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Before the Second World War, some 25 million people in Eastern Europe spoke Yiddish or German. Their numbers had grown over 750 years. The two language groups spread and developed in relative isolation from each other, though they occupied much the same territory and experienced similar fates during the Russian Revolution. In this book, Peter Stenberg uses literature to trace the destinies of these two separate but related language groups. He analyses works by well-known writers such as Aleichem, Singer, and Roth, and by others lesser known, such as Granach and Franzos, to show how the stability of the world of the Jewish shtetl began to erode because of pressures from within and without during the early part of this century. The annihilation of the Yiddish world in the genocide of the Second World War is described in novels by Hilsenrath, Becker, and Steinke. The destruction and expulsion of much of the Baltic-German and Mennonite communities in the Russian Revolution are described by von Vegesack and Neufeld respectively: those events provides a dramatic backdrop for the fate of almost all the East European Germans at the end of the Second World War, as fictionalized in novels by Bobrowski, Wolf, Lenz, and Bienek. Using epic works of literature, Journey to Oblivion examines the two linguistically related cultures and how their symbiotic relationship ended in a macabre dance of death.

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature. --- Deportation in literature. --- German fiction --- Yiddish fiction --- Yiddish literature --- History and criticism. --- Eastern Europe. --- Europe, Eastern --- East Europe

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It is by now almost a cliché that the flight and expulsion of Germans from east-central Europe at the end of the Second World War was a taboo topic in the German Democratic Republic. According to this claim, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) suppressed reference to flight and expulsion so as not to upset its socialist neighbors. This book shows that such a view does not hold up to serious scrutiny. While the topic may not have been addressed in the realm of politics or official commemoration, it was picked up again and again in literature, particularly fiction. Representations of flight and expulsion were by no means restricted, as some have asserted, to Christa Wolf's novel Kindheitsmuster: Niven's study documents around 100 novels and short stories published in the GDR that address flight or expulsion. He argues that in the 1950s and early 1960s GDR fiction included many refugee figures. The predominant emphasis was on their integration under socialism rather than their experience of flight and loss of home; nevertheless, flight and to a lesser degree expulsion were depicted, as was their impact on individuals. They continued to be thematized in the late GDR and even, to a degree, after unification. Flight and expulsion, then, were subject to a developing literary discourse in the GDR, a discourse that this book explores. Bill Niven is Professor in Contemporary German History at Nottingham Trent University.

German prose literature --- Emigration and immigration in literature. --- Emigration and immigration in motion pictures. --- Deportation in literature. --- Refugees in literature. --- Refugees in motion pictures. --- History and criticism. --- Motion pictures --- German literature --- East Germany. --- Expulsion. --- Flight. --- Integration. --- Literary Discourse. --- Literature. --- Loss of Home. --- Second World War. --- Socialism. --- Taboo.