Evolving Memory Narratives: The Transformations of Ruth Kluger’s Autobiographical Writing183 Evolving Memory Narratives: The Transformations of Ruth Kluger’s Autobiographical Writing Dagmar C. G. Lorenz University of Illinois at Chicago Abstract: Kluger’s self-writing is shaped by the memory of the Shoah. The respective works reflect the transformation of memory over time in different cultural contexts. Written for a German readership, weiter leben , confronts the author’s experience in Nazi concentration camps and her liberation and recovery process in Germany until new beginning in the United States. Still Alive , mindful of the American readership, sets counterbalances the experiences of the Shoah with those of Kluger’s life in California, while unterwegs verloren highlights Kluger’s more recent experiences interspersed with observations that suggest the lasting impact of the Shoah. The film Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger (Landscapes of Memories) with Kluger as resource person and narrator synchronizes aspects of her self-writing . My article analyzes the evolution of Kluger’s narratives with respect to their cultural settings, language, and time frames as well as interlocutors, target audiences, and medium. Keywords: Shoah, memory, self-writing, identity, feminism The autobiographical publications and statements by Ruth Kluger, a Shoah survivor from Vienna, who after her liberation and relocation to the United States made a name for herself as a scholar of German literature and a university professor, profoundly influenced the discussions about gender and women in the Holocaust since the 1990s. Considering the expanding scope of Kluger’s German and English language publications the term ’autobiographical project’ seems more appropriate to her writings after 1992 than ’memoirs.’ Kluger’s self-writing transcends genre boundaries and targets audiences in different cultural spheres. It is exemplary of processual memory construction and representation according to the pathbreaking research and experiments on memory, notably traumatic memory, by Frederic Bartlett and Jean Piaget. Kluger’s writing reflects 184 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz time and culture specific memory constructions as it elicits forgotten or suppressed episodes in conjunction with a shifting memory landscape. Kluger left Germany in 1947 and completed college and university degrees in library science and German literature in New York and California. Her academic training and interests shape her narratives, and her expertise as a literary scholar and critic adds critical and literary dimensions to her work that are generally not found in memoir literature. From a feminist perspective Kluger references critical literature on National Socialism and the Shoah, and she includes theoretical perspectives from memory and post-memory studies, international literature and films. In particular her critical commentaries address earlier approaches to the Holocaust, developed from a male perspective. She dismisses assumptions made by many male authors about the female Holocaust experience or writers who consider the male point of view as the normative ’human’ experience. Kluger characterizes herself as a product of the gendered society of prewar Jewish Vienna shaped by its distinct gender roles (Klüger 1992, 42—43). She points out that for the most part she lived with women in her home environment, in the gender-segregated concentration camp universe the Nazis had created, and in the United States (Klüger 1992, 229). She describes the situation as follows: I had spent my life among women, and this didn’t change in New York. In my family, in the camps, and even after the war, men had been at the periphery of my life. It was true that from that periphery they called the shots because they had the power, and my mother never ceased to assure me that a woman needed to marry someone who’d provide for her. But her own example was different. (Kluger 2001, 179) Stuart Tabener aptly observes that the feminist perspective dominates Kluger’s first autobiography weiter leben, and he agrees with Andrea Reiter that “this perspective affects the fabric of the narrative itself ” (Tabener 102; Reiter 327). However, it would be incorrect to assume that with the advancing of old age Kluger deemphasizes the category of gender in her life review. As a feminist Kluger is highly interested in the gendered social construction of aging (Tabener 101). At no point does she endorse a gender-neutral or ’male’ viewpoint, although she conceptualizes gender in conjunction with the experience of aging and the social repositioning this entails. “Alte Leute behandelt man wie Kinder” [Old people are treated like children], her friend Maria observes during a cruise and terms