Voices from a Haunting Past: Ghosts, Memory, and Poetry in Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben. Eine Jugend (1992)

Abstract

This article focuses on the poetry Ruth Klüger wrote after 1945 and included in her highly acclaimed autobiography weiter leben. Eine Jugend (1992). The article addresses the poems’ function within the text and offers a reading of weiter leben as haunted. Klüger’s autobiography echoes with the voices of the dead, particularly the ghosts of her brother and father who were murdered during the Holocaust, and also those of the living. Her poems constitute the initial textual anchors from which the writing of traumatic loss and the recollection of her agonizing past proceed. By reflecting and commenting on the relationship between the dead and the living, memory and history, poetry and autobiography, Klüger locates weiter leben at the intersection of debates about the appropriate narrative form of Holocaust history. (SA)