Given The Large Number Of Texts produced by National Socialists during the period 1933–45 and before, why begin this analysis with the opening greeting from a letter sent to Hitler by a young teenager: “Lieber, guter Onkel Hitler”? The intention here is to shift the focus from the language of and in National Socialism to discourse in National Socialism, with a particular emphasis on language use in context as a shared, communicative phenomenon. In this article I will argue that in analyzing National Socialist discourse as part of communicative practice, the letter should be considered as constituting a significant text-type, as revelatory in its use of language as speeches and propaganda texts. The significance of letters lies in their combination of fixed, recognizable, yet also malleable features. Letters are “defined partly by the functions of communication,” yet “letters may include poetry and narrative; they remain as letters and as a distinct genre in terms of the purposes they serve.” Thus, letters provide the analyst with certain ritualized linguistic features, such as the opening and closing greetings, while also varying in style and content. Moreover, letters can reveal a great deal about the relationship of the writer and the addressee, including potential imbalances in power and a shared language (or lack thereof). Unlike the speeches and printed propaganda texts produced by National Socialists, letters provide insights into the instrumentalization of National Socialist language by the writer and the negotiation of status, power, information, ideas, and wishes that constitute the letter as a text-type.

My analysis will draw in particular on the historical sociolinguistic concept of language history “from below,” which stresses the importance of including long-ignored texts in linguistic studies, texts produced by “ordinary” people, those who did not hold positions of power and are not the authors of official, authoritative texts. The corpus for my analysis consists of four letters written to Hitler and other NSDAP leaders between 1924 and 1945, published in an edited volume by Henrik Eberle entitled Briefe an Hitler in 2007. As the analysis will show, the letters show evidence of a participatory discourse between individuals, who may not have been members of the NSDAP, and leaders of the party.

Throughout Her Oeuvre Herta Müller has returned to the question of language: its insufficiency, its power, its potential to surprise, its personal significance to her, and how as an author she makes use of it. She has also often discussed language in historical context, examining the use of language in the Ceauşescu regime and the abuse of language as a means of manipulation by political leaders more generally. Through her fiction and non-fiction writing a picture develops of Müller as someone who is deeply suspicious of language but at the same time uses it to great effect, and for whom language has provided a means of liberation. I will bring together Müller’s relationship with German and with Romanian against the backdrop of established discourses of postwar German Sprachkritik in order to draw conclusions about her attitude regarding language’s potential to be damaged by dictatorial regimes. With reference to both representations of language use within the Banat-Swabian community of Müller’s childhood and the author’s claims regarding her relationship with Romanian I will argue that, although interested in the idea of language tainting, Müller does not go so far as to suggest that the contamination of language by ideology inhibits free expression, instead demonstrating that the historical associations of language add to its impact and meaning-creating potential. Unlike members of Gruppe 47, who tried to escape from the connotations of the past through their use of language, Müller embraces the difficult relationship between language and memory as something fundamental to her creative approach.

The practice of analyzing language for its ideological content and identifying ways in which regimes manage their own linguistic activity and that of their citizens is well established within German literature and cultural criticism. Since the early postwar period writers and cultural theorists as well as linguists have tried to quantify the extent to which the German language was “tainted” by the National Socialist regime. Some authors, including members of Gruppe 47, tried to use language in a new way, resorting to absolute simplicity of expression in an attempt to escape the shades of associated meaning created by the Nazis’ abuse of German. Like many other more recent German writers Herta Müller displays a suspicion towards that which can be read as part of this postwar trend towards Sprachkritik. However, Müller grew up in a regime where another language, Romanian, was the language of a dictatorship.

