance and proximity 75 . The survivor’s mask 76 . Some remarks pertaining to genres and tropes 86 .. Irony-sarcasm-cynicism-sardonicism 86 .. Autobiography 90 .. Satires and lamentations 97 .. Cathacresis 102 . Into the abyss (I): Testimonies from the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau 106

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Contents

Part One: Pathos and anti-pathos and the ‘risks’ of encyclopaedic and documentary fiction Introduction

113

114  W. G. Sebald: Melancholia, nostalgia and the pathos of empathy . The pathos of reception: some considerations when reading Sebald 114 . ‘Warm’ Sebald: trauma, postmemory and the poetics of empathy 122 129 . ‘Cold’ Sebald .. Empathy or (over)identification? Die Ringe des Saturn and vicarious trauma 129 130 .. Empathy or appropriation? Austerlitz and Die Ausgewanderten .. Sebald’s philosophy of history: the historical uncanny in Die Ringe des Saturn 137 .. Cool characters, cool relations: Major Le Strange, Naegeli-Selwyn, 152 Adelworth-Solomon .. The polemicist Sebald 158 

Dieter Schlesak: The pathos of anti-pathos and the pathos of the ‘real’ in 173 testimony and in the documentary tradition . The Shoah on trial in Germany: a very brief overview 176 . Cynicism, ideology and the guilt question: perspectivation and 178 distance . Keeping cool in court 187 . Fictionality and its issues in Capesius, der Auschwitzapotheker 194 .. Matters of fictionality: signposts 194 .. Adam: simultaneously fictional and real 197 .. Four ‘cold’ intertexts 203 .. The case of the protocols: three forms of fictionalisation 221 . A counter-observation: narratology and mediality in the documentary format 225

Contents

Part Two: The survivors’ pathos of anti-pathos: Autobiography and historiography Introduction

233

236  Ruth Klüger: An (ant)agonistic pathos of anti-pathos . Some considerations when reading Klüger 236 236 .. An autobiographical project .. Multiperspectivity 238 . Comparing names: intertextual and fictitious elements in 243 autobiographies . Breaking the victim frame: irony 256 . Klüger’s wary coolness: distinguishing empathy from identification 265 (and not believing in empathy) . Breaking frames of commemoration: comparisons 273 . A brief prospect: Klüger’s voice 276  Raul Hilberg: The historian’s affective self-control 284 . Historiography and emotions: a very brief overview 284 .. Reading Hilberg (I): the temperamental metaphor 289 291 .. Reading Hilberg (II): the spatial metaphor . Hilberg’s corpus: which texts for analysis? 292 . Continuities and ruptures in Hilberg’s pathos 297 314 . Historiography against closure: Hilberg’s lamentation . Hilberg in Shoah 322 In lieu of a conclusion. Summary and further questions Bibliography Index

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343

330

IX

List of abbreviations The following abbreviations will be used for literary texts being repeatedly mentioned. The complete bibliographical references are found at the end of this book.

W. G. Sebald Austerlitz (German) Austerlitz (English) Die Ausgewanderten Die Ringe des Saturn The Emigrants The Rings of Saturn

Ad Ae DA RSd E RSe

Dieter Schlesak Capesius, der Auschwit- C zapotheker The Druggist of Ausch- DoA witz Ruth Klüger Landscapes of Memory Still Alive unterwegs verloren weiter leben

LoM StA uv wl

Raul Hilberg The Destruction of the DEJ (the edition is indicated with a Roman number) European Jews Perpetrators Victims By- PVB standers The Politics of Memory PoM Primo Levi If This Is a Man I sommersi e i salvati Se questo è un uomo The Drowned and the Saved Claude Lanzmann Shoah

TM SeS QU DS

S (note: this does not include the outtakes)

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110758580-002

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List of abbreviations

Tadeusz Borowski This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen Alexander Kluge Ein Liebesversuch

TW

L

Jean Améry Jenseits von Schuld und J Sühne At the Mind’s Limits AM

A note on translations and transliterations My fascination for the phenomenon of translation – and my great respect for those who undertake this daunting endeavour – does not stop me from reading literature in its original language as much as possible. This should be transparent, and therefore I quote the texts as much as possible in the original language. Translations are provided, however, and are mine, unless otherwise indicated. Since Still Alive is not a mere translation of weiter leben, I have translated certain excerpts from the latter. These are my only translations that are explicitly marked as such. As for Polish names – of persons and of places – I have tried to use the correct spelling including all diacritics, relying on secondary sources and the kindness of a native speaker in light of my imperfect language skills. I have not added diacritics, however, when I found these names quoted without them. When referring to the concentration and extermination camp complex in Upper Silesia, I use the German names Auschwitz and Birkenau to clearly distinguish them from the administrative communities on whose territory these camps were erected, Oświęcim and Brzezinka. As Ruth Klüger says, “I use the German [Theresienstadt instead of Terezin] for the same reason that we say Auschwitz, not Oświęcim. The Slavic names should continue to denote harmless little towns” (StA, 71). But I do not use Kulmhof for Chelmno, for the simple reason that the latter is better known today. No diacritics are used when referring to German extermination camps near Polish towns (Belzec, Chelmno and Sobibor) or for the ghettos erected in Polish cities (Lodz) – but again, where the sources do use diacritics, I do not omit them. Interestingly enough, the second and third editions of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews add these diacritics, whereas the first version did not feature them. While Ruth Klüger is often referred to as ‘Kluger’ in the English-speaking world, I have made an exception to my rule and added an umlaut in all cases. In the bibliography, all her texts are listed under this name, including those originally published as Ruth K. Angress. To be fair, my use of the adjective ‘American’ can be criticised; given the corpus, this term will in most cases refer to the United States of America. This nation does not constitute the whole of America, of course, but given the lack of references to Latin American, Mexican, or Canadian persons, works of literature or history, I have sacrificed precision and correctness for the sake of conciseness.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110758580-003

Introduction: Setting the stage

1 The pathos of anti-pathos In 1978, the Amicale Belge des Ex-Prisonniers politiques d’Auschwitz-Birkenau, Camps et Prisons de Silésie (Belgian Fraternity of Erstwhile Political Prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Camps and Prisons in Silesia) organises a trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Ten survivors accompany circa 120 students, tell them about their experiences during the war and their confinement in the camps, and reflect on the persistent legacy of persecution and genocide. Accompanying this group are two filmmakers: Frans Buyens and Lydia Chagoll, who document the visit and the discussions and thus offer a veritable work of cinéma verité (even though more traditional narrative strategies are used as well, such as historical summaries by a voice from the off). The film, Un jour les témoins disparaîtront (One Day, The Witnesses Will Disappear) was created while Claude Lanzmann was shooting footage for what would become Shoah (1985) and is, like Shoah, a document of testimony, with no archival footage integrated in the film. Instead, the interlocutors reflect on the feasibility of testifying and on the linguistic registers in which testimony is delivered: towards the end of the film, we hear one of the participants commenting the witnesses’ style of narrating; to him, it seems that some witnesses testify in a detached fashion. Rosa and Maurice Goldstein, arms interlocked, respond, and Rosa Goldstein rejects this observation: Je ne suis pas tout à fait d’accord. Je n’arrive pas à en parler, moins sur un ton détaché. Quand je commence à en parler, je tremble et je n’arrive plus à coordonner mes… mes mots. Ce n’est pas vrai. Moi je n’en parle pas de façon détachée. C’est individuel. Je regrette d’ailleurs de ne pas pouvoir garder mon calme. Si je gardais mon calme, je pourrais peutêtre parler et dire davantage. Ça me soulagerait peut-être mieux. Je n’arrive pas. Donc ça n’est pas tout à fait exacte. C’est très individuel. (Buyens 1979, 01h12m04s) I disagree. I cannot speak about it and even less so in a detached way. When I start to talk about it, I tremble, and I can no longer coordinate my… my words. It is not true. I cannot speak about it in a detached way. It is individual. But I do regret not being able to keep my composure. If I could, maybe I could speak about it at all. Maybe that would lighten my burden more. But I cannot. So, what you say is not true. It is very individual.

Rosa Goldstein turns to her husband with a forced, clenched smile. She has just offered two important observations – but there a tension between them. On the one hand, she rightly indicates that the pathos of anti-pathos is not the mode of testimony par excellence; and it is not my intention to fetishize it as the best or most reflected or only mode of testimony. Every testimony is a historical event in its own right, and (despite all genre conventions) a highly individual act. On the other hand, she expresses a desire for more affective control over her testimony, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110758580-004

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which – she suggests – could enable her testifying in the first place. One must not forget, however, that she has been seen testifying throughout the film, so there is a performative contradiction. Rosa Goldstein, one may argue, is being too hard on herself. This aside, she insists on the individuality of each testimony. On this last point her husband agrees, and while Maurice Goldstein’s reaction to the student’s observation comprises a reflective moment, too, his answer diverges immensely from his wife’s. More than hers, his testimony may be considered a manifestation of the pathos of anti-pathos in nuce: Moi je pense que c’est un problème personnel. […] Moi je ne peux pas expliquer. Mais j’ai l’impression qu’il y a du vrai dans ce que tu dis. J’ai l’impression que c’est quelqu’un d’autre qui parle à ma place. […] Ce n’est pas de moi que je – en fait oui: quand je raconte ce que, je réponds à vos questions, ça n’est pas de moi que je parle. C’est quelqu’un d’autre qui raconte ça, et ça n’est pas, ça n’est pas ma vie. C’est la vie des prisonniers, et c’est quelqu’un qui est à côté de moi et qui a vécu tout ça et qui le raconte. Et c’est peut-être pour ça que j’arrive à le faire sans paraître, disons, affecté et touché, mais c’est quand même un peu comme les coureurs : ils courent, ils courent ils courent ; quand ils ont fini ils ont une dette d’oxygène et le paient après quoi, c’est tout. (Buyens 1979, 01h12m35s) I think it is a personal problem. […] I cannot explain. But I have the impression that there is something to what you have said. I have the impression that someone else speaks for me. […] It is not about me that I – actually yes: when I talk about, when I answer your questions, I am not talking about myself. somebody else is talking, and it is not, it is not about my life. It is about the life of the prisoners, and it is somebody standing next to me who has gone through all that and who talks about it. And maybe that is why I can testify without appearing to be, let’s say, affected or touched. But in the end, it is like the road racing cyclists: they ride they ride they ride; but when they finish, they lack oxygen and pay the price afterwards, that’s all.¹

Two elements are striking: Maurice Goldstein detaches himself both from the narrated I and from the narrating I: ‘I am not talking about myself’ and comments on his level of abstraction (‘about the life of the prisoners’) vs. ‘somebody else is talking’ and ‘it is somebody standing next to me who has gone through all that and who talks about it’. Paradoxically though it may sound, this double detachment negatively reinforces the autobiographical pact underlying such testimonies. Moreover, the metaphor of the cyclist hints at the enormous (affective)

 Note that the metaphor is somewhat ambiguous: Goldstein could be referring to track and field athletes or to road racing cyclists. Both interpretations are plausible and have no consequences for understanding Goldstein. I have opted for this translation because of the immense popularity that road cycling has enjoyed in Goldstein’s native Belgium since the sport’s origins in the late nineteenth century.

1 The pathos of anti-pathos

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efforts in testifying and returning to Auschwitz – despite all appearances to the contrary.² After these observations, Rosa reiterates this difference between herself and her husband: she tells us that she is immediately drawn back to the narrated experiences, whereas her husband is able to ‘stay’ in the present. Maurice adds the following remark on the role of the witness – and clearly addresses the young student and the viewer, not his wife: Et c’est probablement à cause de votre présence que je suis comme ça. C’est parce que nous… notre amicale a organisé ça dans un but précis. C’est que notre témoigner… notre témoignage, que nous avons difficile à transmettre et que nous aurons de plus en plus difficile à transmettre, parce que nous devenons moins nombreux, et bien nous avons une mission c’est d’essayer que ces témoignages ne sont pas perdus. Alors les éléments de témoignage sont ici, mais les témoins vont disparaître. […] Il faut que de nouveaux témoins, et vous peut-être, puissiez reprendre ça et que vous puissiez avoir compris ce qui s’est passé, que vous puissiez en parler à votre tour. Et c’est peut-être pour ça que, à cause de vous, j’arrive à en parler comme quelque chose qui est arrivée aux autres. (Buyens 1979, 01h13m53s) And it is probably because of your presence that I am like this. It is because we… our fraternity has organised this with a concrete purpose. It is because our testify… our testimony, which we have difficulty in bringing across and which will be increasingly difficult to bring across because we are becoming fewer and fewer, well we have a mission, which is to try to make sure these testimonies do not get lost. You see, the elements of testimony are here, but the witnesses will disappear. […] We need new witnesses, and maybe you, to take over our duty, we need you to understand what has happened here, so you make speak in your turn. And maybe that is why, because of you, that I can speak about these things as if they had happened to somebody else.

In these moments, the Goldsteins demonstrate a double bind to what I call the pathos of anti-pathos in testimony. On the level of content, they identify character traits that are better or worse suited for the act of testimony. They discuss to what degree they possess these character traits. They lay bare the affective dimension of testimony. They touch upon a political dimension of testimony: the implicit message of ‘never again’. On the level of performance, they stay composed: they do not start to stammer, they do not cry; the few anacolutha do not pose a problem for their intelligibility. For Maurice, this is in line with his message. For Rosa, as noted above, this amounts to a performative contradiction. They both evoke and comment on the pathos of anti-pathos: the expression of

 And indeed, Rosa Goldstein’s clenched smile, which is open for interpretation but is an unambiguous sign of affect, stands in stark contrast to the absence of such signs in Maurice Goldstein’s body language.

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traumatic emotion without resorting to pathopoeia. All the while, the reality of their trauma is clearly not denied. But if this contradictory, we are faced with a contradiction which inevitably must lead to aporia: there is neither a systematic nor an intellectual way out of the conundrum. Instead, this book attempts to describe this tradition in the literature of the Shoah. It poses questions about the rhetoric of testimony, the politics of affect, the attributions of emotionality (both to other and to oneself), the figurative discourse with which such attributions are made, and the demands that this pathos of anti-pathos imposes on the empathic reader. As such, this book is a product of the emotional turn: the renewed interest for emotionality within the humanities. As such, we also need to talk about the legitimacy of such topics in academic discourse.

1.1 Pathos, rhetoric and their ‘anti’s The preface to James Young’s seminal Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (1988) indicates, unwittingly, the values and the self-understanding of the author and the academic culture to which he belongs. After making the standard narratological distinction between form and content of any representation, he adds an interesting dimension by linking emotionality to the content and separating it from the form: [t]he pathos and outrage that move so many students to study this period and others to avoid it altogether become for some the object of Holocaust inquiry. For these students of Holocaust writing, critical inquiry too often begins and ends with how the horror of mass murder is represented, or how the terror of such suffering is grasped. The present study does not inquire into the thematic representation of bloody horror, but into the narrative representation of events themselves. (Young 1988b, vii)

Young’s understanding of the effects of this pathos simultaneously concurs and diverges from Geoffrey Hartman’s view. Hartman, relying on Aristotle, defines pathos as the mise-en-scène of intense pains, corporeal wounding, and the infliction of death³ – all elements that are more or less directly present in Shoah testimonials.⁴ Hartman does not consider how or why such a pathos would drive readers away: that would be contradictory to Aristotle’s conception of pathos as one of three argumentative strategies. Hartman thus argues that these ‘pathos  Cornelia Zumbusch, too, points out that – at least in the Ancient Greek understanding – pathos entails only particularly painful feelings (2010, 8).  Though often more directly than in Ancient Greek theatre, where a messenger often brought the news of such occurrences.

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narratives’ (2012, 56) – which also include madness, treason and incurable disease – have a community-building potential (58). Thus, Aleida Assmann situates Hartman in a Nietzschean tradition: in Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) Friedrich Nietzsche argues that (perpetual) pain is “das mächtigste Hülfsmittel der Mnemotechnik” (Nietzsche 1988, 295; the most powerful aid to mnemonics: Nietzsche 2008, 38). Assmann argues that a difference remains, however: Nietzsche argues from the point of view of the powerful, those who inflict pain precisely to establish and perpetuate their power – the subjugated remember their pain and thus know better than to rise in rebellion again. The result is the establishment of cultural traditions.⁵ By focusing on the testimony of Shoah survivors, Hartman’s pathos is unavoidably victim-oriented; the perpetrators did not inflict perennial suffering in order to subjugate their victims. Indeed, and at the danger of sounding cynical, the latter’s suffering points to the former’s failure in achieving their bio- and geopolitical plans – the complete restructuring of German society and the European continent along ‘racial’ lines. As Assmann argues, [d]ie Holocaust-Erfahrungsberichte haben der alten Gattung des Pathosnarrativs eine ganz neue Form und Qualität gegeben; sie sind nicht mehr auf affektive Gruppenbindung und partikulare religiöse oder nationale Vergemeinschaftung angelegt, sondern bilden das Fundament eines säkularen und universalen neuen Ethos, das im Zeichen der Menschenrechte die individuelle Leidensgeschichte des Einzelnen würdigt. (2012b, 18 – 19) Holocaust testimonials have reshaped and redefined the old genre of the pathos narrative. They do not aim to create specific religious or national imagined communities through affect, but they are the cornerstones of a secular and universal new ethos, which, in the context of human rights, acknowledges the individual’s story of suffering.⁶

This shift in the conception of pathos concurs with a shift – noticeable since the 1980s – from the predominance of the victor’s perspective to the victim’s perspective, a shift “vom Triumph zum Trauma” (Assmann 2012b, 19; from triumph to trauma). Consequently, the ‘new’ pathos is no longer thought to be evoked through “ein großes Arsenal der Ausdrucksformen und Wirkungsweisen” (19; a large arsenal of forms of expression and affective mechanisms) but stands in

 This argument is, of course, reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s view on the intertwining of barbarity and culture: “[e]s ist niemals ein Dokument der Kultur, ohne zugleich ein solches der Barbarei zu sein” (2010, 97; [t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism: 1992b, 248).  ‘Imagined communities’ is Benedict Anderson’s well-known concept by which he explains the modern phenomenon of nationalism and the processes of nation-building, cf. B. Anderson 2006.

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a complex relation to the silences and the trope of the inexpressibility commonly associated with trauma. While Assmann and Hartman do not articulate any scepticism against pathos and instead contextualise it in a longstanding Western cultural tradition, Young’s ambivalent assessment of these ‘big’ or ‘intense’ emotions betrays his suspicion of them. He tacitly presumes that the study of narrative form is not prone to such pathos, which nowadays refers to ‘big’ and ‘intense’ emotions (Zumbusch 2010, 8).⁷ That study thus enables a ‘check’ on the reader’s own emotional state to render it unharmful for academic analysis. In other words, ‘doing style’ is a more ‘scientific’, ‘neutral’, ‘objective’ way of studying Shoah literature than ‘doing content’. To be sure, in the field of memory studies, the strict opposition of pathos and academic analysis is no longer accepted. The co-existence in time of Young’s suspicion of pathos and the emergence of new attitudes towards pathos in academia is not merely caused by different standards in different research paradigms. Rather, it is a manifestation of the ambiguity that surrounds the status of emotionality in the late twentieth century. As Deborah Nelson succinctly summarises, [w]e are told […] that the late twentieth century was a period that prized, often demanded, emotional expressivity and that exhibited a drive toward authenticity and empathy that required the public sharing of feelings. We are also told that the late twentieth century was a period defined by its coolness, its irony, and its affectlessness. (Nelson 2017, 7)

This tension seems unresolvable, and the supposed death of postmodern irony in the wake of 9/11 has complicated these questions even further. But the more recent re-instigation of affect-laden, manipulative and deceitful political propaganda through social media has only increased the urgency of discussing the status and articulation of emotionality in politics and in media. It is a tension found not just in attitudes towards pathos, but in understandings of it – as is clearly the case for Young and Hartman/Assmann. That divergence can be explained by 2,400 years of rethinking pathos – for Aristotle, it is, besides logos and ethos, one of three strategies to convince one’s audience, and it entails the creation of the ‘right’ emotional mindset in that audience (Rhet. I.2, 1355a–1356a; = Aristotle 1991, 36 – 39). While Aristotle regards rhetoric as a

 Hermans and Martens point to a more general suspicion of ‘big emotions’ ever since the reemergence of the novel and certainly since the emergence of Romanticism – the predominant notion of literature remains a Romantic one, at least in ‘Western’ literature. Ever since, such big emotions have been associated with insincerity; the preference goes to ‘smaller’ codifications of emotionality, e. g. sensibility and empathy (Hermans and Martens 2015, 5 – 6).

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tool and thus as morally neutral, meaning it can be used for better or for worse, Young’s distrust of pathos is typical for attitudes in the twentieth century; its intensity of emotionality has become intensely linked to exaggeration, kitsch, emptiness and manipulation – and its full embracement seems only possible in popular culture (Zumbusch 2010, 8). This distrust is a legacy of the Enlightenment, and in the work of Hannah Arendt, we find both the historical argument and its afterlife in the twentieth century, where the binarity of rationality and emotionality (which is shaky at best and completely unfounded at worst) persists: [t]o bring the “irrationality” of desires and emotions under the control of rationality was, of course, a thought dear to the Enlightenment, and as such was quickly found wanting in many respects, especially in its facile and superficial equation of thought with reason and of reason with rationality. (Arendt 1963, 91)

Despite her criticism of this opposition, Arendt cannot entirely escape the Enlightenment thought: her own metaphoric constellation reiterates a binarity when it comes to emotionality and she uses this metaphoric binarity to explain the distrust of pathos as a display of one’s emotional motivations (particularly in politics): [w]hatever the passions and emotions may be, and whatever their true connection with thought and reason, they certainly are located in the human heart. And not only is the human heart a place of darkness which, with certainty, no human eye can penetrate; the qualities of the heart need darkness and protection against the light of the public to grow and to remain what they are meant to be, innermost motives which are not for public display. However deeply heartfelt a motive may be, once it is brought out and exposed for public inspection it becomes an object of suspicion rather than insight. (Arendt 1963, 91)

Such value-laden understandings of pathos make it difficult to instrumentalise it for literary analysis, unless, as Zumbusch suggests, one resorts to the term’s original meaning – that of intense emotionality (8). That does not, of course, resolve the tensions and contradictions between the different conceptualisations: while the Enlightenment homme de lettres and philosopher Johann Christoph Gottsched considered pathos to be ‘hot’ speech, lacking reflection, in opposition to ‘cold’, i. e. merely artificial speech, (thus subscribing to a strict ratio-emotion dichotomy), Friedrich Nietzsche understands pathos as the “kalkuliert[e] Reproduktion des Affekts” (Zumbusch 2010, 14– 18; calculated reproduction of affect). Nevertheless, it does offer a starting point for poetological considerations. Young’s suspicion of pathos does not acknowledge that “[j]ede Generation entwickelt ihre eigenen Pathos-Mittel, in der Sprechkunst ebenso wie in der politischen Rhetorik, und konträr erscheinende Stilmittel können ähnliche Funktio-

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nen erfüllen” (Meyer-Kalkus 2008, 155; every generation develops its own pathos, in elocution as much as in political rhetoric, and seemingly different stylistic devices may serve similar purposes). How, then, do literary and scholarly texts articulate intensive feelings, which are unavoidable in the context of genocide and trauma, when the cultural setting meets such pathos with suspicion? Zumbusch suggests the emergence of four new pathos codifications: the pathos of small forms, the pathos of soberness (“Nüchternheit”), the pathos of grotesque exaggeration and the pathos of the ironic rupture (13). These forms could be labelled as manifestations of the pathos of anti-pathos: they do, of course, still codify intense emotions, but they also articulate a wariness (and, perhaps, an autobiographically motivated weariness) of rhetorical ‘overload’ – or at least of their awareness of this scepticism. That Gottsched’s metaphorical juxtaposition finds imitation in the present will become clear from the texts discussed and their reception – but there are no valid reasons for why ‘warm’ designates emotion or pathos while ‘cold’ means emotionlessness or anti-pathos. On the contrary, I hope to demonstrate that the pervasive ‘coldness’ and ‘coolness’ metaphors used in the discussion of Shoah literature point to this pathos of anti-pathos. But to be sure, just as texts can be perceived as warm or cold, the pathos of anti-pathos can be accompanied by other codifications of pathos that do not point to affective self-control and understatement or that understand and construct authenticity to be precisely an overtly emotional reaction to traumatising events.⁸ What is a rhetorical overload? I argue that the pathos of anti-pathos – as a poetic principle – finds at least one manifestation in what Paolo Valesio has labelled “the rhetoric of anti-rhetoric” (qtd. in White 1982, 122). Just like pathos, rhetoric must be understood in two ways: ‘anti-rhetoric’ betrays a suspicion of the concept of rhetoric – whether for political or for disciplinary reasons, ‘rhetoric’ is not seldom associated with ‘hollow pathos’, with persuasion, with insincerity and falsehood, or with fiction (cf. Hermans and Martens 2015, 5 – 6). Roland Barthes, too, notes that rhetoric is met with contempt – although this is certainly either an exaggeration or an anachronistic assessment – yet he simultaneously points to its tenacity, having been around for at least 2,500 years (Barthes 1985, 88, 116, 119).⁹ It is clear that the suspicion of pathos and the sus-

 This co-existence of ‘overt’ pathos and the pathos of anti-pathos will be primarily demonstrated in the chapters on Sebald and Schlesak.  Barthes admits that his historical overview is restrictive by considering only the Western tradition – and this, in turn, as exemplified in Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and France (Barthes 1985, 86).

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picion of rhetoric are related: rhetoric is suspicious precisely because it is thought to evoke an irrational pathos. Joseph Goebbels’s extensive propaganda machinery and Julius Streicher’s inflammatory antisemitic publications have not helped to counteract these connotations.¹⁰ Yet the first ‘rhetoric’ in the phrase points to the choices that authors must make regardless of the text they write, the mode they use (fictional or nonfictional) or the text’s purposes (roughly divided into communication, information or persuasion). This ‘rhetoric of antirhetoric’ may be ascribed to genres as well as to individual texts, but it goes without saying that these genres and singular texts will express different manifestations of the principle and its articulation and that this bears consequences for our understanding of them. For these reasons, bathos – as a parodistic deformation of pathos (cf. Sasse 2010, 186) – is not a pathos of anti-pathos: it is merely poking fun at this idea of pathos or indirectly criticising it without suggesting a fundamentally different conception of how to codify emotionality. The poetics of documentary theatre and documentary literature may be described in terms of rhetoric of anti-rhetoric and pathos of anti-pathos, especially when one looks at the accompanying manifestos. Perhaps the best known is Peter Weiss’s Notizen zum dokumentarischen Theater (1968, transl. Notes on the Contemporary Theatre, 1985), in which this genre is described as “Anti-Theater” (1971, 91; Anti-Theater: Weiss 1985, 294). Its premise is posited as “Berichterstattung [: Es] enthält sich jeder Erfindung, es übernimmt authentisches Material und gibt dies, im Inhalt unverändert, in der Form bearbeitet, von der Bühne aus wieder” (91– 92; reportage. [It] abstains from any kind of invention, it adopts authentic material and presents it on the stage without any modification of its content, but with definite formal modifications reporting: Weiss 1985, 294). James Young describes this strategy as documentary literature’s “rhetoric of fact” (1988, 64) and highlights the opposition of Weiss’s poetics to mainstream media and their manipulative reporting. Young’s basic argument, which is heavily informed by Barthes’s Mythologies (1957, transl. 1972),¹¹ is that, despite its leftist orientations, Weiss’s documentary literature falls foul of the naïvety of bourgeois realism, which fetishises the ‘real’: just “[a]s bourgeois ideology works by naturalizing its signs in order to appear free, universal, and self-generating, socialist realism and other forms of documentary literature mask and naturalize

 To be sure, my own choice of metaphor in this sentence demonstrates the pervasiveness of the warmth-emotion-pathos-irrationality associative chain.  Indeed, Young quotes from the preface to Mythologies, pointing to Barthes’s unease with what he sees as the ‘naturalness’ of ideology: the way in which popular media and art alike depict realities as ‘normal’ or the ‘necessary’ outcome of historical developments (or even ‘evolutions’) – and how our consciousness internalises such depictions (1988, 3).

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1 The pathos of anti-pathos

their own production” (Young 1988b, 67). In other words, the rhetoric of fact purports not to be rhetorical, not to offer an overarching narrative (and hence an ideological reading of history), yet “through its rhetoric of fact, the documentary mode works to obscure its ideological premises precisely in order to be ideological” (Young 1988b, 67).¹² Young touches a nerve here, especially if one considers Weiss’s manifesto. But then again, that manifesto also explicitly admits that it chooses sides, that it considers objectivity to be a category that may serve the powers that be as an exculpatory factor (Weiss 1971, 99). The purported objectivity of the documentary play is, thus, contextualised (and contradicted) in the manifesto. Two sets of questions arise from such observations. The first is the question of empathy. If documentary literature wishes to be free from rhetoric, how does it wish to evoke empathy for the victims of genocide, atomic warfare and postcolonial imperialism?¹³ Does it wish to do so at all? How can it mobilise political activity if it is not rooted in empathy? And how do other texts and genres marked by a pathos of anti-pathos engage with empathy? The problems and pitfalls of empathy as a form of emotionality in the text, in the reader and as a poetic principle will be discussed at length in Chapter 2, alongside the temperamental metaphors – indeed, matters of empathy are frequently discussed in spatial metaphors.¹⁴ The second question that arises from Weiss’s manifesto pertains to the difference between literary text and poetological programme regarding fiction. One may ask to what extent Die Ermittlung does not already break the ideal of a rhetoric of anti-rhetoric through its obvious inclusion of fictive elements – which in turn raises interesting questions for the relation between literary text and para Robert Cohen refutes Young’s criticism of Weiss and Die Ermittlung on basically the same grounds: where Young criticises Weiss’s critique of capitalism as ideologically motivated and, ultimately, a usurpation of Jewish suffering – all the more since Weiss does explicitly mention Soviet POWs being murdered, in contrast to the nonappearance of the word ‘Jew’ – Cohen considers Young’s criticism to be irksome (because methodologically confounded, reading Die Ermittlung quasi exclusively through Weiss’s own commentaries and manifestoes) and prone to similar ideological investments: the Cold War (though nearing its end) provides a backdrop for Young’s not wishing to emphasise Soviet suffering too strongly (Cohen 1998, 57– 63).  These are the topics of the ‘Holy Triniy’ of German documentary theatre in the 1960s: Rolf Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter (1963, transl. The Representative [UK, 1963] and The Deputy, [USA, 1964]), Heinar Kipphardt’s In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer (1964, transl. In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1967) and Peter Weiss’s Die Ermittlung (1965, transl. The Investigation, 1998) and Viet Nam Diskurs (1968, transl. Discourse On Vietnam, 1970)  Exemplified by Curthoys’s summary of critics who are wary of Littell’s Les Bienveillantes – the criticism is directed towards the question of empathy – or even identification – with the narrator/perpetrator in terms of the reader’s being ‘too close’ to the latter and of the lack of a “critical distance” offered by the literary text (Curthoys 2019, 25).

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text. These fictive elements in Die Ermittlung and the relation between the literary text and the paratext will be discussed in Chapter 4, where I discuss Die Ermittlung as an implicit intertext for Dieter Schlesak’s Capesius, der Auschwitzapotheker (2006) and where I posit the thesis that documentary literature, despite its more explicit embracing of fictionality, cannot escape the genre’s old problem as formulated 30 years earlier by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Stephan Reinhardt: [d]okumentarische Literatur kann so authentisch wie irgend möglich sein – wird sie aber je den erforderlichen Grad der Abstraktion und des Exemplarischen erreichen können, der ihren jeweiligen Stoff in den qualitativ von der Vorlage unterschiedenen Rang des allgemeiner Beziehbaren, Übertragbaren, Verweisenden hebt und Wirkung erzielt, die über den authentischen, dokumentierten Fall hinausgeht? Entweder übernimmt die dokumentarische Literatur, um diesen Verweisungscharakter zu erreichen, fiktionale und also manipulative, d. h. ästhetisch fixierbare, Elemente – oder aber sie verliert ihre Exemplarität […]. Dies […] ist ein grundsätzliches Problem der dokumentarischen Literatur, und es scheint, als sei es unlösbar. (Arnold and Reinhardt 1973, 8) Documentary literature may be as authentic as can be – but will it ever achieve the necessary degree of abstraction and exemplary representativeness? Will it lift its specific content beyond the qualitatively differing grade of its source material and become relatable, transferable, referencing and go beyond the authentic, documented case? Either documentary literature resorts to fictional (and hence manipulative, i. e. aesthetically fixable) elements, to achieve this level of abstraction, or it loses its exemplary status. […] This is the fundamental problem with documentary literature, and it seems to be unsolvable.

To be sure, this quotation raises more questions. First, what is authenticity? Arnold and Reinhardt use the term in its factual sense – as the opposite of forgery or (a) fiction. Authenticity can also refer to the truthfulness of the work, and it can be understood in term of moral and ethical appropriateness (Martínez 2004, 9). In (editorial) philology, authenticity depends on authorship: texts are considered authentic if they are demonstrably the expression of their author’s wishes, and they are considered inauthentic when that authorial will cannot be proven (Martínez 2004, 11– 12). But this understanding of authenticity is equally problematic: what method can guarantee a direct and entirely reliable knowledge of the author’s will? Lastly, it could be understood as a subjective self-perception: here, authenticity means acting in accordance with one’s beliefs and values and thus resembles the concept of sincerity.¹⁵

 A concept which Harry Frankfurt considers “bullshit” since sincerity presumes that we have an extensive knowledge of ourselves: “there is nothing in theory […] to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to sceptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed,

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The sheer ambivalence of the term does not exactly avoid conflicts in its attribution: a survivor’s account may be perceived as authentic since there is no reason to believe that the person is lying or telling a fictional story, but if that story does not accord with aesthetic expectations (heavily influenced by modernist and postmodernist aesthetics in the case of the Shoah and other genocides), it may not gain access to the literary canon – a canon which has been shaped, of course, by authors with a higher education – Primo Levi and Ruth Klüger are but two examples. Conversely, the uncovering of fake memoirs further challenges the attribution of authenticity: when it became clear that Binjamin Wilkomirski, to restrict ourselves to the most famous example, had never been incarcerated in Auschwitz, the authenticity of Bruchstücke (1995, transl. Fragments, 1995), which depended on the matter of authorship, collapsed immediately – the poetic qualities of the narrative could ‘save’ neither the text nor its author’s reputation. Moreover, it has proven impossible to read the text as fictional and thus redeem it as an aesthetic object (Franzen 2018b, 333).¹⁶ And what does one make of the etymology of ‘authenticity’? Lionel Trilling reminds us that authenticity comes from Ancient Greek “[a]uthentes: not only a master or a doer, but also a perpetrator, a murderer, even a self-murderer” (Trilling 1972, 131). To be sure, the testimonies and recollections of perpetrators are de facto suspicious sources, but they have exercised a fascination ever since the war, as the sheer number of perpetrator fictions demonstrate. But does the etymology not leave a bitter taste, implying that the victims’ account is always an inferior source of knowledge? This

[…] insubstantial – […] less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things” (Frankfurt 2005, 66 – 67).  Whether Bruno Dössekker/Grosjean is a liar or truly believes he was a child survivor of Auschwitz and Majdanek is a question that is not relevant for my purposes nor for Ruth Klüger’s judgement: she considers Bruchstücke to be “Kitsch [, which is] immer plausibel, bis man ihn durchschaut und die Wahrheit ihn in seiner Lächerlichkeit entlarvt” (Klüger 2006, 91; kitsch [, which is] always plausible, until one sees through it and the truth exposes it in all its ridiculousness) – but what a sour laughter it is. For a more elaborate account of the case, see the contributions in Diekmann and Schoeps (2002). Bruchstücke is by far not the only fake Shoah autobiography – to mind come Helen Demidenko (Helen Darville/Dale), The Hand That Signed the Paper (1994); Misha Defonseca (Monique de Wael), Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust (1997); and Herman Rosenblat, Angel at the Fence (publication cancelled). In a rather astounding defence of these authors and their texts, Alyson Miller claims that these texts are “parodic works that reflect […] on the tenuous nature of mediums traditionally seen as fixed and stable; that is, both the past and the notion of self” (Miller 2014, 231). That the unmasking of these texts as hoaxes (and their authors as frauds) demonstrates how unstable these concepts are, is clear. But to describe these texts themselves as parodies implies that their authors had the intention of demonstrating this – a claim which cannot in the least be substantiated since Dössekker has kept insisting on the veracity of his account.

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is not a rhetorical question aimed at dismissing perpetrators’ perspectives at all – on the contrary, these provide essential insights for the historical reconstruction of the events, even when they demand an excruciatingly difficult empathy, as the case of Raul Hilberg should make clear. And while we are talking about perpetrators and empathy: their perspectives, their language and, ultimately, their acts have been explicitly and implicitly invoked in the poetics and pedagogics of empathy – both by pointing to a purported lack of empathy on behalf of the perpetrators and by emphasising the importance of empathy for the victims when listening to their stories. If authenticity is etymologically linked to the perpetrator while, in the context of genocide, it points in the direction of the victim, what can authenticity mean? Diachronic changes – even within the shortest of timespans – as to the status of the publicly avowed emotionality also complicate the matter of authenticity. Judith Keilbach posits that cinema and TV productions, in line with Dori Laub’s insistence on the importance of the empathic listener for the articulation of trauma (Felman and Laub 1992, 57– 58), have the potential of not only shattering decades of traumatic silence but of capturing and showing the very act of this shattering. At the same time, however, she points to the ‘traumatification’ of the survivor – be he a perpetrator or a victim: as viewers, we have come to understand a survivor’s sudden silences, trembling and outbursts in tears as signs of his having been traumatised and of ‘reliving’ the events recounted (Keilbach 2008, 157– 160, 163 – 167). Traumatification is, then, a medial construct – but a rather recent one: the authentication of recounted history through what we have come to see as signs of trauma is a phenomenon that, according to Keilbach, emerged between the late 1980s and the middle of the 1990s. This concurs with a shift in the depiction of National Socialism and the Shoah: whereas early TV productions in the 1960s emphasised the political events and often featured experts who commented on these events (and who had quite often emigrated to the United Kingdom or the United States), the end of the twentieth century focused on the everyday experiences of the eyewitnesses interviewed (Keilbach 2008, 211– 224, 236 – 237). In other words, the showing of emotions as authenticating the narrative – and more precisely, that the narrator experienced the events narrated, not somebody else – accompanies the rise of what Annette Wieviorka has called the “homme-mémoire” (Wieviorka 2013, 118; embodiment of memory [un homme-mémoire]: Wieviorka 2006, 88) beyond the legal witness – the testis, who in a criminal case was the victim and in a civil case the the third party invoked to offer an objective account of the dispute (Assmann 2012b, 22). As Keilbach also demonstrates, the Eichmann trial (which, according to Wieviorka, heralded the emergence of this ‘memory man’) may have been prone to highlight emotionality: the trial was a determination of Adolf Eich-

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mann’s role as much as a didactic instrument for Israeli society; yet the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial was not: the judges stressed from the beginning that their job was to assess the individual guilt of each defendant for concrete actions and not to offer a forum for Vergangenheitsbewältigung beyond the specific charges. The role of the witness was a different one than that in Jerusalem, where open emotionality and empathy with the victim was self-evident: in Frankfurt, hers was to testify not primarily to her experiences, but to the involvement of the perpetrator in an act (or acts) of murder committed in Auschwitz and Birkenau (Keilbach 2008, 144– 146). This means that the witness in Frankfurt had to control her emotions in court – and defence attorneys would try to discredit her testimony by provoking her. The result is a pathos of anti-pathos, of course, since the events in se are bound, as Young assumes, to move us – as does our perception that the witness must be hiding her feelings. Legal codes, court rules and diachronic shifts in media constellations further undermine the concept of authenticity as a straightforward category. The question as to the authenticity of any depiction – fictional or not, narrative or not – tends to only raise further questions; instead, asking which texts are perceived as authentic may lead us to insights pertaining to canon, the status of fictionality and the status of emotionality. The term will, thus, not be predominant in this book, but that does not mean that it is completely absent, either: if the reader wishes to do so, she could read it between the lines in discussions concerning fictivity and fictionality in documentary literature or referentiality in autobiography or intertextual positionings within the canon – all of which are discussions which, it seems to me, offer a clearer terminology to describe what is at stake. The question concerning the relation between the rhetoric of anti-rhetoric and the pathos in documentary literature can only be answered on a case by case basis – even more since documentary literature has self-reflectively embraced fictionality since the turn of the millennium. The ways of evoking emotion thus go beyond the strategy of ‘letting the facts speak for themselves’, but does this ‘intensify’ the pathos? Can pathos be quantified to start with? And to what extent does the manipulation of the factual material – upon discovery – influence the emotional reactions to the text? Is pathos merely situated within the text? Such questions suggest that the problem is not limited to documentary literature but that the link between the pathos of anti-pathos and the rhetoric of anti-rhetoric merits a closer look in the closely-connected genre of encyclopaedic fiction, in the not-too-distant genre of historiography, and in autobiography – which could arguably be conceived as the other side of the same medal. These, thus, are the basic questions to be answered: how is pathos evoked in these texts, and how do ‘classical’ pathos manifestations and the pathos of

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anti-pathos relate? What metaphors are used for these constellations, what traditions do they evoke, and how do we make sense of contradictory metaphorical usages? Whereas the concept underlying the title of this book has been introduced, the subtitle still need a word of clarification. It refers to the “Zivilisationsbruch” (Diner 1988; rupture in/of civilisation) that the Shoah – and every other act of genocide, for that matter – constitutes; a rupture in the fabric of humankind, however lofty that may sound, an act which cannot be repaired, the consequences of which are irrevocable. Raul Hilberg succinctly captures this idea more than twenty-five years before Dan Diner’s publication when writing in the preface to the first edition of The Destruction of the European Jews that “when I do something to another, I also do something to myself” (DEJ I, s.p.). Hannah Arendt, in a 1964 interview with Günter Gaus, points not to her exile in 1933 but to her knowledge of Auschwitz in 1943 as a rupturing moment: dies ist anders gewesen. Das war wirklich, als ob der Abgrund sich öffnet. Weil man die Vorstellung gehabt hat, alles andere hätte irgendwie noch einmal gutgemacht werden können, wie in der Politik ja alles einmal wieder gutgemacht werden können muss. Dies nicht. Dies hätte nie geschehen dürfen. Und damit meine ich nicht die Zahl der Opfer. Ich meine die Fabrikation der Leichen und so weiter […]. Dieses hätte nicht geschehen dürfen. Da ist irgend etwas passiert, womit wir alle nicht fertig werden. (Arendt 1964) This was different. It was truly as if the abyss had opened. Because we had had the impression that everything else could be made up for, as in politics everything can be compensated for. Not this. This should never have happened. And I am not referring to the number of victims. I mean the fabrication of corpses and the like […]. This should never have happened. And something happened which will prevent us from coming to terms with it.

The title also refers to the ruptures that occur in what may be called attempts at ‘keeping one’s cool’ while testifying to trauma – the affective self-control cannot hold; deep-seated emotions break through. Saul Friedländer summarises Lawrence Langer’s finding concerning the so-called deep memory of survivors in terms of rupture: [w]hile studying interviews with Shoah survivors, Lawrence Langer noticed that if the interviewer managed to break through the ‘standard’ story of the interviewee, a sudden outburst of chaotic reminiscences surfaced, some kind of ‘deep memory’ overcame the previously built defenses. (Friedländer 2016c, 14)

Langer speaks indeed of a rupture – not only in memory but also in the way authors like Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo conceive of their lives: there is a period before and a period ‘after’ Auschwitz; the experience of Auschwitz is the rupture in their lives (L. L. Langer 1991, 3). Yet dwelling on Delbo, he notes that Ausch-

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witz is more than a “temporal rupture”: its memory disrupts the resocialisation and renewed ‘normal’ life (3). Consequently, the testimonies delivered are not seldom marked by “two kinds of memory [deep and common memory, TV] intrud[ing] on each other, disrupting the smooth flow of their narratives” (6). Hence, the very discourse on trauma – on the afterlife of the past in the present – is marked by the metaphor of the rupture. Moreover, and referring specifically to oral testimonies as videotaped and archived, Langer maintains that the breach between […] present and […] past intensifies the alienation between […] narrative and our response. Literate readers can eventually work their way through the pages of a book […] because the form and style of the narrative are designed to make us complicit with the text. But literacy has little to do with the problem of entering into meaningful intellectual or emotional dialogue with the contents of these videotaped testimonies. As viewers, we have difficulty doing this because the testimonies are not based on common experience or an imaginable past, real or literary. (16)

Diner’s Zivilisationsbruch is invoked here: unlike literary texts, these narratorssurvivors lack a vocabulary rooted in cultural traditions to communicate their experiences to those who do not have first-hand knowledge of similar experiences. But these ruptures occur not only in eyewitness accounts, they can also be identified in discourses on commemoration – where consensuses are questioned or where the distinction between past and present (through architectural remains or otherwise) is suddenly and radically challenged; in other words, where our presupposed assumptions about the past are destabilised. The affections, too, are ambivalent: they point simultaneously to the inherent feelings and emotions that mark any writing on the Shoah, however subdued, and to the process of affecting the reader through writing, of making a difference however minute and temporary – and of being affected through reading. The notion of ‘ruptured’ emotions may be a different way of pointing to the Nachträglichkeit (‘belatedness’) of trauma; the notion of a text’s ‘ruptured’ influence refers to the fact that these processes are not straightforward, nor stabile – they lead, among other things, to incessant renegotiations of other texts.¹⁷ In the remaining part of this introduction, I will outline the corpus and the terms for reading Shoah literature in the twenty-first century. A text’s pathos cannot be a merely textual phenomenon; it is shaped by cultural conventions to which it adheres and from which it may deviate. In the context of the Shoah,

 It has been pointed out that Freud’s Nachträglichkeit has been translated in various ways, all of which equally fall short of transmitting all of the term’s implications – ‘belatedness’ is but one option (Bistoen, Vanheule, and Craps 2014, 672).

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the dominating conventions pertain to the issues of perspective, of fiction (or at least, the issue perceived to be with fiction in the context of the Shoah) and the models of memory – models that highlight the intersubjectivity between reader and author and the subjectivity of the academic. These models question ideologies and depict shifts in our ideological understanding of the Shoah, which begins with the very name for the historical events: metaphors are not neutral.

1.2 The corpus All of the above suggests that the corpus is, and perhaps should be, quite diverse. Indeed, the corpus ranges from those who were born amongst the perpetrators and bystanders to those who were marked for destruction yet survived – either in exile or with the most severe experiences of the persecution. It ranges in length and in focus, in style and in status. Most of the authors have long been part of the canon, but not all (Schlesak). Some of the authors resemble each other in their double- or multiple-voicedness: Sebald and Klüger, though on opposite sides when considering their experiential perspective, both write as literary authors and literary scholars. Some biographical backgrounds are akin, although the authors do not necessarily know each other personally (Hilberg and Klüger). They all can be considered outsiders in some respect. The fact that some authors bear some connection to others but that not all can be grouped together (except, paradoxically, as outsiders) evokes a structure akin to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s family resemblances. The authors can be read together but not interchangeably. The advantage, I would suggest, is that such a diversity allows for a more complete survey of the uses of the metaphors that are constantly used to describe emotional states and emotional codifications, as well as for a more nuanced understanding and discussion of emotional standards and practices such as empathy. Indeed, what unites them is the fact that their texts have been, on some level, described in terms of warmth or coldness or coolness – occasionally by themselves, but mostly by others – yet these metaphors are, more often than not, neither explained nor rendered somehow more concrete. Thus, the breadth of the corpus and the lack of explication should allow for a differentiating perspective on the pathos of anti-pathos. There are undoubtedly similarities across the corpus but genre standards, literary and artistic predecessors and the historical moment of writing unavoidably shape the differences in its manifestation. W. G. Sebald is my exemplary author for encyclopaedic fiction, and Mark Anderson maintains that Sebald’s prose is “despite what seems like an emotionally neutral, report-like tone of voice, Sebald’s texts are neither objective nor cold”

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(2008, 140).¹⁸ But what does this mean? Anderson’s explication is only partially helpful: referring to Die Augewanderten (1992) and Austerlitz (2001), he correctly identifies “the narrator’s subdued but unmistakable empathy for his subjects’ tales of emigration and loss; access to history is always through an individual’s personal story” (M. Anderson 2008, 140). Die Ringe des Saturn (1995) are not mentioned here, yet the metaphors of warmth and coldness are perhaps most fruitful precisely for this text. Indeed, in his review of this text, Ekkehard Knörer notes an ex negativo coolness, i. e. a lack of warmth during the course of reading: “[e]s wird einem nicht warm mit Sebald (und soll es nicht werden)” (Knörer n.d.; reading Sebald does not warm one up [and neither should it]). Somewhat more generally, Ruth Klüger notes a stylistic coolness and a diegetic coldness – the lack of reciprocated friendship let alone romantic liaisons (2003, 96). In order to arrive at a differentiated understanding of the pathos of anti-pathos in Sebald’s oeuvre, I will read these three texts from three interlocked perspectives: it discusses the ethical questions of empathy and of authorship, it looks into the postcolonial implications of his prose – which was published in the aftermath of the Historians’ Debate (Historikerstreit) and the resulting discursive limitations on the commemoration of the Shoah (certainly in Germany) – and it remains aware of the metaphorical constellations of space and temperature. In order to arrive at the question of empathy and empathic unsettlement, which can at times be perceived as amounting to appropriation, it is necessary to frame my reading of Sebald’s prose as the reading of fiction – and not, as so many critics have suggested, to read Sebald’s narrators as barely concealed autobiographical stand-ins for Sebald himself. To read Sebald’s prose as fiction does not pre-empt the question of appropriation, which is directed at the level of authorship, not at the level of referentiality. But Sebald’s is an interesting case, for his prose features documentary impulses that differ substantially from the earlier documentary literature, but which bear strong similarities to his nigh-contemporary fellow documentarians. Moreover, as a critic, Sebald has spoken favourably of both documentary authors (notably of Alexander Kluge) and of a documentary depiction of the air war (Sebald 2005b). This raises

 I borrow Luc Herman and Petrus van Ewijk’s definition of the encyclopaedic novel as a novel “processing an enormous amount of information from a variety of fields, […] produc[ing] the illusion that they have encyclopedic proportions and perhaps even manage to impose some form of order on the wealth of material” (2009, 169). This definition stresses the illusory aspect of such suggestions and leaves leeway as to the ‘form of order’ – indeed, Sebald’s prose certainly has an order, but it can be described as the order of disorder – a never-ending history of violence in which seemingly unrelated anecdotes are woven together. This order of disorder is already anticipated in the title of Sebald’s first prose collection: Schwindel. Gefühle (1990).

1.2 The corpus

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questions as to the comparability of catastrophes and to the contradictions between Sebald’s explicit and implied poetics. Lastly, Sebald’s prose is marked by a diegetic literalisation and intertextual evocation of the coldness and coolness metaphors. That does not clash, I would say, with the perception of his prose as ‘warm’, i. e. empathy-inducing, but rather questions the conditions of empathy. After Sebald’s encyclopaedic fiction follows Dieter Schlesak’s documentary novel, Capesius, der Auschwitzapotheker. Schlesak, an ethnic German from Romania, achieved some literary fame as a composer of hermetic poetry during the late 1960s and the 1970s.¹⁹ The choice for a documentary novel, thus, may be surprising at first sight – hermetic poetry imposes itself as a self-referential poetic text, whereas claims to an extratextual world are the nerve centre, so to say, of documentary literature. To be sure, references to hermetic poetry (and particularly to Paul Celan) are discernible in Capesius, and the documentary novel is ‘autobiographically motivated’ – Schlesak knew the eponymous antagonist, who was a friend of the family;²⁰ and indeed, Capesius could be seen as a continuation of Schlesak’s autobiographical novel Vaterlandstage und Die Kunst des Verschwindens (1986): both texts discuss growing-up amongst the perpetrators and the slow discoveries as to the latter’s being perpetrators. Perpetrators, because Victor Capesius is not the only one: Roland Albert, an uncle of Schlesak’s and erstwhile soldier (and later officer) in the SS guard battalions situated at the concentration camp complex Auschwitz-Birkenau, is no less present in Capesius than Capesius himself. Pathos galore, then: if the magnitude of the Romanian responsibility in the Shoah has been largely forgotten, Schlesak focuses on the responsibility of the ethnic German minority living in Romania.²¹ The politics

 To what extent he is still known as a poet, is unsure: while Capesius has proved quite a success, having been translated in multiple languages (to my knowledge, in Czech, Dutch, English, Italian, Polish, Romanian and Spanish); Schlesak is not part of the canon analysed by Christine Waldschmidt in her 600-page monograph (2011) on hermetic poetry in the twentieth century.  Consequently, the publication date is motivated (auto)biographically: in an interview, Schlesak mentions that he had been working on the novel for thirty years but that he only dared publish it after the death of his parents (Schlesak 2009).  Raul Hilberg concludes that Romanian antisemitic policy was exceptionally strong: “[n]o country, besides Germany, was involved in massacres of Jews on such a scale” (DEJ III, 809). Considering the scope of collaboration in genocide throughout Europe, this is telling. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer equally point to the fundamental ideological and military alliance between Fascist Romania and Nazi Germany and explain the overall forgetting of this fact by post-war ideological battles: the trials against perpetrators were seen, by nationalists, as antiRomanian acts of revenge undertaken by strawmen of foreign powers (Hirsch and Spitzer 2018, 90 – 91). Edgar Hilsenrath’s debut novel Nacht (1964, transl. Night, 1966) remains probably

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of memory, which in this context are largely influenced by the Cold War and the post-war Communist dictatorship, which in turn risks downplaying the size of involvement in the Nazi genocide, mean that Schlesak’s novel has only been lukewarmly received in these communities – communities that currently and often live in exile.²² The major difference: Schlesak cannot quote from the trial against Roland Albert because Albert was never prosecuted for his crimes. Capesius was tried in the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt – and the sources provide a major yet unlikely intertextual constellation for Schlesak’s novel. It is worth drawing some attention to the history of prosecuting Nazis in Germany; it serves as a springboard for outlining the legal peculiarities concerning the prosecution of crimes committed in Auschwitz-Birkenau – in the legal context (and in contrast to the realm of cultural memory), Auschwitz was certainly not a metonymy for the Shoah until 2009. After outlining the historical overview and a brief overview of literary reactions to the trial, I will read Capesius from three perspectives. The first is a matter of emotionality before the court: occurrences of dark and difficult empathy and the ‘cool’ affective self-control of the surviving victims who testify to their suffering twenty years prior challenge lofty ideals of empathy (as they may be found in Sebald’s prose) and provide a model of testimony different to the one to which we have become accustomed over the last 35 years. In the secondary trial, which the novel constitutes, the cold-bloodedness of the perpetrators and their lack of insight or feelings of guilt – their “Gefühlskälte” (FärberHäuser 2009, 365; emotional coldness) both during the killings and decades later – are similarly condemned.²³ The second perspective addresses the question of fictionality in documentary fiction: what is its function (especially visà-vis pathos and anti-pathos), and how is it evoked? This includes matters of a destabilised reference – a comparison of the trial protocols to Schlesak’s montage yields the insight that he did not stick to these protocols but instead intervened. Ethical questions arise, then: Schlesak explicitly uses fictionality in the character of Adam; but the pervasiveness of fictivity in the purported nonfictional sections may raise some eyebrows – though they need not: Capesius is marked as a documentary novel, and the question is whether one emphasises ‘documentary’ or ‘novel’. The final question pertains to pathos and anti-pathos. The novel is unavoidably marked by the strong pathos inherent to the eyewitness accounts of the burning pits of Birkenau, yet it is equally marked by an anti-pathos conthe best-known literary work depicting the Shoah in Romania and perpetrated mostly by Romanians.  Schlesak addresses these issues in his online blog, not without repeating his accusatory pathos (Schlesak 2010).  Schlesak has Wilhelm Prokop describe Capesius in similar terms (C, 104).

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strued in its intertexts. Moreover, the pathos of testimony in court does not mean that these testimonies were not marked by a strong affective self-control. While Sebald and Schlesak differ substantially in many regards, they share growing up amidst the silences of the perpetrators and their writing against that silence. Their texts, moreover, testify to the epistemological difficulties that arise from their search for the eyewitness – Sebald focuses on the victims, whereas Schlesak includes perpetrator testimony as well. Likewise, the authors in the second part of the corpus differ substantially from each other yet belong together in the sense that they are survivors – but with the crucial difference that Klüger is a survivor in the strictest sense of the word, while Hilberg survived in exile, causing a necessarily substantially different relation to the historical events. They, too, write against the post-genocidal silences yet they do not write ‘among’ the perpetrators. Moreover, whereas the three authors in the first part write fictional texts – even though the relation between documentary facts, historical accuracy and fictionalisation is rather complicated – the authors in the second part of the corpus write plain nonfiction. That does not mean that questions of memory, subjectivity or constructionism do not surface, on the contrary. Still, Ruth Klüger, in her academic writing, clearly states that autobiographies and novels are different genres with different rules and expectations, and thus, she insists on the referentiality of her own autobiography. Indeed, Helen Finch refers to Klüger’s ‘follow-up’ text, unterwegs verloren (2008) as “metatestimony” (2018, passim) – and the same description fits Klüger’s early autobiographical work, weiter leben (1992) and Still Alive (2001), which have been alternatively labelled “performative auto/biography” (qtd. in Finch 2018, 61). The fact that Klüger incessantly uncovers her subjectivity and openly discusses the intersubjectivity between author and imagined reader is part of the Lejeunian pact, not contrary to it: it renders the limits of autobiographical memory and biographic knowledge visible rather than making them invisible by smoothing them out and achieving a narrative without such information gaps. This intersubjectivity is akin to the dynamics of cultural memory – a literary articulation of autobiographical experiences. Moreover, Klüger’s texts demonstrate that autobiographical experience can inform the premises of cultural memory by politicising it. That both warmth (Lappin 2003) and coldness (H. Müller 1996, 33) are attributed to Klüger’s texts may have two reasons: Elena Lappin reviews Still Alive, whereas Herta Müller speaks of weiter leben; but it may equally be due to a different understanding of the ethical positions that Klüger demands – and which both Lappin and Müller identify. The pathos of anti-pathos in Klüger’s autobiographies is confrontational, even antagonistic. Finally, I will consider Klüger’s nonmetaphorical voice: how is pathos evoked in the audiobook of weiter leben?

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In the final chapter, I look at Raul Hilberg’s historiography of the Shoah, The Destruction of the European Jews. While the author’s subjectivity is not as admitted as in the other texts, it is deducible from Hilberg’s ironic remarks, his laconic reporting and his use of sarcasm. Indeed, these rhetorical choices have led to Hilberg’s being perceived as ‘cold’ or ‘cool’, as the summary of obituaries in Nicolas Berg’s essay on Hilberg laconic discourse demonstrates (Berg 2019, 168 – 169). Berg’s essay is not an exception: Hilberg’s rhetoric has increasingly become of interest to historians who have long since acknowledged the centrality of Hilberg’s research for the historiography of the Shoah. Hilberg’s subdued prose, his variant on the pathos of anti-pathos, only intensifies over the years. Initially it was accompanied by an inflammatory pathos – which makes Hugh Trevor-Roper’s early assessment, according to which Destruction “is written in an austere style, without literary grace or emotion” (Trevor-Roper 1962) all the more astonishing – but with Hilberg’s increasing use of the perspectives of the victims, this inflammatory pathos disappears over the years.²⁴ A second temperamental metaphor is found in attribution to Hilberg’s prose. Hilberg describes Destruction as “ein heißes Thema zunächst kalt gestellt” (qtd. in Schlott 2016b, 160: a hot topic made cold/cooled off), which, according to René Schlott, is due to Hilberg’s application of Franz Neumann’s political analysis of Nazi Germany along four categories (army, bureaucracy, economics and party) for describing the unfolding of genocide. Hilberg’s own – sarcastic and slightly self-derogatory – temperamental metaphor has little to do with this pathos of anti-pathos. Around the same time, Hilberg uttered views on the constraints of writing, be it historiographical or fictional, which tend towards Hayden White’s claims concerning the narrativity of historiography. But if historiography cannot escape being a construction, it is – if done honestly – a construction which must be as close to the historical facts as possible; it does not have the licences of fiction. Hilberg, indeed, does not go as far as White does (occasionally), but he does admit – ever so slightly – to the making of choices, and thus of a subjectivity, and in later years offers more conclusive remarks concerning his motivation for writing. There is a big gap, thus, between Hilberg’s style and his premises; like Friedländer, he forsakes closure, but his remarks are mainly found in commentaries and conference papers, less so in his magnum opus. A wide variety of survivors, historians, eyewitnesses, artists and descendants will be discussed aside of the four main authors. The reasons vary: sometimes, explicit intertextual references render a comparison fruitful; others have left

 One can only assume that Trevor-Roper left out Hilberg’s inflammatory pathos in order to prevent a backlash against the monograph of which he approves intensely.

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such a powerful impact on the ways in which we understand key concepts of the Shoah that we cannot read the more recent works without their influence. Still others serve as illustrations for their literalisation of specific metaphors. The reasons as to why these authors have not been ‘fully’ part of the canon differ just as much; but mainly, the ambiguity in the temperamental metaphor has been found missing, or at other times, I simply do not possess the linguistic skills to read the text in the original language (as is the case for Tadeusz Borowski). The analyses should make clear that articulations of a pathos of anti-pathos may challenge James Young’s aforementioned uncoupling of narrative form and pathos. While such articulations could be considered rhetorical rather than narrative, it is worth remembering that rhetorical figures and our attributions are always perspective-bound – be that the perspective of the narrative instance or be it ours. Moreover, I would argue that narrative structures in se are instrumental in evoking pathos, be it one of anti-pathos or not. Nor would I suggest that all the texts in my corpus are merely marked by the pathos of anti-pathos; on the contrary, especially Sebald’s, Schlesak’s and Hilberg’s oeuvre demonstrate clear instances of a more classical pathos – of very intense emotionality. When looking at Klüger, it even seems that the pathos of anti-pathos must, at some time, erupt in this heavy, avowed emotionality, giving literary shape to the idea of belatedness as formulated by (Freudian) trauma theory.

1.3 Matters of terminology (I): events, metaphors, ideological implications “In their first applications to unnamed events, terms like ‘holocaust’, ‘sho’ah’, or ‘(dritter) churban’ necessarily evoked other destructions in order to frame the catastrophe of European Jewry during World War II” (Young 1988b, 85). The references inherent in these metaphors are different, which means that the naming of the events is anything but neutral. Indeed, debates on the appropriateness of these metaphors are often evoked and referenced to in the (mostly academic) discourse to position oneself politically and ethically as well as to arrive at a more precise or nuanced understanding of the events.²⁵

 An understanding that is already fragile and contested before arriving at the issue of naming: as Zoë Waxman rhetorically asks, it is unclear when the Holocaust begins. With the rise of the Nazi Party in 1933? With the Kristallnacht pogrom conducted in Germany and Austria on 9 and 10 November 1938? With the Einsatzgruppen shootings in the summer of 1941? Or with the mass murder of the Jews in the gas vans of Chełmno in December 1941? Or, if the Holocaust is to

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‘Holocaust’ is still the most common term to refer to the genocide against Europe’s Jews, especially in the English- and German-speaking world and outside of Jewish communities. Initially, however, it did not refer specifically to the genocide against the Jews of Europe; instead, it was used generally to decry the Nazis’ onslaught, only acquiring its specificity in the late 1950s (Korman 1989, 46). The term certainly does not go uncontested: it is mainly criticised for its connotations of religious sacrifice, and thus several authors consider it to reproduce the Nazis’ world view. A Faustian element would be involved in such a view; the moral integrity of the perpetrators would be sacrificed in order to bring about a world without Jews – a world, in the Nazi ideology, that is better than one with Jews.²⁶ Aside from such questionable political implications, Michael Marrus points to a theological implication: if the sacrificial offering is dedicated solely to God, the event is perhaps not meant to be understood (1988, 3). This could only lead to silence in the face of truths out of reach for us mortals – a silence which ultimately sides with the perpetrators, not the victims. James Young notes how ‘Holocaust’ has been used to refer to any genocide and thus does not fully acknowledge the antisemitic dimension of the destruction of European Jewry (1988b, 85 – 87).²⁷ Similarly, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi sees the word Holocaust as symptomatic of “a Christian reading of Jewish history”, as reflecting “a tendency in European and American culture to circumscribe the events, to allocate to them a place and a function in human history, and to confine the madness which threatens to impinge on a ‘reconstructed’ world” (DeKoven Ezrahi 1980, 2). These arguments have prompted authors and critics to reconsider the naming of the event.²⁸ An increasingly used term is ‘Shoah’, especially in France and Israel as well as in Jewish communities worldwide. Gerhard Paul notes that it, too, has its origins in religious discourse, but cites its context as a reason for preferring it over ‘Holocaust’ – it is found in “einer Erzählung über die Heimsuchung des Volkes

include both the mass murders of Jews and non-Jews, does it begin with the euthanasia programme in 1939? (Waxman 2004, 495 – 496)  Indeed, the perpetrators’ discourse aligns with such an understanding of the term: in the early stages of the Shoah, Walter von Reichenau, commander-in-chief of the Sixth Army, urges that “the soldier must have complete understanding for the necessity of the harsh but just atonement of Jewish subhumanity” (qtd. in Friedländer 2008, 210, emphasis added).  The most striking example is the use of the term ‘holocaust’ in American newspapers covering the Armenian genocide (Oren 2007, 293).  Even though such strong claims need to be nuanced – there are records of Jewish victims using the word ‘Holocaust’ as they were being enveloped by the German genocidal policies (Paul 2003, 7).

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Israel in Krieg und Verfolgung” (Paul 2003, 2; a narrative about the affliction of the people of Israel through war and persecution).²⁹ Berel Lang rejects ‘Holocaust’ yet mentions that its Hebrew alternatives, ‘Shoah’ and ‘(third) Churban’, offer a limited understanding as well: “these references, too, have theological or at least mediating overtones, they are confined to the viewpoint of the victims, and they fail to suggest the specific role of genocide as it figured in the deeds of the Third Reich” (1990, xxi). ³⁰ Likewise, Elie Cohen, a Jewish survivor, maintains that “all these victim-oriented terms blur responsibility” (cf. Clendinnen 1999, 9). Aside from these religious metaphors, John Roth and Michael Berenbaum, who basically reiterate Berel Lang’s distinction, add that several less religious or mediating descriptions have been used to avoid the problematic connotations these may carry. Lucy Dawidowicz speaks of the ‘war against the Jews’ and Raul Hilberg of the ‘destruction of the European Jews’ (Roth and Berenbaum 1989, 43 – 44).³¹ According to Cohen’s view, and in contrast to the use of ‘Holocaust’ or ‘Shoah’ or ‘churban’, the consequent use of ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ (‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’) constantly reminds the reader who the perpetrators were, that “the correspondence and the order were written in the German language, [that] in every other language they lose their aim and sharpness” (qtd. in Clendinnen 1999, 9). Similarly, Hayden White suggests that the designation ‘Final Solution’ – I include the quotation marks that White does not use – may “focus attention on the perversity of the perpetrators” (2004a, 114). Yet  Andreas Schmoller adds that, in the French context, the opposition of ‘Holocaust(e)’ and ‘Shoah’ and the preference for the latter over the first is at least partially informed by the success and acclaim of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, which effectively introduced the term to a broader, non-Jewish audience in Western Europe. Moreover, this also illustrates an aesthetic preference of Shoah over the American soap opera Holocaust (1978, directed by Marvin Chomsky). Holocaust may have raised a broader and longer-lasting awareness for the Shoah in Germany, but it has also been criticised for its sentimentalism, which, for Elie Wiesel, amounts to a falsification of the Shoah. Indeed, Schmoller adds a sociocultural element by specifying that the word ‘Holocaust(e)’ is seldom used in milieus where ‘Americanised’ language does not particularly enjoy a great deal of prestige (Schmoller 2010, 18 – 19).  ‘Dritter hurban’ is found in early postwar recollections; it means third destruction, after the destruction of the second Temple of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE (cf. Wieviorka 1999, 129).  While Hilberg is broadly attested with a dislike of the term ‘Holocaust’ (let Ulrich Herbert’s obituary [2007] be the pars pro toto here), he would not entirely shun it (as Herbert implies) – so much is clear merely from looking at his publication list. Especially in his later writings, when the term had become established, Hilberg uses ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Shoah’ interchangeably – in addition to his earlier, wordier (but less metaphorical) formulation – without thematising or motivating his labelling of the events.

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such appeals seem isolated; most academics seem in agreement as to the danger of legitimising the perpetrators’ discourse according to which genocide is an act of problem-solving. Indeed, White’s interchangeable use of ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Final Solution’ in the same essay suggests that he does not want to restrict his terminology to the Nazi designation. Others distance themselves from the term more firmly – if they use it at all, they use quotation marks to indicate the author’s awareness of the ideological and epistemological (because of the euphemistic circumscription) problems that accompany it (von Glasenapp 2006, 128).³² I will conclude this brief overview with two suggested methods of escaping the terminological quagmire. The first is an attempt at compromise: some authors suggest using both ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Shoah’ without imposing a hierarchy of correctness or appropriateness. According to this compromise, the latter term would refer to the specific genocide against the Jews of Europe, whereas the first would include other systematised murder programmes executed by the Nazis: the genocide against the Roma and Sinti, the murdering of people considered mentally handicapped, the persecution of homosexuals, etc. (cf. Knittel 2018, 9 n.1). One might also add the occupation policies, especially in Poland, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, which were bent to genocide, to this list. Whether a distinction between the two serves any ethical or academic advantages is debateable, with good arguments to be found for both positions. After all, if the religious connotations are problematic for the genocide against the Jews, why would they be less problematic for the genocide targeting non-Jewish victims? What would have been the purpose of their sacrifice? The distribution

 For the same reason, Stephan Jaeger considers David Irving’s narrator unreliable: Irving does not enclose the term with which Nazi propagandists referred to Hitler, ‘Führer’, between quotation marks, which could indicate an embracing of the implications of this term and therefore a lack of critical distance vis-à-vis Nazism. This is taken, with good reason, as a sign that the account does not even attempt to be objective (Jaeger 2015, 371– 372). Irving is a notorious Holocaust denier. Yet why Jaeger upholds a distinction between the author Irving and his supposed narrator is not entirely clear to me since we are neither dealing with literary fiction nor with a form of historiography where various narrative voices are used to probe the strength of arguments (through Einfühlung, cf. Chapter 6) or to offer a multifaceted account of historical events. What we are dealing with here is a completely different concept of (un)reliability, which in this case could be configured in two ways: either as heterodiegetic unreliable narration (Martens 2008), which is not restricted to fiction or nonfiction and seems particularly characteristic of documentary fiction, or, in terms of fictivity and fictitiousness, as belonging to the realm of criticism and the question of the trustworthiness of the sources and of historiographical accounts. Jaeger’s use of the terms has less (if anything) to do with the aesthetic strategy of narrative unreliability in literary fiction, which can cause pleasure in the reader.

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among both terms seems to aim at a political compromise – one which acknowledges that the Jews were not the only victims of Nazi crimes but simultaneously does not fail to recognise that the Nazi ideology (and policy) was preoccupied with the so-called Jewish Question. That desire for compromise is legitimate. Whether the distribution is the most accurate way of articulating it is a different matter. What is sure is that discursively, the distribution has not successfully materialised – at least not in the German context, where the best-known term remains ‘Holocaust’ (von Glasenapp 2006, 128). The second attempt is a reaction to Young’s summary that an author’s choice for a variant tells us as much about the particular understanding of this period by the name[r] as it does about the events themselves. The differences among names also explain the great gulfs in understanding between different nations and people, reflecting disparate experiences of the period as well as the different shapes respective national mythologies and ideologies necessarily confer on events. (1988b, 87)

The reaction consists in a relativisation of the importance of terminology. Robert Eaglestone states that the co-presence of terms like ‘Holocaust’, ‘Shoah’, and ‘Churban’ are “signs of coming to terms with the events in different ways” (Eaglestone 2004, 2 n.4). His way out of the problem of choice is by adhering to the “standard academic practice of referring to the events as the ‘Holocaust’, though this already shows how the events have been ‘normalized’” (Eaglestone 2004, 2 n.4). Around the same time, Dan Stone “think[s] that it is less important to argue about the name which is imposed on those events” and emphasises that ‘Holocaust’ is problematic but, in legitimising his opting of this term, cites “pragmatic rather than ideological reasons – it simply has more currency than the other choices” (Stone 2003, xvi). And Ruth Klüger, to come to the second author in my corpus who has commented on this issue, refers to these debates in weiter leben, only to remark that, contrary to many academic considerations, the ultimate choice of name is irrelevant: “[o]b das hebräische ‘Shoah’ ein geeigneteres Wort sei [als das Wort ‘Holocaust’], wie neuerdings behauptet wird, kümmert mich nicht: Solange es nur irgendein Wort gibt, das sich ohne Umschweife und Nebensätze gebrauchen läßt” (wl, 233; I don’t care particularly, as long as there is a word, any word, that unambiguously refers to what we are talking about without the need for a lengthy circumlocution to pinpoint a particular catastrophe and distinguish it from others: StA, 181) because “[w]orüber man nicht spricht und schreibt, das bleibt unerledigt” (wl, 230; [a] concept without a name is like a stray dog or a feral cat. To domesticate it, you have to call it something: StA, 181).

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What transpires from the previous considerations is this: metaphors carry emotions. That should not come as a complete surprise, considering the predominance of metaphor for our cognition – and emotionality should not be opposed to cognition but rather be seen as an integral part of it.³³ Metaphors not only carry emotional presuppositions, they are also widely used to express emotionality, as is catachresis. This will be outlined in Chapter 2.

1.4 Matters of terminology (II): theory of fiction There are three urgent reasons for including a terminological clarification concerning ‘fiction’ and its derivative and oppositional terms. At the first and most specific level, the topic of the Shoah posits such a sensitivity to all questions pertaining to fiction and reality that a precise terminology is even more important: if there is disagreement (which is probably unavoidable on such topics), let it not be because of terminological misunderstandings. Second, at a slightly more general level, the genres which make up the corpus – encyclopaedic and documentary literature, autobiography and historiography – necessitate such an explanation, for although the institutional model would label the first two as fiction and the latter two as nonfiction, the four genres pertain to a ‘grey zone’ between these polarities³⁴ – if one assumes, that is, that literary texts beyond these genres can be easily classified along this schema (but that does not interest us here). Polemical debates concerning the status of fact and fiction in documentary literature, autobiography and historiography have, moreover, left their discursive mark on the way these texts are conceived and read, not in the least due to ethical implications. Third, at the most general level, the theory of fiction is marked by a large but nuanced vocabulary – a vocabulary that easily leads to misunderstandings, especially when working across languages. This means that no use of the terminology can go unchallenged, only that it needs to be rendered explicit and motivated.

 There is no doubt that emotions may cloud judgement, and that emotions are stirred to cloud judgement; the problem here is not emotionality but the purposefully constrained perspective informing judgement. Judgement may be clouded by wrong statistics and faulty reasoning as well, which need not be the consequence of a steered emotionalization.  A term that some readers may consider offensive, especially considering the topic of this book and Primo Levi’s use of the term in an ethical sense; but I would argue that precisely Levi’s candidness and sense for ambiguities compels us to challenge binary oppositions in our schemes of interpretation and classification – without resorting to a wishy-washy, all too easy relativism.

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Whereas German narratology has come to a consensus on the difference between ‘fiktiv/Fiktivität’ (referring to the ontological status of the narrated), ‘fiktional/Fiktionalität’ (the mode of communication in which, for example, novels are produced and read) and ‘Fiktion’ (which comprises both elements),³⁵ precise English equivalents are not at hand. On the contrary, as Irina Rajewsky demonstrates, the English terminology does not distinguish as strongly between the ontological and sociological components: “[f]ictionality as the nominalized form of fictional thus primarily denotes the property of ‘being’ fiction/al” (2020, 33; emphasis removed). Thus, it may be translated as ‘fiktiv’ and as ‘fiktional’; the imagined translator’s decision would depend on the context. Rajewsky’s overview also makes clear that ‘fictive’ may be used in the meaning of ‘fiktional’ as well as ‘fiktiv’ – when referring to “‘possible’ or ‘fictive’ […] or ‘closed’ worlds” (35), both meanings conflate, as they do in ‘fictionality’. Nevertheless, I will use ‘fictional(ity)’ and ‘fictive’ in their ‘German’ meanings – at the risk of sounding slightly estranged to the English ear – whenever a sharp distinction needs to be made: ‘fictional’ refers to the communicative/sociological element; ‘fictive’ to the ontological. There is common ground between German and English in the unacademic use of ‘fiction’ or ‘Fiktion’ in the meaning of ‘falsehood’ – a sign of Plato’s legacy. Fictitious (‘fingiert’) differs from fictive and fictional in a very specific way: if I were to check in a hotel under the name Smith, that would be a fictitious name – not a fictive one since the name Smith is real; it is merely not mine. It would not be a fictional name for the simple reason that the clerk would have no reason to believe that my name is not Smith and that we were engaging in a setting in which this does not even matter. Thus, while lies are certainly not fictional (and good lies do not even feature entirely fictive utterances), their content is fictitious per definition. What about the opposite of ‘fiction’ et al.? I opt, with Alexander Bareis (2008, 69) and Kendall Walton (1990, 70 – 75), to use nonfictional and nonfiction instead of ‘factual’. There are, I believe, good reasons for doing so: ‘factual’ (as it has become used in ‘continental’ English) is a false friend of the German neologism ‘faktual’. But ‘factual’ is translated as ‘faktisch’, and the realms of fiction and facts are not mutually exclusive: facts are found in fictional narratives, and the realm of nonfiction comprises more than merely facts. Indeed, emotions are something very real while they do not in se belong to the factual level. More-

 Zipfel (2001) offers a detailed terminological schema. The fact that ‘Fiktion’ comprises of both demonstrates that ‘fiktiv’ is not as neutral as its belonging to ontology– not epistemology – would imply: it is value-laden in the sense that it should only be found in fiction.

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over, Gérard Genette, who is credited with introducing the term ‘factual narration’, justifies this problematic (as he admits himself) term by positing that the alternative ‘nonfiction’ would, again, reinstate the privileged status of fiction within narratology – which he wants to avoid (Genette 1990, 756 n.2).³⁶ These are no concerns of mine: in the context of the Shoah, fiction does not quite enjoy a privileged connotation (cf. infra), yet ‘nonfiction’ is not the term used to stress an account’s ‘authenticity’ to distinguish it from suspicious fiction.³⁷ What does fictionalisation mean? Is the ‘fiction’ implied in ‘fictionalisation’ not a negative idea, just as ‘liberty’ in ‘liberation’ is negative – defining it in terms of and in opposition to what the default (in ‘fictionalisation’), or the current (in ‘liberation’), situation is (cf. Arendt 1963, 22)? Understood as such, ‘fictionalisation’ would refer to a nonfictional story, or a narrative, being rendered more fictional through the formal or content-related choices made by the author: relevant omissions, added or changed details or plot elements, unmediated and reliable access to the cognitive processes of the characters, etc. (cf. Cohn 1999, 117– 119) – and this is the way in which Paul Dawson understands the term (2015, 82). In their reply to Dawson, Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan and Richard Walsh suggest that fictionalisation could also mean, however, “the act of signaling fictionality” (2015, 105). In Chapter 4, I will argue that such acts may happen through the most obvious signposts of fictionality – the author’s name differing from the narrator’s, the occurrence of ‘unnatural’ narrative strategies (e. g. speaking animals), etc. – but that documentary literature, through its avowed intertextuality, offers (weak though these may be) clues that the supposedly nonfictional part has been tampered with as well. Moreover, the way in which ‘fictionalisation’ is understood will, at least for the case of Capesius, have a significant influence as to the reader’s moral judgement concerning this tampering (provided that these clues have been investigated). The terminology above, as used in the institutional model, may offer a nuanced vocabulary for theoretical reflection and the analysis of texts pertaining to hybrid genres such as documentary literature. It may also acknowledge, abstractly, that context is one category that bears on the reputation of fiction, but it cannot quite concretely explain why the reputation of fiction in the context of the Shoah is rather troubled when compared to fiction in other contexts and when compared to nonfictional representations of the Shoah. That is largely due to the fact that the institutional model, elegantly formulated though it

 This justification is reprinted in Fiction et Diction (1991), cf. Rajewsky (2020, 31).  Rajewsky offers an overview of other problems with Genette’s distinction, but they are not stringent for my use (2020, 32– 33).

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may be, relies on tautology: according to this model, fictional is what is generally read as fictional and thus ought to be read as fictional, at the risk of being an incompetent reader (cf. Franzen 2018a, 276). The advantage of the model is that it opens our analytical perspective for diachronic and cultural variation; but it can only be the starting point of any further considerations. Our decision for reading texts as fiction – a decision which is conscious only when dealing with texts and authors who destabilise the distinction between them – is, ultimately, a strategic one, as I will try to illustrate in Chapter 3. For the sake of completeness, I will briefly address the suspicions of fiction when it comes to depicting the Shoah – a suspicion that has not died away despite the heyday of postmodernism and despite an overabundance of fictional representations in middlebrow and lowbrow culture. Let that be the first caveat: the suspicion of fiction may be prevalent among academics, reviewers and artists, but in all likelihood it correlates with the training of theoretical reflection – be that as a historian, a philosopher, an observer of art or a creator of art. Frankly, large sections of the audiences do not particularly care about this; else depictions such as the aforementioned TV series Holocaust or Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (1997), which are problematic for various reasons and from various perspectives, would not have enjoyed the popularity that they did.

1.5 The Shoah and fiction: a troubled relation In order to illustrate the scepticism that fictional Shoah depictions have to reckon with, even if they stem from a victim’s pen, I would like to discuss two reviews of a veritable succès de scandale that will not recur in the actual corpus – but which is marked by the anti-pathos of the grotesque: Edgar Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi und der Friseur (1977). Reviewing it for Die Welt in 1977, Friedrich Torberg – himself a survivor in exile – admits that the wariness with which he started to read the novel was intensified at the beginning of his lecture: wenn ich in der publizistischen Resonanz […] zu lesen bekomme, daß es sich […] um einen ‘Schelmenroman’ handelt, zucke ich zusammen. Schelmereien vor dem Hintergrund von sechs Millionen Leichen? Das kann nicht gut werden. Es fängt auch nicht gut an. Das Mißtrauen, mit dem ich an die Lektüre des Buches heranging, erhielt immer neue Nahrung. In einer deutschen Kleinstadt von 30 000 Einwohnern, wo 1907 die Handlung einsetzt, hat ein jüdischer Friseur wohl kaum Chaim Finkelstein geheißen. Nichts gegen Finkelstein – aber Chaim? Der Mann ist Mitglied des ‘Deutschen Tierschutzvereins’ und des ‘Vereins der Pflanzenfreunde’ – und knallt seinen Mitbürgern, auf deren Wohlwollen er nicht nur geschäftlich angewiesen ist, einen herausfordernd jüdischen Namen ins Gesicht? Nun, sei’s drum. Er kommt aus Galizien und will den Chaim, den seine zweifelslos frommen Eltern

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ihm mitgegeben haben, […] beibehalten. […] Aber daß er seinen Sohn auch noch Itzig nennt, lasse ich mir nicht einreden. Schon deshalb nicht, weil Itzig kein richtiger Name ist. Es ist eine Rufform von Isaak, mit unüberhörbarem Beiklang von Spott, und zwar von deutschem Spott. (Torberg 1996, 73) when I read in literary criticism, that this is […] a ‘picaresque’ novel, I shudder. Mischief in the wake of six million corpses? That cannot be good. It does not start well, either. My initial mistrust was incessantly fed. In a small German town with 30,000 inhabitants, where the plot starts in 1907, a Jewish barber would not have been called Chaim Finkelstein. No problem with Finkelstein – but Chaim? The man is a member of the ‘German Animal Welfare Protection Organisation’ and of the ‘Organisation of Plant Friends’ – and would sling a difficult Jewish name in the faces of his fellow citizens, on whose benevolence he relies, and not solely for professional reasons? Well, so be it. He is an immigrant from Galicia and wants to stick Chaim, which his doubtlessly pious parents have given him. […] But I cannot accept that he would name his son Itzig, simply because it is not a real name. Itzig is a nickname for Isaak, but carries an unmistakable derogatory connotation, and a particularly German one at that.

Torberg articulates a suspicion of (historical) fictivity, not fictionality. To be sure, this suspicion is fed by Torberg’s pre-existing familiarity with genre-related conventions: a subversive humour and a reversal of societal standards. In the context of genocide, this could indeed lead to suspicions of relativising the genocide, or even exonerating the murderers – even though the reviewer knows that the author is a survivor himself. Torberg fears that the resurfacing of antisemitic stereotypes – stereotypes that prepared the psychological and ideological ground for genocide – may in hindsight be understood as justifying these events. Torberg’s argument is, therefore, that the falsehood of such implications must not be overlooked just because they are set in a fictional setting since they correspond to implications with severe consequences in the ‘real world’: “[d]as sind, bitte vielmals, keine Haarspaltereien” (Torberg 1996, 73; I insist that I am not splitting hairs).³⁸ The second review is written by Heinrich Böll, who managed to stylise himself as both the moral conscience of West Germany (albeit a bad conscience) and – at times – as its enfant terrible. Böll’s review (1977) is marked by a relentless sarcasm, not against Hilsenrath but against West German society, and it celebrates Hilsenrath’s novel as a showcase of the hypocrisy of that society. Hilsenrath

 Let it be added, for the sake of completeness, that the continuation of Torberg’s review demonstrate that Hilsenrath does manage to convince Torberg by depicting a perpetrator who shows no remorse whatsoever and who cannot be exonerated – neither by earthly justice, nor by a metaphysical one (Torberg 1996, 74– 75). But that the clichés are uttered by a Nazi mass murderer, who must be – by his very activities if not his ideology – considered unreliable (cf. McGlothlin 2014, 163 – 168), is not an argument that Torberg brings up.

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can accomplish this exposure, so Böll suggests, because of the historical veracity present in the novel. But this veracity is not situated in the details: these are grotesque and only betray the narrator’s unrepentance and his adherence to National Socialism. Instead, the veracity lies within the broader phenomena: “Hilsenrath bedient sich nachweisbar historischer Fakten: des Antisemitismus, der Arisierung, der Morde in den Konzentrationslagern, des politischen und moralischen Wirrwarrs der Nachkriegsjahre” (Böll 1996, 76; Hilsenrath refers to documented historical facts: antisemitism, ‘Aryanisation’, murders in the concentration camps, the political and moral confusions in the postwar years). Yet Böll resorts not merely to factuality, but also to plausibility: [Hilsenraths] Helden, diesen grausigen Max Schulz, der einen abenteuerlichen Weg des Überlebens findet, könnte man sich vor den Schranken eines KZ-Prozesses vorstellen: gebrochen, grau, ein zittriger Pensionär, der nach dem Krieg wieder Haare schnitt und Bartstoppeln rasierte; vielleicht mitleiderregend, weil keiner ihm so recht zutrauen würde, daß er getan hat, was er getan hat. (Böll 1996, 76) One can imagine Hilsenrath’s hero, this ghastly Max Schulz, whose journey towards survival had been adventurous, standing in front of the barriers in a trial on the concentration camps, grey, a shaky, retired man, who cut hairs and shaved beards after the war, invoking compassion perhaps, because no one can really believe that he would have committed the deeds he had indeed committed.

Ultimately, Torberg and Böll have the same medal in their hands, but they look at its opposing sides: for Torberg, the initial elements that converge with the antisemitic lies of the Nazis (and are thus utterly implausible) risk to render the entire novel a very dubious enterprise, until a more abstract truth shines through: there is no worldly atonement for genocide, nor can any be expected in an afterlife. When Böll engages with details, he picks an example he deems plausible – although Schulz is, of course, fictive – but focuses mainly on historical events and constellations. As to the details, therefore, both Torberg and Böll base their opinions on their knowledge of the real world – a standard criterium in the moral and literary assessment of Shoah literature. As to the ‘grander’ questions, they have different interests: Torberg focuses on what lies ‘beyond’ history, while Böll remains firmly rooted ‘in’ it. It may be noted that Der Nazi und der Friseur lends itself to both metaphysical and modest frameworks for describing the Shoah and its consequences. As is well known, Hilsenrath wrote Der Nazi und der Friseur in his native language but had difficulties in finding a German publisher. This led to the novel being published in translation six years before the German text was published. In the English translation, Max Schulz dies and, upon meeting God, accuses him of being guiltier than Max Schulz himself – since God did not interfere despite his omnipotence

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(Hilsenrath 1996, 223 – 224). The novel, thus, originally begot a strong metaphysical dimension, which Hilsenrath scrapped before publishing the book in German since the scene could be read as relativising the Shoah or the perpetrator’s guilt (Hilsenrath 1996, 224). In the German version, which Hilsenrath authorises as the ‘right’ one, the novel stops short of metaphysics: the death of Schulz is alluded to, and that constitutes the end of the novel. While Torberg is wary of the apparent confirmation of the purely fictive claims of Nazi ideology in Hilsenrath’s novel, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi notices a more general suspicion of fiction when it comes to Shoah depictions. This suspicion is not linked to a specific novel, nor is it necessarily linked to Nazi ideology shimmering through: [t]here is an unarticulated but uneasy sense that a different logic pertains in regard to “reality” when one crosses over from history or autobiography into imaginative literature; the suspicion that fiction must be somehow subversive of truth is repeatedly manifested in the insistence on the part of those who write memoirs that what they are writing is not “a fiction.” It is this claim on which the documentary writers whom we will consider also base their authority. (DeKoven Ezrahi 1980, 8)

Indeed, James Young’s ‘rhetoric of fact’ analysis coincides with the last sentence. Underlying this phrase is a Platonian suspicion of fiction, the “assumption, […] which is shared by so many memoirists and historians, is that only ‘facts’ tell the truth and that fiction somehow lies” (DeKoven Ezrahi 1980, 25). This obviously runs counter to Sir Philipp Sidney’s A Defence of Poesy, in which he claims that “the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth” (2004, 34): if a poet does not lay claim to the referentiality of his utterances, he cannot be accused of lying – after all, the reader is supposed to willingly suspend his disbelief to “constitute poetic faith” (cf. Coleridge 2014, 208). There are, as Ned Curthoys formulates, “persistent anxieties that fictional representations of the Holocaust are ‘tantamount to making a fiction of the Holocaust’” (2019, 19).³⁹ Lawrence Langer suggests that these fears can (and will) only be overcome with the passing of time, when the specific details of the atrocities at Babi Yar and Auschwitz are forgotten, when their associations with the Holocaust have passed beyond historical memory and they become mere place-names as obscure to their audiences as Borodino and Tagliamento are to Tolstoy’s and Hemingway’s readers today. (1995, 76)

 Curthoys quotes Vice (2000, 1) but refers to Adams and Vice (2012).

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Whether that day will come or not is difficult to foresee, and that day may arrive in some countries and societies sooner than in others, but today is certainly not that day. Jürg Amann’s Der Kommandant, a monologue based on the autobiography of Rudolf Höss, the infamous commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau from its installation in 1940 until its evacuation in 1945 (with the exception of a brief spell at a Berlin desk job), contains an editorial note explaining why Amann felt the need to stick to the perpetrator’s own words: [a]ngesichts der Wirklichkeit ist alles Erfinden obszön. Vor allem da, wo man die Wirklichkeit haben kann. […] Das habe ich nie so stark empfunden, wie als “Die Wohlgesinnten” von Jonathan Littell vor ein paar Jahren auf Deutsch erschienen sind: die affirmative Einfühlung in einen NS-Täter in Form eines Romans. (2011, 107) In the light of reality, every act of invention is obscene. Especially when one can have reality. […] This never seemed so clear to me as it did when Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones was published in German a few years ago: the affirmative act of empathy for a National Socialist perpetrator in the guise of a novel.

These words do not need be contemplated extensively since they speak for themselves: there is no need for fictional depictions of the Shoah given extensive nonfictional documents and narratives of this cluster of events. Fiction, so the argument posits, is even dangerous, for it enables “empathy for the devil” (McGlothlin 2016, 252), and it is indeed remarkable that the suspicion of fiction(ality) is particularly outspoken in the context of perpetrator fiction. Amann’s use of the adjective ‘affirmative’ testifies to his lack of faith in the reader’s capability to engage critically with an obviously untrustworthy narrator. Indeed, it does not occur to Amann (though he is certainly not alone) that this untrustworthiness is translated in plain narrative unreliability in Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (2006; transl. The Kindly Ones, 2009) and elsewhere – and that these narrators pose challenges to our sensitivities and our self-perception as the ‘good guys’ (cf. Curthoys 2019, 20). The scepticism vis-à-vis fiction (albeit not always vis-à-vis the reader) is notable when one looks at prefaces of literary texts where either matters of fictionality and fictivity are complicated or where a Sidneyan defence of fiction is put to the fore. It may come as quite a surprise that such prefaces are often written by the authors of these fictional texts themselves – as if they need to justify their poetic choices. Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s Ark (1982) is one such example: [t]o use the texture and devices of a novel to tell a true story is a course which has frequently been followed in modern writing. It is the one I have chosen to follow here, […] because the novel’s techniques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity and magnitude as Oskar. I have attempted to avoid all fiction though, since fiction would debase the record,

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and to distinguish between reality and the myths which are likely to attach themselves to a man of Oskar’s stature. Sometimes it has been necessary to attempt to reconstruct conversations of which Oskar and others have left only the briefest record. (2007, 13 – 14)

Keneally’s claim that the novel as a genre is an appropriate means of depicting the ambiguities in Oskar Schindler’s personal character reflects the notion that reading novels allows for differentiation and nuance – a notion currently supported by cognitive narratologists.⁴⁰ Yet Keneally does not explain why this is so, if not for the novel’s traditionally fictive content.⁴¹ On the contrary, fiction, at least when depicting the Shoah, is tacitly considered as equal to lies and thus immoral. So far, Keneally fits DeKoven Ezhari’s description neatly. Nonetheless, he avows to resorting to fictive elements when the hiatuses in the historical record threaten the account’s narrativity. Keneally seems torn between a desire for narrativity (which entails a degree of fictivity in the recreation of dialogues) and the suspicion of fiction in the case of the Shoah. A second example is Douglas Skopp’s afterword to his perpetrator novel, Shadows Walking (2009): [i]n 1990, when I realized that I could not add anything significant to the formal scholarship on medical ethics in Nazi Germany, I decided to write a firmly grounded, historical novel. In it, I could more creatively explore, could try to imagine and make “real”, if you will, the mind and motives of what I believed to be an “ordinary” Nazi doctor. […] [I]t allows me to raise two questions: first, what, if anything, can a perpetrator do to redeem himself? and second, what should a responsible society, based on the ‘rule of law’, do if it becomes aware of his deeds? (2015, 448)

Although Skopp argues in defence of fiction, the asteism betrays a more fundamental unease: fiction comes in as second-best after historiography. Nonetheless, his defence is reminiscent of Jonathan Littell’s, who claims he has written a novel featuring an autodiegetic Nazi war criminal narrator in order to understand what he himself might have done, had he “been born in 1913” (Uni 2008).⁴² Moreover, Littell uses fiction as a way for answering questions he

 To name but two theoreticians: Zunshine (2006) and Vermeule (2010) take such positions, arguing that literature enhances our cognitive abilities.  To be fair, neither does cognitive narratology, which is overall less preoccupied with the culturally defined question of the appropriateness of fiction in any context.  This is remarkable, since Littell has a Jewish ancenstry. His remark demonstrates, however, that his understanding of ‘being Jewish’ is not a matter of genealogy but rather one of history and socialisation. As such, it stands in the same tradition as Peter Weiss’s understanding. Weiss tells us of his fascination with the aesthetics of Nazism as a boy and a young man in Abschied von den Eltern (1961, transl. Leavetaking, 2014) – until it was made clear to him that

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poses himself – those concerning the nature of state crimes and those concerning the motivation of perpetrators (Jesús Ruiz Mantilla 2007). Similarly, Skopp explains in an afterword that his novel was the result of this desire for comprehension: Shadows Walking “grew out of my determination to understand the participation of physicians in the Nazi regime” (Skopp 2015, 445). So far, Skopp and Littell seem in line: fiction may offer insights in historical events and may even help us answer questions about the past. Yet there is a difference between both authors. Skopp’s choice for writing a novel rather than a monograph is, again, an ambiguous one: I soon saw that any historical account I could offer would neither be as detailed and comprehensive, nor as analytically incisive as any that these scholars [Robert Jay Lifton, Christopher Browning, Henry Friedlander, et al.; TV] had written. I lacked the intellectual stamina and self-confidence one must have to confront these atrocities as they had. I also saw that archival research alone was not going to provide me with answers to my questions that would satisfy my need to understand why a well-meaning physician would willingly commit […] “crimes against humanity”. (2015, 447)

Even though there is still a noticeable need for explaining the use of fiction, fiction seems redeemed, but only somewhat; and even when fiction is not connoted with deceit or a lack of accuracy, authors feel the need to ‘authenticate’ their fiction as conforming to the historical record. Martin Amis’s labels include an acknowledgements section and epilogue titled That which happened to his second Shoah novel, The Zone of Interest (2014), in which he professes his being “indebted to the loci classici of the field”, naming eighteen historians (2015, 303) and a further one and a half pages with specific references. Amis also mentions a guide “[f]or the tics and rhythms of German speech” (304; though it must be said that the quality of Amis’s rendition of the German language in the novel is questionable, and not just because of the removal of diacritics); and in which he mentions his “only conscious liberty with the factual record” (310).⁴³ All three novels – Keneally’s, Skopp’s and Amis’s – are perpetrator novels. The explicit and implicit formulations found in the prefaces and epilogues justify

he was considered Jewish by the Nazis. But even later, during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, there was no doubt for him that had it not been for this attribution, he might have become a perpetrator rather than a victim (cf. Festjens and Martens 2015, 54).  Remarkably, in his first perpetrator novel, Time’s Arrow (1991), the indebtment is not as strong, referring merely to Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors and to Primo Levi’s oeuvre (Amis 2003, 175 – 176). But these are framed more as intertextual cadre, not as legitimising the novel’s fictionality (which is unmistakable, since this novel’s structuring element consists of the reversal of chronology).

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the use of fiction in such ‘risky’ texts; however, they also tacitly link the use of fiction to risk. Raul Hilberg goes further and posits that any interpretation of the Shoah, i. e. any representation which goes beyond the strictly factual, carries risks: [h]ow much more removed from the actuality of reportage are those works whose authors have introduced a theory or theme or just a visible thought to which the evidence has been subordinated? These recreators of the Holocaust, be they historians, sculptors, architects, designers, novelists, playwrights or poets, are molding something new. They may be shrewd, insightful, or masterful, but they take a larger risk, and all the more so, if they take poetic licence to subtract something from the crude reality for the sake of a heightened effect. (Hilberg 1988, 22– 23; cf. Prager 2005, 81 n.18)

At the bottom of the risk ladder, then, are those who allegedly do not interpret the Shoah but ‘merely’ depict it; half-way are those who depict either abstractly or to illustrate an abstract principle; at the top of the ladder stand those who depict the Shoah in fiction. Two remarks: how odd it is to read these words in a text from Hilberg’s hand: while Destruction is a very detailed description of the destruction process and thus seems, at first sight, to be free of theoretical frameworks of interpretation, this is of course not the case: Hilberg’s choice for focusing on the administrative side of the Shoah and his methodology already is a ‘subordinating of the facts to a theory or theme or a visible thought’, and a risky one indeed, as Chapter 5 should make clear. Moreover, as Lawrence Langer points out, the fact that, tautologically, the dead cannot speak means that every depiction of the Shoah is a mediation: “[t]here is no closure, because the victims who have not survived […] have left no personal voice behind. They can only be evoked, spoken about” (L. L. Langer 1991, 21). Such considerations may lead towards a slightly more relaxed attitude towards the Shoah in fiction and to both ask about the function of fictionality (and to look for better criteria for criticism). Fictionality is both a category for the structure of this thesis and a category of analysis. Both are, of course, intertwined. A short glance at the table of contents will reveal that the main authors are sorted along two axes. First, there is a decrease of fictionality, i. e. whereas Sebald undeniably writes fictional texts (although there is a strong tendency towards autobiographical and biographic readings, which, I will try to argue, cannot challenge the fictional status of the texts), Hilberg undeniably writes nonfictional texts. While the reader may draw the conclusion that, therefore, many texts are ‘in-between’, I refute such simplistic formulations: either texts are fictional or nonfictional (according to the institutional model), but that does not mean that strategies of fictionalisation or authentication may not occur. Indeed, they are omnipresent, and they bear on the texts’ pathos strategies. How they are shaped, how we can detect them, and

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what function they fulfil are some of the main concerns in this book. Aside from this axis, there is a second, albeit less straightforward one. Put crudely, there is an evolution of authors who see themselves between the ranks of the perpetrators but represent the victim’s point of view towards authors who are clearly and undeniably victims but who take the perpetrator’s perspective as their focalisation. Thus, Sebald, who is, of course, obviously not a perpetrator, distances himself extremely from the perpetrators and opts for a perspective akin to postmemory (Hirsch) or the empathic listener (Laub). Schlesak, who grew up among the perpetrators, recuperates the voice of the victim in Frankfurt in order to shed light on two individual perpetrators, Victor Capesius and Roland Albert, who are depicted as utterly untrustworthy sources for an account of what Auschwitz was like – not to mention what they themselves were actually doing there. Ruth Klüger is a survivor of the camps and of a death march, from which she could flee, and could not care less about the perpetrator or his perspective. Raul Hilberg, survivor in exile, has taken the perpetrator’s perspective as the starting point for explaining how the Shoah could happen.

1.6 Methodological premises: models of memory Acknowledging that closure is unachievable is not merely a methodical insight necessitated by epistemological limitations; it is also an ethical and political stance: it amounts to an embracing of ambiguity and ambivalence, a desire to explain from where these stem, but without wishing to dissolve them. The texts in the corpus justify this stance: Klüger points at such difficulties that emerge from the discrepancy between desire(s) and (perceived) needs, between the individual and the collective (whichever collective that may be), between idealism and the imperfect world that we live in: Christophs Gesellschaft machte es leichter, nicht über das unverständliche Unrecht meiner Herkunft zu sprechen, und gleichzeitig war da der Drang, doch darüber zu sprechen, es miteinzubeziehen in den neuen Anfang. Es war beides, Sowohl/Als-auch, undurchsichtiges Nebelzwielicht, wo die Schwermut ihren Ursprung hat und die Gespenster gedeihen. (wl, 213) Christoph’s company made it easier to not speak about the inexplicable injustice of my ancestry, yet simultaneously, the desire to speak about it was there – the desire to include it in our new beginnings. It was both, an ‘as-well-as’, a foggy twilight, where melancholy has its origins and ghosts thrive. (transl. mine)

Such considerations are not only held by scholars of literature or literary authors but are increasingly held among historians as well – and not only amongst those

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historians who lived through the period that is the object of their studies, such as Raul Hilberg, Otto Dov Kulka or Saul Friedländer. On the contrary, in old age Kulka and Friedländer recollect how they tried to adhere to a scientific discourse which does not betray any emotionality at all. Kulka even “assume[s] that readers of my historical publications will have identified [him] unequivocally with an attitude of strict and impersonally remote research”, adding that “few are aware of the existence within me of a dimension of silence, of a choice I made to sever the biographical from the historical past” (Kulka 2014, xi). Friedländer does not speak of a biographical silence within his historiographical discourse, but his metaphors point to a similar uncoupling of experience and history: [a]t some stage in the seminary, I stopped longing for my parents and started worrying about how I would express happiness upon their return. I cried profusely when told they would not come back, but wasn’t that expected of me? Soon thereafter, I recognised that nothing could touch me profoundly. Later I often used a metaphor to describe my incapacity to establish a normal emotional relationship: I was like an insect whose antennas had been torn off. It was not easy to recognise this from the outside – I smiled a lot, knew the right things to say, and readily adapted to fast-changing circumstances. People who knew me well were not fooled, however. “You are incapable of emotion,” I was not infrequently told. “Your soul is arid.” The emotional paralysis applied to my relationships with people only. I could become very enthusiastic about a cause (Zionism, for example) or very emotional when watching a film, reading a book, or listening to music. In short, there was hope for me. (Friedländer 2016c, 22)

This distinction points to the status of emotionality within academic research – a status which has shifted over the last 30 years under the influence of trauma theory on memory studies (as Kulka’s and Friedländer’s belated avowals indicate). Indeed, the strict distinction between memory and history (and historiography) can no longer be upheld. Historians conduct research into areas ‘close to home’, and this observation is not restricted to historians who have lived through these events. Mary Fulbrook, born in 1951, notes in the preface to A Small Town Near Auschwitz, the subject of which is the role of a minor Nazi official called Udo Klausa in the deportation of the Jews of Będzin to Auschwitz, that “there are close personal connections between his family and mine that troubled me deeply, once I realized both what his wartime role had been, and how little I had realized anything at all about his past during the many decades when I knew him personally” (2012, v). That avowed proximity to history does not mean that there is no discomfort as its influence on methodology, but Fulbrook suspects that realisations like hers must be occurring to second- and third-generation historians all over Europe, implying that it can be a motor for historical research rather than a hindrance. Consequently, her book is as much about Klausa and the deportations from Będzin as it is about “ambivalence and ambiguity

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in history, about the personal meanings and interpretations of historical accounts” (vi). Methodologically, that means that objectivity can only be maintained by, “[d]espite inevitably having more sympathy for one or another side in past conflicts, [exercising] our scholarly capacity for empathy across different perspectives” (Fulbrook 2017, 59). Scholars of memory, too, point, directly and indirectly, to the implication of one’s own subjectivity in academic analysis – and frequently does this have political and ethical bearing on the ways in which one conducts research, on the sensitivities of language and of commemorative communities to which one does not necessarily belong. In short, memory studies challenge the idea of a purely objective academic discourse. That does not mean, of course, that it no longer relies on “well-defined […] categories” (Kulka 2014, xi) – merely that there is an increased awareness of their ideological implications as well. I will outline three interlinked models which can inform both the analysis of the primary works respectively describe my own reading practices. First comes Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory as articulated in the eponymous monograph (2009) – a model that at first sight practically imposes itself on Sebald’s prose, most notably on Die Ringe des Saturn and Austerlitz. The premise of Rothberg’s concept is that cultural memory is not linked to strictly severed commemorative communities, that to advocate such an idea could only lead to victims competing for awareness and compensation and that this ultimately is not fruitful for any community marked by trauma. Instead, he suggests (but not without a touch of prescriptivism) that memories are exchanged, can shed new light on other traumata and can foster solidarity between oppressed communities. To understand the dynamics of such exchanges, Rothberg suggests redefining the concept of the screen memory, as it was outlined by Miriam Hansen. She defines screen memories as memories that serve to cove[r] up […] another traumatic event […] that cannot be approached directly. More than just an ideological displacement (which it is no doubt as well), the fascination with the Holocaust could be read as a kind of screen allegory behind/through which the nation is struggling to find a proper mode of memorializing traumata closer to home. (M. B. Hansen 1996, 311)

It is clear from her definition that Hansen considers the memory of the Shoah as the screen memory par excellence, which in the American context may serve to find a language to commemorate the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its aftereffects, the genocide of the Native Americans or the aftermath of the Vietnam war – or to avoid commemorating these painful histories. To be sure, her formulation may make it sound as if this were an apolitical form of commemoration, a

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psychoanalytical device aimed at protecting oneself from (re)traumatising memories. Yet Hansen is aware of this problem, which is due to the metaphorical use of the concept of memory whenever this is used to refer to the ways in which societies, not individuals, deal with their past(s). Her critique is political, as becomes obvious when she claims that as a screen memory the memory of the Shoah allows the Americans to focus on the defeat of another nation: Nazi Germany. This effect is all the stronger since, through this metanarrative, the Americans can perceive themselves as the ‘good guys’ who brought about the defeat of the Nazis and who liberated the concentration camps (M. B. Hansen 1996, 311). This, in turn, may serve as a lightning conductor for metanarratives in which the Americans are not as easily cast as the ‘good guys’. Rothberg points to the Freudian interpretation that Hansen brings to the metaphor of memory but offers a slightly different reading of Freud – one that does not emphasise the antagonism of memories as implied in Hansen’s conceptualisation. In his reading, Freud already posits that memory is “multidirectional, even though powerful forces are always trying to shape it according to more or less rigid psychic or ideological parameters” (Rothberg 2009, 12). As such, screen memories are not merely a political, top-down imposition on memory, but an intrinsic characteristic of memory that lies in the suppression of painful memories by conserving other memories. But Rothberg does not want to lose the political edge – with good reason – and thus readjusts the definition of screen memories where it pertains to cultural memory: “it both hides and reveals that which has been suppressed” (Rothberg 2009, 14). As such, the move from personal, autobiographical memory (in which the screen memory has a soothing function) to cultural memory entails a shift: here, painful memories are confronted with each other (Rothberg 2009, 14). However, as Helen Finch reminds us, the framing of multidirectional constellations often underlies an autobiographical element: using Ruth Klüger’s unterwegs verloren as an example, she posits that surviving authors “make idiosyncratic and often unexpected links between the authors’ private experience of oppression and other political struggles [i. e. the anti-war movement during the Vietnam war]” (2018, 63). In other words, autobiographical and multidirectional memory are linked on both the personal and the cultural level; but of course, they are not synonyms – otherwise, one could not quite read Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn as multidirectional. The central premise of multidirectional memory is that it conceives of memory not as competitive but as “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (Rothberg

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2009, 3).⁴⁴ Memory, thus, forsakes closure, and so the prescriptive implication for memory studies is that its discourse should do so, too. Within such frameworks of comparison, the terms and premises of comparison need to be stipulated. Is the Shoah a unique event? Such a question forbids comparison altogether, but this position – which, at least in Germany, is the inheritance of the Historikerstreit – seems to be increasingly under pressure since it implies precisely a hierarchy amongst the victims of genocides, ethnic cleansings and other acts of violence on a mass scale. Yet comparisons can easily amount to dubious conflations – the debates concerning the air war and the expelling of German refugees from Central and Eastern Europe are an obvious case in point. How to get out of this conundrum? Susanne Knittel, indebted to Rothberg’s concept of multidirectionality, suggests the alternative term ‘singularity’ to describe both historical events and our reactions to them; this includes works of art and our interpretative efforts. In her understanding, singularity defies and enables comparison because, as Derek Attridge formulates, “[s]ingularity is not pure: it is constitutively impure, always open to contamination, grafting, accidents, reinterpretation, and recontextualisation. Nor is it inimitable: on the contrary, it is eminently imitable, and may give rise to a host of imitations” (2004, 63). This openness is reminiscent of James Young: “so long as we are dependent on the ‘vocabulary’ of our culture […], it may not be possible to generate entirely new responses to catastrophe” (Young 1988b, 192, emphasis added). Moreover, “the inventive singularity of the artwork [does not] simply reside in the historical past, available for retrospective enjoyment; […] it bridges, in a way that is not easy to explain, past and present” (Attridge 2004, 64). But that defiance of comparison does not mean that comparison is rendered impossible; on the contrary, considering that the notion of ‘uniqueness’ stems from “a time when refusing to compare the Holocaust to other atrocities was considered the appropriate ethical response […], as any comparison would have been seen as a domesticating gesture” but that “this prohibition against comparison itself [has become] a domesticating gesture” (Knittel 2020, 28), the burden of comparison has shifted. The notion of singularity defies the hitherto valid terms of comparison more than the principle of comparison itself: whereas a perceived ‘uniqueness’ of the event frames the impossibility of comparison in ontological terms (and thus renders any actual comparison suspicious), its framing as ‘singular’ shifts the question to the realm of reception and of (inter)subjectivity. According to Knittel, these shifts in attitudes towards comparison even

 Rothberg uses Dirk Moses’s metaphor of memory as a “zero-sum struggle over scarce resources” (Rothberg 2009, 3; cf. Moses 2005, 456).

