Littners Werk und Koeppens Beitrag. Eine textnahe Untersuchung von zwei Darstellungen des Holocaust: Wolfgang Koeppens Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch und Jakob Littners Mein Weg durch die Nacht

Abstract

The thesis examines two literary works, Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch, published in 1948 in Munich, supposedly being the Jewish survivor Jakob Littner’s Holocaust memoir and Jakob (Jacob) Littner’s original memoir Mein Weg durch die Nacht, written in 1945 but not published until 2002. In 1992, the former work was republished, as Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch, this time as a fictional text written by the prominent German author Wolfgang Koeppen, the well-known author of a modernist trilogy revealing the remnants of National Socialism in the German society, written 1951–54. Littner’s day-to-day struggle for survival in an Eastern Galician ghetto is the subject of both works. In 1999 it was shown that Koeppen’s text relied heavily on Littner’s manuscript. In 2000 a shortened translation of Littner’s manuscript was published as Journey through the Night. With the purpose of collecting examples of the widest range possible of different ways Koeppen has transformed Littner’s text, I have applied Wolf Schmid’s four tier model of narrative constitution on Koeppen’s and Littner’s texts. While preserving (although in some respects simplifying) Littner’s vast amount of historically verifiable information, Koeppen has transformed the style of Littner’s text as well as the narrator’s inner life.