ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on memorial site literature written by four German-language post-war visitors: Horst Kruger, Gunter Kunert, Rolf Schneider, and Peter Weiss, to the camps. It compares and contrasts several short works by German-language authors who engage with divergent East and West German discourses of memory. The chapter examines a variety of perspectives by East and West German authors who visit the sites of the former extermination and concentration camps. It analyses Gunter Kunert's visits to the concentration camps of Dachau in West Germany, a memorial site since 1965 and above all an American symbol of the camps, Mauthausen in Austria, and Buchenwald, the focus of East German official memory. Kruger presents himself as an expert on the Auschwitz war crimes trials, and indirectly underlines the centrality of Peter Weiss's work to memory discourses in both East and West Germany in the mid 1960s.
