Trauma in First Person

Amos Goldberg is Chair of the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His major fields of research are the cultural history of the Jews in the Holocaust, Holocaust historiography, and Holocaust memory in a global world. The Hebrew edition of Trauma in First Person won the Eggit prize for Holocaust literature and research in Israel.

What are the effects of radical oppression on the human psyche? What happens to the inner self of the powerless and traumatized victim, especially during times of widespread horror? In this bold and deeply penetrating book, Amos Goldberg addresses diary writing by Jews under Nazi persecution. Throughout Europe, in towns, villages, ghettos, forests, hideouts, concentration and labor camps, and even in extermination camps, Jews of all ages and of all cultural backgrounds described in writing what befell them. Goldberg claims that diary and memoir writing was perhaps the most important literary genre for Jews during World War II. Goldberg considers the act of writing in radical situations as he looks at diaries from little-known victims as well as from brilliant diarists such as Chaim Kaplan and Victor Kemperer. Goldberg contends that only against the background of powerlessness and inner destruction can Jewish responses and resistance during the Holocaust gain their proper meaning.

PrefaceIntroduction: "If This is a Man"Section I: Reading Holocaust Diaries1. Holocaust Diaries-Between Life Story and Trauma2. Reading the Diaries as a Critique of Holocaust Historiography3. The Dynamic of the Text between the Two Deaths-A Theoretical Model for the Reading of Traumatic TextSection II: From Autobiographical Time to Documentation Time: Victor Klemperer's Diar4. The Life Story of Victor Klemperer5. The Disruption of Life-Story Time in the Klemperer Diaries6. From Autobiographical to Documentary DiarySection III: The Jewish Self and the Nazi Other: Chaim Kaplan's Warsaw Diary7. Chaim Kaplan and his Diary8. The Jews and Nazi "Law"9. Between Perpetrators and Victims: The Gray Zone of Consciousness in the Diary of Chaim KaplanConclusionBibliographyIndex