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means that “the refusal or inability to draw comparisons and parallels between the Holocaust and other atrocities is in fact a failure to respond ethically to its singularity” (2020, 28). Intuitively, this is a valid point: to commemorate the Shoah while refusing to take notice of other ultraviolent legacies, not to mention contemporary ultraviolence, would easily be a matter of hypocrisy (especially for a Western European, non-German commemorator). But the question is whether such a strongly normative statement can be completely in line with the emphasis on the subjective side of singularity. To be sure, Knittel’s case studies and her biography (growing up close to the Grafeneck castle, where the Nazis installed a ‘euthanasia’ killing centre, the staff of which would later be staffing the Aktion Reinhard camps in Poland) demonstrate how that subjective side enables and necessitates comparison, and Knittel acknowledges that “not all comparisons are necessarily appropriate or ethical, and some may even be entirely frivolous or insensitive” (Knittel 2020, 28). That does not diminish her appeal since “others may afford genuine insight and provoke a sense of responsibility” (Knittel 2020, 28). The question is: who gets to decide the terms of comparison? These matters will largely underlie my analyses and occasionally flare up. A final word on singularity – and in defence of it: Ned Curthoys rightly points to the concern […] that an approach based on the ethics of reading for alterity, that is, a singular experience of self-transcendence prompted by the audacious singularity of the text, may displace careful attention to a novel’s pragmatics of communication, its artful, ironic, generic and intertextual positioning to the reader. (Curthoys 2019, 23)

Indeed, when Knittel notices that the demand for comparison is as much a domesticating gesture as its erstwhile discrediting used to be, she is not only documenting this trend but subscribing to it. The danger is, ironically, in closing off the canon to texts that supposedly carry a ‘risk’ – perpetrator fiction first and foremost – and in reinforcing the modernist poetics underlying trauma theory and many of the documentary and postmodernist depictions of the Shoah (cf. Rothberg 2000, 3 – 5; White 1992). This should certainly not be our aim – and there is a way out of this conundrum: Curthoys uses the term ‘singularity’ in a different (and narrower) sense than Attridge or Knittel by reducing it to a textual quality instead of seeing it as the intersubjective process between (imagined) author, text, and (imagined) reader. In that sense, Curthoys’s opposition of singularity and artfulness, irony, questions of genre, and intertextuality may be a false one; indeed, Attridge’s (and, to a lesser degree, Knittel’s) emphasis on the impurity of singularity and its giving cause to imitations poses at least the question of intertextuality quite urgently. I do stand by singularity, then, but do not let it de-

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termine my corpus, which contains a broad array of pragmatic communication strategies, which all come with risks – some more so than others. One such attempt is what Michael Rothberg’s calls traumatic realism. Rothberg outlines the two major epistemological stances towards the depiction of the Shoah: either one adheres that the Shoah is knowable and thus depictable, or one does not. While Rothberg admits that these lines do not run neatly according to genre or discipline, he broadly suggests that historians and sociologists are realists, whereas traumatised survivors, psychologists, philosophers and artists maintain that the horror cannot be adequately represented – and, in some variants, that any attempt to do so is blasphemous (2000, 4– 6). In an interdisciplinary move, he points to the pervasiveness of realism as a mode of representation after the Shoah but points out that it can no longer naïvely claim that texts can depict reality ‘as it is’. Psychological hindrances and the attempts at concealing it render it particularly problematic for the depiction of genocide. Traumatic realism, then, is situated between two manifestations of pathos: that of eyewitness testimony and that of aporia.⁴⁵ Underlying the models of multidirectionality, singularity and the historical uncanny (which will be discussed extensively in the context of W.G. Sebald) and traumatic realism is an epistemological realisation best formulated by Saul Friedländer. In the introduction to The Years of Persecution, he writes that Nazi persecutions and exterminations were perpetrated by ordinary people who lived and acted within a modern society not unlike our own, a society that had produced them as well as the methods and instruments for the implementation of their actions; the goals of these actions, however, were formulated by a regime, an ideology, and a political culture that were anything but commonplace. It is the relation between the uncommon and the ordinary, the fusion of the widely shared murderous potentialities of the world that is also ours and the peculiar frenzy of the Nazi apocalyptic drive against the mortal enemy, the Jew, that give both universal significance and historical distinctiveness to the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question.’ (Friedländer 2007, 6)

The uneasy relation between extremity and banality (traumatic realism; Rothberg 2000, 3), continuity and disruption (historical uncanny; cf. Knittel 2015, 2) and universality and particularity (which is exemplified in multidirectional memory)⁴⁶ – all modes of thinking specifically about the Shoah – correspond thus with Friedländer’s observation about the nature of the Nazi regime: at the same time highly familiar and highly peculiar. There is an epistemological

 Since Rothberg analyses weiter leben as a manifestation of traumatic realism, his concept will be further discussed in Chapter 5.  I owe thanks to Hans-Joachim Hahn for this insight.

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match, then, between the epistemology of historiography and various modes of memory; these need not be diametrically opposed at all costs. Moreover, the relation explains the relentless fascination in popular culture with this epoch – regardless of whether that fascination leads to new insights or to stereotypical appropriation – as well as the enduring political relevance of the Nazi regime and its crimes.

1.7 The cover of this book: Felix Nussbaum’s Selbstbildnis mit Maske (1928, Self-portrait with Mask) While the painter Felix Nussbaum does not feature prominently in this book, I find one of his paintings extremely apt to feature on its cover. Selbstbildnis mit Maske concisely depicts the ambivalences of the mask, which will be discussed in Chapter 2. We see the mask for what it is; Nussbaum shows it to us as such, which means that we can detect his face. Moreover, there is a stark contrast between the smile on the mask and the anxiety – the paranoia? – that is betrayed in the glance that goes sideways, quasi over his shoulders. By thematising the concealing of feelings, it is rendered visible. Such ambiguities are equally found in the pathos of anti-pathos. But the painting poses further questions. One notes that this is not one of Nussbaum’s paintings depicting the persecution and extermination of the Jews: their incarceration in camps (Selbstporträt, 1940, Self-portrait), their lethal identification as Jews – Selbstbildnis mit Judenpaß (1943; Self-portrait with Jewish ID), the danse macabre (Triumpf des Todes, 1944, Death Triumphant), which is considered to have been Nussbaum’s final painting before he and his wife, Felka, were arrested in their hideout in Brussel in June 1944 and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau with the last death train to leave occupied Belgium, on 31 July 1944. Selbstbildnis mit Maske was painted in 1928 and thus cannot be reduced to matters of the Shoah. But these events, and particularly Nussbaum’s fate, render it impossible not to think of the painting as uncannily prefiguring the meanings of the mask during the Shoah and in the context of testimony. Such questions pertaining to the complex links between the event, its representation and its interpretation – and our role in these processes – will be addressed in this book, too. Some final words on my choice for this painting. It is not a straightforward or neutral choice: it comes with the risk of appropriation. Who am I, after all, to use Nussbaum’s art for the purpose of illustrating my book? It is an urgent question, and one to which I have but this to say for myself. In 1942, Felix Nussbaum, well aware of the growing danger, urged a friend: “wenn ich untergehe, lasst meine

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Bilder nicht sterben, stellt sie aus” (qtd. in Heese 2014, 226; if I should perish, do not let my paintings die, but show them to the world). Like so many others, Nussbaum’s trace gets lost in Auschwitz. We do not know exactly when he perished, only that he must have been alive on 20 September 1944 (cf. Heese 2014, 229 – 230). Let the cover of this book be a memorial and, if ever so briefly, let it resubmerge him, the artist and the man, from the anonymity of the death camp.

2 Describing emotions: Metaphorical oppositions and their ambiguities The question as to how the pathos of anti-pathos is articulated also rests on the question of how emotions and the perception of emotionlessness are articulated. In what follows, I wish to trace three conceptual metaphors that are incessantly used to describe precisely a lack of emotionality or a strong emotional bond – be that on the diegetic level of literature, between reader and character respectively author or between human beings. These are the metaphors of warmth and coldness/coolness, the metaphors of distance and proximity and the metaphor of the mask. To be sure, these metaphors must be postulations: the sheer ambivalence and ambiguity that underlie them render a clear argument for their attributions being nigh unachievable. Then again, even the postulation of ‘emotionlessness’ on behalf of, say, a perpetrator constitutes its own pathos: such characterisations easily evoke feelings of disgust and contempt in the reader. Such characterisations serve distancing oneself from the perpetrator. Moreover, the contradictory attributions reveal that these metaphors amount to catachrestic speech, and indeed, I will argue that catachresis is characteristic for the testimonies of the Shoah. But I will also argue that catachresis is inherent to all writing about the Shoah that have testimonial texts at its core and thus constitute a form of post-testimonial literature.

2.1 The temperamental metaphor 2.1.1 A (brief) genealogy of cool The codification of emotionality in temperamental terms started in antiquity, developed by (among many others) Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 BCE) and Galenus (129–c. 216 CE). According to this theory, the emotional constitution and tendencies depend on the imbalances in one’s bodily fluids: “[a]n excess of choler (yellow bile) in the blood produced the choleric temperament; an excess of black bile produced the melancholic; an excess of phlegm, the phlegmatic, an excess of blood, the sanguine” (Arikha 2008, xviii). While today the notion that our health, cognition and disposition are influenced by excesses and shortages of bodily fluids is, of course, medically untenable, in folk psychology, we still usually recognize a physical element in aspects of character or a particular mood: we say that mood swings might be related to hormonal shifts, or that an excitable person might be https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110758580-005

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prone to high blood pressure. This is not very different from humoural thinking, which recognized the interdependency of mind and body. (xix)

Anne and Colin Martindale demonstrate that the humoural metaphors are still used – in poetry and in everyday communication – to describe emotions, and that readers link specific emotions to texts in which any of these metaphors is a motive, although not necessarily aligned with the categorisations found in humourism (1988). The warmth and coldness metaphors are still commonly used to refer to either persons or texts demonstrating (an intense) emotionality and inviting us to engage emotionally with persons who hide their feelings or are even perceived to be emotionless and their texts in which they supposedly do so. The coolness metaphor poses a particular problem in this regard: just as it proves difficult to define ‘emotion’ (Plamper 2015, 11),¹ there is a consensus that cool defies definition and pin-pointing – it can only be defined by what is not cool (Pountain and Robbins 2000, 24). In other words, there is a consensus, albeit unspoken, that cool is inherently catachrestic. Moreover, trying to be cool is assumed to be a self-destroying attempt: either one is cool, or, as soon as one tries to be cool, one is uncool (Pountain and Robbins 2000, 24). But more precision is possible. Before giving a loose overview of the various traditions of coolness, Rüdiger Zill points out that ‘cool’ has undergone two considerable shifts in meaning. The first is metaphorical, where the sensory domain (in terms of degrees of heat) is invoked (as vehicle or source) to express emotional states (the tenor or target). Zill offers a phenomenological explanation for this metaphorisation by stating that coldness and coolness are not inherent qualities but subjective attributions (2010, 40 – 41). The second shift in meaning – a continuation of the first metaphorisation – regards affective self-control. By implicitly returning to the etymology of ‘emotion’ (from Latin emovere), which entails the idea that emotion is marked by movement, Zill associates the cool with an absence (or reduced presence) of emotionality. In this reading, the absence of movement corresponds to a mental state of “großer Gelassenheit” (Zill 2010,

 I understand affect/Affekt to be the preconscious, evolutionarily shaped neurological and chemical component of emotionality, feeling/Gefühl its subjective experience, e/Emotion the culturally coded articulation of this experience (cf. Shouse 2005; Schwarz-Friesel 2013, 139). Mood/ Stimmung can refer to both a prolonged individual emotional state and to a collective state of emotionality, of which the individual does not necessarily know why she is affected by it, and which is usually limited in time – the belligerent mood in Europe in August 1914 would be a prime example. Winko understands emotion as the holistic term incorporating the subjective experience, a corporeal state, and an expression of the experienced (2003, 73), for which I use emotionality.

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41; a large degree of serenity). Indeed, Zill is aware of the heterogeneity of the traditions of the cool – ranging from Yoruba traditions over the Renaissance sprezzatura and aristocratic codes of conduct to the Freikorps masculinities into the Cold War subversion on Polish and Czech jazz clubs. One could add the distinct African American experience, where coolness has been a survival strategy: the affective self-control in the face of racialised suppression and institutional violence is a way of avoiding further victimisation. All these traditions have a celebration of affective self-control in common: “Cool is not simply emotional shallowness, lack of passion or enthusiasm […]. Cool’s real work is done inside […]. A carefully cultivated Cool pose can keep the lid on the most intense feelings and violent emotions” (Pountain and Robbins 2000, 22). How can coolness relate to the pathos of anti-pathos? If the writing of trauma (i. e. trauma being worked through or acted out) results in pathosdriven discourse, which may hinder, LaCapra fears, any critical stance towards it (2014, 186 – 187), do cool discourses necessarily invite a critical stance by the reader just as much as the pathos of anti-pathos articulates a suspicion of pathos in its negative connotation? If so, coolness would imply an ambiguous stance vis-à-vis emotionality: it simultaneously hides feelings and shows this hiding. This ambiguity is revealed, arguably, in an instance of rupture, where the emotionality is openly avowed. Definitions of metaphors beget further metaphors. Perhaps this is unavoidable, and even more so when trying to define matters of emotion: as Monika Schwarz-Friesel points out, the very subjectivity inherent to any notion of emotionality causes us to exclaim that ‘words are lacking for what we are feeling’. The emotional intensity of trauma means that this is particularly true for attempts at describing the traumatising events and their emotional effects. This linguistic failure leads us to resort to metaphors – the word ‘metaphor’ (itself a metaphor) means ‘to carry across’ – to ‘carry’ our subjective experience ‘across to’ our interlocutor (2013, 236 – 238). Thus, as soon as emotionality becomes a matter of intersubjectivity, a figurative use of language seems unavoidable, causing metaphors to be explained by resorting to (or by at least connecting to) further metaphors. ² These will be outlined beneath, but it is worth briefly retracing the idea of coldness in the twentieth century.

 This is not an insight of the twenty-first century, of course. Moses Mendelssohn made this very point in 1783 in relation to religious oaths and the separation of Church and State: [W]ir können unmöglich mit […] denselben Worten […] dieselben innern Empfindungen verbinden […]. Wir […] müssen wiederum zu Zeichen und Worten unsere Zuflucht nehmen, und am Ende zu Metaphern, weil wir, durch Hülfe dieses Kunstgriffs, die Begriffe des innern Sinnes auf äußere sinnliche Wahrnehmungen gleichsam zurückführen. (Mendelssohn 2005, 67– 68)

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2.1.2 The Great War and after Clearly influenced by Helmut Lethen’s Verhaltenslehre der Kälte (1994), Nils Büttner looks at the military traditions in the German armies that prescribe a strong affective self-control and at the internal contradictions in such codes. On the one hand, military training of the troops had, as one goal, the development of an undisturbed attitude during combat. This means of “Affektkontrolle” has also been labelled as cold-bloodedness (“Kaltblütigkeit”, 110; affective self-control resp. cold-bloodedness) and was supposed to help in maintaining combat-readiness and discipline (111– 112). Büttner maintains that this code of conduct is reflected in soldiers’ self-depictions and that this distanced mise-en-scène is potentially critical of military hierarchy and training. On the other hand, a certain ‘coolness’ was already a trait of the officer corps, where a pretended nonchalance concerning the uniform also had, according to Büttner, some subversive potential. One notices that this second conceptualisation of ‘coolness’ shows some resemblance to sprezzatura: both are codes of conduct within a socially and financially privileged “elite” (117, 119), and Büttner’s analysis rightly distinguishes the ‘coolness’ of the officers from the ‘coolness’ amongst the ranks. Scott Denham emphasises the psychological benefits of such affective self-control (also described as iron nerves) during the fighting, and links them metonymically to Ernst Jünger’s “cool and scientific eye, the way he can describe flatly and without emotion the details of violent, bloody combat” (Denham 1992, 121), which “has been noticed by his readers from the start” (Denham 1992, 121).³ Yet here Denham resorts to oversimplification. Jünger’s account features several instances in which he reflects upon his emotions. ‘Coolness’ does not mean emotionlessness, but rather a discrepancy between form and content. A ‘cool’ discourse may mention one’s feelings while still adhering to a pathos of anti-pathos – e. g. by using a ‘scientific’ style. Likewise, ‘coolness’ as a code of conduct is the discrepancy between the presence and showing of emotionality. In extreme cases, the emotional subject does not even admit this emotionality to himself. Hence, ‘coolness’ is not the lack of emotionality, but a way of regulating it. This element of regulation is equally central to Lethen’s study. As a cultural analysis of the First World War’s aftermath in the Weimar Republic, Helmut Lethen’s Verhaltenslehre der Kälte (1994; transl. Cool Conduct, It is impossible that [we] can unite the selfsame inward sensations to the selfsame words. We […] must have recourse to words or to symbols, and in the end to metaphors; because by that device, we, as it were, lead the conceptions of the internal sense back to external sensible impressions. (Mendelssohn 1838, 55).  Denham discusses Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern (1920).

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2002) has proven an instant classic.⁴ Lethen’s thesis is that the German defeat in 1918, the subsequent violent chaos and the need to reintegrate millions of war veterans – many of whom were crippled – caused the emergence of a prescriptive code of conduct (Lethen 1994, 7). This code, intended to reinstate a sense of security amidst the political and economic turmoil and a “Panzerung des Ich” (57; armoring of the ego: Lethen 2002, 36) against vulnerability, and with a focus on the “Diszplinierung der Affekte” (Lethen 1994, 57; disciplining of affect: Lethen 2002, 36), tried to naturalise social norms through internalisation: “Es gilt, die Künstlichkeit der Gesellschaftsformen als natürliches Milieu zu erschließen, um die in der deutschen Kultur versäumte Verhaltenssicherheit zu gewinnen” (9; one must open up the artificiality of social conventions as a natural milieu in order to regain a certainty as to how to heave – a certainty not provided by German culture).⁵ Citing from Helmuth Plessner’s Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (1924; transl. The Limits of Community, 1999), Lethen connects the metaphors of distance and of aristocracy to the temperamental metaphor: [d]ie erzwungene Ferne von Mensch zu Mensch wird zur Distanz geadelt, die beleidigende Indifferenz, Kälte und Roheit des Aneinandervorbeilebens durch die Formen der Höflichkeit, Ehrerbietung und Aufmerksamkeit unwirksam gemacht und einer zu großen Nähe durch Reserviertheit entgegengewirkt. (Plessner 1981, 80; qtd. in Lethen 1994, 9; emphasis added) Forced distance between persons becomes ennobled into reserve. The offensive indifference, coldness, and rudeness of living past each other is made ineffective through the forms of politeness, respectfulness, and attentiveness. Reserve counteracts a too great intimacy. (Plessner 1999, 131)⁶

As such, Lethen’s argumentation differs from Klaus Theweleit’s psychoanalytically inspired portraits of those war veterans who would embrace National Socialism: Theweleit also argues that the perpetrators shielded themselves, but sees this shielding in the realm of sexuality – the protofascist veterans of the First World War and Freikorps members (such as Rudolf Höss and Ernst Jünger)  This translation of ‘Kälte’ as ‘cold’ shows the limits of translation and the limits of finding a univocal descriptive discourse in which all ambiguities are resolved. Since Lethen speaks of Kälte, I use this term, also in translation – despite the English title of his monograph.  The introduction to Verhaltenslehren der Kälte has not been translated in Cool Conduct; in its stead stands a new and much shorter preface for the American version, translated by Lethen’s wife, Caroline Sommerfeld, who would later become active within the far-right Identitäre Bewegung.  One notes the translator’s choice of replacing Plessner’s spatial metaphor (distance) with one of quantity (reserve). Corina Stan contextualises Plessner in the interwar period and explicitly contrasts his plea for society, which is associated with impersonality, distance, coolness and masks with Martin Heidegger’s notions of community (Stan 2018, 7).

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are unable to love women, whom they equate with violence and the threat of castration (Theweleit 2000, 59 – 87, 311). This is not least because Lethen is not preoccupied with one ideological programme but analyses the works of authors all along the political spectrum.⁷ Moreover, Lethen’s approach fits in with New Objectivity’s rejection of psychoanalysis as a paradigm of knowledge. Instead, he insists on a persona, on a conscious self-fashioning as ‘cold’. This evokes the metaphor of the mask: the etymology of ‘persona’ goes back to Ancient Greece, where it referred to “the mask ancient actors used to wear in a play” (Arendt 1963, 102; cf. Ward 2012, 4). The etymological bridge only strengthens the metaphorical connections between a coolness as a suppression (or at least as a controlling) of one’s emotions and the mask metaphor of hiding them; the metaphor of the mask in the context of the Shoah will be discussed later on. Lethen was not alone in positing the emergence of a ‘cold’ generation in the wake of the First World War. Michael Wildt considers the First World War a generation-building watershed. Death, pain, fear, mutilation, murderous equality, and the absolute insignificance of the individual formed the myth of a generation of combatants who, after war, interpreted their experience in terms of heroism, in order to forget the wastelands the war had created, internally and externally, and to lend meaning to what was perceived as senseless. (Wildt 2008, 148)⁸

Refining the identification of a ‘wartime generation’, Ulrich Herbert describes a political generation, consisting of male, bourgeois students coming of age during the war and in its immediate aftermath as the “Generation der Sachlichkeit” (1991, 115; Generation of Objectivity).⁹ According to Ernst Günter Gründel, a con-

 Indeed, Lethen has been criticised for depoliticising the movement of New Objectivity. Sabina Becker argues that Ernst Jünger’s wartime autobiographies cannot be considered to be part of this movement, since its performance of objectivity, distance and ‘cool’ is a ruse: Jünger does not try to offer a truly objective account of the First World War, but instead focusses on thoroughly subjective elements: his own career as an officer. Moreover, Becker sees in Jünger’s autobiography the account of the old bourgeois Subject which is killed off in this highly industrialised war. Jünger does not fashion himself as a synecdochical representation for the millions of soldiers but articulates a sense of distinction from them (Becker 2000 [Vol.1], 62– 63).  A difference between both remains, however: whereas Wildt focuses on the predominance of the concept of ‘generation’ as a category for sociological analysis and political self-consciousness in the interwar period, Lethen defines this generation through their cultural codification of coldness as the emergence of an emotionally defensive attitude in the wake of the war traumata.  Herbert subdivides this generation into those born between 1890 and 1900 (the “junge Frontgeneration”; Generation of Young Frontline Veterans), those born between 1900 and 1910 (the

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temporary speaking for this generation, its values were “Ernst, wortkarge Verschlossenheit und Zurückhaltung, ja manchmal schroffe Kälte”, which coincides with a rejection of showing one’s emotions (qtd. in Herbert 1991, 117; seriousness, taciturn reticence and restraint, yes, sometimes even curt coldness). But as Herbert points out, this was at least in part a reaction to the lack of frontline experience: the Kriegsjugendgeneration venerated the ideal of the frontline fighter and strove to live up to it in its rejection of compromise and its embrace of radical action (Herbert 1991, 117– 118). The temperamental metaphor as expression of a collective emotional codification is, in this context, congruent with the historiographic genre of the “collective biography”, which is suggested as a method as well as a discourse designed to overcome the pitfalls of the “individual biography”, which has often given rise to what Michael André Bernstein labels “foreshadowing” (1994, 1– 8): reductionist and determinist explanations in hindsight, which risk isolating historical actors from their social, political and cultural backgrounds (and thus risk describing influence unidirectionally) but come with the additional risk of describing a historical moment with the knowledge of what happened after that moment and, hence, of drawing problematic causal connections between those events. The collective biography ought to alleviate such risks by “account[ing] for the interrelationships between actors and institutions, between the intentional will to annihilate and structural conditions, between ideology and function, between individual intent and the situational dynamics of violence, between context and decision” (Wildt 2008, 147). Nevertheless, this poses a significant problem for metaphorical descriptions of emotionality, which homogenises rather than it differentiates: it is too encompassing, and it risks ending up as postulations rather than as categories for analysis. This is particularly the case when such metaphors refer to the most diverse ethical and philosophical perspectives. Indeed, Becker objects to Lethen’s association of New Objectivity with coldness: she considers this Lethen’s characterisation as too simplistic – an oversimplification which is due to methodological problems. More precisely, Becker ar-

“Kriegsjugendgeneration”; Generation of Wartime Youth) and those born later still, after 1910 (the “Nachkriegsgeneration”; Postwar Generation) This, in turn, certainly had an impact on their political orientation, with a self-understanding based on adherence to a generation rather than to a socio-economic class (Herbert 1991, 117). Remarkably, it was this second generation – in contrast to the front generation – that would embrace National Socialism the most enthusiastically (Wildt 2008, 149; cf. Earl 2008, 165). Those who had enjoyed an academic education would go on to compose the bulk of the leading cadres of the SS, Gestapo, and Einsatzgruppen (Herbert 1991, 137– 138).

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gues that Lethen (unwittigly) resorts to conservative criticisms of New Objectivity (Becker 2000 [Vol. 1], 352n.213).

2.1.3 Cold perpetrators As should be clear from the previous overview, many problems remain with the temperamental metaphor, and I doubt these can be definitively settled. The polysemy of the temperamental metaphor, especially in its negative expression, renders a fixed meaning simply impossible. It cannot be a merely positive term either, considering its usurpation by the “first and foremost perpetrator”, Adolf Hitler (PVB, ix), who is credited with, if not the invention, then at least the systematisation of a distinction between an anti-Semitism of emotion, which could give rise only to temporary eruptions, or pogroms, without leading to a solution of the Jewish problem, and an antiSemitism of reason, which would result in a series of legal measure aimed at the eventual elimination of the Jews. Hitler’s differentiation between forms of anti-Semitism was not altogether commonplace and it could well have been the product of his own contemplation. (PVB, 5)

This distinction stems from a manifesto, written in September 1919, and ordered by Hitler’s company commander as a reply to a fellow soldier’s questions as to why Germany had lost the war (PVB, 5). But this early distinction seems to have established itself firmly in Hitler’s political ambitions. Dan Stone refers to a political rally during the Nazi Reichsparteitage on 6 September 1938, where “Hitler described National Socialism as ‘a cool doctrine of reality based on the most incisive scientific knowledge and its theoretical elucidation’”, excluding any “‘mysticism which is external to the purpose and goal of our doctrine’” (Stone 2010, 160).¹⁰ The fact that ‘cool’ is, in this case, a literal translation of Hitler’s choice  It is known that Hitler did not speak there, but that a Gauleiter named Adolf Wagner read Hitler’s proclamation (Domarus 1962, 889). But there is no doubt that Hitler is the spiritual author of the proclamation. That Hitler offers his audience a very one-sided picture of Nazi ideology becomes obvious as soon as one looks at Stone’s source: Jeremy Noakes ‘documentary reader’ Nazism 1919 – 1945. Hitler’s speech is marked by an internal contradiction: his claims that Nazism is “not a cult but an ethnic-political doctrine” yet that “[i]ts purpose is […] the care and leadership of a nation determined by blood” (Noakes 1998, 108). Even if this is related to Stone’s concern, i. e. how to historically and yet ethically assess the ‘rationality’ of racism as propagated by the Nazis and the German implementation of the Shoah, it is hard to see any ideology pertaining to ‘blood’ as not mystifying. Moreover, Noakes strongly contrasts Hitler’s dismissal of the cult with a letter written by Alfred Rosenberg to Martin Bormann, insisting on the

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of word – ‘kühl’ – is of secondary importance:¹¹ although the English ‘cool’ comes with connotations (in the realm of the aesthetic) that ‘kühl’ does not have, these connotations are irrelevant for Hitler’s speech. Moreover, others do not consider Hitler’s antisemitism as ‘cool’/‘kühl’ but as ‘cold’ or even ‘icecold’ (Lifton 1986, 439, 532 n.32; Arendt 1953, 244). What the metaphor is meant to convey depends largely on the author’s speaking position: when Michael Wildt, a post-war German historian, describes the bureaucrats in Nazi Germany as “the technician[s] of death, who coldly and without involvement maintained and optimized [their] part of the annihilation machine, without a thought of the murderous nature of the whole operation” (Wildt 2008, 146; cf. 2010, 103), we must interpret what is meant differently from the attributions of coldness, thoughtlessness or numbness to the SS in the extermination camps made by the survivors. We do not lack such attributions. Shaul Chazan, one of the very few survivors of the Birkenau Sonderkommando, describes how an anonymous SS man shot a mother and her child “in cold blood” (Greif 2005, 266). Often, the attributions are not straightforward: the Hungarian survivor Ladislaus Szücs describes Gottlieb Muzikant, Unterscharführer in Melk, as a dilettante who liked to pose as doctor and kill prisoners with a club or a benzine injection, “ohne viel Federlesens, ohne Emotion, kaltblütig” (1995, 96; without much ado, emotionless, coldblooded). Muzikant, so Szücs, “war ein wahrer Sadist und tötete aus Freude” (1995, 96; was a true sadist and killed for joy).¹² Szücs’s description contains

importance of creating a cult around National Socialism for propagandistic purposes (Noakes 1998, 109). One may additionally point to the occultism in Rosenberg’s Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930), the occult Nazi symbolism and the occult enterprises set up by Heinrich Himmler, e. g. the reshaping of the Wewelsburg and the foundation of the Ahnenerbe association (Longerich 2008, 279 – 289; for an account of the competition between Himmler and Rosenfeld, cf. Koop 2016, 171– 177). The connection between Nazism and occultism is, of course, predominant in popular culture: in countless TV ‘documentaries’, in Hollywood cinema – Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but notably in video games (within the Indiana Jones franchise and outside of it), too.  ‘Kühl’ is found in Noakes’s source: Max Domarus’s collection of Hitler’s speeches. The speech in question is found in Max Domarus 1962, 890 – 894 (Hitler’s depiction of National Socialism as ‘kühl’ 893).  Another account combining testimony and historiography, Jules Schelvis’s on Sobibor, is a good example of the need to be aware of translations and original texts, especially when metaphors are concerned. In the description of Kurt Frenzel’s attitude towards the immediately-to-bekilled victims, the English translator adds the metaphor “cold” (Schelvis 2007, 252), whereas the Dutch original limits itself to “totaal onverschillig” (Schelvis 2017, 289), which the German translator literally translates as “völlig gleichgültig” (Schelvis 1998, 302).

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an obvious contradiction: either Muzikant killed ‘emotionlessly’ or he felt joy while killing – a joy that motivated the killing in the first place. Indeed, in this contradiction, Szücs (unwittingly) summarises the various motivations and attitudes with which the killing – in all its various steps and forms – was perpetrated. It may point – equally unwittingly – not only to the multiplicity but also to the ambiguity of the perpetrators’ feelings and emotions: as Wildt succinctly suggests, “the question remains whether the perpetrators did not themselves impose a certain bureaucratic form on their activities in order to hide the emotions, the hatred, that drove them” (2010, 104). Let it be noted here that Szücs is not the only survivor to resort to such contradictions, nor that these contradictory attributions apply only to the perpetrator. In Se questo è un uomo, Primo Levi describes a fellow inmate named Henri, who, after the death of his brother “ha reciso ogni vincolo di affetti; si è chiuso in sé come in una corazza” (QU, 95; has cut off every tie of affection; he has closed himself up, as if in armour: TM, 110). Indeed, Levi seems to anticipate Lethen’s metaphor of self-armouring in the face of traumatic loss; but already on the next page he contradicts Henri’s purported lack of affection: “[p]arlare con Henri è utile e gradevole; accade anche, qualche volta, di sentirlo caldo e vicino, pare possibile una comunicazione, forse perfino un affetto” (QU, 96; To speak with Henri is useful and pleasant: one sometimes also feels him warm and near; communication, even affection seems possible: TM, 112). Indeed, this warmth demonstrates that Henri uses his empathic capabilities and his charm to obtain favours – a ‘dark empathy’ that Levi frames as ‘cold’: “[d]i queste sue doti naturali Henri è perfettamente a conoscenza, e le mette a profitto con la fredda competenza di chi manovra uno strumento scientifico” (QU, 95; Henri is perfectly aware of his natural gifts and exploits them with the cold competence of a physicist using a scientific instrument: TM, 111). Hayden White explains the contradiction by positing that Levi himself may have been “among Henri’s conquests” (2004a, 120) – indeed, the ‘warmth’ metaphor may either point to this or to a different closeness between Levi and Henri – not necessarily manifested in Birkenau, i. e. reciprocal, but rather in their way of perceiving others: “Henri survives due to his talent for recognizing people as ‘types.’ In the passage in question, Levi shows an equally sharp talent for thinking typologically” (White 2004a, 120). Indeed, if we follow White’s refined interpretation, we must conclude that there is a subtle distancing by Levi from his former self, who had been (potentially) seduced by Henri. After all, Levi immediately adds that just when one thinks that Henri breaks out of his armour, “il momento appresso il suo sorriso triste si raggela in una smorfia fredda che pare studiata […] ed eccolo di nuovo tutto alla sua caccia e alla sua lotta: duro e lontano, chiuso nella sua corazza, nemico di tutti” (QU, 97; the next moment his sad smile freezes into a cold gri-

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mace which seems studied […] and here he is again, intent on his hunt and his struggle; hard and distant enclosed in armour, the enemy of all: TM, 112). Here we have an author who has learnt to see through Henri’s “surface show” (White 2004a, 120) and who casts Henri as an egocentric seducer. The final sentence of the chapter sums up Levi’s simultaneous fascination for this type (if you will) of survivor and his desire not to have to deal with Henri as an individual: “[o]ggi so che Henri è vivo. Darei molto per conoscere la sua vita di uomo libero, ma non desidero rivederlo” (QU, 97; I know Henri is living today. I would give much to know his life as a free man, but I do not want to see him again: TM, 112). Szücs’s and Levi’s paradoxical depictions of character demonstrate, once more, that ‘coolness’ can hardly be a category for establishing a collective reaction to the Shoah or for developing a generational (or any other) identity: not only are the attributions often contradictory in themselves, but the metaphors cannot converge when attributing coldness to both the emotionless (or at least pitiless) murderer and to the victim using his youthful charms in order to survive. Second, the temperamental and the spatial metaphor keep interlocking in unpredictable ways. ‘Warm’ does not necessarily equal ‘close’; ‘cold’ not automatically ‘distant’. The question remains under all circumstances: close or distant to whom or to what? To another person, to a younger self? Likewise, ‘cool’ does not necessarily mean somewhere ‘between’ ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ – and this phrase shows how theoretical discourse cannot entirely liberate itself from the interlocking metaphors – but it can be conceived as a pathos of anti-pathos. This harks back to Gottsched’s linking of pathos to ‘hot’ discourse: as lacking reflection and as unfeigned. New forms of pathos emerge as a reaction to such suspicions, and in the logic of the metaphor, these would be ‘cool’. Texts adhering to a pathos of anti-pathos may be perceived as both warm and cold. Such ambiguous attributions are plentiful (cf. introduction). In an interesting variation, Lanzmann’s Shoah, which is discussed as an important intertext for Schlesak and Hilberg, has been described as neither ‘ardent’ nor ‘cool’ (De Kock 2018).¹³ What is it, then? Something in between, defying the temperamental metaphor? Somewhat ardent yet simultaneously somewhat cool? As the viewer of Shoah may confirm, this film is marked by a ‘classical’ pathos as much as by the pathos of anti-pathos – in its sheer length and multiperspectivity, it is unavoidably marked by different emotional codifications. The concept may also explain why Ruth Klüger’s antagonistic reflections on commemoration both evoke a strong pathos and can be described as a cool dis-

 “Het is géén vurig pamflet maar evenmin een koele registratie” [“It is neither an ardent manifesto nor a cool registration].

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tancing from her imagined reader.¹⁴ The concept similarly explains why the pathos of Raul Hilberg’s oeuvre is so highly ambivalent: initially, it was marked by inflammatory and highly polemic formulations as well as by a subdued sarcasm. The polemic formulations disappear with time, and hence one could describe Hilberg’s project as cooling down over time. Remarkably, this occurs after dealing more intensively with the victims’ documents, and after (slightly) moving towards a historiography as advocated by Saul Friedländer, which acknowledges both the insights offered by the narrative turn and the ethical responsibility of the historian towards the victims of history. In other words, the cooling down coincides with an ever so slight acknowledgement of emotionality. The earlier remarks on Levi’s use of the metaphor may lead to the question why his writings are not analysed in a chapter of his own right, and indeed, based on the remarks of many interlocutors, they would argue that Levi must be the primus inter pares of a canon marked by the pathos of anti-pathos. I feel I must briefly resort to an apophasis: I will use the occasion here to delve briefly into Levi’s own ‘coolness’ and try to assert why I do not include him (although including him would not be misplaced) by taking a closer look at some isolated excerpts of Levi’s oeuvre. Moreover, Levi is not entirely absent from the rest of this book: he will show up – rather briefly – as an intertext for Schlesak’s documentary novel (quite like Alexander Kluge’s presence there) and – slightly longer – in the context of Klüger’s approximating to and distancing from the Shoah canon. When my interlocutors pose the question, they undoubtedly think of Levi’s candidness, which arguably reaches its apex in Il sistema periodico (1975), where Levi combines autobiographical episodes from childhood to post-war life and fictional stories. The chapters are titled after chemical elements that bear either a metaphorical or literal link to the episode. The result is a poetic mastery of form and content, of science and art, of matter and thought – intellectual and political. But long before Il sistema periodico Levi had already achieved a voice hovering between autobiographical proximity and scientific detachment. Hayden White analyses Se questo è un uomo from a critical perspective not unlike James Young’s assessments of the “rhetoric of fact” – though White’s assessment does not come with the disapproval that Young brings to Weiss’s documentary

 Although this does not necessarily amount to a Nietzschean “Pathos der Distanz”; as Sven Brömsel summarises, this pathos is to be situated within Nietzsche’s attempts at establishing a new framework of morality – it is an aristocratic enterprise but its hardness is directed towards the self (Brömsel 2011, 299; pathos of distance). In other words, it is a distancing from Christian morality (as Nietzsche understood it to be) as much as a reclusion, but it is not necessarily antagonistic.

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theatre. White asserts that Levi’s self-understanding is that of an author with a clear “desire to maintain a power of objective observation, a rationality of judgement, and clarity of expression” (White 2004a, 114– 115). As such, Levi is in line with the tradition that pejoratively regards rhetoric as “the antithesis of philosophy and reason” and who thus “condemns any writing about the Holocaust marked by ‘obscurity’ or any kind of ‘rhetorical’ excess and indeed views such writing as both evidence of mental illness and morally offensive” (2004a, 115). Indeed, Levi’s training as a scientist and his stance as anti-Fascist link rhetoric to pathos and render both immediately suspicious (cf. Benchouiha 2006, 7– 8). But just as documentary theatre and literature are every bit as rhetorical (in the broad sense) as texts that are not situated in a tradition of anti-rhetoric, so is Levi’s prose.¹⁵ The pathos in Levi’s prose is one of anti-pathos: it names emotions without manifesting them in the text. More concretely, and from the outset of his oeuvre, Levi acknowledges the predominance of shame: shame in the camps, shame upon liberation, the reflected shame decades after liberation (QU, 147, SeS, 52– 66). From the outset, Levi professes his hatred for and fear of the SS (QU, 156) as well as his lasting hatred for some (erstwhile) prisoners (QU, 152). Contradictory to what many readers and critics pose, Levi is “by no means writing as an emotionally detached observer of the events in the concentration camp” (Benchouiha 2006, 9). This pathos of anti-pathos cannot be upheld, however. It already ruptures very early in Levi’s oeuvre. In contrast to the previous examples, where the emotions are literally mentioned, his scorn towards those who thank a deity for having survived a selection – exemplified in Kuhn – does not label his emotions, but that does not mean, of course, that these are not obvious: Kuhn ringrazia Dio perché non è stato scelto. Kuhn è un insensato. Non vede, nella cuccetta accanto, Beppo il greco che ha vent’anni, e dopodomani andrà in gas, e lo sa, e se ne sta sdraiato e guarda fisso la lampadina senza dire niente e senza pensare piú niente? Non sa Kuhn che la prossima volta sarà la sua volta? Non capisce Kuhn che è accaduto oggi un abominio che nessuna preghiera propiziatoria, nessun perdono, nessuna espiazione dei colpevoli, nulla insomma che sia in potere dell’uomo di fare, potrà risanare mai piú? Se io fossi Dio, sputerei a terra la preghiera di Kuhn. (QU, 127) Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen. Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking anymore? Can Kuhn fail to

 White lists the predominant use of the first person plural pronoun (116, cf. Benchouiha 2006, 6 – 7), the anthropomorphising of nature and the depiction of a physical and spiritual atmosphere as malign (116).

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realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer. (TM, 144– 145)

Levi’s reproach of Kuhn goes beyond the latter’s lack of foresight (and thus, supposedly, of intellect) and lack of tact – a failure at empathy – towards the condemned, beyond a grasp of the enormity of the crimes committed. Levi is not God, so he cannot spit – except metaphorically: Levi’s accusatory rhetorical questions, his emphatic parallelisms, the parachesis (“nulla insomma che sia”) and the anaphora (“nessuna preghiera, nessun perdono, nessuna espiazione”) amount to Levi’s spitting on Kuhn’s prayer. An emotional rupture, indeed: before, emotions were merely acknowledged in the text; they were identified and described but not necessarily to be felt by the reader (which does not mean, of course, that the reader is not capable of empathically understanding why Levi was having these feelings); in his outburst against Kuhn, the anger and contempt cannot be but noticed (‘felt’) by the reader. The problem of religion in the camp is readdressed once more, decades later, in I sommersi e i salvati, in the context of Levi’s discussing of Jean Améry’s Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. ¹⁶ Highlighting their shared atheism, Levi confesses that he once came close to praying, nell’ unico momento in cui mi è accaduto di percepire lucidamente l’imminenza della morte: quando, nudo e compresso fra i compagni nudi, con la mia scheda personale in mano, aspettavo di sfilare davanti alla “commissione” che con un’occhiata avrebbe deciso se avrei dovuto andare subito alla camera a gas, o se invece ero abbastanza forte per lavorare ancora. (SeS, 114) in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death. Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index in hand, I was waiting to file past the “commission” that with one glance would decide whether I should immediately go into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. (DS, 164)

This avowed desire for religiosity – as a source of comfort, as a bearer of hope – could, at first sight, be mitigating the religious Kuhn’s. But only at first sight: the atheist Levi sticks to his principles and does not pray: [n]on si cambiano le regole del gioco alla fine della partita, né quando stai perdendo. Una preghiera in quella condizione sarebbe stata non solo assurda […] ma blasfema, oscena, carica della massima empietà di cui un non credente sia capace. Cancellai quella tenta-

 I will briefly address Levi’s discussion of Améry in Chapter 5.

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zione: sapevo che altrimenti, se fossi sopravvissuto, me ne sarei dovuto vergognare. (SeS, 114) You do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these circumstances would have been not only absurd […] but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected that temption: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it. (DS, 164.)

Levi’s hypothetical self-condemnation is not without its ambivalence, of course: the atheist’s values are in line with religious notions (blasphemy and impiety). That ambivalence does not exonerate Kuhn, though: Levi’s vocabulary seems strong enough to outweigh it. The ultimate consequence would be precisely the emotion that is most often explicitly mentioned by Levi: shame. Perhaps Levi’s spitting on Kuhn prayer – were he God – would condemn Kuhn to shame as well.

2.2 Empathy et al.: the spatial metaphor Coolness is often reframed in spatial terms: as distance – the title of Sommer’s essay is a direct indication (Coolness, zur Geschichte der Distanz; coolness, on the history of distance), and Sommer uses the spatial metaphor as a way of specifying the temperamental metaphor. The spatial metaphor is often invoked when discussing the opposite of affective self-control: emotionalisation in the form of empathy and related terms. The field of empathy in literary studies has seen a significant growth in the last decade, unavoidably leading to terminological confusion. Before delving into the possible meanings of proximity and distance, a terminology for this book needs to be established.

2.2.1 Empathy, sympathy and (over)identification: more terminological decisions As alluded to before, the cultural politics of empathy have been linked to the rise of the novel, of individualism and of sensibility in the eighteenth century (Keen 2011, 16). Today, in a cultural-technological environment where literature has long since lost its status as a leading medium (that place has long since been taken by the cinema and television – and more recently online streaming), the novel is still heralded as a medium which teaches empathy. But if one wishes

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to hold a plea for the reading of novels because of its educational value, one needs to ask what the social and political benefits of empathy are. Indeed, a curious shift concerning empathy in the context of the Shoah has taken place over the last decades. Whereas Nora Levin argues in 1973 that a ‘normalisation’ of the Shoah cannot ever do justice to its epoch, because “[o]rdinary human beings simply cannot rethink themselves into such a world and ordinary ways to achieve empathy fail, for all of the recognizable attributes of human reaction are balked at the Nazi divide” (qtd. in Marrus 1988, 2), others have implicitly used the purported lack of empathy from the perpetrators for their victims as an argument for trying to evoke empathy for the dead and the survivors. This seems particularly true of a North American approach to Holocaust literature at university but is also a tacit goal of Western European Shoah education in secondary education, where meetings with survivors were a shared pedagogical experience for several generations of school children. Empathy becomes a direct and indirect tool for political education: to raise future citizens with strong democratic values and commitments, and to recognise what a lack of empathy can lead to. Yet the assumption that it was a lack of empathy that brought the perpetrators to perform their deeds is too easy, for two reasons. First, it cannot hold true on the theoretical level: if one defines empathy as the neutral capacity of understanding someone else’s (emotional) reactions, empathy does not exclude the harbouring of negative emotions vis-à-vis the victims – empathy does not equal compassion. Moreover, ‘dark empathy’ may become a deadly weapon for manipulating the victims and for easing the killing practices. Here, one could think of the camouflaging strategies undertaken by the SS in Auschwitz: these served only to give the victims as few reasons as possible for delaying the killing operations, let alone for revolting. The second reason lies in the fact that the attributions of ‘no empathy’ are often problematic because they are contradictory: how could Hans Friedrich, who as an SS soldier participated in mass shootings in Ukraine in 1941, have had “‘no feelings’ as he shot the Jews”, “a lack of ‘empathy’”, yet an “overall ‘hatred’ of Jews” (Rees 2017, 218)? Rees tells us that Friedrich considered himself to have no feelings during the shooting yet does not mention whether the other attributions – a lack of empathy and an overall hatred – are Friedrich’s or his own. But the idea that the perpetrators were not capable of empathy – or willing to engage in empathy – is not restricted to murderers ‘in the field’. In a 1964 interview with Joachim Fest Hannah Arendt explains what she meant by the ire-inspiring ‘banality of evil’ which she diagnosed in Eichmann: this banality is, in fact, a lack of empathy – and in her own ironic fashion (cf. infra), she just stops short from generalising this character trait for ‘the Germans’ as a whole:

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[i]ch will Ihnen sagen, was ich mit der Banalität meine […]. Ernst Jünger ist während des Krieges zu […] Bauern gekommen (die Geschichte steht in den Strahlungen), und der Bauer hatte russische Kriegsgefangene unmittelbar aus den Lägern bekommen, natürlich völlig verhungert […]. Und er sagt zu Jünger: Na, dass das Untermenschen sind – und […] wie’s Vieh! Das kann man ja sehen: Sie fressen den Schweinen das Futter weg. […] Der Mann sieht nicht, dass das Menschen tun, die eben verhungert sind, nicht wahr, und jeder es tut. Aber diese Dummheit hat etwas wirklich Empörendes. […] Eichmann war ganz intelligent, aber diese Dummheit hatte er. […] Das ist einfach der Unwille, sich je vorzustellen, was eigentlich mit dem anderen ist, nicht wahr? Ich bin nicht der Meinung, dass das deutsche Volk besonders brutal ist. Ich glaube überhaupt an solche Nationalcharaktere [nicht]… Trotzdem, die Geschichte, die ich eben von Jünger erzählte, die ist spezifisch deutsch. (Arendt and Fest 2013, 43 – 45) I would like to explain what I mean by ‘banality’ […]. During the war, Ernst Jünger was visiting […] farmers (the story can be found in Strahlungen [Jünger’s second set of wartime diaries, TV]), and some Russian POWs had been allocated to the farmer straight from the camps, completely starved, of course […]. And the farmer says to Jünger: well, they are subhumans – and […] like cattle! You can see it: they are eating the pigs’ fodder. […] This man does not see that people who are starving would do this, you see, and that anyone would. This stupidity truly outrages me. […] Eichmann was very intelligent, but he was stupid in this regard. […] It is simply the refusal to imagine what someone else must be experiencing, isn’t it? I do not believe that the German people is particularly brutal. I do not believe in such national character traits… But still, this story of Jünger’s, this one is specifically German.

Arguably, the problem of empathy decreases for desktop murderers like Eichmann, who have no direct contact with their victims and thus need not even resort to ‘dark empathy’ for the facilitation of murder. But similar diagnoses have been made for perpetrators more directly involved with the killing: Martin Broszat considers Rudolf Höss’s depictions of the gassing process to be marked by “schockierend[e] Sachlichkeit” (1987, 14; a shocking business-like attitude). Höss is seen as presenting the perspective of a “ganz unbeteiligten Beobachters” marked by a “verstockter Gefühl- und Phantasielosigkeit” (18; completely uninvolved observes, obdurate absence of emotions and phantasy). Paradoxically, Broszat also notes that this purported lack of feeling does not hinder Höss to show a fascination and disdain for the Sonderkommando (18 – 19; in Höss’s account 130 – 131). Of course, Höss does not reflect on the lack of choice which the members of the Sonderkommando faced: either they obeyed the orders from the Germans, were murdered, or committed suicide.¹⁷ Höss betrays the

 Lawrence Langer calls this perversion of power and will a “choiceless choice” (1982, 145), and perhaps the situation of the Sonderkommando was the most extreme example of this.

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Dummheit which Arendt perceives in Eichmann.¹⁸ Gustave Gilbert, the prison psychologist during the Nuremberg trials, interviewed not only the accused but also those perpetrators who were arrested and would testify during the trial. Among those was Höss, who would be extradited to Poland afterwards. In his Nuremberg Diary entry for 9 April 1946, Gilbert describes Höss as speaking about the technicalities of the gassing “in a quiet, apathetic, matter-of-fact tone of voice” (G. M. Gilbert 1961, 229). A few days later, on 12 April, Gilbert diagnoses Höss “intellectually normal but with the schizoid apathy, insensitivity and lack of empathy that could hardly be more extreme in a frank psychotic” (G. M. Gilbert 1961, 239). To be sure, many perpetrators have been diagnosed with an absence of feelings – a diagnosis that itself is ambivalent. Filip Müller, a survivor of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz and Birkenau, attributes an emotionlessness to two SS soldiers on duty in the crematoria, yet his assessment of these two men could not be more different. [w]enn [Johann Gorges] an Exekutionen teilnahm, ließ er weder Genugtuung noch Mitleid oder Erbarmen mit den Opfern erkennen. Das schreckliche Geschehen, das sich täglich um ihn herum abspielte, ließ ihn ziemlich ungerührt. Zu sadistischen Quälereien neigte er nicht. Er war ein ziemlich abgestumpfter Mensch, der wahrscheinlich ein normales und unauffälliges Leben geführt hätte, wenn ihn das Schicksal nicht als SS-Mann nach Auschwitz verschlagen hätte. (F. Müller 1979, 148) When he was present at executions he registered neither satisfaction nor pity. Although he carried out his orders obediently he never did more than he had been bidden, neither did he indulge in sadistic tortures. No doubt he would have led a dully normal and uneventful life, had not fate taken him to Auschwitz as a member of the SS. (F. Müller 1999, 93)¹⁹

Gorges’s emotionlessness is to be understood as the absence, as far as Müller could attest, of hatred as much as of any other emotion. Whether Gorges was, indeed, free of any antisemitic passionate hatred, whether he was free from joy when killing, whether his pose was a coping mechanism or whether the SS had succeeded in turning Gorges into an unquestioning cog – very much

 Gideon Greif offers an alternative explanation: Höss’s “intention is not to comprehend the victims’ actions but to justify the victim’s overall situation. […] The SS did not even wish their victims to feel innocent” (Greif 2005, 59).  According to Andreas Kilian, this 1999 version, which appeared twenty years after the original American and British translations – which, in turn, was published slightly before the German original; a publication history reminiscent of Edgar Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi und der Friseur in the 1970s! – was not authorised by Müller, but he could no longer undertake legal proceedings to prevent its publication (Kilian 2022, 279 n. 24).

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like Eichmann, in Arendt’s view – is not important for our purposes; nor would the answers to these questions mitigate his guilt. But compare this with Müller’s assessment of Otto Moll, who was “brutal, zynisch und skrupellos. […] Sein Sadismus, seine Gefühlslosigkeit, seine Mordgier und seine Mordlust kannten keine Grenzen” (F. Müller 1979, 199; cruel, brutal and unscrupulous. […]: His sadism, his callousness, his bloodthirstiness and his lust to kill knew no bounds: F. Müller 1999, 125). Furthermore, Müller describes Moll (ex negativo, by comparison to a third SS soldier, Peter Voss) as “gefühlskalt”, corresponding to the Nazi ideal – to which Voss does not entirely live up: bei Exekutionen hörte ich manchmal, wie [Voss] vor sich hinbrummte, Befehl sei eben Befehl. In solchen Situationen hatte ich oft den Eindruck, als ob er vielleicht letzte Skrupel überwinden oder sich Mut machen wollte. Die Schulung und Erziehung in der SS hatte ihn eher zu einem kritiklosen gefügigen Werkzeug als zu einem fanatisch gefühlskalten Ausrottungssüchtigen gemacht, dem humane Gefühle fremd geworden waren. (F. Müller 1979, 203) more than once I heard [Voss] mutter ‘Orders are orders’: it was as though he wanted to dismiss any last scruples or give himself courage. His training in the SS had turned him into an uncritical and willing tool rather than a fanatically cruel exterminator. (F. Müller 1999, 128)

Three perpetrators are assessed in terms of emotionality and a purported lack thereof, yet according to Müller, all three differ. Again, ours is not to assess to what extent Müller’s descriptions are accurate – these men’s guilt does not change in the least – but the image of the perpetrator as emotionless or lacking empathy is widespread and is responded to in didactic approaches to the Shoah. The third reason why the assumption about the lack of empathy as motivation for killing is problematic is empirical: Robert Jay Lifton maintains that German psychiatrists were not trained for empathy with their patients – a practice they would have deemed unscientific – but that this lack of empathy was not the factor that made them complicit in the ‘euthanasia’ programme (1986, 113). He bases this finding on the case of Carl Schneider, who had an “impressive record of empathy and rehabilitation measures for patients that he brought to his commitment to direct medical killing” and suggests, based on descriptions by Schneider’s associate, Walter von Baeyer, that Schneider’s lack of moral fibre led to his corruption by the Nazi regime (122). Lifton’s own assessment somewhat differs: Schneider is apparently a prime example for Lifton’s theory that the Nazi biomedical programme presented itself as a positive programme, interested in “end[ing] suffering and strengthen[ing] the race” (Lifton 1986, 123). Idealism and self-delusion (in the form of doubling) are suggested as a motivator for killing, not a lack of empathy.

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The idea that empathy is desirable has been challenged in two ways: some question whether empathy is de facto desirable, whereas other claim that it is not the best foundation for ethical action. An argument for the first position is that empathy can as easily be evoked for the perpetrator as for the victim, and indeed, the suspicion of perpetrator fiction is informed as much against by its seductive potential as by its being fictional. As McGlothlin rhetorically asks, what happens to this structure of identification when the narrator or focalizer is a perpetrator rather than a victim? In rendering the mind of the perpetrator, how do narratives negotiate the risk of allowing or even encouraging their readers to identify with the perpetrator-protagonist? (McGlothlin 2016, 253 – 254)

This is a central concern to Jan Süselbeck’s approach to emotionality in literary texts and other media. His main interest lies in the emotionalisation of the audience: what text strategies lead a reader or viewer to presumably react in a certain affective way, and what are the political consequences of these strategies? Underlying this question is a strong notion of intentionality, noticeable in terms like “provoziert” (Süselbeck 2014, 14; provoked), which lead, wholly in line with the broad tendency in literary studies during the last decades, to a renewed interest in the person of the author. Yet methodically, Süselbeck suggests developing a theoretical model akin to Wolfgang Iser’s concept of Wirkungsästhetik: “Emotionsästhetik” (16 – 19; aesthetic of emotions). In other words, Süselbeck is aware that his analyses are valid only to the degree that “there is no guarantee that an individual reader will respond empathetically to a particular representation” (Keen 2006, 224) and hence, that “empathy with characters doesn’t always occur as a result of ‘reading an emotionally evocative fiction’” (Keen 2006, 214). Presumable ‘emotionally evocative fictions’ are marked by “a small set of narrative techniques [,] such as the use of first person narration and the interior representation of characters’ consciousness and emotional states” (Keen 2006, 213 – 214).²⁰ Nevertheless, Süselbeck refers to the fact that authors (in a broad sense)

 Narrative unreliability is generally taken to be a strategy impeding or complicating empathy – and especially in the case of perpetrator fiction (cf. McGlothlin 2016). But this is not universally valid: Faye Halpern offers a convincing reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989). Stevens, the butler, is a notoriously unreliable narrator because of his naïvety towards his employer, a British aristocrat sympathetic to Nazism – and the reader easily reads through this naïvety with her own historical knowledge in hindsight. Yet Halpern argues that this naïvety renders Stevenson more likable, that it heightens the reader’s sympathy for this narrator (Halpern 2018, 127– 130). If this is true, it is a rather condescending sympathy – one based on one’s own presumed higher intelligence – and as such, the reader risks aligning (unwittingly) with the fascist aristocrat.

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have their own presuppositions concerning the emotional effect of their narrative strategies on their intended audience (2014, 19). Moreover, he couples the evocation of empathy to a genre labelled alternatively as ‘generational novel’ or ‘family novel’, in which historical events are narrated by members of several generations, and in which the younger generations’ search for the ‘truth’ concerning the older generations lives (and, especially in the German context, potentially crimes) is often a central motive (Süselbeck 2014, 14). Asking why this genre has known a relatively long commercial and critical success – which, he claims, defied the expectations of many academics, who considered the genre to be a hype – Süselbeck posits the thesis that, at least in the German context, these novels allow the audience to recalibrate negative emotions such as guilt and shame (2014, 12). The danger of such narratives, which invite the audience to empathise with the perpetrators, is a reversal of victim-perpetrator roles (15 – 16). Fritz Breithaupt’s argument goes further: he does not point to the ‘danger’ of engaging empathetically with the ‘wrong’ persons but argues that empathy is, despite all appearances, self-centred and thus undesirable. Breithaupt is particularly concerned with humanitarianism and thus with political agency and power relations in the present. He argues that empathy leads to “temporary self-loss”, tends to radicalise conflicts, and comes with “the danger of sadism” (Breithaupt, Adloff, and Unrau 2015, 4). In other words, for Breithaupt, empathy is not a prerequisite for humanitarianism but rather impedes it and does not challenge the status quo. In his argumentation, it even seems almost impossible to empathise with those in the Global South: Breithaupt posits (albeit, in this essay, without quoting studies) that “people are generally more willing to empathize when the object of their empathy undergoes change” (Breithaupt, Adloff, and Unrau 2015, 6). This may explain why it is easy to empathise with characters in prose or in film, media that are almost by default marked by narrativity and, thus, by temporality and change. Yet real-life change does not occur, obviously, over the same course or at the same speed as change within a fictional storyworld. To uphold empathy for the victims of contemporary genocides, political violence or economic exploitation is, according to Breithaupt, difficult, “[b]ecause empathy can become a burden, […] a temporal development allows the empathiser to end their empathetic engagement” (Breithaupt, Adloff, and Unrau 2015, 6). In other words, empathy is not the best basis for political change, because it needs change to be sustained. An emotional mise-en-abîme seems inevitable. Moreover, Breithaupt questions who is the real “object of our empathy[:] the victim or the (real or imaginary) helper?” (Breithaupt, Adloff,

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and Unrau 2015, 6)²¹ In other words, Breithaupt maintains that empathy all too easily becomes a feel-good effect, more of a goal in itself rather than a mobilising political force. His development of a theorical model – the “scene of empathy” (6 – 10) – starts from these two observations (indeed, the second question must be read as rhetorical) and involves three steps: a trigger of empathy, usually “the perception that another person is in distress or at risk”, followed by a “mental unfolding of a temporal or narrative sequence leading up to the negative situation”, which in turn evokes in the observer “a future state of affairs in which things have improved” (7). The fourth element is crucial: the role of a helper in order to bring that better future about (7). Moreover, the feel-good effect may result from the imagining of a rewarding “third person” (8): this reward can be as much psychological as material.²² Indeed, the rhetoric of humanitarianism suggest that the observer should become the helper.²³ After outlining this theoretical model of how empathy functions, or rather, could function, Breithaupt points to three “darks sides of empathy” (10): a temporary self-loss, which could lead one to think as if “the other[’s] […] interests were ours” (10). Breithaupt does not mean this in the same way that certain right-wing populist politicians who accuse their opponents (who, for example, do not wish to demonise refugees) of being naïve ‘Gutmenschen’ do. Rather, he fears that “an aid-worker empathising with a group of victims can easily end up adopting the group’s negative sentiments towards another group who may or may not be in some way responsible for the first group’s plight” (11). This is related to Breithaupt’s second issue with empathy: its presumed emotional contagiousness has, according to him, a ten Admittedly, ‘object’ is not the luckiest word here since it potentially reinforces patriarchal hierarchies between human beings – but this is also what Breithaupt, sometimes more tacitly, sometimes more openly, addresses.  Indeed, it seems unlikely that most people who give to charity do so because they expect to have a material gain.  Here, however, Breithaupt brings an example that may be legitimate on its own, but I fail to see how it stands for his scene of empathy. After discussing the appeal to the audience, he mentions Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List: “Where a helper is ‘given’ like this, the audience can simply identify with them” (Breithaupt, Adloff, and Unrau 2015, 9). My issue with Breithaupt is not that he fails to see how this film’s use of empathy is not uncontroversial – he is fully aware of that, as he demonstrates in a footnote. The question is rather how the identification with the helper amounts to empathy: so far, Breithaupt has argued about the difficulties of empathy with those in need, not with those in power. Even as a counterexample, to prove the importance of imagining the helper rather than being presented with her, the example does not really hold. Are we not supposed, as a viewer, to look up to Schindler as an antihero-turnedsaviour? Is this the same empathy we could bestow on (again, a problematic metaphor) the Jewish victims?

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dency to escalate conflicts, thus “becom[ing] part of the problem rather than part of the solution” (Breithaupt, Adloff, and Unrau 2015, 11). A third problem is that empathy can all too easily lead to unconsciously taking pleasure from other peoples’ suffering, which in turn solicits empathy (12 – 13). Empathy becomes a selfserving purpose and goal. This is the consequence of Breithaupt’s scene of empathy, in which a helper expects a reward for his helping those in need. Breithaupt’s notion of empathy stands in the tradition of Moses Mendelssohn, who outlines in Briefe über die Empfindungen (1755) how a spectator watching a painting of a boat crew dying experiences mixed emotions: on the one hand, the spectator experiences awe, or even shock, by imagining the mental and physical distress of those drowning; on the other hand, he can feel a sense of relief it is not actually him drowning (cf. Zelle 1987, 409). The question pertaining to the first two dark sides is, however, to what extent aid-workers are diplomats and to what extent their capacity of empathy renders them blind to the fact that victims are not necessarily free of prejudices or erroneous views. Indeed, this seems a very sentimentalist notion of both empathy and the figure of the victim. But it demonstrates that the notion of empathy, alongside with those of sympathy and identification, is discursively very diverse. Ann Rider, for example, argues that there are different forms of empathy: while there are forms that can, as Breithaupt argues, lead to emotional contagion, for her, the core of empathy is the capacity to imagine the position of another and understand why they think or feel in a given way, which does not necessarily lead to overidentification (Rider 2013, 44– 46). Thus, whereas Breithaupt stresses the temporary loss of the self in empathy, Rider stresses its capacity of either regaining it quickly or of never succumbing to it in the first place. As such, she sees empathy as a more neutral technique than Breithaupt does. So do Frank Adloff and Christine Unrau, who, responding each to Breithaupt’s text, highlight that empathy can have different outcomes: while Breithaupt modestly proposes to replace empathy with solidarity as a basis for humanitarianism, he does not address how solidarity could be achieved. Adloff suggests that empathy “is just as much the basis of the horizontally cohesive feeling of solidarity as it is of asymmetrically configured sympathy or compassion” (Breithaupt, Adloff, and Unrau 2015, 19). For her part, Unrau uses Arendt’s political theory, which forsakes any sentiments of pity or compassion as its motor, as these are “internal and incommunicable and therefore always open to the suspicion of hypocrisy” (Breithaupt, Adloff, and Unrau 2015, 22) to seemingly side with Breithaupt. Yet she, too, stumbles over the political question of creating a “we-identity” that connects the privileged citizens from the Western world to those less fortunate – a problem central to political theory, as her (brief) overview of Aristotle’s, Niccolò Machiavelli’s, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s,

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Martha Nussbaum’s, John Rawls’s, and Elena Pulcini’s answers demonstrates (Breithaupt, Adloff, and Unrau 2015, 26). Süselbeck, then, in addressing the problems of empathy, stresses the lack of criticism this may entail – very much as Breithaupt argues. In their arguments, empathy comes very close to overidentification leading to sympathy, and their criticism of it is remarkably close to the eighteenth-century criticism of sentimentality as a new poetics of feeling: as Terry Eagleton summarises this contemporary discarding of sentimentalism, “[b]enevolence and the empathic imagination are centrifugal faculties which bear you beyond yourself, whereas sentimentalism is secretly centripetal, a self-regarding condition in which you luxuriously consume your own sensations” (2019, 118). Although Süselbeck and Breithaupt’s concerns are legitimate, a terminological distinction may help to avoid the aporia of empathy. Empathy does not forget the self-other distinction, while overidentification does;²⁴ empathy does not have to lead to approval: one can understand why someone’s emotions caused them to act in a certain way, yet one does not need to condone these actions. Sympathy is a special case of empathy: as its etymology suggests,²⁵ it implies a positive evaluation of the other’s actions or emotional reactions (cf. Engelen 2014, 129; Scheele 2014, 39; Bareis 2014, 129). To be sure, empathy comes with its cultural politics – who is included in and who is excluded from our empathic community? If one stresses the self-other dis-

 In this sense, Aleida Assmann considers the testimony (to trauma) to be a new genre, not centred around the identification that fiction offers (before ridding it in the cathartic moment) but rather around the reader’s empathy with the author (2012b, 20). She constructs a hierarchy between both modes, however: this empathy “erfordert allerdings eine besondere Bildung, denn es ist von Mitwissen und sozialer, moralischer und historischer Verantwortung gestützt. Der implizite Vertrag, den der Zuhörer mit dem Zeugen schließt, lautet: Ich lasse Dich mit deiner Erfahrung und Geschichte nicht allein” (Assmann 2012b, 20; demands a particular education, since it is based on knowledge about what happened to others and on social, ethical and historical responsibility. The implicit contract between the listener and witness is this: I will not let you stand alone with your experience and your history). Indeed, this strong imperative corresponds to what Annette Wieviorka labels a “compassionate pact” (1999, 140) and fits Laub’s empathic listener, who enables testimony to emerge for the first time. This imperative is very apt for listening to the victim – but surely it cannot be brought into undertakings of difficult empathy – e. g. with perpetrators or with bystanders.  From Greek syn + pathos. It thus stresses the shared experience: one suffers, or at least feels, with someone else. Empathy, as Suzanne Keen points out, is a rather new term, not finding its entrance in English before the end of the nineteenth century as a translation of Einfühlung. Its prefix suggests directionality and can arguably be the metaphorical basis for describing the emotional (yet value-free) technique. The terms undergo historical variation, then; before ‘empathy’ was a word, terms such as sensibility and sympathy were used to describe this phenomenon (Keen 2011, 16; cf. Engelen 2014, 127).

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tinction in empathy and wishes to distinguish it from overidentification in this regard (unlike Rider, who considers empathy the container term), perpetrator fiction can, of course, have its own didactic value. Jeremy Metz points out that refusing to engage in a difficult empathy with the perpetrator unavoidably leads to an eschewed understanding of the victim: “[q]uite simply, the victim was brought into being as a victim by and through the will of his victimizer. We cannot therefore turn our reading gaze from the victimizer, and, in particular, from his encounter with his victim, without blinding ourselves to an essential aspect of the victim” (Metz 2012, 1021). Moreover, that self-other distinction could be projected on the diegetic level to distinguish ever so clearly between victim and perpetrator: “[i]n such a manner, we would, as readers, be able to enter empathetically into the experience of victims in the moment of trauma, without also empathizing with their victimizers” (Metz 2012, 1037). Beyond these political and ethical questions, a methodological question remains: even if we agree on the terminology and on the fact that we do experience empathy during our reading of fiction, should it be a category of literary analysis? Peter Lamarque is sceptical, pointing – quite rightly – to the fact that empathic responses are “too reader-relative or culture-specific” and “tend to rely too much on first-time reading rather than careful and prolonged study” (2009, 247). Lamarque’s critical view of empathy indicates that his interest lies with the text, not with the reader on the “black box” that exists between both (Caracciolo 2014). But his remarks serve as a check on Suzanne Keen’s plea for ‘scientific’ (as opposed to academic) research on narrative empathy – in order to establish whether the traditionally presumed narrative strategies truly evoke (an increased) empathy: such research would, very likely, yield partial results because of the limitations inherent to cultural, sociological and individual factors but also because of the parameters involved in the act of reading: is it the first or second (or umpteenth) reading of the text? How does the spatial environment influence the reading? When discussing empathy as a part of pathos and anti-pathos, I look at the poetics of empathy and at empathy as a strategy on the diegetic level – be that level the interrogation in the courtroom, the interview with or imaginative reconstruction of the perpetrator or the fictional dialogue between a survivor and the narrator. In other words, I treat empathy as an emotion, not as a feeling. But in order to look at such constellations, it is necessary to briefly look at the metaphorical codification of empathy.

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2.2.2 Metaphors of distance and proximity To be sure, structuralist narratology has been infused with spatial (and many other) metaphors since its beginnings. Genette notably resorts to ‘distance’ as a category for describing the narrator’s ‘position’ vis-à-vis the narrative, but the metaphor – how else could it be – has come to refer to categories such as showing vs. telling and the reliability of the cognitive processes of (other) characters (cf. Klauk and Köppe 2015). It should be no surprise, then, that the metaphor is invoked to describe the politics of empathy, also beyond literature: LaCapra connotes the lack of empathy or its active hindrance as the maintaining or installing of distance to the victims of Nazism (2014, 133 – 134). The ambiguity of empathy – and its pitfalls – means that it can be accurately described not as opposed to distance, i. e. in terms of proximity, but rather as a paradox. This is what Lewis Ward does when he describes the narrators in Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz as “Sebald’s empathic narrative persona” and configures this persona as “a simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance” (2012, 1). This paradox, he notes, lies in the persona’s use of apophasis: [e]s war mir undenkbar, wie die Häftlinge, die wohl in den seltensten Fällen nur vor ihrer Verhaftung und Internierung je eine körperliche Arbeit geleistet hatten, diesen Karren, angefüllt mit dem schweren Abraum, über den von der Sonne verbrannten, von steinharten Furchen durchzogenen Lehmboden schieben konnten oder durch den nach einem Regentag bereits sich bildenden Morast, undenkbar, wie sie gegen die Last sich stemmten, bis ihnen beinah das Herz zersprang, oder wie ihnen, wenn sie nicht vorankamen, der Schaufelsiel über den Kopf geschlagen wurde von einem der Aufseher. (Ad, 37) I could not imagine how the prisoners, very few of whom had probably ever done hard physical labour before their arrest and internment, could have pushed these barrows full of heavy detritus over the sun-baked clay of the ground, furrowed by ruts as hard as stone, or through the mire that was churned up after a single day’s rain; it was impossible to picture them bracing themselves against the weight until their hearts nearly burst, or think of the overseer beating them about the head with the handle of a shovel when they could not move forward. (Ae, 28 – 29; qtd. in Ward 2012, 1).

As Ward notes, [a]n odd contradiction is in evidence here. The reader’s sympathy is apparently elicited: the ground is “hard as stone”; the prisoners’ “hearts nearly burst” with effort; they are even “beat[en] about the head.” Yet simultaneously the narrator insists on his distance from the victims: he “could not imagine” their labor, which is, moreover, “impossible to picture” or even “think of.” Thus while the scene is “pictured” for the reader in prose, the narrator paradoxically asserts his inability or unwillingness to imaginatively conjure the scene in his own mind. (Ward 2012, 2)

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Ward defines empathy against identification and sympathy in the same terms as I have done above and connects both elements of the paradoxical metaphor to empathy’s specificity: the approximation is linked to empathy’s intersubjective nature, while the critical understanding and differentiation is understood as distancing (3).

2.3 The survivor’s mask Connections between the temperamental metaphor and the metaphor of the mask are easily found. The sprezzatura cool, which prescribed the pretence of effortlessness in all undertakings, difficult though these may be (Rebhorn 1978, 33), immediately evokes the metaphor of the mask, which provides a way of suppressing the everyday social self and freeing oneself for definite kinds of self-transformation. The mask allows for the release of otherwise repressed emotions and permits the individual to affiliate himself with the new community formed for the duration of the festival. (Rebhorn 1978, 17)

Andreas Sommer connects the metaphors for the African American context, speaking of a “Maske der Gefühlskälte” (2007, 32; mask of affective coldness) worn to avoid escalations of violence. Such masks have an afterlife in testifying to the events which necessitated them in the first place. In the context of the Shoah, one thinks immediately of Abraham Bomba in Shoah: Bomba, who had been deported to Treblinka and assigned to cut the victims’ hair before they were to be gassed, is placed by Lanzmann in a contemporary salon in Tel Aviv (which Lanzmann rented for the day) and interviewed while cutting a customer’s hair. Bomba describes the events in the Treblinka gas chambers in a matter-of-fact style but cannot continue to do so when he describes a colleague hairdresser recognising his family entering the gas chamber. The mask of the hairdresser is ruptured; the normality of the setting in which Bomba is filmed shattered (S, Part Two, 30m20s). Slightly differently, a mask may be worn by survivors, not during extraordinary acts of testimony, but rather during everyday situations after returning to the ‘normal’ world – indeed, to enable the survivor to partake in everyday situations: “un masque […] pour aller dans la vie, pour aborder les gens, pour prendre part à ce qui se passe autour d’elle, un masque de politesse” (Delbo 2016c, 185; a […] mask, the one we put on to go out, move through life, approach people, a polite mask: Delbo 1995, 338). It is a mask, moreover, that can only be seen through by those with whom one has been deported (Delbo 2016c, 185).

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But the mask metaphor is not limited to the affective self-control of the victims. Rather, the metaphor is also used to describe the (quite successful) self-representation of the German intellectual elites who were complicit in the Shoah: [t]he philosopher believed himself to be in power at last, the doctor saw himself in the role of the unrestricted designer of human life, and the historian thought he was finally at the point where he could make world history. No matter how hard these intellectual elites tried after the war to present their participation in National Socialism as something exclusively functional, matter-of-fact, and technical, their role as perpetrators went far beyond this. One must look behind the mask of objectivity to observe the passion, and then one can discover the energy and vehemence of these perpetrators. (Wildt 2008, 158)²⁶

In the literature on the Shoah, then, the mask takes a completely different (set of) meaning(s). I will briefly discuss two examples. The function of the mask in Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986 & 1991) – what it hides and what it reveals – have been extensively analysed by Ole Frahm, who points to the initially wary reception of this graphic novel: some critics took issue with what they saw as a naturalisation of the Shoah – if Germans are cats and Jews are mice, then it is only naturally logical that Germans kill Jews (Frahm 2006, 22). In only one scene, Spiegelman employs a visual language in line with such biological readings (Frahm 2006, 27), but Frahm demonstrates that the mask is utterly ambivalent in Maus: during the war, the victim’s mask must not be visible qua mask in order to survive: she must pose as non-Jewish.²⁷ This is the pig mask that Vladek and his wife wear on various occasions – Spiegelman’s controversial choice for the depiction of non-Jewish Poles. It is, moreover, a mask that only the antisemitic Germans can ultimately remove to ‘see’ the mouse mask underneath. The latter is a metaphor for the racialised attributions to minorities over which they, as the subaltern, hold no control and which hides their individuality – which is reinstated through Spiegelman’s inclusion of a

 It is in this sense that Roger Caillois’s anthropological observations on the mask may be relevant for our topic, too. Caillois posits that so-called primitive societies relied on the mask as a way to achieve metamorphosis during rituals and that uniforms take over this function in socalled modern societies. The new mask, however, which serves as a regulator of subjectivity and thus as an instrument of power, has become invisible and is no longer separable from the face of the person who is wearing the mask (Caillois 167, 148, 150, 256; Frahm 2006, 45 – 46).  This is the same type of mask that Viviane Teitelbaum-Hirsch evokes: her study of the enfants cachés – Jewish children who were passed on to Gentile Belgian families and institutions – features the telling subtitle Les larmes sous le masque (Teitelbaum-Hirsch 1994; the tears underneath the mask).

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(maskless) photograph near the end of Maus (Frahm 2006, 27– 35, 70). If the Nazis see the mouse mask underneath, it is because they want to see it. As long as the pig mask functions, it is only visible to the reader by means of a strap: the mask is visually focalised through Vladek and Anja. But it demands, as one may imagine, a massive affective self-control. The constant existential fear must not be visible; and other emotions are to be feigned in order to pass as non-Jewish. While Vladek manages to do so, Anja has more difficulties passing as non-Jewish: although she wears the pig mask, a mouse tail illustrates Vladek’s remarks on her unconvincing pose. Nonetheless, Vladek does not specify what makes Anja stand out as Jewish: her clothes, her physical appearance, her behaviour (Frahm 2006, 55 – 58) – or the fact that she cannot control her body language from expressing her strong fear through shaking (56)? The mask begets a different meaning in Ladislaus Szücs’s memoirs of his arrival in Birkenau, his incarceration in Melk and his liberation in Ebensee.²⁸ Here, the mask is a metaphor for civilisation – i. e. for civil (bourgeois) life before incarceration in a concentration camp. The extremity of the concentration camp causes the masks to fall off, for the hitherto luxury of civilised behaviour and reciprocity to crumble in order to survive. Yet contrary to Giorgio Agamben, who theorises that the biopolitics of Nazism as exemplified in the concentration camp constitute “a state of exception” (Agamben 2004), Szücs links the mask – a pretence of civilisation – to the carnival, and hence, it is civil life that is construed as the state of exception: [d]as KZ war ein tragischer Aschermittwoch, wo die Masken fielen. Meist hüpfen wir mit scheppernden Karnevalsmasken durchs Leben und kennen unser wahres Gesicht nicht, bis uns so etwas wie ein KZ mit seinem unbarmherzigen Knochenfinger sie herunterreißt; dann erkennen wir im Spiegel der anderen, wer wird sind, wer wir imstande sind zu sein. (Szücs 1995, 42) The concentration camp was a tragic Ash Wednesday where the masks fell off. Normally, we are hopping through life with our rattling carnival masks and we do not know our own face, until something like a concentration camp tears off the mask with its merciless bone finger; only then do we recognise, through the other, who we are and who we can be.

This idea is given graphic shape in a drawing that depicts eleven conjoint faces: they are not separated, neither necks nor heads are depicted (Fig. 2; taken from Szücs 1995, 55).²⁹ Moreover, the eyes are voids, evoking the idea  Melk and Ebensee were both satellite camps of Mauthausen.  These masks may seem grotesque, but it would still be difficult to tie them in with Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualisation of the grotesque, premodern mask. Bakhtin reads that mask as a way of renouncing individuality and of effacing the boundaries between subjects – and all of

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Figure 1: Ruptured masks in Maus (1996, 138): taking off masks (panel 5, counting left to right and top to bottom); Anja’s mouse tail possibly indicating difficulties in upholding her affective self-control (panel 6); the focalisation of the mask through Vladek and Anja, which is clear to the reader by means of the strap (panel 8).

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Figure 2: Szücs’s masks (1995, 55).

this in a carnivalesque setting. This has liberating and even utopian dimensions, which clash completely with the lack of individuality that the masks in the concentration camp imply. For Bakhtin, these masks of deception would be Romantic masks (Bakhtin 1984, 38 – 40; Frahm 2006, 44– 45).

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that these are masks with different expressions, ranging from (potentially hysteric) laughter to profound agony and aggressiveness. Mask-shedding is dangerous, all the more since it is not clear at what point the mask is being shed: [d]ie dunklen Prophezeiungen von N. schwirrten wie Schmeißfliegen um mich. Ich kannte diesen Menschen bis jetzt nur mit der üblichen Jedermannsmaske. Nicht, daß ich ihm recht gegeben hätte, weit entfernt, aber nachdenklich war ich schon wegen meiner wahnwitzigen, unbedachten Haltung gegenüber der Macht, denn der Verlierer werde ich sein, ohne jemandem damit zu helfen, und verliere dabei auch die Chance, meine Frau jemals wiederzusehen. (Szücs 1995, 63) N.’s dark prophecies were buzzing around me like blowflies. Until now, I had only known this man with his normal Everyman mask. Not that I agreed with him, far from it, but I was considering it all because of my insanely careless attitude towards the instances of power, since I would be the loser without having helped anyone by being a loser, and I would lose the chance to ever see my wife again.

A second mask is at play here: not the one of civilisation, but the one of deceit. The distinction may be fine but is tangible nonetheless: while the first would be a sign of luxury, the second would be one put on after the first has been shed. Both do not (yet) show the behaviour that settles in when the desire for physical survival outweighs erstwhile valid ethical and moral considerations, but the second mask would be a tactical rather than a convivial one: just as much as Szücs does not yet know how far N. might go in acts of collaboration or betrayal, N. might have his reasons for not showing his true colours: after all, and, without wishing to judge either Szücs or N., how could either know in that moment how far they themselves (let alone the other) could ultimately go? Here, too, the mask is utterly ambivalent: one is shed for another, and the differentiation between both is not always clear. At one point, the author recounts how he and his colleagues resorted to ‘organising’ footwraps from deceased inmates – and to sarcasm: “‘wenn nächtens ein Heiliger stirbt, kriegst du nebst seinem Schein seinen sauberen Fußlappen, denn nur die können hier an dreckigem Fuß einen sauberen Lappen bewahren.’ Unsere Maske zeigte Sprünge; wir brachten ein verrostetes Lächeln zustande” (Szücs 1995, 123; ‘when a saint dies overnight, you get his clean foot rags as well as his aureole, because only saints manage to keep their foot rags clean while their feet are dirty.’ Our mask was showing ruptures; our laughter was grating). Which mask is being ruptured here – the one of civilisation? This is certainly plausible and would be the metaphorical equivalent of resorting to robbing the dead and commenting on it in a rather macabre and sardonic fashion.³⁰ But it  In a sense, it would tie in with Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry: the inmates imitate the

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could equally be the tactical mask in the concentration camp: the colleagues are, through their sarcasm and their reciprocal caretaking, almost conspiring to survival, not to their mutual destruction. Moreover, the rustiness of the laughter may be the metaphorical equivalent of a ‘bad conscience’, survivors’ guilt in the making. Both masks can be rupturing at the same time, and the rupturing of the second mask does not necessarily constitute a reinstating of the first. Other occasions, such as the confrontation with SS murderers rather than other inmates, necessitate the elaboration of masks maintained from civil life: with the ‘coolness’ of a doctor – a blocking of empathy with the patient at least to some degree, for reasons of remaining psychologically intact (84) – comes the ‘coolness’ of a doctor who performs illegal operations and who must bluff his way past the SS upon discovery (56 – 57). Szücs’s final use of the mask combines both the metaphorical and nonmetaphorical, as it is situated within the cabaret occasionally performed at Mauthausen and its subcamps.³¹ It functions as a carnivalesque (or perhaps burlesque?) subversion of the concentration camp’s denial of human emotional and physical needs and desires. Nonetheless, and in spite of the defiant celebration of life, the macabre ambivalence of masking, of hiding and revealing simultaneously, remains present: from his position in the audience, the author cannot be sure whether the two step-dancing skeletons are actually so-called Muselmänner – prisoners so emaciated they were very likely to turn to life-threatening apathy and death – or whether they are just masked as such (Szücs 1995, 133). Excursus: postcolonial masks If the mask thus is often perceived as an enabling device by which one can appear stronger than one ‘really’ is (and thus is treated differently), or where the

inhumane and callous rhetoric of their SS tormenters. But a fundamental difference must remain, however: Bhabha considers mimicry to be highly ambivalent: stemming from the colonizer’s desire to change the colonized and recreate them in his image, and equally stemming from the colonized’s desire to become like the colonial overlord, the inevitably imperfect imitation already destabilises the colonialist ideology (Bhabha 1994, 86 – 88). In other words, a complete ‘copying’ is impossible, and thus should reassure us that a fundamental difference between the SS and the prisoners is upheld. But it is not entirely clear how an ideological destabilisation – and thus the potential for subversion, however fragile and problematic – could be read in Szücs’s act of mimicry. If an imitation of the cynicism and brutality of the SS is to be detected, the consequences can never be liberating or relieving, but must cause further unease.  More recently, this cabaret has also been a plot element in The Photographer of Mauthausen, where it serves in part as a carnivalesque subversion of the SS and the Kapos, who do not speak Spanish, and in part as decoy for resistance activities (Tarragona 2018).

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mask is a life-saving device, it should be noted that the metaphor is also invoked to refer to situations that are not considered desirable at all – to situations that are perceived as damaging to the wearer of the mask. This is certainly the case for Frantz Fanon’s psychopathological analysis of colonialism, Peau noire, masques blancs (1952; transl. Black Skin, White Masks, 1967). Moreover, where the theories and premises of multidirectional memory and the singularity of literature (and of historical events) ask difficult questions concerning the ‘productivity’ and ethics of comparing, a short postcolonial perspective on the emotional implications of the mask ought to be included as well. Despite its title, Fanon does not use the term ‘mask’ very often in his text. The metaphor only becomes clear after delving into Fanon’s pathologised relation between the coloniser and the colonised. Fanon argues that the colonial system – not in the least through its control of the educational system – managed to ‘corrupt’ the Antillean population into adhering to the colonial ideological construct of civilisation versus barbarity (or primitivity). The consequence is that the Antilleans consider themselves as civilised, whereas they associate primitivity with Africans (Fanon 2015, 23). That racist attitude is, according to Fanon, nothing more than an inferiority complex – and aside from considering the African other as inferior, the Antillean attempts to heighten his own status by assimilating into European culture: [l]e professeur Westermann […] écrit qu’il existe un sentiment d’infériorité des Noirs qu’éprouvent surtout les évolués et qu’ils s’efforcent sans cesse de dominer. La manière employée pour cela […] est souvent naïve: Porter des vêtements européens ou des guenilles à la dernière mode, adopter les choses dont l’Européen fait usage, ses formes extérieures de civilité, fleurir le langage indigène d’expressions européennes, user de phrases ampoulées […], tout cela est mis en œuvre pour tenter de parvenir à un sentiment d’égalité avec l’Européen et son mode d’existence. (Fanon 2015, 22– 23) Professor Westermann writes […] that the feeling of inferiority by Blacks is especially evident in the educated black man who is constantly trying to overcome it. The method used […] is often naive: “The wearing of European clothes, whether rags or the most upto-date style; using European furniture and European forms of social intercourse; adorning the native language with European expressions; using bombastic phrases […]; all these contribute to a feeling of equality with the European and his achievements.” (Fanon 2008, 9)

While these forms of compensation are rather superficial or naïve, there can be no doubt about the intensity of the inferiority complex. Fanon claims that the basis for it is laid in the educational system, which could perhaps explain why the better-educated part of the Antillean population is more prone to it (and which in turn should lead one to ask what a ‘good education’ actually entails):

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[a]ux Antilles, le jeune Noir, qui à l’école ne cesse de répéter “nos pères, les Gaulois”, s’identifie à l’explorateur, au civilisateur, au Blanc qui apporte la vérité aux sauvages, une vérité toute blanche. Il y a identification, c’est-à-dire que le jeune Noir adopte subjectivement une attitude de Blanc. (Fanon 2015, 145) In the Antilles, the black schoolboy who is constantly asked to recite ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ identifies himself with the explorer; the civilizing colonizer; the white man who brings truth to the savages, a lily-white truth. The identification process means that the black child subjectively adopts a white man’s attitude. (Fanon 2008, 126)

Here, of course, the difference between empathy and identification could not be clearer. The colonised is not invited to see things from someone else’s perspective while maintaining a critical self-other distinction. On the contrary, a ‘foreign’ way of thinking is imposed upon future generations. The Antillean tragedy is, of course, that the self-perception of ‘white’ does not conform to the coloniser’s perception: for them, the Antilleans remain black, which is made painfully clear by exhibiting Antilleans in human zoos as late as 1931 (Macey 2004, 213). To be sure, Fanon decried this colonial notion of ‘black people’ as much as he deplored the naïve Antillean view that perpetuated its idea and was blind to the ‘white’ perception (1955, 261– 262). He experienced this discrepancy firsthand after the fall of France in 1940, when forces sympathetic to the Vichy regime staged a coup and took control over the islands, shedding their masks and acting like “[des] authentiques racistes” (Fanon 1955, 265; veritable racists; cf. Macey 2004, 214). In short, it is not only the colonised who wear a mask; the colonisers (and now veritable occupiers), too, wear theirs – which they shed under wartime conditions. For sure, the shedding of the latter mask comes with unpleasant consequences for the occupied population – Fanon does not go into detail here – but perhaps it can also be seen as a precondition for the shedding of the first mask: only by seeing the racists for what they ‘truly’ are can the Antillean begin to think of shedding his own mask, which amounts to a deconstruction of essentialist racist notions of whiteness and blackness. Fanon’s highly ambivalent comparisons between colonialism and antisemitism confronts him with the ambivalence of empathy and identification. On the one hand, he upholds a fundamental difference between antisemitism and antiblack racism, which is based on the identifiability of the victim of both views. Quoting from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive, Fanon posits that the attitudes and behaviours of the Jews are always a reaction to antisemitism: “[les Juifs] se sont laissé empoisonner par une certaine représentation que les autres ont d’eux et ils vivent dans la crainte que leurs actes ne s’y conforment, ainsi pourrions-nous dire que leurs conduites sont perpétuellement surdéterminées de l’intérieur” (qtd. in Fanon 2015, 112 – 113; [the Jews] have allowed

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themselves to be poisoned by the stereotype that others have of them, and they live in fear that their acts will correspond to this stereotype… We may say that their conduct is perpetually overdetermined from the outside: qtd. in Fanon 2008, 95). But Fanon argues that a Jew can, under certain circumstances, avoid being identified as Jewish – for the simple reason that he has white skin: antisemitic prejudice is not based on phenotype.³² By contrast, a black person cannot hide his blackness; the phenotype of his skin colour is, of course, immediately visible. In Fanon’s words: “[j]e suis sur-déterminé de l’extérieur” (113; I am overdetermined from the outside: Fanon 2008, 95). On the other hand, Fanon professes a solidarity with the Jews, albeit a rather tenuous one. The basis for this solidarity is, however, not intrinsic to either Jew or black, but rather to the ‘othering’ that both experience: [d]e prime abord, il peut sembler étonnant que l’attitude de l’antisémite s’apparente à celle du négrophobe. C’est mon professeur de philosophie, d’origine antillaise, qui me le rappelait un jour “Quand vous entendez dire du mal des Juifs, dressez l’oreille, on parle de vous.” Et je pensais qu’il avait raison universellement, entendant par-là que j’étais responsable, dans mon corps et dans mon âme, du sort réservé à mon frère. Depuis lors, j’ai compris qu’il voulait tout simplement dire: un antisémite est forcément négrophobe. (Fanon 2015, 119) At first glance it might seem strange that the attitude of the anti-Semite can be equated with that of the negrophobe. It was my philosophy teacher from the Antilles who reminded me one day: “When you hear someone insulting the Jews pay attention; he is talking about you.” And I believed at that time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and soul for the fate reserved for my brother. Since then, I have understood that what he meant quite simply was the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe. (Fanon 2008, 101)

Fanon posits that the reasons for persecution – or the idea underlying it – differ: according to him, a Jew is persecuted as member of his race – which causes antisemites to either kill or sterilise the Jews – while a black person is persecuted as individual, which is deductible from the castration he faces (2015, 158 – 160). To be sure, Fanon’s argumentation relies heavily on psychoanalytical theories – and as Michael Rothberg notes, the psychopathology of trauma is a relational one; Fanon pathologises the white man as much as the black man:³³ “psychopathologies affect both victims and perpetrators (and accomplices or beneficiaries) of

 Fanon thus does not take the considerable Jewish community (then) living in Ethiopia into account.  Cf. the introduction to Peau noire, masques blancs: “[c]et ouvrage est une étude clinique” (Fanon 2015, 12; [t]his book is a clinical study: Fanon 2008, xvi).

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racism, albeit in different ways” (Rothberg 2009, 92).³⁴ But as Rothberg also points out, such a relational constellation is not straightforward; the ambivalences amount to a multidirectional framework of analysis. On the one hand, Fanon declares himself to be a brother-in-persecution of the Jew; on the other hand, this declaration is immediately revoked: “[l]e Juif et moi: non content de me racialiser, par un coup heureux du sort, je m’humanisais. Je rejoignais le Juif, frères de malheur. Quelle honte!” (Fanon 2015, 119; [t]he Jew and I: not satisfied with racializing myself, by a happy stroke of fate, I was turning more human. I was drawing closer to the Jew, my brother in misfortune. Disgraceful!: Fanon 2008, 101). Why is this shameful? Because the Jew is still a white person; and because Fanon has earlier reeled against the Antilleans for perceiving themselves to be closer to the white man than to the African. In other words, Fanon’s solidarity risks putting on a white mask himself. It is a conundrum he, so it seems, cannot escape.

2.4 Some remarks pertaining to genres and tropes While the issues of documentary literature and the rhetoric of anti-rhetoric have been discussed in the introduction, and encyclopaedic fiction has equally been discussed as a genre that, at least in a poststructuralist tradition, problematises the notion of presenting the totality of knowledge and complexity as offered by the Enlightenment encyclopaedia, a few more genres and tropes beg to be defined in light of their ambivalence and the contradictory approaches to and understandings of them.

2.4.1 Irony-sarcasm-cynicism-sardonicism In my analyses, particularly in Chapters 4– 6, irony, sarcasm and cynicism (and for Hilberg, sardonicism) are omnipresent yet only loosely linked over the chapters. They address matters of style but also of epistemology and of our perceptions of the perpetrators. These figures are found in survivors’ accounts beyond those analysed in this book, and they are, of course, not exclusively linked to either a pathos of anti-pathos or any other codification of emotionality. But irony  In a similar vein, but pertaining to the Shoah, Jörn Rüsen claims that the Shoah “dehumanizes victims and the perpetrators as well. The victims are robbed of their humanity and physically killed, and the perpetrators mentally kill their own humanity by dehumanizing and killing the others” (Rüsen 2008, 193).

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and its siblings, like pathos, are not situated merely on the textual level – on the contrary, our attributions reveal as much about our standards of normativity as they do about the author who employs those tropes: they are “figure[s] of thought” as much as “figure[s] of speech” (Colebrook 2004, 9). Underlying irony is discrepancy, and the standard distinction between verbal, situational, and dramatic irony is a distinction between what is said and what is meant,³⁵ between intentions and outcomes, and between the reader’s knowledge and that of the character. In effect, underlying so-called ‘postmodern’ irony is a similar discrepancy to the one underlying verbal irony: we wear 1980s disco clothing or listen to 1970s country and western music, not because we are committed to particular styles or senses but because we have started to question sincerity and commitment in general; everything is as kitsch and dated as everything else, so all we can do is quote and dissimulate. (Colebrook 2004, 2– 3)

The difference is between what one does, rather than what one says (as in the case of verbal irony), and what one believes in – indeed, in Colebrook’s condensed example, the very notion of believing in something – is fundamentally questioned. Robert Eaglestone argues against such ideas, particularly against the idea that postmodernism is merely playful. Indeed, in his view “postmodernism in the West begins with thinking about the Holocaust […] postmodernism – understood as poststructuralism, a still developing tradition of post-phenomenological philosophy – is a response to the Holocaust” (Eaglestone 2004, 2). In other words, postmodernism (at least as poststructuralism) is concerned with matters of the highest gravitas – and perhaps its irony also lies in the fact that it pretends to be playful in the face of it. Indeed, a different manifestation of poststructuralist irony is the historian’s irony, which is very much a verbal one: it is a doubly sceptical attitude “not only with respect to the historical record, but with respect to the whole enterprise of the historian as well” (White 1993, 376). As such, there is an “Ironic component in the work of all philosophers of history” (White 1993, 375).³⁶ It is a principle central to the historian’s ethos, a function of the skepticism which requires him to submit the documents to critical scrutiny. Het must treat the documents Ironically at some point in his work, must assume that

 In Hayden White’s words, “by way of negating on the figurative level what is positively affirmed on the literal level” (1993, 34). This has been the standard understanding of verbal irony since antiquity, when it underwent a shift: “[i]n the comic plays of Aristophanes […] eironeia referred to lying rather than complex dissimulation” (Colebrook 2004, 1).  The capitalisation of Irony, Ironic etc. is Hayden White’s – I capitalise these words only when paraphrasing White.

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the documents mean something other than what they say or that they are saying something other than what they mean. (White 1993, 375)

How this methodological irony relates to Hilberg’s stylistic (verbal) irony will be analysed in Chapter 6. Indeed, it is a particular form of verbal irony: it is thoroughly sarcastic. It is not entirely clear where (or when) irony stops being ‘mere’ irony and where (when) sarcasm begins. Indeed, John Haiman’s definition of sarcasm amounts to Colebrook’s definition of verbal irony: [w]hatever our social or psychological purposes in being sarcastic, […] we are doing two things at once: we are communicating an ostensible message to our listeners but at the same time we are framing this message with a commentary or a metamessage that says something like “I don’t mean this: in fact, I mean the very opposite.” (Haiman 1998, 12)

When he links this phenomenon to contemporary US culture, to “[a]lienation and shallowness of affect[,] perceived as the exclusive moral preserve of the generation of Americans born between 1961 and 1981” (13) to “a coolness, a detachment” (13), his definition of sarcasm rather confusingly approaches postmodern irony as we understand it. Is sarcasm, or is irony, truly the hallmark of a geographically and temporally narrowly defined culture? Haiman almost immediately refutes this, pointing to the ‘life in quotes’ idea being substantially older than postmodernism, and later makes intentionality and subjectivity the distinguishing properties: “[f]irst, situations may be ironic, but only people can be sarcastic. Second, people may be unintentionally ironic, but sarcasm requires intention” (20). This means that sarcasm is always intentionally ironic and is used more particularly as “a form of verbal aggression” (20) expressing “hostility or ridicule” (25). Monika Schwarz-Friesel also uses aggression as a category for differentiation: since irony allows the interlocutor to pretend not to understand the message, it can thus save face when mitigating a confrontational message – it can soften the blow and reduce conflicting communication (2009, 227). Sarcasm cannot. Irony does not need to be sarcastic to be used as a distancing strategy, of course, but neither does that automatically mean that such distancing would soften the blow. As Deborah Nelson points out, Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem is fundamentally ironic towards Eichmann, and while this has been misconstrued as empathy (or even, somewhat paradoxically, an unwitting sympathy) for Eichmann, Nelson explains it as a necessary distancing from Eichmann. Arendt wishes to understand the perpetrator and therefore needs to take him at his word but given Eichmann’s resorting to officialese euphemisms and his blatant lying when questioned by the prosecutor, this is impossible (Nelson

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2017, 55, 57– 58). Arendt’s irony consists of the difference between Eichmann’s discourse and the historical facts, of which Arendt assumes that they are self-evident. It is very likely that Arendt’s irony is lost because, to many, the facts are not self-evident. Arendt offers us two more reasons for her irony: it is, along with laughter, an act which demonstrates – or reinforces – one’s sovereignty (especially in the face of trauma) and it is, allegedly, the anti-pathos alternative to a distortion-through-pathos: “[i]ch bin […] der Meinung, dass man über diese Dinge nicht pathetisch reden darf, weil man sie dadurch verharmlost” (Arendt and Fest 2013, 59 – 60; I believe that one cannot speak about these things with a lot of pathos, because that trivialises them). Our attributions of cynicism to the perpetrators, then, stem from a dramatic irony: we, as readers with the necessary historical knowledge, already know what is going to happen to the Jews arriving in Birkenau – whereas they, in most cases, did not.³⁷ We are, in a way, bystanders: we watch the events unfold and do not (and in this case, we cannot) interfere. We also know that the perpetrators know what is going to happen, and hence our attribution. Robert Jay Lifton shows that there are alternative interpretations, and the matter of perspective will be discussed in Chapter 4. Here lies a difference between irony and cynicism on the one hand, and sarcasm and sardonicism on the other. Whereas the latter can only refer to language – or, somewhat extended, to communication (e. g. laughter) – the former may also refer to situations or thought processes. Sarcasm, which shares a certain aggressive and mocking quality with sardonicism, employs irony; while sardonic remarks need not be ironic. All four, however, “can mean or do more than is intended; there can be a force other than explicit and literal meaning, but this cannot be reduced to an other, second or elevated meaning” (Colebrook 2004, 123). Moreover, and this is of course true for all discourse, “we cannot control future effects [of irony etc.]” (Colebrook 2004, 123). This means that attributions of irony and its siblings may run counter to the speaker’s intention, and vice versa, that these intended speech acts are not (always) recognised as such.

 Cynical though this may sound, the SS tested various ways of handling the arriving deportees – looking for the most efficient method. It appeared that leaving no doubts as to the fate of the arrivals increased resistance and thus slowed down operations (cf. F. Müller 1979).

