European Memories of the Second World War 9781782389637

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION: STUDYING EUROPEAN LITERARY MEMORIES
PART I THE GERMAN SOLDIER’S MEMORY
1 PRIVATE AND PUBLIC FILTERS: MEMORIES OF WAR IN HEINRICH BÖLL’S FICTION AND NONFICTION
PART II THE RESISTANCE MEMORY
The Female Resister
2 ORDINARY HEROINES: RESISTANCE AND ROMANCE IN THE WAR FICTION OF ELSA TRIOLET
3 ‘THIS BOOK DOES NOT WANT TO BE A WORK OF ART. THIS BOOK IS TRUTH.’ THE DIARIES OF RUTH ANDREAS-FRIEDRICH
4 A WOMAN’S PERSPECTIVE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND HISTORY IN GIOVANNA ZANGRANDI’S RESISTANCE NARRATIVES
The Male Resister
5 VERCORS – WRITING THE UNSPEAKABLE: FROM LE SILENCE DE LA MER (1942) TO LA PUISSANCE DU JOUR (1951)
6 ‘A HISTORY FULL OF HOLES’? FRANCE AND THE FRENCH RESISTANCE IN THE WORK OF STEPHAN HERMLIN
7 WAR, CIVIL WAR AND THE PROBLEM OF VIOLENCE IN CALVINO AND PAVESE
8 IMAGINING LOSERS IN BUFALINO’S DICERIA DELL’UNTORE
PART III THE FASCIST’S MEMORY
9 MEMORY AND CHRONICLE: LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE AND THE D’UN CHÂTEAU L’AUTRE TRILOGY
10 PORTRAIT OF THE POET AS A DEAD MAN. ERNST JÜNGER’S WRITING IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR: STRAHLUNGEN
11 CHANGING IDENTITIES THROUGH MEMORY: MALAPARTE’S SELF-FIGURATIONS IN KAPUTT
PART IV THE VICTIM’S MEMORY
12 REVIEWING MEMORY: WIESEL, TESTIMONY AND SELF-READING
13 PRIMO LEVI. THE DUTY OF MEMORY
14 LA DOULEUR: DURAS, AMNESIA AND DESIRE
15 MYTH, MEMORY, TESTIMONY, JEWISHNESS IN GRETE WEIL’S MEINE SCHWESTER ANTIGONE
PART V THE MEDIA OF MEMORY: MAY 1968 AND CINEMA
16 L’ARMÉE DES OMBRES AND LE CHAGRIN ET LA PITIÉ: RECONFIGURATIONS OF LAW, LEGALITIES AND THE STATE IN POST-1968 FRANCE
17 ALEXANDER KLUGE: GERMANY – AN EXPERIENCE OF WORDS AND IMAGES
18 FASCISM AND ANTI-FASCISM REVIEWED: GENERATIONS, HISTORY AND FILM IN ITALY AFTER 1968
PART VI WOMEN’S WRITING AND THE QUEST FOR THE FATHER
19 REMEMBERING THE COLLABORATING FATHER IN MARIE CHAIX’S LES LAURIERS DU LAC DE CONSTANCE AND EVELYNE LE GARREC’S LA RIVE ALLEMANDE DE MA MÉMOIRE
20 SEEING THE FATHER: MEMORY AND IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION IN ELISABETH PLESSEN’S MITTEILUNG AN DEN ADEL
21 INTIMATIONS OF PATRIARCHY: MEMORIES OF WARTIME JAPAN IN DACIA MARAINI’S BAGHERIA
PART VII A CHILD’S MEMORY
22 A CHILD IN TIME: PATRICK MODIANO AND THE MEMORY OF THE OCCUPATION
23 CHILDHOOD MEMORY AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY: CHRISTA WOLF’S KINDHEITSMUSTER
24 STRATEGIES FOR REMEMBERING: AUSCHWITZ, MOTHER AND WRITING IN EDITH BRUCK
PART VIII AFTER THE COLD WAR: EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY
25 TRAUMA AND ABSENCE
26 NONRATIONAL DISCOURSE IN A WORK OF REASON: PETER WEISS’S ANTI-FASCIST NOVEL DIE ÄSTHETIK DES WIDERSTANDS
27 FIFTY YEARS ON: GERMAN CHILDREN OF THE WAR REMEMBER
28 MEMORIES OF RESISTANCE, RESISTANCES OF MEMORY
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

EUROPEAN MEMORIES OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

EUROPEAN MEMORIES OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Edited by Helmut Peitsch, Charles Burdett and Claire Gorrara

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First published in 1999 by Berghahn Books © 1999 Helmut Peitsch, Charles Burdett and Claire Gorrara First paperback edition published in 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berghahn Books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data European memories of the Second World War / edited by Helmut Peitsch, Charles Burdett and Claire Gorrara. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57181-936-3 (alk. paper) 1. World War, 1939-1945--Literature and the war. 2. German literature--20th century--History and criticism. 3. French literature--20th century--History and criticism. 4. Italian literature--20th century--History and criticism. 5. War stories--History and criticism. 6. Autobiography. 7. World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives. I. Peitsch, Helmut. II. Burdett, Charles, 1966- . III. Gorrara, Claire. PN56.W3E87 1998 809'.93358--dc21 97-31897 CIP British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 1-84545-158-9 paperback

CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Introduction Studying European Literary Memories Helmut Peitsch I.

The German Soldier’s Memory 1. Private and Public Filters: Memories of War in Heinrich Böll’s Fiction and Nonfiction J.H. Reid

II.

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2

The Resistance Memory The Female Resister 2. Ordinary Heroines: Resistance and Romance in the War Fiction of Elsa Triolet Diana Holmes

12

3. ‘This Book Does Not Want to Be a Work of Art. This Book Is Truth.’ The Diaries of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich Irmela von der Lühe

23

4. A Woman’s Perspective: Autobiography and History in Giovanna Zangrandi’s Resistance Narratives Penny Morris

35

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Contents

The Male Resister 5. Vercors – Writing the Unspeakable: From Le Silence de la mer (1942) to La Puissance du jour (1951) William Kidd

III.

46

6. ‘A History Full of Holes’? France and the French Resistance in the Work of Stephan Hermlin Dennis Tate

55

7. War, Civil War and the Problem of Violence in Calvino and Pavese Sarah Morgan

67

8. Imagining Losers in Bufalino’s Diceria dell’untore Peter Hainsworth

78

The Fascist’s Memory 9. Memory and Chronicle: Louis-Ferdinand Céline and the D’un château l’autre Trilogy Nicholas Hewitt 88

IV.

10. Portrait of the Poet as a Dead Man. Ernst Jünger’s Writing in the Second World War: Strahlungen Justus Fetscher

99

11. Changing Identities Through Memory: Malaparte’s Self-figurations in Kaputt Charles Burdett

110

The Victim’s Memory 12. Reviewing Memory: Wiesel, Testimony and Self-reading Colin Davis

122

13. Primo Levi. The Duty of Memory Robert Gordon

131

14. La Douleur: Duras, Amnesia and Desire Emma Wilson

141

15. Myth, Memory, Testimony, Jewishness in Grete Weil’s Meine Schwester Antigone Moray McGowan

149

Contents

V.

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The Media of Memory: May 1968 and Cinema 16. L’Armée des ombres and Le Chagrin et la pitié: Reconfigurations of Law, Legalities and the State in Post-1968 France Margaret Atack 160

VI.

17. Alexander Kluge: Germany – An Experience of Words and Images Klaus R. Scherpe

175

18. Fascism and Anti-fascism Reviewed: Generations, History and Film in Italy after 1968 David Forgacs

185

Women’s Writing and the Quest for the Father 19. Remembering the Collaborating Father in Marie Chaix’s Les Lauriers du lac de Constance and Evelyne Le Garrec’s La Rive allemande de ma mémoire Claire Gorrara 202 20. Seeing the Father: Memory and Identity Construction in Elisabeth Plessen’s Mitteilung an den Adel Anne Moss

211

21. Intimations of Patriarchy: Memories of Wartime Japan in Dacia Maraini’s Bagheria Judith Bryce

220

VII. A Child’s Memory 22. A Child in Time: Patrick Modiano and the Memory of the Occupation Alan Morris

230

23. Childhood Memory and Moral Responsibility: Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster Chris Weedon

238

24. Strategies for Remembering: Auschwitz, Mother and Writing in Edith Bruck Adalgisa Giorgio 247 VIII. After the Cold War: European Literature and the Politics of Memory 25. Trauma and Absence Omer Bartov

258

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Contents

26. Nonrational Discourse in a Work of Reason: Peter Weiss’s Anti-fascist Novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands Robert Cohen 272 27. Fifty Years On: German Children of the War Remember Jost Hermand 281 28. Memories of Resistance, Resistances of Memory Luisa Passerini

288

Notes on Contributors

297

Bibliography

302

Index

326

PREFACE

The fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 1995 brought with it a series of commemorative ceremonies in France, Germany and Italy. At such ceremonies, survivors, veterans, politicians and writers came together to remember the war. The anniversary of the end of the conflict also served to focus attention on the ways in which events from the war had been remembered in the three European countries, literary texts forming one of the main vectors for the dissemination of images of the period. As well as representing the private face of history, literary texts have indicated some of the ways in which group memories have been constructed and have changed in the five decades since the war. The aim of this volume is to present a study of how certain memories of the war have developed in the literatures of France, Germany and Italy. The essays in the collection do not claim to provide an exhaustive analysis of any one country’s relationship to the memory of the Second World War in literature. The essays do, however, seek to provide an indication of research which is currently being undertaken into the question of remembering the war. There are essays on writers who have achieved canonical status, such as Primo Levi and Heinrich Böll, but there are also essays on relatively unknown writers, such as Marie Chaix or Giovanna Zangrandi. All of the essays discuss themes or point to areas which are central to any understanding of the relationship between literature and the history of the Second World War. The ways in which personal memory intersects with public history create models for remembering and writing about the war. The present volume is divided into sections, each of which looks at dif-

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ferent constructions of the memory of an identifiable group. Essays discuss examples of the soldier’s memory, the resister’s memory, the victim’s memory and the fascist’s memory. The essays look at how memories are framed at different times according to different historical conditions and narratives. The contradictions and controversies inherent in each country’s textual representation of the war years are consistently revealed. The intention behind all the essays is to contribute to a detailed analysis of the conflicting interpretations of the war years in France, Germany and Italy. The impact which gender studies have had on the interpretation of narratives of the war years is a key aspect of the present collection. The focus on the female subject and on women’s changing experiences has served to alter established views on the war and encourage reevaluations. The influence of the collaborating father on daughters’ representations of the Second World War provides the framework for one section of the book as second-generation feminist writers attempt to come to terms with their paternal inheritance. Yet gender considerations permeate most sections of the volume. A presentation of the experiences of the female resister and female victim of the camps provides a counter-weight to male-centred accounts of such events. The sections of the volume have been organised so as to indicate key moments in the changing representations of the war period. The importance of May 1968 as a turning point for the textual and cinematic narratives of the war years is discussed, as is the importance of generational divides in the writing of war histories, for example in the section on the child’s memory. The focus on individual and collective memories stresses the importance of studying the readings of the war years in context, in particular the meaning and background of testimony is examined in a number of essays. Central to work on texts which represent aspects of the Holocaust is how such texts attempt to grapple with the literary implications of writing the ‘unspeakable’. The final section of the volume addresses the mediatory role of individual and collective memory in European history and culture. An investigation into the often traumatic silencing of key areas of private and public memories of the Second World War brings about an enhanced understanding of the ways in which past conflicts continue to make themselves felt in the present-day constructions of identity in France, Germany and Italy. It is through the continued exploration of memory that historians and literary critics can discover new aspects of the dynamic and changing relationship between literature and history. The contributions in the volume were originally presented at the conference ‘European Memories of World War Two: New Perspec-

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tives on Postwar Literature’, held at the University of Wales, Cardiff in September 1995. Unfortunately, we were only able to publish a selection of the thirty-eight papers which were given. Nevertheless, we would like to thank all those who participated in the conference for the stimulating and lively discussion without which this volume would never have been published. Our final thanks go to our sponsors, whose backing enabled so many scholars from different disciplines and countries to come together: the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France, the British Academy, the Italian Cultural Institute, and Professor Jan Philipp Reemtsma and the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sciences and Culture.

INTRODUCTION: STUDYING EUROPEAN LITERARY MEMORIES Helmut Peitsch

‘The “histories/stories” [Geschichten] of Europe will not be united so quickly, if indeed they can be at any time. The nation-state still rules’ (Augstein 1994), the editor of the German magazine Der Spiegel declared approvingly, only a few weeks before the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz which inaugurated the series of international events marking the end of the Second World War. From Auschwitz on 27 January 1995 to London, Paris, Berlin and Moscow on 7 and 9 May 1995, politicians and the media of the Allied victor countries, as well as Germany, joined in remembrance. Augstein’s view, however, that it was not only difficult (as the liberal weekly Die Zeit [Leicht 1995] put it), but impossible to europeanise the memories of the Second World War was shared by others, amongst them the British historian Tony Judt. In an article, readily reprinted in German by the conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he invoked the ‘solid frontiers of memory’ (Judt 1992: 112) in order to criticise European integration as artificial. Fifty years of peace in Europe were written off as an ‘ugly parenthesis’ (110) in the history of European nation-states, a period which should be forgotten because Europeans had preferred to live on myths – about the Second World War – instead of asserting the naturalness of nations whose histories could never be shared.

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This extreme view does not take into account the attempts at reconciliation made by speakers at all the commemorations; obviously they aimed either to find an ‘inclusivist formula’ (Tunbridge & Ashworth 1996: 274) or at least to ‘downplay’ the ‘dissonance’ of memory ‘which divides’ (177). But in spite of the emphasis on reconciliation at the international events of 1995, The Guardian was certainly right when describing the function of commemorating the Second World War as far as the internal politics of the states remembering were concerned: ‘The ceremonies reaffirm the links that bind us as a nation’ (8 May 1995). The chapters in this book raise the question to what degree over the last five decades have the memories of the Second World War been europeanised. They address the contributions of literature from three European countries – France, the Federal Republic of Germany (and the now absorbed German Democratic Republic) and Italy. The aim of this introductory chapter is to explain the format and the structure of the book. After a brief discussion of the problematics of 8 May 1995, taking as an example the newly united Germany, which for the first time was allowed to celebrate with the victor powers, this chapter will develop four points which have influenced the structure of the book and identify some assumptions called into question by the contributions of scholars from French, German and Italian studies in Britain, Italy, the FRG and USA. What is called for in comparative work (Bartram 1996) is the need to avoid essentialising the literary, interdisciplinarity, a move to address the social nature of memory and historicity.

(1) The Public Debate in 1995 As early as 1993, James E. Young, in his The Texture of Memory, raised the question, whether ‘without the wall as a punitive reminder, Germany will become a little more like other nations’. The reason for his forecast, that Germany’s ‘national institutions will recall primarily its own martyrs and triumphs’ (1993: 26), Young gave as the following: ‘a nation’s impulse to memorialize its own crimes is difficult to sustain and is almost always imposed as a certain kind of penance from without’ (35). The official commemorations of 1945, in the FRG at least, called into question the notion of Auschwitz being ‘the key event of World War II’ in German memory, put forward by Ian Buruma in The Wages of Guilt and approved by his American and British reviewers, Michael Howard and Gordon A. Craig in the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, respectively. They both quoted

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Buruma’s clarification that it was ‘not Dresden, not even the war on the eastern front’ (Craig 1994: 44). The way in which, in their 1995 speeches, the Federal Chancellor and the Federal President insisted on the individuality of one’s own memory and on the family as the most important means of transmitting memories to future generations implied not only that, in the end, everybody was somehow a victim of the war (Naumann 1995: 263), but also that differences and power positions which distinguished victims and perpetrators should not be discussed. ‘There is no common denominator for all these different memories and feelings. Therefore one should respect them as existential experiences of the other and should not talk them over [‘zerreden’]’, Kohl (1995) said on the occasion of 8 May. The most irritating feature of Kohl’s and Herzog’s speeches was this attempt to forbid public debate on the meaning of memory. By seemingly giving a voice to everybody and by claiming ‘to confront the whole history’ – as Herzog (1995) put it in Dresden – they tried to delegitimise specific evaluations and explanations of the German experiences of 1945 as limited and one-sided. However, in all their speeches, the experiences of the victims of 1945 were presented in a revealing order: the soldiers and prisoners of war came first, followed by the bombed civilians and then by those expelled from the East. The separation of the sufferings of those victims who were liberated from concentration and extermination camps underlined the construction of a national collective fate – a kind of ‘us’ from which ‘the others’ were excluded. Thus the contradiction, inherent in Kohl’s authoritative warnings against, on the one hand, forbidding anyone to remember (Der Spiegel, 1 May 1995: 33) and, on the other, the divided and selective memory (Wochenpost, 9 May 1995), could only be resolved by his lament on the – supposed – silencing of the generation of the fathers, whereby the soldiers who fought the war were given special official authority. This claim to universal victim status, based on the assumption that the soldiers on all sides of the conflict were victims of the two now defunct totalitarianisms (Diner 1995: 544), allowed nationalism to resurface and soldiers to be identified as heroes; as predicted before the so-called end of the Cold War by George L. Mosse in his comparative study of the cult of the war experience: ‘if nationalism as a civic religion is once more in the ascendant the myth will, once again, accompany it.’ (1990: 224) The public debate in Germany in 1995 about the present significance of remembering 1945 highlighted some of the problematics which emerged in France and Italy. In each case, the public arena brought together politicians, the media, historians and representatives of social groups and organisations – whether political, reli-

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gious or cultural. As far as foreign press coverage was concerned, in France, reactions to President Mitterrand’s Berlin speech of 8 May, and in Italy, the discussion between the historian De Felice and the philosopher Norberto Bobbio were in the spotlight. What was at stake, was, in each case, the ‘truth’ about the past and the claim to represent the ‘whole’ of the nation (Hooper 1995; Altwegg 1995). Mitterrand praised the ‘courage’ of the German soldiers who died in ‘great numbers’ and declared that their uniform and their ‘ideas’ were not relevant. The very fact, however, that neither Mitterrand’s construction of a Europe which was reconciled to itself by fusing victory and defeat into ‘Europe’s victory over itself’ (Mitterrand 1995), nor De Felice’s anchoring of a consensual fascism in the continuity of Italy’s history, as well as in Western modernisation, went without meeting strong opposition, highlights the ongoing struggle over memory. Both versions of the place of the Second World War in national as well as European history were challenged not only in the two countries, but also abroad. In Germany, for instance, Mitterrand’s plea for honouring the good faith of the German soldier contrasted strongly with the overwhelmingly positive response to the exhibition on the Wehrmacht’s involvement in crimes against humanity (Naumann 1996a), while De Felice’s whitewashing of Italian fascist racism was seen as the opposite of French attempts to centralise remembering on the indigenous anti-Semitism of the Vichy regime. In each of the three countries, the public debate was marked by three contradictions: (1) the claim to tell the ‘whole truth’ (Kinzer 1995) involved blaming others for hitherto repressing or denying it; (2) the wish to identify with the ‘whole history’ (Rudolph 1995) of the nation excluded those who did not fit into the present national frame; (3) refusing to differentiate between different group experiences whether as part of the claim to universal victim status or as part of the need to blame all nationals as perpetrators, erected a new hierarchy. The seemingly inclusive rhetoric of identity and continuity could not repress the fact that it needed specific ideological mechanisms ‘to integrate the many individuals of a given society in the abstract whole of “the nation”’ (Bielefeld 1996: 64). The question which seems to arise from this situation and to be answered by research could be formulated as the following: Who remembers what, where, when, why and for what purpose? (Middleton & Edwards 1990: 7; Tunbridge & Ashworth 1996: 5) However, it is worth noting that exactly this question was disapproved of by various sides in the conflict when considering the present meaning of 8 May. The Passauer Neue Presse, for instance, wrote, ‘Asking who remembers whom and for which reasons, who owns

Introduction

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Auschwitz, is a farce’ (quoted by Naumann 1996b: 27). One can also note the polemical value of the terms ‘functionalisation’ or ‘instrumentalisation’ (Groehler 1995: 139) which delimited the kind of usage of the past for the present not seen as legitimate. It seems to be a requirement of any legitimate functionalisation of memory that it is not recognised what it is. Nevertheless the polemical use of the ideologising terms which blame only the others, underlines the fact that memory of the Second World War – to quote definitions of memory given by literary historians, sociologists, historians, political scientists and urban geographers – is ‘the site of intense social contestation’ (Kedward & Wood 1995: x) ‘between varying accounts of shared experience’ (Middleton & Edwards 1990: 8); ‘the site of struggle’ (Bodemann 1996) between ‘coexisting rivalling and alternative memories’ (Burke 1991: 298); ‘the coexistence of contrary tendencies’ of forgetting and remembering (Naumann 1996c: 1130). As Natalie Zemon Davies and Randolph Starn have formulated in their ‘working principle’: ‘whenever memory is invoked we should be asking ourselves: by whom, where, in which context, against what?’ (1989: 2)

(2) Against Essentialising Literature Taking into account the fact that 1995 proved memory to be a site of struggle in France, Germany and Italy, it seems surprising that works of literary criticism tended to locate literary memory safely outside this contested area, mostly by way of viewing it as the opposite. Mary Jean Green is not alone in setting the individual literary work of memory against a realm of ‘institutionalized experience’ in which it is not necessary to distinguish between ‘societal narrative’, ‘public commemoration’ (1993: 223), ‘official history’, ‘central experience’ (224) or the ‘canon’ (223). In fusing these terms, the text to which the critic wants to ascribe a specific literary value emerges as the opposite of ‘mythology’ (224) and ‘fictionalization’ (229). From Frederick Harris’s pioneering comparative study of French and German literature on the Second World War (1983) to Geoffrey H. Hartman’s seminal reader on Holocaust literature from various national literatures (1994), the conviction remains that literature is ‘the counter-force’ (Kosta 1994: 18) which opposes any form of institutionalised memory (Hartman 1994: 5): ‘Literature triumphs over history in the end.’ (Harris 1983: xi) At first glance, this notion of literature as the outside other of social memory would seem to be supported by the fact that literature was missing on Kohl’s list of sources from which Germans,

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born after 1945, could gain access to the older Germans’ sufferings; the chancellor listed ‘pictures and films, eye-witness accounts, diaries and primarily those personal memories which are recounted in families’ (Kohl 1995); however, he did not mention literature. Yet Kohl’s omission of literature as a contribution to the German memory of the Second World War should not be taken as proof of the essentially oppositional nature of literary memory, but rather as an indication of the chancellor’s disapproval of the way in which much of West German literature had challenged, since the late 1950s, the notion of the innocent German soldier as victim of war (Peitsch 1995; Peitsch 1996), a memory which Kohl was keen to reaffirm. Even if there were no writers present at the Berlin commemorative event of 8 May, the ceremonies in Auschwitz, for instance, as well as in Weimar where the liberation of Buchenwald was commemorated, were marked by the presence of authors who have influenced European memories of the Second World War. Elie Wiesel (1995), who helped to popularise the term Holocaust in a way similar to Claude Lanzmann’s later highlighting of the Shoah (Dresden 1995: 125; Steiner 1988), spoke in Auschwitz, Jorge Semprun in Weimar. Semprun’s Weimar speech, far from opposing the anti-totalitarian foundation of Kohl’s and Herzog’s policy of memory, on the contrary, lent additional authority to privileging German memories over, for instance, French and Italian ones. In emphasising that Germans were ‘the only European people who experienced two totalitarian dictatorships’ (Semprun 1995), both fascist and communist, Semprun gave this kind of memory the utmost European significance. The writer could rely not only on his Buchenwald experience, but also on his experience as a Spanish communist who tried to draw a lesson from the camps. This public role of the writer, depending on the authority of both his experience and its literary articulation, could be compared to Primo Levi’s role in the Italian reception of the German historians’ debate. Shortly before his death, Levi influenced the debate by countering the normalising effect of a relativisation of the Holocaust and reemphasised the links between resistance and Holocaust in the memory of the Italian Left (Rusconi 1987: 103). Even if it could be argued that Semprun’s contribution to the official memory or Levi’s intervention in the public debate over memory should be distinguished from their literary work of memory as such, they nevertheless demonstrate that writers as intellectuals are implicated in the social struggle over the present meaning of the Second World War. Therefore the place of memory studies in literary criticism should be at the crossroads of other disciplines.

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(3) The Interdisciplinarity of Studying Memory Over the last fifteen years, memory has become an area increasingly studied in history, geography and sociology (Middleton & Edwards 1990: 3-5). Interdisciplinary literary research can profit from the rediscovery of Maurice Halbwachs’s (1985) notion of group memory; from the attention to the long-term processes of reception elaborated in Pierre Nora’s concept of ‘sites of memory’ (1989) and from geographers’ concern with ‘dissonant heritage’ (Tunbridge & Ashworth 1996). Interdisciplinarity comes as a timely reminder of context when faced with the danger of postmodern and poststructuralist textualism. Peter Burke’s formula ‘social history of remembering’ (1991: 291) identifies the field to which this volume attempts to make a small contribution, necessarily limited by the nature of its object, literature, and the scope of its contributions. Literature can be understood as one of the media of memory, its specificity being, on the one hand, to cut through other forms and practices of remembering and, on the other, to make these forms and practices of social memory its object of study. Outside the domain of literary criticism, the position of literature vis-à-vis social memory has been conceptualised rather differently and in opposition to those critics who essentialise literature as outside of society. The West German historian Martin Broszat, while starting by diagnosing a strange lack of relations between historiography and literature with regard to the memory of fascism, ends by crediting the canonised works by Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll with having anticipated, by two decades, the present interest in everyday life under fascism (1988: 219). The British social historian Arthur Marwick, studying the influence of war literature on society in general, comes to the conclusion that, after the First World War, literature played an even greater role (Emsley 1990: 121). The cultural historian Jan Assmann sets up literary texts as part of society’s cultural memory as against the communicative memory of shared experience in everyday life, that is to say canonical texts become part of the institutionalised memory, far from being oppositional per se (1991: 344). The American psychoanalyst Martin Bergmann presents literature as an alternative way of dealing with trauma in contrast to identification with the aggressor, repression, denial or remembering – namely transforming trauma, something which, however, in his view of the literature of the Holocaust, has not yet been achieved (1996: 19-21). Bergmann insists on the availability of a social framework without which the literary work of transforming trauma could not succeed.

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Thus, in varying ways historians, sociologists and psychologists acknowledge that literary remembering takes place as part of society. They hint at specific links, commonalities and contrasts which implicate literature within the diverse forms and practices of memory.

(4) The Social Nature of Memory: Social Groups, Practices and Forms of Remembering To bring to the fore the social nature of memory, it seems more appropriate to take account of the workings of institutions, forms and practices, rather than to follow those polarities which have already been established: collective vs. individual (Halbwachs 1985), public vs. private (Burke 1991; Naumann 1996c), official vs. popular (Samuel 1994), cultural vs. communicative, commemorative vs. everyday (Assmann 1991). Such dichotomies run the risk of either reinforcing the opposition between the individual and society as such or collapsing the diversity of social remembering into one identity which is labelled national (Schmidt 1991; Tunbridge & Ashworth 1996; Hartman 1994; Friedlander 1994: 254; Geyer & Hansen 1994), and we can lose sight of the public struggle over memory which positions versions of the past as either dominant, negotiated or oppositional (Hall 1973). It seems right to ask whether the labels official, public and popular (Johnson & Dawson 1982), can be fixed to memories permanently or if it is a conjuncture at a given moment which ascribes legitimacy to a version of remembering through a consent which bridges the official, the public and the popular. As far as the Second World War is concerned, in each of the three countries the practices, forms and institutions of remembering (Robins 1995; Eley 1996: 99; Burke 1991: 292-93; Leggewie 1987: 126-27) have operated in the following areas: the state, in particular government, organising rituals, setting up sites and deciding on symbols; constitutional and legislatory solutions for the problems of restitution, financial reparation and amnesty; judicial dealing with purges, trials and statutes of limitation; education where textbook versions of the past are disseminated; academic historiography with its varying links to politics, education and the general reading public; the press as well as the various audiovisual media representing both the past and the present; the heritage industry and everyday communication among family and friends and in the workplace. In each of the three countries, the state’s official memory had to face the problem that at some time two states coexisted, both

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claiming national legitimacy. In spite of the differences between the collaboratory regime of Vichy, the Fascist Republic of Salò and the GDR which legitimated itself through anti-fascism, the common problem for the postwar states of France, Italy and West Germany was to construct a legitimate identity within a framework of national continuity. Excluding or including have been options taken up to differing degrees over the last fifty years, while any stress on continuity with the precursor state could be answered by reemphasising the claim to have broken with the past laid down in the postwar constitutions. The notion of lessons learned from the past shaped constitutional clauses which were meant to prevent the repetition of fascism and war. The constitutional changes which emerged from the Second World War also had repercussions for the regulation of international relations, in particular with regard to West European integration. Legislation on restitution and reparation played a decisive role in defining who was to be remembered as a victim as well as who was recognised as a resistance fighter. Michael Burleigh has drawn attention to the consequences of the FRG’s limited compensation at the state level, which meant that initially West German reparation consisted of payments to Israel and a few Jewish organisations, while the 1952 Luxemburg treaty brought about the ‘de facto marginalisation of other groups of victims’ (Burleigh 1996: 4). In line with the underlying notion of a legal continuity between the Reich and the FRG, federal laws (Surman 1995) prioritised invalid soldiers, war widows and war orphans, those expelled from the East and bombed civilians over the victims of racist and political persecution. In contrast to this legal transformation of the majority of West Germans into victims of the Second World War, the representatives of organisations of former resistance fighters in France, Italy and the GDR denied their victim status in order to erect a hierarchy which placed the fighter over the ‘mere’ victim (Finkielkraut 1989; Danyel 1995). A different picture emerges from those procedures which defined the perpetrators of the crimes marking the Second World War. However, the judicial memory of France, West Germany and Italy shows at least one obvious similarity: its development over time, from the purges of the immediate postwar years to the amnesties of the 1950s and the parliamentary debates on statutes of limitations in 1964-65 (Henke & Woller 1991), to ‘a sudden upsurge in concern at the number of former Nazi war criminals who, undetected, had found a safe haven in the West’ (Gilbert 1990: 742) in the late 1970s. In France, the legal prosecution of ‘crimes against humanity’ which had been introduced in 1964 when the West German

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parliament appeared to make further trials there impossible, was for the first time set in motion in 1979. The trial of Klaus Barbie – as well as the trial of Erich Priebke in Italy in 1996 – gave ‘judicial presence’ (Hartman 1994: 14, quoting Finkielkraut 1989: 10) to the relationship between collaboration, anti-Semitism and resistance and called into question the widely held view that amnesty equalled amnesia. In spite of the seeming closeness of the terms (Hartman 1994: 15), which leads Burke to describe the work of amnesty on memory as ‘erasure’ (Burke 1991: 299), the amnesties of the 1950s, which coincided remarkably in France (Grosser 1990: 178, 180), the FRG and Italy, seemed to have given a public voice to those who previously had reason to fear legal prosecution. An area in which East German denazification purges had been particularly severe in the 1940s, was education. Because of the existence of a socialist German state competing for legitimacy on the grounds of anti-fascism, the common Western Cold War understanding of totalitarianism gained special urgency in West Germany, whereas the national curriculum in France and Italy accentuated the break with the fascist precursor states by being silent on Vichy and Salò – into the 1980s. In 1962, the FRG’s Land ministers on culture agreed on guidelines to regulate the teaching about fascism and war; their emphasis was on the identity of both kinds of totalitarianism – ‘in spite of the deceptive fact that the two systems fought each other’ (Kultusministerkonferenz 1963). By declaring that communism was the present threat to democracy whereas National Socialism had ended in catastrophe because of Hitler’s ‘hubris’, remembering fascism served primarily as immunisation against communism. Changes in the school curriculum on history can often be traced to academic history – with its competing schools of thought on the history of fascism and the Second World War; from personalising and demonising Hitler to a history of ideas, to anti-totalitarian political history and to social history; the shift from an abstract anti-totalitarian distancing of Nazism to a concrete sociohistorical critique of continuities in German history occurred in West Germany in the 1960s and early 1970s (Wippermann 1972: 5-6). In France and Italy the shifts happened later and went into different directions. In the 1970s, in France, the history of mentalities and, in Italy, in the 1980s, the concept of modernisation were applied to Vichy and Italian Fascism in ways that followed respectively the maxim ‘to understand everything’ (Bosworth 1993: 115) and emphasised the consent upon which fascist rule had rested. In effect, ‘the great alternative of Fascism and anti-Fascism’ was overturned (138-39). The post-1970s’ turn to biography – whether of Mussolini, Hitler or Pétain – and to everyday life

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was a common one, as was the debate as to whether historiography was about production of identity: should national history be seen as biography into which trauma must be integrated (Reemtsma 1996: 11)? The opposite has been argued by historians who call into question an unreflecting belief in wholeness, be it diachronic or synchronic (Maier 1988: 149), and qualify any remembering ‘for the sake of national harmony’ as ‘misremembering’ (Remmler 1994: 169; Ringelheim 1985). However, exactly this aim is presented by the French political scientist, Alfred Grosser, as a norm of writing about contemporary history; the past must appear as a unified one for the present (Grosser 1990: 151) and he laments the Catholic and communist fissures in the French national memory (150) which were visible into the 1970s. A cultural historian’s version of the same idea is put forward by Renate Lachmann, for the cultural memory of a nation by definition must be ‘identical through all times and continuous in space’ (Haverkamp & Lachmann 1993: xviii). Moving on from such a view of the value of cultural continuity, it now makes sense to conceptualise the contribution of the press and the various audio-visual media which permeated the postwar societies of France, the Germanies and Italy in largely negative ways, which literary critics and writers have referred to as a ‘war on memory’ (Geyer/Hansen 1994; Hartman 1994); Natalia Ginzburg, for instance, called the media society ‘a society that eschews memory’ (Forgacs 1996: 259). What such cultural criticism tends to overlook is the function of the media in the public sphere. Even the rather problematic media strategy of centring news coverage on personalities and high-profile events has had some plus points; scandals have brought out contradictions in the dominant memory: for instance, the twin construction of continuity and break in the FRG’s official relationship to the Nazi Reich regularly produced a process of remembering what was forgotten in the break (Naumann 1996c: 1135). The press, radio and TV have played a mediating role between the official memory of the state and those memories which are current in the private everyday life. Criticisms of the ‘gap’ (Bessel 1987: xviii) between academic history and versions of the past told to family and friends – popular memory – have come from rather different directions. Whereas Richard Bessel does not shy away from the risk of reaffirming surviving Nazi propaganda in ‘popularly held images of the Third Reich’ (1987: xviii), Burleigh argues the opposite: ‘The argument that the Nazis were in the business of modernizing German society or defending Western civilization from an “Asiatic” barbarism whose political system their own paradoxically resembled, cuts little ice among those whose lives were shattered

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during the period.’ (1996: 3-4) Burleigh’s identification with the experience and the memory of the victims of Nazism – ‘people directly affected by Nazi policies’ (3) – contradicts explicitly the alternative favoured by Bessel: an identification with the experience of fascism and war as ‘normality’ (3) and part of everyday life. The everyday life of postwar Europe can be seen as the ground from which the heritage industry springs. From the travel guide which recommends or is silent on the sites of official celebration or mourning to the advertising or banning of the selling of Nazi memorabilia, from souvenirs to model toys, the leisure time of French, German and Italian adults and children has been overwhelmed by products which sell memories of the Second World War. What should become clear from this rough sketch of institutions, forms and practices of remembering in the societies of France, Germany and Italy, is that ‘the nation’ cannot be taken as a given subject of remembrance, but rather, any memory which claims to be ‘national’ must be seen as the result of struggle between social groups which function as ‘communities of remembering’ (Burke 1991: 298) or ‘communities of memory’ (Middleton & Edwards 1990: 5). There is one rather difficult point which has been discussed rarely in research; whether there has to be a ‘hierarchy of victims’ at any given time (Leggewie 1987: 124). The often professed rejection of hierarchy (Diner 1987: 191; Finkielkraut 1989: 26, 56, 64; Friedlander 1994: 257, 259) runs against the very claim of group memories to social and national representativeness which hardly can be avoided in the struggle over memory. It is in the institutions, forms and practices of social memory that the claim to representativeness is negotiated. However, more often than the issue of hierarchy which points to a dominant or central position, the question has been raised as to whether the experience of a minority can function as a national memory. Some historians – like Pierre Nora and Peter Burke – explicitly acknowledge the possibility of building a national memory on the memory of a minority, or as the sociologists David Middleton and Derek Edwards state: ‘there is no requirement that the participants have had direct or personal experience of the ‘remembered’ events’ (1990: 7). Most historians, however, particularly those involved in oral history, tend towards the opposite view, that only the shared experience of the majority can serve as the basis for national memory and therefore for national identity (Niethammer 1992: 25; Nettelbeck 1987: 80; Danyel 1995). The sections of this book present the memories of distinctive groups, as they have emerged from both the experiences of the Second World War and the ways in which it has been remembered over

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the last fifty years: soldiers and victims, fascists and resisters, male and female. This attempt to break down the supposedly fixed character of nations is supported by the juxtaposition, in the case of each group memory, of examples from each of the three countries. The need for comparison follows on from the danger of essentialising national characteristics, whether one’s own or those of others, a danger which is inherent in literary and historical study of national literatures or histories. Whether it is a French historian, Jacques Le Goff, who declares, that ‘not only the French possess a privileged relationship with their past, but also the historic spirit has been the principal artisan of the French state and the French nation. France, more than other states and nations, is based on a historical consciousness’ (Bosworth 1993: 109) or an Australian specialist on French literature who reasons, ‘The French, perhaps more than most, are obsessed with history’ (Nettelbeck 1987: 2), equally problematic is the frequent claim of German German Studies experts that critical dealings with one’s own national past are peculiarly German (Kopperschmidt 1996). These implicit comparisons are never put to the test in comparative work and this is one of the reasons why the division of intellectual labour makes such studies flourish. However, the criticism made by David Forgacs of De Felice’s construction of a harmonious Italian nation, supposedly modernising itself under fascism, can very well be applied to generalisations on the French or the Germans which are in vogue in single discipline research. It is difficult to ignore the ‘important differences between actively supporting a regime, passively or grudgingly going along with it and privately opposing without openly resisting’ (Forgacs 1986: 6). To take into account the spectrum of behaviour in the occupied as well as in the occupying countries makes it more difficult to turn categories, like perpetrator or victim, resistance or collaboration, into characteristics of nations as such. Such an essentialising neglects the careful negotiation between conforming with and opposing the dominant which have, as Luisa Passerini (1986) points out, become the focus of academic attention in several years.

(5) The Historicity of Memory: Problems of Periodisation It is not only the grouping of memories across national boundaries, but also their historical ordering which could support a comparative reading of the remembering processes in France, the Germanies and Italy from the 1940s to the mid-1990s. From an awareness that legitimacy is ascribed to a specific group memory only at a specific time and for a certain time, could come a notion of peri-

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odisation which would work along commonalities and differences between the four states and national literatures. The widely held view that it was because of the Cold War that no celebrations of 8 May, including the Allied and Germany, were possible before 1995, calls into question the equally common notion of national realities having been ‘repressed’ (Judt 1992) or ‘covered up’ (Claussen 1996) by social conflict. The more cautious notion that nations were relegated to secondary importance during this period, hints at the specific, varying relations of the national problematic to social conflict, fought out not only on the international stage, but also at home. Applying what the social historian Geoff Eley has called an analysis of the ‘succeeding conjunctures’ (1996: 73) of postwar development, European memories depended not only on antagonistic versions of the overall Cold War understanding of fascism (capitalism vs. totalitarianism), but also on the postwar international role and the internal settlement conferred on each individual country (Eley 1996; Paggi 1996). Even the general framework of the Cold War did not delete the differences between the victorious country France, later involved in colonial wars and who became one of the nuclear powers and Italy, which was not among the Allies of 1945, getting its peace treaty only in 1947 while the defeated Germany was first divided and then integrated into the two blocks. Equally varied was the strength of left-wing opposition to conservative dominance and the ‘restoration’ which marked the first period of the Cold War with its alliance of former resisters and collaborators (Hirschfeld & Marsh 1989: 250). Whereas Italy and France had the strongest Communist parties in Western Europe, in the West German case, the radical left opposition was ‘safely placed in another state’ (Levy 1996: 194). In general, the role of anti-fascism in internal politics was overshadowed by the Cold War; three phases can be distinguished: 1. in the 1950s the forces of anti-fascism were subordinated to the dominant anti-totalitarian assumption that parliamentary democracy would prevent any repetition of fascism and war; 2. The reemergence of anti-fascism in 1960s and 1970s was partly based on the ‘real fear’ (Duggan 1995: 10) of autocratic, anti-democratic developments – for instance, de Gaulle’s coup d’etat, the Gladio affair in Italy and the planning for a state of emergency in the FRG which coincided with the government’s wish for nuclear weapons for the Bundeswehr. The renewal was partly brought about by the challenge to social, political and cultural continuity as the result of processes of modernisation which the countries had undergone under restorative governments. The rediscovery of the missed

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opportunity of an anti-fascist postwar break with the past implied that it was only fundamental social change that could prevent the return of the fascist and military threat (Eley 1996: 86); 3. From the late 1970s the so-called second Cold War once again equated antifascism with antitotalitarianism; from the crises of Marxism to the fall of the socialist countries of Europe, among them the GDR which had relied more heavily than others on the party’s anti-fascist legitimation. However, even more important than the return of Cold War liberalism was the emergence of a nationalism, couched in the new rhetoric of national identity which reaffirmed national continuity with the past as a means of preventing a return to extremes. This new liberal nationalism was supposed to bind societies marked by economic crises, as well as by cultural fragmentation heralded as postmodern multiculturalism and the result of the identity politics of the New Social Movements which was deplored for creating a loss of community (Forgacs 1990: 151). Within the overall pattern, two areas of difference were most striking. There was no equivalent in France and even Italy to the West German pacifism (which created some common ground with the nascent East German opposition). Whereas French interwar pacifism had been discredited through collaboration, and its absence in fascist Italy had been reaffirmed by the very nature of military resistance against German occupation, it was in the end the reeducationary anti-militarism of the Allies which strengthened West (and East) German pacifism. From the Potsdam conference in 1945 to the One Plus Four negotiations over unification, a key policy had been to suppress the possibility of a renewed German military threat to European peace. Therefore Allied attempts to minimise this risk – in the form of constitutional clauses and intergovernmental agreements – contributed to the second area of difference between the three countries; the limited space for neofascism in postwar society. In terms of votes and access to the media, the West German equivalents to Le Pen and Fini have never had that much success. Contrary to such a periodisation along the lines of commonalities and differences which arise from three different societies’ involvement in the Cold War, is the generational axis. The generational pattern regularly comes down to the juxtaposition of ‘silence’ – the first generation – and ‘speaking out’ – the second generation: ‘a period of thirty was the lapse which was required’ (Nettelbeck 1989: 268, 272; Geyer & Hansen; Goldhagen & Joffe 1996: 1191). What seems deeply problematic about this pattern adopted by researchers in France, Germany and Italy is, firstly, the assumption of continuity between different memories in a society,

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secondly the presentation of social memories as national: there must be only one memory. There are always the younger ones who are presented as ‘cut off from their roots by the silence of their parents’ (A.Morris 1992: 81, 102), or even stronger, ‘deprived’ of ‘the parental legacy’ ‘on both sides of the political divide’ (85, 103). The metaphors of roots and heritage suggest that the generational approach is part of the nationalisation of memory rather than its critical opposite. This generational periodisation goes hand in hand with the tendency to group material around one turning point which allows for the development from fiction/myth/master-narrative to facts/ truth/pluralism. Although both narratives do not necessarily coincide, there is broad agreement on 1968 as caesura. In any case, for most critics – for instance Judt (1992) in the quoted overview – the late 1940s, i.e. the dominance of anti-fascist memory in France and Italy, invented a narrative which misremembered the Second World War for the following decades. However, there are some others – like Bosworth – who see the 1950s and its construction of national continuity as myth; it ‘silenced’ Vichy in France, fascism in Italy and the victims of and resisters to fascism in Germany. In The Two Germanies, the British historian Mary Fulbrook refers to the generational divide of 1968 in order to explain the ending of a ‘collective amnesia’ (1992: 20). The reviewers of Ian Buruma’s The Wages of Guilt subscribed to the same view. Howard (1994: 9) quoted approvingly Buruma’s rather poetic description of this amnesia, ‘material prosperity covered the past like a blanket of snow, hiding all traces, muffling all sound’. In a more sober tone Craig (1994: 44) made the same point by referring to Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s The Inability to Mourn (1967) as proof of the 1950s’ amnesia, ‘All of this changed dramatically when the first postwar generation came of voting age, began to ask questions about what had happened during the Hitlerzeit and the war, and became curious about the long neglected question of the Holocaust.’ It should be noted that in those accounts which see a second caesura in 1979 after the first in 1968 or, perhaps more correctly, after the 1960s where 1968 was only the ‘point of culmination’ (Naumann 1996c: 1133) – very often attributed to the screening of the film Holocaust (Frei 1992: 104; Mommsen 1992: 97) – the generational criterion is replaced with a ‘national’ one. The very fact that in all three countries public memory has moved on to acknowledging the centrality of Auschwitz (Kwiet 1987: 238-9) is sometimes presented in a way that excludes the Jewish victims once again from those ‘nations’ where German National Socialism isolated them for extermination. Saul Friedlander sees what he

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calls a ‘defense reaction’ (1994: 257), for instance working in West Germany, where one of the leading conservative protagonists of the historians’ debate elided the expulsion of Germans from the East who were defended by courageous German soldiers with the Holocaust. This was to make clear that, as a German, the historian must identify with the German victims and not with the strangers. Burleigh has pointed to the ‘uneven emotional cargo’ of Hillgruber’s very title Two Forms of Downfall: The Smashing of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry (1996: 16). The nationalisation of public memory in the 1980s would also take the explicit form of forbidding people from identifying with the ‘other’. The children and grandchildren of guilty parents and grandparents – whether German Nazis, French collaborators or Italians who consented to fascism – were forced due to so-called generational solidarity not to make an ‘Erinnerungssprung’ (Zipfel 1996: 73), jump of remembering, onto the side of the victims or the resisters. This viewpoint seems critical, since it insists on guilt and responsibility. However, by constructing this time a negative image of national continuity it finally does away with the notion of lessons from the past which aimed at preventing the repetition of fascism and war, whether, in its anti-totalitarian or its anti-fascist version, up to the end of the Cold War, the ‘lesson’ of the Second World War has meant more than the confirmation of national identity. Thus in the 1980s the positive, as well as the negative, construction of national unity worked through either self-criticism or self-assertion – ‘all French collaborated’, but either that was not that bad, or they were all guilty of anti-Semitism. Even Salò Republicans were to be regarded as either ‘good Italians’ or only as ‘weak’ (De Felice, quoted in Bosworth 1993: 139) as all the others. The structure of this volume challenges the established view. It was not amnesia which was replaced by memory after 1968, but rather a change took place in selecting what should be remembered, and this changed selectivity was brought about well before 1968. It was not a generational ‘experience’ that in the 1960s delegitimised the subjects of official memory and their ways of remembering. In fact, the often-used term taboo, which was equated with silence, covered only the specific selection of memories which were dominant in the 1950s. Thus taboo-breaking meant to bring to the fore those memories which had been silenced, i.e., marginalised or excluded. In the German case, the memories of the victims of racist and political persecution had been repressed in favour of the privileged remembrance of suffering German soldiers and civilians on whom the official and popular memory had centred. In France, as

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Margaret Atack (1989: 235) has shown, much of what later became known as mode rétro and linked exclusively to the post-1968 ‘generation’, was remembered in the late 1940s, but – as in Italy – this non- or anti-resistance memory could not gain a dominant position, even at the height of the Cold War (Duggan 1995: 7-8). Within this interpretation of the post-1960s as delegitimising the hitherto dominant memory, it made an important difference whether, as in France and Italy, the heroic image of resistance memory was called into question or, as in Germany, the self-victimising suffering soldier memory. However, disillusionment about the results of Liberation, measured against its promises, and the discovery that Germans had missed the chance to liberate themselves from fascism had something in common. When, in all three countries, women’s rights were set on the agenda, the female experience of the Second World War started to be remembered. The 1970s women’s movements raised the question of female identity and gave special urgency to women’s memories of the Second World War, since in resistance to, as well as in complicity with patriarchal fascism, the private/public dichotomy was crucial to them. Thus the ‘deeply gendered relation between war and literature’ (Cooper et al. 1989: xv) was highlighted. The framework of remembering has always been in the present, but since the 1960s the public use of memory in order to legitimate the status quo has been increasingly challenged by the call on memory to represent social change. Any attempt at an overview which concentrates on the dominant tendencies of literary memory runs the risk of actively forgetting the opposing or marginalised voices. The assumption that one, and only one, paradigm governs all levels of memory at a given time (Broszat 1988: 221), seems rather doubtful. The now current view, for instance, that what is today called the Holocaust – in spite of the ‘estranging’ effect of the word which it shares with Shoah and Churban (Wiesel 1996; Niethammer 1992; Frei 1992) – became central for French, German and Italian remembering only in 1980s, contradicts the facts of publishing history. In all three countries it was in the 1940s and the 1960s that the greatest number of testimonies were published (Wieviorka 1992; Lorenz 1992; Reiter 1995: 228-30). In order to prevent the overly simplistic homogenisation of periods, therefore, the structure of this book is not strictly chronological. Within the sections which present a specific group memory, there is a preference for writers who continually reworked their memory of the Second World War. Like the reediting by publishers, the reinterpretation by critics and the rediscovery by literary historians, the rewriting, as James E. Young (1988) has pointed out most convincingly, brings the social and historical context of

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remembering into play. Thus the ‘waves’ of reworking the past are recognisable within many of the individual chapters, although the overall structure of the volume captures the shifting lines of dominance and centrality: from the German soldier and the French and Italian resisters in the late 1940s, to the amnestied fascists of the 1950s, the victims of the 1960s, the female experiences of war in the 1970s, and ending with the children of the war in the 1980s. The structure does not suggest that in any of these periods a particular group memory was the only one visible, rather it stresses remembering as a ‘complex ideological battle’ (Atack 1989: 235).

PART I

THE GERMAN SOLDIER’S MEMORY

1

PRIVATE AND PUBLIC FILTERS: MEMORIES OF WAR IN HEINRICH BÖLL’S FICTION AND NONFICTION J.H. Reid

Near the beginning of Böll’s satire, ‘Christmas Not Just Once a Year’, the narrator writes: At the risk of making myself unpopular, I must now mention a fact in defence of which I can only say that it really is one. During the years 1939 to 1945 there was a war on. In wartime there is a lot of singing, shooting, talking, fighting, starving and dying — and bombs are dropped, all disagreeable things with which I have no intention of boring my contemporaries. I must merely mention them because the war had a bearing on the story I wish to tell. (Böll 1986a: 421)

By 1952, the year in which this text appeared, the immediate effects of the Second World War in West Germany were beginning to fade. The ‘economic miracle’ was in full swing; Hitler’s generals, whose memoirs were popular with the reading public, were being rehabilitated with a view to their redeployment in a future German army. By and large, the putative readers of ‘Christmas Not Just Once a Year’ did indeed not want to be reminded of the war, its crimes and its deprivations. By contrast, Böll’s whole work is, in a sense, all about remembering. An essay of the same year described the writer’s task in terms of reminding his readers ‘that the devastations in our world

Heinrich Böll’s Fiction and Nonfiction

3

are not merely superficial nor so trivial that one may presume to heal them in a few short years’ (Böll 1979b: 35).1 Down to his final novel, Women in a River Landscape (1988), the characters of his fiction are scarred by the experience of the war and its aftermath, and if Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, in a seminal book of 1967, accused their German compatriots of an ‘inability to mourn’, a collective refusal to confront the past, Böll was the author who most consistently was providing the material on the basis of which such a confrontation would have been possible. That — in spite of the fears of the narrator of ‘Christmas Not Just Once a Year’ — his works were extremely widely read, from the early 1960s onwards almost invariably best sellers, neither refutes nor confirms the Mitscherlichs’ thesis, but implies a complexity in the reception of literary texts which can only be touched on in this chapter. Three points may be made briefly: the popularity of Böll’s oeuvre might seem to imply an exculpatory element: Böll never leaves his readers in complete despair (Nägele 1976). At the same time there is a potentially vicarious element in the reception of the work, whereby the task of dealing with the past is offloaded on to the ‘representative’ writer, something against which Böll, especially in the last decade of his life, vainly protested: to describe the writer as the ‘nation’s conscience’ was profoundly undemocratic and akin to turning him into a ‘scapegoat’ (Böll & Riese 1977: 7). Nevertheless, Böll’s evident moral uprightness undoubtedly did much to rehabilitate Germans internationally, culminating in the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972. Remembering the war was for Böll not a reminiscing in the manner of old soldiers, a danger he was acutely conscious of, especially in his last years, when he was constantly being invited to contribute to anniversaries. As early as 1949, we find the title of one of his short stories arousing the reader’s expectations of such reminiscing only to defeat them at once. In ‘That Time We Were in Odessa’ the teenage voice of one who was sent straight from school to the Russian front becomes increasingly desperate, and at the end of the story we realise that this man did not return to write his memoirs or swap stories over a beer: he and his comrades did not return at all. The shock effect of a narrator who himself dies at the end of his narrative recurs elsewhere in Böll’s war fiction. Even in the immediate postwar correspondence with ErnstAdolf Kunz there are none of the old soldiers’ tales. In one of the earliest letters Böll writes of the ‘dreadful memories of the war, which are only just emerging, now that one is sleeping every day in a bed’ (Hoven 1994: 18). Two months later the memory of war 1. Translations from German sources are my own.

4

The German Soldier’s Memory

and captivity makes everything else appear ‘trivial’ (20). It is striking how seldom either of them refers to contemporary politics: in 1949, for example, the founding of the Federal Republic passes unremarked. The one public topic which does recur is that of militarism and remilitarisation, and it was evidently because of this preoccupation and the unwillingness of publishers to indulge it that Böll took so long to obtain the literary breakthrough he was desperately looking for: My real province is, it is clear, the war with all its subsidiary phenomena, and nobody wants to read or hear anything about the war, and working without any resonance whatever, that drives you insane. (143) I know that the war topic is not wanted and not popular but I can’t help it and unfortunately I really have not — I believe — been chosen to join the ranks of those in the business of producing chocolate pralinés. (166)

One particularly sensitive issue was the degree to which the German army, as distinct from the SS and other specialist units, had been responsible for atrocities. Commenting on the Nuremberg trials in 1946, no less a person than Alfred Andersch declared that the soldiers of Stalingrad, El Alamein and Monte Cassino were innocent of the crimes of Dachau and Buchenwald (Schwab-Felisch 1962: 27), and when in 1991 Omer Bartov revealed the extent to which the Wehrmacht had conformed to National Socialist policies with regard to the ‘inferior races’ in the East, his book had a stormy reception in Germany (Naumann 1992). The text in which Böll comes closest to rehabilitating the German officer class is A Soldier’s Legacy, written in 1948, but not published until 1981. Lieutenant Schelling is noble and humane; his talk of the need to assassinate Hitler associates him with the officers’ plot of 20 July 1944, the date which was to be celebrated in West Germany annually as the Day of Resistance. Schelling, uniquely in Böll’s work, is even allowed to win a battle. No such success is vouchsafed to the General of And Where Were You, Adam? (1951), although he, too, is presented with some sympathy. Alan Bance (1993) has pointed out that even in such an outstandingly anti-militarist novel as this the scene at the concentration camp, where Jews are being murdered under the auspices of the SS, is not linked to the German army’s actions elsewhere in the novel; on the contrary, the transport of Jews to the slaughter is juxtaposed with a scene in which German soldiers are being transported unwillingly to the front, thus implying an exculpatory parallel between the sufferings of Germans and

Heinrich Böll’s Fiction and Nonfiction

5

the sufferings of Jews. Had Böll filtered out of his fiction memories of the atrocities committed by the army in which he served for six years? In the most comprehensive account he gave of his experiences, a long conversation of 1975 with René Wintzen, it is corruption and incompetence that he stresses in his description of the German army and its dealings with civilians; the only passage to refer to atrocities stresses that it was ‘the SS, not the army’ that he witnessed terrorising the Polish population in 1939-40 (Böll 1979a: 127); otherwise the ‘terror’ we read of was being inflicted by the Gestapo and the military police on potential German deserters. In this respect, Böll’s account is similar to other conformist accounts. There are early texts which suggest a different picture. The short story ‘Cause of Death: Hooked Nose’ describes in graphic detail mass executions of Jews in the Soviet Union explicitly being carried out by people wearing the uniform of the army. But if publishers were not keen on war fiction, they were especially not keen on texts which were critical of the Wehrmacht. Böll’s war fiction has to be considered in the context of when it was published: much of what he wrote in the immediate postwar years, with his experiences fresh in his mind, did not appear until the 1980s, and some of it is still coming out posthumously. Of some twenty-seven war stories and novels which Böll wrote between 1946 and 1951 and which have in the meantime been published, only fifteen appeared at the time of writing. ‘Cause of Death: Hooked Nose’ was written in 1947 but not published until 1983. Böll served throughout the war, although he never rose above the rank of lance-corporal (Reid 1988: 28-36). His war fell into two distinct parts: in the first, from 1939 to 1943, he was hardly on ‘active service’, as both Poland and France had fallen to the Germans before Böll was posted there. From July/August 1940 onwards he was in the relative comfort and security of Northern France, where the main enemy appears to have been boredom. Extracts from some of the letters from this period have been published (Böll 1987); a more complete selection, due in 1997, will shed light on the more obscure aspects of Böll’s life and development.2 The information so far available does not on the whole suggest deprivations or acute unhappiness; on the contrary, there are moments of exhilaration when the young Böll is able to wander off on his own. Lack of tobacco, alcohol, above all the exclusively male nature of his immediate surroundings (women are epiphanies here, as elsewhere in Böll’s works) — these are the chief depriva2. I am grateful to the editor, Karl Heiner Busse, for discussing the correspondence with me and allowing me to refer to some of the details in it.

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The German Soldier’s Memory

tions he has to live with. There is undoubted naivety in the twentytwo-year-old’s attitude. The coolness of personal relations between the occupied French and the Germans he found in retrospect understandable, but at the time it had been ‘hard to bear’ (Böll 1979a: 130). In the unpublished correspondence there are even passages in which he expresses his puzzlement at the refusal of the French to be friends with the occupying forces, their inability to understand the ‘new order’ the Germans are trying to create in Europe. This is perhaps one of the things he was referring to when in his first postwar letter to Kunz he writes: ‘We shall abjure all the errors and nonsense of the past years, truly start a new life with God’s help’ (Hoven 1994, 12). The naivety was compounded when in the autumn of 1943 he allowed himself to be posted to the Eastern front, although as an expert malingerer he might have avoided it. He later explained his attitude in terms of curiosity provoked by his teachers’ descriptions of life at the front during the First World War, the topic of numerous war novels of the 1920s and 1930s by such authors as Ernst Jünger (The Storm of Steel). As the authentic, shared experience of the front line was one of the myths exploited by Hitler in his wooing of conservative elements in the German population, it seems that Böll was not as impervious to ideology as might have been imagined. His train, however, was immediately ambushed by the French maquis, he spent three terrifying months experiencing ‘the real thing’ in the Crimea, was wounded, and spent most of the rest of the war trying, with much success, to avoid being sent back to the front lines. To a large extent these contrasting experiences of war are reflected in Böll’s early fiction: the texts set in France are filled with the atmosphere of corruption and boredom, men foraging for food, alcohol, cigarettes and women; they tend to be elegiac in tone (the word ‘Trauer’, mourning or mournfulness, is a leitmotif both of the letters and of the fiction where France is concerned). By contrast, the much larger number of texts set on the Eastern front contain naturalistic, physical descriptions of the horrors of war, the wounds, the deaths, the terror: an arm dangling from the shoulder of a fleeing soldier is a recurrent image. Whatever the setting, war and the army are consistently experienced and presented as a ‘meaningless’ experience, fostering utterly cynical and amoral behaviour among its participants. Heroism, in the conventional sense, is absent; comradeship is helping others, usually younger soldiers, to make the best of a bad job. The army is the embodiment of bureaucracy, and bureaucracy in all its forms was one of Böll’s lifelong targets. From the texts one might assume that Böll had not been involved in the war other than in an entirely passive way. Even

Heinrich Böll’s Fiction and Nonfiction

7

when they are not lying wounded in hospital or waiting to be taken to the front, the protagonists of his war fiction are curiously helpless, being fired on rather than themselves using their weapons. It was startling to encounter a text of 1947, ‘With These Hands’, when it was published for the first time in December 1992 as one of the focal points of a Böll Week in Cologne to celebrate what would have been the author’s seventy-fifth birthday. It begins: ‘With these hands, which in the evening make the sign of the cross on the forehead of your child, you have moved the trigger of your machine-gun by those decisive millionths of a millimetre so that it shattered the foreheads of others and innocents.’ And later we read: ‘These hands you have washed millions of times, and again and again they were clean, pure and innocent, and no-one was afraid to seize hold of them although you used them to place deadly grenades into the funnel of the mortar.’ (Böll 1994, 95-96) Here is a good example of the soldier’s memory, and it is an image of Böll which is different from the impression conveyed by the fiction. One of the unpublished letters reports an incident in France when RAF planes came over and — without waiting for orders — he jumped to the howitzer to try to bring one down. None of Böll’s protagonists in the fiction appears to use his gun or grenades at all; in The Train was on Time, Andreas has even managed to leave his rifle at home. The single exception is the story ‘Vive la France’, where, however, it is a hated German officer who is shot by one of his own men. Another motif in which contradictions appear is that of the cultural tourist. In Böll’s ‘Letter to a Young Catholic’ of 1958, a long and angry attack on his church for falling in with the Adenauer government’s remilitarisation policies, he wrote scornfully of the attitude of those who took advantage of the war to go to places they would otherwise never have been able to afford to visit. He may have had Ernst Jünger in mind, the prototype of the cultured German officer. We might, therefore, assume that Böll had been different. In fact he wasted no opportunity to visit the cultural sites of Northern France: his letters contain accounts of the cathedrals at Le Mans, Rouen, Amiens and Paris, occasionally expressing frustration when he finds himself forced to stay beside uncultivated companions who have no interest in churches and art. He is at pains to distance himself from ordinary tourists: ‘I have the heart of an artist’ (Böll 1987: 27). Böll’s memory and understanding of the war develop in the course of the years. The war stories proper are all written in the immediate aftermath of the war experience itself. From 1951 onwards, with few exceptions, Böll is writing literature set in the

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The German Soldier’s Memory

postwar period. This literature is nevertheless always permeated with a sense of the past, a sense of loss, indignation at the waste and a determination not to forget. What is new is the increasingly important role given to the citizens of the Soviet Union as victims of German aggression and barbarity. In the early stories the Russians are almost invariably anonymous figures (the important exception is the story ‘Cause of Death: Hooked Nose’), identified only as indefinite shapes overrunning the German positions, or even, in ‘Jak the Pimp’, as animal-like sounds from a hundred yards away. In ‘The General Stood on a Mound’, Germany and the Soviet Union are even equated as ‘two forces … which blindly, with insatiable lust, pour blood into a bottomless pit in their slavering lust for power’ (Böll 1994: 21). In A Soldier’s Legacy the narrator reflects that the war in Russia would have ended in 1942 had it not been for the Germans’ fear of Russian prisoner-of-war camps (Böll 1986a: 373). Such was the force of propaganda. From the late 1950s onwards, however, Böll was increasingly seeing through the Cold War propaganda, a continuation of wartime propaganda, and his later works, notably Group Portrait with Lady, his numerous friendships with Russians such as Lev Kopelev, his interest in Russian and Soviet literature and culture represent a generous righting of the balance: in his ‘Letter to my Sons’, written in 1985 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war, he points out that the mortality rate among Soviet prisoners of the Germans was 57.8 percent, that among German prisoners of the Russians it lay between 35.2 percent and 37.4 percent, and that 40 percent of the dead of Europe were citizens of the Soviet Union (Böll 1986c: 81). Why and how the war came about is a question touched on at best indirectly. There is another side to Böll’s refusal to reminisce in the conventional way: the avoidance of speculation on how the catastrophe came about, the omission of any spoken, rationalising analysis. Böll’s returning soldiers are taciturn, like the protagonist of his unfinished novel, Paradise Lost: ‘You’ve come from …’ ‘France’, I said. ‘I was just going to say that, you can see it, they’ve all got their special marks on them. Bad?’ I nodded. ‘Yes, yes.’ (Böll 1995: 147)

To what extent the young Böll was aware of how Hitler came to power and what the war really meant will not be clear until the wartime correspondence has been published. As we have seen, although he was in no sense ever a Nazi, there is evidence to sug-

Heinrich Böll’s Fiction and Nonfiction

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gest that he was partly taken in by propaganda. There is a conservative tendency in the fiction to isolate war as an ‘element’ into which one is plunged (Böll 1986a: 370), implying an uncontrollable force. The epigraph to And Where Were You, Adam?, taken from Saint-Exupéry: ‘War is a disease. Like typhoid’, might imply that war is a natural catastrophe; on the other hand, diseases, including typhoid, have causes and can be avoided if certain precautions are taken, and Böll certainly knew Camus’ allegory The Plague. Occasionally, parallels are drawn between prewar society and the wartime military. The generally negative role of teachers implies a link between authoritarian structures at school and similar structures in the army. Since in his autobiographical account of his school days, What’s to Become of the Boy?, Böll found no evidence of such structures, we may see in this a conscious attempt at analysis. Most interesting in this connection is the recently published text ‘The Pale Dog’, written in 1947, a psychosociological study of a man whose social origins prevent him from making headway in civilian life, who later in the army, volunteers to join the special units entrusted with ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the conquered territories, after the war becomes a gangster and murderer, and yet who is portrayed with considerable compassion. Finally, there is the question of resistance. The failure of Germans to resist Hitler in any meaningful, practical way was a major impetus behind the student movement of the late 1960s; it also inspired Böll himself to resist and to encourage others to resist such things as rearmament in the 1950s and the stationing of Pershing missiles in West Germany in the 1980s. Böll himself did not resist the Nazis other than passively: ‘I functioned without conforming’, he said to Kurt Vonnegut (Böll & Vonnegut 1985: 16). In a review of Alfred Andersch’s Cherries of Liberty of 1952 he pointed out that it took more courage to desert than to obey (Böll 1979b: 66), and in the ‘Letter to a Young Catholic’ he suggested that, although it was actually possible to refuse to obey an illegal order (for example, to fetch a prostitute for an officer), disobedience was unthinkable for the majority of German, especially Catholic, soldiers (263). On the evidence of his fiction Böll was preoccupied with this question in the early postwar years, and was unsure of his own stance. In his first independent publication, The Train was on Time (1949), the protagonist meets a Polish prostitute who has been working for the partisans but is now disillusioned: their kind of resistance leads only to death and further suffering; a similar stance, this time with regard to the French Resistance, is to be found in an unfinished play of 1948 (Bellmann 1995: 250-51). It is related to the metaphysical, religious dimension which was particularly

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The German Soldier’s Memory

overt in Böll’s early writing, the conviction that man is born to suffer, that life is a vale of tears which will be wiped away in the life to come. On the other hand, the unpublished novel Cross without Love of 1948 introduces the figures of two brothers, one of whom succumbs to the temptations of the Nazis, while the other joins the underground resistance; in A Soldier’s Legacy the need to assassinate Hitler is discussed (by contrast, in And Where Were You, Adam? news of the trial of the plotters of 20 July 1944 is greeted with a shrug of the shoulders), and in ‘Vive la France’ the soldier on guard duty finally shoots dead his cynical superior officer. The short text of 1946 ‘The Fugitive’, which even seems to echo Anna Seghers’s socialist novel The Seventh Cross, republished in the same year, focuses on an escape from a concentration camp, where the protagonist had been imprisoned on account of a brochure he had written: resistance here is both ideological and physical. Böll was inconsistent: Schelling, who wishes to assassinate Hitler, also states that man is born to suffer. It is striking, however, that those texts in which effective resistance is propagated or carried out were not published at the time, while those which imply the hopelessness, even worthlessness, of resistance were. ‘The Fugitive’ did not appear until 1995. None of the texts published in the late 1940s contains as direct attacks on Hitler as do A Soldier’s Legacy (‘a blockhead’, Böll 1986a: 342) and The Casualty (‘an arsehole’, Böll 1986b: 54). The German soldier’s memory was filtered not only through his author’s mind, but through the collective mind of the cultural authorities of those immediate postwar years.

PART II

THE RESISTANCE MEMORY The Female Resister

2

ORDINARY HEROINES: RESISTANCE AND ROMANCE IN THE WAR FICTION OF ELSA TRIOLET Diana Holmes

One of the most famous poems of the French Resistance celebrates the beauty of ‘Elsa’s eyes’ (‘Les Yeux d’Elsa’, 1942), transforming them through a series of images into an emblem of hope in the struggle against Nazism. The ‘Elsa’ of the title was Elsa Triolet, wife of Louis Aragon, the poem’s author, and herself both a resistance activist and a resistance writer. The stories and novels she wrote during the Occupation shared the purposes of much resistance fiction: they were attempts to record the lived reality of the period, both as an assertion of the denied right to self-expression, and so that alternatives should exist to Vichyite (and, for Triolet, to postwar Gaullist) versions of the truth. Clandestine publication made illicit self-expression into an act of resistance, punishable like other such acts by imprisonment, torture or death. Such penalties acknowledged the fact that literature could be a form of political intervention: by helping to convince readers of the need to resist, resistance fiction aimed not merely to record but also to change reality. It was not surprising that Triolet should have identified herself with the resistance cause. As a Russian Jew, a communist sympathiser and the wife of a prominent French communist writer, she was viewed with suspicion by the French authorities even before the Republic ended, and under the Occupation she was clearly in

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danger. Triolet left Paris for the South of France in 1940 and went underground in November 1942 when the Free Zone ceased to exist. Like many French writers of the Left (Aragon, Camus, Sartre, Vercors were among the most famous), Triolet became a member of the underground Comité National des écrivains (National Committee of Writers), and helped to write and edit their underground journal, Les Lettres Françaises. She also edited a local clandestine paper Le Drôme en armes, and undertook liaison work between groups of maquis and between the maquis and local civilians. In the time remaining, because writing represented, ‘my freedom, my defiance, my luxury’ (Triolet 1973: 19) she wrote fiction. Her best-known story, ‘Les Amants d’Avignon’ (‘The Lovers of Avignon’), was published and distributed by the underground Editions de Minuit in 1943, and the story ‘Yvette’ was also published illegally before the Liberation. Three more stories were kept hidden until the Occupation ended, then published with ‘The Lovers of Avignon’ in a single volume under the title of the last story: Le premier accroc coûte deux cents francs (A Fine of Two Hundred Francs), which won the Prix Goncourt for 1944. Triolet’s stories are realist, in the sense that they are firmly grounded in the material and political reality of the time, but they also employ the devices of memory and of dream, to produce telling contrasts between the brutality and deprivation of life in occupied France, and the remembered or fantasised pleasures of freedom. Her fiction is also characterised by the bringing of female experience into the foreground: in three out of the five resistance stories the principal protagonist is a woman, and resistance is consistently represented as an activity in which women are central. At a first level, this is part of Triolet’s realism, and of her attempt to record and communicate firsthand experience: the fiction has a strong element of autobiography, and the representative nature of Triolet’s own experience is confirmed by many recent historians’ accounts of women’s central role in resistance activity. In her 1987 article on ‘Redefining Resistance’, for example, Paula Schwartz’s portrayal of the resistance movement closely resembles that provided by Triolet: ‘Present throughout the Resistance movement from positions of leadership to the base, women ran missions, collected intelligence, printed and distributed clandestine newspapers, smuggled arms and ammunition, staged demonstrations, and committed sabotage alongside men.’ (Schwartz 1987: 141) Similarly H.R. Kedward in In Search of the Maquis finds that women’s role in ‘liaison work and the organisation of shelter and supplies’ was ‘at the nerve centre of the growth and development of the maquis’, and that for many of the generation who lived through the Occupation women are remembered as ‘the epitome of what they mean by local resistance’ (1993: 93).

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The Resistance Memory

The emphasis on women as resisters is thus at one level a function of Triolet’s concern with mimetic realism and with témoignage, but it also produces a number of interesting narrative features which both mark off Triolet’s resistance fiction from the rest of her work, and produce the distinctive tone and meaning of her stories within the wider corpus of French resistance fiction. Triolet’s pre-resistance publications (notably Bonsoir, Thérèse [1939] and Mille regrets (A Thousand Regrets, 1942) had been peopled by women who were, in a variety of senses, social outcasts. Single, childless, of no fixed abode, exiled from their native lands, frequently on the border of madness or criminality, Triolet’s female protagonists had rarely found any legitimate role or function in French society.1 In the resistance stories, on the other hand, the image is not of women’s exclusion but of their integration into the community of resisters. The problem of being accepted as a woman in the resistance is scarcely raised in the narratives: on the contrary, there is a strong sense of an egalitarian comradeship encompassing both sexes, both in the depiction of groups engaged in resistance activity (‘The Lovers of Avignon’, ‘A Fine of Two Hundred Francs’) and in scenes of everyday, covert opposition, such as the railway carriage conversations in ‘The Lovers of Avignon’ in which a group of strangers, men and women, wary of each other but united by their hatred of the occupying forces, swap stories and share the humour of dissent. Nonetheless, the representation of women as actively engaged in resistance inevitably raises certain contradictions. As we shall see, it is part of Triolet’s persuasive strategy to refer to a familiar world of contemporary norms and values, and within such a world, in the France of the 1940s, ‘woman’ strongly connotes passivity, dependence, vulnerability, investment of the self in private emotion rather than in public activity – all of these attributes which are profoundly incompatible with the mobility, courage and political commitment associated with the resister. The manner in which this contradiction is negotiated in Triolet’s fiction seems to me to be central to the distinctiveness of her stories – and also to an assessment of the sexual politics they imply. In ‘Cahiers enterrés sous un pêcher’ (‘Notebooks Buried under a Peachtree’), a story which was itself buried underground until the Occupation ended, Triolet created a heroine biographically close to herself: Louise Delfort has spent part of her childhood in Moscow, has lived in Paris amongst intellectuals and artists, has the education, the skill and the desire to commit her experience and her dreams to paper, so that she becomes the intradiegetic narrator of 1. For a fuller discussion of these texts see chapter 9, ‘Elsa Triolet: stories of exile and resistance’ in Holmes 1996.

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her own story. Though Louise’s choice of resistance replaces a pleasurably affluent life of travel, work and love with one of solitude, danger and eventually death, there is a degree of continuity between her prewar political activism and her life under the Occupation. Not so in the case of Triolet’s more ordinary heroines. In the two stories written for clandestine publication, ‘The Lovers of Avignon’ and ‘Yvette’, Triolet insists on the representative normality of her protagonists’ lives before the war brutally imposes the need for heroism. In the opening chapter of ‘The Lovers of Avignon’, the reader meets Juliette Noel as a Parisian shorthand typist, living a secure and unadventurous home life with her elderly aunt and the little boy they have adopted; in ‘Yvette’, the eponymous heroine grows up contentedly in her parents’ home in a provincial town, expecting no future other than one of love, marriage and children. In a resistance text, the function of such recognisably ordinary backgrounds is to generalise the text’s significance, to construct the protagonists as everyman/everywoman and thus potentially to persuade the reader of the compatibility between ordinary people and resistance. What is interesting here is the way in which the conformity to a popular ideal of femininity functions to establish these heroines as authentically ‘normal’ women. Juliette is an efficient secretary, discreet, charming and unassertive; in normal times she is afraid of solitude and ‘would have fainted at the sight of a mouse’ (Triolet 1986: 16). Though it is implied that a disastrous love affair has discouraged Juliette from thoughts of marriage, her maternal feelings are established through her love for the adopted child. If she is beautiful, she is so rather in the manner of the heroines of popular romantic fiction, to whose beauty a female reader might aspire through attention to grooming, make-up and style. Juliette is described ‘as alluring as a typist in a film … silken hair, long lashes, and a kind of natural elegance in her close-fitting pullover, her very short skirt, and very high heels’ (7). The reference to film is significant: Juliette’s cultural reference points are Hollywood melodramas and the songs of Piaf, both of which confirm the generalised sense that the essential female narrative is the love story. Juliette’s credentials as a representative heroine are established by her femininity, implicitly defined in terms of desirability, aspirations to romance, docility and maternal warmth. Similarly, Yvette has the standard attributes of the good heroine: she is ‘gentle, weak and too beautiful for her own good’ (Triolet 1960: 216), ‘lovely, good and tender-hearted’ (228).2 Lovingly obedient to her parents, given to dreams of romance, Yvette looks no 2. The translations are my own.

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The Resistance Memory

further than the horizons of her parents’ drapers shop and the possibility of love with her childhood sweetheart André. Implicit in Yvette’s physical characterisation is the promise of sexual love and of maternity: at the turning point between childhood and maturity, she innocently displays ‘the pleasure, visibly still a recent one, of having breast and hips. Yet she had the breasts of a grown woman’ (229). The heroines’ conformity to the code of femininity is further emphasised by the deployment of a narrative point of view. In those stories which were to be published by the underground press, Triolet necessarily disguised her own narrative voice,3 assuming the male pen-name ‘Laurent Daniel’, and adopting too the voice of a narrator which, despite the absence of explicit marks of gender, reads as masculine. The curiously conspicuous narrator of ‘The Lovers of Avignon’ insists on Juliette’s qualities by describing his (?) personal reaction to her: ‘I’ve always been fond of Juliette Noel’, the story begins, ‘I find her extremely charming and attractive. People tell me that I am too easily pleased by women, that I think them all pretty’ (Triolet 1986: 9). In the case of ‘Yvette’ too, the narrator functions as a commentator and guide who directs the reader’s sympathies, though in this story the sense of an interposed male viewpoint is less a result of the narrator’s voice than of the system of focalisation. Yvette is frequently presented to the reader through the eyes of her childhood sweetheart, André (or Dédé), sometimes explicitly – ‘André knew that Yvette …’ (Triolet 1960: 229), sometimes implicitly, as in the passage alluded to above, which describes Yvette’s burgeoning beauty. Here the narrative perspective appears to be that of the extradiegetic narrator, but after the final sentence of description a new paragraph implies retrospectively that the focalisation is in fact that of André: ‘It was magnificent to glimpse between those red lips the teeth of her strong jaw, and the whole of Yvette was as healthy, wholesome and solid as her teeth. Yet Dédé rarely returned to his native town.’ (229) The effect of the male point of view is further to situate Juliette and Yvette within a conventional framework of gender identity: they are the object of a gaze which is both desiring and protective, signifying the benevolent authority of good masculinity as opposed to the harsh and brutal authority of the occupying forces. The purpose of the focusing on the heroines’ femininity is, as we have said, to establish their ‘normality’, and thus to set up a radical 3. My thanks to Mike Kelly for raising this point in the discussion that followed the presentation of this paper at the conference ‘European Memories of World War Two’, Cardiff, September 1995. Professor Kelly’s point was that the need for anonymity imposed by the situation of the resistance writer could also lend a degree of creative freedom, as the writer necessarily adopts an alternative voice.

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contrast between their peacetime lifestyle and identity, and what is demanded of them by the extreme circumstances of war. After the introduction to Juliette Noel as the elegant Parisian secretary, the narrative proper begins in occupied France, in a ruined, rat-infested farmhouse in the depths of winter. The intrepid liaison agent in hiding there, engaged in a mission to recruit local farmers for the resistance cause, is revealed to be Juliette herself – now living and working in Lyon and risking her life daily. The benevolent narrator highlights the disparity between Juliette’s femininity and the life she now leads: ‘This dream she must now live couldn’t be the right one; it must be someone else’s dream, because Juliette’s dreams, in the secret places of her heart, were simply dreams of love’ (Triolet 1986: 16). The narrator explicitly deplores the sacrifices it demands: ‘How my heart aches for her, for all women … Juliette!’ (58). The same sense of indignation at the war’s cruel disruption of normality informs ‘Yvette’, in which variations on the narrator’s comment, ‘Just an ordinary story, if a crime can ever be called ordinary’ (Triolet 1960: 226, 231, 239), form the story’s refrain. Here, too, the story’s impact depends upon the contrast between a pleasant, commonplace life, and the brutal events that unfold, but Yvette’s gentle, compliant ‘normality’ is not so much transformed into active heroism as reduced through suffering to stoical silence. The story is structured around three visits made by André to his home town. On the first, Yvette and her parents have been arrested by the Gestapo on suspicion of resistance activities. André, himself a resister, uses his connections to engineer the release of the two women. Yvette’s pallor and weight loss betray her suffering, but she refuses either to tell the full story of her imprisonment, or to alter her good-natured manner, maintaining her ‘pleasant, amiable tone’ (251) even when alluding, enigmatically, to the sexual blackmail employed by the Gestapo officer who interrogated her: ‘“With anyone young and a bit attractive they’re very nice. Too nice…”, she smiled, generously’ (232). On André’s second visit, Yvette is in a clinic. That she is undergoing an abortion is never made explicit, the precise nature of Yvette’s experience remaining as opaque for the reader as it does for André – for Yvette’s resistance takes the form of an obstinate refusal to acknowledge evil or to express her own suffering by words or tears. Her stoicism allows her to continue to support her mother, and to maintain such contact as she can with her father, now in a camp. When André returns for the third time, just before he departs for the maquis, Yvette’s physical decline has accelerated and her beauty and energy are lost. The ‘crime’ of the narrator’s refrain lies in the destruction of the young woman’s ‘health, youth, trust in the world’ (239).