In His Autobiographical Report Untergetaucht unter Freunden, German-born refugee Claus Victor Bock describes how he survived the German occupation by hiding in Amsterdam as a member of the Dutch-German community of artists Castrum Peregrini. In order to capture the atmosphere in the group, he states that nobody belonging to this circle gave it a second thought when two Dutchmen presented a third with a volume of German poetry, thereby demonstrating a positive relationship with the language of those endangering their existence, focusing on its aesthetic values. While the situation in the Castrum was certainly a special, if not unique one, Bock’s remark strikingly illustrates a twofold phenomenon that will be central to this article. Whether German or Dutch, those having to fear persecution by Hitler’s henchmen in the occupied Netherlands found themselves confronted with a dilemma: for the Germans, the language of their home country had become the language of those forcing them into exile and threatening their lives beyond the German borders. For their host country, whose intelligentsia had traditionally shown a lively interest in German literature and philosophy, German became the language of the occupiers. This article will focus on autobiographical texts written by the first group and examine to what extent their authors’ fate influenced their relationship with their native language: how and to what degree did they distinguish between “German” and “Nazi”? In the cases of those who avoided using their mother tongue, was this a decision motivated by their contempt for the system they fled, or by a desire to accelerate their integration into their new surroundings? Did they react to the fact that their persecutors had caught up with them and brought their language to all occupied countries? The second group, Dutch with an affinity to German language and culture, will be considered whenever this seems useful with regard to crucial points. The majority of the primary sources used in this article will come from migrants who were not famous at the time they went into exile and whose memories of the years between 1933 and 1945 are often their only publications. These range from Anne Frank’s Diaries and texts from an anthology published by German-Dutch couple Volker Jakob and Annet van der Voort that contains twenty-seven accounts based on transcribed interviews (1988) to Eva Schloss’s After Auschwitz, published in 2013.

Introduction

Reinhard Jirgl (1953–) is an emphatically German author. He insists that German is “die Sprache in der ich denke, spreche und schreibe,” and the award of several prestigious prizes (including the Büchner Prize in 2010) has confirmed his place in the German literary tradition. Yet Jirgl uses the German language in consistently and characteristically iconoclastic ways to challenge the authority of historical, political, and institutional discourse. Precisely because his work went against the ideological prescriptions of the East German state, it remained unpublished in the GDR, where Jirgl lived and worked. Since unification he has become a prolific author, but has also been criticized for his pessimistic, misanthropic view of history, his focus on German suffering (at the exclusion of the Holocaust), as well as his insistence on what some regard as little more than a linguistic tic, namely his idiosyncratic orthography. His peculiar use of German is bound inextricably to the Third Reich and its legacy, specifically, the radical challenge this period of history posed to language as a mode of representation. Jirgl takes his cue from Arno Schmidt, who responded to the upheavals of war and fascism by rejecting conventional modes of writing and developing an idiosyncratic orthography. Influenced by Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Vilém Flusser, amongst others, Jirgl is also interested in language as a system, which, on the one hand, transcends history, but on the other, is made to function differently according to context. Fundamental to Jirgl’s project is his concern for the role of language in the machinations of power and the subjugation of the individual: “Die Kommandohöhen allgemein bilden die Sphäre der Parolen; in den untergeordneten Schichten innerhalb der Gesellschaft verzeichnet man die Wirkungen dieser Parolen.” For Jirgl, the act of remembering is similarly subject to external control through language: in order to remember, the traces of the past must be made part of an objective, external order; but, being made to conform to the rules of language, this version of the past is no longer proper to the individual. In the act of retrieval, something is lost.

As a literary author, Jirgl seeks to reclaim language for the individual by writing against what he calls the “verbindlichen Duden-Norm.”

