Ruth Klüger

Ruth Klüger (30 October 1931 – 6 October 2020) was Professor Emerita of German Studies at the University of California, Irvine and a Holocaust survivor. She was the author of the bestseller Weiter leben: Eine Jugend  (English translation by the author: Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered) about her childhood in Vienna and in Nazi concentration camps.

Biography

Ruth Klüger was born on 30 October 1931 in Vienna. In March 1938, Hitler marched into Vienna. The annexation of Austria by the Nazis deeply affected Klüger's life: Klüger, who then was only six years old, had to change schools frequently and grew up in an increasingly hostile and anti-Semitic environment. Her father, a Jewish gynaecologist, lost his license and was later sent to prison for performing an illegal abortion.

In September 1942, she was deported to Theresienstadt at the age of 10, together with her mother; her father had tried to flee abroad, but was detained and murdered. One year later she was transferred to Auschwitz, then to Christianstadt, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen. After the end of World War II in 1945, she settled in the Bavarian town of Straubing and later studied philosophy and history at the Philosophisch-theologische Hochschule in Regensburg.

In 1947 she emigrated to the United States and studied English literature at Hunter College and German literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Klüger obtained an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1967. She worked as a professor of German literature in Cleveland, Kansas, and Virginia, and at Princeton and UC Irvine.

Klüger was a recognized authority on German literature, and especially on Lessing and Kleist. She lived in Irvine, California, and Göttingen, Germany.

Her memoir, Still Alive, which focuses primarily on her youth in concentration camps, is critical of the museum culture surrounding the Holocaust.

Klüger died in her home in Irvine, California, on 5 October 2020, 25 days before she would have turned 89. She was buried at Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery.

Prizes

Klüger was awarded many prizes, including:

Rauris Literature Prize (1993)

Grimmelshausen-Preis (1993)

Niedersachsenpreis (1993)

Marie Luise Kaschnitz Prize (1995)

Andreas Gryphius Prize, honorary prize (1996)

Heinrich-Heine-Medaille (1997)

Österreichischer Staatspreis für Literaturkritik (1998)

Prix de la Shoah (1998)

Thomas Mann Prize (1999)

Preis der Frankfurter Anthologie (1999)

Goethe Medal (2005)

Roswitha Prize (2006)

Lessing Prize of the Free State of Saxony (2007)

Hermann Cohen Medal (2008)

Ehrenmedaille der Stadt Göttingen (2010)

Austrian Danubius Donauland Nonfiction Book Prize (de) (2010), for her life's work

Theodor-Kramer-Preis (2011)