Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany's Nazi Past in Recent Women's Literature 9783110206593, 9783110202434

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Table of Contents
Introduction
War Children and Child Survivors
Memories and Mourning: Christa Wolf ’s Patterns of Childhood
Trauma and Testimony: Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben
The Children of Survivors and Bystanders
Barbara Honigmann’s Belated Appropriation of her Jewish Heritage: From Roman von einem Kinde (Novel by a Child) to Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (A Chapter of My Life)
Wibke Bruhns’s Father-Portrait: My Father’s Country: The Story of a German Family
The Grandchildren of Nazi Victims, Perpetrators, Collaborators, and Bystanders
Images and Imagination: Monika Maron’s Pavel’s Letters
Tanja Dückers’s “Sensual Historiography:” Himmelskörper (Celestial Bodies)
Backmatter

Citation preview

Caroline Schaumann Memory Matters

Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies Edited by

Scott Denham · Irene Kacandes Jonathan Petropoulos Volume 4

≥

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Caroline Schaumann

Memory Matters Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature

≥

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines 앪 of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schaumann, Caroline, 1969Memory matters : generational responses to Germany’s Nazi past in recent women’s literature / by Caroline Schaumann. p. cm. - (Interdisciplinary German cultural studies ; v. 4) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-3-11-020243-4 (alk. paper) 1. German literature - Women authors - History and criticism. 2. German literature - 20th century - History and criticism. 3. Collective memory and literature. 4. Women and literature - Germany History - 20th century. 5. National socialism in literature. 6. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature. I. Title. PT405.S3345 2008 830.9135843086-dc22 2008003736

ISBN 978-3-11-020243-4 ISSN 1861-8030 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ” Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen

In Memoriam Friederike Schaumann 1974-2004

Acknowledgments The thinking, reading, and writing connected to this book are intrinsically linked to a decade of my life, accompanying my professional and private life, triumphs and tragedies, happiness and sadness for what seems like an infinite amount of time. During this time, countless people offered muchneeded help, counsel, and support. In particular I wish to thank the following individuals. Ursula Mahlendorf and Anna K. Kuhn encouraged me to pursue the direction of my research when I was a graduate student back in the 1990s. They invaluably shaped my dissertation and have since encouraged me in my research beyond it. The department of German Studies at Emory University greatly supported my research project from the day I set foot on campus. It is rare to find such attentive and well-meaning colleagues who look out for additional reading material, who leave numerous detailed notes in my mailbox, and who eagerly engage in yet another intellectual hallway discussion. I would especially like to thank Maximilian Aue who helped meticulously with translations and my chair, Peter Höyng, whose unfailing advice and enduring collegiality sustained me over the last three years. Emory University supported this project by granting me a semester without teaching duties for research abroad. During that time, Marcel Lepper at the German Literature Archive at Marbach generously helped fund a stay at the archive that allowed me to make use of the extensive collection on contemporary literature. The network of colleagues in other departments and at other institutions who contributed their precious time to this project humbles me with gratitude. Kamakshi Murti, Inge Stephan, Angelika Bammer, Paul Michael Lützeler, Brigitte Rossbacher, Michele Ricci, Hans-Peter Söder, Amy Benson-Brown, and Britta Kallin all read parts of this book at various stages, making valuable additions and suggestions. Judy Lee provided indispensable help with the translation of quotes. Christina Frei’s unwavering and exuberant friendship accompanied and strengthened me throughout the years, and the benefit of her input cannot be separated from the joy she brings to my life. I have been privileged to converse with some of the authors of this study. Barbara Honigmann granted me the rights to reprint some of her paintings. Wibke Bruhns promptly responded to questions, allowed me to use some of the Klamroth family photographs, and even selected the appropriate passages of all quotations from the (yet unpublished) English

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translation of her work. Ruth Klüger generously offered her time and expertise when I interviewed her as a graduate student; since then she has reliably made herself available for consultation and questions. Ever since I met Tanja Dückers in July 2004, I have tremendously enjoyed her keen observations, incessant quest for knowledge, and unadorned cordiality. Tanja was also a scrutinizing reader of the chapter on her work. Finding the perfect publishing venue was all I could hope for this book. Dr. Heiko Hartmann, editor-in-chief of the Walter de Gruyter publishing house, backed and assisted this project from its infancy. His kind prodding and enduring sustenance motivated me from beginning to completion. This book would not be in its present state without the careful and critical reading by the three editors of the series Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies. Jonathan Petropoulos provided important comments and historical insights. Scott Denham substantially helped to improve the book in content and style, suggesting additional reading and taking on the arduous task of proofreading the entire manuscript—twice. Irene Kacandes’s high standards and rigorous scholarship made invaluable contributions at earlier and later stages, helping to formulate the argument and direction of this work. I am nothing but honored that she has become my mentor. I also wish to thank the individuals and organizations that granted me the rights to use the images included in this text, in particular Jörg Schöner, the Spiegel Verlag, Wallstein Verlag, the Jüdisches Museum Berlin, and the Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas. In the few cases where I have not been able to get in touch with the right person despite several attempts, I ask those involved to contact me. Thinking about literary families inevitably takes me to my own family, with its boundless love. I am indebted to Alexander Schaumann who has outgrown the role of little brother and to my father Frank Schaumann who introduced me to literature in the first place and still picks just the right books from his library and, failing that, the bookstore. The moral, mental, and physical strength of my mother, Cora-Beate Schaumann, is an inspiration for my own life, as is our mother-daughter bond. Our conversations and interactions as a family, crossing personal and political, past and present concerns, sparked my interest in family dialogues. Sadly, the past years were also shaped by the pain of immense loss. My sister Friederike Schaumann who died at age thirty of a brain tumor, is not able to witness the completion of this book. As most of my childhood memories include her, and as she continues to be my younger sister, middle child, and center of our family, it is to her that I dedicate this book. Ever since I met my husband Bruce Willey, life has jumpstarted beyond the ordinary. His unconstrained thinking, graceful writing, and

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skilled editing inform every page of this book, and our explorations in the lowlands and highlands have filled the much-needed breaks in between. But it is the intimacy, devotion, and love for which I am most grateful.

Table of Contents Introduction ...................................................................................................... 1 Part I: Remembering Childhood in Nazi Germany ..................... 27 War Children and Child Survivors .............................................. 29 The Vicissitudes of Trauma ..................................................................... 34 The Holocaust, War, and Defeat ............................................................ 38 Postwar Developments in East Germany ............................................. 45 Postwar Developments in West Germany ............................................ 49 Discourses on the Nazi Past after Germany’s Reunification ............. 57 Christa Wolf and Ruth Klüger................................................................. 62

Memories and Mourning: Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood........................................................................................................ 66 The (Deadly) Ride Crossing Lake Constance ....................................... 66 Beginnings and Returns ............................................................................ 70 Breaking with Cameos .............................................................................. 75 Melancholy, Mourning, and Physical Pain ............................................. 82 A Collective Autobiography? ................................................................... 88 Forms of Address ...................................................................................... 91 Narrative Strategies.................................................................................... 94

Trauma and Testimony: Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben ........................ 98 The Ride Across the Atlantic ................................................................... 98 Physical and Mental Displacements...................................................... 104 Conjuring Phantoms and the Workings of Memory ......................... 108 Private and Public Work of Mourning ................................................. 114 Genre Distinctions .................................................................................. 118 Saying I, Saying You ................................................................................ 121 Language and Narration ......................................................................... 127

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Part II: Postmemory and the Reconstruction of the Past ....... 133 The Children of Survivors and Bystanders .................................... 135 West Germany’s Postwar Generation: 1968 and its Aftermath ....... 139 Beyond Fathers and Sons: The Generational Conflict in Literature after Reunification ................................................................................... 145 Recent Works on Germans as Victims of War ................................... 154 Jewish Culture in Postwall Germany .................................................... 159 Barbara Honigmann and Wibke Bruhns.............................................. 163

Barbara Honigmann’s Belated Appropriation of her Jewish Heritage: From Roman von einem Kinde (Novel by a Child) to Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (A Chapter of My Life)............... 166 “Rediscovering One’s Face” .................................................................. 166 A Child in a Father-land: Roman von einem Kinde (Novel by a Child) 169 Searching for Fatherly Love: A Love Made Out of Nothing (Eine Liebe aus nichts) .......................................................................................... 174 Delineating Jewish Identity in a Larger Context: Zohara’s Journey, Damals, dann und danach (The Past and What Came After), and Alles, alles Liebe! (Dear All) ...................................................................... 182 The Acceptance of the Elusive: Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (A Chapter of My Life)................................................................................. 189

Wibke Bruhns’s Father-Portrait: My Father’s Country: The Story of a German Family .................................................................... 196 Bruhns’s Plea for Understanding .......................................................... 196 Hans Georg Klamroth and Else Podeus ............................................. 204 History and Everyday Life: The July 20 Plot and the Klamroth Family ........................................................................................................ 209 The Path from a Hitler Supporter to a Hitler Opponent ................. 212 Klamroth’s Involvement in the Resistance, his Death, and his Legacy ........................................................................................................ 217

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Part III: In Search of Grandparents .................................................. 221 The Grandchildren of Nazi Victims, Perpetrators, Collaborators, and Bystanders .............................................................. 223 Postwar and Postwall Germany ............................................................ 228 Institutional Memory after Reunification ............................................ 231 American “Third Generation” Post-Holocaust Art........................... 238 The Enkelgeneration in Germany ............................................................. 242 Tanja Dückers and Monika Maron ....................................................... 249

Images and Imagination: Monika Maron’s Pavel’s Letters ......... 253 “The good, the sacred part of of a terrible chapter in history:” Maron’s Focus on her Grandfather ...................................................... 253 From Flight of Ashes to Pavel’s Letters ..................................................... 255 Remembering and Forgetting – Monika and Hella ............................ 266 The Trip to Poland .................................................................................. 273 Family Photos........................................................................................... 276 Pavel’s Letters and the Act of Imagination............................................. 283

Tanja Dückers’s “Sensual Historiography:” Himmelskörper (Celestial Bodies) ........................................................................................ 289 Pop Culture and the Legacy of National Socialism............................ 289 The Nazi Past in Three Generations .................................................... 295 Private and Public Remembrance ......................................................... 297 Freia’s Trips to Poland............................................................................ 302 The Nazi Past in Family Conversations ............................................... 306 A Granddaughter’s Artistic and Scientific Historiography ............... 310

Epilogue....................................................................................... 315 Works Cited ................................................................................ 323

Introduction When Günter Grass, in his 2003 novella Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang, 2002), called German history a clogged toilet where “we flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising,”1 he could not yet imagine how much the scat was going to hit the fan. Grass’s toilet-tempered metaphor became painfully true in August 2006, when his previously undisclosed involvement in the Waffen SS made international news in an interview prior to publication of Peeling the Onion (2007, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, 2006). Though Grass insists that he never committed any war crimes, nor even fired a shot, the public outcry focused less on Grass’s actual deeds while serving in the SS for six months (of which the actual description in his memoir comprises only a couple of pages), and more on the fact that Grass had not disclosed his membership for over six decades while assuming the voice of postwar Germany’s political and moral authority. Grass’s revelation and its aftermath proves that after sixty years of analyses, debates, and discussions, Germany’s Nazi past is still undigested, its memories silenced, distorted, beseeched. What is less known that two decades earlier another postwar German writer, Barbara Honigmann, had also used the metaphor of a clogged toilet. Then another one of those days occurs when I go into the bathroom and I see a pool of water on the floor and see that it’s coming from the toilet, and I feel like I’m going to be sick because I realize that the toilet is clogged, and that makes me so discouraged because I don’t know how I’ll ever fix it. But then I pull myself together and lift the toilet lid and begin bravely to clean out the toilet. It is disgusting, but nevertheless I reach deep down inside the toilet and pull dirty laundry out of it, laundry, gobs of dirty laundry. And then I finally call out to my boyfriend who has been sitting in the next room the entire time and no doubt knows what has happened but does not make any effort to come see what I am doing and help me. Then finally he comes over but soon comes to rest on a bucket, leans his head against the wall, becomes pale, and faints.

1

“Wir spülen und spülen, die Scheiße kommt dennoch hoch.” Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang, Göttingen: Steidl, 2002, 116. Translation from Günter Grass, Crabwalk, trans. Krishna Winston, New York: Harcourt, 2003, 122. For a more detailed discussion of Crabwalk, see the chapter “War Children and Child Survivors” in part I.

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And I am standing there, between the clogged toilet, the dirty laundry, and the unconscious man. This wasn’t reality, this was a dream, but still it is true. It is so difficult for me, to live in so many worlds simultaneously.2

Rather than German history in general, Honigmann in Roman von einem Kinde (1986, Novel by a Child) applies the image to the life of her German-Jewish narrator in particular, a life grown out of control, in the shadow of a past she cannot contain. Yet the narrator overcomes her disgust and—in marked contrast to Grass—proceeds to clean up the mess. After all, the toilet isn’t merely stopped up but clogged with dirty laundry, and such it is a woman’s task to clean it. Accordingly, her boyfriend sitting in the next room does not feel obliged to take action and rather faints at the sight (which, of course, has traditionally female connotations). As the parallelism of “the clogged toiled, the dirty laundry, and the unconscious man” implies, the (German) men in this story are unable to understand or help the narrator. Contrasting female and male subjectivity, the narrator bemoans “a man’s whole figure is actually straighter, with sharper lines and even some edges,”3 and eventually establishes an independent life abroad. While Grass employs the metaphor for its blunt corporality, for Honigmann’s narrator it has practical, if not earthy, implications in her daily life, encroaching on past, present, and future, and expressing gender differences. Though both Grass and Honigmann conjure up the same vile image when referring to personal and public past, their perspectives, concerns, and conclusions are quite different. Born in 1927 in Danzig (Gdansk), 2

3

“Dann kommt wieder so ein Tag, da gehe ich ins Badezimmer, und ich sehe auf dem Boden eine Wasserlache und sehe, die kommt aus dem Klo, und da wird mir ganz schlecht, denn es ist mir klar, das Klo ist verstopft, und das macht mich sofort so mutlos, denn wie soll ich das wieder in Ordnung bringen. Aber dann fasse ich mich und öffne den Klodeckel und fange tapfer an, das Klo auszuräumen, und ich ekele mich, fasse aber doch ganz tief hinein und hole Wäsche, Wäsche, meterlang Schmutzwäsche heraus. Und dann rufe ich endlich meinen Freund, der nämlich die ganze Zeit im Nebenzimmer sitzt und wohl wissen muß, was da passiert ist, aber keine Anstalten macht, nach mir zu sehen und mir zu helfen. Dann kommt er endlich, aber er lässt sich gleich auf einem Eimer nieder und lehnt den Kopf and die Wand und wird bleich und ohnmächtig. Und ich stehe dann da, zwischen dem verstopften Klo, der Schmutzwäsche und dem ohnmächtigen Menschen. Das war nicht wirklich, das war ein Traum, aber doch ist es wirklich so. Es fällt mir so schwer, in so vielen Welten zugleich zu leben.” Barbara Honigmann, “Roman von einem Kinde,” Roman von einem Kinde: sechs Erzählungen, Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1986, 29-30. Translation is my own. “Ein Mann ist doch schon in seiner ganzen Gestalt gerader, mit schärferen Linien und sogar manchen Kanten,” Honigmann, “Roman von einem Kinde,” 30. Translation is my own.

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Grass volunteered for the Wehrmacht at age fifteen and was called to serve in the Waffen SS at age seventeen. Only after his interment as an American prisoner of war, during his art studies in Düsseldorf and Berlin, did he revise his political beliefs and established himself as both an outspoken liberal and promising artist. The success of his first novel The Tin Drum (1962, Die Blechtrommel, 1959) and the following two novels of the Danzig trilogy (Cat and Mouse [1963, Katz und Maus, 1961], Dog Years [1965, Hundejahre, 1963]) catapulted Grass to the position of Germany’s bestknown postwar author not to mention its unfailing righteous voice. Germany’s Nazi past and its aftermath is a recurring theme in all of his work; for his unrelenting engagement he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1999. While including numerous autobiographical details and carefullyresearched historical facts, Grass wrote in a grotesque style utilizing the tradition of magic realism that distorted reality and subverted deterministic explanations. It was not before 2006 that he articulated his memories in autobiographical rather than fictional form, minutely divulging analogies of fact and fiction in The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, Dog Years, and Crabwalk. In his autobiographical reflections, Grass explains his initial interest in the army with the opportunity of escaping the parental influence, and justifies the concealment of his SS membership with an attempt to hide the shame it caused.4 In the aftermath of the sensational Waffen-SS revelation (some suspected a mere publicity campaign), authors and politicians scorned Grass and turned his own voice of righteousness against him, to the point of demanding that he renounce his Nobel Prize and the honorary citizenship of Gdansk. The shameful scat that he had mentioned in Crabwalk had come back to haunt him, and quickly became literary critics’ favorite metaphor to characterize Grass’s life after his revelation. Ian Buruma, for instance, observes in the September 18, 2006 issue of the New Yorker, “Now the author … is up to his neck in it himself.”5 Honigmann, conversely, uses the metaphor to refer to the victims’ engagement with the Nazi past. Her German-Jewish parents survived the Nazi regime exiled in Britain, and returned in 1947 to East Berlin in hopes of shaping a communist postwar Germany. Born in 1949, Honigmann did not experience Nazi Germany herself yet continues to live in its wreckage. Her literary work acknowledges the loss of personal and public history. In the example above, heaps of soiled clothing without living owners to fill 4

5

In Peeling the Onion Grass reveals in utmost detail the autobiographical content of his work and uncovers many places, persons, and events that informed his books Cat and Mouse, The Tin Drum, Dog Years, and others. Günter Grass, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, Göttingen: Steidl: 2006. Ian Buruma, “War and Remembrance,” The New Yorker, September 18, 2006.

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them (calling to mind the infamous pile of shoes from prisoners arriving at the Majdanek camp at the Holocaust Memorial Museum) cause the narrator nightmares. As the metaphor implies, Honigmann’s narrator painstakingly attempts to reconstruct her family’s past, and negotiate her identity as a mother and a postwar German-Jewish woman writer in the GDR. In 1984, Honigmann moved with her husband and children to the larger Jewish community of Strasbourg, France, and continued writing and painting from abroad. Her highly successful literary work since continues to address German-Jewish identity in the wake of the Holocaust, but also considers the interaction with Ashkenazim and Sephardim Jewish cultures and the history of colonialism in France. Both Grass and Honigmann call Germany’s Nazi past unfinished business, referring to the defiled parts of Germany’s history that continue to resurface despite public and personal attempts at flushing it away. Yet for men and women, former perpetrators, bystanders, and victims, for German-gentiles and German-Jews, and for contemporaries of the Nazi period and their offspring, the unfinished business means something very different. Cultural memory, the term introduced by Jan Assmann in the late 1980s, building on Maurice Halbwachs’s 1920s concept of collective memory,6 defines the processes by which societies interpret and communicate their pasts by way of literature, the media, visual arts, myths, and other information systems. Tied closely to historiography and mythmaking, i.e., the creation and celebration of a national history, cultural memory in Julia Epstein’s and Lori Hope Lefkovitz’s definition provides “the philosophical and historical foundations for ethnic, religious, and racial identities.”7 In the case of Germany, whose postwar identity was shaped by the Nazi past and continues to respond to it, cultural memory is a particularly contested, divergent term. As indicated in the example of Grass and Honigmann, a presumably collective perception of the past encompasses many differentiations and distinctions if one takes a closer look. Focusing 6

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Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: Beck, 1992, 48-59. The French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) argues—in contrast to Freud—that individual memory must be understood in its social context, that is, in families and communities. Halbwachs taught sociology at the University of Strasburg and at the Sorbonne in Paris before the Gestapo arrested the committed socialist in 1944 and deported him to Buchenwald, where he was executed in March 1945. Many of Halbwachs’s works were edited, published, and translated posthumously, among them On Collective Memory (1952), trans. Lewis A. Coser, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Julia Epstein and Lori Hope Lefkovitz, “Introduction: Shaping Losses, Cultural Memory, and the Holocaust,” Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust, eds. Julia Epstein and Lori Hope Lefkovitz, Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001, 1-12, 1.

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on women’s memory-matters, this study seeks to consider a wide range of prominent and less prominent texts that contribute to Germany’s cultural memory. Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature juxtaposes literary texts by six contemporary German writers who delineate their search for memories in order to reconstruct a family history. Focusing on three genealogical thresholds, my study includes a close analysis of two texts that comprise memories of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, two that consider memories of the narrators’ parents, and two that are concerned with the narrators’ grandparents’ past. Each section pairs a non-Jewish and Jewish perspective, linking memories of Nazi Germany with those of the Holocaust. This juxtaposition provides a framework in which I read and reread individual texts from a postwall perspective. Building on Anne Fuchs’s concept of “memory contests,” my work seeks to offer a context for the negotiation of diverging generational, cultural, national, and religious identities.8 While texts by victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, by the war and postwar generations, and by German Jews and non-Jews, have been read in isolation, it is only in dialogue that their relatedness comes into focus. As in the case of Grass’s and Honigmann’s metaphor, only in juxtaposition do similar allegories, literary references, narrative structures, and comparable approaches to memory become visible. To Ruth Klüger, the belief in a shared context is essential when considering the Holocaust in retrospective: If this is true, then the survivors’ attitude toward life becomes more and more like the attitude of those who were never in the concentration camps. And maybe that is one reason why it is easier nowadays to write about it, read about it and make films about it. I think that the last fifty years have created a common ground from which we all look back on the slaughter of the early 1940s with kindred amazement.9 8

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In place of the questionable term “mastery of the past” [Vergangenheitsbewältigug], Fuchs introduces the notion of “memory contests,” which “involve retrospective imaginings that simultaneously articulate, question and investigate the normative self-image of previous generations.” “From ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ to Generational Memory Contests in Günter Grass, Monika Maron and Uwe Timm,” German Life and Letters 59.2 (April 2006): 169-89, 179. “Wenn das stimmt, so nähert sich das Lebensgefühl der Überlebenden der KZs immer mehr dem Lebensgefühl derer, die nicht dabei waren. Und vielleicht ist das ein Grund, warum sich heutzutage leichter darüber schreiben, lesen, filmen lässt. Ich meine, die fünfzig letzten Jahre stiften eine Gemeinsamkeit, aus der wir alle mit verwandtem Staunen auf das Morden der frühen 40er Jahre zurücksehen.” Ruth Klüger, “Von hoher und niedriger Literatur: Missbrauch der Erinnerung: KZ-Kitsch” (1996), Gelesene Wirklichkeit: Fakten und Fiktionen in der Literatur, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006, 29-67, 56. Translation is my own.

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Daring as usual, Klüger posits that it is time to recall the Nazi past as “we,” which encompasses victims and other witnesses, Nazi contemporaries and their offspring, men and women in the framework of postunification Germany. Indeed, with the end of the cold war, the narrow and opposing East-West identities vanished, allowing for the opportunity to delineate Germany’s past outside of the lens of communist and capitalist ideologies. Thus Germans are increasingly and with greater openness acknowledging their roles as perpetrators of Nazi crimes and as victims of the war. Reading in juxtaposition also allows important differences to emerge. This work draws attention to texts that vary in genre, as well as in the authors’ generations, ethnicities, religions, and genealogies. Placing these texts side by side, outside of the distorting victim-perpetrator, JewishGerman, man-woman, and war-postwar binary, it becomes visible that they neither complete nor contradict each other, but instead respond to one another by means of inspiration, reverberation, refraction, incongruity, and ambiguity. As in Grass and Honigmann, only in juxtaposition do different stories about nation and culture, as well as reciprocal connections and discrepancies, come into view. In this work I have refrained from including detailed analyses of texts written by men, offering instead a gendered examination of women’s texts in postwar Germany. This conscious exclusion is a response to postwar politics that consistently deemed female voices less important, less relevant, and less representative than male voices. When Klüger stipulates in Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001, weiter leben. Eine Jugend, 1992) “wars, and hence the memories of wars, are owned by the male of species. And fascism is a decidedly male property, whether you were for or against it,”10 she points to the consequential fact that an understanding of war and its aftermath has explicitly been driven by patriarchy. Until the mid-1980s, female experiences of World War II, be it as victims or bystanders, were generally not distinguished from men’s experiences. In the case of Holocaust victims, scholars assumed a universal survivor profile derived from men’s experiences that generally failed to differentiate according to gender, nationality, class, age, and political or religious orientation. And the emerging canon of Holocaust literature privileged men’s voices such as Viktor Frankl, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Jean Améry 10

“Die Kriege gehören den Männern, daher auch die Kriegserinnerungen. Und der Faschismus schon gar, ob man nun für oder gegen ihn gewesen ist: reine Männersache.” Ruth Klüger, weiter leben. Eine Jugend, Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992, 10. Translation from Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, New York: The Feminist P at the City College of New York, 2001, 18.

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over women’s voices such as Charlotte Delbo.11 Consequently, little was known about the specific experiences of women until Joan Ringelheim and Esther Katz organized the first conference on the topic in 1983.12 Only the groundbreaking feminist Holocaust scholarship that followed elucidated how traditional gender roles affected men and women in different social milieus and networks, shaped early responses to the Holocaust (result of the initial belief that the Nazis would not harm women and children), and distinguished survival of men and women (ruled by the fact that pregnant women and women with small children were the first to be killed in the camps).13 Soon it became clear that women not only experienced the Holocaust differently, they also remembered and expressed it in different ways than men. The attention to women in the Holocaust, harshly attacked at times,14 finally led to a new understanding of male and female survivors, their coping strategies, processes of remembering, and modes of articulation. With respect to the Germans, historiography perpetuated the myth that National Socialism had been a predominantly male affair. Indeed the Nazi years acted as a “gendering activity,”15 promoting women’s motherhood and domestic obligations in stark opposition to men’s militarism at the front. The ensuing myth that “men are naturally fierce and warlike, 11

12 13

14

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Elie Wiesel, who wrote Night in 1955, had trouble finding a publisher, and Primo Levi’s work was first published in an edition of only 2,500 copies. But the success of Wiesel and Levi in the 1960s gave way to a renewed interest in the Holocaust. Charlotte Delbo, however, who wrote the trilogy Auschwitz and After immediately after the war in 1946 and 1947, did not publish the first volume, None of Us Will Return, until 1965 and the second and third volumes until 1970. Only in 1985 did all three volumes appear together as a trilogy under the name Auschwitz and After, published by Yale University Press. See Esther Katz and Joan Miriam Ringelheim, eds. Proceedings of the Conference: Women Surviving the Holocaust, New York: The Institute for Research in History, 1983. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth’s Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (1993), which contains both testimonies by women as well as its analysis, was the first influential major work, establishing and shaping the emerging discourse. Dalia Ofer’s and Lenore J. Weitzman’s following anthology Women in the Holocaust (1998) also includes voices by both survivors and Holocaust scholars, focusing on gender-specific aspects before, during, and after the Holocaust. Elizabeth R. Baer’s and Myrna Goldenberg’s Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (2003) offers an excellent introduction to the topic, tracing feminist scholarship. For instance by Gabriel Schoenfeld in two 1998 essays, by Cynthia Ozick in a letter to Joan Ringelheim, and by Lawrence Langer. For more context, see Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, “Introduction,” Experience and Expression, xiii- xxxiii, xxv-xxviii, and John K. Roth, “Equality, Neutrality, Particularity: Perspectives on Women and the Holocaust, Experience and Expression, 5-22. Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al., eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, New Haven: Yale UP, 1987, 4.

8

Introduction

while women, as mothers, have an affinity for peace”16 intractably shaped the politics, historiography, and literary production of the first postwar decades, especially in West Germany. While the myth served to exculpate women from the charge of having been perpetrators, it also excluded them from the postwar debates.17 If war was a synonym for masculine aggression, then the preoccupation with postwar issues pushed women to the periphery. It took Renate Bridenthal’s, Atina Grossman’s, and Marion Kaplan’s seminal When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (1984) and Claudia Koonz’s Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (1988), to increase our knowledge of women’s roles as onlookers, collaborators, participants, and perpetrators. This work also revealed that women voted Hitler into power and supported him afterwards, despite their lack of power in the party leadership.18 By delineating women’s involvement in the Nazi period, feminist historians in the 1980s outlined what had fallen by the wayside with the previous assumptions that had staged women as victims. Nowadays, debate shifts away from the binary definitions of victims and perpetrators, focusing instead on the heterogeneity of the category “woman.” Women’s exclusion from war and postwar historiography also influenced the literary canon. Germany’s best-known postwar authors are men like Wolfgang Borchert, Heinrich Böll, Siegfried Lenz, Peter Weiss, Günter Grass, and Martin Walser, who present and represent the perspectives and voices of male characters. Literary scholarship continued and exacerbated this development by analyzing and categorizing men’s texts as Literature of the Rubble [Trümmerliteratur], as works by Gruppe 47,19 and as Father Books [Väterliteratur].20 As Margaret Higonnet aptly put it, “men’s writing passed directly into the canon of twentieth-century literature, … 16

17

18 19 20

Higonnet, 1. Higonnet points out that women upheld the war machinery like men, even though their particular involvement was quite different. Women nursed soldiers, worked in the armament industry, and sustained their families through food shortages and evacuations. Claudia Koonz, too, elaborates on this myth: “Historians have discussed women as part of the timeless backdrop against which Nazi men made history, seeing men as active ‘subjects’ and women as the passive ‘other.’” Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics, New York: St. Martin’s, 1986, 3. See scholarship by Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, Christina Thürmer-Rohr, Sigrid Weigel, Elaine Martin, and Marie-Luise Gättens, among others. For a discussion of texts by the Gruppe 47, see the chapter “Postwar Developments in West Germany” in part I. For a definition and more detailed discussion of the genre of Father Books, see the chapters “West Germany’s First Postwar Generation: The Student Movement and its Aftermath” and “Beyond Fathers and Sons: The Generational Conflict in Literature after Reunification” in part II.

Introduction

9

women’s wartime writings, on the other hand, passed into obscurity.”21 With earlier studies focusing almost exclusively on male authors, with the exception of Christa Wolf as the token female, even recent research continues to exclude women writers.22 Stuart Taberner’s German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond: Normalization and the Berlin Republic (2005), an impressively comprehensive volume that traces recent literary developments and introduces a plethora of contemporary authors and their texts, includes only one subchapter on two GDR women writers (Christa Wolf and Monika Maron) among its in-depth analyses of eight male authors (Peter Schneider, Martin Walser, Bernhard Schlink, Marcel Beyer, Botho Strauß, and others).23 In another example, Helmut Schmitz’s On Their Own Terms: The Legacy of National Socialism in Post-1990 German Fiction (2004), which offers psychoanalytically informed analyses of texts by different generations of authors, includes an analysis of Ulla Berkéwicz’s Engel sind schwarz und weiß (1992, Angels Are Black and White) in one out of ten chapters on works by Grass, Sebald, Walser, and Schlink.24 Faced with these realities, I am confident that male perspectives in postwar literature are known by the abundant availability of previous studies, and do not need to be pursued in depth here. While men’s texts can be juxtaposed by assumption, as they are usually the first ones to come to 21 22

23

24

Higonnet, 13. In Hans Wagener’s anthology, for example, there is not a single essay dedicated to a woman writer, and women are mentioned only peripherally. Hans Wagener, ed., Gegenwartsliteratur und Drittes Reich: Deutsche Autoren in der Auseinandersetzung mit der Vergangenheit, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1977. Helmut Peitsch’s Vom Faschismus zum kalten Krieg – auch eine deutsche Literaturgeschichte (1996) cites 266 male and 14 female authors in the bibliography—amounting to only 5 percent women writers. Helmut Peitsch, Vom Faschismus zum Kalten Krieg – auch eine deutsche Literaturgeschichte: Literaturverhältnisse, Genres, Themen, Berlin: Stigma, 1996. Even Ernestine Schlant’s work The Language of Silence focuses primarily on men—all of her chapters are devoted to male authors, though her bibliography of primary sources lists works by 36 men and 7 women. Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust, New York and London: Routledge, 1999. However, Taberner’s latest edited volume, Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic (2007), which came out just before completion of this book, considers a number of texts by women. In his introduction, Taberner acknowledges that “novels by women writers are generally overlooked.” With a broader focus on German contemporary authors, the volume includes an essay entirely devoted to women’s writing, and all the other essays analyze women’s fiction alongside men’s. Stuart Taberner, ed. Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007, 16. Anne Fuchs’s remarks on the recent Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit.Der lange Schatten des Dritten Reichs (2004), eds. Stefan Aust and Gerhard Spörl, go in a similar direction. As Fuchs points out, the editors “either forgot to include or chose to erase the experience of the founding women of the two postwar Germanies”; she finds only three out of thirty contributions by women. Anne Fuchs, “From ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ to Generational Memory Contests in Günter Grass, Monika Maron and Uwe Timm,” 170.

10

Introduction

mind, I am privileging the work of women authors from a sheer need for balance and inclusion. My work calls attention to female narrators and protagonists and seeks to lay bare gender-inflected moments in German postwar history that so easily remain in the shadows. Eschewing dichotomies of a male war and a female domestic experience, these women elucidate how Nazi ideology and the war intrude into a seemingly apolitical home, forcing mothers to care for their families while facing food shortages, destruction, evacuation, and the fear of rape. By emphasizing how gender impinges on everyday life and shapes discrimination and persecution, the authors reveal how sexism intersects with racism and fascism. By approaching the Nazi past against the backdrop of the complicated mother-daughter relationship, the six writers of this study examine how family dynamics are shaped by gender definitions. While struggling to come to terms with their mothers’ memories, the female narrators reflect on their own roles as mothers who pass on memories to their children. To this end, the texts recall the well-researched West German Father Books of the late 1970s and 1980s, but complement patriarchal family history with a focus on women’s genealogies. In contrast to the Father Books’ often sweeping rejection of a tyrannical father, the mother-daughter relationship seems to follow no predictable patterns, provoking discord and empathy, distance and understanding, as well as emotionally charged considerations on the process of transmitting memories. The following chapters juxtapose, in tripartite structure, texts by female survivors and texts by bystanders or co-perpetrators with texts by the two group’s offspring. If I excluded in this framework the group of women perpetrators, it is because I reserve the term for the relatively small group of women who by their profession, ideological influence, and actions actively sustained and assisted the Nazi regime. For the purpose of this study, a discussion about the extent of their crimes would move away from my focus on memory and identity, and encourage another (false) binary of survivors versus perpetrators as opposing categories that characterize each other in reverse. Aside from the group of female perpetrators, there are plenty of inconsistencies that make it difficult to define and characterize the majority of German women who supported the regime in less tangible forms. Calling women who embraced Nazi ideology early on but later suffered under its consequences “victims” seems negligent and incorrect considering the explicitly targeted victims of Nazi persecution. Calling them “coperpetrators,” too, is misleading, especially if they experienced the Nazi years as children or teenagers. Even the term “bystander,” which I am using in this study because of its general applicability and currency, has a passive connotation that fails to address women’s active participation in

Introduction

11

the Nazi era. John K. Roth locates the majority of German women somewhere in between perpetrators and bystanders, calling them “partners” because they helped German men carry out the Holocaust.25 Elaine Martin’s insightful essay “Victims or Perpetrators? Literary Responses to Women’s Roles in National Socialism,” proves helpful in this discussion as it abandons the victim-perpetrator dialectic in favor of a “perpetrator continuum”26 that calls for a more nuanced and attentive analysis. Defining and differentiating terms like “co-perpetrator,” “collaborator,” and “supporter,” Martin calls authors like Christa Wolf, Eva Zeller, Margarete Hannsmann, Ruth Rehmann, Carola Stern, and Melita Maschmann “coperpetrators” but places them at different ends of the continuum. After the war, all of these writers acknowledged their participation in the regime and struggled to explain their thinking and actions to a postwar audience. Though I am less interested in categorizing the authors of this study, I find Martin’s approach helpful in that it offers a framework in which fictional characters can be placed. Therefore I use Martin’s concept of a “coperpetrator continuum” to position Wolf’s protagonist Nelly, the narrator’s mother in Wibke Bruhns’s text, and the grandmother of Tanja Dückers’s protagonist, discussing the particularities of each text in the respective chapters. Martin’s essay, however, fails to mention that large numbers of gentile women were both co-perpetrators and victims, that is, beneficiaries of the Nazi regime and sufferers of the war’s destruction, Hitler supporters and victims of rape, anti-Semites and refugees. Neither does her essay include (groups of) women victimized by the Nazi regime: Jewish, Roma and Sinti, politically or religiously persecuted, women who survived in hiding, by emigration, or in the ghettos and camps. In this way, Martin’s essay is a product of the dual narrative which has divorced analyses of perpetrators, co-perpetrators, and bystanders from those of victims, relegating a consideration of survivor narratives to Holocaust Studies (including the increasingly difficult definition of what constitutes a survivor27). Still, femin-

25 26

27

Roth, 8-9. Elaine Martin, “Victims or Perpetrators? Literary Responses to Women’s Roles in National Socialism,” Facing Fascism and Confronting the Past: German Women Writers from Weimar to the Present, eds. Elke P. Frederiksen and Martha Kaarsberg Wallach, Albany: State U of New York P, 2000, 61-82, 66. For an elaboration (but no answer) to this question, see Elizabeth R. Baer, “Complicating the Holocaust: Who is a Victim? What is a Holocaust Memoir?” Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, Volume 3: Memory, eds. John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, 15-23. In her discussion of how to define Holocaust victims, Baer gives the example of a relative, a “good” German, pious Catholic

12

Introduction

ist scholarship, like the book in which Martin’s essay was published (Frederiksen and Wallach) was among the first to dare juxtaposing texts by Jewish and non-Jewish voices from the Weimar Republic to the present.28 Previously, research on the “second generation” had begun to focus on children of victims and perpetrators, but these studies were often limited to comparing and contrasting presumably opposite ends (perpetrators and victims) in the generations after the Holocaust, ignoring the much more complex and hitherto undefined) legacies in between.29 By including texts that examine victimhood, collaboration, and cases when both intersect, I draw once more on the merit of juxtaposition, which in this case affords a greater frame of reference in which individual experiences can be placed. If “victims,” “bystanders,” and “co-perpetrators” are contested terms, so do the designations “German-gentile” (or “non-Jewish Germans”) and “German-Jewish” demand closer analysis. The category of non-Jewish Germans usually goes without saying and does not warrant a definition, but in juxtaposition it becomes an important and necessary distinction, as it does not make semantic, historical, and ethical sense to contrast “German” and “German-Jewish,” which would also assume that the two are exclusive. The term “German-Jewish” is problematic in itself, as it yet again singles out a group that in Nazi Germany was defined by an ideology of hate and was nearly eliminated during the war. “German-Jewish” binds together a pair that has been declared diametrically opposed, facing each other in a “negative symbiosis,”30 and fails to acknowledge Jews’ highly problematic and ambiguous relationship to contemporary Germany. Moreover, assuming a “German-Jewish” identity seems inappropriate for writers divorced from Jewish religion and tradition like Elfriede Jelinek or Monika Maron, who only recently discovered the Jewish heritage of parents or grandparents. The fact that Maron has no Jewish grandmother,

28

29 30

woman who survived in Ravensbrück and wrote a memoir containing “occasional AntiSemitic” (21) remarks. Early feminist work on women in Nazi Germany, such as When Biology Became Destiny and Mothers in the Fatherland, included research on Jewish women; more recently, Elizabeth R. Baer’s and Myrna Goldenberg’s Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust considers the voices of Jewish and non-Jewish (including Sinti and Roma women, Polish forced laborers, French resistance fighters) in equal parts. See, for instance, Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators, eds. Alan L. Berger and Naomi Berger, Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2001. Dan Diner declares: “After Auschwitz it is actually possible – what a sad irony – to speak of a ‘German-Jewish symbiosis,’ albeit a negative one. For both Jews and Germans, whether they like it or not, the aftermath of mass murder has been the starting point for selfunderstanding – a kind of communality of opposites.” Dan Diner, “Negative Symbiosis: Germans and Jews after Auschwitz,” The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, eds. Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2003, 423-30, 423.

Introduction

13

that her grandfather converted to Christianity, that her mother was discriminated as a “half-Jew,” and that she had to defend herself against the accusation of being “Aryan,” further complicates her identity.31 In their introduction to the Yale Companion of Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096-1996 (1997), Sander Gilman and Jack Zipes delineate a similar dilemma that plagued their project on Jewish writing in Germany from the outset: The idea of “Jewish” writing in ‘Germany’ is a conundrum wrapped in a confusion tied with a desire. How can one separate the writing of the Jews in Germanspeaking countries from the culture in which they wrote? How dare one amalgamate their writing with the cultural production of those so inherently hostile to them? Who are “they”? Where are “they”? Who and where were “they”’? Who is, at the end of all of this, “Other,” and who is “Self,” “Jew,” and “German”?32

Yet another designation, that of “Jews in Germany,” is even more problematic since it includes neither Ruth Klüger who was born in Austria and immigrated to the United States in 1947, nor Barbara Honigmann who chose to leave Germany for France in 1984. Both terms “German Jews” and “Jews in Germany” also conceal another important and constitutive element of the authors’ identity—their gender. To Jeffrey Peck, the varying terms to describe this populace give proof to the fact that “Jewish identity [in Germany] is not static, but rather historical and dynamic.”33 Thus the obviously problematic term might have some merit by pointing to its own limitations. Hartmut Steinecke suggests that scholars limit themselves to using “German-Jewish” as an adjective modifying a specific body of literature rather than discussing “German-Jewishness” altogether.34 In a similar vein, I decided to use the terms German-gentile and German-Jewish writers to denote the demarcation line between the histories of victims and the histories of bystanders/collaborators for my purposes of juxtaposition. Borrowing from 31

32 33 34

In the aftermath of Martin Walser’s Peace Prize Speech in Frankfurt 1998, which Maron publicly defended, Henryk M. Broder charged Maron for being a representative of the “Aryan intelligentsia,” to which she responded “I am indeed intelligent, but not Aryan” [“ich bin zwar intelligent, aber nicht arisch”]. See Antje Doßmann, Die Diktatur der Eltern: Individuation und Autoritätskrise in Monika Marons erzählerischem Werk, Berlin: Weißensee Verlag, 2003, 10. Sander Gilman and Jack Zipes, “Introduction: Jewish Writing in German Through the Ages,” Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096-1996, eds. Sander Gilman and Jack Zipes, New Haven: Yale UP, 1997, xvii. Jeffrey M. Peck, Being Jewish in the New Germany, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2006, 4. Hartmut Steinecke, “‘Deutsch-jüdische’ Literatur heute. Die Generation nach der Shoah. Zur Einführung,” Deutsch-jüdische Literatur der neunziger Jahre: Die Generation nach der Shoah, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Hartmut Steinecke, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2002, 10.

14

Introduction

Dagmar Lorenz, my work assumes first and foremost a linguistic definition—those who write in German—of German-Jewish identity,35 including writers like Ruth Klüger and Barbara Honigmann. As other scholars have done before, I also define German-Jewish literature in its most inclusive sense,36 encompassing all writers who acknowledge and incorporate a German-Jewish identity as a theme in their work, and who, in Sander Gilman’s words, “understand themselves as Jewish participants in German culture,”37 even if they are not religious themselves. This definition also includes East German writers like Monika Maron who rediscovered their Jewish heritage after learning that parents or grandparents were Jewish, information often suppressed in the GDR.38 The belated genealogical quest of Honigmann, Maron, and other writers confirms that the family’s Jewish past continues to profoundly influence the present, and that German-Jewish families are still uprooted by the Holocaust, continuing the diasporic experience of their parents. German gentiles, in juxtaposition, emerge as a group with an identity whose bearers often believe it need not be staked out, rooted in a country that (with changing borders) belongs to them, a group that also faces responsibility for the near annihilation of another group. Pairing German-gentile and German-Jewish perspectives, my study also juxtaposes different genealogical positions. While avoiding to redefine or recount generations, I focus on the genealogical tensions between war and postwar generations, including a close analysis of two texts that comprise memories of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, two that consider memories of the narrators’ parents, and two that are concerned with the narrators’ grandparents’ past. Though it would be tempting and convenient to call these categories “first,” “second” and “third generation,” the distinctions prove far more complicated and, in fact, just plain messy. If one considers that generations succeed each other year by year, month by month, even day by day, the act of distinguishing and labeling generations of writers seems problematic in the first place. The founding father of generational research, Hungarian sociologist and historian Karl 35 36

37 38

See Dagmar C.G. Lorenz, Keepers of the Motherland: German Texts by Jewish Women Writers, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997, xvi. See, for instance Thomas Nolden, Junge jüdische Literatur: Konzentriertes Schreiben in der Gegenwart, Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 1995, or the more recent introduction by Pól O’Dochartaigh to the volume Jews in German Literature Since 1945: German-Jewish Literature? German Monitor 53 (2000): iii-x. Sander L. Gilman, Jews in Today’s German Culture, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995, 2. For an overview of contemporary German-Jewish literature, see also Erin McGlothlin’s astute “Writing by Germany’s Jewish Minority,” Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic, ed. Stuart Taberner, Cambrigde: Cambridge UP, 2007, 230-46.

Introduction

15

Mannheim, characterizes in his 1928 essay “The Problem of Generations” (“Das Problem der Generationen”) generations by both common age and a collective response to a historical event. Yet Mannheim recognizes that there are many differentiated, sometimes antagonistic experiences within a generation, that, in other words, a generation includes several generational-units [Generationseinheiten]. For the purpose of counting generations, it is nowadays assumed that a commonly experienced historical event (like the French Revolution, WW II, German Reunification) distinguishes a group of people collectively and permanently from the preceding and succeeding age groups. As Sigrid Weigel points out, this type of counting is generally applied retroactively and thus begins only with the second generation.39 In her etymology of the term and concept, Weigel also argues that the progression of generations follows a patriarchal model in that it implies the transfer of history from father to son. In other words, generation is a pattern to categorize history and culture by signifying a collective event that structures a particular time and group as a unit. This type of structuring is simplified and thus fallacious: Even with writers of the same age in the same country, it remains questionable if historical and cultural events shape them to the same degree, and whether or not gender, class, family status and genealogy, religion, the time of writing, and other individual circumstances are more influential than the author’s generation. The counting of generations after the Holocaust is a particularly dubious undertaking in that it makes the Shoah the central defining parameter of the twentieth and twenty-first century, labeling age cohorts decades after victims, perpetrators, and bystanders have passed away. With respect to the few survivors, it is doubtful whether the persecution generated a common generational consciousness or whether there exist merely individual stories of exceptional survival. It is even more questionable to link Holocaust survival to the German experience of World War II, lumping together the experiences of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders as a definition of the “first” generation.40 39 40

An example that proves Weigel’s point is Martin S. Bergmann’s and Milton E. Jucovy’s influential study with the revealing title Generations of the Holocaust (1982), which examines the symptoms of the children of survivors and Nazis. Some historians, however, have dissected this general category. Jonathan Petropoulos distinguishes three distinct generational groups of Holocaust deniers, while Harold Marcuse attempts to differentiate the term generation by identifying various German age cohorts born between 1890 and 1976, each one encompassing approximately a decade. See Jonathan Petropoulos, “Holocaust Denial: A Generational Typology,” Lessons and Legacies III: Memory, Memoralization, and Denial, ed. Peter Hayes, Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1999, 239-47, and Harold Marcuse, “Generational Cohorts and the Shaping of Popular Attitudes towards the Holocaust,” Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, Vo-

16

Introduction

Accordingly, definitions of a “second” generation are controversial too since they assume that not only the witnesses but even their children are collectively marked by their relation to the Holocaust. As the author and a child of survivors, Eva Hoffman, points out in After Such Knowledge: Where Memory of the Holocaust Ends and History Begins (2004), “If a ‘generation’ is defined by shared historical experience and certain attitudes or beliefs that follow from it, then the ‘second generation’ is surely a very tenuous instance of it. We have grown up, in the postwar Jewish dispersion, in different countries and cultures, under very different circumstances and within different political systems.”41 If Hoffman questions such a unifying term for the children of survivors, the more dubious it becomes to extend the definition to Germany’s postwar generation, the students of 1968. Is it appropriate to ascertain common “symptoms” for children of Holocaust survivors, and link these symptoms to the experiences of children of Nazi perpetrators? As both Weigel and Susan Rubin Suleiman elucidate, the concept of a generation may conceal differences between victims and perpetrators, especially in the “second” generation, when the assumption of a transmitted and collective traumatization steamrolls the crucial disparity between legacies of victimization and perpetration.42 If the counting continues, even grandchildren, a so-to-speak “third” generation, are defined by an event that has become inevitably removed and bears no immediate biological connection to any member of that generation. The question of whether the term “second” generation should refer exclusively to children of Holocaust survivors or whether it applies to the postwar world in general becomes even harder to answer in the generations following, when it is increasingly difficult to distinguish clearly between grandchildren of survivors, bystanders, collaborators, and perpetrators. The “third” generation does not (and arguably cannot) exist as a coherent group; many grandchildren of Jewish victims may simultaneously be children of survivors which would define them as “second” generation (as in the case of Monika Maron). Moreover, the assumption of a “third” generation begs the idea of a “fourth generation” and the obvious and infinitive question of how long this type of counting will continue. Yet,

41 42

lume 3: Memory, eds. John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell, New York: Palgrave, 2001, 652-63. Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Where Memory of the Holocaust Ends and History Begins, New York: Public Affairs, 2004, 28. See also Gary Weissman’s efforts to distinguish between what he calls “nonwitnesses” and the second generation. Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004, 16-24.

Introduction

17

while many scholars (Eric Santner, Efraim Sicher, Marianne Hirsch) do not distinguish the “second” generation from a “third,” it is likewise debatable whether the two groups can be conflated into one postwar experience. Keeping in mind these intricacies, this study positions the experience of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust as a central event in history that demands the designation of witnesses, their children, and grandchildren. By focusing on genealogies of women, however, I am looking for an alternative narrative to the counting of (male-inflected) generations. Because of the women’s differences in ages and perspectives, I do not assign them to particular generations but read their texts as documents of a certain genealogical perspective. In this way, my work considers texts by Christa Wolf and Ruth Klüger as documents of children’s experiences during the Third Reich, texts by Wibke Bruhns and Barbara Honigmann as reconstructions of the parental life, and texts by Monika Maron and Tanja Dückers as narratives imagining the grandparents’ life. Emphasizing memory’s significance, incompleteness, and complexity, all of these writers employ memory-matter and reflect upon it, in addition to including historical documentation, photographs, and letters. Rather than focusing on the authors’ date of birth, I seek to delineate the transmission of memory and intergenerational conflicts. All six texts considered in this study are autobiographical, that is, in all cases, the narrator’s (or protagonist’s) gender, age, place of birth, and other significant details coincide with the author’s. In addition, the texts include carefully researched historical facts and aim to expand readers’ knowledge about German history, even though narrators question the authenticity of parents’ and grandparents’ memories and suspect bias and distortion in the processes of mediation and transmission. Yet not one of the six texts analyzed could be called an autobiography in the strict definition of the term, as the texts range in genre from novel to biography to memoir. Perhaps this is not surprising: in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the emerging genre of autobiography mirrored a male position of power while claiming representative legitimacy. Whereas Augustine’s, Rousseau’s, and Goethe’s artistic representations of their lives became the most famous examples of the autobiographical canon, women’s works, though often characterized as autobiographical, never entered the literary canon but were marginalized (in the words of Humboldt and Fichte) as sketchy, impulsive, and unstructured.43 43

For more detail, see Almut Finck’s insightful analysis “Identität als Positionalität: Zur Theorie weiblicher Autobiographik,” Autobiographisches Schreiben nach dem Ende der Autobiographie, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1999, 109-37.

18

Introduction

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with the arrival of postmodernism, more differentiations emerged. In her book Gender, Patriarchy, and Fascism in the Third Reich: The Response of Women Writers (1993), Elaine Martin maintains that women’s writing on the Nazi period tends to be more autobiographical (encompassing memoirs, diaries, autobiographical novels, poems, or short stories), while men favor more weighty genres, such as the novel.44 Indeed, in the decades following the war, writers who were not perpetrators in the traditional sense, such as women who experienced National Socialism as children, adopted the autobiographical form as a means to publicly reexamine their investment in Nazi Germany. In this way, Melita Maschmann, Christa Wolf, Eva Zeller, Carola Stern, and Margarete Hannsmann acknowledge in their texts their roles as bystanders and collaborators, and struggle to explain their thinking and actions to a postwar audience. By illustrating the seamless transition from fascism to sexism to racism, these writers also politicize everyday life [Alltagsgeschichte]. The focus on daily life at home rather than militarism at the front not only reflects the female experience of war, it is also a conscious strategy: By refusing to approach and represent history as a series of eminent dates and events generated by distinguished men, women writers elevate the individual and the seemingly ordinary details of life to portray the wide-ranging consequences of war. In this vein, Christa Wolf calls the diary-form “literary genre and raw material for literature,” acknowledging that her novel “Patterns of Childhood (1984, Kindheitsmuster, 1976) is based on a travel-diary.”45 In her biography My Father’s Country: The Story of a German Family (2008, Meines Vaters Land: Geschichte einer deutschen Familie, 2004), Wibke Bruhns continues the gendered approach, recounting in minute detail family dinners, festivities, invitations, meal plans and their respective cost and effort. Bruhns not only emphasizes and elevates women’s labor and domestic deeds but also challenges an understanding of history that focuses exclusively on men’s achievements or defeat at the front. If male authors initially shied away from personal reflections on the “Third Reich,” the trend has thoroughly reversed, with renowned authors like Martin Walser and Günter Grass, even historians like Joachim Fest, publishing their autobiographical writings.46 In the 1990s and beyond, 44 45 46

Elaine Martin, “Women Write/(Re)Write the Nazi Past: An Introduction,” Gender, Patriarchy, and Fascism in the Third Reich: The Response of Women Writers, ed. Elaine Martin, Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1993, 16. “Literarische Gattung und Rohstoff für Literatur,” Christa Wolf, Ein Tag im Jahr 19602000, München: Luchterhand, 2003, 604-05. Translation from Christa Wolf, One Day a Year 1960-2000, trans. Lowell A. Bangerter, New York: Europa Editions, 2007, 596. See Martin Walser’s autobiographical novel Ein springender Brunnen (1998), and the following autobiographies: Günter Grass, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006), Joachim Fest, Ich nicht. Erin-

Introduction

19

both men and women embrace autobiographical genres, and incorporate artifacts such as photographs, letters, and other documents. Male and female literary newcomers like Stephan Wackwitz, Tanja Dückers, and Zafer Şenocak also shaped the autobiographical genre of the family novel [Familienroman].47 To Friederike Eigler, who favors the related term generational novel [Generationenroman], Patterns of Childhood comprises an early example of this genre since it reconstructs family history with the help of transmitted memories, external research, documents, and reflection and imagination.48 The genre, which quickly became a favorite approach of children and grandchildren to trace their family’s involvement in Nazi Germany, seems equally popular with male and female authors. As Eva Lezzi points out, the portrayal of childhood harks back to childhood-autobiographies of the eighteenth century, in particular Karl Philipp Moritz’s incomplete novel Anton Reiser (1785-1790), and mirrors the period’s burgeoning interest in childhood development.49 For women, however, conditioned by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideals of femininity and motherhood, the autobiographical narrative eludes the focus on the transition from father to son. In the mother-daughter relationship, the women narrators reject (from a daughter’s perspective) traditional models of femininity, attempting instead to stake out an identity that embraces both feminism and motherhood.50 Concerned with memory and identity, all six texts of this study pair impressions from childhood with observations by a narrator, juxtaposing the perception of a child with that of an adult. In retrospect, each narrator is forced to scrutinize her childhood fantasies and myths for their authenticity, becoming aware of the deep rifts between the remembering subject and the remembered object.

47 48 49 50

nerungen an eine Kindheit und Jugend (2006), also Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Mein Leben (1999), Elie Wiesel, Alle Flüsse fließen ins Meer (1994), Günter de Bruyn, Zwischenbilanz (1992) and Vierzig Jahre (1996). Other recent Familienromane include Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang (2002), Uwe Timm, Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003), Ulla Hahn, Unscharfe Bilder (2003), Thomas Medicus, In den Augen meines Großvaters (2004), and Gila Lustiger, So sind wir. Ein Familienroman (2005). Eigler locates the Familienroman near the Generationenroman. Friederike Eigler, Gedächtnis und Geschichte in Generationenromanen seit der Wende, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2005, 24-26. See Eva Lezzi, Zerstörte Kindheit: Literarische Autobiographien zur Shoah, Köln: Böhlau, 2001, 116-33. Marianne Hirsch’s observations on “the mother/daughter plot” are helpful here. Hirsch sees nineteenth-century women writers turning away from the ideology of motherhood, constructing instead heroines that refuse conventional marriage, heterosexuality, and motherhood. In the twentieth century, in particular in post-modernism, Hirsch posits that women writers highlight the bond between mother and daughter, displacing fathers, brothers, and husbands in the process. See Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989, 8-17.

20

Introduction

At the same time, the narrator seeks to bridge the distance to her childhood, realizing that it offers the one and only glimpse into the past. The tension between associative recollection and analytical reflection leads to a multi-layered text that often includes multiple levels in time, different literary styles, even changing language and speech. A final though less obvious juxtaposition derives from the fact that three writers of this study (Christa Wolf, Barbara Honigmann, and Monika Maron) grew up in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (though Honigmann and Maron left the country before its demise) and three writers (Ruth Klüger, Wibke Bruhns, and Tanja Dückers) spent their formative years in the Federal Republic (FRG) (in Klüger’s case, also in Austria and the United States). While it has been debated what constitutes GDR literature and whether it makes sense to retain the category after reunification, Helen Bridge in the introduction to her monograph Women’s Writing and Historiography in the GDR (2002) suggests that it is useful to distinguish literatures of the two former Germanies even after 1989, since they were written under vastly different ideological conditions and constraints. I concur with her argument. Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood, for instance, the only text included in this study that was published before reunification, requires (like other texts written in East Germany) a reading that considers the work’s subversive subtext and publishing pressures. Conversely, the publication of Patterns of Childhood paved the way for a confrontation with the GDR regime that Honigmann and Maron continue in open rather than concealed form. It makes good sense to consider Wolf, Honigmann, and Maron in one context, especially since the strategies of literary dissent, as for example Wolf’s 1970s rediscovery and utilization of Romantic literature as a visionary alternative to socialist reality, continue to reverberate in works by Honigmann and Maron. Wolf also introduced a search for subjectivity that became a central concern in GDR literature and is of crucial importance in Honigmann’s and Maron’s work. While both Honigmann and Maron challenge a narrow definition of GDR literature, their work ought to be read against the backdrop of both women’s struggles with the GDR regime. For both authors, the painstaking recovery of their Jewish heritage also turns into a political act in a state that had suppressed multiculturalism. Women writers in the GDR developed their own ideas of what constitutes the female subject, independent from Western feminist theory and practice. Accordingly, while all authors of this study emphasize the significance and centrality of gender, Wolf, Honigmann, and Maron come to a different understanding of women’s concerns and perspectives than Klüger, Bruhns, and Dückers, whose work is visibly influenced by the feminist movements in West Germany and the United States. Bruhns’s

Introduction

21

and Dückers’s texts in particular respond explicitly to the West German student movement and the ensuing Father Books. As the texts of both former East and West Germany are products of each state’s history and also participate in the writing of the state’s historiography, I am reading each text against the backdrop of its socio-political context while taking into account aesthetic and stylistic qualities. Memory Matters puts into dialogue texts by a child of German bystanders (Wolf), an Austrian-Jewish child-survivor (Klüger), a daughter of Jewish émigrés (Honigmann), a daughter of an officer involved in the attempted Hitler assassination (Bruhns), a granddaughter of a baptized Polish Jew (Maron), and a granddaughter of German refugees from East Prussia (Dückers). Yet these designations are by no means defining categories for the authors who move beyond binary concepts and include other cultural contexts, emphasizing both diversity and a gender-specific discourse. My approach questions the assumption that German-gentile and German-Jewish postwar experiences are necessarily diametrically opposed (i.e. respond to a “negative symbiosis”51) and seeks to uncover intersections and continuities in addition to conflicts. With references to a male-dominated Holocaust and postwar literature canon, my work considers both well-known and less-recognized texts, examining the processes and transmissions of memory and exploring the complicated mother-daughter relationship to illuminate generational conflicts from a female perspective. In both Klüger’s and Wolf’s texts, a shared traumatic experience does not bring mother and daughter closer, but rather produces the narrator’s profound ambivalence vis-à-vis her mother. Whether the narrator seeks to convey her own memories to her children or to uncover memories of parents and grandparents, her quest produces tensions that threaten the family as a unit while also disputing public discourses of GDR and FRG historiography. Family dynamics and questions of victimhood and bystandership become even more complex for daughters and granddaughters of the post-Holocaust generations who disembowel diverging stories of parents and grandparents and are also confronted with the ever-growing institutional memory of the Holocaust. The introductory chapters to the three parts of my work summarize pertinent political, historical, and cultural developments, and introduce related literary works and their reception. These chapters also correlate 51

Whereas Jack Zipes in his eloquent essay “The Negative German-Jewish Symbiosis” expands Diner’s concept to maintain that a negative symbiosis marks German-Jewish identity throughout the entire twentieth century, I believe that staging the two as opposites simplifies the issue and reduces the complex, multifaceted dimensions of German-Jewish relationships and identities.

22

Introduction

relevant research and theoretical considerations that emerged in the United States and Germany. The chapter “War Children and Child Survivors” in part I juxtaposes Susan R. Suleiman’s concept of a 1.5 generation of survivors who experienced the Holocaust as children with Sabine Bode’s definition of a “forgotten generation” of Germans who suffered the war as children.52 The chapter also outlines definitions of trauma and provides an overview to postwar developments in East and West Germany. The chapter “The Children of Survivors and Bystanders” in part II connects research on the children of survivors, in particular Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, to work on postwar German culture, including the aftermath of the 1968 student movement. “The Grandchildren of Nazi Victims, Perpetrators, Collaborators, and Bystanders” in part III, finally, examines emerging research on the subsequent generation, i.e. grandchildren who witness both an inter-familial dialogue and the socio-political discourse on the Nazi past, and who observe how communicative memory turns into cultural memory.53 In the decades after the war, Germany’s literary production was accompanied by fierce public debate, proof that the Nazi era is still an extremely sensitive topic, and that its historiography and literary recollection continue to be negotiated. My three introductory chapters trace these developments as far as they are relevant to the discussion of the literary texts. While undoubtedly overlapping, part I generally covers the response of the war’s witnesses, delineating the Historians’ Dispute [Historikerstreit], the German-German Literature Debate [Literaturstreit], Walser’s Peace Prize Speech, and the most recent dispute on Grass’s SS revelation. part II, concerned with a generation born after the war, a generation blessed with innocence and hope and cursed with the legacy of guilt, addresses the genre of Father Books [Väterliteratur] and its contemporary variations, the debates spurred by W.G. Sebald and Jörg Friedrich on Germans as victims of the war, and German-Jewish literature since 1989. Correspondingly, part III examines the debates pertaining to the generation of grandchildren, like the phenomenon of the literary fräulein-miracle [literarisches Fräuleinwunder]. The chapter also investigates the recent genre of the family novel [Familienroman] and discusses how institutional memory presented in 52

53

Sigrid Weigel also mentions the concept of a “concealed generation” of authors born in the time between the generation of bystanders/perpetrators and their offspring. “‘Generation’ as a Symbolic Form: On the Genealogical Discourse of Memory since 1945,” The Germanic Review 77.4 (Fall 2002): 264-277, 72. See Jan Assmann’s distinction between communicative memory, which is circulated in witnessing and in dialogue, and cultural memory, a carefully crafted mediation of the past. 50-56.

Introduction

23

museums, memorials, and the media complements or clashes (sometimes both) with personal recollection in the family. By the merit of their artistic nature, all six texts included in this study transcend theoretical categories and turn out to be far more ambiguous and contradictory. Privileging the open nature of literary texts over theoretical classification, my work analyzes each text individually and independently, yet it is guided by similar questions and approaches related to memory and female identity. As a literature scholar, I have chosen the following texts based on artistic value and literary significance,54 as well as thematic and perceptual considerations. This book takes Christa Wolf’s landmark Patterns of Childhood, the fictionalized account of Wolf’s upbringing in Nazi Germany, as a point of departure. With its non-linear, multi-layered structure, its reflection on memory and recollection, its references to Germans as perpetrators and victims of the war, its focus on women’s life in Nazi Germany and the mother-daughter relationship, Wolf’s text concretely influenced all other works included in this book, as well as other autobiographical undertakings in both East and West. While Patterns of Childhood is still a document shaped by cold war ideology, some of Wolf’s recent work, in particular her prose narrative In the Flesh (2005, Leibhaftig, 2002) and the diary project One Day a Year: 1960-2000 (2007, Ein Tag im Jahr 1960-2000, 2003) shed new insights and interpretations on the 1976 text after reunification. Though a number of scholars have analyzed Patterns of Childhood in detail, few have reconsidered the text from a post-unification perspective in light of the Sebald debate and Wolf’s later work.55 Ruth Klüger’s esteemed memoir weiter leben. Eine Jugend56 conversely embeds the author’s memories of how she survived Auschwitz as a girl in 54 55

56

Though the aesthetic value of any artistic work is highly subjective and always a biased judgment, all of the works included have elicited highest praise and garnered literary awards that are mentioned in the individual chapters. See, for instance, Dennis Tate’s well-researched analysis of what he calls Wolf’s “autobiographical writing” from The Quest for Christa T. to In the Flesh. Tate considers Wolf alongside Brigitte Reimann, Franz Fühmann, Stefan Heym, and Günter de Bruyn, but leaves out a gender analysis altogether. Dennis Tate, Shifting Perspectives: East German Autobiographical Narratives before and after the End of the GDR, Rochester: Camden House, 2007. See also the 2006 volume BIOS, devoted to “Nationalsozialismus und Krieg in literarischen Autobiographien: 30 Jahre ‘Kindheitsmuster’ von Christa Wolf.” See BIOS: Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, Oral History und Lebensverlaufsanalysen 19.2 (2006). Since Klüger’s German weiter leben. Eine Jugend and her own English translation Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered are two different books, written for different audiences, I have refrained from treating Still Alive as a mere translation of weiter leben. Hence, I am using the German title to refer to the German original and the English title to refer specifically to the English version. In cases when the German and English versions overlap, I have

24

Introduction

a meta-discourse on the representation and misrepresentation of the Holocaust 1945-1991. Like Wolf’s novel, Klüger’s memoir contrasts the child’s with the adult’s perspective, mistrusting any nostalgic recollection of the past. Klüger, more so than Wolf, emphasizes her feminist point of view, openly challenging male and female readers to rethink their approaches to the Holocaust. While both Wolf and Klüger seek to uncover unfamiliar memories, Barbara Honigmann and Wibke Bruhns are concerned with their parents’ memories, as they themselves have no first-hand memories of Nazi Germany. By reestablishing her Jewish family’s genealogy, Honigmann belatedly discovers and acquires her identities as a Jew, an émigré, a mother, and a German writer. Much as Wolf before, Honigmann revives the tradition of German Romanticism in order to stake out her own position. But in contrast to her earlier nostalgic, fictionalized quest for her father, her latest work depicts the life of her mother in a more factual tone. Like Honigmann, Bruhns is profoundly shaped by transmitted memories and seeks to belatedly reconstruct the lives of parents. In her literary biography, Bruhns admits that she hardly remembers her father, Hans Georg Klamroth, an enthusiastic Nazi and later co-conspirator of the attempted Hitler assassination on July 20, 1944. Faced with an ambiguous mixture of complicity and resistance, she refuses to either condemn or glorify her parents’ actions, seeking instead to understand them. As the most recent listeners to the Nazi past, the generation of grandchildren is the last direct link to the witnesses of National Socialism, though memories of Nazi Germany are now twice removed and mediated by another generation. Even as the generation of Hitler’s contemporaries is passing away, along with their memories, public discourse on National Socialism and the Holocaust has grown exponentially. To the generation of grandchildren, memories of parents and grandparents complement, contradict, and confirm one another. Faced with selection and distortion of both familial and institutional representations of the past, and with the loss of memory, these grandchildren increasingly come to use their imagination to fill the gaps of memory and history. In this way, Monika Maron integrates in her “family story” Pavel’s Letters (2002, Pawels Briefe, 1999) her Jewish grandfather whom she never knew back into the family, using her mother’s memories, Pawel’s letters, photography, and her creative imagiincluded quotes from Sill Alive as translations of weiter leben. In cases when the German text deviates from the English one, I have used my own, more literal translation of weiter leben. For more detail on the differences between the two texts, see my article “From weiter leben (1992) to Still Alive (2001): Klüger’s ‘German Book’ For an American Audience,” The German Quarterly 77.3 (2004): 324-39.

Introduction

25

nation. Conversely, Tanja Dückers depicts the interplay of three generations in her novel Himmelskörper (2003, Celestial Bodies), which sheds light on the protagonist’s grandparents’ support of Nazi Germany. Working against denial, taboo, and mystification, each writer pleads for more openness and honesty when dealing with the past, realizing that postwar Germany continues to be shaped by its shameful past and its attempts to flush and forget. By placing alongside the texts of female victims, bystanders, and co-participants, their daughters and granddaughters, German-gentiles and German-Jews, both from the Federal Republic and GDR, I attempt to illuminate the vexed relationships between these groups in contemporary Germany, relocating ties that Nazi politics destroyed. As Klüger indicates, perhaps it is time to reflect back on memories of Nazi Germany with a more comprehensive view. The question of how we go on living with different memories of the same events applies not just to those of us who were actually in the concentration camps. If the question is worth asking, then it is because Auschwitz is part of the history of anyone who is living after Auschwitz, it is part of Europe’s history. And therefore all of us, even those who were born later, are to a certain extent survivors of the Holocaust. 57

Reading Wolf, Klüger, Honigmann, Bruhns, Maron, and Dückers in dialogue and juxtaposition is meant as a step in this very direction.

57

“Die Frage, wie man mit unterschiedlichen Erinnerungen desselben Geschehens weiterlebt, gilt heute nicht nur für die unter uns, die tatsächlich in den KZs waren. Wenn die Frage wertvoll ist, so ist sie es, weil alle, die nach Auschwitz leben, Auschwitz in ihrer, in Europas Geschichte haben, so dass wir alle, selbst die Nachgeborenen, gewissermaßen Überlebende des Holocaust sind.” Ruth Klüger, “Von hoher und niedriger Literatur: Missbrauch der Erinnerung: KZ-Kitsch” (1996), 54. Translation is my own.

Part I: Remembering Childhood in Nazi Germany

War Children and Child Survivors The first part of this study places Ruth Klüger’s Holocaust memoir weiter leben. Eine Jugend (1992, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, 2001) alongside Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood (1980, Kindheitsmuster, 1976), a fictionalized account of the author’s youth during National Socialism. Both women experienced the Nazi onslaught, war, and defeat at approximately the same age (Wolf was born in 1929, Klüger in 1931) but in vastly different ways. As a child survivor, Klüger is part of what Susan R. Suleiman coined the “1.5 generation”; Wolf, on the other hand, belongs to nearly the same age cohort that Sabine Bode termed “war children” [Kriegskinder], gentile children born in Germany in the years 1930 to 1945.1 Both terms, war children and child survivors, include multiple generations with diverse experiences, and ignore differences in age, social class, religious background, country of origin, and gender. Yet it makes good sense to distinguish children/adolescents as a separate category since to the Nazis, children held the promise of a future “Aryan” nation. To that aim, the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls (compulsory after 1939) sought to infiltrate children with Nazi ideology, while at the same time Hitler propagated the merciless killing of both disabled and Jewish children. More recent research that has focused on the experience of children during World War II tends to include the accounts of boys and girls throughout Europe, expanding the narrow focus on German-gentile male adults. Studies that go beyond an understanding of war as an activity comprised of adult males also offer a context in which Wolf and Klüger’s gendered accounts can be placed. With respect to German-gentile children, Sabine Bode’s Die vergessene Generation: Die Kriegskinder brechen ihr Schweigen (2004, The Forgotten Generation: War Children Break their Silence) summarizes and analyzes countless interviews with war children that uncover a brutal and ruthless up-

1

Suleiman points out that the wide range of ages encompasses very different experiences, which makes any comparison problematic. See Susan Rubin Suleiman, “The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child Survivors and the Holocaust,” American Imago 59.3 (2002): 27795, 281. Bode, too, acknowledges crucial differences in experiences. See Sabine Bode, Die vergessene Generation: Die Kriegskinder brechen ihr Schweigen (2004), München: Piper, 2005, 16.

30

Part I: Remembering Childhood in Nazi Germany

bringing, so-called poisonous pedagogy,2 beatings, and sexual abuse.3 In addition, war children suffered frightful hours in air raid shelters, during frequent Allied bombings, and from ravaging epidemics, the destruction of homes and cities, and the experience of flight and expulsion. According to Bode, families were strained to the limit of their endurance both physically and psychologically, and children bore the consequences of separated parents and dispersed families, of fearful mothers, and of fathers who were missing, injured, or deceased. Bode’s emphasis on war-children adds to the general discourse on German suffering during war and flight that gained currency in the early 2000s. As discussed in more detail in “Recent Works on Germans as Victims of War” in part II, postwar-generation authors and scholars like W.G. Sebald and Jörg Friedrich documented the atrocity of the Allied air war in On the Natural History of Destruction (2003, Luftkrieg und Literatur, 1999), and The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945 (2006, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-45, 2002). In tandem with the ensuing public discussion, Günter Grass (born 1927), whose novels in the past had focused on the rise of the Nazis and the aftermath of National Socialism, reconstructed in fictional form the sinking of the German refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff, one of the greatest German nautical disasters in history, in Crabwalk (2003, Im Krebsgang, 2002). Grass’s distinguished work meticulously chronicles the lives of three prominent figures: Wilhelm Gustloff, the German leader of the Swiss Nazi party; David Frankfurter, the Jewish medical student who assassinated Gustloff; and Alexander Marinesko, the Russian submarine commander who gave orders to attack the Gustloff ship. Yet the historical facts are embedded in a fictional story of a family struggling to cope with the aftermath of the Gustloff catastrophe over three generations. While Tulla Pokriefke (whom Grass first depicted as a teenager in his 1961 novella Cat and Mouse [1963, Katz und Maus]) is obsessed with her story of survival on the Gustloff, her son Paul has grown weary of his mother’s endless self-aggrandizement, and his son, Konrad, glorifies Wilhelm Gustloff as a martyr on neo-Nazi Internet sites. Crabwalk underscores the necessity of representing German experiences of war and flight, suggesting that its tabooization in the past allowed the extreme right to capitalize on and benefit from the discourse. Following Grass’s bestselling work, the influential news magazine Der Spiegel published a special edition on German flight and expulsion in June 2002, on the war at Stalingrad in December 2002, and on the Allied 2 3

Alice Miller coined the term in Am Anfang war Erziehung to denote a wide variety of physical and psychological child abuse. See Bode, 68-69.

War Children and Child Survivors

31

bombings of Germany, or air war, in April 2003.4 Several popular television series, most notably historian Guido Knopp’s ZDF series History, focused on flight and expulsion (2001, 2006), on liberation (2004), and on the bombing of Dresden (2005). The German experience of war also became the subject of conference sessions, exhibitions, and additional publications. The surge of interest prompted war children to remember and describe their experiences to a German public that, arguably for the first time, had come to pay attention to accounts of firestorms, bombings, flight, relocation, hunger, rape, prisoners and casualties of war. Bode’s 2004 volume is a testament to this interest; so is the first International Convention of War Children [Internationaler Kriegskinderkongress] that met in 2005 in Frankfurt a. M. with over 600 attendees. At the same time, international scholars published on the topic. Lynn H. Nicholas’s Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web (2005) expands in scope from Germany to Europe; in the extensive Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives Under the Nazis (2005), Oxford historian and son of German-Jewish emigrants Nicholas Stargardt examines the fate of young German Nazis and child survivors, as well as young bystanders, collaborators, and supporters of the regime. Nicholas’s and Stargardt’s more comprehensive volumes include the fate of young Germans drafted into the army, of Jewish children placed on Kindertransports, of Polish teenagers during the German assault, of Norwegian girls selected for eugenics, of disabled children taken from their families, of young delinquents in Germany, and of English and Spanish children affected by the war.5 Though Bode’s interviews of children specify the devastating consequences of both Nazi child-raising practices and of the war, they conspicuously omit the many instances when children benefited from the Nazi rule. Conversely, Stargardt’s documents indicate that many Germans re4

5

See “Die Flucht der Deutschen,” Der Spiegel, March 3, 2002 (published as Spiegel Spezial in June 2002), “Hitlers Stalingrad,” Der Spiegel, December 16, 2002, “Als das Feuer vom Himmel fiel. Der Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland,” Der Spiegel, January 6, 2003 (published later in book form). For more information, see Herman Beyersdorf, “Günter Grass’ Im Krebsgang und die Vertreibungsdebatte im Spiegel der Presse,” Wende des Erinnerns? Geschichtskonstruktionen in der deutschen Literatur nach 1989, eds. Barbara Beßlich, Katharina Grätz, Olaf Hildebrand, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2006, 157-67, and the debate “WWII bombing: rethinking German experiences” at http://www.h-net.org/~german/ discuss/WWII_bombing/WWII-bombing_index.htm. Accessed July 17, 2007. As a literary scholar, I find Stargardt’s practice of combining literary and non-literary sources problematic. Stargardt incorporates excerpts from well-known literary works by Timm, Klüger, Klemperer, and Maschmann, less-known autobiographies, diaries, letters, and anonymous files into one personal narrative, told from the perspective of an omnipresent narrator, without reflection on the texts’ varying genres.

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Part I: Remembering Childhood in Nazi Germany

member their childhood in the Third Reich as a happy time, struggling only as adults with the legacy of what they learned later. While Bode espouses the view that Germans (especially young Germans) were victims of war, and does not acknowledge their support for it, their profit from it, and their responsibility, Stargardt points to the dangers of viewing children as (passive) innocent victims, countering that children, too, are “the subjects of history.”6 Accordingly, Stargardt uncovers instances when boys in the Hitler Youth supported Nazi Politics by terrorizing Jews, and when girls helped resettle new “Living Space” [Lebensraum] in the East, expelling Poles in the process. While claiming to illuminate the fate of a so-called forgotten generation, Bode fails to name celebrated German postwar author Christa Wolf who had, back in 1976, published a novel that sheds light on the narrator’s privileged childhood in Nazi Germany, the socialization process in family and school, and the traumatic experience of war and its aftermath. In contrast to Bode’s undertaking, Wolf explores the connections of traumatic and everyday memories in order to uncover the subtleties of life during National Socialism, emphasizing the salience of gender. Wolf also addresses the conundrum of her generation that was too young to be responsible for bringing Hitler to power, yet old enough to embrace and benefit from Nazi ideology. Also missing from Bode’s analyses are accounts of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Facing minimal chances of survival in hiding and nearly none in the concentration camps, few Jewish children and adolescents survived to give testimony of their ordeal. As soon as 1933, Jewish children were forced out of German schools and universities. Beginning in 1941, it became mandatory for them to wear a yellow star and soon thereafter deportations began. According to Suleiman, these children suffered traumatic violence before being able to form a stable adult identity, responding to the atrocities with “premature bewilderment and helplessness.”7 Forced into early adulthood, children had to make choices about their own and others’ survival, often taking care of additional, sometimes older, family members. After the war, these children and adolescents sought to establish their lives and did not identify themselves as a separate generation or even as survivors, especially if they survived in hiding or by emigration. Research on child survivors emerged only in the late 1970s, leading to the generation’s self-identification, to its organization in groups, 6 7

Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives Under the Nazis, London: Random House, 2005, 19. Suleiman, 277. At the same time, Suleiman maintains that all Jews faced so-called choiceless choices, in that they could not change their fate (283).

War Children and Child Survivors

33

and to testimonies of their experience.8 Acknowledging crucial differences based on the year and place of birth, class, gender, and familial context, Suleiman posits that the small group of the “1.5 generation” delayed its response to the trauma they experienced. Research on children during in the Nazi era confirms their resilience: the exceptionally few child survivors generally responded to persecution with shock and quick adaptability, while young witnesses of the war protected themselves with emotional distance and numbing. Scholarship seems to agree that children were generally able to overcome the damage, focusing in the postwar years on restoring or founding families, on advancing careers, and on rebuilding postwar societies. Refraining from complaints, they rarely voiced their pain until decades later. Perhaps this is also the reason why many children (including Wolf and Klüger) come to bear witness only belatedly. In oral and written testimony, child survivors detail their survival and the belated, post-traumatic aftereffects of the Holocaust. Accounts of war children, conversely, typically depict their elation in the Hitler Youth organizations, fear and distress during the final war years, and the struggle of coming to terms with Hitler’s legacy in the postwar era. Yet the effects of Hitler’s genocide cannot be compared to the Germans losing the war, the disintegration of Nazi ideology, and subsequent guilt over Jewish persecution. As Saul Friedlander poignantly sums up, the traumatic experience for war children and child survivors was a fundamentally different one. For Jews of whatever age, the fundamental traumatic situation was and is the Shoah and its sequels; for Germans, it was national defeat (including flight from the Russians and loss of sovereignty) following upon national exhilaration.9

Historians have extensively examined the categories of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders in isolation, while literary studies perceived Holocaust testimonies and German texts about the Nazi past as discrete genres. While these approaches have been necessary in the past to identify and investigate each category, they have also prevented an investigation of wide gaps and obscure junctures. Juxtaposing the first-hand narratives by a German-Jewish and a German-gentile woman, the following chapters seek to illuminate two instances when a victim refuses to be seen as merely a victim and when a bystander struggles with the legacy of co8 9

According to Suleiman, the term “child survivor” emerged in the late 1970s, with scholarly research initially being linked to the treatment of children of child survivors (293). Saul Friedlander, “Trauma, Transference and ‘Working through’ in Writing the History of the Shoah, History and Memory 4.1 (Spring/Summer 1992): 39-59, 45.

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Part I: Remembering Childhood in Nazi Germany

perpetration. The developing field of trauma theory provides new tools for an examination of how Holocaust survivors, as well as those who formerly supported National Socialism remember, cope with, and narrate their pasts half a century later. The Vicissitudes of Trauma There exists no precise definition of trauma, since the concept is still changing and evolving. In Greek, “trauma” originally referred to a bodily injury or wound. Only in the late nineteenth century did physicians begin to refer to trauma as an injury of the mind, resulting from an unpredictable, sudden and overwhelming shock.10 In his foundational essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920, “Jenseits des Lustprinzips”), Sigmund Freud turned his attention to shell-shocked soldiers from World War I and was puzzled by the fact that these soldiers continued to suffer rather than overcome their psychological injury. After diagnosing symptoms such as nightmares, flashbacks, and accidents that victims interpreted as repetitions of their trauma, Freud concluded that a traumatic experience possesses so much force that it breaks through the ego’s protective shield. Since one can neither anticipate nor psychologically prepare for a traumatic experience, it comes as a shock that overwhelms the human psychic system of self-defense, remaining outside of one’s everyday experience. This stimulus absorbs all available psychic systems, thereby overriding the pleasure principle.11 Freud recognized that a traumatic event cannot simply be healed like a bodily injury since it is not accessible in an unmediated way, but only in its belated effects. Surfacing in memories, flashbacks, and nightmares, trauma cannot be accessed at will and cannot be fixed in space and time. Our mental system seeks to master trauma retrospectively following a period of latency or “incubation,” producing what Freud called the repetition compulsion [Wiederholungszwang]. Referring to Freud’s analysis, Cathy Caruth incorporates the notion of such compulsion in her definition of trauma:

10

11

See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1996, 3. For a historiography of trauma and a presentation of the development of ideas about trauma that contests Caruth’s, see also Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, U of Chicago P: Chicago, 2000. See Sigmund Freud, “Jenseits des Lustprinzips,” Gesammelte Werke, Vol.12, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1940, 29.

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In its general definition, trauma is described as the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena.12

In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth concludes that not only is the original catastrophe traumatic, but so is the process of its coming into consciousness, that even “the passing out of it is traumatic; that survival itself, in other words, can be a crisis.”13 According to Caruth, this traumatic aftermath can be re-traumatizing and even life threatening, as high suicide rates of Holocaust survivors and Vietnam War veterans indicate.14 At the same time, these after-effects constitute the sole indications of a trauma that could not be acknowledged when it occurred, and thus comprise an attempt to belatedly claim a previously “unclaimed experience” and survival. In his work with survivor interviews collected at the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University, Lawrence L. Langer distinguishes different layers of memory, and details in particular the painful repercussions of “deep memory.”15 During the past two decades, the concept of trauma has been under revision. In the wake of the Vietnam War, new data in psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and neurobiology led to the recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. According to Ruth Leys, “post-traumatic stress disorder is fundamentally a disorder of memory”;16 Daniel Siegel’s definition reads as follows: PTSD is clinically characterized by both intrusive processes (memories, images, emotions, thoughts) and avoidance elements (psychic/emotional numbing, amnesia, behavioral avoidance of environmental cues resembling the initial trauma).17

While it has been established that a victim of PTSD has trouble recalling a traumatic event at will and suffers nightmares and flashbacks, the specific neurobiological processes are still very much under consideration. Most 12 13 14 15 16 17

Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 91. Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995, 9. See Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 63. See Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, New Haven: Yale UP, 1991. Leys, 2. Daniel Siegel, “Memory, Trauma, and Psychotherapy: A Cognitive Science View,” The Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research 4 (1995): 93-122, 116. Judith Herman offers a more detailed definition of PTSD that is based on seven diagnostic criteria and was used for inclusion in the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association. See Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, New York: Basic Books, 1992, 121.

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scholars and scientists have repudiated Freud’s idea of a “protective shield,” and disagree on whether trauma overwhelms the psyche’s mechanisms of registering and recording events,18 whether a period of “latency” prevents an articulation of trauma, and whether traumatic events are absorbed and processed differently than non-traumatic events.19 The classification of PTSD has led to fluctuating, restless, and continually expanding definitions of trauma. While in 1980, the American Psychiatric Association regarded only those events as traumatic which were “outside the range of usual human experience,”20 nowadays we have come to understand that war, violence, rape, spousal and child abuse, accidents, and disease are, sadly, not unusual in our lives. Moreover, research on the children of Holocaust survivors has spurred research on whether trauma can be transmitted to another generation, and how. The Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry now defines trauma in broad terms as “intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation.”21 This rather general and vague definition measures trauma by its symptoms not its source, a practice which potentially erases critical differences between illness and violence and between collective and individual trauma. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that in today’s confessional culture, traumatic symptoms and their diagnoses are plentiful, while research on PTSD and trauma studies—both in the humanities and sciences—is still in its infancy. In the 1980s and 1990s, adults frequently “remembered”—often in therapy and under hypnosis—instances of childhood molestation and abuse that had allegedly happened several decades ago, charges which the accused family members usually denied. These incidents mostly involved sexual abuse and satanic rituals, cases which could only be settled in a court of law and often resulted in inconclusive answers as to whether the abuse took place or not. These recent examples of the “recovered memory syndrome” (also termed “false memory syndrome”) seem to be part of the contemporary obsession with trauma. Holocaust memories also surfaced. In 1995, the prestigious Suhrkamp Press published Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit 193918 19

20 21

Caruth indicates it does while Susan Brison suggests otherwise. See Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002. According to Siegel, brain research indicates that in contrast to “regular” memories, traumatic memories may not be subject to cortical processing, a process of consolidating memories from the hippocampus to the associational cortex that is believed to happen during dreaming and REM sleep. If traumatic memories cannot be processed and consolidated cortically, they cause both amnesia (impaired recall) and hypermnesia (intrusive recall). Siegel 113-114. Other neuroscientists have challenged this view. Herman, 33. Herman, 33.

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1948 (Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, 1996), which detailed the author’s childhood in Riga, his internment at Majdanek and Auschwitz, and adoption by Swiss doctors. The book was translated into numerous languages and won prominent awards. But in August 1998, Swiss journalist Daniel Ganzfried revealed that the highly acclaimed autobiographical memoir was not based on fact and that Wilkomirski was in fact Bruno Grosjean, born in 1941 and adopted in 1945 by the Swiss couple Dössekker. Apparently, Wilkomirski (aka Grosjean/Dössecker) had reinvented himself with gusto as a Jewish victim of the Holocaust, staging public lectures throughout Germany and France. The notorious case roused heated discussions on the genre of autobiography, historiography of the Holocaust, and on memory and trauma.22 The discovery of the “recovered memory syndrome” spurred additional trauma research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. In his excellent introduction to the anthology Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, Daniel L. Schacter distinguishes between distortion on a micro (brain cells and synapses) and macro (societies and cultures) level,23 and provides a historical overview to memory distortion. While Freud still grappled with the idea of false recollection,24 Maurice Halbwachs believed that illusions and distortions are evidence of society’s influence on the individual and thus an inevitable part of collective memory. Nowadays, there is scientific neurobiological evidence “for ongoing change, reorganization, and plasticity in the brain at the level of cells and synapses,” which suggests “a fertile substrate for distortion to occur.”25 Yet the controversy remains as to whether or not traumatic memories are more accurate than other memories, and whether they can surface after having remained “dormant” for twenty or thirty years.26 22 23 24

25 26

For detail, see Das Wilkomirski-Syndrom. Eingebildete Erinnerungen oder von der Sehnsucht, Opfer zu sein, eds. Irene Diekmann and Julius Schoeps, Zürich: Pendo, 2002, and Jay Geller, “The Wilkomirksi Case: Fragments or Figments?” American Imago 59.3 (2002): 343-65. See Daniel L. Schacter, “Memory Distortion: History and Current Status,” Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed. Daniel L. Schacter, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995, 1-33, 3. While Freud initially believed that all of his patients who claimed so had been sexually abused, he later turned away from his “seduction theory” (for reasons which are hotly debated), favoring instead the concept of “Screen Memories” (1899), i.e. the idea that memories are distorted and replaced by fantasies. See Schacter, 6-7. Schacter, 25. According to the New York Times, clinicians such as Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and Daniel Brown maintain that traumatic memories can be repressed and recovered decades later, while cognitive psychologists such as Daniel L. Schacter argue that trauma cannot be forgotten. See Bruce Grierson, “A Bad Trip Down Memory Lane,” The New York Times, July 31, 2003.

