Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers (review)

Katja Garloff takes the title for her study from an essay with the same title by Adorno in which the philosopher defends the use of foreign words (Fremdwörter) in German. Adorno argues that foreign words introduce a dissonance into language that exposes, in turn, the heterogeneity at the heart of any language, such that no language can ever be native to a people (26). The title could not be more fitting for this remarkable monograph in which Garloff demonstrates the displacement that postwar German Jewish writers inscribe into the German language. At once an historical and a literary project, the book investigates the ways in which Peter Weiss, Nelly Sachs, and Paul Celan responded to their reception in West Germany. That all three authors lived abroad throughout their writing careers contributes to, but is not essential for Garloff's argument. Even if Sachs, Weiss, and Celan had returned to their "native" lands, their relation to the German language would have been irrevocably altered by the Holocaust which made the German language an uneasy, if not impossible, home for a Jewish poet. Drawing equally on Postcolonial Studies and trauma theory, Garloff contends that all three writers "perform for an imagined German audience the violent rupture between the subject and its place of origin" (11).

One of the many feats of this learned and highly readable study is the dialogue it creates between postcolonial theory and Holocaust Studies, which for too long have remained separate fields. In her theoretical introduction, Garloff indicates that postcolonial theory brought to the foreground the idea that the voices of postcolonial subjects call into question any national identity conceived as the outgrowth of a common origin. Diaspora experiences undermine all fixed narratives of the past and projections for the future. In this manner they subvert existing models, while at the same time creating new possibilities. While sympathetic to this position in general, Garloff cautions that German-Jewish literature after the Holocaust cannot be interpreted in such a positive light as the articulation of difference for two reasons that are related but not identical. First, German-Jewish writers cannot stand apart from the models or narratives they critique or, more precisely, disarticulate since these models entail their annihilation as Jews or the complete erasure of their difference. Secondly, they cannot generate "new" possibilities, such as fashioning alternative communities, since the Holocaust destroyed any future for German Jewry. (As Garloff notes, the Jews in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s came mostly from Eastern Europe via displaced persons camps and hence do not represent a continuation of prewar German-Jewish culture [112–13].) In the absence of either a past they can recuperate or a future they can imagine, German-Jewish writers are left in a double bind. On the one hand, they "attempt to transform their own displacement into a critical stance" (11); on the other, their efforts attest to "their inability, or unwillingness, to arrive at a position of strength and detachment" (11). To elucidate precisely this resistance to exile from a position of vulnerability and entanglement, Garloff examines the works of Weiss, Sachs, and Celan with attention to the contexts in which they wrote and published their texts.

The first chapter explores essays by three diverse thinkers (Adorno, Günther Anders, and Jean Améry) that directly address the issue of exile for German Jews after the Holocaust. Although the chapter is divided into three equal sections, the section on Adorno occupies the thematic center, if for no other reason than because Adorno uses the word trauma and outlines what could be called traumatic temporality in his essay "Die Wunde Heine." As Garloff points out, the word trauma is a foreign word, the Greek for wound referred to in the title of the essay (33). The title additionally permits two interpretations: it could indicate either the wound that Heine has, as in "Die Wunde Heine," or the one that he is...