'Fur-ein-Kind-war-das-anders', childhood in Holocaust literature:: Louis!Begley'a Lugen in 'Zeiten des Krieges' (1991-94) and Ruth!Kluger's 'weiter leben, Eine Jugend' (1992)

Authors who try to express their Holocaust memories not only in the form of documentarism and realism, but also through differentiated means of literary representation, face a complex problem. They have to find a language for traumatic experience and, at the same time, an appropriate on the 'former child'. Based on the novels by Ruth Kluger (weiter leben) and Louis Begley (Wartime lies), this essay deals with literary forms of reconstruction and representation of Jewish childhoods during the Holocaust. In different, ways both works thwart the traditional genres and routine readings of autobiographic texts. They construct bulky metaphors of memory and an anti-linear topography of literary imagination, which is of great interest for the research of cultural memory.