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While emotionally arousing and traumatic memories tend to be particularly well retained, so far research seems to support a dynamic view of memory that includes the possibility of distortion, forgetting, and the remembrance of false memories. Moreover, studies have shown that memories, including traumatic memories, can be influenced, altered, or made up altogether even if an individual recalls them in detail and with great confidence and emotion. Complicating matters, neither laymen nor professionals can tell the difference between authentic and fictional memories. In this vein, neurobiologist Stuart Zola suggests that “neural representations of events are continually being modified and reorganized with time” in the brain and that traumatic memories are processed and stored no differently than other memories.27 In light of this research, it is evermore pressing to insist in historical specificities and distinctions rather than to assume a generally applicable experience of historical trauma. According to Daniel L. Schacter, the recent explosion of recovered memories could be rooted in today’s “culture of victimization,” and the recent emergence of false Holocaust memories (as well the phenomenon of collective Holocaust denial) would support this thesis. Significantly, both Wolf and Klüger shy away from the overused term trauma, articulating and examining instead painful memories while reflecting on memory’s capacity for distortion and nostalgia. Klüger also emphasizes the importance of historical accuracy vis-à-vis Holocaust kitsch and sentimentality that manipulates an emotional response. Demanding involvement and critical reflection, both writers encourage their reader to rethink approaches to human suffering as well as existing categories of communication. The Holocaust, War, and Defeat It was not until the 1980s that scholars began to deconstruct the universal category of a “survivor,” paying attention to gender, age, religion, class, social background, and different means of survival. First and foremost, gender and age determined Jewish survival in the camps: at Auschwitz and other slave labor camps, guards separated men and women and sent the old or weak, women with small children, and children and adolescents to

27

Stuart M. Zola, “The Neurobiology of Recovered Memory,” The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 9 (1997): 454. Many thanks to the author for discussing the issue with me at length.

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their immediate death.28 Many women selected for slave labor voluntarily followed their children. While motherhood was directly linked to extermination, fatherhood was not. For Jewish children, the Holocaust had particularly dire consequences. Sources indicate that the prewar population of about 1.6 million Jewish children was reduced to 100,000, amounting to approximately 1.5 million children killed.29 An extreme example is Poland, once home to the largest population of Jews. Of about one million Jewish children under the age of fourteen, approximately 5,000 survived—one half of one percent.30 Most children who survived did so in hiding because their parents had placed them in gentile families, convents, monasteries, or orphanages. About 18,000 children were able to leave Germany because their parents were lucky enough to find a spot on the so-called children’s transports heading to Palestine, the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands before 1939,31 but younger children usually stayed with their mothers. In the labor camps, no rules spelled out at what age adolescents were selected for labor rather than death, so that selection differed from camp to camp and depended on the time of arrival. Even for adolescents who passed the initial screening, chances of survival were minimal as they could not withstand starvation, disease, and frequent beatings. Generally, children who appeared more mature had a somewhat better chance of survival.32 In this way, Klüger passed the selection for a working camp by claiming to be older; her fate, however, was highly dependent on luck and also linked to her mother’s in that both chose to remain with each other. For the small minority of survivors, the traumatic experience of the Holocaust did not cease with liberation. Due to extreme starvation, prisoners continued to die after the war while being cared for in hospitals. 28 29

30 31 32

The only exception being the Theresienstadt family camp of Auschwitz II, a section for Jewish families from the Theresienstadt ghetto that were all killed after six months. According to Nechama Tec, Jewish children had a survival rate of only six to seven percent compared to thirty-three percent of the general Jewish population. See Tec, “A Historical Perspective: Tracing the History of the Hidden-Child Experience,” The Hidden Children: The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust, ed. Jane Marks, New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993, 273-91, 281. While Tec does not define the age of children, Debórah Dwork, another scholar on the subject, uses a definition of ages between 0 and 16 years. Dwork agrees with the estimated death rate of 1.5 million children but concludes that 11 percent of European Jewish children survived the war. See Debórah Dwork, Children With A Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991, XI. Tec, 281. See Marion A. Kaplan, “Jewish Women in Nazi Germany: Daily Life, Daily Struggles, 1933-1939,” Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, eds. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, New York: Paragon House, 1993, 187-212. See Dwork, 210.

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Later, survivors were transferred to so-called Displaced Persons Camps, where they endured hunger and chaotic circumstances while awaiting lengthy immigration procedures, a process that in many cases took years. It was only after liberation that survivors learned the fate of their families and friends and began to grasp the full extent of the Nazi genocide. In the face of such devastating losses, they searched for remaining loved ones and started new families to “undo the threat of genocide.”33 Women affirmed their survival by reconfirming their fertility; in the postwar years, the Displaced Persons Camps’ birth rate was among the highest in the world.34 As survivors settled in new home countries, learned foreign languages, adapted to different cultures, found work, and started new families, they found it difficult to cope with their loss, particularly since there was no public recognition or public outlet for their grief. Evidence of psychological injury came only decades later, when survivors were firmly established in their new lives and their children had grown older. Yet perhaps this delay in time was necessary for confronting the past, as Klüger reasons: We all participated in suppressing the past – the former inmates of course to a lesser extent than those who remained free and the former perpetrators to the greatest extent. For all of us, the ground under our feet was too hot, and almost all of us focused on new things. We tore down the old structures and often did not put up anything better in their place. (This image is more than a metaphor, for the old buildings were filled with memories.) Perhaps it is too hasty to conclude that this was simply wrong and cowardly in every case. Perhaps suppression was the first step in coming to terms with it.35

While denoting differences in the coping strategies of victims, bystanders, and perpetrators, Klüger seeks to explain the dearth of testimony during the 1940s and early 1950s in a less judgmental way. 33 34

35

Judith S. and Milton Kestenberg, “The Experience of Survivor-Parents,” Generations of the Holocaust, eds. Martin S. Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy, New York: Basic, 1982, 46-61, 56. See Atina Grossmann, “Trauma, Memory, and Motherhood: Germans and Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-Nazi Germany, 1945-49,” Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s, eds. Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 2003, 93-128, 110-11. “Wir waren alle beteiligt an der Verdrängung der Vergangenheit, die früheren Häftlinge freilich weniger als die Freigebliebenen, und die früheren Täter am meisten. Uns allen war der Boden unter den Füßen zu heiß, und fast alle haben wir uns auf Neues verlegt, die Altbauten abgerissen und oft nichts Besseres an ihre Stelle gesetzt. (Das Bild ist mehr als Metapher: Die alten Gebäude waren erinnerungsträchtig.) Vielleicht ist es eilfertig, pauschal zu urteilen, das sei nur falsch und feig gewesen. Vielleicht war die Verdrängung der erste Schritt zur Bewältigung.” Klüger, weiter leben: Eine Jugend, Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992, 213. Translation is my own.

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The French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard elucidates the aftermath of the Holocaust with another metaphor, that of an earthquake that not only destroyed lives but also the instruments to measure it. While the shortcomings of this analogy are obvious (the Holocaust was anything but a natural disaster), Lyotard convincingly illustrates that a crime like the Holocaust surpassed any previous frame of reference and could not be grasped or narrated in conventional terms in the decades following. Indeed, in the immediate postwar years, governments in Germany, the United States, and even Israel remained ignorant of the damage and needs of the survivors. Survivors who tried to reach Palestine before 1948 were turned back, but once the state of Israel was established it became a home for many survivors (about one fourth of Israel’s immigrants). Yet the “Promised Land” greeted survivors with avoidance and yet another war. Israel’s War of Independence, in which survivors comprised twenty-five percent of the fighting soldiers, pushed the Holocaust to the periphery, which was not discussed publicly, taught in schools, or researched at universities.36 In the decade following, however, Israel inaugurated the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in 1953 and established the Day of Holocaust Remembrance Yom HaShoah in 1959. In the United States, survivors “encountered a culture which glorifies success, optimism, and happiness, while shunning failure, pessimism, and suffering.”37 Enjoying their political and economic victory, Americans preferred to use World War II as a source of national pride, that is, to remember the “heroic liberators” rather than to contemplate the troubles of survivor-immigrants. In Europe, revisionist historians repeatedly and openly denied the Holocaust, and neither perpetrators nor bystanders as a group took responsibility for their crimes. As Nazi ideology could not be erased in days, months, or years, many Germans continued their racist beliefs, openly or in private. In a first official acceptance of accountability, the West German government agreed to restitution payments to Israel in 1952 and passed Federal Compensation Laws (BEG) in 1953 and 1956, granting individuals that were persecuted for racial, religious, or ideological reasons the right to file for reparation. Germany’s Compensation Law carried the unfortunate title “making good again” [Wiedergutmachung], implying that past crimes could be recti36

37

Eva Fogelman points out that during the fight for their nation, Zionists feared a possibly demoralizing impact of identifying Jews as victims of the Holocaust. Thus, there was little official remembrance until the early 1950s. Eva Fogelman, “Therapeutic Alternatives of Survivors,” The Psychological Perspectives of the Holocaust and of its Aftermath, ed. Randolph L. Braham, New York: Columbia UP, 1988, 86-93. Aaron Hass, The Aftermath: Living with the Holocaust, New York: Cambridge UP, 1995, 43.

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fied.38 And there were other problems, as the law ignored certain groups of victims like homosexuals and Sinti and Roma. As Sigrid Weigel in her illuminating essay “Shylocks Wiederkehr: Die Verwandlung von Schuld und Schulden oder: Zum symbolischen Tausch der Wiedergutmachung” (Shylock’s return: the conversion from guilt to dept, or: the symbolic tradeoff of reparation”) explained, the law was based on the notion of compensating survivors for visible damage rather than them offering a lump sum. This concept was problematic for several reasons. For one, it implied that victims would demand too much money, cunningly reiterating antiSemitic propaganda. For another, Jews and politically persecuted were only entitled to reparations if they were physically sick and moreover agreed to a lengthy examination process by a physician who could prove a causal link between symptoms and maltreatment in the camps. While many survivors declined to be subjected to German administrators and physicians in the first place, it turned out that most who did seek examination could not prove physical damage related to their time in the camps— not to mention that those with severe physical injuries had already succumbed in the camps. The law failed to compensate survivors for longlasting psychological damage that surfaced only decades later and was not yet accounted for by any kind of theory. Most psychiatrists and psychoanalysts in Germany (and the United States) simply did not draw a connection between their patients’ suffering and the Holocaust. By 1961, German-American psychoanalyst William Niederland, who had worked with the German government in examining compensation claims in New York, distinguished a variety of recurring symptoms he termed the “survivor syndrome” that included anxieties, panic attacks, memory distortions, nightmares, sleep disturbances, headaches, and irritability.39 By recognizing a psychological injury that went beyond traditional depression and was difficult to treat, Niederland and other psychoanalysts like Leo Eitinger challenged and redefined existing notions of trauma. More recently, “survivor syndrome” has come under criticism since it posits a rather fixed pathological profile, does not acknowledge survivors’ strength and vitality, and fails to distinguish symptoms among patients.40 38

39 40

As Constantin Goschler points out, the German word gutmachen was used for centuries as an acronym for atonement (14). Goschler offers an up-to-date, comprehensive account of the history of German compensation. See Constantin Goschler, Schuld und Schulden: Die Politik der Wiedergutmachung für NS-Verfolgte seit 1945, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005. See William Niederland “The Problem of the Survivor,” Journal of the Hillside Hospital 10 (1961): 233-247. See Jack Terry, “The Damaging Effects of the ‘Survivor Syndrome,’” Psychoanalytic Reflections of the Holocaust: Selected Essays, eds. Stephen A. Luel and Paul Marcus, New York:

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Nowadays, analysts agree that the psychological damage of the Holocaust is long-term and not easy to overcome, and tend to focus on an individual’s history in relation to the trauma. While survivors were haunted by the experience of the Holocaust, Germans witnessed and felt the consequences of national defeat. After Germany had been taken over by Allied Forces and German Acts of Unconditional Surrender were signed in both Reims, France, on May 7, 1945, and in the outskirts of Berlin shortly before midnight on May 8, 1945, the country and its people were devastated. All major cities had been razed to the ground by repeated Allied bombings, the economy lay in ruins, but the human cost far exceeded any material damage. According to Bode, German statistics in 1950 listed three million war casualties, two million people missing, two million war-disabled, and two million soldiers returning from imprisonment.41 However, these numbers were based on Wehrmacht reports which grossly underestimated its losses and did not include those still missing in action. Rüdiger Overmans since pointed out the blatant discrepancies of statistics on German war casualties in the past forty years and devoted himself to producing more reliable numbers.42 According to Overmans, 5,318,000 German soldiers died, including those missing.43 1944 and 1945 were by far the deadliest years of the war, accounting for 1.3 million war casualties from December 1944 to April 1945 alone. Estimates of the number of German civilians killed range from 500,000 to 2.1 million.44 More than 14 million people who had lost their homes crowded the streets as refugees,45 and nearly all Germans endured hunger and deprivation while trying to reconstruct buildings, families, and communities. As prisoners of war, former soldiers faced starvation, maltreatment, and forced labor, especially in the USSR. The vast majority of Ger-

41 42

43 44 45

KTAV, 1984, 135-150; Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg, “A Philosophical Critique of the ‘Survivor Syndrome,’” The Psychological Perspectives, ed. Braham, 53-78. Bode, 46. Rüdiger Overmans, “Die Toten des Zweiten Weltkriegs in Deutschland. Bilanz der Forschung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Wehrmacht- und Vertreibungsverluste,” Der Zweite Weltkrieg: Analysen, Grundzüge, Forschungsbilanz, ed. Wolfgang Michalka, München: Piper, 1989, 858-73. Rüdiger Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg München: Oldenbourg, 2004, 228. With many thanks to Scott Denham for providing me with this source and pointing out the misconception in the first place. Rüdiger Overmans, “Die Toten des Zweiten Weltkriegs in Deutschland: Bilanz der Forschung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Wehrmacht- und Vertreibungsverluste,” Der zweite Weltkrieg, ed. Wolfgang Michalka, München: Piper, 1989, 858-7. See Elizabeth Heinemann, “The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany’s ‘Crisis Years’ and West German National Identity,” The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany 1949-1968, ed. Hanna Schissler, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001, 21-56, 26-27.

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man soldiers never returned from Soviet POW camps, and those who did, often after years of captivity, came back severely traumatized. Women, children, and the elderly were most affected by the largescale air raids that forced them to take nightly shelter and devastated numerous homes. Liberation also held a particular threat to women and children in that the Allies’ acts of revenge often took the form of rape. Estimates on the number of women who were raped by the Red Army range to as much as one and a half million.46 Helke Sanders’s two-part documentary BeFreier und Befreite (Liberators Take Liberties, 1991-92) and the anonymous published diary Eine Frau in Berlin (2003, A Woman in Berlin, 2005) bear witness to the gruesome, often multiple acts of rape—and women’s clever and desperate responses to elude the threat. In a society largely devoid of men, women were solely responsible for the survival and safety of themselves and their families, and often performed heavy physical labor while fighting starvation. In these arduous times, most Germans were concerned with their immediate physical needs, struggling with flight, hunger, cold, and dispersed families amidst the ruins of their country. Based on testimony and interviews, most Germans were not particularly moved by the Nazis’ downfall, though some scholars, in particular Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich, suggest that the news of Hitler’s suicide came as a traumatic loss of a former ideal.47 After the Allies exposed the full atrociousness of the Holocaust, many Germans chose denial as a way of coping with the past. Most claimed they had not known anything about the extermination camps. Some former Nazis like Melita Maschmann refused to believe in the existence of such camps; many of them were either acquitted or received benevolent verdicts once they had convinced the Allied Forces that they were not actively involved in the murder of the European Jews. In the 1940s, all four Allied Forces, as well as Germans themselves aimed to restore life in Germany as quickly as possible, a goal which took precedence over an investigation of the Holocaust. It was generally assumed that SS men had followed higher orders, that the German Army had nothing to do with mass murder, and that most Germans were good people led astray by one madman, Hitler. But defeat and the slow recognition of the enormity of crimes did have a lasting psychological impact, as the ideologically constructed “master race” deteriorated into a source of shame. The Holocaust and national 46 47

Robert G. Moeller, “Germans as Victims? Thoughts on a Post-Cold War History of World War II’s Legacies,” History and Memory 17.1 (2005): 147-94, 151. For a more detailed discussion of the Mitscherlichs’ work, see the chapter “Postwar Developments in West Germany” in part I.

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defeat defined the national identity in East and West Germany for generations to come, affecting national and international politics, history, and culture. In the immediate the postwar decades, the clear-cut ideologies dictated by the cold war contributed to a bipolar memorialization of the Nazi past. It was only after reunification and the coming of age of yet another generation that the discourse of Germans as perpetrators could be linked to the discourse of Germans as war victims, beyond the allconsuming communist and capitalist ideologies of the cold war. Nowadays, Germans seem to increasingly acknowledge their status as victims of the war (consider the recent publications by Sebald, Friedrich, and Grass) and their status as perpetrators (consider also the erection of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe or the mounting of the Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition), embracing a complex and differentiated identity. Postwar Developments in East Germany Within a devastated and defeated Germany, the Soviet Occupied Zone (SBSZ) had suffered far more Allied war damage than the rest of the country, yet the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) could not offer extensive financial aid and reconstructive efforts comparable to those of the Western Allies. Moreover, the SMAD dismantled German equipment and infrastructure needed in Russia, thus leaving the East German population in greater poverty. In 1946, the government began expropriating land, businesses, and mineral resources; it also consistently removed former Nazis from administrative and educational positions. But this kind of socialism was administered from above and arrived from the top down rather than by revolution. Since the judicial system was not independent from political authority, East German denazification was related closely to the politics of SMAD and the Socialist Unity Party (SED), the ruling party founded in April 1946 as a (compulsory) union of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD).48 While East Germany’s first constitution of October 7, 1949 still contained many elements of a parliamentary democracy, these elements were gradually revoked; the second SED convention in July 1952 determined that the development of socialism was to be the primary political goal of the East German State.

48

For an extensive (and critical) look at East German denazification, see Timothy R. Vogt, Denazification in Soviet-Occupied Germany, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.

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Referring to the origins of the state, Wolfgang Emmerich coined the term foundation myth [Gründungsmythos],49 meaning that the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was theoretically conceived in opposition to both National Socialism and Western capitalism. According to this theory, National Socialism was merely an outgrowth of capitalism, and the antifascist regime of the GDR was the one and only response to both. When referring to the Nazi period, the administration shunned the term “National Socialism” in favor of the more universal term “fascism,” which was used in conjunction with “capitalism” and “imperialism.” The equation of capitalism with National Socialism failed to recognize the innate racist and anti-Semitic character of the Nazi regime and instead proposed that Communists had been its first and foremost victims.50 Accordingly, three prominent former concentration camps in East Germany that were remodeled as museums (Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen) celebrated communist, “anti-fascist” resistance, martyrdom, and heroism, thus marginalizing and calculatingly turning a blind eye to the extermination of European Jews. GDR songs, speeches, and ceremonies glorified Ernst Thälmann, a Communist leader who had been imprisoned and killed by the Nazis. The bend and subsequent pull of this institutionalized memory had practical repercussions, too. Communist members of the resistance who had fought against the Nazis in exile were entitled to the same pensions as Jewish survivors of the camps, and the government did not adopt restitution laws that considered the loss of property and other individual losses of Jews until 1990, after the state had begun to crumble. When in the early 1950s, Stalin adopted an anti-Zionist stance after his initial support for Israel, the GDR followed suit, forcing many Jews living in the GDR to disavow their Jewish heritage. In addition, the founding myth permitted East Germans to perceive themselves as victims of National Socialism and imperialist capitalism; war monuments and memorials reinforced this sentiment by celebrating the Red Army as liberators. As the 1949 national anthem promised, the new Germany that arose from the ruins carried no links to the Nazi past. This ideology not only collectively whitewashed East Germany’s past (by assigning guilt to only the most notorious Nazis and offering redemption in the form of Soviet-style reeducation), it also excluded war stories that collided with the official version of Russian liberation.51 49 50 51

Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR, Erweiterte Neuausgabe, Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1996, 29. For in-depth analysis, see scholarship by Jeffrey Herf and Thomas Fox. See Moeller’s illuminating analysis, 153-56.

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The GDR fashioned itself as a Literature Society [Literaturgesellschaft], which aimed for a greater availability and importance of literature in contrast to the alleged commercial exploitation of art in the West. Yet the politics of the Cultural Association of the GDR [Kulturbund] shaped a literary canon that was both homogeneous and regressive.52 Though the state’s Writers’ Association (founded in May 1952) offered East German authors various kinds of funding including fellowships or literature awards that afforded financial independence from the demands of the publishing market, all members of the organization had to pledge themselves to the growth and continuance of socialism. The Writers’ Association founded its own publishing house, the Aufbau Verlag (whose books could not be purchased in the West because of the communist orientation); all other publishing houses were also owned by the state, which meant that authors had to follow the official guidelines of Marxism/Leninism values in order to be published. Besides being forced to change or omit certain passages in their texts, authors exercised self-censorship since they had to seek final approval for publication by the national government. Accordingly, books of the reconstruction literature [Aufbauliteratur] were generally more concerned with looking ahead to the socialist utopia rather than back at the Nazi past. If socialist literature dealt with the Nazi regime, it either glorified communist resistance or portrayed a protagonist’s conversion from a Nazi (soldier) to a committed socialist.53 Authors who did not adhere closely to GDR ideology were forced to seek publishers abroad, most commonly in the FRG (like Monika Maron). Other harsher ramifications for public dissidents of the regime included arrests, lawsuits, and expulsions to the West. For women writers, it was no different. According to socialist ideology, GDR policies gave women parity with men, and the state seemed progressive indeed if one considered women’s rights and their participation in the workforce. Women figured prominently in GDR public life, the smaller and less wealthy Germany to which hopeful immigrants and burgeoning artists were drawn. Not financially dependent on their husbands, over ninety percent of GDR women had full-time jobs, most of them being mothers who benefited from highly subsidized child care. Women had a legal right to abortion as well as to a generous maternity leave, and it 52

53

The Deutscher Kulturbund was founded in July 1945 by Johannes R. Becher who returned from exile to become East Germany’s first Cultural Minister. Committed to antifascism and antimilitarism, the Kulturbund sought to revive Germany’s tradition of humanism but disapproved of modern writers such as Beckett, Kafka, Sartre. See Emmerich, 81-83. Some examples are Stephan Hermlin, Die Zeit der Gemeinsamkeit (1950); Ludwig Renn, Der spanische Krieg (1955); and Bruno Apitz, Nackt unter Wölfen (1979).

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comes as no surprise that the GDR’s birth rate was higher than in its capitalist neighbor state. Nevertheless, women were confined to lower-paying and lower-status jobs, and the party leadership remained almost exclusively male. As equal rights were legislated from above as part of the socialist package, attitudes towards women changed little, even if the state insisted on the achieved gender equality. Consequently, there was no public forum in which to discuss women’s issues. Since the (male) administration regarded feminism as an outgrowth of capitalism, any inquiry into gender inequality necessarily posed a threat to the state’s foundation and was thus avoided.54 As Eva Kaufmann pointed out, “as long as male standards were tacitly regarded and accepted as the norm, very little sense of female selfawareness could develop.”55 Women writers, in particular, faced male superiors who had little interest in exploring feminist theory and practice, and restricted publication for anyone who deviated from party guidelines. In response, female authors in the GDR tended not to separate their own interests from those of their male counterparts, nor emulate the kind of feminism that emerged in the 1970s in the West. To a great extent, Christa Wolf, for instance, (and later Monika Maron) developed her central quest for female subjectivity seperately from Western feminist theory.56 Though East German politics became more open-minded after Stalin’s death in 1953, the period was short-lived. Uprisings in Hungary and Poland in October 1956 put a violent end to reform politics and caused newly gained privileges to be revoked. At the height of the cold war, the East German government began construction of what it called an antifascist protection barrier [antifaschistischer Schutzwall], i.e. the Berlin Wall in August 1961, to stem the exodus of skilled labor to the West. With the Berlin Wall came an ever-more conservative course. After Erich Honecker came to power in May 1971 and the West German government under Willy Brandt officially recognized the East German State, restrictions eased somewhat, but again, this period was only short-lived. On November 16, 1976, the GDR deprived the popular songwriter Wolf Biermann of his citizenship while he was on concert tour in West Germany. Biermann, a committed yet nonconformist socialist who had 54 55 56

For elaboration, see Helen Bridge, Women’s Writing and Historiography in the GDR, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002, 26-30. Eva Kaufmann, “Women Writers in the GDR, 1945-1989,” Weedon, ed., Postwar Women’s Writing, 169-209,171. One Day a Year reveals Wolf’s skepticism vis-à-vis West German feminism as represented by Alice Schwarzer. Christa Wolf, Ein Tag im Jahr 1960-2000, München: Luchterhand, 2003, 509. Translation from Christa Wolf, One Day a Year 1960-2000, trans. Lowell A. Bangerter, New York: Europa Editions, 2007, 507.

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immigrated from West to East Germany in 1953 (with the support of Margot Honecker), had fallen from grace. Denounced as a class traitor, in 1963 he was excluded from the SED and banned from public performances. After several performances and publications in the West, the GDR government used the occasion of his invitation to a concert in Cologne to grant Biermann a travel visa, but to expatriate him while abroad. In response, thirteen prominent writers, among them Christa Wolf, Volker Braun, Sarah Kirsch, Günter Kunert, and Günter de Bruyn, published a public letter of protest written by Stephan Hermlin and Stefan Heym; approximately 150 artists signed the letter.57 The East German administration reacted harshly, imposing sanctions such as arrest, exclusion from the Writers’ Association, and a ban on publishing. The after-effects of the expatriation and the ensuing protest were far-reaching, and continued to affect literary and artistic production. Even after 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform politics in the Soviet Union had a gradual effect on East German politics, the regime stuck with its restrictive course, disciplining and increasingly marginalizing its intellectual elite under growing protest until 1989. Postwar Developments in West Germany Beginning immediately after the war, the three Western Allies modeled Germany’s British, French, and American occupied zones according to their own political and economic systems. Political, judicial, educational, and cultural offices were superficially “cleansed” of Nazis: in 1945-46, twenty-four of the most high-ranking Nazi officials were brought to trial in Nuremberg under Allied supervision, while leading doctors and judges, members of mobile killing units [Einsatzgruppen], and the political and economical leaders were charged in twelve subsequent US Nuremberg Military Tribunals (1946-49). The military government also censored printed news, radio, film, music, and literature. The American Marshall Plan and the 1948 currency reform became the foundation of capitalism in West Germany. In this way, the Americans most profoundly influenced West Germany’s free-market society, advancing American-style democracy and capitalism and creating new customers for American products in the process. Beginning in 1947, this “reeducation” became increasingly over-

57

See also Wolf’s reaction to the expatriation and its aftermath in One Day a Year, 217-30 (1977).

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shadowed by Red Scare anti-communist rhetoric and turned into a propaganda tool of capitalism. Meanwhile, in the British Zone, Konrad Adenauer had devoted himself to forming a new political party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which united Protestants and Catholics under one conservative agenda. Adenauer became instrumental in drafting the Federal Republic’s (FRG’s) 1949 first constitution, and in August 1949, voters elected him as first Chancellor of West Germany. The CDU government continued what the American occupation had initiated. Under Adenauer’s leadership, the FRG began rearmament, entered NATO, and banned the Communist Party (KPD). As postwar Germany’s oldest and second-longest-serving Chancellor (after Helmut Kohl), Adenauer dominated postwar Germany’s political landscape, establishing the authority of the churches, the role of women in family and church, and the official discourse on the Nazi past. Like their countrymen to the East, West Germans preferred to believe in the myth of a new beginning, as evident in terms like women of the rubble [Trümmerfrauen]58 for the highly praised women who quickly cleaned up the scenes of devastation (and evidence of the Nazi past) and zero hour [Stunde Null]. The economic miracle [Wirtschaftswunder] of the 1950s served to reinforce this illusion of a physical and spiritual rebirth by allowing West Germans to enjoy an increased standard of living, rather than to recollect the experience of Nazism and war. The cold war also facilitated such an illusion. By typecasting both National Socialism and communism as totalitarian regimes, West Germans were able to perceive themselves as victims of “Hitler’s war” and to focus on the future instead of the past. In the midst of the cold war, the CDU was able to attract a large number of voters and stand united—bridging internal party divisions—against the new enemy, communism. West German public commemoration of the Nazi past appealed to Christian values of forgiveness and redemption, and evoked the general suffering of war. In this way, both German states distorted historical victimization by failing to distinguish and acknowledge the most important group of victims, European Jews. While GDR memorials subsumed Jewish victims under the general category of victims of fascism, FRG memorials tended to blur the distinctions by calling attention to all victims of war, including German soldiers, inmates of concentration camps, veterans, refugees, displaced persons, and POWs. However, Adenauer’s government did acknowledge German responsibility for the Holocaust by signing 58

In her excellent analysis, Elizabeth Heinemann posits that in the first postwar years, women of the rubble became a central metaphor symbolizing West Germany’s reconstruction and national identity.

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a reparations agreement (against popular opinion) with Israel in 1952 and compensation laws for Jewish victims in 1953 and 1956,59 arguably in an attempt to settle both claims and discussion once and for all, and to morally rehabilitate Germany. Indeed, West Germans’ public admission of guilt quieted rather than fueled inquiries into the origins and nature of National Socialism, and improved relations between Germany and Israel that strengthened the Western alliance. While Adenauer’s conservative politics propagated ideals of femininity and motherhood, the cold war also marginalized women’s writing. According to Western postwar ideology, war was an activity of men, be it as perpetrators or victims, and thus demanded male examination and analysis. Thus, even West Germany’s first published postwar writers who opposed the conservative political climate and remained troubled by Hitler’s legacy were men, many of whom had experienced WW II as young soldiers. In September 1947, Hans Werner Richter founded the literary association Gruppe 47 in Munich, inviting young authors to read and discuss their unpublished works. Meeting twice a year, the group soon became instrumental in promoting writers who would become Germany’s bestknown postwar authors, including Heinrich Böll, Alfred Andersch, Günter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, Martin Walser, and Peter Weiss. Though these writers made National Socialism a central theme in their works, they tended to present portrayals of Nazis from a distance rather than from within. Böll’s The Clown (1965, Ansichten eines Clowns, 1963) characterizes postwar West Germany as seen by an outsider, while Grass’s The Tin Drum (1962, Die Blechtrommel, 1959) reveals a panorama of Nazi and postwar Germany through the figure of Oskar, a dwarf. Even the young narrator in Lenz’s The German Lesson (1968, Deutschstunde) refuses to participate in his father’s Nazi misdeeds. Presenting the Third Reich from the perspective of an adolescent outcast, these narrators conveniently exclude themselves from critical analysis. An exception to this trend, Peter Weiss’s stark documentary drama of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, The Investigation (1966, Die Ermittlung, 1965), uses courtroom testimony to depict the victims’ ordeal and torture—and the perpetrators’ flat denial of it. As attendance at the readings of the influential Gruppe 47 was by invitation only (spouses were allowed to attend as well) and often depended on the disposition of the organizers, women constituted only 10 to 15 percent of members. Ingeborg Bachmann and Ilse Aichinger were the best-known

59

For background information on the treaties, see Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, Berkeley: U of California P, 2001, 25-30.

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women writers, but generally, the male-oriented Gruppe 47 curtailed rather than promoted possibilities for women to publish their writings. Political change was slow to come, but by the mid-1960s, the Wirtschaftswunder had ceased and West Germany experienced its first postwar recession and unemployment. After Adenauer’s four-term ministry and the grand coalition of the two largest parties in 1965-69 that silenced any influential opposition in the parliament, voters replaced the twenty-year long CDU reign with a government of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) under Chancellor Willy Brandt. Brandt, who had opposed the Nazis in exile by fighting in the Norwegian resistance, changed the direction of German politics with policies that sought to improve relations to East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. In contrast to his predecessors in the CDU, Brandt officially recognized the East German state and the German border with Poland. He also took part in commemorations of war crimes against Jews and Poles—in a prominent gesture of reverence and sorrow that seemed like a public begging for forgiveness, Brandt broke political decorum and spontaneously fell onto his knees while visiting the Warsaw ghetto memorial in December 1970. Press and public reactions were divided, but in 1971 Brandt received the Nobel Peace Price for his efforts to improve relations with East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union [Ostpolitik].

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Brandt’s much-publicized atonement [Kniefall] © Der Spiegel

Around the same time, Germany’s first generation born after the war was coming of age and began to question its parents’ involvement in Hitler’s Germany. As Tony Judt points out, this was a highly educated generation, with more children than ever attending secondary schools, and one that had grown up outside of the clutches of Nazi ideology.60 Protesting against the antiquated conservatism that Adenauer personified, the student movement of the late 1960s rebelled against authoritative fathers and submissive mothers and fought for a more democratic society. In association with the student movement, the 1970s women’s movement rejected traditional roles of women in the Adenauer era, summarized by the three K’s—Kinder, Küche, Kirche [Children, Kitchen, Church]. Women successful60

See Tony Judt’s comprehensive exploration of the student movement in Europe. Tony Judt, “The Spectre of Revolution,” Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London: William Heinemann, 2005, 390-421.

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ly fought for equal rights and the right to abortion, and also disbanded the patriarchal family model, recognizing that the personal sphere has political ramifications [das Persönliche ist politisch]. Women’s writing became equally politicized; female authors increasingly and deliberately discussed in their texts women’s issues from a feminist viewpoint. Another prominent social critique of the late 1960s claimed that Germans’ inability to mourn properly the loss of their Führer and the collapse of the nation resulted in a collective defense mechanism, manifesting itself as political apathy and repression of the past. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s influential study The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (1975, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens, 1967) poses that Germans experienced Hitler’s death and the subsequent uncovering of his crimes as the loss of an ego ideal, but instead of falling into depression pushed aside any thoughts and emotions related to the Third Reich. By shifting responsibility to a few leading Nazis, in particular to Adolf Hitler, the Mitscherlichs suggest Germans were able to identify with the victors, that is, the Americans, while avoiding empathy with the actual victims of National Socialism. Though referring only to West Germany, these arguments convincingly explain the German desire for a new beginning after 1945 in both West and East, and also account for the tendency of both states to place the German suffering in lieu of Jewish suffering. Yet the Mitscherlichs’ work fails to take into consideration German postwar literature, which in the years and decades following the war scrutinized the Nazi past as part of the larger project of coming to terms with the past [Vergangenheitsbewältigung].61 Particularly those who were children or adolescents during the war experienced a loss of identity and selfconfidence after 1945 that led to a search for new directions rather than complacency. And Germany’s first postwar generation called attention to the crimes committed, and was the first to accept collective perpetratorship. Following the political activism, writers began to turn inward [Tendenzwende], replacing the public performances of speeches and demonstrations of the 1960s with poetry and autobiographical writings in the 1970s. Texts of the so-called New Subjectivity, many of them written by women, inspired the autobiographical Father Books of the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which authors born after the war examined the legacy of National Socialism in their families. When West German public television broadcasted the American miniseries Holocaust in January 1979, the mass murder of the European Jews 61

Since the unfortunate, misleading, and much-criticized term implies that the Nazi past can indeed be mastered and overcome, my work generally avoids the phrase.

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became a household discussion. Although postwar literature had dealt with the topic for some time, it was this television series that reached a large audience (over twenty million people in West Germany) and precipitated an overwhelmingly sympathetic and unprecedented emotional response. By representing the lives of a fictional German-gentile and German-Jewish family in Hitler’s Germany in the victim-perpetrator binary, the TV show offered simplistic answers and a happy ending, even to Germans of Hitler’s generation. Yet Holocaust promoted not only a sensational but also a distorted depiction of the past. Appalled by the historical inaccuracies and the sentimental tone, Elie Wiesel called the series in the New York Times a trivialization of Jewish persecution. For Klüger it was a prime example of Holocaust kitsch.62 Whereas Peter Weiss had described Jewish mass murder in austere tones, Holocaust idealized and sentimentalized Jewish life in Nazi Germany, as in the tear-jerking scene of a Jewish wedding that was supposed to take place in hiding. Besides stirring the nation’s good conscience while it was weeping for the brave Jewish hero (who survived, sure enough), Holocaust did little to change FRG politics of the 1980s, characterized by revisionist attitudes and neo-conservative approaches. The right-wing decade of the 1980s was launched with CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl coming to power in 1982, after a vote of no confidence toppled Helmut Schmidt’s SPD government. Against major resistance by the emerging peace movement, Kohl approved American NATO missiles to be positioned in Germany, aligning himself with President Ronald Reagan’s continuation of cold war politics. Public discussion on the Nazi past, too, took a turn toward the conservative. In his 1984 speech to the Knesset, Kohl coined the term “the grace of late birth,”63 a remark echoed in a similar statement in which he declared self-righteously that his generation was not responsible for parental misdeeds. The fact that Kohl chose Israel as the site for his unfortunate remarks did not help the cause, which remains a widely mocked and embarrassing incident to this date. Clearly Kohl (who, born in 1930, was in fact older than the postwar generation) 62

63

For information on Holocaust and its German reception, see Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989, 28-35, Friedrich Knilli and Siegfried Zielinski, eds., Holocaust zur Unterhaltung: Anatomie eines internationalen Bestsellers, Berlin: Elefanten P, 1982, 11, and Ruth Klüger, “Dichten über die Shoah. Zum Problem des literarischen Umgangs mit dem Massenmord,” Spuren der Verfolgung: Seelische Auswirkungen des Holocaust auf die Opfer und ihre Kinder, ed. Gertrud Hardtmann, Stuttgart: Bleicher, 1992, 203-22, 213. “Die junge deutsche Generation weigert sich, sich selbst kollektiv für die Taten der Väter schuldig zu bekennen.” Kohl quoted in Wolfgang Türkis, Beschädigtes Leben: autobiographische Texte der Gegenwart, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990, 117.

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was not only unwilling to accept responsibility for the Nazi regime, but also sought to put an end to discussion of it. Another controversy ignited when Kohl decided to join Reagan on his scheduled visit to commemorate US war veterans on the fortieth anniversary of WW II’s end at the Bitburg German military cemetery. As it turned out, forty-nine members of the Waffen SS were also buried at Bitburg, yet both Reagan and Kohl chose to go through with the commemoration, despite growing opposition to the visit in their respective home countries, as well as from Jewish organizations and government spokespersons abroad.64 (The incident was cause for renewed debate in summer 2006, when journalists recalled Günter Grass’s outspoken condemnation of the visit that now rang of hypocrisy in light of his own involvement in the Waffen SS.) Kohl’s statements and his visit to Bitburg echo the neo-conservative attitudes of the Historians’ Dispute [Historikerstreit], a debate among the West German intelligentsia about the nature of National Socialism and the uniqueness of the Holocaust published in various newspapers in 1986. After well-known historians Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen had pointed in to the difficulties of embedding the Nazi past within German history, the actual debate began when historian Ernst Nolte published an article with the revealing title “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will. Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht gehalten werden konnte” (“The Past That Will Not Pass Away: A Speech that Could Be Written But Not Delivered”) in the prominent Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Seeking to present a German account of history that deviated from what he perceived to be biased historiography of the victors, Nolte suggested that Hitler’s mass murder was merely a response to the Stalinist mass murder in the Soviet Union, in particular the “Gulag Archipelago.”65 Following this, the philosopher Klaus Hildebrand and historian Andreas Hillgruber also disputed the singular character of Auschwitz by pointing to war crimes committed by other countries, in particular the Soviet Union. In response, philosopher Jürgen Habermas, historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and publisher Rudolf Augstein criticized this kind of revisionist history as an attempt to exculpate Germans. This academic debate that continued in 64 65

Kohl’s decision stood in stark contrast to Willy Brandt’s Kniefall in December 1970. For a more detailed analysis of the Bitburg controversy, see Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988, 9-16. “Vollbrachten die Nationalsozialisten, vollbrachte Hitler eine ‘asiatische’ Tat vielleicht nur deshalb, weil sie sich und ihresgleichen als potentielle oder wirkliche Opfer einer ‘asiatischen’ Tat betrachteten?” Ernst Nolte, “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 June 1986, in Rudolf Augstein et al., “Historikerstreit:” Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung, München: Piper 1987, 39-47.

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the media with much publicity was ultimately a struggle over the rights to German historiography, that is, over the interpretation and integration of the Nazi period for the generations to come.66 Discourses on the Nazi Past after Germany’s Reunification In 1990, reunification dominated the German political discourse, pushing aside discussions of the Nazi past. Women in the former East Germany worried about losing precious rights such as the right to abortion and childcare, and women in general were among the first to be hit by recession and unemployment. From its inception, the united Germany met with national and international fears that the past would repeat itself, fears compounded by mounting news of Neo-Nazi violence against foreigners and asylum seekers, the rise of nationalism, as well as anti-Semitic slander. Yet in the aftermath of reunification, the fact that Germany was growing stronger set off a reexamination of postwar German identity and called for renewed responsibility to ensure peace and racial tolerance. With the end of the cold war, the narrow and opposing East-West identities slowly vanished, allowing for the opportunity to delineate Germany’s past outside of the lens of communist and capitalist ideologies. While cold war dogma had staged the ideological other as perpetrator and correspondingly either East or West Germans as victims, it was now necessary to reconceptualize both the status of perpetrator and victim. As a result, discourses on the Nazi past proliferate in the 1990s and 2000s, growing increasingly comprehensive and diverse. As Lothar Probst suggests, “the Holocaust is increasingly viewed as a European phenomenon,” with international, panEuropean commemoration, research, and teaching replacing earlier bipolar interests.67 Along with the cold war ending, opportunities for scholars widened, as the gradual opening of Eastern European borders afforded them access to documents, archives, and libraries. In the decades to come, as statutes of limitations are further being lifted, more documents will no doubt become available in Germany, France, Italy, and Poland. The wealth of new sources spurred far-reaching, thorough documentation and research on 66 67

For a more thorough discussion of the Historikerstreit, see the collection of articles in Rudolf Augstein et al., “Historikerstreit, Türkis 84-90; and Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990, 46-51. See Lothar Probst, “‘Normalization’ through Europeanization: The Role of the Holocaust,” German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Normalization, eds. Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke, Rochester: Camden House, 2006, 61-74, 66.

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the German occupation, Nazi mass shootings, and the processes of ghettoization and extermination. The end of the cold war also makes it possible for scholars in the East and West to share their work and collaborate. Open borders afford survivors as well as (West) German bystanders and their offspring the opportunity to visit their former homes in Eastern Europe, an experience incorporated into the works of Monika Maron, Wibke Bruhns, Stephan Wackwitz, and Tanja Dückers. Conversely, former East Germans were called upon to embrace the West German postwar past as part of their own national history, as Christa Wolf’s speech “Parting from Phantoms: On Germany” (1998, “Abschied von Phantomen. Zur Sache: Deutschland,” 1994) poignantly illustrates. Likewise, Wolf’s diary entries of the 1990s illustrate the devastating impact of her visit to the concentration camp Groß Rosen, showing that the Nazi past gained new currency after reunification.68 In 1999, Wolf wonders whether it may now be possible to confront the Nazi past more honestly, a sentiment which justifies a rereading of Patterns of Childhood in this context. The fall of the Iron Curtain also changed East and West Germany’s demographic make-up, enabling more extensive immigration from Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In an unprecedented and unpredictable turn of events, Jewish life is reemerging in Germany with increased immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union. As discussed in more detail in “Jewish Culture in Postwall Germany” in part II, Russian Jews changed the composition and attitudes of the Jewish communities in Germany and began to shape new Jewish life in Germany. Along with the increase in numbers and influence, synagogues were rebuilt (Dresden 2001, Munich 2006) to house the growing communities. Germans have also (re)discovered their fondness for things Jewish, as the keen public interest in Jewish culture and the 1999 opening of the Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin (discussed in “Institutional Memory after Reunification” in part III) made evident.

68

See Christa Wolf, One Day a Year, 609.

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The new Jewish Synagogue in Munich, which opened on November 9, 2006. © scrapbookpages.com

Reunification also pushed authors who had written about the Nazi past before to reconsider and reassess their experiences, as evident in publications by Günter Grass and Christa Wolf. But similar to the Historians’ Dispute of the 1980s, negotiation of the past after reunification culminated in a public struggle about how the past was to be interpreted, and by whom. A number of prominent East German authors, among them Christa Wolf and Monika Maron, were viciously attacked for their support and alleged collaboration with the GDR regime. After Wolf published her autobiographical report about surveillance by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) that she had written in 1979 as What Remains in June 1990 (1993, Was bleibt), an ugly press campaign followed, led by Ulrich Greiner of Die Zeit and Frank Schirrmacher of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.69 Blaming Wolf for staging herself as victim of a dictatorial regime that she had supported, and for publishing her text at such a “convenient” time, the press denounced her as State Laureate [Staatsdichterin], disavowing her moral and literary qualities. The Inner German Literary Dispute [deutsch69

For an excellent reconsideration of the debate in the context of other German controversies on the relationship between politics and writing, see Frank Finlay, “Literary Debates and the Literary Market since Unification,” Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic, ed. Stuart Taberner, Cambrigde: Cambridge UP, 2007, 21-38.

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deutscher Literaturstreit] that ensued soon stretched to other authors whose Stasi involvement was publicly scrutinized and polemically condemned. The debate had a distinctly patriarchal undertone: West Germany’s most influential male journalists seized the chance to attack publicly and denounce GDR women writers such as Wolf. Soon the debate spread to GDR literature in its totality, which critics saw as inferior to West German literature, demanding its reevaluation according to aesthetic qualities.70 Yet in the cases of both Wolf and Maron, the quantities of Stasi files on them as objects of surveillance far exceed those of Stasi collaboration.71 The discussion about the status of GDR literature, especially the public difficulty to understand that authors like Wolf and Maron had been both Stasi victims and collaborators, reflected West Germans’ own troubles in coping with a highly ambivalent past while also offering a welcome distraction. Almost ten years later, West Germany’s well-known author and outspoken supporter of reunification Martin Walser used the occasion of his Peace Prize award by the German Book Trade Association in October 1998 at the Frankfurt Paulskirche for another attempt at a revisionist rewriting of the German past. According to Walser, German identity continued to be dictated by the moral pressure [Moralkeule] of Auschwitz; in his polemical yet often ambiguous speech before 1,200 invited guests, he pleaded for an end to what he considered restrictive and excessive Holocaust memorialization. Contrary to his previous position in the essays “Unser Auschwitz “(1965, Our Auschwitz) and “Auschwitz und kein Ende” (1979, Auschwitz and No End), in which he indicated that Germans may never have an untroubled relationship with their history, Walser rejected the notion of collective guilt and instead proposed that it was

70

71

For further context, see Anna K. Kuhn, “Eine Königin köpfen ist effektiver als einen König köpfen’: The Gender Politics of the Christa Wolf Controversy,” Women and the Wende: Social Effects and Cultural Reflections of the German Unification Process, eds. Elizabeth Boa and Janet Wharton, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 200-15. Also Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf: Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland, ed. Thomas Anz, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1995, 728. In his anthology, Anz compiled the documents most relevant to the debate. In Wolf’s case, the forty-two volumes that accumulated from the 1960s and designated her as an enemy of the regime far exceed the two volumes from the years 1962-63 in which she worked for the Stasi. Maron worked from 1976 to 1978 for the Stasi, receiving the permission to travel to West Germany in return. Yet Maron was by no means privileged by the regime, after Flugasche’s publication in the West, she took an openly critical and hostile attitude toward the regime. See Lennart Koch, Ästhetik der Moral bei Christa Wolf und Monika Maron: Der Literaturstreit von der Wende bis zum Ende der neunziger Jahre, Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2000, 40, 75.

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time to part with the Auschwitz burden and return to “normalcy.”72 While the speech was applauded by most, it offended Ignatz Bubis, head of the German Jewish Community, who was sitting in the audience and was outraged by suggestions to abolish Holocaust commemoration. The ensuing Walser-Bubis debate grew to national proportions between Walser supporters and critics, drawing many well-known politicians and causing increasing public skepticism toward Walser as well as suspicions of antiSemitism. (Both Wolf and Klüger criticized the speech, Maron defended Walser.) In 2002, Walser again faced anti-Semitic allegations when Frank Schirrmacher, editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung refused to prepublish excerpts from his new book, Tod eines Kritikers (2002, Death of a Critic). In the novel, the writer Hans Lach becomes the prime suspect in the presumed murder of his hated Jewish literary critic André Ehrl-König, by his accent and manners easily decodable for most readers as a portrayal of Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Germany’s most influential Polish-Jewish literary critic. While accusations made headlines, the scandal helped sell the book, leading some to suspect that the affair was nothing but clever media marketing at a time when the public was especially sensitive to anti-Semitic accusations.73 Indeed, just before the 2002 elections, the FDP’s former minister of economics, Jürgen W. Möllemann, had been expelled from his party because of his anti-Semitic statements. The decades after the end of the cold war also coincided with the aging of the war children generation. As Stargardt points out, people might be more inclined to write down their memories after retirement and after their children have grown up.74 And the coming of age of subsequent generations triggered multi-faceted public responses, from renewed inquiries into perpetration and victimhood to calls that it was time to end such examinations. At a time when many interpreted the GDR past alongside the Nazi past, comparing the legacy of two totalitarian regimes, both Wolf and Klüger publicly rejected any tendency to equate National Socialism and Stalinism, insisting on their essential differences. 72

73 74

For more information, see Aleida Assmann’s illuminating essay “Two Forms of Resentment: Jean Améry, Martin Walser and German Memorial Culture,” New German Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies 90 (Fall 2003): 123-33, and Friederike Eigler, “Memory, Moralism, and Coming to Terms with the Present: Marin Walser and Zafer Şenocak,” Memory Traces: 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity, ed. Silke Arnold-de Simine, Bern: Peter Lang, 2005, 55-78. See Bill Niven’s essay “Martin Walser’s Tod eines Kritikers and the Issue of AntiSemitism,” German Life and Letters 56.3 (July 2003): 299-311. Stargardt, 7.

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When I wrote Patterns of Childhood it would not have occurred to me to draw any parallels between German fascism and Soviet Stalinism. I saw those two phenomena, in spite of a series of manifest similarities, as fundamentally different. (Wolf)75 There is no way to defend the Nazi ideology. Socialism has an ideal, even though it did not stand the test of time. (…) Recently somebody summarized things by saying that one ideal was the ideal of equality and the other the ideal of freedom, and that the freedom side won out. There were ideals on both sides. But what on earth was the Nazis’ ideal: the master race? That is not even worth a comparison. (Klüger)76

Christa Wolf and Ruth Klüger In marked contrast to previous literary texts, Patterns of Childhood investigates the narrator’s involvement in Nazi Germany rather than pointing to other characters. This fact is particularly remarkable when considering that Wolf, like her female narrator born in 1929, was hardly responsible for bringing Hitler to power and sustaining him. Claiming nevertheless that her patterns of obedience are representative of her generation, the narrator details her privileged childhood in Nazi Germany when her middleclass parents profited from the regime by opening a new business in 1933 and confronts her defense mechanisms and guilt about having supported Hitler as a young girl. Against the backdrop of life in the GDR in the 1970s, the narrator recalls her adoration of the Führer, her involvement in the League of German Girls, and everyday life in Nazi Germany. It was only during and after the war that she experienced physical and psychological harm in the form of hunger, disease, defeat, flight, the invasion of Russian troops, and subsequent fear of assault and rape. Though the childhood memories conclude with life in the occupied Soviet Zone, the narrator consistently interweaves past and present, reflecting on how to 75

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Wolf, One Day a Year, 405. “Als ich Kindheitsmuster schrieb, war es mir nicht eingefallen, irgendwelche Parallelen zwischen dem deutschen Faschismus und dem sowjetischen Stalinismus zu ziehen. Ich sah diese beiden Phänomene, trotz Ähnlichkeiten in einer Reihe von Erscheinungen, als von der Wurzel her verschieden an.” Ein Tag im Jahr, 403. “Die Nazi-Ideologie läßt sich in keiner Weise verteidigen. Der Sozialismus hat ein Ideal, das sich nicht bewährte (…). Neulich hat es jemand auf den Nenner gebracht, daß das eine eben das Ideal der Gleichheit war, das andere das der Freiheit und die Freiheitsseite hat sich bewährt. Da waren Ideale auf beiden Seiten. Aber was zum Kukuck war es bei den Nazis: Die Herrenmenschen? Das ist nicht einmal einen Vergleich wert.” Ruth Klüger, “… ein ‘deutsches Buch’ ist ja ein bißchen zwiespältig: Ein Gespräch mit Ruth Klüger,” Die Horen: Zeitschrift für Literatur, Kunst und Kritik 46.201 (2001): 31-54, 54. Translation is my own.

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come to terms with the past. As the only book included in this study written before reunification, Patterns of Childhood reflects prevailing cold war ideologies—as a self-identified socialist writer, Wolf was unlikely to voice open disapproval with the regime. Yet Patterns of Childhood, whose 1976 publication coincided with the Biermann expatriation and its aftermath, included ample disagreements with GDR politics and culture. Patterns of Childhood was part of a general renewed interest in National Socialism in GDR literature of the 1970s.77 By the same token, the text influenced West German approaches to the Nazi past. After publication in the FRG in 1977, West German women writers followed heed and acknowledged their roles as perpetrators, co-perpetrators, collaborators, and bystanders in autobiographical reflections. Texts like Eva Zeller’s Solange ich denken kann: Roman einer Jugend (1981, As Long as I Can Think: Novel of a Childhood) and Nein und Amen (1986, No and Amen), Margarete Hannsmann’s Der helle Tag bricht an. Ein Kind wird Nazi (1982, The New Day Dawns: A Child Becomes a Nazi), and Carola Stern’s In den Netzen der Erinnerung: Lebensgeschichten zweier Menschen (1986, In the Nets of Memory: Life Stories of Two People) and Doppelleben (2001, A Double Life) represent the narrators’ struggle to take responsibility for past thinking and actions and to explain this to a postwar audience. Ruth Klüger’s Holocaust memoir weiter leben is visibly influenced by Wolf’s autobiographical novel, even though her experience in Nazi Germany differs profoundly from that of Wolf. Born in 1931 to Jewish parents in Vienna, Klüger experienced the initial stages of the Nazi persecution in Austria. In 1942, she was deported to Theresienstadt, in May 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and in June 1944 to Christianstadt (Groß-Rosen). When in February 1945 the Germans evacuated Christianstadt under the threat of the advancing Russian troops, Klüger, her mother, and four other prisoners managed to flee. After obtaining false passports identifying them as non-Jewish, they finally met the American forces. Klüger and her mother continued to live in Germany until October 1947, when they secured immigration visas to the United States. Only in the late 1980s did Klüger, by now a renowned professor of German language and literature in the US, decide to write down her memoirs. Her text continuously links past and present, discussing the Holocaust itself as well as the possibilities of Holocaust representation. Asserting her identity as a survivor, Klüger’s work also documents her ambivalent relationships with Germans. Patterns of Childhood and weiter leben portray the disparate experiences of a young Hitler supporter and an adolescent Holocaust survivor; there are 77

See Bridge, 40.

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of course other substantial differences. Both texts were written in different countries (the former GDR and the FRG/United States, respectively), and published approximately fifteen years apart. They also comprise different genres; whereas Wolf’s work is an autobiographical novel, Klüger’s is a Holocaust testimony. While these differences preclude a comparison of the writers’ traumatic experiences, I deem it fruitful to juxtapose both works that investigate the same timeframe in the same territories from different perspectives of the same age cohort. Experiencing different ends of the Nazi period, both texts describe the hindrances and taboos when representing the past, and challenge institutional memory in East and West Germany: while Wolf reveals the complacency of her East German State that considered itself exempt from the legacy of National Socialism, Klüger criticizes a newspaper for casting her as a stereotypical Holocaust child-victim. Both texts also juxtapose the child’s with the adult’s perspective, commenting on the distortions of memory. At a locale that resembles the former family’s home but is not home, both narrators become open to new ways of remembering, calling into question previously fixed memory patterns. Klüger calls this process “conjuring up ghosts,” while Wolf terms it “breaking with cameos.” Wolf defines remembering as breaking with fabricated, formulaic recollection, while Klüger sees it as witchcraft, as an exchange and a sampling of various spells concocted in the kitchen. In interaction with the past, each writer reevaluates her childhood and embraces a postwar identity shaped by this childhood. Both writers, finally, employ the pronoun “you” to draw the reader into a relationship with the narrator.78 In this way, both encourage what Irene Kacandes has called “transhistorical-transcultural witnessing,” that is, a reply by a reader situated in a different time period and a different cultural context.79 This type of co-witnessing enables a reader to personalize someone else’s trauma, creating a bridge between diverse experiences. Disputing the dominant patterns of remembrance in East and West, Wolf and Klüger position themselves within a male-dominated historical discourse while questioning the claim to representation that informs such discourse. Wolf recounts the specific effects of war on a genealogy of women—the narrator’s grandmother, her mother, and herself as a mother. The female narrator’s perspective repeatedly contrasts with brother Lutz who embodies a rational, positivist, and scientific outlook that Wolf associated with principal thinking in patriarchal societies. Thus Patterns of 78 79

As Irene Kacandes points out in her illuminating analysis of “talk fiction,” readers may choose to become the addressee, the “you,” of a given text or not. See Irene Kacandes, Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2001, 32. See Kacandes, 116-19.

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Childhood challenges any kind of patriarchal historiography that interprets the role of women merely against the backdrop of men. Klüger’s feminist reflections on the Holocaust, conversely, challenge Holocaust studies which up until the late 1980s subsumed the perspectives of women under the general category of a Jewish survivor, without further differentiation of age, nationality, class, political and religious orientation, or sex. By depicting history as a series of personal experiences, both Wolf and Klüger also analyze the manifestations of Nazi ideology in language and gender relations, and reveal the interrelation of private and public spheres in every incident.80

80

In this way, Wolf contemplates the interrelation of racism and sexism when Nelly instinctively connects the sight of an exhibitionist with the image of Jews. For further discussion, see Marie-Luise Gättens, “Die Rekonstruktion der Geschichte: Der Nationalsozialismus in drei Romanen der siebziger Jahre,” Frauen-Fragen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur seit 1945, eds. Mona Knapp and Gerd Labroisse, Amsterdam: Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik Band 29 (1989): 111-130.

Memories and Mourning: Christa Wolf ’s Patterns of Childhood The (Deadly) Ride Crossing Lake Constance Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood (1984, Kindheitsmuster, 1976) introduces themes that recur in all other texts of this study, i.e. the inter-generational dialogue, the mother-daughter relationship, the contrasting child-adult perspective, personal versus public remembering, the integration of the Holocaust in German history, the difficulties of autobiographical writing, and finally, the search for an appropriate narrative form. Wolf’s descriptions of the painful, dynamic process of remembering—its physical and mental ramifications—anticipate and respond to theories of trauma arising in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Yet Wolf depicts the everyday life of a whole genealogy of women, contrasting male and female experience and remembrance. Patterns of Childhood is a product of the cold-war era, written in a totalitarian state, and thus relies on metaphors and symbolism. Though Wolf’s texts that were written after reunification shed new light on the reading of Patterns of Childhood, little scholarship has (re)interpreted the text from the vantage point of post-Wende Germany. One recurring motif in Wolf’s work that carries particular importance in Patterns of Childhood is the figure of the Lake Constance horseman, based on a well-known German legend1 and subject of Gustav Schwab’s 1826 ballad Der Reiter und der Bodensee (“The Horseman and Lake Constance”). In both legend and Schwab’s ballad, a horseman unknowingly crosses the frozen Lake Constance, Germany’s largest lake, while searching for the boat dock. When the bewildered villagers tell him that the lake is already behind him, the horseman dies of shock upon realizing the extraordinary danger he was in. The horseman freezes on his horse, He heard the first word, the rest was lost. 1

Since the beginning of sources in 1077, a complete freeze of the lake has only been registered seven times (1435, 1573, 1684, 1695, 1795, 1830, and 1963). According to records, an Alsatian postman crossed the frozen lake by horse in January 1573; this incident presumably inspired Schwab’s ballad.

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His heartbeat stops, his hair stands to end, Right behind the danger gleefully grins. His gaze only sees that gruesome abyss, His mind sinks down into the gloomy dark ground. In his ear, the breaking ice roars like thunder about, He is dripping with sweat as cold as the shroud. A sigh of despair, he sinks from his horse, He reached a dry grave at the other world’s shore.2

Schwab’s ballad attests to the force and aftereffect of psychic trauma long before its medical definition. In the ballad, the horseman hears the crackling ice and sees the bottomless abyss only after he is safely back on the shore, replaying in his mind’s eye what had happened before. These imagined horrors of the presumed views and sounds below prove as devastating as the physical reality, so that the belated understanding of the frightful experience claims his life after the fact. The horseman’s “dry grave” is only an ironic, worthless proof of his inconceivable act of crossing water.3 This trope provides Wolf with the concept and vocabulary to express the aftermath of trauma before trauma theory had been popularized. Wolf mentions the Lake Constance horseman for the first time in The Quest for Christa T. (1970, Nachdenken über Christa T., 1968), in which she fictionalized the life of her former classmate, friend, and alter ego Christa Tabbert who died at age thirty-five from leukemia.4 Like the horseman, Christa T. is terrified to look back to the past, which in Christa’s case encompasses the Nazi past with its eliminationist racism and merciless destruction—as 2

3 4

Der Reiter erstarret auf seinem Pferd, er hat nur das erste Wort gehört. Es stocket sein Herz, es sträubt sich sein Haar, dicht hinter ihm grinst noch die grause Gefahr. Es siehet sein Blick nur den gräßlichen Schlund, sein Geist versinkt in den schwarzen Grund. Im Ohr ihm donnerts wie krachend Eis, wie die Well umrieselt ihn kalter Schweiß. Da seufzt er, da sinkt er vom Roß herab, da ward ihm am Ufer ein trocken Grab. Gustav Schwab, Gedichte, Stuttgart: Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1828, 366. Translation is my own. Schwab’s ballad also gave inspiration for Peter Handke’s abstract and experimental play Der Ritt über den Bodensee (1970), which focuses on the fallacy of language and socialized behavior. In One Day a Year, Wolf called the character of Christa T. “medium for transferal” [“Übertragungsmedium”]. Christa Wolf, Ein Tag im Jahr 1960-2000, München: Luchterhand, 2003, 103. Translation from Christa Wolf, One Day a Year 1960-2000, trans. Lowell A. Bangerter, New York: Europa Editions, 2007, 110.

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well as her support of it. Though not dying from this knowledge, Christa T. falls into shock. The horseman who’d done nothing but gallop across a lake that happened to be frozen over fell dead from his horse when he discovered what he’d crossed. She [Christa T.] only screamed, it’s not much. She burned her old diaries, all her vows went up in smoke, and the enthusiasms one was now ashamed of, the aphorisms and songs.5

When Christa T. undertakes a painful but necessary reexamination of the Nazi past, she encounters the lasting effects of perfidious Nazi ideology as well as her shame and guilt. Educated under the Nazi rule, Christa T. (like the narrator in Patterns of Childhood) participated in Nazi youth organizations and supported its ideology. After the war, she decides to rid herself of memories connected to the Nazi regime by burning her diaries. For the narrator in Patterns of Childhood, however, this is not possible as she continues to be haunted by memories well into adulthood. In Patterns of Childhood, Wolf mentions the Lake Constance Horseman at the beginning of her chapter on survival. Horseman crossing Lake Constance. To be rücksichts-los [“thoughtless,” “reckless,” literally: “without a rear view”] as on of the conditions for survival; as one of the requirements that separates the living from those who out-live. (H. says, in the car—it is Sunday around noon, July 11, 1971, you are driving back to the city G.—: Now you have completely blocked my rear view. The jackets in the rear window have to be spread out better.6

5

6

“Der Reiter, hinter dem nichts lag als ein zufällig fest gefrorener See, fiel tot vom Pferd, als er erfuhr, was er hinter sich hatte. Sie [Christa T.] schrie nur, das ist nicht zuviel. Sie verbrannte ihre alten Tagebücher, da gingen die Schwüre in Rauch auf und die Begeisterungen, deren man sich nun schämte, die Sprüche und Lieder.” Christa Wolf, Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968), München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1993, 33. Translation from Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. (1970), trans. Christopher Middleton, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000, 29. “Reiter über den Bodensee. Rücksichts-los sein (ohne Sicht zurück) als eine der Überlebensbedingungen; als eine der Voraussetzungen, die Lebende von Über-lebenden trennt. (H. sagt, im Auto – es ist Sonntag mittag, 11. Juli 71, ihr fahrt in die Stadt G. zurück –: Jetzt habt ihr mir vollkommen die Rücksicht versperrt. Die Jacken im Rückfenster müssen besser verteilt werden.” Christa Wolf, Kindheitsmuster: Roman (1976), Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1977, 388. Translation is my own. As scholars have remarked previously, the English translation of Kindheitsmuster leaves much to be desired. Aside from misleading original title A Model Childhood (which since has been changed to Patterns of Childhood), the translation leaves out many important passages in the text. If adequate, I have used the translation Patterns of Childhood by Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. If the translation is insufficient (as in the quote above) or missing, I have translated the quotation myself, and indicated so in the respective footnote.

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Taking into account emerging research on the traumatic aftermath of the Holocaust, Wolf uses the allegory to refer to the victims of the Holocaust. Detailing the debilitating and recurrent suffering of victims, she uses the German word sur-vive [über-leben] in an unusual context to signify the crossing from one life to another. At the same time, the narrator links the literary metaphor to her own life in the GDR, contrasting the psychosomatic aftereffects of Holocaust survivors with East Germany’s missing confrontation with the Nazi past. The allegory thus refers and foreshadows the difficulties of reflecting on the (Nazi) past in a society that promoted the look ahead, not backwards. H.’s literal difficulty to look back through the car’s rear window on the family’s 1971 trip to Poland, circuitously expresses the conundrum. Though the family returns to the narrator’s hometown with the intention to examine the past, the view may be blocked. The horseman motif also echoes Patterns of Childhood’s very first sentence when the narrator paraphrases William Faulkner, “what is past is not dead; it is not even past.”7 In fact, the metaphor helps to explain the narrator’s project from the outset: having proof of the past’s violent and deadly aftermath in the example of the horseman, the narrator begins the daunting task of remembering and narrating her past. Thus, her central concern is not to examine the past in isolation but rather to look back in order to explain the present and find answers to her central question “How did we become what we are today?”8 In a marked departure from the GDR’s belief in a clean slate, the narrator implies that the concerns of the present call for a reexamination of the past. The horseman motif is evoked again in Wolf’s In the Flesh (2005, Leibhaftig, 2002), which details, like Christa T., a protagonist’s life-threatening illness during the last year of GDR socialism. By now, the narrator is well familiar with her dilemma: “The collapse after the danger has been surmounted, a hackneyed old story. And now I’m sitting on that old horse that’s carried me across Lake Constance.”9 Yet her (male) physician fails to grasp the legend’s old wisdom, believing only in the power of science.

7 8 9

3, “Das Vergangene ist nicht tot; es ist nicht einmal vergangen,” 9. 209, “Wie sind wir so geworden, wie wir heute sind?” 246. 101, “Der Zusammenbruch nach überstandener Gefahr, die alte banale Geschichte. Jetzt sitze ich also auf diesem Gaul, der mit mir über den Bodensee geritten ist.” Christa Wolf, Leibhaftig, Berlin: Luchterhand, 2002, 149. Translations from Christa Wolf, In the Flesh, trans. John S. Barrett, Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine, 2005.

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Beginnings and Returns The Lake Constance Rider is not only a recurring trope in Wolf’s work but also serves to explain the temporal delay of Patterns of Childhood. Like the horseman, Wolf is only belatedly, i.e. temporally and spatially removed, able to recognize and access previously traumatizing events, but unlike him, she begins to articulate them. Wolf’s recently published diary project One Day a Year 1960-2000 (2007, Ein Tag im Jahr 1960-2000, 2003) reveals that Wolf worked on Patterns of Childhood for a about decade. As early as 1964, she mentions her ideas of describing her family’s flight in 1945.10 After the death of her mother in 1968 (an incident that she refuses to describe at the time it was happening11), these ideas materialized into a more concrete plan. The diary also exposes Wolf’s fear of possible censorship (1965, 1971), her attempts of accessing authentic documents such as her former school books (1970), as well has her struggles with the writing process, in particular finding a proper beginning and a narrative voice (1971, 1972). These initial difficulties are also visible in the text itself. The narrator’s countless and unsuccessful attempts to begin writing are mentioned on the first page of Patterns of Childhood where the narrator also claims to have written the final version on November 3, 1972. She begins by recalling a trip to Poland back in July 10-11, 1971, with her husband H., her daughter Lenka, and her three-year younger brother Lutz when she reluctantly agreed to visit her hometown. This fictional travel corresponds to a trip from July 10-11, 1971, when Christa Wolf, her husband Gerhard, her three-year younger brother Horst, and her daughter Katrin visited Wolf’s hometown Landsberg/Warthe, situated in today’s Poland and renamed Gorzów/Wielkopolski. Back in the summer of 1971, you agreed to the proposal to drive to L., now called G. Although you kept telling yourself that there was no need for it. Still, why not let them have their way. The tourist business to hometowns was booming.12

Remaining vague about who initiated the trip, the narrator in Patterns of Childhood portrays the undertaking with irony, pointing to the discrepancies between birthplace L. she left as a refugee in January 1945, and travel 10 11 12

See Wolf’s concept for “My book about 1945” [“Mein Buch über 1945”] on October 1, 1964, which she planned to complete by 1966. One Day a Year, 76. Ein Tag im Jahr, 70. One Day a Year, 119, Ein Tag im Jahr, 111 (1968). 4, “Damals, im Sommer 1971, gab es den Vorschlag, doch endlich nach L., heute G., zu fahren, und du stimmtest zu. Obwohl du dir wiederholtest, daß es nicht nötig wäre. Aber sie sollten ihren Willen haben. Der Tourismus in alte Heimaten blühte.” 10.

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destination G., which now has a different name, language, and currency. In fact, the narrator and her family need visas to enter the so-called hometown that houses no relatives, friends, or acquaintances. G. is hardly recognizable as L.; street and school names, such as Adolf-Hitler-Straße and Hermann-Göring-Schule, have been altered, and even the climate—an atypical heat wave—seems unusual. Yet it is the unfamiliarity that prompts the narrator to reevaluate her childhood anew. Her travels literally bring movement to long-term memories, enabling her to reexamine them for authenticity and provoking new and unexpected memories. The trip’s simultaneous back-and-forward movement—“you were aware that the journey to G.—formerly L.—was in reality a return. Journeys come in pairs”13—mirrors the narrator’s approach to her past in a movement she calls a crab’s walk (11). Abandoning a linear approach, she discovers that a crabwalk, a backward and sideways motion that includes multiple perspectives, is the appropriate way to move forward and reach progress.14 The weaving back and forth movement also explains the text’s three alternating timeframes that include the narrator’s childhood (19321947), the travel to her hometown (July 10 to July 11, 1971), and the writing of her text (November 3, 1972 to May 2, 1975).15 Mirroring the constant interaction between past and present, the three levels interrupt and provoke each other, proving that the content of memories (level one) cannot be separated from its reflection (level two) and narration (level three). In his novella Crabwalk (2003, Im Krebsgang, 2002) Günter Grass employs a similar technique, “to sneak up on time in a crabwalk, seeming to go backward but actually scuttling sideways, and thereby working my way forward fairly rapidly.”16 The term that informs the text’s title and Grass’s own cover illustration can thus be understood both literally as Grass’s technique of articulating a sequence of events in a non-linear fashion, and 13 14 15

16

“Es war dir bewußt, daß die Hinreise nach G. – vormals L. – eigentlich eine Rückreise war. Denn Reisen sind paarig.” 60. To complement the analogy with marine biology, it can also be noted that crabs move diagonally and have independent eyes that enable them to look at multiple directions at once. In One Day a Year, Wolf distinguishes four levels in Patterns of Childhood: “travel level, “level of the past, manuscript level, level of the present” [“Reiseebene, Vergangenheitsebene, Manuskriptebene und Gegenwartsebene”], explaining that these levels dissipate into another. One Day a Year, 176. Ein Tag im Jahr, 170-71. “Ob ich der Zeit eher schrägläufig in die Quere kommen muß, etwa nach Art der Krebse, die den Rückwärtsgang seitlich ausscherend vortäuschen, doch ziemlich schnell vorankommen.” Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang, München: Steidl, 2002, 8-9. Translation from Günter Grass, Crabwalk, trans. Krishna Winston, New York: Harcourt, 2003, 3.

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figuratively, implicating that a look back to the past is necessary in order to move forward. Linking three textual levels, Grass illustrates (like Wolf) that the present can only be captured by moving backwards and looking sideways, i.e. by paying attention to the variety of seemingly disconnected nuances. Acknowledging her difficulty with employing the first person “I” (913), Wolf’s narrator chooses instead to use the name “Nelly” to refer to herself as a child. This rejection of the first-person and the traditional rules of autobiography17 has since become a favorite literary device of writers expressing distance to their childhood, especially when these took place in Nazi Germany. Though the narrator is determined to dare the look back, she finds the Nazi past neither accessible nor acceptable, and has particular troubles with understanding Nelly in hindsight. This ambivalence becomes prevalent when she recognizes the advantages of remaining silent (“the lure of silence, of concealment”18) but still acknowledges the need for testimony (“Things must be told”19). As the narrator maintains, her generation learned to avoid uncomfortable questions that would entail feelings of guilt and responsibility. Where Nelly’s participation was deepest, where she showed devotion, where she gave of herself, all relevant details have been obliterated. Gradually, one might assume. And it isn’t difficult to guess the reason: the forgetting must have gratified a deeply insecure awareness which, as we all know, can instruct our memory behind our own 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.20

17

18 19 20

Two cornerstones of autobiography, Elisabeth Bruss’s Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (1976) and Philippe Lejeune’s Le pacte autobiographique (1975) defined the genre based on two criteria, namely use of the first person “I” and the truth-value of the work. According to both Bruss and Lejeune, autobiography—in contrast to fiction—refers to a real past of a real speaker. In their attempts to distinguish autobiography from other genres, Lejeune considers autobiographical author, narrator, and character to be identical and posited a truth claim for autobiography, arguing that it would be the reader’s role to verify this truth, while Bruss presents several “rules” that designated a given text as autobiography, allowing exceptions to her rules. 8, “Die Verführung zum Schweigen und Verschweigen,” 15. “Es muß geredet werden,” 209. Translation is my own. 229-30, “Wo Nelly am tiefsten beteiligt war, Hingabe einsetzte, Selbstaufgabe, sind die Einzelheiten, auf die es ankäme, gelöscht. Allmählich, muß man annehmen, und es ist auch nicht schwer zu erraten, wodurch; der Schwund muß einem tief verunsicherten Bewußtsein

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The narrator’s family, in particular her daughters (Wolf dedicated her book to her two daughters, Annette and Katrin) and her mother, both encourage and discourage her project. The presence of her daughter Lenka persuades the narrator to mediate the Nazi past to the next generation. On the family’s trip in July 1971, Lenka (like Wolf’s second daughter Katrin) is about to turn fifteen—in 1945, Nelly (like Wolf) turned sixteen. Yet despite the similarity in age between Lenka and Nelly, communication between mother and daughter does not always succeed: Lenka seems uninterested in hearing about Nelly’s worldview, using non-verbal gestures (silently returning her mother’s former biology book with its hierarchy of races), and crude slang (“‘crazy,’ ‘disgusting,’ ‘shitty’” and “pseudo”21) to voice her dissent.22 These instances exemplify Lenka’s difficulties in understanding her mother (and arguably, her adolescence), conversely, the narrator withdraws into silence. But despite the challenges of communicating an experience from one generation to the next, Lenka embodies hope, precisely because she is part of a generation to which former ideals seem utterly foreign. In contrast to Nelly, Lenka is unafraid to voice protest or dissent, is honest in her opinions, and unwilling to fulfill others people’s expectations. In fact, Lenka’s categorical rejection of anything connected to the Nazi past goes so far that she fails to grasp the subtle impact of Nazi ideology in everyday life. As David Dollenmayer suggests, this “rigorous moralism” may reflect her upbringing in the GDR, a state that emphasized heroic resistance to fascism over the gray zones of complicity.23 But even though Lenka was born and raised in a socialist society, she does not shy away from criticizing it, and her refusal to accept any kind of ideology puts her in open conflict with GDR authorities, much more so than her mother’s cautious criticism of GDR politics. Her mother Charlotte, though, hinders the narrator’s book project. Admittedly, the narrator needed distance from her mother in order to assess their relationship more honestly; she also recalls a nightmare that she

21 22 23

gelegen gekommen sein, das, wie man weiß, hinter seinem eigenen Rücken dem Gedächtnis wirksame Weisungen erteilen kann, zum Beispiel die: Nicht mehr daran denken. Weisungen, die über Jahre treulich befolgt werden. Bestimmte Erinnerungen meiden. Nicht davon reden. Wörter, Wortreihen, ganze Gedankenketten, die sie auslösen konnten, nicht aufkommen lassen. Bestimmte Fragen unter Altersgenossen nicht stellen. Weil es nämlich unerträglich ist, bei dem Wort ‘Auschwitz’ das kleine Wort ‘ich’ mitdenken zu müssen: ‘Ich’ im Konjunktiv Imperfekt: Ich hätte. Ich könnte. Ich würde. Getan haben. Gehorcht haben.” 270. 176, “‘Irre,’ ‘mies,’ ‘widerlich,’ ‘beschissen,’” 207. One Day a Year reveals that one of Lenka’s favorite words, “pseudo,” was used by Wolf’s daughter Annette (164). Ein Tag im Jahr 158. David Dollenmayer, “Generational Patterns in Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster,” German Life and Letters 39.3 (April 1986): 229-34, 231.

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had four years after her mother’s death, in which Charlotte discovered and disapproved of her project: Suddenly, a shock that penetrates even the roots of your hair: in the big room on the table lies the manuscript, with, on the first page, only one word, “MOTHER,” in large letters. She’ll read it, guess your purpose, and feel hurt.24

Perhaps because of this guilt, the narrator opts not to begin her text (as initially planned) with Charlotte’s rash decision to defend house and property rather than stay with her children in the face of advancing enemy troops in January 1945. Though admitting her bewilderment over Charlotte’s choice at several points in the text, the narrator chooses not to elaborate on these emotions. If the narrator cannot openly address feelings of guilt and pain vis-àvis her mother, several catastrophic incidents that occur during the writing of her text serve as repeated reminders, and disrupt the narrative. The seemingly trivial event of hitting a cat in the road triggers her feelings of shame and guilt: Home at a snail’s pace, not a word about the incident. In a short English text that you’re trying to read before going to sleep, one of the characters, drunk, disconsolate, repeats the same words over and over: “I was a nice girl, wasn’t I?” To wake up in the middle of the night. The helpless crying. But I was … All your chances, lost forever, crowded around you that night.25

While the accident temporarily silences the narrator and she refrains from mentioning it to anybody that night, it eventually advances the production of her text. So do other tragic events, like the suicide of her daughter’s literature teacher M. and his girlfriend, the untimely death of her friend B. (presumably the writer and friend Brigitte Reimann who died of cancer in February 1973) and the puzzling accident of Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann (who died from a fire in her bedroom in October 1973). The narrator connects each of these disasters to the interpretation of her childhood. Comparing M.’s concealment of his suicidal thoughts with her own pretense of happiness during adolescence, she illustrates the danger and isolation of disguise. Whereas Lenka’s teacher, more openly critical of the regime than the narrator, fails by choosing suicide over the suffering 24 25

10, “Plötzlich ein Schreck bis in die Haarspitzen: Auf dem Tisch im großen Zimmer das Manuskript, auf dessen erster Seite in großen Buchstaben nur das Wort ‘Mutter’ steht. Sie wird es lesen, wird deinen Plan vollständig erraten und sich verletzt fühlen…” 18. 189, “Im Schleichtempo nach Hause, kein Wort über den Vorfall. Du gehst schlafen. In einem kurzen englischen Text, den du noch zu lesen versuchst, spricht eine der Figuren, betrunken, untröstlich, immer den gleichen Satz: But I was a nice girl. Mitten in der Nacht erwachen. Das unstillbare Weinen. But I was… Alle für immer verlorenen Möglichkeiten versammelten sich in jener Nacht um dich.” 222.

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from restrictions and oppression, the narrator emerges with fresh motivation to live and to write. In the same manner, the news of her friend B.’s and Ingeborg Bachmann’s deaths, whose writings had crucial significance for Wolf, bestow the narrator with fresh motivation to bear witness. The order of the day is: The command is sich verlassen in the double sense of the word [abandon and rely on oneself]. After briefly staggering, due to the greater load on one’s shoulders, to straighten up. There are things that need to be said.26

As the narrator indicates, the German word “sich verlassen” could mean either trusting or leaving oneself, two seemingly contradictory concepts that are also evoked in the later work In the Flesh (133). In crisis, the narrator does both; by abandoning her previous mode of living, remembering, and writing, she trusts that new approaches can be found. In this way, each calamity shapes her text: while news of M.’s suicide introduce the chapter on pretending (“The pretenders are silenced. The new house”27), a prophetic Bachmann quotation frames the chapter on war (“‘With my burned hand…’ laying bare of the innards: war”28). Linking past and present, the narrator is use present conflicts for the expression of her text rather than falling victim to them. Breaking with Cameos In her 1968 essay “Reading and Writing” (“Lesen und Schreiben”), Wolf compares memory to a collection of cameos [Medaillons]:29 neatly packaged pieces of jewelry with enclosed photographs or drawings that allow us to interpret the past to our liking: Everyone carries around a collection of colored medallions bearing captions which are partly funny, partly gruesome. On occasion we take them out and show them to people because we need them to confirm the reassuringly unambiguous feelings we have that the past events they commemorate were beautiful or ugly, good or evil. … “Memory” is the name we commonly use when we take out these prettily made craft items and pass them off to people as the genuine article 26 27 28 29

“Das Gebot ist: Sich verlassen, in des Wortes Doppelsinn. Nach kurzem Taumeln, verursacht durch die vermehrte Last auf den Schultern, sich straffen. Es muß geredet werden.” 209. Translation is my own. “Die Verstellten sind verstummt. Das neue Haus.” (Chapter Five). Translation is my own. 163, 171. “‘Mit meiner verbrannten Hand…’ Entblößung der Eingeweide: Krieg” (Chapter Eight). Here I translate Wolf’s metaphor of a Medaillon as “cameo,” even though the English translation uses the word “medallion.” In her essay “Lesen und Schreiben” (1968), Wolf uses the image to refer to little enameled miniatures, with portraits or tiny landscapes embedded. Many thanks to Scott Denham for suggesting this translation.

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so that we can learn their market value, compare them to what is currently on offer and—assuming they match it—hear them pronounced the real thing.30

Fashioned belatedly, these cameos present us with a fantasy of childhood, one that has been manufactured and distorted according to present interests. In the essay Wolf urges us to re-evaluate these fantasies, to break up the cameos in a laborious process whose outcome is unknown: “Remembering—like writing—means swimming against the stream: against the apparently natural stream of forgetting. It is movement, exertion. Where is this movement headed?”31 In a similar vein, Patterns of Childhood’s narrator discovers that her memories have become cameos, encased in amber, and compares her task to the work of a paleontologist who must break through deposited sediments in order to arrive at the deeper-lying, more authentic memories. Over time, Wolf’s metaphors became even more influential. For instance, in Animal Triste Monika Maron compares remembering to the creation of a pearl, while Günter Grass employs strikingly similar imagery as Wolf when he compares unwanted memories to bits of material preserved in amber, and the process of remembering to peeling back the layers of an onion:32 Beneath its dry and crackly outer skin we find another, more moist layer, that once detached, reveals a third, beneath which a fourth and fifth wait whispering. And each skin sweats words too long muffled, and curlicue signs, as if a mysterymonger from an early age, while the onion was still germinating, had decided to encode himself.33

In Patterns of Childhood, the narrator’s attempts at eliciting particular memories fail. She cannot recall her mother’s pregnancy or the birth of her brother so she declares pessimistically that remembering is a skill she does not possess. By illustrating this dilemma, Wolf expresses in fiction what has since been substantiated in neurobiological research. According to a 30

31 32 33

Christa Wolf, “Lesen und Schreiben” (1968), Die Dimension des Autors: Essays und Aufsätze, Reden und Gespräche 1959-1985, Band 2, Frankfurt a. M.: Luchterhand, 1990, 463-509, 47879. Translation from Christa Wolf, “Reading and Writing,” The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays, trans. Jan van Heurck, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995, 20-48, 31. “Sich-Erinnern ist gegen den Strom schwimmen, wie schreiben – gegen den scheinbar natürlichen Strom des Vergessens, anstrengende Bewegung. Wohin treibt das?” Christa Wolf, “Lesen und Schreiben,” 480. “Reading and Writing,” 32. See Monika Maron, Animal Triste, Frankfurt a. M: S. Fischer, 1996, 106-07. Günter Grass, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, Göttingen: Steidl, 2006, 70. “Unter der ersten, noch trocken knisternden Haut findet sich die nächste, die, kaum gelöst, feucht eine dritte freigibt, unter der die vierte, fünfte warten und flüstern. Und jede weitere schwitzt zu lang gemiedene Wörter aus, auch schnörkelige Zeichen, als habe sich ein Geheimniskrämer von jung an, als die Zwiebel noch keimte, verschlüsseln wollen.” Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, 9. Translation from Günter Grass, Peeling the Onion, trans. Michael Henry Heim, New York: Harcourt, 2007, 3.

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dynamic view of memory, memories are never permanently fixed and cannot be accessed at will like data stored on a computer, unaltered and available at the press of a keystroke. Rather, remembering is an activity that, like other cognitive processes, depends on activation and interaction of complex neural net profiles.34 Being subject to distortion and forgetting, memories are continually changed, reproduced, even fabricated.35 Accordingly, the narrator must abandon her expectations of obtaining specific memories, and conversely gains access to unexpected, different memories. Soon she compares the memory-material with ever-expanding millet porridge: Meanwhile, you’re becoming more and more aware of your inability to manage, in the sense of “to interpret,” the steadily proliferating material (the porridge, which boils over from the child’s pot and fills the room, then the house, and finally the street, and threatens to drown the entire town).36

The narrator fears “Do we need protection against the chasms of memory?”37 and she acknowledges the overwhelming potential of repressed memories. The narrator of In the Flesh is even less in control, as she merely observes memories, thoughts, and fantasies drifting by in her feverish dreams, with no hope of channeling them (71). In both texts, remembering also has a markedly physical dimension: Patterns of Childhood’s eighth chapter is entitled “laying bare of the innards,”38 while in In the Flesh, the ailing narrator also witnesses the “exposed entrails”39 when trying “to get to the bottom of the truth of the body, which has been hidden for so long.”40 In particular, the narrator of Patterns of Childhood encounters her own (and her mother’s) desire to romanticize her childhood, a bias that calls to mind Sigmund Freud’s theory of screen memories. According to Freud, screen memories replace unpleasant and offensive memories with wishes 34 35 36

37 38 39 40

See Daniel Siegel, “Memory, Trauma, and Psychotherapy: A Cognitive Science View,” The Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research 4 (1995): 93-122, 97. See Stuart M. Zola, “The Neurobiology of Recovered Memory,” The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 9 (1997): 449-59. 194, “Währendes offenbart sich immer deutlicher die Unfähigkeit, das stetig und unbeirrbar weiterwuchernde Material (der Hirsebrei, der dem Kind aus dem Töpfchen kocht und zuerst sein Zimmer, dann sein Haus, schließlich die Straße füllt und die ganze Stadt zu ersticken droht) zu bewältigen im Sinn von ‘deuten.’” 228. Translation in the parenthesis is my own and deviates from the published translation. “Brauchen wir Schutz vor den Abgründen der Erinnerung?” 85. Translation is my own. 171, “‘Entblößung der Eingeweide,” 201. 94, “Bloßlegung der Eingeweide,” 143. 94, “der Wahrheit des Körpers auf den Grund zu gehen, die der so lange verborgen hat,” 138.

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and fantasies to such a degree that he questions whether there are any authentic childhood memories at all: “It is perhaps altogether questionable whether we have any conscious memories from childhood: perhaps we have only memories of childhood.”41 In a similar vein, Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller suggested that the child’s dependence on parental love makes it impossible to recognize mistreatment at the time it occurs, and that even as an adult a person is more likely to repress resentment against the parents rather than to articulate it: “It is precisely the little Katies and Konrads who as adults close their ears to the subject of child abuse (or else minimize its harmfulness), because they themselves claim to have had a ‘happy childhood.’”42 While the notion of a happy childhood has been a middle-class fantasy since the late eighteenth century, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich maintain that it took on more importance after 1945, when disillusioned Germans withdrew from politics and reverted to the private sphere.43 Expanding on these thoughts, Eric Santner proposes that parents compensated for the “inability to mourn” by seeking refuge at home and expecting children to reverberate approval.44 In Patterns of Childhood, the narrator formulates the notion of a happy childhood as a desire in the subjunctive voice, “Who wouldn’t wish to have had a happy childhood?”45 This notion acknowledges both the particular allure of this fantasy while also exposing it as wishful thinking. Willing to dismantle the falsely idealized picture, the narrator exposes Nazi Germany’s authoritarian child-rearing practices and its consequences. Nelly was first disciplined by her mother who enforced the values of being orderly, composed, and submissive, which are in essence the Nazi ideal of a German woman. In a merciless, even violent “education” in school and in the Hitler youth, Nelly further learned to give up her own wishes and desires in favor of obedience. Occupied with duties and responsibilities in 41

42

43 44 45

“Vielleicht ist es überhaupt zweifelhaft, ob wir bewußte Erinnerungen aus der Kindheit haben, oder vielmehr bloß an die Kindheit.” Sigmund Freud, “Über Deckerinnerungen,” Gesammelte Werke I , Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1952, 553. Translation from Sigmund Freud, “Screen Memories,” The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips, London: Penguin, 2006, 541-60, 559. “Die Käthchens und Konrädchens aller Zeiten waren sich als Erwachsene immer darüber einig, daß ihre Kindheit die glücklichste Zeit ihres Lebens gewesen war.” Alice Miller, Am Anfang war Erziehung, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980, 80. Translation from Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, trans. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983, 62. Alexander und Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens, München: Piper, 1967, 76-77. Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990, 37. 25, “Wer gäbe nicht viel um eine glückliche Kindheit?” 34.

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the household, school, and the Hitler Youth, and finally absorbed with the all-consuming war and flight, the narrator concludes that Nelly did not have the time for personal growth and development. Accordingly, Nelly embraced the Nazi doctrine, seeking nothing more than to please parents, teachers, and mentors. With great effort she learns to suppress innate thoughts and values, and to control her emotional outbursts. Yet the narrator also reveals the high price and ultimate failure of such upbringing, as Nelly turns against herself in the face of unapproachable ideals. Nelly fears that she is worthless (“How could everything be all right, when she knew what a bad girl she really was”46), appalling, and despicable (“because she might have been exchanged in the cradle after all: an ugly duckling, homeless, unloved, despite all protests to the contrary”47). These inappropriate feelings, pointing to the contrasts between ideal and reality, neither fit with the image of a properly happy young girl in the Third Reich nor with memories of her parents’ pride and joy at the success of their new store, and her father’s new position in the SA (“radiance, serenity, harmony, so soothing to the memory”48). Neither do the memories correspond to the information the narrator uncovers belatedly in the daily papers of the time, including the rights and freedom of expression being stripped, the persecution of communists, and the opening of the first concentration camp, Dachau, in March 1933. In reconsideration, Nelly’s childhood games, the verses and songs, and terms like “concert camp”49 are no longer harmless but reveal an undeniable cruelty, violence, and racism. Cloaked in deceptive language, memory’s cameos thus have a distinctly ideological function by trivializing and concealing a bleak and horrific reality. Pointing to the perversion of values of the German educated middle class [Bildungsbürgertum], the narrator invites readers to question idealized notions of education that could not prevent the barbarity of the Third Reich. She demonstrates that the Nazi movement, ostensibly a youth movement, erased young people’s formative years and made Nelly into a little Nazi instead of an informed, educated citizen and healthy adult. Nelly never learned what it meant to be sixteen. She didn’t ever have a chance to be sixteen or seventeen. Her ambition was to look at least twenty, to show no vulnerability, no weakness. Later on, her true age painfully made up for the headstart that she had gained by force. But the years are gone for good. Your children 46 47 48 49

11, “Wie konnte alles gut sein, wenn sie selbst nicht gut war,” 19. 14, “Weil sie womöglich doch ein vertauschtes Kind war: Fundevogel, heimatlos, ungeliebt trotz aller Beteuerungen,” 22. 36, “Glanz und Heiterkeit und Übereinstimmung, die dem Gedächtnis so wohl tun,” 48. 42, “Konzertlager,” 54.

