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©Arnold Heidsieck

Bellow, Styron, Roth: representation of anti-Semitism and its relationship to


German cultural history in Jewish and non-Jewish American novels.

From a non-European perspective, important aspects of the relation between anti-


Semitism and German cultural history have been worked out in American novels of
the last 30 years. The following treatment suggests the plausibility that the public
debate since 1945 in Germany about such aspects has resulted in similar insights.

Bellow
Saul Bellow’s mature novels rarely address anti-Semitism and totalitarianism
directly, but occasionally they do make important statements about these subjects,
and frequently offer intriguing commentaries about German intellectual history. As
the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Bellow grew up in Chicago speaking
English and Yiddish. He is possibly the most significant American novelist of the
second half of the 20th century. His portrayals of mid-century American business,
intellectual, and legal settings are unparalleled in their linguistic-idiomatic
penetration. As a professor in a specialized doctoral program at the University of
Chicago (Committee on Social Thought) since 1962, he also possessed considerable
knowledge of the works of major social theorists such as Adam Smith, Hegel,
Marx, Durkheim, Mill, Toennies, Weber, Sombart, Schumpeter, Polyanyi,
Marcuse, Freud, Jung, Erikson, and Ferenzci.

Each of these names and their theories are ironically mentioned or addressed in
what may be Bellow's most important novel, Humboldt's Gift (1975), the story of
Chicago-born secular Jewish intellectual Charlie Citrine, a man who oscillates
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between a romantic calling to be a major artist and a lucrative career as a film and
nonfiction author. Throughout the novel, Citrine's musings juxtapose the theoretical
models proposed by leading philosophers and sociologists (especially German)
with his observations of the everyday of ordinary lives in Chicago and New York.
The contrast between European theory and American reality serves not only
specific ethnic applications but also as a source of humor at various points
throughout the book. In one instance, at Yellowstone National Park, Citrine notes
that biologists of the Park Service have gone to great pains to create large
billboards that reconstruct the habits and activities of resident beavers, but that the
animals themselves carry on with their daily life without paying the least attention
to the surrounding explanations of their behavior. 1

For Citrine his observation provides a key analogy: he feels that it should apply to
people as well. The residents of Chicago (and generally the United States) are
special cases of such indifference to categories directed at them, the 'so-labeled.'
Citrine's frequent ironic citations of concepts from explanatory systems,
particularly those by German theorists, e. g., on the origins and dangers of
capitalism (such as “alienation”), aim to show these concepts to be over-reaching
and even a bit “whiny” in view of prevailing practices, people’s normal business
conduct. Many are descendants of Eastern European Jewish immigrants with names
like Srole, Pinsker, Tomchek, Swiebel, Szathmar, Urbanovich, and Franush. The
novel sometimes offers up Walpurgis Night-like scenes like the one in a Russian
“shvitz,” the public sauna on Division Street in Chicago full of peculiar fellows:
“Slavonic cavemen and wood demons, […] there may be no village in the
Carpathians where such [steaming and eating] practices still prevail.” (The name

1
Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift [1975] (Penguin Books: New York, 1984[ff.]), 286; the following quotes are on 78f.;
124; 129; 226; 162f.
3

“shvitz” is spelled with “shv” in order to phonetically preserve the Jewish German
word “schwitzen” [to sweat] in English.) Despite such slightly grotesque scenes
and stories, the daily life that is depicted is the unvarnished, imperfect democratic
world in which each person pursues the life of his or her choice. It is hardly an
existentially devalued, soulless and mindless daily grind into which the average
man falls or is thrown, as e. g. Martin Heidegger ascribes to the anonymous
“everyman.” Citrine particularly rejects his friend Humboldt’s view that the
intellectual of the modern world is estranged from his creative, romantic roots, that
he as a Jewish intellectual is doomed to be left out: to be nothing but “a Yiddisher
mouse in these great Christian houses.”

