Charlotte Wardi

Hans Otto Horch

The articles in this volume originated from an international and interdisciplinary symposium organized in October 1994 by the Bibliothèque Nationale Luxembourg in collaboration with the Leo Baeck Institute (London), the Division of German-Jewish Literary History at the RWTH Technical University in Aachen and the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature of Haifa University. Common to all of them is the question of the various available modes of individual and collective Jewish self-awareness and self-definition existing in Central Europe in the period between 1870 and the Third Reich/Second World War.

Jüdische Selbstwahrnehmung - La prise de conscience de l'identité juïve

Analyzes the image of the Holocaust in the fiction of Romain Gary, Saul Bellow, Heinrich Böll, and William Styron. The attitudes of Styron and Böll are viewed as problematic. Böll's Catholicism does not allow him to see the Holocaust in its true proportions, but merely as one of many other persecutions. He emphasizes that Catholics and Jews were equally persecuted by the Nazis. In Styron's "Sophie's Choice", antisemitic myths and stereotypes remain and his denunciation of the Holocaust is ambiguous. Styron is a supporter of the theory of "universal evil" in which Auschwitz is no longer a symbol of the particularity of the Jewish Holocaust and thus Germany's responsibility is minimized.

histoire et représentation

Le génocide dans la fiction romanesque

Elliott M. Simon

Hans-Jürgen Schrader

The articles in this collection originated from an international symposium at the University of Haifa and centre around a major topic in German, European and American literature, i.e. the way in which Jewish self-definition, both positive and negative, has materialized as a product of the tensions between secular culture and society on the one hand, and Jewish tradition and religion on the other. The broad range of authors (most of them of German-speaking origin) necessarily results in an almost equally broad range of answers to this central question. The volume is dedicated to the memory of the Israeli literary scholar Chaim Shoham.

Charlotte Wardi

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