In Memoriam: Ruth Kluger, 1931-2020

Ruth Kluger, professor emerita of German studies at the University of California, Irvine, and a scholar of the Holocaust, died on October 5 at her home in Irvine. She was 88 years old.

A native of Vienna, Austria, Kluger was sent to a concentration camp in 1942 and transferred to Auschwitz a year later. She survived the war and immigrated to the United States in 1947. Dr. Kluger earned a master’s degree in English literature at Hunter College of the City University of New York. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in German literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Kluger joined the faculty at the University of California, Irvine in 1976. She spent the years 1980 to 1986 on the faculty at Princeton University before returning to the University of California, Irvine. She retired from teaching in 1994.

Professor Kluger was the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (Feminist Press, 2001). The original German version of the book has been translated into at least 12 languages.