Myth: German and Scandinavian Studies 1443805556, 9781443805551

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Part I: The Gendered Myth
Pater semper incertus est: The Dialectics of Male Sexuality in Strindberg’s The Father and A Dreamplay • Jonas Karlsson
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Most Postdramatic of them All? Elfriede Jelinek’s Der Tod und das Mädchen I • Anna Zimmer
Part II: Imagined Communities – Myths of Solidarity
Language, Trauma and Exaggerated Fiction: Debunking East German Ideology on the “Jewish Question” in Jurek Becker’s Bronstein’s Children • Victoria Lenshyn
Myths that Shaped the Exile Experience of Central European Jewish Refugees in Japanese-Occupied Shanghai • Diane Liu
Part III: Constructing the Social through Myth
The Compensation of Thialfi and Røskva: A Myth of Child Exposure • Kevin Richards
Cultural Integration in Germany and the Myths of Tolerance • Katelyn Petersen
Part IV: Mythic Constructions of Wisdom and the Psyche
Odinic Elements in the Northern Sigurðr Legend: A Re-Readingof Fáfnismál • Adam Oberlin
Flashbacks, Fantasies and Resistance in Jurek Becker’s Jacob the Liar • Delene White
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Myth

Myth: German and Scandinavian Studies

Edited by

Evan Torner and Victoria Lenshyn

Myth: German and Scandinavian Studies, Edited by Evan Torner and Victoria Lenshyn This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2009 by Evan Torner and Victoria Lenshyn and contributors Cover design by Joshua A.C. Newman. All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-0555-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0555-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword ................................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Part I: The Gendered Myth Pater semper incertus est: The Dialectics of Male Sexuality in Strindberg’s The Father and A Dreamplay Jonas Karlsson ............................................................................................. 9 Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Most Postdramatic of them All? Elfriede Jelinek’s Der Tod und das Mädchen I Anna Zimmer............................................................................................. 19 Part II: Imagined Communities – Myths of Solidarity Language, Trauma and Exaggerated Fiction: Debunking East German Ideology on the “Jewish Question” in Jurek Becker’s Bronstein’s Children Victoria Lenshyn ....................................................................................... 33 Myths that Shaped the Exile Experience of Central European Jewish Refugees in Japanese-Occupied Shanghai Diane Liu................................................................................................... 51 Part III: Constructing the Social through Myth The Compensation of Thialfi and Røskva: A Myth of Child Exposure Kevin Richards .......................................................................................... 77 Cultural Integration in Germany and the Myths of Tolerance Katelyn Petersen........................................................................................ 89

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Table of Contents

Part IV: Mythic Constructions of Wisdom and the Psyche Odinic Elements in the Northern Sigurðr Legend: A Re-Reading of Fáfnismál Adam Oberlin .......................................................................................... 107 Flashbacks, Fantasies and Resistance in Jurek Becker’s Jacob the Liar Delene White ........................................................................................... 119 Contributors............................................................................................. 131 Index........................................................................................................ 133

FOREWORD

The graduate program in German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Massachusetts has gained national and international renown for the lively and innovative scholarship produced by its students and alumni/ae. Following upon the 2007 publication of the collection From Weimar to Christiania, growing out of the 2006 Experimentations graduate conference, this volume provides more evidence for the energetic engagement of UMass graduate students, the quality of their work, and the attention it has attracted elsewhere. Once more this graduate conference, which took place February 15-17, 2008, attracted a wide variety of graduate student participants, this time from five different countries and twelve different universities, and once more it drew an enthusiastic audience of faculty, other graduate students, and members of a wide-flung community. The conference garnered additional attention because it also featured the U.S. debut screening of award-winning Icelandic filmmaker Hrafn Gunnlaugsson’s Viking film Embla (2007), the director’s cut of the third film of his “Raven Trilogy.” Focused on a time of struggle between the old Viking gods and an increasingly militant Christianity, the film was an apt accompaniment to a conference addressing the topic of “Myth.” Gunnlaugsson was a lively presence as he responded to questions after the film screening, his appearance at UMass supported by a generous grant from Icelandair. A keynote address delivered by Professor Glenn Alexander Magee of Long Island University on “The Mythology of Reason: Romanticism, Idealism and the Quest for a New German Myth" added to the intellectual substance of the conference. “Myth” is of course a multi-valenced term, and this volume shows that its contributors pursue its many different meanings. It can designate the founding beliefs and narratives of a culture, perhaps deriving from an archaic past, and some essays here explore those ancient stories and their relevance today. In the Barthian sense, “myth” can also refer to narratives that legitimate particular social structures, while other authors emphasize myth’s function in sustaining hegemonic structures. Some contributions combine those two meanings, showing how the stories a culture tells itself over time can sustain unjust social arrangements. Finally, some of the chapters here show how myth can delegitimate dominant structures and even take on a counter-hegemonic function by fostering alternatives and hope. What this volume thus also demonstrates is the range and creativity

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of the cultural studies research being produced by younger scholars in the fields of German and Scandinavian Studies today. The appearance of this second volume of collected papers from a German and Scandinavian Studies graduate student conference testifies yet again to the cutting-edge investigations produced by the graduate students who are the future of our fields and especially to the energy and ebullience of the graduate students of the program in German and Scandinavian Studies at UMass Amherst, who organized the conference out of which these papers emerged and who put this volume together.

SARA LENNOX PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR OF GERMAN AND SCANDINAVIAN STUDIES PROGRAM AND SOCIAL THOUGHT & POLITICAL ECONOMY PROGRAM UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

INTRODUCTION

“Over the centuries we have transformed the ancient myths and folk tales and made them into the fabric of our lives. Consciously and unconsciously we weave the narratives of myth and folk tale into our daily existence.” —Jack Zipes

This anthology emerged from a graduate student conference bearing the name “Myth” held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in February 2008, at which upcoming scholars explored the boundaries, functions, histories, and cross-sections of myths in German and Scandinavian literature, film, and history. Though the ample mythic traditions in German and Scandinavian literature and folklore - coupled with an overt public interest in the topic since the nineteenth century provide a firm foundation for a study of myth and mythology, this project expands on how mythic symbolism not only constitutes the substance of the Eddic poems, but also how mythic structures are to be found in modern cultural structures in literature and beyond. Joseph Campbell and Hans Blumenberg’s groundbreaking studies in universal mythology aside, this anthology intends rather to contextualize myth as both socially determined and historically specific, raising questions about truths ensconced in myth and, perhaps, the myth of truth itself. We are the first to acknowledge how ambitious such a project is, but with these conference proceedings we hope to open up a public debate on German and Scandinavian mythology, especially how the function of such myths transcends traditionally assumed locations of study such as classics and anthropology (Hansen 26). One of the chief challenges for scholars writing about myths is how to define the term. Eleazar Meletinsky makes an admirable attempt at a definition by paraphrasing sociologist André Sauvy, who identified several traditions and tropes of myth in past structures repeatedly created “by the social psychology of culture”: “the eternal return to the past [‘the good old days’]; ‘the promised land’, ‘the horn of plenty’, and predestination; the ‘political’ myths of Fascism and of liberal democracy; the social demagoguery of parties and nation states; and the myths of popular opinion and the prejudices of specific groups and persons” (17-8). In understanding myth, one’s vantage point might depend on one’s field of

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Introduction

study, one’s belief system, one’s theoretical view, or the social movement in which one wrote. Religious scholar Mircea Eliade, for example, founded his definition of myth in the 1960s in the context of religious studies, where he attempts a more extended definition of myth still grounded in a notion of the sacrosanct as something that “narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial Time […].” For Eliade, “the myth is regarded as a sacred story, and hence a ‘true history,’ because it always deals with realities. The cosmogonic myth is “true” because the existence of the World is there to prove it; the myth of origin of death is equally true because man’s mortality proves it, and so on” (56). Yet Eliade’s theory emphasizes the importance of myth for understanding “not only how things came into existence but also where to find them and how to make them reappear when they disappear” (14). Robert Segal, on the other hand, rejects the constraints of Eliade’s theory grounded in religious studies as against the social sciences, for Segal argues that even Eliade was unable to make his arguments without borrowing from the social sciences (2). If one takes the word “sacred” out and instead regards myth quite simply as a story then, as Segal posits, an even broader understanding of the concept can be attained: “myth can be taken [ . . . ] either as a belief or credo” (4) or “a conviction false yet tenacious” (6). As a story, we can read into myths the symbolism, motifs, character development, narrative structures, and ideology that all contribute to the complexity of the role of myth and how one might come to understand it. As an example of one approach to myth, Segal discusses structuralists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss who theorized that myths were logical structures organized by oppositions, or dialectical structures that also provided in its structure a resolution (113-4). When we understand myth as a story with “symbolic language” (Hansen), then we find our entry point into understanding the veiled constructions of meaning and ideologies behind the myth, whether they are social, metaphysical, moral, or political. The framework for this project can be found in this broad concept of myth evident in German and Scandinavian texts, where mythic structures in literature and film, social texts, and history continue to be evaluated. German and Scandinavian literature provides a strong context for such a project, since some of the most renowned mythic icons come from these cultures, such as Siegfried of the Middle High German epic poem, Song of the Nibelungen, or its Norse equivalent Sigurd of the Völsungen Saga. Later revivals of these mythic tales are to be found throughout literary history (i.e. Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen), but the structures are also found in 20th-Century literature such as Thomas Mann and

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Hermann Hesse. Richard Wagner’s “ideologically charged notion of the Volk” is only one example of how the boundaries between myth, culture, and ideology intersect. Addressing distinct waves of scholarship on myth over the centuries, Meletinsky registers the absolute importance of ideology and mytho-poetic symbols for political developments in the 20thCentury, noting how many intellectuals of all disciplines1 have theorized political myths in what he calls a “rebirth of mythology” (15). In the latter part of the 20th-Century, politically charged mythic structures are often identified and analyzed based on their relationship with Nazism in Germany and Communism in the East, most notably in Roland Barthes’ essay collection Mythologies. Aside from political ideology, in psychology, Freud’s infamous Oedipus complex is an identifiable mythic structure whose allegory repeatedly appears in literature and is utilized in literary criticism. Repressed sexual impulses, for example, might find expression through alternative symbolic means such as dreams (Meletinsky 40, Segal 91, 94). Carl Jung transcends the sexual complexes discovered by Freud and sees myth as an expression of “consciousness out of the unconsciousness” (Segal 102), a transformation that does not stem only from sexual repression. These examples illustrate the complexity of myth as it has taken shape in the 20th-Century, emerging from 19thCentury trajectories that place traditional myth in the realm of religion as counter to science, to an attempt to rejoin myth and science in areas such as psychology (Segal 137), to a secularization of myth through political mythification. This volume explores these various trajectories of myth. It not only provides Germanists and Scandinavianists a collective forum to read each others’ scholarship while also showcasing the best and most recent work being done by the next generation of scholars on a topic fascinating to many in both fields. The contributors to this volume approach ‘myth’ from a variety of subject areas and time periods. As a result, the overarching picture provided in the following eight articles is quite expansive and cover broad geographic distances and time. Several striking characteristics can be detected in these articles, however. The first is their attention to finer points within German and Scandinavian cultural heritage without losing sight of the larger, globally interconnected picture. Another is their incisive analysis of mythic tropes across national and disciplinary boundaries, incorporating literature, theater, film, linguistics, the media, and social history in arguments that test the borders drawn between varying constructed truths. Each essay explores myths not only in their 1

Ernst Cassirer, Thomas Mann, Georges Sorel, Roland Barthes, Mircea Eliade, Henry Hatfield, John T. Marcus, Reinhold Niebuhr, André Sauvy (17).

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Introduction

monolithic, symbolic quality, but also in their contingence on the specific cultural realities of their origin. This volume is divided into four parts: The Gendered Myth, Imagined Communities – Myths of Solidarity, Constructing the Social through Myth, and Wisdom and Memory – Mythic Constructions of the Psyche. Each part demonstrates the interdisciplinary backgrounds and methods of the authors and how their work converges to comment on and explore myths of a similar nature of scholarship in German and Scandinavian Studies. The first section looks at myths relating to gender. Scandinavianist Jonas Karlsson (Yale University) revisits the topics of male sexuality and idealized womanhood through a close and semi-biographical evaluation of August Strindberg’s dramas A Dreamplay and The Father. Karlsson emphasizes Strindberg’s emotionally therapeutic goal of redeeming male sexuality through idealized female archetypes, such as the Virgin Mother. Germanist Anna Zimmer (Georgetown University) then examines a deconstruction of gender roles and the myth of the “perfect life” of the postfeminist, successful and modern woman in the fairy tale genre through a reading of Austrian dramatist Elfriede Jelinek’s “Death and the Maiden,” a retelling of the Grimm Brothers’ Snow White. With an acute analysis of the various gender ironies established by Jelinek, Zimmer provides an object lesson of how the dramatist combats new gender myths with the inconsistent constructions of older ones. The second section looks at myths of the community. Victoria Lenshyn (University of Massachusetts Amherst) examines East German Jewish author Jurek Becker’s Bronstein’s Children as a literary debunking of the myth of assimilation and the resolving of racial conflict through the resolution of class conflict in the former German Democratic Republic, especially regarding the Jewish experience in a post-World War II German state. Lenshyn explores the text through the lenses of trauma and recovery in East Germany, advocating for an interpretation of that country’s history beyond the dynamics of Marxist-Leninism. In her socio-historical article, literary scholar Diane Liu (University of Massachusetts Amherst) describes the experience of German and other European Jewish exiles in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II; an experience of exploitation by the host country based on racial stereotypes equivalent to formulaic notions of the ‘rich Jew’. The third part focuses on the construction of the social sphere through myth. Literary scholar in both the German and Scandinavian fields, Kevin Richards (Ohio State University) proposes a reading of the mythic tale of Thor’s acquisition of the slave children Thialfi and Røskva as a psychological re-channeling of fears of the Scandinavian pagan tradition

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of child exposure. In the second article, translator Katelyn Petersen (University of Alberta, Canada) applies her work on cultural translation to focus on migration literature that examines a myth of tolerance in contemporary Germany. Peterson discusses German-Turkish author Necla Kelek’s explanation of “tolerance wrongly translated,” a social behavior best summarized as “live and let live” – a well-intentioned social method of avoiding racism which, as author Peterson describes in Kelek’s definition of the behavior, only perpetuates continued cultural misunderstandings and further intolerance. The final chapter consists of two papers examining mythic constructions of wisdom and the psyche. Medievalist Adam Oberlin (University of Minnesota) provides a re-reading of the Eddic poem Fáfnismál, suggesting that the heroic Sigurð – a mythic figure across German & Scandinavian traditions – and his act of taking on magical wisdom through his journeys was misinterpreted by medieval audiences, who saw such wisdom as knowledge of chivalry. Instead of the traditionally accepted proto-Christian ideal, Oberlin posits that a deeprooted Odinic tradition is reflected in Sigurð’s acquisition and employment of wisdom, as well as in the Old Norse morphology itself. Literary scholar and historian Delene White (University of Massachusetts Amherst) focuses on the function of flashbacks and fantasies in the book and filmic adaptation of Jurek Becker’s Jacob the Liar as a literary method that challenges the official memory in the GDR that marginalized Jewish suffering and Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. VICTORIA LENSHYN AND EVAN TORNER UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS

Works Cited Blumenberg, Hans. Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979. Campbell, Joseph. Transformation of Myth Through Time. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Eliade, Mircea. “The Structure of Myths.” Myth and Reality. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963. 1-20. Hansen, Thomas S. “Myth in the German Curriculum: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Culture Course.” Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German 13.1(1980): 25-31.

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Introduction

Meletinsky, Eleazar M. “Modern Theories of Myth and Approaches to Literature.” The Poetics of Myth. Trans. Guy Lanoue and Alexandre Sadetsky. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998. 3-149. Segal, Robert. Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.

PART I: THE GENDERED MYTH

PATER SEMPER INCERTUS EST: THE DIALECTICS OF MALE SEXUALITY IN STRINDBERG’S THE FATHER AND A DREAMPLAY JONAS KARLSSON, YALE UNIVERSITY

August Strindberg (1849-1912) began his literary career as a proponent of Naturalism, and it was with dramas such as Miss Julie and The Father, in which the psychology of the characters is laid bare with uncompromising precision, that he achieved his European reputation. Particularly shocking, even for an audience already acquainted with the stark realism of Ibsen, was the grimly pessimistic picture of sexual desire painted in these works, where love is inherently aggressive in nature, and the game of courtship and seduction a fierce battle of conquest. Thus the story of Miss Julie is that of a young, unmarried woman of the aristocracy who falls victim to the skillful ruses of her servant Jean, below her in rank but superior to her in intelligence and willpower. Julie ends by committing suicide, an act of senseless desperation largely portrayed as the inevitable consequence of her biological inferiority as a woman. Yet the supposedly weaker sex returns with a vengeance in The Father, a tautly choreographed “dance of death” (the revealing title of another Strindberg drama), in which the husband and wife of a failed marriage battle each other over the custody of their common daughter. In this case, it is the woman who emerges victorious: acting from instinct mixed with malice, the wife (Laura) manages to raise doubts in her husband (Adolf, a captain in the cavalry) about the paternity of the child (Bertha) he has always believed to be his own. Increasingly desperate about the possibility of ever again finding certainty in this matter, he is finally consumed by the abyss of insanity and dies of a stroke. Strindberg has often been accused of misogyny, and it is undeniably true that both Miss Julie and Laura display the same kind of amoral manipulativeness and putatively biologically grounded incapacity for logical thinking upon which he also bestowed theoretical formulation again and again. Yet it should be kept in mind that Strindberg was always

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The Dialectics of Male Sexuality in Strindberg’s The Father and A Dreamplay

his own fiercest critic. Possessed of an almost uncanny capacity for introspection—as much a curse as a blessing—he applied the scalpel of vivisectional analysis not only to his fictional creations, but also, and perhaps even more impressively, to himself. His semi-fictional autobiography, Son of a Servant Maid, invites comparison with Rousseau’s Confessions in its naked candor and unabashed confessional character. It is for this reason that every attempt by later commentators to demask or debunk Strindberg’s construction of femininity will be sure to have been prefigured by the author himself. The unsettling greatness of The Father may well reside primarily in its utterly merciless exposure of male sexual anxieties. It is this exercise in psychological introspection that shall be at the focus of the present essay. Reading The Father side by side with Strindberg’s later experimental drama A Dreamplay, we shall regard the construction of femininity primarily as projection of the male psyche, to which it is here subservient in function. Whereas The Father confronts the spectator with a dual nightmare of sexual menace and eventual impotence, A Dreamplay can be regarded as a salvaging countermovement, offering a problematic comfort to these same horrors. Together, the two dramas construct an unsettling dialectic of sin and repentance, in which the male protagonist remains iconically fixed while the female is transformed from a biological femme fatale to an essentially mythical ideal of a Virgin Mother. The extension into the realm of myth, however, is already evident in The Father, despite the play’s reputation for psychological realism. On the one hand, to be sure, the Captain’s1 increasing desperation over the sudden uncertainty about the legitimacy of his daughter may seem understandable enough. At stake is not only the future—if the child is not his own, he makes clear, he has “no rights over it, and want[s] none” (177)—but the past as well, as all the care and love he has lavished upon Bertha would have been given for the wrong reasons, and he would have “suffered seventeen years at hard labor as an innocent man” (178), as he pathetically puts it. Yet whether his ultimate descent into madness is psychologically believable or not, it is quite palpable that the torture endured by the Captain is also existential in nature, symbolizing an irremediable deficiency at the very core of male sexual desire. Even after 1

Although he is normally called by his first name by the other characters of the drama, Adolf’s primary identity is given as “CAPTAIN” (140)—an archetypally male profession—in the dramatis personae, and that is also how he is typically referred to in the secondary literature. All quotations from Strindberg’s dramas are from the translation by Evert Sprinchorn. Selected Plays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982, and will henceforth be given in parenthesis in the text.

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Laura has reassured her husband that his suspicions are “completely groundless” (196), he refuses to believe it: “My child? A man has no children; only women have children” (197). The fact that the phrase commonly associated with Sigmund Freud—pater semper incertus est— no longer holds literally true in the age of DNA-testing matters little in this context.2 Strindberg worshipped motherhood all through his life, tending to see in it the fulfillment of woman’s destiny. With the birth of a child, according to Strindberg, a woman’s libidinous passion for the man who begets it is transmuted into a selfless and essentially chaste love for the offspring. This may certainly seem like a mixed blessing, as it effectively denudes motherhood of all its eroticism; yet it is exactly this kind of closure that the male sexual experience inherently lacks, thereby dooming it to an endlessly frustrating circularity. Even though their marriage had once been happy—as is hinted at in the Captain’s delirium: “Laura, when you were young, and we walked among the birch trees […] beautiful, heavenly! How beautiful life was” (196)—the monotonous passing of time has crushed all affection under its weight. An atheistic scientist and freethinker, he declares: “For me, since I do not believe in a life in the hereafter, my child was my […] form of immortality, the only form of it that has any basis in reality. Take that from me, and you cut the thread of life” (177). Yet this secular religiosity requires a leap of faith which, like paternity, can essentially only be believed in, never known for certain. Without this faith in a final closure, the endless drudgery of everyday existence becomes almost impossible to bear. Work will turn into despair as soon as the hope of a reward is taken away. But if there is no progress in male sexuality, there well may be a regress. The theme of incest becomes increasingly prominent as the action approaches its terrifying climax. Assuming a maternal role, Laura attempts to pacify her increasingly distraught husband: Cry, cry, my boy, and your mother will comfort you, as she did before. Remember? It was as your second mother that I came into your life. Your big, strong body was a bundle of nerves. You were a giant child who had come into the world too early, or perhaps had come unwanted. (179)

As his sanity begins to slip away from him, the Captain repeatedly identifies himself with the mythical hero Hercules, bound in servitude to

2

Freud discusses this dictum in his 1909 essay on Family Romances, but as his primary focus is on the child’s uncertainty regarding its father, his analysis is of limited applicability in the present context.

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The Dialectics of Male Sexuality in Strindberg’s The Father and A Dreamplay

Omphale.3 In a final desperate attempt to break free, he cries to himself: “Awaken, Hercules, before they take your club from you!” (197). This symbolic emasculation, however, is as much a relief as it is a defeat. Deprived of his weapon, the officer no longer has to work, to perform, but can submit himself to a state of infantile passivity, resting his head in the lap of his old nurse, tied up in a straightjacket.4 This unsettling fusion of pleasure with humiliation, celestial rest with hellish bondage, is also evoked masterfully in the ironic echoing of Shylock’s famous words from The Merchant of Venice: Yes, I am crying. A man and crying. Hath not a man eyes? Hath not a man hands, organs, senses, affections, passions? Is he not fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as a woman is? If you prick us, do we noot bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? Why should not a man be allowed to wail, a soldier to cry? Because it is unmanly? Why is it unmanly? (179)

This has little to do with any social critique of traditional gender roles; the despair expressed in these lines reaches much deeper, into the very core of man’s existence, where he is torn between the necessity of strength and the longing for relaxation. It is against this gloomy background, I suggest, that it will be rewarding to take a quick look at A Dreamplay, a piece that Strindberg wrote in 1901, during the brief period of marital bliss with his third and last wife, the Norwegian actress Harriet Bosse. The action of this groundbreaking drama is notoriously difficult to retell, as the plot is deliberately structured according to the associative and often incoherent logic of dreams, yet its underlying idea is straightforward enough: the daughter of the god Indra descends to earth in order to experience what human existence is like, and to ascertain whether the universal complaints about life’s inevitable shortcomings are justified or not. Assuming a human identity, she nevertheless retains her divine compassion as she reappears in scene after scene, sometimes playing an active role, sometimes merely watching from the sidelines. Her selfless love and 3

In his 1982 study on Strindberg and the Poetry of Myth, Harry G. Carlson interprets The Father as a modern retelling of this ancient story. 4 Camille Paglia brilliantly connects the “themes of sexual menace” apparent in Strindberg’s play with the painting Madonna by his friend and contemporary Edvard Munch, in which “The male is a timid, starved fetus shivering at the bottom” (Paglia 505).

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perfect understanding are ultimately rejected, however, and she takes leave of earth in a sacrificial pyre, a victim to mankind’s benighted selfishness. If not the most frequently performed, A Dreamplay has certainly come to be Strindberg’s most well-liked drama, and critics too have generally been prone to take its rather sermonizing message of humanism and compassion at face value. Gone, it seems, is the hopeless despair and crass brutality prevalent not only in The Father, but in most of Strindberg’s naturalist dramas. Although infused with a sense of Buddhist resignation, the primary mood of A Dreamplay is one of hope and reconciliation. Yet the redemption proffered is fraught with difficulties, and hidden just beneath the surface of its sometimes cloying sentimentality, the nightmare of The Father lingers on, preventing the establishment of any final peace. Particularly, we may fruitfully read the character of Agnes as an attempt to turn the predatory Laura into an agent of salvation, whose promise of final rest can be trusted in unconditionally. Obviously a being of divine origin, Agnes is a kind of Virgin Mother of celestial purity and goodness, whose boundless compassion for everyone in general denudes her of any subjective libido that could make her desire attach to anyone in particular. Yet what Strindberg tries to set up as a vision of liberation in A Dreamplay, is implicitly deconstructed by the grim pessimism of The Father. In fact, the continuity between the two dramas appears to be almost explicit, as already in the second scene of A Dreamplay an “Officer in a very unusual modern uniform” (653) resurfaces to play the male counterpart to Agnes. She finds him idly “rocking back and forth” (653) in a chair, mindlessly striking his saber against a table. Speaking “as if to a child,” Agnes gently chides him and takes the saber away. The officer complies with dreamlike docility, and it is impossible to overlook the element of almost sadomasochistic pleasure in his submissive plea: “Oh, please be nice to me, Agnes; let me keep my saber” (653). Not altogether surprisingly, critics have been eager to invoke Freud in this context. Evert Sprinchorn, for instance, remarks: Sixty years after Freud, the symbolism of this scene is elementary. The daughter of the gods is a mother figure in the eyes of the Officer, who describes her as the embodiment of the harmony of the universe, and like a good nineteenth-century mother she is telling her son, rocking in his crib, not to masturbate. (Sprinchorn 141)

This is probably to take Freudianism one step too far, reducing a multifaceted symbolism to a somewhat crude psychologizing. More importantly, it entirely overlooks the element of pleasure in the relief

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The Dialectics of Male Sexuality in Strindberg’s The Father and A Dreamplay

experienced by the officer as he is deprived of his weapon.5 The monotonously rocking movement, however, is surely significant, and Sprinchorn may well have a point in linking this to the sort of bootless expense of vitality commonly associated with masturbation—D.H. Lawrence refers to it in his essay on Pornography and Obscenity as a “vicious circle,” voiding the self of content “till it is almost a nullus, a nothingness” (Lawrence 180). Yet there is scant need to limit this state of endless repetition to any one particular sin, for—just as in The Father—it should rather be seen as metonymic for human existence in general. As another character remarks in another scene: “That’s what life is—going through it again and again” (703). Similarly, the officer has to endure the neverending hardship of being a “stableboy and carry out manure” (654), a job that presumably earns him his living, as the phrase goes, but does not yield any rewards that would lead him beyond that. Repetition—even regression—is equally palpable in a later scene, where the Officer (who is never given a name) finds himself back in school, suffering intense humiliation as he is unable to answer even the simplest of questions: “Now, boy, tell me: how much is two times two?” (695). He even has to suffer physical chastisement as the teacher “grabs the Officer by the hair and shakes him” (695). Here too, the strength of the grown man is reduced to childlike impotence. In The Father, the Captain is deprived of his club; in A Dreamplay, the Officer of his sword. The phallic significance of these weapons is naturally difficult to overlook. Crucially, it points to an aggressive quality that Strindberg generally held to be intrinsic to sexual desire. Not altogether surprisingly, Nietzsche reacted with enthusiasm to Le Père (he read the play in its French translation 1888), which he expressed in a letter to “the Swedish genius”: I read your tragedy twice with great emotion; it surprised me beyond all bounds to get to know a work in which my own conception of love—in its 5

It is interesting to compare this with the famous scene in Arthur Schnitzler’s Leutnant Gustl, where the protagonist gets involved in a brief verbal altercation with a baker, and the latter grabs hold of the hilt of the lieutenant’s sword, threatening to break it in two. Convinced that his honor has been irreparably damaged by this insult, the hotheaded young man decides to commit suicide that same night, a duty he is miraculously relieved of as it turns out that the baker died before him from a stroke. The sword here functions primarily as the visible symbol of a man’s honor, a virtue traditionally linked intimately with the male identity. Though it is probably a sheer coincidence, it is fascinating to note that Schnitzler’s novella appeared in 1901, the same year that Strindberg composed his Dreamplay.

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means a war, in its foundation a hatred to the death between the sexes—is expressed in a grandiose manner.6

The Captain himself says something similar: “it’s like race hate. If it’s true that we are descended from the apes, it must have been from two different species” (181). Sexuality is never just pleasure, a reciprocal give and take engaged in by two individuals in mutual agreement. Hidden beneath the surface of even the most harmonious sexual relationship there is always a power game, a nakedly primitive struggle for dominance. Echoing Hamlet, the Captain muses: “To eat or be eaten—that is the question!” (192). Yet if on the face of it, the female would seem to be the victim of this aggression, it is ultimately rather the male who suffers the most acutely under the destructive force of his own sexuality. Indeed, Strindberg’s women are often markedly astute in turning their victim-hood to their own advantage, demanding of the man a strength and determination that is painfully at odds with his existential forlornness. If the infantilization suffered by the Captain in The Father is in itself highly disquieting, it becomes doubly so by the scorn it provokes in Laura to see the man who had once “conquered” her stripped of all his masculine potency. Even as she cajoles him into assuming the role of her child, she cannot but be revolted by the incest implicit in this Oedipal constellation: I loved you for the child in you. But—oh, you saw it well enough, every time your nature changed and you came to me as my lover, I blushed with shame, and your lovemaking was a joy followed by the anguish of incest. The mother became her boy’s lover – . Disgusting! (179-80)

In A Dreamplay, however, the essentially chaste motherhood of Agnes has entirely eclipsed any libidinal desire in her, thus precluding exactly this type of conflict. The Officer can submit to her without hesitation, surrendering the weapon he feels assured she will not require him to wield. She comforts him that she has “come to rescue” him from his “imprisonment” (654), ultimately liberating him from the vicious circle of travail without end. He can finally rest, secure in the knowledge that she only has compassion for the weakness he has now given in to. To offer an analogy that is perhaps not altogether arbitrary, it is as if Strindberg were 6

My translation. The German original reads: “Ich las zwei Mal mit tiefer Bewegung Ihre Tragödie; es hat mich über alle Maaßen überrascht, ein Werk kennen zu lernen, in dem mein eigner Begriff von der Liebe — in ihren Mitteln der Krieg, in ihrem Grunde der Todhaß der Geschlechter — auf eine grandiose Weise zum Ausdruck gebracht ist” (Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, Band 15 188).

