Speaking Past: Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben Eine Jugend

By Leonie Ettinger

Alpine Fellowship 2020 – Academic Writing Prize Winner

At almost 60 years old, in a hospital bed in Göttingen, Germany, Germanist and Auschwitz survivor Ruth Klüger began to draft her memoir weiter leben Eine Jugend. A street accident in which she was hit by a young biker had immobilized her for weeks and left her under medical supervision for a brain hemorrhage. Coming once again in such close proximity with death gave her the impetus, the inner I must, to re-enter the dark corners of her Holocaust youth. With the smell of death in her nose and the taste of something long discarded in her mouth, as she herself describes it, Klüger sets to writing (weiter leben 414). 

Subdivided into a five-part plot structure, the memoir takes the reader through the major stages in Klüger’s life: childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna, deportations into concentration camps, and post-war experiences in Bavaria and New York. The final section consists of an epilogue in which Klüger explains the conditions that led to her belated retrospection. While the chapter distribution provides the semblance of a chronological and coherent storyline, Klüger’s narration displays the fragmentariness typical for traumatic memory. In addition to performing temporal jumps throughout and switching between narrated and narrative time, Klüger interweaves poetry, to a large extent her own lyric writing, essayistic analyses as anachronistic commentary, and dialogues directed both at characters in the book and the readership. 

After a brief examination of how weiter leben and weiter schreiben are tightly connected for Klüger, my paper will consist of two parts. Informed by Sigmund Freud and Cathy Caruth, the first chapter traces how Klüger’s memoir represents life with and after her Holocaust trauma. In a second chapter, I examine how the infliction of such a trauma must necessarily remain unforgivable, based on Jacques Derrida’s theorizations of forgiveness. Paradoxically, Derrida argues, only unforgivable crimes like the Holocaust call for genuine forgiveness. This apparent dead end, however, is a new potential, he explains, a perpetual task that encourages us to rethink what genuine forgiveness could actually mean. I argue that the experimental form of Klüger’s memoir approaches this aporia by addressing her German readership directly and imploring them to continue working through the past, instead of rejecting the burden. Unable to grant forgiveness presently, the dialogic and provocative approach of Klüger’s memoir, which continues to speak to readers as long as the book is read, gestures toward an ongoing search on how to forgive the unforgivable.

To begin with, I would like to draw attention to the book’s title: “weiter leben,” set in lowercase, turns out to be a notoriously difficult expression to translate. Lore Segal’s choice, “Still Alive” (although it was sanctioned by Klüger herself) does not seem to capture the nuance of the German, which distinguishes itself from überleben and yet remains dependent on it. In order to weiter leben––“live on” is the translation I would suggest––one needs to survive. Samuel Weber notes that the prefix über- connotes a static vertical overcoming, while the prefix fort-, which in this context can be read as synonymous with weiter, connotes a horizontal movement, simultaneously continuing and moving forth. From this follows that someone lives on by moving away from their former being (Weber 637).

The subtitle “Eine Jugend” is set in upper case and connected to the main title without punctuation. As is even more evident on the title page inside the book, “Eine Jugend” is placed where the genre classification would commonly be expected, indicating that the work’s experimental form distinguishes itself from traditional memoirs or autobiographies. By highlighting a period in the author’s life, especially one that she was unable to experience fully, the subtitle enters into a dialectic relationship with the main title, for Klüger has both lived on (weitergelebt) after her interrupted youth and yet continues to carry it along like an uncompleted task. The use of the indefinite article “eine,” rather than the possessive “meine,” reveals how Klüger brings herself into relation with a collective and takes on the task of providing a voice for those other youths who did not live to tell their own stories.

At the same time, Klüger vehemently rejects being associated with those that perished in the Holocaust out of the conviction that a focus on survivors falsely attenuates the actual extent of the catastrophe. “Wer schreibt, lebt,” she anticipates such possible reader responses (weiter leben 210). This is her major criticism of most Holocaust memoirs, as she writes in an essay titled “Dichten über die Shoah”: “...es bleibt ein unvermeidlicher Nachteil dieser Erlebnisbücher, daß die Identifikationsfigur, also der Icherzähler, mit dem Leben davonkommt, während diese Bücher eigentlich geschrieben wurden, um von denen zu erzählen, die nicht überlebt haben.” (210) This observation, which Klüger also lays out in her memoir, produces a predicament for Holocaust writing that can only be approached (if never resolved) through a narrative form that places the survivor in a mediating position, one that may bridge the gap between those that perished and those that live in the afterworld. Although the survivor shares the same post-Holocaust world, “das andere Ufer” as Klüger says, they carry “etwas Mitgeschlepptes” that distinguishes them (212). As Michael Rothberg notes in this context, “She who writes lives—but she lives an other life” (137).  

