Description

The Nazi concentration camps evoke images of extreme horror and radical destitution. The atrocities of the events we call the Holocaust defy comprehension, while thinkers continue to ponder the suggestion that it is barbaric to write "poetry after Auschwitz." And yet a number of people wrote poetry while imprisoned in the camps, for example, Hasso Grabner, Fritz Löhner-Beda, and Karl Schnog in Buchenwald; Ruth Klüger in Christianstadt, a satellite camp of Gross Rosen; and Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz in Dachau. Georg von Boris wrote in Flössenburg; Ilse Weber in Theresienstadt; and Alfred Kittner in a succession of smaller camps in Transnistria. Unlike the vast majority of historical documents about the camps, these poems provide insight into the perspective of inmates: they are self-representations that clearly deserve more attention. Traumatic Verses provides psychoanalytically informed close readings of a selection of poems and discusses their significance for aesthetic theory and for research on the concentration camps. It tells the stories behind the composition and preservation of the poems and the history of their publication since 1945. Most of the poems appear here for the first time in English translation along with the original German texts. The book fills a gap left by literary historians, who for the most part have ignored writings from the camps and often have avoided careful scrutiny of the literature produced under the Nazi regime. It also contributes to trauma studies through an analysis of texts composed in an extreme, traumatic environment. Studies of trauma have concentrated on post-traumatic experiences; discussions of aesthetics after the Holocaust have neglected the issue of the artistic impulse in the camps. On both counts this book is a unique contribution to Holocaust studies, showing that, read attentively, poems composed in the camps are productive sites for a contemporary confrontation with the Nazi past, a confrontation that then crucially includes the creative legacy of inmates in the camps. Andrés J. Nader is Project Manager at the Amadeu Antonio Foundation in Berlin, where he is conducting a project on local strategies for coming to terms with the Nazi past. He also lectures at the Humboldt University.