Memory and Criticism: Ruth Klüger's weiter leben

Klüger's autobiography is a literary account of an Auschwitz survivor, an immigrant to the United States and a professor of German literature, weiter leben is also a metadiscourse on earlier accounts and studies of the Holocaust and the exile experience. Klüger's familiarity with international Holocaust literature and Fascism theory lends this very personal work, with its close-up descriptions of concentration camp life and insights into the experience of a Jewish woman scholar in contemporary Germany, a multi-dimensional, critical perspective and an unusual scope and depth. Klüger confronts the present with her own recollections and her generation's collective memory. (DCGL)