Klüger already recognized as a teenager in Auschwitz that the singular, indeed monstrous nature of her experience would require testimony one day. In her memoir, she relays her stubborn decision not to let the Nazis kill her because she had a story to tell: “Ich würde hier nicht umkommen, ich bestimmt nicht” (weiter leben 175). Her urge to share her experiences with the afterworld––“Ich erlebte etwas, wovon Zeugnis abzulegen sich lohnen würde” (174)––reveals that weiter leben and weiter schreiben, to go on living and writing are tightly connected for Klüger. While in Auschwitz, her memorized poems and personal compositions helped her withstand the arduous and lengthy role calls, distracting her from thirst and exhaustion. As an adult, she writes the memoir weiter leben, which strengthened her will to survive the war and functions as a relic, a witness to the horrors that has the potential to live on.

Due to a lack of listeners immediately following the war, it took her until the late 1980s to compile her recollections in an experimental form that displays both the haunting nature of traumatic memory and a defiant address to post-war Germans.

Traumatic Memory

While Klüger survived Auschwitz, the tension in her life is constituted by a struggle to live on, to leave the youth behind that was harshly severed from its idyllic bourgeois home and violently thrown onto the cold concentration camp floors. As Caruth notes, “it is not only the moment of the [traumatic] event, but of the passing out of it that is traumatic; that survival itself, in other words, can be a crisis” (“Trauma and Experience” 9, emphasis in original). For trauma survivor Klüger, living on thus turns into a perpetual quest to move away from her former self that intrusively catches up to her.

This drive to move away imposes itself on Klüger’s choices in life. She repeatedly explains how she is always fleeing, never holding on to the same apartment or job for a long time (weiter leben 398): “Flucht war das Schönste, damals und immer noch” (12). She even reports a repetitive dream in which she is the perpetrator of a hit-and-run accident (399). While this nightly visitation epitomizes her escape from the concentration camp by transposing it onto a common peacetime occurrence, it also contains the secret wish to be able to escape from a guilt, which haunts her: having escaped and survived while others perished. In reality, however, she is incapable of moving away from her past: “Wien ist die Stadt, aus der mir die Flucht nicht gelang” (26). The city in which she was forbidden to move freely after the Nazi occupation, the city that she loved but that hatefully rejected her, haunts her as the place of an interrupted childhood. As noted in Hegel’s Encyclopedia of Logic, “Der Fliehende aber ist noch nicht frei, denn er ist im Fliehen noch durch dasjenige bedingt, wovon er flieht” (200).

Klüger’s repetitive urge invokes Freud’s concept of the “compulsion to repeat,” that is, the tendency to recreate a traumatic event at a later time. Freud ascribes this compulsion to the “unconscious repressed,” thereby situating the painful experience in an area of the mind that the subject cannot consciously access (20). Although the traumatic event was physically experienced, it is never mentally processed and thus denies itself to voluntary mnemonic retrieval (“Recapturing the Past” 152). Yet its impact lasts for the remainder of the victims’ lives, entombed in their bodies, which emerge as sites of forgotten memories. As Klüger herself notes, “Folter verläßt den Gefolterten nicht, niemals, das ganze Leben lang nicht” (weiter leben 14). Unsuspectingly, traumatic events return to haunt their victims belatedly through reenactments, flashbacks, or behavioral patterns. They reimpose themselves, unexpectedly, against the will, and outside of all control. Klüger’s compulsive and ongoing flights from various circumstances in her life signal such an unconscious repetition. The failure to see the peril of the Holocaust in time and leave Vienna while escape was still possible emerges as the incorrigible mistake that Klüger vainly strives to amend throughout her whole life.

