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  • Holocaust Politics:Nanda Herbermann as a Test Case
  • Elizabeth R. Baer (bio)

In his recently published study, Holocaust Politics, John K. Roth talks about the "high stakes" in the field of Holocaust Studies. Specifically, he defines Holocaust politics as "the ways, often conflicting, in which the Holocaust informs and affects human belief, organization and strategy on the one hand, and in which human belief, organization, and strategy inform and affect the status and understanding of the Holocaust on the other."1 Among other topics, Roth devotes chapters to both the role of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust and the issue of gendered approaches to the Holocaust.

The memoir of Nanda Herbermann, a German Catholic woman arrested by the Gestapo in 1941, provides a point of intersection for both of these "political" issues. Her work as editor of an anti-fascist Catholic journal led to her arrest and her subsequent appointment as Block Elder over a barracks of prostitutes in Ravensbrück; this not only created jarring dissonance in identity for her, but also led her to write one of the earliest published memoirs in post-war Germany (1946). How her Ravensbrück experience affected her, and how she framed her memories for publication in the post-war era of de-Nazification are the focus of this essay, which demonstrates the usefulness of gendered perspectives on contested issues in "Holocaust politics."

The memoir of Nanda Herbermann, Der Gesegnete Abgrund: Schutzhäftling #6582 im Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück, was discovered by my daughter, Hester Baer, while reading family papers. Asked by my mother to translate these papers from German into English, Hester found a reference to "Aunt Nanda, who wrote a bestselling memoir about the Holocaust." I happened to be at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with a group of students when Hester telephoned me about her discovery. Turning to the excellent staff of the museum library, I engaged their help in learning more about this distant family relative. Initially, I thought perhaps there was a Jewish branch of my family of which I had been unaware. However, the librarians uncovered her identity as a Catholic, and unearthed the title of the memoir she had published. Following this lead, we obtained a copy of the memoir in German, through interlibrary loan. Then a graduate student in German at Washington University and now an Associate Professor of German and Film Studies at the [End Page 95] University of Oklahoma, Hester read the memoir and found it compelling, not only because Herbermann was a family relative, but also because of the content of the text. Hester translated the memoir into its first English edition, and together we both edited and wrote a lengthy scholarly introduction for it.2 When the manuscript was sent out to external readers by Wayne State University Press, one reader dismissed its potential value by asserting that, because Herbermann was Catholic, the memoir was not a Holocaust memoir, that the book had little or no value for furthering our understanding of the Holocaust, and that there could be problems of reception among certain readers.

Despite this warning, the press accepted the manuscript, and the book was then published in the fall of 2000. Imagine my surprise when I received in the mail the Jewish Studies catalogue of Wayne State University Press with a photograph of Herbermann on the cover! While any author should be gratified by such notice and promotion of one's book, I was dismayed by the "Holocaust politics" implications of such a juxtaposition. Did the right hand of the press not know what the left hand was doing? Or had the press decided unilaterally that this was a Holocaust memoir after all? Or did the press just want to sell books?

I rehearse this somewhat laborious history of the reception of this book for what it illustrates about Holocaust politics. "Who owns the Holocaust?" John Roth dares to entitle one of his chapters. He explains that when scholars or journalists argue "about how to interpret the Holocaust and its implications, debate how the Holocaust is properly remembered, or contend that its history has been distorted or abused, those concerns involve power. Typically, positions on such issues...

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