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Abstract

This dissertation investigates the poetry of Holocaust poet and victim, Felice Schragenheim, subject of the 1994 journalistic book Aimée & Jaguar by Erica Fischer. I argue that Felice’s voice is contained within her poetry, but was silenced. This is due to a subtle power struggle between Felice’s lover Elisabeth Wust and author Erica Fischer for their own claims to Felice’s memory. Because these claims are largely unfounded and are rarely based on any solid fact, I argue that Aimée & Jaguar is an incidental work of ‘autobiografiction’, a concept created in 1906 by Stephen Reynolds. This dissertation will analyse Felice’s poetry in order to recover her ‘lost’ voice from the clutches of Wust and Fischer and will situate her voice within a collective consciousness of Jewish child victims. To establish this, I argue that Felice’s poems contain identical themes to those in the 1993 anthology I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944. These identical themes thus suggest a collective consciousness of emotions and thoughts shared by child Holocaust victims. Moreover, I argue that Felice’s poetry can be interpreted as a legitimate form of testimony in its own right and I will use Bella Brodzki’s theory ‘Testimony’ in order to convey this.

Course: English Literature - BA (Hons) - C0995

Date Deposited: 2021-03-11

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis13673.html