Caruth points out that the temporal delay between the traumatic impact and its return allows the trauma only to become available to consciousness when it imposes itself again (Unclaimed Experience 4). It is thus only through its return that the inaccessible experience can possibly be known, if never entirely. Psychiatrists Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart explain that reactivation predominantly occurs when a person is confronted with a situation or somatic state reminiscent of the original experience (174). Klüger’s collision with a biker (ironically on the Jüdenstraße in Göttingen) that prompted the writing of her memoir can be read as such a trigger, and I would like to look at her description of the moment of impact:

“Seine Fahrradampel, ich war stehengeblieben, um ihn ausweichen zu lassen, er versucht aber gar nicht, um mich herumzukommen, er kommt gerade auf mich zu, schwenkt nicht, macht keinen Bogen [...] ich meine, er verfolgt mich, will mich niederfahren, helle Verzweiflung, Licht im Dunkel, seine Lampe, Metall, wie Scheinwerfer über Stacheldraht, ich will mich wehren, ihn zurückschieben, beide Arme ausgestreckt, der Anprall, Deutschland, ein Augenblick wie ein Handgemenge, den Kampf verlier ich, Metall, nochmals Deutschland, was mach ich denn hier, wozu bin ich zurückgekommen, war ich je fort?” (weiter leben 411)

In Klüger’s disjointed one-sentence description of this incident the reality of the accident and her memory of Auschwitz overlap. Flashes from the past paralyze her, the past reappears, it is transferred into the present and prohibits her from simply avoiding the teenage cyclist. Instead, she stands still, expects him to bypass her and when he fails to do so, she panics and suspects an intentional attack. Throughout the paragraph, the phrases get increasingly shorter, clipped, staccato. They consist only of verbs and pronouns when the cyclist approaches Klüger’s narrator [er verfolgt mich, will mich niederfahren], indicating two distinct and opposed entities, “er” and “mich.” In the moment immediately before the crash the clauses turn into singular noun phrases [seine Lampe, Metall], shooting like gunfire from the past. Oxymoronic expressions like “helle Verzweiflung” and “Licht im Dunkel” emphasize her confusion and disorientation. The adjective “hell” is employed in two distinct meanings, referring to both the cyclist’s lamp and ironically the all but lucid mental state that Klüger’s narrator experiences in her paralysis. The light in the dark German night fails to represent hope (as the general use of the phrase would suggest) but emits danger instead. Recalling the lamps over the barbed wire in the camp, the metal vehicle’s flashlight incapacitates the narrator and turns her into the persecutee whose very right to exist had been denied. Finally, the moment of collision leads to a temporal simultaneity of then and now in which the comparative element “wie” is dropped. “Anprall, Deutschland”––Klüger’s experience turns into a repetition of a repressed past, which impacts her present, pushes her neatly shelved memories to the fore, and obstructs her reactions. Stylistically, the repetitions of “Deutschland” and “Metall” indicate how Klüger experiences the collision as an intentional persecution, a type of second Holocaust (Schaumann 103). Once again on German soil, present tense, present perfect, and simple past are hurried through in one breath [what is she doing here, why has she come back, was she ever away?], implying traumatic memory’s peculiar temporality that resists a chronological order. She had become the victim of her own hit-and-run nightmare (Still Alive 205).

Afflicted by recurring memory flashes, such as this one, Klüger deems the complete overcoming of trauma impossible and explains: “Doch hilft die Erkenntnis keineswegs darüber hinweg” (weiter leben 87). Instead, coping with trauma implies an ongoing examination with a past that refuses to pass, aligning Klüger’s experience with Primo Levi’s self-observation that “the offense persists, as though carved in stone, prevailing over all previous or subsequent experiences” (10-11).

Impossible Forgiveness

As destructive as her memories are, when she is able to grasp them, Klüger clings on to them, ‘cherishes’ them, as she explains in an essay titled “Forgiving and Remembering” (311). Where possible, she wishes to fill the gaps within her disjointed recollection by repeatedly questioning her mother, whose memory is equally fragmented, and lashing on to thoughts when they emerge: “...dieses Stück Leben will ich besitzen, und da ist’s, ich hab’s, aus dunklen Wassern gefischt, noch zappelnd” (weiter leben 410). The parts of her memory that she cannot access are equivalent to dark waters that submerge her past life. When, however, recollections emerge, Klüger yearns to own and integrate them.

