Writing after Hitler
The Work of Jakov Lind
Distributed for University of Wales Press
Jakov Lind was born in Vienna in 1927. As an eleven-year old boy from a Jewish family, he left Austria after the Anschluss, found temporary refuge in Holland, and succeeded in surviving inside Nazi Germany by assuming a Dutch identity. After a literary apprenticeship in Israel, he made his reputation through works of fiction written in German, although he now lives in Britain and writes in English.
Lind’s writings are distinguished by an extraordinary variety of stylistic and linguistic modes, which are used, in both his autobiographical and his fictional narratives, to express the experiences of exile, linguistic dislocation and cultural uncertainty. The articles collected in this volume reassess the strategies which Lind adopted to explore the implications of living and writing ‘after all that occurred under Hitler’.
Writing After Hitler: The Work of Jakov Lind is the first comprehensive study of this creative and controversial writer and will be of interest not only to students and academics working in German and Austrian Studies, but to everyone interested in the Holocaust, the literature of exile and the cultural legacy of central European Jewry.
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Edward Timms and Andrea Hammel
1. Unsentimental Journeys: The Literary Career of Jakov Lind
2. Jewish Refugees in the Netherlands and the Art of Survival
Johannes Houwink ten Cate
3. Jakov Lind and Zionism as a Literary Phase
Mark H. Gelber
4. Representations of the Holocaust in Jakov Lind’s Fictional Writings
5. At War with Language: From The Diary of Hanan Malinek to Travels to the Enu
6. Jakov Lind and the Austrian Popular Theatre
7. Writer without a Home: The Reception of Lind’s Work in Germany and Austria
8. The English-language Reception of Lind’s Fictional and Dramatic Work: From Soul of Wood to Ergo
9. Code-switching in Exile Literature: Jakov Lind’s Cosmopolitan Style
10. Gender, Individualism and Dialogue: Jakov Lind’s Counting My Steps and Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben
11. Memories of Survival in the Netherlands (‘Meine Erinnerungen’)
Bibliography by Silke Hassler