Since The Publication In 1964 of Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl’s landmark iconological study of melancholy from antiquity to the early modern period, Saturn and Melancholy, interdisciplinary scholarship on literary melancholy in the field of German Studies has thrived. Despite the many studies on literary melancholy since the 1960s, however, melancholy, understood as a set of traditions in Western writing and culture from antiquity to the present, has yet to be identified as a feature of German literature that deals with the legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust. This oversight arises, to some degree, from the scholarly association of German melancholy traditions predominantly with the early modern period, the baroque period, Romanticism, and also the fin-de-siècle crisis of modernity; indeed, most postwar publications on melancholy in German literature stop their analysis before the twentieth century. Consistent with the view of the Holocaust as a radical caesura in the history of Western civilization, this lapse implicitly suggests that melancholy traditions in Western writing since antiquity and writing on the legacy of the Holocaust circumscribe two separate kinds of literary aesthetics, one that belongs to a distant and archaic world untainted by knowledge of the Holocaust, and one that emerges in the post-1945 world that is overshadowed by the legacy of Auschwitz. As I show in the following, German and German-Jewish writers after 1945 often adapt the melancholy traditions of a pre-Holocaust world to address, broadly speaking, from the perpetrator and victim perspectives, the problems of representation, literary language, and epistemology that the Holocaust poses. In so doing, they reinvent the invented traditions of melancholy in order to create a novel ethical poetics for a new historical context in which, from the 1960s on, the victim’s perspective becomes paramount. They thus undermine the concept of a, to paraphrase historian Dan Diner, “Zivilisationsbruch” (rupture in civilization) after 1945, suggesting instead the importance—and not the bankruptcy—of established Western cultural traditions for a postwar literary ethics of memory.

One name for the new aesthetics of ethical literary engagement after the “caesura” of Auschwitz is “Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

The Memoir Of Rudolf Höß, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp from May 1940 to November 1943, occupies a strange place on bookshop shelves in the German and English-speaking worlds. It is rare for a major Nazi perpetrator to be present in this way, namely as author of a memoir sold under his own name and purporting to offer insight into his actions and motivation on his own terms: Albert Speer is another, but his memoir was an attempt at self-exculpation published while he was still alive, rather than being a text by an executed criminal. Although there has been a shift in scholarly interest away from the Nazi elite to the history of everyday life under the regime, the study of popular opinion and mentality, and the biographies of “ordinary people,” interest in Höß’s memoir does not seem to have diminished, though it may have affected the way it is read. In this essay, I will explore the changing status of Hoß’s text, in particular how developing interpretations have affected the way it has been translated. I will ask how the ways in which the text is translated and edited reflect the kinds of knowledge that the text is seen to convey, how different translations of the text position the reader in relation to Höß’s narration, and what attitude towards the “Germanness” of the text is on display in each case.

The different editions that I discuss here make a variety of different claims to significance and relevance in order to justify their translation and editorial practices. I will be looking in detail at two English translations. The first, translated into British English by Constantine FitzGibbon, was published in 1959, a year after the first German edition, which was edited by the historian Martin Broszat, originally for the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich; the second is a US English translation from 1992 by Andrew Pollinger, which forms part of a collection of materials on Höß and Auschwitz edited for young readers by Steven Paskuly.

A key issue here is the status of the German language. These editions represent contrasting views about the relationship of the German language to National Socialism: the German edition stresses the linguistic uniqueness of the text, while the English editions work with ideas of universality.

THIS STATEMENT BY Anne Duden suggests not only the need to be constantly aware of the connections with the language of the National Socialist past but the self-imposed task of re-writing German itself, an endeavor that Duden recognizes as not really possible, and one that places her writing at times on the boundary of incomprehensibility. For Duden, existence is Schreibexistenz, only possible in language, in her German mother tongue, so the ethical questions surrounding how to inhabit the German language in the post-Holocaust world are fundamental to her oeuvre. This essay analyzes the different techniques and approaches she used in texts written in the 1980s and 1990s, from her short story collection Übergang (1982), and the novel Das Judasschaf (1985), to her poetry collection Steinschlag (1993).

Übergang: Using Words with History

Übergang comprises eight short texts that all have in common a crisis or breakdown of the narrating self. For instance, in the first text, “Das Landhaus,” the narrator is isolated in a country house and experiences terror as boundaries collapse. In the central text, also called “Übergang,” the narrator is attacked and her face smashed; the writing interrogates the pain and experiences of the body. It is here that historical connotations are evoked in flashbacks, printed in italics, which represent the narrator’s memories while she is in her hospital bed. In these italicized sections clues as to the nature of and reason for the narrator’s sensitivity and breakdowns occur. There is a mixture of personal anecdotes, which appear to be personal and fragmented memories, and cultural memories in the form of quotations from contemporary films and popular music. One of the techniques that emerges is the use of words that we associate with genocide, but which are not applied to direct representations of specific historical realities:

Ich war gerade dreiunddreißig Jahre alt geworden, als ich mir endlich eingestehen konnte, was ich lange schon geschluckt hatte, nämlich daß es um Ausrottung ging.