The urgency of remembering is, for Klüger, related to an impossibility to forgive crimes of a certain magnitude. Before forgiveness can be conceived, she argues, some form of retribution has to take place, which is unthinkable in context with the Holocaust since neither lost lives nor stolen lifetime can ever be repaid (“Forgiving” 312). The only ones who could be “authorized” to forgive, she paradoxically argues, are the dead, “the real victims,” as she calls them, relaying a scenario where remembering and forgiveness can never be reconciled. Instead, she creates another semantic alignment, namely: “Remembering and resenting are...siblings, like their opposites, forgiving and forgetting.” (“Forgiving” 311)

While Jacques Derrida, in his deconstruction of the concept of forgiveness, seems to agree with Klüger that forgiveness is largely impossible, he offers a different pairing, that is, one where forgiveness insists on recollection, and necessitates a turn toward the past (On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness 28). Derrida’s project is preoccupied with the notion of pure forgiveness that only becomes possible as impossible (“On Forgiveness” 53). With a footing in the classical distinction between thinking and knowing, Derrida explains that he cannot fully know what such a pure forgiveness would mean. Instead, he theorizes the traditional Western concept of forgiveness and aspires to think beyond the knowable. First of all, he challenges the assumption that forgiveness is rooted in an economy of exchange as it implies a giver that has the sovereign power to forgive as well as a receiver that recognizes the fault (53). There is an expectation and conditionality in the exchange that Derrida rejects in his attempt to conceive of a forgiveness devoid of healing or reconciliation. To him, these concepts, just like salvation and redemption imply a finality, an equilibrium, a normalizing principle, which Derrida wants to disassociate from forgiveness. Instead, he suggests retaining an asymmetry, where no form of agreement between two parties takes place, indeed, where they remain radically other (57). He goes so far as to argue that even the slightest inclination toward an understanding between the two parties interferes with pure forgiveness as it implies a breech between the categories of self and other.

“... yes, there is the unforgivable. Is this not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness? If one is only prepared to forgive what appears forgivable...then the idea of forgiveness would disappear. If there is something to forgive, it would be...the worst, the unforgivable crime or harm. From which comes the aporia, which can be described in its dry and implacable formality, without mercy: forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable. One cannot, or should not, forgive; there is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable.” (On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness 32-33)

Derrida’s paradoxical concept of forgiveness is reserved for unique crimes of unexpiable gravity, the absolutely unforgivable, such as the Holocaust, which must be acutely remembered rather than falling into the abyss of amnesia (Banki 59, 17). Therefore, the process of genuine forgiveness, as Derrida describes it, necessarily remains unfinished, open like scar tissue that continues to recall the injury.

            In contrast, Klüger explains in her essay that the passing of time, which necessarily leads to forgetting, is closely related to forgiveness, indeed, it seems to be the only acceptable form of forgiveness for her (“Forgiving” 313). While this view reveals her desire for future generations to achieve a reconciliation she herself is unable to offer, I argue that the dialogic approach of her memoir is actually closely aligned with Derrida’s non-finite concept of forgiveness and thus the necessity of remembrance. On the one hand, the very fact that Klüger, according to her own account, waited until the 1990s to publish her book when she expected a receptive German audience betrays her desire to reconcile with the perpetrator’s nation. On the other hand, her defiant tone in which she addresses her readership directly indicates her inability to forgive: “How can I ‘forgive’ the murder of my teenage brother when I have had my life, and he didn’t get to have his. This was not a free decision...it was simply not in my power to grant the kind of absolution that is implied in the plea or demand of forgiveness” (312). Immediately we are placed within the aporia of forgiveness and its impossibility, the hope that forgiveness can be achieved and the awareness of its impossibility, the inability to grant forgiveness where it is necessary. Furthermore, a book like weiter leben inevitably lives on and continues to speak to the reader who is implicated in Klüger’s appeal even after all survivors have passed away, bleeding like an open wound ad infinitum. As Klüger herself explains in a 2013 GSA banquet speech: “...the living witnesses of every event in history have died and their memory has persisted thanks to writing and other recording devices...what remains will be, as it has always been, the written word” (391).      

Let us look at a passage in her memoir where she addresses her readership:

“Für wen schreib ich das hier eigentlich? Also bestimmt schreib ich es nicht für Juden, denn das täte ich gewiß nicht in einer Sprache...die heute nur noch sehr wenige Juden gut beherrschen. Also schreibe ich es für die, die nicht mit den Tätern und nicht mit den Opfern fühlen wollen oder können...die es für psychologisch ungesund halten, zuviel von den Untaten der Menschen zu lesen...die finden, daß ich eine Fremdheit ausstrahle, die unüberwindlich ist? Anders gesagt, ich schreib es für Deutsche. Aber seid ihr das wirklich? Wollt ihr wirklich so sein?” (weiter leben 213)

Klüger’s provocative, defiant, and ironic tone is particularly palpable in this passage, which begins with a question that is recognizable as a direct address. By revealing that her biography is not directed at a Jewish audience, she implies the German Jews’ horrible demise without stating it explicitly. At the same time, she points out the rarity of a Holocaust memoir written in German, the language she had first rejected (like many German-speaking Holocaust survivors) and later re-adopted when she enrolled into the German studies Ph.D. program at Berkeley University.

