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MAX KADE CENTERFOR GERMAN-AMERICANSTUDIESNOVEMBER 1997Author Ruth Klüger to Speak about Holocaust ExperiencesRuth Klüger’s autobiographicalwork weiter leben, an account of herexperience in surviving Auschwitz,has won wide acclaim in Germany.Now also available in paperback, thebook has sold 200,000 copies. It hasbeen translated into Dutch, Italian,French, Spanish, Czech, and Japanese. Klüger has received numerousliterary awards, including theNiedersachsen Prize, the Grimmelshausen Prize, the Gryphius Prize,Rauriser Prize of Austria, and, mostrecently, the Heinrich Heine Prize.She will read selections from herbook, for the first time in English.Ruth Klüger taught at the Universityof Kansas from 1970 to 1972, and iscurrently professor emerita of theUniversity of California at Irvine. Herpresentation “A Jewish Childhood under the Nazis” will be on Wednesday,December 3 at 3:30 p.m. in 330Strong Hall.The following is a review of Klüger’sweiter leben: Eine Jugend by our recent visiting professor, EgonSchwarz:Although this book represents autobiographical holocaust literature, itshighly intelligent approach distinguishes it from most examples of thegenre. Its non-sentimental abstraction and psychological impartialitymatches the best in the literature ofmoral philosophy. Like her predecessors, Ruth Klüger is drawn to aphorism. Fake pieties surface only to bedissected and eliminated. None ofthem can prevail against the insightsderived from the extreme trials shehad to endure.Klüger’s spiritual and intellectualdocument describing personal suffering is balanced by reflection, abstraction, and synthesis. Beneath her selfanalysis, the images of her childhood,her incorruptible psychology, and hersearch for truth, lies the inexorablenonverbal reality that is not supposedto exist. But it does: the Anschluß,the exclusion of the Jews from theirhard-working social positions, the deportations, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, the “selection,” trying to cheatone’s way out of dying in the gaschamber, the workcamp Christian-stadt (the author regrets the inabilityof people to remember the names ofsmaller camps just because it is easierto recall only the famous concentration camps), the strategies and hardships of trying to go on with one’slife (“weiter leben”), the period afterthe war when being a Jew does notimmediately cease to be a stigma allat once, and the never fully successful attempt to return to normality.Weiter leben is a significant book, apiece of sad history, but it is also anattempt to penetrate into the center ofhuman emotions of people and, without tolerance for any cheap excuses,to describe the true motives for action and thought.It makes sense that Ruth Klügerrepeatedly addresses female readers;after all, at first she experienced thecruel exclusion and then the evenmore fatal world of the concentrationcamp not only as a Jew but also as afemale. But why does she believe thatonly men read things that were written by other men? Has she forgottenabout her male readers who are enthusiastic about the book?Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures(785) 864-7342; fax (785) 864-4298; e-mail: MaxKade@eagle.cc.ukans.edu

Ruth Klüger asserts ironicallythat the troublesome details of herautobiography—for example, the factthat toddlers, much younger than she,were deported—should become required common knowledge for Germans. Now, thanks to the success ofweiter leben, German-speaking readers have indelible images as constantreminders. If and when a translationbecomes available, English-speakingreaders will be able to view the holocaust from an entirely new perspective. Weiter leben is one of the finestworks about the most disgraceful period of German history.Albert Bloch made preliminary sketches on a copy of the 1936 University of Kansas commencement brochure.He incorporated the caricature of Hitler in his painting The March of Clowns (1941).