With the idea of human indifference to theoretical explanation of one’s behavior


(the ‘beaver analogy’) as background, Bellow develops two views of the
philosophical devaluation of ordinary life in German thought before 1945. If Raul
Hilberg’s pioneering book The Destruction of the European Jews (1961)
maintained that the Holocaust was made possible by four layers of German
bureaucratic über-efficiency—that of the military, economic, civil-administrative,
and SS machinery—Bellow suspects an additional operational element of the social
structure: its various ideological rationales. Citrine's ingeniously humorous
observations continually point to the notion that system-like historico-philosophic
constructs, especially those descended from the German tradition, such as an
increasing, irresistible bureaucratization (Weber’s “Iron Cage”) 2 and socialist,
nationalist, or centralist (state-defined) utopianisms shared in the blame for the fate
of European Jews. In contrast, American Jews had the good fortune of being

2
In Humboldt's Gift Bellow shows himself fascinated and amused by Weber's contradictory insight into modern
“disenchantment” (155; 197; 203; 364) and, at the same time, “charismatic” requirements of modern politics (199).
Bellow pokes fun at the latter -- under the Hegelian term “world-historical individual” (18; 365) -- through references
to academic eggheads gathering around President Kennedy or the messianic-apocalyptic fervor of the right and the
left in the 1950s and 1960s.
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Americans at the time of the Holocaust, due in part to the underdeveloped condition
of most of these elements in American culture.

The second view amounts to Bellow’s suspicion that the notion of “everyday
ordinariness” in German theory is very different for Heidegger and even Hannah
Arendt than it might be seen in mid-century Chicago and the United States in
general. Citrine published, among many others, the quasi-philosophical book Some
Americans. The Sense of Being in the USA (a play on Heidegger's Sein und Zeit),
but it sold so poorly that it was pulled off the shelves. A clearer example of
Bellow's amusement at Heideggerian philosophizing is the figure of the intellectual
Herzog who notes in Bellow’s eponymous novel (1964): “Dear Doktor Professor
Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression 'the fall into the
quotidian.' When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?” 3
And later in the novel: “No philosopher knows what the ordinary is, has not fallen
into it deeply enough.” 4 Herzog sketches a humorous account of some of the elitist-
authoritarian excesses in German philosophy and culture:
We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods
of the intellectuals. The canned sauerkraut of Spengler's “Prussian Socialism,”
[…] the cheap mental stimulants of Alienation, the cant and rant of pipsqueaks
about Inauthenticity and Forlornness. […] Of all the evils of standardization of
the old bourgeois Europe of Spengler, perhaps the worst was the standardized
pedantry of the Spenglers themselves—this coarse truculence born in the
Gymnasium, in cultural drill administered by an old-fashioned bureaucracy.

3
Saul Bellow, Herzog [1964] (Penguin Books: New York, 1976[ff.]), 55; the remaining quotes are on 117, 82f.;
347f.
4
In Humboldt's Gift Bellow sees Heidegger's themes of “ordinariness” and “boredom” in relation to Hitler's Table
Talks: Hitler “had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with Schlag while he bored them […]
Everyone was [...] afraid to go to the toilet.” (201)
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[And in the middle of this passage:] [The dead] flow out of the extermination
chimneys, and leave you in the clear light of historical success—the technical
success of the West. […] mankind is making it […] unified by the horrible
wars, instructed in our brutal stupidity by revolutions, by engineered famines
directed by 'ideologists' (heirs of Marx and Hegel and trained in the cunning of
reason).

Similarly, in Bellow’s novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), Sammler, having


literally dug himself out from the grave after a German mass shooting in Poland,
tries to comprehend his Holocaust experiences within the aesthetic fascism
operating in German culture of that period:
The Germans had been the giants of the [modern] Method in industry and war.
To relax from rationality and calculation, machinery, planning, technics, they
had romance, mythomania, peculiar aesthetic fanaticism. These were like
machines—the aesthetic machine, the philosophic machine, the mythomanic
machine, the culture machine. Machines in the sense of being systematic […]
based on labor. 5

