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Ruth Klüger (2008): "Vienna is crying out for anti-Semitism"
Photo: Arno Burgi / picture alliance / dpa
It wasn't comfortable for anyone, nor did it want to be.
Not like some of the others who suffered in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald and who looked ever more friendly towards the Germans in the course of their lives.
No, Ruth Klüger was indignant, even bitter, about what happened to her and her family to the end.
Born in Vienna in 1931, Klüger grew up in a Jewish, educated middle-class family.
When she was just eight years old, her father fled to Paris and was ultimately killed by the Nazis. She herself came to Theresienstadt with her mother in 1942 and from there to Auschwitz.
What she experienced in the concentration camp and how she survived the Holocaust, she told in her 1992 book "Live On", a critically acclaimed bestseller, perhaps the most honest, shocking memoir of a survivor ever.
Because Klüger, who emigrated to the USA after the war and made a name for herself there as a professor of German studies, always judged harshly - about herself and others and of course about the perpetrators who suppressed or denied their guilt.
She quarreled with her hometown to the end. "Vienna," she said, "cries out for anti-Semitism."
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Klüger in 2016 at a speech in the Bundestag on the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau
Photo: FABRIZIO BENSCH / REUTERS
Many disturbing scenes from "Live on" will be remembered.
For example the hour-long roll calls with which the inmates were tortured.
Ruth Klüger, a passionate reader from an early age, passed the time reciting the ballads by Friedrich Schiller.
She knew them all by heart.
Or the selection in 1944, when mother and daughter had the chance to leave Auschwitz and be taken to another camp, Christianstadt, for work.
The mother told her not to tell her real age, because that would make her too young to work.
Ruth, a defiant teenager, didn't listen to the mother, said she was 13 and was turned down.
With a lot of luck she was allowed to do the procedure again, the mother begged her again, but the daughter refused.
Ruth Klüger told Josef Mengele that she was 15 - and only survived when a writer, a prisoner like her, also told her not to say, for God's sake, that she was 13.
Ruth Klüger was showered internationally, but above all in Germany and Austria, with literary prizes and medals, but that never put her mildly.
"When an animal species is almost extinct because it has been hunted so intensely," she commented dryly, "the remaining specimens are given special care."
Brilliant and at the same time unpretentious
When her friend Martin Walser - the two had met shortly after the war at the university - attacked Marcel Reich-Ranicki in 2002 with the novel "Death of a Critic", she announced the friendship with Walser.
"Especially in its subliminality", she wrote to him in an open letter in the "Frankfurter Rundschau", "your presentation follows an almost classic pattern of discrimination."
Ruth Klüger has always seen herself as a feminist, her books, such as "Was Frauen haben" (2010), were always a challenge to the male view of literature and history.
She resolutely rejected the famous Brecht quote "The lap is still fertile, from which it crept" about the danger of a relapse into fascist barbarism.
"The rulers were all men. That's why one shouldn't speak of a lap. The metaphor bothers the Germanist."
But only the metaphor could be added.
Because Ruth Klüger never believed that mankind was moving towards a better future.
When she arrived in Auschwitz, she said in an interview with SPIEGEL, a woman in her car could not believe what she was seeing.
"But we're in Central Europe," said the lady.
As if one had to be protected from such madness by culture and civilization.
A fatal error, as Klüger said.
"I don't think that somehow saved us from anything."
Anyone who was lucky enough to meet Ruth Klüger, like the author of these lines, experienced a woman who argued extremely alert and quick-witted in conversation, who was brilliant and at the same time indecent in her decisive judgments.
And yet one always felt that the external hardness with which she armored herself protected a core that was insecure and injured.
Wounded by what she had experienced in her childhood and what she could never forget - and wanted.
Ruth Klüger died on Tuesday night in California after a long illness.
She was 88 years old.
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