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are dealing with parents who were never young themselves. Ruth, Lenka, without knowing it (perhaps even knowingly), enlighten their mother about the foreign word “youth.”50

While the narrator retroactively questions and examines the personal and public factors that affected her upbringing, mother Charlotte clutches to her memory of a happy family, proclaiming repetitively her good marriage and her daughter’s blessed childhood. The narrator mistrusts these memories, noting that the presumably impeccable wife abandoned her marriagebed and repeatedly alludes to the January 1945 occurrence that calls into question notions of motherly love and protection. Although she cannot comprehend her mother’s decision to choose property over her family, she only hints at the impact of this experience, which to Julia Hell is proof of its traumatic nature. While the narrator admits to frequently thinking about this incident, she does not specify any emotions accompanying such thinking. Although this abandonment of her children has become a family legend, the narrator thinks, it has never really been explored; thus the event reflects what most signally characterizes trauma: its lack of articulation. The image of the moment of separation, the medaillon, is evoked and recirculated again and again, but it is never examined.51

Wolf’s theoretical work on cameos does not necessarily translate to the narrator’s ability to break with them. In Patterns of Childhood, this holds true for other traumatic events as well. “A chapter of fear”52 focuses on the narrator’s difficulty to confront her fear and nightmares of violence and rape, but an explanation of the source of her fears remains sketchy and indistinct. As before, the narrator merely alludes to the incident rather than coming to examine it. In this context, Irene Kacandes, noticing that traumatic events are never clearly identified in the text, suggests that readers investigate the markers of “communicative gaps, silences, and even whole stories that cannot be told or cannot be told fully.”53

50

51 52 53

340, “Nelly hat nie erfahren, wie man mit sechzehn ist. Sie kam nicht dazu, sechzehn oder siebzehn zu sein. Ihr Ehrgeiz war es, mindestens wie zwanzig auszusehn und sich keine Blöße zu geben, keine Schwäche zu zeigen. Mühsam holte ihre wirkliche Lebenszeit den Vorsprung, den sie sich abgezwungen hatte, später wieder ein. Aber die Jahre fehlen, für immer. Die Kinder haben es mit Eltern zu tun, die selbst nicht jung gewesen sind. Ruth, Lenka, ohne es zu wissen (vielleicht auch bewußt), belehren ihre Mutter über das Fremdwort ‘Jugend.’” 395. Julia Hell, Post-Fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany, Durham: Duke UP, 1997, 205-06. 357, “Ein Kapitel Angst,” 414. Irene Kacandes, Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2001, 95.

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The premise of Wolf’s novel also challenges the public cameo of GDR historiography, which saw no need for a (re)examination of the Nazi past, particularly from a women’s perspective. Rather than celebrating the antifascist resistance in Nazi Germany or the transformation of a young soldier who overcomes the perils of fascism, Wolf turns her attention to hitherto unnoticed persons and events, examining the everyday life during war, defeat, and flight, as well as the socialization of a child during the Nazi years. In this way, she illustrates how the child Nelly is confronted with the war in many contexts—as a witness to conversations between her parents, a student influenced by (Nazi) teachers, a refugee, and a daughter whose father returns from the front. The narrator juxtaposes Nelly’s perspective with that of her brother Lutz, and complements her memories with travel impressions, newspaper reports, speeches, songs, and other documents. With this mixture of the personal and political, the narrator refuses to divorce the seemingly apolitical daily life from Nazi atrocities.54 By examining the scars of the war and the Nazi past, Wolf establishes what GDR historiography sought to deny, namely the continuities before and after 1945. The diary-project One Day a Year reveals Wolf’s plan to include information from former Nazi school books in Patterns of Childhood as early as 1970, with the goal of drawing parallels and comparisons between past and present. So, tackle the childhood book right now. Subtitle something like: A Childhood in Germany. Or perhaps: An Obituary for the Living. Describe the flight, even the difficult incidents, truthfully. An expulsion from the paradise that was, however, no paradise, as it turns out. Work out parallels to today through precise description of the education mechanism. I need school books from back then: reader, history, biology. Then I can prepare myself to work for a few years, I say.55

Wolf’s search for school books was difficult and, in some ways, unsuccessful: in Patterns of Childhood, the narrator finds her former textbooks locked away in a separate room of the library, accessible only by special permission. By dissociating from the remnants of its Nazi past, the GDR State accepts only a mediated and therefore distorted interpretation of the past. 54 55

See also Marie-Luise Gättens, Women Writers and Fascism: Reconstructing History, Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1995, 98. 160, “Also jetzt gleich das Kindheitsbuch in Angriff nehmen. Untertitel so etwas wie: Eine Kindheit in Deutschland. Oder auch: Ein Nachruf auf Lebende. Die Flucht, auch die harten Vorfälle, wahrheitsgetreu schildern. Eine Vertreibung aus dem Paradies, das aber kein Paradies war, wie sich herausstellt. Parallelen zu heute durch genaue Schilderung des Erziehungsmechanismus herauskriegen. Ich brauche Schulbücher von damals: Lesebuch, Geschichte, Biologie. Da kann ich mich auf ein paar Jahre einrichten, sage ich.” 154.

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The narrator is also surprised when she learns that Adolf Eichmann, “the most dangerous, the man who comes closest to his contemporaries’ concept of ‘normal’ behavior,”56 is nowhere to be found in Lenka’s ninthgrade history book. Although almost one hundred pages cover the “fascist dictatorship in Germany,”57 Eichmann is dully erased from historiography, presumably because a criminal who appears frightfully normal and questions the boundaries of good and evil does not fit with Marxist ideology. The narrator, however, obliterates the dividing lines between Nazi perpetrators and petit-bourgeois Germans when depicting how the business of her middle-class parents prospered and benefited from the Nazi regime. As Helen Bridge maintains, “this had particularly important implications in the GDR context, since the subtle ideological effects of fascism on the German population at large had been notably lacking from discussions of National Socialism prior to the publication of Patterns of Childhood.”58 Besides questioning the institutional remembrance of her state, the narrator also disapproves of capitalistic politics, discussing in her text events such as the Vietnam War, the 1972 Watergate scandal, and the 1973 Pinochet Military Coup in Chile.59 Melancholy, Mourning, and Physical Pain When trying to recall Nelly’s experiences, the narrator realizes that many of her feelings—anguish, sorrow, regret—were repressed and are no longer accessible to the adult. Regarding the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, for instance, the narrator can only mourn the reverberations of emotions as Nelly’s intuitive reaction of sadness and empathy has been long forgotten.

56 57 58 59

237, “Der Gefährlichste, dem ‘normalen’ Verhalten von Zeitgenossen am nächsten Stehende,” 277. As mentioned before, the GDR State deliberately shunned the term “National Socialism” in order to downplay its singular character. Helen Bridge, Women’s Writing and Historiography in the GDR, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002, 59. If the references to capitalist politics seem a bit one-sided, Wolf was in no position to publicly comment on Soviet and GDR politics (in In the Flesh, however, she mentions the impact of the 1968 Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia, as well as the 1976 expatriation of writer Wolf Biermann).

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The pain—maybe it’ll now be forgotten—can still be named but no longer felt. Instead, during nights like these, the pain over the lost pain … To live between echoes, between the echoes of echoes…60

Patterns of Childhood is thus not a work of mourning, but more precisely the absence of it. Having lost the ability to access old pain, the narrator only experiences it second-handedly as “idle melancholy,”61 unable to undo the damage. In Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, melancholia is a pathological fixation that prevents healthy mourning, i.e., a slow and painful process of detachment. Likewise, the contemporary psychiatrist Aaron Lazare views melancholia—in contrast to a successful mourning process—as a sign of unresolved grief.62 Indeed, the narrator’s melancholia seems to keep her from explicitly articulating pain. If many of the narrator’s anxieties remain unspecified in the text, they surface in other ways. Nelly comes to react physically to painful experiences when not allowed to express her distress and unable to change her environment. After she witnesses a girl being punished in the Hitler Youth, for instance, she develops a fever and bronchitis, allowing her to withdraw to the sickroom. On another occasion, she suffers a breakdown when discovering that her mother refused to help a pregnant mother and her young boy on their flight west.63 And after the collapse of the Third Reich, Nelly is afflicted by typhus and later develops tuberculosis, forcing her to spend years in a sanatorium. Unable to withstand grim realties, the receptive and vulnerable child reacts psychosomatically to her surroundings: “It was Nelly’s own body that ultimately signaled the fact that she actually knew without having been informed.”64 The adult narrator’s physical symptoms can be read in a similar context. The headaches and sleeplessness she suffers the night before traveling to Poland seem to indicate impending conflicts of which she is not yet aware, granting her access to past experiences that her mind cannot (yet) 60 61 62 63

64

275, “Der Schmerz – vielleicht vergißt man ihn jetzt – ist noch zu benennen, zu fühlen nicht mehr. Dafür, in Nächten wie diesen, der Schmerz über den verlorenen Schmerz … Zwischen Echos leben, zwischen Echos von Echos…,” 321. “Tatenlose Melancholie,” 87. Translation is my own. See Aaron Lazare, “Unresolved Grief,” Outpatient Psychiatry: Diagnosis and Treatment, ed. Aaron Lazare, Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins: 1979, 499-501. The same could be said for In the Flesh. As Nelly’s breakdown anticipates the collapse of the “Third Reich,” the protagonist’s critical illness in In the Flesh foreshadows the imminent downfall of the GDR regime. In both cases, the body is able to sense historical change before the mind. 280, “Das allerletzte Zeichen dafür, daß sie im Grunde Bescheid wußte, ohne unterrichtet zu sein, kam Nelly aus ihrem eigenen Körper, der sich, da ihr eine andere Sprache durchaus verwehrt war, in seiner Weise ausdrückte.” 327.

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process intellectually. In this way, the body encourages and aids her remembering, as physical discomfort prompts the narrator to confront her past: What forces you, you had asked yourself—not in words, that’s rare: in headaches—what forces you to climb back? To face a child (whose name hadn’t yet been determined); to expose yourself again: to the look of this child, to the offended resistance of all those involved, to the sheer lack of comprehension, but, above all, to your own strategies of concealment and your own doubt.65

Eric Santner has suggested that in Patterns of Childhood the body records suppressed feelings so that it “functions in this novel as a sort of writing tablet and mnemonic device of the unconscious.”66 This is true, but at the same time the text questions the dichotomies of mind and body, conscious and unconscious. Both Patterns of Childhood and In the Flesh locate a person’s soul in the stomach, suggesting that it is a bodily organ rather than an abstract entity. Accordingly, Nelly feels what the Führer means to her as pressure in her stomach, and feels guilt as the impulse to throw herself down on her stomach, giving abstract values a distinctly physical quality. Furthermore, the body in Patterns of Childhood functions not merely as a “mnemonic device,” but prevents encounters with painful memories, making illness a refuge:67 You hit the back of your head so hard against an iron ledge that you lost whole days—or gained them, as you secretly thought—in headaches, doctor’s visits, and X rays.68

The narrator suspects that her accident was not purely accidental, but that it expresses some reservations that can only be sensed, not intellectually processed. In this way, her illness is not merely a metaphor of unresolved conflicts but also an alternative mode of expressing them. She utilizes this potential for communication when relating the stiffness in her shoulders back to upsetting childhood incidents, reasoning that Nelly’s suppression of emotions corresponded to a tightening of her muscles. The text is thus not entirely the result of the mind’s activity, but includes the narrator’s 65

66 67 68

150-51, “Was zwingt dich, hast du dich gefragt – nicht mit Worten, das gibt es selten: durch Kopfschmerz –, was zwingt dich, zurückzusteigen? Einem Kind gegenüberzutreten (sein Name war noch nicht festgelegt); dich erneut auszusetzen: dem Blick dieses Kindes, der gekränkten Abwehr aller Betroffenen, der puren Verständnislosigkeit, vor allem aber: der eigenen Verschleierungstaktik und dem eigenen Zweifel.” 178. Santner, 157. This is also a recurring idea in One Day a Year. 71-72, “Du schlugst dir den Hinterkopf so nachdrücklich an einer Eisenkante, daß wieder Tage durch Kopfschmerz, Arztbesuch und Röntgen verloren – oder wie du heimlich fühltest: gewonnen – waren.” 88.

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physical reactions to processes of thinking, in particular remembering and mourning. In her speech “Cancer and Society” (“Krebs und Gesellschaft”), held at the 1991 convention of the German Cancer Society, Wolf elaborated on the physical dimension of psychological injury, questioning the separation between physical and mental ailments and individual and societal wellbeing. According to Wolf, the body becomes the site of dispute when illness manifests an irresolvable conflict between individual and society,69 a theme evident in all of her work but especially pronounced in The Quest for Christa T., Patterns of Childhood, and In the Flesh. Even in Wolf’s first successful work, Divided Heaven (1976, Der geteilte Himmel, 1963), illness plays a central roll when protagonist Rita has an accident and falls into a coma after learning that her lover has left for West Berlin; she then recovers in the hospital where she reflects on her past relationship. In The Quest for Christa T., the teacher and writer Christa T. develops leukemia when her growth potential is curtailed by societal norms. Unwilling and unable to conform and deny her disapproval, Christa T. dies at age 35, an occurrence later commented on by Marcel Reich-Ranicki: “Christa T. dies from leukemia but her true sickness is the GDR.”70 The book was the first one to rouse official suspicion; after censorship and a political campaign against Wolf’s “seditious” stance, it was published in only a small edition. Christa T. was also Wolf’s first work to articulate her critique of Western medicine. The same criticism echoes in Patterns of Childhood when the narrator’s persistent headaches force her to go to the hospital and have her spinal column x-rayed (during work on her text, Wolf suffered from cardiac arrhythmia that was treated in the hospital). While the narrator is waiting in the x-ray room listening to instructions over the speakers and exposing her head to the x-rays, she reflects on the ways in which modern medicine has split mind and body. Wolf herself experienced the physical manifestations of mental conflicts on her own body: after she spoke at the public protest on November 4, 1989, at Berlin Alexanderplatz about her continued commitment to support and to reform the GDR, she suffered a heart attack. In In the Flesh, which was inspired by a series of appendix operations that Wolf underwent in 1988, she most openly stages the body as a site of unresolved conflict. The text consists of fever-induced thoughts, mythological references, hallucinations, and body memories of a nameless 69 70

Wolf, “Krebs und Gesellschaft,” Auf dem Weg nach Tabou: Texte 1990-94, Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994, 123. “Christa T. stirbt an der Leukämie, aber sie leidet an der DDR.” Marcel Reich Ranicki, Die Zeit, May 23, 1969.

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(though presumably autobiographical) protagonist enduring a near-death experience as she lies in a hospital bed during the final phase of the GDR. While the narrator intuitively links her symptoms to her “psychological exhaustion,”71 the physicians fail to see the connection and (mis)treat her accordingly—mis-diagnosing her tachycardia, operating to no avail, failing to recognize a chronic appendicitis, and searching in vain for the origin of infection. In this text, Wolf’s narrator is most seriously at risk, barely averting death against the backdrop of her collapsing country (ironically, the medicine that promises to be most successful has to be retrieved from West Berlin). Yet while her former colleague, friend, and adversary Paul Urban sees no other solution than suicide,72 the narrator survives, having used her disease as an opportunity to reassess her life. In the Flesh thus continues Wolf’s quest for subjective authenticity73 in a world where the usual priorities and life’s daily routines have turned upside down, in a world where even time begins to disintegrate. In the Flesh recounts and continues episodes narrated in Patterns of Childhood. For example the story of the narrator’s aunt Liesbeth Radde who became pregnant with an illegitimate child by her lover, Jewish doctor Leitner who immigrated to the United States in 1938.74 But rather than search for memories (like the narrator in Patterns of Childhood), the protagonist in In the Flesh comes to accept that she can neither access nor control her recollections, and merely draws on memory fragments as they drift in and out of her consciousness, never separating memory from fantasy. Skeptical about any intellectual insight and the capacity of language, the narrator increasingly suspects words to be false and instead comes to trust her body’s language. Being far more experimental than Patterns of Childhood, In the Flesh is arguably a more successful work of mourning where the protagonist’s sadness manifests itself in her sickness, and she begins to cry in both physical and mental pain. 71 72

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85, “Seelische Erschöpfung,” 126. Paul Urban, conceived as the narrator’s male alter ego, is an opportunistic fellow student who makes a brilliant career in the SED and becomes Secretary of Culture. Later, though, when he openly disagrees with the regime, Urban is publicly scorned and loses his job. Seeing no alternative, Urban hangs himself, thus joining the list of Wolf characters (Christa T., teacher M.) that fell victim to the GDR regime. Several reviewers tried to unmask Urban’s identity, as for instance Volker Müller who claimed in the Berliner Zeitung that the fate of Urban was modeled after Hans Koch. See Volker Müller, “Die Geschichte einer Entgiftung,” Berliner Zeitung, February 25, 2002. For an excellent, in-depth study on Wolf’s notion of subjectivity from Divided Heaven to In the Flesh, see Cheryl Dueck, Rifts in Time and in the Self: The Female Subject in Two Generations of East German Women Writers, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. As documented in Ein Tag im Jahr, Wolf modeled her description of Dr. Leitner after the physician Dr. Alfred Lechner (1899-1992) who left Germany in 1938. 649-49.

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The earlier Patterns of Childhood, conversely, concludes with the narrator forsaking the idea of “mastering” her childhood and conceding to ambiguous, even conflicting memories. You had worked your way to this spot, up to this house, not in a straight line but in a seemingly aimless zigzag course, in order to “get the feel” fort he child— possibly with the help of a memory exposed to the impact of details, one that begins to yield items of astounding insignificance. That’s when you had to realize that you could never again be her ally, that you were an intruding stranger pursuing not a more or less well-marked trail but actually the child herself: her innermost secret that concerned no one else.75 … The “light of childhood”—how could you have hoped to find it again!—remained invisible.76

The narrator has a similar insight when looking at Salvador Dali’s painting, “The Persistance [sic] of Memory” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,77 when she realizes that remembering is an uncanny, threatening process, like the landscape depicted in the painting. In the painting, light is overshadowed by darkness, mirroring the narrator’s missing enlightenment of her childhood. The painting’s three dripping watches, each showing slightly different times equally correspond to Patterns of Childhood’s three levels in time and the narrator’s insight that the timeframes of past, present, and future are all interconnected not to mention fluid. Wolf’s struggle in Patterns of Childhood of finding an appropriate way to represent the interplay of the various timeframes is solved more radically in In the Flesh when the narrator faces the dissolution of any fixed time: “All my temporality has sunk away into timelessness, my time is running away from me like non-time.”78 Here the narrator can only wish for a “time grid” (46) [Zeitgitter 68], a term that evokes Ruth Klüger’s concept of a “timescape” [Zeitschaft] in which past and present events can be placed.

75

76 77 78

119, “Bis hierher, bis zu diesem Haus hattest du dich vorgearbeitet, nicht in gerader Linie, sondern scheinbar ziellos, im Zickzackkurs, um das Kind – womöglich mit Hilfe eines Gedächtnisses, das, hilflos dem Anprall von Einzelheiten ausgesetzt, erstaunliche Nebensächlichkeiten auszuliefern beginnt – ‘in den Griff’ zu kriegen. Hier aber mußtest du einsehen, daß du nie wieder sein Verbündeter sein konntest, sondern ein zudringlicher Fremder warst, der nicht eine mehr oder weniger markierte Spur, sondern am Ende es selbst verfolgte: Sein inneres, niemanden sonst betreffendes Geheimnis.” 142 … “Das ‘Licht der Kindheit’ – wie hattest du hoffen können, es wiederzufinden! – blieb unsichtbar.” 143. Translation is my own. In Kindheitsmuster, the painting is (incorrectly) called “The Persistance of Memory” (301); in Patterns of Childhood, “Persistence of Memory” (258). 47, “Alle meine Zeitlichkeit ist in Zeitlosigkeit versunken, meine Zeit verstreicht mir als Unzeit.” 69.

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Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory (1931) © The Museum of Modern Art, New York

A Collective Autobiography? By entitling her autobiographical work Patterns of Childhood, a term which calls attention to learned patterns of behavior, Wolf shifts emphasis from the individual to Germans of her generation. The text itself also reinforces processes of socialization rather than depicting Nelly’s childhood as unique. A prefaced disclaimer states: Anyone believing that he detects a similarity between a character in the narrative and either himself or anyone else should consider the strange lack of individuality in the behavior of many contemporaries. Generally recognizable behavior patterns should be blamed on circumstances. C.W.79

Without referring to the Nazi period by name, Wolf points to ideology that shaped her and her contemporaries in similar ways, thus taking her work out of a purely personal context. This prompted Barbara Kosta to 79

“Wer Ähnlichkeiten zwischen einem Charakter der Erzählung und sich selbst oder ihm bekannten Menschen zu erkennen glaubt, sei auf den merkwürdigen Mangel an Eigentümlichkeit verwiesen, der dem Verhalten vieler Zeitgenossen anhaftet. Man müßte die Verhältnisse beschuldigen, weil sie Verhaltensweisen hervorbringen, die man wiedererkennt. C.W.” 6.

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call the text a “collective autobiography,”80 while in a similar vein Anna K. Kuhn maintains that Wolf’s endeavor goes beyond the traditional enterprise of autobiography: By speaking not merely for herself but for her entire generation, Wolf violates one of the basic assumptions of the genre of autobiography: its emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual.81

Rather than claiming a universal perspective, however, Wolf’s writes from a decidedly female point of few. The text depicts Nelly’s female role models and the patriarchal restrictions and direct and indirect sexual violence she encounters, and focuses on the narrator’s relationship to her mother and daughter. Describing what historiography lacks, namely women’s daily life and emotional involvement in Nazi Germany, and revealing how gender profoundly shapes remembering, the narrator has a distinctly didactic agenda, and even terms her writing a “duty.”82 The text’s genre classification proves even more complex. Wolf never designated her text as autobiography (in the West German edition it is called a novel, to which Wolf objected), nor does she use her own name (like Ruth Klüger, Monika Maron, and Wibke Bruhns) or a first-person narrator (like Barbara Honigmann and Tanja Dückers). The disclaimer quoted above intentionally blurs the line between fact and fiction: All characters in this book are the invention of the narrator. None is identical with any person living or dead. Neither do any of the described episodes coincide with actual events.83

These words (resembling a similar disclaimer that prefaces Christa T.) imitate and parody disclaimers typical of nineteenth-century realist novels. Placed in front of her autobiographical work, however, Wolf calls into question the genre of autobiography which claims to convey truth. In this way, Wolf professes the opposite, i.e. the fictional quality of her work and characters, of what Jean-Jacques Rousseau promised in his famed autobiography, the Confessions. I wish to show my fellows a man in all the truth of nature; and this man will be myself. Myself alone. I feel my heart and I know men. I am not made like any of 80 81 82 83

Barbara Kosta, “Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood,” Recasting Autobiography: Women’s Counterfictions in Contemporary German Literature and Film, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994, 60. Anna Kuhn, “Patterns of Childhood: The Confrontation with the Self,” Christa Wolf’s Utopian Vision: From Marxism to Feminism, New York: Cambridge UP, 1986, 106. 171, “Pflicht,” 201. “Alle Figuren in diesem Buch sind Erfindungen der Erzählerin. Keine ist identisch mit einer lebenden oder toten Person. Ebensowenig decken sich beschriebene Episoden mit tatsächlichen Vorgängen.” 6.

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the ones I have seen; I dare to believe that I am not made like any that exist. If I am worth no more, at least I am different. Whether nature has done well or ill in breaking the mold in which it cast me, is something which cannot be judged until I have been read.84

Whereas Rousseau affirms the truth-value of his work and the uniqueness of the self, Wolf abandons the first-person “I” and incorporates fictional devices such as imaginary names or letters for persons and places. It is thus impossible to read the text as an autobiography, or to equate narrator and character with the author.85 Still, Patterns of Childhood is far from fictional. In her attempts to strive for authenticity, the narrator includes excerpts from diaries, poems, local newspaper articles, speeches by Himmler and Hitler, former schoolbooks, propaganda songs and verses, proverbs, and descriptions of family pictures. Wolf contrasts her memory with documentary material, imbuing historical data with a personal narrative. Yet the documents can neither lay claim to an authentic representation of the past nor answer the pressing questions of the narrator. The narrator soon realizes that her memories cannot be trusted either, and notes that it is easier “to invent the past than to remember it.”86 Pointing to the genre discrepancies, Sandra Frieden speaks of “genre confusion” [Gattungsverwirrung].87 In the context of Wolf’s overall oeuvre, the questioning of genre boundaries reflects Wolf’s search for adequate representation of present and past, a quest that she called “subjective authenticity” [“Subjektive Authentizität”].88 To Wolf, this term comprises her pursuit of subjectivity informing her work since Christa T.,89 84 85

86 87 88

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malessherbes, The Collected Writings of Rousseau 5, eds. Christopher Kelly, Roger Masters, and Peter Stillman, Trans. Christopher Kelly, Hanover: UP of New England, 1995, 5. One Day a Year elucidates Wolf’s dual approach of fiction and nonfiction when she admits to have used her father’s actual words in the narration of Bruno Jordan’s liberation but comments them with a fictional phrase: “I conclude with a statement by Lenka, which I invent, of course: What madness this whole thing. Or don’t you think so?“ 205. “ganz schön irre das Ganze,” 199. 153, “Vergangenheit zu erfinden als sich zu erinnern,” 181. Sandra Frieden, “‘Falls es strafbar ist, die Grenzen zu verwischen’: Autobiographie, Biographie und Christa Wolf,” Vom Anderen und vom selbst: Beiträge zu Fragen der Biographie und Autobiographie, eds. Reinhold Grimm and Hermand Jost, Königstein: Athenäum, 1982, 158. “I would like to give the provisional name subjective authenticity’ to the search for a new method of writing which does justice to this reality” [“Die Suche nach einer Methode, dieser Realität schreibend gerecht zu werden, möchte ich vorläufig ‘subjektive Authentizität’ nennen”] Christa Wolf, “Subjektive Authentizität,” Die Dimension des Autors, 773-805, 78081. Translation from The Fourth Dimension, Interviews with Christa Wolf, trans. Hilary Pilkington, London: Verso, 1988, 22. Wolf concludes her essay “Lesen und Schreiben,” with the hopeful words “sie [die Prosa] unterstützt das Subjektwerden des Menschen.” Die Dimension des Autors, 503.

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while it also addresses the tension between historical representation and its personal resonance. Forms of Address Wolf’s earlier short story “Blickwechsel” (1970, “Change of Perspective”), which describes Germany’s liberation by American troops and recounts some of the same episodes further developed in Patterns of Childhood, still uses a first-person narrator, but she abandons this perspective in her later, more comprehensive work. The perspective of “I” would presume an untroubled, comfortable acceptance of her past that the narrator feels is lacking. As a result, Wolf struggled with the suitable beginning of her text for over a year;90 which is also evident in her diary.91 From the outset, the narrator discusses her difficulties with finding an appropriate voice and tone and her unease with using the pronoun “I.” “Gradually, as the months went by, the dilemma crystallized: to remain speechless, or else to live in the third person.”92 Shirking the either-or dilemma, she comes up with another narrative voice, one that includes the first-, second-, and thirdperson. Rather than remain speechless, she finally finds a style that promised to be adequate. All of a sudden, sentences began to form which you thought were usable beginnings; you’d be saying “you” to someone. You had found your tone. You refused to believe that you’d have to start all over again but in the morning the sentences still held up—although they had to be taken out later, of course—but the tone remained. Sill refusing to believe, you started one more time. You felt that you were now free to control our material.93

By addressing herself as “you,” the narrator interrogates herself. The second-person pronoun allows the narrator to question and probe her motives, to criticize, lecture, and counsel herself—while “you” can ques90 91 92 93

See Wolf, “Erfahrungsmuster: Diskussion zu ‘Kindheitsmuster’” (1975), Die Dimension des Autors, Bd. 2, Frankfurt a. M.: Luchterhand, 1990, 806-43, 809. In One Day a Year, Wolf comments on September 27, 1971, “Ich habe wieder neu angefangen, objektiver, ohne ein ‘Ich’ einzuführen, unter Verwendung alten Materials,” 156. 3, “Allmählich, über Monate hin, stellte sich das Dilemma heraus: sprachlos bleiben oder in der dritten Person leben, das scheint zur Wahl zu stehen,” 9. “Auf einmal bildeten sich Sätze, die du als brauchbaren Anfang ansahst; jemand war also mit “du” anzureden. Der Tonfall hatte sich eingestellt. Du wolltest nicht glauben, daß du noch einmal von vorne anfangen solltest, aber am Morgen hatten die Sätze sich erhalten – wurden natürlich später getilgt -, der Tonfall war geblieben. Immer noch ungläubig, begannst du von neuem. Dir war, du hättest nun die Freiheit, über den Stoff zu verfügen.” 30.

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tion, there is no “I” that must assume responsibility or provide final answers. In addition, the pronoun “you” by its very nature addresses the reader, prompting a response and allowing, even forcing readers to participate. As Wolf invites her readers in the collective “we” to confront and relate their childhood, her project complements and intervenes in GDR historiography. The pronoun “you” also refers to Wolf’s two daughters, Annette and Tinka (Katrin), to whom Patterns of Childhood is dedicated. In fact, Wolf embeds in her text a dialogue between the narrator and her daughter Lenka, communicating the experiences and patterns of behavior from one generation to another and illustrating the importance, difficulty, and necessity of doing so. Lenka, who is approximately the same age as Nelly at the end of the war, offers to the narrator a glimpse into her own childhood, while also revealing profound differences. Rejecting the first person, the narrator comes to use the third person when referring to her childhood-self. Discussing Patterns of Childhood as a work in progress, Wolf maintains: I said earlier that I made several different beginnings, and most of these were in the first person. For reasons which weren’t clear to me then and which I didn’t really understand properly, it was this which always proved to be an obstacle to really getting to grips with the subject. … 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 to 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 attempt to make a start.94 94

“Ich habe vorhin gesagt, daß ich mehrere Anfänge habe, und davon sind die meisten in der Ich-Form. Und gerade das hat sich aus Gründen, die mir damals nicht einleuchten wollten, die ich auch gar nicht richtig verstand, immer wieder als Hindernis erwiesen, wirklich an die Sache heranzugehen. ... ich meine, ich kaschiere an keiner Stelle, daß es sich sozusagen um Autobiographisches handelt; das wird nicht verschwiegen. Wobei dieses ‘sozusagen’ wichtig ist, es ist nämlich keine Identität da. Aber es gibt doch – das ist eine der Eigentümlichkeiten meiner Biographie, aber vielleicht geht es anderen in meinem Alter auch so – ein Fremdheitsgefühl gegenüber dieser Zeit. Seit einem nicht auf den Tag genau, aber doch auf eine Zeitspanne genau anzugebenden Moment ist man nicht mehr diese Person, habe ich nicht mehr das Gefühl, das ich das war, die das gedacht, gesagt oder getan hat. Und wollte ich mit der dritten Person ausdrücken, das heißt, ich mußte es, weil sich anders das Material mir nicht öffnete, wie ich durch Versuche erfuhr.” Wolf, “Erfahrungsmuster,” 814. Translation from The Fourth Dimension, Interviews with Christa Wolf, trans. Hilary Pilkington, London: Verso, 1988, 44-45.

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Professing her estrangement from the Nazi era in general and her own childhood in particular, Wolf claims that she needed the third person in order to express her reservation and distance. According to psychologist Alice Miller, this distance is grounded in the ambivalent experience of children who participated with intense emotion in songs, speeches, and rallies of the Third Reich and learned as adults of the Nazi atrocities. Significantly, many writers of Wolf’s generation (like Eva Zeller, Margarete Hannsmann, and Carola Stern) decided to write in the third, not first person about their childhoods in the Nazi era,95 and more recently, Günter Grass began his memoir Peeling the Onion by restating Wolf’s dilemma: “Today, as in years past, the temptation to camouflage oneself in the third person remains great.”96 As Helen Bridge suggests, the split in the narrative voice in Wolf’s case also commented on GDR postwar politics, since “the narrator’s inability to identify with her childhood self and tell her story in the first person is an indictment of the GDR for the way it has dealt with the national past.”97 In addition, the removal of the first-person underscores the collective rather than individual concern and relevance of her work. Yet by making Nelly into a separate person whom the narrator observes, interprets, and judges, the narrator in some ways sets herself up for failure. With the third-person, she cannot embrace or accept the childhood self but perpetuates the alienation she feels vis-à-vis her childhood. At the beginning of her text, the narrator imagines that “you” and “Nelly” would merge into one person, “I,” at the end of her text. This plan, however, is repeatedly questioned and at the end of the narrative, “I” emerges only ambiguously in the uncertain statement “I don’t know.”98 This sentence, mirroring the narrator’s earlier statement “You don’t know that,”99 indicates that the narrator has not found an untroubled relationship to her past. But, as Anna K. Kuhn has pointed out, the ending should not be considered inadequate. 95

96 97 98 99

Eva Zeller’s autobiographical novels Solange ich denken kann: Roman einer Jugend (1981) and Nein and Amen: Autobiographischer Roman (1986), Margarete Hannsmann’s Der helle Tag bricht an: Ein Kind wird Nazi (1982), and Carola Stern’s In den Netzen der Erinnerung: Lebensgeschichten zweier Menschen (1986) all reflect on the difficulty of saying “I.” All three narrators refer to themselves in the third person; while Zeller splits her protagonist into “Eva” or “E-M,” depending on the context, Stern uses her old nickname “Eka,” and Hannsmann chooses an entirely different name, “Ulrike,” to speak of her childhood self. “Ob heute oder vor Jahren, lockend bleibt die Versuchung, sich in dritter Person zu verkappen.” Günter Grass Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, 7, Peeling the Onion, 1. Bridge, 65. “Ich weiß es nicht,” 476. “Das weißt du nicht,” 15. Translation is my own.

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Judging the book according to Wolf’s own criteria and bearing in mind Wolf’s understanding of the moral function of art and of the writer as a mediator of experience, this ending should be read not as a failure but as an expression of subjective authenticity. It is the reflection of a never-ending process that is ultimately the end in itself.100

Irene Kacandes reads the narrator’s statement as an expression of ambivalence: while the use of “I” offers hope, the words “don’t know” indicate doubt. Yet Kacandes suggests that it is precisely this ambivalence that opens the narrator to the experience of trauma, an experience that is not wholly expressible while calling for co-witnesses.101 Indeed, Wolf’s statement “I don’t know” and the dream-like passage that follows, mirror the attitude with which the narrator has come to approach and understand her past. Abandoning specific expectations regarding her project’s outcome, the narrator accepts the limitations of her examination and acknowledges that she may never speak about her past in the affirmative first-person. Indeed, in In the Flesh Wolf continues and expands that approach. Even more experimental in its narrative voice than Patterns of Childhood, in In the Flesh the first, second, and third pronouns merge into one another, even within a single sentence, so that these multiple perspectives cannot be separated: “what do you want, where did you come from: She thinks she ought to feel something. Are you saying something? I’m sinking.”102 Additionally, the narrative never arrives at an undivided, authoritative “I” voice. Narrative Strategies In the “Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung” (“Conditions of a Narrative”) essays that accompany her novel Cassandra (1984, Kassandra, 1983), Wolf characterizes her text as a tissue [Gewebe] consisting of many different threads.103 This notion also holds true for Patterns of Childhood, a text that connects several narrative strands and alternates in non-chronological and non-linear fashion the narrator’s childhood memories with her process of probing and examining these memories on a trip to Poland, with the

100 Kuhn, 99. 101 See Kacandes, 102-03. 102 4, “Was willst du, wo kommst du her. Ihr ist, als sollte sie etwas fühlen. Sagst du etwas? Ich sinke,” 7. 103 See Christa Wolf, Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: Kassandra. Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen, München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983, 7.

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process of writing. As Wolf explains in her essay “Subjective Authenticity,” this style mirrors the interaction between past and present. Again it’s a question of finding a style of writing that allows this undertaking a great degree of realism—or even better, imposes that realism upon it—so that past and present can be seen not only to “meet” on the paper, but, as they constantly do in every one of us, to interact and be endlessly rubbing up against each other.104

In contrast to the earlier story “Blickwechsel,” which adheres to a chronological structure, Wolf dispenses with linear sequencing in Patterns of Childhood, attempting to convey a multilayered reality. In a public discussion of her text, Wolf explained her approach by the image of as “narrational space” [Erzählraum] that cannot be filled by one story at a time, but demands multiple dimensions. And then you begin to write, in a linear fashion, for example. In this case, this seemed a bit “thin” in the sense that it did not fill the whole space. It created a narrative line, but not a space. … My opinion is that literature ought to try to reveal these layers buried inside us; they are not so neatly and tidily organized, not so catalogued and nicely “dealt with,” as we like to think.105

In Patterns of Childhood, the narrator repeatedly questions the outcome and success of her project when facing such multifaceted and complicated tasks. But by admitting to gaps and omissions (“The greatest damage that has been done to all of you will not be mentioned. The lifelong consequences of the childhood belief that, one day, the world will be perfect”106), accounting for the possibility of failure (“You wouldn’t be able to write the book, and you knew why”107), and allowing for experimentation (“it is necessary to write otherwise” 108), the narrator gains the freedom necessary to work with the material. As the text advances, the narra104 25, “Wieder geht es darum, eine Schreibweise zu finden, die den höchsten Grad an Realismus für diese spezielle Unternehmung ermöglicht, am besten erzwingt: daß Gegenwart und Vergangenheit – wie sie es in uns Menschen ja andauernd tun – auch auf dem Papier sich nicht nur ‘treffen,’ sondern aufeinander einwirken, in ihrer Bewegung aneinander gezeigt werden können.” Wolf, “Subjektive Authentizität,” 786. 105 41-42, “Und wenn man anfängt, dann schreibt man, zum Beispiel, linear. Das war sehr dünn nach meiner Meinung –‘dünn’ in dem Sinne: der Raum wurde nicht ausgefüllt. Es war eine Linie, aber kein Raum. … Meine Meinung ist jedoch, daß Literatur versuchen sollte, diese Schichten zu zeigen, die in uns liegen – nicht so säuberlich geordnet, nicht katalogisiert und schön ‘bewältigt,’ wie wir es gern möchten.” Wolf “Erfahrungsmuster,” 809 and 811. 106 245-46, “Die schwersten Schäden, die man euch zugefügt hat, werden nicht zur Sprache kommen. Die lebenslangen Folgen des Kindheitsglaubens, einmal werde die Welt vollkommen sein,” 288. 107 276, “Das Buch würdest du nicht schreiben können, und du wußtest, warum,” 322. 108 “Ganz anders muß geschrieben werden,” 266. Translation is my own.

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tor gradually realizes and accepts her limits and no longer produces the text she had envisioned. Toward the end, she understands that the different ideals, values, and behaviors of childhood and adult-self cannot be reconciled, and that she cannot (re)create a single story of the past. These insights culminate in a fragmented narrative, interrupted and incomplete, with a dissolving structure. No more writing. It’s evening. On TV, the song of a choir of old, black men: “Oh when the saints go marchin’ in…” Music by Bach. The train crash in Zagreb was caused by human failure. In G. (formerly L.), a little Polish town, you had breakfast on Sunday, July 11, 1971, in a milk bar on the market square. “I have done much writing, in order to lay the foundation for memory” (Johann Wolfgang Goethe).109

Without an overarching analysis or interpretation, the narrative breaks into incomplete, seemingly disconnected fragments, yielding a conglomerate of quotations, impressions, music, and memories. Similar to many diary entries in One Day a Year, the narrator jots down her last thoughts before going to bed. While this scene occurs at the brink of sleep, Patterns of Childhood ends with a dream-like passage that resists conclusive interpretation. At night I shall see—whether waking, whether dreaming—the outline of a human being who will change, through whom other persons, adults, children, will pass without hindrance. I will hardly be surprised if this outline may also be that of an animal, a tree, even a house, in which anyone who wishes may go in and out at will. Half-conscious, I shall experience the beautiful waking image drifting ever deeper into the dream, into ever new shapes no longer accessible to words, shapes which I believe I recognize. Sure of finding myself once again in the world of solid bodies upon awakening, I shall abandon myself to the experience of dreaming. I shall not revolt against the limits of the expressible.110 109 287, “Keine Zeile mehr. Abend. Im Fernsehen singt ein Chor schwarzer alter Männer: O when the Saints go marchin’ in…Bach-Musik.Das Zugunglück in Zagreb ist auf menschliches Versagen zurückzuführen.In G. (vormals L.), einem Polenstädtchen, habt ihr am Sonntag, dem 11. Juli 1971, früh gegen neun in einer Milchbar am Marktplatz gefrühstückt.‘Ich habe viel aufgeschrieben, um das Gedächtnis zu begründen.’ Johann Wolfgang Goethe.” 366. 110 407, “Nachts werde ich – ob im Wachen, ob im Traum – den Umriß eines Menschen sehen, der sich in fließenden Übergängen unaufhörlich verwandelt, durch den andere Menschen, Erwachsene, Kinder, ungezwungen hindurchgehen. Ich werde mich kaum verwundern, daß dieser Umriß auch ein Tier sein mag, ein Baum, ein Haus sogar, in dem jeder, der

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Though this ending might seem ill-fitted to the rest of the text, Wolf’s previous and later works, from Christa T. to Cassandra to In the Flesh to One Day a Year, reveal her affinity for flights of fancy, and for recalling and interpreting dreams. Having extensively studied Romanticism, Wolf also knew that night for the Romantics was a symbol of the mysterious and boundless aspects of consciousness. In particular, the narrator’s final fantasy calls to mind Novalis’s Hymns to the Night (1960, Hymnen an die Nacht, 1800) beginning with the words “Away I turn to the holy, inexpressible, mysterious night.”111 Like Novalis, the narrator embraces night to turn and surrender to her dreams, a night where she is no longer afraid of nightmares. This ending comes as a surprising and provocative conclusion of the narrator’s quest: if she hoped to illuminate the past, the narrative ends with a vision set in the future tense. If she sought to find an untroubled, first-person identity, her dream leads to a polymorphic, heterogeneous identity. If her memory-cameos purported a fixed meaning, in her fantasy the boundaries of fact and fiction are dissolving, and the identities of herself and others are in flux. If Novalis characterizes night as “inexpressible,” the narrator likewise finds that her fantasies are beyond words. By ending her narrative with a repudiation of words, the narrator relinquishes her urge to assign meaning to her experience, acknowledging instead the limits of representation while giving in to wishes, fantasies, and hopes.

will, ungehindert ein- und ausgeht. Halbbewußt werde ich erleben, wie das schöne Wachgebilde immer tiefer in den Traum abtreibt in immer neuen, nicht mehr in Worte faßbaren Gestalten, die ich zu erkennen glaube. Sicher, beim Erwachen die Welt der festen Körper wieder vorzufinden, werde ich mich der Traumerfahrung überlassen, mich nicht auflehnen gegen die Grenzen des Sagbaren.” 476-77. 111 “Abwärts wend ich mich zu der heiligen, unaussprechlichen, geheimnisvollen Nacht.” Novalis, “Hymnen an die Nacht,” Novalis Werke, ed. by Gerhard Schulz, München: Ch.H. Beck, 1981, 41.

Trauma and Testimony: Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben The Ride Across the Atlantic Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben. Eine Jugend (1992, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, 2001) bears many similarities with Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood (1984, Kindheitsmuster, 1976), with the decisive and devastating difference that Klüger describes her experiences as a victim of the Nazis. While travel initiated the narrative for both authors, Klüger was forced out of her hometown, deported, and displaced. And while both autobiographical narrators seek to analyze the difficult relationship to their mothers, Klüger’s bond with her mother has been deeply affected by their joint survival in Auschwitz. While Patterns of Childhood and weiter leben1 delineate a similarly dynamic concept of remembering, even evoke the same metaphor of the Lake Constance horseman, Klüger struggles with the fact that her father and six-year older half-brother were killed during the Holocaust. Klüger writes with a similar didactic agenda to Wolf, but chooses a more explicit, feminist tone, addressing the conflict with her mother more openly, and depicting her pain more directly. She uses an unswerving firstperson voice and has always maintained that narrator and author are identical.2 When Klüger arrived with her mother in New York in October 1947, after a long wait for immigration visas and a provisional life in postwar Germany, she finally put spatial (in addition to time) distance to the sites of past terrors. Yet in weiter leben she admits that once in New York, she was struck by shock and agony and plagued by suicidal thoughts. By imagining herself as a vermin that scuttled away from death, she adopts precisely the same anti-Semitic propaganda and rhetoric she scarcely managed to outlive.3 Klüger also compares herself to the horseman who had

1 2 3

Since weiter leben and Still Alive are two different texts, I retain in this book Klüger’s German title to refer to the German text, and use the English title to refer to the English text. Since I understand Klüger’s reasoning and accept her wish to speak for herself, I refrain from distinguishing between narrator and author in this chapter. For a more thorough discussion on the topic, see Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: AntiSemitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.

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crossed Lake Constance, recalling the same legend that Wolf mentions in her work. In New York the fear of death which had haunted me in Auschwitz gradually turned into its opposite, into depression, the temptation of death. There is an apt German legend about a winter so cold that Lake Constance was frozen solid, which never happens in reality, since the lake is much too large. One night, according to the story, a horseman unwittingly crossed it. When he got to the other shore and had firm ground under his feet, he looked back and realized where he had been, what he had done, and how unnatural his survival was. Tradition says he died of shock on the spot. I sympathized with that horseman.4

In the previous essay “Lanzmann’s Shoah and Its Audience” (“Lanzmanns Shoah in New York”), which Klüger wrote in 1986 and published in German in Gelesene Wirklichkeit: Fakten und Fiktionen in der Literatur (2006, Read Reality: Fact and Fiction in Literature), she alludes specifically to Gustav Schwab’s 1826 ballad Der Reiter und der Bodensee (The Horseman and Lake Constance). There is a legend about a horseman who one cold winter night rode across Lake Constance, when the huge lake was frozen solid, something that never happens. When he arrived on the shore and had the firm ground under his feet again, he looked back and realized where he had been and how unnatural was his trip and his survival. Tradition says he died on the spot of the shock. I read that story after the war and it struck me with the force of a sick joke.5

Acknowledging that the image of the horseman is a lasting one, and one with unequivocal relevance to her own life, Klüger explains that she 4

5

“Meine schlimmste Kinderkrankheit waren indessen nicht die Windpocken, sondern die Todesangst gewesen, dieses Käfiggefühl, das sich in New York in sein Gegenteil, die Todesversuchung der Depression verwandelte. Denn hier lebte die Vergangenheit erst richtig auf und streckte sich in Öde hinter mir. Reiter über den Bodensee waren wir gewesen, die erst im Rückblick erkennen, was das für ein Wasser war, das sie fast geschluckt hat.” 237. Translations, unless otherwise noted, are from Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, New York: The Feminist P at the City U of New York, 2001, 185. Since Klüger rewrote her book in English for a different audience, the German and English versions vary quite a bit. Accordingly, I have included quotes from Sill Alive wherever possible, even in cases when the English equivalent in Still Alive deviates from the German text in weiter leben and is not a word by word translation. I have translated myself German passages not found in Still Alive. “Die alte Legende vom Ritt über den Bodensee habe ich nach dem Krieg gelesen, und selten hat mich so gegruselt, denn ich erkannte mich darin. Nicht die Gefahr des Ritts übers dünne Eis, der nun hinter ihm lag, sondern die Rückschau überwältigt den Reiter.” Ruth Klüger, “Lanzmanns Shoah in New York,” Gelesene Wirklichkeit: Fakten und Fiktionen in der Literatur, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006, 9-28, 27. Translation from Ruth Angress, “Lanzmann’s Shoah and Its Audience,” online at http://motlc.wiesenthal.com /site/ pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=395045 (Simon Wiesenthal Center, Multimedia Learning Center), accessed 6/2007.

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grasped the extent of her trauma only when temporally and spatially removed from the sites of former suffering, once she had crossed her own waters to safety. While the child managed to survive, the immigrant teenager in New York struggles with the memory of the Holocaust and begins to confront it, a process that continues well into adulthood. Both references to the horseman also emphasize that it is only the look back which affords a glimpse into previous suffering and the inconceivable, highly exceptional act of survival. The belatedness of Klüger’s testimony is even more striking when considering that initially Klüger was determined to give testimony while still at Auschwitz, when the twelve-year-old sensed that she had witnessed such unthinkable crimes that the world thereafter would need witnesses to believe it. In Auschwitz, Klüger crafted poetry that she wrote down when paper and pencil were available, gaining ambition and willpower from the notion that she needed to survive in order to bear witness. Yet when the teenager sent two Auschwitz poems to a local Bavarian newspaper in the summer of 1945, Klüger found herself deeply disillusioned with publishing practices and politics. Instead of her poems, the editors printed her cover letter, not intended for publication, that they had carefully torn into pieces and graced with a drawing of a pitiful child. The article contained only two stanzas from one of Klüger’s poems, embedded in a sappy, tearjerker of a story. Characteristic of a German nadir of confronting the past at the time, the editors deprived Klüger of her voice, reduced her to a passive, helpless victim pleading for compassion, and stifled her identity as a survivor with sentimental preconceptions. The young poet herself received no confirmation of receipt, no notice of the article’s publication, and no payment for her work. Appalled by this experience, Klüger ceased to be interested in publishing her Holocaust survival story, and even shied away from the Holocaust and its representation altogether. weiter leben details another disturbing experience that governed her confrontation with past trauma. Suffering from bouts of depression and severe anxieties before exams in college, Klüger reluctantly agreed to see Lazi Fessler, a New York psychiatrist and former friend of her father. Yet Fessler promptly refuted that her symptoms reflected the impact of the Holocaust,6 explaining instead Klüger’s 6

As I mention in “Total War—Total Defeat” in this part, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts in Germany and the United States often did not recognize the Holocaust as cause for psychological damage in the 1940s and 1950s. Before William Niederland’s definition of the “survivor syndrome” explained survivors’ lasting damage, psychiatrists simply did not draw a connection between their patients’ symptoms and their survival in the camps. Fessler’s analysis seems to exemplify this kind of thinking (as well as its devastating consequences).

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anxieties with personal failures. Reprimanding the sixteen-year-old for her supposed arrogance and disrespect, he advised her to dress in a more ladylike fashion, which only made her feel worse, not better. Klüger experienced this kind of “therapy” (which was conducted in German, to make matters even worse) as another form of Nazi persecution, reasoning in retrospect that Fessler attempted to eradicate her identity as a survivor. Men like Fessler, Klüger analyzes in weiter leben, could not accept that the Holocaust had killed innocent women and children whom they should have tried to protect.7 With a lasting and bitter aftertaste of Fessler as an insensitive, punitive listener with a blatant agenda, Klüger waited forty years before she willfully and purposefully confronted her past again, this time on her own terms. What followed was a slow and gradual path that culminated in weiter leben. While battling depression, Klüger completed her bachelors degree in New York at Hunter College, established life-long friendships, moved to California, got married, and gave birth to two sons. Decades later, against her mother’s will, she decided to re-learn the language and enrolled in a graduate German literature program at the University of California at Berkeley, where she came into contact with Germans and later visited Germany and Austria. Along with her rediscovery of German language and literature, traumatic memories returned. When in 1962 in Berkeley I suddenly decided to turn my life upside down again and study German literature there, and the memories invaded and struck me because I began to speak German again and also learned to write it, painstakingly, for my seminar papers, each sentence a mystery as if hidden behind seven veils: Then suddenly the city reappeared, the one I had left unwillingly about twenty years before, the city from which I was supposed to go to my death and did not go to my death.8

Though re-familiarizing herself with the German language and literature, Klüger avoided a confrontation with her past, and gradually her professional interests merged with her personal life. Klüger’s 1967 dissertation focused on Baroque poetry; her subsequent publications were devoted to eighteenth-century German literature (in particular Lessing and Kleist). It 7 8

Later in the text, Klüger mentions another example, a similarly hostile Viennese uncle who left his mother in Vienna, himself immigrating to America (264-65). “Als ich es mir 1962 in Berkeley einfallen ließ, mein Leben wieder einmal umzukrempeln und dort Germanistik zu studieren, und die Erinnerungen auf mich eindrangen, einschlugen, dadurch, daß ich wieder anfing, deutsch zu sprechen, durch meine Seminararbeiten auch mühsam lernte, es zu schreiben, jeder Satz wie hinter sieben Schleiern: Da war auch die Stadt wieder da, die ich etwa zwanzig Jahre davor unfreiwillig verlassen hatte, die Stadt, von der aus ich in den Tod fahren sollte und nicht in den Tod gefahren bin.” 66. Translation is my own.

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was not until the mid 1980s that Klüger began to research and publish articles on Holocaust literature (under her former married name of Ruth Angress). Klüger rejected requests for an oral interview by the Shoah Foundation, claiming that she preferred to pose her own questions rather than allowing another person to direct and interpret her testimony.9 By 1988, she began to work on her Holocaust memoir. The publication of weiter leben (1992) and its subsequent English version Still Alive (2001) unlocked Klüger’s memories to a large audience of readers. In Germany, her work was received enthusiastically, and garnered numerous prizes and awards.10 Her later work, Gelesene Wirklichkeit (2006), a collection of essays and lectures, audaciously continues to link the private and the public. Analyzing her previous memoir in a context that begins with Plato and ends with contemporary American film, Klüger moves unencumbered from century to century, while carefully distinguishing definitions of autobiography and historical fiction. Currently, Klüger is working on another memoir book, a collection of autobiographical essays with the tentative title unterwegs verloren. Before deciding to articulate her Holocaust memories publicly, Klüger crossed the Atlantic Ocean once again, reversing the path of the Lake Constance horseman. By working as director of the University of California’s study abroad program in Göttingen, she made a commitment to spend two years in Germany, not as a tourist or visitor but resident. During the semester, on November 4, 1988, Klüger was about to meet a student at the local theater when a teenage bicyclist ran into her. Falling backwards onto the ground, she lost consciousness and was rushed to the emergency room, where it was found that she had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Recovering from paralysis, while slowly and painfully learning how to move her limbs again, Klüger remembered things past which she had long thought forgotten. In the German hospital she conceived her memoir weiter leben that she later wrote in Göttingen in the following months and years. Klüger thus remembers and expresses her Holocaust 9 10

Ruth Klüger, personal interview, 12 March, 1998. In her essay “Lanzmann’s Shoah in New York,” Klüger also mentions her refusal of an interview, connecting her fear of becoming a passive object for an eager interrogator with her concept of KZ-kitsch (58-59). To date, Klüger received for her work the Rauriser Literaturpreis (1993), NiedersachsenPreis (1993), Johann-Jacob-Christoph-von-Grimmelshausen-Preis (1993), Marie-LuiseKaschnitz-Preis (1994), Annerkennungspreis zum Andreas-Gryphius-Preis (1996), Heinrich-Heine-Medaille (1997), Österreichischer Staatspreis für Literaturkritik (1997), Prix Mémoire de la Shoa (1998), Preis der Frankfurter Anthologie (1999), Thomas-Mann-Preis der Stadt Lübeck (1999), Bruno-Kreisky-Preis (2002), Ehrendoktorwürde der Universität Göttingen (2003), Goethe-Medaille (2005), Roswitha-Preis der Stadt Bad Gandersheim (2006) and Lessing-Preis (2007).

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experience back in the same country that had annexed Austria in March 1938, barred her from schools, swimming pools, and movie theaters, forced her to wear a yellow star in 1941, deported her to camps throughout the Reich from 1942 on, and murdered her father and half-brother. And yet Germany, specifically Göttingen in the late 1980s, is for Klüger a place removed from her hometown Vienna, from Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Groß-Rosen, as well as from her new home in the United States. While Göttingen itself holds no Nazi memories for Klüger, she immediately and instinctively connects her 1988 accident in Göttingen with her Holocaust experience in an odd twist of memory and collision. I stared at the cyclist’s lamp and stood still so he could bike around me, but he didn’t seem to try (why doesn’t the old biddy get out of my way?), and he comes straight at me. At the last fraction of a second I jump to the left, and he, too, swerves to the left, in my direction. I think he is chasing me, wants to injure me, and despair hits like lightning: I crash into metal and light, like floodlights over barbed wire. I want to push him away with both arms outstretched, but he is on top of me, bike and all. Germany, Deutschland, a moment line hand-to-hand combat. I am fighting for my life, I am losing. Why this struggle, my life, Deutschland once more, why did I return, or had I never left?11

Klüger perceives the collision as intentional persecution, as a type of second Holocaust, for it was motivated by hatred (“er will mich niederfahren”), triggers memories of the camps (“wie Scheinwerfer über Stacheldraht”), unleashes feelings of guilt (“wozu bin ich zurückgekommen”), and is proof of continued suffering (“war ich je fort?”). According to Dori Laub, co-founder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, such thoughts are somewhat representative of Holocaust survivors who tend to re-experience their trauma by interpreting life’s catastrophes as manifestations of their ultimate fate, i.e. another holocaust.12 Yet Klüger’s text also proves that she rises above Laub’s analysis. Refusing to fall victim to the return of trauma, she does not give in to self-destructive thoughts and instead chooses to face the demons of her 11

12

206, “Seine Fahrradampel, ich war stehengeblieben, um ihn ausweichen zu lassen, er versucht aber gar nicht, um mich herumzukommen, er kommt gerade auf mich zu, schwenkt nicht, macht keinen Bogen, im letzten Bruchteil einer Sekunde springe ich automatisch nach links, er auch nach links, in dieselbe Richtung, ich meine, er verfolgt mich, will mich niederfahren, helle Verzweiflung, Licht im Dunkel, seine Lampe, Metall, wie Scheinwerfer über Stacheldraht, ich will mich wehren, ihn zurückschieben, beide Arme ausgestreckt, der Anprall, Deutschland, ein Augenblick wie ein Handgemenge, den Kampf verlier ich, Metall, nochmals Deutschland, was mach ich denn hier, wozu bin ich zurückgekommen, war ich je fort?” 271-72. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge, 1992, 65.

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past. In this way, her accident does not lead to final defeat but initiates her testimony while shaping the process and final output of her writing. Physical and Mental Displacements With the distance of time and space, and the disruption of illness, the accident in Göttingen functions as a catalyst to put Klüger in closer contact with the nightmares of her past. The injury upsets her usual priorities, denying her daily routine and instead allowing her to access forgotten memories. While simple tasks, like carrying on a coherent conversation or moving her limbs take utmost concentration, Klüger experiences abundant thoughts, dreams, and emotions. While she cannot think and speak with her visitors during the day, she awakens at night remembering a poem she wrote in the camps. In short, Klüger can no longer rely on her previous, linear forms of thinking. The past is present. My thoughts whirled in a circle or in a spiral, formed the oddest geometrical figures, where never linear. And hung in the space of the repetitive hospital days. Time was splintered. I didn’t experience it as a continuity but rather as a heap of broken glass, shards cutting into your mind when you try to put them together.13

Confined to a hospital-bed, Klüger finds herself at the mercy of German strangers, and exposed to memories, fantasies, and anxieties. Her disorder destroys the usual hierarchy of thoughts; it also impairs her sense of space and time. While in a medical sense, these symptoms may manifest the biological after-effects of cerebral hemorrhage, Klüger does not dismiss her thoughts and emotions. Like Wolf’s narrators in Patterns of Childhood and In the Flesh, she keenly observes her body, using illness as an opportunity for reflection and reevaluation, as a window into a world normally not available. Klüger thus deliberately utilizes her injury to remember and reexperience her Holocaust memories. In this way, the accident both removes and reconnects her with the past, disrupting previous continuities and categories of thinking. During her convalescence, Klüger is able to make German friends, create a second home in Göttingen, establish a different relationship to her past, and discover a language and voice in which to narrate. 13

208, “Die Gedanken dachten sich von alleine, im Kreis oder in einer Spirale, in den wunderlichsten geometrischen Figuren, nur nicht linear. Und hingen im Raum der sich wiederholenden Krankenhaustage. Die Zeit war zersplittert, ich erlebte sie nicht als Kontinuum, sondern als Glasscherben, die die Hand verletzen, wenn man versucht, sie zusammenzufügen.” 278.

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Accordingly, while recovering in Göttingen Klüger intentionally seeks to conjure up memories, in contrast to her graduate studies in the 1960s in Berkeley when memories invaded her life. Determined not to let anything pass away into oblivion, remembering becomes a tenacious act of willpower, as in the example below, when Klüger is able to recover some more material in her Göttingen apartment after her accident. On the first of June the next year when I was back in my Göttingen apartment and had begun to write down these memories, one morning early as I was waking up, the scene of the accident, the collision, suddenly reappeared and was about to disappear, like dreams do when the light chases them away. I hold tight to this memory, my eyes closed, slowing waking up, very tight, I want to possess this piece of life, and there it is, I’ve got it, fished from dark waters, still thrashing.14

Rather than being overwhelmed by traumatic memories as she was in Berkeley, Klüger consciously seeks to process them in Göttingen. Reclaiming her adolescent self during the Holocaust and mourning the losses she suffered, she establishes her identity as a survivor. According to Judith Herman, this is a sure sign of recovery, “The survivor no longer feels possessed by her traumatic past; she is in possession of herself.”15 Göttingen is clearly linked to Germany’s Holocaust, but to Klüger it also represents a new, neutral space that allows access to the past in ways other places did not. In Göttingen, she explains, she was forced to use the German language, to rely on Germans, and decided to restore her maiden name. In her acceptance speech for the Honorary Doctorate of the Philosophical Faculty at Göttingen in 2003, she even credits Göttingen with her return to Europe: In Göttingen the buried European in me came alive again, the one who had hidden in Vienna, my native city, behind the American that I had become.16

In a similar vein, Klüger elaborates in an essay with the revealing title “Wiener Neurosen” (“Viennese Neuroses”), that for her, Göttingen—in

14

15 16

“Am ersten Juni des nächsten Jahres, als ich wieder in meiner Göttinger Wohnung war und angefangen hatte, diese Erinnerungen zu schreiben, da war eines frühen Morgens beim Aufwachen die Unfallszene, der Zusammenprall da und will hinuntersinken, wie die Träume es tun, wenn das Licht sie verscheucht. Ich halte die Erinnerung fest, mit geschlossenen Augen, langsam aufwachend, ganz fest, dieses Stück Leben will ich besitzen, und da ist’s, ich hab’s, aus dunklen Wassern gefischt, noch zappelnd.” 271. Translation is my own. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, New York: Basic, 1992, 202. “In Göttingen wurde die verschüttete Europäerin in mir wieder lebendig, die sich in meiner Geburtsstadt Wien hinter der Amerikanerin, die ich geworden war, versteckt hatte.” Ruth Klüger, “In Göttingen wurde die verschüttete Europäerin in mir wieder lebendig,” Georgia Augusta 3 (2004): 6-9, 6-8. Translation is my own.

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contrast to Vienna—holds no Nazi memories and thus no implicit feelings of aversion.17 In weiter leben, she emphasizes the importance of place. I first wanted to call this book Stations and tie my diverse memories to the names I connect with them. … Now I ask myself, why place names, when I am a woman who has never lived anywhere for long? These are not the names of present or former homes; they are more like the piers of bridges that were blown up, only we can’t be quite sure of what these bridges connected. Perhaps nothing with nothing. But if so, we have our work cut out for us, as we look out from the old piers. Because if we don’t find the bridges, we’ll either have to invent them or content ourselves with living in the no-man’s-land between past and present. We start with what is left: the names of places.18

Although Klüger did not name her book “Stations” (admittedly because of the word’s religious connotation), she chose to arrange her memories according to locations, naming her five chapters after places rather than dates: “Vienna,” “The Camps,” “Germany,” “New York,” and “Göttingen” (The English edition omits the Göttingen chapter and concludes with an epilogue written in Irvine, California). The original book cover of the Wallstein edition corresponded to these chapters by presenting a montage of four photographs, Vienna, Auschwitz, New York, and Göttingen. If Klüger speculates about the connections between these places, the book cover reinforces these sentiments by linking them with overlapping pictures.

17 18

Klüger, “Wiener Neurosen: Eine Rede,” Die Horen: Zeitschrift für Literatur, Kunst und Kritik 46.201 (2001): 21-19, 22. 68-69, “Ich wollte meine Erinnerungen ‘Stationen’ nennen und ganz unbefangen an Ortsnamen knüpfen. Erst jetzt, an dieser Stelle, frage ich mich, wieso Orte, wenn ich doch eine bin, die nirgendwo lange war und wohnt. Wiederholt bin ich gestrandet, und so sind mir die Ortsnamen wie die Pfeiler gesprengter Brücken. Wir können nicht einmal sicher sein, daß es die Brücken hier, wo es nach Pfeilern aussieht, gegeben hat, und vielleicht müssen wir sie erst erfinden, und es könnte ja sein, daß sie, obwohl erfunden, trotzdem tragfähig sind. Wir fangen mit dem an, was bleibt: Ortsnamen.” 79.

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The original cover of weiter leben (not designed by Klüger herself) © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 1992

The book’s cover, as well as the chapter names of places, also emphasize Klüger’s frequent change of residence and her uprootedness. Forced into diaspora by the Holocaust and its aftermath, Klüger identifies herself as “impatient and absentminded, prone to drop things intentionally or through clumsiness, even breakables like dishes and love affairs; a woman who is perennially on the move, changing jobs and homes at the drop of a hat and inventing the reasons afterwards while she is packing.”19 Klüger interprets her ability to relocate and adapt in ambivalent terms; while it adds to her restlessness, she also credits her survival with her mutability. Indeed she views any place, like time, as subject to change, which also explains her deep-seated mistrust of concentration camp-museums. In order to express the fleeting nature of place, she invents another word, timescape: “There should be a word like timescape to indicate the nature of a place in time, that is, at a certain time, neither before nor after.”20 Klüger shares with other survivors and their children a diasporic experience that

19 20

15-16, “Eine, die leicht was fallen läßt, mit oder ohne Absicht, auch Zerbrechliches, Geschirr und Liebschaften, nirgendwo lange tätig ist und oft auszieht, aus Städten und Wohnungen, und die Gründe erst erfindet, wenn sie schon am Einpacken ist.” 7. 67, “Das Wort Zeitschaft sollte es geben, um zu vermitteln, was ein Ort in der Zeit ist, zu einer gewissen Zeit, weder vorher noch nachher.” 78.

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Marianne Hirsch calls “a strategy of survival.”21 Yet Klüger refuses to see herself merely as a victim of displacement. Rather than bemoaning the loss of Heimat in nostalgic terms, Klüger seems to draw a sense of identity from the fact that she continually changed her physical home, both voluntary and involuntary. Moreover, she uses her frequent relocations for the creation of her testimony. If Klüger first crossed continents to put distance between present and past, four decades later she traveled backwards in order to bear witness. To complete Still Alive (2001), her own translation and rewriting of her book for an American audience, Klüger crossed the Atlantic once more. The book, as mentioned, concludes in Irvine, California, the place she calls “home” (280),22 the center of her professional life where she has spent the longest period of her life, in proximity to children and grandchildren. Whereas Göttingen was a site of dislocation that offered distance from the present and access to the past, Irvine is a less emotionally charged and less disruptive site, and Klüger chooses a more gentle tone to describe her home there. Currently, Klüger lives in both Göttingen and Irvine. Conjuring Phantoms and the Workings of Memory Like Wolf, Klüger seeks to move beyond static and inflexible remembrance-patterns in order to access unfamiliar memories. Whereas Wolf calls this process “breaking with cameos,” for Klüger it involves conjuring up the demons of her past. Remembering is a branch of witchcraft; its tool is incarnation. I often say, as if it were a joke—but it’s true—that instead of God I believe in ghosts. To conjure up the dead you have to dangle the bait of the present before them, the flesh of the living, to coax them out of their inertia. You have to grate and scrape the old roots with tools from the shelves of ancient kitchens. Use your best wooden spoons with the longest handles to whisk into the broth of our fathers the herbs our daughters have grown in their gardens. If I succeed, together with my readers—and perhaps a few men will join us in the kitchen—we could exchange magic formulas like favorite recipes and season to taste the marinade which the old stories and histories offer us, in as much comfort as our witches’ kitchen provides. It won’t get too cozy, don’t worry: where we stir our cauldron, there will be

21 22

Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997, 230. Page numbers refer to the following edition: Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, New York: The Feminist P at the City U of New York, 2001.

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cold and hot currents from half-open windows, unhinged doors, and earthquakeprone walls.23

To Klüger, remembering—akin to witchcraft—is an exchange and a sampling of various spells that are concocted in the kitchen. By adopting and reviving the female tradition of witchcraft, Klüger transfers the act of remembering to an inherently female space, and also embraces its homey [heimlich] and simultaneously uncanny [unheimlich] character. Her approach to coaxing ghosts “out of their inertia” [“aus ihrem Ruhezustand … in Bewegung zu bringen”] recalls Wolf’s concept of “stir[ring] up settled, stabilized rock formations” [“abgelagerte, zur Ruhe gekommene Gesteinsmassen wieder in Bewegung bringen”],24 in that both writers characterize the process of remembering with the same German word, Bewegung, to emphasize the need to bring movement and flexibility to former rigid modes of thinking. In order to do so, both writers seek to pursue and reexamine their memories. As Klüger’s term of “conjuring up past ghosts” indicates, this is a precarious, shadowy undertaking: the narrator of Patterns of Childhood realizes that she cannot direct her childhood memories, and Klüger also loses control over the process when assaulted by memories in the Göttingen hospital. In the interplay between present and past, Klüger uses her disoriented state in the present as bait (“the flesh of the living”) to call upon the memories of the past. Vice versa, she comments on her memories from the perspective of an adult who provides analysis, reflection, and additional information to the former impressions of a child. The resulting concoction of the fathers’ brew mixed with the daughters’ seasoning contains elements of both past and present, putting several timeframes in an ongoing dialogue. At the same time, the traditionally male brew promises to be spiced by female intervention. Acknowledging a male-dominated historio23

24

69, “Erinnerung ist Beschwörung, und wirksame Beschwörung ist Hexerei. Ich sag es manchmal als Scherz, doch es stimmt, daß ich nicht an Gott glaub, aber an Gespenster schon. Um mit Gespenstern umzugehen, muß man sie ködern mit Fleisch der Gegenwart. Ihnen Reibflächen hinhalten, um sie aus ihrem Ruhezustand herauszureizen und sie in Bewegung zu bringen. Reibeisen aus dem heutigen Küchenschrank für die alten Wurzeln; Kochlöffel, um die Brühe, die unsere Väter gebraut, mit dem Gewürz unserer Töchter anzurühren. Zaubern ist dynamisches Denken. Wenn es mir gelingt, zusammen mit Leserinnen, die mitdenken, und vielleicht sogar ein paar Lesern dazu, dann könnten wir Beschwörungsformeln wie Kochrezepte austauschen und miteinander abschmecken, was die Geschichte und die alten Geschichten uns liefern, wir könnten es neu aufgießen, in soviel Gemütlichkeit, als unsere Arbeits- und Wohnküche eben erlaubt.” 79-80. Christa Wolf, Kindheitsmuster (1976), Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1977, 179. Translation from Christa Wolf, Patterns of Childhood, trans. Hedwig Rappolt and Ursule Molinaro, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980, 151.

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graphy, Klüger seeks to revive female tradition to confront and to question previous assumptions. The metaphor of the kitchen, for instance, points to the lesser-known difficulties for women in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and their ways of coping with heavy forced labor, food shortages, sickness, physical exhaustion, and abuse, as well as with the fact that their hair was shaven and their menses, in most cases, stopped. Like Wolf who constructs Patterns of Childhood as a dialogue, Klüger also envisions remembering as a process that includes listeners and readers as participants, and invites her readers (in particular her female readers) to relate their own stories. To Klüger, the confrontation with history demands reinterpretation and continues to evolve, exemplified in the act of re-brewing stories. Klüger contrasts her own memories with those of her mother, and comes to mistrust her mother’s recollections as nostalgia. The walls of those early years: if I could only see what truly haunted her [the mother], not merely what she permitted to surface. If one could peek into the inner chambers of another person’s mind, and reach behind what has been smoothed out and retouched and cosmeticized, behind those word pictures that dissolve the grainy resistance what happened until it’ unrecognizable in the retelling. Her picture of him seemed all of a piece, puppetlike, while mine has too many facets.25

Whereas Klüger’s mother needs to smooth and beautify the ruffled edges of her memories, Klüger rejects such mystification as denial. For instance, in weiter leben she comments on her mother’s claims that her husband was crazy about his daughter, with the unsentimental words that such (wishful) thinking merely reflects the conventions and values of the time. In the English version Still Alive, Klüger elaborates further, “that’s like staging and then retouching a family photo” (31), thus linking her mother’s fantasy to the ideal of a family as depicted and enacted in photographs of the time.26 Giving another example, Klüger reports that her mother insisted on her happy marriage (not unlike the mother Charlotte in Patterns of Childhood), mentioning as proof the sweet letter she received from her husband. According to the daughter’s memory, though, her mother was continually jealous of her husband even after he was imprisoned at the French camp Drancy. 25

26

38, “Diese Wände der frühen Erinnerungen, wenn ich nur sehen könnte, was in ihrem [der Mutter] Kopf spukt, wenn man sich nur nehmen könnte, woran sich eine andere erinnert, ohne die Glättungen und die Beschönigungen, die das Körnige, das Sandige des wirklich Erlebten bis zur Widerstandslosigkeit in der Nacherzählung ausfiltrieren. Ihr Bild ist einheitlich, meines konfus.” 32. Compare to Marianne Hirsch’s pathbreaking work Family Frames, and my discussion of it in the chapter on Monika Maron’s Pavel’s Letters.

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Fearing her mother’s tendency to sentimentalize, Klüger admits that she refrained from questioning her mother about anything she could not remember herself. For example, she resisted the impulse to ask her mother about the loss of her half-brother, or the evening when she contemplated joint suicide at Auschwitz. As I think back, I ask myself if I have ever forgiven her that worst evening of my life. … We never talked about this exchange again…. Yes, there were moments when I had the urge to say: “That first evening in Birkenau, did you mean it or not?” but then I pulled in my feelers like snail that has learned a bit more than it needs to about the outside world and is happy enough in its shell. I figured she was not going to give me an honest answer but would say whatever happened to suit her at the given moment. Besides, I detested any intimacy with my mother, and what could be more intimate than such a question?27

Klüger’s inherent lack of trust and the non-communication about life’s turning points reveals the deep gulf between mother and child and hints at past suffering. Even in the later Still Alive, Klüger insists that she did not seek a conversation about the incident during her mother’s lifetime (97), while answering the previous (German) question of whether she has forgiven her mother in the positive. Klüger’s mother seems largely unaware of her daughter’s struggle for honesty. Inhibiting rather than encouraging her daughter’s work, she disapproved of her renewed interest in the German language and culture, and discouraged her from seeking a confrontation with the past. In response, Klüger—despite her claims of being more versed in English—deliberately chose the German language for weiter leben.28 In the perpetrator language that her mother would presumably refuse to read, Klüger is able to describe and reevaluate her childhood free from expectations, nostalgia, and clichés. In candid terms, she depicts her mother as independent, strong, and generous, but also narcissistic and irresponsible. Klüger illustrates instances of motherly abuse, when her mother forced her into uncomfortable clothes, wished her to be sickly and dependent, and tortured her with an inhumane lice “cure” by pouring petroleum onto her head while ignoring her cries of pain. Yet she credits their survival with her mother’s shrewd idiosyncrasies, which aptly anticipated and responded to the utter 27

28

97, “Ich frage mich, ob ich ihr diesen schlimmsten Abend meines Lebens je verziehen habe. Wir haben nie wieder darüber gesprochen. Mir ist schon manchmal der Impuls gekommen zu fragen: ‘Du, war das damals dein Ernst?’ Dann ziehe ich wieder die Fühler ein, eine Schnecke, die schon genug von der Außenwelt weiß und sich im Gehäuse wohler fühlt. Ich denke, sie wird sich ja doch nicht bemühen, ehrlich zu antworten, sondern das sagen, was ihr gerade in diesem Moment ins Konzept paßt. Außerdem sind mir Intimitäten mit meiner Mutter zuwider, und was könnte intimer sein als eine solche Frage?” 114. See “Wiener Neurosen: Eine Rede,” 27.

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madness of camp life. Acknowledging these contradictory memories, Klüger convincingly illustrates how the stresses and strains of the emerging Jewish persecution made adults more erratic and unstable rather than loving and trustworthy. Linking her family’s distress to the general demise, she thus deconstructs the myth that common suffering bonded victims or changed them for the better. In an effort to avoid publicly exposing her mother to the blunt discussion of the “flourishing mother-daughter neurosis,”29 Klüger made the decision to postpone an English translation of her work while her mother was still alive and living in nearby Los Angeles, California. “I owed her that much,” she explains in the epilogue of Still Alive.30 All to no avail: as it turned out, her mother had obtained a copy of weiter leben from the Swiss cousin of her bridge partner and was “badly hurt”31 after reading passages that pertained to her. Still, weiter leben was published in Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Czech, and Japanese, but not in English until after her mother’s death at age 97. Written “in memory of my mother Alma Hirschel (1903-2000),” Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered includes Klüger’s description of her mother’s last years. Though the mother’s maltreatments narrated in weiter leben also appear in Still Alive, Klüger’s allegations are more curbed, indicating that Klüger found some reconciliation and redemption in the relationship to her mother after her death.32 Like Wolf before her, Klüger challenges not only personal but also public remembrance and nostalgia. Whereas Wolf criticizes—albeit indirectly—GDR historiography, Klüger disapproves of the sentimentality that Holocaust survivors encounter in the Western postwar world. According to Klüger, such idealization imbues the suffering with (false) benefits and meaning and creates a convenient trope for dealing with the Holocaust. As she notes in her essay “Mißbrauch der Erinnerung: KZKitsch” (Misuse of Remembrance: Concentration Camp Kitsch), both pity and awe can lead to the silencing of survivors: The growing community of devoted Shoah students has inspired the caustic pun, “There is no business like Shoah business.” And this community needs us. Today we are considered deputy martyrs (standing in for the dead) and are treated with awe and respect but also with a mixture of disgust and respect – two sides of the 29 30 31 32

54, “Blühende gegenseitige Mutter-Tochter-Neurose,” 57. Still Alive, 210. Still Alive, 210. For further comparison between both books, see Caroline Schaumann “From weiter leben (1992) to Still Alive (2001): Klüger’s “German Book” For an American Audience,” The German Quarterly 77.3 (2004): 324-39, and Erin McGlothlin, “Autobiographical Re-vision: Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and Still Alive,” Gegenwartsliteratur 3 (2004): 46-70.

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same coin. People who are dying are treated this way and also people with cancer and cripples, in other words with a distance that allows both negative and positive associations.33

To Klüger, turning the dead into martyrs and survivors into saints does not help the victims but benefits the post-Holocaust world, since it is grounded in complacency and denial, erases differences among victims, and precludes further confrontation. For similar reasons, Klüger refuses to portray the Holocaust as a sacred, unique event. Conceptualizing the Holocaust as unimaginable and inexpressible automatically excludes involvement and interaction. Analyzing more closely the phenomenon of the “pseudo coming to terms with the past” [“Pseudovergangenheitsbewältigung”],34 Klüger also grows suspicious about preserving former concentration camps as present-day museums. With her plea for dynamic, interactive remembrance, Klüger emphasizes that places do not and cannot carry an eternal, fixed meaning. I don’t believe in going back. Lanzmann does. The museum culture that has sprung up around the concentration camps is based on a sense of spiritus loci which I lack. … I don’t go back to where I’ve been. I have escaped. Lanzmann goes back to where he has never been. No landscape, I have always believed, can recall what happened, for the stones don’t cry out.35

Contrasting Claude Lanzmann’s visits of the death camps in Shoah with her refusal to return to Auschwitz, Klüger explains that a site, even a site of former terror, is continually changing and does not offer belated insights to those returning. Rather, Klüger hints at the fact that it might be

33

34 35

“Eine immer größere Gemeinde von Shoah-Beflissenen gibt Anstoß zu dem bissigen Wortspiel ‘There is no business like Shoah-business.’ Und diese Gemeinde braucht uns. Heute gelten wir als stellvertretende Märtyrer (stellvertretend für die Toten) und werden mit Ehrfurcht behandelt, allerdings auch mit einer Mischung aus Abscheu und Ehrfurcht, zwei Seiten derselben Münze. Sterbende werden so behandelt, Krebskranke und Krüppel, nämlich mit einer Distanz, die sowohl negative wie positive Vorzeichen zuläßt.” Klüger, “Von hoher und niedriger Literatur: Mißbrauch der Erinnerung: KZ-Kitsch” (1996), Gelesene Wirklichkeit, 52-67, 58. Translation is my own. Klüger, “ Von hoher und niedriger Literatur,” 55. “Ich glaube nicht, daß zurückkehren hilft. Lanzmann glaubt’s. Mir fehlt der Sinn für den spiritus loci, der die Grundlage der Museumskultur bildet, die im Umkreis der alten Konzentrationslager entstanden ist. … Ich gehe nicht dorthin, wo ich einmal war. Ich bin entkommen. Lanzmann kehrt dorthin zurück, wo er nie gewesen ist. Keine Landschaft, habe ich immer geglaubt, bewahrt die Erinnerung daran, was auf ihrem Boden geschah, denn die Steine reden nicht.” Klüger, “Lanzmanns Shoah in New York,” 10. Translation from Ruth Angress, “Lanzmann’s Shoah and Its Audience.”

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(Jewish) non-victims who feel more strongly a need to “return.”36 Though Klüger lauds Lanzmann’s careful observations, she fears that other visitors are not as cautious and sensitive, making her doubt whether camps should be transformed into museums. As a “finished rigid memorial,”37 the camps no longer convey the atrocious stench, the unsanitary conditions, and the frightful atmosphere, but become well-preserved and almost idyllic sites, thus whitewashing the Nazi terror while pretending authenticity. In this way, postwar visitors faced with a beautified, sanitized camp may assume that it was not all too bad, or bathe in pity and compassion, relieving their conscience in the process. After all, idealization, sentimentality, and kitsch demand no dissent or involvement.38 Private and Public Work of Mourning As a twelve-year old, Klüger suffered hunger, thirst, unbearable stench, heat, cold, heavy labor, physical and mental abuse, and constant fear and torment. She learned about the crematoria, discovered a pile of naked corpses, and saw women, including her own mother, being brutally punished and tortured. On their first evening in Auschwitz, Klüger’s mother suggested a joint suicide by running into the camp’s electrified fence: this contemplation of death, voiced by her own mother, was simply beyond imagination for the child. After having survived the Nazi terror, Klüger gradually learned that her father, half-brother, and many other family relatives had been murdered. With time to understand the impact of her losses, the effects of the Holocaust continued and grew, so that Klüger calls “memory a prison” and Auschwitz “a bullet lodged in the soul where no surgery can reach it.”39

36

37 38

39

In weiter leben, Klüger mentions Peter Weiss (1916-1982) as another Auschwitz visitor who “returned.” Weiss, whose family converted to Judaism, immigrated to England in 1935 and only saw Auschwitz after the war as a visitor. Calling the former camp “his” place, Weiss maintains that, as a Jew in Europe, he could have died there. “Fertiges, starres Mahnmal,” 75. Translation is my own. Klüger’s argument can be related to James Young’s work on Holocaust monuments. Young suggests “the initial impulse to memorialize events like the Holocaust may actually spring from an opposite and equal desire to forget them.” Accordingly, monuments and memorials may take the burden of remembrance, relieving their audience in the process. James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, New Haven: Yale UP, 1993, 5. 34, “Gedächtnis auch ein Gefängnis,” 27, and 112, “ein Fremdkörper in der Seele, etwas wie eine nicht operierte Bleikugel im Leib,” 138.

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In his work on loss and mourning, British psychoanalyst John Bowlby outlines various stages of the process, emphasizing the importance of mourning rituals for the gradual recovery of the bereaved. They [mourning customs] enable the bereaved, for a while, to give the dead person as central a place in her life as he had before, yet at the same time they emphasize death as a crucial event whose implications must be acknowledged. Subsequently, such customs mark the stages of reintegration.40

By providing a site, an understanding, and a context for death, a culture’s mourning rituals offer an outlet for voicing pain and a community for support, yet Klüger’s father and half-brother had been killed in unknown circumstances, by an anonymous murderer, at an undisclosed site. Like Maron with her grandfather Pawel, Klüger is left to speculate about the details of their murder. If the phenomenon of the missing grave hindered a mourning process in the first place, her grief was exacerbated by the fact that in the postwar era Klüger found neither a place, nor a community, nor rituals which allowed for the expression of her loss. Postwar Germany and the United States downplayed the impact of the Holocaust, and even in the Jewish community Klüger felt excluded from public forms of mourning. Criticizing the male bias in Jewish tradition and postwar culture, Klüger points out that as a woman, she was not allowed to say the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Instead, she created her own forms of private and public mourning, writing first poetry and then a memoir about her losses. Unlike conventional mourning rituals, therapy, or oral interviews, Klüger’s form is self-chosen and self-directed, finally giving her an opportunity to publicly and internally process some of her grief. Using her testimony as a medium to compile and re-examine her memories, Klüger cannot help but notice their utter randomness and contradictions. With respect to her father, she finds her memories incomplete and deficient since they contain seemingly unimportant details and do not correspond to what the adult wants to know. For instance, while the child’s last impression of her father was one of injustice, humiliation, and violence (her father beat her in front of her best friend and expelled her from the living room), the adult struggles to reconcile these memories with the knowledge of her father’s premature death. With no possibility of completing or changing her memories, Klüger can only accept what emerges as a mosaic of dissonant memory-fragments, including fear, sadness, rage, and self-pity. By naming, addressing, and celebrating her father, and finally writing down what she could not articulate in the past, Klüger 40

John Bowlby, Loss: Sadness and Depression. Attachment and Loss: Vol. III, New York: Basic, 1980, 93.

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acknowledges her loss and finds ways to cope with it. In Still Alive, this ability is tested once again when Klüger discovers that her father was not gassed at Auschwitz (as she had thought previously) but presumably killed on transport to Lithuania or Estonia. This information, conveyed by a Frenchwoman who had read weiter leben in French translation, not only calls into question the story Klüger had constructed and believed for decades but replaces it with a “new and undigested”41 version, unsettling once again her understanding of the past. Yet the unexpected turn confirms the necessity of accepting ambivalence with respect to her feelings concerning her father and his early death. Klüger goes through a similar deliberate process with memories of her mother. In weiter leben, she recounts contradictory examples of motherly love; in Still Alive, she complements this picture by including bits about her mother’s childhood in a Czech village, the relationship to her greatgranddaughter, and her sickness during the last years. In this way, weiter leben continues through publication of Still Alive, yet the process of remembering and bearing witness does not follow a linear path nor does it come to a proper ending. Rather, as her remembering triggers uncertainty, despair, and anxiety, and does not promise a predictable direction or outcome, it lends proof to her observation early on in weiter leben, “This story moves in circles, and the more of it I tell, the less it makes sense.”42 As Klüger recognizes, survivor testimony in general and her own memoir in particular naturally culminates in the triumph of survival, which in the context of the Holocaust represents an exceptional example and skews reality. Bothered by the idea that her audience might read her narrative as a successful tale of survival, Klüger takes great care to remind her readers that her story is one without a happy ending. Emphasizing the text’s inconsistencies, Klüger includes her contradictory emotions, tentative insights, doubts, and occasionally dubious information. Still, she appears to draw a sense of identity from these contradictions. Towards the end of her memoir, she asserts: Time is slipping through my fingers anyway, and besides, when have I ever had my life under control? Pieces of broken glass wherever you look. I recognize myself only in my irreconcilabilities, and I cling to them. Let me have them.43

41 42 43

Still Alive, 40. 35, “Diese Geschichte dreht sich im Kreis, und je länger man sie erzählt, desto sinnloser wird sie.” 29. “Mir rinnt ja sowieso die Zeit durch die Finger, und wann hab ich je mein Leben im Griff gehabt. Scherben wo man hinschaut. Nur an meinen Unversöhnlichkeiten erkenn ich mich, an denen halt ich mich fest. Die laß mir. ” 279. Translation is my own.

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Irreconcilability for Klüger means not giving in to false conciliation, or pretending to find harmony. “Forgiving makes me sick, I think or I say, and I lean back in the cushions ….”44 To Klüger, the very idea of forgiveness rings hollow, since she rejects Christian concepts of exoneration or absolution. Yet the crude words she utters (or merely thinks) in the hospital bed in a state of despair and exhaustion exude some self-irony. And so Klüger’s flat out rejection of any kind of reconciliation refers also to the contradictions within herself. In fact, her conflicting emotions and thoughts cannot be reconciled or subsumed under any one interpretation but rather make up the fiber of her identity as a woman, a writer, a survivor, an Austrian, an American, and a Jew. In the end, Klüger realizes that there cannot be a final satisfactory analysis of her past, asserting on the last pages of her memoir “Everything is different from how it has been before. Everything is unresolved and unfinished again, and I have to come to a conclusion, since otherwise even this will no longer be true tomorrow.”45 At the very end of her testimony, where a reader might expect some sort of summary, a conclusion, or final analysis, Klüger disappoints such hopes with the words that her ending is arbitrary and temporary, and might need revision as soon as the next day. Klüger brings her text to an end in the following manner: Self-pitying. Airy-fairy [versponnen]. Go on in spite of it [Trotzdem weiterspinnen]. Finally they tripped me up so that I hit my head, and whatever occurred to me after that, or whatever came out, that was my testimony. Now they could leave me in peace and spare me the trouble of further relocation.46

In the quotation, Klüger calls the process of bearing witness spinnen, “to spin,” “to plot,” or “to think up.” Giving testimony or spinnen for Klüger is not an impersonal and neutral process but a creative one, a literal weaving of her story from the elements of memory and information. Correspondingly, in an earlier essay “Dichten über die Shoah,” Klüger wrote the beginning of a fictional ghost story [Gespenstergeschichte] about the Holocaust, inviting her readers to continue [weiterspinnen].47 With the word wei44 45 46

47

“Verzeihen ist zum Kotzen, denk ich oder sag ich, und ich lehne mich in die Polster zurück ….” 279. Translation is my own. “Alles ist, wie schon lange nicht. Alles ist wieder offen und unfertig, und ich muß Schluß machen, sonst stimmt morgen auch das nicht mehr.” 283. Translation is my own. “Wehleidig. Versponnen. Trotzdem weiterspinnen, so: Schließlich haben sie mir ein Bein gestellt, so daß ich auf den Kopf fiel, und was mir danach einfiel, oder was dabei herausfiel, hab ich ausgesagt. Jetzt könnten sie mich in Ruhe lassen und mir weiteres umziehen ersparen.” 284. Translation is my own. Ruth Klüger, “Dichten über die Shoah. Zum Problem des literarischen Umgangs mit dem Massenmord,” Spuren der Verfolgung: Seelische Auswirkungen des Holocaust auf die Opfer und ihre Kinder, ed. Gertrud Hardtmann, Stuttgart: Bleicher, 1992, 203-21, 220.

