Kluger, Still Alive

Lecture One

 

Johann Strauss: The Blue Danube Waltz

 

I. Vienna: 

 

City of Music, Art, Literature, Pastry, and Psychoanalysis

Capital of Austria

 

Map

 

http://www.mygeo.info/karten/austria.gif

 

City of Culture

 

http://www.burtonholmes.org/business/ViennaCourtOpera1902.jpg

 

http://www.austria-trips.com/Vienna/vienna.jpg

(museum of fine arts)

 

Vienna boys choir

http://boyamazon.com/images/austrin_folk_song.jpg

 

 

Spanish riding school

http://www.austriatravel.co.uk/images/components/cityextras/the-spanish-riding-school-of-vienna-1.jpg

 

larger

http://www.j-archive.com/media/2007-02-22_DJ_06a.jpg

 

The oldest university in the German-speaking world: founded 1365—exactly 600 years before UCI.

 

http://cache.viewimages.com/xc/3142011.jpg?v=1&c=ViewImages&k=2&d=34F6DC9BDA297B9EBA6D6A13480D87BEA55A1E4F32AD3138

 

 

Prater Park with the Riesenrad

 

http://www.hotelstadthalle.at/images/sideimgs/big/wiener_prater_0.jpg

 

Sacher Torte

 

http://www.simonho.org/images/Austria/Vienna_SacherTorte.jpg

 

profile:

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/Sachertorte_DSC03027.JPG/800px-Sachertorte_DSC03027.JPG

 

 

Freud: http://neft.dk/freud.jpg

 

March 12, 1938  Anschluss

 

Hermann Göring: “unbelievable jubilation in Austria

 

 

Kluger was 6; now in her 70’s

http://www.library.villanova.edu/blueprints/nov02gifs/kluger1a.jpg

 

 

Still Alive (2001) is a translation, updating, and adaptation of  weiter leben: Eine Jugend (1992) “living on/continuing to live: the story of my youth” 

 

 

 

Kluger was EAP director in the town of Göttingen, Germany 1988-1990

 

http://eap.ucop.edu/eap/country/germany/Summary/gottingen-immersion.htm

 

 

The Accident 1988

 

Translation into Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Japanese

German/European literary prizes: Heinrich Heine Prize, Thomas Mann Prize, Grimmelshausen Prize, Roswitha Prize, Marie-Luise-Kaschnitz Prize, Lessing Prize, Goethe Medaille (all named for famous German writers); Rauriser Literature Prize, State of Lower Saxony Prize, Author of the Year (Magazin Buchkultur), Prix Memoire de la Shoah.....

 

 

 

II. Doing: The Autobiography

 

 

What Kluger did:  wrote an autobiography

 

 

autos, 'self', bios, 'life' and graphein, 'write',

Truth ( not as in ‘the true story of...’)

 

 

Gandhi’s autobiography:  The Story of My Experiments with Truth

2 vols. I (1927)  II (1929)     Kluger born in 1931

 

Gandhi’s definition of Truth:

 

“This truth is not only truthfulness in word, but truthfulness in thought also, and not only the relative truth of our conception, the the Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle that is God.” 

 

Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Trnsl. Mahadev Desai. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957, xxvii.

 

Gandhi wrote as a famous, politically effective individual who offered his life as a model for others, expressing hope that “many other experimenters will find in them [his experiences] provision for their onward march.” (xxvii) march to Truth

 

Kluger’s truth is relentless honesty about historical and personal events that have been glossed over or sentimentalized.

 

“what it was like.”

 

 

One thing she does is attempt to bridge the gap between herself and her readers:

 

(93) “But if there is no bridge between my memories and yours and theirs, if we can never say ‘our memories,’ then what’s the good of writing any of this?”

 

Thesis: One thing the book is does is to make Kluger’s experience intelligible to those who handle her as a representative of the remote past, the Holocaust, human suffering, the war. She is in many ways integrating the victim into the public conversation.

 

First line: Their secret was death, not sex.

 

Posits a similarity with the reader, with all kids.

 

 

 

III. History of the Book.

 

 

German version of 1992: weiter leben: Eine Jugend (dedicated to German friends in Göttingen)

 

English version of 2001: Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (dedicated to Hirschel)

 

Reception was very different. 

 

European reviewers praised her telling of her story “without pathos”

 

American reviews were more ambivalent.

 

The Washington Post critic, Jonathan Yardley, called it “stunning” and “a genuinely astonishing piece of work” and writes:

 

What an amazing book it is.  The literature of the Holocaust is vast and ever-growing, some of it of an uncommonly high order, but Still Alive moves at once to the forefront. The story it tells is by now numbingly familiar—a child is wrested out of innocence into horror, adapts and copes, miraculously survives and somehow grows into a full, productive adulthood—but the voice that tells it is new and original. Herself “more hard-boiled than I want others to be,” Kluger doggedly resists self-deception, self-congratulation and sentimentality. By nature and upbringing “antiauthoritarian, skeptical, and inclined to question and contradict,” she views the Holocaust and her own path through it with a clinical clarity that at times takes the breath away.

 

The Washington Post, December 9, 2001

 

 

But this honesty was also Incendiary Rhetoric

 

.

 

Gabriele Annan wrote in the NY Review of Books:

[Kluger] resents all views on the Holocaust that do not tally exactly with her own, and gets indignant about everyone who criticizes her....

And of course, nobody could expect to get it completely right unless they too had survived the Holocaust. That makes it difficult to judge her book. It holds one's attention by the very nature of her story, and the story could hardly be better told, in a forceful, colloquial style. All the same, Primo Levi told a similar story without making one feel so hectored.

New York Review of Books, November 7, 2002

 

A secondary source [the two reviews are primary sources in this discussion]:

 

Linda Schulte-Sasse, “’Living on’ in the American Press: Ruth Kluger’s Still Alive and Its Challenge to a Cherished Holocaust Paradigm,” German Studies Review XXVII.3 (October, 2004) 469-75.

 

Where there are many scholarly articles and a few books on the autobiography itself, Schulte-Sasse addresses the American reception of Kluger’s book and she finds that readers and reviewers are often disturbed at its lack of resemblance to the standard Holocaust story as we know it from film, television, and numerous fictional and non-fictional accounts.

 

“We have been conditioned to expect our Holocaust journey through books, movies, memorials, or museums to be ‘useful, edifying and soul-enlarging’ (Lipton), to offer a curious reward for the vicarious pain to which we subject ourselves. In Kluger we have a guide who not only deprives us of such solace, but catches us feeling smug when we pity, finding defenses against phenomena we purport to ‘confront,’ loving ourselves when we hate the Nazis.” (470)

 

[Lipton is Eunice Lipton, who reviewed the book in The Women’s Review of Books issue of April 4, 2002.]

 

 

p.52.  [reflection on incendiary rhetoric]

 

 

p.65.

 

 

Remember the conclusion of Antigone?  The chorus expressed the wish that all of the suffering would ultimately have a positive effect:

 

The mighty words of the proud are paid in full

with mighty blows of fate, and at long last

those blows will teach us wisdom.

 

 

But Kluger writes that Auschwitz was no instructional institution—