Ernestine Schlant

Focusing on individual authors from Heinrich Boll to Gunther Grass, Hermann Lenz to Peter Schneider, The Language of Silence offers an analysis of West German literature as it tries to come to terms with the Holocaust and its impact on postwar West German society. Exploring postwar literature as the barometer of Germany's unconsciously held values as well as of its professed conscience, Ernestine Schlant demonstrates that the confrontation with the Holocaust has shifted over the decades from repression, circumvention, and omission to an open acknowledgement of the crimes. Yet even today a 'language of silence' remains since the victims and their suffering are still overlooked and ignored. Learned and exacting, Schlant's study makes an important contribution to our understanding of postwar German culture.

West German Literature and the Holocaust

The Language of Silence

J. Thomas Rimer

Professor Ernestine Schlant

The literary legacies of World War II have been mixed and varied, especially in West Germany and Japan, where the burden of defeat has been expressed by novelists and intellectuals in strikingly different ways. Reflecting the cultural differences between the two nations, and the experiences of occupation and democratization that occurred after the war, the postwar literatures of Germany and Japan intimately reveal the hopes and aspirations, the dreams and the nightmares, of two peoples confronting the harsh realities of war. Using a comparative approach, Ambiguous Legacies explores the conditions and values under which the postwar literatures of West Germany and Japan were created. Specifically, the book assesses the meaning of the German and Japanese literary responses to the World War II: the tendencies of denial or silence by German writers, the fatalism and passivity of Japanese novels, and the importance of the past in defining the recent "New subjectivism" among German writers and the outpourings of the "Introverted Generation" by Japanese novelists. Ernestine Schlant's introduction sets the context for the individual chapters and offers guideposts for further comparative scholarship. The book also includes a useful annotated bibliography and suggestions for further reading. The contributors are: Arnulf Baring, Carol Gluck, Walter Hinderer, Iremela Hijiya Kirschnereit, Peter Demetz, Marlene J. Mayo, J. Victor Koschmann, Judith Ryan, Van C. Gessel, Dagmar Barnouw, Kato Schuichi, Oda Makoto, and Peter Schneider.

Ernestine Schlant

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