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terspinnen, used both in the essay and in weiter leben, Klüger emphasizes the continuity of the process, a notion that she herself puts into practice with her later work Still Alive, a text that ends on a different note. In colloquial German, however, spinnen also means “to go crazy” or “to be nuts.” By proudly and publicly declaring her testifying as spinnen, Klüger at once appropriates and responds to possible objections or disbelief and introduces a provocative approach to the Holocaust. Acknowledging the impact of conjured ghosts, Klüger urges her readers to go beyond logic and reason in order to understand the Holocaust. Genre Distinctions Klüger identifies her text as testimony or autobiography, two neighboring genres whose boundaries are fluid (“Autobiography is a kind of testimony”48), and of which both include a claim to truth. While Klüger prefers her work to be read as autobiography rather than mere testimony,49 she decidedly resists having her work classified as a novel. My book is sometimes introduced as a novel – usually by people who mean well and have my best interests at heart. Then I say something like: “I wish it were a novel,” – in other words, I wish I had had a different girlhood and had only invented this one. By novel, my well-meaning readers simply mean an interesting or well-written book. They mean it’s a piece of literature, literary fiction. It supposedly has universal value. This kind of praise completely ignores the demand for truth, not to mention the demand for reality.50

In contrast to Wolf, who intentionally frames her work as an (autobiographical) novel to allow for a blurring of boundaries between fiction and 48 49 50

“Autobiographie ist eine Art Zeugenaussage,” Ruth Klüger, “Zum Wahrheitsbegriff in der Autobiographie,” Autobiographien von Frauen, ed. Magdalene Heuser, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1996, 405-410, 409. Translation is my own. In an interview, Klüger remarked that she favored her book being considered as autobiography and thus a more literary, comprehensive work rather than as Holocaust testimony. Ruth Klüger, personal interview, March 12, 1998. “Mein Buch wird manchmal als Roman vorgestellt, und zwar immer von Leuten, die es gut mit mir meinen. Ich sage dann etwa: ‘Ich wollte es wäre ein Roman,’ d.h. ich wollte, ich hätte eine andere Jugend gehabt und hätte diese nur erfunden. Meine wohlwollenden Leser meinen mit Roman einfach ein interessantes oder gut geschriebenes Buch, sie meinen es sei Literatur, Belletristik. Es hätte einen Allgemeinwert. Der Wahrheitsanspruch, und schon gar der Wirklichkeitsanspruch, fällt bei solchem Lob unter den Tisch.” Klüger, “Zum Wahrheitsbegriff in der Autobiographie,” 406. Klüger further elucidated on the problem of distinguishing historical fiction from autobiography in her Poetics Lectures held at the Universität Tübingen in 2005 and published as “Wie wirklich ist das Mögliche? Das Spiel mit Weltgeschichte in der Literatur,” Gelesene Wirklichkeit, 143-219.

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autobiography, for Klüger these boundaries are essential precisely because her survival comprised such an exceptional and improbable act when considering the facts of the Holocaust. In other words, because Klüger saw the risks of her memories being doubted, she asserts their truth. Insisting on historical accuracy right down to the minute details of the numbering and lettering of her Auschwitz number and the names of lesser-known camps, Klüger demands her readers’ attention to differences and details, with which she seeks to counter the simplifications and overgeneralizations arising from inaccuracy. To Klüger, autobiographies “describe an experienced, ingrained [eingefleischte] truth,”51 a truth written on her own body like the Auschwitz number branded onto the skin of her left arm. Faced with these realities, she emphatically rejects postmodern theories that call into question the boundaries between novel and autobiography, between fiction and fact. weiter leben spans two time frames; Klüger’s youth from early childhood memories until she parted from her mother to leave for California (mid1930s-1951), and the present time of writing, coinciding with the fall of the Wall and German reunification (1988-1991). The English version Still Alive keeps the twofold structure but continues the latter timeframe for another decade (until 2000). Although in both texts, the years between 1951 and 1988 are largely excluded, Klüger incorporates some of her experiences and poems from that time. In addition, intertextual references (to Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Elie Wiesel, Peter Weiss, and others), literary and historical documents, quotations, and other authentic materials complement the text. Unlike other Holocaust testimonies, weiter leben is not limited to a description of Klüger’s survival but includes later events and memories as they pertain to the Holocaust. As levels of present and past alternate, Klüger’s experience of the Holocaust determines her relationship to contemporary Germany, and conversely, present experiences affect her understanding of the past. In a personal interview, she noted that her book is more about the present than it is about the past, and indeed her accident, the ensuing recovery, and her encounters with Germans provoke, structure, and guide her memories. As the title weiter leben (living on) implies, Klüger emphasizes the continuities between past, present, and future, indicating that the remembered past and the process of remembering in the present cannot be separated, but go hand in hand.52 51 52

“Beschreiben eine erlebte, eingefleischte Wahrheit,” Klüger, “Zum Wahrheitsbegriff in der Autobiographie,” 405. Translation is my own. According to Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, “die Kleinschreibung und das auseinandergeschriebene Verb signalisieren den Willen zu einem provisorischen Kontinuum. weiter leben

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weiter leben’s subtitle, eine Jugend (A Youth), not only delineates the text’s time frame and focus but underscores with an impersonal rather than possessive pronoun that Klüger’s survival was both particular and somewhat random. Like Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood, Klüger intrinsically connects the general circumstances to her own fate, thus moving the text beyond an exclusively personal realm. Irene Heidelberger-Leonard relates Klüger’s title to Wolf’s work: For [Ruth Klüger], for example, Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood is the German memoir of National Socialism par excellence and thus a German counterpart of the book that Klüger could also have called Jewish Patterns of Youth, both written from a specifically female perspective.53

While Klüger did not name her book “Patterns of Youth,” Wolf in fact considered calling her work “A Childhood in Germany,” as her diary reveals.54 Both writers also stress the public character and dimension of their works. Klüger emphasizes the didactic purpose by calling her work “a German book,”55 intended for a German audience dealing with its Nazi past. Despite their claim to a general experience, both texts embrace a decidedly female perspective, revealing how gender profoundly shapes personal and public remembering. Klüger objects to the male dominated discourse on the Nazi past that presumes to reflect a universally valid perspective, and supplements men’s testimonies by including details of women’s (camp) experiences like amenorrhea, sexual abuse, and continuing discrimination in the postwar era. As an inmate of the women’s camps, Klüger also focuses on the experience of other women, in particular her mother and another girl whom her mother adopted in Auschwitz as a step

53

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wird zum graphischen Äquivalent des Bruchs in der Kontinuität, ja der Kontinuität als Bruch.” Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, “Ruth Klüger weiter leben – ein Grundstein zu einem neuen Auschwitz ‘Kanon’?” Deutsche Nachkriegsliteratur und der Holocaust, eds. Stephan Braese, Holger Gehle, Doron Kiesel, Hanno Loewy, Franfurt a. M.: Campus, 1998, 157-69, 160. According to Owen Evans, the title weiter leben is also an allusion to Jean Améry’s collection of essays Weiterleben, aber wie?. See Owen Evans, Mapping the Contours of Oppression: Subjectivity, Truth and Fiction in Recent German Autobiographical Treatments of Totalitarianism, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006, 97. “So etwa ist für sie [Ruth Klüger] Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster die deutsche Erinnerung an den Nationalsozialismus, nämlich ein deutsches Pendant zu dem, was Klüger auch jüdisches Jugendmuster hätte nennen können, beide geschrieben aus einer spezifisch weiblichen Perspektive.” Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, Ruth Klüger: weiter leben. Eine Jugend, München: Oldenbourg, 1996, 31. Translation is my own. “Eine Kindheit in Deutschland.” Christa Wolf, Ein Tag im Jahr 1960-2000, München: Luchterhand, 2003, 154. Translation from Christa Wolf, One Day a Year 1960-2000, trans. Lowell A. Bangerter, New York: Europa Editions, 2007, 160. “Ein deutsches Buch,” 285. Translation is my own.

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daughter. A mother herself, Klüger also considers the relationship to her sons as well as their response to a mother who survived the death camps. weiter leben, like Patterns of Childhood, thus elaborates on the transmission of memories to the following generations while considering the obstacles to such communication. Saying I, Saying You By employing the first-person “I,” Klüger purposefully sets her text apart from Wolf’s. The autobiography is a work in which the narrator and the author overlap and become one. In an autobiography the author tells us expressly that there is no distance between her (or him) and the protagonist telling the story. In an autobiographical novel the situation is somewhat different. There distance is created through fictionalization, however limited it may be. When Christa Wolf calls the female protagonist in Patterns of Childhood “Nelly,” I interpret that as a signal from the author. Watch out! Although this character may have something in common with me, I state expressly that she is not identical with me.56

While reading Patterns of Childhood as fiction, Klüger asserts that her own text reflects autobiographical truth, urging readers to identify the narrator of weiter leben with herself. Even though postmodern theories point out that all writing is the result of artistic shaping and thus, to some degree, fictional, Klüger insists on the somewhat traditional distinctions in the face of the Holocaust and the history of Holocaust denial. Indeed, with her saying “I,” she confirms that the Nazis did not succeed in their goal of eradicating Jews in Europe. Klüger’s testimony can thus be read as a kind of signature, a designation Shoshana Felman attributes to Holocaust testimonies in general.57 Likewise, Klüger insists on her ability to remember her youth: Today there are people who ask me, “But you were much too young to be able to remember this terrible time, right?” Or rather, they don’t even ask, they maintain 56

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“Die Autobiographie ist ein Werk, in dem Erzähler und Autor zusammenfallen, eins sind. In der Autobiographie sagt uns die Autorin ausdrücklich, daß keine Distanz sie (oder ihn) von der erzählenden Hauptperson trennt. Im autobiographischen Roman ist es schon anders. Da wird Distanz hergestellt durch Fiktionalisierung und sei sie auch noch so gering. Wenn Christa Wolf in “Kindheitsmuster” die Heldin Nelly nennt, so lese ich das als Signal von Seiten der Autorin: Gebt acht. Diese Figur hat zwar eventuell manches mit mir gemeinsam, doch ich erkläre sie ausdrücklich als nicht mit mir identisch.” Klüger, “Zum Wahrheitsbegriff in der Autobiographie,” 407. Translation is my own. See Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” Testimony, 51.

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it with complete certainty. And then I think, they want to take away my life, for life is really just the time spent, the only thing that we have, and that is what they are contesting when they question my right to remember.58

With her claim to accuracy, coherence, and an unswerving narrative voice, Klüger embraces her identity as a survivor. Acknowledging that her imprisonment at Auschwitz was a significant part of her life, she recognizes and accepts that her formative years were shaped by pain, loss, and death. Although for the above mentioned reasons, Klüger rejects the notion of a fragmented self (“But a fragmented, disintegrated first person is not the issue here”),59 she depicts herself as conflicted and unpredictable, granting herself anger and resentment, emotions which Alice Miller regards as crucial to working through the past. But this appropriate form of aggression is unattainable for many people who have grown up with the absurd belief that a person can have nothing but kind, good, and meek thoughts and at the same time be honest and authentic.60

Conceding to conflicting emotions, Klüger allows herself expressive freedom while challenging representations of Holocaust victims as brokenhearted and pitiful. In weiter leben, Klüger uses the second-person “du” to begin a dialogue with relatives, friends, acquaintances, strangers, and readers. In imagined conversations with her deceased father, she responds to his various former objections with “you see” and belatedly gives advice to her halfbrother, “my dear dead brother, we should never have stopped running.”61 By saying “you,” Klüger reestablishes a connection with family members, voicing both anger and attachment and expressing (in the language of a child) what she could not have said when her father and broth58

59 60

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“Heute gibt es Leute, die mich fragen: “Aber Sie waren doch viel zu jung, um sich an diese schreckliche Zeit erinnern zu können.” Oder vielmehr, sie fragen nicht einmal, sie behaupten es mit Bestimmtheit. Ich denke dann, die wollen mir mein Leben nehmen, denn das Leben ist doch nur die verbrachte Zeit, das einzige, was wir haben, das machen sie mir streitig, wenn sie mir das Recht des Erinnerns in Frage stellen.” 73. Translation is my own. See also 228. “Kein Thema jedoch ist ein fragmentiertes, zersplittertes Ich.” Klüger, “Zum Wahrheitsbegriff in der Autobiographie,” 410. Translation is my own. “Aber diese angemessene, adäquate Form der Aggression bleibt vielen Menschen verschlossen, die als Kinder in dem absurden Glauben aufgewachsen sind, ein Mensch könne ständig nur liebe, gute und fromme Gedanken haben und dabei gleichzeitig ehrlich und wahrhaftig sein.” Alice Miller, Am Anfang war Erziehung, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980, 305. Translation from Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, trans. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983, 265. 32, “Siehst du,” 25, and 28-29, “Du, wir hätten gar nicht aufhören sollen zu rennen.” 21.

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er were still alive. In this way, the second-person pronoun “you” links Klüger to the dead but creates a healthy distance to the ghosts of the past. If I cannot reconcile with you, then leave it at that. I cannot dig your graves with you. Those who did not die with you must die in a different way and at a different time.62

Once more referring to the difficult concept of reconciliation, Klüger accepts that she is a survivor and must find a way to live on, which also means coming to terms with father’s and half-brother’s death. The second-person pronoun, then, offers her a venue of communication with the dead without succumbing to depression and becoming deadened herself—saying “you” prevents her from having to use the inclusive “we.” Klüger also uses the unwieldy second-person point of view to address the text’s explicit audience, her German readership: “Whom am I really writing this for? … Well, to put it another way, I am writing it for Germans. But is that really who you are? Do you really want to be like that?”63 As Klüger acknowledges elsewhere, little survivor testimony has been written in German.64 With weiter leben she deliberately seeks to change this fact, calling on German readers to respond and participate in the process of bearing witness. As a Viennese Jew from an assimilated family, deeply embedded in German-speaking culture, and as a survivor who remained in Germany from 1945-1947 while awaiting immigration visas, Klüger daringly heeds her call for involvement and relates her Holocaust survival to the German civilian war experience. Since she herself witnessed Allied bombings, expulsion, and flight in the last months of the war, Klüger is able to empathize not just with Jewish suffering but with the German civilian suffering during and after the war. These are the rare instances when disparate German and Jewish fates in the Nazi years intersect. While cautiously creating bridges between her own life and that of her German readers, Klüger also emphasizes the difficulties of such attempts, as well as the differences between German and Jewish experiences that are incommensurate. Contrary to what some reviewers fantasized would be 62 63

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“Wenn ich euch nicht versöhnen kann, dann laßt es bleiben. Ich kann nicht eure Gräber mit euch schaufeln. Wer nicht mit euch starb, muß anders und zu einem anderen Zeitpunkt sterben.” 98. Translation is my own. “Für wen schreib ich das hier eigentlich? … Also anders gesagt, ich schreib es für Deutsche. Aber seid ihr das wirklich? Wollt ihr wirklich so sein?” 141. Translation is my own. Nancy K. Miller related Klüger’s form of address to nineteenth-century autobiography. See Nancy K. Miller, “Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered: An Unsentimental Education,” Teaching the Representations of the Holocaust, eds. Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes, New York: Modern Language Association, 2004, 386-95, 386. Klüger, “Dichten über die Shoah,” 211-12.

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Klüger’s “return to Germany,”65 Klüger never embraced such GermanJewish identity but insisted in the fact that she became an American citizen because her family was killed in Nazi Germany. weiter leben also illustrates the failure of a German-Jewish dialogue. In particular, Klüger details two German ways of reacting to the Holocaust, both of which she finds inadequate. On the one hand, she speaks with young German conscientious objectors who work at the site of Auschwitz, devoted to preserving the camp as a museum, on the other, she encounters Gisela, an astonishingly self-assured and opinionated German wife of a former colleague at Princeton. Whereas Germany’s youngsters seem guilt-ridden, silenced, and caught in moral imperatives, Gisela conversely does not seem burdened or troubled by her country’s past but verbalizes an array of offensive remarks, downplaying the suffering of Jews and openly ignoring Klüger’s position. Both sides, equally stuck in prejudice and a narrow mind-set, seem unable to engage with Klüger in a dialogue. In similar fashion, Klüger characterizes the German friend she made in 1947 in Regensburg during her studies, Christoph (aka Martin Walser, who recognized himself in weiter leben and appears in Still Alive unencoded as Martin), as an inadequate listener.66 According to Klüger, Christoph’s interest in Jewish history and the Holocaust (in 1965, Walser published an essay entitled “Unser Auschwitz” [Our Auschwitz]) does not encompass his friend’s survival, as he never asked her about it. Deeply rooted in his German identity, Christoph need not bother to question his beliefs and assumptions. To Stephan Braese and Holger Gehle, this attitude continued in the reception of weiter leben that (like Walser) enthusiastically lauded the book but failed to respond to Klüger’s provocations.67 Klüger counters this tendency by anticipating her readers’ reactions in a preemptive account. To this end, her tone turns didactic, sometimes defensive when assuming that her audience will not believe her (“One of my younger readers shakes his head and says that this is a bit unbelievable, even in a girl who was as hung up on the written word as I was”), or react with disapproval (“I see my readers shaking their heads in consterna-

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See Martin Walser’s review of weiter leben in “Ruth Klüger zur Begrüßung,” Das Kulturjournal, Bayerischer Rundfunk, September 27, 1992. Yet in a 2001 interview, Klüger publicly thanked Walser for his support of her book. “‘…ein deutsches Buch’ ist ja ein bißchen zwiespältig,” 36. Stephan Braese und Holger Gehle, “Von ‘deutschen Freunden’. Ruth Klügers weiter leben – Eine Jugend in der deutschen Rezeption,“ Der Deutschunterricht 47.6 (1995): 76-87, 80. On the reception of weiter leben, see also Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, “Ruth Klüger weiter leben – ein Grundstein zu einem neuen Auschwitz ‘Kanon’?” 166.

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tion”).68 By addressing her readers in the imperative voice, Klüger hopes to stir a more passionate response. But let yourselves at least be provoked, don’t hide behind a barricade, don’t say from the very outset that it doesn’t concern you or that it only concerns you within a framework that you have delineated neatly in advance with a compass and a ruler. Don’t say that you had, after all, already put up with the photographs of the piles of bodies and had contributed your quota of shared guilt and compassion. Get angry and belligerent, look for a fight!69

In an outspoken and instructive tone, Klüger demands her readers’ emotional and intellectual involvement, even if that means open dispute. By encouraging her readers to consider new information and interpretation and to abandon previous ways of thinking, her text grows openly instructive. Yet arguably, Klüger does not get much of an honest response when putting words into her readers’ mouths and anticipating a response to her “friction surfaces,”70 even if her candid and austere remarks reflect her own self-critical approach. While the German audience by and large accepted Klüger’s prodding with no misgivings, some of her (male) readers objected to her provocations. Though Klüger’s text frequently distinguishes between male and female readers, and though she reveals elsewhere that she counts on a largely female audience (40), it is her parenthetical statement “(most of them [her readers] likely to be female, since males, on the whole, tend to prefer books written by fellow males)”71 that caused much dissent. Her colleague and reviewer Egon Schwarz, who immigrated to Bolivia before the war and also taught German literature in the United States, comments: But why does she think that men only read “things written by other men” (81)? Otherwise there are no idle questions in her text and no false statements. Has

68 69

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98, “Unglaubwürdig, sagt einer von euch, diese Literarisierung,” 115, and “Ich sehe meine Leser befremdet die Köpfe schütteln,” 236. Translation is my own. “Aber laßt euch doch mindestens reizen, verschanzt euch nicht, sagt nicht von vornherein, das gehe euch nichts an oder es gehe euch nur innerhalb eines festgelegten, von euch im voraus mit Zirkel und Lineal säuberlich abgegrenzten Rahmens an, ihr hättet ja schon die Photographien mit den Leichenhaufen ausgestanden und euer Pensum an Mitschuld und Mitleid absolviert. Werdet streitsüchtig, sucht die Auseinandersetzung.” 141. Translation is my own. See also 139, 159. “Reibflächen.” The task of literature rubbing against oversimplified and premature harmony is a larger theme for Klüger: in weiter leben, she called for “Reibflächen” (79) to conjure up the ghosts of her past. In turn, her essay “Dichten über die Shoah” disapproves of Holocaust books that do not offer “Reibungsflächen” (219). 71, “(Wer rechnet schon mit männlichen Lesern? Die lesen nur von anderen Männern Geschriebenes.)” 81.

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something fashionable crept in here after all? Has she forgotten the male friends that were so enthusiastic about her book?72

Irene Heidelberger-Leonard elaborates on the issue: Thus [Klüger’s] feminist militancy, which occasionally seems to exclude male readers, offended quite a few people. To me this exclusion seems to be just a rhetorical one, a conscious overstatement designed to provoke protests from male readers.73

While Schwarz merely rejects Klüger’s assumptions, giving himself as an example of a male reader, Heidelberger-Leonard responds to Klüger’s feminism in a somewhat contradictory manner: on the one hand, she charges Klüger with militant feminism, a stock phrase characterization that is hardly justifiable. On the other hand, Heidelberger-Leonard rids Klüger of her feminist thinking when claiming that her provocations are merely rhetorical exaggeration. This kind of binary analysis continued more recently when Owen Evans rejected Jennifer Taylor’s feminist reading of weiter leben as “a rather too deductive approach,” and cleansed Klüger’s text of any feminist agenda when stating that “Klüger’s criticism of male readers appears essentially ironic, rather than overtly feminist.”74 But it appears that Klüger’s words are as ironic as they are feminist. By carefully distinguishing between male and female readers, Klüger draws attention to the underlying gender-bias of the German language, which in general assumes male readers.75 And by explicitly targeting and addressing female readers, Klüger playfully reverses the bias, challenging a language, historiography, and literary history shaped by men. Yet Eva Lezzi rightly points out that Klüger herself is a reader influenced by a male bias: containing many intertextual references, weiter leben does not name another memoir written by a woman—though Klüger’s work was admittedly in72

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“Warum glaubt sie aber, daß Männer ‘nur von anderen Männern Geschriebenes’ lesen (81)? Sonst ist keine Frage bei ihr müßig, keine Behauptung falsch. Hat sich hier doch etwas Modisches eingeschlichen? Hat sie die männlichen Freunde vergessen, die sich für ihr Buch begeisterten?” Egon Schwarz, review of “Klüger, Ruth: weiter leben: eine Jugend” The German Quarterly 66 (1993): 286-88, 287. See also Stephan Braese and Holger Gehle, “Von ‘deutschen Freunden.’” Klüger addresses her readers’ reaction to this statement in Frauen lesen anders, München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996, 90-91. “So hat ihre [Klüger’s] feministische Militanz, die streckenweise den männlichen Leser als Adressaten auszuschließen scheint, nicht wenig Anstoß erregt. Mir selbst kommt dieser Ausschluß nur wie ein rhetorischer vor, ein bewußtes Overstatement, das es auf Widerspruch von Seiten der männlichen Leser abgesehen hat.” Heidelberger-Leonard, 61. Translation is my own. Owen Evans, 109. This argument became obvious to me after reading Irene Kacandes work on the genderinflected character of language. See Irene Kacandes, Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2001, 190.

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spired by Cordelia Evardson’s Burned Child Seeks the Fire: A Memoir (1997, Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer, 1986) along with Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood.76 Lezzi’s argument is well taken, but merely proves that Klüger, too, is a product of the literary tradition she seeks to dismantle. Correspondingly, Klüger’s scholarly work focuses for the most part on canonical writers, but includes feminist scholarship and perspectives which is also visible in weiter leben. To Klüger, it is essential that her (German) readers, whether male or female, listen, understand, and respond to her testimony. By establishing a dialogue with her audience, she transcends isolation and combats voicelessness. In this way, her project does not exclude but rather seeks to include readers who she also calls dear friends or my friends. If I succeed, together with my readers—and perhaps a few men will join us in the kitchen—we could exchange magic formulas like favorite recipes…77

Switching to the inclusive pronoun “we,” Klüger reveals how vitally important readers are to her project. Going beyond individual self-reflection, self-analysis, or self-therapy, her testimony becomes an invitation to a dialogue, and the fact that a Jewish survivor chooses a German audience as participants in this dialogue is particularly courageous, if not daring. Language and Narration Switching between the child’s and the adult’s perspective, weiter leben not only documents Klüger’s survival but contextualizes it within a metanarrative on the representation and memorialization of the Holocaust. This framework is mirrored by the text’s narration, which vacillates from (childhood) perceptions in an outspoken Viennese dialect to scholarly analysis by the knowledgeable American Holocaust scholar. While Klüger sequences her memories in a roughly chronological manner, she consistently interrupts her text to reflect on its purpose and outcome and to relate literary and historical intertextual references. In a similar juxtaposition, Klüger includes both her own former poems as well as their analysis. Conceived in Auschwitz and the years following, the poems are Klüger’s rawest form of expression, providing an unadorned and uncompromising 76 77

See Eva Lezzi, Zerstörte Kindheit: Literarische Autobiographien zur Shoah, Köln: Böhlau, 2001, 258. 69, “Wenn es mir gelingt, zusammen mit Leserinnen, die mitdenken, und vielleicht sogar ein paar Lesern dazu, dann könnten wir Beschwörungsformeln wie Kochrezepte austauschen…” 79.

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account of the camps and their aftermath.78 In the poems, Klüger articulates infinite grief outside of the confines of narrative prose, though she still adheres to the rules of verse and meter, rules which according to Klüger allowed her to meet the Holocaust’s threatening madness with stringent structure. By creating her own poetry in accordance with German classicism she read as a girl in Vienna, Klüger arguably uses German literature as a means of survival. Yet she also reevaluates her previous work with impeccable standards, judging the poems’ quality in style and content and meticulously analyzing word choice, meter, rhyme, and refrain. This contrast of the adolescent’s attempt at comprehending and expressing Auschwitz and the scholar’s belated examination of it is paradigmatic for the text’s consistent interplay between past and present. In weiter leben, Klüger grows increasingly skeptical about the capacity of language to express her experience adequately. For instance, she prefaces her description of hunger with a disclaimer “There is little to say about chronic hunger: it’s always there and is boring to talk about,”79 but nevertheless seeks to express what hunger feels like. To Klüger, the strategy of articulating a traumatic experience while reflecting on the difficulties of doing so, is characteristic of the very process of writing. I write a few disconnected lines, …, write them again, read them, I don’t like them because language provides its clichés free of charge. The trite phrases and overused words come easily like bird droppings on a windshield wiper—are you listening, cat?—and like the advertisements that lie in the mailbox next to the real mail. Thus the job is to sort out, delete, laboriously searching for precise terms for unfinished twilight thoughts.80

Since language gravitates toward clichés and accumulates words devoid of meaning, Klüger believes that a writer must critically evaluate her language as she is using it. Not by coincidence is her addressee for this critique of language her language-less cat. The process of writing, then, becomes one of sorting useful words from superfluous ones and of deleting redundancies.

78 79 80

In her recent essay “Wiener Neurosen,” Klüger continues this practice by including three poems on Vienna as well as their interpretation. 75, “Man kann wenig über chronischen Hunger sagen; er ist immer da, und was immer da ist, wird langweilig im Erzählen.” 87. “Ich schreib ein paar unzusammenhängende Zeilen, … , schreibe sie noch einmal, lese sie, sie gefallen mir nicht, denn die Sprache liefert ihre Klischees gratis, die abgedroschenen Phrasen und verbrauchten Wörter fallen einem zu wie Vogeldreck auf den Scheibenwischer – hörst du, Katze – und die Werbung, die im Briefkasten neben der richtigen Post liegt. Also aussortieren, löschen, mühseliges Tagewortefinden für unausgegorene Halbdunkelgedanken.” 283. Translation is my own.

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Another indication of Klüger’s reflective process are numerous questions found in the text, some merely rhetorical (“What else could you expect?”81), some addressed to readers (“True, true, but the dead set us certain tasks, don’t they?”82), and some addressed to the self (“Is my life running circles round me?”83). These questions enable Klüger to initiate a dialogue with readers while reconsidering her project from multiple perspectives, as also evident in the following example: Last night I exuberantly wrote these sentences with memory bearing down on my mind, but today they seem false, an illusion. I want to erase them, but should I? I see how wrong it is to start with the assertion “Anyone who has ever ...” I speak of a moment in my own circumscribed life as if it was more than a personal epiphany, as if it had been a valid revelation giving me the authority to generalize.84

Letting readers take part in the editing process, Klüger carefully reexamines and questions each sentence. By continually reassessing the writing project and by contemplating the deletion of passages that are included in the final text, Klüger reserves for herself the right to change, allowing readers to observe this process. This kind of self-examination is an outlet for doubts and uncertainties that ultimately prevents her from aborting the project altogether. While underscoring language’s fallible nature, Klüger repeats what is utterly important to her. First and foremost, she uses this strategy when representing a decisive incident in her survival, namely the unexpected advice and good deed by one of the young female camp guards for her to pretend that she was fifteen rather than her actual age of twelve. For lack of words, Klüger articulates the improbable and crucial assistance by means of repetition. I saw it, I experienced it, I benefited from it, and I repeat it, because there is nothing to add. Listen to me, don’t take it apart, absorb it as I am telling it and remember it … But it existed. I am a witness.85

81 82 83 84

85

151, “Wie hätte es bloß anders sein können?” 193. 31, “Ja, aber die Toten stellen uns Aufgaben, oder?” 23. 33, “Dreht sich mein Leben im Kreis?” 26. 130. “Gestern schrieb ich diese Sätze, heute scheinen sie falsch, verquer. Ich will sie löschen, zögere. Was stimmt hier denn nicht? Schon der Ausdruck ‘Wer je…’ Ich spreche von einem Augenblickszustand in meinem Leben, als hätte er Offenbarungscharakter. Autoritäre Sätze, ‘ich weiß etwas, was du nicht weißt,’ das mich berechtigt zu verallgemeinern.” 166. 109, “Ich wiederhole es, weil mir nichts Eindringlicheres einfällt als die Wiederholung. Das hab ich erlebt, die reine Tat. Hört zu und bekrittelt sie bitte nicht, sondern nehmt es auf, wie es hier steht, und merkt es euch … Aber das hab ich erlebt.” 134-35.

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Conversely, Klüger refuses to narrate what she assumes are generally known historical facts, like Nazi slogans and anti-Semitic slurs, and the gruesome details of the Nazi murder. What they were yelling can be checked out in the history books.86 From her I learned that the gold fillings of Jewish teeth weren’t permitted to stay in dead Jewish mounts, and much else that is common knowledge today, can be researched in many reference books, and need not be repeated here.87

Her own description of these details would surely enrich an understanding of the Holocaust, but Klüger’s obvious withholding of information serves to provoke readers once again, encouraging them to do their own research and demanding more attentiveness. I don’t want to count up for you again how many [people were killed] because I know you don’t like it and just switch off when you hear the unwelcome numbers in context.88

As Klüger illustrates with her own writing process, she expects readers to reflect on the information given, to pose questions, and to examine existing patterns of Holocaust memorialization. In particular, she uses the example of her German friend Christoph (aka Martin Walser) to contest what she thinks is a prototypical response in postwar Germany. Generous and amiable, he [Christoph/Martin, the epitome of a German] sets out to conquer the unknown, yet he is unwilling to learn any more from it than is possible without compromising his independence. But is learning really learning if you do not put something at risk?89

In contrast, Klüger wants her German readers to become involved by facing a crisis. Her frequent provocations, then, are part of a larger didactic project that calls for an honest self-examination, not unlike Wolf did in Patterns of Childhood. To this end, Klüger encourages her readers to relate their own experiences by means of comparison, even if this threatens the representation of the Holocaust as a singular and sacred historical event. 86 87 88 89

29, “Was geschrien [sic] wurde, läßt sich in den Geschichtsbüchern nachlesen.” 21. 99, “Von ihr wußte ich, daß man unseren Leichen das Gold aus den Zähnen gebrochen hat… und anderes, das heute zur Allgemeinbildung über das zwanzigste Jahrhundert gehört, in vielen Quellen steht und daher hier nicht nacherzählt werden muß.” 117. “Ich will euch jetzt nicht noch einmal vorrechnen, wieviele [Ermordete] es waren, denn ich weiß, ihr mögt das nicht und schaltet ab, wenn ihr die unwillkommenen Ziffern im Zusammenhang hört.” 139-40. Translation is my own. “Großzügig, liebenswürdig zieht er [Christoph als Inbegriff des Deutschen] aus, die Fremde zu erobern, und dabei will er nicht mehr von ihr lernen, als ohne Gefährdung der Eigenständigkeit zu machen ist. Aber ist Lernen ohne eine solche Gefährdung richtiges Lernen?” 212. Translation is my own.

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Perhaps we are afraid they [the victims] may leave the camps, and so we insist that their deaths were unique and must not be compared to any other losses or atrocities. Never again shall there be such a crime. The same thing doesn’t happen twice anyway. Every event, like every human being and even every dog, is unique. We would be condemned to be isolated monads if we didn’t compare and generalize, for comparisons are the bridges from one unique life to another. In our hearts we all know that some aspects of the Shoah have been repeated elsewhere, today and yesterday, and will return in new guise tomorrow; and the camps, too, were only imitations (unique imitations, to be sure) of what had occurred the day before yesterday.90

While Klüger acknowledges that the Holocaust (like any other historical event) was unique, she argues that comparisons are necessary in order to make her experience relevant and comprehensible to others.91 If readers are to move beyond a mere intellectual analysis, they should be able to convey their experiences, emotions, and thoughts. With such reasoning, a confrontation with the Holocaust is relevant to different audiences, crossing national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. In the same way, Klüger’s Still Alive seeks to relate the Holocaust to an American audience, with references to slavery and the genocide of Native Americans. Fueled by personal involvement, such confrontation breaks with established thought processes and enables an honest dialogue. Leave them alone, these knots, I want to say to Christoph’s [Martin’s] wife, whenever she smoothes out something that cannot be smoothed and tries to reconcile something that resists reconciliation. Even the unpleasant aspects, and those aspects in particular, are a part of our history, and not just our own history.92

To Klüger, the confrontation with the Nazi past can result in a productive crisis, linking formerly separated experiences and recreating the bridges necessary for communication. While this dialogue promises irritation rather than reconciliation, it offers a much-needed point of departure. 90

91 92

64, “Ängstliches Abgrenzen gegen mögliche Vergleiche, Bestehen auf der Einmaligkeit des Verbrechens. Nie wieder soll es geschehen. Dasselbe geschieht sowieso nicht zweimal, insofern ist alles Geschehen, wie jeder Mensch und sogar jeder Hund, einmalig. Abgekapselte Monaden wären wir, gäbe es nicht den Vergleich und die Unterscheidung, Brücken von Einmaligkeit zu Einmaligkeit. Im Grunde wissen wir alle, Juden wie Christen: Teile dessen, was in den KZs geschah, wiederholt sich vielerorts, heute und gestern, und die KZs waren selbst Nachahmungen (freilich einmalige Nachahmungen) von Vorgestrigem.” 70. For more on Klüger’s comparisons, see “‘…ein deutsches Buch’ ist ja ein bißchen zwiespältig,” 37. “Laß sie sein, diese Knoten, möchte ich dann zu Christophs Frau sagen, wenn sie glättet, was sich nicht glätten läßt, und zu versöhnen sucht, was sich gegen Versöhnung sträubt: Auch das Mißliche, und gerade das, ist ein Teil unserer Geschichte, und nicht nur unserer eigenen.” 211. Translation is my own.

Part II: Postmemory and the Reconstruction of the Past

The Children of Survivors and Bystanders The generation following the Holocaust grew up in the shadow of an event it did not know first-hand. Children of survivors, after having learned of their parents’ ordeal, confronted both their parents’ suffering and their own responses to it. Conversely, children of German contemporaries to the Nazi period, some of which were born during the last war years, inherited from parents a troublesome legacy of German perpetration and compliance, which in turn connected their own lives to the Nazi war of racial extermination. Faced with the task of explaining and expressing events they could not remember themselves, children of both victims and co-perpetrators came to examine the manner in which memories are mediated and handed down. The following chapters investigate how two women writers, Barbara Honigmann and Wibke Bruhns, articulate the parental experience in Nazi Germany and delineate female identity. Honigmann’s parents had returned from exile to East Germany, where they hoped to help build a socialist utopian state; the daughter, however, parted from these hopes and instead emigrated to France. Continuing to write in her native German tongue, Honigmann comments from afar on the tensions and challenges of contemporary Jewish life in Germany, as well as her female subjectivity as a daughter and a mother. By reconstructing the lives of her German-Jewish parents in fiction, essays, and a memoir, Honigmann deliberately embraces her Jewish identity at a time when her parents in the GDR had long abandoned the Jewish community. Wibke Bruhns began to research her German past and renegotiate her postwar identity while working as a journalist in Jerusalem, as her two daughters (to whom the book is dedicated) were coming of age. Examining her family’s history from the eighteenth century to the present, Bruhns seeks to understand rather than reproach the mindset of her patriarchal forefathers, in particular her own father Hans Georg Klamroth, an early Hitler supporter and later confidant in the attempted Hitler assassination on July 20, 1944. She discards the predictable patterns of earlier maleinflected Father Books, and instead adopts a self-critical and selfinterrogative stance that resists familiar modes of identification while acknowledging both the Nazi legacy and the legacy of resistance. To understand Honigmann’s and Bruhns’s quest, it becomes helpful to understand the peculiar memory-making processes of the generations

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after the Holocaust. In her groundbreaking analysis of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marianne Hirsch proposed the term “postmemory” to delineate narratives of a traumatic past that are only accessible belatedly, in mediated form. According to Hirsch, “the term ‘postmemory’ is meant to convey its temporal and qualitative difference from survivor memory, its secondary, or second-generation memory quality, its basis in displacement, its vicariousness and belatedness.”1 As detailed in Maus, Spiegelman has no Holocaust memories of his own but is left with his father’s memories, with family pictures, and with the knowledge of his mother’s absent memory once he discovers that his father burned her diaries. Spiegelman’s experience is one of temporal and spatial distance, since he is inevitably removed from his parents’ past. Yet his text bridges this distance of time and place by conflating past events (i.e. his father’s story) and present circumstances (i.e. his response upon hearing his father’s story) into one narrative. According to Hirsch, this twofold endeavor is somewhat typical of texts by children of survivors, so that second-hand witnessing not only portrays the actual events of the Holocaust but also a sense of its resounding echoes. While postmemory is partly an act of identification, it simultaneously separates the generation of participants and eyewitnesses from the generation born after. Even though Hirsch’s term emphasizes a transgenerational act, it is not limited to a familial context. Hirsch’s notion of postmemory is tied to a larger scholarly debate that the Holocaust has become a “vicarious past” for generations to come. In his analysis of what he called “after-images” of the Holocaust, James E. Young characterizes post-Holocaust art as inherently anti-redemptory in that it is self-critical and draws attention to the processes of remembering and representation.2 Dora Apel uses the term such “memory effects,” noting that “the art of secondary witnessing examines the transmission of Holocaust experience as a form of secondary trauma and deals with the tensions and discontinuities between the past and the present.”3 Leslie Morris, finally, coined the term “postmemoir” to distinguish texts that grew from postmemory, questioning the boundaries between fiction and autobiography. Examining texts whose authors assume and appropriate 1

2 3

Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001, 215-49, 220. For further elaboration, see also Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997, 21-25. See James E. Young, “Introduction,” At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, New Haven: Yale UP, 2000, 1-11. Dora Apel, Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002, 12, see also 20.

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Holocaust memories, like the notorious Wilkomirski case4 but also publisher Wolfgang Koeppen selling Jakob Littners memories as Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch (1992, Jakob Littner’s Notes from the Underground)5 Morris considers instances of legitimization and falsification. These ethically questionable practices, according to Morris, are “challenging the viability and possibility of history, knowledge, and subjectivity,” and question the limits of Holocaust representation.6 Indeed, Morris’s definition of postmemoir would make it difficult if not impossible to distinguish falsified memories from authentic ones, which tend to include metareflection about the Holocaust, memory, and the limits of art. Of the various terms circulating, Hirsch’s in particular shaped the academic discourse to follow, as her relatively open notion of postmemory does not promote ideological readings and is not limited to a particular traumatic event (Hirsch has been criticized for erasing the historical specificity of the Holocaust). Postmemory not only advances the existing vocabulary by identifying the processes of adopting and expressing traumatic experiences of the parents’ generation, but is also helpful in reassessing the so-called transmission of trauma. By clearly separating memory from transmitted memory, postmemory disputes the notion that trauma is simply being passed on from one generation to another. This has not always been the case. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, for instance, emphasized the intergenerational aspect of trauma and its consequences in The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (1975, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens, 1967).7 In her following work, Margarete Mitscherlich proposed that Germany’s war generation “passed along their own defenses against the past,”8 while Eric Santner refined that argument by claiming that “the second generations inherited not only the unmourned traumas of the parents but also the psychic structures that impeded mourning in the older generation in the first place.”9 Santner 4 5

6 7 8 9

See my discussion in “The Vicissitudes of Trauma” in part I. When Jacob Littner, a Polish Jew who survived in hiding in Russia, looked for ways of publishing his memories, Koeppen offered to rework the manuscript, publishing the book as Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch (1992) with Suhrkamp and claiming authorship. Yet over time it became clear that Koeppen had copied large parts of Littner’s memoir, in contrast to his previous assertions. Leslie Morris, “Postmemory, Postmemoir,” Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis 1945-2000, eds. Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes, New York: Palgrave, 2002, 291-306, 293. See my discussion in “Postwar Developments in West Germany” in part I. Margarete Mitscherlich, Erinnerungsarbeit: Zur Psychoanalyse der Unfähigkeit zu trauern, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1987, 114. Translation from Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990, 34. Santner, 37.

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suggests that second-generation Germans adopted similar coping strategies rooted in similar anxieties. In recent years, the idea that trauma can be transmitted from one generation to another has come under scrutiny. German literature scholar Sigrid Weigel maintains that the very idea of widespread trauma being passed on to subsequent generations unfairly generalizes trauma studies and erases differences in the nature and severity of trauma between children of survivors and perpetrators: Emerging from the symptom study that has been done on case histories of the children of both perpetrators and survivors, a clear tendency in the popular reception of this phenomenology has developed to undo differentiation and to neutralize historically distinct places. Whereas the concept of second and third generations already produces an indifference with respect of the incompatible position of victims and perpetrators—that is, between the descendants of survivors and those that were responsible for their suffering—then moreover the specific events, war activities, as well as the policy of the Final Solution become incorporated into a universal and even anthropologically defined concept of trauma.10

Referring to studies like Alan Berger and Naomi Berger’s Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators (2001), Weigel cautions against the idea of universal transgenerational trauma that flattens the crucial difference between survivors and perpetrators and their respective children. Similarly, Anne Fuchs warns that attempts “to recreate a footprint of trauma through modes of historical writing that favour synecdoche, metonymy and other tropes of indirection over discursive representation, run into the danger of ontolgising trauma and dehistoricising history.”11 Indeed, if the notion of a collective “secondgeneration experience” simply promotes generic victimhood, it seems indicative of that danger. In this vein, it is perhaps not surprising that scholarly inquiries into the transgenerational nature of trauma have, until recently paid little attention to gender, class, and religious background.12 Hirsch’s work, conversely, introduces vocabulary to delineate the response of post-Holocaust generations without presuming a generalized content of 10 11 12

Sigrid Weigel, “‘Generation’ as a Symbolic Form: On the Genealogical Discourse of Memory since 1945,” The Germanic Review 77.4 (Fall 2002): 264-77, 270. Anne Fuchs, “From ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ to Generational Memory Contests in Günter Grass, Monika Maron and Uwe Timm,” German Life and Letters 59.2 (April 2006): 169-89, 172. The pioneering book by Carol Ann Rittner and John Roth, Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, helped change the direction of existing and future scholarship. In the three parts “Voices of Experience,” “Voices of Interpretation,” and “Voices of Reflection,” the volume includes both women’s testimony and its analysis. Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, eds. Carol Ann and John K. Roth, New York: Paragon House, 1993

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such response. Following her lead, my chapters on Honigmann and Bruhns seek to investigate the gendered workings of memory and postmemory but do not attempt to match posttraumatic symptoms of postHolocaust German-Jewish and German-gentile narrators. West Germany’s Postwar Generation: 1968 and its Aftermath In Germany, it was only the first postwar generation that brought the Nazi past into national consciousness by rebelling against parents and the (parental) political, educational, and legal system. The generational divide was especially pronounced in the Federal Republic, where a generation that was no longer educated under Nazi rule unleashed its creativity, free thinking, and protest in 1968. Although a similar Hippie protest culture swept across the United States and other Western societies, West Germany’s student movement had a particular bend in that it addressed the Nazi past both privately and publicly. Students rallied against the obvious remnants of the Nazi past in postwar West Germany by pointing to teachers, professors, judges, and other government employees who had remained in their positions after 1945. With teach-ins, sit-ins, demonstrations, and the foundation of the “extra-parliamentary opposition” [Außerparlamentarische Opposition (APO)], they rejected the apolitical, authoritarian, and elitist nature of German university curricula, demanding political reforms. In addition, sons and daughters questioned their parents’ involvement in Nazi Germany, accusing the parental generation of silencing the past. At a time when more young people lived away from home than ever before, and when contraceptives, especially birth control pills, became widely available, students revolutionized daily life with counterculture experiments in sexual liberation and communes. While the early student movement was still male-centered, women increasingly confronted gender inequalities, challenged patriarchal traditions, and formulated their own political agendas. Women also founded publishing houses, opened women’s bookstores, cafés and bars, and published feminist magazines. Though the movement failed in its short-term political goals as the older generation—represented by the conservative and sensationalist papers of the Springer publishing house—dismissed the students as despicable radicals and public enemies, it nevertheless managed to produce profound long-term changes, such as school reforms, women’s rights, and exposure to and discussion of the Nazi past in the media. In 1998, some of the (former) student protesters assumed influential positions in Gerhard Schröder’s government, most prominently Joschka Fischer as foreign minister. It comes at no surprise, then, that the

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deep-seated changes are also visible in the writings of Honigmann and Bruhns. After the outward protest of the student movement, West German writers in the 1970s began to turn inward, evaluating their utopian ideals as well as the (frequently failed) attempts at activism. Seeking to express their search for identity and individuality, women contributed to the (often) autobiographical writings of the New Subjectivity, which addressed daily life, personal problems, and family conflicts with introspection and self-awareness. This trend led to the new genre of so-called Father Books of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which connected the Nazi legacy with the West German generational conflict. In these autobiographical works, sons and daughters retrospectively reconstructed the parental biography in order to lay bare closely guarded family secrets of the Nazi legacy and its aftermath, identifying the father as either perpetrator or bystander.13 Narrators generally accused their fathers of abusing authority and power, and lacking parental love. They also blamed their parents for the deliberate lack of disclosure about the family’s involvement in Nazi Germany. In this way, Father Books established the narrators’ (i.e. postwar generation’s) innocence and moral superiority vis-à-vis a misguided and ruthless war generation. In what seemed like a public reckoning, narrators investigated their fathers’ past and evaluated the extent of their guilt, establishing their own identity based on the rejection of the paternal role model. While sons and daughters voiced their emotional pain and alienation, they refrained from pursuing their own responsibilities and acts of omissions. As the name implies, Father Books focus on men, depicting a highly gendered image of the father as soldier and as the head of a patriarchal family that was to be both a microcosm and emblematic of the authoritarian fascist German state. Critical reception of the time also focused on the father-son conflict, as the title of Michael Schneider’s widely-read essay “Fathers and Sons, Retrospectively: The Damaged Relationship between Two Generations” suggests. According to literary scholar Barbara Kosta, the authors of Father Books were rooted in a male-dominated student movement yet embraced theoretical works such as Alexander Mitscherlich’s Auf dem Weg zur vaterlosen Gesellschaft (1963, On the Way to a Fatherless Society) and Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies (1987, Männerphan13

The well-known examples of Father Books are: Peter Henisch, Die kleine Figur meines Vaters (1975); Elisabeth Plessen, Mitteilung an den Adel (1976); Bernward Vesper, Die Reise (1977); Sigrid Gauch, Vaterspuren (1979); Ruth Rehmann, Der Mann auf der Kanzel: Fragen an einen Vater (1979); Peter Härtling, Nachgetragene Liebe (1980); Christoph Meckel, Suchbild: über meinen Vater (1980); Brigitte Schwaiger, Lange Abwesenheit (1980); and Peter Schneider, Vati (1987).

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tasien, 1977-78), thus continuing the phallocentric power structures while attempting to break with them.14 Yet the genre was not strictly a male phenomenon and includes a number of West German and Austrian women writers. For women, the genre embodies altogether different challenges and possibilities: daughters, family members with arguably the least amount of power openly challenged patriarchs, imbued with the greatest power. This role reversal forced daughters (in contrast to sons) to reconsider the punitive power and authority structures inherent in the male genealogy, losing the innocence of a child in the process. Susan G. Figge considers gender a constitutive mark of daughters’ narratives, while Sigrid Weigel notes that women’s Father Books also deconstruct the image of an untainted mother.15 Father Books correlate to some films of the New German Cinema. In the Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962, twenty-six young artists had declared the death of the old cinema and vowed to break with established traditions. Indeed, in the following years young directors created films that were radically different in style, content, projected audience, and production, frequently addressing the Nazi past along with troublesome developments of the present. Lisa Saltzman links Father Books furthermore to the works of German artist Anselm Kiefer. Kiefer dressed himself in a Nazi uniform and raised his hand in a (albeit somewhat limp) Sieg Heil salute for his photo series Occupations (1969, Besetzungen), thus publicly ridiculing Hitler and mocking monumental and heroic remembrance altogether.16 Dwarfed by his environment (for which Kiefer chose popular tourist spots throughout formerly occupied Europe), the gawky figure in the photographs becomes stripped of the masculine authority he seeks to seize. While Father Books acknowledge (and arguably, reinforce) patriar-

14

15

16

Kosta reevaluates some Father Books in the (new) context of studies on masculinity. Barbara Kosta, “Väterliteratur, Masculinity, and History: The Melancholic Texts of the 1980s,” Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity, ed. Roy Jerome, Albany: State U of New York P, 2001, 219-41. See Susan G. Figge, “Fathers, Daughters, and the Nazi Past: Father Literature and Its (Resisting) Readers,” Gender, Patriarchy, and Fascism in the Third Reich: The Response of Women Writers, ed. Elaine Martin, Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1993, 274-302. Sigrid Weigel, Die Stimme der Medusa: Schreibweisen in der Gegenwartsliteratur von Frauen, Dülmen-Hiddingsel: tende, 1987. Kiefer stated that he needed to “reenact what they did just a little bit in order to understand the madness” (60), but as Saltzman points out, Kiefer looks more like a caricature of a Nazi, unkempt, clumsy, and ridiculous (56) and appears small and insignificant in his setting, without a cheering mass audience. Saltzman not only links Kiefer’s work to Father Books but also to the New German Cinema, as both are concerned with the aftermath of Nazi Germany (10). Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

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chal power, Kiefer instead chooses to render Hitler as tyrannical father, but one that is ridiculous and decidedly un-heroic. When in the early 1980s, Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl succeeded Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt as Chancellor, he inaugurated nearly two decades of conservative politics and revisionist approaches to history that sought to normalize the Nazi past. However, in the 1970s, a strong left-wing opposition had formed from the roots of the student protest movement, ranging from the Green Party to the Peace Movement to the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist organization. Despite being at opposite ends of the political spectrum, both Left and Right defined themselves as a distinct postwar generation that had broken with the values of a preceding perpetrator generation. In this aspect, Chancellor Kohl’s efforts to exonerate the postwar generation were not completely divorced from the left-wing opposition. To sociologist Heinz Bude, the common denominator of this “Container Generation” was to take on the burdensome legacy of the Nazi past, if only in rebellion.17 Yet opinions of Left and Right differed fundamentally in the question of how to deal with the Nazi past— liberals generally continued to call for discussion, while conservatives sought to put an end to it, emphasizing “normalcy” and historical continuity, as evident in the Historians’ Dispute of the mid-1980s.18 In the GDR, the generational divide after 1945 did not show in open political rebellion but surfaced in other ways. According to the communist leadership, the first postwar generation, raised under socialist doctrine, was destined to become an unyielding proponent of the state. Indeed many young people felt grateful for their parents’ creation of a socialist state, but they also had their own ideas on how to advance a socialist society. Rather than incorporating their initiatives for reforms, the party chose an ever more conservative course, thus marginalizing its intelligentsia. The Biermann protest following his expatriation in 1976 was cause for the government to deny publication to a growing number of authors, with restrictions continuing in various forms until 1989.19 Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika that led to the gradual opening of Eastern European borders and culminated in German reunification in October 1990 and the break-up of the Soviet Union, introduced another era in postwar politics and culture. Though 1989 was no more a zero hour 17

18 19

See Heinz Bude, “Der Einzelne und seine Generation. Kriegskindheit und Jugendrevolte bei der 68er Generation,” Eine offene Geschichte: Zur kommunikativen Tradierung der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit, eds. Elisabeth Domansky and Harald Welzer, Tübingen: diskord, 1999, 34. For more detail, see“Postwar Developments in West Germany” in part I. For more detail, see “Postwar Developments in East Germany” in part I.

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than was 1945, it did call for a reassessment of both the Nazi past and the past of the divided Germanies. Peter Schneider, the West German author who had examined the psychological effects of the divided Germany in his work The Wall Jumper (1983, Der Mauerspringer, 1982), coining the popular phrase “wall in the head,” was among the first to propose that a national and cultural identity had to be negotiated anew. Historian Konrad Jarausch has since termed the identity-formation process a threefold coming to terms with the past [dreifache Vergangenheitsbewältigung], one that includes a confrontation with the Nazi past, the GDR past, and the legacy of 1968.20 As the Holocaust gained renewed national and international attention (in the US, 1993 was dubbed the “Year of the Holocaust,” with the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the release of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List), the postwar generation in Germany contributed to an expansion of perpetrator studies throughout the 1990s. In August 1996, the German translation of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners was published, claiming that the primary cause for the Holocaust was Germans’ “eliminationist antiSemitism.”21 The book elicited a strongly divided reception; while renowned historians such as Hans Mommsen, Klaus Hildebrand, and Eberhard Jäckel questioned the soundness of Goldhagen’s research and disapproved of the book’s argument as being deterministic and monocausal,22 the young German public sided with Goldhagen. His lectures in Germany were sold out well in advance, and newspaper reports indicate that German audiences were much more generous towards Goldhagen than, for instance, his French audiences were.23 Indeed, Goldhagen’s rather simplistic thesis actually exculpates Germany’s postwar generation by counting the number of perpetrators (between 100,000 and 500,000), and by retaining the highly problematic concept of a zero hour (Stunde Null).24 20 21 22 23

24

Jarausch (2002), as quoted in Friederike Eigler, Gedächtnis und Geschichte in Generationenromanen seit der Wende, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2005, 10. See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “Eliminationist Anti-Semitism: The ‘Common Sense’ of German Society During the Nazi Period, Hitlers Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), New York: Vintage Books, 1997, 80-128. See Hans Mommsen, “Schuld der Gleichgültigen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 20-21, 1996, I-II; Eberhard Jäckel, “Einfach ein schlechtes Buch,” Die Zeit, Nr. 21-30; and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “Das Versagen der Kritiker,” Die Zeit , August 2, 1996, 9-14. See Elisabeth Bauschmid, “Der Rächer hat Charme: Von der Gunst des Publikums getragen: Daniel Goldhagen in der Philharmonie des Gasteig,” Süddeutsche Zeitung , September 12, 1996; and Thierry Chervel, “Entlastung und Leidenschaft: Daniel J. Goldhagen in Paris,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, January 25, 1997, 15. For a lucid analysis of Goldhagen’s book, see Jeffrey M. Peck, Being Jewish in the New Germany, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2006, 34-35.

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In March 1995, the exhibit Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 (War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht) opened in Hamburg and toured the country, documenting crimes against civilians in Eastern and Southern Europe, lootings, and killings of Jews and prisoners of war by the German army. The troublesome documentation did not allow for the dividing lines that Goldhagen had drawn but destroyed the myth that the Wehrmacht was composed of soldiers merely doing their job. After being shown in thirty-three German and Austrian cities, the exhibit was withdrawn in November 1999 because critics doubted the credibility of the exhibit’s leading historian, Hannes Heer (a former member of the 1968 student protest movement), and thus the authenticity of the photographs and information presented. A commission of historians reexamined the displays and found minor mistakes but no large-scale falsification; in November 2001, the exhibition reopened in revised form in Berlin under the title Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941-1944 (Crimes of the Wehrmacht: Dimensions of the War of Extermination). While Heer disapproved of the latter, both the original and the revised Wehrmacht exhibition initiated a widespread discussion on crimes of the German army that also found its way into contemporary literature. Along with Christopher Browning’s and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s groundbreaking studies on German police battalions, it contributed to a broadening of perpetrator studies, revealing the extent of crimes committed by Einsatzgruppen, police battalions, and the German army. As detailed in part I, these developments were accompanied by more conservative attempts at rewriting the German past that, for the most part, were led by an older generation (as in the 1998 Walser-Bubis debate). Yet in the 1990s and 2000s, the previous generational clash (visible in the student protest movement, the Bitburg controversy, the Historians’ Dispute) began to cease. In 1998, the governing power switched to the postwar generation: Germany’s last two chancellors, Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel, were born in 1944 and 1954, respectively. With this shift in power, the postwar generation could no longer exempt itself from the legacy of National Socialism. Moreover, this generation was parenting a succeeding generation and had to face the inevitable confrontation with its children. Hence, the recent discussion on German suffering during the war did not split along generational divisions. Authors who had previously indicted their parents in the Father Books of the 1980s went beyond this framework in the 1990s to embrace more diverse, self-reflective, and experimental approaches. Scholars grew more critical of the somewhat predictable moralizing patterns of Father Books. According to Friederike Eigler, post-unification literature tends to consider differing perspectives

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and multiple genealogies, reflecting both empathy and distance vis-à-vis the parental experience. Beyond Fathers and Sons: The Generational Conflict in Literature after Reunification In their works after reunification, postwar-generation writers continue the premise of Father Books and seek to illuminate the Nazi past by reconstructing the lives of (deceased) family members, while widening their perspectives. Whereas narrators in earlier texts pointed to the damage caused by their Nazi fathers, in more recent texts they are self-critical about their own lapses and glitches, producing what Katharina Gerstenberger calls “revisions of the grand narrative of ‘1968.’”25 Focusing on mothers, brothers, and lovers, both male and female narrators in texts from Ortheil to Schlink to Timm reexamine the narrow gender definitions of Father Books. They also re-approach the German past after having traveled overseas, crossed borders, and gained distance in both time and space, defining German identity in a European, even worldwide context. While the genre of Father Books has been well documented and analyzed, there is yet no comprehensive study that traces its evolution after reunification, though scholars (Schlant, Eigler, Gerstenberger) have begun to comment on the ceasing tensions in literature by the postwar generations, while others (Fuchs, Schmitz) view the recent phenomenon more critically.26 In Hanns-Josef Ortheil’s novel Abschied von den Kriegsteilnehmern (1992, Farewell to the War Participants), the first-person narrator returns from a 25

26

See Katharina Gerstenberger’s presentation “Perpetrator Stories: the Uses of German History in Contemporary German Literature and Film” at the GSA conference October 2005 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Many thanks to the speaker for providing me with a written version of her talk. In The Language of Silence, Ernestine Schlant analyzes three German post-unification novels (Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, Peter Schneider’s Couplings, and W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants) which to her reflect the changing German identity after reunification. Friederike Eigler regards family novels after 1989 as distinctly different from Father Books, and Katharina Gerstenberger interprets texts by Zafer Şenocak and Monika Maron as departures from the Father Book pattern. More recently, Anne Fuchs criticized the dismissal of Father Books, reconsidering Meckel’s Suchbild: Über meinen Vater alongside works by Timm, Hahn, and Leupold, and attempting a reconsideration of Father Books after reunification. Anne Fuchs, “The Tinderbox of Memory: Generation and Masculinity in Väterliteratur by Christoph Meckel, Uwe Timm, Ulla Hahn, and Dagmar Leupold,” German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990, eds. Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grote, Rochester, Camden House: 2006, 41-65.

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trip to America to symbolically bury his father and with him the generational conflict that had dominated his life thus far. Thus, only after years of traveling and excessive alcohol consumption, the son finally begins to write about the troubling memories of his father. Writing is also the means of choice for Ortheil (born 1951) himself in dealing with his family’s past, which has been overshadowed by World War II. His father had become disillusioned by his job as a land surveyor at the Eastern front; his mother was deeply traumatized by the death of two of her sons during bombing raids and two more sons after birth. In a marked departure from earlier Father Books, however, Ortheil connects the parting from his father and from the generation of perpetrators with the end of the cold war and the political postwar configuration, implying that reunification calls for new approaches to the Nazi past. In this vein, Stuart Taberner sees Ortheil’s book as “the first of its kind to point to the blind spot of the Vaterromane of the 1970s and 1980s….”27 Following Ortheil, Bernhard Schlink’s best-selling novel The Reader (1997, Der Vorleser, 1995) addresses the concerns of Father Books with a different spin. Narrator Michael Berg (born in 1944, like author Bernhard Schlink) confronts a former Nazi not in his parents but his lover Hanna Schmitz when a love affair unfolds between the then fifteen-year-old student and the thirty-six-year-old streetcar conductor after their coincidental meeting in 1959. Eight months into their lopsided relationship, Hanna vanishes without a trace or an explanation. It is seven years later when Michael, now a student of law, unexpectedly spots Hanna in court, charged with war crimes for working as a guard at Auschwitz and other camps. At this point, Michael also discovers that Hanna is illiterate, which would presumably favor her sentence in court, yet neither Hanna nor Michael chooses to disclose her handicap. Literary critics28 have pointed out the historical absurdity and inaccuracy of depicting a German woman who volunteered for the SS because she was illiterate, and who becomes enlightened and “morally alert”29 to the point of regretting and making amends for her crimes once she learns to read.30 More recently, scholarship has focused on the troublesome gender dichotomy that structures the 27 28 29 30

Stuart Taberner, German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond: Normalization and the Berlin Republic, Rochester: Camden House, 2005, 111. See, for instance, Schlant, Ozick, Donahue. Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust, New York: Routledge, 1999, 213. In prison, while paying off her sentence, Hanna painstakingly learns to read and begins to gather information about the camps, reading survivor literature, accounts of perpetrators, and historical studies on the camps. See Bernhard Schlink, Der Vorleser München: Diogenes, 1995, 193-194.

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text by portraying a Nazi perpetrator as a threatening, sexualized woman.31 Aside from these valid concerns, Schlink’s novel fares better in portraying the (autobiographical yet unreliable) narrator Michael rather than his love interest, Hanna. Faced with his love for Hanna as well as his trepidation of her crimes, Michael experiences feelings of guilt along with a sense of indictment, emotions, which—according to Schlink—are typical for the generation of Germans after the Holocaust. The Reader also focuses on the failure of Michael’s (postwar) generation.32 Even though his father suffered discrimination under the Nazis when he lost his job as a professor of philosophy because he lectured on Spinoza, Michael and his peers in the 1960s student protest declare the parental generation collectively guilty. It is only in hindsight that Michael can mock the zeal with which he used to pass judgment on his parents. I had no one to point at. Certainly not my parents, because I had nothing to accuse them of. The zeal for letting in the daylight, with which, as a member of the concentration camps seminar, I had condemned my father to shame, had passed, and it embarrassed me. … I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. Not only had I loved her, I had chosen her. 33

Belatedly, Michael comes to understand that the collective blame his generation placed on parents served to unite his cohort, purporting a joint group identity.34 Since Hanna is not a parent but a chosen lover, he recognizes that it was insufficient to find fault in his parents’ generation when reassessing their relationship after her suicide. Yet despite his reflections

31

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See Heidi M. Schlipphacke, “Enlightenment, Reading, and the Female Body: Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser,” Paul Michael Lützeler and Stephan K. Schindler, eds., Gegenwartsliteratur 1 (2002): 310-28, and Joseph Metz, “Post-Holocaust Narrative, Postmodernism, and the Gender of Fascism in Der Vorleser,” The German Quarterly 77.3 (Summer 2004): 300-23. See Helmut Schmitz, On Their Own Terms: The Legacy of National Socialism in Post-1990 German Fiction, Birmingham: The U of Birmingham P, 2004, 57. Erin McGlothlin, however, questions Michael’s claim that his experience is that of his generation. See Erin McGlothlin, “The Future of Väterliteratur: Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser and Uwe Timm’s Am Beispiel meines Bruders, Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration, Rochester: Camden House, 2006, 199-227. “Ich konnte auf niemanden mit dem Finger zeigen. Auf meine Eltern schon darum nicht, weil ich ihnen nichts vorwerfen konnte. Der aufklärerische Eifer, in dem ich seinerzeit als Teilnehmer des KZ-Seminars meinen Vater zu Scham verurteilt hatte, war mir vergangen, peinlich geworden. … Ich musste eigentlich auf Hanna zeigen. Aber der Fingerzeig auf Hanna wies auf mich zurück. Ich hatte sie geliebt. Ich hatte sie nicht nur geliebt, ich hatte sie gewählt.” Schlink, 162. Translation from: Bernhard Schlink, The Reader, trans. Carol Brown Janeway, New York: Random House, 1997, 170. See Schlink, 131.

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on “enlightened zeal” [“aufklärerische Eifer”],35 Michael remains torn between emotions and insights and cannot use his bewilderment as an impetus to productive conflict. Confronted with Nazi crimes on both a personal and a public level, Michael has no clear-cut answers for himself or his generation, only questions: “What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? … Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?”36 Even though Schlant faults the author for “Schlink cannot separate Michael’s confusions from his own and leaves many of the issues he articulates (e.g. relativization of the crimes, Hanna’s character, Michael’s attachment) unanswered,”37 the protagonist’s (and possibly the author’s) turmoil is a significant departure from the Father Books’ self-righteous moral agenda. As it turns out, Michael finds neither an answer to his questions nor a solution to his dilemma. Instead, he remains frayed by guilt, trapped by his acts of omission, and defeated after a string of failed relationships. His confusion and oversights remain unsolved and are laid bare to the readers’ interpretation, so that the novel becomes an unusual, sometimes ironic inquiry and comment on the relationship between war and postwar generations.38 More than two decades after his disparaging father portrayal in Image for Investigation: About My Father (1987, Suchbild: über meinen Vater, 1980) Christoph Meckel (born 1935) complemented the family’s portrait with Suchbild: meine Mutter (Image for Investigation: My Mother) in 2002. In his 1980 autobiographical novel, Meckel had characterized his father as unloving, abusive, and dictatorial, and charged him with embracing Nazi ideals in seemingly apolitical poetry, comparing him with Hannah Arendt’s 35

36

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As Eleni Georgopoulou’s insightful analysis reveals, these words are part of a larger “Aufklärungskritik” with which the author criticizes binary approaches to the representation of the Holocaust. “‘Brichst du auf gen Ithaka …:’ Erinnerung und Reflexion in Bernhard Schlinks Der Vorleser,” Paul Michael Lützeler and Stephan K. Schindler, eds., Gegenwartsliteratur 3 (2004): 123-42. “Was sollte und soll meine Generation der Nachlebenden eigentlich mit den Informationen über die Furchtbarkeiten der Vernichtung der Juden anfangen? … Sollen wir nur in Entsetzen, Scham und Schuld verstummen? Zu welchem Ende?” Schlink, Der Vorleser, 99100. The Reader, 104. Bill Niven counts over a hundred questions that Michael poses in the course of the novel, for which he has no answers. See Bill Niven, “Representations of the Nazi Past I: Perpetrators,” Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic, ed. Stuart Taberner, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007, 125-41, 138. Schlant, 215. As Mahlendorf illustrates, most teaching materials on Der Vorleser neglect to mention the narrator’s failures and instead encourage identification with Michael. See Ursula Mahlendorf, “Trauma Narrated, Read and (Mis)understood: Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader: ‘…irrevocably complicit in their crimes…’” Monatshefte 95:3 (2003): 459-81, 475.

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characterization of Adolf Eichmann. Published shortly after his mother’s death, Meine Mutter instead retraces his mother’s life. While Meckel unsparingly and rather audaciously blames his mother for being inapproachable, arrogant, and selfish, he also portrays a woman’s experience of the war, including bombardment, flight, hunger, and pining for her husband’s return from internment in France. If Meckel’s tone changes only slightly, other authors of Father Books markedly depart from previous approaches. For instance, Peter Schneider (born 1940), a former spokesman of the student movement, recounts in his Father book and novel Vati (1987, Daddy) a fictionalized meeting in Brazil between Rolf Mengele and his father, the infamous Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele. After Schneider toned down some of his former revolutionary views, his work shifted from confronting the sins of the fathers to reflections on Germany’s postwar and postwall identities. In Eduard’s Homecoming (2000, Eduards Heimkehr, 1999), a German biologist of the postwar generation returns from Stanford University, California, to East Berlin after the fall of the Wall, receiving a new job and an apartment building inherited from his grandfather. Yet the unexpected gift turns into troublesome legacy, as renters suspiciously eye their new West-German (and Americanized) landlord and question the legitimacy of his grandfather’s purchase of the building from a Jewish friend back in 1933. As it turns out, Eduard must confront both the ramifications of reunification as well as the Nazi legacy. In And Even If We Gain Just Another Hour: How a Jewish Musician survived the Nazi Years (forthcoming, Und wenn wir nur eine Stunde gewinnen, 2001), Schneider depicts the Nazi legacy with yet another focus. Reconstructing the life of Jewish-German musician Konrad Latte who survived the Nazi years hiding in Germany thanks to the help of gentiles, the text dismantles the myth that there was no resistance in Nazi Germany. Instead, Schneider examines the complex shades of opportunism, cowardice, and courage, and rather than assigning collective guilt to the war generation or collective acquittal to the postwar generation, the text espouses the significance of individual responsibility. Uwe Timm (born 1940) uses the example of his sixteen-year-older brother Karl Heinz (1924-43) to reconsider the Nazi past and its aftermath as it plays out in the family. In My Brother’s Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS (2005, Am Beispiel meines Bruders, 2003), however, goes much further than reconstructing the life of a brother who volunteered for the SS Totenkopf Division at age eighteen and died at the Ukrainian front a year later. Written after the death of his father, mother, and sister, Timm offers a collage of letters, diary entries, dreams, memories, stories, historical doc-

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uments, and survivor literature to carefully examine the (gendered) family dynamics.39 While the characterization of his authoritarian father stands in the tradition of Father Books, Timm focuses on the more ambivalent figure of his brother, a scared, sickly child who vowed kill Russian soldiers without remorse yet became unable to articulate the horrors he experienced: “I close my diary here, because I don’t see any point in recording the cruel things that sometimes happen.”40 The change is significant. Much like Michael in The Reader, Timm’s narrator does not charge his father as perpetrator, which would seal the son’s innocence. Instead, the broadened perspective allows for a reflection on the perpetrator-victim dichotomy, and also creates a space in which the family’s (and Timm’s own) traumatic memories of the fire storm in Hamburg can be expressed. In the recent revision of Father Books, daughters increasingly investigate the relationship to their fathers and mothers. In Ulla Hahn’s novel Unscharfe Bilder (2003, Blurred Images), crimes of perpetratorship and complicity remain indistinct, as the title suggests. Hahn’s protagonist Katja believes to have recognized her father in the act of shooting civilians in one of the photos of a Hamburg exhibition “Crimes in the East.” But when the daughter confronts her father with his alleged crimes, she must listen to his cloying account of the war experience and becomes increasingly unsure whether to regard him as perpetrator, bystander, or even victim. In the course of the novel, Katja’s oversights also become apparent: while the father is not interested in learning more about Nazi crimes, his daughter refuses to listen to his descriptions of the suffering during the war. Due to the unreadable nature of the evidence and the supposedly infallible authentic documents, it remains unclear whose version of history is correct. Despite this promising and unusual configuration, Hahn (born 1946) casts her characters as types that act in clichés and unfortunately fails to deliver the complexity that the novel’s title promises. As Helmut Schmitz argues, the daughter fails to counter her father’s narrative with 39

40

Erin McGlothlin’s insightful analysis also considers Timm’s critique of language in the family. See Erin McGlothlin, “The Future of Väterliteratur: Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser and Uwe Timm’s Am Beispiel meines Bruders, Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration, Rochester: Camden House, 2006, 199-227. For another article on Timm that focuses on the text’s reception, see Brigitte Rossbacher, “Cultural Memory and Family Stories: Uwe Timm’s Am Beispiel meines Bruders,” Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch IV (2005): 238-58. “Hiermit schließe ich mein Tagebuch, da ich für unsinnig halte, über so grausame Dinge wie sie manchmal geschehen, Buch zu führen.” Uwe Timm, Am Beispiel meines Bruders, Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003, 159. Translation from Uwe Timm, In My Brother’s Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS, trans. Anthea Bell, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005, 114.

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critical analysis; on the contrary, she becomes increasingly accepting of her father’s stories.41 The text concludes with a cathartic and sentimental reconciliation between father and daughter when Katja retracts her previous charges, an ending much criticized by scholars.42 In Dagmar Leupold’s Nach den Kriegen. Roman eines Lebens (2004, After the Wars. Novel of a Life), the autobiographical narrator misses her father’s funeral because of a delayed flight. But like Ortheil’s narrator, she returns from the US to remember and research her father’s life. After discovering her father’s war diary, the narrator begins to realize that her tyrannical father, a respected mathematician, womanizer, and art-lover, had been much more active in the Nazi movement than he had previously let on. Differing from earlier Father Books, however, the narratordoes not assign blame but recognizes her own ways of thinking in her father’s diaries, acknowledging the continuities of history. Trying to envision rather than to remember her distant father, Leupold’s (born 1955) narrator also remains skeptical of her ability to represent him adequately. In Das falsche Leben. Eine Vatersuche (2006, A False Life: In Search of My Father), finally, Ute Scheub (born 1956), co-founder and journalist at the progressive tageszeitung, re-evaluates her father who became infamous for his dramatic and public suicide at the German Church Day on July 19, 1969: after a reading by Günter Grass, a man in the audience raised his bottle in greeting to honor his comrades in the SS—and collapsed minutes later in front of 2,000 infuriated spectators. As it turned out, the man had taken cyanide and died on his way to the hospital. In his work From the Diary of a Snail (1973, Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke, 1972) Grass later fictionalized the incident and Scheub’s father, calling him Manfred Augst in reference to angst. Scheub, too, chooses the fictional over the actual name of her father but seeks to represent him thirty-five years after his suicide, which the daughter witnessed at age thirteen. Incorporating in her work excerpts from Grass’s work as well as letters and notes written by her father that she only recently discovered in the attic of her former home, Scheub portrays a man who joined the SS in 1933, studied “racial science” 41

42

Helmut Schmitz, “Reconciliation between the Generations: The Image of the Ordinary German Soldier in Dieter Wellershoff’s Der Ernstfall and Ulla Hahn’s Unscharfe Bilder,” German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Normalization, eds. Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke, Rochester: Camden House, 2006, 151-65, 156-59. See Anne Fuchs, “The Tinderbox of Memory: Generation and Masculinity in Väterliteratur by Christoph Meckel, Uwe Timm, Ulla Hahn, and Dagmar Leupold,” and Harald Welzer, “schön unscharf. Über die Konjunktur der Familien- und Generationenromane,” Mittelweg 36.1 (2004): 53-65. To Helmut Schmitz, in Hahn’s novel “the reconciliation of the children and grandchildren with their parents’ trauma is purchased at the expense of a candid engagement with their complicity in a war of extermination.” Schmitz, 160.

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at the university, served in a special Wehrmacht battalion that protected Hermann Göring, and tyrannized his family after the war. Yet Scheub refuses to pass a one-sided, conclusive judgment on her father, in stark contrast to her initial response that was characterized by diametric opposition: “As a teenager, I was the antonym of my father; I rejected everything that came from him. Even decades later, I did the opposite of what he had done.”43 Thus, the text also critically reconsiders Scheub’s own rebellion and the 1968 student movement. These differentiated, self-critical perspectives correspond to a critical scholarly reconsideration of the Father Book genre. In 1987, Austrian journalist Peter Sichrovsky noted that the postwar-generation Germans he interviewed frequently saw themselves as victims of their (Nazi) parents, an observation also supported by Gertrud Hardtmann’s research which finds that children of Nazis who were born and raised in postwar Germany and knew neither Nazi Germany nor Jewish culture, “regarded themselves as the ‘Jews’ of their parents’ generation, as the persecuted and hunted.”44 Though many children of Nazis were indeed abused,45 the postwar generations’ square victimization and faultfinding seems, in retrospect, to reveal a certain amount of denial and avoidance. According to Ernestine Schlant, Father Books’ authors describe in detail the mistreatment and humiliation they suffered at the hand of their “fascist” parents while mentioning only peripherally the atrocities of the Nazi regime as they pertained to Jewish victims.46 In a similar vein, Sigrid Weigel suggests that the student movement allowed the young generation to assume the “role of the historical victim” in place of Jews.47 In this role reversal, Jews became “functional only in helping (second-generation) Germans establish their personal and national identity.”48 Thus postwar Germans’ premature identification with the victim seems to document first and foremost a search for German postwar identity. As a constitutive counter43 44 45 46 47 48

“Als Jugendliche war ich die Negativform meines Vaters, ich lehnte alles ab, was von ihm kam. Noch Jahrzehnte später tat ich das Gegenteil dessen, was er getan hatte.” Ute Scheub, Das falsche Leben. Eine Vatersuche, München: Piper, 2006, 34. Translation is my own. Gertrud Hardtmann, “The Shadows of the Past,” Generations of the Holocaust, eds. Martin S. Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy, NewYork: Basic, 1982, 228-44, 230. For instance Bernward Vesper who in his autobiographical work Die Reise (1977) describes the “childhood-hell” of abuse by his authoritative father, Will Vespers, who was a popular author during National Socialism. Schlant, 92. See also Jochen Vogt, “Er fehlt, er fehlte, er hat gefehlt… Ein Rückblick auf die sogenannten Väterbücher,” Deutsche Nachkriegsliteratur und der Holocaust, eds. Stephan Braese, Holger Gehle, Doron Kiesel, Hanno Loewy, Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 1998, 395. Weigel, 265. Jack Zipes, “The Return of the Repressed,” New German Critique 31 (Winter 1984): 201-10, 204. See also Schlant’s interpretation of Zipes’s words (94).

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event in history, the Holocaust initiated a process of German identity formation that was based on division and discord, as historian Jörn Rüsen explains. The new generation based its relation to self and its self-image on a strict moralistic critique of this portion of German history. In so doing, it used universalistic standards of political culture (in the Western tradition), which became crucial for its political socialization as part of the process establishing West German democracy. Because this generation deliberately dissociated itself from National Socialism, the latter became a constitutive element of the generation’s own identity. In depth psychology this is referred to as counter-identification. In connection with the Holocaust, this dissociation led to an identification with the victims. The others were the perpetrators (and idle bystanders). Otherness as a necessary element of one’s own identity lost its transhistorical status and became a part of German history itself, against which the new Germany was historically positioned.49

Pointing to the problems of the collective creation of an historical counter-event, Rüsen delineates the Holocaust’s importance for German postwar identity. The phenomenon has also been observed by a number of literary scholars. According to Gerd Gemünden, the 1968 generation’s tendency to bond with victims rather than to acknowledge the legacy of perpetratorship extends to other groups of victims such as African Americans or Native Americans in the United States.50 Indeed, the 1968 movement strongly identified with oppressed people everywhere, be it Vietnam War resisters and civilian victims, Palestinians, or third-world guerrillas. Frank Trommler suggests that such discourse of victimhood continued well into the 1980s, with Hiroshima and later Chernobyl supplying the

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“Die neue Generation gründete ihr Selbstverhältnis und ihre Selbsteinschätzung in einer strikten moralistischen Kritik dieses Teils der deutschen Geschichte. Sie verwendete dabei universalistische Standards der politischen Kultur (in der westlichen Tradition), die für ihre politische Sozialisation im Konstitutionsprozeß der westdeutschen Demokratie bestimmend wurden. Der Nationalsozialismus wurde durch bewusste Abgrenzung zum konstitutiven Element der eigenen Identität. Tiefenpsychologisch kann man von einer Gegenidentifizierung sprechen. Diese Abgrenzung führte im Blick auf den Holocaust zu einer Identifikation mit den Opfern. Die Anderen waren die Täter (und untätigen Zuschauer). Anderssein als notwendiges Element des eigenen Selbst verlor seinen transhistorischen Status und wurde ein Teil der deutschen Geschichte selber, gegen die das neue Deutschland historisch gesetzt wurde.” Jörn Rüsen, “Holocaust, Erinnerung, Identität,” Das soziale Gedächtnis: Geschichte, Erinnerung, Tradierung, ed. Harald Welzer, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001, 24359, 251-52. Translation is my own. See Gerd Gemünden, “Nostalgia for the Nation: Intellectuals and National Identity in Unified Germany,” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, Hanover: Dartmouth UP, 1999, 120-33, 121.

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vocabulary and conception of a “nuclear Holocaust.”51 In the 1990s, however, deep-seated changes have affected the previous discord between the war and postwar generation. Along with the end of the cold-war era, Hitler’s contemporaries are passing away, their children growing older, and a succeeding generation is coming of age. The changing discourse on the Nazi past is visible not only in revisions of the Father Books’ theme but also in the postwar generation’s renewed discussion and perception of German victimhood. Recent Works on Germans as Victims of War Discussions of German identity after reunification encompass not only diverse inquiries into crimes of perpetration, but also a reconsideration of victimhood. Rather than suggesting victimhood circuitously (by posing Germans as victims of Hitler, or second-generation Germans as victims of their parents), authors, scholars, and the public widely and directly acknowledge that Hitler’s contemporaries were victims of war and defeat, of expulsion and rape. This surge of interest expressed itself in the public sphere after literary scholar and author W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) maintained in his poetics lectures at Zürich University in November 1997 that “we Germans today are a nation strikingly blind to history and lacking in tradition,”52 despite obsessive preoccupation with the past. According to Sebald, for more than half a century German postwar literature failed to express the pain and agony of the last war years, a “terra incognita”53 that Sebald sought to fill with atrocious photographs and distressing accounts of the course, extent, and consequences of the Allied bombing. Though Sebald’s original lectures on the topic did not garner particular attention, they found a wide German and English audience when edited and published as the book Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999) and Anthea Bell’s muchlauded translation On the Natural History of Destruction, excerpted in the New Yorker in November 2002 and published in 2003 after the author’s untimely death in a traffic accident in December 2001.54 In the wake of Se51 52 53 54

See Frank Trommler, “Stalingrad, Hiroshima, Auschwitz: The Fading of the Therapeutic Approach,” Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, eds. Moishe Postone and Eric Santner, Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2003, 136-53. “Ein auffallend geschichtsblindes und traditionsloses Volk.” W.G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur, München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1999, 6. Translation from W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell, New York: Penguin, 2003, viii. Sebald, 38. For a thorough analysis of Sebald’s oeuvre, see Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh, eds., W.G. Sebald: History – Memory – Trauma, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006.

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bald’s claim, historian Jörg Friedrich published The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945 (2006, Der Brand, 2002) and the subsequent photo documentation Brandstätten (2003, Fire Sites), in which he detailed the devastation of the Allied bombing campaigns against Germany cities in the last war years. Friedrich’s informative as well as engaging—if not sensationalistic—books sold well and, along with Sebald’s text, generated widespread discussion among the intelligentsia and the public. Historians pointed out that the WW II suffering had been well-documented previously, so that neither Sebald’s nor Friedrich’s works were based on original ideas. Needless to say, literary scholars inevitably challenged Sebald’s claim by referring to postwar authors he had failed to mention.55 In her assessment of Sebald’s essay, Susanne Vees-Gulani mentions just two examples, Gerd Ledig’s Vergeltung (Revenge) and Dieter Forte’s Der Junge mit den blutigen Schuhen (The Boy with Bloody Shoes) and In der Erinnerung (In Memory) to refute Sebald’s claim, explaining that “most writers did not actually experience the bombings on German cities, be it because they were soldiers, exiles or because they were living in places that were not affected by the air raids…”56 It is less known that in 1975, Christa Wolf had bemoaned a similar gap in literature, considering similar reasons. Her [Nelly’s] home town is evacuated, and people begin to flee. I don’t think this process has been described before, perhaps because the young men had not returned from the war then and not many women write. Perhaps few writers experienced this exodus, this nomadic existence on the streets.57

Wolf gendered analysis not only sheds new light on the contemporary Sebald debate, it also offers an explanation of why the air war [Bomben55

56 57

See, for instance, Andreas Huyssen “On Rewritings and New Beginnings: W.G. Sebald and the Literature About the Luftkrieg,” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 124 (2001): 72-90; Volker Hage, ed., Hamburg 1943: Literarische Zeugnisse zum Feuersturm, Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 2003; and Susanne Vees-Gulani, Trauma and Guilt: Literature of the Wartime Bombing in Germany, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003. Vees-Gulani reads Sebald’s works as an example of postmemory, calling his approach belated and indirect. Susanne Vees-Gulani, “The Experience of Destruction: W.G. Sebald, the Airwar, and Literature,” W.G. Sebald: History – Memory – Trauma, eds. Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh, 335-49, 338. “Diese ihre [Nellys] Heimatstadt wird ja geräumt, es kommt die „Flucht“, die meiner Ansicht nach auch noch nicht beschrieben ist, weil nämlich die jungen Männer damals im Krieg waren, und vielleicht, weil nicht so viele Frauen schreiben. Es haben vielleicht nicht so viele Schreibende erlebt, wie das war, diese Flucht, dieses Unterwegssein auf den Strassen.” Christa Wolf, “Erfahrungsmuster: Diskussion zu ‘Kindheitsmuster’” (1975), Die Dimension des Autors, Bd. 2, Frankfurt a. M.: Luchterhand, 1990, 806-43, 813. Translation from The Fourth Dimension, Interviews with Christa Wolf, trans. Hilary Pilkington, London: Verso, 1988, 44.

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krieg] debate that was to follow thirty years later was dominated by men. Yet the time, size, and publicity of the debate were different and new. This discourse on German victimhood was in some ways a response to the earlier, revisionist-driven Historians’ Dispute, initiated by left-wing authors and scholars of the postwar generation (both Sebald and Friedrich were born in 1944). Aside from scholarship and other non-fictional work, more nuanced perspectives on the experience of war, violence, and defeat figured in literary treatments on the topic. The previously discussed works by Ortheil, Timm, and Hahn explore the suffering of German soldiers and civilians; another set of works take into account the experience of flight and expulsion. For instance, in Lost (2001, Der Verlorene, 1998), Hans-Ulrich Treichel (born 1952) fictionalizes his parents’ and his own traumatic memories of the refugee trek from East Prussia that brought about the loss of his older brother. Overwhelmed by fear of the approaching Russians, the narrator’s mother placed the infant in the arms of a stranger. Her son never resurfaced, creating a vacuum in the family which the narrator and younger brother cannot possibly fill. As mentioned in the chapter “War Children and Child Survivors” in part I, Günter Grass’s novella Crabwalk also portrays the suffering of German refugees. Pointing to the alleged gap in scholarship and literature, and heeding the call, Grass’s text comprises a literary response to Sebald’s previous claim. Though Grass himself is part of a generation that participated in the final years of the war, Crabwalk includes some criticism of the postwar generation that warrants closer analysis in this chapter. Employing the image of a crab’s walk, the novella links three events in history, each occurring on January 30: Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, the sinking of the overcrowded Wilhelm Gustloff refugee ship in 1945, and the birth of the narrator that same day. By this move, Grass emphasizes the connection between the Nazis’ reign of power, the ensuing civilian suffering during WW II, and postwar Germany’s much discussed process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Grass includes himself as a minor character in the novel who admits his generation’s blatant omissions in narrating the experience of WW II—and passes responsibility on to the younger Paul Pokriefke. Thus the story is told from the perspective of failed journalist Pokriefke who vows to illustrate the German misery at the end of the war differently from how his mother remembers it, yet admits to having no words for such anguish. Growing up fatherless, without guidance or ideals, Pokriefke, in turn, is responsible for his son’s misguided and

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troubled condition,58 dramatically underscored by the end of the novel, when his son Konrad commits a hate crime. In fact, the glaring similarities between the generation of Hitler’s contemporaries (Tulla) and their grandchildren (Konrad) emphasize the narrator-generation’s omissions in the transmission of history and failures of being adequate fathers. As the narrator cannot declare himself innocent (anymore) but is confronted with his shortcomings in the relationship to his son, the novella thus directly responds to the recent reconsideration of Father Books. Rather than voicing blame towards parents, the postwar generation is now in a position of being blamed for parenting. Walter Kempowski (1929-2007), however, took Grass’s approach as personal offense. When Grass suggested that the far right exploited the Germans-as-victims theme (until his own book came along), Kempowski countered, “But I am not a right-wing extremist,” referring to his Echolot (Sonar) project, completed in 2005.59 Kempowski’s “collective journal” details in ten volumes and nearly 9,000 pages select dates between January 1943 and May 1945, integrating without commentary excerpts from newspaper clippings, front reports, soldiers’ letters, photographs, diary entries, poems, and other documents by high-ranking Nazi officers, soldiers, civilians, resistance fighters, artists like well-known authors like Thomas Mann and Ernst Jünger, journalists, unknown eyewitnesses, and Jewish victims. Contesting any one coherent narrative of World War II, Kempowski developed a montage-format to collect a veritable menagerie of voices that intimate the massive scale of the war and effectively explicate the destruction, defeat, and capitulation. Yet the sheer quantity of voices precludes a detailed engagement with any one individual, and the brief entries (that contain no information as to when they were written) interrupt each other with maddening speed and brevity. According to Peter Höyng, “it is the first narrative that juxtaposes the view of perpetrators and victims and thus undermines the all-too-rigid dichotomy that created a narrative void.”60 In this way, Echolot does not separate German aggression and barbarity from German suffering caused by the war. Yet the consideration of both victimization and victimhood also holds true for other literary works included in this chapter (Timm, Hahn, Dückers, Bruhns). 58 59 60

See Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang: Eine Novelle. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2002, 93, 183, 184. Kempowski quoted in Ijoma Mangold, “Jedes Leid hat ein Recht auf Erlösung,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 13, 2002. Peter Höyng, “From Darkness to Visibility: Walter Kempowski’s Das Echolot [Sonar] and Günter Grass’ Im Krebsgang [Crab Walk] as Two Overdue Narratives Facing World War II in Germany,” Reconstructing Societies in the Aftermath of War: Memory, Identity, and Reconciliation, ed. Flavia Brizio-Skov, Boca Raton: Bordighera, 2004, 169-87, 179-80.