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The Resistance Memory

Viewed largely from André’s male perspective, it is a part of Yvette’s conventional femininity that she should remain mysterious and enigmatic. André finds her refusal to adapt her attitudes and behaviour to the changed circumstances of war incomprehensible and infuriating, characterising her misplaced faith in the world as ‘the inexhaustible, stupid, criminal, low trust of a beautiful girl for whom the world divides simply into men and women’ (239), telling her rather contemptuously that ‘I’d have liked to take you with me, but the maquis isn’t for sick ladies’ (238). Whether or not Yvette’s very marked femininity transforms into resistance is thus open to question: Margaret Atack sees Yvette rather as a passive figure whose loss of innocence signifies the disruptive power of war for André and for the reader, but leaves her simply ‘with nowhere to go’ (1990: 243). As we have seen, the story indeed centres on the cruel destruction of a normality partly defined in terms of sexual innocence, but the ending seems to be more ambivalent in perspective and in meaning. Yvette’s refusal to weep or rage puzzles André, but may be read as the confirmation of a silently courageous self-possession which has characterised Yvette throughout the narrative: ‘No, she wasn’t crying, she never cried, not when she banged her shin on the iron benches in the park, nor when Dédé kept her waiting for hours when he’d promised to come, nor when an officer failed to keep his bought promises’ (239). Yvette’s silence might thus be compared to that of the niece in Vercors’ The Silence of the Sea: not an overt gesture of resistance, but the extension of a sense of personal integrity into the political sphere through the refusal to admit to suffering and thus acknowledge the power of the oppressor. This interpretation is made more plausible by a detail of narrative, incomprehensible to André, but open to more than one reading: as Yvette leaves the park where the final conversation with André has taken place, she turns not towards the town but towards the mountains, puzzling André: ‘And why was she turning her back on the town, what could she be going to do up there?’ (239) Given the association between mountains and maquis, this produces at least the possibility that Yvette, too, is actively engaged in resisting. The story’s ending leaves some space for a reading that goes beyond the perspective of André, and makes Yvette’s conventionally feminine identity compatible with attributes that it would appear to exclude: courage, self-determination, and the capacity to resist oppression. Triolet’s stories thus give emphasis to normative definitions of the feminine in order to accentuate the war’s brutal disruption of patterns of normality, and in doing so undermine the apparent incompatibility between femininity and the ‘masculine’ qualities

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and forms of activity associated with resisting. One effect of the Occupation is to render more fragile the boundary between public and private life, a theme which runs through much literature of and about the Occupation, but which also brings into play the question of gender roles since the public/private boundary also corresponds to the boundary of sexual differentiation. In narratives dealing with the prewar period, Triolet’s heroines accept their exclusion from the public world of politics, national and international affairs as normal: Anne-Marie, narrator and central character of the novel Personne ne m’aime (Nobody Loves Me), states unequivocally that ‘politics and war are not women’s business’ (Triolet 1946: 138). Yet the presence of a Nazi power within France itself made the division between public and private impossible to maintain. In Triolet’s story ‘The Private Life of Alexis Slavsky, Painter’, the central character is forced to abandon his belief that art can remain outside politics. For Triolet’s ordinary heroines, the Occupation means the end of a comfortable confinement to the realm of the domestic and the emotional. In texts which demonstrate the necessity of resistance, this politicisation of private life may be shown to be painful, but it is also necessarily imbued with positive value. Alexis discovers that human solidarity can fuel his creativity; Juliette, like Louise and Anne-Marie, finds that her private virtues translate naturally into political involvement. Only Anne-Marie survives the Occupation in terms of narrative chronology, and she does so radically changed – remaining politically active, and both emotionally and financially independent.4 The traditional disassociation between women and politics was not only breached by the war but also used by the resistance to mislead the enemy. If Juliette, like Louise in both ‘Private Life’ and ‘Notebooks’, is entrusted with liaison work, it is partly because the consensual view of gender will make them less liable to suspicion, femininity functioning as a signifier of the private and the domestic. Louise travels ‘with a fur coat and one of those high hats … by way of disguise’ (Triolet 1986: 220), reinforcing her air of femininity by an elegance which further connotes a respectable affluence. Once femininity has served as a kind of masquerade, it can no longer be innocently reassumed as identity, and the change Triolet operates between Anne-Marie’s pre- and postwar personae confirms what is implied by the other stories. War’s disruption of feminine normality is deplored as part of the texts’ persuasive strategy, but a return to prewar gender divisions is neither recommended nor depicted as possible. 4. In the sequel to Personne ne m’aime, Les Fantômes armés.

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The private sphere is also the sphere of intimate emotion and personal relationships. Triolet’s heroines reproduce deeply held assumptions about femininity through their preoccupation with romantic love. Triolet characterises the Occupation period less by scenes of overt violence than by an emphasis on sensory, emotional and aesthetic deprivation – cold, unlit trains, hunger, separation from loved ones – and the bleak present is often further condemned by reference to a remembered or fantasised alternative reality: Juliette’s dreams of love, Louise’s childhood memories of Russia, Alexis’ paintings. Though the primary level of deprivation is material, and Triolet’s stories remain firmly grounded in the everyday reality of shortages and food queues, her characters also suffer from other forms of dispossession: that of the right to selfexpression, thematised most clearly in the story of the artist Alexis Slavsky, and – particularly in the case of female characters – that of the right to love. For Juliette, Yvette and Louise, what is lost under the Occupation is the possibility of love, (hetero)sexual, emotional, romantic love. Louise Delfort (protagonist in ‘The Private Life of Alexis Slavsky, Painter’ and narrator of ‘Notebooks Buried under a Peachtree’) is the strongest and the most independent of Triolet’s heroines, but love constitutes a significant element in her deprivation by war: resistance work separates her from her lover, Jean, and Louise’s diary (the buried notebooks) become an assertion not only of the right to self-expression, but also of the right to love, since it is Jean who disinters and reads them after her death. Through the trauma of her family’s arrest and above all through the abortion, Yvette ceases to be André’s future lover, and the mother of his children; Yvette’s tragedy lies precisely in the loss of an identity founded on the assumption of love and maternity. But it is in ‘The Lovers of Avignon’ that the heroine’s drama is most clearly one of desire for and deprivation of sexual love. The narrator’s descriptions of Juliette’s beauty, and of her tendency to escape into dreams of love, set up expectations of romance from early in the story. Immediately after her return from an exhausting mission, Juliette is obliged to leave home again, on Christmas Eve, to travel to Avignon and inform a resistance leader, code-named Célestin, of the imminent arrest of some of his men. The episode with Célestin is cast as romantic fantasy, mediated by Juliette’s imagination, situated somewhere between the real and the imaginary. Physically, Célestin is the archetypal romantic hero, ‘the head of an archangel, fallen, with burning, prominent eyes beneath bold eyebrows’ (Triolet 1986: 35), a characterisation reinforced by the fact that he inhabits an ancient castle, well supplied

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with warmth and food, in the real but also semimythical city of Avignon, where Petrarch first fell in love with Laura, and which Célestin describes as a ‘holy, satanic town, dedicated to miracles and sorcery, to the Virgin, to Venus’ (34). Juliette proposes a game, which Célestin accepts: that the two should pretend they are lovers, that everything should be ‘as if’ whilst they are together. The narration blurs the borderline between fantasy and reality as the two visit the city hand-in-hand on Christmas Day, both a feast-day which connotes love and plenty, and a day magically linked to Juliette (Juliette Noel). Avignon appears in the perfect primary colours of a bright winter’s day – blue sky, white frost – contrasting with the sordid dinginess through which Juliette travels on her dangerous journeys. The couple’s itinerary has the logic and the inevitability of a dream, the ‘blue-and-white air … gather[s] them up and carr[ies] them’ and they ‘find themselves’ in different parts of the city (41). The interlude is the realisation of Juliette’s desires, and represents all that is excluded by the harsh reality of Occupation – indeed the episode ends abruptly when, as the couple dance by the fire in Célestin’s arched room, a servant arrives to announce that Célestin is needed on resistance business. Avignon becomes again a cold, dark city, ‘a German town’, as Juliette reflects. On her way home, waiting for another train in another cold, unwelcoming town, Juliette takes refuge in a cinema, in whose warm, dark space her dreams of love are fed and celebrated. When Piaf’s voice starts to sing, ‘He was big, he was handsome/ He smelt of warm sand’ (49), Juliette weeps uncontrollably. The characterisation of women’s aspirations as essentially romantic is one aspect of Triolet’s emphasis on ordinary, representative characters: Juliette shares the cultural tastes of her sex, generation and class. It could also be argued that by equating their aspirations with romantic love, despite the courage and competence with which she endows them, Triolet confines her heroines within a conventional, man-centred view of what women want and dream of. However, this represents a limited reading of what romantic love actually means in Triolet’s work. In a manner comparable with Aragon’s poetic celebration of the beloved ‘Elsa’, love is used here to represent not just a literal relationship with another individual, leading towards the social institution of marriage, but a space beyond social imperatives in which desire and emotional need can be expressed and shared, and in which the imagination can have free rein. Love and desire are close to creativity in Triolet’s fiction: Avignon is transformed by Juliette and Célestin’s game into a magical city, and Louise finds the necessary impulse to continue her writing in a fantasy of textual seduction of a future male

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reader. In the tense, impoverished period of the Occupation, love can signify all that is denied by a brutally repressive regime. It is significant therefore that rather than a more conventional form of wartime romance, in which the narrative would hinge on the enforced separation and possible reconciliation of two lovers, Triolet makes Juliette’s interlude of love a perfect fantasy, whose reality status is uncertain, but which forms the heart of the story by its contrast with the tension and the harsh conditions depicted in the rest of the narrative. In ‘Yvette’, a similar function is performed not by an episode, but by a place: the town park in which André and Yvette meet at each key point in the narrative and which has represented, since childhood, their privileged domain. The park, like the city of Avignon in the earlier story, is far more than a realist location: its curious emptiness that guarantees the couple’s privacy, the fact that the air there has a ‘different texture’ (Triolet 1960: 231), the presence at each of their visits of a prearranged pair of seats ‘that an invisible couple seemed to have just left’ (231) – all of these elements identify the park with the potential love between André and Yvette, so that it becomes the space of a possible happiness that is to remain unrealised, but which stands in opposition to the bleak reality that unfolds. At an explicit level, then, as part of the text’s persuasive strategy of making the heroic ordinary, Triolet endorses a conventional definition of feminine identity as ideally compliant, amiable, strongly oriented towards heterosexual love. The representative quality of these heroines is established through their conformity to such norms, and the androcentric nature of French society is reproduced through the use of a male narrative voice. The brutality of war lies partly in its disruption of the normal patterns of women’s lives: Juliette and Yvette are forced to relinquish lives of tranquil domesticity and to become lucid and independent, at the cost of suffering. In both stories, the male narrator deplores the loss of happiness this entails, implying a nostalgia for a prewar world of fixed gender roles. Yet by showing women to be central to both the practice and the spirit of resistance, Triolet’s texts implicitly dispute women’s confinement to the realm of the domestic and the emotional. Within the context of Juliette’s adventurous courage and Yvette’s stoicism, the heroines’ conventionally feminine dreams of romantic love come to mean more than an internalised acceptance of patriarchal institutions. Triolet does not trivialise her heroines’ desires, but finds for them cultural forms which are plausible, within the stories’ realist framework, and which signify wider freedoms repressed under the Occupation.

3

‘THIS BOOK DOES NOT WANT TO BE A WORK OF ART. THIS BOOK IS TRUTH.’ THE DIARIES OF RUTH ANDREAS-FRIEDRICH Irmela von der Lühe

‘We have entered an age of diaries’, wrote Gerhard Nebel (1948: 252) in the literary monthly Welt und Wort in March 1948, thus reacting to the wealth of diaries that were published in the wake of the Second World War by soldiers, members of the Resistance, authors, journalists and by so-called ‘inner émigrés’ of various political and ideological backgrounds. As early as six years before, in November 1942, the Berlin-based journalist Ursula von Kardorff declared in the arts pages of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung that diary writing was on the rise again, ‘regardless of the claim of totality that today’s life makes on the individual’s own time’ (Hartl 1992: 7). Her own diaries – written in 1947 under the title Berliner Aufzeichnungen 1942-1945 (Berlin Notes 1942-1945) and only published in 1962 – prove that the individual is able to withdraw from the totalising claims of the present through the writing of a diary. Her diaries also prove that, by writing notes, observations, comments and reflections on a daily basis, the individual can retain his/her integrity and guarantee the power of personal recollection. Ursula von Kardorff’s diaries were to become an important chronicle because of her close ties with the resistance movement of 20

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July 1944. She began writing her notes fully conscious of the extraordinary historical crisis she was undergoing. On New Year’s Day 1944 she wrote: ‘Later I want to remember what happened’ (Kardorff 1992: 4), at the same time warning herself of the vanity inherent in such notes. Another Berlin journalist, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, explains the origin of her diaries and the intentions behind them very differently. From 1938 until the end of the war she was a member of the resistance group Onkel Emil.1 In the preface to her diaries of that period she wrote that the pogroms of November 1938 had impelled her to start writing. Her diaries were not intended to be a work of art, but a document. Above all, they were supposed to be a monument: a monument to those to whom no help could have been offered, whose lives could not have been saved, and whose eventual deportation could not have been averted. With her own endeavours she wanted to continue the unfinished oeuvre of the victims (Andreas-Friedrich 1984: 90). Andreas-Friedrich’s diaries were first published in America and England in 1946 and subsequently by Germany’s Suhrkamp publishers in 1947. The diaries provide deeply moving evidence of how a group of about twenty people tried to organise food, clothing, shelter and hideaways for Jews between 1938 and 1945. The group also took care of political prisoners and of their relatives as well as supplying political refugees with necessary documents. The group had connections with other resistance organisations and with important individuals such as Harald Poelchau and Helmuth James Graf von Moltke. In April 1945 the group took part in the ‘Say No’ campaign initiated by the Communist resistance group Ernst, when walls all over Berlin were painted with a large ‘No’ to Hitler and to the continuation of the war. The group of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich covered the districts of Steglitz, Schöneberg, Friedenau, Wilmersdorf and Zehlendorf. Saying ‘No’ to Hitler brought people of various opinions and characters together, but after the war the group fell apart. The second volume of the diaries covers the years 1945 to 1948 and provides evidence especially of the problems of everyday survival in postwar Berlin. Andreas-Friedrich, by now a member of the Social Democrats and a fervent critic of the forced union of the Communist and Social Democratic parties in East Germany, is alarmed by the abundance of ‘backdated martyrs’ (Andreas1. For the work of this group see the information by Jörg Drews in the afterword to the paperback edition of Andreas-Friedrich 1984 and the ‘Transactions of the group “Onkel Emil”’ given on pp.301-3 from the last months of the fighting years, presumably set down on demand by ‘Russian officials’.

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Friedrich 1986: 34),2 a phenomenon which seems to her to turn the Germans overnight into a people of opponents to the Nazi regime. The diaries present the modalities of life in the immediate postwar period: there are descriptions of defective gas mains, broken toilets, queues for water, galloping black market prices, the search for food in the litter of the Allied Forces’ kitchens. Such descriptions are interspersed with poignant analyses of the frequently assumed attitude of Berliners: a certain aggressiveness mixed with self-pity and with a consciousness of the mistakes in the Occupation policies of the Allies. One of the most dramatic problems of the immediate postwar period, the mass rapings of women (a problem which in other publications was either exploited sensationally or simply ignored for political reasons), are discussed by Ruth Andreas-Friedrich in a way that is both sensitive and intelligent. When she has to listen to members at the foundation ceremony of the ‘Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands’ (Cultural Union for the Democratic Renewal of Germany) who keep talking about the ‘men’ of art, of science, and of the new Germany, she cannot help remarking: ‘Have they forgotten that there are women here, too?’ (76) Naturally the author’s perspective in the second volume of her diaries is different: the disappointment over negative political, ideological and human developments after 1945 dominates her notes and makes them an early testimony of the literary-journalistic reflection of the era. Significantly enough, the second volume was never published in the GDR; it reached a wider audience in West Germany only after it appeared as a text published by Suhrkamp in 1984. In the present context, I wish to concentrate mainly on the first volume of Andreas-Friedrich’s diaries, the volume which was published in an English translation entitled Berlin Underground in 1946. It was the first book to be published in English after the war by a German woman who had not emigrated. The author herself would have preferred to have seen her book translated under the title of ‘No’, in reference to the graffiti campaign in which she had participated during the war. The ‘No’ to Hitler that runs through Andreas-Friedrich‘s diaries is above all the ‘No’ of a non-Jewish, German woman who did not emigrate. As a trained journalist, 2. For the somewhat complicated publication history of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich’s diaries see Jörg Drews’s detailed information (1984). The first volume, Der Schattenmann, published in German in 1947, was soon out of print; an edition entitled Schauplatz Berlin. Ein deutsches Tagebuch and published in 1962 included the notes from 1938 until 1948, whereas in 1964 Rowohlt publishers limited themselves to the diaries of 1938 to 1945. This volume saw two editions in the GDR in 1972 and 1978, and the Suhrkamp edition of Der Schattenmann received considerable notice in 1984.

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Andreas-Friedrich was aware of the specifically literary qualities of the diary form and a lot of entries and the preface itself demonstrate this awareness. Her decision to write a diary, to collect material for it and to take notes was a decision that she took with the future in mind. She did not keep a diary because the urgent problems of the present forced her to take refuge in the safe sphere of privacy, as in the case of the ‘inner émigrés’ (Bluhm 1991: 237-48). Everyday life under the swastika as it is described by AndreasFriedrich is horrible: she reports persecution, torture, deportation and bombings; she also gives profoundly moving accounts of frequently vain attempts to help and to provide shelter for Jewish refugees. But the daily routine which Andreas-Friedrich faces does not develop into a personal crisis, and even less into a language crisis for the diarist (Vogelsang 1985: 188; Picard 1986).3 On the contrary, the characters in the diary are shown to derive support from their actions and convictions; despite all the setbacks which they face there is no room for despair. Hope of Hitler’s final defeat, confidence in the victory of good over evil, and the belief both in ‘the idea of culture’ and in the power of human creativity are recurring themes in the diaries. Both the imprisoned Count Moltke and his wife Freya (who is engaged in a vain struggle for her husband’s release) become the representatives of a universal idea of humanity and creation, an idea that takes on the form of a legacy that must be protected. AndreasFriedrich quotes Freya Moltke on 6 January 1945: ‘One has to carry the spark across the ages.’ (Andreas-Friedrich 1984: 184) We can infer from the context the sort of spark the countess and the diarist have in mind: it is the spark of goodness and of culture which, if passed on, gives meaning both to life and to death. Hölderlin, Bach, Mozart, Dürer and Goethe are called upon as exemplars of German culture. The ‘No’ campaign against Hitler and the constant attempts to help victims of Nazi persecution are considered, despite all the murderous setbacks which they encounter, as a sacred duty. It is not difficult to recognise the classical ideal of art and humanity behind these sentiments; it is an ideal that many emigrants referred to when trying to discriminate between Hitler and Germany.4 The parallels between inner émigrés’ political and intellectual image of themselves and those of real emigrants have often been 3. Concerning the situation and the autobiographical works of postwar Berlin female authors see Rapisarda 1987. 4. Cf. Heinrich Mann’s program of ‘militant humanism’. For this and for relevant essays in that context see Koebner 1992: 197 (‘Das “andere Deutschland”. Zur Nationalcharakteristik im Exil’) and 237 (‘“Militanter Humanismus”. Ein Konzept des dritten Weges im Exil’). Also Müller-Salget 1986.

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pointed out. In this context a parallel can be made between the everyday struggle against Hitler that Andreas-Friedrich carried out for many years in Berlin and the message of enlightenment that, for example, Erika Mann sought to teach as an emigrant in the USA: both experiences were based on the belief in the ‘spark of humanity’, the passing-on of which gives meaning to an individual’s own humble actions. Andreas-Friedrich’s documentation of both resistance activity and the everyday routine is also based not only on a faith in the victory of humanity but also in the power of the word, the word that is spoken, told and used as a means of enlightening others. It is true that the self-image which emerges from the diaries has certain clear idealistic traits, but it is precisely these traits which prove that the diary intends to represent more than the diaries of many ‘inner’ and ‘real’ emigrants (for example, those of Jochen Klepper, Hans Carossa, Luise Rinser or René Schickele). For Andreas-Friedrich the diary is neither a ‘medium of inner emigration’ (Vogelsang 1985: 12) nor a substitute for conversation, nor even a mere record of a famous individual under memorable circumstances. The innumerable attempts at classification that literary scholarship has proposed for diaries (see Wuthenow 1990; Just 1966) cannot really be applied to Andreas-Friedrich’s notes. On the one hand, the content and the form of the notes between 1938 and 1945 owe a great deal to the personal life of the writer, to the existential questions she poses and to her everyday impressions and encounters. On the other hand, the notes are well-written and show careful narrative construction. In the skilful use of anecdote and alteration of episodes it is possible to see the professional writer and journalist at work. The same level of careful composition is not maintained throughout the diaries. On occasions, a vigorous tone, reminiscent of the style of Irmgard Keun and Gabriele Tergit, contrasts with over-emphatic passages concerning Moltke, the Kreisau Circle, the meaning of the diarist’s actions and the future of Germany after the final defeat of Hitler. This unevenness in style and narrative construction, as well as suggesting authenticity, also points again to the literary nature of the diary. AndreasFriedrich revealed that she collected material and took notes almost daily from 1938 until 1945. All the names that she mentioned were in code, and the completed pages were either hidden or taken along to the basement during nights in which bombings took place. The diary originated from a conscious decision on the part of the author to keep a record of her experiences (AndreasFriedrich 1984: 294). The diary presents us with an account of the period immediately before the war and of the war itself.

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In her 1945 preface Andreas-Friedrich mentions the pogroms of November 1938; in her preface to the 1964 edition of her diaries she expands her commentary on that episode. In the later preface she mentions a trip to Stockholm in the late summer of 1938. During the visit she met the daughter of Carl von Ossietzky, but her conversation with the German emigrant was brusquely brought to an end when in answer to a question about the future, she replied that she had no intention of staying in Sweden and was going to return to Germany.5 Similar scenes are reported in a wide variety of novels and autobiographies by writers in exile. Lion Feuchtwanger, Klaus Mann, Irmgard Keun and Anna Seghers have often employed such incidents as central scenes in their work: a German friend, who has not yet emigrated, comes to visit and does not want to stay or even wants the friend who has already emigrated to return to Germany. Disappointment, a break in the friendship, and literary reflections about the friend’s dangerous illusions tend to follow on from such exemplary episodes. In Andreas-Friedrich’s diary, however, we are presented with the reverse side of the episode: the lack of understanding in Ossietzky’s daughter who has recently emigrated suddenly makes it clear to the anti-Nazi journalist who intends to go on living in Germany that she has a lot to prove in the years to come. The issue will be to prove to the emigrants as well as to world opinion that ‘not everyone who stayed in Germany was a Nazi’ (294). It is in this context that the diary becomes at the same time a means of living with the burden of evidence and an instrument for dealing with that burden, because it served to prepare for the ‘witness stand on day x’ (Drews 1984: 294), as the author stated in 1964. Countless entries in the diary and the basic narrative concept behind the work serve that purpose: the diarist takes her notes and narrates with regard to the future, to the ‘day of reckoning’ (Andreas-Friedrich 1984: 110). In March 1943 she proudly observes that smuggling material on Hans and Sophie Scholl to Switzerland, Sweden and England has been successful. Announcing this success is tied to reflections about the future: now and especially later it will be important that ‘people out there will know that there are human beings in Germany, too. Not just Jew baiters, Hitler disciples and Gestapo henchmen’ (109). This choice of drastic words points to the diarist’s assumption of an emotional position, a position which gets stronger in later entries, especially those of the last 5. The diary of July 1939 also captures impressions of meetings with emigrants in Paris and Stockholm. Cf. Andreas-Friedrich 1984: 56: ‘With a few of them it is a little difficult to communicate. Why do they suddenly think we are Nazi followers? Just because we are returning to Germany?’

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two years of the war. Like many others, the diarist obviously feels an increasing pressure to justify herself, since the conditions of living and survival grow ever more difficult. The emotionally charged outbreaks which are made against emigrants and against the German broadcasts of the BBC, as well as being humanly understandable, also provide a number of important insights. In such entries we see arguments being formed which were to become only too familiar in the immediate postwar period and which were painfully acknowledged in the autobiographies of innumerable returning émigrés: in Nazi Germany people lived in a prison, there was no organisation or strong party to give support, people had to struggle individually for humanity’s sake together with thousands of other Germans, despite the daily exercise of tyranny. This should not be forgotten on the day of reckoning by those ‘for whom it is easier to be good and helpful people than for us’ (110). In many instances it is not difficult to sense that Andreas-Friedrich is not only saying ‘No’ to Hitler, but is also saying ‘No’ to the response of the émigrés, ‘because they ask of us what they could not achieve themselves’ (136). Quite obviously Ruth Andreas-Friedrich refers especially to the emigrants working for the BBC’s German Service, whom she accuses of moral arrogance, lack of knowledge of the internal situation in Germany, and an inability to put themselves in the place of people suffering under the regime. While her aversion for the émigrés increased towards the end of the war, she had expressed a different opinion about them at the beginning of her diary. Then, having witnessed the November pogroms, she reflects and takes notes of the desperate attempts of Jews to obtain the necessary documents – visas, transits, and tickets. She reserves a number of sharp statements for foreign countries and their immigration laws: 250,000 Jews are still living in Germany – why is it not possible to provide shelter for them somewhere in the world, the diarist cries out indignantly. Andreas-Friedrich both mourns and strongly criticises the fact that emigration shamefully became a question of money. She develops this thought in her preface to the 1945 edition. Many other Germans, like her, had known what was to come with Hitler’s rise to power. Like her, many ‘nonJews’ had stood against the regime from the beginning. They had decided to stay in the country of their own free will because they did not want to diminish the chances for emigration for those who were really in danger, and because they assumed that they did not have the moral right to emigrate. The diary – which gives testimony of unceasing, dangerous and unprompted help for Jews in hiding – often stresses that it was non-Jewish Germans who helped fearlessly, modestly and persistently.

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The separation of Germans and Jews ordered by Hitler and his laws of racial segregation also determines the self-assessment of Hitler’s opponents: they helped the Jews as Germans, not as people helping other people.6 This principle finds its parallels in numerous everyday observances: you do not applaud when Hitler appears on the balcony of the Reichskanzlei, you lower your head in shame in sight of the burning synagogues, Berliners do not at all welcome the introduction of the Yellow Star (82) while the successful action against deportation taken by the women of Rosenstrasse fills them with triumph. The scenes from Berlin street life which the diary vividly describes are often linked with interpretations that support the intention of the diary. The gaze of the diarist focuses on such gestures and actions of Berliners that can be construed as opposition or as passive resistance. It is possible to understand Andreas-Friedrich’s creed in the following way: one could live in Hitler’s Germany without being a Nazi. To be sure, the question why the Nazi seizure of power took place remains unasked, and the same goes for the reasons for the election returns of 5 March 1933, and for the outcome of the Saar referendum. Consequently, there is no discussion of the question how far the views, attitudes and actions of those described in the diary really are representative. However, it should not be overlooked that in the literature of exiled writers a good deal of reference is made to the other Germany, the Germany not identifiable with Hitler. Indeed, the endeavour to show the world that Hitler was not Germany, and that not every German was a Nazi, was an urgent concern shared by almost all political factions in exile. The wish to reject the thesis of collective guilt, even before it was raised by the Allies, served as a link between Germans who had emigrated and those who had decided not to. The rejection of the notion of collective guilt is present in Andreas-Friedrich’s diary as it is present in the autobiographies of Heinrich Mann or the messages of the ‘Council for a Democratic Germany’ founded in America in 1944. It is significant that a number of contradictions occur when both exiled Germans and Germans living in their own country attempt to prove the existence of the ‘other’ Germany. Not only is the question of the extent to which particular stories can be seen as representative evaded, but many writers show a tendency to interpret their own actions as con6. In a clearly stylised piece of self-recognition and after corresponding instruction by Andrik the diarist turns this line of reasoning against the emigrated Jews, who in her opinion ‘toot Hitler’s horn’ after their emigration when stressing their similarities with Jews in exile instead of those with their friends (Andreas-Friedrich 1984: 82).

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tributing to the realisation of a superior ideal of culture and humanity. By referring to the ideals of humanity, the individual may well ascribe a general, suprapersonal meaning to actions which in reality are personal, singular and perhaps not representative. This type of self-interpretation is often found in the literature of exile, and while it sees itself as apolitical or suprapolitical, does not always succeed in avoiding a certain élitism and self-satisfaction. Along with many other Germans, whether they were later to become émigrés or not, Andreas-Friedrich knew from 1933 what was to come: ‘Not all the details, but the outlines: deprivation of liberty, mass hypnosis, violence, sadism, ceaseless standing at attention and boundless self-adulation’ (21). The fact that Hitler meant war was as clear to her as it was to the émigrés. But there is another topic common to the literature of exile that we find in Andreas-Friedrich’s writing, a topic which also reveals the sorts of contradictions which occur in a form of reasoning that is motivated by the desire for self-justification. While Andreas-Friedrich gains a sense of being representative through her attempt to serve the ideal of humanity and through her attempt to carry on the spark of culture, decency, and civilisation, she also observes that there is ‘a revolution of the raging petty bourgeoisie’ in Nazi Germany (21). We know from the first novel Irmgard Keun wrote in exile, After Midnight (1937), what Ruth Andreas-Friedrich is alluding to with that phrase. Petty bourgeois mentality, cultural philistinism, the ‘scum of the rabble’7 had risen to power with Hitler; the millions of repressed men and women thus coming to power were the depraved and misled who were faced by the true, good Germans – weak, in small numbers, but courageous. The latter are the righteous who stand for a different Germany, the real Germany. In the opinion of the diarist, those who have stayed in the country will in the end speak with greater justice. Andreas-Friedrich’s attempts at generalisation and justification are clear. She takes a pronounced stand against the fact that the BBC interprets ‘the feverish activity after each bomb attack as an expression of Nazi conviction’ (123). If Berliners repaired their windows in the morning and cleared the rubble away it was a sign of the natural will to survive, and not a mentality of holding out to the last or of war-crazed agreement with the regime, as English broadcasters supposed. On 20 April 1939 Andreas-Friedrich writes concerning the party rallies at the Sportpalast: ‘It has disgraced our reputation throughout the world’ (52) and she goes on to hope that the oppo7. Cf. Thomas Koebner, ‘Polemik gegen das Dritte Reich. Deklassierung und Dämonisierung’, in Koebner 1992: 220-36.

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nents of Nazism would understand that the few thousand people in that building were party members and a forced claque who were not representative of a city of four million people. We come across justifications like this more than once, and thus we encounter the dilemmas which accompany the numerous acts of self-justification. The terror, barbarism and torture that people suffer are in no way made to seem banal; on the contrary, the diary reports repeated attempts to help, to make things easier, to avoid deportation. Practical help in the name of humanity and daily resistance against the hated regime do not, however, go along too smoothly with political reflections that ask for understanding for the Germans. It is in the preface of 1945, rather than in the entries themselves, that we find the diarist arguing for understanding. In the preface Andreas-Friedrich states that her diary was not supposed to report heroic deeds; Nazi crimes could not be put in perspective in any way, and the world knew that the Germans had not overthrown Hitler themselves. Nevertheless, the diary was meant to inform people about the lives and deeds of opponents to Nazism in Germany who were there in great numbers from the beginning and who did not deserve ‘to be scorned together with their entire nation for the sake of an irresponsible government’ (8). Andreas-Friedrich contended that, although Germany was the ‘enfant terrible’ among all nations, her diary might encourage a little more understanding between the nations and might help to ‘raise a little the fallen reputation of the German people in the world’ (8). The actions which the diary recounts are modest, but the diarist places an anxious hope in the effects of the narrative. What is consciously devised as a personal account repeatedly makes superpersonal, superhuman and (within the context of the postwar period) general political claims. The diary appeals to a norm which it considers as binding: it is unjust to equate a nation with its leaders. Through their actions, however modest they may have been, German opponents of Nazism have, Andreas-Friedrich’s work contends, deserved the modest right to claim that the German nation should not be looked down upon as the ‘enfant terrible’ of the world forever. Modesty and a certain kind of presumption lie closely together; the two attitudes are present in the reference time and again to humanity in the diary. The tone and choice of words in the entries display similar contrasts: sobriety and pathos, cool factual reporting and a solemn prayer-like tone, precise descriptions of everyday life and poetic images stand side by side while indicating the author’s generally professional use of fictional strategies.8 The 8. Peitsch 1990: 300-303, judges the literary concept and the political intention of the diary much more critically.

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diary of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, which does not want to be a work of art but a work of truth, turns out to be the composition of a journalist with a strong artistic sense. Of course the diary reports true stories as opposed to merely fictional accounts. The contrast between truth and art that Ruth Andreas-Friedrich makes in the first sentences of her diary aims to exclude any expectations concerning her book‘s literary quality. At the same time, however, the contrast that the author makes stresses the book’s intention to offer a truthful account. The diarist lays claim not only to the truth of the facts that she relates but also to another, ‘higher’ truth. This higher truth depends on the principle of art and composition that are operative in the text. The reader is involved in the events that are described, he/she follows the course of every action, he/she participates in the anxiety and suffering of each successful or hindered escape. The authenticity of the narrative, its ‘truth’, is generated by the author’s professional use of style and narrative structure. This fact, however, merely goes to show that objective facts are brought into a narrative order which in itself is fictitious. It is precisely this type of fiction which guarantees the ‘higher’ truth which the diary aims to convey; the diary is interested in this truth and becomes its instrument. In the way in which the diary functions one can find an echo of the point of view of the Moltke family and of other Christian resistance groups: the individual’s own modest actions serve to pass on a spark – the spark of humanity and of the inviolability of human dignity. When they are seen as serving the ideal of a basically indestructible humanity, individual actions achieve representative status and thus a certain normative power. If this perspective is adopted, then the brutal reality of dictatorship and war becomes a horrible nightmare, a terrible darkening of the horizon, but those who stayed in Germany to help Jewish people, while not being Jewish themselves, did not allow the light of humanity to be totally extinguished. Andreas-Friedrich and her colleagues claim, in all humility and modesty, that their actions were carried out in the name of Germany, the true Germany. The diaries of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich thus call upon an anti-fictional idea of truth, but in terms of composition they show a clear knowledge of the rules of fiction. They offer an intellectual pledge to pursue an ideal of truth; such a conception of truth is undermined by the criminality that rages all around, but it can show its indestructibility through the actions of only a few people. We may find the idealistic or quasi-religious feature of this argument somewhat lacking in originality; as we all know, the creed of culture, humanity and the German ‘Kulturnation’ runs through both inter-

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nal and external emigration. However, it is important when considering the theme of memory to bear in mind that Ruth AndreasFriedrich derives a political or at least a politically applicable feeling of hope from her diary and the manner in which it postulates truth. The point can be made paradoxically: the memory of the diarist is not focused on the past of Nazi terror, but on the future. The diaries were written with regard to the end of the war and the ‘reckoning’ that was to be expected then, that is to say, in full knowledge that there would be a need for defence and justification. With their publication and their reading went the hope that the reading public would wake up to the insight which deeply concerned Ruth Andreas-Friedrich and her circle: that an entire nation must not be despised for the sake of its criminal government. It is clear that Andreas-Friedrich wishes the self-esteem that she herself derives from being an opponent to the Nazi regime to be prolonged in the consciousness of the readers of the diary. Above all, she wishes that her belief in a higher, purer form of truth – whose standard-bearer she and her circle came to be – will be shared by her audience. The present paper is not the right forum to discuss the extent to which Andreas-Friedrich’s hopes have come true. As I indicated at the beginning, the second volume of the diaries which was published much later bears witness to a revealing change of perspective. Alfred Frankenstein wrote about Ruth Andreas-Friedrich in IsraelNachrichten after her death in 1977: ‘She is one of those righteous Germans who have saved the good name of the nation in its worst times. Blessed be her memory’ (Andreas-Friedrich 1984: 293).

4

A WOMAN’S PERSPECTIVE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND HISTORY IN GIOVANNA ZANGRANDI’S RESISTANCE NARRATIVES Penny Morris

Despite the fact that the stereotypical idea of the partisan in Italy’s resistance to fascism is still, to a great extent, the young male rebel up in the mountains with the rest of his partisan band, research has shown that contributions made to the resistance were much more varied and included large numbers of women as well as men. For a long time, the involvement of women in the Resistance tended to be eclipsed; historical analyses took a narrow view of what should be considered significant, often ignoring the so-called ‘domestic sphere’ altogether, and women were discouraged from dwelling on a period during which they participated in activities often regarded as unsuitable, if not downright immoral. Indeed, they themselves were often reluctant to talk about such things after the war, and preferred to try to reestablish a ‘normal’ life. It is only since the 1960s and the development of the modern women’s movement in Italy that there has been an effort to research and remember the ‘other half’ of the Resistance.1 Nowadays, there exists a clear and ever improving picture of the contribution that women made to the Resistance, whether through histories, confer1. The phrase ‘the other half of the Resistance’ forms the title of a collection of papers on women and the Resistance in Italy based on a conference held in Milan, 1977: Franceschi et al. 1978.

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ences, studies of oral accounts or memoirs written by the participants themselves. Moreover, increasing attention is being paid to theoretical questions regarding feminist historiography and the process of memory and writing.2 In fact, not all writing by women about the resistance belongs to this more recent period. Women published memoirs of the Resistance throughout the intervening period, from the end of the war until the 1960s. Certainly, they were fewer in number and the women concerned often had prominence in the world of politics or were related to someone prominent.3 Other published memoirs and commemorative volumes tended to have been prompted by an anniversary of the Resistance, particularly at the instigation of the party most closely associated with the partisan activities of 194345, the PCI. The vast majority of women who have written about the Resistance (from 1945 until the present day) were not writers by profession and did not become writers; their accounts of the Resistance remained their only published work, written not because of any literary pretension, but as an act of testimony. Those women who were concerned not only with testimony, but who also saw themselves as writers, remained very few. When Giovanna Zangrandi’s writing about the Resistance is examined in this context, it becomes clear that she stands out as unusual in a number of ways. She was a writer by profession, and returned to the subject of the Resistance often throughout her career, in newspaper articles, in novels (I giorni veri, The True Days, 1963 and Il campo rosso, The Red Field, 1959), and in short stories (to be found in the collections Anni con Attila, 1966, Gente alla Palua, 1974, Racconti partigiani e no, 1975 and Racconti partigiani, 1981). At the same time, the Resistance was by no means her only source of inspiration and she also published novels and short stories on entirely different subjects.4 It is clear, too, that Zangrandi’s writing about the Resistance was not prompted by the recent exploration into the question of women and the Resistance, as it existed much earlier. She does share some characteristics with the writer Renata Viganò who, for some, wrote the novel of the Resistance with L’Agnese va a morire (Agnese Goes to Die, 1949).5 2. Contributions to this area of study include, Alloisio & Gadola 1981; Bruzzone & Farina 1976; Bravo & Bruzzone 1995. 3. Gobetti 1956 and Lussu 1971 are typical examples. 4. These include her first novel, I Brusaz (1957), for example, and other stories in the collections mentioned earlier. 5. She also published two much less well known collections of short stories (Viganò 1954; Viganò 1976) as well as a tribute to women who took part in the Resistance (Viganò 1955).

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For example, both writers were originally from Emilia Romagna, and both rejected their middle-class backgrounds, choosing to join the PCI and the Resistance. Nevertheless, there were also considerable differences between them. Zangrandi firmly believed in the Resistance as an anti-fascist struggle and in left-wing politics as the potential means to secure a better society. However, she was never part of the partisan command during the resistance, nor a party activist after, and, as will be discussed later with reference to her construction of a ‘self’ in writing, her writing about that period seems as much a result of a personal, as a political agenda. Viganò, on the other hand, was far more entrenched in party politics, and continued throughout her life to be a very active member of the PCI. Her political allegiances are at the centre of her writing; she only ever wrote about the Resistance and L’Agnese va a morire has been seen as a typical example of socialist realism, often judged to have been weakened by its political didacticism. Thus Viganò’s writing was, to a great extent, dictated by her political loyalties, whilst, in the case of Zangrandi, it is the interplay between her political views and her personal life that characterises her work. A fuller understanding of Zangrandi’s resistance writing may be gained by taking a brief look at the course of her life. Born in 1910, Zangrandi spent her childhood and adolescence in Emilia Romagna and studied chemistry at Bologna University. She moved north to the Dolomites in her late twenties to become a teacher in the tourist resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo. It was in these mountains, amongst the people of the Cadore, that she would spend the Resistance. There is no indication of any involvement in anti-fascist activities on her part before the fall of the Fascist regime in 1943. Prior to that time, as well as working as a teacher, Zangrandi was also a journalist, writing articles and short stories for local publications, and that meant, of course, writing for a press that was designed to provide Fascist propaganda. With the invasion of the Nazis, the establishment of the Republic of Salò and the development of an armed resistance, however, Zangrandi became involved very quickly in clandestine activities. These activities were soon discovered and Zangrandi had to move away to avoid capture. She spent the rest of the Resistance acting as a staffetta, or courier, for partisan bands in the mountains. Generally women were not welcome to stay in the bands with the men and Zangrandi was forced to spend the Resistance moving from place to place, staying in haylofts or relying on the hospitality of those living in remote areas. As most men were away, at war, taken prisoner or in partisan bands, Zangrandi was dependent, above all, on the women of the region. It is perhaps for that reason that, even

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though I giorni veri dates from before the development of women’s history in Italy, Zangrandi’s writing does show a clear desire to describe the Resistance from a woman’s point of view and to acknowledge the contribution made by other women. Such an attitude is quite commonplace in more recent accounts but, before the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a tendency even in accounts by women to underplay the role of their own sex and automatically to regard the contribution made by men as more important.6 Zangrandi was often at pains to suggest that hers was the tale of an ordinary staffetta. Whilst that demonstrates that her sympathies lay with the peasant women of the Cadore, it must be remembered that she came from a different area and a different class from most of the other women she worked with in the Resistance. Inevitably she had a rather different perspective on events for that reason, and there is a tension in her writing as she tries to establish her own place amongst those women. In order to examine the way that these different elements of Zangrandi’s attitude to the Resistance are translated into literature, and to assess their relative importance, it is necessary always to bear in mind the question of the perspective of the narrator. Attention to that aspect allows a reader to trace the development of Zangrandi’s interpretation of the Resistance over the years, and judge what her priorities were. In reconstructing the Resistance in writing that was predominantly autobiographical, Zangrandi was not only establishing the significance of the Resistance itself, but also attempting to recreate and give value to a past ‘self’. Thus her writing also gives an insight into the relationship between memory and the Resistance and the implications of writing about the Resistance as a woman. A story about the Resistance, ‘The War Is Over’, the last story in Zangrandi’s last collection, Racconti partigiani e no, provides an interesting illustration of the processes at work in her writing, particularly when it is examined in conjunction with her other longer works, I giorni veri and Il campo rosso. In ‘The War Is Over’, an apparently autobiographical story, the narrator looks back on her own life and recounts what she regards to be a significant incident from the period immediately following the Resistance. The story is set in a small town in the Cadore, where, amongst some sections of the community — certain ‘filonazisti’ as the narrator describes them — the presence of ex-partisans is far from welcome. It describes a brief episode when a drunken American soldier is sent by other inhabitants of the town to the narrator’s house, as a kind 6. A discussion of women’s attitudes to themselves with regard to the Resistance and the implications of that attitude for writing the truth about the period may be found in Morris 1991.

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of cruel joke, on the understanding that it is a brothel. She encourages him to leave and, in fact, he goes quietly, mainly because he is terrified of her Communist party fellow partisans. The story could have been told in a very light-hearted manner, but in fact the tone is quite bitter, particularly at the end. As the narrator watches the American wander off into the town, she notes that, in this supposedly postwar period, it is a town that is cold, introverted and hostile, divided into its separate clans, and, reflects that, when the war was still on and they used to wish for peace, they would never have thought that life afterwards could be so squalid. An interpretation of the Resistance as a failed left-wing revolution is a common one, of course. However, it should be noted that this short story does not express euphoria and optimism at the victory of the Resistance to be replaced by disillusion later, but places that feeling of disenchantment at a time when the Resistance was barely over. It implies that there is no cause for celebration and that, in a way, given the divisions between people, the war was set to continue. The offence that the narrator feels as a woman in ‘The War Is Over’ too, the suggestion that she is a prostitute, is also all the more significant when viewed against the background of attitudes at the time towards women in the Resistance. So, in this short story, written from the perspective of a narrator looking back on the Resistance many years later and published some forty years after the end of the war, what is significant is not so much the Resistance itself, for that is not even present in the story, but rather the dejection felt immediately after it. It is interesting to compare this with the work that takes the events of the Resistance as its subject, I giorni veri. The divisions in society that Zangrandi identifies in her short story are present in this work too. Indeed, she comments that if it had not been for the fact that Italians found themselves fighting other Italians during the Resistance, it could have been a ‘clean’ struggle, a proper war somehow, instead of being sordid. Zangrandi makes it clear that some people did assume automatically that, because she was a staffetta, she was also a prostitute, and they spurned her accordingly. In fact, life as a woman in the Resistance is shown to be not particularly easy, even with respect to the way that other partisans treat her: as a woman she feels she must do better than men to be accepted as equal, she is aware that women are judged to be less reliable and the fact that she is not able to live in the partisan band means that she must find some alternative on her own, without even the support that the resistance network offered to men. However, whilst such details go a long way towards ensuring that Zangrandi’s account of the Resistance does not emerge as idealised, they are not central to the main narrative.

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For I giorni veri also presents a very positive picture of solidarity amongst the partisans, of political faith in their leaders and in the future. There is great solidarity amongst the women in particular. Zangrandi talks admiringly of the other staffette and also of the series of women in kitchens with whom she spent much of the Resistance. It is not suggested that all relationships were good, that there were not mistakes and petty jealousies, rather that such aspects did not take precedence. It also certainly shows the tragedy of the Resistance and of the sacrifices that were made. Friends and fellow partisans die, yet, it seems, there was no time to dwell on any personal response, instead they had to drive themselves onwards and deal with the task in hand. There was no time for a personal life, it is suggested; indeed, it seems almost that there was no time to exist as an individual, certainly not as an individual woman. Zangrandi’s activities were so out of keeping with what is normally expected of a woman, she suggests, that during this time she almost forgot what sex she was and had to be reminded. In this way, everything was subordinated to the higher cause of the Resistance. That is not seen as negative for, even with its tragedy, indeed partially because of it, the Resistance is experienced in I giorni veri as a very intense period and, for Zangrandi, there was an intrinsic value in that intense activity and single-mindedness, in the demands made on her and the sacrifices required. It is also certain that she derived pleasure from her ability to rise to this challenge and felt a certain pride in showing that she could subvert expectations of her as a woman. This commitment and subordination of the self contrasts strongly, Zangrandi claims in I giorni veri and throughout her writing, with the previous period in her life when, under Fascism, she was passive and egoistical. Indeed, she always insisted on a profound difference between her ‘fascist self’ and her ‘resistance self’ and describes joining the Resistance as a kind of conversion she underwent. Such an attitude is scarcely surprising — one would not expect ex-partisans to vaunt their Fascist past — but a closer examination of her writing before and after the war suggests, in fact, a much greater degree of continuity than she would have been prepared to recognise.7 Nevertheless, Zangrandi represents the Resistance as a time when she became politically aware, when she turned away from Fascism and found her true place amongst the people of the Cadore. The Cadore itself indicated both a political and personal choice for Zangrandi, as she felt that she was allying herself with a people who were not bourgeois and who were characterised by their honesty and tradition of democ7. A more detailed discussion of this point may be found in Morris 1996a, chapter three.

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racy. Indeed, it could be said that she used her novels and short stories in later years both to describe the cadorini and as an attempt to recreate a sense of belonging and to write herself into their traditions. In the same way, by writing autobiographical works about the Resistance, she was reestablishing her place in the Resistance and affirming its importance. Indeed, the value of the Resistance is suggested by the title of I giorni veri itself, implying as it does a kind of moral truth in the days of the Resistance, a truth inherent to its events and the way that she and others experienced them. She makes it very clear that she wrote this book for future generations, as well as for herself, to allow them to understand what the Resistance was. It was imperative that it should be seen to be factually accurate, but it was not designed merely to teach the historical facts but to convey a greater significance. The question of perspective is also important in this work. Although it was written in 1963, I giorni veri is in the form of a diary, with the pretence that it was written at most a few days after events. Stylistically, it allows for writing that is a series of actions, with few descriptions (for there was no time for any other kind of writing). It also means that emotions are expressed apparently as they were experienced at the time, uncontaminated, as it were, by later, postwar disappointments. Thus, Zangrandi is able to capture the enthusiasm and faith in political ideals and a hope for the future and she is able to express the value of the Resistance, without having to deal with a later period when (in her view) it would be distorted and clouded by disillusion. In this way, although there are some of the same elements present in I giorni veri as in her much later short story, the different perspective means there is a different emphasis and, although there is considerable sadness and regret in the earlier work, there is little of the bitterness that characterises her short story. If we turn to Il campo rosso, the perspective, and therefore the emphasis of Zangrandi’s ‘message’ about the Resistance, changes again. In some ways, it bears a closer resemblance to ‘The War Is Over’, as it is set immediately after the war and the atmosphere is very similar; it is described as a strange period, as a kind of convalescence after an illness that has lasted years. The first-person narrator, Anna, and the other characters are involved in the building of the mountain refuge in this novel and, on one level, do all they can to avoid the past.8 Most prefer not to talk about it (it is 8. This novel refers, at least in its broad outline, to real events. Unlike I giorni veri, it makes no claim to absolute truth, but Zangrandi did indeed oversee the building of a mountain refuge, the ‘Rifugio Antelao’, in the mountains above Borca di Cadore. The name Anna was Zangrandi’s nom de guerre. In fact, Giovanna Zangrandi was a pen-name adopted after the war. Her real name was Alma Bevilacqua.

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seen as particularly grotesque that one character chooses to boast about his exploits during the Resistance) and try not to think about it. Thus, in this novel what the reader learns about the Resistance is the effect that it had afterwards on the lives of those who were involved. Once more, the divisions in Italian society are prominent, and the relationships between the narrator and the men working alongside her are determined by their allegiances in the previous years. There is a very strong sense of ‘us’ (the ex-partisans) and ‘them’ (the ex-fascists). Even though they are having to work together, the hostility is still acute. The intensity of the narrator’s experience of the resistance is also evident in this work. There are very brief references to the fact that there was never time to think whilst the war was still on, and the intense physical effort required to build the refuge can be seen as an attempt to recreate the allabsorbing activity of the Resistance. In the end, however, Il campo rosso is the story of the narrator’s failure to repress those memories of the Resistance and of desolation wrought by the war. If during the Resistance, it is implied, it was possible to switch off and get on with the task in hand, such an evasion is now no longer possible. The macabre images that are used to describe quite banal objects suggest the memory of traumatic events coming through at an unconscious level (a felled tree recalls a dying man, for example), but in everyday life, too, the narrator continues to experience the tragedy of the Resistance. The death of close friends causes a great deal of pain at times, but the narrator also suffers because she feels personally damaged by what has happened and is aware of having lost the capacity to feel. She even expresses it as having forgotten, during the Resistance, how to be a woman and relate to a man. The failure of the attempted relationship between Anna, the narrator, and Carlo, one of the labourers, is explained at least partly in those terms. Zangrandi referred to a similar idea in I giorni veri, of course, but, in that work, any such feelings were seen in a positive light, as an indication of the narrator’s ability to devote herself entirely to the Resistance. Anything beyond the Resistance was treated as part of an unknown future. In Il campo rosso, however, the emphasis is entirely different. The end of the Resistance is experienced as a loss, its value indicated by its absence, and life afterwards is shown to be empty and disorienting. The narrator feels alienated, not only from those she fought against, but also from those on her own side and even from her own former self and herself as a woman. Indeed, there is a very strong image running through the book, that, in one sense, the narrator is not really alive any more in this life, now that the possibility of a relationship and children seems

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closed to her, and that she is only able to live in the world of her dreams and imagination, the ‘red field’ of the title.9 It should be noted, however, that the perspective of Il campo rosso differs from that of the short story ‘The War Is Over’ in that, in the novel, events are recounted in the present tense and not viewed with hindsight. Despite the tragedy and suffering recounted, there remains some optimism, albeit very muted. The narrator continues to work and the completed refuge at the end of the book provides a very strong image of hope in the future. It should also be added that, although the postwar period is shown to be particularly difficult, the Resistance itself is never undermined, and it is never suggested that it was wrong or unnecessary. Thus, in her resistance narratives, Zangrandi aimed to indicate the value of the resistance for the benefit of future generations, a value that resided in the commitment and solidarity of those taking part, and a sense of purpose that was not easily retrievable in the period after the war. She was also keen to show what it meant to be a woman in the Resistance. In that sense, the Resistance emerges from her writing as a period of great excitement and freedom from convention, yet, in all her work she shows that it was an area of contention and, in I giorni veri and Il campo rosso, it is even shown to challenge her very identity as a woman. In this way, as has been discussed, Zangrandi explores both the positive and negative aspects of being a woman in the Resistance. Indeed, it is characteristic of Zangrandi’s writing about the Resistance in general that it should be seen as a time both of great value and of tragedy, that it was a traumatic experience but that its ending should be felt as a loss. Zangrandi chose to emphasise different aspects of that experience by writing from different temporal perspectives, predominantly in an autobiographical form that combined the perspective of the narrating self and the narrated self. What emerges is a picture of a historical period that involved the denial of herself as a woman, yet which was, in her view, constitutive of that self, and in her writing she attempts to recreate and reconfirm the importance of the Resistance from the point of view of both an individual and of society in general.

9. Further discussion of this topic may be found in Morris 1996b.

The Male Resister

5

VERCORS – WRITING THE UNSPEAKABLE: FROM LE SILENCE DE LA MER (1942) TO LA PUISSANCE DU JOUR (1951) William Kidd

Vercors is an obvious candidate for inclusion in an investigation of resistance memory and its literary expression: the iconic status of Le Silence de la mer, inseparably associated with the creation of the clandestine publishing enterprise, Les Editions de Minuit, the writer’s contributions to the Chroniques interdites in 1943-44, and his role in the debates of the liberation and post-Liberation Comité National des Ecrivains (CNE), are familiar territory, recently revisited in the first international colloquium devoted to his work at Angers in May 1995. However, its very specificity also makes Le Silence de la mer a problematic choice since rather than representing a particular memory of what resistance actually was, it has become emblematic of what after the event the French might have liked it to be (Atack 1989: 3). Retrospectivity does not of course make it a false memory, a phantasm, and it is true that its author’s personal involvement with the Resistance was almost exclusively literary and intellectual;1 but as an encapsulation of the French 1. After demobilisation in 1940, Jean Bruller decided not to publish his engravings under German occupation; in 1941 he was associated with a short-lived escape network for allied airmen and, though not a party member, wrote for the Communist resistance journal La Pensée libre; after its demise, he completed Le Silence de la mer under the pseudonym Vercors, and founded Les Editions de Minuit. These and other events of his wartime career are recorded in Vercors 1967.

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wartime experience, the tale is both highly selective and over determined; it reduces to a singular homogeneous ‘resistance memory’ what was historically plural and diverse. Setting aside other Vercors récits such as ‘L’Impuissance’ (‘Powerlessness’, 1944) and ‘L’Imprimerie de Verdun’ (‘The Printers’ Works at Verdun’, 1945), his nonfictional writings about the period, a fuller and, using the term advisedly, more realistic picture of resistance lived and remembered emerges from the composite ‘novel’ published in August 1945 and August 1951, whose successive volumes are neatly paradigmatic of the progression from the dark ‘night’ of occupation to the ‘dawn’ of liberation.2 Insofar, likewise, that the lexical sequence ‘silence’, ‘armes’, ‘puissance’ also evokes the development of the Resistance movement from initial refusal to acknowledge the invader, via recourse to armed struggle, to post-Liberation conquest of power, Les Armes de la nuit invites inspection as a pivotal text, politically and poetically speaking, between Le Silence de la mer and La Puissance du jour, between the literary assertion of resistance in 1941-2 and post-Liberation resistance remembered. I use the term ‘unspeakable’ in my title in two principal related ways (a third will emerge later in the analysis): firstly, as denoting something too awful legitimately or appropriately to be expressed in mere words, and hence as a moral value judgement; and secondly, as referring to experience so traumatic or problematic that it is actually incapable of physical (verbal) utterance. The first suggests an incompatibility between saying or speaking and writing, as Vercors himself, in the authorial third person, explained: ‘When, in summer 1945, he witnessed the return of the deportees, it was not the desire to write, but the desire to scream, which prompted him to compose Les Armes de la nuit’ (Vercors 1951: 7). In fact, the antithesis is artificial; writing’s task is precisely to find form and expression for that which appears to defy it, and the horror of what came to be known as l’univers concentrationnaire (Rousset 1965) had already inspired him to write ‘Le Songe’ (‘The Dream’), published in 1944. The second meaning reminds us that writing may have a revelatory, therapeutic function. Pierre Cange, the protagonist of Les Armes de la nuit, describes himself as ‘a shadow … returned among men, a shadow bereft even of the strength to tap into the pure well-springs of memory’ (Vercors 1951: 32), avowing thereby that alongside the regenerating but inaccessible reservoirs 2. Stylistic and structural differences notwithstanding, Vercors considered the two volumes, subsumed into the single generic term ‘roman’, as ‘a homogeneous whole’; ‘Au lecteur de l’édition collective’ (1951: 5). Subsequent references are to this edition of the two works, paginated consecutively; translations/paraphrasing are my own.

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of memory, other memories are ‘impure’, problematic. On another level, therefore, the subject of the novel is the gradual emergence into the light – the reader’s awareness as well as the character’s consciousness – of memory unstated or repressed. Cange is a resistance deportee returned from Hochswörth camp whose strange silences, half-finished utterances and allusive remarks, point to some awful secret which neither friends nor family can penetrate. The former include the characteristic Vercors narrator who contextualises the story, the latter, Cange’s patient and loving fiancée Nicole, herself a former partisan. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and tortured for two days, Cange threw himself from a window in order not to reveal names; badly injured in his fall, he returns from captivity with a deformed, useless hand, a disfigurement which assumes symbolic significance. This information is provided by the narrator, Cange’s intended contact on the fateful day two years before, in the very café in the rue de Sèvres where their meeting should have taken place. If that day (‘ce jour-là’) the warning signal – an object removed from the Kodak shop-window at the corner of the boulevard (20) – recalls the earlier, more enigmatic story ‘Ce Jour-là’, the cameo offered in this early flashback goes beyond Vercors’s text to a more collective memory, visual, literary, historical: the sight of Cange being bundled up the steps of the Metro station to the waiting black car is a near-universal image of the period; the narrator’s sudden, instinctive and fortunate decision, as the rafle (drag-net) extends to neighbourhood bars and cafés, to seek the anonymity of a shave in the local barber’s shop cannot now be ‘read’ without the almost identical episode in JeanPierre Melville’s 1969 adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s L’Armée des ombres (Army of the Shadows, 1943);3 the self-defenestration recalls the sacrifice in 1944 of Pierre Brossolette.4 It is partly this familiarising decor of ‘resistance remembered’, with the positive values and associations it evokes for the reader, that makes (and when originally published, that made) Cange’s subsequent behaviour perplexing: returning to his home in Brittany, he shuns his family whom, in what is just one reversal of the situation between von Ebrennac and his French hosts in Le Silence de la mer, he ‘imprisons’ in silence (Vercors 1951: 43-5). After a month of ‘strange evenings’ (43) in which he and Nicole appear stricken with a ‘moving incapacity for closeness’ (41), Cange seeks solitude on a local islet, the symbolically resonant ‘Island of the Jews’ (63). 3. Though Kessel’s original contains a resistance-sympathiser hairdresser (1963: 110-11), the filmic details are much closer to Vercors’s text. Melville also filmed Le Silence de la mer, in 1948. 4. Recalled in Vercors 1967: 284-85.

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That this flight from human society is more than the mutism of the returned combatant, unable to share his experience with noncombatants (Nicole fought too, after all), is hinted at early on. Torture had quickly revealed that mere life or death was not the issue but Cange’s very ‘soul’ (23). The memory of his courageous refusal to divulge the names of his fellow partisans, in its self-directed despair, amounts almost to an admission of the contrary: ‘I divulged nothing. But I wonder what life must be like for the man who betrays his comrades… He is a shadow of his true self. A man degraded in his own eyes is no more than a wreck. Death is hundred times better’ (25-6). The dark secret turns out to be that five times selected for the Hochswörth gas chamber and five times reprieved in extremis, Cange had acted as a surrogate executioner, helping to dispose of dead or dying fellow-prisoners in the ovens until, as he imagined it would, his own turn came. From simply being a witness to ‘the most monstrous crime ever undertaken against humanity’ (115) he has become an accomplice, ‘a survivor of the wreck of the Medusa … who saved his miserable skin … because he [author’s emphasis] did not flinch from throwing into the flames…’ (155).5 The ‘shadow returned among men’ therefore embodies in an acute form the survivor’s guilt, a theme tackled by major Jewish and non-Jewish writers such as Wiesel, Cayrol and Semprun. Cange has lost part of his ‘humanity’ (‘sa qualité d’homme’) though cannot escape his ‘human condition’ (156), the moral awareness which differentiates man from the animals and the site of the existential-humanist problematic which Vercors claimed to address in Les Armes de la nuit: ‘The issue is man’s future. We need to know if the humanity opening up before us will be that of the person or the talking monkey.’ (7) The (written) work is the gradual revelation of this unspeakable secret; it is also Cange’s moral and spiritual quest to redeem his crime and be reconciled with the lost part of the self: the two sections of Les Armes de la nuit are subtitled ‘Eurydice’ and ‘Orpheus’, names more appropriate to the successive novels since complete resolution is not achieved until the end of the second volume. In his voluntary exile, Cange behaves like a pestiféré (plague victim), foreshadowing Camus’s protagonists in La Peste (1947), who recognise their own complicity and who, like Tarrou, resolve ‘not to propagate the microbe deliberately’ (Camus 1960: 133). Yet 5. The Medusa foundered in 1816; of one hundred and forty-nine survivors on one life raft, only fifteen were rescued after twelve days during which dead and dying were thrown overboard and in some cases cannibalised. This episode, immortalised in Géricault’s ‘Le Radeau [raft] de la Méduse’ (1819), was the subject of a later Vercors work of the same name.

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despite its anticipatory quality and its narrative dynamic towards resolution, Les Armes de la nuit is strongly regressive, notably insofar as a number of thematic, stylistic and associative links with Le Silence de la mer, frozen by the author’s own admission in the time warp of 1940-1 (Vercors 1984: 42), point to some unspoken, ‘prehistoric’ experience underlying both works. In particular, they display a common poetics of imprisonment and haunting irreality, including the semantic and metaphoric clusters ‘fantôme’, ‘spectre’, ‘ombre’ (phantom, spectre, shadow), and ‘silence, nuit, engloutir, noyer’ (silence, night-dark, engulf, drown) whose absent/present common term is of course ‘mer’ (sea). Les Armes de la nuit also contains three explicit references to the Shakespearian problematics which, as I have argued elsewhere (Kidd 1991: 40-42), form the subtext of the earlier work: ‘You are like Hamlet’, Pierre is told (Vercors 1951: 53), he uses the Macbethian ‘all the perfumes of Arabia’ (84) to allude to his wartime ‘crime’, and the fictional identification with the parricidal prince is confirmed and extended to the narrator himself in the admission that ‘like Hamlet, from ghostly lips I had heard tell of the blackest crime which can be conceived’ (86). Detailed analysis of this material belongs to a wider, necessarily psycho-critical, enquiry; but the theme of betrayal and ‘Murder most foul’ (86) casts a significant ‘shadow’ over Vercors’s treatment of his contemporary (historical) subject-matter, inscribing the narrator as the writer’s ‘double’ (‘ombre’ also has that connotation), and negatively inflecting reader-reception of resistance and deportation themselves. Significantly, in returning to the subject five years later in La Puissance du jour (The Power of the Day), Vercors focused more centrally on the rationale, efficacy and legitimacy of the movement as a whole, raising issues largely overlaid or ignored in the postwar consensus, but destined to become familiar in the 1970s and 1980s. Whence the third possible ‘unspeakable’ meaning previously alluded to: opinions contrary to the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. Les Armes de la nuit leaves Cange locked in the darkness of selfpunishment; the narrator answers his own question about his friend’s ability to overcome his despair with a plangent ‘I know not. I know not. I know not’ (87). Cange’s ‘resurrection’, his ‘ascent from Hell’ to the world of the living (189) in La Puissance du jour, is the result of a high-risk strategy undertaken by Nicole, who realises that only confrontation with a dilemma of his own stature (124) will exorcise a secret as yet only shared by the narrator and the reader. Accordingly, she persuades surviving members of the wartime réseau (Resistance network) to kidnap the former Vichy Prefect Broussard, ‘the Jackal of the Vendée’ (112), recently

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acquitted of causing the deaths of French patriots by handing them over to the Germans. Cange, only now identified as ‘Cornélius du réseau Valmy’ (173), emerges from exile to rejoin the group he once commanded, charged with the task of deciding Broussard’s fate: the poet and lecturer Saturnin, the primary school teacher Potrel, the Catholic bookseller Altman, the Communist baker Manéon, and Dr Mouthiers, in whose clinic Broussard is being sequestrated in an isolated ‘pavillon’. That the group is socially and politically representative, Catholic and Communist, intellectual and artisan, whitecollar professional, adds to the realism of the portrayal of the historical Resistance, as do the names of the ‘sections’ to which they belonged: Vallès, Voltaire, Viala. Like the memories featuring at the start of Les Armes de la nuit, this information has a normalising narrative function, creating reader expectations which may – or may not – be fulfilled. The group’s composition is also important for the development of the recuperative strategy devised by Nicole, herself memorially reinstated in her wartime role by the narrator: ‘I recalled the ghost-like [‘fantômatique’] young girl from Plenmach … and the same girl, three years earlier at the farm… joyful, tomboyish, a bit exalted, vigilant at her lookout post, machine-gun under arm’ (112). That the clinic, one ward of which houses female patients ‘whose madness is silence’ (132), was once raided by Broussard’s men hunting resistance fugitives is a symmetry of which the narrator approves since it gives a coincidental but symbolically powerful justification to that strategy. As the narrator surmises, dealing with Broussard proves less challenging than coming face to face again with comrades who respect Pierre’s moral authority and expect leadership (171-72). Moreover they too, it emerges, have problems which make the judgmental task more difficult and complicate their memory of recent historical events. Saturnin has discovered that prior to their marriage, his wife had a child during the war by Broussard’s son, subsequently killed in an Allied air-raid; lucidly ambivalent, he realises he should not ‘visit the sins of the father on the son, and still less those of the grandfather’ (200). Manéon reveals that, like Cange, he killed a fellow deportee to save his own life, by pushing him from a train (219), and Potrel that he only joined the Resistance after his impulsive derailment of a German leave train caused the death of fifty hostage railwaymen. So Nicole’s plan unfolds more effectively than she could have imagined, since Cange’s individual guilt is attenuated by extension to the group, a microcosm of the wider movement now in conflict with itself. Potrel offers the unwelcome truism that France owed her liberation not to the Resistance but to the Red Army and the Americans. Cange laments that ‘Tearing ourselves apart, that’s all we know how to do!

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Just because the struggle has assumed a new identity, no longer wears the mask of the Gestapo or the Wehrmacht!’ (210) That attitudes are changing is also demonstrated by Altman, who now argues for clemency for Broussard: the ex-Prefect too is one of the suffering ‘members’ of the mystical body of Christ. Cange notes ironically that his bookshop window display is given over to Montherlant, compromised during the Occupation; embarrassed, Altman mendaciously informs a well-dressed female customer, clearly the wife or widow of some ‘notable’, that he has been unable to satisfy her order for Céline’s Mort à crédit (235). The rapid return to respectability of former collaborationist writers and intellectuals is further evidenced at Saturnin’s poetry lectures at the Law Faculty: to his references to resistance writers such as Eluard and Desnos (the latter died in deportation), his students reply with shouts of ‘Maurras’, tried and imprisoned after the Liberation, and ‘Brasillach’, executed for collaboration in February 1945. These revelations and Cange’s reflections upon them are communicated to the reader in ‘notes’ found by the narrator, who offers the following confirmation: ‘The Broussard case itself is becoming blurred, or rather, is becoming indistinguishable from Pierre’s recovery: each depends on answers to much more important questions.’ (246) It subsequently emerges that during the war, Broussard had warned Saturnin about a rafle, creating a kind of moral ‘trade-off’ which prompts the narrator – and the reader – to ask where exactly purity of motive lay (308). Unsurprisingly perhaps, given the context outlined above, Broussard produces a plausible case for his wartime actions (the legitimacy of Vichy in 1940, the need for a French regime to continue to influence events, etc.), and after a fire at the clinic when he helps to evacuate the patients (293-98), Cange allows him to escape; he is later learned to have been helped by sympathisers at the Admiralty to reach Indo-China, where he finally disappears, presumed dead, leading a commando unit composed of former Waffen-SS members against (presumably) the Vietminh – a problematic patriot (once again on the wrong side?) to the last. Reconciled with Nicole, Cange reaffirms his anti-fascist credentials by gun-running for the underground Spanish Republican resistance until a lung wound and a recurrence of life-threatening pleurisy force a reappraisal. He decides to train as a doctor, eking out his meagre allowance by helping Mouthiers at the clinic while Nicole, reverting from Sten gun-toting partisan to the normal gender stereotype, becomes a nurse, thus producing an ideologically justified if aesthetically questionable ‘happy ending’ necessarily precluded in Le Silence de la mer. La Puissance du jour is structurally more complex but less persuasive than Les Armes de la nuit. This is partly because the rather

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ponderous dialectical mechanism devised to ‘save’ Cange generates predictability, despite numerous coincidences and surprises which at times border on the implausible, and despite Vercors’s attempt to anticipate criticism and signal his intention in what is almost a reprise of the previous prologue: the narrator receives a visit from a nameless resistance deportee asking if Pierre Cange really existed, or whether the narrator had not simply reduced ‘tragedy… to a piece of literature’ (95). This question invites several interpretations, not least that Vercors was uneasily aware that ‘writing resistance’ after the event was perhaps almost as transgressive an activity as resisting by writing. Intratextually, it suggests that Cange continues to represent a figure to be admired, and that the anonymous interlocutor also bears the guilt of a wartime crime, shortly confirmed: the stabbing of one of his closest comrades with, of all things, an SS dagger (98). His need to share that burden provokes an impassioned outburst in the narrator, conscious that he too is guilty, that ‘we are all guilty, that we owe an account of our actions to those we have betrayed, and that they are entitled to demand such explanations. Blaming it all on the Nazis is too easy’ (95). Acceptance of complicity is expressed in a number of ways, including episodes already mentioned. That Broussard is acquitted thanks to the influence of former collaborators protecting their careers under the new regime (121) echoes ‘L’Imprimerie de Verdun’ (1945) in which the collaborator Paars is released after Liberation thanks to friends in high places. But in listing a spectacular series of postwar acquittals and exculpations (314-15), and in highlighting resistance crimes committed against the Resistance itself, or by its organisations on individual members, Vercors voices reservations which were symptomatic in 1950 and which twenty years later would have been considered frankly revisionist. Moreover, the increased use in La Puissance du jour of the imagery and discourse of ‘resurrection’, adumbrated in Les Armes de la nuit and present in a different form in Le Silence de la mer (Kidd 1991: 35-37), adds to the ideological ambiguities of the novel, and, with or without the author’s declared atheism, raise questions about his intended public. The narrator, Cange’s ‘confessor’ (Vercors 1951: 144), recalls how ‘five years earlier, Pierre Cange lay shivering with fever and horror at himself on his litter on the Island of the Jews’ (99), while in a somewhat contrived encounter in the shadow of Notre Dame, a priest likens Cange to Christ assuming the sins of humanity, anticipating Altman’s evocation of the suffering body of Christ/France. Vercors’s image of wounded France emerging into the light (‘le jour’) after five years of occupation bears a striking resemblance to Paul Colin’s iconographically resonant poster art of 1944 (Kelly 1995), and could be inter-

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preted in two different ways: positively, as articulating a sense of political and religious, Catholic-humanist compromise appropriate to the Liberation period (1945-48) to which the novel refers; more negatively, in the ‘Cold War’ context (1948 onwards) in which the novel appeared, as directed at Communist guardianship of the ideological ‘purity’ of an increasingly fragmented Resistance movement. In a telling valedictory episode, Saturnin reveals that he has lost his professorship after refusing, against official advice, to tailor his lectures to the new climate, and has left the party. It should, finally, be recalled that Vercors’s principal objective in La Puissance du jour was to use the story of Pierre Cange to elaborate the humanism which is the hallmark of later works such as Les Animaux dénaturés (1952) and Zoo (1963) and which, the writer-narrator acknowledges, ‘transcend the subject of this story’ (Vercors 1951: 246). As a result, the historic Resistance is distanced and displaced by other concerns. Thus, a determining event in Cange’s evolution is his presence at the removal of a cerebral tumour from one of Mouthiers’s colleagues; fantasising about the famous names the exposed, apparently disembodied, brain could be (Goethe, Einstein, Jesus), Cange reflects on the nature of human identity and personality (and hence motives and values). However, the dominant tone of the episode is ambivalent; he is both horrified and fascinated by the experience, while the description (275) of the living organ as a jellyfish (‘méduse’; cf. ‘la Méduse’) and an octopus (‘poulpe’), terms used in ‘Le Songe’, completes a subtextual connection with Le Silence de la mer whose celebrated evocation of the warring ‘creatures of the sea’ (Vercors 1944: 35) is explicitly recalled in the epilogue (Vercors 1951: 356). At the level of its poetics, therefore, La Puissance du jour, though less metaphorically dense than Les Armes de la nuit, is also strikingly regressive. Following another operation, a lobotomy practised on one of the ‘silent’ inmates, the patient recovers the power of speech, but with it a total collapse of the will. Cange reflects that ‘He who kills the struggle in us kills the person. All that remains is the animal-slave’ (347). That silence is a concomitant of conflict is equally familiar to readers of Le Silence de la mer, but the acknowledgement here is at best ambiguous, suggesting nostalgia for resistance in its idealised form, without the compromises imposed by human fallibility or historical forces. It offers further evidence that in imparting literary form to wartime experience, writing is either unwittingly truthful to complexity, in which case it is subversive vis-à-vis later mythification, or constructs an alternative version of the original experience. Either way, Vercors’s attempt to write the unspeakable underlines the problematic nature of what we ascribe to memory and what we remember, or choose to remember, as history.

6

‘A HISTORY FULL OF HOLES’? FRANCE AND THE FRENCH RESISTANCE IN THE WORK OF STEPHAN HERMLIN Dennis Tate

The special significance of Stephan Hermlin in the context of the resistance memory of the war is that he is the only living German author whose experience includes periods of service in the underground struggle against fascism. Although he began working in this capacity in Germany in 1933, it is the time he spent in France between 1937 and 1943 which has had the most lasting effect on Hermlin’s creative output.1 The impact of these years, and particularly of the period from May 1940 onwards, when he supported the French resistance against his German compatriots in a variety of ways, is immediately evident in the poems and stories of the later 1940s which launched Hermlin’s literary career. Then there is a lengthy gap before he returns to the theme in the mid 1970s, in a more autobiographical vein which conveys a bleaker assessment of the value of his actions. The fact that Hermlin arrived in France in 1937 as a veteran (even at the age of twenty-two) of the communist-led opposition to 1. This paper was conceived and completed before the publication of Karl Corino’s attack on Hermlin’s integrity (Corino 1996). Corino’s article provoked a storm of media controversy which has cast more of a shadow over Corino and his methods than it has over Hermlin’s reputation (see, for example, Baier 1996). His research has, however, unearthed some important factual data about Hermlin’s years in France, which the editors of this volume have kindly allowed me (November 1996) to integrate into my chapter.

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fascism in Germany makes him different from the hundreds of intellectual refugees from the Third Reich who had been forced to leave in 1933 and who had subsequently made Paris the centre of their predominantly cultural activities.2 For the latter, the German invasion of 1940 meant a second desperate struggle to escape persecution, as documented, for example, in Anna Seghers’s novel Transit (1943), a struggle which led most of them to the other side of the Atlantic. Hermlin, in contrast, remained in France, as part of the group of perhaps a thousand German anti-fascist activists, many of whom had already fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, determined to combat Nazism at the side of local resistance groups (Pech 1987: 26-29). It was only after surviving almost three years of this underground existence that he was encouraged by the local leadership of the German Communist Party to escape to Switzerland and devote himself more fully to the cultural side of the struggle against fascism. Considerable parts of Hermlin’s life in France between 1937 and 1943 remain shrouded in mystery, and the author of the most detailed study so far of his literary career, Silvia Schlenstedt (1985: 46-47), has rightly warned of the dangers of attempting to reconstruct a biography from the various fragments of information which can be derived from his fictional, essayistic and autobiographical writings. Hermlin’s reluctance to provide a fuller picture himself does not simply stem from an understandable determination to avoid creative glorification of his actions.3 It is also a consequence of the general disorientation created by a life of impermanence and subterfuge, much of which has become ‘remarkably shadowy’ and ‘dream-like’ (Hermlin 1990a: 458-59) in his memory. In the interests of providing an indication of the specific role of a German intellectual in the French resistance, however, an historical sketch needs to be attempted. As a Jew from an affluent metropolitan background, who recently described his early years as a ‘Proustian existence’ 2. Walter (1988: 273-83) gives a detailed account of the situation of German cultural exiles in France after 1939. In a rare error, he suggests that Hermlin left France for Switzerland in 1942. While Corino has now established that he left in April 1943, rather than in 1944, as Hermlin has hitherto claimed, the experiential difference distinguishing him from the bulk of his cultural contemporaries remains significant. 3. The ‘myth’ of Hermlin’s anti-fascist heroism, which Corino is intent on demolishing, was a product of GDR propaganda of the Stalin era, for which the author can only be held partly responsible. (See Baier 1996 for an explanation of why such a self-protective myth might have been an existential necessity of that period.) It is highly misleading when Corino claims that such self-glorification is inherent in Hermlin’s creative writing.

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(Hermlin 1995a: 91), Hermlin was not an obvious candidate for this wartime role. Yet within months of Hitler’s coming to power he had gone straight from school to join the underground struggle of the German Communist Party in Berlin. In 1936 he left Germany to avoid persecution, exploring the possibility of starting a new existence in Palestine as an émigré before returning to Europe the following year (Hermlin 1983: 198). In 1937-39 he worked for the International Aid Committee in Paris, supporting the Republicans in Spain and producing manuscripts for an illegal German-language radio station directed at young soldiers (Schlenstedt 1985: 59-60, 247-48). These activities, in conjunction with his involvement in the cultural work of the German exiles, brought him into contact with the older generation of established writers, both French (notably Louis Aragon) and German, who were to influence the course of his subsequent literary career. The outbreak of war brought a sudden change to Hermlin’s life, as he (like all other Germans living in Paris) was interned in the sports stadium, the Stade Colombes, followed (in a way which was doubly threatening to him, as a communist and a Jew) by transfer to other camps where the French authorities categorised the inmates according to the political and racial criteria of the Third Reich.4 He was fortunate to avoid incarceration in the infamous concentration camp Le Vernet in the Pyrenees, from which many communists were later deported into the hands of the Gestapo, and in May 1940 he joined the unarmed auxiliary force, the prestataires, serving alongside the French army during its vain attempt to stop the German invasion (Hermlin 1983: 275; Hermlin 1990a: 519-20, 468). What happened after the chaos of the French defeat is more difficult to piece together: there were periods of internment, one in a heavily fortified camp at Nexon; in 1940-41 he worked as a farm labourer in Albi, while in the winter of 1942-43 he was a gardener at a home for Jewish children near Limoges.5 But he was also working with the German communist underground during these years, becoming involved with its wartime organisation, the travail allemand, and with the main French resistance network, the franc-tireurs et partisans. He probably undertook a mixture of propaganda work directed at the German forces 4. In his recent interview with Stephan Suschke (1995: 232), Hermlin suggests that the mass internment took place in May 1940, whereas Walter (1988: 7-47) shows that it occurred immediately after the outbreak of war. 5. An important supplement to Corino’s detective work – and to the new information provided by Hermlin in his interview (1996) – is Baier’s reference to the memoir of Hermlin’s contemporary Ernest Jouhy (1983), which describes their joint efforts to prevent the deportation of Jewish children to Nazi death camps.

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and guerilla actions intended to disrupt supplies and communications: the production of flysheets and newspapers in conjunction with attempts to influence individual soldiers through personal contacts were the priorities of the travail allemand (Pech 1987: 2739, 139-75). Hermlin also wrote at least one poem in the hope that it would be broadcast illicitly to German troops.6 His activities took him in 1942 to Oradour, the village whose inhabitants were later wiped out in one of the worst reprisal atrocities of the war (Hermlin 1983: 157-60). He spent his last months in hiding, in fear of his life, before making his escape with his young daughter across the heavily fortified frontier to the safety of Switzerland in April 1943. Although nothing of his literary work had yet been published, his reception of French culture both before and during the war years clearly influenced his creative evolution. He had come to France as an admirer of surrealism, and the way in which the movement’s best-known poets, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, responded to the national humiliation of 1940 provided a model of how work of aesthetic subtlety could also make a powerful political impact on a large readership. Hermlin later singled out Aragon’s volume of 1940, Le crève-coeur, as an example of how cultural traditions could be utilised by the avant-garde to strengthen the national will to resist, and he was already convinced that this represented a better way forward out of the debates of the 1930s on the politicisation of literature than the Soviet alternative of socialist realism.7 He had also been deeply impressed in 1942 by Vercors and Le Silence de la mer, particularly for its insistence that the threat to French autonomy was posed less by the brutality of the SS than by the cultured, but politically insensitive, officer-class represented by figures such as the author Ernst Jünger, who was one of the models for Vercors’s protagonist, Werner von Ebrennac.8 By 1943 Hermlin had begun to translate Paul Eluard’s poetry, as a personal contribution to making contemporary French culture accessible to a future German readership, an ambition realised in 1947, when a volume of his translations was published.9 The year after his departure from France, one of Hermlin’s own poems, his ‘Ballade von den Städteverteidigern’ (The Ballad of the Defenders of Cities) was published in the resistance journal L’Éternelle revue, in the translation of Jean Tardieu. Although the poem (Hermlin 1990b: 42-43) is addressed to the people of Stalingrad at the height of their struggle for survival, its applicability to the 6. 7. 8. 9.

