Wednesday 1 March 2023
Hof van Liere | Prentenkabinet | Prinsstraat 13 | 2000 Antwerp
Free entrance. Registration by e-mail: ijs@uantwerpen.be.
In order to mark thirty years since the publication of her widely acclaimed memoirs, weiter leben. Eine Jugend (1992), as well as to promote the publication in 2022 of a new volume of essays, entitled The Legacy of Ruth Klüger and the End of the Auschwitz Century (edited by Mark H. Gelber), a one-day International Symposium is to be held at the Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Antwerp to honor the memory and legacy of Ruth Klüger (1931-2020) – Holocaust survivor, scholar, teacher, author, essayist, poet, and feminist. The lecturers and discussants will take this opportunity to assess her role in, and specific contributions to, several discussions concerning fields and perspectives which her writings and career helped to bring into focus critically. These include: the child survivor, forced labor, poetry during and after the Shoah, scholarly autobiography of the Shoah, critique of the memory culture of the Shoah, feminist perspectives and the feminist contribution to Holocaust historiography, beginning anew after the Shoah far from Europe, the return to Germany and Austria after the Shoah, the end (or nearing the end) of the Auschwitz century, among others.
Ruth Klüger (1931–2020) passed away on October 5, 2020. Born in Vienna (Wien Neubau) and deported to Theresienstadt as a child, she survived Auschwitz and the Shoah together with her mother. After living in Europe for a short time after the War, she immigrated to New York. She was educated in the U.S. and received degrees in English literature as well as her Ph.D. in German literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She taught at several American universities and finished her distinguished academic career at the University of California, Irvine. She has numerous scholarly publications to her credit, mostly in the fields of German and Austrian literary criticism and history. She is also recognized as a poet in her own right, an essayist, and a feminist critic. She returned to Europe, where she was a guest professor in Göttingen and Vienna. Her memoir, entitled weiter leben. Eine Jugend (1992), was a major bestseller and highly regarded autobiographical account, which was subsequently translated into more than a dozen languages. It has also generated a vigorous critical discussion in its own right. Ruth Klüger received numerous prestigious literary prizes and other distinctions. In 2022, the city of Vienna officially named a square in the neighborhood where she grew up “Ruth Klüger-Platz.”
Program
- 16:00 Welcoming remarks: Vivian Liska (Director Institute of Jewish Studies) and Waltraud Strommer (Director Austrian Cultural Forum Brussels)
Mark H. Gelber, on the occasion of the publication of the 20th volume in the series Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts (de Gruyter) - 16:15 - 18:00 Screening of Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger followed by a discussion with the documentary director Renata Schmidtkunz (Vienna) and Mark H. Gelber (Beer Sheva)
Moderator: Kathleen Gyssels (University of Antwerp) - 18:00 - 18:30 Coffee Break
- 18:30 - 20:30 The Legacy of Ruth Klüger – Three Lectures
Irène Heidelberger-Leonard (London), Der Jude als Frau, The Jew as Woman: Reflections on Antisemitism and Misogyny in the Life and Work of Ruth Klüger
Ulrike Offenberg (Berlin), Ruth Klüger and the Jewish Tradition of Women Saying Kaddish
Mark H. Gelber (Beer Sheva), Ruth Klüger’s Austrian, American, and Jewish Sensibilities
Moderators: Thomas Ernst and Annelies Augustyns (University of Antwerp) - 20:30 - 20:45 Concluding Remarks: Vivian Liska and Mark H. Gelber
- 20:45 - 21:30 Reception
Symposium organized in cooperation with Prof. Mark H. Gelber (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva) and with the financial support of the Österreichisches Kulturforum Brüssel.
Speakers
Renata Schmidtkunz, born in 1964 in West Germany, is an awarded senior editor, presenter and filmmaker of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation ORF. She studied protestant theology in Vienna and Montpellier, and started to work for ORF in 1988. She directed and produced Landscapes of memory (in German: Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger) between 2008 and 2011. The film was premiered on Ruth Klüger’s 80st birthday at the Vienna International Film Festival VIENNALE in Klüger's presence.
Image © Lukas Beck
Mark H. Gelber (Ph.D. Yale University) is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Center for Austrian and German Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel. He established and directed the International Summer University for Hebrew, Jewish Studies, and Israel Studies for German-speaking students in Beer Sheva. He has written, edited, and co-edited twenty books and authored one hundred academic essays, book chapters, and scholarly articles. He has been a Visiting Professor and Honorary Guest Researcher in Austria, Belgium, China, Germany, New Zealand, Slovenia, and the United States. Mark Gelber was elected to membership in the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (Darmstadt). The Republic of Austria selected him to receive the Austrian Medal of Honor in Science and Art, First Class (Österreichisches Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft und Kunst, 1. Klasse). He was a close friend of Ruth Klüger for almost forty years. They first came into contact with each other in the early 1980s when she was editor of the German Quarterly, and she accepted one of his early scholarly essays for publication. Subsequently, he invited Ruth Klüger to visit and to speak in Israel several times. The first time he hosted her, she read in his living room to a small group of some ten colleagues from a manuscript she was working on, tentatively entitled“Stationen.”Later, it became weiter leben.
Irène Heidelberger-Leonard is Professor Emerita of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (1980-2009) and Honorary Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary College, University of London since 2009. Member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (Darmstadt) since 1999. Author and editor of books on Günter Grass, Alfred Andersch, Ruth Klüger, Jean Améry, Jurek Becker, Peter Weiss, Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann, W.G. Sebald, Imre Kertész. Her biography on Jean Améry. Revolte in der Resignation (2004), was the “Sachbuch des Jahres von der Deutschen Bundeskulturstiftung,” the winner of the Raymond Aron Preis, and was awarded the Einhard Preis for “hervorragende internationale Biographik” in 2005. She is the General Editor of the nine volume edition of Jean Améry, Werke (2002-2008). Her latest book is Imre Kertész. Leben und Werk (2015). She was a close colleague and friend of Ruth Klüger since 1985 and is currently writing her biography.
Ulrike Offenberg is a rabbi and historian living in Berlin. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on the history and the political role of the Jewish congregations in former East Germany. Ordained by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem in 2016, she serves as a rabbi for the Jewish congregations of Hameln and Stuttgart. Also, she is a research fellow at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien in Heidelberg, and she is very active in Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim dialogue. She frequently writes for radio, print, and online media about Jewish, feminist, and interfaith issues. She recently translated Rabbi Dalia Marx’s volume, Durch das Jüdische Jahr from Hebrew into German. Currently, she is researching the rabbinical work of Regina Jonas, the world’s first woman rabbi, during her incarceration in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.