Reconsidering Yikzor Books: Do German Memorial Books Count?

• In Event: New Approaches to Holocaust Literature

Abstract

This paper considers how best to understand the Yizkor or memory books that describe, document and commemorate the destruction of individual, family and communal life we know as the Shoah. Rather than reiterate the conventional and well-documented literature on Yizkor books that presumes they exist almost exclusively in Eastern Europe, I consider those books written and published in small towns and cities as well as better-known metropolises across Germany, which I argue are more alike their Eastern European counterparts than they are distinct from the latter. Using a sample of almost forty memory books written and produced in Germany in the decades following the war, I demonstrate the epistemological advantages of adopting a more geographical expansive definition of what a Yizkor book is. Rather than reproduce an Eastern European and German Jewish binary, I ask what can we gain by adopting a more inclusive definition of memory books? Or alternately are there persistent differences in their form and content that would support maintaining traditional definitions of Yizkor books? The scholarship on Eastern European Yizkor books provides an instructive foundation for my own engagement.

The analysis maps patterns of authorship, funding, and distribution. Did these patterns change over time, vary by region of the country, or size of the hometown? In the conclusions of the paper, I consider how these books provide varied evidence of collective memory in the aftermath of a disaster and suggest the volumes represent practices of mourning, commemoration, philosemitism and ultimately reparation.

Author

• Judith Gerson, Rutgers University