‘Manifest an die Bestürmer der Stadt Stalingrad’, in Hermlin 1990b: 40-41. See ‘Ein Gruß für Aragon’ in Hermlin 1983: 253-57, and Schlenstedt 1985: 7-9. See ‘Mitternachtserinnerungen’ Hermlin 1974: 71-76; Vercors 1992: 179-83. A selection is included in Hermlin 1990b: 141-243.

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French resistance is clearly indicated by his inclusion in the text of the time and place of its composition, November 1942 in Limoges, the month the Germans assumed control of the territory of the Vichy state in which Limoges was situated. When an entire volume of Hermlin’s city ballads was published in Switzerland at the end of 1944 it bore the obvious mark of his French experience in many more points of detail, as well as including a poem entitled ‘Paris’ (54-55), which anticipates the liberation of the capital and the revenge to be taken against Nazi collaborators. What I want to focus on, however, as evidence of Hermlin’s response to his years in France, is his prose writing of the later 1940s, which includes three substantial stories with French locations. Little attention has been paid to the distinctive contribution these stories make to post-1945 German literature, largely because of the political factors which restricted the reception of Hermlin’s work during the Cold War and which are threatening to do so again in postunification Germany. In France Hermlin fell victim to the virtual taboo which existed for well over twenty years on any portrayal of the part played by Germans in the Resistance. He has on various occasions referred to the pain he was caused when, in 1945, the great Aragon expressed his undying hatred for Germans and all things German and remained unmoved when Hermlin pleaded in an Open Letter for a degree of differentiation.10 More than a decade later, when Aragon’s partner Elsa Triolet published a novel, Le Rendez-vous des étrangers, which focused on the part played by foreigners in the Resistance, Hermlin searched in vain for a single reference to the German contribution (Schlenstedt 1985: 38). It was only in 1969 that another French communist, Florimond Bonte, put the record straight with a historical monograph on the role of the German anti-fascists (Bonte 1969). During this entire period Hermlin himself was banned from entering France, for reasons which were never explained to him, and the French readership had no access to his stories.11 In the German Federal Republic he fared little better, even if the political reservations regarding his work were of a different kind, arising from his commitment to the GDR following the division of Germany. None of his work appeared in the Federal Republic between 1948 and 1965, until the initiative of the West Berlin publisher Klaus Wagenbach in producing a small anthology (Hermlin 1965) signalled the begin10. See ‘Offener Brief an Aragon’ in Hermlin 1983: 7-10. 11. According to the bibliography compiled by Gudrun Klatt et al. (1982), the only work to appear in translation during this period was the Poèmes choisis of 1955. The belated publication of a French collection of his stories, Dans un monde de ténèbres, came in 1982.

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nings of cultural détente between the two German states. It was not until 1980 that Wagenbach published a volume of Hermlin’s stories which included all the early ones (Hermlin 1980). Since German unification the fact that Hermlin had earlier enjoyed a special relationship with the GDR’s leader Erich Honecker has been used to cast a further shadow over his literary reputation. Despite this, Hermlin’s eightieth birthday, in April 1995, was marked by a lengthy interview with Fritz J. Raddatz in Die Zeit. Raddatz rightly drew attention to the failure of Hermlin’s generation of communist intellectuals after 1945 to discuss the significance of issues such as the Moscow show trials or the internecine violence on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, sins of omission which had led to the promulgation of ‘a history full of holes’ (‘eine durchlöcherte Geschichte’) in the GDR. Hermlin immediately acknowledged the validity of this criticism, while justifying his actions on the grounds of the overriding need for party discipline during the Cold War. The implication of Raddatz’s judgement would appear to be that nothing of Hermlin’s creative work of this era is worth rereading (Hermlin 1995b). What it fails to address, however, is the question of whether these ideological distortions are also evident in the stories most intimately based on Hermlin’s wartime experience. There is a considerable difference between the propagandist reportage he produced following short visits to the Soviet Union or China, for example (Hermlin 1948; Hermlin 1954), and the stories he wrote after his return from France and before the intensification of the Cold War. Hermlin’s three ‘French’ stories (1990a: 158-98, 199-232, 233-46) of this period are Reise eines Malers in Paris (Journey of a Painter in Paris, 1947), ‘Die Zeit der Einsamkeit’ (‘The Time of Loneliness’) and ‘Arkadien’ (‘Arcadia’, both published in 1949). The first two are portrayals of the paths to political action taken by German émigrés, the third the account given by a German observer of the trial and execution of a young traitor by the French resistance. They are all impressively complex narratives, in which the thought processes, and especially the mental conflicts, of the protagonists are rendered with a subjective intensity arising from the narrator’s empathy with them (even where the stories are ostensibly not autobiographical).12 Taken together, they illuminate some key historical moments in Hermlin’s specifically German experi12. Parts of the Reise are based, according to Hermlin’s note, on hallucinations experienced by the painter Hans Reichelt (renamed Reichmann in the text), while ‘Arkadien’ recreates an event which took place after Hermlin left France, possibly recounted by Rudolf Ernst (the R.E. to whom it is dedicated?), who played an important role in the resistance in the Auvergne, where the story is located (see Pech 1987: 150).

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ence of wartime France: the anxiety which gripped the émigré community in Paris in the summer of 1939, the internment camps to which its members were consigned following the outbreak of war, the attempt of a fugitive German couple to find a safe niche in Vichy France, the decision of one of them to join the resistance, and the role played by other Germans in the maquis on the eve of the liberation. These stories are, almost as an article of faith, entirely positive about the work of the French Resistance itself. The Reise eines Malers is perhaps too ambitious as an early narrative experiment, in the way it uses hallucinatory sequences in its portrayal of the existential crisis of its protagonist before offering him a utopian way out of it. During the ‘orphic’ journey towards self-renewal which combines elements of Hermlin’s experience with that of his fictional figure, the artist Reichmann is able to foresee both the nightmare of the internment camp and the hope for the future represented by postrevolutionary China, where he is inspired by the wisdom of Chou-En-Lai. Although this magical escape from wartime reality makes for a contrived positive ending, the story as a whole provides a reminder that the cultural origins of East German literature were more diverse than the cliché of socialist realism suggests. Hermlin’s other two stories have stood the test of time better as authentic memories of the experience of war. ‘Arkadien’ powerfully depicts the way in which communities were torn apart by acts of betrayal – in this case a young peasant informing the German authorities of the hiding-place of the local maquis – and emphasises the pain involved in exacting retribution afterwards, even when everyone concerned, including the guilty party, agrees that the verdict must be death. The German narrator’s role is to situate these grim events against the idyllic backdrop of the Auvergne, which he describes in almost lyrical detail, in order to suggest the distorting effect of the German occupation on a previously organic community. As a record of Hermlin’s immediate postwar perspective on wartime France, however, it is his ‘Zeit der Einsamkeit’ which particularly merits reexamination. What makes it realistic, in view of the firmness of Hermlin’s subsequent political commitment, is its honest portrayal of the feelings of helplessness and isolation experienced by the partly autobiographical protagonist Neubert after the French defeat in 1940. For some considerable time Neubert is positively relieved both to have found a job as a farm labourer, within reach of his partner Magda, and to have lost touch with his communist comrades. Furthermore, when crisis occurs, through a chain of events which culminates in Magda’s death, he breaks with the discipline of years of underground struggle and kills the French official responsible, in a personal act of revenge. He is then, ironi-

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cally, imprisoned for a crime he did not commit and is fortunate to escape before his real identity is discovered. Only now is he prepared to give up the ‘false self-preservation’ which is not ‘survival’ but a state of ‘no-longer-existing’ and return to the struggle to defeat fascism, but there is no hint of heroism about his decision (Hermlin 1990a: 225, 232).13 Hermlin’s adept use of flashback to piece together the essential details of Neubert’s life preceding this crisis gives his story a dramatic quality which still makes it an absorbing read. After the publication of ‘Die Zeit der Einsamkeit’ and ‘Arkadien’ in 1949 (together with two other resistance stories with non-French locations),14 Hermlin’s contribution to the literature of the Second World War came to an abrupt halt. This unexplained change of direction probably resulted from the decision of the GDR’s cultural ideologues to impose the doctrine of socialist realism on all spheres of art, which led to Hermlin’s poetry and prose being heavily criticised for their ‘surrealist’ tendencies. This was only the first of a series of bureaucratic blows which eventually undermined his confidence in state socialism and restricted his creative output to a fraction of what one might expect from an author of his talent and longevity. One way in which Hermlin responded to this rebuff was to turn himself into the GDR’s leading advocate of French literature. As a translator he built on his success with Eluard’s work, producing a succession of volumes of prose and poetry, ranging from Villon and Verlaine to contemporaries like Aragon and Triolet. As an essayist he focused not just on authors he had translated, but also on figures to whom he was attracted by the quality of their writing rather than by their political sympathies, such as Chateaubriand, Stendhal and Valéry. As an executive member of the GDR branch of PEN he developed close contacts with French counterparts such as Vercors, Vailland, de Beauvoir and Sartre, despite the ban on his entering France.15 There are several 13. Corino’s account of the circumstances leading to the death in 1941 of Hermlin’s first wife, Juliett Brandler, suggests that this may be the most autobiographical of the early stories, although it remains, like the others, primarily a work of fiction. Corino shows no interest in Hermlin’s creative writing as literature. 14. The volume was entitled Die Zeit der Gemeinsamkeit, taking its title from a story about the uprising of 1943 in the Warsaw ghetto. 15. A list of Hermlin’s translations is provided in Schlenstedt 1985: 244-45; his essays on French authors and themes are collected in Hermlin 1974; Hermlin 1983; he lists a number of his literary friendships in Schlenstedt 1985: 31. When, in 1962, he persuaded Sartre at the Moscow Peace Congress to give him a copy of his provocative speech ‘La démilitarisation de la culture’ for publication in the journal Sinn und Form (Suschke 1995: 235), it marked the beginning of another prolonged confrontation with GDR authority.

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moments in his essays, however, where the frustrated chronicler of his own French experience reemerges, giving the reader new insights, for example, into the euphoria of his arrival in France in 1937, into the chaos of his military service with the prestataires or the misery of the internment camp afterwards; then, moving on to his period with the resistance, describing the impact of Le Silence de la mer or his memories of Oradour. Only once, though, does he go into detail about the role played by individual Germans in the Resistance, and then by way of endorsing the accuracy of the first French account of their achievements (Hermlin 1974: 106-11). It is only after his rehabilitation by the French authorities in 1971, and the opportunity this provided to return to the scene of his activities as an exile, that Hermlin begins to write again at greater length about this period of his life. In the majority of the prose works he has produced since then, all of which have been of an autobiographical nature, wartime France has been a point of reference, but now in the wider context of an often disheartening postwar existence. The mood is set in Mein Friede (My Peace) of 1975, which begins with the recollection of a nightmare which takes him back to the months of 1942-43 he spent in hiding, regularly waking with a start and searching desperately for his pistol to defend himself against an imagined assault by his persecutors. The postwar world is then described as having become a nightmare of a different kind, with the loss of his special relationship with France combined with the impossibility of reestablishing a German identity while he is surrounded by citizens unprepared to come to terms with the legacy of Nazism. The moral imperative which drives Hermlin to continue upholding the values for which so many of his friends sacrificed their lives has brought him a terrible isolation, which his life in the GDR has done little to relieve, as he now admits (Hermlin 1990a: 450-57). This rather melancholic tone extends through Hermlin’s longest semi-autobiographical text, Abendlicht (Twilight, 1979), which frustrates any expectations his readers might have had that it would finally provide a fuller account of the events, people and places in his earlier life. Although the particular focus here is on the narrator’s childhood, his family relationships, and his first years of political activism in Germany, there are various references forward to wartime France which place the emphasis more exclusively than in ‘Die Zeit der Einsamkeit’ on the loneliness and fear of these years. The most unexpected moment of insight comes during the narrator’s depiction of his close relationship with his younger brother, who is said to have served and died as a fighter-pilot with the RAF. He recounts a recurring dream of being

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rescued from France by his brother in a Spitfire and being flown to a ‘land without hate and fear’ which he simultaneously knows he will never find (Hermlin 1990a: 527-30).16 Perhaps the most evocative passage in Abendlicht is its central unfinished sentence (consisting of fifteen splinters of memory, at least three of which refer to his work with the resistance), in which he is unable to find the means of connecting the ‘then’ of these memories to the ‘now’ of the narrative present in a way which would give his life an overall sense of purpose (523). He reinforces this feeling of alienation from his past, and specifically now his French past, in his next short text, ‘Rückkehr’ (‘Return’), when he summarises his various trips to Paris since the lifting of the ban in the following terms: ‘I now came frequently to France, once even at the invitation of the government, I sat in the cafés at the Odéon or on the main boulevards, I had many friends and acquaintances, but I had no desire to impose on them and by the end of it all was an old man’ (470). The 1980s nevertheless saw Hermlin continuing to work with the legacy of his wartime experience. ‘Hölderlin 1944’ provides an echo of his early stories in the way the idyllic qualities of his rural surroundings are juxtaposed with the ever-present risk of detection and death (Hermlin 1990: 478-84).17 In the last weeks of his period as a wanted man, hidden away in a hayloft made available by a sympathetic farmer, he uses his enforced leisure to write a commemorative essay on the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, which was to become one of his first publications after he escaped into Switzerland. A moment of real danger occurs just when the idyll seems complete, in the shape of the farmer’s mother, a devotee of Pétain who would denounce him to the Vichy militia without a moment’s hesitation, who arrives unexpectedly to search the hayloft for eggs. Hermlin’s account of how he managed to avoid detection by this otherwise harmless old woman ends with a sober statement which suddenly illuminates the desperate nature of his existence – that he would have had to kill her if she had discovered him.18 The gulf separating ‘then’ and ‘now’ again underlines Hermlin’s changed perspective on this period in his life. He begins his story with comments which stress the naivety of trying to mobilise art in support 16. The fact that the death of Hermlin’s aviator-brother occurred under quite different circumstances, as Corino has now established, does not detract from the force of this fictional evocation of unfulfillable longing. 17. Hermlin’s systematic relocation of subjective experience in what has now been shown to be the wrong historical context – 1944 rather than 1943 – makes this appear the most contrived of his texts, even when viewed from a perspective which acknowledges the inevitable blurring of resistance memories of the war. 18. See also Ribnikar 1985.

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of any political cause. He concludes it with a disillusioned statement – ‘How young I was then, how strange my dreams, how fruitless my efforts’ – which appears to refer beyond his early literary endeavours to his anti-fascist activities as a whole. This ambiguity becomes more apparent when we look at the final two texts in this sequence, ‘Ein berühmter Schriftsteller’ (‘A Famous Author’) and ‘Doktor Dubois’, which were both published in 1985 (Hermlin 1990a: 485-90, 491-94). Each raises uncomfortable questions about the moral superiority he was uncritically prepared to bestow on wartime France in his early writing, as he draws attention to fascist skeletons lurking in the French cupboard. ‘Doktor Dubois’ describes how a friend in the Paris Resistance unwittingly introduced Hermlin, when he was suffering from a minor back problem, to an apparently reliable doctor, who was later identified as a serial murderer with Nazi sympathies. By deciding, at the last moment, against keeping his appointment with Dubois, suspecting for quite different reasons that he might be falling into a trap set by the secret police, Hermlin fortuitously avoided the fate which befell many of Dubois’s other patients, in the gas chamber he had created in his surgery – a chilling detail noted by Hermlin with characteristic understatement. The author recalled in the other story is Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who, during a chance encounter with Hermlin in a Paris café in 1939, launches into a hymn of praise for Hitler’s plans to exterminate Jews and communists, making the assumption that all Germans are equally enthusiastic supporters of the Third Reich. It is not so much this outburst as the fact that the Parisian literary establishment was prepared, soon after 1945, to rehabilitate Céline, that has led to the moral unease about some aspects of French cultural life which Hermlin is now prepared to acknowledge. These two anecdotes are not quite Hermlin’s last word on his changing perceptions of his French experience, to the extent that he has continued to refer to it in interviews, but he has not written any further autobiographical texts since 1985. There are hints of continuing readiness to cast aside what remain of his earlier ideological preconceptions, for example in his changing view of Ernst Jünger, who is now remembered not as a model for the protagonist of Le Silence de la mer, but rather as an outstanding literary stylist and a military officer of old-fashioned integrity (Suschke 1995: 237-38). Regrettably, however, Hermlin’s recent interviewers have been more interested in what he can tell them about émigré culture in prewar Paris than in probing him further about his years in the political underground.19 19. Hermlin’s Spiegel interview (1996) has now helped to restore the balance.

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To conclude: Hermlin has indeed left us with a ‘history full of holes’, although not, in the case of his years in France, as a result of the deliberate ideological distortions with which Fritz J. Raddatz reproached him in his recent interview. The fragments Hermlin has provided are, on the contrary, a highly authentic way both of conveying the nature of an existence in which it was impossible to gain an overview of the struggle to which he was committed, and of acknowledging how incomplete his political perceptions of the time have turned out to be. By refusing to compromise himself creatively, as he would have done if he had attempted to give a rounded ‘historical’ account of his past, Hermlin has been making an important point about the problematic nature of the resistance memory of the war.

7

WAR, CIVIL WAR AND THE PROBLEM OF VIOLENCE IN CALVINO AND PAVESE Sarah Morgan

Within five years, the Italian Communist party passed from its strong and hopeful emergence from the Resistance and Liberation (the PCI had doubled in size during the clandestine period, to become a mass party of 1.7 million members by the end of 1945, and the largest Communist party in Western Europe), to a position of defeat and marginalisation from government after 1948. By 1950 what strength and legitimacy the PCI retained was constantly under siege from the centre-right in the fully established climate of Cold War. In the difficult circumstances of the onset of Cold War and the positioning of forces to right and left, the Resistance was hoisted as an ideological banner of fundamental significance, through which to advertise PCI party policy and integrity, and maintain popular appeal. Particularly after 1945 the image of the Resistance conveyed by the PCI leadership and communist and left-wing sympathisers at local and national level and across a variety of media (in newspapers, novels, fictional and documentary films, memoirs, diaries and historical works), was consistently circumscribed and homogenised. Whatever was problematic or challenged the picture of the Resistance that was cultivated, was suppressed; simply written out of the story.1 Calvino and Pavese were writers who narra1. This effort to suppress facts that were damaging to the idealised portrayal of the Resistance, is particularly evident in the way that the communist press tried to conceal the incidence of postwar partisan violence, frequently referred to by the Right from the period of early 1947 as the ‘triangolo della morte’ or ‘violenza rossa’.

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tivised the Resistance from positions of sympathy for the Communist party, but who challenged the orthodox figuring that dominated in communist and left-wing circles in this period, proposing different schemes of understanding that elaborated three important viewpoints on the Resistance. There were three features of the Resistance that could not at the time, and for decades to follow, be accommodated within the idealised picture that was cultivated by the Left and in particular by the Communists. First of all the Resistance could not be viewed as, or named as, civil war. The Popular Front policy laid down in the mid-1930s by the Communist International in an effort to create strong and wide alliances in the fight against Nazism and fascism, led the PCI to present itself as a party of mass appeal, which would defeat fascism and achieve power through democratic and collaborative means; and this position was reiterated and famously put into effect at the meeting at Salerno in March 1944, when Togliatti led the Left to an agreement to collaborate with the conservative forces, and join the government headed by the King, despite the strong opposition of some of his own comrades and other elements of the Left, particularly the Partito d’Azione. As much as in its policy making, the PCI needed to reassure (the Allies, other parties of the anti-fascist alliance, especially the more conservative and therefore hostile elements, and also potential voters) by projecting the image of a united resistance effort, harmonious cooperation with the other anti-fascist parties, a smooth progression from collaborative routing of the Nazis and fascists to democratic government. To see the Resistance as civil war (and recognise – as we must now – the more complex and difficult sociopolitical configurations of the war) undermined these myths of national unity. Moreover, the notion of civil war had been appropriated into the fascist discourse as part of their legitimisation of their own position. The Fascists of Salò cultivated an image of themselves as honourably and loyally continuing to stand by fascism, while other Italians opportunistically switched sides, or else opted for the deviant illegalism and subversive communism of the Resistance. Partisans were never named as such, but were referred to as ‘rebels’, ‘bandits’ ‘hooligans’ and ‘subversives’. The response of the communist Left was to deny civil war, or more usually to avoid all mention of the term, and build up the argument for their own legitimacy into what became represented as a moral crusade against a supreme evil. Secondly, as a corollary to the notion of civil war, the Resistance as class war was an equally impossible concept that undermined

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the PCI leadership’s interclassist policy. This policy – also part of the general strategy of the Popular Front – aimed to draw votes to the PCI from across the classes, in the process ironing out exclusive links with the working classes and associations of insurrectionary intent and anti-democratic strategies with the party. PCI rank and file and other elements of the Left such as the PSIUP socialists felt that this strategy diluted and betrayed what was fundamental to the revolutionary socialist cause – but were obliged to fall in line for fear of splitting the Left and diminishing their own status. Thirdly, the Communist leadership could not admit that any episodes of irregular or cold-blooded violence had gone on during or after the Resistance. Again, this admission would have suggested the existence of difficult subcurrents to the partisan war and would have contradicted the image of the Resistance as highly disciplined, motivated in a single direction and, above all, democratic. The PCI was particularly concerned to dissociate itself from the phenomenon of postliberation violence that implicated some of its own partisans. In an effort to counter accusations, they insistently projected images of discipline, order and rigorous respect of justice in dealings with the enemy. Especially in the early period, fictional accounts of the Resistance tended to promote the most circumscribed and idealised version of the myth. The film Roma città aperta (Rome Open City), made by Roberto Rossellini in the autumn and winter of 1944 and the novel Uomini e no (Men and Not-Men) by Elio Vittorini that was published in June 1945, constitute some of the first accounts of the Resistance, formed while the Resistance was still being fought. Neither Rossellini as a Catholic with communist sympathies, nor Vittorini, who publicly rejected the notion (put forward by elements of the PCI) that ideology should be carried and conveyed through art, were offering a strictly Marxist account of the Resistance. Yet their representations are remarkably concordant with the myth, offering similar dramatisations of the Resistance. Both tend to dehistoricise the conflict, instead defining positions in moral terms. In their simplified and stereotyped schemes, the chief enemy are the German occupiers, portrayed as monstrous and sadistic, capable of any kind of outrage against humanity. Partisan activity is represented as an inevitable and urgent response to this – a unanimous and unified uprising of the people – a moral crusade against what is evil and subhuman. In Uomini e no, an interesting piece of dialogue aims to point up the absurdity of the fascist claim that the Resistance was a civil war. Two fascist militiamen comment upon a particularly barbarous scene of Nazi cruelty they have just witnessed, in which a man suspected to be an ‘anti-fascist’ is stripped, whipped and then

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set upon and torn apart by dogs. ‘This … is civil war’ says the first as if repeating a notion drummed into him, in an attempt to make sense of what he has seen; the second responds with a question: ‘Feeding men to the dogs?’ (Vittorini 1993: 173), as if to ask – What kind of civil war sees one side responsible for an act of such gross barbarism as feeding men to dogs? How can the two sides be viewed on equal terms? In the next four years the political scene shifts from resistance euphoria and its large aspirations to the reality of postwar compromise and Cold War. It is in this period that Calvino and Pavese are consistently preoccupied in their writing with the war and particularly with the Resistance. From their different perspectives both question the rhetoric of the Resistance projected in earlier accounts, rejecting the simplistic monoliths of the narratives of Vittorini and Rossellini. In their accounts there is more searching and questioning of the whole dynamic of the war; how it began and how it was carried forward, what really determined the taking up of positions. This involves an examination at the microhistorical level; considering individual motivations and how they interweave with and are absorbed into the mass phenomenon of war. Calvino’s short stories of the war were written between 1945 and 1948 and first published in a collection in 1949, Ultimo viene il corvo (Last Comes the Raven); his novel Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path of the Nest of Spiders) was written in 1946 and published in 1947. The novel was written just over a year after Vittorini’s, but already from a very different historical perspective that allowed Calvino a more critical view of the Resistance. By 1946 the signs of a large-scale continuity from fascism were evident, with the failure to carry out epurazione, or purging of fascists from their posts, and by the end of June the Christian Democrats had emerged from the Constituent Assembly elections as the most powerful party. The early hagiographies were no doubt already looking somewhat forlorn – too evidently pointing up the gap between what should have been and what was. Il sentiero was clearly conceived in order to circumnavigate the stereotypes of earlier accounts of the Resistance.2 The narrative is recounted through the unusual perspective of the child, Pin, and Calvino focuses not upon heroes of the Resistance, but upon a group of social misfits (Marx’s Lumpenproletariat) who have 2. In the preface written for the 1964 republication of Il sentiero, Calvino acknowledged his desire to avoid mythologising the Resistance: ‘I would say that I wanted to fight contemporaneously on two fronts, to challenge those who denigrated the Resistance, and at the same time to challenge the high-priests of a Resistance that was sugary and hagiographic’.

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wound up largely by chance on the right side of history and who are mostly uneducated, amoral and politically unaware. While Vittorini and Rossellini had concentrated chiefly upon the conflict against the German occupiers in their accounts of the Resistance, with Calvino the whole focus shifts over to a picture of a community divided and at war among its members. Here and in the short stories, Calvino reflects upon the functioning and meaning of History – the declared or official aspect of war – that stretches like a semantic web over society and things, crudely defining zones and categories of people; friend and foe. He explores what lies beneath this official interpretation of events, and discovers the ungraspable complexity of the world and society, and the layers of understanding and impulse, conscious and unconscious, that make up the human psyche. As the communist partisan commissar Kim remarks in chapter IX of Il sentiero, ‘Everything must be logical, everything must be understood, in history as much as in the minds of men: yet there remains a gap, a zone of darkness between one and the other where collective motivations become individual motivations, with monstrous deviations and unheard-of juxtapositions’ (Calvino 1947: 143). The novel focuses right into this ‘zone of darkness’ that lies between individual and collective motivations. Calvino shows us characters acting out of a sense of self-preservation and self-interest that merges with an instinct to revenge and a dark fascination with violence and destruction. History imposes the invisible dividing line between camps, drawing to one side and the other elements of the population who have no interest in or knowledge of the official causes of war. Amongst this odd assortment of partisans the reasons for joining the Resistance and the motivations to fight the enemy are almost exclusively bound up with personal and private concerns. Many pass indiscriminately from the brigate nere to the partisans and back, with no notion of the political significance of subscribing to one side or the other, but instead propelled by circumstance, an instinct for survival and the quest for some material gain.3 Personal resentments become projected onto the war in its totality – Cugino blames the war on women, and carries out his personal war against women, because he was betrayed by his wife while fighting abroad. Those few who believe themselves to be more 3. Miscèl il Francese, captured by the fascists while working for the GAP, passes willingly into the brigate nere: ‘They’ve explained the advantages to me, the salary I’ll get. And then you know, when we do the round-ups, you can go round the houses taking what you want…’ (Calvino 1947: 61) Pelle, whose twin passions are collecting arms and bedding women, leaves the brigate nere to join the partisans, and later defects back to the fascists. He operates autonomously, always and uniquely in search of new arms to add to his arsenal.

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politicised have either fastened onto a handful of crude slogans (such as the boy Lupo Rosso) or, like Il Carabiniere, who blames the entry into war on students he saw demonstrating in Naples, are too ignorant (and too prone to interpret only through limited personal experience) to understand the historical and political significance of the war. Politics are extraneous and meaningless to this group – Mancino the cook’s attempts to instruct them (according to his Trotskyist politics) are met only with hostility and impatience. To problematise the idea of an informed adherence to one side or the other, is to uncover the greater problem of violence in war. What motivates individuals to participate in the violence? This and the question of the reservoirs of violence and cruelty that lie within individuals are issues that Calvino pursues in the novel and the short stories that recount the Resistance. In an episode in Il sentiero Calvino exposes the gratuitous cruelty of a reprisal killing. Three Calabrian brothers-in-law capture two fascists in order to avenge the killing of another of their number. Without any trial or consultation with the rest of the band, they make the fascists dig their own graves, and then shoot them. In an effort to denude the act of rhetoric, and draw attention to the questions raised, Calvino suspends any moralising comments and adopts an understated narrative voice that moves away from the child Pin as focaliser of the narrative (Pin is present and witnessing throughout the rest of the novel – with the exception of the anomalous chapter IX). This has the effect of framing and lending gravity to the episode. The incident suggests the problem of the arbitrariness of categories of friend and foe, since both the Calabrians, and the fascists (who in a pathetic appeal for justice claim that they were forcibly conscripted), have randomly found themselves on opposite sides. Likewise in an episode recounted in the short story ‘Uno dei tre è ancora vivo’ (‘One of the Three is Still Alive’), Calvino confronts the problem of popular meting out of justice in the postwar period, and the prolonging of violence that was undeniably a part of the civil war, though it is significant that violence is not associated openly with the partisans here.4 A group of villagers carry out a reprisal against three fascists in order to avenge the atrocities done by other fascists to fellow-villagers and relatives during the war. Here too, the arbitrariness of categories and the idea that these fascists may be more innocent than others, but must represent the category of fascism and the crimes attributed to it, makes the killings more problematic, as does the horrific nature of the manhunt: the men are first stripped and tied together, taunted and 4. In other words, Calvino does not go as far in undermining the Resistance, as openly to suggest that such reprisals were carried out by partisans.

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abused, then herded towards a pothole and fired at until either the fall or the bullet wounds kill them. One of the three falls down into the rock unharmed and is able to crawl to safety. Pavese was writing his account of the Resistance a little later still. La casa in collina (The House in the Hills) was written between September 1947 and February 1948, and published at the end of 1948. The significance of writing after 1947 cannot be underestimated. It was a political watershed, the year in which the PCI lost its place in the postwar government, and Cold War aggressions were setting in with the approach to the general election of 1948. It was in this period that accusations were levelled against the Resistance (in the press and elsewhere) of irregularity and hooliganism, making an issue of ‘red violence’ in the postwar period in order to push the Communists and their resistance right out of the picture. When Pavese came to write La casa in collina, therefore, the old stereotypes were in some ways more redundant than ever. Pavese chooses to view the Resistance in terms of social groups pitting themselves against each other. The historical facts of the German occupation and fascist collaboration with the Germans are meticulously integrated into the novel, but what particularly concerns Pavese is the civil war element, which is specifically seen in terms of a class war. Even before 8 September 1943, his protagonist Corrado argues the need of the lower classes to rebel against the oppression of fascism. The Nazi occupation is a passing fact, the domination of the middle classes a permanent and oppressive evil. Pavese sees the positions of fascism and anti-fascism profoundly bound up with class or social status and portrays individuals as being held within these social structures, their choices dictated by them. Of the uppermiddle-class represented by Anna Maria, Corrado comments: ‘They are people who enjoy themselves in different ways to us, even the fascists are better than them. Besides they were the ones who put the fascists in power’ (Pavese 1990a: 44). The bourgeois Egle and her family, the father a rich industrialist, represent the middle classes who colluded with fascism because it seemed to guarantee the maintenance of the status and wealth of their class. For them the first partisans and collaborators with the Resistance are ‘hooligans’ and ‘subversives’ (53). Finally there is the working-class Fontana group who comment wryly, ‘For those who have bread and can stay in the hills, the war is a pleasure’ (50), who have been oppressed under fascism and are now among the principal victims of the war, and who join the Resistance because, as Corrado points out, ‘This is not a soldier’s war that might even end tomorrow, it is the poor people’s war, the war of those who are struggling against hunger, poverty, prison and disgust.’ (66)

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Again, we can link this representation of the war to the perspective of a communist sympathiser assessing the progression of events following the Liberation. The interclassist policy was doomed to failure, the PCI were losing ground despite all their policies of democratic progression, the class-bound component of the PCI was becoming more evident. And the aftermath of continued episodes of violence confirmed Pavese’s thesis. ‘Once we’ve finished with the blacks we’ll start with the reds’ (111) menaces the Badogliano partisan Giorgi, brother of Egle, in an allusion to the class split that existed within the partisan formations and to the perpetuation of the violence of the class conflict past the end of the war. This pessimistic and anti-humanistic view, that saw the Resistance in terms of class conflict – not a positive and powerful move towards change as it was consistently represented by the Left, but a fragile alliance soon to be broken – was more strongly asserted with Pavese’s next novel. La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires) was written in the autumn of 1949 at a point when Pavese could fully confirm the thesis of La casa, and document the perpetuation of class conflict in the antagonism of Cold War, and the massive attacks on the Resistance to which it gave rise. Here the Resistance is no longer the largely idealised movement that it is in La casa, where Pavese comes close to (but also at the end of the novel veers away from) suggesting that being with the Resistance involved an informed moral choice and constituted an act of nobility and sacrifice. Looked at more coolly and from a greater distance than in La casa, the partisan war is acknowledged to have had its share of ‘outsiders, those joining up to avoid conscription, people on the run from the city and hot heads’ (Pavese 1950: 21), some of its participants guilty of episodes of irregular violence (such as the irregular killing of a group of gypsies) and problematic administration of justice (the killing of Santa). He also raises questions about the reliability of accounts of the Resistance, showing how the Right, in a frenzy of anti-communist feeling led by the local priest, uses every killing that comes to light, four years on from the end of the war, as proof that the Resistance was ‘all a situation of guerilla warfare, irregularity and bloodshed’ (49), while the Left too is guilty of suppressing or avoiding truths in order to maintain a pristine account of the Resistance. As in Il sentiero and Calvino’s short stories, the author’s preoccupation with violence in this novel cannot simply be read as emanating from a position of moral condemnation. Violence pervades the imagery of these texts at the level of fantasy, revealing a particular fascination with women as victims of violence. In La luna women recurrently figure as the objects of male rage and frustra-

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tion, whose helplessness and status as victim offer a sense of gratification and empowerment to the male who vents anger and frustration upon their bodies.5 While it is true that Pavese and Calvino challenged or questioned these myths of the Resistance, it should equally be made clear that neither absolutely rejected them. In fact there exist deeplying contradictions or tensions in both their accounts that indicate an adherence to a certain ideal of the Resistance, as well as an attempt to pull away from that. Calvino sets up a very different perspective on the Resistance in Il sentiero, but then draws away from it, with his insertion of chapter IX. This chapter interrupts the narrative to comment upon it and relativise the picture of the Resistance that is being conveyed, inviting us to see the subproletarian band as an anomaly beside the true, orderly, well-disciplined Resistance that is going on elsewhere. Likewise in the short story ‘La stessa cosa del sangue’ (‘The Same Thing As Blood’) the leisurely, autonomous and nonconformist resistance of Giglio’s band (closely related to Dritto’s band in Il sentiero) is eventually rejected by the two protagonists in favour of the Resistance that is established higher up the mountain. The effect then, is of a tension between conveying ‘truths’ or problems through the description of a less than perfect partisan band, and retaining the idea of a heroic, mythical Resistance. In an attempt to stitch together these two disparate pictures of the Resistance, Calvino guides the reader’s interpretation of the narrative through the thoughts and comments of the figure Kim in chapter IX of Il sentiero, and puts forward the idea that however incongruous and misguided the elements fighting for the Resistance, they are still on the side of history, and therefore of justice. Problems and questions raised concerning the Resistance are ultimately resolved or dismissed with this argument. Pavese also proposes an understanding of the Resistance that undermines or contradicts much of what the orthodox account projected, but for all that his partisans (Fonso, Cate and the others of the working-class Fontana group) are remote, one-dimensional heroic figures. The Resistance – its values, its idea of commitment and sacrifice – is still in part idealised with him. This inconsistency 5. Exemplified in the violent imagery of a reflection such as this: ‘In the end the day came when, in order to have something to touch, in order to make yourself known, you strangled a woman, shot at her while she slept, or bashed her head in with a spanner’ (Pavese 1950: 17-18). Likewise, in Il sentiero, Cugino’s hatred of women is conflated with his hatred of the fascist enemy. Pin, who is inclined to express repulsion and fascination with sex as associated with his sister, through violence (shooting at the spiders’ nests) finds the perfect companion in Cugino.

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can, to a large extent, be understood in terms of Pavese’s personal dilemma over the Resistance. La casa can be viewed as an attempt to exorcise a sense of guilt or remorse over his nonparticipation in the Resistance that troubled him, as is occasionally suggested in letters and diary entries.6 We can conclude that the Resistance remained an ideal that he failed to live up to. The distance that he takes (as author) from the protagonist Corrado invites condemnation of his cowardice and inability to act. Yet there are contradictions in the novel that indicate that Pavese was also pulling away from fully condemning the position of Corrado, and towards justification of his inaction. Pavese builds up an argument for participation and the responsibility of the individual, which he also undermines with a counterargument that suggests that each character is bound by class and class interest (a thesis still more strongly asserted in La luna) – Corrado is thus unable to take part in the Resistance for, as a bourgeois intellectual, he has no material motivation to do so. Pavese also moves away from the boldness of his class war thesis in La casa – diluting it with eschatological remarks (‘every war is a civil war’ etc.) at the end of the novel, and resolves his dilemma by removing himself to a morally sanitised limbo from which he pronounces upon the impossibility of justifying any killing in war, irrespective of the cause or motivation. These contradictions in large part indicate the degree to which political positions had become (with the advent of the Cold War) absolutely polarised around the issue of the significance of the Resistance, so that to take a stand away from the mythical Resistance could only place you in the opposite camp, and lay the Communist party and the Left open to a host of attacks that were very difficult to respond to, given the political circumstances. These texts have not been widely read as being subversive (and less problematising readings were no doubt made possible by the ambigu6. The references to the problem of a choice are enigmatic, but I think make sense if they are read in the context of this personal dilemma. In the period when the partisan bands were forming Pavese writes, 20 October 1944: ‘To be fearless and to be right: the two opposite poles of history. And of life. The one generally contradicts the other’ (Pavese 1990b: 294); 26 January 1945: ‘You wanted an excuse not to move. Here it is. Who should be thanked? You hoped for a miracle and it happened. For now, be humble. You shall judge it by its fruits’ (296); 22 November 1945: ‘We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living through it’ (302). The following extract from a letter to his former schoolteacher, Augusto Monti, in response to the latter’s criticism, underlines Pavese’s intention that the reader find repugnant and condemn Corrado for his inaction: ‘It seems clear to me that Corrado is denouncing and punishing himself precisely for having lived and continued to live in a certain way – and the author who reveals this defect in him, has a different point of view, he knows that life consists of other things’ (Pavese 1966: 467), written 21 January 1950.

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ous nature of their representations) and in fact were absorbed into the body of what became labelled and celebrated as resistance literature. Diaries, novels and autobiographical accounts of the Resistance continued to proliferate throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and even the 1980s. The majority sustained the orthodox mythology, while these texts of Calvino and Pavese remain an anomalous and unusual perspective on the partisan war. In later years, as the myth of the Resistance became fully consolidated and bound to the Left’s self-image, it became more difficult and less desirable to adopt such a critical perspective on the Resistance, raising, as these did in connection with the partisan war, difficult questions about the nature of political allegiance (class, culture and the limitations of political understanding and perspective) and of violence, and exposing the dichotomy between public accounts and the experience of individuals. More recently the theses of civil and class war (and to a lesser degree the possibility of admitting that irregular episodes of violence took place) have been explored by those elements of the Left – Socialists and, in particular, former members of the Partito d’Azione – who criticised the policies adopted by the PCI in the years of the war and the early postwar years and have sought out other accounts of the Resistance that help to explain the ways in which PCI strategy and representation worked against the characteristics and potentialities of the Resistance.

8

IMAGINING LOSERS IN BUFALINO’S DICERIA DELL’UNTORE Peter Hainsworth

Diceria dell’untore is not directly about memories of the war. It approaches the subject obliquely, through memories – themselves highly mediated – of 1946, that is, of the year after the war ended. This procedure gives rise to a distinctive novel, one that stands out against the broad tradition of Italian writing about the war, as being unusually modern or even postmodern, which in turn gives rise to some quite problematic implications. The theme par excellence of Italian writing on the Second World War is the Resistance, or civil war, from mid-1943 to April 1945. Almost all accounts, fictional and nonfictional, are written from the perspective of the partisans. They may not fully collude with myths of national regeneration and moral redemption. But the basic moral position is plain: the partisans may not be heroes, but the fascists and Nazis are certainly in the wrong and have to be defeated. In terms of representation they are the other side, the Other, generally faceless and sometimes overtly inhuman. Conversely the humanity and authenticity of ‘our’ side is established by various means, in particular through the writing being un-literary – that is, through not being elaborated stylistically according to the canons of the Italian literary tradition. In this context conventional high styles of writing are associated with the Right, or even, as happened especially in the immediate postwar years, with fascism itself. The writing may in reality be extremely literary, of

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course, but, if so, it must be unconventional – as occurs in quite different ways in Vittorini’s Uomini e no and in Fenoglio’s fiction as a whole. Overall, even in such sophisticated figures as Vittorini and Fenoglio, it is writing which is unproblematic, at least to itself, which avoids overt self-consciousness, preferring instead vividness and directness. Its implicit ideal is epic, though often it settles for nostalgic or testimonial qualities, for an assumption of the popular. Where it does actually edge into the area of popular (i.e., mass) fiction is in the representations of sex, which is regularly the locus for the exploration of personal conflict and moral contradiction, the arena for the representation of the tragic or strong emotions which in one way or another interact with emotions related more directly to war and fighting. The preceding paradigm applies particularly to the great flood of writing about the war of the 1940s and 1950s. As the war has become more remote, there have been important shifts of emphasis. Italian fiction as a whole has become more literary. The political and moral issues seem to have lost their urgency, at least in the form which they had. Rosetta Loy and Francesca Duranti, for instance, look back to wartime childhoods in a quite different way from, say, Calvino’s 1947 representation of wartime boyhood in Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno. All the same, though now hoary, the paradigm still has force. Gesualdo Bufalino might have been expected to adhere to it rather than to move against it, and, for that matter, against its later evolutions. He was born in 1920 and so belonged to the generation which fought in the war. Unlike most writers of that generation, he was a Sicilian. He did not take part in the Resistance. His unit was stationed in the Friuli in the summer of 1943. When the Italian army dissolved in September, he gradually made his way south and rejoined his family. He lived most of his life in Sicily, outside the main literary centres, working as a schoolteacher in a liceo in his home town of Comiso – a place which became well known during the 1980s as the main base for American cruise missiles. He had written some newspaper articles in the immediate postwar years, but he did not publish his first novel until 1981. This was Diceria dell’untore. He went on to publish four further novels, a collection of short stories, a book of poems and various collections of essays and articles. As he himself put it, omertà was succeeded by logorrhoea. He died in 1996 after a car accident near Comiso. Diceria had a long gestation. Bufalino first drafted it, apparently in the late 1940s, but put it on one side as being out of place during the neorealist ‘glaciazione’ (freezing). He redrafted it in 1971 and continued revising until Elvira Sellerio, the energetic Palermo

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publisher, persuaded him to release it to her in 1981. It was quickly a critical – and to some extent a commercial – success. It is Bufalino’s only book relating to the war and is an autobiographical novel. On the model of Marcel and Proust, I shall call the narratorprotagonist Gesualdo to distinguish him from the author. The plot is simple: it is the story of a stay in a TB clinic just outside Palermo in 1946. The patients are mostly young and they know they are going to die. Gesualdo too expects to die. But for some inexplicable reason he recovers. All the other characters he meets, including the doctor, do die. He is left to tell the story, to bear witness, to feel guilt at having survived when for no reason he can imagine all the others perished. As this summary may suggest, the novel works analogically, even poetically. There are obvious resemblances with The Magic Mountain, though Bufalino himself has denied that these have any importance. More significantly there are analogies with Holocaust writing. The situation is a microcosm of the camps and the writer confronts some of the same issues. Is the fatal disease a sign of guilt? Is it a privilege, a sacred mark? And what does survival mean? What duties does it impose? And to all the questions of this sort are there no answers, or too many? Obviously Bufalino is not writing an allegorical commentary on the Holocaust itself. What he seems implicitly to be doing is recognising that it does have analogues, that as schema or syndrome it is recognisable beyond its historical confines. He may also indirectly be querying Holocaust writing (not the Holocaust itself) for its insistence on a series of predictable questions, as if a reverential tone were enough to validate a form of writing that in other ways inevitably risks becoming stale. Such possible interpretations are adumbrated, not stated. They are poetic procedures characteristic of a text which makes no secret of its literariness, starting with the title. ‘Diceria’ is a Renaissance word, meaning ‘talk’, ‘discourse’, not systematically formulated, and possibly in a familiar register. ‘Untore’ is a seventeenth-century term, best-known through Manzoni, which described someone said to spread the plague through smearing polluted rags on victim’s clothing or houses. The knowing implications here are that this writing spreads pollution or at any rate may be accused of it, but that it is a form of discourse which sets itself within a long tradition, or at its end. The prose of the novel itself follows where the title points. Bufalino writes a modern baroque – complex, highly wrought, but with vulgar lapses defacing the blatant literariness. The tone is deliberately and openly unstable, shifting unpredictably between the farcical and the tragic in a usually selfdeflating, sometimes self-destructive way.

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The self-consciousness is explicit. Gesualdo is writing in 1971, twenty-five years after the experience of the hospital. Whilst this accords well enough with Bufalino’s account of the novel’s composition, it also points to a construction of himself as a writer-figure, which will prove characteristic of his subsequent fiction and which is already determining in Diceria. Direct representation, if possible at all, has always to be qualified and assigned a mediate status. In the novel even encounters with others will follow this pattern. They too centre on retelling or telling stories, mostly in fragmented ways, with clear enough indications that the accounts are unreliable, stories, not histories. There is no moral triumphalism, no moral certainties at all to be set against the overriding urgency of disease and death, against ontological and cognitive insecurity. At the same time there is no moral torment either. So the partisan experience is effectively liquidated early on, except perhaps as trace, as a marking which has mysteriously stayed: The war was behind us but the mark of the bandolier had remained on our jackets and there was the acrid odour of gunpowder still in our nostrils and on our hands – hands that had fired guns, perhaps killed. And now we asked ourselves why. In the asphyxia of our feelings, which competed with the asphyxia of our breathing that was choking our throats, each big word became colourless, seemed like a trick the adults had played on us. Even liberty, even truth. Of all those days of intoxication and happy chases up and down the Apennines, with our coloured neckerchiefs and our romantic nomde-guerres, all that remained afloat in our memories were a few odds and ends, a few emblems of atrocity or love; a whistled signal, some smoke rising in the evening over a hayloft, the rattle of a sten in front of us, along a path which led nowhere. Meanwhile, above everything else, overwhelming all grief or glory in our memories, the wind brought the triumphant stench of the bombed city, of its black mouth, of a crotch [pube] laid disgustingly bare, like that of a murdered woman. It was the same stench we now felt rising up from our pillows. It was another war that it now fell to us to fight, against Goths more unrelenting and ferocious. (Bufalino 1981: 38-39)

The over-writing is evident, even in my rough translation, and is as distinct from the tradition as is the perspective which it shapes. But in one way Bufalino keeps to the resistance tradition, though he gives it a postmodern twist. The central narrative is a love story, the story of Gesualdo’s affair with Marta, whose death is the narrative climax of the novel. Marta is the dramatic representation of doomed youth – dramatic in the sense that she is acting out as well as living out her doom both for herself and for others. She is literally performing when Gesualdo first sees her, since she is dancing

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in a hospital play. And she continues to perform to the end. Her story or stories are obscure and melodramatic, and never fully cohere. Gesualdo can tell she is a northern Italian from her accent. She says she was a dancer at La Scala. Maybe she is Jewish, maybe she had an affair with a German officer who saved her from being sent to a concentration camp, maybe she had affairs with other fascists, maybe she was a spy, maybe she is having or has had an affair with the doctor. It is all maybe’s.1 Gesualdo is offered the chance of looking at her file after her death, which would have clarified some of these things – her real name for instance. But he does not take it and burns the file. It is a quite unpolemical gesture as it is presented, one that signals the irrelevance of the past. The present is overriding: her loss of youth, her death, Gesualdo’s obsession with her as she appeared to him in the hospital, with part of her fascination being that she is ambiguous in every way, simultaneously responsive and distancing, both beautiful and horrific, a fabricator of her past and yet somehow true, a personification of the illness and death which Bufalino seems to suspect may be the real determinants of the human condition. Marta’s unreliable stories include evocations of past happiness. Her best year was 1942, she says. She creates an idyllic picture of herself and her lover boating on a lake. It is an obvious cliché and she instantly denies that there is any truth in the picture. But more importantly there is her story of the death of her lover, now named Andrea (129-33), which comes out when Gesualdo asks her about her cropped hair. This episode is a recovery of the execution scene that figures in many partisan novels, a recovery which fits with the developing negative theology of Diceria as a whole but which throws some of its problematic aspects into relief. In a way it is a simple story and it is told in a manner which is much closer to the tradition of neorealist accounts of the war than any other part of the book. Andrea and she have been hiding in a cellar in a farm building. They are discovered by partisans looking for grappa. He is immediately taken away to be shot. She follows, joined by a young girl who attaches herself to her. She watches the execution. Soon after she has her head shaved. It is a remarkable and powerful passage. It puts the ideological issue on one side in a quite significant way: ‘They said he had done something.’ (133) There is no indication of what the something was. Instead the emphasis falls on the living humanity of both 1. In an epitaph inserted, with other epitaphs for other characters, in an appendix to the 1992 edition of the novel, her name is given as Marta Levi and her date of birth as 1917. Bufalino wisely omitted the epitaphs and some other ponderous adjuncts from the first edition.

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Andrea and his executioners, on finding metaphors to represent their changing emotions and their shared suffering. Andrea is physically awkward as he comes out of the hole – he had hurt his leg; he is sweating, trying to show bravado initially but afraid with an animal fear. He is like a fox caught by hunters and now ‘nothing was left for him but to die’. As they move along to where the execution will take place it is like a funeral cortege, only in this case the corpse is still walking. He seems to show a kind of irritation. Then it is as if he has lost something and is looking for it in the wrong place, at the moment when the train has already arrived and it is time to go. The others who will do the shooting seem to Marta at first to be ‘clever and bad’, then unreal, then just other men like Andrea – hungry, dirty, sore. No, they aren’t bad, they’re false, they have kindergarten muskets, they can only fire salutes. And meanwhile we go on, and no one stops, no one says no. He is a man, of a kind they know. They have throats like emery paper, their eyes are full of sleep, they have to finish it and sleep, and begin again tomorrow. Their feet are Christ’s feet, dirty, weary, with this shoe hurting, this toenail digging into the flesh, oozing pus, their unshaven beards pricking against their collar-bones. (131-32)

Andrea is blindfolded with ‘a spotless bandage’, the sole clean thing on him. Then the commander, who had been hesitating, forces himself to go through with it. ‘The commander at last took his decision and turned to them with a weary-seeming gesture. They raised their rifles and pointed the gleaming barrels. Their broad workers’ faces, with the mid-day sun beating on them, now contained only boredom and pity.’ (133) With that the representation ends. The passage moves towards tragedy – a ritual of death presented with appropriate gravity and with the participants, including both executioners and victim, playing their parts. The ritual is rendered all the more serious because it lacks a rationale and purpose, and yet has to be carried through. The shared condition of humanity does not turn on right and wrong, but on the experience of dirt, disease and weariness. Only the condemned man, as his bandage indicates, is to be purified through death. He at least is to be released from foul materiality, whereas those who execute him, the victors and traditionally the righteous victors, must go on. This is more Beckett than Vittorini. The passage is moving and has great graphic quality, making skilful use of stereotypes – including ones which are perhaps more familiar from films (such as Sergio Leone westerns) than from literature. And yet of course it maintains itself as literature – a story

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within a story within a story, one that may be vivid in the space of its articulation but which is too firmly framed to allow its readers any possibility of reading it as a direct representation of reality. Indeed it assumes, as the whole book assumes, that the reader is sophisticated, accustomed to games with fiction and the interpretative problems they give rise to. Any notion of the Resistance as a phenomenon which can be recounted in a ‘popular’ manner for the people has long since vanished, just as it seems that any sense of the Resistance having an actual moral and political import has also vanished. What is left is a repetition of an old story, a story which may be a resistance story, but which has always been known, which is always to be told. All of which may seem fair enough, even inevitable. With the passage of time political and the moral dimensions of specific events recede, and the human and tragic dimension, the eternal dimension becomes more apparent. Ultimately everyone was, and is, a loser. Yet neutralising of the Second World War is not yet neutral. Another book about remembering the war and about remembering remembering, was published five years after Diceria. It, too, contains a powerful and moving description of an execution by firing squad. In this case several people are to be shot. One victim strikes the writer particularly: ‘And he too, appearing to have understood the reality of the situation, was going along with the ritual – a ritual we needed in order to camouflage the ghastly reality of what was happening, in order to reassure ourselves that we were only performing some everyday act similar to what we’d done before’ (Mazzantini 1992: 61). There is a lieutenant in charge: it is as if he ‘were performing some irrevocable act, but one which – no matter how hard he might deny it – he’d just discovered to be futile and absurd’ (62). As for the men to be shot, ‘Stripped of everything which made us hate them, all the reasons which had decided their fate, they were just men now, living men like you or I, part of the same fabric of life; and yet in a moment’s time they would cease to exist’ (63). The parallels with Marta’s story are striking. The tragedy, the humanity, the sense of a ritual which has lost its meaning are all there, and the whole account of the execution, which is longer and more circumstantial than the one in Bufalino, has a similar power. But the writer is Carlo Mazzantini, his book A cercar la bella morte (In Search of a Beautiful Death, 1986). It is an autobiographical account, carried through with great sophistication and subtlety, of Mazzantini’s experiences as a teenage volunteer in the army of the Italian Social Republic, the Republic of Salò. It is an important book because it is the only published account, I think, by anyone who was just a common soldier in the Salò army. The execution

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described is that of partisans and partisan sympathisers in Borgosesia in Piemonte in late 1943. The whole strategy of the book is implicit in this execution section. It is directed towards convincing the reader of the ultimate humanity of the fascist soldiers, particularly at this distance from the events. Mazzantini comes to acknowledge the humanity of the partisans he fought against and whose execution he witnessed. What he hopes to demonstrate is that he and his comrades were also suffering humans, with an ideology they did not really believe in even then and which now seems totally insignificant compared to the basic matters of life and death. The question of borrowings from Bufalino would be an interesting one to explore. I am more disturbed by the strategic nullification of the issue of moral difference in Mazzantini and find that the disquiet rebounds upon Bufalino, bringing out something that I obscurely perceived but found hard to pin down. Bufalino’s own nullification of the issue is not directed towards persuading the reader of a particular case or towards any form of self-justification. At the same time the abolition of difference, the urge to see harrowing conflicts sub specie aeternitatis, installs one dimension as the dominating one, even the exclusive one, and allows what was being fought against to get away, to be forgotten, with the danger that, like all repressed things, it will recur. Diceria either sees no dangers, or implicitly judges them to be outside the competence of literature. The appeal of its stance is obvious. In a climate of resurgent nationalism, and in places at least of resurgent fascism, it is debatable whether it is advisable.

PART III

THE FASCIST’S MEMORY

9

MEMORY AND CHRONICLE: LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE AND THE D’UN CHÂTEAU L’AUTRE TRILOGY Nicholas Hewitt

On 22 March 1945, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, accompanied by his wife Lucette Almonsor and his cat Bébert, left the Black Forest town of Sigmaringen, seat of the Vichy government in exile, on a journey through the bombed-out heartland of Germany which would eventually take him to exile and prison in Denmark. As the fascist journalist Lucien Rebatet recorded: ‘The train started…The rest of us stayed there, anguished, in that infernal trap. But we felt no jealousy. If we were going to be punished, at least the best and the greatest of us all would have escaped.’ (Gibault 1985b: 67) Thus ended a remarkable itinerary, which in the space of twelve years saw Céline transformed from darling of the Left, with the publication of Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) in 1932, to one of France’s most notorious collaborators, a prominent figure of the exiled French colony in Sigmaringen, who had endured extraordinary hardships to get there in the first place and was to encounter even greater ones as he journeyed towards an exile which was not to end until 1951. It was the experience of Sigmaringen, however, and the baroque wanderings through the last days of the Reich, which formed the subject matter of Céline’s final fictional trilogy: D’un château l’autre (Castle to Castle, 1957), Nord (1960) and Rigodon, published posthumously in 1969. Not

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only is this trilogy arguably Céline’s most adventurous and accomplished contribution to European modernism, its careful manipulation and transposition of the autobiographical and historical reality provide a valuable insight into the workings of the fascist memory in the period following the Second World War. Even the most cursory exploration of Céline’s biography, however, not to mention any number of his own disclaimers, leads to an immediate paradox: this prominent French fascist, this arch-collaborator, one of the most despised Frenchmen at the end of the war, was, in fact, neither technically a fascist nor a particularly serious collaborator. Compared with the figures who saw him off from the station in Sigmaringen, such as Rebatet and other members of the Je suis partout (I am Everywhere) team, or the director of La Gerbe (The Sheaf), Alphonse de Chateaubriant, also in Sigmaringen, or Drieu la Rochelle, who committed suicide in 1945, Céline lacked the ideological interest and the commitment of the fascist. At the same time, whilst the impression in newly-liberated France was that Céline was one of France’s most noxious collaborators, the eventual indictment brought against him in September 1946 was lamentably thin and rested on the republication during the war of the two interwar anti-Semitic pamphlets, Bagatelles pour un massacre (Mere Trifles for a Massacre) and L’Ecole des cadavres (The School of Corpses), Céline’s brief membership of the pro-German Cercle Européen, letters and remarks made in support of Jacques Doriot’s fascist Parti Populaire Français, and his presence amongst the collaborationist refugees in Sigmaringen. Had it not been for the attention of the press, especially the communist press, the case would probably have been heard by a Chambre Civique and not a Cour de Justice. As it was, the sentence of one year’s imprisonment, suspended in view of the time already served in a Danish prison by Céline, adequately reflects the relative lack of seriousness of his wartime activities.1 At the same time, Céline’s impression, founded on the actual sacking of his apartment in the rue Giradon at the Liberation, that he almost certainly faced a lynch mob if he remained in France, points to a public perception of his status as a fascist and collaborator which is considerably disproportionate to the known facts. The origins of this perception undoubtedly go back to Céline’s first published novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit, which he subsequently saw as the origin of all his later problems.2 The novel’s ferocious caricature of Western capitalism, through its detailed mechanisms, its militarism and colonialism and the establishment of a modern 1. See Gibault 1985b, chapter 10, ‘Place Vendôme’; Céline 1984. 2. See the preface to the 1949 edition, in Céline 1981: 1113.

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impersonal world, ruled by the bourgeoisie and condemning the lower classes to neglect, all too easily identified the author as a man of the Left, using his own autobiographical experiences to denounce contemporary society, and following the well-trodden path in France of the interwar years established by other working class writers such as Guéhenno, Guilloux, Eugène Dabit or Paul Nizan. Nor was this impression wholly without support: a memorandum sent to his former superior at the League of Nations in 1932 concludes that an effective public health system is incompatible with capitalism and will only come about through a ‘Socialist or Communist social format’ (Céline 1977: 188). More astute commentators, however, such as Nizan himself, or Trotsky, were not so easily taken in and detected both an aesthetic project which was often at variance with the humanist goals of social realism and a political position which, whilst undoubtedly anti-bourgeois, was not necessarily wholly on the Left. For the majority of French readers in the 1930s, however, Céline figured as one of the brightest stars in the left-wing literary firmament, and the disappointment caused by the publication of his second novel, Mort à crédit (Death on Credit) in 1936, which, in uncompromisingly ‘modern’ style, used Freudian psychoanalysis to dissect the neuroses of the turn of the century Parisian petite bourgeoisie, turned to shock and resentment when, in 1936, he denounced the Soviet Union in Mea culpa and, especially, in 1937 and 1938, produced two of the most virulent anti-Semitic pamphlets published in France in the interwar years: Bagatelles pour un massacre and L’Ecole des cadavres. Even though the anti-Semitism had been present in his work right from the beginning, in his early play, L’Eglise (The Church), written in 1927 and already published by 1933, Céline attracted all the resentment and opprobrium directed at the renegade. Nor was his position rendered any more secure by the fact that, on the extreme Right, there was a nagging suspicion that Céline’s pamphlets were in part an ‘exercice du style’ and, even worse, a caricature of conventional anti-Semitism. In fact, Céline’s political stance was always more specifically anarchist, which enabled him, like his literary and artistic colleagues on the Butte de Montmartre, to denounce fiercely the bourgeois republic whilst expressing a certain nostalgia for the Belle Epoque and distrust of soviet or fascist social engineering. During the occupation, however, the anti-Semitism and the anti-bolshevism clearly maintained him in the pro-German camp, with a network of contacts which included leaders of the collaborationist press, such as Lucien Combelle and Alphonse de Chateaubriant, and powerful political figures, like the Vichy ambassador to the German Occupa-

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tion forces, Fernand de Brinon.3 In spite of certain attempts at exculpation, like only writing unpaid letters to collaborationist journals rather than commissioned articles, and an increasing irreverence towards German dignitaries like the German ambassador Otto Abetz, Céline, with his reputation as left-wing renegade and interwar anti-Semite and his prominence within Parisian collaborationist circles, became a important target of Gaullist propaganda on RadioLondres and recipient of death threats from the Resistance. As the Liberation approached, the attempt to reach potentially neutral territory (Switzerland, Holland or Denmark) became increasingly necessary, and in June 1944 Céline left the Gare de l’Est for Germany. What he hoped would be a swift transition to a permanently safe haven became a nine-month nightmare which, in the final trilogy, assumed legendary proportions. It is worth pointing out at this stage that, if the trilogy itself casts valuable insight into the workings of the fascist literary memory, its publication, by France’s most prestigious publisher, Gallimard, is an important indication of the changing status of the memory of fascism in France in the immediate postwar years. The violent reaction to French fascism characterised by the looting of Céline’s apartment, the execution or imprisonment of his collaborationist colleagues, the proscription of his books in the first Black List established by the Comité National des Ecrivains, the defacement of his mother’s tombstone in the Père Lachaise cemetery and the murder of his publisher Robert Denoel in December 1945, mellowed surprisingly quickly. The purge trials had all but finished by 1949; the coalition formed from the Resistance had fragmented by 1947; the Right had returned to parliamentary respectability and polemical daring by the late 1940s; and most former collaborators were released from their prisons in the amnesties of 1951 and 1952. The governments of the 1950s were considerably more interested in economic reconstruction, European union and colonial disintegration than in fighting again the battles of the past, though in the imagination of the French, the period 1940-44 still exerted considerable power. In the case of Céline, although the pro-resistance, and especially communist, press kept up a campaign demanding his extradition from Denmark and exemplary punishment, the trial itself, with Céline in absentia, received relatively little coverage, as did his return to France in 1951. Nor did occasional reminders of his controversial status, such as the publication of Ernst Jünger’s Journal in September 1951, in which he reported alleged inflammatory anti-Semitic remarks by Céline, alter the fact that in the 3. See Gibault 1985a, chapters 11-14.

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June of that year, through the intermediary of Jean Paulhan, he had been given an exceptionally lucrative contract by Gaston Gallimard. Although, as Céline himself complained in exile, his rehabilitation had come later than that of other collaborationist writers like Paul Morand or Montherlant, his adoption by Gallimard as a prestigious member of his stable is an important milestone in the rapid process of normalisation in postwar France and of the changing role of fascism in the collective memory. What Gallimard, mercilessly lampooned by Céline as Achille Brottin, and Paulhan, portrayed as Norbert Loukoum, got from their contract was not merely the outstanding French fictional practitioner of modernism but a writer who was able, with considerable ability, to play upon France’s ambiguous relationship to the past, through the evocation of a period still of intense interest to the French, but transposed in such a way that the history of the period operates as the pretext for a breathtaking artistic and stylistic experiment. The first novels by Céline published by Gallimard, the two volumes of Féerie pour une autre fois (Fairytale for Another Time), of 1952 and 1954, ostensibly recount the wartime bombardment of Montmartre by the RAF. The novels, however, of which the first is dedicated to Pliny the Elder, who died witnessing the destruction by Vesuvius of Pompei, adopt an operatic structure, in which the first volume, echoing Puccini’s La Bohème, is succeeded by the cataclysmic references to Don Giovanni in the second. It is this combination of stylistic innovation, historical awareness and intertextuality which goes on to inform the D’un château l’autre trilogy and which makes it such an important contribution to European modernism, or even postmodernism. D’un château l’autre begins with an extended preamble which recounts the narrator, Céline’s, battles with his publisher, of Meudon. The encounter one evening with a mysterious bateaumouche by the Seine filled with the ghosts of collaborators leads to a detailed evocation of the Vichy government in exile in Sigmaringen, an account which ends with Céline’s bizarre journey to Prussia to attend the funeral of the Vichy transport minister Bichelonne. The second novel in the trilogy, Nord, recounts events which predate those of the first volume: Céline’s arrival from France in Baden-Baden and his, ultimately doomed, attempt to cross directly into Denmark. This attempt takes him to Berlin with the actor Robert le Vigan and then to work as a doctor on the Junker estate of Zornhof. The novel ends with Céline receiving the authorisation to travel to Rostock, which will take him one step nearer his goal of Denmark. The final volume, Rigodon, takes up the story with Céline’s attempt to take a boat from Warnemünde to Denmark.

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Security is too tight, however, and the narrator’s party is eventually returned to the French colony in Sigmaringen. Immediately on arrival, however, they are turned back towards the north, and the novel recounts the slow journey, by rail and on foot, through the bombed cities of Hanover and Hamburg, until they finally cross the border into Denmark and illusory safety. What Céline has done here, and it is this undoubtedly which accounts for Gallimard’s enthusiasm for the project, is to exploit a powerful vein of interest in the French reading public for an insider’s account of a little-known aspect of the final period of the Second World War. The narrator of D’un château l’autre is highly conscious of the intrinsic importance of the narrative for his French audience, and plays with the reader accordingly: one moment apologising for digressions, the next, whetting the appetite with promises of further revelations. And it is undoubtedly true that Céline’s novel-cycle constitutes one of the few eye-witness accounts of the Vichy government in exile, with Pétain’s ritual morning walk, the crazed Admiral Corpechot, leader of a fictitious Fleet of the Danube designed to halt the advance of Soviet submarines from the Black Sea, a sympathetic portrait of Pierre Laval, who appoints Céline as Governor of the Islands of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, and the more sinister presence of the SS officer von Raumnitz, forever sending victims to room thirty-six of the Löwen Hotel, from which they miraculously disappear. Similarly, there are few extant accounts written by non-Germans of Germany in the last days of the Reich. All things considered, Céline’s trilogy constitutes, as its author and publisher were perfectly aware, an unusual and powerful memory of a little-known period in the Second World War. In establishing this memory, that of the European refugees converging upon a defeated Germany within which they were forced to flee for cover, Céline undoubtedly raised his narrative to a level where it reflects, not just the specific experience of French exiles on the run, but, paradoxically for a supporter of collaboration, that of the persecuted civilian population of Europe as a whole throughout the war, from the Exode of 1940 to the mass movements of refugees of 1945. As Henri Godard comments: ‘Céline’s imagination is so perfectly attuned to these visions of cataclysm and defeat that he is never so accurate as when he invents. This world being destroyed, and this humanity at the limits of suffering, found in him the witness they needed.’ (Godard 1974: xiii) In other words, Céline’s chronicle is important, not merely as the evocation of a particular and little-known moment in the history of the Second World War, but also as a powerful tribute to the suffering of the European population as a whole.

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It is at this point, however, that the reader needs to be circumspect. If Voyage au bout de la nuit was, through its intrinsic méchanceté, the origin of all of Céline’s woes, it was essentially because, contrary to the assumptions of its audience, it was his first manipulative and devious published text. In the same way, the text of the trilogy, much as it invokes the status, especially in Nord, of chronique, with the cat Bébert as the narrator’s faithful greffe, is by no means innocent, either morally or aesthetically. Indeed, the constant reference to Bébert in Nord as a greffe, which combines the associations of greffier (lawyer’s clerk) and griffe (claw), points to the essential ambiguities. In the first place, it is noticeable that the dramas which unfold and are recorded by Bébert carefully and strategically place the narrator Céline in a position which is designed to evoke the maximum sympathy from the reader. In the first place, whereas the contemporary narrator is portrayed as a writer, cynically exploited by Gallimard and Paulhan, the narrator of 1944/45 is almost exclusively depicted in his role as doctor: his presence in Sigmaringen and throughout the journey through Germany is described solely in relation to his caring role. In this respect, Céline, who, from 1928 onwards, had dismissed the phoney mythology of ‘la médecine bourgeoise’ (of which the literary expression would run from Balzac’s Bianchon to Camus’ Rieux, via Martin du Gard’s Antoine Thibault), was more than willing to recoup its benefits when polemically necessary. At the same time, this doctor/writer is portrayed uniformly as victim: the contemporary narrator as victim of the Epuration and predatory publishers; the wartime Céline as victim on a multiplicity of levels. As he claims in D’un château l’autre: ‘People will persecute you to death for any advice you give them!…Look at France now; I predicted quite enough what she’d look like!… And look how she treated me!… The state she put me in!…the only one to see clearly!’ (Céline 1974: 250) Céline and his fellow-refugees in Sigmaringen are threatened, not just by the approach of Leclerc’s army, as it nears the German frontier, staffed by its fearsome Senegalese troops, but also by the repeated visits of the RAF and the USAF as they fly to their targets in Ulm and Augsburg, pausing once to bomb the railway bridge in Sigmaringen itself. As if this is not enough, the independently minded Céline, who fits into no established political category, is distrusted by and isolated from the rest of the French community: only the Vichy Minister of Information, Paul Marion, is sympathetic. Attacked by the RAF and isolated from most of his fellow Frenchmen, Céline is also acutely conscious of being a French exile in Germany: vulnerable to traditional German distrust of the French and, more specifically, to the

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ruthlessness of the Nazi regime in disposing of embarrassments. We have already referred to the SS officer von Raumnitz, on the floor above Céline in the Löwen, who regularly sends his victims to their doom through room thirty-six; in Nord, Céline and his party, marooned in a railway siding in central Germany, narrowly escape being shelled by their hosts who wish to be rid of them. Finally, the chronicler of the trilogy never lets his reader forget that the end point of this particular odyssey is imprisonment in the Vestre Faengsel jail in Copenhagen. Whilst this careful positioning of the narrator Céline as victim undoubtedly facilitates Godard’s identification of the narrative with the experience of persecuted Europe as a whole, it is also designed to disenculpate the ‘French fascist’ from charges which could be levelled against him. This process works also in an extremely subtle manner with respect to Céline’s anti-Semitism. Céline was never at pains, even in his letters to his judges and his lawyers, to deny his prewar, and even wartime, anti-Semitism. Indeed, in a letter to his defence lawyer, Albert Naud, he uses an unusual legal argument: It seems to me that it might be useful to suggest that I am the only anti-Semite persecuted for his anti-Semitism who could currently be useful to the Jews… They are far from popular, they are hated as much and more than before Hitler… everywhere… Well, I’m now persuaded by experience, unfortunately, that anti-Semitism led to nothing and that it had no raison d’être whatsoever… I would be prepared to say that officially.’ (Céline 1984: 36)

What he did do was to assimilate his anti-Semitism into a broader ideology of racism, in which, theoretically at least, as with apartheid in South Africa, separate development does not imply persecution. In the trilogy, whilst the narrator Céline pays lip service to the word Auschwitz, he is at pains to neutralise the effects of his own antiSemitism both by assimilating it to a supposedly more comforting racism, and by effectively denying the reality of his own language. As Arnold Mandel, in Nous autres Juifs (We the Jews), so perceptively remarks, there is a very odd process of bad faith going on here: In the first part of D’un château l’autre, Céline describes the chaos of the ruins of Berlin in the approaching débâcle of the Hitlerian regime. Amongst other things, he sees amongst the ruins Jews plotting and looking for business. Yet there had not been any Jews in the capital of the Reich for years, except the ghosts of a few troglodytes, who had somehow missed being called up for incineration, a few living dead, barricaded in cellars and attics. Did Céline lie? Not quite, but he was seeing things, seeing things precisely because that was what

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was necessary for the preservation of his vision and the field of view which he had constructed for his writing. (Mandel 1978: 64)

How then does Céline come to deny what seems to be the obvious fascist reality? How does the fascist memory work? We could call the process in question recourse to amnesia. The murderer forgets that he has killed, not to escape the feeling of guilt or of looking at himself with horror, but because he has a constant need of the person he has killed or had killed. In other words, it is necessary that the corpse should still be alive. Consequently, the dead person is not dead, and he has never killed. The anti-Semite hates the Jew, the extreme anti-Semite hates the Jew a great deal and, if possible, will exterminate him. Yet his hatred is not extinguished. As it feeds upon itself, it is the burning bush which burns and is not consumed. Since the object of his hatred has vanished and is irreplaceable, the anti-Semite goes beyond the victim’s disappearance in believing – and not just pretending to believe – that he is still there. To use a frivolous comparison – it is the exact opposite of the game played by small children with toy guns. One of the children brandishes his gun, aiming at his friend, pulls the trigger – if there is one – and cries: ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead!’ The Judeocide anti-Semite on the contrary goes up to the Jew with a real loaded gun. He fires at point-blank range, kills him and says: ‘Bang, bang, you’re not dead!’ (Mandel 1978: 63-64)

As Walter Benjamin, recalling Baudelaire’s anti-Semitism in Mon coeur mis à nu, was perceptive enough to see, Céline’s anti-Semitism, from Bagatelles pour un massacre onwards, was always devious, self-protective, camouflaged, and for that reason ambiguous: the epitome of that tantalisingly elusive quality of fascist propaganda, ‘le culte de la blague’ (Benjamin 1973). If that ‘culte de la blague’ involves the sowing of disturbing seeds in the mind of the reader by exploiting language which may convey reality and unreality at one and the same time, then the same procedure is operational in the trilogy and serves both to disenculpate and continue the polemic at one and the same time. The fascist writer becomes innocent victim: victim because unjustly persecuted, and persecuted because the innocence and playful quality of his language have been misinterpreted by humourless readers. In this, the extraordinary virtuosity of the D’un château l’autre trilogy is designed to disguise the fact that it forms part and parcel of the standard polemical defence of the postwar French Right: that it was they who were the real victims of the postwar world, or, as one disabused French victim of the postwar purges, Claude Jamet, claimed: ‘We are the Jews of the new régime.’ (Jamet 1947: 260)

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If the trilogy, with immense subtlety, operates a careful process of exculpation, through the positioning of the narrator as victim and the neutralisation of his anti-Semitic language as anything other than a mere game, it also serves, perhaps most importantly, as the most advanced corpus of modernist fiction in French literature after Proust, on whose A la recherche du temps perdu, incidentally, but crucially, Mort à crédit is calqued. It remains one of the most disturbing aspects of the anti-Semitic pamphlets, particularly Bagatelles pour un massacre, that, as Gide half-intuited, the substance of virulent anti-Semitism was being mobilised in part as a modernist literary experiment (Gide 1938: 634). In the same way, the trilogy is conscious of the fact that the historical substance of the narrative is the means to the end of an important work of modern art. As Céline warns the reader at the beginning of Nord, after recognising that his chronology is now all out of kilter: ‘Don’t bear a grudge if I tell you everything out of sequence…the end before the beginning!…Don’t worry!…Only the truth is important!… You’ll get your bearings again!…I can!…All you need is a little good will!… You’d take far more trouble over a modern painting! (Céline 1974: 310) Not only is Céline’s modern painting built up through the dislocation of time, it makes use of his syncopated form of language based upon jazz, his ‘petite musique’, in which the use of exclamations connected merely by three dots is a consistent feature. Finally, as with Féerie pour une autre fois, the ‘fascist’ memory gradually assimilates the specific historical detail into a more general frame of cultural reference, which, in its turn, enhances and validates the detail in an aesthetic formaldehyde. One example amongst many in the trilogy continues the pattern of operatic intertextuality visible in Féerie. As indicated earlier, the descent into the past in D’un château l’autre is accomplished through the encounter between the pariah-narrator on the banks of the Seine at Meudon and the ghostly presence of a nineteenth-century bateau-mouche, called La Publique, and crewed by dead or forgotten collaborators, like Céline’s friend Le Vigan. Clearly, on one level, this is a highly appropriate image with which to begin the evocation of the last days of the collaborationist community in Sigmaringen and the subsequent nightmare journey through the ruins of the Reich. More specifically, however, this ‘vaisseau fantôme’, introduces an operatic theme, this time associated with Wagner, which culminates in the scene in the castle at Sigmaringen in which Otto Abetz and the newly arrived Alphonse de Chateaubriant, look forward to the celebration of the restoration of the New Europe in a ceremony at Versailles with the singing of ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ (Céline 1974: 231). The irony of the New Europe being consecrated by the singing

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of the best known theme from Götterdämmerung is obvious. What is less obvious, but establishes the intertextual complexity and depth of the novel, is the fact that, not only does the Flying Dutchman allusion wonderfully encapsulate the fate of all the ex-collaborators and Céline himself in semi-internal exile in the suburb of Meudon, but that Wagner wrote The Flying Dutchman (in French Le Vaisseau fantôme) whilst actually living in Meudon. In other words, Céline has reinvigorated a rather tired Wagnerian metaphor in the context of the Second World War by placing the entire novel unobtrusively in a Wagnerian literal and metaphorical topography.

10

PORTRAIT OF THE POET AS A DEAD MAN. ERNST JÜNGER’S WRITING IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR: STRAHLUNGEN Justus Fetscher

Ernst Jünger, who was born in 1895, has been declared a national monument in the wake of the public celebrations of his hundredth birthday. He emerged as a public voice in 1920 when he published In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel), an account of his actions as a soldier in the Great War. Leaving the defeated German army only in 1923, Jünger began to study zoology in Leipzig and wrote a large series of articles for journals of the anti-Republican Right. His nationalist and militarist stance is most visibly expounded in his essays Die totale Mobilmachung (Total Mobilisation, 1930) and Der Arbeiter (The Worker, 1932). Here, Jünger sketches the social utopia of an authoritarian state organised along military lines and epitomised in the icon of the worker/technician/warrior. When the Nazis came to power, Jünger withdrew from Berlin to Goslar (Lower Saxony), thus dissociating himself from the new leaders. It seems that Nazi politics were too vulgar to win his unreserved appreciation. Widely esteemed by those who chose to remain in Nazi Germany, and profiting from the rocketing sales of In Stahlgewittern (by 1928, 45,000 copies of the work had been sold, by November 1942 that figure had risen to 185,000) Jünger worked on Auf den Marmor-Klippen (On the Marble Cliffs, 1939), a parabolic novel that has come to represent the literature of ‘inner emigra-

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tion’, namely the work of those authors who, while staying in Nazi Germany, tried to signal an uncertain degree of disagreement with the new regime. The limits and shortcomings of such texts that had passed Nazi censorship might be outlined here in pointing to the way Hitler – if one is to believe Jünger’s contemporary readers – is characterised in this novel. Jünger calls him the ‘Oberförster’, the ranger-in-chief. Jünger was drafted by the end of August 1939, joined the Wehrmacht during the French campaign as a captain and was dispatched by General Speidel to Paris where he became a member of the staff of the High Command. There he stayed, most of the time, from June 1941 to August 1944. In 1949 he published Strahlungen (Radiations), a diary covering the whole war period. What is plain from this voluminous book is that its author never saw any frontline action in the Second World War. As a man of forty-six he followed, together with his unit, the German invasion into France in the spring of 1940. In Paris he seems to have been as idle as a Chekhovian officer. He corresponded with friends and readers, visited places of interest (museums in the centre as well as places on the outskirts of the city), he collected books, fossils and (Jünger is a well-known entomologist) beetles. In the present chapter I wish to proceed by establishing a typology of the roles Jünger played in the war, or at least in his own wartime diary. After having mentioned Jünger the non-soldier, I wish to look at Jünger the knight, Jünger the hunter and pillager, Jünger the observer, Jünger the theorist and theologian, Jünger the survivor and finally at Jünger the poet and literary character. I want to conclude by summing up these characterisations by asking what relation between writing and remembering the Strahlungen diary posits. It is noteworthy that Jünger did not fight at the front in the Second World War because he had glorified the front-line soldiers as modern heroes ever since 1920. In 1930, Walter Benjamin reviewed the anthology Krieg und Krieger (War and Warrior) which had been edited by Jünger. ‘Nowhere the authors admit’, Benjamin wrote, ‘that the battle in which superior equipment is decisive (which some of them consider the utmost revelation of human existence) involved the meagre emblems of heroism which on few occasions survived the World War’ (Benjamin 1972: 239). When talking about modern techniques of war, Jünger in Strahlungen reveals himself not to be a modern warrior but rather an anachronistic knight. Modern war machinery is, in his view, a monster. It threatens to crush his viewpoint on the war – which is to say his point d’honneur. When for the first time he enters a tank,

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he reflects: ‘that I am not at ease in these things which smell of oil, petrol and rubber’ (I: 150).1 Jünger intended, of course, not to wage war with weapons but with his pen. One of the earliest reviewers of Strahlungen, Peter de Mendelssohn, has pointed to the militarisation of Jünger’s language. Jünger, de Mendelssohn wrote, ‘talks with God as if he were a tank general on the enemy side and he talks of God with the same kind of respect that Montgomery would show towards Rommel’ (Mendelssohn 1949/50: 166).2 The main device Jünger uses to cope with the techniques of modern war is, however, to refuse to regard warfare as God given and to seek to diminish its historical impact. The paintings of Hieronymus Bosch convince him that the Flemish artist had already seen tanks (see I: 138). Concerning ‘the whole powerful arsenal of annihilation’, Jünger goes on to comment: ‘Everything is 1. Jünger is quoted after Jünger 1979. Figures in brackets appearing in the main text indicate the Strahlungen volume (I or II) and the page of the passage referred to. This is the somewhat abridged and reworked version of the 1949 text; on these revisions see Bluhm 1991: 140-61; Böhme 1972: 104-30; Loose 1957. Bluhm’s publications can be said to represent the most recent state of Strahlungen research. He seems, though, partly blinded by his admiration for Jünger in whose propagandistical vein he solemnly speaks of ‘the sacrificial death of the volunteers of Langemarck’ (1991: 153). This tendency has earmarked the texts of Jünger’s apologists. They either overestimated the theoretical originality and rank of his thinking (Nebel 1949) or took at face value whatever he said about his biography (Jaeckle 1986, Paul 1985). Loose (1957) chose a more distanced and therefore more rewarding stance. The most sophisticated reading of Strahlungen as a deliberately styled literary text is to be found in Boal 1993: 32-37, for his generic approach, stressing the diary-constituting ‘schisme entre le registre et le contenu, entre signifiant et signifié’ (1751). It would have been interesting had Boal referred to Brandes’ (1990) dissertation because, like Brandes’ (Theweleit-inspired) psychological interpretation, Boal portrays the Strahlungen Jünger as an ‘adoslecent attardé’ (Boal 1993: 120; cf. 173, 202). Meyer 1990 provides, without doubt, the most intellectually skilled reading of Jünger’s Second World War diaries. 2. Other contemporary reviewers hailed or apologetically defended Jünger’s diaries, see Rausch 1950. Jünger’s publisher, the Tübingen-based Heliopolis-Verlag, advertised Strahlungen by quoting from favourable reviews of it: written by Armin Mohler and Erhart Kästner respectively, see Literarische Revue 4 (1949), no. 5: 330. Further reviews were written, e.g., by Arnold Gehlen (Wiener Literarisches Echo 2 (1950) no.4: 72-75) and Curt Hohoff (Hochland 40 (1950) 382-85). Next to Mendelssohn in harshness came Brock 1949, and, with a brilliant review, Kuby 1950. Kuby’s text is, in the same issue of Frankfurter Hefte, followed by Andersch 1950. Outstanding among the many articles preoccupied with the question whether the Strahlungen diaries testify to the philosophical and religious (Christian) conversion of the author is Usinger 1950. A survey of the German 1949/50 reactions to the book is to be found in Dietka 1987: 82-87; Schwarz 1975: 46-48.

