Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond: Disturbing Pasts 9781474241854, 9781474241885, 9781474241861

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Disturbing Pasts
Part I: Emotional Connections
2. Guilt and Shame among Communities of Experience, Connection and Identification
3. Shamed by Nazi Crimes: The First Step towards Germans’ Re-education or a Catalyst for Their Wish to Forget?
4. Ashamed about the Past: The Case of Nazi Collaborators and Their Families in Post-war Dutch Society
5. Autobiography, Moral Witnessing and the Disturbing Memory of Nazi Euthanasia
Part II: Disturbing Narratives
6. Disturbing Mending: On the Imagined Third Generation of Holocaust Survivors in Israeli Literature of the Second Generation
7. Disturbing the Past: The Representation of the Waldheim Affair in Robert Schindel’s
8. The Return of the Jew in Polish Culture
Part III: Fascination/Pleasure
9. Don’t Mention the War
10. ‘However sick a joke ... ’: On Comedy, the Representation of Suffering, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Melodrama and Volker Koepp’s Melancholy
11. Disturbing Anselm Kiefer
Part IV: Better Futures? (Dis) Placing Identities
12. German Tourists in Europe and Reminders of a Disturbing Past
13. Reverberations of a Disturbing Past: Reconciliation Activities of Young West Germans in the 1960s and 1970s
14. Disturbing Pasts and Better Futures: A Comparison of Recent Approaches to the Past among Bukovina Jews and Bukovina Germans
15. How to Cope with It? The Steuben Society of America’s Politics of Memory and the Holocaust
Afterword: Hauntings and Revisitings
Index

Citation preview

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Disturbing Pasts Edited by Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Julia Wagner and Christiane Wienand

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Julia Wagner, Christiane Wienand and Contributors, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-4742-4185-4 978-1-3500-4564-4 978-1-4742-4186-1 978-1-4742-4187-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bird, Stephanie, editor. | Fulbrook, Mary, 1951- editor. | Wagner, Julia, editor. | Wienand, Christiane, editor. Title: Reverberations of Nazi violence in Germany and beyond : disturbing pasts / edited by Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Julia Wagner and Christiane Wienand. Description: London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Identifiers: LCCN 2015030700 | ISBN 9781474241854 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474241861 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781474241878 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939-1945–Atrocities. | World War,1939-1945–Concentration camps. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) | War crimes. | National socialism–Moral and ethical aspects–Germany. | Collective memory–Germany. | BISAC: HISTORY / Europe / Germany. | HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century. Classification: LCC D804.G4 R48 2016 | DDC 940.54/050943–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015030700 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents List of Contributors Acknowledgements 1

Introduction: Disturbing Pasts Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Julia Wagner and Christiane Wienand

vii xii

1

Part I Emotional Connections 2 3 4 5

Guilt and Shame among Communities of Experience, Connection and Identification Mary Fulbrook Shamed by Nazi Crimes: The First Step towards Germans’ Re-education or a Catalyst for Their Wish to Forget? Ulrike Weckel Ashamed about the Past: The Case of Nazi Collaborators and Their Families in Post-war Dutch Society Ismee Tames Autobiography, Moral Witnessing and the Disturbing Memory of Nazi Euthanasia Susanne C. Knittel

15 33 47 65

Part II Disturbing Narratives 6 7 8

Disturbing Mending: On the Imagined Third Generation of Holocaust Survivors in Israeli Literature of the Second Generation Tsila Ratner Disturbing the Past: The Representation of the Waldheim Affair in Robert Schindel’s Der Kalte Katya Krylova The Return of the Jew in Polish Culture Uilleam Blacker

85 107 125

Part III Fascination/Pleasure 9 Don’t Mention the War Julian Petley 10 ‘However sick a joke ... ’: On Comedy, the Representation of Suffering, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Melodrama and Volker Koepp’s Melancholy Stephanie Bird 11 Disturbing Anselm Kiefer Caitríona Leahy

143

161 181

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Contents

Part IV Better Futures? (Dis) Placing Identities 12 German Tourists in Europe and Reminders of a Disturbing Past Julia Wagner

199

13 Reverberations of a Disturbing Past: Reconciliation Activities of Young West Germans in the 1960s and 1970s Christiane Wienand

215

14 Disturbing Pasts and Better Futures: A Comparison of Recent Approaches to the Past among Bukovina Jews and Bukovina Germans Gaëlle Fisher

233

15 How to Cope with It? The Steuben Society of America’s Politics of Memory and the Holocaust Julia Lange

251

Afterword: Hauntings and Revisitings Lisa Appignanesi Index

265 273

List of Contributors Lisa Appignanesi OBE is a prize-winning writer, novelist, broadcaster and cultural commentator. A visiting professor at King’s College London, she is former President of the campaigning writers association, English PEN and Chair of London’s Freud Museum. Her award-winning Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present appeared to great critical acclaim, and was followed by the provocative All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion. Her new book Trials of Passion: In the Name of Love and Madness again delves into the history of psychiatry, investigating the rise of the expert psychiatric witness through remarkable trials of passion. Her family memoir, Losing the Dead, and her novel, The Memory Man, explore the war and its hauntings. Stephanie Bird is Senior Lecturer in German at University College London. She has published on topics ranging from the interaction of fact and fiction in the biographical novel, the relationship of female and national identity, and the representation and ethics of shame. As co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘Reverberations of War in Germany and Europe since 1945’, she has been working on a comparative study exploring the significance of the comical in Germanlanguage cultural representations of suffering. Her latest book, Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Sider of Mourning, analyses how the comical interrogates the expectations and ethics of representing suffering and trauma. It does so by integrating a critique of dominant paradigms, such as that of trauma and of victim identity. The study focuses on the work of Ingeborg Bachmann, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, W. G. Sebald, Volker Koepp, Reinhard Jirgl, Ruth Klüger, Edgar Hilsenrath and Jonathan Littell. Uilleam Blacker is Lecturer in the Comparative Culture of Russia and Eastern Europe at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His research focuses on cultural memory in cities in east-central Europe that experienced large-scale population shifts and losses as a result of the Second World War. He is a coauthor of Remembering Katyn (2012) and a co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (2013). Gaëlle Fisher is a post-doctoral researcher and associate lecturer in History at the University of Augsburg in Germany. She studied German, History and Eastern European Studies at UCL and UCL/SSEES (BA, 2007; MA, 2009) and earned her PhD in History from UCL in 2015. Her thesis compares the post-war discourses and practices of selfidentifying ‘ethnic Germans’ and Jews from the historical region of Bukovina. This work was completed within the framework of the UCL-based, AHRC-funded collaborative

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research project ‘Reverberations of War in Germany and Europe since 1945’ (2010–14). She is currently working on transforming her thesis into a book. Mary Fulbrook, FBA, is Professor of German History and Dean of the Faculty of Social and History Sciences at UCL. A graduate of Cambridge and Harvard universities, she is the author or editor of more than twenty books. One of her major research areas has been the GDR, on which she wrote the pioneering Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949–89 (1995) as well as The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (2005), funded by an AHRC collaborative research award. Recent publications include the Fraenkel-Prize-winning A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (2012), as well as Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (2011), which was supported by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. Following the AHRC-funded collaborative research project she directed on ‘Reverberations of War in Germany and Europe since 1945’, Fulbrook is currently completing a book on Living with a Nazi Past. Susanne C. Knittel is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She holds a PhD in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, New York (2011). Her book, The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (2015), explores the cultural mechanisms by which certain memories become inscribed into the heritage of a country or region while others are erased or forgotten. The Historical Uncanny is a comparative study of German and Italian post-Second World War memory culture, with a particular focus on the memory of Nazi euthanasia in Germany and the memory of fascism and the German occupation in North-Eastern Italy. Her current project, supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), revolves around the representation of perpetrators in literature, film and at sites of memory in Germany and Romania since 1989. Katya Krylova is an independent researcher based in Nottinghamshire, UK. She studied German and Italian at Churchill College, Cambridge, where she then completed an MPhil in European Literature and Culture and a PhD in German Literature in 2011. From 2010 until 2012, she worked as a researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography in Vienna. Between 2012 and 2015, she held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Department of German Studies, University of Nottingham. She was the recipient of the 2010 Sylvia Naish Research Student Lecture prize. Her first monograph, Walking through History: Topography and Identity in the Works of Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard (2013), was the winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in German Studies. Her forthcoming second monograph, The Long Shadow of the Past: Contemporary Austrian Literature, Film and Culture (2016), examines the treatment of the past and Austrian identity in the works of Anna Mitgutsch, Ruth Beckermann, Margareta Heinrich, Eduard Erne, Elfriede Jelinek, Ulrich Seidl, Florian Flicker, Robert Schindel and others. She is the Secretary of Women in German Studies and an Advisory Board member of the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature, University of London.

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Julia Lange is a PhD candidate and a lecturer in American Studies at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She studied American Studies, English Literature and Law at the University of Hamburg and the University of Oxford. Her MA thesis entitled ‘ “Herman the German”: Das Hermann Monument in der deutsch-amerikanischen Erinnerungskultur’ was published in 2013. In her dissertation, she examines the inter-relation between the identity politics of German American organizations and the Holocaust discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. The primary focus of her work is on transnational discourses of victimization and reconciliation and the dynamics of competing memories that have been produced by German American and Jewish American organizations since the end of the Second World War. Ms Lange was a visiting fellow at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in 2012, followed by a visiting scholarship at the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University in 2013, a Resident Fellowship at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (Johns Hopkins University) in 2014, and a short-term fellowship at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 2015. She is currently a scholar with the German National Academic Foundation. Caitríona Leahy is a lecturer in Germanic Studies and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. She was previously a lecturer in German, University College Dublin and Toyota Lecturer in Critical Theory in University College Cork. Her publications include Ingeborg Bachmann (Der wahre Historiker. Ingeborg Bachmann and the Problem of Witnessing History 2007; Re-acting to Ingeborg Bachmann. New Essays and Performances 2006) as well as essays in the areas of law and literature, the concept of the contemporary, biography and metaphor. Her current research is on monumentalism, in particular, in relation to the work of Anselm Kiefer. Julian Petley is a professor of Screen Media in the Department of Social Sciences, Media and Communications at Brunel University. He has a particular interest in media regulation, not least various forms of censorship, and his publications on this topic include Freedom of the Word (2007), Freedom of the Moving Image (2008), Censorship: a Beginner’s Guide (2009) and Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain (2011). He has also written widely about German cinema, his first book being Capital and Culture: The German Cinema 1933–1945 (1979). He contributed chapters on this subject to Picture This: Media Representations of Visual Art & Artists (1988/1998), Anglo-German Attitudes (1995) and The German Cinema Book (2002/2015). He is contemplating a further book on the cinema of the Third Reich. Tsila Ratner is Senior Lecturer in Modern Hebrew Literature at UCL. She is a native Israeli, who has been living in London since 1985. She took degrees in Hebrew literature and philosophy at Tel Aviv University where she served as a lecturer in the Department of Hebrew Literature until her move to England. Dr Ratner has taught Hebrew literature at Cambridge University, Leo Baeck College and UCL. In 1995 she was appointed Lecturer in Modern Hebrew Literature in UCL’s Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Dr Ratner has made important contributions to the viability of Modern Hebrew as a subject in the UK at both university and secondary levels. Her field of academic interest is Gender Studies and Women’s literature. Her publications

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include co-edited textbooks devoted to poetry and literary criticism at Tel Aviv University; translations of a number of American novels into Hebrew, most notably T. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and J. Fielding’s The Other Woman; and articles on Modern Hebrew poetry and fiction. Tzena, Tzena: In and Out of the Dowry Box in Modern Hebrew Literature was written with Professor Hannah Naveh of Tel-Aviv University and will be published in Hebrew by Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Tel-Aviv. Ismee Tames is a professor by special appointment of Foundation 1940–45 at Utrecht University and director of research at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She prepares new research programs under the provisional title ‘Liminal Moments from Peace to War’ and about resistance in wartime. Between 2009 and 2013 she was project coordinator of ‘Legacies of Collaboration: The Exclusion and Integration of Former National Socialist Milieus in Dutch Society’. Prior to this project, she published Besmette jeugd (Contaminated youth) on the children of Dutch Nazi collaborators in the post-war years (April 2009). Tames has furthermore published on the First World War, behaviour and expectations in wartime and war’s long-term legacies. Julia Wagner studied History, Sociology and French at Humboldt University Berlin and at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her PhD thesis looked at post-war Nazi trials and the involvement on so-called ‘Nazi hunters’. Between 2010 and 2014 she was part of the collaborative research project ‘Reverberations of War in Germany and Europe since 1945’ which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Dr Wagner currently works for UCL’s Centre of Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry (CMII). She is also completing a monograph about travel narratives by German post-war tourism and the reverberations of war entitled Invisible Luggage: Narratives of Germans Travelling in Postwar Europe – Perceptions, Experiences, Interpretations. Ulrike Weckel is Professor of History in the Media and the Public at the Justus Liebig University, Gießen. She holds a PhD in Modern History from the University of Hamburg, worked as an assistant professor at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies on Women and Gender at Berlin’s Technical University and while working on her Habilitation was a fellow at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK) in Vienna, the European University Institute in Florence and the German Historical Institute and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, both in Washington, DC. For four years, she was a visiting associate professor in the History Department of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before coming to Gießen, she taught at the Ruhr University in Bochum and the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests include post-war dealings with Germany’s Nazi past, media history and the gender history of the European Enlightenment. In all of her research, she is particularly interested in the variety of concrete audience responses to media representations. In contrast to the approach of memory studies, her work puts the individual back on the agenda of cultural history. As a co-editor of the journal Werkstatt Geschichte, she has been responsible for its regular film reviews since 2000.

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Christiane Wienand works at the Heidelberg School of Education (HSE) where she coordinates the research clusters and the Doktorandenkolleg (Doctoral Training School) of the interdisciplinary research project heiEDUCATION (run by the Universität and the Pädagogische Hochschule Heidelberg). From 2010 to 2015, Christiane was a post-doctoral research associate in the AHRC-funded collaborative research project ‘Reverberations of War in Germany and Europe since 1945’ at University College London where she conducted research on reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Second World War. Christiane graduated in European Society (UCL) and in History, Political Sciences and Economics (Universität Konstanz) and received a PhD from UCL in 2010. Her publications include her monograph Returning Memories. Former Prisoners of War in Divided and Reunited Germany (2015).

Acknowledgements This book reflects in part discussions arising from a collaborative research project based at UCL and generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council on ‘Reverberations of War in Germany and Europe since 1945’ (2010–15). We are very grateful to the AHRC for its funding for this project, and to UCL for hosting the project and related workshops and conferences. We would also like to express our thanks to the many colleagues and students who have participated in discussions relating to the topics discussed in this book.

1

Introduction: Disturbing Pasts Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Julia Wagner and Christiane Wienand

In March 2015, almost seventy years after the end of the Second World War, it became evident how easily old wounds can break open again. Discussions between representatives of the Greek and German governments about the Greek debt crisis had reached an impasse. They took on a hostile tone after the Greek government reportedly threatened to seize German property in Greece if Germany did not agree to pay restitution to victims of Nazi crimes committed in Greece as well as to repay a loan (estimated in today’s values at 11 billion Euros) which the country had been forced to provide during the period of German occupation.1 The irreconcilable position of the German government was that such demands were unjustified as this issue had been subject to a conclusive treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and Greece in 1960, in the wake of which Greece received a lump sum.2 Efforts to keep separate the concerns of the present and the past had clearly failed. Greek and German officials, journalists and others variously termed the positions of their own or the opposing government a provocation, an embarrassment or a diversion tactic.3 A word which continues to haunt discussions and media reporting on the Greek debt crisis and the reparation demands is ‘Distomo’, the name of a village near the ancient city of Delphi. On 10 June 1944, an SS unit brutally assaulted and murdered 218 people in Distomo, including women, children and elderly people. This attack was considered retaliation for a partisan attack on the unit earlier the same day. Afterwards the SS set fire to the houses. In a report to his superiors, commander Fritz Lautenbach justified the ‘sanctions’ against Distomo as appropriate, falsely claiming that villagers had fired at them first.4 This deeply traumatic event holds an important place in Greek memorial culture and has become a significant reference point for post-war Greek culture.5 There are also physical reminders. In the 1980s, a memorial was built on a hill overlooking the village. It comprises a chapel and an ossuary containing the victims’ skulls. A few kilometers away, along the road to Athens, a second memorial was erected based on designs by renowned Greek sculptor Aggelika Korovessi. This monument is not dedicated to the victims, but celebrates the Greek resistance against the German aggressors. A photo of part of this memorial can be found on the cover of this volume. In the idyllic landscape, the green rolling hills of western Boetia, this monument brings to mind a much darker time.

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Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond

During the 1990s, in newly united Germany, the massacre was brought to the attention of an international audience when a group of survivors and relatives and descendants of the victims brought a lawsuit against Germany demanding restitution. The documentary film A Song for Argyris (2006) by Swiss filmmaker Stefan Haupt followed around one of the group’s spokesmen, Argyris Sfounturis, who had survived the massacre as a child.6 The lawsuit was considered by Greek and European courts, but ultimately rejected by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in 2011.7 However, Distomo has become a symbol for the brutal era of Nazi occupation and the suffering that was caused by it. It evokes specific associations and emotions that come up repeatedly in a variety of later contexts and discourses. Distomo refers to a disturbing past that many would like to bury or forget, but which continues to disturb later presents, sometimes in unexpected ways. It is not the only such instance in Europe that is studded not only with the manifest signs but also the scars, the silences and the unwanted reminders of a violent past that may on occasion radically disturb the present – or be disturbed by it.

Disturbing pasts This volume explores the complex and diverse reverberations of the Second World War after 1945. It focuses on the continuing legacies of National Socialist violence in later German-speaking countries and communities, as well as among those directly affected by occupation, terror and mass murder. It explores how those legacies are not only reverberations of a receding past but also intrinsically shaped by a later present. We focus not so much on the nation state as the ‘container’ for discourses about the past, as is so often done, but rather on the development of narratives, experiences and disturbances that go beyond national borders or take place in transnational realms. By choosing this approach, we shift the emphasis onto phenomena that transcend national borders or play out in different ways in different national settings or communities. Several of the case studies presented in this book are transnational in the strong sense of the word; they look at individuals who crossed national borders (see e.g. the contributions in Part IV by Wagner, Fisher, Wienand and Lange). Other contributions look at how the disturbing past was discussed among different communities, predominantly but not necessarily within wider national settings or with comparative implications (see e.g. the discussions of guilt, shame and shaming in the contributions by Fulbrook, Weckel and Tames in Part I). Cultural representations (as discussed in the contributions in Parts II and III by Petley, Krylova, Ratner and Bird) were often consumed by audiences in other countries. This book does not therefore aim to include case studies on every country affected by the Second World War and the Holocaust. Rather, it seeks to develop ways of exploring the long-term reverberations and – sometimes distorted or unexpected – echoes of disturbances initially unleashed by extreme violence in Germany and in German-occupied or dominated Europe. Chapters may therefore draw examples predominantly from one area, but include glances sideways at other cases in other places (see e.g. the chapters by Fulbrook and Wagner), highlighting examples relevant to understanding the significance at a personal level of different aspects of the past.

Introduction: Disturbing Pasts

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The notion of ‘disturbing pasts’ refers to the experience of a specific period of war, violence and genocide. These experiences both continue to disturb a later present and the past itself is disturbed by subsequent responses to it. The focus of this book is on conflicting, unexpected and often dissonant interpretations and representations of these events, among those who were the witnesses, victims and perpetrators at the time and also among different communities in the generations that followed. Substantively, the volume enriches our understanding of the diversity and complexity of the ways in which a disturbing past continues to disrupt the present and how the past is in turn disturbed by a later present. The notion of disturbance raises urgent theoretical questions that run throughout the volume.

Who is disturbing whom? The extreme violence of the war is fundamental to the question of why it continues to disturb our present. It does so not least through the lives of those who directly experienced the violence, whether as persecuted or perpetrators, as collaborators or beneficiaries; and through what their recollected lives tell us about our presents. It disturbs through the inter-generational effects of violence, which may be transmitted through trauma, emotion, communication or silence. More generally, the scope and extent of the atrocities committed fundamentally unsettles assumptions about European identity and culture. Conversely, in our representations and investigations of the past we disturb its narrative in various ways: we question the instrumentalizing aims of political and memorializing narratives, and challenge moral or emotional norms of how we should respond to extreme events; we uncover uncomfortable stories and unsettle veils of obfuscation, posing new questions and suggesting new interpretations in the process.

How is the disturbance made? How the past is transmitted is crucial to the nature of the disturbance it causes, be this through an individual’s memory, the political agitation of communities, through state-sponsored memorialization, historical analysis or cultural representation. Experience is articulated in ways that relate to political, cultural and aesthetic norms and expectations. But central to this volume is the exploration of how those norms, and the assumptions and patterns of identification that they underpin, are disturbed by present narratives and modes of representation.

Why are we disturbed? The obvious answer is that we are disturbed by the degree and scope of suffering and its far-reaching effects. Those who were persecuted not only suffered physical and psychological injuries at the time but also had to face the complexities of building new post-war lives amidst unbearable losses, often far from their original homelands, with all the attendant issues around migration and identity as well as continued haunting by intolerable memories and anxieties. Redemptive stories of ‘liberation’ stop far short of registering continued disturbance across a whole lifetime for many survivors. But

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disturbance is complex: the past can also be unsettling because it has failed to disturb or to disturb enough. Many people who were in varying ways involved in persecuting others show little sign of unease, and many integrated seamlessly into their post-war societies. The pervasive sense of injustice that this has occasioned has also led to a contemporary desire for redemptive narratives and clear moral values. The need for ethical responses to a disturbing past may also point to the fear of another disturbance: that engagement with the past is a sign of a fascination, and that its violence may be a source of present pleasure.

How disturbed are we? The growing distance between ‘then’ and ‘now’ may initially suggest that the violence of the Second World War no longer presents a serious disturbance to the present. Indeed, by engaging with the violent past, we may be seeking to allay its disturbing potential, for explanations and representations can bring their own forms of coherence as well as offering moral reassurance. Tensions continue between those seeking to stir up the past and those wanting to put an end to its haunting the present. This is not a simple dichotomy, however. ‘Being disturbed’ can itself be instrumentalized – for example, politically, in aspects of foreign policy, and at the private level, by positing oneself as an ethical person precisely through manifestations of disturbance.

Personal narratives and ‘collective memory’ Perhaps the most popular current approach to understanding the lingering significance of selected aspects of the past is that of ‘collective memory’. Its current wide usage has been somewhat inflationary, often now encompassing much that we think should be treated from quite different perspectives. We briefly here outline some of the theoretical issues involved, although not all contributors to the volume would necessarily agree with our views. We hope this discussion will serve as a fruitful contribution to an ongoing debate about how to think and write about the reverberations of the past, a debate that at times seems less than well-served by an often over-generalized use of the concept of collective memory. The notion of collective memory has been much in favour in the past three or four decades, although its provenance goes back a great deal further than the recent memory boom.8 Scholars using the term ‘collective memory’ usually make reference to ideas that were first developed by the French sociologist and philosopher Maurice Halbwachs in the early twentieth century. Halbwachs quite rightly stressed the collective dimension of all individual memory once it is narrated and communicated to others, in the sense that all individuals are part of wider social contexts that influence what and how they remember and recount selected aspects of the past.9 But the developments of recent decades depart considerably from Halbwachs’s original contribution. Two crucial insights in Halbwachs’s approach are significant here. First, individuals can only remember and narrate their personal experiences within a wider social

Introduction: Disturbing Pasts

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framework of shared discourse; as he writes, ‘a person remembers only by situating himself within the viewpoint of one or several groups and one or several currents of collective thought’.10 Secondly, the selective construction and reinforcement of particular narratives may serve certain collective functions, particularly in small groups which gain a sense of social cohesion and common identity by virtue of repeating a shared narrative about the past – which inevitably highlights some aspects and disregards or marginalizes others. In contrast to much current usage, Halbwachs considered collective memory to be limited by individual lifespans and hence by the passage of generations: once all those individuals who form part of such a group have died, there is no longer anything that can genuinely be called shared memory. Thus, he insists that ‘[w]hile The Collective Memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember’.11 Whereas Halbwachs fundamentally argued against an exclusive focus on individual memory as the ‘necessary and sufficient condition for the recollection and recognition of memories’, he nevertheless maintained the link between a living person’s memory and the collective: ‘I would readily acknowledge that each memory is a viewpoint on The Collective Memory’.12 This aspect of his thought seems to have got lost in many recent discussions, with the second element of Halbwachs’s insight being widely picked up and developed by scholars, who, in the process, have abandoned or at least departed from key elements of his ideas. The enthusiasm for analysing the wider significance of shared constructions of the past has led literary scholars, historians and social scientists to focus on the ways in which particular narratives have been constructed, adapted and variously instrumentalized or contested by groups that extend well beyond the individuals who actually lived through the experiences in question. Such groups may be large or small, vague or specific: ‘nations’, ‘societies’, political parties or particular groups may be seen as ‘memory communities’ or the key actors and bearers of ‘collective memory’.13 Similarly, scholars have extended the notion of collective memory to cover acts of remembrance and commemoration involving collectives (social groups, the media or entire nations) whose members may not – and over time cannot possibly – have experienced the events in question themselves.14 Such extension of Halbwachs’s original insight has resulted in a proliferation of subconcepts and extensions. Among German-speaking scholars the approach to collective memory developed by Aleida and Jan Assmann has been particularly prominent. Within their own variant of the notion of collective memory the Assmanns further distinguish between ‘cultural’ and ‘communicative’ memory. In neither of these versions need participants actually have any personal memory at all, in the pure sense of the term, of the past events that are of interest. These concepts are not actually about memory, then. What these concepts actually focus on is not memory, but rather the form or medium through which particular narratives about the past are transmitted. What the Assmanns call ‘communicative memory’ consists in narratives about the past that have been passed down across the generations by personal communications; what they call ‘cultural memory’ refers to narratives about the past that are preserved and represented in, for example, museums, cultural representations and collections. ‘Memory’ used in this way refers, as Jan Assmann puts it, to ‘the structures of storage, tradition, and the circulation of cultural meaning’. In his view, ‘cultural memory [...]

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is “cultural” because it can only be realized institutionally and artificially, and it is “memory” because in relation to social communication it functions in exactly the same way as individual memory does in relation to consciousness’.15 On this approach it is not always clear who the ‘agent’ doing the ‘remembering’ actually is or is meant to be, since the reference can become very wide indeed. There is an inbuilt functionalist tendency to reify (or anthropomorphize) a collective, and to attribute to the social whole a ‘memory’. Aleida Assmann, for example, discusses the question of whether there can be a ‘global memory’ of the Holocaust.16 She sees ‘nations’ or ‘states’ as the ‘groups that have a claim to such a memory’ because there is an ‘experiential link between the memory and the event’, singling out in this respect Israel, Germany, European ‘nations’ that were sites of genocide, and the Allies ‘as the nations of rescuers’.17 Further, she observes that some ‘reflections [...] argue for historical diversity and a national framing of Holocaust memory’ but ‘international measures have been taken to transcend the national level by reshaping and standardizing this memory in terms of a common historical reference’.18 This, presumably, is where ‘global memory’ or possibly ‘European memory’ is seen to be heading, if such an approach is followed.19 This kind of research has led to much that is of interest, prompting a proliferation of studies showing the significance for particular groups of certain narratives about the past that are clearly something other than historical knowledge in the academic or scholarly sense of the term.20 But the agents of such acts of cultural construction or remembrance are not necessarily those who can actually remember the events in question, who have any genuine personal memory of them. They take us far away indeed from Halbwachs’s insight concerning the ways in which an individual can only remember – or more importantly, recount to others – his or her own experiences within a particular collective framework. And many approaches from this perspective rely on functionalist assumptions about the collective actors that deflect attention away from individuals as the key carriers of memory in relation to the wider social and cultural surroundings. There is one area of research that has in fact productively developed the first insight that can be derived from Halbwachs, namely the significance of the social framework within which individual memories are inevitably framed. This is the field of oral history, where recent work has been increasingly sophisticated theoretically.21 Here, individual memory is no longer treated as it was in the 1970s and 1980s, when oral history was only just beginning to be established as an approach to what the Germans call ‘contemporary history’ (Zeitgeschichte). At that time, there was much hope – as there still is on the part of some historians, and justifiably so in relation to some topics – that exploring the memories of ‘ordinary people’ would provide a route to unearthing aspects of the past that had remained hidden, marginalized, leaving no discernible traces in the archives. This may indeed on occasion be the case. But now oral historians tend to see memory scripts as self-representations in the context of a later present where contemporary discourses, normative frameworks and interview contexts play a key role in the construction of memory narratives.22 This is not to say that there is no basis for exploring memory scripts with a view to understanding a ‘real’ past, but it does draw attention to issues around what is selectively highlighted as relevant, what is suppressed, and what is a framing narrative or an acceptable ‘myth to live by’ in a

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particular later context.23 In this sense, they can also be viewed as a particular kind of ‘ego-document’, or source about the self, that is distinctive by virtue of its creation in interaction with an interviewer at a specific date and place. We are unlikely to win a wider terminological battle in favour of a purist use of the term memory, and many contributors to this book continue to use the term in the sense we have critiqued. However, the volume as a whole seeks to shift the emphasis to processes and agents of disturbance, in order to avoid some of the tendencies to social functionalism and reification of collectives that are to be found in much recent writing on collective memory. Some of the contributions in this volume seek to emphasize memory as an act of individual remembering that is symbolically mediated.24 As Paul Ricoeur writes, ‘[i]n its declarative phase, memory enters into the region of language; memories spoken of, pronounced are already a kind of discourse that the subject engages in with herself ’.25 Thus, while ‘remembering is [...] set on the path of the narrative, whose public structure is obvious’, memory remains tied to the personal and inter-subjective experience of the individual. It is for this reason that Ricoeur puts forward his ‘hypothesis of the threefold attribution of memory: to oneself, to one’s close relations, and to others’.26 Resonating strongly with Ricoeur’s suggestion for escaping the polarity of individual and collective memory is a different tripartite approach with which many contributors engage. Instead of using the notion of collective memory, they explore narratives about the past that are produced, used and referred to by various communities of experience, connection and identification.27 These communities have different relationships to the past, depending on whether they have themselves experienced the past, whether they are (personally or emotionally) connected to it or whether they identify with particular aspects of this past. Members of these communities produce different, at times diverging, narratives of the past. The focus on narratives and communities allows for a more precise and nuanced analysis of patterns and rules, absences and disruptions that can vary according to specific contexts. Investigating communities allows for a differentiation of those collective agents that influence the ways in which the Nazi past was remembered, referred to, used or instrumentalized in a variety of contexts during the post-war decades. In this way it may be possible to develop theoretically informed and subtle insights into the ways the deeply disturbing past still reverberates today. Overall, the volume presents a variety of approaches to understanding the continuing significance of a disturbing past. Some of the contributions continue to use the notion of collective or cultural memory, as though it were unproblematic to broaden the use of a term derived from individual experience to apply to wider groups or a society as a whole. Other contributions seek to go beyond prevalent collective memory approaches by exploring complex interactions and connections among different communities of experience, connection and identification over space and time. Whatever approach to notions of collective memory is adopted, the contributions share a concern with exploring key issues around disturbance and the ways in which the past continues to reverberate across time and space. This is what is most fundamental here: exploring the multi-facetted character of ‘disturbing pasts’.

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Inter-disciplinary approaches This volume is by the very nature of the topic inter-disciplinary: it takes seriously the ways in which people inhabit a world of physical spaces and cultural meanings, in which works of literature, art and film are significant interventions in historical processes and self-understandings, not only ‘representing’ but also actively affecting the course of history. It is only as historians, film critics and literary scholars work together, drawing also on the insights of the social sciences and psychology, that we will gain a better understanding of the complex reverberations of a violent and still disturbing past. In particular, the questions raised by the notion of disturbing pasts give critical shape to the volume’s four sections. Part One focuses on emotional responses to the Second World War and the role of emotions in responding to and understanding questions of culpability and responsibility for crimes. It looks at how various post-war communities – predominantly in Germany and the Netherlands but also elsewhere – were affected by feelings of guilt and shame related to past events, and how these emotions are inscribed and reflected in testimonies by perpetrators and victims alike. The four contributions analyse the connections and discrepancies between the experiences of specific groups during the period of the Third Reich and their emotional responses in later historical contexts. Case studies exploring experiences of guilt and shame among both persecutors and persecuted in a variety of places (Mary Fulbrook), reactions by German audiences who were made to watch atrocity films in the context of Allied ‘re-education’ efforts (Ulrike Weckel), testimonies of former Dutch Nazi-collaborators (Ismee Tames) and their families, as well as more recent campaigns to acknowledge and commemorate the victims and survivors of the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ programme (Susanne Knittel), form the core of the contributions in this part. They provide insights into the role emotions play in how post-war agents perceived and communicated both their own and others’ culpability and responsibility for crimes committed during National Socialism. In each case, a continuing sense of emotional unease precipitates later stirring of the past, disturbing what has been repressed or silenced, and altering the ways in which people in a later present view and engage with and further disturb this past. Part Two explores literary and filmic responses to the war, and considers how literary narratives use disturbing tropes and techniques to problematize the complex inter-relations among historical events, fiction, trauma and politics. These literary and film texts could in turn be perceived as disturbing in their own right. The texts under examination in this section range from early post-war examples written by members of communities who lived through the historical events to more recent examples from the 1980s and the 1990s, depicting and problematizing the views of post-war generations. Based on the analysis of novels and stories by Israeli and Austrian authors and Polish authors and directors, the contributions in this section show how works of fiction dealt with a disturbing past by making use of disturbing literary patterns and tropes. They range from failed attempts by Israeli authors of the third post-war generation to expose the traumata of their grandparental and parental generations and find redemption (Tsila Ratner), through translating historical events into a literary world and at the same contributing to an altered and revised understanding of the past,

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as in the Austrian novel Der Kalte (Katya Krylova), to the more recent renegotiation of Polish relations with the Polish Jewish heritage (Uilleam Blacker). The contributors explore how literary and filmic responses to the war and the Holocaust are both embedded in and offer an insight into the changing legacies of violence and its intergenerational effects. Part Three brings together contributions about post-war cultural representations of war and violence in films, literature and art that problematize the role of pleasure and fascination in our preoccupation with violent and horrific aspects of the past. These contributions directly address the unsettling tension between such pleasure and questions of ethics. The contributors situate their individual case studies within specific historical contexts ranging from the early post-war period to today. They explore the line between what is seen as permissible and impermissible, controversial or acceptable, pleasing or disturbing in various contexts. The contributions focus on film censorship (Julian Petley), the role of comedy in cultural depictions of suffering (Stephanie Bird) as well as on audience reactions to unexpected versus comfortable artistic representations of the past (Caitríona Leahy). What is perhaps particularly disturbing in this area is the possibility of gaining what is often seen as illicit pleasure in engaging with violence and atrocities; or of feeling that horrified engagement at the same time serves to underline the high moral and ethical standards of later audiences. Finally, Part Four examines processes of identity construction, in interaction with others ‘elsewhere’, among communities of Germans, German-speakers, and those who identified as ethnic Germans during the post-war period, and explores how they continue to be disturbed by it. The contributions focus on attempts to selectively engage with aspects of the past while conveniently ‘forgetting’ about other – less comfortable – aspects. Based on case studies of post-war German tourists to other areas of Europe (Julia Wagner), of German-speaking Jews and ethnic Germans who emigrated from the Bukowina region (Gaëlle Fisher), of young West German reconciliation activists (Christiane Wienand) and groups of Germans, ethnic Germans or German émigrés living in the United States (Julia Lange), this section investigates the complex relationships between history, identity, representation and place in interaction with others from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century. Like the majority of post-war Germans, these groups were motivated by their desire to build a ‘better future’ on the ashes of the past. However, while some saw it as a necessary prerequisite to confront the past in order to move on, others believed in the idea of turning over a new leaf and focusing on the present and the future instead of confronting the past. Based on post-war sources (ranging from ego-documents through memoirs to press coverage), the contributions in this section show that, regardless of their inclination, the past remained disturbing for the communities in question. There is, as indicated, no one theoretical approach adopted in common by all contributors to the volume. But by taking seriously the notion of ‘disturbing pasts’, the contributions extend our understanding of the ways in which the legacies of the Second World War continue to affect the present and are in turn shaped by the present. The book includes analyses that consider different but interacting levels: the past itself and those who experienced it; those who actively investigate and interrogate the past;

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and the disturbing issues that scholars, writers and artists – and their audiences – face, including ethical issues and the wider impact of interventions in the past. By engaging with and challenging concepts that have become key to analysing the Second World War and its effects, the contributions also offer a critical disturbance of expectations and norms of representation, and provide alternative perspectives on the ways in which the past has been used, whether for political, cultural or historiographical reasons. At the same time, they open up new avenues of inquiry and interpretation that help us to understand better some of the issues with which such approaches have sought to grapple. Overall, the volume seeks to understand the continuing significance of a disturbing past, going beyond prevalent collective memory approaches by exploring complex interactions and connections among different communities of experience, connection and identification over space and time. The ideas developed in the contributions in this volume will therefore be of wider theoretical significance beyond the particular substantive focus of this book.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

Michael Martens, ‘Die Akte Griechenland’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 March 2015, available online: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/historische -schulden-die-akte-griechenland-13483054.html (accessed 12 April 2015). gec/dab, ‘Entschädigung für Kriegsverbrechen: Griechenland will deutsches Eigentum beschlagnahmen’, Spiegel online, 11 March 2015, available online: http:// www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/griechenland-will-deutsches-eigentum -beschlagnahmen-a-1022879.html (accessed 12 April 2015). Interview with Michael Große-Böhmer, Deutschlandfunk, 23 March 2015, available online: http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/griechische-forderungen-reparationen -wird-es-nicht-geben.694.de.html?dram:article_id=314991 (accessed 12 April 2015); Gesine Schwan, ‘NS-Entschädigungen für Griechenland: Das reiche Deutschland wirkt peinlich’, Spiegel online, 17 March 2015, available online: http://www.spiegel. de/politik/deutschland/griechenland-schwan-fordert-entschaedigung-fuer-ns -verbrechen-a-1023956.html (accessed 12 April 2015). Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 212 and Eberhard Rondholz, ‘Schärfste Maßnahmen gegen die Banden sind notwendig ... – Partisanenbekämpfung und Kriegsverbrechen in Griechenland. Aspekte der deutschen Okkupationspolitik 1941–1944’, in Ahlrich Meyer (ed.), Repression und Kriegsverbrechen, die Bekämpfung von Widerstands- und Partisanenbewegungen gegen die deutsche Besatzung in West - und Südeuropa (Berlin: Verlag Schwarze Risse, 1997). A striking example is the haunting poem ‘Federico García Lorca’ by Nikos Kavvadias which connects the massacre of Distomo and the execution of 200 Communist prisoners by the Germans at Kaisariani in Athens, Greece, on 1 May 1944 in retaliation for the killing of General Franz Krech by partisans in Molaoi to the execution of the Andalusian poet Lorca by the Franco regime. The poem was turned into a very popular song interpreted first by Giannis Koutras in 1979 on the album Σταυρός του Νότου and then again by Vasilis Papakonstantinou

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6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13

14

15

16

17 18 19

20

11

on the album Γραμμές Των Οριζόντων (1992). Other examples of references to Distomo in literature and music include the poem ‘Επιμνημόσυνη γονυκλισία Στους εκτελεσμένους του Διστόμου’ by Nikiforos Vrettakos. This poem was also set to music. The song ‘Distomo’ was released on the record Echoes by Greek Australian composer Arthur Rorris in 2012. For an extensive list of literary works which refer to Distomo, see available online: http://www.istoria.gr/index.php?mod=articles&action =disArcArt&issue=103&id=1315 (accessed 12 April 2015). The synopsis of the film is available online: http://www.fontanafilm.ch/DOKFILME/ argyris/synopsis_e.html (accessed 17 March 2015). Dapd, ‘Hinterbliebene des Massakers von Distomo scheitern’, Deutsche Handwerkszeitung, 6 July 2011, available online: http://www.deutschehandwerks-zeitung.de/hinterbliebene-des-ss-massakers-in-distomo-scheitern-instrassburg/150/3092/81833 (accessed 12 April 2015). See for an overview: ‘Introduction’, Jeffrey Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy (eds), The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–49. For a review article on recent approaches to the notion of collective memory, see Bill Niven, ‘On the Problems and Pitfalls of Collective Memory’, German History 26, 3 (2008): 427–436. See also Mary Fulbrook, ‘History Writing and “Collective Memory” ’ in Bill Niven and Stefan Berger (eds), Writing the History of Memory (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 65–88. Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Alcan, 1925). Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1950; reprinted 1980), 33. Ibid., 48. Ibid. See, for example, Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck, 2006); Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume (Munich: Beck, 1999); and Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992). Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; original German 2007), 9. Aleida Assmann, ‘The Holocaust – A Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New Memory Community’, in Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (eds), Memory in a Global Age. Discourses, Practices and Trajectories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 97–117. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 101. See also, for example: Aleida Assmann, ‘ “Europe: A Community of Memory?” Twentieth Annual Lecture of the GHI, November 16, 2006’, GHI BULLETIN 40 (spring 2007): 11–25; and with rather more empirical and analytical focus, Aline Sierp, History, Memory, and Trans-European Identity. Unifying Divisions (London: Routledge, 2014). See for example – embodied in the very title – the use of the term in Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove and Georg Crote (eds), German Memory Contests. The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990 (London: Camden House, 2006).

12 21

22

23 24

25 26 27

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond See for good introductions: Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010); Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006). Key practitioners of such approaches – from rather different perspectives – include particularly the now classic study by Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato and Dorothee Wierling, Die Volkseigene Erfahrung. Eine Archäologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1991); and Dorothee Wierling, Geboren im Jahr Eins (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2002). See also, for example, Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller and Karoline Tschuggnall, ‘Opa war kein Nazi’. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002). See, for example, Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (eds), The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 1990). Arguing against the notion of collective memory, Jay Winter has suggested using the term collective remembrance as an alternative. See Jay Winter, Remembering War. The Great War and Historical Memory in the 20th Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 129. Ibid., 132. See also Mary Fulbrook, ‘Generations and the Ruptures of 1918, 1945 and 1989 in Germany’, in Tim Haughton, Nicholas Martin and Pierre Purseigle (eds), Aftermath – Legacies and Memories of War in Europe, 1918–1945–1989 (London: Ashgate, 2014), 7–24; ‘East Germans in a Post-Nazi State: Communities of Experience, Connection and Identification’ in Mary Fulbrook and Andrew Port (eds), Becoming East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), 33–55; and ‘Legacies of a Significant Past: Regimes, Experiences and Identities’ in Sarah Colvin (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of German Politics and Culture (London: Routledge, 2015), 34–47.

Part I

Emotional Connections

2

Guilt and Shame among Communities of Experience, Connection and Identification Mary Fulbrook

The Second World War, according to a joke prevalent among members of the so-called ‘Hitler Youth generation’, was a war that Germans could never lose; they would be stuck with it for the rest of their lives.1 If this was true on the side of the perpetrators, at least among those in a fit enough state to joke about it, the underlying truth was even more relevant for those victims who managed to survive. Even where survivors recovered their physical strength and were not scarred or disabled by wounds and diseases, they remained deeply troubled by their traumatic experiences. Guilt and shame provided complex emotional links with a past that could not be laid to rest. Experiences of humiliation and dehumanization, through exclusion, maltreatment, starvation and exploitation, affected survivors’ self-perceptions; their memories of pain, of appalling conditions and suffering, and their feelings of loss, affected them throughout their lives; some, additionally, felt a sense of guilt about their own survival. This was a catastrophe that radically altered the course of survivors’ lives. Whether or not they talked about their experiences – and there were variations in the extent to which people talked, to whom, when and about what they talked – the experiences of persecution shaped the whole of the rest of their lives, and made survivors feel apart from others who had not gone through similar experiences. People closely connected with victims also struggled with the questions of guilt, and of how the ‘catastrophe’ (Shoah) might have been resisted, averted. By contrast, many perpetrators of appalling atrocities, and people who had sustained the system, often seemed to feel no shame and rejected accusations of guilt. The past itself seemed barely to disturb them; it was rather when others began to scratch the surface of convenient post-war myths, and to explore a little deeper below stories of ignorance and innocence, that disturbance made itself felt. Much depended on later social and political conditions. In West Germany, former members of the SS, or returning soldiers, were able to talk far more openly about the ‘good old days’ than they were in communist East Germany, for example.2 Lack of empathy with the victims, and great deal of empathy with ‘fallen comrades’, allowed widespread talk about scenes of war, of heroism and comradeship, with almost no victims (except on one’s own side). Communities of experience among perpetrators were not built on shame and guilt,

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as they were among the victims. Officially, the public cultures of both West and East Germany allowed an effective disappearance of guilt on the part of the vast majority of perpetrators, beyond the few vilified monsters at the top. In West Germany, the path set by Konrad Adenauer of taking on moral responsibility for the past did not include acknowledgement of guilt beyond the few who had been or were being dealt with. In East Germany, guilt was effectively exported to the capitalist West while the official culture of the GDR was one of celebrating anti-fascist resistance. It was left to the communities of connection and identification – the children, grandchildren and others with a close identification with the Nazi past – to take on a burden of inherited shame. In West Germany in particular, it was members of the ‘second generation’ who seemed to feel the most shame, often accompanied by an entirely misplaced sense of personal guilt. The past was intensely disturbing. But the way in which the children of the perpetrator generation acted on their disturbing sense of shame was to engage in massive identification with the victims. This led to waves of memorialization, of collections of stories and testimonies, of nearly obsessive exploration of victim experience. It did not necessarily lead to any closer engagement with questions of guilt – at least until the passing away of the perpetrator generation, when the personal connections were no longer so acutely disturbing. The emotional landscapes across different communities and generations are key to understanding the ways in which the Nazi past repeatedly disturbed a later present; and how in turn people later disturbed a past that many would have preferred to have been laid to rest. Despite the demands of the truly guilty, who generally refused to acknowledge their guilt, that a ‘line should be drawn’ under this past, it was not one that would go away. The shame experienced by people connected to or identifying with this past ensured that it would continue to trouble. But while survivors remained deeply disturbed by the past – however outwardly successful their post-war lives might appear  – most of the perpetrators seem to have succeeded both in living relatively undisturbed post-war lives and evading public view. Only as the generation of communities of experience gives way to an era where communities of connection and identification have taken the active role is it possible to shine a more discerning spotlight on the topography of guilt.

The significance of guilt and shame: Some theoretical considerations Feelings of guilt and shame linger, linking people to a troubling past; accusations of guilt demand retribution, compensation, some form of readjustment of an imbalance. Explicit or publically acceptable narratives about the past may bear little relation to continuing unease or a sense of injustice; continuing emotional disturbances refuse to let a violent past disappear into ‘history’. Guilt and shame have been analysed from a variety of disciplinary frameworks. Legal scholars and historians have explored the ways in which ‘guilt’ was defined, and evaluated how the trials of prominent Nazis and front-line perpetrators were affected by varying political contexts; philosophers and theologians have debated interpretations

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of guilt and morality in the light of religious, legal and ethical frameworks; literary critics and psychoanalysts have pored over written testimonies and oral history interviews, seeking to understand the impact of traumatic events on later narratives and individual self-representations; social psychologists have explored not only the effects on those who lived through horrific experiences, but also questions of intergenerational transmission and the legacies for subsequent generations; and historians of ideas have traced the changing professional and interpretive frameworks through which feelings of guilt and shame relating to traumatic experiences were addressed. In relation to this almost overwhelming subject – one that has, on some views, tested the possibility of representation to the limits – there is clearly a wealth of material and a multifaceted, massively debated intellectual landscape.3 What then can a historian add? I do not want here to address questions of individual psychology – particularly as these relate to inner processes to which it is hard to gain empirical access – but rather to look at expressions of emotions, public discourses and the communication of feelings in different historical environments; in other words, to explore what might be called a historical phenomenology of guilt and shame. I am not interested in assumptions about the internal workings of emotions within an individual psychology – as in psychoanalytic assumptions about the internalization of the father figure, the identification with the aggressor and so on.4 Rather, I wish to focus on empirical manifestations of guilt and shame, and to explore the relations between these expressions and particular historical contexts. Who expresses a sense of guilt or shame, to whom, when, in what context? Who is accused of being guilty, by whom and with what historical consequences? Who is subjected to shaming processes, or told they ‘should be ashamed of themselves’? In developing a historical phenomenology of guilt and shame, it is helpful to use a broader conceptual framework focusing on communities of experience, connection and identification.5 ‘Communities of experience’ are those who lived through certain events – ‘defining experiences’ – that significantly affect the subsequent course of their lives, whether or not they explicitly engage in ‘memory work’. ‘Communities of connection’ consist of those who did not themselves personally live through these experiences, but are inevitably affected by the consequences for significant others; typically, but not necessarily, second- and third-generation members of the families of perpetrators and survivors. ‘Communities of identification’ are those who, for whatever reasons, become personally invested in and in some way identify with the ‘projects’ (understood in the broadest sense of this term) of those who have been directly affected by a salient past. What are the distinctions between guilt and shame? Shame can be seen as an emotion directed primarily towards the self, arising particularly when some aspect of the self is inappropriately exposed to the gaze of others, whereas guilt relates to acts (or failure to act) towards others, where the focus is on the effects on the victim. Shame is in large measure about problematically perceived identity (the sort of person I am seen to be), while guilt is about inappropriate agency (the wrong things I have done or the right things I have failed to do). Both shame and guilt are therefore inherently relational and involve others, but there are key differences. In shame, it is the self who feels damaged or wronged by

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exposure; in guilt, it is the victim who has been harmed and may seek redress, with the possibility in principle, if not always in practice, of compensation or reparations. (But this distinction is complex; and there are debates about crimes without victims.) In shame, the exposure to the gaze of others is either real – actual others are present to witness the self in a diminished or inappropriate state – or imagined, in terms of an internalized eye of salient others. But with respect to guilt one may or may not be found out as having committed a transgressive act; and one need not actually feel guilty. The extent to which theorists hold ethical assumptions about shame varies between what are sometimes called Kantian and non-Kantian approaches. Kant, in awareness of shame’s concern with ‘saving face’ or fear of ‘loss of face’, saw shame as inherently egoistic and potentially unethical; as Bernard Williams puts it, in ‘the scheme of Kantian oppositions, shame is on the bad side of all the lines’.6 The evaluation of guilt is also variable, according to the character of the codes that have been transgressed, and the extent to which people were forced to make choices between unpalatable alternatives in situations of extremely limited freedom. There are also philosophical debates around the extent to which guilt ‘tracks wrong-doing’, or the extent to which guilt varies according to the consequences of wrong-doing. Is it worse (quite apart from the viewpoint of the unlucky victim) to have succeeded in killing someone than to have tried and failed? The question of guilt may be answered differently from a legal perspective (attempted murder is a lesser offence than murder) than it would from a moral perspective. The notion of ‘blameworthiness’ can also come in very useful here. Both shame and guilt are therefore intrinsically related to wider social and cultural contexts. The perceptions and actions of others may not correspond to the internal emotions of the individual. Practices of shaming involve public humiliation, whether or not the person subjected to such treatment actually experiences a sense of shame: ‘you should be ashamed of yourself ’ is not always followed by agreement on the part of the person thus castigated. Similarly, being accused of being guilty of an act that transgresses ethical standards and legal codes may not be accompanied by a personal sense of guilt. Public processes of blaming and shaming therefore do not necessarily correspond with a sense of guilt or shame. In the case of guilt, there is an extra dimension; a person may be guilty of an inappropriate (immoral, illegal, unethical) act, without this ever coming to light; people may not even be aware that they have committed a transgressive act and ‘should’ feel guilty. By contrast, shame inevitably and necessarily entails a subjective element: someone must always be aware of or actively perceive some basis for shame, whether the shame is subjectively experienced with an internalized sense of the gaze of an imagined other, or whether it is externally imposed by a shaming process, or both. There are other distinctions of significance too. The personal identity that is involved in shame may be seen as entirely to do with individual attributes; but it may also be related to a wider community of which one considers oneself a member, and on behalf of which one may feel shame. Shame is thus to some extent transitive – ‘I share your shame’ – in a way that guilt is not; one is either responsible for the act (or failure to act) or one is not. There are degrees of guilt relating to specific acts; but ultimately

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someone who is not in any way connected with the act can only be deemed to share in the guilt by some considerable lengths of (controversial) argument. Bernhard Schlink, for example, includes here the willingness to continue to benefit from the proceeds of a crime, and the failure to condemn or oust the criminal from the relevant community of beneficiaries.7 On most counts, this would be seen as stretching the notion of guilt a shade too far. Furthermore, many post-conflict situations suggest that policies which re-accept former perpetrators into the community are more likely to succeed in establishing stable political situations than those in which the conflict is effectively continually perpetuated. ‘Goal rationality’ may take precedence over ‘value rationality’ in considerations of transitional justice, to use Max Weber’s terminology. Even where psychologists agree on the inner psychic processes at work, there still remains major historical variation in what counts as an act about which one should feel guilt, or what actually precipitates shame. These change across significant transitions, whether at the wider political and social level, or within an individual’s personal life. And they vary with cultures, as in the classic contrast between ‘guilt cultures’ and ‘shame cultures’, with apparently persisting differences in cultural outlooks and codes of honour and shame. In the late 1940s, when Ruth Benedict reflected on the Japanese culture of shame, she portrayed a sociocultural system that was perceived by the West as virtually static: the Japanese culture of honour was described in terms of materials drawn from across generations, even centuries; this was contrasted to the supposed ‘guilt culture’ of the Christian West.8 Even so, within a western ‘guilt culture’, shame and shaming could play a major role in small group cohesion, as in the inclusionary and exclusionary dynamics through participation in morally dubious escapades among schoolmates or in the complicit bonds of ‘camaraderie’ among German Army units. Simple contrasts across cultures clearly require much refinement. But what is particularly striking when we are looking at post-Holocaust Europe is that there is no simple persistence of enduring codes of honour across time. Rather, what is crying out for clarification are the ways in which guilt and shame are related to massive transitions and clashes of conflicting codes. This is clearly the case when exploring the societies that displaced the defeated Nazi empire. It is also the case when we look at shame and guilt at the individual level. What then can be said about historical manifestations of a sense of guilt and shame among victims and perpetrators after the Holocaust?

Shame, dehumanization and the reconfiguration of victim identities Shame, humiliation and dehumanization played a major role in forming communities of experience among those who were victims of Nazi persecution.9 Expressions of shame frequently relate to transitional experiences: what might be called, often literally as well as metaphorically, arrivals and departures. Feelings of shame appear to be most acutely experienced when there is a disjuncture between the actual and the idealized self, or the exposed self and the self as one would like to be seen by others.