            Beginning with an antithesis, stating first whom she is not addressing, Klüger carries her reader through an investigative thought process. Without mentioning who the book is written for, she describes them as disinterested and detached, neither victim nor perpetrator. Then she posits herself as the other and finally spits it out: the book is written for Germans. Klüger must be well aware that an author cannot pick her readership but almost in spite, she points to a specific demographic anyway. A change in pronouns follows, the average reader is now assumed to be German. Klüger asks these readers directly what being German means, both then and now, openly, without providing an answer: “Is that how you want to be?” Ignorant and borderline xenophobic?

            The passage continues:

“Ihr müsst euch nicht mit mir identifizieren, es ist mir sogar lieber, wenn ihr es nicht tut; und wenn ich euch ‘artfremd’ erscheine, so will ich auch das hinnehmen… Aber laßt euch doch mindestens reizen, verschanzt euch nicht...Werdet streitsüchtig, sucht die Auseinandersetzung” (213-214).

Klüger asks for no identification from her chosen readership. Instead, she wishes to emerge as distinctly other, in line with Derrida’s insistence on victim and perpetrator as separate entities, signified by the Nazi epithet for the Jews, “artfremd.” Yet, forty years after the Shoah, she does not address the Nazis but rather a new generation of Germans that still struggles to understand the history of their nation. While these individuals cannot be perceived as guilty, they still carry the burden of the past. As Derrida explains, “...there is no question of forgiving a guilty one, a subject subject to transformation beyond the fault. Rather it is a matter of forgiving the fault itself…” (“On Hospitality” 386). Klüger’s addressees, however, are not merely transformed subjects but––to a large extent––an entirely new generation. She addresses them in a bellicose manner and incites them to defend themselves, argue with her if necessary. Far from offering forgiveness for the unforgivable fault, and fully conscious that the finality of such an offer would be beyond her capacities, Klüger’s approach still betrays the desire for dialogue (von der Lühe 36). Yet this dialogue is not conceived as a direct exchange, since it is inscribed in a literary text that continues to challenge its addressed readers long after all survivors have passed away, as a voice speaking from the past, a speaking past. 

Based on Derrida’s understanding of aporias not as paralyzing impasses but as moments of endurance before new possibilities, Peter Banki suggests that the absence of finality or even intelligible meaning in Derrida’s “aporia of forgiveness” contains two different moments: first, it affirms that pure forgiveness is impossible and second, if such a forgiveness could be imagined, it would have to differ greatly from traditional conceptualizations (17, 62). Consequently, the aporia of forgiveness must not simply make the contradictory character of the concept explicit, but it must also continuously strive to invent the impossible (60-61).

Banki, who reads Derrida’s theory in context with Holocaust literature, explains that, “offers and requests of forgiveness should be approached as inventive, poetic tasks…” (66). And it seems to me that the experimental and dialogic approach of Klüger’s memoir lends itself to such an ongoing task precisely because it abstains from forgiving the injury.

Throughout this paper, I have moved from the fragility of traumatic memory to the necessity for a different concept of forgiveness. I interpret Klüger’s non-linear poetic model, which engages the reader actively, yet openly, without implying the rigid finitude of ready-made answers, as an experimental gesture toward a forgiveness of the unforgivable, a crucial component in the ongoing quest of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Rather than writing for personal healing or sympathy, Klüger is interested in a process that keeps both parties acutely aware of the fault that was the Shoah. Writing a book that not only reflects on the struggle of living with trauma but also inhabits a plea for dialogue, she gave birth to the possibility of an indefinitely speaking past, though perhaps one that is still only speaking past us.

Works Cited

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Levi, Primo, and Ruth Feldman. Moments of Reprieve. Simon and Schuster, 2017.

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Van der Kolk, Bessel A., and Onno van der Hart. 1995. "The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma" In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 158-182. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

Von der Lühe, Irmela. “Das Gefängnis Der Erinnerung: Erzählstrategien Gegen Den Konsum Des Schreckens in Ruth Klügers Weiter Leben.” Bilder Des Holocaust: Literatur, Film, Bildende Kunst, edited by Manuel Köppen and Klaus R. Scherpe, Böhlau, 1997, pp. 29–45.