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The ruins of the Church of Our Lady and surrounding buildings, summer 1947 (View from the Georgen Gate)

Perhaps the quandary of German postwar and postwall identity between perpetration and victimhood is expressed most openly in two architectural milestones of the twenty-first century: the German Holocaust Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe and the rebuilding of the prominent Dresden Church of Our Lady (Frauenkirche). Inaugurated in May, 2005, after a decade-long debate, the steles of the Berlin Memorial serve as visible reminder of the Holocaust alongside the pillars of German past and present power embodied by the Brandenburg gate, the restored Reichstag building, the glass high-rises of the Potsdamer Platz, and the former subterranean Führerbunker. While the memorial, situated on the former no-man’s land between East and West Berlin, stands as a reminder of German crimes, the Church of Our Lady once again dominates the Dresden skyline as a monument of hope and reconstruction. Destroyed during the firebombing of Dresden by the Allies in February 1945, Dres-

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den’s oldest church remained a ruin under communist rule. In the months before the Wende, it became the gathering site of the peace movement and protesters against the regime. Only after reunification did private donors raise enough money for the reconstruction of the church. On October 30, 2005, the Church of Our Lady was reconsecrated, representing the literal and symbolic conclusion of the postwar era and the rebuilding of Dresden.

The reconstructed Church of Our Lady. The darker stones are originals from the ruin © Jörg Schöner, Fotodesign BFF, Dresden

Jewish Culture in Postwall Germany After 1945, most Jewish survivors of the Holocaust resettled in Israel, the United States, the U.K., even Australia, and only a minority stayed in Germany (estimates range between 20,000 and 40,000 survivors, com-

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prised of assimilated German and East-European Jews).61 These numbers were relatively stable from the mid 1950s to the late 1980s. The fall of the Soviet Empire and the end of the cold war, however, profoundly affected Jewish life in Germany as an increasing number of Russian Jews immigrated to Germany. By law, postwar German governments granted Jews immigration visas by default, and aided Jewish integration into Germany with language courses and other educational and monetary help. (In 2005, however, the German government in agreement with Israel limited immigration quotas and decreased benefits). With an estimated 180,000 to 200,000 Russian Jewish immigrants in the last fifteen years, Germany’s official Jewish community now counts over 100,000 members, with 12,000 in Berlin.62 While the Jewish communities in Germany grew rapidly (Germany’s Jewish community has the highest Jewish immigration rate outside Israel and is now the third largest in Western Europe), the Russian immigrants changed the numbers, composition, and attitudes of Jews in Germany. Before the 1990s, postwar Jewish life in both Germanies consisted of close-knit, small, and observant communities. The much larger group of Russian immigrants, however, included younger, more diverse, and less orthodox Jews that often identified more readily with Russian liberators rather than Jewish survivors. Brought up under the communist postwar rule in Russia, these immigrants also knew little about Jewish customs and traditions, and began to challenge the existing German-Jewish communities and their leadership. While the Jewish population in Germany has become increasingly “diverse, multiethnic, and multinational,”63 German-Jewish writing in the 1990s also redefined Jewish identity in Germany. Barbara Honigmann, Esther Dischereit, and Irene Dische re-examine Jewish life in present-day Germany, staking out women’s perspectives and identities that previously had gone unnoticed. While mourning the loss of Jewish history and genealogy in Germany, these writers and their male counterparts also acknowledge the possibilities of a renewed Jewish culture in Germany, thus rejecting the previous tendency to perceive Jews in Germany primarily in terms of their absence. Conversely, Germans are discovering their interest—even obsession—with Jews and their culture, even though they are still a fairly small 61 62 63

Numbers are from Frank Stern, “The Return of the Disowned Home—German Jews and the Other Germany,” New German Critique 67 (Winter 1996): 57-72, 64. Numbers are from Jeffrey M. Peck, Being Jewish in the New Germany, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2006. Leslie Morris and Karen Remmler, “Introduction,” Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany: An Anthology, eds. Leslie Morris and Karen Remmler, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002, 30.

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minority in Germany when compared to other ethnic and religious groups. The upsurge in attention is evident in Germans’ consumption of Yiddish songs, books, theater, and film, klezmer music, cultural city tours, exhibits, and kosher food. According to Karen Remmler and Wolfgang Benz, this celebration of philo-Semitism functions as “an ersatz for German folk culture,” and reveals the contemporary German desire to absorb a German-Jewish minority culture in a cosmopolitan German nation.64 Yet the elusive nostalgia for a society akin to the Weimar Republic not only fails to acknowledge the current diversity of Jewish life but also reinstitutes a highly idealized, symbiotic notion of Jews in Germany. Perhaps it is not by chance that the monolithic, wistful image of German-Jewish culture surfaces exactly at a time when Jewish communities in Germany negotiate issues of diversity and difference. Katharina Ochse calls the phenomenon a “political as well as cultural appropriation,” which, like its flipside, exclusion, indicates that Germans still possess a continued inability to accept Jews within their culture.65 Yet other scholars, such as Jeffrey Peck, “see this new Jewish presence as a positive part of renewal and real experience for Jews and non-Jews alike.”66 Jewish culture resists attempts at appropriation, as the so-called second and third generations67 of Jewish intellectuals in Germany do not 64

65

66 67

Karen Remmler, “Encounters Across the Void: Rethinking Approaches to German-Jewish Symbioses” (3-29) and Wolfgang Benz, “Jewish Existence in Germany from the Perspective of the Non-Jewish Majority: Daily Life between Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism” (101-117). Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes, eds., Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis 1945-2000, New York: Palgrave, 2002. See Katharina Ochse, “‘What Could Be More Fruitful, More Healing, More Purifying?’ Representations of Jews in the German Media after 1989,” Reemerging Jewish Culture in Germany: Life and Literature Since 1989, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Karen Remmler, New York: New York UP, 1994, 122. Jeffrey M. Peck, 3. While sharing some similar observations, scholars differ in their definitions of first, second, and third generations. In The Language of Silence, Ernestine Schlant claims to borrow from definitions by Gilman, Zipes, and Remmler when asserting that the so-called first generation of German-Jewish writers include those who began publishing in the Weimar Republic and shaped immediate postwar life in Germany (such as Theodor Adorno or Ernst Bloch). According to Schlant, second-generation German-Jewish writers comprise those who survived the Holocaust as children or teenagers and began to articulate responses in the postwar decades (such as Paul Celan, Jurek Becker, Edgar Hilsenrath, or Ralph Giordano), while the third generation are their successors, writers temporally removed from the Holocaust seeking to express the struggle of living as Jews in Germany (such as Barbara Honigmann, Jeanette Lander, Esther Dischereit, Rafael Seligmann). See Schlant, 237. Yet, despite Schlant’s reference to Remmler, Remmler never defines the third generation. Rather, Remmler’s Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany: An Anthology, delineates the first generation of writers as those with firsthand knowledge of the Holocaust (such as Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, and Jurek Becker) and the second generation as their offspring, i.e. writers

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strive for assimilation like many of their parents but consciously seek to live out the tensions of a Jewish minority culture. Authors like Katja Behrens, Barbara Honigmann, Gila Lustiger, Esther Dischereit, and Chaim Noll examine and question Jewish identities in Germany. Embracing multiple perspectives and approaches, their texts portray the complexities of living as Jews in contemporary Germany, in interaction with both the Jewish communities and postwar German culture. German-Jewish authors like Rafael Seligmann and Maxim Biller also challenge notions of morality and appropriateness in Holocaust representation, with satires of both Jewish stereotypes and German philo-Semitism. It was only after the fall of Wall that German-Jews living in the former GDR attained greater visibility. Back in 1945, more German-Jews had returned to the Soviet rather than the Western Zones in hopes of building a better socialist and antifascist society. Initially, as Frank Stern points out, the nascent East German State embraced these Jewish Communists who significantly shaped artistic and political life in the GDR. After 1951, however, following anti-Semitic campaigns in Russia, domestic and foreign policy quickly changed. Withdrawing its initial support for Jewish religious communities, the regime began to marginalize its Jewish minority, promoting a non-religious communist society. As Marxist theory did not account for racism and anti-Semitism but instead framed National Socialism in purely economic terms, the state privileged communist political prisoners over Jewish victims in official Holocaust remembrance. When Zionism became reason for blame and discrimination, many Jewish citizens in the GDR decided to leave the country; those who remained largely renounced their membership with the Jewish communities and withdrew from religious practice (as did Honigmann’s parents). Under Erich Honecker, the GDR government publicly rejected Zionism to the point of eliminating diplomatic relations with Israel. While the state supported the Palestinian cause, Jewish communities in the GDR were steadily declining: by the late 1980s, they counted just 350 members.68 Consequently, many children and grandchildren of Jewish survivors, like Jurek Becker, Barbara Honigmann, and Monika Maron, learned little about Judaism from parents and grandparents and were instead raised to support GDR socialism. Monika Maron, for instance, reveals that her mother liter-

68

with “no firsthand memories” (1) such as Katja Behrens, Barbara Honigmann, and Esther Dischereit. Other definitions, such as the one by Sander Gilman and Hartmut Steinecke, also identify second-generation writers as those born after 1945. See Michael Brenner, “The Transformation of the German-Jewish Community,” Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis 1945-2000, eds. Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes, New York: Palgrave, 2002, 52.

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ally “forgot” about her Jewish heritage in conjunction with the socialist rebuilding. To quote Frank Stern, their parents’ “return from exile of 1945 was never completed,” so the task of recuperating and preserving the family’s Jewish tradition fell to their children.69 GDR authors like Barbara Honigmann (born 1949) and Monika Maron (born 1941) who formally defined themselves primarily as socialists, discovered their Jewish roots only after reunification without ever having grown up in religious families. Their texts thus connect the post-Holocaust experience with the postwall experience and delineate a German-Jewish identity that must be articulated anew. Barbara Honigmann and Wibke Bruhns In their texts, both Barbara Honigmann and Wibke Bruhns connect a (fictional) reconstruction of their parents’ past with a search for independent identity, using their experience of postmemory to examine the processes of secondary witnessing. A daughter of German émigrés, Honigmann investigates her family history in order to recover and recreate her own Jewish heritage. While she escaped the tenuous German-Jewish relations shaped by the Holocaust by choosing to immigrate to Strasbourg, France, she also anchors herself in the German literature canon and in her forefathers’ lineage of influential German-Jewish lawmakers, professors, and writers. Honigmann reconnects with her family’s (Jewish) past by writing a novel about her father (A Love Made Out of Nothing 2003, Eine Liebe aus Nichts, 1991), an essay about the greater family (Damals, dann und danach 1999, The Past and What Came After), and a memoir about her mother (Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben, 2004, A Chapter of My Life). Faced with the incomplete nature of postmemory, Honigmann turns to literature, especially the tradition of German Romanticism, to bridge her forefathers’ and her own experiences, and to express both nostalgia and imagination. As Christa Wolf had done prior, Honigmann also uses German Romanticism to counter the doctrine of GDR realistic and naturalistic art with her utopian images. Yet unlike Wolf, Honigmann did not believe that her utopia could be realized within the GDR system, as her recovery and re-creation of Jewish identity runs against the core of Marxist belief and communist ideology. In My Father’s Country: The Story of a German Family (2008, Meines Vaters Land: Geschichte einer deutschen Familie, 2004), Wibke Bruhns painstakingly 69

Stern, 70.

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recreates her family’s daily life and her father’s path in the resistance from a wealth of material—photographs, letters, documents, diary entries, family archives, songs, and poems—which are juxtaposed with her mother’s and her own (missing) memories. The reexamination yields mounting contradictions as Bruhns looks for a loving father and a committed member of the resistance but instead finds an unfaithful husband, an inadequate father, and an enthusiastic Nazi. Unsatisfied by this uneven picture, the narrator traces the lives of her grandparents and her mother yet continues to find conflict and incongruity. Bruhns’s book represents a general reckoning with the tradition of German Father Books. Seeing her father as both perpetrator and victim, Bruhns replaces moral indignation and reproach with an attempt to overcome the distance, coupled with the difficult struggle to understand him. Her father-portrait remains ambivalent, a depiction that fits with other recent writings on the theme. Both Honigmann and Bruhns face the conundrum of breaking with the patriarchal family tradition while at the same time seeking to renew and continue it from a decidedly female perspective. In this vein, narrators belatedly yearn for their (deceased) fathers and critically analyze the narrow gender definitions of fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters alike. Both Honigmann’s and Bruhns’s narrators delineate a sense of abandonment by parents, grounded in their fathers’ womanizing and their mothers’ distance, even though their families lived under vastly different circumstances. Yet both authors use different approaches, genres, and styles. Honigmann’s oeuvre never detailed her parents’ experience in exile but focuses on its aftermath and consequences in novels, essays, and a recent literary biography of her mother. Bruhns only began to write her text after retiring from a successful career as a journalist in television, and sticks to a more factual tone and style. Whereas Honigmann’s narrator in her 1986 novel Roman von einem Kinde (Novel by a Child) begins to reconsider her parents from the perspective of a child, Bruhns’s text analyzes and even counsels her father after the author reached retirement age, having outlived her father by more than twenty years. In addition to these differences, there are similar insights and conclusions, especially when comparing the works both authors published in 2004. Responding to the tradition of Father Books, the texts consider multiple family members from different generations, including mothers, grandparents, and great-parents. Different from the previous approaches of Father Books, Honigmann’s and Bruhns’s narrators do not frame their response in terms of repression and rebellion but acknowledge the inherited similarities between fathers (and, to a lesser degree, mothers) and themselves, staking out an identity that is not shaped by generational revolt. The framework of postmemory elucidates each daughter’s distance

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to her parents’ past while allowing for an independent stance. In the renegotiation and ultimate acceptance of the parental relationship, and in the self-critical and self-questioning process that it engenders, both writers come to appropriate the memories of their parents. But in the process, they establish their own separate and distinct voices.

Barbara Honigmann’s Belated Appropriation of her Jewish Heritage: From Roman von einem Kinde (Novel by a Child) to Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (A Chapter of My Life) “Rediscovering One’s Face” In the progression from Roman von einem Kinde (1986, Novel by a Child) to Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (2004, A Chapter of My Life), Barbara Honigmann appropriates her Jewish heritage by reconstructing first her father’s family history and then her mother’s. Documenting her parents’ life also illuminates the devastating consequences of the depreciation of Judaism in the former GDR. In contrast to her ancestors, though, Honigmann refuses to assimilate and lose the family’s Jewish beliefs. She establishes her Jewish identity not only by returning to the traditions of assimilated Jews in prewar Germany but also in conversation with Sephardim and Ashkenazim cultures in France. Identifying herself as a German writer (though she has also published in French), Honigmann takes up the tradition of German Romanticism to express her divisions, fragmentation, and yearning. Differing from her family’s patriarchal traditions, Honigmann connects her Jewish identity to her life as a mother and an artist. While her writings are not explicitly feminist, they reflect on the effects of patriarchy, on gender dynamics, and on the challenges of motherhood. Honigmann has also become a recognized painter. Her works are on display at the Michael Hasenclever Gallery in Munich, several of which are reproduced on the cover of her books. The paintings frame her narratives, creating a subtext that accompanies, complements, or contradicts the reading of the main text. When Honigmann quotes Lévinas in the title of her latest collection of essays Das Gesicht wiederfinden (2006, Rediscovering One’s Face), “as Emmanuel Lévinas says, art consists in rediscovering one’s face,”1 she posits that all of her work—painting and writing—is concerned with rediscovering and recreating a complex and multifaceted 1

“Wie Emmanuel Lévinas es sagt: Die Kunst besteht darin, das Gesicht wiederzufinden,” Barbara Honigmann, “Das Gesicht wiederfinden: Rede zur Verleihung des Jeanette Schokken-Preises in Bremerhaven,” May 6, 2001, Das Gesicht wiederfinden: Über Schreiben, Schriftsteller und Judentum, Wien: Carl Hanser, 2006, 139. All translations of Honigmann’s essays are my own.

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identity. To be sure, the author’s self-portrait on the cover features a face that looks hauntingly disheveled. Honigmann herself has warned her readers against falling into the autobiographical trap: in her first Zurich Poetics Lecture (2002), she describes her unease with interviews in which she is forced to answer the same biographical questions that she had answered numerous times before. Yes, I am a Jewess, a German; I am from the GDR, and now I am living in France. I don’t know whether or nor I feel at home in Strasbourg; I doubt that I am orthodox. At least not in the way you imagine.2

Instead, Honigmann wishes for a deeper engagement with her texts. Yet precisely because her texts respond so closely to Honigmann’s autobiographical particularities (she tellingly entitled her lecture “Whenever people accuse me of speaking too much about myself, I accuse them in turn of never thinking about themselves at all.”),3 it makes good sense to briefly consider Honigmann’s life before analyzing her texts. At the same time, Honigmann’s texts go beyond the autobiographical facts, playing with fiction, varying scenarios and outcomes, and different identities, so that an exclusive autobiographical reading misses many of the texts’ idiosyncrasies. Born in 1949 in East Berlin, Honigmann initially identified herself as an East German socialist—akin to her Jewish parents who returned to East Germany in 1947 from exile in Britain in the hopes of building a communist state that had no links to the Nazi past. And like her father, dramaturge Georg Honigmann (1903-1984), who was chief editor of the Berliner Zeitung and director of the renowned cabaret “Die Distel,” Honigmann started out in the theater business. After majoring in theater studies at Humboldt University (1967-1972), she began to work as a literary and artistic director at the Deutsches Theater and Volksbühne, but her life soon took a momentous turn. In 1976, as Honigmann awaited her first child, she became a full-time writer (writing an adaptation of a Grimm fairytale for the GDR theater), and joined the Jewish community in East Berlin: “I wanted to become a mother, an artist, and a real Jewess, all at 2

3

“Ja, ich bin Jüdin, Deutsche, komme aus der DDR, lebe jetzt in Frankreich. Ob ich mich jetzt in Straßbourg zu Hause fühle, weiß ich nicht, daß ich orthodox bin, bezweifle ich. Jedenfalls nicht, wie Sie sich das vorstellen.” Barbara Honigmann, “Wenn mir die Leute vorwerfen, daß ich zuviel von mir spreche, so werfe ich ihnen vor, daß sie überhaupt nicht über sich selber nachdenken,” Zürcher Poetikvorlesung (I): Über autobiographisches Schreiben, Das Gesicht wiederfinden: Über Schreiben, Schriftsteller und Judentum, 38. “Wenn mir die Leute vorwerfen, daß ich zuviel von mir spreche, so werfe ich ihnen vor, daß sie überhaupt nicht über sich selber nachdenken.”

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once.”4 While her parents sought to cope with discrimination and persecution by avoiding a confrontation not only with the Holocaust but with their Jewish heritage altogether (they left the Jewish community in the 1950s), Honigmann refurbished her Jewish identity without ever having grown up in a Jewish religious home. She began to learn Hebrew, converted to Judaism, and in 1981 married historian Peter Honigmann in one of the GDR’s first traditional Jewish weddings. In this “reclaiming of our Jewish identity out of the void,”5 Honigmann recreated the family’s Jewish identity from myth and hearsay, by imagining rather than remembering herself as Jewish. In 1984, Honigmann, along with her husband and two sons, left the GDR to resettle in Strasbourg, France, home to a large Jewish population. Incidentally, it was only after the move to France that Honigmann became a celebrated artist and writer, writing in German for a German audience. She considers herself a Jew and a German writer,6 aligning her literary heritage with the tradition of Goethe, Kleist, and the German Romantics, and incorporating literary ideals such as the search for a home, the journey, hope, and longing for another place in time as elements of her Jewish identity. Another influential writer for Honigmann is Heinrich Heine (1796-1856) who like herself pondered a socialist utopia, wrestled with a German-Jewish identity, and immigrated to France and (in an opposite move, though, Heine converted from Judaism to Christianity). By writing German prose as a Jew in France, as a neighbor to Germany who looks with “homesickness”7 across the Rhine River, Honigmann crosses not only geographical but religious, political, generational, ethnic, gender, and

4

5 6

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“Mutter, Künstlerin und eine richtige Jüdin wollte ich werden, und zwar alles auf einmal.” Barbara Honigmann, “Des vielen Büchermachens ist kein Ende,” Zürcher Poetikvorlesung (II): Über Schöpfung und Schreiben, Das Gesicht wiederfinden: Über Schreiben, Schriftsteller und Judentum, 78. “Wiedereroberung unseres Judentums aus dem Nichts,” Barbara Honigmann, “Gräber in London” Damals, dann und danach (1999), München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002, 29. “It sounds paradoxical, but I am a German writer even though I don’t feel that I’m a German and have not lived in Germany for years… As a Jew I left Germany, but in my work, in a very strong attachment to the German language, I keep on returning.” [“Es klingt paradox, aber ich bin eine deutsche Schriftstellerin, obwohl ich mich nicht als Deutsche fühle und nun auch schon seit Jahren nicht mehr in Deutschland lebe. … Als Jude bin ich aus Deutschland weggegangen, aber in meiner Arbeit, in einer sehr starken Bindung an die deutsche Sprache, kehre ich immer wieder zurück.”] Barbara Honigmann, “Selbstporträt als Jüdin,” Damals, dann und danach, 18. “Heimweh,” Barbara Honigmann, “Von meinem Urgrossvater, meinem Grossvater, meinem Vater und von mir,” Damals, dann und danach, 46.

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personal borders. Indeed, Honigmann’s self-proclaimed “double life”8 mirrors the quandary of a Jewish existence vis-à-vis a country marked by the absence of Jews and manifests her unique answer to the so called German-Jewish negative symbiosis with which Dan Diner characterized German-Jewish relationships after the Holocaust.9 It is only in a foreign country that Honigmann can escape the difficulty of being Jewish in Germany and establish her identity by going back to the roots of Jewish faith, reading and translating both the Torah and Talmud. At the same time, she uses the German literary canon, especially motifs of German Romanticism, to articulate her thinking and to transcend the divide(s). A Child in a Father-land: Roman von einem Kinde (Novel by a Child) In her first critically acclaimed work, Roman von einem Kinde (1986), published two years after Honigmann moved to France and after the death of her father, the autobiographical narrator characterizes her path as “triple breakneck leap, without a net: from the East to the West, from Germany to France, and from assimilation into the midst of Torah-Judaism.”10 Yet, the death-defying leap [Todessprung] with which she ended her previous life also affords the narrator the opportunity to look back to the GDR and her non-religious parents from a different political, geographical, and religious position, and provides a new life for her son, her husband, and herself. Roman von einem Kinde crosses genre boundaries: Graced with a selfportrait of the author and dedicated to her father, the text is called a novel but turns out to be a collection of six prose narratives, the first one of which carries the title of the entire collection. In deliberate reference to Bettina von Arnim’s Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (1835, Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child), Honigmann wrote the titular story “Roman von einem Kinde” (Novel of/by/about a Child11) in epistolary form;

8 9 10

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“Doppelleben,” Barbara Honigmann, “Meine sefardischen Freundinnen,” Damals, dann und danach, 72. See Dan Diner, “Negative Symbiose. Deutsche und Juden nach Auschwitz,” Babylon 1 (1986): 9-20. “Dreifachen Todessprung ohne Netz: vom Osten in den Westen, von Deutschland nach Frankreich und aus der Assimilation mitten in das Thora-Judentum hinein,” 111. Page numbers refer to the following edition: Roman von einem Kinde. Sechs Erzählungen (1986), München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001. All translations are my own. The German “von” could have either one of those meanings; hence the English title has been translated with varying prepositions. I am using the preposition “by” since Honig-

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the other narratives do not follow the letter format though they all are written in the first-person and include autobiographical details.12 Like von Arnim, Honigmann chooses a literary style that acknowledges gender inequality. Historically, women faced great difficulties when publishing their works and resorted to letters and diaries. Title and epistolary form, as well as the reference to writer von Arnim (1785-1859), allude to German Romanticism, which idealized both childhood and art. As did previous writers in the GDR, in particular Christa Wolf, Honigmann harkens back to earlier literary traditions in order to voice cautious dissent with the regime.13 Similarly, with dreamlike and fantastic elements, and an overall fairytale-style, Honigmann (like Romantic writers) characterizes and responds to a reality devoid of artistic imagination. In later texts, Honigmann reveals that in her first novel she wanted to begin anew and see the world as a child. Indeed, the title words “of/about a Child” refer both to the birth of the narrator’s first son, Johannes (Honigmann’s first son Johannes was born in 1976), and the narrator herself who assumes a childlike voice, with simple sentence structure and a naïve, innocent tone. Yet mother and child are no separate entities: in “Roman von einem Kinde,” the boundaries between mother and child dissolve (15, 18), and in “Wanderung” (Hike), the narrator dreams of becoming a child (83). Even in her self-portrait that graces the book’s cover, Honigmann painted a likeness of herself with disproportionably large, childlike eyes, a round face, and fair, unblemished skin. (As Lorenz revealed, the cover of the book’s first edition included Honigmann’s self-portrait Schwangere

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mann in her own translation of her later essay “On My Great-grandfather, My Grandfather, My Father, and Me” referred to her earlier text as Novel by a Child. In an interview with Guy Stern, Honigmann refers to von Arnim’s text. See Guy Stern, “Barbara Honigmann: A Preliminary Assessment,” Insiders and Outsiders: Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria, eds. Dagmar Lorenz and Gabriele Weinberger, Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1994, 329-46, 330. The story begins as a deliberate play and confusion of genres: “Dear Josef! I would like to write you a letter. A long letter containing everything. As long as a novel. A novel by a child.” [“Lieber Josef! Ich möchte Dir einen Brief schreiben. Einen langen Brief, in dem alles drinsteht. So lang wie ein Roman. Ein Roman von einem Kinde,” 9]. In Damals, dann und danach, Honigmann further comments on the misleading title of her text, explaining that it refers not to the content but to the narrator’s attitude vis-à-vis her work. (Damals, dann und danach 51). As Uta Klaedtke and Martina Ölke as well as Dagmar Lorenz point out, Honigmann uses the reference to German Romantic literature to voice her disapproval with GDR political reality. See Uta Kaedtke and Martina Ölke, “Erinnern und erfinden: DDR-Autorinnen und ‘jüdische Identität’ (Hedda Zinner, Monika Maron, Barbara Honigmann),” Jüdische Intellektuelle im 20. Jahrhundert. Literatur- und kulturgeschichtliche Studien, eds. Ariane Huml and Monika Rappenecker, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003, 249-74, 262, and Dagmar C.G. Lorenz, Keepers of the Motherland: German Texts by Jewish Women Writers, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997, 215.

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[Pregnant Woman, 1997].)14 Many reviewers noticed the carefully constructed uncomplicated narration and language, first and foremost Marcel Reich-Ranicki who lauded the book in his review for the Frankfurter Allgemeine for its “hardly surpassable simplicity.”15 Title, cover, and language link Honigmann’s work to the longstanding conception and idealization of childhood in German literature that peaked during German Romanticism.

Book cover Roman von einem Kinde (Novel by a Child) © Barbara Honigmann

After the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762), German writers embraced the notion of deeming children as a tabula rasa that could and would be formed (or deformed) by parental guidance and environmental influences. While Friedrich Schiller mourned the loss of childhood as the loss of innocence, later German Romantic writers celebrated childhood as the most pure and open form of being human. To the Romantics, children represented qualities that had become lost in the increasingly industrialized world after the Enlightenment—intuitive wisdom, 14 15

Lorenz, 211. “Kaum zu überbietender Schlichtheit.” Marcel Reich-Ranicki, “Es ist so schön, sich zu fügen. Hinwendung zum Mystizismus – ein Generationssymptom? Die Prosa der Barbara Honigmann,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 25, 1986. For a detailed analysis of Honigmann’s “simple narration,” see Petra Günter, “Einfaches Erzählen? Barbara Honigmann’s ‘Doppeltes Grab,’” Jews in German Literature Since 1945: German-Jewish Literature? ed. Pól O’Dochartaigh, German Monitor 53 (2000): 123-38.

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artistic vision, innocent spontaneity, and closeness to nature. Taking cues from these bygone ideals, Honigmann likewise attempts to explore the world afresh in an unmarked and unspoiled way as a Jew and a mother. Yet as Dagmar Lorenz points out, “Honigmann achieves this naïveté after the Shoah.”16 It is indeed after the Holocaust that Honigmann needs to create and imagine her spiritual home anew. Thus, different from German Romantics, Honigmann does not necessarily yearn for another childhood, but considers herself in a childlike position, in consequence of the erasure of Jewish culture in Germany. In her second Zurich Poetics Lecture, she also links such childlike position to the totalitarian politics of her State. In some ways it was a slightly delayed entry into adulthood, and this delay may have been caused by the infantilism of the living conditions in the GDR as much as by the privileged yet vulnerable situation of my parents in that state.17

As the narrator in “Roman von einem Kinde” begins to appropriate her Jewish identity from scratch,18 she recounts her first Passover service and Seder dinner at the East Berlin synagogue, Jewish celebrations that typically gain importance in childhood. It is after this spiritual experience, when the narrator feels intuitively at home among unfamiliar surroundings, that former GDR sites of oppression turn into holy sites. For instance, the Berlin Alexanderplatz, site of a rotating World Time Clock, gigantic TV tower, lavish parades, and a veritable showcase of socialist architecture and power, suddenly opens up to the narrator like the parting of the Red Sea, metaphorically evoking her liberation from oppression.19 Framing her conversion to Judaism and her son’s birth as her own mythical rebirth, the narrator overcomes her isolation and fragmentation and comes to feel connected to a tradition and a community. 16 17

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Lorenz, 215. “In gewisser Weise war es ein etwas verspätetes Erwachsenenwerden, und an dieser Verspätung mögen die infantilisierenden Verhältnisse der DDR ebenso einen Anteil gehabt haben wie die gleichzeitig privilegierte und ungeschützte Situation meiner Eltern in diesem Staat” Barbara Honigmann, “Des vielen Büchermachens ist kein Ende,” Zürcher Poetikvorlesung (II): Über Schöpfung und Schreiben, Das Gesicht wiederfinden: Über Schreiben, Schriftsteller und Judentum, 81. Thomas Nolden adds that Chaim Noll similarly speaks of his “return to a Jewish sense of self” [“Rückkehr zu einem jüdischen Selbstgefühl”], rediscovering and appropriating a Jewish identity that his parents had abandoned. Thomas Nolden, Junge jüdische Literatur, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995, 36. Translation is my own. Apparently, Peter Honigmann also compared the couple’s move to Strasbourg with a move away from Egypt. See Klaedtke, Uta, and Martina Ölke, “Erinnern und erfinden: DDRAutorinnen und ‘jüdische Identität’ (Hedda Zinner, Monika Maron, Barbara Honigmann),” Jüdische Intellektuelle im 20. Jahrhundert. Literatur- und kulturgeschichtliche Studien, eds. Ariane Huml and Monika Rappenecker. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003, 249-74, 268.

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At the same time, the stories in Roman von einem Kinde hint at the narrator’s separation from her parents, her past, and her home country, emphasizing displacement. In “Wanderung,” its very title a reference to Romantic art, the narrator delineates the experience of travel and compares the sights of her journey with the landscape paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, the most prominent and celebrated German painter of the Romantic Movement. In the Romantic tradition, a wanderer has no domicile, no society, and no family to which he belongs but instead draws a sense of belonging from the journey itself. As Galili Shahar illustrates, in Romantic and later modernist literature this notion merged with the image of the wandering Jew—a symbol of Jewish Diaspora—to inform the ideal of a progressive traveler who is not bound by the confines of society but drives the quest for spiritual renewal.20 Yet while many of Friedrich’s paintings carry a directly Christian and allegorical message in times of dwindling faith, Honigmann takes up the tradition after the war to revive and imbue it with the spirit of Judaism. Like the nineteenth-century Romantics, Honigmann seeks to free herself from a restrictive government and religious oppression by wandering away, looking back at her home with affection from the periphery. Yet by emigrating, Honigmann did not choose a journey from which one returns but a distinct border crossing, the aforementioned “death-defying leap.” As the name implies, she safely landed on the other side but continues to pay the price for the irreversible jump over the border to France. While the Romantics reacted to an increasingly disintegrated modern existence with nostalgia for a more complete idealized past, the narrator in Roman von einem Kinde can only react with nostalgia for what she has left behind, perceiving her life path in the binary pairs of East vs. West, Germany vs. France, and assimilation vs. religious affirmation. Roman von einem Kinde does not idealize the past, and couches nostalgia in general rather than specific terms. Missing her father and the biological father of her child, the narrator mentions the profound effects of their absence only sporadically. In “Bonsoir, Madame Benhamou,” she reveals that in her first year in France she could not leave the house because she 20

According to Christian mythology, the wandering Jew originated in the figure of a Jew who taunted Jesus on his way to crucifixion and was thus doomed to travel eternally. Later this image served to exemplify Jewish foreignness, homelessness, and immortality (also visible in the image of the “eternal Jew”) in anti-Semitic literature. In her insightful essay, Shahar reveals that the image of the wandering Jew remained an ambivalent one, used by German conservatives as an allegory for danger and by liberal artists as expression of progressive thinking. See Galili Shahar, “Figurations of Unheimlichkeit: Homelessness and the Identity of “Jews” in Sebald, Maron and Honigmann,” Paul Michael Lützeler and Stephan K. Schindler, eds., Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 3 (2004), 28-45, 28-30.

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mourned for her father intensively (116) yet does not elaborate on the issue. For the narrator, her “homesickness” [Heimweh] is simply a “heartache,”21 a pain signaling the alienation from her parents, her native country, and a political system bound to disintegrate. It is in her chosen exile in France, as a mother and a Jew, that Honigmann longs for her parents and begins a confrontation that becomes more manifest in her later texts. Searching for Fatherly Love: A Love Made Out of Nothing (Eine Liebe aus nichts) After Honigmann wrote about her move to France, the birth of her child, and her conversion to Judaism in Roman von einem Kinde, in her subsequent novel, A Love Made Out of Nothing (2003, Eine Liebe aus nichts, 1991), the (autobiographical) narrator returns to Germany after living in France. Again, the book’s cover depicts a painting by the author in which a young woman with a beret stands in front of a closed window, looking at a stylized city on the one side of the window pane and an abstract, open landscape on the other. As Karen Remmler suggests, the woman’s contemplative, introverted stance is reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Junge Frau am Fenster (Young Woman at the Window)22 connecting Honigmann once more to Romantic art and its meditation on the natural world. Both Friedrich’s and Honigmann’s paintings depict a person’s back, a popular motif in Romantic art which allows the observer to share the protagonist’s gaze from inside to outside, mirroring both the protagonist’s gaze in the painting and the gaze of oneself looking at the painting. In addition, the protagonists in both paintings look through a window, a central symbol of the division between home and outside, and the familiar and the mysterious: in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the prominent woman-at-the-window motif divulges Emma’s repressed desire and her yearning. While the woman in Honigmann’s painting (and novel) also yearns for a distant place, she looks at a strikingly dual and abstract view: a landscape stretches to the left and a modern cityscape with skyscrapers and empty highway-bridges to the right. The rectangular horizontal and vertical borders in the painting (inside-outside, left view-right view, even the lines within the city- and landscape) emulate the narrator’s divisions and rifts, as detailed in the text. Yet the abstract nature of the paint21 22

“Heimweh,” “Herzweh,” 115. See Karen Remmler, “Orte des Eingedenkens in den Werken Barbara Honigmanns,” Deutsch-Jüdische Literatur der neunziger Jahre: Die Generation nach der Shoah, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Hartmut Steinecke, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2002, 43-58, 44-45.

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ing precludes a conclusive and realistic interpretation: although the protagonist’s beret could indicate a connection to France, the city she sees on the right is neither recognizable as Strasbourg or Berlin, nor does it correspond to the narrator’s view of Paris from her basement apartment window. Likewise, the landscape to which the protagonist tilts her head cannot be identified.

Book Cover A Love Made Out of Nothing © Barbara Honigmann

A Love Made Out of Nothing begins with a move back in both space and time. Only a few months after arriving in Paris, the narrator must travel back to East Germany where her father had just died. The experience of emigration and the confrontation with her father’s death allows her to reflect on both the past in Germany and the present in France. While the narrator in Roman von einem Kinde enthusiastically embraces her new life, the narrator in A Love Made Out of Nothing is more skeptical of her transformation, emphasizing departure rather than arrival. She begins to suspect that she merely escaped from her old life and slowly realizes the price of isolation she must pay for her move, feeling exiled among strangers who speak a foreign tongue. The “death-defying leap” the narrator undertakes in Roman von einem Kinde thus proves to come with forceful aftereffects, not unlike the horseman’s crossing of the snow-covered Lake Constance that both Wolf and Klüger mention. Honigmann’s narrator also likens her move to the experience of European immigrants at Ellis Island who faced an unknown life, separated by ocean from family, friends, and

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their home. Once the narrator has safely crossed over to the other side does she realize what she has left behind. It turned out to be difficult to start my new life and I thought much more about everything that I’d left behind, about my father from whom I’d run away because he had demanded too much of me for my entire life, about the friends whom I’d gotten tired of, and about the Berliner Theater, where I didn’t want to work any longer.23

Unlike Roman von einem Kinde where the narrator experiences a far more general Heimweh, her nostalgia in A Love Made Out of Nothing has turned into a specific yearning for her father and her home. Using this longing deliberately for the creation of her text, the narrator in A Love Made Out of Nothing details in realistic and specific terms the relationship to her father whom she perceives as distant and unavailable. The narrator blames her father (who like Honigmann’s actual father remarried twice after divorcing her mother and was married four times altogether) for abandoning her and her mother, for disliking and criticizing her appearance, and for failing to see her as an independent adult. She remains disappointed that her father once missed her arrival at the Frankfurt train station and is suspicious of his frequent lovers and girlfriends. In her dreams, the narrator waits in vain for her father to come back—along with his four wives—and she remarks in conclusion that she never managed to satisfy his demands. The narrator also likens her father to her (unavailable) lovers. Like her father who abandoned her by leaving town but refuses to visit her in Paris, her former German lover, a theater director named Alfried, left Berlin to move to Munich from where he merely sends the occasional postcard and letter. Afraid of intimacy, Alfried does not allow the narrator to come to his apartment and does not want to see her residence in Paris. Even her new friend in Paris, a Jewish American named Jean-Marc, refuses to visit her former home in Germany. While the narrator shares with Jean-Marc her Jewish identity as well as the experience of immigration, Jean-Marc does not understand her intrinsic connections to Germany. Rather, he invites her to come with him to start a new life in New York. To the narrator, the three men blend together in their inability to understand her, so much so that her assessment of her relationship with Alfried becomes “a 23

“Es fiel mir schwer, das neue Leben zu beginnen, und ich dachte viel mehr an alles, was hinter mir lag, an meinen Vater, vor dem ich weggelaufen war, weil er mein ganzes Leben lang zuviel von mir verlangt hatte, an meine Freunde, derer ich überdrüssig geworden war, und an das “Berliner Theater,” an dem ich nicht länger hatte arbeiten wollen.” Barbara Honigmann, Eine Liebe aus nichts (1991), Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993, 1718. Translation from Barbara Honigmann, A Love Made Out of Nothing & Zohara’s Journey, trans. John Barnett, Boston: David R. Godine, 2003, 13.

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love made out of nothing, in which nothing happens, and which endlessly fades away into nothingness”24 also characterizes the relationship to her father. The title of the novel thus encompasses both the instinctual feeling of love she feels for her father and her lover and the missed realization of this love.25 As much of the narrator’s relationship to men takes place over distance in dreams and communication through letters, it remains stuck in yearning instead of evolving to its potential. Hence, the narrator feels happy and connected with Alfried upon receiving his letter but their meeting in person fails miserably. Even her relationship to Jean-Marc that began with her new life in Paris eventually breaks up after he returns to New York. Writing to Jean-Marc from Berlin, the same city he refused to visit, the narrator muses that they are joined by the experience of being foreigners in Paris but separated by their respective homelands and thus speak to each other in foreign tongues. Yet the experience of immigration is ultimately a positive one, as it affords the narrator the opportunity to reinvent herself. After she discontinues her career at the Berlin Theater, refusing to remain a mere assistant, the narrator enrolls in painting and drawing classes in Paris, promising herself to accept change rather than to hinder it. Instead of letting the wave of this new life simply roll over me, exhaust me, or even drag me to the bottom, I wanted to use its movement to change places for myself.26

As part of this change, the narrator breaks with her former lover Alfried and repudiates his wish to give him a portrait she drew of him. She works through the relationship with her father, and at the end of the novel decides to accept Jean-Marc’s absence. The novel concludes with the narrator boarding the train back to Paris, in an opposite direction from the beginning. In contrast to her previous departure from Germany, however, she has grown to embrace a more self-reflective perspective that acknowledges an identity shaped by (and not in opposition to) her father. Aware of the similarities between herself 24 25

26

56, “Eine Liebe aus nichts, in der nichts passiert und die sich endlos im Nichts verliert,” 78. Petra Renneke suggests that the apparent contradictions in the titles of Honigmann’s texts (e.g. Roman von einem Kinde and Eine Liebe aus nichts) encourage her audience to read with closer attention. See Petra Renneke, “Kryptogramme der Schrift: Barbara Honigmanns ‘Roman von einem Kinde,’” Paul Michael Lützeler and Stephan K. Schindler, eds., Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 3 (2004): 1-27, 3. 37, “Statt die Welle von neuem Leben einfach nur über mich hinwegrollen und mich von ihr erschöpfen oder gar zu Boden werfen zu lassen, wollte ich ihre Bewegung nutzen und selbst meinen Platz wechseln.” 52.

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and her father, the narrator recognizes that she accused her father of running away from her, even though she, too, ran away from her Berlin home, from family and friends, and especially from her father. If her father was “homeless”27 and without family (“his family consisted only of his succession of wives”28), the narrator feels likewise deprived of a spiritual home, and decides to move abroad to begin a new life, not unlike her parents who returned from exile to East Berlin after the war with similar hopes. The narrator also understands that both father and daughter accused each other of not loving the other enough. While she blamed her father for putting too many demands on her, she conversely demanded that he father visit her in Paris while elderly and sick. Later on, the narrator realizes that even her father’s fears and insecurities mirror her own. In this way, she recounts a decisive childhood experience in her father’s life who confessed that as a young boy he once prepared and announced a play that he had never written. According to her father, this early experience of public humiliation patterned his adult life, his career, his ideas, even his love affairs, and where he chose to live. While her father saw his life overshadowed by the pressure of having to live up to others’ expectations, the narrator similarly fears to have failed in her job at the theater and disappointed her colleagues. Stressing the continuities along with the rifts in her family history, she concludes: Besides, I didn’t want to follow my parents’ footsteps forever, even if I knew that I’d never get away from them and my emigration was perhaps just a dream of real separation, the wish for a rootless life. Perhaps more than anything else, I’ve been running away from my parents and yet still go on trotting along behind them.29

In acknowledgment of such continuation, the narrator decides to continue her father’s diary, writing her own entries following his. With this act, the daughter not only figuratively and literally preserves and maintains the family history, but also replaces the patriarchal perspective with a female one, changing family tradition. With this ending, the title can be interpreted in yet another direction: as the daughter’s love for her father originates from nothing but also continues to grow from nothing as manifested in the progression of the diary. 27 28 29

47, “Heimatlos,” 65. 49, “Seine Familie waren nur seine wechselnden Frauen,” 68. 22, “Ich wollte ja auch nicht immer in den Spuren meiner Eltern bleiben, wenngleich ich wußte, daß ich auch nicht aus ihnen herauskomme und mein Auswandern vielleicht nur der Traum von einer wirklichen Trennung, der Wunsch nach einem wurzellosen Leben war. Mehr als von allem anderen bin ich vielleicht von meinen Eltern weggelaufen und lief ihnen doch hinterher. ” 31.

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Brigitte Rossbacher reads A Love Made Out of Nothing as a work of mourning, structured by the reconnection with the lost love object and the subsequent separation from it. Indeed, both the narrator’s initial obsession with her father and her concluding acceptance of his death confirm Rossbacher’s claim.30 But while the narrator reestablishes links to her father and his family and mourns his loss, the mother (Honigmann’s mother died in the same year the novel was published) remains conspicuously absent. In the novel, the narrator’s mother is Bulgarian and increasingly speaks Bulgarian, a language the narrator neither likes nor understands (Honigmann’s own mother grew up in Hungary speaking Hungarian). This language barrier seems symptomatic for the mother’s distance; she is only mentioned in passing in relationship to her husband, and the narrator does not pursue a relationship with her mother like she pursues one with her father. Instead, the narrator focuses on her relationships with men. Honigmann’s novel is unquestionably autobiographical since the author, too, left the Berlin Theater, moved to France, and reevaluated the difficult relationship to her father after his death in 1984. Even minor details in the novel correspond to and even elucidate Honigmann’s life. For instance, in a later essay Honigmann explains that she—essentially like her narrator who enrolls in painting classes in Paris after leaving Germany— had to begin to paint before she could write. I for my part could only advance to the word via the image, since I come from an extremely logocentric, Jewish environment, in which only words and sentences attest to existence, and of course that also includes words that were never uttered, merely hinted at. By my turning to the image I began leaving behind a part of this culture of words. Certainly, by painting I also sought to differentiate myself from my parents who were literally not conversant with the field.31

While the quotation confirms that Honigmann had already gained a more independent, mature relationship to her father when she wrote A Love Made Out of Nothing, it likewise suggests that the narrator has developed the confidence to both continue and alter her family’s logocentric tradition (i.e. her father’s diary) at the novel’s ending. The diary excerpts, let30 31

See Brigitte Rossbacher, “The Topography of Mourning in Barbara Honigmann’s Eine Liebe aus nichts,” Seminar 38.2 (May 2002): 154-167. “Mir war es wohl erst durch das Bild möglich, zum Wort vorzudringen, da ich aus einem extrem logozentrierten, jüdischen Milieu stamme, in dem nur Wörter und Sätze Existenz bezeugen, natürlich auch die ungesagten, die nie ausgesprochenen und immer nur angedeuteten. Einen Teil dieser Wortkultur konnte ich durch die Hinwendung zum Bild erst einmal hinter mir lassen. Sicher suchte ich mich mit der Malerei auch von meinen Eltern abzugrenzen, die da im wörtlichen Sinne nicht mitreden konnten.” Barbara Honigmann, “Des vielen Büchermachens ist kein Ende,” Zürcher Poetikvorlesung (II): Über Schöpfung und Schreiben, Das Gesicht wiederfinden: Über Schreiben, Schriftsteller und Judentum, 79.

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ters, anecdotes, quotations, and impressions also lend the novel a subjective, authentic touch that is underscored by its simple language reminiscent of Roman von einem Kinde. Yet decisive differences preclude an exclusively autobiographical reading of the novel. Unlike her single narrator who moved to Paris, Honigmann moved to Strasbourg, along with her husband and two sons. And unlike the narrator’s Bulgarian mother, Honigmann’s mother was born in Vienna to Hungarian-Jewish parents. Choosing the genre of autobiographical fiction, Honigmann thus experiments with different life scenarios, putting her own life in different contexts and looking at it from shifting perspectives. In a later essay, she suggested that the “project of selfinvestigation, self-discovery, and self-disclosure always involves at least to the same degree self-dramatization, self-fictionalization, the transformation of one’s life into a novel, and sometimes also self-mythologization.”32 This artistic shaping of her work, which is often overlooked, far exceeds a mere act of mourning, as Honigmann playfully affirms and alters her identity outside of Germany’s borders. In A Love Made Out of Nothing, Honigmann also identifies with other characters in the novel, such as the son of émigrés, Jean-Marc, and likewise appropriates her parents’ experience of exile as a defining moment in her own life. Mostly we talked about our backgrounds, about our parents, where they came from, and how they’d fled from the Nazis. The routes of their emigration and their experiences in those foreign countries were like myths of our childhood days and of our lives in general – like the wanderings of Ulysses, legends told a thousand times.33

If the narrator in Roman von einem Kinde was setting out in new directions, the narrator in A Love Made Out of Nothing realizes that her act of emigration is actually a continuation of her family’s nomadic life. To Thomas Nolden, the uprootedness of the children of exiled parents has become a leitmotif in second-generation German-Jewish work, as succinctly articu32

33

“Projekt der Selbsterforschung, Selbstentdeckung und Selbstoffenbarung mindestens in dem gleichen Maß immer auch Selbstinszeniereung, Selbstfiktionalisierung, Verwandlung des Lebens in einen Roman, manchmal auch Selbstmythologisierung.” Barbara Honigmann, “Wenn mir die Leute vorwerfen, daß ich zuviel von mir spreche, so werfe ich ihnen vor, daß sie überhaupt nicht über sich selber nachdenken,” Zürcher Poetikvorlesung (I): Über autobiographisches Schreiben, Das Gesicht wiederfinden: Über Schreiben, Schriftsteller und Judentum, 39. “Meistens sprachen wir von unserer Herkunft, von unseren Eltern, woher sie kamen und wie sie vor den Nazis geflüchtet waren. Ihre Emigrationsrouten und Erlebnisse in den fremden Ländern waren wie Mythen unserer Kindheit und unseres Lebens überhaupt, wie die Irrfahrten des Odysseus; Legenden, tausendmal erzählt.” 55.

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lated in Robert Menasse’s novel Wings of Stone (2000, Selige Zeiten, brüchige Welt, 1991): The exile of parents means exile for the next generation, too, and they are in exile wherever they are. Here or there makes not a jot of difference. The question is: Can something come from exile? And the answer to that was provided on many occasions a long time ago.34

Marianne Hirsch likewise details the diasporic experience of children who cannot feel at home in a place their parents left. The children of exiled survivors, although they have not themselves lived through the trauma of banishment and the destruction of home, remain always marginal or exiled, always in the diaspora. “Home” is always elsewhere, even for those who return to Vienna, Berlin, Paris, or Cracow, because the cities to which they can return are no longer those in which their parents had lived before the genocide, but are instead the cities where the genocide happened and from which they and their memory have been expelled.35

While Honigmann shares the experience of emigration with other children of exiled parents, it is important that her narrator in the novel recognizes the legacy of exile precisely at the time when she returns to Germany from abroad and decides to continue her father’s writing. As Christina Guenther puts it, “she, thus, embraces self-imposed and empowering uprootedness—physical exile from her cultural and geographical site of origin—as a necessity for spiritual survival.”36 Hence, the narrator’s decision to leave the GDR, the country to which her parents had immigrated, is not only a departure from her parents but also a return, as she consciously repeats and embraces her parents’ path.

34

35 36

“Das Exil der Eltern bedeutet auch Exil für die nächste Generation, und die ist im Exil, egal, wo sie ist. Da oder dort, das ist doch ganz egal. Die Frage ist: kann im Exil etwas entstehen? Und die Antwort wurde doch schon längst vielfach gegeben.” Robert Menasse, Selige Zeiten, brüchige Welt, Salzburg: Residenz, 1991, 121. Translation from Robert Menasse, Wings of Stone, trans. David Bryer, London: Calder, 2000, 98. Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today 17.4 (Winter 1996): 659-86, 662. Christina Guenther, “Exile and the Construction of Identity in Barbara Honigmann’s Trilogy of Diaspora,” Comparative Literature Studies 40.2 (2003): 215-31, 222.

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Delineating Jewish Identity in a Larger Context: Zohara’s Journey, Damals, dann und danach (The Past and What Came After), and Alles, alles Liebe! (Dear All) Honigmann’s third novel, Zohara’s Journey (2003, Soharas Reise, 1996), attests to the author’s broadened perspectives after emigration in that it goes beyond her former themes of parental separation and GermanJewish relationships after the Holocaust. Zohara’s Journey is Honigmann’s first text that is set after German reunification, though surprisingly Honigmann never mentions the GDR (as in her other, more autobiographical novels), and turns her attention to France’s colonial history rather than German reunification. Karen Remmler, however, draws a parallel between the novel’s thematic focus on the effects of colonialist oppression and the so-called colonization of the GDR, arguing that the novel deals with Germany in less direct form.37 Zohara’s Journey also turns away from the personal, direct aftereffects of the Holocaust to illustrate the complex relations between contemporary Jewish communities, in particular Ashkenazim and Sephardim cultures. Taking place in Strasbourg, the novel depicts the friendship between the narrator Sohara, a religious Sephardic Jew from Algeria, and Frau Kahn, an assimilated German-Jewish Holocaust survivor who refuses to return to Germany. Though both women have distinctly different perspectives and cultural backgrounds, they share the experience of immigrating to France, an ostensibly neutral country that nevertheless has been marred by its history, both colonialist oppression and collaboration with the Nazis. By adopting the perspective of an orthodox immigrant woman who sought refuge from Northern Africa in France, Honigmann extends her concerns with contemporary Jewish life beyond the Holocaust, indeed linking the Holocaust to other instances of colonialist oppression and genocide. According to Remmler, this broadened perspective denotes Honigmann’s refusal to represent Jews exclusively as victims of the Holocaust: “Dichotomies between Germans and 37

“The colonial history of France and the Algerian war of liberation function respectively as stand-ins for Germany’s short colonial history and the postcolonial relationship between the Soviet Union and the GDR. Even though the GDR is not named and there are no biographical indications of Honigmann’s past, ‘Zohara’s Journey’ could be interpreted as a reflection of the experiences of GDR citizens after unification.” [“Die Kolonialgeschichte Frankreichs und der algerische Befreiungskrieg fungieren als eine Verschiebung der kurzen Kolonialgeschichte Deutschlands und das postkoloniale Verhältnis [sic] zwischen der Sowjetunion und der DDR. Obgleich die DDR nicht genannt wird und biographische Hinweise auf Honigmanns Vergangenheit fehlen, könnte ‘Soharas Reise’ als eine Reflektion für die Erfahrungen von DDR Bürgern nach der Vereinigung gelten.”] Karen Remmler, “Orte des Eingedenkens in den Werken Barbara Honigmanns,” 46-47. Translations are my own.

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Jews, French and Germans, victims and perpetrators are questioned and represented as historically constructed and contingent.”38 In fact, Honigmann illustrates with empathy both Sephardim and Ashkenazim cultures, delineating Jewish identity shaped by the experience of diaspora rather than the Holocaust alone. Damals, dann und danach (1999, The Past and What Came After) traces in nine openly autobiographical essays the family’s history over four generations, this time from the vantage point of distance: after Honigmann had lived in France for more than a decade, after Germany’s reunification and its immediate aftermath, and after several years after the death of both of her parents. The collection represents an important link between A Love Made Out of Nothing and Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (A Chapter of My Life), for the essays connect Honigmann’s relationship to her father and her father’s history with a reconsideration of the relationship to her mother who had remained in the background in previous works. The book’s first brief narrative, “Ich bin nicht Anne” (I am not Anne), summarizes Honigmann’s difficulties with German-Jewish relationships after the war. In the text, the narrator stands accused of being a Jewish woman named Anne whom her East Berlin neighbor, a habitual drunkard, claims to have hidden during the Nazi years. Eulogizing her act of courage in what she calls “the bad times,”39 the German neighbor blames Anne, the narrator, and, by extension, all Jews, for abandoning her and being ungrateful. The narrator suffers not only from her neighbor’s open hostility when soon thereafter her other neighbors, too, begin to discriminate against her by carefully guarding their words and avoiding her whenever possible. In the narrative, anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism are imperceptibly intertwined so that the narrator finds herself unable to escape the infamous “negative symbiosis” that casts Germans and Jews as opposites. By illustrating the impossibility of asserting Jewish identity without stigmatization, the text confirms and elucidates Honigmann’s decision to leave Germany. If the first text establishes Honigmann’s uneasiness as a Jew in Germany, the essay “Selbstporträt als Jüdin” (Self-Portrait of a Jewish Woman) defines her identity as a Jew in France.

38 39

“Dichotomien zwischen Deutschen und Juden, Franzosen und Deutschen, Opfern und Tätern werden in Frage gestellt und als historisch konstruiert und bedingt dargestellt.” See Remmler, “Orte des Eingedenkens in den Werken Barbara Honigmanns,” 50. “Der schlimmen Zeit,” 7. Page numbers refer to the following edition: Barbara Honigmann, Damals, dann und danach (1999), München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002. All translations are my own.

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My father and my mother are dead. My role as the “child of my parents” has run its course; I myself have to move to the front line of the generational formation, where nobody stands between me and death any longer.40

And if A Love Made Out of Nothing was still dominated by the narrator’s feelings of her father’s rejection, the narrator of “Selbstporträt als Jüdin” uses the death of both parents as a point of departure to delineate an independent identity. Seeking to preserve a history of which much has been lost, she places herself within the family’s genealogy and widens her perspective to include other family members. According to Honigmann, the publication of A Love Made Out of Nothing sparked mail from relatives that helped her reconstruct the paternal family tree: “suddenly after my father’s death, past generations had risen again from the dead, telling a coherent story and easing the state of utter homelessness that my father has left to me.”41 With such broadened perspective Honigmann is able to reconnect with her larger family, even tracing her heritage back to the assimilated German-Jewish intellectual and writer Heinrich Heine who represents what both she admires and criticizes in her forefathers. In the volume’s central essay “On My Great-Grandfather, My Grandfather, My Father, and Me” (1995, “Von meinem Urgrossvater, meinem Grossvater, meinem Vater und von mir”), Honigmann continues to write herself into her forefathers’ history. Beginning with her great-grandfather David Honigmann, one of the first German reform Jews, to her grandfather Georg Gabriel Honigmann, a successful professor of medicine, to her father, Georg Friedrich Wolfgang Honigmann, she characterizes her family’s patriarchal history as a step-by-step move toward assimilation. But while her ancestors attempted to adopt German culture in lieu of Jewish religion, Honigmann puts these attempts to rest. Along with other German-Jewish writers of her generation, she declares the history of Jewish assimilation as a failure and instead chooses to learn about Judaism from its texts rather than from returning to familial roots. Quoting Dan Diner’s much-discussed term of a German-Jewish negative symbiosis (15), Honigmann likewise sees German-Jewish relationships after the Holocaust as tainted in that Germans and Jews cannot interact without being reminded of the past. In contrast to her ancestors who made Germany their physical 40 41

“Mein Vater und meine Mutter sind tot. Die Rolle ‘Kind meiner Eltern’ ist ausgespielt, ich muß selber in die vordere Reihe in der Kette der Generationen treten, wo zwischen dem Tod und mir niemand mehr steht.” 11 “Plötzlich waren nach dem Tod meines Vaters vergangene Generationen wieder auferstanden, die eine zusammenhängende Geschichte erzählten und den Zustand der völligen Unbehaustheit, den mein Vater mir hinterlassen hat, milderten.” 34

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home, she decides to make her home outside of Germany’s borders, yet remains intrinsically linked to Germany by writing in German and publishing with German publishers. Although Honigmann aligns herself within her family heritage, she chooses to discontinue its traditions and uses the reconstruction of her ancestors’ history to precisely set herself apart from that history. Keeping her fathers’ family name and continuing their logocentric, intellectual, and religious heritage, Honigmann emphasizes at the same time that she is a woman writer not interested in assimilation, thus putting an end to the patriarchal tradition. While her parents left the Jewish community and rarely spoke about past experiences, Honigmann views her heritage as a magical secret that beckons to be solved, a myth that needs to be explored: Our meetings had a conspirational air, and we read the bible in Hebrew like a forbidden book. The crazier all others declared us to be, the more heroic we felt, and we created a new myth for ourselves: the reclaiming of our Jewish identity out of the void.42

Revisiting the themes of Roman von einem Kinde, Honigmann once more details her decisions to become a Jew, a German émigré, and a mother, but the essay departs from the earlier naïve tone and looks back at the GDR past with distance, even irony. Other essays of the collection abscond from the German-Jewish theme and are evidence of new connections and a larger context that Honigmann encounters when interacting with Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and Eastern European Jews in Strasbourg. The essay “Hinter der Grande Schul” (Behind the Grande School) explores her confrontation with orthodox, practicing, and assimilated Jews, while the essay “Meine sefardischen Freundinnen” (My Sephardic Girlfriends) elaborates on her acquaintance with Sephardim and Ashkenazim Jews, a theme that Honigmann already developed in Zohara’s Journey. The latter essay also corresponds to Honigmann’s painting “Mes Amies et moi” (1997) on the cover in which five women sit at a table in front of a window at night, drinking tea, and eating—presumably—the Moroccan pastries described in the essay, while reading a Hebrew text. In 2002, Honigmann painted a sequel, “Mes Amies et moi II,” in which the same women are sitting in different attire at a different table in a different home, this time without cookies and tea, but still reading Hebrew texts. The essay explains that Honigmann and her friends 42

“Unsere Treffen hatten etwas Konspiratives und wir lasen die Bibel auf hebräisch wie ein verbotenes Buch. Für je verrückter uns alle anderen erklärten, um so heroischer kamen wir uns vor und schufen uns einen neuen Mythos: die Wiedereroberung unseres Judentums aus dem Nichts.” 29.

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must negotiate between different beliefs, nationalities, languages, and cultures when two Ashkenazim and three Sephardim women come together to translate the Torah and Talmud into French, German, Arabic, Italian, and Spanish. In a difficult balancing act, the friends try to decipher an incomprehensible text, endeavoring to transfer ancient wisdom to modern times. By returning to the roots of Judaism, Honigmann affirms and seeks to renew the core of Jewish tradition rather than merely appropriate Jewish customs.43 Since to Honigmann, the utopia of a German-Jewish symbiosis has proven disastrous, she embraces a state of being that leaves her uprooted and divided, crossing back and forward between a German and a Jewish identity. Her life after the Holocaust, as a Jew and a German writer, has become a “double life.”44 In her acceptance speech for the Heinrich von Kleist-Preis (2000), Honigmann repeated her assertion of the “double life”45 and elaborates on it. Conceding to the Kleistian dictum of “the skewed, the ungraceful, the impossible, the dissonant,” Honigmann terms herself a “border crosser”46 who cannot find unity but goes back and forth between her multiple identities. In hindsight, she admits that she had initially hoped to reconcile these identities, which may help to explain the importance of nostalgia in Honigmann’s earlier work, in particular Roman von einem Kinde. In rewriting her turn to Judaism, however, Honigmann accepts that she is torn, acknowledging that her family’s Jewish roots were severed many generations ago.47 While much scholarly attention has focused on Honigmann as a second-generation German-Jewish writer, her identification as a mother is less often discussed. Yet in Damals, dann und danach, the essay “Selbstporträt als Mutter” (Self-Portrait as a Mother) clearly corresponds to the previous essay “Selbstporträt als Jüdin” (Self-Portrait as a Jewish Woman), not only in its name but also in the experience of “double life,” 43 44 45

46 47

See Honigmann’s distinction between Jewish folklore and her turn to Judaism, and Petra Renneke’s discussion of the distinction in Renneke, 7. “Doppelleben,” 72. “Doppelleben,” 158. Page numbers refer to the following edition: Barbara Honigmann, “Das Schiefe, das Ungraziöse, das Unmögliche, das Unstimmige: Rede zur Verleihung des Kleist-Preises,” Das Gesicht wiederfinden: Über Schreiben, Schriftsteller und Judentum, Wien: Carl Hanser, 2006, 151-65. Translations are my own. “Das Schiefe, das Ungraziöse, das Unmögliche, das Unstimmige,” “Grenzgänger,” 160. To that end, Jutta Gsoels-Lorenzen points out, “Honigmann’s first-person narrators, like many of her peers, pose question after question, but receive evasive replies or no replies at all.” Jutta Gsoels-Lorenzen, “‘Un drame interdit d’accés’: Remembrance and the Prohibited Past in Barbara Honigmann’s Generational Texts,” The German Quarterly 80.3 (Summer 2007): 369-90, 374.

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as Honigmann seeks to negotiate between her life as a writer and a mother. While the first essay thematically explores the split between German and Jewish identities, the second essay details the narrator’s difficulties with connecting her life as an artist to the banality of everyday life. Yet Honigmann seeks to incorporate everyday tasks and her responsibilities as a mother with an understanding of herself as an artist. Illustrating such a process of negotiation, the book’s last essay, “Ein seltener Tag” (A Rare Day), illustrates the first-person narrator’s mood swings, household tasks, and her artistic drive of a single day. The focus on family and homework is reminiscent of Christa Wolf, in particular her latest diary project One Day a Year 1960-2000, but also resembles Wibke Bruhns’s depiction of everyday life in My Father’s Country: The Story of a German Family. In Damals, dann und danach Honigmann also turns to her mother’s and grandmother’s pasts with more detail than her previous works. The third essay of the collection, “Gräber in London” (Graves in London), begins with a letter translated from Hungarian in which her grandmother asked her mother to make arrangements for her grave. As the letter is one of very few keepsakes that her mother preserved, it hints at the gap in Honigmann’s maternal history that becomes even more apparent when Honigmann, together with her sons, visits London to see the graves of her mother’s parents. As it turns out, even though they know the exact location of the grandparents’ graves, neither a gravestone nor a name can be found. Honigmann’s son can only exclaim with incredulity that there is nothing (37), similarly puzzled like Maron’s son when witnessing the absence of Jewish history in Poland.48 When juxtaposing the essays “On My Great-Grandfather, My Grandfather, My Father, and Me,” and “Gräber in London,” it becomes obvious that Honigmann is able to reconstruct her paternal genealogy but her mother’s remains hidden and enigmatic. The other essay that focuses on her mother’s past, “Der Untergang von Wien” (The Downfall of Vienna) also begins with a grave, namely her mother’s grave at the Jewish cemetery in Vienna. The graveyard visit recalls similar incidents in previous texts, for instance the narrator’s visit to her father’s grave in A Love Made Out of Nothing. As with her father before, her mother’s death prompts an inquiry into her life and her heritage, but unlike her paternal history, her mother is steeped in myth and secrecy. Honigmann reveals that her mother’s first name existed in several variations, that she spent in multiple countries with different lovers and husbands, that she 48

In Pavel’s Letters, Monika Maron and her son travel to Poland in an effort to find pieces of evidence of her grandparents’ life. After realizing that signs of Jewish existence have disappeared, the narrator’s son wonders, stunned, how he can capture this absence on film. See my chapter “Images and Imagination: Monika Maron’s Pavel’s Letters” in part III.

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spoke Hungarian, English, and Viennese German but rarely mentioned the past. An important link between earlier and later work, “Der Untergang von Wien” outlines Honigmann’s travels to some of the places where her mother had lived and her visits with acquaintances, such as her mother’s former lover in Amsterdam. The essay also mentions several incidents described in more detail in Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (2004), like her mother’s marriage to the Cambridge student who later became a Soviet spy. In continuation of “Gräber in London,” Honigmann also explores the lives of her maternal grandparents, Israel and Gisella Kohlmann who moved from a Hungarian village to Austria until they had to leave Vienna in 1939 and moved to a Jewish neighborhood in London. Unlike her paternal grandparents, the Kohlmanns kept their Jewish heritage, thus offering Honigmann a wholly different Jewish tradition and identification. Indeed, the essay concludes with a short epilogue after Honigmann traveled to Israel, the country where she claims to have met her mother after her death in a dream. Honigmann’s following epistolary novel, Alles, alles Liebe! (2000, Dear All), considers an artists’ protest in the GDR in the 1970s while also explicating the State’s marginalization of Jews and silencing of the Holocaust. Once again Honigmann focuses on larger contexts and connections, turning her attention to both the Nazi and the GDR past as it affects German Jews of the first and second generation. In Alles, alles Liebe!, published in times amidst Ostalgie (nostalgia for East Germany), Honigmann formulates her criticism of GDR politics most pointedly. Parting from any kind of GDR nostalgia, she turns to a different kind of utopia, that of Romanticism. Consisting of letters that a group of friends write each other, the epistolary novel harks back to Roman von einem Kinde but is even more firmly grounded and unabashed in the Romantic tradition. The protagonists in Alles, alles Liebe! not only admit their indebtedness to Romantic art but celebrate creative freedom, friendship, and uprootedness as means to oppose the repressive, dreary regime. In this way, main protagonist Anna Herzfeld uses the letters she writes to her lover Leon, her mother, her friends and acquaintances as means of surviving the bleak winter months at the provincial theater of Prenzlau, in the midst of oppressive times before Wolf Biermann’s expatriation in November 1976. Petra Fiero suggests that Honigmann’s rediscovery of Romanticism harkens back to Christa Wolf’s turn to Romantic women writers in the late 1970s in order to articulate her feminist utopian vision. Honigmann, however, not only links the Romantic tradition to political opposition but also to her identity as a German and Jewish woman writer. Connecting German Romanticism with the Jewish Diaspora, the work curiously evokes an ideal of a Ger-

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man-Jewish symbiosis, even if Honigmann’s previous essays insist on the impossibility of such harmonious cultural synchronization. Although much of Honigmann’s work is concerned with the infamous GermanJewish symbiosis and its negative after the Holocaust, Honigmann does not seem not stuck in such binary context as her works Zohara’s Journey and, in particular, Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben proceed in another direction.49 The Acceptance of the Elusive: Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (A Chapter of My Life) Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (2004, A Chapter of My Life) at first sight differs from Honigmann’s previous works. Instead of one of Honigmann’s paintings, the book’s cover shows a photograph of Litzy Kohlmann from the 1930s. The text is not designated as a novel; it reads much like a memoir and a biography, depicting in factual and neutral tone the life of her mother, Litzy Kohlmann (1910-1991), especially her years of marriage to the British spy Kim Philby who worked as a double agent for the Soviet Secret Service (KGB) in Britain and Spain before fleeing to Moscow. While the narrative departs from Romantic yearning, there are numerous connections to previous works, especially to the essays in Damals, dann und danach. Honigmann already maintained in “Gräber in London” and “Der Untergang von Wien” that her mother embodied ambiguity and uncertainty, but Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben lends much more detail to such assertion. Honigmann divulges that her mother’s name existed in various variations, from Alice to Litzy to Lizzy to Lisa, depending on the country she resided in and the person she was with—in fact, Honigmann herself changed the spelling of her mother’s name from Lizzy in Damals, dann und danach to Litzy in Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben. Speaking Hungarian, Viennese German, British English, French, and even Italian, the mother knew languages and cultures foreign to the daughter. Honigmann also conveys that her mother willfully changed dates and other data, moving the day of her birth 49

In this way, I would negate Remmler’s question “Or does her work remain tangled up in this (negative) symbiosis that is marked by war and the Shoah? Could it be that Honigmann’s work is carrying on precisely what she is fighting against in her essays?” [“Oder bleibt ihr Werk in dieser durch den Krieg und die Shoah gezeichneten (negativen) Symbiose verhaftet? Kann es sein, daß das Werk Honigmanns genau das fortsetzt, wogegen sie in ihren Essays ankämpft?”] Karen Remmler, “Orte des Eingedenkens in den Werken Barbara Honigmanns,” 58.

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from May 2 to May 1, fluctuating the dates of her weddings and divorces, and omitting in official documents her marriage to Kim Philby altogether. According to Honigmann, it is even impossible to determine the actual color of her mother’s hair because she colored it so often and in so many shades that she could not remember its original tone herself. The contradictions, secrets, and lies point to a profound loss of knowledge that cannot be recuperated. Perhaps this is also the reason why Honigmann feels the need to be as honest and objective as possible, foregoing additional fictionalization.

Book cover Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (2004) © Barbara Honigmann

Instead of attempting to excavate her mother’s past, Honigmann surrenders to the uncertainties, knowing that this approach alone befits her mother. In stark contrast to the essay “Der Untergang von Wien,” where Honigmann asserts “only after her death did I do what in her eyes was improper, and went to the old places that I imagined she had kept secret from me,”50 she concedes in Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben: “I did not travel, drive, or go anywhere. Did not search for, find, or see any documents. I neither spoke with anybody nor asked anyone questions. I could have

50

“Nach ihrem Tod erst habe ich das in ihren Augen Ungehörige getan und bin selbst an die alten Orte gegangen, die sie, wie ich mir einbildete, vor mir verheimlichte,” 101.

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done so but didn’t.”51 Whereas Honigmann’s previous autobiographical narrators (for instance the narrator in A Love Made Out of Nothing) included travel to former places as an essential element in their quest of coming closer to their parents’ past, the narrator in Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben respects the privacy of her mother, even if it comes at the cost of not knowing her history. Though Honigmann could have written a suspense thriller about the love affair between the worldly Austrian-Jewish Communist and the British double agent, she shies away from sensationalizing her mother’s life, assuming that digging up this history would be against her mother’s will. In contradiction to this parental deference, Honigmann’s decision to publish documents, letters, and even a photograph of her mother along with her own observations and comments proves that the daughter does not completely obey her mother’s request to keep secrets. Apparently, Litzy Kohlmann was ambivalent about whether her daughter should publicize her life story or not. In a 1988 letter, she begged her daughter to keep quiet even if asked by the press about Philby, and assured Honigmann that she did not know anything about Philby’s involvement. The letter closes with the words “this communication is only for you.”52 Conversely, Honigmann claims that her mother visited her in Strasbourg a year before her death at age eighty, disclosing the infamous “chapter of my life” and asking her to publish it in the London Times or New York Times (78). With Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben, Honigmann violates both of these wishes. She publishes Litzy’s letter instead of keeping it to herself, commenting sarcastically “Which is the truth. That I know nothing, absolutely nothing.”53 But she also writes a book about her mother’s life that goes far beyond the facts of her involvement with Kim Philby. While her mother hated remembering, objecting in the above letter “It weights heavily on me that the past catches up with us, no matter what,”54 Honigmann decides to publicly remember her mother, writing down what she knows and does not know. Born in Vienna in 1910, Litzy Kohlmann spent her childhood years in Southwestern Hungary, on the homestead that belonged to her Jewish 51

52 53 54

“Ich bin nirgends hingereist, hingefahren, hingegangen. Habe keine Dokumente gesucht, gefunden, gesehen. Ich habe mit niemanden gesprochen und keinem Menschen Fragen gestellt. Ich hätte es tun können, aber ich habe es nicht getan,” 141. Page numbers refer to the following edition: Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben. München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2004. All translations are my own. “Diese Mitteilung ist nur für Dich,” 137. “Entspricht ja auch der Wahrheit. Daß ich nichts weiß, absolut nichts,” 138. “Es bedrückt mich sehr, daß man doch von der Vergangenheit eingeholt wird,” 137.

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parents, and the daughter remembers that her father explained his wife’s unpredictability and capriciousness with the origins that he termed “from the ‘Balkans.’”55 To Honigmann, her mother’s native Hungarian tongue remains just one of the incomprehensible and foreign aspects of her mother’s life that she cannot come to know. The family’s Jewish heritage remains also quite intangible in that Honigmann only knows that her maternal grandparents were devoted Jews who did not attempt to assimilate like her paternal grandparents. Litzy Kohlmann lived in Vienna in the early 1930s with her first husband, a devoted Zionist who later immigrated to Palestine, while meeting her lover and second husband, Kim Philby, a Cambridge student who sought to aid a Viennese revolution. After revolutionary plans failed, Philby fled to the U.K., marrying Litzy so that she, too, could escape persecution in Austria. In England, Philby began to work for the KGB and later assumed a (fake) position as a journalist in Spain, while Litzy lived off his salary in Paris with her lover, Pieter. While Honigmann’s previous essay “Der Untergang von Wien” elucidates her trip to Amsterdam and meeting with Pieter, she recalls the incident in Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (89-93), noting that Pieter felt similarly closed off from her mother even though he loved her dearly. When the war broke out, Litzy returned with her husband to the U.K. where she divorced Philby, then met and later married Georg Honigmann. After Honigmann’s father returned to East Berlin, Litzy followed in spring 1946. Though rather unhappy in East Germany, she continued to reside there until her daughter moved to France. In 1984, Litzy resettled once again in Vienna where she lived until her death in 1991. Philby remained in the U.K. until he was discovered and forced to seek refuge in Moscow in 1963. After briefly sketching Litzy’s childhood, Honigmann relinquishes her narrative voice and describes her mother’s favorite years in Vienna and Paris by interweaving Litzy’s voice with that of friends and lovers, letters and documents. This narrative technique draws attention not only to Honigmann’s insufficient knowledge but also to the elliptic and elusive nature of her mother’s language “with which she simultaneously made me an accomplice and excluded me from the story.”56 The lack of Honigmann’s own voice also hints at the distance between mother and daughter, not to mention the daughter’s persistent hurt. As Honigmann casually states, her mother resented being called “Mutti” [mommy], and welcomed the daughter’s move out of the house. In fact, it was her father who wanted a 55 56

“Vom ‘Balkan,’” 38. “Mit der sie mich gleichzeitig zur Mitwisserin machte und aus der Geschichte ausschloß,” 75.

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child and went through considerable efforts to convince his wife to become pregnant. Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben lacks the longing of A Love Made Out of Nothing, and Honigmann divulges little about the emotional impact of her mother’s secrecy. One exception is her mother’s failure to care for her parents’ graves, the only time when Honigmann questions her mother’s decisions. In a painful sequel to her earlier essay “Gräber in London” that begins with a translated letter from her grandmother in which she requested, “I would like to be laid into Papa’s grave, if that is possible.”57 Honigmann uses a different translation in Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben, quoting her grandmother’s request for “a decent grave, together with Papa, if that is possible”58 along with other sentences not found in the essay. While the earlier essay depicts Honigmann and her sons’ failed quest to find the grandparents’ graves, Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben reveals that it was Litzy who was to blame for the missing graves, as she evidently denied her parents’ last wishes by not putting headstones on their graves. In a flabbergasted response, Honigmann asks herself, “Why didn’t she take care of this before her departure from England? Why did she do this to her parents? Why didn’t she ever tell me about this?”59 Yet she immediately seeks to explain her mother’s behavior, reasoning, “Perhaps my mother was one of those people who have to betray what they love and who express their bond and close affinity in just such a betrayal.”60 In this, Honigmann also seems to entertain the possibility of being herself a victim of her mother’s betrayal. Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben, however, refrains from placing blame and seeks to accept her mother’s untruthfulness and disloyalty with compassion. While in her earlier work, Honigmann portrayed herself as a subject torn between multiple cultures and identities, in Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben, she increasingly accepts ambiguity. In addition, her voice seems more confident, devoid of Romantic pretension and yearning. A child gains a clearer view of its parents after their death, because then that view is no longer obstructed by their greatness or shortcomings, and this change of perspective brings about a kind of rearrangement, but no epiphany. Even after 57 58 59 60

“Ich möchte gerne mit ins Grab von Papa gelegt werden, wenn das möglich ist,” “Gräber in London,” Damals, dann und danach, 19. “Ein anständiges Grab, mit dem Papa zusammen, wenn das möglich ist,” Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben, 110. “Warum hat sie das nicht vor ihrer Abreise aus England in Ordnung gebracht? Warum hat sie das ihren Eltern angetan? Warum hat sie mir nie etwas davon gesagt?” 110. “Vielleicht gehörte meine Mutter zu den Menschen, die, was sie lieben, verraten müssen und gerade in diesem Verrat ihre Bindung und enge Zugehörigkeit ausdrücken,” 110.

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her death my mother has remained as incomprehensible and contradictory to me as she used to be, when father would complain about these qualities.61

Instead of holding her mother accountable for her failures, or craving for parental love like the narrator in A Love Made Out of Nothing, Honigmann seeks to accept her mother, acknowledging that her chaotic, secretive, and nomadic lifestyle was a response to the historical circumstances and, presumably, the only way she could survive. Indeed, the text ends with ambiguity when the narrator looks at a photograph of a man whom her mother identifies as her father, Israel Kohlmann, even though Honigmann’s father vehemently rejects this claim. When I look closely at the man on the photograph I believe I can see a similarity to his daughter, my mother, and even to me and my sons. I am not sure whether I am gathering this from the photo or reading it into it. Perhaps it is my grandfather. Perhaps, but perhaps not.62

The description recalls Monika Maron’s Pavel’s Letters, resembling both the narrator’s questioning of her mother’s memories with the words “perhaps, but perhaps not,”63 and her uncertainty of whether her great-grandfather is smiling or not.64 In the concluding words, Honigmann (like Maron) acknowledges the contradictions and the impossibility of ascertaining her past, but beyond that she admits that her own desires may influence her interpretations and assumptions. Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben connects Honigmann’s inquiry into her mother’s past with an inquiry into the GDR past. While both A Love Made Out of Nothing and Alles, alles Liebe! refer to the State’s suppression of Jewish culture, Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben more openly criticizes GDR politics and historiography. In A Love Made Out of Nothing, Honigmann framed the narrator’s turn to Judaism as a response to a generational conflict, and depicted her father as a representative of an oppressive regime who sup61

62

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“Nach ihrem Tod gewinnt das Kind einen freieren Blick auf die Eltern, weil dieser Blick nicht mehr von deren Größe oder Kleinheit verstellt ist, und dieser Perspektivwechsel bringt eine Art Umordnung mit sich, aber keine Offenbarung. Auch nach ihrem Tod ist meine Mutter so unverständlich und widersprüchlich für mich geblieben, wie es mein Vater so oft beklagt hat.” 141. “Wenn ich mir den Mann auf dem Foto genau ansehe, glaube ich eine Ähnlichkeit mit seiner Tochter, meiner Mutter, und sogar mit mir und meinen Söhnen erkennen zu können. Ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob ich das aus dem Foto heraussehe oder ob ich es in das Foto hineinsehe. Vielleicht ist es mein Großvater. Vielleicht aber auch nicht.” 141-42. Pavel’s Letters, 31. “Vielleicht; vielleicht aber auch nicht,” Pawels Briefe, 50. See my analysis in “Family Photos” in the chapter “Images and Imagination: Monika Maron’s Pavel’s Letters” in part III.

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ported anti-Semitic measures despite them being directed against himself. In Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben, however, Honigmann reveals that it was not by choice that her parents and many of their friends chose to abandon the Jewish community and kept quiet about their Jewish heritage, devoting themselves instead to the ideals propagated by the state. While initially privileged as “persecuted by the Nazi regime,”65 both for being Jewish and for being longtime Communists, her parents soon learned that privileges were contingent on party politics. The anti-Semitic climate that originated in Moscow in the early 1950s soon arrived in the GDR, forcing Jewish citizens to flee or renounce their Jewish identity. In this way, the GDR State rewarded politically persecuted individuals with higher pensions than Jewish victims, and in 1951 forced Honigmann’s mother to choose between her membership in the Jewish community or the party. Only in the last years of her life did Litzy Kohlmann reenter the Jewish community in Vienna, choosing to be buried at the Jewish cemetery. Unlike her previous works, Honigmann does not oppose her parents but uses the example of her mother as a Jew and a committed socialist to rewrite Jews into GDR postwar history. Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben likens Litzy’s concealment of her private memories to the State’s public regulation of Jewish memory. By examining how Jewish persecution was silenced both publicly and privately, the book complements and expands Honigmann’s oeuvre concerned with the recovery and creation of her Jewish heritage. Beginning with her emigration from Germany and continuing with her becoming a mother, her visual art, her conception of a Jewish identity in France, her reconstruction of parents’ and grandparents’ lives, and her integration of Jews in GDR historiography, Honigmann’s work has written and rewritten many faces, including her own.

65

“Verfolgte des Naziregimes,” 122.

Wibke Bruhns’s Father-Portrait: My Father’s Country: The Story of a German Family Bruhns’s Plea for Understanding My Father’s Country constitutes Wibke Bruhns’s attempt to overcome the distance to her father (executed in August 1944 as a co-conspirator in the July 20 plot), filling the missing memories with stippled information and pure speculation. As Bruhns sets out to learn about her father and his upbringing, she repeatedly finds that the image which begins to emerge is different than her previous expectations. Already the book’s first pages explicate this process: The first page displays two overlapping photographs that both fit a small picture frame, while the text opens with the words “I’ve found a photograph of my father.”1 Rather than referring to a picture she discovered leafing through albums or letters, Bruhns elaborates that the photograph of her father literally had to be uncovered since it was shielded by another photograph of her mother as a smiling child in a cute dress. For decades, the picture hung in her mother’s bedroom and later sat on Bruhns’s desk until one day it coincidentally fell out of its frame, exposing the underlying photograph of her father taken when he was in his thirties, and looking profoundly sad. As Bruhns reasons, her mother must have selected and cropped her father’s photograph for the small oval frame but later decided to cover it with her own picture. Only belatedly can Bruhns reflect on the apparent contradictions and inconsistencies: why did her mother choose such a heartbreaking image of her husband instead of one that represented his allegedly humorous personality? And why did she later cover his image with her own? As the double image suggests, the work of covering and uncovering sets the tone for the entire text, as Bruhns repeatedly learns that her family history was different than it seemed. While her parents’ marriage seemed exemplary, it was 1

“Ich habe ein Foto von meinem Vater gefunden,” 7. Page numbers refer to the following edition: Wibke Bruhns, Meines Vaters Land: Geschichte einer deutschen Familie, München: Econ, 2004. Translations from Wibke Bruhns, My Father’s Country: The Story of a German Family, trans. Shaun Whiteside. New York: Knopf, forthcoming 2008. With many thanks to Wibke Bruhns who provided me with translated passages from the English unpublished manuscript.

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badly damaged by her father’s affairs. And while the Klamroth family was educated and well-read, it quickly succumbed to the spell of Hitler and the prospect of military domination. Her father’s involvement in the resistance, her mother’s silence, and Bruhns’s own amnesia all comprise acts of covering and uncovering. And even though Bruhns wishes she could conclude her text with a happy ending, her father’s death and her mother’s way of living was different from what she had hoped.

Bruhns’s Father and Mother (6) © Wibke Bruhns

Born in September 1938, Bruhns claims that her memory only reaches back to April 8, 1945, when Allied forces bombed Halberstadt and destroyed eighty-two percent of the old town. As a six-year-old, Bruhns experienced the bombing primarily as the destruction of her Easter eggs when a chandelier smashed into the Easter wreath on the dining room table. According to Bruhns, her memory began with outrage over the wrecked eggs symbolizing the unpredictable devastation that invaded her home on a Sunday afternoon, right at the dining room table, whereas the childhood memories of her town, home, and family, in particular of her father were buried deep in the rubble. The adult, however, finds the child’s perception highly insufficient. Looking back, Bruhns does not recognize her father’s voice, posture and gestures, and even claims to have never heard him speak to her. Left with the desire for physical memories

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of his voice, his touch, for him, Bruhns dedicated herself in her sixties to the difficult task of reconstructing her father’s life beyond preconceived categories. Bruhns grew up in Berlin, Stockholm, and London, and attended boarding school in Northern Germany. After studying history and political science, she went on to pursue a career as a journalist and TV anchorwoman. Quitting her first job as an intern for the sensationalist BILD newspaper (she did not agree with the paper’s conservative agenda), Bruhns became known as Germany’s first female newscaster, presenting the heute news for the ZDF channel from 1971 to 1973. During this time she worked for Willy Brandt’s 1972 election campaign. In the 1980s, Bruhns reported international news from Jerusalem and Washington, D.C. while working as a correspondent for the newsmagazine Stern. A report on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., for the magazine GEO earned her the prestigious Egon-Erwin-Kisch journalism prize in 1989. After the years abroad, Bruhns returned to television, working for the private VOX station and later directing the culture division of the public Ostdeutscher Rundfunk Brandenburg (ORB) station. In 2000, she acted as a spokesperson at the World Exposition (EXPO) in Hannover. Bruhns currently lives as a freelance writer in Berlin. According to her daughter Meike, her mother had always wanted to write a book about her father, but Bruhns first began to inquire about her father’s past in 1979, thirty-five years after her father’s death, and after she had established herself as a successful journalist. Returning from Israel on a visit to Hamburg, Bruhns watched a documentary on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the failed Hitler assassination, and saw her father, merely five years older than herself at the time, receive his death sentence from the People’s Court [Volksgerichtshof] judge, Roland Freisler. She reacted with utter shock when seeing the trial in moving images for the first time (Hitler had initially ordered the trial be documented on film for propaganda purposes but later sought to destroy the material after public reaction was negative). Despite her feeble memories of her father, Bruhns instinctively recognized herself as his daughter: “his eyes are my eyes; I know that I look like him”2 and began a questioning process that initiated her project. Yet Bruhns began writing her book only after her mother’s death in 1987. Like Klüger, Wolf, and Honigmann had done prior, Bruhns thus delayed publication until after her mother’s death to describe their intricate relationship while respecting privacy and, presumably, to break free 2

“Seine Augen sind meine Augen, ich weiß, daß ich ihm ähnlich sehe,” 13.

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from motherly expectations.3 While Wolf’s narrator mentions her feelings of guilt vis-à-vis her mother surfacing in nightmares, Klüger professes in Still Alive that she did not want to hurt her mother, and Bruhns acknowledges her mother’s repressed pain and anger that she did not want to rekindle. In addition, the delay in time allowed Bruhns to incorporate the extensive inheritance of her mother’s photographs, letters, diary entries, shopping lists, menus, and genealogical tables. Reunification also played a crucial role in the book’s genesis: Only after the fall of the Wall did Bruhns discover the Klamroth family archive in the attic of the Halberstadt Liebfrauen church, where vast records revealed extensive diaries, numerous letters, festschrifts, speeches, songs, and household and business accounts. In the Communist era, the GDR government had been reluctant to admit that there was resistance to Hitler other than communist, and had either downplayed the importance of “bourgeois,” conservative resistance or tried to characterize the members of the July 20 plot as “progressive,” that is, left-leaning.4 In this way, her text is a distinct postwall document, made possible by having access to her family’s records that had been stowed away in East Germany and even Stasi archives. After relatives in East and West added further memories and stories, Bruhns devoted two and a half years to putting the material into book form. The result of this wealth of material, My Father’s Country: The Story of a German Family, connects the history of the Klamroth family in Halberstadt from 1790, German history of the twentieth century, and her mother’s and her own (missing) memories with Bruhns’s analytical voice. If her mother had kept quiet about her husband’s private and public life, Bruhns conversely publishes the family records, dedicating the book to her two daughters in an open attempt to lay bare the family’s secrets. The book quickly attained success, leading the bestseller list of Spiegel magazine for weeks. In 2006, it was awarded the Friedrich-Schiedel prize for literature. A television production of the same title was aired in January 2007 at the RBB station, and a translation is forthcoming. My Father’s Country constitutes Bruhns’s attempt to fill the gaps of memory concerning the war years and also serves as a venue to come closer to a distant father who does not fit the mold of a heroic fighter in 3

4

Though this is never mentioned in the book itself, Bruhns readily acknowledged to have delayed publication in consideration of her relatives, in particular her mother, at a Berlin reading in 2004. See Elke Schubert, “Die Normalität besichtigen: Exemplarisch zeigt Wibke Bruhns den Weg der eigenen Familie ins ‘Dritte Reich,’” Frankfurter Rundschau, April 6, 2004. See the preface to the Third Edition of Peter Hoffmann’s seminal The History of the German Resistance 1933-1945, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1996, xv.