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mere theatre, pure setting which changes with the times; and it was no less so, for instance, under Titus.’ (I: 156-57) Belonging to a self-declared élite, Jünger conceives of the war as a kind of tournament where the warring parties act as duellists. Adopting this supposedly aristocratic attitude, he regards war also as a kind of hunt. This attitude is certainly evident at least for Gärten und Straßen (Gardens and Roads), the first part of Strahlungen describing the French campaign and published as early as 1942. The book was soon banned by the Nazi authorities, but it was evident that in it Jünger had tried to satisfy them on a number of occasions in the text.3 He took pride in that he had been decorated for, as he put it, the ‘Erlegung’ (bringing down) of enemy soldiers – a word that clearly belongs to the German vocabulary of hunting (to kill, shoot, bag). From 1940 onwards Jünger was not engaged in hunting other men down. Rather he assumed the attitude of hunting and collecting ideas and goods.4 At odds with his claim to uphold ‘Haltung’ (a stoical, chevalieresque attitude), the rearguard captain avails himself of whatever he likes. He requisitions French houses, looks through the private papers of their fled or fallen owners, screens their furniture and photographs, takes with him what he thinks he needs. In Paris, he regularly visits the bouquinistes and purchases a whole library of old and new books. Given that he never stops to consider whether his actions (profiting from the poverty of a defeated country and its warstricken economy) are consistent with his notion of ‘Haltung’, one might define the attitude he adopts as being that of the plunderer. But Jünger does not simply help himself to precious goods. Drawing on his eclectic schooling and knowledge, he loots all epochs and cultures to portray and explain his own position.5 The boundless egoism of Jünger’s Strahlungen is, of course, an implication of the literary genre he chose to write in. His egoism is indeed all-encompassing and when we expose this egoism to close scrutiny we reach the essence of his view on his personal experience of the Second World War. What we find is the pretension to the utmost aesthetical passivity on the one hand and the utmost poetical activity on the other. 3. Brandes 1990: 20 points to the fact that there were additional prints (distributed from Paris and Riga respectively) of Gärten und Straßen printed for German soldiers. 4. In a letter written in Paris on 9 November 1942 Jünger rejoiced in owing Paris ‘eine ungemeine Ausbeute an Einsichten’ (an immense gain of insight) (quoted after Schwilk 1988: 169). 5. Reading Auf den Marmor-Klippen in 1950, the Austrian author Heimito von Doderer (1964: 791) dryly remarks in it a ‘Spoliierung aller Kulturen, Länder und Zeiten’ (plundering of all cultures, countries and times).

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Jünger was above all an observer of the Second World War.6 He contemplated events without appearing to take sides. It was only post festum that he admitted, rather than reflected upon, his practical involvement in the war as a postal censor for the Nazi Army in occupied Paris.7 In the same vein, he constantly avoids mentioning that he was receiving orders from high-ranking officers. His relative inferiority belied the Selbstherrlichkeit (high-handedness) Jünger bestows on his self-portrait. It transpires, however, that during these years he was quite an obedient follower of his generals and functioning subject of the Nazi German state. Rather than talking about the unpleasant nature of the function he performed during the war, Jünger, on almost every page of Strahlungen, endeavours to aestheticise the war. But he contends that he did not choose to adopt such a viewpoint. He maintains that such a reception of the war was the only one open to him; the literary aesthesis of his text, he suggests, mirrors the purest reception of meaning. Staring at a group of soldiers melted to death in a destroyed tank his eyes perform a function similar to that of a camera: ‘Almost automatically, I perceive images which are presented to me often minutes, even hours later as if they have been developed by some mysterious process.’ (I: 174) More symptomatically, Jünger sums up the description of a cat and her six embryos crushed by a tank with the remarkable sentence: ‘As had happened many times before I felt the question: Why is this view presented to you?’ (I: 171) The aestheticisation of war is the most spectacular aspect of Jünger’s diaries. It is this aspect of his text which has outraged or delighted his detractors and admirers respectively. According to Jünger’s stated intention of weaving together innocence and conscience (I: 340), his depictions of killings and bombardments merely report what an open-minded witness could not fail to experience. However, such a statement should not prevent us from looking for the angles from which these pictures were taken and the function they fulfil in Jünger’s writing. 6. Seeking to explain his taking this stance, at the age of ninety Jünger held his genes responsible for it: ‘il semble que cela soit profondement inscrit dans mes genes. J’ai eu ainsi cette position d’observateur durant le temps où je me trouvais en quelque sorte dans l’entourage d’un proconsul, auprès du commandant en chef à Paris.’ (Hervier 1986: 103) 7. See the diary entry, dated 10 May 1945, in his Die Hütte im Weinberg. Jahre der Okkupation (II: 440-41). It seems as if only after the end of the war was Jünger able to face his employment – although still through a somehow self-beguiling lens. The enduring fascination with the implicit voyeurism of this task still overshadows the reflection on its (and its executor’s) role in the war.

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To begin with, Jünger’s aestheticising tableaux imply distance.8 Disappointed in his desire to regain the youthfulness he had experienced in the First World War, retreating implicitly from the appeal he had once made for the control and perfection of the state, society and warfare of soldierly self-sacrifice,9 Jünger steps back from the war that surrounds him. Although he tends to claim that he is the victim of his phenomenological sensitivity, we might apply to his writing the principle of the aesthetics of the sublime, where the contemplator should ideally be unthreatened by what he sees. Indeed, it is significant that Jünger declares himself unthreatened in aestheticising of war. By treating the horrors of war as works of art he denies their historicity and renders them surreal or rather unreal. The accounts he is given of what is taking place at the Eastern front he calls, ‘Capriccios’. Thus they have a formal analogue in Francisco Goya’s famous prints and, more importantly, with Jünger’s own former oeuvre, namely the second version of Das Abenteuerliche Herz (The Adventurous Heart), a book that he had subtitled in 1938 ‘Figuren und Capriccios’. Jünger notes: ‘At a crossing of trenches, there stood the frozen figure of a commissar who had been slayed by a German lance-corporal in hand-to-hand fighting. Frequently, the same lance-corporal has to escort unknown officers through the fieldworks, and he uses his commissar to lead them along; he is like a sculptor showing his work.’ (I: 312-13) The reader might hold Jünger responsible for this cynicism, but Jünger ascribes it to the lance-corporal. It is, however, evident that those events or objects which are repeatedly aestheticised in Strahlungen take on the form of sculpture or painting.10 Music never serves as an element of aestheticisation, presumably because it is a process (its Prozeßhaftigkeit) and because its quality of suggesting dissolution is alien to the rather static style of Jünger’s war writing.11 8. Brandes (1990: 278-79) who is not always accurate in his psychological readings makes a good point in ascribing Jünger’s aestheticism (in Strahlungen) to his solipsistical stance. Cf. Boal (1993: 112-23) on Jünger’s social solipsism and its impact on his writing. 9. These are (with the exception of the failed hope for rejuvenation) the main differences Bullock (1992b) has found in Jünger’s perceptions of the First and Second World Wars. 10. Cf. Boal 1993: 169-72 on the ‘tableaux’ in Jünger’s book. 11. Usinger (1950: 266) noted concerning Jünger: ‘Totally alien to him is the musical melos … . This accounts for his specific impact.’ Cf. Bense’s (1984: 88) remark, Jünger’s ‘prose might have a metre, but it certainly has no rhythm’. The most caustic assessment of Jünger’s style is to be found in the letters of an author who is often parallelled with him. Reading, it seems, an early print of what was to become the Strahlungen, Gottfried Benn summed up his impression of it on 7 January 1948: ‘catastrophic. Feeble, vain, pompous and styleless. In his language insecure, insignificant as a character’ (Benn 1979: 108).

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It is optics which represent the discipline of this writing and ‘spectacle’ (‘Schauspiel’) which stands as its favourite metaphor.12 In particular, it is the Allied bombardment of Paris that Jünger time and again conceives of as the glowing backcloth of a theatre (see II: 113), a great performance (II: 125) and ‘a spectacle of high beauty and demonic strength’ (II: 155). Jünger’s Caucasian excursion serves to stress the link between distance and aestheticisation. When speaking of the events in Stalingrad between November and December 1942, Jünger’s tendency to aestheticise begins to fall apart. He wrote: ‘I felt how the spirit of the time [Zeitgeist] tries to extinguish everything beautiful in us’ (II: 449). This remarkable statement contends that beauty resides within us rather than in the world outside. But Jünger is unable to live up to such an experience. As if compulsively he returns (and resorts) to his images of beauty, or more particularly to an image of the beauty of a bombed Paris. Even in the Caucasus he states: ‘It is obvious that somewhere these hells offer deep enjoyment.’ (I: 462)13 ‘Somewhere’. But the question is where? In Deo sive natura? Jünger does not believe in Spinoza, but he tries to raise his mind to God. He shows himself to be a humble seeker of divinity. In his search for God, however, he attempts to replace God’s perspective with his own. Unwilling to view himself as Hitler’s soldier, he attempts to be like the lieutenant of God. All the historical events which unfold before his eyes are thus seen as part of nature, present time is related to the historical dimensions of nature’s time. 12. Presumably during the years of the Second World War Jünger wrote an aphorism that he first published in his Sgraffiti in 1960: ‘For example, it is hardly within the liberty of the individual that the state sends him onto the battlefields. However, it is within the liberty of the individual to take up the position of the observer, and thus he puts the state at his own service, namely as an organiser of colossal spectacles.’ (Quoted after Schwilk 1988: 163) The problem with this viewpoint obviously is that Jünger suggests to himself an illusion he feels most comfortable with (see Boal 1993: 103-6, on Jünger’s illusory faith in his artistic freedom in occupied France). The circenses that the ‘Third Reich’ offered him were genocidal, and he got from the same state his soldier’s pay and his panem. On Jünger’s use of the world-as-theatre metaphor and his foible for masking and hiding his self see Gruenter 1952: 176-78. 13. The term ‘hells’ points to the somehow odd tendency in the Caucasus passage to seek refuge from the threats of war in Christian religion from which to make sense out of what he witnesses. Even here, the Operation Barbarossa – the Nazi Wehrmacht’s campaign against the Soviet Union – seems contemporary to Dante and coextensive with his ‘Inferno’; see II: 250. When he was writing Das abenteuerliche Herz. Figuren und Capriccios, Jünger was confident that it is the spirit, and this means in particular his spirit, that has this ‘enjoyment’ in relishing such experiences: ‘Cappriccios, witticisms of the night, enjoyed by the intellect without emotions as if in a lonely situation, but not without risk’ (quoted after Gruenter 1952: 177).

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This is the ultimate consequence of Jünger’s aesthetics. As an unyielding and, one should add, an astute observer of beetles, flowers, all kinds of insects and fossils, Jünger concludes: ‘Thus all the measures which human art can invent, have been organised already in nature, in natural growth. Our liberty consists in discovering what has been formed already – by creating we advance to the Creation.’ (I: 215) Such an article of faith seems to communicate that nature is the great mould that encompasses and structures all works of art. If this conception of nature is applied to history, then it implies that all human acts are part of nature and can, at least theoretically, be reduced to it. The capacity of the human mind to understand nature (by understanding nature Jünger includes such apparently diverse activities as collecting beetles and producing art) serves to recreate Creation. Further, if this perspective is adopted, then historical developments become mere epiphenomena. In the stance which Jünger adopts it is possible to trace an echo of that which Goethe assumed with regard to the liberation wars of 1813.14 Although Jünger is intent on imitating Goethe’s Italienische Reise (Italian Journey), the theory behind his imitation is haphazard and inconsistent. Although he notes a general ‘strong return to Germany’ (II: 40) and seems to include himself in that trend, Jünger the theologian never constructs or adopts a complete gospel. His reflections are instead characterised by a paragraph such as the following: ‘It is the adventure of these years that there is no way out to be seen. No star is blinking in the lonely night. This is our horoscopic-metaphysical situation; the wars, civil wars, means of destruction emerge as secondary, timely decoration. The task which we have to fulfil is to master the world of destruction, something that cannot be done on the level of history.’ (II: 148)15 14. Meyer (1990: 362-64) traces Jünger’s cyclical theory of history back to Macchiavelli, Vico and Goethe. 15. Bense (1984: 40) stated that the building of Jünger’s universe was ‘inhabited by somebody who formulates brilliantly, but is weak in thinking’. Although I disagree with Bense’s overall viewpoint that nothing but ‘formal structures and methodological elements’ (68) decide on the actual relevance and merit of a literary text, and although I neither like his resenting Thomas Mann as being part of the ‘former Californian emigration’ nor his worshipping of Gottfried Benn as the epitome of modern German writing, I would subscribe to Bense’s observations regarding the shortcomings, the nineteenth-century style out-datedness of the intellectual and literary habits in Strahlungen. With Bense, I would argue that Jünger’s philosophical competence should not be overrated, e.g., when Jünger writes: ‘In the infinite, every point is centre. I stated this axiom this morning while digging the beds’ (Strahlungen, II: 211), he is wrong in claiming himself the inventor of an idea that already had played an important role, some five hundred years earlier, in the thought of Nicolaus Cusanus (see Blumenberg 1976: 43).

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Most of Jünger’s ideologies are assembled here: his belief in fate and in astrology, his idealism and his enmity towards history that is dissolved into the theatre of natural and of revelation history. One might add a certain Hegelianism that makes Hitler an agent chosen by the Weltgeist (II: 196) together with a vague Christian humanism. Jünger resembles the authors of ‘inner emigration’ to the extent that his main theologoumenon is the demonisation of Hitler and of the ‘Third Reich’. In his view, the Führer turns from Diabolus to Satanas in May 1942 (see I: 321). His orders to imprison potentially resistant French citizens are, in Jünger’s words, ‘examples of a grotesque language of thugs and demons – derivatives from the florid ornaments of Hieronymus Bosch’ (II: 113). The problem which Jünger faces is that he is a relative of the unpleasant artist Hitler-Bosch. He attempts to solve this problem by declaring himself the former prophet of this devil. Reading the Bible, Jünger views the Second World War as if he were John looking at the final Apocalyptical conflagration. He implies that he had foreseen all this innocently and consciously, claiming that he is the seismograph wrongly held responsible for the earthquake (see I: 13). The real miracle is that the earthquake of the Second World War, together with the outraged blows of its (ignorant?) victims, fail to shatter the self-confidence of the seismograph. Jünger pretends to remain the unshakeable, a God-like indicator of movement in the same way that he pretends to remain the unchanged survivor of whatever might happen. If he thinks of death he does so only to make it his friend (II: 78); but the reason he attempts to make friends, is fear of death. Speaking of his old habit of following (in whatever country he happens to be in) the funeral processions of dead people who are unfamiliar to him, Jünger neatly reminds us of the typical survivor as described by Elias Canetti in his Crowds and Power.16 One of the survivor’s favourite places is the cemetery, and thus for the author of Strahlungen the whole of Europe, overshadowed by war, might be defined as one vast, edifying playground. Uncanny as such a site may have been, Jünger was able to feel at home there. He made it a writer’s cabinet. The books he bought and read were called by him his oasis (I: 405), and even in October 1943 he admits that his Paris existence is ‘surrounded by the background of comfort’ (II: 169). One can assume that by comfort, Jünger means luxury as well as solace. This fortification is constantly endangered and further fortified by the world war which rages outside. Jünger knows moments of resignation: ‘the prospect of potential suffering opens up and one lets one’s arms drop’ (I: 470). But these experi16. See Canetti 1960.

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ences do not lead to anything practical. Jünger’s reactions to them remain limited to the sphere of private feelings: he expresses nausea or feels himself to be ‘geniert’ – that is, he feels a mixture of shame and embarrassment. What he does do is to refuse to let his arms drop and to keep the pencil in his hand. Out of his experiences he makes words, and out of his words he makes literature. ‘We believe’, he states in the preface to Strahlungen, ‘that the only possibility of making life tolerable lies in the creation of a new style’ (I: 21). Following a popularised version of German idealism, Jünger’s writing is destined to lend sense to reality by means of ‘Besinnung’ – a word that connotes the effort both to recall and give sense to something (see I: 219). Drawing on this double entendre Jünger claims to teach what he had been taught. It is, he maintains, possible to assume a perspective on the cosmos that shows it as ‘merely pedagogically ordered’ (I: 115). Everything one can encounter serves simply to enlarge one’s own knowledge, provided, that is, one knows how to adopt the correct way of seeing. This is Jünger’s ‘mysterious moral aesthetics’ (II: 14). It represents a recreation of the world. The God-like theorist and creative poet Jünger is the active master and creator of the world to the same extent that Jünger the observer of the aesthetic phenomena of the world claims to be merely a passive recipient. But Jünger recreates the natural and historical universe solely for the sake of recreation. Such a recreation does not teach anything about ethics. The central question Jünger poses is whether he is to be held responsible for what he had ‘prophesied’; whether his enmity towards the Weimar Republic, his glorification of war and his cry for German revenge for Versailles prepared for, and thus to some extent, caused what he now witnesses. Not surprisingly, he denies this: ‘Our words are throws – we cannot know whom they will hit behind the wall of the years.’ (II: 86)17 When stating, ‘I do not contradict myself’, Jünger contends both that he is not guilty of any contradiction and should not, therefore, rebuke himself. He continues: ‘Rather I am moving through different layers of truth of which the uppermost each time subordinates the others.’ (II: 144) To put it bluntly: Jünger’s diary turns out to be a Bildungsroman whose only possible author, hero and reader is Jünger himself (I, 489).18 Aesthetics and ethics become aesthetics as Jünger’s 17. It now becomes increasingly evident that Jünger has played down and watered down to a certain extent his anti-republican and chauvinist writing of the pre-1933 period ever since 1945. See Walther 1995. 18. Boal (1993: 103) talks of a ‘processus de maturation du personnage principal’ in Strahlungen who is not, as Boal conceives it, the empirical Jünger but this author’s self-image.

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reports reveal themselves to be calqued on the traditional fictional scheme of the Goethean novel. The public, Jünger holds, calls into exoteric being a work that is essentially the artist’s monologue. But Jünger’s monologue evidently lacks two qualities that are central to the traditional novel: firstly, Jünger is unable to portray a character other than his own; secondly, he does not tell any story. His sentences are static because they are enunciations. They know no process that is not cyclical. In a telling metaphor, Jünger ascribes to memory, ‘traits of reversed causality’ (I: 342). Memory is considered to be like the tip of an iceberg, the effect of multiple causes. Immediately after this reflection on memory, Jünger swiftly identifies past with future in a unity that can be divined only by the artist. Here Jünger is fighting his own Hitlerian demons. In September 1943, he subscribes to a sentence he quotes from Aldous Huxley: ‘One should never give a name to the evil which one feels approaching; otherwise one provides fate with a model with which it can build events.’ (II: 152) Jünger, the author who had proclaimed in 1934 the slogan of ‘total mobilisation’ should have seen a parallel between this and the Nazis’ call for a total war in 1943.19 Attempting to escape from the mobilisation he had himself recommended, Jünger finds himself hiding in the total stiffness and torpor of his style. It is through a complex process of mimicry that he is able to survive the fallen; he pretends himself to be dead. Shying away from drawing any ethical conclusion or any binding moral judgement and avoiding any responsibility, he abstracts himself from his wartime existence through a form of writing that can be defined as mortifying.20 His diary does not recall his life. Instead it functions as what Freud calls ‘Deckerinnering’, a covering rather than an uncovering, of memory. It is a monument, a still-life painting of nonmemory. ‘As an author’, Jünger writes, ‘one has to learn from painters – in particular with regard to “working over”, to the art of putting always newer and finer layers over the coarse text.’ (II; 156) I would like to thank Katharina Ochse (Berlin/Sarajevo), Helmut Peitsch (Cardiff) and Jeffrey Grossman (Charlottesville) for helping me in writing this text. 19. Jünger tried, from hindsight, to first metaphorise (i.e., ‘genealogise’; see II: 241) and then distance himself from it – although still with the vanity of an explorer: ‘Furthermore I learn that I am the inventor of “total mobilisation”. This is an error too; I am the discoverer of it, its god-father, and this is an important difference.’ (5 January 1948, II: 647) 20. Kuby pointedly characterising Jünger’s description of natural objects wrote: ‘The flowers growing there are punched from sheet metal, and small slips of papers stick to the beetles’ legs, carrying the Latin names.’ (Kuby 1950: 208)

11

CHANGING IDENTITIES THROUGH MEMORY: MALAPARTE’S SELF-FIGURATIONS IN KAPUTT Charles Burdett

At the age of seventeen Kurt Erich Suckert (later to assume the name Curzio Malaparte) volunteered to fight in the First World War. He fought with the Italian army against the Austrians in the Alps and with the French on the Western front. He was wounded on several occasions and decorated for valour. Immediately after the war he began to write articles and essays for a variety of mainstream and marginal publications. He gained a certain notoriety for defending the actions of the common Italian soldiers at Caporetto in the short and highly polemical book, La rivolta dei santi maledetti (The Revolt of the Damned Saints, 1921). He participated actively in the fascist rise to power; he saw Mussolini’s party as part of the same revolutionary movement which had earlier militated for intervention. Writing for his own journal, La conquista dello stato (The Conquest of the State), and for a number of other pro-fascist journals, he glorified the acts of violence which brought the movement to power and declared that Mussolini should make sure above all that his government reflected the will of the masses and the ex-combatants. He saw Mussolini himself as a ‘new and legitimate tyrant’ whose role it was to employ the regenerative power of violence and renew Italy’s link with the heroic past of the Roman empire. Malaparte’s rise to prominence in public life continued unchecked in the 1920s. As well as contributing essays and stories to a variety of literary journals, he even occupied the prestigious

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position as editor of La Stampa. But although a committed fascist, on friendly terms with many of the leading figures of the party, he retained his outspoken character and the subversive nature of his polemics often proved difficult for the regime to tolerate. While in France in 1931, and trading on his insider knowledge of the fascist coup, he published the work, Technique du Coup d’Etat (The Techniques of the Coup d’Etat, 1931). The book demonstrated how marginalised militant groupings could rise suddenly to power. It was a huge success. Inevitably, however, the very success of the book led Malaparte into trouble with the Italian authorities. He suffered the largely symbolic punishment of being exiled for a short period in the island of Lipari and then confined to his villa in the Tuscan resort of Forte dei Marmi. He was, nevertheless, allowed to continue to write for the major newspapers of the day. Between 1937 and 1943 he was in charge of the review Prospettive. When the Second World War broke out he participated in the Italian invasion of Southern France but in 1941 he obtained permission to follow the invading German troops into Russia. He sent a series of dispatches which were initially printed in the Corriere della sera and which subsequently appeared in the volume, Il Volga nasce in Europa (The Volga is Born in Europe, 1943). Following his experiences in Russia he was sent for a longer period to Finland. It was during this period that he wrote most of his novel Kaputt, a book which he was able to complete only on his return to Italy in the chaos that followed the fall of Mussolini. Kaputt was published by the publisher Casella in Naples in 1944; it was immediately reprinted and very quickly translated into a variety of other languages.1 Malaparte describes his book as ‘a long and cruel journey through Europe, through the war, through blood, famine, burnt out villages and destroyed cities’ (1995: 396). It is a journey which is broken up into six largely discrete episodes. The first part of the book finds him in Stockholm in 1942. He is at a dinner party given by the Swedish prince Eugene. To the assembled guests he tells of his experiences of the summer of 1941 when behind the German lines in the Ukraine. He tells also of his recent stay at the Finnish front. The scene then shifts from neutral Sweden to Poland, where the narrator is again at a dinner party, but his host is the German governor of the country Frank. To the other guests Malaparte relates his journey to Moldavia in 1941. On that visit he had witnessed a Romanian pogrom against the Jewish community of Jassy. The narration of the massacre is followed by the description of a trainload of dead Jewish victims. 1. All quotations from Kaputt are taken from the latest edition of the work (Malaparte 1995). For a history of the text’s publication see Guerri 1990: 214. All translations are my own.

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The narrative then returns to Finland in the spring of 1942. Malaparte tells friends of the German advance on Kiev, of the massacre of Russian soldiers, and of the bombardment of Belgrade. The subsequent episode revolves around the narrator’s meeting with Princess Louise von Preussen in Potsdam. To her he recounts a number of stories which exemplify the cruelty of the German officer class. He also recounts a dinner party at the Italian embassy in Germany, and the gossip surrounding Edda Ciano. From Germany the scene returns to Finland, where the narrator is entertained by the governor of Lapland, sees Himmler taking a sauna, and hears stories of the exploits of the Germans on the Finnish front. After an illness suffered in Finland, the narrator finds himself again in Italy, or, more precisely, in the exclusive setting of Rome’s golf club. He chats with the members of Rome’s high society and the occasional German aristocrat. When he meets his old friend Galeazzo Ciano, he tells him he should have impeded Mussolini from entering the war. Finally, the narration moves onwards to August 1943, where Malaparte, fleeing to his home on the island of Capri, is trapped in Naples. For a variety of reasons Kaputt is an interesting text: it offers an insider’s account of life among high-ranking officials and soldiers of the Axis powers; it offers detailed pictures of activities on different fronts; it provides a complex account of how one of the most prominent supporters of Italian fascism formulates impressions and articulates memories of the war; it provides a pan-European vision of the war. As well as being an interesting document, Kaputt is also a disconcerting text. To begin with, it is difficult to determine the status of the work. The author is keen to present himself to his readership as a qualified journalist and on a number of occasions he mentions the dispatches he has been commissioned to write for Il corriere della sera. Yet, at the same time that he seems concerned with establishing an objective or factually accurate account of the war, he also includes a good deal of material that is probably invented or which he could not possibly have witnessed. Thus the narrative of Kaputt hovers between the reporting of an eye-witness and the fantasised memories of one of the war’s more peculiar observers. Further, the frequently anecdotal nature of the narrator’s style generates a kind of humour that is often grotesquely inappropriate considering the implicit or explicit horror of many of the scenes that are described. But the text is above all disconcerting in the way that it presents the reader with a figure who is extremely prominent in each narration, but who continually fails to reflect on his presence in compromising contexts. Kaputt documents the attempt of its writer to position himself as a disinterested spectator, but the more that subject position is exam-

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ined the more it becomes possible to see the extent to which Malaparte is implicated in the action he describes. In Kaputt memory becomes a means of assuming a series of identities which absolve the writer from any responsibility. As a journalist with a clear fascist past, wearing an Italian soldier’s uniform on the German front, Malaparte’s impartiality is dubious. A familiar strategy of the writer, however, to reinforce his identity as a mere observer is to avoid any sense of personal responsibility by accusing others. Throughout Kaputt an accusatory finger is pointed at the Germans. In many episodes German soldiers are described in demeaning or ridiculous situations. There is little to distinguish one German from another. They are continually being outwitted by their adversaries, whether these are Slavs, Russians or even animals. What is perceived to be their intellectual slowness is the subject of a stream of jokes and anecdotal stories. At one point, for example, a German general, von Heurnet, while fishing in Finland is enraged by one salmon who manages consistently to avoid being caught. The general decides to have the salmon shot (1995: 352). If the members of Hitler’s army are depicted as mentally inflexible, then they are also shown to be physically degenerate. On meeting a group of young German officers in Finland, the narrator writes: They are all in their twenties, but their worn and yellow faces bear the marks of old age, decay and death. … It horrifies me to think that they are like beasts, wild beasts. In their eyes and faces you can see the wonderful sadness of wild beasts, the absorbed and melancholy madness of animals. (326)

Another technique employed by the narrator to suggest a distance between himself and the Germans is to emphasise the latters’ cruelty: for example, Kaputt contains a number of tableaux depicting German commanders in pursuit of easy prey. The episode where Malaparte dines with Reichminister Frank and his entourage ends with the governor of Poland taking a pot-shot at a Jewish child trying to escape from the Warsaw ghetto (172). The narrator sees such grotesque examples of cruelty as springing from what he defines as the ‘feminine’ nature of the German national character. For example, when Frank and his guests speak of the Poles, the narrator observes: ‘As always, they spoke contemptuously about them. Their contempt, however, was strangely alloyed with an unhealthy feminine sentiment of pique, deluded love and unconscious jealousy.’ (79) At another point in the narrative he remembers dedicating a copy of one of his works to Sir Oswald Mosley, with the same

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misogynous analogy: ‘Hitler, like all dictators, is simply a woman. Dictatorship is the most accomplished form of jealousy.’ (105) The formulation and repetition of the stereotype of the Germans acts, as all stereotypes do, to create a series of binary oppositions: the speaker and his readership belong to the category of a ‘we’ that is defined inversely by the properties of the ‘they’ of the stereotype. In other words, the unremittingly negative characterisation of the Germans creates a correspondingly positive image of the narrator of Kaputt: what the Germans are, Malaparte by implication is not. If the Germans are remarkable for their lack of intellectual agility, then the narrator is quick-witted and always able to supply the final remark at the dinner table; if the Germans are committed to the pursuit of the war, then the narrator is uncommitted and able to observe from a distance; if the Germans act in a way that is perverse and cruel, then by contrast the narrator represents a standard of behaviour that is straightforward and humane; if Malaparte characterises the German officer class as ‘feminine’, then he encourages his reader to believe that he upholds a set of ‘masculine’ virtues. The way the narrator uses gendered sets of values is itself disturbing, especially when we consider the importance which such ‘male’ virtues as self-assertion, discipline or unthinking courage played in the ideology of fascism. But the essential point about Malaparte’s dependency on the stereotype is that it represents a means through which he can imply his own innocence by pointing to others’ guilt. The stereotype further enables the narrator to form a bond with his reader based on the humour that is directed at the Germans: both reader and narrator are on the same side of the joke. If the implications of Malaparte’s characterisation of German officers and bureaucrats are problematic, then so is the very nature of the information that he is able to supply against them. It cannot escape the reader that he is on the same side of the front as the German army and often he is a guest at Nazi dinner tables. Such distance as the negative stereotype establishes between the narrator on the one hand and the Nazis on the other would seem to be continually undermined by elements that place the two together. However, Malaparte attempts to provide a plausible resolution of the contradiction in which he is involved by suggesting throughout Kaputt that he is associated not only with the highest level of German society but is a member of an exclusive, metaphorical club whose members belong both to the Axis and the Allied powers. The narrator is invited to dinner parties in neutral Sweden where he mingles not only with Swedish royalty but with the representatives of a variety of European countries, and Kaputt is littered with his memories of cordial encounters with French and British dignitaries. The narrator

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likes to show that he is acquainted with Europe’s aristocracy. He likes to parade his knowledge of its secret rules and power relations. He likes to mention his intimacy with some of high society’s most glittering members and with the gossip that surrounds them. The image of a club extending indifferently across national borders, battlefields and front lines serves to diminish the very importance of war: the political differences between democratic powers and fascist states are blurred, as are any moral dichotomies, by a common image of power. Indeed, in Malaparte’s narrative the war serves to cast the perennial practices of high society in bold relief: extravagant lunches, dinners and receptions all continue to take place, as do shooting parties and rounds of golf. The emphasis on the continuation of élitist activities serves a dual purpose. At one level, the narrator implies that the war, for all its barbarity, is merely a temporary disruption in a preexisting order of things. At another level, he suggests that although the position and the rituals of the ruling class will continue, the class itself has grown rotten: it is an unhealthy remnant of what it should be. The German dinner parties that the narrator attends in Poland are seen as examples of extreme decadence. The Roman court surrounding Galeazzo Ciano is described as showing, ‘an interested servility, an avidity for honours and pleasure, a moral indifference’ (285). When speaking of the Romanian pogrom against the Jewish population of Jassy, Malaparte defends the common soldiers guilty of the atrocity by saying: ‘It is not their fault if the classes, the families and the men who should serve them as an example, have a rotten soul, a rotten mind and rotten bones.’ (68) The degree to which the ruling class spreads its decay across the whole of Europe is indicated throughout the work at a metaphorical level. The very title, Kaputt, signifies things being ruined, broken and done for. The text is punctuated by a series of grotesque evocations of things rotting and falling apart. In one of the opening scenes the narrator tries vainly to escape the stench of a dead horse. In another episode Finnish soldiers release the putrefying remains of a group of horses, trapped for the whole winter in the ice of lake Ladoga on the Russian front. The narrator explains the meaning of so many pictures of rotting horses to the Swedish prince Eugene. He explains how the horse stands as an image of Europe. Its transformation from a noble animal into an object of disgust conveys a concrete symbol of Europe’s degeneration: ‘The rotting horses are images of the war. They represent the way we have come to speak and to smell. They are reflections of a dead Europe.’ (58) The narrative ends when Malaparte finds himself in Naples; those of the city’s inhabitants who have been unable to

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flee take refuge in the sewers of the city as if they were trapped in the intestines of a rotting carcass. The picture of a Europe which has died owing to the neglect of its rulers and is now simply a rotting carcass is an image that runs not only through Kaputt but through the later collection of stories inspired by the American presence in the south of Italy, La pelle (Skin, 1949) and in the posthumously published meditations on Europe, Mamma marcia (Rotten Mother, 1959). The insistence on corruption and decay exercises a series of related effects in Malaparte’s writing. Firstly, the accuracy or apparent objectivity of a reporter’s style is submerged beneath a weight of recurrent metaphorical constructions. Secondly, the extent to which memory is transformed into a series of apocalyptic visions alters the very focus of the book. It begins to seem as though Kaputt is not about the ethical or political divisions at the centre of the war or about the collapse of fascism, but a work which instead articulates a prophesy of the decline of Europe. Standing above divisions between nations and armies, the narrator assumes the identity of the representative of an older order; he sees all that he considers noble collapsing around him, but he is powerless to do anything.2 Like the stereotype of the Germans, the prediction of the death of Europe which Kaputt so often emphasises is a complex and ambiguous textual strategy. Above all, it is one that shifts attention away from introspective inquiry and places it instead on a notion of a whole continent’s collective guilt. Although Kaputt is cast as a record of dramatic memories of the war, its narrator shows a strong reluctance to register personal feelings of moral doubt, responsibility or political outrage. One might expect a former fascist, on witnessing the effects of unrestrained violence, to engage in a troubled examination of his conscience. But Kaputt provides little introspective comment and nothing so straightforward as a confession. Malaparte’s reaction to what he sees does not always impel him to condemn examples of cruelty or to acknowledge a degree of responsibility. He remains curiously static. On the two or three occasions that he does reflect upon his own position he comes up with phrases that are vague or evasive. At one point, he says to a friend: ‘Remember I am Italian. We Italians don’t know how to assume any responsibility after twenty years of slavery.’ (119) While at another stage he writes: ‘Sometimes I think 2. It is worth noting at this point that Kaputt is peppered with allusions to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Although the text makes no explicit reference to La Grande Illusion (1937) there are a number of interesting analogies that could be made between the ways in which Renoir’s film and Malaparte’s book both present a European aristocracy bound together by common pursuits and inclinations that transcend the reality of war.

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that I have a certain responsibility in all that’s happening now in Europe.’ (253) It is significant that he fails to expand on this point. In the course of merging the private with the collective, while allowing apocalyptic vision to take the place of introspection, Malaparte assumes a variety of shifting identities. In the complex record of his memories he takes on the role of the true soldier, the disillusioned aristocrat, the participant who is present but at the same time not involved. However, the most important identity which he cannot avoid assuming is that of the witness. Although he has consciously fictionalised many of the events which he reports, he does speak of real happenings and he does draw extensively on his work as a journalist. The very writing of Kaputt, like the writing of other texts such as Il sole è cieco (The Sun is Blind, 1947) and Il Volga nasce in Europa, constitutes the writer’s identity as a witness: he is involved in presenting to a potentially wide audience a series of important events. The act of committing a narrative of past events to others impels the witness to assume a degree of responsibility for the truth of the narrative, but what is striking and disturbing about Malaparte’s text is the degree to which its narrator refuses to explore the ethical implications of the sights which he sees. At critical points in his narrative he shows an inability to represent events as anything other than as a series of external appearances. The limitations of the narrator become particularly clear when he is confronted with evidence of actual or impending atrocities. At one point the narrator, together with the Italian consul in Romania, a character called Sartori, go looking for the corpse of one of the victims of the Jassy pogrom. Their search takes them to the railway station of the Romanian town of Podul Iloaiei, where they discover a trainload of dead victims. They try to open the door of one of the wagons. Malaparte writes: Suddenly the door of the wagon opened, and the crowd of prisoners fell upon Sartori, throwing him to the ground and piling up on top of him. In reality the prisoners were the dead fleeing from the wagon. They fell in heavy groups, with a dull thud, like statues made of cement. Buried under the corpses, crushed by their enormous cold weight, Sartori squirmed and struggled … Trying desperately to protect himself, he pulled some of the corpses by their hair or by their clothes. He tried to push others away clasping them by the throat or hitting them in the face with clenched fists. It was a silent and ferocious struggle. (165).

The passage begins as an example of an eye-witness account but is gradually transformed into a peculiarly literary piece of prose. Both here and in what immediately follows the physical aspect of the

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falling corpses is described with meticulous attention to detail. The passage ably manipulates the grotesque by the surreal attribution of sentient qualities to the dead. The style in which the piece is written alerts the reader to its status as an elaborate construction of a past event. However, the knowledge the style creates of that event does not focus upon its moral significance. Instead, it is the phenomenology of the episode that seems centrally important. Brutality becomes a spectacle that is considered aesthetically. Further, the element of farce that is emphasised in the scene’s description deflects attention away from its atrocity. The writing does not seem to be conscious of the importance of the event which it documents. When Malaparte visits the Warsaw ghetto he presents a vivid picture of the locality. He evokes the tense, silent atmosphere of the place. He defines the frightened stare of its inhabitants and he describes their emaciated faces: ‘As we passed the threshold of a house, those within immediately withdrew frightened; we heard the odd frightened shout, after which silence followed.’ (90) The narrator seems aware that the ghetto awaits an evil fate. His observations are coloured by elaborate metaphors and biblical overtones. The ragged clusters of people who gather on street corners seem like lambs waiting to be slaughtered. The member of the Gestapo who accompanies the narrator is characterised as an evil angel. An angel who, the narrator speculates, portends the coming of the wrath of God. Such comparisons are lent a sinister reality by the details that emerge. At one point the narrator stumbles over a corpse laid out on the ground. The representation may be accurate or compelling, but the witness only registers details. Malaparte does not consider how the ghetto was formed, how it functions or what role it may serve within a wider, genocidal system. He shows an inability to empathise with the victims of brutality and a reluctance to assume a position of authority. The very fact that as an eye witness he is included in the scenes he documents is something he does not consider. Instead, he prefers to take refuge by becoming a specialised observer of surface reality. Malaparte’s description of certain wartime events do not posit a readership or community of listeners sure of the values against which such events should be judged. In Kaputt the concentration on the aesthetic dimension of many scenes indicates an inability on the part of the writer to appeal to a common fund of ethical understanding that he shares with his reader.3 The nature of Malaparte’s 3. It is clear that Kaputt is not predicated on the same basis as much documentary writing which was to be printed in Italy in the immediate postwar period: writing which, documenting personal experience, was aimed at pointing its readership to lessons of a moral or political kind. For a discussion of Italian writing in the immediate aftermath of war see Caesar 1989.

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narrative posits a community of readers who are undergoing the same crisis of values and the same crisis of identity which confronts the book’s narrator. It is not so much to the ethical sensitivities of his readers that Malaparte appeals, but rather to a common feeling of unease about past affiliations and uncertainty about the future. The very function which Malaparte performs as a witness is geared less to establishing an authenticated version of the truth than to furthering a private process of exculpation. Even when assuming the identity of the witness, he avoids committing himself. Inextricably caught up in the contradictions of the war, Malaparte drags his reader with him: the reader of Kaputt shares in the processes through which stereotypes work and becomes involved in the text’s metaphors of decay and destruction. Above all, the reader watches how the process of memory becomes a means to fashion a series of changing identities. The way in which Kaputt is constructed makes it curiously difficult for the finger of accusation to be pointed against Malaparte: it is he himself who becomes the satirist of the mad and degenerate behaviour of those engaged in the war. Any attempt at indictment becomes still more difficult when the developments of Malaparte’s life in the final months of the war are considered.4 After having returned to Capri for three months he was arrested by American forces in November 1943 as a potentially dangerous fascist sympathiser. Freed after the intervention of a number of powerful friends he was arrested again in February 1944 by the Italian authorities concerned about his past as a fascist. He was again freed, this time with the help of an American officer, Henry Cumming, with whom he had become friends. On being released he agreed to serve with Cumming as an officer (concerned with public relations) in the Allied advance through Italy. In this capacity he followed the front as far as Florence, where illness marked the end of his war. In the course of the war he succeeded in changing his identity from fascist-sympathiser to Allied officer and the writing of Kaputt certainly served to facilitate such a transformation.

4. For a record of Malaparte’s actions in the final months of the war see Guerri 1990: 224-28.

PART IV

THE VICTIM’S MEMORY

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REVIEWING MEMORY: WIESEL, TESTIMONY AND SELF-READING Colin Davis

The title of this volume, European Memories of the Second World War, highlights the theme of memory which has become increasingly prominent, particularly in Holocaust studies, as the war recedes into the past. In an essay first published in 1992, itself entitled ‘Memory’s Time’ (Langer 1995: 13), Lawrence Langer draws attention to the large number of recent texts on the Holocaust which, in their titles or subtitles, suggest the problem of memory: When Memory Comes (1979), The Assassins of Memory (1985), Days and Memory (1990), In Fitting Memory (1991), The Ruins of Memory (1991), Memory Offended (1991), Between Memory and Hope (1990), The Texture of Memory (1993), The Shapes of Memory (1994). This proliferation of titles implies that it becomes more important to remember as it becomes more difficult. Most of the survivors of the Holocaust are now dead or nearing the end of their lives, and the memories of those of us who were not alive during the war are entirely constituted by secondary or textual sources. Given the urgency of memory, Elie Wiesel has described the modern age as the age of testimony (Wiesel 1977a: 9). But, as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub argue in their crucial, powerful work, the central paradox of the era of testimony is that testimony is precisely what cannot take place (Felman and Laub 1992). The Holocaust, given the status of founding moment in the contemporary crisis of testimony, is an event without a witness. Its victims

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were either literally destroyed or undermined in their ability to bear witness; their selfhood, their sense of themselves as sites of their own experience, their faith in the adequacy of language or the reliability of memory, were all fundamentally eroded. Yet testimony remains an imperative; memory, as the title of Robert Gordon’s essay in this volume asserts, is a duty. So how is it possible to bear witness to the Holocaust? This question is as central to academic work on the Holocaust as it is to the survivor witnesses who undertake the heroic and doomed project of testimony. Some of the issues involved are raised with admirable lucidity and symptomatic confusion in Lawrence Langer’s recent collection of essays, Admitting the Holocaust (1995). For some years now, Langer has been arguing that what he calls the ‘culture of consolation’ permits us to avoid a frank confrontation with atrocity through linguistic evasions and recourse to comfortable habits of thought: When we speak of the survivor instead of the victim and of martyrdom instead of murder, regard being gassed as a pattern for dying with dignity, or evoke the redemptive rather than the grievous power of memory, we draw on an arsenal of words that urges us to build verbal fences between the atrocities of the camps and ghettos and what we are mentally willing – or able – to face. … If we go on using a discourse of consolation about an event for which there is none, it is partly because old habits of language cling like burrs to the pelts of civilisation, and partly because no fully-fledged discourse of ruin, more appropriate to our hapless time, has yet emerged. (6-7)

However, Langer’s own writing on the Holocaust is hardly free from unexamined blind spots; most problematic in the current context is his conventional and in my view unworkable distinction between testimony and literature. Langer credits testimony with direct, unmediated access to a subject’s experience of the event itself.1 He refers to ‘fences’ (6) or ‘barriers’ which ‘shield’ (9) us from the reality of atrocity; but such metaphors also imply that impediments can be overcome, surmounted or broken down; thereby we may after all achieve a ‘frank encounter’ with brutality, as part of what he calls ‘a gradual but relentless and unsentimental progression towards truth’ (11). Written texts such as Wiesel’s La Nuit (The Night, 1958) on the other hand, ‘[suffer] the curbs’ of art, they show life ‘other than it literally was’, entail ‘selection’ and 1. This point is made by Dominick LaCapra in his discussion of Langer’s Holocaust Testimonies (LaCapra 1994: 194).

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‘composition’ which ‘[alter] the purity … of the original event’ (Langer 1995: 99). So oral testimony gives us ‘the original event’ without selection and composition, whereas the written text alters the purity of the event, falling short of its literal truth.2 Langer’s attempt to break down barriers seems to me to preserve in a rigid form precisely some of the distinctions which Holocaust writing insistently and explicitly throws into question; for example, the distinctions between the unmediated truths of oral testimony and the altered representations of literature, between documents and rhetorical constructs, or between literal and imagined experience. Jorge Semprun, for example, adopts a much more subtle position than Langer in his account of his own memories of the Holocaust published in 1994, L’Ecriture ou la vie (Writing or Life): according to Semprun (and here he is rejecting one of the commonplaces of Holocaust testimony), the whole, literal truth about the experience of survivors can be told, but only through the medium of highly self-conscious literary artifice which acknowledges its distortions and its interminability (1994: 23-24). Langer, writing from the standpoint of a critic, maintains a distinction between the purity of testimony and the artifice of fiction; Semprun, interned in Buchenwald as a member of the communist resistance in 1942, dismantles such a distinction with his insistence that the truth of testimony positively requires the artifice of literature. The position of Elie Wiesel on these issues is paradoxical and subject to important changes of emphasis through time. Wiesel was in Auschwitz with Primo Levi and in Buchenwald at the same time as Semprun.3 As one of the best known authors of Holocaust literature, he bluntly states that there is and can be no such thing as Holocaust literature (Wiesel 1977b: 190). As a defender of the urgency of memory and imperative of testimony, he has himself always been reluctant to recount his own experiences of the Holocaust. Indeed, until 1994, he had written about them in detail only twice: first in a long book published only in Yiddish in 1956, and second in a shorter French version, La Nuit, published in 1958 and generally regarded as the starting point of his literary career. In the decades after the publication of La Nuit, Wiesel combined journalism, teaching and an increasing involvement in human rights 2. In more detailed discussions, Langer’s position is sometimes more nuanced than this implies. He refers, for example, to ‘the fruitless struggle to expose “the way it was”’ (1995: 15), thus acknowledging that testimony may be no more literally truthful than art; and, in defence of art, he suggests that ‘only art can lead the uninitiated imagination from the familiar realm of man’s fate to the icy atmosphere of the death camps’ (174-75). 3. For comparison between texts by Wiesel and Semprun, see Davis 1991.

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activities with the production of a series of novels (to date he has published ten) in which the Holocaust is always present in the background but rarely described. However, in 1994, somewhat to my surprise, Wiesel published a long collection of memoirs entitled Tous les fleuves vont à la mer (All Rivers Run to the Sea), the second and third chapters of which, occupying about sixty pages of text, cover roughly the same period of Wiesel’s life as narrated in the hundred or so pages of La Nuit. Published thirty-six years after La Nuit, Tous les fleuves vont à la mer provides a remarkable opportunity to chart the shifting contours of memory in the work of one of the Holocaust’s best known survivors. In Tous les fleuves vont à la mer Wiesel acknowledges that he is going over the same ground covered in La Nuit, but he suggests that he will not simply reiterate what was said in the earlier text: ‘My intention is not to repeat what I have recounted in La Nuit, but to look again at that testimony with my eyes of today.’ (1994: 104)4 Wiesel, then, explicitly places Tous les fleuves vont à la mer in a revisionary relationship to La Nuit, and in part this entails amplifying and correcting his earlier version of events. At one point, for example, Wiesel explicitly takes issue with La Nuit. The narrator of La Nuit reported how, on the train taking the Jews of Sighet to Auschwitz, sexual inhibitions were temporarily suspended: ‘Freed from all social censure, the young people openly gave in to their instincts and under the cover of night they coupled [s’accouplaient] in the midst of us, without a thought for anyone else, alone in the world.’ (1958: 33) In Tous les fleuves vont à la mer Wiesel quotes this sentence and insists that it described something that never took place; he claims that the verb s’accouplaient is a mistranslation of the original Yiddish account which refers to people who ‘under the cover of night, succumbed to their excited senses [leurs sens excités]’ (1994: 99). This phrase, Wiesel insists, does not imply sexual intercourse: In fact [En fait], there were timid contacts, hesitant touching which never went beyond the limits of decency. How could I have translated that by ‘coupling’? I do not know. Yes, I do know. Misplaced shame? I was perhaps speaking of myself. I was speaking of my own desires, repressed up to then. I was lying near a woman. I could feel the warmth of her body. For the first time in my life I could touch a woman. Slight contact with arms or knees without her even noticing. The rest is pure fantasy. I remember it [Je m’en souviens]. (99)

4. Translations from the French are my own.

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So Wiesel now establishes the facts of the matter, beginning his self-commentary with the words ‘En fait’ (In fact). The later text, published fifty years after the events described here, claims to be based on a more sound, more accurate memory of events than the account published fourteen years after the deportation of the Jews. The one-sentence paragraph which ends the commentary in Tous les fleuves vont à la mer (‘Je m’en souviens’) abruptly asserts the authority of indisputable memory over the earlier text; in this episode at least, La Nuit is depicted as a fantasmatic text rather than a truthful testimony, its veracity undermined by the fantasies of a sexually repressed child. The revisionary stance of Tous les fleuves vont à la mer towards La Nuit operates in a number of different ways. At some points Wiesel either explicitly rebuts certain readings of La Nuit, or implicitly contradicts the emphasis of the earlier narrative. In one passage, for example, he describes as ‘quasi blasphemous’ the interpretation of those readers who have ‘abusively’ seen La Nuit as indicating a loss of religious faith on the part of the narrator (Wiesel 1994: 109). Instead, Wiesel emphasises the continuity of his religious revolt with attitudes authorised by his Hasidic origins, and he insists: ‘I have never renounced my faith in God.’ (109) Although Wiesel is of course free to define his own religious stance, La Nuit itself provides only equivocal support for this assertion. At moments, it is true, the narrator describes his attitude as one of revolt, not atheism (Wiesel 1994: 74, 78); however, his response to the sight of babies being cremated in Birkenau would seem to justify the interpretation which Wiesel later rejects. The assertion ‘I have never renounced my faith in God’ fits uneasily with these words from La Nuit: ‘Never will I forget those flames which consumed forever my Faith. … Never will I forget those moments which assassinated my God and my soul, and my dreams which came to resemble the desert.’ (44) More telling, in my view, than this questionable piece of selfreading are the silences and elisions in Wiesel’s later account of events. In his description of the train journey to Auschwitz in Tous les fleuves vont à la mer, Wiesel emphasises the unity, solidarity and generosity of the Jews (Wiesel 1994: 99-100). In passing, he mentions a certain Madame Schechter who becomes delirious and sees flames; in a curt sentence he refers to ‘The efforts to silence her’ (100). In La Nuit the narrator is more expansive about what these ‘efforts’ to silence Madame Schechter (spelt Schächter in La Nuit) consisted in. At first, her child attempts to console her, and the women try to calm her down; then, some people force her to sit down, tie her up and gag her (1958: 35). When she frees herself,

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she is again tied up and gagged, though the scene is now becoming more violent: Once more the young people bound and gagged her. They even gave her a few blows. Others encouraged them: – Make her keep quiet, the madwoman! Make her shut up! She is not on her own! Get her to shut up!… She was dealt several blows on the head, blows to kill her. (36)

Later still, the narrator’s use of the first-person plural implies that he also took part in the beatings: ‘As she continued to cry out, we started beating her again, and it was with great difficulty that we got her to be silent.’ (37) So Wiesel’s non-committal phrase ‘The efforts to silence her’ alludes to, whilst concealing, a bitter scene of violence and fear which breaches the solidarity and generosity depicted in Tous les fleuves vont à la mer. Wiesel is sanitising his own earlier account as he excises from it its most painful, traumatic elements. This is clearest, and most significant, in the account of the death of his father. In a short paragraph in Tous les fleuves vont à la mer, Wiesel describes how the death of his father left him free: ‘My father dead, I feel curiously freed. Free to sink. To let myself slip into death.’ (1994: 123) The references to freedom here might alert the reader of La Nuit to the parallel, but very different, passage in that earlier text: ‘And, within myself, if I had searched the depths of my enfeebled mind, I would perhaps have found something like: free at last!…’ (1958: 118). The respective meaning of these two liberations is radically different. In Tous les fleuves vont à la mer, the father leaves the son free to die; in La Nuit the son is freed of someone who, although much loved, has become a burden, a positive threat to the boy’s own chances of survival. La Nuit tortures its own narrator with the lucid consciousness of his own complicity, at least at the level of desire, with the death of his father; thirty-six years on, the work of mourning belatedly undertaken,5 Tous les fleuves vont à la mer lets Wiesel off the hook. The later text renarrates the death of the father as a personal catastrophe, as a moral outrage, but as an event which no longer compromises the integrity of its most intimate witness. And here we are approaching the crux of the difference between La Nuit and Tous les fleuves vont à la mer. The question of which text is more truthful, which gives the more accurate portrayal of the Holocaust, is to my mind irrelevant (though I think that it would be naive to assume that the later, most recent account is the 5. For discussion of the problem of mourning as it emerges in Wiesel’s fiction, see Davis 1994: 141-58.

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most reliable). It is worth recalling the preliminary comment to Charlotte Delbo’s account of her time in Auschwitz in Aucun de nous ne reviendra (None of Us will Come Back): ‘Today, I am not sure that what I have written is true [vrai]. I am sure that it is truthful [véridique].’ (Delbo 1970: 7) What matters is not the historical truth, but the testimonial truthfulness of the narrative; and for those of us who were not witnesses, testimony is inevitably bound up with questions of rhetoric and textuality. So the crucial differences between Wiesel’s two texts are in the modes of representation adopted and the types of textuality which are developed. Thematically, Tous les fleuves vont à la mer replaces the self-laceration, the pain and loss of La Nuit with continuity, fidelity, generosity, respect and love. At the level of textual practice, this corresponds to the shift from the traumatised textuality of La Nuit to the detraumatised prose of Tous les fleuves vont à la mer. The role of trauma in the respective deployment of the two texts is of central importance. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud describes trauma as ‘a breach within an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli’ (Freud 1984: 301); in terms of psychic economy, trauma is an excess of stimulus over what the organism can readily dispose of. In La Nuit, this excess – unliquidated by the narrating subject – permeates every aspect of the narrative, commanding its structure, style and obsessive themes. The whole text is a losing battle to contain the excess of the Holocaust within a hundred short pages, reined in by but also always breaking out of its short paragraphs and curt, breathless sentences: ‘In front of us, these flames. In the air, this smell of burnt flesh. It must be midnight. We had arrived. At Birkenau.’ (Wiesel 1958: 38) Most importantly, the text is punctuated, even generated, by repeated images of sons colluding in the destruction of their fathers: Bela Katz places his own father’s body into the furnace at Birkenau (44); a child beats his father (72); during the long march from Buna to Gleiwitz, Rabbi Eliahou is left behind by his son, who has run on ahead, the narrator believes, ‘in order to free himself from a burden which could reduce his own chances of survival’ (99); on the train to Buchenwald, a man murders his own father for the sake of a piece of bread (108); and finally the narrator’s father dies as the devastating fulfilment of his own most unspeakable, darkest desires. By contrast, Tous les fleuves vont à la mer is a detraumatised text, and ultimately a narrative of reconciliation. Its sentences and paragraphs are longer and more reflective, its anger and bitterness are mediated through a narrator assured of his own position. Moreover, the story of the Holocaust occupies only a short, early section of the book. The text begins with Wiesel’s childhood and a Rabbi’s

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prediction that he will become a great man of Israel (Wiesel 1994: 22); and it ends after 550 pages on the day of his marriage in Jerusalem in April 1969 to Marion, the future mother of his son who will bear his father’s name and ensure continuity with an unforeseeable future. What we are dealing with here is not simply two texts which adopt different views, but two versions of testimony. Dominick LaCapra has described alternative responses to the Holocaust which entail either redemption or repetition, with texts offering either an unpersuasive salvation from trauma or the prospect of being doomed endlessly to repeat it (LaCapra 1994: 192). These alternatives, translated to the testimonial stance itself, can be seen in operation in Wiesel’s Tous les fleuves vont à la mer and La Nuit. Wiesel’s account of his experiences in Tous les fleuves vont à la mer forms part of a personal memoir which narrates his own story from birth to marriage. In La Nuit, the stakes are higher, as the first-person narrator is embroiled in a drama of race, belief and selfhood in which ultimately even the subject’s ability to narrate his own story is corroded. It will perhaps be evident from my tone that I am more moved by the traumatised textuality of La Nuit than by the reconciliations offered in Tous les fleuves vont à la mer. The honesty and power of La Nuit have little to do with its factual veracity; they lie rather in its bold textualisation of trauma, the excess of the Holocaust over the powers of the narrating subject to bear witness. Trauma is not only the subject of the text, but its dynamic organising principle. The only glimmer of hope La Nuit offers is in the survival of the narrator as narrator, preserving at least the theoretical possibility of a future moment when he might be able to order the past into a meaningful whole. In a different context, I have argued that La Nuit has a paradoxically reassuring aspect in that it preserves the norms of narrative coherence which the experiences it describes would seem to corrode (Davis 1994: 61). I now reject that view. The tautness and relentlessness of the work, its tight thematic coherence, are consequences of a trauma inscribed at every level of the text, as La Nuit dwells obsessively on its own inescapable data. If reassurance is to be had, it is in the bland, detraumatised textuality of Tous les fleuves vont à la mer. There can be no question of my criticising Wiesel for finding, fifty years after the event, some degree of reconciliation with the past. To do so would be outrageous on my part. But what is fascinating here for me are the questions raised by Wiesel’s later revisions of Holocaust memory. Most crucially, Wiesel allows us to glimpse how the process of memory is bound up with a process of forgetting. In order to remember the generosity of the camps,

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Wiesel must forget their brutality, as he concedes in Tous les fleuves vont à la mer: ‘I remember, I remember. Unconsciously I have noted everything. Everything? Not everything. Not the executioners.’ (1994: 115) In other words, the memoirs collected in Tous les fleuves vont à la mer entail a strategic forgetting of the memories of La Nuit. The later text enacts a search for what Saul Friedlander has called ‘redemptive closure’, where closure is characterised as ‘an obvious avoidance of what remains indeterminate, elusive and opaque’ (Friedlander 1994: 262, 261). For the individual, he suggests, there can be no effective healing; and for Wiesel and his readers, I believe, the consolations of Tous les fleuves vont à la mer are unlikely to suture the wounds of La Nuit. But, Friedlander continues, in the public domain, we may foresee ‘a tendency towards closure without resolution, but closure nonetheless’ (263). This closure is not brought about by real confrontation or by genuine healing. What Langer calls the ‘culture of consolation’ or Leo Bersani calls ‘the culture of redemption’ (Bersani 1990) operates by transforming the rituals of memory into monuments of forgetting. The exploration of atrocity cannot take place if we expect the slightest glimmer of consolation to derive from it. But it is hard to cope without consolation; and I suspect that the piety which has sometimes characterised Holocaust studies stems in part from the anxious need to shore up a fragile sense of our own moral purity. Unlike the narrator of La Nuit, we hope to be able to show that we are untouched, uncontaminated, uncompromised, by the culture of atrocity.

13

PRIMO LEVI. THE DUTY OF MEMORY Robert Gordon

In recent years memory has become something of a talisman in Holocaust studies, and its invocation to describe the aporia of ‘coming after’ has become almost de rigueur amongst both writers and critics, to the extent that its meaning has been loosened or at least blurred at times. Colin Davis, in this volume, has quoted Lawrence Langer’s recent lucid diagnosis of this trend as a shift to a new phase in our modes of response to the Holocaust, from ‘the province of historians’ to ‘our own imaginations and what we are prepared to admit there’ (1995: 13). The title of this paper, borrowed from a French publication of a 1983 interview with Levi, Le Devoir de mémoire (Levi 1995), is guilty of climbing on the same bandwagon, and carries some of its risks of imprecision. But Langer’s model of phases of response points to a particular value in approaching Primo Levi’s work from this perspective. At first sight, the dominant rhetoric of Levi’s writing would seem to belong to Langer’s first stage, the province of historians who record what happened, but who eschew metaphysical speculation around the meaning and difficulties of recording what happened in writing. The aim and function of this rhetoric is perhaps best encapsulated in the apostrophic lines from the poem-epigraph to Se questo è un uomo, (If This Is a Man) ‘Shemà’: ‘Consider if this is a man/ … Consider if this is a woman/ … Meditate that this has been [questo è stato].’ (1987-90, 1: 1)1 The impact of these bald imperatives should be to underscore the 1. All translations are my own, unless otherwise stated.

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quiddity, the actual being of the event, not the process of its becoming past or indeed of its reemergence as memory in some projected future. Nevertheless the workings of memory do seep through to the surface in Levi’s testimonial writing; and they do so, as the phrase ‘the duty of memory’ is intended to suggest, through his persistent pursuit of an ethical response to his experience as a deportee and writer of testimony. And since this ethical dimension of his work frames the historical dimension, the relaying of the event, as another world which is not captured by chronology, memory is distilled into a less contingent phenomenon. In other words, a looser relationship is forged between then and now. My aim, then, is to examine some of the ways in which Levi makes both the act of remembering and its consequences of ethical value, and thus instils a ‘duty of memory’ in himself and in his readers; and by enveloping his readers in a sort of collective meditation, returns in some fashion to the historical dimension and to an historical consciousness of the Holocaust. In this context, Langer’s second phase becomes an amplification and transformation of memory within the dynamic of testimony. As a complement and counterpoint to Levi, I have made a number of references to an extraordinary recent work of testimony which revolves around precisely this issue and which is in continuous dialogue with Levi among others: Jorge Semprun’s L’Ecriture ou la vie (Writing or Life, 1994). As in many other areas of his testimonial work, the representation of memory in Levi runs along two distinct axes: one traces a line from Auschwitz to his life before deportation in Turin and Milan, evoked in the early chapters of Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table, Levi 1987-90, 1: 429-549); the other moves from the perspective of the survivor back towards the terrifying contemplation of Auschwitz. A form of radical fracture between these two lines of recalled experience is axiomatic in all Holocaust testimony, but Levi expends much energy in building bridges of analogy and equivalence (even if inverted equivalence) between them – what Cicioni (1995), drawing on La chiave a stella (The Wrench, Levi 1987-90, 2: 1-181 [104-26]), calls ‘bridges of knowledge’ – to reach an impression of ‘common sense’. In the field of memory, the strongest link between the two axes is their shared dual nature as always both intellective and sensory, voluntary and involuntary. To shift Langer’s terms slightly, understanding memory for the survivor means understanding not only what we are prepared to admit to our imaginations, but also that which we cannot erase from them. The workings of involuntary memory are most evident in Levi’s use of dreams which play a powerful role in his depiction of the

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subjective experience of the camps, representing a locus of instinctual resistance of the human to systematic brutalisation. He explains how every prisoner shared two types of dream, each of which is bound up with processes of memory: the first was a dream of luxuriant food and drink and company, thoughts of which were constantly banished by the conscious mind as a strategy to survive the desperate hunger and thirst of the present; the second was a dream of returning home, only to find that their story is too horrific to be believed even by their closest family (1987-90, 1: 57-58). The two dreams have in common a pattern of denial or disavowal which is threatened by the involuntary eruption of subconscious memory into the present, whether the fantasised foodstuffs in the first case or the survivor himself in the second. Such memory is dangerous because it represents a visceral return of the repressed, uncontrolled by rationality: it blurs the boundary between the past and the present, subconscious and conscious. After his return, the same pattern is seen to recur in terrifying form for Levi. La tregua (The Truce) closes with a dream that is the principal focus of Semprun’s dialogue with Levi (Semprun 1994: 23360), and one of the most powerful moments of despair in all his work. He has finally reached home, and rediscovered a semblance of normal life, but: A dream full of terror has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer intervals. It is a dream within a dream, varied in detail, single in substance. […] as the dream proceeds, gradually or all at once, each time differently, everything collapses and disintegrates around me. … Now everything has turned to chaos; I am alone in the centre of a grey and turbid nothing, and now I know what this means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager once more, and nothing was true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief hiatus, a deception of the senses, a dream; my family, nature in bloom, my home. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream which continues ice-cold a well-known voice resounds; a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, ‘Wstawac’. (1987-90, 1: 422-23)

Suddenly the former reality resurfaces and obliterates the present, inverting its relation with memory, making the present into a dream and the unbearable past into reality. This is the agony that returns ‘at an uncertain hour’, an agony of a memory that does not only constitute or reconstitute the self, but threatens its dissolution. There is no ethical content or value to this memory, only the oppression of the senses. Sensory memory of this kind, in the

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shape of memories of smells, provides a running thread of imagery for Semprun in his account of his experiences in Buchenwald and his recall of them: It struck me that my most personal, least shared memory … which made me what I am … which sets me apart from others … which cuts me off from, whilst identifying me with the human race (…) which burns in my memory with a flame of horror and abjection … and of pride too … is the hardy, heady memory of the smell of the crematorium: flat, sickening … the smell of burnt flesh over the Ettersberg hill. (1994: 302)

Semprun’s perceptions find parallels in Levi who uses the sense of smell to figure a deeply personal, uneasy and ineradicable memory in two pieces of writing: a short story called ‘I mnemagoghi’ (‘The Mnemagogues’, 1987-90, 3: 5-13) and an essay ‘Il linguaggio degli odori’ (‘The Language of Smells’, 1987-90, 3: 808-11). The short story tells of an old provincial doctor Montesanto who has withdrawn into a secluded, strange world where he embodies and captures his memories in chemical compounds, each preserved in a flask to prevent their fading: ‘I can only think with horror of the possibility of even one of my memories being lost.’ (1987-90, 3: 9) Montesanto has come to exist only as he is embodied in his perfumes: ‘you could say that they [these ‘mnemagogues’] are my very self’ (1987-90, 3: 9). The young visitor Morandi is at first seduced by the game of identifying the different smells, as though entering into Montesanto’s being, but he comes away strangely disturbed, needing fresh air and exercise as though to cleanse himself of some poison. In ‘Il linguaggio degli odori’, by contrast, Levi celebrates the sense of smell, linking it to his choice of a career as a chemist (as he and others have linked his writing and attitude to Auschwitz to his chemistry). He notes the striking power of smell as a marker of memory, even when compared to sight and hearing which are to an extent more readily manipulable. And he illustrates his point by recourse to his time in Auschwitz: as a prisoner, he happened upon momentary encounters with familiar smells from the outside world which worked as violent reminders of his appalling predicament; and as a visitor to the site forty years later, he found himself overwhelmed not by any sight or sound, but by the ‘smell of Poland’ (1987-90, 3: 811). Semprun’s comments on olfactory memory, quoted above, also emerge from and revolve around his return to Buchenwald, and although Levi carefully specifies that his ‘smell of Poland’ is a sweet one, it is not too fanciful to detect not far beneath the surface the residue of another, far more insidious aroma.

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Dreams and smells are two analogous examples of means for the deepest strata of traumatising memory to circumvent subconscious processes of censorship. They are subjective, and as such not subject to the processes of manipulation, rationalisation and denial that characterises Levi’s extended discussion of victims’ and oppressors’ memory in the essay ‘La memoria dell’offesa’ (‘The Memory of the Offence’, 1987-90, 1: 663-73). There, he is fascinated by the vacillation of memory on the borderline of conscious and subconscious control, noting how a false account of an event with repeated ‘recollection’ can be taken as true even by its creator, whether the original motivation for deception was protection from trauma or from prosecution. Dreams and responses to smells cannot be controlled, and as such can overwhelm their subject, as Montesanto illustrates. Furthermore, in the camps, they are radically intensified as rational; elective thought is attenuated. This intensification is well illustrated by Levi’s discussion in another essay, ‘Comunicare’ (‘Communicating’, 1987-90, 1: 720-34), of what he calls ‘mechanical memory’ (1987-1990, 1: 731), and the example is of particular interest since it hinges on the relationship between memory, language and writing. Mechanical memory is what Levi calls his and other prisoners’ tendency to etch automatically and irremoveably into their memories whole strings of foreign words (Polish, German, Yiddish, Russian, Dutch) heard in the babel of the camp, without having the slightest idea of their meaning. He calls these snatches ‘indistinct fragments torn from the indistinct reality; the product of a useless and unconscious effort to forge meaning where there is none’ (1987-90, 1: 731). Later these form the basis of many key moments of his written accounts, as was seen above with the haunting Polish wake up command, ‘Wstawac’. By extension, Levi constantly and at times jarringly casts himself as immune to the fading of memory when dealing with the camps, as though he had lived his time there on a higher, ineradicable plane of existence: for example, he ends ‘La memoria dell’offesa’ (‘The Memory of the Offence’), a chapter dedicated entirely to the fallibility and self-serving distortions of memory, with a disclaimer: despite all he has said, his own memories seem to him ‘untouched by the slippages I have described’ (1987-90, 1: 673). Similarly, in the preface to his collection Racconti e saggi (Stories and Essays), he portrays himself, with typical modesty, as ‘a normal man with a good memory who happened to get caught up in whirlwind’ (1987-90, 3: 833; emphasis added). But as with his favourite literary role model, the Ancient Mariner, this condition of heightened memory is a curse and an intolerable burden. In an article entitled ‘Un “giallo” del Lager’

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(‘A Mystery in the Lager’, 1987-90, 3: 887-90), he is presented with a photo of a fellow deportee whom he had hardly known at all, but finds he remembers him without hesitation: ‘At times, but only in dealing with Auschwitz, I feel like a brother of Ireneo Funes, Borges’ “memorioso”, who remembers every leaf of every tree that he has ever seen, and who “had more memories himself than all the men who had ever lived since the world began”.’ (1987-90, 3: 889) In Borges’ 1942 story ‘Funes el memorioso’, Funes is ultimately overwhelmed by his infinitely detailed memory. He cannot communicate in normal language, since language requires categorisation by similarities, whereas he is swamped by infinite differences (he tries to invent an infinite, asystemic language). He tries to explain his condition to the narrator by saying that our normal perceptions of reality are to his as our dreams are to our waking reality. Eventually he dies, aged only twenty-two. The dilemma Levi implicitly sets himself in confronting these aspects of the involuntary memory of the prisoner and the survivor is to assign them value of an ethical kind, to move from the pathology of testimony, where memory is subjective and overwhelming and cannot be shared fully with the reader, to an ethics of testimony, in which both conscious, voluntary elaboration and some form of collective experience between writer and reader can be reestablished. Thus if there is no meaning as such to the Holocaust, its recording might have use and value in a pragmatic sense. The moral duty of striving for this value lies behind Levi’s angry polemic against what he saw as specious theories of incommunicability in ‘Comunicare’: ‘Except in cases of pathological incapacity we can and we must communicate. … To deny that we can communicate is false: we always can. To refuse to communicate is morally wrong [è colpa].’ (1987-90, 1: 721) Semprun agrees: ‘One can always say everything [on peut toujours tout dire], in the end. The ineffable which people harp on about is merely an alibi. Or a sign of laziness’; and earlier, ‘Not that the lived experience is unsayable [indicible]. It was unliveable [invivable] which is quite a different matter’ (1994: 23). To reject the alibi is to accept the ‘duty of memory’. The ethical turn, then, is a turn to deliberated memory, or to an experience of the present as always already a potential act of memory. It begins in the camp itself, as Levi explains in Le Devoir de mémoire, when evoking his doomed, brief attempts to take notes on what was happening in the camp: ‘these notes … are very real: I really did have a notebook, but they never got beyond twenty lines. I was too afraid, writing was extremely dangerous. … I knew I would not be able to keep them. It was materially impossible … there was no way of keeping anything on you. I only had my mem-

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ory.’ (1995: 26-27) The role of the observer adopted by Levi in the camp, informed by his training as a chemist, is envisaged as both a strategy for survival and resistance, and as a preliminary step towards writing down the observations at a later date (cf. 1987-90, 1: 765). Recorded impressions are written into a sort of ‘book of my memory’. Similarly, the mechanical memorising of foreign phrases mentioned above is not only a token of that ‘useless and unconscious effort to forge meaning where there is none’, but also a preliminary to something of greater value: ‘Or perhaps this useless and paradoxical memory had another meaning and another aim: it was an unconscious preparation for “after” for an improbable survival in which every scrap of experience would become a piece of a vast mosaic.’ (1987-90, 1: 726) The after, the vast mosaic to which those fragments might contribute is not, however, simply an explication of what was inexplicable before. The foreign phrases can perhaps be translated afterwards but they remain, as they must remain, fragments of a senseless universe. Levi goes on to explain how he has made a conscious effort to retain his bastardised camp accent and the jargon of his German, even after learning standard German in the postwar years, for the same reason that he has kept his tattooed number on his arm: to turn the imposed and unchosen into a chosen, and thus ethically determined act of memory (1987-90, 1: 730). Furthermore, the tattoo is one of Levi’s key examples of the ‘Useless Violence’ of the camp system to which an entire chapter of I sommersi e I salvati (The Drowned and the Saved) is dedicated: the detail with which he explores there the nature of ‘uselessness’ as the characterising feature of Nazi oppression only adds to the impression that his own work aims at a turn towards the useful. In both these examples (his German and his tattoo) use is activated in situations of communication, of collective interaction where his memory in the present can be ‘demonstrated’ in order to encourage some form of collective memory of the offence in others. Levi found a way to make his mental notes, the useless memory of words, and his truncated camp language into a preliminary vocabulary later elaborated in the fuller, ethically acute language of his texts. Once more, the comparison with Semprun is instructive, since despite the profound affinities the latter feels with Levi, his book L’Ecriture ou la vie revolves around his absolute inability to fulfil his intention to write down his experience in Buchenwald until more than fifteen years after the event. He chooses life over the death, over the asphyxia of writing memory: ‘I had come back to life. That is to oblivion [l’oubli]. … I had chosen a long course of treatment with aphasia, deliberate amnesia, in order to survive.’ (1994: 205) Levi,

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by contrast, had managed to write his memory and to turn it towards life. One might say that Levi reinstates the aut aut of the title of Semprun’s book as it was first conceived, which hauntingly echoes the actual title throughout: L’Ecriture ou la mort. Two further moments of Levi’s work evoke powerfully the ethical and communal value of acts of memory, and both develop the link between these acts and writing and language. The first is perhaps the best known of all the episodes in Se questo è un uomo, the chapter ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ (1987-90, 1: 112-18). With an hour to spend fetching and carrying soup, Levi and Jean il Pikolo enter into one of the rare moments of reprieve when human communication is still possible in the camp, and as usually occurs, their humanity and their memories – of homes, cities, studies, of their mothers (1987-90, 1: 114) – return all at once. When Jean asks to be taught some Italian, Levi starts off for no apparent reason – and thus, initially, as if involuntarily – reciting the famous episode of Ulysses from Dante’s Commedia. The lines come to him, partially, with gaps and leaps and inversions, and he can only translate them into his rough, paraphrasing French. The rest of the chapter comes in a sort of stream of consciousness as Levi strains to recapture the lines he learned at school, finding in them personal memories – of the mountains between Milan and Turin, for example – and other, intuited meanings and interpretations, for himself and Jean, for the camp world and for all humanity. Spiralling out from the halfrecalled text, the act of memory is thus only indirectly significant for the content of Dante’s ‘canto’ (although clearly Levi’s appeals to Jean are in part a degraded, inverted and yet somehow equally heroic version of Ulysses’s appeal to his companions). It is rather the rote-learned relic that is being put to use here, in building a bridge of humanity to Jean and to the outside world. A spontaneous impulse is being transformed into an act of ethical value. In I sommersi e I salvati (1987-90, 1: 764-65, 767), forty years later, Levi glosses this episode in his discussion of the ‘Intellectual in Auschwitz’, setting his own uses of culture against Jean Améry’s damning aphorism ‘no bridge led from death in Auschwitz to Death in Venice’ (Améry 1966: 33).2 Levi agrees in large part with Améry, confirming that cultural baggage was indeed of little practical use in orienting oneself or understanding: ‘Reason, art, poetry cannot help to decipher a place from which they have been banished.’ (1987-90, 1: 767) Thus such residues were to be set alongside those resurgent memories of home and family which one could never entirely suppress but which it was wise to avoid. How2. Améry’s statement is quoted in Langer 1995: 55.

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ever, the case of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ is an exception to this rule, since it offered a displaced, oblique route to some sort of value and understanding: ‘Culture was indeed of use to me: not always, and perhaps in subterranean and unforeseen ways, but it served a purpose, and maybe even saved me.’ (1987-90,1: 764) Remembering Ulysses was a path to both a renewal of a sense of selfhood – ‘a way (…) of rediscovering myself’ (1987-90, 1: 765) – and to at least a mirage of communal understanding and memory: thus it is Jean il Pikolo who is the real hero of the episode, since it is his intuition that there is something more than Dante being evoked here which charges the episode with poignant value. The core of Ulysses’ speech which, almost by accident, seems to provide a momentary revelation for Levi and Jean, links with the second instance of the conjunction between ethical memory and writing. Levi remembers perfectly the most famous terzina of the speech, Ulysses’ appeal to the moral dignity and prowess of being human: ‘Consider well the seed that gave you birth./ You were not made to live your lives as brutes,/ but to be followers of worth and knowledge.’ (Inferno, XXVI, 118-20; tr. A. Mandelbaum) The incitement speaks directly to the two prisoners who have all but lost their human dignity, all but become brutes. But it also represents an appeal to an atavistic humanity, to the seed or origin. This idea and the imperative ‘consider’ take us back to the poem ‘Shemà’, where the same imperative (and its cognate ‘meditate’) sets up precisely a communication between text and reader as an ethical obligation, a challenge to what Semprun calls the ‘radical Evil’ that the Final Solution represented. The bind between the imperative of ‘Shemà’ and memory is strengthened yet further if we return to the source of the poem, the prayer at the heart of the Jewish faith from Deuteronomy 6, 4-7. The prayer opens with the central monotheistic declaration: ‘Here O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One’. But the rest is taken up almost entirely with an injunction to memory, to the recording and passing down of this single truth: Write these words on your heart, teach them to your children and repeat them when you are in your house, and when you are walking, when you are in your beds and when you rise. And bind them on your arm and between your eyes to remember. And write them on the doorposts of your home and on your gates.

