Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory

This is a meditation on memory and on the ways in which memory has operated in the work of writers for whom the Holocaust was a defining event. It is also an exploration of the ways in which fiction and drama have attempted to approach a subject so resistant to the imagination. Beginning with W. G. Sebald, for whom memory and the Holocaust were the roots of a special fascination, Bigsby moves on to consider those writers Sebald himself valued, including Arthur Miller, Anne Frank, Primo Levi and Peter Weiss, and those whose lives crossed in the bleak world of the camps, in fact or fiction. The book offers a chain of memories. It sets witness against fiction, truth against wilful deceit. It asks the question who owns the Holocaust - those who died, those who survived to bear witness, those who appropriated its victims to shape their own necessities.

• An accessible examination into the work of a range of writers including W. G. Sebald, Arthur Miller, Anne Frank and Primo Levi • Author is extremely well-known for his extensive work in the area of twentieth-century drama and literature • Makes an important contribution to Holocaust studies and Sebald studies

1. The past remembered; 2. W. G. Sebald: an act of restitution; 3. Rolf Hochhuth: breaking the silence; 4. Peter Weiss: the investigation; 5. Arthur Miller: the rememberer; 6. Anne Frank: everybody’s heroine; 7. Jean Améry: home and language; 8. Primo Levi: from the darkness to the light; 9. Elie Wiesel: to forget is to deny; 10. Tadeus Borowski: the world of stone; 11. Memory theft; Coda.