Alsen Eberhard - J.D. Salinger and the Nazis

J. D. Salinger came to prominence as a writer during the postWorld War II renaissance of Jewish American literature. He stands out among other major writers of that movementSaul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamudbecause he deliberately avoided writing about Jewish themes. Above all, he avoided writing about the Holocaust even though he had seen what unspeakable atrocities the Nazis were capable of when he entered a recently abandoned concentration camp near the end of the war. In fact, there is only one reference to the Holocaust in all of his writings, including his wartime letters, and that reference is indirect.

Salingers fiction shares with the work of Bellow, Roth, and Malamud such traits as a predilection for New York City locales; educated, middle-class characters; and the theme of peoples alienation from the mainstream of American life. But it is hard to imagine that Bellow, Roth, or Malamud would have passed up the opportunity to write about the Holocaust if they had seen and smelled the still-smoldering corpses of scores of Jewish prisoners whose quarters the SS had set on fire.

There are complicated reasons for Salingers unwillingness to confront the Holocaust. Among them are his upbringing, his adversarial attitude toward the US Army, and his nervous breakdown shortly after the end of the war. These factors made him change his attitude toward the Nazis from an early unconcern, to a gung-ho Kill the Nazis attitude, and from there to a final nonjudgmental stance.

This book developed out of research I did for Shane Salernos 2013 film Salinger and for the massive oral biography that accompanied it. I am very grateful toMr. Salerno for funding research trips to archives in the United States and Germany. I am especially grateful that Mr. Salerno gave me permission to use this research in my book. Necessarily some of the material in my book overlaps with that in the chapters of Mr. Salernos biography, where it deals with Salingers concentration camp experience and his German wife. But the most important ideas I presentespecially the reasons Salinger came to feel nonjudgmental toward the Nazis and hostile toward the US Armydo not appear in Mr. Salernos book and movie.

Concerning my research in Europe, I want to express my gratitude to three archivists and two journalists who provided me with valuable information. The archivists are Jrgen Zottman of the Nuremberg city archive; Reiner Kammerl, who heads the town of Weienburg archive; and Lukas Morscher of the Stadtarchiv Innsbruck in Austria. I am also grateful to the freelance journalist Bernd Noack, who published new information about Salingers time in Germany in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and especially to Jan Stephan of the newspaper Weienburger Tagblatt, who allowed me to use information from an as-yet-unpublished interview with two relatives of Salingers German wife.

Additional thanks go to Norbert Hofmann of the University of Tbingen; to Sarah Elbert, formerly at Cornell University; and to Raphael Kadushin of the University of Wisconsin Press. They read an earlier version of the book and offered excellent advice.