the cruise ship a “schwimmendes Altersheim” [a swimming retirement home] (Klüger 2008, 225—26). Kluger also remarks upon the physical effects of aging: “Im Vergleich zu den Menschen, denen wir auf unserer Reise begegnen, sehen wir mehlig aus mit unförmigen Körpern, während die ihren geschmeidig Evolving Memory Narratives 185 und sportlich wirken” [Compared to the people we meet on our journey, we look pasty with our shapeless bodies, while theirs appear supple and athletic] (Kluger 2001, 226). Feminism provides the dominant point of view in Kluger’s German language autobiography weiter leben, in the English adaptation Still Alive, and it informs unterwegs verloren with the added critical perspective on aging and age discrimination. These trajectories also inform her statements in interviews, presentations, and essays. However, the tenor and urgency of these positions change over time. As a public intellectual, Kluger would be right in considering her feminism to be a known fact. Moreover, after the millennium feminist approaches to the Holocaust were no longer revolutionary—they had become firmly ensconced in the critical discourse to which Kluger herself had made major contributions. Additional structural principles in Kluger’s writing include attention to the phases in an individual’s life; in Kluger’s case, the transition from girlhood to adulthood during the Holocaust, the student years and married life in the United States, motherhood, her academic career and her later life as an autobiographer. These phases are set off by turning points that call for reinterpretation in her different accounts. Also important are geographic, cultural, and linguistic touchstones. With Vienna as her point of departure, Kluger remembers her deportation to the Nazi camps—a German-dominated sphere—, and her relocation from postwar Germany to the United States and into the English language. Her moves from the East Coast to the West Coast and back and forth within the United States, her intermittent stops in the Midwest and her move to Germany, her development as a writer and her visits to Vienna and return to the United States pattern her life story. Kluger herself expresses the divide within her identity in her statement that she is the mother of two “American sons,” who, in turn, stress their mother’s European character in the film by Renata Schmidtkunz. Kluger lives in two languages, German and English and is versed in Yiddish, which she picked up in the camp Christianstadt and which she avoids because of its negative cultural connotations (Klüger 1992, 176). The title of Kluger’s first autobiography weiter leben (1992), which Linda Schulte-Sasse translated as “Living On” may signify the author’s resolve to lead her life to the fullest after surviving Auschwitz. It may also indicate that as an American professor in Göttingen she found herself embarking on a new path, that of an autobiographer and public speaker. Stuart Tabener notices an element of passion as the driving force in Kluger’s ’life review’—her “outrage directed against (male) colleagues and publishers and her family” and the pleasure she takes in her late successes (Tabener 105). For Tabener the latter seems connected to Kluger’s search for meaning: 186 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Klüger’s almost teleological narration of her journey from academic outsider to bestselling author and media personality not only suggests the older woman’s pleasure in her belated success. It also invests her otherwise often sorrowful narrative of exile and dislocation with a retrospective coherence and meaning. (Tabener 107—08) Unsurprisingly, Kluger’s autobiographical project started later in life, when it was possible to survey the past and, more importantly, when the author had become capable of articulating her traumatic memory. At age sixty-one she published weiter leben without having achieved a Goethean, quasi-Olympian position, from which she could authoritatively assess her life. Instead, she blends memory strains and recent experiences, impressions of new and old friends, professional and personal conflicts, changing constellations within her family and prospects for the future. The autobiographical project has an experimental character and often Kluger’s strongest assertions turn out to be provisional. In Kluger memory is tied to the experience of the present moment. In unterwegs verloren this anchoring in the present is evident from certain assertions: “Es ist uns schon schlechter gegangen” [there were times when we have been worse off] in association with her memories of being a ’slave girl’ and her empathetic terror during her visit at the Senegalese slave trade center Île de Gorée during a cruise with her friend Maria (Kluger 2010, 232; 235). At such moments, Kluger’s focus