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In looking at survivor testimonies, it is striking that experiences of shame tend to be mentioned in relation to the beginnings and ends of particular periods, as well as after liberation. It is at liminal moments, when the yawning chasm between the acceptable self and the exposed and diminished self is evident, that a sense of shame may be most vividly registered. The overall process may be seen as a threefold one, with phases of partial or progressive dehumanization (and the battle against this process), with shocks of transition at initial humiliation, a continuing sense of shame in awareness of the pernicious effects of longer-term degradation, and a subsequent, sometimes quite sudden perception of one’s diminution or awareness of the state to which one had been reduced. There were also longer-term consequences, although the extent to which people were degraded varied, as did individual responses to dehumanizing processes. The first stage was that of what might be called ‘de-individualization’; or least, being forcibly stripped of certain social relations and aspects of one’s personal identity that had shaped and characterized a life before. This did not always have to accompany entry into an objectively obviously ‘worse’ situation; the subjective apprehension of forcibly changed status was what was most important. The moment precipitating a sense of personal reduction could be, for a child, the separation from parents at the start of a Kindertransport. One survivor recalls his departure from Vienna as one of degradation, in that he became simply a number on a list, that he was now just ‘reduced to a thing’.10 On this occasion, when the mission was rescue of the vulnerable young, humiliation was clearly an unintended by-product of dealing with large numbers of children; yet in retrospect it was remembered as the moment when a unique individual with a personal name was reduced to an object, a member of an imposed category. Liminal experiences of shame could be marked and sudden at times of arrival at a place of degradation and death, such as the labour and extermination camps. On arrival, individual identities were taken away, people were actively ‘shamed’ and their individual identities erased: as in the practices of shaving hair, tattooing a number which would replace the individuality of a name, removal of personal possessions and replacement with camp clothes. Arrival rituals served to transform individuals into homogenized and diminished camp inmates. Gilbert Michlin, for example, recounts his arrest and deportation from France and his arrival at Auschwitz in February 1944. His mother was selected immediately for the gas chambers, aged 49. Selected for work, Michlin was stripped naked and shaved, including even his pubic hair.11 Equipped with striped clothing and ill-fitting clogs, and waiting in line to be tattooed, he felt he now ‘looked like a clone of everyone else’ and soon would have ‘a number on my arm’. He bitterly summarized his transition: ‘My identity was the only thing left to me. And they stripped me of that as well.’12 Even at these moments of dehumanization, any evidence of feeling ashamed could be met with severe punishment, as Janka Galambos, a Jewish woman from Hungary, recalled. Having been selected for slave labour, she too was stripped, showered and shaved, along with others. Most were too ‘exhausted and apathetic’ to engage in any resistance; but those that did were brutally struck and stamped on. In this way, Galambos recalls, ‘the last vestiges of human dignity were beaten out of us and we were completely degraded to animals’.13 Many other survivors

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record similar memories of the transitional moments of ‘entry’ into what was often seen as ‘hell’. Shame at the transformation of status could be a somewhat longer-term process, depending on context. Ghetto life, for example, could at first seem to be part of a period from which one might plausibly emerge; it only slowly dawned on people that this was not a passing phase but rather one of progressive disease, mass starvation and high death rates, even before deportations began. A sense of shame about reduction in status could be evoked by exposure to one’s own eyes, or the eyes of imagined others from one’s own community, or witnessing contrasts among members of the community. Abraham Levin, living in the Warsaw ghetto, recorded the distinctions between those Jews who were sufficiently wealthy to be able, despite all, to maintain an air of affluence, to wear smart clothes and obtain sufficient food through the black market, on the one hand, and the starving, ragged, dying Jews all around, on the other. Observing the ‘crowds of drawn faces’ and the ‘literally skeletal figures’ who ‘have the look of corpses’, in an atmosphere of ‘all-embracing gloom and despair that stares from every pair of eyes’, Levin was shocked by the very occasional sight of a rich Jewish girl in ‘over-elegant attire’. This brought home to him the reduction in status of himself as well as others: ‘Walking down the streets I observe this sickly elegance and am shamed in my own eyes.’14 For those in concentration camps, the exigencies of adjusting to and seeking to survive life within the extraordinary circumstances, hierarchies, deprivations and multiple brutalities of camp life, always on the verge of death, had inescapable consequences. For some, taking on positions within a power hierarchy based on the forced co-option of inmates with little choice, it might also mean a degree of identification with the aggressor.15 The extent to which this was willing or otherwise, and the ways in which conduct within this situation should be evaluated, remain strongly contested. The dehumanization of collaborators in what Primo Levi called the ‘grey zone’ was clear to many survivors. In the view of Galambos, it was not only those who were humiliated who were reduced to an animalistic status, but also the Kapos who held a slightly higher position with small degrees of power in the camp hierarchy, ‘who had been in the concentration camps for years and had become fully animalised [vertiert]’.16 In describing her later experiences on being moved briefly to Ravensbrück, Galambos makes a similar comment about the way in which Kapos, in becoming like the aggressors, have lost their humanity. She speaks of the brutal treatment at the roll-call or ‘Appell’, where the prisoners were beaten for no other reason than that ‘these totally dehumanised women so enjoyed this’.17 The behaviour of those inmates who managed, by one route or another, to gain and often abuse positions of relative privilege within the camp hierarchies was also seen by others as ‘shameful’.18 Under such appalling conditions personalities changed, with long-term consequences for those who were not ‘drowned’ but ‘saved’, to use Primo Levi’s terminology, and not only among those who were clearly compromised by their formal positions. The dangers of dehumanization even among victims who held no place in the camp hierarchy were perceived as problematic.19 Battles to remain human under conditions of ‘survival of the fittest’ often entailed compromises of previously held moral principles and ethical codes of conduct. Many survivors record a sense of discomfort and shame

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about such compromises. The situation was such that for many victims, any morality gave way to the desperate struggle to remain alive by any means, even those which beforehand, and later, would seem repugnant. A Polish Jew, Alex H., for example, who after the war settled in the United States, recalled waiting for the prisoner next to him to die, ‘so that I can grab his bread’; breaking down in tears, in his interview some forty years later, he adds ‘and I can never forget it’.20 Later in the interview, Alex H. comes back to this scene, and his sense of shame: ‘How would somebody who lived all his life in [...] normal circumstances [...] react if I tell them I waited for someone to die so that I could grab his bread. What would they think of me? That must be some kind of a monster.’ For others in more fortunate situations, there could be a sense of shame about their own privilege in light of the suffering of the wider community to which they belonged. Mary Berg, a teenager at the time, was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family in Poland; by virtue of her mother’s American citizenship, her family was spared the deportations from Warsaw to the death camps in 1942. They were instead interned in the Pawiak prison, and subsequently sent in January 1943 to an internment camp in Vittel in France, before being exchanged for German prisoners in the United States; they arrived in America in March 1944. While in Vittel, Berg confessed to her diary: [W]e, who have been rescued from the ghetto, are ashamed to look at each other. Had we the right to save ourselves? [...] I am ashamed. Here I am, breathing fresh air, and there my people are suffocating in gas and perishing in flames, burned alive.21

This was a sense of shame on behalf of the few privileged Jews who, despite being victims of racism, nevertheless managed to escape the murderous fate that befell so many others. For survivors, there was often a final phase: registering a sense of shame as they emerged from these appalling conditions – a phase that might be transitional, shortlived or might last for most or all of a lifetime, as a result of what they had been through. ‘Re-humanization’ towards the end or after the war could be accompanied by a sense of shame at the state to which one had been reduced. It was often only in this further moment of transition that people recognized the extent to which they had been diminished; this was a shame not possible while reduced to animalistic status, but experienced only when regaining a sense of being a human who could look back at the state to which the former self had been brought down. In Primo Levi’s view, ‘one suffered because of the reacquired consciousness of having been diminished. Not by our will, cowardice, or fault, yet nevertheless we had lived for months and years at an animal level.’22 Survivors had to relearn a sense of faith in humanity – which not all of them managed. Specific incidents could play a significant role in this process. Michlin, for example, recalled an experience on the death marches, one similar to experiences recounted by others. Michlin’s account is interesting for the way in which it interrelates a sense of shame and yet a returning faith in humanity. The few survivors were crammed in an open wagon on a train heading westwards via Prague, where the train halted for a

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while under a bridge. There a group of onlookers stared at the prisoners, disappeared, then after a short while returned and threw them bread. This restored for Michlin not only a belief in humanity, in that some fellow human beings had compassion for their plight; it also provoked in him a sense of shame about being seen in his emaciated, weakened, naked state.23 Michlin’s shame relates to his body, and others seeing him in a state he does not think appropriate, at both the beginning and the end of his camp experiences: nakedness on arrival at Auschwitz; and ‘dirty and emaciated’ on the death march, in an open carriage on the train, stationary under a bridge in Prague. Shame could be transitory and individual, as in relation to bodily exposure (closely akin to embarrassment); or it could be long-lasting, with a wider, collective identity on behalf of which there was a sense of shame. For Primo Levi, shame was applied by extension to humanity as a whole. In relation to what he perceived as the Russians’ shame on witnessing horrific scenes when they arrived at Auschwitz, Primo Levi commented: It was the same shame which we knew so well, which submerged us after the selections, and every time we had to witness or undergo an outrage: the shame that the Germans never knew, the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and he feels remorse because of its existence, because of its having been irrevocably introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will has proven non-existent and was incapable of putting up a good defence.24

Similarly, Michlin experienced a wider sense of shame when he returned to France after liberation. He was shocked by the convenient myths of innocence and resistance, by the downplaying of French anti-Semitism and the widespread refusal to acknowledge responsibility for the complicty of French officials in the deportation of Jews from France. Now, it was on behalf of the collectivity of France, with which he had personally identified and which had in his view not acted appropriately either during or after the war: ‘I was ashamed of this country that refused to face up to its past’.25 Michlin’s solution was emigration to the United States, accompanied by the chance of higher education, professional development and identification with American values. Shame at dehumanization could persist, although it need not be perceived in the same way once people had emerged and were able to look back from a more secure distance. As one woman, later reflecting on her time in Theresienstadt, commented on her perceptions at the time: ‘We did not want to feel shame before the world, we did not know that it is the world that should feel ashamed.’26

Life after survival: A sense of guilt and agency Feelings of shame and guilt continued to plague some, but not all, survivors of Nazi persecution. A contrast is sometimes drawn between shame and embarrassment: both may be acutely experienced at a specific moment, causing involuntary physical phenomena such as blushing; but unlike embarrassment, shame may persist over long

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periods. Once shame is a persisting emotion, disassociated from specific incidents, it may become virtually indistinguishable from feelings of guilt. As Primo Levi put it: ‘That many (including myself) experienced “shame”, that is, a feeling of guilt during the imprisonment and afterwards is an ascertained fact confirmed by numerous testimonies.’27 Why do the innocent feel guilty? There are several senses of the phrase ‘survivor guilt’. There are widely prevalent and strong feelings of guilt on the part of many survivors, for a variety of reasons, sometimes quite confused, and often without any real basis for such feelings. This makes the past acutely disturbing. In addition, and rather differently, there are also attributions of guilt and apportionment of blame by others, either to distinct groups, such as the Jewish Councils, or the Kapos, for having collaborated with the Nazis; or even ‘all European Jews’ for having supposedly ‘gone like lambs to the slaughter’, thus allegedly colluding in their own tragedy. This ambiguity and multiple usage was evident from the start. The term was already used during the war by Bruno Bettelheim as a key element in defining ‘survivor syndrome’.28 The feeling of survivor guilt subsequently became a defining feature of having suffered trauma – almost a central symptom. Bettelheim’s article, however, refers specifically to the ‘old prisoners’ who began to imitate their oppressors, and not only behaved but even tried to dress like members of the Gestapo, deploying bits of rags and insignia for this purpose. This is a narrower usage than that evident in the discussion by Primo Levi, although he too does look at the ways in which some but by no means a majority of prisoners begin to imitate their oppressors and become part of the system of oppression. But it has fed energetically into the psychoanalytic literature on internalization of the aggressor figure.29 Although some prisoners undoubtedly were more compromised than others by the collusion and collaboration they entered into, there is another and far wider notion of guilt in survivor accounts. This is one that relates to a sense of agency – and particularly to either the misuse or the failure to use adequately that very limited agency which remained to them. This is manifested as feelings of guilt because of failure to save loved ones; or guilt because the individual survived at the expense of others. There is a widespread sense that one could only have survived through having been bad in some way, by stealing another person’s piece of bread, engaging in morally compromised activities. In this situation, it was almost by definition the good who died first, for there was no way to survive if you obeyed all rules absolutely. This wider sense of survivor guilt encompasses the unending agony about how an individual should have reacted, and who could have been saved. Throughout survivor testimonies, the following questions occur with considerable frequency: Why me? Why did I survive and not others, who were better, nobler, more deserving? What more could I have done to save others, particularly those I loved most? What did I do that was wrong, such that I not only survived at the expense of others, but perhaps even in some way contributed to their deaths? Such questions are often accompanied by burdens that remain throughout life. What can I do with the rest of my life, to make it worthwhile to have been saved? Nothing can outweigh what has happened and give it any kind of justification; nothing can even begin to weigh in the balance and justify why I and not others survived.

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Agency is significant here in another way. Self-accusations of guilt partially contrast with the sense of shame: there was a lack of agency about the shamed self in its previously reduced state, physically wretched, exposed. Guilt suggests at least that agency could in principle have been exercised, that an element of humanity remained even in conditions of utmost dehumanization, however poorly an individual actually succeeded in deploying what limited agency was left. Worst of all, however, is the feeling that agency was exercised wrongly: that the survivor not only had done nothing to prevent evil, but had actually played a causal role in the suffering or deaths of others. Elly G., for example, was agonized about her own actions on arrival at Auschwitz.30 A teenager at the time, Elly was concerned that her mother was about to leave her little brother, Albert, with a neighbour and her children, in order to go with her in the column of those selected for work. Elly, trying to be ‘good’, told her mother she was old enough to look after herself and that her mother should stay with the little brother. This was the moment, as Elly later saw it, in which she herself had ‘killed’ her mother, then aged only 36. As she put it, ‘I waved her goodbye and never saw her again in my life’. Breaking down crying, Elly asserts that ‘In that moment I killed my mother.’31 She felt deeply guilty for the rest of her life, and felt she ‘deserved’ anything bad that subsequently happened to her, because of this one mistake, this one ‘wrong thing’ that she did, because she was herself such a ‘bad’ person: ‘I sent my mother to [...] I have to be punished, and that’s it. I deserve it.’ A similar sense of guilt plagued Alex H., who managed to remain with his brother until near the end of the war, on the death march; but then his brother could no longer walk ‘and he was taken from me and shot in the road’.32 Alex was torn up about this even forty years later: ‘Did I do my best or didn’t I do something that I should have done – but at that time I wanted to survive myself, that maybe I did not do my best, I missed to do certain things.’ The agonized feeling of misplaced or inadequately exercised agency seems to have been experienced only among those who were adults at the time – and only by some of them. Steven H. and Marion L. were a pair of twins who survived Bergen-Belsen as young children. In a joint interview, given when they were adults who appeared to be leading highly successful lives in the United States, they displayed no apparent sense of guilt. And, after all they had been through, unlike Elly G., they both felt they ‘deserved’ all and any of the good things of life that they could experience.33 In their case, good things in later life helped to compensate for an excess of suffering in young childhood; in the case of Elly G., bad things in later life could be explained as welldeserved punishment for the guilt of having actively, as she saw it, sent her mother to the column heading to the gas chambers – even though she had not known this at the time of the action. Some survivors do not appear to have been plagued by guilt precisely because they did feel they had made the right choices, even in constrained conditions where such choices were extraordinarily limited. Michlin, for example, had an early opportunity to escape, which would have meant abandoning his mother alone to her fate in the hands of the police. On the night of 3 February 1944, he and his mother were both arrested near their home in Paris. He could easily have escaped while being lightly escorted back on an errand to pick up blankets, but chose not to because of concern about

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leaving his mother alone in the police precinct without him. He was then deported to Auschwitz alongside her. Although he could not ultimately save his mother, in his own account written much later in life he had certainly saved himself from being plagued by a guilty conscience: If I had run away, I would have lived with the idea, a terrible burden, that if I had stayed maybe I could have saved her. Having made this choice, I know now that it was impossible to save her. I remained with her until the end, until the last moment. That night, that choice, determined the rest of my life.34

The question of survivor guilt is clearly one that would bear further historical exploration. Whether or not survivors felt a sense of guilt themselves, there was almost inevitably a closely associated need to find answers, and to apportion blame, thus exploring the guilt of others, leading to the question: Who was responsible for this catastrophe, who became complicit in guilt? This often led to wider discussions, not only among those who directly experienced persecution but also among communities of connection who had a very live interest in the fate of victims. The finger of blame may be pointed at many actors, but in particular at those who appear to have colluded in their own fate, rendering this truly a ‘Jewish tragedy’: the Jewish Councils, the Kapos and members of the Sonderkommandos, and finally all those Jews who allegedly went meekly and passively to the places of deportation and death. It is worth noting that these accusations of guilt also started very early on, and are not purely a post-war phenomenon, let alone one waiting for Arendt’s reflections occasioned by the Eichmann trial. Feelings of shame and guilt were not the only ones to plague survivors. There was among many survivors a sense of an acute break between the life before and the life after; a sense of uprootedness; and, however well settled and successful in new lives, a pervasive sense of loss, as well as an awareness of an alternative life, a life unlived. This was common not only among survivors of the camps but also among those who had managed to escape Nazi persecution before the war. For those who had experienced the worst horrors of camps or survival in hiding, the long-term effects of persecution and loss of loved ones were exacerbated by extreme experiences. Flashbacks and excruciatingly vivid visions of appalling scenes; memories and ever relived experiences of fear, running, hiding, discovery; nightmares and panic attacks – all these are wellknown phenomena among survivors throughout their post-war lives. As Alex H. put it, ‘sometimes there comes a picture before my eyes and it is so real that I could touch it’; when looking at his children and grandchild, and remembering what had happened to people whom he had loved, ‘I get that depression and I simply cannot get out of it’.35 Often, as in the case of Steven H., an extraordinarily balanced, humorous and pragmatic approach to life – a life that is outwardly fulfilled – is tinged with an underlying sense of ‘bitterness’ and a wish that justice had been done: ‘I would have liked to see more people swing from a rope’.36 Innumerable accounts record again and again the pain, the difficulties of talking to children, and the sense of being different from others who had not gone through the same excruciating experiences. Although they have been the focus of attention here, feelings of guilt and shame were far from

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the only long-term emotional consequences of persecution for the victims. And these few examples must stand here for hundreds of thousands.

The guilty and the ashamed It is, by contrast, hard to find references to any post-war sense of guilt among those who were genuinely guilty. For obvious reasons those who were actually brought to trial – which was a shockingly tiny minority of the numbers who had been involved in atrocities and genocide – downplayed their own personal roles in any wrong-doing; and those under investigation and at risk of being prosecuted engaged in similar strategies of self-exculpation. Many more did not even see themselves as guilty. Among the wider circles of those who had actively sustained the system of persecution and genocide, there were a variety of common strategies to deflect accusations of guilt or any stirrings of an uneasy conscience. Stories common among perpetrators frequently rely on strategies of distancing themselves from evil. These include claims that one had done morally ‘good’ deeds which might be weighed in the balance, such as having allegedly given assistance or sustenance to prisoners, which was a form of ‘insurance policy’, in effect ‘banking’ potentially favourable witness testimonies during the end stages of war, or having supposedly ‘tried to save a Jew’. Similarly, people widely claimed that they had been geographically distant from where the ‘truly evil’ things happened – a site of evil that was frequently reduced to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Even if they could not plausibly deny that they had been in close proximity to criminal acts, they claimed they had not personally been involved in doing bad things. The division of labour that was involved in mass murder, whether in the ‘euthanasia’ programme or in the ghettoes, labour and extermination camps, also made it genuinely easy to see one’s own small role as a mere cog in a machine, not as having been directly responsible for another person’s death. And if people could not deny actual involvement, they could claim that it was not the authentic inner self that was acting: they had not acted out of personal motives, but were only following orders, without having been personally invested in the action. In all these and related ways, perpetrators – in German, the ‘Täter’, those who did the act or ‘Tat’ – effectively denied the very agency embodied in the notion of acting.37 The perpetrator community, then, denied responsibility and rejected guilt. Some former perpetrators continued to sustain a Nazi worldview; others transitioned seamlessly into the new post-war societies, and became conformist citizens of the new states. The past appears to have disturbed them most when there was a risk of being brought to court, or when public controversies erupted over particular issues, when a common reaction was the demand to ‘draw a line under the past’. Only rarely do we get glimpses of perpetrators who were personally troubled by memories of their misdeeds. This left a serious legacy for the children and grandchildren of the perpetrator generation. Guilt, unlike shame, is not transitive. Those who were not there, who were children or indeed not even alive at the time, cannot be guilty of having committed certain acts (or omitted others). But they can have very strong emotional responses to those with whom they are closely connected – as portrayed, fictionally, in Schlink’s Der

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Vorleser (‘The Reader’), and evidenced historically in many second generation accounts.38 So there is no question of distancing and value neutrality or objectivity here; but there is a different attitude towards the past, which may call forth very different reactions on the part of later generations. Some children of perpetrators simply denied the guilt of their parents, and continue to ‘not see’. Examples of this are widespread, from some of the siblings in Malte Ludin’s film Zwei oder drei Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß, to innumerable children and grandchildren of perpetrators who simply preferred not to know too much. Another widespread response is one of vicarious shame, often associated with attempts to work this through by more thorough exploration and understanding of the past. Some have engaged in extraordinary efforts to ‘make good again’ through campaigns for compensation, restitution, or other morally relevant works. A notable example is Hilde Schramm, daughter of Albert Speer; there are many others. The key point here, however, is that among communities of connection with the perpetrators there was a remarkable growth of identification with victims, in what was often a tortured emotional situation for individuals who continued to love but could no longer respect parents with compromised pasts. And it was members of this second generation – including the wider ‘second generation’ that was brought up in the public culture of shame of the Federal Republic of Germany – that were behind much of the growing pressure for memorialization of victims and collection of survivor testimonies that set in from the 1970s onwards. It is important, however, to note that historical context mattered. In the GDR, the official culture of pride in the antifascist state meant that there was not a comparable legacy of shame and inappropriate feelings of guilt among younger citizens. Among young East Germans in the later 1980s, there was a wider degree of understanding for and sympathy with parents who had been ‘forced’ into conforming under conditions of a dictatorship. The growth of memorialization of victims, and the ever-expanding circles of victim groups that received recognition and (very belated and often minimal) compensation, has been widely applauded. By the start of the twenty-first century, it was not only the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but also Roma and Sinti, victims of sterilization and ‘euthanasia’ policies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, ‘a-socials’, forced labourers and others who were the focus of attention – more so in some cases than others. Berlin’s memorial landscape in particular blossomed with ever-new memorials to victims right at the centre of the nation’s capital city. But the converse of the extensive focus on victims remained the relative invisibility or marginalization of perpetrators. The travelling exhibition on the ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’ aroused such controversy in the mid- to later 1990s in part because it drew attention to so many ‘ordinary grandfathers’, and raised questions about the complicity of far wider circles among the German people, smashing the earlier, convenient restriction of perpetrators to the demonized circles of Hitler and his henchmen, the SS and Gestapo. There are now portrayals of perpetrators, such as the exhibition on female concentration camp guards at the Ravensbrück Memorial Museum, the displays on individual perpetrators at Neuengamme, the focus on the terror of the Gestapo and SS at the Topography of Terror, and on the decision-makers at the House of the Wannsee Conference. But the complicity of lower levels of the civil service, and the significance of acquiescence, conformity and indeed approval of the regime on the part of wider

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sections of the population, remain relatively underexplored in public representations of the past. Despite long-term fascination with the Nazi past, the guilt of the guilty has still not been adequately explored and exposed.

From shame to guilt? Changing interpretations of the legacies of the Holocaust among survivors have recently been summarized under the title From Guilt to Shame.39 Whether or not this holds good as a description of the movement between theoretical paradigms, can something of this sort be said for the historical manifestations of guilt and shame? In a sense, yes – but only with respect to communities connected with perpetrators, not victims; and with respect to the shift from communities of experience to related communities of connection and identification under particular historical circumstances. Widespread denial strategies and sparse evidence of feelings of guilt or shame characterize the discourses prevalent among perpetrator communities after the war. It was subsequent generations who felt an overwhelming sense of shame about the past. But in another sense, no, because both guilt and shame can and often do coexist; and because the dissonances and contradictions between inner perceptions and outer attributions are highly complex and variable, so that a search for tendencies or a unidirectional movement from one to the other is arguably an unhelpful way of proceeding. Particularly with respect to survivors, developments could be captured under an entirely opposite caption: from shame to guilt. For what we have here, it could be argued, is a recognition that the shame initially felt – in early moments of humiliation, in later registration of the extent to which victims of persecution had been diminished – was, if never entirely replaced, at least partially displaced by widespread feelings of guilt about having survived. The legacies of Nazi persecution were never easy for survivors: some pain will simply not pass, nightmares recur, and even in dying survivors may re-experience the death marches. But among those considering themselves to be second and third generation in survivor communities, there could be a degree of pride in their family heritage, and a determination that it should never again be possible for such acts to be perpetrated again. Among second and third generations in perpetrator communities, the moral burdens of the past and the failure to address adequately questions of guilt could provide new parameters of responsibility in a later present. In complex ways, then, guilt and shame provide clues to the complex legacies of a persistently troubling past.

Notes 1

Gabriele Rosenthal, ‘Einleitung’ in Rosenthal (ed.), Die Hitlerjugend-Generation. Biographische Thematisierung als Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Essen: Verlag Die blaue Eule, 1986), 11.

30 2

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6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond See, for example, Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006); Robert Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001). See for a small selection of relevant works in these different fields: Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1946; in English The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: The Dial Press, 1947); Nathan Stoltzfus and Henry Friedlander (eds), Nazi Crimes and the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Devon O. Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Rebecca Wittmann, Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Geoffrey Hartman (ed.), Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, ‘Opa war kein Nazi.’ Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002); Gabriele Rosenthal (ed.), The Holocaust in Three Generations. Families of Victims and Perpetrators of the Nazi Regime (London: Cassell, 1998); Daniel BarOn, Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Dominick LaCapra and Saul Friedländer (eds), Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). These are extensively explored in Ruth Leys’ work on what she calls the mimetic and anti-mimetic polarity in changing interpretations; see Leys, From Guilt to Shame and Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2000). Discussed further in Mary Fulbrook, ‘History Writing and “Collective Memory” ’, in Stefan Berger and Bill Niven (ed.), Writing the History of Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 65–88. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 77–78. Bernhard Schlink, Guilt about the Past (London: HarperCollins, 2009); Cf. also Götz Aly’s work on Hitler’s willing beneficiaries: Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2005) and my review of this in Neue Politische Literatur, 50, 2 (2005), 187–202. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Patterns of Japanese Culture (New York: Meridian, 1974; orig. 1946). Developed further in a book I am currently writing on Living with a Nazi Past. Wiener Library (henceforth WL), 050-EA-0703, P.III.d.No.197, Heinz Landwirth, testimony of December 1955, 4. Gilbert Michlin, Of No Interest to the Nation. A Jewish Family in France, 1925–1945 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004; orig. French 2001), 67. Michlin, Of No Interest to the Nation, 67. WL, 049-EA-0666, P.III.b.Np.1178, testimony of Janka Galambos, from Pécs, Hungary. Recorded by Alexander Szanto, London, February 1960, 5. Quoted in Zoe Vania Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 28.

Guilt and Shame among Communities 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

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Cf Bruno Bettelheim, ‘Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations’, Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology 38 (1943), 417–452. WL, 049-EA-0666, P.III.b.Np.1178, Janka Galambos, 6. WL, 049-EA-0666, P.III.b.Np.1178, Janka Galambos, 7. See for example WL, 049-EA-0605, P.II.e.No.1068, Richard Israel Friedmann, Dr Caecilie Friedmann, Prague, 5 December 1945, 12. See for example Michlin, Of No Interest to the Nation, 73–74. Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library (henceforth FVA), HVT-210, Alex H. Mary Berg, Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary, quoted in Waxman, Writing the Holocaust, 38. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Michael Joseph, 1988), 56. Michlin, Of No Interest to the Nation, 93. Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 54, quoting his own previous work The Truce (written 1947, published 1963). Michlin, Of No Interest to the Nation, 107. WL, 059-EA-1333, P.III.h. No.485; Klara Caro, ‘Stronger than the Sword! In Memory of the Martyrs at Theresienstadt’ (1942 to February 1945). Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 54 (my emphasis). Bettelheim, ‘Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations’. See further Leys, From Guilt to Shame. YVA, HVT-2519, Elly G. YVA, HVT-2519, Elly G. YVA, HVT-210, Alex H. YVA, HVT-544, Steven H. and Marion L. Michlin, Of No Interest to the Nation, 56. YVA, HVT-210. YVA, HVT-544. These strategies are discussed in greater detail with examples in Living with a Nazi Past. See, for example, Bar-On, Legacy of Silence; Stephan Norbert Lebert, My Father’s Keeper. The Children of the Nazi Leaders – An Intimate History of Damage and Denial, trans. Julian Evans (London: Little, Brown and Co., 2001; orig. German, Denn Du trägst meinen Namen, Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2000); Peter Sichrovsky, Born Guilty. The Children of the Nazis, trans. Jean Steinberg (London: I.B. Tauris and Co.,1988; orig. German 1987, Schuldig geboren); Dörte von Westernhagen, Die Kinder der Täter: Das Dritte Reich und die Generation danach (Munich: Kösel, 1987). Leys, From Guilt to Shame.

3

Shamed by Nazi Crimes: The First Step towards Germans’ Re-education or a Catalyst for their Wish to Forget? Ulrike Weckel

Several liberators of concentration camps and correspondents who arrived soon after the Allied troops reported having felt shame at the sight of the miserable, emaciated survivors who no longer looked like human beings but, rather, like members of a species of their own.1 These shameful sights were documented on film, and the footage was compiled into various so-called atrocity films which all four of the Allied nations showed both to their publics back home and to Germans: defendants in Nazi crime trials, prisoners of war (POWs) and residents in their respective zones of occupation. Much can be said in favour of the thesis that at least the Americans and British staged their screenings of these films to Germans in 1945–46 as acts of public shaming.2 Interpreting German responses in the light of shame and shaming, as I will argue, leads to a better understanding of how the Nazi past was disturbing to Germans than does the common focus on guilt. The focus on guilt has regularly led both contemporaries in 1945–46 and later scholars to the disappointed, reproachful conclusion that Germans in the immediate post-war period, who denied any guilt over or responsibility for Nazi crimes, failed to come to terms with their past and did not even seriously try to do so. Apparently, commentators who reached this conclusion had expected a large number of Germans, when confronted with the Nazi regime’s crimes, to admit their guilt or at least their responsibility as Germans, given that so many of them had supported the regime in the previous twelve years. At any rate, they took Germans’ widespread denial of collective guilt to justify their charge of failing to face the past. Indeed, in two different polls of German viewers immediately after screenings of the film Todesmühlen (Death Mills) in the American zone of occupation, the majority expressed just such a denial. In one case, 70.5 per cent rejected the claim that – as the questionnaire phrased it – ‘the whole German people’ shared the guilt for Nazi crimes; in the second case, 87.9 per cent claimed not to have ‘the feeling that [they were] responsible’ for what they had just seen I would like to thank Greg Sax for stimulating discussions and his most insightful editing.

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on the screen.3 If one takes the confession of wrongdoing, that is, the acknowledgement of guilt, as the only evidence for coming to terms with the past, then these results do seem to show that a majority did not come to such terms, but not much else. Through the lens of shame, however, a more nuanced picture comes into focus. To begin, I will put forward some basic considerations about shame and shaming and then discuss how the primary sources from three main target groups for Allied screenings of atrocity films in 1945–46 shed light on the explanatory potential of shame in this context. First, I will look at the twenty-one defendants before the International Military Trial against the Major War Criminals in Nuremberg, who were the German viewers of atrocity films watched most eagerly and by the largest number of observers. We have numerous reports of what these observers observed and can see the conclusions they drew about whether the prosecution’s film screening successfully shamed the defendants. But, as I will demonstrate, these reports illuminate rules of storytelling more than they reveal which defendants really felt any shame and which felt none. Second, I will examine the German POWs in American and British custody – the target group from which we have by far the largest number of individual viewers’ direct responses to a film screening. Commentators who took responses to confrontations with the crimes as a litmus test for coming to terms, or failing to, with the Nazi past, seem to have assumed that there were in effect just two possible reactions, a ‘right’ one and a ‘wrong’ one. However, as I will show, it is possible to construct from these responses a wide spectrum of reactions. Third, there were all of the Germans in the American zone of occupation who were given the chance to watch Todesmühlen voluntarily, as the film was screened throughout the whole zone, military district after military district, for one week each. Though several individuals were polled and interviewed, the primary sources for their reactions are mostly conclusions drawn from these surveys, including, for example, summary articles in the press. Reading this contemporary reasoning allows one to identify problems with shame and shaming. This will lead me, finally, to discuss the question of whether shame was a necessary first step in Germans’ re-education or whether it only intensified the wish of many not to talk or think about their disturbing past.

Focusing on shame From the very beginning, Germans’ relation to Nazi crimes has been addressed in terms of guilt rather than shame. Recent studies have concluded that post-war Germans heard – and indignantly rejected – the accusation of collective guilt much more often than the Western allies actually articulated it.4 Nevertheless, the reproach was in the air in 1945, and Germans’ collective hyper-sensitivity to it heightened tensions between the victors and the vanquished. Before it was even possible to develop apt terminology for discussing the different kinds and degrees of responsibility, the debate over guilt was deadlocked – with Germans feeling insulted and Allied commentators complaining about their political immaturity. Still today, moralizing undertones colour the historiography of Germany’s coming to terms with its Nazi past and often limit historical analysis. So, I suggest a shift in focus from guilt to shame. My suggestion may

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not sound significant because feelings of guilt and shame overlap, and it may not sound innovative because historians have used the word ‘shame’ in reference to Germans’ responses to Nazi crimes before. But historians of post-war Germany have not yet systematically incorporated a philosophical and psychological understanding of this emotion into their findings.5 When we think more deeply about shame, though, it becomes clear that it fits extremely well the tense situations that arose when the camps on German soil were liberated, those living nearby were forced to bury the corpses of inmates and many more Germans were prompted to watch atrocity films. Humans feel shame when, without deliberate intent, they violate a moral norm that they share, especially when others discover the violation, and it becomes public.6 In contrast to feelings of guilt, which concern those harmed through one’s moral failure and the possibility of redress, shame essentially concerns damage to one’s own reputation. And while feelings of guilt can emerge gradually and without being triggered by any concrete occasion, shame is typically induced suddenly through a change of perspective from the first to the third person as, for example, when one realizes that somebody is observing one’s violation and then imagines what one looks like from that external perspective. Therefore shame makes one desperate to avoid eye contact or wish, as we say, that the ground would open and swallow one up. I assume that most Germans had been well aware before the end of the war that what had been done to Jews, Slavs, the regime’s political opponents and others who were declared harmful to Nazi Germany or just unwanted were serious offences and that the moral norms of social behaviour require not only refraining from crimes but also refusing to tolerate them. During the Third Reich, however, it must have seemed to them that there wasn’t anybody who did not tolerate the regime’s crimes. Since everybody appeared to participate in this shameful toleration, there was good reason to expect tact from others in regard to one’s own violation, that is, that others would benignly overlook one’s shameful complicity and not raise the subject. But when the Allies entered Germany and discovered many more sites of mass murder than they had expected, several of them not far from residential neigbourhoods, they felt no obligation to be tactful. On the contrary, as most Germans chose to declare – perhaps out of shame – that they had ‘known nothing about it’,7 the occupiers, who were not convinced, took their claims as an invitation to teach them a lesson that they had not meant to ask for. They confronted Germans with the evidence of Nazi crimes and observed them while they were finally looking at what they had turned their heads away from during the Third Reich. Ashamed Germans’ concern over their loss of reputation thereby received confirmation. In the eyes of the world, they no longer were the nation of celebrated highbrow culture, the country of poets and thinkers (‘Dichter und Denker’), but a barbaric people consisting of mass murderers, beneficiaries of systematic robbery and opportunistic bystanders. This was not their own perception of themselves, to be sure, but it was hard to argue against it. The claim not to have known could hardly convince anybody (probably not even themselves), and the other notorious, widespread assertion that one had not wanted these things to happen, true as it might have been for most, was far too little in the light of such horrendous crimes to serve as an excuse. Since the Allies’ staged confrontations with these crimes were purposeful and public, they took on the character of shaming. However, purposeful public shaming offers the shamed the escape of shifting attention away from their own

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shameful behaviour to the questionable moral authority of those doing the shaming. (As I will later show, many Germans in 1945–46 made use of this escape.) As Allied producers of atrocity films for German audiences and organizers of the screenings hardly ever wrote their intentions down, we can only infer that shaming was one of them from some of the films’ narrations and, particularly, from the ways in which screenings were set up. Consider three examples of the latter. First, on the night before the American prosecutors at the Trial of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg were to show their hour-long film, Nazi Concentration Camps, staff members fixed neon tubes to the dock’s balustrade. They had realized just in time that otherwise it would be impossible for observers in the darkened courtroom to watch the reactions of the twenty-one representatives of Nazi rule as some of the regime’s most disgraceful crimes were exposed on the screen.8 Second, British and American commandants of POW camps made attendance at atrocity film screenings mandatory for German prisoners. All of the other movie programmes were optional even though these programmes often also served re-educational purposes and were not meant as mere entertainment. When an atrocity film was shown, guards monitored the prisoners and occasionally, according to POWs’ complaints, even shone flashlights into their faces to ensure that they were not closing their eyes.9 Third, only very few civilians in Germany were forced to watch an atrocity film, many fewer than later ‘recalled’ having been compelled to attend by needing to get their food ration cards stamped at the box office. On two of the rare exceptions to the rule of voluntary attendance, however, moviegoers in the British zone were filmed and photographed as they entered and exited the cinema, and people who left the cinema giggling were sent back in to sit through a second screening.10 The invention of compulsion by so many more might indicate that they had felt obligated in various ways to attend, that their participation was not entirely voluntary.11 It is true, for example, that when attendance figures were low local papers sometimes published articles accusing the local population of ‘fear of the truth’, as was the case in Berlin’s American sector in March 1946.12 The Allies, and in particular the Americans, frequently observed German film viewers during screenings or interviewed or polled them right afterwards. These records document that many viewers responded not only to the film’s shocking images but also to what they took to be attempts by the Allies to shame them. Yet it is not easy to tell from these primary sources whether those who were observed, interviewed and polled actually felt shame. In what follows, I use reports on the responses of the three different German target groups of Allied atrocity film screenings that I have studied in order to demonstrate what the primary sources do reveal.

The rules of storytelling No other target group was more eagerly monitored than the twenty-one defendants before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Some clues suggest that the American prosecutors interrupted their long-winded presentation of internal German memos, with which they sought to prove Count One of the indictment – a conspiracy to launch aggressive war – in order to show their film on the liberation of the camps

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because they wanted to offer something sensational to the international journalists covering the trial, who, one week into the proceedings, were already becoming bored.13 The sensation by that point in time, 29 November 1945, was not so much the film itself as the fact that everybody in the courtroom could watch some of the men who had been in charge of Nazi terror while they viewed the film. At the opening of the trial some days before, all of the defendants had pleaded ‘not guilty’ without the slightest indication of any awareness of wrongdoing. Now, observers were eager to find out whether they would show at least some signs of shame as the disgraceful consequences of their deeds were revealed for all the world to see. In most of the numerous reports of this day of the proceedings, the defendants’ reactions received far more attention than the film.14 Although the press gallery was quite some distance from the dock and the neon tubes on the ballustrades cast only a little light on the defendants in the otherwise darkened courtroom, reporters claimed that they had caught glimpses of telling postures, gestures and facial expressions. Many, it seems, wanted to have seen, as they reported, some or other defendant lower his head, cover his eyes with his hands, attempt to look away but eventually turn his head back towards the screen, ball up his handkerchief and press it to his mouth, clench his fists, bite his lip or even shed tears and also to have seen some other defendant maintain his bearing unaltered, let no emotions show on his face or manifest indifference in some other way, or even evince fascination at the shocking images. Subsets of these presumed indicators of shame and shamelessness appear in almost all of the press articles. However, though they all concluded that at least some of the defendants had felt shame, different reporters attributed different indicators to different defendants. Reporters’ interpretations of defendants’ movements and gestures gave their stories different twists. For example, a defendant’s turning his head away from the screen or lowering or closing his eyes was sometimes taken to show that he could no longer stand what he was seeing and sometimes that he could not follow through on his intention to maintain his composure and reveal no feelings. Under both interpretations, though, the behaviour was taken as a sign of shame. Given the presumption that no defendant wanted to reveal his emotions to the victors, weeping would be the highlight of any story. Several journalists reported having seen the unmanly Minister of Economics and Reichsbank president, Walther Funck, cry. Others interpreted Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel’s use of his handkerchief as an attempt to conceal the fact that he had lost control and begun to weep. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, under the sarcastic headline ‘ “Butcher” in Tears’, that Hans Frank, of all people, who as Governor-General of occupied Poland had earned the epithet ‘the butcher of Poland’, had sobbed loudly in the middle of the film screening.15 On the other hand, many of the reporters who claimed to have noticed tears in defendants’ eyes, dismissed them as crocodile tears or as tears cried over a defendant’s own presumed fate, not over that of the victims portrayed in Nazi Concentration Camps. Regularly, some defendants’ apparent signs of shame were contrasted with what was taken to be evidence of other defendants’ insensitivity. The most prominent case of the latter was Hjalmar Schacht, which almost all of the reports mentioned. Schacht, Reichsbank president until 1939, who was among the many to have been arrested after the attempted assassination of Hitler on 20 July 1944, and had been sent to a concentration camp, demonstratively turned his

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back to the screen during the whole one-hour screening in order to express that he was the wrong addressee for the intended shaming. His was the only unambigious response of a defendant to the atrocity film of the American prosecution, and commentators not only agreed on their interpretation of it but also on their judgement that Schacht’s gesture was unearned, self-righteous and annoying. In general, callousness was the worst that observers suspected of defendants in light of their responses to Nazi Concentration Camps. A few, however, wondered whether a defendant could have possibly taken pleasure from or even been aroused by the scenes of piled-up corpses, many of which had been stripped naked. The most likely candidate for such sadism was Julius Streicher, the editor of the pornographically anti-semitic Stürmer, who had the reputation of ‘a dirty old man’.16 Two German newspapers also reported that Göring had seemed to get excited when the film mentioned torture.17 All of the descriptions of defendants’ purported reactions to Nazi Concentration Camps show how subjective are perceptions of someone feeling shame or not and how much they depend on the perceiver’s image of and expectations for the person, and his wishful thinking or apprehension, and, with journalists especially, the rules of good storytelling. The story that nearly all of that day’s observers wanted to tell was about the successful public shaming of some defendants. Most of them reported, with evident gratification, that when the film was over the judges filed out in silence without, as usual, formally closing the proceedings and ordering their continuation on the next day. According to The New York Herald Tribune, the defendants, ‘with all eyes upon them’,18 left the courtroom without chatting, for a change. I take observers’ obviously strong desire to find that at least some of the defendants were susceptible to shaming to have been grounded in their realization that no verdict, however harsh, could fit the Nazi mass murder of millions. The twenty-one Nuremberg defendants were the most monitored German viewers of Allied films about the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, but these reports of their reactions reveal more about their observers and the kinds of stories they wanted to tell than about the defendants’ feelings. The very few autobiographical notes of defendants that we have and the reports of their defence lawyers and the prison psychologist are no different, for they too were told as stories with messages.

The broad spectrum of responses The primary sources we have for the second German target group of Allied atrocity films, POWs, contain by far the highest number of individuals’ responses, many of which are first-hand accounts. In the summer of 1945, all German POWs held in British or American captivity away from the European continent were ordered to watch a twenty-minute-long atrocity film, KZ,19 and their responses, either written or verbal, were collected immediately afterwards by their German camp leaders, who then prepared summaries for the Allied commandants.20 Since attendance at the screening was not voluntary, we can assume that participation in the surveys was not either. However, the chances of gaining any personal benefit with one’s answers in such large camps were quite low. So, even if some respondents might have taken into account

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what their captors wanted to hear, there is no reason to be suspicious about the POWs’ responses in total. The POWs are an especially informative group also for reasons other than the quantity of individuals questioned. On the one hand, they were heterogeneous in regard to their wartime experiences, the dates of their capture and their political views. On the other hand, they all found themselves together in the hands of the (former) enemy who now compelled them to attend a film screening and monitored their reactions. The resulting primary sources have allowed me to classify responses along a broad spectrum that runs from approval and justification of the crimes, at one end, through dismissal of the film as ‘propaganda’, relativizing references to Allied war crimes, expressions of dismay, outbursts of fury at Hitler or the SS and avowals of shame and discarding of Nazi emblems to, at the other end, collectively incinerationing uniforms, commemoration ceremonies for the victims and collecting donations for survivors. Responses at the two extremes were rare. Very few POWs seem to have applauded or defended the Nazi crimes, and when they did they seem to have wanted primarily to provoke their captors.21 Demonstrations of support and empathy for the victims were equally exceptional, but the groups that carried them out sometimes motivated others to follow suit.22 Since many of the prisoners’ responses are ambiguous, however, not much insight is gained by simply classifying them along the spectrum. Consider, for example, the frequently articulated reservation that the film was Allied propaganda. By ‘propaganda’, a critic could have meant that the film was fake, for example, that the dead shown were victims of Allied air raids on German cities dressed in striped prisoners’ uniforms and made to look like they had died in concentration camps. A small number of POWs did level this charge while more at least expressed doubts about the origins of the corpses. Much more often, though, the word ‘propaganda’ was used not to question the general authenticity of what the film showed but to say that the filmmakers had exaggerated. For example, some who called the film ‘propaganda’ argued that it depicted only the chaos of the last weeks of the war. Others employed ‘propaganda’ to complain about what they perceived as the film’s one-sidedness and its silence in regard to Allied war crimes. Yet others referred to nothing more than the undeniable fact that the Allies had shown them the atrocity film in pursuit of a policy aimed at impressing and re-educating German viewers. My suggestion is that exactly this ambiguity in the meaning of ‘propaganda’ made it such an attractive reservation for Germans to lodge. It helped to keep nightmarish images at bay without requiring one to articulate what it was exactly that one doubted about the film. POWs’ harsh criticism of the Nazi regime is also open to interpretation. With such criticism, a viewer of the film could express his anti-fascist convictions, articulate his disillusionment with Nazism, distance himself from it, give outlet to his distress over what he had seen or seek to exonerate himself. So, in order to assess a criticism correctly and evaluate to what extent it was triggered by the atrocity film, it would be best, of course, to know what the critic had thought about National Socialism before the screening. However, some inferences are possible. For example, explicit anti-fascist statements were probably not effects of the film but the result of long-harboured political sentiments. Especially when POWs used political catchwords from workers’ parties, we can assume that they had already despised the Nazis before the screening,

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and only taken the film to confirm the worst of their expectations. On the other hand, expressions or signs of grief from convinced supporters of Nazism who had had illusions to lose are much less open to interpretation. This is something that the guards seem not to have realized when they voiced their surprise at noticing tears among those POWs who were labelled ‘black’, meaning they were considered ‘fanatical Nazis’.23 So, we can confidently take such responses as evidence of the film’s effectiveness. Most commentators seem to have been certain that the film and the way it was screened had aroused shame in at least some of the German POWs. Explicit utterances of shame, like ‘I am ashamed to be a German’, were often reported, though, strictly speaking, they do not verify that a POW felt shame so much as to show that he understood that that was what his captors wanted. They also show – and this might enhance the credibility of confessions of shame made in what was, despite the official end of hostilities, still a confrontational situation – that he did not begrudge his captors the success of their pedagogy of shock. One report from a camp whose inmates were unruly mentioned with grim satisfaction the uncommon silence that prevailed on the night following the film’s screening.24 At the same time, however, the frequent references to Allied war crimes which the film triggered show that the POWs not only experienced its screening as an attempt to shame them but how much many of them wanted to undermine the Allies’ moral authority to do so.

Problems with shame and shaming The many kinds of sources reporting on citizens’ reactions to atrocity film screenings in occupied Germany confirm the spectrum constructed from POWs’ responses except for its two poles. That is not surprising. The boldness to provoke observers with demonstrative applause for the crimes, on the one end, and collective acts of public distancing from the Nazi regime, commemorating the victims or collecting donations, on the other, seem to have grown out of the group dynamics of the POWs. For a prisoner was led into the theatre in the company of men he knew and with whom he would continue to share his accommodations for some time. There is evidence that some POWs conversed among themselves after the film screening, discussing their knowledge of and doubts about Nazi crimes, and these seem to have regularly led to staunch defenders of the Nazi regime losing their influence and Nazi opponents gaining authority among the prisoners. However, when, several months after the POWs, German civilians in the American zone of occupation attended screenings more or less voluntarily, they watched the atrocity film anonymously with the other coincidental members of the audience. Even if they went with a family member or friend or met acquaintances in the cinema, it was easier for civilian movie-goers to avoid conversation about the shameful images afterwards. In addition to the lack of organized collective responses, the rare mention of the atrocity film in diaries25 indicates that people in post-war Germany had much less desire to talk about the footage of the liberated camps than did German POWs far away from home. From the broad variety of sources for reactions to the film Todesmühlen, which the US military government screened in their zone of occupation in early 1946, I will

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concentrate on two which I find particularly telling for reflections on shame and shaming. First, as I briefly mentioned above, one of Berlin’s daily newspapers, the Tagesspiegel, published a harshly critical article entitled ‘Fear of the Truth’ when attendance in the American sector’s fifty-two cinemas dropped significantly after the first day on which the film was shown and remained low for the rest of the week.26 The author calculated that ‘only’ 25 per cent of the healthy, non-disabled adult population had been willing to face the truth, and they had left the theatre ‘deeply ashamed’, as he put it. The other 75 per cent, he continued, did not want to feel shame; in spirit, he claimed, they still stood at attention and ‘hailed Herrn Hitler’. The article provoked at least twenty readers to write letters to the editor, fifteen of whom rejected the accusation that non-viewers feared the truth and wanted to avoid shame.27 Most of these argued that the truth was already well known (this was in March 1946, four month into the Nuremberg trial) and pointed out, apparently thinking of various sources, that emotionally exhausted Berliners had enough of their own suffering to deal with. Some said the descriptions of Nazi atrocities already made them ashamed, and they did not need to see footage of the deplorable victims for that, while others questioned whether all of the viewers of Todesmühlen automatically counted as ‘the good guys’, that is, denazified. A female teacher reasoned that shame could not be demonstrated in public: ‘Wanting to feel ashamed publicly is either cynical or pathological’, she wrote. I agree that explicit demonstrations or public confessions of shame need not be persuasive. The difficulty is that there are few unambiguous indicators of shame, which means that scholars have to examine cases individually and often may not be able to come to a conclusion. My second source also comes from a newspaper; it is the film review of a talented professional writer, the well-known theatre critic Friedrich Luft. He vividly described gruesome images from Todesmühlen, insistently spoke of Germans’ guilt and urged his readers to go and see the film.28 For he believed that only the rage that those pictures triggered would enable Germans to start, as he put it, ‘working off the horrible pile of their guilt’. I see no reason to doubt Luft’s sincerity. He was obviously disturbed by the film’s evidence of Nazi crimes and felt shame as a German. However, when, in campaigning for repentance, Luft described its hoped-for effects, he said, tellingly, that the ‘clean and humble daily work of Germans’ should efface (‘tilgen’) the horrifying images from ‘the world’s consciousness’. Only then, he claimed, ‘we can breathe more freely. This film finally has to be the turning point.’ (‘Dieser Film muss endlich die Wende sein.’) His ‘finally’ signals impatience. Already in March 1946, Luft seems to have felt that it was ‘enough’, that feeling ashamed as a German should now come to an end and that feeling shame merited a clear reward: forgetting. Luft’s phrasing hints at a dilemma which raises the question posed in this chapter’s subtitle: was shame over Nazi crimes a first step towards Germans’ re-education or a catalyst for their wish to forget? The advance of Allied troops into Germany and their discovery of hundreds of camps, sub-camps and mass graves along the routes of the death marches brought with it a change in perspective for all Germans: they were now confronted with people who during the previous few years had not turned their heads away from, not to mention participated in, state terror and mass murder in their own countries. If Germans still accepted the norms that such crimes should not be tolerated and empathy should be extended to their victims, then in general they must have felt

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shame for, as I explained above, that is exactly how shame works. To be sure, we cannot know how many of them did. Nevertheless, in light of understanding the mechanisms of shame, I am not as pessimistic as were many contemporary commentators who – like Primo Levi, for example – were certain that Germans lacked the capacity for the shame that most others seemed to feel about German crimes.29 I do not mean this apologetically; rather, I want to argue for an epistomological conclusion. As we have seen, there are hardly any unambiguous indicators of shame that observers can rely on. Observers’ assessments of whether a person feels shame or not are therefore subjective and depend largely on their expectations, fears and hopes. So, contemporaries’ statements about post-war Germans’ lack of shame, like all primary sources, have to be analysed critically with regard to the context in which they were made. Moreover, the lack of many explicit articulations of shame cannot be taken as evidence for its absence. On the contrary, as Luft’s article demonstrates, people who feel shame are likely not to talk about it exactly because the feeling is humiliating for them. On the other hand, this close connection between shame and silence tells us that avowals of shame are not necessarily trustworthy. The only univocal indicators here are of shamelessness. Shamelessness in regard to Nazi crimes against humanity would have been obvious had Germans bragged about these crimes, proudly sought to justify them as part of a mission that transcended conventional moral norms or even regretted that they had not been more extensive. According to all of the source we have, however, this was almost never the case. Not even the defendants at the Nuremberg trial tried to justify the crimes committed in the camps. They did not deny them, but none, not even Göring, who normally took cynical pride in his Nazi endeavours, wanted to have had anything to do with them. Even though the dark figure (Dunkelziffer) of cases of shamelessness was probably significantly higher than the sources indicate, I think we can conclude from the rarity of documented forthright justifications of Nazi crimes that Germans in general had neither forgotten basic moral standards nor replaced them with a non-universalistic ‘national socialist morality’, as some scholars have recently argued.30 However, if I am right that many Germans felt shame and for exactly this reason did not want to talk about Nazi crimes or their complicity in them, then we can see that shame for what one had done, or failed to do, does not by itself contribute much to re-education. And the chances for success here seem to have been made worse when Germans – rightly or wrongly – felt that they were being shamed. That many felt that the Allies were trying to shame them can be seen from the ways in which they defended themselves or whitewashed their failure to object to Nazi crimes: they vaguely disqualified the atrocity films as Allied ‘propaganda’, pointed at Allied war crimes as undermining their authority to shame others and, similarly, argued that the Allies, too, had underestimated Hitler, as their appeasement policy showed. With such arguments, they tried to redress the moral imbalance between Germans and the rest of the world rather than accept the consequences of acknowledging the shamefulness of their past behaviour, namely, a loss of national esteem. At this point, a new question arises. If Germans’ shame as Germans or their feeling shamed by the Allies was not productive for re-education, would it have been more productive for them to have included themselves, or been included by the Allies, among those who felt shame as humans? As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, many

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liberators and visitors to liberated concentration camps reported having felt shame either at the sight of the miserable survivors or in the face of the crimes Germans had committed there. They felt this shame as human beings. Margaret BourkeWhite reflected on the fact that those who had caused these wretched conditions were ‘men with arms and legs and eyes and hearts not so very unlike our own’. It had made her ‘ashamed to be a member of the human race’, she said in her memoirs.31 Martha Gellhorn recalled that when she and some fellow journalists entered Dachau concentration camp they had not dared to look at each other. ‘I do not know how to explain it’, she wrote, ‘but aside from the terrible anger you feel, you are ashamed. You are ashamed for mankind.’32 Bourke-White’s and Gellhorn’s utterances correspond to what Hannah Arendt had already outlined in January 1945 in her essay ‘Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility’: For the idea of humanity, when purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men and that all nations share the onus of evil committed by all others. Shame at being a human being is the purely individual and still nonpolitical expression of this insight.33

Such universal shame might be what Germans today feel when thinking of Nazi crimes or watching a documentary on the liberation of the concentrations camps. This would not have been so for Germans in 1945, I am afraid. Rejoining the family of nations as if Germans had not been the perpetrators would have let them off the hook too easily. It is true that all people with arms and legs and eyes and hearts are capable of such immorality, and to this extent there was no difference between Germans and others. However, there is an essential moral difference between actually violating a norm and merely being capable of it. A nation’s citizens must acknowledge this distinction and recognize which side of it they are on. In concluding, I would like to point out that the insights into the psychologically complex encounters between defeated Germans and Allied victors as their prosecutors, captors and occupiers presented here were attained by looking closely at individual cases. Generalizing theses about ‘the’ Germans not coming to terms with the Nazi past or their ‘collective memory’ of it miss what is most interesting in German–Allied encounters and the process of political change that they gradually brought about: the different attitudes towards occupation, denazification and democratization; the variety of responses to Nazi crimes and the confrontation with them; the circumstances in which certain responses were more likely than others; the contemporary observers’ hopes and fears and the ways in which they tried to make sense in their reports of a morally overtaxing situation. Of course, when historians write about the past they have to reduce its complexity; we cannot simply reproduce everything we find in the primary sources. However, the usual narrative about an overall failure of Allied re-education measures or selective attention to the remarks of only certain contemporary observers about Germans’ inability to face the Nazi past, can tell us more about a historian’s desire to declare his high moral standards than about the historical subject. One way to escape the temptation to moralize instead of analysing complexity is, as I have suggested here,

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to focus on shame and shaming rather than on questions of (collective) guilt and the relatively small number of post-war Germans who did not reject such a charge.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6

7

See, for example, Robert H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Brewster Chamberlin and Marcia Feldman (eds), The Liberation of the Nazi Camps 1945: Eyewitness Accounts of the Liberators (Washington, DC: US Holocaust Memorial Council, 1987); Derrick Sington, Belsen Uncovered (London: Duckworth, 1946); Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1959); Margaret Bourke-White, ‘Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly’: A Report on the Collapse of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Years’ (New York: LLC, 1964). For more details, see my book Beschämende Bilder. Deutsche Reaktionen auf alliierte Dokumentarfilme über befreite Konzentrationslager (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012). The first poll took place in Berlin, the second in Eichstätt, both in early 1946. Except for the relatively high number of rejections of guilt or responsibility, all other answers on the different questionnaires differ significantly, the Berlin poll showing, for example, much more openness to the film than the one in Eichstätt. A broad majority of polled Berliners voted for showing the film to all Germans. The question about guilt feelings therefore seems to be an apt indicator of whether an audience was impressed by the film or not. See Weckel, Beschämende Bilder, 469–494. Josef Foschepoth, ‘German Reaction to Defeat and Occupation’, in Robert G. Moeller (ed.), West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 73–89; Norbert Frei, ‘Von deutscher Erfindungskraft oder: Die Kollektivschuldthese in der Nachkriegszeit’, Rechtshistorisches Journal, 16 (1997), 621–634; Heidrun Kämper, Der Schulddiskurs in der frühen Nachkriegszeit. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des sprachlichen Umbruchs nach 1945 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2005), esp. 277–301. Most common are attempts to make use of the distinction between a ‘shame culture’ and a ‘guilt culture’, as the anthropologist Ruth Benedict developed the distinction at the end of the Second World War to explain perceived differences between Japanese and American cultures. According to Benedict, in a shame culture, people regulate their behaviour externally in terms of their concern with how their moral conduct appears in the eyes of others while in a guilt culture the individual is guided internally by his or her conscience. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (New York: Meridian, 1974; orig. 1946). In the wide literature on shame, I find particularly instructive: Hilge Landweer, Scham und Macht. Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Sozialität eines Gefühls (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996); Maria-Sibylla Lotter, Scham, Schuld, Verantwortung. Über die kulturellen Grundlagen der Moral (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2012); Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004). Peter Longerich has convincingly argued that by their nearly unanimous declaration not to have known Germans subsequently rejected the Nazi regime’s strategy of disclosing enough information about its ongoing crimes to make the citizens accomplices and thereby tie them to the regime. Peter Longerich, ‘Davon haben wir

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8 9 10

11

12 13

14 15 16

17 18 19

45

nichts gewusst!’ Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Munich: Siedler, 2006). Stuart Schulberg, ‘An Eyewitness Reports’, Hollywood Quarterly, 2, 4 (1947), 412–414. See Weckel, Beschämende Bilder, 255–278. This film screening took place on 30 May 1945, in the little town of Burgsteinfurt in the Münsterland. Photographs of the event have often been reprinted in books on post-war Germany. For background information and the whole series of photographs, see Weckel, Beschämende Bilder, 374–390. In early 1946, several articles in the licenced German press in the American zone of occupation suggested that there was a moral obligation to see the atrocity film Todesmühlen, especially because the military government had not made attendance mandatory. Some journalists appealed to their readers to show the American occupiers that they were better than their reputation. See Weckel, Beschämende Bilder, 431–442. ‘Angst vor der Wahrheit’, Tagesspiegel, 9 April 1946. There is more on this article and the responses it triggered below. Some contemporaries suspected as much, for example, Janet Flanner in her snide report on the American prosecutors’ long-winded proof-presentation. Scholars have picked up the thesis, however, without Flanner’s negative evaluation. See Janet Flanner, ‘Letter from Nuremberg’, The New Yorker, 5 (January 1946), 46–50; Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 21 and 27; Christian Delage, ‘L’Image comme preuve. L’Expérience du Procès de Nuremberg’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire, 72 (2001), 63–78; Mirjam Wenzel, ‘Vom Zeugnis zum Tribunal. Zum Status des Dokumentarischen in Filmen, die im Nürnberger Prozess gezeigt oder über ihn gedreht wurden’, in Claudia Bruns, Asal Dardan, Anette Dietrich (eds), ‘Welchen der Steine du hebst’. Filmische Erinnerung an den Holocaust (Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2012), 332–343. See Weckel, Beschämende Bilder, 200–226. Philadelphia Inquirer, 30 November 1945. In her reportage on the Nuremberg trial, Rebecca West mocked Streicher, in his appearance in the dock, as ‘a dirty old man of the sort who gives trouble in parks’. See ‘Greenhouse with Cyclamens I’, in Rebecca West, A Train of Powder (New York: Open Road, 1955), 5. Articles that report his delight while watching the atrocity film include: ‘Frank cries at horror film’, Daily Express, 30 November 1945; Victor Bernstein, ‘19 Nazis look at Face of Death’, PM, 30 November 1945; Ann Tusa and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial (London: Macmillan, 1983), 160. ‘Heß gesteht Täuschung des Gerichts’, Die Neue Zeitung, 3 December 1945; ‘Sie sahen den Kz-Film’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 4 December 1945. ‘Atrocity Films in Court Upset Nazis’ Aplomb’, The New York Herald Tribune, 30 November 1945. After an American test-screening in Germany in the summer of 1945, KZ was not released but withdrawn in order to improve it. The revisions resulted, several months later, in a new film, Die Todesmühlen, also 20 minutes long but no longer simply a sequence of footage from different camps. The atrocity film that the US Department of War produced particularly for targeting German POWs, which was entitled Deutschland erwache, was finished only after KZ had already been shown in all of the POW camps in the United States. Although its educational approach was much more sophisticated, it was screened only sporadically.

