Dr. Ruth Kluger

will be reading from her memoir

Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered

Tuesday, January 21, 2003,

8:00pm

207 White Hall

Still Alive will be available for purchase at this event. A book signing will follow the reading.

Sponsored by the departments of German Studies, Jewish Studies, Political Science, and Women’s Studies.

Born in 1931 to Jewish parents in Vienna, Klüger experienced the beginnings of anti-Semitism in Austria. Beginning in 1942, she was deported to the concentration camps Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Christianstadt. When in 1945 the Germans evacuated Christianstadt under the threat of the advancing Russian troops, Klüger, her mother, and four other prisoners took advantage of the disorder and anguish and decided to flee. After they managed to obtain false identification papers classifying them as non-Jewish, they ultimately met up with American forces. Klüger and her mother continued to live in Germany until October 1947, when they were finally able to secure immigration visas to the United States. Only in the 1990s did Klüger, by now a renowned professor of German language and literature in the US, decide to write down her memoirs. Her text continuously interweaves the present and past; discussing the Holocaust itself as well as the possibilities of Holocaust representation. Asserting her identity as a survivor, Klüger's work also documents her ambivalent relationship with Germans.

When Ruth Klüger's "weiter leben: eine Jugend" was published in 1992 in Germany, it met with enormous success, selling over 250,000 copies and quickly climbing bestseller lists. Klüger published her own English translation, "Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered," in 2001. "Still Alive," according to Klüger, is "neither a translation nor a new book: it is another version, a parallel book, if you will." (210). Yet the years between 1992 and 2001 substantially shaped and transformed Klüger's book. As one of very few literary works Klüger's text has grown and changed with time instead of merely being updated in a new edition. "Still Alive" has no new foreword or footnotes but is an entirely different text than "weiter leben", which attests to Klüger's courage to rework and alter an already completed and successful book as well as her commitment to her own title weiter leben-to go on living. Klüger's text emerges as a remarkably exceptional cultural translation that challenges our understanding of the Holocaust.