And Levi’s poem too moves from the quiddity of ‘this has been’ to the hard tangible incision of its setting down: ‘I command these words to you./ Etch them into your heart.’ (1987-90, 1: 1)

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The ethical turn from involuntary to voluntary memory that has been sketched out here is built in part on another, even more familiar dyad, that of body and mind. Levi is far from unique amongst Holocaust survivors in feeling particularly traumatised by the absence of the victims’ bodies, and thus the radical difficulty of any act of mourning or memorial. Federico Cereja, who conducted the interview Le Devoir de mémoire, ends his postface to the book, ‘Contre l’oubli’ (‘Against Forgetting’: 80-81), by evoking Levi’s Pirandellian short story ‘Nel parco’ (‘In the Park’, 1987-90, 3: 295305), in which he imagines all fictional characters living in a park where they survive only as long as they remain in the collective memory of the real world. At the end of the story, the protagonist, Antonio Casella, finds his body slowly but inexorably fading away, until it is all but dispersed into light and wind, ‘his memory extinguished, and his testimony complete’ (1987-90, 3: 305). Historical memory is here a sort of afterlife founded on the transmission of memory to others, through testimony. Similarly, the 1978 poem ‘La bambina di Pompei’ (‘The girl in Pompei’, 1987-90, 2: 553), describes the preserved, incinerated body of a girl in Pompei which causes the visitors to relive her fear and anguish. But no body remains to help us remember Anne Frank or a girl from Hiroshima. The same contrast is made at the outset of Giorgio Bassani’s meditation on mourning and melancholy, Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of the Finzi Contini), where the Finzi Contini’s empty family tomb is set against the inhabited, domestic tombs of the Etruscans preserved near Rome (1980: 7-13). Levi’s poem ends with an appeal to those in power to pause before destroying the world in a nuclear holocaust, echoing both ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ and ‘Shemà’: ‘Before you push the button, pause and consider well [considerate].’ (1987-90, 2: 553) The appeal is to a recognition of the humanity of the individual and the individuality of the human being, even in her exemplarity. And in its broad sweep of history, the poem forges a link between Levi’s ethical uses of memory and the historical consciousness contained within his work: history returns as itself prone to trauma and loss, to fading along with memory, as in ‘Nel parco’. The duty of memory for Levi is to reinvent collective history after the loss of testimonial, sensory memory, since, as Semprun puts it: ‘One day soon, no one will any longer have the real memory of that smell: it will be no more than a phrase, a literary reference, an idea of odour. And so, odourless [inodore, donc].’ (Semprun 1994: 302)

14

LA DOULEUR: DURAS, AMNESIA AND DESIRE Emma Wilson

In this chapter I am going to concentrate on the first part of Marguerite Duras’s text, La Douleur, which was published in 1985. This first part is a text of suspension and preemptive grief which records a woman’s experiences as she waits to discover whether her husband will return from Dachau. It is a text which ostensibly focuses on the possibility of creating narrative testimony to personal suffering. It will be the purpose of this paper to analyse the status of La Douleur as testimony and its reflections on the survival of the witness. In a text which depends so extensively on indeterminacy and interpretative insecurity, what conclusions is the reader to draw about the reliability of the account offered? How far does language here give access to memory? I will argue that Duras creates in La Douleur a text in conflict with itself, a narrative testimony which radically calls into question the relation between retelling and survival. My theorising of testimony here is crucially indebted to the book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. Felman states in her first chapter: ‘Oftentimes contemporary works of art use testimony both as the subject of their drama and as the medium of their literal transmission. Films like Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, The Sorrow and the Pity by Marcel Ophuls, or Hiroshima mon amour by Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais, instruct us in the ways in which testimony has become a crucial mode of our relation to the

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events of our time.’ (Felman & Laub 1992: 5) She goes on further to explore the meaning of testimony in terms of both form and content, saying: ‘As a relation to events, testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference.’ (5) It is precisely this notion of the memory overwhelmed by occurrences, and of events in excess of our frames of reference, which is of relevance to this reading of La Douleur. Now, the italicised preface to La Douleur has quickly become a notorious fragment for readers of Duras. The preface gives her reader the illusion that she is framing the text retrospectively, as she publishes it in 1985. Yet in fact I would argue that Duras attempts to deny the possibility of framing, drawing attention to the fact that she believes the events she recounts exceed our frames of reference, and disable the conditions of narrative. This preface can be read, in itself, as a confession of amnesia, and a testimony to the annihilation of memory. La Douleur here appears to bear witness both to a loss of memory, and to the loss of the means to represent memory. Here Duras’s text implicitly draws attention to the nexus of questions about the possibility of representation post-Auschwitz and in postwar texts in general. Since it appears in an essay on Duras, I’ll quote Kristeva’s comments on this question. Kristeva reminds us in Soleil noir: Dépression et mélancolie: ‘What those monstrous and painful sights do damage to are our systems of perception and representation. As if overtaxed or destroyed by too powerful a breaker, our symbolic means find themselves hollowed out, nearly wiped out, paralysed.’ (Kristeva 1987: 223) What the reader of La Douleur comes to question is, in effect, the seeming impossibility of the existence of the text Duras presents before us. La Douleur opens with a moment of revelation as Duras narrates the discovery of two notebooks of a journal in her blue cupboards at Neauphle-le-Château. The discovery is immediately placed within a narrative of amnesia. Duras writes: ‘I have no recollection of having written it.’ (Duras 1985: 3) Here the reader may note that it is not the events themselves that have been forgotten, but, more specifically, their placing in narrative. Duras’s narrating persona recognises the text as her own, claiming: ‘I know I did, I know it was I who wrote it’ (3); she recognises her handwriting and her own involvement in the events described. What has been suppressed or annihilated, however, is the act of writing, thus she specifies: ‘But I can’t see myself writing the diary.’ (3) She undermines the possibility of viewing the self in the act of bearing wit-

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ness as she questions: ‘When would I have done so, in what year, at what times of day, in what house? I can’t remember.’ (3) This statement of the lack of memory is then further overlain in the text with a more anxious analysis of the impossibility of testimony. Duras seeks to suggest that it would have been unthinkable to have produced this text as a literal diary recounting its events day by day. She states, giving a suggestion of lucidity, of certainty: ‘One thing is certain: it is inconceivable to me that I could have written it while I was actually awaiting Robert L.’s return.’ (4) Revealing this to her readers, she deprives us necessarily of clues as to the real conditions of production of the text. Yet the suggestion that it would have been impossible to write this during the wait for the return of Robert L., is further undermined by the suggestion that in fact it is the very writing of the text at any time which appears an impossibility to her: ‘How could I have written this thing I still can’t put a name to, and that appals me when I reread it?’ (4) That it appears impossible to have written the text at any time, ironically reinstates the possibility of its being produced in the very context of the events it describes. Duras works insistent doubt into her text, interweaving stark immediacy with reasoned retrospection, perpetually undoing her reader’s security in her text and her text’s commitment to the possibility of bearing witness. Writing about the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, Dori Laub suggests persuasively that testimony to trauma is necessary to survival. He claims: ‘The survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their story; they also needed to tell their story in order to survive.’ (Felman & Laub 1992: 78) Laub details the experience of retelling as one which builds on absence and annihilation; he notes: ‘The victim’s narrative - the very process of bearing witness to massive trauma - does indeed begin with someone who testifies to an absence, to an event that has not yet come into existence, in spite of the overwhelming and compelling nature of the reality of its occurrence.’ (57) Laub finds in the survivor an imperative need to tell ‘and thus come to know one’s story’ (Felman & Laub 1992: 78). What I will argue here is that La Douleur offers a more troubled account in historical or psychoanalytic terms. Duras’s text is not only one which testifies to what Kristeva has described as the fracturing of our means of representation, it is also one which, all the more disturbingly, denies the possibility of ever knowing one’s own story. It looks, consequently, and perhaps unethically, towards a different mode of survival. Duras ends her narrative of the rediscovery of the journal with the statement: ‘I found myself confronted with a tremendous chaos of thought and feeling that I couldn’t bring myself to tamper with,

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and beside which literature was something of which I felt ashamed.’ (Duras 1985: 4) She posits her text as raw and disordered, and as one which has acquired testimonial status necessarily placing it outside the bounds of the confected literary work of art. As Leslie Hill suggests, in his revelatory reading of La Douleur, for Duras the work has value ‘precisely to the extent that it precedes - and thus exceeds - literature in the received sense’ (Hill 1993: 125). For Hill, La Douleur is in many senses a text of survival. Developing an argument which might be set in parallel with that of Felman and Laub, he describes La Douleur as ‘a work that bears witness to the sheer impossibility of bearing witness’ (Hill 1993: 129). He shows with great subtlety how the text is haunted by ‘the fragile and speculative character of those boundaries that make representation possible’ (127). Hill suggests also that ‘the diary owes its existence to the indestructible quality of writing as an act of witness’ (124). He notes that, coming forty years after the events it records: ‘La Douleur is naturally unable to add anything of importance to public knowledge of the Resistance and the fate of those prisoners who were sent to concentration camps’ (126). Yet he is notably concerned to stress the importance of the text as an act of witnessing. As a result of subtle textual analysis of differences between the text of La Douleur and the fragments of the original diary which were published anonymously in the feminist magazine Sorcières in 1976, Hill concludes that ‘the [later] text is further depersonalised, and the act of bearing witness is no longer a private act, authorised solely by personal experience’ (Hill 1993: 125-6). It certainly seems crucial to argue that the import of La Douleur extends beyond the realm of personal experience: it is a text of more than private concern, despite the supposed familiarity of its historical evidence. The imbrication of the personal and the public is necessarily peculiarly marked in texts which stand as testimony and are shaped by suffering and survival. But I am interested in questioning which personal truth is made public in La Douleur and whether the text itself is seen to ensure the survival of its witness. What I would like to suggest is that the possibility of survival as envisaged in La Douleur is in many ways more problematic and more ambivalent than the positive acclamation of writing as an act of witness might suggest. Indeed I will argue the text not only testifies to the impossibility of bearing witness but that it also questions the notion that the act of narration can itself be redemptive. While the public importance of testimony to trauma is undeniable, what Duras comes to question here is the efficacy of narrative cure. In La Douleur Duras works perpetually to dispossess her text: despite the opening statement that La Douleur is one of the most

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important things in her life, it is a text which she has rejected and repressed; it is a text of abandonment. In the preface Duras questions: ‘And how could I have left it lying for years in a house in the country that’s regularly flooded in winter’ (Duras 1985: 4). In this statement she at once suggests and suppresses the desire for the text to be destroyed and her memory drowned in the winter floods. In this sense, the publication of the text testifies not, I would argue, to the imperative necessity of testimony, but rather, to the need to bear witness to the very inadequacy of testimony, to the falsification of narrative and to the horrifying inability of the self here to be a reliable witness. We should remember, to begin with, that La Douleur is the testimony not of a survivor of a concentration camp, but of an apparent witness to another’s survival. It is a text of displaced suffering which hesitantly, painstakingly, reenacts a witness’s presentiments of suffering and death. Duras shows the narrator taking the suffering of her husband into herself and she shows how the witness’s fear denies the possibility of survival. The narrator confesses: ‘His death is in me, beating in my head’ (Duras 1985: 6). The narrative is taken over with a tortured fantasy of Robert L. lying dead in a ditch with his head facing into the ground, his legs curled up like a foetus. The narrator imagines: ‘He thought of me before he died. The pain is so great it can’t breathe, it gasps for air. Pain needs room.’ (7) La Douleur is given a place within the text, and indeed this is the suffering which Duras’s text takes as its subject. It is palpable for her reader. She sees the imagined body as one in a series lining the roads of Germany: ‘All along the roads of Germany there are men lying like him. Thousands, tens of thousands, and him.’ (78) This vision, and the way it is used to displace the lack of knowledge of the fate of Robert L., absorbs the narrator to such an extent that her own life is suspended. As she writes: ‘I fall asleep beside him every night, in the black ditch, beside him as he lies dead.’ (10) The text remains tacitly poised between this image of annihilation, and the gradually returning fragments of hope and hints of survival. Duras’s obsession is with the decomposition of the self in the face of suffering. As she writes: ‘My face falls apart, changes. I fall apart, come undone, change. There’s no one in the room where I am. I can’t feel my heart anymore. Horror mounts in a slow flood, I’m drowning’ (37). In an interview with Michelle Porte, Duras speaks in similar terms of her heroine Lol V. Stein, describing her as a figure drowning, whose image resurfaces yet incessantly slips beneath the water (Duras & Porte 1977: 99). Duras’s heroine is intent on a suicidal act of remembering which undermines any stable knowledge within the text, and denies the reader any resolu-

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tion. In La Douleur, in the slow eradication of her self, Duras’s narrator appears to lose any knowledge of Robert L., questioning: ‘Who is this Robert L.? Has he ever existed?’ (Duras 1985: 37) And in a sense Robert L. is left always already dead in the text. In literal terms he survives. This we learn as Duras’s narrative significantly slips out of the diary form into retrospective narration, as she writes: ‘I can’t remember what day it was, whether it was in April, no, it was a day in May when one morning at eleven o’clock the phone rang.’ (50) The immediate testimony dissolves into a more overtly mediated account and the reader loses his/her illusion of privileged access to the events described. Appropriately Robert L.’s actual return is eradicated, and goes unwitnessed by the narrator: ‘I can’t remember exactly what happened. He must have looked at me and recognised me and smiled. I shrieked no, that I didn’t want to see. I started to run again, up the stairs this time. I was shrieking, I remember that.’ (53) It seems possible to argue, indeed, that La Douleur is a text which in effect refuses to bear witness to the survival of Robert L. This is instead a testimony to the almost unwilling survival of the narrator who states: ‘Sometimes I’m amazed I don’t die; a cold blade plunged deep into the living flesh, night and day, and you survive.’ (63) And this survival is predicated not on the act of telling her story and claiming the act of narration. This is the impression we are given at the end of the text as the narrator says, speaking of her friend Ginetta: ‘Every day she thinks I’m going to be able to talk about him, and I still can’t. But that day I tell her I think I shall be able to one day. And that I’ve written something about the return. Tried to say something about that love.’ (67) Again we are left in doubt as to the exact status of the text we read, left to wonder whether the writing mentioned here in the end of La Douleur in fact itself forms the body of the text. Duras leaves the creation of written testimony only ever as an ambivalent possibility within the text; the means to survival to which she testifies implicitly, yet quite unequivocally, is in fact of a very different order. Early in La Douleur, as the narrator imagines the horror of Robert L.’s death, she says: ‘I feel two strong, gentle hands around my shoulders, raising my head from the table. I’m pressed against D.’ (10) She continues, saying: ‘It’s a comfort to have someone’s arms around you. Sometimes you might almost think you feel better.’ (10) But here her pain returns and she wishes D. will leave so that she can lie in bed alone with the phantom body of Robert L. D.’s presence pervades La Douleur, but his character remains almost anonymous, reduced to the bare initial which designates his name. It will, however, be D. who goes to fetch Robert L. from Dachau, saving him, in effect, and effecting his survival. And it

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will be D. who allows the narrator herself to survive and to escape her suffering. A few pages from the end of La Douleur, after pained images of Robert L. gradually learning to eat, to recover, to survive, the narrator reveals: ‘More strength came back. Another day I told him that we had to get a divorce, that I wanted a child by D., that it was because of the name that the child would bear. He asked if one day we might get together again. I said no.’ (63) The reader who is, I think it would be fair to say, completely nonplussed by this statement, learns that the narrator’s survival depends on her divorce (understood both literally and metaphorically) from Robert L. It is in her annihilation of memory and her rediscovery of love with D. that survival becomes possible. And it is the testimony to this survival that Duras attempts to lose and dispossess as she carelessly abandons her text. La Douleur should, as I have been suggesting implicitly, be read in the context of Duras’s other fictions: the text should not be seen to stand alone as testimony which exceeds the status of the literary (as Duras herself claims). This rewriting of survival can be understood more fully in relation to questions of the creation of the self which surface repeatedly in Duras’s fictions, and it is to this point that I wish, finally, to turn. In her obsessive enactment of dramas of the self, of herself and her self as other, Duras would appear to provide her reader with a perpetually reiterated analysis of identity and performance. Identity is fractured in her texts where she dwells on the impossibility of anything but partial vision, exploring both the inevitable subjectivity of her narratives and the disintegration of the self in dramas of regret and dispossession. La Douleur may be read as a performance of an identity in pieces, as a testimony to a dispersal of the self in suffering. Yet the reader might note that the radical force of the text comes in the narrator’s ability to bring this performance to a close and take on a new role in the drama she stages in the text. This drama is dependent on the supporting role of a lover who will at once resemble, yet displace the former partner. Thus D.’s hands reach out to touch the narrator and model a new part for her to play; thus Lol V. Stein takes Jacques Hold as her lover, displacing the lost image of Michael Richardson; thus the female protagonist makes love with the Japanese man at Hiroshima, obliterating her pain in his desire. Duras’s texts appear to demonstrate and find narrative forms to express the fictitious and fractured nature of identity. Yet in the dramas of desire she enacts, her characters appear always impelled by the search for an illusory survival within a displaced scenario of passion. In Hiroshima mon amour Duras returns indeed to the territory of La Douleur as a pained protagonist seeks to bear witness to her

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loss of memory of suffering, to her survival through amnesia. The text takes the form of a displacement and reenactment of her encounter at Nevers with a German soldier, of their passion and of his inevitable death (left lying shot and face down on a quayside). It may be possible to read Hiroshima mon amour as a text of testimony, as Felman does in the quotation with which I began, or one of survival through narration. Yet what I want to argue too, is that it bears witness above all to passion and to the illusion of survival through desire. Duras creates the brief, seductive suggestion that in the performance of desire, memory is annihilated and the fracturing of the self denied. Yet her testimony to this is only itself tentative; where in La Douleur the reader is offered no further vision into the relations with D. which are projected in the end of the text, in Hiroshima mon amour a restorative relationship is placed centre stage and the reader very soon becomes aware that this love affair is always already circumscribed by its own ending. It is in its brevity and impossibility that the love holds solace. Its ending offers not the resurgence of suffering, but paradoxically, the horror of forgetting as the heroine cries: ‘I’ll forget you! I’m forgetting you already! Look how I’m forgetting you! Look at me!’ (Duras 1960: 79) Duras’s texts bear witness not to the necessity of testimony, but to the inevitable, tortured necessity of forgetting. Her fictions incessantly attempt to place trauma in narrative, foretelling yet never entirely figuring the annihilation of the self. Where in the ending of Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (The Rapture of Lol V. Stein) the heroine does not die but merely sleeps alone, surviving in the ryefield, Duras appears herself, in the repeated performances of her fictions, to testify paradoxically to the possibility of survival, not through narration but through amnesia and desire.

15

MYTH, MEMORY, TESTIMONY, JEWISHNESS IN GRETE WEIL’S MEINE SCHWESTER ANTIGONE Moray McGowan

The Antigone myth is one of the recurrent motifs of resistance in European culture. Grete Weil’s novel Meine Schwester Antigone (Antigone, My Sister, 1980), even though – and precisely because – it focuses on a narrator who did not resist, and is set in a narrative present (West Germany around 1980) temporarily removed from the Nazi period, addresses the theme in relation to the agonies of memory, the problematics of testimony, and the temptation to self-deception inherent in ‘Jewish’ victim identity. Comparison with Lea Fleischmann’s autobiographical Dies ist nicht mein Land (This Is Not My Country), also 1980, helps position the novel. Fleischmann’s family were ‘Ostjuden’, East European Jews. She was born in 1947; her childhood in a displaced persons’ camp near Munich was filled with stories of the brutality of an alien group called ‘die Deutschen’. In this postwar ghetto she met non-Jews only at school. Subsequently, she trained and worked as a teacher, before emigrating to Israel in 1979, convinced of the unregenerate nature of West German society. Fleischmann’s relationship to a past she is too young to have experienced is obsessive: she relates the still-valued qualities of order, thoroughness and discipline to the bureaucratic efficiency of the extermination programme, the business letters she teaches to

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bureaucratic communications about concentration camp inmates, the frugal habit of reusing leftover food to the economic exploitation of the corpses in the camps (Fleischmann 1986: 137, 163, 25). Fleischmann’s self-image as a stigmatised victim is a widespread postwar Jewish attitude, analysed critically and self-critically in Alain Finkielkraut’s Le juif imaginaire (The Imaginary Jew, also 1980). Finkielkraut, himself born in 1949, argues that growing up a ‘Jew’ after Auschwitz offers a dangerously attractive false identity, the aura of the martyr without the cost: ‘I inherited a suffering I did not experience … Without exposing myself to a real danger, I had the status of a hero.’ (Finkielkraut 1984: 17) This unreflecting identification with the Auschwitz generation is the post-1945 Jews’ version of mauvaise foi; and by defining Jewish identity as that of a suffering race, they actually exclude themselves from it, for whatever the identity of a European Jew born after 1945 may be, it is not that of genocide victim (24). Finkielkraut’s criticism could be applied to the aggressively self-righteous aspects of Fleischmann’s book; moreover, her scornful generalisations about ‘die Deutschen’ depend as much as does anti-Semitism on racial stereotypes and hierarchies. Grete Weil’s origins and experience and their textual articulation could hardly be more different from Fleischmann’s (not merely in the sense that Weil, born in 1906, belongs to an earlier generation). Her background was upper bourgeois, liberal, assimilated, her experience shaped by class not religion. She was largely shielded from the anti-Semitism of the 1920s and early 1930s, which, as the semi-autobiographical narrator1 of the novel Generationen (Generations, 1983) remarks, ‘took place somewhere way below us, and, so we thought, primarily affected the “Ostjuden”’ (Weil 1985: 111-12). Snobbery towards the ‘Ostjuden’ was widespread amongst bourgeois German Jews who saw their own efforts at assimilation and socioeconomic betterment threatened (see Wertheimer 1981), and thus echoed, in microcosm, the anti-Semitic category of ‘die Juden’. Grete Weil flirted with Zionism in the 1920s, but less out of Jewish self-awareness, rather, along with love affairs, travel, bohemian adventures and a suicide attempt, as part of a typical bourgeois youth in the Weimar Republic, capped in 1932 when she married theatre director Edgar Weil. After the Nazi takeover, however, the ‘spoiled princess’, became ‘marked out for extermination with the yellow star as trees are marked with white circles for felling’ (Weil 1985: 83). A whole 1. Apart from Tramhalte Beethovenstraat, Weil’s major texts all have recognisably autobiographical narrators, often called Grete; the usual caution about quarrying fictional texts for biographical information applies.

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spectrum of socioeconomic and cultural difference within the European Jewish population was erased in favour of the racial identity imposed by the persecutors: ‘Ostjuden’ and Westernised Jews ‘came together in the gas chambers of Auschwitz’ (Fleischmann 1986: 186). One paradox of contemporary German-Jewish self-representation is the need to explore this enforced common history, whilst not promoting a unitary ‘Jewishness’ which, in reverse, perpetuates the anti-Semitic stereotypes. Edgar Weil emigrated to Amsterdam in 1934. Grete followed in 1936, her mother in 1938. In June 1941 Edgar was transported to Mauthausen, where he died shortly after. Grete Weil worked in the Jewish Council in Amsterdam, whose ambiguous role between clandestine sabotage and compliant fulfilment of Nazi persecution policy has led to accusations of collaboration. In 1943, she went into hiding. She returned to (Western) Germany in 1947: initially illegally, since as the stateless person the Nazis had made her, she was barred by the Allies from reentering the country. But she was determined to reassert the native rights the Nazis had torn away, to prove to Hitler that ‘not he, but I belonged here’ (Weil-Jockisch 1985: 57). In contrast to Fleischmann’s angry rejection of life in the Federal Republic, Weil, cushioned by relative affluence, disclaims significant experience of discrimination on the grounds of her Jewishness: ‘I was integrated, did not feel “a stranger in my own country”.’ (56; invoking the widely circulated slogan ‘fremd im eigenen Land’: see Broder & Lang 1979) Generationen is sceptical of the revived interest in German-Jewish identity shown by collections of essays like Mein Judentum (My Jewishness, Schultz 1978) or Fremd im eigenen Land (A Stranger in My Own Country, Broder & Lang 1979; see also Schmuckler 1985; Broder 1986; Ginzel 1980; Sichrovsky 1986). This debate, Weil argues, excludes the German Jews once again by reidentifying them as the victim group (1985: 140). Yet she virtually always writes under her first husband’s surname (the loss of her second husband Walter Jockisch appears in her work as the secondary echo of the primary trauma of Edgar Weil’s death in Mauthausen): this choice of writing name is in itself an act of testimony, positioning her in the second, most traumatic and ‘Jewish’ of the three phases of her life. All Weil’s texts are characterised by a tension between repression of Jewish identity and affirmation of it and of the history which goes with it, tension between anger towards the perpetrators and the guilty feelings of someone who survived, who did not actively resist, who returned to Germany after 1945 to live on in relative affluence, and yet who never escapes, and, as many of her narrators recognise, must not escape, the trauma of loss. The con-

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tradictions and complexities of this particular German-Jewish identity condition the narrative structure of most of her texts: a multi-levelled process of reflection, in which the narrator repeatedly approaches, identifies with and distances herself from figures from the narrative present, the directly experienced past and the world of myth. Role models, icons, self-projections become merged, are viewed in a new critical light, modified, toppled. Weil has had a lifelong fascination with the figure of Antigone: as well as Meine Schwester Antigone, there is an unpublished ‘Antigone’ novel dated 1957; the theme is prominent in the novels Tramhalte Beethovenstraat (Tram-stop Beethoven Street, 1968), Generationen and Der Brautpreis (The Bride-price, 1988), and in a speech in 1988 Weil referred to Sophie Scholl, one of the White Rose group of protesting students executed by the Nazis in 1943, as an ‘Antigone of our times’ (a frequent contemporary parallel: see Frühwald 1993; Oldfield 1989; Schmidt-Berger 1994). In nineteenth-century Germany and Europe generally, the bourgeoisie to which Weil’s teachers and assimilated German-Jewish parents belonged imbibed a culture strongly influenced by Hellenism and for which the Antigone figure was one of the key emblems. As George Steiner argues, this was an idealised female embodiment of a self-determined, active role from which, in practice, this very same society actually excluded women (1986: 1-17). Ludwig Tieck’s 1841 production of Sophocles’ Antigone, for example, swept the European theatres, and its choruses, set to music by Mendelssohn, were a staple of bourgeois family musical evenings (8). For Weil, therefore, to invoke Antigone meant not only to identify with the courage to do what one feels to be right, necessary and dignified for oneself and for those to whom one remains committed beyond the grave, but it also meant a resistance against exclusion, a demand to participate in the tradition of European culture from which European barbarism was seeking to expel her. Yet Weil’s representation of the Antigone figure remains ambivalently positioned between this integration into European bourgeois culture and the other possibilities inherent in the myth, such as feminist rebellion.2 The narrator of Meine Schwester Antigone is a well-off elderly German-Jewish woman whose mundane existence in her Frankfurt 2. On Antigone’s double-role deviance as rebel and woman, see Lefkowitz 1981: 4, 45, 75-76. For examples of the widely varying judgments of the novel within feminist criticism, see Schmidt 1990: 261; Weigel 1987: 299-303. On the semiotics of the Antigone figure as a female subject, see Bossinade 1990; Bossinade 1991. Certainly, Weil’s lasting fascination with brother-sister relationships (e.g., in Der Brautpreis) links her treatment of the Antigone theme with the ‘sorority’ which Steiner (1986) sees as typifying nineteenth-century male reception of the myth.

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high-rise block is interrupted in three ways: by traumatic memories of persecution, fear and loss, especially of her first husband in Mauthausen; by meditations on the parallels and contrasts between her life and that of the mythical Antigone, about whom she is fitfully writing; and by the unexpected incursion of a young woman on the run. The novel moves, sometimes seamlessly, sometimes abruptly, between the three narrative levels: myth, the narrator’s past, especially in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, and the West German present. This structure is consistent with the novel’s theme of memory as ‘the wound that does not heal’ (Weil 1982: 32). Signing a tax form, the narrator remembers how failing to add the compulsory ‘Sarah’ to her name nearly cost her deportation (104). Planting a camellia, she imagines she is digging her own grave, or tending a camp commandant’s garden, the air full of the smell of burning bodies (147). Where Fleischmann’s parallels between present and past are self-righteous generalisations from the perspective called into question by Finkielkraut, Weil’s narrator, though aware of latent aggressions in West German society, rejects the ‘postwar hysteria of the emigrants’ which sees a Nazi in every German (78). For her the insistent intrusion into her present consciousness of experiences – like those of camps or executions – she too (like Fleischmann) has not actually had, reflects a life haunted by grief, fear and guilt. Grief at the loss of loved ones has cut deep channels in her mind; even the loss of a pet dog can release a flash-flood of grief that sweeps reason away (Weil 1985: 58). Fear of persecution has penetrated so deep that it remains, even though its source – the Nazi state – is no longer there (Weil 1982: 70, 80). She shares the guilt felt by many Jewish survivors: that she did not resist; that her enforced silence left her husband not only unburied but unmourned; that she has by chance escaped a campaign aimed at total racial extinction and that others have therefore died in her place; that she can bear to go on living when her husband has been brutally murdered (24, 68). Her response to this multiple trauma has been to invoke the mythical figure of Antigone. In an essay on Lessing’s Nathan der Weise published in 1956 at the time she wrote her first, unpublished Antigone manuscript, Weil compares Nathan, the man of reason, of compromise and appeasement, with Antigone, who risks and sacrifices all for her uncompromising love for her brother and her unbending instinctive sense of the right. In Tramhalte Beethovenstraat the narrator observes that in postwar German society the flood of information about the extermination programme permitted a rationalistic explanatory process (what Detlev Claussen [1987: 11] criticises as the ‘Pädagogisierung’ of history, its processing into lessons, rather than retaining the undi-

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gested, incomprehensible shock of its reality), which suppresses the intransigent emotional truth represented by Antigone: that of ‘lovers, who throw themselves, with a cry, across the scavenged and mutilated bodies of their loved ones’ (Weil 1983: 65). In Meine Schwester Antigone Weil both takes refuge in myth and explores its emotional and rational potential to promote insight and change (see Blumenberg 1985). On the mythic plane of the Antigone story, she can approach her traumas without having to face them directly. As an individual and as a Jew, her life has been dominated by loss; Antigone, as a myth, cannot be taken from her like her two husbands, her family and is not, however, trying to escape into the past, but to find a way out, for like all Jewish survivors, she is haunted by and trapped in the past. In Generationen, the narrator, at an exhibition of art from the death camps, gives her address in the visitors’ book as Mauthausen; since her husband’s death there, she has never left it (Weil 1985: 93). The Antigone the narrator creates in Meine Schwester Antigone is a polyvalent figure to whom she has an equally complex, fluctuating attitude. Weil’s main textual source is Sophocles’ Antigone in Heinrich Weinstock’s translation, though she also quotes Hölderlin’s version.3 But like most writers who employ myth, including the Greek sources themselves, Weil reworks the myth to suit her purpose (Weil 1982: 19),4 and unlike the uniform mythic narrative plane of Christa Wolf’s Kassandra (1983), Weil’s reconstruction of the Antigone theme is explicitly part of her narrator’s present-day process of reflection. Weil’s Antigone is, on the one hand, an existing figure against whose principles and actions the narrator can measure her own reality, both as model and as counterpoint – both ‘a piece of me’ and ‘my opposite in everything’ (Weil 1982: 10); and, on the other hand, a blank outline onto which she can project her desires, fears and speculations. The title indicates the ambiguity: on the one hand the narrator feels sisterly identification and solidarity with Antigone. Even before the Nazi years, the pampered Jewish daughter was drawn to Antigone’s dual identity as princess and homeless wanderer: an eas3. There is no explicit indication that she has drawn on the many modern versions, such as Hasenclever’s utopian pacifism (1917), Anouilh’s gloomy and politically ambiguous nihilism (1942), Brecht’s celebration of anti-imperialist resistance (1948) or even Elisabeth Langgässer’s ‘Die getreue Antigone’ (The faithful Antigone, 1947-48) which shares with Weil’s text the specific motif of a loved one murdered in Mauthausen. 4. Myth can of course be harnessed to many different purposes. For example, official attempts to bury the Nazi pimp Horst Wessel discreetly led to the Nazi propaganda apparatus dubbing his sister ‘the Antigone of the Brown Movement’: see Ritchie 1983: 83.

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ily romanticised prefiguration of Ahasuerus (38-39). The confrontation with Nazi tyranny strengthens her identification with Antigone as outlaw and with her stance against Kreon’s command that her brother Polyneices shall have neither grave nor mourning: like genocide, an erasure of human identity. As Primo Levi’s work emphasises, the absence of the corpses of the camp victims prevents proper mourning and intensifies the survivors’ trauma. Antigone stands for an unrequitable longing for the healing of this trauma. But on the other hand the narrator enters into the role of Antigone’s sister, the submissive Ismene, whose rational good sense distances her from Antigone’s self-destructive defiance. Thus, though the narrator longs for the simplicities of her period of illegality in Amsterdam, she distances herself from this position in two ways: firstly by arguing that it is egoism as well as bravery that makes Antigone’s choices so blissfully simple, whereas the narrator had so often to make ‘decisions which, either way, made me guilty’ (68) – for example, her work for the Jewish Council, when immediately going underground would have kept her free of the taint of collaboration, but risked her mother’s life. Secondly, she comes to recognise that her idealisation of Antigone has been a wish projection, a compensation for her own inactivity, like Finkielkraut’s post-1945 Jews parading their false victim identity. The experience that provokes this recognition is the arrival of the narrator’s goddaughter Christine with Marlene, a sympathiser on the fringes of the West German terrorist scene, for whom Christine requests sanctuary. The narrator rejects the terrorists as ‘crazies’ who practise a counter violence she cannot condone (85), and resents the reintroduction of an all-too-familiar atmosphere of insecurity into the cocoon of her mundane life. But though she ‘wants peace’ and tries to reject Marlene, ‘my wound makes it impossible’ (114). She recognises the Antigone in Marlene, whose refusal to conform has cost her a teaching career. To counter Marlene’s suspicion of this wealthy bourgeois woman who inexplicably offers her shelter, the narrator recounts her persecution and her husband’s death in the Mauthausen quarries. She feels both love and resentment towards Marlene for reopening old wounds and restoring her to painful truth (85-86). The manipulable Antigone, ‘the beautiful artistic creation’ which can be ‘dismissed and summoned at will’, her ‘favourite plaything’ (38, 9), is replaced by an Antigone who foces her to face the truth. This Antigone has much in common with real figures like Sophie Scholl: ‘People who go to the limits. … Awkward ones … Who force us to reflect. Who shock our consciousness into wakefulness.’ (112) But where abstract identification with such figures may be comforting, real

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confrontation with their unbending ethical certainty is deeply discomforting (97). The narrator now also sees terrorism as ‘despair at inhumanity. Antigone and Gudrun Ensslin as of one mind’, the difference between resistance and terrorism as one of nomenclature and historical chance (113). Both Antigone and Ensslin, the narrator concludes, were ‘moralists’ (109).5 One might recall that Sophocles’ Antigone was convinced she was acting according to the wishes of the gods, a moral certainty usually distrusted and labelled extremist in an age of secular reason. Antigone’s declaration, ‘I am not here to share in hate, but in love’, is a leitmotif of the novel: however, the narrator recognises that she has used it to justify inaction, conformity and compromise. ‘Not to hate, to love; falsifying Antigone’s … words which brought her death, in order to secure one’s life.’ (86) Her passive ‘love’ is as much an existential lie as Lea Fleischmann’s self-righteous hatred. Those who passively accept tyranny must accept their partial responsibility; the narrator now rejects the argument that ‘as a Jew I had no alternative. I did not say no. Saying no, the only indestructible freedom, which Antigone exercised’, whereas the narrator acquiesced in evil, her loss of citizenship, the yellow star, the alien name Sarah: ‘Thus I save my life, thus I abolish myself’ (87-88). This obedient self-effacement unites victims and perpetrators; without principled resistance there is no identity, only ‘puppets which murder, puppets which let themselves be murdered’ (93). The novel reproduces at length – it forms one-seventh of the text – an eye-witness account of the elimination of a ghetto, a manuscript left amongst his effects by Weil’s friend Friedrich Hellmund, who disappeared in Poland in 1945, a document of impotent horror which shows how the soldier Hellmund also destroyed himself by obeying, and how Jews let themselves be murdered without protesting (115-36). The striking incongruity of this text as a documentary insertion into Weil’s self-reflexive autobiographical narrative positively urges reflection on the relation of her novel to testimony literature, indeed interrogates the ethics of her narrator’s narratological stance and its relationship to her Jewishness and to history (see Lang 1988; Young 1988; Felman & Laub 1992). References to Marlene immediately precede and follow the Hellmund text, and thus the real-world Antigone demolishes the narrator’s strategy of using the mythical 5. Heinrich Böll’s sketch in the film Deutschland im Herbst (1977) of a television production of Antigone being suppressed for its contemporary political message, which Weil’s comparison echoes, was itself preempted by a grotesque reenactment of the Antigone theme: the controversy in 1977 as to whether Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe should be permitted burial in the Stuttgart city cemetery. The West German theatre of the late 1970s saw many productions of Antigone drawing similar contemporary parallels; see Hensel 1983: 338-39.

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Antigone as an idealised projection of resistance to shield herself from recognition of her existential reality and her responsibility to bear witness. ‘He is a witness whether he has seen or known of it; if he does not utter it, then he shall bear his iniquity.’ (Leviticus 5,1; quoted in Young 1988: 18) The scriptural roots of this responsibility are, though, less relevant for the secularly-orientated Weil than the political imperative of resisting Himmler’s call for the destruction of the European Jews to be a ‘never-to-be-written page in history’ (17). Witness, even of indirect experience, may threaten her carefully constructed equilibrium: Hellmund’s account forcibly evokes images of mass slaughter which the narrator has long self-protectively repressed: ‘I am totally exhausted, without hope. Hear shouts, hear whimpering. The naked corpses lie in a pile near the old gravestones. I hide my face in my hands.’ (Weil 1985: 136) But being a witness also initiates resistance to the self-abolition inherent in the narrator’s substitution of the idealised Antigone for a direct relationship to her own historical and contemporary reality. As she begins to find this relationship, she lets the Antigone figure fall. Moreover, Weil does not seek to legitimate herself or her narrator via a fictional account of the extermination to which, by virtue of her Jewishness, she has a bond of testimony but which she did not actually experience. Instead she quotes a document by an empirical witness (himself not victim but perpetrator). This locates exactly and scrupulously the separate historical position of her autobiographical narration. Meine Schwester Antigone closes with a dream sequence in which the three narrative levels of myth, the past and the present intermingle. Antigone speaks, relating her self-awareness to the shock of exile – just as enforced exile made Grete Weil into a Jew – and insisting that resistance to tyranny is an act of life-affirming identity, even if it costs one one’s life (141). Antigone appears amongst the Jewish deportees being herded through an Amsterdam goods station, gives her name: Antigone; her address: Thebes; and then, inverting her famous words, announces: ‘I am not here to share in love, but to share in hatred’, and shoots the SS officer in charge (151-52). The narrator both admires and shrinks from this act. Having lived out, in her dream Antigone, the act of resistance whose absence has haunted her, she releases and distances herself from the figure of Antigone (152). The dream ends in the drained disorientation that follows the painful abandonment of a dearly held self-deception. Yet, in freeing herself of the normative pressure of the myth, she also rejects the myth’s call for action, a rejection legitimised by Antigone’s selfishness (see Schmidt 1990, 255-56). It is possible to see the unresolved ambiguities of this novel reflected in the cover design of the first Fischer paperback edition:

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a female doll flung down, its neck snapped, its limbs askew. It evokes the dehumanisation of the camps, the carelessly flung, twisted corpses. It reflects Antigone’s principle that human life is more than survival, and the novel’s central argument that without self-assertive resistance the human subject is reduced to a puppet. It expresses the narrator’s rejection of the plaything Antigone she had clung to for comfort, in favour of a more truthful view of her Jewish identity: the doll is her juif imaginaire, the emblem of her mauvaise foi, her spiritual non age, cast aside in her new state of pained, disorientated but more genuine enlightenment. Myth has been a means to unlock the painful truths of her memory and of her Jewish identity which she had been using myth to escape. However, it is noteworthy that Grete Weil herself disapproved of this design (e.g., in an interview with me in December 1987) which was replaced for the second edition. Jewish experience includes certain historical commonalities but must not, if one is to avoid the perpetuation of the structures which permit the stigmatisation of an alien Other, be reduced to a singularity, especially not that of the dehumanised corpse. In Spätfolgen (Late Consequences, 1992), Weil recognises and rejects her assumption of a posture of testimony which had fixed her in a false role: ‘For more than forty years I imagined that I was a witness, and that enabled me to live as I did.’ Reading Primo Levi, she realises that she was never really able to imagine the reality of the camps. ‘I am no longer a witness. I knew nothing.’ (Weil 1995: 102) Meine Schwester Antigone addresses the reality of a German-Jewish narrator in 1980s West Germany for whom memories and fantasies of persecution and extermination form part of her current psychological reality, but do not constitute ‘testimony’ in the sense of historical record. Drawing on one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms from Sanctus Januarius, Jost Nolte argues in an essay published in 1976 that the ability and willingness, embodied by Antigone, to say ‘no’ to despotism is the point of emergence of the European spirit (Nolte 1990). Grete Weil’s lifelong embrace of the figure of Antigone expresses her affinity with this view, but as an Other embraced in compensation for her own silence in the face of tyranny and injustice. Thus the considered distancing from the figure of Antigone with which Meine Schwester Antigone closes is, paradoxically, the very act of contradiction her embrace of the symbol of contradiction had in fact always avoided. I would like to thank Leslie Adelson, Justus Fetscher and Margaret Littler for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

PART V

THE MEDIA OF MEMORY: MAY 1968 AND CINEMA

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L’ARMÉE DES OMBRES AND LE CHAGRIN ET LA PITIÉ: RECONFIGURATIONS OF LAW, LEGALITIES AND THE STATE IN POST-1968 FRANCE Margaret Atack

The war may have ended in 1945, but the postwar period took a long time a-dying. For many at the time, it was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 which marked the final chapter. For France, one could almost mount an argument for 1968. Economic, political, cultural and institutional changes all have their own dynamic and pace, and the modernisation of France in the aftermath of the destruction of the war, in which paradoxically Vichy can be said to have played an economic role, proceeded very unevenly (Azéma & Bédarida 1992: 49). The post-1968 return to the Occupation of France, which of course marks a distance from it, is linked to the end of the political dominance of de Gaulle. L’Armée des ombres (The Army of the Shadows), directed by JeanPierre Melville, came out in 1969. Melville is best known for his gangster films, but this one is the third he devoted to the Occupation; he had earlier filmed Le Silence de la mer and Léon Morin, prêtre. He is generally acknowledged to be an important precursor of the nouvelle vague, shown in qualities such as an admiration for American cinema, use of outside locations, naturalistic dialogue, small-scale production and independent financing (Prédal 1991: 6263; Williams 1992: 330-35). L’Armée des ombres is a high-profile film

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with a star-studded cast list which was not uncontroversial for its transplantation of the film noir gangster genre into a resistance story. It is a powerful and compelling film, which does not appear to be ambiguous from a narrative point of view, but which, by virtue of its historical material, could be said to be ideologically ambiguous. The reason for taking this film as a focus of discussion to raise some issues of post-1968 representation of the war is the intriguing passage devoted to it in Rousso’s The Vichy Syndrome which seems to me to flatly contradict itself within the space of a paragraph. The argument is a little elliptical, but suggests that L’Armée des ombres is an oddity in appearing in 1969 yet bearing no trace of the 1968 upheavals; also that, because of the strength of the individual performances and the value accorded to the individual, no exemplary role in relation to the national Resistance could be founded by it: A purer, more faithful portrayal of a Free French resistance network could be seen, however, in Jean-Pierre Melville’s L’Armée des ombres. Oddly enough, the film contains no trace of May ‘68 or of de Gaulle’s departure from office. It treats the careers of a few exceptional but easily comprehensible individuals and with its excellent screenplay and discreet (but already anachronistic) Gaullism, might well have crystallized a certain view of the era. But, beyond arriving on the scene too late, the film showed too much of the actual diversity of temperaments and types and was therefore incompatible with the abstract and timeless idea of ‘Resistance’ honoured by de Gaulle and Malraux. Too much concerned with individual fates, the film lacked political punch. For that very reason, Melville’s masterpiece, which appeared five years after the Pantheonisation of Jean Moulin, marked a turning point. It ended all possibility that a film would ever be made that might serve as a foundation for the myth of the Resistance. Soon afterwards, Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity, which was shot at about the same time, would make it pointless to even think of such a thing. (Rousso 1994: 274)

The argument that the exceptional individuals are too individualised to be exemplary and found a mythic dimension is a possible, though in my view a misleading reading. The film reproduces quite faithfully the vision of a national Resistance portrayed by Joseph Kessel in the original. Apart from the questions of treachery and betrayal, instigated by the Germans anyway, the French generally are spontaneously pro-Resistance. But the historical/ideological situation, as Rousso sets it out, is nonetheless very puzzling. That this film bears no mark of 1968 and post-Gaullism, is discreetly and anachronistically Gaullist, yet marks a crucial turning point, ending, as he says, all possibility that a film would ever be made that might serve as a foundation for the myth of the Resistance, is confusing. It is presented as

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stumbling onto the same terrain as Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), a film which by no stretch of the imagination could ever be said to be discreetly Gaullist. The double vision of the film, both anachronism and anticipation, is worth trying to unpack. That L’Armée des ombres is seen as a precursor of the film which is generally taken to open the doors to the reappraisal of the ‘resistance myth’, Le Chagrin et la Pitié,1 is a paradigm of the mode rétro historiography, according to which the postwar years were dominated by the Gaullist/Communist myth of national resistance which excluded all other narratives and memories (Esprit 1992: 8, 47; Munholland 1994). Everything which is not pro-Gaullist or pro-Communist is therefore an anticipation of Le Chagrin et la pitié which owed its huge impact to the way it put the official history on trial and showed it to be wanting. There are important points to be made about this: firstly, that the historiography of the mode rétro operates on a 1944/1969 axis. Le Chagrin et la pitié is presented as the starting point for the painful years of reexamination of the complexity of life under Vichy, for the realisation of the extent of French collaborationism, French anti-Semitism, and the relatively small numbers making up the active Resistance. Virtually all analysis of the mode rétro, and Le Chagrin et la pitié in particular, deals directly with the Occupation. The years between the occupation and the post-1968 dissections are not part of the process; they constitute the mythic years, and any texts, literary or filmic, dealing with collaboration or deportations are ‘cracks’ in the myth with no long-term resonance, or anticipations, precursors of Le Chagrin et la pitié and the works of the 1970s. There are vast numbers of them, but their existence is consistently explained as an aberration (Colombat 1993: 20-21). Reinforcing this perspective, that 1969 speaks unto 1944 in both the more popular mode rétro and the historians’ memory,2 is the dominance of psychology and a ‘psycho-morality’ as the theoretical mode of analysis. No one is supposed to believe in the psychology of nations any more, but one would hardly credit it when reading, for example, The Vichy Syndrome, where the very word syndrome is overtly used in its psychological sense, and coupled with obsession, neurosis, identity, travail du deuil. A more conventional inter1. Le Chagrin et la pitié, directed by Marcel Ophuls for Swiss television, was not adopted by French television and was shown in a Paris cinema. It was finally shown on French television in 1981. 2. This is a distinction which is being ever more frequently made, as the historians take themselves as their object of study. See Azéma & Bédarida 1992: 43-50; Frank 1993: 494-97. It is not impossible that quarrels over the Annales ‘longue durée’ perspective are part of this debate, as the historians who are now internationally famous for this work establish their own historiography of the war as event as a counterpoint to this.

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section of psychology and morality is found generally elsewhere, in terms such as shame, pride, sorrow or pity. There is nothing particularly reprehensible about this; both psychology and psychoanalysis can provide a useful metaphorical language.3 But it does have the specific consequence of strengthening the 1944-69 axis. The nation as psychological subject is trying to work through the trauma experienced and repressed. One is inevitably reminded of Hollywood’s use of Freud. The one privileged Freudian narrative was the repression of the traumatic event, neurotically recalled through triggering symptoms, until finally relived and faced up to. Hitchcock’s Marnie is one of the best-known examples. This model, applied to history, explains why examples of material not conforming to the myth have to be those premonitory symptoms. The thesis of psychological repression cannot work unless Le Chagrin et la pitié and the mode rétro are the traumatic reliving for the first time. This is in spite of considerable documentation showing that the Gaullist/Communist myth was not at all in monolithic domination during the intervening decades. The 1992 issue of Esprit ‘Que faire de Vichy?’ starts with this very conundrum: how is it that the flood of material never stops, yet the subject is always referred to as ‘hidden, occulted, and forgotten’(5). It did not take long in the immediate postwar years for the collaborationist circles to start mobilising in their own defence (Hewitt 1995; Rousso 1992). There are large numbers of novels, films and essays attacking the Resistance and sanctimonious moral stances associated with it, and its pretensions to represent the nation. The term résistantialisme was coined at this time, and functioned in a manner very similar to the contemporary notion of ‘political correctness’, being at one and the same time a delineation of a particular phenomenon and a politically motivated attack on it; the phenomenon becomes something one should attack by the very mode of its delineation. The battle for the political ownership of, and supremacy over, the right interpretation of the Occupation years never stopped and was part of the social and cultural fabric. What is undeniable is that after the amnesties of the early 1950s, significant and, it is judged, successful efforts were made to rehabilitate Vichy and Pétain within the national image. The myth of the ‘good Vichy’ of Pétain, as opposed to the ‘bad Vichy’ of Laval, takes off again in these years, and receives official consecration in Aron’s Histoire de Vichy, which had a measure of popular success, passed into paperback, and was virtually the only attempt at an overview until Le Chagrin et la pitié (Esprit 1992: 20, 46). After Le Chagrin et la pitié, it is impossible for 3. See Rousso 1990: 23-24, for his response to criticism of the psychological terminology and discussion of his approach.

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Gaullist and good Vichy interpretations to coexist hazily together, for if it is anything, Le Chagrin et la pitié is a full frontal attack on the myth of a good Vichy. If you take a different discourse within all this material, such a reading becomes impossible. You cannot take a political track, concentrating on questions of the State, the Army, the Law, without the years 1945-68 becoming activated, so to speak. Not only does the use of this history in those years come into focus, but it very helpfully contextualises Le Chagrin et la pitié, which can be seen to be of and about the politics of 1968, rather than being a discourse on the Occupation liberated into existence by 1968. While the argument about the nature and extent of French collaboration, anti-Semitism and betrayal is a complex and important one, alongside rages a no less complex one about the legitimacy and legality of Vichy, and its status as a sovereign state. The defeat of France in 1940 did, after all, bring down an imperial state; the political and military ramifications of the military Occupation by one state, Germany, of another, in a country which ended up with two governments by 1944, and which knew no political stability in the postwar years, are always there. And one has only to think of the storm over Mitterrand’s television interview4 to start wondering if ambiguity at the heart of the state is indeed most troubling of all (Kaes 1989: 192). Chirac apologised in 1994 for the French State’s complicity in the deportations of the Jews, which Mitterrand notoriously never did (although it is true that Chirac has long been seen as not belonging to the Gaullist Resistance/Liberation establishment, Esprit 1992: 8). But both are appealing to, and thereby founding, the legitimacy of the French State, in one case by including Vichy, in the other by excluding it. There is the spirit and letter of Gaullism in both gestures. What is also being neglected is the extent to which the past is a point of forward reference yoked to the service of the open narratives of the present; the narrative of the Occupation in the 1940s and 1950s is much more complicated than the historiography of the mode rétro will allow. The rather convoluted statements about L’Armée des ombres in The Vichy Syndrome bear witness to this; the wrong question is being asked, for in relation to the myth, it is effectively ‘unplaceable’. What is interesting is that in The Vichy Syndrome Rousso does not skate over the intervening years, gives a full and very useful account of the narrative of the Occupation in relation to the fall of the Fourth Republic and the early days of the Fifth Republic; yet this has had little impact on the way the mode rétro is actually written about. My contention is that to take reflec4. In September 1994, he discussed the details of his Vichy/Resistance trajectory as revealed by Pierre Péan (1994).

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tions on legalities, the law, official and subversive power, the military and the State, which is what the gangsterised resistance of L’Armée des ombres prompts us to do, and to look at Le Chagrin et la pitié from that angle, is necessarily to bring not only 1968 into focus, and the relationship of the years 1940-44 to 1969 (the film itself, by using testimony from those who had lived through the Occupation, and are speaking about it in the context of the present, makes this structurally important) but also the intervening years. The years 1958-62 are the years of crisis which saw the end of one republic and the beginning of another. The Occupation is again centre stage for many reasons. Firstly because of the personality of de Gaulle, ‘l’homme du 18 juin’, the liberator of the nation returning once more. The figure of this national hero had always been a politically complex one. Colin Nettelbeck’s book on the American exiles during the war gives a good picture of the figure of ‘de Gaulle’ as he mythically became, in gestation as it were; for he evoked suspicions in many circles as a military, right-wing, antidemocratic figure (Nettelbeck 1991). These suspicions are amplified a thousand-fold in the crisis days of Algeria, and the fears of a fascist, anti-democratic, military dictatorship are very real ones for many. The Occupation is therefore a central reference point in these new political battles, which are battles around the State, the Army, the Nation, about national and colonial identities. Pierre Mendès-France, an extraordinarily complex political figure who played a central role from the 1930s onwards, casts himself in the role of ‘l’homme du 18 juin’, the defender of liberty against de Gaulle, in a situation which is inevitably recalling the 1940 vote in favour of Pétain (Rousso 1994: 68-71; Mendès-France 1987: 41825). The hero of the Resistance now represents repressive State power. Deputies in the National Assembly are hurling insults about their Vichy past to others they disagree with (Mendès-France 1987: 408). Everyone, from the extreme right-wing terrorist Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) to the network associated with Francis Jeanson transporting funds for the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), is seeing themselves as the new French Resistance defending the nation. The arguments are again focusing on whether the Republican State is the oppressor or not. The French can now be seen as the occupiers in Algeria, and many texts use this explicitly to fight the new political battles (Dine 1995). The Parti Communiste Français (PCF) is also renewing the vocabulary of Occupation and war in these years. The communist rhetoric of the Cold War uses the language of resistance and denunciation of fascism to pit the supporters of ‘peace’ against the ‘war-mongers’, that is to say, those supporting the Soviet Union

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against the Americans. This political division still depends on a hierarchy of moral stereotyping, good versus bad, where bad equals fascist, and army of occupation; only now, in relation to Korea, the Rosenberg trial and McCarthy, the United States is the fascist aggressor and oppressor.5 Therefore, across the political spectrum the rhetorical configuration of France, Occupier, fascist, anti-democracy, depends on the personalities, personas, experience and vocabulary of the Occupation being to hand. The year 1964 saw the twentieth anniversary of the Liberation. Rousso describes the political use to which it was put, two years after the accords d’Evian ended the Algerian war. It was a celebration of the national Resistance, and took place in the same year as the pantheonisation of Jean Moulin (Rousso 1992: 82-90). A certain political class and age group, clearly associated with the Resistance, was now in power, a connection seemingly reinforced by some popularising films of the time such as Paris brûle-t-il?, which has been described as a ‘film de Ve République’ (Prédal 1972: 281). Combined with this is the indifference of the younger generation to the war as recorded in a television documentary on attitudes of the young, pointedly entitled: Hitler, connais pas (Delale & Ragache 1978: 14). De Gaulle received an impressive popular mandate in the massive Gaullist vote at the 1964 and 1965 elections. On the other hand, 1968 has been described as the revolt of those born between 1945 and 1952, none of whom had the vote by 1965. One might therefore say that the Gaullist myth, the solid front of political establishment and resistance activity defining the nation, was precisely four years old by May 1968, and there were enough straws in the wind to indicate it had not penetrated to the young. The contexts of May 1968 are well known and can be briefly sketched in: outdated social, cultural and ideological structures under pressure from economic and industrial modernisation; the massive expansion of student numbers, without matching investment; the Vietnam war. The challenge, which created an alliance of industrial and agricultural workers and students, of class and youth, was focused on the French State, and oppressive state power; it saw the birth of a new cultural politics, which was at times deliberately readdressing some of the old cultural politics of the 1930s and 1940s. It bypassed the PCF and other left-wing parties as cultural and ideological dinosaurs. Among political figures, Pierre Mendès-France, who will of course have a starring role as a victim of French State oppression in Le Chagrin et la pitié, was one of the few to have a positive image (Delale & Ragache 1978: 122). 5. An excellent account of this is to be found in the Montand biography (Hamon & Rotman 1990).

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Le Chagrin et la pitié is generally seen as settling accounts, not with the Resistance, but with the Gaullist myth of the Resistance. The distinction is very important, because the film is undoubtedly pro-Resistance. That the notion of France as a nation of collaborators might stem from this film is an extraordinary misreading, no doubt sometimes a wilful one, but more often, I suspect, one which reveals a generational divide in its reception.6 For an older audience, especially a Gaullist voting audience, to evoke a bad Vichy and French anti-Semitism or fascism, is to attack France. For a younger audience, especially a 1968 audience, for a French film to investigate the extent of French collaboration and anti-Semitism and to be pro-Resistance is in no way a contradiction, as long as the resisters are workers and the collaborators are bourgeois. To take the State and the Army as themes to highlight in Le Chagrin et la pitié is illuminating. From the outset, Le Chagrin et la pitié is investigating the terrain of nation, government and military. The film opens with images of German culture, the German nation, the German state. At a wedding in Germany we listen to the father of the bride making a speech, we hear him refer to the war and the toast he proposes to ‘our Federal Republic of Germany’. Helmut Tausend, the father in question, was stationed in Clermont-Ferrand during the Occupation. The film cuts to the presentation of Clermont-Ferrand, including shots of the Square de la Résistance, and the chemist Marcel Verdier’s voice is heard. He introduces the topic of the war, stating where he was stationed. When in the subsequent interview he uses the words ‘le chagrin et la pitié’, the film cuts to footage of Maurice Chevalier, performing ‘Ça fait d’excellents Français’ to prisoners-of-war in Germany. Henri Mendras has reminded us that one of the sacred institutions of the Republic to be radically changed through the Second World War, is the Army. The Army of the Republic is a peasant army, a national army of foot soldiers defending French soil: the army was therefore the embodiment of the patrie, the physical and spiritual home of the French, and there was a fundamental ideological link between the peasantry and the defence of French land in the forging of Republican consciousness (Mendras 1994: 101103, 107). This makes a lot of sense in understanding the iconography of the Resistance and of Vichy, and the thematic importance of geography and the land to both. It is certain that Vichy, the betrayal of the nation by the State, as de Gaulle presents it, and col6. In his analysis of Sartre’s reaction, Rousso suggests that in this and other instances, there is a division between those who had experienced the Occupation (generally hostile), and those who had not.

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laboration, represent a very deep fracturing of this link. Part of the scandal of the mode rétro also lies here. Chevalier’s song is a perfect example of the imbrication of republicanism and nationalism: The colonel was a right winger The major was a moderate The captain loved the Church The lieutenant hated the clergy The sergeant-major was a wild extremist The sergeant was a dedicated socialist The corporal bet on everyone and everything The buck private bet on horses only. And they are all terrific Frenchmen And they are all terrific soldiers Marching in step And they say their Republic’s The best thing going And while their political views are different They all agree on wanting just one thing To be left alone, once and for all. (Ophuls 1975: 6)

The ‘We hate war’ theme is very ironic in the context of singing to prisoners of war, and with the words: ‘1. The Collapse’ on the screen pointedly coinciding with the last two lines, revealing the extradiegetic commentary structured into the film. After the song ends, the film cuts to a long shot of the countryside with the Grave brothers walking through it, reinforcing, within the diegetic level of the film, the link between peasantry, defence of the land, Republicanism, and Resistance, in explicit contrast to the (defeated and possibly defeatist) Army of the State. The first ten minutes or so of the film have thus set a structure of very complex images and words around military, Resistance, France, Germany, defence and defeat, republicanism and the Republican State. The Army and State constantly reappear in Le Chagrin et la pitié, through the witness of those who had fought and the major political figures; the lengthy analysis and footage of Vichy, which lays a striking emphasis on the figure of Pétain as soldier and head of state, important constituent in the (historically inaccurate) representation of Vichy as homogenous. There is a plural resistance in this film but not a plural Vichy; the mobilisation of important figures in the recent history of war and the turbulent transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Republics: Pierre Mendès-France, an incredibly ‘charged’ figure of the 1958-62 years; Georges Bidault similarly, though from the other side of the political spectrum

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defending French Algeria, who had only been able to return from exile in 1967. And the thesis which emerges from Le Chagrin et la pitié’s investigation of the Occupation years is the May 1968 thesis par excellence: the State is oppressive. If one divides Le Chagrin et la pitié according to its own heroes and villains, a very clear picture emerges. Firstly, resistance is dissidence, a view for which it has often been criticised. D’Astier de la Vigerie insists you had to be maladjusted to be in the Resistance, especially if you were from an upper-class background.7 But the fact that resistance was widespread at the base of society is amply testified to, through the English witnesses who relate you only had to find the local communist or curé to be safe; the Grave brothers and other representatives of la France profonde; the young, as portrayed in the evidence of the very ethically dubious teachers. (And what could be more eloquent of the spirit of 1968 than choosing two old lycée teachers as ‘villains’?) Righteousness is on the side of the peasants, the people, the young – a combination which could have appeared on any PSU (Parti Socialiste Unifié) poster in 1968 (Delale & Ragache 1978: 115). Negative are the defenders of Vichy, the old, very often, those who espouse a spirit of hierarchy, and the French bourgeoisie, referred to time and again as sympathetic to Hitler’s views. It is likely to have been the first time many of the audience had heard the phrase: ‘Plutôt Hitler que Blum’. The Occupation was a perfect metaphor, or at least provided much of the vocabulary, for saying how repressive the French state was. There are many famous examples, such as the slogans ‘CRS/SS’, ‘de Gaulle aSSaSSin’ (Delale & Ragache 1978: 14-15; Kidd 1995). The national Resistance sanctioned by the Fifth Republic and its political establishment fades, and the subversive, antiestablishment, anti-legality, anti-fascist, popular resistance, comes into focus. The film underplays totally the organisational and government-in-waiting side to the Resistance (Rousso 1994: 106). Moreover, opposition to Vietnam, and the other colonial wars, has put national liberation movements high on the political agenda, and this further reinforces the narrative of the Resistance as dissident national liberation movement within France. Rebellion can therefore be legitimised by appropriating the French Resistance 7. This view has been explicitly refuted in the case of Clermont-Ferrand by John F. Sweets (1994: 208). While the film clearly supports the notion of a widespread resistance, the notion of resistance as maladjusted has simultaneously supported the ‘Lacombe Lucien myth’, that a pro-Resistance attitude was not the norm. Although this myth is the foundation stone of popular understanding of the mode rétro, it is generally accepted that it is not supported by the evidence. ‘Le mythe Lacombe Lucien est faux’ writes Stanley Hoffman (Esprit 1992: 39); see also Sweets 1994: 137-69.

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which is officially celebrated, and this is central to the ideological problematic of Le Chagrin et la pitié. It is not surprising de Gaulle is marginalised; one hears more from the politicians of the British State. De Gaulle is totally associated with the oppressive state for the 1968 contestataires. And there is no getting away from the fact that in 1940 de Gaulle was dissident and illegal, which would unfortunately put him on the side of the angels. By the force of its attack against the ‘good Vichy’, it put the fault-lines within the French state on the front page. It also had the much overlooked, very important consequence of making the Resistance politically and culturally interesting again for a younger generation.8 But its own political specificities have, I believe, got buried by it being collapsed into Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien and Patrick Modiano’s La Place de l’étoile, even though they are completely overturning its own hierarchies. They may be the three founding texts of the mode rétro, but Le Chagrin et la pitié could not be more different from the other two. That Lacombe Lucien has been described as the fictional enactment of the matrix of Le Chagrin et la pitié is symptomatic of the way the later works of the mode rétro have cast their shadows back over it. If it is true that Le Chagrin et la pitié continues the correlation, the Republican correlation, between the French people, the French land and resistance to oppression, then for a young French peasant to espouse the Gestapo française on a whim, the starting point for Lacombe Lucien, is unthinkable within the cultural politics of oppression of Le Chagrin et la pitié. In La Place de l’étoile too, the cultural politics of the text constitute geography and land as a force of repression, not of resistance and liberation. At first sight L’Armée des ombres is also operating a politics of resistance as dissidence and transgression. Its shadow army is an outlaw army, living in a world apart, formally the world of the gangster, in Melville’s hands a world marked by tragedy, where the individuals face their destiny, which is death. Like Le Chagrin et la pitié, L’Armée des ombres starts, through the brief explanatory captions, by highlighting the divided leadership of France, in the context of a foreign military occupation. But the French people are seen to support the Resistance, from all sides of the political spectrum. For example, an aristocrat lends his château for subversive activities and talks about his prewar antiRepublicanism. This is a standard pro-Resistance technique con8. That it was not alone in this perspective can be seen from Yvon Birster’s play, 4045: scènes de la résistance populaire, first performed in Le Havre in February 1972. The published text includes reproductions of Vichy posters and resistance tracts and papers.

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structing the unity in diversity of the nation. Interestingly, this is a figure which will find its way into Lacombe Lucien too, though in that film its possible national representativeness is undermined by the odd figure of the aristocrat’s son and his emotional attraction to Lucien. It contrasts with the surprisingly positive upper-class fascist in Le Chagrin et la pitié, Christian de la Mazière. But de la Mazière is the very incarnation of a 1968 Marxist cultural politics: I am my ideological conjuncture. What do you expect of a child of the bourgeoisie in the 1930s, but fascism? Kessel’s novel was orientated towards a foreign audience, and is organised around a central question of survival. It does nonetheless carry some clear political messages also about the importance and strength of the Communist Party in the Resistance, and makes it clear that London’s distrust relates to this. L’Armée des ombres evacuates that politics9 and has no informative or communicative mission. This Philippe Gerbier does not spend time in prison listing all the titles of clandestine newspapers he can remember. None of the group survives, extradiegetically at least. They know their mission will lead to their deaths, and are the blood brothers of Le Samouraï, Melville’s previous and incredibly chilling film. They bear their suicidal knowledge, that their only end is death, and they will continue to act by their codes of honour and loyalty, even as it demands they kill their own. The striking music, the grey and brown tones, the meditative voice-over of Gerbier, all concord to make this a world apart, closed, dangerous and threatening. L’Armée des ombres is formally an interesting film by virtue of its intertextuality. Its main characters are stars, bringing a complex web of references with them. Paul Meurisse and Simone Signoret were together in Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques, Lino Ventura was closely associated with his gangster roles. The structure and textuality of the genre of the metaphysical film noir removes this Resistance from any optimistic celebration. But this is not necessarily antimyth. If one turns to the use of history in the film, one can see it is entirely devoted to supporting the truthfulness of the narrative, and thus supporting the nobility and dignity of the protagonists. Firstly it is using a literary text – with changes and elisions, but much of the dialogue is verbatim reproduction of the novel. Kessel’s text itself was re-presenting narratives of the Resistance well-known in France. This process is symptomatic of the film’s general procedures. L’Armée des ombres is drawing on what is 9. There is an episode where Colonel Passy makes it clear they will not receive arms. But there is no particular reference to communism in this, only to the efficacity of the Resistance.

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familiar and recognisable, therefore, as true. The most obvious is ‘le colonel Passy’ playing himself, and the back view of the very tall man playing de Gaulle. But there is much more. The titles of Luc Jardie’s books which are so important to Gerbier, Transfini et continu, and Sur la logique et la théorie de la science, are the titles of posthumous books by Jean Cavaillès, the famous philosopher and mathematician shot in 1944, a reference which inscribes the mark of death at the heart of the film. Luc is recalling Jean Moulin also, especially in Kessel’s text, but here by the way he dies under torture. The opening scenes of the German soldiers reproduce well known newsreel footage; Jean-François’s train arriving in Paris reproduces the beginning of La Bataille du rail; shots of Félix and later Jean-François having been tortured, slumped alone on a chair in the middle of an empty room, recall famous shots of Rome Open City. At the very beginning of the film is the caption, ‘bad memories, you are welcome, for you are my distant youth’.10 In other words, through a range of techniques, this history is familiar, it can be registered as true, it has been lived. This authenticity is nonetheless purely textual. Typical in this of the nouvelle vague and its interest in the formal qualities of film, it bears its signature as film. L’Armée des ombres is guaranteed as authentic by other texts. Furthermore, the film noir is by definition pure textuality. It is in its mobilisation of this genre that we meet the question of transgression. Jill Forbes has written that the political thriller is frequently used in France in times of national crisis (1992:60). It is an excellent vehicle for sorting through forbidden questions, and by virtue of that definition, it can represent a certain ambiguity. Film noir and the gangster film as operating in L’Armée des ombres is indeed the realm of shadows, the murderous dark night of the soul whose participants are in a world apart, other, different and therefore subversive. One has only to think of the controversy surrounding Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943) to realise the power of material combining unconscious, irrational forces and national issues. The gangster film, particularly associated with Ventura, has a metaphysical dimension of acceptance of death and destiny. The rather verbose narrative voices of Gerbier and the narrator of the Kessel text are here replaced by the laconic meditative voice-over of Gerbier ruminating his fate and how well he will face up to it. The difference between their world and the world of the living is at times comically registered (‘de Gaulle’ meets film noir, or the deliciously ham barber played by Reggiani). But the shot of the tired, blank, 10. For an account of Melville’s wartime experiences, see Williams 1992: 332.

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middle-aged faces of Gerbier and Jardie in the cinema in London, faces which belong to the insistent, dramatic and haunting music which dominates the film, with the flickering light from the screen and the lush romantic score of Gone With The Wind washing over them, is one of the most poignant images of alienation and truly tragic incongruity one could imagine. L’Armée des ombres is pro-Resistance. Its characters are heroic and tragic. It does not mock the Gaullist vision of an alliance of internal and external resistance broadly supported by the French, as much as anything because the iconography of Resistance struggle and historical references are mobilised in order to support the story as familiar and historically true. The film also constructs the Resistance as transgressive other, obeying its own dark laws of death and murder, and in so doing it presents very interesting variations on the long-established use of a sexual politics of outlaw (male) and betrayal (feminine/feminised), which are already in place in Resistance writing and postwar anti-Resistance writing (Higgins 1993, Kelly 1995, Lauren 1995, Reynolds 1990). All of this is very coherent. The film could not be as powerful as it is if that were not the case. But it is also an excellent indicator, in the political framing of it as anachronism and anticipation, of the reductive reading which the historiography of the mode rétro has imposed on the texts which predate it. The opposition between subversion and legitimacy which L’Armée des ombres brings into focus allows us to map continuities across seemingly disparate discourses. Issues of legitimacy have been central to the configuration of the French State in relation to the Occupation, the Algerian war, the passage from the Fourth to the Fifth Republics, and particularly to the relationship between the French State and the French Nation (which state, or which political grouping seeking power over the state, can claim the right to represent the nation?). The mode rétro evacuates these continuities in the political memory of the State, since it is a discourse whose subject is the French nation, not the State. Le Chagrin et la pitié and L’Armée des ombres each has its own logic and coherence. Neither can be neatly slotted into the mode rétro as commonly understood. Within the ideological problematic of Le Chagrin et la pitié, political subversion and authentic national consciousness go together, whereas Lacombe Lucien points the finger of blame back at the nation, although Le Chagrin et la pitié certainly played a central role in breaking the hegemony of the Fifth Republican discourse on the Occupation. In other words, the mode rétro covers the coexistence of contradictory discourses as much as anything which preceded it. In 1995, for a French television screen-

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ing, L’Armée des ombres was described as: ‘the best film made about the fighters of the shadows, those anti-heroes.’ (Télepoche magazine) One could say that the intricate interweavings of hero and anti-hero encapsulate the shifting narratives of memory in the postwar period.

17

ALEXANDER KLUGE: GERMANY – AN EXPERIENCE OF WORDS AND IMAGES Klaus R. Scherpe

‘Who are we, in reality?’ Alexander Kluge (1989: 107) asks in one of his many interviews. He argues that we are almost (but not quite) administrators, translators or collectors; he suggests that we are part-time gardeners or caretakers of ruins; essentially, however, he contends that we are ‘parallelists’ (‘Parallelisten’) because of our tendency to appropriate in our language the codes of the worlds in which we live, together with their fragments of dead labour. We draw parallels, we mimic reality in ways that may be radical. In the quest for identity in which we are engaged what matters is the problem of circulation, gravitation and proportion. We are, Kluge (1973) suggests, advocates of an ‘occasional materialism’ (‘Gelegenheitsmaterialismus’), that is, set against all forms of wishful representation, all sorts of mythical realism. His central category is not ‘totality’ which sounds like totalitarianism to him, but ‘Zusammenhang’, which can be rendered only approximately as ‘seeing things in their interconnection’. Through interaction, we habitually transform the twentieth century into a lively concert. Given that many of us have a feeling of being placed on the wrong side of history, we feel we have to find new forms of staging history. Such statements as these betray not the voice of postmodernism but instead the rebelliousness of the generation of 1968. The ques-

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tions which Kluge raises concern not only the problem of individual identity but also Germany as a whole. It is worth remembering that Kluge was a convinced author of ‘Heimat’, and that Germany is central to all his films. His film, The Female Patriot (1979), opens with a quotation from Karl Kraus: ‘The more closely you look at a word, the more distantly it looks back at you’ (Kluge 1979: 165). In the focus of this insert a word is added in capital letters, ‘GERMANY’. ‘Kluge looks so closely at Germany’, Anton Kaes (1989: 129) writes in his book From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, ‘that the viewer’s gaze becomes confused, and what has been familiar suddenly seems distant, strange, foreign’. The particular mode in which Kluge re-writes and re-views Germany has its origin in the traumatic events of the Second World War: Stalingrad, which for him symbolises a final stage and permanent obsession of German history; the Allied air raids on his home town of Halberstadt; the Nazi concentration camps; a story from the medical division of Auschwitz, ‘Ein Liebesversuch’ (‘An Experiment of Love’), where a Jewish couple is forced to make love under the eyes of SS guards. Kluge never deals with ‘events’ as such. Instead he explores configurations and constellations which sometimes go back as far as the middle ages of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa or as far forward as the party convention of the Social Democrats in the 1970s or to the restructuring of the skyline of Frankfurt which presents an allegory of the new Deutschmark capitalism. By imagining the disasters and suppressed energies of German history, Kluge cannot avoid the problem of representation. As Castoriadis (1983: 22) writes: ‘Auschwitz or the Gulag cannot be contradicted, you have to fight them.’ From around 1962 Kluge became one of Adorno’s favourite students in Frankfurt, and to Castoriadis’ statement he would add the proviso that the past should be made accessible and comprehensible not by means of symbols and terminologies, but by observing and organising substantive reason in public matters as a modality of sensory, imaginative experience. Further, he would certainly share Adorno’s verdict, which, correctly rendered, contends that there should be no writing about Auschwitz, that makes sense out of Auschwitz (Koch 1992: 143-45). One might reasonably ask to what extent Kluge’s ideas and works are representatively German. As a theoretically orientated, deliberately nonmetaphysical, committed, left-wing thinker and writer, Kluge works within the tradition of Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno. It was on Adorno’s advice that he studied law and business administration. It must, however, have been to Adorno’s surprise that he represented these subjects in artistic forms and

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particularly through the medium of films – Adorno (1967) judged films with outspoken hatred, stating that the worst thing in films are the pictures.1 Kluge’s important but never popular films go under titles such as Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday’s Girl, 1966); Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos (Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed, 1967); Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin (Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave, 1973), strongly criticised by feminist critics; Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1978), dealing with the terrorism of the RAF; Die Patriotin (The Female Patriot, 1979), maybe his chef d’oeuvre; Die Macht der Gefühle (The Power of Emotion), dealing with nineteenth century opera; and Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit (The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time, 1985). I mention these titles because in my opinion they convey the essence of Kluge’s German pedagogy. His collected prose and theoretical writings include such titles as Geschichte und Eigensinn (History and Obstinacy, 1981, a text which he wrote together with the social scientist Oskar Negt; Eigensinn is rendered by Miriam Hansen as ‘obstinacy’, linked with human desire of autonomy) and Learning Processes with a Deadly Ending (1973), a title which, with its combination of didactic obsessions and negative dialectics, is quintessentially German. A good deal of sophisticated critical writing (in both German and English) has been devoted to Kluge’s work as both writer and film-maker. There are two special issues on his work in the American journals October (1988) and New German Critique (1990) with important articles by Miriam Hansen, Anton Kaes, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson and others. Jameson’s article in the Fall issue of October in 1988, explores the theoretical network which links Kluge’s ideas back to Marx, Gramsci, Sartre and Althusser, and which connects them with the ideas of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall with their passionate anti-structuralism. The aim of the present chapter is to bring together the fragments of Kluge’s narratives and films about Germany. More specifically, I want to analyse his project of tracing a history of the resistance of the five senses against the process of history, or rather against the text of history.2 1. Adorno’s essay ‘Filmtransparente’ (1967: 79-88) in the context of his criticism of the culture industry is the only document in this respect and therefore permanently quoted. 2. Having seen his films in the 1980s, and now seeing them again, I find personally that my previous suspicion has strengthened: Kluge’s cold-hearted analytic explorations and universal desires are most likely of romantic origin. This judgement should not be a verdict.

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My first point is that Kluge’s written and cinematographic experiments follow the German project of memory, as theorised in Alexander Mitscherlich’s Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (The Inability to Mourn, 1967). His films on Germany’s history and presence are ‘Totengedenken’, memorials, variations and certain shifts of the memorials of the dead, investigating the survival of their remnants. In his film The Female Patriot, Kluge’s ‘Trauerarbeit’ (the work of mourning) expresses itself through a critical variation of Mitscherlich’s central thesis, that millions of Germans at the end of the war could not overcome separation from their beloved object – Hitler. In the first of the film’s twelve sequences, entitled The Knee, Kluge collects and quotes pictures, shots of unknown soldiers fallen in battle. Then the camera wanders among pre-urban landscapes of a past Germany, images of nature, a blossoming tree, contrasted in later pictures with the Frankfurt skyline glowing ambiguously in the evening sunlight. From the beginning Kluge uses a great variety of framing (long shots, close-ups, deep focus, pans etc.), a multi-perspectivism which implies the negation of a universal view of history. The voice-over, spoken by Kluge himself, is identified with the knee of Corporal Wieland, who died in the battle of Stalingrad on 29 January 1943. Kluge was looking for a metonym which had to do with the body and with Stalingrad; a part of a human being which unfortunately was placed in this fatal history. He quotes the poem of Christian Morgenstern, ‘A knee walks lonely through the world’ (Kluge 1979: 52), and takes it as an allegory for the German Reich which has been destroyed and can no longer have an identity. Therefore, the individual he describes cannot be a complete human being. History is what hurts. In an interview Kluge confessed that his editor Beate Mainka Jellinghaus, whom he always praised as the real author of his films, had the idea of the knee (Liebman 1988a: 52), and his was the job of finding the pictures: the whole process of collecting and editing, of course, being a manifestation of Kluge’s theory of memory. The knee’s commentary throughout the film does not explain but demonstrates what it is and what it claims to be its power of survival. The knee defines itself as ‘the space in between’, the link which cannot be missed in all these pictures which in their elegiac mode give us the impression of a void, a sense of absence and loss. Kluge makes liberal use of images of ice and winter, coldness and freezing. We remember Heine’s Germany: A Winter’s Tale and the well-known pictures of the German soldiers of Stalingrad, prisoners-of-war on their march through the Russian winter. The knee serves as an allegory of an activated, working memory which exploits its capacity to find the space in between: between, on the

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one hand, the frozen memory of public discourse which objectifies and legitimises history and, on the other hand, memory’s unique faculty of resisting the dissolution of time, thereby conducting a rescue operation to save what Kluge calls ‘Erfahrung’ (‘experience’). We have been mutilated, says the knee, and I have been disintegrated from the dead body of Corporal Wieland whose other bones rest in Stalingrad. But nobody can stop me from ‘talking, talking, talking’, and thereby knitting together what has been separated by a technological understanding of time or by the way in which warfare categorises time rigidly into past, present, future. Accompanied by pictures of Stalingrad, the voice-over states: ‘I must clarify once and for all a fundamental error: namely, that we are dead or somehow dead. We are full of protest and energy. Who wants to die? We speed through history, examining it. How can I escape the history that will kill us all?’ (Trans. Kaes 1989: 112) The impact of Germany’s dead on the survivors or on those presently living in Frankfurt, for example, cannot be narrated. Kluge’s views on the illusion of cinema and its use of suggestive plot development are as sarcastic as those of Adorno. His pseudodocumentary book on Stalingrad’s significance in German history is called Schlachtbeschreibung (1964) – he entitles the work, description of a battle, thus deliberately avoiding the word narration that is used in most war novels that also include using illustrations and meaning as a substitute for the devastating void of the battlefield. Kluge investigates the structural principles that operate in time and in language codes in an endeavour to reveal more than can be seen by one pair of eyes alone. He maintains paradoxically that Stalingrad is a ‘grid to which the imagination of the reader or spectator can cling when it moves in the direction of Stalingrad’ (Kluge 1983: 368). When the single issue, the so-called event is being told, Kluge halts the course of time, transforms events and actions into what he calls an ‘enclosed space’, the space of a laboratory situation or that of a case study. In the sixth tableau of Kluge’s film we find a scene called The Relation of a Love Story to History (see Kaes 1989: 111-12). Following a montage of photographs of fascist Italy we see a long static shot of a newly married couple looking at each other silently in front of a mirror. The voice-over provides us with necessary information. They are a German officer by the name of Fred Tacke und his wife Hildegard (her maiden name is Gartmann), and they are on their honeymoon in Rome. The date is August 1939. The scene shifts to the pair hastily packing their suitcases: it is 1 September and the Second World War has broken out. We are then told, ‘he has to join his regiment’. Then we see shots of military activities

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and Tacke’s wife waiting at home. The photograph which comes next shows an elderly couple and then the off-screen voice comments: ‘In 1953 Tacke returns from Russia, where he was a prisoner of war. Now the two are supposed to continue the love story of August 1939.’ (Kluge 1979: 109-14) Kluge insists on finding the crucial patterns – in this case the historical outcome of the classic conflict between personal und public history – in the raw material (Rohstoff) of ordinary life. ‘Since 1933 we have been waging a war that has not stopped. It is always the same theme – the non-correlation of intimacy and public life – and the same question: How can I communicate strong emotions in order to build a common life?’ (Liebman 1988a: 45) Kluge adheres to Benjamin’s notion that thought should press close to its object, making the reader feel its tactile qualities (Adorno 1955). In Kluge’s opinion both the social dimension of experience and the correlation between private and public life depend on the way in which the flow of time is conceptualised: its [time’s] acceleration, retardation, the time of experiencing it, response time, time to be gained, time to be lost, and so forth. The production of the ability to remember, of a horizon, a perspective, of precision, certainty, movement (in two senses, as motion and emotion) – all this is realised through ever so fine manipulations of time (Kluge 1990a: 19).

