Literature

Holocaust Literature

Initial Responses

Authors who first wrote about the Holocaust were almost always victims of National Socialist persecution. Their texts usually took the form of diaries or letters. When they were written, the authors very rarely intended them to be published. Often, they appeared in published form after the end of the Second World War and, in many cases, after the writer had been killed in a Nazi camp or ghetto.

Diaries

Diaries offer us an insight into day-to-day life during the war, during occupation, while in hiding, during imprisonment in ghettos, and during imprisonment in concentration camps. Entries may stop suddenly. The break could mark the arrest, imprisonment, or even death of the writer.

Poetry

Poems use language and grammar creatively. Writers employ poetic techniques such as rhyme or alliteration to draw attention to certain ideas, words, or emotions. There is no fixed way to write a poem: length, rhyme scheme, rhythm, and use of imagery vary from poem to poem. Because of the stylistic use of language, some have questioned whether poetry is a suitable form for writing about the Holocaust.

Postwar Literature

Between 1945 and the end of the 1960s, literary treatments of the Holocaust were dominated by the writings of survivors. The works of first-generation authors represent the difficulties they faced when trying to comprehend the enormity of what they had experienced. Yet their works have more differences than similarities: every survivor’s experience was unique. These texts often cross literary boundaries: they are neither purely autobiographical nor are they entirely fictional.

Second Generation Literature

The children of Holocaust survivors struggled to understand their parents’ trauma, but at the same time were affected by it. Second-generation literature often reflects this sense of inherited trauma. Marianne Hirsch calls this “postmemory”. Second-generation authors push out the boundaries of literature by combining different literary forms or subverting genre expectations.

New Engagements

Since the 1980s, new ways of writing about the Holocaust have emerged. Authors with no personal connection to the Holocaust now write first-person narratives about life in concentration camps. There are books aimed specifically at children. There are also now novels about the Holocaust told from the perspective of the perpetrators, such as Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones (first published in French in 2006). This novel is narrated by an SS officer involved in carrying out the Holocaust.

Fabricating Memory

There has been relatively little controversy about who can write about the Holocaust. There is one exception: when authors pretend to have a personal link but in fact have none. The Belgian writer Misha Defonseca claimed in Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years (1997) that she had survived the Holocaust as a young girl. It subsequently transpired that she was neither Jewish nor incarcerated during the war. There are a number of similar examples. (1)