The literature of the Holocaust is a body of writing without close historical precedent. It includes the diaries kept inside the ghettos and the camps, the immediate post-war memoirs of survivors, the documentary histories produced from the late 1940s onwards, the slowly emerging fictional and poetic works of survivors and their children, the archival projects that have gathered testimony from tens of thousands of survivors before they died, and the academic historiography that has run alongside all of these. The pages in this section deal with the books that have done most to shape public understanding of the Holocaust, beginning with the survivor memoirs that became canonical and continuing into the second-generation works that interrogate what survivor memory becomes when its first witnesses are gone.
The shape of the canon
The first wave of Holocaust literature was contemporaneous. The Warsaw ghetto archive of Emanuel Ringelblum, buried in milk cans before the ghetto’s destruction in 1943 and partly recovered after the war, contained diaries, statistical surveys, posters, photographs, ration cards, eyewitness accounts of the Treblinka deportations and a sustained attempt to document a community as it was being murdered. The Łódź ghetto chronicle, kept day by day by an internal archive department from 1941 to 1944, ran to several thousand pages. The diary of Adam Czerniaków, the Warsaw Judenrat chairman who killed himself rather than carry out the great deportation in July 1942, survived the war and was edited by Raul Hilberg. The diary of Anne Frank was the most famous but was not the only one; many others were kept and most were lost.
The second wave was the immediate post-war memoirs. Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man) was published in Italian in 1947 by a small press; the major Italian publisher Einaudi had rejected the manuscript, and the book did not reach a wide international audience until the late 1950s. Eugen Kogon’s Der SS-Staat, written by a Buchenwald political prisoner immediately after the war, was published in German in 1946 and remained the standard survivor history of the camps for decades. Filip Müller’s Eyewitness Auschwitz, a Sonderkommando survivor’s account, was published much later. The most influential single text of this wave was Viktor Frankl’s Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, published in German in 1946 and translated into English in 1959 as Man’s Search for Meaning, which became one of the most-read books of the second half of the twentieth century.
The third wave came in the 1950s and 1960s with the consolidation of the Holocaust as a historical subject in its own right. Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews was published in 1961, the same year as the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, with its disputed thesis on the banality of evil, was published in 1963. Elie Wiesel’s La Nuit (Night) was first published in French in 1958 in a heavily compressed version of his original Yiddish memoir Un di velt hot geshvign from 1956; the English translation appeared in 1960 and slowly became, over the following decades, the most-assigned single Holocaust text in the American school system.
The second generation
The fourth wave, beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, was the work of children of survivors and of the slowly enlarging group of survivors who had not been ready to write earlier. Imre Kertész’s Sorstalanság (Fatelessness), drafted in the 1960s, was published in Hungarian in 1975 and won its author the Nobel Prize in 2002. Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben (Still Alive) was published in German in 1992 and in English in 2001. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the graphic memoir of his father’s experience at Auschwitz and his own complicated relationship with that experience, was serialised from 1980 in the comic magazine Raw and collected as two books in 1986 and 1991; Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and remains the most-cited graphic novel about the Holocaust.
Other significant second-generation works include Marcel Cohen’s Sur la scène intérieure (2013), an exploration of the few photographs and fragments his murdered family left behind; Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost (2006), a six-year investigation into the murder of six members of his extended family in Galicia; and the work of Patrick Modiano, whose novels (notably Dora Bruder of 1997) circle the disappearance of French Jews during the German occupation.
The historians’ literature
Alongside the survivor and second-generation writing has run the historians’ literature. Hilberg’s three volumes (the original 1961 work and its much-expanded later editions) remain the foundational documentary history. Saul Friedländer’s two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997 and 2007) is the most-cited single work of the past three decades. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992), based on the records of Reserve Police Battalion 101, is the standard study of how non-ideological perpetrators became killers. Peter Longerich’s Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (2010) is the standard one-volume German-language history. Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (2010) places the Holocaust in the wider context of the murders carried out by both the Nazi and Soviet regimes in eastern Europe. Lucy Dawidowicz’s The War Against the Jews (1975), although now overtaken in detail, was for two decades the most-read introductory history.
What this section covers
The pages below treat the most influential individual books in turn. The Diary of a Young Girl, If This Is a Man, Night, Man’s Search for Meaning, Fatelessness and Maus each have a dedicated page treating the book, its author, the conditions of its writing, the questions of translation and revision that affected its public reception, and its standing in the larger Holocaust literature.
The pages below treat the books one at a time. The historians’ literature, the documentary archives and the major reference works are addressed elsewhere on this site under their authors and under the relevant historical pages.
What is here
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- Night by Elie Wiesel
- If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
- Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz
- Maus by Art Spiegelman
Sources
- Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, Yale University Press, 1975
- Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature, University of Chicago Press, 1980
- James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation, Indiana University Press, 1988
- Sue Vice, Holocaust Fiction, Routledge, 2000
- Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, Cornell University Press, 2006 (the standard history of how Holocaust testimony became a public genre)
- David Roskies and Naomi Diamant, Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide, Brandeis University Press, 2012
- Alan Berger and Naomi Berger (eds), Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators, Syracuse University Press, 2001
- USHMM bibliography, https://www.ushmm.org/research/library
- Yad Vashem libraries and archive, https://www.yadvashem.org