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2.4.2 Autobiography As it happens, the temperamental metaphor and the metaphor of the mask collide in a theoretical framework: in the question of the referentiality of autobiography. The notion that texts or discourses have a temperamental quality is not new. Manfred Schneider’s Die erkaltete Herzensschrift ³⁸ (1986) is an analysis of the autobiography genre in the twentieth century, i. e. after the emergence of new academic and scientific disciplines and the invention of various technologies which in turn have led to the emergence of new media landscapes. “Herzensschrift”, the writing of the heart, is, in Schneider’s understanding, any text pertaining to a genre where, in structuralist terms, the author conventionally equals the narrator: the confession, the diary, the autobiography (9) – and one could add: the memoir. “Erkaltet” (cooled down) implies a process: a change from the original ‘warm’ writings of the heart to a cooler version. Schneider traces the origins of this genre in a religious context – the writings of the apostle Paul (previously named Saul)³⁹ who, in an epistle to the Corinthians, distinguished between the old Jewish writing in stone (i. e. the Ten Commandments) and the new Christian writing that was inspired by the spirit of God and written in the flesh of the heart (9). Schneider contextualises this dichotomy in a proselytising context, with the convert Paul attempting to convert non-Christians. The Jewish diaspora following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the emergence of Christianity as the dominant religion in vast areas of Europe in the subsequent centuries (not to mention the political power of the Church)  The ambivalence of “Herzensschrift” becomes poignant when attempting to translate the term. Does one opt to translate “Schrift” as “script,” “scripture,” or “writing?” And is the heart the author of that text, or its object? No doubt, the latter ambivalence is closely connected to the very specific convention of the autobiography, where the author is simultaneously the text’s subject.  Schneider reads quite a lot in the replacement of this one letter by the other – linking it, through the homonym “Charakter” to the subjectivities as expressed in the confessional genre. Indeed, Schneider argues that the homonymic relation between those words is the consequence of a shift in meaning resulting precisely from the emergence of this genre (17). Be that as it may, there is at least one Jewish author who expresses a similar idea – but in the other direction. In his childhood memoirs, When Memory Comes (1978; orig.: Quand vient le souvenir…, 1978) Saul Friedländer illustrates how his birthname Pavel turned French when his family emigrated from Prague to France (Paul) and was later, under a false Christian identity changed to Paul-Henri. He shod those names in favour of Shaul/Saul and recovered his Jewish origins (Friedländer 2016b, 11). In her introduction to the newest edition, Claire Messud emphasises the (subjective) importance of this renaming for his becoming an Israeli citizen, too (2016, ix– x). Indeed, in his more recent autobiography, Where Memory Leads, Friedländer links his names to his “various identities” (Friedländer 2016c, 18).

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have infamously led to difficult relations between the Jewish minorities and Christian majorities and powers. The increased secularisation of politics since the Enlightenment and the concurrent emancipation of the Jews as fellow citizens did not lead to the end of antisemitism in Europe. The consequences are all too well known. Spanning a very wide gap between early Christianity and twentieth-century modernity, Schneider links the political power of the spiritual Herzensschrift to the Shoah: [d]ie politische Macht dieser Schrift haben jahrhundertelang Juden bezeugen müssen, die sich an ihr altes, in die steinernen Tafel geschnittenes Gesetz hielten. Denn die Markierung zwischen Buschstaben und Geist fand im Realen zahlreiche architektonische Varianten: Sie reichen von den Ghettomauern bis zu KZ-Gräben. (M. Schneider 1986, 9) The Jews, sticking to their old laws set in stone, had to acknowledge and testify for the political power of this writing for centuries, since the mark between letter and spirit manifested itself in many varying architectural varieties: these include the ghetto walls and the pits in the concentration camps.

His focus is on the shaping of the Herzensschrift after the invention of the printing press. Schneider claims that there is no subjectivity (“Innerlichkeit”) without the print medium (10) – a somewhat surprising view, when one considers the fact that the print medium erases the visual differences between individuals’ handwriting. It seems that he stresses the importance of the printing press for the diffusion of the confessional genre, in two ways. The direct way is obvious: the print press allowed the wider diffusion of written texts tout court. The indirect way is the link of both the printing technology and the genre to Protestantism (and to Calvinism more particularly). The religious imperative is still strong in the Calvinist confessions between Gutenberg and Rousseau, but it is not necessarily a proselytising genre. These confessions were conceived as a means for letting the reader discover what was going on in the hearts of the authors (10). Such texts are to be considered, through Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, as ‘hot’ media: [h]eiß nennen wir diese Kopien der testamentarischen Inskriptionen zum einen, weil sie im Sinne der Medientheorie McLuhans ein homogenes, detailreiches, alle Informationen intensiv, suggestiv abstrahlendes Medium speisten. Und zum anderen erreichten die Mitteilungen selbst solch hohe Temperaturwerte, weil sie unter der Regel uneingeschränkter, vorbehaltloser, erpreßter Wahrheit ergingen. (M. Schneider 1986, 10) We label these copies of the testamentary inscriptions hot because a) they constitute, with McLuhan, a homogenous, detailed medium suggesting it contains all information available and b) because the announcements themselves reached such high temperatures, because – as a rule – they were enacted as unlimited, unconditional, extorted Truth.

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For Schneider, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (first instalment 1782; first complete publication 1813) is a defining moment for the genre’s development: in it, he sees the combination of radical subjectivity and scientific obligation (M. Schneider 1986, 10) and the usurpation of the genre by the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie – previously, Schneider claims, autobiographies were written by churchmen, experts and state secretaries (16). As such, the Confessions offer a crossroads between an anthropological discourse and the indications of the author’s individuality, thereby anticipating the emergence of new disciplines in the course of the nineteenth century – most notably, criminology and psychology (10 – 16). During the nineteenth century, so Schneider argues, the genre’s heat intensified – in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire (11). The heat metaphor, it is suggested, is Poe’s, who is quoted speculatively claiming that a book entitled “My Heart Laid Bare” could offer to the reader a complete account of human thought, meaning, and perception, yet that the writing of such a text would be impossible since the paper would shrink under the heat of the feather (M. Schneider 1986, 11; Poe 1965, XVI: Marginalia-Eureka:128). Charles Baudelaire announced in a private correspondence that the writing of his autobiography was an impossible task due to the intensity of his hatred (M. Schneider 1986, 12).⁴⁰ Simultaneously, Schneider invokes Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis to suggest that the hotness of the Herzensschrift is originally – and emphatically – not an expression of its author’s ‘true’ emotions, thoughts and opinions, but rather a genre marked by religious and later secular disciplining: by the adaptation to the rules, codes, and laws of the powers that be: [d]ie calvinistische Disziplin, die an die Stelle der Beichte trat, ist der historische Begriff für eine Praxis öffentlicher Selbstkontrolle, der gegenseitigen Observation der Gemeindemitglieder. […] Im 18. Jahrhundert eroberte die Polizei des Herzens die Kinderstuben: In unzähligen Erziehungsschriften wurde den frisch zur Schrift ertüchtigten Zöglingen nachgelegt, täglich über die eigene Sündhaftigkeit Buch zu führen. (M. Schneider 1986, 18) The Calvinist discipline, which replaced the confession in this regard, is the historical notion for a practice of obvious self-control, of reciprocal observation by and of the community members. […] In the eighteenth century, the heart police conquered the infantile realm: in countless educational texts, the pupils, who had been recently disciplined into writing, were admonished to keep a daily diary about their own sinfulness.

 The allusion to Poe is obvious not only in the shared idea of the impossibility of the project, but also in the proposed title: Mon coeur mis à nu. A book with that title was, eventually, published – posthumously, in 1887, and containing only fragments.

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Technological and sociological shifts in the nineteenth century further question the role of autobiography as the medium to articulate and record the knowledge of the self: “[d]ie anthropologischen Wahrheiten gehören heute der Psychologie und der Kriminalistik” (M. Schneider 1986, 15; today, the anthropological truths are delegated to psychology and criminology), and autobiographies orient themselves increasingly to the new media – photography, the gramophone record, telephone, cinema – as technological inspirations. These media, which are initially, in McLuhan’s metaphor, ‘cold’ because they contain a considerable amount of noise that is reduced by technological innovations (compare the technological quality of a picture from 1870 with a smartphone picture from 2023 or the cinematic quality of film from the 1920s with contemporary 8K technology). The autobiography cannot compete with these new technologies and withdraws from the ‘competition’ by increasingly thematising the act of writing and thus to an autonomous poetics: [d]er autobiographische Text im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert verläßt das symbolische Terrain der Wahrheit. Er löst sich von der Vorschrift, die einst seine Bewegungen zu diktieren schien: Der Autor verzichtet auf die Suggestion, daß er die Schatten seines Profils in der camera obscura nachzeichnet, daß er ein natur- oder wahrheitsgetreues Porträt von sich gibt. (M. Schneider 1986, 13 – 14) In the twentieth century, the autobiographical text leaves the realm of the truth. It detaches itself from the prescription which once seemed to have dictated its movements: the author renounces the suggestion that he is drawing the shadows of his profile in the camera obscura, that he is offering a natural or truthful portrait of himself.

The cooling down of autobiography is, then, due to an influence of hitherto cold media on its conceptualisation and its rejection of referentiality.⁴¹ If Rousseau wanted to demonstrate the innately human in himself (and hence, in every human being, regardless of social status or wealth), Helmut Heißenbüttel notes that this is an adhering to a ‘fiction’: after all, Rousseau’s confession cannot be (and was not meant to be) subject to verifiability or falsification. Rather, the notion of the subject “war eine fiktive Sammelstelle. Eine Fiktion, durch welche die Gleichheit der Menschen begründbar wurde. Es war die Fiktion schlechthin” (1966, 568; a fictive collection point – a fiction which could argue for the equality of all humans. It was the fiction par excellence). To be sure, Heißenbüttel’s use of the word ‘fiction’ derivates from the usages in academic or literary-commercial discourse: here, it obviously does not refer

 Schneider’s theory is thus undeniably influenced by Friedrich Kittler’s technological-materialist views but harks back to observations made in the 1960s.

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to any ‘pact’ between reader and author nor to a literary genre, but rather it coincides with constructionist notions – not unlike Paul de Man’s theory of autobiography. Although this use of ‘fiction’ is at times repeated in analyses of Heißenbüttel’s own literary work (e. g. Dischner 1981, 38), and neuroscientific research does suggest that autobiographical writing entails an act of imagination, too (cf. Horstkotte 2002, 44), positing that any text or any discourse is fictional loses the sharpness of the term fictionality. Frank Zipfel maintains, instead, that any text, any discourse emerges through an act of construction – autobiography as much as any other. There lies an important difference between the implicit claim that every text is free from the duty to referentiality, as radical deconstructionism would have it and as is implied in labelling every text as ‘fiction’, and the claim that referentiality is problematic in every discourse – the latter is a corrective of the fictivity of any strong bipolar distinction between fiction and nonfiction as implied in the somewhat tautological institutional model, but it is not a fundamental challenging of this model’s insistence on the cultural and historical determination of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction (cf. Bareis 2008, 84– 85). The experience of the loss of totalities like the self is, unsurprisingly, autobiographically motivated, not in the least due to Heißenbüttel’s loss of an arm in 1941 in the campaign against the Soviet Union. The idea of totality, or the propagating of totality is also linked to fascism and hence the deconstruction of such images is an act of antifascist activity as much as it is a demonstration of the pervasiveness of fascism (“Entdämonisierung des Faschismus”, Dischner 1981, 41; de-demonisation of fascism). But does a complete disappearance of the author in autobiography, the complete forsaking of referentiality for the sake of autonomous poetics, not sit uneasily in the context of trauma, genocide, and fascist(ic) historical revisionism equally? The poetics and theory of autobiography are highly political. De Man’s theory of autobiography is the ultimate consequence of such readings that posit the lack of referentiality, and through a peculiar translation it has come to be described in terms of masks: his (in)famous essay Autobiography as De-facement, has been translated rather freely as Autobiographie als Maskenspiel (de Man 1993, 131). This is a peculiar choice: taken literally, defacement would amount to the removal or the reversal of the face; in its common-sense meaning it denotes the spoiling of an appearance, a disfiguring, a marring. Moreover, it is a translation which seems to drastically contradict de Man’s position; radically challenging the referentiality of autobiography, he posits that “the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine […] life” (1979, 920), that “the distinction between fiction and autobiography is not an either/or polarity but that it is undecidable” (921), and that consequently, “[a]utobiography […] is not a genre

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or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts” (921). The de-facement is, then, a “De-Maskierung des Ichs” (Holdenried 2017, 25) – a deconstruction of the pretence that we have unrestricted access to our own subjectivity or identity (akin to Heißenbüttel’s position) and thus of the notion that autobiography could be free of invention, arrangement, or preceding interpretation. It does not suggest that the author hides behind a narrator or a character – but rather that the author’s self is not accessible from the start. To be sure, according to de Man, it is not subjectivity that renders autobiographical writing ‘fictional’ or ‘fictive’ but rather the fact that language cannot be referential, only autoreferential (Schmidt 2014, 69). The translation of defacement as “Maskenspiel” (game of masks), however, suggests the opposite of marring our notions and reading habits: surely, the mask is an extra layer which may hide the face, but it does not undo the face. The mask shows itself and thus hints at the presence of the ‘authentic’ face underneath.⁴² However, this authenticity is precisely what de Man questions. While Holdenried’s alternative translation (2017) uses the mask metaphor, it brings a different accent than the original translator. She focalises the metaphor through de Man’s theory, whereas the original translator could be said to focalise it through the potential consequences that this theory has, i. e. that autobiographers put on masks and do not show ‘themselves’.⁴³ Translations can seriously complicate theoretical frameworks. Yet de Man’s theories sit uneasily when discussing the literature of the Shoah – for theoretical and biographical reasons. If the poststructuralist version of postmodernism is a response to the Shoah – not in the least in its scepticism vis-à-vis propaganda and ideological metanarratives and its awareness of the “limits and processes of rationality” so celebrated in modernism (Eaglestone 2004, 3),⁴⁴ de Man’s radical deconstructionist position – equally a branch of postmodernism – has been under attack just as much as Hayden White’s thesis on the purported fictivity of historiography, which Carlo Ginzburg

 And even if the mask is technically so refined that it manages to be perceived as the real face, it does not do any damage to the face underneath.  But after this initial translation, Holdenried resorts to de Man’s English term and instrumentalises its negative connotations in a subversive way, using it to demonstrate how female autobiographers in the first half of the twentieth century (equally subversively) changed the preceding autobiographic tradition (2017, 33 – 43).  Anticipating Rothberg’s model of multidirectional memory, Eaglestone maintains that “[p]ostmodernism […], is in no small part the result of anti- and postcolonial struggles […]. These, in turn, are also understood in the wake of the Holocaust. The colonial genocides of the Native Americans, First Australians, and the Herero in Namibia are now interpreted as genocides: the term dates only to 1944, after all” (Eaglestone 2004, 343).

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even attacks as an (unwitting) part of the fascist legacy and against which White even warns us (Ginzburg 1992, esp. 90 – 92; cf. Young 1997, 27– 28). In de Man’s case, his hidden personal past has raised question marks as to his rebuttal of autobiographies as texts with historical reference. In a review written for Het Vlaamsche Land,⁴⁵ an Antwerp-based wartime newspaper, of Albert Erich Brinckmann’s Geist der Nationen (1938), de Man posits that art is an expression of the ‘national character’ and infuses his nationalist notions with mystifying racial categories and the idea of an overarching ‘Western culture’ (de Man 1988, 300 – 301). One could, however, understand de Man’s later theory of deconstruction as a radical break with his politically problematic past, were it not for his antisemitic texts published in the collaborationist newspaper Le Soir ⁴⁶ – and for his never having mentioned this throughout his later career: de Man’s wartime activities have been only revealed posthumously by Ortwin de Graef. Critics connected this biographic element to de Man’s deconstructionist theory, which they reinterpreted as an intellectual alibi: if there is only text, then the author becomes irrelevant – and relieved of any political or ethical responsibility. In turn, de Man’s defenders argued that such accusations were attempts at discrediting deconstructionism and suggested that these attempts were politically motivated.⁴⁷ Interestingly enough, Jacques Derrida, whose intellectual influence on de Man is unmistakable, defended de Man, at times indirectly and at others more directly. Derrida rhetorically asks whether the controversy in the US would have been as substantial had de Man not been a professor at Yale and points to the lack of defence de Man could offer: he had died, after all. This causes Derrida to defend de Man: he points, in deconstructionist fashion, to both de Man’s simultaneous (biological) absence and his (through his texts, synecdochal) presence, begging for an ethical response – a fair assessment of de Man’s activities that does not gratify itself with platitudes and polemics (Derrida 1989, 128). Moreover, Derrida points to the fact that de Man’s virulent writings ended after 1942, “that is, well before the end of the war and of the German occupation” (Derrida 1989, 129) and seems to conclude from this fact that de Man

 ‘The Flemish nation/land’ – the Dutch word ‘land’ is ambivalent yet embodies the principles of ethnic nationalism quite succinctly.  Some particularly vicious texts were published on 4 March 1941, cf. de Man 1988, 286 – 292. It is worth pointing out that Le Soir was ‘stolen’, i. e. that the pre-war owners were disposed and that a new, collaborationist editorial team was put in charge of daily business.  In a similar vein, W.G. Sebald accused many of his university lecturers in Freiburg of having been either actively involved in or having abided the Nazi movement – and had his problems with the post-war biographic silence that these teachers managed to uphold (Schütte and Cross 2016, 162).

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must have been internally conflicted about his past – while remaining silent about it.⁴⁸ Evelyn Barish notes that these early polemics ironically mirrored de Man’s deconstructionist theory: [i]n the period that followed the scandal, a great many angry essays and letters were published, but they focused on de Man’s wartime writings and this single anti-Semitic article in particular. Little or nothing appeared to explain what lay behind this journalism, or to examine its roots, or to understand the factors that had influenced him and the culture from which he derived. Like his own approach to literature, he seemed to have virtually no history. (Barish 2014, xvi)

Yet the subsequent emergence of counternarratives, in which de Man has sheltered Jewish friends and helped friends who were involved in the Resistance (Derrida 1989, 157), show that this disappearance has not held up: de Man’s actions aside from writing are used as arguments to outrightly challenge the notion that de Man collaborated or at least to mitigate the accusations. This is only confirmed by the publication of a biography on de Man. Whatever the truth about de Man may be, he has subsequently resurfaced, not surprisingly, after deconstructionism has been challenged and literary theory has seen the return of the author.

2.4.3 Satires and lamentations None of the texts in the corpus would be, at first sight, considered satirical – no works of Edgar Hilsenrath, Maxim Biller, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon or Günter Grass are discussed here – and although satire can undeniably be marked by a

 While not quite coming to de Man’s defense (or only half-heartedly), Christoph Menke shows some understanding for the upheaval in the United States, where de Man was an academic star, but is appalled by the ferocity of the criticism in Germany: “[I]m Blick auf die deutsche Diskussion und die nahezu völlige Unbekanntheit des verhandelten Autors [drängt] sich die Frage auf, ob hier nicht ersatzweise, an einem belgisch-amerikanischen Fall, diskutiert wurde, was man an sehr viel näher liegenden deutschen Fällen nicht diskutieren wollte” (Menke 1993, 267; with regard to the discussion in Germany, one must ask whether the case of a nearly unknown BelgianAmerican scholar did not serve as an ersatz for so many obvious German cases which were not scrutinised). Screen memories indeed. That does not mean, as Menke himself indicates, that de Man should not be criticised, that his theory can under no circumstances be connected to his political activities and his autobiographic silence, but merely that selective outrage may deflect from deeper-lying roots. This should be, I think, another strong argument for comparative approaches – if done honestly – which may better contextualise the historical events and our own commemorative frameworks.

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pathos of anti-pathos (especially if grotesque themes and depictions are invoked, as in the case of Hilsenrath), it would be a very specific anti-pathos indeed. Nevertheless, if we join Hayden White in considering satire to be a plot structure rather than a genre, we could consider The Destruction of the European Jews as a satire. White, in line with Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957), suggests four such plot structures, consisting of two juxtaposed pairs: Romance, Satire, Comedy, and Tragedy.⁴⁹ While “[t]he Romance is fundamentally […] a drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over darkness, and of the ultimate transcendence of man over the world in which he was imprisoned by the Fall” (White 1993, 8 – 9), Satire is the precise opposite of this Romantic drama of redemption; it is […] a drama dominated by the apprehension that man is ultimately a captive of the world rather than its master, and by the recognition that, in the final analysis, human consciousness and will are always inadequate to the task of overcoming definitively the dark force of death, which is man’s unremitting enemy. (9)

Comedy and Tragedy both offer middle positions: in the former, “hope is held out for the temporary triumph of man over his world by the prospect of occasional reconciliations of the forces at play in the social and natural worlds”, while in the latter, such occasions are absent, “except [for] false or illusory ones”; the difference between Tragedy and Satire lies in the fact that in Tragedy the fall of the protagonist and the shaking of the world he inhabits […] are not regarded as totally threatening to those who survive the agonic test. There has been a gain in consciousness for the spectators of the contest. And this gain is thought to consist in the epiphany of the law governing human existence which the protagonist’s exertions against the world have brought to pass. (9)

If “the best grounds for choosing one perspective on history rather than another are ultimately aesthetic or moral rather than epistemological” (xii), each choice “has its implication for the cognitive operations by which the historian seeks to ‘explain’ what was ‘really happening’” (11). If it has cognitive implications, it has emotional implications, and this is particularly evident in the emplotment of traumatic events. White does not spare those historians who emplot the history of the Second World War as a Tragedy, criticising Andreas Hillgruber in particular for the latter’s depiction of the German warfare on the Eastern Front as Tragedy, framing it as a war of defence against the ravenous Soviets but completely forgetting both the war of annihilation unleashed by the Nazis two

 Here, too, the capitalisation is White’s.

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years prior and the ongoing mass murder in Central Europe – which could, of course, only continue as long as the Germans held the frontlines (White 1992, 42– 43). If the conception of the Second World War as Tragedy excludes the Shoah, could the Shoah itself be emplotted as Tragedy? A factual answer would be yes (this is possible, and Ruth Klüger might suggest that many of the sentimentalist depictions of the Shoah would be Tragic); a normative answer might see difficulties in the redemptive element: the Shoah has not decreased antisemitism or racism, and the traumatic impact implies that for the victims, the Shoah was not over when it was for the perpetrators, liberators, and bystanders. But perhaps Raul Hilberg’s historiographical project is marked by a Satirical streak – even if the notion that ‘man is ultimately a captive of his world’ might exonerate the perpetrators⁵⁰ (and blend out power imbalances and hierarchies, even if to read ‘the dark force of death’ as a reference to the [colour of the] SS [uniforms] would be a rather cynical lecture). Nevertheless, if there are only four plot structures detectable (in historiography), Satire might come the closest since it represents a different kind of qualification of the hopes, possibilities, and truths of human existence revealed in Romance, Comedy, and Tragedy […]. It views these hopes, possibilities, and truths Ironically, in the atmosphere generated by the apprehension of the ultimate inadequacy of consciousness to live in the world happily or to comprehend it fully. (10)

Precisely this lack of full comprehension is central to Hilberg’s (and many other’s) attempts at understanding the Shoah, at making sense of the utterly senseless. Moreover, if the “trope of Irony […] provides a linguistic paradigm of a mode of thought which is radically self-critical with respect not only to a given characterization of the world of experience but also to the very effort to capture adequately the truth of things in language” (37), it may be the trope par excellence to articulate the Satirical philosophy of history (even though White emphasises that Irony can be employed in the other plot structures as well). But satire and irony are thus uncoupled from (satirical) humour, and uncoupled from Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between irony and humour based on a distinction between

 This could go two ways: by implying that the perpetrators were merely ‘cogs in the machine’ – an important defence strategy in post-war trials – or by implying that it was ‘the world’ that murdered the Jews, and not the Nazis; thus potentially shifting blame to the Allies and neutral states for not taking in the refugees, or for failing to bomb Auschwitz. That a reluctance to take in Jewish refugees before the war (and up to 1941) caused Jewish lives to be lost is a fact beyond reasonable doubt, but it does not condone or in any way relativise the perpetrators’ guilt.

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(a nigh Platonic) ‘subject’ and (a very corporeal) ‘man’ (cf. Colebrook 2004, 135 – 147) – instead, satire is a pessimistic perspective on history and assumes that historiography cannot correct the wrongs of the past or offer a hopeful perspective for the future. If literary satires are aggressive, as Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek states (2005, 376), the Satirical philosophy of history contains a great deal of self-aggression. None of the texts in the corpus would be, at first sight, considered lamentations – no religious texts are discussed here. Yet nevertheless, Herman Wouk describes Raul Hilberg’s Destruction as at heart a Jewish lamentation, all the more powerful because not a word of grief escapes from its 1,000 pages line by line; and yet between every line there is the grief, the prophetic grief, of a Jew mourning for his people. It is that grief that drove the author to write those 1,000 riveting pages (Wouk 1995, 191– 192).

This is somewhat surprising, considering Hilberg’s avowed atheism – he only started attending (progressive) religious ceremonies in the final years of his life, after his second wife converted to Judaism (PoM, 36 – 37; Schlott 2016a, 106). Is there such a thing as a secular lamentation? What sets lamentation apart as a genre? Skimming through the collected volume Lament in Jewish Thought, it is clear that Gershom Scholem’s religiously and metaphysically connoted philosophy of language, itself heavily influenced by Walter Benjamin’s Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen (1916; transl. On Language as Such and the Language of Man, 1978), has unmistakably left a pervasive influence on our conceptualisation of the genre of lamentation (cf. Barouch and Schwebel 2014, 307). By contrasting lament with revelation (a contrast marked by a dialectic relation), Scholem roots it within a religious tradition; moreover, he considers it a peculiar form of language: “[i]n der Klage spricht sich nichts aus und deutet sich alles an” (Scholem 2000, 128; nothing is expressed and everything is implied: Scholem 2014, 313). It is “Sprache an der Grenze, Sprache der Grenze selbst” – the border between silence and expression (Scholem 2000, 128: a language on the border, language of the border itself: Scholem 2014, 313). If lament is thus “die Sprache des Schweigens” (Scholem 2000, 131; the language of silence: Scholem 2014, 316), its only concrete expression can be that of mourning – a mourning which, so Scholem maintains, must always amount to falling mute since the lament could only be adequately replied to by divine revelation: [e]s gibt keine Antwort auf die Klage, das heißt, es gibt nur eine: das Verstummen. […] [H]ier […] erscheint die Klage als die tiefe Gegenübersetzung der Offenbarung als der Sprache, die am absolutesten nach Antwort verlangt und sie ermöglicht. Nicht einmal

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mit einer Klage selbst kann man ihr antworten. Denn auf die Klage antworten heißt, der Trauer, die nur auf ihren eigenen Untergang gerichtet ist, eine andere Richtung geben wollen. Nur Einer kann auf die Klage antworten: Gott selber, der sie durch die Offenbarung aus der Revolution der Trauer hervorrief. (Scholem 2000, 130) There is no answer to lament, which is to say, there is only one: falling mute […]. Here […] lament shows itself to be the deep opposition of revelation, which is the linguistic form that absolutely demands an answer and enables one. One cannot even answer lament with a lament itself. For to answer lament means wanting to give mourning, which is directed only toward its own downfall, another direction. Only One can answer lament: God himself, who through revelation evoked it […] out of the revolution of mourning. (Scholem 2014, 316)

As Werner Hamacher formulates, the lament can thus be seen as self-serving and self-defeating: “[i]ch rede, aber diese Rede ist an niemanden gerichtet, von dem ich annehmen könnte, dass er sie aufnimmt. Die Klage ist also […] immer auch eine Klage darüber, dass sie nicht vernommen und im Vernommenwerden erst zu Klage werden kann” (Hamacher 2014, 91; I am speaking, but my speech is not addressed to someone who could presumably hear it. Lament is therefore always a lament about the fact that it cannot be heard and hence, that it cannot become a lament). Benjamin’s influence is clear when one considers his metaphysical (and slightly Platonic) formulation of the essence of language: [d]ie Sprache teilt das sprachliche Wesen der Dinge mit. Dessen klarste Erscheinung ist aber die Sprache selbst. Die Antwort auf die Frage: was teilt die Sprache mit? lautet also: Jede Sprache teilt sich selbst mit. Die Sprache dieser Lampe z. B. teilt nicht die Lampe mit (denn das geistige Wesen der Lampe, sofern es mitteilbar ist, ist durchaus nicht die Lampe selbst, sondern: die Sprach-Lampe, die Lampe in der Mitteilung, die Lampe im Ausdruck. (Benjamin 2019b, 11) Language communicates the linguistic being of things. The clearest manifestation of this being, however, is language itself. The answer to the question “What does language communicate?” is therefore “All language communicates itself.” The language of this lamp, for example, communicates not the lamp (for the mental being of the lamp, insofar as it is communicable, is by no means the lamp itself) but the language-lamp, the lamp in communication, the lamp in expression. (Benjamin 1997, 63)

Benjamin’s formulation is tautological: he concludes that “in der Sprache verhält es sich so: Das sprachliche Wesen der Dinge ist ihre Sprache” (Benjamin 2019b, 11; the linguistic being of all things is their language: Benjamin 1997, 63). If language can only communicate itself, then, Scholem stresses the self-defeating purpose of the lament – of language in the lamentation. For Scholem, lamenta-

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tion is the poetic expression of the lament⁵¹ – and possibly the only real concrete possibility of expressing the abstractness of the lament since mourning belongs to the symbolic realm. Poetry is the only adequate means of doing justice not only to the symbolic nature of mourning but to the self-defeating nature of the lament: “[d]ie Sprache in der Beschaffenheit der Klage vernichtet sich selbst, und die Sprache der Klage selbst ist eben darum die Sprache der Vernichtung” (Scholem 2000, 129; [l]anguage in the state of lament annihilates itself, and the language of lament is itself, for that very reason, the language of annihilation: Scholem 2014, 314). Indeed, by linking poetry to the instability of this language and its self-defeating purpose Scholem could be said, to some degree, to take a deconstructionist position avant la lettre, yet it is telling that his preoccupation lies with the lament, not with the lamentation. It seems, then, that White’s satire and Scholem’s lamentation – coming from entirely different perspectives – touch upon the same issues: the possibilities and the limits of language; the writing in spite of the knowledge that writing cannot redeem humanity, restore losses or reinstate justice; the writing that occurs because it is still better to write than not to write and thus give in to the silences. This discourse creates its own pathos – a pathos that nonetheless manifests itself as traditional and as anti-pathos. Such preoccupations are not limited to Hilberg’s case but form a red thread throughout the corpus.

2.4.4 Cathacresis If the polysemy of coldness in Charlotte Delbo’s oeuvre can be considered to be catachrestic, it should be outlined that catachresis is found on several levels in the testimonial and post-testimonial literature of the Shoah. It may, as in Delbo’s accounts, amount to a double reference (literal and symbolic), but it is also manifest in instances where language is inadequate to describe historical reality, and yet language must be used to describe that reality. As Leigh Ross Chambers says, catachresis as a kind of lexical error or making do, a form of bricolage whereby in the absence of a “proper” term another term is inappropriately, but necessarily (and hence in a sense legitimately or at least pardonably) détourné, turned away from its dedicated function, and pressed into alternative service. […] Catachresis is thus a figural operation whereby a literal term is made

 Although Hebrew has only one word for both concepts: ‘kinah’ (Barouch and Schwebel 2014, 305).

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available for other uses by means of associations that are normally metaphoric […] or metonymic […], or of course both. (Chambers 2004, 29)

Chambers considers catachresis to be characteristic for the genre of testimony, which needs to resort to a pre-existing vocabulary to describe hitherto unknown experiences (at least to the person who testifies), if one wishes to be able to describe these experiences at all. Perhaps the best-known example of catachresis in the literature of the Shoah is Primo Levi’s insistence on the inadequacy of words like ‘hunger’, ‘thirst’ and ‘cold’: they cannot begin to describe the hunger, thirst and coldness experienced in Auschwitz, emerging as they do from a world and from discourse before Auschwitz (QU, 120 – 121). These concrete examples are prefigured by a general remark: after the initial showering, tattooing and haircutting, Levi says that “[a]llora per la prima volta ci siamo accorti che la nostra lingua manca di parole per esprimere questa offesa, la demolizione di un uomo” (QU, 18 – 19; [t]hen for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man: TM, 28).⁵² But the inadequacy of language is, as outlined, just one reason for the emergence of catachresis. The second is the need to testify despite this inadequacy. As such, Chambers sees testimony as inherently catachrestic, because the détourne-

 Via a psychanalytically inspired reading of Sophocles’s Antigone, Judith Butler links catachresis, via the destabilisation of kinship, to the concept of social death, which is “the term [given] to the status of being a living being radically deprived of all rights that are supposed to be accorded to any and all living human beings (Butler 2000, 73). Butler argues that catachresis emerges through the categorisation of “lives that are not genocidally destroyed, but neither […] being entered into the life of the legitimate community in which standards of recognition permit for an attainment of humanness”. And she asks: “[h]ow are we to understand this realm, […] which haunts the public sphere, which is precluded from the public constitution of the human, but which is human in an apparently catachrestic sense of that term? (Butler 2000, 81). There remains a difference, of course, between Antigone on the one hand and Delbo, Klüger and Levi on the other: while the former dies, the latter survive and are reintegrated as political subjects in various postwar societies. For obvious reasons, such a reintegration is impossible for Antigone; and self-evidently, for Delbo, Klüger and Levi it was only possible because of the massive reshaping of the public sphere: the total defeat of Nazi Germany on Europe’s battlefields. In other words, Antigone’s discourse is catachrestic because she is a catachresis within Thebes’s public sphere, whereas Delbo, Klüger and Levi speak catachrestically because of the need to testify to their catachrestic status decades before – a status which demands testimony (if only to avoid the re-emergence of such a status, though liberal democracies are obviously rife with catachrestic life, as the European migration policies and the resulting biopolitical realities in the Moria and Kara Tepe refugee camps on Lesbos demonstrate), but perhaps also because of the psychological aftermath of having been catachrestically instead of fully human. On the concept of catachresis in Butler’s oeuvre, cf. Ingala 2018.

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ment is rhetorically prefigured: instead of naively considering testimony as a direct representation of ‘what has been’, he sees it as a social act in which the person giving testimony must, somehow, gain the attention of the addressee who is not likely to be the empathic listener – the empathic listener whom Dori Laub, a psychoanalyst, considers crucial for the act of giving testimony to traumatic experiences (Chambers 2004, 21; Felman and Laub 1992, 57). In other words, Chambers sees testimony as a social act fraught with power dynamics, but an act which may have transgressive qualities, which in turn at least suggests empowerment. Here, he reminds us of Levi’s fears: Levi recounts a nightmare he frequently had in the camp: of returning home, of testifying, only to find that nobody is listening (QU, 53 – 54; cf. Chambers 2004, 7). Delbo’s oeuvre gives us further catachresis beyond those outlined above. Elizabeth Scheiber rightly highlights Delbo’s innovative use of figurative language, which “makes an appeal to our imagination” (Scheiber 2009, 2). Concretely, she refers to the imagery of the mannequins. In Aucun de nous ne reviendra, Delbo evokes this image, which Scheiber considers to be metaphorical, to describe the heaps of corpses outside Block 25 (cf. Delbo 2016a, 28 – 33). Chambers would consider this metaphor to be catachrestic, and I would agree, since, as Scheiber herself outlines, the image is not supposed to be “gratuitous” but should rather “reach across the chasm of incomprehension to communicate to a group that did not directly experience the event and in doing so establish a community between writers and readers” (Scheiber 2009, 2). Delbo uses a trope that seems utterly out of place: not only does it dehumanise the victims, but its imagery also invokes a world before Auschwitz: a world of commerce, surely, but also a world of elegance.⁵³ She consciously uses this trope, not merely to bear witness to the historical facts, but also to articulate a sense of bewilderment and disbelief, which only heightens the urgency of her testimony.⁵⁴ But catachresis is equally tied to risky depictions and to sardonicism. Consider Delbo’s use of the word “combustible” to describe those human beings who were burnt in the crematoria of Birkenau (Delbo 2016a, 18; fuel: Delbo

 As such, it constitutes a further element of Delbo’s traumatic realism. Rothberg analyses her oeuvre extensively but focuses on the disruptions of synchronicity (Rothberg 2000, 156 – 177). But in his introduction, he equally stresses the “peculiar combination of ordinary and extreme elements that seem to characterize the Nazi genocide in these accounts” (Rothberg 2000, 6).  Nathan Bracher considers the trope to be utterly ironic, and while the irony is indeed situated in the difference between the narrating I (shortly after liberation) and the narrated I (in Birkenau) – and indeed, between the narrated I in Birkenau and the pre-war narrated I – the label of catachresis seems to better catch both the sense of bewilderment and the communicative function of the trope (Bracher 1994, 89 – 90).

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1995, 8). At first sight, we are seemingly not confronted with a catachresis, since, as Nathan Bracher rightly states, “combustible” is that which burns, that which one may put in an oven – but still this description sends shivers down our spine (Bracher 1992, 254). The trope is completely in line with the notion of industrialised genocide; but more critically, the victims’ dehumanisation is complete. But the rhetorical dehumanisation cannot be taken to express Delbo’s political or anthropological view. On the contrary, in its sardonic formulation, it exposes the perpetrators’ dehumanising practices for all the world to see. The catachresis may be provocative, but in its provocation and in its unsettling nature, it again highlights the urgency of testimony. A final example of catachresis in Delbo’s oeuvre addresses the unavoidability of catachresis in testimony. But it is not situated in the realm of commentary, as Levi’s are. Rather, it is a poetic image situated in the reality of Birkenau. While describing the icy temperatures in the winter of 1943 in Birkenau – all the more biting due to the lack of decent clothing, of course – Delbo mentions the utter silence during the Appell: “[l]es paroles glacent sur nos lèvres” (Delbo 2016a, 101; [w]ords freeze on our lips: Delbo 1995, 63). Later, these lips are said to be “brûlées de froid” (Delbo 2016a, 104; seared by the cold: Delbo 1995, 65). Slightly later again, the problem of communication is repeated: “[l]e matin au réveil, les lèvres parlent et aucun son sort des lèvres” (Delbo 2016a, 112– 113; lips move but no sound comes out: Delbo 1995, 70). The contradictions that Delbo invokes amount to catachresis: words cannot freeze, but lips can; the coldness cannot burn lips, but at most leave a burn-like sensation; if the lips speak, they must utter a sound.⁵⁵ Here, catachresis is not the consequence of the inadequacy of language, but catachresis is used to express the problem of communication, which, undeniably, is situated in the extremity of the everyday violence and the limitations of the body in such circumstances. But in the light of the problem of ‘returning’ to the normal world in the trilogy’s final part, Mesure de nos jours, the challenges to testimony lie not only in the extremity of the events: they are also rooted in the problem of communication during the events themselves. Here, too, Delbo’s traumatic realism is manifested through its “nonsynchronicity” (Rothberg 2000, 175). Here, too, catachresis offers a language to bear witness to traumatic experiences. So much for catachresis in testimonial texts, so much for testimony as inherently catachrestic. One can argue that post-testimonial texts, such as W. G. Sebald’s and Dieter Schlesak’s, amount to catachresis, too. While these texts do not pretend to be testimonies, they rely heavily on the testimonies of survivors

 One notes that the last catachresis is not maintained in the English translation.

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to articulate the horrors of the Shoah – whether that reliance is rendered transparent or not, and whether these horrors are depicted directly or indirectly. Therefore, while questions of appropriations inevitably doom large, these texts do try to maintain a sense of the real through testimonies, but by doing so, they unavoidably (in Chambers’s understanding) constitute catachresis on the generic level: as a culturally familiar form of appropriative making-do, a catachrestic move – which may of course range from an appropriation so discreet as to escape notice to one that is very bold – has some potential for achieving a kind of legitimacy for the rhetorical subject on grounds of expressive necessity. No other means existed for saying what needed to be said; in the absence of direct means (a dedicated genre), indirect, figural means requiring reading (a substitute, appropriated genre) have been resorted to, even though these means are inappropriate. Thus catachresis can work the magic whereby an infraction is read as deliberate, but necessary, and hence as constituting, not an error and not an act of madness or even of gratuitous provocation, but a meaningful utterance that requires – not despite but because of its untimely character – to be taken seriously. (Chambers 2004, 29 – 30)

2.5 Into the abyss (I): Testimonies from the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau Before we delve into the main corpus, let us take a briefer look at the testimonies from the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau: to the testimonies gathered by Gideon Greif, the interview with Shlomo Venezia and Filip Müller’s acts of testimony. They have been excluded from the main corpus for methodological reasons: While Greif conducted his interviews in Hebrew, the book was first published in German.⁵⁶ Moreover, a comparison with the English version demonstrates the methodological challenges posed by translation: in the German translation of the Hebrew, Josef Sackar answered that it was “nicht angenehm” (not pleasant) when he heard the screams of the victims being gassed. The English translation does not retain this litotes: “[i]t was definitely unpleasant” (Greif 2018, 94; Greif 2005, 112). The effects these choices bear on a potential pathos of anti-pathos are considerable. A similar constellation emerges in Shlomo Venezia’s account: he was interviewed by Béatrice Prasquier in Italian, whereas the book was originally published in French. And we know that the rendition of Filip Müller’s account was heavily dependent on the editorial work of

 The English publication features one more interview, with Ya’akov Silberberg. Its introductory essay on the historical circumstances of the Sonderkommando as well as the place of the Sonderkommando in imagination is an extension of the introduction to the German version.

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Helmut Freitag, who influenced the linguistic and stylistic register. Andreas Kilian notes that Müller recounts “überwiegend fast leidenschaftslos, ohne Hassgefühle und nicht anklagend” (Kilian 2022, 270; generally, almost passionless, lacking expressions of hatred and accusations). This is not only due to Müller’s documentary aspirations; Kilian argues that Freitag edited the book in light of what a German audience in the late 1970s would be willing to accept (Kilian 2022, 271). But note that Müller’s appearance in Shoah will be briefly addressed. To be sure, the testimony of Müller as we see it is largely shaped by the editorial decisions made by Claude Lanzmann and Ziva Postec; but these decisions are nowadays more transparent, given that the outtakes are nowadays accessible on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. As such, we can accurately describe and contrast Müller’s pathos with Lanzmann’s.⁵⁷ But even more importantly is the matter of the ‘ownership’ of testimony: Lanzmann has been criticised for not respecting Müller’s wishes as to what would be shown in the final film; Müller thereupon refused to give further interviews (Greif 2005, 81; Chare and Williams 2019, 225; Kilian 2022, 273).⁵⁸ If Lanzmann opted to retain a powerful moment and a very real element in Müller’s testimony, it came at the price of putting an end to Müller’s testifying. There are two reasons for dwelling, if ever so briefly, on the very few testimonies we have from these very few survivors. The first reason is that some of these testimonies, also known as the Scrolls, serve as an important intertext in Schlesak’s novel. The second is that they pose a particularly difficult testimony to listen to – but an ever so important one. Because of the nature of the events that they describe, these testimonies articulate a strong pathos, but at the same time these survivors often speak about the numbing of feelings, even if they readily admit to feelings of shame (or the lack thereof) and to the traumatic afterlife of their experiences, e. g. in the form of nightmares. Occasionally, they discuss matters of style and expression. These testimonies may be divided according to their creation: very few were written in 1944 and buried in the earth, their authors hoping that one day they would be found, since they anticipated that they would no longer be around to bear witness. These are the Scrolls of the Sonderkommando, and matters of emotionality will be discussed amply in Chapter 4. Suffice it to point to one instance here: Zalman Lewental describes the conditions of their work as machine-like: the violence inflicted on them as well as the sheer horror of their task did not allow for moments of reflection (qtd. in  Nicholas Chare and Dominick Williams offer an extensive overview of these decisions and the underlying artistic principles (Chare and Williams 2019, 219 – 247).  Conversations with Andreas Kilian in 2002 seem to be one of the very few exceptions to this rule (cf. Kilian 2022, 278 n.15).

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Greif 2005, 38). The notion of such machine-like, automatic, robotic work is prevalent in the second type of testimony: those testimonies which were recorded after the facts. During the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, Filip Müller describes those Sonderkommando prisoners who had witnessed the death of their relatives and who had consequently succumbed to extreme apathy as robots (“Strafsache gegen Mulka u. a.” Vernehmung des Zeugen Filip Müller 1964, 42), and even a superficial reading of Gideon Greif’s collection of interviews with Sonderkommando survivors shows how pervasive the trope remained decades later. Included in Greif’s collection are interviews with Josef Sackar, the Dragon brothers (Abraham and Shlomo), Ya’akov Gabbai, Eliezer Eisenschmidt, Shaul Chazan, Leon Cohen and Ya’akov Silberberg. None of them cried during the interviews, Greif assures us, and Josef Sackar links this to the uselessness of tears in Auschwitz: “[t]here, weeping could no longer express the feelings of bereavement and fury over the murder of an entire people” (Greif 2005, 87– 88).⁵⁹ In other words, if the title of Greif’s collection – We Wept Without Tears – resorts to catachresis, it is perhaps because tears in Auschwitz would have been catachrestic to begin with. With few exceptions, they all describe their emotional state in Birkenau as robot-like.⁶⁰  Abraham Dragon explicitly links pervasive feelings of depression with an absolute absence of tears (Greif 2018, 171). To be sure, the notion of not crying is partially informed by gendered cultural codes – codes that pertain either to the moment of experience or the moment of testimony (or both, of course). Shlomo Venezia tells us he did not cry when he was told that his mother had been gassed (Venezia 2009, 43). Ya’akov Gabbai testifies that he told a friend to “[s]top wailing. A man doesn’t cry” (Greif 2005, 206). Then again, Charlotte Delbo, recounting the death of her friend Viva Daubeuf in the Krankenrevier in July 1943, ends the matter with a similar observation: “[a]ucune larme ne m’est venue. Il y a longtemps que je n’ai plus de larmes” (Delbo 2016b, 65; [n]ot a tear came to my eyes. I’ve had no tears for a long, long time: Delbo 1995, 154). Though a different experience is being described and articulated, the absence of tears is not merely an engendered code of emotionality, as Gabbai’s testimony might give cause to believe. To be sure, Delbo’s experiences differ from Gabbai’s – and perhaps this explains why, towards the end of Aucun de nous ne reviendra, she recounts how, in a state of exhaustion, she shed tears, even though she did not want to (Delbo 2016a, 165).  Sackar: Greif 2005, 103; Gabbai: Greif 2005, 206; Silberberg: Greif 2005, 322. In Cohen’s case, the observation is rendered central by alluding to it in the chapter’s title: “We Were Dehumanized, We Were Robots” (Greif 2005, 286). Shaul Chazan does not use the trope directly but says that he had “stopped being human […]. We kept going because we’d lost our humanity” (Greif 2005, 273). Ya’akov Silberberg puts it even stronger: “[a] person who can’t cry is not a human being” (Greif 2005, 326). Chazan’s assertion is not a moral judgement – it should not be, in any case – but a description of his mental state. But the possibility that Chazan is judging himself morally cannot be entirely negated – this is clear from Silberberg’s strong statement: again, the reality of the Sonderkommando can only be expressed catachrestically. Such self-attributions are, of course, not restricted to the testimonies of the Sonderkommando: Regina Zielinski, one of

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Apart from this attribution, sometimes they describe their feelings most laconically, even if it is not always clear whether this is a reaction to disbelief or outrage. This is demonstrated in Sackar’s answer to Greif’s following question: How did you feel as everyone around you suddenly began to undress? How did I feel? You can imagine how difficult it was. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling to be in the middle with them all. But what could I do? (Greif 2005, 103)

Shlomo Venezia uses the trope of the robot as well: he states that the violence with which the new arrivals were met caused them to step “like robots, in response to the yells and orders” (Venezia 2009, 35). Later, he uses the same metaphor in his description of a collective state of mind in the Sonderkommando: “we were terror-struck. We had turned into robots, obeying orders while trying not to think, so we could survive for a few hours longer” (Venezia 2009, 59). Greif acknowledges this vocabulary and even uses this vocabulary of self-attribution for the characterisation of the men he interviewed, describing their actions as machine-like (Greif 2018, 31). But he equally stresses that while some may have genuinely become utterly apathic and brutalised – especially among those who had to shove the corpses in the furnaces – others tried to maintain humane relations (Greif 2005, 17; Greif 2018, 38). This is evident from the testimonies, too. Venezia recounts an episode where “in spite of everything, we were touched, and affected” (98), describing the time a mother and her son had apparently evaded immediate gassing – but of course, they could not escape and were doomed to die. Venezia could, of course, do nothing to help them. In the face of such helplessness and hopelessness, those members of the Sonderkommando responsible for the sorting of the clothes, by contrast, were incessantly confronted with the demand of affective self-control: Greif stresses that these men “preferred to mask the truth in order to spare the victims from suffering” (Greif 2005, 12). Their behaviour was, then, not callous:

the very few who survived Sobibor, testified that life in the camp occurred on a day-to-day basis, leading to a robot-like existence (qtd. in Hänschen et al. 2020, 144). Abraham Margulies, another survivor of Sobibor, similarly said that the existence of the prisoners was like that of automatons (qtd. in Hänschen et al 2020, 144 n. 46). And Shlomo Venezia, while testifying to the belatedness of trauma, tells us that “[w]hen I finally did see my sister, twelve years after the Liberation, […] I started to cry. In twelve years, since my deportation, I’d never cried… apart from once, when I cried with rage. But all of a sudden, my emotion at seeing my sister again had made all the poison I’d been building up inside myself all those years pour out. And I couldn’t stop talking and weeping” (Venezia 2009, 105).

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The Sonderkommando prisoners did not calm and deceive the people who faced the gas chambers in order to assure the SS a smooth killing process. Rather, their concern was to give the victims, at this desperate moment, a touch of warmth and humanity on their short walk to the gas chamber. In this respect, the secretive behavior of the Sonderkommando men was intended for the victims’ benefit. […] In a world of continual atrocity that had by then numbed their senses and feelings, these encounters and brief conversations […] provided the Sonderkommando prisoners with a rare opportunity to relate to others like human beings. (59 – 60)

To be sure, the suppression of feelings was a strategy of survival, both physically and mentally. Unavoidably, this had an impact on the everyday discourse that the Sonderkommando prisoners used in the crematoria. Eliezer Eisenschmidt testified that one man “tried to be entertaining and funny even in that place. He always spoke in a sarcastic or macabre way. For example, he said that the gas chambers at the crematorium were like a movie. The pictures flashed by until the word ‘Ende’ [The End] came up on the blank screen” (Greif 2005, 245). It is obvious that such cynical remarks differ from the cynicism of the SS – this will be dealt with in detail in Chapter 6 but suffice it to point briefly to an instance from the context of the Birkenau crematoria. Ya’akov Silberberg informs us that the SS had developed a “special method” for burning the corpses: “they decided that you had to cremate a man, a woman, and a child in one go. This made the cremation more effective since the man was skinnier, the woman fatter, and the child very pudgy. […] The Germans had a word for this child: Zulage” (Greif 2005, 321). Indeed, the translators provide us with a footnote, explaining that Zulage was “prisoners’ jargon for ‘extra’, mainly extra food, which meant so much to them” (Greif 2005, 380 n. 20). While it is easy to see how the victim’s cynicism is a coping mechanism, the perpetrator’s cynicism is less straightforward. To be sure, it could be a manifestation of his utter disregard for human life or of his antisemitism. It could also be a way of mocking and taunting the prisoners of the Sonderkommando. But it could also be a coping mechanism, a way of distancing himself from his historical guilt. Needless to say, it would not absolve him from this guilt.

Part One: Pathos and anti-pathos and the ‘risks’ of encyclopaedic and documentary fiction

Introduction As indicated in the introduction, the authors in this section position the eyewitness and the narrator’s and/or author’s search for the eyewitness centrally in their works of fiction. The testimonies of these eyewitnesses constitute a veritable pathos of the ‘real’ – they are framed as the most tangible link to the traumatic past. But this link is uncanny, precisely because it means that the traumatic past does not entirely belong to the past. Moreover, this pathos of the ‘real’ is double sided: it is primarily constituted through the description of the traumatising events and it is evoked through the sense of authenticity that these authors of fictional texts wish to install. This doubling means that a conflict must arise: is the victim given a voice out of ethical concerns or is this, despite best intentions, a strategy that benefits the literary author rather than the victim? Is the exercise in empathy a genuine concern for the other, or is it ultimately self-oriented? Can it be both simultaneously? This link to the past through the eyewitness is particularly uncanny when that eyewitness is not a victim but a perpetrator, and the ‘real’ is not situated in the perpetrator’s discourse, because the latter is rife with lies. Such constellations make it clear that the ‘real’ is a mediation of the past. This is not to suggest that there is no way of establishing what happened; it is not resorting to radical deconstructionism; but the testimonies in court demonstrate a pathos of anti-pathos for important, albeit different, reasons. Due to the conceptualisation of juridical guilt in the FRG, the perpetrators did their best to obscure any insight into their motivations for participating in genocide, presenting themselves as parts of a machinery following orders; the survivors had to keep their cool to be perceived as credible witnesses; but this demonstrates that the discourses and institutions supposed to uncover the truth – in this case a legal rather than a historical truth – are bound by rules as well. Sebald’s survivors – who are mostly indirect eyewitnesses themselves, having survived in exile or witnessing the aftermath of the Shoah – remain aloof from the narrators: they are distant; the atmospheres are cold. The pathos is thus one of anti-pathos, too: to some degree, the pathos of the real and the pathos of anti-pathos overlap. One can read the texts of both Sebald and Schlesak as articulating their own awareness of these limitations, of their suggesting the truth, by looking at their strategies of narrative unreliability, which demand an active role on the part of the reader. If read as such, the conscious fictionality serves to nuance the poetics and the pathos of the ‘real’ by pointing to its own limitations. This is not an anti-pathos, to be sure, it is situated on a different level akin to the witness’s anti-pathos: it serves to establish a sense of integrity, of trustworthiness, albeit in a changed cultural framework. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110758580-006

3 W. G. Sebald: Melancholia, nostalgia and the pathos of empathy Terry Eagleton describes the eccentric outsider, which he considers a caricature of the English ideal of the free gentleman, as “free to be themselves yet slaves to their own singularity” (Eagleton 2019, 120). This description applies rather neatly to many of the outsiders featured in Sebald’s prose – and to a degree also to Sebald’s self-stylised image, as an expat who had taken a peripheral position, both far away from his native Germany as well as in the field of his discipline (as scholar working nearly exclusively on predominantly literary outsiders: Austrian and Swiss authors as well as Shoah survivors). This has a considerable influence on Sebald’s reception. After elaborating on this phenomenon, I will look at the pathos and the anti-pathos in Sebald’s oeuvre, using Mark Anderson’s attribution of warmth to Sebald’s prose quoted in the introduction. But Anderson tells, so I argue, only one half of the story, and I would argue that the metaphor of coldness is even more central to Sebald’s prose than the metaphor of warmth. I include Sebald’s polemics under ‘cold Sebald’ but understand this may be confusing: do polemics not invoke the notion of passion, of anger, of heat? This may be so, and while Anderson’s attribution demonstrates that he would rather associate coldness with emotional neutrality and a factual reporting style, he connects it, in Sebald’s prose, with warmth. That is, of course, because Sebald’s discourse is not emotionally neutral and transcends the factual. But to align Sebald’s polemical essays with this warmth would be equally confusing as its heated lack of emotional neutrality belongs to an entirely different category, of course, than the perceived warmth in Sebald’s own literary prose. Generally, whereas Anderson’s warmth is positively connoted, Sebald’s polemics have not been well-received – a further reason for listing them under the opposite of Anderson’s metaphor.

3.1 The pathos of reception: some considerations when reading Sebald There can be no doubt as to the canonical status of W. G. Sebald within Germanlanguage literature – suffice it to point to the enormous academic output on his oeuvre in the last two decades – but the process has been marked by two dia-

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metrically opposed attitudes: hagiography and polemical disapproval.¹ Both hinge on the image that Sebald fashioned of himself as the outsider: in the first case, as a somewhat eccentric outsider who sympathises with those marginalised by history; in the second, as a polemicist who consciously broke away from his academic field’s mainstream with psychopathologising tendencies aimed at its literary ‘heroes’ (Carl Sternheim and Alfred Döblin) and polemical attacks against his peers, while devoting his own research to authors considered social and cultural outsiders (Schütte 2011, 161– 164; 2017, 101; Schütte and Cross 2016, 163).² The double pathos of reception is mirrored, moreover, by the double pathos one finds during Sebald’s career as a literary author: during the 1990s, he wrote two polemical essays which reached a broader audience – on Alfred Andersch and on the perceived failure of the post-war literary scene to adequately address the air war and its psychological consequences. Both the pathos of hagiography and the pathos of polemics lead to onesided and at times plainly wrong understandings pertaining to Sebald’s prose and his poetics. Ruth Franklin claims that “[r]eading Sebald, we are all amateurs” (2006, 138) – which is a remarkable statement, since it implies that we cannot read Sebald critically. She credits Sebald with the creation of “an essentially new genre, a profoundly unstable hybrid of fact and fiction that confounds every expectation, forces the reader to approach his work without preconceptions” (2006, 138). Fact and fiction are indeed interwoven in Sebald’s prose, but surely, he is not the first author to achieve the illusion of the encyclopaedia in fiction. Is the assumption that a reader can approach a work without ‘preconceptions’ tenable? Is it tenable that a reader can be forced to abandon all preconceptions? Does Sebald’s work not further complicate these general questions in its resemblance to Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality as a mosaic, in an attempt to re-write collective history – or at least read it against the grain (cf. Gray 2017, 122– 123)? This is not to say that Sebald’s literary texts do not inces-

 The academic output on Sebald is so vast that even mentioning this fact is quickly becoming a cliché. There lies gentle irony in the fact that this should befall Sebald, who himself ironically noticed the similarly overwhelming output on Franz Kafka: “Wer die fast schon ins Abstruse angewachsene Literatur zu Kafka zu überblicken versucht, den nimmt vor allem wunder, weshalb das an der eigenen Ausgezehrtheit schon leidende Werk dieser parasitären Invasion nicht erlegen ist” (Sebald 1986, 194, qtd. in Prager 2006, 105; whoever attempts to get an overview of the almost ridiculously expansive literature on Kafka, will mainly wonder how the oeuvre, suffering from its own exhaustion, has not collapsed under this parasitical invasion. Note that ‘Auszehrung’ is a dated term for tuberculosis, from which Kafka suffered).  Although this, too, has changed: to give just one example, Thomas Bernhard, whom Sebald would later explicitly mention as a literary influence, is no longer a marginal author – neither in the German Feuilleton, nor in academia.

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santly question the borders between imagination and factuality, between biography and (auto)fiction – there is no doubt that they do. But that is not the point. The point is rather that Sebald’s reception has been marked by hyperbole for quite some time. That is not a completely surprise, considering that Sebald’s legacy has partially been written by friends and colleagues, as is exemplified in Saturn’s Moons (2011): as the list of contributors mentions, co-editor Jo Catling was a colleague of Sebald at UEA (xiii), and the volume contains several essays by former colleagues (Clive Scott, Richard Sheppard and Gordon Turner) and by former PhD students (Florian Radvan and Uwe Schütte). It is perhaps inevitable that such biographic ties lead to biographism in the Sebald scholarship.³ The admiration of Sebald leads academics to imitate the utter ambivalence of Sebald’s prose. Sven Meyer starts his 2003 essay by pointing to the confusing relation between fact and fiction, but his description is slightly confusing: “[d]as Verhältnis von Fakten, Effekten und Fiktionalisierungen wird von W.G. Sebald in seinen wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten ebenso wie in seinen narrativen Texten vermessen” (S. Meyer 2003, 75). Translating this sentence is tricky, since it is ambiguous. The ambiguity lies in the contranym ‘vermessen’, which means both to measure an object exactly and to make a mistake while measuring. If there is one thing that cannot be exactly measured in Sebald’s prose, it is most surely the relation between facts and fictionalisation. But if ‘vermessen’ is understood as an adjective – and not the pejorative ‘presumptuous’ or ‘impudent’ – Meyer’s

 A prime example is Mark Anderson’s contribution to Saturn’s Moons: not only does he link Sebald’s family history to Ambros Adelwarth’s family in Die Ausgewanderten, he also points out that Sebald’s academic interest for authors like Jean Améry is inspired by a similarity the latter shares with Sebald’s admired maternal grandfather (2011, 33). Yet his description of Die Ausgewanderten indicates the limits of such biographism since Anderson notes the similarities and the differences between the jobs of Sebald’s emigrated aunts and uncles and their fictional counterparts (35). Pointing out the limits of this reading practice is important in light of certain critics’ tendencies to conflate fictive characters with real-world persons. To limit myself to one example: Boehncke seems convinced that “Ambros Adelwarth, […] Titelfigur der dritten ‘langen Erzählung’” is “der Großonkel des Autors” (2003, 43; Ambros Adelwarth […] the eponymous character in the third ‘long story’, is the author’s great-uncle). One cannot really hold this against Boehncke: Sebald had mentioned a great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth in an interview a few years before his death (Wachtel 2007, 52). Nonetheless, by saying that the title character is Sebald’s great-uncle, Boehncke a priori deprives Sebald of any fictionalisation. This is a step I hesitate to take: Ceuppens demonstrates the subtle discrepancies between Sebald’s biography and the biography of this title character: their respective wives have different names, Sebald’s first home in Norfolk was not Hingham. Moreover, Ceuppens claims that Sebald’s greatuncle was not called Ambros (Ceuppens 2017, 37). This flatly contradicts Sebald’s statements and demonstrates the need for a cautious reading.

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sentence makes more sense: it points to the boldness of Sebald’s enterprise of balancing fact, effect (or perhaps affect?) and fictionality. Indeed, what seems to happen in Meyer’s discourse – wittingly or not – is a linguistic constellation that confuses the reader as much as Sebald’s discursive constellations between academic writing and prose, which are marked incessantly by fictionalisation strategies. To be fair, Sebald’s own statements have not helped the classification of his texts as fiction or as (auto)biographies in disguise – instead, he has insisted on a genre declamation that does not let itself be assigned to one pact or the other: ‘prose’ (cf. Franklin 2011, 196). Moreover, his textual strategies invite the reader to be confused as to the veracity of the events described: Sebald integrates the biographies of other authors (often in fictionalised form) in his prose, and he creates the impression of integrating himself in the narrative as an autofictional narrator. There is an undeniable methodological spill-over from his academic work, in which he never made a strict distinction between author and work, into his fiction. Sebald’s academic article on Peter Weiss, whose works supposedly betray a pathological melancholy, is exemplary (cf. Schütte 2014, 397). Not only does Sebald describe the ‘protagonists’ of Weiss’s Das große Welttheater as “vollig autistische, geschichtslose Seelen” driving their “kaum mehr lebendiges Wesen” (Sebald 1986, 267; wholly autistic beings without any past history [who] are scarcely alive any more: Sebald 2004d, 178), but the painting is supposedly marked by a “pathologisch[e] Chromatik” (Sebald 1986, 267; “pathological chromaticism”: Sebald 2004d, 177), and the self-portrayals supposedly allow us an insight into the painter’s psychological condition: “[e]ine Gouache aus dem Jahr 1946 zeigt ein von schwerer Melancholie verhangenes Antlitz, während ein etwa gleichzeitig entstandenes, in kalten Blautönen gehaltenes Porträt bestimmt ist von einer in sich versammelten, geradezu ungeheuren intellektuellen Resilienz” (Sebald 1986, 267; [a] gouache of 1946 shows a face marked by deep melancholy, while a portrait executed at around the same time in cold shades of blue is striking for its huge sense of concentrated intellectual resilience: Sebald 2004d, 179). Thematically, the article on Weiss utters views on Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp that are repeated in Die Ringe des Saturn. Sebald deconstructs the painting, and in a metonymic logic, he deconstructs the myths of the Enlightenment.⁴ While he does not deny that the emergence  The influence of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947, transl. Dialectics of Enlightenment, 1972) and of Benjamin’s Theses is undeniable and has long been established in Sebald scholarship. The narrator in Die Ringe des Saturn points explicitly to the dualism of cilivisation and barbarity: the lesson is “einesteils […] eine Demonstration des unerschrockenen

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of anatomy led to a better understanding of the human body, which in turn enabled subsequent breakthroughs in medicine, he points to the – arguably often forgotten – price paid: the dehumanisation of the criminal, who is reduced to a synecdoche, to an object of study for the betterment of the species. Yet whereas the scholars objectify the criminal, Sebald argues that van Rijn, by painting the left arm as a second right arm, adds an element of subversion, indicating sympathy for the man on the table (Sebald 1986, 269 – 270; Bernstein 2006, 35). This reading, which profoundly challenges the notion of Progress – or at least points to its ‘dark side’ – is reproduced by the narrator in the first chapter of Die Ringe des Saturn (22– 27). The main difference between the essay and the prose is that the latter, using the licences of fiction, suggests that Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century scholar, attended Tulp’s dissection. Nevertheless, the strong intertextual continuities are striking, and Sebald strengthens the idea that his nonacademic work can still be read as nonfiction, by suggesting that the mere labels are no guarantee as to the accuracy or veracity of the narrative: what I liked about it was that if you just changed […] the nature of your writing from academic monographs to something indefinable, then you had complete liberty; whereas […], as an academic, people constantly say, “Well, it’s not correct, what you put there. It’s not right.” Now, it doesn’t matter. (Cuomo 2007, 99)

While this is as telling of Sebald’s academic work as it is of his fiction, it should come as no surprise, therefore, that many professional readers approach the anonymous narrators as stand-ins for the author. Katja Garloff suggests that the biographical (in the sense corresponding to German ‘biographistisch’) reading is the consequence of Sebald’s narrators not talking about themselves: “[w]e know very little about the narrator of Austerlitz, and the little we know might lead us to assume that the narrator is identical with the author” (Garloff 2006, 160). The same could be said about the narrators in Die Ausgewanderten and Die Ringe des Saturn. This fusion is akin to treating Sebald’s prose as nonfictional texts – a step Garloff seems nonetheless reluctant to take, given the substantial amount of hedging (‘might lead us to assume’). Although Sebald never declared to be identical with his anonymous narrators – indeed, this would instantly revoke the pact of fiction – the overlaps ‘invite’ critics and scholars to look for similarities and discontinuities, and Sebald has not challenged such approaches. This is telling of Sebald’s idea of the au-

Forschungsdrangs der neuen Wissenschaft, andernteils aber […] das archaische Ritual der Zergliederung eines Menschen” (22; a demonstration of the undaunted investigative zeal in the new sciences, [but also] the archaic ritual of dismembering a corpse, RSe 12).

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thor: when he writes “Döblin,” “Sternheim,” or “Weiss”, he does not refer to an implied author but to the flesh-and-blood Döblin, Sternheim or Weiss. This partially explains the harsh criticism dealt out to Sebald – and is reinforced by Sebald’s refusal to invoke the argument of being misunderstood or to downplay the strong relation between artist and artwork. Whether Sebald does not, malgré soi, refer to his own imaginations of these authors is a different question, and conventional disciplinary knowledge would tell us that indeed, he does.⁵ How we deal with this implied author depends, I would argue, on the genre under scrutiny. But as readers, we always imagine an author – regardless of whether we read fiction, journalism or criticism.⁶ Remigius Bunia refers to a double differentiation between author and narrator: a differentiation in narratology (i. e., the classical structuralist distinction) and a differentiation in the theory of fiction. This distinction is necessary because Cohn, Genette and other structuralist narratologists have built their theories on a fictional corpus. Bunia takes issue with the structuralist terminology because of its metaphor of the voice – which suggests, paradoxically, that the author merely uses the narrator as a mediating instance, that a real distinction between them is not made. Instead, in a “Radikalisierung der Cohn-Genette-Theorie” (2007, 94; radicalisation of the CohnGenette-theory), Bunia posits his “Modell-Autor” (97) not in contrast to a model reader (as reader-response criticism does) but in contrast to the ‘real’ author. This means that texts with multiple narrators still have one model-author, who is still ‘responsible’ for the evocation of the fictive world but who remains elusive for the reader and does not directly speak: the narrator does that. According to Bunia, fiction is, then, marked by the possibility of distinguishing between author and model-author; this distinction is not possible in nonfiction and vice versa: when we can distinguish between them, we are reading fiction; when we cannot, we are reading nonfiction (96 – 98). The question is whether the fusion to which Garloff alludes is a conditio sine qua non for the interpretation and the aesthetic and ethical appreciation of Sebald’s prose: would the reader feel ‘betrayed’ if she were to find out that its narrators are not one narrator that corresponds, according to Cohn and Genette, to the author? The answer, I would say, is no: even though Sebald’s prose undeniably contains a vast amount of (auto)biographic elements, they are still written

 The irony is not lost on me: when writing about Sebald, I, too, resort to the implied author – not the ‘actual’ Sebald.  This is clear when we read texts by colleagues we personally know (we link our knowledge of their personalities, interests, etc. to their work) but becomes equally clear (although ex negativo) when we meet, for the first time, colleagues whose texts we have avidly used for our own research.

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without any hard claims of referentiality. It is possible to read Die Ausgewanderten as a collection of stories with different narrators and not feel cheated; it is equally possible to concur that they are, in fact, manifestations of the same voice. In other words, we are reading a text which belongs to the realm of fiction, and the same goes for Sebald’s other texts. This phenomenon is described by Bunia as a “Faltung” (2007, 98) – a convolution. Bunia uses a metaphor from mathematical functional analysis to theorise our reading of fiction as an enterprise which must leave the possibility to acknowledge that two potentially contradictory meanings can co-exist without there being a logical or ethical conundrum; rather, one chooses one of two possibilities in light of the results these may yield (98 – 99). This may pertain to interpretation but also, I would argue, to the epistemological decisions we make: we can read and enjoy fiction, acknowledging that a story told within the fictional world transcends that world (i. e. belongs to our ‘real world’ as much as to the storyworld) or that it is fictive (and only transcends the storyworld allegorically); the fact that we cannot always determine fiction’s precise relation to our own world is not a hindrance to our enjoyment.⁷ This is unique to fiction (and doubtlessly it is not generally valid from a diachronic or comparative point of view): such licences do not exist for nonfiction, where we wish to have fact, speculation, argumentation and counterfactual instances clearly delineated. But it does not permit us to pick whichever interpretation we want – on the contrary: the doubling necessitates that we acknowledge the paradoxes and contradictions within the text in order to treat it seriously and in its full complexity.

 But it is worth pointing out that Bunia’s insistence of fiction as Faltung ultimately results in an adherence to the institutional model: insisting that style is not a good indicator for the ontological status of a text, Bunia maintains that “[e]in Text ist also nur dann fiktional, wenn mit ihm umgegangen wird, als wäre er fiktional” (99 – 100; [a] text is only fictional if it is read as if it were fictional,) and points to the centrality of the author’s “Verhalten […] nach der Veröffentlichung” (101; behaviour […] after publication). Our labelling of texts as fiction is, then, already a manifestation of the Faltung. If Bunia’s argument risks being tautological (“[Faltungen] realisieren sich dadurch, daß sie zwei verschiedene Anschlußmöglichkeiten ermöglichen, diese aber nicht konditionieren: umgekehrt wird die Faltung charakterisiert, indem die spezifische Wahlmöglichkeit des Anschlusses das Vorhandensein der Faltung markiert,” 98; [convolutions] manifest themselves by enabling two different connectivities without conditioning these, and reversibly, what is characteristic for the convolution is that the specific option in choosing the connection marks the presence of the convolution), we may equally tautologically posit that the labelling of fiction or nonfiction is a Faltung that can only be adequate insofar as we are reading fiction: nonfictional texts usually do not wish to leave it up to the reader whether she is reading fiction or nonfiction, though there are some notable exceptions, such as New Journalism, that serve to confirm the rule.

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If the reader nonetheless sees similarities between the Johannes Naegeli in Die Ringe des Saturn and the corpse of an alpinist found in Switzerland in 1986,⁸ or if she imagines recognising places like Breendonk, Liverpool Street and Jeruzalemstraat, it is because she shares a real-world knowledge about Wilrijk, London and Antwerp with the author – but that does not make the texts any less fictional.⁹ To be sure, Sebald presupposes such a real-world knowledge for optimal effect, and the fact that the narrators throughout his oeuvre narrate in a similar way – there never is a true stylistic rupture – suggests that it is the same narrator. Lewis Ward describes this narrator as Sebald’s persona in order to avoid conflagrating narrator and author and to avoid adhering to an all-too-strict literalism or dependence on this narrator’s ‘reporting’ (2012, 4). Ward maintains that Sebald “mystif[ies] the relationship between himself and his persona” (5), but this seems inaccurate: rather, the persona is the necessary construct we develop because of Sebald’s mystification of the link between himself and his narrator(s). A further, intermedial, argument in favour of reading Sebald decisively as fiction can be distilled from Silke Horstkotte’s remark that “the fictional and imaginative aspects of photography are masked […] because of the historical and autobiographical content of the narrative” (2002, 42). Horstkotte points to the discrepancies between the verbal and the pictorial narratives as a sign of the narrator’s unreliability, which in turn is linked to Sebald’s philosophy of history (which is influenced by Walter Benjamin) and to his media critique. This strategy of misguiding the reader thus already undermines the autobiographical character of the text, or at least surrounds the extradiegetic narrator (who is supposed to correspond to the author) with a veil of mystery, destabilising the expected correspondence. Moreover, the lack of a clear autobiographical pact (Lejeune 1975) – or any other clear pact, for that matter – justifies our reading of Sebald’s prose as fiction. This may seem somewhat counter-intuitive, as one may assume nonfictional narrative to be the default mode and fiction as an aesthetic derivation of it. Perhaps it is the sensitivity of Sebald’s topics, and specifically the Shoah, that provokes such caution: we may feel comforted, in the absence of any strong paratextual commitments to referentiality, to read the texts as fiction and thus to attribute to them the licence of deriving from the historical record. This immunises them to a degree and causes us to ask questions concerning their ‘veracity’ and appropriateness, not their referentiality – but these are questions of a higher order. Reading Sebald’s prose as fiction allows us to  Cf. the article in the L.A. Times, “Frozen Body Identified as Man Missing 72 Years”, 23 July 1986.  Would anyone claim Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is not fictional, despite its nonfictional sources and places with real-world reference?

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read it in its complexity but it does not debunk the thematic gravitas, the veracity of the stories passed down or his philosophy of history – and neither does it a priori absolve the author of potential ethical faux pas.

3.2 ‘Warm’ Sebald: trauma, postmemory and the poetics of empathy There can be little doubt that Sebald’s acclaim stems, in fact, from concerns pertaining to the voice with which the Shoah is narrated. Being a non-Jewish German Nachgeborener,¹⁰ Sebald has himself been critical of the ways in which non-Jewish Germans had been giving a literary voice to Jewish survivors, and his prose has heralded as an articulation of Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory (albeit outside of a family frame) and as an ethical enterprise of mediating the voices of the survivors. This leads others to read Sebald’s narrator as an empathic listener who, according to Dori Laub, enables testimony to be articulated in the first place (Felman and Laub 1992, 57; cf. [metonymically for many others] Wolff 2014b, 183). It leads Robert Eaglestone to consider Sebald’s prose, and particularly Austerlitz, as the articulation of a “broken voice” (2017), in which the “Pathos des Primären wurde abgelöst durch ein Ethos des Sekundären” (Köppen and Scherpe 1997, 4; qtd. in Schley 2012, 85; pathos of the first-degree representation is replaced by an ethos of the second-degree representation): Sebald [bedarf] einer Doppelstrategie, welche Authentizität nicht nur auf der inhaltlichen (die Wahrheit des Dargestellten) und poetologischen (die Stimmigkeit der Darstellungsmittel), sondern auch auf der außertextlichen Ebene (die Autorität des Darstellenden) sicherstellt. Der Erfolg dieser Strategie erscheint so in einem paradoxen Licht: Die Inszenierung seiner Autorschaft macht Sebalds Literatur über Inszenierungsvorwürfe weitgehend erhaben. (Schley 2012, 91) Sebald needs a double strategy, the authenticity of which is not only guaranteed on the content-level (the truthfulness of what is represented) and the poetological level (the aptness of the methods of representation), but also on the extratextual level (the authority of the representant). Thus, the success of this strategy appears to be paradoxical: the staging of his authorship largely insulates Sebald’s literature from accusations of being staged.

Harking back to Aleida Assmann’s claim that the pathos of the testimony built the foundation of the ethos of the human-rights discourse (cf. the introduction), clearly, Sebald’s ethos is firmly rooted in pathos; ethos does not exclude pathos – on the contrary. Moreover, the idea of primary and secondary needs to be  Someone ‘born after’, i. e., after the Second World War and the Shoah.

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nuanced – let it be reminded that Lawrence Langer argues that every depiction – including the eyewitness’s – is a mediation, and hence considers every depiction to be secondary (cf. the introduction). How is Sebald’s pathos construed, then? It hinges on the baroque structure of Sebald’s prose: Silke Horstkotte links the sequence of title, motto, picture and narrative in each of the biographies in Die Ausgewanderten to a baroque aesthetics (2002, 40). Even more dominant is the incessant use of inquit-forms, notably in Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz. While Judith Praßer does not delve into an analysis of Die Ausgewanderten, her argument concerning Austerlitz may be transferred to Sebald’s earlier text since Austerlitz amounts to a quasi-follow-up on Die Ausgewanderten: both feature a non-Jewish narrator (or, mutatis mutandis, multiple non-Jewish narrators) who coincidentally meet(s) Jewish emigrants and who function(s) as a witness (witnesses) to their witnessing (cf. Taberner 2004). The inquit-forms steadily remind the reader of the intradiegetic narration and the epistemological uncertainties that result from the anonymous, extradiegetic narrator’s role as mediator of Austerlitz’s life story (Praßer 2013, 49). Moreover, the mediation of Austerlitz’s story is a mediation of a mediation, for Austerlitz needs to reconstruct the fates that had befallen his parents, who could not (unlike himself) emigrate and who would ultimately perish in the Shoah (cf. Crownshaw 2004, 216). There is a danger, however, in such constellations: Crownshaw’s concerns lie with “the potential for adoption to turn into appropriation”, the “collapse into seeing through one’s own eyes and remembering one’s own memories instead” – a “colonization of victims’ memories and identities” (2004, 216). However, for Austerlitz, Crownshaw concludes that Sebald’s narrator does not amount to such colonisation: by passing Austerlitz’s photographic archive to us, the narrator has “illuminated” (234) Austerlitz’s life: [i]t is in this text that the narrator has illuminated an archive for future memory work, bequeathed to us just as it was bequeathed to him. The concepts and contents of the futural archive have marked out where the inheritance of memory can be appropriative. In establishing this relation between narrated, narrator, and reader, […] Sebald has therefore instigated a much more complex and ethical dynamic of postmemory that resists a colonizing impulse. (235)

A different ethical instance is Sebald’s writing against traditional historiography since this is, with Benjamin and Arendt, the legitimation of the powers that be. Sebald’s resistance against this tradition means that he posits history in an uncanny light (cf. infra), but it simultaneously aims at restoring the voices of history’s victims. This is not achieved merely by passing on the torch handed to him by the survivors – especially in Die Ringe des Saturn, it means that the nar-

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rator imitates historiography yet resorts to narrative unreliability, thus undermining the authority of the tradition.¹¹ “Intranarrational unreliability”, as Hansen notes, “designates the ‘classical’ definition – that is unreliability established and supported by a large stock of discursive markers” (241). “Unresolved self-contradictions” (241) constitute the primary of these discursive markers. Martin Blumenthal-Barby’s analysis of Die Ringe des Saturn reveals the self-contradictions in the narrator’s discourse. His first example contains the contradiction within the description of Emperor Hsien-feng’s funeral march: it seems to allow for the inconspicuous, if not inconsequential, insertion of numeric errors. For if the funeral march began on October 5 and arrived at its destination on November 1, it took not three weeks (as the narrator misleadingly suggests) but exactly four weeks or 28 days. (Blumenthal-Barby 2011, 544)¹²

 There are two major approaches to narrative unreliability. To use Per Krogh Hansen’s (2007) terminology, the first is the intentional approach, associated primarily with the Chicago School theoreticians Wayne C. Booth and James Phelan. This approach, as the names suggest, places high value on the (fictional) work’s double communication (author-reader and narrator-implied reader) and with the concurrent author’s intentional use of unreliability, which the reader is supposed to uncover and to appreciate on its aesthetic merits. Hansen labels the second approach the cognitive approach and links it mainly to the position of Ansgar Nünning. Nünning, as well as various other authors, shifts the importance to the reader, whose congruence of “a moral standard, values, or beliefs” (P. K. Hansen 2007, 227) with the narrator – or parting from the narrator’s – will determine whether he judges a narrator as (un)reliable. That such cognitive activities are, moreover, historically variable has been demonstrated by Vera Nünning (2004), who points to the diachronic discrepancies in the reception of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). Hansen maintains that both approaches miss out on a fundamental element, namely the variety caused by the interplay of pre-existing reader knowledge, the narrative situation, the ‘type’ of narrator (i. e. his characterisation) and discourse (2007, 243 – 244). To account for this variety, he suggests a taxonomy of unreliable narration, which consists of four categories: “intranarrational”, “internarrational”, “intertextual” and “extratextual” unreliability (241). Whereas according to the first two categories unreliability is dependent on intratextual criteria; in the latter two, extratextual or contextual issues are definitive. As such, “intranarrational” and “internarrational” unreliability is established in line with the criteria offered in the intentional approach, while “intertextual” and “extratextual” unreliability follows the cognitive approach. How these elements interplay can only be judged on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, as useful as this taxonomy may be for the analysis of literary prose, like any taxonomy, it is slightly artificial. I shall try to demonstrate that the very categories cannot be strictly separated from each other but that these are themselves dependent on cognitive bias, which needs to be accounted for and contextualised.  The relevant passage is found in RSd, 177.

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The discrepancy in numbers is, moreover, not the consequence of a banal typo: the German original (as well as the English translation, it would seem) spells out “[d]rei Wochen” (RSd, 177; three weeks: RSe, 147). We may, therefore, with some degree of certainty, prefer the interpretation of this passage as unreliable and not look for “alternative logics of resolution” (Yacobi 2001, 224). This is strengthened by Blumenthal-Barby’s second example: we read that Emperor Kuang-hsu died in 1908 at the age of 37. According to this piece of information, however, he cannot have been a “two-year-old” but must have been four years old when he acquired power over the monarchy from his predecessor T-ung-chich, who died in 1875 (179 – 185[…]). (Blumenthal-Barby 2011, 545)

Akin to the first example, where the “barrage of dates and numbers […] induces some confusion” (Blumenthal-Barby 2011, 545), this elaborate hypotyposis may make it hard for the reader to keep track. Moreover, the fact that the relevant passage stretches over several pages renders the uncovering of the self-contradiction arguably more difficult. As such, Blumenthal-Barby’s claims that such unreliable narrations constitute a critique of historiography:¹³ the narrator figuratively breaks down the ‘continuum of history of the oppressors’ on behalf of the fragmentary perspective of the oppressed. He undercuts the impeccable, seemingly irrecusable, logic of the victor’s history and, as such, implicitly challenges the legitimacy of the ruling class’s claim to power. (Blumenthal-Barby 2011, 545)

Indeed, the reference to Jorge Luis Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940), immediately after the account of the Chinese dynasties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, strengthens Blumenthal-Barby’s argument.¹⁴ Borges’s short story highlights in postmodernist fashion the dependency of reality perception on power structures. Yet one can take Blumenthal-Barby’s argument even

 The argument adheres to the old adagio that history is written by the victors – a notion that has become as cliché as it is problematic. Going into detail would drift away from the actual argumentation, but two counterexamples may be mentioned: the perception of the American Civil War (1861– 1865) in the Southern States and the neo-conservative popular historiography of the Second World War in Germany. Perhaps history is written by the losers, as well, but within their own commemorative communities – however broadly or narrowly one defines those and presumably while simultaneously victimising other members of their societies. The African Americans cannot be considered the winners of the American Civil War, despite their liberation from slavery; the Jews – it should go without saying – cannot be considered the winners of the Second World War.  Cf. Bernstein 2006, 52. His argument applies to the connection between the description of the Chinese dynasties and the mentioning of Borges’s story.

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further. Whereas both of his examples contain, as noted, confusing strategies, the narrative seems to increasingly hide its unreliability. The first example, it should be recalled, contains the contradiction within the same page, whereas the reader needs to puzzle more substantially in the second example, with the puzzle’s pieces scattered over six pages. The linearity of the lecture needs to be broken, and in this way, it comes to resemble the narrator’s meandering ‘pilgrimage’.¹⁵ Why would it do so? One possible reason is to urge the reader to resist the narrative flow, to be wary of historiography and tradition. In its self-deconstructive fashion, the literary narrative takes a pedagogical instance for the reader’s reading of nonfictional historiography and to look for the silences within these texts. The hiding of unreliability and the meandering lecture required to uncover it do raise poignant questions for a different instance of narrative unreliability in Die Ringe des Saturn. Situated earlier in the narrative, this instance concerns the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by British troops. The narrator maintains that he remembers an article in the Eastern Daily Press about a Major George Wyndham Le Strange: “Le Strange habe, so hieß es in dem Artikel, während des letzten Krieges in dem Panzerabwehrregiment gedient, das am 14. April 1945 […] das Lager von Bergen Belsen befreite” (RSd, 77– 80; [d]uring the last War, the report read, Le Strange served in the anti-tank regiment that liberated the camp of Bergen Belsen on the 14th of April 1945: RSe 59).¹⁶ The Eastern Daily Press is a real-world press, but Le Strange is very likely a fictitious character; Adrian Daub considers him to be another instance for Sebald himself (Daub 2007, 324). True to the historical record, Bergen-Belsen was liberated by an anti-tank regiment (Shephard 2005, 34). The account deviates from the historical record by setting as date of liberation 14 April, whereas the historical record seems in agreement that Bergen-Belsen was liberated on 15 April. This minute discrepancy may be thought of in two different ways: either as irrelevant, perhaps due to a typo but otherwise unproblematic in the realm of fiction – and

 The meandering reading does not only highlight unreliability, but also foreshadowing: Borges’s short story is mentioned, seemingly en passant, some 100 pages earlier. Such foreshadowing is, of course, more strongly present in genres that depend on keeping the reader in suspense. Another instance of foreshadowing unreliability lies in the ironic subtitle of Die Ausgewanderten: vier lange Erzählungen. The adjective, of course, reveals nothing: long compared to what standard? The reader is being misguided: the implication that she will encounter four stories of comparable length is thwarted during the lecture, with each narrative being longer than the previous one.  I include the ellipsis within brackets because this is the place in the text where the muchdebated photograph of the corpses between the trees is inserted.

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pointing it out as pedantry – or as another instance of narrative unreliability. In the latter instance, it would (with Booth and Phelan) insist on the author’s intention of parting ways from the historical record but would need to account for the reader’s pre-existing knowledge about said record. In other words, with Hansen’s typology, it may be described as extratextual unreliability since it hinges on “the reader’s direct implementation of own values or knowledge in the textual world” (P. K. Hansen 2007, 242) and no longer on text-internal self-contradictions that need resolving. What would be the conclusion of that interpretation? Would it amount, as Blumenthal-Barby suggests, to “infusing erroneous information into his historical narration” (544) in order to “undercut the impeccable, seemingly irrecusable, logic of the victor’s history” (545)? If so, it would mean not simply challenging the Nazi propaganda written during the war to justify its genocide, which would – in the counterfactual event of a Nazi victory – have led to their version of history, but also the factual victors’ account, i. e., the Allies’. This is a small step away from perceiving the Allies as perpetrators as well, which may be true for Sebald’s depiction of the bombing of the German cities but certainly not for Le Strange. According to the legend that the narrator recites, upon death, Le Strange’s body turned olive green, his grey eye pitch black, his white hair raven (RSd, 83). This transformation mirrors the body of the herring after death: [z]u den Besonderheiten des Herings gehört übrigens auch, daß sein toter Körper an der Luft zu leuchten beginnt. Dieser einzigartige, der Phosphoreszenz ähnliche und doch von ihr grundverschiedene Leuchtkraft erreicht wenige Tage nach dem Eintritt des Todes ihren Höhepunkt und nimmt dann in dem Maße ab, in dem der Fisch in Verwesung übergeht. (RSd, 76) An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that, when dead, it begins to glow; this property, which resembles phosphorescence and is yet altoghether different, peaks a few days after death and then ebbs away as the fish decays. (RSe, 58)

Whether this means that Le Strange is symmetrically opposed to the herring or indeed had – in a metaphorical way – already started to die before his biological death is open to interpretation. The second option would resonate with the overall tone of the text, which does not strictly oppose humankind and other species, culture and nature. Moreover, it would adhere to the humanistic notion of a shared humanity by supplementing the metaphorical connection between the herring’s and the Jews’ mass death (which by no means is an equation) with a second metaphorical connection. The third leg of the triangle would be to connect Le Strange to the victims he has not been able to liberate because they had already been murdered. In a next (albeit increasingly speculative, or at

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least associative) step, this links Le Strange to the narrator – and not just because both have been read as (not-so‐) covert manifestations of Sebald. Bernstein advocates the position that Le Strange functions as a pivotal figure within Die Ringe des Saturn (Bernstein 2006, 44) or, rather, as the knot where several threads meet. In his reading, Le Strange’s witnessing caused a traumatisation, which leads to his death and belatedly shines through (a literal reversal) after death. To be sure, the unreliability in Sebald’s prose is not merely a verbal construction. Silke Horstkotte argues that the relation between the photographs and the verbal text that surrounds them proves that the narrator is unreliable. A case in point is the recounting of Johannes Naegeli’s fate. This fate is told to us by Henry Selwyn but once removed: the narrator tells us how Selwyn told him about Naegeli (DA, 23 – 24). Yet as Horstkotte notes, the narrator then claims that years later, he had coincidentally come across a newspaper reporting on the discovery of Naegeli’s corpse, and [t]o prove the authenticity of this story, the author has reproduced the newspaper cutting containing the item about Naegeli’s rediscovered body. But instead of substantiating this claim to authenticity, the reproduction refutes it. The narrator has relayed how he discovered the news item, by chance, in a paper which he had bought in Zurich. A close look at the reproduction, however, reveals that the newspaper in this photo is taken from an archive. The top of the paper bears a date stamp of the kind used for archival purposes, and directly below the top line someone has scrawled the following filing information: “CH/FD/Morts suspectes” […]. Thus, the newspaper cannot have been bought by chance: it has been searched for in an archive. (Horstkotte 2002, 42)

Although Horstkotte is certainly overall right when she says that “the reliability of photographic evidence [is drawn] into doubt” (42), here it seems to be the other way around: the reproduced picture falsifies the narrator’s claim. The picture further suggests a discrepancy between Sebald the author, who is ultimately the one looking in the archive, and his narrator. Horstkotte’s remark on the questioned reliability of photographs applies more neatly to a second example, this one beyond Die Ringe des Saturn: she notes that in the Paul Bereyter story, in Die Ausgewanderten, a picture of a notebook describing Bereyter’s aunts is ‘inserted’ in a description of notebooks that discuss Bereyter’s favourite authors. This discrepancy could lead the reader to deduct that the narrator is unreliable, but since (in Horstkotte’s words) the narrator is a function of the text, she sees this discrepancy as a deliberate attempt on Sebald’s behalf at misguiding his reader (41– 42). Photographic reproduction and verbal narration undermine each other’s claims; they are mutually destabilising. A media critique meets the Benjaminian philosophy of history in a protest

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of (or certainly a wariness of) the victors’ (perpetrators’) writing of history, which marginalises the losers’ (victims’) perspective and experiences. Such and other approving readings of Sebald’s prose, like Crownshaw’s or Wolff’s, rest on the model-author Sebald conveying to us the dangers of colonising and appropriating the victim’s voice by having a narrator whose practices are, indeed, ethical: Sebald’s narrator does not impersonate Austerlitz. Others, however, are not as convinced. They do not challenge the ethics of Sebald’s narrator, but rather of the model-author Sebald himself. The argument shifts from the diegetic to the authorship level.

3.3 ‘Cold’ Sebald 3.3.1 Empathy or (over)identification? Die Ringe des Saturn and vicarious trauma When Mark McCulloh notes the lack of inquit-forms in Die Ringe des Saturn and their presence in Austerlitz (2006, 12; cf. Chapter 3.2), he presents an argument suggesting a linear development without noticing the earlier presence of such forms in Die Ausgewanderten. That does not mean, however, that Die Ringe des Saturn were somehow exempt from the question of the colonisation of memory which is a permanent danger in the concept of postmemory. In Die Ringe des Saturn, Sebald’s narrator colludes with the alter ego of Michael Hamburger: it is the very absence of inquit-forms that renders any identification of the voice speaking extremely difficult; Hamburger and the narrator “are represented as occupying the same exilic and imaginative space” (Schlesinger 2004, 53). What are the potential consequences of such far-reaching identifications with the victims? Harking back to the previous strand of Le Strange’s vicarious trauma, Blumenthal-Barby posits that Le Strange is not the only one traumatised by what he witnessed: the narrator, too, is suffering from vicarious trauma. And, again in hindsight, this serves to make sense of the grid in front of the window in the narrator’s hospital room: [t]he melancholic saturnine is a patient in a mental clinic in Norwich, traumatized by the traumatic stories he has resuscitated. […] Complicity with the barbarism of history is – in Benjaminian parlance – a graver hazard, a worse punishment than death. In order to eschew collaboration with the discourse of the oppressors, the narrator pays the price of his own mental and physical health. (Blumenthal-Barby 2011, 555)

Blumenthal-Barby phrases the narrator’s vicarious trauma as the ethically superior alternative to not being traumatised, to blend out the suffering of others and

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tacitly legitimise their victimisation. But is this not precisely the public manifestation of emotionality which Arendt argues is so suspicious – and certainly raises suspicion? How one reacts to such constellations depends on one’s attribution of emotionality. While Schlesinger refers not to Sebald’s narrator but rather to Sebald himself, Blumenthal-Barby does speak of the narrator’s “mission [of reconstructing what history has silenced – a mission that] reaches the point of identification with the victim”, even suggesting that Sebald’s narrator is “mad to believe he is one with Hamburger” (552). It comes as no surprise, then, that Schlesinger shows a greater wariness of Sebald’s literary undertaking than Blumenthal-Barby does – precisely because for Schlesinger, the undertaking seems to transcend its artistic framework. The traumatisation of the secondary witness is not unproblematic: its aporia risks blocking any political activism. This is precisely Wohlfarth’s criticism: Sebald reads Benjamin but reduces him to his Theses – Benjamin’s final text. Sebald, according to Wohlfarth, depoliticises Benjamin’s flaneur in order to strengthen the traumatic imagery (2009, passim). The latter confines psychopathology to the narrative instance, not (as Sebald himself repeatedly did) to the author, thus avoiding the polemical pathos of reception and instead rendering a reading of Die Ringe des Saturn as a warning against overidentification possible.

3.3.2 Empathy or appropriation? Austerlitz and Die Ausgewanderten Whereas the question about the purported identity between the fictional text’s extradiegetic narrator and its author is addressed and problematised by autofiction and its theoretical treatment, the question of the correspondence between characters and extratextual, ‘real-life’ persons is at stake in the genre of the roman à clef. Yet if the roman à clef constitutes a genre, it is certainly not free of any value judgement: Johannes Franzen argues convincingly how the prevalence of an autonomist conceptualisation of literature (since the late eighteenth century) caused the roman à clef to be considered scandalous, unethical and unliterary. The roman à clef challenges precisely this autonomy of literature, by positing an extratextual reference whilst pretending not to do so: the reference needs to be decoded (Franzen 2018b, 102– 103). That decoding may be quite easy, in the case of the “satirical-public” variant, or only possible for those with insider information, in the case of an “autobiographical-private” roman à clef (127). Moreover, the misprizing of the roman à clef is not limited to an aesthetic judgement, but also entails an ethical dimension: romans à clef are considered indiscrete (16 – 18). Consequentially, the designation roman à clef is not (only) a neutral genre attribution, but (also) a strong condemnation (19).

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However, like all forbidden fruits, the roman à clef is highly attractive to literary scholars: “[d]as literaturwissenschaftliche Sündenbewusstsein (verbunden mit einem gewissen Sündenstolz) verdeutlicht die anhaltende Fragwürdigkeit des Themas, beruft sich gleichzeitig auch auf seine Brisanz” (16; the academic interest in the topic is aware of the genre’s sinfulness [and takes a certain delight in it]. While showing that the topic remains questionable, that interest is motivated by its potential for polemics). One question, then, looms large: who has the ‘moral right’ to unmask a roman à clef as such and thereby making the reference to the real-life individual explicit? After all, the establishment of such a reference always harbours a risk: if done correctly, it risks damaging the depicted person’s right of privacy; if done incorrectly, it risks damaging the author’s reputation. These elements must be considered when debating the accusations against Sebald as the author of a roman à clef – or at least an histoire à clef. By now, the issues surrounding the character of Max Aurach in Die Ausgewanderten have been well documented: the nominal similarity to Frank Auerbach, a British painter of German-Jewish origin, and the inclusion of several of the latter’s paintings in Die Ausgewanderten have been read as strategies by which Sebald wanted his reader to decode Aurach as Auerbach (Franzen 2018b, 311).¹⁷ After Auerbach’s protests, the English translation saw two modifications: Aurach was henceforth called Ferber (which, as an occupational surname, is arguably not entirely disconnected from Ferber’s – and Auerbach’s – profession), and Auerbach’s paintings are no longer included (Franzen 2018b, 310 – 312; Dilly 2017, 34). Similar changes were made to the subsequent German editions of the novel.¹⁸ Yet Franzen is somewhat cautious: while he maintains that Sebald’s intention was presumably for his reader to link Frank Auerbach to Max Aurach, he weakens it by stating that this was “zumindest teilweise” the case (312; at least partially). And indeed, two complementary ‘sources’ for Aurach have been suggested: the first, by virtue of Sebald’s preferred nickname, is Sebald himself, although Ceuppens stresses that this should not be read as paramount to identification with a victim on behalf on Sebald: “[d]er Erzähler ist der Zeuge, der für die Zeugen zeugt, den Ausgewanderten eine Stimme verleiht, ohne ihnen aber seine aufzuoktroyieren” (Ceuppens 2017, 34; the narrator is the witness tes-

 Franzen stresses a presumed intentionality in the very labelling of a text as roman à clef: “Der Autor wollte, dass diese Personen erkannt werden” (2018, 115; the author wanted for these persons to be recognised). In other words, the author’s – as imagined by the attributor – ideal reader is supposed to see through the pretended character’s fictivity.  It is, therefore, rather astonishing that several contributors to the W.G. Sebald Handbuch (2017) who consistently refer to Max ‘Aurach’ do not refer to the controversy and do not even mention the renaming.

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tifying for the witnesses, he offers them a voice without enforcing his own) – in line with Sebald’s ‘warm’ poetics of empathy and postmemory. The second suggested person was Peter Jordan, Sebald’s landlord during his Manchester years, whose reaction was different from Auerbach’s: Jordan’s participation as an interviewee in Thomas Honickel’s W. G. Sebald. Der Ausgewanderte (2007) suggests his approval of Sebald’s poetic practice. A different issue pertaining to the ‘ownership’ of a story is at stake in the discussions concerning Austerlitz. Martin Modlinger (2012b) points out the ‘origins’ of Austerlitz and the parallels between its eponymous protagonist and Susi Bechhöfer, a child evacuated from Germany on a Kindertransport to the UK in 1939. Bechhöfer, too, only found out about her German-Jewish origins years later in school. Bechhöfer’s story was first published by the Jewish Chronicle in 1989, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Kindertransport operation, and subsequently aired in the early 1990s on British television.¹⁹ In 1996, her story was published as a biography, Rosa’s Child. ²⁰ The evaluations by literary scholars and critics of Sebald’s literary procedure diverge widely. Klaus Jeziorkowski sees no problem: he maintains that Sebald’s narrative strategies, marked by an aestheticized ‘disappearance’ of the author, which suggest an ‘auto-narration’ (2003, 72), lead to a Sebald-specific narrative, to which Bechhöfer can stake no claims: der Autor [hat] mit seinem Erzählgestus aus dieser Biografie [Rosa’s Child, TV] etwas vollkommen Eigenes, Neues und Authentisches gemacht hat. In dieser Erzählform, die unabweisbar Sebald vollkommen zu eigen ist, kann das Erzählte nicht dieser Frau gehören; es ist literarisches Eigentum Sebalds, ihm zugehörig durch die originale und nicht imitierbare ästhetische Prägung von seiner Hand. (Jeziorkowski 2003, 73) out of this biography, the author has created something completely new and authentic that belongs to him through his narrative stance. In this narrative form, which is undeniably Sebald’s own, the narrated story cannot belong to this woman; it is Sebald’s literary possession; it is his because of the work’s original aesthetic character, which cannot be imitated.

 Presumably illegally uploaded copies are found on YouTube, but due to a lack of authenticating imprints, verification is problematic.  Without going into too much detail here, the book features an interesting author constellation: it is officially a biography written by Jeremy Josephs with Bechhöfer’s collaboration. More recently, Bechhöfer’s Rosa (2016) was published, because she did not feel “really able to express my feelings in Rosa’s Child, […] not least because it was written in the third person. I wanted to speak in my own voice, to say something really authoritative” (Frazer 2017). Rosa has been published by a very small publishing house, Christians Aware, and is not easily accessible.

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This is a very benign stance towards Sebald in which form is strictly separated from content.²¹ Jeziorkowski maintains that Austerlitz belongs to Sebald (cf. the subtitle of the chapter: “sein Roman Austerlitz”; his novel Austerlitz, emphasis added), and that Bechhöfer has not lost anything: “[i]hre Biographie bleibt dieser Frau erhalten, sie ist ihr durch das Sebaldsche Erzählen nicht entwendet worden” (Jeziorkowski 2003, 73; her biography remains her own, it is not taken away from her through the Sebaldian narrative style). The crucial word in that last sentence is ‘biography’: what does Jeziorkowksi mean by it? Does he refer to her ‘life story’ – one that transcends narration, all the more since it has been marked by traumatic disruptions of memory – or to the biography as genre, exemplified in Rosa’s Child? Moreover, the question is whether the separation of form and content is a solid basis for separating ethics and poetics. To be sure, Jeziorkowksi’s privileging of aesthetics over ethics has not gone unchallenged. While Ceuppens’s criticism of Sebald can be considered as rather mild,²² Jenni Frazer blatantly calls Sebald’s practice “appropriation” yet hints at the possibility of amends that were rendered impossible due to Sebald’s sudden demise (Frazer 2017; Ceuppens 2008, 313 – 315). In other words, her harsh criticism is not absolute: it leaves some – admittedly, not a lot of – space for the idea that Sebald would eventually have acknowledged Bechhöfer openly and publicly. Modlinger goes as far as to say that Austerlitz is Bechhöfer’s “fictional doppelganger” (Modlinger 2012, 222), although he acknowledges the presence of other fictionalised biographies (225) and thereby points to the mosaic structure of the text. In other words, Modlinger, too, acknowledges Sebald’s poetic interventions, but he does not follow Jeziorkowski’s privileging of aesthetics over ethics. For him, the Kindertransport narrative (and therefore, Bechhöfer’s) is the novel’s central thread, and consequently he accuses Sebald of having “stolen [Bechhöfer’s] story” (229). As such, Austerlitz may come across as a roman à clef, in which the fictional character shares so many traits with a real-world person that ethical issues of discretion and the propriety of personal (hi)stories are at stake (Franzen 2018b, 418). Yet three phenomena problematise this label. Firstly, whereas the roman à clef is not seldom the object of lawsuits in which real-world persons sue the author and/or the publisher for defamation and vehe-

 Note the emphatic repetitions in both this quotation and the next.  Ceuppens rhetorically asks whether Sebald’s use of Bechhöfer’s story does not amount to a second stealing of her biography – the first one having occurred when her English family raised her as Grace and did not tell her about her German-Jewish background. His criticism is mild, because he points out that Austerlitz does not thematise this stealing and only hints at it indirectly – which could, of course, be considered the very problem with this text.

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mently refute their novelistic depiction, Bechhöfer asked Sebald “to properly acknowledge her role in the genesis of Austerlitz” (Modlinger 2012, 228). At stake is, therefore, not the issue of ownership but rather that of recognition (and of modesty on behalf of the author). Secondly, in the case of Austerlitz, and arguably in contrast to Die Ausgewanderten, there are few – if any – indications that the readership was supposed to recognize Bechhöfer in Austerlitz. After all, as noted above, Modlinger’s criticism is exactly this: that Sebald never publicly acknowledged the parallels between his character and Bechhöfer, although he did so in private correspondence with her (Modlinger 2012, 229 n.2). This is only approaching the truth: Sebald does mention that two persons serve as models for Austerlitz, although these remain anonymous: [t]here was a colleague of mine […] and I had bumped into this man a number of times fortuitously, in Belgium of all places, in the late 1960s, in unlikely places. He was an architectural historian, somewhat older than me, about ten, twelve years older, a born, very gifted teacher. […] And this chap was interested in the architecture of the capitalist era – opera houses, railway stations, that sort of thing – and he could go on endlessly about the most fascinating details. Then I lost sight of him for a while, and in the 1990s we made contact again. So this is one foil of the story. But there is another foil, which is the life story of a woman, and that story I came across, as one does sometimes, on television. You know how ephemeral these appearances are on television – you see a film or you don’t see it, and then it vanishes forever and you can’t get a copy of it despite your best efforts. But there was this story of a woman who together with her twin sister had also come to Britain on one of these Kindertransporte, as they were called, trains with very young children leaving Germany or Czechoslovakia or Austria just before the outbreak of war. And those two girls were, I think, two-and-a-half to three years old. They came out of a Jewish Munich orphanage and they were fostered by a Welsh fundamentalist childless couple who then went on to erase their identity. And both foster parents ended tragically, as one might say, the father in a lunatic asylum, the mother through an early death. And so the children never really knew who they were. This is just one strand, as it were, of the story which I then put together with that other life history. (Cuomo 2007, 110 – 111)

In hindsight, it is obvious that Sebald is referring to Bechhöfer, but the contemporary audience was clearly not supposed to ‘decipher’ her – as Sebald’s pointing to the ephemeral character of the television medium makes clear.²³ He may have had good reasons to keep her identity secret: after all, Frank Auerbach had insisted on not being recognisable as Max Aurach/Ferber in Die Ausgewanderten. But when Bechhöfer had insisted on being recognisable in the form of an acknowledgement, Sebald’s upheld silence did become problematic. And indeed,

 Franzen uses the terms “Verschlüsselung” and “Entschlüsselung”, respectively (passim).

