Archives of Thought
The Austrian-American literary scholar and writer Ruth Klüger, who, as a young girl, was deported with her mother to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz-Birkenau, recounts in her autobiography »Weiter leben. Eine Jugend« (1992) her coming of age as a Jew in Austria and Germany during the time of National Socialism, as well as the conditions of her survival and continued existence. Before she could think about her own weakness during the hours-long roll calls, she spent the seemingly endless time silently reciting poems, thereby creating a poetic counterbalance to the senseless and destructive chaos of her tormentors. Her accumulated wealth of literacy also proved life-saving as a measure of reassurance, for it can be understood as a strategy to maintain a respectful self-concept in a place of dehumanization. To keep her own thinking machine running, Ruth Klüger thus developed thought figures that she preserved in her archive of thoughts, imperceptibly arranging them for outsiders.
