Still Alive Response

Ruth Kluger’s memoir was a fascinating read, to say the least. She’s a witty, snide woman who “tells it like it is”. For me, her autobiography was the most fun to read this quarter. After reading the entire memoir, I wanted to revisit one of the passages we explored during class. My group tried to decipher the passage where Kluger states, “as Bertolt Brecht was fond of saying, the truth is concrete, meaning specific” (p. 66). Now, thinking about why she mentioned this line about truth. It was a quest, much like in Henreich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, for the truth. But for Kluger, the truth was enough specificity. In her half-brother’s death and especially her father’s, she was never able to know the details of their fates. She finds remnants and hears bits about what may have happened, but she will never know exactly what occurred or the product of the events (i.e. a burial ceremony). And this indefinite history of her brother and father is what haunts her with “what if” memories. For Kluger, the truth is something you can examine and pick apart, make sense of. It is also something devoid of sentimentality, because evoking the emotional part to memories makes it unreal and selfish saying, “It means looking into a mirror instead of reality” (p. 66). Thus, this outlook on life is appropriate to her character as being brutally honest.