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Modlinger brings a certain pathos to Sebald’s reception by implying that the protectors of Sebald’s legacy, in the shape of his literary agent, continue this problematic silence by hindering Modlinger’s quoting from Sebald’s relevant egodocuments retained at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach (henceforth DLA; Modlinger 2012, 219). Thirdly, the character of Jacques Austerlitz may be considered an amalgamation of several biographies. Sebald maintains that the “Austerlitz character has two models and bits from other lives also” (Cuomo 2007, 110). The two models are referred to, anonymously, above; and the flourishing scholarship has offered many suggestions whom “the bits from other lives” refer to. While Mary Cosgrove argues that “Sebald’s ethics of memory overlaps with Améry’s concept of ressentiment” (Cosgrove 2006a, 233),²⁴ Michaela Holdenried specifies the connection between Améry and Austerlitz, arguing that Die Tortur is the central intertext for Austerlitz – its organising element (Holdenried 2007, 84). Indeed, the references in Austerlitz to Améry are ample: the description of Breendonk in Austerlitz mentions Améry and Die Tortur by name; both Austerlitz and Améry share their initials, and both texts posit – Améry’s explicitly, Sebald’s implicitly – that torture constitutes the essence of Nazi Germany (Holdenried 2007, 84). Wenxi Wu not only points to similarities between Austerlitz and Walter Benjamin, but also demonstrates how Austerlitz’s narrator compares the eponymous character to Ludwig Wittgenstein (Wu 2014, 223). For Wohlfarth, Benjamin’s biography is the inspiration par excellence for Austerlitz’s (Wohlfarth 2009, 219). Similarly, Robert Eaglestone suggests Saul Friedländer as inspiration for the character Austerlitz: both are “Czech-born Holocaust survivor[s]” (2017, 86). One could be even more precise: both are child survivors from Prague. Where Memory Leads, Friedländer’s first autobiography, is, like Austerlitz, a story of rediscovering one’s childhood lost under traumatic circumstances. Moreover, Eaglestone points to Friedländer’s intertextual reference to Gustav Meyrink, a Czech author: whereas Meyrink maintains that knowledge and memory are the same thing, and that, hence, “when knowledge comes, memory comes too”, Friedländer reverts this formulation: “when memory comes, knowledge comes too” (Eaglestone 2017, 86 – 87; cf. Friedländer 2016b, 172). For Eaglestone, Friedländer’s reversal of Meyrink’s formulation would constitute an apt motto for Austerlitz, which in turn reminds us of Irving Wohlfarth’s observation of Austerlitz  But if Fareld (2016, 53) is right in claiming that Améry’s ressentiment was an attempt at developing a new morality (just like Nietzsche had proposed a new morality, albeit a morality that Améry polemically holds responsible for enabling the Shoah), we must ask whether Sebald’s ethics of memory constitute a new morality, too. This seems an exaggeration (but this does not devalue Sebald’s ethical position, of course).

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having become a “grabende[r] Forscher” to uncover his own past (2009, 202; a digging researcher). However, the relation between Friedländer, (Benjamin), Austerlitz and Austerlitz is not that simple: Friedländer shows similarities to Vera, Austerlitz’s nanny, in their strong phonetic memories of Hitler’s speeches (Eaglestone 2017, 86).²⁵ Moreover, Friedländer is not the only historian-turned-survivor to be ‘detected’ in Austerlitz: H. G. Adler, survivor and historian of the Theresienstadt ‘ghetto’,²⁶ is strongly present through his study on Theresienstadt, although this presence is not always marked (Vogel-Klein 2014, 185).²⁷ This should not be read as an attempt to diminish Bechhöfer’s demands for recognition – as the amalgamation metaphor suggests, there should be no ‘competition’ or hierarchisation between the different biographies that crystallise in Austerlitz. This crystallisation should, instead, highlight the need to see Austerlitz as a genuinely fictitious character and not as a nonfictional person wearing a mask provided by a ‘secret’ pact between author and reader. It is fictitious, because it is not opposed to any sense of the real – let one be reminded that fiction necessitates an interpretative stance in which one can decide for one interpretation but must keep an open stance towards other, conflicting interpretations: “[m]an entscheidet anhand möglicher Resultate für eine der beiden Optionen, die jeweils vorliegen, doch muß man, egal wie die Wahl ausfällt, die andere Option als latente Möglichkeit annehmen” (Bunia 2007, 99; one chooses from both option in the light of possible results, but one must – regardless of the outcome – accept the other option as a latent possibility). The controversies concerning Max Aurach/Ferber and Frank Auerbach and Jacques Austerlitz/Susi Bechhöfer point, however, to the poetological and ethical  In his first autobiography, Friedländer had already recounted how his erstwhile nanny, Vlasta, had written him after the publication of the Czech translation of his study on Pope Pius XII and how they had met up a short while later (Friedländer 2016a, 39). Quand vient le souvenir… can be rightly taken as an intertext for Austerlitz. Moreover, fifteen years after Sebald’s death, Friedländer’s second autobiography strengthens the connection to Austerlitz by repeating the incident: “I had received a letter from Czechoslovakia. When I looked at the sender’s name I immediately recognized it: Vlasta Hajnerova, my nanny. […] We met. […] We walked and walked for two days” (Friedländer 2016c, 113).  The word ‘ghetto’ is not unproblematic when referring to Theresienstadt: as Klüger sardonically points out, “a ghetto doesn’t normally mean a prison, but that part of town where Jews live. Theresienstadt, however, was the stable that supplied the slaughterhouse” (LoM, 76).  Whether the relation between Adler and Sebald is best described as “postmemory”, as Wolff does (2014a, 137), is open to debate: Wolff refers to Marianne Hirsch’s own extensions of the concept of postmemory, as formulated in The Generation of Postmemory. Her earlier conceptualisation as suggested in Family Frames, has a sharper analytical advantage, which may have become somewhat blunted by the extension and which may not be useful for Austerlitz, especially since Sebald does not stage himself as a (metaphorical) next of kin to Adler.

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problem that, arguably, any non-Jewish writer is confronted with when writing about the Shoah: there is the traditional scepticism of depicting the Shoah in fiction – as outlined in the introduction. If the author chooses to use real-life biographies as the basis for fictional character, to heighten both the historical and the victim’s subjective authenticity, he runs the risk of sliding into cultural appropriation. Sebald is aware of this: I think certainly for a German gentile to write about Jewish lives is not unproblematic. There are examples of that, writers attempting this in Germany in the 1960s and 70s, and many of these attempts are – one can’t say it really otherwise – shameful. In the sense that they usurp the lives of these people. Perhaps not consciously so; they might be done with the best of intentions, but in the making it comes so that it isn’t right, morally not right. That is, something is spun out of the lives of these victims which is gratifying for the author or for the author’s audience. It’s very, very difficult terrain. I don’t know whether I succeed in this, but I was certainly conscious from the beginning that even in talking to the people who you perhaps might want to portray, there are thresholds which you cannot cross, where you have to keep your distance. (Cuomo 2007, 111– 112)

Although Cosgrove acknowledges the ethical commitment underlying Sebald’s novels, i. e. to “allo[w] the other to bear witness to his or her experiences and to give voice finally to the silenced trauma of the past” (Cosgrove 2006a, 234), she points to the “blind spot” (Taberner 2004, 181) in Sebald’s prose project: Sebald’s depictions of the connection between Germans and Jews is [sic] fundamentally nostalgic; these portrayals express a melancholic resuscitation of the nineteenth-century ideal of German-Jewish symbiosis in a self-consciously sentimentalizing way that rather too eagerly sidelines the alienation of German-Jewish relations in the post-Holocaust context. (Cosgrove 2006a, 234)

One could say – carefully – that, despite all good intentions, Sebald’s writing practice adds to that alienation: aside from Cosgrove’s suggestion that Sebald might have given in to a philosemitic attitude (234), which, as Stuart Taberner reminds us, might be ultimately speaking as much about German suffering as about a genuine concern for the fate of the European Jewish communities (Taberner 2004, 183).

3.3.3 Sebald’s philosophy of history: the historical uncanny in Die Ringe des Saturn Principally, there are four ways of making sense of coincidences: one can consider them as indicators of fictivity, one can consider them as bearers of the histor-

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ical uncanny, one can question whether they really are coincidental or one can take them to be coincidences without attributing much meaning to their occurrence. Sebald’s prose is rife with such presumable coincidences, and as so often, Sebald has considerably influenced the scholarship on Sebald by insisting on the absence of a logic of causality. Sven Meyer rejects Deane Blackler’s explanation of sheer happenstance, Lynn Wolff’s metaphysical, religiously connotated interpretation and Peter Schmucker’s attempt at finding causal connection malgré Sebald (S. Meyer 2016, 21– 22) in favour of a different intertext, named by Sebald: Rupert Sheldrake’s esoteric scientific theories (24– 28).²⁸ Sebald’s professed interest in Sheldrake corroborates his fascination for the eccentric, which is more celebrated in British culture than in other European traditions (cf. Blumenthal-Barby 2011, 553, 558). But do we really need to follow Sebald’s own ‘guidelines’? How helpful are these to start with? In a 2001 interview with Joseph Cuomo, Sebald maintains that coincidence […] is very prominent in my writing. […] I don’t particularly hold with parapsychological explanations of one kind or another, or with Jungian theories about the subject. I find it all rather tedious. But it seems to me simply an instance that illustrates that we somehow need to make sense of our nonsensical existence. […] I think all our philosophical systems, all our systems of creed, all our constructions, even the technological ones, are built in that way, in order to make some sort of sense, which there isn’t, as we all know. (Cuomo 2007, 96 – 97)

This statement blatantly contradicts Sebald’s references to Sheldrake, who does research in parapsychology (Sheldrake n.d.) and attributes causal relations where none have been verified by mainstream science. But even if one distinguishes between Sheldrake’s parapsychology and Sebald’s undeniable interest in metaphysics (cf. Cuomo 2007, 115 – 116), his insistence on the centrality of coincidence also sits uneasily with the postcolonial reading which Die Ringe des Saturn and Austerlitz unmistakably evoke. If one reads these texts alongside Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Aimé Césaire’s Dis-

 The scientific community may protest my use of the word ‘scientific’ when referring to Sheldrake’s theories, and with good reason. To avoid any misunderstandings, I use this term not to express approval of them, but rather because Sheldrake understands himself to belong to the scientific community – as does Sebald. The adjective is thus not to be read as evaluative and supportive but rather as referring to Sheldrake’s self-description and Sebald’s categorisation. The same goes for the word ‘research’. It is problematic in this context, but it is also part of the discourse in which (and with which) Sheldrake positions himself. A transcript of the interview to which Sven Meyer alludes is found in Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s collection of interviews and review (Silverblatt 2007).

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cours sur le colonialisme (1950), coincidences are refuted by emphasising the structural continuities between colonialism and Nazism. Yet the postcolonial politics of memory may have rendered such connections as undesirable, and the Historians’ Debate certainly problematised any comparison with the Shoah. These constellations may thus appear uncanny upon their manifestation, and these are the constellations that Susanne Knittel addresses with the concept of the historical uncanny. It is a concept which allows us to treat these issues as a phenomenon of literary reception – a reception that can be described as a defamiliarisation of the familiar and an approximation of seemingly distant events. In other words, the spatial paradox situated in the narrator’s positioning vis-à-vis his interlocutors, which Lewis Ward has described in terms of empathy, is not just situated on the text level, where it is often encoded in temperamental metaphors, but also on the intertextual level – or at least, philosophical and political intertexts give us the language to describe the interventions that Sebald’s prose pose in the commemorative cultures in which they were published. Knittel develops the concept in The Historical Uncanny (2015) by drawing heavily on Sigmund Freud’s essay Das Unheimliche (1919) and applying it to collective memories. The bulk of her study concerns the suppression of historical facts for political reasons, which decades later may – under changed political circumstances – resurface and cause history to look uncanny. Both the subjectivity of the reader and the (perceived or discursively constructed) relevance of that past are relevant for the concept of the uncanny. As Helmut Lethen formulates (regarding similarities between modernist conservatives and Marxist intellectuals), “[u]nheimlich wirkt der Austausch freilich nur, insofern uns die Denkmotive heute noch verführen. Sobald die Epoche ihre Anziehungskraft verloren hat, können wir gelassen die Logik der Nachbarschaften betonen” (Lethen 2009, 44– 45; the exchange is only uncanny inasfar as the thought patterns are still seductive. As soon as the epoch loses its attractivity, we may relax and emphasise the proximities in their logics). The pervasive ‘attractiveness’ of the Nazi era and its constant (yet also renewed) relevance for contemporary political debates cannot be denied (even though the renewed relevance demonstrates, paradoxically, that history does not serve as a good teacher). Yet in Knittel’s argument, the attractiveness of a historical era does not suffice: history becomes uncanny when it is reinterpreted and rearticulated. Her two prime examples are the German suppression of the medicalised killing of patients deemed mentally handicapped and untreatable – infamously known under its codename, Aktion T4, or more callously, the ‘euthanasia’ programme; and the complicity of Italian fascists in ‘ethnic cleansings’ in the border regions with then-Yugoslavia (now-Slovenia), which have increasingly been hushed up in the media landscape under Silvio

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Berlusconi. The uncanniness is increased by the fact that the Aktion T4 killing centres, the Aktion Reinhardt extermination camps and the Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp near Trieste were largely staffed by the same German perpetrators, who were also responsible for other massacres in North Italy and the Balkans – perhaps the best-known perpetrators (though certainly no household names) are Odilo Globočnik and Christian Wirth (Knittel 2018, 27– 41). Knittel indicates another potential meaning of the historical uncanny: summarising the introduction to Anne Fuchs’s, Mary Cosgrove’s and Georg Grote’s German Memory Contests (2006), she considers the coincidence of the occurrence of indirectly related historical events on the same date in different years as uncanny.²⁹ Fuchs, Cosgrove and Grote’s prime example is the so-called Schicksalstag der Deutschen, 9 November: on this date in 1918, the first German republic was pronounced; in 1923, Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch was defeated;³⁰ in 1938, anti-Jewish pogroms in Germany signalled the transition from social, economic and legal discrimination to all-out physical violence;³¹ in 1989, the Iron Curtain fell, starting the political reunification process of both Germanys.³² Knittel paraphrases:

 With “indirectly”, I mean that there is no direct causal relation between the events that explains their occurring on the same day.  Raul Hilberg notes that the Beer Hall Putsch “had been timed to assure a Nazi victory by November 11, the fifth anniversary of the armistice” (PVB, 7). This demonstrates that apparent coincidences are, in fact, not always that coincidental. Nevertheless, coincidence cannot be entirely discarded – after all, there is no telling what course history would have taken had the coup succeeded, and whether it would be 9 November (the start of the coup) or rather 11 November (potentially the day of its successful completion) that have would been commemorated. Such considerations are, of course, highly speculative, but the success of the genre of the counterfactual historical novel proves their appeal.  Which could thus be considered, if not as the start of the Shoah, at least as an important prelude to genocide. Anthony Read and David Fisher warn against such interpretations in hindsight: despite establishing their own, albeit rank weak, link between the (aftermath of) Kristallnacht and the Shoah by positing the first as a “start” for the Nazis, they maintain that, “no one’s imagination in 1938 could possibly have been black enough to envisage the creation of the machinery for mass murder on such a vast scale” (Read and Fisher 1989, 122, 163). For them, the Shoah began with the deportation of Austrian and Czech Jews to Poland on 12 October 1939 (Read and Fisher 1989, 244).  Or, technically more precisely, the integration of the former GDR in the FDR since the former has no successor state. One may also note that the very nickname for 9 November demonstrates the continuous centrality of the nation-state for commemoration practices and the writing of historiography, despite numerous innovative attempts to transcend this limitation – suffice it to mention just two approaches here, namely entangled history (histoire croisée, Verflechtungsgeschichte) and multidirectional memory.

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such dates become historically overdetermined, creating an “uncanny repetition effect” that “exceeds a rational framework of analysis” […] and is therefore not typically acknowledged or examined by historians. Instead, […] such uncanny coincidences are usually “the proper domain of fiction”. (Knittel 2015, 9, the quotes from Fuchs, Cosgrove, and Grote 2006, 8 – 9)

A variation on this is a linguistic uncanniness, where words are used in similar contexts but with different meanings, which only in hindsight are perceived as uncannily close, as if the author had ‘foreseen’ later events and later designations. One case in point would be Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’enfance d’un chef (1939),³³ and more specifically, its conclusion. L’enfance d’un chef is, as its title may suggest, a negative Bildungsroman: it depicts the childhood and youth of Lucien Fleurier, born in a French bourgeois milieu shortly before the First World War. While his family does not forget to articulate their paternalist and contemptuous attitudes vis-à-vis the working class, Lucien is made to understood that they expect him to be one day a chef himself.³⁴ He comes of age in an era where psychoanalysis and modernist art hold no explanatory value for his self-consciousness, and through his association with other young fascists, he develops a radical antisemitism, culminating in his assaulting a Jewish immigrant. The narrative ends, however, with Lucien’s musings about the future, which includes sexual phantasies with his wife-to-be: “[i]l l’épouserait, elle serait sa femme […]. Lorsqu’elle se dévêtirait le soir, à menus gestes sacrés, ce serait comme un holocauste” (Sartre 2003, 129; [h]e would marry her, she would be his wife […]. When she undressed herself in the evening, with sacred little gestures, it would be like a ritual sacrifice: Sartre 2005, 205). The remarkable choice of metaphor is not entirely coincidental: arguably, Lucien wishes to evoke the notion of burning passion and has to buy into the destructiveness that has historically always been implied in ‘holocaust’ (cf. Young 1988b, 85). That is itself telling of Lucien’s image of women – being a (proto)fascist, this is not the most enlightened image³⁵ – but that does not make it uncanny. It could not even be canny in 1939, but it is extremely uncanny for the reader aware of what French Fascists collaborating with German Nazis would bring upon the Jews of France and Europe in the six years following Sartre’s publication. The fact that “holocauste” is not as often used in the French context as “Shoah” (especially after the release of Lanzmann’s artwork) is of secondary importance: it is certainly

 Published originally as part of the short story collection Le Mur.  Which would be translated in this context as either ‘Führer’ (which has, of course, begot its own connotations) or, somewhat more neutrally, ‘leader’.  Whether those are to be linked to Lucien’s own insecurities as to his gender or to his one-off homoerotic encounter is a different matter that cannot be discussed here.

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not unknown (cf. the introduction). Yet even if Sartre had an inkling of the impending danger, it is hard to believe he could imagine its dimensions, and even harder that those events would one day be called ‘the Holocaust’.³⁶ Sometimes these historical and linguistic coincidences beget a cynical undertone: how else can one react to the title of a German legal comedy, Der Gasmann, which hit German theatres in 1941 – the year the first gassing experiments took place in Auschwitz and a more systematic gassing process started at Chelmno?³⁷ This seems especially true when one considers that the titular character is a person who commits no crime but nonetheless gets into trouble with the legal system, only to be met with the judge’s leniency (Drexler 2001, 76 – 77). The ‘gas man’ is cast as an innocent victim; and just like many of the perpetrators who operated the gassing motors or threw the Zyklon B pellets into the gas chambers, he is ultimately not really prosecuted. Apart from history seemingly repeating itself in unexpected ways, the historical uncanny may also refer to events that are individually and collectively suppressed from memory. As Knittel notes, this notion of the uncanny is linked to Freud’s psychoanalytical theory, and it is this kind of history that she is mainly interested in: [t]his emphasis on the mechanisms of repression and disavowal comes closer to my own understanding of the historical uncanny as a concept, which describes the vertiginious intrusion of the past into the present, the sudden awareness that what was familiar has becole strange. This uncanny effect is at work on a variety of different levels, both individual and collective, national and transnational, in history and in literature – two components of a site of memory as I conceive of it. (2015, 9)

One example, on the individual level, is voiced by Ralph Giordano, who vocally accused post-war West Germany of having suppressed their Nazi past instead of having taken full political and societal responsibility for it. Giordano blames the Wirtschaftswunder for making this possible, and he moreover insists that those who survived the Nazi persecution are not helped by that economic revival:

 It is telling that Andrew Brown decides to translate ‘holocauste’ as ‘ritual sacrifice’: in the twenty-first century, the term would evoke images of deportations, killing fields, ghettos and extermination camps, which are not (cannot be) implied in Sartre’s short story. The timelapse between the original and the translation causes an inadequacy in the translation’s dealing with the historical uncanny. It cannot be reproduced, since the presence of ‘holocaust’ would irritate the reader; what remains is an erasure of the effect by circumventing and choosing a different, domesticating (and in this case arguably the most sensible) translation option (cf. Venuti 1995).  That is, experiments as to the feasibility of gassing as a method in the so-called Endlösung der jüdischen Frage; the Nazis had, of course, already resorted to gassing in Aktion T4.

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[die BRD] soll wissen, daß [unter den Augenzeugen, die nicht vergessen können und wollen] Menschen sind, denen beim unfreiwilligen Einatmen der Auspuffschwaden im Stau des motorisierten Wohlstandsblechs unweigerliche Gedanken an die […] Gaswagen von Chelmno kommen. (Giordano 1987, 362) West Germany should know that there are people [among the eyewitnesses, who cannot and do not want to forget] who are inevitably reminded of the gassing trucks in Chelmno whenever they unwillingly inhale the exhaust fumes while standing in the traffic jam of the motorised welfare tin cans.

But the feeling of uncanniness may not only befall those who were victimised by, engaged in or witnessed such atrocities. Since Knittel’s chosen case studies, the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ complex Grafeneck and the Italian foibe are comparatively unknown, she maintains that they have the potential of revisiting existing opinions, notions, and categories within literary studies, historiography and memory studies (Knittel 2018, 25). The uncanny hinges on a lack of pre-existing knowledge, which is in turn explained by the importance of screen memories: memories that serve the forgetting of other events – both individually/psychoanalytically and collectively/culturally. To link such a concept of history to Sebald’s prose, then, should not be all too surprising: Knittel’s phenomenological take on history and memory seems closely linked to Walter Benjamin’s Theses: “[d]er Historismus stellt das ‘ewige’ Bild der Vergangenheit, der historische Materialist eine Erfahrung mit ihr, die einzig dasteht. Er überläßt es anderen, bei der Hure ‘Es war einmal’ im Bordell des Historismus sich auszugeben” (Benjamin 2010, 26; [h]istoricism gives the eternal image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello: Benjamin 1992b, 254). The influence of Benjamin on Sebald’s prose has been described time and again – suffice it here to point to analyses of Sebald’s extradiegetic narrator as flaneur, to the Arcades Project as inspiration for Sebald’s architectural considerations, to the concept of aura in describing the interplay between text and photographs and so on. Indeed, Sebald’s philosophy of history shares undeniable traits with Benjamin’s Theses, both from a theoretical point of view and the ethical motivation of this history-writing: [n]ur dem Geschichtsschreiber wohnt die Gabe bei, im Vergangenen den Funken der Hoffnung anzufachen, der davon durchdrungen ist: auch die Toten werden vor dem Feind, wenn er siegt, nicht sicher sein. Und dieser Feind hat zu siegen nicht aufgehört. […] Die Tradition der Unterdrückten belehrt uns darüber, daß der Ausnahmezustand, in dem wir leben, die Regel ist. […] Das Staunen darüber, daß die Dinge, die wir erleben, im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert noch möglich sind, ist kein philosophisches. Es steht nicht am Anfang einer Er-

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kenntnis, es sei denn der, daß die Vorstellung von Geschichte, aus der es stammt, nicht zu halten ist. (Benjamin 2010, 18 – 19) Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. […] The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. […] The current amazement that the things we are experiencing in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. (Benjamin 1992b, 247– 249)

With respect to literary texts, the historical uncanny can be addressed on three levels – and Benjamin will resurface on the third level. The first level is that of unlikely coincidences between text, history and the act of reading. An example of this phenomenon is my own reading experience of Die Ringe des Saturn: I came across the passage pertaining to the Voyager II, which contains a “Grußbotschaft [und] ander[e] Memorabilien der Menschheit” (RSd, 123; words of greeting [and] other memorabilia of mankind: RSe, 99), forty years to the day after its launching. What is more, I would not have discovered this coincidence were it not for another coincidence, namely my reading of an article in the New York Times, which mentions this fortieth anniversary exactly (Overbye 2017). At the risk of completely alienating my reader but for the sake of completeness,³⁸ I have to add that this experience was repeated during my lecture of Die Ausgewanderten, when on 4 October 2017 I read passages of the novel which include a sketch with the inscription “[s]o ist es seit dem 4.10.1949” (DA, 91; it is like this since 4 October 1949). An extra layer of coincidence is at play as well: I encountered Knittel’s theory of the historical uncanny only after reading Die Ringe des Saturn and Die Ausgewanderten. Had I not documented these extreme coincidences during my lecture, and had I not come across Knittel’s monograph, I would not have had the language to describe my reading experience. Of course, such coincidences have limited heuristic or hermeneutic value, more so because they cannot be cross-examined and only barely falsified. The second level is the diegetic uncanny. By this I mean the fact that for literary characters, certain experiences may seem utterly unbelievable. This is what happens in a passage from Schwindel. Gefühle (1990), where the narrator, while talking about Kafka, “encounters two twin boys who look exactly like Franz Kafka did at that age” (Cuomo 2007, 116). Sebald confirms that the narrator’s bafflement is autobiographically inspired: “[i]t was a completely unnerving afternoon. It was really terrible. But, you know, it does happen. Doubles do exist.

 Remember, coincidences tend to be considered implausible.

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The irony is, of course, that Kafka’s prose fiction is full of twins or triplets. And that it should happen in real life seemed to me quite implausible” (Cuomo 2007, 117). Perhaps the prime example of uncanniness in Sebald’s oeuvre – without resorting to autobiographical readings – is the repeated yet coincidental meeting of Austerlitz and the extradiegetic narrator: their roads cross in Antwerp (Ad, 14), in Liège (44), in Brussels (46), in Terneuzen (49), in Zeebrugge (49) and finally, near Liverpool Street Station, London (announced on page 54 but happening only on page 62, after the narrator’s extensive commentary).³⁹ The planned visits to Austerlitz in London (51) are, of course, to be excluded from these encounters. A macabre example of the diegetic uncanny is the death of Paul Bereyter in Die Ausgewanderten, who commits suicide by throwing himself in front of a train (Dilly 2017, 41). As Jan Ceuppens notes, “[d]er Vorwurf einer Tante gegenüber dem eisenbahnbegeisterten jungen Bereyter, ‘er werde noch einmal bei der Eisenbahn enden’ […], wird hier auf makabre Weise bestätigt” (Ceuppens 2017, 30; the premonition of an aunt of the young railroad enthusiast Bereyter that ‘he would end up on the railways’⁴⁰). Though the notion of the macabre is certainly linked to that on the uncanny, it must be regarded as the result of an interpretation which is only possible in hindsight: the discrepancy between the message conveyed by the aunt and its ultimate manifestation, which may or may articulate not a wry sense of humour in the face of a modernist vanitas,⁴¹ emerges, of course, after Bereyter’s death. Of course, the precondition to arrive at such conclusions is a willing suspension of disbelief: as a reader, we temporarily ‘forget’ the fictional status of the literary text – or, alternatively, decide to read the text as nonfictional. This principle allows us to take a double stance towards uncanniness: what we perceive to be uncanny for the characters in the text need not (permanently) unsettle us because of the temporal nature of this suspension.

 Such occurrences are not limited to fiction. Many survivors encountered and recognised perpetrators in everyday situations after the war; Victor Capesius was arrested by the American occupation forces in 1946 after such an encounter in Munich but released the next year. Perhaps the most extreme case is that of Filip Müller, one of the few survivors of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau, who encountered three of his erstwhile SS tormentors after the war in Germany: in 1971, he recognized Johann Gorges on the parking lot of a motorway service area; a few years later he encountered Peter Voss in a spa; in the late 1970s he met Hans Stark, who had already been released after serving his sentence, on a train to the same spa (Kilian 2022, 266 – 267).  The quote within the quote is found in RSd, 92 and RSe 62, respectively.  Vanitas pervades Sebald’s oeuvre and must be linked to the pathos of the baroque. The picture of a skull, presumably Thomas Browne’s, at the beginning of Die Ringe des Saturn (21) is but one instance of this vanitas.

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Mark Anderson points to the motive of the stag in Die Ausgewanderten, which is continued in Austerlitz and which for him is a sign of the texts’ fictionality: “[f]ictional and historical characters intersect in an endless series of seeming coincidences” (M. Anderson 2003, 107). Zipfel lists structural intertextuality as a strong indicator of fictionality situated on the discursive level (Zipfel 2001, 232– 238). Anderson’s indication – structural intertextuality – therefore belongs to the category of Zipfel’s textual direct signs of fictionality. Zipfel is aware that even direct signs of fictionality can never be a guarantee, that these indicators can only be considered as augmenting probability: the stronger the intertextuality, the more likely that the narrative is fictional (Zipfel 2001, 237). Paradoxically, however, Anderson resorts to an autobiographical reading when he uses this motive to argue that the anonymous extradiegetic narrators in the stories of Die Ausgewanderten are, in fact, one and the same: “he is the secret center, the thread that holds these narrations together in an implicit gesture of solidarity and identification that is all the more effective for being unstated” (M. Anderson 2003, 107). Indeed, Anderson suggests that the narrative instance allows an identification between the author Sebald and the victims of history: [h]idden but visible, the leaping stag knitted into the boy’s sweater works as a literal emblem of identification between the narrator and the text’s fictional Jewish characters, Bereyter and Seweryn. But also, implicitly, between Sebald and the actual Jewish victims of German history, not a few of whom bore the name Hirsch. (M. Anderson 2003, 107)

The earlier mentioned problem of empathy and identification hinges, then, on the attribution of a conscious use of fictionalisation⁴² in order to install oneself in the stories of others, to become the beating heart of one’s prose. What seems coincidental on the diegetic level can be explained away by our knowledge of the conventions of fiction. What happens, however, when we decide to read either the entire text as non-fictional or when our knowledge of the real world causes us to read local passages within the text as nonfictive? This would bring us to the third level, namely the nonfictional uncanny, where literature has the potential of evoking the unsettling effect as Knittel describes it. Not through the willing suspension of disbelief – but on the contrary: through the acceptance that literature is not autonomous and has the capability of speaking about the real world. Admittedly, this level hinges on the reader’s recognition between real-world places and the places described in the texts, as well as on the reader’s pre-existing historical knowledge: if this is lacking, the text will not evoke a sense of historical uncan Thus, ‘fictionalisation’ in Dawson’s understanding; cf. the introduction.

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niness as strongly (even if the reader is willing to accept Sebald’s connections between colonialism, capitalism and genocide). A variety of this level is to see Sebald as a reader of biographic, literary and political history. As Richard Gray points out, Sebald comments in Schwindel. Gefühle rather explicitly on the uncanny parallels between the lives and intellectual developments of Marie-Henri Beyle (better known under his nom de plume Stendhal) and Franz Kafka (Gray 2017, 124). One could argue that this is a variety of the diegetic uncanny – but that would almost imply that Stendhal and Kafka were already somehow connected before Sebald noted the similarities. Moreover, whereas the second level is unlikely to be experienced as uncanny by the reader – she is aware of the conventions of fiction – the reader Sebald cannot ‘hide’ behind the willing suspension of disbelief because he reads a different text: not a fictional text, but the historical record – which he in turn may fictionalise.⁴³ Sebald’s reader and Sebald as the reader are situated on different levels. But from here, another variation is possible: considering how predominant the topic of the dead speaking to us from beyond the grave is (which is especially outspoken in Die Ausgewanderten), one may consider Sebald’s literary ‘afterlife’ uncanny: in 2010, rather unexpectedly, Sebald’s essay on Jurek Becker, which was not accepted by Irene Heidelberger-Leonard for publication almost twenty years before, found its way to an academic journal and to a broader public through the newspapers, “wie vom Geisterhand gereicht” (Schley 2012, 8; as if it were handed down by the hand of a ghost). This elaboration should clarify that this third level is, much like the first one, reader-dependent, although supposedly less ‘erratic’ and certainly more graspable. Indeed, it is reminiscent of the unsettling that Knittel (2018, 9) describes: it may render the familiar locations uncanny by pointing to hitherto unknown historical facts pertaining to genocide, or at least by connecting such uneasy topics to these familiar places. It is undeniably related to certain philosophical views on history and on societal organisation, and hence it is politically relevant.⁴⁴ This brings us back to Benjamin’s narrator as outlined earlier. Yet whereas Benjamin’s influence on Sebald’s prose, alongside Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s influence, has been well-established and finds additional legitimation in Sebald’s remarks on the literary and philosophical texts he read as a student (Sebald 1998, 12; qtd. in Atze 2014, 3), the influence of Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire’s theses on colonialism and totalitarianism has not been researched

 In Dawson’s understanding; cf. the introduction.  That it is reminiscent of Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory should not come as a complete surprise, given Knittel’s elaborate discussion of it.

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properly. A notable exception is Wohlfarth, who draws parallels between Sebald’s understanding of capitalism amounting to Nazism and Arendt’s theses in Origins of Totalitarianism (2009, 214). Robert Pirro poses a second exception, highlighting the co-existence of tragedy and political freedom (as Arendt articulates it in On Revolution) in Sebald’s works – at least partially in response to the prevailing tendency of trauma-theory-informed readings (2014, esp. 305 – 306). Wohlfarth’s remark that Sebald’s historia calamitatum of modernity starts in earnest with the French Revolution (2009, 187– 188 n.15) may pose a further, albeit weak, link to Arendt, who in On Revolution lauded the American Revolution yet considered the French Revolution an absolute disaster. Then again, Wohlfarth sharply contrasts Sebald and Arendt (albeit the Arendt of We Refugees, 1943) in their interpretation of the motivation for suicide amongst the Jewish exiles: [b]ei Sebald erscheint der Selbstmord jüdischer Emigranten […] als der letzte Schritt einer langen Auswanderung aus der Heimat, sich selber und der Welt, bei Arendt hingegen als die letzte Konsequenz eines Assimilationsbestrebens, das auf einer ganz anderen Selbstverleugnung beruht. Bei ihm sehnen sie sich heraus, bei ihr sehnen sie sich hinein. (193 n.48) In Sebald’s prose, the Jewish emigrants’ suicide seems to be the last step in a long process of leaving home, oneself and the world, whereas in Arendt’s philosophy it is the final consequence of a desire for assimilation, which relies entirely on a denial of the self. For Sebald, they yearn to leave, for Arendt, they yearn to belong.

But no entries for Arendt are found in Saturn’s Moons, nor is she quoted by any of the contributors to W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma, to Saturn’s Moons or to the Handbuch. Arendt’s conceptualisation of history-writing, which does not differ substantially from Benjamin’s (cf. Benhabib 1988, 163), has not been considered as an influence. This may be due to the fact that Arendt was not mentioned in any interview with Sebald,⁴⁵ and as Eric Santner points out, Sebald’s “autoexegesis […] has done so much […] to frame the discourse of his own reception, to provide in advance the terms of critical engagement with the work” (Santner 2006, 45). One may add that Sebald’s authority is presumably heightened by his status as a professional reader, i. e. as literary scholar, even if his academic writings have generally been less well received than his prose. We know, however, that he was in possession of a German edition of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism: his copy is contained in his Nachlass at the DLA

 Based on Richard Sheppard’s “Index to Interviews with W. G. Sebald” in Saturn’s Moons (2011, 592– 618).

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(Schütte 2011, 421).⁴⁶ Despite their obvious differences in perspective and experience, both Sebald and Arendt cast the Shoah as a present absence. Just as Sebald’s prose depicts the Shoah by not depicting it – by merely invoking it as a “silent present being left out but always gestured toward” (Silverblatt 2007, 79) – the Shoah is the understated impetus for The Origins of Totalitarianism (Berg 2003, 469). Moreover, Berg argues that Arendt’s Origins has been infamously misread in the Cold War commemorative framework: instead of equating Nazism and Stalinism and their respective destructive policies and instruments (as it has often been read),⁴⁷ it was fundamentally informed by Arendt’s being informed on the reality of Auschwitz in 1943 and her realisation that this “mass production of corpses” (1948, 745) constitutes an irreparable “Zivilisationsbruch” – a rupture in (or of) civilisation (Diner 1988, 9; Berg 2003, 469 – 470; cf. Benhabib 1988, 158). For Arendt, the three phenomena analysed in her book – racism, antisemitism and totalitarianism – form the components of Nazism and its implementation of the concentration (and, one should add, extermination) camp system, and the knowledge of the proceedings in Auschwitz marked a personal, biographic caesura as much as an intellectual one (Berg 2003, 470 – 471). Moreover, in a private letter she described the resulting melancholia in terms of a void (Berg 2003, 472). A further, quite relevant link to Sebald’s understanding of history is Arendt’s attempt at writing history which refuses a reductionist understanding of causality (cf. Berg 2003, 473). Indeed, as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl formulates, Arendt viewed Origins “as a frontal assault on Europe’s Nineteenth Century, the Bourgeois Century that had cast up the elements from which totalitarianism crystallized in Germany” (Young-Bruehl 1982, 200). This is clear from her methodology as well, as it derives from “traditional historiography” (YoungBruehl 1982, 200). The same could be said of Sebald’s history-writing: Die Ringe des Saturn and Austerlitz strongly imply that colonialism served as a major predecessor to the Shoah while refraining from depicting the Shoah directly. Instead, the description of the silk production serves to loosely link China, the Boxer rebellion and Nazi Germany’s desire for autocracy, while in a similar fash-

 From a philological perspective, it would be doubtlessly interesting to look for clues that suggest whether Sebald read Origins or not. But even if such clues would not be found, it is worth looking at the similarities between Arendt and Sebald – and not just because of the link between them and Benjamin.  Seyla Benhabib cites methodological imbalances as facilitating, if not provoking, such interpretations (1988, 160 – 161). Hilberg cites these, too, as a reason for discarding Origins unconditionally – and rather bitterly – in an interview with Alfons Söllner (1988, 183 – 184); yet his judgement may have been informed by personal animosity. The more complex dynamics between Arendt and Hilberg will be addressed in Chapter 6.

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ion the herrings’ and the silkworms’ death on an industrial scale eerily resembles the fate of European Jews in the death camps.⁴⁸ To be sure, the examples stem mainly, if not exclusively, from colonialism as practiced in the nineteenth century: the colonisation of Africa (illustrated by the biography of Joseph Conrad, the Polish-British author of Heart of Darkness [1899]) and the European ‘informal Empires’ in China (the Opium Wars and subsequent conflicts) are the two main examples – the ventures of Spanish, British, Dutch and Portuguese colonialists in the Americas (dating back to 1492) are not discussed.⁴⁹ Sebald’s preoccupation with this fourth period of colonialisation during the nineteenth century coincides with his literary prose style, which many commentators have noted is reminiscent of the nineteenth century authors on whom Sebald published so widely – and to whom he accredited literary influence.⁵⁰ Arendt’s boomerang thesis resembles Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme, in which he accuses post-war Europe of hypocrisy since it condemns and demonises Hitler and Nazism for “avoir appliqué à l’Europe des procédés colonialistes dont ne relevaient jusqu’ici que les Arabes d’Algérie, les coolies de l’Inde et les nègres d’Afrique” (1955, 13; the fact that he had applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘niggers’ of Africa: Césaire 2000, 36). Likewise, to my knowledge, Sebald has not been read with or against Césaire. This is somewhat odd: the influence of the Marxist Frankfurt School on

 Moreover, it is uncannily reminiscent of Billy Wilder’s Death Mills/Die Todesmühlen (1945), the title of which cynically connects the vitality linked to the products of mills (nourishments) with astounding mortality rates. Wilder, an Austrian-Jewish emigrant himself, would later become famous for his comedies but was drafted during the Second World War to make propaganda films for the US Department of War. Death Mills/Die Todesmühlen consists of footage shot immediately after the liberation of concentration camps in Germany, and it was screened in 1946 throughout Germany in an Allied attempt to ‘re-educate’ the Germans. Yet several factors posed serious challenges for that attempt: an inner ideological resistance within viewers, an overexposure to Nazi propaganda and the falsification of First World War atrocity propaganda ‘mocked’ the reality effect that film and photography offer (an effect that results from media socialisation, which is itself not free from ideological implications) yet could not, of course, entirely discard the factuality of the scenes filmed. For a more detailed overview of these challenges and the techniques which the film crews used to enhance the credibility of their material, cf. Carruthers (2001, esp. 737– 742).  For the differentiation between ‘informal’ and ‘formal empire’, see Osterhammel and Jansen (2017, esp. 22– 25).  Osterhammel and Jansen distinguish six phases of European colonialism (Osterhammel and Jansen 2017, 28 – 45). They acknowledge that this schematic overview is inherently Eurocentric (30 – 31) and a heuristic schema that must be substantially modified for single historical case studies (29).

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Sebald’s writing has been analysed extensively; the influence of the Marxist postcolonial philosopher has not. A link between the two is merely hinted at by Rothberg: in Multidirectional Memory, he delivers a rather elaborate analysis of Césaire’s Discours and suggests that Sebald’s prose, too, could be read within the framework of multidirectional memory (2009, 66 – 107 resp. 2009, 28). Whether that holds true, remains to be seen. How does Sebald depict colonialism? How does he frame it? How does he relate it to the Shoah? Just like Sebald, Césaire is a polemicist, suggesting that the Nazi conquest of Europe was the logical, inevitable – and even just – consequence of European colonialism: nul ne colonise innocemment, […] nul non plus ne colonise impunément ; qu’une nation qui colonise, qu’une civilisation qui justifie la colonisation […] est déjà une civilisation malade, une civilisation moralement atteinte, qui, irrésistiblement, de conséquence en conséquence, de reniement en reniement, appelle son Hitler, je veux dire son châtiment. (Césaire 1955, 16 – 17) [N]o one colonizes innocently, […] no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization […] is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment. (Césaire 2000, 39)

This reasoning corresponds to a Marxist view on National Socialism, namely as an utterance of late capitalism in crisis: Césaire, like Arendt, argues that the capitalist desire for new markets played a bigger role in the development of colonialism than, for example, a missionary Christian religion purportedly bringing ‘civilisation’ to ‘uncivilised’ lands. Césaire’s reasoning does not quite amount to the logic of the syllogism, but rather his association of capitalism to colonialism and to Nazism suggests a historical inevitability of Nazism mimicking colonialism. The causality is, in other words, not logical but structural. This is where Arendt and Césaire differ fundamentally: for Arendt, colonialism constitutes a mould for future bio- and geopolitical atrocities, but there is no causal inevitability between colonialism and the Shoah. For the Marxist Césaire, there undoubtedly is. Sebald has given us contradictory statements, but more interesting is the difference in pathos. While both are polemicists, their respective speaking positions and the politically different environments in which they write may explain why Die Ringe des Saturn is not polemical. Instead, Sebald frames modernity – which includes colonialism – as “unsere beinahe nur aus Kalamitäten bestehende Geschichte” (RSd, 350; our history, which is but a long account of calamities: RSe, 295). In Sebald’s prose, the framing is not polemical; it is pure melancholy: while still coming with political implications, the aspect of

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mourning takes priority.⁵¹ For this reason, I do not consider Sebald’s prose to be properly multidirectional: the political implications remain just that: implications. Sebald does not discuss the German imperialist practices in Southwest Africa, nor does he discuss the legacy of Austria-Hungary’s hegemony in Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe, which only ended with military defeat in 1918.⁵² With the exception of the palimpsestic description of Terezin/Theresienstadt in Austerlitz, there are few if any concrete examples where colonialism and the Shoah are directly confronted with each other.

3.3.4 Cool characters, cool relations: Major Le Strange, Naegeli-Selwyn, Adelworth-Solomon When Ruth Klüger uses the temperamental metaphor to discuss the emotionality in Sebald’s prose, she differentiates between coolness and coldness. Whereas Knörrer uses coldness (“kalt”) to describe a stylistic phenomenon, Klüger relates coolness to style (“kühl angedeutet”) and coldness to the nature of intradiegetic emotional relations (“Herzenskälte”): [t]rotz des Austausches im Gespräch fehlt die Beschreibung menschlicher Beziehungen fast gänzlich. Nicht nur Liebesaffären und Ehen sind abwesend oder nur kühl angedeutet, auch Eltern und Kinder leben nicht miteinander, und selbst Freundschaften sind als solche kaum erkennbar, obwohl es Menschen gibt, die einander viel erzählen und erklären, denn das ist ja der Duktus von Sebalds Fiktionen. Anders gesagt, es fehlen genau die Konstellationen, die wir vom Roman erwarten. […] Von Liebe kann überhaupt nicht die Rede sein, von Herzenswärme nur selten, von Herzenskälte dagegen viel. (2003, 96) Despite the exchange in conversation, a description of intersubjective relations is nearly completely absent. Not only are love affairs and marriages either absent or coolly alluded to, but children are not living with their parents, and even friendships are barely recognizable as such, although there are people who tell stories and explain things to each other, since this is the ductus of Sebald’s fiction. In other words, precisely the constellations that

 This is Wohlfarth’s critique of Sebald’s interpretation and presentation of Benjamin’s philosophy: it negates the potential for political activism and anachronistically reduces Benjamin and his philosophy (and Marx and Adler as well as their philosophies) to be solely mourned as the victim (2009, 193, 203, 213).  For a discussion of Austria-Hungary as colonial power and its aftermath, see Feichtinger, Prutsch and Csáky (2003) and Ruthner (2018). Similarly, the question of whether Ireland was a British colony or not (cf. Howe 2002; Cavanagh 2013) – a highly politicised question to this very day – is not answered by Sebald: his including the story of Roger Casement merely implies that Sebald considers it as an example of inner-European colonialism.

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we expect in a novel are absent here. […] There is no love in these texts, only little warmth of the heart – but a lot of coldness of the heart.

Both cannot be entirely separated, however, since the cool style is explicitly connected to the notion of Romantic love – and here, to its absence. As such, Klüger frames coolness as a phenomenon of reception since it points to the reader’s unfulfilled expectations. This applies to the seeming loveless marriages and to the lack of friendships, despite the vast number of encounters.⁵³ Klüger sees in storytelling and explanation acts of (Platonic) intimacy, perhaps because these speech acts, especially in the context of genocide and war, cause a certain vulnerability vis-à-vis the interlocutor – they imply a trust that is to be reciprocated. Moreover, Klüger may see – though she does not state this explicitly – this lack of friendship in the fact that the extradiegetic narrator does not tell his stories to the characters he meets, nor does he explain to them his interpretation of nature or even the cosmos. At least, this extradiegetic narrator does not report such acts of storytelling or explanation to the novel’s reader. The relation is thus one-directional – more akin to therapy than to friendship. The (reported) one-sidedness of who-tells-whom in Sebald’s prose must be considered when discussing empathy, all the more since Jan Ceuppens opposes coolness and distance to empathy (2006, 253). In contrast, using LaCapra’s definition of empathy, Ward maintains that empathy is not opposed to coolness but that it is rather the mediation between distance and proximity (2012, 3; Ward refers to LaCapra 2001). A poetic crystallisation may be Johannes Naegeli in Die Ausgewanderten. The reader only hears from Naegeli through the narrator, who in turn is told about Naegeli through the eponymous protagonist of the first narrative within Die Ausgewanderten, Dr Henry Selwyn. Selwyn recounts how he befriended Naegeli, who is a 65-year-old mountain guide when Selwyn meets him as a young student in the summer of 1913. The outbreak of the First World War, which had caused Selwyn to return to the UK to serve in the army, means that the two would never meet again: Naegeli had disappeared shortly after and had been presumed dead (DA, 23 – 24). Yet, in a fashion that has caused many commentators to see a link to Johann Peter Hebel’s Unverhofftes Wiedersehen (1811), the anonymous narrator recounts how he came across a newspaper article in 1986 reporting on the recovery of Naegeli’s body, which had been preserved in the glacier’s

 For Sebald’s biographer, Carole Angier, that loneliness is puzzling: “[i]t is the question why, despite a long and loyal marriage, despite devotion to his daughter, [Sebald] was always alone. His books are so full of this aloneness that some critics scoff at it” (Angier 2021, vii).

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ice (DA, 36 – 37). Naegeli is thus the embodiment of a proximity kept at a distance: he is emotionally close to the intradiegetic narrator Selwyn, with whom a physical closeness is no longer possible after the outbreak of the war. Nonetheless, the revelation that Naegeli’s corpse had been preserved by the ice bears an uncanny resemblance to Selwyn’s description of his depression caused by the news of Naegeli’s death: “[d]ie Nachricht davon erhielt ich in einem der ersten Briefe, die mich als Kasernierten und Uniformierten erreichten, und verursachten in mir eine tiefe Depression, […] während der mir war, als sei ich begraben unter Schnee und Eis” (25, emphasis added; [t]he news reached me in one of the first letters I received when I was in uniform, living in barracks, and it plunged me into a deep depression […]. It was as if I were buried under snow and ice: E, 15). This connection between Selwyn’s emotionality and Naegeli’s corporeality is only provided through the extradiegetic narrator – to whom Selwyn is arguably not very close. There is a good deal of small talk, and the latter invites the narrator to dinner with his friend Edward Ellis, but that dinner, too, is marked by a metaphorical configuration of temperature and distance: a fire is lit “gegen die am Abend sehr empfindliche Kühle” (21; against the distinct chill of the evening: E, 12), but the dinner arrangements do not invite proximity: “[a]uf der eichenen Tafel, die leicht dreißig Gästen Platz geboten hätte, standen zwei silberne Leuchter. Für Dr. Selwyn und Edward war am oberen beziehungsweise unteren Ende, für Clara und mich an der der Fensterfront gegenüberliegenden Seite gedeckt” (22; [o]n the oak table, at which thirty people could have been seated with no difficulty, stood two silver candelabra. Places were set for Dr Selwyn and Edwin at the head and foot of the table, and for Clara and me on the long side facing the windows: E, 12).⁵⁴ Both Selwyn and the extradiegetic narrator do not seem to harbour many close relationships: the former is estranged from his wife, whereas the latter never tells the reader who Clara is: an acquaintance, a friend, next of kin, a lover? The only indication that Clara could be close

 Dr Selwyn’s friend is named differently in the German original and in the English translation: Edward Ellis and Edwin Elliott, respectively. It is worth mentioning that Jan Ceuppens considers the ambivalences of distance and proximity as characterising Sebald’s poetics of empathy, with the element of distance countering the ethical problems inherent in (too much) proximity (Ceuppens 2009, 17– 22). A particularly strong example is the story of Paul Bereyter (Ceuppens 2009, 157– 167). And indeed, one could read this story in the light of Plessner’s plea for tact and respectful interpersonal distances required for coexistence in society: Bereyter’s story exemplifies the aftermath of the destruction of tact – genocide as a means of destroying societal bounds in order to create an imagined community. (I am grateful to Corina Stan for this valuable insight).

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to the narrator is a linguistic one: they are often collectively referred to with firstperson plural pronouns. Another example, but this time ex negativo, is Ambros Adelwarth, the narrator’s Great-Uncle and butler to the Solomon family and lover of the family’s son, Cosmo (DA, 130). In the years before the First World War, Ambros and Cosmo travel together through Europe from casino to casino before embarking on a voyage via Italy to Constantinople and Jerusalem (132– 133). The narrator’s aunt and uncle, who tell him what they have been told concerning these matters, have no information on this voyage. Years later, when Ambros and Cosmo travel to “Banff im kanadischen Hochgebirge” (142; Banff in the Canadian Rockies: E, 97), Cosmo shows signs of a nervous breakdown, which presumably has its origins in the destruction of pre-war jet-set life due to the First World War, and ultimately dies in a mental hospital in Ithaca. Ambros later wilfully reports to the same hospital, where he voluntarily undergoes electroshock therapy, which will cause his death. In the final part of the story, the narrator recounts from Ambros’s Jerusalem diary, and it is revealed that the journey is marked by impressions of death and decay (cf. Ceuppens 2017, 31). Ambros recounts a sense of feeling “verachtet und kalt” (205; despised and cold: E, 140) whenever locking eyes with a deformed inhabitant; this stands in implicit contrast with his supposedly ‘warm’ relation to Cosmo. A third candidate for the denomination cool character would be Major Le Strange. The argument would no longer be based on the diegetic coldness or coolness but on intertextuality: does this hybrid French-English composite name not remind us of Meursault, the autodiegetic narrator of Albert Camus’s L’étranger (1942)? This may seem a long shot at first, but I posit that Meursault functions as a literary predecessor in terms of a certain cool, or at least of a certain detachment that only seemingly ruptures at the end of his narrative. L’étranger opens with the notification of Meursault’s mother having passed away in a retirement home and with Meursault’s travelling to attend the funeral (Camus 2017, 9). In contrast to several of his mother’s friends and her new fiancé, no sadness or mourning is shown or mentioned during Meursault’s conversation with the director in which the details of the funeral are discussed, nor during the wake on the eve of the funeral nor during the funeral itself.⁵⁵ Moreover, not only does he put up this attitude towards the other characters, but his narration does not divulge a single clue: no grief is mentioned to the reader, and Meursault ad-

 One hint at Meursault’s emotions could be his wish to see his mother’s corpse straight upon arrival, but this is not granted to him; the conversation with the director apparently cannot wait (11).

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mits he is not even sure when his mother died (9). This purported lack of emotion will cause his downfall during the trial in which he stands accused of murder: the prosecution uses it to argue that Meursault is capable of cold-blooded murder, and although the novel does not make it clear whether his argument proves devastating, Meursault is – to the (feigned or real) surprise of his lawyer – condemned to death (142, 162).⁵⁶ What we do know is that Meursault shoots an anonymous man who has a fight with Raymond, a neighbour of Meursault, and that he pulls the trigger four more times after the initial and fatal shot, suggesting a coldblooded execution – although interestingly, Meursault blames a heat stroke for his disorientation during which he commits the murder (92– 93). But again, no overt feelings are admitted or displayed. This prevents him from experiencing any empathy for his friend’s ex-girlfriend, whom his friend has beaten – Meursault acts as character witness for his friend – and convinces him to marry his own girlfriend but without much excitement (67). A similar detachment is presented during the interrogations while he is imprisoned, which suggest Meursault is a modern kynikos – a cynic in the Greek philosophical sense: while the investigative judge insists on the morality that is only attainable through (the Catholic) religion, Meursault repeatedly insists on his being an atheist (106). At no point does he pretend to be religious in order to ingratiate himself with this judge. His behaviour during the trial is not very different, mainly remaining silent and even resorting to daydreaming. All this does not tell us whether Meursault merely hides his emotions or whether he is profoundly indifferent. Is Meursault not a mere (but profound) adherent of absurdism? There are several hints that Meursault’s stoic attitude is one of composure, which equally amounts to euphoric feelings that have to be checked: “je me donnais en quelque sorte la permission d’aborder la deuxième hypothèse: j’étais gracié. L’ennuyeux, c’est qu’il fallait render moins fougueux cet élan du sang et du corps qui me piquait les yeux d’une joie insensée. Il fallait que je m’applique à réduire ce cri, à le raisonner” (172; I gave myself leave, to consider the other alternative; that my appeal was successful. And then the trouble was to calm down that sudden rush of joy racing through my body and even bringing tears to my eyes. But it was up to me to bring my nerves to heel and steady my mind: Camus 1972, 143). Yet the final part of the story does link various cognitive processes and realisations to a bodily state of coldness: à l’idée de me voir libre […], à l’idée d’être le spectateur qui vient voir et qui pourra vomir après, un flot de joie empoisonnée me montait au cœur. Mais ce n’est pas raisonnable. J’avais tort de me laisser allez à ces suppositions parce que, l’instant après, j’avais si affreuse-

 However, Camus himself has answered this in the positive (cf. Carroll 2007, 27– 28).

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ment froid que je me recroquevillais sous ma couverture. Je claquais des dents sans pouvoir me retenir. (166) the moment I’d pictured myself in freedom, […] the mere thought of being an onlooker who comes to see the show, and can go home and vomit afterward, flooded my mind with a wild, absurd exultation. It was a stupid thing to let my imagination run away with me like that; a moment later I had a shivering fit and had to wrap myself closely in my blanket. But my teeth went on chattering; nothing would stop them. (Camus 1972, 138 – 139)

At the end, a rupture of kinds takes place – but only to some degree: not that Meursault suddenly shows remorse, starts to question his atheist assumptions or admits that his pose conceals a vulnerable emotionality, but he suddenly lashes out against the chaplain – and his recollection of it leaves space for the articulation of seemingly paradoxical emotions: [a]lors, je ne sais pas pourquoi, il y a quelque chose qui a crevé en moi. Je me suis mis à crier à plein gosier et je l’ai insulté et je lui ai dit de ne pas prier. Je l’avais pris par le collet de sa soutane. Je déversais sur lui tout le fond de mon cœur avec des bondissements mêlés de joie et de colère. (180) Then, I don’t know how it was, but something seemed to break in me, and I started yelling at the top of my voice. I hurled insults at him, I told him not to waste his rotten prayers on me; it was better to burn than to disappear. I’d taken him by the neckband of his cassock, and, in a sort of ecstasy of joy and rage, I poured out on him all the thoughts that had been simmering in my brain. (Camus 1972, 151)

The differences between Meursault and Le Strange are, however, too significant to go unmentioned. First and foremost, Meursault is a perpetrator: his candidness, his coherent self-representation, his ‘integrity’ – in the sense that he takes responsibility for what he has done – do not change this fact; indeed, it is only the relative ‘forgetting’ of the murder that renders sympathy for Meursault as a victim of the judiciary possible: let us not forget that the victim remains anonymous (cf. Carroll 2007, 26 – 29).⁵⁷ This cannot be plausibly said of Le Strange – Sebald’s condemnation of the Allied bombing strategy, which does feature in Die Ringe des Saturn, cannot quite be linked to Le Strange, who functions as a belated witness to the Shoah’s immediate aftermath in Bergen-Belsen. Le Strange’s bodily transformation postmortem may constitute a rupture; after years of silence,⁵⁸ his corpse testifies to what Le Strange has seen but to

 Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête (2013) is a postcolonial response to L’étranger.  The obituary mentions that his housekeeper and cook, Florence Barnes, was employed “on condition that she dined with him in silence every day, [and] said that Le Strange had, in the course of time, become a virtual recluse” (RSd, 81).

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which he has not testified; it also suggests a kinship with the victims. This kinship may be once removed (through the herring), just as many of the biographies are narrated once removed, but is nonetheless there, however uncanny. Meursault, too, posits a kinship to the victim (his victim), but only metonymically: his philosophy of the absurd leads him to believe that “[t]out le monde était priviligié. Il n’y avait que des priviligiés. Les autres aussi, on les condamnerait un jour. Lui aussi, on le condamnerait” (182; every man alive was privileged; there was only one class of men, the privileged class. All alike would be condemned to die one day; his turn, too, would come like the others: Camus 1972, 152). Moreover, Meursault finds peace with the possibility of his appeal being revoked by positing that “tout le monde sait que la vie ne vaut pas la peine d’être vécue. Dans le fond, je n’ignorais pas que mourir à trente ans ou à soixante-dix ans importe peu puisque, naturellement, dans les deux cas, d’autres hommes et d’autres femmes vivront, et cela pendant des milliers d’années” (171; ‘it’s common knowledge that life isn’t worth living, anyhow.’ And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten – since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before: Camus 1972, 142 – 143).

3.3.5 The polemicist Sebald The tenth anniversary of Sebald’s death led to several laudatory films, monographs and commemorative events, but around this time, awareness of Sebald’s writing beyond (and mainly before) his literary prose grew. It was high time for some of Sebald’s critics to consider these texts in order to getter a completer picture of the author (cf. Schütte 2010, 242). Indeed, Fridolin Schley remarkably starts his monograph on Sebald’s performed authorship with a moment of fiction: a pastiche of Sebald’s polemical literary criticism, only this time it is directed against Sebald. It features an attack against the academic discipline (Germanistik) to which Sebald and Schley both (used to) belong: the author speaks of a “Fehlleistung des Kollektivs”, of a “deformation [sic] professionelle”, of “unkontrollierte Begeisterung für ein an Peinlichkeiten reichhaltiges, größtenteils schlicht mißlungenes Werk” (Schley 2012, 7; collective failure, professional deformation, unchecked enthusiasm for an oeuvre which is full of embarrassments and is by and large simply a failure). A further defamation of Sebald’s prose is found in a somewhat more concrete attack: Austerlitz is considered kitsch, and – in Sebald’s own polemical style – the perceived literary shortcomings are considered symptoms of a pathology: its author is diagnosed with a confused mind (7– 8). Two signposts of fictionality, albeit rather covert ones, come immediately

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to mind: the entire paragraph is printed in italics,⁵⁹ and the use of the eszett in “mißlungenes” – an anachronism, given the reform of official German orthography in 2006. This fictionality is avowed in the following paragraph, no longer italicised, and in which Schley admits to using fiction to supply what will never materialise and comes close to offering an apologetic justification: [e]ine polemische Selbstrevision W.G. Sebalds – sie wird, auch wenn all diese Formulierungen, auf verschiedene Autoren angewandt, aus seiner Feder stammen, ein uneinholbarer akademischer Fiebertraum bleiben. Wie manche Träume erscheint er indes nicht gänzlich unbegründet, zumindest wenn man den Einschätzungen von Sebalds Zeitgefährten Glauben schenken darf, dass ihm die hybriden Auswüchse seines posthumen Ruhms wohl eher suspekt gewesen wären. (Schley 2012, 8) A polemical self-revision by W. G. Sebald – it will remain an academic’s unachievable feverish dream, even though every formulation above stems from his pen, directed towards various authors. But like some dreams it does not appear entirely unfounded, at least if one may believe the characterizations of Sebald by some of his contemporaries, who claim that the hybrid excrescences of his posthumous fame would have been suspicious to him.

If Sebald’s polemics hinge on his not adhering to the academic standards pertaining to the separation of author and narrator, of life and work, they serve his self-fashioning as an outsider. Likewise, others have used this constellation to carve a position within ‘Sebald philology’ or to fashion themselves as a literary author – very much in Sebald’s wake. These authors, like Sebald, insist on their subjectivity to legitimise their methodology and their interpretations – but this tactic is certainly not limited to Sebald’s legacy. It seems that there is an increased perceived need to admit one’s subjectivity when addressing topics of trauma, of genocide and of cultural commemoration. Excursus: on the admitted subjectivity of literary scholars Schley starts his work of nonfiction with this fiction while claiming to adhere to the archive.⁶⁰ This, too, is in line with Sebald’s writing, at least with his literary

 For reader-friendliness, I have abandoned this, and I will do so occasionally throughout this book – particularly regarding Dieter Schlesak’s Capesius, der Auschwitzapotheker (2006), where italics are also used to mark the fictional discourse.  And it does not mean that Schley does not include some of the criticism in his nonfictional argumentation, albeit – overall – slightly less polemically: “Gerade in akademischen Kreisen trägt die Verehrung Sebalds mitunter hysterische Züge” (9; especially in academic circles, Sebald’s adoration is not free from hysterical excesses). Although this is partially true, and while I do not wish to suggest that Schley’s argument is not sustained by enough sources – no-

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prose, and it is a tension that is present throughout documentary literature (as shall be discussed in Chapter 4). To be sure, this opening paragraph is as much about Schley as it is about his monograph: Schley is a literary author himself and uses this paragraph not only to introduce the topic – the performance of authorship – but also to position himself as a literary (and not merely an academic) author. Perhaps it is indicative of a more recent development within literary studies, where some authors have opted to openly admit their subjective positioning, particularly when tackling the subjects found in Sebald’s prose: genocide, trauma, exile, catastrophe, extinction, etc. It is a development that is not necessarily astonishing considering two broader phenomena: the ethical turn in literary studies and the phenomenological touch that memory studies (which are predominantly looking at traumatic memory⁶¹) bring to historiography and literary studies alike. Two examples: Phil Langer starts the preface to his monograph on the autobiographies of three Shoah survivors with a biographical notice: [a]ls katholisch erzogener deutscher Staatsbürger der zweiten Generation nach Beendigung der nationalsozialistischen Terrorherrschaft wird mir ein Legitimationsproblem unterstellt: Es gebe weder Grund noch Notwendigkeit für meine Studien zur Shoah. Schließlich sei alles bekannt; man habe in den letzten fünfzig Jahren sämtliche Aspekte geklärt; es müsse endlich einmal ein Ende der Schuldzuweisungs- und Demutsdebatte gefunden werden; und überhaupt: warum ich mich nicht mit positiveren, erfreulicheren Dingen beschäftige, anstatt immer nur derart deprimierende Themen zu behandeln. (P. C. Langer 2002, 7– 8) As a German citizen raised in the Catholic faith and belonging to the second generation after the termination of the National Socialist terror regime, I am confronted with supposed problems of legitimacy: there is, supposedly, neither reason nor necessity for my researching the Shoah. After all, everything is supposedly known, we have clarified all aspects in the last fifty years, we supposedly should finally end the debates establishing guilt and prescribing modesty; and besides, why don’t I keep myself busy with more positive, joyful things, instead of only dealing with such depressing topics.

Practically stopping short from Michel Leiris’s physical self-description at the beginning of L’âge d’homme (1939, transl. Manhood, 1992),⁶² Langer lays bare the

body can read all relevant publications – some of the more critical essays on Sebald are not found in the bibliography.  Ann Rigney suggests going beyond focussing on traumatic events and holds a plea for commemorating ‘positive’ historical events as well (Rigney 2018).  Schneider considers this novel “ein wahrhaft polizeikonformer Text” (1986, 38; a truly police-conforming text) since it starts with a “Steckbrief” (1986, 38; a description of a ‘wanted’ person) describing its authors physical appearance en détail, thus imitating the new media and dis-

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criteria that are more relevant for his authorship on the Shoah: his religious socialisation, his nationality and approximate age, a vague political orientation and an indirect positioning towards his research project: one can read the posited problem of legitimacy ironically in light of its explanation: the accusations do not seem to stem from the survivors or their descendants but rather from the community of the perpetrators and the bystanders. After refuting the demands of drawing an infamous Schlussstrich under the Nazi regime and the Shoah, he poses a question which, in all fairness, ought to be rhetorical: “[w]oher nehme ich mir das Recht, mich über die Shoah äußern zu wollen?” (9; what gives me the right to want to speak out about the Shoah?) The answer is a familial motivation: Langer, no longer as naïve as he claims he once was, suspects that his grandfather may have been involved as a police officer in the vicinity of Chelmno during the renewed bout of gassing in June 1944. The second example of this admitted subjectivity is Johannes (Jan) Konst’s monograph on Louis Ferron, an author born out of wedlock in 1942 to a Dutch mother and a German father who had been living in the Netherlands before the invasion (and would later become part of the occupying forces). Konst, a scholar of Dutch literature at the Free University of Berlin, argues that Ferron’s oeuvre can be read through another scope than that of postmodernism and insists on the referentiality of the novels – despite Ferron’s destabilising language games (2015, 71– 72, 77– 78). He also notes that academia has largely ignored the topic of the Shoah in Ferron’s oeuvre precisely because the focus lay on its postmodernist aesthetics, thus implying that a) there is still considerable unease around postmodernist aesthetics with their destabilising effects when depicting the Shoah and b) that it is high time that Ferron’s oeuvre is read through another paradigm – one that emphasises the historical references, one that restores a storyworld stability (78). That insistence on the novels’ referentiality leads to parallels between ‘our’ world and the storyworld: Konst draws parallels between the villa where his office is situated and a villa in one of Ferron’s novels (18), and he tells us that his research on Ferron’s “Duitslandromans”⁶³ started in 2003 and ended in 2015 – precisely 70 years after the Nazis came to power respectively were militarily defeated (19). He speaks of his fascination, even admits his admiration for Ferron

ciplines which guaranteed a more accurate understanding of the self – and thus could all the better serve the (self‐)disciplining of the subject. Moreover, this corporeality is destroyed throughout L’âge d’homme, so Schneider posits, in a move of “Autosuggestion seiner Authentizität” (202).  Literally “Germany novels,” although a somewhat more refined translation might be “Germany pentalogy”.

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(21) and to some degree identifies himself with Ferron when claiming that they have both incessantly searched for what ‘really happened’ in Nazi Germany (316). Perhaps the closest link to Ferron is the familial structure and the intercultural identity, albeit in reversed form: while Ferron’s earliest years were spent in Germany (returning in 1948 to his Dutch mother), Konst has been living in Germany as an adult, and has made a family with a German woman. He links this biographic information to a heightened reflexivity on the specificity of cultural and political commemoration that is shaped by the nation-state (which does not, or should not, imply that commemoration in any given nation-state is homogenous or undisputed) and subject to historical variety. That specificity made him – initially – reluctant to openly discuss the Second World War and the Shoah with Germans, for fear of being perceived as moralising. Against Andersch To date, Sebald’s polemical attack against Alfred Andersch, which was met with the same scepticism as his positions on Sternheim and Döblin, has been well documented, but it is worth revisiting it to some extent since it serves Sebald’s autopoetological programme – also in terms of empathy and identification – and since it has, therefore, had consequences for the reception of Sebald’s oeuvre. Sebald’s argument is twofold: on the one hand, he offers a critique of Andersch’s literary oeuvre; on the other hand, he subjects Andersch’s actions before, during and after the war to rigorous ethical judgement. Sebald’s polemic consists of reading Andersch’s work and life in relation to each other and finding fault with both. He sets the scene by sarcastically ridiculing Andersch’s artistic ambitions and self-awareness as a writer: Andersch is quoted as the author of a (self‐) promoting, unnuanced paratext; this is evident in the letters to his mother,⁶⁴ in which he highlights his literary successes (Sebald 2005a, 113 – 114). Sebald contrasts this self-image with Andersch’s self-fashioning as anonymous hero of the inner emigration (114). This discrepancy between Andersch’s private and public images is, to Sebald, not innocent: the latter is a masquerade both of Andersch’s questionable behaviour and of his true aesthetic role model: Ernst Jünger. This  This is where Sebald’s sarcasm is the most outspoken: she is referred to – multiple times – as “die Mama,” which amounts to a focalisation from Andersch’s perspective, of which Sebald’s argument has no particular need. That this is sarcastically intended is evident from the first footnote: “In späteren Briefen adressiert Andersch die lb. Mama gern als Dear Mom oder Ma chère maman. Was für einen Reim die doch ziemlich biedere Frau Andersch sich darauf gemacht hat, wissen wir nicht” (Sebald 2005a, 152 n.1; [i]n later years Andersch likes to address his ‘dear Mama’ as ‘Dear Mom’ or ‘Ma chère maman’. What the rather unassuming Frau Andersch made of this we do not know: Sebald 2004b, 201 n.1).

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link does not only serve to discredit Andersch politically but also intellectually (Sebald 2005a, 115). Through Jünger’s legacy, Andersch is equally discredited as an erstwhile Mitläufer and refashioned as a post-war conservative opponent, but does this not also imply that Andersch’s rapprochement with Jünger was naïve? Indeed, instead of legitimising Andersch’s art, it eventually proves damaging. Interestingly, Sebald’s criticism of Andersch was, in itself, not particularly new. In the mid-1980s, Ruth Klüger had denounced three of Andersch’s novels – Sansibar oder der letzte Grund (1957), Die Rote (1960) and Efraim (1967) – as kitsch. While admitting that no West German author has thematised the persecution and genocide of the Jews as extensively as Andersch, Klüger maintains that these novels are, basically, wishful thinking: [d]ort werden Juden von Deutschen ganz außergewöhnlich gut behandelt, und zwar mit der größten Selbstverständlichkeit, als seien solche Fälle eher typisch als Ausnahmen. Nun ist die Erfüllung geheimer Wünsche, oder das “Richtigstellen” einer rauhen [sic] Wirklichkeit, gewiß eine der therapeutischen Funktionen von Literatur; doch wenn Phantasie sich als Realismus gibt, dann wird daraus per definitionem Kitsch. Die Überhöhung der Wirklichkeit, wenn sie als ästhetische Methode ernst genommen werden will, muß dem Leser als solche deutlich sein. Besonders in bezug auf die historische Vergangenheit sollten Wunschträume nicht so tun, als spiegelten sie, was stattgefunden hat. (Klüger 1994a, 13) In Andersch’s novels, Jew are treated exceptionally well by Germans, and as a matter of course no less, as if such instances were the norm rather than the exception. True, the fulfilment of secret wishes, the correction of a raw reality is certainly one of the therapeutic functions that literature has to offer; but when phantasy poses as reality, the result must by definition be kitsch. The surpassing of reality, if it is to be a serious aesthetic principle, must be visible to the reader as such. Especially when dealing with the historical past wishful dreams should not pass as historical reality.

Already in 2001, Stephan Braese pointed to Sebald’s and Klüger’s shared criticism of Andersch’s wishful thinking; he implied that Sebald’s criticism basically runs along the same lines as Klüger’s yet transcends it (Braese 2001, 237– 238): Sebald’s is an ad hominem attack; while Klüger’s aesthetic programme addresses the issue of history and literature in rather broad terms – she not only speaks of Jews and Germans in the plural, but also of their (historical) reality – Sebald focuses on the specific case of Andersch’s “Subjektgeschichte” (Braese 2001, 238; personal history). Klüger’s criticism is political: she acknowledges that fiction, like Sansibar and Efraim, cannot be reduced to reality – that it has its own autonomous rights – but she contextualises these historical novels as an exponent of the philosemitism of the early FRG and convincingly argues that the very genre suggests a closer proximity to historical realities than, say, fantastic literature, and therefore, historical novels should ‘behave’ accordingly, i. e. they should not be instrumentalised for wishful thinking or dubious historical revi-

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sionism. When this suggestion turns out to be a falsehood, she is wary of its implications and its political instrumentalisation: the demonisation of the perpetrators, who supposedly had nothing to do with the decent Germans who help(ed) their Jewish neighbours and fellow citizens. For her, such sensitivities do not negate the autonomy of fiction, but they do delineate them (Klüger 1994; esp. 15, 19 – 22). Thus, Sebald’s criticism of Andersch seems less baseless than Andersch’s defenders like to propose. Yet that does not mean that Sebald has only been criticised for creating a wrong or at least one-sided picture of Andersch: when criticising Sebald for ‘stealing’ Susi Bechhöfer’s life story for Austerlitz, which is discussed above, Modlinger’s criticism is not solely concerned with the inherently unethical character of such an undertaking, but it is also so fierce because Sebald’s literary practice clashes with his own rigid moral standards, which Modlinger derives from Sebald’s criticism of Andersch (Modlinger 2012, 229, 232). Against Grass And such criticisms are not limited to Sebald’s judgement of Andersch: Sven Meyer sees inconsistencies between Sebald’s criticism of Günter Grass’s Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972) and his own poetic practices. Sebald’s essay, Konstruktionen der Trauer: Günter Grass und Wolfgang Hildesheim was originally published in 1983 and has posthumously been included in Campo Santo (Sebald 2006, 101– 127). Mary Cosgrove reads Sebald’s essay as a competition between manifestations of melancholia: Grass’s codification of melancholia is deemed inferior to Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s – Sebald decisively takes the side of the Jewish outsider (2006b). Meyer’s summary of Sebald’s criticism of Grass’s literary project highlights the fact that although Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972) restores a place in history to the deported Jews of Gdansk/Danzig, its emotional and ethical power is due to Grass’s unacknowledged prime source: the account of Jewish historian Erwin Lichtenstein – whereas Grass’s own literary contribution amounts to a toilsome exercise out of moral duty. As such, for Sebald, the documentary impulse provided by the testifying victim has a stronger literary potential than the fiction created by the German author (S. Meyer 2017, 61).⁶⁵ Meyer argues that a similar statement could be made about Austerlitz: it, too, draws heavily from the fact that the events are not entirely made up but have an emotionalising core in Bechhöfer’s life story.

 At the time, Sebald could not fathom how big the contrast between Grass and Lichtenstein truly was: Grass’s revelations about his Waffen SS membership came more than twenty years after the publication of Sebald’s essay – and five years after the latter’s death.

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Moreover, Sebald steadily advocates a poetics of the documentary, refusing to have his prose designated as novels. Meyer, who calls Sebald’s treatment of Bechhöfer’s story as ‘careless’ (S. Meyer 2017, 61), only points to one problematic attitude in Sebald, one that may be easy to criticise, but without delving deeper into the issue himself.⁶⁶ One could add, to Meyer’s highlighting of Bechhöfer’s story, Sebald’s depiction of Theresienstadt through another Jewish historian/survivor, H. G. Adler (cf. Wohlfarth 2009, 240 n.350, 240 n.353). Against all (again): the air war The publication of Luftkrieg und Literatur caused controversies for several reasons, which, like the polemics surrounding Andersch, have been amply described and contextualised.⁶⁷ They may be summarised under two broad categories. The first critique against Sebald concerns itself with the factual correctness of Sebald’s thesis, namely that the Germans, burdened by a collective guilt as warmongers, looters and murderers, could not quite criticise the Allies for committing war crimes against them. Sebald argues, as Anne-Rose Meyer summarises, that the Germans did not only repress their guilt, but also their victimhood (A.-R. Meyer 2007, 28). As such, Sebald uses the discourse of collective trauma. The second critique is situated along ethical lines: why does Sebald hold the literary authors accountable? Should literary scholars formulate normative poetics of what to depict in literature – let alone how (Meyer 2007, 36)? This question is intensified by the fact that Sebald is not only a literary scholar, but also a literary author. Meyer points to Peter Schneider’s rhetorical question: “[w]arum hat Sebald selber die Form des Essays vorgezogen und diesen Essay erst so spät verfasst?” (qtd. in Meyer 2007, 36; why did Sebald himself prefer the genre of the essay, and why did he write it at such a late moment?). Here, as with Modlinger’s reproaches of Sebald, the issue at stake is hypocrisy: does Sebald live up to the standards he had set other authors? However, in defence of Sebald, Meyer points to three elements. Firstly, Sebald had already published an essay in 1982 on the literary depictions of the

 This may also be explained by the fact that Meyer’s article is published in a handbook and thus cannot strive to delve into the Bechhöfer story, which goes beyond the focus of his necessarily concise argumentation.  It is telling that the essay on Andersch has been added to the print version of Sebald’s Poetikvorlesung. Sebald legitimises it in the preface by linking his thesis on the relative absence of the air war from post-war literature to Andersch: in the latter, he sees the exemplification of the compromised German author who needs to re-legitimise himself and who, therefore, cannot be preoccupied with the ‘real relations’ surrounding them – i. e. the material and social consequences of the war and of Nazism (Sebald 2005b, 7).

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air war and its consequences, which did not receive much attention because of the changing political-cultural landscape, in which collective memory emphasised not German victimhood but German guilt (at least in West Germany). Sebald’s claims were (also) controversial because they did not align with the changed politics of memory of the 1990s: the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany (along with the increasing deaths of those who lived through the 1930s and 1940s) facilitated a discourse that made the Second World War seem more remote than ever before, while Sebald’s thesis blatantly questioned this discourse (Braese 2002, 6). Secondly, Sebald does address the air war, occasionally, in his prose, notably in Nach der Natur, Die Ausgewanderten, and Die Ringe des Saturn. In the preface to Luftkrieg und Literatur, Sebald points to the fact that this text is an edited version of his first Poetikvorlesung in Zurich, and that he has opted to not include his own literary accounts because he felt that this would be a faux pas (Sebald 2005a, 5 – 6). And Marcel Atze (who challenges the factual correctness of Sebald’s thesis) points to a preoccupation with the air war ever since Sebald’s student days in Freiburg (2014, 15 – 16). Thirdly, although it was a surprise for many to see that it was Sebald who addressed the air war – an issue until then mostly thematised by those whose ideologies are rather situated on the right⁶⁸ – Sebald manages to link these po-

 At stake is – once again – not necessarily whether one is allowed to compare, but rather, what is compared, how comparisons are made and how these issues relate to its (implied) content. Wolfgang Sofsky is rather suspicious of comparison: it may cause the creation of taboos, which does not advance historical knowledge. In the analysis of the events, he pleads for considering every act of violence (and every crime) for its own sake (Sofsky 2003, 124– 125). Yet it seems his own essay cannot help but compare: [d]er deutsche Vernichtungsfeldzug im Osten tilgte die Demarkationslinie zwischen Krieg und Verbrechen, aber der Bombenkrieg verstieß gleichfalls massiv gegen das Kriegsvölkerrecht. Lübeck oder Hamburg verkleinern die deutsche Schuld an Auschwitz nicht im Geringsten. Umgekehrt ist es unzulässig, die Planierung von Kassel, Dresden oder Pforzheim mit Treblinka zu rechtfertigen. Bombenkrieg und Völkermord waren weder kausal noch intentional miteinander verknüpft. (Sofsky 2003, 125) The German war of destruction in the East erased the demarcation line between war and crime, but the bombing campaign violated the laws of war, too. Lübeck or Hamburg do not reduce the German guilt of Auschwitz in the least. Reversely, the flattening of Kassel, Dresden or Pforzheim cannot be justified by referring to Treblinka. The bombing campaign and the genocide were not connected – neither causally nor intentionally. The latter point is also the tenor of Ralph Giordano’s essay in the same volume: as exposed to both the bombing campaign and the ‘racial’ persecution by the Nazis, he cannot help but think of both events together without reducing the ambivalence of either experience: “[i]ch erlaube […] keinerlei Zweifel an meiner Anteilnahme am Schicksal dieser Toten – sie ist selbstver-

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etics to Jean Améry’s poetics of the Shoah: a poetics of “faktenbetonte, dokumentarisch-realistische Darstellungsweise” (qtd. in A.-R. Meyer 2007, 33; factual, documentary-realist representation). Schley, too, establishes a link between the polemicist Sebald and the polemicist Améry: “[w]ie dieser will Sebald notfalls polemisch gegen das Schweigen und das Erinnerungsembargo der Deutschen antreten, wie dieser beruft er sich auf die aufklärende Autorität des Heimatentfremdeten” (2012, 15; like [Améry], Sebald wants to line up against the silence and the German memory embargo, polemically if need be, like him, he invokes the enlightening authority of someone who has been alienated from his home). After the war, Améry returned not to Austria but to Brussels, where he wrote for German newspapers and radio stations – as an outsider, that is, and between French and German culture. The parallels to Sebald’s self-imposed outsider status loom large – is he making more than poetic connections to Améry? Is he, once more, fashioning his public image in light of Améry’s? Is he, then, trying to be Germany’s moral conscience thirty years after Améry? Whatever the answer to these admittedly suggestive questions may be, Sebald emphasises the adequacy of the documentary mode and favours it over expressionist, abstract and melodramatic depictions (Braese 2002, 7).⁶⁹ Meyer describes Sebald’s poetical programme as one of “Kälte” (A.-R. Meyer 2007, 34) – an uneasy yet reflected attitude towards the aestheticisation (and therefore, the instrumentalisation) of suffering, which Theodor Adorno already warned against in Minima Moralia and Engagement (A.-R. Meyer 2007, 34). These correspondences suggest that Braese is right when he claims that Sebald’s polemics extenuate beyond literature and pose questions for commemorative cultures in general (Braese 2002, 11). What is at stake is, therefore, the contribution that literature can make towards society through its mediation of that society’s past. Sebald argues that sentimental depictions, like Gert Ledig’s Vergeltung, drove the German

ständlich. Ebenso selbstverständlich jedoch war und ist für mich dies: ‘Die da oben’ waren Teile meiner Befreier!” (Giordano 2003, 166; I will not allow that my pitying the dead is put into question – it goes without saying. But it also goes without saying that ‘those up there’ were my liberators!) He criticises Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand (2002) for suggesting that the bombing campaign was “eine kriegshistorische Einmaligkeit, die es nicht gegeben hat” (Giordano 2003, 167; a uniqueness in the history of warfare, which was not the case). Moreover, Friedrich completely ignores the Shoah qua Shoah and describes the air war with terms usually reserved for the description of the Shoah, equating the bomber crews verbatim with Einsatzgruppen and describing the air raid shelter as crematoria.  It is undoubtedly Sebald’s demand for Dokumentarismus, for forsaking fictionalisation, that causes Edward Wood to inaccurately describe him as a historian (2006, xiii).

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readership away.⁷⁰ The question is not only whether this is correct (or rather not betraying an elitist, modernist poetics of traumatisation), but also to what extent Sebald’s own prose really differs from such sentimental depictions. Brad Prager argues that there is a fundamental difference in Sebald’s poetics on the Shoah and those on the air war: the first can, to speak with Rothberg once more, be described as antirealist, the latter as realist (cf. Prager 2005, 79 – 80). This is a possible juxtaposition, but the differences between these poetics are perhaps not as substantial as Prager’s description suggests: there is no doubt that Sebald’s poetics of the documentary pertain to the same ‘secondary’ category that Köppen and Scherpe identify (cf. Chapter 3.2): the documentary effect created by anatomical reports (in Hubert Fichte’s Detlevs Imitationen “Grünspan” [1971]) or (pseudo‐)documents (in Alexander Kluge’s Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945 [1977]) documents the aftermath of the destruction, not the destruction itself. There is also a difference between Sebald’s own depiction of the air war and the poetics that he prescribes in Luftkrieg und Literatur: while in the latter, the realist imperative is strong indeed, Die Ringe des Saturn features a strategy which highlights the fact that we cannot imagine the horrors of the air war and which alienates the predominant documentary way of writing history: [m]an macht sich, sagte Hazel, kaum mehr einen zureichenden Begriff von den Ausmaßen dieses Unternehmens. Die achte Luftflotte allein hat im Verlauf der eintausendundneun Tage währenden Aktion eine Milliarde Gallonen Gasolin verbraucht, siebenhundertzweiunddreißig Tonnen Bomben abgeworfen, nahezu neuntausend Flugzeuge und fünfzigtausend Mann verloren. (RSd, 52)⁷¹

 The first pages of Vergeltung already indicate the centrality of the “Pathos des Primären” (cf. supra), albeit a pathos interlaced with laconic descriptions: “was heute geschehen würde, stand noch vor. Sogar die Verfaulten in den Soldatengräbern wußten es nicht. Und die hätten es wissen müssen. Auf ihren Kreuzen stand: Ihr seid nicht umsonst gefallen. Vielleicht wurden sie heute verbrannt” (Ledig 2004, 12; and today’s events were still to come. Even the rotten corpses in the soldiers’ graves didn’t know what was going to happen, and they should have. On their crosses it said: you did not fall in vain. Perhaps they were cremated today: Ledig 2003, 2). Sebald’s argument is subdued: he maintains that it is not easy to review the novel on its aesthetic merits: “[m]anches in ihm ist aufgefaßt mit erstaunlicher Präzision, manches wirkt unbeholfen und überdreht” (Sebald 2005b, 101). And while he points to other elements – Ledig being a “maverick” (Sebald 2005b, 101) – that have caused his having been forgotten (that is, until the publication of Luftkrieg und Literatur: Vergeltung was reprinted in the same year) he leaves some room for a lack of canonisation based on aesthetic shortcomings: these are, in his view, merely not the primary reason – but one reason nonetheless.  Die Ringe des Saturn cannot be entirely uncoupled from Sebald’s later essay though: Hazel articulates Sebald’s central thesis in Luftkrieg und Literatur: [i]ch habe sogar, als ich Anfang der fünfziger Jahre mit den Besatzungstruppen in Lüneburg gewesen bin, einigermaßen Deutsch gelernt, um, wie ich mir dachte, die von den Deutschen

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People nowadays hardly have an idea of the scale of the operation, said Hazel. In the course of one thousand and nine days, the eight airfleet alone used a billion gallons of fuel, dropped seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons of bombs, and lost almost nine thousand aircraft and fifty thousand men. (RSe, 38)

The statistical discourse is not thrown overboard but instead turned against itself by refraining from using numbers, slowing a reading (for facts) down, increasing the sense of ‘secondariness’. This is surely opposed to Ledig’s take on the air war: he tries to ‘show’ us the air war as it happens, not merely the aftermath. That Sebald disavows Ledig is, therefore, not a surprise, but Sebald’s prose is certainly as pathos-driven as that of the more ‘traditional’, less avant-garde authors whom he criticises. Its pathos is merely differently constructed. As Geoffrey Hartman notes, [ä]ltere Formen der Fiktion scheinen widerständiger zu sein als es avantgardistische Theoretiker und Künstler zugestehen wollen. Über lange Zeiträume hinweg haben die Künste ein Arsenal von Formen, Gattungen, Charakteren, Handlungsschemata, Motiven, Topoi und Symbolen angelegt, das sich sowohl aus der Populär- als auch aus der Hochkultur speist. Schriftsteller wie Sebald […] arbeiten mit keinen sonderlich radikalen oder experimentellen Repräsentationstechniken. Es gibt nach wie vor eine dominante, wenn auch komplexe Form der literarischen Überlieferung, die die vorhandenen Gedächtnisspeicher nutzt und erweitert. (2012, 48) older fictional programmes may be more resistant that avant-gardist theoreticians and artists would like to admit. Over longer periods of time the arts have established an arsenal of aesthetics, genres, figures, plot structures, motives, tropes and symbols – an arsenal which stems both from high- and low-brow art. Authors like Sebald […] do not work with radically new or experimental techniques of representation. There is still a dominant, albeit complex form of literary tradition, which uses and enlarges the available containers of memory.

selber über die Luftangriffe und über ihr Leben in den vernichteten Städten geschriebenen Berichte lesen zu können. Zu meinem Erstaunen freilich mußte ich bald feststellen, daß die Suche nach solchen Berichten stets ergebnislos blieb. Niemand scheint damals etwas aufgeschrieben oder erinnert zu haben. Und auch wenn man die Leute persönlich befragte, war es, als sei in ihren Köpfen alles ausradiert worden. (RSd, 53 – 54) In the early Fifties, when I was in Lüneburg with the army of occupation, I even learnt German, after a fashion, so that I could read myself what the Germans themselves had said about the bombings and their lives in the ruined cities. To my astonishment, however, I soon found the search for such accounts invariably proved fruitless. No one at the time seemed to have written about their experiences or afterwards recorded their memories. Even if you asked people directly, it was as if everything had been erased from their minds. (RSe, 39).

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“[W]ie vom Geisterhand gereicht” (Schley 2012, 8): against Becker? In an essay on Jurek Becker, which was declined in 1992 and which was published only posthumously in 2010, Sebald gives voice to his personal reading experience of Jurek Becker’s Jakob der Lügner (1969), which he admittedly never finished, and utterly attacks Becker on aesthetic reasons. Sebald finds issue with Becker’s “falschem Realismus” (2010, 226; false realism) but particularly attacks “die faktische […] sowohl als emotionale Absenz des Autors” (227; the author’s factual […] as well as the emotional absence). This is out of line with Sebald’s poetics of trauma: Becker, a child survivor, does not let his personal suffering emerge in the literary text, not even in the first-person narrator, who could be, in Sebald’s fashion, an autobiographical instance within the fictional storyworld – or at least present itself as such: “das erzählende Ich bleibt eine blasse Figur, die kaum nur den fiktiven Status der übrigen fiktiven Gestalten erreicht und der man die ihr eingangs als Charakteristikum und Legitimation zugeschriebene, später aber nicht weiter reflektierte Erfahrung extremen Leids nicht abnimmt” (228; the narrating I remains a shimmer, which only barely achieves the fictional status of the other fictional characters and whom one does not accord the experience of extreme suffering, which nonetheless initially characterises and legitimises the narrative I, but which later is no longer reflected). As such, Sebald unfavourably compares Becker to Primo Levi and Jean Améry: “[d]ie Schreibhaltung Beckers scheint mir der Levis diametral entgegengesetzt. Becker bezieht nirgend in seinen Büchern eine exponierte Position. Die Radikalität der subjektiven Reaktion, die Kompromißlosigkeit Levis oder Amérys sind ihm offenbar fremd” (230; to me, Becker’s positioning as an author seems radically opposed to Levi’s. Becker never takes up a position where he is vulnerable to attacks. He does not voice a radically subjective reaction like Levi or Améry, he does not share their refusal of compromises). The explicit comparison to Levi and Améry is, of course, complemented with an implicit comparison to Sebald, who marks this essay as highly subjective: he repeatedly uses the firstperson singular pronoun; any reader of Sebald’s prose notices the mediation of reality through the many narrative instances. And the comparison delegitimises Becker’s voice as a victim: [i]ch glaube, […] daß die Bücher Beckers auch von einem von der Verfolgung nicht Betroffenen hätten geschrieben werden können. Sie erwecken geradezu den Eindruck von Erfahrungslosigkeit, insbesondere wenn sie vergleicht mit dem im vergangenen Jahr im Löcker Verlag erschienen Bild- und Dokumentationsband über das Getto von Łodź. (232) I believe […] that Becker’s books could also have been written by someone who had not been persecuted. They suggest a lack of experience, particularly when one compares

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them to the documentation about the Lodz Ghetto, which has been published last year by Löcker Verlag.

Sebald’s essay was rejected by the editor, Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, and Uwe Schütte points out that there are various possible interpretations of as to why Sebald did not attempt to publish the essay elsewhere: [v]ielleicht hat es ihm genügt, daß er sein “Vorurteil” gegen Becker im Prozeß der Niederschrift geklärt, d. h. bestätigt gefunden hatte. Oder er wollte nicht den Verdacht aufkommen lassen, daß er diesen um jeden Preis angreifen wolle. Ob man aus dieser Zurückhaltung auf eine nachträgliche Einsicht in ein Fehlurteil schließen kann, ist jedoch fraglich. Mir erscheint es vielmehr denkbar, daß ihn die Beschäftigung mit Becker dazu anregte, ein aus seiner Sicht sinnvolleres und relevanteres Ziel ins Revier zu nehmen, nämlich Andersch. (Schütte 2010, 232– 233) Perhaps it was enough for him render his “prejudice” against Becker explicit by writing it down, and thus to see it confirmed. Or he did not want to feed the suspicion that he wanted to attack Becker at any cost. It is questionable whether this restraint may be understood as a belated realisation that he had been mistaken. I would rather suggest that his reckoning with Becker led him to aim his devices at another, presumably more relevant target, namely Andersch.

Another possibility (still in line with the ‘writing for self-clarification’ or ‘the decision to attack a perceived hypocrite instead’ arguments) could be, despite the harshness of Sebald’s judgement, a sense of tact vis-à-vis the victim Becker. But as Schley reminds us, this does not make the impetus for writing – a selfprofiling as author – any less real: “[d]ass der aggressive Angriff gegen den Feldkonkurrenten Becker nicht öffentlich wurde, verwässert nicht den strategischen Impetus” (2012, 100; the strategic impulse of Sebald’s aggressive attack against his literary competitor Becker is not minimized by its not being published). In contrast to Schütte, however, Schley offers no answer as to why Sebald did not attempt to publish the essay, and instead deflects to Schütte’s explanation that Sebald used this and his other polemical essays in order to steer clear “von den Fesseln der Vereinnahmung durch die Shoah-Rezeption” (Schley 2012, 101; from the chains of appropriation by the Shoah reception). In sum, the pathos of anti-pathos in Sebald’s literary oeuvre is constituted mainly of the exiled survivors who maintain a critical distance with the narrator(s), while the latter’s ethical stance constitutes its unmistakable own pathos, which does not amount, of course, to a pathos of anti-pathos. Neither does the confrontation of the pathos of anti-pathos and the ethical pathos with Sebald’s polemical pathos as an academic cause us to resort to a pathos of anti-pathos – even if we try to avoid the pathos of the ‘real’ by arguing strongly for the

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reading of Sebald’s literary prose as works of fiction and thus for approaching his project more critically than earlier, quasi-hagiographic readings. After all, the pathos of anti-pathos is the manifestation, among other things, of a distrust towards ‘big emotions’ – reading Sebald’s texts as fiction and comparing his literary practices with his literary criticism (‘theory’) does not mean reading Sebald in a spirit of distrust but merely of reading his pathos-constructions in a spirit of nuance and differentiation. A similar practice will be suggested regarding documentary literature, the pathos-constructions it contains, and similar obfuscations of fact, fictivity and fictionality in the following chapter.

4 Dieter Schlesak: The pathos of anti-pathos and the pathos of the ‘real’ in testimony and in the documentary tradition While the prosecution of the Shoah had taken a second start before the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt (1963 – 1965), this trial may have had a more profound impact on the overall confrontation with that recent past. It was “the largest, most public, and most important Nazi trial to take place in West German courts after 1945” and probably “the most dramatic and politically resonant of the more than 6,000 such trials that took place in between 1945 and 1980” (Pendas 2006, 1). From its very beginning, the Auschwitz trial was met with considerable interest – by journalists (whose work found, certainly at the beginning of the trial, a broad readership) and by literary authors alike.¹ As such, it stands in stark contrast to many of the trials mentioned before, which found only modest resonation in contemporary news coverage and artistic creation (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 87).² Fifty years after its inception, Ronen Steinke describes it as a “Mammutprozess” and the metaphor refers doubtlessly to the trial’s scale and its lasting importance – writing against the background of the NSU trial, which had started a few months before (Steinke 2013; mammoth trial). The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial has indeed proven to be “a cultural watershed. It was both a focal point and a wellspring for the politics of memory in the Federal Republic” (Pendas 2006, 251). This cannot be merely explained by an increased contemporary media coverage. Astonishingly, German courts have no obligation to keep a transcript of trial proceedings, yet, given the scope and length of the Auschwitz trial, many of the interrogations and pleas were recorded on audiotape to support the court’s memory. Somehow, these recordings were not destroyed and were rediscovered decades later. After having been transcribed, these recordings were published by the Fritz Bauer Institute in 2004 (cf. Witt-

 An overview of the literary reactions to the trial is offered by Stephan Braese, who discusses Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Martin Walser, Peter Weiss, Horst Krüger, Grete Weil and Alfred Andersch (Braese 2001). Others have relativised the idea that the Frankfurt trial is a watershed, in the sense that the German media had already extensively covered the Eichmann trial two years prior (Wilke et al. 1995, 53 – 57, 137). But since Capesius is not preoccupied with the journalistic accounts of the trial and instead uses literary intertexts and eyewitness accounts, we shall not delve into this dimension.  Not all the preceding trials went without extensive media coverage: the Ulm trial against the Einsatzgruppen members caused several journalists to ponder on the very lack of persecution of Nazi crimes (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 105 – 106). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110758580-008

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mann 2005, 4). Two years later, Dieter Schlesak’s documentary novel would rely substantially on these transcriptions. But the fact that Capesius, der Auschwitzapotheker thematises precisely this trial is, of course, not in the least because Victor Capesius only faced trial there and then. This man, born in southern Transylvania in 1907 would serve as an ethnic German in the SS and be stationed in Auschwitz, where he oversaw the apothecary from 1943 onwards. During the so-called Ungarn-Aktion, which lasted from May until July 1944, he would participate in the infamous selections and send erstwhile customers to the gas chambers. With the gold he stole from the camp (gold that was won by smelting the victims’ gold teeth into bars), he would later take part in the FRG’s Wirtschaftswunder by founding an apothecary and beauty parlour. Today, he is not a household name, unlike his colleague in Birkenau, Josef Mengele, but Capesius did draw considerable attention during the trial. Arendt only described Capesius off-topic but nonetheless as “der makaberste von allen [Angeklagten]” (1989, 132; the most macabre of all the accused); Martin Walser laconically notes his “Anfälligkeit gegenüber gewissen Wertsachen” (1968, 13; predisposition towards certain objects of value), which was also – poignantly – addressed in Weiss’s Die Ermittlung. ³ Dieter Schlesak knew this man personally: he was a family friend. Capesius’s notes in preparation for his trial are included in the novel and are arranged in such a way as to demonstrate his attempts at withholding the truth about his personal involvement in the gassing. The interviews with the perpetrators indicate a complete lack of remorse, and Schlesak even suggests that Capesius never realised the enormity of his guilt. But the novel is equally marked by eyewitness accounts – before the court, and as memoirs and autobiographies. How does this bear on pathos and anti-pathos? Aleida Assmann reminds us that the notion of testimony is in the first instance a legal notion and that the bearing of testimony in court is an asymmetric form of communication: “[a]uch dort, wo das Opfer in eigener Sache spricht, kann es die Form der Informationsübermittlung nicht selbst bestimmen […]. Denn im Zentrum steht immer das gerichtliche Verfahren selbst, nicht das Individuum” (Assmann 2012b, 23; even when the victim is speaking about her own affairs, she cannot determine the way in which she conveys information […].

 Cohen discusses the singling out of Capesius in Die Ermittlung (Cohen 1993, 90). In his analysis of Die Ermittlung, Christopher Bigsby somewhat singles out Capesius as well, next to the adjunct-commander Robert Mulka, a few other doctors and the ‘intellectual’ Perry Broad (Bigsby 2006, 160).

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Since the legal procedure takes predominance over the individual).⁴ Moreover, the witness in court must be neutral, reliable, sincere and must have had a direct perception of the events at stake. One does not need an extraordinary amount of imagination to see how this can be problematic in the case of traumatised victims. Apart from a nigh impossible neutrality, the asymmetry in the proceedings means that they must adhere to standards they cannot define. The emotionally intense experience of testifying to, and thus to a certain degree, reliving Auschwitz necessitated an affective self-control in order to be perceived by the court as trustworthy – and this self-control was rendered even more difficult by the defendants, who regularly tried to discredit these witnesses. If this can be described as a tactical manoeuvre, the witnesses’ counter-tactic was precisely this coolness. This coolness before the court is only briefly and occasionally mentioned in Capesius, which relies on other strategies to create both pathos and anti-pathos. These include intertextual references not only to so-called ‘cold texts’ but also to memoirs. Yet a different pathos lies hidden between the lines, and it is a pathos of reception not entirely unlike Sebald’s. But whereas Sebald tried to ‘authenticate’ his prose by refusing to label it as fiction, Schlesak’s documentary novel not only embraces an avowedly fictional yet encyclopaedic character, Adam, but he also takes poetic liberties with the fictional intertexts. To be sure, his taking similar liberties with the ostensibly nonfictional part of the novel may create unease and is a risky strategy. How we deal with these interferences depends, arguably, on our familiarity with the poetics of documentary literature since the 1960s and on our willingness to read Capesius not as a necessarily immoral project but as a project that highlights the historical instability of the document and thus must be contradictory in itself – just as much as one could read Sebald’s prose as an enterprise that, despite (or perhaps because of) its self-imposed high ethical ideal, must be confronted with the moral limits of representation.

 Assmann further discusses the importance of testimony for religious discourse, but this conception is only marginally interesting for this chapter or, indeed, for this thesis. While the autobiographical account of Mariana Adam and Ella Salomon is heavily framed in a Christian proselytising setting, as is obvious from the subtitle, from the postscript – which, truly stunningly, reduces antisemitism to a hatred of God – and from the publishing house (Edition Anker im Christlichen Verlagshaus), this dimension is completely ignored in Capesius. But it does remember one – wryly – of Manfred Schneider’s wide span between autobiography, proselytising practices and conversion from Judaism to Christianity.

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4.1 The Shoah on trial in Germany: a very brief overview It would be an exaggeration (and factually wrong) to claim that the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt was a historical prime: it does not constitute the first trial in the Federal Republic held against erstwhile SS staff stationed in concentration and extermination camps. Indeed, Frankfurt seems to have been a hotbed for trials against former SS personnel with a track record in extermination camps: the first trial was held in 1950 against Hubert Gomerski and Johann Klier, who had been stationed in Sobibor; 1951 saw the trial against Josef Hirtreiter, who committed his crimes in Treblinka.⁵ Yet very few perpetrators in Auschwitz and Birkenau had been brought to (German) trial.⁶ The trial against Wilhelm Reischenbeck, an erstwhile SS officer in Auschwitz, (LG Munich, 1958) was not about his crimes there but rather about murders committed during the forced ‘evacuation’ marches in January 1945. Sometimes the factor of ‘bad luck’ was added to a general reluctance to prosecute: the trial against Carl Clauberg failed to materialise due to the latter’s sudden demise. Gerhard Peters, from DEGESCH, faced trial (LG Frankfurt, 1955) because his company delivered the Zyklon B pellets to the camp administration (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 68 – 77). This list proves how prevalent the non-prosecution of war criminals and mass murderers was. To be fair, the regulations imposed by the occupying Allied forces proved to be formidable challenges in the immediate post-war period.⁷ But after the de facto abolition of such regulations (through the foundation of the two Germanys in 1949) the will to intensify the prosecution was not too strong: political,⁸ social⁹ and practical¹⁰ circumstances prevented a systematic

 As is well known, however, Fritz Bauer did face enormous internal resistance against the prosecution of Nazi crimes. In recent years, this problem has seen a resurgence of interest: it is thematised by Alexander Kluge in “Wer ein Wort des Trostes spricht, ist ein Verräter” (2013; Bauer had already featured in Kluge’s 1966 Abschied von gestern) and in the films Im Labyrinth des Schweigens (2014, dir. Giulio Ricciarelli) and Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer (2015, dir. Lars Kraume).  Several of the camps’ commanders had been, in accordance with the Declaration of Moscow (30 October 1943), extradited to the Polish government. Rudolf Höss, Arthur Liebehenschel and Hans Aumeier were, like various other officers, NCOs and soldiers from the enlisted ranks, sentenced to death and executed there. But overall, only a minute fraction of all those who had at some point been stationed in Auschwitz and Birkenau were ever put on trial.  The legal situation varied across different occupying zones at different moments. For a detailed overview of the sheer legal competences and possibilities of prosecuting perpetrators, cf. Jasch and Kaiser (2017, esp. 35 – 41).  E. g. the fact that many crime scenes were situated in countries that in the 1960s were lying behind the Iron Curtain.

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prosecution of the mass murderers. Instead, those prosecutors willing to prosecute had to be content with cases against suspects living in their area of jurisdiction or against suspects of crimes committed in that area (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 63). Moreover, this (already lukewarm) prosecution of genocide and war crimes focused on ex-members of the SS and the Gestapo, collaborating Kapos and socalled ‘Intensivtäter’ (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 33 – 34).¹¹ The exceptions, e. g. the trials against members of the Einsatzgruppen, are a case in point: in the 1949 trial against Martin Weiß and August Hering, the judges subscribed to a narrative that pathologised the mass murderers and sentenced them to life sentences that they did not serve completely due to early releases and the granting of amnesty (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 65 – 67). Likewise, in the 1958 trial held in Ulm against ten members of Einsatzgruppe A, the judgement mentioned the theft of the victims’ valuables and the implied cold-blooded perpetration of the murders, with the murderers ordering their victims to hurry up so their workday would be over sooner (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 97). It must be said that such findings did not automatically lead to severe punishments, as such perpetrators were often considered accomplices to the ‘true’ perpetrators, i. e. Adolf Hitler and the leaders of the State and Party organs (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 97– 99). The same understanding ruled the judgements in the trials against extermination camp staff members.¹²

 E. g. the contemporary challenges of housing and integrating the war refugees from erstwhile German lands and the fact that many perpetrators had assumed aliases to avoid prosecution.  E. g. the lack of a centralised database or a centralised investigative body (which would only be established in 1958 as the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen).  The term is quite vague, and it is especially unclear if the adjective ‘intensiv’ refers to the quantity or quality of crimes committed. The fact that bureaucrats, doctors, industrialists and Wehrmacht soldiers were by and large not prosecuted, and that the absolute majority of defendants had been ‘active’ in concentration and extermination camps, suggests that ‘intensiv’ was (tacitly) understood as a particular kind of behaviour – one that was particularly deemed punishable.  Chelmno: 1962, LG Bonn; Belzec: 1963 – 1965, LG Munich; Sobibor: 1965 – 1966, LG Hagen; Treblinka: 1964– 1965 LG Düsseldorf and 1970 (against Franz Stangl, its second commander); cf. Jasch and Kaiser (2017, 124– 135).