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the resistance. Born in 1898, Hans Georg Klamroth joined the Nazi party in 1933 and later became a member of the SS and a devoted Wehrmacht officer; meanwhile his wife Else Podeus (the daughter of a wealthy factory owner in Wismar) enthusiastically supported the war for German “living space” [Lebensraum], Hitler’s expansionist territorial aims in the East. But as early as 1940 Klamroth sought contact with the Danish resistance; in July 1943 he befriended leading members of the July 20 resistance group. With his marriage deteriorating, marred by his frequent affairs, Klamroth apparently knew of the plans to assassinate Hitler, though his intentions, motivations, and exact role in the assassination remain unclear. According to Bruhns, he never revealed anything about his involvement to his wife or in letters; the Gestapo later confiscated his diaries after 1938. The Freisler court charged Klamroth with knowledge of the conspiracy plans, sentenced him to death, and hung him in August 1944 in BerlinPlötzensee. To Bruhns, the yawning gap that still surrounds her father’s role in the resistance is symptomatic of his general absence. Under the callous Nazi policy of kith and kin, families of the July 20 resistance members were to be punished for they carried, in Himmler’s words, “traitor blood.”5 Accordingly, after Klamroth was killed, the police confiscated the family’s assets (later to be released again by Hitler and Himmler). Bruhns’s nineteen-year-old brother Jochen was expelled from the Wehrmacht and sent to a correctional unit; their sister Barbara was suspended from the University of Vienna and was forced to work in a chemical factory. The family of Klamroth’s cousin and co-conspirator Bernhard Klamroth suffered even more severe repercussions; his father and brothers were sent to jail and his mother detained in a forced labor camp. According to Bruhns, the public castigation did not end with the overthrow of the Nazi regime but extended well into the 1950s: in 1953, when Bruhns (age fifteen) was expelled from the conservative boarding school for wearing pants and disobeying the rules, the school director released her with the remark “No wonder that you have such a bad character. After all, your father was guilty of high treason.”6 Bruhns’s family did not talk about her father. Hurt by her husband’s affairs, Bruhns’s mother sealed her husband’s absence by burning their correspondence, thus effectively erasing his legacy from family memory. Instinctively aware of her mother’s pain and anger over Klamroth’s affairs, Bruhns accepted the loss of family history and must later painstakingly try 5 6

See Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance 1933-1945, 519-20. “Kein Wunder, dass Sie einen so schlechten Charakter haben. Ihr Vater war ja auch ein Hochverräter.” Quotation recounted by Meike Bruhns, “Ein halbwüchsiger Vater ist oft schwer zu ertragen,” Brigitte 1 (2004): 111. Translation is my own.

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to reconstruct it. Her attempts of recovering the missing memories in psychoanalysis fail, and unlike her four older siblings, Bruhns never remembered what happened before 1945—her first memory of the postwar era is that of a slap in the face the child received when she asked why no one said “Heil Hitler” anymore. Even when Klamroth later rose to fame, becoming a martyr and hero, her mother continued to be plagued by guilt, while Bruhns mistrusted the sudden reversal of opinion. In her study on the wives of the July 20 resistance members, Dorothee von Meding found that many of the widows chose silence while rebuilding their families’ lives without fathers. Facing public prejudice and suspicion, both positive and negative, von Meding reports that “the widows found it difficult to talk about their experiences, especially with their children.”7 For instance, Emmie Bonhoeffer acknowledges in an interview that the heroic remembrance of her husband, the influential resistance member Klaus Bonhoeffer, made it difficult for their children to live in his shadow.8 Freya von Moltke, wife of the late Helmuth von Moltke, founder and key figure of the Kreisau resistance group,9 maintains: Today I wonder at times whether I spoke too little about my husband. But what could I have said? My sons gradually came to appreciate what was at stake. At any rate, I did not burden them with this. After all, it isn’t easy having such a father.10

While their fathers’ public degradation and following heroization was one reason that prevented critical inquiries in the postwar era, children’s intuition was another. Meding suggests that children sensed their mothers’ emotional turmoil and did not ask questions; this observation also holds true for Bruhns, who as a child, did not dare to dig into her father’s past and never asked her mother about him. To Bruhns the experience of alienation extends from her father to her former hometown, Halberstadt, to her “father’s land,” Nazi Germany. Because of the same gaps in memory, she cannot remember Halberstadt before the devastating firestorm in April 1945. But even in the postwar decades, she perceives the reconstructed town with distance, since Halberstadt was at the time located in the GDR and was only accessible to the West German Bruhns in short trips that required registration and a 7 8 9

10

Dorothee von Meding, Courageous Hearts: Women and the Anti-Hitler Plot of 1944, Oxford: Berghahn, 1997, xxii. See interview with Emmi Bonhoeffer, Courageous Hearts, 24. Named after von Moltke’s estate where the group frequently met, the Kreisau Circle brought together diverse, independent thinkers with very different political beliefs. According to Peter Hoffmann, the group had no “established leader.” Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 192. Interview with Freya von Moltke, Courageous Hearts, 82.

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visa. Likewise, Nazi Germany is a foreign country to Bruhns whose postwar life remains overshadowed by the Nazi era even though she had no memories of it. In this way, Bruhns recalls that when she was eleven attending a Stockholm school, Swedish schoolchildren shunned her because of her German nationality, and that the family’s Christmas tree was devoid of national flags as was customary with the Danish and Swedish relatives. When Bruhns later sought a confrontation with the Nazi legacy while living and working in Israel, she accepts that her father’s involvement in the resistance does not exempt her from blame and shame. Bruhns neither insists on her own or her generation’s innocence nor does she distance herself from her father’s generation. Perhaps it is precisely the experience of distance that allows for new ways of seeing and approximation. Bruhns not only avoids calling her father “dad,” but also chooses his initials over his actual name, admitting “in my head, incidentally, he is HG.”11 The letters acknowledge her disconnection from a man she never considered calling father. Yet as Bruhns admits in an interview, the emotional and physical distance liberated her from predetermined expectations and presumptions, allowing her to approach Klamroth primarily as a human being, not as her father.12 Indeed, Bruhns’s role is neither that of an impartial observer nor an emotionally deprived daughter. Contrary to her claims of being merely a “chronicler”13 who recounts her father’s life impartially,14 Bruhns never ceases to be emotionally involved but critically examines her father’s actions and thinking rather than judging it. While the generation of 1968 convicted their parents with moral indignation, Bruhns’s text exemplifies a new approach of self-awareness and forgiveness, as many reviewers including Volker Ullrich in Die Zeit recognized.15 My Fathers Country marks a new form of confronting the Nazi era and the entanglements of the parental generation. The 1968 generation’s accusatory attitude of 11

12 13 14 15

“In meinem Kopf heißt er übrigens HG,” 39. In an interview, Bruhns reveals that her father signed letters with these initials rather his actual name. Interview with Wibke Bruhns, Leipziger Buchnacht, moderator Janine Strahl, Axel Bulthaupt, MDR, March 27, 2004. See Interview with Wibke Bruhns, Schümer & Dorn: der Büchertalk, Dirk Schümer, Thea Dorn, SWR, April 17, 2007. “Chronistin,” 245. Translation is my own; the English translation reads: “I’m just telling the story.” See “Ich hätte gerne Erinnerung,” Interview with Wibke Bruhns, Fokus 12 (2004): 60. See Ulrich Rauf, “Großvater und Gral. Monumentale Intimität: Die NS-Zeit als Familienroman,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 8, 2004, and Volker Ulrich, “Eine Tochter, die nicht verurteilen, sondern verstehen will,” Tages Anzeiger, May 12, 2005.

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has disappeared. The author does not want to condemn but to understand – to understand how it could come to this.16

Indeed, Bruhns’s text represents a significant reckoning with the tradition of German Father Books. In an interview, Bruhns reveals that she could not have written her book in the late 1970s, because her attitude changed as she got older, as did the attitudes of her contemporaries: I was a typical member of the 1968 generation. I knew exactly what was happening and felt self-righteous vis-à-vis the parental generation. Now I find it beneficial to be able to revise this unproductive attitude.17

According to Bruhns, the delay in time allowed her to replace a selfrighteous agenda with the desire to portray her father in a multidimensional way, which included his strengths and weaknesses. In addition, her biography acknowledges inconsistency and lack of knowledge. Seeing her father as both perpetrator and victim, and rejecting a dualistic approach of either reverence or reproach, Bruhns refrains from passing blame (though she admittedly wishes to do so), and struggles instead to understand her father and acknowledge the inherited similarities between them: “I want to understand how that emerged which did such damage to my generation of those born later.”18 While Bruhns’s approach is the result of a reevaluation of 1968—visible in other recent writings on the same theme—she also credits her age and maturity with the ability to remain ambivalent rather than one-sided. In addition, Bruhns claims that her approach is one of female perception and representation, acknowledging the gendered dimension in her work. In a recent interview, she maintains “only a woman can write such a book,”19 thus positioning her work as distinctly different from men’s portrayal of fathers and mothers. 16

17

18 19

“Meines Vaters Land markiert eine neue Form der Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Zeit und den Verstrickungen der Elterngeneration. Der anklägerische Gestus der 68er ist verschwunden. Die Autorin will nicht verurteilen, sondern verstehen – verstehen, wie es so weit hat kommen können.” Volker Ullrich, “Gruppenbild mit Nazis,” Die Zeit, February 19, 2004. All translations of book reviews are my own. “Ich war eine klassische 68erin. Ich wusste genau, wo es langgeht und fühlte mich gegenüber der Elterngeneration im Recht. Diese ungute Haltung jetzt revidieren zu können, empfinde ich als wohltuend.” Wibke Bruhns, “Wir sind immer noch traumatisiert,“ Handelsblatt, March 26/27/28, 2004. In another interview, Bruhns expresses a similar satisfaction about having her book written and published as late as she did, explaining that the additional time allowed her to get rid of self-righteousness. See Elke Schubert, “Die Normalität besichtigen,” Frankfurter Rundschau, April 6, 2004. “Verstehen will ich, wie entstanden ist, was meine, die Generation der Nachgeborenen so beschädigt hat,” 21. “So ein Buch kann nur eine Frau schreiben,” Interview with Wibke Bruhns, Schümer & Dorn: der Büchertalk.

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Hans Georg Klamroth and Else Podeus To Bruhns, the history of National Socialism in Germany begins long before 1933. Calling attention to the traditions of militarism and chauvinism at the turn of the century, Bruhns uses her family as a prototypical example in order to explicate the origins of German nationalism and its continuities from Bismarck to Hitler. Her extensive query begins in 1790, when merchant Johann Gottlieb Klamroth comes to Halberstadt at age twentytwo and founds the company “I.G. Klamroth,” which specializes in the sale of seeds and fertilizers. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, the Klamroth business flourishes and expands, changing hands from Johann Gottlieb to his son Louis to his son Gustav. When Gustav Klamroth realizes that his oldest son Johannes prefers a life on the farmstead over a business career, he entrusts his younger son, Kurt, Bruhns’s grandfather, with the company. Kurt marries his longtime love, Gertrud Vogler, at age 25; their first son Hans Georg Klamroth is born two years later, in 1898. Bruhns’s portrait of her father’s life includes the biographies of paternal (and to a lesser degree, maternal) ancestors in five generations, exemplifying the rise (and fall) of the German bourgeoisie. In this way, she illustrates that in 1911, the flourishing business allows the Klamroth family to purchase a mansion at the stately Bismarckplatz, designed by then star architect Hermann Muthesius, complete with expansive gardens, a goldfish pond, bocce ball playing areas, horse stables, and indoor as well as outdoor tennis courts. Bruhns spent her childhood years on these spacious grounds until the domicile was bombed and Halberstadt destroyed. Yet the building proved surprisingly resistant: the thirty-three bedroom house withstood World War II and decades of neglect during GDR socialism, and is now a four-star luxury hotel. Documented by the doublepaged photo filling the inside cover of her book, the beginning of Bruhns’s Klamroth chronicle reads like a Halberstadt variation to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.20 Hans Georg grows up nurtured and privileged. Kurt takes his son horseback riding through the neighboring countryside but also teaches him military games and drills. Full of respect and admiration for his father, Hans Georg shares his loyalty to Wilhelm II and his enthusiasm for war: when World War I breaks out, the family rejoices. Kurt, a cavalry officer in reserve, eagerly joins the army at the first mobilization, while his wife cares for the wounded in Halberstadt’s military hospital. Reading Kurt’s 20

Compare also to Wolf’s description in Patterns of Childhood, when in 1933 prosperity (gained from discrimination and bribery) allows the family to open another store and in 1936 to build a new house.

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patriotic letters from the front, their son Hans Georg—at age sixteen still attending the local Gymnasium—grows increasingly envious of his father’s military exploits and honors (who was awarded the Iron Cross). At age seventeen, Hans Georg, too, joins the military—against the initial wish of his father. After passing both an early exit exam from school and a physical examination for which the teenager trained in secret, he enlists in the Prussian regiment in Königsberg as an ensign in 1916. He is successful, quickly rising to the post of corporal and also earning the Iron Cross for service at only his second day in battle. Despite his injuries from battle, Klamroth eagerly returns to the front, willing to risk his life for a war that prolongs more than expected, claiming the lives of family and friends alike. In letters, he boasts about his healthy reflexes and shooting skills, even as they pertain to his first killing when he shoots a Russian cavalry corporal in self-defense. If this death did not trigger feelings of remorse, another shooting that takes place in April 1918 becomes a traumatic turning point in Klamroth’s life. The second killing involves shooting a drunken German infantry soldier charged with stealing a pig from Russian civilians. Although Klamroth was acting in self-defense and the commander praises his response, he cannot forget this murder of a countryman. Fearing a military tribunal and becoming obsessed with his misdeed, he even contemplates suicide in diaries and letters. As late as 1942, he revisits the site of the shooting, continuing to feel culpable and remorseful. After WWI, Klamroth secures a job as an intern at a freight company in Hamburg, with the help of his father. Spending his father’s money in exclusive restaurants and bars, he entertains the possibility to continue the fight (along with other officers who rally against the conditions of the Versailles Treaty), and fails miserably in private business enterprises. Commenting on her father’s behavior “it doesn’t occur to HG that it [World War I] might already have been lost,”21 Bruhns finds her father’s desires to continue the war ludicrous, and compares with both criticism and compassion his political goals to her own unreasonable Marxist ideals at age twenty. As a child of the postwar era, Bruhns cannot fathom her father’s enthusiasm for war but intervenes with personal commentary, explanations, outrage, questions, and sarcasm. In this way, she consistently interrupts the narrative to scrutinize her father’s and grandfather’s motivations: “What on earth is going on with these men?”22 While she cannot figure out how one can sacrifice his life for honors and awards, Bruhns examines 21 22

“Daß er [WW I] verloren sein könnte – darauf kommt HG nicht,” 108. “Was geht blos vor in diesen Männern?” 82.

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her fathers’ lives with the naïveté and frankness of a child, in informal and direct language similar to Barbara Honigmann’s simple and childlike narration. Bruhns contrasts her father’s values with her own pacifist beliefs and never hides the fact that she is a highly biased and often critical narrator. She rebuffs her father’s statements in letters with remarks like “he’s nuts. But Kurt was exactly the same,” or “what nonsense,” and disapproves of her father’s reaction to the killing “while he’s there he clearly loses his mind.”23 Yet Bruhns’s approach rises above the pattern of generational conflict as she does not merely reproach her father but seeks to understand his actions and conflicts. Comparing her father’s dilemmas with her own (“In short: he’s going through what we’ve all been through before getting married.”24), she attempts to acknowledge and relate to what seems utterly foreign to her. This process usually follows her initial indignation and rejection. For instance, after Bruhns attacks her father’s meaningless prayers upon his cousin’s death, she concludes: “About that nonsense I’ve raged already. I’ll stop for now. I can’t turn the man into something he isn’t.”25 While her first reaction of resentment would be more typical of Father Books, Bruhns struggles to accept her father’s actions even if she does not agree with them. In a similar way, she contradicts her initial comment that she scribbled in the margins of her father’s diary, “The boy is dreadful. Precocious, pompous, actually unbearable,” in her book with the words “He isn’t. I just didn’t know him yet.”26 If Klüger in weiter leben concedes to ambiguity vis-à-vis her father in the face of contradictory sentiments and memories, Bruhns likewise grants herself the right to discrepancy, even though in her case the change in opinion is the result of deliberate reflection and processing. With her desire to move beyond a gut reaction, Bruhns’s text becomes an inquiry into both her father’s past and her frustration with it. In this way, she includes her intuitive, childlike, and often defiant response but probes her own former beliefs and assumptions by analyzing parents’ and grandparents’ actions from the position of an equal. Unlike a child would tend to do, Bruhns characterizes her father as weak and immature. In this way, she interprets his acne outbreak as a psychosomatic reaction to his killing of the German soldier, and even ana23 24 25 26

“Der spinnt. Aber Kurt war ja genauso” 8, “Was für ein Quatsch!” 105, “dort flippt er offenbar völlig aus,” 102. “Kurz: er macht das durch, was wir alle durchgemacht haben vor der Hochzeit,” 93. “Über diesen Unsinn habe ich mich schon empört. Das lasse ich jetzt. Ich kann mir den Mann nicht anders backen als er ist,” 141. “Der Junge ist gräßlich. Altklug, pompös, eigentlich unerträglich … Das ist er nicht. Ich kannte ihn nur noch nicht,” 145.

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lyzes her grandparents’ response: “They couldn’t or wouldn’t see the turmoil raging within him. The first time his life takes a really serious turn, both parents refuse to help their son.”27 At times, Bruhns counsels her father, elevating herself to a parental figure: “Poor HG, I sympathize with your red ears. But let me assure you that usually it isn’t as bad as you feel afterwards.”28 This atypical role reversal of earlier Father Books requires maturity and empathy rather than outrage. By analyzing her father’s life in hindsight, Bruhns takes the moral high ground, and in some passages her tone turns presumptuous and overly analytical, as in when she decodes the symptoms of his craving for recognition: In my eyes HG hasn’t grown up. I see this straight line that starts with his “abnormal, painful shyness as a child” against which he later battles with his tortuous prose style and his intellectual exercises. This continues in the endless correspondence, which HG uses to stay in touch with his network to avoid falling into the abyss. He needs his fibs because he lacks confidence in himself, and the many women he consumes like drugs must one after the other confirm to him that he is better than he thinks he is.29

In her quest to find the reasons behind her father’s affairs and lies, Bruhns turns to premature and deterministic answers. While her reasoning in the above example may help explain her father’s behavior, it also simplifies and fixates it. Thus, Bruhns grants herself ambiguity and inconsistency, but leaves little room for her father’s idiosyncrasies. At other times, however, Bruhns responds to her father with sarcasm and humor (146), and her text generally reveals her admiration of his talent and courage (his speech in Danish at the illustrious sixtieth wedding anniversary of his inlaws in Denmark comes to mind). In a newspaper review of the book, Bruhns’s daughter Meike Bruhns suggests that her mother’s untypical attitude vis-à-vis her father could be rooted in her grandfather’s absence so that generational conflicts never arose.30 27 28 29

30

“Den Tumult in seinem Innern können oder wollen sie nicht sehen. Als es zum ersten Mal wirklich ernst wird in seinem Leben, verweigern sich beide Eltern ihrem hilfesuchenden Sohn,” 106. “Armer HG, ich fühle mit dir deine roten Ohren. Aber laß dir sagen, daß es so schlimm meistens nicht ist, wie man sich hinterher fühlt,” 149. “Für mich ist HG nicht erwachsen. Ich sehe den direkten Weg, der beginnt bei seiner „abnormen, quälenden Schüchternheit als Kind“, gegen die er später anprahlt mit seinem verquasten Schreibstil und seinen intellektuellen Exerzitien. Das setzt sich fort in seiner unendlichen Korrespondenz, mit der HG sein Netz knüpft, um nicht ins Bodenlose zu stürzen. Seine Lügengeschichten braucht er, weil er sich selbst nicht traut, und die vielen Frauen, die er konsumiert wie Drogen, müssen ihm eine nach der anderen bestätigen, daß er besser ist, als er selber glaubt.” 271. See Meike Bruhns, 112.

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Though unmistakably focused on her father, Bruhns also considers the relationship to her mother and grandparents, continuing to find conflict and incongruity. With her father absent, Bruhns spent the postwar years in a difficult, awkward relationship with her mother. Like Ruth Klüger, she finds that her mother hindered rather than encouraged inquiries into the past, but even though she blames her mother for her reticence and seclusion, Bruhns also reflects on her mother’s difficulties and on her own rebellion and separation: “She was exhausted and I was going through puberty – not a good mix. After leaving school, as the last of five children, I quickly relieved her of me.”31 Bruhns regrets that she did not know her mother before 1945, when acquaintances described her as worldly, eloquent, and self-confident, so different from the distant, embittered woman whose life was devastated by her husband’s infidelities and by his premature death. Contemplating that her father must have instantly admired her, Bruhns, too, is full of admiration for her mother as a young woman, describing her parents’ courtship and their first years of marriage in detail. Unimpressed by her father’s military honors and accomplishments, Bruhns meticulously recounts her mother’s domestic deeds, which include raising five children, planning meals, organizing festivities, and entertaining a large number of guests under meager and difficult circumstances during the war. In these descriptions, her mother seems stronger than her father. Furthermore, she is self-assured and rooted in her identity, while her husband in contrast appears tired, plagued by self-doubts, and feelings of insufficiency. With this type of characterization Bruhns also explains her father’s adultery and compulsive deceit. Exposing her father’s frequent affairs that had already begun while the two were engaged, Bruhns clearly takes her mother’s side, even though her mother’s perspective remains hidden because she destroyed personal documents relating to her husband. Still, Bruhns seeks out to reconstruct her father’s infidelities in one excruciating detail after another: after six years of marriage, Klamroth initiated an affair with a married woman, and his wife, not to be outcuckold, had an affair with the woman’s husband. The resulting “Ménage à quatre” (227) goes on for two tenuous years, driving the Klamroths apart. Even after they decide to terminate the knotty affair, her father’s infidelities continue. Apparently, he seduced a 17year-old girl who worked as a maid while his wife was out of town, and sometimes took his conquests home so that his wife could get to know his lovers. While her mother’s reaction is unknown, Bruhns senses her intui31

“Sie war erschöpft, ich pubertär – keine gute Konstellation. Nach dem Abitur habe ich, das letzte von fünf Kindern, sie zügig von mir entlastet.” 158.

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tion and mistrust upon discovering that she unfailingly marked any mentioning of an attractive woman in her husband’s letters. Admitting to her mother’s and her own pain, Bruhns rages against society’s double standards when it comes to men and women: “Then as now husbands who screw around are dashing fellows, their wives poor wretches.”32 Despite the women’s alliance, Bruhns never became close to her mother. Rather, she assumes that her mother did not want to raise her two youngest children (Bruhns being one of them) amidst the marital discord, and wonders why she did not have an abortion as she did a couple years before. Though her mother already had four children and (according to Bruhns) was feeling old at age thirty-nine, Bruhns concludes that she had hopes of conceiving a boy like Jochen, whose birth caused the family considerable delight back in October 1925. While Bruhns never elaborates on her pain of feeling like an unwanted daughter, she covers her sentiments in sarcasm and cynicism. Illustrating her parents’ disappointment at her birth, Bruhns comments wryly that it took them weeks to come up with a Nordic girl’s name, “Wibke.” History and Everyday Life: The July 20 Plot and the Klamroth Family If the subtitle of Bruhns’s text, The Story of a German Family, seems reminiscent of Sebastian Haffner’s Geschichte eines Deutschen: Die Erinnerungen 19141933 (2000, Defying Hitler: a Memoir, 2002), there are other, deeper connections between the two texts. Like Haffner (and other authors of this study), Bruhns depicts children’s perception of historic events, illustrating how history is absorbed and refracted in everyday life. While seven-yearold Haffner experiences the outbreak of WW I as an interruption of his summer vacation and an exhilarating change of news and headlines,33 Bruhns endures the end of WW II as a six-year-old, perceiving Allied bombing as a disruption of family life on a Sunday. And like Haffner, Bruhns is interested in the rise of nationalist and racist thinking in Germany, tracing increasing anti-communism and anti-Semitism in the wake of Germans’ disappointment and disorientation after defeat in 1918, inflation, and stabilization. Elucidating the German confidence in victory in WW I and the ensuing shock over its defeat, Bruhns embeds the Nazi era in a larger context of the history of the twentieth century; in this context, 32 33

“Damals wie heute sind die rumvögelnden Männer die tollen Hechte und die Frauen die armen Hascherl.” 272. See Sebastian Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen: Die Erinnerungen 1914-1933. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2000, 13-21.

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she even mentions Haffner’s book as a secondary source in her text. Unlike Haffner, however, Bruhns’s book covers a much greater timeframe and seeks to illuminate the belief systems of Hitler supporters rather than his opponents. Bruhns also depicts family life and the history of the July 20 plot from the perspective of a woman. Using her family as example, Bruhns shows how different generations enabled Hitler’s rise to power and became persuaded into accepting the Nazi rule, ignoring early signs of the abuse of power. In her efforts to come closer to her father’s worldview, she scrutinizes a massive amount of material, ranging from her grandmother’s diaries that chronicle her son’s growth, to the letter exchange between her father and grandfather that elucidates political as well as personal matters, to the books her father read at the front. Bruhns thus approaches her father by way of belated conjecture and reconstruction; as the youngest of five children she missed most family gatherings and festivities and there was very little contact between father and daughter once the war began. At the same time, she includes related historical documents and facts. Uninterested in familiar and canonical information (Bruhns comments on Hitler’s 1933 rise to power “I can abbreviate this story we already know”),34 she instead explicates the public outrage over President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Versailles Treaty, and the origins of the stab-in-the-back myth [Dolchstoßlegende]. In this way, she draws the reader’s attention to lesser-known details, such as Goebbels’s speeches from 1928, and the arrests of Carl von Ossietzky, Erich Mühsam, Ludwig Renn, Egon Erwin Kisch, and Hans Litten in February 1933, while also relating her family’s (non-existent) response to the political changes. While her father and grandfather are initially concerned about and skeptical of the demagogue Hitler and his new government, they soon become increasingly enthralled with Nazi parades and spectacles, accepting the stripping of rights and other warning signs of tyranny. Knowing the actual course of history, Bruhns corrects her father’s misleading perspective in hindsight: “Except he’s raging against the wrong people. His fury is directed at the representatives of the centre-left parties.”35 While the inclusion of such everyday-life details [Alltagsgeschichte] has become both popular and well-respected, Bruhns’s insistence and attention to detail remains surprising and unusual. Besides elaborating her parents’ convoluted courtship, her father’s insecurities and infidelities, and the resulting marital discord, she includes numerous fine points and full34 35

“Man kann das abkürzen. Die Geschichte kennen wir,” 240. “Nur ist er wütend auf die falschen Leute. Sein Zorn richtet sich gegen die Vertreter der Mitte-Links-Parteien…,” 114.

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bodied details of life such as her grandfather’s love letters to her grandmother, the menu of their wedding feast, her father’s childhood diseases, the price of a baptism dinner in the inflation years, etc. Bruhns meticulously describes anniversaries, weddings, baptisms, and family vacations, giving as much credence to family dramas as to political events. Thus her text uncovers bourgeois family life in the 1920s and 1930s within the contexts of historical events while elucidating the connections between both. In but one instance, when her mother Else returns from a trip to Berlin sporting a stylish bob haircut [Bubikopf], her grandparents’ outrage over the new haircut perfectly illustrates both the infiltration of Weimar metropolitan culture and the conservative small-town backlash against it. In hindsight, Bruhns is also able to point to the blind spots in her family’s and city’s historiography. Noting that the Klamroth records never mention any interaction with Halberstadt’s large, influential Jewish community (which should have been a natural business partner for Klamroth, given its importance in the international business community), Bruhns discovers that her grandfather viewed the success of Eastern European Jewish merchants with open suspicion and anti-Semitic sentiment. Long before General Ludendorff’s cries for Lebensraum and Nazi expansionist plans, Bruhns explicates that even back in 1893, her family’s conservativeChristian attitude was inherently anti-Semitic by its ignorance and shunning of religious, autonomous Jews. The discovery in turn enables her to acknowledge and contextualize her father’s claim of being a fervent antiSemite as early as 1920 (150), exposing continuities in German antiSemitism from Kaiser Wilhelm to Hitler. Bruhns elaborates on these political and military matters in an informal and outspoken tone that earned her praise as well as blame. While many reviewers laud the style in which she conveyed historical data,36 others conclude “Even more upsetting it is that she [Wibke Bruhns] misses the appropriate tone on each page. Too tabloid-like she dishes up the story of her father….”37 Christian Eger finds fault with Bruhns’s “hackneyedpedagogical tongue,”38 while Babette Kaiserkern calls the book “un36

37 38

For positive reviews, see Hermann Rudolph, “Waren die Deutschen so?” Der Tagesspiegel, May 3, 2004, Volker Ullrich, “Gruppenbild mit Nazis,” Die Zeit, February 19, 2004, and Christine Diller, “Der gezahlte Blutzoll,” Münchner Merkur, March 6, 2004. I wish to thank the Econ publishing house, in particular Juliane Brümmer, for sending reviews of Bruhns’s text. “Umso ärgerlicher ist es, dass sie [Wibke Bruhns] in ihrem Buch auf jeder Seite den nötigen Ton verfehlt. Allzu boulevardesk tischt sie die Geschichte des Vaters auf….” Hartmut Kühne, “Vom Mitläufer zu Stauffenbergs Mitwisser,” Rheinischer Merkur 10 (2004). “Volkspädagogischer Zungenschlag,” Christian Eger, “Es war einmal in meines Vaters Land,” Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, June 9, 2004.

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thoughtful” and “embarrassing.”39 The fact that Bruhns conveys complicated historical data in such casual and provocative style seems to bother those reviewers, as if grave events could only be told in a solemn and formal way. But this goes beyond mere stylistic matters. Bruhns’s informal tone actually mirrors the content of her work which stresses the details of her family’s daily life over a heroic description of the July 20 plot. By describing the history of everyday life [Alltagsgeschichte] in corresponding everyday speech [Alltagssprache], Bruhns provokes her readers with a style that visibly contrasts with the exalted and grandiose expressions used by her father. The Path from a Hitler Supporter to a Hitler Opponent After Hitler’s seizure of power, the Klamroth family gradually accepted, even embraced the new chancellor and his politics that they had called ridiculous just a few months earlier. Bruhns finds this change of attitude typical of the German bourgeoisie who at first disdained the Nazis as being populist and plebeian but accepted the regime after the 1933 election. In her father’s diaries, Bruhns traces small but influential changes in the political landscape, such as the renaming of streets, the celebration of new national holidays, the decoration of streets with flags and banners, the staging of parades and torch-lit processions, and anti-Semitic speeches along with calls to boycott Jewish businesses. While the Klamroth family cannot fathom the anti-Semitic turn, they choose to go along with it and in April 1933 decide to exclude Jewish employees from the company. Shortly after, her father joins the NSDAP, as well as in May 1933 the SS. In that same month, he proposes to add to the Klamroth family annals a so-called Aryan clause which would expel any Klamroth member from the family if he or she married a Jew. As Bruhns elaborates, this entirely voluntary policy that the family had certified by a notary preceded the Nuremberg laws by two and a half years. The photograph that Bruhns includes in this book’s chapter perfectly illustrates how Nazi ideology infiltrated family life. In the picture, the seemingly private space of the Klamroth living room has turned into a political arena for Hitler. Bruhn’s seven-year-old brother Jochen wears SA uniform, Hans Georg has grown a Hitler-mustache, and Else begins to write in Sütterlin. Later on, Bruhns includes a letter in which her grandfa39

“Unreflektiert” and “peinlich.” Babette Kaiserkern, “Land der Vernichter und Henker,” Märkische Allgemeine, March 17, 2004.

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ther Kurt eagerly describes to an American friend the new nationalistic and patriotic climate. Apparently, both parents and grandparents are deeply impressed by Hitler’s speeches and continue their approval even after hearing news of the Nazi regime’s murder of SA members in the Night of the Long Knives in June/July 1934. The family also enthusiastically welcomes the reintegration of the Saar territory into Germany, celebrating it with song, torchlight, and a bonfire. In 1937, their children—actively involved in the Hitler Youth—are allowed to visit the Party Congress in Nuremberg, where they stand in awe of the systematically staged mass rallies. The family’s support of the Nazis continues with Austria’s annexation, though Bruhns is unable to reconstruct her father’s later opinions since the Gestapo confiscated his diaries from 1938 on. Bruhns does not separate the recounting of these developments from her present beliefs. Time and again, she questions her father’s swift and thorough change of thought, wondering whether he had options other than embracing the Nazis and anti-Semitism (she concludes yes). But rather than assessing the fascination with Nazi ideology from the position of a distant observer armed with acquired knowledge, Bruhns seeks to understand the appeal of Nazi parades and battle songs, to follow the family’s private and voluntary anti-Semitism, and even attempts to share their joy about Germany’s takeover of the Saar territory. In the end, she explains her father’s transformation to a staunch Nazi both as a rational calculation, in that he seized the opportunity to take leadership positions early on, and as an irrational attraction to military uniforms and awards, along with the prospect of waging a war that he did not want to end back in 1918. In addition, Bruhns includes outside material and information, supplying information that is missing from the family documents. For instance, in the 1934 elections, she provides an account of the invalid ballots and votes cast against Hitler (amounting to almost 900,000), to defy the prevailing opinion that Germany was unequivocally under the spell of the Nazis. She also quotes from Haffner’s Defying Hitler and even looks at former theater and movie schedules to find out more about popular culture, entertainment, and amusement of the time. With respect to the public book burnings, Bruhns questions her parents’ ignorance: “Authors they’ve both just read were among those destroyed: Remarque, Döblin, Glaeser, Heine, Kästner, Kerr – don’t they care?”40 As a critical, sarcastic, and knowledgeable narrator, Bruhns furthermore details what followed in 40

“Da sind Autoren verbrannt worden, die beide gerade gelesen haben: Remarque, Döblin, Glaeser, Heine, Kästner, Kerr – geht sie das nichts an?” 255.

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the years after the initial enthusiasm for the Nazis. Explaining Germany’s decrease in unemployment with preparations for war, she scratches beneath the surface to reveal the step-by-step sequence of racial discrimination and persecution. Beginning in 1936, the Nuremberg Laws forbid Jews to vote and study at the university, to practice many professions and to serve in the army. They are also excluded from social benefits. Bruhns complements these historical facts with individual stories such as the fate of Löwendorf, a Jewish acquaintance of the family forced to sell his land to Klamroth because of economic discrimination. Though Klamroth paid the full sum, Löwendorf never received his money because it was transferred to a “security-account” which he could not access. Löwendorf died in Theresienstadt in April 1943. Keeping in mind such tragic stories, Bruhns admits that she can ultimately not figure out what was the appeal of Hitler back then: Incomprehensible today. I’ve read Hitler’s speeches, more importantly I’ve heard them. The effect of this yapping gnome is a mystery to me. But I wasn’t there. I was brought up differently, partly thanks to the yapping gnome.41

Though seeking to comprehend her parents, Bruhns accepts her own bewilderment and disbelief, considering her upbringing and socialization. Such insight departs from moral judgment and condescension without sacrificing an ethical, informed opinion. In a difficult if not impossible juggling act, Bruhns’s endeavor attempts to understand evil while neither succumbing to it nor dismissing it from the outset. After 1939, her parents’ attitudes shift once more. Bruhns recounts her mother’s outrage over the so-called Night of Broken Glass [Kristallnacht] but adds that she was concerned mainly about Germany’s image abroad, not the affected Jews. At the beginning of World War II, Klamroth becomes commander of an infantry regiment in Poland. While he initially supported plans for German expansion, he grows increasingly disturbed by the suffering of civilians and the overall destruction of the war, as evident in his letters from the front. Forced to wait anxiously for news and letters from her husband, the war constrains her mother to passivity and apprehension. In 1940, Klamroth is sent to Denmark, and Bruhns reasons that he must have disapproved of the German occupation of a country he considered home. In February 1942, he is transferred to the Russian front for reasons Bruhns can only speculate, since her father’s letters were destroyed and her mother never revealed any information. It 41

“Es ist nicht nachzuvollziehen, heute. Ich habe Hitlerreden gelesen, vor allem gehört. Die Wirkung dieses keifenden Gnoms ist mir ein Rätsel. Aber ich war nicht dabei, ich bin anders sozialisiert, unter anderem dank dieses keifenden Gnoms.” 247.

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is here, Bruhns assumes, that her father must have witnessed the maltreatment of Russian civilians, prisoners of war, and Jews. Once more Bruhns supplements the family story with historical information and her own questions and considerations. In this way, she emphasizes that the German invasion of Russia in June 1941 was in violation of Hitler’s Nonaggression Pact with Stalin, and includes Himmler and Hitler quotations about the war of extermination with Russian Jews and communists. Tracking the murder of the disabled in the “Euthanasia” program and the beginnings of Jewish persecution, Bruhns expounds on the deportations and mass execution of Russian Jews as well as the lack of response by the Allies. While she cannot find an answer to the question of whether her parents knew about the impending ghettoization and extermination, she reveals that they react in peculiar ways to the deteriorating situation. Her mother begins to take sleeping pills on a daily basis while the rest of the family consumes large amounts of alcohol. Bruhns comments coolly, “They are all sick, but what do you expect, war is sick, the country is sick, why should people be healthy,”42 interpreting the family’s turn to narcotics and drugs as a manifestation and effect of Germany’s misguided militarism. Again Bruhns links the country’s political developments with intimate details and emotions of individual family members. In this way, she elaborates on the budding love between her older sister Ursula and her father’s cousin Bernhard. The thirty-year-old army officer proposes to Ursula on her eighteenth birthday, after he saw the then sixteen-year-old for only four and a half days. After submitting the necessary proof of Aryan descent, the two are engaged, and their festive and elaborate 1942 wedding, in the midst of the war, is for Bruhns “the brilliant end of an era at the Bismarckplatz.”43 In 1943, Bernhard advances to Lieutenant Colonel while his wife begins to work as a translator for the German Intelligence in Berlin. As evident from letters, both remain exultant and euphoric during the short-lived period of their marriage. In contrast, her parents’ marriage steadily deteriorates. After her mother discovers love letters from a former mistress to her husband, she grows increasingly infuriated and distant, never shedding her suspicion and wariness. Else never reconciles with her husband during his lifetime. As Bruhns discloses from countless letters, her father in his last years desperately tried to save their marriage, but to no avail. His wife remains embittered and depleted at a time when Klamroth is urgently pleading for her 42 43

“Die sind alle krank, aber was soll sein, der Krieg ist krank, das Land ist krank, wieso sollten die Menschen gesund sein,” 318. “Das glanzvolle Ende einer Epoche am Bismarckplatz,” 324.

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help, himself deeply disillusioned with the Nazi regime. Admittedly, Bruhns is touched and saddened by her parents’ misery, by the emotional hurt and anguish at a time when both needed each other’s support: At some point an end must come and as always it’s at the worst possible moment. Because war and the Pervitin are taking their toll on Else, because the children are still so small and and the outlook for the future so bleak, because there isn’t enough money and Else doesn’t know how she’s supposed to feed that whole crowd at Bismarkplatz day after day, because her mother is dying and in such torment, because Else wants to be loved and appreciated.44

Bruhns sympathizes with her mother’s pain while also acknowledging the damage Else’s rigidity caused to her father. In these moving passages, Bruhns does not offer advice but concedes to her parents’ discord, wishing in retrospection that they could have been there for each other in the short time remaining. Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad on January 31, 1943, is another turning point in the Klamroth family. Her mother becomes deeply distraught by the suffering of soldiers and civilians, and her father’s letters—despite the strict censorship— express doubts about Hitler’s military strategy. While detailing civilian suffering in the last years of the war, Bruhns also attempts to trace how much their parents knew about the escalating extermination of European Jews. Fact is that her father visited a V-2 rocket production facility that made use of foreign slave laborers and inmates of several adjacent concentration camps. Suspecting that her parents knew of Jewish persecution to a considerable degree (all Halberstadt Jews were deported as early as 1942, and a concentration camp was built nearby), Bruhns remains unsure whether they accepted or rejected Hitler’s policies. Whether due to ignorance or censorship, she finds no written document in which either parent mentions Jewish persecution and murder. Without any evidence of repulsion or shock, she can only conclude “I have no answer” and continue to narrate what they did or did not know about the Holocaust: “Why am I telling this? Because the story can never be told too often.”45

44

45

“Irgendwann ist Schluß ist wie immer zum am wenigsten geeigneten Zeitpunkt. Weil der Krieg an Else zehrt und das Pervitin, weil die Kinder noch so klein sind und die Zukunftsaussichten so düster, weil das Geld nicht reicht und Else nicht weiß, wie sie den ganzen Pulk am Bismarckplatz Tag für Tag ernähren soll, weil ihre Mutter stirbt und sich so quält, weil Else geliebt werden will und anerkannt.” 335. “Ich habe keine Antwort,” 338. “Warum erzähle ich das? Weil man es nicht oft genug erzählen kann,” 348.

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Klamroth’s Involvement in the Resistance, his Death, and his Legacy In a short concluding chapter that contrasts sharply with the earlier expansive accounts, Bruhns describes her father’s last year, after he became involved in the resistance. Apparently, her father met and befriended influential people critical of the regime as early as July 1943. It has also been documented that Klamroth met with four of his new friends in February 1944, including his cousin Bernhard who later acquired the explosives used in the assassination attempt. Unfortunately, these meager facts are the whole extent of any records. Even Else never knew of her husband’s involvement, probably because he did not want to burden her with this information amidst their marital difficulties. With no written evidence, Bruhns concludes that her father was a “confidant, not a fellow perpetrator”46 of the conspiracy. After the assassination fails, he returns home a day later and informs his wife that his life is in imminent danger. His cousin Bernhard, who never mentioned in his many loving and affectionate letters to his pregnant wife anything about his more active role in the resistance, is arrested as soon as July 21. Bruhns’s sister is never to speak with her husband again, all the while giving birth and in the midst of painful labor. Her father, on the other hand, is able to speak with his wife until July 29. Both Klamroth and his cousin are sentenced to death on August 15, by the Supreme Judge of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler. Bernhard is hanged that same day; Klamroth must suffer for ten additional days before his death on August 26. The families are informed only after the fact, court records are missing, and information is scant to this day. Bruhns refuses to recount the well-known details of the failed assassination but focuses on its emotional impact on her family, even though this is painful and exhausting: “What I would most like to do now is take my leave of the story, simply stop and leave it incomplete. I would like to act as though I were in charge of whether it continued or not.”47 Especially difficult for her are the circumstances of her father’s death and the knowledge that he must have endured agonizing physical and mental torture during the days before his hanging. Although claiming that she does not want to imagine her father’s painful death, she chooses to describe it in detail, acknowledging his achievements and standing by him in his darkest hour. Only at the very end of her text does Bruhns admit that his 46 47

“Mit-Wisser, nicht Mit-Täter,” 354. “Ich möchte mich jetzt am liebsten verabschieden aus dieser Geschichte, einfach aufhören und sie unvollständig lassen. Ich möchte so tun, als hätte ich es in der Hand, ob sie weitergeht oder nicht,” 368.

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involvement in the resistance enabled her to feel less burdened by German history: You have paid the blood toll so that I don’t have to. I have learned from you what must guard against. That’s what a father is there for, isn’t it? I thank you.48

This quotation, atypical of the general tone of her text, introduces the problematic notion of Judeo/Christian redemption and sacrifice, as if the idea of a “blood toll” that Bruhns’s father paid exonerates her in consequence.49 It also brings the controversial and provocative text to a somewhat sentimental and self-serving ending. Nevertheless, the ill-fitted quotation does not contradict the fact that Bruhns’s project is driven by the desire to understand rather than reproach her father. Bruhns’s text consistently breaks with any kind of myth that surrounds the July 20 resistance. She shares this attitude with other wives and daughters of those involved who view the postwar glorification of German resistance with open suspicion. In an interview, Freya von Moltke maintains, “I have been trying ever since to take him [her husband] down from this pedestal,” revealing that the Kreisau circle did not even use the word resistance [Widerstand].50 Barbara von Haeften, wife of Hans-Berndt von Haeften, an active member in the Confessing Church, was infuriated to see the “heroes of 20 July” being used for political purposes of German rearmament in the 1950s.51 While Rosemarie Reichwein, whose husband established contacts with communists and was actively involved in the assassination attempt, reports that her young son was troubled when his father was portrayed as a role model in the classroom,52 Bruhns’s daughter Meike remembers that the July 20 plot was celebrated in school as “a heroic fight against a diabolic regime.”53 According to Meike Bruhns, her mother corrected such iconic remembrance with the words “July 20 48 49

50 51 52 53

“Du hast den Blutzoll bezahlt, den ich nicht mehr entrichten muß. Ich habe von dir gelernt, wovor ich mich zu hüten habe. Dafür ist ein Vater da, nicht wahr? Ich danke dir.” 381. The word Blutzoll first emerged in the context of the Ottomans who kidnapped children of conquered areas and raised them according to Islamic religion. In the context of WW II, Blutzoll refers to many sacrifices, such as Allied and especially Russian victims of war, as well as German victims of war. As late as 1961 (in the wake of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem), the German government under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer evoked in biblical terms the idea of German sacrifice when claiming that Germans under Hitler paid “selbst dem Henker seinen Blutzoll.” See Irmtrud Wojak, Eichmanns Memoiren: Ein kritischer Essay, Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2001, 196. See interview with Freya von Moltke, Courageous Hearts, 80 and vii. See interview with Barbara von Haeften, Courageous Hearts, 164. See interview with Rosemarie Reichwein, Courageous Hearts, 93. “Ein heldenhafter Kampf gegen ein teuflisches Regime,” Meike Bruhns, 111.

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[1944] is much romanticized.”54 By going beyond heroic transfiguration and by maintaining rather than solving the contradictions in her father’s words and actions, Bruhns’s text becomes a valuable and unique contribution in the historiography of the July 20 plot.

At the “People’s Court” (352) © Wibke Bruhns

54. “Der 20. Juli wird sehr verklärt.” Meike Bruhns, 111.

Part III: In Search of Grandparents

The Grandchildren of Nazi Victims, Perpetrators, Collaborators, and Bystanders In “Uns hat keiner gefragt” Positionen der dritten Generation zur Bedeutung des Holocaust (2002, No One Asked Us: Positions of the Third Generation on the Meaning of the Holocaust), ten young academics born between 1967 and 1977 summarize their personal and scholarly concerns with the Holocaust and its aftermath. According to the editor Jens Fabian Pyper, his generation inherits a prescribed meaning of the Holocaust (as exemplified by the parliament’s decision to construct the Berlin Holocaust memorial), without being given the opportunity to construct an independent response. As put forth by the title, the anthology accuses parents and grandparents of eschewing a dialogue with the generation of grandchildren and seeks to break with inherited definitions and acquired meanings, proposing alternative ways of how to deal with the past. If Pyper uses the term “third generation” with respect to young Germans, scholars like Meike Herrmann adopt the term rather indiscriminately, applying it to anyone born after the immediate postwar decades: The third generation, those are the grandchildren of the contemporaries of National Socialism and the Holocaust, born after about the mid-1960s. They have no personal biographical memory of the events.1

This chronological definition, however, is problematic in that it presumes a common generational experience based on the years of distance after the Holocaust, and thus conflates stories of victimization and victimhood into one category.2 In fact, the generations in question are marked by vastly different legacies and experiences, making it difficult to define them in relation to the Holocaust as a “third generation,” which is why most scholars refuse to discern the group in such terms and why young authors are 1

2

“Die dritte Generation, das sind die Enkel der Zeitgenossen des Nationalsozialismus und des Holocaust, geboren etwa sei Mitte der sechziger Jahre. Sie haben keine persönliche, biographische Erinnerung an die Ereignisse.” Meike Herrmann, “Spurensuche in der dritten Generation: Erinnerung an Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust in der jüngsten Literatur,” Repräsentationen des Holocaust im Gedächtnis der Generationen, eds. Margrit Fröhlich, Yariv Lapid, and Christian Schneider, Frankfurt a. M.: Brandes & Apsel, 2004, 142. Translation is my own. Herrmann consequently analyzes Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated is the same category as Marcel Beyer’s Spione.

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reluctant to ascribe themselves to a third-generation. Undoubtedly, a grandchild’s interest in the grandparents’ persecution of is different than a child’s concern with parents who survived the Holocaust. Likewise, a granddaughter who discovers that her grandparents aided and abided the Nazi regime responds differently than a daughter coming to grips with the fact that her parents had been Nazis. While the differences in the responses of children and grandchildren are profound, it is also evident that other factors, such as gender, age, siblings, whether or not grandparents are alive, as well as the parental relationship, shape the nature of children’s and grandchildren’s inquiries. Germany’s grandchildren do not solely depend on their parents’ and grandparents’ memories (or, for that matter, repression of memories) for information on the Nazi past, but grow up with abundant available knowledge. In Germany, the history of National Socialism is still anchored in family memory, but it is also taught extensively in school and has become part of an institutionalized memory culture that encompasses museums, memorials, documentaries, feature films, history books, and more. In this way, grandchildren are in a pivotal position, in which they are able to listen to testimonies of the Nazi past, effecting what Jan Assmann calls communicative memory, while at the same time participating in the production of cultural memory. While Assmann defines communicative memory as the direct exchange between generations in a span of about eighty years,3 cultural memory encompasses the creation of a shared past through media and the arts, literary and film canons, and memorials and museums in order to define collective identity for the generations to come. As Germany’s grandchildren assume the critical task of mediating the past from the parental and grandparental generations to the generations following, they reinterpret it in ways distinctly different from previous generations, that is, with a post-unification perspective that includes inquiries into both perpetration and victimhood in Nazi Germany and the postwar era. In her definition of postmemory, Marianne Hirsch emphasizes that the concept applies to post-Holocaust writing by victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, and can also extend to other contexts.4 Distinguishing 3

4

In Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, Jan Assman defines communicative memory as the memories shared between various generations in the time span of about three to four generations, in which direct communication is possible. See Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, München: C. H. Beck, 1992, 50-56. Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001, 220-21. See also Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997, 22. As I mention in “The Children of Survivors and Bystanders” in part

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memory’s reminiscent qualities from postmemory’s imaginative approach, Hirsch points to the importance of imagination for the post-Holocaust generations: “Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation.”5 For the generation of grandchildren, however, this statement takes on even more significance. Whereas postmemory does not distinguish between children and grandchildren, there are crucial differences in that children encounter their parents’ (traumatic) memories but grandchildren acquire and alter their parents’ postmemories. For grandchildren, the legacy of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is tied to the biographies of various family members over multiple generations, with different perspectives and interventions. Thus, creative imagination becomes the necessary, appropriate, and imperative approach to the past. In addition, for the generation of grandchildren the Holocaust is not the only historic condition: there are other important historical turns, caesuras, and losses. Responding to their parents’ political activism of 1968, to the demise of socialism and the end of the cold war, to globalization, terrorism, and the ever-expanding public memory culture, grandchildren’s texts on the familial past are not exclusively focused on the Nazi Germany. Beginning their inquiries from a position of knowledge, authors also shift focus from explaining the origins of National Socialism to reconstructing its consequences and after-effects in family genealogies, using documents, photographs, letters, and of course, the imagination, to envision history from a variety of perspectives.6 To some authors and scholars, the generation of grandchildren—born and raised in a democratic, multicultural society—can reflect upon the Nazi past with distinct advantages such as increased empathy and critical distance. Brigitta Huhnke pegs her hope on this generation, suggesting that “many of them are more open to pose questions; they are not within direct grasp of the perpetrators anymore as we still were, not only in families but also in school and other social institutions.”7 Björn Krondorfer

5 6 7

II, there are decisive differences between the postmemory of children of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. For more on this, see also Gabriele Rosenthal, “Similarities and Differences in Family Dialog” The Holocaust in Three Generations, ed. Gabriele Rosenthal, London: Cassell, 1998, 8-13. Hirsch, Family Frames, 22. See also Alon Confino, “Introduction,” History and Memory 17.1 (2005): 5-14. “Viele von ihnen sind freier zu fragen, sie sind dem unmittelbaren Zugriff der Täter entzogen, denen wir noch teilweise ausgeliefert waren, nicht nur in den Familien, sondern auch in der Schule und in anderen sozialen Institutionen,” Brigitta Huhnke und Björn Krondorfer, “Einleitung,” Das Vermächtnis annehmen: Kulturelle und biographische Zugänge zum Holocaust

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adds that although the generation is still emotionally attached to the Nazi past, it is sufficiently removed in time to have the proper balance between involvement, confrontation, and willingness to learn more.8 In a similar vein, Aleida Assmann proposes that the second generation attempted to break with their (Nazi) parents but that the following generation looks for connections instead of conflicts.9 As a representative of this generation, Tanja Dückers declares with confidence that her generation is the first to undertake an unimpeded analysis of World War II,10 and claims to approach the Nazi past in a more unprejudiced manner since she (and her age cohort) does not have to blame parents for the atrocities of the Holocaust.11 Scholars and authors are correct to point out that since grandchildren are liberated from the burden of being the direct descendants of Nazi perpetrators or bystanders, their texts portray the family’s genealogy more comprehensively and benevolently. Yet the tendency to privilege the response of a “third” generation over that of a “second,” to me, falls flat, especially if it leads to a claim of synthesizing previous approaches to the Nazi past. While Germany’s grandchildren may indeed look at their (Nazi) grandparents in a less accusatory tone, their texts, too, are driven by conflicts between parents and children. In this way, grandchildren’s perspectives are as much a response to parents as the 1968 generation’s political rebellion was a response to their parents’ silencing of the Nazi past. It also remains uncertain whether more distance in time affords a more unbiased perspective. The fact that German grandchildren are less likely to blame their parents for the rise of Hitler and thus feel less burdened by guilt does not necessarily mean that their approaches to the Nazi past are inherently more neutral, or bear less dependency on the parental experience. On the contrary, the political apathy or right-wing extremism among some young Germans would question the above assumptions to the full. As examples of texts by grandchildren, this part considers Monika Maron’s Pavel’s Letters (2002, Pawels Briefe, 1999), which reconstructs the

8 9 10 11

– Beiträge aus den USA und Deutschland, Gießen: Psychosozial Verlag, 2002, 29. Translation is my own. See Björn Krondorfer, “Die Gegenwärtigkeit des Holocaust in interkulturellen Begegnungen: Stimmen der dritten Generation” Britta Huhnke und Björn Krondorfer, Das Vermächtnis annehmen, 348-349. See Aleida Assmann, “Die Flut der Erinnerung,” Der Tagesspiegel, November 8, 2003. See “Der nüchterne Blick der Enkel. Wie begegnen junge Autoren der Kriegsgeneration? Ein Gespräch mit Tanja Dückers,” Die Zeit, April 30, 2003. See Tanja Dückers, “Der Schrecken nimmt nicht ab, er wächst. Warum die “Enkelgeneration” nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg noch nicht zum “entspannten Umgang” mit der Vergangenheit geneigt ist” (2002), Morgen nach Utopia, Berlin: Aufbau 2007, 101-7.

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biography of the author’s Polish-Jewish grandfather and details the family’s way of coping with his murder, and Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper (2003, Celestial Bodies), a family novel spanning three generations that features the protagonist’s quest to document her grandparents’ involvement in Nazi Germany. Both narrators connect childhood memories, transmitted memories, and historical documentation with their own creative interpretation since neither their own memories nor their parents’ memories can answer questions pertaining to the grandparents’ past. Maron’s autobiographical undertaking relies on a dozen letters written by her grandfather in 1942, whose existence her mother, Helene (Hella) Maron, had entirely forgotten. Bewildered by this loss of memory, Maron takes the private and public amnesia as a point of departure to retrieve and restore Pawel’s story—if only by imagination—which emerges from painstakingly collected documents and her mother’s missing or suspect memories as well as from the narrator’s acts of imagination. In a similar vein, Himmelskörper’s protagonist Freia belatedly seeks to piece together the past by incorporating her grandparents’ waning memories, the somewhat suspect perspectives of her parents, and her own creative imagination. Though adhering to historical accuracy, Freia does not discriminate between private stories and public histories. In both texts, the female narrators are faced with the task of rewriting in addition to recovering and preserving a family history that conventionally excludes the experiences of mothers and grandmothers. As parents do little to question gender inequalities, the narrators are forced to fill the lack of female role models by delineating a (female) identity independent from family tradition. Growing up with more or less absent fathers, the narrators also focus on the tenuous relationship to their mothers. In Himmelskörper, the thinking and actions of protagonist Freia are determined by rebellion against her father and avoidance of her mother. And in Pavel’s Letters, the documentation of her grandfather’s victimization can be read as a reckoning of the daughter-mother conflict. Himmelskörper and Pavel’s Letters differ with regard to the author’s age, country of origin, and time frame, as well as to approach, genre, and style. Maron was born during the war and must live with echoes of its memory; Dückers is one of Germany’s youngest prominent authors. Maron portrays the rise and fall of the Communist regime, developments that deeply shaped her identity; Dückers’s novel incorporates the protagonist’s coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, including her Holocaust education in school, the effects of reunification and globalization, and the experimentation with multiple sexual identities. Concerned with her family’s victimization in Nazi Germany (and communist Germany), Maron tries to recover knowledge about her grandfather that has been willfully destroyed;

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Dückers’s text, however, resonates the recent discussions on German wartime suffering, representing in fictional form family interactions from the perspective of a granddaughter. Postwar and Postwall Germany The twentieth century concluded with profound political changes—the demise of the Soviet Union and its hegemony over Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, and the expansion of the European Union— changes which also affected collective as well as personal memory of the Holocaust. As detailed in “Discourses on the Nazi Past after Germany’s Reunification” in part I, the fall of the Iron Curtain enabled Western historians to examine an unprecedented amount of sources that had previously been inaccessible, while the lifting of travel restrictions allowed survivors, expellees, emigrants and their offspring to visit former homes in Eastern Europe and Russia. These border crossings found their way into recent historiography, novels, autobiographies, and film. After reunification, Germans are also confronted with the task of how to commemorate as one nation both the Nazi and the communist past, and to do so outside the framework of cold war ideology that had previously provided a dualistic notion of victims and perpetrators. The Berlin Holocaust Memorial, as well as the preceding struggle before its inauguration in May 2005, attests to the current efforts and difficulties with remembering the Holocaust in postwall Germany. In the twenty-first century, the German society faces challenges such as AIDS, immigration, conflicts between diverse ethnicities and religions, rising nationalism and extremism, post-9/11 terrorism, and its role in a strengthened and interconnected Europe. Still, the Nazi past continues to influence German politics and culture on both a national and international level. Germany’s transition to the new millennium coincided with a remarkable change of power when in September 1998, voters replaced the sixteen-year administration of Chancellor Helmut Kohl with a newly elected, liberal government under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, with Joschka Fischer as Vice Chancellor and Minister of Foreign Affairs. This first coalition of the Social Democratic Party and the Greens phased out nuclear power, liberalized Germany’s naturalization laws, opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq during the Gulf War, and pushed toward a stronger European Union, favoring increased independence from US foreign policy. To sociologist Heinz Bude, this was not simply a change in government but epitomized the coming of age of a new Generation Berlin. Indeed, German leadership changed from war to postwar generation: while Kohl

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(born 1930) was drafted in the last weeks of the war (during which his older brother was killed) and came of age in the wake of World War II, Schröder (born 1944) experienced neither the war nor knew his father who was killed in action a few months after his birth. Even a few years younger, Fischer (born 1948) had become a key member of the German student movement, protesting against the reign of fathers in families and politics. To Bude, the 1998 transition of power symbolized the changeover from war to the first postwar generation while the simultaneous move of the nation’s capital from Bonn to Berlin epitomized the end of Germany’s divided postwar era. As the former students of 1968 abandoned their revolutionary ideals and became established in the political leadership, a third generation that Bude termed Generation Berlin was waiting to fill the vacant posts of power.12 Indeed, in 2005 the generational turn continued when the CDU’s Angela Merkel rose to lead a grand coalition of CDU and SPD as Germany’s first female Chancellor. Born in 1954, Merkel is considerably younger than Germany’s first postwar generation; she is also the first East German to govern a united Germany. Based on her age and her conservative, non-feminist agenda, Merkel is surely not a spokesperson of the former 1968 student movement but rather fashions herself as its successor. Bude’s Generation Berlin delineates a cohort that had been recognized previously in various German newspapers, if only in less praiseworthy terms.13 Historian and journalist Brigitte Seebacher-Brandt announced in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the new generation was breaking with the parental 1968 traditions,14 while Florian Illies, author and journalist for the same newspaper, labeled the 1980s children Generation Golf (2000), i.e. narcissistic, brand-conscious, fun-loving consumers without political ideals. Illies’s turn of phrase echoes and mocks the abiding characterization of the materialistic and conservative values of the young, a depiction that Spiegel journalist Volker Hage made in March 1999 when he graced successful contemporary women writers with the flattering yet diminutive 12

13 14

For further elaboration on Bude’s concept, see Margit M. Sinka, “Heinz Bude’s Defining Construct of the Berlin Republic: The Generation Berlin,” Berlin: The Symphony Continues: Orchestrating Architectural, Social, and Artistic Change in Germany’s New Capital, eds. Carol AnneCostabile-Heming, Rachel J. Halverson, and Kristie A. Foell, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004, 187-204. For a more skeptical perspective on the booming generational discourse, see Richard Herzinger, “Mythos, Stil und Simulation: ‘Generation’ als kultureller Kampfbegriff und literarische Selbstfindung,” neue deutsche literatur 48.532 (2000): 144-64. See Thomas Anz, “Epochenumbruch und Generationenwechsel? Zur Konjunktur von Generationenkonstrukten seit 1989,” Schreiben nach der Wende: ein Jahrzehnt deutscher Literatur 1989-99, eds. Gerhard Fischer and David Roberts, Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001, 33.

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title “literary fräulein-miracle” [literarisches Fräuleinwunder].15 According to Hage, writers like Judith Hermann, Karen Duve, Julia Franck, and Zoë Jenny are more concerned about matters of sex and love than politics and history. By resurrecting a term that American GIs had used in the 1950s to flatter single attractive German women, Hage seems to praise the 1990s writers based on their appearance and men’s potential sexual interest, an impression underscored by the article’s photographs showing the authors in seductive and mysterious poses. In tandem with the visual impression put forth by the images, Hage portrays the women’s writing as youthful, untainted, and erotic, a characterization reinforced by Illies’s stereotyping of the 1980s and 1990s as mere pop culture devoid of political meaning. According to Heidelinde Müller, this is a generic classification that fails to distinguish between such diverse writers and defines a wide range of literary texts on the sole basis of the authors’ sex. By creating the category of fräulein-writers (and omitting the fact that some of the women named were approaching forty), Hage also evokes long-standing gender clichés of female naïveté and eroticism vis-à-vis male intellectual seriousness and artistic maturity. Moreover, by linking the contemporary women writers to fräuleins in the 1950s, Hage conveniently skipped over Germany’s influential postwar female authors like Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Monika Maron. Soon it became obvious that Hage’s paternalizing term was part of an effective publicity ploy that cast writers as charismatic, good-looking celebrities splayed in magazines and parading on talk shows.16 Yet even academic scholarship began to pit the emerging pop culture against intellectual seriousness.17

15 16

17

See Volker Hage, “Ganz schön abgedreht,” Der Spiegel 12/1999 and “Die Enkel kommen,” Der Spiegel 41/1999. See Peter J. Graves, “Karen Duve, Kathrin Schmidt, Judith Hermann: Literarisches Fräuleinwunder?” German Life and Letters 55:2 (April 2002): 196-206. See also Stuart Taberner, “The Consumer Republic? The Rebirth of ‘Pop,’” German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond: Normalization and the Berlin Republic, Rochester: Camden House, 2005, 81-93; Heidelinde Müller’s excellent analysis Das “literarische Fräuleinwunder.” Inspektion eines Phänomens der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur in Einzelfallstudien. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2004; and Christiane Caemmerer, Walter Delabar, and Helga Meise, eds. Fräuleinliteratur literarisch: Literatur von Frauen zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2005. Friederike Eigler, for instance, maintains that “‘Pop writers’ have broken with the traditions of aesthetic modernism (the stronghold of the ‘conservative’ intellectuals), while also turning away from questions of moral, political, or historical weight (the focus of liberal intellectuals of the previous generations).” Friederike Eigler, “Memory, Moralism, and Coming to Terms with the Present: Marin Walser and Zafer Şenocak,” Memory Traces: 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity, ed. Silke Arnold-de Simine, Bern: Peter Lang, 2005, 55-78, 58.

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If journalists and scholarship characterize Germany’s new writers as antagonistic to the (parental) 1968 political ideals, authors of the generation in question counter these charges, delineating for themselves their values and attitudes. In their introduction to the anthology stadt land krieg: Autoren der Gegenwart erzählen von der deutschen Vergangenheit (2004, City, Country, War: Contemporary Authors Narrate the German Past), Tanja Dückers and Verena Carl define themselves as a generation of grandchildren [Enkelgeneration] (rather than a “third generation”) that approaches the Nazi past without any one overarching theme or agenda. Refuting the charge of being apolitical and materialistic, Dückers maintains that World War II shaped her generation more than any other historical event. Yet, according to Dückers, her generation replaces the 1968 parents’ overt call to activism and use of literature as a means of achieving political goals with implicitly political literature. Acknowledging deep rifts among the members of her generation in which some still embrace the 1968 ideals while others reject them, Dückers replies that her generation may lack a joint political agenda but is nevertheless deeply concerned with history and politics. Journalist Iris Radisch adds in Die Zeit that the generation of grandchildren seems to look back to the past without seeking to come to terms with it, attempting to explain the present rather than the past.18 Petra M. Bagley distinguishes what she calls Grandmother Literature [Großmütterliteratur] from Father Books, suggesting that “this kind of writing is symptomatic of the passage of time in reunified Germany and of the advent of a new generation more at ease with itself.”19 Yet Bagley’s insightful analysis deliberately excludes texts with a political agenda and thus in large part continues the stereotyping of the generation as apolitical. Institutional Memory after Reunification Though some feared that reunification would squelch the discourse on the Nazi past, it actually fueled many public efforts to commemorate the victims of National Socialism. After over forty years of separate historiographies in East and West Germany, reunification emphasized the need to unite the divided memories of Nazi Germany and the postwar decades. And if Berlin was to be again the capital of a reunited Germany, it would 18 19

See Anz, 35. Petra M. Bagley, “Granny Knows Best:: The Voice of the Granddaughter in ‘Grossmütterliteratur,’” Pushing at Boundaries: Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck, eds. Heike Bartel and Elizabeth Boa, German Monitor 64, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006, 151-66, 152.

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have to acknowledge its history as capital of Nazi Germany. Indeed, Berlin has become the center of public Holocaust commemoration in the reunified Germany, housing the Jewish Museum, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and planned memorials to homosexual and Sinti and Roma victims. The construction of each of the buildings raised considerable controversy, proving that even sixty years after, German memory of the Holocaust is a complex, disputed, and highly-charged issue. When Daniel Libeskind (born 1946), the American son of JewishPolish survivors,20 proposed his daring architectural design for a Jewish Museum adjacent to the existing Berlin Museum, he touched on a fundamental conundrum of Jewish minority culture in Germany. Whereas a Jewish museum that was distinctly separate from the Berlin Museum would purport and reinscribe divisions between Germans and Jews, a Jewish component within the Berlin Museum, as it existed since the mid1970s, subsumed Jewish culture within German majority culture.21 Libeskind addresses this dilemma with a design called “Between the Lines.” Formed in a straight and broken line resembling the Star of David, the Jewish Museum seeks to give credit to the Jewish contribution to German culture while delineating “physically and spiritually the meaning of the Holocaust into the consciousness and memory of the city of Berlin.”22 In this way, the very building devoted to Jewish history and culture in Germany emphasizes its destruction and discontinuity. The design of the museum comprises several voids—unused spaces throughout and around the building—which can be viewed but not entered, evoking the erasure and absence of Jews in Germany as well as the inability to restore this void.23 Yet at the same time, the Museum’s permanent exhibit not only fills gaps of knowledge but highlights and integrates Jewish life in German history 20

21 22 23

Born in Lodz, Poland, Libeskind grew up in Israel, Great Britain, and the US to pursue first a career as a keyboardist before studying architecture at Cooper Union in New York with Peter Eisenman, among others. “Between the Lines” was his first project to be commissioned. See Noah Isenberg, “Reading ‘Between the Lines:” Daniel Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum and the Shattered Symbiosis,” Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis 1945-2000, eds. Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes, New York: Palgrave, 2002, 155-79; and James E. Young “Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin: The Uncanny Arts of Memorial Architecture,” At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, New Haven: Yale, 2000, 163. See also James E. Young, “Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin: The Uncanny Arts of Memorial Architecture,” in At Memory’s Edge, 153-54. Daniel Libeskind, “The Jewish Museum Berlin Between The Lines,” http://www.daniellibeskind.com/projects/, accessed 9/2006. For further discussion of the voids, see Isenberg, 167.

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by chronicling the long-standing history of Jews in Germany without exclusive focus on the Holocaust. The tenuous postwar relationship between Germans and Jews also becomes apparent as one approaches the museum and finds that the postmodern, bright-metallic Jewish Museum has visibly altered the perception of the baroque-style Berlin Museum next door. While both buildings appear to be separate structures, visitors enter the Berlin Museum and pass through a subterranean walkway in order to go into the Jewish Museum, experiencing for themselves the difficult intersections of Jewish and German histories. Clashing in style, size, and content, yet inextricably linked, Libeskind’s design visibly recalls what Dan Diner terms the German-Jewish “negative symbiosis” after 1945,24 and which Jack Zipes calls the “basis of German-Jewish identity during the twentieth century.”25 In such negative symbiosis, Germans and Jews are bound together by the lasting, destructive force of the Holocaust, with each side struggling for a separate identity. The difficult tension between union and separation of German and Jewish cultures is also evident in the decade-long debate that preceded the Museum’s opening in 1999, and the installation of its permanent collection in 2001. Even without an exhibit, the building drew numerous visitors and publicity, and shaped the face of the new capital in the post-Holocaust, postwall era.

24 25

See Dan Diner, “Negative Symbiose: Deutsche und Juden nach Auschwitz,” Babylon 1 (1986): 9-20. Jack Zipes, “The Negative German-Jewish Symbiosis,” Insiders and Outsiders: Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria, eds. Dagmar C.G. Lorenz and Gabriele Weinberger, Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1994, 144.

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Aerial view of the Berlin Museum and the Jewish Museum © Jüdisches Museum Berlin

Another prominent attempt to commemorate the Holocaust includes the German Parliament’s 1999 decision to construct the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe [Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas] in the center of Berlin. Impeded by an almost two-decade long dispute on the purpose, size, and design of the memorial,26 as well as scandals about one of the contractors (as it turned out, a branch of the Degussa company which supplied anti-graffiti coating for the memorial’s concrete had produced Zyklon B gas used in the extermination camps), the memorial was inaugurated on May 10, 2005, two days after the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war. Yet, to scholars like James Young, it is the preceding debate that reflects the efforts and obstacles of public Holocaust commemoration in postwar Germany. After two competitions for designs in 1994 and 1997 (the first winning design was declared unacceptable by thenChancellor Helmut Kohl), the memorial became a contested political issue in Germany’s 1998 election. The second winning design of American architect Peter Eisenman, a New York deconstructuralist artist and theorist, also faced strong opposi26

For an excellent and thorough recapitulation of the debate, see James E. Young “Germany’s Holocaust Memorial Problem—and Mine,” At Memory’s Edge, 184-223.

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tion. In revised final form, the memorial covers an area of 19,000 square meters from which 2,711 concrete slabs rise eight inches to fifteen feet above ground, creating a wave-like, austere labyrinth. While the slabs resemble pillars or tombstones, they are intentionally unadorned and thus devoid of any symbolical meaning. According to the architect, this grid pattern of irregular, inclined blocks on uneven ground is supposed to evoke a sense of instability, disorientation and uncertainty. The monument remains controversial; where some find the blank steles too abstract (in a somewhat bizarre proposal, journalist and Memorial spokesperson Lea Rosh planned to embed a tooth of a Holocaust victim and a yellow star in one of the pillars), others are skeptical over such an arguably monumental gesture of atonement. Yet the site has become a major tourist attraction of the new Berlin in the years following its completion. Nowadays, the memorial draws visitors to its troubling depths and stirs an uncanny loss of orientation while also inviting children to play hide and seek, jump from pillar to pillar, even picnic on its grounds. This is precisely what Eisenman envisioned. He rejects the idea that the space be treated as a holy site and even opposes any anti-graffiti coating (as it turns out, there have been several attempts to paint swastikas on the pillars). Underneath the steles, an underground information center complements the above ground memorial site by listing the names of all known Jewish victims, supplying general information on the Holocaust, and portraying the fate of selected Jewish families. The public remembrance of national shame remains a daring move; as Moishe Postone and Eric Santner point out, it is “the first time a nation will erect, in the middle of its capital, an installation (designed by Peter Eisenman, an American Jew) commemorating the most horrific crimes of its history.”27 To Michael Naumann, the project and scope of the memorial aptly reflects the unprecedented scale of the Holocaust. The memorial and its debate also highlighted the need to remember other victims of National Socialism, and decisions fell to commemorate both homosexual and Sinti and Roma victims with separate future memorials in Berlin in the future.

27

Moishe Postone and Erik Santner, “Introduction,” Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2003, 2.

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Aerial view of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial © Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, Photo: Paul Langrock, Panoramablick über das Stelenfeld

With both the Jewish Museum and the Holocaust Memorial, German Holocaust remembrance is mediated by a Jewish-American perspective. This merely follows tradition, as arguably German awareness of the Holocaust was always closely tied to American representations: sparked by the television series Holocaust (1979), continued by the blockbuster Schindler’s List (1993)28 and by the translation of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996), all of which were met with unprecedented success in Germany despite resolute trepidations by historians (see “Postwar Developments in West Germany” in part I and “West Germany’s First Postwar Generation: The Student Movement and its Aftermath” in part II). In his influential essay “The Americanization of the Holocaust” (1997), Alvin Rosenfeld claims that American representations of the Holocaust tend to “individualize, heroize, moralize, idealize, and universalize”

28

For more detail on the German and Austrian reception of Schindler’s List, see Scott Denham, “Schindler Returns to Open Arms: Schindler’s List in Germany and Austria,” Lessons and Legacies III: Memory, Memorialization, and Denial, ed. Peter Hayes, Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1999, 193-210.

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troubling crimes.29 In a similar vein, Peter Novick, in his controversial work The Holocaust in American Life, maintains that in the United States the Holocaust is remembered as a non-specific, undisputed, and uncontroversial event30 which serves to elicit the seemingly opposite American values of hope and optimism.31 Indeed, this characterization seems to fit popular and successful American representations of the Holocaust, be it the 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust with its emphasis on romantic love and family values, Schindler’s List with the moral restitution of its main protagonist and salvation of the Schindler Jews, or even the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. that concludes with a message of survival and liberation.32 Such universal concepts also leave little to no room for differentiation according to gender, class, and other distinctions among survivors. While the designs of the Jewish Museum and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin purposefully reject allusions to hope and survival and defy any universal lessons, they are still irrefutably American representations of the Holocaust, reflecting American ideals, even patriotism (Daniel Libeskind is best known in the United States for his winning design of New York’s World Trade Center Memorial site, which has since been abandoned and considered unrealizable). The “Americanization of the Holocaust” in Germany has not yet been examined,33 though it is worth asking what the effects are of a dominant Americanized version of Holocaust remembrance culture in Germany. While James Young’s discussion of the various proposals for the Berlin Holocaust Memorial makes it clear that the German entries could not match the striking vision of Eisenman’s design, questions remain unanswered of whether German representations of the Holocaust would differ 29 30 31 32

33

Alvin H. Rosenfeld. “The Americanization of the Holocaust,” Thinking about the Holocaust: After Half a Century, ed. Alvin Rosenfeld, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997, 123. See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999, 279. Gary Weissman, for instance, elucidates how the stage adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank “dejudaized” the text. Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004, 12-13. The permanent exhibit in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum concludes with stories of liberation, and in the closing scene of Schindler’s List, the surviving Schindler-Jews are shown marching from their incarceration straight to Israel—turning from black and white into color to the tunes of “Jerusalem the Golden,” a popular song from the SixDays’ War. See Dora Apel’s discussion of Holocaust kitsch in Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002, 18-22, 26; Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler. How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold, Routledge: New York, 1999; and Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000, 155-78 (on Holocaust). Exceptions are Isenberg’s brief discussion in the context of the Jewish Museum (172), and Young’s evaluation of the different entries for the Holocaust Memorial (184-223).

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from American ones and whether they would draw similar or different conclusions, or, for that matter, draw the crowds of tourists. When considering the erasure of Jewish culture in Germany, the fact that AmericanJewish artists have become instrumental in shaping German Holocaust memory seems a sad necessity. Yet as Jewish life in Germany is beginning become established once again, German-Jewish writers have been increasingly vocal about their experiences and are less inclined to accept an imported Holocaust discourse. American “Third Generation” Post-Holocaust Art As American Holocaust representations have grown increasingly influential in the German cultural context, this study briefly considers examples of “third-generation” American post-Holocaust art along with secondary works by American scholars. In the U.S., scholars have been more willing to accept the term “third generation” to delineate the offspring of survivors, whereas scholars in Germany, by and large, favor “generation of grandchildren” [Enkelgeneration] to refer to Germans’ offspring as a category. Yet even in the U.S., the assumption of a “third generation” does not go unquestioned as scholars wonder whether it is viable and productive to presume a) that the Holocaust warrants the counting of generations, and, more substantively b) that the generations after the Holocaust, whether they are descendants of survivors or not, share a common, binding experience. As it becomes increasingly more difficult to classify and categorize the post-Holocaust world, the legacy of the Holocaust has permeated vastly different aspects of Western society and is being appropriated from many sides, reflecting different national and cultural contexts. Even though individual approaches vary greatly, reflecting variety and experimentation, there is an increased tendency to reject religious meaning and redemption in the representation of the Holocaust. In his analysis of postapocalypse representations, James Berger proposes that descendants of both survivors and bystanders witness what he calls the “end of testimony”34 and collectively respond to this knowledge: In what might be called the “third generation” of Holocaust fiction, the Holocaust has become open for universal appropriation. Departing from the forms of actual and fictional testimony that characterize the work of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust in “third-generation” fiction enters the autobiographies and bildungsromans of people who were never themselves in the camps; it enters 34

James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999, 69.

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comic books, pornography, movies about Vietnam, avant-garde experimentation, 35 and postmodern parody.

To Berger, post-testimonial fiction on the Holocaust is expanding exponentially with respect to both form and perspective. Dora Apel likewise suggests that the post-Holocaust generations tend to desacralize the Holocaust, appropriating the past in ways she called “nonnarrative, polyvalent, metaphorical, enigmatic, and ambiguous.”36 Mieke Bal extends the term “cultural memory” to describe the ever-extending legacy of the Holocaust. By its very definition, cultural memory links individual and collective memory as well as past, present, and future, transferring “Holocaustrelated issues, insights, critical vocabularies, and therapeutic paradigms to other, related, historical contexts.”37 Similarly, Leslie Morris, emphasizes that the Holocaust’s postmemory seeps into other cultures and other geographical spaces. Efraim Sicher views this type of appropriation more critically, cautioning: Appropriation of the Holocaust for all kinds of agendas means it is now likely the Holocaust will be met as a trivialized tope, as a representation of a memory or as a memory of a memory in a twilight museum culture of simulacra and hypertext.38

The art by children and grandchildren of survivors that is beginning to emerge substantiates and expands on these theoretical insights. In the Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art exhibition displayed at the Jewish Museum in New York from March 17 through June 30, 2002, pioneering international artists (some of them children or grandchildren of survivors) turn away from reproducing images of Holocaust victims to focus instead on the representation of (and fascination with) perpetrators. This shift not only challenges the identification with the victim so common in popular Holocaust representations but also questions assumptions and rules in the consumption of the Holocaust altogether. The artists’ highly provocative works, like Tom Sachs’s Prada Death Camp (1998) or Zbigniew Libera’s seven-box Lego Concentration Camp Set (1996), brashly contest sacrosanct beliefs such as the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the separation of good and evil, laying bare the seductive power of Nazism instead. Responses to the exhibit ranged from condemnation of the art exhibits (by 35 36 37 38

Berger, xvi. Dora Apel, Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002, 4. Mieke Bal, “Introduction,” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, Hanover: UP of New England, 1999, vii-xvii, xi. Efraim Sicher, “The Future of the Past: Countermemory and Postmemory in Contemporary American Post-Holocaust Narratives,” History & Memory 12.2 (2000): 56-91, 58.

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the well-respected, orthodox New York Rabbi Haskel Lookstein), protest demonstrations (by Yeshiva High School students), calls for a boycott (by the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors), to full support of the exhibition (by the Board of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture). After only six-weeks, over 400 comments were gathered and displayed in the exhibition’s concluding room that reflect the wide range of opinion and emotion the artworks elicited. In another example involving literature, Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated (2002) blends, often shockingly, past and present, perpetrator and victim, fiction and fact, sex and death, and humor with horror. Foer (born 1977) frames the representation of the Holocaust in a fictional (yet autobiographical) story of himself visiting Ukraine in search of his grandfather’s past.39 Integrating the Holocaust in a larger historical and cultural context, the text connects Jonathan’s imagined history of life in the Jewish shtetl Trachimbrod 1791-1942, his trip to Ukraine in the summer of 1997, and a follow-up written exchange with his Ukrainian translator, Alexander Perchov, from July 1997 to January 1998. Whereas the narration of Trachimbrod’s history, a novel within the novel, is told in the tradition of magic realism,40 punctuated by folklore, it clashes visibly with the more realistic narration of Jonathan’s trip to Ukraine and the ensuing letter exchange. With Jonathan’s letters omitted, however, the reader only knows Alex’s responses, filled not only with blundering grammar and word choices but also with self-aggrandizing fantasies and ponderings about the past of his own Ukrainian family. Foer’s alter ego Alex, a funny but wholly untrustworthy narrator who uses the English language to bizarre ends, emits blatantly racist and anti-Semitic statements, bends the truth whenever it comes in handy, and seems uninterested in authenticity altogether: We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes? The both of us? Do you think that this is acceptable when we are writing about things that occurred? If your answer is no, then why do you write about Trachimbrod and your grandfather in the manner that you do, and why do you command me to be untruthful? If your answer is yes, then this creates another question, which is if we are to be such nomads with the truth, why do we not make the story more premium than 41 life? (Alex’s letter to Jonathan, December 12, 1997)

39 40

41

Foer’s story was inspired by his own trip to his grandparents’ home Trachimbrod in Ukraine and his unsuccessful search for the woman who had saved his grandfather’s life. As Lee Behlman reveals, the use of the fantastic harkens back and continues the tradition of Yiddish folkloric storytelling. “The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasure of the Comic Book in Recent Jewish American Holocaust Fiction,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22.3 (Summer 2004): 58. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002, 179.

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In his eccentric style, Alex points to a central dilemma of Holocaust representation. Should the post-Holocaust generations continue to strive for truthfulness when such thing seems unattainable altogether? But if the demand for authenticity is abandoned, should there be any limits to imagination and representation? Jonathan, for instance, prefers to narrate Trachimbrod’s past in magical style rather than adhering closely to historical facts, but Alex, too, has inevitably altered the story (and history) to his liking. And Foer adds another level of distortion: since the text omits Jonathan’s letters, only alluding to them in Alex’s words, it favors a rather unintelligible Ukrainian narrator over the more qualified and eloquent (autobiographical) American protagonist, thus emphasizing the narrative’s gaps and limits. Everything is Illuminated turns horror into humor when broaching the Shoah business that transpires from wealthy Americans searching for the homes of lost relatives in Eastern Europe and when exposing Alex’s racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes, not to mention numerous misunderstandings that occur in the process of communication and translation. Alex continues to spill his opinions on “Negroes” and “spoiled rich Jews,” commenting on particularities of American life from the perspective of an ignorant outsider. Yet both Alex and Jonathan recognize that humor is in some ways a strategy for dealing with pain and an easier way of representing a traumatic past. While Jonathan refuses to be funny, reasoning that “humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world,” Alex admits toward the end of the narrative “I do not want to be disgusting anymore. And I do not want to be funny, either.”42 The text, however, does both; it uses comedic elements to approach the theme of the Holocaust (though the Holocaust is never represented in funny terms) and simultaneously questions such use. Foer’s novel also addresses the enigma of how to represent Jewish culture in light of the absence of Jewish life in Germany and Eastern Europe, the same issue Eisenman and Libeskind engender in architectural designs. In Everything is Illuminated, the Jewish shtetl has not only been completely destroyed but Trachimbrod is erased from maps and memory. There is but one frail and elderly eyewitness left (perhaps this is indeed Augustine, the woman who saved the life of Jonathan’s grandfather, but it is unlikely) who can still locate the former hub of Jewish life. In ironic contrast to the text’s title, nothing has been illuminated when Alex, his grandfather, and Jonathan finally visit the site of Trachimbrod at the text’s culmination: 42

Foer, 158 and 219.

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“No,” she said, “we are here.” “She says we are here,” I told the hero. “What?” “I informed you that there would be nothing,” she said. “It was all destroyed.” “What do you mean we’re here?” the hero asked. “Tell him it is because it is so dark,” Grandfather said to me, “and that we could see more if it was not dark.” “It is so dark,” I told him. “No, she said, “this is all that you would see. It is al43 ways like this, always dark.”

With Trachimbrod’s Jews murdered, their culture erased, even their memories lost, the text merely emphasizes the darkness. Indeed, Jonathan (whom Alex incongruously calls a “hero”) only hears a fraction of what the woman, presumably the last eyewitness of the Trachimbrod murder, has to tell. As Alex’s translation omits important details, the narrative reveals the process and limits of translation, adding yet another layer of distance and uncertainty to a past that is already difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct. In a surprising final twist it turns out that Jonathan and Alex’s pasts are in fact intertwined. Jonathan’s search for his Jewish grandfather’s past unravels an act of perpetration committed by Alex’s Ukrainian grandfather, who in 1941 became responsible for the killing of his Jewish best friend at the hand of the Nazis. It is only with the distance of two generations that Jonathan and Alex can acknowledge the connections between victim and perpetrator histories and, as friends, witness the emotional scars in both of their families. With the distance to past events, however, the text hinges on mediation and translation at all levels: Jonathan’s story of his search for his grandfather is represented by Alex, while Alex’s search for his own grandfather’s past is only revealed in his letter to Jonathan. And the imaginary, magical narrative style of Jewish life in the shtetl Trachimbrod romanticizes a Jewish past rather than documents it. As the grandchildren of victims and perpetrators meet and interact in a postHolocaust world, Foer draws attention to the present interests that guide reconstruction of the past and questions the moral limits of such representation and imagination. The Enkelgeneration in Germany Foer’s text introduces several issues relevant in texts by the generation of grandchildren. Narrators turn to fantasy and imagination when memories are not available, deliberating the processes of mediation and distortion. Stretching across three or more generations, grandchildren’s texts also move beyond the dual victim-perpetrator typology, embracing the fact 43

Foer, 184.

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that their fates (like Jonathan’s and Alex’s) have become intertwined and multifaceted. In Germany, the generation of grandchildren seems especially interested in how the Nazi legacy connects to seemingly ordinary family memories and stories. In a Tagesspiegel article of November 2003, Aleida Assmann distinguishes a tidal wave of texts by Germany’s grandchildren concerned with their family’s memories, and a Spiegel article of July 2004 pronounces young Germans obsessed with the past, in particular their family’s.44 Recent writings on the Nazi past indeed have exploded exponentially, in multiple directions, contradicting earlier assessments that decried the generation as apolitical children of consumerism.45 As a child of Russian parents who moved to West Germany in 1970, Maxim Biller (born in 1960 in Prague) is part of a generation of Jews who arrived in Germany after the Holocaust. According to Thomas Nolden, “third-generation” Jewish writers like Biller no longer bemoan the erasure of Jewish culture in Germany but begin to establish it anew.46 Biller’s controversial writing continues to spark interest and debate, and contribute to the growing cultural and geographical proliferation of Holocaust representation. Along with Rafael Seligmann, Biller also fashioned the idea of German-Jewish Holocaust parody. Poking fun at Germans and Jews alike, Biller’s writing breaks with narrative conventions and taboos, in particular with respect to the recent German obsession with Jewish culture. Though highly provocative and seemingly insulting, Biller acknowledges that his writing is rooted in ethical concerns: Actually, it is not the Holocaust itself that interests and moves me so much as what it did to human beings, regardless of whether they were perpetrators or victims, and what it still does to them, and particularly to their descendents. … Although it annoys and bores my generation and we get so fed up with it, still everything that we write and think and do today, everything that concerns us politically and intellectually, is an echo of the most horrific period of all horrific periods.47 44 45

46 47

See Aleida Assmann, “Die Flut der Erinnerung,” Der Tagesspiegel, November 8, 2003; and Susanne Beyer, “Gesucht: die eigene Herkunft,” Der Spiegel 29 (2004): 118-120. See also the following works that are not mentioned in the main text: Mirjam Pressler’s Die Zeit der schlafenden Hunde, a book for teenagers in which a granddaughter begins to uncover her grandparents’ past, following a history class project, Thomas Lehr’s Frühling (2001), Jörg Bernig’s Niemandszeit (2002), and Tanja Langer’s Der Morphinist oder Die Barbarin bin ich (2002). See Thomas Nolden, Junge jüdische Literatur: Konzentriertes Schreiben in der Gegenwart, Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 1995, 54-55. “Eigentlich ist es nicht der Holocaust selbst, der mich interessiert und bewegt, sondern vielmehr das, was er mit den Menschen, egal ob Täter oder Opfer, gemacht hat und noch immer macht, und vor allem aber mit ihren Nachkommen. … Es kann meine Generation nämlich noch so nerven und anöden, es kann uns noch so lästig sein – und doch ist es so,

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Depicting the central importance of the Holocaust in contemporary Germany, the two male protagonists of Biller’s short story “Harlem Holocaust” (1990) belong to a postwar generation that only knows the Holocaust in mediated form but continues to live in its shadow. Gerhard “Gary” Warzawski, son of German-Jewish émigrés who arrived in the United States well before 1933, shrewdly uses the Holocaust to his favor by reminding Germans of their guilt at every opportunity, especially his German counterpart, the “suffering German son of wrongdoers”48 with a Jewish-sounding name Efraim Rosenhain (the misleading name being a result of his mother’s attempts at making amends). The text exposes clichés of perpetrators and victims that promote false empathy and false attempts at reconciliation: both Warzawski and Rosenhain gain profits from the Holocaust’s aftermath as Warzawski’s Holocaust novels, especially his story Harlem Holocaust, are celebrated in Germany despite failing to reach a broad audience in America, and are also the source of income for Rosenhain who translates the works into German. As a corpulent, privileged Jew who constantly seeks profit and habitually preys on women, Warzawski personifies the worst of anti-Semitic stereotypes. And armed with his “imperious Auschwitz bonus,”49 Warzawski secures a scholarship in Munich and trounces Efraim in sexual matters, too. After losing his Jewish girlfriend, Eve, Efraim loses his German girlfriend, Ina, to Warzawski. The narrative culminates with Efraim’s fantasy of a sexual encounter between Warzawski and Ina, in which Warzawski insists on protecting himself with a condom graced with the Stars of David. During her orgasm, Ina lets out a “wild, unconscious, archaic scream in High German: ‘I feel so terribly sorry for your people!’”50 In Biller’s text, the relationship between victims and perpetrators is turned upside down and carries explicitly sexual overtones51 as the successful, narcissistic, and potent War-

48

49 50 51

dass alles was wir heute schreiben und denken und tun, dass also alles, was uns politisch und intellektuell beschäftigt, ein Echo auf die schrecklichste aller schrecklichen Zeiten ist.” Maxim Biller, “Geschichte schreiben,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, January 4, 1995. Translation is my own. “Leidenden deutschen Tätersohn.” Maxim Biller, “Harlem Holocaust,” Wenn ich einmal reich und tot bin (1990), München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000, 80. Translation from Maxim Biller, “Harlem Holocaust,” Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany: An Anthology, eds. Leslie Morris and Karen Remmler, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002, 205-42, 208. 235, “Selbstherrlichen Auschwitz-Bonus,” 114. Maxim Biller, “Harlem Holocaust,” Wenn ich einmal reich und tot bin (1990), München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000, 114. 230, “Wilden, besinnungslosen, archaischen Schrei auf Hochdeutsch: ‘Ihr Volk tut mir ja so schrecklich leid!’” 108. As Morris and Remmler elaborate, “Biller often chooses confined spaces, such as the closet or the elevator described above, to suggest the closeted erotic tensions between Ger-

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zawski victimizes the guilt-ridden, philo-Semitic German Rosenhain who then becomes paralyzed by the Jew’s material and sexual triumphs. On the other hand, the story’s epilogue by a fictitious professor Hermann Warschauer at Columbia University undermines the narrator’s (Rosenhain’s) credibility. Warschauer claims to have received the story “Harlem Holocaust” from a deceased acquaintance, a dubious and unstable man named Friedrich (!) Rosenhain. With this surprising end, it remains unclear whether Warzawski, Rosenhain, Warschauer, or all three are unreliable narrators and protagonists, in other words, whether “Harlem Holocaust” is Warzawski’s or Rosenhain’s product, whether Rosenhain truly experienced his daunting defeats or expressed merely troubled fantasies in his paranoia, and whether Warschauer, so obviously a fictitious figure, is any more trustworthy. Flaunting stereotypes of both victims and victimizers, Biller ruthlessly (and hilariously) lays bare the convoluted taboos, projections, distortions, and guilt complexes that structure contemporary relations between Germans and Jews. He also constructs German philo-Semitism as a (sexual) fetish grounded in sexual anxiety. As a fetish, Jews are both aggrandized and degraded in contemporary Germany, as well as clouded in taboo. In this way, the seeming opposites of German philo-Semitism and German anti-Semitism actually resemble one another (Rosenhain’s philo-Semitic fantasies turn into anti-Semitic projection), a connection that Rita Bashaw recognizes in her interpretation of Rafael Seligmann’s Der Musterjude (1997, The Model Jew), where Jews are similarly the target of German fantasies, anxieties, and prejudice.52 In “Harlem Holocaust,” however, the untenable nature of Germans and Jewish relations elicits questions of ownership when it comes to victimhood. For instance, Efraim’s former Jewish girlfriend chastises his disapproval of Germans with the words “Only I can do that!”53 thus claiming authority over the German-bashing discourse. Because there is so much to gain (and lose), all parties involved hunt for their piece of the Holocaust business. While the mere fact of belonging to a group of former victims has turned into a priceless advantage and led to material, sexual, and moral superiority, Biller’s Germans are still trying to catch up, fantasizing about a German-Jewish symbiosis in an

52 53

mans and Jews.” Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany: An Anthology, eds. Leslie Morris and Karen Remmler, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002, 23. See Rita Bashaw, “Comic Vision and ‘Negative Symbiosis’ in Maxim Biller’s Harlem Holocaust and Rafael Seligmann’s Der Musterjude,” Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis 1945-2000, eds. Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes, New York: Palgrave, 2002, 263-76. 208, “Das darf nur ich,” 80.

