Abstract

The literary texts of the German-Jewish author Lotte Paepcke (1910–2000) have been read predominantly as historic accounts of a survivor of the Shoah, while their artistic merit has been all but neglected. In this article, her wartime autobiography Unter einem fremden Stern (Under a Foreign Star) of 1952 is analyzed from the viewpoint of literary criticism. The focus lies on the formal aesthetic aspects, the retrospective reflections on the questions of German-Jewish integration, guilt and reconciliation, the references to Buber’s theology of the Fall of Man, and the consequences for Paepcke’s later stance on the German politics of Holocaust memory. (TV; in German)

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