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4.2 Cynicism, ideology and the guilt question: perspectivation and distance The demonisation of Nazism and of the perpetrator served political and social functions in the 1940s and 1950s. By the time of the Frankfurt trial, however, this was no longer feasible: those who had experienced the war as a child had reached adulthood – and even those born afterwards were reaching it – and they realised that the perpetrators were everywhere. This caused a new political and ideological impetus: how to make sense of the perpetrator? How to make sense of the Shoah? Martin Walser, who attended several trial sessions, responded to the trial in the form of a political essay titled Unser Auschwitz (1965). The polemics surrounding his infamous speech in the Paulskirche in 1998 and his novel Tod eines Kritikers (2002, no translation to English) raised the question as to what extent Walser is an antisemite – latent or otherwise. These polemics also have caused Unser Auschwitz to have become increasingly forgotten.¹³ Nonetheless, Unser Auschwitz seems quite representative of the contemporary intellectuals’ critical engagement with Auschwitz and with the trial as a means of confronting the genocidal past, which includes a politicised interpretation of the ‘causes of Auschwitz’. Already in the very first two sentences, Walser points not only to the broader implications of the trial for German society (which he argues could only be brought to confront the crimes of the Nazis by the trial) but also for the historiography of the Shoah (Walser 1968, 7). To be sure, the latter element is of secondary concern for Walser, and the rest of the essay is concerned not with the historical facts – the focus on which in the newspapers, he argues, even renders the ‘true’ meaning of Auschwitz invisible, as it serves a nigh-voyeuristic fascination for the atrocious (8). Yet by serving this fascination, the newspapers distance the readers from both the historical actors (who are literally demonised by the press) and, thereby, the historical event (8). And al-

 The same may be true for Walser’s early plays, Eiche und Angora and Der schwarze Schwan. These were originally performed in 1962 resp. 1964 and their reception was influenced by the Auschwitz trial (M. N. Lorenz 2015, 177). Suffice it to say that Walser’s prose is shot through with perpetrator-victim inversions and a relativisation of perpetratorship: the intellectually and academically socialised Nazis are depicted as having seduced the less-educated Germans, who in turn serve as scapegoats: they get punished after the war, while the doctors and academics manage to flee and live a life without sorrow (M. N. Lorenz 2015, 178 – 182). Unser Auschwitz, too, is not without its problematic implications: the implied ‘we’ may be read as a respectful distancing from the victims, but it also exculpates the German population in the sense that it implicitly reiterates the logic of wir haben es nicht gewusst (see M. N. Lorenz 2005, 405 – 414).

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though Walser points towards the problematic framing of Auschwitz as Dantesque,¹⁴ the cause and effect in his argument is not entirely clear: does the demonisation of the perpetrators lead to a distancing of Auschwitz, or does the description of a Dantesque Auschwitz allow us to distance ourselves from the perpetrators? Walser seems to point to a dialectical process: the atrocious details of Auschwitz cause the German readers (and journalists) to distance themselves from its reality, which enables demonisation. This, in turn, exculpates the reader as well: she does not need to ask for the historical and political factors that enabled Auschwitz. As a consequence, Auschwitz retains only a sense of reality for the former inmates, and the only moment when Auschwitz may regain some of its reality for the others – Walser does not specify whether he refers to the other trial participants or to a more general audience – is when the eyewitnesses have difficulties in testifying or when facing the accused (9). His formulation of memory as an “Abbild unserer damaligen Rolle” (10; image of our erstwhile role) – a highly mimetic notion – informing one’s behaviour in the present, serves as an argument for not interpreting the laughter of the accused (which occurred frequently) as cynicism: they, too, remember their personal experiences of Auschwitz – which, apparently, was not the worst place to be for SS members during a brutalised war. To summarise, while the traumatic memory causes the eyewitness to fall silent during their discourses, or to let a quasi-stream of consciousness take over their discourse, the untraumatised perpetrator smiles at the memory of ‘the good old days’ (10 – 11).¹⁵ The matter of cynicism seems a matter of perspective. Just as  This label was not exactly innovative: Allied newspapers had used the same rhetoric when reporting on the newly liberated concentration camps in 1945. The image seems even older: Friedrich Karl Kaul and Hermann Langbein quote, independently, from Johann Kremer’s diary (entry for 2 September 1942), where the ‘Sonderaktion’ is described as making Dante’s Inferno look like a comedy (Kaul 1968, 94; Langbein 1995, 509). Kremer arrived in August 1942 in Auschwitz as a Nazi doctor and was sentenced to death in the Kraków Auschwitz trial, but that sentence was commuted to life in prison. Released in 1958, he was tried in Germany and sentenced to 10 more years in prison (LG Munich 1960). The court deemed this punishment as already served in Poland (Klee 2013, 236). Kremer testified in Frankfurt, but neither the recording of his testimony nor its protocol is available for consultation. To be sure, Walser’s critique is aimed at contemporary newspapers and not, as Robert Cohen points out, against Die Ermittlung, although Weiss famously used Dante’s Divina Commedia as a structural influence (Cohen 1993, 86).  Indeed, Kurt Franz, nostalgically entitled his photo album depicting his time as camp commander in Treblinka “Schöne Zeiten”, cf. Klee, Dreßen, and Rieß (1988, 7, 206). In Capesius, it is not the titular character who is depicted as showing some nostalgia for his Auschwitz days but another perpetrator, Roland Albert. Albert refers to his time in Auschwitz as horrible yet associates it with a time for leisure, for reading Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry (C, 31– 35). Moreover, Schlesak quotes a taped conversation with him, in which Albert simultaneously professes aston-

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much as the presence of a Red Cross truck upon the arrival of the victims about to be gassed might be considered a cynical perversion of the symbol of healing, it need not be: it points to the medicalisation of genocide in Nazi Germany as much as it can be explained as a camouflaging strategy aimed at avoiding any arousal or uprising of the victims, which would slow down the killing machine.¹⁶ ishment at the fact that the Sonderkommando lied to the to-be-gassed victims – an attitude towards those prisoners not unlike Höss’s as manifested in the latter’s memoirs (Höss 1987, 130 – 131, 170) – and demonstrates a considerable amount of self-pity (C, 69). This is topped off with quotations of Albert claiming that he did not want the Jews to be destroyed, that he had Jewish friends, that there never had been antisemitism and intolerance in Transylvania (a blatant lie), that he tried to stay out of the destruction process but that the circumstances in Auschwitz showed that he was more robust than the others (C, 72– 73). Here, the Nazi ideal of Härte leaves its traces, and Albert later admits to not feeling at all guilty for Auschwitz (C, 182– 183). Ruth Klüger does justice to Lanzmann’s Shoah when she says that this film “brings home graphically the difference between guilt and guilt feelings. The perpetrators have innocent minds and are fond of fresh mountain air; the victims speak of their poisonous hearts” (Klüger 1986). The same could be said of Capesius. And just as many of the perpetrators interviewed for Shoah never faced trial, Paul Milata mentions that the Staatsanwaltschaft Wien started an investigation into Albert’s crimes but does not offer any details nor any references (Milata 2007, 271).  Likewise, how can we interpret Filip Müller’s depiction of a captain of the Hlinka Guard, the Slovak collaborative fascist militia? Müller tells us how this captain had smiled, waved the deportees goodbye in Slovakia and wished them good travels (1979, 44– 45). But Müller does not offer any interpretation of this behaviour – does he believe that the captain sincerely wished them all the best and did not know (or at least suspect) what was going to happen to the deportees? Was this a way for smoothening the deportation, just as the Red Cross was meant to smooth the destruction process at the other end of the railway line? Müller’s account itself is free of cynical or sarcastic comments on this matter, but the scene is recounted as a memory while sitting inside a truck marked by the Red Cross in Auschwitz. (It is, thus, the recollection of a recollection.) This proximity makes the question as to the Hlinka Guard captain’s cynicism or camouflage all the more pressing. Müller even explicitly juxtaposes cynicism to camouflage; as to the murdering of the Jews in the “family camp”, he notes that “[d]er Zynismus der Henker war heute frei von allen Hemmungen. Sie verzichteten auf jegliche Täuschungs- und Tarnungsmanöver” (F. Müller 1979, 172; [t]his time the cynicism of the executioners knew no bounds. Today they gave up any tricks of deception and disguise: F. Müller 1999, 109). If Müller’s account challenges our conceptualisation of cynicism through its content, then its own form does so, too. Müller notes that “[d]iejenigen, die [Medikamenten] mitgebracht hatten, brauchten sie nicht mehr, weil das Zyklon-B-Gas sie von allen Krankheiten und Gebrechen befreit hatte” (F. Müller 1979, 101; [t]he people who had brought [drugs and medicines] here no longer needed them, because Zyclon B gas had cured all their pains and diseases: F. Müller 1999, 64). How are we to read this? It is easy to consider Müller’s choice of the verb ‘liberate’ as cynical – and the hindsight of Lifton’s analysis (which was published a few years after Müller’s memoir) may cause us to perceive of an unintended irony: Müller anticipates Lifton’s thinking together of medicine and genocide. But we can also read Müller’s sentence as uncynical if we think of Miklós Nyiszli – himself a doctor in the Sonderkommando – and his honest (but aporetic) question:

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In this sense, it would be an extension of the “verbal camouflage” used in the Nazi bureaucratic jargon of genocide (DEJ II, 962). In other words, what seems cynical for the victims and for those who sympathise with them, need not seem cynical for the perpetrators. Indeed, the ascription of cynicism is not always clear for those who experienced events that could be considered cynical. In his memoirs Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death, Otto Dov Kulka, an Israeli historian and child survivor of Theresienstadt and Birkenau and, coincidently, an eyewitness in Frankfurt reflects on his experiences, on his attempts at repressing and remembering and on the separation of his academic and his private perspectives. A key scene deals with the choir established in the children’s block. This may need some explanation since it was utterly exceptional: twice in the history of Birkenau, in September and December 1943, a transport arrived from Theresienstadt – which was not subject to the infamous ‘selection’ upon arrival: all deportees, regardless of sex, age or corporeal state, were admitted to the camp. This was only a respite: the conditions in the so-called Familienlager were no less murderous than those in the other sections of Birkenau. Moreover, all were destined to be gassed six months after arrival: the first transport was murdered on 8 and 9 March 1944, the second between 10 and 12 July 1944. The family camp was, therefore, one of the very few places in Birkenau where children lived – for a limited time.¹⁷ What Kulka struggles with is the musical programme taught to the children: a choir conductor, Imre,¹⁸ taught the children to play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, to which Schiller’s Ode To Joy (1785) was sung. Indeed, the utterly aporetic ambivalence of Kulka’s reaction to this fact is grounded in (his recollection of) a grown-up German Jew explaining the absurdity of it, the terrible wonder of it, that a song of praise to joy and the brotherhood of man […] was being played opposite the crematoria of Auschwitz, a few hundred metres from the place of execution, where the greatest conflagration ever experienced by that same mankind that was being sung about was going on at the very moment we were talking and in all the months we were there. […] Naturally, the question I ask myself, and that I go on asking myself to this day, is what drove that Imre – not to organize the children’s choir, because after all one could say that in the spirit of that project of the educational centre it was necessary somehow to preserve sanity, somehow to keep occupied – but what he believed.

“[w]ho then – of our parents, brothers, children – was more fortunate, he who went to the left or he who went to the right?” (Nyiszli 1993, 57).  For a more elaborate history of the Familienlager, cf. Keren 1994.  A nickname for Emmerich Acs, who was murdered in the first liquidation of the family camp (Kulka 2014, 124n.4).

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What was his intention in choosing to perform that particular text, a text that is considered a universal manifesto of everyone who believes in human dignity, in humanistic values, in the future – facing those crematoria, in the place where the future was perhaps the only definite thing that did not exist? Was it a kind of protest demonstration, absurd perhaps, perhaps without any purpose, but an attempt not to forsake and not to lose, not the belief in, but the devotion to those values which ultimately only the flames could put an end to – only that fire, and not all that preceded it raging around us; that is, as long as man breathes, he breathes freedom, something like that? That is one possibility, a very fine one, but there is the second possibility, which is far more likely, or may sometimes be called for. I will not say when I prefer the first and when I am inclined to the other. I refer to the possibility that this was an act of extreme sarcasm, to the outermost possible limit, of selfamusement, of a person in control of I beings and implanting in them I values, sublime and wonderful values, all the while knowing there is no point or purpose and no meaning to those values. In other words, that this was a kind of almost demonic self-amusement of playing melodies to accompany those flames that burned quietly day and night and those processions being swallowed into the insatiable crematoria. The second notion seems more logical on the face of it. The first notion is very tempting to believe in. (Kulka 2014, 26 – 27)

This (rather long) excerpt demonstrates Kulka’s back-and-forth, his remaining undecided on the issue.¹⁹ This is, of course, clear in the many questions asked, which surely are not rhetorical questions, in reinforcing and affirming relative clauses (‘a very fine one’), which seem to serve as self-convicting more than convicting the reader, in the contrast between such careful questions and very strong adjectives (‘demonic’). In the end, the matter seems split between a conviction and a wish. But interestingly, the conclusion of the episode – or rather, of Kulka’s reminiscences – arguably leaves his phrasing open to similar scrutiny: [t]he subject remains an open one for me, like Imre’s big arms that opened to both sides and hung there. Whoever chooses the left or the right, or when I choose the left or the right, that is in fact the whole unfolding of my existence or of my confrontation both with the past and with the present form then until today. (Kulka 2014, 29)

 Other authors did not battle as frantically with it: Ladislaus Szücs repeatedly refers to music in the concentration camp as life-affirming and important for his (mental) survival (Szücs 1995, 45, 89, 97). While we cannot entirely leave the realm of speculation, potential reasons for this different assessment are the difference in age (Szücs was an adult, socialised long before the Shoah), the different setting (Szücs arrived in Birkenau and witnessed horrendous scenes, cf. infra, but spent most of his time in Melk, a satellite camp of Mauthausen), the different ‘role’ or ‘responsibility’ (Szücs served – illegally – as doctor in the barracks) and the specificity of Ode to Joy in Kulka’s account versus the more general trope of classical music in Szücs’s. But the nigh unbelievable irony in Szücs’s account (which almost amounts to the uncanny) is that one of the sadistic SS soldiers with whom Szücs has a regular contact is named Gottlieb Muzikant.

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How are we to read ‘left or right’, here used metaphorically, but nonetheless quasi in front of the Birkenau gas chambers? Moreover, how does this link to the victim’s choosing either of these options? These are questions that are similarly not quickly or easily or definitively answered, but as a rhetorical strategy, they might be read as a counterweight to Kulka’s strong language when considering Imre’s motivations. It might, ever so subtly, serve as a partial retraction of the emotional weight of the charge: even if one opts for reading Imre’s behaviour as callous beyond imagining, it seems to say, who is to judge him for it? But let’s get back from this extreme problematisation of perspective, which is complicated by the fact that Imre was not a perpetrator but a victim and by the fact that the notion of a future – implicit in teaching the young – may be read as a demonstration of hope (albeit of a hope against hope). Such a positive ‘message’ could not be derived from the fact that the Zyklon B was transported in trucks marked by the Red Cross. If one assumes that this was not a cynical reversal of the symbol of healing, one only remains with the dark (indeed, pitch black) empathy used by the perpetrators in order to keep the machinery of destruction functioning as smoothly as possible. The same perspectivisation goes for the courtroom: whereas the victims and their sympathisers may perceive the laughter of the perpetrator as an insult of the victim’s memories and experiences – all the more when these are being told and performed in court – the perpetrator may, in his mental reconstruction of his time at Auschwitz, experience nostalgia for the friendship with his fellows, for the comparably safe context of his ‘service’ – especially when compared with the Eastern Front – for the potential enrichment during his time there, etc. This could sound, at first sight, as a positive alternative – nostalgia as a positive memory – but it is not. While the smile and the nostalgia would certainly indicate a lack of sympathy for the victim, which should not come as a complete surprise, it does not necessarily indicate the perpetrator’s desire to deride the victim’s experience; rather, it demonstrates egocentrism.²⁰ Walser’s brief reflections on the personal memory serve as departure point for his more elaborate considerations on the implications of Auschwitz and the trial in Frankfurt. Indeed, his comment on the perpetrators, while not cynically mocking the victims but apparently fond-

 As such, it may be perceived where the producer did not (necessarily) intend it. Hans Laternser, the attorney of several of the accused, argued that the ‘selection’ at the Rampe was life-saving as it meant that some people were not sent to the gas chamber, (Dirks 2001, 174– 175) is easily perceived as extremely cynical: those people were, after all, not supposed to survive the concentration camp but to perish through labour, undernourishment, lack of shelter and beatings. Nevertheless, Laternser may have used the argument – a lie – for strategic reasons (cf. infra) rather than as intentionally cynical.

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ly recollecting their own nice lives, does away with the demonisation and brings the perpetrators back into the realm of humanity. Walser demands that we do not focus too much on the individual perpetrators’ peculiarities and eccentricities, but rather that we conceive of Auschwitz as a site of industrialised, anonymous murder and of exploitation of slave labour by the German industry (1968, 12– 13). That none of those captains of industry or their subordinates are charged in Frankfurt is, for Walser, a big deficit, one that causes him to compare it unfavourably to the Nuremberg trials, where, according to him, an attempt at establishing the actions and decisions (and thus, the guilt) of individuals and organisations was undertaken (13). This does, however, contradict his demand of not focussing on the peculiarities of the individual SS men. How to resolve this contradiction? It seems that Walser has a double standard when it comes to judging the culpability of ‘ordinary people’, i. e. the guards in Birkenau who were judged in Frankfurt and those who bore political responsibility (judged in Nuremberg). Moreover, Walser argues that the prosecution of violent perpetrators and the absence of so-called Schreibtischtäter feeds into the demonisation of ‘the perpetrator’ (cf. Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 207; Giordano 1987, 136). Bearing in mind the essay’s opening remark – the Frankfurt trial cannot be reduced to a legal case, but it serves to advance historiography and a political/ social confrontation – Walser’s opinion of the trial must be that it was, overall, a failure: the demonisation of the perpetrators and the lack of critical reflection of the political and economic circumstances lead to a suspiciously easy sympathy for the victims (14). Walser focuses on the politicisation of subjectivity, and indeed, the guilt question, was subjectivizing in character. In other words, [guilt] was […] conceived largely in subjective terms, as a matter of the defendants’ internal disposition toward their actions. […] Even much of the apparently “objective” evidence served mainly to establish indices for evaluating the subjective motivations of the accused. (Pendas 2006, 291)

Indeed, this reasoning went counter to that during the trials against SS members active in the Aktion Reinhardt camps (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka), where even members who were not directly involved in the killing were accused of murder. The courts deemed this legitimate since the sole function of those camps was to gas the Jewish deportees and burn their corpses (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 126 – 127).²¹ By contrast, the judges in Frankfurt deemed Auschwitz as not a pure ex Yet this does not exclude the prevalent thesis that the main perpetrators were Hitler and the higher SS officers (Himmler, in the case of the Aktion Reinhardt also Odilo Globočnik and Chris-

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termination camp, which is technically true, but which fails to adequately address the murderous nature of the everyday violence, undernourishment and extremely hard labour. In Capesius’s case, this notion of guilt meant that the topic of his robbing the dead was systematically addressed in interrogations, as this would provide the court with a personal motivation for killing Jews. The court, however, did not deem Capesius’s economic success as sufficient proof of a motive for committing murder – they argued that Capesius may ‘just’ have profited from an extraordinary occasion (Werle and Wandres 1995, 185). That does not mean that the court deemed it unproven that Capesius participated in ‘selections’. Capesius was convicted, but only for aiding and abetting (Werle and Wandres 1995, 185). The aggravating circumstance for the court was that Capesius also sent victims whom he had known personally from pre-war business relations to the gas chambers (Werle and Wandres 1995, 186). He was deemed not guilty on other accounts due to lack of evidence – the court deemed it unproven, for example, that Capesius had ordered and kept stock of the phenol used to kill inmates (Werle and Wandres 1995, 187). The fact that the Auschwitz trial was attended and covered more intensively than these preceding trials renders political interpretations like Walser’s (and Weiss’s) not implausible: Walser argues that the way in which the court approached guilt question protects the distancing built between audience and perpetrator, with the aforementioned political implications. Yet there are other implications besides the criticism of capitalism and the continuity of wartime careers – implications that the experienced reader detects straightaway. The psychological implication is – again, according to Walser – that it even allows to perceive one’s own Nazi Germany (if one had lived through it, of course, but this is implied in his use of the first-person plural pronoun; cf. Braese 2001, 221) as radically different from that of the perpetrators (Walser 1968, 16 – 17), which allows for what Ralph Giordano calls a collective affect: “we did not know” (Giordano 1987, 32– 33). Ultimately, such a distorted but willed ignorance could lead, Walser argues, to the next catastrophe. Auschwitz will not be repeated, he argues, and he leaves open what the options could be. A third world war, this time fought with nuclear weapons, is heavily suggested but not specified (16).

tian Wirth). In the Treblinka trial, Kurt Franz, Heinrich Matthes and August Miete were indeed convicted, but as Mittäter, and only because the court considered their killing to have been not a mere following of orders but a willed act (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 129 – 131).

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If one offers a contextualisation of the German legal prosecution of the Nazi crimes, it is only fair to address – briefly – the legal heritage of Frankfurt as much as its cultural impact. It points to persistent difficulties in (legally) judging genocide. In recent years, German courts have adapted the logic of those earlier Aktion Reinhardt trials, arguing that all SS members in Auschwitz contributed, directly or indirectly, to the murderous enterprise. This applies, too, to the case of John Demjanjuk, who stood, as a former Trawniki camp guard in Sobibor, accused of being accessory to murder in 28,060 cases.²² Demjanjuk was convicted, although the court did not deem his direct involvement in a single death proven. Instead, it was argued that his presence as a guard at the camp site was proven, and that he therefore contributed to the camp’s function: genocide (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 191). A similar reasoning underlay the conviction of Oskar Gröning (LG Lüneburg, 2015), who faced charges of accessory to murder in 300,000 cases. Gröning had been a member of the Auschwitz camp administration during the Ungarn-Aktion. ²³ Here, too, the court established that Gröning need not have killed personally in order to have served the purpose of the camp: genocide (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 191– 194).²⁴ This also means that Gröning’s corruption, for which he was supposed to be investigated by SS judge Konrad Morgen, who launched an broad-scale investigation into corruption and theft by the SS in Auschwitz (Rees 2005, 197– 198), does not need to be mentioned in the court’s judgement: personal motivations are not deemed relevant in the assessment of

 Demjanjuk’s case is rather peculiar, almost farcical: having lost his US citizenship in 1988, he was extradited to Israel and sentenced to death in 1988 for his role in Treblinka (not Sobibor), only to be cleared of all charges in 1993 and regain his US citizenship in 1998. Around the turn of the millennium, new evidence seemed to incriminate him, and he again lost his US citizenship in 2002. In 2009, Demjanjuk was extradited to Germany, where he faced trial in Munich (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 189 – 191). Before his appeal could be heard, he died in 2012 – legally, according to his attorney, an innocent man (Volk 2012, 139). If this constellation – of losing and regaining citizenship, of claiming a convicted man is in fact innocent – is farcical, it is not without an aporetic touch: it serves as a textbook example for the severe limitations the legal system faces when dealing with genocide in establishing historical facts and guilt, and in reconciling the world with a pre-genocidal state.  In fact, he had been posted there for almost two years: since 28 September 1942 (Klee 2013, 151).  Whereas the case of Demjanjuk borders on the farcical, Gröning’s has an exceptional potential for infuriation: his name was on an Allied list of war criminals; an investigation against him (and 61 others) was initiated in 1978 (!); he took the witness’s stand in the early 1990s in a trial against another Auschwitz SS man (Heinrich Kühnemann) and yet it took an interview broadcast by the BBC in 2005 to finally start pressing charges against him (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 192). Another interviewee, Hans Friedrich, who murdered Jews in the killing fields of Eastern Europe, became the object of investigation, too, but he died before he could be tried (cf. Duke 2005).

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guilt.²⁵ This causes the Gröning trial to take a somewhat peculiar space in the history of Germany’s juridical confrontation with Nazi crimes: SS clerks posted in Auschwitz were deemed as accountable as their colleagues in similar positions in other extermination camps – like Alfred Ittner, who was an SS bookkeeper in Sobibor and who had already been convicted in 1966. As Werner Renz notes in Die Zeit shortly after Gröning’s conviction, and not without a sense of irony: “[s]ollte der Bundesgerichtshof das Urteil des Landgerichts Lüneburg gegen Gröning bestätigen, wäre dies ein deutliches Zeichen, dass Auschwitz-Birkenau vor Gericht heute ebenso als Todesfabrik gilt wie Sobibór” (Renz 2015; the Federal Court of Justice’s confirmation of the judgement passed on Gröning by the Landgericht Lüneburg would be a clear signal: it would mean that nowadays, Auschwitz-Birkenau is treated by the courts as a death factory, just like Sobibor.)

4.3 Keeping cool in court When Devin Pendas claims that “trials […] have actors” (2006, 80), he does not wish to evoke the notion that the Frankfurt trial was the performance of a script written in advance – that would, of course, suggest that the outcome of the trial had already been decided. Instead, his observation is to be situated in an old tradition of linking the proceedings before court to drama.²⁶ Pendas claims that the word ‘actor’ must be read in a double way: in a sociological sense (“that is, those who enact and, in a significant sense, ‘cause’ the events to happen,” Pendas 2006, 80) and in a theatrical sense (“they have prescribed roles to play,” Pendas

 Interestingly, the court does mention the word “gefühllos” several times – both as a description of the crime of murder, as a description of the murders in the gas chambers, and as a doctrine of behaviour amongst the SS, particularly against Jews (“Beihilfe zum Mord durch Tätigkeiten als Mitglied der Waffen-SS in der Lagerbesatzung des Vernichtungslagers AuschwitzBirkenau; tateinheitliche Beihilfe bei tateinheitlichen und tatmehrheitlichen Haupttaten” 2015). Even though Gröning is not explicitly described as emotionless – this condition is not a necessity in the question of juridical guilt – the court implies that he demonstrated this character trait: he was a member of the SS who knew about the gassing of the Jews.  For early studies on the link between literature (and particularly drama) and the law that go back to the 1920s, cf. Amely-Pauleikhoff 1988, 1n.3. She notes that an increased interest in the link is noticeable since the early 1980s (2). Cornelia Vismann argues that the performativity is situated within the very genesis of a trial as a gathering to settle a matter, which involves a strong agonal confrontation (2011, 17), but that both the theatricality and the agonal character of the trial may be coming to an end due to recent developments in the form of transitional justice in post-conflict societies with an emphasis on truth and reconciliation (cf. her remarks on the ICTY, esp. 354– 365).

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2006, 80). The implications of both roles seem contradictory: on the one hand, Pendas insists on the agency of the performers by pointing out their potential for causality; on the other hand, the notion of the theatre and of the prescription might lead one to think – erroneously – that the trial becomes a work of fiction. To be sure, the paradox is easily solved: only the roles are prescribed, not the script: “[t]he script in a trial is of course much looser and more improvisational than in most plays, but it is no less a script for that” (Pendas 2006, 80). Moreover, Pendas maintains that the behaviour of the trial participants may be defined as the congruence or discrepancy between strategy and tactics, allotting the first as the social behaviour of the ‘powerful’ and the latter, which are “grafted onto the strategies of others” (81), with the behaviour of the subordinate as an act of subversion or guerrilla.²⁷ As such, Pendas considers the strategy as the prescription of the roles of the trial’s participants – prescribed by law – and tactical autonomy as the liberty that these actors have within that role. To be sure, Pendas’s militaristic metaphors point to the conflictive nature of the trial – a conflict with legal guilt or innocence at stake. In this sense, the metaphors coincide with the attribution of theatricality to the counsellors and witnesses by the press: Dietrich Strothmann, writing for Die Zeit, described Friedrich Karl Kaul and Hans Laternser as the “Initiatoren so manchen Theaterdonners” (qtd. in Dirks 2001, 181; the initiators of frequent theatrical thunder-

 Frank Schäfer (2020, 193 – 223) has developed a typology of courtroom scenarios, based on the cooperation or confrontation between the judge(s) and the defendant(s). He distinguished three scenarios for each of these possibilities. Where there is no cooperation, the scenarios are destruction (when the outcome of the trial is clear beforehand and the judges wish to destroy the accused, cf. Roland Freisler’s treatment of the accused, or show trials initiated under Joseph Stalin), refusal (where the accused simply do not wish to comment on the case, as in the case of Beate Zschäpe in the NSU trial) or guerrilla (where the accused aggressively undermine the authority of the court, as in the case of the first trial against the Rote Armee Fraktion). Schäfer also distinguishes three scenarios in which there is a cooperation between the accused and the judges: a submission (in which the accused pleads guilty, often in turn for a less severe sentencing), a deal (which is similar to the submission, but with the difference that the quid pro quo is negotiated before the trial), and the collusion (basically the opposite of the destruction scenario: the defendant’s acquittal is clear beforehand. When Hitler was tried for treason and acquitted in 1924, this amounted to a conspiracy against the Weimar Republic.) Perhaps his typology could be supplemented by including several axes of cooperation or confrontation: in the Frankfurt trials, the defence strategy relied heavily on a refusal to testify – a mechanism that protected the defendants from reciprocal accusations – but that does not mean that there were no other scenarios acted out: if one looks at the axis between counsellor and court, or counsellor and witnesses, one sees obvious guerrilla tactics in Laternser’s behaviour.

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storms);²⁸ Ella Salomon bitterly comments on the FAZ describing her behaviour as a witness as ‘theatrical’ (Adam and Salomon 2001, 123; qtd. in C, 11). The conflictive nature of the trial expands, in Frankfurt, to the realm of emotionality. As summarised in the introduction, the witnesses in Frankfurt were not supposed to be ‘persons of memory’, recounting whatever personal experiences of the Shoah they had; instead, they were to be juridical witnesses only testifying to objective facts pertaining to the accused’s participation in murder in Auschwitz and Birkenau. Thus, if their account must be deprived of too much subjectivity, any open avowal of emotionality may discredit them as witnesses. How did the survivor-witnesses keep their cool while testifying in court about their experiences in the camps? This issue was highly important for maintaining factual credibility, which was being challenged by the defence attorneys, particularly by Hans Laternser and Fritz Steinacker in the Frankfurt trial. In particular, eyewitnesses living behind the Iron Curtain were explicitly discredited as agents of their respective governments trying to destabilise the Federal Republic and, by extension, the ‘West’ (Dirks 2001, 171). Moreover, Laternser found arguments to discredit any testimony – either they were too vague or too precise; too discordant from other testimonies or too accordant; Jewish witnesses were supposedly motivated by a desire for vengeance (Dirks 2001, 172).²⁹ And indeed, if one looks at the protocol of Salomon’s testimony, one cannot help but strongly suspect a certain disdain from this lawyer for the prosecutor’s witness: Nebenklagevertreter Ormond: Frau Zeugin, ich habe nur noch eine Frage: Was ist Ihr Beruf? Sie sagten, Professorin, Sie Zeugin Ella Salomon [unterbricht]: Sprachprofessorin, ich unterrichte. Nebenklagevertreter Ormond: An einer Schule? Zeugin Ella Salomon: An einer Schule. Nebenklagevertreter Ormond: Gut, vielen Dank. Keine Frage. Verteidiger Laternser: Frau Zeugin, an was für einer Schule? Zeugin Ella Salomon: An einer pädagogischen Schule. Verteidiger Laternser: Ja, entspricht das den hiesigen Volksschulen oder Mittelschulen oder höheren Schulen?

 Friedrich Karl Kaul was the plaintiff from and representative of the GDR.  Pendas notes that certainly not all defence attorneys took such political stances as Steinacker and Laternser (Pendas 2006, 94– 95).

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Zeugin Ella Salomon: Ich probiere es Ihnen klarzumachen. Verteidiger Laternser: Ja. Ist nicht so wichtig. Zeugin Ella Salomon: Meine Schüler kommen nach der Matura und haben drei Jahre zu lernen, damit sie Volksschullehrer werden und von der ersten Klasse bis in die vierte lehren können. Verstehen Sie? Verteidiger Laternser: Ja. Und für welche Sprache unterrichten Sie? Zeugin Ella Salomon: Für rumänische Sprache. (“Strafsache gegen Mulka u. a.” Vernehmung der Zeugin Ella Salomon ,  – ) Nebenklagevertreter Ormond: Madame, I have a final question: what is your profession? You said ‘Professor’, you Witness Ella Salomon [interrupts]: Professor of languages, I teach. Ormond: At a school? Salomon: At a school. Ormond: Good, thank you. No more questions. Defence counsellor Hans Laternser: Madame, at what kind of a school? Salomon: At a pedagogical school Laternser: Yes, does that corresponds to our German primary school or secondary schools or colleges? Salomon: I will try to explain it to you. Laternser: Yes. It’s not that important. Salomon: My students have finished their A-levels and have three more years of education ahead of them so they can teach in primary schools. Do you understand? Laternser: Yes. And what language do you teach? Salomon: Rumanian.

Laternser’s disdain is noticeable when he questions Salomon (what kind of school do you teach at, and what would be the German equivalent?) and his interjection devalues the answer a priori. If the matter is not deemed that impor-

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tant, then why ask about it in the first place? It is tempting to deduce that his liminal message is that it is her explanation, not the matter, that is not very important. Laternser’s immediate reaction seems in line with his politically motivated strategy: by asking what language she teaches, the answer hints at her biographic background and nationality. This suspicion is only reinforced by a later remark concerning her interrogation by an investigative judge in Vienna in 1962: Verteidiger Laternser [unterbricht]: Nun gut. Frau Zeugin, bitte, wenn Sie jetzt sagen, über die Sprache sei nicht gesprochen worden, warum haben Sie denn dann bei Ihrer Vernehmung in Wien gesagt, Doktor Capesius habe dabei in ungarischer Sprache gerufen? Da mußten Sie doch eine Veranlassung gehabt haben, das zu sagen. Es ist doch so aufgenommen worden. Ich habe keine weiteren Fragen. (“Strafsache gegen Mulka u. a.” Vernehmung der Zeugin Ella Salomon 1964, 19; emphasis added) Defence counsellor Laternser [interrupts]: Very well. Madame, please, when you tell us that the topic of language had not been discussed, why did you say, during your interrogation in Vienna, that Dr Capesius had shouted in Hungarian? You must have had your reasons for saying so. It has been documented. No further questions.

The issue at stake pertains to an episode in Birkenau, during which Capesius might have spoken to a group of inmates and, in hindsight, incriminated himself. More precisely, the question is in what language he had spoken to this group: Hungarian or German? Salomon did not belong to this group, though: she had been told the stories by someone who did. Initially the confusion arose due to a misunderstanding: which language was meant, the one in which Capesius yelled, or the language in which the episode was recounted to Salomon? Salomon eventually admits that she could not answer the question; what mattered for her was the content – Capesius had threatened the prisoners – not the language in which that threat was uttered. Moreover, the presiding judge had already intervened in the interrogation, suggesting that this matter was perhaps not mentioned in the episode’s recounting. Yet Laternser ignores the possibility of a misunderstanding during the interrogation in Vienna and instead politicises the matter in order to discredit the survivor. His behaviour may be explained by the asymmetry in the courtroom’s structure: whereas the judges and jurors are supposed to be neutral (siding with neither the defendants nor the plaintiffs nor the state) and even the prosecution (in the German legal system) must let truth prevail over the state’s interests (Pendas 2006, 95), the defence attorneys are “partisan actors […], obliged to act ‘in the interests of their client.’ […] In this sense, a defense attorney’s obligation to his client takes precedence over his obligation to the truth” (Pendas 2006, 95).

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Indeed, for Laternser this amounts to maintaining close to his clients: “[d]efence attorneys who distance themselves from their clients would do better to avoid such cases because such distancing not only does not help their clients but rather, at times, does them only considerable harm” (qtd. in Pendas 2006, 95). Even though contemporary legal experts opposed the notion that counsellors were equated with their clients – a notion proposed by the media (cf. Dirks 2001, 163) – Laternser offers a discourse of identification, if not psychologically,³⁰ then at least rhetorically and strategically. Indeed, even if Laternser did not identify himself psychologically with his clients, then perhaps he did so with his role as defendant, through whom empathy for (or identification with) his clients can be evoked in the audience (and predominantly the judges), much as actors can evoke empathy for the character they temporarily “feign [to substitute their] actantial identity” with (Schaeffer 2010, 228). This rhetorical-strategic identification, then, is used to block the judges’ and/or the audiences’ empathy with the victimised eyewitnesses, who are, arguably, victimised a second time by this very discrediting and attempted denial of empathy. This constellation is in line with Anna Parkinson’s notion of “dark empathy” as a “tactical implementation of empathy by an individual in order to attain a particular goal or to make his or her interlocutor behave in a certain manner that is advantageous to the former” (Parkinson 2017). Only here the empathy is indirectly evoked – or rather, sabotaged. In Parkinson’s example, that ‘dark empathy’ is rather directly used: Judge Hans Hofmeyer uses it in his interrogation of Hans Münch, an erstwhile SS doctor in Auschwitz to direct Münch into the direction that Hofmeyer desires.³¹ Yet Laternser, by suggesting that the witnesses do not speak on their own behalf but as spokespersons for their politically antagonistic states, hopes to influence a different conversational partner: the judges, and arguably the media, who must deliver a legal resp. a public judgement of guilt. It is clear from other trials that many judges did recognise and acknowledge the tormenting exercise in emotional self-control. In the trial by the LG Leipzig

 That remains, ultimately, extremely difficult if not impossible to assess. Moreover, there are indications that Laternser was not a convinced National Socialist, which caused him occasional conflict with the regime between 1934 and 1939 (Dirks 2001, 164– 165). There lies a bitter irony in the fact that he defended nurses who refused to participate in the ‘euthanasia’ programme in 1939, only to defend various perpetrators accused of participating in that programme in 1945 and 1946 (Dirks 2001, 165 – 166). It seems that Laternser especially identified with his role as lawyer and took his corresponding duties very seriously – but perhaps that role served as the perfect mask to avoid having to answer questions about his ideological commitments.  Münch was not accused in Frankfurt but was interrogated as a witness. This was certainly not exceptional: many other erstwhile perpetrators testified.

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against perpetrators in the Hasag labour camp, the judges deemed the witnesses reliable since they “hätten die Angeklagten nicht aus Hass oder Rachsucht oder einem an sich verständlichen Vergeltungstrieb belastet” (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 78; they had not accused the defendants out of hatred or a desire for revenge or retribution). To be sure, the paralipsis may suggest that the emotionality of the courtroom was to some degree politicised: when a desire for retaliation is considered understandable, the court suggests that the entire legal procedure may be informed by a retributive notion of justice rather than the determination of guilt. Simultaneously, this is denied since the court rules that this desire for retaliation is not what motivates the witnesses to testify.³² The judges reached similar conclusion in other proceedings and other political contexts, as in the trial against Hubert Gomerski, who had been an SS member in Sobibor (LG Frankfurt/ Main, 1950): “[i]m Urteil wird hervorgehoben, dass die Zeugen trotz der Schwere der Leiden, die sie in Sobibor durchgemacht hatten, und trotz des Verlustes naher Angehöriger ihre Aussagen ruhig und ohne Hass gemacht hatten” (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 69; the verdict emphasises that the witnesses had testified calmly and without hatred, despite the severity of their suffering in Sobibor and despite the losses in their families). The court deemed the witnesses reliable for another reason as well: “[a]uch hätten sie nicht jeden Deutschen der gleichen schweren Verbrechen beschuldigt, sondern ausgesagt, dass der zweite Angeklagte, Klier, sich von diesen Verbrechen ferngehalten habe” (Jasch and Kaiser 2017, 69; moreover, they did not accuse all Germans of the grievous crimes, but testified that the second accused, Klier, did not get involved in these crimes). Nevertheless, the link between a controlled emotionality and a factual reliability is evident and obviously echoes the ideal of the judges’ impartiality that is required for fair judgement.

 Yet Jasch and Kaiser note that this court upheld the notion of in dubio pro reo: if the guilt question is not determined in the affirmative without a doubt, the defendant is considered not guilty (2017, 79). Just as it will not do to make overgeneralised claims about the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of the Frankfurt Trial (cf. Pendas 2006, 288 – 305) or of the German post-war prosecution of Nazi perpetrators, it will not do to consider the entirety of the legal prosecution in the GDR as merely politically tainted. That is also the conclusion one must draw from the Tschenstochau trial (LG Leipzig, 1949), where the only accused who was deemed not guilty was the foreman of an ironworks – a fact that is in plain contradiction with the official (and self-exonerating) GDR doctrine that it was capitalism that had caused the rise of Nazism. This, of course, should not suggest that the GDR was a Rechtsstaat – it was not.

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4.4 Fictionality and its issues in Capesius, der Auschwitzapotheker 4.4.1 Matters of fictionality: signposts As mentioned above, Capesius relies heavily on the protocols of the Auschwitz trial, especially in the first chapters, which establish Capesius’s involvement in the selections and the gassing. Numerous literary authors, however, supplement the testimonies of those whose appeared before court. In this sense, Capesius exemplifies Aleida Assmann’s remark that “[d]ie Begriffe ‘Zeuge’ und ‘Zeugenschaft’ haben längst den Gerichtssaal verlassen” (2012a, 30; the concepts of the witness and of testimony have long since left the coutroom), while of course pointing to the performativity of the testimony in court. Indeed, the so-called “era of the witness” starts, according to Annette Wieviorka, with the trial in Jerusalem but has had wide-stretching medial and historiographical echoes (Wieviorka 2013, 127, 168 – 180).³³ The predominance of the eyewitness accounts in Capesius serves as a considerable “signpost of factuality” (Lavocat 2020). Françoise Lavocat suggests that signposts of fictionality invite the reader to immerse in the narrative, to accept the offered access to another world, while the signposts of factuality serve to strengthen the reader’s belief in the referentiality of the account. She further argues that the signpost can either be positive or negative – in the latter case, it is supposed to discard any notions usually linked to the reading of fiction. This point seems is particularly poignant since she takes issue with Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s reaction to Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Marbot (1981) – a novel in which, though it is stylistically very different from Capesius, similar issues of signalling fictionality or nonfictionality (sufficiently, or ‘strongly’ enough) are at stake. Marbot is Hildesheimer’s biography of a young aristocratic aesthete living in early-nineteenth century Europe. The only catch is that Sir Andrew Marbot never existed. Hildesheimer provoked outrage, perhaps heightened by the fact that a considerable share of German literary criticism did not see through the hoax: the book was marketed as nonfiction (Schaeffer 2010, 110). Hildesheimer appeared astonished, offering the following defence: although he admits that the “revelation of [Marbot’s] fictive character was perhaps too hidden and too  Catherine Gilbert nuances this finding, pointing out that such claims need to be checked for cultural and national backgrounds. Moreover, the traumatic impact of the First World War had already given rise to an enormous production of eyewitness accounts – by the former soldiers who fought the battles, not (solely), as was traditionally the case, by the strategists and highranking officers who planned them (C. Gilbert 2018, 56).

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weak”, he points to the book cover, where the verb ‘eingewoben’ points to Hildesheimer’s intervention in the cultural history of the nineteenth century – adding a fictive chapter to it (qtd. in Schaeffer 2010, 111). Hildesheimer adds that Marbot’s name is not found in the book’s index, which “contains exclusively the names of persons who really existed and [which] becomes, for this fact, the key of the book” (Schaeffer 2010, 111). Finally, Hildesheimer points to the possibility of falsification: any consultation of an encyclopaedia of international renown, or any cross-checking of the ego-documents written by the persons Marbot had supposedly met, would have raised questions as to the existence of Marbot (Schaeffer 2010, 111). For his part, Schaeffer evokes astonishment at Hildesheimer’s astonished reaction: the two indices of fictionality to which [Hildesheimer] refers are so weak and so well-hidden that it takes a detective-reader to discover them. In addition, they are more than counterbalanced by a multitude of massive indices that, on the contrary, push the reader to believe that he is faced with a real biography. (Schaeffer 2010, 111)

Yet Schaeffer emphasises that he believes Hildesheimer when the latter claims that his intention was not to deceive but rather to increase the mimetic character of the text, which in turn ought to “facilitat[e] the fictional immersion of the reader” (Schaeffer 2010, 112). Indeed, if we may believe Hildesheimer, this immersion is not only situated on the side of the reception but also on the side of the production: es war mir darum zu tun, nach Möglichkeit die Spuren des Arbeitsprozesses zu verwischen, der aus Phantasie nicht etwa Fiktion, sondern Realität machen sollte. Und dies nicht nur anderen gegenüber, sondern auch gegenüber mir selbst. Ich mußte mir ständig einreden, daß Marbot existiert hätte, und es ist mir beinahe gelungen. (Hildesheimer 1984, 139) it was my intention to cover the traces of the workflow as well as possible; this workflow creates not fiction but reality out of our phantasy – and I wanted to cover it not just for others, but also for myself. I constantly had to tell myself that Marbot had existed, and I almost succeeded.

Schaeffer is rather interested in the strategies that could lead to reading the fictional text as nonfictional in the first place, pointing to

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a) the “authorial context” (i. e. the fact that Hildesheimer had some years before published a nonfictional biography of Wolfgang Mozart and had ‘introduced’ Marbot on conferences even before the publication of Marbot);³⁴ b) the paratextual designation of Marbot as a biography (i. e. as a nonfictional text), the iconography, with an explicit (but fictitious) commentary claiming that the portrait on the cover depicts Marbot and the aforementioned index – which traditionally suggests nonfictionality but in this case contains an indication of fictivity;³⁵ c) the “formal mimesis”, which refers to the style: Hildesheimer’s novel mimics the style of a biography; d) the “contamination of the historical world by the fictional world” – this is Schaeffer’s formulation for the omnipresence of characters who seemingly correspond to historical persons, e. g. Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Hector Berlioz (Schaeffer 2010, 112– 118; cf. Hildesheimer 1984, 145 – 146). Moreover, he points to the stylistic divergence from the genre of the (obviously) fictional historical biography,³⁶ which is usually marked by an internal focalisation, an obvious marker for fictionality, according to Dorrit Cohn (1999, 118 – 119).³⁷ Since Marbot does not feature such internal focalisation, it adheres to the conventions of the nonfictional biography. Lavocat, in turn, shows herself somewhat surprised at Schaeffer’s argumentation. Citing empirical research demonstrating that average readers are capable of recognising the fictional or nonfictional status of a text without being provided paratexts that influence this recognition, she does not understand Schaeffer’s preoccupation with such indications – indeed, she even claims that “these strategic declarations have little or no effect on the manner in which the work itself is read (for instance, readers of Barthes’s autobiography do not read it as a fiction, despite the author’s statements that it is fiction)” (Lavocat 2020, 578). Nevertheless, as she notes herself, the insistence on the importance of paratextual

 Schaeffer adds that Hildesheimer had retracted this illusion towards the end of the conference but argues that “a repeal is not a cancellation” (2010, 113). While technically true, he fails – in my opinion – to illustrate the relevance of the conference: if the reader was not aware of the retraction, how likely is it that she was aware of the conference in the first place? And even if so, how does this illusion stand despite the retraction? Through selective media coverage? But would that still pertain to the realm of the authorial context?  Or, to retain Schaeffer’s detective metaphor, a clue hinting at fictivity.  His textbook example is Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil (1945; Schaeffer, 2010, 118).  Or, if found in nonfictional discourse, such as historiography, it indicates that the author is not reporting but interpreting the ‘inner life’ of persons.

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signals seems especially pronounced in discussions surrounding pseudo-factual hoaxes – texts that challenge the validity of our reading practices and point to our tendency to (perhaps all too naïvely) rely on extratextual criteria. Capesius is, to be sure, not a pseudofactual hoax, but it is a text in which the constellations between fact and fiction are at times equally unclear. This is partially due to the omnipresence of intertextual references to texts in which these relations are unclear to begin with; partially due to Schlesak’s ‘own’ fictional character, Adam; and partially due to the intersections between these constellations. These pertain, however, to the fictional realm of the novel – a realm in which, according to the adage, such confusions pose no ethical problem: fiction can refer to the ‘real world’ but is not obligated to (cf. White 2004b, 22). Nonfiction must live up to its referential promises and especially so when discussing genocide and the suffering of others.

4.4.2 Adam: simultaneously fictional and real According to the book cover, Adam is the only fictional character in Capesius, albeit one whose narrative “entstammt bis ins Detail den historischen Quellen”. This is a strong claim to make, but there can be no doubt that Adam serves as an encyclopaedic character: he is a literary condensation (a Verdichtung) of the events in Auschwitz and Birkenau. Moreover, the factual errors in his account may be pointing to the illusory character of encyclopaedic fiction (cf. introduction).³⁸ Adam may be fictional, yet simultaneously, he is real. What does this mean and how is this possible? He is fictional, of course, according to the pact with the reader; and he is real because his discourse is largely an intertextual compilation (at times nearly verbatim) of survivors’ experiences. Adam is fictitious; his stories are not. Or, in structuralist terms, if Adam is a sign, the signifiant is fictitious (and this corresponds neatly to his fictional status), the signifié is real.³⁹ Consider Adam’s discourse being shaped by the actual discourse of the

 Adam claims that Ala Gertner (1912– 1945), one of the women who smuggled gunpowder out of a munitions’ factory to the Sonderkommando for their revolt (which took place on 7 October 1944), was Belgian (C, 305). She was not: she was born in Będzin, and there are no indications she ever obtained Belgian citizenship or even lived there – unlike another prominent member of the resistance within the camp, Mala Zimetbaum, who was deported from Mechelen/Malines in September 1942 and executed in Birkenau in September 1944 together with Edek Galiński (cf. Kielar 1979, 340 – 341).  In fact, the matter is slightly more complicated since Adam is a given name. As Barthes notes, the relation between signifiant and signifié is more complicated in this case: a name

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survivors. The novel’s first paragraph quotes Adam as describing his arrival in Birkenau: [s]ie treiben uns zu den Duschräumen. Ich sehe lohende Flammen in einen langen Graben, höre Kreischen, Kinderweinen, Hundegebell, Revolverschüsse. Die hohen Flammen verdecken hüpfende Schatten. Rauch, Flugasche und Geruch von versengten Haaren und Fleisch erfüllt die Luft. “Es kann nicht wahr sein”, schreit mein Nachbar. Kinder, Frauen, Kranke werden von Deutschen Schäferhunden lebend in die Flammen getrieben. Eine Hitzewelle. Dann Schüsse. Ein Rollstuhl stürzt mit einem Alten in die Flammen; ein schriller Schrei. Säuglinge fliegen wie weiße Blumenkelche in hohem Bogen ins Feuer… Ein Junge läuft um sein Leben, Schäferhunde jagen ihn, er wird in die Flammen gestoßen. Ein Schrei bleibt zurück. Eine Frau mit entblößter Brust stillt ihr Kind. Sie fällt mit dem Säugling in die Glut. Ein Schluck Muttermilch bis zur Ewigkeit. (C, 6) They are herding us towards the showers. I see a long trench blazing with flames. I hear screams, children crying, dogs barking, gunshots. I see leaping shadows, half hidden behind the high flames. smoke, ash, and the smell of burnt hair and flesh fill the air. “This cannot be true,” cries someone near me. Women, children, and invalids are chased, alive, into the flames by German shepherds. A wave of heat, then shots. A wheelchair carrying an old man plunges into the flames, a shrill cry. Small babies, white as lilies, trace an arc through the air as they are catapulted into the fire. A boy runs for his life, the dogs chasing him; he is pushed into the flames. His scream hangs in the air. A mother nurses her child at her naked breast She and the baby fall into the inferno. one swallow of mother’s milk, for eternity. (DoA, 3)

This scene, which arguably is the very opposite of cool or cold– and not just because of the omnipresence of the flames and the heat – is not Schlesak’s discourse (through Adam), although the italics in the novel (which I have not reproduced for the sake of readability) heavily suggest that this is Adam’s description of his first impressions of Birkenau. This impression is strengthened by the following sentence, which describes Adam as a survivor and repeats his name several times. The novel seems to suggest, from the outset, that Adam has resorted to literature as a means of working through his experiences: the last sentence of the quoted excerpt could, at first sight, be read as an allusion to Paul Celan’s arguably most famous poem, Todesfuge, in which the absolute metaphor of the

both serves to distinguish between human beings, but of course, a name cannot refer to one person – that would exceed human creativity and undermine the concept of name-giving. ‘Adam’ does not refer solely to Schlesak’s Adam, of course, but to all men named Adam (cf. Barthes 1964, 97). Insofar as this dimension of the sign ‘Adam’ is concerned, any observations pertaining to its referentiality are, of course, obsolete – except as intertextual reference, e. g. to Genesis, which would frame Adam in Capesius as a pars pro toto for humanity in the concentration camp.

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“schwarze Milch der Frühe” (Celan 2003, 40 – 41)⁴⁰ similarly poses a highly ambivalent picture of life-affirming nurture in the context of industrialised murder – and in its absoluteness poses itself between the sublimity of poetic language and the sublimity of the Shoah.⁴¹ Reading Adam’s final sentence as such an allusion remains valid,⁴² even if a ‘closer’ or ‘stronger’ intertext is easily found: Schlesak/Adam’s description is very akin to the one offered by Ladislaus Szücs: [u]ns trieb man weiter zu den Duschräumen. Von weitem sah ich auf einmal lohende Flammen aus einem langen Graben steigen, von wo Kreischen, Kinderweinen, Hundegebell und Revolverschüsse zu hören waren. Die hohen Flammen – die Hölle mag so aussehen – verdeckten beweglich hüpfende Schatten. Rauch, Flugasche und Geruch von versengten Haaren und Fleisch füllte die Luft. Wir hielten und starrten versteinert mit weit geöffneten Augen hin. Es kann nicht wahr sein, schrie mein Nachbar, der Bäckerssohn I. aus unserer Stadt. Tagesroutine, bemerkte der uns begleitende Kapo mit gestreifter Mütze. Es war nicht zu glauben, was sich vor unseren Augen abspielte. Nein, nein, versuchte eine zitternde Stimme den Anblick, der sich unseren Augen bot, zu leugnen: daß die SS da Menschen – Kinder, Frauen, Kranke – bei lebendigem Leibe in die mit Petroleum begossenen brennenden strohgefüllten Gräben hineintrieb. Allmählich nähern wir uns dieser Entsetzlichkeit. Wir spüren schon die Hitzewelle. Es krachen die Schüsse für die, die nicht springen wollen. Eine hübsche junge Frau mit einem ungefähr vier bis fünf Jahre alten Kind, das seine Puppe krampfhaft an sich drückt, fleht den SS-Mann an, daß er das Kind zuerst erschießen möchte, bevor er es ins Feuer schmeißt, was der auch tat. Ein Rollstuhl flog samt dem Drinsitzenden in die Flammen; ein schriller Schrei. Säuglinge werden geschleudert, die wie weiße Blumenkelche in die Flammen fliegen. Ein Junge, der ausreißen will, wird durch zwei Schäferhunde gejagt und erwischt, ein Schuß, nachher in die Flammen gestoßen. Es verfolgt mich ein Bild aus dieser Hölle bis heute: Ich träume nicht, wie gerne ich es auch möchte. Eine Frau mit entblößter Brust in der Menge stehend, ihr Kind stillend, in der Haltung wie seit Äonen. Sie wird bald erschossen, denn Revolverpatronen sind nun mal stärker als Millionen von Jahren. Ein Schluck Muttermilch noch bis zur Ewigkeit. Vom ganzen langen Leben bleibt dem Kinde nur soviel: wie ein Schluck Muttermilch schmeckt, sonst, sonst nichts. Nicht, wie ein sprießender Frühling sich präsentiert, ein Hund den Mond anbellt, ein Hase um sein Leben Haken schlägt… der Tod, sein Kindestod schmeckt

 Various translations are possible, as John Felstiner points out: “[i]ts title in English might be ‘Fugue of Death,’ ‘Death’s Fugue,’ ‘Death Fugue,’ or ‘Deathfugue’” (1995, 31). He translates the absolute metaphor as “[b]lack milk of daybreak” (Felstiner 1995, 26); Pierre Joris opts for “[b]lack milk of morning” (Celan 2020, 42).  Celan insisted that Schwarze Milch der Frühe is not a “Genitivmetaphe[r], wie sie uns von unseren sogenannten Kritikern vorgesetzt [wird], damit wir nicht mehr zum Gedicht gehen; das ist keine Redefigur und kein Oxymoron mehr, das ist Wirklichkeit” (qtd. in Wiedemann 2003, 608; genitive metapher, as our so-called critics present it to prevent our accessing the poem; it is no longer a trope or an oxymoron, it is reality).  Even more since Celan’s poetry (more specifically, Tenebrae) is quoted elsewhere in Capesius and since Schlesak had made a name for himself in the 1970s as an exponent of hermetic poetry.

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nach einem mutterwarmen Schluck Milch. Und nun weiß das Kind, wie das Leben ist. (Szücs 1995, 28 – 29) They were herding us towards the showers. From afar I suddenly saw blazing flames going up from a long trench, from where we could hear screaming, children crying, dogs barking, gunshots. The rising flames – this is what Hell might look like – were covering lifelike, jumping shadows. The air was filled with smoke, ash and the scent of burnt hair and flesh. We stopped and we were looking, petrified, our eyes wide open. It cannot be true, the baker’s son from our village, I., screamed. Everyday routine, the Kapo with the striped cap accompanying us said. What was taking place before our eyes was unbelievable. No, no: a shaking voice tried to deny the reality our eyes were given to see: the reality that the SS were throwing people – children, women, the ill – who were still alive into the petrol-soaked pyres. Gradually, we approach this horror. We can already sense the heat. Cracking shots for those who do not want to jump. A pretty, young woman, whose four- or fiveyear old child is clinging to its doll, begs the SS man to shoot the child before throwing it in the fire – which he did. A wheelchair is flying with its occupant into the flames; a shrill scream. New-borns are flung into the fire like white calyces. A boy who attempts to flee is hunted down and caught by two German shepherds, one shot, afterwards thrown into the flames. There is an image from this Hell that haunts me to this day: I don’t dream, however much I’d like to. A bare-chested woman standing in the crowd, nurturing her child, a pose as old as Aeons. Soon she is shot since bullets are stronger than eternity. A last gulp of breastmilk for eternity. Of a long life, the child experiences but this: how a gulp of breastmilk tastes – nothing else. Not the taste of budding Spring, not the sound of a dog howling to the moon, not the sight of a hare crisscrossing to save its life… death, its dying in childhood, tastes like a gulp of mother-warm milk. And now the child knows how life is.

In other words, just as D.M. Thomas relies heavily on Kuznetzov’s Babi Yar for the pathos-driven scene of a mass shooting in his own documentary novel The White Hotel, and Kuznetzov in turn relies on the post-war testimony of a survivor of the Babi Yar massacre (Young 1988a, 53 – 57), Schlesak’s documentary novel relies on a survivor’s account for the pathos-driven scene of the Ungarnaktion in Birkenau in the summer of 1944. The sheer discrepancy in length demonstrates, of course, that Szücs’s discourse is not reproduced verbatim. Apart from some changes in syntax, Schlesak makes more interesting editing choices: the switches between present tense and past tense (which could be read as a narratological expression of trauma as a continued presence of absence) disappear; the number of details is reduced; the laconic response of the Kapo is deleted, as is the name of the ‘neighbour’; the witness’s initial disbelief of what he is seeing (and hence, of his very witnessing) is no longer present; the SS man’s ‘gesture of compassion’⁴³ is not retained; a word is replaced for another that is not a synonym (‘old man’ instead of ‘the person sitting inside’); the metaphor of the

 But what a horrible compassion, what a horrible description this is.

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eternal breastmilk forms the end point in Schlesak/Adam’s account: the pathos of the (slightly elliptic) anaphora, with which a counterfactual situation is evoked and marked as such, and which ends in Szücs’s sarcastic yet aporetic conclusion, is left out as well. To sum up, Adam’s account features an increased staccato, a ‘condensed’ description of the burning pits of Birkenau, in which the visual element is increased: all information is economised, all reflections and speculations are removed, the pathos is somewhat reduced – the word ‘hell’ is not used to describe the scene – and the suggestion that the SS was able of compassion during their face-to-face killing, too, could distract from the events described. To be sure, later, the novel does insist on the presence of a grey zone, but it does not start with such nuanced concepts. This non-quoting of Szücs – this absorption, if you will, into Adam – is exceptional. Often, the mediation of the sources through Adam is made explicit: [d]er sehr religiöse Chronist Lejb Langfuß, er hatte eine ganze Gruppe Orthodoxe und Gläubige um sich geschart, der bis zu seiner eigenen Ermordung Ende 1944 fast zwei Jahre in der Todeszone arbeiten musste, hat mir seine heimlich verfassten Aufzeichnungen gezeigt, wir hatten ein gemeinsames Versteck für unsere geschriebenen Schreckens-Testamente, ich habe seine in meine “Röllchen” aufgenommen, falls sie verloren gehen sollten. (C, 57) The pious chronicler Leyb Langfuss, who had to work in the death zone for almost two years before his own murder at the end of 1944, showed me his secret notes. We both had a common hiding place for our written testament of horrors; I included them in my “rolls,” in case his should be lost. (DoA, 54)

The historical record shows us that Leyb Langfuss was a real person – and the author of a chronicle, hence his presence in the historical record – and there are, indeed, strong indications that he was very religious. As Adam tells us, Langfuss was murdered in November 1944 (cf. Chare and Williams 2016, 7). What Langfuss certainly has not done is to show his secretly recorded chronicle to Adam: since Adam is fictitious (and fictional) and hence cannot have read the real Langfuss’s account: that is an ontological impossibility. But the historical Langfuss and his chronicle serve as ‘inspiration’ for Adam, who becomes a chronicler himself. Through similar meetings, e. g. with Tadeusz Borowski and Hermann Langbein, Adam becomes a veritable passe-partout character: he is at one time a ‘doctor’, a plumber, a member of the ‘Kanada’ commando, in the camp resistance, in the Sonderkommando, etc. (cf. C, 53). He is thus construed as the representative survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau in ‘all’ its facets. This is an illusion, of course, but an illusion typical of the encyclopaedic novel. Zipfel would suggest that the fact that Adam is everywhere is an indication of his fictivity since it rests on structural intertextuality, which is, according to Zipfel, a direct indication of fictionality (2001, 237). While Zipfel discusses fic-

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tional texts in which there is one structuring intertext (e. g. James Joyce’s Ulysses [1922] based on Homer’s Odyssey), the argument would be even stronger for Adam in Capesius since the structural intertextuality is not constrained to one intertext. Excursus: Wiesław Kielar’s incredible survival There is one problem with Zipfel’s argument in the context of Shoah literature: it implies that improbability amounts to fictivity, and the stronger the improbability, the more likely the fictivity. That may make sense intuitively, and as earlier remarked, the idea of the historical uncanny hinges on this suspicion, too: our sense of uncanniness arises from the fact that we consider coincidences as a plot device in fictional texts – not as real-world occurrences. But the stories of the surviving Sonderkommando members, referred to above, and the story of Wiesław Kielar are prime counterexamples to Zipfel’s argument: against all the odds, Kielar survived in Auschwitz and Birkenau for more than four years, and his memoirs thus have, in the prefacing words of Mieczyslaw Kieta, the “Breite eines Panoramas” (Kielar 1979, 7; the width of a panorama).⁴⁴ Deported to Auschwitz with the first transport of Polish resistance fighters and others (perceived to be) hostile to the Nazi occupying forces in 1940, Kielar performed many functions in the camp. Though the following is not an exhaustive list, Kielar mentions having worked as a carpenter (35), an assistant-nurse (52), a ‘corpse dragger’ (“Leichenträger”, 65), a member of the proto-Sonderkommando (still in Auschwitz and not in Birkenau, 92– 98), a Stubendienst (110), a foreman (132), a Schreiber (140, 213, 264), a Blockältester (236), and a hard labourer (263). He testifies to the ‘sport’ – an imitation of military drill exercises (this is, of course, while being undernourished, poorly dressed and under incessant physical abuse; 19) – to being in a penal unit (48 – 50), to public flogging (53 – 54), to incarceration in the standing cell (204– 212), to the public execution of his friend, Edek Galiński (who had escaped with his lover, Mala Zimetbaum, and had been recaptured; 340 – 341). He mentions the sterilisation of inmates (298) as well as the massive deportations and the corruption that came with  Kieta himself had been imprisoned in Auschwitz and testified in Frankfurt on 31 August 1964 – but, for the sake of clarity, his testimony is not included or referenced to in Capesius. Kielar’s name is not found on the list of witnesses in Frankfurt; Wera Kapkajew is mentioned in one session as an accredited translator (“Strafsache gegen Mulka u. a.” Verlesung eines Urteils eines sowjetischen Militärgerichts gegen den Angeklagten Kaduk 1964). It is, moreover, more than likely that she is interpreting between Kieta and the court; the protocol mentions a Dolmetscher Kapkajew but does not mention a given name; the corresponding voice on the audio tape strongly suggests that the interpreter is a woman.

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the arrival of the deportees’ valuables, clothes and food (passim). In the autumn of 1944, Kielar was deported to concentration camps in Germany with other Polish (non-Jewish) inmates. That his account encompasses so many facets of life and death in these camps is, thus, due to his having lived throughout the near entirety of the camp complex’s existence: it was evacuated only months after Kielar had left it. This constitutes a major difference to Adam: as a Transylvanian Jew, he is deported to Birkenau in 1944 during the Ungarn-Aktion. Thus, while Kielar’s multi-facetted account is ‘completer’ because of his, by all standards, lengthy stay in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Adam’s is a condensation of events that happened in the real world before and during his fictional incarceration. Such confusing constellations are not entirely new – indeed, it is a constellation which appears paramount to documentary novels (even though Adam is the encyclopaedic exception within Capesius). If one substitutes ‘Babi Yar’ for ‘Auschwitz’, ‘Lisa Erdmann’ for ‘Adam’, ‘D. M. Thomas’ for ‘Dieter Schlesak’ and ‘Dina Pronicheva’ for (an admittedly rather wordy and vague) ‘literature written by Auschwitz survivors’, Lawrence Langer’s description of the ontological problem in D.M. Thomas’s documentary novel The White Hotel (1981) would fit the ontological problem that Adam poses: [f]acts we know because they have happened; fictions we only imagine. But the facts of Babi Yar are “unimaginable,” and this is why what I call fictional facts play such an important role in our response to and understanding of the Holocaust. By creating an imagined context for Dina Pronicheva’s experience at Babi Yar, Thomas makes accessible to the imagination what might have seemed intractable material. But at the same time, he alters the narrative of the real survivor, Dina Pronicheva, whose ordeal is transmitted by Kuzenstov; and in so doing, he creates what I call a factual fiction, since there never was a Lisa Erdmann, so that her “perception” of Babi Yar is an invention. (L. L. Langer 1995, 79)

4.4.3 Four ‘cold’ intertexts Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen: “Kanada”, moral indignation and cynicism The author of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1947), Tadeusz Borowski, was a non-Jewish Polish survivor of Auschwitz, Natzweiler and Dachau, whose prose was often (but not exclusively) set in Auschwitz-Birkenau.⁴⁵ This

 With the exception of my discussion of the Sonderkommando Scrolls, this subchapter relies heavily on an earlier publication (Vanassche 2018) but is an extended version of it – particularly the discussion concerning Mauritius Berner. As to Borowski’s short stories: they were originally

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constellation often causes critics to read Borowski’s texts as factual and autobiographic, but there are good reasons for reading Borowski’s prose as fictional discourse (Franklin 2011, 27– 28). Of course, this interpretation does not negate the obvious fact that Borowski’s experiences in the concentration camps have substantially influenced (or even defined) his literary texts. Nevertheless, the intertextual reference within Capesius to This Way complicate matters substantially. The fictional Adam recounts his meeting with a Tadeusz Borowski, who shows strong biographic parallels to the historical Borowski: Adam Salmen: Tadeusz, mein “Kanada”-Gefährte, mit dem ich in jenen Tagen auf der Rampe arbeiten musste, hat das ganz anders im Sinn. Er hat nach der Befreiung, erst neunundzwanzig, Selbstmord begangen, draußen konnte er es nicht aushalten, die Erinnerung hat ihn getötet. (C, 35) Adam Salmen: Tadeusz, my “Canada partner,” with whom I was forced to work on the ramp in those days, had a completely different view of all this. He committed suicide after the liberation, only twenty-nine years old, he couldn’t take it on the outside; the memory of it killed him. (DoA, 32)

Moreover, the intradiegetic narrator named Tadeusz Borowski in Capesius shows remarkable parallels to the extradiegetic first-person narrator from Borowski’s This Way: both describe the arrival of a death train using a very similar vocabulary and discourse. There is the presence of a whining, one-legged girl (TW, 46; C, 36, 41). Dead children lifted from the cattle cars are being removed “like chickens” (TW, 39; C, 38). There is a French friend named Henri (TW, 30; C, 38). A desperate question about the morality of the actions of the ‘Kanada’ commando arises (TW, 40; C, 39).⁴⁶ The Zyklon B poison gas is transported to the gas chambers in a truck marked with the Red Cross (TW, 38; C, 33). The perpetrators do their ‘bookkeeping of destruction’: the recording of the precise number of trucks transporting victims to the gas chambers (TW, 39; C, 33). An SS soldier cynically replies to a request to speak with the camp commandant (TW, 46; C, 40 – 41). Such correspondences suggest a nonfictional reading of This Way – as if there were no difference between that text’s anonymous auto- and intradiegetic narrator and its author Borowski. Principally, the Borowski featured in Adam’s fictional narration is also fictional, but he is only as fictional as Napoleon in Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) is: he is not entirely imaginary (Gallagher published under the title Pożegnanie z Marią (literally: Farewell to Maria); the English translation was first published in 1967.  This commando, consisting of inmates, was responsible for bringing the newly arrived victims’ belongings to warehouses and for sorting the items and valuables (which were then transported to Germany).

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2011, esp. 318 – 321). As such, he has a different ontological status than Adam himself. Of course, that does not contradict the fact that Capesius renders a nonfictional reading of This Way plausible. The suggestion of the factual is weaved into Adam’s fictional story. On the one hand, Capesius denies This Way’s fictivity by (on the pragmatic level) ignoring its fictionality and (on the ontological level) by not implying its events had not taken place. On the other hand, this purportedly factual story is integrated into Adam’s fictional story. The implication is, therefore, that Adam’s story may be fictional, but not necessarily fictive. This would be in line with the claim on the book’s cover: “[a]uch was Adam, die einzige fiktionale Person des Buchs, berichtet, entstammt bis ins Detail den historischen Quellen” (what Adam, the only fictional character in the book, reports, corresponds to the historical sources down to the last detail). So far, there are no internal contradictions: if one can integrate historical persons in a fictive narrative without necessarily rendering those persons fictive, the same logic applies to historical events. And even if one doesn’t agree with Capesius’s implication – that This Way is to be read as nonfiction – this does not pose an insurmountable ontological problem. On the contrary, a fictive story can easily be incorporated in another fictive and/or fictional story.⁴⁷ However, there is a different phenomenon threatening my line of argumentation so far: despite the vast correspondences between the narrator Borowski’s story (in Capesius) and the author Borowski’s story (This Way), there is one substantial difference, albeit a detail: in Adam’s story, the newly arrived victims come from Transylvania (C, 39), while in This Way they are Polish (from “Sosnowiec-Będzin;” TW, 37).⁴⁸ It is not difficult to fathom why Schlesak takes this ‘poetic liberty’: his documentary novel primarily deals with the circumstances his ‘compatriots’ faced in Auschwitz – outlining both the fates of the Transylvanian Jews as well as the crimes committed there by the ‘ethnic Germans’ of that region.⁴⁹ As such, the modification in the re-narrated story serves the depiction on the novel’s ‘macro-level’. Yet this means that the claim on the cover cannot live up: either one considers Borowski’s short story as a historical, nonfictional source – in that case, any modification would entail a degree of fictivity, and ergo, Adam’s narrative cannot correspond to the historical sources “bis ins De-

 And if one considers This Way fictive, the designation “historische Quelle” might be problematic to start with.  Moreover, these victims come from the immediate surroundings of Auschwitz-Birkenau, as Sosnowiec-Będzin lies approximately 45 km from the extermination camp.  Hilberg notes that in Auschwitz, “a sizable percentage of the guards was ethnic German” (PVB, 38). Elsewhere, he specifies this: according to him, more than one-third of the Auschwitz guards in 1944 were ethnic Germans (Hilberg 1997, 4).

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tail” (emphasis added: down to the last detail); or the modification causes us to conclude, retrospectively, that Borowski’s short story must be read as fiction rather than as nonfiction. This, in turn, clashes with the implication of Adam’s description of Borowski. Alexander Kluge’s Ein Liebesversuch: medicalised killing and sexual violence If the interferences between fictionality, fictivity and nonfictionality in the first intertext disrupt the interpretation process massively, they do so even more in the second intertext, Alexander Kluge’s Ein Liebesversuch, especially since this intertext is marked by such interferences itself. In the preface to Lebensläufe, the volume in which Ein Liebesversuch was originally published, the reader is being ‘warned’: “[d]ie Erzählungen dieses Bandes stellen aus sehr verschiedenen Aspekten die Frage nach der Tradition. Es handelt sich um Lebensläufe, teils erfunden, teils nicht erfunden; zusammen ergeben sie eine traurige Geschichte” (Kluge 1962, s.p.; in various aspects, the stories in this volume pose questions about tradition. They are life stories, partially invented, partially not invented; together, they add up to a sad story). Ein Liebesversuch is the retrospective description of an experiment by National Socialist doctors, by which they tried to determine the success of their sterilisation attempts: two concentration camps inmates, who were known to have been lovers before their incarceration, are being seduced to sexual intercourse. The doctors then wish to establish the (in)fertility of the inmates and hence the success of their earlier attempts. Yet the experiment fails because the inmates cannot be brought (or are not able) to have intercourse. Schlesak’s re-narration quotes from Kluge’s short story (partially literally) but modifies the details. The prisoner J. is renamed Lotte (L, 134; C, 256) and P. becomes Paul (L, 134; C, 256). The female prisoner’s native city is no longer G. in Lower Saxony but Bistritz in Transylvania (L, 134; C, 256). ⁵⁰ Kluge’s original text does not name the perpetrator (who seems to be conducting a self-interview, cf. Stollmann 2004, 152); in Schlesak’s re-narration, the perpetrator is called Dr Schumann (C, 255). As such, he shares his name with a historical perpetrator based in Auschwitz (cf. Mitscherlich and Mielke 2009, 314– 315, 378). Whether this or similar experiments took place is impossible to establish without a doubt. Mitscherlisch and Mielke refer to correspondence between an SS-officer named Rudolf Brandt and Professor Carl Clauberg, with the former suggesting to the latter to organise an experiment along the lines of Kluge’s de-

 In Romanian: Bistrița.

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scription (Mitscherlich and Mielke 2009, 319).⁵¹ However, it is unclear whether such an experiment ever took place (Stollmann 2004, 152). If we may believe Rudolf Höss – which is not self-evident – it did not, with Clauberg unable to organise it due to the imminent Nazi retreat from the area (cf. Lifton 1986, 272). It is not unlike Kluge to distil his story from Brandt’s letter, as this is a literary procedure found throughout his oeuvre: as points out in his analysis of Kluge’s Heidegger auf der Krim (published in Chronik der Gefühle [2000]), Kluge uses historical events (the Einsatzgruppen mass shootings on the Crimea in 1941) and historical texts (Martin Heidegger’s infamous Rektoratsrede, in which he urged German academics to support the Nazi cause in 1934) to create a counterfactual Heidegger. The counterfactuality basically consists of the military metaphors in the Rektoratsrede rendered literal: Heidegger joins the invading German armies, is confronted with the Wehrmacht’s crimes,⁵² and is expected to provide a cultural legitimation for the invasion of the Crimea (Martens 2014, 70). Yet here, the counterfactual element is unmistakable: in spite of the correspondences to isolated atrocities and sociological realities (in particular, the generally very high level of education enjoyed by the officers in these death squads) the real Heidegger, of course, did not take part in the German invasion (Martens 2014, 71– 73). By contrast, in Lebensläufe, the ontological status of the events remains ultimately unclear. It is – sadly – not unimaginable that the experiment did take place but that all evidence about it has been destroyed in anticipation of Nazi Germany’s military defeat. In this context, Kluge seems to point to the difference between truth and facticity – or at least shows that facticity entails not just the factual event but also its sheer possibility within a given (bio)political configuration. For this reason, fiction and nonfiction are not easily distinguished within his oeuvre. By attributing the questions and answers to a historical perpetrator, Schlesak seems to strengthen their factual authenticity and, hence, the events as having actually happened – even if he names Schumann and not Clauberg as the organiser of the experiment (the fictional Adam does, however, claim that Schumann got his inspiration from Clauberg; C, 253).

 Rudolf Brandt was a member of Himmler’s personal staff and was sentenced to death in Nuremburg for his role in the murderous experiments conducted in Auschwitz.  In 1961, Hilberg already and repeatedly pointed to the involvement of the Wehrmacht in genocide and war crimes, the myth of the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht, as contrasted to a soiled (?) SS, persisted in Germany until at least fifty years after the war, when the controversial Wehrmachtsausstellung, initiated by the Hamburg Institut für Sozialforschung, toured Germany and Austria. The myth proved persistent, without a doubt also because Destruction was only translated into German in the 1980s.

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Schlesak-through-Adam posits that Kluge uses two eyewitness statements: ich weiß, wer es war, es war mein Leidensgenosse und Freund Dr. Berner, doch vor allem das Tagebuch und die Briefe der mitagierenden Ärzte, und zwar die des Dr. Wirths, Aufzeichnungen von Schumann selbst, sowie Kluges eigene Einfühlung in den Fall. (C, 255) some of this came from my friend and brother in suffering, Dr. Berner, but more of it, importantly, is taken from the journal and letters of Dr. Wirths, one of the doctors who was part of these experiments. He also uses notes taken by Schumann himself, and Kluge includes his own empathetic sense of these events. (DoA, 262)

If the factual authenticity is enhanced, there are hints at a potential fictivity, too. Kluge’s empathetic sense already marks a shift from mere fact to interpretation, which is moreover not marked as such. Yet Adam’s own discourse is equally – if not more – marked by fictionalisation. One contradiction is obvious: instead of two purported eyewitnesses, three are mentioned: Berner, Wirths and Schumann. Other instances of fictionalisation are paramount – aside from the aforementioned changing of names and this instance of seeming narrative unreliability. One of them is rather covert – and, frankly, prone to a good deal of speculation: could Berner have been involved at all? This would imply that he served as Häftlingsartz, which is not impossible, but to my knowledge, the historical record does not substantiate this. Berner does not mention this in his Auschwitz memoirs, which were written in Hungarian shortly after the war but have only recently been translated in German, and instead claims he held a privileged position in the Kanada commando, where he had to tie shirts together in parcels to be sent to Germany (Berner 2016, 79 – 80). Berner does mention medical experiments that involved partial or complete castration and testifies that he has seen some of these men’s emasculated bodies – but only because these victims showed their mutilated bodies to him (116 – 117). To be sure, corroborating a negative is more difficult than corroborating a positive. Gisella Perl’s I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, which is mentioned in Capesius’s bibliography, does not refer to Berner at all. Neither does Ladislaus Szücs’s eyewitness account (equally mentioned in Capesius’s bibliography) offer us any indication: between the dedication of the memoir to his grandchildren and the table of contents, the author maintains that he has not written it in order to judge anyone. Therefore, he has anonymised all persons unless they are already known through other accounts or legal proceedings (Szücs 1995, s.p.). Neither does Olga Lengyel refer to Berner – Lengyel, who had been a medical assistant to her husband prior to the war, had also served in the medical staff, albeit as a nurse rather than a doctor. Afterwards, she wrote her memoirs, Five Chimneys, which opens with a proclamation of shared guilt in the deaths of her family members (Lengyel

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1995, 11) but in which she describes the prisoner doctors as “shackled” (185).⁵³ She does not name them, however, and only maintains that a Polish doctor headed the sterilisation experiments described in Capesius (Lengyel 1995, 190). Elsewhere she abbreviates the names of fellow prisoner doctors to the initial letter (145 – 150). Her memoir cannot be used as indication of Berner’s activities as Häftlingsarzt. Berner is mentioned as the author of a manuscript titled Memoir in the bibliography attached to Capesius, and it is implied that Schlesak holds a copy of this memoir, which has been translated and annotated by, surprisingly, Victor Capesius. At the time of writing, this copy was not retained in Schlesak’s Vorlass, held at the DLA, and therefore it was impossible to assess whether Capesius comments or suggests that Berner did serve as Häftlingsarzt. ⁵⁴ To claim that Berner was a Häftlingsarzt is, therefore, ontologically speaking only a potential fictionalisation of history. Nonetheless, one may ask what the ethical implications are of suggesting that a doctor was a Häftlingsarzt. Schlesak evokes the pathos of unease, the pathos of the grey zone, which calls for sensitivity yet does not come without accusatory implications. If it is uncertain whether a person belonged to this specific grey zone, an additional pathos (in reception) is evoked. Released in the same year as I sommersi e i salvati, where Levi outlines the fact that one had to cross certain moral thresholds in order to survive,⁵⁵ Robert Lifton highlights that a grey zone amongst the Häftlingsärzte does not automatically amount to their being perpetrators: [w]hat resulted were profound conflicts within prisoner doctors concerning their relationship to the Auschwitz ecology and to their SS masters as they (the prisoner doctors) struggled to remain free of selections […] and to retain a genuinely healing function […]. There were antagonisms among these prisoner doctors along with a few examples of close identification with Nazi medical policies […]. But it was the SS doctors who pulled the strings,

 Perl’s and Lengyel’s accounts are marked by an unmistakable pathos – not merely because of the facts described in them but also by the authors’ insistence on resisting the SS, each in her own way: Perl by aborting foetuses so their mothers would not be sent to the gas chamber; Lengyel by passing on information for the resistance movement in the camp. Yet Lengyel addresses the importance of keeping cool in the face of danger, not in the least to avoid upsetting her children and to remain some sense of order in the deportation trains (Lengyel 1995, 15 – 17).  Schlesak’s death in March 2019, and the subsequent pandemic, left me with no opportunities for checking his Nachlass on this matter.  Levi makes sure not to resort to platitudes: his concept of the grey zone does not imply that there were only grey – on the contrary, it states that there are many shades of it, and so his reactions to (his judgement of) the Sonderkommando and Chaim Rumkowski, the chairman of the Jewish council in the Lodz ghetto, remain very ambivalent as well (cf. SeS, 24– 51).

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who, while not without their own significant inner conflict, managed to adapt sufficiently to the Auschwitz system to maintain its medicalised killing […]. (Lifton 1986, 151)

In spite of Lifton’s justified and nuanced approach to those doctors, a sense of unease – which, I wish to stress, comes without moral judgement – remains: this grey zone may be considered especially sensitive because of the reversal of life and death in the Nazi death camps’ medicalised killing. Schlesak risks drawing Berner in a morally fraught situation, even more when one considers the normative implications that underlie his depiction of the Sonderkommando. ⁵⁶ One could argue, with Maria Irod, that such liberties go against the perpetrator’s discourse. Irod sees three modes of representation in Capesius: Capesius’s adhering to the sheer facts as expressed in statistics and dates; Albert’s very lofty and speculative language, which renders Auschwitz and the crimes committed there extremely abstract (and, therefore, devoid of any individual guilt) and the surviving eyewitness’s reports written in Auschwitz itself (Irod 2009, 201– 202).⁵⁷ Yet if Schlesak meddles with sheer facts in order to avoid falling prey to Capesius’s mode of representing Auschwitz, here he risks unwittingly siding with the perpetrators by potentially blaming an innocent victim. The fact that Adam later avows his survival to Berner’s having bribed two guards cannot completely disavow the earlier meddling (C, 309 – 310). In addition to this very covert fictionalisation strategy, others are more easily discerned, by comparing Kluge’s original and its re-narration in Schlesak’s work. Such a comparison shows that unlike J. in Kluge’s Liebesversuch, ⁵⁸ (but in line with older Nazisploitation literature and cinema), Lotte is the daughter of a Jewish lawyer from Transylvania and would therefore be considered Jewish by the Nazis as well, which would render her an unlikely selectee for the camp brothel, as Schlesak describes her: “Lotte, Tochter eines siebenbürgischen jüdischen Re-

 Cf. Adam’s (self‐)description of the Sonderkommando: Das gab es vor allem im Krematorium, dort war fast alles unbewacht, außerhalb jeder Kontrolle. Man war gesellig beisammen. Ja, es wurde sogar zusammen mit den SS-Leuten gesungen und gegessen. Die schienen in Ordnung zu sein! […] Und es wurden laufend mit den SS-Männern Geschäfte gemacht. Sogar mit den Offizieren. (C, 108 – 109) That was mostly in the crematorium, there were almost no guards there, nobody checking up on you. It was sort of like a club. Yes, we even sang with the SS men, and ate with them. They actually seemed all right! […] And we were always making deals with the SS men. Even with the officers. (DoA, 108)  ‘Surviving’ refers to the fictional Adam. Many of those who wrote their accounts in Auschwitz did not live to tell afterwards.  At least, there is no explicit mentioning of her being Jewish – the only (and slightest) hint would be the explicit mentioning of her ‘Aryan’ husband (L, 134).

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chtsanwaltes […] hatte sich freiwillig als Hure gemeldet” (C, 256; Lotte, daughter of a Transylvanian Jewish lawyer […] had voluntarily chosen to be a prostitute: DoA, 263 – 264).⁵⁹ Moreover, the notion of these women volunteering to be prostitutes is no longer considered accurate: Christl Wickert’s research demonstrates how these women were forced and coerced into what can hardly be considered anything other than systematised rape and how STDs and pregnancies endangered them (Wickert 2002, 50).⁶⁰ Soon after the war, with the camp brothels becoming increasingly taboo, derogatory depictions of these women as ‘whores’ became commonplace. This seems somewhat in line with the post-war claims by accused SS members that these girls and women volunteered for the brothel – claims which these women could not counter since they were not invited to the witness stance (Wickert 2002, 51– 52). Moreover, Robert Sommer demonstrates that those women who did ‘volunteer’ were either lured by false promises by the SS, or that they were volunteered by the camp hierarchy, often the so-called Blockältesten (Sommer 2009, 88 – 90). And even if one assumes that some women might have ‘volunteered’, one needs to ask what it means to volunteer under the prevailing conditions in Auschwitz-Birkenau: starvation, exposure to the elements, extreme violence, corporeal emaciation etc. (cf. the testimonies by former ‘prostitutes’ cited in Sommer 2009, 100 – 101). But the re-narration’s fictionality is also obvious for those readers who are not aware of such historical facts. Rather, it is obvious from the story’s rhetorical situation: the inmates abused in the experiment, who have afterwards been shot, are made to speak in the fashion of retrospective testimony. Here, they have the last word, and the ‘detached’ perpetrator’s perspective, which dominates and determines Kluge’s Liebesversuch (and the general post-war narratives of the ‘brothel’⁶¹) is therefore perforated. Even if the perpetrator’s perspective is not exactly replaced with the victims’ perspective, it is certainly being supplemented with the latter. The pathos of the victims supplements the coldness of the perpetrators.

 Lifton strongly implies that the women in the brothel were all non-Jewish, probably in accordance with the Nazi race laws from 1935: “the twenty-two prostitutes – mostly Germans, Poles, and Russians – [were] the only non-Jewish residents of Block 10” (Lifton 1986, 270). Moreover, Christl Wickert shows that the Nazi ‘racial’ laws applied to prostitution as well – therefore, no Jewish women were forced (by the Wehrmacht) into sexual slavery (Wickert 2002, 43). Sommer finds no indications of Jewish women in the ‘brothel in Auschwitz’ (Sommer 2009, 136). For the same reason, only non-Jewish inmates were allowed to frequent the ‘brothel’ (Sommer 2009, 132).  As to the terminology, cf. Sommer 2009, 27– 29.  Sommer notes that no testimonies by women who had been forced in the Auschwitz ‘brothel’ have been handed down and that testimonies by other former Auschwitz inmates highlight the post-war silence upheld by these women (136, 140).

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The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, once more: Peter Weiss’s Die Ermittlung The assumption that Peter Weiss’s Die Ermittlung serves as a tacit intertext for Capesius seems to have existed in some way since the publication of the latter. Irod considers the documentary format, the problematisation of testimony, a lack of guilt on behalf of the perpetrators and a shared poetics of antirealism as reasons for considering both texts in the same tradition (Irod 2009, 194). Yet there are additional reasons for such views: Die Ermittlung already constitutes a literary response to the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, and it explicitly mentions Victor Capesius’s crimes. But more fundamentally, it also uses intertextual interpolations which equally lead to interferences between fictivity, fictionality, and nonfictionality. Moreover, these go beyond Irod’s correct observation that an interpolation between the documentary and the invented stems from a postmodern distrust against an “Omnipotenz des Fiktionalen” (195; omnipotence of fiction): the interferences take place within each of these modes. Die Ermittlung remains a tacit intertext, however: in contrast to Borowski’s This Way and Kluge’s Liebesversuch, Weiss’s drama is not mentioned in the bibliography attached to Capesius. Most of the intertextual references in Die Ermittlung are tacit as well. These have been well-documented, however:⁶² Weiss attended several of the trial sessions; a substantial part of the play is based on the news coverage of Bernd Naumann for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Yet there are other sources, and Weiss has been severely criticised for not mentioning them. According to that criticism, this amounts stricto sensu to Verdichtung. ⁶³ As such, the practice contradicts the claims of authenticity that are central to documentary theatre. To put it somewhat bluntly, Weiss’s contemporaries, by refusing the playwright any poetic licence of Verdichtung, constructed Die Ermittlung as factual. Yet in the preface to Die Ermittlung, Weiss acknowledges that the play features fictional elements: [h]underte von Zeugen traten vor dem Gericht auf. Die Gegenüberstellung von Zeugen und Angeklagten, sowie die Reden und Gegenreden, waren von emotionalen Kräften überladen. […] Doch sollen im Drama die Träger dieser Namen nicht noch einmal angeklagt werden. Sie leihen dem Schreiber des Dramas nur ihre Namen, die hier als Symbole stehen für

 The list to follow is thus an amalgamation of the following sources: Meyer (2000, 123 – 140), Meyer (2005, 252– 260), Lindner (1990, 114– 128) and Lindner (2004, 131– 145). This applies to the paragraphs after the Weiss quotation, too.  In this context, this word proves impossible to translate: literally, Verdichtung means compression, compaction, densification; but the pun lies in the meaning of Dichtung as literature, literary work, poetry. In the latter sense, it is often associated with fictionality; Ver-Dichtung then points to a fictionalisation of historical events.

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ein System, das viele anderen schuldig werden ließ, die vor diesem Gericht nie erschienen. (Weiss 2005, 9) Hundreds of witnesses appeared before the court. The confrontation of witnesses and the accused, as well as the addresses to the court by the prosecution and the replies by the counsel for the defence, were overcharged with emotion. […] Yet the bearers of these names should not be accused once again in this drama. To the author, they have lent their names which, within the drama, exist as symbols of a system that implicated in its guilt many others who never appeared to court. (Weiss 1966, s.p.)

Aside from this anonymisation, Die Ermittlung features alienation effects in line with Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre: the written language is ‘broken’ by the many enjambments and the absence of punctuation. This has been interpreted as Weiss’s poetic shaping of his critique of capitalism – a critique that is uttered as well as formed: the collaboration between the SS and Big Industry and the latter’s exploitation of the concentration camp inmates is repeatedly mentioned in the play (e. g. Weiss 2005, 12, 107, 140, 215) and already alluded to in the preface (9 – 10). The play’s structure is a reference to Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia and thus continues the immediate post-liberation news coverage by the Allied press, which described the concentration camps as Dantesque infernos. Moreover, the inversion of the Sermon of the Mount (according to Matthew) should illustrate the inmates’ hopeless situation. Such fictionalisation strategies have two consequences: first, they serve a political (Marxist) interpretation of Auschwitz, which is (paradoxically) depicted as a quasi-ahistorical phenomenon, as perverse culmination of capitalism. As such, the play aimed to break political taboos in the Federal Republic of Germany, but Raul Calzoni argues that the play’s contemporaries did not perceive it as such (Calzoni 2015, 6). Secondly, they ‘de-emotionalise’ the pathos of the testimonies before court (in the case of the alienation effects) and reinforce, perhaps paradoxically, their emotionality (the structure of the play and the inversed Sermon of the Mount). Some caution is due with these remarks: some fictionalisation and emotionalisation strategies cannot (or only to some extent) be retained on stage. Very often, prefaces will not be read out loud. Therefore, Weiss’s remarks in the preface might be considered as a response to the criticism or as an attempt to authorise the play’s poetic aspirations (which implies at least some degree of fictivity). The claim that the contemporary reception understood Die Ermittlung as nonfictional is supported by Burkhardt Lindner’s critique of literary scholars, who, according to Lindner, have not scrutinised Weiss’s remarks (Lindner 2004, esp. 133, 141). Lindner’s thesis challenges the consensus by positing that Die Ermittlung is not a prime example of documentary theatre. He points to

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the fictivity of the material and thematises this unmarked fictivity rather than the marked fictionality: gerade an Krauses akribischer Quellenübersicht […] lässt sich, anders als es der Autor intendiert, aufs deutlichste ablesen, wie Weiss die Chronologie der Aussagen unbeachtet lässt, wie er Aussagen verschiedener Zeugen amalgamiert, wie er Aussagen einzelner Personen zerschneidet und an verschiedenen Stellen in den Text einfügt und wie er Prozessaussagen und andere Überlieferungen als einheitliches Material verwendet. (Lindner 2004, 137) Krause has meticulously listed Weiss’s sources [, which] allows us, against the author’s intentions, to see how Weiss does not take the chronology of the testimonies into account, how he amalgamates the statements of various witnesses, how he cuts up testimonies and inserts section in his text, and how he uses testimonies before the court and different sources as being all one and the same.

The differentiation between fictivity and fictionality, which Lindner does not mention at all, is nonetheless particularly relevant for documentary literature and documentary theatre: underlying Lindner’s argument is a perceived incongruence between fictivity and nonfictionality – not to mention the normative idea that nonfictional texts do not have (or ought not to have) fictive elements. To be sure, Lindner’s object of criticism is not as much Peter Weiss or his play, but rather its uncritical interpretation: Lindner maintains that Die Ermittlung is to be read as fiction. Into the abyss (II): the Sonderkommando Scrolls For a considerable amount of time, the antirealist notion that the Shoah was “an event without a witness” (Felman and Laub 1992, 80) – because the Nazis tried to kill all witnesses, and because the events were of such a psychologically distorting nature that even those present could not really testify – was commonplace, especially in approaches to the Shoah informed by trauma theory. Primo Levi famously argues that the “saved” cannot ‘really’ testify about the Shoah because they constitute an aberration: no one was supposed to survive the genocide, and those who did form the statistical exception: [i] sommersi, anche se averessero avuto carta e penna, non avrebbero testimoniato, perché la loro morte era cominciata prima di quella corporale. Settimane e mesi prima di spegnersi, avevano già perduto la virtú di osservare, ricordare, commisurare ed esprimersi. Parliamo noi in loro vece, per delega. (SeS, 63 – 64) Even if they had pen and paper, the submerged would not have testified because their death had begun before that of their body. Weeks and months before being snuffed out,

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they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, compare and express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy. (DS, 90)

From this perspective, which is heavily influenced by the fate of the Muselmänner and does not take the Sonderkommando Scrolls nor the three poems from the Theresienstadt family camp into account,⁶⁴ only the “drowned” could testify to the absolute horror, which is, of course a (bio)logical impossibility. It seems to me that this notion equally stems from the camouflage with which the gassing and burning were surrounded and with its invisibility: the Sonderkommando did see the unfolding of the gassing and the gruesome scenes upon opening the gas chambers, and the only ones to see the gassing as it happened were a handful of SS doctors and officers. To be a direct witness to the gassing implies having a compromised perspective. Nevertheless, against this notion of unrepresentability, Nicholas Chare and Dominick Williams emphasise that the Shoah has produced direct witnessing, and that this is manifested in the secretly written accounts by members of the Sonderkommando (Chare and Williams 2016, 14– 17). Apart from criticising Dori Laub’s insistence on the necessity of “passive detachment” for witnessing, they refute Laub’s rebuttal of the Scrolls as an authentic witnessing (Chare and Williams 2016, 14). Laub indeed refutes these scrolls because these supposedly lack an “awareness and […] comprehension of the event – of its dimensions, consequences, and above all, of its radical otherness to all known frames of reference” (Felman and Laub 1992, 84; qtd. in Chare and Williams 2016, 14). Yet Chare and Williams are sympathetic to the notion of trauma and its being only accessible through the blank screen of psychotherapy – as Laub suggests. They argue, however, that the “plain pages used by the authors of the ‘Scrolls’ occasionally provided a ‘blank screen’ comparable to the analyst” (Chare and Williams 2016, 15). The Scrolls thus fulfilled, in this argument, a therapeutic function, amidst the destruction in which their authors were forced participate that could otherwise not be fulfilled: therapists incarcerated in the camps, like Viktor Frankl, were of course preoccupied with surviving themselves (15). Instead, writing the Scrolls “helped to prevent the kind of loss of subjectivity that Laub has claimed rendered attesting from within impossible” (15). How does one read these Scrolls? Before the turn of the century, they were largely dismissed as historical evidence. Chare and Williams argue that this was the result of both a fundamental suspicion of the Sonderkommando – as ex-

 These poems may be even lesser known than the Sonderkommando Scrolls, which have been the subject of increased analysis and research over the last years. The poems are included, in Gerald Turner’s English translation, in Kulka 2014 (51– 55).

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emplified, for example, in Primo Levi’s highly ambivalent description of them in The Grey Zone (SeS, 38 – 44) – and their limited scope: they were only sources of the Shoah as it took place in Birkenau and could not shed any light on the other extermination camps, the killing fields or the ghettos (Chare and Williams 2016, 5 – 13). At the beginning of the century, Stone and Didi-Huberman, with their own emphases, argued that the Scrolls (and, for Didi-Huberman, the Sonderkommando photographs) constitute agency: Didi-Huberman highlights the fact that taking pictures in a concentration camp – let alone in an extermination camp – was an act of resistance, while Stone points to the historical and philosophical reflection found in the Sonderkommando Scrolls (Didi-Huberman 2001, 229; Stone 2013a, 23 – 25). They read these texts as nonfictional (although Stone mentions the literary quality of Zalman Gradowski’s text). Chare and Williams wish to differentiate this reading, though. They, too, stress the fact that Gradowski’s text is a literary representation, which implies a degree of fictionality in the sense that not every event happened precisely as described but without losing its status as ‘true’ (20). Indeed, the fact that they all emerged in a shared spatial-temporal environment – the Sonderkommando active in Birkenau after December 1942 – may render us blind for their diversity, which is in part explained by the diverse background of their authors: Zalman Gradowski, Zalman Lewental and Leyb Langfuss were Polish Jews. Chaim Herman was deported from France. Marcel Nadjary was a Greek Jew. Moreover, the specifics of the anti-Jewish persecution and final deportation to the death camps differed, however slightly, from country to country. Additionally, Chare and Williams point to the different self-understandings these authors had: whereas Lewental considered himself a historian (Chare and Williams 2016, 32– 33), Gradowski fashioned himself as witness “while simultaneously attesting to his powers as a writer, expressing, preserving his own creativity” (Chare and Williams 2016, 20). They question the historical veracity of his account of a group of soon-to-be-gassed women falling upon members of the Sonderkommando, asking for sexual gratification; and suggest that the text may be read differently: not referential, but as a testimony of Gradowski’s sense of guilt and desire for bodily and spiritual connectivity (79). Similarly, they consider the writings of Langfuss to transcend the merely factual: Chare and Williams argue that this religious man with a profound knowledge of Judaism probes the “ethical and affective mode of witnessing […] in ways that both draw upon narrative traditions within Yiddish, and that also meditate carefully upon the relation of individual suffering and collective trauma” (97). Moreover, there is the methodological difficulty of not being able to ask most of these authors why their accounts, at points, derive from the historical record: they did not survive. They cannot clarify which pact holds true. This means that

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the historian and literary scholar must take different possibilities into account and allow for a certain degree of speculation. In the case of Langfuss, they discuss a temporary discrepancy. In The Deportation, he describes the hanging of a group of Jews in Maków and the deportation announcement as both taking place in November 1942, whereas other historical sources agree that the hanging took place in the summer and that the announcement was made in November. Chare and Williams discuss the various possibilities for this derivation: a) the illegible part of the account (another methodological complication) could include a prolepsis; b) the author’s memory could have played a trick on him; c) Langfuss may not have been in Maków and thus did not report as a primary witness; d) or he knowingly decided to include an anachronism, in order to bring the point of the story home: [m]ass execution is compounded with an announcement of resettlement to draw out the latter’s equivalence to the former, to show the powerlessness of those receiving the announcement, and to highlight the way the execution was a form of terrorising and cowing the people so that they would be less willing to resist other moves against them. (Chare and Williams 2016, 99)

It will not do, therefore, to treat all Scrolls as one uniform object. Yet this is what happens in Capesius. From a quantitative point of view, the Sonderkommando Scrolls cannot be said to be very dominant, as they are sparsely quoted: their first appearance is after roughly one-sixth of the novel, with Adam referring to his copying of Leyb Langfuss’s story of the 3,000 naked women (C, 57– 58); the second appearance follows quite soon – it is Gradowski’s story of the shooting of Josef Schillinger (78);⁶⁵ the majority of the references is found in the penultimate chapter. But here, their positioning – after the story of the Hungarian Jews has been told, the novel cuts the pace and treats the final months almost as an epilogue to the Ungarn-Aktion – seems to imply that their texts constitute the ultimate form of witnessing. All authors of the Scrolls, except for Marcel Nadjary, are mentioned here, even if none of Lewental’s texts is quoted and one text by Langfuss is not attributed to him. Nonetheless, there is an inequality in the authors’ presence: Zalman Lewental, the ‘historian’ or ‘archivist’ of the Sonderkommando

 The story is also told by Filip Müller (1979, 138) as well as by several interviewees in Gideon Greif’s We Wept Without Tears (2005).

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(Stone 2013a, 24– 25; Chare and Williams 2016, 126) is mentioned there for the first time (C, 311). Moreover, in this later passage, where the Sonderkommando Scrolls are depicted in more detail, a minimal form of instability arises: whereas Gradowski’s first name is spelled initially with a ‘Z’ (78), here the initial letter is ‘S’ (311). Likewise, whereas the last letter of Leyb’s surname is initially spelled with ‘S’ (57), here it becomes ‘ß’ (311). The multiple options of transliterating the authors’ Yiddish names are not smoothed out, thus pointing, however faintly, to their Jewishness, which retains a linguistic trace.⁶⁶ Also mentioned for the first time is Chaim Herman (312), who instead of writing literature or chronicles wrote letters to his wife and daughter (Chare and Williams 2016, 154– 155). When it comes to the writings of Langfuss, there are ample citations as well: one text, attributed to him by Esther Mark and Chare and Williams, which consists basically of an appeal to the finder, is reproduced, but according to Adam, its author is not known. Indeed, the authorship cannot be established with 100 % certainty, but Chare and Williams follow Esther Mark in reading it, through the initials I.A.R.A.,⁶⁷ as a text by Langfuss: Mark argues that the initials stand for the Hebrew translation of his name (Chare and Williams 2016, 96, 119 n.5). This is in contrast with the earlier attribution, amongst others by the curators and historians at the Auschwitz Museum, to Gradowski. Adam suggests, however, that he, as an insider, might know who the author is: “[m]anche unterschrieben nicht einmal, blieben anonym, wie in folgendem Testament, doch ich kannte die Toten, wir haben zusammen Leichen zum Krematorium geschleppt. Hier sein Testament: [followed by what is presumably Langfuss’s testament]” (C, 310; [m]any of them were unsigned, anonymous, as this one is. However, I knew the man who wrote it, for together we had dragged bodies to the cremato-

 The practical and ethical questions of how to translate, especially how to translate texts testifying to trauma, are particularly interesting for Capesius since it contains various instances of the so-called lagerszpracha, the pidgin that emerged within the multilingual prisoner population of each of the concentration camps. The analysis of it falls out of the scope of this chapter (cf. Vanassche 2021). Suffice it to say here that the use of the lagerszpracha in Capesius serves at the same time as a poetics of realism and of depicting Auschwitz-Birkenau as an inaccessible place beyond time and space, and that translators of the novel have often, but not always, opted to erase those linguistic traces of Otherness in favour of rendering the text more readable. Although one cannot exclude the rather dull explanation that Schlesak was ‘sloppy’ in his transliterations, it might be worth thinking of the differences in transliteration at pointing at a similar poetics: retaining a nonhierarchical diversity of options, which in turn mirrors the various contradictory attempts of explaining or depicting Auschwitz. It does not necessarily point to a metaphysical or sublime connotation of the Sonderkommando experiences, although their inaccessibility has often obtained such dimensions.  In other transliterations: Y.A.R.A.

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rium: DoA, 324). In a sense, just as Langfuss elsewhere refuses to share certain details with his readers, Adam’s insistence on knowing the author could be read as posing a limitation to witness: only those who were in the Sonderkommando know, all others are separated by what Claude Lanzmann has called a “circle of flame” (Lanzmann 2007, 30; cf. Chare and Williams 2016, 214).⁶⁸ Yet the story of the 3,000 naked women, originally found in a text written by Langfuss, is correctly attributed. Adam notes how he copied the story, just in case the original got lost (C, 57– 58). Here, too, a tension between fiction and reality is detectable: of course, it was not ‘really’ Adam who knew the historical Langfuss, but the copying itself would imply an unmentioned act of translation: Langfuss was a Polish Jew who wrote his texts in Yiddish, while Adam reports in German. While Langfuss’s story of the 600 boys is included in Capesius, it is mentioned only towards the very end of the novel. A similar pathos-driven scene is narrated earlier: Josef Glück, born in Transylvania, testifies in the Auschwitz trial; Schlesak ‘reduces’ his testimony to the murder of Glück’s nephew Andreas Rapaport together with 1,200 other Hungarian teenagers, while supplementing it with the judges’ notes and Glück’s implication of Capesius in this event (C, 147– 148). The pathos consists, aside from the horrible death of children, mainly of the boy screaming to his uncle, telling him they know they are going to die and asking to tell his mother he thought of her. Glück then adds that he could not tell the boy that his mother had already been gassed. Schlesak comments that this witness was overwhelmed by the memory and broke down in court (C, 146 – 48). The pathos-driven story of the 600 boys is quoted by Adam – but not copied by him, as is the story of the 3,000 naked women. Moreover, Langfuss is not identified as the author of this text. It remains somewhat eerie in its non-attribution, as if the story has no known author – even more since the other texts are, mostly, attributed. It is treated as an isolated excerpt, a fragment fulfilling the Barthesian effet de réel. In this constellation, it differs fundamentally from Lanzmann’s approach to the story. The difference lies in Glück’s (and Schlesak’s) pathos versus Lanzmann’s pathos of anti-pathos. Filip Müller, one of the most predominant witnesses in the film, was filmed while reading the story, but this part did not make it into the final film (nor has it been included in any of the follow-up films to Shoah).⁶⁹ Chare and Williams argue that Lanzmann’s not using a close-up indi Yet Adam’s claim retains some ambivalence: it could be read as saying that Adam knew who the text’s author is, or alternatively, that he knew the author as a person – due to their co-presence in the Sonderkommando – but without knowing who exactly the author of that text is.  He and Lanzmann attribute the text to Lewental, in line with earlier scholarship. Chare and Williams maintain, with Esther Mark, that the text was very likely written by Langfuss.

