Ruth Klüger (born 1931) is Professor Emerita of German at the University of California, Irvine. She was born in Vienna and, after the Nazi annexation of Austria, she was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp together with her mother at the age of 11; her father had tried to flee abroad, but was detained and killed. One year later she was transferred to Auschwitz, then to Christianstadt, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen. Following the end of World War II in 1945 she settled in the Bavarian town of Straubing and later studied philosophy and history at the University of Regensburg.
In 1947 she emigrated to the United States and studied English literature in New York and German literature at Berkeley. Klüger obtained an M.A. in 1952, and later a Ph.D. in 1967. She worked as a college professor of German literature in Cleveland, Ohio, Kansas, and Virginia, and at Princeton and UC Irvine.
Klüger is a recognized authority on German literature, and especially on Lessing and Kleist. She lives in Irvine, California and in Göttingen.
Her memoir, Still Alive, which focuses primarily on her time in concentration camps, is strongly critical of the museum culture surrounding the Holocaust.
Publications include:
She has also published under the name Ruth Angress.
Klüger has been awarded many prizes, including: