Jean Améry und Fred Wander: Erinnerung und Poetologie in der deutsch-deutschen Nachkriegszeit by Ulrike Schneider (review)

This monograph is the book version of Ulrike Schneider’s 2010 dissertation, written within the framework of the Graduiertenkolleg Makom: Ort und Orte im Judentum at the University of Potsdam. She describes her project as “die Untersuchung der Entstehungs-und Veröffentlichungsbedingungen der Werke Amérys und Wanders im Kontext der jeweiligen deutsch-deutschen Literaturbetriebe” (15), that is, of these Austrian Jewish exiles and concentration camp survivors, who in the 1960s and 1970s published their works not in Austria but in the Federal Republic (Améry) and the gdr (Wander). Schneider contends that the two Austrian survivors found a “publizistische Heimat” in the frg and gdr, respectively. After his release from Bergen-Belsen in 1945, Améry had returned directly to his country of exile, Belgium; from across the border in Brussels, he established a broad media presence in West Germany beginning in the 1960s. Freed from Buchenwald at the end of the war, Wander had first returned to Austria but emigrated in the 1950s to the gdr, where he lived as a journalist and writer for some twenty-five years before returning to Vienna in 1983.

The book’s broad subtitle and the project description quoted above give little indication of Schneider’s main interest, which is to document the role played by the “Außenstehende” Améry and Wander in the West and East German Aufarbeitung of Jewish persecution during National Socialism and in the creation of a Jewish “Gedächtnisort” in the two countries as well as postwar German literature.

In addition to the introduction (with a survey of previous research) and a brief conclusion, the book is divided into three parts: one part for each author (each with two chapters) and a shorter third part that brings the two authors together, although still treating them separately, on the authors’ understanding of the role of literature and their shared expectation that literary works would create an “Erinnerungsraum” in East/West German society. The first chapter on each author treats the Literaturbetrieb, the political and cultural situation of the respective German state, and the author’s particular circumstances, his means and places of publication, his “Sprecherposition.” The second chapters deal more specifically with the writer himself, with his motivation and intentions in writing about his concentration camp experience as well as the form and content of selected texts, and their public reception.

In the case of Améry, many of whose works, including the five essays collected in his best-known book, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (1966), were first written as radio addresses for late-night West German cultural programming, Schneider elaborates the postwar development and relevance of radio in the frg and the role of radio editors who paved the way for Améry’s entrance into West German public life in the early 1960s.

Améry began his series of broadcasts just as restorative West German society, sensitized by the Eichmann trial, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, and the books of Primo Levi and others, had begun to confront its Nazi past. With essays combining his personal camp experience and reflection on its effects, the intellectual Améry hoped to initiate a healing process in West German society, a process requiring an acknowledgment of Jewish suffering. He called for, in Schneider’s words, the “Übertragung des Erfahrenen auf die moralische Konstitution der westdeutschen Gesellschaft” (63). Améry insisted on a Jewish voice in the writing of German history, placing the testimonies of the persecuted above objective historiography. In the various texts discussed by Schneider, Améry advocates the “Moralisierung der Geschichte.”

Turning to Wander, Schneider first traces the evolution of the treatment of fascism and Jewish persecution in gdr literature, noting that, as in the frg, a new openness in describing Jewish ghetto and camp life became manifest in the gdr in the mid-1960s—in contrast to the dominant policy...