“I once visited Dachau with some Americans who asked me to come along. It was a clean and proper place, and it would have taken more imagination than your average John or Jane Doe possesses to visualize the camp as it was 40 years earlier”, wrote Ruth Klüger.

It also takes more imagination than most people possess to understand what Ruth Klüger experienced in her own life. In her book “weiter leben. Eine Jugend” (“Still alive: a Holocaust girlhood remembered”), she describes how she was shaped by her experiences of disenfranchisement and her abduction to the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Groß-Rosen. In 1947, Ruth Klüger emigrated to the USA, where she studied English literature and German literature before going on to become a lecturer in literary studies at various universities, latterly at the University of California in Irvine.

With her multi-award-winning publications “weiter leben” and “unterwegs verloren” in particular, Ruth Klüger created a special form of remembrance. It was therefore an exceptional honour for us to welcome her as a guest at the German Exile Archive 1933–1945 in the German National Library in 2011. Together with Herta Müller, she used the occasion to explore possible contemporary forms of remembrance.

On 27 January 2016, Ruth Klüger was invited to give a talk at the German Bundestag to mark the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism. She spoke of forced labour, of the double disenfranchisement of women, of her own experiences. She concluded her speech with a look at the present and referenced Angela Merkel’s words “We will manage”: “[...] this country which, 80 years ago, was responsible for the worst crimes of the century is now applauded by the world for its open borders and its willingness to welcome Syrian and other refugees with such kindness and warm-heartedness. I am one of the many onlookers whose response to this has shifted from bemusement to admiration. That was the main reason why I was so pleased to accept your invitation and take advantage of this opportunity to speak about the atrocities of the past here, in this setting, in your capital city – in a country where a very different kind of example is being set with the seemingly understated and yet heroic words: “We can do it.”

These are also the words by which we should remember Ruth Klüger. She passed away in the night from 5 to 6 October 2020.

(Dr. Sylvia Asmus)