Abstracts "Soma Morgenstern’s book Die Blutsäule – an early attempt to deal with the Holocaust" There may be doubt whether Soma Morgenstern can be considered an Austrian author. Born in Eastern Europe, in Galicia, in 1890, he lived in Vienna for most of the time between 1918 and 1938 before being forced into exile; he died in New York in 1976 without having wanted to – or having been invited to – return to Vienna. (Still, in a letter written in 1972, he would characterize himself in these words: "I am not a German, but an Austrian Jew, born in Galicia".) There should be no doubt, however, that Die Blutsäule is one of the fascinating and visionary texts of post-1945 literature. Having learned about the Holocaust, where most of his family had been murdered, Soma Morgenstern had to overcome a series of writing blockades when he tried to deal with the horror. He finished the book, which he had started in 1946, in 1952; an English translation (The Third Pillar) appeared in 1955. The first German edition came out in Vienna in 1964; however, it is only through the tireless work of Ingolf Schulte, who started editing Soma Morgenstern’s collected works in the 1990s, that the book has found a wider readership – a theatrical production, based on the novel, was arranged and performed to wide acclaim by Conny Hannes Meyer in Baden bei Wien in 2000. In the Blutsäule Soma Morgenstern tried to come to terms with the Holocaust by writing a book in the style and the language of the Hebrew Bible; a short novel that brought together the real and the miraculous by showing a group of survivors sitting in trial over an SS unit that had performed a massacre. I propose a critical analysis of this book that will result in an ambiguous conclusion: Morgenstern’s book, powerful as it is, ultimately gives meaning to the Holocaust by contextualizing it within the Bible, within the holy Jewish tradition, and by placing it within a context of Heilsgeschichte – a strategy that may have been the only possible way for somebody like Morgenstern, a faithful Jew, to go on living, but that still is problematic to us, Spaetgeborene. Textauszug |
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