on the present serves as a barrier against the memory of her own suffering. Already weiter leben spans Kluger’s life before and after the Nazi concentration camps and thus exceeds the scope of a typical Holocaust memoir. The episodes associated with the different life spheres do not invalidate others, but they do relativize them. The reflections about the abrupt end of her childhood in her Viennese middle-class family and those succeeding Kluger’s liberation are equally pertinent to the construction of the autobiographical self. Kluger mediates her life through different genres, and she targets different audiences. The published versions of her life story reveal the expanding memory work. The first autobiography appeared in German in 1992, in post-unification Germany, under the title weiter leben: Eine Jugend [Living On. A Youth], in Göttingen. In a biographical and a historical sense the theme of renewal dominates, autobiography being a new genre for Kluger, and she wrote in and for the new united Germany. Even her venue, the Wallstein Verlag, founded in 1986, was a relatively new company. The modified and expanded English-language version Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered followed in 2001 and was geared toward English-speaking audiences. The publisher was the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, and the American novelist and translator Lore Segal provided the introduction. Like Kluger, Segal is a native of Vienna. Segal had left Ger- Evolving Memory Narratives 187 man-occupied Austria on a children’s transport to England and thus constitutes a complementary voice to Kluger’s, who was deported to Theresienstadt. Kluger states her regrets over having been prevented from leaving Austria: her mother had kept her from joining a children’s transport to Palestine as a last chance to escape. Kluger surmises that she would have taken that chance and become a different, presumably freer, person under more favorable circumstances (Klüger 1992, 62). Throughout her writings this missed chance is a recurring theme and a factor in the resentment toward her mother. In 2008 Kluger published unterwegs verloren with the Vienna Zsolnay Verlag. Continuing Still Alive , the book reviews Kluger’s life and career in the United States. In many ways unterwegs verloren is a book of farewells. For one thing, Kluger tries to explain her decision of having the Auschwitz number on her arm surgically removed. The associated memories are associated with her mother, whom she now reevaluates. Alma Klüger, née Hirschel, died at the age of ninety-seven in 2000. Kluger records the mental and physical changes affecting the old woman, who is no longer the tyrannical mother of her younger years but has turned into the childlike great-grandmother of Kluger’s granddaughter. Kluger also abandons the sentiments encapsulated in the German and Austrian term “Heimat” [home country] and affirms the emotional distance to her familiar but not beloved native Austria, her former ’home,’ without identifying another place to call home. Kluger’s nomadism clearly comes across in the chapter “Sterben im Exil” [Dying in Exile] (Klüger 2008, 38—52). The closest the author comes to a sense of home is in her condominium in Irvine, California, the setting of large segments in Renata Schmidtkunz’s Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger (2013, Landscapes of Memories: The Life of Ruth Kluger). The first two publications focus on the author’s childhood in her female-dominated family, which in hindsight she characterizes as neurotic, and her adolescence in Nazi concentration camps. Not until her almost fatal accident in Göttingen’s Jüdenstrasse [ Jewish Street] did her childhood and Holocaust memories assume such urgency that she felt compelled to record them. After almost four decades her near-death experience in Germany, where she served as the Director of the University of California’s Study Abroad Program, transformed her sense of identity and mission. The change of her married name Ruth Angress back to her family name Klüger is an outward expression of her transformation. The autobiographies are written with an eye towards the countries that shaped Kluger’s personality, Germany, the United States, and Austria, all of which contain lived and unlived life alternatives. Speculations about the latter play an important role in all of her autobiographies. Kluger subtitled weiter leben “Ein deutsches Buch” [A German Book] and dedicated it to her friends in Göttingen at a time when she attached no irony 188 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz to this term. Later, disillusioning experiences in Göttingen precluded such an attitude of optimism and good will toward German post-Shoah society. At no point does Kluger’s attitude arise