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Preface As work on this book progressed during the last four years, we were often asked how we had discovered the memoir by Nanda Herbermann, which we present here in its first English edition. Here is the story. In 1996, while looking through some family documents in German, Hester discovered a reference to a distant relative who had written a book about her experiences in a concentration camp. Elizabeth was at that time teaching a course on the Holocaust at Gustavus Adolphus College and Hester was completing her coursework for a doctorate in German. We had never heard ofNanda Herbermann, but our curiositywas piqued, and we quickly ordered a copy of her book through interlibrary loan. Hester began to translate the 1946 edition of the memoir during the summer of 1996. The project originated as a rough translation for family members, but as more people asked to read the book, Hester revised the translation. Together, we determined that the book contained information about, and insights into, the Third Reich and the experiences of women in the camps that would be of interest to a wider audience. We thus began to investigate the life of Nanda Herbermann and to research the history of Ravensbriick, the concentration camp in which she was imprisoned. As we learned more about Herbermann and the historical background out of which her memoir emerged, our understanding of the memoir and our analysis of it moved through a number of stages. Central to our thinking about the book was the question of its relationship to other narratives written by victims of Nazi persecution. Is it a Holocaust memoir, a concentration camp memoir, or is it better understood within the context of memoirs written by German women about their experiences in the Third Reich? The Blessed Abyss does not seem to fit comfortably within any of these categories, though the scholarship generated by historians and literary critics about all three types of memoirs sheds light on Herbermann s memoir in different ways. Preface Certainly, Herbermann was explicitly victimized by the Nazis through her incarceration in police prisons and in Ravensbriick, an experience that set her apart from most "Aryan" German women during the Third Reich. Nonetheless, her avowed German patriotism and her chauvinistic adherence to German values even in the face of her own victimization present parallels to memoirs byother German women, as does—in a different vein—her gradual understanding of the connections between fascism and patriarchy. The BlessedAbyss is, of course, a concentration camp memoir, presenting as itdoes Herbermann's memories ofher experiences in Ravensbriick. Yet her memoir differs in striking ways from the majority of non-Jewish women's writings about Ravensbriick and other camps. Most of these memoirs were written by women who were imprisoned for their roles in the Communist or Socialist antifascist resistance movements; their experiences and representations of the camps were of course highly influenced by their political backgrounds. It wouldbe problematic in manyways to labelNanda Herbermanns book a Holocaust memoir, not least because of her own anti-Semitism and lack of consciousness of the Holocaust and genocide. Indeed, Herbermann experienced all kinds of privileges because she was "Aryan," including her ultimate release from Ravensbriick at the direct order of Heinrich Himmler. Yet many thematic, historical, and psychological parallels can be found between Herbermann's memoir and memoirs byJewish women. Many such parallels can also be found between The BlessedAbyss and Charlotte Delbo's memoirs: both memoirs were written by non-Jewish women arrested for work in resistance; both memoirs recount experiences at Ravensbriick and were written immediately after the war; and both were intended to serve the purpose of witnessing the horrors of the Third Reich in order to educate readers. Though Delbo is not Jewish, her books have entered the canon of women's Holocaust memoirs, further complicating the issue of what constitutes a "Holocaust" memoir. In addition, scholarship on women, gender, and the Holocaust, which has developed primarily in reference to Jewish women, is particularly applicable and useful in an attempt to understand The BlessedAbyss. Ultimately, the question of how to categorize Herbermann's memoir is perhaps the wrong way to approach the book. The Blessed Abyss is a complex and ambivalent memoir that often stands in tension with and provides a counterpoint to other representations of the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and the concentration camps, while also having much in common with other memoirs. To our minds, this tension and ambivalence make Herbermann's book particularly compelling and...

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