Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory (Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre)
Cambridge University Press, 10/19/2006
EAN 9780521869348, ISBN10: 052186934X
Hardcover, 416 pages, 23.5 x 15.8 x 3.1 cm
Language: English
This is a meditation on memory and on the ways in which memory has operated in the work of writers for whom the Holocaust was a defining event. It is also an exploration of the ways in which fiction and drama have attempted to approach a subject so resistant to the imagination. Beginning with W. G. Sebald, for whom memory and the Holocaust were the roots of a special fascination, Bigsby moves on to consider those writers Sebald himself valued, including Arthur Miller, Anne Frank, Primo Levi and Peter Weiss, and those whose lives crossed in the bleak world of the camps, in fact or fiction. The book offers a chain of memories. It sets witness against fiction, truth against wilful deceit. It asks the question who owns the Holocaust - those who died, those who survived to bear witness, those who appropriated its victims to shape their own necessities.
1. The past remembered
2. W. G. Sebald
an act of restitution
3. Rolf Hochhuth
breaking the silence
4. Peter Weiss
the investigation
5. Arthur Miller
the rememberer
6. Anne Frank
everybody's heroine
7. Jean Améry
home and language
8. Primo Levi
from the darkness to the light
9. Elie Wiesel
to forget is to deny
10. Tadeus Borowski
the world of stone
11. Memory theft
Coda.
'The chapters on the playwrights, Weiss, Hochhuth and especially Miller, offer enlightening insights ...' Times Literary Supplement