from naiveté as the critical framework of her first autobiography already suggests. Through references to Fascism theory, studies about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, weiter leben establishes a critical subtext and relates it to the author’s life experience. Kluger challenges common assumptions about gender and gender roles, and she reexamines historical narratives by German intellectuals (Lorenz 1993, 207). Luna Filipovic’ in her study on memory maintains that bilingual memory processing occurs interdependently, but admits the possibility of separate storage. Thus bilingual memory may be privy to both common and separate store options, which account for variations in the respective languages (Filipovic’ 2011, 472). Filipovic’s assumptions explain some of the variations between Kluger’s autobiographies in German and English. Other variations are obviously deliberate, aiming at accommodating readers of German and, alternatively, of English. Still Alive follows the same chronological-geographic structure as weiter leben with Kluger’s Viennese childhood as the point of departure, followed by the deportation and prisoner experience, and the survival of the camps Theresenstadt, Auschwitz, and Groß-Rosen. The segment on the United States is extended in the later book, where the Göttingen episode is condensed and configured as ambiguous. Germany is no longer a possible destination despite the fact that Kluger had acquired a home in Göttingen. While telling the same life story, many of the examples and comparisons in Still Alive differ from the German text. The fact that Still Alive appeared almost a decade after weiter leben accounts for the expanded time frame and shift in focus from Göttingen to California. unterwegs verloren is marked by yet another shift in positionality. Vienna, past and present, takes on greater significance than before. The chapter “Wiener Neurosen” [Vienna Neuroses] captures the author’s ambivalence toward the city of her childhood. The emphasis on friendships with other Austrian expatriates and the mottos taken from Central European women writers are further expressions of the preoccupation with Austria. Tabener discusses the structural significance of the mottos from the post-Shoah authors Ilse Aichinger, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Herta Müller in light of the Central European experience, and Kluger’s own place within this experiential landscape: The choice of these particular writers is significant, of course. To state the obvious, all three are women. Just as important, however, Aichinger and Bachmann were both Austrian—Aichinger was of Jewish descent and Bachmann the daughter of convinced Nazis whose postwar love affair with the returning Austrian Jew Jack Hamesh brought Evolving Memory Narratives 189 about an early confrontation with her time in the Bund Deutscher Mädel. Bachmann, moreover, was also close to Paul Celan, the German-Romanian-Jewish poet whose work revolves around the Holocaust and exile. Herta Müller, in contrast, is originally from Romania. Like Klüger, she lives in a form of exile from her native country following her experience of state persecution during the communist period, although in contrast to Klüger her minority status was as a member of an ethnic German community that had been largely Nazi during the war years. As a matter of fact, Müller’s father had been in the SS . (Tabener 109) Referencing these writers Kluger affirms her embeddedness in the cultural world shaped by the legacy of the Austro-Hungarian multination state and the destroyed Christian-Jewish symbiosis of which Vienna had been paradigmatic until its annexation by the Third Reich in 1938. The German-Austrian documentary film Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger, directed by Renata Schmidtkunz, adds further insights as it expands the scope of Kluger’s books. The medium of film creates a virtual immediacy between the cast and the viewers, and it concretizes the spoken words by showing, for example, Kluger’s childhood home in Vienna or her apartment in Irvine. The film derives its dynamic from the interactions between Kluger and her interlocutors, including her two sons, colleagues, and students. Their visual presence creates the film’s multiperspectivism. In her narratives Kluger controls the text, but the images of actual persons, settings, and sceneries engender processes in which Kluger functions as the central, but by no means, the only or even the authoritative figure. As Kluger’s life review has evolved, new layers of memory have emerged. Shifts in her geographic orientation and frequent dramatic turning points produce directional changes and the recurrence or resumption of motifs provide continuity; for example, the episode of being tattooed upon entering