Rosen, Alan. Autobiography from the Other Side: the Reading of Nazi Memoirs and Confessional Ambiguity

In this article, Alan Rosen discusses the complicated position of Nazi memoirs and autobiographies using Rudolf Hoess’ “My Soul” (1947) as a case study. Rosen follows a motif of confession throughout Hoess’ memoirs and uses it as a benchmark to discuss the position of the reader in relation to works written by perpetrators themselves. Rosen argues that in “My Soul” the reader is put in the position of the confessor, a position that is compromised earlier in the memoir by a priest who betrays Hoess’ trust in early childhood. Rosen performs a compelling close-reading of “My Soul,” which serves as an interesting example of how to engage with perpetrator testimony from a literary studies perspective. In addition to his own response, Rosen discusses two other responses to “My Soul”. The first is by Tzvetan Todorov, who attempts to separate his critical analysis from his affective response to the memoir. Todorov divides his reading into two parts, in which the affective section is “shorter, italicized, and set off in parentheses” and “implicitly tries to offer an alternative model for encountering memoirs from the other side” (562). However, Todorov’s inclusion of these affective responses and his critical attention to the parts of the memoir that evoked them provides, according to Rosen, “a strategy […] for reading Hoess against the grain” (563). The second response discussed by Rosen is Kolbe and the Kommandant (1983) by Ladislaus Kluz, a literary biography that takes the motif of confession as its inspiration by mirroring Hoess’ life to Catholic priest Maximilian Kolbe, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz and later canonised as a saint. In Kluz’ narrative, Hoess’ “My Soul” as his final confession is both “the key evidence for Hoess’ restored humanity” and “the solution to the problems of confession” throughout the narrative (564). This motif of confession thus makes Kluz’ work “just as dependent as Hoess’s autobiography on the power of confession to make or unmake a life” (564).

Author of this entry: Lotte van den Eertwegh

Rosen, Alan. “Autobiography from the Other Side: the Reading of Nazi Memoirs and Confessional Ambiguity.” Biography 24, no. 3 (2001): 553-569.