46 20 21

22

23 24

25

26

27

28 29

30

31 32 33

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond For more details on the POWs’ responses, see Weckel, Beschämende Bilder, 247–327. In a camp in Great Britain for POWs classified as ‘fanatical Nazis’, many inmates had laughed during the screening and gibed at the film’s allegations, and someone anonymously posted a note on the bulletin board declaring that all ‘decent’ Germans had to approve of the fact that so many Jews, Poles and Russians had been ‘exterminated’. Henry Faulk, Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in Großbritannien – Reeducation (Munich: Gieseking, 1970), 343; Matthew Barry Sullivan, Thresholds of Peace: Four Hundred Thousand German Prisoners and the People of Britain 1944– 1948 (London: H. Hamilton, 1979), 119. Articles about prisoners’ donation campaigns in POW-camp magazines and local newspapers seem to have been published in order to instigate imitation. Some cases can, indeed, be traced to these articles. ‘Grey’ was the label for apolitical men and ‘white’ was for Nazi opponents. The British colonel in charge of the POW camp in the Egyptian desert reported to the Political Intelligence Department: ‘On the actual night the Nazis were shown the film, they were very subdued.’ Shirley to PID Mission ME, 2 August 1945, The National Archives (Kew): FO 939/72. Naturally, I could check only a random sample. Yet, a search by keyword in the Deutsches Tagebucharchiv Emmendingen and inquiries among colleagues who work on German post-war diaries have confirmed this. ‘Angst vor der Wahrheit’, Tagesspiegel, 9 April 1946. For more details, see Ulrike Weckel, ‘22 March 1946: Screenings of Die Todesmühlen Spark Controversy over German Readiness to Confront Nazi Crimes’, in Jennifer Kapczynski and Michael Richardson (eds), A New History of German Cinema (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), 321–327. Excerpts from twenty letters to the editor can be found in the files of the Information Services Branch, four of them were published in the Tagesspiegel some days after the article’s appearance. ‘Antworten aus dem Leserkreis auf den Tagesspiegel-Artikel “Angst vor der Wahrheit” ’, National Archives and Record Administration (NARA), College Park: RG 260/OMGBS, ISB, General Records 1945–49, Box 84, Folder: Film. Friedrich Luft, ‘Todesmühlen’, Tagesspiegel, 22 March 1946. In his memoir The Truce, Levi recounts how the four young Red Army soldiers who first arrived at Auschwitz seemed self-conscious at the sight of the miserable survivors: ‘It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: The shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.’ Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce (London: Abacus, 1987), 188. Raphael Gross, Anständig geblieben. Nationalsozialistische Moral (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2010). Supporting my thesis is Martin Löw-Beer, ‘Verschämter oder missionarischer Völkermord? Eine Analyse des Nürnberger Prozesses’, Babylon. Beiträge zur jüdischen Gegenwart, 1 (1986), 55–69. Bourke-White, ‘Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly’, 73. Gellhorn, Face of War, 236. Reprinted in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, Jerome Kohn (ed.) (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1993), 121–132, originally published under the title ‘German Guilt’ in Jewish Frontier, January 1945.

4

Ashamed about the Past: The Case of Nazi Collaborators and Their Families in Post-war Dutch Society Ismee Tames

Shame and shaming have become key elements that dominate Dutch public discourse on the history of collaboration: people generally believe that after the Second World War ended, a vengeful society shamed, stigmatized and excluded former National-Socialists and their families. Pictures of shorn women or of men dragged through the streets on carts seem to provide evidence of this, followed many years later by autobiographical accounts by descendants of Dutch Nazi collaborators of their difficult childhood, feelings of shame and experiences with shaming and exclusion.1 These accounts caused a shift in the public discourse. Since the 1980s Dutch society is supposed to be ashamed of how it dealt with this particular disturbing past: the legacies of collaboration. This article draws on the research programme Legacies of Collaboration: The Integration and Exclusion of Former National-Socialist Milieus in the Netherlands after the Second World War conducted at the NIOD, Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam.2 It also builds on my previous research on the children of collaborators in the immediate post-war period.3 Within these research projects, shame and shaming were topics that interviewees and written sources referred to relatively frequently. All too often, however, these references were regarded as self-evident: neither the person involved nor the listener or reader would ask further questions to analyse and thus better understand the actual significance of these references to shame and shaming for either the speaker (writer), or the listener (reader). The narrative about shame and shaming seemed to fit in well with existing and prevailing ideas regarding the post-war period: the idea, commonly accepted since the late 1960s, of a narrow-minded society, obsessed with feelings of guilt regarding the almost complete destruction of its large Jewish population and looking for scapegoats, a role forced upon the former Nazi collaborators and their families.4 Stories about shame and shaming show us how the legacies of Nazi collaboration were and are dealt with in the Netherlands.5 In this chapter, I propose to view current This chapter is based on my paper for the conference Shame and Shaming in the 20th Century, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany, 6–7 December 2012.

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narratives about shame and shaming as a development towards redemption and selfconfirmation. Whereas in previous decades Dutch Nazi collaborators and their families were pressed, through (the threat of) shaming, to accept guilt and to conform to the dominant narrative about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the Second World War, more recently the dominant narrative shifted towards expressions of a shared feeling of shame about a past nobody is actually personally responsible for. This may indicate that references to shame are becoming a way of using the disturbing past to confirm an integrating and redemptive narrative about oneself and the past.

‘The war’ Seventy years after the liberation people in the Netherlands generally still refer to the Second World War, and more specifically the occupation of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, as ‘the War’, thus demonstrating the lasting social impact of these five years. This impact of course results to a significant degree from what happened during this period: the brutal occupation that emphasized the powerlessness and vulnerability of the Dutch people; but also from the fact that 75 per cent of the Dutch–Jewish population was deported and killed, culminating in the death of over 100,000 people.6 Another reason for referring to the Second World War as ‘the War’ lies in the fact that for the Netherlands 1940 marked the end of a long period of neutrality that started after the Napoleonic period. In the late 1930s Nazi Germany was feared by many; few, however, seriously believed the Nazis would occupy the Netherlands. Unlike neighbouring small state Belgium, the Netherlands had no memory of modern war and its possible consequences. On the contrary, to the Dutch the First World War seemed to confirm their neutral status: if neutrality had been possible during such a war, surely it would be possible in any other.7 When in May 1940 Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands, the Dutch people were stunned: war waged on their country; military defeat in only five days; the city centre of Rotterdam bombed to ashes; German military and officials taking over the country; the queen a refugee in Britain ... people could not believe it. They felt offended and humiliated.8 These feelings of being offended were reinforced when the small minority of NSB (Dutch National-Socialist Movement) members took over the streets, wearing their uniforms again, displaying that their time had come. Before the war the NSB had been on the radical fringe of the political spectrum with – compared to fascist parties in many other European states – very limited success in elections.9 Neither fascism nor communism had ever been a serious threat to political stability. Dutch democracy was a truce between the large minorities: Protestants, Catholics, social democrats and liberals. None of them could dominate; they were forced to work together. This was later called the verzuiling or ‘pillarization’: a society organized from top to bottom and from cradle to grave along religious and ideological lines, held together by cooperating elites.10 This social-political structure of division to maintain stability was disrupted in 1940 and its core values were attacked when the tiny NSB minority claimed power. This went against everything the Dutch political and moral order stood for.

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Initially, the German occupier – first military, soon replaced by civilian authorities – tried to make a friendly impression on their supposed ‘Germanic brother nation’. The Dutch hearts and minds were to be won over to National-Socialism. By the end of 1940, however, anti-Jewish measures were already being carried out and long-standing political freedoms were abolished. In the following years, Dutch Jews were to be isolated, outlawed, deported and most of them killed in Auschwitz and Sobibor. Political adversaries were arrested, sometimes executed. Ordinary people were restricted in all kinds of ways. Wild rumours about the end of the war spread when the Allies liberated France, Belgium and the southern part of the Netherlands in the summer of 1944, and people in Amsterdam and other cities were waiting for their liberators; sometimes literally standing on the lookout, the national colours at hand. The Allied advance came to a halt, however, when Operation Market Garden failed and they were unable to cross the rivers that divide the Netherlands. The largest and in many respects most important part of the Netherlands remained in German hands. Nazi oppression radicalized from then on and so did resistance activities. Many NSB members fled during the chaotic days of early September when liberation was expected. NSB families ended up in the north and east of the country; others were sent on to Germany.11 The winter of 1945 was a disaster in the Netherlands: in the cities, in the western part of the country, 20,000 people died of starvation and cold. It took until 5 May 1945 before the entire country was liberated. It was heavily damaged; there were shortages of food and basic goods and there was no functioning central government or executive power. Despite happiness about being liberated, many people felt ever more humiliated and hated both the external and the internal enemy. These circumstances resulted in the arrest of tens of thousands of people suspected of being collaborators.12 The way these arrests took place varied greatly due to the lack of coordination before the summer of 1945. Some arrests were made by resistance groups, some by the police, some by self-appointed community leaders. People suspected of collaboration were often simply carried off and locked up. Sometimes they were humiliated during their arrest, sometimes they were not. Some were physically ill-treated. Some were not. These differences were caused partly by the fact that many former-NSB members were arrested in the north or east where they had evacuated to after the summer of 1944, away from home. The public violence and shaming during the liberation may be regarded as an attempted ‘cleansing’ or ‘purification’ ritual by the community, but how the suspect was treated depended on their perceived role within the (local) community. Unlike people who had stayed in their original neighbourhoods, evacuated NSB members were often seen less as ‘traitors’ to the community and more as a problem of public order that needed to be dealt with (where to send them, how to feed them, how to start investigating their deeds). People arrested away from home, therefore, seem to have been treated differently; not necessarily better, as they were also prone to falling victim to the arbitrariness of those in more powerful positions. This is especially true for their children. Regardless of when and where they were arrested, the suspected collaborators and their children generally ended up in the dreadful situation of internment camps and children’s homes. Here they were met with arbitrariness, lack of food and basic goods

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and uncertainty about the future.13 From the autumn of 1945 onwards, the situation slowly started to improve when the state apparatus began to function again. Thousands of people, the so-called ‘light cases’, were released in 1945 and 1946. As soon as the state took control it wanted to move away from exclusion and towards reintegration of former collaborators.14 Shaming was clearly part of what happened during the liberation and the internment of collaborators: it was an integral part of the transition period from the terror regime of the Nazis to the moral and political order Dutch society tried to restore. Shaming the perpetrators and their helpers underscored the end of the wartime order. The message was that their fellow countrymen regarded their deeds as wrong and that the injustices done to the victims were precisely that: injustices that were now brought to an end and punished. The period in which these injustices had taken place was condemned and closed. This should bring closure to a disturbing past and open the future for the victims and the nation as a whole.15 Within this violated nation, however, the religious and political elites wanted the former collaborators to be reintegrated. As soon as the reconstructed state was able to, it therefore worked towards reintegration of former collaborators and restoration of their families.16 After arrest, internment and punishment, a quick return to society was deemed necessary. Dutch Nazi collaborators were not regarded as a ‘different species’, but as sinners gone astray that had to be led back to the herd. It is important to stress that in the Netherlands the phenomenon of collaboration was not restricted to a specific part of the population, be it a certain religious group or ethnic minority. Dutch Nazi collaborators came from every part of the country and every level of society. The fact that they stood out as collaborators therefore did not reinforce other or older cleavages.17 Collaborators were not to be shamed perpetually. On the contrary, on a public policy level they were made invisible: their reintegration was depoliticized and decentralized to local communities.18 Nazi collaborators were no longer defined as political enemies but as Dutchmen who had been ‘stupid’, ‘weak’, ‘unstable’ people who had lost their moral bearings. Many blamed the economic crisis of the 1930s for making them vulnerable to the promises and seductions of Nazism and the selfcongratulatory aspects of ‘Germanendom’. The religious and political elites viewed this as proof of their own shortcomings: they had lost contact with these citizens before the war and allowed them to fall victim to Nazi propaganda. In this time of emerging Cold War and the urgent threat of another totalitarian ideology, this could not happen again.19 Fear of communism thus prompted the elites to reintegrate Nazi collaborators. It is striking that by depoliticizing the problem of collaboration political elites ignored National Socialism as an ideological contender or an alternative political order. The fact that former collaborators were made invisible meant that they were no longer singled out, but it also meant that they were not acknowledged as a minority or a group with their own shared identity. This sets them apart from, for instance, repatriates from the former Dutch East-Indies in the same period. Former Nazi collaborators were offered the chance to say sorry and on a local level assimilate into one of the main pillars of society. They were not supposed to reunite or to continue their lives openly as Nazis. Anyone who did was harshly condemned or even prosecuted.20 Using (the threat of) shaming to force former collaborators to accept guilt and conform to the

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dominant narrative of what was right and what was wrong during the war, was how the disturbing past was dealt with in the early post-war decades. Many Dutch collaborators seized the opportunity and tried to assimilate: they distanced themselves from Nazism, conformed to the new circumstances or even converted to one of the religions. This is not to say that their lives were easy from then on: these people often felt vulnerable as knowledge of their ‘wrong past’ could remain a trump card in the hands of others. On the surface the disturbing past seemed overcome; but the people who knew about it kept silent only as long as they deemed it opportune. The collaboration past could return in many guises and it affected many people: the war victims of course, but also the former collaborators themselves and their offspring in manifold and changing ways. The following paragraphs will outline various strategies undertaken by former collaborators and others and the role of shame and shaming. I will show how – after the initial decades of focusing on silence, assimilation or denying guilt – a shared narrative of shame came to dominate.

Withdrawal and silence Former collaborators dealt with their pasts in a variety of ways. Many withdrew from social and political life altogether; a famous saying goes that they didn’t even want to join a musical society, such was their fear of getting involved in something potentially risky. The ‘wrong past’ was locked up and stored away in the hope no one would ever mention it again. This often worked, although it took a heavy toll on the family concerned. It could mean that children growing up in such families were made more or less co-responsible for keeping the family secret, which could cause psychological stress and feelings of alienation from the rest of society.21 ‘Tessa’, interviewed for Besmette Jeugd, explained how she always felt anxious about the family secret. In class she feared someone would find out and her life would collapse; that she would be ‘unmasked’ as being co-responsible for the war dead remembered on the memorial tablet in the school hall. In retrospect ‘Tessa’ sees the secret her mother made her keep concerned more than her parents’ wartime collaboration and open adherence to SS-ideology: it was conflated with the secret about her father being away, her mother often going on foreign trips with a ‘rich uncle’, her parents’ divorce and subsequent fighting over the children. Thus socially ‘dangerous’ secrets aligned and accumulated and caused a sense of shame often referred to in stories of children of collaborators: the shame of being someone who ‘was not allowed’ to exist.22 It took her years until ‘Tessa’ was able to talk about her parents’ past and come to terms with her own youth. Keeping the ‘wrong past’ a secret could function as a social strategy: normalcy seemed to have the upper hand. But it always came at the cost of the fear of being exposed. Under the surface, the past haunted the present. Others could find out about the past and tacitly let you know, which sometimes even led to blackmail. Or the knowledge was kept until a situation arose in which it was deemed necessary or opportune to be made public, for instance to prevent a former collaborator obtaining

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a certain position at work, in church, in politics or in the community. The longer a war past was kept secret, the more venomous the secret became. Not ‘only’ the horrors of National Socialism blackened one’s reputation, keeping the secret also meant trust was seriously undermined: who was this person really? What else had he or she lied about? For many, therefore, opening up about their (family’s) war past did not become easier over time; on the contrary, it became increasingly difficult. This position of vulnerability and hiding caused feelings of shame, especially for the descendants: their family past ought not to exist, but keeping up the appearance that it did not made the past into an enduring present.

Religious conversions Not all former collaborators turned to withdrawal and silence. Conversion was another integration strategy. Especially the route offered by the churches, both the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches, often proved successful. One of the reasons why religious conversion or a return to the church worked so well was because of the existing routes for forgiveness and conversion within religious practices. Like others, for example, thieves or prostitutes, who had sinned or fallen from grace former Nazi collaborators could fit their story into the established framework of the sinner who has found God. By doing so, the sins of the past could be addressed without damaging the individual’s identity too much: he could distance himself from National Socialism and accept guilt and shame because his new religion did not deny his past; it gave it a different meaning. The wrong past served a purpose: it had been necessary for the individual to see the light. The old identity was disposed of and at the same time provided a basis for the new religious identity.23 In Doorn in het vlees, I present various examples of former collaborators who converted. Many of them led quiet lives and are thus hard to trace in written or oral sources. Some examples, however, show that conversion was not always a clear-cut break with the past. Those stories show how the disturbing past surfaced at varying moments and was experienced differently by the various people involved. This can be illustrated by the example of Piet Cieraad, whose daughter I have spoken to and who had left a paper trail in the archives.24 Cieraad’s career had a troubled start in the 1930s. Born into a rich family, his expectations were high, but he failed to fulfil them. He left every job after quarrels and rows. Cieraad developed an interest in National Socialism and began to see Nazism as a solution to all problems. During the occupation his chances improved. He joined the police and pretty soon obtained a position in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). He rounded up people, especially from the resistance. He did this personally, which made him a well-known figure in the various towns he was active in. During the final period of the war he married a German woman who worked as a secretary for the SD. She fell pregnant and had his child in the liberation period. Cieraad and his wife were arrested separately. His parents took the baby, but only to give it away again as soon as possible through an advertisement in the local papers.25 The wife was taken care of by the Protestant pastor A. Keers who helped her find her child and gave her a job after she was released from prison. He did this because,

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as Keers wrote in a letter, he wanted to make a ‘true Christian out of a real Nazi’.26 In other words: pastors like him were actively looking for former Nazis to bring (back) to the church. Meanwhile, Cieraad was in custody and was regularly severely ill-treated, often by members of the former resistance who came to take revenge for the comrades they had lost due to him.27 Cieraad was initially sentenced to death, but with the help of various pastors the court of revision became convinced that this young father understood his mistakes and was turning into a new person. One of the pastors explained to the court that ‘God himself ’ was working on this man.28 Cieraad wrote humble letters, asking for forgiveness, stating that he now realized that he had ‘failed as a human being’ and that he wanted to make amends to the country he had betrayed.29 And so protestant social workers helped both Cieraad and his wife. Cieraad was released in the late 1950s because ‘his family needed him’, which was another way of saying his teenage daughter needed a firmer hand and his wife should stop working in order to be a fulltime mother. According to the daughter the father she hardly knew returning home marked the end of a relatively harmonious youth: the man was a disaster, according to her.30 He took her from the gymnasium, tyrannized the family, contacted former Nazi comrades and constantly pulled the wool over the pastors’ eyes.31 Meanwhile, official authorities were merely confirmed in their belief that this family was on track: the wife in her role as a mother, the husband relatively successful in a new career as a salesman, and – by that time – two children. To this day his daughter hates him and regrets the death penalty was never carried out.32 This complicated family history shows that whether integration into society is viewed as a success or failure depends heavily on who you ask or what level you look at. To the pastors, the disturbing past had effectively become the past. For the daughter it never ended. For Cieraad himself his new life and professional success was not enough: in the 1960s and 1970s he wrote haughty letters to the Ministry of Justice and the Queen, claiming his full political rights (having received the death penalty meant he had lost his right to vote) and increasingly presenting himself as an innocent victim of the state. His narrative of guilt and shame about his wartime deeds evaporated, causing his daughter great distress, and state bureaucrats increasing irritation when yet another of his letters of complaint arrived. Religious conversion, be it wholehearted or feigned or a mixture of both, meant a new starting point to many. It meant practical help and social benefits, but also the possibility to deal with a disturbing past without denying one’s entire history and identity. It did not, however, always eliminate differences in narratives about and interpretations of the past.

Denial of guilt and shame To some the route of conversion and religiosity was out of bounds: these former Nazi collaborators countered social demands for expressions of guilt and shame by repeating that their intentions had been good, they had been ‘idealists’ or that they were in fact the real victims, underscoring this notion by pointing out the bad conditions in the

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internment camps. I have come across many examples of former Nazi collaborators who tried to justify their deeds and stress their noble and patriotic motives.33 These were often meant attempts by people to evade the question of guilt. This evoked a particular dynamic: it made the past into present, a matter that was not closed and resolved, but needed revision and a departure from the dominant narratives that condemned National Socialism and its followers. A telling example of a collaborator who looked for ways to revise the dominant interpretation of the war was G.P. Smis, a former NSB propagandist and novelist, who in the 1950s and 1960s wrote a manuscript about his life, focusing especially on the war and immediate post-war years. It provides us with a unique story, written down relatively soon after 1945, from the perspective of a former Nazi collaborator in which Smis is clearly struggling with the questions of guilt and shame.34 G.P. Smis was born into a poor family in Amsterdam in 1898. He received very little education, suffered from colitis and was mentally unstable. In the late 1920s he was convicted for the attempted murder of his wife and placed in a psychiatric institution. He later remarried and was able to publish his first novel about the slums of Amsterdam. The novel was relatively successful and widely appreciated for its ‘authenticity’.35 The Smis family lived in great poverty, however, and when war broke out, Smis turned to NSB publisher George Kettmann in desperation. Kettmann offered him a good contract and the family was saved. Smis soon became fully engaged in Nazi radio-propaganda. Smis was never a convinced National Socialist; he merely saw the Nazi takeover as a useful way to eliminate the injustices of the pre-war period. To him the anti-Semitism and brutal violence that Nazism also introduced were mere details he could easily turn a blind eye to. According to Smis, the occupation meant the reversal of power: finally the underdogs were on top. To him that was justice. Smis and his family lived in a cramped apartment block where the neighbours hid several Jews. This knowledge caused Smis a headache: how could he, as an NSB propagandist, tolerate such a situation? What if someone found out he knew about the people in hiding and had kept quiet? Smis turned to his publisher Kettmann for advice and, presumably after some heavy drinking, told him everything. Kettmann, a shrewd man, telephoned his friend and SD-functionary Dahmen von Buchholz and kindly asked Smis to repeat his story. Smis took the phone and talked. The Jews were betrayed. After a few days, during which Smis, although heavily confused, did nothing to warn the people in hiding, the Jews were taken by the police and deported.36 Smis struggled with his betrayal, but never accepted responsibility: to him Kettmann was the real culprit. Moreover, Smis claimed not to understand why the Jews had to be killed at all. What had they done to the Germans? But each time Smis posed these questions in his manuscript, he also immediately takes another turn: as if the pre-war system had been fair. Didn’t others make mistakes as well? According to Smis, the world was inhabited by good people and bad people, in his words the Rough and the Slick (‘de Ruigen en de Gladden’). The Rough were the true, honest people, but also always the underdogs. The Slick exploited the honest and naïve Rough and were always keen on making a profit. It had been his mistake, Smis wrote after the war, that he had realized too late that the Nazi movement harboured

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the same dangerous Slick people as the pre-war system. The revolution was therefore corrupted and ended in failure and disaster. The real social cleavage was not between collaboration and resistance, or Nazism versus democracy, but between the Slick and the Rough: those who always profited versus the well-intentioned who were always on the losing side. Smis never defended National Socialism and he admitted he had made a mistake.37 However, his mistake was not that he had betrayed people, profited from the war or supported Nazism. He had only failed in realizing that the Slick had taken over the Nazi movement. In other words: the guilt he was prepared to accept was not the kind of guilt that society demanded and expected from him. His way of framing his collaboration illustrates how he and many former NSB members experienced the world: they were the honest people, with the true ideals, but they were severely punished because others had ruined it and shifted the blame to them. From their point of view the real disturbing element of the past was that it was not correctly appreciated in the present. Looking closely at Smis’ manuscript and other ego-documents from the group of former Nazi collaborators, it is striking how the protagonists present themselves as honest and the victim of circumstances.38 Smis never succeeded in putting his own position and deeds into perspective: his j’accuse against the injustices done to the ‘little guy’ was in fact a long tirade against everyone who had caused damage to him. This tendency was rather widespread among former Nazi collaborators’ families: the ways in which the internment was talked about as punishment of the innocent by those who wanted revenge, how they had never been correctly understood as idealists who wanted to make a better country, etc.39 They wanted to end pre-war social injustices, former NSB members claimed, but looking closer it is remarkable that many of them equated their own, indeed often miserable or at least disappointing social position with social injustices in general. Their own pursuit of a better social position was framed as a general struggle for social justice. That collaboration provided them with all kinds of benefits (career, better housing, power) was nothing short of justice (‘Finally the roles had been reversed!’). That Nazism also made victims was deemed part of any revolution, part of war in general or ultimately someone else’s fault. In any case: nothing they should feel guilty about. Soon after the war this kind of reasoning, in a variety of ways and with varying degrees of intensity, was already quite common in former collaborator families. One problem that could not be solved by this explanation and justification of the past as an honest endeavour at creating a better future was the murder of the Jewish population. The Holocaust made it impossible to regard the Second World War as just another war with idealists fighting on both sides that was won by those with military superiority. How could they fit the Holocaust into the story that they had ‘only wanted a better society’? A solution was provided by one of the most radical representatives of this strategy of evading guilt, former Waffen SS officer Paul van Tienen.40 Van Tienen, a true adherent of Nazism, publicly accepted that the Nazis had made mistakes, but he never failed to point out that the Allies and the resistance had also done many bad things. Moreover, he doubted the death of six million Jews and the existence of gas chambers. Where was the proof, he demanded, all we know about Auschwitz comes from Soviet

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sources.41 Auschwitz and the ‘tale of the six million’ according to him were mere Soviet propaganda that nobody in his right mind should believe. His activities and publications were met with outrage in the 1950s and 1960s. This outrage has often been depicted as evidence in support of the idea that the Dutch people want to think in black and white and reject the idea that the bulk of the population did not consist of heroic resistance fighters.42 Looking closely at the sources from the 1950s and 1960s, as I did in Doorn in het vlees, pointed me in the direction of another explanation: the moral outrage caused by people like Van Tienen was the result of the fact that by rejecting shame and guilt these collaborators did not comply with the new rules. They openly challenged, even rejected the post-war moral order. Thus they ignored the fact that they had lost the war and Nazism had been condemned as wrong. With the counter narrative that what they did during the war was basically right, and any failure was not unlike any other human mistake, they seemed to want to turn back time to the pre-1945 situation: the disturbing past returned as the present and a common morality was denied. The war had never ended. Thus former Nazi collaborators who openly rejected guilt and shame and propagated a revision of the moral order based on right and wrong in the war revived the Nazi order in which they had been able to make their victims. In this light we should read the various public condemnations of what people like Van Tienen said. The victims, in those years regarded as the entire Dutch people, felt pushed back in their wartime position of humiliation and danger and reacted by again harshly condemning National Socialism and excluding everyone who seemed to defend it. On an individual level we can also detect this mechanism. During my research I spoke to Mr P., a man of Jewish descent who survived the war as a child in hiding.43 After the war he rebuilt his life, married and had a family. The years went by. Mr P. did well in his job and made a career for himself. He was on friendly terms with his manager and they used to play tennis together. Then, in the early 1970s, Mr P. accidentally found out his superior had been in the Waffen SS: after a game of tennis he saw the SS blood group mark. Mr P. felt the past coming back to him, haunting him in the present: this man could have been his murderer in the war, he thought. The man had lied about his past. Who was he really? Mr P. lost trust, not only in his boss, but in society at large for not keeping the past away from him. His wartime vulnerability again engulfed him and he felt pushed back in the role of the persecuted. The war appeared not to be over. Mr P. had to be taken into psychiatric care. After returning from the clinic, Mr P. tried to expose his boss as an SS-man. That was his way of trying to push back evil and of underscoring the post-war moral order. At work he exposed this manager as a former SS-man to his other colleagues, hoping to name and shame him. In this case, however, his approach backfired. Mr P. wrote to the political party his boss was engaged in (the Labour party) and asked them to throw him out. But the party refused and wrote back to him they did not regard a ‘sin of youth’ sufficient reason to kick this person out. Mr P. wrote letters to a variety of institutes and organizations in order to collect evidence against his boss. It was all in vain: the man indeed seemed no more than someone who had made a bad choice when he was young, but had later changed his life and taken a different turn.

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What Mr P. did not do was try and talk to the man involved. He simply could not. In this individual example we see how, more than twenty years after the war, fear and distrust still loomed large; many had little trust in the true reversal of power after 1945 and the urge to force former collaborators to express shame and guilt was still acute. Sometimes this exposing and shaming worked, sometimes it did not, but it shows the ways in which the disturbing past to many in society remained or returned into the present.

Shame and shaming in later narratives Contrary to Mr P.’s experiences, identifying someone as a (former) Nazi often was a highly effective way of singling people out and causing them serious problems in life and work.44 Knowledge of someone’s ‘wrong past’ was a trump card that could be played when he who held it thought it right or to his advantage. This ‘trump card effect’ is a common aspect in the daily life of the families of former Nazi collaborators, especially in the stories told by their children. Over the past decades several of these descendants have published their stories, as books, through interviews or in online entries in the life story archive managed by the Dutch National Archives.45 Through their testimonies we have come to hear many stories about how these children were bullied in school, how they were excluded in their neighbourhoods, or not allowed to play with some of the other children. These incidents were harsh and often repeated reminders of their family’s wrong past. ‘Marijke’ in Besmette Jeugd talks about the time her father was imprisoned and they had to live with the father’s family in a small village where everybody knew about their war past. While the headmaster of her school tried to protect her and assured her that nothing bad would happen to her at school, she feared the walk home from school: the children would be waiting for her to beat her up. When she came home black and blue, her mother looked away.46 It is this discourse of the innocent child punished by society that is very well known in the Netherlands.47 When I wrote my book on what happened to the children of Nazi collaborators in the early post-war years, this was also the framework into which people tried to fit my research. Many descendants of Dutch Nazi collaborators remember how they felt singled out or were physically ill-treated in school, by other pupils or even the teachers. They remember how they were afraid that someone might find out about their family’s past and hold it against them. They often still feel the agony caused by this secret. These memories and feelings are as genuine as any other and I have no intention of marginalizing them in any way. However, the conclusion and emotional messages that often follow – namely that society punished the innocent by shamefully shaming the children – appear to be more complex. Scrutinizing the interviews, autobiographies and archival sources, it became increasingly clear to me that my conclusions did not fit neatly into this framework. Two additional aspects had to be taken into account: perspectives and families. The issue of perspective comes into play when interviewing a broader variety of people and looking at multiple sources. Teachers I have spoken with, for instance, claim that they kept silent about the legacies of collaboration in a sincere attempt to

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protect these children of NSB parents.48 Their now outdated 1950s pedagogy taught them to just not bring up the past, and by not reviving the wounds of the past it would slowly fade away. They thought they were helping rather than leaving their pupil out in the cold. Some former schoolmates told me they remember who the ‘NSB child’ was in their class, but they all state that no one really brought it up. They also proclaim that the bullying (if there was any mention of it) had more to do with this specific child – for being arrogant or bossy or any other reasons usually given by onlookers or the bullies – than with the Nazi past of the parents. The different perspectives provide us with different stories: what it shows at the very least is that what and how people remember is closely related to how they understand their life stories and what makes sense to them. The emotional messages that all interviewees sent to the listener have one thing in common: I am a decent person and those who punished the children of NSB-members should be ashamed of themselves. A similar complex picture emerged when I looked at the ways in which the older children of interned NSB members were ‘re-educated’ in the early post-war years. In their memories, this re-education was a horrible and deliberate punishment: they were forced to hear that their parents were murderers and traitors; responsible for the concentration camps.49 Some even had to look at pictures of the concentration camps or were confronted with former political prisoners who lectured them about right and wrong. Some were urged to condemn their parents’ beliefs. From the archives, however, it became clear that the people who were working with these youngsters were working within their usual framework: in the Netherlands in the 1940s it was normal for youths in state care to be harshly confronted with the wrongs of their families. Just as children of prostitutes or thieves were confronted with the alleged moral and social evils their parents had engaged in, now the same way of ‘illumination’ was tested on the children of Nazi collaborators. They were supposed to have been raised with a lie that needed to be countered: Nazism was not about a bright future, but about terror and murder.50 Many social workers did not mean to traumatize them but worked within a framework of re-integrative shaming. What I saw in the documents and heard from some of them is that they thought this was the way to bring these children over to the right side: they needed to be confronted with the truth and only when they accepted the truth, could they be raised to be ‘good citizens’.51 Only much later, when ideas about pedagogy and social work changed, it was recognized that this kind of re-education generally failed and was often counter effective since the older children in particular in order not to be crushed by feelings of shame and vulnerability could resort to fierce statements of loyalty to their parents and their ideology. The second aspect I want to raise with regard to the framework of the innocent child punished by society refers to relations within the families. Closer scrutiny of what at first sight seems a problem between former Nazi families and society often reveals that it is – at least partially – a problem within the families. The topic of shame is often brought up by descendants of Nazi collaborators, shame being part of the socially accepted public discourse surrounding them since the late 1970s: the innocent child feeling shame for their parents’ wartime behaviour and this shame being enhanced by how society looked upon them as ‘wrong’ as well.

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But what kind of shame people feel and refer to appears to vary. Some were ashamed because they regarded their parents as accomplices in the Holocaust or traitors to their country, like ‘Maarten’ who felt shame for his mother’s ongoing anti-Semitic rhetoric and so vowed to never have any prejudices himself and always help those in need.52 ‘Tessa’ told me about her feelings of shame when she found out her parents had announced her birth in the newspapers in full SS-style, including rune symbols. She felt so ashamed, because this announcement identified her as predestined to be part of the Germanic future her parents strived for.53 But when we read or listen more closely, we find that some descendants felt shame because their parents were deemed social outcasts, had been socially degraded and humiliated after the war, were divorced or in low-status jobs.54 Remember, for instance, how the secrets ‘Tessa’ tried to keep were a mixture of the secret of the Nazi past of her parents, and of her parents’ divorce and her mother’s new affair. Some children of former Nazi collaborators felt shame for not being able to stand up for their parents: they felt unworthy because they could not or dared not restore their family’s honour in public.55 These descendants may downplay their parents’ Nazi ideology, especially by stressing the pre-war economic crisis and emphasizing that their parents had nothing against Jews.56 This claim is often substantiated by anecdotes with a strong emotional message for the listener or reader, thus proving the basic need of people to regard their next of kin as principally decent people.57 Another issue that could arise within the families was that children of collaborators were shamed or morally blackmailed by their parents: ‘We didn’t hear you complain back then.’ ‘We did it for you.’ ‘Don’t think you would have done differently.’ ‘Your name is in the files as well – no one will want you.’ Or: ‘You have to choose between us and them, your family or the outside world.’58 To be accepted in society children of Nazi collaborators were urged to distance themselves from their parents’ wartime deeds. Many did this by fiercely condemning National Socialism and everything it stood for. Sometimes this resulted in breaking off all relations with their parents (often for a combination of reasons).59 Others felt cornered by the social pressures to condemn Nazism and, moreover, to distance themselves from their parents’ war past. Some therefore stressed that it was morally wrong to hold them in any way responsible for the deeds of their parents or to ask them to accept shame and guilt for an ideology they had never chosen willingly. This is where the notion of the innocent child comes in again, and over time this plea was indeed met with increasing understanding and approval: the past should no longer be held against them.60 The narrative of an innocent child punished for the sins of the fathers and suffering shame thus integrated the disturbing past into a shared identity of the descendants. The disturbing past became the foundation of a new, shared and by some cherished identity of innocence. For some of the descendants the notion of innocence stretched further. For instance, they urged that a clear distinction be made between their parents as parents, and their parents as people engaged in National Socialism. This route was often combined with statements that their mother and father had been really nice parents. These children of collaborators ask for the possibility to remain loyal to their parents without being suspected of downplaying the horrors of National Socialism or covertly trying to

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rehabilitate Nazism. Some of them are sincere in their request. To others it is a first step towards justifying their parents’ deeds during the war by implying that nice people could not really have intended to do wrong and consequently their deeds could not be regarded as ‘really wrong’. Like their parents often did, these descendants refer to shame as something they reject and they opt for a revision of the perceived dominant narrative of the past.

Conclusions Social practices of shaming were part of strategies to deal with the disturbing past of occupation, collaboration and genocide. It was a harsh and brutal attempt to clarify the post-war division between right and wrong. Soon the Dutch state depoliticized the problem of Nazi collaboration, made Nazi collaborators invisible and let civil society deal with them on a local level. Integrating into society thus meant integrating into the dominant narrative about right and wrong during the war that was to keep the demons of the past at bay, but that also urged former Nazi collaborators and their families to accept guilt and express shame. It follows from my research that for people whose identity had never had strong foundations in or connections with Nazism depolitization of the legacies of collaboration did indeed pave the way to reintegration. Psychologically it was relatively easy for these former collaborators to distance themselves from their wartime past and to turn or return to another identity, for instance a religious one. Shame and guilt could be accepted, as it was the basis for a post war identity. Many former collaborators, however, had invested heavily (socially) in National Socialism. Their political choices and actions might have been cause for family feuds, a marriage break up or the pursuit of an entirely new career under occupation. Their ties to a pre-National Socialist past were much more difficult to repair. To them it was more important to cling to their pre-1945 choices, beliefs and actions: if they lost this foundation, they would lose their sense of self-esteem. It required much more mental strength to accept guilt and shame, as that would undermine their core identity. Similarly, those who had lost wealth and possessions due to the purges had more difficulties: it was often easier to blame others (‘society’) for the end of their career, loss of social status or relative wealth than to confront their own failure. Thus many former Nazi collaborators felt a need for their wartime identity to be acknowledged, for instance, by the recognition of their ‘noble motives’ and of their humiliation after the war. They strived for a revision of the dominant narrative about National Socialism and the war. To them the real disturbing element about the past was that their own role was not correctly appreciated. In the Netherlands, attempts at revision were met with outrage because society at large experienced this as a critical undermining of the post-war moral order about what was right and what was wrong: it revived the past and pushed the victims back into their 1940–45 position of vulnerability, humiliation and danger. It was not until the children of Nazi collaborators presented the redemptive narrative of the innocent child that was shamed and suffered shame to the wider public that it became possible

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to escape from these dynamics and to take a next step towards taming the disturbing past. Over time this development opened up the possibility of a new self-confirming narrative for all those of later generations who felt shame about the disturbing past: both shame about the war past and how post-war society had dealt with the war’s legacies. Instead of a powerful lever that pushed former collaborators and their families into accepting (or denying) guilt, referring to shame about the past became a signifier for declaring oneself an ethical person.

Notes 1

2

Harry van Beetem, De eerste tien jaar van de oorlog 1940–’45. Van een oorlog die maar niet voorbij wil gaan, unpublished manuscript, 2006, collection NIOD. Iet van Bekkum, Vlucht naar Duitsland, 1944–1945. Verslag aan de hand van brieven van 2 kinderen, unpublished manuscript 2003, collection NIOD; P. Berserk (pseudonym), De tweede generatie. Herinneringen van een NSB-kind (Utrecht: Spectrum, 1985); Duke Blaauwendraad-Doorduijn, Niemandsland (Amsterdam: Amber, 1989), Corry Brokken, Wat mij betreft. Memoires (Amsterdam: Archipel, 2000); Corinne Falch, Kinderen van ... Interviews met de naoorlogse generatie (Leiden: Stichting ICODO, 1999); Marius Flothuis et al. (eds), Kinderen van de oorlog. Getuigenissen uit de emotionele nalatenschap van ’40–’45 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1990); Jean Paul Franssens, Een goede vader (Amsterdam: De Harmonie, 1993); Jean Paul Franssens, Een gouden kind (Amsterdam: De Harmonie, 1991); Jac van Gool, Foute boel (Haarlem: De Pauw, 1981); Dick Kampman, Verwerking (Groningen: Private Edition, 2006); Frederike van Kemenade, De blauwe vlinder (Kampen: Kok, 1993); Bas Kromhout, Fout geboren. Het verhaal van kinderen van foute ouders (Amsterdam: Contact, 2004); Claudine Landgraf and Rosemarie Pfirschke (eds), Unterwegs mit Koffer und Teddybär. Europas Kinder und der Zweite Weltkrieg (Rheinbach: Inmerc, 2005); Martijn Lindt, Als je wortels taboe zijn. Verwerking van levensproblemen bij kinderen van Nederlandse nationaal-socialisten (Kampen: Kok, 1993); Ruud Luiks, ‘Hebt U nog zo’n NSBmeisje voor ons? Opvang en reclassering van kinderen van NSB-ers en jeugdige politieke delinquenten’, Spieghel Historiael, 24 (1989), 75–80, 99; Paul Mantel (ed.), De Werkgroep Herkenning twintig jaar, 1982–2002 (Utrecht, 2002); Rinnus Rijke, Niet de schuld, wel de straf. Herinneringen van een NSB-kind (Bussum: Holkema & Warendorf, 1982); Rinnus Rijke, Op zoek naar erkenning. De strijd van een NSB-kind om een plaats in de na-oorlogse samenleving (Weesp: Holkema & Warendorf, 1985); Rietje Siebel, Mijn verhaal had niet verteld mogen worden. Een zwijgende generatie sterft uit, unpublished manuscript, 2006, collection NIOD; Gonda Scheffel-Baars and Paul Mantel, NSB-kinderen in tehuizen. ‘De oorlog’ in 1988, MA Thesis, Amsterdam, 1988; Inge Spruit, Onder de vleugels van de partij. Kind van de Führer, levensverhaal van een Nederlandse ex-SS’er (Bussum: Wereldvenster, 1983); Hanna Visser, Het verleden voorbij (Sliedrecht: Merweboek, 1989); Trees Vorst-Thijssen and Nico de Boer, Daar praat je niet over! Kinderen van foute ouders en de hulpverlening (Utrecht: NIZW, 1995), Sytze van der Zee, Potgieterlaan 7. Een herinnering (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1997). Legacies of Collaboration was funded by NWO, Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, 2008–2012. Especially: Ismee Tames, Doorn in het vlees. Foute Nederlanders in de jaren vijftig en zestig (Amsterdam: Balans, 2013).

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13 14 15

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Ismee Tames, Besmette Jeugd. Kinderen van NSB’ers na de oorlog (Amsterdam: Balans, 2009). This project was co-financed by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports. See, for instance: Armando and Hans Sleutelaar, De SS’ers. Nederlandse vrijwilligers in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1967), Koos Groen, Landverraders, wat deden we met ze? Een dokumentaire over de bestraffing en berechting van NSB-ers en kollaborateurs en de zuivering van pers, radio, kunst en bedrijfsleven na de tweede wereldoorlog (Baarn: In den Toren, 1974); Chris van der Heijden, Grijs verleden. Nederland en de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam: Contact, 2001). I refer to shame and shaming as culturally defined and changing emotions that can create or disrupt communities, in other words as concepts worthy of closer analysis especially in relation to disturbing pasts. See also Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (Budapest [etc.]: Central European University Press, 2011), Jan Plamper, ‘The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns’, History and Theory, 49, 2 (2010), 237–265. This is almost twice the percentage of Belgium or France. Ismee Tames, ‘ “War on Our Minds.” War, Neutrality and Identity in Dutch Public Debate during the First World War’, Journal for First World War Studies, 3 (2012), 201–216. Lou de Jong, De Duitse vijfde colonne in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1953). Also Ismee Tames, ‘War and Emotions at the Outbreak: The Dutch Cases of 1914 and 1940 as Example of How Emotions Shaped Expectations and Behavior’, unpublished paper presented at the conference Emotions and the Cultural History of the Two World Wars, Helsinki, September 2014. Josje Damsma, Nazis in the Netherlands, PhD Thesis. University of Amsterdam, 2013, Robin te Slaa and Edwin Klijn, De NSB: ontstaan en opkomst van de Nationaal Socialistische Beweging, 1931–1935 (Amsterdam: Boom, 2009), Gerrit Kooy, Het echec van een ‘volkse’ beweging. Nazificatie en denazificatie in Nederland, 1931–1945 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1964). See, for example, in English Arend Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1968), James Kennedy and Jan Zwemer, ‘Religion in the Modern Netherlands and the Problems of Pluralism’, BMGN Low Countries Historical Review, 125, 2–3 (2010), 237–268. Tames, Besmette Jeugd, 29, 35–40. Helen Grevers, Van landverraders tot goede vaderlanders? De opsluiting van collaborateurs in Nederland en België, 1944–1950 (Amsterdam: Balans, 2013); Peter Romijn, Snel, streng en rechtvaardig. Politiek beleid inzake de bestraffing en reclassering van ‘foute’ Nederlanders (Houten: De Haan, 1989). See Grevers, Van landverraders tot goede vaderlanders? Romijn, Snel, streng en rechtvaardig. Grevers, Van landverraders tot goede vaderlanders? Romijn, Snel, streng en rechtvaardig. Tames, Besmette Jeugd, Ch. 2. It is important to stress here that victimhood in the early post-war Netherlands is not about the individual victimhood of resistance fighters or victims of the Holocaust; it refers to the victimhood of the nation as such: a collective victimhood. Hans Blom, ‘Lijden als waarschuwing. Oorlogsverleden in Nederland’, Ons erfdeel, 4 (1995), 531–541.

Ashamed about the Past 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39

40 41 42 43 44

45

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Tames, Besmette Jeugd. Also Grevers, Van landverraders tot goede vaderlanders? Romijn, Snel, streng en rechtvaardig. Unlike, for instance, the situation in Belgium where Flemish collaboration could coincide with the Flemish struggle for more autonomy; thus collaboration deepened already existing cleavages. Tames, Besmette Jeugd, Ch. 3 and 4. Tames, Doorn in het vlees, Ch. 2. Tames, Doorn in het vlees, Ch. 2, 87–160. Tames, Doorn in het vlees, Ch. 2 and 5, 87–160, 282–342. Tames, Besmette Jeugd, 165–166. Ibid., 165–166, Tames, Doorn in het vlees, Ch. 1. Tames, Doorn in het vlees, Ch. 1. Tames, Doorn in het vlees, 32–36. Email daughter to author, 12 May 2012. Arinus Keers to Jonker, Arnhem 13-1-1947, NL-Den Haag Nationaal Archief, Justitie/CA Bijzondere Rechtspleging, 2.09.09, inv.nr. 74909. Various documents in NL-HaNA, Justitie/CA Bijzondere Rechtspleging, 2.09.09, inv. nr. 74909. Pieter Stevens to Bijzonder Gerechtshof, Zwolle 17-10-1946 en Den Haag 18-111946, in NL-HaNA, Justitie/CA Bijzondere Rechtspleging, 2.09.09, inv.nr. 74909. Piet Cieraad to Sandick, Breda 8-11-54, NL-HaNA, Justitie/Gratie Doodstraffen, 2.09.71, inv.nr. 82. Email daughter to author, 12 May 2012. Ibid. Ibid. For example, Tames, Doorn in het vlees, 41–44. The example of Godefridus Smis extensively: Tames, Doorn in het vlees, 46–59. Godefridus Smis, Het Spionnetje. Roman uit de Jordaan (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1939). Various statements in NL-HaNA, Justitie/CA Bijzondere Rechtspleging, 2.09.09, inv. nr. 64411. Manuscript Smis, Collectie Letterkundig Museum, 223–224. Frederik Harterink, Verslag van mijn internering: Bergum, Wolvega, Leeuwarden, Ameland, Farmsum, 15 April 1945 – 17 januari 1947 (Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1997). Also Catharina Gosewins, Een licht geval (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1980). Harterink, Verslag van mijn internering; Alie Noorlag, Een leven lang gezwegen. Getuigenissen van voormalige NSB’ers en hun familie (Bedum: Profiel, 2007). Johannes Houwink ten Cate and Nanno in ’t Veld, Fout. Getuigenissen van nsb’ers (’s-Gravenhage: SDU, 1992). Tames, Doorn in het vlees, Ch. 2 and 5. Ibid., Ch. 5. Groen, Landverraders, wat deden we met ze?; Van der Heijden, Grijs verleden. Tames, Doorn in het vlees, 81–82. In the 1970s, for instance, high ranking politician W. Aantjes was exposed as a former member of the SS. Although the allegations did not all prove correct, his career was finished. See note 2. Also http://hetverhalenarchief.nl/kinderen-van-foute-ouders. For Besmette jeugd, I conducted extensive interviews with eighteen persons between 2006 and 2008; between 2008 and 2012, I interviewed approximately fifteen persons for

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48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Doorn in het vlees, most of them from a collaborationist milieu. I let the interviewee talk to me about his or her life as much as possible. Based on a thematic guide, I made sure to bring up issues that were relevant for the study and I continued to ask questions about issues that remained unspecific (e.g., relating to perceived exclusion, or when the who/what/where/when remained unclear). The duration of the interviews was between three and six hours. The interviews were often preceded and/ or followed by telephone conversations or e-mails. The gathered material (in addition to audio recordings and/or records of discussions, some of these interviewees also gave me e-mails or archival materials) is stored in the research archives Besmette jeugd and Legacies of Collaboration at the NIOD. I spoke to several dozen people about other aspects of the research topics, for example, about their role as teachers or staff members in a home for NSB children or about their mothers who were involved in the assistance shortly after the war. I also spoke to some people on the promise not to use their story for the books. This was often the case with people who contacted me by telephone because they had something to say (that this was a good study, that the study came too late, that they knew someone who was the child of NSB parents, that they were the child of NSB parents and were looking for information about their parents, etc.). In addition to interviews, I used published and unpublished autobiographies for Besmette jeugd. Most of the latter are part of the collection of the NIOD. For an exhaustive list, see Besmette jeugd, Bronnen en Literatuur. Tames, Besmette Jeugd, 171–172. See also Jolanda Vanderwal Taylor, A Family Occupation. Children of the War and the Memory of World War II in Dutch Literature of the 1980s (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1980); Jolanda Vanderwal Taylor, ‘Rinnes Rijke’s Niet de schuld wel de straf, as a social phenomenon. An attempt to come to terms with a tragic past’, Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies 12, 2 (1991), 28–32. Tames, Besmette Jeugd, 166. Tames, Besmette Jeugd, a.o. 226. Also Scheffel-Baars and Mantel, NSB-kinderen in tehuizen. Tames, Besmette Jeugd, Ch. 4. Tames, Besmette Jeugd, a.o. 226–229. Tames, Besmette Jeugd, 180. Interview ‘Tessa Muller’ , 7 January 2007. Tames, Besmette Jeugd, 181–182. Various examples of people contacting the NIOD in 2008 after the launch of Legacies of Collaboration. Interview H.R., 9 November 2007. See also Harald Welzer et al. Opa war kein Nazi. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Fisher, 2002). Tames, Besmette Jeugd, a.o. 172–173, 176–177, 181. Tames, Besmette Jeugd, 172–173. Bram Enning, Spreken over fout. Hoe de kinderen van foute ouders het zwijgen verbraken (Amsterdam: Balans, 2014).