The most effective pointer to these reflections on the manipulation of time (which have dire consequences for Lieutenant Tacke and his wife) is, of course, the film medium itself which can manipulate time at will. Defining cinema as a site of temporality, Kluge is interested in certain changes that cinematographic images exert on the ‘grammar of time’. In order to make a Marxist break with the fetishistic character of the cinema of illusions (‘den Fetischcharakter des Illusionskinos’), Kluge maintains that every moment of the film must be free from the ‘closed’, mythical structure of narration, often called ‘realism’. The film should attempt to reach back to the raw material of the scene. The possibilities of the film to explore temporality reside within the technical reality of projection: ‘The eye looks outward for one forty-eighth of a second and inward for one forty-eighth of a second.’ (Quoted in Hansen 1988: 186) ‘This metaphor’, writes Miriam Hansen, ‘translates into an aesthetics of montage, of gaps and pauses, in which the spectator’s “inner film” swerves from the film; it enables the representation of “invisible images”.’ (186) It is these images that Kluge calls the ‘third pic-

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tures’ (‘die dritten Bilder’); they are produced in between the setting of two pictures: ‘The third picture then is the utopian dream, which the spectator has been dreaming for a long time.’ (Kluge 1989: 115) Lieutenant Tacke and his wife were, so to speak, in the wrong film, the film of Nazi Germany and of the Second World War. Kluge’s montage of the time pattern of their lives makes it impossible for the spectator to identify with the pictures she/he sees of their life. The spectator ‘identifies’ – or rather she/he should sense and trace, according to Kluge’s project – ‘the gap’, the ‘in between’ (it is worth remembering that the film’s protagonist, the knee, is also an ‘in between’), where the ‘real’ life and love story of the Tackes should have happened, the life they had ‘really’ wished for (instead of being separated from this life by the terrible invention of Germany which Hitler imposed on them). And Kluge adds another theoretical remark which brings forth the basic assumption of the whole operation of temporality in film: ‘The third picture is the utopian dream which follows the ban on images [Bilderverbot].’ It appears that Kluge does, after all, agree with Adorno’s dictum that the worst part of films are the pictures. What this means is that the spectator who sees the Tacke couple on the honeymoon in Rome in Kluge’s film sees and learns something about life under fascism and during the Second World War, precisely by not seeing pictures which illustrate fascism and the Second World War. It would be interesting to compare Kluge’s view with Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Bilderverbot’, his radical opposition to both the documentary and the fiction making of the Holocaust in his film, Shoah. Another example of Kluge’s cinematographic experiments with German history can be found at the very beginning of the film The Female Patriot. Switching back and forth in Kluge’s films is a wholly appropriate motion. When he first showed The Female Patriot in Berlin’s Arsenal Theatre, the operator used the second reel first by mistake – to Kluge’s delight, the audience failed to notice. The first image of The Female Patriot is the observing eyes of Gaby Teichert, a history teacher from Hesse. She has decided, as she declares, to change the starting point of the material for her history lessons. I cannot teach history, she says, if I don’t feel it, touch it, smell it. Like Corporal Wieland’s knee, she is full of the energy to protest. At the same time, she is an example of German perfectionism. A member of what other country would take on the burden of personally testifying for the whole of a nation’s history? Gaby Teichert, a teacher of German history, does so and consequently she creates problems for herself with the board of her secondary school. This is the stuff Kluge’s patriotism is made of: the

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attempt to reconnect emotionally that which has been disconnected in a society which enforces separation and exchange (‘Zwangstauschgesellschaft’). Being a patriot of the postwar period means, first of all, that Gaby Teichert takes an interest in all of Germany’s dead. She sets out on a wintery day with a spade over her shoulder to dig for Germany’s history in the frozen earth. The idea of digging is the central metaphor of the film. The tableaux which follow on from the initial scene show us her various endeavours and the results of her excavations which concern both the past and the present: she takes part in the illegal activities of a group of amateur archaeologists in Frankfurt; she figures at the beginning of one tableau talking to two bomb disposal experts before they are hit by a bomb themselves; she visits the Party Convention of the Social Democrats to collect new historical material while history is in the making; she attempts to connect her present work of ‘collection’ with similar endeavours of the past (the brothers Grimm, collectors of fairy tales, are presented as ‘researchers of wishes’); she also examines history through a telescope, while nearby a baby is being born; together with her friends she makes a painful effort to reconstruct the third verse of Schiller’s Ode to Joy on New Year’s Eve; and she presses even closer to history when we see her in her laboratory working on a book of obviously great historical importance; it is not difficult to guess which work it is since she is cutting it to pieces with a hammer and sickle. She goes on to dissolve the pages in order to swallow them, enacting a cannibalistic method of dealing with history and the historical belief in materialism. As has been noticed by various critics, it is the voiceover of Kluge which attributes meaning to all her activities (Sander 1990). Gaby Teichert herself is very often tired of her school teaching and the assaults of her colleagues and her students’ parents. She emphasises the strain of her efforts: ‘I am trying hard’. It is hard labour to grasp the past physically. My endeavour to extract a coherent story by stringing together Gaby Teichert’s experimental undertakings, gives a false impression of the fabric of experiences that Kluge has constructed in his film. When Gaby Teichert collects fragments of the German past, it is implicit that Walter Benjamin stands as the adviser of this ‘form of practical remembering’ (Kaes 1989: 110). Kluge has adopted Benjamin’s allegorical method of appropriating fragments, the ruins of history which he hopes to recover by piling them up in a synthetic, hybrid structure (Liebman 1988b: 21). History, when it is searched for seriously, presents itself as a permanent construction site. The ‘German misery’ (Friedrich Engels’s ‘deutsche Misere’) is, as Kluge once remarked, a ‘free-floating misery’. The collected frag-

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ments of that history cannot be reunited and completed so as to form an improved version of German history. There will be no ‘Schicksalstragödie’ in the old apocalyptic fashion: ‘new life will blossom from the ruins’ and the like (an old-fashioned slogan of socialist politics). Kluge’s mode of narration, informed by Benjamin’s allegorical collecting and re-reading of history, does not allow linear progression. His method is instead descriptive and counter-narrative; he achieves in film what he set out to do in his prose work, Schlachtbeschreibung, the ‘novel’ about Stalingrad (see above). This counter-narrative mode generates an Entdramatisierung (a dedramatisation) of history, cutting to pieces the German master narrative which runs from Frederick Barbarossa through the Second World War to the present. This is also the reason why Gaby Teichert in this historical space of contradiction and difference performs more like a comical figure from the repertoire of Karl Valentin than like a tragic heroine such as Schiller’s Mary Stuart or Jeanne d’Arc. Story telling in the age of information, as Benjamin had already suggested in the 1920s, has to become an analytical and structuralist activity if the experience of destruction in the modern world is to be conveyed adequately. What is also fundamentally important in Kluge’s cinematographic experiments is the theoretical insistence that the intellectual constructions cannot be separated from emotions. Kluge needs his female patriot to work as another of his go-betweens: Gaby Teichert is a construction of a female figure who suffers physically and emotionally from the sort of patriotism that has ruined history and which is normally championed by men. In the making of history, emotions (as Kluge learned from the Dialectics of Enlightenment) often do not follow the reason that is inherent within them. In opposition to the historical outburst of uncontrolled feelings (here Kluge’s version of fascism coincides with that of Adorno), Kluge argues that feelings and unconscious behaviour should be transformed into specific modes of resistance. Engaged in her curious endeavour to uncover fatal German history, Gaby Teichert points to the most precious of all human capacities – and that is the capacity to distinguish differences (das ‘Unterscheidungsvermögen’). Gaby Teichert exemplifies, in Kluge’s terminology, a ‘strategy from below’: such a strategy is posed in opposition to the ‘strategy from above’, which is exemplified in the ‘dead labour’ of a bombing attack which hits Frau Teichert, Frau Tacke, Corporal Wieland and the rest of us. This capacity to differentiate is theorised and imagined as a practice of the individual senses. As Marx believed, the senses

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themselves behave as theorists, having a longer history than Western civilisation. For the benefit of Western civilisation, not only to enable the reeducation of Germany, Kluge (1990: 106) imagines and advocates a ‘general assembly of emotions’, which would form part of a society based on forced exchange (‘Zwangstauschgesellschaft’). In such an assembly Gaby Teichert would be a backbencher on the left: The ears are an independent person; the eyes are a further person, much more synthetic than the ears. The nose is a repressed and underdeveloped person. The tongue is a cautious man, the lips that preside over the passage from inner to outer – these are only concrete cases of the capacity to differentiate. When anyone says something is a whole, we don’t trust him. If he says this is a particular thing, then we trust him. Our party is the party of differentiation. Throughout history our party has never had the majority. That doesn’t preclude the possibility that it suddenly may have one. (Liebman 1988a: 46)

Within the context of postwar Germany, it may be accurate to characterise Kluge as one of the last reeducators, similar to the American reeducators who worked in Hesse and Bavaria between 1946 and 1947: Kluge sees the Germans as so inward-looking, so deeply involved in their own losses and shortcomings, so obsessed with problems, if not of a military order, then at least of an organisational kind. But there is also a persistent redemptive quality in Kluge’s work. In his texts and films it is possible to sense a romantic sensibility whenever the theorising leads to the deadlock of aporia. At this point history becomes, as in the saying of the romantic poet Novalis (O’Kane 1985: 13), a fairy tale which is opposed to Hegel’s legal viewpoint in matters of a general constitution. Finally, one finds the slogan of the 1968 generation ‘la phantasie au pouvoir’ and the gesture of refusal taking its peculiarly German shape of purity. But Kluge is, as I mentioned at the beginning, not only a postwar and postponed rebellious poet and film-maker, but also a thinker who looks for the possibility of pragmatic interventions: important legal actions, his appearances on commercial television on Monday night at 11 o’clock with his ‘culture window’. As the female protagonist of one of his earlier films, Yesterday’s Girl, says: ‘We are separated from yesterday not by an abyss, but by the changed situation.’ (Quoted in Hansen 1988: 198)

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FASCISM AND ANTI-FASCISM REVIEWED: GENERATIONS, HISTORY AND FILM IN ITALY AFTER 1968 David Forgacs

‘Il sessantotto’ has become a shorthand in Italy for an array of protests involving, among others, workers, youth, students, women, Catholic activists and pensioners and for a period which stretches back at least to 1967 (and in some respects to the early 1960s), and forward at least until 1972 in its ‘hot’ phase and up to the late 1970s in its social and legislative impact.1 Here I shall look first at how this ‘long 1968’ changed earlier ways of looking at the war, fascism and anti-fascism and then at how these changes left their mark on a group of feature films made in the first half of the 1970s. The films I shall discuss are Strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem) and Il conformista (The Conformist), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci (both 1970), Pasqualino Settebellezze by Lina Wertmüller (English title Seven Beauties, 1975), Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1973) by Liliana Cavani and Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom, 1975) by Paolo Pasolini. Their historical interest lies, I shall argue, not so much in their heuristic value as films ‘about’ fascism or anti-fascism as in 1. For a good discussion of the collective action of the late 1960s and 1970s along these lines see Lumley 1990 and Tarrow 1989. Among the general histories which discuss the period well are Ginsborg 1990 (chapter 9) and Lanaro 1992 (part II, chapters 3 and 4).

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what they tell us, through their intertwinings of fantasy and memory, about the kinds of relationship to the past that were established by film-makers in the early 1970s. The movements of the late 1960s constitute a historical watershed in Italy as in several other countries, not least because they were a generational revolt, the revolt of the first postwar generation (those born in and just after the war) against not only their real parents but also their symbolic parents: the authorities, ‘authority’ in general, the prevailing systems of values. In this process the accounts of the past handed down to these young people by their parents were also challenged. In Italy the generation which reached adulthood in the 1960s had grown up into a society of unprecedented prosperity but riven by the dislocating effects of mass migrations, rapid urbanisation, deep socioeconomic divisions and regional disequilibria. They had lived as children or adolescents under a phase of centre-right government in the 1950s, followed in the 1960s by a centre-left consensus politics that had failed to deliver real structural reforms; with a large left opposition party – the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) – committed to a gradualist strategy and discredited in the eyes of those to the left of it by its inability to wrench itself completely free from Stalinism. In all this they were highly receptive to alternative models, whether the anti-colonial guerrilla movements in various parts of the Third World, the radical critiques of capitalism and consumer culture produced by new left intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse or earlier instances of revolutionary communism in the pre-Stalin period. This last point is important: the protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s may have rejected many aspects of the present and the immediate past, but their receptiveness to alternative models ensured that they did not break with the past as a whole. Rather, the younger generation looked back to before their parents’ generation for many of their models of protest, in particular to examples of left communism or council communism from the Paris Commune to the early 1920s, as well as to examples of feminism or women’s activism from the same period, such as Alexandra Kollontai and Clara Zetkin. This meant bypassing the whole period from the mid-1920s to the 1960s, which came to be seen by many young left activists en bloc as a relatively continuous phase of monopoly capitalism in the West and of state socialism or Stalinism in the East and in the Western Communist parties. The overall effect of this operation was to rewrite history in a particular way, drawing lines of continuity through a period into which their parents’ generation had inserted a series of decisive breaks: in Italy this meant in particular drawing a line of continuity from the fascist regime

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(1925-43) through the war to the foundation of the Republic (1946) and its subsequent consolidation (1950s and early 1960s). The rewriting of the past had an international dimension – for instance there was Gabriel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s Linksradikalismus (Le Gauchisme) in 1968 which argued for a recovery and renewal of various forms of extreme left politics, and then the writings in the 1970s of Nicos Poulantzas (1970) and Ernest Mandel (1975) which fitted fascism and the postwar Western states into a long wave of capitalist development. These texts were influential in Italy, as elsewhere, but in Italy the rewriting of the past had two interrelated ‘regional’ features which it is worth drawing out. The first is that it had the effect of challenging the main legitimating narrative of the postwar state, that of the Italian Republic as the product of the Resistance (1943-45) – ‘The Republic born of the Resistance’. According to this narrative, the Republic was cemented together by the basic common aims of anti-fascism, aims which were shared by all parties represented in the 1948 Constitution, and it was thus a radical negation and inversion of the fascist state. In the counter-narrative that was produced in the 1960s, largely by the non-Communist left (that is to say the left wing of the Socialist Party and the new left groups which had begun to form after 1956), the Italian Republic, although it had formally reintroduced democracy and pluralism, was just another form of state reared up over the same capitalist economy and the same social relations as in the fascist and pre-fascist periods. It was not even all that new as a state, since after 1945 there had been many elements of continuity: in the personnel working in public administration, the judiciary and the armed forces, in the legal statutes and in the centralised form of government with its centrally appointed prefects in the provinces (a system dating from 1865). As for the Resistance, its role was not entirely diminished in this counternarrative, but it was critically revalued. The Resistance came to be seen from the left no longer as a consensual anti-fascist alliance which had laid the basis of the postwar state but as a ‘failed revolution’, a movement whose radical aspirations to political and social regeneration had been defeated by the restoration of capitalism and liberal democracy, with which the PCI had fatally colluded and which had been firmly entrenched in the late 1940s by the economic and political support of the US government. Thus, the 1960s generation could draw inspiration from the more radicalised parts of the Resistance, for instance the model of ‘guerre per bande’ (war of movement and surprise attack by small armed units) or the experiments in direct democracy practised in some areas in 1944-45, such as the self-styled Republic of Valdossola, but they rejected the mythification of the Resistance as a whole which had been passed on by many veteran

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partisans and by the historical accounts of ex-partisans belonging to the PCI and the Partito d’Azione (disbanded in 1948, linked to the liberal-socialist Giustizia e Libertà movement which had played a major role in the Resistance in Piedmont). The second, related, feature was the suggestion that fascism, which had been born in Italy, had not been killed in 1945 but lived on in the postwar state, partly in its old form, and partly by having mutated into new forms. This narrative of a continuity of fascism did not arise in 1968. It can be traced back to Communist and Socialist discourse of the Cold War period, with its comparisons between the repressive policies of Christian Democrat (DC) Interior Minister Mario Scelba and fascist internal repression, or between the DC’s propagandist use of the radio and that of the fascist regime. However, the narrative was fleshed out further in the 1960s. At the origins of this lay the Tambroni affair (June-July 1960), when a new Christian Democrat government was formed with the confidence votes of the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) which then attempted to hold its congress in Genoa. This raised the spectre of a persistence of fascism into the Republic and gave rise to mass protests. While on the one hand the Genoa protests could be seen as reaffirming the narrative of the ‘Republic born from the Resistance’ because they demonstrated the continued strength of collective anti-fascist feeling, on the other the Tambroni affair as a whole gave rise to a series of negative and pessimistic assessments of continuity between fascism and the Republic. It put the Left on the alert over possible fascist recidivism and served as a reminder of the importance of not forgetting the past. In 1961 an important series of lectures was held in Milan on Italian history from 1918 to 1948. Most of the speakers were former anti-fascist political activists (Giorgio Amendola, Lelio Basso, Vittorio Foa, Ferruccio Parri) and only a few were academic historians. The organising committee issued a statement before the third lecture justifying this choice and the aims of the series. One aim was the need to understand fascism rather than seeing it as an ‘unknown parenthesis’ (‘una parentesi ignota’): ‘We need to understand what fascism was yesterday and what it is today’. Another aim was to transmit memory down the generations. ‘Twenty years of fascism’, the statement said, ‘have prevented the natural relationship between different generations from forming’. The lectures and testimonies would help ‘to reestablish a real and immediate continuity’ between them.2 Another significant docu2. The statement is quoted in the introductory note to the published lectures, Fascismo e antifascismo. Lezioni e testimonianze, 2 volumes, Milan 1962: 5-8. The passage translated here is on p.7.

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ment of this moment is the documentary film of 1961, All’armi siam fascisti (To Arms We Are Fascists, the title is from a fascist marching song), by Lino Del Fra, Cecilia Mangini and Lino Micciché. It is a didactic film, in the Brechtian sense, with a script by Franco Fortini for voice-over to archive footage. It covers fifty years of history, from the Libyan war of 1911-12 (launched, as the script puts it, by the conservative élites in Italy to ‘distract the country’ from the rise of socialism and universal suffrage) through the fascist action squads of 1919 to the neofascism of Genoa 1960. Its thesis is simple: there has been a historical continuity of fascism and imperialism, not just in Italy but internationally – the authoritarian regimes of Franco and Salazar, the apartheid state in South Africa, French colonial rule in Algeria. Such systems will reproduce themselves so long as the economic and political interests behind them remain dominant. But is fascism still present? It is. It has rediscovered its face of fifty years ago, before the blackshirts. The face of conservatism which still offers cheap on the political market its little bands of provocateurs, so that the small amount of visible fascism may hide all the better the large amount of invisible fascism. (Fortini 1963: 53)

It was in this period that the Left (again in particular the non-communist Left) began to extend the label ‘fascist’ to the Christian Democrats and their governmental allies. Symptomatic of this was an article in Quaderni Piacentini in 1962 which criticised the way the governing parties had appropriated the annual 25 April celebrations commemorating the Liberation. The article said that the Resistance had to be considered ‘dead’ if it could be celebrated by official Italy, by the ‘fascists’ arm in arm with former anti-fascists – by ‘fascists’, the article went on to specify, it meant not the MSI but ‘the same old ruling class’ which had been fascist before Mussolini, was a lot worse than Mussolini and ‘had always been fascist’.3 This example shows how by the early 1960s the terms ‘fascist’ and ‘anti-fascist’ were becoming elastic signifiers. ‘Fascist’ no longer meant just the politics of ‘historical’ fascism and neofascism but could apply also to other forms of conservative and reactionary politics. At the same time its traditional binary opposite, 3. ’25 aprile l945-25 aprile 1962’, in Quaderni Piacentini, 1 bis, April 1962; reproduced in Baranelli & Cherchi 1977: 17.

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‘anti-fascist’, was starting to fall into discredit, coming to mean something like ‘a politics complicit with the compromises of the postwar state’. From this point on there were to be acrimonious wrangles over legitimate and illegitimate uses of the term ‘fascist’. One example was the controversy provoked by Pasolini’s use of the word in the early 1970s to describe the contemporary Italian state and the society of ‘false tolerance’ and ‘repressive hedonism’ (Pasolini 1975: 232-36). It was Pasolini’s contention that the Italy which had emerged out of the economic boom of the 1950s and early 1960s, with its allegedly near universal consensus on petty bourgeois norms and values, its lack of a credible political alternative (the PCI had bought into the dominant ethos), and its networks of hidden power, could properly be described as ‘fascist’. This drew the retort from other left intellectuals, including Fortini, that Pasolini was ignoring or underestimating the differences between the society of the 1970s and ‘historical fascism’. By calling contemporary society ‘fascist’, Pasolini, said his critics, was emptying the term ‘fascism’ of all specific meaning. For all the differences between them, the critical positions adopted by Fortini and Pasolini towards fascism and anti-fascism serve to illustrate an important point: it was not just the generation born at the end of the war that challenged the myth of ‘the Republic born from the Resistance’. Rather, some members of the previous generation (those born around 1920) moved against the current and were to become influential figures in the 1960s and early 1970s counterculture. Fortini (born in 1917) and Pasolini (born in 1922) both belonged to this generation. Both had experienced the war at first hand – Fortini had played a brief part in the Resistance as a member of the Socialist Party during the Republic of Valdossola; Pasolini was conscripted for just a few days but his younger brother volunteered as a Partito d’Azione partisan in Friuli and was killed by Titoist communists. Another member of this generation was Nuto Revelli (born in 1919), who had been a volunteer soldier in the Russian campaign in 1942-43 and then a Partito d’Azione partisan in the Cuneo area. He wrote his own memoirs of the war and his conversion to anti-fascism – Mai tardi (Never Late, 1946), La guerra dei poveri (The War of the Poor, 1962), but he was also a pioneer non-academic oral historian, collecting life stories first of other war veterans from the Russian campaign (La strada del davai [The Road of Davai], 1966) and then of Piedmontese peasants (Il mondo dei vinti [The World of the Conquered], 1977): the latter was particularly important for cutting away at the myth of a natural alliance between peasants and partisans and revealing a more complex picture. In addition there were

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academic historians like Claudio Pavone and Guido Quazza (both born in 1920) who had taken part in the Resistance and were both critical of the PCI from left positions. Pavone wrote a milestone essay on the ‘continuity of the state’ between fascism and the Republic, published in 1974; Quazza wrote a fundamental work of historical reorientation, Resistenza e storia d’Italia (The Resistance and the History of Italy, 1976), the culmination of over a decade’s research in this area. In the introduction he said: For the study of the Resistance too … the lesson of the present is starting to prove decisive … I can confirm that the period 1965-68 was a watershed between two ages, two ways of looking at the partisan war. The young people’s criticisms of the Italy ‘born from the Resistance’, which were part of the explosion of students’ and workers’ ‘protest’, managed to invigorate almost at a stroke, because of their mass character, their passionate impetus, and even their militant ideological and political one-sidedness, the attempts at innovation which had up till then been made by a handful of scholars, igniting them with a provocative power which has opened up a new path of historical research. (Quazza 1976: 7)

Quazza’s book was indeed scored through with the consciousness of 1968. It gave considerable emphasis to partisan experiments in selfgovernment and to the partisan bands as microcosms of direct democracy, to the ‘Jacobin’ centralism of the Comitati di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN) – the official coalition government of the Resistance – and to left initiatives outside the orbit of the CLN. However, looked at now, Quazza’s is also very much a reading which emphasises the class aspect of history and leaves other aspects invisible, most notably gender and the experiences of women. And yet it was at just the time that his book was published that the women’s movement began to force a rewriting of the history of the war years. In the second half of the 1970s there were several important conferences on the local role of women in the Resistance – in Conselice (Province of Ravenna) October 1976; Bologna, May 1977; Milan, November l977 – each of which gave rise to published collections of papers. In the same period women were collecting and publishing oral testimonies of women: Anna Maria Bruzzone and Rachele Farina’s La Resistenza taciuta (The Silenced Resistance, 1976) contained twelve life stories of women partisans from Piedmont. Bianca Guidetti Serra’s Compagne. Testimonianze di partecipazione politica femminile (Women Comrades. Testimonies of Women’s Political Participation, two volumes, 1977) included a larger number. Lidia Beccaria Rolfi and Anna Maria Bruzzone’s Le donne di Ravensbrück (The Women of Ravensbrück, 1978) collected life stories of former political deportees to the women’s concentra-

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tion camp of Ravensbrück. The main aims of this research were to draw attention to the large numbers of women who had participated actively in the Resistance, and to the diversity of their roles, to examine the political aims of the Gruppi di Difensa della Donna, to see how women’s demands were frustrated by the outcome of the liberation struggle, and to collect the stories of women activists. Here too the work resulted from an alliance between generations. Young women born during or just after the war who had been among the protagonists of the feminist movement of the early 1970s were seeking to retrieve the lessons and experience of older women, such as Ada Gobetti, who had taken part in the anti-fascist struggle. In their introduction to the papers from the 1977 Milan conference, L’altra metà della Resistenza (The Other Half of the Resistance), the organisers, Lydia Franceschi and Isotta Gaeta, wrote that it had been a meeting place between the Resistance generation, women who had been thrust back into ‘the ghetto of private life’ after the war, and the generation that had entered political life in 1968. ‘We all felt that there was a continuity between the long march of the anti-fascist women activists to transform the condition of women by pulling down all forms of oppression and the will to liberation which had emerged from the new generations. Even though we did not share the same experiences or the same language, methods and choices of struggle.’ (Franceschi 1978: 7)4 There was a note of selfcriticism here. For Franceschi and Gaeta, the post-1968 feminist movement had been too exclusively focused on male oppression, at the expense of class oppression, and had attempted ‘to sweep away the whole of the past’. In this way, it had ‘risked erasing the historical memory of the women’s struggle’ (8). Part of the point of this encounter between generations of women militants was thus to recombine class analysis with the analysis of patriarchy, and to mend the broken links between the older and younger generations. One of the salient features both of Quazza’s work and of the women’s history that emerged in this period – the conferences and the life stories collected by Beccaria Rolfi, Bruzzone, Farina, Guidetti Serra – was that they all told stories of political activists. Their radical rewriting of history thus produced a selective account. In the case of the women’s history, the emphasis on the minority of women who were politically active had the unintended effect of ‘feminising’, in other words of reconsigning to a gender-subaltern sphere, the majority of women who were not politically active. To conclude on the historiography, the postwar generation which came to maturity in 1968 dismissed the official narratives of 4. Respectively these were Casadio & Fenati 1977, Pieroni Bertolotti 1978, Franceschi 1978.

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an anti-fascist consensus giving rise to a unified democratic Republic; they opened up new methods and new emphases in historical research, in particular the turn away from a ‘top-downwards’ history of parties and leaders to a history from below and a use of oral sources; yet at the same time they looked back to the previous generation for other narratives, narratives that were less politically sanctimonious and more truthful, narratives of a ‘betrayed’ Resistance, of a ‘silenced’ Resistance, of the ‘other half’ of the Resistance. Radical members of the Resistance generation, such as Pavone, Quazza and the older feminist historians, met the new generation halfway by opening up these hitherto hidden aspects. But the new narratives of the 1960s and 1970s were also partial in their own way. For one thing, they selected from the totality of the war experience that part of the war which was essentially redemptive, the Resistance. For another, within the totality of the Resistance experience they tended to emphasise the positive moments of radical challenge, of grassroots democratisation, even when these were marginal or frustrated by the outcome of events. The fiction films I have chosen to discuss were all affected by this wholesale reorientation of historiography and bear many traces of it, but they also attempt to deal with the darker side of historical memory: the memory of fascism, guilt and complicity with oppression. This does not mean that they are good historical films; indeed, most of them are open to criticism on historical grounds for the inadequacies and distortions in their representations of fascism. Their main historical interest lies in the evidence they provide of the kinds of relationship with the fascist past which emerged in this period. Bertolucci’s two films of 1970 both confront critically the memory of anti-fascism handed down to the postwar generation. Without being explicitly political films, they are scored through with the political consciousness of that generation. Bertolucci was born in 1941, the son of a well-known poet, Attilio Bertolucci (born 1911); he shot his first short films on 16mm at the age of fifteen and at twenty worked as assistant director on Pasolini’s first feature film Accattone (1961). Both Strategia del ragno and Il conformista are to a large extent about the way the postwar generation must deal with the political legacy of its parents’ generation or, to be more exact, how a male of this generation must confront his real and symbolic fathers. Strategia del ragno opens with the young Athos Magnani arriving in the small town of Tara where his father, who was also called Athos Magnani, was killed in 1936 and is prominently commemorated as an anti-fascist martyr in a statue and a street name. Through conversations with his father’s anti-fascist comrades and former lover

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Draifa, the younger Athos gradually discovers a more complex truth, revealed through a series of flashbacks to the fascist period. His father had tipped off the authorities about a plot he and his comrades were hatching to kill Mussolini on a planned visit to an opera performance in the town. When his comrades find him out, rather than have them execute him as a spy, he himself proposes that they shoot him in the back in the theatre to make it look like a fascist murder. In this way they can exploit his memory for their cause. These facts have never been disclosed to the mainly elderly population of Tara, who continue to celebrate their anti-fascist hero. At the end, Athos, unveiling a new commemorative plaque in the town square, is unable to decide whether his father was in the end a traitor or, through his voluntary martyrdom, a hero. At one level the film is a critique of a certain kind of officialised anti-fascism. The point of using the traitor-hero plot (adapted from Borges’s story ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’) is not to suggest the nihilistic thesis that the boundaries between fascism and anti-fascism are unimportant but to imply that the official cult of anti-fascism has simplified the past in order to produce a reassuring history. Commemorations of martyrs belong to a narrow, provincial mentality which too easily erases traumatic memories of collaboration and betrayal. Various defamiliarising techniques used in the film (reverse-angle shots which fail to match, sudden changes of background, fades to black which do not mark any elapsed time, shots of empty squares and streets reminiscent of De Chirico’s paintings) undermine the viewer’s sense of being securely located in space and time. At another level, the film portrays the difficulty, but necessity, of confronting paternal power and authority. The film casts the same actor, Giulio Brogi, as both the younger and older Athos, but the performances are different: the father is confident and debonair, the son nervous and sweaty. The physical appearance of the other characters does not change between the flashbacks to the 1930s and the present despite the gap of more thirty years between the two time frames. This device reinforces the oedipal narrative by making the young Athos literally ‘take his father’s place’: for instance, in his successive meetings with Draifa (Alida Valli) she increasingly invests him with her erotic memories of his father and yet she is old enough to be his mother. At the end of the film the son is partly released from the oppressive grip of the paternal superego by understanding his father’s fallibility and thus differentiating himself from him. Translated into collective historical terms, this implies that the postwar generation can be released from the grip of its parents’ generation by viewing their past critically rather than mythically.

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The father and son plot is less manifest but no less central in Il conformista. Based on Alberto Moravia’s 1951 novel of the same title, and loosely, like the novel, on the historical event of the murder in France in 1937 of the anti-fascist Carlo Rosselli and his brother Nello by a Cagoule agent acting on behalf of the Italian government, the film tells the story of a man in his early thirties, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who volunteers to locate and assassinate his former university teacher, Luca Quadri (Enzo Taroscio), now an anti-fascist operating from Paris. Marcello’s real father, formerly a fascist squadrista, is incarcerated in a long-stay psychiatric institution, where his ‘madness’ takes the form of reciting tenets of liberal political doctrine; his symbolic father is Quadri, whose place he usurps by having sex with his wife Anna (Dominique Sanda) before helping set up his murder, and inadvertently Anna’s too. This film also works on several levels, not all of which are related to the oedipal theme: like Moravia’s novel, it satirises fascism as social conformism, and in addition it depicts this conformism metaphorically with images of blindness, imprisonment and entrapment (this is done, sometimes in a rather heavyhanded way, through the use of blind characters, the stylised designs of the sets, lighting and costumes and through unusual camera set-ups and movements). But it is by means of the oedipal theme that Bertolucci, as in Strategia del ragno, dramatises, in this case through the allegory of the murder of the once-admired father, his generation’s collective feelings towards its anti-fascist parents: feelings both of inadequacy, of a failure to match up to the paternal model, and of aggression towards the ‘correct’ anti-fascist father, the bourgeois leftist intellectual and, by extension, the PCI’s reformist politics of gradualism and interclassism. And yet in representing the relation with the fascist and anti-fascist past as an oedipal conflict, both films are also open to the objection that they reduce the problem of the historical relationship with the past to a struggle between generations and, moreover, to a specifically gendered struggle over masculine identity. The films by Wertmüller, Cavani and Pasolini are open to a stronger objection: that as films made for commercial release they exploit the collective memory of the Nazi genocide in an irresponsible way by hitching it either to comedy (Wertmüller) or to sex (Cavani and Pasolini). Of the three films, one might seek to defend Pasolini’s Salò above all from this indictment on the grounds that it is an artistic work which he and his producer, Alberto Grimaldi, could have guessed would be banned from public viewing, as it was in Italy from 1976 to 1978 and as it has been in Britain since 1976. The fact that Pasolini was killed (on 2 December 1975) just before

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Salò was released has made it harder to attack and easier to uphold as his last cry of outrage against a corrupt and valueless world. However, it seems to me that for all Pasolini’s good faith in presenting his film as a work of art and a political statement the charge of exploitation must be made to stick. Ultimately the appeal to integrity is an inadequate covering for the film’s harnessing of Holocaust memory to a cinematic spectacle designed for commercial distribution which centres on ritualised humiliations of the naked body. I would maintain nevertheless that the use of Holocaust images or associations in these films bears examining as a symptom of a new attitude to the fascist past which had emerged in the late 1960s and which was more complex than earlier attitudes, which had tended to be of simple refusal or repression. Wertmüller (born in 1928) and Cavani (born in 1937), both of whom also wrote their own scripts (Cavani in collaboration with Italo Moscati and others), deal in their films with traumatic memory, a theme which started to figure prominently at about this time in the postwar generation. Pasqualino Settebellezze, set during the war, is a picaresque story about a Neapolitan wide boy, a guappo, played by Giancarlo Giannini (his nickname is a pun on settebello, a hand in the card game scopa). After killing a pimp and cramming his dismembered body into several suitcases, which he dispatches on different trains, he pleads insanity, is sent to the psychiatric institution in Aversa, where he rapes a bound female patient, and is then given a discharge in exchange for enlistment in the army. He is sent to the Russian front, where he deserts with another soldier, Francesco; they are apprehended by the Germans and end up in a concentration camp. There Pasqualino learns to survive within the camp hierarchy by offering his sexual services to an obese female Kapo; promoted to the position of block leader, he is forced to choose between shooting six prisoners himself or having the whole block, including himself, executed. An anarchist and some others commit suicide, Francesco entreats Pasqualino to shoot him: he does so and saves himself. The experience of the camp leaves him, after his release, bowed but not broken. The main device of this film, and perhaps its main point, is the disruption of genre expectations. By putting its happy-go-lucky Neapolitan through the successive episodes of the killing of the pimp, dismemberment of the body, the rape in the psychiatric institution and internment in the camp it puts the audience through a series of increasingly disorienting hoops. The scene where the Kapo forces Pasqualino to have sex and he is almost too weak from hunger to get an erection is one example. The film, through Pasqualino and the caricatural stage Neapolitans, satirises the qualunquismo (indifference) of the

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Italians; insofar as it delivers serious messages, these are that there can be no good memories of fascism and that even the most ebullient type, ‘one of life’s survivors’, does not really survive morally or psychologically. In an interview Wertmüller said, ‘This is the life of man, but that empty survival is his death. What lives on is not a man, but some other being full of shit, full of distortion.’ (Berets 1979: 81) Yet this is also the main problem with this film, since to make her point Wertmüller mobilises the collective historical memory of the Holocaust, simplifies and partially detraumatises it (little sense is conveyed of its being a racial genocide, for instance, and no children are shown) and contributes little to a historical understanding of it, which is probably the only acceptable justification for putting the Holocaust into a commercial feature film.5 In Il portiere di notte, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), a camp survivor, arrives with her husband in a Vienna hotel in 1957 where she meets again a former Nazi from the camp, Max (Dirk Bogarde), who is now working as a night porter. The hotel serves as a meeting place for other ex-Nazis who conduct a ritualised war crimes trial on each other but in practice swear their continued allegiance to the Nazi cause and are prepared to murder anyone who threatens to reveal their identity. At first Lucia seems horrified to see Max again (the viewer establishes their earlier roles in the camp through a number of flashbacks, associated with both Max and Lucia’s subjective viewpoints, showing Lucia huddled naked with other prisoners while Max, in SS uniform, films her with a movie camera) but it emerges that she is also drawn to resume with Max the sexual relationship they had begun in the camp, based on sadomasochistic rituals of domination and submission. Pursued by the other Nazis, whom Lucia has seen in a meeting, Max and Lucia hole themselves up in a room until they run out of food, whereupon they escape and are gunned down by the Nazis as they run across a bridge. Cavani had started her film career as a maker of documentaries about the war years. Her first film was a four-hour documentary, Storia del Terzo Reich, made in 1962 for the second RAI television channel. In 1965 she directed La donna nella Resistenza (The Woman of the Resistance, shown on RAI 2 on 9 May in the series ‘Prima pagina’), one of several interview-based documentaries she 5. Giorgio Cremonini (1976: 57) described the film as ‘distasteful, crude, often banal, but also extremely aggressive’. For a critique of the film on the grounds both of its alleged promotion of a moral of ruthless self-preservation and of a juxtaposition of comedy and horror whereby the former wipes out the emotional impact of the latter, see Bettelheim 1976. For a defence of the film as ‘a contribution to the understanding of survivorship’, see Pfefferkorn 1992.

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made in that year on memories of the war (others were about the proposal to rehabilitate Pétain and an investigation into how much young people in Europe twenty years on knew about the war). She explained in the introduction to the published script of Il portiere di notte that the idea came to her from her interviews with Italian women partisans who had survived the Nazi camps. One, a woman from Cuneo, had been in Dachau for three years and subsequently returned to the area every summer on vacation; another woman, from Milan, had been in Auschwitz and she spoke of the shame she experienced as a survivor. ‘I asked her which memories tormented her the most. She replied that what disturbed her still was not the memory of this or that episode but the fact that in the camp she was able to discover her own nature to the depths, how much good and evil she was capable of doing: she stressed the word evil.’ (Cavani 1973: viii)6 The entwinement between traumatic memory and masochism in the central story of Max and Lucia is certainly very powerful, but around it Cavani’s film plays dangerously with historically misleading images and stereotypes: that Holocaust victims and survivors legitimated their oppressors; that they were unconsciously bound to them through masochistic submission; that Nazism was founded on homosexuality (the Nazis in a flashback witness a homoerotic dance; Max’s sexuality is ambiguous), that it is linked, through its uniforms and rituals, to sadomasochistic fetishism and that homosexuality is linked to sadism. Cavani’s film is a peculiar combination of historical travesty and genuine engagement with the issue of traumatic memory, of sexploitation movie and an attempt by a woman director to get sympathetically inside female sexual fantasy.7 These tensions, and the film itself, can, I think, be understood historically as resulting from the convergence of multiple and contradictory causes at the moment of its production: changes in the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable representations, the development of feminism and the new psychoanalysis with its interest in women’s memory and female sexuality, an emerging historiographical interest in trauma and memory of the war. The sadism-fascism association is also central to Pasolini’s film which, as its title indicates, relocates the action of Sade’s novel Les 120 journées de Sodome in the Republic of Salò, the regime set up by Mussolini in German-occupied Northern Italy in September 1943. It suggests an equivalence between fascism as a system of coercion and manipulation of the bodies of its victims and the coercive system set up in Sade’s story, where a number of young 6. These parts of the interviews are not included in La donna nella Resistenza. 7. For sympathetic analyses of the film by female critics see Silverman 1980 and de Lauretis 1976-77.

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men and women are first rounded up and then, over a period of four months, repeatedly sexually abused and finally tortured and killed to satisfy the lust of a small group of libertines. However, the film, as Pasolini made clear in interviews he gave during shooting, in turn uses the historical Salò setting allegorically to allude to the present, to the society of the early 1970s where sex had become ritualised, taxonomised and subjected to the laws of commodification and consumption. The film is therefore only indirectly about ‘historical fascism’; it is directly about what Pasolini called ‘new fascism’, which he saw as developing more oppressive, because more latent, forms of social control than old fascism. This way of reconceiving fascism as continuous with the past, as surviving into the present and being modulated in new forms, was one of several products of that critical reassessment of the relation between past and present which took place in the 1960s. If film audiences now find metaphorical and allegorical conflations such as those of Cavani and Pasolini between fascism and sadomasochism less palatable than audiences in the early 1970s, it is perhaps because they can see in retrospect how much those conflations depended on a particular polemic and how much simplification and erasure of historical difference they involved. One of the few critics who had the perspicacity to see this at the time was Roland Barthes, who reviewed Salò in June 1976: Fascism is too serious and insidious a danger to be dealt with by simple analogy, with fascist masters ‘simply’ taking the place of the libertines. Fascism constrains us: it obliges us to think it exactly, analytically, politically; the only thing that art can do with it, if it handles it, is to make it credible, to demonstrate how it comes about, not to show what it resembles. (Barthes 1976: 25)

PART VI

WOMEN’S WRITING AND THE QUEST FOR THE FATHER

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REMEMBERING THE COLLABORATING FATHER IN MARIE CHAIX’S LES LAURIERS DU LAC DE CONSTANCE AND EVELYNE LE GARREC’S LA RIVE ALLEMANDE DE MA MÉMOIRE

Claire Gorrara

Father figures loom large in cultural narratives of the Occupation; from the octogenarian Pétain, head of the paternalistic Vichy regime, to de Gaulle, symbol of the French Resistance and father of a regenerated postwar France. In opposition to such representations stands the collaborating father, disrupting the images of national unity which Pétain and de Gaulle aimed to create. During the 1970s and 1980s in France, a renewed interest in the more problematic heritage of French collaboration, later to be known as the mode rétro,1 brought with it a number of texts which focused on the père indigne, the disgraced father, as he came to be known (Ory 1981: 112). In this chapter, I want to explore how such a figure can be read as a privileged site for understanding the legacy of the Occupation in post-1968 France. In selecting texts by two women writers, Marie Chaix and Evelyne Le Garrec, I will also be examining the importance of the collaborating father as a symbol of patriarchy, 1. See early chapters of Alan Morris’s 1992 study of the mode rétro for a discussion of the political, cultural and historical context for the development of such a literary trend.

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allowing these two women writers to reassess the gender politics of the Occupation and collaboration from a feminist perspective. Both Marie Chaix and Evelyne Le Garrec write about the Occupation from personal experience. Chaix is the youngest daughter of Albert Beugras (named Albert B. in the text) who was a high-ranking member of the PPF (Parti Populaire Français), a wartime French fascist party led by the charismatic Jacques Doriot. Le Garrec is the oldest daughter of an unnamed PPF local activist. Both women have memories of the period as children and yet neither chooses to write a conventional autobiographical account. Instead they produce complex reconstructions of the war years which focus on their fathers in an attempt to confront their wartime heritage as daughters of collaborators. Chaix’s text Les Lauriers du lac de Constance (The Laurels of Lake Constance, 1974) gives a fragmented and impressionistic vision of the war years. Divided into two parts, the first section follows Albert B.’s political career during the war and his activities within the PPF. The second part presents his postwar trial for collaboration and focuses on the after-effects of the war on his family, particularly his wife Alice and youngest child, Marie, born in 1942. The last chapter of the text hurriedly sketches out Albert B.’s homecoming, amnestied when Marie is twelve, and their later relationship. He dies when she is twenty-one with none of the key issues surrounding his wartime activities ever discussed in the family. The text is narrated from several different points of view, creating a multidimensional effect. No one point of view predominates and any authoritative version of the past is rejected. Chaix deliberately frustrates the reader’s attempts to consider the war years in simplistic terms of good and bad; clear moral distinctions do not exist. This image of the Occupation is crystallised in the treatment of her collaborating father. Three narrative perspectives give a contradictory and ambiguous image of the collaborating father. Firstly, there is Albert B.’s perspective on events, taken from his personal notebooks. These extracts explain his reasons for collaborating and portray him sympathetically. They chart his wartime career; from frustrated army officer at the French defeat in 1940 to PPF activist, a member of the party’s central committee. In these extracts, Albert B. appears to be a victim of circumstances who collaborates with the Germans by chance. He projects an image of himself as a faithful PPF member who deplores the hypocrisy of other party members. Yet this image of the well-intentioned and duped traditionalist is contrasted with the textual interventions of Chaix as an adult narrator. Early in the text, the adult narrator rejects her father’s claims

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to know little about the political deals between the German occupiers and the PPF. She highlights his role in supplying information about French public opinion to the Nazis in return for party funds. Yet, her criticism of his wartime activism is directed mostly at his decision to join the LVF at the time of the Normandy landings. The Légion des volontaires français contre le bolshevisme was the French wing of the German forces which fought for Axis victory, mostly on the Eastern Front, and where French soldiers wore a German uniform. For the adult narrator wearing a German uniform becomes a symbol of French surrender to German sovereignty. Albert B.’s proselytising mission in Normandy is seen as a grotesque caricature of the disciples’ mission to spread the word of Christ. The adult narrator highlights his apparent disregard for the confusion and fear of the local people: ‘Running around under the bombs, you spread the word for the dying PPF. You preach in the Normandy desert, giving out propaganda to terrified families and explaining to them that Our Father Doriot wants to save them while the Allies of France are going to massacre them.’ (Chaix 1974: 105)2 This outburst is presented in the text as an imagined confrontation between the collaborating father and his adult daughter across time and space as, at the time of writing the text, Chaix’s father, the model for Albert B., is dead. However, the adult narrator still feels the need to expose her father’s diary extracts as unreliable testimony, especially given the context of 1970s France when new evidence of French collaboration in some of the worst atrocities of the war years was coming to light. The third narrative perspective on the father figure, that of Chaix’s fictional childhood self, shows the influence of recent historical research on Chaix’ reconstruction of the war years. It is the childhood narrator who makes the connection between French collaboration and anti-Semitism. At no point in his diary extracts does Albert B. confront France’s complicity in the deportation of Jews to the extermination camps. The childhood narrator is the only voice in the text to make the link by juxtaposing her happy childhood to that of deported Jewish children: ‘I was born in 1942. Other children from the round up, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, box cars, Auschwitz. Not me. I was a healthy, loved, well fed, cradled child. A saved child. 1942’ (59).3 In this passage, the narrator expresses her sense of guilt that she was protected from such persecution; the chopped, staccato sentences reflect her inability to produce a coher2. All translations from the original French texts are my own. 3. Chaix is referring to the round-up of 12,000 Jews on 16 and 17 July 1942 by French policemen. They were kept at the sports stadium, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, before being deported to Auschwitz and almost certain death.

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ent narrative of the concentration camp experience. Collaborationist parties, like the PPF, openly supported the Vichy government’s antiSemitic laws. By linking the father to anti-Semitism through his political affiliations, Chaix adds another dimension to the portrait of the père indigne: a symbol of French complicity in the Holocaust. For Chaix, the Occupation as viewed through the prism of the collaborating father is one of conflicting interpretations. By allowing the father a voice in the text, Chaix gives a sympathetic presentation of collaborators as misguided idealists, duped by exceptional circumstances into accepting fascism. Yet, Chaix also inserts her own understanding of the real pacts made between the PPF and the German forces and her awareness of the links between collaboration and antiSemitism further complicates the picture. By suggesting that her own birth is tied to that of deported Jewish children, Chaix’s narrator implicates herself, as well as her father, in the process which led to the deportations. Indeed, there is a sense in which the quest of the father becomes a quest to understand the author’s own connection to the moral ambiguities of the Occupation as a postwar French adult. Evelyne Le Garrec approaches the collaborating father from a different perspective. La Rive allemande de ma mémoire (The German Bank of My Memory, 1980) follows an autobiographical narrator’s attempts to reconstruct her father’s collaborationist past from the few personal memories, testimonies and historical accounts available to her after he was gunned down outside the family home by resisters in September 1943. Le Garrec does not give her father a voice in her text like Chaix nor does she wish to portray him sympathetically, for her motivation in reconstructing his wartime life is to counter the work of historians and commentators who would seek to rehabilitate collaboration. It is, therefore, in the guise of an investigative journalist that the narrator carries out a search for sources which could help her reconstruct her father’s life. Firstly, Le Garrec’s narrator approaches her mother as a key witness to the past. Claiming to have forgotten about this taboo period, her mother can only give the narrator snippets of information about her father’s political life. Clearly, the mother does not wish to reopen old wounds and Le Garrec’s narrator has to accept that she can not rely on the testimony of family members in her quest for the father. At this point, the narrator turns to private records, possibly papers left by her father, which could shed light on his activities but none exist. She is forced, therefore, to look further afield for clues to her father’s past and makes trips to the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris in order to read wartime journals and newspapers. These trips, together with letters to historians and former collaborators, do not lead to a clearer picture of her father as she supposed. Instead, they

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create yet more confusion as she discovers that her father apparently wrote propagandist articles for PPF newspapers. Le Garrec’s narrator discovers that a PPF newspaper columnist with her father’s name acted as a regional inspector for the party, a man with considerable influence and power. It is only when her father’s obituary is published in a PPF newspaper alongside news about a regional inspector with the same name that she realises she has been charting the career of another man. The whole experience convinces Le Garrec’s narrator of the slippery nature of the past; she will never discover an exact and unbiased record of her father’s activities because it can never exist. It would seem that written sources are as unreliable and elliptic as oral history and coloured by the prejudices of the chronicler, as well as the needs of subsequent generations of researchers. Yet, rather than this realisation causing confusion or despair, Le Garrec’s narrator chooses to produce her own rereading of the Occupation, making gender an important part of her analysis. The narrator’s decision to reconstruct the Occupation as a gender-conscious reader leads her to examine the cultural politics of the period through images of women. She begins by focusing on the right-wing agenda of the Vichy government and collaborationist organisations. Extracts from PPF newspapers are inserted in between chapters as a counterpoint to the main text showing how the PPF endorsed a traditional gender sphere separation. Wives are advised to ‘always be attractive to look at … Compliment him [the husband] on his intelligence and his foresight’ (Le Garrec 1980: 187), while husbands are told ‘whenever you can, devote a few hours of your time to your wife; talking to her about your dearest memories and hopes’ (188). Le Garrec has clearly chosen these texts for the idealised picture they give of domestic life, illustrating how the collaborationist press endorsed the strictly hierarchical nature of Vichy society, firmly rooted in the patriarchal family unit.4 This feminine ideal is opposed to another image of womanhood in La Rive allemande de ma mémoire: the Spanish refugee women. They are despised by the local community for their love of dancing and music, interpreted as a sign of loose morals. The symbol of their free spirit is La Pasionaria, a communist activist who was the embodiment of the new role for women in Republican Spain in the 1930s. Le Garrec reproduces attacks made against La Pasionaria in collaborationist newspapers: ‘She [La Pasionaria] showed what monstrous hatred and terrible barbarism can reside in the heart of a woman when that woman is an atheist and a reprobate.’ (201) By using such extracts, Le Garrec shows how the pro-Vichy and Ger4. For a discussion of the ideology of the family promoted by Vichy, see Miranda Pollard 1985 and Hélène Eck 1994.

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man press manipulated gender stereotypes to label women as monstrous if they fell outside the social and religious roles assigned to them by conservative commentators. Yet La Pasionaria has a dual identity in the text for she represents not only the feminine disorder of the Spanish refugee women but also the threat of communism, as a Republican heroine. Her composite identity for the collaborationist press, as both moral and political enemy, serves to emphasise how gender imagery worked as a key site of ideological struggle in the battles of the Second World War. Le Garrec, like Chaix, has, therefore, used her quest for the collaborating father to challenge the notion that there is any one authoritative interpretation of the Occupation. She shows how, as contemporary commentators, we are unable to fix the past and must rely instead on a variety of unreliable sources. This realisation does not lead to confusion but allows Le Garrec to carry out her own rereading of the past which is resolutely centred on gender. It is this last connection between political activism and gender roles that I want to examine finally in the work of Chaix and Le Garrec. For Marie Chaix, the image of the father is developed over a trilogy of texts beginning with Les Lauriers du lac de Constance. The following texts: Les Silences ou la vie d’une femme and L’Age du tendre, portray the father as the catalyst for the young girl’s sexual rites of passage. Yet, in Les Lauriers du lac de Constance, the influence of the father figure is confined to images of disruption and hardship, particularly in the immediate postwar period as the burden of Albert B.’s actions as a collaborator falls most heavily on the female members of the family, particularly the narrator and her mother, Alice. They are identified as the sacrificial victims of a failed patriarchal order. Albert B.’s collaboration has a catastrophic effect on Alice. For the first time in her life, she is forced to work, a source of some shame as it goes against her bourgeois upbringing where women were expected to stay at home, supported by their husbands. On a more disturbing level, Albert B.’s collaboration affects Alice’s mental stability; she takes refuge in extreme religious devotion in order to atone for his actions. This situation is further complicated by her grief at the death of their eldest son, Jean, killed whilst fleeing with Albert B. and the PPF. The narrator’s childhood world is subsequently turned upside down by the repercussions of her father’s collaboration where women carry the economic and emotional scars of their husbands’ and fathers’ decisions. The father’s return from prison when the narrator is twelve disrupts the balance of the women-centred household. The family home has evolved to accommodate the absence of the father figure, replaced by the family maid, Juliette, described as the narrator’s

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second mother. His return traumatises family members and is only touched on in the last pages of the text. Yet even in this short section, Chaix projects an image of her father as a patriarchal figure who wields his power in his refusal to talk about the war years and his censorship of his children’s reading material. By placing a smokescreen over Germany’s wartime record and banning books by Jews, homosexuals and left-wing thinkers from the house, the collaborating father asserts his control over mainstream history, as well as over the personal history of the family. Chaix’s relationship with her collaborating father is an ambivalent one in Les Lauriers du lac de Constance. Although there is no direct condemnation of him, either as collaborator or as patriarch, Albert B. remains a profoundly disturbing figure. The title of the book Les Lauriers du lac de Constance, refers to Lake Constance in Germany, the last refuge of the PPF when fleeing from the advance of Allied troops. Such a book title has an ironic ring to it. As Chaix’s adult narrator comments: ‘I have accepted the laurels of your war [meaning her father]. It has taken me some time but I don’t hold it against you any more.’ (247) Laurels are for victors yet it is clear that both father and daughter are losers. It would seem that the narrator has been forced rather to accept a crown of thorns as, in different ways, both she and her mother attempt to atone for the sins of a largely absent father and husband. Albert B.’s hold over the family history of the war period, with his silences and obfuscations, further implicates him as the private figure of an oppressive intellectual and political system. Le Garrec’s view of the link between the collaborating father and patriarchy is starkly expressed in La Rive allemande de ma mémoire. Far from assimilating the family tie as Chaix seems to do, Le Garrec’s narrator rejects any affective bond with her father. As a committed activist in the 1970s French women’s movement, Le Garrec is concerned to trace the effects of her father’s political beliefs on his relations with his wife and two daughters. Indeed, for Le Garrec, the collaborating father becomes the union of the public and private faces of fascist ideology at the heart of the patriarchal family unit. Le Garrec’s father is depicted as a repressive, overbearing man whom she rejected from early childhood. Her life as his daughter is interpreted in terms of a Marxist feminist sexual economy where women’s lives are regulated by male owners: ‘He loved me but only when docile, graceful, a little prostitute, parading around and pandering to his fatherly pride. Feminine’ (194). For Le Garrec, the little girl has no identity for her father beyond that of submissive daughter, an identity which she sees as revolving around sexual dominance. In an attempt to counter such images, she turns to the generations of women hidden behind the family patronymic for an alternative matrilinear heritage.

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Large sections of the text are devoted to reconstructing the life stories of those women hidden by the handing down of the family name. These women offer a different vision of the family past and counterbalance the negative influence of the father’s wartime heritage. The most important figure amongst these is the narrator’s maternal grandmother, Crescence. Crescence comes to stand for those women who disrupted conventional social stereotypes by refusing the role of mother and housewife assigned to her by her native Bavarian society. Casting aside the wartime imagery of Kinder, Kirche, Küche (children, church, kitchen), Crescence left her native Germany for Greece and travelled widely before giving birth to the narrator’s mother illegitimately in France. Yet it is only years afterwards, when looking through family papers, that the narrator discovers this unconventional past; as if it were buried by the patriarchal norms of the family name. The character of Crescence also leads the narrator to reevaluate the traditional wartime narratives which have dominated France for so long. Linked to both France and Germany by her parents, the narrator is divided in her loyalties. The title of the book emphasises this image of the narrator in emotional limbo; La Rive allemande de ma mémoire, the German bank of my memory, as if the writer and narrator are forced to cross between two river banks: one the father’s heritage of collaboration and the other the mother and maternal grandmother’s guilty connection to Germany through birth. The notion of taking sides has particular resonance in this context for, by choosing to be placed on her mother’s side, Le Garrec disrupts the association of France and resistance and Germany and collaboration. Challenging conventional Gaullist narratives of the Occupation, she posits a vision of ‘Frenchness’ which is linked to the father, Vichy, collaboration and fascism; notions she as a left-wing feminist writer rejects. Unlike Marie Chaix, Evelyne Le Garrec has made her text a means of confronting and exorcising the heritage of the collaborating father. It has enabled her to work through her own identity as a French feminist writer during the 1970s and 1980s by using her relationship with an authoritarian father figure to implicate political and ethical systems of thought associated with patriarchy. By rediscovering the secret lives of her female relatives, she comes to investigate ‘herstory’, a women-centred perspective on the past, which has been missing from studies of the French Occupation until very recently.5 5. New work being published on women’s lives during the Occupation has uncovered much valuable material missing, until now, from mainstream historical studies. The Gender section in Kedward and Wood 1995 and Margaret Collins Weitz’s Sisters in the Resistance, 1996 are good examples of an attempt to theorise as well as give voice to gendered narratives of the war years.

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In conclusion, the quest for the collaborating father can be interpreted as a literary strategy which highlights the difficulties in remembering the Occupation in postwar France. Yet issues, such as wartime collaboration, are also bound up with contemporary debates surrounding gender and identity for women writers. Marie Chaix’s attempt to assimilate the legacy of the collaborating father and patriarch and Evelyne Le Garrec’s outright rejection of him as part of her identity as a feminist writer illustrate how two French daughters of the Occupation have taken radically opposed positions with regard to the contentious heritage of the war years. Both strategies raise provocative questions about the relationship between public and private memories of the Second World War, as France continues to come to terms with the années noires, the dark years of its wartime past.

20

SEEING THE FATHER: MEMORY AND IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION IN ELISABETH PLESSEN’S MITTEILUNG AN DEN ADEL Anne Moss

Seeing is believing, as the saying goes. ‘Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world.’ (Berger 1972: 25) But our perception of an image depends on our way of seeing, which, in turn, depends on our state of being, all of which are manifest in our writing and reading. What happens when boundaries between the perceiver and the perceived become merged? How might gender, social standing, and intergenerational conflict affect such boundaries? How are memory and perception linked to the psychology of the self? How accurately can literature investigate these questions? What follows is an examination of a literary text in which a daughter of a former Wehrmacht officer sees and does not see her father, confuses herself with him, and finally appears to come to terms with him. In the years around 1968, a number of young Germans were not only demonstrating against the war in Vietnam but also confronting parents and others in positions of authority with questions of their complicity in the Nazi era. Elisabeth Plessen, who participated actively in the student rebellions in Berlin, uses her largely autobiographical novel, Such Sad Tidings, first published in German in 1976, to document the turbulent times while probing her troubled

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relationship with her father. Changing the names of family members and employing a mixture of first- and third-person narration in a collage of fictional and nonfictional references,1 the author examines the dilemma of identification on various levels. She presents the problems of insight and seeing not only as questions of facility of perception but also as a study in memory, subject identity, and identification with the father. By taking as central themes the acts of seeing and being seen, Plessen draws attention to several phenomena: the difficulties in self-perception, ambiguities involved in being seen, and discrepancies in seeing the other (especially the father). She exposes as well a warp in power relations as they are inscribed in the operations of looking and seeing – going public and speaking out. As a manifestation of this, the author describes the protesting students of 1968 as revolutionaries ‘marching through the patriarchicallydominated institutions’ with the goal of emancipating themselves from the traditionally held German ‘virtues’ of their parents: blind obedience to authority and the uniform, as well as unquestioning reverence for duty, honour, loyalty, law and order, nobility, ownership, and fatherland. With the impact of their personal provocations, university sit-ins, and public street demonstrations, the students hoped to draw attention to their cause and challenge some of the assumptions of the past. They expressed outrage that members of the so-called establishment enjoyed easy access to the public eye through the press and other media. Those same media labelled the protesters ‘thugs’ for taking to the streets and voicing their concerns. The author uses this clash and these contradictions as a backdrop for the novel. It is 1975. The novel opens with a telephone call from home to the protagonist, Augusta, in Munich. Her father, C. A., has just died of a heart attack. But the charge is brought against the daughter that she is indirectly responsible for her father’s death. In the search for an answer to this disturbing accusation, Augusta delves into her conscience to explore her awkward relationship with C.A., acknowledging that the two of them were inextricably bound up in one another’s identities. Feminist scholar Juliet Mitchell writes on the topic of merging identities and perception: ‘Identity is a mirage arising when the subject forms an image of itself by identifying with others’ perception of it.’ (1985: 5) In Plessen’s text, the protagonist is introduced 1. Sandra Frieden (1983) discusses the vacillation between first person (ich) and third person (sie or er) singular and how it allows for a contrast of perspectives. But, as she notes in her critical analysis of Plessen’s narrative strategies, ‘the separation of the narrated and narrating figure becomes indistinguishable’ (146-47).

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as the daughter of a noble landowner. Part of the mirage originates with the perception of her own aristocratic privilege. In the context of her particular family, Augusta also finds herself grappling with the conventional construction of patriarchy: as female she must defer entitlement as by course of law she will not inherit the family property, which will go instead to her brother (Plessen 1979: 14546). Another crucial aspect of the mirage is her identification with her father’s original disappointment at her gender: at Augusta’s birth her mother apologised for her inadequacy in having born a daughter instead of a second son (146). As if to add insult to injury, the protagonist’s image of herself is confused with that of her father: ‘Augusta had the same face as his, the same large eyes, the same large ears, the same large mouth’ (97). Strangers often stop her on the street to ask about him. Her self-identification is all the more problematic as C.A. served as first lieutenant in the Wehrmacht. Although Plessen never states this explicitly in the novel, by implication her protagonist has been shaped by a perception of herself as a Nazi. Her dilemma is manifested as fear, despondency, emptiness, dissociation, and as a fragmentation of vision. The story is a kaleidoscope of fragments: fragments of narration, dreams, real and imagined conversations, recurring word images, excerpts from C.A.’s never-completed war diaries, and staccato references to media reports of the day. The rapid superimposition of images one upon another seems random – much like chatter or a series of unfocused snapshots. This technique appears to serve as a refracting lens, informing the text and yet deflecting meaning from it. The flashback, which comprises most of the novel, allows time and space for Augusta and C.A. to shadow one another. As soon as she has left home to attend university in Berlin, for example, he traces her footsteps, as if turning her into an object of investigation. Augusta echoes this pursuit in her search for traces of her father throughout the novel. At the same time, these two characters are being exposed to the reader as objects under scrutiny. The book works to show how not only the protagonist but also the reader must search through these memories of seeing, being seen and self-image in order to gain a perception of the problem itself and its possible resolution. As the narrative moves forward in time, Augusta reflects on the past. While she views her world from the driver’s seat of her car, making a four-day journey from South to North Germany to attend her father’s funeral, she seems to be looking backward through the rearview mirror and fixing her gaze through a camera obscura.2 In 2. Roland Barthes refers to the ‘little hole’ through which the photographer looks to frame the picture as the ‘stenope’. One peers through the stenope to see an image inverted (1981: 10; 106).

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the process, not only do various inversions of images appear, but Augusta seems inundated with their reflections in the form of introspections and memories. We, the readers and spectators, look in through her windshield to find that we are looking at her looking at herself. In her fragmented attempts at reconstruction of father and self, Augusta embarks on a roundabout route and is further encumbered by her ‘double vision’, an apparent need to see herself as if from seemingly endless vantage points (22). On her long journey north to the family estate, Augusta appears to be marking progress through road signs upon the horizontal line of the Autobahn: Karlsruhe 149 km, Kehl 12 km, Lübeck 316 km. Upon closer inspection, however, we note that it is the force of her recollections and her perception of herself which influence her direction and are themselves influenced by the stops she makes. The apparent sequentiality of her route from Munich to Holstein masks the actual nonlinearity of her lonely voyage along intricate inner pathways, detours and actual reversals of direction (233).3 On the first day of her journey, Augusta smiles as she spots an exit sign for the village Umweg (a pun on the German word for detour). She imagines her trip as one long detour from horizon to horizon. As if on a sightseeing tour of her past, Augusta deviates from the direct route by stopping in Straßburg, Baden-Baden, Wiesbaden and Göttingen, in each town looking for evidence of her own history or that of her father. While driving she feels haunted by memories ‘torn apart by sentences as if by dogs and torn by the sound of words and torn by eyes from everywhere, as if chased by dogs’ (23). One of Augusta’s most powerful memories is of her early terror at the bloodthirsty look of triumph in her father’s eyes during the hunting season and her dread of opening her eyes to the violence. Her childhood wish was not to have eyes at all so she would not have to see everything. Paradoxically, her father has given his three young children the clear directive that they are to neither look for him nor look at him. He wishes to remain undisturbed and unseen. He makes the rules of the family home: ‘Castles were made to keep their inhabitants quietly out of sight’ (19). C.A. allows his children to see him at most for five minutes just before bed; during this ritual they often catch sight only of his back disappearing down the shadowy corridor (26-27). 3. By way of comparison, contemporaries Bernward Vesper (Die Reise, 1977) and Thorsten Becker (Die Bürgschaft, 1987) employ the image of the Autobahn and its horizontality in the development of their respective novels. Further reference to the study of the projection – either spatial or temporal or both – of ‘structure as sequence’ is made by Craig Owens 1980: 76.

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A daughter of nobility, Augusta is ‘to be seen but not heard’, expected to obey and remain passive, to look to her father for cues and approval, to wait patiently for a glimpse of him, but never to participate in the act of looking for him. These conflicting messages severely confound her sense of identity construction. Augusta is expected neither to complain nor express herself openly, but rather to lower her eyes and bow her head, to use the proper deferential forms of address, and to answer her father with a submissive, programmed ‘Ja’ (69). Through the confusion and degradation, Augusta is split off from herself, hallucinating a vision of her double. John Berger examines this phenomenon in his lucid chapter on the female nude: To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of women’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey and critique herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. (Berger 1972: 46)

In Plessen’s novel, Augusta’s own understanding of herself is supplanted by a feeling of being recognised as herself only after being verified by another, usually male, appraiser.4 She splits into two, agonising over both the roles of the obsessive surveyor and the haunted surveyed. As Augusta watches the past played out in her mind, she discerns that, despite his power over her, C.A. is, in actual fact, surprisingly ineffectual. He idles a large portion of his life away in bed, fantasising over war medals and decorations, lapsing into nostalgia, pleading for privacy, or threatening suicide. In stark contrast to this unofficial lethargy, she observes the blue-blooded C.A. stepping out to capture the public eye. Entrenched in his own image, every Christmas he presents each of his struggling employees with a new portrait photograph of himself. Throughout the house she sees framed pictures of a smiling C.A. flanked by his perfect fam4. Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1982: 10-13) sheds further light on the question of looking/not looking in the context of her feminist discussion of photography and the male gaze in her article ‘Playing in the Field of the Image’.

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ily (Plessen 1979: 29). Every few days his photograph appears on the society page of tabloids, such as Elegante Welt, in the company of the postwar German élite – prominent industrial magnates, bankers, film and football stars. Augusta remembers receiving these pictures, carefully clipped by him and sent to her while she is away at university in Berlin (67). Thus the media provides C.A. with a neatly packaged present for the 1960s, a discreetly deleted past, and a reassuring, materially comfortable future. But the very mechanisms which serve to project C.A.’s presence onto the public eye, exaggerating his selfimportance, seem to entrap him in a distorting hall of mirrors. His condition can be described in terms of visual impairments: myopic blurring of his Nazi past (nostalgic language in his diaries, his complete denial of responsibility), hyperoptic acceptance of the status quo (the primacy of title, property, and public visibility), presbyopic trust in the course of established mandates (reverence for patriarchy, political authority, and law and order), astigmatic moral wavering (his ethical double standard), and cataractic blindness to life and consciousness (his ignorance of the plight of others, difficulty in discerning reality from fantasy, suicide threats). There are vivid examples of his blind denial. Employees who have worked for him in virtual serfdom most of their lives do not earn C.A.’s notice, even when, at intervals in the novel, several of them commit suicide. When visiting his daughter’s student commune in Berlin, he promises to lend support to her impoverished room-mates of nonaristocratic origins. But, ultimately too distrustful of the ‘defiant youth’ to follow through on that pledge, he squints at crude press representations of them and finally writes them off as ‘communists’. C.A. makes the trip to Berlin repeatedly, pouring over the newspapers for more clues about the ‘rebellious youth’ and, though he does not directly admit it, about his wayward daughter. In order to gain understanding of their motivations, he believes in an ‘eye-to-eye’ confrontation, as he calls it, with Augusta and her student companions (100). What confounds C.A. is that he does not know how. By ‘eye-to-eye’ he can only mean either opposition or control – interrogation through the rigid staredown or omnipotence through the commanding view (104, 198). His actions prove ultimately manipulative, serving only to reinforce the hierarchy. Once, immediately upon returning from the war, C.A. attempted to step out of the spotlight for a few months to make what he called ‘order’ of his Nazi past. Travelling to Flensburg, renting an unheated room, he began to record his memories of the front. The diary is never completed, but C.A. is fishing for vindication.

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Proudly handing the fragment to his teenage daughter with instructions to read it, C.A. appears to have devised his own exoneration of any charges of Nazism. But as Augusta reads, she wonders, ‘Did C.A. have a short memory?’ (58). Her father has unconsciously attempted to justify his involvement in the Third Reich by pointing the finger, indulging in language typical of media propaganda, augmenting this with nostalgic accounts of ‘eye-to-eye’ intimacy with comrades-in-arms. His recurring references to obedience, honour, duty, loyalty – all for the fatherland – cause Augusta to choke with disgust at his denial and compulsive tunnel vision; his inability to open his eyes to his own complicity (120). Plessen, in presenting Augusta’s internal conflict, succeeds also in personalising the broader rebellion of German youth. Challenging their compulsively bourgeois parents, many university students shared living space and pursued their political goals in communes. While living in hers, Augusta endeavours to reclaim some of her own identity and devise a common denominator with her peers: she rejects her aristocratic title by removing the von from her surname. The gesture also represents a strike against patriarchy, an unwillingness to buoy herself up with her father’s title, a refusal to objectify herself. With student companions, Augusta criticises inflammatory headlines and distorting press photographs of fellow protesters published regularly in the various tabloids. The novel reproduces actual headlines: trumpeting the threat of ‘civil war’ if student activist Rudi Dutschke is not stopped, labelling the students as ‘the mob, rabble, hooligans, red hordes, communists, terrorists, red SAs’ (95; 129). Echoing the press, the tabloid-reading populace responds: ‘[Those radicals] belong on the other side of the Wall… Put them in concentration camps!… Gas them!’ (200). By equating the actions of the demonstrators with those of the Nazis, the tabloids themselves reawaken and exploit memories of Nazi terror. In so doing, they also severely misrepresent the spirit of the student movement they claim to document. Meanwhile, C.A.’s visits to his daughter in Berlin have become less frequent. Continuing to monitor press reports as if expecting to find new evidence of the student ‘enemy’ conjured up in the media, he nevertheless believes himself to be more sophisticated than the common man who succumbs to media sensationalism. With superior understanding and analysis of the issues, he imagines himself dissecting the student movement. When he reads, though, that his daughter has placed her signature on the most provocative political petition of the day in protest at impending governmental measures (Notstandsgesetze) which represent a serious infringement of civil freedoms, he explodes and threatens to

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shoot her if she dares to ever cross the threshold to the family estate again (225). To his mind, she has irreparably defiled the family name, signalling the end of communication between them. The setting for the beginning of the novel was Munich, where Augusta first received the telephone call informing her of her father’s death and requesting her presence at his funeral, thus propelling her journey through Germany and ultimately through the complexity of her relationship with C.A. Her mourning is for the loss of her father, their differences and failed communications, and simultaneously for the loss of herself and the revolutionary ideals of her generation. Arriving at her northern destination on the last page of the book, she barely glimpses the family estate through the trees when suddenly she stops her car by the roadside, astonished at her newfound clarity. Augusta feels she has accomplished what she set out to do: to cast aside the old identity and separate herself from her father. There is no need to attend his funeral at all. She turns the car round on the spot with the words: ‘You won’t see me C.A… I won’t be there; you’re not there either… We find ourselves eye-to-eye. Satisfied?’ (239). The question of identity is closely linked to the phenomenon of perception; our individuality seems dependent on a picture of ourselves as held by those perceiving us. Standing at the intersection of what the author is trying to do with her father’s legacy and what she is trying to do with the student movement, we ask: Can we sense a true freedom for either Plessen or Augusta at the end of the book, or are we left with a cold war, a stand off? By declining to be seen, Augusta believes she has freed herself from her family and their judgements, and in so doing, reconstituted her own identity. But there are contradictions in her critique of her inherited identity and her quest for a freely chosen one. Although she has deleted the von from her published signature, put hundreds of miles between herself and her ancestral home, and absented herself from her father’s funeral, Augusta has not managed to make as clean a break from her father as he has ostensibly made from her. In fact, she has unwittingly followed C.A.’s orders and last request to the word: she has not allowed herself to step across the threshold to the estate. Has her rebellion actually backfired? Disenchanted by the splintering of the student movement into tiny study groups, warring parties and sub-parties during the 1970s, Augusta has retreated as far from political activism as she has from the physical proximity of her family, moving south to Munich to become, ironically, a photojournalist for the established newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Literary critic, Michael Schneider, points to an unprecedented number of young German writers who followed Plessen in the

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1970s with a rash of ‘father biographies’ unparalleled in other nations (Schneider 1981: 8). Yet those written out of the Berlin student protest movement were less radical in their assertions than could be expected. Apparently unable to make a clean break with the ‘law’ of the father, such activists were conditioned by prevalent cultural norms (Peitsch 1993: 7-9) and needed first to hear from Rudi Dutschke that deliberate acts of civil disobedience could, in fact, prove instrumental in transforming both the activist and society. German students, born in the postwar world, were asked to come to terms with the collective memory and societal norms which showed how most of their fathers, through compliance and acquiescence, were implicated in the Nazi project. In modern societies, the cultural, social and technological influences of each generation are profoundly different from those of the preceding generation. The relatively recent phenomenon of the ‘generation gap’ can probably be traced to those who came of age during and after the Second World War. To this day, in fact, a large segment of Western literature is devoted to coming to terms with the parental legacy. Plessen’s novel, though unique to German experience, illuminates the more general struggle between generations to rectify personal and political differences. In an attempt to bring this problem closer to the reader, Plessen makes frequent reference to the question of perception. But seeing and perceiving do not necessarily result in identity. The reader of Such Sad Tidings may be left in doubt as to whether the protagonist has indeed worked through the assemblage of identities, reconciling the Nazi self inherited from the patriarch with the acquired individuality shared with her own generation. The energetic experiment of Plessen’s generation to break with dependency on identification with the father may not have fully succeeded. But the phenomenon of identity construction, of particular relevance and concern in Germany to the generation following the Second World War, is sure to remain a focus of study for a long time to come.