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cates that he did not expect an emotional outburst on Müller’s part – Müller admits that he did not witness that event himself – yet tears do well up during Müller’s reading of Langfuss’s story. Here, he maintains his emotional self-control. This stands in contrast to the part where Müller tells the camera that upon the arrival of Czech Jews, he entered the gas chamber as a way of committing suicide, only to be implored by a girl named Jana to leave and to live in order to testify. Recounting this, he breaks down;⁷⁰ his performance of keeping cool is ruptured in the same way Abraham Bomba’s is when he recounts the meeting of family members in the Treblinka gas chamber (Chare and Williams 2016, 217– 219). It should be noted that he almost breaks down again when he recounts the breaking down of Jana’s boyfriend when the latter hears of her death (Lanzmann 1979a, FV3210, 16m45s).⁷¹ At this moment, Müller may be said to empathise or even (briefly) identify with the boyfriend, which is reflected linguistically: during this recounting, he slips briefly, presumably unconsciously, into the perspective of this boyfriend: “[d]a würden wir heiraten. Und da brachte er in einen großen, also da fängt er an zu weinen” (Lanzmann 1979a, FV3210, 17m26s, emphasis added; we would get married. And then he broke into a big, so he starts to cry). Lanzmann seem to have omitted this excerpt from the film since he already has the rupturing of Müller’s affective self-control in the narrating of other events;⁷² in Schlesak’s narrative the stories of the Sonderkommando take the form of either an afterthought or a story to which little more can be added. Note that this clashes with his modifications in Borowski’s and Kluge’s narratives: whereas these recount the murder of Polish resp. German Jews, Schlesak renders the stories ‘closer to home’ by changing these minor details. The stories

 If one compares the outtakes with the final film, one concludes this must happen on camera roll 15 (Lanzmann 1979a, FV3210).  The scene is found in F. Müller 1979 (179 – 189) and ends with Müller’s avowal that he could no longer find the strength to try and console Sascha. Inga Clendinnen, while not discarding or diminishing the value of Müller’s account, is sceptical about the Jana episode: “[w]ould [Jana] have died where [Müller] left her? It may be true. Extraordinary things happened in Auschwitz, as in every camp. But it is also true that in any other context I would challenge Müller and some of his death-chamber stories on the ground of implausibility” (Clendinnen 1999, 24).  Lanzmann has been criticised for keeping these outbursts in the film, against Müller’s express wishes (Kilian 2022, 273). It is widely noted that Müller refused to give further testimonies after the release of Shoah; Chare and Williams claim that this is not (only) due to Lanzmann’s disregarding Müller’s wishes, but also due to the intense editing of his testimony (Chare and Williams 2019, 225). Gideon Greif adds that Müller “no longer wished to […] provide written replies to questions that were presented to him and that his “physical and mental condition deteriorated perceptibly” (Greif 2005, 81).

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of the Sonderkommando, so it seems, are not to be meddled with – perhaps these are for Schlesak, too, surrounding by a ‘circle of flames’.

4.4.4 The case of the protocols: three forms of fictionalisation Schlesak’s use of these literary intertexts is, thus, fundamental in the shaping of the pathos and the anti-pathos that both run through his novel. These intertexts, which already confuse the reader as to the degree to which their fictionality is rooted in historical reality, are further fictionalised. While these two phenomena – pathos and fictionality – do not stand in any causal relation, occasionally they intersect: few would consider Schlesak’s interventions within these literary intertexts as problematic, save with the exception of Berner’s being placed in a grey zone for which there may not be enough evidence. Save for this, the fact that not everything corresponds to the historical facts, as the paratext claims, is not an insurmountable ethical problem: Capesius is, in this regard, a literary response to literary texts. But does the same hold true for the interference with the protocols? The fact that the testimonies before court count as such a signpost of factuality, its montage as a way of undoing Capesius’s self-exculpatory strategy, means that any tampering with it is a sensitive issue. If the perpetrator is shown to be lying, is any tampering with the protocols not also a form of lying? The answer must be nuanced since there are three kinds of fictionalisation to be noticed, not all of which need be met with such a suspicion. These can be defined as the literalisation and condensation of oral discourse, the mingling of different sources by the same authors and Schlesak’s including of phrases never spoken by the quoted witness. This latter category is established with a major caveat: whereas the first two categories can be unambiguously demonstrated by comparing two (or three) texts and pointing at the differences; maintaining that Schlesak included elements not found in other texts means that one is dealing with a negative phenomenon: the comparison can only yield what is not found. Corroborating a negative is more difficult than corroborating a positive, and my claims are limited to the extent that I compare the protocols and the available published memoirs as listed in the bibliography. Literalisation and condensation Schlesak’s literalisation means that the orality of the testimonies in Frankfurt is smoothed out in favour of an account that adheres to the standards of written German. This includes the correction of grammatical errors – although many

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of the Romanian survivors did testify in German, the grammatical quality of their testimonies varied. But Schlesak also smooths out the Austriacisms found in Otto Wolken’s testimony in favour of Standard German (compare C, 50 – 53 with “Strafsache gegen Mulka u. a.” Vernehmung des Zeugen Otto Wolken 1964, 19 – 22). A prime example of condensation is Schlesak’s editing of Paul Pajor’s testimony, where presumed irrelevant details are deleted (compare C, 27– 28 with “Strafsache gegen Mulka u. a.” Vernehmung des Zeugen Paul Pajor 1964, 1– 2). This condensation goes beyond the obvious fact that Schlesak had to shorten all testimonies. But in the case of Wolken, certain episodes are quasi entirely reproduced (with grammatical and stylistic modifications), whereas Pajor’s account is stripped of details within the one recounted in Capesius. Mingling of sources The mingling of these sources is exemplified in the testimonies of Ella Salomon and Mariana Adam, who both testified in Frankfurt and co-authored their Auschwitz memoirs: the book contains both memoirs separately. Indeed, there is a tacit indication that both the testimonies and the memoirs are used: after all, Salomon is initially quoted commenting on her testimony in court (C, 11; cf. Adam and Salomon 2001, 123). One does not need to expand upon the fact how this could not stem from the testimony itself. And indeed, the next quotes stem from these memoirs as well (C, 16 – 17; Adam and Salomon 2001, 122) – only the third occurrence of Salomon is quoted from her testimony in Frankfurt – albeit in condensed and literalised form – which is indicated by Schlesak’s mentioning of a “Vorsitzender” (a presiding judge) posing a question (compare C, 21– 22 with “Strafsache gegen Mulka u. a.” Vernehmung der Zeugin Ella Salomon 1964, 1– 2) Technically, Schlesak does not say that he merely quotes from either the testimonials in Frankfurt or the memoirs, and in these previous cases, the attribution is possible even without comparing the sources, but this is not always the case: while Schlesak creates the illusion that Mariana Adam’s first appearance is a quote from Frankfurt by seamlessly montaging it after Magda Szabo’s testimony, it is in fact a quote from the memoirs (compare C, 28 with Adam and Salomon 2001, 44). Pure invention? There are several instances where a comparison of the novel with protocols and memoirs as cited in the bibliography leads to the strong suspicion that Schlesak put words in the witnesses’ mouths that they did not utter – at least not in public. Suffice it to point to two instances. The first pertains to the testimony of Otto Wolken. While Schlesak largely follows the protocols (albeit while stylistically in-

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terfering, cf. supra), there is one instance where he seems to resort entirely to fictivity: Dr. Otto Wolken beim Prozess: “Oft an die tausend blieben dort meist ein bis zwei Tage. […] Am späten Abend wurden sie dann in der Regel auf Lastautos verladen – je 80 auf eines – und in die Gaskammer abtransportiert. Die SS leistete sich dabei noch manchen ‘Scherz’, indem sie prügelte und schoss.” (C, 56) Dr. Otto Wolken at the trial: “Often up to a thousand victims stayed there, mostly one or two days. […] Late in the evening, as a rule, they were then loaded into trucks – eighty per truck – and taken off to the gas chambers. And during this process the SS allowed itself a little ‘fun’ with them, with beating and shootings.” (DoA, 53)

Wolken’s testimony in Frankfurt as recorded in the protocol does not mention this selection within the camp, during which prisoners deemed too weak to continue working were sent to the gas chambers.⁷³ Moreover, the source is explicitly mentioned – an amalgamation with other sources remains a theoretical possibility, of course, but even if so, there lies a fictivity in the attribution. Similar observations can be made for Jan Sikorski’s testimony: while large sections correspond, in condensed form, to the protocol,⁷⁴ the remarks pertaining to the multilingual situation in the camp’s apothecary – due to the national variety among the prisoners – are not found in the trial protocol: es wurde polnisch, russisch, ungarisch, aber auch deutsch und jiddisch geredet, diese spezielle Häftlingssrpache, die “lagerszpracha” von Auschwitz hörte man ebenfalls… Unser Apotheker Capesius, der Chef, tat so, als höre er nicht zu, wenn seine Häftlinge die “lagerszpracha” sprachen. (C, 86; compare with “Strafsache gegen Mulka u. a.” Vernehmung des Zeugen Jan Sikorski 1964). People spoke in Polish, Russian, Hungarian, but also German and Yiddish, and also this special prisoners’ language, the so-called lagerszpracha of Auschwitz… Our pharmacist Capesius, the boss, acted as though he wasn’t listening when his prisoners were talking lagerszpracha. (DoA, 86)

How to assess these interventions? One could argue that Schlesak simply breaks his pact with the reader: the reference to the files, along with the paratextual indication and the presumption that the average reader will not cross-check the protocols, offers a pact of nonfictionality. Upon discovering the discrepancy, the reader may feel cheated or deceived. It is, I would argue, not an entirely un This is the kind of selections Levi refers to in the episode with Kuhn and Beppo, cf. supra.  The condensation is especially outspoken since it does not include the interpreter’s activity. That is not a major factual problem: it is mentioned that Sikorski testifies in Russian; the reader has the knowledge to infer that the quoted Sikorski is a condensed version (C, 85 – 86).

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reasonable reaction. And indeed, Schlesak’s fictionalisation (again, to my knowledge and to the contemporary practical limits of cross-checking) is not always identified as such. Patricia Posner copies ‘Sikorski’ testifying to the use of the lagerszpracha as quoted by Schlesak without showing any indication of her awareness that Schlesak tampered with the protocols (Posner 2017, 77, 362 n.108). Even if we leave the necessary room for manoeuvring by stating, for the sake of the argument, that Schlesak weaves a different source (where Sikorski does mention the lagerszpracha) in the testimony, which would mean that the fictitiousness lies not in the factual correctness but in the quoting of another source (C, 85 – 86), Posner’s quoting indicates that Schlesak’s strategy creates certain illusions – illusions that could perpetuate certain ‘falsehoods’ as factual. But one could also say that Schlesak’s additions – which are to be considered fictive at least to the extent that they do not feature in the testimonial – point to the mediality of the file itself, and that the files may, therefore, at least theoretically contain a fictivity in the sense that not everything that is mentioned has a corroborated reference. The trial is, indeed, also a mediation of contradictory testimonials. This argument, which will be elaborated later on, could be used as a critique of Posner – in the sense that she should have cross-checked her sources – but that would simultaneously be a rather cheap shot: certainly, it may seem somewhat dubious to quote a documentary novel as a historical source⁷⁵ (all the more since Posner’s bibliography indicates that Schlesak’s is a documentary novel), and certainly, the protocols were also available for Posner to crosscheck. However, it is obvious that cross-checking every single quotation is not the most labour-economic way of writing a book. Schlesak’s tampering, which is well-hidden, comes with certain risks. That does not mean that it cannot be read as either a symptom or a tacit commentary (depending on how central one wishes to make Schlesak’s intentions for one’s own argumentation) for fundamental problems concerning testimony and the historical record. Indeed, just as with Sebald’s persona, I argue that our reading of Capesius ought to be open  In a not fundamentally different vein, Zoë Waxman uses Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen to argue that some “women attempted to distance themselves from their children in the uncertain hope of survival” (Waxman 2010, 320 n.17). While Borowski was, of course, incarcerated in Auschwitz, he was not a member of the Kanada commando – which could have increased his authority as an eyewitness for the specific event described. That does not mean that Waxman’s point is not valid or that her use of Borowski’s text is entirely irresponsible: indeed, one could say that the probability of her point being valid is higher than Sikorski’s testifying about Capesius’s ignoring the lagerszpracha. It does indicate that authorship is often taken as an authoritative category, especially in the context of testimony, but that this cannot be taken for granted: eyewitnesses can, of course, write fiction and use fiction’s licences when describing events akin to those they witnessed.

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to a double stance in line with Bunia’s Faltung (cf. Chapter 3) and it is narratology which can offer us the language for describing the Faltung in Capesius.

4.5 A counter-observation: narratology and mediality in the documentary format Reading the novel with a focus on the strenuous relations between fictionality, fictivity and nonfictionality in Capesius is but one way of reading it, and such a reading easily unsettles the critical reader. Then again, a focus on the narrative strategies may contextualise these uneasy findings: whereas any unease with Capesius is the result of reader’s expectations pertaining to the documentary in the genre designation ‘Dokumentarroman’ being thwarted, Capesius may be ‘saved’ by stressing the second noun in that compound – which amounts to considering the tradition of documentary literature and theatre, even when addressing the sensitive topic of the Shoah. A narrative analysis, moreover, does not only serve as a ‘corrective’ to or ‘explanation’ of the fictionality–nonfictionality confounding, but it also supports the idea that the novel does not just thematise the Frankfurt trial but that it also mimics the rhetoric of judgement – and that it highlights the mediality of the court room. At the heart of Capesius is a desire to reconstruct the historical reality of Auschwitz-Birkenau as completely and accurately as possible. Yet equally at the core is a phenomenological problematisation of that desire: the four ways of achieving that end – the judicial discourse, perpetrator documents, living eyewitnesses and autobiographical and (auto)fictional literature – are all tried and proven insufficient on their own. Capesius, with its various quotations from the trial hearings, was one of the first – if not the first – novel to address the Frankfurt trial in this shape, and thus demonstrates – wittingly or otherwise – the limitations of prosecuting genocide. To include and montage the protocols is, by necessity, to point to their use within the judicial system. Records, according to Cornelia Vismann, constitute the three entities on which the law finally rests: “[Akten] wirken mit an der Formierung der drei großen Entitäten, auf denen Recht beruht: die Wahrheit, der Staat, das Subjekt” (2000, 8; files co-establish the formation of the three entities on which the law rests: the truth, the state, the subject). If they are both a product of the legal system and influencing judgement, Capesius condenses this abstract notion in its inclusion of the accused’s preparatory files. If their main function within this system is to transmit and to save data (9), the novel transmits and ‘saves’ their use within the setting of the trial. More specifically, it thematises and documents the attempted manipulation of the records (and thus, some-

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what more abstractly, of the ‘historical record’) by the accused. Nevertheless, this transmission and saving of data does not pertain to the trial setting. After all, the records are not just used as a means of demonstrating how Capesius was judged or why he was sentenced. The structure of the novel indicates that Schlesak offers them as historical evidence, too. On the one hand, Schlesak offers a reconstruction of the murderous activities Capesius participated in – a reconstruction that is completely at odds with Capesius’s self-fashioning during the trial and afterwards: until his death, he never expressed any sense of guilt or remorse. On the other hand, Schlesak documents precisely this deception (which he avows might be a form of self-deception). This double usage of the records – as historical evidence and as instruments of the law – leads, paradoxically, to an aporetic situation. Indeed, as Vismann remarks, “[Akten] speichern ihrer Bestimmung gemäß, was speicherbar ist und führen so unerkannt ihr raumgreifendes Eigenleben” (Vismann 2000, 8; files will record what is recordable and so they live out, unrecognized, their extensive idiosyncracy). That Schlesak’s novel – at least in its first two parts – is a continuation of the trial, rather than a partial depiction, manifests itself intermedially as well: Schlesak use the montage technique to insert documents that would not have been present during the trial sessions. Probably referencing the German legal system, Vismann notes that courts have traditionally been quite sceptical towards photography: [w]ie stets, wenn ein neues Medium aufkommt, reagieren Gerichte darauf mit Abwehr aus Konkurrenzverdacht. In diesem Fall droht die Fotografie dem Gericht seine Zentralfunktion zu nehmen. Ist eine Gerichtsverhandlung dazu da, eine Tat in die Vergangenheit zu stellen, so nimmt das Foto dieses Ritual vorweg. Die Fotografie kürzt es ab in einem einzigen stillgestellten Bild, das vordringlich dies eine sagt: dass etwas stattgefunden hat. (Vismann 2011, 185) as always when a new medium emerges, the courts react with disapproval, since they suspect these media to be competitors. In this case, photography threatens to take away the court’s central function. If a court session serves to establish the act in the past, photographs tend to pre-empt this ritual. Photography reduces it to a single snapshot, which urgently says this: that something has taken place.

Schlesak does integrate several pictures in his depiction of the Auschwitz trial. Some are pictures found in the infamous Auschwitz Album, which features pictures taken by two SS photographers documenting the arrival, ‘selection’ and admission to the concentration camp of a group of Hungarian Jews during the spring of 1944. As such, these pictures are (apart from the Sonderkommando pictures, which are not featured in Capesius) the closest visual representation of the

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destruction process in Birkenau.⁷⁶ The pictures in Capesius that stem from this album are found on pages 21, 38, 40 and 118. Other pictures depict survivors who testified in Frankfurt, but they are depicted outside of the courtroom (C, 12, 87),⁷⁷ whereas others are mugshots of Victor Capesius (C, 29, 161); still others depict other perpetrators, such as Fritz Klein standing in a mass grave in BergenBelsen (C, 111) and Kurt Jurasek (C, 125, the caption only indicates that it was taken before 1945). Pictures more directly related to the trial show Capesius’s annotations to the files he prepared for his defence (C, 128, 133, 149). While these are illustrative of Schlesak’s remarks concerning Capesius’s defence preparation (with the obligatory lies), they could not stand on their own: the quality of the pictures is suboptimal, which (to say the least) would render the deciphering of Capesius’s handwriting a tedious undertaking (cf. the documents reprinted and attributed to Capesius through captions, C, 133, 149). The final picture is arguably Schlesak’s addition to the testimony of Ella Salomon, who tells the court that she had already known Capesius as a child, long before Auschwitz. She argues that this can be proven by a family picture, depicting Capesius, Salomon and members of their families near a swimming pool (“Strafsache gegen Mulka u. a.” Vernehmung der Zeugin Ella Salomon 1964; 3, 13 – 14). The picture (C, 22), which is inserted after a condensed version of Salomon’s testimony with reference to the picture and which contains a caption identifying Capesius and Salomon, is presumably the picture in question. To be sure, the picture was not shown in the Frankfurt trial, but Salomon had it sent to the court a few weeks after her testimony (“Strafsache gegen Mulka u. a.” Vernehmung der Zeugin Ella Salomon 1964, 3 n.1). What one has here is a variation on Vismann’s observation that [w]enn Bilder in der Hauptverhandlung zugelassen sind, dann […] unter der Bedingung, dass sie nicht stumm bleiben. Fotografien […] müssen in die Aussage des Angeklagten oder Zeugen integriert werden. Die Bilder sollen nicht etwa für sich sprechen. Sie sollen die Prozessbeteiligten zum Sprechen bringen. (Vismann 2011, 186)

 The reader who is unfamiliar with this album and its remarkable history may want to consult the various essays and commentaries accompanying various editions (e. g. Israel Gutman and Bella Gutterman 2002; Hans-Jürgen Hahn 1995). The Sonderkommando pictures, taken illegally and at (additional) enormous risk by Jewish inmates, are discussed in detail in Images malgré tout (Didi-Huberman 2001) and by Dan Stone, who maintains that they offer an unknown proximity to the events, which paradoxically evokes an even bigger distance from them (Stone 2001, passim). Chare and Williams discuss Lanzmann’s polemical attacks on Didi-Huberman but also the former’s fascination for the pictures and his reasons for not including them Shoah (2016, 215 – 221).  Wittmann reminds us that cameras were not allowed to be used in the courtroom (2005, 3).

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When pictures are allowed in the main hearings, it is […] under the condition that they do not remain mute. Photographs […] must be integrated into the statements of the accused or the witnesses. The images should not speak for themselves. They should cause the involved parties to speak.

In Salomon’s case, the photography is technically not admitted to the main hearings but is nevertheless ‘admitted’ in the sense that the court accepted it as evidence – so much is implied by the footnote in the protocol acknowledging its arrival. As such, the picture does not bring the witness to speak, but rather illustrates – retrospectively – her testimony. Schlesak, who presumably obtained the picture by contacting either Salomon or her mother, Gisela Böhm,⁷⁸ can integrate it alongside Salomon’s testimony as indexical proof, nevertheless with a caption explicitly linking it to said testimony. Indeed, on its own, the picture would probably not speak for itself: perhaps the 35-year-younger Capesius might still be recognised by juxtaposing this particular picture with the mugshots offered elsewhere in the novel, but that seems much less self-evident for the case of Salomon, who was, after all, a very young child in the swimming pool picture. Capesius, then, is undeniably marked by the pathos of accusation as well as the pathos of (suggested) primacy through the eyewitness accounts and Adam’s narrative, although these are, of course, mediated twice: through the references to the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and in its own medial constellation. The novel constitutes a trial of its own – and transcends the legal framework that rendered the prosecuting of perpetrators so difficult and so frustratingly fraught with failures. But the narrative strategies amount to a poetics of the detective: in the first two chapters, the mediation of the eyewitness accounts and their juxtaposition to Capesius’s deceitful strategies slowly reveals that Capesius was a mass murderer. Such poetics are not unheard of in the documentary tradition: Lanzmann himself describes Shoah as a return to the crime scene, thus casting himself in the role of a detective (cf. Rothberg 2000, 235; Felman and Laub 1992, 256 n.4).⁷⁹

 The caption mentions that the picture stems from Böhm’s, not Salomon’s, private collection.  A similar observation can be made beyond Shoah literature: José Martínez Rubio notes an increase since the turn of the millennium (and even stronger since 2010) of Spanish “investigative novels” that ‘investigate’ the past of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Francoist dictatorship. I cannot discuss these texts much deeper, but suffice it to point to a few similarities: the timing of the boom coincides with the emergence of a ‘third generation’ of documentary literature – suggesting that both genres are an indication of a certain desire for ‘the real’ – and both genres use narrative strategies and topics once associated with whodunit thrillers to uncover Fascist and Nazi acts of violence and to denounce the silence with which these have been covered up. But both are also marked by a strenuous relation between historical facticity and veracity (if one wants, authenticity) and the function of fictionalisation strategies: in Schlesak’s

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The unreliability that enters the protocols through Schlesak’s interventions – especially the mingling of sources and the more creative interpellations – are, then, arguably accompanied by a more general heterodiegetic narrative unreliability. Generally, theories and analyses of narrative unreliability look at homodiegetic narratives; indeed, perpetrator fiction often features homodiegetic narrators. These are unreliable from a cognitive point of view: it focuses on a discrepancy between the narrator’s “worldview, […] moral standard, values, or beliefs” and the imagined reader’s (P. K. Hansen 2007, 227). While the testimonies in Capesius are, of course, homodiegetic narratives, they are not necessarily unreliable. But the montage of these homodiegetic narratives constitutes, arguably, a heterodiegetic (and certainly extradiegetic) narrative in which information is withheld. The unreliability is not cognitive; on the contrary, there is arguably a consonance between this narrator’s values and beliefs and the imagined reader’s; but this narrator withholds information only to release it later, wilfully creating an informational tension. This is precisely the “‘detective’ element of unreliability”: the notion that unreliable narration functions through a “heightened activity” (or participation) of the reader (Martens 2008, 79). In this sense, the detection of Schlesak’s intervention is the continuation – the radicalisation, if you want – of this reader’s involvement: after all, Schlesak does offer the sources used and thus enables the reader to scrutinise his use of these sources. Martens’s list of narrative strategies causing heterodiegetic narrative unreliability (“marked metalepsis, shifts in master tropes, and epithetic redundancies”, 2008, 101), which does not claim exhaustiveness, can be extended with intertextual unreliability, which manifests itself in misattributions on the textual and the paratextual level. The novel invites the reader-detective to investigate history and its literary mediation. The novel, which casts judgement, leaves the openness to be judged itself.

case, I argue, as a metafictional device to point to the mediality of testimony, in Martínez Rubio’s argument, to adhere to a postmodern “pact of ambiguity” (Martínez Rubio 2012, 73, translation mine).

Part Two: The survivors’ pathos of anti-pathos: Autobiography and historiography

Introduction The texts that will be analysed in the following part of this book differ fundamentally from those in the previous part in two ways. The first important difference is that these texts are written by survivors of the Shoah and manifest conflicting stances between the hiding of feelings, the avowing of feelings and the suspicion of heavy emotions. Coincidentally, the protagonists in this part are both born in Vienna before (eventually) emigrating to the United States, where both became respected academics, although they both bore witness to thematic, personal, and structural obstructions in their ways. However, these parallels are not the main reason why Ruth Klüger and Raul Hilberg are chosen as the ‘representatives’ of a nonfictional traumatic cool in the following pages; indeed, some fundamental differences between them remain: while Klüger could not emigrate before the war and was consequentially deported to Theresienstadt and afterwards Birkenau and Christianstadt (a satellite camp of the Groß-Rosen camp complex), Hilberg and his parents managed to emigrate in 1939 – in Mary Cosgrove’s words, he is an “absenteeist” (2006b, 221). But the fate of twenty-six family members leaves little doubt as to Hilberg’s chances of survival had he not been able to emigrate, which does justify labelling him as a survivor. And Klüger does not hide her unsatisfiable desire for having been able to emigrate before the war. Coincidences (and wealth) decided on these matters, not the persons themselves (who were, moreover, children at the time). While Klüger became a literary scholar, Hilberg became a political scientist and historian. While Klüger did not address the Shoah in her scholarly work until a later stage in her career, Hilberg delved into this topic since his master’s thesis and never quit. While Klüger’s position is feminist, Hilberg does not consider gender as a category of analysis. A shift to nonfictional modes of representation does not mean, of course, that the temperamental metaphors disappear completely from either the literary texts or from the reception. Klüger describes her mother’s pose during a bombing raid as “völlig cool” and contrasts this with her own fear of death (wl, 188; perfectly cool: StA, 148). Later, when reminiscing on an unjust insult long in the past, she invokes the reversed metaphor for her own emotional state during the writing process: “schon die Erinnerung daran erhöht die literarische Temperatur dieser Sätze” (uv, 57; just the memory of it increases the literary temperature of these sentences). Another recollection on structural discrimination causes her to admit: “[u]nd wieder steigt mir das Blut in den Kopf und ich merke, wie meine Empörung über längst Vergangenes aufwacht und wie meine Fähigkeit veschwindet, zwischen wesentlichen Mißständen und lediglich ichbezogenen Beleidihttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110758580-009

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gungen zu unterscheiden” (uv, 64; and again the blood rushes to my head and I notice how my outrage about things long passed awakens and how I lose the ability to differentiate between substantial abuses and merely self-related insults). The metaphorical codification of anger as heat is not, of course, typical for Klüger but a rather common way of communicating one’s anger. It is in line with Monique Scheer’s finding that “the experience of emotions is very often described as a merging of body and mind, as a physical involvement in thought” (2012, 218).¹ Klüger goes one step further and suggests that texts take on these qualities, too. Besides looking at metaphors invoking bodily states, how does one identify feelings that are only given a voice between the lines? Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams, working with manuscripts, posit that [t]he handwriting possesses feeling in a way typescript cannot capture (even if retrospectively identifying specific emotions and stimuli with certainty in the original is not possible). […] The extant manuscripts index not just the personalities of their authors. They also manifest the affective circumstances in which they were written. This affective register operates in excess of the overt narrative. (2016, 38)

The implication is, indeed, that the identification of feelings in typescripts must be even more difficult than in the case for the Scrolls, precisely because the typescript is not produced under the same affective circumstances and because its reproductive character reduces the indexicality of the author. This, one may argue, is one of the reasons why archival research has a certain appeal: not only can it yield factual information beyond the published text, but it suggests signs of the author’s individuality beyond her public image. But it seems unavoidable that even for manuscripts, we attribute emotional meaning to the briskness of the writing, differences in spacing, paratextual marks (e. g. underscoring), the grafting of the pen into the paper. We make our interpretations of the mental state of the author plausible but cannot reconstruct it; in truly hermeneutical fashion, we deduct text from context and vice versa. That does not mean, of course, that there are no differences between manuscripts and typescripts that must be considered during this process. On the contrary: what Chare and Williams identify as setting manuscripts apart from typescripts is what Walter Benjamin has famously labelled the aura: “das Hier und Jetzt des Kunstwerks” (2019a, 13; its presence in time and space: Benjamin 1992a, 214). The specific (i. e. direct spatial, temporal and material) circumstances in which the Scrolls were written lead us to assume that their intellectual authors coincide

 Let it be reminded that Scheer exemplifies this with the metaphor of boiling blood (2012, 218).

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with the material authors: the man who conceived the text literally wrote it (and vice versa). For typescripts, this collision is, of course, much less of a given, and the very technique with which the typescript is produced makes it more readily reproducible, thus, according to Benjamin, destroying its aura. But the aura is an effect that we attribute to art (it is, no doubt, an affective response to it), intersubjectively plausible though it is, and hence, the process of attributing emotional meaning to manuscripts or typescripts is not fundamentally different. If attributing emotionality to the author of a manuscript is as fraught as such attributions to the authors of typescripts, is it not paradoxical to look at Klüger and Hilberg conveying pathos or anti-pathos in other medial constellations – in the audiobook version of weiter leben and in Shoah, respectively? It certainly would be if one were to use these appearances as paratexts that contain explicit and unambiguous commentaries on the pathos and anti-pathos in the authors’ primary works. That is not my aim in including the audiobook and Shoah: these are not unmediated, ‘true’ expressions of emotionality, free of affective self-control; Lanzmann’s artistic vision is, of course, as important for the imagery in Shoah as is Hilberg’s composure in front of the camera. And the audiobook of weiter leben differs in length from the written book, yet little if any information on the directing of the recording is available. These texts, then, serve as additional manifestations of pathos and anti-pathos, not more or less indicative of the author’s ‘inner feelings’ but manifestations that undeniably contribute to the personae of the authors and to our image of them.

5 Ruth Klüger: An (ant)agonistic pathos of anti-pathos 5.1 Some considerations when reading Klüger 5.1.1 An autobiographical project After publishing weiter leben in 1992 with the then-new and relatively small Wallstein publishing house, Klüger published Still Alive with the equally relatively small Feminist Press in New York in 2001.¹ Both texts may be considered as two “performance[s] of the autobiographical pact”, with Still Alive being the performance that “replicates without replacing” (McGlothlin 2004, 47). Therefore, “the correspondence between the two autobiographical counterparts exists in tension somewhere between the poles of identity and difference” (McGlothlin 2004, 46). Klüger “insists on their disparity, obliging us, as critical readers of her autobiography, to grapple with both versions” (McGlothlin 2004, 47). The risk of looking at merely one text is exemplified in Jerry Schuchalter’s blatantly false conclusion at the end of his analysis of weiter leben. Schuchalter, who only reads weiter leben and does not consider Still Alive, arrives at the conclusion that Klüger has become a recognized voice in society. She has amassed power, despite what she maintains is patriarchal indifference. […] The child, wrenched out of every societal relation and reduced to a cipher, waiting her turn to be sent to the gas chamber, has now joined the educated elite of a civilization, which has managed to slough off its own taint of depravity and can now incessantly proclaim its own virtue – on both sides of the Atlantic. That she concludes her memoirs with a dedication to her “Göttinger friends” of her very “German book”

 Machtans sees this, alongside a paratextual note on the 2001 edition, as implying that “es sich bei Still alive [sic] um eine möglichst wortgetreue Übersetzung handelt” – which she subsequently deconstructs by pointing to contradicting claims in the paratexts (2009, 164; Still alive is a translation which tries to be as close to the original as possible). Yet I cannot help but wonder whether the implied attitude is not a different one: whereas weiter leben points to a literally ruptured continuity, expressed in the adverb ‘weiter’, while the verb implies an active process of working through; Still Alive seems (to me) to express an attitude of defiance towards an imagined audience of erstwhile perpetrators and bystanders: it contrasts her survival to the mass murderers’ intentions, it metaphorically flips them off. Such connotations get completely lost in the British title, Landscapes of Memory, which refers to Klüger’s structuring her autobiography based on geographic differences. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110758580-010

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suggests not only irony and retribution, but also that some sort of synthesis has finally been achieved. (Schuchalter 2009, 110)

If anything, this conclusion reeks of everything Klüger warns against, not in the least of completely undue sentimentalism. The final page of weiter leben does not constitute an endpoint, as even a superficial reading of Still Alive would make clear. The outright celebration of nationalism and the idea that the Shoah has somehow been ‘mastered’ or relegated to the past are utterly questionable even without reading Still Alive. Klüger incessantly warns and reels against any suggestion that the Shoah is confined to the past and no longer has any relevance. Nowhere in her autobiography does Klüger hint at a synthesis being achieved or at the German-Jewish symbiosis, which, in Schuchalter’s argument, seems to function as that synthesis’s predecessor. Claiming that Klüger has amassed power reeks, moreover, of an old antisemitic stereotype. Schuchalter may have read weiter leben, but if anything, his reading is precisely the kind of reading and listening of which Klüger is so wary, as shall be discussed below, and against which her pathos of anti-pathos is directed.² A second reason for comparing both texts is that it shows what does not get translated (and hence, that the denomination ‘translation’ would be odd): Klüger’s own poetry. The German text contains several of her poems composed during her time in the concentration camp and in the months after the war; the English version only alludes to these. A poem written in English during the 1950s is included in Still Alive but absent from weiter leben. If, as Robert Frost is often said to have said, poetry is indeed what gets lost in translation, then Klüger’s poems as classified as Poetry – even though she repeatedly diminishes her own poems. Is this false modesty? Perhaps, but the point is that the silences that reveal themselves upon comparison are telling. If one refuses, with McGlothlin, to consider Landscapes of Memory a translation of weiter leben, one must, however, be willing to concede that certain modifications may be considered as cultural translations (cf. Schaumann 2004, 326). As McGlothlin herself notes, the references to German authors such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, Bertolt Brecht, Wolf Biermann, Thomas Bernhard and Anna Seghers (McGlothlin 2004, 58)³

 Schuchalter’s nationalist reading is definitely proven untenable by Klüger’s decision to send her Vorlass, to the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna in May 2018, and not to the DLA in Marbach.  One may add Peter Weiss, whose Meine Ortschaft Klüger mentions in the context of musealisation and of ethical-political imperatives the Shoah poses to contemporary citizens (wl, 75 – 76).

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are left out in Landscapes of Memory, which in turn features references to American authors like Toni Morrison and Mark Twain (LoM, 58). The English version has been published as Still Alive in the US, but the UK title is already a first move away from literal translation: there it has been entitled Landscapes of Memory. I have initially read the British edition; to my knowledge, there are no differences with the US edition – even the spelling has not been altered. This practice is, of course, not idiosyncratic of Klüger’s English text but of the Anglophone publishing industry. I will, then, primarily quote from Landscapes of Memory. Nonetheless, the reader may see a mild irony in the fact that nominal discontinuities between the German and English versions are paramount.⁴ These will be systematically analysed, but I will not go into detail on many other instances of diversion.

5.1.2 Multiperspectivity Like Sebald, Klüger achieved not only a career as literary scholar but also, at a later stage in life, fame as a literary author in her own right. As with Sebald, there is a remarkable thematic and political spill-over between Klüger’s writings as a scholar and her own literary work. In various lectures and publications, she addresses the contradictions within Enlightenment discourse (1996a, 9 – 17), the assimilation of the Jews in German bourgeois society (1996a, 9 – 17) and gender issues (Klüger 1994b, 1996a).⁵ These matters return in weiter leben, where Klü Ironically, this pertains even to Klüger’s own name, which in the paratexts is transliterated as ‘Kluger’.  Whereas Klüger rhetorically asks, in a 1994 lecture, whether women read differently than men (Lesen Frauen anders?), the title of a 1996 publication answers that question affirmatively: Frauen lessen anders. It is worth pointing to the distant reading undertaken by Doris Schafer Scherrer. She critically assesses claims that women write differently than men (which often contain patriarchal assumption about the literary quality of what is denigratingly called ‘women’s literature’). Her comparison between fifty literary texts written by women and fifty written by men shows that there are some general differences, especially in the quantitative relation between male and female characters (men write more about men, and do so more often than women do), the featuring of a protagonist of the opposite sex (it is more common for women to write literary texts with male protagonists), the level of detail in the description of characters (higher in texts written by men, but these do not give detailed descriptions of elements associated with female domains such as fashion), the adherence to the idea that protagonists have to be geniuses of some sort (higher in texts written by men, i. e. women write more often about ‘ordinary’, ‘everyday’ characters than men do), the length of the literary texts (men write longer texts) and narratological categories – men use indirect speech more than women (Schafer Scherrer 1998, 297– 304). Schafer Scherer offers cultural explanations for these differences, points out

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ger’s feminism attacks sexism at the core of our reading habits: “wer rechnet schon mit männlichen Lesern? Die lesen nur von anderen Männern Geschriebenes” (wl, 81; most of [my readers are] likely to be female, since males, on the whole, tend to prefer books written by fellow males: StA, 71). As Dominik Hofmann-Wellenhof notes, Klüger is not consistent in her use of the female substantive ‘Leserinnen’, resorting to the generic male when she anticipates a negative reception or criticism (Hofmann-Wellenhof 2016, 74). The positing of such an imagined male reader, of course, does not exclude her recounting of actual instances where Germans did not – or even could not – properly listen to Klüger’s story, and surely, these are not always men: ‘Gisela’ is repeatedly criticised by Klüger for downplaying the latter’s traumatic experiences and for trying to divert attention to herself and her family. As the bibliography indicates, many of these publications were published after her autobiography, leading one to ask to what extent there is a spill-over from the scholarly work into the literary creation. Yet as the attestation of the individual essays in Katastrophen demonstrates (i. e. where they were originally published), the Enlightenment, German-Jewish relations and Jewish assimilation have been Klüger’s research interests since (at the latest) 1971 (Klüger 1994a, 228 – 229). It seems that Klüger’s biography has at least as much influence on her research interests as her academic voice influences her autobiography. Klüger’s foreword to Katastrophen explicitly links her subjective voice to her academic work: [s]chließlich steckt in mir die Empörung und Nostalgie der Nachzüglerin, die von jenen 200 Jahren zwischen Aufklärung und Endlösung, als die Juden teilhatten am deutschen Kulturleben, nur noch einen letzten Zipfel erwischen konnte, und ich ziehe kräftig an diesem Zipfel eines Seils, unter dem sich der Abgrund der jüdischen Katastrophe auftut. Auch davon handelt das vorliegende Buch. (Klüger 1994a, s.p.) After all, I am marked by the indignation and nostalgia of the latecomer, who could only get a hold of the very last tip of those 200 years between Enlightenment and Final Solution, a time when the Jews were active participants in German cultural life, and I am pulling vigorously at the tip of this rope, under which the abyss of the Jewish catastrophe looms large. This book concerns itself with these matters, too.

that the differences are thus by no means ‘natural’ and suggests that the differences may change when broader socio-economic differences do so (304) – be they changing for better or for worse, as the contemporary resurfacing of misogynistic political policies give cause to ponder on. But her findings are worth mentioning here since the novels analysed were all published between 1985 and 1990, only shortly before the publication of weiter leben and therefore pertaining to a very similar broader context.

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The essays contained in Katastrophen have all been published before weiter leben, the hitherto tacit influence of life on work is explicitly proclaimed after the publication of weiter leben. The publication of the autobiography, still the prototypical genre defined in terms of the relation between life and work (despite its inherent instability, and despite overt and covert tendencies of fictionalisation, which indeed hinge on the classic understanding), authorises the evocation of that link for a genre which was – and partially still is – supposed to stand on its own, independent of the author’s life. Klüger’s process of reception differs from Sebald’s, however: weiter leben was immediately embraced and lauded by critics. Yet the metaphorical (albeit impressionistic) descriptions run parallel: the conception of Klüger’s narrative as warm stems from the English-speaking world; the opposite stems from the German-speaking world. Like Hilberg, the Viennese Klüger achieved a career in the United States. Unlike Sebald or Hilberg, Klüger survived the Shoah while being trapped in Central Europe. All three authors write multiperspectively; in each case, the multiperspectivity is an amalgamation of different perspectives. This causes similarities to both Sebald (whom Klüger has avidly read) and Hilberg (although despite their biographic similarities, I have not come across references between them),⁶ but the dissimilarities weigh upon my analytical perspective. I try to argue that, as in Hilberg’s case, conceiving of Klüger’s style as ‘cool’ may clarify the distinction between identification and empathy, but in Klüger’s case, this is a politicised matter, whereas in Hilberg’s, it is rather a methodological consideration. The concept of distancing shifts, however: whereas in Sebald’s prose project, a non-Jewish, German literary author maintains distance from Jewish survivors (or not), the Jewish survivor Klüger tries to keep a distance from her implied readers – Germans and Americans alike. She also simultaneously approaches and keeps her distance from highly canonised Shoah accounts, thus creating a niche for her autobiographical project within the Shoah canon. Her multiperspectival voice (child survivor, emigrant, woman, poet, academic) results in a

 A textual proximity consists in their forewords to Götz Aly’s Eine von so vielen. Das kurze Leben der Marion Samuel 1931 – 1943 (2011). But here as well they are concerned with entirely different aspects: Klüger speaks as a child survivor, admits that Samuel’s story touches her profoundly because they were born in the same year. Yet Klüger survived Birkenau; and while pointing to Aly’s ironical style – not unlike Hilberg’s – she maintains that the “Einzelschicksal […] und das Persönliche” of Samuel’s story are paramount to Aly’s study (Klüger 2011, 12– 13; the individual fate and the personality). Hilberg’s preface, on the other hand, is a veritable laudation of the historian Aly and a subdued slap in the face of academia – subdued, but a slap nonetheless (Hilberg 2011, 15 – 16).

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discourse in which form consciously shapes and reflects content and which steadfastly breaks off the reader’s interpretative process in order to send it in a different direction. Considering such reflections, the discrepancies in the discourse – both between the translations and between form and content – are of special interest for my analysis. As mentioned before, Klüger describes her mother’s composure during a bombing raid as “völlig cool” (wl, 188; perfectly cool, StA, 148) and contrasts this to her own behaviour. We cannot, of course, compare her discourse with her mother’s, but Klüger’s ‘cool’ style offers the first discontinuity which has consequences for the interpretation process. I try to describe this by differentiating between first-degree descriptions – Klüger’s sarcastic and cynical descriptions (which remind one of Hilberg) – whereas the second-degree ‘coolness’ may emerge in the reader’s critical attitude towards Klüger’s text and which is evoked by the text’s contradictions, as we shall see: the contradiction between form and content, but also the contradictory offering and revoking of distance to her readership. Nadine Jessica Schmidt states that weiter leben aims at evoking a dialogue (2014, 189), but surely the text provokes the imagined reader as well: Klüger’s insistence on the differences between survivors and non-survivors must be acknowledged before an approximation can take place. That this dialogue does not always materialise, or is occasionally halted by Klüger herself, should not astonish: the figure of Christoph – a stand-in for Martin Walser – is a case in point (Yowa 2014, 302– 305). A final point of difference and multiperspectivity: despite their similar overlapping of literature and criticism, a fundamental difference between Sebald and Klüger remains, and it lies in the persona offered in their texts. As noted above, Klüger claims that Sebald has broken the ‘taboo’ on biographism, yet it should be clear that, despite Sebald’s refusal to label his texts as novels (and hence as fiction), Sebald does not (and could not) equate his narrative persona(e). Such a confounding constellation is not found in Klüger’s persona. Notwithstanding the inherently constructive nature of any narrative and the fictivity inherent to memory, she adheres to a Lejeunian autobiographical pact with her reader: Autobiographie ist Geschichte in der Ich-Form. Weil sie dank ihrer Subjektivität Dinge enthält [,] die nicht nachprüfbar sind – Gefühle und Gedanken –, wird sie öfters und leicht mit dem Roman verwechselt. Sie ist sicherlich in einem Grenzdorf angesiedelt, wo man beide Sprachen spricht, die der Geschichte und die der Belletristik. Aber jedes Grenzdorf gehört dem einen oder anderen Staat an: und die Autobiographie gehört eindeutig zur Geschichte. (Klüger 2006, 86) Autobiography is history in the I-form. Because of its subjectivity, it contains claims which cannot be corroborated – feelings and thoughts – and because of this, it is often and easily confused with the novel. For sure, it is situated in a borderland village, where two languag-

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es are spoken: that of history and that of the belles lettres. But every borderland village belongs either of two states; and the autobiography belongs unambiguously to History.

The proximity to the border, she maintains, and the overflowing of fictional narratives (in ‘highbrow’ as much as in ‘lowbrow’ formats), has led to a confusion of facts and fictions, to which she retorts ironically: [a]n diesem Punkt geben wir Platon recht, der die Dichter aus seinem Idealstaat verbannen wollte, verwünschen die Produzenten von Fiktionen, die uns mit ihren Lügen verwirren, und wollen es nur mit den Historikern zu tun haben, die uns erzählen wie es wirklich gewesen ist. Aber im Grunde ist es ja umgekehrt: die Historiker lügen, wenn sie uns Falsches auftischen und unsere Gutgläubigkeit mißbrauchen, die Dichter machen von vornherein kein Hehl daraus, daß sie erfinden. (Klüger 2006, 86 – 87) Here, we agree with Plato, who wanted to banish the poets from his ideal state. We curse the producers of fictional texts, who confuse us with their lies, and we only wish to deal with the historians, who tell us how it really was. But fundamentally, it is the other way around the historians lie, when they tell us things that are not true und abuse our gullibility; the poets do not pretend that they do anything other than inventing things.

Klüger’s defence of fiction is obviously a reformulation of Sir Philipp Sidney’s aphorism “the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth” (2004, 34). Her subscription to an institutional model of fictionality and nonfictionality gives her (largely nonprofessional) audience a guideline for distinguishing between the two: [j]edes Buch […] bietet sich den Lesern als eine, und keine andere, Gattung Text an. Meist ersehen wir aus der Titelseite, womit wir es zu tun haben, doch können auch die entscheidenden Signale auch im Text gegeben werden. Die Hauptsache ist, daß Autor und Verlag einen Vertrag mit uns schließen. (2006, 87) Every book presents itself to its readers as belonging to one genre and to no other. Mostly, we can see on the title page what we have in our hands, but these signals can be sent in the text itself, too. The main thing is that author and publisher enter into a binding contract with us.

Whether fiction can indeed be signalled in the text itself has been the subject of intense debate – in his monography, Zipfel outlines the various approaches within fiction theory, ranging from the institutional and narratological to the ontological, and his description of the signs of fictionality are established in a binary structure: at the very top, textual vs. paratextual (to which Klüger refers); within the textual, those on the story level (this is the level where tensions between the uncanny and the fictional are situated) and those on the discourse level. Zipfel rightfully notices that direct discourse signs of fictionality differ according to the

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narratological situation but include a (heterodiegetic) narrator’s access to a character’s cognitive processes (thoughts, emotions, moods, mindsets), mimetic excess, structural intertextuality and metafictionality; indirect discourse signs of fictionality would include – with Genette – purely external focalisation. Zipfel maintains, however, that this is not a logical but a statistical indication: nonfictional narratives can be purely externally focalised, though they seldom are. Moreover, Zipfel offers various counterarguments and examples for his direct discourse signs and for signs on the story level. This may be explained by his theoretical and pragmatic considerations: readers do not perceive a text’s (non)fictionality by a sign but rather by the interplay of such signs (Zipfel 2014, 102), which may strengthen – or frustrate – their perception as they read along. Moreover, the terms ‘sign’ and ‘signal’ may indicate indexicality: if sign x (and signs y, z) is (are) present, the text is fictional; if signs -x, (‐y, -z) is (are) present, then the text is not (cf. Zipfel 2014, 102). However, Zipfel simultaneously remarks that these signs are not definitive – that they are, indeed, ‘merely’ indications; Jean-Marie Schaeffer notes that these signs have to be historically, culturally and cognitively contextualised (Zipfel 2001, 101; Schaeffer 2013). The discrepancies between weiter leben and Still Alive show that Klüger resorts to fictitiousness in her autobiographical project, yet this is not contradictory to the autobiographical pact she offers her readers – so much is clear from her paratextual commentaries. This is not necessarily contradictory since her insistence on the pact is revealed in her strong indication to the readers as to where fictitious elements enter her narrative. These become even stronger upon comparing both texts – the differences between weiter leben and Still Alive cannot be reduced to the temporal dimension (i. e. an update on the development of Shoah commemoration between 1992 and 2001) or the different implied audience (cf. McGlothlin 2004, 48 – 49, 54– 60). They even strengthen the ambiguities already present within the German text. In short, the signs are simultaneously textual and paratextual. Should it, considering Zipfel’s insistence on names as a sign of fictionality, surprise that discrepancies between names are the strongest (non)indicator in Klüger’s project?

5.2 Comparing names: intertextual and fictitious elements in autobiographies The discrepancy of a first-person narrator’s name with the name of the author is generally considered a sign of the text’s fictionality (cf. Zipfel 2001, 236). For weiter leben and Still Alive, this discrepancy is nonexistent, as one would expect

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in autobiographies. Nevertheless, whereas it may play no role as a paratextual clue, the author’s name is of great concern on the diegetic level: [v]or Hitler war ich für alle Welt die Susi, dann hab ich auf dem anderen Namen bestanden, den ich ja auch hatte, warum hatte ich ihn denn sonst, wenn ich ihn nicht benutzen durfte? […] Nur meine alte Großmutter nannte mich bis an ihr Ende Susi. (wl, 40) during the first week of the German occupation, I changed my first name. I had been called Susi, a middle name, but now I wanted the other name, my first name, the Biblical name. Why do I have it if I can’t use it? I thought, and under the circumstances only a Jewish name would do. […] Only my father’s mother continued to call me Susi until the end of her life. (LoM, 39 – 40)

What’s in a name? Quite a lot, as Raul Hilberg notes the Nazis’ preoccupation with names: they replaced names referring to Jews when they considered the object German, and they branded ‘Jews’ with compulsory middle names that were considered Jewish (‘Israel’ for men, ‘Sarah’ for women) to mark them as Jews – a dangerous step towards genocide. Simultaneously, “Aryanised” enterprises were to be re-branded so as to render their original proprietors into oblivion (Hilberg 1971, 14, 119). Whether the child Klüger was aware of this, or somehow sensed it, cannot be corroborated. But as far as the adult Klüger can tell, for her younger self, names carry meanings, too. The child Klüger insists on (and succeeds in) being called by her first name, because she wanted a Jewish name, which the adult Klüger explicitly situates within a broader context of renaming: as she notes, after the 1938 ‘Anschluss’ to the German Reich Austria was rebranded ‘Ostmark’.⁷ While (the child) Klüger politicises the denominations ‘Ostmark’ and ‘Österreich’, she does so from the perspective of her own identity: as a Jew, she does not belong to this new ‘Ostmark’ (and her self-situating amongst the highlights of the Wiener Moderne suggests that she did belong to a pre-‘Ostmark’ Austria); likewise, the Germans (who at this point are still seen as the ‘real’ Nazis) do not quite belong to Austria (wl, 39). If one wonders why, in light of Klüger’s attention for names, she does not insist on the differentiation between ‘Shoah’ and ‘Holocaust’, let it be reminded that Klüger insists on her origins lying in Vienna, not in Auschwitz: “Wien ist ein Teil meiner Hirnstruktur und spricht aus mir […]. Auschwitz war nur ein gräßlicher Zufall” (wl, 138; Vienna is part of my mind-set, while Auschwitz was […] merely a gruesome accident: StA, 112). While names constitute (or contribute to) identities, denominations do not necessarily do so.

 ‘Ostmark’ would translate as ‘Eastern March’ or ‘Eastern Mark’ (or, with Klüger, “eastern border country”, LoM, 38).

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The importance of names, however, becomes even more outspoken upon comparing weiter leben and Still Alive. To start with a minute difference: in weiter leben, Klüger’s middle name is reported as Susanne (40), in Landscapes of Memory we are offered told it is Susanna (40). Although the reported nickname is congruent between both accounts (‘Susi’), we are confronted between the lines – or rather, between the books – with intertextual instability. This instability is much stronger for the names of others: while some remain unchanged, others are fundamentally different – i. e. they are not variants of the ‘same’ name (like Susanne/Susanna). These names have not been changed: Viktor Klüger (the author’s father), Alma (her mother), Schorschi (her half-brother), Liesel (an acquaintance from Vienna, whom she met in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz) and Hans (her cousin). These names have been changed: Ditha/Susi, Olga/ Hanna, Marge/Kit, Anneliese/Liselotte, and Simone/Monique.⁸ The first pair of names refers to Klüger’s “foster sister” (LoM, 145), the second to Klüger’s “closest friend from Theresienstadt” (LoM, 195), the others to her friends at Hunter College in New York. Why Klüger has opted for these names I do not know – even less why she has opted for ‘Susi’ as an alternative for Ditha, with Susi being her nickname as a small child. The suggestion that Klüger has split her biological person into two characters cannot hold since it would amount to radically questioning the referentiality of her account, which she insists belongs to the realm of history. But why have some names been changed, while others have not? Viktor Klüger and Schorschi die at the hands of the Nazis, as does Liesel. Alma dies shortly before the publication of Still Alive, which is not the incentive for publishing the English version, but rather the earliest desirable moment: “I thought if I wrote in German, my mother wouldn’t see it, as she had no contact with things German and even considered my career an embarrassment” (LoM, 264). Yet someone from Klüger’s broader social circle sent Alma a copy: “[e]ven though she was an impatient and infrequent reader, my mother easily found all the passages that were critical of her and was badly hurt. […] I just let it go and promised myself not to publish it until after her death” (LoM, 264).⁹ In other words, Klüger tells us that her decision not to resort to self-censoring was not due to spite vis-à-vis her mother, but because she suspected no

 The first name is the one found in weiter leben, the second the one in Landscapes of Memory.  unterwegs verloren does include a chapter on the mother’s death and thus updates weiter leben as much as Still Alive does (uw, 35 – 37).

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reason to do so. Perhaps, in hindsight, this was also the reason for not changing Hans’s name in Still Alive. ¹⁰ Hans, like Alma, lived in an English-speaking country, albeit in the United Kingdom. Therefore, by the same logic, Klüger may have expected him not to find her German autobiography. Moreover, by the time Still Alive was published, Hans had died as well (LoM, 7) and the fact that his death is not mentioned in weiter leben suggests that Hans died at some point between 1992 and 2001.¹¹ In both the cases of Hans and Alma, therefore, there is arguably no (longer) a need to protect their identities. Of course, the pseudonym ‘Hans’ might have offered enough protection in 1992. Ditha/Susi and Hanna/Olga are still alive in 2001, which may be the reason for hiding their persons behind a fictitious name. The rights of the persons involved are arguably bigger than the reader’s right for absolute veracity. Schaumann claims that the names in the original German are pseudonyms and that the birth names are revealed in Still Alive (2004, 326). While Klüger admits to resorting to pseudonyms in weiter leben (250), I do not see why offering diverging names in Still Alive should be taken at face value as these persons’ birth names. If there is an important link between Klüger’s pathos and the issue of the names, the anonymisation of family members and friends has consequences for her pathos. This is exemplified in Schaumann’s reading: she assumes that the names in Still Alive are the birth names and thus concludes that its tone is “more personal, honest, and forgiving” (326) than weiter leben’s, but this, too, seems only true to some extent. Especially Klüger’s affirmation that behind Christoph stands Martin Walser – an affirmation through comparison with weiter leben but one made explicit elsewhere – and her subsequent intense yet nuanced criticism of Walser’s Unser Auschwitz are important counterexamples to Schaumann’s observations.¹² Moreover, Klüger does not hide her contempt

 Again, this cannot be ascertained unless one would look for independently developed genealogies. The congruence between both versions does not logically mean that Hans was truly named Hans – rather, the lack of a difference excludes a quasi-certain fictivity – especially since the autobiographical pact would expect us to, and because divergences are the very exception.  Hans is not extensively mentioned in unterwegs verloren – but when he is, there is a factual difference: he is said to have been locked up in Dachau and not, as we read in weiter leben, in Buchenwald (uw, 44, wl, 7).  Still Alive was published before Walser’s roman à clef Tod eines Kritikers (2002) – which caused Klüger to definitively break off her friendship in a public letter, which is reprinted in unterwegs verloren (168 – 176). As an academic, Klüger has condemned Walser and his novel, too: she has contextualised Tod eines Kritikers in a longer tradition of antisemitic prejudice; more precisely, as a ‘bastard’ of Wilhelm Raabe’s Der Hungerpastor (1864) – and thus Walser as befall-

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for American sentimentalism or for the idea that the Americans fought a ‘good war’ ‘for’ the Jewish victims under Nazism – as, to be fair, Schaumann admits later on in her essay (334). While admitting – for her American friends Marge/Kit, Anneliese/Liselotte and Simone/Monique – to using pseudonyms rather belatedly in weiter leben, there are early indications that this is the case: “ich war da aus Amerika, mit einem anderen Cousin, […] sagen wir Heinz, der hatte den Krieg mit falschen Papieren in Ungarn überlebt” (wl, 8, emphasis added; I had come from America, together with Heinz, another cousin on my mother’s side, who had survived the war in Hungary with false papers that declared him an Aryan and a Catholic: LoM, 4). Remarkably, these signals of fictitiousness are not reinstated in Still Alive: there, the cousin is still called Heinz, the discursive fictivity marker (‘sagen wir’) is not. Perhaps the concerned persons’ rights for discretion are guaranteed through anonymisation when they are not famous, but does this strategy work for academic ‘stars’ – all the more when these stars work on topics about which Klüger writes? Is it unlikely that her reader, who must have an interest in these topics (why read weiter leben if one does not have these interests?), does not possess the intertextual and ‘real-world’ knowledge to establish such links? One cannot help but wonder whether the “visiting lecturer, who was born a Czech and had been hidden in France” (LoM, 93) is not Saul Friedländer. This lecturer is quoted as saying “when all is said and done, there is still a residue which passes beyond our comprehension, something that is incompatible ing the same problem as Raabe: though both do not profess to being antisemitic, their texts perpetuate old antisemitic tropes and structures: the non-Jewish protagonist, with whom one ought to sympathise, versus the Jewish antagonist; the chastity of the former versus the sexual lusts of the latter; the environment with which each is associated (nature leading to philosophical purity versus the metropole with its corrupting influence); a German-Christian mysticism as a psychological shield against unfair attacks by the Jews and finally, a professed belief that antisemitism belongs to the past – in Raabe’s case, it purportedly ends after the 1819 Hep-Hep riots, when Romanticism still constituted a dominant cultural and literary paradigm, for Walser, with the awareness of Auschwitz (Klüger 2007, 109 – 110). To be sure, Klüger is quite hard on Raabe and his apologists as well: “Raabes Verteidiger versichern uns, er sei kein Antisemit gewesen. Wenn er es nicht aus Überzeugung war, so hat er sein antisemitisches Publikum auch zynisch und aus Profitsucht manipuliert. Dass der judenfeindliche Bestseller ‘Soll und Haben’ sein Vorbild war, hat er selbst bestätigt” (Klüger 2007, 104; Raabe’s defenders assure us that he was not an antisemite. If he was not a convinced antisemite, he manipulated his antisemitic readership cynically for monetary profit. He himself confirmed that he was inspired by the antisemitic Soll und Haben [by Gustav Freytag, 1855]). In this essay, Walser is not accused of such cynicism, yet as is clear elsewhere, the accusation is one of Dummheit in Arendt’s sense: an incapacity, or lack of will, to consider reality from someone else’s perspective.

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with the human psyche as we think we know it” (LoM, 93). Such notions are certainly compatible with Friedländer’s notion of the excess: “[t]he Shoah carries an excess, and this excess cannot be defined except by some sort of general statement about something ‘which must be able to be put in some phrases [but] cannot yet be.’ Each of us tries to find some of the phrases” (Friedländer 1992a, 19 – 20). This excess, which Friedländer defines as the “‘something [that] remains to be phrased which is not, something which is not determined’” (1992b, 54), leaves “an extraordinary uncertainty in the reader’s mind, notwithstanding the ultimate significance and total ‘concreteness’ of what is being reported” (1992a, 20). His views on this issue have, moreover, not changed over the years. On the contrary: he rounds off the introduction to the second part of his magnum opus, The Years of Extermination, with the following remark, which pertains to the realm of the ethical rather than the ontological: [s]uch disbelief is a quasivisceral reaction, one that occurs before knowledge rushes in to smother it. “Disbelief” here means somethings that arises from the depth of one’s immediate perception of the world, of what is ordinary and what remains “unbelievable.” The goal of historical knowledge is to domesticate disbelief, to explain it away. In this book I wish to offer a thorough historical study of the extermination of the Jews of Europe, without eliminating or domesticating that initial sense of disbelief. (Friedländer 2008, xxvi)¹³

Such an excess is evident in weiter leben: when she describes the death of Liesel as the latter’s choice to remain faithful to her father (who was in the Sonderkommando and who faced, therefore, even lower odds of survival), she compares herself negatively to Liesel, claiming that she knows she would never have stayed loyal to her mother. The conclusion is marked by excess: [a]us dieser meiner Mittelmäßigkeit heraus und dem damit verbundenen Unverständnis für ein Kind, das den Vater buchstäblich mehr geliebt hat als das eigene Leben, erwähne ich sie hier noch einmal, erzähle hier noch einmal von diesem abgebrochenen Kinderleben, das ich nicht kommentieren und schon gar nicht analysieren kann, weil mir dazu nichts einfällt, weil es sich meinem Verständnis entzieht. Wenn ich an Liesel denke, die ich nie recht mochte und daher keineswegs bewundere (denn wie könnten wir Menschen, die uns unsympathisch sind, bewundern?), dann scheint mir das eigene gerettete Leben noch ein ganzes Stück weniger wertvoll als meistens. (wl, 136)

 This leads me to wonder: am I hurting Friedländer’s rights by pointing out the similarities between his life and the historian mentioned by Klüger? Unlike others who had been anonymised by Klüger (Walser), Friedländer has, to my knowledge, not stepped forward to identify himself as the guest at Princeton. I comfort myself (somewhat) with the knowledge that Klüger offers us an additional clue in Still Alive: his survival in France, which the reader can connect to Friedländer’s being hidden in a French Catholic seminary.

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Liesel was a child who loved her father literally more than her own life, and my own moral mediocrity precludes me from commenting on, let alone analyzing, what went on in her. All I can do is mention her once more in order to tell the end of this aborted, short life. When I think of Liesel, whom I never liked and therefore don’t admire (you can’t admire without liking), my own rescue from those flames seems even less significant than at other times. (StA, 110)

Klüger suggests that it is her ‘moral mediocrity’ that renders any comment or analysis impossible. This is a step away from Friedländer’s excess theory, which is undoubtedly rooted in subjectivity but not in individual merit or paucity: it is a cognitive, not a moral problem. Then again, Klüger strengthens the link to Friedländer in her description of the Shoah stories told among survivors. Whereas in weiter leben these are described as “aberwitzi[g]” (97), in Still Alive they are “excessive” (83). Let it be remarked that these intertextual links – stylistic, biographic and even verbatim – suggest an intense pathos, but here as elsewhere Klüger’s prose is marked by the pathos of anti-pathos, acknowledging intense emotionality but holding back before becoming sentimental and aiming its arrows against oneself. The reading of Friedländer as the guest at Princeton and of weiter leben (and Still Alive) as a manifestation of the notion of excess is not the only instance of reading a highly canonised author into Klüger’s autobiography.¹⁴ The story of Hans can be read from a similar perspective, too. But a difference remains: whereas we may understand Friedländer to be the guest at Princeton, Hans is Klüger’s cousin (although, so we assume, under a different civil name) and he also serves as a literary reference to Jean Améry. How does this work? Klüger says that Hans’s narrative of his pre-war experiences in Buchenwald betrays “nur aus dem Tonfall […] das Anders-, Fremd- und Bösartige […]. Denn die Folter verlässt den Gefolterten nicht, niemals, das ganze Leben lang nicht” (wl, 9; [o]nly in Hans’s tone of voice is there a hint of the sheer evil, of the radical otherness. For the sensation of torture doesn’t leave its victim alone – never, not to the end of life: StA, 18). This, in turn, reminds the reader of Die Tortur (1966), in which Améry describes his arrest by the Gestapo in July 1943, the beatings during the initial interrogation, and the subsequent torture in Breendonk at the hands of the SS.¹⁵ The link is immediately suggested by the cousin’s name: ‘Jean Améry’

 We know for sure that Friedländer is familiar with Klüger’s autobiography: Still Alive is referred to repeatedly in The Years of Exermination (Friedländer 2008, 255, 354, 494, 504, 577, 651).  Remarkably, this essay cannot be considered part of a ‘Shoah canon’: it does not depict the persecution and genocide of Europe’s Jewish populations but an older, inherently apolitical phenomenon. Moreover, Améry has reflected elsewhere on the consequences of his being arrested as a resistance fighter instead of as a Jew: the torture was precisely an instrument used to un-

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is, as is well known, the pseudonym of Hanns Mayer, and, like Klüger, a native Austrian.¹⁶ In Die Tortur, Améry reports his loss of “Weltvertrauen” (J, 61; trust in the world: AM, 28) during the first beating by the Gestapo. Whereas Améry’s description of this beating demonstrates that it is, to an extent, accessible to language,¹⁷ torture ‘proper’ defies representation: [e]s wäre ohne alle Vernunft, hier die mir zugefügten Schmerzen beschreiben zu wollen. War es “wie ein glühendes Eisen in meinen Schultern”, und war dieses “wie ein mir in den Hinterkopf gestoßener stumpfer Holzpfahl”? – ein Vergleichsbild würde nur für das andere stehen, und am Ende wären wir reihum genasführt im hoffnungslosen Karussell der Gleichnisrede. Der Schmerz war, der er war. Darüber hinaus ist nichts zu sagen. Gefühlsqualitäten sind so unvergleichbar wie unbeschreibbar. Sie markieren die Grenze sprachlichen Mitteilungsvermögens. Wer seinen Körperschmerz mit-teilen wollte, wäre darauf gestellt, ihn zuzufügen und damit selbst zum Folterknecht zu werden. (J, 69) It would be totally senseless to try and describe here the pain that was inflicted on me. Was it “like a red-hot iron in my shoulders,” and was another “like a dull wooden stake that had been driven into the back of my head”? One comparison would only stand for the other, and in the end we would be hoaxed by turn on the hopeless merry-go-round of figurative speech. The pain was what it was. Beyond that there is nothing to say. Qualities of feeling are as incomparable as they are indescribable. They mark the limit of the capacity of language to communicate. If someone wanted to impart his physical pain, he would be forced to inflict it and thereby become a torturer himself. (AM, 33)

If the pain can only be shared by reproducing it, Améry graphically reports the methods by which it was achieved, even though he promises his reader to keep the description as short as possible (J, 72). Of course, the similar experiences and the nominal proximity of Améry and Hans do not suffice to suggest that Améry’s essays serve as intertext for Klüger. After all, the sheer number of torture victims at the hands of the Nazis renders further explanation superfluous – suffice it to mention Wiesław Kielar’s recounting of being tortured by the Gestapo in Auschwitz in the same way (although his cover resistance networks, not necessarily to find other Jews in hiding. Lastly, even the location is determined by the reason for his arrest: generally, from 1942 onwards, resistance fighters arrested in Belgium were imprisoned in Breendonk (and often deported to German concentration camps), whereas Jews were brought to the Dossin barracks in Mechelen/Malines before being sent to Birkenau.  It can be assumed that Cousin Hans is Austrian too: while Klüger does not address this explicitly, both of her parents were Viennese, thus strongly suggesting that Hans is Austrian (only her half-brother was Czech, because his father was).  “Die auf uns niedergehenden Schläge haben subjektiv vor allem eine räumliche und eine akustische Qualität” (J, 63; [t]he blows that descend on us have above all a subjective spatial and acoustical quality: AM, 29).

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account is not as detailed and hence less visceral than Améry’s; cf. Kielar 1979, 45) and to refer, once more, briefly to Sebald’s Austerlitz, where the narrator juxtaposes Améry’s fate with Gastone Novelli’s as it is described by Claude Simon in Le Jardin des Plantes (1997; transl. The Jardin des Plantes, 2001; A, 42– 43).¹⁸ Nonetheless, the specificity of the method and Améry’s sarcastic reflection on it renders a dialogic reading of Klüger and Améry meaningful: “Tortur, vom lateinischen torquere, verrenken: Welch ein etymologischer Anschauungsunterricht!” (J, 73; Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What visual instruction in etymology! AM, 32– 33). If we decide to read Klüger in light of Améry, we may be able to make more sense of a particular discrepancy within Klüger’s text: whereas she states that Hans told her in detail about the torture (‘nicht ohne eine gewisse ächzende Umständlichkeit’, wl, 9; a certain groaning roundaboutness: LoM, 6), Klüger’s reader is not informed of these details. Here as elsewhere, the text is marked by several levels of reception and narration, Klüger tells the reader what she has been told by Hans. If we read Améry’s report in Klüger’s second-hand report, there is no need for Klüger to reiterate the details of Hans’s account. Yet this does not amount to seeing Hans as a fictitious character, as a literary manifestation of Améry akin to the relation between person and character in the roman à clef. In other words, it would be to equate both or to see Hans as a metaphor for Améry. This solution would be too simple, and it would, moreover, amount to accusing Klüger of lying since she herself has insisted on the nonfictional status of autobiography. It is too simple for two reasons. First, it would fail to address why it is precisely Die Tortur that functions as an important intertext to Klüger’s account – and not any other text from Améry’s oeuvre. After all, (and though it may constitute the ‘core’ of Améry’s literary oeuvre, cf. Holdenried 2007, 77), it does not address the Shoah (whereas Klüger’s texts obviously do), and Améry wrote prolifically on the Shoah and post-war antisemitism as well. Perhaps the answer is to be found in the loss of trust in the world.  Robert Lifton notes, and this can quite safely be assumed to be his own experience, how “to permit one’s imagination to enter into the Nazi killing machine – to begin to experience that killing machine – is to alter one’s relationship to the entire human project” (1986, 3). His is, surely, an extremely difficult empathy: it is obviously necessary for his research project, which is based methodologically in interviews with perpetrators, but its insistence on its unsettling one’s world view faintly echoes the tortured victim’s loss in his trust in the world. Moreover, the faintness of this echo is clear from the chapter’s subtitle: “Approaching Auschwitz” (1986, 3), which suggests that it cannot be ‘reached’, that as one who has not been incarcerated there, Lifton cannot fully ‘arrive in’ Auschwitz. This indicates that empathy with the perpetrator does not equate being prone to take their point of view nor that a siding with the victims necessarily implies usurping their voice.

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Primo Levi summarises that for Améry, “[l]a tortura è stata […] una interminabile morte: Améry […] si è ucciso nel 1978” (SeS, 14; torture was […] an interminable death: Améry […] killed himself in 1978: DS, 18). This summary features a striking tautology: death, once it has occurred, cannot be undone. Yet the metaphor could only function by including the tautological adjective: ‘torture is death’ would be an oversimplification, especially in light of the reason for Améry’s arrest (being a resistance fighter) and his deportation to Birkenau (being Jewish). The adjective precisely points out the difference between torture and death – namely, while death is interminable, it cannot be experienced as such since the subject of (or to) death can no longer experience it at all. By contrast, the tortured unavoidably experiences its physical and mental consequences until his biological death. If torture is death, it is a death-in-life. Moreover, Levi seems to imply a causality, although belated, between Améry’s experiences in the camps and his suicide. While such reasoning seems plausible at first sight, there are good reasons to remain wary of all too straightforward causalities.¹⁹ As irony would have it, Levi’s own writings have been reread after their author’s presumed suicide, in an attempt at finding ‘clues’ from which his suicide would appear predetermined or even ‘announced’. This is particularly true for Levi’s discussions about Améry’s “fighting back” (Stille 2005, 209), and commentators have ex post facto argued that Levi’s impossibility to do so ultimately drove him to suicide (Stille 2005, 209 – 210.).²⁰ Like Stille, and in the same volume, Jonathan Druker warns against such readings, noting a fundamental discrepancy between Levi’s and Améry’s (and he adds: Celan’s) juxtaposed poetics and their shared cause of death. As such, Druker logically deduces that an author’s expressed optimism or pessimism cannot be an indicator of potential suicidal ideations (Druker 2005, 224– 225). To be sure, in the case of Améry (and unlike Levi’s), there is an explicit textual precedent: Hand an sich legen (1976; transl. On Suicide, 1999), published some two years before his suicide. While one should not forget that Améry cannot be reduced to the traumatised victim who commits suicide, that he was more political and expressed hope for progress (Steiner 2002, 664), the widespread image of Améry – against which Steiner pleads – seems to still be that of a mel-

 And, to be fair to Levi, he acknowledges that “[i]l suicidio di Améry, […], come tutti i suicidi ammette una nebulosa di spiegazioni” (SeS, 106; Améry’s suicide, […] like other suicides allows for a nebula of explanations: DS, 153), but nonetheless Levi cannot help but speculate as to the ‘reason’ or ‘cause’ or ‘meaning’ of Améry’s suicide.  For the sake of completeness, Stille argues that those who deny Levi’s suicide do so from the symmetric perspective: those deniers, according to Stille, cannot reconcile suicide with Levi’s earlier, more optimistic writings (210).

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ancholic, depressed, suicidal, and resentful survivor.²¹ It is this image that Sebald artistically responds to in Austerlitz (Holdenried 2007, 83 – 85; Pirro 2014, 304) and – tentatively – the image that Ruth Klüger approaches stylistically but refutes programmatically in the very title of her autobiography. weiter leben amounts to a confirmation of life, albeit a life that is marked by a gap: here, the professor of German literature deviates from the official German spelling, which would write the verb in one word.²² And can it be considered coincidence that the title of one of his essays has been used to title a posthumous volume: Weiterleben – aber wie (1982)? Klüger’s chosen title simultaneously evokes continuity and rupture – both concerning her own life and in her literary positioning vis-à-vis Améry. In this sense, she takes a similar position to Levi, who described Améry as “[i]l mio compagno ed antagonista” (SeS, 111; my companion and antagonist: DS, 159). Klüger’s title, both on its own and in relation to Améry, is easily read as a textually resp. intertextually constructed utterance of trauma. After all, “[t]he repetition of trauma […] is not only an attempt or an imperative to know what cannot be grasped that is repeated unconsciously in the survivor’s life; it is also an imperative to live that still remains not fully understood” (Caruth 2013, 6). Secondly, equating Hans with Améry would be too simplistic because it suggests that similarity amounts to equality (akin to the way that singularity would amount to uniqueness, cf. 1.6). Moreover, if Hans demonstrates a certain ‘coolness’ in his telling to Klüger by sticking to a presumably factual discourse – and let’s not forget that we only have Hans’s account through Klüger’s mediation – Améry’s approach has been considered cold rather than cool. Primo Levi considers Améry’s essay An den Grenzen des Geistes, published in the same volume as Die Tortur, “amaro e gelido” (SeS, 102; bitter and icy: DS, 145). A similar coldness has been attributed to weiter leben. Herta Müller connects this coldness with various elements: “[d]ieses Buch fordert Takt für Takt eine ethische Position ein. Seine Details sind zusammengewürfelt und spröd. Sein Atem ist kalt. Ruth Klüger spricht von sich, aber sie zieht uns tief hinein in eine Hypothese, in die Frage: Was würdest du tun, wenn…” (1996, 33; this book incessantly demands an ethical position on behalf of the reader. Its details are thrown in together and frigid. Its breath is cold. Ruth Klüger tells us about

 Suffice it to look at the table of contents of the edited volume On Jean Améry (2011), which features the word ‘resistance’ only once and favours a vocabulary of negativity instead: “The Wounded Subject”, “‘My Calamity’”, “Resentment,” “Imposition, or Writing from the Void”, “Pathos and Pathology”, “Saying No and Fleeing Nowhere”, “Suffering and Responsibility”.  Klüger does write the nominalised verb in one word (wl, 107), further strengthening the poetic character of the spelling in the title.

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herself, but she draws us deeply into a hypothesis, into the question what you would do if…).²³ Müller associates this coldness with the demand for incessant ethical engagement (and, one may add, for equally incessant reassessment of the reader’s interpretations), and sees it in both the details and the ‘breath’, which could be interpreted as the coherence between the fragments. The question remains as to how this coldness is established. In Müller’s definition, it seems to have little to do with sarcasm or the author’s accusatory stance and more to do with the aporia inherent to the instability of the interpretation, or to the potentially disturbing answer to the hypothetical question formulated. For Levi, who does not explicitly formulate what constitutes Améry’s coldness, one must speculate somewhat, but it seems linked through the adjective ‘bitter’ to Améry’s poetics of resentment. Levi attempts to keep such resentment in himself at bay, as he sees it as the main reason for Améry’s suicide.²⁴ To be sure, accusative sarcasm is a trait shared by Klüger and Améry and is not necessarily unrelated to matters of aporia or disturbance. Améry, too, wishes to break the post-war silence shielding the perpetrators: [a]ber warum soll ich eigentlich seinen Namen verschweigen, der mir später so geläufig wurde? Es geht ihm vielleicht gut zur Stunde, und er fühlt sich wohl in seiner gesund geröteten Haut, wenn er vom Sonntagsausflug im Auto heimkehrt. […] Der Herr Leutnant, der hier die Rolle eines Spezialisten für Folterungen spielte, hieß Praust – P-R-A-U-S-T. (J, 68) But why, really, should I withhold his name, which later became so familiar to me? Perhaps at this very hour he is faring well and feels content with his healthily sunburned self as he drives home from his Sunday excursion. […] The Herr Leutnant, who played the role of a torture specialist here, was named Praust. P – R – A – U – S – T. (AM, 32)

Akin to weiter leben and Landscapes of Memory, which both oscillate between “autobiographical narration and essayistic commentary” (Rothberg 2000, 129), Die Tortur also goes back and forth between the historical account of his arrest, interrogation and torture and his observations on torture and philosophical anal-

 The respect seems mutual: unterwegs verloren is an allusion to a poem of Müller (HofmannWellenhof 2016, 163).  Sebald mildly criticises Levi for such speculations, pointing to some biographic differences – Améry was tortured by his ‘fellow citizens’, could not (at least psychologically) return home and instead returned to his self-imposed exile – which suggest that Améry’s experiences were even more extreme than Levi’s (Sebald 1990, 118 – 119). And then Sebald resorts to a somewhat peculiar explanation ex post facto: pointing to both authors’ realisation that a counterviolence against Nazism can never be realised, they use violence against themselves, not only by committing suicide, but also by rationally attesting to their survivor’s guilt (119 – 120).

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ysis of the Nazi regime. In short, whereas Améry’s story is similar to Hans’s, his discourse shows resemblances to Klüger’s. Let’s not overlook, moreover, that Klüger offers a complementary, feminist perspective to Améry’s views on torture. While this undoubtedly constitutes a form of “perennierende[s] Leiden” (Adorno 1967, 353; perennial suffering: Adorno 1983, 362), Klüger adds to it the phenomenon of rape: [d]ie Gefolterten und die Vergewaltigten haben dies gemeinsam, daß die Zeit nicht wegspült, was ihnen geschehen ist, und daß sie, anders als diejenigen, die durch Unfall oder Krankheit gelitten haben, ihr Leben lang mit dem an ihnen Verübten abgeben, um damit zu Rande zu kommen. (wl, 190) The tortured and the raped have this in common: time does not wash away what has happened to them; they, unlike those who have suffered an accident or a disease, spend their entire life with what was done to them, only to deal with it. (transl. mine)²⁵

Klüger’s emphasis on rape is undeniably a feminist intervention in solidarity with Améry’s position – Améry, too, compares torture to rape, though he does not dwell on the latter (J, 62). But Klüger’s intervention must be considered feminist because she draws attention to the patriarchal minimisations of sexual violence and the objectification of raped women as an act of revenge between the men who wage war. Klüger also emphasises the patriarchal ideology of sexual honour and its perverse victim-blaming: in patriarchal ideology, it is not the rapist who is considered to have breached his honour, but the victim who is dishonoured by being raped: Vergewaltigung als ein Eingriff in männliche Eigentumsrechte, etwa im Sinne von: “Dem Onkel ist leider die Tante vergewaltigt worden” […]. Und die so verdinglichten Frauen verstummen. Über einen Gewaltakt, der auch “Schändung” heißt, schweigt man am besten.

 The corresponding chapter in Still Alive is considerably shorter and does not dwell on the mass rapes committed by Soviet troops, the politics of memory surrounding this topic or the patriarchal understanding of rape en vogue during the war. Apparently, Klüger considers it not particularly relevant for her American readership – which must raise the question: was the US armed forces’ rape rate, while less ubiquitous than that committed by soldiers of the Red Army, so low that it is not an issue which Americans should ponder? It is too big a question to be addressed in length here. Suffice it to say that the US Army’s double standards concerning the punishment of rape – African-American soldiers were more likely to be prosecuted for rape, and were more likely to be punished, which includes execution – does turn it into an important issue. It could be considered the mirror image for the German context: Klüger addresses the politics of memory surrounding rape in Germany (cf. infra), which includes racist stereotypes about Soviet soldiers as raping barbarians, while she does not address the link between history, memory and racism in the American context as extensively.

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Die Sprache dient den Männern, indem sie die Scham des Opfers in den Dienst des Täters stellt. (wl, 190) Rape as a violation of male property rights, in the following sense: “sadly, the uncle has had his wife raped” […]. And the objectified women fall silent. An act of violence, also known as “dishonouring” or “defilement”, is best not talked about. Language serves the men by pressganging the victims’ shame into the men’s service. (transl. mine)

This is undeniably an intervention on behalf of the victims as much as a disruption of lasting silence – the mere fact that Klüger speaks out on these issues is political: by pointing to the role of patriarchy and continued victimisation, she addresses these topics while avoiding any proximity to questionable discourses that legitimise the German war as a defensive war against invading ‘raping hordes’.²⁶ To be sure, Klüger mentions the rape of Jewish women by ‘liberating’ Soviet soldiers as well (wl, 189) and thus points to double traumatisation without installing a hierarchy amongst the victims. In Still Alive, she adds a sharp criticism against Western racist double standards and the political recuperation of suffering – here in a negative manifestation: “[w]e abhor these attitudes in non-Western cultures, but when a brave woman filmmaker recorded this chapter of German history, she was virulently attacked by a knee-jerk reaction from the German left, which wouldn’t tolerate a chronicle of German women as victims” (StA, 159). The German left, one suspects, must have been suspicious of the framing of German women as victims, while Klüger emphasises the German women as victims – and thus indicates both the patriarchal continuities beyond political divisions and, implicitly, the quagmire of political recuperation in discourses of memory. But, like Améry, this autobiographically motivated political engagement does not mean that Klüger wishes to speak only as a victim. Her pathos of anti-pathos hinges not only on the identifiability (or not) of persons, but also in the refusal of the frame of the survivor as a mere victim.

5.3 Breaking the victim frame: irony “Wie so oft, diese Diskrepanz der Wahrnehmungen” (wl, 24; this discrepancy of perception: LoM, 24). Klüger seems to be astounded by the different perceptions

 Discourses that resurface often in order to demonise an enemy – whether real or construed – and thus to legitimise inhuman behaviour towards this enemy (Stanley 2018, 131– 132). Today, this inhuman behaviour consists of letting them drown in the Mediterranean or, as in the case of the Rohingya people, by resorting to genocide.

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that adults and children hold of the same facts. It is a sentence, however, that equally applies to Klüger’s fierce criticism of the lack of genuinely listening to her and other survivors’ biographic stories about the Shoah – and the German and American preferences for war stories about German suffering or American heroes. Klüger attacks the simplistic notions that have emerged around the survivors – notions that are simplistic precisely because of a lack of adequate or sincere listening to the victims. These clichés serve a separation of the past from the present, a self-perception as fundamentally different from either victim or perpetrator; and Klüger has no mercy for these antisemitic, philosemitic and demonic views. She mentions a German student who, she has no doubts, means well but reduces the victim to an unachievable moral perfection: [e]r habe in Jerusalem einen alten Ungarn kennengelernt, der sei in Auschwitz gefangen gewesen, und trotzdem, “im selben Atem” hätte der auf die Araber geschimpft, die seien alle schlechte Menschen. Wie kann einer, der in Auschwitz war, so reden? fragte der Deutsche. (wl, 72) One reports how in Jerusalem he made the acquaintance of an old Hungarian Jew who was a survivor of Auschwitz, and yet this man cursed the Arabs and held them all in contempt. How can someone who comes from Auschwitz talk like that? the German asked. (LoM, 70)

Klüger refutes this philosemitic notion with one swift movement, “vielleicht härter als nötig, […] Auschwitz sei keine Lehranstalt für irgend etwas gewesen und schon gar nicht für Humanität und Toleranz. Von den KZs kam nichts Gutes, und ausgerechnet sittliche Erläuterung erwarte er?” (wl, 72; I get into the act, perhaps more hotly than need be. […] Auschwitz was no instructional institution […]. You learned nothing there, and least of all humanity and tolerance. Absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps, […] and he expects catharsis, purgation, the sort of thing you go to the theater for? LoM, 70). Yet she equally refutes the other side of the medal, namely that all Jewish survivors had come out of the camps beyond psychological salvation and at the expense of others – a popular notion, so Klüger’s synecdoche implies, with American Jews: “[e]in Bekannter, ein Jude in Cleveland […] sagt mir ins Gesicht: ‘Ich weiß, was ihr getan habt, um euch am Leben zu halten. […] Ihr seid über Leichen gegangen’” (wl, 72; [i]n the late sixties, when I was teaching in Cleveland, a young Jewish political scientist, engaged to a German woman, said to my face, without flinching: ‘I know what you survivors had to do to stay alive.’[…] You walked over dead bodies’: LoM, 70 – 71). Her refusal to subscribe to the role of the victim

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reminds the reader of Peter Novick’s worries about the perceived centrality of the Shoah for the American-Jewish community.²⁷ Novick argues that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a “set of legislatively mandated curricula about Jews in American public schools” and “the proliferating Holocaust curricula zealously promoted by Jewish organisations” create the impression “Jew-equals-victim” (Novick 1999, 11). Simultaneously, he implies that the American-Jewish community is too small to lay claim to “a second Jewish institution on the Mall, presenting an alternative image of the Jew” – a view which would cast Jews not as merely victims (Novick 1999, 11). Klüger’s cynicism must be seen in this context, too. Consider the following sentence, which refers to childhood taboos (Hans’s torture in Buchenwald) that can, now as adults and after the Shoah, be openly discussed: “[j]etzt wußte ich sowieso viel und konnte drauflos fragen, wie und wann ich wollte, dann die, die es verboten hatten, waren weg, verstreut, vergast, gestorben in Betten oder sonstwo” (wl, 8, emphasis added; [n]ow I was better informed and could ask all I liked, for those who had imposed the restriction were gone, dispersed, had died in gas chambers or in their beds, wherever: LoM, 5).²⁸ To be sure, this specific instance is Klüger’s own manifestation of the attitude she expects from her audience – German or American: “[d]ear reader: don’t wax sentimental” (LoM, 146). Yet her cynicism is also directed at the perpetrators: “[z]war waren die Lager in Deutschland und ‘made in Germany’, aber sie waren oder schienen mir eine Kapsel, die wir durchbrochen hatten” (wl, 169; [o]f course the concentration camps were within the German Reich, and their brand name would forever bear the label ‘Made in Germany’, but they were, or seemed to me, encased in a capsule we had shattered: LoM, 161). In this instance, the famous quality label is revaluated, but it also reinvokes the notion of the concentration (and especially extermination) camps as factories of death. Here, too, the translation, by rendering the pun more explicit, seems to lose of its cynical character. The same proximity of everyday life and mass death is expressed rather laconically: “[w]enn man lange genug wartet, dann kommt der Tod” (wl, 21; [i]f you wait long enough, death comes for you: LoM, 21). The butt of the laconic joke is double: it jabs indirectly at the perpetrators but does not spare those vic Both also note that the Shoah was barely a topic of conversation in Jewish-American families or the US mass media in the first two post-war decades (LoM, 204– 205, 225 – 226; Novick 1999, 1– 2).  The potential for a cynical reading seems to be absent in the translation, while it does retain and perhaps even reinforce the laconic style.

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tims who remained either undecided about emigration or decided to wait for the end of Hitler’s regime. This is even more so since the sentence functions as counter to her parents’ view: “[m]an muß warten lernen” (wl, 21; [y]ou have to learn to wait: LoM, 21). After the laconic sentence, Klüger offers her alternative: “[m]an muß fliehen lernen” (wl, 21; learn to run away: LoM, 21). There is certainly a twisted situational irony in the plain fact that the sentence can only be uttered because of Klüger’s very own survival. Then again, as a child, she could not make any decisions, and therefore, arguably, could not ‘wait’. Nor did she not ‘not wait’: as a child, she could do nothing but follow the decisions taken by her parents; if she were said to be waiting or not waiting, one would attribute to the child Klüger an agency that she did not have. The criticism against her parents must not be understated here – but simultaneously, the reader is not supposed to join her in her critique: Klüger does not fail to mention that her family history makes it abundantly clear that the decision to emigrate was not a guarantee for survival: her father had emigrated but was nonetheless murdered by the Nazis, as was her half-brother. Meanwhile, even though she and her mother could not emigrate, they survived. It reminds the reader of that the fact that “in reality the cause of survival was almost pure chance” (LoM, 71). Klüger’s own discourse is, then, rife with contradictions – laconically accusing the passivity of some victims but acknowledging that they are, in fact, not to be blamed. If one sees the laconic remark as a remnant of coolness in the face of imminent danger, the distancing within her own discourse may be seen as a coolness in the face of interpretation. In other instances, Klüger uses scathing sarcasm to denote the sexism inherent to organised religion: she criticises the limited role women are allotted by (traditional) Judaism. But she does so sardonically: [w]är’s anders und könnte ich sozusagen offiziell um meine Gespenster trauern, zum Beispiel für meinen Vater Kaddisch sagen, dann könnte ich mich eventuell mit dieser Religion anfreunden, die die Gottesliebe ihrer Töchter zur Hilfsfunktion der Männer erniedrigt und ihre geistlichen Bedürfnisse im Häuslichen eingedämmt, sie zum Beispiel mit Kochrezepten für gefilte fish abspeist. (wl, 23) If it were different, if I could mourn my ghosts in some accepted public way, like saying kaddish for my father, I’d have a friendlier attitude towards this religion, which reduces its daughters to helpmeets of men and circumscribes their spiritual life within the confines of domestic functions. Recipes for gefilte fish are no recipe for coping with the Holocaust. (LoM, 24)

The politicised pathos is unmistakable, yet here, too, the butt of the joke in the final line is double: the sarcasm is evoked by the semantic ambiguity of the verb “abspeisen”, which means both ‘to feed someone’ as well as ‘to become less than

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expected’. Moreover, the first meaning is inverted: the women are supposed to feed the men. Mentioning the gefilte fish adds couleur locale, highlights the Jewish context in which Klüger experienced this injustice. While a dialogue with a (probably Jewish) interlocutor serves to acknowledge the plurality of opinions concerning the role of women in Judaism, she ultimately sticks to her criticism – and defiance – of the gender roles: [d]u unterschätzt die Rolle der Frau im Judentum, sagen mir die Leute. Sie darf die Sabbatkerzen anzünden am gedeckten Tisch, eine wichtige Funktion. Ich will keine Tische decken und Sabbatkerzen anzünden, Kaddisch möchte ich sagen. […] [D]ie Toten stellen uns Aufgaben, oder? (wl, 23) Yet I am often told that I underestimate the role of woman in Judaism. She may light the Sabbath candles after having set the table, an important function. I don’t want to set the Sabbath table or light candles; I don’t live with tablecloths and silverware. […] [T]he dead set us certain tasks, don’t they? (LoM, 24)

Yet despite the lashes – some more severe than others – to the Jewish community and to Jewish individuals, Klüger’s use of language is a weapon mostly pointed at the Nazis and those readers who look for a sentimental account. How else is one to read the following sentence, describing their freedom after having fled the death march? “Wir konnten rasten wann und wo wir wollten, und nach unserem Belieben rechts oder links gehen” (wl, 175; we could rest whenever we pleased and choose whether to go to the right or the left: LoM, 168). This freedom to go left or right certainly constitutes a victory of life over genocide, albeit a precarious one: “[dies] gab uns eine Sicherheit, die gar nicht gerechtfertigt war” (wl, 175; Susi and I felt far more secure than was justified: LoM, 168). However, it can be read in opposition to the image of the ‘selections’ of newly arrived prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where left and right both meant death.²⁹ By 1992, when weiter leben was published, the image of these ‘selections’ was already a central element of Shoah narratives, be they autobiographical or fictional.³⁰ Klüger’s stated freedom contains, therefore, a grotesque dimension: her freedom is expressed with a vocabulary that, in this context, usually denotes either death or death. Only sheer coincidence has not yet led to it, but her still precarious sit-

 In contrast to what Laternser and other legal counsellors of Nazi defendants implied (cf. Chapter 4), ‘admission’ to the camp did of course not lift the de facto extra- and illegal death sentence imposed on the arrivals.  Lifton notes a familiarity “with photographs of Nazi doctors standing at the ramp and performing their notorious ‘selections’ of arriving Jews” (1986, 4).

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uation (on the story level) is only referenced to in the next sentences. As such, the idyllic connotation of freedom is immediately taken aback.³¹ It is noteworthy to address the notion of freedom, especially since the excerpt refers to Klüger’s unlikely survival, which was due not only to her mother’s stubbornness, but also to the help of a Funktionshäftling, who risked her life with no material gain to expect: [t]he main characteristic of freedom is its unpredictability. […] And therefore I think it makes sense that the closest approach to freedom takes place in the most desolate imprisonment under the threat of violent death, where the chance to make decisions has been reduced to almost zero. (And where is the zero point? The gas chambers are zero, I believe, where the men in their final contortions are forced by a biological urge to step on the children. But how can I be sure?) In a rathole, where charity is the least likely virtue, where humans bare their teeth, and where all signs point in the direction of self-preservation, and there is yet a tiny gap – that is where freedom may appear like the uninvited angel. (LoM, 128)

Despite their hugely diverging wartime experiences, Klüger’s concept of freedom echoes Jean-Paul Sartre’s, who published La République du silence in a Résistance newspaper, Les Lettres françaises, in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of Paris. It starts with the provocative notion that [j]amais nous n’avons été plus libres que sous l’occupation allemande. Nous avions perdu tous nos droits et d’abord celui de parler; on nous insultait en face chaque jour et il fallait nous taire; on nous déportait en masse, comme travailleurs, comme Juifs, comme prisonniers politiques; partout sur les murs, dans les journaux, sur l’écran, nous retrouvions cet immonde visage que nos oppresseurs voulaient nous donner de nous-mêmes: à cause de tout cela nous étions libres. Puisque le venin nazi se glissait jusque dans notre pensée, chaque pensée juste était une conquête; puisqu’une police toute-puissante cherchait à nous contraindre au silence, chaque parole devenait précieuse comme une déclaration de principe. (Sartre 1949, 11) Never were we freer than under the German Occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to speak. We were insulted to our faces every day and had to remain silent. We were deported en masse, as workers, Jews or political prisoners. Everywhere – on the walls, on the screens and in the newspapers – we came up against the vile, insipid picture of ourselves our oppressors wanted to present to us. Because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped into our very thoughts, every accurate thought was a triumph. Because an all-powerful police force tried to gag us, every word became precious as a declaration of principle. (Sartre 2008, 3)

 A counterargument may be that the very act of writing hints at Klüger’s survival. That is an argument that cannot be refuted, of course, and Klüger addresses it elsewhere. In this excerpt, however, she reflects feelings and not the writing process with its implications.

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The crucial difference is that Sartre situates freedom in an intellectual resistance to propaganda, whereas in Klüger’s example it is tied to concrete action – to subdued yet active resistance to the genocide. Klüger’s considerations offer a counternarrative to a political discourse of liberation, yet it is by no means addressed primarily to her American audience, where notions of the ‘Greatest Generation’ and the Second World War as a war for democracy are still particularly en vogue. ³² Indeed, the same passage can be found in the German original, albeit in slightly changed form – here, unpredictability is not a characteristic of freedom, but rather its very essence: “[v]ielleicht sollten wir Freiheit als das nicht Voraussagbare definieren” (wl, 134; the main characteristic of freedom is its unpredictability: LoM, 128). But the core of the message remains the same: true freedom manifests itself in a life-threatening situation or, more paradoxically, when one is deprived of one’s freedom of movement. The concentration camp, of course, combines both. Sarcasm and cynicism constitute a pathos of anti-pathos on their own, which is found side by side with openly emotional stances. On various occasions Klüger shows a preoccupation for death in the gas chamber: “Hans’ Mutter, meine Großtante, hat auch diesen jämmerlichsten Tod erlitten, den in der Gaskammer” (wl, 11; Hans’s mother, my great-aunt, was one of those who died in the most pitiful way there ever was: the infamous death in the gas chambers: LoM, 8). The superlative form suggests an empathy with the victims in the gas chamber, and a resulting sense of horror. Yet the ‘definite’ moment where intense emotionality breaks through the anti-pathos is the description of a near-fatal accident which re-evokes the experiences in Birkenau and thus is a testimony to the belatedness of trauma:

 That the dispelling of one myth does not necessarily amount the dispelling of the other, is clear from Kenneth Rose’s conclusion to his social history of the Americans during World War Two. Rose maintains that the Second World War was not a ‘good’ war but a just one because the alternative, German victory in Europe and Japanese victory in Asia, would be far worse (2008, 251). The war effort of the other Allied nations is not mentioned, at least not here. But that does not mean that Rose is not highly critical of the notion of the ‘Greatest Generation’, which could do a disservice to (traumatised) veterans by propagating further wars (254). Edward Wood is particularly critical of the military policy ‘heritage’ – the idea that the Shoah demonstrates that military intervention is the best means to proceed and stop genocide or restore justice. In his argument, the myth of the ‘good war’ is kept alive for the sake of the military-industrial complex, as Dwight Eisenhower called it (and warned against) in 1961 (Wood, Jr. 2006, 3 – 14). He traces the phrase ‘good war’ to Stud Terkel’s eponymous oral history of the Second World War (19); Terkel, in a preface, explains that he opted for putting the phrase in quotation marks, since “the adjective ‘good’ mated to the noun ‘war’ is so incongruous” (Terkel 1984, s.p.).

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[s]eine Fahrradampel, ich war stehengeblieben, um ihn ausweichen zu lassen, er versucht aber gar nicht, um mich herumzukommen, er kommt gerade auf mich zu, schwenkt nicht, mach keinen Bogen, im letzten Bruchteil einer Sekunde springe ich automatisch nach links, er auch nach links, in dieselbe Richtung, ich meine, er verfolgt mich, will mich niederfahren, helle Verzweiflung, Licht im Dunkel, seine Lampe, Metall, wie Scheinwerfer über Stacheldraht, ich will mich wehren, ihn zurückschieben, beide Arme ausgestreckt, der Anprall, Deutschland, ein Augenblick wie ein Handgemenge, den Kampf verliere ich, Metall, nochmals Deutschland, was mach ich denn hier, wozu bin ich zurückgekommen, war ich je fort? (wl, 271– 272) I had been in Germany for only a few months when a teenage bicyclist ran me down one evening as I was crossing the street in a pedestrian zone. Suddenly I saw three bikes coming downhill from my right at what seemed a tremendous speed, one of them headed right at me. I stared at the cyclist’s lamp ad stood still so he could bike around me, but he didn’t seem to try (why doesn’t the old biddy get out of my way?), and he comes straight at me. At the last fraction of a second I jump to the left, and he, too, swerves to the left, in my direction. I think he is chasing me, wants to injure me, and despair hits like lightning, I crash into metal and light, like floodlights over barbed wire. I want to push him away with both arms outstretched, but he is on top of me, bike and all. Germany, Deutschland, a moment like hand-to-hand combat. I am fighting for my life, I am losing. Why this struggle, my life, Deutschland once more, why did I return, or had I never left? (LoM, 258)

The biker is depicted as having evil intentions; the catachresis (‘helle Verzweiflung’) combines a mental state with a sensory impression; the combination of darkness, a single light source and metal causes a flashback to the traumatising moment (the concentration camp); Germany supposedly returns with a vengeance to settle unfinished business, but in line with trauma theory, the temporality is disturbed: the traumatised victim never left the time-space of the victimising experience.³³ Trauma is, with Cathy Caruth, not the experience itself but the experience’s aftermath: [w]hat causes trauma […] is an encounter that is not directly perceived as a threat to the life of the organism but that occurs, rather, as a break in the mind’s experience of time […] The breach in the mind – the psyche’s awareness of the threat to life – is not caused by a direct threat or injury, but by fright, the lack of preparedness to take in a stimulus that comes too quickly. It is not the direct perception of danger, that is, that constitutes the threat for the psyche, but the fact that the danger is recognized as such one moment too late. It is this lack of direct experience that thus becomes the basis of the repetition of the traumatic nightmare. (Caruth 2013, 5 – 6)

 Moreover, we are confronted with the repetitive character of the traumatic structure (cf. Caruth 1996, 1– 7): it is the occurrence of a trauma in its original sense – a physical wound – that is cited as the impetus for the writing about Klüger’s psychological trauma(ta).

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Certainly, ‘Germany’ can only be read as synecdoche – in two senses: the nation of the perpetrators and the place of the crime. Yet this metonymical reading is subject to irony, too: Dagmar Lorenz notes that the bicycle driver was not a ‘native’ German but the adopted son of friends of Klüger – a young man with Vietnamese origins (D. C. G. Lorenz 1993, 213; qtd. in McGlothlin 2004, 68 n.4).³⁴ Ours is not to say whether the author Klüger deliberately left this out: suffice it so say that her persona registers the bicycle rather than the rider, who is reduced to the third-person masculine pronoun. And if Germany is undoubtedly also the place of many crimes committed during the Shoah (and the Second World War more generally), it only features minimally in Klüger’s account: there, the focus is on Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Groß-Rosen – all places in occupied Europe, all crimes committed by the Germans, but not in Germany.³⁵ If anything, Germany is the place where Klüger witnesses more death marches after having escaped from one.³⁶ Such ironies notwithstanding, and despite the potential factual differences between Klüger’s account and the incident itself (cf. Lorenz 1993), the scene is the definitive rupture in Klüger’s cool p(r)ose: “Klüger’s immediate reaction to the accident as it occurs is to read the present danger through the lens [of] her Holocaust experience” (McGlothlin 2004, 51). Interestingly, McGlothlin opts to quote the German text – not the English rewriting. If we compare both versions, one notices Klüger’s accounts are factually not fundamentally different – save for the added context in the very first and very

 Remarkably, Lorenz does not offer a source for this claim, and McGlothlin does not comment on this. A possible explanation is inside knowledge: at the time, Klüger was, after all, professor of German Literature at an American university.  The exception in Groß-Rosen, which did belong to the German Reich as long as Lower Silesia did; nowadays, this region is Polish. Moreover, Groß-Rosen (or, more precisely Christianstadt) is almost presented like a relief after the horrors of Theresienstadt and Birkenau.  Furthermore, Klüger is originally Austrian, not German – which is highlighted by the Austriacisms in the description of her early years in Vienna. Pascale Bos notes that this fact is easily overlooked, and she is right to point out, therefore, that Klüger’s “textual ‘return’ […] represents […] something distinct from [Grete] Weil’s actual return” (Bos 2005, 72). One might add: Klüger’s textual ‘return’ represents something distinct from Klüger’s own actual ‘return’, although presumably her return to Germany led to the bicycle accident, which in turn gave cause to her writing her autobiography (cf. McGlothlin 2004, 52). Perhaps one needs not to emphasise the latter point too strongly, however. After all, Klüger notes that “[s]omething pulled her back” (LoM, 257). This, evidently, happens before the accident. Caruth emphasises that Sigmund Freud considered traumatic repetitions to be “particularly striking because they seem not to be initiated by the individual’s own acts but rather appear as the possession of some people by a sort of fate, a series of painful events to which they are subjected, and which seem to be entirely outside their wish or control” (Caruth 1996, 2).

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last English sentences and the free direct speech³⁷ between the brackets. But the German version features various ellipses strung together by commas, whereas the English version contains full sentences and has, in a musical sense, less of a staccato rhythm. In other words, the German version features a build-up of tension akin to Klüger’s experience in the seconds before the crash, whereas the English version does not, or not as much. Yet both texts are marked by a temporal discrepancy between story and discourse: the pacing is akin to slow motion.

5.4 Klüger’s wary coolness: distinguishing empathy from identification (and not believing in empathy) In her review of Landscapes of Memory, Elena Lappin expresses the presence of emotionality – and presumably an unspecified codification of it – with the metaphor of warmth: this is […] a deeply poetic book, its clear prose full of lyrical images that allow [Klüger] to tread lightly, with warmth and emotion and pride, but without drama. And, very unusually for a memoir of this or any sort, it is written like an open dialogue with the reader. […] She doesn’t insist on being right, but she does insist on being heard. (Lappin 2003)

Lappin’s attribution is even more remarkable since Klüger does not address this identification-empathy difference as explicitly in Landscapes as in weiter leben. Indeed, the question concerning the audience for which Klüger writes (and thus, the question of dialogue which Lappin mentions) is a covert question concerning the purpose of writing and reveals which attitude she expects from her German audience (and which is, consequently, not included in Still Alive): [i]hr müßt euch nicht mit mir identifizieren, es ist mir sogar lieber, wenn ihr es nicht tut; und wenn ich euch ‘artfremd’ erscheine, so will ich auch das hinnehmen (aber ungern), und falls ich euch durch den Gebrach dieses bösen Wortes geärgert habe, mich dafür entschuldigen. Aber laßt euch doch mindestens reizen, verschanzt euch nicht, sagt nicht von

 Even if it is (only imagined to be) spoken to oneself. To be fair, the German text features a similar phrase shortly after the quoted passage: “warum weicht mir die alte Ziege nicht aus, der werd ich’s zeigen” (wl, 272; why doesn’t the old biddy get out of my way? LoM, 258), which then is immediately softened: “[s]o ungefähr denke ich es mir” (wl, 272). The imagined maliciousness, which is taken back, is not articulated in Still Alive – on the contrary, it is explicitly presumed to be non-existent: “He wasn’t acting out of ill will, I am sure, just feeling the exuberance of being on a vehicle that was fast” (StA, 206).