Auschwitz in weiter leben is seemingly resolved in unterwegs verloren when Kluger has the tattoo removed (Klüger 1992, 115; Klüger 2008, 11). Another circle closes when the overpowering mother figure of weiter leben appears transformed in Still Alive: she “looked small and shriveled,” and the author, now acting as a mother, encouraged her to take some fruit juice. Kluger concludes: “She had died like an old cat” (Kluger 2001, 211). Kluger’s life story is replete with momentous incidents. For instance, the intervention of an unknown female clerk makes Kluger’s survival in Auschwitz possible: she tells the girl to say that she is fifteen rather than thirteen, which qualified her to work (Klüger 1992, 132—133). Another lifesaving moment is the decision to escape from a death march (Klüger 1992, 166). Another near-death and survival episode is the accident in Göttingen, a lifechanging event and the 190 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz beginning of Kluger’s confrontation with the ’ghosts’ of her past (Klüger 1992, 279). In Still Alive she elaborates: But the memories remained, like cave paintings […]. They had at last caught up with me; in my hospital bed I had been their prisoner. […] How did I come to write this story? For a long time I had wanted to, but didn’t because other urgencies interfered and because other books had appeared and seemed to have done the job. Now, while I still felt the presence of the angel with the ambiguous face, whom I have known all my life more intimately than I wished, I began. (Kluger 2001, 208) Previously known as the scholar Ruth Angress, Kluger emerged during her convalescence as Ruth Klüger—her memories had arisen with such intensity she had to write her life story. As Roger Woods points out, her decidedly subjective position as a memoir writer precludes finality. “Following Kluger’s writing across the sixteen years between weiter leben (1992) and unterwegs verloren (2008) demonstrates not merely the absence of resolution, but also the emerging certainty that there can never be any kind of resolution” (Woods 183). The concept of landscape in the English title of Schmidtkunz’s film, Landscapes of Memories visualizes the mind as a terrain to be explored. Indeed, Kluger’s autobiographical practice follows the model of an exploratory excursion rather than that of a teleological narrative. The pertinent sites are named in weiter leben as “Theresienstadt,” “Auschwitz-Birkenau,” “Christianstadt (Groß-Rosen),” while Still Alive defines them generically as “Ghetto,” “Death Camp,” “Forced Labor Camp.” The settings of Kluger’s post-Shoah life in postwar Germany, New York, and 1980s and 1990s Göttingen, likewise represent memory landmarks in conjunction with a chronological nexus. In unterwegs verloren the spatial order intersects with thematic structures propelled by reversals and new beginnings. The removal of the Auschwitz number is such an instance of bundled memory themes: the mother’s aging and dying, and the decision to erase and reinterpret traces of the past. The granddaughter, on the other hand, is proof of hope and continuity. She connects across the generational divide with her great-grandmother in ways Kluger could not. Finally, Schmidtkunz’s film explores Kluger’s life story through the medium of film. The effect is expansive and mosaic-like. Different interviewed persons provide insights about Kluger based on their own experience. With every additional work Kluger’s narrative scope has expanded, partly because of the passing of time, partly as a result of the changing social and political context. Language plays an important role in Kluger’s writing. weiter leben, which postdates the death of Alma Hirschel, Kluger’s mother, is written in German, presumably because Kluger did not want her mother to read candid passages about the problematic mother-daughter relationship. “I thought if I wrote in Evolving Memory Narratives 191 German, my mother wouldn’t see it, as she had no contact with things German and even considered my career as an embarrassment” (Kluger 2001, 210). In unterwegs verloren , Kluger revises this assertion: “Meine Antworten auf diese Fragen waren nicht immer dieselben, weil ich selbst nicht genau wußte, warum ich das Deutsche mit seinem bekanntlich bedeutend kleineren Wortschatz gewählt hatte. […] Die deutsche Sprache, latent im Gehirn, aber noch immer robust, hatte mich gewählt, nicht umgekehrt” [I did not always respond to these questions in the same way, because I myself did not know exactly why I had chosen the German language, which has, as is well known, a considerably smaller vocabulary. […] The German language, latent but still robust in my brain, had chosen me] (Klüger 2008, 213). Still Alive uses proper names with greater transparency than the earlier works. In weiter leben Kluger conceals the identity of her postwar friend Martin Walser under the pseudonym of Christoph. In Still Alive she refers to him by his real name, Martin, and in unterwegs verloren she identifies him as the famous postwar author and mentions her open letter in which she criticizes him for his blatant anti-Semitism in the novel Tod eines Kritikers (2002). She even associates him with Herta Müller’s poem “Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen.” Linking elegance and polite manners with latent violence as is the case with Müller’s image of gentleman hunters, who wear a fuse cord on their hats, undoubtedly appealed to Kluger as an expression of Walser’s ambiguous character. In her Walser passages Kluger announces the end of her friendship with the celebrated author and former Nazi Party member (Kluger 2001, 168—69). Kluger contrasts the untenable relationship with Walser with her continued bond with her Californian colleague, Herbert Lehnert, who, like Walser, has a Nazi past. Yet, in the film the dialogue between Kluger and Lehnert reveals how much good will and effort is required to maintain this difficult friendship, for which, Kluger notes, the only possible place is the United States. The film uncovers paradoxes in Kluger’s experience, which often goes against the grain and challenges the collective German memory as well as American versions of the Shoah. In unterwegs verloren Kluger often assumes the role of a concerned observer because of her special position toward Germany, Austria, and the United States. Aware of the contradictions in her self-representation she insists on synthesizing the disparate elements because she refuses to compartmentalize her life. “Mein Leben als Mutter ist untrennbar vom Rest. Ich bin nicht auf der einen Seite Germanistin und Autorin, auf der anderen Seite Frau mit Kindern” [My life as a mother cannot be separated from the rest. I am not a German scholar and author on the one side and on the other side a woman with children] (Klüger 2008, 140—41). This synthesizing approach is also a concession to life changes that occur in different ways. Self-determination, reason, and 192 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz logic make it possible to overcome the position of victimhood, but Kluger also envisions factors beyond her control such as chance and fate. Both coincidence and choice play a role in her survival—even the notion of fate occasionally arises as a possibility. Göttingen represents a major turning point. In the 1980s Kluger had begun to offer seminars on Holocaust literature, and in 1985 she published the pathbreaking article “Discussing Holocaust Literature.” Yet, these were scholarly projects, but the autobiographies are deeply personal as statements such as the following reveal: “Wiens Wunde, die ich bin und meine Wunde, die Wien ist, sind unheilbar” [Vienna’s wound, which I am, and my wound, which is Vienna, cannot be healed]. In her conversation with Schmidtkunz, Kluger expresses her emotional ambivalence about Vienna and its relevance to her sense of identity: “[…] ich gehöre ja irgendwie hierher […] ich gehöre eigentlich nicht hierher, ich nehme das sofort zurück, nachdem ich es gesagt habe, aber es stimmt und es stimmt nicht” [I belong here somehow […] actually, I do not belong here. I retract my statement immediately after making it] (Schmidtkunz 2008, 123). Her reception in Vienna seems an external confirmation of her diffidence: In public she was feted as a celebrity, but as a colleague and visiting professor she was ignored. She considers this treatment proof that a Vienna-born Jew and Shoah survivor is still not welcome in Vienna. Her presence, she surmises, exposed the dark side of the glamorous city (Klüger 1992, 68; 2008, 214). Adding to the complexity of her position, Kluger points out that she holds Austrian and US dual citizenship. She rationalizes her decision to accept Austrian citizenship with the advantages of an EU passport, but more important seems her right to restitution: “Ich habe ein Recht auf diese Staatsbürgerschaft, man hatte sie mir genommen, warum sollte ich sie mir nicht zurückholen, schließlich bin ich dort geboren worden und kann wie die Einheimischen sprechen” [I have a right to this citizenship; one had robbed me of it, why should I not get it back. After all, I was born there and can talk like the native Austrians] (Klüger 2008, 214). In her conversation with Schmidtkunz she expresses this thought as well: “Wien ist die einzige Stadt in der Welt, der einzige Ort in der Welt, wo die Leut’ so reden wie ich, obwohl man mir sagt: Wie ich spreche, ist ein Schönbrunner Deutsch oder etwas ganz Altmodisches” [Vienna is the only city in the world, the only place in the world, where people talk the way I do, even though