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The Dialectics of Male Sexuality in Strindberg’s The Father and A Dreamplay

trying to apply a Lutheran seratology to the realm of human sexuality, pronouncing salvation to be a product of grace alone, not of works. This, then, is the redemption held forth in A Dreamplay, hinging on the combination of compassion and chastity embodied in Strindberg’s ideal of the Virgin Mother. Yet to a psychologist of Strindberg’s caliber, it almost goes without saying that such a solution must needs be precarious. Ultimately, the submissive—even humiliating—character of the Officer’s renunciation cannot be accepted, inescapably provoking a concomitant reaction of reasserted pride and rebellion. Indeed, it is almost as if the very innocence of Agnes arouses a desire for wanton cruelty, amply demonstrated by the battery she is subjected to at the end of the drama, as the benighted bystanders vent their frustration on this Christlike “lamb” (the Latin meaning of “agnus”) of God. The chastity of Agnes is as much pre- as postsexual, and the revolt against the maternal oppression inevitably takes the form of a wilful defilement of a virginal purity. Yet of course, this defilement will in its turn give rise to the yearning for forgiveness, thus completing the vicious circle of sin, repentance, and uneasy atonement, out of which it may well appear impossible to break free. It is a dreary logic of endless repetition, invoked towards the end as a “constant strife between the anguish of joy and the pleasure of suffering, the torments of remorse and the delights of sensuality” (728). The utter hopelessness of this situation is perfectly epitomized by the door that remains fixed in place in scene after scene, firmly closed until the near end, when it is finally opened with ceremonial solemnity. Yet predictably, the great excitement of the assembled bystanders turns instantly into disappointment and perplexity as it is revealed that behind the door there is “nothing—nothing at all” (724). Again, it might be tempting to use Freud here, who regarded any sort of vessel or empty container as symbolic of the female reproductive organs. Yet perhaps a better reference in this context would be Shakespeare, who frequently gave expression to a similarly dark pessimism about human sexuality, and who could refer metonymically to the vagina as a “nothing,” or—in King Lear—as “the sulphurous pit” (King Lear IV.vi). One might consider, for instance, his Sonnet 129, in which “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame” is “Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight”; and which ends with a couplet expressing a hopeless despair over the inexorable logic of this oscillation between desire and disgust: “All this the world well knows, yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell” (Shakespeare 870). The sexual import of the anticlimactic opening of the door in A Dreamplay is further underscored as the people immediately

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vent their frustration over this “swindle” (724) on Agnes, who is significantly held responsible for it. Strindberg famously referred to A Dreamplay as “my most beloved play, child of my greatest pain” (Strindberg, Plays: Two 167), and he explicitly intended the role of Agnes to be played by Bosse, his then beloved wife. Certainly, his genuine tenderness for her is much in evidence throughout, infusing the action with a spirit of melancholy resignation. Yet the unquestionable beauty of A Dreamplay can never quite disguise the fact that the sweetness of the atonement offered by Agnes still comes at a high price. The peace and comfort she instills in her male counterparts retains an element of emasculation, making the revolt against her inevitable. If A Dreamplay was indeed conceived as a sort of antidote to the sexual pessimism of The Father, its ultimate efficacy must remain very much in doubt.

Works Cited Carlson, Harry Gilbert. Strindberg and the Poetry of Myth. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. Freud, Sigmund. Studienausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2000. Lawrence, D. H. Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence. London: Heinemann, 1961. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980. Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Schnitzler, Arthur. Fräulein Else; Leutnant Gustl; Andreas Thameyers Letzter Brief. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 2000. Shakespeare, William. William Shakespeare, the Complete Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Sprinchorn, Evert. “The Logic of A Dream Play” in: Reinert, Otto. Strindberg; a Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1971. Strindberg, August. Plays. Trans. Michael Meyer. New York: Random House, 1964. —. Selected Plays. Trans. Evert Sprinchorn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO’S THE MOST POSTDRAMATIC OF THEM ALL? ELFRIEDE JELINEK’S DER TOD UND DAS MÄDCHEN I ANNA ZIMMER, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

In 1972, American poet and professor Adrienne Rich published an essay titled “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.”1 Rich wrote with a sense of urgency: “We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” (19). Today, many years after the height of Second Wave feminism and the Frauenbewegung, Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek continues to write in this spirit—for her, fairy tales are such suspect writings of the past and are still deserving of feminist critique. While postfeminist culture suggests that women have achieved emancipation, Jelinek counters this viewpoint: [ . . . ] what’s so stifling is that we all claim that things have changed fundamentally, that women now have choices. It’s actually much worse now than when there was still a feeling of anticipation, of expectation (Aufbruchsstimmung), a belief that one must simply fight hard enough for things to change, an optimism. Now one is made to feel like a hysterical old hag who keeps on screaming even though it no longer matters. (quoted in Bethman 68)

Written in 1999, Jelinek’s first of five Prinzessinnendramen, Der Tod und das Mädchen I (Schneewittchen), is composed in such a way that postdramatic techniques—such as the separation of the vocal from the corporeal and the suspension of meaning-making—question the traditional fairy tale from which she borrows and challenge the story’s affirmation of gender-related ideologies and institutions. This well-known Grimm fairy 1

I would like to thank Susanne Neuenfeldt, as her article alerted me to the existence of this essay.

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Elfriede Jelinek’s Der Tod und das Mädchen I

tale is not spared Jelinek’s criticism as John Stephens and Robyn McCallum explain: “[ . . . ] even the most revered cultural icon can be subjected to mocking or antagonistic retellings [. . .] not so much a retelling as a re-version, a narrative which has taken apart its pre-texts and reassembled them as a version which [has] a new textual and ideological configuration” (4). Inline with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s description of postdramatic theater, Jelinek’s play’s “political engagement does not consist in the topics but in the forms of perception” (Lehman 184). Furthermore, Jelinek’s play deconstructs the conventional genres of fairy tale and drama through its form. The four remaining plays that complete Jelinek’s quintet take on the retelling of another fairy tale (Dornröschen), the challenge of being a woman and a writer (Rosamunde), the false triumph of Jackie Kennedy after the death of her husbands (Jackie), and the difficulties that modern women writers face (Die Wand, a play about Sylvia Plath and Ingeborg Bachmann). Jelinek’s re-versions of iconic stories in the quintet prove that even today seemingly successful women do not necessarily lead perfect lives, thus exposing the mythical nature of postfeminism. Unlike traditional fairy tales, Jelinek’s play questions the assumptions and allusions presented by stories and challenges adults who heard them as children to rethink the values they transmit. Stephens and McCallum explain the importance of children’s stories to a society: “Under the guise of offering children access to strange and exciting worlds removed from everyday experiences, they serve to initiate children into aspects of a social heritage, transmitting many of a culture’s central values and assumptions and a body of shared allusions and experiences” (3). In order to question the norms presented in these texts, Jelinek—as Horace Engdahl describes—“[ . . . ] manipulates the codes of pulp literature, comics, soap operas, pornography, and folkloristic novels (Heimatsroman) so that the inherent madness in these ostensibly harmless consumer phenomena shines through” (43-4). Fairy tales could now be added to this list of genres tackled and dismantled by Jelinek. Cathy Lynn Preston, in her essay titled “Disrupting the Boundaries of Genre and Gender: Postmodernism and the Fairy Tale,” writes of the potential of fairy tale reversions to question the boundaries of gender and challenge other dominant ideologies. She quotes Amy Shuman: “[ . . . ] when we borrow another's words, and traditional phrases and stories are not only another's words but are the words of the anonymous and sometimes authoritative, traditional ‘other,’ we negotiate between the world the authority describes and the world we describe” (198). With these words, she suggests that retelling stories allows one to possibly even tell a story with new (gender-

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related) values. Furthermore, this technique, as utilized by Jelinek, creates the semiotic implosion of the fairy tale by working from the inside (i.e. using words from and motifs of the original tale) in order to question the traditional semiotic significance and meaning-making devices of the story. One gender-specific ideology questioned by Jelinek’s play is the beauty myth, a myth that must be contextualized within postfeminist culture. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra in their book, Interrogating Postfeminism, describe this elusive term: “Postfeminism broadly encompasses a set of assumptions, widely disseminated within popular media forms, having to do with the ‘pastness’ of feminism [ . . . ] As postfeminism has raised a premium on youthfulness, it has installed an image of feminism as ‘old’” (1-11). Furthermore, they argue that postfeminism highlights the role of woman as empowered consumer, but ignores injustices and “[ . . . ] has become so installed as an epistemological framework that in many ways our culture has stopped asking the kinds of questions that it appears to settle” (6). Jelinek, however, fights to reopen such questions. Her writing seems to suggest as Tasker and Negra argue, “The necessity of feminist critique, at a time when women face significant challenges to their economic well-being, hard-won reproductive rights, and even authority to speak, while popular culture blithely assumes that gender equality is a given, seems to us selfevident” (12). Indeed, years after many gender myths have been critiqued and demystified by feminists, Jelinek refuses to abandon the fight for women’s rights and equality. By focusing on ostensibly successful, self-determined women, Jelinek’s princess plays challenge the postfeminist viewpoint that women are truly emancipated. Jelinek explains: “[ . . . ] the norms are still determined exclusively by men, in particular the cultural norms of patriarchy. [...] Women are still reduced to biology” (quoted in Bethman 68). The problems Jelinek describes—which are fueled in part by the ideologies portrayed in fairy tales—are today part of a larger social phenomenon: the beauty myth. In her seminal work, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, Naomi Wolf claims this ideology of femininity has arisen in response to the increasing power of women and changing gender roles. Wolf explains, “The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us” (10).2 Wolf argues that while the accomplishments of women are being celebrated, an obsession with beauty and ‘perfect’ physical appearances is 2

It must be noted that Wolf has been described as a postfeminist; in some ways, Jelinek prescribes to her line of reasoning, in other ways she abandons it.

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Elfriede Jelinek’s Der Tod und das Mädchen I

resurging, exploited by the media, and drawing attention away from women’s intellectual and artistic achievements. Jelinek’s play challenges not only the modern beauty myth, but also disputes an earlier variety of this myth: the German Romantic discourse on artistic genius, which juxtaposed masculine notions of intellectual and artistic accomplishment with feminine beauty and women’s bodies. Furthermore, German Romanticism also marks the origin of the written fairy tale as a German literary phenomenon, making Jelink’s critique twofold. Jelinek said about her princess plays: “Diese kleinen Texte sind ja zum Teil sehr philosophisch, sie verarschen unter anderem die Philosophie Heideggers, denn die Gebiete, aus denen die Frau am gründlichsten ausgeschlossen ist und war, sind: das Denken und die Musik” (quoted in Lücke [2004] 22). Jelinek’s later princess plays demonstrate the difficulty that women face in artistic realms, but her first play reveals how women struggle to even think in a male-dominated world. Relatively little has been written about Jelinek’s Der Tod und das Mädchen I, but Bärbel Lücke and Susann Neuenfeldt provide interesting insights into the problem of thinking outside current power relations. Lücke shows how Jelinek’s first three plays in the quintet challenge theories by philosophers from Plato to Heidegger and illustrates how Jelinek reveals that men are allowed to think while women are often denied this right. However, she ignores the important role that fairy tales play in disseminating these myths. Neuenfeldt also fails to address the propagandistic role of the fairy tale, but acknowledges that “[ . . . Jelinek] wirft [ . . . ] die Frage danach auf, ob es überhaupt ein Sprechen außerhalb bzw. jenseits dieses männlichen Imaginationsrahmens geben kann? [ . . . ] Gibt es ein Sprechen außerhalb dominater Macht- und Herrschafts-verhältnisse” (151)? Notably, Jelinek does not tell a new story, but rather deconstructs Snow White: “Jelinek’s social criticism is formulated not from the safe distance of superior knowledge but from the depths of unqualified contamination” (Engdahl 44). With this statement Engdahl suggests that Jelinek pushes for change from within a dominant discourse, not from a distanced utopia; the techniques of postdramatic theater such as the utilization of new audiovisual media forms that disconnect the voice from the body and question traditional meaning-making devices enable her to do so. In Hans-Thies Lehmann’s influential work, Postdramatic Theatre, his largely descriptive portrayal of postdramatic theater offers definitions of this emerging genre. In an attempt to define postdramatic theater, he writes, “[…] postdramatic theatre, again and most definitely, does not mean a theatre that exists ‘beyond’ drama, without any relation to it. It should rather be understood as the unfolding and blossoming of a potential

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of disintegration, dismantling and deconstruction within drama itself” (44). This distinction is essential to remember—Jelinek’s princess plays do not exist beyond drama, nor do they exist beyond the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales. Rather, Jelinek’s Snow White brings about the implosion of the genres of dramatic theater and the fairy tale, thus exposing the potential of deconstructing these dominant discourses. Furthermore, Lehmann admits that many people find it difficult to imagine political theater after Brecht: “[ . . . ] is there a political theatre without narration? Without a fable in Brecht’s sense” (180)? Jelinek’s plays answer these questions in the affirmative. Her use of postdramatic techniques and her deconstruction of prevailing discourses offer “a space and speech/discourse without telos, hierarchy and causality, without fixable meaning and unity” (Lehmann 146). As evidenced in her theoretical essays, it is clear that Jelinek has conflicting feelings towards Brecht and his contributions to theater. Britta Kallin in her article, “In Brecht’s Footsteps or Way Beyond Brecht? Brechtian Techniques in Feminist Plays by Elfriede Jelinek and Marlene Streeruwitz,” explains that Jelinek’s theater is political because it exposes the “often unequal power relationships between men and women and point[s] out changes that have to be implemented before women can gain equal status with men in our societies” (66). The following textual analysis aims to illustrate how Jelinek uses postdramatic techniques politically to challenge hierarchical gender ideologies and institutions. The postdramatic nature of Der Tod und das Mädchen I first becomes apparent in the stage directions: “Zwei riesige, popanzartige Figuren, die zur Gänze aus Wolle gestrickt und dann ausgestopft sind, eins als Schneewittchen, eins als Jäger mit Flinte und Hut, sprechen ruhig miteinander, die Stimme kommen, leicht verzerrt, aus dem Off” (9). The actualization of these directions undermines the dramatic tradition of vocal and corporeal unity, as described by Lehmann: “Owing to an illusion constitutive to European culture, the voice seems to be coming directly from the ‘soul’” (148). He continues: “Traditionally, the vocal sound as an aura around the body, whose truth is its word, promised nothing less than the subjectively determined identity of the human being” (149). Postdramatic theater, however, frequently utilizes new forms of audiovisual media to play with voices, thus debunking the illusion that stage characters use language in order to create their identities. From what I have gleaned about productions of this play, no director has opted to use large dolls or puppets in the place of live actors. Perhaps Jelinek’s stage directions are not meant to be read as orders, but rather as suggestions, instilling ideas in the mind of the director, and urging him/her to at least

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Elfriede Jelinek’s Der Tod und das Mädchen I

consider the importance of the disconnect between body and voice in this work.3 Lücke interprets Jelinek’s suggestion of the dolls: “Gestrickt aus Wollfäden sind sie jederzeit auftrennbar, wie jedes Gewebe: Als männliche oder weibliche Figuren sind sie […] in ihrer Substanz nicht stabil, und das heißt, dass sie auch als Paradigmen einer Geschlechterdifferenz nicht unveränderbar, zeitlos und stabil sein können“ (114). Even these lifeless figures, in their unstable composition, embody the possibility of disrupting traditional dramatic techniques and gender norms. Rather than telling the story from the standpoint of an all-knowing (male) narrator, Jelinek’s protagonist speaks her mind and explains that she seeks truth: “Seither bin ich Wahrheitssucherin, auch in sprachlichen Angelegenheiten [...M]eine Geschichte gibt es schon seit Jahrhunderten, keine Ahnung, was daran so lustig oder aufregend sein soll” (9-10). Her search for truth in linguistic matters emphasizes her intellectual curiosity, a quality not often found in female fairy tale characters. These first few lines of the play therefore undermine the traditional representation of female lives in fairy tales which are “[ . . . ] represented as revolving around, competing for, and winning male attention, and hence the emphasis falls on beauty, passivity, and dependence on outside forces” (Stephens 204). Moreover, Jelinek’s ironic tone shines through as these lines call the worth of the fairy tale into question by musing about why the story is so popular. After urging Snow White to give up her search, the Hunter says, “Obwohl man es dann endlich hinter sich hätte und wieder Märchen erzählen könnte” (11). Does the Hunter suggest that if Snow White gives up her search for truth the world will go back to its ignorant state and be able to tell fairy tales again? As these lines indicate, Jelinek’s characters rarely speak in a straightforward manner, but seem to consider their thoughts just as they speak them, avoiding clear-cut meanings. Karen Jürs-Munby, in her introduction to Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre, explains that postdramatic theater requires effort on the part of the audience: “The spectators are no longer just filling in the predictable gaps in a dramatic narrative but are asked to become active witnesses who reflect on their own meaning-making and who are also willing to tolerate gaps and suspend the assignment of meaning” (6). Jelinek’s

3

In one of her later princess plays, Der Tod und das Mädchen IV (Jackie), Jelinek goes so far as to give extensive stage directions and then writes, “Aber Sie werden ja sicher was ganz Andres machen” (66). This comment gives the impression that Jelinek acknowledges the freedom of the director to do as he/she pleases.

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reader/viewers are forced to do just that—reconsider the meaning-making of fairy tales and witness the injustices they help foster. After the Hunter mocks her search for truth rather than beauty, Snow White admits that such a search is not easy: “Bergsteigen als große Aufgabe der Gesellschaft, doch es ist leider meist kein Gebirge vorhanden” (14). Whether she means that women are not even given the opportunity to excel or that society fails to recognize the challenges it faces, her tone is undoubtedly critical. Snow White is also critical of her stepmother and speaks of their competition, alluding to the fact that her stepmother is wrapped up in the beauty myth. Mary Daly suggests that remnants of these harmful female roles persist today: “The child who is fed tales such as Snow White is not told that the tale itself is a poisonous apple, and the Wicked Queen (her mother/teacher), having herself been drugged by the same deadly diet throughout her lifetime [ . . . ], is unaware of her venomous part in the patriarchal plot” (quoted in Haase 3). Here Daly suggests that women are co-producers of such dominant discourses. Snow White describes the attempts of her stepmother to assert her power in the world and even calls their beauty competition a “Titaniakampf” (Jelinek 15). Wolf explains that the beauty myth often divides women as they constantly compare themselves to one another and therefore weakens the emancipatory efforts of feminists. “The core of the myth—and the reason it was so useful as a counter to feminism—is its divisiveness” (Wolf 284). In a postfeminist culture, women may even believe that their attention to beauty is empowering and therefore questioning a patriarchal society is unnecessary. Jelinek’s re-version demonstrates that some ideologies are so deeply ingrained that people fail to realize that they are fighting potential collaborators. Inline with postdramatic techniques, Snow White also speaks ironically about the role of media and articulates media’s attempts to disseminate the beauty myth: “Die Schönheit will nämlich immer auf der Welt bleiben, am besten in Illustriertenblättern, die durchs dauernde Blättern noch schneller abfallen als normales Laub” (15). On the one hand, she suggests that media propagate gender stereotypes; on the other hand, Jelinek’s irony suggests that due to the fleeting nature of the media, the hold that these stereotypes have over us can be broken. When writing about postdramatic theater, Lehmann makes the case that “Media [ . . . ] transform the giving of signs into information and through habit and repetition dissolve the consciousness and even the sense for the fact that the act of sending signs ultimately involves sender and receiver in a shared situation connected through the medium of language” (184). This characteristic of media is often challenged by postdramatic theater as

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Elfriede Jelinek’s Der Tod und das Mädchen I

“Theatre does not simulate but obviously remains a concrete reality of the place, the time, the people who produce signs in the theatre—and these are always signs of signs” (Lehmann 167). By drawing upon these postdramatic theater techniques, Jelinek reawakens our consciousness of constructed nature of information in the form of signs, challenges the allknowing character of the media, and simultaneously contests the beauty myth created in part by magazines. However, challenges still exist as the Hunter states that he prefers to hoard openness and freedom, protecting it from Snow White, and women in general. Snow White’s response, though she does not address the Hunter’s comments directly, suggests that women are not permitted this openness and rather are trapped by the beauty myth: “Meine Stiefmutter wollte immer für andere sein, durch ihre Schönheit, die sie dauernd spiegelte, als wäre sie mindestens zu zweien gewesen. Es war ihr ein Dorn im Auge, das nur sich selbst erblicken wollte, daß ich war. Der Spiegel war nicht das Warum. Er war das Was. Er war das Was Wollt Ihr Denn Noch” (17)? With these words, Snow White focuses in on her stepmother’s obsession with beauty. Furthermore, her musings on the mirror, especially the last statement “Was Wollt Ihr Denn Noch,” refer to the stepmother’s failed attempts to live up to the beauty myth, giving others everything they wanted from her. Also, the frustration and dissatisfaction of the stepmother come through in these capitalized words and illustrate that the pressure of the mirror and the desire to be beautiful weigh heavily upon her. Seemingly unconnected from her previous lines, Snow White’s next assertion is that people should not fret if they have unanswerable questions: “Das Unerklärbare soll in seinem Erklärungsgrund ruhen, bis der Vorstoß der Blumen von unten her in den Arsch tritt. Dann soll es gefälligst aufstehen und uns erklären, damit wir uns, was ist, endlich auch vorstellen können. So, das wäre auch schon das Ende meiner Wünsche” (21). Lehmann’s description of postdramatic theater helps decode Snow White’s wish list: “The rupture between being and meaning has a shocklike effect: something is exposed with the urgency of suggested meaning—but then fails to make the expected meaning recognizable” (146). Furthermore, in his essay, “Die heutige Schaubühne als moralische Anstalt betrachtet. Über das Erbe der Aufklärung im postdramatischen Theater der Elfriede Jelinek,” Hajo Kurzenberger explains that Jelinek’s “Sprachartistik schafft hier die Nähe und den Abstand, die nötig ist für geschärfte Wahrnehmung und zu reflektierende Irritation” (26). As Kurzenberger rightly claims, Jelinek’s writing can be rather irritating, but it is also provocative. By suggesting that the unexplainable can explain

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things better, Jelinek challenges the reader/viewer’s understanding of what has meaning and what can convey meaning. With the lines above, Jelinek debunks the perception that the status quo is unchangeable and that seemingly unexplainable things should be taken for granted. Rather, she asserts that the unexplainable is possibly where one can find truth and begin to undermine the status quo. Threatened by Snow White’s challenge to the Hunter’s male-dominated world, the Hunter shoots her saying, “In Sargkleidung sollte man nicht im Wald herumspazieren” (23). This line suggests that Snow White was possibly doomed from the beginning and follows the same poor logic as the idea that women should not wear revealing clothing if they hope not to be sexually abused or raped. While the Hunter admittedly does not sexually abuse Snow White’s corpse, he does belittle her by suggesting that he did her a favor by killing her before age could destroy her beauty: “Nur die Zeit habe ich ihr genommen, das mußte genügen, die war ja auch das Gefährlichste an ihr” (23). As the Hunter finally leaves, the Seven Dwarfs enter and surround Snow White. They refer to her as beauty and suggest that she was misled: “Was die Schönheit für Täler gehalten hat, waren in Wirklichkeit Berge. Nur das Gute kann Berge versetzen, manchmal auch der Glaube, die Schönheit kanns jedenfalls nicht” (24). The wisdom presented by the Seven Dwarfs argues that goodness and faith can accomplish great things that beauty simply cannot. As if speaking for the reader/viewers, they continue: “Uns bleibt so und so wieder die ganze Arbeit. Immer müssen wir die eine energische Haltung einnehmen und den Dreck von andern Leuten wegmachen” (24). Perhaps Jelinek charges the reader/viewer to carry out the work that is still left to do so that similar catastrophes do not happen yet again. Then again, the Seven Dwarfs end the play with the following words: “Manchmal denken wir, daß wir einmal gerne selber tot wären, damit die andren einmal an lustigen Figuren wie uns sehen, daß der Tod nun wirklich nicht so lustig ist, wie sie es sich offenbar vorgestellt haben” (24). They carry Snow White offstage in a glass coffin, again evoking images from the original tale; however, this time Snow White’s death is not temporary. Furthermore, the glass coffin resembles a glass display cabinet, thus reducing Snow White to be nothing more than a young, beautiful body to be marveled at. These closing remarks, together with Jelinek’s entire re-version of the tale of Snow White, serve as a reminder that many fairy tales also are not as funny and innocent as originally imagined. Jelinek’s princess plays, though they utilize traditional feminist critiques, present old stories in refreshingly new ways that urge the

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Elfriede Jelinek’s Der Tod und das Mädchen I

reader/viewer to reconsider feminist agendas. Jelinek has begun to free herself from the beauty myth, attaining some intellectual and artistic freedom. Her theater becomes political as she fights with words for those who remain voiceless or choose not to speak. Barbara Burckhardt, in her article, “Wer ist die Schönste im ganzen Land? ‘Prinzessinnendramen’ von Elfriede Jelinek,” quotes Jelinek who explains that Woman is not a dramatic subject: “Die Frau ist kein großes dramatisches Subjekt... Die Frau konstituiert sich, als die Unterlegene, nur in der Spiegelung durch den Mann, der sie immer nur sich selbst ins Gesicht wirft, und durch die Bilder, denn nur ihr Aussehen und ihre Jugend können ihr Wert verleihen, nie das Denken“ (44). Is Woman then more appropriately and accurately represented in postdramatic theater? Can the postdramatic help free Woman from this position that only allows her being in opposition to Man and assigns her value because of her youth and beauty alone? Jelinek’s Der Tod und das Mädchen I (Schneewittchen) provides affirmative answers to these questions. In his book, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, Jack Zipes explains, “The culture industry constantly seeks to cast magic spells over viewers and readers so that they cannot see and read the truth” (x). Jelinek’s theater, in contrast, does not subscribe to the ways of the mainstream culture industry and questions the traditional genres of fairy tale and dramatic theater. Her writing pushes the reader/viewer, like Snow White, to ask many questions and search for truth in unlikely places. Furthermore, Jelinek’s “[ . . . ] retold stories have the potential to disclose how old stories suppress the invisible, the untold, and the unspoken […T]hrough changing the modes of representation as well as, and more than, changing the content […her stories] remind readers not only of how they read the text but of how they read the world” (Stephens 22). More importantly, however, than reminding readers of how they read the world, Jelinek pushes readers to imagine the world in their own way, identify injustices, and possibly fight for change. Even after receiving the Nobel Prize for her artistic achievements, Jelinek continues to fight for the rights of women, and with the help of postdramatic theater techniques, urges reader/viewers to read mediatized discourses differently and not be satisfied with the status quo or traditional ways of understanding. Furthermore, though many things have changed for the better for women around the world, Jelinek does not falter and continues to write because injustices persist, despite the fact that postfeminist culture, the beauty myth, and the continued popularity of fairy tales that portray negative role models for young girls, would have us believe otherwise. Refusing to turn inward, Jelinek exposes the continued

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victimization of women through the semiotic implosion of the beloved fairy tale of Snow White and dramatic theater. She continues to fight linguistically for equality long after many have given up hope or falsely believe that the work of feminists is complete.

Works Cited Bethman, Brenda L. ““My Characters Live Only Insofar as They Speak”: Interview with Elfriede Jelinek.” Women in German Yearbook 16 (2000): 61-72. Burckhardt, Barbara. “Wer ist die Schönste im ganzen Land? “Prinzessinnendramen” Von Elfriede Jelinek - um die Wette inszeniert im Deutschen Schauspielhaus Hamburg, beim Steirischen Herbst in Graz und am Deutschen Theater Berlin.” Theater heute 1.3 (2003): 4448. Engdahl, Horace. “A Tribute to Elfriede Jelinek.” World Literature Today 79.2 (2005): 43-44. Haase, Donald, ed. Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004. Jelinek, Elfriede. Der Tod und das Mädchen I-V. Prinzessinnendramen. Berlin: Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003. Jürs-Munby, Karen. “Introduction.” Postdramatic Theater. London: Routledge, 2006. 1-15. Kallin, Britta. “In Brecht's Footsteps or Way Beyond Brecht? Brechtian Techniques in Feminist Plays by Elfriede Jelinek and Marlene Streeruwitz.” Communications from the International Brecht Society 29.1-2 (2000): 62-66. Kurzenberger, Hajo. “Die heutige Schaubühne als moralische Anstalt betrachtet. Über das Erbe der Aufklärung im postdramatischen Theater der Elfriede Jelinek.” Forum modernes Theater 15.1 (2000): 21-31. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. London: Routledge, 2006. Lücke, Bärbel. “Die Bilder Stürmen, Die Wand Hochgehen: Eine dekonstruktivistische Analyse von Elfriede Jelineks Prinzessinnendramen Der Tod und das Mädchen IV. Jackie und Der Tod und das Mädchen V. Die Wand.” Literatur für Leser 27.1 (2004): 22-42. —. “Denkbewegungen, Schreibbewegungen--Weiblichkeitsund Männlichkeitsmythen im Spiegel abendländischer Philosophie: Eine dekonstruktivistische Lektüre von Elfriede Jelineks 'Prinzessinnendramen' Der Tod und das Mädchen I-III.” Weiblichkeit als politisches

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Program? Sexualität, Macht und Mythos. Eds. Bettina Gruber and Heinz-Peter Preußer. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. Neuenfeldt, Susann. “Tödliche Perspektiven. Die toten sprechenden Frauen in Elfriede Jelineks Dramoletten “Der Tod und das Mädchen IV”. Sprachkunst 36.1 (2005): 147-65. Preston, Cathy Lynn. “Disrupting the Boundaries of Genre and Gender: Postmodernism and the Fairy Tale.” Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches. Ed. Donald Haase. Series in Fairy Tale Studies. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004. Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” College English 34.1 (1972): 18-30. Stephens, John, and Robyn McCallum. Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children's Literature. Children's Literature and Culture. Ed. Jack Zipes. Vol. 5. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. Tasker, Yvonne, and Diane Negra. Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002. Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. 2002 ed. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 2002.

PART II: IMAGINED COMMUNITIES – MYTHS OF SOLIDARITY

LANGUAGE, TRAUMA AND EXAGGERATED FICTION: DEBUNKING EAST GERMAN IDEOLOGY ON THE “JEWISH QUESTION” IN JUREK BECKER’S BRONSTEIN’S CHILDREN VICTORIA LENSHYN, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS

The German Democratic Republic marginalized the Holocaust and the Jewish experience in the east by merging it into the GDR’s antifascist grand-narrative.1 The “Jewish Question” in the east was treated as “an economic and political problem unique to both feudal and capitalist societies.” In both societies, Marxist-Leninist doctrine argued that ruling classes were to have used anti-Semitism to control the lower classes through religious rhetoric in feudal societies and in the 20th-Century through propaganda (Timm 39). Historian Jeffrey Herf describes the GDR’s attitude toward the “Jewish Question” as it fits into Marxist attitudes toward religion starting in the 19th Century up to Soviet policies toward Jews living under Stalin, especially antifascism, and the GDR’s manifestation of antifascism as a cornerstone of GDR national identity. Marx linked Jews in his essay “Zur Judenfrage” with capitalists and the bourgeoisie, a view that persisted into postwar East Germany and the eastern states (Herf 15-17). In such a view, the socialist state excluded itself from the political and racist persecution of Jews, instead suggesting liberation through the resolution of class struggle. Furthermore, in postwar East Germany, the “Jews were competitors for scarce political and emotional resources.” Though the communists did not deny the racist war 1

Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (1997); Thomas C. Fox, Stated Memory (1999); Caroline Alice Wiedmer, The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France (1999); Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (2002); Anke Pinckert, Film and Memory in East Germany (2008).

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by Nazi Germany, “they rarely if ever mentioned the Jewish catastrophe and never addressed its central role in Nazi policy” (Herf 38). In a literary engagement with this political topic, Jurek Becker’s Bronstein’s Children (book 1987, Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s film adaptation 1991) illustrates the painful repercussions of the Holocaust and the postwar handling of it in the GDR on both private and public levels. The exploration of Jewish experiences on an individual level offers a counternarrative, albeit set in a fictional tale, to the myth of a collective memory guided by Communist ideology. In exploring this topic through an East German protagonist of Jewish descent, the story illustrates how the mishandling of the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the official marginalization of the Jewish experience in actuality has an alienating effect on Jewish citizens; thus language barriers, historical experience, and questions of identity challenged their assimilation into socialist society thereby revealing the mythic nature of the ideological undertaking. Furthermore, recent Jewish suffering caused traumas for survivors and their descendents for which the State provided no mechanism for overcoming. These traumas are explored through exaggerated fiction in Bronstein’s Children, a fictional hyperbole of reprisal that addresses the ideological illusion maintained by the East German State that anti-Semitism could be resolved through the resolution of class conflict. The story instead proposes an alternative fantasy in which certain members of the East’s small Jewish community assert their own convictions and subversively assume positions as arbiters of justice. Regarding the writing of this novel, Thomas Jung quotes Becker as having said of Jews in the East, Why didn’t the anger of the survivors flare up later as the risk became smaller? [ . . . ] Why didn’t the survivors never, or as good as never, retaliate? Were they so acquiescent and deactivated that such an impulse wasn’t possible anymore? I wanted to portray a case that I would have presumed to be much more frequent, but obviously didn’t happen.2

The abduction in Bronstein’s Children is fictional and Becker suggests that such events did not happen in the GDR. It is precisely the non-event, 2

Translation mine. “Warum flammte der Zorn bei den Überlebenden auch später nicht auf, als das Risiko viel geringer geworden war? […] Warum haben die Lagerhäftlinge nie oder so gut wie nie Rache geübt? Waren sie so geduldig und desaktiviert, daß eine solche Lebensregung nicht mehr möglich war? Ich wollte einen Fall schildern, den ich sehr viel häufiger vermutet hätte, aber der offenbar nicht eingetreten ist” (183-4).

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the inaction of Jewish survivors to act out violently against their oppression and the repression of their recent historical tragedy that concerned Becker. This story of exaggerated events invented by Becker serves as a social object lesson to work on unresolved issues in East German society. By exaggerating such a possibility in his fictional story, he creates this fantasy that is constructed and then examined in several ways through acts of narration. The story reveals the complexity of the questions it raises by demonstrating the differing perspectives of Jewish survivors and their descendents that illustrate intergenerational positions and identities, especially in relation to the Holocaust. The Jewish characters in the novel and film encounter several issues that East German Jews faced in their socialist society: questions of assimilation, intergenerational conflict, and justice, which are manifested in a unique way due to the trauma of the Holocaust for both the victims as well as succeeding generations. Language and how language functions, as a means for communication and an indispensable element of identity and assimilation is central to the issues listed above. Becker’s grammatically attentive High German is depicted in his Jewish protagonist who also speaks flawless German, which serves as a reminder to Becker’s nonJewish German audience that this struggling Jewish protagonist is also a German. His Germanness is solidified through his adeptness with the language. Sander Gilman explains this role of language in his article on the Jewish subject in German literature: “[…] the ability of the ‘Jew’ to be understood a part of ‘German’ culture retains an older and still valid association. For the ‘Jew’ must speak German” (Gilman 20). German and Eastern European Jews were expected to assimilate to German language, culture, and Marxist ideology, and successful East German Jews made the decision between a Jewish identity and a German one by adopting this expectation of sameness. Becker’s decision to use an East German setting also calls for an understanding of the historical context: 1970s East Germany and almost 30 years after the end of the War. Despite Becker’s familiarity with both East and West German societies (he was living just across the border in West Berlin at this time), this novel concerning Jewish matters returns to an East German context. The return to this setting suggests something compelling about the myth regarding GDR policy toward the Jewish question; the myth of acceptance, tolerance, and the resolution of the “Jewish question” and anti-Semitism through addressing class conflict. In exploring these issues I will examine the thematization of trauma and the role of language in relation to trauma, assimilation, and identity, especially

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how the ongoing effects of the Holocaust are manifested in ensuing traumas for the younger generation of East German Jewish citizens. In his chapter “Trauma and Transference,” Jewish historian Saul Friedländer discusses the “nonintegration of the Shoah at the level of collective consciousness,” since the Shoah presents a problem to prior patterns of Jewish history that had up to that point integrated Jewish persecution into redemptive “patterns” (120-1). Friedländer explains that Jewish historians today must “question such an immobile structure”; a questioning that examines “the redeeming power of myth” (121). James Young summarizes: “To what extent will the introduction of the survivors’ memory into an otherwise rational historiography add a destabilizing strain to this narrative, and to what extent will such deep, unassimilable memory be neutralized by the meaning generated in any and all narrative?” (12). Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi writes in his exploration of Jewish history and memory, that Jewish memory tends to “subsume even major new events to familiar archetypes, for even the most terrible events are somehow less terrifying when viewed within old patterns rather than in their bewildering specificity” (36). In the case of Becker’s novel, however, the “rational historiography” challenged by the individual memories of the survivors is not only a challenge to a paradigmatic Jewish historical structure, but also to the GDR’s meta-narrative of antifascism. The experiences of repression and return in Becker’s story illustrate the notion of what Friedländer has called the “nonintegration of the Shoah” for a collective consciousness, albeit the socialist collective consciousness for both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. The conflict outlined by Friedländer is a collision of “deep memory” (repressed memory and unresolved trauma) and “common memory” (a redemptive or normative memory) (Friedländer 119). The complexities of Becker’s novel illustrates the resulting repression and return as Arno and his accomplices struggle with their memories counter to the state’s doctrine, and as the younger generation inherits the tragedy and work their way through the resulting traumas as Jewish citizens. Bronstein’s Children is the third book in a trilogy3 that treats specifically Jewish themes, a fact that is not unremarkable in postwar German literature (Pinkert 174). The protagonist, Hans Bronstein, is an East German youth and the son of Holocaust survivors. His mother died shortly after his birth and his much older sister, Elle, is mentally and emotionally damaged from her wartime experiences. Hans becomes 3 The first book of the trilogy is Jakob der Lügner (1969) and the second is Der Boxer (1976).

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estranged from his already distant father when he discovers that his father and two of his Jewish friends have abducted a former Neuengamme prison guard, Arnold Heppner, and beat him to coerce an undefined confession at the family’s cottage in the woods. Hans, born after the war, is too young to share the older generation’s memories of the Holocaust. The scale of each generation’s different experiences of historical tragedy and their different social experiences contribute to the different perspectives and intergenerational tension that is demonstrated especially between Jewish father and son in the novel and the film. Hans’ crisis reaches a climax when he decides to free the prisoner and finds that his father has died of a heart attack while interrogating him. Only after his father’s death is Hans able to first distance himself from the events of the past year and then begin his journey into sorting it out. The first traumatic event for Hans as a Jewish descendent arises from a lack of justice for the first generation. The unresolved issue of the Holocaust is something his father does not discuss with him and he is forced to confront it belatedly as a young adult. The protagonist’s temporal distance from the Holocaust is due to his age, but his status as a descendent of Jewish victims of the Holocaust ties him to the traumatic experience in a way he does not understand. Confronted with the urgency of this issue directly for the first time, Hans does not know how to react, a problem his father concurrently faces as Arno must come to understand his own intentions with the prisoner. The second trauma is the reliving of the violence through his father’s actions, which forces Hans to suddenly view his father as a perpetrator and not as a victim. Finally, the necessity for Hans to work through this past and revisit the trauma in order to move forward is a traumatic event in itself. A Freudian reading on trauma is helpful in understanding this process. In her discussion of trauma, Cathy Caruth describes latency as the stage in “which the effects of the experience are not apparent” and this includes the process of repression and return (202). It is upon the return that the victim is able to experience the traumatic event at all, meaning that one can really only experience the trauma after forgetting and then returning to the incident after a period of latency. Caruth explains, “since the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only in connection with another place, and in another time” (202-3). The later experience was understood by Freud to happen through transference. He wrote in his “Fifth Lecture on Psychoanalysis” that the patient directs emotions toward the physician; emotions that are unrelated to the actual relationship between patient and analyst and must therefore be “traced back to old wishful fantasies of the patient’s which have become unconscious” (56-

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Debunking East German Ideology on the “Jewish Question” in Jurek Becker’s Bronstein’s Children

57). The patient, therefore, re-experiences the original emotions of the traumatic event in his transference of emotions to the analyst. The notion of latency and transference is apparent on several levels in Bronstein’s Children. Hans’ belated experience of the Holocaust only arises through his father’s delayed revisiting of it through the resurfacing of this former concentration camp guard whom Arno now holds prisoner. Due to the fictional abduction and extreme actions of former victims depicted in this novel, the protagonist must contend with a new trauma after a new period of latency begins. Though Hans was initially confronted with the issues initiated by the abduction one year prior while it took place, he will really experience them for the first time in his active narration of the past. Furthermore, the act of transference is important in understanding the traumas in this story in that Freud reveals a human impulse to repeat traumatic events all over again. We see this manifestation in the story in the cycle of Arno, a Holocaust victim, who becomes an aggressor toward a former guard. Since Arno does not have a therapist to whom he can transfer his repressed emotions, he transfers them to his own prisoner instead. Indeed, it is through transference that Arno’s individual struggle and personal memory becomes a challenge to society, for the victim will in his process transfer his emotions, memories, and experiences to those people and things around him. Summarizing Dominick La Capra, historian Kerwin Lee Klein explains the pervasiveness of transference in that “everyone has a transferential relation to everything.” Klein quotes La Capra: “transference is a ‘universal phenomenon of the human mind [ . . . ], and in fact dominates the whole of each person’s relations to his human environment” (quoted in Klein, 140). I read this process of transference as having two sides. Since individuals want to be a part of something they might re-insert themselves into a narrative. This explains why Arno tortures and demands a confession from a guard who was not stationed at a camp in which he was interned. His transference allows his individual psyche to apply to a group collective psyche of suffering for the European Jewish community, especially for his generation. On the other hand, his process of transference in his East German society causes a relocation of his individual memories onto the official collective memory that is exclusive to many of its Jewish citizens in terms of the genocide and suffering of European Jews. Hans attempts to intervene in this violent cycle of repression and return through his act of narration, which is his working through the past so that such an experience does not happen to him again. He explains, “What other people achieve with their emotions, I would say, I’d like to

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accomplish with my reason” (2); thus, he begins to recount the events of the last year in an attempt to find an understanding of it. The film more directly states his goal in narration: “Maybe I should get the facts straight first… before putting them out of my mind. Otherwise they’ll go on haunting me. The memories will come and go… beyond my control.” The event of narrative closure is for Hans a way of trying to end the impulse of repeating traumatic events. Again referring to a Freudian reading on trauma, Dominick La Capra explains that when the past invades the present, the difference between past and present becomes indiscernible for the victim (207). It is precisely this phenomenon that Hans addresses in his retelling of events. His acknowledgement at the beginning of the film that the past must be mastered in order for him to live fully in the present implies that there are levels of trauma that must be worked through first. It is clear in both the novel and the film that the distance he has put between himself and the past has isolated him from his present and continues to negatively impact his future. This working through4 is clearly marked in the novel by the constant transfer from present to past tense, and through the film by the juxtaposing of scenes from the past with those of the present. Cathy Caruth identifies narration as a method for working through traumatic events, in that the trauma transforms “into a narrative memory” (quoted in La Capra 208). La Capra also points out in his reading of Freud and trauma that the act of narration may be therapeutic in working through the traumatic past in order to allow the victim to move forward (208). Furthermore, language has an important role in this process, namely that narrative “enables one to recount events and perhaps to evoke experience, typically through nonlinear movements that allow trauma to register in language and its hesitations, indirections, pauses, and silences” (La Capra 208). Hans must work through the lies, the silences, the language barriers, and potential memory loss to overcome the past, and he does this through narration and flashback. Through alternation between his account of the recent past and his present state of being, Hans works his way through these challenges.

4

The idea of working through the past recalls the German term Bewältigung, or more specifically, Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The term means not only coming to terms with the past, but also processing it and learning to live with past events in the present. The process especially applies to Germany’s Nazi past and the Holocaust, and it applies on both a personal and social level. Though a discussion of social Vergangenheitsbewältigung is larger than the scope of this paper, the connections between this larger social task and Hans’ task as a descendent of Holocaust survivors entreats recognition as two sides of Germany’s recent past.

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Language is not only a tool for remembering, however; it is also paradoxically a barrier. The problematic nature of language is a key motif to understanding its role in the characters’ working through traumatic pasts. Hans’ confusing experiences also correlate with the postwar generational experiences which Becker wished to explore. Historians Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer have commented on a generational disparity specifically in the east that resulted in “contrary memories.” A public distance from the past was the manifestation of “a generation that had been brought up on antifascist rhetoric” (Jarausch 334). In Bronstein’s Children this disparity pertains specifically to the complex relation between Jewish children and their parents and how the “antifascist rhetoric” impacted the intergenerational relations and memories of East German Jews. In the novel, the father does not discuss his experiences with his son. This results in a discordant relationship between the two. In addition to the different political ideologies that have defined their lifetimes, the unspeakable experience of the Holocaust has created an insurmountable gap between the generations. A moment in the novel when Hans explicitly shows his frustration and anger with his father is when he hears his father and his Jewish friends speak Yiddish for the first time. The incident with the concentration camp guard, however, has stirred Holocaust memories for his father and his friends, and they turn to Yiddish to speak about them. When Hans eavesdrops on the conversation, he explains, “I found that terrifying; I felt betrayed. [ . . . ] Never had I felt such hostility toward him.” Hans suggests, “Perhaps they were talking Yiddish because they thought it especially appropriate for the subject” (191). Despite the similarities between Yiddish and German, the shock of hearing his father use the unfamiliar tongue and his alienation from this language culture lock the young protagonist out of the memories of the Holocaust, for he does not even possess the language in which it is discussed around him. The use of Yiddish deepens the intergenerational rift and it helps Arno assert his Jewish identity and belated resistance. Language indicates the characters’ places in society as well as in history. Yiddish is the language for survivors such as Arno and his friends to discuss their tragic experiences of the past, but for their children, Yiddish is used despite their inability to understand the language, which consequently helps block their understanding of the history. For Hans’ generation, the German language is the everyday language and used to express their own experiences. The German language also coincides with his experiences in the present, while Arno’s turn to Yiddish allows him to alternate between times, to leave the contemporary GDR that largely

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ignored his past of suffering. As a member of that society, however, and as the father of a GDR youth, he brings the past memories into the present, which consequently complicates identity and historical orientation for his son. Language very strongly indicates a person’s “identity and history” in this official Marxist-Leninist context (Gilman 168). Sander Gilman identifies the role of language in Bronstein’s Children especially in this differentiation between time: “Language, as is rarely the case in such an explicit manner in Jurek’s fiction, defines identity and history, and serves to distance father and son” (168). Language also functioned this way for Becker, especially in the process of remembering. Becker had very little or no memory of the Polish ghetto Lòdz and the concentration camps Ravenbsbrück and Sachsenhausen where he was interned as a little boy. His father also declined to talk about it, and the silence made an impression on the young Becker (Becker, Vater 15). The urgency for Becker to assimilate into East German culture and overcome his feeling of alienation required a rather quick transition both linguistically and culturally. Despite Becker’s initial childhood struggles to learn German as a second language, he had as an adult almost completely forgotten his native language (Polish), and as it seems, with the forgotten childhood language went many of the concrete childhood memories; thus, the connection between language, memory, and identity were for Becker very strong. Becker himself explained that the memories of the ghetto and the camps were locked in with his forgotten mother tongue (Rock 338-9). Furthermore, Becker’s lost mother tongue went with his own lost mother who died of tuberculosis in internment at Sachsenhausen, weakened from giving her food to save her son. The loss of language faded with the memories of her and the camps (Gilman 20). The relationship he had with his father after the war was not defined by shared memories of their loss, but rather by the “day-to-day reality of a Jew raising a son alone in the post-Shoah world of Germany.” This included their existence in a society that silenced their experiences as Jews surviving the Holocaust, as well as his own father’s silence on the subject. Becker himself turned to writing as a means for working through the past (Gilman 21). Hans’ silence concerning Jewish issues is most clearly exposed when his Jewish girlfriend says to him, “I’ve known for a long time that there is a certain subject one cannot discuss with you. [ . . . ] The moment there’s a word starting with J, you break out in a sweat. The real victims are forever wanting to celebrate memorial days and organize vigils, and you want silence to be kept” (219). Hans’ preference for silence on Jewish issues is parallel to his own father’s years of silence about his Holocaust

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experiences and it reflects the GDR policy of silence on the same issues: they are acts of repression. Arno’s inability to communicate his suffering as a victim of fascism correlates with Hans’ inability to articulate his own trauma as a son of a victim of fascism. Indeed, Hans actually denies the designation “victim.” When Hugo Lepschitz scolds him for refusing to use the official designation “victim” that would bring him certain social advantages in the GDR, Hans remarks, “But you’re mistaken. I am not the son of a victim of Fascism. [ . . . ] By the time I was born, he had long ceased to be a victim.”5 Lepschitz tries to explain, “One remains a victim for the rest of one’s life, my boy [ . . . ]. One never gets rid of that” (41). Socially, however, the assumption of the title victim carried with it psychological consequences. In order to fully understand resistance to the label Opfer des Faschismus (victim of Fascism), one must also understand that this designation was a conflated term for victims, that for GDR Jews who accepted the title, it meant they were relegated to a group of victims separate from another designated group, the Communists or Kämpfer (fighters), who according to the difference, resisted Fascism. The rhetoric illustrates well the East’s policy of antifascism, which inherently marginalized the Jewish question by creating an ideological framework for the State to generate a model society with heroic Communist martyrs at the top. Thomas C. Fox explains that antifascism created a hierarchical system for designating victims of Fascism and allocating social, cultural, and financial atonement (Fox 8-9). While the Jews were allocated to the group of victims, the Communists were given the more active designation of Kämpfer gegen den Faschismus (fighters against fascism). Such titles carried significant meaning for the different groups, since the more passive term victim labeled Jews themselves as passive, a designation that in effect blames Jews for their persecution. The difference in meaning carried practical consequences. “Pensions of the Opfer, for example, were higher than those of the average citizen, but less than those of the Kämpfer.” Furthermore, Fox cites East German Historian Helmut Eschwege who describes incidents of Jewish Kämpfer who did not receive the higher benefits of non-Jewish fighters based on their status as Jews (Fox 81). The victim/fighter (or passive/resistant) rhetoric also emerges as a generational difference in the novel between Jewish father and son. As Hans reflects on the events leading up to his father’s death, he at one point thinks, “The thought that I might have saved Father if I had confronted 5

“Aber ihr irrt euch. Ich bin nicht der Sohn eines Opfers des Faschismus [ . . . ]. Als ich geboren wurde, war er längst kein Opfer mehr” (44).

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him more decisively continues to haunt me.” He remarks, however, “No one had taught me how to resist, no one had shown me how to do what one feels is the right thing” (70). Hans is recognizing a weakness in conviction and action that, as we will see, Arno points out about East Germans and the state apparatus of the GDR. In this way, the weakness of conviction and action based on moral conviction is something the narrative suggests that Hans shares with his fellow Germans, thus separating his identity with his fellow Jewish citizens, especially at the moment between Jewish father and son. Although Hans would like to reject his Jewish identity, which he awkwardly feels to be physically present in him, his father holds on to his Jewish identity, which Arno paradoxically feels is also an artificial creation. Regardless of Hans’ suppression of his Jewish heritage, he is forced to contend with his different social standing as a male of Jewish descent in a public swimming pool. Hans punches a fellow student when the other boy orders Hans to remove his clothes in the showers as is indicated by a sign on the wall. After Hans apologizes for punching him, the other student remarks, “If I had known about it, I wouldn’t have bothered you, of course.” Hans convinces himself that his teacher has attempted to amend the situation by explaining that Hans is a Jew: “Hans is a Jew. There may well be sensitive areas there of which people like us have no idea”6 (37). Hans’ assumption is reasonable and it discloses the challenges he faces to break from the designation ‘Jew.’ The construction of his thoughts indicates that he does sense a division, for he can imagine that his teacher would communicate with the other boy by articulating an us-and-them (unsereins) split. His last thoughts to himself about the matter are to refute the physical classification of being Jewish by wanting to correct the mistaken assumption that he is circumcised. In the novel, the swimming pool scene is where Hans also narrates his father’s concept of Jewish identity. The film depicts the same concept by combining two parts from the novel into one scene thus allowing Arno to articulate the opinion himself. Hans comes home to an empty kitchen and asks Arno, “Do you believe that every Jew should go miserably hungry at least once in his life?” His use of the word “Jew” is meant to attack his father’s concept of Jewish identity based on an understanding of collective Jewish suffering. The question initiates Arno’s speech, who asks, “What do you mean with ‘Jew’? Are you a Jew? There are no Jews at all. Jews were an invention [ . . . ]. The inventors had spread their rumor with so much conviction and persistence that even those who were directly 6

“Hans ist Jude. Es kann da leicht Empfindlichkeiten geben, von denen unsereins nichts ahnt.” (41).

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Debunking East German Ideology on the “Jewish Question” in Jurek Becker’s Bronstein’s Children

affected and suffered from it, the alleged Jews, fell for it and claimed to be Jews” (37-8). This speech illustrates Arno’s idea that Jewishness is an external designation internalized by ‘Jewish’ people. His thoughts regarding Jewish identity compare with Becker’s own father’s comment on identity. Becker’s father explained to him once, “If there weren’t any anti-Semitism – do you think I would have felt for one second as a Jew?”7 Again, the external forces that classify people as ‘Jew’ have forced the classified group to collectively become a group. Furthermore, recent history, the external persecution and murder of the identified group, have created a unique social space in postwar society for Jews to unite with others who have shared in the same sufferings. It is this social space that Becker explores. This is clear in the novel by the connection Arno has with his other two accomplices and their joint crime against the former guard. Hans also experiences the external designation, but unlike his father and his father’s friends, he resists the identity completely. Arno’s accomplice and fellow Holocaust victim Kwart also justifies his actions against the prisoner based on this understanding of Jewish identity. When Hans goes to him for an explanation, Kwart suggests, “You should think hard about whose side you’re on. If you can answer that, it will take care of a lot of questions” (118). Arno also urges Hans to take sides on the issue and he pulls at Hans’ emotions as a son and brother of Holocaust victims: Why are you so unconcerned? Why don’t you get angry when you think of their victims? I don’t mean only the dead; I also mean people like me and Elle. A little more indignation, if you please. [ . . . ] I’ll explain it to you once again. The reason they [the courts] can’t condemn him out of their belief is that they have none. All they know is orders. Many of them imagine that the orders they are given correspond to their own opinions. But who can rely on that? Order them to eat dog turds, and, if you’re strong enough, they’ll soon come to regard dog turds as a delicacy. (109)

Hans dismisses his father’s opinion as simply talk, but Arno’s vision of the past and present and his opinion of the State’s justice system for handling it is obvious. He defines the difference between the State’s handling of justice and his own in that his treatment of the prisoner stems from a strong conviction in the matter, something the State lacks. Arno’s inability to convince his son of the integrity of his actions recalls our discussion of Hans’ reflection about himself as a person unable to show 7

Translation mine. “Wenn es keinen Anti-Semitismus geben würde – denkst du, ich hätte mich auch nur eine Sekunde als Jude gefühlt?” (Becker Mein Vater, 15).

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resistance or do what he sees as right (“No one had taught me how to resist, no one had shown me how to do what one feels is the right thing”). Arno is doing what he thinks is the right thing, thereby demonstrating a difference in state sanctioned actions and personal belief in a moral matter. Hans regrets his inability to show such strength, for if he had he thinks he might have been able to stand up to his father and save him (“The thought that I might have saved Father if I had confronted him more decisively continues to haunt me.”). The paradox of this dilemma for Hans illustrates the complexity of the issues at hand – a balance between the limitations of political dogma and the dangers of individual (in)action. The paradox turns the rhetoric around in which the lines between those who fight or resist and those who comply are not so clearly drawn. In this situation Hans finds that he was indeed a coward: “Between the worlds of speaking and thinking there was a wall, and I would have considered myself the greatest idiot if I tried to break down that wall. To this day I panic when I find myself alone with an opinion” (70). Hans’ hesitations illustrate his father’s criticism of the GDR state and its people and Hans finds himself on the line between the side Arno criticizes and the side to which Arno belongs. Hans also still sits on the wall “between the worlds of speaking and thinking,” but his narration is a way for him to find his opinions, even if those opinions are met with resistance. Becker’s novel of exaggerated fiction portrays extreme effects of a difficult debate surrounding the politics of antifascism and the reality for those asked to collectively forget their own past memories and conform to the State’s own collective memory and idea of justice necessary for the present and future. Though the abduction of the prison guard is purely fictional, the extreme action of Holocaust survivors becoming perpetrators against their former tormentors illustrates a sense of frustration in the legal system. Hans asks his father, “Why don’t you and the others simply report the man? [ . . . ] Are you afraid that he’ll get off too lightly?” His father’s answer, explicitly in the film, considers specifically the East German courts’ record for penalizing former Nazis. He replies, “No, I don’t believe that. Not here in the East.”8 Arno clearly differentiates, however, between a policy of punishing former Nazis and the reasoning behind it. He identifies the rhetoric of antifascism in the East compared to the official policies for handling former Nazis in the west, where many were able to submit to the process of denazification or stay anonymous and reestablish lives and professional careers in the postwar period (Fox 6, Herf 182-183). The characterization of the West as a refuge for former Nazis is 8

“Nein, das glaube ich nicht. Nicht hier im Osten.”

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Debunking East German Ideology on the “Jewish Question” in Jurek Becker’s Bronstein’s Children

also thematized in Becker’s writing. For example, in Jacob the Liar the narrator must go to West Berlin to interview a former Nazi about the disappearance of a Jewish doctor during the war (179). In Bronstein’s Children Arno’s prisoner goes west after Hans frees him (220). Arno’s speech also alludes to this difference between East and West Germany, but he does not recognize a moral difference in the policy. Instead, he reduces the policy-making to the chance of borders and occupying forces thereby suggesting that the East Germans are mere puppets of an occupying regime. He explains to Hans, It was true that the concentration-camp guard would be severely punished if they handed him over to a court of law. But on what basis? Solely because one occupation power rather than the other happened to have conquered the country? If the border had been drawn slightly differently, the same people on either side would have opposite convictions. Anyone strong enough could impose his convictions on this German rabble, whether his name was Hitler or something else. (66)

Arno and his friends do not believe that the court system represents the same moral convictions as they do, especially for a case with strong moral implications. Though Arno certainly alludes to a difference between a state-led persecution of Nazi perpetrators in East and West, he is unconvinced by the morality that drives the official decision. The theme of individuals taking justice into their own hands is significant when one considers the role that the GDR’s policy of antifascism played for many postwar European Jews who decided to move to or stay in the East. Frank Stern explains that about 4,000 returnees of Jewish origin chose to live in the East. “It was their intention to participate in the economic, cultural, academic and political reconstruction initiated by Soviet policy.” In short, “[t]he overarching difference between those who chose to live in the West and those who chose to live in East Germany was the primacy of antifascist principles.” The reality of antifascism in the East, however, amounted to a “dialectics of return” for the Jewish exiles, where return often meant not only “political integration” but also “negation of Jewish traditions and identities” (Stern 57-62). This echoes the “dialectics of the Enlightenment” pointed out by historian Jeffrey Herf, who wrote that in the GDR the invitation to Jews to join East German society and the socialist project evoked the paradox of the Enlightenment (Herf 16-7). Jews’ successful assimilation depended on their ability to assume this notion of sameness. The ideology of antifascism in the GDR, however, suffered at the State’s close alliance with the Soviet Union, and with it the 1950s Stalinist anti-Semitic

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campaign. The 1950s Soviet-led anti-Zionist campaigns consequently reduced the rights of East German Jews (Fox 80). Though Jews in East Germany, including Becker and especially his father, “initially [were] convinced of the merits of the GDR both as home and as political system” (Rock 338), the faith in the integrity of the GDR’s antifascist principles and the capacity of the state to protect the interests of the Jewish victims and the surviving population was diminished. It is certainly the contradictions of the official policy of antifascism that at first seemed so promising for Europe’s remaining Jews who decided to live in the East and the GDR’s close alliance to the Soviet Union and with it the long-term results of the Stalinist anti-Semitic campaign that Arno reflects on when he considers the legal system. By the 1970s the inequity of the grand narrative of antifascism is also clear, especially in light of the hierarchical system of “victims” and “fighters” of fascism. In understanding Hans’ alienation from his father and his father’s friends, and then again after Arno’s death, his alienation from his surrogate family, one must examine the reasons for his deviance from the Jewish community as a historically and contemporaneously marginalized group. Hans is unable to share in his father’s past sufferings thus he is unable to sympathize in his father’s beliefs. His resistance to this designation of ‘Jewish’ belonging or identity challenges the theory that Arno and his friends maintain, but the complexity of the subject is explored in Hans’ inability to completely depart from the community and the challenges he repeatedly faces in society. Despite the traumatic consequences of the Holocaust for his family, reified in his father’s transgressions against the former guard, Hans is tormented by related yet different traumas. Hans’ experience with the War and the Holocaust is defined by the experience lived by the postwar generation, but the GDR’s silence on it and his father’s lack of communication about it contributes to Hans’ ensuing alienation from recent Jewish history, which is also his family’s personal history. Hans’ story is his discursive space to revisit and work through the traumas that climaxed in the weeks leading up to his father’s death. Saul Friedländer quotes Jean-Francis Lyotard’s definition of “working through” as “something [that] remains to be phrased.” Friedländer warns against the “naive historical positivism leading to simplistic and self-assured historical narrations and closures” (131). Becker offers a narrative on an individual level that serves as a counter to the simplistic Marxist explanation that reduced the Jewish experience, especially the recent tragedy of the Holocaust, to the margins of class conflict.

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Debunking East German Ideology on the “Jewish Question” in Jurek Becker’s Bronstein’s Children

Works Cited Becker, Jurek. Bronstein’s Children. Trans. Leila Vennewitz. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1988. —. Bronsteins Kinder. Rostock: Hinstorff, 1987. —. Jacob the Liar. Trans. Leila Vennewitz. New York: Arcade Pub., 1996. —. “Mein Judentum.” Mein Vater, die Deutschen und ich: Aufsätze, Vorträge, Interviews. Christine Becker, ed. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2007. 13-23. Bronstein’s Children. Dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz. Based on the book by Jurek Becker. 1991. Caruth, Cathy. “Trauma: Explorations in Memory.” Theories of Memory: A Reader. Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead, eds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007. Fox, Thomas C. Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust. Rochester: Camden House, 1999. Freud, Sigmund. Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961. Friedländer, Saul. “Trauma and Transference.” Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993. 117-137. Gilman, Sander L. “Becoming a Jew by Becoming a German: The Newest Jewish Writing from the ‘East.’” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. 25.1(2006). 16-32. Hake, Sabine. German National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2002. Herf, Jeffrey. Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the two Germanys. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1997. Jarausch, Konrad and Michael Geyer. Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Jung, Thomas Klaus. Jurek Becker: Schreiben zwischen Sozialismus und Judentum. Eine Interpretation der Holocaust-Texte im Kontext. [Ph.D. dissertation]. Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 1996. Klein, Kerwin Lee. “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse.” Representations. 69 (2000). 127-150. La Capra, Dominick. “Writing History, Writing Trauma.” Theories of Memory: A Reader. Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead, eds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007. Pinkert, Anke. Film and Memory in East Germany. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008.

