Words from the rubble: Wolfgang Borchert's representations of the inexpressible

This study of Wolfgang Borchert's short stories reveals hidden representations of the atrocities and inexpressible horrors that the writer witnessed between 1941 and 1947. Clearly traumatized by his experiences as a soldier on the Russian frontier during the Second World War, Borchert returned home in 1945 to the nightmarish landscape of Hamburg and its apathetic citizenry. Deathly ill, he related his experiences in numerous short stories. This dissertation focuses on these short stories and uncovers the different rhetorical techniques Borchert uses in order to represent the inexpressible horror of his experiences. At times, his words read as reportage as they openly detail ghastly occurrences and images confronting his protagonists; at other times, such frightening imagery only hints at its existence by hiding as subtext in the margins of the story. Through a close textual reading, I draw this concealed imagery out from behind the facade of reportage. My methodology melds the interpretive palimpsest of philosophical hermeneutics with a particular semiotic approach of "thick description" that was first employed by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. This hybrid approach binds Borchert's stories to his time as cultural artifacts and targets certain words or phrases in order to unveil hidden significations that reveal an unspeakable snapshot of his times unnoticed by traditional literary criticism. In other words, my approach allows me to peel back the facade of his description-as-reportage in order to reveal new interpretations, additional subtexts, created in the margins of the text. I assert that Borchert's manner of hiding images and not speaking openly actually conceals representations of the Holocaust, the terror of the battlefield, and the incomprehensible field of rubble and ruins in Hamburg. Moreover, I contend that Borchert shares certain rhetorical attributes with other authors such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Jerzy Kosinski, Jean Amery, Heinrich Boll, and Gunter Grass, all of whom have struggled in the their attempts to express the unspeakable horror of their experiences. And although Borchert's experiences were markedly different from those of Holocaust survivors who wrote about their suffering, I argue that the representation of such suffering in Borchert's written stories has a tendency to hold similar rhetorical conventions and forms.