Writing After Hitler

The Work of Jakov Lind

Edited by Andrea Hammel, Silke Hassler and Edward Timms

Jakov Lind was born in Vienna in 1927. As an eleven-year old boy from a Jewish family, he left Austria after the Anschluss, found temporary refuge in Holland, and succeeded in surviving inside Nazi Germany by assuming a Dutch identity. After a literary apprenticeship in Israel, he made his reputation through works of fiction written in German, although he now lives in Britain and writes in English.

‘This path-breaking essay collection, including interpretative, biographical and reception studies and a full biography of Lind's published and unpublished writings . . . make his work considerably more accessible.’ (Times Literary Supplement)

‘The collection effectively inspires interest in an author whose works have often been ignored . . . It is to be hoped that this multifaceted and thought-provoking anthology will lead to further research on a hitherto under-examined author . . . ’ (Modern Language Review)

Lind’s writings are distinguished by an extraordinary variety of stylistic and linguistic modes, which are used, in both his autobiographical and his fictional narratives, to express the experiences of exile, linguistic dislocation and cultural uncertainty. The articles collected in this volume reassess the strategies which Lind adopted to explore the implications of living and writing ‘after all that occurred under Hitler’.

Writing After Hitler: The Work of Jakov Lind is the first comprehensive study of this creative and controversial writer and will be of interest not only to students and academics working in German and Austrian Studies, but to everyone interested in the Holocaust, the literature of exile and the cultural legacy of central European Jewry.

Andrea Hammel is Research Administrator at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex. Silke Hassler is an artistic adviser for theatre and opera based in Vienna, as well as a librettist. Edward Timms is Research Professor in German Studies and Director of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex.

Contents and contributors: * Edward Timms and Andrea Hammel, Introduction; * Stella Rosenfeld, Unsentimental Journeys: The Literary Career of Jakov Lind; * Johannes Houwink Ten Cate, Jewish Refugees in the Netherlands and the Art of Survival; * Mark H. Gelber, Jakov Lind and Zionism as a Literary Phase; * Waltraud Strickhausen, Representations of the Holocaust in Jakov Lind’s Fictional Writing; * Edward Timms, At War with Language: From ‘The Diary of Hanan Malinek’ to ‘Travels to the Enu’; * Silke Hassler, Jakov Lind and the Austrian Popular Theatre; * Ursula Seeber, Writer without a Home: The Reception of Lind’s Work in Germany and Austria; * Silke Hassler, The English-language Reception of Lind’s Fictional and Dramatic Work: From ‘Soul of Wood’ to ‘Ergo’; * Eva Eppler, Code Switching in Exile Literature: Jakov Lind’s Cosmopolitan Style; * Andrea Hammel, Gender, Individualism and Dialogue: Jakov Lind’s ‘Counting My Steps’ and Ruth Klüger’s ‘weiter leben’; * Cäcilie Peiser-Levitus, Memories of Survival in the Netherlands; * Silke Hassler, Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

• Stella Rosenfeld taught German Language and Literature at Ohio State University. With Sidney Rosenfeld, she co-translated Jean Améry's At the Mind's Limits and Radical Humanism: Selected Essays. She has published several articles on Jakov Lind.
• Johannes Houwink ten Cate is a Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam. He has published numerous articles on the history of the Shoah in Holland.
• Andrea Hammel is the Research Administrator of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex. Her research interests include exile literature and women's writing in German. Together with Edward Timms, she has edited The German-Jewish Dilemma: From the Enlightenment to the Shoah (1999), and she has published several articles on Hilde Spiel.
• Waltraud Strickhausen was until recently Assistant Professor at the Institute for Modern German Literature and Media Studies at Marburg University. She is preparing a Habilitationsschrift on the Moses figure in German literature. Her publications include Die Erzählerin Hilde Spiel oder 'Der weite Wurf in die Finsternis', and she is co-editor of the volume 'Für ein Kind war das anders'. Traumatische Erfahrungen jüdischer Kinder und Jugendlicher im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (1999).
• Edward Timms is Research Professor in German Studies and Director of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex. In 1990 he founded the 'Austrian Studies' series, co-edited with Ritchie Robertson and published by Edinburgh University Press. He is best known for his book Karl Kraus -Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (1986).
• Silke Hassler studied Comparative and German Literature in Vienna and London and researched the works of Jakov Lind. She now works as an artistic adviser for theatre and opera and as a dramatist. She is the editor of Peter Turrini's plays and writings. She has published several articles on Austrian literature and post-war Austrian theatre, on writers in exile and Jewish history, and on modern music and opera.
• Ursula Seeber is the head of the exile library Österreichische Exilbibliothek im Literaturhaus in Vienna. She has convened numerous exhibitions and published widely on Austrian exiles, for example as editor of Die Zeit gibt die Bilder (1992) and of Kleine Verbündete, Little Allies (1998), and as co-editor of Altes Land, neues Land (1999) and of Frauen aus Wien (1999).
• Eva Eppler is lecturer in Linguistics at Roehampton Institute, London. Her research on Jakov Lind was part of a thesis on bilingual immigrants.
• Mark H. Gelber is Professor of Comparative Literature at Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel, and the director of the summer school for Hebrew, Jewish and Israeli Studies at Ben-Gurion University .He has published numerous articles and books on German and Austrian Jewish writers, with a focus on issues concerning acculturation, Jewish identity, anti-Semitism, and Cultural Zionism. His most recent book publication is entitled Melancholy Pride: Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism (2000).
• Cäcilie Peiser-Levitus (information to follow)