Translating Testimony: Jakob Littner’s Typescript and the Versions of Wolfgang Koeppen and Kurt Nathan Grübler

Summary

This typescript also formed the basis for another text, Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch, that was published in 1948. That same text had been reprinted in a facsimile edition in 1985 by Kupfergraben Verlag in Berlin, and was then republished, to much literary debate, with the same title, but now under the authorship of the well-known West German writer, Wolfgang Koeppen, in 1992. While admitting that there had been some notes from which he had elaborated his text, Koeppen, however, did not mention the existence of the typescript in his preface to the 1992 publication. Reinhard Zachau encountered Kurt Grübler and the typescript as part of his quest to discover the “genuine” Jakob Littner, whom he had sought to trace after it had become clear that Littner’s biography and Holocaust experiences had, as Koeppen’s preface suggested, been the basis for Koeppen’s version. The belated surfacing of the typescript demonstrated how closely (and, one might say, faithfully), Koeppen had worked with the typescript in composing his own work.

The multifaceted ethical and documentary complexities of the Koeppen/Littner case have been described and analyzed on a number of occasions. The rights and wrongs of Koeppen’s adaptation of Littner’s text have produced two major lines of argument: one that condemns any “tampering” with a Holocaust memoir (the position of, e.g., McCombs, Klüger, and Zachau), and the other, less common, which more benevolently stresses the imaginative potential of literature and literary form. Ruth Franklin argues that Koeppen’s work is “an artistically coherent text, one that rises above the specific circumstances of its narrator to present a vision of humanity in extremis.” In this article, I revisit in the specific context of translation the questions raised in my earlier reading of Koeppen’s and Littner’s texts, which focused on how Koeppen’s text interrogates language as a specific tool of racial definition. In doing so, I mean to open out questions of alterity that are implicated both in any work of translation, and any re-telling of testimony. My starting point is Walter Benjamin’s citation from Rudolf Pannwitz in “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (The Task of the Translator), where Pannwitz criticizes those translators who “have a far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works …