5

Autobiography, Moral Witnessing and the Disturbing Memory of Nazi Euthanasia Susanne C. Knittel

In the decades after the Second World War, jokes featuring the figure of Blumepeter (flower-Peter) enjoyed great popularity in the southwestern German city of Mannheim. In these jokes, Blumepeter appears as a ‘wise fool’ who demonstrates the arbitrariness of social rules and laws. The humour surrounding Blumepeter is inherently anecdotal, often based on physical comedy, and usually follows the same pattern: Blumepeter is discovered performing some idiosyncratic or subversive act, for example illegally fishing in the Neckar river, is then accosted by one of the locals, for example a policeman who wants to give him a fine, upon which he provides a humorous punch-line, always in dialect, that gets him out of the situation and makes the others look silly, such as: ‘Isch duh jo gar net fische, isch will bloß moin Worm baade!’ [But I’m not fishing at all, I’m just giving my worm a bath!].1 The somewhat naïve and clumsy but forthright Blumepeter has become a Mannheim legend and a symbol of the locals’ character. To this day, countless jokes and prank stories about him circulate, particularly during Fastnacht [shrovetide]. In the late 1960s, Blumepeter was at the centre of a publicity campaign organized by the local newspaper Mannheimer Morgen. It was in this context that, in 1967, a Blumepeter monument was installed in the city centre and the first annual Blumepeterfest, a town fair, was held. Three years later, in 1970, the Bloomaulorden, a medal of honour in recognition of extraordinary achievements by citizens of Mannheim was awarded for the first time. The medal’s name derives from a local term of abuse, Bloomaul, roughly equivalent to ‘blowhard’, that is, a boaster, who, in this instance, always gets the last word.2 The medal bears the image of Blumepeter as the emblematic Mannheim Bloomaul. Blumepeter’s real name was Peter Schäfer. Born in 1875 in a small town near Mannheim, he suffered from congenital hypothyroidism, also called cretinism. Even as an adult he was diminutive and misshapen; he never went to school or learned a trade, and instead eked out a living selling flowers on the street and in bars around Mannheim, which earned him the nickname Blumepeter. The historian Eberhard Reuß has meticulously researched Schäfer’s life, which has very little to do with the The research and writing of this chapter was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

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legends surrounding his witty and irreverent alter ego Blumepeter. Initially tolerated in Mannheim as a sort of clown or mascot, Schäfer was made fun of and put on display, especially during carnival, but once his disability became uncomfortable and he began to engage in obscene behaviour, he was locked away in a psychiatric institution where he remained until his death in 1940. Official records suggest that Schäfer died of cardiac arrest, which may or may not be true,3 but in any case he would have been scheduled for transfer to the Nazi euthanasia killing centre at Grafeneck, where he would have been killed along with more than 10,500 victims of the ‘Aktion T4’. Tellingly, this aspect of Schäfer’s biography does not form part of the popular legend of Blumepeter. This can be clearly seen in the local media coverage of the inauguration of the monument in 1967. These reports exhibit a complete lack of interest in or knowledge of the historical figure of Peter Schäfer, suggesting that the true aim of the monument to Blumepeter has very little to do with the actual human being and quite a lot to do with a self-congratulatory performance of the ostensibly non-conformist and hence humane identity of the Mannheimers. This becomes especially clear in the following quote from the Abendschau, a nightly television news programme broadcast on the Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR): ‘The flashes of wit that have been ascribed to the little flower seller prove that even someone who is poor in intellect can be lifted up by the voice of the people and placed on a pedestal.’4 Here we can see how the commemoration of Blumepeter simultaneously constitutes an act of forgetting. In casting Schäfer as the embodiment of the subversive and anti-authoritarian voice of the people, these stories obscure the fact that he was an individual who lived and died at a specific time in German history and that his death is intimately bound up with the difficult and troubling legacy of discrimination, exclusion and murder of people with disabilities and mental illnesses. Moreover, the legend of Blumepeter also obscures the city’s complicity in his death. The Abendschau quote is an example of a kind of selfstylization that goes along with placing the weakest in society on a pedestal, which has the conscious or unconscious effect of absolving one of wrongdoing, when in fact it was also the ‘voice of the people’ that denounced Schäfer in the first place. Among the victims of Nazi euthanasia, Schäfer is unique in that he has been afforded any form of public commemoration, but this memory has been purged of almost everything relating to Schäfer himself, most importantly the circumstances of his death. Blumepeter is not remembered as a victim of the Nazi euthanasia programme. Thus, the public narrative that survives is essentially a fabrication. Moreover, through this false memorialization, Schäfer’s own voice has been silenced – bitterly ironic, given that he is remembered as someone who always had the last word. As Reuß rightly observes, ‘the case of Peter Schäfer is symptomatic of our way of dealing with our guilty conscience and the discomfort we feel in the face of our own history’.5 Furthermore, the mechanisms of silencing and repression that have defined the commemoration of Blumepeter are paradigmatic of the memory of Nazi euthanasia as a whole. In the landscape of German post-war memory, Nazi euthanasia stands out as particularly disturbing, in large part because of the uncomfortable fact that the prejudices that gave rise to it have not gone away. The systematic elimination of people with supposedly hereditary cognitive disabilities and mental illnesses has traditionally not formed part of the discourse and memory of the Nazi crimes, even though it was part and parcel of

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the Nazis’ plan to ‘cleanse’ the German race once and for all of all its social, racial and cultural ‘ballast’. There are a number of different yet interrelated reasons for this omission. On the one hand, the almost total lack of survivors has meant that there was hardly any witness testimony to draw public attention to these crimes, and moreover, the victims bore the stigma of mental illness, which served to disqualify them from testifying to these crimes,6 and made their relatives and descendants reluctant to speak out, for fear of drawing this stigma upon themselves.7 In general, people with disabilities or mental illnesses have not been seen as agents of memory. More problematic still is the lingering assumption that in contrast to the racially and politically motivated persecution of Jews, Sinti, Roma, and other minorities, the policies behind the euthanasia programme were in some way medically justifiable. According to this logic, people like Peter Schäfer were victims first and foremost of their disability and only secondarily of the Nazi regime. This uncritical and usually unacknowledged assumption tacitly affirms the eugenicist logic at the heart of the euthanasia programme itself, namely by viewing impairment, disability and ‘abnormality’ as something that needs to be cured or eradicated rather than accommodated. To a significant extent, the estimation of a person’s value to society still hinges on his or her ability to be assimilable and productive, in a socio-economic sense above all, and that thus the difference between society’s attitudes towards people with disabilities then and now is ultimately one of degree, not of kind. The memory of Nazi euthanasia is disturbing precisely in the triple sense under discussion in this volume: firstly, it forces us to confront our ambivalent relationship to disability and mental illness and to recognize continuities between Nazi eugenic thinking and contemporary attitudes; secondly, by placing the Holocaust in the broader context of the international eugenics movement, it disturbs the established notion that it was a predominantly Jewish catastrophe and our preconceived ideas about who its victims were; and thirdly, it disturbs the assumptions and methodologies underlying the field of memory studies (mainly the reliance on survivor testimony). The way that this past intrudes on the present, rendering familiar concepts and practices strange, contributes to making the memory of Nazi euthanasia a salient example of what I have elsewhere termed the historical uncanny.8 In what follows, I will illustrate these three aspects of the disturbing memory of Nazi euthanasia by analysing some of the few existing testimonies, written by people who were confined to psychiatric institutions, subjected to racial hygienic policies such as coercive sterilization, or witnessed the deportations of their fellow patients. These testimonies are important first and foremost because they allow the victims’ own voices to be heard. I will focus on three texts in particular, each of which illustrates a different facet of the Nazi treatment of people with supposedly hereditary illnesses: firstly, coercive sterilization, as represented in Ich, die Steri, written by Elisabeth Claasen; secondly, life at a Nazi Kindererziehungsheim (reform school) and children’s euthanasia in Vienna, as described by Alois Kaufmann in his autobiography Totenwagen. Kindheit am Spiegelgrund [Death Cart: Childhood in Spiegelgrund]; and thirdly, life at a psychiatric institution and the miraculous escape from death in the gas chamber at the Brandenburg euthanasia killing centre, as related by Elvira Manthey (née Hempel) in her book Die Hempelsche. Das Schicksal eines deutschen Kindes, das 1940 vor der

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Gaskammer umkehren durfte [The Hempel Girl: The Fate of a German Child Who Was Allowed to Turn Away from the Gas Chamber in 1940].9 All three texts not only give insight into the discriminatory attitudes of the general public towards people who did not conform to society’s standards and expectations, but also present unique accounts of the inhuman conditions in German institutions in the 1930s and 1940s and the interconnection between racial and social persecution. Moreover, their authors relate their continuing struggle against discrimination and stigmatization, which is mirrored in the publishing and reception history of their books: each of these texts was initially self-published, and it took several decades until two of them found a publisher  – Manthey never did. Kaufmann’s autobiography is the only one still in print, in a version that was edited by the poet Mechthild Podzeit-Lütjen and furnished with an afterword by the historian Peter Malina. In spite of their status as unique testimonies, these texts have so far been largely ignored by scholars and the broader public. This chapter represents a first step towards filling this gap. Before turning to these texts, I will briefly sketch the historical background for the Nazi euthanasia programme and the repression of its memory after the war.

The social question The question of what to do with those perceived as weak, sick, unproductive and unassimilable, in short, with everybody who was different and unwilling or unable to work or contribute to society in a useful way, was not unique to Nazi Germany. The ‘social question’ is a key feature of modernity and continues to pre-occupy societies today. The ‘final solution’ to this problem, as elaborated by the Nazis, was no doubt the most radical and totalizing approach, but that doesn’t mean that the ideas were entirely unprecedented or that the fundamental question disappeared with the downfall of the Third Reich. It is crucial to see the Nazi euthanasia programme as part of a trajectory that partakes of the theory of eugenics, and thus has its scientific roots in the nineteenth century, and that continues, albeit in a different guise, to this day. The nineteenth century marked a radical shift towards the medicalization of the social question. Advances in medical science and the growing confidence in medicine’s ability to cure illnesses of all sorts led to the creation of a complementary category for people with ‘incurable illnesses’. Since there was no hope of reintroducing such people into the workforce, the legislature in Germany and elsewhere began to discuss the possibility of passing laws regarding sterilization and the legalization of suicide and mercy killing. The first draft of a sterilization law was debated in Germany as early as 1914, but the outbreak of the war prevented its ratification. Five more drafts followed before the Nazi law in 1933.10 In the meantime, as a result of the general food shortage during the First World War, a different ‘solution’ to the social question presented itself: rations for patients of mental institutions and asylums were lowered to such an extent that the death rate was as high then as during the Nazi euthanasia programme.11 Such a politics of planned starvation would be one of the key factors in the Nazi policy of eliminating the ‘useless eaters’ from society. From 1933 onwards, the Nazi politics of ‘healing’ the Volkskörper by excising the sick elements followed an increasingly

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radicalized and accelerated trajectory that led in quick succession from coercive sterilization, marriage prohibition, to the gassing of people with ‘hereditary’ disabilities and illnesses at six killing centres in Germany and Austria between 1939 and 1941. During this centralized phase, known as the Aktion T4, about 5,000 children and more than 70,000 adults were killed.12 After 1941, the killings continued in a decentralized manner, and over 200,000 people were killed by lethal injection or starvation at more than 100 institutions throughout Germany and Austria. The systematic killing of the ill and weak was extended to the occupied territories in France, Poland and Russia.13 In all, approximately 300,000 people fell victim to Nazi euthanasia between 1939 and 1945.14 Even after the end of the war, patients continued to die in large numbers from starvation. Meanwhile, the medical staff remained largely the same, indicating that neither the Allies nor the Germans felt the need to improve the conditions for these people.15 On the part of the medical professions in Germany and abroad, there was no soulsearching to speak of regarding the roots of the Nazi ‘solution’ to the social question. Instead, it was opportune to treat the Nazi regime and its medicine as an aberration and bracket it off from the larger social and cultural context.16 This was further facilitated by the decision to exclude Nazi euthanasia from the purview of the Nuremberg trials, which served to reinforce the idea that these killings were not crimes against humanity but rather specifically medical issues, a distinction that was preserved in all subsequent trials. The absence or avoidance of a public engagement with the role played by the medical profession in the euthanasia crimes, coupled with the continuities of eugenic thinking and the medicalization of disability, hindered a proper politics of compensation. The victims of coercive sterilization and of the euthanasia programme were excluded from the 1953 Law for the Compensation of the Victims of National Socialist Persecution because they were not considered victims of this specific form of racial, religious, or political persecution. The victims themselves or their relatives and descendants were not consulted on this matter – evidently they were not considered legal subjects who could speak for themselves. Furthermore, when these victims tried to sue for compensation, the experts called upon to evaluate their claims were often the same doctors who had pronounced them deficient in the first place.17 This discriminatory politics has only changed in the last decade, when steps were taken to grant these victims equal rights: the Nazi Sterilization Law from 1933 was officially declared unconstitutional in 2007, and in 2011 financial compensation and official acknowledgement was finally granted to the victims.

The memory of Nazi euthanasia This belated granting of equal victim status coincided with a growing public profile of the euthanasia programme in German memory discourse and its recognition as a part of the Holocaust. A major milestone in this process of de-marginalization was the inauguration in September 2014 of a national memorial at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin, the former headquarters of the euthanasia programme. While the past two decades had seen an increase in the attention towards this topic at the local and regional level,

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mainly as a result of successful memory work at the sites of former killing centres, the more recent leap towards bringing the memory of Nazi euthanasia to a national and even international public was largely due to the work of memorial artists and authors.18 Memorials such as Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine [stumbling blocks] and Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz’s Denkmal der Grauen Busse [Monument of the Grey Buses] physically return the traces of Nazi euthanasia to public spaces, whereas writers such as Sigrid Falkenstein, Helga Schubert and Hans-Ulrich Dapp are above all concerned with recovering the names and stories of some of these forgotten victims. To meet the challenge of the overwhelming lack of first-hand documents of these victims, biographers have drawn on a variety of different literary genres, such as the biographical sketch or literary case history (psychopathography), for example, Reuß’s biography of Peter Schäfer,19 and family memoirs, written by descendants or relatives of victims.20 There is also a set of more hybrid texts written by authors who have no direct connection to the victims and who approach the biographies more creatively or philosophically, reflecting on the process of reconstruction in a more overtly fictional and metafictional way and considering the victims’ stories and the authors’ own practice in the light of contemporary critical questions about autobiography, moral philosophy, psychoanalysis and social science.21 All of these authors have become advocates for the memory of the victims of Nazi euthanasia and have taken on the difficult task of witnessing on behalf of those whose voices are irrevocably lost. The act of bearing testimony by proxy, or vicarious witnessing, as I have called it, is a key issue and critical problem for memory studies.22 While trying their utmost to reclaim the memory of these victims from the documents, the basic problem of these biographies remains: the victims cannot speak for themselves. All of these literary or documentary texts constitute, essentially, an act of speaking for the victims, which, ultimately, silences them yet again. By no means do I want to diminish the important recuperative work done by the vicarious witnesses – on the contrary, especially in the context of marginalized memories such as that of Nazi euthanasia, it is crucial that artistic, fictional, biographical, historical representation take place, particularly if it is forthright and self-conscious about its own limitations. But it is nevertheless notable that this recent wave of victim biographies has not resulted in a re-discovery of the small number of autobiographies written by victims of the Nazi euthanasia programme. To be sure, scholars working on the memory of Nazi euthanasia and sterilization have drawn on them as documentary sources or evidence,23 but they do not discuss their status as works of testimonial literature: as self-conscious acts of representation that reflect on the difficulty of remembering and of bearing witness. A thoroughgoing study of these texts thus needs to address not only the facts of these victims’ suffering, but also their status as ‘moral witnesses’, in Avishai Margalit’s sense, namely as people who have experienced crimes against humanity first hand, and who feel a moral obligation to testify to these crimes, despite, or precisely because of the public’s reluctance to hear their testimony.24 Primo Levi, the paradigmatic moral witness, for example, was confronted with almost universal reluctance to publish his memoir If This Is a Man. This resistance becomes a facet of the testimony itself, which reflects explicitly on the difficulty of representation. Moral witnessing is hence always ‘untimely’, and directed at a ‘moral community’ to come or

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existing ‘in another place or another time [...] that will listen to their testimony’.25 In the same way, the three authors I consider in this chapter, all of whom were excluded from their communities and singled out for persecution, direct their testimonies at just such a moral community. Concomitantly, each of them is highly aware of the fact that they are testifying also on behalf of the thousands of other victims who did not survive or who are either unwilling or unable to speak for themselves.

Elisabeth Claasen: Ich, die Steri Elisabeth Claasen’s memoir, Ich, die Steri, is dominated by the loss of her family, which happened early in her life, and her unfulfilled longing to compensate for this loss by starting a family of her own. Her sterilization at the hands of the Nazi doctors is the axis around which her autobiography turns because this intervention foreclosed any possibility of continuing the family line. Claasen was born Elisabeth Herrmann in 1910 in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). Her mother was a piano teacher, her father a shopkeeper. As Claasen describes it, the happiness and love she knew in childhood is disrupted by the death of her brother and, shortly thereafter, of both her parents. Her hopes of finding a husband are repeatedly dashed when the men she is interested in don’t return her affections and instead marry friends of hers. Still single in her twenties, she begins to attract unwanted attention from older men. The loss of her family and her constant sense of rejection, coupled with her extreme poverty, hunger, and a thyroid condition, ultimately lead to a nervous breakdown. She seeks help at a psychiatric institution, but instead of receiving the care she needs, she is treated like a lunatic, given strong medication that exacerbates her anxiety and emotional instability, as a result of which she is officially labelled ‘abnormal’. Following her release from the institution, she applies for a marriage permit; instead she is marked for sterilization. Her efforts to get her diagnosis revoked are unsuccessful and in the end she is forcibly sterilized. Claasen’s description of her experiences in the clinic and her encounters with the doctors and nurses form the critical core of her text. She presents the psychiatric system as a machine that produces the very symptoms it purports to treat. The patients’ every word and action is documented and used against them as evidence of madness: Everything was quickly written down. Until the files were one long list of crazy thoughts, megalomania, paranoia, relationship fantasies. They would often ask you if you didn’t realise you were sick. You didn’t dare answer, and so you decided to keep your mouth shut [...] The windows were barred, the doors bolted, and you started to rummage around fearfully in your mind trying to think what you might have done wrong. (40)

The dehumanizing and depersonalizing effect of this machinery is emphasized by the use of the passive voice and the impersonal pronoun ‘man’ to describe both the staff and the patients. In addition to the terror of being treated like a criminal without having committed a crime, the patients suffer constant humiliation and insults. In the case of Claasen, it is the mocking way the doctors and nurses draw attention to the

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fact that, post-sterilization, she is now ‘available’ for casual sex without worrying about falling pregnant. This continues even after her release from hospital: everybody knows about her ‘condition’, and people either avoid and exclude her – for example, in the air raid shelter, her gasmask is given to a more ‘deserving’ person (45) – or approach her with requests for casual sex. The memoir consists of short evocative vignettes interspersed with black and white illustrations and poems. A recurring theme is the reciprocal relationship between the outside world and her state of mind. The effect of social and political circumstances on her well-being is mirrored in changes in nature. The structure of the narrative is also cyclical, but rather than being a natural cycle of rebirth, Claasen’s memoir leads inexorably back to the traumatic moment of her sterilization. The book opens with a scene of her waking up in the hospital after her sterilization and with her demand that it be undone. The short episodes that follow this opening chapter recount scenes from Claasen’s life in roughly chronological order, leading up to this traumatic event, which thus frames the entire narrative. The four concluding chapters contain impressions of her life after the war. These are less narrative and more oneiric, albeit punctuated by stark, emotionless statements such as: ‘a restorative operation was carried out on me, which gave me hope for a short while [...] But my fate won’t let me go. I remained alone’ (60–61). The final chapter is made up of three enigmatic images of spring passing through summer and into autumn. Here, again, Claasen inscribes her own story into the cycle of nature, but the implication for her is that it is by now too late for her to live a second spring. The autobiography thus ends on an ambiguous and disconsolate note. The title of Claasen’s memoir clearly marks it as an act of testimony, a work of autobiography with a speaking subject front and centre, signing this document in the manner of a last will and testament. Furthermore, in identifying herself so emphatically with the phrase ‘die Steri’ (short for sterilized), the derogatory name the doctors and nurses at the clinic used to call her, Claasen reclaims her identity from her persecutors in a defiant gesture of re-signification. The title of the memoir must be seen in relation to the name of the author, which is a pseudonym – Claasen being a family name on her mother’s side. The book was initially self-published in 1969, under the name Ria Claasen and, following her death in 1984, it was republished by the Psychiatrie Verlag under the name Elisabeth Claasen. The illustration on the cover of both editions, by Claasen herself, depicts a tree that has been snapped in two, the top hanging down at an angle. On the branches of the broken-off section there are blossoms, while the branches on the trunk are bare. The tree clearly symbolizes Claasen’s own life, and her fertility cut off in its prime, but it may also be seen as a representation of her family tree. As such, her decision to adopt a name from an earlier generation may represent a desire to return to an identity in which the lineage is still intact. In the preface, Claasen lays out the threefold function of her book. Firstly, her writing constitutes an act of testimony on behalf of herself and others who have suffered the same fate: ‘perhaps I will even help someone else who has suffered the same fate’ (5). Thus, she inscribes herself into the tradition of testimonial literature and invokes a community of victims and, indirectly, gestures towards a future community of memory. Secondly, her text is a critique of the hypocrisy and mendacity of ‘civilized’ society that values only appearances and conformism: ‘people are often so primitive; if

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they cover their dirty fingernails with red nail polish, or put lipstick on their unwashed lips, they are seen as cultivated’ (5). She invites the reader to question or even invert the values attached to binary oppositions such as primitive and modern, irrational and rational. Thirdly, she shows how the distinctions between binaries are mobilized in order to enforce conformity and punish difference. She refers to the distinction between a ladder and a staircase, which formed part of intelligence tests used to determine the mental capacities of children and anyone entering the psychiatric system. The tests consisted of general knowledge questions, basic mathematical problems and questions regarding the similarities and differences of certain terms. If you were unable to correctly articulate the difference using terms such as ‘steps’ and ‘rungs’, you were labelled impaired and slated for sterilization or euthanasia.26 The emotive and impressionistic style of her book can be seen as an indictment of the violent suppression of non-rational forms of intelligence and expression. It can also be seen as embodying the desultory and fragmented nature of memory.

Alois Kaufmann, Death Cart Of the three authors discussed here, Kaufmann is the only one to have published other literary works besides his memoir and whose work has received some acknowledgement.27 Kaufmann describes himself as ‘author, biographer, survivor’, and regularly gives readings and visits schools to tell his story, thus clearly presenting himself as a moral witness.28 Totenwagen has had a complicated publication history: the 2007 edition is a revised and expanded version of a 1993 text entitled Spiegelgrund, Pavillon 18 – Ein Kind im NS-Erziehungsheim, which in turn was an expanded and substantially revised version of the original self-published 1986 text. The main differences between the versions consist in the scope of Kaufmann’s narrative: the later versions include chapters about the post-war period, reflecting on issues of memory and trauma, and critiquing society’s forgetting of the victims and the rehabilitation of the doctors. Both the 1993 and 2007 versions contain additional material by the historian Peter Malina, who supplies the historical background and sketches the particular situation of children as the victims of Nazi pedagogy. The 1993 version also contains an interview with Kaufmann, conducted by the journalist Peter Lachnit, in which Kaufmann describes the motivation for writing his memoir: in 1978 he came across a newspaper article about Dr. Heinrich Gross, who was one of the psychiatrists at the Spiegelgrund institution and who enjoyed great popularity as a forensic psychiatrist in post-war Austria. This article initiated a long overdue discussion about the crimes committed at the Spiegelgrund and it brought Kaufmann’s repressed memories back. He decided to write down his story, as a means of coping with the traumatic past, but also as a memorial to his dead friends. Totenwagen narrates Kaufmann’s experience at the institution in the form of short chapters, each devoted to a specific theme, describing everyday life there (e.g. ‘The Assistant Director’, ‘Hunger’, ‘The Christmas Party’). Kaufmann also thematizes the book’s previous incarnations and the belatedness of its appearance by setting up a series of frame narratives. The first consists of a very brief segment written in the present

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tense and describing a sleepless night the narrator suffers as a result of his traumatic memories. This fragment is addressed to a ‘you’ sleeping soundly beside the narrator. At the level of the narrative, this ‘you’ presumably refers to the narrator’s partner, but placed at the beginning of the memoir, it also implicitly addresses the reader as someone whose dreams are not troubled by these traumatic memories. This opening also stages the ensuing narrative as part of a dialogue, in which the interlocutor is silent, and hence the reader thus addressed is invited to respond. This opening section ends with the narrator hearing a voice whispering: ‘Do you still remember ...’ (7). The reader turns the page to find a blurry black and white photograph, presumably of Kaufmann himself as a child and one expects to find the beginning of the narrator’s reminiscences of his childhood. Instead, there follows a preface by the author, entitled ‘It’s very late, but not too late’, in which he describes the aforementioned publication and reception history of the book. Following this interruption, the narrative indeed continues with an account of Kaufmann’s childhood. The text thus effectively begins three times, echoing the three attempts Kaufmann has made to tell his story. Evidently, the ‘you’ addressed in the epigraph has still not responded. Kaufmann’s biological parents could not look after him, and so he was placed in foster care, where he was poorly treated, both by his foster parents, and by a neighbour, who sexually abused him at the age of four. He grew obstreperous and began to play truant, refused to attend Hitler Youth meetings, and was generally disobedient and ‘difficult’. As a result of this misbehaviour he was sent to the reformatory Am Spiegelgrund, part of the Steinhof psychiatric institution in Vienna, where he remained until 1945. In this institution, Kaufmann was at the mercy of the Nazi system of ‘Heilpädagogik’ [curative pedagogy], which, as Malina observes, was really a ‘Straf- und Verfolgungspädagogik’ [punitive and persecutory pedagogy] (110). Here, ‘difficult’ children were to be beaten into good, productive citizens, while those who were not ‘reformable’, or deemed hereditarily ill, were ‘weeded out’ in weekly selections and euthanized. The narrative voice oscillates between description and reflection, between retrospective and immediate experience. The text is written predominantly in the past tense, with occasional commentary on Kaufmann’s experiences and development at the institution, but the almost total lack of historical or political context anchors the narrative in the perspective of a nine-year-old. On other occasions, the narrative voice focalizes the doctors and teachers. In these passages, the narrator imagines the thoughts and motivations of his tormentors. Thus, in the chapter entitled ‘The Assistant Director and the “Jewboy” ’, the reader is given access to the head physician’s plans to keep Herbert, a Jewish boy, around as a sort of alibi in case the Germans lose the war: ‘If the final victory never comes [...] then, well then this “Jewboy” would be excellent evidence of his humane disposition’ (35). Other figures are cast in a more sympathetic light, for instance, one of the teachers, Clara Grüner, who clearly cares for the children, and voices her disapproval of their maltreatment and murder – an act of insubordination that lands her in the Gestapo prison and ultimately leads to her execution. The narrative thus also presents a nuanced portrait of the perpetrators, and of the combination of external circumstances and personal choices that have led them to this institution. Emotionally, however, it centres on the moving stories of a few individual children, whom Kaufmann admired for their unbreakable spirit and

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who together present a typology of the victims of this cruel and dehumanizing system. One is the Jew Herbert, who, after standing up to a sadistic teacher is taken away by the Gestapo. Another is Martin, a bed-wetter who is bullied by the other children to the point where he snaps and stabs one of them with a knife. The central scene, to which the title of the memoir refers, is Kaufmann’s discovery of the dead body of Karl W., one of the children in his class, in the green ‘death cart’ outside in the courtyard. Whereas previously he had experienced the weekly selections and noticed the regular disappearance of the weakest and most intractable children, he now becomes an eyewitness to their murder. In calling his memoir Totenwagen, he transforms the means by which the Nazi doctors disposed of their victims into a metaphorical vehicle of memory. Kaufmann’s memoir thus serves as a memorial to these boys, none of whom survived.

Elvira Manthey, Die Hempelsche Die Hempelsche is a truly unique text, not only because it tells the singular story of a girl ‘who was allowed to turn away from the gas chamber’, as the subtitle has it, but also because of its form and materiality. The book is self-published. Because it is written in Manthey’s very own matter-of-fact style, and is at times rather colloquial, the publishers she approached insisted it be thoroughly edited. In effect, they wanted to erase Manthey’s unique voice and substitute it with a more polished, ‘sanitized’ narrative. She refused, and in the end, she and her husband printed a few thousand copies of the book themselves, in their own home, between 1994 and 1997.29 It has a simple grey paper cover with the title and subtitle printed in an imitation cursive script font. Each copy is signed and dated by the author. The book is dedicated to Manthey’s younger sister Lisa, who died in the gas chamber in Brandenburg in 1940, shortly before her fifth birthday. The dedication page features a portrait photo of Lisa at age 2, which is glued onto the page by hand. The following page contains the first paragraph of the German constitution, ‘The dignity of man is inviolable’ (6). Throughout the text, a number of drawings (by Elli Koll) and a few blurry photographs serve as illustrations to the events narrated. Most strikingly, however, Manthey has included photocopies or transcripts of documents relating to her ‘case’: during the Nazi period and afterwards. Thus, the text contains medical and legal files, deportation lists, intelligence test results and her entire official correspondence regarding her repeated and unsuccessful requests, in the 1990s, to have her name cleared of any suspicion of ‘hereditary feeblemindedness’. The documents in the text function not only as evidence, giving the story the weight of authenticity, but also as a meta-narrative illustrating the frightening continuities in the cold and dehumanizing language of bureaucracy during and after the war. Set against this impersonal language is Manthey’s own narrative of emancipation from an object of Nazi persecution and imprisonment to a subject who takes control of her life, claims her rights, and becomes the author of her own autobiography. In contrast to Claasen’s memoir, the title and subtitle of Manthey’s text do not enact a self-proclamation as subject; instead, The Hempel-Girl invokes the dismissive appellation of the local community. The adjectival form, ‘Hempelsche’, denies her

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individuality and casts her as the embodiment of a specific type or set of (negative) characteristics. It pre-supposes a degree of notoriety, which, however, when coupled with the subtitle, transforms Die Hempelsche into an almost proverbial figure, the stuff of popular legend. The title thus presents Manthey’s story as a moral lesson, in which her singular fate stands symbolically for the thousands of other German children like her, who were less fortunate. Notwithstanding the documentary component, the early sections of Manthey’s memoir read like a children’s book, an impression that is reinforced by Elli Koll’s black and white illustrations. The text is written in the first person and mostly in the past tense, although the narrative shifts to the present tense during especially emotional or pivotal scenes, a device which heightens the immediacy of these traumatic memories. The sentences are short and unadorned, and Manthey preserves the perspective of a child with limited insight into the events narrated. In the later sections, the narrative voice becomes more self-reflexive, as her understanding of her past grows. Elvira Hempel was born in 1931 to a poor family. Under the Nazi laws, the family were termed ‘asocial’ and her parents ‘work-shy’. The children were forced to sell scrap metal to make ends meet instead of going to school regularly. As in Claasen’s case, it was the appeal for help from the state that set in motion the machinery of Nazi medicine: Elvira’s mother asks the child welfare service for support, and as a result the children are taken away and placed in various reformatory institutions, where they are mistreated both physically and mentally. Elvira becomes a bed-wetter. In 1938, she is taken to a doctor who certifies her as hereditarily feebleminded and transfers her to the Uchtspringe psychiatric institution in Sachsen-Anhalt, a sort of ‘transit’ institution for the killing centres at Brandenburg and Bernburg. Here she meets her younger sister, Lisa, who was born in 1935 and who has spent her entire life in homes. Uchtspringe turns out to be an even worse place than the reformatory, because the disobedient children tend to vanish. Even though more and more children arrive, their number keeps dwindling. This is when Elvira begins to become a close observer of the goingson at the institution. Having witnessed the psychological toll that the constant beatings and neglect have on the other children, she resolves to find something to occupy herself so that she won’t lose her mind. She starts helping the nurses with simple tasks and polishes the floors. In this way she gets access to all the rooms and wards in the clinic and notices how certain children are given injections and then disappear. She sees the ‘Totenmann’ [death-man] come in every day, who wraps more and more children into sheets and puts them on his cart: ‘Every day children are given injections, and I notice that whenever the children get injections, the next day they are usually dead’ (46). One day, all the remaining children are deported to Brandenburg. Manthey describes these scenes in the same detached and matter-of-fact style that characterizes the book as a whole: ‘Outside there are four buses. We have to get on [...] The windows are painted blue from the inside so that no one can see in or out. I have scratched a tiny hole with my fingernail and can see a bit’ (68). Here, as elsewhere, Manthey emphasizes her ability to see and to witness these events, even though her perspective is necessarily limited. When they reach their destination, they are led to a windowless room. She describes this room in great detail and a drawing by Koll provides a bird’s-eye view of the layout of the room. By the entrance there are piles of clothes and shoes. In one corner a group

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of doctors are seated at a table. On the right-hand side, there is a heavy iron door. One by one, the children are led through this door, until Elvira alone remains in the room. The room is empty, all the children are gone. [...] They shout, telling me to hurry up and get undressed. I’m wearing an ugly red dress with many buttons. I undo them very slowly and throw the dress on that mountain [of clothes]. I can tell I’m being watched from behind, by the people sitting at the table. [...] Once I am fully undressed, someone grabs my left arm and pulls me toward the table. There I am asked my name and age. I answer. The man leafs through a file. Then I am allowed to get dressed again. I don’t have to go through that iron door. (68–70)

Manthey never discovers the reason why she was turned away from the gas chamber, and so her miraculous escape constitutes an aporia in her narrative, which drives her investigation into her past many decades later. Her search for an explanation also leads her to become a moral witness to her fate and that of the children who did disappear behind the iron door. But, like Claasen and Kaufmann, her memoir bears witness not only to the crimes of the Nazis but also to the on-going discrimination against her and other victims of Nazi eugenic policies after the war. Having been deprived of an education through her institutionalization by the Nazis, Manthey was unable to find work after the war and was forced to resort to stealing and other petty crimes in order to survive. It was not until 1965, when she met Heinz Manthey, that she achieved any degree of stability and happiness in her life. But this newfound security was disrupted by the return of her memories of her childhood trauma. Manthey writes how she opened up to her husband, telling, for the first time, the story of her experiences during the war. In addition to the uncertainty as to why she was spared, she also didn’t know where this room with the iron door had been – not until she saw it again in a television documentary about the Nazi euthanasia programme. She and her husband travelled to Brandenburg to revisit this site, and this was the first step on her quest to understand what had been done to her and to seek official compensation. Die Hempelsche presents a forceful critique of post-war German bureaucracy, medicine and memory culture. Her correspondence with the various institutions, politicians and ministries shows how her case is being treated as a bureaucratic ‘problem’ and everything possible is done to delay, obstruct and ignore her pleas to have her files handed over to her and her name cleared. The psychiatric institution argues that the original medical records must remain with the institution. The reluctance of institutions such as Uchtspringe to make patient files publicly available, often on the grounds of doctor–patient confidentiality, has been a major hindrance to public working through of the memory of Nazi euthanasia. This reticence extends even to publishing the names of victims, also out of consideration for their families – thus perpetuating the taboo and secrecy surrounding these crimes. Yet, as Manthey compellingly argues in her letters, her file is in fact based on a false and unlawful diagnosis, and hence it cannot legitimately be treated as a medical document. Instead, it must be seen as a document of social persecution, and as such, it belongs to her. After six years of petitioning and waiting in vain, she writes on the last page of her

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book: ‘Perhaps this will be the page where, hopefully soon, I will be able to report the restitution of my human dignity’ (300). The reference to human dignity recalls the first article of the German constitution, quoted at the beginning of the book and serves as an indication that Manthey’s story is not yet over. The page opposite is blank, but numbered, and there is thus space for her story to be completed in the future.

Conclusion When the German constitution was drafted in the immediate aftermath of the war, a fundamental concern was to prevent a repetition of the atrocities that had just been committed. For this reason, the absolute inviolability of the dignity of man was enshrined in the first article of the new constitution. The dual imperatives of Holocaust memory – ‘never forget’ and ‘never again’ – thus formed the backbone of the new German republic, and Primo Levi’s exhortation to ‘ask yourself if this is a man’ became the guiding concern for post-war memory culture and the field of memory studies in particular, which, perhaps more so than any other recent field, has been committed to a humanist conception of the subject. In light of post-structuralist critiques of subjectivity, however, it is becoming apparent that the question, ‘if this is a man’, must be coupled with an interrogation of the category of the human itself. It is here that the memory of Nazi euthanasia begins to disturb established categories and assumptions within the field as a whole. The exclusion of the victims of Nazi euthanasia from the discourse on the Holocaust reflects unexamined prejudices concerning who is or can be an agent of memory, and inadvertently reproduces the Nazi stigmatization of these people with physical and mental disabilities as not fully human. It is therefore all the more shocking that it has taken over half a century for these victims to receive official recognition from the very institutions put in place to guarantee the human dignity of the victims of Nazi crimes. Regardless of any latent prejudice against people with disabilities, a major contributing factor to the marginalization of the memory of Nazi euthanasia has been the lack of survivor testimony. A cornerstone of Holocaust memory has been the privileged place given to the voices of the victims, who, by telling their own stories in their own words, can reclaim the humanity that was denied to them by the perpetrators. The ability to say ‘I’, to speak in the first person, is the condition of possibility for claiming subject status and affirming one’s humanity. Conversely, the first step in denying another’s humanity is to deny them the ability to speak for themselves. And it is for this reason that the three autobiographies examined in this chapter are of such singular importance. All three authors discussed above were labelled hereditarily feebleminded, but none of them would be considered cognitively disabled by contemporary standards. Nevertheless, their texts have been ignored as Holocaust testimonies and, more importantly, they have not been seen as authors who have authority over their stories and themselves, and who have something to contribute to society or memory culture. It is telling that both Claasen’s and Kaufmann’s memoirs should have been published by psychiatric trade presses, which effectively frames their narratives as psychological ‘case studies’ and limits their audience. There are two

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conclusions to be drawn from this: firstly, that the pathologization of difference still holds sway in cases of supposed mental illness, regardless of all evidence to the contrary. As Manthey and Kaufmann emphasize, the disciplinary and punitive machinery of the Nazi regime effectively produced the very conditions it then claimed to cure. Hence, secondly, it shows how little we know about the actual victims of Nazi euthanasia, and how readily we reify them into an anonymous and homogeneous group with ‘incurable’ conditions, instead of seeing them as individual human beings.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9

10

http://www.kurfas-net.de/blumepeter/witze_alt.htm (accessed 20 September 2015). Eberhard Reuß, Erinnerungen an den ‘Blumepeter’. Ein Mannheimer Schicksal (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2007), 94. As Reuß points out, ‘cardiac arrest’ was one of the official formulations used by Nazi euthanasia doctors to conceal the true cause of death, that is, gassing, starvation or lethal injection. In addition, Reuß found many inconsistencies in Schäfer’s medical record: the last four entries, covering Schäfer’s last six months, were all written in the same hand and apparently in one sitting, after Schäfer’s death. The medical record was lost for ten years and it is likely that parts of it were taken out and destroyed. Reuß, Erinnerungen, 79–85. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 99. Klaus Dörner, Tödliches Mitleid. Zur Sozialen Frage der Unerträglichkeit des Lebens (Neumünster: Paranus, 2007), 90; Ute Hoffmann, ‘Aspekte der gesellschaftlichen Aufarbeitung der NS-“Euthanasie” ’, in Stefanie Westermann, Tim Ohnhäuser and Richard Kühl (eds), NS-‘Euthanasie’ und Erinnerung: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung – Gedenkformen – Betroffenenperspektiven (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011), 67–75, 69. Götz Aly, Die Belasteten. ‘Euthanasie’ 1939–1945. Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2013), 9–11. Susanne Knittel, The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). Elisabeth Claasen, Ich, die Steri (Bonn: Psychiatrie-Verlag, 1987 [1969]); Alois Kaufmann, Totenwagen. Kindheit am Spiegelgrund, ed. Mechthild Podzeit-Lütjen (Wien: Mandelbaum, 2007 [1986]); Elvira Manthey, Die Hempelsche. Das Schicksal eines deutschen Kindes, das 1940 vor der Gaskammer umkehren durfte (Lübeck: Hempel-Manthey, 1994). All references to these three texts will be given in parenthesis in the main text. There are other texts that deserve to be studied in this context, but which the spatial constraints of this chapter do not allow. These include: Norbert Ney, Ich bin sterilisiert. Informationen. Protokolle (Hamburg: Buntbuch, 1979); Josef Muscha Müller, Und weinen darf ich auch nicht ...: Ausgrenzung, Sterilisation, Deportation – eine Kindheit in Deutschland (Berlin: Parabolis, 2002); Dorothea Buck-Zerchin, Lasst euch nicht entmutigen. Texte 1968–2001 (Norderstedt: Anne Fischer, 2002); Dorothea Buck-Zerchin, Auf der Spur des Morgensterns. Psychose als Selbstfindung (Neumünster: Paranus, 2005); and Dorothea Buck, Ermutigungen. Ausgewählte Schriften (Neumünster: Paranus, 2012). Dörner, Tödliches Mitleid, 41 and 66.

80 11 12

13

14 15 16

17 18 19

20

21

22 23

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Heinz Faulstich, Hungersterben in der Psychiatrie 1914–1949: Mit einer Topographie der NS-Psychiatrie (Freiburg: Lambertus, 1998). Cf. Ernst Klee (ed.), Dokumente zur ‘Euthanasie’ (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1985); Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany, 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Thomas Foth, Caring and Killing: Nursing and Psychiatric Practice in Germany, 1931–1943 (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, Universität Osnabrück, 2013). H.-W. Schmuhl, ‘Die Patientenmorde’, in Angelika Ebbinghaus and Klaus Dörner (eds), Vernichten und Heilen. Der Nürnberger Ärzteprozeß und seine Folgen (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2002), 295–328, 297. Margret Hamm (ed.), Lebensunwert – Zerstörte Leben. Zwangssterilisation und ‘Euthanasie’ (Frankfurt am Main: VAS, 2005), 7. Faulstich, Hungersterben in der Psychiatrie 1914–1949, 712–717; Schmuhl, ‘Die Patientenmorde’, 316. Cf. Dörner, Tödliches Mitleid, 88; Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 101–104; Stefan Kühl, Die Internationale der Rassisten. Aufstieg und Niedergang der internationalen eugenischen Bewegung im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2013). Dorothea C. Roer, ‘Erinnern, Erzählen, Gehört werden. Zeugenschaft und “historische Wahrheit” ’, in Hamm, Lebensunwert, 183–197, 192. I have written extensively about some of these art projects and collaborative memorials in Knittel, The Historical Uncanny, 33–71. Other book-length biographies include Hellmut G. Haasis, Heisel Rein, der gscheite Narr. Schwänke und Ermordung eines schwäbischen Eulenspiegels (Reutlingen-Betzingen: Freiheitsbaum, 2008); Robert Domes, Nebel im August. Die Lebensgeschichte des Ernst Lossa (München: cbt, 2008). For two collections of shorter biographical sketches of victims see also Hamm, Lebensunwert; Petra Fuchs, Maike Rotzoll, Ulrich Müller, Paul Richter and Gerrit Hohendorf (eds), ‘Das Vergessen der Vernichtung ist Teil der Vernichtung selbst.’ Lebensgeschichten von Opfern der nationalsozialistischen ‘Euthanasie’ (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007). See also Susanne Knittel, ‘Beyond Testimony: Nazi Euthanasia and the Field of Memory Studies’, The Holocaust in History and Memory 5 (2012), 85–101, 93–99; Knittel, The Historical Uncanny, 106–133. For example Helga Schubert, Die Welt da drinnen. Eine deutsche Nervenklinik und der Wahn vom ‘unwerten Leben’ (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003) and Tino Hemmann, Der unwerte Schatz. Gegen das Vergessen. Über die KinderEuthanasie im NS-Staat. Erzählung einer Kindheit (Leipzig: Engelsdorfer, 2005). Knittel, The Historical Uncanny, 106–133. See, for example, Eberhard Gabriel and Wolfgang Neugebauer (eds), Von der Zwangssterilisierung zur Ermordung. Zur Geschichte der NS-Euthanasie in Wien (Wien: Böhlau, 2002); Karl Cervik, Kindermord in der Ostmark. Kindereuthanasie im Nationalsozialismus 1938–1945 (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2004); Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability; Dörner, Tödliches Mitleid; Stefanie Westermann, Verschwiegenes Leid. Der Umgang mit den NS-Zwangssterilisationen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Köln: Böhlau, 2010); Uwe Gerrens, Medizinisches Ethos

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27

28 29

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und theologische Ethik: Karl und Dietrich Bonhoeffer in der Auseinandersetzung um Zwangssterilisation und ‘Euthanasie’ im Nationalsozialismus (München: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2010); Aly, Die Belasteten. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 150–165. Ibid., 155. Similar intelligence tests were also used after the war in rehabilitation hearings, in which victims were sometimes confronted with the exact same questions, and were re-traumatized as a result. See Westermann, Verschwiegenes Leid, 157–166. In 2006, he published a collection of poetry about his traumatic experiences during the Nazi regime, entitled Dass ich dich finde: Kind am Spiegelgrund [So That I May Find You: Child at Spiegelgrund] (Wien: Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft 2006); and most recently a collection of short stories, entitled Wahre Unwahrheiten: Kuss des Schattens [True Untruths: Kiss of the Shadow] (Berlin: Novum, 2010). See the author’s website at http://www.aloiskaufmann.at/. Wolf Thieme, ‘Die Mordmaschine’, Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten. Available online: http://www.pnn.de/dritte-seite/673114/ (accessed 17 January 2015).

Part II

Disturbing Narratives

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Disturbing Mending: On the Imagined Third Generation of Holocaust Survivors in Israeli Literature of the Second Generation Tsila Ratner

All the rivers / run into the sea and the sea / is not full/ because / all the rivers return / to the rivers ... Avot Yeshurun, ‘Adon Menucha’ (‘Master of Rest’), 19901 After the birth of his daughter Aaron Hass, a son of Holocaust survivors, wondered what of her family history should be passed on to her: ‘How steeped do I wish my son or daughter to be in the Holocaust? How should I present the material? At what age should I expose them to which details?’2 Eva Hoffman’s response to the anxiety of the second-generation parent is unequivocal. For her, a daughter of survivors, the intergenerational transmission of Holocaust legacy exceeds any conscious control. It is being passed on as involuntarily and inevitably as the flow from mother to foetus through the umbilical cord: ‘For me, the world as I knew it and the people in it emerged not from the womb, but from war.’3 What is being transmitted are the traces of scars and wounds that have become the ‘molecular elements’ of the next generation.4 Hass’s pondering upon the question of inter-generational transmission arises from the parental anxiety which he shares, as his research shows, with other second-generation parents. All of them are highly conscious of the imprints of the ‘molecular elements’ on their identity. The following discussion looks at the ways literary representations by Israeli writers of the second generation reflect on this parental concern through the construction of third-generation characters in their works. Literary writings and other forms of representations by the second generation in Israel have been the subject of extensive research.5 At the core of these representations, as this research shows, is the complexity of inter-generational transmission of Holocaust memories which has shaped the psyche and sensibilities of the secondgeneration writers and in turn of their fictional characters. Within this wide context the present chapter reflects on one particular aspect, on the way the writers of the second generation, whether biological or cultural, envisage and picture the effects of their own experiences on the next generation through their works of fiction. It aims to shed light

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on the ways their literary writings position the second generation as parents and as guardians of the individual memories which have become their ‘molecular elements’. While the following discussion focuses only on the writing of the second generation, it forms a referential framework for the study of the emerging literary works by third-generation writers. In turns it reflects on the role literature plays in both the construction of public commemoration and its destabilization. The projection of parental anxiety which the writing of the second generation reveals in the way it constructs the next generation, exposes the deeply rooted legacy of the Holocaust as a major constituent of the individual psyche. As a reflection of the wider social and cultural context it reveals apprehension that defies closure.

Disturbing mending: The quest of the second-generation characters The complexity inherent to inter-generational transmission of trauma underlies the formative experiences of the second-generation literary characters. The inevitable collapse of survivors’ testimony into the ‘black hole’ or ‘lacuna’ of trauma6 and the suppression of its memory are persistently present in the writing of the second generation. Whether growing up with survivor-parents who talk about their past or not, they struggle with what Iris Milner has termed ‘the family crypt’,7 namely the inaccessibility of their parents’ repressed traumatic memories. Their quest as writers, indeed the motivation to become writers,8 is to break through the crypt, to turn the inexplicable and intangible past into a coherently articulated family history as a means to consolidating their own sense of selfhood: ‘And about being unable to understand my life until I learn about my unlived life Over There’.9 Most if not all the attempts of the second generation to penetrate the encoded past end in failure as comprehension and reconstruction of the past proves to be impossible. The drive for articulation which is supposed to bring about redemption achieves the opposite result. Instead of healing and mending it reproduces the survivors’ unresolved quandary. In a large number of the second-generation narratives, this predicament is presented as uncontrollable and therefore inevitable. The second-generation fictional characters have no choice but to attempt penetrating and articulating the parents’ traumatic past in order to constitute an autonomic subject position. Their quest leads to actual and imagined journeys to the core of the lived trauma which Milner sees as the formative experience of second-generation literary characters.10 Inevitably, this pursuit is destined to failure as the parents’ traumatic memory cannot be incorporated into any narrative of coherent past.11 Echoing the trajectory of the survivor-parent, the second-generation fictional characters withdraw inwardly and in many cases towards mental and physical collapse and disintegration of subjectivity (death, suicide, mental and physical illness).12 The attempt to break down muteness ends with what seems to be its reproduction. However, there is a profound difference between the two generations. While the literary characters of the survivor parent have been muted by the intrinsic inability to articulate the experienced trauma, the second-generation characters eloquently elucidate their withdrawal, aware of its origins, its consequences and implications. Their compulsive

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drive to decode the inexplicable is fully documented in their narratives. They might have failed to reach the core of the traumatic experience of their parents, but they have successfully communicated its disturbing manifestations.13 Their portrayal of growing up in survivors’ families is an account of an afflicted parenthood14 which will be transmitted further or at least be reflected on. Literary representations describe the transmission of Holocaust trauma from survivors to their children as powerful and all embracing. Its intensity has been reiterated in autobiographical writings15 and in the findings of therapists working with children of survivors alike. Based on her own therapeutic work with children of survivors, Dina Wardi16 states that the trauma has been transmitted from mother to child already during pregnancy.17 The powerful mental identification with the survivor parent, usually with the mother, has been manifested at times in bodily inscriptions and even a belief in genetic transmission.18 This profound internalization of the trauma and its transmission reverberates in the literary works by the second generation: in Leah Aini’s story ‘Until the Whole Guard Has Passed’ (1991), the effects of trauma are believed to be hereditary;19 and in Nava Semel’s story ‘Suitcases’ (1988), a second-generation character delays having children of his own for fear of the inevitable transmission.20 While the therapeutic work in Wardi’s account has enabled the children of survivors to separate themselves from their parents’ scars, Aini’s and Semel’s stories end with disturbing ambiguity as to a possible separation.21 Besides the many literary manifestations of bodily inscriptions like physical illness,22 the second-generation writings delve into the less visible marks of inter-generational trauma transmission. In whatever form they take, those deep engravings signify a lasting presence of the ruptured past.23 By definition, the inter-generational transmission of trauma is always a ‘second hand’ memory which is selective and incomplete and which will never reproduce the actual experiences. This inherent distance from the actuality of the trauma impels the literary second-generation characters to take their ‘journeys to the heart of darkness’.24 Their journeys have already been informed and contextualized by mediating agents, thus the ‘authentic’ experience which they strive to reconstruct will remain evasive.25 The multiplicity of reconfigurations of the past by all the knowledge agents involved in its reconstruction contribute to if not constitute the failure of those journeys. It is only to be expected that these fictional characters would foresee a further problematized interaction with the traumatic past in future generations. Against this background, the second-generation narrators imagine the transmission of traumatic past experiences to their own children. At the basis of this projected and imagined future lies the essence of the already transformed, reconfigured and fragmented memory. The fictional characters in these writings are not only recipients but also active agents of this process of transmission. In numerous literary works of the second generation, the protagonists are writers, chroniclers and memoirists whose narratives are driven by this dual position.26 They write/record/document in order to articulate the repressed traumatic experiences their parents were unable to testify to (as recipient); to repair the shattered life of their parents (as active agent); and to constitute their own subjectivity (as both). This acute awareness of the complexity involved in inter-generational transmission is best illustrated in literary works portraying the relationships between three generations of Holocaust survivors.

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Four literary works have been selected for the present discussion. Each revolves around inter-generational interactions between three generations and in each case contemporaneous concerns have been projected onto a third-generation fictional character. The four works are divided into two significantly different historical groups: before the emergence of the second-generation writing in the mid-1980s and from within it. Aharon Megged’s ‘The Name’ (1955) is an early representation of inter-generational transmission preceding the writing of the second generation.27 The early 1950s perspective on Holocaust remembrance in this canonical story highlights the unique sensibilities of the second generation.28 As such it is an invaluable point of reference for the concerns over knowledge agency and the vicissitudes of memories at the core of the following three chosen works by second-generation writers. Three well-known literary works by writers born to Holocaust survivors29 and published in the early 1990s form the second group and the main body of this chapter. In each one of these works a third-generation character is being informed of the traumatic past by different degrees of contact with it and by different agencies, from a direct and personal exposure to an almost impersonal mediation by public commemoration. ‘Excision’ by Savyon Liebrecht (1988) revolves around the direct exposure of a third-generation girl to her grandmother’s traumatic past;30 Benny Barbash’s novel My First Sony (1994) assigns to the third generation the role of the chronicler of the second generation’s struggle with the effects of parental traumatic past;31 ‘Shoes’ by Etgar Keret (1994) reflects on the national commemoration discourse as an inter-generational transmitting agency.32

What’s in a name: Aharon Megged’s ‘The Name’ Apprehension over the commemoration of the Holocaust instigates the fictional thirdgeneration character in Aharon Megged’s early story ‘The Name’. The publication of the story in 1955 coincided with the official establishment of Israel’s national Holocaust museum and archive, Yad Vashem, which is also the original Hebrew title of the story.33 There is no doubt that this concurrence was unintentional, nonetheless it indicates the preoccupation of the time in general and of Megged in particular with the need for, and the future of, the commemoration of the Holocaust.34 Three generations of one family are at the centre of the story: Grandfather Zisskind, his daughter Rachel and his granddaughter Raya. When Grandfather came to live with his daughter in pre-state Israel leaving behind his son and his family, he was, as Raya recalls, a loving, sociable and humorous man as his name suggests (Zisskind means literally ‘sweet child’). But after the Second World War he changed dramatically. Once it became clear that his family in his Ukrainian home town had perished, he became deeply steeped in mourning. His grief was focused mainly and overwhelmingly on his dead grandson, Mendele. Engrossed in his bereavement, he became more detached and moved to a small room at the edge of town. The story progresses around the visits Raya, now a married woman, pays him once a month. The visits follow a repeated ritual: after offering Raya and her husband tea and after some small talk, Grandfather

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reaches out for the wall clock which has long stopped working. He opens the clock and takes out a cloth bag containing a bundle of handwritten papers, adamant that Raya’s husband, who almost knows them by heart, read them again. Raya’s husband reads Grandfather’s lamenting memorial to the community that perished during the Holocaust. Grandfather then puts the papers back in the bag and takes out a photograph of his beloved grandson Mendele, lamenting his death. The story reaches its climax when Grandfather asks his pregnant granddaughter to name her baby after Mendele. Raya and her husband refuse, insisting on a ‘proper’ Israeli name. A compromise suggested by Raya’s mother is rejected and Grandfather loses all interest in his once beloved granddaughter, in her baby boy and in fact in life altogether. The focal point of the story is the conflict between the grandfather and Raya over the naming of the baby. Raya vigorously rejects the name Mendele as ‘a Ghetto name, ugly, horrible! [...] Do you want me to hate my child?’ (38). She recoils from the Diasporic name and the memories it bears of ‘all those dreadful things’ (39). Adopting the Zionist endeavour to construct a new Jewish identity, she chooses an all-Israeli name and refuses to assign the role of ‘memorial candle’ to her child.35 For Grandfather her steadfast refusal expands beyond the private and the particular. For him it means that they are turning their back on the national/communal past altogether: ‘everything that was there is past and gone. Dead without sequel. [...] Ties are remembrance! [...] They took the bodies away from the world and you – the name and the memory ... No continuation, no evidence, no memorial and no name. Not a trace ...’ (39–40). As for Rachel, Raya’s mother, she finds herself caught ‘midway between the generations’ (38), arguing and deeply empathizing with both. So much so, that the question of the name, which did not seem too significant at first, appears to conceal ‘something preordained, fearful and pregnant with life and death’ (38). In her distress she offers a compromise: a translation of the Yiddish name Mendele to the Hebrew Menachem, meaning ‘a consoler’. When the latter is declined too, she retreats into herself: ‘As if to herself, she said in a whisper: I don’t know .... at times it seems to me that it’s not Grandfather who’s suffering from loss of memory, but ourselves. All of us’ (39). Rachel has abandoned her confrontational position with her father and her daughter, turning inward and reexamining her earlier wavering stance. Expressed in a whisper, her thoughts remain inaudible. She, like her father, retreats into silence. The narrator’s empathy towards each of the generational representatives intensifies the tone of despondency in the story. The last visit Raya and her husband pay to Grandfather is meant to be a celebratory one, an introduction of a newly born great grandson, but it ends with deep dejection. Grandfather does not acknowledge the baby and the baby is spoken of namelessly (‘infant’, ‘baby’). Grandfather’s face is described as ‘tortured’ and the tearful Raya bends over the baby carriage: ‘At that moment it seemed to her that he was in need of pity and of great love, as though he was alone, an orphan in the world’ (41). It seems that each generation is being locked into historic circumstances beyond individual control: Grandfather in the painful past; the second generation in its transitional position between past and present; and the third generation destined to reject the legacy of the past as it strives for a new Jewish identity. The mediating attempts of the mother, the second generation, appear to be futile.