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Rock, David. “Questions of Language, Identity and Jewishness in Jurek Becker’s Works.” Jews in German Literature since 1945: GermanJewish Literature? Pól O’Dochartaigh (ed.). Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. 337-351. Stern, Frank. “Return to the Disowned Home – German Jews and the Other Germany.” New German Critique. 67(1996). 57-72. Timm, Angelika. Jewish Claims Against East Germany: Moral Obligations and Pragmatic Policy. Budapest: CEU Press, 1997. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1982. Young, James. “Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the After-Images of History.” At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. 12-41.

MYTHS THAT SHAPED THE EXILE EXPERIENCE OF CENTRAL EUROPEAN JEWISH REFUGEES IN JAPANESE-OCCUPIED SHANGHAI DIANE LIU, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS

The plight of German and Austrian Jewish refugees during World War II is well documented. Exile discourse, however, often ignores one historical phenomenon: the Jewish community that found refuge in Shanghai. Japanese-occupied since 1937, Shanghai was both the least sought-after and most accessible destination in the world for members of the German-speaking Jewry fleeing National Socialist persecution. More desirable destinations such as the United States and England implemented selective entry restrictions; yet, the doors to Shanghai, a most unlikely haven, stayed open to all. Upon suffering defeat in the First Opium War (1839-1842), China signed treaties with the British, Americans, and French that allowed for Western business and residence and extraterritorial rights in several port cities, including Shanghai. These treaties led to the establishment of two local foreign municipalities: the International Settlement, governed by the British and Americans, and the French Concession. These quasi-colonial districts were treated as sovereign municipalities through the first years of Japanese occupation. Western perception of power and sovereignty in China, Japanese occupation, and Chinese chaos—international and domestic—led to Shanghai’s functioning as an open port, for none of these governing powers regulated the entry of refugees into the city. There were three distinct waves of Jewish emigration into Shanghai. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Sephardic Jewish businessmen, bankers, merchants, and traders settled there. They prospered and established themselves as prominent figures in the city. Later, Ashkenazi Jews fled to North China and Shanghai to escape persecution during the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) and the Russian Civil War (19171922). Following the November pogroms of 1938, Central European Jewish refugees began to stream into the city. The following focuses on the experience of the central European Jewish refugees in Japanese-

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Myths that Shaped the Exile Experience of Central European Jewish Refugees in Japanese-Occupied Shanghai

occupied Shanghai from “Kristallnacht” (November 9-10, 1938) until Japanese capitulation in August 1945. Why did Japan, a traditionally xenophobic country with close ties to Germany and Italy, allow this influx of central European Jewish refugees from her allies into Shanghai? The following will expose the myths that shaped Japanese perceptions of the Jews and, in doing so, explain Japan's policies towards these refugees. Stereotypes about rich, intelligent, and influential Jews pervaded Japan. These stereotypes, which were based on myths, did not foment anti-Semitism. Instead, they garnered admiration. Japan encouraged the influx of central European refugees through a passive attitude as to offend neither her allies, who expelled the Jews, nor potential investors in the West, who were thought to be under Jewish control. Ultimately, Japan hoped to attract foreign capital from the West, and use it to bolster her status as a leader on the international stage and the premier power in Asia. Yet Japanese policies toward the refugees changed over time. The first restrictions on emigrant influx were implemented in August 1939. What led to this new policy? It was not Japanese anti-Semitism. A barrage of anti-Semitic propaganda in Japan made the Japanese suspicious of Jews, but did not convince them to exterminate them. Instead, these restrictions were implemented in order to placate Jews who had already settled in Shanghai and were concerned about a housing shortage and economic competition. Focused on establishing herself as a world power, Japan sought to gain favor with Jews, who would then— according to myth— convince America and Britain to invest in Japan. As the war unfolded, it became more advantageous to the Japanese to appease the Germans than to pursue Western capital. Therefore, Japanese policies became more restrictive and oppressive. The turning point in Japanese policy occurred on the night of December 7th, 1941. That night Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and she and America became official enemies. As myths surrounding Jews no longer factored into Japanese policy-making, Japanese passivity towards them eroded. The following will reveal the true motivation behind Japanese policies toward Jews – economic self-interest – and how that opportunism saved over 15,000 lives. This will be shown through a description of how the Japanese first welcomed Jews to Shanghai, the presentation of antiSemitic propaganda and its failure to convince the Japanese to destroy the Jewish refugees, and details of the changes in Japanese policy after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Following the November pogroms, emigration from Central Europe increased rapidly. Hugo Hoenigsberg, an Austrian Jew who fled to Shanghai in 1939 and left Shanghai for England after the war, shared his

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memories of his last months in Europe and his experiences in Shanghai in a personal report recorded in September 1955. He recounted his arrest during his imprisonment following the Night of Broken Glass, or “Kristallnacht”1: Then November 10, 1938 approached. Like so many other Jews, I was arrested in my friends’ apartment and sent to prison. Here I was not treated too badly, while others suffered abuse. I was released one week after I pointed out that I was a soldier in World War I—and suffered from a crippled hand as a result. I was given until February 1939 to leave Austria. (2)

By then, destination options were limited. Many other central European Jews found themselves in a similar situation. The international community was reluctant to help. At the Evian Conference, held in France in July 1938 and attended by thirty two nations to address the growing refugee problem, representatives explained why their respective nations could not allow more refugees to enter—European countries claimed to be “saturated,” Latin American nations sought farmers and not “merchants and city intellectuals,” Canada cited the bad situation of its labor market, and Australia claimed the refugees would disrupt “racial uniformity” and that their presence would give rise to antiSemitism there (“No One Wants to Have Them”). Emigration policies reflected their unwillingness. The American, Australian, and British governments not only required visas, which they refused to issue citing quota restrictions, but also demanded affidavits, police certificates of good behavior, which would have to come from the Nazi authorities, and proof of financial independence. Latin American nations effectively closed their doors to Jewish refugees as well. Brazil indirectly refused Jews by requiring baptismal certificates to enter, whereas Bolivia and Paraguay explicitly declared Jews ineligible to enter (Sakamoto 30). The New York Times reported on November 12, 1938 that both Mexico and Poland turned away refugees at their borders (“Mexico”; “Poland”). Below these articles was a small report entitled, “Refugees Crowd Liners: Many Austrian Jews Sail on Italian Ships for the Far East.” The final paragraph of the three-paragraph article mentions: “No restrictions have thus far been placed on Jewish emigration by Near Eastern and Far Eastern governments. Even crowded countries like Japan do not deny them hospitality.” Hoenigsberg himself faced the emigration obstacles and 1

The reports of Hugo Hoenigsberg, Robert Peritz, Richard Stein and Kurt Lewin were recorded in German and have been translated by the author.

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Myths that Shaped the Exile Experience of Central European Jewish Refugees in Japanese-Occupied Shanghai

resorted to moving to China. He described his unsuccessful attempt to immigrate to Trinidad: We [my wife and I] tried to obtain entry visas to Trinidad, and had already collected the allotted 545 dollar entry fee and bought the tickets when immigration to Trinidad was suddenly restricted by the English. (2-3)

After being prevented from traveling to Trinidad, Hoenigsberg was advised by a representative of the Jewish community in Vienna to try to enter Shanghai. The unique history of Shanghai partially explains the port city’s open door policy. The signing of the Treaty of Nanking between China and Britain at the end of the First Opium War (1842), and its supplement, the Treaty of the Bogue (1843), called for five plots of land in Chinese cities, including Shanghai, to be set aside for businesses and traders. The subsequent Treaties of Wangxia (1844) and the Whampoa (1844) granted similar rights to the Americans and French, respectively (Ristaino 7; Heppner 37-38). This led to the establishment of two self-governing Western concessions within the city of Shanghai outside of Chinese jurisdiction, namely the International Settlement and the French Concession. Over time, these settlements expanded their land holdings and increased their sovereignty (Ristaino 12). The International Settlement of Shanghai was formed in 1854 and governed by the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) which, after World War I, was made up of five British, five Chinese, two American, and two Japanese members (Heppner 38; Ristaino 10; Tokayer and Swartz 63). The French refused the multi-lateral agreement between the British and Americans; hence, the French Concession was governed separately (Ristaino 10). After defeating the Chinese in the Battle of Shanghai (1937), Japan gained control of Shanghai, excluding these local foreign municipalities, and ruled it through a Chinese puppet government called Dadao. Shanghai was therefore governed by a Chinese puppet government, occupied by Japan, and controlled partially by Britain, the United States, and France. This complicated sharing of control of the city worked in refugees’ favor, for none of these governing powers regulated entry of emigrants. News of unrestricted entry into Shanghai circulated among German and Austrian Jewish refugees. Between November 1938 and August 1939, when Japanese first placed restrictions on emigrant influx, central European Jews streamed into Shanghai at a rate of 2,000 per month (Armbrüster, Kohlstruck, and Mühlberger 14; Barnett 251).

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Why did the Japanese wait until there were already over 15,000 refugees in Shanghai to implement entry restrictions? Japan wanted Jewish refugees to settle there. Before World War II, philosemitic notions were prevalent in imperial Japan. The Japanese subscribed to widely circulated stereotypes about Jewish wealth, intelligence and influence, and believed they would benefit economically from the Jewish presence in Shanghai. Jews were considered a model of long-lasting strength and prosperity, wisdom and intelligence (Zhou 29). One such reason is because “[the Jews were seen as] unusual people without a country or armies, but whose ideas were as dangerous […] as any geographicallybased enemy” (Kranzler, “Japanese” 195). In a time of imperialism and ultranationalist sentiment in Japan, this legendary power garnered admiration from the Japanese. An initiative now known as the Fugu Plan reflects their belief in Jewish stereotypes of ingenuity and capability. It was named by Marvin Tokayer, a historian and a rabbi in Tokyo in the 1970s, after the Japanese word for blowfish, or “fugu,” a delicacy can be deadly if not expertly handled before consumption. Hatched by Japanese Navy Captain Inuzuka Koreshiga, the Fugu Plan called for the establishment of a satellite settlement of Shanghai in Manchuria, which was renamed Manchukuo when the Japanese took control of it in 1931, for 30,000-70,000 Jews fleeing central Europe. The Japanese hoped to utilize Jews’ mythical influence and know-how to develop Manchukuo. As opposed to the small, crowded islands of Japan, Manchukuo was a large, thinly-populated region rich in natural resources including coal, timber and minerals. Japanese industrialist Ayukawa Gisuke, one of the founders of Nissan Motors in 1932, sought to exploit Jewish “creative energy, industrial skills, and cultural finesse” to develop the area (Tokayer and Swartz 52). According to the Fugu Plan, Jewish contentment would neutralize any potential threat posed to the Japanese. The Japanese also believed the Jews to be a rich and influential race. Marvin Tokayer described the Japanese association of the word “Jew” with access to and control of vast sums of money (46). Jacob Schiff, a Jewish banker with Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York, lent credibility to this myth. He gave the Japanese a desperately-needed US$180 million loan during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) (Ristaino 31). This load led to American and British political sympathies with the Japanese, proving to the Japanese that Jews were indeed influential in the politics of the West (Krebs 59). The Japanese emerged victorious over Russia—the first time a non-European nation defeated a major world power in a full scale war— and earned its place among the powerful imperial countries (Goodman 9).

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Myths that Shaped the Exile Experience of Central European Jewish Refugees in Japanese-Occupied Shanghai

Another believer of this stereotype, Capt. Inuzuka asked U.S. Jewish circles for ¥200 million to fund the Fugu Plan and some of Japan’s other initiatives— only ¥20 million was intended for development of Manchukuo (Ristaino 154). He believed the proposed Jewish settlement to be a crucial bargaining chip in the negotiations with the Americans. To the Japanese, further confirmation of the stereotype of the wealthy Jews could be found in the membership of the Shanghai Stock Exchange: the president and approximately 33% of its 99 members were Sephardic Jews when the Japanese took control of Shanghai in 1937 (Tokayer and Swartz 63). This statistic is especially impressive when one considers the overrepresentation of Jews relative to making up less than 0.1% of the population of Shanghai proper at the time. Anti-Semitic propaganda distributed in the Far East attempted to exploit Japanese belief in these Jewish stereotypes. The propaganda manipulated those same myths to denigrate the reputation of Jews with the intent to supplant admiration with Jew-hatred. An American pamphlet that originated in the West, Germany, and Russia exploited these stereotypes. An American pamphlet distributed by the Anti-Jewish K.K.K. in Shanghai in 1939 spread anti-Semitic notions. It claimed that: Railways, banks, hospitals, factories, hotels, steamship companies, courts of justice and legal practice, police service, universities and schools, theatre and arts, [are] at the hands of Jews who are corrupting the people and making them weaker through their educational system of effeminacy, implanting their sin and soul poison. (4)

This publication also distorted the myth of the Jew as a major influence on American politics. It labeled Jews as “those who were parasites and who were bound to give account for the evil which plunged Germany and Austria into unequal treaties and nearly turned Germany into a second U.S.S.R., into a country under the yoke of international Jewry (7).” It not only accuses Jews of orchestrating unfair treaties but also alludes to the false accusation of all Jews being Satanists and “Judosocialists (sic)” (Anti-Jewish K.K.K. 9). The pro-Germany Englishlanguage publication of the XXth Century (XXC), published in Shanghai from October 1941 until June 1945, also claimed that Jews influenced politics. It asserted that public opinion in the United States is “is under the influence of Roosevelt’s political machine and the Jews, who [. . .] advocate Churchill’s policy” (Mehnert 2). The myth of Judeo-Bolshevism reached Japan as she sent 70,000 troops to fight alongside White Russians during the Siberian Intervention (1918-1922). Many Japanese who had no

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contact with and little interest in Jews were socialized to be anti-Semitic through contact with the White Russians. Once the Meiji Restoration period opened Japan to the West in 1868, many Japanese studied abroad to learn foreign languages and to familiarize themselves with foreign cultures. In addition to their gaining knowledge about other cultures and peoples, it also exposed them to antiSemitism. The influence of General Shiǀden Nobutaka of the Japanese Army supports this claim. He was exposed to anti-Semitism in his youth when he studied in France and later in his career while stationed at the Siberian Intervention when he had contact with anti-Jewish White Russians. Upon General Shiǀden’s return to Japan, he attempted to indoctrinate fellow officers. General Shiǀden was named director of the “Kokusai Seiki Gukkai,” the Research Institute of International Economics and Politics. Under his direction, the institute published Kokusai himitsuryoka kenkynj— Studies of International Secret Powers— which was renamed Yudaya kenkynj in 1941, or Jewish Studies (Krebs 64). Other notable Japanese who imported anti-Semitism were Russian language instructor Higuchi Tsuyanosuke, German literature professor Okutsu Hikoshige, and diplomat Shiratori Toshio (“Japan”). Even Daikichi Inokawa, a highly respected liberal historian in Japan, believed these antiSemitic claims. He asserted that “Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, Roosevelt and Churchill [were] all puppets of the international Jewry” (Goodman 110). Anti-Semitic notions were not only spread by word of mouth but also through print as Nazi propaganda barraged Japan. In the 1930s around 4,500 Germans who belonged to the “NSDAP-Auslandsorganisation” (NSDAP-AO), the Organization of the National Socialists Abroad, lived in China. They published newspapers and journals in both German and English— such as the Deutsche Shanghai Zeitung, XXth Century, and Ostasiatischer Beobachter (OAB) (Seywald 63; Taaks 214). They spread not only pro-Germany propaganda, but also anti-Jewish sentiment. In January 1939 OAB, which was printed from June 1933 through December 1940, published an article entitled: “The corrosive element. Jews are behind all separatist movements in the postwar period” (“Das zersetzende Element”). Japanese newspapers also began to print prejudiced articles. The Osaka daily Mainichi praised the Hitler Youth and its actions in 1938. It also sponsored a “Greater Germany Exhibition” to celebrate Japan’s special relationship with Germany. German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Propaganda Minister Joseph von Goebbels served as advisors of the exhibition. Due to the popularity of that exhibition, others were arranged during wartime and displayed in department stores such as

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Matsuya and Takashimaya (Krebs 71). In 1944 Jews were painted as warmongers in the Tokyo paper Yomiuri and as threats to scientific thought in the pro-government paper Asahi (Goodman 109). Literature of the time also promoted anti-Semitism in Japan. Much of it originated in Europe. Most notably, Hitler’s Mein Kampf was translated into Japanese in 1937. In 1938, a Japanese translation of Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century was published, which warned the Jewish financiers would try to take over the Japanese economy (Krebs 61-62). Both The International Jew and the forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were translated into Japanese in 1924 (Goodman 94). Protocols was especially influential because it allegedly confirmed a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. It was required reading for White Russian soldiers in Siberia, where they fought alongside Japanese soldiers and exposed them to these anti-Semitic myths. It has since been proven to be a falsified document; yet it continues to be printed and distributed (See Figure 1). This exportation of anti-Semitism to Japan led to Japanese suspicion of Jews. Intrigued by pre-conceived notions of Jews and the supposed Jewish plot of world-domination, the Japanese funded research into Jewish economic power and influence. This funding led to the 1937 establishment of the Muslim and Jewish Problem Committee in Japan. (Kranzler, “Restrictions” 54; Tokayer and Swartz 49). Under the direction of navy Capt. Inuzuka, this committee researched the Jewish network in Japanese-occupied China and “intended to make covert inroads into Jewish circles in hope of turning their strength and influence in support of Japan” (Ristaino 151). Kranzler (“Restrictions” 55) saw the group as a means to “root out communists and spies among the refugees.” The “Jewish experts,” a group of twelve army and navy officers qualified through their experience abroad and knowledge of Jews, were responsible for policies governing Jews in Shanghai from 1939-1942. The actions of these “experts” contradicted the anti-Jewish sentiments in their work. Both Capt. Inuzuka and army Colonel Yasue Norihiro, the leading “experts,” published anti-Semitic works in Japan under the pseudonyms Utsunomiya Kiyo and Hǀ Kǀshi, respectively. In fact, it was Hǀ Kǀshi who translated the Protocols into Japanese in 1924 (Sakamoto 27). Yet, they allowed refugees to continue to enter Shanghai. Further, they refused to mistreat the Jewish refugees in hopes that the Jews would, in turn, repay them with generosity (Sakamoto 193).

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Figure 1: Anti-Semitism in Japan. Protocols first appeared in Japanese translation in 1924. Since then, millions of books based on the Protocols have been sold in Japan. In this edition, anti-Semitic ideologue Ota Ryu claims that Jews dominate the Western nations and that Japan must guard vigilantly against a Jewish takeover. Published in Tokyo, 2004. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)

On December 6, 1938 Prime Minister Konoe, Army minister Itagaki, Navy minister Mitsumasa, Foreign Affairs Minister Arita and Finance Minister Ikeda convened for the Five Ministers’ Conference in Japan to discuss the plans of the Problem Committee and the “Jewish experts.”

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Japanese policy could not explicitly encourage Jewish immigration because of Japan’s alliance with Germany and Italy, countries that had expelled the Jews. Yet the ministers sought to avoid straining relations with the Jewish refugees to stay in their good favor. Overall, the conference had a positive effect on the refugee program. It adopted the following three principles (Goodman and Miyazawa 111; Kranzler, “Japanese” 232-233; Ristaino 151): 1. Jews living in Japan, Manchuria and China are to be treated fairly and in the same manner as other foreign nationals. No special effort to expel them is to be made. 2. Jews entering Japan, Manchuria and China are to be dealt with on the basis of existing immigration policies pertaining to other foreigners. 3. No special effort to attract Jews to Japan, Manchuria or China is to be made. However, exceptions may be made for businessmen and technicians with utility value for Japan.

The third principle mentions the “utility value” of Jews and confirms that the Japanese sought to exploit Jewish talent and ability. The ministers thus negotiated a way to both comply with their allies and gain favor with Jews—both outcomes benefited the Japanese. However, due to a housing shortage and unwanted economic competition, Jews who were already settled complained about the rapidly growing refugee population in Shanghai. Since refugees were only allowed to bring 10 Reichsmark (RM), the equivalent of US$4, from Germany, they arrived in Shanghai essentially penniless. Many packed valuables that could be sold if need be. Hugo Hoenigsberg did just that when he and his wife left Austria. He wrote: After a short time, I was successful in booking a cabin for the trip, and on March 8, 1939 my wife and I could make the trip to the Far East. Each of us had, as stipulated, four dollars on hand. In contrast, we could take along plenty of luggage—copious amounts of clothing, porcelain, silver, among other things. (3)

The destitute refugees settled into the poor, Japanese-occupied neighborhood north of the Soochow Creek called Hongkew, where rent and food prices were lower. In an already densely-populated city, tensions rose within the Jewish community. In May of 1939 the Shanghai Municipal Council, or SMC, met to discuss the danger of “an unlimited influx of refugees to Shanghai.” Cornell S. Franklin, chairman of the SMC wrote Consul-General Alves of Portugal, who was serving as

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chairman of the International Committee for Granting Relief to European Refugees (IC) in Shanghai, a refugee assistance organization in Shanghai established in August 1938, to warn of a lowered standard of living and increased threat of crime should immigration continue unrestricted (Kranzler, “Restrictions” 51-52). Another member of the SMC, G. Godfrey Phillips, who served as secretary and commissioner general, wrote relief organizations such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint) and the Relief Organization of Jews in Germany, Hilfsverein der Juden in Deutschland, and raised the question of who would fund these impoverished refugees (Altman and Eber 15). That year the United States Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, discouraged the U.S. Embassy in Berlin from allowing Jews to travel to Shanghai due to the swelling and uncontained population (Heppner 45; Kranzler, “Restrictions” 52). Unwanted economic competition for relief aid and employment also created tension among Jews in Shanghai. News of the need for aid spread world-wide. A report in The Washington Post on December 17, 1938, at the beginning of the influx of central European refugees, mentioned the need for relief aid to help with the population in need and the expected arrival of more (“Shanghai Jews”). Dwindling resources and the struggle to survive gave rise to resentment among the Jews in Shanghai. In a community with a limited number of jobs, Russian Jews grew to resent German Jews, who were generally white collared workers, skilled artisans, professionals or artists (Barnett 251). Despite complaints from settled Jewish refugees, regardless of their backgrounds, the SMC, and foreign governments, the Japanese allowed the entry of Jewish refugees to continue unchecked (Tokayer and Swartz 71). In fact, the Japanese had positive first impressions of the “industrious, productive and cooperative” Jews. As the central European Jews had a shortage of housing, they attempted to repair dilapidated, uninhabitable buildings. Furthermore, the refugees successfully transplanted their culture and developed a community in Hongkew that “took on the character of a little Vienna or slice of central Europe, with shops and cafes with names familiar in Europe” (Ristaino 106-107). In Shanghai at the time, the oppressed people were the Chinese, not the Jews. Hoenigsberg recollected: The Chinese treated us refugees very respectfully. […] The same could be said of the Japanese who, at the time when we arrived in Shanghai, already occupied the Hongkew district. Japanese sentry stood on the bridge that connected Hongkew to the other parts of the city. When the Chinese were on these bridges, they had to kowtow in front of the Japanese and would

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Myths that Shaped the Exile Experience of Central European Jewish Refugees in Japanese-Occupied Shanghai often be hit by the sentinels. In contrast, we [refugees] could cross the bridges without harassment. (4)

The Japanese actually treated the Chinese more poorly— through harassment and subjugation— than they did the Jewish refugees. Ambivalent policies towards Jews would not last. When the Japanese were assured a change in policies would not diminish their chances of receiving capital from the West, they restricted refugee emigration. In August of 1939 Capt. Inuzuka and Col. Yasue met with Sir Victor Sassoon and Ellis Hayim, prominent and successful members of the Sephardic Jewish community in Shanghai, who assured the Japanese that the United States and Britain would not protest any restrictions on immigration. Days later, legislation regulating emigration was set in place. Restrictions required adult refugees to have US$400 of guarantee money to prove financial independence—US$100 for refugees under the age of 13— and a landing permit in order to enter the city (Heppner 45; Kranzler, “Restrictions” 55-58; Ristaino 114; “Various Reports” 3). Entry permits were only issued after the guarantee money was deposited to the Committee for Assistance of European Jewish Refugees (CAEJR) in Shanghai. As explicitly outlined in the protocols, permits were only valid for three to four months, during which time refugees must have made their way to Shanghai (“Various Reports” 4). As a result of the time-consuming communications, slow-paced mail, and expensive tickets, only 20% of those who obtained entry permits reached Shanghai (Ristaino 115). Once in Shanghai, it was also necessary for the refugees to register with the Japanese navy (Barnett 252; Altman and Eber 23). Fearing that refugees would settle in the International Settlement because of these restrictions on entering Hongkew, the SMC then barred refugees from entering the International Settlement. The French followed, implementing similar policies barring refugees from the French Concession (Altman and Eber 24-25). Previously, one could simply disembark the ship and enter the city. By the time the restrictions were implemented, over 15,000 central European Jewish refugees had moved to Shanghai. Afterwards, only an additional 1,000 arrived (Hochstadt 32; Barnett 251). This restriction was implemented in response to pressure from the Jewish community and the assurance that the Japanese would not fall out of favor with Jews for doing so (See Figure 2).

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Figure 2: Registration certificate of Hilda Sara Heppner for the Directory of Jewish Refugees. A German Jew, Heppner left Europe for Asia in March 1939. Japanese policies implemented in August 1939 required Jewish refugees to register with the Japanese authorities in Shanghai. Credit: USHMM Photo Archives Collection

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Japan also acceded to pressure from her allies. Japan grew close to Germany through the 1930s as both had left the League of Nations in 1933, signed the Cultural Agreement together in 1936, and the AntiComintern Pact later that year, but she officially allied herself with Germany and Italy when she signed the Tripartite Pact in September 1940 (Kranzler, “Restrictions” 50; Sakamoto 76). At this point, Japan began to neglect plans to win over the West, specifically the United States and Britain, and instead worked on fostering her relationship with the Axis powers. As such, Japanese refugee policies changed. The Fugu Plan in Manchukuo, proposed to be a safe settlement for Jewish refugees as well as an economic gain for Japan, never materialized. A representative of the United States Jewry had been sent to Japan to discuss the settlement, but planning ceased after Japan signed the Tripartite Pact (Ristaino 154). Other more subtle changes took place in Japanese treatment of the Jews. In October 1940, the Japanese military forced 2,000 Jewish refugees who resided in the Hongkew area, the Japanese-controlled area formerly of the International Settlement, leave their belongings and move out of the area on the day before Yom Kippur. Ten months later in August 1941, Japanese officials called for the expulsion of 4,000 Jews from Shanghai on the grounds that the refugees had not properly registered with the emigration office (Zhou 149). Increased Nazi presence in the Far East did not bode well for the Jewish community. Established in 1940, the German Information Bureau (GIB) published information and produced music for the German radio station in Shanghai, XGRS. The GIB also funded the aforementioned anti-Semitic publication XXth Century, which was circulated throughout Shanghai, starting in 1941. Under the direction of Baron Jesco von Puttkammer, who arrived in Shanghai in May 1941, the GIB collected information on both Jews and the Japanese. Colonel Josef Meisinger, the “Butcher of Warsaw” who oversaw the deaths of 100,000 Jews in Poland, was sent to the German embassy in Tokyo in May 1941 as head of the Gestapo in the Far East (Ristaino 177-178). Japanese policies did not immediately undergo major changes. The night of the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War converged, marking another change in Japanese attitude towards Jews. By bombing the American naval base and sinking the long British naval ship in the Pacific, the Petrel, the Japanese joined the international fight. Immediately after the attack, the Japanese navy occupied the entire city of Shanghai, including the International Settlement and the French Concession, so the refugees all fell under Japanese authority. The next day the United States

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officially entered into the war. Thus, Japanese plans to receive money from Americans were abandoned completely. As Hoenigsberg recalled (4), “When the war in the Pacific began in the winter of 1942, many things changed for us refugees.” The Japanese took control of the entire city of Shanghai and completely halted entry of central European Jewish refugees. Within one month of the attacks the proclamation of the Five Ministers Conference was rescinded. A German-language anti-Nazi newspaper, Die Zeitung, published details of the changes in Shanghai in the month following the attack on Pearl Harbor. By order of the Gestapo, the Japanese required Jewish refugees to register with the police. Similar to what happened in Germany under Nazi rule, Jews were arrested and Jewish bank accounts were frozen in Shanghai. The Japanese also began to heavily censor newspapers critical of them. Further, the Japanese took control of relief aid organizations—both Jewish and non Jewish. (“Nazi-Maßnahmen in Shanghai”) Nazis pressured their Japanese allies to implement the Final Solution in the Far East. When Robert Peritz, a German-Jewish refugee escaped from Berlin in October 1938, was manager of the IC, he periodically came in close contact with high-ranking Japanese officials, including the Japanese supervisor of the IC, to whom he refers to as “Innoue,” and Consul-General Shibata. He reported on their benevolent attitude towards the Jews which worsened after Pearl Harbor, something he attributes to the increased presence of German functionaries. Peritz quoted Innoue as having said in 1943, verbatim, “Remember the name von Puttkammer. He is responsible for all the evil done to the Jewish refugees” (1-3). German Colonel Josef Meisinger had explicitly called for the implementation of the Final Solution in Shanghai (Kranzler, “Japanese” 67). Another influential Nazi, Captain Fritz Wiedemann, German Consul-General in Shanghai, repeatedly proposed that the Japanese build gas chambers. Richard Stein, an Austrian Jew who lived in Shanghai from 1939-1949, reported that: They [the Japanese] resisted the construction of gas chambers with success, which, so far as I had heard, were planned by Captain [Fritz] Wiedemann upon his appointment as German Consul-General in Shanghai. They [the Japanese] allowed Jewish refugees to carry on with their work, often in areas of the city outside of Hongkew, without much harassment. (4)

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Figure 3: Proclamation calling for the ghettoization of all stateless refugees who arrived after 1937. It was announced on February 18, 1943 and effective as of May 18, 1943. Credit: USHMM Photo Archives Collection

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Figure 4: Hongkew Ghetto. In this map of Shanghai, published in the North China Daily News in February 1943, the shaded line demarcates a three-quarter square mile "designated area." Stateless refugees who arrived in Shanghai after 1937 were forced to move there. Credit: USHMM Photo Archives Collection

The Japanese refused to commit such violence because they did not share an anti-Semitic mentality with the Germans. In response to this pressure, however, the Japanese created a ghetto in Shanghai (See Figures 3 and 4). On February 18, 1943, the Japanese released a proclamation announcing the “Ghettoisierung,” or ghettoization, of all “stateless persons” who arrived in Shanghai after 1937. Since Russian Jews arrived prior to 1937, they were exempt. The proclamation instead targeted German and Austrian Jewish refugees and forced them to move to “ugly and depressing” Hongkew (Kranzler, “Japanese” 116). The language of this proclamation, full of euphemisms, is indicative of the origin of and

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reason for Japanese anti-Jewish policies, which were implemented in an effort to conform to the policies of the Axis powers. While trying to avoid insulting the Jews, the proclamation did not name them. However, there was no ambiguity as to who the victims were. On November 25, 1941, the Nazi’s “Reichsbürgersgesetz” called for the denaturalization of all Jews (Hoss 172; Kranzler, “Japanese” 177). Therefore, German, Austrian, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian and former Polish Jewish refugees were all stateless (Tokayer and Swartz 243). By specifically naming those “stateless persons” who emigrated after 1937, the proclamation specifically targeted central European Jewish refugees. The proclamation also used the term “designated area” instead of “ghetto.” The “designated area” was a Nazi-inspired ghetto in Hongkew, which was three-quarters of a square mile large with over 15,000 refugees among nearly 100,000 Chinese Shanghailanders. Those affected were required to move within three months, by May 1943 (Kranzler, “Miracle” 43). The émigrés had to obtain stamped passes from Ghoya, a notoriously capricious and violent Japanese officer, and his assistant Okura in order to enter and exit Hongkew. It would be incorrect to consider even these figures anti-Semitic. Hoenigsberg noticed that Ghoya treated everyone, not only Jews in Hongkew, in such a demeaning way (See Figure 5 below). According to survivors’ accounts, it was because of Ghoya’s need to please his German allies. Richard Stein, remembered Ghoya as a strange man who would slap refugees in the face and kick them (3). He also asserted that Ghoya, in spite of everything, went to great lengths to ensure the welfare of the Jews, especially considering the circumstances of an alliance with Germany. Hoenigsberg also recalled that Ghoya would play cards and play music in the homes of the Jews in Hongkew, and seek out those whom he mistreated to excuse his behavior by claiming he behaved violently in order to not seem lenient in the eyes of the Germans (5-6). In addition to the establishment of the ghetto, the Japanese began to subjugate the Jews. There was tight censorship of dissenting newspapers. Kurt Lewin described the Japanese censorship in his short narrative, “Emigration of a Jewish Communist to Shanghai.” He and his friend Petzall founded the publication Die Tribüne, an antifascism monthly that proved to be well-liked and widely read among German speakers in Shanghai. Lewin wrote:

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Figure 5: Queue of Jewish refugees applying for permission to leave Hongkew. In order to leave the Hongkew ghetto, refugees had to obtain official passes from Ghoya, a Japanese representative of the Bureau for Stateless Refugees who oversaw the ghetto. Credit: USHMM Photo Archives Collection Until the Japanese occupation of the International Settlement, everything was going well. And then the major setbacks came. The Japanese banned our journal because of anti-Japanese tendencies, and I was ordered to go see Mr. Ghoya. The result of this “discussion” was an occupational ban. I was also banned from making public appearances and publicizing my opinions (4-5).

