As a Jew in Germany, at the age of 11, Kl. was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp together with her mother; her father - a practicing gynaecologist - had fled to Italy and then to France, when she was nine. Kl. never heard of him again. For a long time Kl. assumed he had ended up in Auschwitz. But that turned out not to be the case. In 1992, when her book 'Weiter leben' was published in French, someone got in touch with her, and told her about a group of 900 men who were transported to the Baltic states. There was a list and her father’s name was on it. Her elder step-brother, who was Czech and who she was very devoted to, met a similar same fate. 

About two years later (in September 1943), the Klügers were interned in the camps of Auschwitz and subsequently of Christianstadt, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen. Kl. and her mother didn’t go through the selection process on the ramps when they arrived, but went straight to the family camp. At the end of the war, the inmates of Christianstadt were forced to walk to camps within Germany. Kl. and her mother survived, by hiding with the help of a sympathetic pastor. 

Following the end of World War II in 1945, Kl. settled in the Bavarian town of Straubing where she finished her school education. In 1947 she emigrated to the U.S. and studied English literature in New York and German literature at Berkeley. Klüger obtained an M.A. in 1952, and later a Ph.D. in 1967. She worked as a college professor of German literature in Cleveland, Ohio, Kansas, and Virginia, and at Princeton and UC Irvine.

Kl. is a recognized authority on German literature, and especially on Lessing and Kleist. She lives in Irvine, California and in Göttingen/Germany. Kl.'s 1992 'Holocaust' memoir, 'Weiter leben - eine Jugend' (To Continue to Live - A Childhood) is a work, focusing on the difficulties Kl. faced as an inmate of Theresienstadt and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. For instance, when she and her mother arrived in Birkenau in the summer of 1944, her mother suggested that they throw themselves onto the electric fence in the yard so that they might be spared watching each other suffer. In 'Fairy tales' Kl. is retelling the story of 'Schneewittchen' (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) as a literary representation of her own broken childhood. An important thread in Kl.'s narrative is the 'Holocaust' and its legacy. She is bitterly critical of the museum culture which has grown up around the camps. 

Literatur über / Writings concerning Kl.: 
Vienna Reeks of Anti-Semitism

Letzte Änderung / Last update: 06.09.2008 

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