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Published in 1955, Megged’s story reflects the concerns of its time. It was written from an outsider’s perspective.36 Living away from Europe during the Second World War, Megged, like his contemporary Israeli writers, experienced the Holocaust indirectly, through the refugees who managed to escape the Nazis during the war and the survivors who left Europe after it.37 Like the character of grandfather Zisskind, Megged’s encounter with the reality of the Holocaust was mediated by their testimonies.38 The third generation in the story is a projection and a vision of future generations in the context of public and national commemoration rather than the outcome of individual and intimate experience. This projected concern has assigned a subsidiary role to the second generation in the story, unlike the centrality of their position in later years. The present chapter approaches the constructed third generation from a distinctively different perspective, as it proposes to look at literary representations written in the 1990s by writers of the second generation. The four decades separating Megged’s story from these works have witnessed major changes in the Israeli discourse including the public discourse of Holocaust remembrance and the rising prominence of Holocaust writings by survivors and their children.39 The large volume of Holocaust memoirs and literary representation has introduced a multiplicity of voices and attitudes that has shifted the grounds of enquiry. Along with the reinforcement of a unified public remembrance these representations introduce personal and private voices which disrupt and destabilize the public discourse. Besides memories of defiance and courage against the odds that were easily incorporated into the national narrative of strength, resilience and redemption, they also represent the Holocaust as the ultimate weakness and victimhood which stand in contrast to those values. Furthermore, the ever-evolving articulation of those personal memories throughout the generations resists the firm setting of the commemoration narrative, presenting instead a fluid and incomplete process. Unlike the ‘outsider’ perspective of Megged’s contemporaries, the literary representations of the second-generation authors are written from within. Living with the trauma of their parents has been the reality of daily life in Israel, whether they have experienced the aftermath in their nuclear families of survivors, in their immediate communities or in the wider context of the dominant national discourse.40 This perspective positions the imagined literary third generation differently. While Megged’s story expresses a sense of foreboding as it portrays the third generation recoiling from the traumatic memories, works by second-generation writers convey a complex and rather contradictory anguish. They reflect anxiety about reproducing the effects of the aftermath from which they as children of survivors have suffered. Concurrently, rather than an unbridgeable rift between the generations they at times portray a strong affinity with the past and new strategies of relating to it.41

‘I want my child to hear stories about Cinderella’ – Savyon Liebrecht’s ‘Excision’ Unlike Megged’s ‘The Name’, Savyon Liebrecht’s ‘Excision’ is narrated from an intimate perspective which allows the narrator access to the woman survivor at the centre of

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the narrative, penetrating and rendering her unspoken traumatic memory. Liebrecht’s story takes place at the very moment repressed memories break loose. It is a study of the seemingly sudden emergence of the traumatic past as it unfolds, of the attempts to re-contain it and its impact on the survivor’s family. In the story, Miri, the granddaughter of Henya, the survivor, is a kindergarten girl whose pride and joy is her beautiful golden hair. One Friday she returns home with a note from the teacher that lice were found among the children and parents are to treat their hair to prevent further infestation. Sending such notes is a regular practice but Henya, who takes care of the girl on that Friday, is deeply shaken by it. Unable to control the memories of lice in the concentration camp, she cuts off the girl’s hair while telling her of lice in the women’s barracks. When the girl’s parents return home they are devastated by what has happened. The mother declares Henya a mental case who should have no contact with her daughter. The father, Henya’s son, is torn between compassion towards his mother, his wife’s loud arguments and his daughter’s bewilderment. Unable to assert himself, he gives up. Henya is left to relive her traumatic experiences. Labelled a mentally ill woman, she will be locked away from her family and in her trauma. ‘Excision’ illustrates what Milner describes as an ‘inter-generational event’ in which the repression of traumatic experiences as a fencing off mechanism breaks down.42 This collapse of repression transfers the survivor from a semblance of normal life in the present to the traumatic past which takes over. The trigger that sets the memories flooding belongs to the present but the connection to the repressed past is inaccessible to anyone but the traumatized survivor. Hence the breakdown appears to be arbitrary and its consequences inexplicable and unjustified. Whereas Milner explores the intergenerational event between the literary characters of survivors and their children, ‘Excision’ involves three generations in the collapse of repressed memory, adding a significant further dimension. The story opens without any expositional information: Henya takes out the scissors, touching her granddaughter’s golden hair while her face changes into a mask as she withdraws into her past.43 The following paragraphs detail the actual cutting of the hair while Henya talks to the girl explaining and comforting at the same time. The structure of the story reproduces the unpredictability of the involuntary breakdown of the repressed trauma. Aware of Miri’s distress and torn between her love for her and the compulsive hold of her traumatic memories, Henya tells the girl what lice meant in the camps. However, the content of Henya’s telling remains unknown to the readers even though Miri recounts it later on to her parents. Henya cannot hear Miri’s version as she has been moved to the next room, neither can the reader who hears only what Henya does. The detailed account of her experiences is disclosed only at the very end of the story, when Henya is on her own and the surge of traumatic memories overcomes her struggle to contain them. How Henya told her granddaughter of her past and what Miri understood remain concealed. Miri’s experience of the wrath of the traumatic eruption is not different from that of child and adult literary characters of the second generation. Her father, the now adult son of a survivor-mother, shares her bewilderment. Growing up with Henya has exposed him to the unpredictability of ‘strange’ behaviour as his repeated scolding

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words show: ‘Mother, I don’t know what came over you. This time you’re really out of your mind’ (95). However, his efforts to reach Henya and make sense of her action prove how ineffective his past attempts have been and how impossible the task is. His ‘logical’ arguments belong to the present (lice are commonplace, you saw it on television etc.), while Henya’s response is embedded in her repressed past experience, invisible and unknown to her son. Overwhelmed by what she sees in the mirror, the four-year-old girl worries about being mocked by her peers, and she both feels a sense of threat that if she tells her mother she might never talk to her grandmother again, and faith in her mother’s omnipotence (‘and then she will stick my hair back’) (94). Although her experience reiterates that of second-generation child characters, Miri is not a child of survivors. Her contact with the survivor-grandmother is mediated by her parents, who know and are familiar with the so-called odd behaviour of the survivor. Her mother, the outsider daughter in-law,44 expresses her knowledge of Henya in harsh terms to her husband: ‘You have to realize that your mother is crazy. I told you long ago’ (97). Miri’s father’s knowledge and empathy is being silenced: ‘In her son’s study, with eyes staring at the darkness, Henya heard her daughter-in-law screaming, her granddaughter wailing, and her son trying to intervene, to explain, but his voice was drowned out by theirs’ (97). Likewise, Henya’s voice, which was locked with her memories, struggles to come forth: ‘Henya suddenly started to cry and to emit a strange sobbing sound, like a person who was born without the ability to cry but has learned to fake it, to reduce the distance between themselves and other human beings’ (96). The voice of the present reality has forced both survivor and son into silence, into a growing distance between themselves and the others. As a comment on the parenthood of the second generation, the story draws attention to its failings. Written by a second-generation writer, it is clearly a projection of the worry of this generation as well as a realization of their inadequacy when caught in their in-between generational role. In both ‘The Name’ and ‘Excision’ the outsider to the survivor’s nuclear family expresses the wish to leave the traumatic legacy behind. In Megged’s story Raya’s husband argues against the hold of Jewish European past over the present in Zionist Israel. Similarly, Miri’s mother argues: ‘The world has advanced a little since then, and we are not in the camps now. [...] Those stories are prehistory by now’ (97). Like Raya’s refusal to hear about the ‘dreadful things’, Miri’s mother rejects listening to what her husband is trying to say, assumedly in defence of his mother: ‘A four- year-old needs to hear such things? [...] I want my child to hear stories about Cinderella, not about Auschwitz!’ (98). ‘Excision’ does not offer a direct insight into Miri’s future, but there is little doubt that Miri, as her mother argues, will bear the marks of this traumatic event. However, Miri relates to her grandmother in a far more complex way than her mother predicts. Throughout her ordeal the little girl does not show any signs of fear or mistrust of her grandmother’s love, although she blames and threatens her. On the one hand this complexity reproduces the positioning of second-generation child characters. Yet, this complexity might also turn into affinity and empathy in later years, since unlike the child characters of the second generation, Miri’s experiences were mediated by her parents. They stand as buffers between her and the survivor’s trauma. Unlike the

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typically isolated character of the second generation, she is not bound by the secrets of the survivor. How will this mediation shape Miri’s memory of the event, how will it inform her relationship with her grandmother’s legacy is left un-answerable. However, it is hard to imagine that Miri’s life will be unscathed by it. While Megged’s story expresses the concerns of the wider national discourse, Liebrecht’s story focuses first and foremost on the dynamics of families of survivors. Intimate knowledge of these dynamics turns away from the public commemorative narrative and enables a close study of the survivor’s psyche and the transmission of their trauma. Consequently, a complex portrayal of the imagined third generation emerges, whereby the notion of the inevitable inter-generational transmission of the trauma, in this case in its extreme form, is placed alongside the possibility of empathy and compassion. Against the certainty of Megged’s story, Liebrecht portrays a much more subtle yet menacing picture of the destabilizing nature of personal memories. Their inaccessibility and the unpredictability of their emergence throughout the generations threaten to disrupt any semblance of ordinary life.

‘The most important thing was to be precise’ – Benny Barbash’s My First Sony Memory, its reconstruction and transmission permeates Benny Barbash’s novel My First Sony (1994). The complex inter-generational transmission of traumatic memories is central to it. It shapes the psyche of the main characters and determines the course of their life as well as that of the wider social/national context. The large canvas of a novel allows for a multitude of characters that constitute the extended family of Yotam, its narrator. The following discussion concentrates on the transmission of trauma through three generations of Yotam’s paternal family. Yotam, the ten-year-old narrator/protagonist of Barbash’s novel, is the highly articulate son of Asaf, a son of a Holocaust survivor-mother and a failing playwright, and Alma, an architect who fled the dictatorial regime in Argentina. Trauma, disrupted life and a mixture of cultures, languages and conflicting ideologies characterize the extended family, which in turn reflects the wider Israeli social and cultural context. As the novel progresses the inharmonious and quarrelsome marriage of Yotam’s parents disintegrates. Haunted by failure and depression Asaf is engaged in numerous adulterous affairs, neglecting his obligations to his three children, wife and family home. His depression deepens even further as he struggles to write the memoirs of Holocaust survivors. After a visit to Treblinka with one of them he commits suicide in the neglected small flat he has moved to. Yotam is the one to discover his body. Sensitive, introverted and socially isolated, Yotam craves for his father’s love and attention. Time and again he insists on similarities between them, which he believes to be hereditary. The Sony tape recorder in the title was a gift Asaf gave him so that the stories he keeps telling his father would not be forgotten. But from the moment he receives the recorder Yotam stops inventing stories and begins to record everything that takes place in his extended family and beyond. Yotam’s expansive monologue consists

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of an eclectic selection of recordings linked by his associations and commentary. They are a mixture of mundane and momentous events in many voices and different languages. They reflect the chaotic familial space where memories of the past impact heavily on the unfolding disintegration of the family which the child narrator tries to make sense of. Second-generation characters in literature watch their survivor parents as a means to comprehend what has shaped their own identities. Yotam, a third-generation character, observes his second-generation father for the same reasons. The novel, therefore, adds another link to the chain of trans-generational transmission of the initial trauma. Unlike ‘Excision’, My First Sony positions the second-generation parent rather than the survivor at the centre of its enquiry, looking at the struggle of this generation with their parents’ legacy as the source of furthering the effects of trauma. The attempt and failure to unravel the hidden forces haunting the parent belong here to the imagined third-generation character. Thus rather than reading Asaf as the protagonist of the novel,45 the present discussion places Yotam in this position, as he wrestles with the incomprehensibility of the adult world in general and of his father’s life and suicide in particular. Repeated patterns mark and reinforce Yotam’s strong notion of the inter-generational transmission in his family. Asaf, the middle son of three, is the closest to his mother. Yotam, the middle child, is the closest to his father. Like Asaf as a child, Yotam is the one susceptible to bullying, being sensitive, overweight, socially isolated and articulate. Like Asaf ’s identification with his mother, he identifies with the weaker and suffering parent. He is loyal to his father even after he leaves the family home and despite his hurtful and humiliating outbursts, such as when Asaf expresses his disappointment at Yotam’s weight and clumsiness by breaking the first Sony tape recorder he had bought him. Yotam points out repeatedly how like his father he is, recounting in great detail his father’s childhood experiences, when bullying pushed him to attempted suicide. Yotam listens and records as Asaf laughingly recalls those events. The commentary inserted in Yotam’s narration reveals Asaf ’s significance to his life: ‘And the fact that he could laugh at such a sad story gave me hope that I would be able to laugh one day too, in years to come, about all the terrible things that are happening to me now in school – [...] and inside I feel like Dad must have felt when he climbed on to the windowsill [...] and wanted to kill himself, but in years to come, when I’m Dad’s age, I’ll probably laugh at it like Dad laughed [...]’ (89). Tragically, Yotam’s desperate wish for solace will be shattered on his discovery of his father’s dead body. Similarly, Asaf defines his identification with his mother as the underpinning drive of his life: ‘all his life was one long attempt to understand her and identify with her and love her and live for her and liberate himself from her ... [...] and inside his soul there was already a little concentration camp, which held all the mysterious memories she never talked about’ (115–116). The traumatic memories that were never told have infiltrated the semblance of normal life and were present in different forms throughout Asaf ’s life, from his mother’s constant anxiety over food and minor illnesses to her intrusive and humiliating letter to his commander for which he was constantly mocked (116). The Holocaust memories of Asaf ’s mother never emerge in full, although the story of her survival is told by Asaf ’s father and against her will. However, and perhaps as a

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means for sublimating her own experience, she initiates Asaf ’s ghost writing of other survivors’ memories, professedly to help him financially. Buying his son a tape-recorder to safeguard stories from forgetfulness instead of listening to them is a parallel act of redirecting. The mother’s sublimating act sends Asaf deeper into the lacuna of trauma and results in his suicide. Asaf ’s gift to Yotam leads to his compulsive eavesdropping, which strengthens the bond between the two,46 but also exposes the boy to the incomprehensible complexity of adult experiences which he tries in vain to decode. Yotam’s comment on the difference between adults and children is revealing: ‘perhaps that’s one of the biggest problems there is between children and grownups: that they talk about things they can’t see, and between them and us there’s an imaginary dividing line, and whoever crosses it stops being one thing and begins being another’ (82). Asaf is tormented by his futile attempts to elucidate the heart of trauma. Even the memories he is instructed to write down by his clients escape the right measure of accuracy, as Sonya, one of the survivors, complains: ‘Sonya [....] tried to be precise, and if possible she would have put her story in mathematical formulae, so that reality would not be softened ... [...] and it was forbidden to look at what had happened through filters’ (146). As Hannah Naveh points out,47 the tape recorder is supposed to overcome the obstacles of imprecision as well as that of silence,48 but to Yotam’s distress it is not sensitive enough to record what is really important: ‘the sound of my heart praying that nothing would move, nothing would change’ (74). Both father and son have crossed the dividing line: father crossed it to the black hole of his mother’s trauma, the son has been drawn into his father’s torments. Like the grandfather in Megged’s story Yotam is an archivist, obsessively collecting and storing evidence on his tape recorder. The archive in ‘The Name’ is a methodically arranged memorial of the past. Yotam’s archive seems to be an eclectic collection of daily and fateful details waiting to be sorted and classified. It is an archive in the making, recording present materials as they evolve and unfold and attempting to interpret them. Against the historic fragmentation surrounding him, Yotam uses his tape recorder as a means to arrest the fast flow of time, struggling to translate its intangibility into material evidence of its existence. Unlike Megged’s grandfather for whom time has been frozen in the finality of the memorial he had erected, Yotam’s archive of loss is ever evolving: ‘Time really does pass without us feeling it, and this is its cunning, because you can’t fight against someone who’s never present, and only when it’s past you realize that it was there all the time, and in force, but then too you can’t do anything against it, because it’s already gone’ (256). Tragically, he finds that time stops running away only in death, when he discovers the body of his father hanging from the ceiling: ‘when I looked at him I remembered the thoughts I once had about the connection between air and time, and I thought about another connection: now that he didn’t have a drop of air left, he had all the time in the world, [...] but the time that had passed, that time’ (312). Like Miri in ‘Excision’, Yotam is only a child, albeit a clever and articulate one. Unlike her he is the narrator of his childhood memories. It might be argued that structuring the novel along the parallel lines between the life of his father and his own serves Yotam’s need for his father’s love and affection. However, the representation of methodical reproduction of trauma transmission from the first through to the third

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generation of survivors in the novel cannot be interpreted only in terms of a child’s desire for his parent’s love. In the fictional world of the novel Yotam is the actual child of a second-generation character. Outside the fictional world he is the imagined child of a writer of this same generation. From this perspective the novel portrays an alarming chain of inter-generational transmission, consisting of links of damaged and wounding parenthood.

‘Made out of the bones and skin and flesh of dead Jews’ – Etgar Keret’s ‘Shoes’ Both Miri in Liebrecht’s story and Yotam in Barbash’s novel represent third-generation children growing with talking/telling survivors or their descendants.49 In both cases child characters are being directly exposed to the violent collapse of repressed memories or their impact on the second generation. Both narratives present the damaging effects and their deep inscription on the third-generation characters as inevitable. Unlike these two narratives, ‘Shoes’ by Etgar Keret introduces a third-generation child character who has no apparent close contact with a survivor relative.50 It tells the story of a boy taken on a school trip to the museum of Volhnia Jewry on Holocaust Memorial Day.51 Being the only child of European origins in the group, the boy feels privileged rather than distressed by the exhibits. This feeling heightens when he breaks the rules and touches one of the photographs of ‘skinny old men’ exhibited along the museum’s walls, claiming that he is allowed to do so because it is a photograph of his grandfather. The visit to the museum ends with a talk by a survivor who tells the children about resistance during the Holocaust, reminding them of the obligation to remember. He warns them against any association with Germans and German products, because ‘they were made out of the bones and skin and flesh of dead Jews’ (42). With this in mind the boy opens a box of Adidas trainers, a gift from his parents on their return from a trip abroad. The boy is caught between the desire to own the trainers and the warning of the survivor in the museum. He tries to raise his concern with his mother without sounding ungrateful: ‘Grandpa was from Germany too’ (43), to which she responds ‘Grandpa was from Poland’ (43). Her factual correction seems to brush off or evade the issue. The boy wears the trainers to please his parents and even manages for the first time to do well in a football match. He uses the shoes as a means of ‘bonding’ with grandfather following what seems to be a logical process: since German products are made of dead Jews, his Adidas trainers must have been made of grandfather. By wearing them grandfather, therefore, becomes inseparable from his own body/feet. The missing biographical link has been found and restored. The boy has resolved the tension between the warning against German-manufactured goods and his parents’ token of love. Keret’s ‘Shoes’ is open to at least two different interpretations due to the opaqueness surrounding the biographical link between the boy and his grandfather. The first one might be based on the assumption that there was indeed a grandfather who had perished in the Holocaust and the appropriation of the museum photograph signifies a deep drive to fill in the biographical gap. This line of reading might interpret the

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unsatisfactory response of the mother as the attempt of second-generation parents to protect their children from ‘unsuitable’ truth. The second reading doubts if there was such a grandfather and understands the boy’s relation to the old man in the photograph as an imaginary adoption of an unknown grandfather. The boy’s interpretation of his mother’s response to his exploration reinforces this reading as it obscures the family history even further and relies only on public commemorative agencies: ‘Mom didn’t have a clue. She had never been to Volhynia House. Nobody had ever explained it to her. For her, shoes were just shoes and Germany was Poland’ (43). The story does not offer any details of the circumstances surrounding Grandpa’s life and absence, except for the mother’s momentary sadness: ‘For a moment she became sad, but she got over it in no time’ (43). Against what the boy interprets as a deliberate absence of memories in his family, the museum displays a wealth of remembrance objects in the form of photographs and videos of individuals, families and communities. To most of them, even those which were supposed to evoke a deep sense of horror, the boy responds of handedly: ‘[they] showed us a movie about little children who were shoved into a truck and then suffocated with gas’ (41). Selecting one of the many photographs of the ‘sad black-andwhite pictures’ is a random choice that subverts the official purpose of the museum of remembrance. The boy who fails socially, as his exclusion from the neighbourhood football teams shows, has found a way to elevate his social status. As the only boy of European origins in his class, his claim for a share in the impressive museum made of black marble singles him out and grants him special privileges. He, unlike the others, feels entitled to touch the photographic exhibit: ‘I said she [a class mate] could tell whoever she wanted, even the principal, I didn’t give a damn. It’s my Grandpa and I’m touching whatever I want’ (41). Using the Holocaust remembrance for personal gain compromises the obligatory reverence for national Holocaust remembrance.52 It undermines an official commemoration that is set in stone literally (black marble) and symbolically. The ritualistic nature of a museum, like the grandfather’s lamentations locked in a clock in Megged’s story, has lost its power to evoke empathy. Ironically, only by breaking the rules of propriety and due reverence, by turning the official memory objects around, does the boy find a way to connect with past memories. He turns the collective remembrance into a personal memory. Furthermore, the selected photograph is not of small children being gassed, with whom the boy might be expected to identify. It is a photograph of an old man, probably of a survivor since he is holding a sandwich. The boy can relate it to his own world: ‘The tears came streaming down his cheeks like the lanes’ dividing lines you see on the highway [...]’ (41). It is the banality of the simile that enables a possible lead to the memory, as Hirsch argues.53 Distorted proportions, shifting hierarchies, the mixture of literal and metaphorical, revered and mundane, permeates Keret’s writing and has become his hallmark.54 In ‘Shoes’ these characteristics evoke a disturbing sense of what Bakhtin calls grotesque realism, namely the degradation of what is commonly thought of as abstract and noble to corporal manifestations that are held to be debasing. The boy’s embodiment of the metaphoric ‘flesh, blood and skin’ of his assumed grandfather in the Adidas trainers, seems to follow suit. However, the context of the Holocaust dislocates the boy’s actions. The commemorative ‘flesh and blood’ in the museum world is not an abstract or noble

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metaphor, for in the concentrationary universe it epitomizes a lived debasing reality. Pulling the symbol of Nazi atrocities down to mundane trainers by a child removed in time from the lived experience of the camps, turns the metaphor around. What was meant to exemplify abject evil becomes a celebratory intimacy, as scoring a goal by wearing grandfather/Adidas proves. Thus, ‘bones, skin and flesh’ is incorporated into the present. In a similar way, as Morahg’s study has shown, the introduction of the fantastic into Holocaust narratives has enabled second-generation writers to incorporate their formative experience of life under the shadow of the Holocaust into Israeli discourse.55 Unlike the characters in the novels discussed by Morahg,56 Keret’s protagonist is not impelled to get to the ‘heart of darkness’; rather, he stumbles upon it unintentionally. As such, Keret’s story illustrates what Marianne Hirsch refers to as post-memory: the structure of inter/trans-generational transmission of trauma, whereby the constitution of personal memories of previous generations is informed by knowledge agencies other than lived experiences, yet are internalized so deeply that they become lived memories.57

The imagined third generation ‘A radical departure from the prevailing cultural norms’ is how Gilead Morahg describes the move of second-generation Hebrew writers in the 1980s from realistic to fantastic modes of Holocaust representations.58 The three literary works discussed in this paper signal another point of departure that might be as radical. They mark a shift from the preoccupation of the second-generation writers with their own struggles with the aftermath of the Holocaust to those of their imagined children; from their position as children of traumatized parents to that of parents. These narratives are their projection of apprehensions and expectations, as their choice of child characters reflects. What future adulthood holds for these children characters remains unknown, not only as a rhetorical device of dramatic amplification, but also as a realistic representation of the questions parents ask about the future of their children. The theme of damaged parenthood which dominates the literary writing of the second generation continues to hover over these works, only here it is the parenthood of the second generation which is the subject of enquiry. Barbash’s novel in particular exemplifies this generational shift by placing the second-generation father, Asaf, as the object of his son’s reflection and scrutiny. Tracing Asaf ’s tragic death to its source, the traumatized survivor-mother, evokes compassion but does not shield the fact of his failing parenthood. To a different degree Liebrecht’s and Keret’s stories also present ineffective parenthood of the second generation: the voice of Miri’s father in ‘Excision’ is drowned out by his wife’s arguments; and the response of the mother in ‘Shoes’ to her son’s dilemma is at best a misunderstanding, while his father is utterly oblivious to it. Although different by nature and degree, the second-generation parents in these works replicate the parenting they have experienced. However deterministic the view of inter-generational transmission is, the construction of the imagined third generation in the three works suggests other possible outcomes. The boy in Keret’s story has found a way to bypass his parents’

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silence and to turn around the imposition of the impersonal commemorative discourse. The trainers made in Germany have been transformed to embody intimacy with the unknown grandfather. Miri in Liebrecht’s story has been subjected to raging traumatic memories, yet the story does not reject a possible affinity with the grandmother. In the story ‘Hat of Glass’ (1988) by Nava Semel, herself a daughter of survivors,59 a survivor grandmother initiates the bond with the third generation as she takes her granddaughter to Poland, to the home she was deported from. Standing in front of her old home she decides not to tell her granddaughter of the baby she had lost and of her first husband. The journey to rekindle historical roots has been hindered by her need to mediate and soften the traumatic memory connected with the house. The return to the past does not fill the profound gap in her biography and her granddaughter hears a story ‘suited’ to her age and generation. Nonetheless, the house at the centre of the censored biography provides the granddaughter with a tangible object of personal memory on which an insight into the past might be built. Semel’s later book And the Rat Laughed (2001) takes the possible bonding even further.60 The granddaughter of a survivor in the novel widely disseminates her grandmother’s account of survival. The possibility of the third generation in these works to renew the bonding with the survivor-grandparent might signal a bridge, however partial, over traumatic ruptures. However, it seems to skip over the second generation, intensifying the sense of inadequate parenting.61 The winding nature of the transmission route from survivors through the second generation and into the third underlines the construction of the latter in the literary imagination. As the trauma and its aftermath meander their way through the generations, its transmission accumulates various agencies of knowledge and mediation which reconfigure and contextualize the initial experiences and their memories. Inevitably, the literary inter-generational transmission engages with the textual community that the first and second generations of survivors have established.62 This ongoing process has informed the imagined third-generation characters in the writing of the second generation and that of writers of the actual/ biographical third generation, as Hannah Yaoz’s study of their poetry testifies to.63 Alongside modifications of symbols and cultural codes that characterize this literature, there is an overwhelming continuity of themes and insistent personal affiliation. This literature perpetuates the significance of the Holocaust as a major constituent of the individual and national psyche, although in different ways. The writing of the second generation, as Keret’s story shows, has offered new and radical modes of representations by breaking through the boundaries of sanctified commemoration. The projection of the inter-generational transmission portrayed by secondgeneration writers has been the subject of polemical deliberations. Some psychological studies argue that third-generation youth exhibit no distinctive characteristics while others claim the opposite.64 Literary critique like that of Ruth Franklin insists on the precedence of authentic and true traumatic experience over its literary representation, leading Franklin to label the second-generation writing ‘identity theft’.65 A striking response to this somewhat circular and recurrent debate over Holocaust representation versus truth is the publication of Yigal Schwartz’s book Hungarian Chorus (2014) in which he encounters his own childhood in a survivors’ family through its literary

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construction by another writer.66 Schwartz’s autobiographical narrative converses with Ruth Almog’s story ‘Dwarves on her Pyjamas’ (1993) based in turn on what he told her about his childhood more than twenty years earlier.67 Re-reading Almog’s literary interpretation of his own life story enables Schwartz, himself a critic of survivors’ literary works, to face the turbulent history of his family. Schwartz’s book is a fascinating study of the inherent tension between the ‘original’ and its representation in any process of transmission and particularly in the context of Holocaust transmission. Questioning the truth or ‘greater truth’ of the two is as futile as the comparisons Franklin draws between the writings of different generations. Rather, the two narratives are testament to what LaCapra has termed ‘founding trauma’, which in the case of Holocaust trauma is its internalization as a personal event whether or not it was experienced personally or by any biographical/familial affiliation.68 Positioning itself at the uniquely individual, disrupted and disruptive seams of the social and cultural fabric, literary imagination forces out the buried ghosts of history. The constant dialogue between the literary representation and the so called ‘true story’ attests to the un-mend-ability of the rupture and its lasting disturbance.

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Yeshurun Avot, 1903–1992, Hebrew poet, ‘Adon Menucha’ (Master of Rest), in Poems (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad [Hebrew], 1990). Aaron Hass, ‘The Third Generation’, in In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 156. Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (London: Vintage, 2005), 3. Ibid., 34. Such as Iris Milner, ‘A Testimony to “The War After”: Remembrance and Its Discontent in Second Generation Literature’, in Israel Studies, Vol. 8, No. 3, Israel and the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, Fall, 2003), 194–213; Iris Milner, Past Present: Biography, Identity and Memory in Second Generation Literature (Tel Aviv : Am Oved [Hebrew], 2003); Gilead Morahg, ‘Breaking Silence: Israel’s Fantastic Fiction of the Holocaust’, in Alan Mintz (ed.), The Boom in Contemporary Israeli Fiction (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1997); Lawrence Langer’s extensive writings on the subject since 1975, to name but a very few. See Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2002); Shoshana Felmann and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (Baltimore, MD, and Oxford: Routledge, 1992). Milner, Past Present, 36–58. Indeed, many of the fictional characters are writers, such as in Benny Barbash, My First Sony, trans. Dalya Bilu (London: Review, 1999); David Grossman, See Under: Love, trans. Betsy Rosenberg (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990); Michal Govrin’s The Name, trans. Barbara Harshav (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998); Rivka Keren’s Anatomia shel Nekama [Anatomy of Revenge] (Tel Aviv : Am Oved, 1993) to name but a few. Grossman, See Under: Love, 190.

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See Iris Milner’s elaborate discussion on this quest as a constituent in the writings of the second generation in Milner, ‘A Testimony to “The War After” ’, 201–204; Milner, Past Present, 92–143. Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 5–6. Suicide in Barbash’s My First Sony; mental/physical collapse in Grossman’s See Under: Love; death in Savyon Liebrecht’s ‘Hayuta’s Engagement Party’; mental illness in Kaniuk’s Adam Resurrected; Keren’s Anatomy of Revenge; Nava Semel’s ‘Hunger’, in Kova Zechuchit [Hat of Glass] (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim [Hebrew], 1988); to name but a few. Or ending with metaphors of emptiness and death like the home to which the protagonist returns from her journey into the past in Avigur-Rotem’s Heatwave and Crazy Birds. As Marianne Hirsch argues, survivors might be silent but their families are noisy spaces, filled with disturbing sounds that have to be made sense of: Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today, 29, 1 (2008), 103–128. Scholarship on survivors’ parenthood from psychological/psychotherapeutic and literary perspectives is widely available. This research points out the difficulties or failures of parenthood expressed as either over protectiveness or detachment and disassociation. See Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust, trans. Naomi Goldblum (London: Routledge, 1992); Milner, Past Present; Milner, ‘A Testimony to “The War After” ’. In Grossman’s novel See Under: Love, for example, the traumatic memories become a contagious disease easily spread by physical touch. Consequently, the parents of Momik, the child protagonist, avoid touching him. Helen Epstein’s collection of testimonies Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (New York: Penguin Books, 1979) was the first publication of its kind. Dina Wardi’s Memorial Candles was one of the first to conceptualize the profile of the second generation. Wardi’s seminal work was followed by Ilany Kogan’s The Cry of Mute Children: A Psychoanalytic Perspective of the Second Generation of the Holocaust (London: Free Association Books Ltd, 1995). The intense transmission of memory from mother to baby/child is central to Dinora Pines’s ‘The Impact of the Holocaust on the Second Generation’, in A Woman’s Unconscious Use of Her Body: A Psychoanalytical Perspective (London: Routledge, 2010), 171–187. Such, for example, was the case of a survivor’s daughter who believed she had inherited her birthmark from her mother. Only years later she realized that the marks on her mother’s arm were not a birth mark but the deep scars left by repeated medical experiments she was subjected to in the camps (Wardi, Memorial Candles, 57–59). Leah Aini, ‘Until the Whole Guard Has Passed’, in Risa Domb (ed.), New Women’s Writing from Israel, trans. Philip Simpson (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1996), 11–20. The protagonist of the story is a pregnant married woman who survived the Holocaust hidden in a convent. The nuns taught her to clap her hands to overcome the fear of the Nazi patrolling guard. The passage of time, the girl is now a woman, and the geographical distance, she lives now in Israel, did not alleviate the fear and every day at certain times she vigorously claps her hands to the embarrassment of her husband. He, in turn, dreams at night of his baby boy clapping his hands. In Aini’s story the mother’s trauma becomes part of her child’s DNA. Nava Semel, ‘Mizvadot’ [Suitcases], in Kova Zechuchit [Hat of Glass], 83–104.

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Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond On Aini’s story, see Talila Kosh-Zohar, Ethics of Memory: The Voice of Mnemosine and Second Generation Holocaust Literature (Tel Aviv : Hakibbutz Hameuchad [Hebrew], 2009), 73–75; Milner, Past Present, 172. Talila Kosh Zohar points out that it is usually women survivors who exhibit physical symptoms of the traumatizing past while men survivors resemble ‘normal’ behaviour. See Kosh-Zohar, Ethics of Memory. Further examples include Lily Perry’s novel Golem Ba’maagal [Golem in the Circle]: ‘In the Stav family home people don’t walk – they hover in hysterical quiet, usually close to the walls. Therefore, it was only natural that little Ami and I would adopt the nervousness that was seeping the air.’ Lily Perry, Golem Ba’ma’agal [Golem in the Circle] (Jerusalem: Keter [Hebrew], 1988), 12. In Semel’s ‘Hunger’ the protagonist assimilates her mother’s compulsive storage of food, although she is aware of it and talks about it with her mother’s doctor. Momik, the child, in Grossman’s See Under: Love, observes his so-called Grandfather Anshel in order to find the story hidden in his body. Later on as the adult writer Shlomo Neuman, he tries to tell the story, to rescue Anshel’s story from being locked in his body. Milner, Past Present, 92–112. Awareness of the constructive nature of memory extends to survivors’ writings as well. See, for example, Aharon Appelfeld’s Masot Beguf Riahon [Essays in First Person] (Jerusalem: Hasifriya Hatziyonit [Hebrew], 1979), 36–37; Yigal Schwartz, Aharon Appelfeld: From Individual Lament to Tribal Eternity (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 2001). On the act of writing in the works of the second generation, see Milner, Past Present, 160–166. Aharon Megged, ‘The Name’, trans. Minna Givton in Joel Blocker (ed.), Israeli Stories: A Selection of the Best Writing in Israel Today (New York: Schoken Books, 1965), 87–106. Further references will be given in parenthesis in the main text. The original story was published in Hebrew in Megged’s collection of stories Israel Chaverim [Israel Is Friends] (Tel Aviv : Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1955). On the iconic status of the story and its inclusion in the school curriculum in Israel, see Yaffah Berlovitch (ed.), Aharon Megged: Selected Stories (Tel Aviv : Zmora-Bitan [Hebrew], 1989), 7–33. The autobiographical aspect is widespread in the writing of the second generation. Some critics believe that the writing of this group of authors is their personal therapeutic way to process their experiences as sons and daughters of survivors. See, for example, Dan Laor ‘The Homing Pigeon of the Holocaust’, Haaretz, 21 February 1986 [Hebrew]; Yael Feldman ‘ “Whose Story Is It Anyway?”: Ideology and Psychology in the Representations of the Shoah in Israeli Literature’, in Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 223–245; Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles. Savyon Liebrecht, ‘Excision’, trans. Marganit Weinberger-Rotman, in Apples from the Desert (London: Loki Books, 1998) 93–98. Further references will be given in parenthesis in the main text. The original publication was in Hebrew: ‘Kerita’, in Susim al Kvish Geha’a [Horses on the Highway] (Tel Aviv : Sifriyat Poalim, 1988). Barbash, My First Sony. Further references will be given in parenthesis in the main text. The original publication was in Hebrew: My First Sony (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1994).

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Etgar Keret, ‘Shoes’, trans. Marganit Weinberger-Rotman, in Etgar Keret, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories (London: Toby Press, 2004), 41–43. Further references will be given in parenthesis in the main text. The original publication was in Hebrew: Etgar Keret, ‘Na’alayim’ [Shoes], in Ga’aguay Le’Kissinger [Missing Kissinger] (Tel Aviv : Zemora-Bitan, 1994). Legislation of the law of Holocaust commemoration was passed in the Knesset in 1953. However, the initial archival documentation had started already in 1946. Megged’s preoccupation with the devastation of European Jewry during the Holocaust has been a predominated feature of his early works, as Nurit Govrin argues in her latest study. Stories written in the early 1940s, at the heart of the Holocaust, express deep identification with the victims and horror at their fate. Those stories preceded the publication of ‘The Name’ and were not included in the collected works. See Nurit Govrin, Aharon Megged: The Grace of Life: Portrait of an Israeli as a Hebrew Writer: A Condensed Biography (1920–1950) (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2011). The term ‘memorial candle’ was coined by Dina Wardi. It refers to the need of survivor parents to ‘compensate’ and relive that which was lost. See Wardi, Memorial Candles, 26–47. On the debates surrounding the attitudes of Megged’s contemporaries to the Holocaust and survivors’ testimonies, see Avner Holtzman, ‘ “They Are Different People”. Holocaust Survivors as Reflected in the Fiction of the Generation of 1948’, trans. Ralph Mandel, in Yad Vashem Studies, XXX (2002), 337–368; Nurith Govrin, ‘The Holocaust in Hebrew Literature of the Young Generation’, in Reading the Generations, vol. 2 (2002) 370–387; Gershon Shaked, Modern Hebrew Fiction (Indiana University Press, 2000), 172–174. Megged’s family immigrated to pre-state Israel when he was six years old. His memories of life in Eastern Europe were vague. Nonetheless, this autobiographical element explains at least partially, his deep affinity with Jewish life in Diaspora, as Govrin argues in her book, Aharon Megged. The writings of survivors from within the Holocaust only started to emerge in Israel from the mid-1950s on, such as the writings of Aharon Appelfeld, Ben Zion Tomer and Shamai Golan. Those writers came to Israel as children/adolescent survivors. They began writing in Hebrew once they had acquired the language in various educational institutions in Israel, where they were placed on their arrival. On the changes in the representations of the Holocaust in Israel, see, for example, Geoffrey Hartman, ‘ “Darkness Visible”: On the Constructions of the Holocaust Memory’, Alpayim, 10 (1994), 68–92 [Hebrew]; Avner Holtzman, ‘Crossing Border’, Effes Shtayim (Spring, 1992), 119–120 [Hebrew]; Dan Laor, ‘Changes to the Image of the Holocaust: Notes on the Literary Aspect’, Katedra, 69 (1993), 160–164 [Hebrew]; Gershon Shaked, The New Tradition: Essays on Modern Hebrew Literature (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2006), 36–47; Yael Zrubavel, ‘Masada and the Holocaust as Counter-metaphors’, in Recovered Roots (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 70–76. As is evident in David Grossman’s interview, ‘Confronting the Beast’, The Guardian, 15 September 2007. Grossman’s testimony in both interview and his novel See Under: Love attests to the expansion of the term beyond the biological parameters of the originally therapeutic term ‘Second Generation’. The term has been used since the 1980s as a generational concept, referring to the cultural discourse of the generations born after the Holocaust. On the concept of the cultural second generation, see Milner, Past Present, 25–35.

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Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Although this chapter does not discuss the literary works of the third generation, the above observations are evident in those works. Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated (London: Penguin, 2002) revolves around the attempt of the protagonist to trace his grandfather’s experiences in the Holocaust; Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York: Harper Perry, 2006) traces a similar route to the beginning and end of his family members in Ukraine; Nir Baram’s Anashim Tovim [Good People] (Tel Aviv : Am Oved [Hebrew], 2010) takes place in Berlin and Leningrad during the Second World War. Milner, Past Present, 72–81. In Gila Almagor’s autobiographical narrative, The Summer of Aviya, the survivor mother shaves off her daughter’s hair in a similar scene (Tel Aviv: Am Oved [Hebrew], 1986). In translation (London: Collins, 1991). Henya realizes the severity of her action and apologizes to Miri: ‘You know I have only Zvika (her son) and one Miri in the whole world’ (96). Similar family dynamics are depicted in Liebrecht’s ‘Hayuta’s Engagement Party’ where the daughter-in-law of the survivor expresses her dismay and intolerance of her father-in-law’s memories. Like in ‘Excision’ the collapse of repressed memories is triggered by an event in the present and takes over. See Liebrecht, Apples, 81–92. Reading Asaf as protagonist is common in most of the existing scholarship on the novel. See, for example, Milner, Past and Present; Leah Or, A Celebration of Disintegration: A Study of the Nuclear Family in Some Israeli Novels (Tel Aviv : Or Am [Hebrew], 2002); Vera Korhi-Shaphir, ‘Searching for the Lost Present: On Time in Benny Barbash’s My First Sony’, Iton 77, 18 (1995), 24–27 [Hebrew]. Hannah Naveh’s analysis offers an outstanding and uncommon view, as it looks at the novel within the conext of child memoirs whereby Yotam as well as his tape recorder are its primary concern. See Hannah Naveh, ‘Things Fall Apart’, MHL, 14 (1995), 18–21. Armed with his tape recorder Yotam witnesses it all from his eavesdropping position on the balcony. Afraid of reproach after his hideout is discovered, he is gratefully surprised by Asaf ’s reaction: ‘and he held out both his hands and pulled me to him and hugged me tight, without saying a word’ (149). The bond between father and son has tightened in face of the collapse of testimonies and the ensuing despair. Naveh, ‘Things Fall Apart’, 20. Yotam tries to record the echoes of his grandfather’s laughter in the Dead Sea. This is one illustration of telling families that repudiates the assumption of survivors’ silence. However, both non-telling and telling families are silent in the sense that their testimonies of trauma are fragmented and non-coherent by definition. See, for example, the father’s narrative in Art Spiegelman’s Maus (London: Penguin, 1986), 158–159; Felman and Laub, Testimony, 75–93. Both writers are children of survivors. Liebrecht was born in 1948 in Munich and came with her parents to Israel in 1950; Keret was born in Israel in 1967. His name means ‘challenge’ in Hebrew. The museum is not fictional. It is a centre dedicated to Holocaust education and was built to commemorate the rich Jewish history of the region from the late eleventh century until the Holocaust. Similarly, the boy protagonist in Keret’s story ‘Siren’ uses the siren announcing the two minutes silence on Holocaust Memorial day to get away from the boys who bully him. In both stories not complying with the sanctified commemoration is not an act of disrespect. On the contrary, it deepens the characters’ empathy. In Keret, The Bus Driver, 57–60.

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For the evocative power of ordinary family photographs in this context, see Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, Post Memory (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997). On the use of the grotesque and its effects in Keret’s works, see: Avraham Balaban, A Different Wave in Israeli Fiction: Postmodern Israeli Fiction (Jerusalem: Keter [Hebrew], 1995); Adia Mendelson-Maoz, ‘Extreme Situations – Horrendous and Grotesque – in the Works of Castel-bloom and Keret’, in Dapim Research in Literature (Haifa University, 1998), 269–296 [Hebrew]; Shalgi and Stepak, Reading Keret: Analysis of Etgar Keret’s Stories (Tel Aviv : Ankori [Hebrew], 2002). Morahg, ‘Breaking Silence’, 150–152. David Grossman’s See Under: Love, Itamar Levi’s The Legend of the Sad Lakes (Jerusalem: Keter, 1989) [Hebrew], and Dorit Peleg’s Una (Tel Aviv : Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1988) [Hebrew]. Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, 106–107. Morahg, ‘Breaking the Silence’, 144–145; In similar words, ‘crossing the border’, but from a contradictory perspective, Avner Holtzman has expressed his criticism of the attempt of this generation’s writing to penetrate the traumatic experience, which he sees as an immoral presumption. See Avner Holtzman, ‘Crossing Borders’, Effes Shtayim (Spring 1992), 119–120 [Hebrew]. Nava Semel, ‘Hat of Glass’, in Risa Domb (ed.), New Women’s Writing from Israel, trans. Miriam Shlesinger (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1996), 186–201. First published in Hebrew in 1988 (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim). Nava Semel, And the Rat Laughed (Melbourne: Hybrid Publishers, 2008). First published in Hebrew in 2001 (Tel Aviv: Yediot Acharonot). In Thane Rosenbaum’s novel The Golems of Gotham (New York: HarperCollins, 2002) a third-generation girl liberates her father, a survivor’s son, from his writing block by setting the ghosts of her grandparents’ trauma free to roam in New York. The girl might seem to bond with her family’s history; however, her main concern is her father whom she tries to rescue. As is evident even in the writing of survivors, such as Aharon Appelfeld’s The Story of a Life (New York: Schoken Books, 2004). Hannah Yaoz, ‘Notes on the Third Generation of Holocaust Poets in Israel’, Iton 77, 36 (1983), 22–23 [Hebrew]; Three Generations of Hebrew Poetry on the Holocaust (Tel Aviv: Eked, 1990) [Hebrew]. For example, Bar-On’s research links the degrees of inter-generational transmission to wider issues in the family of survivors and the wider social and cultural context: Daniel Bar-On, Fear and Hope: Life Stories of Five Israeli Families of Holocaust Survivors, Three Generations in a Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Abraham Sagi’s research claims that the third generation of survivors are no different than any of their peer group: Abraham Sagi, et al., ‘Does Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Skip a Generation?’, Attachment and Human Development, 10, 2 (June 2008), 105–121. Yael Danieli’s book portrays diverse and intense manifestations of intergenerational transmission of the Holocaust: Yael Danieli (ed.), International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), 21–118. Ruth Franklin accuses the writers of the second generation of ‘stealing’ the trauma experienced by survivors. The literary protagonist of the second generation is driven not by the initial traumatic experiences but by the distance and the silence that obscure them. See Ruth Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

106 66 67

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Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Yigal Schwartz, Makhelah Hungarit [Hungarian Chorus] (Tel Aviv : Dvir [Hebrew], 2014). Ruth Almog, ‘Dwarves on Her Pyjamas’, in Risa Domb (ed.), Contemporary Israeli Women’s Writing (London and Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), 79–106. First published in Hebrew in Tikun Omanuti [Invisible Mending] (Tel Aviv: Keter, 1993). Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 66–67.

7

Disturbing the Past: The Representation of the Waldheim Affair in Robert Schindel’s Der Kalte Katya Krylova

The Waldheim affair of 1985–88 was a turning point in Austrian society, sparking the beginning of a belated process of coming to terms with the country’s National Socialist past. The debates that the exposure of the presidential candidate Dr Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past provoked, signalled the end of the post-war era in Austria and led to ‘eine massive Umwertung zentraler Werte’ (a wide-ranging reassessment of central values), as Robert Schindel has asserted in an interview.1 The Waldheim affair constituted a significant disturbance of a past that had been repressed during the previous four decades behind the myth of Austria having been ‘the first victim of Hitlerite aggression’,2 which had been raised to the level of Austrian national identity in the post-war era. Robert Schindel’s Der Kalte (The Cold One, 2013) is the first literary treatment of the Waldheim affair, which, nearly three decades on, has become historical.3 However, as this chapter will demonstrate, by drawing attention to the events of the late 1980s in Austria and the disturbance of the past that they provoked, Schindel’s fictional narrative in turn disturbs and challenges our interpretation of this period in Austrian history, refusing to lay the ghosts awakened during that time to rest. Ultimately, Schindel’s performative interventions, reinscribing aspects of the Waldheim affair, serve to draw attention to the work that remains to be done in order for Austria to fully confront its past. Der Kalte is Robert Schindel’s second novel in his planned trilogy focusing on the legacy of the Second World War and the Holocaust in Austria, the first part of which, Gebürtig (Born-Where), appeared in 1992 and was made into a highly successful film by Schindel and the director Lukas Stepanik, released in 2002.4 It is unclear when the third volume, given the provisional title Genia und die lichte Zukunft, will appear.5 Schindel was born in April 1944 in Bad Hall to Austrian-Jewish communists. He was able to escape the Holocaust, following his parents’ arrest near Linz and subsequent deportation to Auschwitz, thanks to the efforts of an infant nurse who handed him over to a National Socialist Volkswohlfahrtheim (People’s Welfare home).6 Here Schindel spent the first year of his life, before his mother (who survived Auschwitz and Ravensbrück) was able The research presented in this chapter was made possible by the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust.

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to return to Vienna and find her son in August 1945.7 Schindel’s father was murdered at Dachau in March 1945. Schindel began his literary career writing poetry, but it was the publication of his second novel, Gebürtig, that led to his literary breakthrough, a novel that has subsequently been hailed as the manifesto of a new Viennese Jewish literature, particularly in Anglophone scholarship.8 In Gebürtig Schindel explored the problematic relationships between Jews and non-Jews of the second generation in post-war Austria, and the lack of a proper confrontation with the National Socialist past in the country, symbolized through the novel-within-a-novel which sees exiled composer Hermann Gebirtig make a painful return to Vienna to testify against notorious Oberscharführer (senior squad leader) Anton Egger, only for the Schädelknacker (skull-cracker) to be acquitted. While the narrative time of the novel, set in the early 1980s, does not extend to the Waldheim affair proper,9 the film adaptation, produced nearly a decade later, makes a number of subtle references to the political scandal, in the wake of which Gebürtig was undoubtedly written, through the film’s dialogue and mise en scène.10 The Waldheim affair was, in many ways, a coming of age for artists and intellectuals of Schindel’s generation, which was heavily involved in a protest movement against the presidential candidate. This group, predominantly, but not exclusively, made up of those born after 1945,11 was ultimately instrumental in the formation of a civil society and oppositional culture in Austria, a movement in which Austrian Jews played a significant role.12 Confronted with the open anti-semitism that the Waldheim affair brought to the surface, many Austrian Jewish writers and intellectuals, such as Doron Rabinovici and Robert Menasse, became heavily involved in the protest movement against Waldheim. Austrian Jews of the second generation, unlike their parents, were no longer prepared to ‘keep a low profile’,13 and ‘contemplate[d] how to coexist with and eventually be accepted by the Catholic majority in an increasingly anti-Semitic climate’.14 Instead, ‘a highly visible, discursive Jewish culture’ emerged in opposition to Waldheim’s candidacy and presidency,15 with Austrian Jews affirming ‘a Jewish space’ in public discourse for the first time in post-war Austria.16 Schindel himself has asserted that he only played a marginal role in the ‘Neues Österreich’ (New Austria) protest movement (the leading opposition movement to Waldheim), founded in 1986.17 However, the writer has emphasized time and again the significance of the Waldheim affair and the protest movement it sparked for Austria’s historical development, asserting that Austria would not be what it is today without the debates which took place around the ‘Gedächtniskünstler’ (memory artist) Kurt Waldheim.18 It is this fascination with both the figure of Waldheim and the processes his candidacy unleashed in Austria that is the subject of Schindel’s Der Kalte (2013). Initially an uncontroversial presidential candidate for the Österreichische Volkspartei (Austrian People’s Party), Dr Kurt Waldheim ‘seemed someone who would make an ideal Austrian president’ because of his previous credentials, having served as Austrian foreign minister in the Austrian People’s Party between 1968 and 1970 and two terms as UN secretary general between 1972 and 1981.19 Waldheim went into the presidential election as the clear favourite,20 campaigning under the slogan ‘ein Österreicher, dem die Welt vertraut’ (an Austrian whom the world trusts),21 a motto that was to come spectacularly undone when Waldheim’s past was uncovered. In his autobiography Im Glaspalast der Weltpolitik (In the Eye of the Storm), published in 1985, he glossed over

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his period in the Wehrmacht, claiming to have been injured on the Russian Front and returned to Vienna in 1941, where after his recovery in 1942 he remained until the end of the war to complete his doctorate in law.22 However, in March 1986, Hubertus Czernin, investigative journalist for the profil news weekly, who had found Waldheim’s Wehrstammkarte (military record card), published a major expose of Waldheim’s wartime record which showed his membership of Nazi organizations, namely the SAReitersturm (SA riding unit) and the Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (National Socialist German Students’ League) from 1938 to 1945.23 In an article published in The New York Times on 4 March 1986, it emerged that Waldheim had served on the staff of General Alexander Löhr (a convicted war criminal who was executed in 1947) between 1942 and 1944, when brutal atrocities against Yugoslav partisans and deportations of Greek Jews were taking place.24 Waldheim had elided more than two years of his life from his autobiography. Following these revelations, Western media organizations and the World Jewish Congress claimed that Waldheim was a war criminal.25 This turned out not to have been the case and made Austrians react strongly to these accusations. Waldheim defended himself throughout by claiming that he had only done what his fellow countrymen at the time had done, his ‘duty’. Waldheim’s camp also resorted to anti-semitism to fend off attacks, concentrating their efforts above all on the World Jewish Congress, and dismissing American media criticism as coming from the ‘Ostküste’ (East Coast), which played on historic prejudice against ‘Ostjuden’ (Eastern European Jews).26 Waldheim’s campaign posters asserted ‘Wir Österreicher wählen, wen wir wollen!’ (We Austrians vote for whom we choose!) and ‘Jetzt erst recht!’ (Now more than ever!).27 The Waldheim affair polarized Austrian society, prompting a belated and grotesque confrontation with Austria’s Nazi past directly proportional to its repression since the Second World War. On 8 June 1986 Waldheim was elected president. The Waldheim affair did not go away at this point, however. An informal ban was imposed by Western governments on meetings with Waldheim, and the only countries he visited throughout his six-year-term were the Vatican, Cyprus and several Arab countries.28 Waldheim was similarly put on the US Watch List of suspected war criminals, and therefore not permitted to enter the United States.29 In February 1988 an international historians’ commission, which had been called to examine Waldheim’s war service, stopped short of identifying Waldheim as a war criminal, but concluded that he must have been very well informed about Nazi atrocities committed in the Balkans and deportations of Jews from Salonika.30 In the course of the historians’ commission’s investigations, Michael Graff, then General Secretary of the Austrian People’s Party, expressed the view, in an interview conducted in November 1987, that ‘Solange nicht bewiesen ist, daß er eigenhändig sechs Juden erwürgt hat, gibt es kein Problem’ (As long as it is not proved that he [Waldheim] strangled six Jews with his own bare hands, there’s no problem).31 Graff was subsequently made to resign from his post. Waldheim’s initial covering up of his Nazi past, followed by denial of any wrongdoing, may be seen as symptomatic of a country that founded its post-war identity on the Lebenslüge (grand delusion) of being ‘the first free country to fall a victim to Hitlerite aggression’, as stated in the Moscow Declaration of 30 October 1943.32 Despite irrefutable signs of Austrian participation in all echelons of the Nazi war machine and

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in the Holocaust (Tony Judt has asserted that half of all concentration camp guards were Austrians, despite Austria having just one-tenth of Germany’s pre-war population33), Austria was not held to account for its execution of Nazi crimes after the Second World War. The Lebenslüge of Austria having been ‘the first victim’ of Hitlerite aggression was born out of the marriage of convenience of Western Allies seeking to gain Austrian support in the emerging Cold War and the Austrian desire to avoid being held to account for the crimes committed during the Nazi era.34 The Waldheim affair made the ‘first victim’ myth untenable, leading to a confrontation and reassessment of the country’s past, although it took until 1991 for the Austrian Government to officially refute the myth that Austria had been ‘Hitler’s first victim’ and to highlight Austria’s share of responsibility for crimes committed during the Nazi era.35 However, a survey conducted in Austria in 2014 by the SORA Institute for Social Research and Consulting found that forty-two per cent of respondents still adhere to the view that Austria was the first victim of fascism.36 The Waldheim scandal, dominating Austria’s political stage in the late 1980s, also reverberated in the cultural arena. Schindel identifies three Kulturkämpfe (cultural battles) in total, which dominated that period: the Waldheim affair itself; the premiere of Thomas Bernhard’s play Heldenplatz, which addressed Austria’s unconfronted National Socialist past and provoked a scandal at its premiere at Vienna’s Burgtheater on 4 November 1988; and, in the same month, the unveiling of Alfred Hrdlicka’s controversial Mahnmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus (Monument against War and Fascism).37 In Der Kalte, Schindel presents the different spheres of Austrian politics, journalism and culture nestling side by side, particularly through their topographic proximity in a capital city whose main political and cultural institutions may be located within a one-mile radius. The various tribulations of the Burgtheater, Vienna’s national stage, are given as much weight as the scandal surrounding the figure of Johann Wais, the Austrian presidential candidate. This is symptomatic of a nation where historically the theatre has had as much, if not more importance than the country’s political institutions.38 Robert Schindel’s Der Kalte effortlessly spans the political and cultural arenas in Vienna where the Waldheim affair played out, including the chancellery, the headquarters of various political parties, the Burgtheater, the Musikverein, numerous cafes and bars, and the private apartments of the protagonists. Yet Schindel’s novel is not only focused on Austria’s capital, but takes in the Austrian countryside, as well as Israel and New York, in order to trace the reverberations of the Waldheim affair upon the Austrian nation and Austria’s image across the world. The places and localities in Schindel’s novel are rendered in great detail, which has provoked criticism in one review of the novel.39 This exact rendering of locality, place and milieu (to the extent that the novel, published by the German publishing house Suhrkamp, has a sixteen-page glossary aimed specifically at the non-Austrian reader), means that Der Kalte may be ascribed to the genre of the Viennese city novel, and indeed the novel in its detailed representation of Vienna’s topography has drawn comparisons with the work of Heimito von Doderer.40 The novel has also been widely read as a Schlüsselroman (roman-a-clef),41 although Schindel himself has rejected this label.42 However, in common with the genre of the Schlüsselroman, Der Kalte’s success as a novel undoubtedly rests on the reader’s identification of the fictionalized and

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very-thinly-veiled characters and events, such as, for example, the figure of Johann Wais, who is unmistakably modelled on Waldheim. The characters who populate Der Kalte are drawn from three generations; the generation who experienced the Second World War and the Holocaust first-hand, their sons and daughters (the second post-war generation), and in the case of sixth-formers Stefan Keyntz and Dolly Segal, the third post-war generation. Through these diverse constellations Schindel is able to show the effect of the Waldheim affair at every level of Austrian society. The narrative of Der Kalte coalesces around the story of Edmund Fraul, a (fictional) former Communist and concentration-camp survivor, who was Lagerschreiber (camp writer) for the SS-Standortartzt (SS doctor) Eduard Wirth in Auschwitz. Fraul, loosely modelled on the Austrian resistance fighter Hermann Langbein,43 is married to Rosa, ‘eine unpolitische Jüdin’ (an unpolitical Jewess) (64), who also survived Auschwitz. Despite never having seen each other in Auschwitz the couple were drawn together by their shared past. Edmund Fraul is, due to the nature of his past experiences, emotionally cold and distant, giving the novel its title, and is unable to forge a bond with his son Karl, an actor, who regards him as self-righteous and an ‘antifaschistische[s] Heldenarschloch’ (antifascist hero-arsehole) (540). In the course of the novel, however, Fraul becomes less emotionally distant through his acquaintance, and ultimately friendship, with Wilhelm Rosinger, who was formerly an SS-officer at Auschwitz. Having been detected by Fraul and the ‘Nazijäger’ (Nazi-hunter) (54) David Lebensart, arrested in 1960 and tried in the Auschwitz Trials, Rosinger was sentenced to three-and-a-half years’ imprisonment, which he had already served by the time of the trial verdict. In Rosinger’s self-perception he belongs to the ‘Wichten, nach denen sich nach fünfundvierzig keiner umgeschaut hat’ (the little wretches that no one looked for after 1945) (55), while former concentration camp inmates had described him ‘als Menschen in SS-Uniform’ (a human being in an SS uniform) (55) at Rosinger’s trial. Fraul’s conversations with Rosinger about Auschwitz function as a talking cure, allowing Fraul, in particular, to free himself from his nightmares of the past. Throughout the novel, the past is presented as being omnipresent for Fraul and his wife, Rosa: Der Novemberregen fiel auf die ganze Wienerstadt ... und der November von Auschwitz-Birkenau mit seinem stürzenden Himmel ... Wenn der Himmel in Wien im November sich öffnete, dann prasselte all das Vergangene herunter wie zu anderen Zeiten auch (The November rain fell on the whole city of Vienna ... and the November of Auschwitz-Birkenau with its pouring sky ... When the heavens opened in Vienna in November, then all the bygone times pattered down, as at other times as well) (32–33)

The past imposes itself on the Frauls with a cyclical regularity, with the climatological invariability of November rain reminding Edmund Fraul of autumn in Auschwitz. Similarly, Fraul habitually sees former friends and adversaries from his time in the concentration camps among Vienna’s pedestrians. The former SS-doctor Wilhelm Rosinger is also haunted by the past. His dreams are plagued by the voices of the children he murdered in Auschwitz.