Lewin was forced to find other work, so he sold cigarettes from then until the end of the war, when he began to write again. The Japanese authorities also closely supervised all businesses. Bank accounts were frozen. Short wave radios were confiscated. Enemy nationals – Americans, British, Canadians, Dutch and French citizens – were interned. These restrictions resulted in unemployment, inflation, and a lack of relief aid, as the majority of aid came from the Joint (Kranzler, “Japanese” 454). The Hongkou Ghetto, which existed from 1943-1945 because of pressure from the Third Reich, imprisoned Shanghai’s refugee community until the Japanese capitulated on August 15, 1945.

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Myths exaggerating the wealth, influence, and power of the Jews were widely believed in Japan and fomented admiration. Imported anti-Semitic propaganda led to the replacement of the positive Jewish stereotypes by suspicions of Jewish cunning and untrustworthiness. Before this change in mindset, the Japanese hoped to gain favor with the Jews, who were rumored to control the United States’ government and, more importantly, their economy. It was also the reason why the Japanese remained silent over the swelling refugee population in Shanghai despite both local and international concerns. Japanese policies were not created as an act of magnanimity towards the Jews, but rather as a means to serve Japan’s own interests. The Japanese hoped to attract foreign capital and, ultimately, gain global clout. As Japan grew closer to Germany and no longer waited for assistance from the West, she abandoned the policies that favored the Jews. Ernest Heppner, a survivor of the Shanghai exile experience, commented on the change from a “strangely benign attitude of the Japanese toward the Jews” that “deteriorated after Pearl Harbor. Until then, we [Jewish refugees] had often speculated why the Japanese had treated us as well as they did” (103). The answer lies in economic selfinterest and opportunism. Once it was clear that the Japanese would not be receiving foreign capital from the United States and Britain, it became more advantageous to instead accede to their allies, the Germans and Italians. This is clear, for Japanese emigration policies and efforts to gain favor with Jews in Japanese-occupied China worsened after the signing of the Tripartite Pact, and again after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japanese emigration policies had “nothing to do with the Jews and everything to do with the anti-Semites” (Goodman and Miyazawa xvi). However unpredictable the Japanese policy of the time, refugees lived in relative tranquility in Shanghai compared to the rest of the world. Hugo Hoenigsberg noted that in his report: We could not complain about the behavior of the Japanese authorities, specifically that of the commander of the district, Ghoya. We have the Japanese to thank for that, as they could not go through with the Germans’ demand that gas chambers be erected for the Jewish refugees. It appeared that maltreatment of refugees consisted of slaps to the face from the Japanese for no reason (6).

He left for England in 1947 (7). He was one of an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 German-speaking Jewish refugees who found a safe haven in Shanghai on account of Japanese opportunism.

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Works Cited Altman, Avraham and Irene Eber. “Flight to Shanghai, 1938-1940: The Larger Setting.” Yad Vashem Studies XXVIII. 2000. Yad Vashem. 6 Aug. 2008. Anti-Jewish K.K.K. A Warning to All Chinese, Japanese and Gentiles Alike: The "Chosen People" Have Invaded Shanghai! Be Prepared to Resist an Economic Invasion and be Prepared for an Era of Crime, Sin and Intrigue. Shanghai, 1939. Armbrüster, Georg, Michael Kohlstruck, and Sonja Mühlberger. “Exil Shanghai: Facetten eines Themas.” Exil Shanghai 1938-1947: Jüdisches Leben in der Emigration, eds. Georg Armbrüster, Michael Kohlstruck, and Sonja Mühlberger. Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2000. 12-19. Barnett, Robert W. “Shanghai's German Refugees Face Uncertainties.” Far Eastern Survey 8.21 (1939): 251-253. “Das zersetzende Element. Juden fördern alle separatistischen Bewegungen der Nachkriegszeit.” Ostasiatischer Beobachter. January 1939: 14. Goodman, David G. and Masanori Miyazawa. Jews in the Japanese Mind: The History and Uses of a Cultural Stereotype. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000. Heppner, Ernest G. Shanghai Refuge: A Memoir of the World War II Jewish Ghetto. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1993. Hochstadt, Steve. “Flucht ins Ungewisse: Die Jüdische Emigration nach Shanghai.“ Exil Shanghai 1938-1947: Jüdisches Leben in die Emigration, eds. Georg Armbrüster, Michael Kohlstruck, and Sonja Mühlberger. Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2000. Hoenigsberg, Hugo. “Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen des Herrn Hugo Hoenigsberg in Shanghai 1939/1947.” Testaments to the Holocaust, The Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History. 22 Sept. 1955. Hoss, Christian. “Der lange Arm des deutschen Reiches: Zu den Ausbürgerungen von Emigrantinnen und Emigranten in Shanghai.” Exil Shanghai 1938-1947: Jüdisches Leben in de Emigration, eds. Georg Armbrüster, Michael Kohlstruck, and Sonja Mühlberger. Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2000. 165-183. Kranzler, David. Japanese, Nazis & Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, 1938-1945. New York: Yeshiva UP, 1987. —. “The Miracle of Shanghai.” Exil Shanghai 1938-1947: Jüdisches Leben in de Emigration, eds. Georg Armbrüster, Michael Kohlstruck, and Sonja Mühlberger. Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2000. 35-45.

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—. “Restrictions Against German-Jewish Refugee Immigration to Shanghai in 1939.” Jewish Social Studies 36.1 (1974): 44-64. Krebs, Gerhard. “Anti-Semitismus und Judenpolitik der Japaner.” Exil Shanghai 1938-1947: Jüdisches Leben in de Emigration, eds. Georg Armbrüster, Michael Kohlstruck, and Sonja Mühlberger. Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2000. 58-76. Lewin, Kurt. "Emigration of a Jewish Communist to Shanghai." Testaments to the Holocaust, The Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History. Sept. 1955. Mehnert, Klaus. “Allied Strategy.” XXth Century. 2006. 1-10. “Mexico sends back German refugees.” The New York Times 2 Nov. 1938. Historical New York Times. “Nazi-Maßnahmen in Shanghai.” Die Zeitung 31 Dec. 1941. “No One Wants to Have Them.” Völkischer Beobachter, North German Edition 13 July 1938. Peritz, Robert. “‘The Japanese Proclamation’—An Affidavit.” Testaments to the Holocaust, The Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History. 11 Jan. 1952. “Poland Bars Jews Deported by Reich.” The New York Times 2 Nov. 1938. Historical New York Times. “Refugees Crowd Liners.” The New York Times 2 Nov. 1938. Historical New York Times. Ristaino, Marcia Reynders. Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. Sakamoto, Pamela Rotner. Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees: A World War II Dilemma. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1998. “Shanghai Jews ask Support for Nazi Refugees.” The Washington Post 17 Dec. 1938. Historical Washington Post. Seywald, Wilfried. Journalisten Im Shanghaier Exil 1939-1949. Salzburg: Neugebauer, 1987. Stein, Richard. “Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen des Herrn Richard Stein in Shanghai 1939-1949.” Testaments to the Holocaust, The Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History. Aug. 1955. Taaks, Christian. “Die NS-Parteizeitschrift Der Ostasiatische Beobachter 1933-1940.” Exil Shanghai 1938-1947: Jüdisches Leben in die Emigration, eds. Georg Armbrüster, Michael Kohlstruck, and Sonja Mühlberger. Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2000. 214-232. Tokayer, Marvin and Mary Swartz. The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews During World War II. New York: Weatherhill, 1996.

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“Various Reports from the Jewish Central Information Office.” Testaments to the Holocaust, The Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History. 8 Dec. 1939. Zhou, Xun. Chinese Perceptions of the "Jews" and Judaism: A History of the Youtai. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2001.

PART III: CONSTRUCTING THE SOCIAL THROUGH MYTH

THE COMPENSATION OF THIALFI AND RØSKVA: A MYTH OF CHILD EXPOSURE KEVIN RICHARDS, OHIO UNIVERSITY

Hans Blumenberg’s definition of myth was once summarized by Reiner Shürmann as “the one tool with which we dispel fears” (Schürmann 135). In Work on Myth, Blumenberg believes the function of myth is to reduce primal anxiety and shield psyches from a ‘traumatic’ reality characterized by an overpowering of the senses. In theory, the narrative framework, or myth, structures and helps interpret experience, thereby guiding the psyche away from the risk of an unfiltered overwhelming emotional and sensory experience of the world. In this context, I believe that myths and cultural traditions, such as ritual, work together to provide psychic barriers barring the threat of a traumatic experience of reality, thus the ritual and myth both reduce such anxiety by maintaining communal continuity and socio-political cohesion. Blumenberg deems myth a necessity for man whenever intense emotions of despair and vertigo threaten to overwhelm the psyche, for it is myth that makes the incomprehensible suddenly tangible through language. This paper will examine whether the narrative of Thor’s acquisition of Thialfi and Røskva can be read as a myth functioning to re-channel the traumatic and self-destructive energies/emotions of the cultural tradition of child exposure in Pagan Scandinavia. The Thialfi and Røskva myth narrative not only addresses the anxiety of starvation, but also converts tragic circumstance into a spiritual victory, turning material loss into spiritual gain through human sacrifice. In Iceland, child exposure increased in periods of famine, and it stands to reason that given the scarcity of resources, some sacrifices would have to be made (Pentikäinen 67). The practical necessity of child exposure during these periods does not weaken the emotional traumatic potential elicited by human sacrifice, but may instead point to the necessity of its containment by narrating and ritualizing the action so that it gains a spiritual empowerment. I agree

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with John Lindow’s interpretation that the narrative of Thialfi and Røskva transforms the loss of a child into a spiritual gain in the form of a new kinrelationship with Thor, albeit precipitated by the violation of a ritual that evokes Thor’s wrath (Lindow, Norse Mythology 285). However, the offering of the children is an act that serves to placate anger rather than a gesture that reveals a compassionate pagan god (Lindow, Oral Tradition 173). I posit that the narrative of Thialfi and Røskva negotiates the traumatic emotions associated with child exposure, a loss necessitated by the scarcity of resources, and that is symbolically figured as an act of ritual sacrifice and substitution in order to gain Thor’s favor in granting fair weather and the provision of food. Before I go any further, it may be helpful to give a brief summary of the myth. Thor, called Öku-Þórr, visits a farmhouse and shares a meal with the household, which includes not only the farmer and his immediate family, but often also included extended family, thing-men (i.e. political supporters), slaves, concubines and hired hands. Loki accompanies Thor on this journey, but does not merit any further mention in the acquisition of the children. Thor provides a meal for the household from his two goats. After skinning the goats, the skins are laid out a certain distance from the fire. Thor gives everyone the specific direction to throw the bones back onto the goatskin when finished. Thialfi, the farmer’s son, breaks a bone to suck out the marrow. The next morning, Thor awakens early and hallows the goatskins and bones with his hammer, thereby resurrecting the goats. As Thor is doing this, he notices that one has a lame hind-leg and Thor becomes terribly angry with the farmer. The farmer cringes and offers the god anything he wishes, if only his life be spared. Thor considers this offer and asks for the two children as compensation, leaving his goats then behind with the farmer.

Two Goats, a Ritual, and Fair Weather Thor’s goats represent a renewable food source in as much as they are symbolic for a recurring sacrifice that ensures fair weather and a bountiful harvest. Snorri Sturluson the Christian Icelander who recorded this narrative, mentions the goats’ names within the same manuscript as tanngniostr, teeth-cracker, and tanngrisnt, teeth-gnasher (Sturluson, Edda 23). Their names have an onomatopoeic quality imitating overtly loud mastication, and their names perhaps underline their symbolic function as food. The goats are killed, eaten and resurrected in a presumably eternal cycle. This cycle of death, feast and rebirth is even tied to what looks to be a specific ritual. The detailed description of the ritual includes the

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placement of bones on the goatskins, specific gestures of Thor with his hammer, and the presence of the conspicuous word ‘vígja’. The term ‘vígja’ encompasses the meaning ‘to hallow’ and is used as Thor resurrects the goats that were eaten the night before. While the word ‘vigja’ is rather uncommon, it is associated in other ritualized contexts as well as in magic. In Þrymskviða, the verb ‘vígja’, in conjunction with Thor’s hammer, is used in the very vows of betrothal that consecrate a mock marriage between Thor and the giant Thrym. Þá qvað þat Þrymr, ’Berið inn hamar, leggit Mjöllni vigit ocr saman

þursa dróttinn: brúði at vígia, í meyiar kné, Várar hylli! (Edda 115)

Then said Thrym, lord of ogres: ‘Bring in the hammer to sanctify the bride, Lay Miollnir on the girl’s lap, Consecrate us together by the hand of Var!’ (Larrington 101)

The verb also appears elsewhere, such as in Hervarar Saga ok Heidrek, with the meaning “to cast a spell,” giving it a semantic range that accords people a connection with the supernatural and their gods. The presence of “vigja” in the narrative of Thialfi and Røskva supports the claim that the children are involved in the compensation of a broken ritual. This ritual, when performed correctly, would see the goats restored and Thor moving on. The goats are critical to a ritual that is meant to ensure the cyclical prosperity of the farmer’s household. The ritual that has been described in the narrative is symbolic for one performed by the farmer on a yearly basis, in which the offering of a goat helps establish a connection with a god that has control over what is, for the farmer, uncontrollable. The farmer is thus paying Thor for good weather, prosperity, and ultimately his very survival, whereas a poor season can be understood as Thor’s refusal of the offering. Fair weather is the key to a farmer’s survival and the ritual provides him his access to his god. According to Adam of Bremen’s History of the Archbishoprics of Hamburg-Bremen, “Thor, they say, presides over the air, which governs the thunder and lightning, the winds and rains, fair weather crops” (xxvi). If Adam of Bremen’s words are accurate, then there was certainly a belief that Thor was responsible for ensuring a good harvest and therewith food upon the table, but in order to insure the repetition of the cycle, a sacrifice was most likely required. Adam of Bremen notes that “For all their gods there are appointed priests to offer sacrifices for the people. If plague and

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famine threaten, a libation is poured to the idol Thor…”(xxvii). In the case of famine, the specific god that Adam of Bremen’s manuscript acknowledges is Thor. Tacitus also provides evidence of human sacrifices made to Mercury, and that Hercules received offerings only of the lesser animals (108). Tacitus was using Roman names and interpretatio Romana for his Roman readership so that the familiar name of Mercury is the Germanic Wodan, or Odin, and that of Hercules is Thor (Beare 70). The implied hierarchy in Tacitus’ statement of what may be sacrificed to whom, spanning a gulf between ‘even’ humans and lesser animals, clearly positions Wodan at the top. The stark contrast of offerings substantiates claims that Wodan was a god for the nobility, who were perhaps the only ones who could both afford and have the authority to offer such a sacrifice, while the offering of lesser animals typifies the economically prudent practicality of the farmer. Thor’s anger is ignited at the sight of defective bones, which then become the catalyst for the ensuing narrative action. Although there is little evidence elsewhere in Icelandic manuscripts that would point to a specific instance of broken bones as a ritual faux pas, there is an interesting parallel found in the Bible under the restrictions of Passover. During Passover, meat, “must be eaten inside one house; take none of the meat outside the house. Do not break any of the bones” (Holy Bible NIV, Exodus, 12:46). Thor’s feast with the farmer bears a close resemblance to the origin of the Passover feast, in which Thor functions similarly to the angel of death and steals away the first born son (and daughter). Other common threads include the ritual sacrifice of a goat in the Norse and the sacrifice of a lamb in Hebrew. It is quite possible that Snorri borrowed elements from the Old Testament for the narrative of Thialfi and Røskva’s acquisition. Other biblical parallels include the regulations concerning offering found in Leviticus in which the animal must be “without defect” (Lev. 3:1). Snorri Sturluson was most likely aware of and perhaps playing upon the parallel of narratives of a pre-conversion pagan Iceland with the narratives of the Pre-Christ Old Testament, thereby equating the arrival of Christianity in Iceland with the arrival of Christ in the Bible. Considering the further development of the narrative, the god’s impending fury indicates that the purity of the offering is also a concern for the bones that are hallowed by Thor. The bones are not to be broken. The ritual is violated and the cycle of regeneration is at this point broken as well, only to be restored after the symbolic exchange of the children for the goats.

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Thialfi’s Overindulgence The farmer’s son, Thialfi, clearly overindulges by not only picking the bone clean, but also by breaking it to get at the marrow. This act can be interpreted as violating the medieval Icelandic social more called hóf that praised moderation and disdained excess (Byock 180). The figures in Saga that do not observe moderation are always condemned (Andersson 580). By having Thialfi break the bone, it is the child who eats too much who becomes the origin of the problem between the farmer and his god. The blame for the disrupted ritual lies squarely with Thialfi’s need not only to eat, but also to take too much. The anger of the god is, however, not directed at the boy, but at the farmer, who is responsible for managing the entire household. The farmer must see to it that, especially in periods of famine, all excesses are curtailed and all burdens and strains upon the household’s rations are reduced as much as possible. The narrative points a finger at the culprit and scapegoats a child for impending famine by having Thialfi suck the marrow out of the bone. The resulting anger of Thor has the farmer genuinely afraid for his life, so much so that he thinks he might drop dead before Thor’s gaze, “þá hugðisk hann falla mundu fyrir sjóninni einni samt” (“Then he thought he would fall (dead) at once before the sight”; Sturluson, Edda 37). The sacrifice should have been sufficient and ensured the return of food, but now that the ritual is broken something else is needed. A wet season could be interpreted by a pagan farmer as a sign of an angry god withholding the conditions that provide for the provision of food. H.R. Ellis Davidson suggests that Thor was associated foremost with the weather in her section entitled “The God of the Sky.” She believes that his burning eyes were the red sky foretelling a storm and his “raising beard” the rush of wind before a storm (85). The narrative not only warns against angering a god through overindulgence, deficient offerings and violations of ritual, but also sheds light on the unfortunate practical circumstances in which raising children strained household resources, while likewise offering a parable on household management. The survival of the entire household depended upon its head, the farmer, to make the difficult decisions that an impending famine necessitated, which included reducing the number of mouths in the household.

Influencing the Weather After a rainy summer in settlement Iceland, it was customary to calculate the number of livestock that one could feed through the winter

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and then slaughter those that could not be sustained (Byock 60). Two rainy seasons in a row could spell disaster. Pentikäinen notes that periods of economic and subsistence hardship correlated directly to the incidence of child exposure and infanticide, and argues that the Christian demands of conversion to give up child exposure and horsemeat greatly weakened a farm’s economy (71). The circumstances of famine are addressed in the legendary saga of Vemundr Saga in which the people of Reykjardalr are deliberating on what to sacrifice in order to improve the weather. One person suggests that they abandon the children and kill off the old. However, it should be stressed that the ultimate outcome is one in which the people decide to help the old and collect money to provide for the children (Pentikäinen 71). In the Hervarar Saga, it is prophesied that there will never be a good year until the highest-born boy is sacrificed. The sacrifice to Odin has King Heidrik substituting a host of men for his son, including the son of rival King Harald, “…at aldri mundi ár koma fyrr á Reiðgotaland en þeim sveini væri blótat…” (“that never would a good year (weather) come again to Reiðgotland unless a boy were sacrificed by them…”; Hervarar Saga ok Heidreks 29). The use of human sacrifice to influence the weather is again present in Ynglinga saga, but this time it is King Olaf Tretelgja’s lack of sacrifice that is deemed by his Swedish subjects to be the cause of the poor weather. The King’s subjects rectify the situation by burning Olaf in his home as a gift to Odin: Óláfr konungr var lítill blótmaðr. Þat líkaði Svíum illa ok þótti þaðan mundu standa hallærit. Drógu Svíar þá her saman, gerðu för at Óláfi konungi ok tóku hús á honum ok brenndu hann inni ok gáfu hann Óðni og blétu honum til árs sér. (Sturluson Heimskringla 74) King Olaf was a man sacrificing little. That displeased the Swedes and thought the bad season would have come from it. The Swedes gathered together, surrounded King Olaf and took his house and burned him in and gave him to Odin and sacrificed him for the season.

The narrative stresses that famine was believed to come from an unwillingness to make human sacrifices to Odin, and that it may end by offering the King, who himself refused to sacrifice. It is not surprising that Odin, instead of Thor, receives the sacrifice of Kings, even when it is to influence the weather. As it states in Hárbarðzlióð: Var ec á Vallandi Atta ex iöfrom, Óðinn á iarla,

oc vígom fylgðag, enn aldri sættac þá er í val falla,

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’I was in Valland, and I waged war, I incited the princes never to make peace; Odin has the nobles who fall in battle and Thor has the breed of serfs’ (Larrington 73).

In the verbal sparring above, Odin, disguised as Harbard, is claiming his superiority over Thor based on the offering, or dead, that each god lays claim to. It is also very likely that Odin is making a reference to the acquisition of Thialfi and Røskva as Thor’s “þræla kyn.” There also remains some confusion as to what one may ask of a certain god and which domains each god could influence. The roles of the god’s overlap and this may be an indication of the temporal distance between the author and practiced paganism or perhaps that the god’s were first and foremost divided according to social strata. Harbard’s song indicates that Odin was reserved for the Kings and noble families, while Thor was the primary god of the serfs, the medieval farmer. The method of sacrifice of nobility to Odin often alludes to or imitates the mythic narrative of Odin’s collection of the runes in Hávamál, an indicator that there was a mythic narrative basis, or archetype, for the ritual killing depicted in the literature. This could then explain Thor’s claim to the children of a farmer, who then ultimately become his servants in a narrative that serves as an archetype for the ritual understanding of child exposure. The literature indicates that there was a strong tradition of sacrificing favored sons of nobility to Odin, but was there then a similar tradition of sacrificing farmers’ sons and daughters to Thor?

Exposure or Sacrifice? In order to interpret Thor’s demand for the two children as symbolically representing exposure, it is important to examine whether there is any other evidence of sacrifice to Thor and if then exposure is to be understood in this context as an offering. Exposure is well represented throughout heroic literature, the Bible, and in the law books of 2nd century Rome. In Rome, if an exposed child were taken into a new family, it would most likely become a slave (Corbier 66). In comparison to settlement age Iceland, which also had a slave culture, one may be certain that in times of famine, most families would not be looking to add to their household. It is possible that the Icelandic authors, lacking knowledge of child exposure, sought models elsewhere and borrowed these notions from

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outside the culture. The practice of child exposure both in turn of the century Rome and the much later settlement Iceland shared rituals that had the patriarch of the family formally acknowledge a child and accept it into the family, thereby making it illegal to expose this child. The infant began its life as a “liminal” object until officially recognized, without any legal rights of its own. In Roman practice, if the child did not survive the first week, it was not considered to have been legally alive, however, if it did survive another 8-9 days it was then decided whether it were to be exposed or kept by the family (57-58). In medieval Iceland, as long as the child had not yet been water-sprinkled, it was not considered murder to have it exposed (Pentikäinen 72-74). The cultural origin of water-sprinkling is one of many found in the Icelandic literary sources that remains unclear, owing its uncertainty to a possible Christian influence. It also remains unclear, whether the Roman practice of child exposure informed the Scandinavian practice, or if it was established independently. There are several early law texts from Scandinavia that provide echoes of child exposure, albeit not by pagan practitioners but by Christian ones. The Borgarthing and Eidsivathing church laws created two categories for deformed infants, those infants looking like animals were to be drowned and buried in the “devil’s place”, and those infants, whose bodies were covered with hair were to be starved under supervision and then buried in the church’s graveyard (79). Thus the Norwegian church laws of 1020 made infanticide mandatory in certain circumstances. This is hardly the case for Thialfi and Røskva, who neither have defects nor are so young that exposure could have been considered legal. There is, however, some evidence to support the idea that the children ‘given’ to Thor may have been sacrificed, or likewise, that the narrative metaphorically uses these children to describe the practice of exposure and they represent a mass of lost ‘nameless’ infants.

Sacrifice to Thor Odin was not the only god to whom sacrifices were made. There are also a few examples of human sacrifice to Thor, such as in the description of the temple of Thorgrim goði, where there was a stone dedicated to Thor on which the backs of men were broken, as well as a sacrificial bog: En mönnum, er þeir blótuðu, skyldi steypa ofan í fen þat, er úti var hjá dyrunum; þat kölluðu þeir Blótkeldu. (Kjalnesinga 7) And men, who they sacrifice, were thrown downwards into that bog, which was outside near the portal; that they called the sacrificial bog.

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There is also a reference to a sacrificed child in the Landnámabók in events concerning Hallstein: Hallstein son Þórólfs Mostrarskeggs nam Þorskafjörð ok bjó á Hallsteinsnesi; hann blótaði þar til þess, at Þórr sendi honum öndvegissúlur ok gaf þar til son sinn. (Landnámabók v.ii. 163-64) Hallstein, son of Thorolf Mostrarskegg, took Thor’s inlet and lived at Hallsteins headland; he sacrificed there to this, that Thor send him high seat pillars and gave thereto his son.

There is a successful transaction between Hallstein and Thor, trading child for a temple gift. Du Chaillu notes that when one prays to Odin, “sacrificing a beloved child of a chief was considered…the highest atonement that could be offered” (366). This would also seem to be pertinent to sacrifices to Thor, for in the case of Hallstein, his offering is depicted as an effective way to bring him what he wishes. The sacrifice of a first-born son was most likely believed to allow leverage in bartering with gods. This again brings up parallels found in the Old Testament. In Exodus 22:29, the first born son, along with the first born of every animal is to be dedicated, or sacrificed, to God. In Leviticus 27:29, human sacrifice is implied in the religion of Moses as it states that no human given over to the lord in sacrifice is redeemable, or may be substituted. Of course, the narrative of Abraham contradicts this law by replacing his son with a ram, perhaps in an act that was a first step in the rejection of human sacrifice. There are also examples of mythic public sacrifice in both Odin’s loss of his favorite son Baldur, which itself provides a narrative to the ritual sacrifice of first born sons, as well as the sacrifice of Jesus, the first son of God. Both narratives play upon a ruler’s sacrifice for his people, although in Baldur’s case, it signifies the onset of Ragnarók. Sacrifices made to Thor are to attain items or a desired result. The farmer in the Thialfi and Røskva narrative placates Thor by giving up his children, i.e. sacrificing them. It is unlikely that the acquisition of Thor’s child servants could be representative of other households acquiring them, and thereby allowing fate to provide them a slim chance of survival, but rather that they were intentionally offered.

Exposure as Sacrifice Authors of Icelandic sagas often employed the voice of an anonymous narrator to provide and direct public opinion. This narrator always relates

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child exposure as being viewed very negatively (Pentikäinen 69-70). The question remains, however, whether this is another Christian lens filtering back onto the past, or whether the act itself was synonymous with infanticide and a weak household. With the initial conversion to Christianity, child exposure was an issue of debate, and was still allowed in secret for a number of years. It is interestingly worded in the Íslendingabók: En of barnaútburð skydu standa en fornu lög ok of hrossakjötsát. Skyldu menn blóta á laun, ef vildu, en varða fjörbaugsgarðr, ef váttum of kvæmi við. (Íslendingabók 17) In regard to child exposure should stand the old law and in regard to horsemeat. Men should sacrifice in secret, but become a lesser outlaw, if witnesses came to know.

In a highly dramatic, perhaps highly embellished, conversion story, it is interesting to note that the line between a pagan and a Christian is marked specifically in the issues of sacrifice, child exposure and the consumption of horseflesh. Could it have been considered wicked by a pagan to expose a child as the saga narrator indicates, especially if it truly was a point of contention defining the difference between pagans and Christians?

Summary The necessity of small farms to reduce their number before winter and to hope for better conditions the following season indicates that in the case of Thialfi and Røskva, there is a conceptualization of the practice of child exposure that is understood as an offering. The children leave with the God and do not join another household. The goats do, however, remain behind and restore the cycle of food provision. It would not benefit the farmer if he did not ‘sacrifice’ his children, but instead left them to be found by another, as exemplified in the exposure of heroes, since the farmer must appease his god in order to change the conditions that are out of his control. Ultimately, the narrative initially appears only to be a prelude to the much longer journey to Utgard-Loki and provides background information on Thialfi, Thor’s companion. It may, however, very well have been a separate myth that touched upon the harsh conditions of domestic life in Iceland, and was either influenced by parallels found in the scriptures of imported Christianity, or harkened back to pagan myth that has since been

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lost in its independent form. The narrative could have served as an excellent introduction, or as a short þáttr interlude, to various stories that featured Thialfi as Thor’s companion. What speaks for the independence of this prelude is the notable lack of integration of Loki into the action as well as the surprising disappearance of Røskva from the rest of the corpus. Loki would have been an excellent candidate to encourage the boy to suck out the marrow, as he did in the 1986 Danish animated Film Valhalla. Røskva could also have possibly whetted Thor or her brother during the competitions at Utgard-Loki’s. If the prelude were, however, a separate myth, Loki’s absence is easily dismissed, and Røskva may then take on a symbolic value that allows for the logical conceptualization of exposure of both sexes. This myth offers us a window into the beliefs, hopes, and practices that were summarily lost and silenced a short time after conversion. The loss of a child, especially if it were a particularly beloved one, is certainly a great sacrifice, and Thialfi and Røskva figuratively express the negotiation of this loss by representing the young nameless infants, who during years of famine must be given up and who are summarily then taken into the household of the god who can restore order and bring a farming family prosperity. Even though the practicality of enabling households to adjust their size seems crucial to surviving in such harsh conditions, child exposure was still able to offend Christians, and perhaps the general public, not unlike abortion may today when used as a form of birth control. The myth relates a ritual and practice believed to have influenced the variables that ensured a prosperous future, an abundant harvest, and created a kind of kinship to a God, while at the same time, unanswered prayers, successive crop failures and conversion saw the dissipation of hope in this practice. It is possible that doubt is but the first step that allows fear to rise and slowly unravel the veil of trauma, the void into which these children were plunged. The myth functions to create a sacred narrative that reinterprets the practice, the ritual, as something gained and a line of communication with a god, which then allows parents the comfort of honor, the security of empowerment and diverts emotional charges away from their great loss and the insecurity of the unpredictable.

