Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust
The Chain of Memory

A study of how the Holocaust has been remembered and interpreted in theatre and fiction.

Christopher Bigsby (Author)

9780521869348, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 October 2006

416 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 3.1 cm, 0.789 kg

'The chapters on the playwrights, Weiss, Hochhuth and especially Miller, offer enlightening insights …' The Times Literary Supplement

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.

Subject Areas: Second World War [HBWQ], The Holocaust [HBTZ1], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], European history [HBJD], Theatre studies [AN]