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The furore surrounding the presidential candidacy of Johann Wais does not provoke a strong reaction from Fraul and Rosinger. They are too preoccupied with working through their own past from that time to be overly concerned with that of Wais. Fraul is not surprised by the scandal since, as he describes to journalist Roman Apolloner, he views his own generation as irrevocably blighted by the National Socialist era: der Nationalsozialismus hat meine ganze Generation verdorben, ihr gesamtes Denken und Handeln ist mit Wegschieben, Verdrängen und Lügen beschäftigt ... Meine Generation ist verloren. Wir müssen ihr Abtreten abwarten und höchstens darum kämpfen, dass sie nicht den Träumen ihrer Jugend treu bleibt und die früheren Zustände wiederherzustellen versucht. (National Socialism ruined my whole generation, its entire thought-patterns and actions are geared towards pushing aside, repression and lying ... My generation is lost. We have to wait for them to make their exit and, at the very most, see to it that they don’t remain true to the dreams of their youth and try to turn the clock back.) (250–251)

Fraul is not surprised by Wais’s lying, which he sees as symptomatic for that of many of his generation, describing Wais as ‘ein normaler Österreicher’ (an ordinary Austrian) among his own kind (250). Fraul pursues his efforts to find and bring old Nazi criminals to justice through his work in Vienna’s historical archives, and has little time for what he sees as the self-righteous anger of the younger generation, advising the journalist Apolloner to join with others to oppose Wais (252), rather than merely lamenting the state of Austrian politics. He himself is absolutely convinced of his own moral rectitude in his actions as a resistance fighter during the Second World War, and advocates that Apolloner’s generation should fight resurgent Nazism with the same level of commitment (393). Other figures belonging to Fraul’s generation include his wife Rosa, the sole person to survive the Holocaust in her family, who tries to avoid being overwhelmed by painful memories of the past through her devotion to her son and through losing herself in her work, cataloguing books in the backroom of a bookshop. For Rosa, unlike her husband, the past is not something she can draw anything positive from, and it is something that she tries her utmost to supress. However, even she cannot escape the precarious political climate in the country, and is confronted with the antisemitism unleashed by the Waldheim affair while running an errand. When passing the Stephansplatz (Vienna’s central square) in order to pick up a book from a nearby distribution centre, she finds herself in the middle of a demonstration for and against Waldheim. Here she overhears an elderly Austrian, wearing a traditional Styrian hat, advise a young man, who is handing out leaflets against Waldheim, that he should not be helping ‘die Juden’ (the Jews) since ‘die haben doch eh alle auf ihrer Seite’ (they have everyone on their side anyway) (368). Rosa intercedes, telling the man to be quiet, at which point she is subjected to anti-semitic abuse on the basis of her appearance, with the elderly man echoing the racial stereotyping propagated during the Nazi era: ‘Da ist ja eine. Dieses Gesicht. Das sieht man sofort. Merkst du das, Burscherl?’ (There’s one. That face. One sees it straightaway. Do you notice it, lad?) (369). In this manner,

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Schindel draws attention to the experience of many Jews living in Austria in the late 1980s, who had to face increased anti-semitism in the wake of the Waldheim affair. Rosinger, the repentant ex-SS officer, is another representative of the war generation, who tries to provide Fraul with details of surviving Nazis. Through his Nazi-sympathizing sister he is connected to the dark underworld of unapologetic Nazis who meet annually at Carinthia’s Ulrichsberg, and who are given new hope by the ascent of Jupp Toplitzer (clearly modelled on Jörg Haider), new leader of the Austrian Freedom Party. Mountains and the Alpine landscape, with their perennial association with Austrian identity and the Alpine Republic,44 take on a central function in Der Kalte, as was the case in Schindel’s earlier novel Gebürtig (1992). In Gebürtig the notorious Ebensee Schädelknacker (skull-cracker) Anton Egger was discovered by the former resistance fighter Karl Ressel and his daughter Susanne during a walk on the Rax mountain range. In Der Kalte we see Egger meet his end on the Rax, when he decides to flee to Argentina due to the resumed efforts of Nazi hunters during the Waldheim affair to track down Nazi criminals. Deciding to walk through the mountains on foot before travelling to the airport, from where he would travel to Bariloche with his wife, the former skull-cracker slips and falls on a rock, fracturing his skull in the process. In this instance at least, Fraul’s thesis about the need to wait for perpetrators of his generation to meet their end, is proven correct. Other members of the generation who experienced the Second World War directly include the sculptor of the Denkmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus (Memorial against War and Fascism) Herbert Krieglach, whose father was arrested for socialist activities in 1938 and sent to the Dachau concentration camp for two months (201); the Czernowitzborn architect Ernst Segal, the only one in his family to survive the Holocaust, who decides to take his family away to Israel immediately upon Wais’s election; and the star-columnist of the populist right-wing newspaper Die Stunde, Martin Moldaschl, who launches an anti-semitic campaign against Waldheim’s detractors, and frequently dreams about his experiences of fighting in Hitler’s army on the Eastern Front (408). In this manner, Schindel shows the responses of the war generation to the Waldheim affair to be irrevocably shaped by their experiences in the Second World War and, most importantly, by their attitude to these at the time. For this generation in Der Kalte the Waldheim affair constitutes a continuation of the unconfronted legacy of the Second World War and the Holocaust in displaced form. Displacement, which Freud saw as symptomatic of a repressed trauma,45 is exemplified in Der Kalte through the finding of Johann Wais’s Wehrstammkarte (military record card), with the intrepid journalist Apolloner rightly assuming ‘dass die Karte nicht verschwunden, sondern woanders verborgen war’ (that the card had not disappeared, but was hidden somewhere else) (212). These words closely echo Freud’s ideas about the psyscho-logic of trauma, whereby the repressed traumatic symptom must eventually manifest itself, albeit in another time and place, ‘an eine andere Stelle’ (at another point), ‘anderswohin’ (somewhere else).46 It is this belated manifestation of a trauma, repressed by the war generation, which Der Kalte is concerned with. The second post-war generation in Der Kalte is shown to be deeply critical of Wais’s (Waldheim’s) candidacy and presidency, whether this is expressed in political action or merely in private circles of friends and acquaintances. These include Roman

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Apolloner, a journalist who publishes an exposé of Wais’s wartime record; the doctor and political activist Boaz Samueli, and cultural journalist Judith Zischka, who found an opposition movement to Wais, under the name of Club Diderot: das andere Österreich (Club Diderot: the other Austria); and Johannes Tschonkovits, secretary of the (socialist) Austrian Chancellor, who has an ideological interest in defaming the presidential candidate of the opposition party. The banker-cum-writer Emanuel Katz and poet Paul Hirschfeld are similarly exercised about Wais in private conversations in Vienna’s fashionable bars, but while Hirschfeld decides to join the Club Diderot in combatting Wais, Katz merely takes refuge in humour and irony. Meanwhile the ensemble of actors on Vienna’s foremost stage, the Burgtheater, led by director Dietger Schönn, act in a number of plays selected to draw the audience’s attention to the country’s political situation. The opposition to Waldheim is presented in Der Kalte largely as a generational conflict between the war generation and their descendants, as the following monologue by Apolloner illustrates: Da wachsen wir auf im Nachkrieg unter den Blicken einer zugleich stummen und verlogenen Generation. Wie die sich herausputzten, nachdem sie erst dem Führer zugelaufen waren, auf sein Geheiß sowohl die Andersdenkenden denunziert, die Juden verjagt und umgebracht hatten oder es billigend in Kauf genommen hatten, bis Stalingrad gelatscht waren oder in den Bombennächten mit vollgeschissener Wäsche in den Kellern gesessen sind, die Gräuel gesehen, mitgemacht, erlitten hatten, und als der Krieg zu Ende war, sich eben herausputzten und schwiegen. Sie schwiegen uns alle frech ins Gesicht, diese verbrochene und zerbrochene Generation. Im Zuge dieses Herausgeputzes schau dir doch die Politiker an. Das Gelüge, die Machtspiele, das hohle Reden, diese Grundfeigheit, alles eine Folge der österreichischen Staatslüge, damit die sich alle herausputzen: Wir Österreicher, das erste Opfer Hitlers, wir Österreicher, die im Herzen immer Österreicher waren, zwar Heil Hitler gerufen, aber O du mein Österreich gedacht haben. (We grew up in the post-war era under the eyes of a simultaneously mute and mendacious generation. How they all scrubbed themselves up, after they first ran after the Führer, denounced the dissidents at his bidding and expelled and murdered the Jews, or gave it all their seal of approval, traipsed to Stalingrad or sat in the cellars in their dirty underwear through the nights of bombing, they saw the atrocities, joined in, endured, and then when the war ended, they just scrubbed themselves up and kept quiet. They all insolently kept silent right in front of our faces, this criminal and broken generation. And in the wake of this scrubbing up, take a look at the politicians. The lying, the power games, their empty words, this fundamental cowardice, all of this is a consequence of the Austrian state lie, so that they could all scrub themselves up: We Austrians, Hitler’s first victim, we Austrians, who were always Austrians in our hearts, who admittedly had shouted ‘Heil Hitler’, but were really thinking ‘O thou, my Austria.’) (100)

For the second generation in Der Kalte, who did not experience the Second World War directly, but had to grow up with its consequences, including emotionally distant

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parents, the Waldheim phenomenon constitutes the bursting of the surface of the ‘firstvictim’ myth to uncover the latent violence and repression beneath. Despite the novel’s focus on the interdependency and interconnectedness of Viennese politics, media and cultural life, the narrative does not remain centred on these spheres. Instead, through the weave of the characters’ personal relationships, the narrative extends to the lives of those far removed from the epicentres of power. This is particularly evident through the representatives of the third generation in Der Kalte, in the shape of adolescent Stefan Keyntz and his girlfriend Dolores (Dolly) Segal, whose love story is told via means of Keyntz’s diary entries. The non-Jewish Keyntz begins a relationship with Dolly Segal whose Jewish family immigrate to Israel following the election of Kurt Waldheim, leaving the young Keynz heart-broken. Keynz and Segal are the only representatives of the third post-war generation in the novel, yet the effect that Waldheim has upon their relationship is symptomatic of the inescapable impact of the Waldheim affair upon every generation living in Austria at the time. Schindel’s novel is strongly satirical in its treatment of the Austrian cultural and political establishment, and the tragi-comic is his preferred mode for dealing with the insufficiencies of Austria’s confrontation with its historical legacy. Nowhere more is this the case than in Schindel’s depiction of Johann Wais (Kurt Waldheim), with his surname, Wais (homophonic to the word weiß, meaning the colour white), ironically evoking associations with moral purity and a whiter-than-white image. The collective white-washing of the past that Waldheim symbolizes, meanwhile, is underlined in Der Kalte through reference to Wais’s supporters as ‘die Waiswäscher’ (the whitewashers) (340). Johannes Tschonkovits, secretary of the Austrian Chancellor Theodor Marits (Fred Sinowatz), initially laments that nothing can be done to destroy Wais’s whiterthan-white image, but he is unable to abandon his ‘Idee fixe, vom Bedrecken des Doktor Johann Wais’ (his idée fixe of dirtying Doctor Johann Wais) (210). Both Tschonkovitz, and the intrepid journalist Roman Apolloner who writes for the (fictional) Austrian weekly Signal (clearly modelled on the Austrian news weekly profil) are delighted when it emerges that Wais was a member of the SA. From there the depictions of Wais become ever more grotesque as Waldheim’s historical press statements are given almost verbatim in Der Kalte in assertions such as that his initial experiences in the SA extended to ‘nichts anderes ... als an Sportveranstaltungen, also Reitveranstaltungen teilzunehmen’ (nothing more ... than taking part in sports events, that is, in equestrian events) (285). When Wais’s advisors show him a map in order to demonstrate the proximity of his wartime villa in Salonika to the train station from where the area’s Jewish population was deported to Auschwitz, Wais can only plead the excuse of having been too preoccupied with his doctoral thesis and his burgeoning relationship with his future wife: ‘Ich habe es nicht bemerkt’, sagte Wais. ‘Was soll ich denn tun? Ich weiß auch nicht, wieso mir das nicht aufgefallen ist. Ich kann es mir lediglich mit meiner Dissertation erklären, mit Aglaja.’ (‘I didn’t notice it’, said Wais. ‘What am I to do? I don’t know why it didn’t strike me either. I can only explain it with my dissertation, with Aglaja.’) (449)

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The constant assertions by Wais about his inability to remember or to have witnessed any of the atrocities going on around him are parodied by the organization der Club Diderot (which closely resembles Der republikanische Club: Neues Österreich, the opposition movement that emerged at the time of Waldheim’s candidacy and presidency). Similar to their real-life counterparts, who introduced a performative, humorous aspect into their protests by adopting a wooden horse, a symbol for Waldheim’s ‘equestrian’ participation in the SA, designed by Alfred Hrdlicka, as their mascot (an aspect of the club’s activities that also finds its way into Der Kalte, with the mascot designed by the architect Herbert Krieglach), der Club Diderot devise a series of initiatives in order to improve Wais’s memory. These include encouraging all schoolteachers to hang portraits of the new president upside down in Austria’s classrooms: ‘Bekanntlich hebt eine rasche Blutzufuhr zum Kopf das Erinnerungsvermögen’ (as is well known, a sudden rush of blood to the head improves memory function) (367). However, Schindel does not portray the Waldheim affair as merely unfolding in public arenas. While the political and cultural intrigues are centred in Vienna’s first district, spreading out from the chancellery, parliament and Burgtheater into the cafes and bars surrounding them, the depiction of private space extends to the residential districts of Vienna, in particular the second, third and sixth districts. The lunchtime meetings between Rosinger and Fraul, which take place in a little-frequented Beisl (pub) in the third district near the Danube Canal, which Fraul has to reach using a ferry boat taking him from the second to the third district of Vienna, have the air of transgression about them, not least because of the numerous topographical boundaries that are being crossed (of city districts, of land and water) prior to the meetings. While the Waldheim affair is shown to dominate the country’s and the world’s media, more subtle confrontations with the nation’s collective past in Der Kalte take place in private, whether this is in insalubrious pubs where no tourist or fashionable bohemian would venture, or the living room of the Segal family where Dolly’s boyfriend Stefan watches the election results coverage with the Austrian-Jewish family, which leaves them in a state of shock: ‘Die Mutter hat zu weinen angefangen und ist verschwunden, der Vater hockte stumm da mit einem Gesicht, als wäre der Hitler soeben an die Macht gekommen’ (The mother started crying and disappeared, while the father sat there in silence with an expression on his face as if Hitler had just come to power) (329). However, Schindel does not only retrace the topography of the Waldheim era in Der Kalte, he also reinscribes the Viennese topography through his depiction of the installation of Alfred Hrdlicka’s controversial Mahnmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus (Monument against War and Fascism, 1988). Planning for ‘an anti-fascist monument’ in the Austrian capital began in 1972,47 with the monument being formally commissioned by the Vienna City Council on 30 September 1983.48 Among the many controversies that would plague the monument before and after its execution was the issue of its location. The planned monument would be erected on the Albertinaplatz, behind the Vienna State Opera, a site notable for the multiple ‘layers of historical memory repressed and buried there’.49 The proposed monument would not only be located on the site of the former Philipphof residential building (which collapsed on the night of 12 March 1945 during an Allied bombing raid, burying alive the 200 Viennese sheltering in the bomb shelter below), but also on the site of a pogrom, during which

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Jews were burned at the stake on the same day (12 March) in 1421.50 As such the Albertinaplatz is a particularly fraught lieu de mémoire or site of memory in Pierre Nora’s definition.51 Following Aleida Assmann, the square may also be understood as a spatial archive, with the space acting as a placeholder for the memories that some would prefer to forget.52 Both Nora and Assmann construe sites of memory as spaces where different versions of the past may be uncovered, contested and elaborated. Hrdlicka’s decision to erect his monument on this historically-laden site, constituted precisely such an uncovering and disturbance of the past, as ‘the history of the Albertinaplatz as an unmarked grave of persecuted Jews in the 1400s and of civilian casualties after an Allied air raid in 1945 only gained prominence in national consciousness through Hrdlicka’s monument’.53 The monument, unveiled on 24 November 1988, is a ‘walk-in space’ consisting of four sculptures,54 beginning with the ‘Tor der Gewalt’ (Gate of Violence), passing to the ‘Straßenwaschender Jude’ (street-washing Jew), and ‘Orpheus betritt den Hades’ (Orpheus enters Hades), and ending with the ‘Stein der Republik’ (Stone of the Republic, showing the text of Austria’s Declaration of Independence, signed on 27 April 1945). The implied teleology, that the violence of the Second World War and the Holocaust was somehow redeemed by the birth of the Second Republic, has been widely criticized,55 as has the fact that ‘the monument does not draw any distinctions between the victims of racial persecution, fallen Austrian soldiers, or the victims of Allied bombings’.56 The monument has also remained highly controversial, not least amongst Austria’s Jewish community, because of its statue of a Jewish man scrubbing the pavement, symbolizing the anti-semitic violence of the Anschlusspogrom following Austria’s annexation with Germany. The views of renowned documentary filmmaker Ruth Beckermann, written in an essay of 1989 examining her AustrianJewish identity, are emblematic of the anger that the monument sparked amongst Austria’s Jewish community: ‘Was immer dieses Denkmal den Wienern sagen will, mir sagt es: Im Staub seid ihr gelegen. Auf dem Bauch seid ihr gerutscht. Und das ist heute unser Bild von euch. Fünfzig Jahre danach formen wir euch nach diesem Bild’ (Whatever this memorial wants to say to the Viennese, to me it says: there you lay in the dust, crawled on your belly. And that is our image of you today. Fifty years on we make you in this image).57 The failure of Hrdlicka’s monument to adequately commemorate Austrian Holocaust victims ultimately led to the commissioning and unveiling of a Holocaust memorial, designed by Rachel Whiteread, on Vienna’s Judenplatz in 2000.58 In Beckermann’s assessment, what is missing from Hrdlicka’s monument, that equates all victims of war in an undifferentiated manner, is any depiction of the perpetrators, which have been cut out of the picture: Da nahm einer die Photos der knienden Juden, die mit Zahnbürsten zur Belustigung der Wiener die Straßen waschen mußten, zur Hand, in die andere Hand die Schere und schnitt die Grinser, die ganz Unpolitischen in ihrer Alltagskleidung ohne Abzeichen und die in den Kniebundhosen mit den weißen Stutzen, die schnitt er weg. Der ewige Jude wurde zum ewigen Opfer anonymer Gewalt ... Wo ist das grinsende Publikum geblieben? (One took in one’s hand the photo of the kneeling Jews who had to wash the streets with toothbrushes for the entertainment of the Viennese, and took the pair

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of scissors in the other, cutting out the smirkers, the completely unpolitical in their workaday clothes without insignia and those in their knickerbockers, with their white knee-length socks, he cut them out. Thus the eternal Jew became the eternal victim of anonymous violence ... Where has the smirking public got to?)59

In Schindel’s depiction of the unveiling of Herbert Krieglach’s ‘Denkmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus’ (Memorial against War and Fascism) (93) in Der Kalte, he seems to answer the question posed by his friend Beckermann and, on a fictional level, corrects the failure of Hrdlicka’s memorial to represent the perpetrators of the ‘terror unchained’ that followed Austria’s annexation to Nazi Germany.60 In Der Kalte the statue of the Jewish man scrubbing the pavement is surrounded by three further figures: Um den gedemütigten Juden hatte Krieglach drei Wienerleute aufgestellt, zwei Männer und eine Frau. Einer der Männer trug einen Hut mit Gamsfeder, der zweite eine Sportkappe, die Frau hatte aufgesteckte Haare, die am Hinterkopf in einem kropfgroßen Dutt verknotet waren. Der Wiener mit Hut zeigte auf den Juden und hatte ein höhnisches Lachen im Gesicht. Der Wiener mit der Sportkappe deutete einen Tritt in den Hintern des Knienden an, die Frau hielt die Hände so vor den Körper, als würde sie entweder zu klatschen beginnen oder den Juden packen wollen. (Krieglach had arranged three Viennese, two men and a woman, around the humiliated Jew. One of the men wore a hat with a chamois feather, the other a sports cap, the woman had her hair pinned up in a goitre-sized bun at the back of her head. The Viennese man with the hat pointed to the Jew and had a mocking laugh on his face. The Viennese man with the sports cap looked as if he was about to kick the kneeling man in the backside, the woman held her hands in front of her body in such a way, as if she was either going to start clapping, or was about to grab the Jew.) (638)

Schindel’s fictional memorial thereby reinstates the perpetrators of anti-semitic acts, which paved the way for the Holocaust, into the picture, rather than make the perpetrators disappear and turn the victims into subjects of ‘anonymous violence’ as Hrdlicka’s memorial does.61 To emphasize that this amendment to Hrdlicka’s monument constitutes a wish-fulfilment, in Schindel’s novel the jeering Viennese onlookers are removed four months after the monument’s unveiling (having provoked considerable dismay among the country’s political establishment), and the statue of the Jewish man is, as was the case with Hrdlicka’s monument, covered in barbed wire to prevent tourists from sitting on the statue.62 Yet in his depiction of this albeit temporary monument to Austrian complicity in the Holocaust, Schindel highlights the unrealized possibilities of remembering and drawing attention to the extent of Austria’s participation in the Second World War and in the Shoah. Although the mocking Viennese figures are removed (perhaps in order to uphold the realism principle), through his imaginary installation Schindel underlines the absence of a monument in the Viennese cityscape, or a public discourse more broadly, that would challenge the long-prevalent Austrian self-understanding as first victim of fascism. The presence of the jeering Viennese

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figures also symbolically counters Waldheim’s avowed absence at the scene of the crime during his time in the Wehrmacht. The temporary addition of the sneering onlookers to Hrdlicka’s Mahnmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus in Schindel’s Der Kalte, in its transient nature, foregrounds the precise lack of a sustained public discourse in contemporary Austria regarding the country’s complicity in Nazi crimes. Schindel’s depiction of the Mahnmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus is not the only instance of wish-fulfilment in the novel. Another notable instance of this in Der Kalte is the resignation of Johann Wais on 23 December 1989, thus ending Wais’s presidential term two-and-a-half years earlier than that of his real-life counterpart. Similarly, Schindel also has Wais die nearly four years earlier than Waldheim did. Wais dies on 14 March 2003, on the sixty-fifth anniversary of Hitler’s arrival in Vienna in March 1938, following Austria’s Anschluss with Nazi Germany. The forgetful former president, who persistently denied his involvement in the Nazi war-machine, is thereby irrevocably associated with the Nazi regime, even in his hour of death. The epilogue of the novel ends in a conciliatory tone, with Wais, on his deathbed, asking ‘alle um Verzeihung, die er gekränkt und verletzt hatte’ (all those for forgiveness, whom he had offended and hurt) (643). This is one of several reconciliations that dominate the closing section of the novel. Prior to this we see Fraul shed tears following the death of Rosinger, who is run over by a car. The unlikely friendship between the former resistance fighter and the SS officer ultimately enables the former to achieve a sense of closure with regard to his past and to reconnect with his family emotionally. The epilogue concludes with the reported deaths of Edmund Fraul in 2004, and Rosa Fraul in January 2013. The various reconciliations (that of Fraul with his past, that of father and son in the Fraul family, and that of the former president and his countrymen) and the hasty exit of Wais from the Austrian political stage in Der Kalte may also be regarded as poetic license and wish-fulfilment. In reality, the Waldheim affair created waves in Austrian life which did not subside as easily, with Waldheim paving the way for the rise of right-wing populist Jörg Haider in the following decade,63 culminating in the entry of his Austrian Freedom Party into the coalition government in 2000 following the 1999 general election. As Dagmar Lorenz has asserted, ‘Waldheim’s self-justification as a Nazi collaborator’ allowed Haider to succeed ‘on a racist populist platform that appealed to xenophobes and revisionists eager to vindicate the Nazi generation and to normalize Austria’s history’.64 At the same time, the oppositional culture that emerged as a consequence of the Waldheim affair was instrumental in the formation of a civil society in Austria, which would also play a crucial role in the movement against Haider more than a decade later.65 The Waldheim affair arguably drew up the battle lines between liberal progressive forces and right-wing populists in Austria, along which political battles in the country continue to be fought. Schindel’s novel returns to a time in recent Austrian history when Austria’s postwar consensus on the National Socialist past was severely disturbed. Through the novel’s panoramic focus on several generations and on the places and spaces where the Waldheim affair unfolded, Schindel highlights the extent to which the political scandal came to dominate every sphere of Austria’s national life over a period of several years, and which began a long-overdue process of confronting the past in Austria. Furthermore, Schindel’s novel constitutes a disturbance of the past in its own

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right, in so far as it draws attention both to recent Austrian history (the Waldheim affair), and to the country’s National Socialist past nearly seven decades earlier. By fictionalizing Austria’s recent past and staging his own interventions in it, specifically through his treatment of Hrdlicka’s Mahnmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus, Schindel disturbs narratives of Austrian victimhood. By means of his playful reinscription of historical events and personages, Schindel evaluates the Waldheim affair from the perspective of today, seventy-five years on (at the time of Der Kalte’s publication in 2013) from Austria’s Anschluss with Nazi Germany in 1938, and highlights missed opportunities for reflecting on Austria’s National Socialist legacy. As such, Schindel invites his readers to a continual engagement with the past and upon the way that we remember and commemorate it.

Notes 1

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5 6 7 8

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Wolfgang Paterno, ‘Robert Schindel: “Erst als Toter pflegt man Gleichmut” ’, profil, 9 February 2013, available online: http://www.profil.at/articles/1306/560/352177/ robert-schindel-erst-toter-gleichmut (accessed 6 May 2014). Heidemarie Uhl, ‘The Politics of Memory: Austria’s Perception of the Second World War and the National Socialist Period’, in Günter Bischof and Anton Pelinka (eds), Austrian Historical Memory and National Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 65. Robert Schindel, Der Kalte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013). Further references to the novel are given in parentheses in the text. Translations from the German are my own. An English translation of the novel by Bill Martin, under the title of Winter in Vienna, will be published by Frisch & Co., Berlin, in 2016. Robert Schindel, Gebürtig (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, [1992] 2012). Robert Schindel, Born-Where, trans. Michael Roloff (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1995). Gebürtig, DVD, directed by Robert Schindel and Lukas Stepanik (2002, Vienna: Hoanzl, 2009). Robert Schindel in an interview with the author of this chapter, 18 August 2015. Matthias Beilein, 86 und die Folgen: Robert Schindel, Robert Menasse und Doron Rabinovici im literarischen Feld Österreichs (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2008), 16. Ibid., 16. Matti Bunzl, ‘Political Inscription, Artistic Reflection: A Recontextualization of Contemporary Viennese-Jewish Literature’, The German Quarterly, 73 (2000): 163–170, as cited in Beilein, 86 und die Folgen, 134. The last date in the novel (in the epilogue) is given as 26 February 1986, in Schindel, Gebürtig, 341. These include images of Waldheim used in a protagonist’s cabaret programme, a news bulletin playing on the TV screen in the background of a scene, with an item about the unfolding scandal, and a reference to Waldheim’s election slogans deterring the exiled Hermann Gebirtig from returning to Vienna. Andrea Reiter, Contemporary Jewish Writing: Austria after Waldheim (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2013), 33. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, ‘The Struggle for a Civil Society and Beyond: Austrian Writers and Intellectuals Confronting the Political Right’, New German Critique, 93 (2004): 37–38.

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15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35

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Reiter, Contemporary Jewish Writing, 23. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, ‘Austrian Responses to National Socialism and the Holocaust’, in Katrin Kohl and Ritchie Robertson (eds), A History of Austrian Literature 1918– 2000 (Rochester: Camden House, 2006), 181–200, 193. Lorenz, ‘The Struggle for a Civil Society and Beyond’, 37–38. Reiter, Contemporary Jewish Writing, 9–10. Paterno, ‘Robert Schindel’. ‘Robert Schindel – Interview zu seinem Roman Der Kalte über die Waldheim-Jahre in Österreich’, narrated by Tobias Lindemann, Stoffwechsel, freie-radios.net, 26 June 2013, available online: http://www.freie-radios.net/56812; Paterno, ‘Robert Schindel’; Beilein, 86 und die Folgen, 311–312. Steven Beller, A Concise History of Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 287. Ibid., 287. ‘Mann ohne Eigenschaften’, Der Spiegel, 10 March 1986, available online: http://www. spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13517535.html (accessed 15 February 2015). See Jacob Heilbrunn, ‘Waldheim and His Protectors: Review of Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up. By Eli M. Rosenbaum with William Hoffer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993)’, The New York Times, 10 October 1993, available online: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/10/books/waldheim-and -his-protectors.html (accessed 15 February 2015). Hubertus Czernin, ‘Waldheim und die SA’, profil, 3 March 1986, 16–20, as cited in Cornelius Lehnguth, Waldheim und die Folgen: Der parteipolitische Umgang mit dem Nationalsozialismus in Österreich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2013), 93. Lehnguth, Waldheim und die Folgen, 93. Beller, A Concise History of Austria, 288. Ibid., 288. ‘Wir Österreicher wählen, wen wir wollen’, Der Spiegel, 14 April 1986, available online: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13517709.html (accessed 15 February 2015). Beller, A Concise History of Austria, 290. Ibid., 291. Helga Pick, Guilty Victims: Austrians from the Holocaust to Haider (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 162. Lehnguth, Waldheim und die Folgen, 115. ‘The Moscow Declaration; October 1943. Joint Four-Nation Declaration’, The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, Yale Lillian Goldmann Law Library, available online: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/moscow.asp (accessed 15 February 2015). Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2007), 808. Beller, A Concise History of Austria, 250. Heidemarie Uhl, ‘Das “erste Opfer”: der österreichische Opfermythos und seine Transformationen in der zweiten Republik’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 30/1 (2001): 19–34, as cited in Andrea Reiter, Contemporary Jewish Writing, 34. ‘Ein Drittel der Österreicher sehnt sich nach “starkem Führer” ’, Der Standard, 7 May 2014, available online: http://derstandard.at/1397522693954/Ein-Drittel-der -Oesterreicher-sehnt-sich-nach-starkem-Fuehrer (accessed 15 February 2015). ‘Robert Schindel – Interview zu seinem Roman Der Kalte’.

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49 50 51 52 53 54 55

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Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond As Stefan Zweig asserted, the first pages that a Viennese would turn to in his morning newspaper would inevitably be the theatre listings, as opposed to the national or international news, in Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, [1944] 2001), 30. Cornelius Hell, ‘Der Kalte: Roman von Robert Schindel’, oe1.ORF.at, 14 February 2013, available online: http://oe1.orf.at/artikel/331361 (accessed 15 February 2015). Thomas E. Schmidt, ‘Wien, die Skandalmaschine’, Die Zeit, 23 April 2013, available online: http://www.zeit.de/2013/16/robert-schindel-der-kalte (accessed 15 February 2015). Schmidt, ‘Wien, die Scandalmaschine’; Franz Haas, ‘Zeitgeschichte als Wiener Melange’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 13 April 2013, available online: http://www.nzz. ch/aktuell/startseite/zeitgeschichte-als-wiener-melange-1.18063054 (accessed 15 February 2015); Wolf Scheller, ‘Wiener Walzer rechtsherum’, Jüdische Allgemeine, 21 March 2013, available online: http://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/article/view/ id/15506 (accessed 15 February 2015). Stefan Gmünder, ‘Wenn Fragen vor Selbstgerechtigkeit schützen’, Der Standard, 21 February 2013, available online: http://derstandard.at/1361240730492/Wenn-Fragen -vor-Selbstgerechtigkeit-schuetzen (accessed 15 February 2015). Klara Obermüller, ‘Nachrichten aus dem Operettenland’, Die Welt, 20 April 2013, available online: http://www.welt.de/print/die_welt/literatur/article115449232/ Nachrichten-aus-dem-Operettenland.html (accessed 15 February 2015). Katya Krylova, ‘ “Eine den Menschen zerzausende Landschaft”: Psychotopography and the Alpine landscape in Thomas Bernhard’s Frost’, Austrian Studies, 18 (2010): 74–88. Sigmund Freud, ‘Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion’, in Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards and James Strachey (eds), Sigmund Freud: Studienausgabe, 11 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1972), IX, 459–581. Ibid., 493. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 105. ‘Mahnmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus’, Zentrale österreichische Forschungsstelle Nachkriegsjustiz, available online: http://www.nachkriegsjustiz.at/vgew/1010_alb. php (accessed 15 February 2015). Young, The Texture of Memory, 105. Ibid., 105–106. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989): 7–24. Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: Beck, 1999). Eva Kuttenberg, ‘Austria’s Topography of Memory: Heldenplatz, Albertinaplatz, Judenplatz, and Beyond’, The German Quarterly, 80, 4 (2007): 468–491, 469. Young, The Texture of Memory, 112. Erich Klein, Denkwürdiges Wien: Gehen & Sehen: 3 Routen zu Mahnmalen, Gedenkstätten und Orten der Erinnerung der Ersten und Zweiten Republik (Vienna: Falter, 2004), 103. David Art, The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 125. Ruth Beckermann, Unzugehörig: Österreicher und Juden nach 1945 (Vienna: Löcker, 1989), 14.

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Reiter, Contemporary Jewish Writing, 49–50. Beckermann, Unzugehörig, 15. Title of chapter in G. E. R. Gedye, Fallen Bastions: The Central European Tragedy (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939). Beckermann, Unzugehörig, 15. Matti Bunzl, ‘On the Politics and Semantics of Austrian Memory: Vienna’s Monument against War and Fascism’, History and Memory, 7, 2 (1995): 7–40, 28–29. Lorenz, ‘The Struggle for a Civil Society and Beyond’, 26. Ibid., 26. Lorenz, ‘Austrian Responses to National Socialism and the Holocaust’, 193.

8

The Return of the Jew in Polish Culture Uilleam Blacker

Context For Poland, the mourning of the loss of its Jewish population to the Holocaust has been a complex and difficult process. Transnational Holocaust discourse, which incorporates the suffering of Polish Jews into a wider Jewish tragedy, has been seen by some Poles as eclipsing Polish wartime suffering and building an image of Poland as a vast Jewish cemetery. In this landscape, Poles, often portrayed as anti-Semites who allowed the Holocaust to happen or took part in it, become the villains. This memory narrative was resisted in different ways by both the Polish communist regime and its opponents, meaning that the deaths of Poland’s pre-war Jews were seen in terms of sharply drawn ethnic boundaries. Polish and Jewish suffering were incompatible, even mutually exclusive, and the patriotic Polish self was left to gather and protect its suppressed and fragmented memories in confrontation with the Jewish other. The State increasingly helped to form this image, especially in the post-Stalin period, when the regime became more nationalistic and anti-Semitic.1 In the 1960s and 1970s, however, writers, intellectuals, historians, civic activists and remaining Jewish communities combined to question the official effacing of Poland’s Jewish past and the tragedy of the Holocaust, as well as the polarization of representations of Polish and Jewish experiences of the war.2 To give an exhaustive summary of all the literary texts, art works and films that have contributed to this process over the last half century or so would go far beyond the scope of one chapter; I will instead focus on a number of texts that have approached the topic through one specific motif, that of the return. The chapter hopes to demonstrate that writers and filmmakers use the motif of return in order to disturb familiar ways of remembering the war and the Holocaust, and in particular the practice of drawing sharply defined borders between Jewish and Polish memories; at the same time, the chapter will identify a tendency to move away from the dominant notion that the re-appearance of the Jewish parts of Poland’s past must always contain an element of the disturbing, a move that attempts to soften the shock and dissonance of the Jewish return.

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Return The dynamic of return is at the heart of memory. In Freudian terms, repressed memories may come back to disturb and haunt us; this return can be related to melancholia, whereby a loss that we fail to identify and name brings about a pathological confusion, often an obsessive acting out, or return to the ‘scene’ of the trauma. The ‘healthier’ process of mourning also involves a return to the object and moment of loss, but this time a conscious one aimed at productively working through and accepting the loss: here the object of loss is identified and named.3 In Freud’s conception, then, mourning is a condition that is oriented towards the other, at an external object of loss, whereas melancholia, unable to find that object, turns inwards, narcissistically conflating the ego with the object. This dichotomy becomes problematic when applied to complex situations of collective loss, as in the case of Poland’s Jews: are Polish texts addressing the loss of Polish Jews directed at a Jewish other, at a composite Polish-Jewish self, or are they rather concerned with addressing a purely Polish trauma related to the witnessing of the Holocaust? In a sense, the inability to locate the object of loss in melancholia parallels the lack of knowledge of the traumatic event that is at the heart of trauma, an idea used frequently to describe the relationship to the Holocaust of survivors or their descendants.4 According to Alexander Etkind, however, the concept of trauma itself is unsatisfactory when describing processes of later representations of catastrophes: the idea that an actual trauma may be passed on across generations through cultural media is ‘empirically less verifiable’ than the idea that the often tortured returns to historical catastrophes are in fact products of ‘warped’ processes of mourning: an other-oriented condition based in practices and representations that can more realistically be imagined as being transferred across generations. The overwhelming nature of the loss often inspires convoluted forms, frequently involving gothic or supernatural imagery.5 Etkind’s focus is mourning for the victims of the Gulag, a loss whose scale and ambiguity make it particularly prone to producing ‘warped’ forms of representation. The self-other mourning dynamic is, according to Etkind, more straightforward in the case of the Holocaust, with its clearly defined perpetrators and victims, better documented atrocities, clear admissions of guilt by the ‘perpetrator society’, more easily locatable crime scenes and more extensive public commemoration. Yet when the Holocaust is considered in light of the complex relationships to it of the societies that were its primary witnesses (in other words, those in east-central Europe), it becomes clear that this is a memory discourse that is also riddled with ambiguities. A rescuer of Jews, for example, could become a denouncer depending on contingency, while an exploiter of hiding Jews could become a courageous rescuer, as Agnieszka Holland’s memoir-based film In Darkness (2011) demonstrates. Also, just as pre-war anti-Semitism and segregation played a role in the course of the German occupation in Poland, so too did the intermingling of Jewish and Polish families and identities. Many Jews, of course, spoke Polish as a first language and held a strong affinity for Polish culture and civic identity, both of which they helped to create. The self-other dynamics at work within post-war and contemporary Polish mourning for the victims

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of the Holocaust are thus far from straightforward, and also often take on surprising, ‘warped’ forms.

Physical returns Mnemonic or temporal returns are often mapped onto space through physical returns. Svetlana Boym has noted of nostalgia that it allows us ‘to revisit time like space’.6 Given that Boym famously gives two categories of nostalgia, reflective and restorative (the former healthy, ironic, recognizing loss, the latter unable to accept the loss and unhealthily obsessed with reversing it), we can suggest that there are different types of physical return: one that recognizes the space that is returned to as bearing only degraded traces of an irrecoverable past, and another that seeks the lost time in earnest as though it were in fact a place. This difference resonates with the difference between mourning and melancholia. Both of these sets of ideas can be linked to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’, which describes the way in which experiences that are not ours may be passed on to us via powerful images, family narratives and other media. Hirsch’s focus in exploring this phenomenon is the second generation of Holocaust survivors, who experience their parents’ memories almost as vividly as their own. The strength of this post-memory is such that members of the second and third post-Holocaust generation see journeys to the places that their families inhabited before the war, or to the places where family members were killed, in terms of return. The locus of such returns is usually eastern Europe, and in Hirsch’s own case it is Chernivtsi (pre-war Cernăuţi or Czernowitz), in western Ukraine. For many Jews with eastern European heritage, the focus of the return is Poland, cities like Kraków, Warsaw, Lublin, or many villages and former shtetls, as well the sites of the death camps at Oświęcim, Treblinka or Majdanek. The experience of return to the lost Jewish homeland of eastern Europe is one that is well documented in memoirs, fictional texts, photographic projects and documentary and fiction films. The experience of those witnessing these returns – in the case of this paper, the Poles who inhabit these places today – attracts less attention.7 Even less well studied, however, are the returns that are actively made across or within these former Jewish spaces by those who inhabit them, whereby, in the Polish case, an increasing number of Poles are either seeking ways to mourn more effectively the loss of the Jewish element of Polish society, or recovering previously obscured Jewish identities; in each case, those re/discovering Jewish pasts and identities embark on their own pilgrimages, metaphorical and physical, in order to revisit vaguely known personal and/or collective pasts and activate their own post-memories. The nature of the return here is complex: in Freudian terms, the returnees cannot be said to be straightforwardly mourning a Jewish other; yet their practices and texts go beyond the inward dynamic of melancholia. Writers, filmmakers and ordinary people turn away from the idea that commemorating the Holocaust means recognizing the loss of the Jew as the principal other, and instead begin to discover the object of loss as an element of the self (sometimes individually, sometimes collectively). The Polish Jew is thus simultaneously an other who is part of the self, and a part of the self that is other.

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The feared return Before examining the more complex returns alluded to above, it is instructive to start from one extreme, but not uncommon attitude towards Jewish return: fear. On the face of it, it may seem strange that anti-Semitic attitudes and prejudices should persist in a country that, since the war has had only a tiny Jewish minority. Yet it is precisely the memory of the circumstances of the destruction of Poland’s Jews, and the fear of the return of these memories with the return of surviving Jews, that fires resentment.8 Since the very early post-war period, fear of Jewish return has played a large role in the attitudes towards Jews and the wartime past in Poland. Jan Gross, whose books Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001) and Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (2006) are among the most important historical texts written on Polish-Jewish relations, outlined the situation in the latter of these works. The fear of Jews reclaiming homes and property that had been taken by Poles during the war, and the fear of retribution for assistance in the Nazi persecution of the Jews was so powerful, according to Gross, that it led to acts of horrific violence, such as the infamous Kielce pogrom of 1946. The controversy that followed Gross’s uncovering and discussion of these incidents serves as testament to the powerful hold that the fear of the return of this knowledge still has in Poland, though at the same time it signals Polish society’s readiness for a wide-ranging, if often acrimonious discussion.9 Hanna Krall, a Polish-Jewish writer and journalist whose works sit on the borderline between fiction and reportage, documented these attitudes in her book Dowody na istnienie (Proof of Existence, 1995). When she travels to the southern Polish town of Leżajsk, the inhabitants of pre-war Jewish houses refuse to speak to her. One of the few locals willing to speak tells her: They won’t open up. One woman came and said she wanted to look at the stove. I’ll just touch it with my hand, she said. I’ve come from America to touch our stove ... I shouted through the window that the woman just wants to touch the stove and then go back to America, but they didn’t open the door. [...] People are already asking whose house the Jews will take first.10

The fear of material claims by Jews is intertwined with the fear of moral condemnation either over actions during the German occupation or over the appropriation of property. These possibilities were not simply imagined by those inhabiting the exJewish towns and buildings, but were fed in part by the attitudes of those visiting from abroad to investigate the Holocaust. One prominent example of a project that could be said to have contributed to this fear is Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). Lanzmann’s film is structured around physically ‘returning’ to ‘crime scenes’, as the director himself put it. In its sections filmed in Poland, the film features almost exclusively poor and uneducated rural Poles, and seems to deliberately try to draw out anti-Semitism and lack of regret over the fate of their former neighbours. While the film was widely acclaimed in the West, its reception in Poland was negative. Some, like the dissident intellectual Jacek Kuroń, defended Lanzmann’s right to a one-sided approach, but most,

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including Polish-Jewish organizations and progressive intellectuals, criticized the film’s confrontational stance (Lanzmann openly stated that his film was an ‘accusation against Poland’).11 The film performs a double function in this respect: it portrays the fear of Jewish return, and at the same time acts as a manifestation of precisely what is feared. The resentment towards the accusatory tone of Shoah finds echoes in Polish attitudes towards one of the most common types of Jewish return to Poland – that made by the countless groups of young Israelis who travel to Poland to see the death camps or the site of the Warsaw ghetto, and who see nothing of Poland beyond the legacy of persecution and death. As Elżbieta Janicka has shown in her study of commemorative practices in Warsaw, Polish nationalist memory politics seems to anticipate this confrontational type of return by placing its own ostentatiously Polish Catholic memorials along the same routes.12 In some ways, the reaction to Lanzmann’s film and to the memory tourism of Israeli youth groups was echoed in the controversy that Jan Gross’s books sparked: in each case, Jews ‘return’ to Poland to confront Poles with forgotten and uncomfortable parts of the jigsaw of the memory of the war. Yet the difference in Gross’s case was marked: Gross may have written and returned from the US, but he was born and raised in Poland. His mother, an ethnic Pole, had been in the Home Army, and had helped his father, a Polish Jew, to survive the occupation. Gross emigrated in 1969, while still a student, after suffering reprisals for his oppositionist activity and in the wake of the state-sponsored anti-Semitic campaign of 1968. His historical work in the 1970s sought to combat communist myths about Poland’s past, including addressing the taboo topic of the Soviet Union’s wartime aggression against Poland. For some, Gross became a figure of hate for supposedly blackening the reputation of Poles; but his books became extremely widely read, and even produced their own artistic afterlife. In 2008, playwright Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Nasza klasa (Our Class), closely based on Gross’s book, was first performed, itself causing something of a sensation; other playwrights (Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk, Paweł Demirski and Michał Zadara) have also taken inspiration from the Jedwabne case as described by Gross.13 Perhaps the most influential artistic interpretation of Gross’s work, however, was Władysław Pasikowski’s controversial film Pokłosie (Aftermath, 2011). Aftermath is structured around returns: the return of the ghosts of the past, but also the return of a Polish emigrant from Chicago to his home village in provincial Poland. The man’s brother, who has remained in the town, has aroused suspicion locally by gathering together Jewish gravestones that had been used as building materials around the area. The brothers delve deeper into the past of the town and discover that, contrary to the accepted narrative of Nazi culpability, the local Jews had been murdered by their Polish neighbours and their property subsequently appropriated by local families. Indeed, the brothers’ own father had played a leading role in the massacre, which took place in what was then his house (now a burnt out, overgrown ruin). The house the brothers grew up in and its surrounding land had belonged to the murdered Jewish neighbours, as indeed had the houses of many of the village’s inhabitants. On a visit to the local archive, the elder brother not only establishes the original ownership of the land, but also that the chronology of events in relation to post-war legislation means that the previous owners would have rights to reclaim it.

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Following a tip-off from an older neighbour, the brothers dig into the earth under the ruin of their father’s old house and discover the bones of dozens of Jews. The scene, drawing on horror conventions, takes place at night, in pouring rain, with skulls and bones emerging from the muddy water, and morning finds them sitting among piles of bones; at this moment a mysterious old woman appears from the forest and recounts her childhood memory of witnessing the massacre. Here we see an overlaying of different kinds of return: the physical, uncanny return of the dead Jews is a manifestation of the return of the buried memories, which in turn is facilitated by the return of the brother, who, perhaps influenced by the Western mind-set, breaks through the stubborn silence of the Polish province and uses his right of access to information to unearth the documents that prove the original status of the land on which the villagers live. The result of the brothers’ activities is a rise in fear among the local people of the uncovering of past crimes, but also of claims by Jews on their property. This combination leads to tragic consequences for the younger brother, who, in the film’s most notorious scene, is crucified on the barn door.14 The barn is an important motif in relation to the subject matter of the film: when the brother’s field is set on fire by neighbours, we see a dramatic shot of a burning barn, which is a direct reference to the Jedwabne massacre, in which the Jews were burned alive in a barn, not a house. Yet the brother’s death is not in vain: we are assured, at the film’s close, that the memory of the fate of the village Jews has been brought back into the open and properly commemorated. The last scene, set some time after the main events, echoes the famous ending of Schindler’s List in this regard: a group of Israeli Jews stands in the brothers’ field praying over the gravestones that the latter had salvaged and erected on their land; there is also a modest monument, a rock reminiscent of the one at Jedwabne. Memory has been openly restored to the village thanks to the (very Catholic) redemptive self-sacrifice of the son of the Polish murderer. While closure of sorts may be intended here, the final scene also reveals something different. The ‘cemetery’ may be seen to be endorsed by living (returning) Jews, but the viewer is also left with an uneasy impression: the site has been created artificially by the Polish brothers by haphazardly re-erecting the headstones and, we assume, reburying the recovered bones in a similar way in the middle of a field. The unlikeliness of the scenario serves ultimately to create a grotesque imitation of mourning, with the ‘other’, the foreign Jews (who do not speak in the film), inserted as a kind of stage decoration for a performance about Polish guilt and redemption. At the same time, however, this unlikely, overtly symbolic ending is in keeping with the film’s exaggerated, thriller- and horror-influenced plotting and aesthetics: one could, indeed, read the whole film as a grotesque parody of Poland’s tortured relationship with its Jewish past in general.

