German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust: Grete Weil, Ruth Klüger, and the Politics of Address (Studies in European Culture and History)

Combining cultural history and literary analysis, this study proposes a new reading of the changing relationship between Germans and Jews following the Holocaust. Two Holocaust survivors whose work became uniquely successful in the Germany of the 1980s and 1990s, Grete Weil and Ruth Klüger, emerge as major contributors to a postwar German discussion about the Nazi legacy that had largely excluded living Jews. By tracing the decades-long waxing and waning of the German public's interest in German-Jewish literature, and the particular cultural-political impact that Weil's and Klüger's works had on their German audience, it investigates the paradox of Germany's confrontation of the Holocaust without necessarily confronting the Jews as Germans.