In another instance of pointing up a mere (amoral) functionality of culture, the


fictional Herzog questioned Nietzsche's relativist genealogy of morality:
Dear Herr Nietzsche—My dear sir, May I ask a question from the floor? You
speak of the power of the Dionysian spirit to endure the sight of the Terrible,
the Questionable, to allow itself the luxury of destruction, to witness […] Evil.
[…] Some of these expressions, I must tell you, have a very Germanic ring.
[…] [You want us to question] relentlessly, with iron determination, into evil,

5
Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet [1970] (Penguin Books: New York, 1977[ff.]), 19; 18, 16.
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through evil, past evil, accepting no abject comfort. […] Any philosopher who
wants to keep his contact with mankind should pervert his own system in
advance to see how it will really look after adoption.6

Sammler, who had just come away with his life, could also find no common ground
with Hannah Arendt:
The idea of making the century's great crime look dull is not banal. […] the
Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better
way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or
trite? [...] But do you think the Nazis didn't know what murder was? [...] human
beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred. [...]
Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience. 7

In 1999, at age 84, Bellow had an extensive, free-flowing conversation with his
friend Norman Manea which appeared posthumously in Salmagundi in 2007.
Throughout this interview Bellow led his friend through arrays of personal events
and issues that had shaped his writing career. He spoke about the Holocaust in ways
that went far beyond his portrayal of it in his 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet. His
provocative remarks point to a better understanding of his long-standing severe
disagreement with Hannah Arendt over her thesis of the banality of Nazi evil. In
Sammler’s Planet a disciple of Arendt’s fictional stand-in says: “[There] is no spirit
of evil. Those people were too insignificant […], they were just ordinary lower-

6
Bellow's later friend at the University of Chicago, Allan Bloom, in his book The Closing of the American Mind,
Preface by Saul Bellow (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks: New York, 1987) offers similar views on Heidegger and
Nietzsche. Here we have the interesting case of a non-fictional account of a specific philosophical-historical topic
attempting to emulate its previous fictional treatment.
7
Cf. Sammler's remark about his niece Margotte: she looked at "everything under the sun with such German
wrongheadedness. As though to be Jewish weren't trouble enough, the poor woman was German too." (S. 17). Since
Margotte echoes the “banality of evil”-thesis of her professor Hannah Arendt, the remark ultimately is aimed at
Arendt. – Her idolizing of Christian-German “High Culture” amounts to a denial of her own Jewishness (“Saul
Bellow in Conversation with Norman Manea,” in Salmagundi 155-56 [Summer-Fall 2007] 131-211; 167, 174-181).
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class people, administrators, small bureaucrats, or Lumpenproletariat. A mass


society does not produce great criminals.” Against this perhaps simplistic novelistic
comment on Arendt’s position Bellow makes clear in this portion of the interview
that the “naked nihilism” (S. B. in Conversation) and horror of the Holocaust
consisted not just in “ordinary” or “administrative” (and in that sense banal) murder
but in the over-all administrative dehumanization of victims. He says:
[T]he real subject is the expendability of a certain branch of humankind,
namely the Jews, that they can be gotten rid of and nobody can protect them
[…] having their death, their elimination [not] taken seriously. I think there is
something in the fact that it’s always presented by the enemies of the Jews as a
kind of comedy. [It] was part of the genius of the Nazis to confer on the thing a
comic aspect. The man may have lost his pants, and is trying to cover himself,
but he’s a goner. He’s doomed. (S. B. in Conversation)

