AS WAS DISCUSSED IN THE INTRODUCTION, Saul Friedländer has called for attention not only to the “everyday life” of “ordinary” Germans in the Third Reich but also to the “everyday life” of the victims of the National Socialists (1994, 262). The following poems provide portrayals of daily occurrences in the concentration camps. They also show how daily atrocity alters the nature of “everydayness.” They suggest in other words that everyday living with extreme physical abuse, in harmful conditions, and among corpses numbs the senses and undermines the sense of time. The poems foresee that “everyday life” in atrocity may subsequently, as an aftereffect, destroy the everydayness of ordinary life after a return to “normalcy” for those who survive.

Monotony versus Meaning

Born in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) in 1906, Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz first worked as an agricultural apprentice and then became a bank employee. During this time he wrote poetry and short essays for newspapers and magazines. He emigrated from Germany to France in 1934, and in 1937 he became a tour guide on the Italian island of Ischia. He was never directly involved in politics and did not belong to any political organization, yet in 1940 he was arrested under allegations that he had made remarks critical of the current governments in Germany and Italy. Security forces extradited him and detained him in a prison in Innsbruck.