Works Cited Adam von Bremen. History of the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen [by] Adam of Bremen. Trans. Francis J. Tschan. New York: Columbia UP, 1959.

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Andersson, Theodore M. “The Displacement of the Heroic Ideal in the Family Sagas.” Speculum, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Oct., 1970), pp. 575-593. Beare, William “Tacitus on the Germans.” Greece & Rome 2nd ser. 11.1 (1964): 64-76. Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth. Robert M. Wallace. Trans. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985. Byock, Jesse. Viking Age Iceland. London: Penguin, 2001. Corbier, Mireille. Childhood, Class and Kin in the Roman World. Suzanne Dixon. Ed. London: Routledge, 2001. Du Chaillu, Paul B. The Viking Age. Vol. I. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1889. Edda: Die Lieder des Codex Regius Nebst Verwandten Denkmälern. Ed. Hans Kuhn. Heidelberg: Carl Winter UP, 1962. Ellis Davidson, Hilda Roderick. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. London: Penguin, 1964. Hervarar Saga ok Heidreks. Ed. G. Turville-Petre. London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1956. Kjalnesinga Saga. Ed. Jóhannes Halldórsson. Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 1959. Islendingabók: Landnámabók: Siðari Hluti. Vol. 1.2 Ed. Jakob Benediktsson. Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 1968. Lindow, John. Norse Mythology. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. —. “Thor’s visit to Útgarðaloki.” Oral Tradition. 15 (2000): 170-186. Pentikäinen, Juha. Nordic Dead-Child Beings: A Study in Comparative Religion. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica; 1968. Schürmann, Reiner. ”Hans Blumenberg. Arbeit am Mythos.” The Journal of Religion, Vol. 64, No. 1. (Jan., 1984), pp. 135-6. Sturluson, Snorri. Edda: Prologue & Gylfaginning. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1988. —. Heimskringla I. Ed. Bjani Aðalbjarnarson. Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 1956. Tacitus. “Germania.” The Agricola and The Germania. Trans. H. Mattingly. Rev. S.A. Handford. New York: Penguin Books, 1970. 101141. The Holy Bible, New International Version. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1973. The Poetic Edda. Transl. Carolyne Larrington. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Valhalla. Dir. Peter Madsen and Jeffrey James Varab. Perf. Dick Kaysø and Preben Kristensen. Swan Film Productions A/S, 1986.

CULTURAL INTEGRATION IN GERMANY AND THE MYTHS OF TOLERANCE KATELYN PETERSEN, UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA

Tolerance in social, cultural, and religious contexts has been a major theme in German literature for centuries. From Lessing’s Nathan der Weise to contemporary intercultural literature and social analysis, tolerance, or the lack thereof, is an ongoing concern and topic of heated debate. In this paper I shall discuss the reciprocal connections between experiences of (in)tolerance, social and cultural integration, and selfreflexivity as portrayed in contemporary German migration and intercultural literature, media, and related social discourse. I shall discuss the limitations that sociologist and author Necla Kelek and lawyer Seyran Ateú suggest be placed on tolerance. The “Myth of Tolerance” as it exists in Germany today is multi-faceted. Some of the common perceptions to which Kelek and Ateú take exception in their texts are as follows: more tolerance is necessarily and always better; establishing and maintaining distance between oneself and the Other constitutes tolerant behavior; and an active knowledge of and engagement with the Other is not a necessary part of tolerance. However, in pointing out these misconceptions, Kelek and Ateú fail to draw attention to perhaps the most fundamental myth of all – that tolerance as a concept is sufficient in the first place to effect the desired social harmony.1 Both Kelek and Ateú contest the nebulous, though relatively pervasive, notion that more tolerance is necessarily better. They work to debunk the “myths” surrounding (in)tolerance and the practice of tolerance with regard to minority communities within German society. The literary means by which Kelek in particular pursues her political goals shall be 1

Here it is essential to keep in mind the huge – and at times conflicting – multiplicity of visions concerning successful integration and the advantages and disadvantages of a multicultural society. Tolerance is often discussed in the context of, or with a view to, cultural integration. It is, however, necessary to realize that integration can have very different meanings for different groups and individuals and that for some, it is not the primary goal.

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taken into account, together with the question of genre. Texts by Hatice Akyün and Emine Sevgi Özdamar shall be taken as examples to show how tolerance may be handled differently in intercultural literature thematizing migration. Factors such as gender, economic positioning, and education need to be paid as much attention as culture, religion, and ethnic heritage, such that the idea of tolerance ceases to contribute to the demarcation of culturally specific us/them binaries and can be applied in much broader contexts. Finally, I shall propose that tolerance discourse be reevaluated and the concept of “tolerance” be augmented by new ideas more conducive to the ever-increasing necessity of acceptance, adaptation, and adoption in intercultural environments.

Tolerance as a Discursive Construction and the Question of Self-reflexivity In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault describes discourses as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (54). Like all other social phenomena, tolerance is a discursive construction. The concept exists within and because of a set of relations “established between authorities of emergence, delimitation, and specification […] between institutions, economic and social processes, behavioral patterns, systems of norms, techniques, types of classification [and] modes of characterization” (Foucault, 49). These systems of relations emerge under varying circumstances, change over time, and differ between societies. Consequently, objects of discourse – in this case, the concept and social practice of tolerance – also change according to the status of these relations. As the members of a society become increasingly mobile, the system of relations generating ideas such as tolerance becomes increasingly complex, undergoes changes, and, as a result, multiple – and at times contradictory – conceptions of an object arise. When these conceptions conflict with one another, some inevitably come to be regarded as misconceptions, or even myths in the sense of false or unfounded beliefs. Keeping this in mind, and coupling it with the idea that culture may be conceived of as a system of self-portrayal that both describes and produces itself, how might one reconcile the idea of self-reflexivity with the notion that our conceptions and practices are determined by our location within networks of institutional, normative, and classificatory relations? It is in recognizing one’s location or, perhaps more accurately, trajectory, within this network, formulating one’s personal standpoint with regards to the prioritization of concepts, values, and behaviors that is also a product of

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discourse, and assuming one’s active role in the production of discursive objects that self-reflexivity comes to play a major role. It is essential to the assessment, analysis, and further development of cultural practice and interaction. It is particularly productive to investigate migration literature – literature thematizing migration – and intercultural literature – literature influenced by two or more cultural spaces and often describing the synthesis of these – in this context. Personal as well as cultural selfreflexivity can be found on many levels within migration and intercultural literature. Accounts of migration and the experiences of migrants in Germany are heavily influenced by events in the lives of individuals, as well as by a tradition of autobiographical writing by immigrants. Authors attempt to locate themselves socially and culturally, and the result is a unique and individual creation that often features a self-reflexivity of the everyday. Everyday experiences become the object of analytical focus and priority is given to the relation of one’s own experiences. It is often the case that these autobiographical texts include aspects of other genres, express cultural, political, and social criticism, offer related commentary, and may therefore be regarded as political writing. Criticism and commentary are often written from within a mixed cultural space and refer to Germans, members of an author’s cultural community, him or herself, and possibly others as well. Works of migration and intercultural literature often present a self-reflexive insider perspective as well as the more objective views of an outside observer, both of which have the potential to inspire critical reflection in a reader.

Tolerance Discourse in Germany – Where to Set the Boundaries? Since the 1950’s, Germany has experienced an ever-increasing rate of immigration. The influx of Gastarbeiter after the Second World War seemed, at the time, to be mutually understood as a temporary arrangement. Thus, the challenges involved in achieving successful integration were not addressed. As a result, many migrants in Germany remained isolated, and integration continues – even after three or four generations – to be a challenging process. Tolerance and intolerance were prevalent themes in the Gastarbeiterliteratur movement during the 70’s and 80’s and continue to be topics of concern and interest today, especially as many second, third, and even fourth generation immigrants turn their literary attentions to the trials and tribulations – as well as the joys and advantages – of integration and a multicultural and multilingual existence.

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There are multiple interpretations of, and means of practicing, tolerance currently co-existing in German society. In her article “Mord bleibt Mord,” Seyran Ateú emphasizes the importance of exercising an “active” tolerance based on experience: Der wirklich tolerante Mensch kennt andere Kulturen, andere Sprachen und hat wenigstens eine Empathie dafür, was es bedeutet, mehrsprachig und vielkulturell zu sein, in anderen Ländern zu leben und andere Kulturen auch wahrzunehmen. Solch ein Mensch kann tolerant sein und Toleranz üben, weil er das Andere kennt. Derjenige aber, der sich dem entzieht, der sich in seiner urdeutschen Welt bequem eingerichtet hat und sagt: “Mir geht es gut, warum sollte es den Anderen nicht auch gut gehen, lass sie doch machen” – dieser Mensch ist ein ignoranter Mensch. (43)

The critical self-reflexivity offered in migration and intercultural literature is useful for both German readers and members of migrant groups. Inspired, interested, or even troubled by others’ stagings of identity, both demographics may further develop their own processes of intercultural identity construction. In the context of migration, the concept of “we” becomes at times clearer and particularly important – in that one suddenly becomes conscious of one’s own cultural orientation – and at times more difficult to define – in that one may belong to multiple ethnic, national, or religious groups and may assume new values. Integration can succeed or fail based on “we,” on inclusion and/or exclusion, whether self-imposed or not. Necla Kelek writes that she still has a sense of “wie schwer die Befreiung von dem ‘Wir,’ von den Geboten einer kollektivistischen Leitkultur fällt [ . . . ] Wer sich von diesem ‘Wir’ nicht löst, wird sich nie eine eigene Geschichte erarbeiten können” (Söhne 194-95). With respect to integration, it is important to construct an “I” out of the network of connections constituting the “we.” When regarded in this way, migration – a dynamic process, indeed, a way of life – appears characterized by a tension between individuality and membership in one or more groups. In this sense, both integration and tolerance may be regarded as processes of mutual approach. People come into increasingly closer contact with others and with themselves, with other ways of life, and with other systems of belief. As is the case with the process of identity creation, these processes, or instances of mutual approach, demand adaptability and an ever-expanding knowledge base. Nor are they necessarily specific to the context of migration and integration. Traversing us/them binaries, negotiating individual identity while belonging to multiple groups, and interacting with varying ways of life

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and belief and value systems are challenges facing all individuals. They have become aspects of daily life and are no longer bound to, or delineated by, the constructs of nation and culture. Multiple discourses, and indeed mythologies, have sprung up around the topic of tolerance and are being continually reinterpreted. Each author discussed in this paper contributes in her own way to the reformation and (de)mystification of the current tolerance discourse in Germany. Necla Kelek is a Turkish woman, who lives, works, and writes in Germany. Her two books Die fremde Braut and Die verlorenen Söhne illustrate the problems and abuses that occur among Turkish-Muslim immigrants in Germany and deal with German as well as with Turkish culture. With regard to Turkish culture, Kelek focuses on family and gender roles, and the consequences that these roles may have for individuals, as well as for successful integration. Many of the behaviors taking place in this context are determined by a mentality that Kelek harshly criticizes. She takes particular exception to the concept of “Kismet” or fate: Mann kann die Grundstimmung der muslimischen Lebenseinstellung kaum besser wiedergeben als mit diesen Worten – das Leben ist das Äußerliche, das Uneigentliche, für dessen Geschehnisse man nicht verantwortlich ist, und alles ist vergänglich, und Kismet, Schicksal, [in] das man sich zu ergeben hat, wie sich ein Muslim Gott unterwirft. ‘Hüzün’ bezeichnet dieses fatalistische Gefühl des Ausgeliefertseins, im Fluss des Lebens. (Braut 74)

Kelek asserts that some Muslims put no effort into exerting active control over their lives. She associates the belief that a higher power determines everything in advance, and that one cannot change or challenge its dictates, with Islam and claims that this belief gives rise to indifference. For women, such resignation hinders positive advancement and hampers resistance, self-defense, and the questioning of norms. For men, it results in a lack of opportunity and motivation to develop a sense of individuality and personal responsibility. She writes: “In ihrer abgeschlossenen Welt, in der es auf Gehorsam, auf Dienen und auf Nachahmung ankommt, sind Neugier, Eigenständigkeit, ‘Welteroberung,’ Bildung keine Werte, sondern Gefährdungen ihrer alten Traditionen” (139). According to Kelek, the development of the “Zukunftskompetenz” (139) necessary for what she portrays as successful integration into German society is not encouraged. Moreover, according to Kelek, Turkish Muslims are constrained by the dictates of socially prescribed silence. Criticism either of the religion of

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Islam or of Turkey as a nation is not permitted; such accusations are counterproductive for the collective good. Therefore, critical discussion is rare and few questions are posed; there is no cultural or religious selfreflexivity to speak of. Consequently, social problems accumulate – the oppression of women, the perpetuation of harmful behaviors among men, enforced silence, and the resulting difficulties with integration. Clearly, these are sweeping statements to which many Muslims would take great exception. Indeed, Kelek has been criticized for presenting exceptional cases and excluding the far more representational majority of (Muslim) immigrants in Germany, who lead peaceful lives as contributing members of society. To provide a contrasting example, journalist and author Hatice Akyün also writes about integration from the perspective of a Muslim woman of Turkish heritage. She describes herself as “ein Paradebeispiel einer gelungenen Integration” (7), and relates the details of her journey to arrive at this point. Akyün puts particular effort into showing how different individual experiences and lifestyles can be, even though they all take place within the context of what is often perceived to be one culture – a fact that is all too often forgotten when one is dealing with cultures other than one’s own. When asked in an interview about the issue of Turkish women being forced into marriage and otherwise oppressed and abused, Akyün responded as follows: Ich leugne das, was in den Medien berichtet wird, nicht. Natürlich gibt es Zwangsverheiratungen, Ehrenmorde und Frauen, die nicht von zu Hause weg dürfen. Aber es ist nur ein kleiner Teil. Dagegen gibt es tausende, tausende türkische Mädchen in diesem Land, die ein ganz normales Leben führen. Ich habe ein Buch geschrieben, das die Normalität einer jungen deutsch-türkischen Frau repräsentiert. Es ist zumindest repräsentativ für viele türkische Frauen, die ich kenne. [ . . . ] Im Koran steht nichts von Ehrenmord. Das ist nicht islamisch und es ist auch nicht türkisch. Ist eine Frau, eine deutsche Mutter, die ihr Kind verhungern lässt, typisch deutsch? Nein, sie ist unmenschlich. Die Leute differenzieren hier nicht. (“Für meine Familie”)

In both of her books, though she does acknowledge the issues that Kelek handles in detail, Akyün endeavors to present the everyday existence of German-Turkish citizens. In order to combat the problems she portrays, Kelek goes on to suggest that it is necessary for women as well as men to foster inquiry, education, responsibility, and individuality. It is not enough to create opportunities; these opportunities must be grasped. With respect to young Turkish men, who are pressured not only by their fathers, but by the entire Muslim

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community, Kelek writes: “Wir müssen alles tun, um sie vor der Willkür, besonders auch ihrer eigenen Väter, zu schützen, aber wir sollten aufhören, sie als Opfer, als Bedürftige zu sehen. Wir müssen sie anspornen und fördern, aber wir müssen auch etwas von ihnen fordern” (Söhne 204). One can see here how tolerance can have counterproductive, even damaging, effects when it covers up injustice and social ills. However, this is not a phenomenon that is necessarily specific to the Turkish or Muslim population in Germany, and, as Akyün demonstrates, it is certainly not a matter that directly concerns the vast majority of immigrants in Germany. Kelek does point out that tolerance is necessary both between cultures and within individual cultural communities – as a process of constant, active engagement – but she draws boundaries for this tolerance. Ateú states that tolerance without education and continual engagement is simply ignorance. Both speak out against idealized and simplified tolerance and call for a realistic assessment of what is to be tolerated and what is not. Kelek offers a critical description of German history and current social and legal procedures. For fear of being labeled or regarded as racist, Germans often practice “falsch verstandene Toleranz” (Braut 239), or improperly interpreted tolerance. In Germany, human rights violations, offences against democracy and against the German constitution may be either consciously ignored or “in geringerem Maße bestraft” (Ateú 42) if it is possible to prove that the crimes are a consequence or an expression of cultural difference. According to Ateú and Kelek, such incidents must not be tolerated. Ateú writes that “kulturelle Eigenheiten, Werte und Normen, die nicht unbedingt gemeinsame Werte und Normen sind, […] nur soweit akzeptabel [sind] soweit sie die universellen Menschenrechte nicht verletzen” (43). Violent, criminal, or oppressive acts must not be tolerated and, above all, may not be ignored in the name of tolerance. This type of misplaced tolerance is disadvantageous and appears in school systems, legal systems, and in the mentalities of many people who would consider themselves tolerant. Ateú offers as examples the debate regarding headscarves and other visible religious symbols and the fact that Muslim girls are often excused from physical education classes in the name of religious freedom. She explains that, in her opinion, regardless of whether a woman chooses to, or is made to, wear a headscarf, or is depicted in a provocative manner for advertising purposes, the question at hand is the sexualization of women. She points out “[u]nd doch nimmt die muslimische Seite für sich in Anspruch, sittlicher und moralischer zu sein. Da sind wir wieder bei der alltäglichen Toleranz” (43).

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These authors argue for active self-reflexivity and self-examination from both Germans and immigrants and a knowledge and awareness of similarities, differences, and contradictions. For tolerance to function effectively and in the appropriate contexts, it must be strategically defined and delineated – not simply allowed to follow the whims of public opinion or the perceived needs of national image. More is not necessarily better. However, despite clearly good intentions, both authors present tolerance as something that exists and is practiced – or not – along cultural and religious lines, and thus contribute to an exaggerated emphasis on cultural identification and fail to draw attention to the limitations of current conceptions of tolerance.2

Literary Strategies Necla Kelek conveys complicated and controversial messages in her books. Points of focus include history, tradition, religion, gender relations and roles, and her personal suggestions for change. Her texts take the form of open letters; she strives to share her personal viewpoints with her audience, but she supports these with historical, statistical, and personal proof. Readers demand “true” stories – that is, both thoroughly researched, as well as authentic and emotionally moving. For the reader, “authenticity” is an identifiable characteristic and a point of attraction, especially when the text is meant to provide a factual portrayal and when it thematizes culture. The author him or herself lends validity to the text. According to Wolfgang Behschnitt und Thomas Mohnike: Wie schon im Fall der ‘Frauen-‘, der ‘Arbeiter-‘ oder anderer Gruppenliteraturen sind auch hier die Biographie des Autors und der Bezug auf seinen Erfahrungshintergrund wesentliche, wenn auch nicht hinreichende Voraussetzungen, um einen literarischen Text dieser Kategorie zuordnen zu können […] Für […] die Rezipienten […] ist neben der mimetischen Wirklichkeitstreue die Glaubwürdigkeit des literarischen Textes im Sinne seiner Autorität zweifellos ein wichtiger Faktor. Wie aber wird der Text autorisiert? Zunächst einmal durch seinen Autor und – das ist im Zusammenhang der interkulturellen Literatur wesentlich – durch dessen kulturelle Zugehörigkeit (2).

Kelek must demonstrate that she is qualified to tell her story, to represent her countrymen and religion, and to push for the changes that 2

Here I am referring primarily to the idea that “tolerance” is the most productive approach to furthering intercultural understanding.

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she suggests. The possibility of accurate representation of a group by one individual is questionable at best, but readers often place a great deal of faith in the person and personal experiences of an author. Kelek writes in the first person and employs a mixture of genres comprising the open letter, personal anecdotes, historical and political reportage, journalistic writing, and autobiography. In this way she is able to use both her own experiences and her insider perspective (applicable to both German and Turkish communities) to satisfy the demand for authenticity. Stories detailing extreme cases are related in order to give the text emotional weight and to support the urgency of her cause. Unfortunately, because of the attention these stories receive, they come to be perceived as the norm, even to be expected, which – as mentioned above – leads to a skewed perception of particular demographics (both from within and without) and has an impact on practices of tolerance. In Kelek’s texts, anecdotes, whether personal or not, are juxtaposed with historical and political facts supported by statistical evidence. In this way Kelek shows that she is not only personally qualified – through ancestry, religion, and experience – but also in terms of knowledge and the research she has done. This recipe for validity is often applied in migration literature, especially when it is politically motivated. Although Kelek writes in the first person throughout her text, she never addresses the reader directly. As author, she includes the reader in an often employed “we,” but utilizes multiple “we” groupings, all of which – to return briefly to Foucault – are defined by, and change with, discourse. Thus she offers the reader a variety of possible points of identification, but also partially excludes him/her. Because Kelek belongs to multiple groups – Muslims, immigrants, women, academics etc. – she is in a position to address multiple groups with “we.” This then raises the question, for whom is she writing? Although Kelek writes about Turkish women and men in these two books, she writes predominantly for German readers. Many of the individuals about whom Kelek writes would not be able to read her books. Although Kelek is a Turkish Muslim woman and an immigrant, she distances herself from her subjects. She locates herself in what she portrays as the more European tradition of inquiry, individuality, responsibility, and selfexamination in order to show that these values are indeed compatible with her religion and cultural heritage. She confesses: „bis heute berührt mich nichts so sehr wie meine türk halkmüzigi, türkische Volksmusik, ich esse immer noch nur zu sehr gern meinen Döner und tanze leidenschaftlich gern tscherkessische Tänze – so wie ich Latte macchiato, Pasta, Grünkohl, Bach und Jazzrock schätzen gelernt habe“ (Söhne 208). Such assertions of

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successful integration3 and the fusion of multiple cultures can often be found in migration literature and lend the text further validity for German readers.

An Overemphasis on Culture and the Limitations of Tolerance Much of the factually based migration and intercultural literature appearing in Germany today places a very strong focus on culture, religion, and heritage. Even when this is done in an attempt to make the “Other” more accessible to German readers, it contributes to a skewed picture of this Other and his or her real situation, and excludes many important aspects of life and communication. Beverly M. Weber addresses precisely this concern with a focus on the consequences for female immigrants: “The relegation of immigrant women to the realm of culture has produced a dearth of research on immigrant women’s positioning in Germany in relationship to economics and politics” (Weber 20). This exaggerated focus on culture and its more shocking practices also leads to “a conflation of the ‘immigrant woman’ with ‘Turkish woman’ and in turn with ‘Muslim woman,’” (Weber 20), who is in turn constructed as a “victim of culture” (Weber 23). Issues of political and economic positioning and education, for example, are not taken into account. This one-sided social focus is reflected in literary analyses as well; “Studies of Özdamar, for example, pay scant attention to the fact that her main characters, mostly women, often work in German factories or immigrate as guestworkers [sic]” (Weber 22). Although she describes cultural practices as part of her everyday life, Hatice Akyün also puts a great deal of emphasis on her education and the significance of her work as a journalist and author. Thus both authors, Akyün and Özdamar, move away from culture as main focal point and present a much broader view of the lives of immigrants in Germany, thereby offering a more comprehensive portrayal upon which to base new conceptions and practices of tolerance. Though it has long been a major topic of discussion and object of literary production, it now seems that there are limits to the applicability and effectiveness of the concept of tolerance. The word “tolerance” itself connotes a power differential. One party tolerates another party, though the first party has the power to revoke the tolerance it bestows, leaving the 3

It could be questioned whether assertions of this nature are representative of integration into, or identification with, German (or any other) society.

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second party in a position of implied inferiority. Furthermore, the idea of one individual or group “tolerating” another group or individual could be seen as implying a suppressed animosity4. To tolerate also means to suffer through, to resist, or to put up with. Putting up with something or someone hardly necessitates – or even suggests – establishing an equitable relationship of mutual exchange and appreciation. Neither power differentials nor animosity are conducive to effecting lasting change; it is therefore my contention that, as a leitmotif for social change, especially in intercultural contexts, tolerance can only go so far. Words such as “adoption,” or “adaptation” may be useful additions to the concept of tolerance as they indicate the necessity of openness and willingness to accept change and new perspectives that needs to take place on both sides of the tolerance dichotomy. Further developments regarding the concept of tolerance also appear in migration and intercultural literature.

Different Approaches Migration literature – or, indeed, intercultural literature in general – certainly does not have to include any express criticism of tolerance or the lack thereof. Nor does the topic of culture have to be directly addressed. There are many texts that foreground the migration and integration processes without focusing on issues surrounding tolerance, or which address tolerance indirectly. The reader is often offered no clear evaluative standpoint, but is rather left to draw his or her own conclusions and form a personal opinion. In her two novels, Einmal Hans mit scharfer Soße (2005) and Ali zum Dessert (2008), Hatice Akyün offers a humorous, honest, and often selfcritical engagement with the topic of stereotypes. She draws readers’ attention to the stereotypes and misconceptions held not only between cultures, but also within cultures. Akyün displays a consciousness of, and an ongoing engagement with, her own preconceived notions and prejudices and encourages her readers to do the same. In Einmal Hans mit scharfer Soße, the narrator admits that “Hans und Helga heißen alle Deutschen bei uns Türken” (8). Akyün reveals the misconceptions held by both groups, as well as those held within each group. In Ali zum Dessert, Akyün’s German-Turkish narrator relates a German friend’s advice that she not become involved with a German-Turkish man: “Sie 4

Henryk M. Broder’s recent book Kritik der reinen Toleranz (2008) was key in prompting me to examine the word “tolerance” and the connotations it may carry with it.

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wollte mich von einer Dummheit bewahren. Und ich könnte es ihr nicht einmal vorwerfen, denn gewisse Vorurteile pflegte ich ja selbst” (61). As the text progresses, the narrator becomes increasingly aware of her own prejudices and endeavors to work through them as she, despite her friend’s advice, pursues a relationship with the man in question. At the end of the book, the narrator describes her plans for raising their daughter in an intercultural atmosphere and her hopes for the sort of open-mindedness and mutual exchange this atmosphere might foster. She writes “und vielleicht kommt irgendwann einmal eine Zeit, in der nicht nur meine deutschen Freunde sich bei uns erkundigen, wie wir Weihnachten feiern, sondern ich sie frage: ‘Wie begeht ihr eigentlich in diesem Jahr das Zuckerfest?’” (221). Though the topic of tolerance is seldom directly addressed in her books, Akyün exhibits and prompts the sort of selfreflexivity and willingness to accept and adapt to new influences and perspectives that is necessary for productive engagement with the topic. In Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei Emine Sevgi Özdamar deals with similar topics as does Kelek. She tells the story of her childhood and adolescence in Kurdistan, while focusing on the power of narrative and storytelling, thus locating herself in the Turkish narrative tradition. Gender and family relations are also focal points, and Özdamar does describe instances of child abuse and the oppression of women. Her book is not, however, directly political. Tolerance is not presented as a main theme. In fact, Özdamar has been criticized for writing with too much emotional distance and offering too little criticism. One could, however, pose the question of whether this distance is indeed an expression of uncritical tolerance, or ambivalence, or whether it also reflects a critical viewpoint. Because this particular text is written in such an emotionally detached manner, it seems to the reader that Özdamar is telling a fictional story. Moreover, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei is an example of magical realism, a style often used to deliver veiled social and political criticism. This comprehensive, impressive, and artistically affecting novel opens a window into another world, which the reader is forced to discover and decode for him or herself. By contrast, Kelek functions as a very wellread tour guide. She accompanies the reader and clearly explains what is to be criticized, for which current or historical reasons, and what is to be done to improve any given situation. Özdamar, on the other hand, does not make any such suggestions. As a guide, a teacher, a sociologist, or a generally recognizable figure in the text, she is completely absent. While I would argue that both texts raise crucial social and political questions, Kelek is much more direct in foregrounding certain issues. Özdamar

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leaves her readers to choose the degree to which, and the level on which, they will engage her text. Kelek confronts her readers by immediately addressing certain points and makes it clear that nothing about her text is, or could be, fictional. Thus, it would likely depend on the approach a reader takes and the level of engagement he or she chooses, as to which text would prove to be more effective in prompting critical reflection. Although her writing style differs from that of Kelek, Özdamar employs some similar strategies. Her novel also includes, or is characterized by, multiple genres – autofiction, fairy tales, anecdotes, magical realism, and intercultural writing. In that it combines aspects of the German and Turkish languages, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei becomes an excellent example of intercultural narration. In contrast to Kelek, whose books are written in flawless German, Özdamar makes an effort to convey the fact that she is not a native speaker of German. She uses her roots in the Turkish language and the creativity acquired out of necessity by non-native speakers to develop a particularly unique and poetic style. As such, her texts defamiliarize not only the objects and experiences she describes, but the German and Turkish languages as well. The fact that Özdamar’s work is heavily influenced by the works of Bertolt Brecht adds further intercultural and intertextual dimensions to her writing, and indicates a possible source of inspiration for her skillful defamiliarization. Through metaphor, literal translation, personification of objects, and a layering, or juxtaposing, of places and movements, Özdamar makes her readers take a second look at the German and Turkish languages, and on a larger scale, at the phenomenon of worker migration, and at political and social occurrences in both Germany and Turkey during the 60’s and 70’s. Özdamar uses defamiliarization, and the idea of multiple, very different, modes of expression existing within one language, to draw attention to the huge variety of lifestyles and viewpoints existing within each nation and culture. For example, she describes varying political standpoints according to the spectrum of newspapers available: “An den Zeitungskiosken hingen die linken, faschistischen und religiösen Zeitungen nebeneinander, alle in Türkisch, aber es war wie drei Fremdsprachen. Im Schiff öffneten alle ihre linken, faschistischen oder religiösen Zeitungen, und man sah keine Gesichter mehr” (Brücke 295 – 296). Özdamar’s use of defamiliarization and the attention she thereby draws to historical and linguistic particularities encourages self-reflexivity in her readers, regardless of their heritage, and a closer, more detailed examination of the experience of the Other. Although her writing style is very different from that of Kelek, Özdamar fulfills the same requirements for authenticity and authority by

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weaving a great deal of historical information, and all sorts of myths, into the story of her childhood. She informs the reader about historical facts, like, for example, the inauguration of the Latin alphabet (69). However, she does not appear to have any clear political goals. She demonstrates personal as well as factual knowledge and is a member of the culture she describes. Özdamar leaves the task of critical appraisal to the reader, however she provides him or her with more than adequate material to begin this process.

Conclusion Integration, tolerance, and self-reflexivity are portrayed, explored, and discussed in literature and in other forms of media. Migration literature offers a space for the construction of identity and the discovery of various possible realities. Despite readers’ continuing demand for “authentic” portrayals of other cultures, and their association of this authenticity with the personal experiences and background of authors, the possibility of exploring various realities in literature serves to dismantle assumed connections between an author’s language, nation of origin, and ethnic or cultural heritage. (In)tolerance between and within cultures, the subject of a long-standing discourse in Germany, has become a focal point in intercultural literature thematizing migration and is one of the primary topics appearing in this genre. Authors such as Necla Kelek or Seyran Ateú criticize tolerance and how, when, and to what extent it is practiced in order to convey a specific political message. They point out what they consider to be pervasive misconceptions regarding tolerance in Germany and reveal and deconstruct at least some of the myths surrounding the issue. Hatice Akyün and Emine Sevgi Özdamar, by contrast, occupy themselves less directly with the topic of tolerance and focus instead on the day-to-day normalcy and experiences of German-Turkish and immigrant women. This certainly downplays the status of tolerance discourse and shows that neither it, nor culture, need be the direct focus of migration literature. Because all of these authors produce very individual combinations of genre and stylistic characteristics, they address, and appeal to, different audiences, all of whom will be situated differently within the ever-evolving discourse of tolerance and intolerance in Germany. Some address tolerance as it is currently conceived, and some speak to the necessity of developing the concept further by incorporating the ideas of adoption and adaptation.