Engaging with return Pasikowski’s film represents a melancholic turning inwards in which the returning Jew is eclipsed by the returning Pole. The Jew appears as an uncanny, voiceless Shakespearean ghost in a Polish tragedy: a tragedy that, judging by the film’s popularity and the controversy it caused, needed to be played out before contemporary Polish

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society. A related, but separate, trend in Polish culture, however, has focused more on complexities of mourning. Central to Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz’s influential novel Umschlagplatz (1988) is the return of a fictional Polish-Jewish writer, Icyk Mandelbaum, to Warsaw many years after the war. Rymkiewicz’s semi-autobiographical narrator is open about the fact that he has invented Mandelbaum as a way to get inside the head of a returning Jew (‘what would I have done as a Jew after the war?’),15 and as a way of creating dialogue. The novel is saturated with dialogues between the narrator and his Jewish wife, between the narrator and Mandelbaum, the narrator and his friend as they walk through Warsaw’s former Jewish district and the former ghetto, or the imagined conversations Mandelbaum has in pre-war Warsaw among circles of Jewish intellectuals. Rymkiewicz allows voices to grow independently, to contradict his narrator, to put his narrator and his projected Polish reader in awkward positions with regard to the past. This is a work that by its very construction, following Bakhtin, opens the possibility for dialogue that escapes the control of the authorial voice.16 Rymkiewicz’s Mandelbaum comes back not as an alien force intent on disturbing Polish memories; he comes home reluctantly, willed to do so by his friend, Rymkiewicz’s narrator. This return is intended not to accuse or confront, but to encourage Poles to ask the question: ‘What meaning does it have, can it have, that we live around their death?’,17 and also to probe the border between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Czesław Miłosz, one of Poland’s Nobel Prize laureates, wrote one of the most famous texts on this border, the poem ‘Campo dei Fiori’, in 1943, describing how a carousel spun on a Warsaw square while the ghetto burned nearby.18 The poem is a stark exposé of the horrific divide that can open up in that distance created by persistent othering, a divide which the literary critic Jan Błoński captured in his famous essay ‘Poor Poles look at the Ghetto’, published in 1987, just before Rymkiewcz’s book: according to Błoński, Poles’ historical failure to fully come to terms with the Jewish other, to negotiate a place for that other within Polish society and culture, and the complex legacy of the Holocaust that resulted in part from that failure, have left a ‘bloody and awful mark’ on Polish culture.19 For Rymkiewicz, finding the erased site of the Umschlagpatz in Warsaw is precisely about uncovering and understanding the nature of this mark, and tackling the question of what to do with it. The return of Mandelbaum in Rymkiewicz’s work is an early example of a string of Jewish returns in recent Polish culture. In her prose debut, Sefer (2009), the distinguished poet Ewa Lipska imagines the ‘return’ to Kraków of a Viennese Jewish psychoanalyst, the eponymous Sefer, whose father had fled the city after narrowly surviving the Holocaust. The psychoanalyst is an urbane, educated foreigner, much like Icyk Mandelbaum, but his connection to Poland is different; written twenty years after Umschlagplatz, and featuring a representative of the post-Holocaust generation, Sefer is an exercise in post-memory. The conversations that ensue when Sefer ‘returns’ to Kraków are less tortured than those entered into by Mandelbaum. The latter finds himself disorientated by a drastically transformed late-socialist Warsaw from which traces of Jewish life have been expunged; Sefer’s Kraków is an EU city basking in newfound confidence and proudly displaying its Jewish heritage. Sefer’s engagement with his family’s past during his trip – through the classic medium of post-memory, the photograph – is tinged with nostalgia, with a sweet melancholy that characterizes

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his relationship to Poland more generally. There is nothing difficult about the return: Sefer encounters only educated, enlightened people, even enjoys a brief romance with a younger local woman, a descendent of his own father’s first sweetheart. Violence, resentment, fear – all these seem distant, and Lipska’s return belongs firmly to the new, EU Poland, in which anti-Semitism and the fear of the Jewish return are becoming more and more marginal. Lipska gives over her narrative perspective entirely to the returning Jew, placing the Pole in the position of (here rather romanticized) other. In contrast to the confused, compulsive acting out of Pasikowski’s film or the difficult conversations in Rymkiewicz, Lipska’s treatment of the question of mourning Poland’s Jews is transferred into the rarefied and harmonious sphere of Viennese and Krakowian intellectuals, where the complexities of the self-other dynamic are negotiated with an ease that is increasingly characteristic of the newly self-confident, post-accession Poland more widely. A different type of return altogether appears in Igor Ostachowicz’s debut novel Noc żywych żydów (Night of the Living Jews, 2012), which attracted a flurry of media attention on its publication and was nominated for Poland’s leading literary prize. In Ostachowicz’s novel, it is not émigré or second-generation Polish Jews that return to contemporary Poland, but the Jews who died in the city during the war, who return to haunt Warsaw as zombies. The protagonist, a Polish everyman living in Muranów, the pre-war Jewish district of Warsaw and during the war the main part of the ghetto (the same district that is traversed by Rymkiewicz’s protagonists), has little interest in the Jewish past, engaged as he is, the author leads us to understand, in the banal, materialistic concerns of most contemporary Poles. His encounters with Jewish zombies, who emerge from under the foundations of his building, changes his outlook. Eventually, the protagonist joins the zombies in a dramatic battle against Polish neoNazis in a shopping centre. The novel is composed from a patchwork of popular cultural references, most obvious being George Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, and is written with considerable irony and a willingness to play on the edge of good taste. Despite its surface shock value, however, Ostachowicz’s novel is a highly moral tale (not unlike Romero’s original film, widely seen as a moral warning against rampant American consumerism), whose irreverence masks an earnest liberal agenda that fits well into Poland’s ever-increasing canon of texts on Polish-Jewish relations.20 On the one hand these Jewish zombies represent a curious ‘warped’ form of mourning for the lost other. On the other, however, the message is straightforward, and is merely an expression of the same, well-established, politically correct desire to engage with the Jewish past that has produced Muranów’s recently opened state-of-the-art Museum of the History of Polish Jews. (Indeed, its author, as a former adviser to Poland’s progressive ex-prime minister Donald Tusk, is a member of the political class.) Reading the three texts discussed above, it is important to bear in mind that those by Ostachowicz and Lipska are products of post-EU accession Poland, where Jewish festivals are hard to escape, and where there is possibly greater academic and cultural interest in all things Jewish than in any other country in Europe.21 There is little in Night of the Living Jews and Sefer that would seriously disturb the status quo in terms of memory culture and politics. Rymkiewicz, who posited the dialogic return of the

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Jewish other long before these works, is doing something different. Umschlagplatz did not come out of a vacuum, but it was not part of a dominant discourse: indeed, the novel went against the grain not only of the state-approved discourse (albeit at a time when this was becoming less monolithic), but also that strand of opposition thinking that was crystallized around patriotic Polish opposition to foreign-imposed communism. What makes Rymkewicz’s work even more remarkable is that he is hardly typical of the liberal-left circles that pursue the topic of Polish-Jewish relations. Rymkiewicz has always had a conservative, at times nationalistic outlook (though this has become more pronounced in recent years), and he has treated the nature of Polishness and Poland’s national losses and tragedies extensively.22 To the heart of Polish patriotic intellectual resistance, then, Rymkiewicz brings Icyk Mandelbaum, a more challenging figure than any of Ostachowicz’s zombies or Lipska’s Sefer, to disturb the national narrative of victimhood, and ask what it means for his narrator, a patriotic Polish intellectual, to ‘live around their death’. This important difference notwithstanding, Rymkiewicz’s, Lipska’s and Ostachowicz’s texts are united by their treatment of the subject of the return. In each case, the Jewish other is imagined as returning, in some cases to unsettle the Polish self, in others to shore up that self ’s latest methods for self-identification. All three texts are in a sense born of the failure to bridge the divide between Poles and Jews identified by Błoński and Miłosz, and interrogate this divide by bringing back Jews, be it as symbols, as phantoms or as real characters with whom Poles can engage in dialogue. For Ostachowicz and Lipska, empathy and openness towards the other are clearly posited, but there is a distinct sense of distance and separation. Sefer is a foreigner who comes to Kraków as a tourist, encountering his exotic eastern European hosts and their joie de vivre, so lacking in stuffy Vienna, and his hosts find a similar gratification in the Freudesque figure of the Viennese psychoanalyst. Ostachowicz’s Jews are certainly native Polish, but they appear as humorously grotesque revenants, and are only temporarily invited into the present in order to teach contemporary Warsaw a lesson, before they are consigned again to the underworld. Pasikowski’s Jews are, similarly, called on as both scary spectre and as classroom prop. In Rymkiewicz (and, indeed, in Krall), the division between us and them, our suffering and their suffering, is still apparent, but the encounters and the dynamics of the returns that facilitate them, are more complex, the forms of mourning and melancholy more convoluted and confused, and the conversations more involved.

Return of/to the self The motif of the ‘return of the Jew’ has taken on a different dimension more recently in Polish culture and more widely in society, whereby the sharp division between Polish and Jewish identities has begun to be questioned at its most fundamental level. Instead of the Jewish other returning from without (from abroad), it is increasingly being shown returning from within: from within Poland, and from within Poles themselves. The sociologist Katka Reszke’s book Return of the Jew: Identity Narratives of the Third Post-Holocaust Generation of Jews in Poland (2013) represents one of the first in-depth

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treatments of this topic, and focuses on the ‘third generation’ of Polish Jews after the Holocaust (generally those born from the 1970s onwards), whose parents and/ or grandparents had concealed their Jewish identity. In most cases, the discovery is the result of family detective work, and comes when these people are in their teens.23 Reszke’s work portrays a generation of ‘new’ Polish Jews for whom the question of return is complex. As Reszke states: ‘Jewish culture in contemporary Poland is not a returning phenomenon. It is a new construct, which very much relies on its past renderings and aspires to be rooted, to be a continuation.’24 These returns are different from those post-mnemonic returns described by Hirsch and others, whereby a powerful existing identity inspires a physical return to a place never before visited: here, the ‘return’ is to an identity and culture that is barely known, but occurs in a place that is well known. The topic has been dealt with before: Krall’s Proof of Existence, for example, in a section called ‘Niepamięć’, or ‘non-memory’, documents cases of the rediscovery of Jewish roots by Poles who had previously had little or no knowledge of their mixed origins.25 The subject has received more elaborate artistic treatments in recent years, however. Central to this process has been the writer and editor of the Polish-Jewish magazine Midrasz Piotr Paziński (born 1973), who has been hailed, in an echo of Reszke’s book’s title, as ‘the first voice of the third post-Holocaust generation’ in Poland.26 Although Paziński does not fall into the category of those who ‘suddenly’ became aware of their Jewishness, his work nevertheless focuses on the experience of returning to or maintaining Jewishness as a Pole in contemporary Poland. Paziński’s debut novel Pensjonat (The Guesthouse, 2009) is built entirely around the motif of the return: a young man travels from Warsaw to a Jewish guesthouse in a small town of Otwock (not named in the novel), where he used to spend time as a child. The journey to Otwock may be grounded in autobiographical experience, but it forms an intertextual link with Rymkiewicz’s Umschlagplatz. Umschlagplatz features imagined scenes from the 1930s at a very similar guesthouse in the same town, and a later journey back to the town to try to relocate the guesthouse, as the narrator-author tries to piece together his picture of Icyk Mandelbaum. Paziński’s protagonist partakes in further returns via the post-memory routes opened up by piles of old photographs and the rambling stories of the elderly guests in Otwock. This return is different from those outlined above, where an alien or semi-alien Jew comes back into the midst of Polish society in order to disturb memory narratives; this is rather a journey that takes place entirely within Poland, by a Polish Jew into the past of Polish Jewishness. The narrator’s return extends into the wartime and pre-war memories of his interlocutors, but is perhaps more importantly a journey back to his own childhood in communist Poland, among the Jewish community that never entirely disappeared, living a life that was its own and yet also entirely connected to the everyday reality of the Polish People’s Republic. Paziński does not dig up a corpse or import exotic Jews: his is a return less of what is lost, than of what has gone unperceived – that is, the continuing Jewishness of Poland.27 A similarly complex intra-Polish return to Jewishness, to the Polish-Jewish experience of the Holocaust, and to the difficulties faced by Jews in post-war Poland can be observed in Magdalena Tulli’s novel Włoskie szpilki (Italian High Heels, 2011). The

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reader is again confronted with a complexly woven fabric of mnemonic and physical returns. The narrator, the daughter of a Polish Jewish woman who survived Auschwitz, returns to her own childhood, sifting through the layers of personal traumas that have shaped her, not least of which are the realization as a child that she is a Jew in the antiSemitic climate of late 1960s Poland. Recalling her own childhood, the narrator also recounts yearly trips to Italy to visit her father’s family (he is Italian), and the difficult returns to Poland after these trips, which also serve as a spark for the narrator to travel back into her Italian family’s history. As the loosely structured novel progresses, the narrator unravels the most important return of the work: that made by her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease, back through her own life, first through the hardships of late socialist Poland, then the anti-Semitic campaigns, and finally back to the concentration camp and the war. With each stage of her regression, the mother places her daughter in the shoes of a figure who has emerged from memory, until she seems to believe that they are together in the concentration camp. Tulli’s narrative piles memory on memory until the effect becomes overwhelming, even manifested physically in the world around the narrator: it hangs over Warsaw as a black cloud, a reference also to the smoke rising from the incinerators in the death camps, and at one point the narrator even collapses under the weight of this past. The word Jew is never actually mentioned in Tulli’s novel. Indeed, despite her untypical roots, the narrator’s story is remarkable in many ways for its typical Polishness. It is the wider story of the generation that grew up in the 1960s unable to emerge from the shadow of the war that had scarred their parents, struggling through the difficulties of the Polish People’s Republic. In a way, the unusual figure of the Italian living in communist Poland here replaces the returning foreign Jew, and by contrast serves to underline the Polishness of the Jewish mother, who shares also in the general Polish wartime trauma. The narrator’s Jewishness is not clear to her from her earliest childhood, but is gradually revealed to her as she gets older, with the full trauma of its implications revealed ultimately through her mother’s mnemonic reversion: the disorientating effect of this on the narrator are a perfect example of the power of the post-memory return. The ‘return’ of a suppressed Jewish identity is even more dramatically revealed in the Polish-British director Paweł Pawlikowski’s film Ida (2013). Set, as are some of Tulli’s stories, in Poland in the 1960s, the film tells the story of a novice nun who is sent to stay with her only living relative, her aunt, before taking her final vows. The aunt, a public prosecutor, reveals to the girl that their family is Jewish, and that her parents died during the war. Pawlikowski takes his visual cues from French (and also Polish) new wave cinema, and incorporates a loving eye for period detail that is far more affectionate than Tulli’s bleak Polish People’s Republic. The film becomes a road movie of sorts as the girl and her aunt travel back to their native village in eastern Poland to find her parents’ grave. The return of the girl’s lost Jewish identity is thus, again, accompanied by a physical return; this is then mirrored by her return, despite the revelations, to the convent at the film’s close. As is the case with Paziński and Tulli, Pawlikowski’s film reminds the viewer that Jewishness is not foreign to Poland, neither did it vanish after the Holocaust. Ida’s

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journey echoes in some ways those being made by contemporary young Polish Jews, as described by Reszke, who are suddenly made aware of their roots, often to their complete surprise: the important difference here being the context – 1960s Poland was a far less friendly place to be Jewish than contemporary Poland. The primary function of Pawlikowski’s characters is symbolic, and the director consciously draws on stereotypes: a meek Catholic nun serves as a natural metaphor for Poland, while the post-war Jew is represented by a ruthless judge and committed communist, evoking the myth of a Jewish-controlled communist state that was – and to an extent remains – popular particularly with regard to Stalinist-era Poland. At the same time, we also see the image, familiar from Lanzman’s Shoah, of the sultry, impoverished, uneducated rural Pole when the women visit their village. This reversion to stereotype and a certain flatness of characters has been criticized by some commentators, as has the overt use of Catholic aesthetics to tell a ‘Jewish’ story (and the film’s generally highly aestheticized approach to its subject).28 It could also be argued, however, that the film’s physical and mnemonic returns complicate these black-and-white images, removing them from their familiar, closed spatial framings (the convent, the aunt’s spacious city-centre flat) and taking them on journeys into the openness and uncertainty of wider, undefined spaces, causing the contours of these images to blur. The opening scenes of the film, for example, show four young nuns within picturesque convent walls cleaning a statue of Jesus then carrying it outside into the snow and placing it on a pedestal – a quintessentially Polish image. When one of these nuns is taken outside of the convent and brought into contact with the complex reality of post-Holocaust Poland her hybrid identity is revealed, and the original image takes on an extra resonance that serves to disturb familiar conceptions of Polishness. At the same time, the back-story of the aunt, who we learn during the trip back to the village also lost her own child when the girl’s parents were killed, reveals a depth of traumatic experience behind a flat image that had initially seemed to invite the antipathy of the viewer. A similar approach is taken to the Polish family who now inhabit the women’s family home. Shown as simple and poor, their initial reaction is one of hostility and suspicion. Yet it is soon revealed that the current occupier’s father had first hidden Ida’s parents in the forest, and that his son had later killed them out of fear for what would happen to his own family were they to be discovered. This revelation occurs during a scene that is strongly reminiscent of the exhumation scene in Aftermath: the son takes the pair to the site of the parent’s death, digs up their bones and hands them over to the women. Pawlikowski, however, constructs this macabre scene without the broad-brush melodrama of Pasikowski’s film, revealing the complex reasons for the son’s actions and showing with sensitivity the way the underlying memories provoke simultaneously outward hostility and profound shame and regret. At the end of the film, Ida returns to the convent. It is unclear how her newly gained knowledge about her origins will affect the way she perceives herself, or how or whether she will act on that knowledge. Indeed, the return to the convent has been seen as a sort of return to Polish normality and laying to rest of the complexes and complexities generated by the loss of Poland’s Jews.29 It is true that Pawlikowski’s film ends ambiguously but serenely, leaving many questions unanswered, allowing

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the disturbing questions it raises to sink beneath the film’s calm, beautiful veneer. Yet perhaps this is one of the most effective aspects of the film: Ida refuses to force its characters to torture themselves with questions, to define themselves as Polish or Jewish, or to quantify how a hybrid of the two might work for them. Ida seems to accept her Jewish origins without question or difficulty, and yet also does not seem to allow it to shake her identity as a Polish Catholic. Perhaps, the film seems to suggest, it is not always necessary to seek tension or contradiction; perhaps the return of this suppressed aspect of Polishness does not have to be challenging or deeply disturbing.

Conclusion The return of the Jew to the heart of Polishness that we find in the texts outlined above and the representation of identities that are irreducible to a stark self-other dichotomy are not new to Polish culture. These things can be found in various forms in Polish literature from both post- and pre-war eras, as Jews, who made enormous contributions to Polish literature, attempted to negotiate their way in a culture that they did not necessarily see as a ‘host’, but as their own. Non-Jewish Polish intellectuals and writers have also contributed to this stretching of identity. Recent years have, however, seen a particular resurgence in expressions of this kind of complexity, expressions that are couched in the language and imagery of mourning, and overturning the simplistic idea of the disturbing return of the alien Jew as ghost, zombie, corpse or foreigner, intent on upsetting the order of national narratives of the past and identity. The return first becomes something that happens within Poland, and then manifests itself within individual Poles, revealing something contradictory, yet somehow naturally so, at the heart of Polish cultural memory. Writing about the memory of the Holocaust, Dominick LaCapra has stated that: [...] one might suggest that the ghosts of the past – symptomatic revenants who have not been laid to rest because of a disturbance in the symbolic order, a deficit in the ritual process, or a death so extreme in its unjustifiability or transgressiveness that in certain ways it exceeds existing modes (perhaps any possible mode) of mourning – roam the post-traumatic world and are not entirely ‘owned’ as ‘one’s own’ by any individual or group.30

Poland’s Jews are precisely the kind of revenant that challenges the very idea of what may or may not be ‘ours’, that is, of the self and not of the other. The dead who are the source of these revenants certainly provoke melancholic turning inwards and obsessive returns, and in the confusion they provoke over the relationship between subject and object of mourning inspire warped forms of the latter that are expressed, as in the works by Ostachowicz and Pasikowski discussed above, in macabre imagery and pleasantly shocking popular genres. While Pasikowski and Ostachowicz revert to entertainingly grotesque expressions of loss, the more complex texts by Pawlikowski, Tulli and Paziński, demonstrate the intertwining of mourning and melancholy in the dynamics of post-memory: in each case

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a second-or third-generation survivor accesses their lost, or rather, never-experienced past through physical returns, mnemonic media (photographs are prominent in all three texts) and family stories. This is not the return of a previously hidden traumatic memory that is excavated from within the self, returning to disrupt that self. Rather, it is a post-mnemonic return that is orchestrated through external stimuli, and it is thus not restricted to the individuals who experienced the original events: it is something that haunts Polishness more widely, which is available in the stories, objects and places among which all Poles live. The hybrid dynamic in these three texts whereby individuals find memory ‘within themselves’ precisely through the external apparatus of cultural memory means that the returns depicted belong exclusively neither to melancholy nor mourning: they go inwards and outwards simultaneously, into the self and out towards the other, blurring the boundaries between these. These latter texts suggest that Poland’s Jews cannot be mourned through a straightforward process of empathetic return to/of the other. As the work of Paziński, Pawlikowski and Tulli in particular demonstrate, this is not simply a matter of Poles’ orientation towards their dead, but to their living too, something that sociological studies of contemporary Polish Jews, like Katka Reszke’s, confirm. And just as Reszke’s respondents encounter the return of the knowledge of their Jewishness not in terms of the disturbing return of suppressed knowledge, but rather as the result of a voluntary, often pleasurable process, Pawlikowski’s Ida suggests that in the end it may be possible to think of Poland’s Jewishness beyond the categories of contradiction, repression, haunting, disturbance, or even mourning, but rather as something that can be calmly acknowledged, accepted and reflected upon as an inherent part of twenty-first-century Polish cultural memory.

Notes 1

2

3

4

On various aspects of these problems, see Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Poland and Germany (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2011), 161–168; Michael Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997); Konstanty Gebert, Living in the Land of Ashes (Kraków and Budapest: Austeria, 2008); Piotr Forecki, Od Shoah do Strachu: spory o polsko-żydowską przeszłość i pamięć w debatach publicznych (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2010); Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994). Meng, Shattered Spaces, 155. Katka Reszke, Return of the Jew: Identity Narratives of the Third Post-Holocaust Generation of Jews in Poland (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 24–25. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, The Pelican Freud Library, trans. James Strachey, vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984); Sigmund Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through’, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12 (London: Vintage, 2001). Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1996); Shoshana Felman and Dori

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5 6 7

8

9

10 11 12

13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20

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Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xviii. See Jackie Feldman, Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008); Erica Lehrer, ‘Relocating Auschwitz: Affective Relations in the Jewish-GermanPolish Troika’, in Kristin Kopp and Joanna Nizynska (eds), Germany, Poland and Postmemorial Relations: In Search of a Liveable Past (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012). Karen Underhill, ‘Next Year in Drohobych: On the Uses of Jewish Absence’, East European Politics and Societies, 25, 3 (2011): 581–596, 588; Genevieve Zubrzycki, ‘Narrative Shock and Polish Memory Remaking in the 21st Century’, in Marc Silberman and Florence Vatan (eds), Memory and Postwar Memorials: Confronting the Violence of the Past (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), 104. In this sense, Poland probably leads the way among east-central European states. For discussion of Gross’s work and its impact in Poland, see Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic, ‘Introduction’, in Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic (eds), The Neighbours Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004). Hanna Krall, Dowody na istnienie (Poznań: a5, 1995), 24. Joanna Szczęsna, ‘25 lat spory o “Shoah” ’, Gazeta wyborcza, 24 March 2010. Available online: http://wyborcza.pl/2029020,76842,7694169.html (accessed 30 March 2015). Elżbieta Janicka, Festung Warschau (Warsaw : Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2012). For a discussion of Israeli artistic responses to this type of ‘return’, see Erica Lehrer and Magdalena Waligorska, ‘Cur(at)ing History: New Genre Art Interventions and the Polish-Jewish Past’, East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, 3, 27 (2013): 510–544. On Słobodzianek, see Paul Vickers, ‘Constructing a Memory of Polish/ Jewish Community in Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class’, Polish Literature in Transformation, ed. Ursula Phillips, Knut Andreas Grimstad and Kris Van Heuckelom (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2013), 203–224. The Polish artist Rafał Betlejewski caused some controversy in 2010 with his ‘Burning Barn’ performance, which marked the 70th anniversary of Jedwabne: he bought and reassembled an old barn and burned it in a village near Warsaw. See Lehrer and Waligorska, ‘Cur(at)ing History’ and Uilleam Blacker, ‘Spatial Dialogues and Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Polish Art: Yael Bartana, Rafał Betlejewski and Joanna Rajkowska’, Open Arts Journal, 3 (2014), 173–187. Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz, Umschlagplatz (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1988), 73. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1984). Rymkiewicz, Umschlagplatz, 16. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Campo dei Fiori’, in New and Collected Poems, 1931–2001, trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass (London: Allen Lane, 2001), 33–34. Jan Błoński, Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto (Kraków : Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1987), 10. For an analysis of Jewish motifs in popular culture in Poland, in particular in detective diction, which helps put my discussion of Ostachowicz and Pasikowski

140

21

22 23

24 25 26 27

28

29 30

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond in perspective, see Magdalena Waligorska, ‘The Jewish-Theme Whodunnit in Contemporary Poland and Germany’, East European Jewish Affairs, 43, 2 (2013), 143–161. This claim was made by Janusz Makuch, director of the Festival of Jewish Culture in Kraków, in an interview for Polish Radio: Kultura w wielkim mieście (2012), [Radio programme], Polish Radio 2, 3 March, 20.20. Available online: http://www. polskieradio.pl/8/1399/Artykul/567406,Kultura-zydowska (accessed 30 March 2015). See, for example, Rymkewicz’s recent works Wieszanie (2007) and Kinderszenen (2008), or the earlier Rozmowy polskie latem 1983 (1983). The American filmmaker Adam Zucker has treated exactly the same topic in his documentary The Return (2014), which follows four young Polish women as they rediscover their Jewish roots and (re)-embrace Jewish identity, culture and religious practice. Reszke, Return of the Jew, 12. Krall, Dowody na istnienie, 57–84. Joanna Sobolewska for the magazine Polityka, as cited on the book’s cover. On Paziński, see Knut Andreas Grimstad, ‘Writing after Testimony, or the Relevance of Piotr Paziński’s The Boarding House’, Polish Literature in Transformation, ed. Ursula Phillips, Knut Andreas Grimstad and Kris Van Heuckelom (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2013), 189–202. Agnieszka Graff, ‘ “Ida” – subtelność i polityka’, Krytyka polityczna: Dziennik opinii, 1 November 2013, available online: http://www.krytykapolityczna.pl/artykuly/ film/20131031/graff-ida-subtelnosc-i-polityka (accessed 30 March 2015). Ibid. Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (London and Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 21.

Part III

Fascination/Pleasure

9

Don’t Mention the War Julian Petley

Introduction This chapter analyses how certain kinds of images of a particularly disturbing past – namely that encompassing the rise of the Third Reich, the Second World War and the Holocaust – were suppressed in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the combined efforts of the Foreign Office, the Independent Television Authority (ITA) and the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC). It does this by drawing on files from the Foreign Office, now held at the National Archives at Kew, and on files still held by the British Board of Film Classification (the Board changed its name in 1984). To my knowledge, most of these documents have never been discussed in print before. The chapter explains that during this period, deep in the Cold War, the British government was extremely hostile to anything which might present the Federal Republic of Germany, now of course a key NATO ally, in an unfavourable light. This most certainly included revelations emanating from the German Democratic Republic that former Nazis, including those who had been involved in genocide, were now occupying prominent positions in the Federal Republic – and indeed, in one case, in NATO. The government, and more specifically the Foreign Office, did its utmost to prevent the circulation of any such material, and this chapter explains how it did so in the case of three particular films and one television programme, and also reveals the role played by supposedly independent regulatory authorities in this process. But what make these examples of political censorship all the more disturbing – disturbing, that is, because political censorship is not supposed to exist in the UK – are the really quite remarkable parallels with the 1930s, when films (newsreels, documentaries and features) dealing with the Third Reich were also censored. Then the British government was pursuing a policy of ‘appeasement’ towards Germany (a euphemism whose function was and is to disguise all-out support for Hitler’s policies in significant sections of the Conservative Party and the wider Establishment), and the country was regarded as a friendly power. Films critical of Nazi Germany could thus not be permitted, whether home-grown or imported. As the decade wore on, the excuse was made that nothing should jeopardize Neville Chamberlain’s negotiations with Hitler, but this was seen increasingly by many as threadbare and deceitful, and

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actually occasioned a parliamentary debate, which is discussed below. The fact that the major actors in this pantomime were, as in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Foreign Office and the BBFC, serves only to underline certain disturbing ideological continuities between pre-war and post-war Britain. The chapter thus begins with a brief account of the censorship in the 1930s of films critical of the Third Reich.

Prologue: The disturbing present Up until 1932 the BBFC operated with numerous rules or ‘exceptions’. These banned, inter alia, ‘incidents having a tendency to disparage our allies’ and ‘themes likely to wound the just susceptibilities of friendly nations’.1 Because so many BBFC documents were destroyed in an air raid during the Second World War, it is not possible to tell whether such rules persisted after 1932, but the Board’s treatment of films and film projects with an anti-Nazi theme strongly suggests that indeed they did. It is important to understand that at this time British film-makers had to submit not only completed films to the Board but also plans and scripts for films which they were thinking of making. This meant that unsuitable projects could be nipped in the bud, but it also suited film-makers since it avoided their shooting scenes, or indeed whole films, which the Board would then refuse to pass. Films with an anti-Nazi theme which were turned down at synopsis stage included two Gaumont-British projects – A German Tragedy and City Without Jews (both 1933). The former concerned a Jewish doctor who loses his job and family as a result of anti-Semitism. Colonel Hanna, the BBFC’s senior script examiner and also its VicePresident, noted: The story is pathetic and would probably in itself be quite free from any objectionable feature, but with the recent political agitation which has just taken place in Germany in connection with the Jewish problem it undoubtedly comes definitely under the heading of political propoganda [sic]. Feeling still runs very strongly in London on this subject and a film based on this story might easily provoke a disturbance (vide Times May 9 1933). On these grounds we do not consider the subject a desirable one at the present juncture.2

City Without Jews was based on a novel by the anti-Nazi writer Hugo Bettauer, who had in fact been murdered for writing it; the story imagines the decline of an Austria from which all Jews had been expelled. Gaumont-British received exactly the same response from Hanna as it did when it submitted A German Tragedy. The Mad Dog of Europe was submitted as a complete scenario in 1934. This told the story of two German families, the Aryan Schmidts and the Jewish Mendelssohns, from the First World War to the present day, against the background of the rise of Nazism. According to Hanna: Various well-known figures in Germany history such as von Hindenburg, Ludendorff, Von Papen and Goering appear under thinly disguised alternatives of name. This is pure anti-Hitler propaganda and as such I think it unsuitable

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for production as a film. The names are absurdly disguised with no attempt to disguise the country and main political events. In any case, it would be impossible to disassociate the story from Germany of today.3

An idea for a film based on a novel set during the Anschluss, Passport for a Girl, was turned down in 1938, as was the project Swastika in 1939. The latter concerned an émigré German who returns to his country with his American wife and child and discovers widespread anti-Jewish persecution. Colonel Hanna stated: ‘Apart from the grossly offensive liaison between Eric and his stepmother, the story is mainly concerned with relating the horrors of the Jewish persecution in Germany today and as such has been classed by Lord Tyrrell [the BBFC President] as unsuitable for exhibition on the film in this country at least at the present juncture.’4 Non-fiction films banned outright included the American documentary Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934) and Adrian Brunel and Ivor Montagu’s Free Thälmann (1935), a documentary pleading for the release of the erstwhile leader of the German Communist Party, Ernst Thälmann, who had been imprisoned by the Nazis in 1933 and would be shot in Buchenwald in 1944. Although British newsreels did not have to be submitted to the BBFC, the same was not true of the American March of Time series; several which featured segments about Nazi Germany were cut, and one, Inside Nazi Germany (1938), was banned outright. According to Colonel Hanna: In my opinion the public exhibition of this picture in England would give grave offence to a nation with whom we are on terms of friendship and which it would be impolitic to offend. I suggest that conditions are by no means similar in the US and in England: 3000 miles of Atlantic Ocean is a useful buffer. The cinemagoing public in England seek amusement, not political guidance from the screen, and are quite likely to resent such guidance if it comes from an alien source.5

Feature films which were banned outright included the Yiddish production The Wandering Jew (1933), which concerns a Jewish artist hounded out of Nazi Germany; the Soviet Professor Mamlock (1938), in which a brilliant Jewish surgeon falls victim to an anti-Semitic purge; and I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany (1939), the true story of the arrest and imprisonment in Germany in 1934 of the American journalist Isobel Steele. Julien Duvivier’s 1936 remake of the German silent classic The Golem, which touched indirectly upon Nazi policies, was heavily cut, and in June 1939 the BBFC held up the Boulting Brothers’ Pastor Hall, based on a play about Martin Niemoller by Ernst Toller, Colonel Hanna stating that ‘its exhibition at the present time would be very inexpedient’, and his assistant Mrs Crouzet noting that ‘even with the nationality disguised, it must be evident that the story is anti-Nazi propaganda’.6 Such activity did not go unnoticed, and on 7 December 1938 Sir Geoffrey Mander, the Liberal MP for Wolverhampton East, put before the House of Commons the motion: This House, attaching the utmost importance to the maintenance undiminished of British democratic traditions of the liberty of expression of opinion, both in the

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Press and in public meetings and also in other media such as cinema films, would greatly deplore any action by the Government of the day which tended to set up any form of political censorship or which exercised pressure direct or indirect.

During the course of the debate, he complained: Nothing anti-Government, nothing anti-Fascist, is permitted, but anything that is favourable to the policy that the Government are pursuing is allowed to go forward. I venture to say that it is not the job of the British Board of Film Censors to deal with political matters of this kind at all. It is monstrous that they should be permitted to carry on this subtle kind of unofficial political censorship. Who asks them to be political? I do not say by any means that it is always done at the direct instigation of the Government – that is not one of my charges to-night, but I believe that a great deal is done on what they believe would be acceptable or otherwise to the Government, according to their own ideas – but I do believe there is pressure by Government Departments or by their friends at times.7

In the last analysis, however, it makes little difference whether BBFC’s cutting and banning of anti-Nazi films or projects were directly prompted by a government department such as the Foreign Office or were the results of its own initiatives. The plain fact is that, prior to the Second World War, the upper echelons of the Board were staffed by people whose qualifications were essentially political as opposed to cinematic. Thus, for example, Sir Edward Shortt, the BBFC President from 1929 to 1935, was a former Chief Secretary for Ireland, member of the Cabinet and Home Secretary, whilst his successor from 1935 to 1948, Lord Tyrell, was a former Permanent Head of the Foreign Office, where previously he had founded the News Department and headed Political Intelligence. Both were also Privy Counsellors. Four out of the five examiners had military backgrounds, and Colonel Hanna was a former Deputy Chief of Intelligence in Ireland. Meanwhile J. Brooke Wilkinson, the administrative head of the BBFC from 1913 to 1948, had been in charge of film propaganda to neutral nations during the First World War and was a member of the (secret) CID Subcommittee on Censorship. In other words, these were men of high political position with impeccable contacts: the Establishment personified. As Nicholas Pronay argues, the presence of such figures in the BBFC proves ‘the existence of high-level contacts, of wide experience of politics and government at the highest level, and of knowledge about other operations being conducted in the field of propaganda and counter-propaganda which are the essential prerequisites for conducting political censorship’.8 Pronay concludes that what made the political censorship of films so effective at this time was that the experience and background of a figure such as Shortt Ensured that he could be relied upon to know what was needed, who was ‘fully in the picture’ knowing not only what was known to members of the public and whom it was ‘safe’ to ‘contact’ or consult. It made no difference to his ‘official’ standing either where the money for his salary came from or what position, if any, the organisation formally possessed.9

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The debate initiated by Mander does, however, contain one example of direct Foreign Office interference in the content of a newsreel, and this is particularly significant in the light of its post-war film and television activities, which will be explored below. At the time of Chamberlain’s negotiations with Hitler over Czechoslovakia, the Paramount newsreel of 22 September 1938, entitled Europe’s Fateful Hour, had included interviews with former Times editor Henry Wickham Steed, political editor of the News Chronicle, A.J. Cummings, and man-on-the-street broadcaster Herbert Hodge, all of whom were highly critical of the policy of ‘appeasement’. This section was deleted the day after the newsreel was released and replaced with a new section entitled ‘Premier Flies for Peace’. According to Mander: ‘A telegram was sent by British Paramount News to all its theatres, saying: “Please delete Wickham Steed and A. J. Cummings’ speeches from to-day’s Paramount news. We have been officially requested to do so”. Later on they denied that they had been officially requested to do so and said they had done it at their own discretion.’10 However, in response to a question about the incident from Mander on 23 November, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Simon, had stated: His Majesty’s Government considered that certain passages in the news reel referred to, which was being shown at the time of the Prime Minister’s conversations with Herr Hitler at Godesberg, might have a prejudicial effect upon the negotiations. The Ambassador of the United States, I understand, thought it right to communicate this consideration to a member of the Hays organisation which customarily deals with matters of this kind and which brought it to the attention of Paramount News, who, from a sense of public duty in the general interest, decided to make certain excisions from the news reel.11

As Mander concluded: ‘There you get a perfectly clear and open case of political censorship by the Government of the day in the interests of the foreign policy that they were pursuing, and it was a foreign policy which was detested by probably half the nation.’12

The disturbing present becomes the disturbing past It is generally assumed that after the war the BBFC was preoccupied mainly with representations of sex and violence and was far less exercised by political matters than it had been up until 1939. However, the Board in fact continued to concern itself with the way in which the Third Reich was represented, the only difference from the 1930s being that then it was concerned with images of the Nazi present whilst in the 1950s and the early 1960s it was certain kinds of representations of the Nazi past that it was determined to keep off the screen. Once again, there was either direct or indirect Foreign Office involvement in its decisions, but now the Foreign Office also turned its attention to programmes on television about the Third Reich. It was particularly perturbed by films emanating from the German Democratic Republic which made the point that many former high-ranking Nazis were now occupying positions of power in the Federal Republic. Several of these were imported into the UK by Plato Films,

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which was formed in 1951 with funds from Ivor Montagu’s now defunct Progressive Film Institute and the British-Soviet Friendship Society. It was run by Stanley Forman, and distributed films from the Soviet Union, China and other Communist countries.13 The three films dealing with the Nazi past which ran into very considerable problems with the BBFC were Urlaub auf Sylt/Holiday on Sylt (1957), Unternehmen Teutonenschwert/Operation Teutonic Sword (1958) and Ein Tagebuch für Anne Frank/A Diary for Anne Frank (1958). Additionally, Operation Teutonic Sword encountered problems with the ITA over a proposed screening of an extract from it on ITV, which never in fact materialized.

‘Doing our best to suppress it’: Holiday on Sylt Holiday on Sylt was the first in a series of films by Andrew and Amelie Thorndike, two of DEFA’s most acclaimed producers, entitled Archive sagen aus/The Archives Testify. Drawing on the immense German film archives in the hands of the GDR, the series dealt with what DEFA called the ‘militaristic, war criminal and fascist past of the leading militarists in today’s Federal Republic’.14 The twenty-minute film showed that SS Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth, who had played a leading role in the crushing of the Warsaw uprising in 1944, earning him the title ‘The Butcher of Warsaw’, was now the Christian Democrat mayor of Westerland on the North Sea island of Sylt, although he was still wanted in Poland for war crimes. The film also contained contemporary footage of a rally of 8,000 former SS members near Würzburg. The censorship of the film in both the cinema and on television has been discussed by Bert Hogenkamp,15 but the fullest picture of its fate is to be gleaned from the relevant Foreign Office file, on which the following account is based.16 The historical background is outlined in a memorandum written on 6 May 1958 by J.K. Drinknall, whose role was to promote Anglo-German relations. Reinefarth was originally captured by the Americans and employed by them. Then In June 1948 he moved to the British Zone of Germany but was not used by us. On several occasions in 1948 and 1949 the Poles applied to the Americans for his extradition but first received negative answers and then were told that he had left their Zone. On October 10, 1950, the Poles applied to us for his extradition. We were inclined to think that the Poles had a reasonable case for demanding his extradition but consulted the Americans who specifically requested us in June or July, 1951 (in a written Memorandum) not to hand him over to the Poles. As a result of these representations we decided not to reply to the Polish Note of October 10, 1950.

Quite apart from anything else, this provides a very revealing insight into UK/US power relations in post-war Europe. In March 1958 Plato obtained customs clearance for Holiday on Sylt, and began to publicize it. This attracted the attention of Associated-Rediffusion (the ITV franchise holder for the London area from 1954 to 1968), which scheduled a screening of an

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extract from the film in its This Week slot, 1 May 1958. A note from D.D. Brown, 30 April, reveals that, after consulting with the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), which played a key (if highly secretive) role in spreading antiCommunist propaganda during the Cold War,17 he had informed the programme’s producer, Peter Hunt, ‘that Plato films Ltd. is directed entirely by members of the Communist Party’ (which was in fact true). The above-mentioned memo from Drinknall notes that the German Embassy and German Foreign Ministry were told that ‘we were doing our best to suppress it’. Associated-Rediffusion contacted the Foreign Office on 30 April and invited them to comment on the truth or otherwise of the allegations in the film. The head of the ITA, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, then spoke on the phone with Ralph Murray of the Foreign Office, after which Kirkpatrick ordered that the broadcast be pulled from the schedules. (Significantly, Sir Ivone had only the previous year vacated his post as Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office.) Associated-Rediffusion then flew Reinefarth to London and filmed his responses to the film’s central charge in an interview with Ludovic Kennedy, with the idea of broadcasting this in a revised version of the programme. Drinknall’s memo makes it clear that Reinefarth himself ‘so far from objecting, would be very glad if the two films were shown’. The Foreign Office also suggested inviting a representative of West German embassy onto the programme to discuss the film. However, the abovementioned memo from D.D. Brown reveals, rather embarrassingly, that when the Foreign Office approached ‘Herr Ritter, the German Minister’ about arranging for a representative to appear on the programme, he had stated that ‘frankly nobody in the Embassy at present had a sufficiently impressive array of facts to want to be crossexamined about them’. Brown thus ruefully concluded: If we try to get the programme suppressed ... we cannot argue about the truth or falsehood of the allegations; we can only say that the programme is unlikely to do Anglo-German relations any good. This approach is vulnerable to the retort that if there is a recrudescence of Naziism [sic] it is a matter of public interest on which Associated-Rediffusion can legitimately comment.

Drinknall’s memo reveals that he and another Foreign Office official were shown the film and the interview on 5 May. He notes that he did not think that showing the film would contribute to promoting Anglo-German relations and that ‘therefore I disliked the prospect of it being shown at all. I was not, however, asking for the film not to be shown; I merely wished to ensure that if it had to be shown this was done in as fair a manner as possible.’ A great deal of debate then ensued in the Foreign Office – P.F. Hancock noted that this is precisely ‘the sort of thing which riles Dr Adenauer’, and questions were raised about whether Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick actually had the ‘constitutional power’ to veto the programme, whether pressure could be brought to bear on him by Sir Frederick Hoyer Millar (then Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, and formerly Ambassador to the Federal Republic), and whether there might be awkward Parliamentary Questions if the Foreign Office succeeded in suppressing the programme altogether. Finally, it was decided to write to the ITA on 7 May. The letter noted that when Associated-Rediffusion first contacted the Foreign Office, it

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was informed ‘confidentially that Plato Films Limited was a company with strong Communist connexions. (All the Directors appear to be members of the Communist Party of Great Britain or closely related to it.)’ It went on to state that although ‘it can be no part of the intention of Foreign Office to suggest censorship or suppression of items which the organisers of television discussion programmes consider of public interest’, it was felt that it was questionable to use ‘an item of Communist political propaganda in discussion of a subject of such importance’. It concluded: In general we are seeking to enlarge our contacts with the programme people of all the companies of ITV so as to give them a service of information and guidance comparable with that set up with the newspapers. It seems to me however that the companies are statutorily divorced from the Authority to a degree which does not obtain, say, in the relationship of the BBC public affairs programmes to DirectorGeneral and Governors of the Corporation, and I would welcome some time your views on whether and how we might ensure that our contact with you and your staff on foreign political issues runs parallel with that of the companies devising programmes under your control.

Thus are invitations to self-censorship issued in the gentlemanly tones of the Foreign Office. An idea of the kind of ‘service of information and guidance’ that was euphemistically being offered here can be gleaned from Lashmar and Oliver, and especially the chapter on the BBC.18 However, as it turned out, late on the previous day, 6 May, Associated-Rediffusion had already decided not to show the programme at all. The sudden cancellation immediately attracted the attentions of sections of the press, and it was not long before the finger of blame was pointing at the Foreign Office, which consequently felt it necessary to issue a statement to the effect that it ‘has neither raised objection to, nor expressed approval of ’ the programme’s transmission. (This is quoted in Drinknall’s memo.) A note from D.D. Brown, 9 May, states: The interesting thing about all this is that, in spite of the flurry which it caused in the Foreign Office, the reason for the suspension of the programme on each occasion – May 1 as well as May 8 – was a decision, in the first case by the I.T.A. and in the second case by Associated-Rediffusion, reached independently of Foreign Office views and indeed before these views had been given to those who made the decisions. It is cheering to think that we are not the only hurdle that Miss Doncaster [Carol Doncaster was the Head of Features at Associated-Rediffusion] and Mr Hunt have to get over before they get through to the public.

But what is also interesting is that this note confirms that the Foreign Office did actually see both itself and the ITA (run, it needs to be remembered, by a former Foreign Office mandarin) as ‘hurdles’ standing in the path of investigative journalism. The extent to which the ITA and Associated-Rediffusion reached their decision to ban the programme ‘independently of Foreign Office views’ is a matter for the individual reader to judge.

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On 2 July the Labour MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, Stephen Swingler, asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Selwyn Lloyd: ‘On how many occasions has the Foreign Office intervened to prevent the exhibition of films on television or in the cinema for political or diplomatic purposes?’ Lloyd responded that as the answer to the first question was ‘none’ the second question did not arise. Swingler then raised the non-appearance of Holiday on Sylt, to which Selwyn Lloyd retorted: ‘It is quite untrue that we intervened to prevent the showing of any film.’19 Swingler returned to the fray on 14 July, asking the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir Allan Noble: ‘On what date consultations took place between his Department and the Associated Rediffusion company about the proposed exhibition of the film, Holiday in [sic] Sylt; who initiated these discussions; and why?’ Noble replied: At the invitation of Associated Rediffusion, two Foreign Office officials attended a showing of the film Holiday in [sic] Sylt on 5th May; this invitation was extended on 30th April, when the company first consulted the Foreign Office about the film. It is not for me to answer why the company in this instance decided to consult the Foreign Office; I can only say that journalists and broadcasters dealing with questions of foreign affairs frequently and naturally do so.

Swinger then asked: May we know what opinion was expressed by the Foreign Office in view of the fact that the company had engaged to exhibit this film on 8th May and somehow, in the period in between, during which the Foreign Office saw the film, it was suddenly decided to withdraw it? Does the right hon. and gallant Gentleman still stick to the view that the Foreign Office had nothing whatever to do with it?

To which Noble responded: ‘The Foreign Office officials explained to the company that the film, which was made by the East German authorities, contained deliberate distortions of historical facts in order to serve the interests of Communist propaganda. Whether or not the film was shown was a matter for the company.’20 Such are the politics of pressure. Plato also submitted Holiday on Sylt to the BBFC. The first account in the Board’s files of its dealings with the film is a report by two examiners on 20 August 1958. The film was also seen by the Board’s President, Sir Sidney Harris, and its Secretary, John Trevelyan. The examiners’ notes state that the film was ‘made apparently in East Germany’, and takes the cases of two ex-SS commanders, ‘one said to be now Mayor of Sylt, and shows what they are supposed to have done in Poland before, during and after the rising’. The notes conclude: We all feel that this sort of propaganda – apart even from shots of camps and executions – should not be passed as it is tendentious, very probably much exaggerated and likely to give offence to a friendly foreign country. But it was decided that J.T.[John Trevelyan] should be asked about the ITA’s refusal to televise this film and the attitude of the F.O. and perhaps their authorities.21

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A note from Trevelyan on 21 August reveals that he phoned a Mr McCormack of Associated-Rediffusion; according to the note: ‘They had been privately advised by the Foreign Office not to show the film because of its dangerous political propaganda and offence to the West German Government. He said that the decision, like all such decisions, was taken by the Company and not by the Foreign Office.’22 Having received an angry letter from B. Toms on 5 December 1958, Trevelyan replied on 9 December that the Board ‘was not prepared to issue a certificate to this film on the grounds that it made an attack on a living person without giving that person an opportunity to refute the charges or to submit alternative evidence’.23 He makes exactly the same point in his memoir What the Censor Saw, noting that ‘the Board always refused to pass films, or scenes in films, which appeared to be legally defamatory about living people, and it was on this policy, and not for political reasons, that we rejected the film’.24 However, it is important to note that the issue of defamation is nowhere raised in the examiners’ report. His letter concludes: You imply that these decisions were political censorship. I cannot see any justification for this implication. You suggest that the film might cause ‘government embarrassment’. I see no possibility of this and this Board’s decision was not related to any such possibility. The Board of Film Censors is independent and is not answerable to the government in any way. This decision, like all its decisions, was taken independently and without consultation with any government department or outside body.25

An assurance which would be flatly contradicted by the Board’s handling of A Diary for Anne Frank. In its publicity for the film, which was distributed non-theatrically without a BBFC certificate, Plato drew attention to the fact that it ‘was banned from a television programme at 24 hours’ notice on May 8th; was the subject of a series of questions in the House of Commons to the Foreign Secretary on July 2nd and 14th; and has received more comment and attention in the national press than any other documentary in the history of cinema’. In the circumstances, the hyperbole is surely understandable.

‘Friendly diplomatic relations’: Operation Teutonic Sword The next film in The Archives Testify series was Operation Teutonic Sword. The film’s problems with both the BBFC and the courts have been analysed by Hogenkamp,26 and I will concentrate mainly on the former here. The film concerns General Hans Speidel, at that time Supreme Commander of NATO ground forces in Europe, and implicated him in the murder of hundreds of Resistance fighters and Jews in France in 1942, in war crimes in the Soviet Union, and in the betrayal of Rommel to the Gestapo after the failed Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler in 1944. The film was shown to the press at the NFT on 19 November 1958, but refused a certificate by BBFC twelve days later, on the grounds that it ‘makes serious allegations against a living person now in a prominent position and provides no opportunity for

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an alternative interpretation of the evidence produced. Furthermore, it is critical of a Government with which this country has friendly diplomatic relations without providing any opportunity for its charges to be refuted.’27 It is surely significant that when Trevelyan wrote a brief letter to the New Statesman, 6 December 1958, in response to an article by William Whitebait in the edition of 29 November, which mentioned the banning of the film, he referred to only the first reason for the ban. But even this is dubious, as Elizabeth A. Allan of the National Council for Civil Liberties pointed out in a letter in response to Trevelyan in the edition of 13 December: ‘If the “serious allegations” to which the Board refers constitute a defamatory representation, the individual concerned has the protection of the courts. If they do not, what right has the Board to use its censorship powers to prevent legitimate discussion of an individual’s reputation? What principle of public interest is involved?’ Once again the suspicion was voiced that the Foreign Office may have had something to do with the Board’s decision, and on 2 February 1959 the Labour MP Arthur Lewis asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs ‘to what extent the communication which he received from the Federal Government of Germany last September, concerning the film Operation Teutonic Sword constituted a request for his assistance in securing a ban on the public showing of this film in Great Britain; and on what grounds?’ As he received the response from the Junior Foreign Minister, Commander Robert Allan, that ‘I cannot reveal details of a confidential communication from another Government’,28 one can only assume that a communication about the film was indeed received. Plato then approached the London County Council (LCC) for a local certificate, and on 3 February 1959 the Council passed the film for showing in London. However, on 19 February the company received a letter from Speidel’s solicitors, Holland & Co, informing them that the film was libellous and demanding that it should not be shown. Significantly, Holland & Co was also the firm used by the West German Embassy in London, and the writ was in fact their idea in the first place. All bookings were cancelled, but on 12 March writs were issued against Plato Films and Unity Theatre (which had shown the film). Plato then cut what it thought to be the offending passage (about Speidel’s alleged involvement in the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in Marseilles on 17 October 1934), and unveiled General Speidel – The Archives Testify on 27 April 1959. This was submitted to the BBFC on 9 May, and rejected, the BBFC having been informed by Holland & Co that Speidel objected to the Rommel material as well. At this point Plato’s managing director Stanley Forman sold his share in his house to his wife and set about establishing a new company, Educational and Television Films Ltd (ETV), which commenced business on 5 July 1959. In January 1960 Plato submitted the new version of Operation Teutonic Sword and A Diary for Anne Frank (see below) to the BBFC, and re-submitted Holiday on Sylt, but the Board turned down all three on the grounds that they attacked living people. After a series of tortuous wranglings in the courts the GDR authorities agreed to pay Speidel’s legal costs, whilst he indicated that he would renounce any financial claims for damages, providing that all prints of both versions of the film were taken out of circulation.

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Jackals and hyenas: A Diary for Anne Frank A Diary for Anne Frank was also refused a certificate by the BBFC and was very similar in form to the two Thorndike films, in that it used archival material to show that those involved in the death of Anne Frank were alive and well and living in the Federal Republic. This again caused considerable debate within the BBFC, and an internal memo, dated 7 August 1959, by chief examiner Frank Crofts (who, before he joined the Board, had worked for the Indian civil service), reveals that: N.K.B. [Newton Branch] said that we should protect ourselves against a charge of abetting a libel: if the accusations made against the men were untrue we had a complete answer to anyone who criticised us for refusing to pass the film. If the accusations were true, on the other hand, we should allow them to be made. (This might not be a defence in a suit for damages – F.N.C.). He and A.O.F. [Audrey Field] thought that we should ask the Foreign Office about the truth of the accusations: this was eventually agreed upon, but we also said that the F.O. should not be consulted about the censorship of the film.29

On the same day, Crofts duly wrote on behalf of the Board to the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs at the Foreign Office on 7 August 1959, informing them that We have had a film which connects half a dozen Germans by name with atrocities, mainly at Auschwitz and Belsen, and alleges that they have for the most part secured their release and are now living in prosperity in West Germany where their future activities will probably menace world peace. Before we decide what to do with the film we should like to check the truth of some of the facts alleged.

He then asks the Foreign Office for information about various named individuals. Crofts notes that ‘I have marked this letter “confidential” for obvious reasons’.30 The film is not named but it is clearly A Diary for Anne Frank. In the course of ensuing discussions, a senior officer, John Killick, makes the revealing comment on 22 October that ‘I have spoken to Mr Trevelyan earlier about Teutonenschwert, and the Board will continue to refuse licenses to films that are or may be defamatory of persons living who are unable to defend themselves’.31 The Foreign Office was able to answer a number of the Board’s queries to the latter’s satisfaction, and in a letter to Plato Films, which is reproduced in the Democratic German Report, 25 September, Trevelyan stated: The Board decided to maintain its policy of being unwilling to pass for exhibition sequences which appear to be in any way defamatory to living persons. This film shows the activities of certain named people in Germany during the war and continues by showing the present activities of these persons. This material has the appearance of being defamatory only if both parts are shown. The Board has no objection to the film showing the wartime activities of the persons concerned and by removing information about their present employment and whereabouts no

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indication is given that they are in fact living persons. Cinema audiences in this country are unlikely to know these people by name and know therefore that they are living persons. By deleting references to their present day activities the matter is at least left in doubt.32

But this once again raises the question why, when faced with this kind of film, the Board did not seek legal advice on its policy regarding allegedly defamatory material. Indeed, in an undated memo examiner Branch explicitly suggests that it should do so. However, according to Trevelyan’s memoir, he did so only after what he called the ‘fuss’ had died down, which seems distinctly odd. At this point the Board’s legal adviser was Arnold (later Lord) Goodman, and Trevelyan enquired of him: Whether by issuing a certificate stating that a film was considered suitable for public exhibition the Board would be involved if, arising from the film, there was an action in the courts on the grounds of libel. He gave me a considered opinion that this policy of the Board was not justified since it was not the job of such an organisation to do the work of the Courts, and furthermore that it was most unlikely that the Board would be involved in any libel proceedings since it was not an accessory in the publication of a libel and as merely making a decision on a film’s general suitability for exhibition in cinemas. On receiving this opinion we immediately abandoned our former policy.33

The three films discussed above, however, remained uncertificated. What the BBFC file on A Diary for Anne Frank also reveals is a good deal of anger among the examiners at the problems which Plato Films had caused them, and clearly they were particularly irked by accusations that they were acting as political censors. In a vituperative memo, Branch accuses Plato of ‘being like jackals, eager to cash in on the publicity’ for the release of the Hollywood film, The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), and suggests that Trevelyan should inform the company responsible for it (Twentieth Century Fox) about the existence of the East German film, adding: ‘We have no moral obligations to hyenas like Pluto who would be only too happy to wreck the cinema as a place of entertainment by turning it into a political battleground.’ But the memo, like others quoted above, is equally interesting for the light which it sheds on the question of whether at this point the BBFC was still operating the ‘friendly nations’ policy mentioned elsewhere in this chapter. Branch’s memo distinctly suggests that it was, and it also illuminates the extent to which this examiner, at least, thought it proper for the Board to engage in political censorship. Thus he refers to ‘our “good neighbour” policy about attacks on friendly nations’, although he goes on to note ruefully: In this age of double-talk, all nations are friendly if we have diplomatic relations with them. Therefore any decision on these grounds can only be interpreted as political censorship. In such cases, we should only cut or reject when we have good reason to believe that in this country a film would cause a breach of the peace or very strong resentment (a) to the public in general; (b) to sizeable groups – racial, religious or ‘foreign’ (e.g. American citizens living in this country).34 [Emphasis in the original].

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In this respect, he wanted removed from the commentary of A Diary for Anne Frank the remark: ‘These men are murderers. Unless we prevent them, they will do the same again.’ In his view, ‘this is an open incitement to people who see this film to make mischief ’.35

‘Unbelievable horrors’: Censoring images of the Holocaust There was, though, another problem for the BBFC with A Diary for Anne Frank. The letter from Trevelyan to Plato cited above via the Democratic German Report, 25 September, also insists on the deletion of shots involving concentration camp victims. Thus: ‘Delete the first shot of skeletons in trench – before Anne’s face appears over them. Delete two shots of bulldozers shovelling piles of bodies into mass grave.’ In his response, also quoted in the Report, Trevelyan states that ‘we have raised no objection to any film showing the dreadful things that the Nazis did’.36 But this simply is not the case, as Trevelyan himself admits in his memoir: In the 1950s we had a good many documentary films showing cruelty to human beings. These were films found in Nazi archives after the war, some of which had most horrifying scenes taken in concentration camps. They presented us with a very difficult problem. We had no wish to stop people from knowing about the appalling inhumanity and unbelievable atrocities, but the films showed real people being tortured, horribly maltreated and ruthlessly killed, and some of the scenes made us feel physically ill. After careful consideration we decided that we ought to modify some of these films by removing the worst of the horrors.37

Another casualty of this policy was The Warsaw Ghetto (1960). The Board demanded cuts of five minutes, which the distributors were unwilling to make, and so withdrew from the negotiations. Curiously, in Erwin Leiser’s Mein Kampf (1960) certain shots were allowed which the Board had wanted removed from The Warsaw Ghetto, but this was because they were ‘without the macabre emphasis with which they were presented in that film’. However, ‘in Reel 10 we suggest still shot of nude women and children should be removed’.38 The suspicion that the Board was actually trying to impose ‘taste and decency’ considerations on representations of the most horrific event of our time, namely the Holocaust, is only increased by the discovery that in the documentary footage of concentration camps in Samuel Fuller’s Verboten! (1959), it insisted on the removal of a shot ‘where two naked men are covered with blankets, shot of pile of corpses in gas chambers also shots of living people in the gas chambers and shot of woman’s body being thrown into a pit on top of bodies’.39 And confirmation that this was indeed the case is provided by the Board’s treatment of Alain Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog (1955), which was submitted to it in 1960. The ‘exception form’, dated 1 February, notes: Remove second still showing naked woman, seen from behind. Remove all shots of bodies or parts of bodies burning or charred. Remove shots of decapitated bodies and human heads in a tub.

