Die andere Erinnerung

Argues that the position of Jewish authors in West German postwar literature (both fiction and non-fiction) was marked by a gap between their memory of the Holocaust and non-Jewish German authors' memory of the Nazi period; there was strong competition between these two memories. Focuses on the efforts of Grete Weil, Edgar Hilsenrath, and Wolfgang Hildesheimer to secure a place of their own in this context. Traces, specifically, how the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish German literature developed during two decisive periods: the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s-beginning of the 1980s. Weil's "Tramhalte Beethovenstraat" (1963), Hilsenrath's "Nacht" (1964), and Hildesheimer's "Tynset" (1965) belong to the previous period; Hildesheimer's "Das Ende der Fiktionen: Reden aus fünfundzwanzig Jahren" [or "The End of Fiction"; lectures in English and German (1975)] and "Mein Judentum" [this text was conceived as a radio essay for Süddeutsche Rundfunk and appeared in print the same year] (1978), Hilsenrath's "Der Nazi & der Friseur" (1977), and Weil's "Meine Schwester Antigone" (1980) to the latter. Concludes that these works have helped integrate Jewish memory of the Holocaust into West German literature. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)