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Works Cited Akyün, Hatice. Einmal Hans mit scharfer Soße. Munich: Goldmann, 2005. —. Ali zum Dessert. Munich: Goldmann, 2008. —. “Für meine Familie bin ich Helga.” . Accessed May 23, 2007. Ateú, Seyran. “Mord bleibt Mord.” Kulturaustausch: Zeitschrift für internationale Perspektiven. Ausgabe 3, 2007. Behschnitt, Wolfgang and Mohnike, Thomas. “Interkulturelle Authentizität? Überlegungen zur ‘anderen’ Ästhetik der schwedischen ‘invandrarlitteratur’”. Über Grenzen. Grenzgänge der Skandinavistik. Hrsg. Wolfgang Behschnitt und Elisabeth Herrmann. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2007. 79 – 100. Broder, Henryk M. Kritik der reinen Toleranz. Berlin: wjs, 2008. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 2002. Kelek, Necla. Die Fremde Braut. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2005. —. Die verlorenen Söhne. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2006. Özdamar, Emine Sevgi. Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1992. —. Die Brücke vom goldenen Horn. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998. Weber, Beverly M. “Beyond the Culture Trap: Immigrant Women in Germany, Planet-Talk, and a Politics of Listening.” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature and Culture. 21 (2005). 16 – 38.

PART IV: MYTHIC CONSTRUCTIONS OF WISDOM AND THE PSYCHE

ODINIC ELEMENTS IN THE NORTHERN SIGURÐR LEGEND: A RE-READING OF FÁFNISMÁL ADAM OBERLIN, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

“þá scal freista, hvárr fleira viti, 1 gestr eða inn gamli þulr.” “Then it shall be tested, which one knows more, the guest or the old Þulr.”

Hermann Pálsson, in his essay “Odinic Echoes in Gísla saga,” attempts to collect literary evidence for the importance of Óðin’s cult in early Iceland. Though the reconstruction or explanation of the historical Norse religion may be misguided when developed through such late literature, Pálsson’s essay nevertheless deftly explicates the cultic, pagan aspects present in Gísla saga, features of saga literature often overlooked in favor of concentrating on Christian themes. His analysis underlines the literary importance of Óðinn in understanding certain themes in Old Icelandic literature, both prose and poetry, namely that Óðin’s role as god of battle, sorcery, and deception in the saga is consequent of a correlation between thematic characterization in Gísla saga and V lsunga saga (Pálsson 99). Odinic themes are also present in Fáfnismál and its repetition in V lsunga saga and provide a more coherent view of the wisdom discourse in first part of the poem than is usually accepted. The purpose of the following paper is to analyze how Sigurðr, in the beginning strophes of Fáfnismál, represents a fully-formed Odinic hero, who has received not only the patronage of the god but aspects of his persona as well, and how the mythology and roles of Óðinn form a thematic connection 1

Vm. 94-6. All references to poems in the Poetic Edda are from Gustav Neckel and Hans Kuhn, Edda. Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmälern, 5. verbesserte Auflage (Heidelberg: Winter, 1983). This and all subsequent translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.

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between Óðin’s poem Vafþrúðnismál and the Jungsigurddichtung, which is the poem-complex Reginsmál, Fáfnismál, and Sigrdrífumál. It seems prudent, due to his characterization in the Edda and V lsunga saga, to analyze Sigurðr not merely as an archetypal part of the Niflung/Nibelung tradition but also as a literary character in the uniquely-formed Scandinavian expression of the tradition, shaped by the mythological and heroic conventions of that environment. In strophes 12-15 of Fáfnismál, the Eddic dragon-slaying episode also found almost verbatim in V lsunga saga, Sigurðr unexpectedly and abruptly queries Fáfnir about mythological knowledge after being warned of the nature of the gold’s curse. This episode is bracketed by discourse between the hero and dragon, in which Sigurðr initially conceals his name and Fáfnir seeks to learn it, followed by a further explanation of the cursed hoard. That many scholars have been both perplexed and put off by strophes 12-15 of Fáfnismál is clear: Edzardi (314-325), de Vries (1-59), Hollander (223), Jónsson and Müllenhof (273) have commented on these strophes’ lack of cohesion with the rest of the poem, particularly that such an interpolation is aesthetically displeasing and difficult, if not impossible, to explain in context. The Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda shows a hesitation to ascribe meaning or origin to these lines by stating “[d]ie verbalen Übereinstimmungen zwischen den Fm.-Strophen und anderen Eddaliedern lassen sich nur Ausnahmsweise auf den Einfluß des einen Liedes auf das andere zurückführen[,]” (von See 386) which may be true in the direct transposition of lines and half-lines from Vafþrúðnismál, but I find the thematic influence to be much stronger, as I shall demonstrate. A dissenting voice, however, rises above this uncertainty. The most recent stance, expounded by Joyce Lionarons, is that “[t]his scholarly perplexity seems to stem in part from confusion over genre, for as discourse, the conversation between hero and dragon does not easily conform to any one of the Old Norse discursive subgenres, but is instead constituted by a second intertextual interaction, a conversation, as it were, among the coded conventions of three separate forms of traditional discourse in Germanic literature: the senna,2 the death song, and wisdom poetry.” (Lionarons 64)

Two types of verbal duels in the Edda are termed flytings, the senna (an insult/threat exchange) and the mannjafnaðr (a boast exchange). Here Lionarons distinguishes between senna and the special didactic-discursive 2

For the role of senna in Fáfnismál, cf. Quinn.

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form of Eddic wisdom poetry, which allows one to connect other poems and saga episodes to a specific singular tradition of dialogue otherwise seen as unconnected. All of the previously listed scholars who find little thematic cohesion in the beginning of the poem recognize only the linguistic parallel between Vafþrúðnismál and Fáfnismál, while Lionarons sees it as an intrinsic part of the episode’s symbolic value. Her ultimate analysis, however, explains the dialogue as a replacement for physical combat between individual subjects and states that this ignores the audience’s expectation of distinction between the hero and the monster to some extent, raising “subtextual questions concerning the underlying nature of heroes and dragons” (Lionarons 70). This seems to be beyond the likely associations made by the Edda and saga audiences, who had numerous examples of mythological heroic characters who were not only not challenged by a self-aware monster but required such a foil to prove their yet greater wisdom and strength. Some attention has been given to the mythological information contained in and implied by Sigurð’s questions,3 most thoroughly in Alv Kragerud’s article “De mytologiske spørsmål i Fåvnesmål.” Though the queries and their answers can serve as a means of seeking and receiving prophetic pronunciations or simply a thematic element of mytho-didactic Eddic poetry, the two questions may be as important for the establishment of roles as for their content; Sigurðr cannot prove his status as an Odinic hero (that is, fully educated in combat, mythological or religious wisdom and runes) to the serpent until their roles as bearers of mythical knowledge have been sufficiently affirmed. Óðinn, the fickle patron of the V lsung line, is the god of wisdom and of verse, and, as one of the gods who cursed Fáfnir, a further clear link between dragon and dragon-slayer within the context of formulaic wisdom discourse. Both man and dragon are representative of the struggle between the Gods and Giantkind, replaying an oft-occurring theme in which Sigurður plays the role of Óðinn and Fáfnir of a giant. In str. 29 of Fáfnismál, Fáfnir is called “inn aldna iotun” (“the old Jotun”), as the dwarf Reginn in str. 38 is named “inn hrímkalda iotun” (“the rime-cold Jotun”), conflating various categories of monster in one term. Lee Hollander, without further commentary, remarked that “[b]oth Reginn and Fáfnir are originally of the giant race,” (228) and as a modern example Wagner portrayed Fáfnir as a giant instead of a man or dwarf before his transformation to dragon in Der Ring des Nibelungen. Katja Schulz has suggested that “[b]ei Fáfnir scheint es zu einer Kontamination von 3

Cf. Gould.

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Drachen- und Riesen-Motivik gekommen zu sein,” (94) which can be refuted by the Edda author’s ease and frequency in switching between various terms for monstrosities, the generic term being “Giant.” This is echoed in the prose of the Sagas, where the conflation of multiple monstrous beings simply as “trolls” or “ghosts” seems to contradict the idea that the category “giant” is confused in the Eddas. The generic category of Giantkind functions thematically as the collective enemy of the gods and the dragon-slaying episode in Fáfnismál contains the entire “God(-figure) fights Giant” episode from Óðin’s perspective in Vafþrúðnismál. This can be outlined as hearing of the monster and announcing the desire to best it, travel, reception in the hall of the monstrous host, a contest, and finally the slaying of the monster. The episodic construction is parallel to the episode in Vafþrúðnismál, in which Óðin’s superior wisdom and guile lends him the necessary force to conquer the giant Vafþrúðnir. The Vafþrúðnismál contain a hoard of mythological ĮʌĮȟ ȜİȖȩȝİȞĮ, and this didactic battle of wits remains one of our best single sources for Norse mythology, embellishing parts of the outline of creation and eschatology set forth in the V luspá. Óðinn tells Frigg that he wishes to test his wisdom against the “all-wise giant” and proceeds to Vafþrúðnir’s hall, where they agree to wager their heads on the contest’s outcome. Sigurður’s interaction with Fáfnir closely resembles the motivations, purpose and results of Óðin’s endeavor. The formula “segðu” (“say,” 2nd per. sg. imperative), coupled with mér, þat, þat iþ eina Æ tólfta (“to me, that, that first Æ that twelfth”) in Vafþrúðnismál and Alvíssmál may certainly have functioned as a memoryaiding device to facilitate oral recitation or composition per oral-formulaic theories, and clearly serves as an element of a theme of the ritualized knowledge-exchange contest in the Eddas. That this theme finds duplication in Fáfnismál is then explicable from Sigurð's use of the formula, as well as Fáfnirs responses, which fit the meter and stylistic requirements of the theme in Vafþrúðnismál. It is possible that those requirements are purely stylistic, relating to the restrictions of ljóðaháttr verse form, but it is also possible that the exchange as a whole is so formulated because of its ritual nature. Snorri writes in Ch. 5 of Ynglinga saga that Óðinn “spoke all in rhyme, which is that poetry called skaldcraft.” Indeed, the use of “Óðinn/Vafþrúðnir qvað,” beginning before strophe 18 of Vafþrúðnismál, can indicate not only that speech will follow (as it is used in a general sense in other poems such as Hárbarðsljóð and Skírnismál) but also that the speech is verse itself within the verse structure of the poem. Verses 13-15 of Fáfnismál on the edge of the R

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manuscript, Codex Regius, show “q” for “qvað,” though the name abbreviations have not been preserved (Neckel/Kuhn 182), further relating this episode stylistically to Vafþrúðnismál and the “generic” wisdom exchange contest, if we can define such a contest as one in which two supernatural beings exchange mythological knowledge and the loser (always the representative of Giantkind) is slain, usually by beheading. Ultimately, the role and meaning of the þulr present the greatest confusion in Vafþrúðnismál. Much has been said on the topic regarding meaning and function, which I shall only briefly mention.4 Standard dictionaries define þulr as “a sayer of saws, a wise-man, a sage (a bard?).”5 Walther Heinrich Vogt’s position that the þulr functions as a “Kultredner,” inseparable from Norse religious practices, finds little foothold in modern scholarship. Anatoly Liberman and Elena Gureviþ, among others, have exposed the flaws in this theory and left us with little certainty except for a possible borrowing from a Baltic word for “interpreter,” a self-referential verb “þylia,” “to speak like a þulr” or “to compose þulur,” which are lists of mythological or heroic names and objects, and a difficult to define OE cognate, þyle, which is a position seemingly unrelated to the ON þulr (Liberman 71-77). Though the etymology will most likely remain vague, the function of the þulr as presented in the Eddic poems can be roughly defined by its actions in the texts in which it occurs. There is perhaps a requirement that a þulr speaks “þular stóli á” (“on the þul’s seat”) as presented in the Loddfáfnismál portion of the Hávamál (str. 1112), which seems functionally related to the seat of power from which a v lva speaks prophecy and wisdom. Óðin’s Hliðskjálf is such a seat, and he has experienced other seats of power; for example, if we are to accept Sólarljóð as a source of Odinic mythos, the god says “I sat nine days on the Norn’s stool,” which is certainly related to prophetic and mythological/magical pronouncements (Hunke 70). Óðinn, though here not seated because he is the challenger, is a recognized þulr from other sources; Vafþrúðnir’s claim in str. 9 that he too is a þulr is unsupported from any other source, but he provides the three main functions of the wise-man’s “duties” as defined by Óðin’s conduct in Vafþrúðnismál and other lays: 1) he is seated in a position of power, 2) he is knowledgeable about mythology and poetry, if my earlier mention of the poetic discourse 4

Cf. the bibliographies in Liberman and Gureviþ. This is the definition given in Cleasby/Vigfusson, repeated as “wise-man, sage” in Zoëga. Adolf Noreen gives simply “redner” in his “Altisländische und Altnorwegische Grammatik,” and cites it as a man’s name on a Swedish runic inscription in “Altschwedische Grammatik.”

5

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within the poem itself is taken into account, and finally 3) the mythological wisdom is used for a contest. Thus, Vafþrúðnir fulfills the role of a þulr in the same manner as Óðinn, and this outline of the þul’s office, admittedly meager but probably recognizable to the medieval Icelandic audience from the sources we have, can be applied to both Sigurðr and his opponent Fáfnir. Wisdom is often a central characteristic among Giant-kind, which Mímir, Útgarða-Loki, Vafþrúðnir, and Reginn exhibit in the Eddas. That Fáfnir is also a wise giant is evidenced not only by his actions but also through his age when he is called “old giant,” as age and wisdom are typical traits assigned to giants through such epithets (Schulz 65).6 His brother Reginn is characterized as both a giant and a dwarf, and Otr as a shape-shifting Giant-kin, removing Fáfnir’s family completely from the human realm and placing their lineage in opposition to gods and heroes. The worm’s water source is located on Gnitaheiðr, and a heath is generally a flat place.7 Sigurðr however transforms this landscape into a manner of high-place for his enemy, on Óðin’s advice in V lsunga saga, by digging several ditches in which to hide and subsequently slay the dragon. Fáfnir thus begins Fáfnismál in the position of prophetic power, despite his being mortally wounded, and Sigurðr has entered his home with a challenge in the same manner as Óðinn in Vafþrúðnismál. Indeed, Sigurðr names himself “g fuct dýr” (“noble beast”)8 in order to conceal his identity, as Óðinn does as “Gangráðr” before Vafþrúðnir. The dragon is vanquished and Reginn is decapitated afterward, as Vafþrúðnir’s beheading is implied at the end of his lay. These similarities in episodic construction are, taken as a whole, not necessarily indicative of borrowing, but show nevertheless a conscious use of common thematic elements to replicate an encounter between one þulr and another, whatever that archetypal encounter may be. Jere Fleck, considering such encounters in their formulaic construction and repitition, concluded that “[d]ie ursprünglichen Wissensbegegnungen werden also mit den überliefernden Óðinsbegegnungen funktionell identisch gewesen sein“ (Fleck 71). But Óðin’s attributes do not end with wisdom, and his functions as Warriorand Chieftain/King-god are mirrored further in Sigurð’s education and deeds.

6

Cf. also Gm., Hav., Skm., Hym. and Vsp. Cf. Cleasby/Vigfusson, “in Icel. particularly heiðr (or heiði) is chiefly used of a low barren heath or fell.” 8 Cf. Gade. 7

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If this episode in Fáfnismál is seen as one of a number of foregone victories due to Óðin’s patronage, Sigurð’s heroic development is continually portrayed as traditional and therefore static; he has been declared “í orðom spacr” (“wise in words”) already as a young man in Grípisspá,9 from which “Sigurðr [in Fáfnismál] zeigt sich als rednerischer Taktiker, der seine Argumentation der gerade vorliegenden Situation anpaßt” (Sprenger 121). His first mention in the prose of Frá dauða Sinfiotla is that he is “foremost among his brothers, and men in the old tales call him greater than any men and the most renowned of war-kings” (l. 35-36). His subsequent adventures in Reginsmál and Fáfnismál only confirm, despite a later un-heroic death, that his abilities and knowledge are thus predisposed to (possibly sacral) kingship. M.I. Steblin-Kamenskij praises the “strength of mind” (Steblin-Kamenskij 81-93) of heroines in the heroic lays and observes a seeming lack of this strength in male heroes, particularly in Sigurðr, who are predominantly characterized by raw physical force and sometimes deception. However, Sigurð’s use of deception to kill Fáfnir is not a cowardly act without context, for it was on the behest of a disguised Óðinn, who deceived his hosts with onomastic trickery twice to enter contests in Vafþrúðnismál and in the Heiðreksgátur of Hervarar saga og Heiðreks, where he asked the same trick question to win, and each ends in the loser’s death.10 Sigurðr, by the end of Fáfnismál, has become a complete hero, having already learned mythological wisdom, magic, and quite possibly rune lore from Reginn before he ever meets Sigrdrífa. As the leading prose of the Reginsmál states “[h]e was the most skilled of men, and was a dwarf in stature; he was wise, grim and well versed in magic. Reginn was Sigurð’s fosterfather and taught and loved him greatly.”11 In Sigrdrífumál, the last and most potent rune lore given to Sigurðr by Sigrdrífa is a further and final education, drawn from the Ljóðatal portion of the Hávamál and certainly pertinent to a discussion of Odinic mythos. In order to establish the medieval Icelandic image of Sigurðr as a preChristian hero, the Christian ideals that were common in 13th century continental Germanic culture must be discussed, particularly as they form important motifs in the German Siegfried legend and other Middle High German texts. As presented in the sources, Óðin’s nature as a warrior and sorcerer is capricious and self-serving, in contradistinction to the courtly medieval ideals expressed in the common MHG terms êre, milte, stæte, 9

Grp. 76, cf. Vm. 51-2, “Fór þá Óðinn, at freista orðspeki” With the sole exception of Svipdagsmál, every like contest ends in death, according to de Vries Om Eddaens Visdomsdigtning. 11 Rm. introductory prose, l. 5-6. 10

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zuht, tapferheit, mâze, and triuwe. Óðinn directs battles wantonly, travels for his own purposes instead of âventiure, and has been linked to ancient conceptions of both shamans and mounted warriors.12 Whether Sigurðr more closely resembles an Odinic hero or a continental knight, courtly and of good breeding, has great impact on the reception of both the Jungsigurddichtung and V lsunga saga. Edgar Haimerl views Sigurðr as “ein vorbildhafter Held im Sinne des christlichen Mittelalters“ (102), furthermore stating of Fáfnismál that “[d]iese Dichtung in der im Codex Regius überlieferten Gestaltung die Erziehung Sigurds zu einem mittelaltergemäßen Helden vorführt, der Fortitudo mit Sapientia zu verbinden weiß” (82), and gives a few notes about the doubt surrounding the age of the Jungsigurddichtung based on these positions. I accept rather de Vries’ placement of the overwhelming reliance on mythological knowledge in the narrative to the 10th century (Literaturgeschichte 147), as Sigurðr is noble, educated, and heroic, but his education is the antithesis of courtly. Siegfried’s education in Das Nibelungenlied is not explored in detail, but the theme of education in Gottfried’s Tristan is developed much further, and can serve as a detailed model of courtly instruction to contrast with the method of Sigurð’s education. Tristan lines 3700-32 relate the young hero’s abilities in languages (Norwegian, Irish, German, Scottish, and Danish) riding, hunting, and playing instruments – lines 3719-20 read “ein vierzehenjaerec kint / kan al die liste, die nû sint!” (“A fourteen year old has all the skills there are!”). Later, his abilities in foreign languages, knightly combat, and courtly conduct become essential to the narrative. Sigurðr, by the episode with Fáfnir, has displayed his complete remove from such a courtly conception of education by engaging in a preChristian wisdom contest, whether “accurate” or merely half-remembered tradition by the time of written composition. It is also useful to contrast these differentiated narrative categories by comparing the courtliness of Sigurð’s dragon-slaying with Tristan’s: the former is after treasure and presumably wisdom, for “[w]ie die Götter sind auch die Helden von Habsucht beherrscht” (Haimerl 84) and the latter seeks, in heroic though still courtly fashion, to win a lady’s hand. The uncourtly element of greed does not enter into the Tristan legend as a direct result of the hero’s education in courtly values. Sigurd’s development is heathen, magical, and does not require the obligatory “mâ‫ޡ‬e” of a medieval court hero. The fortitudo et sapientia topos espoused by Haimerl is present to a degree in the poems, but only to the same extant that it is present in any work that involves heroic 12

Cf. Motz.

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characters from any period in the occidental world. This seems to me to be a confusion of the traits as “requisite qualities of a knight” (Serrano 111) and the wider application it has received since long before the poetic explication of European knighthood began. This topos has been argued suitably for passages in Beowulf13 as well as for uncountable works from antiquity, including the Bible, and nearly all human cultures. We know many heroes to be wise from their epithets and formulaic descriptions, from Odysseus to Beowulf to Sigurðr – kingship and chieftaincy, sacral or not, require wisdom. However, the type of wisdom exemplified by medieval courtly-chivalric heroes is domestic. Hunting, poetry, foreign languages, and politics are the daily bread of a hero like Tristan. Since Sigurð’s wisdom in the Jungsigurddichtung is mythological and magical, not at all concerned with 13th century realities or fictions of the court, we should not be hasty to ascribe a later medieval influence from the time of written composition when we see fortitudo et sapientia, but rather look toward a more traditional conception, especially where it is visible in multiple mythological sources. In summary, though we cannot be certain of the intended use of the Vafþrúðnismál episode in Fáfnismál, the connections between Óðinn and Sigurðr are manifold and preclude treating the poem as the product of a Christian culture already exposed to the customs of court literature. Contrary to the commonly-held contention that the didactic verses in Fáfnismál are meaningless or unexplainable, whether interpolations or not, viewing Fáfnismál as a heterogeneous composition of Didactic/Mythological and Heroic lays demonstrates that Odinic elements within the mythological portion of the Edda can be replicated in the tradition of a larger Germanic heroic narrative. If the Odinic aspect of the northern Niflung/Nibelung legend is accepted as integral to Sigurð’s heroic development, the wisdom discourse in Fáfnismál serves as the point at which Sigurðr proves his ability to use the lore he learned from Reginn and replicates Óðin’s triumph over the wisdom of Giantkind. Though the Icelandic written narrative is roughly contemporaneous with its German counterpart, the texts show distinct and meaningful approaches in the construction of heroes for audiences with different expectations.

13

Cf. Kaske “Sapientia et Fortitudo as the Controlling Theme of Beowulf” and his other articles on the subject, “The Sigemund-Heremod and Hama-Hygelac Passages in Beowulf” and “Weohstan’s Sword.”

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Works Cited Edzardi, Anton. “Kleine Beiträge zur Geschichte und Erklärung der Eddalieder. II.” Germania 23 (1878): 314-325. Fleck, Jere. Die Wissensbegegnung in der altgermanischen Religion. Phil. Diss. München, 1966. Gade, Kari Ellen. “Sigurðr – g fuct dýr: A Note on Fáfnismál.” Arkiv for Nordisk Filologi 105 (1990): 57-68. Gould, Chester Nathan. “Which are the Norns who take Children from Mothers?” Modern Language Notes 42 (1927): 218-221. Gureviþ, Elena. “Zur Geneaologie der þula.” Alvíssmál 1 (1992): 65-98. Haimerl, Edgar. “Sigurd – Ein Held des Mittelalters. Eine textimmanente Interpretation der Jungsigurddichtung.” Alvíssmál 2 (1993): 81-104. Hunke, W. “Odins Geburt.” Edda, Skalden, Saga – Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Felix Genzmer. Ed. Herman Schneider. Heidelberg: Winter, 1952. Jónsson, Finnur. Oldnorske og Oldislandske Literaturs Historie. Bd. 1. København: Nielson & Lydiche, 1894. Kaske, R.E. “Sapientia et Fortitudo as the Controlling Theme of Beowulf” An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism. Ed. Lewis E. Nicholson. Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1963: 269-310. —. “The Sigemund-Heremod and Hama-Hygelac Passages in Beowulf.” PMLA 74 (1959): 489-494. —. “Weohstan’s Sword” MLN 75 (1960): 465-468. Kragerud, Alv. “De mytologiske spørsmål i Fåvnesmål.” ANF 96 (1981): 9-48. Liberman, Anatoly. “Ten Scandinavian and North English Etymologies.” Alvíssmál 6 (1996): 63-98. Lionarons, Joyce Tally. The Medieval Dragon – The Nature of the Beast in Germanic Literature. Enfield Lock (UK): Hisarlik Press, 1998. Motz, Lotte. “The King, The Champion and The Sorcerer: A Study in Germanic Myth.” Studia Medievalia Septentrionalia 1. Ed. Rudolf Simek. Wien: Verlag Fassbaender, 1996. Neckel, Gustav and Hans Kuhn. Edda. Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmälern. 5. verbesserte Auflage. Heidelberg: Winter, 1983. Pálsson, Hermann. “Odinic Echoes in Gísla saga.” Gudar på Jorden – Festskrift til Lars Lönnroth. Eds. Stina Hansson and Mats Malm. Stockholm: Symposion, 2000: 97-118. The Poetic Edda. Trans. Lee M. Hollander. 2nd rev. ed. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000.

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Quinn, Judy. “Verseform and voice in eddic poems: the discourses of Fáfnismál.” ANF (1992): 100-130. Schulz, Katja. Riesen. Von Wissenshütern und Wildnisbewohnern in Edda und Saga. Skandinavische Arbeiten 20. Heidelberg: Winter, 2004. See, Klaus von et al. (eds.). Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda. Bd. 5: Heldenlieder. Heidelberg: Winter, 2006. Serrano, Richard. “No Place for a Lady in ‘The Song of Roland.’” Pacific Coast Philology, 27 (1992): 110-116 Sprenger, Ulrike. “Fáfnismál Str. 1-31.” Deutsch-Nordische Begegnungen: 9. Arbeitstagung der Skandinavisten des deutschen Sprachgebiets 1989 in Svendborg. Eds. K. Braunmüller and M. Brøndsted. Odense: Odense UP, 1991: 116-127. Steblin-Kamenskij, M.I. “Valkyries and Heroes.” ANF 97 (1982): 81-93. von Straßburg, Gottfried. Tristan. Nach dem Text von Friedrich Ranke. Hrsg. und Übers. Rüdiger Krohn. Bd. 1. 8. Aufl. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005. Sturluson, Snorri. Heimskringla. Eds. Bergljót Kristjánsdottir et al. Vol. 1. Reykjavík: Mál og Menning, 1991. Walter, Heinrich. Der Þulr. Stilgeshichte der eddischen Wissensdichtung 4. Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt, 1927. de Vries, Jan. Altnordische Literaturgeschichte. Bd. I. Grundriß der Germanischen Philologie 15. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1941. —. “Om Eddaens Visdomsdigtning.” ANF 50 (1934): 1-59.

FLASHBACKS, FANTASIES AND RESISTANCE IN JUREK BECKER’S JACOB THE LIAR DELENE WHITE, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS

The plot of both the film and the book Jacob the Liar revolves around Jacob Heym, a Jew who is living in an unnamed Jewish ghetto somewhere in Poland. According to the novel’s anonymous narrator, Jacob is a small man, not the “usual” hero. One evening, Jacob is caught by an SS guard who tricks him into thinking he has broken the curfew law and then sends him to the police station to request a “proper punishment,” which is certain death. While in the station, Jacob hears on the radio that the Russians are fighting the Germans near Bezanika. This leads Jacob to think that the Russians are very near to the ghetto, and that they might liberate it soon. The next day, Jacob tells his fellow ghetto inhabitant and younger coworker Mischa about the news, which quickly spreads. People then come to Jacob for more news, believing that he has a forbidden radio. This belief in an elusive and forbidden radio raises hope among the society within the ghetto. In addition to the burden of keeping people’s hopes up about the Russians nearing their ghetto, Jacob is also haunted by his personal memories of the past, pre-war and pre-ghetto life. These memories are of a happier, albeit petit bourgeois life, and they come to Jacob in the form of flashbacks throughout the film, and to the novel’s narrator in the form of analepsis. The memories depicted in the narrative of Jacob might appear to be documentary or autobiographical, but they are in fact fictional. This is complicated by Becker’s personal history. He was himself a childsurvivor of the àódĨ ghetto as well as the Ravensbrück concentration camp. He does not, however, retain any personal memories of this experience and relies on other survivors’ stories and historical research for inspiration to write. The aim of this paper is to examine the ways in which Becker’s Jacob the Liar, in the shape of the novel and Frank Beyer’s film

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adaptation, negotiate Becker’s own struggle with recollection and the Communist discourse of Holocaust memory. This paper is an attempt to place the film and novel of Jacob the Liar in the historical and biographical contexts as they relate to Becker, the author of the novel and screenplay writer of the film. Moreover, the structure of this paper is organized around the flashbacks—or analepsis—within the film and novel as a point of departure to discuss the role of the layering of memories and fantasies in Jacob the Liar that construct Becker’s challenge to the dominant concept in GDR policy regarding the Holocaust.1 I examine flashbacks in their technical form as markers of temporality and their psychological meaning. While fantasy in Jacob is in part fairy tale, for the most part, I refer to the word fantasy as the very human capacity to dream—to envision a future for oneself. This human capacity to imagine a better future and to keep memories of a better past directly undermines the presumed Nazi intention to dehumanize Jews and break their will to live. Furthermore, this is a challenge to the Nazis’ Final Solution. The Jewish resistance that Becker portrays, however, did not become part of GDR memory of the Holocaust. This paper additionally aims to place Becker’s fictional writing as personal memoir and therefore as a form of testimonial narrative of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Becker was originally a Jew from Poland who was forced with his parents into the àódĨ ghetto, then transported to a transit camp and later to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. He was separated from his father, and his mother died at Sachsenhausen, shortly after Soviet-led liberation of Ravensbrück. After liberation, the eight-year-old Becker was reunited with his father with the help of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Organization and they moved to occupied East Germany (Gilman 20-21). As a Jew, as a child survivor of the Holocaust, and as an East German, Becker is placed among East German fiction writers of the Holocaust. Becker does not quite fit within this limitation, however, since his background is complicated and since, with his narrative in Jacob the Liar, he challenges public memory of the Holocaust. While the narrative reads as if it could be a memoir of a survivor, an understanding of his narrative as personal memoir is complicated with the point that Becker retained no personal recollection of these events. As he states in his last interview before his death in 1997, Becker lost all 1

For definitions of analepsis and narrative temporality, see Gérard Genette, Die Erzählung, trans. Andreas Knop (Munich: 1998). Cited in Sabine Becker, Christine Hummel, Gabriele Sanders, eds., Grundkurs Literaturwissenschaft (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006), 133-134. See also Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York: Routledge, 1989).