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vornherein, das gehe euch nichts an oder es gehe euch nur innerhalb eines festgelegten, von euch im voraus mit Zirkel und Lineal säuberlich abgegrenzten Rahmens an, ihr hättet ja schon die Photographien mit den Leichenhaufen ausgestanden und euer Pensum an Mitschuld und Mitleid absolviert. Werdet streitsüchtig, sucht die Auseinandersetzung. (wl, 141) You don’t have to identify yourselves with me, I’d rather you didn’t. And I appear ‘alien’ to you, I will accept it (but grudgingly), and if the use of this word upsets you, I want to apologise. But allow for some enticement, don’t hide in a fortress, don’t say in advance that this has nothing to do with you or only within a framework which you have neatly drawn with your pair of compasses and your ruler. Don’t say that you’ve endured the photographs with the heaps of corpses and that you’ve done your share of atonement and compassion. Be willing to discuss these topics, seek the dispute. (transl. mine)

Klüger connects identification to insincere emotions, linking a (self-centred) discussion with the pretence of compassion or the pretence of responsibility – how else can one interpret the notion of complicity or compassion that could be absolved?³⁸ Either one feels complicit or one does not (in which case any posing of compassion is just that: a pose). Instead of identification, which Klüger, moreover, elsewhere links to an uncritical attitude favoured by propaganda films like Jud Süß (dir. Veit Harlan, 1940; cf. wl, 53), she demands irritation, debate, continued and continuous dialogue. That implies, however, an empathic connection: how can debates take place if one does not try to take the other side’s perspective into proper account? And, simultaneously, how can debates take place when one does not acknowledge the difference of the other’s experience and point of view? Klüger sees this empathy as a conditio sine qua non for reaching a perhaps unattainable German-Jewish ‘collaboration’ – in the sense of a ‘coworking through’ the traumatic legacy of the Second World War and the Shoah – to which she metaphorically refers: Erinnerung ist Beschwörung, und wirksame Beschwörung ist Hexerei. […] Zaubern ist dynamisches Denken. Wenn es mir gelingt, zusammen mit Leserinnen, die mitdenken, und vielleicht sogar ein Paar Lesern dazu, dann könnten wir Beschwörungsformeln wie Kochrezepte austauschen und miteinander abschmecken, was die Geschichte und die alten Geschichten uns liefern, wir könnten es neu aufgießen, in soviel Gemütlichkeit, als unsere Arbeits- und Wohnküche eben erlaubt. (Sorgt euch nicht, daß es zu bequem wird – in einer gut funktionierenden Hexenküche zieht es immer, durch Fenster und Türen und brökkelnde

 ‘Auseinandersetzung’ is tricky to translate, particularly here: it may mean discussion, argument, dispute, but also a ‘dealing with’ something. While those claiming to have absolved their share of remembrance, to have atoned for any (rhetorically presumed – yet tacitly questioned) collective guilt might consider this to be an Auseinandersetzung with the past, it is not the dialogical Auseinandersetzung that Klüger seeks, which is not a confrontation with the dead but with the living as well as a confrontation which can have no end.

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Wände.) Wir fänden Zusammenhänge (wo vorhanden) und stifteten sie (wenn erdacht). (wl, 79 – 80) Remembering is a branch of witchcraft; its tool is incantation. […] If I succeed, together with my readers – and perhaps a few men will join us in the kitchen – we could exchange magic formulas like favorite recipes and season to taste the marinade which the old stories and histories offer us, in as much comfort as our witches’ kitchen provides. It won’t get cozy, don’t worry: where we stir our cauldron, there will be cold and hot currents from half-open windows, unhinged doors, and earthquake-prone walls. (StA, 69)

Klüger is clear: this ‘co-working through’ will not, indeed cannot, be easy or pleasant. The conjunctive mood, especially in the final sentence (which, despite its comparative brevity, typographically ‘stands on its own’), illustrates Klüger’s estimation of this scenario: she deems it rather unlikely.³⁹ At the same time, does the translational modification of the draughts – cold and hot – not (also) stand for her pathos of anti-pathos? Does it not point to the gap between affect and cognition in her project of commemoration? When Klüger describes that gap cognitive (cf. infra), she reports to be met with commentaries like this one: “[j]a, sagen die Leute, wir sehen ein, daß das ein Schlag für dich gewesen ist, und bedauern dich auch, wenn du das wünscht” (wl, 27; [p]eople say, okay, we understand that the murder of your father hit you hard, and we are ready to sympathize with you if you want us to (though we suspect that you can do without our pity): StA, 33). The prosopopoeia, by its nature, constitutes a discrepancy between the first-person plural and the narrator’s overall use of the first-person singular: the narrator becomes the addressee. Yet the prosopopoeia is broken by the clause ‘sagen die Leute’, where the narrator slips back in to frame the second discourse. Moreover, the last clause (‘wenn du das wünscht’) within the prosopopoeia heightens the polyphony, which is confirmed and even expanded upon in the translation. On the level of the interlocution, the phrase cannot be considered ironical in its classical sense: irony is understood as a violation of the Gricean maxim of quality by communicating “the opposite of what is said” (Giora 1995, 239; cf. Grice 1975, 46; Schwarz-Friesel 2009, 224). If the people would literally say this to Klüger, it would diverge from social conventions but certainly not mean the opposite of what they say – on the contrary: it would have to be taken literally and would only indicate the opposite of their message: ‘wir bedauern dich’ would mean: we do not offer our condolences; we do not engage empathically. But if ‘wenn du das wünscht’ only points to

 Remarkably, the last sentence is not translated in Still Alive. This further emphasises the specificity of Klüger’s Germany-specific appeal and her corresponding lack of hope for it being heeded.

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the opposite of what is said – not its own opposite – it does not violate the quality principle or Grice’s maxim of quantity by overreporting since if spoken, it would be highly relevant (cf. Grice 1975, 45). How can we make sense of this clause? The clause still seems to go beyond what is ‘actually’ said to Klüger. This can be explained by considering Searle and Vanderveken’s illocutionary sincerity condition (rather than Grice’s implicature – which can only be used to draw conclusions from Klüger’s inclusion of the phrase). ‘Wenn du das wünscht’ would expose a discrepancy between one’s genuine and one’s pretended feelings – and thus not violate the sincerity that Searle and Vanderveken consider crucial for the ‘strength’ of the speech act, ⁴⁰ i. e. the expression of regret and compassion (“wir bedauern dich”), but render this violation obvious for the interlocutor to hear: [t]he fact that the expression of the psychological state is internal to the performance of the illocution is shown by the fact that is paradoxical to perform an illocution and to deny simultaneously that one has the corresponding psychological state. Thus, one cannot say […] “I apologize but I am not sorry.” (Searle and Vanderveken 1985, 18 – 19)

‘Sagen die Leute’ reflects on the acknowledgement of the witness’s suffering and suggests that this acknowledgment is insincere. As such, in its (very likely) fictivity, the clause serves to illustrate the narrator’s (Klüger’s) suspicions of faked compassion on behalf of her interlocutors. On this level, it could be considered as a form of aggressive irony: Klüger puts words in the mouths of interlocutors who dare not speak them, and through their silence, they ex negativo articulate the opposite – their condolences. The irony emerges only in the literary text – not in the conversation referred to – from the discrepancy between silence and articulation: “[d]ie tatsächliche Einstellung [from the speaker] wird nicht explizit vermittelt, sondern ist zu rekonstruieren” (Schwarz-Friesel 2009, 225; the speaker’s real attitude is not explicitly communicated but must be reconstructed). This is what Klüger does – she has her own reasons for seeing through the implicature in conversation and in discourse – but without absolving the reader from interpreting: the clause ‘wenn du das wünscht’, though it leaves little doubt as to its function, retains a sense of indirectness. Here, the double decoding inherent to verbal irony sets in: the first step is establishing the difference between the literal and the figural meaning of the utterance; the second step is

 Searle and Vanderveken’s notion of the illocutionary force is largely the philosophical variant of John Austin’s concept of the speech act. They also explicitly mention “condole” as a verb with illocutionary power (Searle and Vanderveken 1985, 212).

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asking for the function of irony: why not communicate more directly? The second step is the step to be taken by the reader of Klüger’s account – to conclude that Klüger does not believe her interlocutors to be sincere, which in turn should raise the question as to one’s own stance towards Klüger: is one really engaging with her account? Why is one reading it, and on which terms? While Lappin’s metaphor of the ‘light tread’ presumably refers to Klüger’s laconic style, her pathos of anti-pathos, her choice of the ‘warmth’ metaphor suggests that she heeds to Klüger’s desire for dialogue, that she engages in empathically listening to the survivor. Lappin’s listening to the victim is quite a different one than the listening Klüger demands from her German reader: her parents were Jewish survivors themselves. And indeed, it is remarkable that Klüger’s “address” (Bos, 2005, 72– 73) is completely absent from Still Alive – the American audience, of course, has never been ‘asked’ to feel complicit. As noted above, her address to that audience is to rethink the role of the Americans during the war: as indifferent soldiers who waged a war for reasons that Klüger does not discuss – but certainly not as liberators who fought the war for the sake of the European Jews. Nevertheless, Still Alive differentiates between empathy and identification as well, albeit in a very subtle way – through metaphor, not through address: “[m]y dislike of standing in lines dates from this experience in the camps: to stand, just stand. Sometimes I leave a line when it’s almost my turn, out of revulsion for the bovine activity of simply standing” (LoM, 139, emphasis added).⁴¹ Read ex negativo, and Klüger (understandably) refuses to identify with a cow.⁴² Yet the metaphor does not only refer to the endless waiting during the infamous rollcalls but  The metaphor of people (Jews) as cattle shows up already in the description of Theresienstadt: it was “der Stall, der zum Schlachthof führte” (wl, 81; the stable that supplied the slaughterhouse: LoM, 76). What was life like in Theresienstadt? “In einem großen Stall leben. Die Machthaber, die manchmal in ihren unheimlichen Uniformen auftauchen, um zu überprüfen, ob das Vieh nicht am Strick zerrte” (wl, 103; [l]ife in a big stable. The owners occasionally show up in their ominous uniforms to make sure that the cattle behave: LoM, 99). It shows up in her description of Auschwitz, too: “‘[d]ie ist aber noch sehr klein’, bemerkte der Herr über Leben und Tod, nicht unfreundlich, eher wie man Kühe und Kälber besichtigt” (wl, 133; ‘[s]he seems small,’ the master over life and death remarked. He sounded almost friendly, as if he was evaluating cows and calves: LoM, 126). To be sure, the bovine metaphor is also used by other survivors: Regine Beer, deported from the Dossin barracks in Mechelen/Malines to Birkenau in May 1944 – around the same time of the transports from Hungary – describes being treated and driven like cattle in the Dossin barracks (De Keulenaer 2006, 41) and while disembarking from the train in Birkenau (De Keulenaer 2006, 59).  In a similar vein, Klüger problematises another self-chosen metaphor, namely that of Theresienstadt as “ant heap […]. Who wants to have been an ant?” (LoM, 99; cf. wl, 103). The metaphor, it seems, may bring about (or reinforce) feelings of shame at being utterly powerless.

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also to her vulnerability as a child confronted with not-all-too-brutal guards: “wasn’t I the calf with which you play, knowing it’s still going to be slaughtered before it gets to grow into a cow? I didn’t want to be a calf. (This recurring tendency I have of comparing myself to likable animals later on cured me of my meat-eating habit)” (LoM, 137). Here, the practices of identification, and perhaps even more importantly, of refusing identification, lead to empathy with animals. That the metaphor is animal-specific need not astonish: our capacity for empathy (or our willingness to empathise) with animals is species-dependent. Describing the deportation from Theresienstadt to Birkenau as being trapped in a “Rattenfalle” (wl, 107; trapped like rats: StA, 104), Klüger seems to resort to the Nazi imagery of Jews as vermin – one thinks of Fritz Hippler’s propaganda film Der ewige Jude (1940), in which Jews are depicted as rats. If so, she does so sardonically: the metaphor is used immediately after she rhetorically asks why deportation trains are labelled “Viehwaggons […]. Ist denn die Tierquälerei die einzige Beziehung von Menschen und Tieren, die uns einfällt, wenn wir sagen, man hätte uns wie Tiere behandelt, uns in Viehwaggons gesteckt?” (wl, 107; [i]t is customary to call them cattle cars, as if the proper way to transport them is by terrorizing and overcrowding them. Of course that happens, but we shouldn’t talk as if it is the norm, as if abuse were our only option in treating animals: LoM, 104). By positing both the metarhetorical remark and the rhetorical image next to each other, Klüger challenges the exploitation of animals and the pathos of virulent antisemitism that depicts humans as nonhuman animals – both of which are possible only because of the ideological notion that one species (humankind) is superior to all others. The persona’s ironic identification with rats points precisely to the limits of empathy. The distinction between empathy and identification should be obvious, and its implications are the same for a German audience: empathy does not prerequire identification – or, depending on one’s terminology, it certainly does not equal identification. Simultaneously, it is empathy that may inspire ethical and/or political action. Her demand is one for differentiation: theoretically, between empathy and identification; practically, between the reader’s own identity and Klüger’s. It is even more painful that this demand, which Caroline Schaumann considers a “particularly courageous and daring aspect of [weiter leben]” (2004, 325), has by and large not been heeded. Bos summarises as follows: “German critics empathize and identify with Klüger; they imagine themselves in her position, her life, instead of engaging with her text as an invitation to confront

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their own possible complicity” (2005, 79).⁴³ To be sure, any refusal to acknowledge Klüger or to a priori dislike her text would equally be suspicious because such an attitude might easily be construed as subliminal or latent antisemitism. Yet Bos’s criticism of the professional reception of Klüger’s text points exactly to that issue: [Klüger’s] critical warnings and comments in the text are […] ignored by most of the German critics, and instead, the memoir is read in such a way as to fit in with other works of this particular genre […], which serves to make these kinds of texts harmless. It is read as the work of a (Austro‐)German author who bears witness to her experience during the Holocaust, who lost her place in German society because of the racial ideology of the Nazis, and who is able to “rediscover” her Germanness after the war by becoming a successful professor of German language and literature. What is sought for in this kind of reading […] is solely a German identity. Klüger’s Austrian background, and in particular her Jewishness, (and after four decades, her unmistakable Americanness) disappear. In short, her otherness, her displacement, is taken for granted, pushed to the background, or ignored and thus deprived of its subversive potential. (2005, 80)

It is quite hard to establish whether such attitudes testify to a lingering antisemitism or if they are rather to be thought of as philosemitic. In the end, and certainly for Klüger, this does not matter. As already noted, she wishes to do away with both, considering them two sides of the same coin. To be sure, this does not facilitate one’s reaction to the text, as it may seem that one gets caught in a loselose situation: review it favourably, and criticisms like Bos’s loom large; dispel it and accusations of antisemitism are likely. From her side, the ‘saved’ Klüger also refuses to identify with the ‘drowned’ victims. This necessitates taking an explicit stance against certain emotional codes, even when those are not explicitly named: [i]ch erzähle diese Kindereien, weil sie alles sind, was ich von ihm [Klüger’s father, TV] habe, und obwohl ich sie beim besten Willen nicht zusammenbringe mit seinem Ende; weil ich mich, ohne in ein falsches Pathos zu geraten, nicht umstellen kann, auf das, was ihm geschehen ist. Aber auch nicht loslösen kann. (wl, 26) I recount these childish trivia because they are all I have of him, and because I can’t make them jibe with his death. Try as I may, I can’t change these images or the feelings that go with them, and concentrate instead on what I know happened to him in the end

Exactly what is meant by ‘false pathos’ remains unclear: sentimentality, against which she rails elsewhere, or perhaps a too visually detailed and too visceral  Bos clearly uses ‘empathy’ in a different understanding than I do, insisting less on the selfother distinction.

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imagining of her father’s death. It might, however, also refer to the topic of unspeakability, of not being able to imagine the events at all, and hence take the antirealist stance.⁴⁴ The fact that she cannot bring both elements – the memory of her father and the knowledge of his “jämmerlichste[r] Tod” (wl, 11; the most pifitul way [of dying]: LoM, 8) – to which she refers as a “gap” (StA, 33) bears similarities to Saul Friedländer’s concept of excess (cf. supra). The identified problem is not intellectual or cognitive, but rather it is affective: the difficulty “liegt in der Diskrepanz der Affekte” (wl, 27; the bad fit between facts and feelings: StA, 33).⁴⁵ The question is, between which affects? “Einerseits die Rührung, […] die nicht viel Höheres ist als Eigenliebe” (wl, 27; the quaint nostalgia, […] which is mere self-love: StA, 33) is not followed by an ‘andererseits’, and this seems no coincidence. Klüger contrasts memory with fantasy, her father raising his hat in the streets of Vienna and her father dying in great agony (27). The connections between both run “ins Leere” (28; in a vacuum: StA, 34), and this emptiness manifests itself in the text: no ‘andererseits.’ The alternative is “Rührseligkeit” (wl, 28): the “sentimentality” (StA, 34) that is vehemently discarded. What follows is the conclusion that the dilemma has no way out, that her father has become a ghost (28). Manuela Günter describes the ghost as an indissoluble symbiosis of the dead and the living (2002, 27). What is more, the ghost is a common crosscultural and transnational metaphor for “representing and not-representing trauma” (Chassot, 2018, 24), being a remnant (albeit an intangible one) from the past in the present (cf. Chassot, 2018, 7, 24– 26). Before diegetically returning to the Vienna of 1940, a highly ambiguous – and unresolved – “Gespenstergeschichten sollte man schreiben können” (wl, 28; I wish I could write ghost stories: StA, 34) remains.⁴⁶

 The presence of both tendencies causes Rothberg to consider Klüger’s weiter leben as an instance of traumatic realism, which, he concludes, “does not allow a naturalized, mimetic consumption of the extreme, [as would be the case for nineteenth century, ‘classic’ realism, TV] but it also refuses to accept the postmodern version of the bystander’s lament whereby ‘we didn’t know’ is transformed into ‘we can’t know’” (Rothberg, 2000, 140).  The opposition is clearly a false one: ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ are not antagonisms. Klüger’s prosopopeia, which has been discussed earlier, suggests that this false binarity even impeaches empathy: “[j]a, sagen die Leute, wir sehen ein, daß das ein Schlag für dich gewesen ist, und bedauern dich auch, wenn du das wünscht. Nur das kognitive Problem sehen wir nicht” (wl, 27; [p]eople say, okay, we understand that the murder of your father hit you hard, and we are ready to sympathize with you if you want us to [though we suspect that you can do without our pity.] What we don’t get is the problem: StA, 33).  Klüger has repeatedly expressed her own mixed feelings about Vienna (e. g. Schmidtkunz 2008, 13) – mixed feelings she shares with Hilberg (Schlott 2016a, 102– 106).

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5.5 Breaking frames of commemoration: comparisons It is easy to see how the alternative strategy could be construed as ‘false pathos’ – as an emotionalisation strategy that serves to disconnect the Shoah from contemporary society or from other instances of structural and mass violence. Klüger emphasises that comparison is essential when discussing historical events: “[i]sn’t all reflection about the human condition (or conditions) a process of deducing from ourselves to others? What tools are left if we don’t compare?” (LoM, 107). Yet when comparisons amount to equations, we are facing an intellectual falsehood. Moreover, Klüger implies that this falsehood serves political or psychological purposes: “[d]ie scheute sich nicht zu vergleichen, nur wurden aus ihren Vergleichen gleich Gleichungen, und schlechte Rechnerin, die sie war, stimmten die Lösungen nicht” (wl, 110; she did not shy away from comparisons, but her comparisons amounted to equations, and since she was a poor arithmetician, her solutions were wrong: transl. mine).⁴⁷ Such demands for comparisons – indeed, their insisting on the cognitive as much as the political necessity of comparison – is provocative in 1992, relatively shortly after the Historians’ Debate. Yet these issues of comparison are not straightforward – on the one hand, Klüger’s carving of a spot for herself in the literary canon means that she engages in practices of approximation and sharp distinguishing and that she tries to set the standards of comparison. That is legitimate, of course, but it comes with the risk of resorting to auto-exegesis, as in the case of Sebald: the author setting the terms for interpretation of their work. It certainly also comes with the pathos of rejection – this is particularly clear in Klüger’s rebuttal of Bruno Apitz’s Nackt unter Wölfen (1958; transl. Naked Among Wolves, 1960) and the mythification surrounding Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe’s martyrdom; both of whom are unmistakably alluded to.⁴⁸

 The person she refers to is Gisela, the German wife of a Princeton colleague, who had already been depicted as a naïve, ignorant, egocentric or plainly stupid person; cf. wl, 92. A decade later, Klüger tones down her depiction of Gisela (cf. LoM, 106).  For an overview of the genesis of Nackt unter Wölfen and its political implications in the GDR, cf. Niven (2007, esp. chapter 3). Yet Niven simultaneously argues that “the postwar story of the Zweigs is also a West German one, not just an East German, Israeli, or Austrian one” (223). And indeed, the recent re-adaptation for the screen by Philipp Kadelbach (2015) demonstrates that it remains relevant well after the reunification of the two Germanys. As to Kolbe, Klüger emphasises that his deed was an absolute exception – committed for a fellow Catholic, and not, so it is implied, for a Jew (wl, 74). It seems that Klüger’s anonymisation of these presumably well-known – to a German audience – victims even serves the purpose of commemorating differently: by focusing on the facts she avoids a sentimentality or heroic pathos which those names may evoke more easily, once they become canonised and used as metonymies,

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On the other hand, the issues of comparison, once more, raise the question of empathy and identification. Recounting how she secretly went to a screening of Carl Peters (1941), she says that the colonialist and deeply racist imagery affected her profoundly: “ich fühlte mich von Peitsche, Stiefel und der rassischen, schwarz-weißen Konfrontation auf schwarz-weißer Leinwand persönlich bedroht” (wl, 53; I felt personally threatened by the whip, the boots, and the racist black-white confrontation in black-and-white: StA, 52). It is impossible to assess, of course, whether the remembered self ‘actually’ experienced that fear and could list the cinematographic strategies that caused such fear, or whether this is not a reconstruction ex post facto, after having experienced the presence of whips and jackboots in the form of SS guards and after having lived in the United States where the legacy of racism may have added to that multidirectional affect: multidirectional along the axes of space (United States versus Central Europe), the historical moment (slavery and colonialism versus the prelude to and the Shoah itself) and the temporal difference between the events described (a childhood in Vienna) and the moment of writing. Perhaps less multidirectional in that sense, but still comparative, is Klüger’s remark concerning the linguistic interpretations of which children are capable: while she hears “Scharführer” (an SA rank) as “Scharfführer” (in analogy with “Scharfrichter”, wl, 66), she recounts how, as a child, a black colleague assumed that the city of Lynchburg was a place of lynching (66). She describes such Fehlleistung-like interpretations as “[s]prachgebundene Terrorphantasien der Kinder von verfolgten Minderheiten” (wl, 66; language-bound terror phantasies of persecuted children: transl. mine). Likewise, in Still Alive, Klüger resorts to cultural translation to describe the experience of flight, which she illustrates ex negativo with the flight of the African American Jim in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884; StA, 138). But this does not necessarily amount to an equation of the African American experience and the Shoah or to a higher spot for the Jews in a ‘victim hierarchy’ – on the contrary. As Schaumann summarises (with particular validity for Still Alive), Klüger’s “version is more an embrace than an appropriation, as she uses distinctly American traumatic phenomena

e. g. emplotted as martyrdom (as was definitely the case for Kolbe, and arguably also for the Buchenwald inmates who saved Zweig – albeit in a secular, GDR-prone fashion). This different commemoration is then continued in the English-language text by avoiding the emergence of such pathos-driven (in the worst meaning of pathos) martyr stories altogether. If Klüger opposes the amalgamation of victim groups and of experiences, she also seems opposed to the emphasising of extraordinary accounts, which have the potential of mythologising the camps.

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to explain and make relevant the Holocaust” (2004, 333).⁴⁹ Nevertheless, such comparisons have often been met with scepticism or even downright hostility, and Schaumann points to James Baldwin’s rejection of the comparison on the grounds that the Jews in America were not under threat, whereas African Americans were (and are) still facing structural violence and discrimination (Schaumann 2004, 333). The fact that Klüger still “presumes to know enough about African-American suffering to empathize, using even Baldwin’s name to support her point” (Schaumann 2004, 333) raises a series of difficult questions:⁵⁰ [i]s Klüger justified in her assertion that a Judenstern is the equivalent of dark skin color? Or do such assumptions void a victim’s specific experience, an attitude that Klüger herself reprimanded in weiter leben in her depiction of a postwar German know-it-all who presumed stand the suffering Klüger endured without ever listening to her? Do Klüger’s words “I understand” include or exclude her African-American reader? (Schaumann 2004, 334)

The comparison reminds the reader of Fanon’s conundrum, which is mentioned in Chapter 2: to what extent do differences in historical experiences allow for solidarity, despite the parallels between them? When does solidarity unwittingly silence those victims to whom it wishes to lend a voice? As with Sebald (but in a different constellation), issues of empathy and appropriation hinge on the question of the model-author, and they hinge on the question of hypocrisy. They can easily lead to aporia, framing even well-intended attempts at fostering solidarity and visibility for the victims as attempts at promoting one’s own image. Especially for Klüger, and despite the risks of silencing the African American victim that  In unterwegs verloren, the connection is made between the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Shoah – again through the autobiographical moment: a cruise ship holiday with a stop on the Île de Gorée near Senegal, an erstwhile centre of the slave trade. Here “taten mir plötzlich die Füße weh. Nicht auf gewöhnliche Art weh, sondern krampfhaft, ich möchte schreien” (uv, 232; my feet suddenly hurt. And not like they usually hurt, but convulsively, I wanted to scream). While not as intrusive as the bicycle accident in weiter leben, which may be seen as the impetus for writing weiter leben, a physiological response emerges in the place of the other’s suffering – but that suffering is linked to her own traumatic past: “[i]ch kenn das ja, war einmal mitten drin. […] Ich bin der einzige Mensch hier, ob Touristen oder Einheimische, ob Männer oder Frauen, der sich dran erinnert, was Sklavenarbeit ist. Persönliche Erfahrung, nix Vorfahren und 18. Jahrhundert. ‘I was a slave girl’” (uv, 233 – 234; I know all of this, once I was in the middle of it. […] I am the only person amongst the tourist and locals, men and women, who remembers what slave labour is. Personal experience, not my ancestors in the 18th century. ‘I was a slave girl’).  “This part of my story coincides with what older blacks will tell me, what black writers such as James Baldwin have poignantly described: a child facing a sea of hostile white faces. No white can understand, they say. I do, I say. But no, you have white skin, they counter. But I wore a Judenstern to alert pedestrians that I wasn’t really white” (StA, 22– 23; qtd. in Schaumann 2004, 334).

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come with her professed understanding, this framing would be harsh, considering her autobiographically motivating models of multidirectionality through political activism (Finch 2018, 63). Yet here, too, if one wishes to heed Klüger’s appeal, one must critically engage with her literary practices, which includes outlining such risks: it seeks discussion and it seeks the terms for interpreting the past – it can certainly be quarrelsome. In other words, it takes Klüger’s views and her address seriously.

5.6 A brief prospect: Klüger’s voice As is clear from sections above and the bibliography, the comparison between weiter leben and Still Alive has been made by several authors, and even though I try to put my own accent to the analysis, many of the findings point in the same direction: Klüger has, as she says herself, written “a parallel book” (LoM, 264), and this cultural translation refutes both the presumption that the first text (as Urtext) has a higher authority – an assumption that could be made by philologists or historians – nor is the second text on the basis of its being a ‘correction’ of mistakes – even though Klüger does undertake such factual corrections, especially concerning the death of her father (cf. McGlothlin 2004, 47). While Schaumann argues that the tone of Still Alive is less hostile, perhaps ‘warmer’ than the tone in weiter leben, and while there are isolated instances where this seems to be the case, the later update (in the guise of unterwegs verloren) suggests otherwise. But another such update does not seem to have been considered as much by literary criticism: Klüger’s own reading of weiter leben as an audiobook (Klüger 1996b).⁵¹ This constellation is commonplace for poetry but less so for prose (Benthien 2017, 118 – 119).⁵² What applies to the parallel existence of Klüger’s autobiographies, and what equally and more generally applies to the parallel existence of audiobooks and their written counterparts, applies to Klüger’s audiobook as well: it is a re-mediatisation of weiter leben, but this does not mean that it is meant to ‘replace’ the written book (cf. Benthien 2017, 138).

 This audiobook will be quoted in the text as follows: a Roman number indicates the parts (which have been retained from the text: Wien – Die Lager – Deutschland – New York – Epilog: Göttingen; I–V) followed by an Arabic number to indicate the chapter within each part, the beginning letter of the subchapter in line with the written table of contents. The approximate moment in minutes and seconds refers to the starting point of the relevant fragment.  Then again, in all Klüger’s autobiographical texts, she includes and comments on her poems.

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This is especially true for the timeline of the publication. Dating this reading is not straightforward: its first publication as a CD appears to date to 2008 (Süselbeck 2008); it was earlier released on 6 cassettes, probably in 1996. The audiobook forms no exception to Toni Bernhart’s critical remark that audiobooks generally do not come with editorial dates, such as the date and place of reading, the technical staff involved, the director and technical information (Bernhart 2017, 67). Perhaps the accuracy of such dating is, although of course not unimportant, only of secondary importance: it seems clear that the reading dates from a point in time after 1992, the original publication date of weiter leben and very likely before the publication of Still Alive, as the commentaries on Martin Walser suggest. If the relevance of comparing the audiobook to the written text needs demonstration,⁵³ let it be reminded, once more, how Klüger describes Hans’s account of his being tortured: “nur aus dem Tonfall hörte man das Anders-, Fremd- und Bösartige heraus” (wl, 9; [o]nly in Hans’s tone of voice is there a hint of the sheer evil, of the radical otherness: StA, 18). Moreover, Heinrich Detering claims that weiter leben has the authoritative quality of a voice, i. e. that the written text corresponds to the articulation of a person with a body (Detering 2004, 71) – his metaphorical way of saying that weiter leben has the authority of the autobiography – and that it is marked by a “fingiert[e] Oralität” (Detering 2004, 75; fictitious orality). However, Detering does not listen to Klüger’s ‘actual’ acoustic voice. How does this voice accompany her account? Is the polyphony acoustically retained? Does the voice suggest the dialogical structure of the written text (cf. Benthien 2017, 121)? Is the antagonistic coolness retained in the voice, or is the voice ‘warmer’ than the text? Does Klüger’s reading enhance or reduce the pathos of her memoirs? The audiobook unavoidably differs from the written text in four perspectives: first, in rather irrelevant syntactical variations: “wir sagten: ‘Salon’” instead of “eigentlich sagten wir ‘Salon’” (wl, 7). These are not numerous (and not of great interest). Second, there are the ‘quantitative differences’: a few additions in the form of brief recapitulations to ensure the reader is still ‘on track’ – the infamous length of German sentences in literary discourse makes them easier to read than to listen to. But these, too, are not very numerous. Elisions, however, are more common: whereas the written text offers high German equivalents  It actually should not be: “[d]er Performance eigener Texte […] wird traditionell eine besondere ‘Authentizität’ zugeschrieben, die mit dem ‘Ursprungsmythos der Sprache als O-Ton’ und ‘authentische Verlebendigung’ zusammenhängt” (Benthien, 2017, 118 – 119; performing one’s own text is regularly considered particularly authentic, a notion which is related to the mythological origin of language as original sound and authentic enlivenment).

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for certain specifically Austrian lexemes, the audiobook leaves some of these out: ‘Stanitzel’ is no longer accompanied by ‘Tüte’ – but note that the Yiddish “Toches” is still supplemented with “Hintern” (I–4, 3m) and “Rachmones” with “Mitleid” (I–5, 0m16s). This nonexplanation of the Austrian term does constitute somewhat of a challenge to the book’s dedication and description: “den Göttinger Freunden ein deutsches Buch” (a German book for the friends from Göttingen). The translation of an English quotation in German is remarkable (I–9, 5m). The inclusion of a translation for the Yiddish term aligns with her claims that she does not imagine many Jews will read her German memoirs (wl, 141). This gesture can be seen as both an approximation to her imagined audience – offering it the knowledge it lacks and needs to understand the text – and also as a distancing from it, by positing that it lacks this knowledge and by still insisting on using the unknown terms, i. e. by making an explicit differentiation between herself and her audience. Sometimes the elisions are longer: when commenting on her own poem Mit einem Jahrlichtzeit für den Vater (I–6, 5m), two paragraphs are not read (corresponding wl, 35 – 36). Remarkably, the commentary is about a different version of a strophe and on her reasons for not incorporating it. Fittingly, the commentary is not incorporated in the audiobook. Another rather lengthy elision (two paragraphs) occurs in chapter 14 of the Vienna section: these deal with lice. Are lice too uncomfortable to talk about, their presence a cause for shame? Slightly further in her account, a subclause equally referring to children having lice (wl, 62) is also deleted from the audiobook. A rather surprising elision concerns the lack of belief some interlocutors have in Klüger’s stories (due to her having been a child and their corresponding beliefs) and the ideological recuperation of the Shoah, including the references to Apitz and to Kolbe. The section on the musealisation of the Shoah is substantially reduced; overall, approximately two and a half pages are not read (in wl, 73 – 76), and subsequently, a section on the discussion of Polish antisemitism is deleted as well. In other words, some sections that articulate a reciprocal distancing – Klüger’s not being believed, Klüger’s vehement criticism of mainstream representations of the Shoah and Klüger’s refusal to idealise the victims – are deleted. So is her tacit criticism of Lorenz’s post-war career (wl, 185 – 186), and her supposition that she was offered an assistant’s position at Berkeley for conducting her PhD research only because her marital status (divorced with two children) made her an unlikely candidate for continuing her academic career (wl, 199). The extremely antagonistic relation to Lazi Fessler, a psychiatrist whom Klüger is urged to visit due to her bouts of anxiety (wl, 238 – 244), is entirely left out. Do these elisions reduce the antagonistic character of the audiobook? Can they be taken as an argument for Benthien’s general claim that audio-

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books are supposed to be better versions of their written counterparts (Benthien 2017, 138)? Third, the audiobook starts with explicit comments on paratextual phenomena: “[i]ch lese mein autobiographisches Buch, weiter leben. Eine Jugend. Ich habe dem Buch ein Motto vorangestellt, ein Zitat von der französischen Philosophin Simone Weil, richtig ausgesprochen si.mɔn vɛj” (I–1, 1m; I am reading from my autobiographical book, weiter leben. I have put a motto in front of it, a quotation by the French philosopher Simone Weil, correctly pronounced si.mɔn vɛj). Similar instances occur when Klüger signals the end of a quotation. Fourth, it also updates some information. The German Studies scholar at Berkeley that Klüger mentions (wl, 199) is named explicitly as Heinz Politzer (III–B–3, 4m55s).⁵⁴ Similarly, after describing how she met Christoph and after mentioning the tensions that mark their friendship, Klüger adds that “[d]er Mann, den ich in dem Buch Christoph nenne, heißt eigentlich Martin Walser. Er hat sich in diesem Christoph erkannt, sich öffentlich zu ihm bekannt und ihn mir nicht verübelt” (III–B–5/7, 8m20s; the man whom I call Christoph in the book, is really Martin Walser. He recognized himself in this Christoph, publicly said so, and did not resent me for it).⁵⁵ She thus updates the book while assuring that she does not hurt his right for privacy; after all, she justifies this inclusion by pointing to Walser’s own offering of the key and by the absence of any accusations or polemics (which are rather common in the genre of the roman à clef). In this sense, the voice breaks away from the text, often in order supplement it, just as Still Alive would a few years later. So far, the discrepancies are also easily describable since they relate to quantitative questions: which information is added, which parts are not narrated. The difficulty arises when trying to assess whether the voice is in congruence with the events or attitudes narrated. This is a qualitative question; it asks for the relation between form and content. Yet while literary scholars are trained to analyse such relations for written language, they often lack an adequate vocabulary for the description of spoken language: “[w]ir sind analphabetische Hörer geworden, weil uns eine Sprache fehlt, um das Gehörte diskutierbar zu machen, und weder Literatur- und Theaterkritik noch die

 The American journalist David Halberstam is not as ‘lucky’: while he is named explicitly in the text (wl, 213), the voice of the audiobook does not speak his name and only quotes him (in German translation).  The notation may be slightly confusing since it deviates from my standard notation – but chapters 5 and 6 in the ‘Bavaria’ section of the ‘Germany’ part are heavily reduced resp. obliterated from the audiobook and inserted together with chapter 7, which is also clear from the name of the audio file.

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Theaterwissenschaft geben uns dafür Kategorien und Bewertungsgesichtspunkte an die Hand” (Meyer-Kalkus 2008, 167; we have become analphabetic listeners, for we lack a language in which we can dicsuss that what we have heared, and neither literary studies nor theatre studies offer us any categories or criteria for evaluation).⁵⁶ I do not claim to be a more literate listener,⁵⁷ and Meyer-Kalkus, too, resorts to metaphorical expressions in an attempt at establishing a vocabulary – his “Koordinaten der Sprechkunst” (180; coordinates of the art of speaking) include the timbre of the voice: “warm, kalt, stählern etc.” (181; warm, cold, ironclad etc.). This is not a criticism: rather, it points to the difficulty of establishing an objective vocabulary. For my part, I try to describe the paralinguistic signals and relate these to my listening experience. It is only a modest first step towards an academically adequate way of describing audiobooks. To put it simply, there are several instances where the voice seems in congruence with the events or attitudes narrated, and others where this is not the case. One example of the voice being in congruence is found in the visceral rejection of Jewish male classmates, who had forgotten their yarmulkes and thus had to cover their heads with their dirty handkerchiefs. The remembered self’s opinion is crystal-clear: “[i]ch fand das widerlich” (wl, 14; I was revolted: StA, 23), and the voice of the remembering self leaves little doubt about the veracity: the words come abruptly; the emphasis is on the first syllable of ‘widerlich’; the rest of the sentence, which offers a sociological explanation as a reflection on her disgust, is spoken more slowly – thus the affect comes out suddenly, suggesting the authenticity of a true gut reaction; the subsequent reflection as more controlled. Another example shows, once more, that the distinction between affect and reflection cannot be upheld: supporting Klüger’s feminism, her voice emphasises the last syllable of “Papageiin” (I–7, 3m) when adding the feminine noun as a corrective for the more commonly used “Papagei”, which she initially uses (wl, 38; this gets utterly lost in translation). The politicised emotion coincides with linguistic and rhetorical reflection: the male noun is not erased, making the correction even more relevant. Another strong emotion, not political but disdainful, pertains to questions as to whether Klüger, still a child, could play in Birkenau: the antagony is particularly clear in her repeating the word ‘gespielt’, followed by a sudden ‘Appell gestanden’ – creating a paralingual contrast to

 Toni Bernhart offers an brief overview of the acoustic turn, which emerged around the turn of the last century, but argues that audiobooks still pose terminological and methodological problems for textual criticism (Bernhart 2020).  The alliteration cannot hide the catachrestic nature of this formulation – which confirms Meyer-Kalkus’s claim.

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complement the semantic and historical contrast (which in turn demonstrates the Arendtian Dummheit on the interlocutor’s behalf; II–B–5, 0m50s). This is especially true for her plea to her German readers not to resort to easy identification or an equally easy a priori shunning away, which becomes an invitation to engage in a dialogue with Klüger. The sentences are spoken with various pauses, but these suggest some hesitation rather than a harsh or brusque tone: the pitch does not go up, the timbre remains the same (II–C–1, 5m). Another excerpt where she directly addresses her reader and reminds her (and, according to her, the occasional him) not to take away an optimistic or positive ‘message’ from weiter leben – a message that she somewhat nuances here – is completely left out, thus slightly reducing the dialogical character of the audiobook (the passage is found in wl, 172). The importance of names, as illustrated by the pseudonyms on the road and the anonymity of the helping reverend, is not rendered invalid by the absence of a rather substantial reflection on their own pseudonyms, and after all, the anonymous reverend is mentioned along with Klüger’s reflections on the adequacy of her gratitude towards him by naming him. He is not deleted from the audiobook (III–F–2, 8m50s). At other times, (presumed) emotionality is masked by the voice. When recounting how after the war a Bavarian man dragged her from her bicycle, suspecting her of participating in orgies in the man’s (confiscated) house, she reflects on his having picked on “die kleinste und schwächste unter dem Judenvolk” (wl, 196; the smallest and weakest of the despised kikes: StA, 154). The ironical usage of ‘Judenvolk’ may lead the reader to suspect Klüger feels contempt or anger for that man (or both) – she admits to no longer feeling sorry for his destroyed property; in the audiobook, the voice reads the passage rather neutrally: the pitch does not go up, there is no staccato tone emphasising particular words, no other indications pointing to a particular emotional attitude (III–B–2, 4m50s). The second question: how does Klüger’s voice relate to my analysis? Do I need to rethink some assertions? The comparison yields some remarkable differences yet also similarities.⁵⁸ Experiencing Klüger’s voice as cool (or not) is a matter of paralanguage: the speed of speech, the emphasis, the pitch, etc. – elements which may, much like any rhetorical construction, have intentional or unintentional effects on the listener. As the title of this subchapter suggests,

 Let it be stressed here that I first read weiter leben and then Landscapes of Memory and only later came across and heard the audiobook on lengthy car trips without fellow travellers. That, too, undoubtedly influences the experience of listening to Klüger’s voice.

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here is not the place to measure any accelerations or decelerations very accurately, any differences in pitch, or other subtle phonetic shifts; that would constitute an entire chapter in its own right. Rather, I have opted to listen more closely to those excerpts from the written text that I deemed noteworthy in terms of cynicism, distancing or scepticism, and to describe to the best of my abilities Klüger’s voice when compared to the sentences preceding and following them. These will follow chronologically according to the (audio)book, not the sequence in which these excerpts are presented in my argumentation. I noted that I deemed Klüger’s use of the adjective “zerstreut” (wl, 8; dispersed: StA, 17) rather cynical, in the sense that it refers both to her family members who survived the Shoah and have migrated to all possible countries and to those who did not survive, who, as she presumes in 1992, were gassed in Birkenau and subsequently cremated: their ashes were, of course, scattered. In the audiobook, this sentence is spoken with what seems like a certain laconic nonchalance: the words are somewhat ‘stretched’; the final words, “oder sonstwo” (wl, 8; wherever: StA, 17), come rather abruptly, as if the previous sentence, which points precisely to the fate of these family members, is deemed not particularly relevant. It does not stress the singular words and thus does not create a staccato of horror images or leave ‘pauses’ to think of the ambivalence of the chosen adjective. The voice treads rather lightly and does not seem particularly antagonistic here, which would somewhat contradict my attribution of it as cynical (which I nonetheless do not wish to revoke completely). Another example, where I could more easily agree to a revocation, concerns Klüger’s choice for the verb ‘abspeisen’ as sarcastic: it is used in a metaphorical sense while criticising the traditionally domestic role to which Jewish women were confined, but Klüger’s voice gives no direct clue as to its being intended sarcastically (I–4, 4m22s). The same goes for the seemingly cynically intended labelling of the concentration camps as “made in Germany” (III–F–1, 0m20s). Then again, that cannot entirely disprove an intention – what can? The act of writing and the act of reading aloud are different ones; attitudes might have changed; the audiobook, too, can be seen as a parallel book to the written one. And ultimately, even if one does not (or no longer) see(s) it as sarcastic, a certain irony nonetheless remains: sarcasm cannot be involuntary, irony can. To conclude this subchapter and these first and modest findings on Klüger’s voice, I wish to mention a phrase hitherto absent from my analysis, a sentence in which the tone of the voice suggests how intertwined distancing and approximation are in weiter leben, all the more since Klüger distances herself not only from her audience but also from her mother. When recounting an episode that took place in Vienna and shortly after the Jews were compelled to wear the yellow star in public, Klüger describes her mother’s accusations upon returning with

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an orange secretly handed to her by a sympathiser – her mother reprimanding her for accepting the gift unwittingly received: “‘[w]as fällt dir ein, Geschenke von Fremden auf der Straßenbahn anzunehmen? Wir sind keine Bettler. Kriegst du nicht genug zu essen?’” (wl, 50; “[w]hat got into you to take presents from a stranger in a streetcar? Are we beggars? Don’t you get enough to eat?”: StA, 49) To which Klüger replies – to her reader, not her mother – “[a]ber es war doch ein Dilemma, oder?” (wl, 50; [b]ut hadn’t I been in a quandary? StA, 49) This phrase can easily be read as a rebuttal of her mother’s criticism, the interjection a reinforcement of this antagonistic attitude. The voice, which leaves a pause after representing the mother’s speech and then (perhaps hesitantly) offers her defence rather slowly, with an emphasis on the second syllable of ‘Dilemma’ and the pitch going up and culminating in this interjection (I–10, 4m20s), suggests that Klüger does ask her reader to side with her on this matter – and side, here, against the mother.

6 Raul Hilberg: The historian’s affective self-control 6.1 Historiography and emotions: a very brief overview While some may find the phrase “emotional turn” uninspired, disinteresting, or downright problematic, there seems to be broad consensus that the turn of the millennium witnessed the umpteenth turn within the humanities and social sciences: the emotional turn.¹ In 1999, Thomas Anz pleads for cultural studies to address the topic of emotions, arguing that is high time to discard the false dichotomy between (objective) research and (inherently subjective) emotionality: [ü]ber Liebe und Haß, Freude und Trauer, Lust und Schmerz, Furcht und Mitleid, Angst und Schauer, Spannung und Erleichterung, Wut und Ärger, Wohlgefallen oder Ekel, Faszination und Langeweile, Neid, Bewunderung oder Eifersucht läßt sich durchaus rational sprechen. (Anz 1999) One may speak rationally speak about love and hatred, joy and misery, lust and pain, dread and compassion, fear and chills, tension and relaxation, anger and annoyance, pleasure or disgust, fascination and boredom, envy, admiration or competition.

Instinctively, Anz’s thesis seems correct since the opposite claim would fall foul to the confusion of the object and method of study. It would also amount to submitting to the false dichotomy of rationality and emotionality, which has been deconstructed during the last twenty-five years (overviews are offered by Anz 1999 and Frevert 2009, 189 – 190). This emotional turn has certainly left its mark on the study of history, where the history of emotions posits that emotions, their articulation and their evaluation are both historically and culturally variable and can have an influence on the course of history. Collective protest in the form of strikes and demonstrations are perhaps the most obvious example, but the (erstwhile) influence of the concept of honour on diplomatic relations demonstrates this history-shaping dimension as well (Frevert 2009, 199 – 202). But if one would deduce that the emotional turn constitutes the first moment in intellectual history where emotions are considered an object worthy of study, or as a category by which to define historical epochs, they would be mistaken: shortly after the First World War, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga published Herfsttij

 Thomas Anz notes that the field of psychology had already turned towards emotion in the 1980s (Anz 2006). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110758580-011

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der Middeleeuwen (1919; orig. transl. as The Waning of the Middle Ages, 1924, and more literally as The Autumn of the Middle Ages, 1996), in which he posits that the Middle Ages were marked by an intensified emotionality, which disappeared with the Reformation and the emerging ideal of affective self-control (Frevert 2009, 195). Ute Frevert draws a parallel to Norbert Elias’s (contested) thesis in Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation (1939, transl. The Civilizing Process, 1978 & 1982), according to which modernity is marked by a tempering of the emotions, a turn towards the rational. The historian Frevert situates these historiographic works in their historical context: [a]uffällig ist, dass sowohl Huizinga als auch Elias ihre Bücher zu einer Zeit schrieben, als “Affekte”, “Passionen” und “Gefühle” hohe Wellen schlugen. Der Erste Weltkrieg hatte Ängste belebt, Hoffnungen geweckt, Hasstiraden losgetreten, Beschämungsrituale eingerichtet, Stolz aufmarschieren lassen – in einem Maße, das seinesgleichen in der Geschichte suchte. […] Elias veröffentlichte sein Buch 1939 im britischen Exil, von wo aus er die öffentlichen Gefühlsexzesse im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland beobachtete. […] Die intellektuellen Versuche der Zwischenkriegszeit, der “maßlosen Gemeinschaftsmoral” Verhaltenslehren der Kälte und des Abstandes entgegenzusetzen, waren grandios gescheitert. (Frevert 2009, 196) It is noteworthy that Huizinga and Elias wrote their books at a time when affects, passions and feelings were en vogue. The First World War had created fears and hopes, had provoked tirades of hatred, put in place rituals of defamation, had seen pride march – all that to a degree which had no historical precedent. […] Elias published his books during his exile in Great Britain in 1939, from where he saw the public excesses of affect in National Socialist Germany. […] The intellectual endeavours during the interbellum of confronting the “absolute community spirit” with conducts of coolness and distance had massively failed.²

Unsurprisingly, the next historian in Frevert’s account is Lucien Febvre, who is considered the “one solitary man […] [i]n the beginning of the history of emotions” (Plamper 2015, 40). In a 1941 article, Febvre had pleaded – doubtlessly influenced by the stirring of contemporary emotions through propaganda machines – for interdisciplinary research into basic human feelings and their codifications (Frevert 2009, 196; Plamper 2015, 40 – 43). The historians’ rediscovered interest in emotionality – asking whether it is historically variable, how it shapes history and how these questions bear consequences for the methodologies (and vice versa) – must almost automatically lead to the next question: how does emotionality relate to historiography? How are the historian’s emotions shaping her writing? What are the professional stand-

 Plamper largely agrees with Frevert’s account and offers a somewhat more detailed account of the centrality of affective self-control for Elias’s conception of modernity (2015, 48 – 50).

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ards concerning emotionality? How does the topic of research potentially bear on these questions? Quoting Tacitus’s ethos of writing history, sine ira et studio, Leopold von Ranke’s similar insistence on a shedding of one’s emotions or partisanship and Robin George Collingwood’s situating of irrational feelings to the realm of psychology but not history, Plamper’s overview on the matter suggests that the predominant historical attitude amongst historians is that of writing history without letting one’s feelings interfere (Plamper 2015, 290 – 291).³ Indeed, Collingwood seems to uphold the old but meanwhile generally discarded binary distinction between rationality and irrationality, speaking of “sensation as distinct from thought, feelings as distinct from conceptions” (qtd. in Plamper 2015, 290). In this sense, historians formed no exception amongst their fellow academics in the life sciences: as Uffa Jensen and Daniel Morat demonstrate, even when scientists performed research on emotions, they themselves aimed at absolute detachment – only very occasionally challenged in favour of observing the scientist’s emotions and its influences on his research (Jensen and Morat 2008, 11– 13). Daniela Saxer shows how historians writing at the end of the nineteenth century testify to their feelings concerning the more monotonous facets of their work in ego-documents – while still adhering to the prescribed objectivity in their academic prose (Saxer 2008, 79, 90; cf. Plamper 2015, 291). These attitudes seem somewhat contradictory to the nineteenth century historian’s dominant practice of Einfühlung – a form of empathy and thus necessarily a highly subjective enterprise opposed to the standards of objectivity – in order to create an understanding of the historical events. Perhaps it is no coincidence that with the increased ‘rationalisation of the feelings’ the teaching of empathy as method waned (Saxer 2008, 91– 95; cf. Plamper 2015, 291). Indeed, the notion that historians are not (or ought not to be) affected by affection found in their sources is articulated by Dominick LaCapra and, with him, Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams: LaCapra associates archival research with “excessive objectification, purely formal analysis, and narrative harmonization.” The historian who engages is such activities is conceived here as someone who sifts through documents, extracting pieces of information which are then coolly combined into a coherent account of the facts of an event. This detached approach leads to the production of histories that are unfaithful to traumatic experiences. (Chare and Williams 2016, 46, emphasis added)

 Collingwood (1889 – 1943) was a British historian and philosopher in the analytical tradition with a strong interest in metaphysics and aesthetics. His philosophy of history was published posthumously as The Idea of History (1946).

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The metaphors of coolness and detachment refer, here, to matters of methodology more than matters of discourse (although one would presumably look at the discourse to find fault with the methodology). Chare and Williams refer to a binarity between the eyewitness writing ego-documents at the time of the historical events (and depicting them explicitly) and the historian who must reconstruct history by considering all sorts of accounts and perspectives. But it is a binarity that they, like LaCapra, deem untenable for writing (about) trauma. Indeed, as a survivor (though not an eyewitness) Hilberg – whose methodology relies heavily on access to archival sources; especially for Destruction – cannot be considered to speak merely with the voice of the historian, and he has increasingly touched upon these poetological premises as much as the epistemic ones. To be sure, trauma theorists in the humanities can be read, at least in part, as a reaction to the positions in the Historikerstreit. Martin Broszat’s plea for a historicization of the Shoah and of the Nazi era begs some questions. As Paul Betts and Christian Wiese summarise, [f]or Broszat, the Nazi experience not only has made “German” and “Jewish” history-writing fundamentally incongruous; the Jews’ victim status, so he continued, has meant that “Jewish” historiography remains too beholden to emotional memories of the past. […] For Broszat, it was precisely the (West) Germans’ break with the Nazi past in the 1950s and 1960s that has afforded them the necessary distance and detachment to write more objective and scholarly histories of the period. (Betts and Wiese 2010, 6)

That the break with the Nazi past was never completely successful – neither in West nor East Germany – is no longer a matter of dispute. But Broszat’s assumptions are one-directional and thus miss a crucial point: he posits that a critical political distancing enables a critical emotional distancing, without asking to what extent the emotional aftereffects influence the political distancing. It is now known that Broszat was a member of the NSDAP (Berg 2003, 615), and while it would be unduly unfair to discard his scholarship based on this biographic fact (cf. Ian Kershaw’s warning for ex post facto hubris, 2004), Broszat apparently could not see what Friedländer, his sparring partner, could: Broszat considered the subjectivity of the victims “and of their descendants” – in short of Jews – whenever and wherever they spoke of Nazism, as leading to fictitious renderings of this history. I had no choice but to ask him, in my response, whether he did not think that former members of the Hitler Youth generation (like himself) weren’t also gathering a burdened subjectivity in their perception of those years. (Friedländer 2016c, 225)

Trauma theory in the humanities reacts to such negative views of emotionality – more precisely, the victims’ emotionality – by embracing affect, by considering it a productive force in the creation of narrative and by adopting a metatheoretical

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and ethical point of view according to which academic discourse need no longer be, and indeed, must not be affect-ridden if it is to regard the suffering of others without downplaying the profound impact that trauma has. Then again, it was never true that historians always attempt to hide their feelings – so much is clear from Febvre’s aforementioned 1941 article, in which he points to the relevance of including emotions in historical research by stating that emotions “demain […] auront achevé de faire de l’univers un charnier puant” (Febvre 1941, 19; will tomorrow have finally made our universe into a stinking pit of corpses: qtd. in Brudholm and Lang 2018, 1 n.2). Studies like Saxer’s demonstrate an awareness of the historian’s often veiled emotionality. But the question becomes more pertinent due to the traumata of the twentieth century – total and industrialised warfare, genocide, the bloody processes of decolonisation and the lingering violence in postcolonialist states.⁴ Nevertheless, Plamper notes that there has been little if any research on the “relation between those writing history and their own emotions [in] the twentieth century”, and makes a partial exception for “the outrage and anger of young historians about the injustices of their own day – segregation in the American South and the Vietnam War” (Plamper 2015, 292). But these emotions are often hidden, as his somewhat surprising example shows: Plamper refers to the works of a historian who has not worked on either segregation or the Vietnam War but nigh exclusively on the Shoah – Raul Hilberg. Hilberg might be a slightly surprising example since he, in contrast to Léon Poliakov (Le Bréviaire de la haine, 1951; transl. Harvest of Hate, 1956) and Gerald Reitlinger (The Final Solution, 1953), never bothered to identify any emotion as motivation for the actions of so many individuals – while Hilberg does stress personal initiative within the institutions as a catalyser of violence (Schlott 2016b, 157). For him, the role of ideology and its inflations of ‘big’ emotions are of secondary importance when compared to the initiatives taken by members of the administration who were, in his view, not driven by ideology (redemptive antisemitism, in Friedländer’s terminoly) but rather by a desire to ‘solve problems’ – however problematic that sounds (and is). Bute even if Hilberg was not predominantly interested in emotions in history, it is undeniable that his historiography is marked by emotionality and the simul-

 The democratisation of higher education and, thus, of academic research, the challenging of the Western, white, male canon and the increased specialisation (allowing for a sharper profiling) of the disciplines may be factors that further explain why such shifts did not occur earlier, during the imperial dividing of Africa in the nineteenth century or in the immediate aftermath of the First World War.

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taneous need to suppress it to some extent.⁵ Plamper situates this emotionality between Hilberg’s lines: “one can sense what an enormous effort this reticence took – we sense a kind of engaged disengagement” (2015, 292). He backs this observation with retrospective remarks by Hilberg in his autobiography The Politics of Memory but does not tell us where the “reticence” in Hilberg’s academic oeuvre is visible, why it becomes visible there and what this means for the historiography of the Shoah. These questions will be addressed in this chapter. I will, like Plamper, take Hilberg’s retrospective self-description into account, but I will explicitly link it to his historical writing as well as to his methodological and epistemological considerations. Moreover, I will point to Hilberg’s relevant use of the temperamental and spatial metaphors – though he does not resort to these very often – and ask where they fit in the overall concept of the pathos of anti-pathos. Finally, it is worth pointing out that in a way, the renewed interest for Hilberg and for his rhetorical style closes the circle: early in his career, Hilberg’s research found many opponents precisely because of it. The changed status of emotionality within the discipline of historiography and in the sensitive context of the Shoah may be a partial explanation as to Hilberg’s (relatively) belated fame.

6.1.1 Reading Hilberg (I): the temperamental metaphor As mentioned in the introduction, Hilberg’s prose has often been described in terms of coldness, of soberness, of distance, and Hilberg himself described his approach to the Shoah as “ein heißes Thema […] kalt gestellt” (Schlott 2016b, 160; a hot topic cooled off).⁶ According to René Schlott, this cooling off was the result of Hilberg’s application of Franz Neumann’s political analysis of Nazi Germany along four categories: army, bureaucracy, economics and party.⁷ The contradiction within Hilberg’s own metaphoric formulation is not only a perfect example of his laconic discourse, but it equally points to his intellectual re-

 Indeed, Hilberg points to the bureaucratic perpetrator’s rationalisation: “he did not act out of personal vindictiveness. In the mind of the bureaucrat duty was an assigned path; it was his ‘fate.’ The German bureaucrat made a sharp distinction between duty and personal feelings; he insisted that he did not ‘hate’ Jews” (DEJ I, 659).  Somewhat surprisingly, Schlott does not offer a source for what is presumably Hilberg’s selfattribution.  Indeed, retrospectively Hilberg claims that he preferred to continue working with Neumann because the latter’s model allows him to write Jewish history as a history of reaction to others’ (in this case: the Nazis’) actions/agency (Hilberg and Söllner 1988, 181).

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lation to Neumann: whereas the first adapted the latter’s framework and style, Neumann warned Hilberg about the topic of his dissertation. According to Hilberg, Neumann told him: “it’s your funeral” (PoM, 66). To be sure, this is the laconic discourse that Hilberg would embrace himself. In relation to the temperamental metaphors, the metaphor of the funeral proves ambivalent in this context. On the one hand, it is a reformulation of Hilberg’s problem: his research topic is too ‘hot’, i. e. too politicised, to advance his academic career. Yet the coolness of the style is equally present in the metaphor: ‘kalt gestellt’ no longer refers to Hilberg’s monograph but to his career. Indeed, Hilberg’s style caused him problems, too: Ulrich Herbert points to the different reception attitudes it evoked: [d]ie Arbeit wurde an der Columbia Universität hoch gelobt und ausgezeichnet – aber sie wurde lange Zeit nicht gedruckt. Hilberg war seiner Zeit um Jahre voraus, die meisten Historiker, die die Arbeit lasen und beurteilten – Neumann war bereits früh verstorben –, erkannten gar nicht, was sie hier vor sich hatten. Das lag auch an Hilbergs Stil: trocken, apodiktisch, völlig schmucklos. Hilbergs Darstellung und Analyse schien demgegenüber unangemessen, prosaisch, ja banal. (Herbert 2007) The dissertation was praised at Columbia University and received awards – but for a long time, it was not published. Hilberg was years ahead of his time; most historians who read and evaluated it – Neumann had already passed away – did not recognize its immense value. This was partially due to Hilberg’s style: dry, apodictic, completely austere. In this light, Hilberg’s presentation and analysis appeared inappropriate, prosaic, even banal.

It almost seems as if there were not enough avowed emotionality for Hilberg’s work to be acceptable. Herbert further mentions the negative attitude in Israel towards Destruction, and indeed, Nathan Eck’s reaction was nothing short of passionate: “[w]hat we have before us is not a serious study seeking out the truth, but an outlet for feelings of disappointment and frustration, resentment and anger, perhaps even pain. I am not sure whether because of hate (of himself or of the whole people) or of love” (Eck 1967, 430).⁸ Eck, a survivor himself,⁹ ac-

 Magnus Brechtken cites Eck as one example for the initial reception of Hilberg’s work in Israel, but remarkably does not quote the second sentence (Brechtken 2012, 36). Similarly, Christopher Browning limits the quotation to the hatred, while not mentioning Eck’s other suggestion (Browning 1986). I do not wish to suggest that Eck’s judgement is less harsh than Brechtken’s and Browning’s quotations would suggest, but some nuance threatens to get lost: even if Eck sticks to a rudimentary emotional vocabulary articulated in binary oppositions – love or hate, self-directed or towards one’s people – he tries to understand Hilberg’s motivation, not just read his emotional state between the lines. And it suggests that Eck did not entirely exclude Hilberg’s potential siding with the victims.

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cuses Hilberg (as well as Arendt and Bettelheim) of producing “slanders” – akin to the perpetrators’ victim-blaming, exemplified by a quote from Paul Blobel’s interrogation in the Nuremberg trial against members of the Einsatzgruppen (Eck 1967, 385). Eck argues that Hilberg’s thesis of the Jewish passivity ‘acquired’ in the Diaspora is based on dubious sources, lacks sufficient examples, does not consider relevant historical counterexamples, is described too broadly to be insightful, fails to address the lack of immigration possibilities in the late 1930s and is written to fit Hilberg’s preconceived notions (Eck 1967, 390 – 395). Such criticisms have been uttered by others as well, but for our purposes, Eck’s description of Hilberg’s emotional state is more interesting. While defending Arendt and Hugh Trevor-Roper, who were convinced by Hilberg’s analysis respectively wrote a supportive review of the first edition, Eck asserts that Hilberg “insists that he is a fanatical devotee of the truth, who, suppressing his own feelings, would not shrink from denouncing the murdered millions of his own people – always for the sake of the truth” (Eck 1967, 387, emphasis added). However, Eck does not offer any source for that claim, nor does he explain how the suppression of emotions is visible. But clearly, Eck’s view on emotionality is a negative one: it clouds judgement; it distorts vision, and all-too heavy emotions eventually side with the perpetrators, as is summed up in the final sentence: “[o]ur Sages said ‘Love and hate pervert justice.’ We may add, they pervert not only justice but also the historian’s judgement” (Eck 1967, 430). How ironic, then, that Eck’s review unmistakably evokes a pathos in its polemical argumentation and phrasing. To be sure, his fundamental disagreement with Hilberg’s argument has political reasons as well as, presumably, personal ones: Eck survived the Shoah hidden in attics and with the help of sympathising citizens; while Hilberg’s survival is of an entirely different order: it is due to his pre-war emigration in 1939 along with his family.

6.1.2 Reading Hilberg (II): the spatial metaphor Aside from the perception of emotionlessness (Trevor-Roper; cf. introduction), of suppressed emotionality (Eck) and of coldness or coolness, the second set of metaphors with which Hilberg’s prose has been described is the spatial set.  Eck invokes his status as eyewitness and survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto only en passant, in a footnote (Eck 1967, 407 n.26). Eck’s position as a surviving eyewitness seems to be seldom mentioned by those who take his review as illustration for Hilberg’s early reception. That is somewhat peculiar since the dynamics between the emotionality of this author and the authority with which he speaks are thus erased from the debate.

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Berg sees Hilberg’s style as the exemplum of Adorno’s definition of laconicism as the “sprachliche Form der bedeutenden Nüchternheit” (Adorno 1989, 128; qtd. in Berg 2017, 1; the linguistic form of meaningful sobriety) and constantly describes Hilberg’s use of the perpetrators’ documents as a methodological proximity to the perpetrators, I wish to emphasise Hilberg’s distancing from the sources – and hence, from the perpetrators’ perspective. Yet Hilberg’s laconic discourse is not merely a distancing from these sources, it is a way of letting the silences found in both the perpetrators’ documents and in the victims’ accounts, notably Adam Czerniaków’s diary, resonate in his own text, thereby remaining ‘faithful’ to the lacuna that lies between language, history and (historical) imagination. Before directing attention to the corpus, and before actually looking at Hilberg’s texts, let me remark that, at least for the case of Hilberg (and in contrast to Klüger), the pathos of anti-pathos does not allow for a qualification of the emotions experienced during writing – one can only find traces of an intense emotionality. This is evident from the early reception: Nathan Eck suggests several feelings detectable between the lines and offers two (perhaps equally) intense yet ultimately different emotions as underlying Hilberg’s analysis: hatred and love. Identifying the feelings that are voiced between the lines is seldom (if ever at all) a straightforward task, especially when these voices are suppressed – even when the suppression is intentionally visible. It also means that Hilberg is not as antagonistic as Klüger, who does not hide her suspicions towards the reader of her text.¹⁰

6.2 Hilberg’s corpus: which texts for analysis? Hilberg’s magnum opus will be the main focus of research, and I will selectively read Perpetrators Victims Bystanders (1992) as a ‘counterweight’: not only is it structurally completely different due to its different focus, but this later text was not met with the acclaim of Destruction, as Hilberg indicates in his memoir. The Politics of Memory could be considered an autobiography, considering it starts in Hilberg’s early youth, covers his formative years in Vienna, the emigration over France to the United States, his further education there and his military service, during which he first got in contact with Nazi documents in Munich – the importance of which cannot be overstated given Hilberg’s later methodology – and his studies at university culminating in Destruction. Here, however, the autobiographical character of The Politics of Memory shifts into the memoir; the

 The Hilberg of Destruction’s first edition is a potential exception to this remark.

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subsequent parts nearly exclusively focus on Hilberg’s difficulties in getting funding for the publication of his monograph and in launching his academic career; Hilberg-as-scholar features prominently, while as a private person – a husband, a father – he is nearly entirely absent. Hilberg’s memoir do not ascribe to autonomist or self-referential aesthetics: the reliable reconstruction of one’s own past is not doubted or destabilised, and to the extent that The Politics of Memory is as much a summary of Hilberg’s early life as an immigrant and US soldier and a history of Hilberg’s difficult start to his career and an account of the trouble he faced in having Destruction published, it does not hint at its own publication history. I have opted to use the 1996 English version and not for the authorised German translation by Hans Günter Holl, which had already been published in 1994. This German version states Hilberg’s copyright in 1994, lending the impression that the translation is authorised as Urtext; simultaneously, the text is clearly marked as translation and thus cannot be the Urtext. Curiously, Hilberg does not explain why the translation was published before the original – neither in the English nor in the German version, and to my knowledge, not elsewhere either. The one remarkable difference between the German translation and the English original is the inclusion of several private pictures of his parents and of himself in different stages of life in the former (Hilberg 1994; 21, 25, 49, 67, 173). These pictures are not included in the English version; only the picture of Hilberg’s mother is mentioned (PoM, 31). However, no such references are found for the picture of Hilberg’s father in uniform or for the three pictures featuring Raul Hilberg himself. My use of this text is double, and this shows in the places where it is discussed in this chapter: on the one hand, I use it as Hilberg’s self-commentary and commentary on his other texts – and as such, Politics is referred to throughout. On the other hand, I use it as a key moment within Hilberg’s oeuvre, and as such, it is discussed – albeit rather briefly – in the chronological order that underlies the structure of the analysis. Sources of Holocaust Research (2001) is, apart from the third and final version of Destruction (2003), the last text published during Hilberg’s lifetime. It differs from Documents of Destruction in the sense that it is not a collection of documents with a short commentary that should be representative for the whole archive, but rather a typology of the sources and a reflection on the methodological problems they pose to the historian. Coming late in Hilberg’s career – after his retirement – it should not come as a surprise that it is as much a reflection on Hilberg’s own premises and style. Like Politics, it offers direct insights into Hilberg’s philosophy of language and of history, which will, however, mainly be discussed in context of Hilberg’s appearance in Shoah – any remarks pertaining to Sources of Holocaust Research will be integrated there.

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The Role of the German Railroads in the Destruction of the Jews (1976) will not be analysed here due to practicalities: I had no access to either a print or a digitally archived version, and I have chosen not to work with its German translation, Sonderzüge nach Auschwitz (1981): Eberhard Jäckel points to the addition of substantial material by the German publisher (Jäckel 1985). The matter of authorship thus becomes more complicated, more so since the translation is not Hilberg’s work and since Hilberg unambiguous opinion on the quality of the translation adds an additional burden. After all, if one is prone to look for veiled emotionality, any authorial principled distancing from the text renders an autobiographical reading (which is not a synonym for reading the text as autobiography) problematic. The language of Sonderzüge is considered by Hilberg to be ein absolutes Desaster. Alles was ich schreibe, ist ja in gewissem Sinne schon eine Übersetzung aus dem Deutschen, der deutsche Übersetzer des englischen Textes befindet sich also bereits in dem originalen Sprachraum und muß ihn nur ausfüllen, sollte man meinen – aber das funktioniert nicht so einfach, weil das Nazi-Deutsch der Dokumente verschieden ist von dem heute gesprochenen Deutsch. (Hilberg and Söllner 1988, 194) a complete disaster. Everything I write is in a way already a translation from the German language; the German translator of my English text is, therefore, already situated in the original linguistic environment and only has to fill it out, one would think – but it is not that easy, for the German of the Nazis differs from the German spoken today.

Hilberg’s displeasure with the translation of Role sharply contrasts with his appraisal of the German translation of Destruction – but as already I already argued with regard to the testimonies of the Sonderkommando, any translation would already problematise reading between the lines for emotion: I will briefly point to the difficulties inherent to translation in the analysis of Destruction. In short, Sonderzüge is a poor candidate for two reasons: for being a translation, and for being a translation that the original author does not condone. Documents of Destruction (1971) is not included in this analysis, save for a few short remarks here. This work is a collection of various documents, written by perpetrators and by victims, on which Hilberg briefly comments. In fifty collages, it supposedly depicts the Shoah in its entirety – both from an administrative and from a geographical perspective, and although one must assume that Hilberg translates the German documents into English, he remains aloof in his commentary. Only seldom is the reader left to put one and one together (as in the case of Fanny Steiner);¹¹ only once does Hilberg point, by using inverted

 Hilberg quotes the 83-year-old Fanny Steiner’s demand for a stay of deportation, which would allow her to emigrate to Peru, which granted her citizenship and was where her daughter

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commas, to the Nazis’ euphemistic discourse (1971, 142).¹² Only seldom does one find a sarcastic tone: it occurs in the laconically understated title of ‘chapter’ 28, The Way It Was Done in the Netherlands (143), and in Hilberg’s description of the occupier’s pragmatics in determining whom to deport and whom not: “[t]he full Jews in mixed marriages were manifestly linked to the Christian majority, and for this reason they and their children complicated Seyss-Inquart’s life” (144).¹³ When allowing for its comparative brevity to his magnum opus, and for the fact that Hilberg’s activity in this work is primarily that of an editor and commentator (compilator or commentator) and only secondarily that of a writer (auctor),¹⁴ one cannot help but conclude that Hilberg continues to be a sarcastic commentator, and one could even argue that the laconic character increases: the documents speak for themselves, the commentator refrains from commenting extensively. Nevertheless, one notion will prove crucial for analysing Hilberg’s composure in Shoah: the notion that documents do not just ‘document’ history, but are history, in the sense that memoranda and orders bring about chains of events (vii). Likewise, the paratexts to The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, which Hilberg co-edited with Stanislaw Staron and Josef Kermisz, are not included in this corpus, for several reasons: Hilberg is listed as the translator of the German material and the co-author of the second introduction (with Staron; Kermisz is listed as the sole author of the first introduction). It is difficult, if not impossible, therefore, to establish which passages have been written by Hilberg. Moreover, the jointly written introduction, though not unlike the staccato style of Hilberg’s

lived. She finishes her letter by saying that the deportation to Poland would inevitably cause her death. In his commentary, he notes that researchers have found her name on a deportation list: Steiner’s fate need not be stated explicitly (Hilberg 1971, 112– 113).  Additionally, Hilberg includes a part of the transcript of Eichmann’s questioning in Jerusalem concerning the protocol of the Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942), where Eichmann recounts how the protocol does not reproduce the discussions verbatim but was edited by the conference’s organiser, Reinhard Heydrich, so it would be in line with Nazi jargon (99 – 106).  Arthur Seyss-Inquart was the appointed Reichskommissar in the Netherlands – the most senior civil administrator there. He stood accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Nuremberg and was executed in 1946.  These Latin terms, along with a fourth (scriptor), point to a rather old tradition but nonetheless retain relevance for the conceptualisation of the writing person (cf. Woodmansee 1992) – as is also evident from the chapters on Sebald and Schlesak. That Hilberg may be considered the auctor of Destruction and of the other texts extensively analysed here, may be justified by referring to his self-fashioning: frequently, he considers Destruction as a Gestalt of the documents he compiled. As such, he invokes the notion that Destruction is more than the sum of its parts.

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monographs, does not feature the sarcasm or cynicism found there.¹⁵ Suffice it to mention that Hilberg and Staron notice a similar rupture in Czerniaków’s discourse as one that I consider in line with the codification of coolness: [o]nly seldom does he mention a subject that was troubling him most deeply: his son, living in Lwów, and missing after the German assault on the USSR had begun. One day, Czerniakow notes that his little dog Kikus disappeared and then, no longer able to repress, his asks: And where is my only son Jas? (Hilberg and Staron 1979, 69; entry for 13 February 1942; emphasis added)

Nonetheless, the diary proves pivotal in Hilberg’s oeuvre, as he admits himself in one of the interviews for Shoah. Lanzmann bluntly asks him whether the diary had made Hilberg “change [his] mind since [he] wrote The Destruction of the European Jews” concerning the role of the Judenräte, because he had “the feeling that [he was] much more harsh, severe towards these people when [he was] writing the book than [he is] now” (Lanzmann 1979, FV3775, 24m47s) – to which Hilberg replies that he was very, very brief about the role of the Jews in their own destruction, and the very brevity of the words made them harsh. It isn’t the tone, it isn’t the adjectives but rather it is the sheer brevity, the simple statement that the Jews were in a sense aiding their own destruction – not necessarily the Jewish councils, but the Jewish community as a whole, in all of its activities, in complying with German orders, in carrying out German wishes, in following what it is that the Germans told them to do to the letter was moving in a single direction to its own destruction. And to say this as I have just said it this minute, so briefly, in a single paragraph is to be very harsh, because a single paragraph does not tell what happened in the process of doing these things. What thoughts, what pain occurred during that time. Of course, then we did not have the diary of Adam Czerniaków, we did not have a lot of other documents. Today we do. So today, while I’m not really changing the conclusion, I certainly tell the story in a more elaborate and hence perhaps more consoling fashion. […] This is not to say that I now believe that the Councils were not a disaster: they were. There’s no question of that. In some sense one can see even more how much of a disaster they were. But one can see the mechanisms. (Lanzmann 1979, FV3775, 25m21s)

 The ‘coldness’ and ‘distance’ metaphors are linked to each other to describe the behaviour of an exemplified and anonymous member of the Warsaw Jewish Council, but of course this is not in itself any indication as to the authorship of such descriptions – the laconic style might suggest Hilberg’s authorship, but this is difficult to prove conclusively (Hilberg and Staron 1979, 31). Similarly, Hilberg and Staron connote coolness with a positive character trait: they see Czerniaków as respecting Dr Ludwik Hirszfeld “not only for his ability but also his apparent coolness” (Hilberg and Staron 1979, 69).

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While Hilberg’s explanations as to the harshness of his depiction of the Jews in Destruction must be nuanced – as mentioned above, Christopher Browning points to Hilberg’s inflammatory pathos in the first edition – Shoah has certainly contributed to a more nuanced understanding of Hilberg, by depicting him as both reading perpetrator documents and reading from the diary – thus, Lanzmann brings Hilberg in line with his own multi-voiced project – and indeed, others have suggested Hilberg’s emotional closeness to Czerniaków, a suggestion that hinges on Hilberg’s appearance in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). I will explain how Hilberg hides and reveals emotionality in Shoah, but the passage quoted above demonstrates the centrality of storytelling, of language and of emotionality for Hilberg’s writing of history.

6.3 Continuities and ruptures in Hilberg’s pathos While a considerable number of reprints of the first edition of Destruction were published during the 1960s and 1970s, almost a quarter of a century passed before a second, extended revision was published in 1985. It should come as no surprise that Hilberg changed his mind on some issues, or rather, that his research during these decades intensified some the beliefs Hilberg already held in 1961. Most obviously, Hilberg changed his mind on the role of Adolf Hitler in the decision-making process leading up to the Shoah: [i]n the first edition the image of the impersonal machinery of destruction was dominant, but this image was at least partially tempered by Hitler as ultimate decision-maker. In the new edition, all references in the text to a Hitler decision or Hitler order for the “Final Solution” have been systematically excised. Buried at the bottom of a single footnote stands the solitary reference: “Chronology and circumstances point to a Hitler decision before the summer ended.” In the new edition, decisions were not made and orders were not given. The Führer prophesied, commented, and wished; within the bureaucracy ideas crystallized, thinking converged, and atmosphere and expectation facilitated initiative at every level. Adolf Hitler does not disappear from the scene, but he appears only infrequently as catalyst, not decision-maker. (Browning 1986)¹⁶

This is echoed by Michael Marrus: [w]hile there can be no doubt about the Nazi leader’s inspiration of mass murder, he seems an even more distant figure in the new edition than the first. Passages that considered or

 For the image of Hitler in both versions, Browning refers to DEJ I, 177, 257– 258, 261– 262 and DEJ II, 273, 393 – 394, 399 – 402, respectively; the quoted footnote is found in DEJ II, 402.

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speculated about his decisions have been removed, and the role of the machine and its destructive logic are thereby enhanced (Marrus 1988, 49).

Hilberg’s sarcasm is directed against the perpetrators in two senses: like his laconic language, as an ironic imitation of their vocabulary and reasoning – the irony pointing to the discrepancy between the euphemism and the reality (cf. Eaglestone 2004, 180) – and, on a metalevel, as a distinct difference from the perpetrator’s discourse: “[t]here was little irony, subtlety, restraint, or understatement in [Hitler’s] words, just as there were few instances of such usages in German discourse generally” (PVB, 9). Thus, by resorting to sarcasm himself, Hilberg indicates the limits of language and distinguishes him from the perpetrator, who supposedly knows no sarcasm. To be sure, if I wish to strengthen the idea that Hilberg’s sarcasm is mainly directed against the perpetrators and ultimately sides with the victims – though I do not wish to deny Hilberg’s tendency to blame the victims, especially in the first edition – my perspective is influenced by my having read only the 1985 edition in its entirety and having seen Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah before having consulted the 1961 and 2003 editions – let it be briefly recaptured that Browning already notices a softening down in Hilberg’s rhetoric when it comes to the victims: [Hilberg] has changed far less in his views regarding the role of the Jews. Here the shift is not one of interpretation but of tone. Hilberg omits inflammatory terms [found in the first edition, TV] such as “collaborators” and “Jewish self-destructive machinery.” Murmelstein of Vienna no longer has “the ambition to become a modern Josephus Flavius.” […] Now the Jewish community is “viewed in terms of what it did and did not do in response to the German assault” for “the very progress of the operation and its ultimate success depended on the mode of the Jewish response.” (Browning 1986)¹⁷

On this point, Marrus disagrees. What he describes as Hilberg’s “unsparing […] critique of Jewish passivity […] reappears without change or modification in the new and definitive edition” (1988, 109). Who is right, Browning or Marrus? An interview with Lanzmann, in which Hilberg says that his views have been even strengthened by the emergence of documents containing the victim’s perspective but that this enhanced understanding of the events leads to more compassion, seems to settle the argument in favour of Browning (Lanzmann 1979, FV3775, 26m21s).¹⁸ To be sure, this form of ‘cooling down’ – Browning uses a

 Browning’s quotations are found in DEJ I, resp. 666; 291; 283; the last quotation in DEJ II, ix, 22.  I discuss this interview in more detail in 6.5.

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metaphor pertaining to the same isotope, but in a negative formulation: omitting inflammation – does emphatically not apply to Hilberg’s condemnation of the perpetrators and the bystanders. Two (sets of) examples should serve to illustrate the complexities in Hilberg’s pathos and anti-pathos. The first is Marrus’s example, which is not as straightforward as he assumes; the second set of isolated examples demonstrates that there are continuities in Hilberg’s discourse vis-à-vis the perpetrators and that it even sharpens – but without resorting to pathos formulae like the comparison of Benjamin Murmelstein to Josephus Flavius.¹⁹ Consider Hilberg’s remark that “[t]he Jews attempted to tame the Germans as one would attempt to tame a wild beast” (DEJ II, 1038). According to Marrus, the sentence expresses a contempt for the lack of Jewish resistance – and Hilberg is annoyed with such interpretations: after the publication of the first edition, Oscar Handlin refuted it as an “impiety” and saw Hilberg as “defaming the dead” (qtd. in Paris 2001, 316). Decades later, Hilberg still expressed annoyance at such judgements: “I was looking for resistance every time I opened a new page of documents. […] I also wanted the comfort. But the evidence just wasn’t there” (qtd. in Paris 2001, 317). One may, of course, also consider this phrase as a critique of a lack of sense of reality: the repetitio of the verb ‘attempt’ suggests an emphasis on the discrepancy between Jewish hope and genocidal reality – and on the utter futility of Jewish policy.²⁰ Yet elsewhere, Hilberg has argued that the most rational conduct was precisely not to resist, for this would provoke German retaliations, which would probably target the most vulnerable elements of the Jewish communities: the children and the elderly (Lanzmann 1979b, FV3776, 16m46s). Howsoever one reads the phrase regarding the victims, Marrus does not remark that Hilberg’s phrase also dehumanises the perpetrators: it depicts them as predators. One could plausibly argue that the metaphor focalises the perpetra-

 Josephus Flavius, it should be noted, was one of the Jewish generals in the uprising against the Roman armies (66 – 70 BCE). After his military defeat in 67 BCE at Jotapata, where he commanded the garrison, he surrendered and defected, interpreting for the Romans during the interrogations of other Jewish prisoners. For these services, he would be granted Roman citizenship, the title Flavius (an aristocratic name belonging to Josephus’s erstwhile military opponents and later emperors Vespasian and Titus) and artistic patronage. He would author the pro-Roman The Jewish War – where the Jewish Diaspora begins, Flavius becomes a Roman. Hilberg’s initial judgement of Murmelstein could, thus, not be harsher.  Hilberg would rephrase this sentence slightly in the 2003 edition, removing the repetitio: “The Jews attempted to tame the Germans as one would try to tame a wild beast” (DEJ III, 1112). Semantically, there is arguably no difference, but the change reduces the staccato prosody, somewhat softening the rhetorical blow.

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tors through the eyes of the victims, yet one must also bear in mind that this dehumanisation of the perpetrators is paramount in Hilberg’s oeuvre (but especially in Destruction) – not in the least in his repeated metaphor of the machinery of destruction, as if inanimate objects, not human beings, embarked upon genocide. Metaphors have cognitive consequences, even when they are not intended. To be sure, I do not wish to argue that Hilberg did not criticise the Jews. On the contrary, apart from keeping the metaphor in the second edition (DEJ II, 1038), which indicates he did not change his opinion on the matter, Hilberg gives us an explicit clue: in a rather condensed version of the history of the Jewish Diaspora, he claims that their survival strategy had worked for 2,000 years, and that thus they “hoped that somehow the German drive would spend itself” (DEJ II, 1038).²¹ With Hilberg, sarcasm cuts both ways, but it cuts unevenly: its slashes are directed mainly at the perpetrators and the bystanders. His litotes, antiphrasis, bluntness, and depersonalising similes and tropes are accusatory descriptions of mindsets, attitudes and (in)actions. Consider the following examples:²² 1. “The Slavs had no particular liking for their Jewish neighbors, and they felt no overpowering urge to help the Jews in their hour of need.” (DEJ II, 307) 2. “A few weeks later, Wöhler organized a forced labor system for the Moldavian Jews – the German army’s parting gift to the Rumanian Jews.” (DEJ II, 794– 795) 3. “Lohse was a little late.” [in forbidding members of civil administrations in Eastern Europe to take part in executing Jews] (DEJ II, 379) 4. “In the center the Order Police of Higher SS and Police Leader von dem Bach helped kill 2,278 Jews in Minsk and 3,726 in Mogilew. (The beneficiary of this cooperation was Einsatzgruppe B.) in the south Higher SS and Police Leader Jeckeln was especially active.” (DEJ II, 297) 5. “There were to be more beneficiaries of German generosity.” (DEJ II, 594)

 Marrus points to the circularity of Hilberg’s argument: at the beginning of the book, Hilberg says that “it should be emphasised that the term ‘Jewish reactions’ refers only to ghetto Jews. This reaction was born in the ghetto and it will die there” (DEJ II, 27). Yet as Marrus points out, “it is not clear what Hilberg means by ‘ghetto Jews’ in this context, but the term seems to apply to all Jews whose reactions he examines” (Marrus 1988, 225 n.2). Hilberg’s argument seems much in line with a Zionist interpretation of history, namely that only in their own state the Jews can defend themselves against their enemies. Hilberg was, during his youth, a member of a Zionist association (Popper 2010).  The emphasis in every example to follow is added, unless explicitly mentioned otherwise. I have discussed some of these examples elsewhere (Vanassche 2017, 314– 316) and borrow from this essay, partially verbatim. The analysis of the cynicism of the SS in Treblinka is analysed in this book for the first time.

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“The Ukrainians were used principally for dirty work.” [i. e. the shooting of children, whereas the adults were shots by the Germans] (DEJ II, 314) “Did Kube agree? Kube replied that he agreed.” [the agreement concerned the fact that the productive value of Jewish labourers for the German war economy should not except them from being shot] (DEJ II, 378)

Note that in the first example, the sarcasm lies particularly in the inclusion of modifiers – without these, the phrases may or may not be read as litotes – which is not necessarily sarcastic: it would be hard to demonstrate intentionality. This is also true for the third example, where Lohse is seemingly depicted as benign, as merely failing to save the Jews. The fourth example stems from an updated section on the Netherlands, and the sarcasm lies in the contrast with Hilberg’s description of Theresienstadt as mild a place as common perception would have it, and that a considerable amount of those Jews was ultimately transported to Auschwitz anyway. The sarcasm is double: it attacks the idea propagated by the Germans that life in Theresienstadt was comparatively good – Hilberg knows it was not comparatively good – and it attacks the idea that those sent to Theresienstadt would never be sent to extermination camps. Since this section is an update to the first edition, Hilberg demonstrably adds sarcastic remarks to his previous work. Comparing the first example in the 1961 and the 1985 edition, one notes that the 1961 edition includes a modifier: “and they perhaps felt no overpowering urge” (DEJ I, 201, emphasis added).²³ The removal of the modifying adverb sharpens the judgement on the bystanders. However, the fifth example reveals that there are occasions where Hilberg downplays the sarcasm aimed at the perpetrators. Whereas there is no difference in the equivalent in the first edition (save a different demonstrative pronoun, DEJ I, 163), the third edition omits the sarcastic ‘beneficiary’, and ‘especially active’ is replaced with a list of Jeckeln’s murderous actions (DEJ III, 303 – 305). Similarly, the sixth example is reformulated: “[a]s time went on, Ukrainians were used in several cities and towns for the unpleasant work of wiping out the families of Jewish men. Einsatzkommando 4a went so far as to confine itself to the shooting of adults while commanding its Ukrainian helpers to shoot children” (DEJ III, 323). Hilberg’s caustic perpetrator’s perspective is not entirely abandoned here – the psychological difference is still attested, and ‘went so far as to confine it-

 Hilberg’s conclusion is marked by a traditional pathos, and not by an anti-pathos: “[a]cross the whole occupied territory Jews were turning to the Christian population for assistance – in vain” (DEJ I, 202; II, 308; III, 316; emphasis added).

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self’ is similar to the implications concerning Lohse – but the sarcasm is downplayed somewhat. These are exceptions, though: the first two, the fifth and the seventh examples are retained (DEJ III, 316, 852, 628 and 393, respectively). The third example is absent since Hilberg seems to draw a different conclusion based on new information (cf. DEJ III, 394). In the sixth example, one could argue that Hilberg’s stylistic concern lies with the victims and not with the perpetrators: in a sense, the human dignity of the adult victims, which was ironically downplayed in the first editions, is restored on Hilberg’s behalf. Whereas the examples above are clearly sarcastic, there are moments where the text demands from the reader a slightly bigger interpretative effort, similar to the one the historian who is confronted with the veiling language of the Nazi documents has to undertake: “[f]or the deportees one-way fare was payable; for the guards a round-trip ticket had to be purchased” (DEJ II, 410). Not only do such petty descriptions in both Nazi documents and Destruction indicate the bureaucratic nature of the entire enterprise, they also disguise the victims’ fate – which is obviously clear to the reader of Destruction and to the historian, but which the perpetrators did not wish to be known. Both in the ironic figures of speech (litotes and antiphrasis) and in these petty details, Destruction mirrors – sarcastically – the language of Nazi bureaucracy – which includes infamous terms such as ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’, ‘Sonderbehandlung’, ‘Umsiedlung nach Osten’ (‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, ‘special treatment’, ‘resettlement in the East’) etc.²⁴ These examples are perhaps the most obvious instances of Hilberg’s sarcasm. His laconic discourse pervades, however, the entirety of Destruction, including the footnotes.²⁵ This is most obvious in the case of Barry, an SS dog

 Obviously, such terms had strategic reasons (secrecy), but according to Hilberg, there were psychological reasons as well. But they also express the desire to rid Germany and Europe of a perceived problem. Our very labelling of expressions as antiphrasis (in this context at least) is rooted in a political and ethical perspective. Berel Lang suggests labelling such euphemistic terms lies, but in a rhetorical sense. These euphemisms are not lies as a speech act, because the people communicating shared an understanding of what was referred to. They are lies in a rhetorical sense because such terms do not tell the truth: instead of solving a problem, the genocide worsened Nazi Germany’s labour shortages, and “the figurative lie links two contradictory literal references; it also attempts, in asserting the connection, both to deny the contradiction and to conceal the denial” (Lang 1990, 92).  This is no ironic coincidence: Hilberg fashioned himself as a “footnoter” (qtd. in Paris 2001, 318) – which Berg sees as mere posing, not as an accurate or sincere self-description. Berg stresses Hilberg’s philosophy of history; and footnotes are apparently too mundane or too minute for such theoretical ‘bigger pictures’.

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in Treblinka. Before describing Hilberg’s take on Barry, let us look at the broader description of the events in Treblinka. Hilberg highlights the perpetrators’ behaviour towards the soon-to-be-gassed arriving victims, listing several of the activities that these victims are forced to perform: “mock marriages and other amusements” and the singing of the Treblinka song “composed by the Jewish conductor with words by Untersturmführer Franz emphasizing work, fate, and obedience” (DEJ II, 898). His explanation suggests that he considers the SS behaviour utterly cynical, and not as a tactic of camouflaging the purpose of Treblinka: “[i]n essence the SS thought of the arriving Jews as having forfeited their lives from the moment they stepped off the train” (DEJ II, 898). To be sure, these activities may certainly be considered cynical, but Hilberg’s attribution of cynicism is already visible in his practical application of a theory of (the perpetrator’s) mind: the notion of the Jews’ forfeiting their lives is, if not a blatant inversion of the perpetrator-victim, a classical example of victim-blaming. Let it be stressed that Hilberg attributes this victim-blaming, of which he himself has been accused, to the SS. Indeed, as in the earlier examples, Hilberg uses a laconic sarcasm to distance himself from the cynicism of the SS, which he describes with a metonymy: [t]heir psychology is epitomized in the story of a dog, Barry, about whom a West German court wrote several pages. Barry was a very large Saint Bernard who appeared first in Sobibór and then in Treblinka. He had been trained to maul inmates upon the command, “Man, grab that dog! [Mensch, fasst (sic) den Hund!]” (DEJ II, 898)

The order, which (if we may allow ourselves a sardonic metaphor) was presumably barked at the dog, is – besides the obvious dehumanisation of the victim – a definite reversal of victim and perpetrator in language but not in reality. There lies an irony in the etymology of the word ‘cynicism’, which goes back to Old Greek kyon, meaning ‘dog’. We cannot be sure decide whether this instance of irony is intentional, in which case it would amount to sarcasm. But Hilberg’s description of Barry the dog is undoubtedly laconic, especially in contrast to the bloodiness of the scene which is implied in the command with which the excerpt ends. The metonymical representation of the SS through Barry amounts, moreover, to an equation of dog and master, who are imputed with a similar (if not the same) psychology – an imputation which surely must be read cum grano salis. But Hilberg’s reaction to the presence of Barry and his training is most tellingly captured in the summary of his life after Treblinka – in a footnote: “Barry, like many of the human perpetrators, had a peaceful life after 1943. When he became old and ill in 1947, he was subjected to euthanasia” (DEJ II, 898 n21). Here,

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Hilberg makes the previous equation of dog and master explicit by describing Barry as a perpetrator. The adjective ‘human’ is key. Hilberg’s style is marked by a relative absence of adjectives, making each instance of them poignant.²⁶ If it had been dropped, Barry would have been placed parallel to but not among the perpetrators. Without the adjective, the contrast between Barry and the SS would have been based on the latter’s status as perpetrators – but with the adjective, he is contrasted to them by virtue of his being not human, not of his not being a perpetrator. The other parallel between Barry and the SS points to the lack of prosecution many mass murderers enjoyed: they, too, had a peaceful life (after 1945). But nonetheless, the laconic description ends with a double cynical reversal, when one considers the fact that staff members of Treblinka and other extermination sites were previously involved in the “euthanasia” killing programme – and Hilberg draws an explicit link between this killing programme and the Shoah: “‘[e]uthanasia’ was a conceptual as well as technological and administrative prefiguration of the ‘Final Solution’ in the deathcamps” (DEJ II, 873). These abstract prefigurations follow in the second edition after substantially updating the section on Aktion T4, but Hilberg had already, in 1961, established a link on the personnel level – perpetrators in the Aktion Reinhard camps had been largely recruited from the six killing facilities in Germany where those deemed abnormal, uncurable and useless were gassed (DEJ I, 622). Although the perpetrator and victim roles are cynically conflated in this reading, Barry’s euthanasia, one may assume, is a euthanasia in the literal meaning of the word (a ‘good death’) and thus has little to do with the Nazis’ perverted terminology. Elsewhere, Hilberg takes notice not only of the perpetrators’ cynical acts but also of their cynical words:²⁷ [a] survivor, Wolf Sambol, recalling scenes of shootings in the town [of Rawa Ruska, in Galicia; TV] quotes a drunken Gendarmerie man shouting at the victims: “You are not Jews anymore, you are the chosen. I am your Moses and I will lead you through the Red Sea.” He then opened fire at the victims with an automatic weapon. (DEJ II, 496 – 497)²⁸

If Hilberg’s sarcasm, which regularly borders on the cynical, thus could be said to be a persiflage of the perpetrator’s discourse, there are instances – particularly in Perpetrators Victims Bystanders – where the attributions become murky. His

 Hilberg mentions his “commit[ment] to compression” (PoM, 88).  Uttering words is an act, too, of course, but the example makes clear that acts and acts are two things.  Who said that Hilberg never relies on eyewitness testimony?

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description of the Aktion T4 order may raise some eyebrows: “[i]n the realm of domestic affairs, he signed a directive in September 1939 for the killing of patients afflicted with hopeless mental diseases” (PVB, 15). How does one read this? As a sarcastic jab at the perpetrator’s inhumane ideology? Does he side with the victims, if one understands ‘hopeless’ to be so in the wake of being delivered to murderers? Or does he unwittingly subscribe to the Nazi reasoning – although, of course, without approving of their ‘solution’? Similarly, how do we make sense of his description of Hitler’s final hours – “[h]e killed himself […] after writing a testament in which he left no doubt that it was he who had prophesied the end of Jewry and that the Jews had indeed atoned for their sins” (19). Is the notion of atonement laconically ironic to the point of being invisibly so? Of course, that does not mean that Hilberg’s familiar laconic discourse disappears: “[t]he death of these Jews has become their most important attribute” (PVB, x). Likewise, similar to the accusations levelled against the Slavs in Destruction, Hilberg employs litotes to criticise the wartime governments of the United States and the United Kingdom, “to which American and British Jewry appealed, did not lack power, but they were not about to go out of their way for the victims” (PVB, xi). Hilberg also points to the perpetrators’ cynicism, although he does not use this word: [s]ome of the perpetrators liked to laugh at the Jews. The jokes, sometimes alloyed to sadistic practices, might consist of dressing up an inmate in a comic costume and stationing him in front of an Auschwitz latrine with instructions to allow prisoners in distress only one minute for their relief; or of affixing the Star of David on a gas building in Treblinka; or, in the more refined circles of the German railways, of sending transports to a death camp with the remark that soon there would be an additional consignment of soap. (PVB, 54– 55)

To be sure, Hilberg looks at the perpetrators with the irony of contempt, tacitly building in a hierarchical distance between him and them. This starts in the book’s very first chapter, which is Hitler’s biography in concise form: it takes Hilberg seventeen pages to tell the life story of this “first and foremost perpetrator” (ix). The fact that Hilberg starts a mosaic overview of the sociological groups to be discerned in the context of the Shoah with Hitler is both unspectacular and surprising.²⁹ Unspectacular because there would probably have been no Shoah  This monolithic categorisation has been repeatedly criticised: “one may legitimately suggest that Hilberg’s categorisations are too sharply drawn […]; that the distinctions between perpetrators and bystanders, between perpetrators and victims, or between victims and bystanders, are not always as clear as Hilberg has presented them” (Warmund 2005, 164).

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without Hitler’s ordering; surprising because Hilberg had by 1985 downplayed Hitler’s role and had instead increasingly emphasised the everyday decisions taken by clerks and officers in accordance with “guidelines and inspirations” (12). Hitler’s biography is structured chronologically, starting with his birth date, a subsequent sketch of the family background, and his mediocre school career. The next phase of his life is equally sketched sparingly: after moving to Vienna, where Hitler was not admitted to the Art Academy, he lived a rather destitute life and came in touch with the virulent ‘racial’ antisemitism of the days for the first time, before volunteering for military service in 1914 in a Bavarian regiment. His military service is summarised in few sentences, with the most striking sentence being “Hitler was gassed” (5). This refers, of course, to Hitler’s being a victim of chemical warfare; but the sentence is uncanny in light of his later crimes.³⁰ While it is a perfectly sound sentence to describe his being wounded in a gas attack, the phrase, in the context of the Shoah, points to death rather than to survival. It is difficult to conceive of this sentence as anything other than Hilberg’s irony at its very bitterest moment, for a slightly more elaborate sentence (e. g. ‘Hitler was wounded in a gas attack’) would not evoke the immediate connection with the Shoah. But Hilberg pokes more direct fun at Hitler and his con men. Discussing the possible ‘solutions’ to the ‘Jewish question’, Hilberg paints a picture of Hitler discussing his options: “Hitler was asked what he intended to do with the Jews. He replied reflexively, ‘Madagascar,’ and on being reminded that the island was far away, admitted that the project was not achievable” (16, emphasis added). The farce is obvious: Hitler is depicted as a man who does not think and yet acts and who needs his lackeys to point out the most obvious facts; the adverb ‘reflexively’ only increases the farcical character of the scene. The farce works so well, of course, because the preference of action in the absence of thought is a core element of fascist ideology.

 To be sure, Hitler’s own remarks pertaining Jews and poison gas in Mein Kampf are uncanny enough: “[h]ätte man zu Kriegsbeginn und während des Krieges einmal zwölf- oder fünfzehntausend dieser hebräischen Volksverderber so unter Giftgas gehalten wie Hunderttausende unserer allerbesten deutschen Arbeiter aus allen Schichten und Berufen es im Felde erdulden mußten, dann wäre das Millionenopfer der Front nicht vergeblich gewesen” (2016, 1719; [i]f at the beginning of the war and during the war, twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebraic corruptors of the nation had been subjected to poison gas, such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of two million at the front would not have been in vain: qtd. in Yahil 1990, 51– 52).

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But this is but the start of Hilberg’s derision of the perpetrators. Adolf Eichmann and others are depicted and decried as petit bourgeois: they have a narrow view of the world, are focused primarily on their career and status, and engage in hobbies such as numismatics, which may suggest an obsession for establishing order and being in control at all times. But not all perpetrators are said to be petit bourgeois; many “had made false starts in life and […] were early failures or drifters” (40). Hilberg points out that “not everyone in the SS was a genius” (41), thus implying (by discussing his career prior) that Eichmann was a genius – but a petit bourgeois genius. The concentration camp guards are described, with Eugen Kogon, “as a negative elite. They were nothing but dregs who could do nothing but guard helpless inmates” (PVB, 43). The perpetrators’ sadism is considered to be not especially innovative. They did not have the imagination of their counterparts in earlier centuries or their contemporaries in the ranks of the Romanians or Croatians. The predominant type of German sadism was somewhat predictable and virtually institutionalized. It even had a name, “to make sport,” and often enough it took the form of staging “gladiatorial” fights among inmates or of commanding prisoners to carry heavy stones from one place where they were not needed to another place where they were not needed. That is not to say that the game was harmless. The gladiators and stone carriers would die, wounded or exhausted. (54)

Hilberg sarcastically reiterates old stereotypes about the Germans, which recalls Tacitus’s Germania (98 CE): here, they are unsophisticated barbarians. The link to Antiquity is strengthened by the catachresis of the gladiator. The perpetrators’ lack of sadistic creativity accompanies their legal and administrative creativity in subjecting as many Jewish citizens to discriminatory and genocidal policies as possible. The subsequent repetition (‘from one place where they were not needed to another place where they were not needed’) only strengthens this sense of boredom. But then Hilberg annuls the sarcasm: if it were proper sarcasm, it would necessitate a more creative sadism. Instead, the double negation in the next sentence (‘not… harmless’) serves as an abrupt departing from the previous discourse, which only serves as a euphemism for the brutality of the camps’ biopolitical realities. The final sentence, then, completes this rupture by formulating rather directly what the consequences of such ‘fun’ (for the perpetrators) were for the victims: agonising death.³¹

 For the sake of factual completeness, it must be said that the violence inflicted in the camps was not always violence for the sake of violence, as Hilberg seems to see it: indeed, Primo Levi sees the extremely brutal punishments dealt to recaptured escapees as “crudeltà fantasiosa” (QU, 122; imaginative cruelty: DS, 176) with the intention of deterring the other prisoners:

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Just as in Destruction, footnotes prove extremely relevant for Hilberg’s distancing himself from the perpetrator. This procedure is applied to Hans Frank, the Governor of the so-called Generalgouvernement. In Nuremberg, Frank “proclaimed Germany’s guilt for what had happened, a guilt, he said, that would not be erased in a thousand years” (49). Obviously, Hilberg cannot believe – with good reason – that such claims, coming from an ardent National Socialist and antisemite,³² are sincere and uttered without strategic considerations.³³ Frank, probably unwittingly, even reiterates the Nazi idea of a thousand-year Reich – in his inversion of it, he confirms his adherence to it. In the footnote directly referring to Frank’s utterance, the historian comments, after indicating his source: “Frank was convicted and hanged” (276 n.29). Thus, he comments tacitly on Frank’s potential reasons for such claims by pointing to their strategic failure. The footnote is a textual manifestation of this ambiguously simultaneous approximation and distancing. In retrospect, Saul Friedländer describes his first impression of Hilberg as a “sad man to whom life was being unjust” (2016c, 101), and he adds that “[s]omething of his persona transpired in his autobiography, The Politics of Memory” (102). This is undoubtedly true – as mentioned earlier, Hilberg discusses the difficulties he faced in his academic career at length, and settles some old scores – notably with Nora Levin, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Hannah Arendt. And these impressions coincide with Hilberg’s stylistic continuation – again, in isolated instances – of Destruction’s aggressive sarcasm. Recounting the fate of his uncle Jacob, who had been an Austro-Hungarian artilleryman in the First World War and returned home from the war half deaf, Hilberg notes that “the German occupants of Poland […], I must surmise, thanked him for his help by killing him and his family” (PoM, 24). The same bitterness pervades the description of his grandmother’s death: “[b]y 1942, in her eighties and blind, she lay in bed most of the time. Apparently, that is where the German raiders found her and where they shot her on the spot” (25).³⁴

“[q]uesta non era ‘violenza inutile’. Era utile: serviva assai bene a stroncare sul nascere ogni velleità di fuga” (QU 123; [t]his was not ‘useless violence’. It was useful: it served very well to crush at its inception any idea of escaping: DS, 177).  On the same page, one reads the initiative Frank took in establishing ghettos and in trying to have the Jews deported ‘east’ – a well-known euphemism for genocide.  In his interview with Hannah Arendt, Joachim Fest mentions that Frank withdrew his words of remorse in his closing statement in Nuremberg (Arendt and Fest 2013, 47).  Remarkably, Hilberg resorts to a more metaphysical imagery for the death of another uncle: “Augusta, Sanyi, and his family were swept up by the deportations to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. There they disappeared into the night” (PoM, 29).

