Ruth Kluger's Vienna: Family, Memory, and the Holocaust

Introduction

This paper examines the reflections of Ruth Kluger in Part I: Vienna of her memoir Still Alive: Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, focusing on her relationships with her parents and on why it was so difficult for her to speak about those relationships honestly in light of the Holocaust. Each relationship is considered in turn, with attention to how the historic events of that era complicate any straightforward account. The paper also addresses how Kluger's narration of these relationships confirms or contradicts the reader's expectations of Holocaust memoir.

Vienna as Prison: Kluger's Early Life and Half-Brother Schorschi

Kluger reports that Vienna became her first prison — "a city with no exit, a city that banished you and then didn't allow you to leave" (p. 26). Their bags were always packed, the family perpetually "on the brink of moving to another country," never comfortably settled, not even for the near future (p. 26).

Kluger did not know her half-brother Schorschi well. Her memory of him is limited to small details: that he could ride a bicycle, that he was more knowledgeable than she was, and that she looked up to him as a role model. Yet she describes him as her "first great loss," noting that "every subsequent loss seemed a replay of that first" (p. 28). Her mother's words deepened this wound considerably. She told the young Kluger that had it not been for her, she would have saved Schorschi — she could not leave Kluger alone in Vienna. This left Kluger questioning whether his death was somehow her fault. She also remembers asking her mother whom she loved more, herself or Schorschi, and her mother answered that she loved Schorschi more because she had known him longer. Sixty years later, Kluger could still recall that statement.

Kluger's Relationship with Her Father

Kluger recalls her father as a handsome, dignified man who seemed to her more distinguished than other parents. As a doctor restricted by Nazi racial laws to treating only Jewish patients, he had also learned the side trade of making sausages. Kluger expresses a desire to celebrate him in some way, to "find or invent an appropriate way of mourning, some ceremony for him" (p. 30). Yet she admits she suspects such ceremonies of "mendacity," and they often strike her as "ridiculous" (p. 30). Her grandfather, by contrast, she remembers with uncomplicated warmth — he always "had a welcome smile and his pockets full of presents for me" (p. 30).

Kluger's father did not pay close attention to young children, as was common in his generation. Although her mother insisted he was "crazy about her," Kluger describes this as "staging and then retouching a family photo" — she "knew better" (p. 31). Her father began to take a genuine interest in her when she started to read. He took her to a bookstore and let her choose a book. He also taught her to play chess, a game she was not especially interested in as a child, but one that later gave her great pleasure with "its esthetic of pure cohesion, unspoiled by questions of means and ends, since the means are the end: a game like a dance" (p. 32). Playing chess became, for Kluger, "an ongoing conversation with my father; You see, you didn't waste your time with me in your Herrinzimmer. I haven't forgotten what you taught me" (p. 32).

Because Kluger was not close to her father, she was afraid of him and found it difficult to gauge his moods. She reflects on what might seem trivial childhood memories precisely "because they are all I have of him and because I can't make them jibe with his death. Try as I may, I can't change these images or the feelings that go with them, and concentrate instead on what I know happened to him in the end. For I only know of his fate, I don't recall it, and imagined pictures have a lower priority than remembered ones" (p. 33). She describes this as the impossibility of bridging the "gap between knowledge and memory" (p. 33).

Kluger writes that under normal circumstances, one has a stable image of a person one loves — a coherent mental frame. Without that stability, one is left with "a dozen snapshots that split and turn like the images in a kaleidoscope" (p. 34). When people speak of someone whose life is finished and whom they knew, they "generally use a certain tone of voice, integrating the end with the beginning" (p. 34). Kluger cannot do this, "because memory is a prison of sorts, too: you can't shake or alter the images engraved there" (p. 34).

Conclusion: The Holocaust's Distortion of Family Memory

Kluger's descriptions of her relationships with her family are overshadowed by the Holocaust and by the knowledge that many of those she loved failed to survive. Her memories of the people she cared for are distorted in a particular way: the images she carries are frozen, and no amount of grief or effort can alter them. The Holocaust did not only destroy lives; it disrupted the ordinary narrative arc by which the living integrate a person's end with their beginning, making coherent mourning nearly impossible.

Beyond individual grief, the confines of Jewish faith — imposed on the family like a cloak worn for survival — remain with Kluger throughout her adult life, across her many changes of location and relationship. She is, as she writes, never able to stop running and never able to feel "comfortably settled." Her memoir offers a view of the Holocaust as experienced by a Jewish girl that is disturbing and informative, and that deliberately dismantles any romantic or sentimentalized notions of that era.

References

Kluger, R. (2001). Still Alive: Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. Feminist Press at CUNY.