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memories of his childhood that occurred before his eighth year (Gilman 20). Becker turned to his father to fill in gaps of his personal memories, which was mostly unfruitful, and then began historical research of the places in which he was imprisoned as a child so that he could create a narrative that might be historically accurate and reflect something of his own life (Schenk 72). This blend of historical research and fictional narrative creates a unique memoir narrative. As James Young argues, fictional and personal memoir narrative can be more illuminating than historical fact alone. The fiction, especially in Becker’s case, gives interpretative meaning to the historical facts about the Holocaust. Furthermore, Young’s distinction of the survivor-memoirist in regards to Holocaust literature can be expanded with Jurek Becker’s work to see him as survivor-memoirist without the personal memoir. He is indeed a child survivor, however, since he retains no personal recollection of this part of his life, he relies on fictional narrative to recreate memories that could resemble his own experiences. I agree with Young that this kind of narrative, though honestly fictional, is nonetheless valuable in describing the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Readers may examine Becker’s narrative as a negotiation of lost memories with historical record. This depiction of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust is a challenge to the discourse produced by East German literature and film that often privileges the legitimacy of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in its selective artistic memory of Holocaust victims and victimhood (Fox 98). Leading to a conflict with East German-Jewish memory of the Holocaust, East German public memory portrays Communists as the most important victims-turned-fighters against Nazism. This memory construct allows no room for the centrality of racism and especially anti-Semitism in Nazi ideology (Fox 9). Thomas Fox has found that the leitmotivs of "silence," "taboo," and "repression" recur in critical discussion of Jews in the GDR. According to Fox, writers and filmmakers proved best able to interrogate and revise East German Holocaust discourse and with it the silences and taboos surrounding the so-called "Jewish Question," (Fox 91). While writers who were of Jewish descent often legitimized the GDR’s version of Holocaust history by contributing to the discourse of a Communist-led resistance, Jurek Becker’s Jacob the Liar serves as a challenge to the earlier Marxist writings on the subject, and thus challenges the GDR policy regarding memory of the Holocaust (Fox 120). Furthermore, Becker challenges the accepted public memory by being a surviving Jew and writing in a way that brings the Jewish experience in the ghetto to the forefront and hardly mentions Communists. Becker’s work as an East

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German writer is further complicated by the fact that he is actually a Polish Jew whose father fabricated his background in order to “pass” as German and as a Jew to a lesser extent (Gilman 20-22). The novel’s narrator, who in some ways is a reflection of Jurek Becker, admits that he is an unreliable source for factual information. He admits that he cannot know every detail about what occurred in the ghetto and about the memories that Jacob and others shared with him. In some ways, he is a secondary witness, reporting information that is hearsay, and in others he is his own witness. With these flaws in his role, the narrator nevertheless remains significant to his narration. He addresses the problem of his recollection and his attempt to tell this story: “Some things I know from Mischa, but then there is a big gap for which there are simply no witnesses. I tell myself that it must have happened more or less in such and such a way, and then I tell it and pretend that’s how it was. And that is how it was; it’s not my fault that the witnesses who could confirm it can no longer be found” (32-33).

The novel’s narrator reveals information about himself in this passage. First, he survived the Holocaust while many others did not, and he is alive and able to tell this story. If this circumstance can be connected to Elie Wiesel’s argument, this survival status alone would qualify the narrator as one with a mission to state his testimony of experience in the Jewish ghetto-- to obey the command to remember. Still, one might argue that survival means that he has the burden to live with the memory of his Holocaust experience.2 Second, the narrator is inhibited in telling this story by the fact that he has suffered a traumatic experience. His status as survivor distinctly marks him as one who suffers trauma and loss. He shares this story as part of his working through this trauma. He either cannot or chooses not to remember all details exactly as they occurred, making him an unreliable source for factual details. Statements qualifying the narrator’s ability to tell this story serve to remind the reader that this novel is a work of fiction and that the erratic story, which is punctuated by layers of analepsis, is a result of a fragmented memory—not simply that the narrator intends to lie to his readers, as the title might of the novel might suggest. In one Freudian reading, flashbacks are one symptom—along with dreams and hallucinations—of trauma. These symptoms haunt the traumatized person. This happens as long as the cerebral cortex is shut down because the affect is too much to be registered cognitively in the 2

See Elie Wiesel, Night. Trans. Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.

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brain (Kaplan 5). In this theory, flashbacks would be representations of painful, traumatic memories that the person cannot work through. For the novel’s narrator, who mediates all changes in temporality for the characters as well as for himself, this attempt to work through trauma is depicted in the narrative technique of the analepsis. For Jacob, some flashbacks in the film narrate the story of his love for a woman who is no longer in his life because she escaped the Holocaust in her move to the United States. They do not narrate the typical Holocaust memory of the torture and starvation that Jews suffered. This is perhaps because the present time of the film is the Holocaust, and Jacob cannot have memories of it yet. The memories function contrary to the typical metaphor of the flashback—or of what I call the trauma-flashback—in which a memory of a traumatic event may be disclosed with the aid of this film technique and which the person having the flashback may not otherwise be able to describe. Instead of spectators seeing the past as the traumatic event—as in the Holocaust—we see it depicted in the present. While Jacob suffers the loss of his love, this event is not a trauma on the same scale as the Holocaust. We do not see anything happening to Jacob in the past, but rather that he has made decisions that affect his current life. The reserved, introverted Jacob has made a decision not to ask the woman to marry him. The real traumatic events happening to him that are driven by someone else—in this case, the Nazis—is his present life in the ghetto. Thus, the flashbacks do not represent trauma for Jacob. They instead represent the happier time in his life, and he is now traumatized in the present partly because he can no longer live that life and more directly because he is tortured in living this present life. With this portrayal of trauma with the flashback sequence, Becker creates a challenge to the memory of the Holocaust. While working with Frank Beyer to make the film Jacob, the two intended to make a film that was different from the typical Holocaust representations of the Jewish victim, as in documentaries (Schenk 74). Furthermore, they also intended to make the film different from East German fictional representations of the period, in which the Communist “fighters against fascism” are the heroes (Herf 83). This was part of their original plans, in 1965, when they began to work together on the film. However, their work suddenly halted as did many other film projects of the DEFA studios, after the Eleventh Plenum of the SED began on December 16, 1965, which was to return cultural politics of the GDR to a Stalinist model. After some debate, Beyer and Becker decided to add flashbacks into the film because they agreed that it would give the present-tense of the film more meaning. This technical feature of the film in fact does add

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layers of Jacob’s memories. Flashbacks, which signify memories, can run in what Gilles Deleuze calls a “circuit.” Once completed, the circuit tells a story, which Deleuze calls a zone of recollections, dreams, or thoughts that corresponds to a particular aspect of the thing: each time it is a plane or a circuit, so that the thing passes through an infinite number of planes or circuits which correspond to its own ‘laters’ or aspects. A different, virtual mental image would correspond to a different description, and vice versa: a different circuit. (Deleuze 46)

An “actual” image connects to a “recollection” image in the device of the flashback. “This is precisely a closed circuit which goes from the present to the past, then leads us back to the present,” (Deleuze 46). This form is also the pattern for many of the flashback sequences in Jacob. There are several circuits of flashbacks in the film. Just before the first flashback of the film starts, Jacob is walking out of his ghetto apartment. The spectator can see that Jacob lives in a ghetto as the mise-èn-scene signifies that this is the location. The building is dilapidated. The windows are broken, with paper and tape holding them intact. Furthermore, the costume signifies that Jacob is Jewish as he wears two yellow stars on his coat— one on the front and one on the back. The other figures who walk by Jacob also wear the yellow stars. In order for the spectator to understand these signifiers, he or she would need to have some prior knowledge of the history of the Holocaust. With the concentration of the yellow stars that stand out on the figures’ clothing, however, spectators can understand that the Jews are isolated from the rest of the world in this ghetto, even if they do not know the full history of Jews in ghettos during the Holocaust. A layering of the past with the present experience in the ghetto and with envisioning of a future after the war begins when Jacob notices Kowalski approach him in the freight yard. In the film, Kowalski’s approaching leads Jacob into a flashback. In the present, Jacob is eating his small ration of soup as he notices Kowalski walk up in the present. When the flashback starts, the now well-groomed Kowalski is cutting Jacob’s hair and asks, “What’s new?” The film then flashes to Jacob in the present, where he looks confused. He appears to wonder if he just heard Kowalski, or if this was a revisited memory. Kowalksi then asks in the present time—“anything new to report?” This sequence is an example of Deleuze’s “circuit.” In the novel and in the film, Kowalski has heard the news about the Russians from Mischa. From this point on, Jacob knows that his storytelling will have a tremendous impact on ghetto life. Once Jacob

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confirms the news, Kowalski begins to resist the Nazis by planning a future after they are defeated and the Jews are freed. He makes plans for his and Jacob’s collaborative business ventures. He also resists by pushing over crates to distract a guard while Jacob escapes from an outhouse, an act for which he also takes a beating. Although Kowalski is inspired to act against the Nazis, he quickly loses hope of his fantasized future after Jacob tells him the truth about the radio. Jacob reveals that he has been telling lies about the Russians in an attempt to bring hope to the ghetto. He admits to Kowalski that he has no radio, and that he does not know where the Russians are. Revealing that everyday life in the ghetto and the lack of fantasy of a future can make the figures lose the will to live, Kowalski is found dead the next morning after he hangs himself. His death is a reminder of the consequence of the Jews giving in to the Nazi plan to break their will and giving up on plans for a future. His suicide works directly against Jacob’s motive to tell stories, which he hopes will help the people to live, or at least give them the will to live. Jacob emphasizes this importance of his storytelling to Professor Kirschbaum in the film and in the novel on the night when the professor comes to protest the spreading of the news around the ghetto. In the novel, Jacob says in response to Kirschbaum’s request: Isn’t it enough for you that we have almost nothing to eat, that in winter one in five of us freezes to death, that every day half a street gets taken away in transports? All that still isn’t enough? And when I try to make use of the very last possibility that keeps them from just lying down and dying—with words, do you understand? I try to do that with words! Because that’s all I have!—then you come and tell me it’s prohibited!” (165)

The most important facet of his role as storyteller is that Jacob is responsible for leading the Jews in the ghetto to their fantasies of their future. These fantasies, which are stronger than hope alone, help the ghetto inhabitants to imagine that they will survive the ghetto. The characters take an active role in planning their future after they begin to envision their upcoming freedom. Once they begin to plan their futures with each other, the ghetto inhabitants start their psychological—and unarmed—resistance against the Nazis. In this sense, Jacob is a hero. Jacob says to Kirschbaum that he is aware that his stories will not make the Russians arrive any sooner, but it is important to him that no one has committed suicide since the news spread (166). Jacob’s reminding Kirschbaum of the devastation that people suffer in the ghetto also works

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to remind the audience of the poor quality of life there. It also underscores the leading to fantasy that Jacob consciously does in order to give life to the people in the ghetto and to resist the death that the Nazis plan for them. As the fairy tale fantasy works for the child Lina, the adults need to believe that their rescuer will arrive soon to liberate them. Like the sick princess and like Lina, the adults’ belief in the fantasy helps them to live—that is, without depression or focus on their starvation, and without considering suicide. Even though the Russians do not appear in the film or in the novel, most people in the ghetto believe the lies that Jacob tells because they enjoy the hope and fantasy that it gives them. They also are not willing to fight the German sentries because they believe that salvation is on its way via the Russian army. This belief, in turn, makes the Jews of the ghetto more passive physically. They are at the same time, however, also psychologically empowered. They show resistance to the Nazi plan for their destruction simply by remembering how they once lived and fantasizing that they can once again live this way in the future. Thus, the creation of the stories about the Russians’ advancement and the layers of memories and fantasies which are then evoked from those stories can be understood as a process that is a form of psychological resistance in the ghetto.3 In response to criticism stating that he did not include resistance in Jacob, Jurek Becker has written about the resistance that permeates this novel. He states that resistance was not the norm in the many ghettos of Eastern Europe, contrary to what the GDR leadership wanted everyone to believe. Becker argues that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was a one-time event and a big exception to the experiences in the many ghettos in Eastern Europe. He berates the "inflation" of the rebellion in literature of the Holocaust that typically highlights the Communist resistance and the expectation that physical resistance should be the norm. Becker states that the “others”—the non-heroes and the reluctant— are typically left out of the literature of the Holocaust because it is more comfortable to believe that the victims fought back and created a hard time for the unjust. Instead of fighting, Becker says, “in the hundreds of ghettos, [the victims] waited quietly for their end, maybe hoping for the liberation, maybe too weak to fight, maybe too afraid, maybe too intimidated. Nowhere, except for one instance, were fists raised,” (Becker, “Widerstand” 67).4

3

Lucy Dawidowicz states that in the Bialystok ghetto, hope of deliverance was pinned on the Red Army. See Davidowicz 217. 4 Translation of this quote from German is my own.

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Becker’s statements regarding resistance from Jews are supported further by Lucy Dawidowicz’s argument that Jews in ghettos realized that they had no choice but to come to terms with the days ahead in their prison house. That realization was no mere passive reconciliation with their lot. On the contrary, they enlisted their whole historic experience in trying to transform their environment. The commandment to preserve life had generated a strategy of accommodation, a tactic of adaptability, which centuries of powerlessness under oppressors had fashioned into a serviceable tradition. (Dawidowicz, 219)

If this accommodation strategy helped Jews to survive—to preserve life— then it was successful. The adaptability that Dawidowicz describes, then, helped the Jews to resist the Nazi’s plan of Jewish extermination. Aware of the armed resistance portrayed in other literature of the Holocaust, the narrator, in 1969, addresses the idea: “I have since read with awe about Warsaw and Buchenwald—another world, but comparable. I have read much about heroism, probably too much [. . .]. Be that as it may, we remained passive until the last second, and there’s nothing I can do about it now. [. . .] Where I was, there was no resistance” (81). I take this apology of the narrator as more of a sarcastic statement referencing the inflation that Becker mentioned regarding other Holocaust literature. As the Jews in Jacob the Liar demonstrate, they resist the Nazis’ attempt to demoralize them, led by Jacob and his stories that come from his radio. Just as Jacob argues to Kirschbaum, the suicides stop, the people have a better demeanor, and they start to talk about their futures. While this hope and the resistance itself are based on a fantasy (or lie, depending on how one reads it), the hope of the future itself is nevertheless real. In fact, that resistance did not occur in Jacob is a myth. The resistance portrayed in Jacob is of a different kind than the typical armed resistance that is portrayed in Communist-themed memories of the Holocaust and the typical Holocaust discourse in the German Democratic Republic. Again, in this way, Becker challenges the accepted GDR views—or myths—of the Jewish experience as he gives voice to the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Confirming this challenge, the deputy minister of culture, Winfried Maß, criticized the original film screenplay of Jacob in February, 1966. Maß claimed that the film was too “full of humanistic spirit rather than indicating the specifics of a spirit of socialist humanism,” (Gilman 64). Further complications came with changes in the cultural landscape of the GDR in 1966, with the change in the official cultural politics during the

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Eleventh Plenum of the SED. By the beginning of 1966, the so-called “Rabbit films” named after Kurt Maetzig’s I Am the Rabbit, became the definition of what film culture in the GDR could not be. These films were accused of using everyday situations and conflicts to create doubt, skepticism, and negative thoughts among the GDR youth. The return to a Stalinist notion of what should be appropriate culture for the GDR, as in Maß’s argument, collided with the opening of Frank Beyer’s Trace of Stones (Spur der Steine 1966). The film was banned after a number of staged demonstrations. Beyer was eventually sent to Dresden State Theater for two years and was limited to work for GDR television, and he could not make any more films. It was not until 1973 that the third incarnation of Jacob the Liar was finally produced. The only problem with the script for the GDR was its Jewish subject matter. What held up production in 1966 were the Polish authorities who had seen Becker’s screenplay (Schenk 74). Becker then turned to reconceptualize the screenplay into a novel. It was published in 1969, shortly after the Prague Spring catastrophe in Czechoslovakia in 1968, which changed Becker’s views of the GDR. At this point, he saw the State as oppressive and that it had become exactly what he feared about Germany. After the novel proved successful by winning many awards and high acclaim in both Germanies and another change in government policies in the GDR in 1971,5 DEFA authorities reconsidered making the film. Becker and Beyer then traveled to Poland to do research on the ghettos and to find how much of Becker’s writing might actually be based on his hidden memories—or personal flashbacks. They found that Russians had not liberated any ghettos. Beyer explains: “not because they did not want to free the ghettos, but rather because the Nazis cleared out the ghettos as the Red Army approached and had driven their inhabitants either to the gas chambers or in transports toward the West. This brought us to a huge dilemma regarding the close of our film,” (Beyer 184). Becker decided to revise the ending of the screenplay from the typical GDR memory of the Holocaust, wherein a Soviet saves the Jewish child-victim, but it remains one of the possible endings of the novel.6 5

In 1971, Erich Honecker deposed Walter Ulbricht as SED party secretary. See Gilman, 81, 89. 6 In the original version, a Soviet soldier leads the Jewish child Lina to liberation.This is a trope of the GDR memory of the Holocaust: the Jewish childvictime being rescued by the Communist-fighter against fascism. This trope is also portrayed in the enormous memorial to Soviet soldier in East Berlin’s Treptow Park, whereby a Soviet soldier cradles an infant. See Gilman, 63.

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Referring to the Communist discourse on the Holocaust, Jeffrey Herf states, “The old anti-Semitic stereotypes of the Jew as [ . . . ] passive weakling would continue to lurk within the muscular Communist discourse of East German antifascism” (Herf 83). While these stereotypes might have remained, Becker nevertheless challenges them with Jacob the Liar. Though the narrator does not emphasize resistance in the novel and the figures do not discuss it in the film, it is nevertheless present in the plot. The narrator ironically mentions that there was no resistance where he was, but with that he belittles the psychological resistance that the figures develop and which Jacob enables through his storytelling. This storytelling—the benevolent lying—about the Russians’ advancement on the Germans and the possibility of liberation from the ghetto enables the figures to remember that they once had better lives. It is important to them that they chose these lives for themselves, before the Nazis forced them to live—or die—in the ghetto. The memories of the past become layered with fantasies of a future that are based on the faith that the characters will live after the war is over and after the Nazis lose their position of power. This layering is depicted through the narrative technique of switching perspective and temporality throughout the novel, and through flashbacks and fantasy scenes in the film. While it does not promise survival, since the figures are not invincible to the guards and their punishments, this layering of memory and fantasy reveal that it is necessary for the figures to live—again, without depression or thought of suicide—as much as they can control it for themselves. The acts of resistance through storytelling, fantasizing a future, and even remembering that they once had better lives before Nazi repression gives the Jews of the ghetto strength and will to live. In addition to the storytelling and psychological resistance that ensues in the novel and film adaptation, yet another layer of storytelling emerges in the novel that reveals the narrator’s role in storytelling. He presents challenges to the accepted national memory of the Holocaust while simultaneously revealing that he himself has problems in his effort to remember details. This raises questions about the role of memoir and the problem with authenticity of such narratives-- regarding the Holocaust or other historical events. Can memoirs, which are in some ways fictional due to problems in recollection, be valued as documents for historians? Can they provide a challenge, or an interpretative enhancement, to the national narrative of memory, that readers can use to understand the past? I say that they indeed do provide important information that helps to understand how people experienced events, which, in this case is the Holocaust. In Becker’s case, he has a desire to write to confront his past,

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but he has no choice but to write fiction, since his memories of his childhood vanished with his survival. With his research about his past, he provides a unique kind of memoir narrative. Memoirs- fictional as they may be-- and other fictional writing by survivors of the Holocaust should be part of the larger historical narrative and should valued as an important contribution to understanding human history.

Works Cited Becker, Jurek. Jacob the Liar. 1969. Trans. Leila Vennewitz. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990. —. “Widerstand in Jakob der Lügner.” Mein Vater, Die Deutschen und Ich. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007. 65-70. Becker, Sabine, Christine Hummel, Gabriele Sander, ed. Grundkurs Literaturwissenschaft. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006. Dawidowicz, Lucy. The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945. New York: Bantam Books, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: the Time-Image. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Fox, Thomas C. Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 1999. Genette, Gérard. Die Erzählung. Trans. Andread Knop. Munich, 1998. Gilman, Sander, Jurek Becker: A Life in Five Worlds. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Herf, Jeffrey. Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1997. Jacob the Liar, 1974. DVD. Icestorm International. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma and cinema: cross-cultural explorations. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2004. Kolker, Robert. Film, Form and Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006. Schenk, Ralf. “Damit lebe ich bis heute: Ein Gespräch mit Frank Beyer.” Regie: Frank Beyer. Ed. Ralf Schenk. Berlin: Filmmuseum Potsdam, 1995. 8-105. Turim, Maureen. Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. New York: Routledge, 1989. Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Marion Wiesel. New York : Hill and Wang, 2006. Young, James. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1990.

CONTRIBUTORS

Jonas Karlsson is a native of Stockholm, Sweden. He is currently a sixthyear graduate student in Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. His current dissertation research looks at the theme of Treue in the works of Richard Wagner. Victoria Lenshyn is a Ph.D. student in German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She holds a B.A. in History and German from the University of Nevada, Reno and an M.A. in German from the University of Massachusetts. Her research interests include GDR literature, DEFA film, and memory culture. Lenshyn also serves as the Book Review Editor for Edge: A Graduate Journal for German and Scandinavian Studies, which will produce its premiere issue in the summer of 2009. Diane Liu is a master's candidate in the Department of German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests include the Shanghai ghetto, anti-Semitism and exile literature. Adam Oberlin is a PhD student in Germanic Medieval Studies at the University of Minnesota. He has also studied at the University of Florida, the Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität in Munich, and Háskóli Íslands in Reykjavík. His primary interests are the literary and poetic monuments of Middle High German and Old Norse. Katelyn Petersen is a Ph.D. student at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany. She completed her Master’s Degree in translation, where she began to focus on migration literature, intercultural writing, and cultural translation. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis, which also centers on migration and intercultural literature in Germany. Kevin Richards is a third year Ph.D. student at Ohio State University. His areas of specialization include the Germanic heroic epic and my dissertation topic focuses on the 20th century popular reception in

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Contributors

Germany and Scandinavia of the Nibelungenlied and Volsunga saga. Kevin is currently the web administrator for the Center of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Ohio State University. Evan Torner is a Ph.D. student in German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he works as the program assistant for the DEFA Film Library. His current projects treat German science fiction works such as Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf and Alfred Döblin’s Berge Meere und Giganten, and his dissertation research deals with race in German media of the Cold War. Delene White holds both a B.A. and an M.A. in History from the University of South Alabama and is currently a Ph.D. student in the German and Scandinavian Studies program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her main research area focuses on memory culture, as presented in German-Jewish literature and film, particularly in regards to the Holocaust. White also serves as a graduate representative for the Graduate Studies Committee and as Editor-In-Chief of Edge: A Graduate Journal for German and Scandinavian Studies. Anna E. Zimmer’s (M.A., Georgetown University) research interests include the study of contemporary literature, especially the re-telling of older stories in different genres or media that challenge societal conventions such as gender. Currently a Ph.D. student of German Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, she has also developed an interest in notions of race and Heimat as represented in literature beginning in the late 18th century and continuing to today.

INDEX Akyün, Hatice, 90, 94 - 95, 98 100, 102 antifascism, 33, 36, 40, 42, 45 - 47, 62, 68, 129 anti-Semitism, 33 - 35, 44, 46 - 47, 52 - 53, 56 - 59, 64 - 65, 68, 70 assimilation, see myth Ateú, Seyran, 89, 92, 95, 102 audio-visual media, 22 - 23 Barthes, Roland, vii, 3 Becker, Jurek, 4, 31 - 34, 37 - 39, 42 - 44, 45; analepsis, 107, 110; father, 4, 9, 10, 12 – 16, 34 – 35, 37 – 42, 44; flashback, 5, 37, 107 - 108, 110 - 112, 115 - 116; Freudian, 13, 35 - 37, 45, 110; GDR, 5, 31 – 34, 38 – 40, 42 – 44, 108 – 109, 111, 114 116,119; Jacob the Liar, 5, 43, 45, 107 – 109, 114, 116 – 117 Bible, The, 80, 83, 115 Blumenberg, Hans, 1, 5, 69, 79 - 80 Bosse, Harriet, 12, 17 Brecht, Bertolt, 23, 101 Bronstein’s Children, 4, 31 – 34, 37 – 39, 42 - 45; see also Becker, Jurek Brothers Grimm, The, 4, 21 child exposure, 77 - 78, 82 - 84, 86 87 China, 51, 54, 57 - 58, 60, 67 ,70 Christianity, vii, 72, 76, 78, 82; Lutheranism, 16 communist, 3, 39 - 40, 54, 62, 65, 107, 109, 114 - 116 community, vii, 4, 32, 36, 44, 47, 49 – 50, 55 – 58, 62, 64, 82, 85 consumerism, 20 - 21 dialectics, 9, 43 - 44 Death and the Maiden, 1, see also Jelinek, Elfriede

Dreamplay, A, 2; see also Strindberg, August East Germany 4, 31, 33, 43 – 46, 108, 117, 121, 127 - 128 Eddas, 99 - 101 Eddic, 1, 4, 98, 101, 106 Eliade, Mircea, 1 – 2, 5 Engdahl, Horace, 20 - 22 everyday, the, 11, 13 - 14, 20, 94, 98, 128; self-reflexivity, 91; language, 40; life in the ghetto, 125 exiles, Jewish, 4, 43 Fáfnismál, 4; dragon-slaying, 98 – 100, 104; monsters, 99 - 100; pulr, 101; Odinic hero, 97, 99, 103 fairy tale, 4, 18 - 21, 23, 26 – 28, 92, 108, 113; see also Jelinek, Elfriede famine, 77, 80 - 83, 87 fascism 1, 39, 40, 111, 112 Father, The, 4, 9 - 16 femininity, 10, 21; womanhood and, 3 feminism, 19, 21 First Opium War, 51, 54 Foucault, Michel, 90, 97 Fox, Thomas, 33, 42, 45, 47, 121 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 10 - 11, 13, 16, 35 - 37, 45, 110; Freudianism, 13; see also Becker, Jurek Friedländer, Saul, 36, 47 Fugu Plan, 55 - 56, 64 gender, 90; roles, 12; ideologies, institutions and norms, 19, 21, 23 - 25, 93; boundaries of, 20; beauty myth, 21 - 22, 24 - 26, 28; equality, 21; genre, 20, 22

134 German Democratic Republic, see East Germany Ghoya, 68 - 70 Gilman, Sander, 35, 41, 127 Hercules, 11, 12, 80 Herf, Jeffrey, 33, 45, 46, 123, 129 history, 1 – 4, 34, 38, 41, 44 – 46, 50, 64 – 66, 71, 79, 87 – 88, 107, 109, 112, 117 - 120 Hitler, Adolf, 46, 57 - 58 Hoenigsberg, Hugo, 60 - 61, 65, 68, 70 Holocaust, 31 - 39, 41 - 42, 44 - 46, 64 - 66, 107 - 112, 114 - 118, 120 Hongkew, 60 - 62, 64 - 65, 67 - 69 humanism, 13; socialist, 127 intolerance, 4, 83, see also prejudice Jackie, 20, 24 Jacob the Liar, see Becker, Jurek Jelinek, Elfriede, 4, 18 - 28; beauty myth, 20, 23 - 24, 26 – 28; Brecht, 21 – 22, 27, 92; Death and the Maiden, 4, 18, 21-22, 26-28; fairy tales, 4, 18 – 21, 23, 26 – 28, 92, 108, 113; gender, 18 – 20, 22, 24, 28, 82, 85, 88, 91, 120; Nobel Prize, 27; postfeminism, 19 – 20, 28; postdramatic, 18 – 19, 21 - 28; princess plays, 20 - 21, 26; Schneewittchen, 18, 22, 26; Snow White, 4, 21, 23 – 27 Japan, 51 - 60, 64, 70 Jewish question, 33, 35, 42, 53, 121 Judenfrage, see Jewish question Jungsigurddichtung, 108, 114 - 115 Kelek, Necla, 4, 81 – 82, 84 – 89, 91 - 94 Kristallnacht, 52 - 53 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 20, 22 - 23, 26 Loki, 86, 112 Lücke, Bärbel, 22, 24 Manchukuo, 55 - 56, 64

Index Marxism, 35, 41, 121; MarxistLeninism 4, 33, 47 Meletinsky, Eleazar, 1 - 3, 5 memoir, 120 - 121, 129 migration literature, 4, 83, 89 – 90, 91, 93 myth, vii, 1 - 5, 10 - 11, 16, 28, 53 54, 69, 79 - 80, 82, 93, 106, 117; assimilation, 4; beauty, 20, 23 – 24, 26 – 27; collective memory, 32 – 33; fairy tales, 21, 23; ideology, 32; knowledge, 99, 103; narrative, 69, 75, 78 - 79; political, 3, 92; postfeminism, 19; propaganda, 52; redemption, 34; resistance, 117; sacrifice, 77; solidarity, 3; stereotype, 48, 51, 62; tolerance, 5, 33, 81 – 82; trauma, 69; wisdom, 3 multiculturalism, 89, 91 mythology, vii, 1, 3, 70, 79, 84, 97– 101; rebirth of 3, 70; Old Norse 5, 98, 119; mytho-didactic, 99 naturalism, 9, 13 Nazism, 3, 34, 45 - 46, 53, 57, 64 65, 120 - 121, 123, 125 - 129; anti-Nazism 65, see also antifascism; Reichsbürgergesetz 68 Nietzsche, Friedrich 14 - 15 Odin, 5, 71, 73 - 77, 97, 99, 101 Özdamar, Emine Sevgi, 90, 98, 100 - 102 poetry, 11, 16, 97 – 101, 104 postfeminism, 19 – 20, 28 prejudice, 1, 53, 91 see also intolerance Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 58 59, 62 psychology, 1, 3, 9; social, vii, viii, 1 – 4, 12, 19 – 21, 32, , 37, 39, 40 – 41, 44, 65, 67, 72, 75, 81 – 83, 85 – 87, 90, 92 racism, 4, 109; race hate, 15; race war, 33

Myth: German and Scandinavian Studies realism 9; psychological, 10; magical, 100 redemption, 13, 16; memory, 36 religious studies, 1 - 2 resistance, Jewish, 5, 38 - 39, 42, 44, 85, 107 - 109, 113 - 116 Ring of the Nibelungen, 2 ritual, 77 - 81, 83 - 84, 87, 110 Røskva, 4, 77 - 80, 83, 85 - 87 sacrifice, human, 77, 80, 82, 84 - 85 Sauvy, André, 1 - 2 Segal, Robert, 2 - 3, 5 sexuality, 14, 15; sadomasochism, 13; human, 15 – 16; male 3 – 4, 10, 12, 17 Shakespeare, William, 12, 16 Shanghai, 4, 51 - 70 Shoah, 36, 41, see also Holocaust Snow White, see Jelinek, Elfriede social sciences, 2, 4 Song of the Nibelungen, 2, 114 - 115 Soviet Union, 33, 46 - 47, 120, 128 Sprinchhorn, Evert, 10, 13, 14

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Stephens, John, 20, 28 stereotype, 4, 24, 48, 50 – 52, 63 – 64, 91, 116 story (storytelling), 2, 91, 112, 116 Strindberg, August, 4, 9 – 17; Dreamplay, 9 – 10, 12 - 16 structures, 1, 2; cultural, 1; dialetical, 2; hegemonic, vii; mythic, 1 – 3; narrative, 2; social, vii Thialfi, 4, 69 – 74, 76 - 78 Thor, 4, 69 - 79 transference 37, 38; see also Freud, Sigmund Virgin Mother, 4, 10, 13, 15 Wagner, Richard, 2, 99, 119 womanhood, biological inferiority of 9; construction of, 10; see also femininity World War II, 4, 47, 50, 64, 65 Young, James, 36, 121 Zipes, Jack, 1, 26, 28