This passage insists that the German genocide was perpetrated not just by society’s
“small bureaucrats” (Sammler’s Planet) but both indirectly, and directly, by its
well-educated “in the name of an heroic age.” (S. B. in Conversation) Given
Bellows tenor, this would be an age of militarized racial arrogance and hatred.
Through jolting metaphor Bellow wants to show events through the mindset of the
perpetrator. Taking away the Jews’ civil liberties (their “pants”) was the blueprint
for exclusion, intended ridicule (“comedy,” “comic aspect”) and ultimately “trivial”
elimination. Bellow feels certain that the horror of the Holocaust cannot be
artistically rendered. Anachronistically, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” may be the
closest thing to portraying this dehumanization, to rendering something “in this
line”. Bellow wants these metaphors to reveal a historical truth.
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His three novels try to show the German culture's susceptibility to authoritarian
structures and anti-Semitism. They form a narrative arc from ironic citations of
late-romantic philosophical constructs (Heidegger's; Nietzsche's) and reflections on
culturally operating totalitarian aesthetics to carnivalesque parodies of idealist
systems, especially those by (and in the tradition of) Marx and Hegel. On the other
hand, Bellow views the destruction and racism in twentieth-century Europe as,
among other things, a screen for the historic loss of a peculiar American innocence,
which has been a main topic of American literature during the past hundred years.
Accordingly, Citrine says:
[We Americans weren't] locked up in madhouses for our ideas, […] slave
laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and
nights of terror. [And further:] Americans! With their stupid ideas about love,
and their domestic tragedies. How could you bear to listen to them after the
worst of wars and the most sweeping of revolutions, the destruction, the death
camps, the earth soaked in blood and fumes of cremation still in the air of
Europe.

I am not sure to what “domestic tragedies” refers, whether it be television series


about families for families, plays like Death of a Salesman, or maybe even the
Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank, in which the deeper historical
dimensions are overlooked. However, only three years after the appearance of
Humboldt’s Gift, the television series Holocaust became the first success in popular
fictional culture to attempt to merge the domestic aspect with the events of the
Holocaust as a whole. Notwithstanding his mocking of “domestic” (that is,
narrowly individualist) literary portrayal of social actions, Bellow prefers it to any
collectivist description or explanation.
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Styron
The notion that a loss of cultural moral innocence has a different, less severe
meaning for the United States than it does for Europeans (or particularly the
Germans) is also an important motif in William Styron’s novel Sophie's Choice
(1979). Stingo, the novel's narrator, shares many characteristics with Styron
himself. Both have a Calvinistic, Southern background and write an early novel
about a bloody slave revolt in Virginia. Both were led by their experiences of
African American protests in the 1960s to a moral examination of the Holocaust in
a novel whose convoluted narrative, spanning multiple decades, compels the label
'baroque.' Taking a much more personal tone than Bellow, Styron's novel received
American as well as European acclaim. Even before Meryl Streep’s Oscar for her
role as Sophie in the 1982 movie Sophie's Choice, Styron was given a place of
honor next to French President Mitterand during his inauguration dinner at Élysée
Palace. Mitterand stated at the time that he was deeply engaged with Sophie's
Choice. 8 Although merely of anecdotal significance, this does reveal one
European's fascination for this unmistakably American attempt to portray the
phenomenon of Auschwitz from a purely fictional perspective, far removed from
the direct experience with Nazism, Germans or surviving victims. By incorporating
narratives from Sophie, a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz, into America's
immediate post-war period, the author produces a penetrating “artist's novel” that
sends the previously mentioned motif of American innocence into a further
historical spiral. Stingo, an aspiring author, is initially an uninvolved, naive
contemporary who during the time of Sophie's struggle for survival in Auschwitz
was concerned with nothing more important than his alma mater's (Duke
University) sports teams and his extensive sexual fantasies.

8
Victor Strandberg und Balkrishna Buwa, An Interview with William Styron, in: Sewanee Review 99 (1991), 463-
78; 472.
10

