Ch. 8: Voices from an “Extinct Species”: Narrative Responses to Trauma in German Jewish Memoirs
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Description
This chapter appears in the book, Contested Selves: Life Writing and German Culture. Edited by Katja Herges and Elisabeth Krimmer.
Chapter abstract: THE GERMAN JEWISH WOMEN who spent many of their later years writing memoirs about their lives during and after the rise and fall of Nazi Germany seldom expected to publish their work. They wrote for their children and grandchildren and for the generations to come, but mostly they wrote for themselves, in order to work through their traumatic pasts, to make sense of their choices, and to confront their losses and regrets from a temporal and geographical distance. Hundreds of these personal statements now lie in archives, silent like their authors. This essay seeks to amplify the voices of these women because they tell an important story both individually and collectively. Amplification implies, primarily, a psychological, literary, and theoretical understanding. I choose a descriptive stance rather than a tribute to the memoirists’ loss. The memoirists were witnesses to personal and collective trauma in 1930s and 1940s Germany; as literature, however, their memoirs demonstrate the ways that life writing acts as a response to trauma: that is, as a reconstitution of the self and as a form of pursuing and attaining moral meaning and cultural purpose.
ISBN
9781640141056
Publication Date
2021
Publisher
Boydell & Brewer
City
Martlesham (UK)
Keywords
Collective trauma, Nazi Germany, Women, Memoirs, Jewish
Disciplines
Holocaust and Genocide Studies | Women's History
Recommended Citation
Hansen-Glucklich, Jennifer, "Ch. 8: Voices from an “Extinct Species”: Narrative Responses to Trauma in German Jewish Memoirs" (2021). Modern Languages & Literatures Books. 9.
https://scholar.umw.edu/modernlanguages_books/9