Blind Spots: Feminist Memory, Gendered Testimony, and Cultural Trauma in Holocaust Memoirs

This article examines how gender shapes Holocaust memory through close analyses of two canonical women’s memoirs: Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After and Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive (2001), a considerably rewritten and culturally reinterpreted version of her earlier German book Weiter leben (1992). Delbo, a French political deportee, and Klüger, an Austrian Jewish survivor, provide testimonies that challenge the male-centered paradigms that have long dominated the Holocaust literature. Although pioneering feminist scholars have shown that women experienced and remembered the Holocaust differently, gender-based analysis remains underused—not only in Holocaust studies but also in broader memory studies, where it is often assumed to be already complete or exhausted. This view of theoretical saturation reflects a Eurocentric bias that equates critical maturity with Western academic prominence, thereby masking the ongoing influence of gender on the production, circulation, and reception of testimony worldwide. Drawing on trauma theory, concepts of multidirectional memory and postmemory, systems theory of media, and ethical approaches to testimony, this article argues that gender is not merely descriptive of Holocaust experience but also constitutive of how trauma is narrated, circulated, and archived. Testimony, as a cultural form, is inherently mediated, and that mediation is fundamentally gendered. This analysis illustrates how Delbo and Klüger create gendered testimonial forms through unique aesthetic strategies. Delbo’s writing focuses on seeing by invoking a feminist aesthetics of voir as imagined and ethical visualization, while Klüger’s narrative emphasizes voice, utilizing rhetorical sharpness and ambivalent narration to challenge postwar silencing. Instead of equating gender with femininity, the article understands gender as a relational and intersectional system—one that includes masculinity, non-binary identities, and structural power differences. It also questions Eurocentric assumptions that feminist critique has been fully explored within memory studies, urging renewed engagement with gender in transnational contexts, such as the often-overlooked testimonies from wartime Shanghai. Ultimately, this article argues that feminist approaches to Holocaust testimony expose the gendered structures of grievability that determine which kinds of suffering are preserved—and which remain unspoken.