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attempt of appropriating and redirecting the discourse and finally tossing out the faulty German postwar image. In his short story “Kohn in der Couch,” a German counterpart to “Harlem Holocaust,” Norbert Kron (born 1965) mocks the “philoSemitic—anti-Semitic complex”54 from a gentile perspective when the story’s protagonist, Heinrich Krohn, fantasizes about sleeping with a Jewish woman for his absolution. Krohn knows no Jews but identifies with Jewish artists, loves Jewish jokes, wants Jewish friends, chooses to omit the “r” in his last name to sound more Jewish, and, above all wants to have sex with his (supposedly) Jewish psychoanalyst. As in Biller’s story, “Jewishness” has turned into a German fetish, and a Jewish character holds sexual and material powers over a German—or so they desire. While the reader in Biller had to doubt Rosenhain’s credibility, in Kron’s story, it remains unclear altogether whether the object of Krohn’s desire is Jewish. Since the protagonist thinks he knows who is Jewish or not (undoubtedly relying on stereotypes and his “Jewdar”) his fantasies and projections are inherently racist, while the text’s obvious similarities between the names Kron–Krohn–Kohn mocks and simultaneously questions an autobiographical reading. Like Biller before, Kron uncovers the links between anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism, decrying the self-serving nature of the latter. Krohn’s vision of his “Jewish” psychoanalyst is as much grounded in misperception and imagination as is the narrator’s image of her grandfather in Verena Carl’s “Schlachtensee,” who fantasizes about her grandfather’s alleged work for Hitler’s architect Albert Speer. Both stories are part of Dückers’s and Carl’s anthology stadt land krieg (City, Country, War), which rejects the concept of a homogeneous “grandchildren generation” [Enkelgeneration] but emphasizes common concerns that unite the writing of grandchildren, distinguishing it from that of previous generations. The book’s diverse, often mysterious and paradoxical short stories by young authors between thirty and forty all focus in one way or another on the Nazi past, although the connection is not necessarily obvious and often secondary to another story set in the present. In addition, the stories concede to the impossibility of knowing the past, combining imagination and fantasy with experimentation in genre and style. This approach mirrors Foer’s in Everything is Illuminated, which did not pose the Holocaust as a central, sacred event either but linked it to other contexts. Likewise, the 54

“Philo-semitisch-antisemitscher Komplex,” Norbert Kron, “Kohn in der Couch,” stadt land krieg: Autoren der Gegenwart erzählen von der deutschen Vergangenheit, eds. Tanja Dückers and Verena Carl, Berlin: Aufbau, 2004, 105-15, 108. Translation is my own.

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narrators of stadt land krieg come across taboos, projections, and family’s secrets that more often than not remain hidden. This type of experimentation also characterizes Marcel Beyer’s (born 1965) The Karnau Tapes (1997, Flughunde, 1995), which traces the life of Nazi sound engineer Hermann Karnau. Using the form of a novel to adopt multiple perspectives and two independent narrators (Karnau and Goebbel’s oldest daughter, Helga, whose voice Karnau recorded before her death), Beyer explicates how Karnau, out of obsession with his studies, embraced Nazi ideology to the point of taking part in inhumane and cruel medical experiments. Beyer’s later novel Spione (2000, Spies, 2005) is likewise concerned with the legacy of perpetration when four cousins peruse through a photo album and try to piece together the life of their grandparents, in particular their involvement in the war. Other texts by German grandchildren attempt to reexamine the categories of perpetrators and victims by investigating the involvement and concerns of several family members. Zafer Şenocak’s (born 1961) novel Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (1998, Dangerous Affinities) blends different cultural, national, and semantic contexts, as well as victimhood and perpetration when protagonist Sascha Muhteschem explores his German-JewishTurkish heritage. Portraying the aftermath of the Holocaust in a larger, non-exclusively German context, Şenocak considers Holocaust victims as well as perpetrators of the Armenian genocide. Similarly linking between countries and cultures, Stephan Wackwitz’s (born 1952) An Invisible Country (2005, Ein unsichtbares Land, 2003), connects the legacy of the Holocaust with the history of German-Polish relations and German colonial Africa. The novel begins with the narrator’s discovery of a camera that his father received from his grandfather, decades after he became a British prisoner of war. While it turns out that the camera’s film has deteriorated, so much so that the coveted pictures from South Africa in 1939 have become indistinct smudges, the discolored film inspires the grandson to research and reconstruct a family history that has been covered by silence and taboo. As indicated in the text’s title, the narrator is intrinsically interested in places, as his grandfather worked as a pastor in the German protestant congregation of Anhalt from 1921 to 1933, just ten kilometers from the neighboring town, Auschwitz. This concern with both infamous and uncharted territory is directly linked to reunification, as the fall of the Iron Curtain made it possible and necessary to map and redraw the boundaries of Germany and Europe. Having worked at the Goethe Institutes in New Delhi, Tokyo, Krakow, and Bratislava, Wackwitz also relates German history from the perspective of having lived abroad. Reevaluating family photos, documents from both grandfather and father, and his own memories, Wackwitz not only portrays his grandfather’s ideological blind spots

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but also his own, especially when it comes to the 1968 students’ movement. The text’s designation as a family novel [Familienroman] quickly became a favorite term of critics to distinguish children’s and especially grandchildren’s inquiries into their families’ past.55 In Vielleicht ist es sogar schön (2004, Perhaps It Is Even Beautiful), one of the youngest authors I have mentioned so far, physician Jakob Hein (born 1971, the son of author Christoph Hein), recalls his mother’s life after her premature death to breast cancer. Hein, too, embeds in his autobiographical novel the legacy of the Holocaust, integrating it into the family’s history. In this way, Hein connects the fate of his Jewish grandfather, physicist Johannes Figulla and his childhood memories in the GDR in the 1970s and 1980s with the progression of his mother’s illness. As the narrator reveals, he and his mother faced ignorance and deceit when attempting to find out more about the family’s Jewish history in the GDR. However, when trying to establish contact with the Jewish community in the unified Germany, the narrator and his mother are rejected because they are not Jewish “enough.” While the text only peripherally deals with the Holocaust, it examines memories and mediated memories of parents and grandparents, and the resulting tensions of a heritage that includes both Jewish and non-Jewish relatives. In another family novel, In den Augen meines Großvaters (2004, In My Grandfather’s Eyes), Thomas Medicus (born 1953) posthumously reconstructs the life of his grandfather, Wehrmacht officer Wilhelm Crisolli (born 1895), in fictional form. In an approach resembling earlier Father Books, the narrator searches for traces of his grandfather in Poland, Russia, and Italy, in letters and photographs, seeking to illuminate the dubious circumstances of his early death. Apparently, Crisolli had a distinguished military career as commanding officer in three armies, both during the First and Second World War until he was shot by partisans in Tuscany in September 1944, at age forty-nine. Yet the family never investigated the reasons for his murder. While the narrator admits that Crisolli may well have participated in Wehrmacht crimes, he struggles with the notion of such indistinct guilt, and seeks to approach his grandfather as an unbiased observer rather than a prosecutor—a strategy criticized in some reviews. 55

Besides Wackwitz’s text, Zafer Şenocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (1998), Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang (2002), Ulla Hahn’s Unscharfe Bilder (2003), Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper (2003), Uwe Timm’s Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003), Wibke Bruhns’s Meines Vaters Land (2004), and Thomas Medicus’s In den Augen meines Großvaters (2004) have all been termed Familienromane. Hannes Heer offers a more critical if not polemical perspective on the recent genre. See Hannes Heer, “Literatur und Erinnerung: Die Nazizeit als Familiengeheimnis,” Hitler war’s: Die Befreiung der Deutschen von ihrer Vergangenheit, Berlin: Aufbau, 2005, 196-236.

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From a grandson’s perspective, Medicus furthermore focuses on the aftermath of Crisolli’s death, including family secrets and taboos. Having no memories of his own available, he refuses to separate fact from fiction: For me, a person who was born later, the photos from the war in Italy in 1944 had made my grandfather into a character in a novel. And I had thus crossed a boundary that seems to me in retrospect to be typical of sentiments expressed by the third generation. I wanted to know what had happened, but the reconstruction of an authentic past was not an option. Fact and fiction, documents and imagination, are not opposites in my book. The multiple refraction of perspective determines the narrative approach.56

With Das Tagebuch der Maria Meinhof. April 1945 bis März 1946 (2004, The Diary of Maria Meinhof. April 1945 to March 1946), Renate Meinhof (born 1966) augments the male-dominated bomb war debate with perspectives and experiences of women. Complementing the diary of her deceased grandmother with interviews of friends, acquaintances, and relatives, Meinhof details women’s hunger, fear, abuse, and rape at the hand of Soviet soldiers upon liberation of the Ducherow village in April 1945, from the belated perspective of a granddaughter. Tanja Dückers and Monika Maron The following chapters examine Monika Maron’s Pavel’s Letters, which reconstructs the biography of her Polish-Jewish grandfather Pawel Iglarz, and Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper, which considers the protagonist’s grandparents’ support of Nazi Germany. Both authors belong to distinctly different generations: born in 1941, Maron is generally considered a second-generation writer—indeed she is older than some of the authors mentioned in part II57—while 1968-born Dückers is the one of the 56

57

“Die Fotos aus dem Italienkrieg 1944 hatten für mich, den Nachgeborenen, meinen Großvater zu einer Romanfigur gemacht. Damit hatte ich eine mir im nachhinein für das Sprechen der dritten Generation kennzeichnend erscheinende Grenze überschritten. Ich wollte wissen, was geschehen war, aber die Rekonstruktion einer authentischen Vergangenheit war keine Option. Fakten und Fiktionen, Dokumente und Einbildungskraft bilden in meinem Buch keine Gegensätze, die mehrfache Brechung der Perspektive bestimmt die Erzählhaltung.” Thomas Medicus, “Brüche und Widersprüche: Die Erinnerung der 3. Generation,” 60 Jahre Kriegsende, Goethe Institut, http://www.goethe.de/ges/ztg/dos/60j/ de446659.htm, accessed January 2007. Translation is my own. Since Maron was born in 1941, before the war ended, Friederike Eigler situates her between the (first) generation that grew up during the war and the (second) postwar generation. Other scholars consider her a second-generation writer. See Friederike Eigler, “Engendering Cultural Memory in Selected Post-Wende Literary Texts of the 1990s,” The German Quarterly 74.4 (Fall 2001): 392-406.

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youngest author of this study. Moreover, the writers are born in different countries (East Berlin [GDR] and West Berlin [FRG]) and wrote the respective texts at a different point in their lives (late fifties and early thirties). Despite these differences, I juxtapose both texts as they focus on the grandparents’ experience in Nazi Germany and elaborate on the relationship to grandparents and parents from the perspective of grandchildren. Rather than the year of birth, I thus focus on the genealogical tensions between grandparents, parents, and (grand)children, borrowing from James Berger’s biological rather than chronological definition of postHolocaust cohorts. While Berger credits survivors and victims with firstgeneration Holocaust representation, he defines a second generation as the one “that directly encounters the survivors,” whether they are contemporaries, younger relatives, or children of survivors. For the third generation, however, “the direct living contact with the survivors is lost, or begins to be lost,” leading to the generation’s appropriation of Holocaust representation that excludes testimony.58 There are other disparities in perspective and experience. Pavel’s Letters exposes a victim’s history that Maron calls “the good, the sacred part of a terrible chapter in history,”59 whereas Dückers delineates a family’s embrace of Nazi ideology. Yet this classification characterizes only part of each text and reduces multifold stories to two opposing categories. Looking at their family’s history over several generations, both narrators reconstruct genealogies that comprise victims and collaborators in different historical and cultural contexts. In Pavel’s Letters, the narrator’s grandparents were maltreated as Poles, her grandfather killed as a Jew, her mother discriminated as a “half-Jew,” while her stepfather and, to a lesser degree, her mother influenced the ideological course of East Germany, which in turn caused the suffering of political dissidents. Considering the various ideologies that held a grip over her family, the narrator terms herself a “victor” of history, that is, a heir from a family of both victims and perpetrators, and a survivor of Nazism and communism. Dückers’s protagonist Freia, conversely, cannot claim such a victory but must live with the consequences of her grandparents’ and parents’ support of Nazi Germany. While Freia is able to uncover her family’s dark secrets and accept the consequences of Nazism and war, her mother suffers under her own and her parents’ misguided ideals, so much so that she commits suicide, thereby also becoming a victim of history. As becomes clear in the course of 58 59

Berger, 67. “Der gute, der geheiligte Teil der furchtbaren Geschichte,” Monika Maron, Pawels Briefe: Eine Familiengeschichte, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1999, 8. Translation from Monika Maron, Pavel’s Letters, trans. Brigitte Goldstein, London: Harvill P, 2002, 2.

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each text, the narrator faces a multidimensional, ambiguous family history that includes stories of perpetration, acquiescence, and victimhood. Looking back at the Nazi past from the vantage point of postwall Germany makes it increasingly difficult for granddaughters to uphold an exclusive twofold characterization of victim versus perpetrator. Maron introduces her memoir with the words “I have known the story for as long as I can remember. It is the story of my grandparents and I have never forgotten it.”60 Yet forgetting is precisely one of the themes of her work, since the narrator’s mother “forgot” about Pawel’s letters in the attic, and the public education in the postwar GDR offered the narrator little information about Jewish persecution. Conversely, Dückers’s protagonist admits that she knew about Germany’s Nazi past from early childhood on, both from the World War II narratives of her grandparents and from its coverage in elementary school. But what Freia learns about the Holocaust in school cannot be reconciled or even related to narratives she hears at home from parents and grandparents, and only as an adult is she able to reevaluate the disparate sources, disjointed information and insight from a self-serving fantasy. Thus for both narrators public memory contrasts with the family’s memory, to the point that the granddaughter’s act of recovering her grandparents’ memories challenges the institutional memory culture promoted in both West and East Germany. Using a woman protagonist who assesses the lives of her grandparents’ during National Socialism and of her parents in postwar Germany, both texts emphasize the decisive role of granddaughters as mediators between history and future generations. As mothers, both narrators struggle with the task of how to explain Germany’s Nazi past to their children. As daughters, the women examine the relationship to their mothers and grandmothers, as well as their mothers’ relationship to their mothers. In Pavel’s Letters, the narrator never knew her grandparents but questions her mother about a history that needs to be hypothesized if it cannot be remembered; in Himmelskörper, Freia assumes the task of preserving her grandmother’s memories before her death because her guilt-ridden mother is unwilling or unable to do so. While Maron’s narrator suspects that her mother (who survived in Nazi Germany as a “Mischling”) failed to become an adequate listener to her grandparents’ past, Freia must uncover a family history that her mother never revealed. Thus in both texts, the narrator’s parents impede communication rather than encourage the flow of information. The relationship to parents is pivotal in that daughters must 60

1, “Die Geschichte kenne ich, seit ich denken kann. Es ist die Geschichte meiner Großeltern, und ich hatte sie zu keiner Zeit vergessen.” 7.

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actually turn away from their mothers (and fathers) in order to gain more information about the past. While Dückers put a granddaughter’s search for her grandparents’ past in fictional form (despite the fact that her protagonist is roughly the same age as herself and shares numerous similarities with the author), Maron seemingly guarantees the authenticity of her memoir by using her first and last name as well the actual names of relatives, and includes quotations from letters, documents, and photographs. Despite choosing different genres, however, both authors come to the conclusion that they may need to imagine a connection to the past if reliable memories are unavailable. For Marianne Hirsch, such connections are a central component of postmemory: Full or empty, postmemory seeks connection. It creates where it cannot recover. It imagines where it cannot recall. It mourns a loss that cannot be repaired. And, because even the act of mourning is secondary, the lost object can never be in61 corporated and mourning can never be overcome.

Faced with the task of preserving their grandparents’ memories before they slip into oblivion, the narrators sift through competing stories by grandparents and parents, trying to decipher the discrepancies. In the confusing, often contradictory conglomerate of different narratives, they realize that any one coherent reconstruction of the past is impossible. Having no wartime experiences and memories of their own, both narrators make do with mere traces and in the end resort to their imagination to fill the gaps of memory. While Maron begins to imagine her grandfather, Dückers chooses the genre of a novel to convey historical facts and her interpretation of them. For both grandchildren, it is vital to relate and to share their postmemory work with other individuals, generations, and cultures. In order to convey the Holocaust’s relevance to post-Holocaust generations to come, to those who no longer have a living link to the past, both writers connect and combine documents, memories, stories, with their creative imaginations.

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Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer, 664.

Images and Imagination: Monika Maron’s Pavel’s Letters1 “The good, the sacred part of a terrible chapter in history:”2 Maron’s Focus on her Grandfather In Pavel’s Letters (2002, Pawels Briefe, 1999), Monika Maron (born 1941) belatedly pieces together the biography of her Polish-Jewish grandfather, Pawel Iglarz, who died in August 1942 after his deportation to a Polish ghetto. Like other descendents of Holocaust victims, Maron describes the difficulties in representing a traumatic past she never knew directly, but her perspective—that of a German writer who does not define herself as Jewish—is rather unusual. Unlike (West) German writers of her generation who are more concerned with the Nazi heritage of their own parents, Maron focuses on her grandparents’ experiences rather than her parents’ to lay claim to her Jewish heritage, a move that has provoked criticism. Considering her family’s history of conversion, intermarriage, and religious and political change,3 Pavel’s Letters exposes the intersections between German non-Jewish and German-Jewish histories and the private and public silencing of the latter. The text also obfuscates narrow definitions of the so-called second and third generations: the narrator focuses 1

2 3

This chapter elaborates on my arguments made in a paper at the conference Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts at Bowling Green State University in March 2006. Conference proceedings are forthcoming as Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts, eds. Christina Guenther and Beth Griech-Polelle, Cambridge Scholars Press. “Der gute, der geheiligte Teil der furchtbaren Geschichte.” Monika Maron, Pawels Briefe: Eine Familiengeschichte, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1999, 8. Translations from Monika Maron, Pavel’s Letters, trans. Brigitte Goldstein, London: Harvill P, 2002, 2. While Pawel and Josefa converted to the Baptist faith, their daughter Hella left the church, and the narrator, though not religious, had her son baptized. Maron points out this history of change: “In our family, no one remained true to the faith in which he was raised. Pavel did not remain a Jew, Josefa did not remain a Catholic, Hella, Marta and Paul did not remain Baptists, and I, in my time, stopped believing in communism.” (132) [“In unserer Familie ist niemand dem Glauben treu geblieben, in dem er erzogen wurde. Pawel ist nicht Jude geblieben, Josefa nicht Katholikin, Hella, Marta und Paul haben sich nicht von den Baptisten taufen lassen, und ich habe mit der Zeit aufgehört, an den Kommunismus zu glauben.” (192)].

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on retrieving her grandfather’s story and only mentions peripherally how her mother and her aunt survived in Nazi Germany as so-called half-Jews. (A more typical second-generation response would accentuate the parent’s survival.) The fact that Maron’s illegitimate father, Walter, was a German soldier awarded the Iron Cross and as an “Aryan” not permitted to marry her mother, and that later, her step-father, Karl Maron, became an instrumental public figure in the GDR after he returned from exile in Russia, further complicates classification. Emphasizing that in her family, categories of victims and bystanders converge, Maron’s work poses questions as to how and by whom the Holocaust is being appropriated and represented. Since her work also elucidates how the meaning of these categories shifted in the postwar GDR, it adds a distinct post-unification perspective and differentiation to the discussion of (auto)biographical writing of the post-Holocaust generations. While Maron had used the figure of her Jewish grandfather in her first novel Flight of Ashes (1986, Flugasche, 1981), Pavel’s Letters is an autobiographical undertaking that seeks to document and understand events of the distant past. The text begins when the narrator’s mother Helene (Hella) Maron discovers a dozen letters that her father wrote from the Belchatov ghetto in 1942, letters whose existence Hella had entirely forgotten. While Hella grows increasingly distraught over her discovery, the narrator becomes intrigued by her mother’s memory loss. In this way, it can be said that Pavel’s Letters is as much about the narrator’s mother, who emerges as a devoted Communist, as it is about her grandfather. Quoting her mother with the words “we were always living in a forward mode,”4 Maron’s narrator reveals the continuities between the legacies of National Socialism and GDR communism, when the naissance of the latter stifled recollection of the former. The narrator uses this shortfall as the driving narrative force for an undertaking in which both mother and daughter attempt to uncover and articulate Pawel’s story. Together with her son Jonas (whose photographs are included in the text), she and her mother travel to Poland in hopes of finding family documents and witnesses that can illuminate the grandparents’ last years. When that fails, the narrator turns to photographs of her maternal family relatives and excerpts of their letters. Yet she remains disappointed with the unreliability of photographs, with the scarcity of documents and artifacts, and with her mother’s inability to remember details of her parents’ life. Abandoning a conventional concept of remem4

“Man habe nach dem Krieg immer so nach vorn gelebt.” Monika Maron, Pawels Briefe: Eine Familiengeschichte, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1999, 114. Translations from Monika Maron, Pavel’s Letters, trans. Brigitte Goldstein, London: Harvill P, 2002, 76.

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bering, the narrator comes to use Pawel’s letters as a catalyst to envision the life of her grandparents and to imagine that she knew her grandfather. In this way, the text emerges as a result of both compilation and imagination, and the narrator turns what she cannot remember into something she could i.e. into something “memorable” [erinnerbar]. The narrator’s appropriation of memories does not contradict historical facts, nor does she conjure a memory that is highly unlikely. Rather, I suggest that Pavel’s Letters, in an engagement with and expansion of postmemory, attempting to restore and make meaningful the Jewish past in the narrator’s family history by using imagination in cases where recollection fails. From Flight of Ashes to Pavel’s Letters Born in 1941 in Berlin, Monika Maron spent her formative years in postwar East Berlin with her devotedly communist mother, Hella Maron (born Iglarz), and her stepfather, Karl Maron, a key figure in the founding years of the GDR.5 As a teenager, Maron dedicated herself to the same communist ideals of her parents and became active in the GDR youth organization FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend): “I was ten years old, and for me the word ‘Communist’ was a synonym for a good person.”6 Maron joined the SED party from 1965-1978 but later came to reject the socialist regime. After majoring in theater studies and art history at the Humboldt University in Berlin, she began work as a journalist and production assistant; since 1976 she has been a full-time writer.7 Unlike Christa Wolf, she was never officially recognized in the GDR but could only be read and discussed clandestinely in her native country. After Maron refused to make 5

6 7

Karl Maron, a metal worker and member of Germany’s Communist Party (KPD) since 1926, immigrated to Denmark and later to Russia during the Nazi regime, followed by an exemplary career in the GDR upon his return. Maron became a member of the SED in 1946 and was chief editor of Neues Deutschland from 1946-50. From 1950-56, he was head of the Volkspolizei, and in 1954, he became member of the Zentralkommittee of the SED. Maron advanced to the post of GDR Minister of the Interior 1955-1963 and representative of the Volkskammer 1958-1967. Karl Maron passed away in 1975. Brigitte Rossbacher calls Karl Maron “one of the GDR’s founding fathers.” See Brigitte Rossbacher, “The Status of State and Subject: Reading Monika Maron from Flugasche to Animal triste,” Wendezeiten Zeitenwenden: Positionsbestimmmngen zur deutschsprachigen Literatur 1945-1995, eds. Robert Weninger and Brigitte Rossbacher, Tübingen: Stauffenburg 1997, 195. “Ich war zehn Jahre alt, und das Wort Kommunist war für mich ein Synonym für guter Mensch.” Monika Maron, “Ich war ein antifaschistisches Kind,” Nach Maßgabe meiner Begreifungskraft: Artikel und Essays, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1993, 17. Translation is my own. As Maron reveals in Pavel’s Letters, it was her stepfather’s inheritance that initially enabled her to pursue a career as full-time writer.

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substantial changes to Flight of Ashes as demanded, the Ministry of Culture denied publication of the novel that candidly exposed the scale of environmental pollution in the chemical industrial region of Bitterfeld. Three years after completing the manuscript, Maron published Flight of Ashes in 1981 with the West German publisher S. Fischer; all of her following works before the Wende were also published exclusively in the FRG.8 Despite her privileged upbringing as Karl Maron’s stepdaughter, Maron was subjected to an ever changing set of rules and regulations, and constantly observed by the Stasi. In June 1988, Maron left the GDR for Hamburg on a three-year visa, and only came back to Berlin in 1992, after the fall of the Wall. Her acclaimed 1991 novel Silent Close No. 6 (1993, Stille Zeile Sechs, 1991) attacks the patriarchal structures of a declining and corrupt GDR State, as well as one of its representatives, Karl Maron. The novel’s narrator, historian Rosalind Polkowski, recounts with growing disgust her work in the mid-1980s for Herbert Beerenbaum, a high-ranking politician of the GDR’s founding generation almost twice her age, who employs Rosalind to type his tainted and vindicatory memoirs (and tellingly reminds Rosalind of her father). Whereas Silent Close No. 6 seems like an obituary to both Beerenbaum and the Communist era, Animal Triste (1996), and Pavel’s Letters (1999) comprise a distinct postwall perspective. According to Maron, the interplay of remembering and forgetting is a topic in all of her work,9 but in both of the latter books it advances to a central theme. In Animal Triste, the text’s first-person narrator, a paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, tries to recall details of her life with lover Franz and life in the GDR, reflecting on both the processes of remembering and forgetting. In her late fifties, Maron wrote Pavel’s Letters as “victor of history,”10 framing the text as a confrontation with both National Socialism and communism. Maron’s work thereafter expands on some of her previous themes and introduces others; Endmoränen (2002, Terminal Moraines) documents the protagonist’s physical and mental effects of aging, while Geburtsort Berlin (2003, Place of Birth: Berlin) characterizes Berlin in eight autobiographical texts and photographs by her son Jonas Maron. Maron introduces her Jewish grandfather Pawel in her first novel Flight of Ashes, in which the heroine, a young journalist named Josefa Nadler (as Maron reveals in Pavel’s Letters, this name is the German translation 8 9 10

For a critical reading of Maron’s novels that deal with her disassociation from the GDR State, see Brigitte Rossbacher. See Martin Lüdke’s interview with Maron, aired on SWR April 28, 1999. 107, “Sieger der Geschichte,” 156.

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of her Polish grandmother’s name, Josefa Iglarz) reports on the inhumane and dangerously polluted conditions at the GDR industrial town Bitterfeld. Flight of Ashes was the first (and only) text to criticize the State’s outdated environmental policies years before the Chernobyl disaster and the West German environmental movement. Beyond that, the novel illustrates the discrepancy between a young, inquisitive, and uncompromising female journalist and her older, dishonest, and disinterested male colleagues, questioning the (male) quest for technological progress. In the novel, Maron makes Pawel Josefa’s grandfather, a character who (unlike the historical Pawel) did not break with his Jewish family and never joined the Communist Party. Mixing fact (Pawel’s Jewish roots and his poverty) with fiction (his dreaminess and rejection of the communist doctrine), Maron portrays Pawel in Flight of Ashes as a figure of identification for the protagonist who consciously adopts his (presumed) defiance: I decided one day towards the end of my childhood that I had inherited my most important personality traits from (…), my grandfather Pawel. … grandfather Pawel had the sort of character that opened up for me a wealth of possible traits useful for my future. As his heir I felt I could come to terms with my own nature. My grandfather was a dreamer: restless, spontaneous, hot-tempered. He didn’t get up when the cat sat on his lap; every morning he made what each of his children wanted to drink for breakfast: tea, milk, coffee or hot chocolate, and he is 11 said to have been a bit mad, now that I think of it.

In a self-reflective and somewhat ironic tone, Josefa describes how she imbued her grandfather with all possible positive traits, contrasting his 11

2, “Im Wesen des Großvaters Pawel eröffneten sich mir eine Fülle charakterlicher Möglichkeiten, mit denen sich eine eigene Zukunft denken ließ und die zugleich geeignet waren, die Kritik an meinem Wesen auf das großväterliche Erbteil zu verweisen. Der Großvater war verträumt, nervös, spontan, jähzornig. Er stand nicht auf, wenn die Katze auf seinem Schoß saß, kochte jeden Morgen jedem seiner Kinder, was es zum Frühstück trinken wollte, Tee, Milch, Kaffee oder Kakao, und soll überhaupt ein bisschen verrückt gewesen sein.” 8-9. Page numbers refer to the following edition: Monika Maron, Flugasche, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1981. Translations from Monika Maron, Flight of Ashes, trans. David Newton Marinelli, London: Readers International, 1986. In Pavel’s Letters, the narrator elaborated further and specified the same observations, reportedly her mother’s recollections: “My grandfather was the first one up every morning. He served breakfast to each of his children: tea for Bruno, coffee for Marta, milk for Hella, cocoa for Paul. Even when his children were grown up and out of work and he himself was unemployed, he fixed their beverages for them, as long as they got up early enough.” (14) “Mein Großvater stand jeden Morgen als erster auf und servierte jedem seiner Kinder ein Frühstück; für Bruno Tee, Kaffee für Marta, Milch für Hella, Kakao für Paul. Auch als seine Kinder erwachsen, sogar wenn sie arbeitslos waren und er selbst Arbeit hatte, kochte mein Großvater ihnen, sofern sie früh genug aufstanden, ihre Getränke, und das, wie Hella beteuert, nicht nur an den Sonntagen, sondern wirklich an jedem Tag.” 25. A similar reference to Pawel’s craziness follows on page 63.

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Jewish heritage with her father’s German, essentially Prussian, mentality. Although the protagonist admits that she does not know what defines a Prussian attitude, to her it epitomizes a misguided sense of duty, militarism, and national pride. Rejecting her “German” traits and instead embracing her Polish-Jewish heritage, Josefa attempts to reinvent herself as “half Jewish” in her attempts to oppose the regime (“Since I considered myself my grandfather’s sole heir, I doubled my portion of Jewish blood and said I was half-Jewish.”12). Though Josefa obviously thinks highly of her grandfather, Pawel’s personality, his concerns, and pursuits remain secondary. In fact, Josefa operates under some callow, even racist stereotypes when appropriating Pawel’s heritage: not only does she pit presumably German-Prussian against presumably Jewish qualities, but she also unquestionably adopts the idea that Pawel carries some intrinsic “Jewish” characteristics in his genetic make-up (according to Josefa, in his blood), a pseudo-scientific notion used and abused by the Nazis. Comparing Pawel’s suffering at the hand of the Nazis to her own suffering at the hand of GDR party officials, Josefa uses her grandfather to define her own rebellion. Even though Maron lays bare the protagonist’s omissions and misguided identification by means of ironic distance, she nevertheless aligns Josefa and Pawel, using the example of a Jewish victim of the Holocaust in order to frame a story of generational and political discord. In Flight of Ashes, Maron seems less interested in documenting the victims of Nazism than in depicting herself as a victim of her father and the political system he embodies. This also becomes evident when more than a decade later the narrator of Pavel’s Letters acknowledges that her earlier work was shaped by the desire for “personal legitimation”13 and parental revolt. Indeed, Maron was only able to write her first novel after the death of her stepfather in 1975, and after she suffered a deep personal crisis. By her own admission, Pawel (said to resemble her aunt Marta) seemed removed from her immediate environment, in particular from her step-father Karl Maron, while her grandmother resembled her mother. Back then, Maron explains later, she decided to side with her grandfather (and break with her step-father), justifying her original interest in her grandfather by a dominating parental conflict rather than by the fact that Pawel was Jewish.14 12 13 14

4, “Da ich mich als genetische Alleinerbin des Großvaters fühlte, verdoppelte ich den Anteil jüdischen Bluts in mir und behauptete, eine Halbjüdin zu sein.” 10. 5, “Eigenen Legimitation,” 13. See Maron, Pawels Briefe, 9.

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In her 1989 essay “Ich war ein antifaschistisches Kind” (I Was an Anti-fascist Child), Maron writes about her experience of observing German reunification from Hamburg, and reconsiders her relationship to Germany. She mentions Pawel again, this time in the context of a more comprehensive family portrayal. Seeking to fill a historical void rather than to define generational rebellion, Maron turns her attention to her illiterate Polish-Catholic grandmother, Josefa Iglarz (born Przybilski), and chronicles the couple’s conversion to Baptism (a Protestant-Christian faith) and subsequent move to Berlin-Neukölln in 1905, where Pawel worked as a tailor. The couple lived in Germany with their four children (Maron’s mother being the youngest) until they were expatriated as Polish citizens in 1938. In a matter-of-fact tone, Maron describes private as well as public acts of discrimination in Germany and Poland—when German “friends” and neighbors witnessed the Iglarz’ deportation with silent acquiescence, when the Polish government refused to let them enter the country as Polish Jews for nine months in 1938-39, and when Polish doctors declined to treat the dying Josefa because she had not divorced her Jewish husband.15 Maron’s essay does not conclude with the end of World War II but uses the suffering and the resulting divisions in her family to characterize East and West German postwar history. Recalling her first meeting with her West-German cousin Sylvia a year before the fall of the Wall, the narrator realizes that she erroneously claimed her grandfather all for herself, forgetting about Pawel’s other granddaughter. Yet only the reestablished contact with Sylvia affords the narrator the opportunity to compare diverging memories. The essay ends with the mother’s reconciliation with her daughter and Hella’s deep-seated confusion about the collapse of the GDR. Unlike Flight of Ashes, Maron acknowledges in “Ich war ein antifaschistisches Kind” that Pawel was both Jewish and a Communist, and admits that she had previously used his heritage to distance herself from East Germany and GDR policies. By documenting both grandparents’ lives, the essay lays the foundation for Pavel’s Letters but lacks the emotion15

Biographical information in the essay “Ich war ein antifaschistisches Kind” and Pavel’s Letters differs in this aspect. In her essay, Maron writes “Josefa had died a year before her husband was murdered because, as the wife of a Jew, she was denied medical assistance in occupied Poland.” [“Josefa war, ein Jahr bevor man ihren Mann ermordete, gestorben, weil ihr, der Frau des Juden, im besetzten Polen ärztliche Hilfe verweigert wurde.” Monika Maron, “Ich war ein antifaschistisches Kind,” 16. Translation is my own. In Pavel’s Letters, Maron revises these claims (presumably after having obtained additional information in her grandfather’s letters). According to the later text, it was Josefa who refused to go to the doctor (Pawel complains about her stubbornness in letters), and Josefa died merely a few months, not a year, before Pawel.

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al charge and volatile confrontation with her mother’s memories that characterize the later work. With Pavel’s Letters, Maron reconsiders her family history with another eleven years of distance, and as a result the tone is more reflective than in her previous attempts, creating a tension between the child’s admiration for Pawel and the adult’s analytic perspective. Merging approaches of Flight of Ashes with “Ich war ein antifaschistisches Kind,” Maron retains an affective identification with the grandfather: We, my grandfather and I, because I came after him and only after him, were a little different, a little impractical, but filled with dreams, leaned towards sponta16 neous ideas, were nervous and a little crazy.

Yet she complements the emotional response with analysis and factual information documented in the essay, as well as with letters, documents, and photographs. More so than either Flight of Ashes or “Ich war ein antifaschistisches Kind,” Pavel’s Letters focuses on Maron’s grandparents rather than herself: “Pavel’s Letters is not a text of self-understanding. I was not interested in my own history but in the history of my grandparents and their children.”17 Using her own first and last name and the actual names of her relatives, as well as incorporating family photographs, letters, and other authentic documents, Maron structures her text as an autobiography, yet the artistic shaping and the use of imagination indicate that Pavel’s Letters is a work of fiction. The text itself does not pose the two as opposites; quite in the contrary, the seamless transition from documents like photographs and letters to the narrator’s fantasy suggests that all reconstruction of an unknown past includes some degree of invention. The fact that Pavel’s Letters evolved from both the previous novel Flight of Ashes and the theoretical essay “Ich war ein antifaschistisches Kind” also explicates this provocative mixture of fact and fiction. In her speech at the 2002 Historians’ Convention, Maron specified on the process: In order to leave no doubt about my mistrust of our freedom of self-invention and of biographical truths, I also want to point out our irresistible urge to make sense of our life stories after the fact – when the things that were supposed to 16 17

40-41, “Wir, mein Großvater und ich, weil ich nach ihm und nur nach ihm kam, waren eben ein bisschen anders, ein bisschen unpraktisch, dafür verträumt und zu spontanen Einfällen neigend, nervös, ein bisschen verrückt.” 63. “Ein Selbstverständigungstext ist ‘Pawels Briefe’ nicht. Es ging mir nicht um meine, sondern um die Geschichte meiner Großeltern und ihrer Kinder.” Tilman Krause, “Wir waren ja immer ganz eng: ein Gespräch mit Monika Maron über ihre Familie, das Erinnern und das Verschwinden der DDR” (1999), “Doch das Paradies ist verriegelt…” Zum Werk von Monika Maron, ed. Elke Gilson, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2006, 321-25, 322. Translation is my own.

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happen and the things that were not supposed to happen have merged to form our life, and we have forgotten our original plan or have gradually adjusted it to fit the possibilities that were open to us. We give meaning to our history’s course, which has flowed together from innumerable sources, by inventing a causality for 18 it and a narratable biography for ourselves.

Noticing people’s drive to belatedly give sense to past actions, Maron deems it futile to try to separate fact from fantasy. Expounding this notion, Pavel’s Letters does not focus merely on what happened but on “that what did not need to happen” [“das, was nicht hätte geschehen müssen”], aiming to make Maron’s biography both “narratable” [“erzählbar”] and “memorable” [“erinnerbar”]. The text’s subtitle, “A Family Story” [Eine Familiengeschichte], eschews the more personal “my” [“meine”] in favor of a more general “a” [“eine”], and emphasizes general validity that reaches beyond the individual concern.19 Similar to Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood and Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben. Eine Jugend,20 Maron’s text points to the larger historical context of German history in the twentieth century rather than claiming the exceptional and exclusive. By using the double-meaning German word Geschichte ([history/story] notably, she refuses to designate her text as a novel like her previous works), Maron further merges the reconstruction of her family’s past with the creation of her family’s story. Indeed, the text blends, as Friederike Eigler recognizes, “affective and investigative ele-

18

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“Um an meinem Mißtrauen in die Freiheit unserer Selbsterfindung und in biografische Wahrheiten keinen Zweifel zu lassen, will ich noch auf unseren unwiderstehlichen Drang verweisen, unseren Lebensgeschichten nachträglich, wenn das, was geschehen musste, und das, was nicht hätte geschehen müssen, zu unserem Leben verschmolzen sind und wir unseren Erstentwurf vergessen oder nach und nach unseren Möglichkeiten angepaßt haben, diesem aus unzähligen Quellen zusammengeflossenen Verlauf unserer Lebenszeit einen Sinn zu geben, indem wir ihm eine Kausalität erfinden und damit uns selbst eine erzählbare Biographie.” Monika Maron, “Lebensentwürfe, Zeitenbrüche:” Vortrag auf dem Historikertag 2002 in Halle, “Doch das Paradies ist verriegelt…” Zum Werk von Monika Maron, ed. Elke Gilson, 31-40, 33. Translation is my own. See also Friederike Eigler’s interpretation of the subtitle: “The subtitle, ‘Eine Familiengeschichte’ (my emphasis) indicates that the significance she attributes to this family history transcends the individual realm.” Friederike Eigler, “Engendering Cultural Memory in Selected Post-Wende Literary Texts of the 1990s,” The German Quarterly 74.4 (Fall 2001): 393. See also Eigler, Gedächtnis und Geschichte in Generationenromanen seit der Wende, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2005, 147. Bearing a similarly general subtitle, Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale can be interpreted along the same lines, albeit in a different (American) context. For a discussion on the Spiegelman title, see Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997, 26.

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ments,”21 i.e. emotional and analytical approaches to the family’s past that trigger both the narrator’s investigation and imagination. Pavel’s Letters begins with the question, “Ever since I decided to write this book, I have asked myself why now, why only now, why still now,”22 similar to how Günter Grass frames Im Krebsgang, published three years later. Prefaced by the words “in memoriam,” Grass’s novel begins with the question “‘Why only now?’ He says, this person not to be confused with me”23 and concludes with the words “It doesn’t end. Never will it end,” commenting on former and recent attempts to normalize the past.24 Though both writers depict different aspects of the Nazi period—the persecution of Jews and the suffering of German civilians in the final phase of the war—they seek to explain the delay in time with private and public reasons. Both narrators reason that they needed distance from their parents; Grass’s reveals that his mother’s incessant rambling precluded the articulation of his own perspective,25 while Maron’s maintains that her youthful rebellion against her parents impeded an approach to the family’s past (13). Both mention their profession as journalists as another impediment; Grass’s narrator admits he was caught up in daily news and current events, while Maron’s narrator remarks that she traveled first to the world’s metropolises—New York, London, Rome, Paris—before finding interest in her ancestors’ small town in Poland. Both narrators also point to public taboos in the FRG and the GDR. According to Grass, there was no public outlet for representations of the German war experience in the FRG,26 while Maron blames the GDR regime for suppressing stories of Jewish victimization. Although Maron’s narrator has no memories of the war, she calls herself a “war child” [“Kriegskind”] and emphasizes that the experience of 21 22 23 24 25 26

“Affective und kritische Elemente, ”Eigler, Gedächtnis und Geschichte, 145. 1, “Seit ich beschlossen habe, dieses Buch zu schreiben, frage ich mich, warum jetzt, warum erst jetzt, warum jetzt noch,” 7. “‘Warum erst jetzt?’ sagte jemand, der nicht ich bin.” Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang: Eine Novelle, Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2002, 7. Translation taken from Günter Grass, Crabwalk, trans. Krishna Winstorn, Orlando: Harcourt, 2002, 1. 234, “Das hört nicht auf. Nie hört das auf,” Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang :Eine Novelle, Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2002, 7, 216. Grass’s words can be seen as an answer to both the arguments of the Historikerstreit and to Martin Walser’s speech at the Paulskirche. Grass, 7. Grass waited even longer with his revelation that he had served in the Waffen SS in the years between 1944 and 1945. It took Grass more than sixty years to at last put memories of his childhood, his early admiration for Hitler, the experience of World War II, and the postwar years in Paris as a burgeoning artist in unveiled autobiographical form in Peeling the Onion (2007, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel 2006) at the ripe age of 78. He explained the delay in numerous interviews, saying that he waited for the right context and literary form.

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war and defeat was fundamental to her life (116). Her perspective on the Nazi past thus resembles that of other German writers born in the 1930s and 1940s who cannot remember the war itself but are influenced by their childhood experience of it. Like Wibke Bruhns (born 1938), who claims to have forgotten the first six years of her life after the family’s home was bombed, Maron’s narrator only experiences the traces of memories, such as fear of alarms, sirens, and firecrackers that must (or might) echo previous hours in the shelter. Faced with unmistakable yet inaccessible evidence of the war’s lasting aftermath, the narrator grows suspicious of childhood memories altogether. I completely distrust autobiographical childhood remembrances, my own in27 cluded. I remember little about my childhood, yet I have a clear image of it.

Christa Wolf’s narrator in Patterns of Childhood is similarly skeptical about memory’s capability and the success of her autobiographical undertaking. But while the narrator in Patterns of Childhood attempts ever more tenaciously to recall events of her past, the narrator in Pavel’s Letters realizes from the outset that her efforts are futile and that she needs to find a different approach. Unlike Patterns of Childhood, Maron’s narrator also confronts not only personal and public denial, but the deliberate erasure of Jewish history and culture. In this aspect, Maron’s writing resembles that of Jurek Becker (1937-1997) who had no actual memories of his survival in Lodz, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen, but emphasized in his work the significance of the years in the ghetto and camps, resorting to fiction in order to portray Jewish life in the ghetto in Jakob the Liar (1996, Jakob der Lügner, 1969). According to Dagmar Lorenz, Becker “was the first East German author who wrote about the Nazi persecutions from a Jewish point of view,”28 depicting, like Maron thirty years later, Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The timing of her book allowed Maron to reconsider Pawel’s life almost a decade after reunification, at a time when Germany was beginning to establish itself as the Berlin Republic but was also still experiencing the aftermath of the fall of the Communist regime. In fact, the publication of Pavel’s Letters followed a public debate on Maron’s past involvement with the Stasi when in 1995 the news magazine Spiegel, where Maron had pre27 28

113, “Autobiographischen Kindheitsbeschreibungen mißtraue ich ganz und gar, meinen eigenen auch. Ich erinnere mich wenig an meine Kindheit und habe trotzdem eine genaue Vorstellung von ihr.” 165. Dagmar Lorenz, “Imagined Identities: Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors in Literature,” German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990, eds. Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grote, Rochester: Camden House, 2006, 169-92, 171.

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viously published many articles, “discovered” her “Stasi affair” and made it sensationalist news. The narrator mentions the matter in Pavel’s Letters, using the literary text to refute charges that she had informed the police about her friends. As Maron maintains in Pavel’s Letters and elsewhere,29 her brief (eight months), somewhat bizarre affair with the Stasi was motivated by hopes of leaving the State and posed no reason for remorse or shame. Claiming that she did not disclose her previous involvement because there was nothing to confess, Maron published her two 1976 Stasi reports in German newspapers in 1995 and included them again in her collection of essays quer über die Gleise (2000, Straight Across the Railroad Tracks). Even though the reports reveal that the public outcry was both unfounded and unfair, journalists continued to discredit Maron, as also visible in reviews of Pavel’s Letters. While most critics lauded the text’s ambivalent and self-reflexive tone, to some the book about her grandfather’s victimization represents a poorly hidden attempt to whitewash her own past.30 Responding to one particular spiteful attack that was published in a Swiss newspaper, Maron published her speech “Rollenwechsel” (Change of Roles) in the collection quer über die Gleise in her defense. Yet the assaults continue to this day. Andrew Plowman was among the first to read Pavel’s Letters as an apologia, insisting “Pawels Briefe should also be interpreted in its entirety as a response to Maron’s ‘Stasi-Affäre’.”31 While Plowman attempts to unravel what he calls an “affair” by examining the Stasi reports, J. J. Long deliberately dis29 30

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See Monika Maron, “Heuchelei und Niedertracht” (1995), “Doch das Paradies ist verriegelt…” Zum Werk von Monika Maron, ed. Elke Gilson, 50-57. In her extremely negative review of Pavel’s Letters, Corina Caduff charges Maron with staging herself as a victim rather than addressing the legacy of perpetrators [Tätergeschichte]. Along with a critical review of Christa Wolf’s Hierzulande, Andernorts that appeared on the same page, Caduff’s review exemplifies the aggressive, neo-conservative attitudes of critics attacking East German women writers for their (alleged) support of the regime. See Corina Caduff, “Missbrauchte Geschichte,” Die Weltwoche 8 (1999). Christa Baumberger refrains from such devastating judgment, but claims to miss in Maron’s text a thorough analysis of GDR ideology. See Christa Baumberger, “Mutmaßungen über Pawel,” Entwürfe: Zeitschrift für Literatur 19 (August 1999): 155-59. Thomas Kraft, finally, finds Maron’s “Tête-à-tête mit der Stasi … schwammig und mutlos.” Thomas Kraft, “Vergessen erinnern: Auf Spurensuche in der Familiengeschichte,” Neue deutsche Literatur 47.525 (1999): 167. In Gedächtnis und Geschichte, Friederike Eigler summarizes and evaluates the reception of Pavel’s Letters (176-83). Owen Evans discusses the aftermath of Maron’s Stasi work in “‘Mutmaßungen über Pawel’ – Monika Maron, Pawels Briefe: Eine Familiengeschichte (1999),” Mapping the Contours of Oppression. Subjectivity, Truth and Fiction in Recent German Autobiographical Treatments of Totalitarianism, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006, 291-23. Andrew Plowman, “Escaping the Autobiographical Trap? Monika Maron, the Stasi and Pawels Briefe,” German Writers and the Politics of Culture: Dealing with the Stasi, eds. Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 227-42.

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regards the text of Maron’s Stasi reports, asserting “not what she wrote but the fact that she wrote is what constitutes the moment of collaboration.”32 In open disagreement with the text, Long reads Pavel’s Letters as justification of Maron’s work for the Stasi and as affirmation of her superiority vis-à-vis her mother. Though the Stasi episode is addressed only at the end of Pawels Briefe, it is possible to read the entire narrative as being governed by Maron’s desire to relegitimize her political identity following this moment of autobiographical crisis. The text as a whole gives the lie to her claim that she had to have ceased battling with her parents in order to concern herself with her grandparents’ story in a way that transcended her own need to legitimate herself (PB, 13); Pawels Briefe remains obsessed with such self-legitimation, and this can only take place via identification with the victim and a simultaneous denigration of the GDR, metonymically 33 represented by Hella.

Accusing Maron on moral grounds, Long overlooks the text’s complexity and self-doubt, as well as the fact that Pavel’s Letters deliberately integrates a reflection on the family’s communist history in the narration of the Nazi past. Long also does not elaborate on the differences between Pavel’s Letters, Flight of Ashes, and “Ich war ein antifaschistisches Kind,” which demonstrate the development of Maron’s narrative voice. Going even a step further, Dennis Tate in his characterization of Pavel’s Letters ignores Maron’s focus with the Nazi era and interprets the text solely as selfdefense vis-à-vis the Stasi accusations, as her “postunification desire … reaffirming the view of herself she had constructed in her earlier firstperson narratives as a relentless critic of the GDR.” In this way, Tate compares the travel to Poland in Patterns of Childhood and Pavel’s Letters, but fails to acknowledge the decisive difference between representing a history of collaboration versus a history of victimization when he accuses Maron of using what he calls “the trappings of authenticity.”34 In Pavel’s Letters, the public accusation of transgressions she could not remember throws the narrator into self doubt and depression: I had never forgotten the incident, yet forgetting was insinuated. … I searched my innermost feelings, asked myself whether there was another, unknown person living inside of me, who, as in a psycho-thriller, had briefly gained control over me. There was a moment when I was ready to believe anything. When Hella

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J. J. Long, “Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe: Photography, Narrative, and the Claims of Postmemory,” Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grote, eds., German Memory Contests 147-65, 160. Long 160. Dennis Tate, Shifting Perspectives: East German Autobiographical Narratives before and after the End of the GDR, Rochester: Camden House, 2007, 57.

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called, she found me incoherent, disturbed. What if I really wrote this report? I 35 said. Can a person be outside of herself and afterwards know nothing about it?

This incident mirrors Hella’s crisis in Pavel’s Letters when she cannot remember the letters she wrote to her father even when confronted with her own handwriting. In contrast to her mother, the narrator did not write the report but only doubted her memory, emerging once again as a victor in the conflict with her mother, as well as in the historical progression (yet it is notably with the comfort of her mother that the narrator is able to soothe her emotional state). In this way, Maron uses the Stasi affair to question public notions of memory, guilt, and repression after the GDR dissolved, and to investigate her own—albeit potential—shortcomings and the mechanisms of forgetting. Remembering and Forgetting – Monika and Hella Pavel’s Letters spans the time from 1879, Pawel’s birth year, to 1995, the time of the narration, but gains considerably more detail with the onset of mother Hella’s memories (born 1915) in the late 1920s. In contradiction to its title, the book is not a text filled with letters but contains only short excerpts from roughly eleven letters dated May 7, 1942 to August 8, 1942. This apparent mismatch is but one of many indications of the gap the narrator faces when trying to reconstruct her family’s history. Besides Pawel’s few remaining letters which are incomplete documents written under censorship, she has to rely on only a handful of photographs and on her mother’s sparse memories which she suspects to be tainted by a socialist and idealist perspective. In fact, the narrator feels so distant to past events that she soon cannot contain her troubles with narrating Pawel’s story: Something is wrong between me and the story I want to write. Whatever subject I touch on, after five or four, sometimes even two pages, either the story throws me out or I throw myself out. As if I had no business being in it. As if my desire

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138, “Ich hatte die Geschichte nie vergessen, trotzdem wurde mir Vergessen suggeriert. … Ich suchte nach meinen heimlichen Gefühlen, fragte mich, ob in mir eine zweite, mir unbekannte Person lebte, die, wie in einem Psycho-Thriller, für kurze Zeit die Herrschaft über mich gewonnen haben könnte. Es gab eine Stunde, in der ich bereit war, alles für möglich zu halten. Als Hella anrief, fand sie mich aufgelöst, wirr. Wenn ich diesen Bericht nun wirklich geschrieben habe, sagte ich, wenn es das gibt, dass einer außerhalb seiner selbst ist und dann nichts mehr davon weiß.” 199-200.

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to put together a picture for myself of the overall story from photographs, letters, 36 and Hella’s memories was the presumption of an intruder.

With the word “intruder” the narrator explicates the difficulties of appropriating Pawel’s life and creating a story of the Holocaust from her genealogical position, one that has only indirect links to the Holocaust. At the same time, she questions her undertaking altogether, reflecting that even with best intentions and minute research she can only hope to gain a small glimpse of the entire picture. The resignation she feels sets the tone for the theme of the text, namely the loss of historical and personal memory resulting from lost documentation of Jewish life in Poland and missing familial remembrance. In keeping with this theme, the text unfolds with the discovery of amnesia—namely with her mother’s memory loss over the existence of her father’s letters, not with a specific memory. When a Dutch film crew interviewed Hella Maron in the summer of 1994 for a documentary on Germany’s confrontation with the Nazi past, she stumbled upon her father’s letters from this time, letters which she had kept in safekeeping after her sister Marta’s death in 1983. Hella had not only avoided rereading her father’s letters from the ghetto and the children’s responses but had entirely forgotten the existence of such letters. In essence she effectively silenced the words of her father who had mentioned his grandchild Monika lovingly in almost every letter and urged his children Hella and Marta: “And when Monika is big enough show her the letter and tell her of the great unhappiness that befell her grandparents in their old age, perhaps she will then shed a tear.”37 Incidentally, Hella not only “forgot” about her father’s letters, but also about his Jewish background and thus her own Jewish heritage.38 Hella’s forgetting thus proves to be neither coincidental nor merely personal but exemplifies and manifests East German approaches to the Nazi past that tended to downplay the persecution of Jews in favor of the persecution of Communists. In this way, the narrator reasons, Hella merely embodied GDR ideology that stipulated its citizens be reborn without a past, giving 36

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33, “Zwischen der Geschichte, die ich schreiben will, und mir stimmt etwas nicht. Welches Thema ich auch anrühre, nach fünf oder vier, manchmal sogar nach zwei Seiten schmeißt mich die Geschichte oder schmeiße ich mich aus dem Buch wieder raus. Als hätte ich darin nichts zu suchen; als wäre meine Absicht, aus den Fotos, Briefen und Hellas Erinnerungen die Ahnung vom Ganzen zu gewinnen, vermessen für einen Eindringling wie mich.” 52. 76, “Und wenn Monika groß ist zeigt ihr den Brief und erzählt ihr, wie tief unglücklich ihre Großeltern gerade in den alten Tagen geworden sind, vielleicht weint sie dann auch eine Träne,”113. Hella can neither remember her father’s Jewish birth-name, Schloma, nor the threat of her own deportation to Poland in 1939 because of her status as “half-Jewish.”

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newspapers names like “New Germany,” “New Time,” “New Life,” and “New Way” to signal that the Nazi past was overcome and remembering it unnecessary (113). As the narrator discovers that personal and public amnesia went hand in hand after World War II, her look back into the Nazi era entails a critical reconsideration of historiography in the GDR, as Christa Wolf had undertaken in Patterns of Childhood. In her inquiry into the phenomenon of forgetting, the narrator attempts to define what it means to forget and why, wondering how she can envision and represent the act of forgetting: We can explain why we remember something, but not why we forget. We have no way of knowing what we have forgotten, because what we have forgotten is 39 something that happened to us.

The narrator acknowledges that two forces, remembering and forgetting, are at play in the construction of the past. While she cannot find a definitive answer to the question of why one forgets, she reasons that forgetting may have its benefits such as allowing a person to grow and change by suppressing and forgetting elements which resisted change (166). In this case, forgetting is a natural act rather than denial or an inability to remember (11). The narrator’s missing memories of the war, experienced in the first five years of her life, could be read as an example of such forgetting. In weiter leben, Ruth Klüger similarly mentions what she calls a healthy forgetting, such as her inability to remember details of their harrowing escape from the Nazis, their false German names, or the time spent on the train to Southern Germany. To Klüger, the gaps in her memory indicate that she left behind painful experiences. Indeed, both Maron and Klüger define the process of remembering as one that entails forgetting parts of the past. Encouraging critical analysis but refraining from moral judgment, Maron’s narrator transcends and challenges the mere imperative to “never forget,” raising instead questions about the forgotten which cannot be represented nor investigated. Pawel’s story, conversely, serves as an example of a deliberate disregard for memories and silencing that began with his assimilation before the war and stretches into the GDR postwar years. Since Pawel converted to Christianity and withheld information about his orthodox Jewish family from Galicia, the narrator knows little about her family’s Jewish background. Later, the Nazis committed an act of mass murder and covered up all traces (the narrator does not know whether her grandfather was 39

9, “Wir können uns erklären, warum wir uns an etwas erinnern, aber nicht, warum wir vergessen, weil wir nicht wissen können, was wir vergessen haben, eben weil wir vergessen haben, was uns zugestoßen ist.” 18.

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shot in the surrounding woods or gassed in vans at the Kulmhof extermination camp, and she knows even less about the fate of Pawel’s relatives), with the goal of terminating Jews and their history. But even in the postwar years in East Germany, Pawel’s story continued to be silenced. Hella changed her maiden name and blocked out memories of her Jewish father, while the GDR State made no efforts to honor, let alone remember, Jewish victims. Pawel’s letters are thus evidence of what the narrator does not know and cannot come to know. They prove the irrevocable loss of history, including Hella’s and Martha’s acts of omission, and Maron’s dependency on these unreliable witnesses. In order to represent her grandfather’s life, Maron realizes that she must put aside his gruesome death (23), a tension also expressed by Klüger who could not connect memories of her father with the knowledge of his violent death. To bridge the antagonism of remembering and forgetting, the narrator finally comes to imagine Pawel. Maron’s approach to her family’s past resembles that of Christa Wolf in Patterns of Childhood in that both texts’ narrators interweave a description of memories with a reflection on the processes of remembering (and forgetting). Maron, however, knows from the outset that she cannot hope to illuminate buried memories of Pawel. Instead, she depends on her mother’s recollections which she inherently mistrusts, since she links Hella’s nostalgic childhood memories to a positivist socialist ideology that left no room for misgivings and uncertainties. In this way, the narrator (like Wolf’s narrator in Patterns of Childhood) feels compelled to question her mother’s insistence in her happy childhood, even though Hella claims to remember the time before 1939 well, and the narrator finds her mother’s memory generally accurate. Yet Hella’s disingenuous and quixotically positive letters to her father in the ghetto, in which she advises him to rise above his troubles, expresses delight at her fiancée’s award of the Iron Cross, and tells him to get over the pain of his wife’s death, question her sense of reality, so much so that the narrator vows to approach any intimate, idyllic family scenes with a more rational mind: I find it difficult not to doubt the idyll that emerges from Hella’s stories. Could a childhood really have been that carefree? Parents so completely faultless? Hella was twenty-four when Josefa and Pavel were expelled and twenty-six when they died. Did their violent death and the terrible years which followed not lead her to 40 idolise her early life as a paradise? Perhaps; perhaps not. 40

31, “Es fällt mir schwer, die Idylle, die mir aus Hellas Erzählungen entsteht, nicht zu attackieren. Kann überhaupt eine Kindheit so ungetrübt gewesen sein? Eltern so makellos? Hella war vierundzwanzig Jahre alt, als Josefa and Pawel ausgewiesen wurden, und sechsundzwanzig, als sie starben. Haben ihr gewaltsamer Tod und die furchtbaren Jahre, die

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Suggesting that her mother might have covered up traumatic experiences with gratifying childhood fantasies, the narrator also explains her mother’s optimistic (and socialist) outlook later in life. In Animal Triste (1996), Maron’s narrator compares the making of memories with the development with a pearl inside an oyster: A memory is like a foreign body inside an oyster. First it is only a bothersome intruder in the flesh inside the shell. The oyster envelops it with its epithelium and grows one layer after another of mother-of-pearl around it until a shimmering, round pearl with a smooth surface is created. In reality it is a sickness human be41 ings have elevated to the level of a precious object.

Maron’s sentiments call to mind Christa Wolf’s theoretical essay “Lesen und Schreiben” (1968, “Reading and Writing”) in which she compares memory to medallions: These medallions are to memory what ossified lung tissue is to a tubercular patient, or prejudices are to morality: once there was file there, activity, but now they are encapsulated, shut down. Once you were afraid to touch them, you burned your fingers on them; now they are cool and smooth. Some have been skillfully polished; some especially valuable pieces have cost years of work, because there is a lot you have to forget, a lot you have to rethink and reinterpret before you can present yourself to advantage on each and every occasion: that’s 42 why we need medallions for.

Both Maron and Wolf point to memory’s self-serving nature and liken it to jewelry (in a similar vein, Grass in Peeling the Onion compares it to amb-

41

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Hellas Kindheit folgten, die frühen Erinnerungen nicht paradiesisch verklärt und unantastbar gemacht? Vielleicht; vielleicht aber auch nicht.” 50. “Mit den Erinnerungen verhält es sich wie mit dem Fremdkörper im Innern einer Perle, zuerst nur ein lästiger Eindringling ins Muschelfleisch, den die Muschel mit ihrem Mantelepithel umschließt und eine Perlmuttschicht nach der anderen um ihn wachsen lässt, bis ein schillerndes, rundes Gebilde mit glatter Oberfläche entsteht; eigentlich eine Krankheit, von den Menschen zur Kostbarkeit erhoben.” Monika Maron, Animal Triste. Roman, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1996, 106-07. Translation from Monika Maron, Animal Triste, trans. Brigitte Goldstein, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000, 57. “Diese Medaillons sind für die Erinnerung, was die verkalkten Kavernen für den Tuberkulosekranken, was die Vorurteile für die Moral: ehemals aktive, jetzt aber durch Einkapselung stillgelegte Lebensflecken. Einst scheute man die Berührung, man verbrannte sich die Finger daran; nun sind sie kühl und glatt, manche kunstvoll zurechtgeschliffen, manches besonders wertvolle Stück hat die Arbeit von Jahre gekostet, denn man muß viel vergessen und viel umdenken und umdeuteten, ehe man sich immer und überall ins rechte Licht gerückt hat: das ist es, wozu wir sie brauchen, die Medaillons.” Christa Wolf, “Lesen und Schreiben” (1968), Die Dimension des Autors: Essays und Aufsätze, Reden und Gespräche 19591985, Band 2, Frankfurt a. M.: Luchterhand, 1987, 463-503, 478. Translation from: Christa Wolf, “Reading and Writing,” The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays, trans. Jan van Heurck, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995, 20-48, 31.

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er43), calling it “smooth,” “shimmering” (Maron), and “skillfully polished” (Wolf). And interestingly, for both authors such artificial homogeny of memories is rooted in sickness progressing unnoticeably yet unfailingly, in memory’s creeping decay. In Pavel’s Letters, Maron expands on this metaphor, using the image of a sculpture to contrast her mother’s and her own remembering: If Hella [w]as asked to describe the sculpture of her life, she would presumably envision a harmonious, compact work, with a few scratches and bruises, a piece may have chipped off, but on the whole a success. When I seek to give form to my own biography, it turns out to be a paltry, rough piece, arbitrarily pulling right then left, as if it were meant to be something that 44 might have given the rest some meaning.

Whereas the narrator’s characterizes her sculpture as raw and roughedged, Hella’s is embellished and beautified. The passage resembles Ruth Klüger’s depiction of her mother’s smooth and beautified memory in contrast to the daughter’s uneven and confusing memories.45 In both cases, the daughters grow suspicious of their mothers’ memories, and refuse to mythologize the past. Expanding on Maron’s previous work, Pavel’s Letters constitutes the narrator’s attempt to break with such nostalgia and look with jaundiced eyes beyond the calcified layers of ornamental craftsmanship of memories. By reestablishing a connection to her grandparents, in particular her grandfather, the narrator also corrects her mother’s misleading perspective that culminated in the support for yet another repressive regime. Unlike her mother, the narrator acknowledges her desire for nostalgia but seeks to examine it analytically. While she admits her “longing” [“Heimweh” (47)] and “nostalgia” [“Rührung” (53)] when looking at pho43 44

45

See Günter Grass, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, Göttingen: Steidl, 2006, 70. 45, “Wenn Hella die Skulptur ihres Lebens beschreiben sollte, würde sie vermutlich ein harmonisches kompaktes Werk vor Augen haben, mit einigen Schrunden und Scharten, vielleicht ist irgendwo sogar ein ganzes Stück rausgehauen, aber insgesamt erscheint es gelungen. Wenn ich meiner Biographie eine Gestalt suche, kommt ein dürres eckiges Gebilde zustande, mit willkürlichen Streben nach rechts und links, als hätte da etwas werden sollen, was dem Rest seinen Sinn geben könnte.” 70. Compare to Ruth Klüger: “Diese Wände der frühen Erinnerungen, wenn ich nur sehen könnte, was in ihrem [der Mutters] Kopf spukt, wenn man sich nur nehmen könnte, woran sich eine andere erinnert, ohne die Glättungen und die Beschönigungen, die das Körnige, das Sandige des wirklich Erlebten bis zur Widerstandslosigkeit in der Nacherzählung ausfiltrieren. Ihr Bild ist einheitlich, meines konfus.” weiter leben: Eine Jugend. Göttingen Wallstein: 1992, 32. See also my discussion on the above quotation in “Conjuring Phantoms and the Workings of Memory” in the chapter “Trauma and Testimony: Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben.”

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tographs of the tight-knit family, she also attempts to rise above such sentimental feelings. Though the narrator knows that she can merely question her mother’s childhood memories, she begins to attack Hella’s “interpretative sovereignty over her life”46 just as soon as she can revert to her own memories. In this way, she perceives Hella’s 1945 meeting and subsequent marriage to the influential government representative, Karl Maron, as the most significant turning point in Hella’s life, even though her mother insists that she would have turned to communism nonetheless. As the narrative progresses, the narrator’s authority over the family’s story only increases. Despite the deep rifts between mother and daughter (after Flight of Ashes came out with a West-German publisher, Maron and her mother did not speak for a year), in Pavel’s Letters the conversation, though often tenuous, does not cease. In a dialogue replete with anger, confusion, understanding, and empathy, the narrator grants herself interpretative freedom and fluidity, while Hella in contrast seems steeped in self-blame and regret, remaining distressed over her letters to Pawel in the ghetto. Whereas Hella cannot forgive herself for her own words and becomes overwhelmed by confusion and disbelief once she discovers the “forgotten” letters she wrote to Pawel, the narrator, when confronted with her former Stasi activities, becomes likewise bewildered about her (alleged) past actions, but does not grow distraught as a result. Instead, she explains her life’s turning points with natural changes and progression. Taking up the central question of Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood, “How did we become what we are today?”47 she responds “Like most people, I have wondered at various points in my life why I became the person I am, and at different times I have found different answers.”48 This answer not only leaves room for different responses in different times but also questions, even more radically than Wolf, the assumption that there is one discernible way of being. As a confident and ever-changing subject, the narrator approaches her family’s past from varying perspectives that include emotional as well as analytical attitudes. In an interview, Maron described this attitude in the following: 46 47

48

105, “Alleinige Interpretationshoheit für ihr Leben,” 154. “Wie sind wir so geworden, wie wir heute sind?” Christa Wolf, Kindheitsmuster: Roman (1976). Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1977, 268. Translation from Christa Wolf, Patterns of Childhood, trans. Hedwig Rappolt and Ursule Molinaro, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980, 209. 113, “Wie die meisten Menschen habe ich mich in meinem Leben hin und wieder gefragt, warum ich wohl geworden sein könnte, wie ich bin, und habe mir zu verschiedenen Zeiten verschiedene Antworten gegeben.” 166.

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And I have tried to find a tone in which memory could be narrated as a continual alternation of approximating and rejecting. I wanted to present the process of remembering as something vague, incomplete and changeable; as something that you experience like dreams that you try to hold on to as you awaken: the more intently you try to focus on them, the faster they disappear. My memory image has to remain fragmentary, with gaps that readers can fill in themselves. And there49 fore questions to which answers cannot be found will simply remain open.

The Trip to Poland Even though the narrator cannot hope to remember anything about her grandparents’ past herself, she uses some of the same strategies and mnemonic aids that Christa Wolf’s narrator employed in Patterns of Childhood to prompt her mother’s memory. In this way, Maron’s narrator incorporates into her text historical documents, statistics, photographs, and letters, and in the summer of 1996 embarks—together with her mother and her son—on a trip to Poland. From the outset, both narrators hold different aspirations and objectives of their travels; while Wolf’s narrator visited her former hometown in hopes of retrieving her childhood memories, Maron’s narrator—in contrast to her mother Hella—does not have such expectations. To her, the home of parents and grandparents is the space of postmemory for she can merely look for traces connecting her life to that of her relatives, i.e. “to search for the thread that connects my life to theirs,”50 not for memories themselves.51 Yet in both texts, the trip frames and initiates the narrative, and is introduced in a similar fashion: Back in the summer of 1971, you agreed to the proposal to drive to L., now called G.

49

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“Und ich habe versucht, einen Ton zu finden, in dem sich Erinnerung als ständiger Wechsel von Annäherung und Zurückweisung erzählen ließ. Ich wollte das Erinnern als etwas Vages, Unvollständiges, Veränderbares vorführen, als etwas, mit dem es einem ergehen kann wie mit Träumen, die man noch im Aufwachen festhalten will und die sich um so schneller entziehen, je angestrengter man sie fixieren will. Mein Erinnerungsbild muß fragmentarisch bleiben, mit Leerstellen, die der Leser selbst ausfüllen kann. Und deswegen bleiben einfach auch Fragen offen, auf die sich keine Antworten finden lassen.” Tilman Krause, “Wir waren ja immer ganz eng: ein Gespräch mit Monika Maron” (1999), Doch das Paradies ist verriegelt…, ed. Elke Gilson, 321. 5, “Den Faden zu suchen der mein Leben mit dem ihren verbindet,” 12. Compare this to Marianne Hirsch’s description of her trip to her parents’ home in Czernowitz. While Hirsch grew up hearing her parents’ stories about their hometown, so that Czernowitz “embodied the idea of home” (Family Frames 242, see also 226).

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[Damals, im Sommer 1971, gab es den Vorschlag, doch endlich nach L., heute 52

G., zu fahren, und du stimmtest zu.]

It was then we decided to go to Ostrow-Mazowiecka, my grandfather’s birthplace. [Damals beschlossen wir, nach Ostow-Mazowiecka zu fahren, wo mein Großva53 ter geboren wurde.]

Both narrators mention the idea for such a trip rather nonchalantly, as if it arose arbitrarily. Wolf’s narrator even replaces her own voice with the anonymous, off-kilter, and passive-voiced expression “es gab.” Contrary to the casual tone in which it is introduced, the trip to Poland in both cases is an important turning point in the reconstruction of the past: in Patterns of Childhood, it enables the narrator to remember important details while in Pavel’s Letters, it confirms the erasure of Jewish culture and ensuing inaccessibility of memories. As Maron’s narrator learns, Ostrow, a small town about one hundred kilometers northeast of Warsaw, was once the home of more than 3,000 Jewish citizens (sixty percent of the town’s population); now there are no Jewish people and no physical remainders of their existence. The Jewish homes, street names, cemeteries, and synagogues have all vanished, and contemporary Ostrow is not only marked by a complete absence of Jewish culture but also deprived of its Jewish history, as there is no Jewish museum or memorial. The only evidence that Pawel and his family once lived in Ostrow are the few entries in birth and death registers at the local library and city hall. The narrator, her mother, and her son Jonas depart with Jonas’ question of how to capture the absence of Jews in a photograph, with Hella’s grief over her missing childhood memories, and with the narrator’s plain observation that her grandfather lived in an impoverished town. The travelers’ visit of Josefa’s hometown Kurow near Lodz, where Pawel and Josefa lived with Josefa’s older sister, Jadwiga, from 1939 to 1942, does not yield much information either. Back in 1939, Maron’s grandparents decided to resettle in Kurow after Pawel was expelled from Germany in November 1938 (not allowed to enter Poland, Pawel waited along the German-Polish border for three months) and after Josefa—who developed cancer while still in Berlin—decided to leave Germany together with her husband rather than to divorce him (as proposed by Nazi officials). Yet the return to Josefa’s hometown, which she had left after converting to Baptism and after meeting Pawel in the Lodz Baptist congregation, was not the refuge they that hoped for. After a local Pole denounced 52 53

Christa Wolf, Patterns of Childhood, 4, Kindheitsmuster, 10. Pavel’s Letters, 4, Pawels Briefe, 12.

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Pawel, he was deported to the Belchatow ghetto in spring 1942 and perished that same year in Kulmhof. Josefa refused medical treatment for her advancing cancer and died shortly after Pawel was taken to the ghetto. Their four children, left behind in Berlin, were unable to help, and were themselves under the threat of deportation. Even though the travelers are able to locate Hella’s cousin and his wife who still remember Hella and show the visitors Josefa’s grave, the encounter does not entirely fulfill their quest for information. Conversation with the distant relatives remains awkward and filled with pauses, so much so that the narrator concludes, “what I wanted to know, I couldn’t find out and I couldn’t think of anything else to ask.”54 Contrary to what she had hoped, the trip to Poland does not stir any memories in Hella, and the narrator begins to wonder whether the undertaking helps or hinders her story, “whether all these images were not more disturbing, whether the attempt of fixing the place was not a barrier blocking my desire to get closer.”55 The trip does not even strengthen the bonds between family members, as each person becomes isolated in their own disappointment. Mirroring this sense of frustration, the description of the family’s trip remains an isolated, unsuccessful incident: while in Patterns of Childhood, the narrator’s childhood, the family’s trip to Poland, and her process of writing comprise three closely linked levels in time, in Pavel’s Letters, the trip remains unrelated to the rest of the narrative and fails to connect the text’s various levels. Another difference between the two texts is that Wolf’s narrator finds her hometown in Poland changed, street names altered, but memories of her family’s existence still accessible, whereas Maron’s narrator encounters the utter absence of Jewish culture in Poland.56 While in Patterns of Childhood, the mere passing of time impedes the narrator’s memory of past events, the narrator in Pavel’s Letters confronts the willful and deceitful erasure of Jewish memory. As Marianne Hirsch details in her diasporic definition of postmemory, it is typical for the children of Holocaust survivors to feel such disconnect vis-à-vis the parental home: European Jews of the postwar generation are forever turning left, but we can never catch up with the past; inasmuch as we remember, we remain in a perpe-

54 55 56

61-62, “Was ich wissen wollte, konnte ich nicht erfahren, und mir fiel einfach nicht ein, wonach ich sonst hätte fragen können.” 93. 63, “Ob mich all diese Bilder nicht eher störten, ob die Festlegungen mir meinen Weg der Annäherung nicht verstellten.” 94. See also Eva Hoffman’s description of the tenuous relationship between Jews and Poles in Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

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tual temporal and spatial exile. Our past is literally a foreign country we can never 57 hope to visit.

Even though the narrator in Pavel’s Letters is concerned about her grandparent’s generation, the pre-war home of her Jewish family remains equally inaccessible. As she has no personal memories of her grandfather and as the material remainders and documents of Jewish life in Europe have been destroyed, the trip to Poland only confirms to her the pointlessness of attempting to know an unknown past. Family Photos Besides using her mother’s memories and the experience from their travels, the narrator seeks to shed light on the past by incorporating photographs of her maternal family relatives in her text (as J. J. Long points out, photographs of her father and stepfather are conspicuously absent).58 On the one hand, the narrator becomes intrigued by the eyes, faces, hands, expressions, and postures in the photographs; on the other, she realizes that the intimate family scenes are staged and arranged. Though she cannot change the existing photographs, give them color, or insert Pawel who is missing in all of the postwar pictures, she can magnify and reframes the images in order to find answers to her detailed questions and inquiries. Still, later on she concludes that the black and white photographs tend to conceal her own rarely colorful images of her grandparents and thus impede rather than facilitate her association (18).59 To the narrator, the photographs remain ambivalent at best and cannot replace her own imagination.60 With its carefully crafted interplay of image and text, Pavel’s Letters 57 58

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Hirsch, Family Frames, 244. J. J. Long, “Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe: Photography, Narrative, and the Claims of Postmemory,” 155. I disagree with Long’s assessment that this exclusion equals Karl’s and Walter’s erasure, and that “by thus erasing Karl and Walter, Maron creates a genealogical gap in the visual record into which she can insert Pawel as the only father she is willing to acknowledge” (155). The narrator comments on her biological and her step-father in the written text, and I suggest that the visual absence of father figures merely confirms her status as a war child. I read Maron’s sentiments differently than Joanna Stimmel, who suggests that “… the black-and-white images prove much stronger than her multicoloured imaginings.” Joanna K. Stimmel, “Holocaust Memory between Cosmopolitanism and Nation-Specificity: Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe and Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz’s Umschlagplatz,” The German Quarterly 78.2 (Spring 2005): 155. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes observes similarly that photographs tend to impede and disrupt the process of imagination. In contrast, Hirsch’s article “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy” points to several examples in which

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brings forth a different story, one that questions the validity of any one medium to represent the past. Some images and descriptions of images clearly correspond to the earlier description of the grandparents in the novel Flight of Ashes. For instance, in Flight of Ashes, Maron describes a photograph that hangs in the protagonist’s room and depicts her illiterate grandmother washing the dishes (7)—in Pavel’s Letters, there is a similar description of that same photograph hanging in the narrator’s room (22), with the image embedded twice in the text (54, 57). Likewise, in Flight of Ashes, the protagonist’s mother recalls that her father took bicycle rides on Sundays and brought home flowers in the evenings for his wife, and Pavel’s Letters matches the previous description with a picture of Pawel and his bicycling club, along with references to his weekend rides. Other images do not correspond, however, like a photograph of Pawel described in Flight of Ashes that purportedly shows him with a frightened look in 1942 but is nowhere to be found in Pavel’s Letters (unless it is a 1939 photograph included in Pavel’s Letters that to the narrator reveals Pawel’s exhaustion). The repeated, detailed descriptions of these images emphasize their persistence and continuity. To the narrator in Pavel’s Letters, photographs reveal additional information about their subjects, such as Josefa’s resemblance to a “real grandmother,”61 Pawel’s dreaminess (29), and his later exhaustion and desperation (84). The narrative directly and indirectly explicates and addresses the photographs, complementing, questioning, or contradicting what is communicated from the images, even though the description and the actual image are sometimes printed as much as 100 pages apart, demanding careful and attentive reading.62 What remains troubling to the narrator, however, is that the beautiful, intimate family photos conjure images that evoke appealing, eternal family values even when Pawel’s and Josefa’s deaths violently contrast with such an idyllic enactment. The images also confirm Pawel’s and Josefa’s eradication in the war years and their nonexistence in contemporary Germany and Poland, when more recent family photos only portray the truncated family consisting of Hella, Marta, and the narrator. Like her son Jonas

61 62

Holocaust photography serves to inspire the imagination of Jewish and non-Jewish artists alike. Marianne Hirsch, “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy,” Acts of Memory: Cutural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, Hanover: UP of New England, 1999, 3-23. 12, “Richtige Großmutter,” 22. In this way, the narrator follows her description of a 1939 photograph in which Pawel looks like “an exhausted, desparate man,” 55 [“ein erschöpfter, ein verzweifelter Mann,” 84] with a reprint of the actual photograph only on page 180 (182), which is the last photograph of Pawel and the second-to-last photograph in the text.

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who wonders how he can photograph the absence of his greatgrandparents, the narrator questions how she can portray absence and restore her grandparents’ presence. To this end, the book’s cover in the original hardback edition depicts a photo (taken by Jonas) of dense birch woods, corresponding to the place where Pawel was (presumably) murdered, however the text neither refers to the cover photograph nor provides a date or place, as referenced in other cases.63 Like other visual representations of the Holocaust, most notably the films by Alain Resnais, Night and Fog (1955), and Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (1985), which draw attention to the incongruity between Poland’s serene countryside and the sites of mass murder, Maron points to the invisibility of her grandfather’s murder amongst a tranquil scenery that evokes a peaceful place of safety and conceals any evidence of previous crimes. In addition, the missing date and locale of the photograph symbolize the gap of information surrounding Pawel’s death. Maron includes a picture of Josefa’s grave (94), which, as Friederike Eigler notes, emphasizes the contrast between Josefa’s grave and Pawel’s missing one.64 While Josefa died of a natural death, Pawel, a victim of mass murder and the deceit of it, does not even possess a grave. In an attempt to expose the deceptive nature of Hitler’s crimes, the text reprints a postcard written by Pawel from the Belchatow ghetto (132, 135) that bears witness to both Pawel’s presence in the ghetto and his violent murder, since no photographs of Pawel exist after his deportation. In an additional close-up of the postcard, its stamp becomes more visible, displaying Hitler’s profile above the words Deutsches Reich and an official seal that reads, Belchatow, 04.6.42. Again the image evokes the conundrum of seeing/not seeing: though there are no eyewitnesses of Pawel’s murder, the stamp and seal spell out the year of his death and his last place of residence, as well as the identity of his murderers—on Hitler’s orders, the Belchatow ghetto was eradicated in August 1942. In her seminal work Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997), Marianne Hirsch expresses a similar tension when examining the ideological function of family photography in general and images of her own exiled family in particular. Hirsch links home photography’s popularity in the late nineteenth century to the rise of the modern family, finding photography instrumental in the creation of the family as a unit and the performance of family rituals. As a medium for familial arrangement and self-representation, family photos easily erase differences and 63 64

The narrator refers only indirectly to the image when mentioning that on their visit to Kulmhof, she was waiting for her son who took off by himself, taking pictures (184). See Friederike Eigler, Gedächtnis und Geschichte, 167.

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divergence and “provide perhaps even more than usual some illusion of continuity over time and space.”65 In support of her argument, Hirsch gives herself as example. In Family Frames, she includes a picture of herself and her mother in affectionate embrace in the outdoors. While the picture won the photographer much praise, both Hirsch and her mother felt unhappy with it since “this picture tells a story of a relationship we do not want to claim.”66 All Hirsch remembers is feeling stiff and awkward while the picture was taken. The photographer managed to conceal these sentiments, staging instead an intimacy between mother and daughter that apparently holds great public appeal. It is only Hirsch’s written reflection pointing to the contrast between the photographer’s agenda and her own sentiments that reveals the context necessary for properly reading the image. With the capacity of representing and simultaneously misrepresenting its subjects under the pretense of authenticity, family photography thus serves an ideological function that becomes only visible when looking at the images in their historical and cultural context. Maron’s text, likewise, points to photography’s deceptive quality. Examining one of her favorite family pictures from the 1920s, the narrator cannot help but feel an indeterminate and irrational longing [“unbestimmte Sehnsucht and irrationales Heimweh” 46, 47] for such a united and constant family. But there are some indications that the image engenders and manipulates such desire. For one, like the aforementioned photograph of Hirsch’s mother and herself, the Iglarzs’s photograph manages to hide the disparity between what is seen and what is felt. In this case, Hella who looks particularly pretty in the picture with white stockings, a white dress, and a big white bow in her hair, remembers primarily the pain of her leg falling asleep while posing for the photographer. But the deception goes further. As the narrator explains, the photograph was meant to be sent to an American immigration office and thus taken for the very specific purpose of convincing the authorities that this was a proper, hard-working, prosperous family worthy of immigration visas. This background information reveals that the skillfully choreographed photo evokes the allure of a poised, elegant family in precious clothes precisely at a time the family’s well-being was gravely threatened and Iglarzs hoped for a better future abroad. In this case, the photograph generates and directs the familial gaze, defined by Hirsch as “an act of adoption and an act of faith determined by an idea, an image of family: it is not an act of

65 66

Hirsch, Family Frames, xi. Hirsch, Family Frames, 106.

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recognition. It is fundamentally an interpretive and a narrative gesture….”67

Josefa, Marta, Hella, Bruno, Paul, and Pawel (46)

Hella Close-up (49)

In her efforts to make this interpretative process more visible, Maron duplicates many photographs with an additional close-up. Cropping the photograph to zoom in on a particular person, a face, hands, or eyes, the narrator applies her own gaze rather than the photographer’s and recreates the choreography of each image. One such photo displays her great67

Hirsch, Family Frames, 83.

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grandfather, Juda Lejb Sendrowitsch Iglarz, sitting at a desk, his hands resting on an open book as if he had just looked up from his readings. A close-up magnifies Iglarz’s hands holding the book, while the text reveals that her great-grandfather was in truth illiterate (26-29). As the only existing image of her great-grandfather—in fact, the only evidence of Pawel’s family in Ostrow—the photo fools readers into thinking that Iglarz regularly read at his desk, twisting reality and the perception of the past. Yet the close-up hints at the narrator second, scrutinizing look: she begins to wonder whether her great-grandfather is smiling in the photograph or not, and what other important cues the image manages to conceal. As Eigler remarks, the example readily comments on the unreadable nature of photographs; the image is not an accurate representation of the past frozen in time, though it proposes that illusion. Yet by cutting her own excerpts from the existing photographs, Maron reframes and appropriates each image.

Juda Lejb Sendrowitsch Iglarz (26)

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Cropped Image of Sendrowitsch’s Hand (29)

In Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald similarly explores the ambiguity and deceit of photography when embedding old black-and-white photographs of a loved one lost to the Holocaust in his narrative. Like Maron, Sebald poignantly uses both text and image for his inquiry into the workings of memory. He also enlarges some photographs and varies their location in the text. According to Maya Barlzilai, such play with size, shape, and frequency brings “to a halt the flow of the narrative.”68 In similar fashion, Art Spiegelman incorporates in Maus I and II three family photographs: of his mother, his brother, and his father. Marianne Hirsch suggests that by including these photos, Spiegelman appropriates photographic artifacts, changing their structure and context in the process: By placing three photographs into his graphic narrative, Art Spiegelman raises not only the question of how, forty years after Adorno’s dictum, the Holocaust can be represented, but also the question of how different media—comics, photographs, narrative, testimony—can interact to produce a more permeable and multiple text that may recast the problematics of Holocaust representation and definitively eradicate any clear-cut distinction between documentary and aesthetic.69

68 69

Maya Barzilai, “On Exposure: Photography and Uncanny Memory in W.G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz,” W.G. Sebald: History – Memory – Trauma, ed. Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006, 205-18. Hirsch, Family Frames, 25, see also 13, 21.

