Politics of Memory in Gerda Weissmann Klein’s All But My Life
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Department of English
Abstract
The present research project examines the politics of memory in Gerda Weissmann Klein’s memoir All But My Life in order to analyze how Klein’s act of remembering her traumatic past documents, the alternative picture of Holocaust history and shows how there is a politics behind remembering. It further explores how Klein, through her humanistic contemplation to rememorize past, develops her knowledge of humanity as the men’s responsibility and imparts it as a message for the world to learn. It claims the writer’s position as an ethical humanist whose painful memory aims at not lamenting the past but learning from it to heal and cope with the trauma. While doing it, the researcher has incorporated the theoretical insights of ‘working through’ by Dominick LaCapra from the field of Trauma theory and the philosophical ideas of Levinas’ ethical humanism in order to strengthen the major argument to its fullest logic. The research concludes with the findings that the writer’s politics behind remembering her traumatic past in the memoir is to heal her from the Holocaust trauma as well as to awaken the world for the preservation of humanity.
Keywords; Politics of memory, ethical humanism, Working through, Holocaust