The Institution of Holocaust Literature

Separate from the timeline of wartime writing in the occupied zones, clandestine and therefore disparate; separate from the first public responses to the unfolding catastrophe among writers and artists in the free zone; separate from the timeline of recovery and of a new literary response aborning, both of which began on the day of liberation, there was a fifth timeline—the most sporadic and erratic—of literary canonization.

The course of Holocaust literature was set in 1947 with the publication of Het achterhuis, the wartime diary of Anne Frank. The politics of postwar publishing; how a work was edited; its cover art and additional textual apparatus; its adaptability for stage and screen; its suitability for young readers; and how fierce, on occasion, the controversies that it provoked—these and other seemingly extrinsic factors were decisive in the formation of a literary canon. Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Liberation in a new translation into English, the “definitive edition” re-presented Anne Frank as an assertive, sexually-aware young woman, bursting with literary ambition. As Anne Frank changed from child victim to young woman in love, so too did the reception of Holocaust literature during this formative period.

Setting a new course was the publication in 1986 of Art Spiegelman’s Maus I: My Father Bleeds History as a trade paperback. Maus was the intergenerational story of survival against all odds, marked by physical displacement and deep psychic wounds as recounted in a broken, borrowed tongue. By using the animal fable; adopting the stark realism of such writers as Borowski and Levi; by introducing multiple simultaneous time schemes, photographs and mixed media; by merging comics, underground comix and Holocaust iconography, Spiegelman was instrumental in establishing Holocaust literature as its own documentary-fictional genre.