am Institut für Germanistik der Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
am Institut für Germanistik der Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
The aim of this project is to record the early texts of the German-language Holocaust and camp literature from 1933 to 1949 in an online database. In doing so, these early texts, which were largely superseded by cultural and collective memory, can be rediscovered and made accessible for public, scientific and didactic perception.
Self-published German-language works are included in the online bibliography (http://www.fruehe-texte-holocaustliteratur.de). In addition to content summaries, autobiographies and lists of publications are also provided if such information is available.
Project partner: Department of Holocaust Literature and the University of Giessen Library
Project Manager at the Department of Holocaust Literature: Charlotte Kitzinger
E-Mail: charlotte.kitzinger@germanistik.uni-giessen.de
Memory Discourses in the Holocaust and Camp Literature After the Disappearance of Eyewitnesses
The remembrance of the Holocaust still has high political and public relevance. Soon, however, there will no longer be any direct witnesses of Nazi crimes. All that remains is "only" the texts that testify to the disaster and document it. These "testaments" of individual memories must be preserved, in many cases even developed and made accessible to a collective memory after the testimony of the times.
(Re) Discovery of Early Texts
The early texts of the Holocaust and camp literature are particularly important. Numerous German-language texts were already published parallel to the persecution and extermination texts that appeared in exile and underground, and above all in the phase between 1944/45 and 1948/49. The great significance of these early testimonies lies, among other things, in the fact that they bear a double testimony: of the National Socialist crimes themselves, to which they are in close temporal and spatial proximity, and of the specific contexts of origin. Often, the texts also have a strong didactic and political character. However, these early texts have largely been forgotten and pushed out of the collective and cultural memory. A systematic and comprehensive bibliography of the Holocaust and camp literature in general and especially of the texts of the years 1933 to 1949, as well as a comprehensive research based on it, is long overdue. This project seeks to fill this research gap.
Digital Giessen Collections / Early Holocaust Literature
The collection "Early Holocaust Literature" on DIGISAM (http://ahlwiki.ub.uni-giessen.de/index.php/Frühe_Texte_der_Holocaust-_und_Lagerliteratur_1933_bis_1949) is part of the project "Early Texts of Holocaust and Camp Literature". It provides complete electronic versions of German-language works of Holocaust literature from 1933 to 1949. Much of these historically significant testimonies, which are the first to address the crimes of the Holocaust and the concentration camps, can be obtained today only with great effort.
The acquisition, registration and cataloging of this literature is a main objective for the Department of Holocaust literature and the University Library Giessen. The aim is to preserve these testimonies of the victims of the Holocaust and to make them more widely used, also in view of their growing importance after the "age of contemporary witnesses". The publication platform provides copyright-free texts of Holocaust literature from 1933 to 1949, which were digitized in the University Library in Giessen and are also available there in print form. This platform is continuously being expanded to include digitized out-of-print and so-called “orphaned” German-language full texts.