Holocaust literature has developed along a checkered path because right after the war, there was wholesale denial, side by side with the discovery of what the Nazis had done. The German intellectual class creatively talked of a "Stunde Null," thus verbally nullifying previous events. The much admired "Trümmerfrauen" didn't only seem to clean up the mess that the allied air strikes had leftin German cities but also the historical mess. To be sure, the discovery of the genocide helped establish the state of Israel, but basically the public at large wanted to be leftalone when it came to details. There were a lot of reports, some true, some lies, there was a cottage industry of Holocaust pornography, but essentially here and in Europe the world was future oriented and the survivors were regarded with suspicion. What had they done to stay alive? Had they sacrificed others? There was literature that warned of them, as if they were escaped criminals; and the surviving children were sometimes seen as if they were mistreated puppies, to be pitied, but too corrupted by their experiences in the camp to be admitted into a decent household and polite society and perhaps beyond redemption. In a bestseller of 1955, Hans Scholz' novel Am grünen Strand der Spree, a book that was still selling in ordinary bookstores as late as the mid-eighties, a German veteran, who is not a Nazi and functions as a reliable narrator, tells of his experiences with Jews in Poland. Polish Jews, in his narration, mistreat other Jews so badly that children turn to the German invaders for help. A little girl trustingly asks the narrator whom she addresses as "Scheener Herrr aus Daitschland" to shield her from the blows of her "Rassegenossen." The scene is staggering in its self-serving unreality. Moreover, remember, the term "Holocaust" for the Jewish catastrophe only came into use in the seventies. (Elie Wiesel claims he first used it in this sense and brought it into circulation.) Since language is so important to our thought processes, until there was a verbal label for it, the genocide of the Jews didn't stand out from all the other multimillion deaths which Hitler Germany had inflicted on the world. And since it wasn't identified as a special problem, the Allies did not make it a special subject in the reeducation of the German people. There was no attempt to remember or teach the history of European and German Jews, neither the history of their achievements nor of their persecution and certainly no attempt to analyze the phenomenon of antisemitism. And let's face it: there wasn't much talk about it at American colleges and universities either.