A refusal to mourn
Theo Richmond
LANDSCAPES OF MEMORY: A HOLOCAUST GIRLHOOD REMEMBERED by Ruth Kluger
Bloomsbury, ,C12.99, pp. 272, ISBN 0747560056
Ruth Kluger was six when Hitler marched into Vienna and shattered the foundations of her settled, Jewish middle-class family life. At the age of 11 she was deported to Theresienstadt. Eighteen months later she and her mother staggered out of a fetid railway wagon at the gates of Auschwitz. Her memoir stands out from the main body of Holocaust survivor literature, not least because of its author's refusal to draw her sense of identity from victimhood, her heretical questioning of certain Holocaust shibboleths, her avoidance of generalisation in favour of personal uniqueness, and her loathing of sentimentality. Bringing a muscular approach to a subject sometimes played for tears, she resists the pitying suggestion that the camps deprived her of a childhood. This was her childhood, she insists, as much a childhood as anyone else's even if she wishes hers had been different. She recalls it forcefully without exploiting gruesome detail, in contrast to the published fantasies of the soi-disant child survivor and non-Jewish Holocaust impostor Bruno Grosjean, alias Binjamin Wilkomirski. She gives a gripping account of her unpremeditated dash for freedom, escaping with her mother from a death march in the winter of 1945, then passing as Germans until the Russians came. Equally absorbing is the viewpoint of Ruth Kluger approaching 70, recalling not only her girlhood years but her subsequent decades in America, where she married, divorced and made her career in academia.
Hers is the sophisticated Weltanschauung of a prickly, difficult and, by her own admission, 'hard-boiled' nonconformist who won't register with Holocaust archives as a survivor, who doesn't feel obliged to venerate the dead millions as 'martyrs and saints'. She deplores concentration camp tourism, castigates the 'worldwide museum culture of the Shoah', and has no wish to see the places of her own incarceration preserved for posterity. Rightly disapproving of institutional efforts to elicit a 'phony demonstration of appropriate emotions', she risks trampling on the feelings of those who visit these places of death out of genuine grief rather than, as she suggests, 'for the satisfaction of our own necrophilic desires'.
The loss of her father, half-brother and other relatives in the Shoah continues to haunt her, and she admits to a love-hate relationship with the nation that killed them, and the German language, of which she became a distinguished professor at Princeton. She describes warm but touchy relations with non-Jewish friends in Germany, where she has taught. Her ambivalence must have fascinated German readers who bought 200,000 copies of her book when it appeared 11 years ago_ The present edition, which she has written in English, is a reworking of the text, a parallel volume rather than a translation.
Kluger published her memoir — recipient of eight literary prizes — first in Germany because she wanted to keep it from her aged mother, whom she portrays as manipulative, selfishly possessive, given to petty cruelties towards her child, impossible to live with, and paranoid, clinically so towards the end of her long life. The author's awareness of her own failings counterbalances the recriminations. Love and admiration are to be found in these pages too, lending the book a wrenching pain. Over-familiar feminist resentments aside, KJuger writes with intellectual vigour and verbal flair, giving us her thoughts on survival as a happy or not-sohappy ending, on freedom of choice, friendship, facing danger, human evil and, lying at the very heart of this book, the subject of memory, its power and its dilemmas — for her. like 'riding a see-saw'.
Aware that tirelessly repeated memories stand in the way of the future, she cannot resist the urge to explore the past, hoping that in the process she will discover herself.
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