21

INTIMATIONS OF PATRIARCHY: MEMORIES OF WARTIME JAPAN IN DACIA MARAINI’S BAGHERIA Judith Bryce

Dacia Maraini, now one of Italy’s best known writers, was among many thousands of prisoners liberated after the unconditional surrender of Japan in 1945. With her were her mother, Topazia, two younger sisters, and her father, Fosco, an ethnologist specialising in the Far East who had taught at the universities of Hokkaido and Kyoto since 1938 and whose decision in 1943 to support the Badoglio government rather than Mussolini’s Republic of Salò had led to the family’s internment. Over the intervening years, Maraini has returned intermittently to her childhood experience in Japan, for example in poetry and in interviews, but most recently in Bagheria (1993), the title referring to the location of the ancestral country residence near Palermo of her mother’s aristocratic Sicilian family to whom the Maraini turned for assistance when they sailed back to Europe, virtually destitute, in 1946. Bagheria is in many ways a tale of two islands, Japan and Sicily, marking two distinct periods in Dacia Maraini’s life; the first from infancy to the age of almost nine, the second from nine to her late teens. It is therefore an autobiographical text although not an autobiography. Its varied preoccupations include her Japanese memories, Sicily’s troubled past and present, and her difficult relationship with her aristocratic maternal family. A possibly problematic rela-

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tionship with her mother, unstated yet suggested by the comparative silence concerning her, contrasts with an intense and unreciprocated passion for Fosco whose eventual departure from the family represented a devastating event for a daughter who describes herself as having been ‘in love with her father’ (Maraini 1994a: 9). The text has a loose formal structure based largely on a sequence of locations in and around the Villa Valguarnera, the Alliata family home in Bagheria. There is also a less obvious ordering of memories selected on the basis of highly personal associations, the significance of which may not always be made apparent to the reader and to which we shall return later. As autobiography, Bagheria indeed possesses many of the features traditionally identified (by male practitioners of the genre) as undesirable, including reconstructed scenes and dialogue, flashbacks, flashforwards, anecdotes and the inclusion of parts of other people’s texts, all of which have been viewed as in fact characteristic of women’s autobiographical writing (Jelinek 1986: 188). Bagheria’s multifaceted and often apparently disjointed structure may be said to correspond to the nature of the text as a painful exploration of a selfhood perceived by Maraini as fragile, fragmented and contradictory rather than as rational or coherent. That selfhood, initially constructed in the first sixteen years or so of life in Japan and Sicily and viewed from the vantage point of someone in her late fifties who has experienced the impact of Italian feminism is, I would suggest, consciously interpreted in terms of gender, with the daughter/father plot as simply its most conspicuous element. Lynda Boose has written about the relative silence that has enveloped this particular intrafamilial relationship involving the least powerful and the most powerful person in the traditional family (1989: 20). In psychoanalytical terms we can choose between Freud, Lacan, and feminist revisions of, or challenges to them. In the Freudian scenario, the Oedipal crisis for girls hangs on an awareness of lack in the mother and the self (recognition of castration, absence, imperfection) and the turning to the father as primary love object. With Lacan there is the mirror stage marking the end of dyadic oneness with the mother and the recognition of otherness symbolised by the father and governed by the symbolic order of the Father, the entry into language, and the assimilation of society’s gender myths including the prestige of the male with the phallus as a privileged signifier, the opposite of need or loss or lack associated with the mother. Feminist contestations and rewritings of Freud and Lacan have usually either rejected the apparent inevitability of this negative scenario for women or, in the case of French and Italian feminist psychoanalysts and philosophers, val-

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orised instead the pre-Oedipal and/or the mother/daughter relationship, a stance with which the mature Dacia Maraini had much sympathy. Her later rediscovery of the mother finds expression, for example, in the Demeter/Persephone myth and in a poem, ‘Demetra ritrovata’, in the 1978 collection Mangiami pure, which incidentally also addresses her Japanese experiences (Montini 1977: 105, 156; Maraini 1987: 140). Recognising the absolute predominance of the father in her early life, however, she herself has been tempted by the notion of the Electra complex (suggested but later rejected by Freud) although admitting that the parallel with the Oedipus complex is problematic because of the asymetrical nature of gender construction and gender relations (Maraini & Esposti 1980: 55). The material regarding the Maraini daughter/father relationship in Bagheria would appear to relate to Sicily rather than to Japan. Her passion for Fosco is expressed in intellectual, emotional and erotic terms. The word seducente (seductive) recurs in descriptions of him and there is an incestuous element which remained, as far as the reader can tell, in the realm of erotic fantasy (45-46), contrasting therefore with the cruder realities of incest and child abuse which also constitute a leitmotif of the text and with which the fantasy is problematically juxtaposed. Fosco’s apparent withholding of love from his daughter (the perspective is of course hers) is symbolised by his withholding of speech (44). Her positive interpretation of this is that their relationship was occasionally one of equals who understood one another without words but it may also be viewed as representative of an unequal power relationship involving a denial of her authenticity, literally, as a speaking subject. Maraini recalls in classic terms her lack of self-esteem connected with this seeming denial of love and approbation (cf. Owen 1983; Sharpe 1994). And Fosco himself is described in similarly classic terms as ‘a solitary man, impatient of all ties, of all responsibilities, who travelled ceaselessly from one continent to another’ (31). From writings such as Segreto Tibet (Secret Tibet, 1951) emerge such standard topoi of Western masculinity as the desire for the Other identified with the feminine aspects of Asia (contrasted with the rational, masculine culture of Greece and its inheritors), whose ultimate embodiment for Fosco was Princess Pema Choki, whom he met in Sikkim in 1948: ‘she is Tibet, secret and untranslated’ (48, my translation). It is easy to understand why in Bagheria the relationship with the father is primarily seen in the Sicilian context of preadolescence and adolescence. But what of her earlier experience? The memories relating to wartime Japan raise a number of problems: the traumatic nature of the experience, its distance in time, and her extreme youth, not to mention the particular function of such memories

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within the textual economy of Bagheria. Over the years, the events of this period have been forgotten, repressed, exhumed, written, rewritten and rethought in the light of her own intervening experience and of family oral traditions and family writing. One stage in the transmission of this material is represented by an interview with Maraini published in 1987 in the French periodical Europe in an issue devoted to Japan. Here events are telescoped and transposed, and a tailpiece offers corrections to her original responses and additional information provided by her mother. Topazia Maraini kept a diary for part of the family’s internment, some of which is cited in what one might call the ‘master’ account by Fosco Maraini in a book entitled Ore giapponesi (1957). The Europe interviewer explicitly refers to this latter text while Dacia seems to have decided not to, turning instead, significantly perhaps, to her mother, recovered by then as a direct result of the daughter’s feminist experience and rejection (in theory at least) of patriarchy – the word and the world according to the father. Looking back into her past in order to write Bagheria, however, it is, as I have already suggested, the daughter/father plot of identity formation which predominates, overtly in the material relating to Sicily but also, much less obviously, in the Japanese material on which we shall now focus. ‘It is deprivation that is the origin of all desire and also of all the more or less secret distortions of our thinking.’ (Maraini 1994a: 28) Dacia Mariani is ostensibly talking about the experience of hunger in the prison camp: playing with stones pretending they are food (13, 21-22; cf. Maraini, F. 1959: 393), associating individual items of clothing with specific tastes (65, 70), hiding items of food for later consumption even after their return to Sicily in 1946 (behaviour characteristic of starvation anxiety), fantasies of cannibalism on the part of other camp residents casting longing glances at her baby sister, memories of the Japanese daikon, nauseating in its taste and in its mandragola-like similarity to the human form, a neonato, a newborn child, raising again the spectre of cannibalism (12, 28). There are fantasies, too, of Sicily as a world which is edible raised to the status of a lost paradise, all part of an understandable obsession with food under such conditions (48). Apart from the physical effects (the family suffered from malnutrition, scurvy, beri-beri and pernicious anaemia), deprivation of this sort has psychological consequences, not least because of the close relation in infancy between feeding and all other experiences. Personality and all complex social behaviour depend on how one’s hunger drive is met and satisfied during one’s formative years – it is an important part of psychological growth. As starvation increases, so too does psychiatric illness, engendering high levels

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of stress, anxiety and oral fixation (see Bettelheim 1965: chapter 7). Loss, described by Malakoff as a defining characteristic of refugee status, encompasses the area of nutrition but also the loss of habitual surroundings, familiar objects and people, for instance the family’s Japanese nurse, Miki Uriu, whom Dacia met again on a visit to Japan in the 1970s with her then partner, Alberto Moravia (Elkann & Moravia 1990: 237). In short, such experiences can be a ‘developmental catastrophe’ (Malakoff 1994: 152, 156). In this particular case, one must add the fear of bombing (nearby Nagoya was a major port and industrial centre, a target for heavy bombing particularly in April to August 1945) and the related fear of death. Actual physical separation from her parents was not one of Maraini’s traumas and this no doubt mitigated the damaging effects of the experience, but there was always separation anxiety, the fear of abandonment and/or parental death (Bettelheim 1978: 159). Indeed, nightmares relating to the latter continued in Sicily after the war as well as a fear of the dark and silence (Maraini 1994a: 21). One might also ask how all this impacted on the child in terms of the continuing negotiation of identity, particularly gendered identity, within the context of the Maraini ‘family romance’, sketched earlier in purely abstract psychoanalytical terms? What plots did the writer as a child invent as part of that project? In semi-starvation conditions with Dacia as the eldest of three daughters, the youngest little more than a baby, one might expect the issue of sibling rivalry to be important, whether in competition for scarce food or for the attention of the mother. One might further speculate on the existence of competition with the mother for the attention of the father as the ultimate provider and protector in an abnormal and life-threatening situation engendering deep anxiety and insecurity. For years, Maraini said, she feared that adults (presumably adult men?) were going to kill her (Maraini & Esposti 1980: 28). Of the fifteen Italians in the Nagoya house where most of their two years’ internment was spent, Topazia was the only adult woman and the Maraini daughters the only children. It was an overwhelmingly masculine world in which incomprehensible male power contests were played out between the guards and the prisoners, among the prisoners themselves, and overhead, with terrifying effects, between the pilots of the B29 bombers and the Japanese kamikaze pilots or the unseen Japanese military (Maraini, F. 1959: 409). The camp experience reinforced to an exquisite degree the experience of women in patriarchy. One episode recounted by Maraini in earlier interviews, by her father in Ore giapponesi, and even by Moravia, but which is omitted in Bagheria, might be addressed here. Fosco’s account makes use of

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his wife’s diary entry of 18 July 1944: the internees were on hunger strike in reaction to starvation rations (the guards had been appropriating and selling provisions intended for their charges) and during an investigation by visiting officials the Italian prisoners were denounced as liars and traitors. Fosco picked up a kitchen knife, cut off a finger and threw it at one of their tormentors covering the latter’s white uniform with blood. The children saw and started screaming. The action, called yubikiri, had a ritualistic importance as an affirmation of courage and sincerity, according to Fosco (1959: 400-401). Both the episode of self-mutilation and the fact of its omission from Bagheria are striking. Whatever other interpretations might be possible, at the most obvious level it contributes to the argument about the dramatically enhanced role of the father as selfsacrificing protector and hero and Dacia later specifically linked it to an improvement in their conditions (1987: 146-47). In the predominantly oral culture of the camp, the narrating of fairy tales was presumably as important to the children as it had been back in Kyoto with their Japanese nurse (Maraini F. 1959: 216). One might have expected Hansel and Gretel and Maraini does indeed mention it in the Europe interview apropos of the American air-drop of supplies after the surrender of Japan in late August 1945. In Bagheria, however, there is only one direct allusion to a fairy tale and that is to Carlo Gozzi’s Love of Three Oranges (1761) and Dacia’s repeated requests for it to be told by her mother. Fairy tales are, among other things, stories about children and their relationship to parents and siblings. ‘Once upon a time there was a king with three daughters’ runs the English translation (1994a: 70) but the original Italian is actually figli, sons or children (1993: 100). Is this a failure of memory or perhaps a smokescreen? The king in this tale has only one son; instead, there are three princesses hidden inside oranges of whom two (her sisters?) die of thirst leaving one to marry the prince (the father?), an outcome which the wicked fairy (the mother?) seeks to prevent. I am encouraged in attempting this interpretative line from such an exiguous reference after reading Maraini’s recent novel, Voci (Voices, 1994b), in which fairy tales are given just such a psychosexual interpretation. As has already been suggested, one of the structural features of Bagheria is its constant juxtaposition of disparate material. The elements of the particular sequence which incorporates the Gozzi reference are, however, again only apparently disparate, offering instead a concatenation of fragments which is characteristically suggestive although ultimately enigmatic. The sequence is as follows: Dacia’s guilt that growing up will age her beautiful young

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mother; a reference to Alice in Wonderland (the White Rabbit and his watch); her mother being prevailed upon to tell the story of the three oranges yet again; examples of lessico famigliare à la Natalia Ginzburg, including the family habit of using Japanese to identify the male and female genitals (a legacy of the Japanese nurse?); the beginning of her mother’s narration of the fairy tale with its reference to the king and his three figli; a family photograph of the five members of the Maraini family, ‘my father … shut away in seductive silence’, and one of the comparatively rare references to her sisters with the detail that her middle sister has her father’s eyes while Dacia does not (70-71). All the elements of this sequence concern aspects of identity of vital importance both to the child and to the adult’s exploration of a past self or selves: the family, gendered identity, and gender relationships within the family. Alice in Wonderland, seemingly a key text for Dacia Maraini, is cited or alluded to openly or obliquely both in Bagheria and in other writings (as an epigraph to Voci, for example). In the light of Dacia’s experiences in Japan, particularly with regard to food deprivation, early psychoanalytical interpretations of Alice are suggestive. Paul Schilder, for example, noted oral aggressiveness and anxiety (also in Hansel and Gretel), sadistic trends of a cannibalistic character, a continuous threat to the integrity of the body in general (the cutting off of heads if not of fingers), a world of cruelty, destruction and annihilation from which Alice, constantly threatened, still emerges unscathed (1972: 283-92). Also interesting in this context is Nina Auerbach’s reference to Mrs Miniver reading Alice to her children during bombing raids as ‘an eternal talisman against destruction’ (1985: 150). The Alice references in Bagheria will take us further. In the nightmarish Wonderland of the Japanese camp surrounded by rice fields with their snakes and leeches (12), the family ate anything that was available – from mulberries and mushrooms to ants. The web of interconnections between the first two is complex and elusive but essentially comes to this: the mulberries appear in the text as a common factor linking Japan and Sicily. They figure notably in the sequence which includes the recounting of a childhood experience, on one occasion, of a degree of sexual abuse by a family friend (29). His penis is compared to a silkworm whose magical growth and contraction made her think of Alice changing size by eating a piece of mushroom (31). Furthermore, this sequence is interrupted by (and textually embraces) more references to her passion for her father including one to her father’s penis, seen only once and certainly, she states, never offered (30-31). Later in the text, the sensual perfume of mulberry trees forms the olfactory context to a long

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passage concerning her father (80). One can perhaps do no more than speculate whether these intimations of male/paternal sexuality have their origins in the Japanese camp, associated in the writer’s imagination with texts absorbed either then or later. ‘Chi sono?’ (‘Who am I?’) The question asked by Alice during her conversation with the caterpillar on the mushroom concludes the epigraph to Voci, but it also seems appropriate to Bagheria as an exploration of the question of identity with its necessarily partial answer as to the writer’s place in what she terms the puzzling ‘family geometry’ of two parents, four grandparents and so forth (1994a: 67) as well as in society at large. A fundamental doubt about the solidity of traditional female identity pervades this text as it does others by Maraini such as Il treno per Helsinki (The Train to Helsinki, 1984) in which the female protagonist’s ruling equation is essentially: ‘I am loved therefore I am.’ The self-reconnaissance project in Bagheria reveals a divided, insecure and fragile selfhood indicative partly perhaps of childhood trauma in wartime Japan but also of the precarious subjectivity of women under patriarchy with its privileging of the male and of the male body, its location of value only in terms of relation (albeit an asymetrical and subordinate relation) to the male. The failure of the primary relationship, her failure to seduce her father, essentially cast her whole existence into doubt (Montini 1977: 112). The notion of female identity emerging from Bagheria is in many ways classic, instantly recognisable. That it is classic and recognisable is because we, like Dacia Maraini, look back over our past experiences in the light of feminism, using its insights to interpret that past. As readers in the 1990s we recognise her anxiety over body image, her sense of fragmentation of the body into its constituent parts borrowed from others (the genetic inheritance), her troubled identification of her own mildness and submissiveness as signs of insecurity and of a masochistic acceptance of patriarchy, her constant, anxious propitiation of adults, above all of her father. She recalls her ‘smile … giving in to anyone who can dissolve me with a look of annoyance, as my father used to do sometimes, so taken up was he with his own affairs, his unshackled thoughts, and his passion for sport and for travelling the world’ (1994a: 59). She coped with feelings of what she describes as a deep and senseless panic by invoking a glacial calm to support her in times of danger, expressing a wish to learn to divide herself into two more efficiently, like Shen-Te and Shui-Ta in Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan (59-60). It was a trick she had learned well enough for her partner of eighteen years, Alberto Moravia, apparently to accept the contradiction at face value: ‘Dacia has an Eng-

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lish sort of character – she has extraordinary self-control’ but she is also ‘particularly sweet and affectionate’ (Elkann & Moravia 1990: 236, my translation). Moravia, that alternative father figure, was the travelling companion who compensated in some measure for her father’s solitary departures for distant places leaving his daughter to pursue him imaginatively through books of travel and adventure or not at all (Maraini 1994a: 44, 46). Fosco was unattainable except through substitutes, whether Moravia or her writing, the latter generated and marked by desire and loss. Looking back into her past she discovers the extent to which she was implicated in patriarchy, her failed seduction of the father constituting instead her own successful seduction by patriarchal power. This is not the whole story in Bagheria, however. A subtle but significant variation on the theme of mourning the ‘lost father’ comes in the notion of the ‘repudiated father’ mentioned only once (90; cf. Montini 1977: 105). This rejection of the father (although never total, as the presence of the ghost of the protagonist’s father in Voci attests) is predicated upon a rejection of patriarchy with the inevitable search for viable alternatives: the valorisation of the mother/daughter bond and the struggle towards an affirmation of personal autonomy as a woman and as a woman writer together with a new sense of connectedness with other women, including some at least of her rejected Sicilian ancestresses exhumed and reexamined in Bagheria. That, too, is another story, as indeed is the fuller account of her Japanese experiences which, she has recently said, she may yet give.

PART VII

A CHILD’S MEMORY

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A CHILD IN TIME: PATRICK MODIANO AND THE MEMORY OF THE OCCUPATION Alan Morris

Speaking in 1975, Patrick Modiano observed of the dark and distant period of the Occupation: ‘I have always felt … that I was born of that nightmare’ (Ezine 1981: 22), and from the very first, his work has given ample proof of this ‘filial’ dependence upon what the French call the années noires.1 His debut novel, La Place de l’Etoile (The Square of the Star, 1968), soon became part one of an informal trilogy on the ‘dark years’ when it was followed by La Ronde de nuit (Night Patrol, 1969) and Les Boulevards de ceinture (Ring Roads, 1972). The co-signing – and publication – shortly thereafter of the screenplay of Louis Malle’s seminal film, Lacombe Lucien (1974), then took this focus into an entirely different medium. In every major text since, whatever its format – novel or short story – the war has always been present to at least some degree, whether explicitly or implicitly, and this despite a general tendency on the author’s part to set his fiction ever closer to his own day. So, the status of the early 1940s as a matrix for Modiano almost goes without saying, and it is this key element of his writing that the present chapter will seek to examine. Or, to be more precise, and to add to discussion of the way in which the Second World War is recalled, this study will centre on Modiano and the memory he can draw on as a self-confessed child of the Occupation, a mem1. Where English versions of original French quotations have been given, the translations are my own.

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ory which, it will be argued, emerges as a series of tensions, and hence as irrevocably ambiguous. To begin this analysis of Modiano’s recollection of the war, it will be useful to make one important point clear. Born on 30 July 1945, after fighting in Europe had officially ended, he can, quite evidently, have no personal remembrance of the années noires, not even as the very youngest of young boys. Or can he? For in one of his most autobiographical texts, Livret de famille (Family Record Book, 1977), he confesses, through his narrator: ‘I was only twenty years old, but my memory preceded my birth. I was sure, for example, that I had lived in the Paris of the Occupation.’ (96) Such a candid declaration is intriguing and offers an excellent foretaste of the ambiguity which is to mark the ‘dark years’ more or less throughout the oeuvre; Modiano has a memory of the period which, indisputably, cannot be his, and yet he insists that it is his. So what is going on? One means of answering this question is to refer to the novelist’s stated literary goal, articulated after he had interviewed the philosopher and writer, Emmanuel Berl. ‘Berl’, he disclosed, ‘gives me encouragement for my project: to create a past and a memory for myself out of the pasts and the memories of other people’ (Berl 1976: 9), a project which is duly translated into practice, with the early novels in particular seeming to confirm what their author has said about them, for the narrators of these works likewise possess memories of the Occupation which they have appropriated from others. Witness Raphaël Schlemilovitch of La Place de l’Etoile, whose familiarity with the Second World War elicits great surprise. ‘How come you remember all that’, he is asked almost at the end of the book, ‘you weren’t born’ (1968: 150). Similarly, the protagonist of Les Boulevards de ceinture, Serge Alexandre, also has prenatal recall, being able to describe how he and his father mixed with collaborators during the années noires, even though this common experience is a physical impossibility, as he himself recognises when he mentally addresses his one-time partner: ‘By what miracle had I known you before you became my father?’ (1972: 142). These closing remarks lead on to what is perhaps the preeminent point about Modiano’s so-called memory of the early 1940s: it is indissociably linked to the figure of the father, and there is good reason for this, because, as has been well documented (Assouline 1990: 38; Jamet 1975: 31-32), Modiano had an extremely difficult relationship with his own parent, Albert, with Albert rarely communicating with his son, and finally deserting him when he was still a teenager. And if this abandonment was a devastating enough blow in itself, it took on even greater significance as the future novelist, like so many others in adolescence, was at this time just start-

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ing to take an interest in his identity, and therefore wanting above all to hear about the paternal experience of the Occupation, a period in which the son had his roots, the ‘compost from which [he] sprang’ (Modiano 1977: 169). But Albert left without revealing everything he remembered, bequeathing only a void wrapped in a few inconsistencies, such as his known readiness, despite his being Jewish and hence permanently under threat of deportation, to mingle and do business with established collaborators (albeit under a false identity). How could he have formed such a ‘pact’ with his nominal persecutors? What was it like to be on friendly terms with one’s enemies? These and other such questions were vital for Modiano, wrecked as he was by his own contradictions (Texier 1969). But the answers, which could only come from Albert’s memory, had disappeared along with the man himself. Patrick, the son of his father, the child of the ‘dark years’, had, to all intents and purposes, suddenly become an orphan. And this brings us back to the oeuvre modianesque, and more specifically to the Occupation ‘trilogy’, since one interpretation of Modiano’s opening works is, precisely, to see them as attempts to fill this void, attempts to plug the gap left by Albert’s failure to recall his past for his son. For instance, the narrator of La Place de l’Etoile is, for much of the time, ‘a Jewish anti-Semite … a Jewish collaborator’ (1968: 25). In short, rather like Albert, if somewhat more extreme, he is both a victim and a torturer. If the accessing of the father’s missing memories is merely implicit in this particular text, it is considerably more explicit in Les Boulevards de ceinture. For what is Serge Alexandre’s sharing of his now absent parent’s wartime experience, if not an attempt to have the same recollections, the recollections of a Jew linked more or less directly to collaboration? Furthermore, and to move away from the first three texts, can it really be a coincidence that the lead character in Rue des Boutiques Obscures (The Street of Darkened Shops, 1978), the amnesiac Guy Roland, identifies with figures who can easily (with a bit of cross-referencing) be tied in to Modiano père (Modiano 1978: 36, 152, 183-86, 200, 205-206; Modiano 1977: 10, 169-71, 173; Doucey 1992: 5)? So, we can see that one of the things Modiano is doing in his fiction is trying to assimilate himself to his father (‘I have often put myself in his shoes’, he has admitted (Jamet 1975: 31)). Or in other words – and in this he gives us his version of the filial quest highlighted elsewhere in this volume – he is trying to appropriate the paternal memories of the war which he has been deprived of. It may seem that this is a perfect illustration of the novelist’s stated aim – the taking of the pasts and the recollections of other people to

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be his own – but there is an obvious problem with such an inference: Modiano senior, as we have observed, revealed very little of what he knew, so there is, strictly speaking, no established recall for the son to arrogate. Accordingly, the only course of action possible is to forge an alternative, to cobble together the life the father might have had out of whatever material is to hand: snippets of information gleaned from the people who knew him, literary records of the early 1940s of all sorts, and pure invention … especially pure invention, as the narrator of Les Boulevards de ceinture suggests: ‘You are interested in a man who has long since disappeared … All you have to show you what his life was like are a few vague and often contradictory details … So all you can do is imagine’ (1972: 148). From all of this, then, we can see how Modiano’s very project is shrouded in ambiguity – his aim is to compose a fictitious autobiography, to write about his ‘other life’, as he calls it in Les Boulevards de ceinture (162), the life he ‘led’ during the Occupation, the life he has concocted for himself out of the true recollections of other people, supplemented, where necessary, by a host of invented reminiscences. And that is not all. We can likewise see that the novelist’s position is in essence that of a child: having no experience of the ‘dark years’ himself at the outset, he builds up a memory of the period entirely from scratch, in much the same way as a baby builds up its memory as it progresses towards adulthood. Not for nothing, it might be said, are the early narrators depicted as minors rather than mature men – this age bracket is entirely suited to the authorial role. And should any doubts about this remain, they can perhaps be removed by referring to Sigmund Freud whose theories on infant psychology have a distinct relevance to the oeuvre modianesque, with two concepts especially seeming to underline this link. The first of these is the Oedipal complex, which transforms a situation where a ‘boy deals with his father by identifying himself with him’ into one where ‘his identification … takes on a hostile colouring and changes into a wish to get rid of his father in order to take his place with his mother’ (Gay 1995: 640). The second, which is a corollary of this basic Oedipal urge, is the notion of the Familienroman or ‘family romance’, according to which the child, unhappy that ‘his own affection is not being fully reciprocated … finds a vent in … a phantasy in which both his parents are replaced by others of better birth’ (298). This procedure culminating in ‘a curious curtailment: it contents itself with exalting the child’s father, but no longer casts any doubt on his maternal origin’ (298-99). Reviewing these quotations along with the paragraphs which precede them, a certain, if by no means perfect, resonance very

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quickly emerges. Like Freud’s infant prototype, Modiano, too, broadly ignores his mother’s side, preferring matters paternal (‘My mother does not feature in my work’, he has observed of his early obsession with the ‘dark years’ (Texier 1969: 8), ‘My concern is with my father and me’); Modiano, too, seems to pursue a symbolic parricide, assimilating himself to – and thereby personally replacing – the problematic Albert; and Modiano, too, creates a family romance to offset parental aloofness. Indeed, the more we delve into Freud’s writings, the greater this sense of overlap becomes. Consider, for example, the following comment by Freud explaining why there is more to all Familienromane than initially meets the eye: These works of fiction, which seem so full of hostility, are none of them really so badly intended, and … they still preserve, under a slight disguise, the child’s original affection for his parents. The faithlessness and ingratitude are only apparent. If we examine in detail the commonest of these imaginative romances, the replacement of both parents or of the father alone by grander people, we find that these new and aristocratic parents are equipped with attributes that are derived entirely from real recollections of the actual and humble ones; so that in fact the child is not getting rid of his father but exalting him. Indeed, the whole effort at replacing the real father by a superior one is only an expression of the child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and the strongest of men … He is turning away from the father whom he knows today to the father in whom he believed in the earlier years of his childhood; and his phantasy is no more than the expression of a regret that those happy days have gone. (Gay 1995: 300)

In Modiano as well we find this self-same ambiguity, this self-same mixture of the positive and the negative, of filial love and hatred, and we find it most obviously in the author’s memory of the Occupation which is portrayed in terms of this Freudian blending of nostalgia and exorcism. On the one hand, recall of the ‘dark years’ is shown by the novelist as something to be aspired to – a way of gaining access to the father, of ‘exalting’ him, of discovering missing roots. In brief, the whole reason behind the imaginary autobiography. Yet on the other hand, it can be decidedly unappealing in its effect, for to remember the années noires is, of course, to relive the threat of deportation and the guilt of paternal compromise, and to be in constant anguish, as the narrator of Livret de famille is well aware: ‘However, I tried to fight against the weight which was pulling me backwards, and I dreamed of freeing myself from my poisoned memory. I would have given anything on earth to become an amnesiac’ (Modiano 1977: 96).

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This image of the amnesiac introduces another key concept in Modiano’s work, a concept which is more fully presented in the form of the blank-minded narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures – the phenomenon of forgetfulness, developing the point made above about the novelist and his role of child. For it was Sigmund Freud who noted ‘the peculiar amnesia which, in the case of most people, though by no means all, hides the earliest beginnings of their childhood up to their sixth or eighth year’ (Gay 1995: 259), and who went on to add: ‘There can … be no question of any real abolition of the impressions of childhood, but rather of an amnesia … of which the essence consists in a simple withholding of these impressions from consciousness, viz., in their repression’ (Gay 1995: 260). Applying these statements to the present case, we can see exactly how relevant they are to Modiano: no sooner has he forged a child’s memory for himself – a child’s memory of the ‘dark years’ – than he realises just how much suffering it causes and wishes he could erase it. Alternatively, turning Freud’s second sentence on its head (and thereby reintroducing a note of ambivalence), we could almost say the exact opposite, and argue that, because of the links between infancy and lack of recall, the author actually yearns to be a youngster again, rather like his alter ego in the closing lines of Livret de famille. Looking at his baby daughter, and using words which plainly allude to his earlier comments on the Occupation, the narrator of this novel reflects: ‘Nothing troubled her sleep. She did not yet have a memory’ (Modiano 1977: 179). O, to be a child and as unrecollecting as her, the subtext seems to read. This notion of forgetfulness leads on to an additional contrast which generates ambiguity – the conflicting relationship between recollection and temporal erosion, a relationship which, once again, can have both good and bad implications where remembrance is concerned. On the positive side, memory, especially when made concrete through writing, can act as the antidote to the ravages of time; can preserve details from the war which would otherwise slip into oblivion. Modiano’s oeuvre is full of names, addresses, cinema programmes, newspaper cuttings, Who’s Who entries, police index cards, marriage certificates, and various other source materials from the ‘dark years’, all reproduced as they stand. Modiano’s protagonists are informal archivists, recorders of a world (and let us not forget that the early 1940s are the father’s world) which is about to disappear completely, as the narrator of La Ronde de nuit exemplifies. ‘Time has passed’, he is forced to concede, thinking of two old friends. ‘If I did not write their names: Coco Lacour, Esmeralda, there would be no trace of their lives here

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on earth’ (Modiano 1969: 91). And the fact that Coco and Esmeralda turn out to be figments of his imagination – his equivalent of a child’s invented playmates – does not undermine the point in the slightest. On the contrary, it helps to show that, within the larger conflict under consideration, there is a supplementary tension, in this instance a tension between the destruction wrought by time, and the creation represented by memory. As Martin Amis has ably demonstrated in his novel, Time’s Arrow (1991), anything which reverses the corrosive influence of the passing of the years can be said to act creatively, replacing nothing with something. It is this creative quality, then, this ability to thwart erosion that makes recollection a positive feature of Modiano’s work. Yet that said, there is also a negative tinge to this relationship because memory is simultaneously subject to time. Modiano’s protagonists, understandably, would always like to know everything there is to know about the années noires, but they are for ever frustrated. The more the years pass, the more recollection shows itself to be unequal to the fight. Fragmentation occurs, vagueness creeps in, and doubts crop up, the formal result of which is that, along side the wealth of precise detail in the oeuvre modianesque, we also get the exact opposite: absences, omissions and blank spaces – all of which are signs of an inability to remember which leads us back to amnesia. On the basis of all of this, we can appreciate how Modiano’s treatment of forgetfulness conforms to an established pattern: like remembrance (reassuring preserver of days gone by/unwelcome arouser of anguish), the Occupation (attractive seat of origins/repellent realm of the Holocaust) and childhood (age of desired obliviousness/time of unwanted traumas), it is sometimes considered a godsend (an eraser of old nightmares), and at other times viewed as a curse (a destroyer of a treasured past). As with the other main themes discussed in this chapter, the theme of forgetfulness emerges as indelibly marked by ambivalence. Yet all four of the above mentioned concerns are interconnected and through them we can see a whole network of tensions at play in the oeuvre of Modiano. In addition, there is another underlying polarity in evidence – that of similar/dissimilar. For although recollection, memory loss, the war and childhood are indisputably different things, they also resemble each other in having both desirable and undesirable connotations. In conclusion, one basic point has been argued in this chapter, namely that, no matter how we look at Modiano’s memory of the Occupation, it tends to manifest itself as a series of binary oppositions. On the level of the author’s project, it is an impossible mem-

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ory taken as possible, a child’s memory compiled by an adult, a father’s memory ‘possessed’ by a son; while as a theme, it is simultaneously positive and negative, and both comparable to, and different from, three other associated themes (childhood, amnesia and the années noires themselves). In short, it is characterised by that self-destructive movement first outlined by Alain Robbe-Grillet as the ‘double movement of creation and erasure’ (1963: 127).

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CHILDHOOD MEMORY AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY: CHRISTA WOLF’S KINDHEITSMUSTER Chris Weedon

In the GDR, the official narrative of the Third Reich, German fascism and war was that they were products of capitalist social relations. Fascism, like racism, was regarded as an epiphenomenon of the capitalist mode of production. The radical economic, political and social transformations which took place in the Soviet Occupied Zone between 1945 and 1949 had, it was argued, destroyed the material basis for racism and fascism, and denazification and reeducation had begun to radically transform the population of the GDR. In literature, fascism and war were represented in a highly selective fashion which privileged narratives of resistance to fascism (mostly by communists) and the conversion to socialist values of former fascists. Both these types of narrative found easy expression within the dominant socialist-realist aesthetic of the 1950s and early 1960s. Indeed the official cultural political role of these texts was explicitly to transform a population shaped by twelve years of Nazi dictatorship into what were called ‘all-round developed socialist personalities’. Missing from representations of German fascism (and underplayed even on the memorials in former concentration camps) were representations of the atrocities perpetrated against the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally ill. Absent, too, was the role played by ordinary people under the Nazis.

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In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, Christa Wolf’s work played a crucial role in extending and transforming both the subject matter and the aesthetics of writing in the GDR. Her texts addressed both contemporary life and representations of the past. Wolf’s fourhundred-page autobiographical text Kindheitsmuster – variously translated as Patterns of Childhood and A Model Childhood1 – is one of the most provocative attempts to confront the experience of growing up in Nazi Germany. A Model Childhood defies conventional description as autobiography or fiction. Its very structures put into question the usual assumptions underpinning theories of autobiography which rest on language as an expression of the subjective experience of a unique individual. In the preface to the text, Wolf states that all her characters ‘are the invention of the narrator’ (Erzählerin), a statement that both collapses author and narrator and suggests that autobiography is necessarily a construction not an expression of reality. A Model Childhood draws on autobiographical material from Christa Wolf’s first sixteen years of life, but uses it to question humanist ideas of unified subjectivity, language as expression, and the very possibility of conventional conceptions of autobiography. Subjectivity, the text suggests, like language, is the product of specific historical and social conditions and can change.2 At the same time the text attempts to portray the everyday life of one family in a way that can begin to throw light both on the hold that Nazism had over people between 1933 and 1945, and its implications for the postwar period.3 The need to come to terms with the past is a recurrent theme in Christa Wolf’s writing.4 A Model Childhood opens with the words: ‘What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we pretend to be strangers’ (Wolf 1983: 3). For Wolf, both the present and the future are rooted in the past, and a selective 1. Kosta 1994: 59, note 11 states that Wolf considered the American title Patterns of Childhood more appropriate than A Model Childhood, that of the otherwise identical UK edition. 2. This point is also made by Kosta 1994: 62. 3. In an interview with the literary critic Hans Kaufmann, first published in Weimarer Beiträge (1976), Wolf argues that: ‘A past like fascism envelops us like a wave, unless we put up an internal barrier against it (which is a defence mechanism which is commonly employed). But nobody can evade the effects, or seal themselves off from influences that penetrate from childhood and youth into later life, even when – indeed especially when – they would prefer to forget and deny (first and foremost deny to themselves) the influences to which they were exposed as children, and the behaviour they acquired (Wolf 1988: 24-25). 4. The need to come to terms with the past is most powerfully expressed perhaps in her novel Nachdenken über Christa T (1968), published in English as The Quest for Christa T (1982).

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memory about the Third Reich can only have negative effects, as deeply ingrained attitudes and patterns of behaviour remain unacknowledged and untransformed.5 A Model Childhood is dedicated to extending the collective memory of the period 1933-45. Wolf’s generation occupies a peculiar place in German history. Born in 1929 in the former Landsberg an der Warthe, which at the end of the war became part of the Polish province of Gorzow, she belongs to that generation who experienced the Third Reich as children and, as such, escaped the question of direct responsibility for the system. Yet belonging to this generation also meant that, until the end of the war, she knew nothing other than life under Nazism. Moreover, her generation’s formative years were followed immediately by the attempt to construct a socialist society – the former GDR.6 Wolf uses multiple perspectives in her attempt to depict and understand the past. Writing in the GDR between 1971 and 1975, she invokes and comments on contemporary events, for example in Chile and Vietnam, giving the reader a sense of where she is writing from. She refers to her present-day self as it figures in the narrative in the second person – ‘you’. Her one-time self – the child Nelly – is referred to in the third person, as are the various members of Nelly’s family.7 Wolf explicitly resists a linear narrative as inadequate to the task of depicting the effects of fascism on individual subjectivity: 5. In a discussion of this point after a public reading of an extract from Kindheitsmuster shortly before its publication, Wolf gave the following example: ‘Why can so many people in our country only stand up for themselves against authority in fear? Why do they find it so difficult to “cock a snook” at little kings and princes? There are reasons for this. This is why I see my book as a book about the present, because it tries to describe what led up to people behaving the way they do today’ (Wolf 1988: 48, first published in Sinn und Form, 1976, no.4). 6. Writing in the early 1970s as a committed socialist, Wolf sees this as a particular source of insight: ‘No other generation will ever go through what we did: growing up in and being educated and shaped by one society and then having the opportunity, in the GDR, to express a form of criticism and self-criticism that went right to the very roots of society; being given the chance to think, understand and act, and, as a result, coming up against new, far from simple conflicts and contradictions; and, what is even more important, being involved in creating and resolving those contradictions, while at the same time being unable to disown the model of behaviour that had shaped our childhood and youth.’ (Wolf 1988: 29) 7. Kosta comments: ‘She refers to herself as “you” in order to create, inquire, remember, speculate, and draw associations. The second person informal pronoun engages the autobiographer in a dialogical format. It also acknowledges Nelly outside the present tense. On occasion “you” is the form of enunciation that reproduces the voices directed at the child – an imperative that calls the child to attention.’ (1994: 86)

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You have to find writing techniques ... that manage to free up those almost indissoluble bonds and constrictions that hold us in their grip, to unravel that vast range of elements that have become entwined during our development, so that patterns of behaviour in which we thought we were firmly entrenched can be explained, and, where possible (and where necessary), still be changed. (Wolf 1988: 25)

In an attempt to recover memory and depict it from various perspectives, the narrator consults local newspapers from the period and visits the now Polish town of her childhood accompanied by her younger brother Lutz, husband H and daughter Lenka. Lenka, a child of the GDR, who has never known any other society, presents an outsider perspective on a past totally foreign to her. She acts as both questioner and listener, offering the narrator the space to explain her past. In writing A Model Childhood, Wolf attempts ‘to report not only what was, but also how it feels’ (1983: 94). Emotional investments of various kinds – both positive and negative – are shown to play a central role both in ordinary people’s attitudes to and feelings for the Nazi regime and in what they later remember of it. They are central to Wolf’s question: ‘How one could be there and not be there at the same time?’ A similar question is wearily put to Nelly’s mother as they flee the Red Army. Charlotte Jordan naively asserts that being a communist was insufficient reason for incarceration in a concentration camp. The ex-concentration camp inmate to whom she is talking responds: ‘Where on earth have you all been living?’ (332). Wolf attempts to answer this question through her reconstructed memories of her own childhood, a painful process since she cannot possibly like the child that she ‘entices out’ (120).8 The narrative shows how the Nazi system of schooling and youth organisations instilled in children a coherent value system, impervious even to family influences. Although Nelly’s mother quietly resists many aspects of Nazi ideology and attempts to 8. Wolf comments on the autobiographical nature of the text and her relation to the child Nelly in the Sinn und Form discussion of A Model Childhood: ‘I don’t think that I ever hide the fact that the book is, so to speak, autobiographical. I admit this. But this “so to speak” is very important because I do not feel identity with my character. There is, and this is perhaps one of the peculiarities of my life story, though others of my age may have the same experience, a sense of alienation from this period. From a definite moment, which one cannot trace from the exact day but certainly to the exact period, one is no longer the same person. I no longer feel that it was I who had thought, said or done those things. And that’s what I wanted to express through the third person, or rather had to, because otherwise the material remained closed to me, as I learned from my various attempts to make a start.’ (Wolf 1988: 45)

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maintain respect for others in the face of a system that insists that she deny the humanity of various categories of people such as Jews, Slavs, communists and the mentally ill, the child Nelly becomes an avid believer in Nazi ideology and an emotional devotee of the Führer. Non-Germans become for her less valuable and inalienably other. This unquestioned belief is ‘not based on any secret, but on … [her] history lessons’ (249). A Model Childhood suggests that children brought up under Nazism could only begin to question its value system in extreme situations, for example, when called upon to hate whole groups of people. Yet, even here, the emotional costs are high. The price of Nelly’s failure to hate all Jews, for example, is guilt and fear. On the morning after Kristallnacht (the occasion when Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues were set alight throughout Germany), Nelly goes to see the synagogue: ‘Nelly couldn’t help it: the charred building made her sad. But she didn’t know she was feeling sad, because she wasn’t supposed to feel sad. She had long ago begun to cheat herself out of her true feelings.’ (160) When another member of the League of German Girls (Bund deutscher Mädchen) is disciplined for stealing, Nelly is unable to feel what is expected of her. She feels pity rather than disgust; fear of the leader’s disciplinary actions rather than enthusiasm for them. On this occasion, her response is physical: she falls ill for the three months that Gerda Link is expelled from the movement. Yet there are rare moments of conscious resistance. Aged thirteen, Nelly secretly reads an account in the Nazi newspaper the Schwarze Korps of: ‘houses in which tall blue-eyed SS men are brought together with brides of similar background for the purpose of producing a racially pure child whom the mother then offers to the Führer as a gift’ (223). The narrator comments: It was one of those rare, precious and inexplicable instances when Nelly found herself in conscious opposition to the required convictions she would have liked to share. As so often, it was a feeling of guilt that engraved the incident in her memory. How could she have known that bearing guilt was, under the prevailing conditions, a necessary requirement for inner freedom. (223)

The child Nelly’s emotions are mixed as she becomes increasingly active within the League of German Girls. Fear, in the form of a blinding inner alienation, has devastating and far-reaching effects on her subjectivity: ‘A person who wants to pass unnoticed soon stops noticing anything. The horrible wish for self-surrender doesn’t allow the self to emerge’ (231). This fear even extends into the pre-

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sent as the narrator realises how, on her return to the former Landsberg, she had avoided revisiting the building that had been the Hitler Youth district headquarters. Yet, in addition to fear, Nelly has a strong desire for recognition, an overwhelming wish for the approval from her teachers that came from obedience and which is incomprehensible to her mother (100). When Nelly accepts a leadership position in the League of German Girls – against her mother’s wishes – the narrator reflects: Nelly was involved in a compensation deal, and it could almost be assumed that she knew it, because she was crying as she defiantly railroaded her mother into giving her permission. Recognition, and comparative security from fear and from overwhelming guilt feelings are guaranteed, and she in turn contributes submission and strict performance of duty. There had been moments when she wasn’t able to cope with her doubts. She rids herself of any possibility of doubt; above all self-doubt. (194)

Yet, in reality, such submission and lack of doubt proves impossible and Nelly develops a split consciousness and an inability to act: Once on Ludendorfstrasse, she ran into a girl from her Jungmädel unit who rarely showed up for “Duty”, and to whom Nelly had therefore sent a written admonition. The girl’s mother took issue with Nelly publically, in the street, making it quite clear that a young thing such as Nelly had no right to give her daughter orders. And Nelly just stood by, instead of insisting on her rights, hastily agreeing with the mother, because the side of her that was not standing in the street, but was looking down on the incident, was telling her that she ought to be ashamed of herself. (228)

Even Nelly’s desire to be brave is shaped by the system. In her eyes it means enduring pain in the course of duty rather than daring to tell the truth. She learns that survival and popularity are founded in part on the ability to hold one’s own and to lie (116). The narrative of A Model Childhood extends into the immediate postwar months and addresses Nelly’s difficult future. Her emotional reaction to Germany’s defeat is ‘to keep absolute, lasting faith in the Führer’ (304). Yet, when she hears from a soldier that Hitler is dead, she has ‘a new thought. The end of the world didn’t mean one’s own death. She was alive. It was surely shameful, but also interesting’ (322). Indeed, it is her experiences as a refugee that begin a long and difficult process of learning to see

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and interpret the world differently. This involves years of depression and grieving for the loss of all she had believed in.9 A key motif in A Model Childhood is the exploration of the processes of memory and the social and political determinants of what is remembered and what forgotten. ‘One distinguishes’, Wolf writes, ‘the following types of memory: mechanical, gestalt, and logical, verbal, material, action memory’. However, she adds, ‘the absence of one category is acutely felt: moral memory’ (36). Addressing the processes of memory in the context of the GDR of the early to mid-1970s, the crucial question for Wolf is what is remembered and what repressed. Newspapers from the Nazi period are useful here: ‘Anyone who later affirmed that he [or she] had not known about the concentration camps had completely forgotten that their establishment had been reported in the papers.’ (39) Similarly, those who claimed ignorance of Nazi social policies would likewise have read about them: Alien blood was another glitter word. Isn’t it likely that Bruno Jordan [Nelly’s father] now and then read words such as these to his wife from the paper, words which she herself would never have used? The law for the prevention of genetically unfit offspring. Or sterilization, which, as the paper stressed, was not to be identified with castration. (60)

The key to disavowal on the part of large sections of the German nation is, Wolf suggests, already inscribed in the ways in which they dealt with difficult, emotionally-charged issues at the time. People had strategies for avoiding remembering what they would rather forget: Once, Nelly saw dreadfully emaciated women in prison clothes squatting alongside the road, relieving themselves, their bare buttocks turned to the road, indifferent to whoever might be passing by … Nobody said a word about the women, whom they passed (forever passing) as though they didn’t exist. Their eyes had been trained to look the other way, they hastily withdrew. It’s easier to 9. Commenting on other GDR books about the Nazi period and its effects on individuals, Wolf stated: ‘It disturbs me that many of our books on this period end with heroes experiencing a kind of instant metamorphosis and, even under fascism, managing to arrive at important, correct ideas on both the political and human level. I don’t want to dispute the personal experience of any author, but my own experience was very different. I found that it was a very long time before I gained even the first limited insights, and only later did more profound changes become possible.’ (Wolf 1988: 39-40) For an account of representations of fascism in GDR literature see Silberman 1987; Hohendahl & Herminghouse 1983.

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forget what one didn’t see, almost didn’t see. The stockpile of the forgotten was growing. (322-23)

Even Nelly, a very inquisitive child, learns not to ask questions. Thinking back the narrator asks: Does curiosity diminish if it remains unsatisfied for a long time? Is it possible to numb a child’s curiosity completely? And could this perhaps be one of the answers to the question by the Pole Kasimierz Brandys about what enables human beings to live under dictatorships: that they learn to restrict their curiosity to realms that are not dangerous to them? (67)

The keys to memory provided by reading the newspapers of the day make the narrator realise that her ‘memory was storing not random nonsense but reality – no matter how intricately coded’ (143). The newspaper reports enable her to make sense of remembered fragments and to realise how much public knowledge of Nazi practices had been repressed by popular memory. Also crucial to the process of reconstructing memory is the narrator’s short visit, nearly thirty years later, to her childhood home. Yet here too – she is shocked to discover – many important unacceptable details remain inaccessible: `Where Nelly’s participation was deepest, where she showed devotion, where she gave of herself, all the relevant details have been obliterated’ (229). Reflecting on the reasons for this, she comments: The forgetting must have gratified a deeply insecure awareness which, as we all know, can instruct our memory behind our backs, such as: Stop thinking about it. Instructions that are faithfully followed through the years. Avoid certain memories. Don’t speak about them. Suppress words, sentences, whole chains of thought, that might give rise to remembering. Don’t ask your contemporaries certain questions. Because it is unbearable to think the tiny word “I” in connection with the word “Auschwitz”. “I” in the past conditional: I would have. I might have. I could have. Done it. Obeyed orders. (229-30)

Memory, Wolf argues, is not static. It is a process which changes with circumstances and above all it is a ‘repeated moral act’ (143). In her chapter on A Model Childhood, Barbara Kosta suggests that ‘the opening up of the text of history through personal viewpoints is a key to the autobiographical project’ (Kosta 1994: 89). As such, it might be seen to contribute to a plural, postmodern conception of history. The process of writing about her childhood leads Wolf to conclude (like many postmodernists) that ‘the past –

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whatever the continuously accumulating stock of memories may be – cannot be described objectively’ (164): There is no technique that permits translating an incredibly tangled mesh, whose threads are interlaced according to the strictest laws, into linear narrative without doing it serious damage. To speak about superimposed layers – “narrative levels” – means shifting into inexact nomenclature and falsifying the real process. “Life”, the real process, is always steps ahead; to catch it at its latest phase remains an unsatisfiable, perhaps an impermissible desire. (272)

Yet history, for Wolf, is far from any postmodern notion of the free play of competing narratives. The process of mediation between past and present is inevitably a political and moral question. It can serve as a mode of ‘reconciliation’, ‘appeasement’, ‘smoothing out’ or a ‘rapprochement’ between past and present which might ‘permit today’s person to meet yesterday’s person through the medium of writing’ (164). In a discussion of A Model Childhood following a public reading in the months before the book appeared, Wolf commented: ‘The question “How was it [fascism] possible, and what was it really like?” remains in principle unanswered’. Yet, she added ‘those who lived through this period and who know how powerfully, how far and in what ways it moulded them as people, have a certain duty to put this into words. As far as they are able.’ (Wolf 1988: 39) The political imperative for confronting and understanding the past is what Wolf calls ‘History’s accursed tendency to repeat itself’ (1988: 84). An adequate understanding, for Wolf, must include the emotional investments and patterns inherited from the past. ‘The intellectual realisation that one has made a mistake is easier to bear’, she suggests, ‘than the emotion of shame, and it is less difficult to acquire precise knowledge than to feel things “correctly”. The one without the other, though, produces remarkably split personalities, as we can see around us’ (1988: 56). For Wolf, memory is central to the self: ‘The present intrudes upon remembrance. Today becomes the last day of the past. Yet we would suffer continuous estrangement from ourselves if it weren’t for our memory of the things we have done, of the things that have happened to us’ (1988: 4). Thus recovering and confronting memory are not only the keys to preventing history repeating itself but also the key to individual change.

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STRATEGIES FOR REMEMBERING: AUSCHWITZ, MOTHER AND WRITING IN EDITH BRUCK Adalgisa Giorgio

Adorno’s cry in the early 1950s that no poetry was possible after Auschwitz drew attention to the fact that any writing on the Holocaust would inevitably domesticate and make tolerable the most barbaric and unspeakable event in history (Howe 1988: 179-80). Since silence is an impossible alternative, representations of the Holocaust must follow certain criteria – such as faithfulness to facts and treatment of the event as unique in order not to diminish its enormity or dishonour its dead – for it to be valid and morally and artistically acceptable (Des Pres 1988: 217). More recently, and especially in France, a self-conscious kind of creative writing has emerged which dramatises the impossibility of writing the Holocaust at the very same time as it is being written (Stamelman 1995: 269). The narratives of Edith Bruck, an Auschwitz survivor who moved to Italy in 1954 and has been publishing in Italian since 1959, are informed by the dilemmas posed by Holocaust writing: the difficulty of retrieving a past which has become enveloped in forgetfulness, the question of representing an extraordinary experience which defies understanding and a human means of expression, and the moral duty of the survivor-writer to remember and write for the generations to come. Bruck’s progressive movement away from autobiography and autobiographical modes of writing – the third-person narration in

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her most recent novel L’attrice (The Actress, 1995), as opposed to the first person consistently employed in her previous works, is a measure of the writer’s increasing distance from the autobiographical material – parallels an increasing awareness of the problematic relationship between the real-life experience of the concentration camp universe and its representation in writing. In this relationship, the issue of the memory, personal and collective, of the Holocaust as we move away from it in time plays a crucial role. The narrator of her first book, Chi ti ama così (Who Loves You This Way, 1959), does not seem to question her ability to remember or to represent truthfully the unbelievable events she has lived through, even though she becomes painfully aware of the difficulty of conveying the full atrocity of her experience to those who had been lucky enough not to be subjected to it, including her own sisters. Bruck’s later narratives, however, record the survivors’ difficulty in relating an experience which, after the events, seems unreal even to themselves, a difficulty which is compounded by their strong desire to forget (Appelfeld 1988: 86) and by the community’s efforts to repress or deny it. This chapter focuses on Lettera alla madre (Letter to My Mother, 1988) which addresses all these issues in a forceful and original way. It consists of two apparently independent narratives, Lettera alla madre itself and Tracce (Traces). The first is a letter written by a daughter who survived Auschwitz to her mother who died there. The second is a first-person account by the same speaker in Lettera of her trip back to Germany, forty years later, to ‘face’ her past. Lettera attempts to bring back a daughter’s repressed memory of her mother; Tracce stresses the difficulty of such an endeavour by focusing on the processes of remembering, forgetting and normalising the past amongst the victims and the perpetrators, and highlights the crucial role of writing in bearing witness to the Holocaust. Tracce, which is placed after Lettera in the book, relates the events leading to the writing of the letter and describes the narrator’s current physical and psychological strife to turn her past experience into words. Tracce opens with the narrator’s failed attempt to bring back her mother’s memory by various methods. She has to fight to bring herself out of a state of bewilderment, drowsiness, paralysis, out of the fog which envelops her memory and prevents her from remembering her past. The first twelve pages are a powerful account of the struggle taking place within the narrator’s mind and body; between the need to remember the fading features of her dead parents, in order to ask them ‘to make themselves alive’, and the wish to free her mind from the many memories and uncertainties which

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burden it: ‘A sudden amnesia would mean a real holiday’ (Bruck 1988: 106, 101).1 Everything – photographs, objects, writing a letter to her mother – is discarded as inadequate to bring the past to life. To escape the ever-present lure of suicide, she goes to Germany on ‘a journey into memory’ to confront her past (112). The firstperson, highly emotional and disjointed narrative of the first twelve pages turns into an ordered narrative of her train journey from Rome, her twenty-four-hour stay in Munich, and her visit to Dachau. Throughout her trip, she must confront and defend herself against the many Germans who are eager to claim recognition for their own suffering (the executioners turning themselves into victims) and against their attempts to deny the uniqueness and specificity of the Holocaust by equating it to crimes committed at other times against other groups (Langer 1995: 150). The personal narrative turns into a public narrative of denunciation and the narrator’s initial project of recuperating the lost memory of her parents is forgotten. Back in Rome, she realises that, in Dachau, her mind never recalled her father who died there. She highlights the malfunctioning of memory which has treacherously let this out at the wrong time: ‘My memory betrays me, strikes me, knocks me down: I suddenly remember that my father died precisely in Dachau! … How did I manage to forget? I ask myself and cannot forgive myself for it’ (Bruck 1988: 161). Deprived of the Jews, the German SS, and the atrocities which took place in it, Dachau is only a building and does not reveal its past reality. As a place without images, it has no power to represent the past or to affect the present. Her visit to Germany, a ploy to stimulate her memory, has failed, as did the photographs and the objects belonging to her mother. As Segal points out, ‘we cannot will ourselves a madeleine; nor can we rid ourselves of those memories which never cease their demands that we bear witness, that we write them into stories’ (Segal 1988: 65). Writing can compensate for the failure of voluntary memory. Thus the narrator, a Holocaust writer herself and Bruck’s own persona, reads her work in progress, the story of an old Hungarian Jew named Sandor (the name of Bruck’s own father and of many father figures in her 1962 short story collection Andremo in città (We Shall Go to Town)). Sandor/Alex emigrated to the USA after surviving the Holocaust. There he met a Russian immigrant who gave him his daughter in marriage and his business on condition that he would never speak about his past. It was the Russian’s belief that silence would protect his daughter and her husband-to-be from the memory of his horrific experience. 1. All translations of original texts in Italian are my own unless otherwise specified.

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Now old and weak, Alex is overwhelmed by his past which comes back to his consciousness and wipes out the memory of his present life and his ability to speak English. The theme of the embedded story and the efforts of the community to erase the memory of the Holocaust highlight the purpose of the surrounding narrative: to convey knowledge which must not be lost, to depict the isolation into which society forces the survivors, and to point out the impossibility for them to be healed without the help of the community, if healing is at all possible (Avni 1995). The survivor-writer, however, can try to cope with her anguish through writing. Bruck’s narrator is now able to write a letter to her dead mother in an attempt to assuage her pain and to bring her back to life. Lettera alla madre, by its very form, is capable of bringing to life its addressee, since it employs an I/Thou structure in which the ‘I’ evokes the ‘you’ in much the same way as the poet evokes an absent being through the rhetorical trope of apostrophe. According to Barbara Johnson, apostrophe is simultaneously a form of direct and indirect address in that ‘it manipulates the I/Thou structure of direct address in an indirect, fictionalised way’, with the effect that ‘the absent, dead, or inanimate entity addressed is thereby made present, animate, and anthropomorphic. Apostrophe is a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness’ (Johnson 1986: 30). In the Shelley poem Johnson discusses, the West Wind is addressed and brought to life so that it can in turn bring back to life the lost child the poet used to be (31). In the contemporary poetry on abortion by women which Johnson analyses, apostrophe produces more subtle and complex effects because of the responsibility of the mother/speaker in the life and death for the foetus, because of the uncertain status of the foetus as a human being and, finally, because of the blurred boundaries between self and other in pregnancy. Johnson’s observations are relevant to Lettera because of the confusion between mother and daughter, between Self/(M)other, which the text highlights. The evocation of the mother in Lettera is not simply the evocation of another being, but of an-Other whose presence is essential to the speaker’s existence, not only in the way that contemporary women need to define themselves in relation to their mother, but also in the sense that this particular mother/daughter dyad was violently destroyed at Auschwitz in circumstances which painfully literalise Luce Irigaray’s classic line: ‘And what I wanted from you mother was this: that in giving me life, you still remained alive’ (Irigaray 1981: 67). The letter begins with the last words the mother addressed to her daughter, ‘Obey!

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Obey!’, when, on arrival at Auschwitz, they were assigned to two different lines and the twelve-year-old daughter tried to follow her mother (Bruck 1988: 8-9). Mother and daughter are hit by a soldier and the mother orders her daughter to obey. She does. They are separated. The mother is gassed, the daughter survives: ‘“Go! Obey! Go away! Go away, away, obey your mother!” And I had obeyed. And because of that I am still alive. And I am happy to be alive. You had given birth to me with unspeakable pain for the second time’ (92). This second separation makes the daughter aware of the previous merger with her mother: The soldier hit you because of me, he struck you down, forgive me, but how could I let you go, and let myself be taken away from you. The blow he gave you hurt me more than all the blows that I received. I didn’t even feel them, but seeing you on the ground, holding your head with your hands, hurt me so much that I obeyed at once. (9)

In trying to imagine life in the camp with her mother alive, the daughter stresses how the life of one often meant the death of the other. The mother’s presence often hindered the daughter’s survival, not only because the daughter had to fight for her mother as well, but also because the mother’s death meant the daughter’s annihilation: ‘To see a mother die in the Lagers was a moment of mourning for everybody … I am really glad that you were not with us mother, to see you die a little every day would have destroyed me.’ (13) Conversely, and this is one of the many topoi of Holocaust writing by women to which Lettera conforms (Heinemann 1986: 23-24, 105), she believes that her dead mother gave her the strength to remain alive when she was about to give up (Bruck 1988: 17). Language – the letter – empowers the daughter to imagine her mother to be alive: ‘I would like to believe that you are alive … Mother, it is already great to be able to imagine the unimaginable’ (20). Mother and daughter are linked by a linguistic structure which allows their reciprocal animation: If I do not talk to you, if I never mention you, if I never quarrel with you, I forget you, and if I do not write and do not write to you, I allow you to be forgotten. And if I forget you I forget myself. As long as I live, you will live, as long as you exist, I will exist. Only death will break the umbilical cord. (47)

Yet, if apostrophe can animate the dead, it cannot lend them an independent voice. The daughter has the power to give her mother

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a voice but also the power to take it away from her: ‘No, no, do not get upset so fast … You can’t tell me anything unless I give you the word. I will be more generous than you were with me, I promise’ (8). The daughter exploits this power to give the narrative a very precise direction. The emphasis on the mother’s demand to be obeyed – she is portrayed as a strict and unforgiving enforcer of moral and religious order – has interesting structural and thematic implications for the mother-daughter narrative which unfolds. The I/Thou structure of the letter generates a narrative which is dominated by the mother in absentia. The letter must serve many purposes. It must rescue the mother from oblivion and grant her a form of life after an arbitrary death. It must enable the daughter to come to terms with the loss of her mother and heal a relationship which was marked by conflict and anger, but she can recreate only along those lines. Since the absence of the mother is inextricably linked to Auschwitz, the narrative also attempts to recover the memory of Auschwitz, a memory which, the narrator forcefully argues in the text, is under threat of being forgotten: Here, now, in a letter to you, it is the last time even I will speak about it [Auschwitz]. Let me speak about it one more time … If I strain my memory, something unsaid will probably still be found, the memory of you, of us, cannot be lost, otherwise I lose myself and I lose you. Perhaps my letter to you is only an instrument to write about Auschwitz, but you and Auschwitz are inseparable like Dachau and my father. (65-66)

Similarly, her vocation originates in the missing dialogue with her mother and in her experience of Auschwitz: ‘If you had listened to me properly just once, perhaps I would not be writing to you now, perhaps I would not have written any books, I owe this disease of mine of writing to you and to Auschwitz’ (78). Consequently, the letter constantly moves from the private to the public; at times concentrating on the memory of the mother before Auschwitz, at other times explaining the process of dehumanisation to which individuals were subjected in the camps. The letter also projects Auschwitz into the future by focusing on the daughter’s present life, as well as stressing the public duty of the survivor-writer to prevent the Holocaust from falling into oblivion. The starting point is always the mother/addressee who becomes a sounding board for the daughter to discuss issues of ethics, religion and theodicy which have been thrown into question by the Holocaust. ‘What else were you if not God?’ (21), asks the daughter, the Jewish God who demands obedience at all times. The opening

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scene of the separation and the mother’s last words to her daughter emphasise this character trait of the mother which will dominate the mother-daughter monologue/dialogue in the letter. Through the I/Thou structure of her narrative, the daughter arrogates to herself the right to talk to and be listened to by her mother, a position which religion and poverty had usurped: It was enough for me if only you noticed me, and I would not be jealous any longer of your God to whom you devoted yourself entirely; you spoke to Him more in one day than to me throughout my life. But our life together was too short, mother, and so full of miserable and necessary things that there was no time left for the two of us. (68-69)

By becoming her mother’s exclusive interlocutor, she can claim the love and attention which she had always felt deprived of. Moreover, by identifying her mother with God and the Jewish precepts and prohibitions – like God, the mother is here an inscrutable Thou and the daughter addresses her without knowing whether her prayer will be listened to – she also engages in a diatribe against the Jewish religion and its relationship to the Holocaust. The private and the public again intermingle to produce a narrative which puts the mother on trial as a mother as well as a Jew, when she is asked to account for the Jews’ acquiescence in their own destruction, even though the daughter knows that her mother’s failings are a consequence of her entrapment in poverty and Jewish culture (60-61). It soon becomes clear that the daughter’s attack on her mother is an attempt to fend off her own guilt at having transgressed the rules and traditions of her race and religion (for example, by having abortions). Yet her origins and self-definition are located in her mother and her race, identities which she wishes to reject but also needs to preserve. The mother becomes a projection of the daughter’s own conscience which increases the confusion between ‘I’ and ‘you’. The daughter tries to make amends for her mother’s death and to express her love for her, while begging her forgiveness and requesting her blessing for her life (79, 89-90). Ultimately, appeasement with her mother comes to signify appeasement with herself as a woman, a Jew, and also as a writer. In Lettera, the narrator often wavers in her belief in writing as a means of informing the new generation and the old ones who have failed to learn a lesson from the Holocaust. Her discussion of the suicide of another survivor-writer (easy to identify as Primo Levi), and of the doubts he had about his writing, introduces her own sense of being torn between the conviction that she has a duty to carry on living in order to write, and the feeling that writers like

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herself and Levi, dead or alive, are not heard (65, 71-73). The daughter’s debate with her mother oscillates between the attempt to justify to her an activity which is frowned upon even by her own brother and sister who accuse her of deforming, exaggerating and inventing her memories, and the effort to justify it to herself when her convictions falter. The value of the book we are reading is also questioned because it ‘will become useless, the obsession of a poor woman who demanded that herself and her people set the example’ (65). The narrative we read is one that continuously undermines itself and its purpose, a writing that stages its own uncertainties and dramatises the writer’s own painful activity of writing: I still write by hand. Like a scribe. Only thus can I live with the illusion of leaving something written behind me. Like our ancestors. The typescript does not bear any traces of oneself, the letters are all the same, everything disappears: one’s mistakes, what has been erased, one’s private thoughts, self-censorships, the blood, the pain of writing (31-32).

As the daughter-writer wavers between one position and the other, the narrative shifts accordingly between Auschwitz and the mother. Towards the end, she disavows the public function of her writing, when the mother returns to be the letter’s sole motivator and addressee: ‘I am writing to you, in order to be known by you … It is you who must read me even though nobody else ever will’ (75). We are taken back to the beginning when the daughter had declared that the only certainty in her enterprise was ‘the infinite silence, the unbridgeable distance between us’, despite their being bound by ‘an indissoluble tie’ (7). Has this distance been bridged by the end of the letter? The identification of the mother with Jewish law and tradition makes the daughter’s reconciliation with her difficult, since her monologue/dialogue is dominated by the clash between her right to freedom and her mother’s withholding of this freedom. Positive and loving memories of the mother are rare, challenged as they are by the memories of her as an unforgiving mother, obsessed with God and with the ever-present problem of feeding her family: ‘There, if I think of you as my friend, I immediately start to feel freer, I fear you less and could tell you more about myself. That which I do not tell when I write, which remains between the lines, behind the words, that which is censored’ (80). It is the daughter’s love for her mother which is censored and remains between the lines. The good, loving mother is identified with nurture and the bad mother with culture: ‘To feel you, I only need to cook something you used to cook. I make it, and then I eat it all with an immoderate appetite

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as if I were eating your body’ (82). Reconciliation can only take place through compromise and the daughter suggests they meet halfway. The letter ends with the daughter imagining her mother with one of her rare smiles and offering her a Jewish prayer (92-95). Lettera alla madre marks a turning point in Bruck’s work, which has moved away from Auschwitz itself to focus on the exploration of its long-term effects on the individual and the question of how the victims, the perpetrators and society deal with it now. Her novels Nuda proprietà (Naked Property, 1993) and L’attrice insert Bruck’s own on-going attempt to deal with Auschwitz into fictional frames which ingeniously explore the Holocaust from the perspective of the victims’ lives today. They portray survivors caught in a moment of crisis in their apparently integrated life which forces them to confront their suppressed past and Jewish identity. This device enables Bruck to convey the full force of the reality of the Holocaust without actually representing it, a task which she is consciously pursuing at present (Mattei 1993). In so doing she shows one possible way to write about Auschwitz today. The narratives of Tracce, Nuda proprietà and L’attrice all represent the Holocaust only by implication: by focusing on its devastating consequences on the individual, they succeed in effectively making its atrocity audible and its lesson relevant today in a world where xenophobia, racism and the on-going wars remind us that Auschwitz is still very much part of our lives.

This study is part of a larger project on the literary representation of the mother-daughter relationship. I wish to thank the British Academy for supporting this project with a research grant.

PART VIII

AFTER THE COLD WAR: EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY

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TRAUMA AND ABSENCE Omer Bartov

Traumatic historical events often produce multitudes of victims and gaping absences.1 The victims may be discredited institutions, sacked cities, exiled nations, fallen empires, or mounds of corpses; the absences can express themselves in a loss of legitimacy, disintegration of belief systems, disappearance of moral and political points of reference, or loss of family and memory. Hence the process of coming to terms with trauma is closely associated with reconstruction of both collective and individual identity and with compensation for loss. While the links between collective and personal trauma are obviously complex and tenuous, traumatic historical events tend to produce large numbers of traumatised individuals, just as collective memories of destruction contain within them endless personal tales of loss and absence. Moreover, it is possible to trace mutual 1. This is the second part (made of the third and last section) of a much longer paper with the same title. Versions of this paper were delivered in 1995-96 at the Society for French Historical Studies Annual Meeting, Emory University; the colloquium ‘Traumatic Events: Historical Constructions of Violence in Modern France’, Rutgers University; the conference ‘The Soldier’s Experience of the Second World War’, Edinburgh University; the European History Colloquium, Cornell University; the History and German Departments, University of California, Berkeley; the History Department, Université de Lille III; and at Trinity College, Dublin. I would like to thank the participants in these meetings for their comments and criticism. Thanks are also due to Paul Addison, James Amelang, Yehudit and Hanoch Bartov, John Erickson, Sarah Farmer, Carole Fink, Paul Holdengräber, Steven Kaplan, Jacob Meskin, Barry Strauss and, most especially, to Wai-yee Li.

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influences between collective modes of remembering and repressing the past and their expression in the personal recollections of individuals. This is not to say that they coincide; quite the contrary, in many cases we will find them in stark opposition to each other. But at the same time the collective and the individual will normally maintain a relationship whose tensions and contradictions may shed light on the manner in which societies and cultures cope with the reality and memory of loss and destruction. Public remembrance is often the function of a complex set of negotiations between memory and repression, and aims at manipulating the present by evoking a certain image of the collective past; by the same token, the balance between repression and recollection is also integral to the process of piecing together individual identity. And while individual self-perception is constantly informed by the sociohistorical context, collective identity fluctuates in accordance with the changing perceptions of those who make up the whole. Hence if I have discussed elsewhere2 the impact of war and destruction on the construction of collective memory and the anticipation of the future, I turn here to a number of personal reflections on trauma and absence – the trauma of war both as event and as a metaphor for destruction, disintegration and reconstruction of identity, and the absence of parents and childhood, both as actual deprival and as a metaphor for the loss of memory and its return. As we will see, such reflections produce a complex and self-contradictory process. On the one hand, the attempt to recapture the prewar, predestruction past as memory, is contingent on a conscious self-remembering that must repress past destruction as an event still in the future. On the other hand, the remembering individual is filled with the sense of personal annihilation, bound with war, death and deprival, which obliterates and leaves no trace of that very prewar existence crucial for the reconstruction of memory and identity. Hence the difficulty of articulating an unbearable memory of destruction is compounded by an even more disastrous lack of memory, an emptiness, a void, which the imagination tries in vain to fill with borrowed, fantastic, at times monstrous, images. If the trauma of war can make the thought of its reenactment in the future so unbearable that it must be contemplated only in terms of total destruction (and therefore should be either avoided at all costs or perpetrated with unlimited force), the traumatic loss of parents, and consequently of childhood and its memory, may 2. In the first part of this paper, containing sections I and II, being published as ‘Trauma and Absence Since 1914: Part I’, in The Soldier’s Experience of War, ed. P. Addison and A. Calder (London, 1997).

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deprive the individual of all needed points of reference and make thinking about the future into something akin to navigating without any coordinates toward an unspecified destination. The loss of memory among soldiers traumatised in battle may be seen as a conscious refusal to recall an event whose details are so deeply etched in their minds that returning to them in thought or speech is too horrible to contemplate. Conversely, the absence of childhood memory due to the loss of parents may be perceived as irreparable, since both the parents and the memory of childhood which they could have preserved were snatched from the mind before they could leave anything more than a faint and ambivalent trace. And yet the similarity here is arguably greater than would first appear. On the one hand, repression of traumatic memories is rarely willed, but rather the result of a psychological defence mechanism whereby the mind shuts off those sights and sounds it is unable to confront. Recalling them in a controlled environment may have a healing effect on the traumatised, but may also have shattering, destabilising consequences leading to a complete disintegration of one’s personality. Absence, on the other hand, is never wholly unwilled, since in order for there to be an absence there must have been, at some point in time, and however briefly, a presence, and the inability to recall it is not merely one of physical and temporal limitations, but also of the mind’s wishes and fears. The repressed memory of atrocity may return through the act of committing it; the absent memory of family and childhood may return through a reenactment of this absence on one’s own family and child. And when the memory of atrocity combines with the deprivation of parents and childhood memories, repression and recollection chase each other in a vicious circle of pain and pleasure, hope and despair, being and not being, self and nonself. It is here that the unbearable anticipation of the next war becomes the unbearable anticipation of the next moment, of life as it might have been and as it may yet be; it is at this point that the (non)memory of the past becomes a denial of the possibility of a future. Hence the traumatic memory of war and the anxiety produced by anticipating its repetition is closely related to individual erasure of both memory and its carriers and the struggle to reconstitute identity from the remnants of a shattered past. What is ultimately at stake here is the future itself, which may be fought over not only by armies, but by competing memories and claims of victimhood, whereby the survivors must come to terms with the memory of the victims (whose own memories are extinct), renewal must be wrenched out of devastation, the future founded on the ruins of the past. In this perpetual war between remembering and forget-

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ting, repression and absence, each memory forgotten, and each retrieved, heralds a new battle over identity, simultaneously making and unmaking one’s personality, gathering its dispersed references and scattering them anew, day in, day out, in a constant struggle for cohesion. In Le Premier Homme (The First Man, 1995), Albert Camus visits the grave of the father he had never known as a forty-year-old man (Camus 1995: 20-36). He does so because he happens to be in the vicinity, not because of any predetermined plan (in fact, he is visiting his old mentor, who had acted as an ersatz father to him in his childhood).3 He is also fulfilling the wish of his mother, who had repeatedly asked him to visit the grave she had never seen. But as he stands over the grave, many years older than his father was when he was killed during the battle of the Marne in 1914, he is suddenly filled with an urge to find out more about this man who died for France only a few days after he had set foot on its soil for the first time in his life. Yet no one remembers. The mother has long forgotten, not only because so many years have passed, but also, as he says, because the poor do not remember, they are too preoccupied with making a living, with surviving from day to day.4 And besides, she cannot read and write, and is hard of speech and hearing. Upon meeting his father for the first time, Camus is confronted with his absence. For a brief moment he is there, and the next he is gone again. Searching for the lost memory of his father, Camus discovers instead his childhood. Moreover, having had no previous historical tie to the Great War, Camus’s visit to the grave invests it with a hitherto nonexisting meaning, across two generations and another world war. There is a remarkable similarity between Camus’s recently published, unfinished autobiographical novel, which was found by his side when he was killed in a car crash at the age of forty-seven in 3. One of the first links between the child and his father is forged when his beloved elementary school teacher reads aloud to the class Roland Dorgelès’s novel, Les Croix de bois, an account of the author’s experience in the Great War (and by extension of both the teacher’s and Camus’s father’s). Shortly after the protagonist’s visit to his father’s grave, his old teacher gives him that same book by way of farewell (Camus 1995: 147-49). 4. ‘To begin with, poor people’s memory is less nourished than that of the rich; it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughout lives that are grey and featureless. Of course there is the memory of the heart that they say is the surest kind, but the heart wears out with sorrow and labour, it forgets sooner under the weight of fatigue. Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death. And besides, in order to bear up well one must not remember too much, but rather stick close to the passing day, hour by hour, as his mother did.’ (Camus 1995: 80)

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1960, and Georges Perec’s semi-autobiographical novel, W, ou le souvenir d’enfance (W or the Memory of Childhood) first published in 1975, just seven years before Perec’s death at the age of fortysix. Perec visits his father’s grave, for the first time, when he is twenty years old. His father was killed, as senselessly as Camus’s father, in 1940, in the course of the German attack on France. Perec has very few memories of him, having been only four at the time. It takes him another twenty years to begin consciously searching for his childhood, when he is, just as Camus was at the outset of his own search, forty years old. But while Camus must reinvent his childhood because the people who may tell him about it are inarticulate, stricken by poverty and hard work, Perec cannot return to his childhood scenes because the people who accompanied him there were taken away from him and killed. Camus’s mother lives in a distant, unreachable world, staring out of the window without a word; Perec’s mother was deported to Auschwitz when he was six. He asserts: ‘I have no childhood memories’ (Perec 1988: 6), but he writes to save the absent, the parents taken away from him, with whom his memory of childhood was also erased: ‘I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life’ (42). This loss of parents, of childhood, of memory, is also the confrontation with war and atrocity, with man-made disaster, one of whose gravest consequences is not only the destruction of human beings but the erasure of their memory, indeed, even the erasure of the survivors’ memories, and, in a different, perverse manner, also that of the perpetrators (the memory of their deeds, the memory of their victims). No one remembers. Yet everyone remembers. But the memory of everyone is also the memory of no one. As Perec writes, up to his twelfth year he could hardly remember anything: ‘I took comfort in such an absence of history’. This absence protected him from his own history. Not remembering was an avoidance of pain. The answers to his history were ‘a different history, History with a capital H … the war, the camps’. History, he thought, had an ‘objective crispness’, an ‘apparent obviousness’, an ‘innocence’; whereas his own history, ‘the story of my living, my real story, my own story’, was ‘presumably … neither crisp nor objective, nor apparently obvious, nor obviously innocent’ (6). Hence memory, or rather knowledge of History can also serve as a refuge from the memory of one’s own, one’s private history. But one can never escape History’s reach into one’s personal tale, for the private has been swallowed up and devoured, and all that is left are fragments which can be put together this way or that, not

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knowing what belongs where, for the instructions, the guides, have all disappeared. Perec thus escapes to his imaginary, and increasingly monstrous W, the dreamland of his childhood transformed in his adult imagination into a land of sports and inhumanity, progressively taking the shape of the Nazi ‘concentrationary universe’. Camus, for his part, having once escaped from his home(land) to France, the nation to which he feels a cultural allegiance, now seeks to return to Algeria, the site of childhood’s physical pleasure of life and nature, the land of the ‘first man’. Yet there is no return, for Camus can no longer communicate with the ‘first men’ of his life, his long-dead, silent father, and his inarticulate, worn-out uncle, while he himself has been touched by civilisation, and is now a foreigner in his own homeland on the eve of yet another bout of war and slaughter, the bitter and bloody struggle between France and the Algerian liberation movement, the FLN, which will destroy it (for him) once and for all. Perec and Camus return to the scene of the crime, to the physical traces of death, the father’s grave, the war, and from those sites of past slaughter they seek to return to their childhood, to the houses in which they lived, the streets through which they ran as children. It is a belated return, long postponed, painful, almost paralysing, but by opening up the possibility of memory, it also makes life possible, and hence the capacity to think of the future and its own still unrealised memory. We live in a century saturated with the memories of shattered childhoods, lost parents, devastation on an enormous scale (Lorch 1995). The memory of the destruction may be so unbearable, so debilitating and wrought with despair, that we are often tempted to forget. But absence of memory makes life equally unbearable, for it is lived in an incomprehensible, uncharted void, without hope of a future. We remember so as to be able to forget, and forget only to remember all over again. We remember. But memory, as we know, is an elusive entity, and the human mind is never the same. What some remember, others forget; what some excavate, others cover up. Memory can liberate; it can also bury under its weight. The memory of the past will always project itself into the future, always threaten to monopolise our hopes and aspirations. And so we mould it to fit our needs, and in the process distort it, and project that distortion into our future, making it too into a distorted mirror of imagined, fabricated recollections. One of the most striking features of the Second World War and the Holocaust is that both Germans and Jews remember them as events of victimisation. The perpetrators may be remembered, but they rarely record their memories, or do not remember themselves as perpetrators. Moreover, the sites of German and Jewish victimi-

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sation are different. Germans remember being victimised in the rear by bombing raids and rapes, and at the front by enemy soldiers and their own command. Jews remember being victimised in ghettoes, concentration and death camps (Des Pres 1976; Evans 1989; Hartman 1994; Maier 1988; Young 1993). Hence the scene is emptied of memories by identifiable agents of the traumatic events endured by the victims. While evil reigns supreme both in fact and in memory, its messengers remain faceless during the action and deprived of any memory after the event.5 If both German and Jewish memories negotiate between recollection and repression, the former (often unconsciously) repress the evil they perpetrated or were complicit in, since evoking it would delegitimise their own status as victims and undermine their identity, while the latter (often consciously) repress the evil they endured or escaped, since expressing it might completely block their ability to reconstitute their identity from those memories they choose to evoke (Buruma 1994; Horwitz 1990; Langer 1991; Segev 1993). One bewildering consequence of this phenomenon is that in the process the number of victims is enormously expanded, while the number of the perpetrators is drastically diminished, and the two groups come to be seen as identical not because they share a common fate or memory but because of their common claims of victimhood. Memory is conditioned not merely by past events, but also by its perceived consequences for the future. The past is remembered only after it has already happened. Hence memory, in the long run, is always more durable than the events remembered, even if it may also be more opaque and disputable, malleable and unreliable. And when the past is violent and traumatic, filled with loss and absence, then its memory will be all the more directed not merely at recollection, but at making continued existence possible. This may be illustrated by juxtaposing two memoirs by Germans who, while opposed to the Nazi regime, also served in the ranks of the Wehrmacht, and two memoirs by Jews who survived the Holocaust by changing their identity and finding shelter in Catholic institutions. There are interesting parallels between these texts, just as there are striking differences. All four authors reconstruct the memory of their childhood and youth at a distance of several decades from the events described; all four are aware, to differing degrees, that their memories have a relevance for the present and implications for the future, that they are, in that sense, not only difficult, almost unbearable as a record of past events, but also as an indication of future potentials; yet all four also retain a measure of opti5. For an exception that proved the rule, see Broszat 1985.

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mism, not least because they are survivors of events which witnessed the destruction of millions of lives and had very nearly brought about their own extinction. Moreover, these are the memoirs of individuals with double identities, of complicit nonconformists, dissemblers of the faith, insiders as outsiders (in the case of the Germans), or adult children, quasi-converted converts, outsiders masquerading as insiders (in the case of the Jews). Most importantly, they reveal the ability of the individual simultaneously to encompass several identities at times of crisis, and the difficulty of distinguishing between these identities once the crisis is over, of telling which was ‘real’ and which merely the mask worn in order to survive both physically and mentally, of somehow piecing together a new self from the fragments left after the traumatic event. Significantly, the German authors are far less aware of this process of reconstituting identity through memory and repression, and less concerned with the question of absence and loss. Yet whether consciously or not, these are depictions of double, or multiple lives, only some of whose aspects seem to be visible to the writers, while others must be identified by readers aware of the inevitable ambiguity of such texts. Indeed, these memoirs tell us a great deal about the inherent obstacles of recording a traumatic memory, or perhaps about the inability to record it faithfully, the need to make it bearable so as to be able to write it, and the fact that it may become bearable (but also less truthful, purged of precisely those aspects which made it unbearable to contemplate) only after it is written. Trauma, in this sense, is not overcome by confronting it unexpunged, as it ‘really happened’ (which we can in any case never achieve), but rather by first constructing a more bearable image of it, an image into which we can stare without being turned into stone. In other words, what we have here is the projection of a deeply disturbing, ambiguous, uncertain memory of the past into an anticipated future (war, trauma), a constant presence in the mind, a perpetual threat, a daily struggle, which can be overcome only by a reorganisation of the past, or at least, of its memory. And this becomes all the more difficult in those cases where much of the memory to be reorganised is made up of absences. This last point is also one of the reasons for the great differences between the German and the Jewish memoirs. The writer Heinrich Böll was raised in a Catholic family which sustained and supported him in his inner resistance to Nazism and his determination not to join the Hitler Youth. In his Was soll aus dem Jungen bloß werden? (What’s to Become of the Boy? 1984) he describes the roots of his courageous postwar moral stance and his opposition to all forms of hypocrisy and control, the seeds of his independent, unconven-

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tional Catholicism which made him into a thorn in the flesh of the conservatives and the left alike. But what ‘finally’ became of that youth in the war years, as we know, was a soldier in the Wehrmacht, reluctant to serve the Führer, but brave and determined all the same, to the extent that he returned to the front again and again after being wounded several times in combat. In this memoir, Böll does not reach into his service in the army, but in other quasi-autobiographical stories, written in large part shortly after the war, he does (Böll 1982; Böll 1972).6 It is a difficult, painful memory, but one which is cleansed of what would have apparently made it wholly unbearable and thereby impossible to tell, namely, not the memory of his own and his comrades’ suffering, but that of their innumerable, truly innocent victims. It is, finally, a memory of courage and victimhood (or perhaps of the courage of victimhood), in a world remembered as one that made that kind of victimhood possible. It is, therefore, a memory which is suited to serve the future rather than to excavate the past, a memory where true faith and conscience make it possible for man to remain man, and to sustain himself thereafter as a human being, if only because he remembers himself only as victim, never as perpetrator (Bartov 1994; Bartov 1997). Otl Aicher’s memoir depicts him as a close friend of Hans and Sophie Scholl, the founders of the students’ White Rose resistance group at the University of Munich, who were ultimately uncovered and executed by the German authorities. Aicher came from a Lutheran background, and his recollections are interspersed with theological ruminations reflecting a thoughtful, deeply religious, but unconventional mind. He too refused to join the Hitler Youth and was consequently ostracised by the authorities and unable to take his Abitur. Unlike Böll, he was neither a brave nor a committed soldier, and did his best to get out of the front and find noncombat duties whenever the opportunity presented itself. He hated the military establishment and refused an officer’s commission, rightly perceiving the junior officers of the Wehrmacht as the backbone of the regime, devoted ‘Nazis without party membership cards’, as he repeatedly calls them (Bartov 1985). He even vaguely speaks of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, though he finds them quite similar to those perpetrated by all nations at some point 6. The blurb on the 1972 German edition of Böll’s The Train Was on Time, signed by Henri Plard, is of some relevance here, since it points to Böll’s consistency in presenting all soldiers as victims: ‘There are authors who grant war an apparent nobility, others, who have known the humour and rough joys of the warriors. In none of Böll’s writing can one find even the most qualified approval of war; nowhere does man appear there as anything but its victim’. This, and all further translations from texts without an English language version, are my own.

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in their history (Aicher 1985). And yet, his memoir is a strange melange of anti-Nazi sentiments and complicity, of accusations against German society (especially the bourgeoisie) and of assertions of personal integrity. Aicher has many painful recollections of the war and Nazism, but his memory of the period, and especially of his own role in it, is one that he can apparently live with, for like Böll he was both in and out, part of it enough to survive, and apart from it enough to feel redeemed by his refusal to share the sentiments of his society. He is, again like Böll, an ‘inner immigrant’, hence the title of his memoir, Innenseiten des Krieges (War from Within, 1985), for even as he directs the Wehrmacht’s guns at the Russians in his capacity as an artillery observer, he is not ‘really’ there as far as his own consciousness is concerned, and even as he escapes arrest by the Gestapo (in a somewhat dubious episode), he is ‘really’ part of the White Rose resistance group. Aicher can therefore look forward to his long and successful career in postwar Germany, even if, like Böll, he expresses bitter criticism of ‘the State’ and most of what it stands for. His is thus both a remarkably bearable, not to say complacent memory, and yet one at the same time that betrays deeply repressed feelings of guilt and self-doubt, of which the author himself seems quite unaware. When the memory of converted child survivors of the Holocaust comes, it is a memory of loss and separation, absence and uprooted identity, repressed, fragmented, traumatic. It has remained unrecollected because it is unbearable, and when it finally resurfaces, it threatens to undermine everything that had been constructed with so much care and pain, that other, third identity, the last remaining, fragile refuge. ‘An adult conversion’, writes Saul Friedlander in Quand vient le souvenir… (When Memory Comes, 1978), ‘may be a purely pro forma affair … or it may be the result of a spiritual journey that ends in a decision freely made; nothing disappears, yet everything is transformed: the new identity then changes one’s former existence into a prefiguration or a preparation’. But for him, a child whose parents were determined to save him at any price, conversion had a much deeper, traumatic, enduring meaning: The rejection of the past that was forced upon me was neither a pro forma affair – for my father had promised not only to accept my conversion but to assure me a Catholic education if life resumed its normal course – nor, of course, the result of a spiritual journey. The first ten years of my life, the memories of my childhood, were to disappear, for there was no possible synthesis between the person I had been and the one I was to become. (Friedlander 1991: 70-78)

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Saul Friedlander was saved through conversion – physically saved. But conversion spelled an irreparable loss of parents and childhood, of self; spiritually, it was the equivalent of a child’s hell. Having escaped from the Catholic boarding school to which his parents had sent him, and before being taken back, never to see his parents again, the child clings to the bars of his father’s hospital bed. ‘How did my parents ever find the courage to make me loosen my hold, without bursting into sobs in front of me?’ He does not know, he does not remember: It has all been swept away by catastrophe, and the passage of time. What my father and mother felt at that moment disappeared with them; what I felt has been lost forever, and of this heartbreak there remains only a vignette in my memory, the image of a child walking back down the rue de la Garde, in the opposite direction from the one taken shortly before, in a peaceful autumn light, between two nuns dressed in black. (87-88)

Shlomo Breznitz parted from his parents at the entrance to the Catholic orphanage, where his older sister was also to remain. The final farewell was brutally brief. We all knew what it meant, and said nothing to each other. The tears of all four mixed on our faces, and even after they left I could feel the taste of salt on my lips. That was the last material remnant, and for a while I tried to distinguish between mother’s and father’s salt … Did my official admission into the orphanage mean that I had become an orphan? (Breznitz 1993: 35-36).