one tells me: The way I talk is Schönbrunner German or something very old-fashioned] (Schmidtkunz 2008, 23—24). The response Kluger attributes to her Austrians contemporaries is on the one hand an acknowledgment of her Austrian identity, but at the same time it relegates her to a bygone era and social order. Evolving Memory Narratives 193 Schönbrunn, the palace of the Habsburg rulers, evokes Vienna’s imperial past, the expelled aristocracy, and the murdered Jews. Kluger’s intent is to articulate her personal memory rather than writing a historical account—the record of history was firmly established at the time weiter leben appeared. Still, her accounts are critical of the familiar cultural narratives. They are oppositional, as she herself as a young person often turned to oppositional behavior as a survival strategy. As a child, she emphasizes, she did not accept her powerlessness, but, unable to escape her predicament as a Jewish girl, she protested against her circumstances by changing her name Susi, which sounded too German to her, to Ruth, in memory of Ruth, the Moabite, who chose her own identity (Klüger 1992, 40; 2001, 42). The resentment because of her mother’s decision to keep her from leaving Vienna resurges as late as in the Jerusalem segment of Schmidtkunz’s film. Kluger imagines how she might have thrived as a citizen of Israel until her idealized image of the Jewish State fades in light of the gender inequality she observes and because of the oppression of the Arab population. The process of disillusionment she displays is comparable to Kluger’s disenchantment with Göttingen and Vienna. Also in these cases her initially positive impressions yield to the less than glamorous reality. In the Jerusalem episode she exonerates her mother at least momentarily by acknowledging that her ideal society, a fair and just Israel, does not exist, and that consequently she can no longer blame her mother for destroying her life. In the final section of unterwegs verloren , “Kreuzfahrt” [Cruise] Kluger asserts: “I was a slave girl” (Klüger 2008, 232). The excursion to the Senegalese slave trade center Île de Gorée elicits this statement in association with Kluger’s own concentration camp memories. She contextualizes her own and others’ suffering with the failure of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment project documented by the mass-captured women during the Middle Passage and the Holocaust. Elements immediately present intrude upon these thoughts to reveal the complexity of reality: a game of Black Jack, a conversation about shoes bought in Vienna for the African cruise, and allusions to alternative constructions of history such as the “myth of the Stunde Null” (Klüger 2008, 235). Kluger’s narrative defies the boundaries of time and space as it links distinct sets of the past through memory. At the time of the visit at Île de Gorée the author was already a retiree, but the earlier memory of the camps arises with greater immediacy than that of her professional life. At the former epicenter of the slave trade, she is overcome with disgust at the bondage of the African slaves, with whom she identifies because of a partially shared fate, and she associates her own memory with this site. An additional memory association arises as she contemplates the fate of her cousin Herbert, who left on a “Kinder- 194 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz transport” [children transport] only to be classified a hostile alien in England and shipped off to Australia (Klüger 2008, 228—29). There is no ’happy’ ending to Kluger’s journey, as the final question “Hat sich die Reise gelohnt? ” [Was the trip worth it? ] at the end of unterwegs verloren suggests (Klüger 2008, 234). No healing or reintegration has taken place after the Holocaust. Kluger notes that despite the fact that former Nazi victims and perpetrators lived under identical conditions during the postwar era, they remained permanently separated by their history. Mainstream Germans may have taken the same escape routes as she did on her flight from the death march, but the circumstances were different: “They were mourning their losses, the possessions they had to leave behind, and grieving for the homeland they wouldn’t see again, while we were happy to have left our prisons and to have gained so much, that is, our naked existence” (Kluger 2001, 137; compare: 1992, 173). Throughout, Kluger’s life review documents the rift between the perceptions of the survivors and dominant narratives confirming Dan Diner’s thesis about the divided Jewish and German and Austrian post-Shoah memory in his study “Negative Symbiosis.” In Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger , the exchange between Kluger and her colleague Herbert Lehnert documents this divide Diner