The novel incorporates Rudolf Hoess’ life story—the Auschwitz commandant's


summary autobiography, written before his execution—in such a way that when
Stingo first reads it 15 years after meeting Sophie in 1946/47, it confirms to him her
personal account of Auschwitz. "It confirms one's belief in the basic truthfulness of
Hoess's account to know that during Sophie's brief stay under the Commandant's
roof she, like the other prisoners, just as she claimed, was never in any way or at
any time badly treated." 9 Employed in the Kommandant’s house for several months
as his personal secretary, Sophie provides a point of view that covers both the
“selection ramp” and Hoess’ cunningly deceiving language of death, which Sophie
is forced to record stenographically and then in typewritten form. Hoess himself is
quoted directly: "Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not
was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked
the necessary breadth of view." Styron intends to use the figure of Sophie (as well
as that of her fellow prisoners) to show that “absolute evil absolutely paralyzes us”
—that the prisoners’ ruthless will to live places them under nearly unbearable
moral pressure. Yet, he insists, that during their imprisonment, Sophie and others
were confronted with a battery of actual moral dilemmas and choices, such as
organizing resistance or sharing food. Sophie also knew that, as a Polish woman,
she could feel safer because the Germans were initially killing mostly Jews. All of
these things forced her to ask herself and others during her recuperation in New
York whether she was a victim or collaborator.

Contrary to such unheard-of mutual displacement of documentary authenticity and


fictionality in this novel, it nevertheless alludes more historically, with an

9
William Styron, Sophie's Choice [1979] (Vintage Books: New York, 1992[ff.]), S. 167; the remaing quotes are on
165; 428 ("absolute evil paralyses absolutely"); 161; 160.
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educational intent, to the Hoess autobiography. Styron relates how during World
War I the 17-year-old Hoess becomes the youngest sergeant in the German army
and then slowly develops, as if on autopilot, into an obedient robot and mass
murderer. It shows, according to the novel, “the cretinous innocence […] of an
obedient robot.” The autobiography, a portrayal of the “true nature of evil, […]
should be read throughout the world by professors of philosophy, ministers of the
Gospel […] historians, writers, politicians and diplomats […] lawyers, judges […]
children, those incipient American leaders at the eighth-grade level, who should be
required to study it along with The Catcher in the Rye, The Hobbit and the
Constitution." Beyond the mass extermination the novel portrays the lethal
exploitation of inmate industrial labor (by the chemical concern I. G. Farben e. g.)
in Auschwitz. Styron’s view of the Southern slave system implies for him the
paradox that it was the Southern-rarified culture, claiming a spurious moral
superiority, that went astray. Such paradox can provide a glimpse into the human
perversions of German culture that (within the novel) was perceived in a wide
swath of eastern and central Europe economically, scientifically, and musically as
exceedingly powerful. In Styron’s opinion, his early intensive literary occupation
with the cruelty of the slave system provides him with insights into this genocide,
which is not limited to targeting just Jews. The question arises of whether the long
gestation time for Sophie’s life story within the narrator until he finally sets it down
on paper 25 years later resembles the historical pause between the events of the
Holocaust and their delayed empathic representation (a coming-to-terms-with) in
German post-war literature.

Roth
Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004) addresses the anti-Semitism present
in America at the end of the 1930s. Many protested and objected to Roosevelt’s
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massive financial and technological aid to Great Britain at the beginning of the war.
Roth imagines an alternate history set in 1941-42 with Charles Lindbergh as
President, at which time Jews are suspected as war-mongering foreigners. They in
turn—in the young narrator’s eyes—experience this threat through the ironic-
anachronistic insight “never before”. 10 The “plot” in the title can be interpreted in
four different ways. (1) An anticommunist, anti-Semitic right-wing Lindbergh tries
to align America with Germany or, at least, preserve America's neutrality in the
European war. (2) Hitler's minions abduct Lindbergh's baby Charlie and have him
raised as a model Hitler youth in the hope of pressuring Lindbergh into canceling
the 'Bill of Rights' and permitting a Jewish Holocaust in America. (3) After
Lindbergh's mysterious disappearance over the Atlantic parts of the public impute
to Jewish circles the President’s abduction to Canada in order to draw America into
the war and seize political dominance for themselves. (4) In response to this
purported plot, the extreme right-wing overthrows the government and arrests the
most powerful “Roosevelt Jews,” who attained influence in the 1930s (Supreme
Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, New York
State Governor Lehman, and others), and even the non-Jewish Roosevelt himself.
These arrests result in anti-Semitic riots throughout the country.

