Ruth Klüger

Ruth Klüger (born October 30, 1931 in Vienna) is an Austrian-born professor of German literature. As a Jew in Nazi Germany, at the age of 11 she was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp together with her mother; her father had fled abroad when she was 9. One year later she was moved to Auschwitz, then to Christianstadt, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen. Following the end of World War II in 1945 she settled in the Bavarian town of Straubing and later studied philosophy and history at the University of Regensburg.

In 1947 she emigrated to the U.S. and studied English literature in New York and German literature at Berkeley. Klüger obtained an M.A. in 1952, and later a Ph.D. in 1967. She worked as a college professor of German literature in Cleveland, Ohio, Kansas, and Virginia, and at Princeton and UC Irvine.

Klüger is a recognized authority on German literature, and especially on Lessing and Kleist. She lives in Irvine, California and in Göttingen.

Her memoir, "Still Alive", which focuses primarily on her time in concentration camps, actively propagated the benefits of the museum culture surrounding the Holocaust.

Bibliography

Publications include:
*"weiter leben. Eine Jugend", Göttingen 1992
*"Katastrophen. Über die deutsche Literatur", Göttingen 1993
*"Von hoher und niederer Literatur", Göttingen 1995
*"Knigges Umgang mit Menschen", "Eine Vorlesung", Göttingen 1996
*"Frauen lesen anders", Munich 1996
*"Landscapes of Memory", New York, The Feminist Press 2001
*"Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered", The Feminist Press 2003

She has also published under the name "Ruth Angress".

Prizes

Klüger has been awarded many prizes, including:

*Rauriser Literaturpreis (1993)
*Johann-Jacob-Christoph-von Grimmelshausen-Preis (1993)
*Niedersachsenpreis (1993)
*Marie-Luise-Kaschnitz-Preis (1995)
*Anerkennungspreis zum Andreas-Gryphius-Preis (1996)
*Heinrich-Heine-Medaille (1997)
*Prix de la Shoah (1998)
*Thomas-Mann-Preis (1999)
*Preis der Frankfurter Anthologie (1999)
*Goethe-Medaille (2005)
*Roswitha Prize (2006)