The night (book)
Die Nacht is an autobiographical book by Elie Wiesel about his experience of the deportation to Auschwitz with his father, and the story of his own survival in the years 1944 and 1945, up to the liberation of Buchenwald by US troops. Wiesel originally wrote it in Yiddish, but it then appeared in French as La Nuit (1958).
Over the next fifty years it was translated into 30 languages. Night is the first part of a trilogy, followed by Dawn (1960) and Day (1961).
The original Yiddish manuscript, completed in 1954, comprised 862 pages and was initially published in Argentina in the original language as Un di velt hot geshvign ("And the world has been silent"). Finally, the Nobel Laureate in Literature supported François Mauriac Wiesel in finding a French publisher.
background
Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in Sighetu Marmației . His father was a trader Chlomo Wiesel, his mother Sarah (née Feig). At that time the city had an Orthodox Jewish population of around 10,000 to 20,000 people and was again subjected to Hungarian rule by the Second Vienna Arbitration from 1940.
At the beginning of the book, Wiesel describes the time after the annexation of the Maramureș district from 1941 to 1943 as relatively quiet for the Jewish population, despite the legal repression that was already in force. In 1944, after the German occupation of Hungary , over 20,000 people from Sighet were deported to extermination camps; between May 16 and June 27, 1944, there were a total of 131,641 Jews who were deported from northern Transylvania .
publication
The original manuscript Un di velt hot geshvign was initially edited for a 245-page publication in Argentina. With the support of Mauriac, Wiesel was able to win over the publisher Éditions de Minuit , which had grown out of the French resistance . In 1958 the publishing house published Wiesel's work as La Nuit , further shortened and condensed to 178 pages. In 1960, the New York publisher Hill & Wang published a translation that was again shorter than Night .
Publications in German language build u. a. based on the French version from 1958.
reception
Sometimes Wiesel was criticized for not having worked historically and documentary, but to condense events at the expense of factuality, with climactic intensification, characterization through dialogue and the like. a. generic literary elements, as literary critic Ruth Franklin notes:
“Wiesel's account is ballasted with the freight of fiction: scenic organization, characterization through dialogue, periodic climaxes, elimination of superfluous or repetitive episodes, and especially an ability to arouse the empathy of his readers, which is an elusive ideal of the writer bound by fidelity to fact. "
The reception in the German-speaking area is based on Wiesel's reception in the USA, especially against the background of a separate American Holocaust remembrance culture .
Individual evidence
- ^ Elie Wiesel, Curt Meyer-Clason, Martin Walser, François Mauriac: The night: Roman. Herder, Freiburg i. Br 1996.
- ↑ Franklin 2011, 71; Franklin 2006 .
- ↑ Lawrence L. Langer: The Dominion of Death. In: Harold Bloom (Ed.): Elie Wiesel's Night. Infobase Publishing, 2001, 16.
- ^ Hermann Theißen : Peter Novick: After the Holocaust. Dealing with the mass murder. Deutschlandfunk , March 19, 2001. Accessed June 26, 2017.