Rev. of Encrypting the Past: The German-Jewish Holocaust Novel of the First Generation by Kirstin Gwyer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. x, 246 p. ISBN 9780198709930.

Authors

William Grange, University of NebraskaFollow

Date of this Version

7-2016

Citation

SHARP News (Society for History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) 3 July 2016: http://www.sharpweb.org/sharpnews/2016/07/03

Abstract

Kirstin Gwyer re-investigates (and in some cases, re-discovers) works of fiction written in the aftermath of the Holocaust experience. Selected works by H. G. Adler (1910-1988), Jenny Rosenbaum Aloni (1917-1993), Elisabeth Augustin (1903-2001), Erich Fried (1921-1988), and Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1916-1991) constitute her primary focus. Critics at the time their works initially appeared found such narratives mostly incomprehensible; others branded them unethical, immoral, or worse. They were narrative attempts to “express the ineffable” (20), after all. It was better, some believed, to allow preterition to be the better part of disclosure. Author Kirstin Gwyer successfully debunks such biases, a process she calls “mapping the blind spot.”