Memory of the Holocaust as an Imperative: Places of Remembrance — Auschwitz and the Monument of the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — in the Writings of Stephan Hermlin that Were Written after the Second World War

Abstract

In the literature of the GDR, where the problem of the II World War was a central topic, texts that were related to the annihilation of the European Jews were almost nonexistent. The reasons of this void were political matters: The political leaders of the GDR created so called “anti-fascist creator myth” of a new country and claimed themselves as “the heroes of the history”; additionally they declared aggressive anti-Israeli politics. The works of Stephan Hermlin, written in 1949, in the same year as the creation of the GDR, are a few of the examples that faced the Holocaust in the literature generated in the East Germany. The main starting points in the author’s writings were the places of the remembrance that he visited in 1949: Auschwitz and the Monument of the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; in his writings the memory of the murdered victims becomes a value of a superior significance.