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In particular, Spiegelman questions the limits of representation by commenting a photograph of him and his healthy and smiling mother with the words, “in 1968, when I was 20, my mother killed herself—she left no note!”70 Pavel’s Letters poses similar questions, though without so much sting and shock as Spiegelman. The text’s last photograph (dated 1953) displays the narrator and her mother Hella embracing in a meadow (191), not unlike Hirsch’s picture of herself and her mother. In contrast to the intimate picture stemming from the narrator’s childhood, though, the text goes on in time, mentioning just a few pages later their falling out and concluding with a very questionable reconciliation.71 Unlike the picture, where mother and daughter look strikingly alike gazing in the same direction, the text remains overshadowed by their tenuous relationship and emphasizes the dissonance between two adults. With image and narrative repeatedly at odds, Maron challenges the representational capacity of either text. Pawel’s Letters and the Act of Imagination Faced with her inability to remember the past, plus the scarcity of documents, the narrator decides to abandon a conventional concept of remembering altogether: Remembering is actually the wrong word for what I had in mind with regard to my grandparents, for in me was no submerged knowledge about them I needed to bring to light. I was familiar with the rough outlines of their story, but missing was their inner life and most of all a deeper knowledge about it on my part. For me, the essence of my grandparents was their absence.72

While the narrator grows frustrated with her mother’s failure to remember, with the outcome of their travels, and with the existing photographs, the book’s title suggests that Hella’s, Josefa’s, and most notably Pawel’s

70 71

72

Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Part I: My Father Bleeds History (1973), Part II: And Here my Troubles Began (1986), New York: Pantheon, 1973, 100. Compare the last sentence of Pavel’s Letters: “Tomorrow I shall give her (Hella) a call, or the day after, when her euphoria has subsided a little. At any rate, not today” (142) [“Morgen werde ich sie (Hella) anrufen, oder übermorgen, wenn ihre Siegesfreude sich ein bißchen gelegt hat, heute jedenfalls noch nicht” (205)]. 2, “Erinnern ist für das, was ich mit meinen Großeltern vorhatte, eigentlich das falsche Wort, denn in meinem Innern gab es kein versunkenes Wissen über sie, das ich hätte zutage fördern können. Ich kannte die Umrisse der Geschichte, der das Innenleben und erst recht meine innere Kenntnis fehlten. Das Wesen meiner Großeltern bestand für mich in ihrer Abwesenheit.” 8.

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letters effectively inspire and fulfill her quest. She uses Hella’s and Pawel’s letters as a springboard to envision the life of her grandparents. It was only when reading her letters that I realised I had never experienced my mother as a daughter. Jonas knows me as his mother and, at the same time, as the child of his grandmother; I was deprived of this dialectic of family continuity. Now, in retrospect, I create for myself images I could have remembered instead 73 of inventing them had my grandparents not been killed.

While photographs and documents can, at best, accompany and support her story, Hella and Pawel’s letters flesh out her narrative, stirring her fantasy instead of inhibiting it. As Friederike Eigler maintains, Maron “goes beyond the recording of postmemories … to create postmemories by imagining aspects of her grandparents’ lives.”74 In this way, the narrator (re)creates Pawel in her mind to the point that she can imagine him speaking to his wife: And what did they talk about? I ask Hella. Well, what do you think? She replies. They probably talked about us, their children, about politics, and most assuredly about money; after all, we never had any. Did they speak German or Polish with each other? When they were alone, Polish. So, my grandfather and grandmother are sitting on the windowsill in the kitchen of their flat in Neukölln. Jusha, says my grandfather (this is the Polish diminutive for Josefa), Jusha, he says. And what else? I don’t know the sound of his voice, I don’t know what he looks like when he laughs because we don’t have a photograph in which he is laughing. I don’t know anything about this life which I am trying to imagine, neither the poverty, nor the crowding, not the religiosity. My grandmother spoke a broken German and couldn’t write more than her name. Hella remembers a day when her mother brought her breakfast to school because she first had to exchange yarn for bread. 75

Jusha, says my grandfather, please hand me the scissors. 73

74 75

32, “Erst wenn ich ihre Briefe lese, wird mir bewußt, daß ich meine Mutter nie als Tochter erlebt habe. Jonas kennt mich als Mutter und zugleich als das Kind seiner Großmutter; mir ist diese Dialektik familiärer Kontinuität vorenthalten geblieben. Nachträglich schaffe ich mir nun die Bilder, an die ich mich, wären meine Großeltern nicht ums Leben gekommen, erinnern könnte, statt sie zu erfinden.” 51. Eigler, “Engendering Cultural Memory in Selected Post-Wende Literary Texts of the 1990s,” 395. 19, “Und was haben sie sich denn erzählt, frage ich Hella. Ja, was werden sie sich erzählt haben, sagt sie, über uns Kinder werden sie sich unterhalten haben und über Politik, sicher auch über Geld, wir hatten ja nie welches. Haben sie Deutsch oder Polnisch miteinander gesprochen?

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Exemplary of the processes of remembering and imagination found in the text, the exchange reiterates the narrator’s disappointment with her mother’s insufficient memories and the lack of documents, but also reveals her tenacious verve and creative resourcefulness. When she turns to her mother in hopes of learning more about her grandparents’ conversations, Hella does not remember any details. Yet the narrator cannot accept this void and begins to picture her grandparents herself. At first, she remains unsuccessful since she has no documents available that would provide an image for the situation—no photo exists of Pawel laughing. Yet by using her own limited knowledge, her mother’s sparse memories, and by making a concerted effort, the narrator becomes able to imagine a dialogue between her grandparents. With these imagined words, she grants herself access to a past she cannot come to know.76 In the previous example, the narrator’s questioning and her knowledge of Pawel combined with Hella’s memories stir her imagination, but in most cases it is Pawel’s letters that enable her to envision her grandfather speaking to his wife in Kurow (“Juscha, says my grandfather, the children will write soon”77), walking along with her (“In the afternoon, my grandfather takes me for a walk”78), and even addressing her (“Drink your milk, he says to me”79). This type of imagination is not fantasy and does not bring back Pawel in a fairytale. There are also instances when her imagination fails (“and now I cannot find a place for him [Pawel] in the house in Pankow next to the man in the general’s uniform, who would be his son-in-law”80), proving that she cannot seamlessly insert her grandfa-

76 77 78 79 80

Wenn sie allein waren, bestimmt Polnisch. Also, mein Großvater und meine Großmutter sitzen auf dem Fensterbrett in der Küche ihrer Neuköllner Wohnung. Juscha, sagt mein Großvater, das ist die polnische Koseform für Josefa, Juscha, sagt er. Und was weiter? Ich weiß nicht, wie seine Stimme klingt, wie er aussieht, wenn er lacht, weil es kein Foto gibt, auf dem er lacht. Ich kenne nichts von dem Leben, das ich mir vorstellen will, weder die Armut, noch die Enge, noch die Frömmigkeit. Meine Großmutter hat bis zum Ende gebrochen Deutsch gesprochen und nicht mehr schreiben können als den eigenen Namen. Und Hella erinnert sich an einen Tag, an dem ihre Mutter ihr das Frühstück in die Schule brachte, weil sie erst Garn für Brot hatte tauschen müssen. Juscha, sagt mein Großvater, gibst du mir bitte mal die Schere?” 32-33. Stimmel reads the same passage in a negative light: “Everything beyond the printed or written record is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine.” 157. 65, “Juscha, sagt mein Großvater, die Kinder werden bald schreiben,” 97. 75, “Am Nachmittag geht mein Großvater mit mir spazieren,” 112. 126, “Trink deine Milch, sagt er zu mir,” 183. 125, “Und jetzt gelingt es mir nicht, einen Platz für ihn [Pawel] zu finden in dem Haus in Pankow neben dem Mann in der Generalsuniform, der sein Schwiegersohn gewesen wäre.” 182.

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ther in postwar life. In contrast to Flight of Ashes, when the protagonist characterized her grandmother in a cheerful and colorful manner as the “enviable farm girl,”81 the imaginations in Pavel’s Letters rarely hold color and do not promise sudden revelations. Even with bits of imagination, the narrator never ceases her questioning process and remains torn between wishful thinking and critical analysis. 82 In this way, she admits her difficulties with picturing Pawel as a member of the Communist Party (60-61) but does not ignore that fact, unlike in Flight of Ashes, where she conveniently omitted it. As the narrator in Pavel’s Letters aims to imagine only what could resemble reality, Pawel’s actions and words arise in the simple and plain gestures of everyday life, as in his request for the scissors while sewing. Only after the narrator persistently questions and probes her knowledge (97, 183) is she able to fathom a few occasional words of an imagined dialogue. Thus, the tension between competing yet similarly inadequate approaches to the past is never solved. In other words, the narrative never shifts into fiction but remains a conglomerate of multifaceted approaches. By inserting the missing bits and pieces, the narrator is able to respond sixty years later to Pawel’s affectionate words in his letters: “‘Never let the child see the hatred, envy and vengefulness in the world. I want her to become a precious human being.’”83 Even though she cannot recuperate her grandfather, the narrator as the addressee of the aforementioned words can belatedly formulate an answer and draw meaning from Pawel’s correspondence. As Hirsch points out, this is precisely the engagement of postmemory: It is a question of adopting the traumatic experiences—and thus also the memories—of others as one’s own, or, more precisely, as experiences one might oneself have had, and of inscribing them into one’s own life story. It is a question of conceiving oneself as multiply interconnected with others of the same, of previous, and of subsequent generations, of the same and of other—proximate or 84 distant—cultures and subcultures.

To Hirsch, the post-Holocaust generations depend on connections with the past, ones that need to be imagined if they cannot be recalled. Inspired 81 82

83 84

1, “Beneidenswerten Bauernmädchen,” 7. J.J. Long, disregarding the narrator’s doubts and self-questioning, reads the above passage as “an avowedly unregulated fantasy, based on no more than a fairly arbitrary conviction on the narrator’s part.” (159). I suggest that it is precisely the narrator’s analytical intervention that prevents her imagination from drifting into fantasy. 5, “‘Zeigt niemals dem Kinde, daß es Haß, und Rache giebt. Sie soll ein wertvoller Mensch werden.” 112. Hirsch, “Projected Memory,” 9.

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by Pawel’s letters, the narrator comes to use her imagination as a bridge between individuals, generations, and cultures, placing her missing grandfather back in the family. In this way, she answers the central question of Pavel’s Letters, —“What determines whether we remember the happy moments of our lives or unhappy ones; our triumphs more readily than our humiliations, or vice versa?”85—with her creative forces and appropriation. It is the creative self who rules over the (re)construction of one’s past. The narrator also feels free to envision different outcomes to past events, wondering, for instance, what would have happened if Hella had fallen in love with a Social Democrat instead of a communist (73), and how life would have changed if Pawel and Josefa had returned after the war (110-11, 180-83). With her imagination she thus finds a way to reinstate the severed connection to Pawel and lay claim to a past that she cannot remember: ... When I imagine that the man who wrote those letters thought of me, hoped for me, then, for a few minutes, the word “past” loses all meaning. Then the years become porous and 26 July or 8 August are days in my life I can remember. 86 I see my grandfather, a thin shadow, gliding through the ghetto streets.

Accessing and embracing distant events, the narrator begins to move them into the present tense, both in a literal and figurative sense. To this effect, Pavel’s Letters becomes an autobiographical undertaking that not only seeks to chronicle and to preserve Pawel’s story but to claim, even evoke, something that cannot be remembered as “memorable,” i.e. personally relevant and significant. With the gradual and careful shift into imagination, the narrator thus refutes the doubts she voiced at the book’s beginning: Why should I feel that I had to justify my writing this story, about which little is certain, even now when the fate of this vanished generation, and that of their children, has been assigned to history, where it has been entombed? When nothing new can be added to the life stories such as those of Pavel and Josefa Iglarz, 87 and certainly not by someone who is following their traces from a safe distance. 85 86

87

4, “Was entscheidet darüber, ob wir uns eher an die glücklichen Momente unseres Lebens erinnern oder and die unglücklichen, ob uns unsere Triumphe vor den Demütigungen einfallen oder umgekehrt?” 69. 96, “... Wenn ich mir vorstelle, daß der Mann, der diese Briefe schrieb, an mich dachte, auf mich hoffte, verliert das Wort Vergangenheit für Minuten seinen Sinn. Dann werden die Jahre durchlässig und der 26. Juli oder der 8. August 1942 gehören zu den Tagen meines erinnerbaren Lebens. Ich sehe meinen Großvater, ein schmaler Schatten, der über das Pflaster der Ghettostraßen gleitet.” 141. 1, “Warum habe ich überhaupt das Gefühl, rechtfertigen zu müssen, dass ich diese Geschichte, an der wenig sicher ist, schreiben will, jetzt noch, nachdem die Schicksale dieser gerade versunkenen Generation der Historie zugeordnet und in ihr vermauert worden,

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Ceasing her status of an “intruder,” the narrator in the course of her text turns into a participant who unearths the safe distance between past and present rather than leaving the past “entombed.” Even though her text cannot reveal missing factual information on her grandparents’ lives, it still manages to bring the past back to life. As postmemory’s definition indicates, this type of engagement has different ramifications for different people in different contexts. In Maron’s case, it is a balancing act between the legacies of the Holocaust and communism, of victimhood and perpetration, between German and Polish cultures and Jewish and Christian beliefs, poised and balanced between the generations of parents and grandparents. Her definition of “memorable,” however, makes a case for a kind of appropriation that negotiates fact with fiction and will become evermore pressing for future post-Holocaust generations.

selbst die ihrer Kinder. Nachdem über Lebensläufe wie die von Pawel und Josefa Iglarz wenig Neues zu sagen ist, schon gar nicht von jemandem, der ihnen aus sicherer Entfernung nachspürt.” 7.

Tanja Dückers’s “Sensual Historiography:” Himmelskörper (Celestial Bodies)1 Pop Culture and the Legacy of National Socialism Over the past years, Tanja Dückers has emerged as one of the most prominent young authors in Germany who focuses on Berlin’s postwall scene, on artists’ lifestyles in Europe’s metropolises, on the entangled relationships and identity searches of Germans in their thirties and forties—and on the twenty-first century’s legacy of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Dückers approaches the Nazi past beyond any particular category, depicting both the suffering of victims and the suffering of civilians from the perspective of men and women, children and grandchildren. Her notion of sensual historiography [sinnliche Geschichtsschreibung] can be seen as a leitmotif to her short stories, novels, and journalistic essays. Sensual historiography does not seek to establish a historical record but complements the existing history and memory of the (Nazi) past with emotions, intuition, and imagination. In both Dückers’s earlier and later work, such sensual historiography exudes from objects and artifacts, photographs, stories, memories, and documents, offering the protagonists a chance to belatedly glimpse into the past through all of their senses. Dückers is the youngest author of this study and the only one who is a child of Germany’s first postwar generation and the student movement of 1968. Born in 1968 in West Berlin, Dückers studied German and North American literature at the Free University of Berlin; after completing her M.A. degree, she began work as a journalist and freelance writer. As part of a generation that experienced the fall of the Iron Curtain and the opening of Europe in her youth, Dückers traveled extensively to Englishspeaking countries and, more recently, Eastern Europe; she accepted several grants with residence in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Pennsylvania, Prague, Gotland/Sweden, Krakow, Bristol, and Brussels. Yet she remains first and foremost a Berlin author. 1

This chapter expands my arguments made in an earlier article: “Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper: A Third-Generation World War II Narrative,” Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch IV (2005): 259-80.

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After writing poetry and participating in Berlin poetry events, Dückers portrays in her initial novel Spielzone (1999, Playground) a cadre of manic Berliners, from teenagers to senior citizens who are looking for sex, adventure, closeness, and love in the provincial district of Neukölln and the trendy Prenzlauer Berg. Her following collection of eighteen short stories, Café Brazil (2001), concerns a similar theme but with a broader focus and perspective. Narrated in first person (except for four texts) from the perspective of either a man or woman of varying ethnicity, the stories intimately explore the obsession, sex life, infatuation, and jealousy of confused and egocentric thirty-something men and women in Berlin and abroad. Both Spielzone and Café Brazil were celebrated as part of the literary fräulein-miracle” [literarisches Fräuleinwunder]2 and were linked to works of other successful young women writers who were reproached for being more interested in private affairs than in politics. Yet Dückers always rejected the concept of Fräuleinwunder in general and the characterization of herself as its attractive exemplar in particular, suggesting that the categorization revealed more about the sale strategies of publishers and expectations of readers than her artistic enterprise.3 Emphasizing that her work does not separate personal and public concerns, Dückers claims that both Spielzone and Café Brazil link stories of love, sex, anguish, and abuse with Berlin’s history postwar politics. In some of the stories in Café Brazil history is conveyed through seemingly innocuous personal belongings that prove to have a devastating grip of their own, pulling the protagonists back to a repressed familial past. In “Die Wollmütze” (The Woolcap), Viola remembers and reexperiences nightmarish scenes of family fighting, abuse, and alcoholism when she wears a wool cap knitted by her mother that smells of a mixture of beer, sausages, lard, cleansing agent, and her father’s vomit. If Viola ever believed that she could escape the uncanny parental home, the wool cap forces her to succumb to the permeating grip of family history. In “Maremagnum”—an early example of what Dückers calls her “grandmother-stories” [Großmüttergeschichten]—the first-person narrator and her brother dissolve the grandparents’ household to discover that both grandparents had been former Nazis, a motif that recurs in many subsequent texts. Only belatedly, when discovering papers and photographs that prove their grandparents’ membership and fondness for the Nazi party as well as their postwar denial of it, do the grandchildren recognize the fami2 3

See Volker Hage, “Ganz schön abgedreht,” Der Spiegel, 12/1999. See also my discussion in the previous chapter “Postwar and Postwall Germany” in part III. See Tanja Dückers, “Die Mär von den unpolitischen Autoren” (2002/2006), Morgen nach Utopia. Kritische Beiträge, Berlin: Aufbau, 2007, 132.

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ly’s blind spots.4 Thus Dückers’s project of sensual historiography can be said to begin here, with her attention to Berlin’s subculture and its troubles. Dückers’s novel Himmelskörper (2003, Celestial Bodies), which is also set in Berlin, more explicitly turns to the experience of Germany’s grandchildren whose dying grandparents are the last eyewitnesses to the Nazi period. Himmelskörper reconsiders the sinking of the German refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff, as did Günter Grass in his novella Crabwalk (2003, Im Krebsgang, 2002).5 Yet Dückers is less concerned with the historical specificities of the Gustloff catastrophe than with the wide-ranging legacy of the Nazi era for generations of children and grandchildren. Thus she takes the maritime disaster merely as a point of departure to allow for a reflection on the processes of communication, memory, and silencing across various generations. Accusing Grass of giving a biased representation of Germans as victims, Dückers insists that her book is historically more accurate6 and points out that the Gustloff ship was targeted by a Russian submarine because it appeared as a military vessel and carried military personnel.7 Indeed, Himmelskörper depicts the suffering of German civilians, especially women and children, while exposing their privileges, differences, and moral choices, calling into question the myth of innocent, passive refugees as victims. Dückers chooses the form of a novel to describe the experiences of her own life, such as growing up in postwar West Germany in the 1970s, learning about the Holocaust in school and the media, witnessing her grandfather’s death and her grandmother’s dementia, and dispersing her grandparents’ household, at which point she recovered documents about their flight from East Prussia (Dückers’s own uncle and aunt almost boarded the Gustloff but escaped on a minesweeper instead). Using the genre of fiction, however, Dückers imagines rather than reconstructs her family history: “Similar to Paul and Freia, I created a novel from my family history and many documents, from the variety of impressions and snip4 5

6 7

Tanja Dückers, “Maremagnum,” Café Brazil. Erzählungen, Berlin: Aufbau, 2001, 148-69, 160. On January 30, 1945, the Russian submarine S13 fired four torpedoes at the Gustloff on its way west from Gotenhafen, causing the ship to sink within a few hours. Around nine thousand civilians (mostly women and children) met their deaths by freezing in the ice-cold Baltic Sea, locked in the sinking ship, squeezed in the hallways, smashed by the crashing steel walls, or falling from the frozen deck. Only an estimated one thousand two hundred lives could be saved. The sinking of the Gustloff is the single deadliest maritime disaster of all time. Tanja Dückers, “Meine Version ist die richtige,” Berliner Zeitung, March 22-23, 2003. See Dückers, “Der Schrecken nimmt nicht ab, er wächst,” 106.

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pets of conversation in my head.”8 In this vein, Dückers evokes the tradition of magical realism rather than a representation of reality when the autobiographical protagonist Freia recalls her childhood.9 In a later, selfcritical, theoretical essay “Die Lieblingsfrage der Leser” (2006, The Readers’ Favorite Question), she renders her readers’ urge to conflate autobiographical fact and fiction an insulting response in that it disrespects artistic freedom. In Himmelskörper, Freia negotiates between imagination, memory, family stories, documentation, and belated analyses to write what her mentor calls “sensual historiography.” Dückers’s later short stories also evolve from these themes. “Das Harmonium” (2006) illustrates the enduring pull of an object’s past, in this case a harmonium that the narrator’s parents took from their Jewish neighbors before deportation. “Die Badekappe” (2003, The Bathing Cap), yet another variation of “grandmother-stories,” also involves the narrator and her brother’s task of dispersing her grandmother’s household when she is moved to a retirement home. Unlike the earlier “Maremagnum” and Himmelskörper, however, the narrator discovers proof of suffering during the war when unearthing an old bathing cap that prompts their grandmother’s account of how her best friend was killed during the air raid. In yet another variation, the narrator in “Das Schloß von Bíla Hora” (2005) comes across a love letter among her grandmother’s possessions at the household dissolution and decides to travel to Prague in an effort to find out more about her grandmother’s lover. Through objects and belongings, Dückers’s protagonists uncover their parents’ and grandparents’ loss, fear, and suffering, but they are also confronted with denial, deception, and denunciation. Providing a context often missing in the contemporary debates on the air war, Dückers’s explicates the German experience of flight, and expulsion and of Germans as perpetrators and bystanders, calling attention to German culpability as well as to civilian suffering. A passage from her short-story “Das Eckhaus” (2004, The Corner House) illustrates this connection: Later, back in Berlin, the huge, confusing, chronically discordant city, in which I was actually never content but neither tired, everything seemed like a dream, a chimera, a fairytale. Once upon a time there was a house that was bombed in one night from the Classicism of the late nineteenth century back into the Stone Age. Bombs that no one in my family survived, except for my mother who incidentally 8

9

“Ich habe ähnlich wie Paul und Freia aus meiner Familiengeschichte und vielen Dokumenten, aus der Wirrnis der Eindrücke und Gesprächsfetzen in meinem Kopf einen Roman gemacht.” Tanja Dückers, “Der nüchterne Blick der Enkel. Wie begegnen junge Autoren der Kriegsgeneration? Ein Gespräch mit Tanja Dückers,” Die Zeit, April 30, 2003. Dückers, “Das Flüchtige und das Doppelbödige,” 59.

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stayed with Uncle Walter and Aunt Hilde in Cologne. Bombs that fell from airplanes which would have never started if the country where I come from had not bombed other countries before, without need. Bones, blood, broken skulls, splinters in the bodies of not quite dead, trapped people.10

Using the suffering of the narrator’s family as an impetus to reflect on the suffering caused by Germans, Dückers delineates the connection of these legacies that is especially jarring in Berlin where the narrator finds bullet holes scarring the buildings next to the contemporary Stolpersteine, i.e. cobblestones in the street pavement recalling the names of deported Jews.11 The complex and multifaceted interaction of past and present is also the theme of Dückers’s short story “Schulweg” (2005, Way to School), in which the narrator describes the bus ride to her former school in Berlin’s bourgeois and major shopping district Kurfürstendamm. As a teenager on her way to school, the narrator passes the flashing advertisements of capitalism and homeless people, a porn club, and the ruins of Berlin’s KaiserWilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, a building devoted in 1895 to the first Emperor of the new Reich, demolished by an Allied air raid on November 23, 1943, and since then a ruined tower (with a modern protestant church besides it) as symbol of the war’s destruction.12 Thus, part of the narrator’s education is the history and culture she confronts in the Berlin streets: remnants of the German Reichs, WW II, and the Cold war, Western consumer culture, and its gloomy shadow of poverty and prostitution. 10

11

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“Später, zurück in Berlin, der großen, unübersichtlichen, chronisch mit sich selbst uneinigen Stadt, in der ich eigentlich nie zufrieden, aber auch nie müde gewesen war, schien mir alles ein Traum, ein Hirngespinst, ein Märchen gewesen zu sein: Es war einmal ein Haus, das in einer einzigen Nacht vom Klassizismus des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert [sic] zurück in die Steinzeit gebombt worden war. Bomben, die niemand aus meiner Familie überlebte, bis auf meine Mutter, die zufällig in dieser Nacht bei Onkel Walter und Tante Hilde in Köln weilte. Bomben, die aus Flugzeugen fielen, die niemals gestartet wären, wenn das Land, aus dem ich komme, nicht zuvor andere Länder ohne Grund, ohne Not, mit Bomben übersät hätte. Knochen, Blut, gebrochene Schädel, Splitter in den Körpern noch nicht Toter, Verschütteter.” Tanja Dückers, “Das Eckhaus,” 35. All translations of Dückers’s texts are my own. Dückers, “Das Eckhaus,” 34. Dückers refers here to Günter Demnig’s (born 1947) art project “Stumble-Stones” [Stolpersteine] that began in 2000 when the artist started to place golden cobblestones containing the names of deported Jews, Sinti and Roma, politically persecuted, homosexuals, Jehova’s witnesses, and victims of Hitler’s “Euthanasia” program in the pavement in front of their last self-chosen residence. In 2004, Demnig placed the stones in his hometown Berlin, and by now, the project includes as many as 12,500 stones in 190 cities and has expanded to Europe, with Demnig placing cobblestones in Budapest in 2007. For further information, see http://www.stolpersteine.com/. For a lucid analysis on the “memory value” of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche and other ruin sites, see Simon Ward, “Material, Image, Sign: On the Value of Memory Traces in Public Space,” Memory Traces: 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity, ed. Silke Arnold-de Simine, Bern: Peter Lang, 281-308.

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Dückers’s latest novel, Der längste Tag des Jahres (2006, The Longest Day of the Year), describes the reactions of five siblings to the news of their father’s death, keeping the family theme but shifting the focus in time and place to Bavaria in the 1950s. Working against belated nostalgia and mythmaking of the 1950s era, Dückers implies that the 1950s workethic and family values were a way of suppressing the 1940s legacy, and thus reveals the continuities of history.13 Abandoning a gender dichotomy and stereotypical male and female roles, Dückers frequently switches male and female perspectives, so much so that in many of her narratives it is at first unclear whether the firstperson narrator is male or female: and only later is the gender revealed. In this way, her male protagonists can be as needy, weak, and obsessive as her female ones, and conversely her female protagonists, like Freia in Himmelskörper, a bald-shaven scientist and mother who records the family’s history, confidently assume the equal rights that the 1968 generation was still fighting for. In addition, the protagonists are frequently homosexual or bisexual, which further serves to obliterate the stereotypes of the sexes. Thus Dückers’s feminism arguably reinforces her genealogical position as a child of the 1968 generation. Dückers’s fictional approaches to the past are complemented by a variety of theoretical and journalistic essays. In the introduction to the anthology stadt land krieg: Autoren der Gegenwart erzählen von der deutschen Vergangenheit (2004, City, Country, War: Contemporary Authors Narrate the German Past), Tanja Dückers and Verena Carl define themselves as a Enkelgeneration, carefully distinguishing their approach from that of the previous postwar generation. In this way, Dückers sees the increasing genealogical distance to the Nazi past as an advantage which equips her with a more unbiased perspective: “To the young people personal experience is missing, to the old historical distance. Perhaps one evaluates parents differently than grandparents.”14 Yet she acknowledges that her generation inherited from their parents an important counter-culture mindset and precious advantages such as women’s rights. Distancing herself from current “68-bashing,” Dückers insists, “the students of 1968 made an important contribution to the Germans’ reflection of their past since they posed

13 14

See also Dückers’s assessment of Germany in the 1950s on the television discussion, Die 50er Jahre – Comeback eines Jahrzehnts, moderator Peter Panzer, ZDF, December 5, 2005. “Den Jüngeren fehlt die direkte Erfahrung, den Älteren die historische Distanz. Über Eltern urteilt man vielleicht anders als über Großeltern.” Tanja Dückers, “Das Flüchtige und das Doppelbödige: Uwe-Michael Gutzschhahn im Gespräch mit Tanja Dückers,” Neue deutsche Literatur: Zeitschrift für deutschsprachige Literatur 51.548 (März/April 2003): 54-62.

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questions and challenged the war generation, and made them speak.”15 Lacking direct memories of the Nazi past, Dückers claims that her work is a response to both the memories of Hitler’s contemporaries and their children’s reaction to it, and also considers both private and public sources of information. Thus for Dückers, it is precisely the historical distance that spurs her creative process. Most recently, Dückers published Morgen nach Utopia (2007, Tomorrow After Utopia), a collection of non-fiction, journalistic essays inspired by the author’s research for her literary work (in particular Himmelskörper and stadt land krieg). These essays, focusing on the aftermath of the war, young authors in contemporary Germany, and travel impressions from Eastern Europe, the US, Japan, and South Korea, further elucidate what emerges from Dückers’s short stories, “grandmother stories,” and novels: that, in Dückers’s case, pop in the sense of a concern with a surface and triviality is intrinsically linked to politics and that thus Dückers’s earlier work Spielzone and Café Brazil cannot be separated from her political and historical concerns expressed in her current work. The Nazi Past in Three Generations Told from the perspective of a granddaughter, Himmelskörper takes place in the 1990s and portrays three generations of women and their ways of remembering, absorbing, and coping with the Nazi past. In her early thirties, Freia is a woman of the author’s generation16 who concludes the doctoral research for her book project Clouds for the Twenty-First Century. Freia seeks to reconstruct and represent her mother’s and grandmother’s past just as she too, perpetuates the family lineage by giving birth to a daughter. Yet Freia’s world is not that of an isolated female realm, and the novel swiftly obliterates stereotypical gender identities. Freia’s twin brother, Paul, functions as Freia’s mirror and her alter ego; his effeminate nature, homosexuality, and artistic ambitions stand in contrast to Freia’s tomboyish appearance (she cuts her braids and shaves her head) and scientific talents. Born into a middle-class family living in a wealthy West Berlin suburb, Freia and Paul come of age in the 1980s and 90s, experiment with their sexual identification, and enjoy unrestricted travel after German reunifica15

16

“Die 68-er haben einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Vergangenheitsreflexion der Deutschen geleistet, indem sie die Kriegsgeneration befragten, herausforderten und zum Reden brachten.” Tanja Dückers, “Der Schrecken nimmt nicht ab, er wächst” (2002), Morgen nach Utopia, 102. Like her protagonist, Dückers confesses her fascination with meteorology.

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tion. From the vantage point of these experiences, they come to reexamine the Nazi past, familiar since childhood from both their grandparents’ wartime stories and their Holocaust education in school. As it turns out, even Freia’s meteorological discoveries are linked to her familial history: the cloud atlas she seeks to compile resembles her search for a more complete picture of the family’s past, and correspondingly, Freia keeps the photographs of family members inserted in her working manuscript of cloud types. Compared to their postmodern children, Freia’s and Paul’s parents seem rather traditional. Yet this is only party true. Their father Peter Sandmann, who is unwilling to talk about his experience of the war years, shrouds himself in secrecy—most likely to hide his frequent affairs from his wife, Renate. Yet with his wit and fantastic stories he is a more favorable and available role model to the children than their reticent mother. In contrast to their charismatic but untruthful father, Renate (born 1940 in Gotenhafen) is depressed, withdrawn, and utterly obsessed with the Nazi past. With her acquired knowledge and unfailing political correctness, Renate seeks to remedy her parents’ biased viewpoints, in particular their beliefs on the sinking of the Gustloff. But she is repeatedly rejected, even defeated at the novel’s end. In her desperate but ineffective rebellion that seems representative of the 1968 movement, Renate accepts German guilt, in particular her own acts of omission, yet fails to convince her parents and becomes increasingly isolated. Since the conflict with her parents cannot be solved or even adequately communicated, Renate resolves to adopt her parents’ guilt, in their place, and begins to turn it against herself. Disillusioned by convoluted feelings of guilt (that her parents never experienced) intermingled with martyrdom, and tormented by her husband’s infidelity, she commits suicide at the novel’s end. Renate’s parents, Maximilian and Johanna (born 1918 in Königsberg), stubbornly refuse to believe any outside information that contradicts their own experience of Nazi Germany and the war. Both dwell on their stories of war and flight, staging themselves as victims in a catastrophe that seems unconnected to Hitler’s war objectives. While Maximilian points to his war injury that resulted in an amputated leg and an artificial limb, Johanna elaborates on the family’s heroic flight on the minesweeper Theodor. Forever trapped in denial, both refuse to see that they were privileged in the Nazi era, and that their economic rise in Gotenhafen (Gdynia) came at the cost of the Poles’ expulsion. Even in postwar Germany, they continue to idealize their youth in the Nazi years and cling to Hitler’s concept of the enemy as embodied in Russians and Jews. Though Maximilian and Johanna are unreliable and inadequate witnesses, Freia realizes when her grandmother is dying that she has one last

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chance to get a testimony of the Nazi past from one of its eyewitnesses. Trying to preserve her grandmother’s stories, Freia eagerly engages in an intergenerational dialog, and learns even more about her grandparents’ past when searching their belongings after their death. Yet what Freia discovers are disappointing revelations. As it turns out, both of her grandparents were much more involved in Nazi politics than they had let on, having been long-time, enthusiastic members of the Nazi party, and retained their nationalistic beliefs after the war. In her attempts of reconstructing the past, Freia cannot help but notice her mother’s mounting guilt that surfaces in a silence that obscures rather than illuminates her research. But rather than give up or accept her mother’s limits, Freia digs deeper into her mother’s, her brother’s, and her own childhood. At the end of the novel, she and Paul decide to articulate this family history even after their mother has passed on, despite their own, their parents’, and grandparents’ illusions and willful suppression of the past. Private and Public Remembrance As Freia reexamines her recollection of the past, she realizes that, more often than not, her childhood memories disappoint the grown woman’s quest for knowledge. For instance, in her lavish childhood imagination Berlin’s Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain) was an ominous peak surrounded by evil ghosts, but to the adult it is merely a hill built from WW II rubble (69).17 In a similar vein, the lake behind the family’s house, which to the child’s mind was frequented by fairies, turns into a small puddle, and a once mysterious forest becomes a plain tract of pines (276). With time and hindsight, Freia’s estimation of her parents and grandparents is diminished as well, as their miraculous tales metamorphose into mundane accounts. Her father, Peter, shrinks from a vivacious hero who paints monsters and visit with fairies to an egocentric, weak man unable to quit smoking, whose only secrets are his extramarital love affairs. Her grandfather Maximilian does not fare much better. He is transformed from a shrewd warrior who lost his leg during a heroic dragon fight to an immobile, cancerridden, lonely old man. Yet, Freia’s loss of innocence is a much-needed step into adulthood in the sense that her childhood legends and fairytales veiled painful truths. Only as an adult can Freia recognize her grandfather’s continuing anti17

Page numbers refer to the following edition: Tanja Dückers, Himmelskörper. Roman, Berlin: Aufbau, 2003.

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Semitic tendencies that surface when Maximilian aggrandized to the children the hierarchical leadership of a beehive in which the queen bee keeps out foreign bees, the “Jews within a beehive.”18 Likewise, it is decades later when Freia understands that her grandmother’s favorite activity— braiding her granddaughter’s blond hair while dreaming about the “happiest time in my life”19—hints at the fact that Johanna continued to romanticize Nazi ideals, possibly never abandoning them. These insights are only available after Freia’s careful, belated reexamination of the stories her grandparents used to recount at family get-togethers. And such reassessment is prompted by a troubling discovery: After her grandparents’ death, when Freia and her mother disperse their household and sift through copious keepsakes,20 Freia finds postcards of the Führer, a photograph of the infamous Luftwaffe pilot Hanna Reitsch, a letter congratulating Hermann Göring, Hitler’s Mein Kampf,21 and other Nazi paraphernalia among their possessions. She further learns that both grandparents had been long-time party members, even though during their lifetime they only owned up that they had moderate relations with the Nazi party. The information proves that Johanna and Maximilian were faithful Nazis and continued to idolize Hitler after 1945, yet it fails to provide reasons or explanations for their thinking and their actions and thus leaves Freia’s quest for understanding unfulfilled. Her mother Renate, conversely, benefits from Freia’s belated reevaluation. As a child Freia was absorbed in admiration for her father, resenting her mother as being muted, dreary, and dull. But while her grandparents’ and father’s heroic stories diminish when reconsidered by Freia as an adult, she comes to respect her mother’s tenacity, complexity, and sensitivity. As Renate’s standing with her daughter grows, Freia more seriously reconsiders the difficulties of her mother growing up dominated by narcissistic parents and destined to a life in the shadow of her self-centered husband. Her mother’s response is one of escape: as a teenager, she involves herself in a forbidden love affair (with a boy of the same age and appearance as the one who perished on the Gustloff) and as an adult, she remains in her unhappy marriage but becomes reclusive and secretive, 18 19 20 21

“Juden im Bienenvolk,” 187. “Glücklichste Zeit in meinem Leben,” 27, 62. As mentioned, Dückers uses the motif of the grandparents’ household dissolution in short stories, namely “Maremagnum” in Café Brazil (155), “Die Badekappe,” and “Das Schloß von Bíla Hora” (2). In Nazi Germany, every married couple received a complimentary copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but after the war it was ruled illegal to republish or sell Hitler’s work in Germany, along with the retail of other Nazi paraphernalia.

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withholding her sentiments from her husband and children alike. Renate’s feelings of guilt further alienate her from parents, husband, and children. Her suicide, then, is the ultimate act of escape from a world where others ruled—first her parents, then her husband, and finally the children. In a male-dominated postwar German society, it seems, there is no place for Renate, but even her martyrdom does not achieve anything except communicate her abiding unhappiness. After her mother’s death, Freia begins to understand the need to change established family traditions. Acknowledging the darker aspects in her grandparents’ past, Freia does not withdraw into reserve and exhaust her energies in pointless rebellion as her mother did, but integrates childhood fantasies, family-legends, information, and analysis. As Freia learns, reality is a world full of injustice and prejudice, and she must face and engage herself in this reality. Despite the discrepancies between the generations, Freia also finds unexpected, sometimes unwanted continuities. Seeing her face mirrored in a rain-soaked train window at the very beginning of the novel, she recognizes that she inherited from her father his brown eyes and bushy eyebrows. Yet Freia fails to see that she likewise inherited her father’s egocentricity and hubris, and ironically repeats her father’s shortcomings just as she is pondering about their similarities: when she unexpectedly spots her mother at the same train station, Freia realizes that she (like her father) managed to overlook her mother once again, failing to keep abreast of her whereabouts. Observing her from the train rather than interacting directly with her, Freia comes away with a feeling of estrangement for both did not communicate and coordinate their travel plans. This incident at the beginning foreshadows Freia and her father’s later apathy that contributes to Renate’s tragic suicide. Freia also comes to understand that her very name denotes a legacy of the past. While she initially rejected her actual name “Eva-Maria” because of its overly innate female qualities and its reference to Hitler’s lover Eva Braun, she later comes to mistrust her nickname “Freia” as well, learning that her twin brother Paul took it from their grandmother’s Nordic Dictionary of Myth. Either way, it seems, Freia cannot escape her connection to Germany’s Nazi past, a connection that she accepts at the end of the novel by consciously (and biologically) continuing the family’s lineage. Rather than a mere link to the past, then, Freia’s nickname symbolizes multiple layers of meaning: not only does it pay tribute to the Nordic goddess of fertility, but also to Asteroid Number 76 spinning somewhere in the universe (mirroring Freia’s scientific interests), and it contains the German word frei, indicating her unencumbered approach to the past.

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In the same way that Freia reconsiders her parents’ and grandparents’ stories of National Socialism and World War II, she also reevaluates other sources of information influencing her as a child. Like most children of her generation in postwar Germany, Freia learned about the Nazi past from both parents and grandparents and from school, two often contradictory sources. In the family, Freia and her brother Paul heard obscure stories about dangerous Russian men, the flight from Königsberg, and the infamous sinking of the Gustloff, stories that spur wild fantasies in the children who come to imagine Russia as a fairytale country called Rosenland (84, Land of roses) and World War II bombings as the popping sound when breaking the foil of a Nutella jar (88). What Freia and her brother learn in school about the Holocaust cannot be united with or even related to the incomplete and contradictory narratives by parents and grandparents they hear at home: The images that we finally came to see after grandfather’s strange monologue about “Russia,” were shown in the dark cavern called elementary school. They were inconceivable, they seemed to come from another world. Corpses, emaciated and naked, in piles on carts, stacked in pits. Burning houses, cities. Airplanes falling in flames from the skies. Black and white movies. Trembling people, troop maneuvers. Landscapes, empty and vast. Carpet bombings. Explosions. Science fiction. Gas chambers. Gas—like in our kitchen, when Paul and I heated milk on the stove for hot chocolate? There was no place anymore that didn’t remind us of these films. The parental home had become infinitely large 22 …

As the children absorb this information and attempt to translate it into something familiar (like comparing firestorms with the opening of a Nutella jar, or equating the gas used for extermination with the kitchen’s gas stove which heats their cocoa), the ghastly words and images prove to have a hold over life at home that makes the parental quarters seem eerie. In the Freudian sense (it is not by coincidence that Freia’s last name, Sandmann, invokes the Romantic uncanniness of E.T.A. Hoffmann).23 Objects of daily life, such as a nougat-jar, a gas stove, or the parental 22

23

“Die Bilder, die wir nach Großvaters seltsamem Monolog über “Rußland” in dem dunklen Gewölbe zu sehen bekamen, das sich Grundschule nannte, waren unfaßbar, sie schienen aus einer anderen Welt zu stammen. Leichen, ausgemergelt und nackt, in Bergen auf Karren getürmt, in Gruben übereinandergeschichtet. Brennende Häuser, Städte. Flugzeuge, die in Flammen vom Himmel fallen. Knisternde Schwarzweißfilme. Zitternde Menschen, Truppenmanöver. Landschaften, leer und weit. Bombenhagel. Explosionen. Sciencefiction. Gaskammern. Gas – wie in der Küche, wenn Paul und ich uns Milch für einen Kakao aufsetzten? Es gab keinen Ort mehr, der nicht an diese Filme erinnerte. Unendlich groß gewordenes elterliches Haus...,” 92. I owe this reference and insight to Scott Denham.

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house, take on a frightening, unfamiliar dimension, making the homey home a strange place. As the Holocaust images presented in school are dreadful and distressing, they challenge rather than complement what the twins hear at home. The novel’s adults (parents, teachers, grandparents) seem able to keep private and public strictly separate, but the children cannot draw such dividing line. As a child, Freia instinctively senses a connection between the disjointed pieces of information presented in the family and in school, but only as an adult can she consciously work at incorporating the various sources into one (her own) framework. While the Sandmann’s family conversations concentrate on episodes of the war and flight, casting Germans as victims of Russian soldiers, in school the instruction focuses on the Holocaust, bearing little connection to the tales of German suffering and Russian occupation. In her journalistic work, Dückers repeatedly bemoaned the incommensurability between the blunt coverage of the Holocaust in school and the media, and its simultaneous silencing at home, acknowledging that her protracted school education on the Holocaust consisted merely of graphic documentaries, abstract diagrams, facts, numbers, and dates.24 This type of instruction, according to Dückers, overwhelmed children and insinuated no connections to family, home, and country. At the same time, Dückers points out that family stories of German suffering during the war remain unacknowledged at school. For young people it is not always easy to find one’s bearings between what has been heard too often and silenced too long, between the over-emotional, very subjective and disjointed memories of relatives on the one hand and the abstract, diagram-like, and distant “lessons” (Lutz Niethammer) on the Third Reich on the other hand.25

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Note that with weiter leben, Ruth Klüger precisely tries to counteract this type of factual information: “I don’t want to count up for you again how many [people were killed] because I know you don’t like it and just switch off when you hear the unwelcome numbers in context.” [“Ich will euch jetzt nicht noch einmal vorrechnen, wieviele [Ermordete] es waren, denn ich weiß, ihr mögt das nicht und schaltet ab, wenn ihr die unwillkommenen Ziffern im Zusammenhang hört.”] Ruth Klüger, weiter leben: Eine Jugend, Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992, 139-40. Translation is my own. “Es ist für die Jüngeren nicht immer einfach, sich zwischen gefühlsüberladenen, sehr subjektiven bruchstückhaften Erinnerungen von Verwandten und auf der anderen Seite abstrakten und in diagrammhafte Ferne gerückten ‘Lektionen’ (Lutz Niethammer) über das Dritte Reich einen Weg zwischen zu oft Gehörtem und zu lang Verschwiegenem zu bahnen.” Tanja Dückers, “Der 8. Mai 1945 und die jüngere Generation,” Morgen nach Utopia, 90-91.

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To Dückers, the well-meant but insufficient Holocaust education may be cause for the political indifference and apathy among some young Germans today. Other scholars have expressed similar concerns from different national contexts. Recalling his schooling in the Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s, Dutch museum director and literary scholar Ernst van Alphen (born 1958) maintains that the Holocaust was taught at length but the lesson failed to instruct the students, and rather, produced boredom. As Holocaust narratives were presented to elicit a particular response and embedded in the context of victorious World War II narratives, van Alphen intuitively refused to accept this construction of national and masculine identity: “Whereas the Holocaust was explained to me as being part of a more or less consistent, reconstructable history, to me it seemed like an intrusion of another world, one that did not relate to the war story of heroic masculinity.”26 School education focused on comprehensible, explicable lessons, while to van Alphen, the Holocaust precisely contradicts an encompassing framework in which collective and personal experiences could be placed, threatening a coherent, triumphant narrative of World War II. While in Dückers’s novel, the stories Freia hears at home center on victimhood, not heroic victory, Freia senses a similar mismatch between what is taught and what she feels. Freia’s Trips to Poland Like the narrators in Patterns of Childhood and Pavel’s Letters, Freia travels to Poland in an attempt to learn more about her family’s past. As a native of West Berlin, the opportunity of unrestricted travel to Eastern Europe comes as a recent privilege to Freia and her generation who witnessed the end of the Cold War in their formative years. While her boyfriend Wieland accompanies Freia on her first trip to Warsaw, she embarks on a second trip to Gdynia (Gotenhafen) together with her mother and her unborn child. At both destinations, Freia seeks to retrieve both private and institutionalized memory by speaking with residents and visiting Polish monuments and memorials. Yet in both cases, the unreliable, sparse information cannot bridge the spatial and temporal distance to the past, and Freia’s hopes of finding out more about the Holocaust in general and her family’s

26

Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997, 3.

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past in particular are disappointed in a process comparable to the narrator’s frustration in Pavel’s Letters. After hearing news that her mother’s Polish-German cousin and Freia’s favorite uncle, Kazimierz, committed suicide, Freia travels to Warsaw together with her boyfriend Wieland to examine the motives of his death. Yet the trip discloses little about Kazimierz. Freia cannot solve the mystery of his death by wandering through Warsaw and speaking with former friends and acquaintances. Apparently, Kazimierz, whose Polish heritage stands in contrast to Renate’s German guilt, had a history of depression and alcoholism, struggling with the ambiguous legacy of both victims and perpetrators. It is not until the very end of her trip, when Freia chews on one of her uncle’s favorite licorice candies, that the salty taste in her mouth suddenly unlocks her uncle’s thoughts and feelings, prompting her tears but also allowing her to remember details of his life: I felt the candy slowly dissolve in my mouth, the salt burned at my palate, like it must have burned at Uncle Kazimierz’ palate hundred, no thousand times … for a moment, I buried my face in my hands, so that the world around me became dark, and suddenly, for seconds, I understood. … (My uncle) loved the opaque, his favorite mineral was onyx, his favorite tree the thick fir tree, all of that sud27 denly came to my mind.

This Proustian moment, occurring by chance, grants her better access to the past than the entire—and intentional—trip to Warsaw.28 Yet even the unexpected revelation only confirms the obscurity: Kazimierz favorite candy, mineral, and tree (licorice, onyx, fir tree) all invoke darkness rather than illumination.29 27

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“Ich spürte, wie sich der Bonbon langsam in meinem Mund auflöste, das Salz brannte an meinem Gaumen, wie es an Onkel Kazimierz’ Gaumen hundert-, nein, tausendmal gebrannt haben muß. … einen Moment schlug ich die Hände vors Gesicht, so dass die Welt um mich herum dunkel wurde, und –plötzlich – für Sekunden – verstand ich etwas. … (Mein Onkel) liebte das Opake, sein Lieblingsstein war der Onyx, sein Lieblingsbaum die dichte Hemlocktanne, das fiel mir jetzt plötzlich alles ein…,” 174-75. Compare Dückers’s description with Marcel Proust’s famous words in Remembrance of Things Past, observing how the taste of “petites madeleines” soaked in hot tea triggers memories of his deceased aunt and her home: “No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. … the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.” Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume One (1913), trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, New York: Random House, 1934, 34-36. Jens Stüben’s detailed analysis examines the novel’s motifs and symbols connected with Kazimierz. According to Stüben, Kazimierz’s preference for obscurity and secrets is expressed in the text by his penchant for black onyx and dark fir-trees, and by the opaque cloudiness that covers Warsaw’s sky. See Jens Stüben, “Erfragte Erinnerung – entsorgte Familiengeschichte: Tanja Dückers’ ‘Wilhelm-Gustloff’-Roman ‘Himmelsköper,’” Wende

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The gap of information with respect to Freia’s family history corresponds to a public gap Freia encounters when visiting the inner city and the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial. To Freia, Warsaw rises like a fata morgana from wasteland like Las Vegas from the desert (171), and its old town is so perfectly reconstructed that it does not carry any links to the past anymore that would hint at the devastating destruction by the Germans.30 Without visible ruins and scars, even the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial remains devoid of meaning. Looking at Japanese tourists shooting photographs, her attractive boyfriend, a mother with her twins, and modern Polish cars at the Memorial, Freia is unable to imagine the history of the place and its victims, no matter how hard she tries: “That I could not feel anything appalled me. I could not establish a connection with everything that happened in this town. The destruction had been too perfect.”31 These words call to mind Maron’s narrator and her family’s frustration with the absence of Jewish culture in contemporary Poland. Even though Freia (unlike Maron’s narrator) stands at a site designed specifically to commemorate Holocaust victims, the erasure of Jewish life has been so devastating that it severed not only physical but also sensual reminders of the past. With no impressions and sentiments available, Freia’s (and Dückers’s) project of a sensual historiography must fail here. Reflecting on her sense of detachment, Freia expresses the general conundrum of remembering a culture that has been eradicated. I was standing at a memorial, not at a real place. The memorial, I thought, while Wieland smashed a fly at the commemorative plaque and immediately turned around, embarrassed, the memorial replaces the real site, as an explanation, an interpretation, and a signifier. In fact, the memorial is certain proof that there is no site here anymore. A site cannot exist and be interpreted at the same place. Per32 haps the relation is proportional.

30 31 32

des Erinnerns? Geschichtskonstruktionen in der deutschen Literatur nach 1989, eds. Barbara Beßlich, Katharina Grätz, Olaf Hildebrand, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2006, 169-89, 183-84. In her essay “Think before you drink: in Warschau,” Dückers details similar impressions of a trip to Warsaw, again comparing the reconstructed town to Las Vegas. Tanja Dückers, “Think before you drink: in Warschau,” Morgen nach Utopia, 54-56. “Daß ich nichts empfinden konnte, entsetzte mich. Ich konnte keine Verbindung aufnehmen mit alldem, was in dieser Stadt geschehen war. Die Zerstörung war zu perfekt gewesen.” 172-73. “Ich stand an einem Denkmal, nicht an einem wirklichen Platz. Das Denkmal, ging mir durch den Kopf, während Wieland an der Gedenktafel eine Fliege erschlug und sich gleich darauf erschrocken umblickte, das Denkmal ersetzt als Erklärung, als Hinweis, als Zeichen den wirklichen Ort. Ein Denkmal ist geradezu der sichere Beweis dafür, daß hier kein Ort mehr ist. Ein Ort kann nicht gleichzeitig existieren und an derselben Stelle kommentiert werden. Vielleicht ist dieses Verhältnis proportional.” 170.

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To Freia, the very fact that she visits a memorial serves as proof that the authentic site has been displaced. The effects of such displacement become evident when Wieland feels absurdly guilty about smashing a fly on a commemorative plaque meant for tourists. Wieland is far more concerned about his entomological murder than the killing of human victims that took place at the same site, thus displacing (and misplacing) his discomfort. Even though or perhaps because Poland’s official sites of remembrance, like the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, insinuate a specific interpretation, both Freia and Wieland have trouble absorbing and embracing such meaning. Freia’s reflections on the memorial as a displacement echo Ruth Klüger’s sentiments on former concentration camp sites. Questioning the impulse to maintain the camps as museums, Klüger invents the word “timescape” to demarcate a certain place in time: But the concentration camp as a memorial site? Landscape, seascape—there should be a word like timescape to indicate the nature of a place in time, that is, at 33 a certain time, neither before nor after.

According to Klüger, a place inherently reflects its time and cannot be infinitely maintained to produce the same emotions. Since one cannot preserve what happened at a particular place, the attempt to do so essentially fakes authenticity. It is for this reason that Klüger rejects in both weiter leben and her essay “Lanzmanns Shoah in New York” to return to the places of past horrors. In a similar vein, literary scholar James E. Young suggests that the very motivation to establish a Holocaust memorial springs from a desire to forget. Functioning as a public reminder, the memorial relieves an individual from the obligation of remembering by averting rather than encouraging personal imagination.34 Klüger’s and Young’s arguments help to explain Freia’s and Wieland’s confusion and indifference. Throughout her visit of Warsaw’s old town and the former ghetto, Freia feels rather unmoved, and her search remains unfulfilled: “My research had resulted in nothing, unearthed nothing that I did not know before.”35 Indeed, the trip serves to increase Freia’s mistrust 33

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“Das KZ als Ort? Ortschaft, Landschaft, landscape, seascape – das Wort Zeitschaft sollte es geben, um zu vermitteln, was ein Ort in der Zeit ist, zu einer gewissen Zeit, weder vorher noch nachher.” Ruth Klüger, weiter leben, 78. Translation from Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, New York: The Feminist P at the City College of New York, 2001, 67. See James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, New Haven: Yale UP, 1993, 5. “Meine Recherche hatte nichts ergeben, nichts zutage gefördert, was ich nicht schon vorher gewußt hatte,” 173.

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of institutionalized Holocaust memory and its interpretation put forth in school, the media, monuments, and memorials. And rather than bonding the two lovers, the trip reveals their deep-seated disparity, and estranges Freia from Wieland. Uninterested in German history in general and his family’s past in particular, Wieland responds to Freia’s research with increasing disinterest, even hostility. Unlike Freia, Wieland has no ties to his conservative parents (who decorate their living room with a map of Germany and its borders in 1914), but revolts against hated family traditions by avoiding them altogether and traveling the world. Yet while celebrating his independence and status as a single, Wieland turns into an aloof loner, unable to keep any commitments. Discomfort and disparity also overshadow Freia’s and her mother’s trip to Gdynia (Gotenhafen) in Poland. The mere thought of linking Gdynia in the late 1990s to Gotenhafen in January 1945 seems ridiculous as soon as Freia and Renate spot the beach promenade filled with tourist stores, Polish teenagers sporting Western fashions, and the pompously contrived model of a Viking ship. To Freia and Renate, the blazing summer heat and the crowds of tourists preclude any imagination of the cold spell back in January 1945 and the suffering of refugees. What is worse, alienation prevails not only between Gotenhafen and Gdynia but also between mother and daughter. Although their joint trip could potentially offer a chance for deeper communication and closeness, their relationship remains characterized by withdrawal and silence. If Freia hoped that her mother would remember former events when visiting her old home, Renate indeed recalls the sequence of events that unfolded back in 1945 in Gotenhafen but prefers to keep them to herself rather than communicate with her daughter. Likewise, Renate refuses to disclose information about Kazimierz’s suicide, even though her daughter anxiously awaits an answer (301). Conversely, Freia decides to keep quiet about her father’s infidelities, making herself an accomplice of her father, not her mother. Though Freia realizes her shortcomings, she is unable to change them against her better judgment. The chapter concludes with silence; looking at her daughter’s taciturn face, Renate senses that she is hiding something from her. The incident seems to seal Renate’s lifelong isolation and no doubt contributes to her subsequent suicide. The Nazi Past in Family Conversations Over the course of the novel, Freia understands that she must reexamine not only her childhood memories and the institutionalized Holocaust memory presented in school and memorials, but also the conversations

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and often contradictory stories in which her family remembers, explicates, and narrates the Nazi past. In some cases, it is quite obvious that her grandparents’ memories are sugarcoated and thus untrustworthy. In their stories, Johanna and Maximilian completely gloss over the persecution of Jews and focus instead on German suffering during the war and flight. By offering selective memories that cover up what happened, Johanna and Maximilian reinterpret and rewrite the past. For example, with her “Banana Story,” a tale of how she failed to feed a hungry Jewish boy, Johanna manages to turn an act of omission into its opposite. Freia contemplates: The absurd thing about the banana-story was that Jo described her pondering, her wish to help, her insecurity and fear, each time so dramatically that in the end one could get the impression that Jo had liberated a concentration camp. Some36 how she succeeded to stylize the omission of an action into a heroic act.

Johanna’s clever admission of anxiety and indecision serves to reinforce her basic goodness and moral consciousness, so that in turn her misdeed becomes understandable and acceptable. With Johanna ennobling her motives and actions, and her listeners acknowledging and accepting the misrepresentation, the family gains harmony, even unity. And this is the only time that Johanna mentions Jews. In other cases, Freia is unable to verify the authenticity of either her grandparents’ or her parents’ memories as she has no means of evaluating the competing versions and can only reiterate conflicting stories. While Johanna and Maximilian turn their escape on the refugee ship Theodor into a harrowing tale of suspense, heroism, and triumph, for Renate the same incident is reason for shame and guilt. Unlike her parents who remember the cruelty of Russian soldiers,37 Renate considers a more comprehensive viewpoint, shaped by her education after the war, and bears in mind the war crimes committed by the Germans. [Johanna] “It was almost the end of January and terribly cold. The streets were dangerously slippery, everything was frozen, and it was also snowing! It wasn’t really possible anymore to travel over land. The Russians…”

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“Das Absurde an der Bananengeschichte war, daß Jo ihr Abwägen, ihren Wunsch zu helfen, ihre Unsicherheit und Angst jedesmal derart dramatisch schilderte, daß man am Ende fast den Eindruck bekommen konnte, Jo hätte ein KZ befreit. Irgendwie gelang es ihr, das Unterlassen einer Handlung zur Heldentat zu stilisieren.” 105. In conversations, the Sandmann family uses the loaded term die Russen (the Russians) rather than Soviets or Red Army, which not only continues Hitler’s concept of the enemy but also, as Scott Denham suggests, essentializes ethnic difference

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At this point my mother intercepted with the precision of a Swiss clockwork: “Yes, but it could not have been a surprise that the Russians wouldn’t be nice to 38 us, after the Germans had devastated their country.”

The discrepancy between the perspectives elucidates the gulf between the generations and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of productive communication. The conversations of the Nazi past follow a predictable pattern in which family members argue over the power to interpret history. Ignoring their daughter’s objections, Johanna and Maximilian take turns complementing each other’s anecdotes in a meticulously predetermined dialogue, while expecting their grandchildren Freia and Paul to play their respective parts by feigning interest and excitement and by giving predictable answers: Now Jo began as always with the sentence: “Three times you may guess how she called her child—a girl—that was born on the ship in this particular night?” Paul answered dutifully: “Theodora.” “Exactly!” Jo stroked his arm.

39

Freia and Paul are a captive audience for Johanna and Maximilian, bringing the story out and making it relevant, but the grandchildren’s role is limited to a few words that supplement the grandparents’ monologue. On the other hand, Freia’s mother Renate typically rejects her parents’ narrative and provides an opposing point of view. Yet despite Renate possessing a wealth of knowledge, the style of her delivery hints at a lack of confidence: At this point my mother often launched into a longish speech in which she lowered her voice and spoke quickly and softly, like a nervous student at an oral examination.40

38

39

40

“[Johanna] ‘Es ging auf Ende Januar zu und war fürchterlich kalt. Die Straßen waren spiegelglatt, es hatte gefroren, und schneien tat es auch noch! Aber auf dem Landweg war ja nicht mehr viel zu machen. Der Russe…’ An diesem Punkt schaltete sich mit der Präzision eines Schweizer Uhrwerks meine Mutter ein: ‘Ja, aber daß die Russen nicht nett zu uns sein würden, nachdem die Deutschen erst einmal in ihrem Land herumgewütet hatten, war wohl keine Überraschung.’” 127. “Jetzt kam wie immer der Satz über Jos Lippen: ‘Dreimal dürft ihr raten, wie sie ihr Kind – ein Mädchen – genannt hat, das noch in dieser Nacht auf dem Schiff geboren wurde?’ Paul antwortete brav: ‘Theodora.’ ‘Genau!’ Jo tätschelte ihm den Arm.” 148. “An diesem Punkt setzte meine Mutter meist zu einer etwas längeren Rede an, wobei sie ihre Stimme senkte und schnell und leise wie eine aufgeregte Abiturientin bei einer mündlichen Prüfung sprach.” 129.

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While Johanna and Maximilian clearly falsify some events and suppress others, Renate can merely recite memorized knowledge, acting like a nervous student being examined by a figure of authority. Mirroring the square resistance of her (postwar) generation, Renate’s objections are testimony to the struggle with her parental supporters of National Socialism. Yet Renate’s revolt remains ineffective, as her arguments turn into predictable and inefficient opposition that is easily dismissed by her parents as the belligerent voice of the postwar generation. Renate’s voicelessness also reflects her status as a (rather powerless) woman in postwar society. Her husband Peter, however, does not help the cause either, as he refuses to engage in political discussion and most of the time is not even present at all. When recalling the conversations as an adult, Freia characterizes the exchange between her mother and grandparents with words and phrases such as “every time,” “as always,” “with the precision of a Swiss clock,” and “mostly.” Apparently, the dialogue has been firmly established for years if not decades, and does not allow for flexibility or a questioning of existing roles. Despite the family members’ frequent and extensive talk about the war experience, the customary discourse leads to familiar replies and reiterates the conflict between war and postwar generation, leaving little room for negotiation or construction of a different narrative. In Opa war kein Nazi: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (2002, Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi: National Socialism and Holocaust in German Family Remembrance), a study on how families recollect and reenact the past, the authors (Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall) find this type of “conversational remembering” typical for a family discourse on the Nazi past. Their findings from interviews mirror what is depicted in the novel. In both, family stories do not reveal new or different insights but merely reinstate what other family members already know.41 As the title of the study suggests, family stories also include a great deal of bending and shaping the truth. In both novel and interviews, the war generation tends to dwell on their own suffering rather than the suffering of Jewish victims. In their analysis of 182 interviews and family conversations, Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall count 1130 stories recollecting occasions of German victimhood, stories of hunger and poverty, of violence and rape, and of general suffering as refugees or

41

See Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, “Opa war kein Nazi:” Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer 2002, 19.

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victims of war.42 The authors also point to a tendency to glorify stories of the war, a fact also evident in Himmelskörper. And even when family members do not deny perpetrator or bystandership, their stories are distorted and accepted rather than scrutinized. Yet the interviews reveal that stories and perspectives on the past are by no means coherent, and often are disputed among family members, as in Himmelskörper. Arising casually, while eating or watching TV, such a ritualistic act of communication serves to define and join together the family as a unit, even if opinions differ. In this way, as the authors point out, the purpose of familial remembering is to (re)create family rituals and unity, not unlike Marianne Hirsch suggests is the case for family photography. While firmly ingrained in the family’s identity, such rituals can only be questioned posthumously, after, say, the death of a family member. This holds true for Himmelskörper: Freia only begins to question the validity of her grandparents’ stories after her grandfather’s death and her grandmother’s onset of dementia, and after she discovers Nazi paraphernalia among their possessions. As a child, Freia cannot influence the predetermined interplay of the family conversation, but as she matures in the second half of the novel, she begins to intervene and deliberately seeks memories that have not yet been incorporated into the predictable dialogue. A Granddaughter’s Artistic and Scientific Historiography When her grandmother becomes bedridden and sedated because of a broken thighbone and is rapidly deteriorating from advancing cancer, Freia recognizes that she has little time left to preserve her memories, and seeks desperately for a means of accessing her grandmother’s waning memory. Of late I had been trying to get into her memories. I wanted Jo to remember this time that had been so often the subject of conversation in our family and yet was full of gaps. I wanted her to remember. As well as possible. While she was still with us.43

42 43

See Welzer, 19, 52, 86. See also Aleida Assmann and Ute Frevert, Geschichtsvergessenheit Geschichtsversessenheit: Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999, 45. “Seit neuestem versuchte ich, in ihre Erinnerungen ‘einzusteigen.’ Ich wollte, daß Jo sich erinnerte – an diese Zeit, von der so oft in unserer Familie erzählt worden war und in der es dennoch so viele Leerstellen gab. Ich wollte, daß sie sich erinnerte. So gut wie möglich. Solange sie noch da war.” 212.

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To that end, Freia consciously changes her role in the family dialogue, changing from a receptive listener as a child who supplies only predictable answers to a jaundiced adult inquiring and examining the content of her grandmother’s memories. In order to uncover different and unfamiliar memories, she shows her grandmother old photographs, postcards, and objects, lets her smell her former perfume and listen to familiar music, and finally devises yet another memory-sparking technique. Talking to her delirious grandmother by pretending to be her deceased sister Lena, by repeating her grandmother’s words to prompt her to continue the narrative, and by claiming an untrue story to provoke her disagreement, Freia finally uncovers a decisive and previously silenced incident in her family’s history. As it turns out, her grandmother, great-aunt, and mother were able to board the minesweeper Theodor instead of the overcrowded Gustloff because of an act of betrayal, committed by her mother as a five-year-old child. Flaunting her support for the Nazis, Renate accused the mother and son, who stood in the crowded line for the Theodor of not using the Hitler salute. As a result, the boarding officer chose Johanna, her sister Lena, and Renate for the last spots on the minesweeper, despite their being at the end of the line. Whereas the grandparents celebrate their daughter’s “heroic” act, crediting her with saving the family’s life, Renate furiously seeks to repress the incident after the war, considering it her responsibility for sending an innocent family to their death. In fact, Freia’s successful recovery of her grandmother’s memories regarding the Gustloff episode comes at a high price: Freia fails to see that her mother withdraws into silence as her grandmother unveils the story, and that—consumed by guilt—she increasingly distances herself from her husband and children until her suicide. With her mother’s premature death, Freia loses the chance to preserve her version of the family’s memory, along with the opportunity to establish a more satisfying relationship with her mother. It is at this moment, however, that Freia and Paul decide to write down family history from their perspective of grandchildren. Together, the twins embark on a project they call “Himmelskörper,” that is, unlike Dückers’s novel, a text consisting of images and words, written by a male and a female author, an artist and a scientist. Rather than accepting the notion that remembering and writing is an isolated, lonely process, the joint enterprise “Himmelskörper” combines Freia’s scientific interpretation of historical facts and Paul’s abstract paintings accompanied by a digit that indicates the temperature of each picture in degrees Celsius. In an approach that calls to mind Anselm Kiefer’s Margarethe collages, Paul even seeks to incorporate Freia’s former blond braids into his landscape images. The interdisciplinary and androgynous project in some ways resembles Dückers’s work (in which

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male and female narrators frequently interchange), and expresses the author’s utopian vision of an intergenerational dialogue in various media and modes of expression. The reexamination of the family’s past comes at a time when Freia becomes a mother herself. The fact that she is pregnant with her daughter proves to Freia the absolute necessity of negotiating and transmitting history: I was now carrying a child like many other women. I would write on history. I would participate in a new war, with hide and hair, perhaps as a concerned mother, I was not the cul-de-sac of history anymore, … I was deeply involved, the brown line that connected all members of the family with each other on our family tree (drawn as a real tree with branches) would not stop with “Eva Maria Sandmann” but would continue through me and further. Suddenly, I was the 44 cross point in a thick network…

Recognizing the significance and consequence of motherhood, Freia not only records and represents her family’s history but also decides to continue it, both biologically and figuratively. Whereas her mother committed suicide, Wieland ran off, and even her brother Paul moved to Paris to break away from the “pull of the past,”45 for Freia, as a mother, escape is not an option. As she must one day explain both personal and collective history to her daughter, Freia considers the arrival of a new generation reason to reassess the previous one, thus becoming a link between past and future. I would go to school with my child through the city, the city would come back to me, strike back, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Memorial Church, the bullet holes at the houses in Friedrichshain, the unbroken grandeur of the Jewish synagogue on Oranienburg Street that still or once again had to be guarded, a shame for this town, the train station Oranienburg Street, which pulled hundreds to their deaths when flooded, the many gaps between buildings. All that would come back to me and continue, there was no escape, I had to face up to future and history, which would, through the curiosity of my child, forever unite personal and collective 46 experience.

44

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“Ich bekam jetzt ein Kind wie so viele andere Frauen. Ich würde die Geschichte fortschreiben. Ich würde mit Haut und Haaren an einem neuen Krieg, vielleicht als besorgte Mutter, beteiligt sein, ich war nicht mehr die Sackgasse der Geschichte, ... Ich hing auf einmal mittendrin, der braune Strich, der auf unserem Stammbaum (als richtiger Baum mit Ästen eingezeichnet) alle Familienmitglieder miteinander verband, würde nicht bei “Eva Maria Sandmann” aufhören, sondern durch mich hindurch und weiter gehen. Plötzlich war ich der Knotenpunkte in einem dichten Netzwerk,” 254. “Sog der Vergangenheit,” 316. “Ich würde mit meinem Kind zur Schule durch die Stadt gehen, die Stadt würde mit meinem Kind zu mir zurückkommen, zurückschlagen, die Gedächtniskirche, die Einschuß-

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The passage, which parallels and contrasts with Dückers’s short story “Schulweg” (2005), evokes moments of perpetration, victimhood, capitalism, and communism in German history. Like Dückers’s autobiographical narrator in “Schulweg,” Freia’s daughter will see Berlin’s Kaiser-WilhelmGedächtniskirche on her daily trip to school. But while the narrator in “Schulweg” is growing up in the 1980s and only encounters the remnants of the past in West Berlin, Freia’s daughter will pass by the Jewish synagogue, the train station Oranienstraße, and houses in Friedrichshain in the reunified Berlin, thus witnessing not only the scars of the war and Holocaust but also West and East Berlin landmarks, reestablished Jewish culture in the city, and neo-Nazi acts of violence. Raising a child in postwar and postwall Berlin thus gives Freia the chance and the responsibility to establish a new, post-1989 connection with her city’s past. Dückers’s text concludes with Freia’s discovery of the long-sought Cirrus Perlucidus cloud. And the text’s ending recalls the conclusion of Patterns of Childhood: Like Wolf’s narrator surrendering to an open-ended and unsettled dream and leaving “the world of solid bodies,”47 Freia spots an intangible apparition that is continuously changing and dissolving. If the meteorologist had long been searching for an opportunity to photograph this particular cloud to complete her cloud atlas, it is not by coincidence that Freia is finally able to snap a picture of the cloud on the occasion of the trip to Gdynia and at the turning point of her mother’s life. While Freia is able to catch sight of the rare and especially translucent weather appearance, she fails to notice her mother’s lasting pain, so that the moment of Freia’s discovery coincides with her ignorance. Indeed, the tension between seeing and not-seeing is a leitmotif in the text, as indicated by the title, Himmelskörper: even though clouds appear as objects when seen from far away, they are an unstable and permeable phenomenon, remaining beyond a firm grasp. While the clouds in the sky also stand in marked contrast to the life-threatening sea and the sinking of the Gustloff, the protagonist’s search for the ethereal Cirrus Perlucidus much resembles her search for an elusive past.

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löcher an den Häusern in Friedrichshain, die ungebrochene Würde der jüdischen Synagoge an der Oranienburger Straße, die, eine Schande für diese Stadt, immer noch oder schon wieder bewacht werden mußte, der U-Bahnhof Oranienburger Straße, der, mit Wasser überflutet, Hunderte in den Tod riß, die vielen Baulücken in der Stadt, all das würde zu mir zurückkommen und weitergehen, es gab kein Entrinnen, ich mußte mich stellen, der Zukunft und der Geschichte, die in der Neugierde meines Kindes, persönliches und kollektives Erleben untrennbar vermischen würde.” 254-255. “Die Welt der festen Körper,” Christa Wolf, Kindheitsmuster, Roman (1976), Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1977, 477. Translation from Christa Wolf, Patterns of Childhood, trans. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980, 407.

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Freia’s meteorology professor immediately recognizes the significance of this barely discernable cloud for a larger project he terms “historical storehouse.” The term that he invented, “historical storehouse,” according to him referred to both history and story. Using the example of Cirrus Perlucidus, he wanted to examine the precarious boundary between subjective and objective history, between fact and feeling, and invite authors, journalists, historians, political scientists, and 48 meteorologists alike.

If Freia’s professor envisions that scientific discoveries can demonstrate and substantiate the hybridity of genres and disciplines, Dückers likewise proposes that the interplay of science and the humanities can challenge established boundaries. Accordingly, Himmelskörper is a “historical storehouse” in that it comprises chronicled, remembered, and imagined narratives historical fact and fictional representation and grants documentation, memory, and imagination equal access to the past. Yet some contradictions remain. Cirrus Perlucidus is precisely not a Himmelskörper [extraterrestrial heavenly body] like a star, planet, or asteroid. Neither does the novel correspond to the twin’s project of the same name: In contrast to Freia’s and Paul’s scientific and creative work, Himmelskörper is not a text co-written by a woman and a man, and does not include authentic artifacts, documents, artwork, or scientific treatises. With such details preventing a straightforward and premature emblematic interpretation, Dückers’s reassessment of a family’s past during the Nazi era remains incomplete and ambiguous, much like Freia’s elusive cloud.

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“Der von ihm erfundene Begriff ‘Geschichtsspeicher’ bezog sich, wie er fand, sowohl auf ‘Geschichte’ wie auch auf ‘Geschichten.’ Und er wollte anhand von Cirrus Perlucidus die schwebende Grenze zwischen ‘subjektiver’ und ‘objektiver’ Geschichte, zwischen Faktum und Empfindung erörtern, Schriftsteller, Publizisten, Historiker, Politologen und Meteorologen gemeinsam einladen.” 307.

Epilogue The texts considered in this study all include female narrators who seek to uncover memories of their own, of parents, and of grandparents, while at the same time evaluating the potential and the limits of remembering. This twofold endeavor of reconstruction and reflection characterizes each text, though in the progression from war to postwar generations, narrators increasingly steer away from the question of why and how National Socialism gained power in Germany (an issue of continual central importance to Christa Wolf) but rather examine the aftermath of the Nazi era, in particular the ways in which memories are mediated, distorted, or repressed (as visible in Monika Maron and Tanja Dückers).1 In this way, memory “matters” in the double sense of the word: it is both an object and a verb in that narrators search for memory-material of a Nazi past and at the same time scrutinize means of communication, mediation, distortion, and forgetting. What is more, memory “matters” in that the female narrators in Wolf, Klüger, Honigmann, Bruhns, Maron, and Dückers all act as a hinge between generations: focusing on the emotional entanglement and the difficult bond with mothers, narrators are simultaneously investigating their own roles as mothers who pass on memories of the war to the following generation. Considering the mother-daughter relationship in particular, they examine how gender definitions shape family dynamics, a pursuit that has been received with mixed reactions. When, for instance, Klüger and Maron were criticized for their candid and often unflattering characterization of mothers, it was because they dared to question the assumption of motherly protection and love, a taboo that does not exist for fathers in this form. Approaching mothers both emotionally and analytically, the writers of this study choose to remain in the tension between affection and distance, between nostalgia and irony.2 The texts’ female narrators also reject the narrow definitions of a dualistic (German) perpetrator and (Jewish) victim discourse, and instead demarcate the ambiguous spaces in-between. In this way, they continue a 1 2

Friederike Eigler also points to this development in generational novels after 1989. See Friederike Eigler, Gedächtnis und Geschichte in Generationenromanen seit der Wende, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2005, 29. Friederike Eigler elaborates on this strategy with respect to Monika Maron’s Pavel’s Letters. See Eigler, 150-58.

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discourse that Primo Levi initiated with his provocative thesis of a “gray zone” in The Drowned and the Saved (1988). According to Levi, the postwar world tends to simplify the Holocaust by failing to acknowledge complexities and unpleasant truths, such as the inevitable hierarchy and ruthlessness among camp inmates.3 Recent scholarship expands on the concept;4 indeed one might argue that women in the Holocaust fall into a “gray zone,” as the gendered image of woman in itself does not fit with established norms of what constitutes a Holocaust victim or a German perpetrator. The authors of this study, however, draw on such cultural expectations to contradict and question male and female choices during the Nazi era. Christa Wolf, a three-year-old girl at the time when Hitler seized power and hardly responsible for the rise of the Nazis, investigates her generation’s shortcomings while also depicting the effects of war, flight, and expulsion. Ruth Klüger, having survived both Jewish persecution and Allied bombings, calls attention to male-inflected definitions of survivors and perpetrators, and challenges the notion that German and Jewish experiences are necessarily opposed. Barbara Honigmann reevaluates her ancestors’ history of assimilation in Germany, and delineates her in-between identity as a German-Jewish writer in France with both ironic distance and Romantic nostalgia. Wibke Bruhns reexamines her father’s role in the resistance but has trouble to distinguish noble from selfish motives and vows to accept ambiguity instead. For Monika Maron, it is impossible to disconnect incidents of perpetration and victimhood in the legacy of both Nazism and communism. Tanja Dückers, lastly, depicts in her project of sensual historiography grandparents’ suffering as refugees as well as their ignorance and vindictiveness as Nazis. Unsettling monolithic definitions of Germans, Jews, perpetrators, victims, men, and women, the above authors represent female postwar and postwall identities that acknowledge the ambiguity of “gray zones.” Yet it is within these “gray zones” that connections between diverse experiences and narratives can be recalled and recreated. While Nazi politics destroyed existing ties between Jews and gentiles in Germany, it is Klüger’s expressed goal to reestablish those connections, to restore bridges between her experience and that of her contemporaries, and to begin a provocative dialogue with Germans: 3 4

See Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (1988), New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989, 3669. I am drawing here on the definition and exploration of gray zones that Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth dare with the anthology Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, New York: Berghahn, 2005. See also Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

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So I listen in bored silence to speeches about the Holocaust with the usual selfenclosed phrases that don’t engage anyone’s attention, let alone imagination, and when I am with company, I let others talk. (You might not invite me back if I didn’t.) And yet that evening we had a lot in common, those Germans and I: we had a common language, a common culture, and an old war that had destroyed much of both. We were articulate and knowledgeable. But the bridges had been blown up; we spat on piers that don’t connect anything, though our houses are postwar and the equipment is state-of-the-art. But if there is no bridge between my memories and yours and theirs, if we can never say “our memories,” then what’s the good of writing any of this?5

Expanding on the concept, Klüger asserted in a personal interview that weiter leben is supposed to function as a mediator, a third entity between two people that enables a dialogue.6 Yet such dialogue is difficult and tenuous: Klüger does not entertain fantasies of a German-Jewish symbiosis which would require the Jewish minority’s assimilation. weiter leben in fact rebuts the German nostalgia for things Jewish and debunks the sentimental need behind misplaced attempts at reconciliation. In her essay “Selbstporträt als Jüdin” (Self-portrait as a Jew), Barbara Honigmann expresses a similar tension: The Germans do not even know what Jews are any more. They only know that a terrible history lies between them. And every Jew who appeared reminded them of this history, which still hurts and gets on one’s nerves. It is this oversensitivity that seemed intolerable to me, because both groups—the Jews and the Germans—feel pretty bad in this kind of encounter. They make impossible demands on one another, but at the same time they cannot leave each other in peace.7 5

6

7

“Und ich schweige und darf nur zuhören und nicht mitreden. Menschen derselben Generation waren wir, gutwillig und der Sprache mächtig, doch der alte Krieg hat die Brücken zwischen uns gesprengt, und wir hocken auf den Pfeilern, die in unsere neuen Häuser ragen. Doch wenn es gar keine Brücke gibt von meinen Erinnerungen zu euren, warum schreib ich das hier überhaupt?” Ruth Klüger, weiter leben: eine Jugend, Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992, 110. Translation from Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, New York: The Feminist P at the which proves its significance. Ruth Klüger, personal interview, 12 March 1998. Klüger’s words also call to mind Irene Kacandes’s work on “Talk Fiction,” in particular her concept of “transhistoricaltranscultural witnessing,” which assigns to the reader the task of co-witnessing trauma, helping to “make a bridge between literature and history.” Irene Kacandes, Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2001, 136. “Die Deutschen wissen gar nicht mehr, was Juden sind, wissen nur, daß da eine schreckliche Geschichte zwischen ihnen liegt, und jeder Jude, der auftauchte, erinnerte sie an diese Geschichte, die immer noch weh tut und auf die Nerven geht. Es ist diese Überempfindlichkeit, die mir unerträglich schien, denn beide, die Juden und die Deutschen, fühlen sich in dieser Begegnung ziemlich schlecht, sie stellen unmögliche Forderungen an den anderen, können sich aber auch gegenseitig nicht in Ruhe lassen.” Barbara Honigmann, “Selbstporträt als Jüdin” (1999), Damals, dann und danach, München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 2002, 15-16. Translation is my own.

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While Honigmann chose to escape this conflict by moving to France, both her and Klüger’s work can be thought of as an attempt at connecting divergent histories. In a similar vein, Memory Matters is meant to bridge the literary representations of war and postwar generations, West and East Germans, Jews and non-Jews. Specifically, the volume seeks to contribute to Germany’s changing discourses on the Nazi past in the 1990s and 2000s, in which post-Holocaust generations illuminate, analyze, and question the transmitted Holocaust experience and Germans are beginning to acknowledge their roles as both perpetrators of Nazi crimes and as victims of the war. Memory Matters has been inspired by personal history. In my family, complex stories of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, of parents, various grandparents, aunts and uncles converge, drawing attention to blurry gray zones rather than clearly defined categories. While both victimhood and collaboration are deeply embedded in my family history, little common ground exists that allows for the articulation of such a mixed legacy. In fact, the bipartite discourses on victims and perpetrators have split my family in half. My great-grandfather, Dr. Karl Meyer (born on March 27, 1871), stems from a Jewish family that had lived in Lippe/Westfalia since the Thirty Years War. Meyer was an assimilated Jew and a politician in the German People’s Party (DVP); like some of his six siblings, he converted to Protestantism in his early twenties. Meyer married a Christian woman, Wilhelmine Opdenhoff, in 1908, and kept information about his Jewish family under wraps (the fate of his parents Abraham Meyer and Lina Hirschfeld and his siblings is largely unknown8). In his career as a successful and influential politician, he was rewarded with the Iron Cross First Class for his service as a jurist at the front in World War I before becoming Senior Legal Secretary [Ministerialrat] and Privy Councilor of War [Geheimer Kriegsrat] in the Weimar Republic’s national government. When Hitler came to power, Meyer remained protected from early discrimination because of his “Aryan” wife and his service in World War I. However, when in 1935 Hitler passed the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” it became clear that he could not 8

All that is known is that Gustav (1862-1900), his oldest brother, had three children: Ernst (1893-1947) who immigrated to the United States, Fritz (1895-?) who was killed along with his mother in the camps, and Gertrud (1899-1993) who immigrated to England. His older brother Hemann (1864-1936) died in Bad Wildungen under unknown circumstances. His sister Clara (1865-1942) was deported in August 1942 to Theresienstadt and later that year to Treblinka. His other sister Selma (Sidy, 1868-1961) had Argentinean citizenship because of her Argentinean husband. Lev (?-?) lived in Germany, and Ella (?-?) moved to Switzerland.

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remain in such a prominent governmental position. Upon recommendation of his colleagues, Meyer resigned from his post in 1936, just before he was officially dismissed. The thank-you note for his lifelong service signed by Adolf Hitler remains a despicable yet highly valuable memento in my family’s possession. When my great-grandfather died of heart failure on March 5, 1936, at the age of sixty-four, the family wondered whether his death was influenced by his political demise and considers him lucky to have escaped the ensuing persecution. According to the Nuremberg Laws, my grandmother Anneliese Meyer and her younger sister Dietgard were considered Mischlinge (“half breed”) of the first degree and as a result suffered arbitrary and sometimes bizarre restrictions. Dietgard recalls as a “non-Aryan” she was not allowed to participate in field-day trips with her class, like rowing or helping with the potato-harvest, but instead was sent to work in a kindergarten. Anneliese, on the other hand, was denied a university education. Still, the family was able to remain in Nazi Germany, albeit under the constant threat of worsening conditions. While my grandmother completed her doctorate law degree in Switzerland during the final years of the war, her sister was forced to work in the armament industry. After the war, Anneliese easily found work at Berlin’s magistrate courts—the Allied administration was desperately looking for people in the field of law who had not been identified as Nazis. After working with restitution cases and passing the Second State Examination [Zweites Staatsexamen], Anneliese became a judge in Berlin. Dietgard studied theology and became a Protestant pastor. Conversely, my paternal grandfather, Ernst Schaumann (born February 7, 1890), studied at the Art Academy in Berlin where he was awarded the Menzel Prize in 1913 before moving back to his hometown Königsberg. In East Prussia, he made his living as a full-time artist, painting portraits of wealthy landed gentry and estate owners and their families, as well as their horses, farmhouses, and the countryside of the surrounding area. In World War I and II, Schaumann was commissioned to paint battle scenes, Russian prisoners of war, and generals of the Wehrmacht at the front, and was dispatched to Poland, Russia, and France. His drawings of Russian prisoners of war were later used for propaganda purposes by the Nazis in a postcard series “The Face of the Enemy” (Das Gesicht des Gegners). Schaumann was able to sustain his second wife and three children during the war, but when Soviet troops invaded Königsberg in April 1945, things abruptly changed for the worse. My grandfather was briefly interned but soon released since there was no evidence of Nazi crimes or activities—he had not even been a party member. Yet many of his works (several of which hung in public buildings and offices) were destroyed. Until 1948, the family continued to live in Königsberg under Soviet occu-

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pation. According to my father, the family eked out a meager living, in part due to a painter-friend who spoke fluent Russian and arranged for my father to sell his art by painting Russian officers and Stalin portraits. Nevertheless, those times are the worst my father remembers who between the ages of eight and eleven, witnessed starvation, crime, rape, and murder. By 1948, the German population of Königsberg had been reduced to one quarter of its original size; along with the remaining German survivors my father’s parents were expelled and they resettled with my grandfather’s sister in Berlin. During occupation and flight, most of my grandfather’s paintings were lost or destroyed. More recently, however, a few of them resurfaced thanks to Ebay. It seems difficult to discern the victims, co-perpetrators, and bystanders in my family in the first place, and the categories have begun to converge with each subsequent generation. While Anneliese and Dietgard would not consider themselves Jewish or survivors, my father Frank (born 1937) would not call his parents Nazis, insisting that his father was utterly apolitical. Yet the family benefited from the Nazi rule: my father remembers that his father was on good terms with the local Gauleiter who bought his paintings and gave my family a yearly Christmas goose in the midst of the war. Unreliable details further complicate an interpretation that would provide an overarching framework. While my grandmother accused her husband of wanting to divorce her because she was considered “halfJewish” (because of the Nuremberg laws, my grandfather was unable to accept a professorship at Humboldt University while married to her), my mother insists this was not the case (indeed my grandparents divorced only in 1947). Dietgard’s emphasis on her father’s “Germaness,” along with the occasional muttering that Eastern European Jews were distinctly different from her family, sounds strange if not prejudiced to me, but fits with her identification as non-Jewish. What is more, divorce and strife divide the families: while the ugly divorce of my grandparents caused my mother to be on non-speaking terms with her mother for decades, my paternal grandfather also got a divorce after he almost bled to death when his first wife shot him in a fit of jealousy. My father did not know anything about the children of his father’s first marriage, and only met his half-sister, who also became a painter, fifteen years after their father’s death. Sketching the mixture of facts and rumors inevitably leads to the lost details, be it the fate of my great-grandfather’s Jewish family, or the location of my grandfather’s paintings. Also lost are many stories, from the persecution of my great-grandfather’s siblings and their children (my great

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aunt recently purchased a “Stumble Stone” [Stolperstein]9 for her aunt Clara who died in September 1942 in Treblinka) to the story of how it was possible to survive in Nazi Germany as a “Mischling,” to the tale of how my grandfather obtained berths on the Gustloff but decided not to board the ill-fated ship after all. Little is known about my father’s half-brother Horst who died on the infamous Bismarck battleship where he worked as a cook, and my mother’s uncle, my grandfather’s younger brother Paul who immigrated to Russia as a hopeful communist in the 1930s but soon became critical of the regime and presumably perished in a Siberian camp. My father (whose birth certificate, incidentally, is missing), does not speak about his childhood trauma to this day, therefore, I can only imagine what the family suffered from anecdotes, or from the 1949 letter of a family friend my father casually handed me last year: My sister in Berlin is in touch with the Schaumanns. She wrote me that he [Ernst Schaumann] now has a couple of jobs so that they will be able to buy themselves a little bit now and then, which is certainly badly needed. The children are supposed to be very talented, especially Frank! But how will he develop psychologically? For this is a child who experienced horrible things. He witnessed his mother being raped on more than one occasion. He tried to fight with the Russian [sic], but they hurled the little fellow to the ground so hard that his mother thought they had broken his spine!10

Since the “little man” whose psychological development was questioned is my father, memory matters in my upbringing and directly concerns me. Relying on my parents’ anecdotes and sparse documents, I am reminded of Honigmann’s, Maron’s, Bruhns’s, and Dückers’s quest to narrate a past that leaves so much to the imagination. I am drawn to literature in light of the narratives missing in my own family, and the need to create a story of my own. Reading literary texts, I can create a context that I feel is still missing, despite the abundance of information on the Holocaust I received in school and the media, and despite the growing cultural memo9

10

Michael Althen’s column “heute morgen” in the Frankurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 22, 2007, comments on the particular Stumble Stone for Clara Lehmann that he finds in front of his house Mommsenstr. 6 in Berlin. For more information on Günter Demnig’s project Stolpersteine (“Stumble-Stones”), see http://www.stolpersteine.com/ and my reference to the project in footnote #11 in the Dückers chapter. “Meine Schwester in Berlin steht mit Schaumanns in Verbindung. Sie schrieb mir, daß er jetzt ein paar Aufträge hätte, sodaß sie in die Lage kommen, sich auch mal ein bissel was anschafften zu können, was ja bitter nötig ist! Die Kinder sollen sehr begabt sein, vor allem Frank! Wie aber mag er sich seelisch entwickeln? Denn gerade dieses Kind hat Furchtbares miterlebt, er war mehr als ein Mal Zeuge, als seine Mutter vergewaltigt wurde, er hat versucht, mit dem Russen [sic] zu kämpfen, sie haben dem kleinen Mann auf die Erde geschmettert, dass die Mutter dachte, sie hätten ihm das Rückgrat zertrümmert!” Letter by Lise Sohr, July 3, 1949. Translation is my own.

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ry of the Holocaust and World War II. In the framework of juxtaposing works that transcend an either-or narrative of victims or perpetrators, I am able to incorporate the murky, undefined legacy of my own family, even if some dimensions and particularities continue to remain in the shadows. As the history of the Holocaust and WW II has become an institutionalized cultural memory communicated in the media, in memorials, museums, and public debates, the task of keeping memories alive has shifted to the post-Holocaust generations. Without memories of their own, generations of children and increasingly grandchildren have begun to appropriate and interpret their parents’ and grandparents’ memories, complementing them with reflection and imagination. Perhaps it is possible now to bridge from Klüger’s text to Wolf’s to those of the postwar generations, connecting narratives of the period’s divided experiences to study intersections and ruptures. That is, at the very least, my hope.

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