Arnold Schoenberg’S A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46, is a twelve-tone cantata for male narrator, male chorus, and orchestra, written in August 1947. The narrator recounts, in Sprechgesang, how, one day during an early morning reveille in an unnamed camp, the Nazi guards started viciously beating the Jews, killing many of them. Those surviving are ordered to repeat the roll call, and suddenly start singing the Jewish prayer Shema Yisroel. One of the most striking elements of the cantata is the fact that its libretto uses three languages: English, German, and Hebrew. The narrator tells his tale in English, citing Nazi commands in German, and the prayer is sung in Hebrew by the chorus; this tripartite linguistic organization is mirrored by the music, which is characterized by tripartite parallelisms. The push and shove between English and German in the narrative section of the cantata and the use of Hebrew in the Shema raise questions about the relationship between languages: how is German (the language of the composer, an émigré German-speaking Jew living in Los Angeles) positioned as the perpetrator language in the figure of the Feldwebel? How is English (the then-emerging language of Holocaust memorialization, the dominant language of prosecution during the Nuremberg Trials, and subsequently the leading language of Holocaust Studies as a discipline) framed as the language of witnessing in the cantata? And finally, how is Hebrew (the language of liturgy, but also the language of political Zionism) enacted here and to what effect? These three languages, we will suggest, stage a range of subject positions and, in particular, invite the audience to make specific ideological and ethical (or unethical) associations with the communities represented by the three languages.

The libretto of Survivor, as an early example of Holocaust-themed art music, encourages reflection on memory, the representation of trauma, and the role of languages in that work of memory. The three languages used, whilst each serving different functions when taken on their own, also form a network in which each language unfolds its meaning in relation to the other two. Their main significance lies in destructions and constructions of community.

This typescript also formed the basis for another text, Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch, that was published in 1948. That same text had been reprinted in a facsimile edition in 1985 by Kupfergraben Verlag in Berlin, and was then republished, to much literary debate, with the same title, but now under the authorship of the well-known West German writer, Wolfgang Koeppen, in 1992. While admitting that there had been some notes from which he had elaborated his text, Koeppen, however, did not mention the existence of the typescript in his preface to the 1992 publication. Reinhard Zachau encountered Kurt Grübler and the typescript as part of his quest to discover the “genuine” Jakob Littner, whom he had sought to trace after it had become clear that Littner’s biography and Holocaust experiences had, as Koeppen’s preface suggested, been the basis for Koeppen’s version. The belated surfacing of the typescript demonstrated how closely (and, one might say, faithfully), Koeppen had worked with the typescript in composing his own work.

The multifaceted ethical and documentary complexities of the Koeppen/Littner case have been described and analyzed on a number of occasions. The rights and wrongs of Koeppen’s adaptation of Littner’s text have produced two major lines of argument: one that condemns any “tampering” with a Holocaust memoir (the position of, e.g., McCombs, Klüger, and Zachau), and the other, less common, which more benevolently stresses the imaginative potential of literature and literary form. Ruth Franklin argues that Koeppen’s work is “an artistically coherent text, one that rises above the specific circumstances of its narrator to present a vision of humanity in extremis.” In this article, I revisit in the specific context of translation the questions raised in my earlier reading of Koeppen’s and Littner’s texts, which focused on how Koeppen’s text interrogates language as a specific tool of racial definition. In doing so, I mean to open out questions of alterity that are implicated both in any work of translation, and any re-telling of testimony. My starting point is Walter Benjamin’s citation from Rudolf Pannwitz in “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (The Task of the Translator), where Pannwitz criticizes those translators who “have a far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works …