Erinnerte Shoah - Die Literatur der Überlebenden/The Shoah Remembered - Literature of the Survivors
International Colloquium
(May 27 - 31, 2000)
Conference program
In 2003, the contributions to the colloquium were published in the series "Lesecher... Judentum in Mitteleuropa" by Thelem Verlag in Dresden.
A review of the volume appeared on haGalil.
Organizer:
Cultural Studies Center for Central Europe at the TU Dresden
in cooperation with
HATiKVA - Educational and Meeting Center for Jewish History and Culture in Saxony e.V. and the
Cultural Office of the City of Dresden
Director:
Prof. Dr. Walter Schmitz
Organization:
Annette Teufel
Funding:
Supported by
the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation
Deutsche Lufthansa AG
the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft
the Saxon State Ministry for Science and the Arts
the Society of Friends and Sponsors of TU Dresden
the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Dresdner Bank and
Karat Digital Press, Radebeul
Press coverage:
Sächsische Zeitung, June 3-4, 2000
The lessons of the cold
"Remembering the Shoah": Authors and academics read and discussed in Dresden
By Gregor Kunz
Writers should not be confused with their work. Ruth Bondy said this before she began reading from her autobiography "Mehr Glück als Verstand". She spoke about her understanding of literature: "What you want to say is written in black and white and there are no perfect biographies. And: The thickest book is the one that is not said...
Every book is an artifact and a selection, it is said, and what can be said is there. Ruth Bondy explores the how of survival and the why, and the questions that follow. "How did you stay alive in the hell of the Shoah, what kept you alive?" Growing up in a Jewish family in Prague, Ruth Bondy was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto at the age of 19, three years later, in 1943, to the Auschwitz-Birkenau "family camp", and in 1944 to Bergen-Belsen.
To survive, she says, you needed an iron will, a talisman, a miracle. But almost everyone else had the will, the talisman and the hope for a miracle...
"First and foremost, age decided your fate in the camp. Children and old people hardly stood a chance. Then chance. Then profession. Presence of mind, physical and mental condition. Where someone stood at roll call and which work detachment they were assigned to... But chance has lost none of its power," says Ruth Bondy. She learned to talk about Theresienstadt and Birkenau without her voice failing her: "But not in the first person..."
It took her twenty years. She describes her concern as "To wrest from the fog of six million individual figures, people of flesh and blood", her limits are marked by a large sentence: "I cannot take any lessons from the death of the millions of murdered children". Ruth Bondy has lived in Israel since 1948.
Aharon Appelfeld spoke of his universities, of the suppressed memories of a generation, of writing about human things. Wonderful schools, he says: I was in the forest, in the ghetto, in the camp, with criminals.... It is a fool answer? "My childhood was in Czernowitz and ended in 1940, when the Germans invaded. My mother was murdered... I was nine then." He was sent to the ghetto and then to a camp, from which he managed to escape, survived in the Ukrainian forests and with prostitutes, beggars, criminals... "The outsiders were good, the normal people, the middle class were bad to me."
In 1944 he joined the Red Army and made his way to Palestine via Yugoslavia and Italy... His book "Der eiserne Pfad", now available in German, is the story of a 40-year, obsessive journey, about empty train carriages and served coffee, the loathing of thermos flasks and loudspeaker music, about fear of life and the insect-like existence of small civil servants, about avoiding big cities and small villages... "If I didn't have to work, I would never leave the trains... Nothing beats love on the train... If it weren't for tiredness and certain women, I wouldn't leave the stations. I've learned to love them too..."
The starting point is a non-place where the SS left the wagons with the deportees in 1945. The literature of the remembered Shoah - in a broader sense: the camps and extermination - is the literature of a minority of survivors: Primo Levi, Fred Wander, Jurek Becker, Jorge Semprun, Aharon Appelfeld, Ruth Bondy, Sara Kofmann. Primo Levi called the survivors a privileged group who saw through the system, their literature the detached observations of a minority. Those who reached the lowest point died or lost the ability to observe.
How to deal with the "behavioral teachings of the cold" (Claudia Albert, Berlin), the how and why of language, chronicle and interpretation were the subjects of discussion, lectures and readings during the four-day colloquium of the Central Europe Center at TU Dresden and the HATiKVA Educational and Meeting Center for Jewish History and Culture in Saxony. Keep writing and keep writing. This Auschwitz is a world experience, says Imre Kertész. It has changed the life of mankind. The Shoah is a central question of European civilization. Only by continuing to write, by understanding this Auschwitz as a continuous world experience, can the testimony endure.
Sächsische Zeitung, May 30, 2000
Torture and death, music and theater
The colloquium "Remembering the Shoah - the literature of the survivors" began in Dresden
By Wolfgang David
Studies on the Nazi mass murder of the Jews are booming. It is easy to lose sight of the dwindling number of people for whom the subject of research was a lived life. It is already difficult to track down their testimonies among all the secondary literature. If no countermeasures are taken, the day is not far off when the Holocaust will be approached as detachedly as the Napoleonic Wars are today.
Three dozen academics and authors from Europe, the USA and Israel have come together at TU Dresden to help ensure that those affected have a say in interpreting what they suffered: Representatives of several disciplines, as the initiator, Professor Walter Schmitz, emphasizes. This is not as self-evident as one might think, since literary studies are primarily pursued within the framework of a national philology.
The concentration camp as a performance venue for jazz and Schönberg
Other disciplines are also working on the subject. The musicologist Milan Kuna, for example, confronts us with the idea that it takes some getting used to that in the camps not only people were killed and tortured, but also made music, composed and performed, often with the connivance of the authorities. In Dachau, "Cyrano de Bergerac" was performed; in Sachsenhausen, a music group of Czech students gave themselves the macabre name "Sing-Sing-Boys". Jazz was played in some concentration camps as well as - unthinkable "outside" - Mendelssohn Bartholdy or Schönberg. The reasoning behind this is clear: the machinery of extermination would not be harmed if the prisoners distracted themselves a little; on the contrary. In turn, they would strengthen their threatened will to live. Nevertheless, it takes your breath away.
The horror does not need to be conjured up, it is always present in its projections. For example, when the American McGlothlin describes how the Austrian Jew Jean Amery experienced exile. Torn from the environment that shaped him, he even begins to hate his mother tongue. Never again, he knows, will there be a home for him. Things are different for the Israeli author Ruth Bondy, who, as a survivor of three camps, even at 77 cannot stop looking for an explanation for her rescue (this obsession is echoed in the title of her brilliant memoir "More Happiness than Understanding"). She knows that the usual rules did not apply "there", that neither cleverness nor robustness offered the slightest protection. In the camp, chance decided over death or life - only he did. She knows this and still can't bear the thought today.