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Hilberg’s pathos of anti-pathos pertaining to the perpetrators of the Shoah is, thus, continued – though it begets a more personal touch by addressing the deaths of family members. Considering it still as a necessary affective selfcontrol is difficult; after all, Politics was published after Hilberg’s retirement and is not an academic work. Nevertheless, there is an implicit admiration of his father’s “equanimity” (32), of his capacity to remain calm and to retain a composure under stress. The emotional power of Politics is shaped, moreover, by the retaining of information, by the avoidance of foreshadowing. Hilberg mentions the difficult marriage of his parents, and specifically, his mother’s perception of his father as “ein Niemand” (32; a nobody), but also his father’s marital love and respect. The second chapter, entitled Origins, ends with the death of the father: “the surgeon announced [that] my father had succumbed to a heavy dose of anesthesia. At that moment my mother burst into tears” (34). The marital love is thus framed as restrained and gaining full acknowledgement belatedly – an emotional rupture occurring after years of estrangement, an acknowledgement which can no longer lead to a reconciliation or a strengthening of the emotional bond. Important as such subdued yet nigh tragic manifestations of emotionality are for the establishment of Hilberg’s sad persona in the autobiographical section of Politics, a different pathos of anti-pathos manifests itself in the memoir – in Hilberg’s settling of scores in the tellingly titled Questionable Practices. His attacks against Nora Levin and Lucy Dawidowicz can be briefly summarised: he bases these attacks in a supposed ‘unacademic’ attitude, a lack of serious scholarship. Hilberg does not dwell too long on Levin’s alleged plagiarism (142– 143) and only slightly longer on Dawidowicz’s interpretations and very one-sided depictions of history (143 – 147).³⁵ He devotes a longer section on Arendt (147– 157), accusing her simultaneously of plagiarism (in her Eichmann trial reports published in the New Yorker, 148 – 149) and hypocrisy (in her negative evaluation of Destruction for Princeton University Press, 156). All attacks include partial character assassinations – Levin is depicted as wimpish (143) and Dawidowicz as intellectually arrogant (146). The attacks against Arendt are the most interesting. These have not gone unnoticed and have been explained as the consequence of thematic and political proximities between Hilberg and Arendt: both studied the problem of political evil in the twentieth century […] and wrestled with the dilemma of the Jew in the twentieth century. Perhaps most important, at the core of their

 In Dawidowicz’s extremely anachronistic reading of history, the outcome of the First World War already sealed the fate of the Jews, and hence she claims the Shoah starts in 1918.

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books about the Holocaust is a deep disappointment over the lack of Jewish resistance to the Nazis. After the war, both Hilberg and Arendt fashioned themselves as defiantly strong Jews, in contrast with their vision of the weak Jews they had left behind, and yet both remained fascinated by the story of those who were killed. (Popper 2010)

To be sure, the fact that Hilberg felt plagiarised and discarded by Arendt did not lessen his bitterness towards her. And while Popper points out that a large part of the animosity stems over their different interpretations of the same perpetrator, Eichmann,³⁶ he does not point to their similar ironic distancing from the perpetrators: as outlined earlier, Hilberg sketches an image of the German perpetrators as unsophisticated barbarians, which he does not see in flat contradiction to the centrality of the modern state institutions (particularly the administration) for the development and radicalisation of anti-Jewish persecution. And, as outlined in Chapter 2, Arendt attests an emotional stupidity, a lack of empathy to the Germans, and considers this to enable the Shoah. But Hilberg attests arrogance to Arendt, especially in her treatment of him, as he makes clear by quoting from her private correspondence. Arendt indeed diminishes Destruction’s intellectual depth: [t]he author has worked for fifteen years only with sources, and if he had not […] written a very foolish first chapter, in which he shows that he does not understand much about German history, the book would have been perfect so to speak. No one at any rate will be able to write about these things without using it. (qtd. in PoM, 156)

Arendt’s backhanded compliment may be taken as an indication of her struggles in writing about the Shoah – an event so disruptive that normal standards of historiography or analysis do not apply. Hilberg, for this part, cannot help but invoke a sense of hypocrisy and retort with an ad hominem argument: I still wonder what triggered her reactions to my first chapter. Was she really aroused by my search for historical precedents […]? To be sure, she had a personal need to insulate the Nazi phenomenon. She went back to Germany at every opportunity after the war, resuming

 Hilberg spells out their different interpretations and maintains that Arendt has missed the point concerning Eichmann, i. e. the enormity of the destruction that Eichmann organised with a small staff (PoM, 150); Popper remarks that Arendt addresses questions that are not tackled by Hilberg. In Perpetrators Victims Bystanders, Hilberg had already – tacitly – refuted Arendt’s thesis of the banality of evil: “much more was required of a bureaucrat than an automatic implementation of anti-Jewish measures” (25); Eichmann is described as “a man who played the violin and a little chess, and who also drank at times. His private life was, in short, normal, but in the maze of the bureaucratic apparatus, Eichmann was a pathfinder and a supreme practitioner of destruction” (41).

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contacts and relationships. With Heidegger, who had been her lover in her student days and who was a Nazi in Hitler’s time, she became friendly again, rehabilitating him. But in dismissing my ideas she also made a bid for self-respect. Who was I, after all? She, the thinker, and I, the laborer who wrote only a simple report, albeit one which was indispensable once she had exploited it: that was the natural order of her universe. (156 – 157)

That Hilberg’s personal attacks against Levin (who, he points out, was a high school teacher, not a professional historian) amount to a similar tactic, seems to go beyond him. Similarly, he rejects Dawidowicz not merely on intellectual grounds but on her not participating in ‘serious’ conferences. Whether Hilberg’s criticism of Levin’s and Dawidowicz’s intellectual merits is justified or not, his criticism could have done without the polemical pathos – it is strong enough, after all, and it only weakens his criticism of Arendt. Politics is, then, marked by both a pervasive sadness, Hilberg’s well-known pathos against the perpetrators and a polemical pathos against other authors. But it ends on a very personal note: it gives us an insight (or it confirms what the reader had already suspected) as to Hilberg’s motivation for researching the Shoah. Indeed, from a chronological point of view, here we have the final rupture in Hilberg’s cool pose: by quoting a letter by fellow historian H. G. Adler, in which the latter describes the impression that the lecture of Destruction had made on him – and by leaving Adler the final word in Hilberg’s memoirs, Hilberg authorises Adler’s assessment: [w]hat moves me in this book [Destruction, TV] is the hopelessness of the author […] he already has the viewpoint of a generation, which does not feel itself affected directly, but which looked at these events from afar, bewildered, bitter and embittered, accusing and critical, not only vis-à-vis the Germans […] At the end nothing remains but despair and doubt about everything, because for Hilberg there is only recognition, perhaps also a grasp, but certainly not understanding… (PoM, 202– 203)

Hilberg gives Adler the last word on matters pertaining to Hilberg. In sharp contrast to all other historians on historical matters, Adler is not refuted on personal matters. Hilberg tells us by instilling a silence that was right all along. Several years before the publication of Politics, Gie van den Berghe had arrived at a similar conclusion: he sees in Hilberg’s treatment of (the relative lack of) Jewish resistance a sign of the “unbelieving pain of a strongly involved author who is looking in vain for satisfactory explanations” (van den Berghe 1990, 120). Where Adler identifies embitterment next to bewilderment, van den Berghe notices pain next to a sense of disbelief.³⁷ This is not the endpoint of Hilberg’s oeu Wildt reaches a similar conclusion (2010, 111).

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vre, however – but it is a rupture. As noted above, Hilberg tones down – ever so slightly – his pathos against the perpetrators in the third edition of Destruction in favour of elaborations and factual ‘completeness’, but this third edition is marked by a short yet fundamental update. As Jonathan Littell, the author of Les Bienveillantes (for which he relied heavily on Destruction) remarks in an interview, Hilberg has not closed his eyes for the problem of genocide in the late twentieth century: “[à] ma connaissance, Raul Hilberg a été le seul spécialiste de la Shoah à comprendre que son travail était pertinent pour se rendre compte de ce qui se passait sous les yeux du monde au Rwanda” (Beevor and Littell 2011, 94; to my knowledge, R.H. has been the only specialist on the Shoah who understood that his work was fundamental for an understanding of what was happening in Rwanda while the world was watching).³⁸ Littell is slightly exaggerating: Hilberg’s addressing of the Rwandan genocide is minimal – but in its being so minimal and subdued, it resonates perhaps all the louder. Hilberg ends the third edition of Destruction – and thus, his oeuvre – with approximately three pages addressing the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda: he broadly sketches the historical (colonial) background; discusses how the United Nations did not take steps to prevent an escalation of the violence, despite all indications; shows how the victims were dehumanised as vermin and how killing was framed as a job; how the United Nations pulled out the peacekeepers after the murder of ten Belgian soldiers and how the United Nations did not intervene when the genocide was occurring in plain view.³⁹ In other words, Hilberg points to similar-

 This is not the first time that Hilberg links the Shoah to other legacies of structural violence; in Politics, he recalls noticing the strict segregation immediately after disembarking in the United States and linking this to the anti-Jewish discrimination in Vienna (47– 48). While such recollections in hindsight are to be read cum grano salis, Hilberg does connect the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s to the Shoah by stipulating that the latter caused an awakening amongst the white majority (DEJ I, 760 – 761; cf. Schlott 2016b, 158 – 159). Just as Hilberg’s notes on the lack of Jewish resistance may have been harsh in their brevity, such connections may be well-meant but too simple in theirs – but Hilberg did try to prevent the Shoah from being considered in isolation. Remarkably so, one might add, considering his own life-long research interest.  It must be said, however, that Hilberg’s summary of Rwanda’s colonial legacy contains some baffling statements: “[u]nlike the Flemish and Walloon Belgians, the Tutsi and Hutu had not managed to live in complete harmony, even though they spoke a common language, Kinyarwanda, and lived intermingled as neighbors” (DEJ III, 1294). The comparison to Belgium seems off, although Belgium was, of course, the colonial power in Rwanda from 1916 – 1960. But the ethnic and linguistic co-existence in Rwanda and Belgium are so different that their implied similarity makes little sense. One would almost suspect Hilberg to be sardonically caustic again, if only the punchline were clear. Whereas Hilberg has retroactively pointed to his own brevity as the reason for the initial harshness of his judgement of the lack of Jewish resistance against the Nazi gen-

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ities – particularly pertaining to the psychology of the perpetrators and the indifference of the bystanders – and to the differences: [t]he disaster of the Tutsi took place in full view of the world. No global crisis overshadowed this event. No lack of aircraft or manpower hampered countervailing action. The challenge was posed and not met. Legal specialists in the Department of State of the United States opposed even the use of the word “genocide” with reference to Rwanda, lest its utterance be construed as an obligation to do something. On April 30 President William Clinton referred in a public radio message only to the “horrors of civil war and mass killings in Rwanda” in the course of the preceding three weeks, and on May 17 the United Nations Security Council followed in a unanimous resolution to condemn the “killing of civilians,” and to decide that it would “remain actively seized of the matter.” History had repeated itself. (DEJ III, 1296)⁴⁰

Something interesting happens here: Hilberg clearly yet subtly accuses the contemporary United Nations of not intervening, of committing themselves only to rhetoric and even of making sure their rhetoric does not oblige them to take action – and this in the absence of any ‘excuses’. Implicitly, this might exonerate the Allied powers during the Second World War for not doing more to save the Jews, but Hilberg’s pessimism and the pathos of the final sentence – the final sentence, indeed, of Destruction – leave no doubt as to the implications: that these historical excuses were merely excuses, that the Allies (of whom the United Nations are, so to speak, the global political heritage) could not care less about saving Jews.⁴¹

ocide (cf. infra), it seems that in this context his brevity is a symptom of his lack of profound knowledge of Belgian and Rwandan history.  One notes Hilberg’s subtle distancing from the American President by referring to his birthname (William) and not the hypocorism (Bill), by which Clinton was and is generally known.  In Hilberg’s usual laconic way, he also mentions that “[t]he Tutsi captured Kigali on July 4, and completed their advance by August 21, 1994. They had won a completely victory, shooting more than a few Hutu along the way, but the Tutsi dead surpassed 500,000” (1296, emphasis added). ‘Surpassing 500,000’ is a very conservative estimation, with most estimates ranging the death toll between half a million and a million victims. Hilberg notes that : “[i]n raw numbers the Tutsi in Rwanda at the beginning of April might only have been a tenth of the Jews successively caught in the German vise, yet in percentage terms the Tutsi loss was just as heavy as the Jewish toll of five million” (1296).

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6.4 Historiography against closure: Hilberg’s lamentation How to make sense of the closing remarks of Hilberg’s memoir? How to make sense of the utterly pessimistic message conveyed at the very end of the third edition of Destruction? This double disbelief – towards the Shoah and towards its repetition in Rwanda – can be explained by discussing the problem of rationality. Berel Lang does not suggest any concrete emotions and emphasises Hilberg’s understanding of explanation as an interpretative activity that presupposes a rational goal: when Raul Hilberg […] speaks of the ‘historical incomprehensibility’ of that event, he takes this to mean that there were no sufficient reasons, in terms of rational self-interest, for the decisions and actions of the Nazis resulting in the Final Solution. […] Since reasons of this sort are in his view required for historical understanding, the Nazi genocide against the Jews is in this sense inexplicable – although that does not mean that other forms of explanation (for example, psychological or economic) are not relevant.” (Lang 1990, 151)

Indeed, in the roundtable discussion of the Writing and the Holocaust conference (held in Albany in April 1987), which is included in the eponymous volume, Hilberg emphasises the existence of a central riddle or mystery or enigma. It goes by an old name: Why? Why? I sometimes, though never answering that question myself, ask it, especially of Germans – I ask the Germans, what do you think? And, of course, I never get an answer at all. It seems as though here is an entire nation that is utterly incapable, despite the fact that there are still eighty million Germans on this earth, of explaining its own actions. […] It’s useless even to ask what impelled them. I hear this word this past month from one very articulate German, “Ein Rausch,” something that just took hold. […] I believe very strongly that the attack upon the Soviet Union, and the attack upon Jewry which occurred simultaneously, sprang from that same source beyond rationality, for its own sake, for the experience of it, for the making of this history. (Hilberg et al. 1988, 274)

The question is, then, whether Lang’s ‘other forms of explanation’ – psychological or economic – are necessarily all forms of explanation. Infamously, in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996), Daniel Goldhagen has suggested one collective psychological phenomenon: namely, that a criminal government had instrumentalised an “eliminationist” antisemitism that had been lurking for decades, if not centuries, ‘within’ the German people. Whether this is a good explanation is a different matter – Hilberg, along with most professional historians, certainly thinks not (1997, 3 – 4). But an attempt at explaining it certainly is, even going

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as far as suggesting it is the explanation and thus offers the closure of which Saul Friedländer is so suspicious.⁴² Instead of offering an explanation of the Shoah, Hilberg’s oeuvre is predominantly a description of these events, as he comments in Shoah: “in all of my work I have never begun by asking the big questions because I was always afraid that I would come up with small answers” (S, Part One, 2h52m52s). Instead, Hilberg looks at the details, which need to be conjoined into a Gestalt, “a more full description of what transpired” (S, Part One, 2h52m52s). This is emphatically illustrated in a series of research questions: “[k]illing centers could be hidden, but the disappearance of major communities was noticed in Brussels and Vienna, Warsaw and Budapest. How, then, did the few thousand guards in the death camps handle the millions of arrivals? How did the Germans kill their victims?” (DEJ II, 967, emphasis added). The answers to each of these seemingly simple questions require a widespread and bottom-up approach because of the diversity of the study objects – differences in camps, in moments of destruction (July 1942 versus July 1944), and in managers of death. Indeed, the only time where he attempts to explain a phenomenon, it is not the action but the reaction: the – in his eyes limited – resistance put up by the victims. Hilberg explains this as the consequence of a mentality developed during 2,000 years of diaspora. Indeed, the explanation does not entail much description: Hilberg’s description of Jewish reactions to violence are reduced to the reactions during the Nazi years; he does not describe the reactions to pogroms throughout history – that would, of course, collapse the frame of his study. In other words, the description of the action does not explain it, and the explanation of the reaction is not founded in a profound description.

 And one should ask – against Lang – whether a focus on the economic dimension of the Shoah is not descriptive rather than interpretative. This dimension is included in Destruction: Chapter 5 is titled ‘Expropriation’ (DEJ II, 81– 154), one of the steps Hilberg identifies in both the escalation of antisemitic policy (after having defined who counts as a Jew, the Nazis organised boycotts and promoted a policy of ‘Aryanising’ Jewish businesses big and small) and as a means of physically annihilating the Jews, by imposing and escalating starvation measures on them – these, in turn, allowed the German administration to supply more food to the non-Jewish German population (149 – 154). But these facts do not explain the Shoah: even if one considers the extensive looting of Jewish property during roundups, greed cannot explain the Shoah, as it could manifest itself only after a decision to commit genocide has been taken. At best, it could explain (amongst other factors) a continued indifference towards the fate of the Jews – but that is a psychological explanation. Indeed, even when Hilberg lists the subsequent economic measures, and even when he points to their escalation, he sticks to a description of steps towards and means of genocide – but the temporal succession does not, of course, equate a causality.

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Yet these descriptions and partial explanations do not solve the riddle to which Hilberg refers at the Writing and the Holocaust conference: why did the Shoah happen? What was its rationale? If one considers this question unanswerable, it is a question that must linger and lead to aporia. The suggestion that, despite first appearances, Hilberg is a historian who is aware of the demands that trauma places upon representation is not new. Undoubtedly, the revised edition of Destruction, the publication of Czerniaków’s diary and Hilberg’s association with Lanzmann influenced both Wouk’s attribution of grief underlying Destruction, of its status as a lamentation (cf. the excursus in Chapter 2) and Friedländer’s perception of Hilberg as a historian working through historical trauma. While Wouk’s identification of a single emotion – grief – is compelling by itself, one may note that grief and mourning are (at least colloquially) used interchangeably yet that a difference along the feeling-emotion axis is possible: grief may be defined as the internally and biographically experienced emotional state, while mourning may be considered the social practice of communicating this feeling. Thus, if grief is indeed the underlying emotion for Hilberg’s writing – which is synecdochally reduced to 1,000 pages – then perhaps this writing practice could be considered a form of mourning. The lamentation, then, would not be a matter of style or of religious pathos – Scholem’s vagueness on the matter of style (a consequence of his restraining himself to principles, not manifestations) leads Werner Hamacher to note that there are no limitations as to the style or form of lamenting (2014, 89). This means that sarcasm, laconic sardonicism, and mockery are not mutually exclusive to the act of lamenting. The lamentation, then, is a matter of length, of comprehension: Hilberg is not content with describing the fate of one family, one shtetl or one ghetto, of the Jews living in one particular country – he wants to encompass all so that none are forgotten. Hilberg’s mourning takes no end. As a term, mourning is more central to trauma theory than grief. Dominick LaCapra frequently refers to the differences between grieving and mourning (in a Freudian sense), but grief as a noun and an emotion is not the object of his study (LaCapra 2014). Whether one sees this mourning rather as an act of working through or acting out is fraught and comes with preconceived hierarchies between acting out and working through, the latter of which is often considered preferable to the first. But as LaCapra reminds us, working-through and-acting out are not two separate offers on the table: he understands working-through as “an open, self-questioning process that never attains closure and counteracts acting-out (or the repetition compulsion) without entirely transcending it […]. And one need not simply dismiss or denigrate acting out […], which may be necessary in processes of working-through” (LaCapra 2014, xxiii). Nevertheless, Saul

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Friedländer champions Hilberg as the prime example of the emotionally involved historian working through – and not acting out: the major difficulty of historians of the Shoah, when confused with echoes of the traumatic past, is to keep some measure of balance between the emotion recurrently breaking through the “protective shield” and numbness that protects this very shield. In fact, the numbing or distancing effect of intellectual work on the Shoah is unavoidable and necessary; the recurrence of strong emotional impact is also often unforeseeable and necessary. “Working through” means, first, being aware of both tendencies, allowing for a measure of balance between the two whenever possible. But neither the protective numbing nor the disruptive emotion is entirely accessible to consciousness. A telling example is Raul Hilberg’s magisterial work. More than most of us, he has succeeded in balancing the necessary distancing or “numbness” with elements of intense emotion. But the full impact of this emotion has on occasion been deflected toward overcritical comments on the behavior of the victims. (Friedländer 1992b, 51– 52)⁴³

Excursus: Friedländer as counterexample? This may sound somewhat surprising coming from the “theorist historian” (Stone 2013b, 37) who would, fifteen years later, embrace the perspective of the victims in his magnum opus – and who has been compared to Hilberg precisely on this matter: they are juxtaposed as adhering to “different, even contradictory historical approaches to the Shoah” (Wildt 2010, 6). While Friedländer has indeed pondered on the theoretical possibilities and limitations of an interdisciplinary historiography, Hilberg has never published on the theory of historiography. Undoubtedly, that is because he was one of the pioneers and, hence, had to start with a description of the events. As he writes in the Preface to the 1961 edition, the destruction of the European Jews has not yet been absorbed as a historical event. That does not mean a general denial that millions of people have disappeared, nor does it imply a serious doubt that masses of these people were shot in ditches and gassed in camps. But acknowledgment of a fact does not signify its acceptance in an academic sense. Unprecedented occurrences of such magnitude are accepted academically only when they are studied as tests of existing conceptions about force, about relations between cultures, about society as a whole. […] But to perform such tests, it is not enough to know that the Jews have been destroyed; one must also grasp how this deed was done. That is the story to be told in this book. (DEJ I, v; cf. Browning 1986)

 For some reason, Friedländer italicises the word ‘Shoah’ throughout this essay. I have opted to un-italicise it in order to reduce any chance of misinterpretation: since the italicisation is commonly used to refer to Lanzmann’s film, not the historical event.

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Neither did Hilberg, after the publication of this magnum opus (and while constantly updating it), engage in theoretical reflection, nor did he choose to take sides in some of the historical debates that had emerged during the 1970s and 1980s, steering clear of “the historiographical fray” (Browning 1986). Instead, he has published various collections of documents and methodological considerations (Documents of Destruction and Sources of Holocaust Research). His focus is mainly on a critique of the sources, not the theoretical frameworks. Another major methodological difference cannot be ignored, either. As has often been noted, Friedländer explicitly draws on testimonies and ego-documents of the witnesses in order to sketch a more complete picture of the Shoah. Hilberg, in his methodological commentary, Sources of the Holocaust, argues why he considers oral history and survivors’ memoirs not the best source of historical information: the hasty preparation of the staff [on oral history projects] was not always sufficient for an adequate familiarity with the subject. Notwithstanding the quantity of words in oral history, it is inherently limited in three respects: (1) The survivors as a whole are not a random sample of the Jewish community that was destroyed. (2) Those who testified are not a random sample of the survivors. (3) Their testimony does not contain a random sample of their experiences. […] The limits and limitations of oral delivery also apply to books, and on occasion even more so. The authors had to make themselves available. They had to invest their time and step forward with an idea, outline, draft, or manuscript. What they finally offered remained a personal account with selected revelations. (Hilberg 2001, 47– 49)

To this comes the hearsay that is often found in eyewitness accounts but not labelled as such (163) – another reason for dispelling eyewitness accounts. Yet Friedländer explicitly argues against Hilberg’s position: I do not share Raul Hilberg’s skepticism about diaries as valid sources for our understanding of the events. See Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis (Chicago, 2001), mainly pp. 141– 42, 155 – 59, and 161– 62. The problems with some of the diaries are easily recognizable when the case arises. (Friedländer 2008, 665 n.12)

While Friedländer’s general picture of Hilberg is accurate, and while one would expect that a reference to the latter’s methodological work would yield the material to substantiate Friedländer’s argument, his specific reference is off: on all the pages referenced, diaries are mentioned and/or quoted from, but Hilberg’s a priori rejection of them as sources for the historian cannot be found in them. Let us more closely examine what the pages do entail. The relevant part of page 141 contains a quotation of Anne Frank’s diary (entry of 11 April 1944), finishing on page 142, but there is no argumentation on Hilberg’s behalf as to why Frank’s diary would not be an adequate source. On the contrary, the lack of commentary

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suggests he uses the excerpt to illustrate a spirit of hope, of endurance, perhaps of emerging stronger than before. And in that sense, perhaps it subverts the Nazis’ fear of a biologically reinforced Jewish people – by embracing it.⁴⁴ Sources of Holocaust Research continues, after the Anne Frank excerpt, with a rather dry description of the kinds of information found in any source – whether ego-document or administrative report: “[t]he information in the sources may be characterized in three ways. (1) It may be general or detailed. (2) It may be positive, based on explicit passages, or negative, when it is deduced from the absence of any notation or remark. (3) It may be firsthand or reprocessed.” Hilberg’s subsequent remarks relate to official documents, not to ego-documents. On pages 155 – 159 the reader finds a summary, with some direct quotations, from three diaries: that of Hans Frank, Generalgouverneur in occupied Poland; that of a young boy named David Sierakowiak, who was incarcerated in the Lodz ghetto and that of ghetto police officer Calel Perechodnik. As such, three perspectives are represented: that of an unmistakable perpetrator,⁴⁵ that of an unmistakable victim, and that of a victim in the grey zone who asks himself whether he has become a murderer. Although the latter is allocated slightly more space than the first two, the difference is not substantial. Immediately after concluding with “[Perechodnik] lived until October 1944” (159) – which is a euphemistic but not necessarily laconic way of saying Perechodnik did not survive the Shoah – Hilberg stipulates that “[m]ost of what is known, in large measure or small, comes directly from the sources in the form of data and descriptions. But what if one looks for confirmation that something did or did not happen, only to find silence in the materials?” (159). No contradiction emerges, nowhere does Hilberg state that the remark in the first sentence does not apply to the diaries. The question is answered by the suggestion that “when that point is reached, the blank may signify not non-existent information but information about a nonexistence” (159), which he then in turn illustrates by turning towards the issue of Hitler’s having ordered (orally or on paper) the genocide against the Jews.

 Hilberg deducts that fear was one reason to decide on the complete elimination of European Jewry from the Wannsee conference protocols: the Jews that would survive the harsh conditions in ghettos (starvation, bad clothing and housing, lack of access to sanitation and healthcare) would, in the Nazi logic (which perverts Darwinism), constitute a ‘biologically’ reinforced ‘race’ (Hilberg 2001, 141).  Frank sees himself as the loser in the power struggle with Himmler and the SS, however. Surely, Hilberg does not wish to relativise Frank’s status as perpetrator. Is this a subtle way of indicating the unreliability of the diary, after all? But if so, is it not also due to the perpetrator’s unreliability?

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Finally, on pages 161– 162, Hilberg does acknowledge somewhat more systematically that historians must be aware of the fact that diaries written in the ghettos may be subject to their authors’ self-censoring in order to protect themselves and others, should the diaries once day be confiscated, and that they often feature rumours which can, of course, be “baseless” (163). Yet he does acknowledge that other information can be derived from them: “the rumor in itself is always a fact” (162). In short, little scepticism on Hilberg’s behalf towards diaries is to be found, at least in the pages quoted by Friedländer. On the contrary, these pages ironically come closer to Friedländer’s own interweaving of ego-documents and historiographical description and synthesis – perhaps closer than any other ‘moment’ in Hilberg’s oeuvre. Again, my point is not to that Friedländer is wrong over the whole line but rather that Friedländer’s and Hilberg’s approaches are marked as much by similarities as by differences, especially after Hilberg’s extensive work on Adam Czerniaków. Although Hilberg (mainly) uses German sources, he was the first to offer a Europe-wide account of the genocide, listing for all countries under Nazi occupation and their allies – in more or less detail – the steps towards the destruction of the Jewish communities living there. Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination offers a similar Europe-wide account (Betts and Wiese 2010, 7– 8). More fundamentally, Michael Wildt suggests that the common problem with which both historians are preoccupied is that “of finding a language, an idiom to write about the Holocaust” (Wildt 2010, 107). Indeed, Hilberg has illustrated the conundrum that he faced during his writing process: if he uses contemporary (English) equivalents for German and/or Nazi terms, he fears losing “the atmosphere, the feeling for what has occurred” (Wildt 2010, 107);⁴⁶ if he does replace the latter, he fears being accused of using the perpetrators’ discourse. The question is, once again, that of proximity and distance to the historical events, which are attainable only through the historical sources. Hilberg’s choice of sources adds a profoundly moral dilemma on top of the methodological conundrum with which all historians are confronted. Yet, as Wildt notes, Hilberg, “although trying to keep very close to the German original terms, has never been accused of writing about the destruction of the European Jews in the perpetrators’ idiom” (Wildt 2010, 107). Wildt seems to imply that this accusation never materialised because “[a]lthough carefully camouflaged, Hilberg’s emotions are still visible in his texts” (Wildt 2010, 107).

 This stems from a translation of the interview between Hilberg and Söllner (1988, 193).

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Both are, then, emotionally invested historians, only Hilberg hides his emotionality – or codifies it differently: to be sure, Friedländer’s general remark on the importance of working-through for the historian must also be read as a statement about his own affective control during the writing process. Friedländer does not, however, explain us how this working through manifests itself in Hilberg’s writing, and it comes with a mild version of the criticism that Hilberg had already faced – this, too, serves his self-positioning as a historian with a profoundly different methodology. Interestingly enough, the metaphor of balance is used by Hilberg himself a few years later: “Beethoven’s Appassionata […] showed me that I could not shout on a thousand pages, that I had to suppress sonority and reverberations, and that I could loosen my grip only selectively, very selectively” (PoM, 85; qtd. in Plamper 2015, 292). Plamper thus links this inspiration in music to the “engaged disengagement” mentioned earlier (Plamper 2015, 292), referring to Hilberg’s self-attested “suppressed irony” (PoM, 88; qtd. in Plamper 2015, 292), but it is worth pointing out that Hilberg’s idea of balance transcends his visible affective self-control. Indeed, Hilberg sees music as the artistic inspiration for structural composition where literature could provide none for the telling of the Shoah: [t]o portray the Shoah, Claude Lanzmann once said to me, one has to create a work of art. […] No literature could serve me as an example. The destruction of the Jews was an unprecedented occurrence, a primordial act that had not been imagined before it burst forth. The Germans had no model for their deed, and I did not have one for my narrative. Yet later I became aware that I was appropriating, transcribing, arranging something. It was not a work of literature but a body of music. (PoM, 83 – 84)

Where narrative fails, music succeeds – unwittingly. The composition is clearly not merely an emotional but also a structural balancing: a means of making a narrative of the Shoah achievable, perhaps even to see the Gestalt which Hilberg claims the victims could not see.⁴⁷

 He utters this views in the outtakes of Shoah (Lanzmann 1979, FV 3776, 18m08s). In other words, the victims could, of course, see what was happening in front of their eyes – to them – but the increased isolation and impoverishment made it impossible to grasp the bigger picture. Moreover, if Hilberg is right in proclaiming that the perpetrators could not even imagine what was to unfold years or months later, how could the victims? Moreover, returning eyewitnesses were often plainly disbelieved, considered either crazy or sadistically cruel for spreading such stories. Abraham Bomba, back in the ghetto Częstochowa after his escape from Treblinka, was not believed, and while the Vrba–Wetzler report, written in the spring of 1944 by two escapees from Auschwitz, did reach Hungarian Jewish communities, many members could not believe the report. Whether their belief would have prevented their embarking the death trains

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I grasped for an overall symmetry. Beethoven […] had sketched the finale of his Eroica symphony by pairing what he placed first with what he put down last, and then what followed the first with what preceded the last, and so on in candelabra fashion towards the middle. I had done something very similar with my twelve-chapter work. The first chapter was thematically reflected in the last. The second was matched with the next to last, and the third with the tenth. The longest of my chapters was the one on deportations. It was the andante of my composition, with a theme and multiple variations that mirrored the special conditions under which deportations were carried out in each country. (PoM, 85 – 86)

This shows, once more, how closely intricated emotionality and cognition are – and, on a side note, how research projects and interests can be motivated by memory and emotion: Hilberg’s memoirs include a particularly poignant case of foreshadowing pertaining to trains. Hilberg recounts how, as a child, [t]he linear experience of being on a train was my awakening to space. I needed a window not only to see what was outside but to estimate speed. I had to listen to rhythmic sounds which one can no longer hear, now that the tracks are seamless. The train opened the world to me. […] This magnetism of the railroad never deserted me. In my adulthood I kept it a secret, of course, thinking that it would be regarded as an element of infantilism. (PoM, 39)

Hilberg makes the connection between childhood fascination and research explicit: “My cognizance of trains has affected my work, and for a long time I was preoccupied with them in a research project. Specifically I was interested in the transport of Jews to their deaths” (PoM, 40). Here, too, Hilberg’s laconic discourse emerges in the abrupt shift; here, too, Hilberg seems to downplay his emotional attachment by describing his passion for trains are mere ‘cognizance’ – slightly later, he describes his meeting with Lanzmann: [a]fter I had just completed my study, Claude Lanzmann visited me in Vermont to discuss his idea of making a major film about the Jewish catastrophe. He showed me a railway document he had found and I seized it like an addict to explain the hieroglyphical contents to him. “This I must film,” he said, and I repeated my analysis before his camera. (PoM, 40)

6.5 Hilberg in Shoah As mentioned earlier, Lanzmann’s interview with Hilberg for Shoah comes at a pivotal moment in the latter’s writing, and the release of the film, approximately

is a different matter, of course, and one that could only be pondered in an excruciatingly difficult speculative fashion.

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coinciding with the publication of the second edition of Destruction,⁴⁸ has undoubtedly had a profound influence on Hilberg’s perception. Hilberg is seen on three occasions. The first time he starts by outlining his methodology, his research goals and his premises; the second time he reads and discusses a document listing a death train to Treblinka and explains the principles of payment to the Reichsbahn; the third time, he discusses the dilemmas faced by Adam Czerniaków and reads from the latter’s diary. I highlight three elements from Hilberg’s appearance in Shoah: (1) his body language, which betrays a barely containable affective self-control – as an audio-visual support of my thesis that this self-control shines through, occasionally, in Destruction (and to a lesser degree elsewhere);⁴⁹ (2) his philosophy of history and of language – indeed, Berg looks at Shoah as well (2019, 169 – 170) – and (3) the question of empathy with Adam Czerniaków. Before delving into these matters, a misunderstanding must be pre-empted, a factually dubious yet widespread claim needs correction: Hilberg is not the only historian interviewed by Lanzmann. As the digital archive demonstrates, Lanzmann interviewed Gertrude Schneider along with her sister and mother in November 1978. Like Hilberg (and, coincidentally, Klüger), Schneider is Jewish and has Viennese roots; like Hilberg, she became a historian of the Shoah. Unlike Hilberg, she did not emigrate before the war and thus was deported in 1942 to the Riga ghetto. Like Klüger, she emigrated in 1947 to the United States. Unlike Hilberg, she was nearly completely absent from the final film; her voice is only heard singing a lamenting Yiddish love song off-cue, while the camera shows first a wintery landscape of emptiness, after which her mother is shown weeping. Schneider is then shown, again very briefly, looking at her weeping mother. As Marianne Hirsch rhetorically asks: “[w]here are the women in the film?” (2012, 8; cf. Hirsch and Spitzer 1993, 4– 7). Hilberg is not the only historian interviewed by Lanzmann; he is not even the only historian in Shoah. Schneider’s voice is, however, not heard as that of the historian but as that of the eyewitness, of the victim. If “Hilberg is the only historian to appear in Shoah” (Popper 2010), he is the only historian qua historian in Shoah. Even Schneider’s status as survivor can

 The interview with Hilberg, coincidentally, took place around the publication of Czerniaków’s diary.  Although this is a simulation of Hilberg’s visceral reactions, it is, through our capacity of theory of mind, not too difficult to sense this viscerality (and some will, no doubt, experience it themselves).

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only be deduced from the singing and the weeping retained for the film: her story did not make the final cut.⁵⁰ But the archive contains approximately six hours of interviews with Hilberg, and while Lanzmann has always urged us to watch Shoah and leave the outtakes for what they are (Vice 2013, 47), it is worth discarding these instructions. Especially Hilberg’s treatment of Czerniaków in the outtakes strengthens the impression Hilberg makes on us as viewers of Shoah: they show more of Hilberg’s selfcontrol; they betray more of his views on the importance of language; they support his comments on the ‘structure’ of his prose reflecting what he perceived and described, somewhat vaguely, as the ‘structure’ of the sources (cf. Berg 2019, 2, 4– 6, 10). The first manifestation of Hilberg’s emotionality in Shoah is his composure, his affective self-control, which is visible, if only slightly, in his body language – and more particularly, in his facial expressions: he steadily raises his eyebrows, as if to signal a disconnect between the vocabulary of the perpetrators he is forced to use and his own stance; he seems to bite his lips when listing the history of anti-Jewish measures which the Nazis copied before perpetrating outright genocide (S, Part 1, 2h54m25s); when hearing Hilberg’s explanation, in a very matter-of-fact style, how the deported communities were robbed so that the deportation could be paid to the Reichsbahn but how currency exchange issues led to the uncompensated deportation of the Jews of Saloniki, one notices how either Hilberg consciously pulls up his mouth corners or uncontrollably twitches – the first would communicate Hilberg’s awareness of the perpetrators’ cynicism (and hence of his reporting), the latter would be a subdued anger bursting out; either way, an emotional state is visible (S, Part Two, 1h52m26s). There are too many subtle instances of twitches or mouth corner raisings, of lip biting, but also of obvious swallowing – suffice it at Hilberg’s discussing (but not reading from) Adam Czerniaków’s diary written in the Warsaw Ghetto (S, Part Two, 3h42m14s).⁵¹  Other victims are heard and seen singing and weeping – the film opens with Simon Srebnik’s testimony and, more particularly, with his singing. It would be worth taking a closer look at Schneider’s monographs and probe it for the codification of emotionality; a first glance at Exile and Destruction reveals that she weaves autobiographic childhood memories into the broader historical picture, but that apart from the occasional litotes – “[o]thers were not so lucky” (i. e. as lucky as Louis Rothschild, who was able to emigrate to England in 1939; G. Schneider 1995, 15) – her style does not show the affective self-control so omnipresent in Hilberg’s magnum opus.  More difficult to substantiate is the impression of extreme sadness conveyed in the way Hilberg looks at Lanzmann and away from the camera, again, while discussing Czerniaków and the conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto.

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That is not to say that the sardonic veil is completely absent – as his response to Lanzmann’s question concerning a fascination for a railway document (Fahrplananordnung 587) listing death trains from Sędziszów, Szydłowiec, and other ghettos to Treblinka shows: “[w]ell you see, when I hold a document in my hand, particularly if it’s an original document, then I hold something which is actually something that the original bureaucrat had held in his hand. It’s an artefact. It’s a leftover – it’s the only leftover there is. The dead are not around” (S, Part Two, 1h45m36s). Hilberg utters the last sentence with an obvious smirk and while looking rather intensely at his interlocutor. The tautological remark is spoken unapologetically; in its slightly subdued utterance, Hilberg of course legitimises his methodological choice of working with the perpetrators’ documents, yet his facial expression – including a raised eyebrow – and the intensity of the gaze not only betray but actively signal an underlying layer of meaning, and perhaps they exemplify par excellence Hilberg’s strand pathos of anti-pathos.⁵² Precisely the documents cause this pathos of anti-pathos to rupture: to leave no doubt as to the bafflement underlying Hilberg’s research (and prose). Fahrplananordnung 587 informs the staff at the railway stations that death trains will roll through on the way to Treblinka. Tim Cole rightly points out that this document “does not simple record that 10,000 ‘Jews’ were taken to Treblinka in September 1942, but initiated this action” (2011, 1). The document is, moreover, not singular or unique: this very document is issued in at least eight copies, and there are many documents like it. Far more than 10,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka in September 1942.⁵³ The document may, as a tangible artefact, reduce the distance between the perpetrator and the researcher (be it the historian or the filmmaker), but it cannot bridge that gap – or the others: the gap between knowing and understanding, to be sure, but also the gap between the perpetrator’s ‘clean’ deskwork and the visceral reality of deportation, gassing and burning (cf. Gigliotti 2009, 27, 36 – 37) and the gap opened up by realising that the document is history – and hence, that one has genocidal history in one’s hands. Indeed, the paradoxical constellation of proximity and distance is condensed in Hilberg’s body language with which he distances himself from the document: while summarising the document – “we may be talking here about 10,000 dead Jews on this one Fahrplananordnung right here” (Part Two, 1h45m15s) – he emphatically touches the document lying on the table, picks it  To be sure, Lanzmann’s diegetic silence, the camera slowly zooming in on Hilberg and the next pan shot depicting empty landscapes add to this sense of momentousness.  Appendix A to Yitzhak Arad’s study on the Operation Reinhard extermination camps shows that more than 160,000 Jews were deported just to Treblinka just in September 1942 (Arad 1999, 392– 397).

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up and holds it in front of Lanzmann, only to put it down as emphatically as he picked it up while looking away from the document and from Lanzmann – all in a matter of seconds. Upon Lanzmann’s suggestion that the document plans the deportation of more than 10,000 people, Hilberg has regained his composure and laconically remarks: “well, we will be conservative”. Upon Hilberg’s third appearance “he has taken the place of a dead man. He is, entirely, Adam Czerniaków. […] His voice, heard off over the snows of his Vermont, over the foliage of the Jewish cemetery of Warsaw, resurrects the dead” (Lanzmann 1995, 187).⁵⁴ To be sure, one could interpret this claim of overidentification in various ways: as the result of Hilberg’s ‘acting’ or as the result of Lanzmann’s artistic vision; whereas Hilberg is seen as describing the historical context and heard as reading from Czerniaków’s diary, the excerpt where Hilberg explicitly utters his high respect for Czerniaków is left out of Shoah: “[a]bove all, however, I can admire […] Czerniaków, […] because all three share one characteristic: they saw events as they actually transpired. They did not substitute illusions for reality” (Lanzmann 1979, FV3480, 0m12s).⁵⁵ Why this excerpt did not make the final cut is unclear; but these words are only available as audio – Hilberg was either not filmed speaking them, or there were technical problems with the visual material. Hilberg’s reading of the diary is a more indirect way of signalling his respect for Czerniaków. This fits Lanzmann’s poetics of getting as close to the dead victims as possible – either through the harrowing testimonies of the few surviving Sonderkommando members, who were the last persons to see the victims alive, or through Hilberg’s literally giving voice to the Chairman of the Warsaw Judenrat. There are, thus, good reasons for challenging Lanzmann’s diagnosis of identification on Hilberg’s behalf and good reasons for stating that Hilberg is basically adhering to the method of Einfühlung to try to envision Czerniaków’s reality. Indeed, while it is left out of Shoah, Hilberg openly formulates this: “I think it’s necessary to role-play, it’s necessary put oneself to some extent in somebody else’s place”, adding that this is precisely what he has done for five years with

 In a strict sense, Hilberg appears more than three times; the discussion of Czerniaków and the reading from his diary is interlaced with Lanzmann’s interview with Franz Grassler, the deputy of Heinz Auerswald – the commissioner of the Warsaw Ghetto. Interlaced are, in a sense, the representatives of the German and the Jewish leaders in Warsaw. And the differences could not be bigger: whereas Grassler babbles and babbles but says nothing of substance, the silences in Czerniaków’s discourse – and Hilberg’s – speak volumes.  Next to Czerniaków, “all three” refers to Rudolf Kästner (1900 – 1957), who tried to negotiate with the Nazis in order to save Jews, and Mordechaj Anielewicz (1919 – 1943), the leader of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943.

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the diary (Lanzmann 1979b, FV3775, 20m22s).⁵⁶ The key here is ‘to some extent’ – it points to a critical self-other distinction and thus forbids identification. Then again, and curiously enough, in the preface to the second edition of the diary, Hilberg notes that “[in] Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, Czerniakow is a witness speaking through entries in his diary” (1999, ix). In what can either be considered a gesture of incredible modesty or a gesture of identification, Hilberg forgets to mention that he is the ‘channel’ through which Czerniaków is presented to the viewer. And indeed, others have used the term ‘identification’ to refer to what would perhaps be better labelled Hilberg’s sympathy for Czerniaków. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer consider Hilberg “in apparent identification with Czerniakow’s” conclusions after learning that he can no longer protect the orphans: seeing that he can no longer intervene for anyone in the ghetto, he commits suicide (1993, 12). Sympathy, as mentioned earlier, goes beyond empathy in the sense that it is not a mere technique or method but that it entails an evaluative component as well: it approves of the thoughts or the motivations or the deeds of the person for whom empathy is shown. And indeed, Hilberg’s sympathy is clear in his emphatic (not empathic) explanation of Czerniaków’s decision. When Lanzmann asks why it is precisely the impending deportation of the orphans that leads the Chairman to take his own life, Hilberg leaves no doubt as to where his sympathies lie: [t]hey are the most helpless element in the community, they are the little children, its future, who’ve lost their parents, they cannot possibly do anything on their own. If the orphans do not have exemption [from being deported, TV], if he does not even get the promise, the words spoken by a German SS-officer, not even assurances which as he knows he cannot be counted on, if he cannot even get the words, what can he think? (S, Part Two, 4h09m45s)

The speed of speech remarkably decreases: while the first sentence is spoken in rapid succession (to the point where my commas are, perhaps, misleading), the middle of the second sentence is pronounced with increased emphasis on the singular words, culminating in the strong emphasis on ‘words’ – again, demonstrating Hilberg’s awareness of the importance of language and of discourse,

 This self-positioning comes shortly after a presumable jab at Arendt. When Lanzmann enquires about the accusations of collaboration directed at the Jewish Councils, Hilberg retorts that “All sorts of people say all sorts of things; they’ve done so without much study, they’ve done it without deep penetration into the problem areas that these very people had” (Lanzmann 1979b, FV3775, 20m13s).

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even ex negativo ⁵⁷ – and the final part of the rhetorical question is rather hushed, almost mumbling. Apart from his admitted admiration for Czerniaków because of the latter’s sense of reality – and, undoubtedly, for documenting the destruction and thus providing the historian with an important source (S, Part Two, 3h41m23s) – Hilberg’s perceived proximity is thus also an intellectual one, and it becomes clear when Hilberg attributes sarcasm and sardonicism to Czerniaków – in Shoah Hilberg says that “he is, erm, sarcastic enough, if that is the word, in December 1941 to remark that now the intelligentsia were dying also” (Part Two, 3h44m11s).⁵⁸ But his remark that the diary is rife with sardonic jokes demonstrates that sardonicism and sarcasm lie as much in the eye of the beholder as in the text itself:⁵⁹ one such sardonic joke is found in Czerniaków’s recounting of a petition for money: the petitioner needed money with which he would not buy food but pay the rent for his apartment, preferring to die under a roof rather than collapse in the street (Part Two, 3h45m). But does this reversal of priorities not shed light on the extremity of starvation, on the fatalism pervading the ghetto (and Czerniaków)? Where does the sardonicism lie, precisely? Hilberg does acknowledge the fatalism of that particular individual yet does not quite demonstrate the sardonicism on Czerniaków’s behalf – though Lanzmann suggests (and Hilberg confirms) that it lies in the fact that not only is it presumably better to die inside than outside but that death is not only unavoidable but imminent; more generally, Hilberg implies that it is the everyday reality of mass death that causes Czerniaków’s sardonic remarks (3h46m10s). Both the discussion of the Fahrplananordnung and of the diary are, then, relevant for Hilberg’s language. The document’s material two-dimensionality thus does not do justice to its three-dimensional content: not only is it history, but it is a riddle – riddled with silences. What do the abbreviations mean? Hilberg offers the explanations to the viewer, yet Hilberg needed years, and many documents, to reconstruct what P Kr, Lp Kr, 50 G and other formulations mean. Likewise, Czerniaków’s reporting, which is rife with understatement and marked by  Hilberg gesticulation, bringing his hand to his mouth and seemingly pulling something out – presumably, the SS officer’s words – only emphatically increases his sense of urgency, strengthens the importance of language for Hilberg.  In his explanation, Hilberg’s own laconic style shines through. Lanzmann asks for the relevance of Czerniaków’s remark, which Hilberg attributes to “the class structure within the ghetto, [causing differences in] vulnerability to starvation: erm, the lower classes died first, the middle class died a little bit later”. But this does not diminish the relevance or urgency: “intelligentsia were of course at the top of the middle class. And once they start dying the situation was very, very, very bad” (3h44m31s).  Hilberg seems aware of this, considering his qualifying ‘if that is the word’ in the previous quotation.

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the brevity of factual observations, leaves screaming silences. Hilberg is seen in Shoah drawing indirect parallels between his own sarcasm and sardonicism and Czerniaków’s, and the outtakes contain instances where Hilberg characterises the diary as not only “the most unique and certainly the most important document coming from the Jewish side” but as marked by a “matter of fact language, without embellishment”, “in an almost laconic style” (Lanzmann 1979, FV3775, 02m30s). Hilberg’s laconic discourse tries to do justice to all the victims by metonymically paying (stylistic) homage to one. The perpetrator’s camouflage and the victim’s sense of bewilderment. These are the silences that Hilberg’s prose reflects.

In lieu of a conclusion. Summary and further questions Where are we standing now, after the discussion of these very different strands of the pathos of anti-pathos? Where is it situated? How does it relate to our understanding of traumatic history and our interpretation of literature? What functions does it fulfil? The answers are not straightforward – the heterogeneity of the corpus in terms of genres and speaking positions necessitates a nuanced description of this broad spectrum of codifying an inevitably intense emotionality in the face of a wariness of such intense emotions. A first general remark is that the pathos of anti-pathos seems to manifest itself in discourses of intellectuals who are indebted to the legacy of the Enlightenment, be they outspokenly leftwing (Delbo) or liberal (Arendt). At the risk of sounding normative, I want to suggest that the principle of the pathos of anti-pathos is more suited to and more efficient at evoking strong emotions.¹ This is tied, in part, to the predominance of catachresis in testimonial literature. But the persistence of catachresis in posttestimonial literature (and indeed, historiography) demonstrates that the bind between pathos of anti-pathos and catachresis is double. On the one hand, catachresis emerges when ‘proper’ words lack to describe reality, and thus it also underlies the laconic, sarcastic and cynical discourses that have been analysed here. On the other hand, the pathos of anti-pathos is catachrestic in the sense that attributions of emotionality are often unstable, contradictory and ambivalent. Therefore, its relation to trauma is not straightforward. But perhaps it offers an accompanying paradigm. After all, we cannot read Hilberg, in Shoah, through the trauma paradigm like Abraham Bomba or Filip Müller. We need a different framework. And with this framework, we can read the other texts anew, too. Let us briefly look at the individual authors before drawing preliminary closing remarks and attempting a first assessment of the viability of the concept and its metaphors at the end of the beginning of the twenty-first century.

 Such observations equally underlie Christopher Bigsby’s and Robert Cohen’s views on Die Ermittlung: Bigsby points to the inherently “sheer emotional power” of the courtroom testimony which “defied capturing” and led Weiss “to create a documentary theatre that was, as he explained, dry and emotionless” (2006, 161). Weiss does not “provide the emotion” but rather elicits it from details and anecdotes and lets the reader fill in the space between the lines (161). Robert Cohen reels against any depiction of Die Ermittlung as rid of emotionality and instead argues that a strong emotionality is evoked through avant-gardist, modernist techniques – not through the sentimentality and morality that is found in Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 Der Stellvertreter (Cohen 1998, 50). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110758580-012

In lieu of a conclusion. Summary and further questions

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The reader may have been surprised to see W. G. Sebald as the first author to be discussed under the pathos of anti-pathos: Sebald’s prose is clearly marked by the pathos of testimony and especially by the pathos of the ethical obligation towards the witness. Yet it is precisely the pathos of testimony that is, in Sebald’s prose, marked by a pathos of anti-pathos: the survivor remains an eccentric character, aloof from the reader and the narrator alike, just as much as the narrator remains aloof from the survivor. Moreover, the survivor testifies to immense loss – Aurach/Ferber and Austerlitz survive in exile but lose their parents and do not return to the homes of their childhood. So do those who do not survive to tell their stories: Selwyn and Adelworth lose their close male friends, Naegeli resp. Cosmo; and, arguably, the narrator in Ringe loses his sanity. On the diegetic level, there is no restitution, and this aporia constitutes its own pathos. The anti-pathos consists of the imbalance between who tells of his suffering to whom, of the imbalance in avowed vulnerability. For Selwyn, it may reside in a distrust of the narrator, who is literally kept at a distance despite being an apparent confidant. To be sure, this imbalance is necessary in Sebald’s poetics of postmemory: if there were no such imbalance, the victim’s suffering might easily be conceived of as being compared to the suffering of the German non-Jewish Nachgeborener – which would be problematic indeed. That does not mean that Sebald’s prose comes without its own risks and potential ethical shortcomings. Then again, when Schütte and Schley invoke Sebald’s self-chosen remoteness and the estimations of his contemporaries who suggest that Sebald’s would feel awkward with being so famous, they both consider a substantial critique and revision (instead of a celebration) of Sebald to be a homage to him, and there lies merit in this view. The question of empathy or appropriation pertains, to some degree, to the level of critique (diegetic or authorial) causing tensions within the model-author Sebald – tensions which ultimately defy resolution. Sebald’s poetics of postmemory and empathy may be, and have been, met with approval; yet the fact that it is the author Sebald who gains cultural (and financial) capital out of the stories of survivors creates a sense of unease. This unease is only intensified by Sebald’s polemical attacks against authors who have done the same but whose prose is stylised differently. But it is the consequence of looking for a mediation that adheres as closely to the historical facts as possible. Moreover, not all survivors have reacted similarly: some have demanded to be severed from the characters who are based on their experiences (Auerbach); others have approved of Sebald’s poetics (Klüger); still more others have actively demanded recognition (Bechhöfer). Yet whereas the literary author Sebald has been extremely successful (in contrast – somewhat – to the scholar Sebald), his ethical impulses cannot prevent a suspicion of his intentions or premises. Considering Arendt’s remarks on public emotion-

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ality in politics and the suspicion with which this is unavoidably met, this should come as no great surprise: if Wohlfarth argues that Sebald depoliticises Benjamin’s Theses, this depoliticisation has, of course, political implications. The suspicions, then, amount to a hidden philosemitism, an appropriation of trauma and a nostalgia underlying the obvious melancholia: a nostalgia for an era in which the German-Jewish symbiosis was supposedly intact – and these suspicions are not exactly levied by Sebald’s own rigorous set of aesthetic and ethical rules for literature: to the victims, he says, show us your trauma; to all others, do not usurp the suffering of others. The question of appropriation looms particularly large in this regard. To be sure, Sebald’s peculiar pathos has been criticised as well: just as appropriation may be the shadow side of empathy, nostalgia is the shadow side of melancholia: there is broad agreement on the manifestation of melancholia, particularly in Die Ringe des Saturn through an astrological discourse in which melancholia is associated with Saturn and with the month of August; a modern(ist) manifestation of melancholia is found in the conception of psychological trauma: Sebald’s prose is marked by a never-ending mourning of irreparable losses, particularly in Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz (but also in Die Ringe des Saturn); not only losses that were imposed on Europe by the destruction of its Jewish communities but also losses that colonialist European nations inflicted upon their neighbours, their own populations and the populations of countries on the other side of the world. Ultimately, this melancholia has psychopathological consequences for the narrator of Die Ringe des Saturn. There is no doubt that it will befall a part of the readership – however temporarily. The nostalgia underlying this melancholia pertains, then, to the ruptures in humanity that the perpetrators brought upon themselves and the world by committing genocide – an irreparable loss identified by Hilberg in the 1961 preface and summarised in Diner’s idea of the Zivilisationsbruch. The nostalgia would be, in such reading, for a presumed erstwhile German-Jewish symbiosis. In this reading, Sebald’s prose, perhaps astonishingly, eerily approaches Eric Santner’s idea of narrative fetishism, which is “the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into being in the first place […]; it is a strategy of undoing, in fantasy, the need for mourning by simulating a condition of intactness” (Santner 1992, 144). But again, the attributions seem different: no nostalgia is expressed on a diegetic level – that is marked by melancholia pur. It is there, so to say, between the lines and attached to the image of the author Sebald. A further point of critique remains in the inconsistencies between Sebald’s explicit and implicit poetics: he holds entirely different views on the appropriateness of the depiction of the air war and the Shoah; and these beget the question

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of comparison: while Andreas Huyssen admits that “Sebald is not an Aufrechner, is not tallying moral equity, and cannot be read according to this old paradigm,” there is for him no doubt that “[i]n its accusatory tone, the book lapses into the discourse of Abwicklung, of a settling with the past, […] and the reader begins to wonder what may be at stake for Sebald, given the vehemence of his accusation” (Huyssen 2003, 147). Sebald’s pathos of anti-pathos co-exists with his polemical pathos – precisely because it is to be attached to different images: that of the author of fictional texts and that of the author of a nonfictional pamphlet. Huyssen points out that “the widespread theoretical discourse of the 1990s about trauma, repetition, and the aporias of representation” (Huyssen 2003, 147) is not central to Luftkrieg und Literatur, whereas it is to Die Ausgewanderten – texts that can be compared since they both thematise “the memory problematic of the second generation, of Germans who were born and grew up after the war. Nossack, Kluge, and Fichte experienced the bombings. Sebald did not” (Huyssen 2003, 148). The question is, then, what ‘right’ Sebald has in polemically refuting the accounts of those who were present. It seems that the poetics of secondariness take priority over the voice of those who were present – and this pertains to his views on the ‘right’ way of depicting the air war as much as the Shoah, as his attack on Becker shows. Paradoxically, the literary articulation of trauma takes priority over the actual traumatised voice – precisely what Wulf Kansteiner and Harald Weilnböck, slightly polemical themselves, warn against (2008). What Mary Cosgrove criticises is Sebald’s “tendency to extrapolate from a single perspective on the past […], for it is highly problematic when applied to general interpretative frameworks and invites undiscerning forms of identification” (Cosgrove 2006b, 232). Cosgrove’s remark is strikingly accurate, and it is an eye-opener, considering the uncanniness of repetitive history as articulated in Die Ringe des Saturn and Austerlitz. To summarize, Taberner, Huyssen, and Cosgrove articulate a wariness of Sebald’s good intentions – not unlike (although presumably for different reasons) Klüger’s wariness of philosemitic, well-meant actions and engagement. Nonetheless, Klüger does not share their assessment and has spoken highly of Sebald and his prose. Sebald’s prose is marked by a strong pathos which is manifested in entirely contradictory ways: it includes the pathos of anti-pathos but is certainly not restricted to it. It is no surprise, then, that his reception is manifested in entirely contradictory ways, too. It hinges, remarkably, not on the anti-pathos of the narrators (which is manifested by their aloofness) or of the characters (which is manifested metaphorically and intertextually) but on their obvious ethical impetus – whether one considers it sincere or ultimately self-centred. If Arendt is right in claiming that a public display of emotionality in politics is bound to create suspicion, then Sebald’s project could only attract a considerable amount of wa-

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riness as well as outright admiration. There is no empathy without the risk of appropriation, no melancholia without the risk of nostalgia.² It is this doubling that, once more, prevents any closure in our trying to grasp, describe and interpret the Shoah and colonialism. It is this doubling that equally enables us to read Sebald as a magnificent aesthete and an erudite and well-read literary author despite the pitfalls of his empathy and melancholia. Dieter Schlesak’s novel is equally confusing on various levels: on the matter of pathos and anti-pathos, which co-exist as well: first and foremost, the novel is an accusation of perpetrators who may have been known at one point (Capesius) and those who avoided persecution at all (Albert). The pathos of accusation is, then, unmistakable – even more since the novel psychologises the perpetrators just as much as the prosecutors had to in order to show the perpetrators’ juridical guilt. Capesius’s guilt is construed in Capesius as much through a poetics of the detective as through his configuration of an unrepentant man who seems to have no sense of guilt – this latter image is construed largely through Schlesak’s autobiographically motivated intervention, relying on protocols of interviews with this family acquaintance. The intertexts used create a strong, ‘classical’ pathos and an equally strong pathos of anti-pathos. Capesius is equally, if not more so, confusing on the matter of fictionality and nonfictionality, veracity and ‘authenticity’. James Young is undoubtedly right when claiming that “[w]hat is remembered of the Holocaust depends on how it is remembered, and how events are remembered depends in turn on the texts now giving them form” (Young 1988b, 1). That applies to a much more basic question as well: what is remembered depends on what is being told and excluded. At times, Schlesak’s novel is so confusing precisely because it entangles both elements through its very complex intertextuality and the liberties it takes with the historical record. If one takes a benign view on the novel, one might say that it achieves to do what students of Shoah literature usually acknowledge in their academic work: it does not “deny the historical facts of the Holocaust outside of their narrative framing, but only […] emphasize[s] the difficulty of interpreting, expressing, and acting on these facts outside of the ways we frame them” (Young 1988b, 3). If this is so, the student of Schlesak’s novel must return to a reading method which Young deems unnecessary for the reader of testimony: “[t]he role of the critic here is not to sort ‘fact’ from fiction in Holocaust literary testimony, but to sustain an awareness of both the need for unmediated facts in this literature and the simultaneous incapacity in narrative to document these facts”

 Here, the doubling of fiction implied in Bunia’s Faltung finds a parallel doubling in our literary judgement.

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(Young 1988b, 11). That may be so, but the remediation of the genre of testimony and the highly ambiguous subtitle do beg the question of what is fact and what is fiction. To assume that layout choices (the use of italics for Adam’s account) reflect the division would be utterly naïve. It would be equally naïve to assume that the discrepancies between the intertexts and Schlesak’s novel could tell us what the historical facts ‘really’ are, but the discrepancies between these intertexts and Schlesak’s novel demonstrate that the fictionalisation is a conscious strategy that can be attributed to the author – after all, he lists the sources in a bibliography, which simultaneously suggests authenticity through falsifiability and enables the researcher to cross-check Schlesak’s sources. This may provoke a pathos of condemnation in our reception of the novel – just as much as one of the novel’s predecessors, Weiss’s Die Ermittlung did in the 1960s, albeit for different reasons. If one wishes to avoid such pathos-driven judgements, one may consider such at best semi-visible and at worst completely hidden interferences as heterodiegetic narrative unreliability, and as such a strategy that draws attention to itself as a means to a purpose: as a means of questioning our standards of authenticity without completely destabilising the idea of referentiality. In this reading, Capesius is not fundamentally different from homodiegetic fictional narratives told by perpetrators – narratives that have been met with scepticism as well as with critical acclaim. Such a benevolent reading is, however, not marked by the pathos of anti-pathos since it is not concerned with matters of emotionality. The pathos of anti-pathos pertaining to Capesius is situated intertextually (through a recourse of the testimony in court which demands an affective selfcontrol) and on Adam’s intradiegetic level, which is mediated through intertexts marked by articulations of emotionality that can be described as a pathos of anti-pathos: through Borowski’s biting cynicism; Kluge’s implicating detached doctors and scientists in programmes of genocide; Weiss’s politically charged reportage and accusation; and the Sonderkommando Scrolls, which incorporate both the pathos of accusation, of outright hatred (and other difficult emotions), the pathos of religion, and the pathos of anti-pathos. It should be clear, both from this limited set of intertexts and from the corpus of this book, that the pathos of anti-pathos is an umbrella term referring to a spectrum of codifications of ‘big’ emotions against the background of a suspicion of heavy emotions being publicly aired – not one specific codification as such. Even if narratological considerations can serve to avoid a polemical pathos in the reception, Young’s assumption of narratology ‘freeing’ us from pathos is not entirely accurate: narratology can only offer the tools to discuss the pathos of the text and the pathos of reception in more nuanced ways. ‘Nuanced’ does not mean, of course, ‘free of emotions’ – nor should it.

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Ruth Klüger’s autobiographies are, by contrast, marked by a heavy pathos of anti-pathos, which directs its arrows at many targets: prevalent Shoah discourses marked by latent antisemitism, philosemitism, moralism, and sentimentalism; German audiences who perhaps mean well but do not quite listen to the survivors; American audiences who treat the Second World War in isolation and cast themselves as heroes without considering their acts of victimisation, particularly those in the second half of the twentieth century; and patriarchy. Her own discourse emerges through a rapprochement to the Shoah canon (yet while retaining her individual voice) and a repeated distancing from the reader, who is met with a fundamental distrust – the German reader of weiter leben as much as the American of Still Alive. This distrust is manifested in an aggressive irony on various levels and in clear imperatives. Whether the fictitious names for family members and friends are to be read as a further sign of this distrust is questionable: indeed, the implicit yet unmistakable reference to Améry must mean that she attributes the reader of her text with the necessary knowledge to establish the intertextual link and Klüger’s distancing from Améry as much as her rapprochement to him. The tension between Klüger and her reader – a similarly incessant and simultaneous approaching and distancing from her – is a manifestation of the same phenomenon but on a different level. Yet Klüger’s distrust does not lead to a ‘cooling down’ of her autobiography as Schneider understands it: she does not become anonymous or intangible, and the obvious multiperspectivity in Klüger’s reflections does not lead to a destabilisation of her identity. On the contrary, she is very frank about her identity, and this must be so, if she wishes her reader to engage in an act of empathy. Moreover, when Klüger describes her text as heating up, she refers to the effect that her emotional constitution in remembering episodes of injustice has on her recounting them. Her literary reflection (in both form and content) does not equal a turn to autonomist poetics – historical referentiality remains primordial, even when (or perhaps particularly when) it is problematised. If one considers Klüger’s wariness as a cooled meeting with the reader, one must acknowledge that this coolness exists parallel to her passionate (‘hot’) anger. The coolness is a consequence of this anger, namely as a manifestation of a deep-rooted wariness towards her readers. Her pathos of anti-pathos does not seek to elicit compassion; rather, it demands a never-ending questioning of one’s previously held beliefs about the Shoah and its survivors. While it does not juxtapose emotion and cognition, it is wary of certain codes of emotionality – notably sentimentality – without repressing her own emotions. In this sense, Klüger would have made for a great seventh author in Deborah Nelson’s study of women who are “tough enough” to face “painful reality” (Nelson 2017, 5) without rendering it less painful through an oversimplifying sentimentality. Indeed, trauma is persis-

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tent throughout Klüger’s oeuvre: its avowal constitutes a major rupture in weiter leben and is repeated in Still Alive, and it does not disappear with age: whereas unterwegs verloren starts with the observation “[m]it den Jahren weichen auch die Gespenster zurück” (uv, 11; with the passing of the years, the ghosts pass on as well), which is explained as a decrease in the sense of loss over the years (the idea that the older brother, had he not been murdered, would have spent his life anyway and would probably have died a natural death), such suggestions of closure are taken aback at the end of this text: “[j]e älter ich werde, desto deutlicher wird es, daß die Jugenderlebnisse nicht die geringste Absicht hatten, sich aus der Psyche zu entfernen” (uv, 235; the older I get, the clearer it becomes: my experiences as a child do not intend in the least to remove themselves from my psyche). unterwegs verloren, paradoxically, starts with the suggestion of closure and ends with the ever-gaping wound. As Lawrence Langer formulates it, “[o]ne of the paradoxes emerging from these testimonies is that, although nothing could be more final than the deaths recorded there, nothing could be less final either” (1991, 23). I have tried to demonstrate how Hilberg’s initial pathos against some of the victims, decisive though it was for his initial reception, quickly became a marginal phenomenon in his work, and that the pathos of anti-pathos, directed against the perpetrators and the bystanders has only increased throughout the years. His moral judgements are clear from his use of litotes and sarcasm; the laconic style reflects the importance of silence in the documents – the perpetrators’ as much as the victims’ – for historical reconstruction: these silences scream at us as much as they do throughout Destruction and throughout Lanzmann’s Shoah. And just as Lanzmann incessantly tries to discover how the destruction process was shaped but ultimately insists on an antirealist epistemology – claiming that the Shoah cannot be fully depicted – Hilberg’s similar quest for the how (the small questions) do not exclude a bafflement as to the why – the big questions cannot be answered with the big answers of ideological, theological or psychological interpretation. Language, Hilberg realises, shapes reality; likewise, his linguistic choices should offset the risks of his methodology of Einfühlung by emphasising, upon closer scrutiny, the self-other distinction. Yet his topic and his style have contributed to his image as an outsider: “in der Wissenschaft, innerhalb des Judentums und auch räumlich” (Schlott 2016b, 160; within academia, within Judaism, and also geographically); and Hilberg certainly continued to cultivate this persona after his broad (and now nigh universal) recognition. One rupture in Hilberg’s oeuvre constitutes his work on Adam Czerniaków’s diary. Hilberg admires Czerniaków and keeps a respectful distance. And yet a proximity is noticeable in their stylistic similarities for which there is no causal explanation: Hilberg’s sarcasm and laconic style are already present in the first

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edition of Destruction – years before working on Czerniaków’s diary. The admiration is fuelled by the discovery that Czerniaków held similar views on language and style. Moreover, the intellectual Hilberg admires the clarity and presence of mind that the intellectual Czerniaków possessed in the chaos that surrounded him in Warsaw in July 1942. Perhaps Hilberg’s admiration is found in its most condensed form when he suggests that “the farther away we are from the event itself, it seems that the diary transcends the man” (Lanzmann 1979, FV3775, 4m37s). How fitting, almost uncannily so, then, that the same observation could be made about Hilberg. However, focusing on the link between Hilberg and Czerniaków may be too narrow. It may even do injustice to Hilberg. Considering that Hilberg sees his narrative as the creation of a Gestalt out of numerous locally and temporally diverse occurrences, and considering his view that the Jews could not see the Gestalt – that they could not fathom the totality and radicality of the German determination to kill all Jews in Europe – how else can one read Destruction as an attempt at, however incompletely, restoring a Jewish perspective, at doing justice to the victims? Hilberg’s disappointment upon receiving a publication rejection by Yad Vashem reinforces the idea that Destruction offers a Jewish perspective, despite its heavy reliance on perpetrator documents: “[f]or ten years I had imagined that the Jews, and particularly the Jews, would be the readers of my work. And now this” (PoM, 111). What is clear is that the pathos of anti-pathos takes many manifestations – the eyewitness and the historian’s exercises in affective self-control (which often ruptures at some point); the wariness of big emotions and the wariness of the interlocutor are the most predominant manifestations in the corpus. Likewise, empathy takes many forms: as an ethical enterprise, which, although it upholds a self-other differentiation, may not do full justice to the victim (but then again, what can?); in its ‘dark’ form, as a method for facilitating genocide; as a tactical manoeuvre in court; as a part of the historian’s methodology. In the latter case, the pathos of anti-pathos serves as a tool for signalling one’s critical distance: empathy with the perpetrator does not mean justifying his actions, excuses or convictions. However, the risks of empathy demonstrate the risks of models of memory relying on multidirectionality and singularity: while these amount to an extending of our ‘circle of empathy’ by looking at the Shoah through the perspective of colonialism, slavery and eugenics (and vice versa), Klüger’s autobiographies raise the question whether these comparisons are not an appropriation of the others’ suffering by European victims – despite all good intentions. This is not a plea for abandoning such models of memory, as these models do have the potential to sharpen our understanding of history and perhaps even our understanding of our role within history. It means that such models, with their strong ethical implications and obligations, should be used and applied in modesty

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and in constant dialogue with the actual victims of history – as with as many of them as possible. In this sense, this book, too, has its obvious limitations. The pathos of anti-pathos is often perceived as ‘cold’ or ‘emotionless’, though this is not universally valid. I hope to have shown that such attributions are problematic because of the ambiguity and ambivalence of the metaphors, which are postulations arising from the need to communicate about emotionality but also the inherent shortcomings of nonfigurative language to do so adequately. In other words, the ‘coldness’ metaphor is culturally prevalent yet used in entirely different ways. The attribution of emotionlessness must equally be taken cum grano salis: a closer look reveals that such attributions often refer to the absence of specific emotions but not of emotionality tout court. Moreover, the attributions of emotionlessness are often contradictory in themselves – yet in turn, they constitute a considerable pathos: they can suggest a complete dehumanisation of the victim in the sense that the perpetrator is not even affected by their suffering, or it can suggest that no negative emotions such as hatred or revulsion are required to commit genocide (and hence that the pedagogy of empathy is not a tool to erase the genocidal potential of arguably any society), or it can serve to depict the perpetrator as a monstrous creature. Each of these implications is chilling, but each in its own way. Surely it is not surprising, however, that the ‘coldness’ attribution is so prevalent. There even seems to be an entire chain of coldness. Sebald’s prose is considered cold by Klüger, whose autobiography is considered cold by Herta Müller. These are not negative evaluations, and they exist alongside the perception of both oeuvres as warm. But Sebald responds to Améry (as does Klüger, albeit differently), who is considered cold by Primo Levi but who, in turn, considers the sarcasm in Jean-François Steiner’s documentary novel Treblinka (1966, transl. 1968) cold (Améry 2002, 7:410 – 411). Even beyond this chain, other Shoah texts in which the pathos of anti-pathos is a guiding principle see similar confusing metaphorical attributions. In Soazig Aaron’s Le non de Klara (2002), a fictional text depicting the readjustment of a German Jewish survivor to society in the summer of 1945, the survivor’s feelings of hatred are encoded paradoxically: “sa voix raconte posément des choses brûlantes qui se refroidissent en sortant d’elle. Elle parvient, je ne sais comment, à exprimer sa haine froidement” (Aaron 2002, 138; her voice calmly speaks of burning matters which cool down when they leave her. She manages, I don’t know how, to express her hatred coldly). And why should a perception of the pathos of anti-pathos as essentially cold or cool be surprising? If the camps were Dantesque – they certainly were framed as such in newspapers and literature (autobiographical and otherwise), and Capesius is a culmination of this tendency – then let us not forget that Dante’s vision of Inferno was not a sea of flames.

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Breaking away from Christian mediaeval imagery, Dante Alighieri described Inferno as a place dominated by ice in which even Satan is frozen up to the midwaist (Alighieri 1999, 156). Our catachrestic metaphors may have a basis, however fleeting, in the Western canon, after all. Yet as Andreas Sommer points out, global warming may lead us to re-evaluate the coolness metaphor. In the fifteen years since, there are no strong indications that such a shift has started to take place, and hence, any further comments on this matter must remain speculative. However, it is worth leaving the Wittgensteinian Familienähnlichkeiten of the corpus and moving to a truly rhizomatic association by pointing here, briefly, to Teju Cole’s novel Open City (2011), a novel that has been compared to Sebald’s prose³ – and with good reason: told by an autodiegetic narrator named Julius, the novel does not truly care for plot structure but rather recounts whom Julius, a trained psychiatrist, meets on his long walks in New York City. Julius also recounts to us the stories told by these people to him, and the reader is met with a similar account of hidden stories and repressed (colonial) traumas, which in turn seem to traumatise the people who delve into them. One example: Julius recounts how a patient of his, V., is being treated for depression. He connects this depression – at least partly – to her professional activities: V. is the successful author of a monograph on the massacres committed by European settlers against Native Americans on Long Island – the traces of which have, almost unavoidably, been erased from the landscape and (almost) from collective memory (T. Cole 2012, 26 – 27). But the account is immediately followed by a hint at contemporary pressing matters: after having bought the book, he walks to the cinema “on what, I recall, was a warm night. I had my recurrent worry about how warm it had been all season long. Although I did not enjoy the cold seasons at the most intense, I had come to agree that there was a rightness about them, that there was a natural order in such things” (T. Cole 2012, 27). In other words, this narrator does not remain stuck in the past, and while it is obvious that weather phenomena do not equal climate change, the reader cannot help but link similar experiences to an undeniable global warming. How does this relate to the historical trauma? The victims’ own words are not passed on – for obvious reasons – and the perpetrator’s discourse is described as “written in calm and pious language that presented mass murder as little more than the regrettable side effect of coloniz It comes as no surprise that it is James Wood – whose admiration for Sebald’s prose is so obvious from his reviews in the New Yorker – who confirms the link, but only after initially – and rhetorically – casting some doubt on the comparison, suggesting that it may be more of a sales pitch than a genuine observation (Wood 2011). Writing for the New York Times, Kakutani equally sees parallels to Sebald’s prose but compares Open City unfavourably to it (Kakutani 2011).

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ing the land” (T. Cole 2012, 26). This, too, does not quite amount to a coolness or coldness or even pathos of anti-pathos as discussed in this thesis. But clearly the metaphor of warmth, especially when linked to a desirable empathy, is rendered even more complex than before. It might be worth looking into literary texts dealing with warfare, refugees, and trauma caused (in part) by global warming and see which dynamics and which metaphors are invoked there. While we are discussing phenomena happening here and now, a sense of urgency grows with every election. The success of extremist and populist parties precedes, of course, the timespan during which this book has been written by several decades, but the Brexit campaign and Trump presidency highlight the renewed relevance of two issues fundamental to the memory of fascism, of the Shoah and of Europe’s and the United States’ colonial legacies: the importance of facts and referentiality and the status of emotionality in politics and in public discourse. Whereas both the Brexit campaign and Trump’s Twitter rhetoric are marked by blatant lies and other untruths, the first is largely framed as a deceitful smear campaign – only unmasked as such after the referendum, albeit very soon thereafter – while for the latter, the very rules concerning lies are thrown out the window; lies are ignominiously labelled ‘alternative facts’ and truthfulness is completely devalued: at least the liar tries to conceal his lies, and thus the liar and the political system in which he can be successful ex negativo confirm the value of truth (cf. Frankfurt 2005, esp. 60). This has caused conservative commentators to blame postmodernism and deconstructionism: with its purported abandoning of referentiality, it has supposedly forged the weapons now used by its political opponents. Such accusations are cheap shots and lack any intellectual honesty; they do not acknowledge the ethical commitments of poststructuralism, and – knowingly or unwittingly – discard and discredit intellectual resistance, critical thought and the politics of equality. Indeed, Claire Colebrook, who discards a radical rejection of referentiality and meaning, reminds us that [w]e can only read texts ironically, seeing the tensions and relations between what is said and not-said, what is and is not the case, if we commit ourselves to a sense and truth towards which speech and language strive. There cannot be, then, a simple abandoning of the structures of truth and reason or the difference of irony in favour of a postmodern world of textuality, where signs coexist without conflict, hierarchy or tension. (Colebrook 2004, 177)

This is completely in line with the ethical stance which Eaglestone has identified in postmodernism’s reaction to the Shoah and to (post)colonialism. Moreover, over the last fifteen years, Colebrook’s appeal – written at a time when “bullshitting” (cf. Frankfurt 2005) in US politics was common practice and when populist, fascistic parties had been long established in Europe – has only gained in

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urgency. And while many of the Critical Theorists would, presumably, not have been surprised to see a rise of neofascist tactics and policies in the erstwhile heartlands of liberal democracies (imperfect though these always have been, having been founded on global and local exploitation), the more liberal Hannah Arendt would, no doubt, have been truly appalled by this phenomenon. The pathos of anti-pathos is, so much should be clear by now, not neutral. The political tendencies of the authors discussed at length in this thesis are diverse. However, a common denominator is their adherence to the Enlightenment. Nor should we necessarily strive to conceive of it as such – the attacks on academia by fascist politics make it nigh impossible to remain so (cf. Stanley 2018, esp. chapter 3). Its relevance, its promises and its pitfalls, seem to have achieved a relevance that I never would have expected when I started doing my research. Yet the re-emergence of fascism – no matter which mask it puts on – with its emotional appeal and its pathos in the most pejorative sense of the term imaginable, risks to render recent discussions on pathos, which at least try to save the term, outdated. The current political developments and their threats to researchers and teachers who, directly and indirectly, promote and increase the embracing of ambivalences and the values of the Enlightenment, of democracy and equality, may send shivers down one’s spine, or they may make one’s blood boil – but how could they leave one cold?

Bibliography For the primary texts, the original year of publication has been included between brackets in the text. For online blogs and newspaper articles, the date refers to the date of publication. For all other online sources, it refers to the day on which the source was last consulted.

Primary texts The main corpus Hilberg, Raul. Documents of Destruction. Germany and Jewry 1933 – 1945. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971. Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Revised and Definitive Version. 3 vols. New York & London: Holmes & Meier, 1985. Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators Victims Bystanders. The Jewish Catastrophe 1933 – 1945. Paperback. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993 [1992]. Hilberg, Raul. Unerbetene Erinnerung. Der Weg eines Holocaust-Forschers. Translated by Hans Günter Holl. Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 1994. Hilberg, Raul. The Politics of Memory. The Journey of a Holocaust Historian. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996. Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. 3rd ed. 3 vols. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2003. Hilberg, Raul. “Eine von so vielen.” In Eine von so vielen. Das kurze Leben der Marion Samuel 1931 – 1943, by Götz Aly, translated by Bernhard Suchy. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011. 15 – 17. Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Eastford, CN: Martino Fine Books, 2019 [1961]. Klüger, Ruth. weiter leben. Eine Jugend. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992. Klüger, Ruth. weiter leben. Eine Jugend. Audiobook, 1996b. Klüger, Ruth. Landscapes of Memory. London: Bloomsbury, 2004 [2003]. Klüger, Ruth. “Ein ganz normaler Mord.” In Eine von so vielen. Das kurze Leben der Marion Samuel 1931 – 1943, by Götz Aly. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011. 11 – 14. Klüger, Ruth. Still Alive. European Classics. New York: The Feminist Press, 2012 [2001]. Klüger, Ruth. unterwegs verloren. Erinnerungen. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2016 [2008]. Schlesak, Dieter. Capesius, der Auschwitzapotheker. Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz, 2006. Schlesak, Dieter. The Druggist of Auschwitz. Translated by John Hargraves. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. London et al.: Penguin Books, 2002 [2001]. Sebald, W.G. The Emigrants. Translated by Michael Hulse. London: Vintage Books, 2002 [1996].

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Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Translated by Michael Hulse. London: Vintage Books, 2002 [1998]. Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011 [2001]. Sebald, W.G. Die Ausgewanderten. Vier lange Erzählungen. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2013 [1992]. Sebald, W.G. Die Ringe des Saturn. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2015 [1995].

Literary texts and films beyond the main corpus Aaron, Soazig. Le Non de Klara. Paris: Éditions Maurice Nadeau, 2002. Adam, Marianne, and Ella Salomon. Was wird der Morgen bringen? Zwei Jüdinnen überleben Auschwitz und finden zum Glauben an Jesus Christus. Translated by Moshe Vogel. Stuttgart: Edition Anker im Christlichen Verlagshaus, 2001 [1995]. Alighieri, Dante. La divina commedia. Edited by Fredi Chiappelli. Milan: Mursia, 1999 [1320]. Amann, Jürg. Der Kommandant. Monolog. Zurich & Hamburg: Arche, 2011. Améry, Jean. Werke. Edited by Stephan Steiner. Vol. 7. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002. Améry, Jean. Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2018 [1966]. Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow, or The Nature of the Offence. London: Vintage Books, 2003 [1991]. Amis, Martin. The Zone of Interest. London: Vintage Books, 2015 [2014]. Berner, Mauritius. Oh, mein Auserwähltes Volk! Translated by Francisc Incze. s.l.: epubli, 2016 [1947]. Borowski, Tadeusz. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Translated by Barbara Vedder. London et al.: Penguin Books, 1992 [1967]. Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972 [1946]. Camus, Albert. L’étranger. Paris: Gallimard, 2017 [1942]. Celan, Paul. Paul Celan: Die Gedichte. Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band. Edited by Barbara Wiedemann. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. Celan, Paul. Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry. Translated by Pierre Joris. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020. Cole, Teju. Open City. London: faber and faber, 2012 [2011]. Deaths Mills/Die Todesmühlen. Dir. Billy Wilder. United States Department of War, 1945. Accessed 23 March 2018. https://archive.org/details/DeathMills. De Keulenaer, Paul. Regine Beer: Mijn leven als KZ A 5148. Berchem: EPO, 2006. Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. Translated by Rosette C. Lamont. Yale University Press: New Haven & London, 1995. Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz et après I: Aucun de nous ne reviendra. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit 2016a [1965]. Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz et après II: Une connaissance inutile. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit 2016b [1970]. Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz et après III: Mesure de nos jours. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2016c [1971]. Delbo, Charlotte. Le convoi du 24 janvier. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2020 [1965].

Primary texts

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El Fotógrafo de Mauthausen. Dir. Mar Tarragona. Filmax, 2018. Friedländer, Saul. Quand vient le souvenir… Paris: Éditions Points, 2016a [1978]. Friedländer, Saul. When Memory Comes. Translated by Helen R. Lane. New York: Other Press, 2016b. Friedländer, Saul. Where Memory Leads: My Life. New York: Other Press, 2016c. Greif, Gideon. We Wept Without Tears. Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz. Translated by Naftali Greenwood et al. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005. Greif, Gideon. “Wir weinten tränenlos…” Augenzeugenberichte des jüdischen Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz. Translated by Matthias Schmidt. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2018 [1999]. Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Edited by Christian Hartmann, Thomas Vordermayer, Othman Plöckinger, and Roman Töppel. 2 vols. Munich: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 2016 [1925]. Höss, Rudolf. Kommandant in Auschwitz. Edited by Martin Broszat. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987 [1963]. Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s Ark. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2007 [1982]. Kielar, Wiesław. Anus mundi. Fünf Jahre Auschwitz. Translated by Wera Kapkajew. Frankfurt/ Main: S. Fischer, 1979 [1972]. Kluge, Alexander. Lebensläufe. Stuttgart: Henry Goverts, 1962. Kulka, Otto Dov. Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death. Reflections on Memory and Imagination. Translated by Ralph Mandel. London: Penguin Books, 2014. Lanzmann, Claude. Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, Interview with Filip Müller. Germany. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, 1979a. Accessed 22 January 2019. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1003921. Lanzmann, Claude. Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, Interview with Raul Hilberg. Burlington, Vermont. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, 1979b. Accessed 28 January 2019. https://collections.ushmm.org/ search/catalog/irn1004662. Ledig, Gert. Payback. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. London: Granta, 2003. Ledig, Gert. Vergeltung. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2004 [1956]. Lengyel, Olga. Five Chimneys. A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1995 [1947]. Levi, Primo. I sommersi e i salvati. Torino: Einaudi, 2007 [1986]. Levi, Primo. If This Is a Man/The Truce. Translated by Stuart Woolf. London: Abacus, 2013a [1959/1965]. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. London: Abacus, 2013b [1988]. Levi, Primo. Se questo è un uomo. Torino: Einaudi, 2014 [1947]. Müller, Filip. Sonderbehandlung. Drei Jahre in den Krematorien und Gaskammern von Auschwitz. Edited by Helmut Freitag. Munich: Steinhausen, 1979. Müller, Filip. Eyewitness Auschwitz. Three Years in the Gas Chambers. Translated by Susanne Flatauer. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999. Nyiszli, Miklós. Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1993 [1960]. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Edited by James A. Harrison. Vol. XVI: Marginalia-Eureka. New York: AMS Press, 1965.

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Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’enfance d’un chef. Paris: Gallimard, 2003 [1939]. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “The Childhood of a Leader.” In The Wall, translated by Andrew Brown. London: Hesperus Press, 2005. 117 – 206. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “La République du Silence.” In Situations III. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. 11 – 14. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “The Republic of Silence.” In The Aftermath of War (Situations III), translated by Chris Turner. London, New York & Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2008. 3 – 7. Schelvis, Jules. Vernichtungslager Sobibór. Translated by Gero Deckers. Berlin: Metropol, 1998. Schelvis, Jules. Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp. Edited by Bob Moore. Translated by Karin Dixon. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2007. Schelvis, Jules. Vernietigingskamp Sobibor. 12th ed. Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 2017 [1993]. Shoah. Dir. Claude Lanzmann. New Yorker Films, 1985. Sidney, Sir Philip. “The Defence of Poesy.” In Sidney’s “The Defence of Poesy” and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, edited by Gavin Alexander. London: Penguin Books, 2004 [1595]. Skopp, Douglas R. Shadows Walking. s.l.: CreateSpace, 2015 [2010]. Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus – a Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997 [1986 & 1991]. Szücs, Ladislaus. Zählappell. Als Artz im Konzentrationslager. Edited by Ernst-Jürgen Dreyer. Lebensbilder. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995. Un jour les témoins disparaîtront. Dir. Frans Buyens. Lyda Films, 1979. Venezia, Shlomo. Inside the Gas Chambers. Eight Months in the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. In collaboration with Béatrice Prasquier. Translated by Andrew Brown. Cambridge & Malden: Polity Press, 2009. Walser, Martin. Heimatkunde. Aufsätze und Reden. edition suhrkamp 269. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1968. Weiss, Peter. Die Ermittlung. Oratorium in 11 Gesängen. Mit einem Kommentar von Marita Meyer. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2005 [1965]. Weiss, Peter. The Investigation. Translated by Jon Swan and Ulu Grosbard. New York: Atheneum, 1966.

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Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition. London & New York: Verso Books, 2006. Anderson, Kjell. “Colonialism and Cold Genocide: The Case of West Papua.” Genocide Studies and Prevention 9.2 (2015): 9 – 25. Anderson, Mark. “The Edge of Darkness: On W.G. Sebald.” October 106 (2003): 103 – 121. Anderson, Mark. “Documents, Photography, Postmemory: Alexander Kluge, W. G. Sebald, and the German Family.” Poetics Today 29.1 (2008): 129 – 153. Anderson, Mark. “A Childhood in the Allgäu: Wertach: 1944 – 1952.” In Saturn’s Moons. W.G. Sebald – A Handbook, edited by Jo Catling and Richard Hibbitt. London: Maney Publishing, 2011. 16 – 41. Angier, Carole. Speak, Silence. In Search of W. G. Sebald. London et al.: Bloomsbury Circus, 2021. Anz, Thomas. “Plädoyer für eine kulturwissenschaftliche Emotionsforschung. Zur Resonanz von Daniel Golemans ‘Emotionale Intelligenz’ und aus Anlaß neuerer Bücher zum Thema ‘Gefühle.’” literaturkritik.de 1.2/3 (1999). Accessed 6 May 2019 https://literaturkritik.de/ public/rezension.php?rez_id=47. Anz, Thomas. “Emotional Turn? Beobachtungen zur Gefühlsforschung.” literaturkritik.de 8.12 (2006). Accessed 11 June 2019 http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php? rez_id=10267. Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999. Arendt, Hannah. “The Concentration Camps.” Partisan Review Issues 15.7 (1948): 743 – 763. Arendt, Hannah. “Ideologie und Terror.” In Offener Horizont. Festschrift für Karl Jaspers zum 70. Geburtstag, 229 – 54. Munich: Piper, 1953. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: The Viking Press, 1963. Arendt, Hannah. Was bleibt? Es bleibt die Muttersprache. Interview by Günter Gaus. Zur Person (ZDF, 28 October 1964). Accessed 24 November 2018. https://www.rbb-online.de/ zurperson/interview_archiv/arendt_hannah.html. Arendt, Hannah. “Nach Auschwitz.” In Nach Auschwitz. Essays & Kommentare 1, edited by Eike Geisel and Klaus Bittermann, translated by Eike Geisel, 99 – 136. Critica Diabolis 21. Berlin: Edition Tiamat, 1989. Arendt, Hannah, and Joachim Fest. Eichmann war von empörender Dummheit. Gespräche und Briefe. Edited by Ursula Ludz and Thomas Wild. Munich: Piper, 2013. Arikha, Noga. Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. Aristotle. On Rhetoric. A Theory of Civic Discourse. Edited by George A. Kennedy. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Arnold, Heinz Ludwig, and Stephan Reinhardt. “Vorbemerkung” In Dokumentarliteratur, edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Stephan Reinhardt. Munich: Richard Boorberg, 1973. 7 – 12 Assmann, Aleida. Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Gedächtniskultur? Vienna: Picus, 2012a. Assmann, Aleida. “Pathos und Passion. Über Gewalt, Trauma und den Begriff der Zeugenschaft.” In Die Zukunft der Erinnerung und der Holocaust, edited by Aleida Assmann. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2012b. 9 – 40. Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London & New York: Routledge, 2004.

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Benthien, Claudia. “Über die Grenze akustischer Mimesis. Nora Gomringers AuschwitzGedicht als audio-poetische Provokation.” In Phänomen Hörbuch. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven und medialer Wandel, edited by Stephanie Bung and Jenny Schrödl. Bielefeld: transcript, 2017. 117 – 133. Berg, Nicolas. Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker. Erforschung und Erinnerung. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003. Berg, Nicolas. “Das Innere der Dokumente – Zur Lakonie von Raul Hilberg.” In Raul Hilberg und die Holocaust-Historiographie, edited by René Schlott. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019. 161 – 182. Bernhart, Toni. “Bücher, die man hören kann, oder: Über das Fehlen editionswissenschaftlich informierter Audioeditionen.” In Phänomen Hörbuch. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven und medialer Wandel, edited by Stephanie Bung and Jenny Schrödl. Bielefeld: transcript, 2017. 59 – 67. Bernhart, Toni. “Audioeditionen”. In Handbuch Literatur & Audiokultur, edited by Natalie Binczek and Uwe Wirth. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2020. 554 – 567. Bernstein, J. M. “Mad Raccoon, Demented Quail, and the Herring Holocaust: Notes for a Reading of W. G. Sebald.” Qui Parle 17. (2006): 31 – 58. Bernstein, Michael André. Foregone Conclusions. Against Apocalyptic History. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994. Betts, Paul, and Christian Wiese. “Introduction.” In Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination. Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies, edited by Christian Wiese and Paul Betts. London & New York: Continuum, 2010. 1 – 20. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London & New York: Routledge, 1994. Bigsby, Christopher. Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust. The Chain of Memory. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Bistoen, Gregory, Stijn Vanheule, and Stef Craps. “Nachträglichkeit: A Freudian Perspective on Delayed Traumatic Reactions.” Theory & Psychology 24.5 (2014): 668 – 687. Blumenthal-Barby, Martin. “Holocaust and Herring: The Resuscitation of the Silenced in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.” Monatshefte 103.4 (2011): 537 – 588. Boehncke, Heiner. “Clair obscur. W.G. Sebalds Bilder.” In W.G. Sebald, edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold. Munich: edition text + kritik im Richard Boorberg Verlag, 2003. 43 – 62. Böll, Heinrich. “Hans im Glück im Blut.” In Edgar Hilsenrath. Das Unerzählbare erzählen, edited by Thomas Kraft. Munich: Piper, 1996. 76 – 79. Bos, Pascale R. German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust. Grete Weil, Ruth Klüger, and the Politics of Address. New York & Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Bracher, Nathan. “Faces d’histoire, Figures de violence: métaphore et métonymie chez Charlotte Delbo”. Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 102.3 (1992): 252 – 262. Bracher, Nathan. “Histoire, ironie et interprétation chez Charlotte Delbo: une écriture d’ Auschwitz”. French Forum 19.1 (1994): 81 – 93. Braese, Stephan. “‘In einer deutschen Angelegenheit’ – Der Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsliteratur.” In Gerichtstag halten über uns selbst…, edited by Irmtrud Wojak. Frankfurt & New York: Campus, 2001. 217 – 243. Braese, Stephan. “Bombenkrieg und literarische Gegenwart. Zu W.G. Sebald und Dieter Forte.” Mittelweg 36 11.1 (2002): 4 – 24.

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Ceuppens, Jan. “Transcripts: An Ethics of Representation in The Emigrants.” In W.G. Sebald. History – Memory – Trauma, edited by Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter, 2006. 251 – 263. Ceuppens, Jan. “Falsche Geschichten: Recherchen bei Sebald und Gstrein.” In Literatur im Krebsgang: Totenbeschwörung und “Memoria” in der deutschsprachigen Literatur nach 1989, edited by Arne De Winde and Anke Gilleirs. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 299 – 317. Ceuppens, Jan. Vorbildhafte Trauer. W.G. Sebalds Die Ausgewanderten und die Rhetorik der Restitution. Eggingen: Edition Isele, 2009. Ceuppens, Jan. “Die Ausgewanderten.” In W.G. Sebald Handbuch, edited by Claudia Öhlschläger and Michael Niehaus. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2017. 29 – 38. Chare, Nicholas, and Dominic Williams. Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016. Chare, Nicholas, and Dominic Williams. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando: Testimonies, Histories, Representations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Chassot, Joanne. Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity. Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2018. Cheung, Maria, Torsten Trey, David Matas, and Richard An. “Cold Genocide: Falun Gong in China.” Genocide Studies and Prevention 12.1 (2018): 38 – 62. Clendinnen, Inga. Reading the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Cohen, Robert. Understanding Peter Weiss. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Cohen, Robert. “The Political Aesthetics of Holocaust Literature. Peter Weiss’s The Investigation and Its Critics.” History and Memory 10.2 (1998): 43 – 67. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Cole, Tim. Traces of the Holocaust: Journeying in and out of the Ghettos. London & New York: Continuum, 2011. Colebrook, Claire. Irony. London & New York: Routledge, 2004. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Edited by Adam Roberts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. “Contronym.” In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Accessed 13 March 2018. https:// www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/contranym. Cosgrove, Mary. “The Anxiety of German Influence: Affiliation, Rejection, and Jewish Identity in W.G. Sebald’s Work.” In German Memory Contests. The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990, edited by Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and George Grote. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006a. 229 – 252. Cosgrove, Mary. “Melancholy Competitions: W.G. Sebald Reads Günter Grass and Wolfgang Hildesheimer.” German Life and Letters 59.2 (2006b): 217 – 232. Crownshaw, Richard. “Reconsidering Postmemory: Photography, the Archive, and PostHolocaust Memory in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” Mosaic 37. (2004): 215 – 236. Cuomo, Joseph. “A Conversation with W.G. Sebald.” In The Emergence of Memory: Conversation with W.G. Sebald, edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York et al.: Seven Stories Press, 2007. 93 – 117. Curthoys, Ned. “Evaluating Risk in Perpetrator Narratives: Resituating Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones as Historical Fiction.” In Fiction in the Age of Risk, edited by Tony Hughesd’Aeth and Golnar Nabizadeh. London & New York: Routledge, 2019. 19 – 37.

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Index Adam, Mariana 175, 222 Adler, H. G. 136, 152, 165, 311 Adorno, Theodor W. 117, 147, 167, 292 Agamben, Giorgio 78 Albert, Roland 21 f., 41, 179 f., 210, 334 Améry, Jean 63, 116, 135, 167, 170, 249 – 256, 336, 339 Amis, Martin 39 Andersch, Alfred 115, 162 – 165, 173 Arendt, Hannah 9, 17, 65, 67 f., 72, 88 f., 123, 130, 138, 147 – 151, 174, 247, 291, 308 – 311, 327, 330 f., 333, 342 Assmann, Aleida 7 f., 73, 122, 174 f., 194 Aumeier, Hans 176 Bakhtin, Mikhail 78, 80 Barthes, Roland 10 f., 196 f. Bauer, Fritz 176 Bechhöfer, Susi 132 – 134, 136, 164 f., 331 Becker, Jurek 147, 170 f., 333 Beer, Regine 269 Benjamin, Walter 7, 100 f., 117, 121, 123, 130, 135 f., 143 f., 147 – 149, 152, 234 f., 332 Berner, Mauritius 203, 208 – 210, 221 Bernhard, Thomas 115, 237 Bettelheim, Bruno 291 Bhabha, Homi 81 f. Blobel, Paul 291 Böhm, Gisela 228 Böll, Heinrich 34 f. Bomba, Abraham 76, 220, 321, 330 Borges, Jorge Luis 125 f. Bormann, Martin 57 Borowski, Tadeusz 25, 201, 203 – 206, 212, 220, 224, 335 Brandt, Rudolf 206 f. Brecht, Bertolt 213, 237 Broszat, Martin 66, 287 Browning, Christopher 290, 297 f. Butler, Judith 103 Buyens, Frans 3

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110758580-014

Camus, Albert 155 f. Capesius, Victor 21 f., 41, 145, 174, 185, 191, 194, 209 f., 212, 219, 221, 224, 226 – 228, 334 Celan, Paul 21, 198 f., 252 Césaire, Aimé 138, 147, 150 f. Chagoll, Lydia 3 Chazan, Shaul 58, 108 Clauberg, Carl 176, 206 f. Cohen, Leon 108 Czerniaków, Adam 292, 296 f., 320, 323 f., 326 – 329, 337 f. Dawidowicz, Lucy 27, 308 f., 311 de Man, Paul 94 – 97 Delbo, Charlotte 17, 102 – 105, 108, 330 Demjanjuk, John 186 Derrida, Jacques 96 Diner, Dan 17 f., 332 Döblin, Alfred 115, 119, 162 Dragon, Abraham 108 Dragon, Shlomo 108 Eck, Nathan 290 – 292 Eichmann, Adolf 15, 65 – 68, 88 f., 295, 307, 310 Eisenschmidt, Eliezer 108, 110 Elias, Norbert 285 Fanon, Frantz 83 – 86, 275 Febvre, Lucien 285, 288 Fest, Joachim 65, 308 Fichte, Hubert 168 Frank, Anne 318 f. Frank, Hans 308, 319 Frankl, Viktor 215 Franz, Kurt 179, 185 Frenzel, Kurt 58 Freud, Sigmund 18, 44, 139, 142, 264 Friedländer, Saul 17, 24, 42, 47, 61, 90, 135 f., 247 – 249, 272, 287 f., 308, 315 – 321

374

Index

Friedrich, Hans 65, 186 Fulbrook, Mary 42 Gabbai, Ya’akov 108 Galiński, Edek 197, 202 Gertner, Ala 197 Ginzburg, Carlo 95 Giordano, Ralph 142, 166, 185 Globočnik, Odilo 140, 184 Glück, Josef 219 Goebbels, Joseph 11 Goldhagen, Daniel 314 Goldstein, Maurice 3 – 5 Goldstein, Rosa 3 – 5 Gorges, Johann 67, 145 Gradowski, Zalman 216 – 218 Grass, Günter 97, 164 Greif, Gideon 67, 106, 108 f., 217, 220 Gröning, Oskar 186 f. Hartman, Geoffrey 6 – 8, 169 Heidegger, Martin 54, 207 Herman, Chaim 216, 218 Heydrich, Reinhard 295 Hilberg, Raul 15, 17, 19, 21, 23 – 25, 27, 40 – 42, 60 f., 86, 88, 99 f., 102, 140, 149, 205, 207, 233, 235, 240 f., 244, 272, 287 – 330, 332, 337 f. Hildesheimer, Wolfgang 164, 194 – 196 Hilsenrath, Edgar 21, 33 – 36, 67, 97 f. Himmler, Heinrich 58, 184, 207, 319 Hirsch, Marianne 21, 41, 122, 136, 323, 327 Hitler, Adolf 28, 57 f., 136, 140, 150, 177, 184, 188, 259, 297, 305 f., 319 Hochhuth, Rolf 12, 330 Hofmeyer, Hans 192 Horkheimer, Max 117, 147 Höss, Rudolf 37, 54, 66 f., 176, 180, 207 Huizinga, Johan 284 Ittner, Alfred

187

Jäckel, Eberhard 294 Jünger, Ernst 53 – 55, 162 f. Jurasek, Kurt 227 Kafka, Franz

115, 144 f., 147

Kaul, Friedrich Karl 179, 188 f. Keneally, Thomas 37 – 39 Kermisz, Josef 295 Kielar, Wiesław 202 f., 250 Kieta, Mieczyslaw 202 Kipphardt, Heinar 12 Klein, Fritz 227 Kluge, Alexander 20, 61, 168, 176, 206 – 208, 210 – 212, 220, 335 Klüger, Ruth 14, 19 f., 23, 25, 29, 41, 44, 60 f., 99, 103, 136, 152 f., 163, 180, 233 – 251, 253 – 283, 292, 323, 331, 333, 336 – 339 Knittel, Susanne 45 f., 139 f., 142 – 144, 146 f. Kogon, Eugen 307 Kremer, Johann 179 Kulka, Otto Dov 42, 181 – 183 Kuznetzov, Anatoly 200 LaCapra, Dominick 52, 75, 153, 286 f., 316 Lang, Berel 27, 302, 314 f. Langbein, Hermann 179, 201 Langer, Lawrence 17 f., 36, 40, 66, 123, 203, 337 Langfuss, Leyb 201, 216 – 220 Lanzmann, Claude 3, 27, 60, 76, 107, 141, 180, 219 f., 227 f., 235, 296 – 298, 316 f., 322 – 328, 337 Lappin, Elena 23, 265, 269 Laternser, Hans 183, 188 – 192, 260 Laub, Dori 15, 41, 73, 104, 122, 215 Ledig, Gert 167 – 169 Lengyel, Olga 208 f. Lethen, Helmut 53 – 57, 59, 139 Levi, Primo 14, 17, 30, 39, 59 – 64, 103 – 105, 170, 209, 214, 216, 223, 252 – 254, 307, 339 Levin, Nora 65, 308 f., 311 Lewental, Zalman 107, 216 f., 219 Liebehenschel, Arthur 176 Lifton, Robert Jay 39, 68, 89, 180, 209 – 211, 251, 260 Littell, Jonathan 12, 37 – 39, 312 Margulies, Abraham 109 Marrus, Michael 26, 297 – 300

Index

Mengele, Josef 174 Meyrink, Gustav 135 Moll, Otto 68 Müller, Filip 67 f., 106 – 108, 145, 180, 217, 219 f., 330 Müller, Herta 23, 253 f. Münch, Hans 192 Nadjary, Marcel 216 f. Nelson, Deborah 8, 88, 336 Neumann, Franz 24, 289 f. Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 9, 61, 135 Novelli, Gastone 251 Nussbaum, Felix 48 f. Nyiszli, Miklós 180 Pajor, Paul 222 Perl, Gisella 208 f. Plessner, Helmuth 54, 154 Poliakov, Léon 288 Postec, Ziva 107 Prokop, Wilhelm 22 Reichenau, Walter von 26 Reitlinger, Gerald 288 Rosenberg, Alfred 57 f. Rothberg, Michael 43 – 45, 47, 85 f., 95, 104, 147, 151, 168, 272 Rumkowski, Chaim 209 Sackar, Josef 106, 108 f. Salomon, Ella 175, 189 – 191, 222, 227 f. Sartre, Jean-Paul 84, 141 f., 261 f. Schelvis, Jules 58 Schlesak, Dieter 10, 13, 19, 21 – 23, 25, 41, 60 f., 105, 107, 113, 159, 174 f., 179, 197 – 201, 203, 205 – 210, 218 – 224, 226 – 229, 295, 334 f. Schneider, Gertrude 323 f. Scholem, Gershom 100 – 102, 316 Schumann, Horst 206 – 208 Sebald, W.G. 10, 19 – 23, 25, 40 f., 43 f., 47, 96, 105, 113 – 123, 126 – 139, 143 – 154, 157 – 160, 162 – 172, 175, 224, 238, 240 f., 251, 253 f., 273, 275, 295, 331 – 334, 339 f.

375

Seyss-Inquart, Arthur 295 Sikorski, Jan 223 f. Silberberg, Ya’akov 106, 108, 110 Skopp, Douglas 38 f. Spiegelman, Art 77 Spitzer, Leo 21, 327 Srebnik, Simon 324 Stangl, Franz 177 Stark, Hans 145 Staron, Stanislaw 295 f. Steinacker, Fritz 189 Sternheim, Carl 115, 119, 162 Streicher, Julius 11 Szabo, Magda 222 Szücs, Ladislaus 58 – 60, 78, 80 – 82, 182, 199 – 201, 208 Theweleit, Klaus 54 Thomas, D.M. 200, 203 Torberg, Friedrich 33 – 36 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 24, 291 Trilling, Lionel 14 Venezia, Shlomo 106, 108 f. Voss, Peter 68, 145 Walser, Martin 173 f., 178 f., 183 – 185, 241, 246 – 248, 277, 279 Weiss, Peter 11 f., 38, 61, 117, 119, 173 f., 179, 185, 212 – 214, 237, 330, 335 White, Hayden 24, 27 f., 59, 61 f., 87, 95 f., 98 f., 102 Wiesel, Elie 27 Wieviorka, Annette 15, 73, 194 Wilder, Billy 150 Wilkomirski, Binjamin 14 Wirth, Christian 140, 185 Wirths, Eduard 208 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 19, 135 Wolken, Otto 222 f. Young, James 6, 8 f., 11 f., 16, 25 f., 29, 36, 45, 61, 334 Zielinski, Regina 108 Zimetbaum, Mala 197, 202