Friedlander and Breznitz were saved by conversion, and as children and youths they excelled in their religious studies. Their previous Jewish identity was a threat, a hidden blemish not to be revealed, the cause of endless anxiety and shame, but also their only link to their childhood, their parents. After the war, Breznitz is told by his mother (who had survived the camps) that he was protected by the local Bishop precisely because he knew that he was Jewish and admired his extraordinary ability to memorise Latin prayers. Hence memory – memory of Latin texts – had facilitated his salvation. Friedlander discovers his identity through a Jesuit teacher just as he is about to enter a Jesuit school and be launched on a promising career in the clergy. By now the war is over, but he knows nothing of what had happened. They stand under a painting of Christ on the Cross: ‘Didn’t your parents die at Auschwitz?’ Father L. asked. What did this name mean? Where was Auschwitz? He must have understood

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then that I knew nothing of the extermination of the Jews: to me, the death of my parents was enveloped in vague images, indistinct circumstances that bore no relation to the real course of events. And so, in front of this obscure Christ, I listened: Auschwitz, the trains, the gas chambers, the crematory ovens, the millions of dead. (Friedlander 1991: 137)

The Father tells him further about anti-Semitism: For the first time, I felt myself to be Jewish – no longer despite myself or secretly, but through a sensation of absolute loyalty. It is true that I knew nothing of Judaism and was still a Catholic. But something had changed. A tie had been reestablished, an identity was emerging, a confused one certainly, contradictory perhaps, but from that day forward linked to a central axis of which there could be no doubt: in some manner or other I was Jewish – whatever this term meant in my mind. (137-38)

When memory comes, Friedlander’s reconversion to Judaism is not the product of memory. It is of the kind discovered by a member of a younger generation of French Jews, the child of Jewish-Polish parents, Alain Finkielkraut, described in his essay Le Juif imaginaire (The Imaginary Jew, 1994); an identity based on defiance, not on familiarity, on absence, not wholeness. But for Friedlander, it springs from confrontation with the knowledge of what had happened. And with that knowledge, he says, ultimately comes memory. But does it? Is it knowledge that makes the need to remember so urgent? Or is it memory that endowed knowledge with this and no other meaning, that redefined him as a Jew? Is knowledge not Perec’s History with a capital H, the History that protects him from his own past, and that must be discarded, made into an adult’s version of a child’s nightmare of atrocity (in that imaginary land of W), so as to make room for his private, his unique memories? ‘As a child who happened upon the wrong place at the wrong time, caught in the whirlpool of events, I too became one of the centers of the earthquake’, writes Breznitz (1993: 11). ‘I was born in Prague at the worst possible moment, four months before Hitler came to power’, writes Friedlander at the opening of his memoir (1991: 3). This was bad timing not only because children in such vast numbers became victims of the Nazi murder machine. It was also bad timing because those who survived were left with gaping absences, not only of parents and siblings, but of the memory of their own childhood, of their identity, which came to be split into disparate fragments and had to be put together again and again in different and contradictory versions. These are the unbearable

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memories that need to be juggled and rearranged over and over again, every day, as part of a perpetual struggle to preserve a reconstituted identity. For while they want memory to come, it is always unbearable. ‘For many years my memories of those times played tricks on me’, writes Breznitz: While some could always be recalled, others were more elusive, surfacing for a moment, tempting me to chase them, and then disappearing again without a trace. And there was a third kind of memories, whose existence was evidenced by the deep voids in the story of my childhood. As if it too had been buried under the debris of the earthquake. For too long it remained beyond my reach, its secrets locked behind the faithful bars of repression. (Breznitz 1993: 11)

Can one ever reach back with any kind of clarity or certainty, and can one express these retrieved memories in words? For Friedlander, the text of his own memoir is ‘very far removed … from my memories, and even my memories retrieve only sparse fragments of my parents’ existence, of their world, of the time when I was a child’ (Friedlander 1991: 134). But precisely because of the loss and the absence, and precisely because of those few, uncertain memories, which now remain only in his own mind, Friedlander, just like Perec, feels compelled to write. Not because he remembers well, but because he remembers at all; not because of the need to describe a rich, multifaceted past, but because of the urge to save even a fragment of presence from that vast absence before it recedes into total oblivion: ‘I must write, then. Writing retraces the contours of the past with a possibly less ephemeral stroke than the others, it does at least preserve a presence, and it enables one to tell about a child who saw one world founder and another reborn’ (135). Böll and Aicher experience the trauma of war, devastation, and the destruction of the world into which they were born. They must rebuild their lives and forge for themselves new identities from the debris of fallen friends, shattered cities, discredited beliefs. Their return to the homeland is a difficult journey, but a possible one. They retain their language, their family, their landscapes. Böll wrote once that at times he cannot understand how he still lives in Germany.7 And indeed he was throughout his life a harsh and demanding critic of his society. Yet he became and remained a German author, deeply rooted in his culture, honoured and respected by many readers. He and his generation underwent a deep trauma, but if there was an absence, if many members of his age group (but neither he nor Aicher) felt that with the collapse of the Third Reich 7. In a private communication with this author’s father.

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and Hitler’s suicide their whole world had broken apart, they could at least pick up the pieces and march on into a new future in the old land and culture. This return to the homeland is barred to Camus. He experiences the trauma of the Great War only vicariously, upon visiting his father’s grave, but the path back to the land of his childhood, the physical pleasure of the sea and the sun, the simplicity and innocence of poverty, is no longer open to him; he must remain in the land he adopted, the civilisation to which he adapted himself without ever fully belonging to it. Perec can remain in the land and language of his birth, but is doomed to a life without a memory of childhood, for he has been deprived of the most important references to that past, his parents; he can only reconstruct his lost years from material remains, from houses, streets, photographs, and each time he tells a different tale, for no one can remember. Friedlander and Breznitz, like Perec, have lost the adult bearers of the memory of childhood, and like him they survived in Catholic institutions and thus the memory of their lost childhood is interwoven with the memory of lost faith and identity. They cannot claim the integrity and conviction of Böll and Aicher, for their survival depended on conversion, and their salvation belied once more the identity they had assumed. Nor can they return to their homeland and language. And since the path back to the past is blocked, they return to an identity they had discarded and a land they had never been to. They recreate themselves, with few points of reference and only fragments of memory. Yet the absence remains, the trauma of loss and separation leads them to search for the past, to travel to the sites of their childhood, to reconstruct in their minds the universe and people they had lost. Their new identity is an act of choice and reason, not of faith and memory; and as such it is always fragile and tenuous. They are there, and yet they are not. Their survival is a cause for hope, but unlike their German counterparts, it is grounded in despair, for they are always perched over an abyss, a gaping void which makes them homeless in their own selves. In their memoirs, both Friedlander and Breznitz move in time between the present and the past, so that the present serves as a model of coherence, so lacking in their memories, as if justifying or legitimising their own biographies. Yet behind this confident façade one senses the anxiety of trauma and absence, of reconstituted identities always threatening to disintegrate, of unbearable, orphaned memories of solitary children, carried into a future of ever more war and genocide. For them, war is a daily struggle with their own memory, with what it remembers, and what it forgets. And always there remains the fear of the unbearable memory of tomorrow.

26

NONRATIONAL DISCOURSE IN A WORK OF REASON: PETER WEISS’S ANTI-FASCIST NOVEL DIE ÄSTHETIK DES WIDERSTANDS* Robert Cohen

The Aesthetics of Resistance1 begins with an absence. Missing is Heracles, the great hero of Greek mythology. The space he once occupied in the enormous stone frieze depicting the battle of the Giants against the Gods is empty. Some two thousand years ago the frieze covered the outer walls of the temple of Pergamon in Asia Minor. In the last third of the nineteenth century the remnants of the ancient monument were discovered by the German engineer Carl Humann and sent to Germany. The fragments were reassembled in the specially built Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the capital of Wilhelminian Germany, and were to signal from this point forward the late claims to power of German imperialism (see Schalles 1986). The Pergamon frieze can still be seen in Berlin today. In the autumn of 1937 – and here we are at the beginning of Peter Weiss’s novel – three young men find themselves before the frieze. Two of them, Coppi and the narrator, whose name is never mentioned, are workers. The third, a sixteen-year-old named Heilmann, is a high 1 For easier reading the title of Weiss’s novel will be quoted in English throughout even though it has not yet been translated.

*This chapter has been translated from the German by Daniel Slager.

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school student. Coppi is a member of the illegal Communist Party, Heilmann and the narrator are sympathisers. All three are active in the anti-fascist resistance. In a lengthy discussion the three friends attempt to interpret the stone figures and events depicted in the frieze in a way which would make them relevant for their own present-day struggle. They cannot, however, find Heracles. Other than a fragment of his name and the paw of a lion’s skin, nothing remains of the leader of the Gods in the battle against the Giants. The ‘leader’ of 1937, on the other hand, is an omnipresent force, even in the still halls of the Pergamon Museum, where uniformed SS troopers, their Nazi insignia clearly visible, mingle among the museum’s visitors. Under the pressure of the present and with their lives in constant danger, the three young anti-fascists read the empty space in the frieze as an ‘omen’ (I/11),2 they feel encouraged to fill it with their own representation of the absent half-god. What they envision is an alternative myth in stark contrast to the traditional image of Heracles. From a friend of the Gods, the mighty and the powerful, Heracles is transformed into a champion of the lowest classes, of the exploited, imprisoned and tortured – a messianic ‘leader’ in the struggle against the terror of the ‘Führer’. The concept of a messianic bearer of hope is by no means unique in Weiss’s work. Starting with the coachman in his experimental novel The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body (1952/1959), messianic figures appear repeatedly in Weiss’s literary work. That Weiss would continue to be obsessed with such figures after he turned to Marxism in 1964/1965 may seem surprising. However, the concept now becomes increasingly secularised, as for example in the figure of Empedocles in the play Hölderlin (1971). In The Aesthetics of Resistance this process of secularisation is brought to its logical conclusion. Before they reach this conclusion, however, readers of Weiss’s novel are confronted with nearly a thousand pages of text interrupted only occasionally by a paragraph break – a sea of words which resists any attempt at summarising.3 Even to characterise The Aesthetics of Resistance as an anti-fascist novel seems unduly to narrow the scope of Weiss’s broad project. There is no clearly defined geographical or historical space within which events unfold. There is no unifying plot, and neither is there a chronological structure to the narrative. The novel presents a history of the European Left, from Marx and Engels to the postwar era, in coun2 References throughout are to Weiss 1986. Volume numbers are indicated by roman numerals, followed by page numbers. Translations are mine. 3 For an introduction to The Aesthetics of Resistance see Cohen 1993, chapter 8; see also Scherpe 1983; Metscher 1984.

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tries as diverse as Germany and Sweden, the Soviet Union, France and Spain. Woven into the historical narratives and political discourses are extensive passages on works of art and literature from many centuries and from many European, and even non-European cultures – from the Pergamon frieze to the temple city of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, from Dürer and Brueghel to Géricault and Picasso, from Dante to Kafka, and from surrealism and dadaism to socialist realism. The novel takes upon itself the enormous task of reinterpreting the great works of Western culture from the perspective of the perennial victims of history and to fuse art and politics into one inseparable revolutionary unity. In its final section, the novel contains one of the great passages of anti-fascist literature – a description of the end of the resistance group ‘Red Orchestra’ (‘Rote Kapelle’) in fascist Berlin in 1942 and of the execution of all of its members in Berlin’s Plötzensee prison.4 All of the characters whose end Weiss describes here, indeed all of the characters who appear in The Aesthetics of Resistance, and there are hundreds, are actual historical figures. They bear their real names in the text, and everything that happens to them is based on verifiable facts which Weiss researched in many countries.5 In its obsession with historical facts, as in other respects, The Aesthetics of Resistance is a work which transcends all boundaries.6 The narrator – the only fictional character in the novel – is one of many nameless contributors to the activities of the communist resistance. From 1937 to 1945 he wanders through much of Europe. His two friends, Heilmann and Coppi, remain in Berlin and eventually become members of the ‘Red Orchestra’. From time to time a letter from Heilmann reaches the narrator. In his letters Heilmann continues his struggle for a reinterpretation of the Heracles myth. Amidst the reality of fascism and in a German capital strafed by Allied bombs, however, the notion of a messianic saviour becomes less and less plausible. Coppi abandons it altogether. Years later, years after the end of the war, after Heilmann and Coppi had been hanged in Plötzensee – this, too, is historically authentic – the narrator once again finds himself before the Pergamon frieze in rebuilt Berlin. Heracles’ place is still empty. There is no leader, no conceivable presence which can replace this absence. There is no hope for a messiah. No one other than the narrator 4 On this passage see Cohen 1991. 5 For biographical information on the figures in The Aesthetics of Resistance, an index, a chronology and other information on the novel, see Cohen 1989b. 6 On the literary transformation of facts in The Aesthetics of Resistance see Cohen 1989a, chapters 5 and 6.

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himself and those like him can bring about their liberation. It is with this thought that the novel ends. The difficulties encountered by the three young protagonists in their consideration of the myth of Heracles and the eternally victorious Gods are linked to what Roland Barthes in the 1950s identified as the principle of myth: ‘it transforms history into nature’ (Barthes 1972, 129; see also 101, 110, 142). According to Barthes, myth is a de-historicising discourse. It makes social relations, created by human beings in pursuit of their specific interests, appear as something natural, eternal and unchangeable, thus removing them from critique. It serves those in power. Myth, Barthes emphasises, is ‘depoliticised speech’ (143). In the case of the Pergamon frieze, this speech might go as follows: the powerful are rightly victorious because they are powerful; hierarchical relations are hierarchical relations, eternally immutable and thus justified. This amounts to a tautology: the rulers are the rulers. But tautology, according to Barthes, is an essential aspect of myth. It is, in fact, the linguistic structure mythological discourse takes refuge in ‘when one is at a loss for an explanation’ (152). In view of Barthes’s notion of myth as depoliticised, dehistoricised and tautological discourse, one may well ask what the Marxist Peter Weiss could have intended by employing just this discourse. The literary works of Peter Weiss, and above all his plays, are concerned with the man-made catastrophes of the twentieth century and with the historical events which led up to them. His topics include revolution and counter-revolution in France (Marat/Sade) and Germany (Hölderlin), colonialism in Africa (Song of the Lusitanian Bogey), imperialism in Vietnam (Viet Nam Discourse), the Holocaust (The Investigation), and the Stalinist deformation of socialism (Trotsky in Exile). What events such as these have in common is that they seem to resist and defy literary expression. They have, in the words of the narrator in The Aesthetics of Resistance, gone ‘beyond the boundaries of our conceptual capacity’ (III/24). Time and again Peter Weiss was confronted with the fact that the events he needed to describe could not be described. His aesthetic practice was shaped by the relentless pressure of this aporia. That events have gone ‘beyond the boundaries of our conceptual capacity’ is a phenomenon which confronts any writer seeking an expression for the reality of fascism and of the Holocaust. The events in The Aesthetics of Resistance, however, transcend the boundaries of conceptualisation in still another way, for they are told from the perspective of communists. Stalinism thus becomes a central topic of the novel – a topic which for Weiss appears to have defied description equally as much as fascism. How could a communist writer ren-

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der what happened to the communist movement, to its leading figures and innumerable nameless supporters during the Stalin era without losing his credibility either as a communist or as a writer? Or, to express the dilemma historically, how was Weiss to treat this topic without losing his credibility either in the Federal Republic or in the GDR? ‘The form [for such a narrative] would be monstrous’ is the answer the narrator himself provides in the novel (I/130). ‘Monstrous’ is a term which appears repeatedly in The Aesthetics of Resistance. It is used to refer both to the events themselves and to the literary form in which they might one day be rendered. The passages about the Moscow trials and about the execution of anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, about the Hitler-Stalin Pact and about the dissolution of the Comintern, amidst suspicions and accusations from every quarter, all bear the traces of this double monstrosity. In The Aesthetics of Resistance the aporetic situation of the author Peter Weiss is projected onto the narrator. The young worker is intensely involved in the study of art and literature. During the Spanish Civil War he is able to meet writers from all over the world and, by the beginning of the Second World War, he finds his way into the circle surrounding Brecht, who temporarily resides in Sweden. Eventually, the narrator begins to write and becomes a correspondent for a small union newspaper. Gradually, the focus of his existence shifts from manual labour to writing. He resolves one day to record his experiences during the years of the anti-fascist struggle. At the same time, he doubts whether he will ever be able to keep this resolution, whether he will ever be able to represent the events which engulf him. These doubts remain the often recurring leitmotif of the novel. All of this is part of the context in which the narrator and his friends attempt to reinvent the myth of Heracles. In contrast to Barthes’s rational critique and rejection of myth as an ideological weapon of the bourgeoisie, Weiss insists on the productive use of myth and other forms of nonrational discourse in the struggle against oppression. This concept is very much in evidence in the opening passages of the novel. The Pergamon frieze which the three young comrades visit in Berlin in 1937 is in ruins. Large pieces are missing and of most figures nothing remains but fragments, cracked and weathered. Distinctions that once were clear have become vague; it is almost impossible to decipher who, in this epic struggle, is on top and who on the bottom, who is the perpetrator and who the victim. The three young observers react to the current state of the frieze in an unexpected manner: they take its devastation and fragmentation, all of the transformations it has undergone in its two-thousand-year history to be part of its essence, of its meaning. Where

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there are missing limbs, they see mutilations, and where portions of a figure’s face or hands have broken off, they see war wounds. Where the weathered state of the frieze has rendered it indecipherable, where, in moments of acute danger, friend and foe can no longer be distinguished with any certainty, they see their own situation. From the contingent state of the monument they construct a new meaning. This nonrational reception and interpretation has an almost hallucinatory effect on the reader. It is an effect which grows in intensity throughout the opening pages of the novel: as, for example, when it is noted that the frieze once covered the outside of the four walls of the great Temple at Pergamon. When the frieze was reconstructed indoors in Berlin, however, the outside walls were inverted. They now form a rectangular space which encloses the frieze, as well as the visitors. This reversal of outside and inside, in the perception of the three young men, makes reality appear unstable, the perspective of the observers seems to have shifted in complex ways. The displacement the ancient structure has undergone has a dizzying effect on the three young anti-fascists and even makes them think of the Theory of Relativity (I/15). The way in which the three young workers reconceptualise the Pergamon frieze can be seen as a model for the way in which the narrator reconceptualises the fascist epoch thirty years after the end of the war. Just as for the young narrator the reconfiguration of the frieze becomes part of its essence, so for the now mature writer in the 1970s the reconfiguration of the fascist period through the Cold War now belongs to its essence. He sees the distant struggle against fascism the same way he once saw the battle between the Gods and the Giants: as a vast expanse of ruins and rubble, disfigured, weathered, transformed, an expanse whose meaning has become nearly indecipherable. The locus of the narrator in historical space has, of course, changed. Once he was at the centre of the action. The events surrounded him like the inverted walls of the frieze. His place was within the chaos, where conceptualisation of events was nearly impossible. Decades later, however, the walls appear to face outwards again. They form an almost hermetic object which the narrator must inspect from without. Once again the perspective of the observer has shifted in complex ways. He responds with a narrative strategy which problematises this shift itself. The past is reconstructed emphatically from the present. A present which is anything but a secure place from which to look at the fascist period. In the words of Jürgen Habermas (1985), the present of the 1970s and 1980s was a time of ‘new obscurity’ (‘neue Unübersichtlichkeit’). Habermas was referring to the growing neoconservatism in the Federal Republic which led to an increasingly

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perfunctory attitude towards the fascist past. Distinctions between cause and effect, and between perpetrator and victim became increasingly blurred. Efforts to situate the epoch of fascism within a historical continuum threatened to efface its incommensurability. Several major anti-fascist novels of the 1970s opposed this tendency. In Alfred Andersch’s Winterspelt, Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood, Stephan Hermlin’s slender volume Abendlicht, as well as in The Aesthetics of Resistance, every effort is made to reconstruct the fascist period in all its incommensurability. This again brings me to the essential question which besets both the narrator and Peter Weiss: ‘How could it all be described’ (I/130)? How could the situation of the Spanish volunteers be described, who had before them the superior power of the fascist armies of Europe and behind them the Stalinist apparatus, staging show trials in Moscow, but whose ominous presence could be felt all the way to Spain. Who was friend and who foe? How could this relentless and increasingly hopeless struggle be described in all its ‘nightmarish horror and panicked confusion’ (II/149)? Time and again the irrationality of the events threatens to engulf the narrative process – in the three friends’ appeal to myth, in their hallucinatory interpretations of the Pergamon frieze, in their sensitivity to the instability of reality, as well as in many other passages. This then is the paradox: The Aesthetics of Resistance, this product of historical and analytical reason, is an oneiric novel. Visions, hallucinations and dreamlike states shape the narrative. The three young comrades repeatedly insist on the importance of the visionary and of ‘dream impulses’ (‘Traumimpulse’, I/57) as the basis of all creativity. They find their notions realised by the movements of the avant-garde, as well as in the works of Kafka, Rimbaud and Hölderlin. Their aesthetic concepts consciously and systematically break with any narrow concept of socialist realism. Against their Marxist teacher (‘Lehrmeister’, I/78) – which appears to refer to Georg Lukács – they defend the works of formal innovators such as ‘Joyce and Kafka, Schönberg and Stravinski, Klee and Picasso’ (I/79). Tirelessly they debate the importance of the avant-garde and the nonrational for an art in the service of a new society. The novel itself, of course, is the very example of such an conjuncture of avant-garde and nonrational aesthetics and discursive political reasoning. If I insist here on the importance of the nonrational elements for the aesthetic of Weiss’s novel, I am only following Weiss himself. In one of his last written statements he emphasised the fact that The Aesthetics of Resistance could only be understood with the element of dreams in mind.7 It would, of course, be a mistake to 7 Weiss’s statement is quoted in Scherpe 1992: 190.

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equate Weiss’s aesthetic of dreams with the realm of fantasy, with unbridled and uncontrolled imagination. The Aesthetics of Resistance remains a work of reason. The rigors of analytic reasoning can be found on every page. The novel’s obsession with documented facts is beyond compare. In some passages this obsession strips the text of any narrative element. Indeed, the high point of the novel, the passage on the execution of the members of the ‘Red Orchestra’, consists of nothing more than a series of microscopic descriptions of bureaucratic and technical procedures, of movements and gestures, of machinery and sounds. This passage is devoid of any attempt at invention or identification, of any dramatisation or emphasis, of all literary artifice. All attempts at ‘art’ seem to have been renounced here, including those of the document brut, of hyperrealism or of minimalism. The effect of this passage is produced neither by the apparently objective tone of historiography nor by the facts themselves, horrifying as they are. After an earlier career as an often fanciful, sometimes opulent painter, Weiss in his literary work had perfected a style of extreme, obsessive reduction of all artistic means. It is this carefully achieved artistic reductionism which gives this stark passage and the novel as a whole its oneiric and visionary quality. Language was a crucial, often traumatic element in Weiss’s existence. The father being Jewish, Weiss’s family had to leave Germany after 1933, when Peter was not yet eighteen. The family settled in Sweden in 1939. Weiss became a Swedish citizen. His everyday language was Swedish, but he wrote all his major works in German, a process which he found increasingly difficult. The circumstances of his life prevented him from becoming an obvious master of the German language like Max Frisch or Christa Wolf. In his texts there are few brilliant turns of phrase or formulations of linguistic elegance which might remain fixed in one’s memory. His language is not quotable, as Brecht demanded of good formulations. His vocabulary is not rich, his syntax is unwieldy, his style, overloaded with nouns made of verbs, is often stiff and austere. One senses the arduous work of the writer in every sentence. Weiss’s language does not measure up to the traditional demand that one must not notice the efforts of the creator in his or her creation. It does not flow as if of its own; it seems crafted, artificial, highly formulaic. In The Aesthetics of Resistance Weiss made the artificiality of his language even more apparent. He dispensed with paragraphs almost throughout, even where the context would seem to impose them. He shortened words using ellipses, and he dispensed with punctuation except for commas and full stops, thus creating the even, unemphatic epic tone of the novel. It lets the narrator report in the objective, emotionless voice of a

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chronicler, and this tone hardly changes when the narrator cedes the reporting perspective to other characters. This is, then, a language which is as distant from a lyrical tone as it is from common speech, a language simultaneously austere and celebratory, a language which defamiliarises figures and events, while rendering them with the exactness of a bookkeeper. Often things seem to be said as if for the first time, and often they are said for the first time, since there had been no language for them until Peter Weiss. It is a language acquired in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles, and it proves adequate for the expression of events which threaten to evade language. The Aesthetics of Resistance is a European novel. It is perhaps the most comprehensive attempt at a pan-European anti-fascist novel since James Aldridge’s Of Many Men of 1946. Less than a third of the events take place in Germany, the remainder in Czechoslovakia, Spain, France and Sweden. The art works discussed in the novel represent many periods and countries. The narrator himself emphasises that his writing belongs to no ‘national culture’ (I/136) and repeatedly insists on his internationalism. This was also true of Peter Weiss. The historical catastrophes which shaped his life had prevented him from developing any sense of belonging to any nation. In response to the question as to which place played the most important role in his life he named Auschwitz (Weiss 1967). Weiss at times suffered from his lack of belonging, but he also used it productively. In The Aesthetics of Resistance it drives the narrator’s insistence on internationalism, particularly on ‘proletarian internationalism’ (II/115). The narrator’s experience of exile, his stays in many countries, and his contacts and solidarity with antifascists from different cultures eventually come together in his ‘vision’ of a ‘revolutionary, universal culture’ (III/258). This notion leads to the concluding thought of the novel, where the victims of history are encouraged not to wait any longer for a mythical saviour, but rather collectively to make themselves into the subject of history. But whom might one think of as this subject today? The utopian potential of the socialist countries no longer exists, the historical moment of the industrial proletariat has passed, and the liberation movements in many parts of the world, which are referred to in the last pages of The Aesthetics of Resistance (III/267), seem to have exhausted their potential for renewal.8 Has hope in the masses as the subject of history with which The Aesthetics of Resistance concludes become a myth itself? History is not yet at an end. 8 See in a similar vein Lindner 1992: 75.

27

FIFTY YEARS ON: GERMAN CHILDREN OF THE WAR REMEMBER Jost Hermand

The expression ‘children of the war’ is not as clear as it may appear at first glance. In the German context, it is largely applied to those young people who were still under twenty at the end of the Second World War, that is, those born after 1925. However, this definition of German war children according to age is inadequate when attempting to understand their experiences. After all, is it fair to describe as children those fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys who, from 1942 onwards, were drawn into military service, first as Flakhelfer and later as soldiers? Similarly, can girls of the same age group be thought of as children? They not only attended school but also worked in ammunitions factories and were later conscripted into the Reich work scheme. Even those Germans born between 1930 and 1935 can hardly be regarded as children in any ordinary sense of the word. Their fathers and older brothers lived away as soldiers and their mothers worked to support the family. In the closing years of the war, many such German children were killed during the Allied bombing raids. Between 1939 and 1945, German youngsters were rarely given the opportunity to grow up as well-adjusted and contented individuals, looking forward to predictable lives in a world where teachers and parents served as unquestioned role models. Instead, they usually grew up without a father, as so-called latchkey children, even if they came from what would be considered middle-

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class and prosperous families. They had very little parental supervision and boys, in particular, were subject to Hitler Youth leaders who taught them to value physical force and violent actions as part of their training to become fit Jungmänner, ready to defend the fatherland. As one of the best known propagandist statements of the day put it: ‘The German boy must be slim and trim, swift as a greyhound, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. He must learn to take hardship upon himself, to endure rebukes, to be reliable, discreet and loyal’ (Gamm 1964: 22; 48). The aim of such military-style training was to eliminate the liberal tendencies of an earlier era and to promote the new ideal of a tough and rugged youth with a ‘fighter temperament’ (Gamm 1964: 28). To this end, Nazi leaders declared that the purpose of the Hitler Youth organisation was to turn ‘mummys’ boys’ into ‘hemen’. Adolf Hitler expressed such ideas in the following way: My pedagogy is harsh. Weakness must be pounded out. I want a violent, domineering, fearless, heartless younger generation. It must be able to endure pain. There can be nothing weak or tender about it. The gaze of the untamed, magnificent predator must once again gleam in its eyes. I want an athletic, younger generation. This is paramount. I have no use for intellectual education. Knowledge would only ruin them. They must learn self control. They must learn to overcome the fear of death during the hardest trial. This is a time for heroic youth. (Hofer 1957: 88)

Like all areas of life under National Socialism, the educational system was to promote a Darwinian concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ in which the weak would submit to the strong. Instead of leaving German boys in the hands of what were perceived to be pampering mothers and teachers, they were now subjected to a rigorous training drill, first in the Jungvolk, then in the Hitler Youth, followed by the Reich work scheme and, finally, the Nazi army. All such training made it clear that, in the new German state, the principle of democratic equality had been firmly supplanted by the cult of the leader and the subjugation of the weak. Thus, Hitler and his Reich Youth leader, Baldur von Schirach, declared that they envisaged this new German youth as a pack of wolves with leadership devolving to the strongest. In the very first months of the Third Reich, the Nazi Party began to attack the teaching methods used at German schools, demanding that a new emphasis be placed on physical activity which could be achieved in camps organised by the Hitler Youth. Only at such camps, it was said, could German boys be trained to become ‘victorious, superior and successful’ and to overcome any sense of compassion ‘for minorities, the weak and the inferior’ (Klönne 1982:

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153). As early as 1934, Schirach wrote that in such camps, German boys would be trained in ‘decisiveness, brutality and a refusal to compromise’ (Schirach 1934). When the first British bombs began falling on German cities in the autumn of 1940, the political leadership seized the perfect opportunity to launch a mass evacuation of German children away from the big cities to remoter regions of the German Reich. This project was named euphemistically the Expanded Programme of Shipping Children to the Countryside (Erweiterte Kinderlandverschickung or KLV) and resulted in many children experiencing the kind of upbringing that Nazi leaders had wanted for some time. From 1940 to 1945, nearly three million German children joined the programme, so that one can talk fairly accurately of a mass phenomenon.1 Rather than leave the administration of these camps wholly in the hands of teachers appointed by the Nazi Teachers League, Schirach decreed that each camp should have a political leader drawn from the ranks of the Hitler Youth (a Lagermannschaftführer or Lagermädelführerin). In so doing, Schirach left the division of powers intentionally unclear. This too was in keeping with the prevailing cult of the leader; the strongest was to have his or her way. Although there were certainly some camps where concerned teachers, acting as parental substitutes, set the tone, the Nazis regarded the most effective camps to be those in which fascist indoctrination, monotonous routine, brutality, if not outright sadism, abounded. Despite the propaganda promoting the community spirit and camaraderie of the camps, German boys were to be trained to be battleready young men who would later become Europe’s master race. The KLV camps were generally ruled by the dictum that might is right and structured around a rigid hierarchy which allowed a given individual to maintain or improve his standing only through cunning, cruelty or savagery. Like the young boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, German boys were exposed to a series of harrowing and traumatic experiences, such as killing animals or torturing them to death. At times, they were transferred to training camps under SS command where they were drilled and beaten to the point of losing consciousness. Some were forced to watch as so-called Untermenschen, including children and pregnant women, were killed before their eyes by SS Special Squads in order to train them to feel no compassion for others and to have no remorse for their future violent actions. It is these experiences which continue to have the strongest impact on the minds of many Germans who lived through the war, 1. For further details of this programme, see my book, Als Pimpf in Polen, 1993.

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especially those who were young boys at the time. Yet, despite the efforts of the German nation to ‘come to terms with its past’ over the past fifty years, this age group has scarcely dealt with any of these experiences in the media. The KLV camps are not mentioned in either East or West German literature; although grappling with one’s childhood under fascism has been a key motif in literature from both German states; from Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959) and Cat and Mouse (1961) to Christa Wolf’s Childhood Patterns (1976) (see Schneider 1981: 90-102). Even German sociologists, historians, educationalists and literary scholars, figures who have tackled every possible sociohistorical issue over the last twenty-five years, have generally left the KLV phenomenon untouched. However, there are a number of fascist publications available which portray this programme as a humane rescue attempt carried out by Hitler in order to save German children from first British and then American bombing raids. Probably the most prominent exponent of this interpretation is Otto Würschinger, a leading figure in the Hitler Youth organisation, who termed the KLV programme an ‘inalienable part of German national history’ because of its allegedly high ideals and the sense of comradeship it was supposed to have cultivated amongst German children (Griesmayer & Würschinger 1979: 7; 259). He even claimed that the war generation which had grown up influenced by the Third Reich’s community-based ideals had by no means capitulated at the end of the war. On the contrary, he believed that the success of postwar West German reconstruction was down to the work of those who had been trained in Hitler Youth organisations. The KLV experience was recalled with equal enthusiasm by Jutta Rüdiger, a high-ranking official in the League of German Girls (Rüdiger 1983). She too praised the KLV camps for their selfless community spirit which she claimed had inspired all involved in the programme. She went on to describe the camps as a unique experience which had been the greatest social programme for young people in the history of Germany. She assured her readers that children at the KLV camps had not been beaten or physically abused and had not had food rations reduced as a form of punishment. From the outset, she declared that the camps had promoted ‘moral cleanliness, respect for decency and a preparedness for national service’ (Rüdiger 1983: 328), all virtues which she believed were lacking in today’s society. In writing their books, both Würschinger and Rüdiger called upon statistical data and written accounts still available at that time in the archives of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft KLV. Some of the documents stored there were published in 1981 by Gerhard Dabel,

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a former Hitler Youth leader and the last director of the KLV section of the Reich Youth programme. Dabel had published a number of pro-Nazi novels for young readers in the early 1940s and his postwar KLV book is an unashamed endorsement of the KLV project.2 He reiterates the wartime propaganda about Schirach’s and Hitler’s motives for establishing the programme and portrays the KLV camps as one of the most important and enriching experiences in the lives of evacuated children, ignoring the traumatic effect separation from their parents was to have on them (Dabel 1981: 310). Up until now, few commentators have been prepared to criticise such an idyllic vision of the KLV camps. Indeed, many former KLV children have remained silent in the face of such retrospective whitewashing of the camps. Were their experiences really as innocuous or even agreeable as such Nazi sympathisers would have us believe? I would contend that many of the evacuated children in these camps were subjected to a terrifying round of paramilitary training, interminable field marches and heavy-handed attempts at Nazi indoctrination. It was not only the more liberalminded and highly educated amongst them who felt oppressed and marginalised by the military-style regime as the supporters of the camps claim; the organisation and command structure of the camps made them a centre for ideological brainwashing which brought suffering for all camp internees and demonstrated the brutal outlook of the Nazi leadership. Granted, there may have been camps with a more humane regime, as well as strong, athletic children for whom the KLV experience was a grand adventure. However, as I have learned over and over again in conversations with former KLV children, for the overwhelming majority – and let us not forget that they are to be counted in their millions – it was a terrifying experience which has traumatised them for life. Many of them still do not want to talk about this time in their lives and, if they are willing to do so, they will only talk to trusted friends who went through the same thing. This often results in the more resilient among them remembering concrete details about camp life, while those who were more traumatised remember mainly their psychological suffering. It would seem that the entire KLV programme still remains a taboo subject for discussion in Germany, as evidenced by the critical silence which greeted my 1993 book on the KLV experience. It 2. In 1941-42, Dabel published six Nazi boys’ books with the Verlag Junge Generation: Das Gebot der Stunde. Verse für die Front; Großstadtjungen. Der Weg einer jungen Mannschaft in die Zeit; Kameraden der 100 Zelte; Mit Krad und Karabiner. Fahrt und Kampf einer Kradschützenschwadron; Die Piraten von Moen and Der Rächer der Eifel.

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was published as a relatively inexpensive Fischer paperback and sold rather well. However, it was not reviewed or even mentioned in the German press. How is this silence to be explained? It is understandable that former teachers at the camps should have chosen to ignore the book; like the overwhelming majority of former Nazis, they pretend not to have promoted Nazi values or claim they tried to prevent worse things from happening.3 Former KLV camp leaders, far from carrying out any public mourning over the past fifty years, have never spoken out. Even in private, survivors from these two groups have never been willing to talk about the KLV phenomenon. The only ones who could talk about these camps would, therefore, be those who lived through that era as children and young men and women. Yet they too have shied away from providing the general public with any direct account of life in the camps. What keeps them from revealing all? Are they still afraid of their camp leaders? I find it hard to believe that fear of these people has prevented them from speaking out. Instead, many are probably made uncomfortable by recollections of the 1940-45 period and prefer to repress such memories. This kind of repression does not make any sense today for I firmly believe that it is time to come to terms with the past and to write down detailed accounts of camp life with the aim of warning others about the reality of the war years in Germany. After all, we live in an age when pro-Nazi and neofascist ideas are in the ascendent. Some of these extreme right-wing groups present a fallacious image of Nazi Germany which they have retrospectively invested with a sense of community and group solidarity, entirely missing at the time. Such images have a seductive potential which could attract a number of young Germans who feel alienated from contemporary society.4 Today, when we talk about wartime memories, we should ask ourselves how such memories could be put to good use. It is not enough to relegate the memories of the war generation to the realm of individuals’ private psychological problems. Indeed, it is not enough to use wartime memories as the basis for the collective work of mourning about the war years which Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich have called for (Mitscherlich 1988). Faced with the new fascist groupings of the past decade, we can and should use these memories to help address some of the challenges of contemporary politics. Only in this way can we resist the dangerously romantic view that the Third Reich was a regime which promoted 3. One of the few exceptions is Albert Ehrenstein 1985. 4. On the seductive power of such concepts in the Weimar Republic, see my book, Der alte Traum vom neuen Reich, 1988: 103-190.

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a spirit of national unity and comradeship. The memories of the KLV camp children reveal how the regime was predicated on authoritarian leadership and a rigid social and political hierarchy. Examined in the light of such memories, National Socialism is by no means an acceptable alternative to our present liberal democracy, whatever its failings may be. The real alternative to these two political systems lies in a completely different direction. Unfortunately such a society, based on egalitarian principles, has remained, up until now, only a possibility.

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MEMORIES OF RESISTANCE, RESISTANCES OF MEMORY Luisa Passerini

The years since 1945 have seen the acceleration of two important trends that have been present since the beginning of the century, or in fact since the end of the nineteenth century. Firstly, the tendency to give increasing value to individual memory, while studying its peculiar ways of functioning. Such a tendency has been evident in the development of psychology and of psychoanalysis; in the growing interest in the biographies and autobiographies of both well-known and obscure people; in the attention that has been paid to memory as an historical source and in the development of oral history. In the last twenty years the obsession with collective forms of memory has intensified. Nostalgia has become an important element in determining fashions; there is a whole trade in memorabilia and both the media and the market are invaded by aspects of memory (see Samuel 1994). Secondly, the borders of history have extended massively. A number of factors have conspired to accelerate this tendency: contact with other disciplines, from geography (for example, the Annales School between the wars) to anthropology in the 1970s to literary criticism today; contact with social movements campaigning for women’s rights or those of ethnic and minority groups; the interest of the media in public history and in commemorations. Despite the explosion of its boundaries, history has by and large retained a certain conservatism in its forms of expression and hesitated to alter its epistemological status (see LaCapra 1983 and

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White 1978).1 This kind of conservatism is reflected, for instance, in the relationship between history and memory as it has traditionally been theorised: whereas memory is presented as spontaneous and unreflexive, history is characterised as critical and scientific. It is interesting that such a model was to a large extent inverted in the communist countries of Eastern Europe: while history was subjected to the power of the regime, memory functioned as a reminder of a different way of life and served as an area of potential criticism. Although the reversal of the roles performed by history and memory has not been so dramatic in Western democracies, there are many instances (illustrated by oral historians) where history has been more oblivious than memory. The result of such inconsistencies has been the emergence of a series of extremely interesting works which combine history and memory in new ways and in hybrid genres. It was against this background that the events of 1989 took place. The impact of 1989 generated new directions of research and new forms of expression, both of which are exemplified by some recent Italian works. It is only now that some aspects are coming fully to light, after having survived in a hidden form in the memory of some individuals. The emergence of new aspects of past happenings is directly linked with 1989, the collapse of communism and the crisis of social and political ideologies. It is significant that a major piece of research such as Claudio Pavone’s work on the Italian Resistance (a work which uses the concept of civil war and which considers the questions of ‘morality’ and violence) was published in the autumn of 1991, when the processes started in 1989 had become fully apparent. The delayed memory of the war years that is emerging now in the mid-1990s, owes something to the publication of books like Pavone’s. But the emergence of this delayed memory also points to new directions in public memory that have been shaped by new attitudes to the recent past. I have chosen three examples that seem to me of particular significance for indicating present trends. Fifty years on from the end of the resistance to Nazism/fascism it is clear that a great deal of the whole period has not been remembered publicly or recorded as history. This has not happened by chance, but for a very precise reason: memory is a battlefield, where nothing is neutral and where everything is continually contested. We only have to think of the recent debate over the memory of Auschwitz to understand that the conflict of memory is at its 1. As well as the work of LaCapra and White on the transformation of historiographical expression, one should also mention the important essay of Lloyd S. Kramer, 1989.

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most acute when the tragedy of the past happening is greatest: at stake is the identity of both the living and the dead, the relationship between those who survived and those who died, the strength of the survivors to live in the present, the message that has to be transmitted to the future. In Italy, over the decades that have passed since the war, the memory of the Resistance has displayed resistances, of both a psychological and a social kind, to remembering important aspects of the period. Thus, the seeds of memory have remained latent within the minds and the hearts of a few individuals who have patiently worked to cultivate them and who now courageously offer us the results of their labours. Some of the fruits of this delayed memory are very important both because of the nature of their content and because of their expressive form which shows similar directions to be operating in different works. The first area of resistance to memory concerns the image of the enemy. Among all images, that of the enemy is the most easily reducible to a set of rigid stereotypes which do not allow exceptions. Indicative of the strength of a common picture of the enemy is the frequent confusion in everyday language between Nazis and Germans. In everyday life there are other traces of this confusion which is one of the saddest reminders of our recent past. There are many people in Italy and elsewhere who refuse to go to Germany or to speak German. The latter refusal painfully shows the trace of the terrible appropriation of Hölderlin’s and Goethe’s language by the brutality of the Nazi shout. Not all of those people who refuse to have any contact with Germany are of Jewish descent. Indeed, some are Germans. The attitudes of these people are the manifest form of an enormous trauma, the complexity and atrocity of which can be glimpsed only when memories are expressed, as the work on the war by oral historians has shown. Nuto Revelli’s Il disperso di Marburg (The Lost Soldier from Marburg, 1994) is compassionate in its desire to challenge the inflexible equation made between Germans and Nazis, between Nazis and ‘beasts’. The merit of the book lies in the way in which it consciously sets out to realise its principal intention, namely to articulate the story (hitherto transmitted orally in the province of Cuneo) of an enemy soldier who seemed to be, unlike his fellow soldiers, a normal person who behaved in a humane way. These were the essentials of the story that memory had retained, but it was no longer clear whether the soldier was German, Russian or Polish. Inspired by the nucleus of this story, Revelli began an inquiry which he knew would be ‘impossible’ (Revelli 1994: 159) and in certain respects impossible ever to finish. He interviewed people from the region, consulted archives, asked for the assis-

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tance of researchers and scholars in both Germany and Italy, such as Christoph Schminck-Gustavus, Bodo Gutmüller, Michele Calandri and Carlo Gentile. Revelli writes: ‘It has been my obsession in the record of my inquiries that forms the basis of my book to give a name and a surname back to the lost soldier, whether he was German, Polish or Russian.’ (27) In the book the memory of the lost soldier begins with some positive information. When every morning he used to go out on horseback he would greet people working in the fields and sometimes offer a cigar. But the oral tradition defines him mostly in terms of what he didn’t do: he didn’t kill, he didn’t shout and scream and on his death (he was killed on 14 June 1944 and was not buried until his body was carried away by the waters of the river Gesso) his fellow soldiers didn’t commit a bloody reprisal. The value of his refusal to act in a given way is to be measured against the negative image of the ‘brutal’ German; the exceptional nature of his actions increases the horror of the latter image. That the decision to refuse to behave brutally is considered on its own to be an indication of humanity shows to what degree evil had become banal, contaminating a whole people and a whole period of history. In Il disperso di Marburg, the accumulation of fragments of information and of minute details allows a meaning to emerge. The picture, although full of gaps, becomes clearer as the mist which surrounded everything at the beginning slowly lifts. The soldier acquires a name, Rudolf Knaut, and a few biographical details: he was born in Marburg on 18 November 1920, he had fought on the Russian front, where his elder brother had been killed, he was from a well-to-do family and he was not a member of the Nazi party. Such information has been gathered only through stubborn, patient work. Commenting on the nature of his inquiries, Revelli speaks of the need to ‘avoid being in a hurry’. From his painstaking inquiries and those of his helpers a picture of ‘a quiet, self-effacing young man’ emerges. He was not a hero but a man like many others. Revelli insists that he was not a professional soldier or a fanatic, but was one of the many unfortunate people that the war threw across Europe. It is at this point that a notion of Europe becomes important. Revelli’s book does not allude to a Europe of intellectuals (l’Europe des esprits of the Enlightenment) but to a Europe of exiles, of political refugees, of migrant workers and of homeless people. The book helps to define a memory of the war that is European. A memory that is different from the terrible memory of the concentration camps where the idea of Europe is atrociously reversed and exits like a vanished dream, where people of different origins and

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nationalities are forced to converge by an absolute form of domination. In narratives such as that of Il disperso di Marburg, a notion of European identity emerges as a possible similarity between human beings who are not heroic but who are ‘unfortunate’, disgraziati, and who are subject to the same form of domination but who are in some way reluctant to be dragged along by it. The events of the story are communicated to us both through an oral tradition and through the book’s reconstruction of the memory. Thanks to these two sources it has become possible for us to remember something which before we were not able to do. What we can remember serves to unite rather than divide, it serves to make us reflect on what brings together European countries, with their high and low cultures. On the subject of tolerance, for example, the narrative shows popular traditions working together with the ideas advanced by the Enlightenment. Revelli’s book provides an example of a type of research which needs to be taken further. It is a type of research which is important not only for the information it provides but for what it reveals about the way in which memory works. It is significant that the book takes the form of a research diary which accumulates pieces of dialogues, interviews, letters. It recreates an indirect path of research which proceeds without certainties and which is supported by some and obstructed by others. The second area of resistance to remembering concerns the contradictions and often violent conflicts between forces within the Resistance itself. At this stage I would like to introduce a personal note drawn from my own memory. In Asti, where I was born and grew up, I remember there being a story often alluded to in whispered tones as if it were something that was unusual, shameful and shrouded in a mystery that had never been cleared up. It was the story of a Communist who had been killed, ‘eliminated’, by other communists because of political disagreements. The integrity and positive qualities of the man were not questioned and relatives of his still lived in Asti. Everyone knew that Mario Acquaviva2 had been absurdly accused of having fascist sympathies and had been killed by someone in the Italian Communist Party (PCI). But confronted with this memory, those who belonged to the Left (as I and many other young people did in the late 1950s) were perplexed and helplessly unable to make sense of such different information and unable to produce an idea of the Resistance which would resolve such contradictions. Recently I found that Acquaviva’s story is retold in the novel by Giampaolo Pansa, Ma l’amore no (But Not Love, No, 1994). In Pansa’s novel, Acquaviva appears as the character Ernesto Gal2. Some information on Mario Acquaviva is to be found in Zaccaria 1964 and in Peregalli 1991.

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imberti: in the novel the character is involved in a love story, while in real life Acquaviva, a militant of the International Communist Party, was married with a daughter. Pansa himself told me that he too had heard Acquaviva’s story when he was a child in Casale Monferrato, where the killing took place not far from his own house, at the exit to the Tazzetti factory on 11 July 1945. In his reconstruction of the event, Pansa has relied to a large extent on his own and on others’ memories. To begin with, he wrote down page upon page of recollections from childhood, trying to find out whether these recollections coincided with any of the articles that were written in the weekly news sheets of the time. He consulted an extensive series of books and collections of photographs of the Resistance and made all kinds of inquiry into the folklore and dialect of Monferrato at the time. What is striking about the preparatory work he did for his historical novel is the extent to which it both differs from and coincides with what a piece of historical research requires. The two types of inquiry share an obsession with the accuracy of details and with the overall picture; in both it is uncertain what material can be used and both types of research are guided by the decision to follow a path the precise direction of which remains unclear until the end. Like the diary, the historical novel is a hybrid genre par excellence: both the historical novel and the diary allow a mixture of expressive forms and allow the combination of an enormous variety of different tones. In Pansa’s novel the autobiographical memory is expressed through the representation of the boy Giovanni. It is in this representation, where imagination and documentation are woven together, that the reader can trace Pansa’s research into the dialect of Monferrato. But the representation also provides a medium through which it is possible to remember and elaborate events and circumstances which before could not be remembered. It is perhaps possible to say that it is at the moment when we are able to remember elements which unite different peoples, going beyond hatred for one group or another, that we are also able to remember that which divided people who not only belonged to the same nation but who shared essentially the same political convictions. Today the memory of the war years can – and must – attempt to understand the internal conflicts among communists and the repercussions of Stalinism across the whole of Europe (implicit within the story of Galimberti/Acquaviva there is a European dimension). It is also the duty of memory to represent those aspects of the civil war which have been neglected by historiography, but which in some countries have become the object of careful reconstruction and intense historical debate. An example of one

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such aspect is the shaving and chaining together of women fascists. In Pansa’s novel, when he is confronted with such a spectacle, the boy Giovanni vomits. An English officer observes, ‘it is the law of the war throughout the whole of Europe’. It is not for nothing that one of the topics most keenly discussed by historians at the moment (with conferences which took place in Vienna and in Berlin) is that of the reprisals which occurred after 1945. I do not wish to claim that the value of Pansa’s book resides only in the reconstruction of past events which it offers. The novel expresses passions and images through a lively style. The characterisation of the central protagonist and of the grandmother is excellent. The grandmother represents perfectly a whole group of older Piemontese women who, while having a slightly wild touch, were both strong and wise. Pansa’s visual and at times cinematic style also succeeds in giving life to the younger women of the narrative such as Giovanni’s mother or his aunts. The sketches he offers of some of the minor characters are also highly successful. There is, for example, the neighbour Tere who, with her permed black hair and her stockings rolled down to her ankles, is the lover of ‘the Centurion’, who in turn is, ‘Just like Amadeo Nazzari in the film The Pilot Luciano Serra’. But here too what interests me most is the hybrid quality of these representations and what that quality manages to convey. The mixing of the oral with the written, of memory with history, of standard Italian with dialect reveals work involved in forging a medium to articulate what has not been expressed. A third area of resistance to remembering concerns not only the impurity of the Resistance, but also its connections with the corruption which was to follow after the war. The involvement of the Resistance, in other words, in continuities between fascism and the Italian Republic, continuities which were to extend injustice and complicity well beyond 1945. This subject is the theme of a short work by Bianca Guidetti Serra. In the work the memory in the first-person alternates with an address in the second person to the lost friend of the writer and finally with sentences delivered in an impersonal form. Guidetti Serra’s essay came to be written because, ‘one evening going over the past with some friends’, she discovered that those friends’ recollections of Emanuele Artom3 were confused or approximate, and that one friend even asked ‘whether it was worth going over those horrible facts’. It was Guidetti Serra’s decision to reconstruct the political commissar Artom’s exemplary story. He is vividly recalled in the writer’s per3. The diaries of Emanuele Artom were published by the Centro di documentazione ebraica, see Artom 1966. For more information on Artom see Cavaglion 1993.

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sonal memory: he is remembered at one stage ‘waiting on a small hill to my side, with his light jacket standing out against his plusfours, as I was dashing down the hillside’. Having been betrayed by a prisoner, Artom was captured together with a number of others and taken to the Nuove prison of Turin where he was tortured to death. The cruelty of his death was followed by another injustice: in order to document this injustice Giudetti Serra relies on the memories of a former clerk at the criminal court in Turin. She manages to put together the details of the trial of Artom’s torturer, the captain Arturo Dal Dosso. Dal Dosso was condemned in 1951, but eluded capture. In 1960, when he was living in São Paulo in Brazil, he was able to take advantage of an amnesty and was even able to reobtain the pension he received from the state railways before being sentenced. Artom’s memory, meanwhile, was entrusted to his writings, to those of others and to the name of a street in Turin in a district inhabited mostly by the poorer and more marginalised members of the city’s population. Having a street named after him in such a district would, Giudetti Serra thinks, have pleased Artom. Addressing herself directly to her dead friend, she writes: ‘I think you would have smiled goodnaturedly at this little gesture against your enemies’. As all the examples which I have traced show, both memory and history are divided into different camps. Whichever camp one speaks from, it is necessary to assume a definite stance if one is to be able to make conscious and critical statements. In many cases history is not scientific and memory is not spontaneous, but the result of brooding, suffering and patience. It is often the case that the differences between one historical account and another are greater than those between certain memories and certain historical accounts. Fortunately, we also have literature which serves to throw bridges between history and memory while reminding us of the significance of both. It is indeed important to remember that literature (here I am thinking particularly of Beppe Fenoglio’s recently published Appunti partigiani (Partisan Notes, 1994)) has anticipated some of themes which are only now being appropriated by historiography. The image of the Resistance which is restored to us by all these memories is one which is capable of overcoming some of the resistances to remembering conflicts, weaknesses and injustices. It is troubled, complex and contradictory. It is shot through with feelings of gaiety and of horror. This renewed reading of the Resistance derives from the times in which we live. It is a reading which draws the Resistance closer to us. It is a reading which can appeal especially to young people because it problematises the Resistance and

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makes us aware that its interpretation is in flux and is something which our own progress through history helps us to understand. The Resistance remains an important site of our values, values which are not passively accepted but mediated through a response which includes pity and criticism, distance and participation, the perception of unrepeatability together with a faith in continuity. Although all the texts which I have examined illustrate features specific to Italy, such as divisions between different factions and the weakness of state institutions, these texts also contain many elements which are common to other countries and which one might define as European. Among such elements is the possibility, which has become apparent with and after 1989, of placing the recent past in a wider and more complex perspective; a perspective in which we no longer see ourselves and our adversaries as unambiguous and monolithic entities divided by a Manichean dichotomy. It is through this possibility that the work of remembering carried out unofficially by many individuals and groups over past decades can finally come to fruition. Some of the resistances to remembering have been worn down by the collapse of the ideological divisions between East and West Europe. It is this collapse which has allowed a new relationship between history and memory, thereby opening new spaces both for historiographic research and for experiments with expression. It is through a new compassionate understanding of our common past and of past enmities and conflicts that the construction of a European memory of the war becomes possible. It is only in this way, and certainly not through the false kind of reconciliation offered by revisionist historians, that one of the most profound needs of memory can be satisfied. The real challenge is not to ignore the horrors of the past, but to deepen our knowledge of the worst aspects of European history. In the pursuit of this kind of knowledge we need at the same time to know how to find elements of humanity and of positive intersubjectivity. We need to be able to discover those spaces where notions of identity and alterity are not posed in opposition. I would like to thank Charles Burdett for translating much of the present chapter.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Margaret Atack is Professor of French at the University of Leeds. She has published extensively on twentieth-century French literature, including Literature and the Resistance – Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms 1940-1950 (1989) and Contemporary French Fiction by Women (1990). Omer Bartov is Professor of History at Rutgers University. He has published widely on German history of the twentieth century, especially on history and memory. Among his books are Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (1991) and Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (1997). Judith Bryce is Professor and Head of Italian at the University of Bristol. She has published on gender studies and the Renaissance as well as on literature of the modern period, particularly from the south of Italy. Charles Burdett is Lecturer in the Department of Italian at the University of Bristol. His study of fascist politics and literary culture will appear in 1999. His articles cover the Florentine avant-garde and travel-writing in the Fascist era. Robert Cohen is Professor at the Department of German at New York University. He has published numerous articles on exile literature and three books on Peter Weiss – of which Peter Weiss in seiner Zeit. Leben und Werk (1992) appeared also in English as Understanding Peter Weiss (1994).

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Colin Davis is Tutor and fellow in French at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. His many publications on French literature and philosophy of the postwar period include studies of Michel Tournier, Elie Wiesel and Emmanuel Levinas. Justus Fetscher has taught German and Comparative Literature at the universities of Berlin, Charlottesville and Sarajevo. He has published on West German post-1968 theatre as well as on the literature of the 1930s to 1960s; his most recent publication is a book on Heinrich von Kleist’s Amphitryon (1998). David Forgacs is Reader in film studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely on Italian culture in the fascist period. He has edited Rethinking Italian Fascism (1986) and two volumes of writings by Gramsci. He is the author of Italian Culture in the Industrial Era, 1880-1980 (1990) and co-editor of Italian Cultural Studies (1996). Adalgisa Giorgio is Lecturer at the University of Bath. Her main area of research is twentieth-century narrative prose by women. She has published on Morante, Ginzburg and Fabrizia Ramondino and coedited a volume of essays on culture and society in Southern Italy. Robert Gordon is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Gonville and Caius. His work on the films and poetry of Pasolini has appeared as Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity (1996). Claire Gorrara is Lecturer in French in the School of European Studies at Cardiff. She has published on French women’s writing and the Occupation, most recently Women’s Representations of the Occupation in Post-’68 France (1998). Peter Hainsworth is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. His interests cover Dante, Petrarch and the modern novel and modern poetry, especially Gadda and Zanzotto. He is co-editor of the collection of essays Writers and Society in Contemporary Italy (1986). Jost Hermand is Professor in the Department of German at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His immense work covers German literary and cultural history from the eighteenth century to the present. Among his recent publications are Grüne Utopien in Deutschland: Zur Geschichte des ökologischen Bewußtseins (1991) and Geschichte der Germanistik (1994).

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299

Nicholas Hewitt is Professor of French at the University of Nottingham. He has published extensively on literary and cultural history. He is the editor of The Culture of the Reconstruction – European Literature, Thought and Film 1945-1950 (1989). His books include Les Maladies du siècle: The Image of Malaise in French Fiction and Thought in the Inter-war Years (1987) and Literature and the Right in Postwar France (1996). Diana Holmes is Professor of French at the University of Keele. She is one of the editors of Modern and Contemporary France. Her publications include Colette (1991) and a book on nineteenth-century French women’s writing. William Kidd is Senior Lecturer in French at Stirling University. He has published widely on twentieth-century French literature and ideology. Recent publications include a critical guide to Vercors’ Le Silence de la mer (1991). Irmela von der Lühe is Professor of German at the Georg-Wilhelms-Universität Göttingen. In 1982, she edited one of the very first collections of essays in West German feminist literary criticism. She is a specialist on Ingeborg Bachmann and exile literature. Her biography of Erika Mann (1994) was a great success with the reading public. Moray McGowan is Professor and Head of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Sheffield. He has published widely on German literature and theatre of the twentieth century, especially on Franz Xaver Kroetz and Botho Strauß. His work on Marieluise Fleißer appeared in German in 1987. Sarah Morgan is a postgraduate student at Clare Hall, Cambridge. She is working on Pavese and Calvino. Alan Morris is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Strathclyde. He has published on French literature and the Occupation. Recent publications include Collaboration and Resistance Reviewed: Writers and the Mode Rétro in Post-Gaullist France (1994). Penny Morris is Lecturer in the Department of Italian at University of Glasgow. She wrote her D.Phil thesis on the works of Giovanni Zangrandi. She has published on women’s writing and the Italian resistance.

300

Contributors

Anne Moss is a graduate of the Department of German at New York University. She has published on Brecht and the responsibility of scientists. Luisa Passerini is Professor in the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute, Florence. She is best known in the English-speaking world for her ground-breaking oral history study on Turin workers, Fascism in Popular Memory (1987). Among her recent books are Mussolini imaginario (1991) and Storie di donne e femministe (1992). Helmut Peitsch is Professor of European Studies at the University of Wales, Cardiff. He has published on German literature of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the editor of the first complete English translation of Heinrich Mann’s The Loyal Subject (1998). James Henderson Reid is Professor Emeritus of the Department of German at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on postwar literature. His publications include Heinrich Böll: A German for His Time (1988) which appeared in German in paperback in 1991, and Writing without Taboos (1989), a study of East German literature. Klaus R. Scherpe is Professor and Dean of the Institute for German Literature at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin. He has published extensively on post-war literature; a collection of his essays appeared in 1994. He is editor of seminal collections of essays on postmodernism, the city in literature and cultural studies. He is also co-editor of the series Literatur – Kultur – Geschlecht. Dennis Tate is Reader in German at the School of Modern Languages and International Studies, University of Bath. He is a specialist on East German literature. Among his many publications are The East German Novel (1984) and Franz Fühmann: Innovation and Authenticity. A Study of His Prose-writing (1995). Chris Weedon is Reader at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory of the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at the University of Wales, Cardiff. Her book Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (1987) has been translated into several languages. As a specialist on East German literature, she edited the anthology Die Frau in der DDR (1987). Among her recent publications is Cultural Politics: Class, Gender, Race, and the Postmodern World (1994), with Glen Jordan.

Contributors

301

Emma Wilson is a Lecturer in French at Corpus Christi, Cambridge. Her research interests cover twentieth-century French literature, especially women’s writing. She has published Sexuality and the Reading Encounter: Proust, Duras, Tournier and Cixous (1996).

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INDEX

A Abbetz, Otto, 91, 97 Adorno, Theodor W., 176, 179, 183, 247 Aicher, Otl, 266-67, 270, 271 Aldridge, James, 280 Algeria, 165, 173, 263 Amery, Jean, 138 Amis, Martin, 236 amnesia, xxii, xxviii-xxix, 96, 148, 235, 236, 244, 249, 26061 Andersch, Alfred, 4, 9, 278 Andreas-Friedrich, Ruth, 23-34 anti-fascism, xxvi-xxvii, 37, 52, 68, 73, 165, 169, 187, 18890, 194, 273, 278 anti-Semitism, xxix, 89, 90, 91, 95-97, 150, 151, 162, 164, 167, 204, 205, 232, 238, 242, 269 Aragon, Louis, 12, 13, 57, 58, 59, 62 Aron, Raymond, 163 Artom, Emanuele, 294-95 Assmann, Jan, xix Atack, Margaret, xxx, 18 Auerbach, Nina, 226

Augstein, Rudolf, xiii Auschwitz, xiii, xviii, xxviii, 124, 125, 126, 128, 132, 13334, 138, 150, 151, 176, 198, 204, 245, 247, 248, 250, 251, 252, 254, 268, 280, 289 autobiography, 13, 38, 40-41, 55, 60, 62, 63, 77, 84, 150, 156, 157, 220-21, 239, 247 avant-garde, 278

B Balzac, Honoré de, 94 Bance, Alan, 4 Barbie, Klaus, xxii Barthes, Roland, 199, 213, 275, 276 Bartov, Omer, 4 Bassani, Giorgio, 140 Baudelaire, Charles, 96 BBC, German Service, 29, 31 Benjamin, Walter, 96, 100, 176, 180, 182, 183 Berger, John, 211, 215 Bergmann, Martin, xix Berl, Emmanuel, 231 Bersani, Leo, 130

Index

Bertolucci, Bernardo, 185, 19395 Bessel, Richard, xxiii-xxiv Bildungsroman, 10 Bidault, Georges, 168 Bobbio, Norberto, xvi Blum, Léon, 169 Böll, Heinrich, ix, xix, 2-10, 156, 265-67, 270, 271 Bonte, Florimonde, 59 Boose, Lynda, 221 Borges, Jorge Luis, 136, 194 Bosch, Hieronymus, 101, 107 Bosworth, R.J.B., xxviii Brandys, Kasimierz, 245 Brasillach, Robert, 52 Brecht, Bertolt, 154, 176, 189, 227, 279 Breznitz, Shlomo, 268-70, 271 Brinon, Fernand de, 91 Brossolette, Pierre, 48 Broszat, Martin, xix Bruck, Edith, 247-55 Bruzzone, Anna Maria, 191, 192 Buchenwald, xviii, 124, 134, 137 Bufalino, Gesualdo, 78-85 Burke, Peter, xix, xxii, xxiv Burleigh, Michael, xxi, xxiiixxiv Buruma, Ian, xiv-xv, xxviii C Calvino, Italo, 67-77, 79 Camus, Albert, 9, 13, 49, 94, 261-63, 271 Canetti, Elias, 107 Carossa, Hans, 27 Carroll, Lewis, 226-27 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 176 Cavaillès, Jean, 172 Cavani, Lina, 185, 195, 197-98 Cayrol, Jean, 49

327

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 52, 65, 88-98 Cercle Européen, 89 Cereja, Federico, 140 Chaix, Marie, ix, 203-205, 2078, 209, 210 Chateaubriand, Alphonse de, 89, 90, 97 Chateaubriand, Francois René de, 62 Chirac, Jacques, 164 Chou-En-Lai, 61 Ciano, Galeazzo, 112 civil war, 68, 289 classicism, 79 Claussen, Detlev, 153 Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 172 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 187 Cold War, xv, xxii, xxvi, xxx, 8, 54, 59, 60, 67, 70, 73, 76, 165, 188, 277, 296 collaboration, 52, 53, 73, 88, 89, 93, 164, 167, 203, 204, 210, 232 Combelle, Lucien, 90 Comité National des Ecrivains (CNE), 13, 46, 91 commemorations, ix, xiv, xviii, 130, 166, 194 concentration camps, 49, 82, 145, 150, 176, 204-5, 241, 264 Corino, Karl, 55 Craig, Gordon A., xiv-xv, xxviii crimes against humanity, 49 D Dabel, Gerhard, 285 Dabit, Eugène, 90 Dachau, 141, 146, 198, 249 Dante Alighieri, 105, 138-39, 274 D’Astier de la Vigerie, Emmanuel, 169 Davis, Colin, 131

328

de Beauvoir, Simone, 62 De Felice, Renzo, xvi, xxv de Gaulle, Charles, xxvi, 160, 161, 165, 166, 170, 172, 202, 209 Delbo, Charlotte, 128 Del Fra, Lino, 189 Denoel, Robert, 91 Desnos, Robert, 52 diaries, 23-24, 26, 27, 28, 3233, 77, 100, 108, 136, 142, 204, 216-17, 225, 292, 294 Doriot, Jacques, 89, 203, 204 dream, 132-33 Dresden, xv Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre, 89 Duranti, Francesca, 79 Duras, Marguerite, 141-48 Dutschke, Rudi, 217, 219 E Eastern front, 6, 8, 104, 111, 204, 291 Editions de Minuit, 13 education, xx Edwards, Derek, xxiv 8 May, xiv-xvi, xviii, xxvi, 46 Eley, Geoff, xxvi Eluard, Paul, 52, 58, 62 Engels, Friedrich, 182, 273 Ensslin, Gudrun, 156 Erweiterte Kinderlandverschickung (expanded programme of shipping children to the countryside), 283 ethics, 132, 244 everyday life, 238-39 exile literature, 28, 30-31 extermination camps, 204, 264 F fairy tale, 184, 225 Farina, Rachele, 191, 192

Index

fascism, xxiii, 89, 92, 109, 112, 183, 238, 275 Felman, Shoshana, 122, 141, 143 feminism, 36, 177, 198, 208, 221 Fenoglio, Beppe, 79, 295 Finkielkraut, Alain, 150, 153, 155, 269 Fischer, Samuel, 157 Fleischmann, Lea, 149-50, 151, 153, 156 Forbes, Jill, 172 Forgacs, David, xxv Fortini, Franco, 189, 190 Franceschi, Lydia, 192 Frank, Anne, 140 Frankenstein, Alfred, 34 Freud, Sigmund, 90, 109, 128, 163, 221, 233-35 Friedländer, Saul, xxviii-xxix, 130, 267-70, 271 Frisch, Max, 279 Fulbrook, Mary, xxviii G Gaeta, Isotta, 192 Gallimard, 91, 92, 94 gender, x, xxx, 13, 14, 18, 25, 35, 43, 74-75, 114, 152, 173, 192, 206-207, 208-209, 210, 221, 253 generations, x, xv, xviii, xxviixxviii, xxix, 43, 150, 175-76, 186, 192-93, 194-95, 208209, 212, 219, 221, 240, 253, 254, 281 Géricault, Théodore, 49, 274 ghetto, 156, 264 Gide, André, 97 Ginzburg, Natalia, xxiii, 226 Giudetti Serra, Bianca, 191, 192, 294-95 Godard, Henri, 93

Index

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 26, 54, 106, 109, 290 Golding, William, 283 Gordon, Robert, 123 Goya, Francisco, 104 Gozzi, Carlo, 225 Gramsci, Antonio, 177 Grass, Günter, xix, 284 Green, Mary Jean, xvii Grosser, Alfred, xxiii Guéhenno, Jean, 90 H Habermas, Jürgen, 277 Halbwachs, Maurice, xix Hall, Stuart, 177 Hansen, Miriam, 177, 180 Harris, Frederick, xvii Hartman, Geoffrey H., xvii Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 107, 184 Heine, Heinrich, 178 heritage industry, xx, xxiv Hermlin, Stephan, 55-66, 278 Herzog, Roman, xv Hill, Leslie, 144 Hillgruber, Andreas, xxix Hiroshima, 140, 148 Historikerstreit (German historians’ debate), xxix historiography, xx, xxii, 162, 164, 173, 191, 288 Hitchcock, Alfred, 163 Hitler, Adolf, xxii, xxviii, 2, 10, 25, 26, 30, 31, 31, 107, 114, 151, 165, 169, 181, 243, 271, 273, 282 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 26, 64-65, 273, 275, 278, 290 Holocaust, x, xviii, xxviii, xxx, 80, 122, 127-28, 129-30, 131, 136, 140, 195-97, 205, 236, 247, 248, 252, 255, 263, 264, 275

329

I inner emigration, 26-27, 99100, 267 Irigaray, Luce, 250 J Jameson, Fredric, 177 Jamet, Claude, 96 Johnson, Barbara, 250 Joyce, James, 278 Judt, Tony, xiii, xxviii Jünger, Ernst, 6, 7, 58, 65, 91, 99-109 K Kaes, Anton, 176 Kafka, Franz, 274, 278 Kardorff, Ursula von, 23-24 Kedward, H.R., 13 Kessel, Joseph, 48, 161, 171, 172 Keun, Irmgard, 27, 31 Klepper, Jochen, 27 Kluge, Alexander, 175-84 Kohl, Helmut, xv, xviii Kollontai, Alexandra, 186 Kopolev, Lev, 8 Kosta, Barbara, 245 Kraus, Karl, 176 Kristeva, Julia, 142, 143 Kunz, Ernst-Adolf, 3 L LaCapra, Dominick, 129 Lacan, Jacques, 221 Lachmann, Renate, xxiii Langer, Lawrence, 122, 123-24, 130, 131 Langgässer, Elisabeth, 154 Lanzmann, Claude, xviii, 141, 181 La Pasionaria, 206-207 Laub, Dori, 122, 141, 143 Laval, Pierre, 163

330

Le Garrec, Evelyne, 203, 205207, 208-210 Légion des volontaires français contre le bolshevisme (LVF), 204 Le Goff, Jacques, xxv Leone, Sergio, 83 Les Lettres Françaises, 13 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 153 Levi, Primo, ix, xviii, 124, 131-40, 155, 158, 253-54 liberation, xxx, 89 literature, xix, 34 Loy, Rosetta, 79 Lukács, Georg, 278 M Malakoff, Marguerite E., 224 Malaparte, Curzio, 110-19 Malle, Louis, 169, 170, 230 Malraux, André, 161 Mandel, Arnold, 95-96 Mandel, Ernest, 187 Mangini, Cecilia, 189 Mann, Erika, 27 Mann, Heinrich, 26, 30 Mann, Klaus, 28 Mann, Thomas, 80, 138 Manzoni, Alessandro, 80 maquis, 6, 13, 61 Maraini, Dacia, 220-28 Maraini, Fosco, 220, 222, 223, 224, 228 Marcuse, Herbert, 186 Martin du Gard, Roger, 94 Marwick, Arthur, xix Marx, Karl, 177, 183, 273 Maurras, Charles, 52 Mauthausen, 151, 153, 154 May 1968, x, xxviii, xxix, 166, 169, 175, 185, 211 Mazzantini, Carlo, 84-85 media, xx, xxiii, 217

Index

Melville, Pierre, 48, 160-61, 170-74 Mendelssohn, Peter de, 101 Mendès-France, Pierre, 165, 166, 168 Mendras, Henri, 167 Middleton, David, xxiv militarism, 4, 100-101 Micciché, Lino, 189 Mitchell, Juliet, 212 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete, xxviii, 3, 178, 286 Mitterrand, François, xvi, 164 mode retro, xxx, 162, 168, 169, 173, 202 modernism, 89, 92 Modiano, Patrick, 170, 230-37 Moltke, Hellmuth James Graf und Freya von, 24, 26, 27, 33 Montherlant, Henri de, 92 Morand, Paul, 92 Moravia, Alberto, 18, 21 Morgenstern, Christian, 178 Mosley, Oswald, 113 Mosse, George L., xv Moulin, Jean, 161, 166, 172 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 92 Mussolini, Benito, xxii, 110, 189 myth, xxviii, 56, 68, 75, 76-77, 149, 153, 154, 157, 162, 163, 166, 275 N narrative, 14, 22, 38, 70-71, 94, 109, 115, 129, 142, 144, 163, 177, 183, 187, 192-93, 202, 238, 246 National Socialism, xxii, 99 nation-state, xiii-xiv, xxi nationalism, xxv, xxvii, 85, 168 Nebel, Gerhard, 23

Index

Negt, Oskar, 177 neofascism, xxvii, 85, 188, 189, 286 neorealism, 79 Nettelbeck, Colin, 165 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 158 Nizan, Paul, 90 Nolte, Jost, 158 Nora, Pierre, xix, xxiv Novalis, 184 Nuremberg trials, 4 O Ophüls, Marcel, 141, 161, 162, 167-70 Oradour, 58, 62 Ossietzky, Carl von, 28 P pacifism, xxvii painting, 109 Pansa, Giampato, 292-94 Parti Communiste Français (PCF), 165 Parti Populaire Français (PPF), 89, 203, 204, 206, 208 Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU), 169 Partito Communista italiano (PCI), 36, 67-69, 73, 74, 77, 186, 187, 190, 195, 292 Partito d’Azione, 68, 77, 188, 190 Partito Socialista Italiano di Unità Proletaria (PSIUP), 69 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 185, 190, 195-96, 198-99 Paulhan, Jean, 92, 94 Pavese, Cesare, 67-77 Passerini, Luisa, xxv Pavone, Claudio, 191, 193, 289 PEN, 62 Perec, Georges, 262-63, 269, 271

331

persecution of Jews, xxi, xxviii, 24, 28, 29-30, 111, 115, 11718, 151, 153, 204, 242 Pétain, Henri Philippe, xxii, 163, 165, 168, 198, 202 Picasso, Pablo, 274, 278 Plessen, Elisabeth, 211-19 Pliny the Elder, 92 Poelchau, Harald, 24 Porte, Michelle, 145 postmodern, 79, 245-46 Poulantzas, Nicos, 187 Priebke, Erich, xxii Proust, Marcel, 80, 97, 116, 249 psycho-morality, 162 Puccini, Giacomo, 92 purges, xx, 70, 91 Q Quazza, Guido, 191, 192, 193 R Raddatz, Fritz J., 60, 66 Rebatet, Lucien, 88, 89 Renoir, Jean, 116 repression, 42, 67, 109, 259, 260, 264, 286 resistance, xxi, xxx, 9, 12, 13, 18, 24, 32, 35-36, 38, 39, 47, 55-56, 61, 62, 67-69, 71-72, 78, 84, 144, 149, 157, 162, 163, 166, 168, 170, 187, 19293, 238, 273, 274, 289, 290, 294, 295-96 Resnais, Alain, 141 Republic of Salò, xxi, xxii, xxix, 37, 68, 84, 198-99 restitution and reparation, xxi Revelli, Nuto, 190, 290-92 revisionism, 53, 296 Rimbaud, Jean-Arthur, 278 Rinser, Luise, 27 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 237 Rossellini, Roberto, 69, 70, 172

332

Rousset, David, 47, 263 Rousso, Henri, 161-62, 162-63, 164 Rüdiger, Jutta, 284 S Sade, Donatien-AlphonseFrançois, Marquis de 198-99, 275 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 13, 62, 177 Schickele, René, 27 Schilder, Paul, 226 Schiller, Friedrich, 182, 183 Schirach, Baldur von, 282, 283, 285 Schlenstedt, Silvia, 56 Schneider, Michael, 218 Scholl, Hans and Sophie, 28, 152, 155, 266, 267 Schwartz, Paula, 13 seeing, 216 Segal, L., 249 Seghers, Anna, 10, 28, 56 Semprun, Jorge, xviii, 49, 124, 132, 133-34, 136, 137-38, 139, 140 Shakespeare, William, 50 Sigmaringen, 88, 93, 94 socialist realism, 37, 58, 61, 62, 238 Sophocles, 152, 154 Spinoza, Baruch, 105 Stalingrad, 4, 58, 105, 176, 178, 179 Stalinism, 186, 275-76 Starn, Randolph, xvii Steiner, George, 152 Stendhal, 62 student movement, 9, 185, 186, 211, 217, 218 Suhrkamp, Peter, 24, 25 T Tardieu, Jean, 58

Index

Tergit, Gabriele, 27 terrorism, 155, 177 testimony, 14, 28, 29, 36, 49, 80, 92, 112, 117, 122-24, 132, 141-42, 143, 145-47, 149, 156-57, 158, 248 Togliatti, Palmiro, 68 tradition, 78 trauma, x, xix, xxiii, 42, 47, 126, 128-29, 140, 143, 151, 153, 155, 163, 198, 224, 25871, 285 Triolet, Elsa, 12-22, 59, 62 Trotsky, Leon, 90, 275 20 July 1944, 4, 10, 23-24 V Vaillant, Roger, 62 Valentin, Karl, 183 Valéry, Paul, 62 Vercors, 13, 18, 46-54, 62, 63, 65, 160 Verlaine, Paul, 62 Vernet, 57 Vichy regime, xxi, xxii, xxviii, 52, 88, 92-93, 94, 160, 162, 163, 164, 167-69, 202, 205, 209 Viganò, Renate, 36-37 Villon, François, 62 Vittorini, Elio, 69-70, 79 Vonnegut, Kurt, 9 W Wagenbach, Klaus, 59-60 Wagner, Richard, 97-98 Wehrmacht, 4-5, 52, 100, 266 Weil, Grete, 149-58 Weiss, Peter, 272-80 Wertmüller, Lina, 185, 195-97 Wiesel, Elie, xviii, 49, 122-30 Williams, Raymond, 177 Wolf, Christa, 154, 238-46, 278, 279, 284

Index

women’s movement, xxx, 35, 192, 208 Würschinger, Otto, 284 Y Young, James E., xiv, xxx

333

Z Zangrandi, Giovanna, ix, 35-43 Zemon Davies, Natalie, xvii Zetkin, Clara, 186

Also available from Berghahn Books THE MASSACRE IN HISTORY Edited by Mark Levene and Penny Roberts History/Holocaust Studies The role of massacre in history has been given little focused attention either by historians or academics in related fields. This is surprising as its prevalence and persistence surely demands that it should be a subject of serious and systematic exploration. What exactly is a massacre? When – and why – does it happen? Is there a cultural, as well as political framework within which it occurs? How do human societies respond to it? What are its social and economic repercussions? Are massacres catalysts for change or are they part of the continuity of the human saga? These are just some of the questions the authors address in this important volume. Chronologically and geographically broad in scope, The Massacre in History provides in-depth analysis of particular massacres and themes associated with them from the 11th century to the present. The book explores the subject of massacre from a variety of perspectives – its relationship to politics, culture, religion and society, its connection to ethnic cleansing and genocide, and its role in gender terms and in relations to the extermination of animals. The historians provide evidence to suggest that the “massacre” is often central to the course of human development and societal change.

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Also available from Berghahn Books NATIONAL-SOCIALIST EXTERMINATION POLICIES Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies Edited by Ulrich Herbert

Translated from the German

History/Holocaust Studies Moving beyond the well-established problems and public discussions of the Holocaust, this collection of essays, written by some of the leading German historians of the younger generation, leaves behind the increasingly agitated arguments of the last years and substantially broadens, and in many areas revises, our knowledge of the Holocaust. Unlike previous studies, which have focused on whether the Holocaust could best be understood as the “fulfilment of a world view” or as a process of “cumulative radicalisation,” these articles provide an overview of how situational elements and gradual processes of radicalisation were variously combined with everchanging objectives and fundamental ideological convictions. Focusing on the developments in Poland, the Soviet Union, Serbia, and France the authors find that heretofore we have actually had very little knowledge of many aspects of this history, particularly with regards to the specific forces that motivated German policy in the individual regions of Central and Eastern Europe. Thus the National-Socialist extermination policy is not seen as a secret undertaking but rather as part of the German conquest and occupation policy in Europe.

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