postulates. Lehnert insists that the Third Reich and the Holocaust were mere episodes in German history, and he characterizes his friendship with Kluger as a continuation of the pre-Nazi German-Jewish symbiosis. Kluger, in contrast, stresses the strictly personal aspects of their friendship rejecting her colleague’s notion that their Jewish-Gentile relationship signifies a victory over Hitler’s ideology. She notes that this friendship could only occur in California ( Das Weiterleben ), but that she cannot even trust the United States to be a safe haven. In her California home, she reports, she was slighted by an English professor from Germany, who did not acknowledge or greet her although he attended a party that she hosted. “Weil man mit Frauen und Juden so umspringen kann? Die Frau als Opfer, der Jude als Frau […]. Ich werde oft gerügt, wenn ich über Diskriminierung gegen Juden und gegen Frauen in einem Atemzug rede, aber so hab ich’s erlebt” [Because women and Jews can be treated this way? The woman as victim, the Jew as woman […]. People often criticize me when I speak of the discrimination of women and Jews in the same breath, but this is the way I have experienced it (Klüger 2008, 155—56). In weiter leben Kluger’s experience in Göttingen ends on a positive note; she even acquires a second residence in the German university town, because she obviously felt at home there. In Still Alive the episodes featuring her friends in Göttingen seem shorter and more sober, and in unterwegs verloren her attitude has taken a negative turn in light of several disturbing occurrences: A financial Evolving Memory Narratives 195 consultant embezzled her savings and a student harassed her. “’Deutschland’. Und wieder ’Deutschland’. Immer wieder. Sicher ist es ein Rechtsstaat und man kann sich Recht verschaffen, wenn man es richtig anstellt. Oder schwelt noch was? Mit Ausländern, mit alten Frauen, mit Juden? ” [’Germany.’ And again ’Germany.’ Time and again. No doubt a state under the rule of law, and one can litigate, if one proceeds properly. Or is there something still smoldering? Something concerning foreigners, old women, Jews? ] (Klüger 2008, 192). In an effort to establish a balance, Kluger occasionally revises some of her harsh earlier assessments. For example, in weiter leben she surmises that the young man who caused her near-fatal crash was ruthless and aggressive: “[…] ich meine, er verfolgt mich, will mich niederfahren […] den Kampf verlier ich, Metall, nochmals Deutschland, was mach ich denn hier, wozu bin ich zurückgekommen, war ich je fort? ” [I think he pursues me, wants to run me down […] I’ll lose this fight, this metal, again Germany, what am I doing here, why did I return here, did I ever leave? ] (Klüger 1992, 271—72). “Und diese Vorstellung, oder auch nur Einbildung, daß mich der Sechzehnjährige aus Aggression umgefahren hat? Nicht aus aggressivem Denken, wohl aber aus aggressivem Instinkt, wie die Buben hinterm Steuerrad eines Autos” [And this notion, perhaps only imaginary, that this sixteen-year old ran me over out of sheer aggression? Not out of aggressive thinking but out of an aggressive instinct, like a boy behind the steering wheel of a car] (Klüger 1992, 272). In Still Alive , Kluger is understanding towards the boy: “I had been in Germany for only a few months when a teenage bicyclist ran me down one evening as I was crossing the street in a pedestrian zone. […] The boy was sixteen. He wasn’t acting out of ill will, I am sure, just feeling the exuberance of being on a vehicle that was fast—much faster than the old bikes used to be, more like being behind the steering wheel of a car—and perhaps some impatience with the old woman in his way” (Kluger 2001, 205). The film Das Weiterleben der Ruth Kluger thematizes Kluger’s multifaceted persona; the opening shots show Kluger as makeup is applied to her face prior to a public presentation. Later she appears as a casual, private person in her kitchen in the company of her sons. The comments of Percy and Dan Angress, Kluger’s self-characterizations, and the statements of her friends and colleagues expand the scope of Kluger’s life world and problematize issues that go unchecked in Kluger’s self-narratives. With the addition of the elements in the film, Kluger’s autobiographical project offers a dynamic identity model, provisional and inclusive, and in its fluidity appropriate to the exponentially expanding post-millennium experience of reality. 196 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Works Cited Angress, Ruth K. “Discussing Holocaust Literature.” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 2 (1985): 179—92. Bartlett, Frederick. Remembering. Cambridge ( UK ): Cambridge UP , 1932. Diner, Dan. “Negative Symbiose. 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