The last two plots underscore how American anti-Semitism differs from the
German variety (or from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion). By the 1930s many
American Jews had become so politically prominent that—within the novel's
fictitious events—the implausible Jewish cabal might appear believable to
religiously or ethnically paranoid segments of the populace. A simple number may
illustrate the conceit of the fiction and consequently the impossibility of an
American fascism at that time in history: in 1940, the year before the imagined
10
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America [2004] (Vintage Books: New York, 2005), 172.
13

Lindbergh presidency, the United States delivered to the British 50 older destroyers
as part of the Lend/Lease program—nominally in exchange for the use of British
military bases but really without any expectation of material reimbursement or
payment.

Counter-factual events have always been a signature feature of Roth's novels which
invent all sort of 'counter-lives,' individually or historically alternate stories about
their protagonists. For example, Nathan Zuckerman, the first-person narrator of The
Ghost Writer (ultimately Roth himself), is being admonished: "If you had been
living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a [purportedly
anti-Semitic] story? 11 The counterpart ['double'] Philip Roth of the narrator Philip
Roth in Operation Shylock promotes the return of all 'European' Israelis to the
countries of their respective origin. They would be welcomed with joy, because if
one ignored the Holocaust, they are really Europeans: "If Hitler had not existed […]
then it would seem to you no more unthinkable that Jews should be also Europeans
than they should also be Americans." 12 At the stated fictional time, the first-person
narrator of Plot is of the same age as the author and is named Philip Roth. The
novel therefore makes clear that the ethnic threat is how it might appear to an eight-
year-old boy. During incidents of (in the thirties not uncommon) personal anti-
Semitic hostility this boy sees himself as a member of the “American Jewish” clan
or tribe and fears being robbed of the equal protection of law, the loss of his civic
equality. Historically speaking, Roth judged his situation differently in The Facts. A
Novelist's Autobiography: "Not only did growing up Jewish in Newark in the
thirties and forties […] feel like a perfectly legitimate way of growing up American
but, what's more, growing up Jewish as I did and growing up American seemed to

11
Roth, The Ghost Writer [1979] (Vintage Books: New York, 1995), 102.
12
Roth, Operation Shylock [1993] (Vintage Books: New York, 1994) 42f.
14

me indistinguishable." 13 The novel not only aggravates the narrator's counter-


factual hurt personally and legally-politically, but fashions a fairytale-like 'counter-
life' for Charlie, Lindbergh's actually murdered two-year old son, while
marginalizing the novel's imaginary Charles Lindbergh:
The Lindberghs were at last allowed to visit their child, by then a handsome
fair-haired boy of almost eight who, from the day he had arrived in Germany,
had been raised as a model Hitler youth. The German-speaking cadet did not
understand, nor was he told, that the famous Americans to whom he and his
classmates were introduced following parade exercises at their elite military
academy were his mother and father. 14
With this fantastic episode toward the novel's end Roth has described an arc from
the relatively benign anti-Semitic hostility in a Lindbergh-run country—which still
remained a Jewish “homeland”—to the then-thoroughly anti-Semitic, militarized
German culture.

This essay tries to show that these three novelists reacted very personally to the
German anti-Semitism of that time. Bellow sees it as a product of a long-standing
intellectual tradition, Styron as the moral downfall of an entire culture. For Roth
anti-Semitism and Holocaust become the outer limits of a non-historical, dystopian
America. This paradoxical construction not only illuminates, as most of his novels
do, the Jewish-American experience, but also signals all our increasing historical
distance from a mythically perceived radically evil Hitler-Germany.

13
Roth, The Facts. A Novelist's Autobiography (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: New York, 1988), 122.
14
Roth, The Plot Against America, 322; (5: "our homeland was America").
15

This essay is based on a paper presented to a 2007 conference at the Universität Bielefeld
(translated into English by Matthew Held). It appears in the conference proceedings
Literarischer Antisemitismus nach Auschwitz, ed. Klaus-Michael Bogdal, Klaus Holz, Matthias
Lorenz (Metzler: Stuttgart/Weimar, 2007). The present website version makes use of a recently
published Bellow interview from the journal Salmagundi [Summer-Fall 2007].

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