british holocaust poetry: songs of experience Gershon (n ́eeK ̈atheLowenthal), Lotte Kramer, Gerda Mayer, and Anne Ranasinghe ̈
(n ́eeAnnelise Katz), it is their major theme. To Michael Hamburger, who escaped
to Britain with his German-Jewish parents in 1933, we are indebted for not only his
own poetry but the magnificent translations of major Holocaust poets such as Paul
Celan and Nelly Sachs. Other Jewish poets born in Britain such as Dannie Abse,
Elaine Feinstein, and Denise Levertov, like Litvinoff, write as survivors who would
surely have perished if Germany had invaded. Emanuel Litvinoff might speak for
all these British-Jewish writers when he says, ‘My parents’ flight from Russia saved
me, my seven brothers and one sister, from the holocausts of famine and Nazism. I
am connected to these tragedies with the guilt and obsession of a survivor and they
inform almost everything I have written.’^30 As Harold Fisch recognized, the sense
of being a survivor (even if at one remove) does give such poets authority and a
right to speak. Some have felt it to be an obligation.
Non-Jewish British poets, too, who lived through the time, have written in
response to the Holocaust as politically engaged observers, such as W. H. Auden,
whose long-term partner was Jewish and who, like Stephen Spender, witnessed Nazi
Germany in the 1930s.^31 Edward Bond, whose wife is Austrian, claims in ‘How We
See’ that ‘after Treblinka’ we see racism differently, and in ‘If’ he invites us to imagine
‘if Auschwitz had been in Hampshire’, in order to argue that ‘We must create a new
culture’.^32 Alongside such bystanders are other poets who have alluded to the Holo-
caust extensively. Notorious amongst these is Sylvia Plath, whose work has given rise
to one of the major controversies concerning the (mis)appropriation of Holocaust
imagery for other purposes. Tony Harrison has also been criticized for insensitivity,
whereas Geoffrey Hill, like Peter Porter and Thom Gunn, appears to have enabled
readers to ‘reach out imaginatively’ in insightful ways, as Schiff demanded.^33
Poets of the next generation, born after the War, seem to have regarded their
obligations differently. For instance, James Fenton and Tom Paulin have each
produced a sequence of poems that approach the Holocaust circumspectly.^34
Though remarkably different in tone—Fenton’s poetry being calm and detached,
Paulin’s iconoclastic and at times scurrilous—they share similar aims. Fenton’s
epigraph from Hobbes’sLeviathanindicates what they have in common:
After great distance of time, our imagination of the Past is weak; and wee lose...many
particular Circumstances. Thisdecaying sense, when we would express the thing it self,
(^30) Litvinoff, cover ofJourney through a Small Planet(London: Clark, 1993).
(^31) History has caught up with his 1930s sonnet XVI of ‘In Time of War’, in which the places Auden
points to as real examples of ‘Where life is evil now’, are ‘Nanking. Dachau’ (inThe English Auden:
Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), 257).
(^32) Edward Bond, quoted in Schiff (ed.),Holocaust Poetry, 155 and 156.
(^33) Poems by Porter, Gunn, and Hill appear in Schiff’s anthology. Harrison is extensively discussed
in Antony Rowland,Tony Harrison and the Holocaust(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001)
and again inidem,Holocaust Poetry(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).
(^34) James Fenton, ‘A German Requiem’, inThe Memory of War and Children in Exile: Poems 1968–83
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 9–19; Tom Paulin,The Invasion Handbook(London: Faber, 2002).