Anders lesen: Juden und Frauen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts

by Ruth Klüger

Vielfältigkeit des Denkens und Schreibens der Autorin von "weiter leben".

Diese Auswahl literaturwissenschaftlicher Essays von Ruth Klüger versammelt eine Reihe von unveröffentlichten oder an abgelegener Stelle publizierten Texten, Essays und Vorträgen. Im Zentrum steht die Deutung jüdischer Autoren wie auch jüdischer Figuren in literarischen Texten. In Untersuchungen zu Heinrich Heine, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Stefan Zweig werden präzise Textanalysen mit einer historischen Kontextualisierung verbunden. Auf epische Texte von Wilhelm Raabe, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach und Herta Müller fällt aus dieser Perspektive neues Licht, ergänzt durch Essays und Vorträge zu Autorinnen des 20. Jahrhunderts, u. a. zu Anna Seghers, MarieLuise Fleißer, Grete Weil, Marie Luise Kaschnitz und Ingeborg Bachmann.
Grundlegend ist Klügers Essay "Dichten über die Shoa. Zum Problem des literarischen Umgangs mit dem Massenmord" (1992).

291 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 26, 2023

About the author

Ruth Klüger is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of California, Irvine and a Holocaust survivor. She is also the author of the bestseller weiter leben: Eine Jugend about her childhood in the Third Reich.

When she was only six years old, Hitler marched into Vienna. The annexation of Austria to the Third Reich deeply affected Klüger's life: Klüger, who then was only six years old, had to change schools frequently and grew up in an increasingly hostile and antisemitic environment. Her father, who was a Jewish gynaecologist, lost his practitioner's license and was later sent to prison for performing an illegal abortion.

After the Nazi annexation of Austria, she was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp together with her mother at the age of 11; her father had tried to flee abroad, but was detained and killed. One year later she was transferred to Auschwitz, then to Christianstadt, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen.

Following the end of World War II in 1945 she settled in the Bavarian town of Straubing and later studied philosophy and history at the Philosophisch-theologische Hochschule in Regensburg.

In 1947 she emigrated to the United States and studied English literature in New York and German literature at Berkeley. Klüger obtained an M.A. in 1952, and later a Ph.D. in 1967. She worked as a college professor of German literature in Cleveland, Ohio, Kansas, and Virginia, and at Princeton and UC Irvine.

Klüger is a recognized authority on German literature, and especially on Lessing and Kleist. She lives in Irvine, California and in Göttingen.