RediscoveringAlbert Bloch at theUniversity of KansasBorn in 1882 in St. Louis, AlbertBloch was trained in a local art schooland from 1900 to 1905 worked as afree-lance draftsman for severalnewspapers in both St. Louis andNew York. Bloch’s cartoons attractedthe attention of William MarionReedy, editor of The Mirror, a St.Louis-based political and literaryjournal with a national readership.Reedy hired Bloch in 1905 to contribute to The Mirror, which over thenext four years published almost twohundred of Bloch’s “Kindly Caricatures” of prominent St. Louisians,each of which was accompanied by atext written by Reedy. In 1908, withReedy’s encouragement and financialsupport, Bloch went to Europe to continue his artistic training. Though hevisited museums in London and Paris,Bloch settled in Munich, and therestudied independently, eschewing traditional academic instruction. Anencounter with reproductions of thework of Wassily Kandinsky in thecatalogue of the 1909 NeueKünstlervereinigung München(NKVM) exhibition encouragedBloch to seek out progressive members of the Munich artists’ community and eventually to pursue modernist experiments in his own paintings.ADOLPHUS BUSCHDAWSON WATSON, Albert Bloch’s art teacher in St. LouisIn 1911 Kandinsky, along withhis friend Franz Marc, visited Bloch’sstudio and soon thereafter proposedthat the American exhibit his workswith the NKVM. When conservativemembers of that society opposedBloch’s participation, Kandinsky andMarc protested, and invited Bloch tojoin them in their new venture, thefirst exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter(The Blue Rider), which opened inMunich in December 1911. Blochshowed six canvases in the first BlueRider exhibition, more than any otherartist except Gabriele Münter, whoalso showed six. He also exhibitedeight works in the second and finalBlue Rider exhibition, devoted tographics and watercolors, whichopened in March 1912 in Munich.Thereafter Bloch participated in othermajor avant-garde shows such as the1912 international Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne and the 1913 ErsterDeutscher Herbstsalon in Berlin. InDecember 1913, Herwarth Waldengave Bloch a solo exhibition at hisfamous Berlin gallery Der Sturm, andin 1916 Bloch shared an exhibitionwith Paul Klee at the same gallery.Meanwhile, the Chicago collectorArthur Jerome Eddy helped to arrange for solo exhibitions of Bloch’swork in Chicago and St. Louis in1915, and became an important patron of the artist.Following his return to the UnitedStates in 1921, Bloch held a solo exhibition at the Daniel Gallery in NewYork, but thereafter chose to withdraw from the art market; he nevershowed again at a commercial gallery,and exhibited only by invitation. After living briefly in St. Louis, Blochtaught for a year at the Academy ofFine Arts in Chicago (1922-23) before accepting the position of head ofthe department of painting and drawing at the University of Kansas in thefall of 1923. For the next twenty-fouryears, Bloch taught art at the University, leaving his imprint on countlessstudents, several of whom went on topursue successful careers as artistsand teachers. He also initiated andtaught the first courses in the historyof art at the University of Kansas.Bloch retired in 1947, but he continued to be an active painter, completing numerous canvases in the subsequent decade. He died in 1961,survived by his second wife, AnnaFrancis Bloch, whose dedication,knowledge, and accessibility havemade the rediscovery of Bloch possible.

Bloch and LiteratureRUDYARD KIPLINGI did my stint of newspaper drudgery, magazine illustration and thelike, sandwiched in amongst regularcontributions of political and portraitcaricatures to my dear old BillReedy’s “Mirror”. I had the greatbenefit of a good bit of private criticism from painters whom I respected,in New York, Paris, Munich; and then,somehow, I came into contact, during the Munich days, with Marc andKandinsky.— Albert Bloch, letter to Edward A. Maser,20 June 1955, reprinted in Albert Bloch: ARetrospective Exhibition of his Work from1911Bloch became an admirer of KarlKraus in 1914 and strove to enhancethe appreciation of the Austrian criticin the United States. He translatedsignificant portions of Kraus’s poetryand prose.Even before Bloch met Kraus, hewas a severe Austrian critic of histimes. In more than two hundred caricatures, to which William Reedy, theeditor of the Mirror, provided bitingprose texts, Bloch scrutinized thepowerful political, business, and cultural personalities as well as the social problems of St. Louis. The persistent attacks on human folly and itstragic consequences are constants inBloch’s work. In an illustrated essayBloch surveyed German and Austrianliterature in 1913, just before the outbreak of the war; he analyzed twentyprominent writers (includingHermann Bahr, Thomas TheodorHeine, Heinrich Mann, ArthurSchnitzler, and Karl Kraus). The article focuses on the promise andweaknesses of these writers. It alsorepresents Bloch’s determination tocommunicate to the American publica greater appreciation of German andAustrian culture. Though Bloch’searly work (including some of the earliest known comic strips) providesimportant documentary material forRICHARD STRAUSS (Munich, 1909)the history of journalism, his latersatirical work (including paintings,prose writings, poetry, and translations) represents important contributions to German literature and German-American studies.Franz Marc’s request of 1915 totranslate his essay “Das geheimeEuropa” into English helped Blochdiscover his talent as a translator.Bloch’s most important contributionsto German studies were in this field.The correspondence with Marc showsthat Bloch took his task as translatorvery seriously. He was determinedto communicate his friend’s analysisof the European crisis and his visionof peace precisely and persuasively.He faced a far more ambitious taskwhen he undertook to translate worksof Karl Kraus in the 1920s. Inspiredby ideas of Kraus, Bloch developedhis own theory of translation. Hecalled his translations “reconstructions,” which often involved radicaldepartures from literal translation, butwhich allowed him to remain faithful to the impact of the original textin form and content.Theodor Haecker (later knownfor his opposition to Hitler), whomKraus consulted in evaluating Bloch’sefforts, wrote effusively about thehigh quality of Bloch’s work. On thebasis of Haecker’s recommendation,Kraus designated Bloch as his authorized translator into English. Bloch’s