The Holocaust in British Literature: From W. H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues” (1939) to David Edgar’s Albert Speer (2000)

• Christoph Houswitschka

Writing about the Holocaust is one of the most difficult tasks for poets, novelists, and dramatists. How can these ineffable events be represented without playing them down? In what manner can the uniqueness of the Holocaust, a breach in civilization, be recreated in language without losing its significance for the present? It has been observed by many critics that the first and foremost step to a solution of these problems is to analyse thoroughly the temporal and local perspectives from which the Holocaust is described. Writing about the Holocaust will always be a question of perspective. The perspective does also determine the memory of the Holocaust as a political and cultural problem. “Holocaust studies begin and end with the questions, ‘How do we remember? How do we interpret?’” In the following this is shown with the help of a few exemplary texts in which these issues are raised from prewar, post-war, and post-Cold War perspectives in British poetry, novels, and drama.

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