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Remove still shot of skulls (one of which has smashed eye socket). Remove all shots of bulldozer and corpses. Remove shots of man carrying partially nude and emaciated female corpse and of man throwing corpses into ditch, and shot of corpses in this ditch. Remove shots of men handling skulls.40

A memo from John Trevelyan, 2 February, notes that Kenneth Rive, who headed Gala Films, which distributed the picture, had telephoned and Appealed against the exceptions on the grounds that (a) this material was factual and (b) it has been shown in newsreels. I admitted that it was factual but said that in our view there were limits to what should be shown and that these shots were beyond these limits. I added that we had asked for similar deletions in other films showing material of this kind.41

But not only did the Board refuse to give way on the ‘exceptions’, it insisted on two more when Gala submitted the cut version: ‘One is of naked men, front view showing genitals. Second is male corpse on pile of corpses with genitals clearly exposed.’ Rive agreed to cut the second but not the first, and Trevelyan agreed to pass the film with an ‘X’ certificate.42 Thus the reason for banning the showing of certain disturbing images from the Nazi past had shifted from a desire not to upset and anger a key Cold War ally to an extraordinarily prudish determination to shield spectators from the sight of human nakedness – irrespective of the fact that the least shocking aspects of these bodies is that they are naked. It is not as if such images had not been seen before – in the wake of the Western allies’ discovery of the camps at Belsen and Buchenwald, the newsreels had included footage shot there, and newspapers had published still images. Admittedly, the latter were not the most graphic or horrific. Thus the front page of the Daily Telegraph, 21 April 1945, stated that ‘more than a dozen photographs each giving indisputable testimony of the bestial cruelties [...] reached the Daily Telegraph yesterday; but they are of such a revolting nature that it has been decided not to reproduce them’. Such images were, however, printed in magazines such as Picture Post and the Illustrated London News. Indeed, on 28 April 1945 the latter produced a detachable four-page supplement which carried the warning: ‘Our subscribers with young families whom they would not desire to see the photographs, can remove these pages. These revelations of coldly calculated massacre and torture are given as a record for all time of German crimes, and are intended for our adult readers only.’43 The Daily Express also staged an exhibition in Trafalgar Square of photographs of the camps, entitled, significantly, Seeing Is Believing. This consisted of twenty-two photographs from Belsen, Buchenwald and Nordhausen. As Hannah Caven has put it: The whole issue of how to present such a story to the public was very real. There had never been a story like this before and there was a real danger that the public would be so shocked and horrified that they would reject the information that

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the papers carried. Many of the later reports carried headlines emphasising the message that these things had to be witnessed and remembered for the sake of future generations. The whole concept was one of ‘Lest We Forget’, a headline frequently used in the papers, including the Evening Standard and the Illustrated London News. The camps were such an extraordinary phenomenon they were viewed as a problem that the whole of the civilised world had to confront.44

On the other hand, even by late 1945 the official attitude towards Germany had already begun to soften as the Cold War developed, and it may also be that officialdom did not want to encourage anything which might give succour to the Zionist cause and exacerbate the already highly unstable situation in Palestine. Furthermore, many people wanted simply to forget these horrific images, and were anyway largely unaware of the true enormity of what they represented – namely the evidence of genocide, as, for various reasons, this was rarely made clear in the discourses which traditionally accompanied such images.45 However, these considerations serve only to make the BBFC’s cutting of concentration camp footage all the more reprehensible, since people clearly needed to be reminded about, and indeed to learn more about, what had happened in what was the still very recent past. As Sylvie Lindeperg puts it: ‘In Spring 1945 the shots of Bergen-Belsen had been taken and shown to the British public from the perspective of putting Germany on trial, the violence and the horror were consubstantial with the act of accusation by the image. Fifteen years later, decency and public protection redefined the contours of the representable.’46

Conclusion This chapter has shown, in some detail, how certain images of a particularly disturbing period were suppressed in Britain, first when the events represented were actually taking place, and then when they had entered ‘history’. The institutions responsible for the censorship of these images remained the same (with the addition of the ITA in the 1950s), as did the reasons for their actions, although the BBFC’s sanitizing of images of the Holocaust appears to have been motivated more by staggeringly misplaced prudery than by overtly political considerations. The story told here illustrates certain disturbing ideological parallels between the Britain of ‘appeasement’ and the Britain of the Cold War, but it also lays bare the gentlemanly, intra-Establishment mechanisms by which political censorship takes place in a country in which governments habitually deny the existence of any such thing.

Acknowledgements I owe a very considerable debt of gratitude to Patsy Nightingale for allowing me to consult her MA thesis ‘Films on Trial: Political Censorship in British Cinema and Television, 1955–60’ (Queen Mary University of London, 2001), and to Bert

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Hogenkamp for sending me his unpublished article ‘Film und kalter Krieg: Vorführung und Verbot der DEFA “Entlarvungsfilmen” in den Niederlanden und Grossbritannien, 1958–1963’. I would also like to thank Edward Lamberti for allowing me to access the relevant BBFC files.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13

14

15 16 17

For a full list of these rules and exceptions as they developed over the years see John Trevelyan, What the Censor Saw (London: Michael Joseph, 1973), 30–46. Quoted in Jeffrey Richards, ‘The British Board of Film Censors and Content Control in the 1930s: Foreign Affairs’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2, 1 (1982), 39–48, 41. Ibid., 42. Interestingly, in Hollywood too it had already proved impossible to make the film, whose original script was written by Herman J. Mankiewicz, because of implacable hostility from the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), which feared that, if made, it might encourage the Nazi regime to ban the import of American films. See Thomas Doherty, Hitler and Hollywood 1933–39 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 54–59. Quoted in Richards, ‘The British Board of Film Censors’, 42. Ibid., 40. Quoted in James C. Robertson, The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action, 1913–1975 (London: Routledge, 1989), 75–76. Available online: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=1938-12-07a.1270.2 Nicholas Pronay, ‘The Political Censorship of Films in Britain between the Wars’, in Nicholas Pronay and D.W. Spring (eds), Propaganda, Politics and Film (London: Macmillan, 1982), 98–125, 114. Ibid., 115. Available online: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=1938-12-07a.1270.2 Ibid. Ibid. See also Tony Aldgate, ‘1930s Newsreels: Censorship & Controversy’, Sight and Sound, 46, 2 (Summer 1977), 154–158. The most comprehensive accounts of Plato Films (later to become Educational & Television Films Ltd. (ETV)) are to be found in Bert Hogenkamp, Film, Television and the Left 1950–1970 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2000), and Bert Hogenkamp, ‘GDR Films and the British Left: A Failed Breakthrough’, in Stefan Berger and Norman LaPorte (eds) The Other Germany: Perceptions and Influences in British-East German Relations, 1945–1990 (Augsburg: Wissner Verlag, 2005), 225–238. Plato is also discussed in Alan Burton and Julian Petley, ‘Wonderful Odds and Wonderful Sods’, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 4 (2001), 128–136. Quoted in Bert Hogenkamp, ‘Film und kalter Krieg: Vorführung und Verbot der DEFA “Entlarvungsfilmen” in den Niederlanden und Grossbritannien, 1958–1963’, unpublished. Hogenkamp, Film, Television and the Left 1950–1970, 77–78; ‘GDR Films and the British Left’, 230–231. FO371/137352, National Archives, Kew. Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War 1948–1977 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1998).

160 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Ibid., 60–65. Available online: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1958/jul/02/ television-and-cinema-films Available online: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1958/jul/14/ holiday-in-sylt-film BBFC file on Holiday on Sylt. Ibid. Ibid. Trevelyan, What the Censor Saw, 174. BBFC file on Holiday on Sylt. Hogenkamp, Film, Television and the Left 1950–1970, 78–84; Hogenkamp, ‘GDR Films and the British Left’, 231–234. Quoted in Derek Hill, ‘No Political Censorship – Except for Political Films!’ Tribune, 5 December 1958. Available online: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1959/feb/02/ film-operation-teutonic-sword BBFC file on A Diary for Anne Frank. FO 371/146061, National Archives, Kew. Ibid. Ibid. Trevelyan, What the Censor Saw, 175. BBFC file on A Diary for Anne Frank. Ibid. FO 371/146061, National Archives, Kew. Trevelyan, What the Censor Saw, 173. BBFC file on Mein Kampf. BBFC file on Verboten! BBFC file on Nuit et brouillard. Ibid. Ibid. Both quoted in Hannah Caven, ‘Horror in Our Time: Images of the Concentration Camps in the British Media, 1945’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 21, 3 (2001), 205–253, 231. Ibid., 232. Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), Part III. Sylvie Lindeperg, Nuit et brouillard: Un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), 93.

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‘However sick a joke ... ’: On Comedy, the Representation of Suffering, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Melodrama and Volker Koepp’s Melancholy Stephanie Bird

Primo Levi invokes the notion of a joke when he first arrives in Auschwitz. The prisoners, who have had nothing to drink for four days, are put into a room with a tap and a card that forbids drinking the water because it is dirty: ‘Nonsense. It seems obvious that the card is a joke, “they” know that we are dying of thirst and they put us in a room, and there is a tap, and Wassertrinken Verboten.’1 In Levi’s example, the relationship of mocked and mocker is clear, as is the moral evaluation that condemns those that would ridicule and taunt the prisoners. Yet in Imre Kertész’s novel Fateless, the moral clarity offered by Levi is absent from Kertész’s reference to the notion of a joke. In it, the 14-year-old boy, György Köves, describes how the procedure he and his fellow passengers must undergo from arrival in Birkenau to either the gas chambers or showers elicits in him a ‘sense of certain jokes, a kind of student prank’.2 Despite feeling increasingly queasy, for he is aware of the outcome of the procedure, György nevertheless has the impression of a stunt: gentlemen in imposing suits, smoking cigars who must have come up with a string of ideas, first of the gas, then of the bathhouse, next the soap, the flower beds, ‘and so on’ (Fateless, 111), jumping up and slapping palms when they conjured up a good one. In Fateless the moral heirarchy offered by Levi is undermined by a sustained distanced and laconic tone. Kertész elsewhere describes how Fateless, based on his own experience of being deported to Auschwitz and Saitz, was initially rejected by the publisher for this reason. Along with the shocking reference to the joke, the publisher objected to the protagonist’s failure to transform the concentration camp experience into a shattering experience for the reader, who is offended and repelled by his ‘lack of compassion’ for other prisoners (Fateless, 57). Kertész acknowledges the challenge his novel presented to the authority of the Hungarian dictatorship, referring to its ‘sheer impudence [...], its style, its independence; a sarcasm inherent in its language that strains permitted bounds and dismisses the craven submissiveness that all dictatorships ordain for recognition and art’.3 Yet the offence of coupling Auschwitz

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and a joke extends beyond the desire of a dictatorship for submissiveness. It also strains the expectation that Holocaust representation should remain uncoupled from the joke, and, more widely, from the comic. Through his eye for the joke and his comic sensibility, Kertész interrogates representations of the ‘greatest trauma of the twentieth century’ (Dossier K., 106) that seek to evoke horror through emotional identification, and he confounds our expectations of how traumatic experiences are depicted. The reader is herself unsettled by the possibility of a sick joke, one that she is drawn into enjoying, a voluptuous delight in reading divorced from the subject that perhaps hints, shockingly, that ‘however sick a joke this may sound, Auschwitz proved a fruitful enterprise’.4 Yet conversely, to deny ‘aesthetic “pleasure” ’, to comply with the ‘moral stink bomb’ that censures Celan and Radnóti as barbaric, is also ‘a sick joke’ (Dossier K., 105–106), for ‘like it or not, art always regards life as a celebration’ (Dossier K., 104). Kertész’s work, with its comic edge, emphasizes how far spectatorship of extreme, traumatic events is fraught, raising the question of what exactly it is we take pleasure in when we watch suffering from afar, whether this pleasure is the one of knowing oneself to be the survivor, of Schadenfreude, or the satisfaction of morbid curiosity. The transfiguration of the violent and traumatic event into an aesthetic object relieves the spectator of the accusation of being a bystander and sanctions our pleasure in reading about or looking at another’s suffering. The moral universe within which we may enjoy watching and reading of traumatic violence is normally carefully contained by the boundaries of genre or the aspiration, however articulated, to social and ethical education or transformation. But if our pleasure in other people’s suffering becomes too manifest as precisely that, pleasure, the response is anxiety, moral disquiet and the devaluation of those modes of representation that clearly signal their association with pleasure, including comedy. It is precisely the unashamed association of comedy with pleasure that can cause anxiety when representations of trauma and suffering include a comic dimension in their aesthetic.

Disturbing comedy The post-Holocaust context has undeniably intensified doubts about comedy being an appropriate form of response to suffering and death. The suspicion of comedy sits within the wider distrust of pleasure that has a long philosophical tradition and that was particularly sharpened by modernism. In her analysis of pleasure and modernism, Laura Frost sets out the hierarchy explicit in the difference between hedone (pleasure), which was associated with the body and the senses, and eudaimonia (happiness), which was more highly valued as being measured, metaphysical and partaking of truth.5 The distinction that Plato makes between the ‘true’ pleasures of reason and intellect and the ‘false’ pleasures of the body is typical of the pleasure hierarchy that persists into the modern period.6 In modernity, this hierarchy manifests itself particularly in what Andreas Huyssen terms the Great Divide between mass culture and high art.7 This divide sustained a polarity whereby mass culture was distrusted and disparaged compared to high art, with, for example, the commodified, feminized and distracting pleasures of popular cinema being deemed inferior to the critical, reflective

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and contemplative modes of viewing offered by art. Popular culture became quickly aligned with the easy, superficial and fake pleasure of kitsch, a term that emerged with the ability to mass-produce cultural products. Seen as morally unsavoury, as an ‘aesthetic form of lying’, kitsch offers ‘effortless enjoyment’.8 In contrast, modernism emphasized the hard cognitive work needed for true pleasure, which is achieved through the process of deciphering complex writing. Quick and easy sensory pleasures are disavowed as modernism teaches readers to strive hard for their pleasure: ‘Difficulty becomes an inherent value and is a deliberate aesthetic ambition set against too pleasing, harmonious reading effects.’9 It is against this background of philosophical and aesthetic distaste for pleasure that the conviction that there is ‘something unseemly’ and ‘selfish’ about it is radically intensified by debates around Holocaust representation.10 The impact of Adorno’s ‘moral stinkbomb’, as Kertész puts it, that ‘nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, barbarisch [ist]’ (‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’), reflects a profound crisis concerning representation.11 This crisis relates fundamentally to the problem of ethical representation, including the incongruity between the aesthetic pleasures of art and the extreme violence and suffering of the genocide. As Adorno went on to say, his assertion about poetry ‘gilt nicht blank, gewiß aber, daß [nach Auschwitz], weil es möglich war und bis ins Unabsehbare möglich bleibt, keine heitere Kunst mehr vorgestellt werden kann’. (‘The statement that it is not possible to write art after Auschwitz does not hold absolutely, but it is certain that after Auschwitz, because Auschwitz was possible and remains possible for the foreseeable future, light-hearted art is no longer conceivable.’)12 The seriousness of art thus becomes further aligned with the seriousness of its ethical response to the events it depicts and the validity of its truth claim. As Dominick LaCapra points out, this has resulted in a tendency to privilege aesthetic modes that emphasize rupture, aporia and loss in the representation of limit events.13 Melancholy has assumed particular significance as the emotional and subjective state that seems to bear witness to the immeasurable loss and suffering of the Holocaust and of traumatic suffering. At the individual level, the subject, by internalizing the lost object, ensures that its ‘Existenz [...] psychisch fortgesetzt [wird]’ (‘the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged’).14 Hence loss is not simply forgotten with time and the pain of suffering remains actual. Figuratively, melancholy can be understood as supporting the ethical injunction to remember and as ensuring that the lost other remains constitutive of how the past is approached and represented. Melancholy’s affective intensity also serves as testament to the desolation of the human condition, serving, in its relationship to trauma, as a metonymy for being. Crucial to the privileging of melancholy as a representational mode that is adequate to human suffering is its association with the masculine genius and the melancholy man’s ability ‘die Wahrheit [...] schärfer zu erfassen als andere’ (‘he has a keener eye for the truth’).15 Thus historically ‘melancholia appears as a specific representational form for male creativity’ as the artist uses his ‘superior aesthetic virtues’ to transform suffering into ‘a privileged artifact’.16 As an ‘exceptional individual’, the melancholy man is a suitable heir to tragedy, for he embodies the suspicion that ‘truth itself [might] be gloomy’.17

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The ‘true’ and gloomy masculine pleasure of melancholy is in marked contrast to the ‘false’ feminine pleasures offered by melodrama. Despite being a mode of representation that places suffering and victimhood at its core, melodrama has traditionally been treated with suspicion as a debased form of tragedy. Its historical genesis in pantomime and music hall brings with it the taint of common entertainment, as does its tendency towards sensationalism. Its traditional emphasis on action and spectacle promote an ‘aesthetics of astonishment’ that ‘proposes the total enjoyment of excruciating situations in their unadulterated [...] state’.18 Melodrama’s fascination with overwrought feelings and pathos seem to confirm its superficiality, fuelling the view that its pleasures are based on no more than ‘emotional thrill which has no social significance’ or ethical worth.19 Its promise of wish fulfilment makes it vulnerable to accusations that it trivializes suffering and relapses into kitsch. Comedy too can easily smack of the accessible but trivial amusements of mass culture. As the ‘Erbfeind des Erhabenen’ (‘hereditary enemy of the sublime’) it undermines the aspiration of high art as well as offends against topics considered serious or sublime: ‘Wenn Komik ihre Funktion besonders gut erfüllt, meldet sich gleich das Mißtrauen des gebildeten Ästheten, der die hehre Kultur gefährdet sieht.’ (‘When comedy fulfils its function particularly well, it immediately elicits the mistrust of the educated aesthete, who sees it as a threat to sublime art.’)20 The effortless fun of much comedy makes it seem incompatible with the horror of atrocity and suffering, a view that is reinforced by comedy’s unabashed relationship to joy or delight as ends in themselves. Comedy’s association with the pleasures of the senses and of the debased body mark it as superficial and offensive, for comedy provokes the suspicion that someone is the object of amusement and that victims are being objectified for the laughter or smiles of others, even if it is through the medium of fiction. Instead of encouraging the empathy for another’s suffering that is central to an ethical encounter, comedy can facilitate our pleasure in the other’s reduced state. Furthermore, comedy’s characteristics of distance and play present a fundamental challenge to the orthodoxy of both Holocaust representation and the representation of trauma more generally. Distance from suffering can represent a betrayal of that suffering, a rejection of those who were murdered, or a rejection of those elements of one’s identity that are inseparable from the experience of persecution and trauma. As Jean Améry so forcefully articulates, even though the passing of time inevitably leads to the healing of wounds, such healing has something ‘widermoralisch’ (‘antimoral’) about it, a sentiment that can make any form of distancing highly ambivalent.21 The ability of comedy to generate and hold together incompatible perspectives, as well as its playful tenor, offends against the unspeakability of the Holocaust, and the tendency to ascribe to it a sacred or unique status. This is Rüdiger Steinlein’s reservation: he worries that by detracting from the sacred Holocaust comedy may undermine the scale of the Nazi crimes and the fundamental way in which they transgressed against humanity.22 Nevertheless, although anxiety about comedy relating to the Holocaust persists, it is receding, depending very much on what the object of the comedy is and who the author is. In 1982 Peter Stenberg suggested that the passing of time had led to enough distance and opened up a space for black comedy. But his concern is

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nevertheless manifested in a new type of prescription: not only does he specify the particular nature of the comedy, he also argues that the taboo on comedy may only be broken by a member ‘of the victimized culture, who has gained a certain distance from the time and place of the Holocaust without being able to forget it’.23 Anne Fuchs rightly points to the problematic nature of Stenberg’s position, commenting that being a survivor does not in itself ‘justify employing the wrong register in portraying the Holocaust’. Fuchs makes two further interesting points. First, she argues that by focusing on the Jewishness of the writer, Stenberg ignores what effect the comedy may have on a German readership. Secondly, she points out that the sense of guilt that is typical of the German post-war cultural climate, and that was reinforced by the ‘negative but sacred boundary around Auschwitz’, has contributed to ‘collective repression’.24 Her points reflect precisely the vacillation that characterizes the moral response to comedy generally: on the one hand fears about its tendentious impact, in this case the worry that it would reinforce anti-Semitic stereotypes and the attempt to normalize the Holocaust; on the other hand comedy’s liberating challenge of norms, which here include stipulating the rules of Holocaust and trauma representation as well as condoning a culture of un-self critical guilt. It would be misleading to insist on a strict polarity between these two responses to comedy, for the sacralization of the Holocaust need not itself be devoid of tendentiousness. As Slavoj Žižek remarks, the ‘depoliticization of the holocaust, its elevation into the properly sublime Evil [...], can also be a political act of utter cynical manipulation, a political intervention aiming at legitimizing a certain kind of hierarchical political relation’.25 Ofer Ashkenazi makes a similar point in relation to the specific German context in his discussion of contemporary comic representations of the Nazi past. Concentrating on visual representations, he distinguishes between pre-unification comedy that tends to depict Nazis returning into the post-war reality and post-unification images that ‘emphasize the inconceivability of the inclusion of Nazi worldviews, pathos, and appearance within “normal” society’.26 The humorous gap between the past and the present could be read as a form of escapism from responsibility, but, he insists, the humour is also a response to issues of representation: ‘humor enables one to represent Nazism beyond the trauma and its mechanism of suppression. The humoristic references [...] are a reaction to, and a result of, the perceived obstructions of representation – not an escapist indifference to it.’27 Jill Twark situates the comic responses to the Nazi past within the general growth in humour culture in post-unification Germany, which is a result of greater openness among Germans, particularly younger Germans towards their history: ‘Germans now possess enough self-confidence to be able to laugh at just about anything, including themselves and their turbulent history.’28 Yet her assertion is perhaps rather too slick. Although it is true that the question of whether Germans, and others, should or should not mock Hitler and the Nazis is no longer relevant because they do, comic depictions still cause controversy. Discussion around Mel Brooks’s musical The Producers, Walter Moers’s comic strip Adolf, die Nazi-Sau (1998–2006) and Dani Levy’s film Mein Führer – Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (2007) are testament to ongoing anxiety. Thus the heated response to comic depictions ‘demonstrates that the conundrum of German ridicule and laughter about the Nazi past [...] is far from being resolved’ and

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fuels concern that such depictions are no more than ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung “lite” ’ and a profitable commodity.29 It is significant that these examples focus on ridiculing or satirizing the Nazi perpetrators and their ideology and are therefore perhaps less likely to raise the complex ethical issues that comedy directed specifically at Holocaust victims does. Nor, from a different angle, do they raise the troubling ethical questions relating to texts in which the legacy of the Holocaust and Second World War is linked with German suffering. German narratives of suffering have been implicated in a ‘rhetorics of victimisation’30 that has played a significant role in responses to the Second World War. The mass migration of up to fifteen million ethnic Germans at the end of the war,31 the mass rape of women and the bombing of German towns were fundamental in the construction of West Germany as ‘a nation of victims, an imagined community defined by the experience of loss and displacement during the Second World War’.32 Discourses of victimhood were present in the domestic sphere from 1945 onwards,33 but also played a vital role in forging an identity for the united Germany. If in the FRG narratives of suffering had offered collective legitimacy against East European communism and eased integration into the West,34 in the united Germany they offered a means for establishing cohesion. Thus, for example, forced expulsion was viewed by the government as common to the history of East and West Germans and therefore as useful for a post-unification understanding of the past.35 To acknowledge German suffering does not necessarily mean avoiding issues of responsibility and guilt. As Rainer Schulze remarks, ‘the moral obligation to remember the victims of National Socialism does not mean that it is not possible to remember the victims of the consequences of National Socialism’.36 Yet his formulation is crucial, for German suffering is often part of what Samuel Salzborn refers to as the ‘Entkontextualisierung der Vergangenheit’ (‘decontextualization of the past’) and it all too quickly becomes equated with victimhood.37 German suffering and victimhood has been instrumental in diminishing or deflecting from questions of culpability for policies that led to war and genocide, a process that has occurred in three main ways. First, through uncritical or uncontextualized comparison which helps promote the ‘indivisibility of humanitas’.38 Secondly, through the ‘Subjektivierung des Geschichtsdiskurses’ (‘subjectivization of historical discourse’), which manifests itself as ‘human interest ebenso wie als selbstkritische Reflexion, als historiographische Rekonstruktion ebenso wie als persönliche “Aneignung” und Übernahme “nationaler Verantwortung” ’ (‘human interest as well as self-critical reflection, personal “appropriation” and taking on “national responsibility” ’).39 The academic interest in ego documents and memory studies has contributed to the shift from recounting experiences of suffering in private, which has always been a vital aspect of how the war is remembered, to narratives of personal experience moving into public discourse. And complementing the role of the academy’s interest in subjective accounts has been the huge impact of cultural representations of the German experience of the expulsions and bombings since 1989.40 Finally, the globalization of Holocaust memory and the universalization of trauma have lent credibility to German discourses of victimhood. As Fassin and Rechtman remark: ‘By applying the same psychological classification to the person who suffers violence, the person who commits it, and the person who

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witnesses it, the concept of trauma profoundly transforms the moral framework of what constitutes humanity.’41 Extreme or traumatic suffering has become a signifier of humanity regardless of the moral context in which it happened. In what follows I consider the work of two German directors whose works differently represent disturbing pasts. The films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Koepp are centrally concerned with the legacy of suffering caused by the Second World War and the Holocaust but they display a discernible comic aesthetic. Crucially, the texts are not comedies, but they assimilate a comic aesthetic with other representational strategies and thereby embody Benjamin’s conjoining of comedy with mourning: ‘Die Komik – richtiger: der reine Spaß – ist die obligate Innenseite der Trauer, die ab und zu wie das Futter eines Kleides im Saum oder Revers zur Geltung kommt’ (‘Comedy – or more precisely: the pure joke – is the essential inner side of mourning which from time to time, like the lining of a dress at the hem or lapel, makes its presence felt.’).42 The inclusion of comedy crystallizes the question of how we may enjoy portrayals of suffering, for by integrating comedy into texts that are predominantly concerned with the legacy of suffering, anxiety arising over the pleasure at others’ pain is not contained by conventions of genre or form. The incorporation of a comic aesthetic can function to disturb the values that commonly attend particular artistic forms and representational modes, not least melodrama and melancholy. Furthermore, consideration of the ways in which comic devices are deployed helps illuminate how empathy and identification are constructed to sustain particular identities and moral positions, thereby unsettling those positions: Fassbinder tempers melodrama with comedy in the context of West Germany of the economic miracle, and Koepp gives his melancholic vision a comic edge in his documentary explorations of the post-1989 Ostgebiete.

Melodrama and comedy: Rainer Werner Fassbinder In melodrama the experience of suffering assumes a moral agency, for in the polarized scheme of good versus evil, suffering is the result of virtue overpowered by the very real presence of evil in the world. As Peter Brooks argues, melodrama is a response to the loss of the sacred and the moral certainties it guaranteed. A tragic vision of humanity is no longer available in modernity, for such a vision is dependent upon sacred truths. Melodrama reintroduces the notion of ethical striving, but in modernity this is only possible ‘in personal terms’,43 and in consequence ethics is associated with emotional states. Tragedy, of course, is also concerned with suffering, but melodrama expresses suffering without restraint and, furthermore, commonly shows passivity in the face of suffering rather than assertion or decisive action. Melodrama is characterized by an intensity of emotion, particularly of love and suffering, that offends social norms. But it is as the victim of social norms that the suffering victim acquires moral value: her agonized body is symptom of the ideological fissures that run between ideals of fulfilment (personal and social) and actual antagonism. Perhaps surprising given melodrama’s focus on suffering is its importance in contributing and drawing attention to narrative pleasure. Melodrama, in its emotional excess and its strategies of eliciting emotional identification with its protagonists, is peculiarly honest about the troubling

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relationship between representations of suffering and enjoyment: finitude is terrible and we’ll jolly well suffer and have a good cry. This pleasure is neither ennobling nor redemptive and therefore draws attention to the fact that storytelling is also about pleasure, whatever the content of that fiction. Furthermore, melodrama’s emphasis on emotional excess brings it close to what are also qualities of comedy: hyperbole, amplification of recognizable situations and types, unbelievable plot twists, shock, overwrought emotions and tension. The slippage from melodrama into comedy, from responding with pathos to responding with amusement, is often seen as a failure of melodrama, but the marked co-existence of melodrama with comedy puts into question both the ethical valorization of suffering and of identification with it. Melodrama emerges as Fassbinder’s key representational mode. Thus the intensely personal space of Fassbinder’s films is also social and economic and relationships are a symptom of wider systems of social and economic exploitation, typically of bourgeois capitalism. Furthermore, these are German spaces, and the systems of emotional, political and economic exchange and exploitation are situated in relation to Nazism and its legacy, even if, as in Effi Briest, it is set in a time before. Fassbinder’s films are concerned with the destructive effects of bourgeois capitalism and values, and the failure of its ideals that both fed and refused to learn from Nazism. His work traces the ‘sellout of bourgeois morality, the free market of humanistic values, and the meritocracy turned black market of the emotions’.44 This destructive effect is figured in terms of victimhood and suffering, for relationships cannot flourish in a system in which value is governed by commodification and competition. Fassbinder’s interest in the suffering German body functions as a vehicle of criticism of unjust power relations. But it is also problematic: it raises questions about the purpose of identifying with and inhabiting a victim position in a context where Germans perpetrated atrocities upon others. This particular German context is, though, inseparable from the issues arising from a wider general trend that increasingly ascribes ethical value to victims, a trend that underpins melodrama as a mode of representation that enjoys and valorizes suffering.45 Fassbinder’s style is noteworthy for its combination of melodrama with extensive comic devices, which range from irony through visual humour, situation comedy, incongruity, satire, Schadenfreude, and, last but not least, sheer ludicrousness.46 All facilitate a playful response on the part of the spectator and play a crucial role in imposing a limit to the melodrama and masochistic suffering portrayed in so much of his work. The limit set by comedy is particularly evident in relation to Fassbinder’s appearance in his own films. The director figures as a character in many of his films, among others as the Greek in Katzelmacher, a gangster in Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (Love Is Colder than Death) and as Fox in Faustrecht der Freiheit (Fox and His Friends). Fassbinder’s tendency not to change his appearance or acting style from one role to another (Fox being an obvious exception) at once makes him a player in his own fantasy world, but also includes him within the critical, and often comic framework. This is very evident in Niklashauser Fart (The Niklashausen Journey), a film that explores the contribution of a vanguard to bringing about revolution through performance and role-play. Fassbinder is of course one of the vanguard, directing his comrades, slouching around and perpetually smoking: acting himself. The comic effect of Fassbinder’s repeated appearances, as of those of his leather jacket, has received no

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comment. Rather, his involvement in his own films has been criticized as egotistical indulgence, the unmediated playing out of his own problems or fantasies, or as a positive mode of identifying with his protagonists. Thus Kaja Silverman analyses Fassbinder’s involvement in In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (In a Year of 13 Moons) and Berlin Alexanderplatz in relation to male masochism and the exploration of nonphallic masculinity. Yet the comedy forms part of another crucial effect of his presence within his films: the self-contained fantasy of the film is ruptured by his entry into it. This importance of this rupture for understanding how we regard and identify with the suffering of others is explicitly addressed in the epilogue of Berlin Alexanderplatz.47 In the slaughterhouse scene a pile of bodies is being processed as though they are animals in an abattoir. The iconography of the piled up bodies is powerfully reminiscent of the corpses in the death camps, establishing a direct and problematic link between the German protagonist, Hans Biberkopf ’s, suffering and that of the murdered Jews. Watching the scene are two angels, and next to them is the silent figure of Fassbinder. Kaja Silverman argues that by standing next to the angels and being an onlooker, Fassbinder invites the viewer to realize that he, Fassbinder, is himself part of Biberkopf ’s suffering body. Silverman privileges this moment as one of heteropathic identification, in which the ‘I’ is ‘so overwhelmed and [...] fettered’ by the other self that its ‘formal status as a subject is usurped by the other person’s personality’.48 Yet the scene is more complex than Silverman’s reading suggests, for she does not take account of the fact that the figure of the watching Fassbinder is part of wider dynamic that includes a comic dimension. The scene is characterized by a degree of exaggeration that tips into hyperbole: the intrusive operatic aria expresses heightened emotional states not normally associated with a slaughterhouse; the moaning bodies are glimmering with glitter and nipple-tassels; and the acting of the butchers is stylized to the point of being stilted. The excesses of the scene, which tip easily into caricature, the grotesque, and even hilarity, extend to the three observers. The two angels are dressed in suspenders, with golden tunics and golden, glittering hair, with a few black costume feathers at their shoulders. Their camp appearance visually ironizes their serious task of deciding Biberkopf ’s fate, and they offer an amused commentary on the scene: ‘schwing, hack, hack; schwing, schwing, hack’ (‘swing, hack hack; swing, swing, hack’), says Sarug, to which Terah happily responds ‘schwing, hack’ (‘swing, hack’) (XIV, 57:00). Next to them, the gloomy presence of Fassbinder also has a comic dimension. Like a caricature of all his previous roles, he slouches to the left of the screen, the ubiquitous cigarette raised to his lips, looking like a gangster in his shades and hat. The comic aspect of this scene means that the spectator’s identification with the suffering Biberkopf or with the anonymous bodies as emblematic of suffering humanity is interrupted. By placing Fassbinder next to the angels, two contrasting perspectives on the scene are concurrently held in the same frame, one of identification, the other of (amused) observation. Neither excludes the other, nor is either reducible to the other. Furthermore, the appearance of Fassbinder within the diegesis, although possibly demonstrating the importance of heteropathic identification as a mode of response to suffering, is not the equivalent of privileging that response. The entry of Fassbinder into the fictional space explicitly draws the spectator’s attention to the ambiguity of the relationship between Fassbinder the director, the character of Fassbinder the

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director and shifting perspectives of the camera. This explicit ambiguity ruptures the absorbed gaze, here associated with identification with the suffering victim, and offers an ironic perspective on the iconographic alignment of Biberkopf ’s suffering with that of murdered Jews, as well as modes of identificatory spectatorship that draw the viewer into elevating the status of their own suffering through such visual equivalence. The slaughterhouse scene constructs a complex model of spectatorships and demonstrates in microcosm the effect of the co-existence of a comic aesthetic with melodrama. Importantly, Fassbinder’s presence in his films is evident not just from his appearances but also from his distinct style. As a vital component of his style, comedy both contributes to and is itself fuelled by other alienation effects. These include the alienation caused by the sheer ludicrousness running through the director’s work, a sense of the ridiculous that frequently stems from poor acting or from shoddy miseen-scène, with the unintended comedy that results (his Western Whity being one of the more obvious examples). As Paul Coates points out, scholarship seems ‘often oblivious of the flaws caused by an indifference to acting quality, marshalling camp and Brechtianism as alibis, and of the effects of Fassbinder’s preferred one-take aesthetic [...]: flaws swept under the carpet of the works’ political utility, or an auteur status ensured by stylistic and thematic continuities stewing monotonously’.49 The blatant flaws of Fassbinder’s aesthetic go beyond what John David Rhodes characterizes as the ‘obviousness of its belabored appearance’, and should not be divorced from a style that is marked by his presence.50 Thus more generally, Fassbinder’s comedy, flawed style and all, interrupts the process of identification with victimhood, or with masochistic abjection, that his films at one level undoubtedly invite. Indeed, the manner in which the director flaunts his presence, actually and through his distinct style, goes some way to affirm Gilles Deleuze’s view of male masochism: ‘What insolence and humour, what irrepressible defiance and ultimate triumph lie hidden behind an ego that claims to be so weak’.51 If an ethical impetus is to be sought anywhere in Fassbinder’s work, it is as a result of the ambivalent and unsettling confrontation of, on the one hand, the invitation to identify with those entrapped in structures of melodramatic suffering and on the other the excessive, often comic and ludicrous, style. Comedy limits the stewing monotony of melodramatic suffering and the unmediated identification that it elicits. Conversely, melodrama’s concern for the victim, its insistence that good and evil persist in the post-sacral world, ensures that empathy with the victim is not sacrificed to comic distance, even if it is disturbed or ‘unsettled’.52

Melancholy and comedy: Volker Koepp In stark contrast to the hysterical excesses of melodrama, melancholy has been privileged through its associations with the exceptional individual. Freud describes melancholy as the internalization of the lost object in order to preserve it, resulting in symptoms that may be pathological since the lost object is unconscious and remains obscure. In mourning, in contrast, the lost object is identifiable and the loss can be worked through. As discussed above, Freud perpetuates the link of melancholy with male genius: unlike melodrama, the melancholic’s access to the truth of the tragedy

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of the human condition is a man’s prerogative, and it is as someone who carries the weight of suffering that he derives moral profundity. As Mary Cosgrove argues, the melancholic’s deep sense of loss and the nature of that loss is what has been seen as fertile ground for creativity and imagination in post-War discourse.53 Writing about melancholy and writing about the Holocaust are structurally affiliated, for in both, ‘the effort to find words that capture the object without distorting it raises the issues of knowing and representation and determines that these are the central concerns of the signifying process’.54 Yet this structural similarity notwithstanding, the moral implications of representing suffering through a melancholy lens remain complex and controversial. The pathological dimension of melancholy has also led to a highly critical evaluation of it as an emotional mode through which to respond to and represent limit events, since it inhibits the healthy work of mourning. Paul Ricoeur argues for this view in his alignment of mourning with working through and melancholy with acting out, as does Dominick LaCapra, who sees in melancholy ‘a compulsive preoccupation with aporia’ which functions as a ‘secularized displacement of the sacred’.55 Melancholy facilitates the elision of a generalized, timeless absence with a historically and socially specific loss, which in turn leads to easier (self-)identification as victim by those who are not victims. The documentary filmmaker Volker Koepp was born in Stettin, now Szczecin, in 1944, and fled westward with his mother, settling and growing up in East Berlin. His work is saturated with a melancholy that derives from his strong interest in the Ostgebiete and the longer span of history within which events and movements of peoples have taken place. The Eastern Territories, those areas that before 1945 were part of Greater Germany, including West and East Prussia and Pomerania, are areas that experienced the extreme violence of war, persecution and genocide. Koepp explicitly presents these areas both as having a long history of conflicts and his films constantly allude to the deep legacy of suffering left by the violence of the war and the Cold War. Furthermore, he is fascinated by Eastern Europe as a place where different ethnic groups lived alongside over centuries and he consistently encourages individuals of different ethnicity, class and age to tell their own stories. Their experiences form part of the wider collapse of multicultural communities, of the thriving Czernowitz where Romanians, Ukrainians, Germans, Jews lived side by side, or of East Prussia where Germans, Poles and Kashubians did. The melancholy or nostalgic yearning for this lost time is, though, offset by an intense humanity and interest in individuals. Many of the characters recount experiences of violent dispossession, genocide, death of immediate family and abandonment, but they are mostly not bitter or accusatory. Indeed, Koepp’s fascination with his subjects extends to his eye for laughter and comedy. He admits to being amazed by how amusingly people relate all manner of things that are not amusing and sees it as ideal for art of any sort if it can maintain its balance between tragedy and comedy.56 Central to the films’ comic moments are the characters themselves, their idiosyncrasies, their own sense of humour and their interaction with others. Individual idiosyncrasy is manifested in peoples’ faces: the long comic tradition that centres on physiognomies and appearance cannot be ignored when watching Koepp. Comic effect is heightened by the director’s use of an unflinching camera, which elicits varied

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responses ranging from ignoring it, through playing up to it, to embarrassment. Koepp himself plays with these reactions, building the differences and contrasts into the structure of the films. These characteristic features of Koepp’s comedy come together most clearly in his sustained use of the comedy double act. In Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann (1999), the comedy generated by the two friends arises from the strong contrasts between them.57 Frau Zuckermann is small and plump, whereas Herr Zwilling is taller and thinner and cuts a somewhat dour figure. She is spirited, dynamic, decisive in her movements, humorous and positive. He is lugubrious, doleful, long-faced and possesses a gloomy outlook. She, the optimist, speaks confidently into the camera; he, the pessimist, behaves as though there is no camera there, waiting for instructions to begin talking even though he is already being filmed. Uckermark (2002, henceforth U) opens with a five-minute double act in which Adolf-Heinrich von Arnim speaks almost non-stop, and with great passion, about the virtues of a proper rail network. He speaks at length about his successful fight to increase the number of trains along the branch line (up from one to eight or nine in each direction), the connections as they existed in 1923, the importance of establishing effective bus connections (which are not yet what he would wish them to be), the need for investment in the railway infrastructure (after 100 years of simply taking) and the crucial role of the transport network. Frau Albert, in the meantime, the reticent young woman who operates the old Wilhelmine signaling equipment from 1907, is always in the frame, standing with a deadpan expression except when he addresses his remarks to her or solicits a response. They are an incongruous pair: the urbane aristocrat and the provincial worker, the articulate man and the woman of few words, the old activist and the passive employee. Indeed, in his enthusiastic bearing, von Arnim seems more youthful than she: despite being 84, he says, he still has a lot before him, adding that he is freshly married (U, 2:43). Also in Uckermark the two old farmers are similar in background and outlook.58 Visual comedy is initially established through filming the men head on, with a still and unflinching camera. The old men sit next to each other: one is plump, and his physique is unflatteringly emphasized by the direct frontal shot on his groin; the other is scrawny. Both wear similar hats, and together they are a gloomy, Laurel and Hardy-esque pair. There is nothing funny about what they say, for they circle around their memories of disempowerment, their repeated experience of having stock and land taken from them, first after the war, then through collectivization, finally after reunification. Yet the way in which they egg each other on to speak lends a comic edge to the scene, for they enact many of the routines of a double act. One repeats and reinforces what the other says: ‘ “viele sind nach Canada”, “ja viele von hier nach Canada” ’ (‘ “many have left for Canada”, “yes, many have gone from here to Canada” ’) (U, 53:40), and they constantly affirm, with repeated ‘ja’ or ‘ja, ja’, what the other has said. They bicker mildly like an old married couple, disagreeing about whether to relate certain events: ‘ “Ich möchte was sagen, aber ich werd’ mal lieber still sein” [...] “Es ist die Wahrheit”. “Ach, und wenn’s die Wahrheit ist” (‘ “I want to say something, but it’s best if I stay silent [...] It’s the truth”. “Well, so what if it’s the truth” ’ (U, 1:19:00). When they are finally persuaded to speak, they then bicker about what point in the past things started to go wrong.

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Comedy functions at one level to temper Koepp’s melancholy sensibility, for he is drawn to people who fit his wider humanitarian striving for coherent and harmonious multi-ethnic community in which difference does not lead to conflict and suffering does not result in antagonism and a perpetuation of strife. However, at the same time Koepp’s taste for laughter and comedy complements rather than challenges his melancholic sense of loss, for he uses it to advocate the restoration of what has been lost. Rather than forming part of a self-reflexive or critical tension, comedy is inseparable from his emphasis on landscape, which offers coherence, continuity and belonging. Beautiful landscapes are central to Koepp’s films. Individuals are firmly located in their surroundings; they speak to the camera against a background of their home or their workplace. Interior shots are set within a wider, rural context: the countryside is either just outside, or the city, as with Czernowitz, is shown only after shots of the surrounding land. Thus human habitation is visually posited as arising out of the land and the aesthetic focus on the timeless, unchanging countryside is frequently reinforced by voice-overs that summarize the momentous events of migration, invasion and wars, all of which have been survived by the enduring landscape. The landscape becomes ‘Medium des Gedächtnisses’ (‘a medium of memory’) rather than simply a place to live.59 Individuals themselves are victims of larger forces beyond their sphere of personal responsibility and trauma and suffering are part of humanity’s lot in the longue durée of nature, and are thereby removed from the realm of political scrutiny. Claims to the land may change, but nature persists: as the director of the ornithology station in Memelland asserts, whoever was in power, be they Communists, Bolsheviks, Catholics or Protestants, his nightingales carry on singing for all (1:25:05).60 Landscape functions as a counterpoint to the cruelty of history, but Koepp’s delight in the comédie humaine is resolutely unpolitical. As Stefan Reinecke writes, Koepp’s ‘poetische[r] suchende[r] Blick taugt nicht, um etwas zu kritisieren’ (‘searching poetic gaze is no good for criticizing anything’).61 Koepp avoids satire and social criticism by constructing ‘filmische Liebeserklärungen’ (‘filmic declarations of love’) in which people are filmed in context while carrying out their normal activities.62 His devotion is identifiable in moments of portraiture, influenced by photography and art, when the camera lingers on peoples’ faces either before or after they speak.63 The complementary visual modes of portraiture and landscape, both of which invite contemplative viewing, formally represent the bond between land and inhabitants that transcends temporary change. The films convey an emotional yearning for the longue durée of belonging and resistance to forces of modernizing homogenization. Thus, in Uckermark, von Arnim refers to the twenty-two generations of his family who have lived in the region, and Graf von Hahn emphasizes the relationship of the aristocratic families with their land, seeing their re-acquisition of the estate as a ‘Fortführung der unterbrochenen Zeit’ (‘continuation of interrupted time’) (U, 18:13). In terms heavy with spiritual resonance, he describes their ‘innere Beziehung zur Landschaft. Man identifiziert sich mit einer Landschaft’ (‘inner relationship to the landscape. One identifies with a landscape’) (U, 1:00:00). A potentially dissonant voice in Uckermark is the actor and director, Fritz Marquardt. He speaks of his allegiance to communism as part of the post-war desire for radical change from National Socialism (U, 1:31:15). His allusion to the Nazi period and the desire for change is in stark contrast to the negative view of the GDR

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and collectivization expressed by the von Hahns and the two old farmers, who see it as a violent rupture with continuity and as an aberration, albeit in different ways. In contrast, Marquardt is adamant that the reunification of the two Germanies represents ‘die absolute Restoration’ (‘an absolute restoration’) (U, 1:31:50), an ironic reversal of the communist monument celebrating the transition of ‘Junkerland in Bauernhand’ (‘Junkers’ land in farmers’ hand’). The historical shifts from pre- to post-1945, and then post-1989 are for Marquardt like shifts through different dramatic genres. In answer to Koepp’s question, ‘komisch mit der Geschichte, nicht?’ (‘history’s a funny one, isn’t it?’), his response forms the last words of the film: ‘Ja, ja. Ein Mal als Tragödie, und dann als Komödie, und dann: Tragikomödie’ (‘Yes, yes. First it’s tragedy, then it’s comedy, and then: tragicomedy’) (U, 1:42:00). Marquardt’s answer plays into Koepp’s hands. History is shifted from the realm of political and social responsibility and conflict and finds resolution in a compromise artistic genre: a bit of tragedy here, a bit of comedy there and a balanced synthesis in tragicomedy. This is characteristic of much of his work, in which the question of responsibility for violence and atrocity is neutralized through his emphasis on harmony and the individual. Koepp focuses on the specific and consequently loses sight of the universal: he refuses political or structural analysis of events, concentrating instead on personal stories. Thus Koepp’s work is fundamentally monologic despite the multiplicity of voices. Comic devices, although they give rise to an optimistic humanism at the individual level, nevertheless complement the melancholy awareness of a lost past.

Conclusion When Benjamin refers to comedy as the lining of the coat of mourning, he draws our attention to its necessary role as part of a painful healing process. Paul Ricoeur and LaCapra both argue for the importance of the work of mourning, or ‘working-through’, resisting the notion that it is tantamount to a form of closure which involves turning away from the past.64 And like Benjamin, both recognize the importance of comedy and laughter for responding to trauma and loss. Ricoeur insists upon the importance of gaiety and humour for countering acedia, the ‘complaisance towards sadness’, and LaCapra argues that the ‘carnivalesque, along with the comic and the grotesque in general, is also a significant counterpart to the sublime, which helps to question it and bring it down to earth’.65 However, as is evident from the work involved in mourning, this is not an easy or pacifying process. Indeed, arguably the healing potential of comedy springs from its ‘interpretative openness’ and its disturbing demand for different perspectives, even while these encourage change.66 Fassbinder’s films are disturbing in different ways, not least because the troubling past pervades his films. Personal suffering is represented as a symptom of the wider economic systems of social and economic exchange that are inseparable from Nazism and its legacy. The overlap of personal suffering and the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust is on occasion made explicit, most obviously in the figure of Biberkopf in the slaughter house with the piles of dead bodies that are reminiscent of the piles of

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dead Jewish corpses in the extermination camps. The brazenness and camp hyperbole of this imagery draws attention to the way in which the Holocaust suffuses debates around representations of suffering and it offers a visual and emotional riposte to Holocaust kitsch. Yet while Fassbinder’s hyperbolic representation of the suffering German body self-consciously thematizes the question of German suffering, a further disturbance lingers: for no clear resolution is offered and it remains unclear how far Fassbinder indulges the comparison of German suffering with the suffering of the victims of Nazism or questions it. At another level, the sheer overindulgence in misery disturbs melodramatic conventions that depend upon eliciting spectator identification with suffering. The often ludicrous comedy refuses the solipsism of extreme suffering as well as the unreflected identification with those who suffer. Thus the jostling perspectives encouraged by comedy set a limit to the ‘theatre of satisfaction’ staged by melodrama and the comic excess of Fassbinder’s style ensures that the spectator cannot indulge the identification that is undoubtedly invited. Rather, she is explicitly invited to reflect upon her own pleasure attendant upon vicariously assuming the victim position through identification and to question the enjoyment that she derives from the representation of another’s pain. At the same time, however, comedy’s play with perspective means that suffering need not be belittled or objectified. Koepp’s films address a disturbing past in as far as the director gives his subjects the space to recount their memories. Many of them testify to various types of suffering, much of which is profound. Yet the disturbing past figures only at the level of this personal testimony. The comic edge to his work does not serve to irritate but to endear the subjects to the viewer, to make them more accessible and to evoke our empathy towards them. Furthermore, the subjects’ personal experience is placed within the slowly changing landscape, with harmful events moved to the realm of an abstracted, long durée of ‘history’ and hence away from questions of responsibility and agency. Thus Koepp’s films address the disturbing past at a resolutely personal level in order to be conciliatory in the present. Here comedy reinforces rather than limits definable directorial aims, forming part of a textual strategy that bolsters particular modes of identification and the values that are associated with them. If the ongoing disturbance of the past can be understood as belonging to the work of mourning, then it is those aspects of comedy that thrive on and contribute to indeterminacy that make it significant in relation to representations of suffering. Comedy has about it the indeterminacy of play, and with it an element of unpredictability: what is amusing or funny for some is not so for others, nor does the reader or spectator always understand why she finds something comic. It is by remaining a playful irritant that comedy can negotiate suffering, not by elevating it through tragic catharsis but celebrating rather the ‘permanent suspension, postponement or parody of catharsis’.67

Notes 1 2

Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and the Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1993), 28. Imre Kertész, Fateless, trans. Tim Wilkinson (London: Vintage, 2006), 111.

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Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Imre Kertész, Dossier K., trans. Tim Wilkinson (New York: Melville House, 2013), 183. Imre Kertész, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, trans. Tim Wilkinson (London: Vintage, 2010), 41. Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 7. Plato, Philebus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 102. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986), viii. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 259. Frost, The Problem with Pleasure, 20. Ibid., 12. Theodor Adorno, ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I. Prismen. Ohne Leitbild’, in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften, 10 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), X.1, 30; Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983), 34. Theodor Adorno, ‘Noten zur Literatur I’, in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften, 10 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), XI, 603; Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature II, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 251. Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits. Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 65. Sigmund Freud, ‘Trauer und Melancholie’ in Sigmund Freud. Studienausgabe. Band III: Psychologie des Unbewußten (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1989), 199; Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1917), 237–258, 245. Freud, ‘Trauer’, 200; Freud, ‘Mourning’, 246. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 8. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2004), 76. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination. Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 36. See also Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity. Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 37–58. Simon Shepherd, ‘Pauses of Mutual Agitation’, in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill (eds), Melodrama. Stage, Picture, Screen (London: bfi, 1994), 25–37, 25. Jean Paul, ‘Vorschule der Ästhetik’, in N. Miller (ed.), Jean Paul: Werke (Munich: Hanser, 1980), V, 105; Jean Paul, Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for aesthetics, trans. Margaret R. Hale (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1973), 73; Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Johann Sonleitner and Klaus Zeyringer, eds, Komik in der österreichischen Literatur (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1996), 10. Jean Améry, ‘Ressentiments’, in Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2012), 129; Jean Améry, ‘Resentments’, in

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At the Mind’s Limits, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1980), 72. Rüdiger Steinlein, ‘Das Furchtbarste lächerlich? Komik und Lachen in Texten der deutschen Holocaust-Literatur’, in Manuel Köppen (ed.), Kunst und Literatur nach Auschwitz (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1993), 97–106. Peter Stenberg, ‘Memories of the Holocaust: Edgar Hilsenrath and the Fiction of the Genocide’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 56 (1982), 277–289, 278. Anne Fuchs, ‘Edgar Hilsenrath’s Poetics of Insignificance and the Tradition of Humour in German-Jewish Ghetto Writing’, in Anne Fuchs and Florian Krobb (eds), Ghetto Writing. Traditional and Eastern Jewry in German-Jewish Literature from Heine to Hilsenrath (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999), 180–194, 182–183. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2011), 67. Ofer Ashkenazi, ‘Ridiculous Trauma: Comic Representations of the Nazi Past in Contemporary German Visual Culture’, Cultural Critique, 78 (2011), 88–118, 98. Ibid., 101. Ashkenazi is referring here to: Dani Levy’s 2007 film Mein Führer: Die Wirklich Wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler as well as Levy’s response to Der Untergang as a film which made him laugh because of the absurdity of ‘this amiable, old grandpa and his funny ideas in the bunker’ (quoted on p. 96); the July 2002 cover of the satirical magazine Titanic which depicted an image of Hitler with the ‘schrecklicher Verdacht’ that he might be anti-Semitic; a film clip made by Florian Wittmann in 2008 which super-imposes a voiceover by the comedian Gerhard Polt onto a clip of Hitler taken from Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens and shows Hitler getting very worked up about his encounter with a car leasing company, available online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrTiIhMDn4 (accessed 30 August 2014). Jill E. Twark, ‘Introduction: Recent Trends in Post-Unification German Humor’, in Jill E. Twark (ed.), Strategies of Humor in Post-Unification German Literature, Film and Other Media (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 1–25, 4. Annika Orich and Florentine Strzelczyk, ‘ “Steppende Nazis mit Bildungsauftrag”: Marketing Hitler Humor in Post-Unification Germany’, in Twark, Strategies of Humor in Post-Unification German Literature, Film and Other Media, 292–329 and 294–295. Robert G. Moeller, War Stories. The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of Los Angeles Press, 2001), 48. Pertti Ahonen, After the Expulsion. West Germany and Eastern Europe 1945–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1. Moeller, War Stories, 6. Helmut Schmitz and Annette Seidel-Arpacı, eds, Narratives of Trauma. Discourses of German Wartime Suffering in National and International Perspective (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), 4–6. Ahonen, After the Expulsion, 271. Rainer Schulze, ‘Forced Migration of German Populations during and after the Second World War: History and Memory’, in Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth White (eds), The Disentanglement of Populations. Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Post-War Europe, 1944–9 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 51–70, 61. Ibid., 64. Samuel Salzborn, ‘Kollektive Unschuld. Anmerkungen zu Funktion und Intention der neuen Debatte um Flucht und Vertreibung’. See Sozialistische Positionen.

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Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Beiträge zu Politik, Kultur und Gesellschaft, available online: http://www.sopos.org/ aufsaetze/3d18db8cdf4b8/1.phtml (accessed 12 July 2014). Bill Niven, ‘Implicit Equations in Constructions of German Suffering’, in Helmut Schmitz (ed.), A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 105–124, 113. Daniel Fulda, ‘Abschied von der Zentralperspektive. Der nicht nur literarische Geschichtsdiskurs im Nachwende-Deutschland als Dispositiv für Jörg Friedrichs Brand’, in Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch (eds), Bombs Away! Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 45–64, 58. Key texts that fuelled debate include Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999), Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang (2002), Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand (2002), Uwe Timm’s Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003) and Guido Knopp’s Die große Flucht (2001). There is an extensive bibliography on the discourse of German suffering and victimhood, including accounts of the Historikerstreit, the Walser-Bubis debate on ‘normalisation’, the impact of cultural representations on that debate, and the importance of memory culture. In addition to the works cited here, see the Bibliography in the special edition on German suffering, German Life and Letters, 57, 4 (2004): 354–356; also, the select bibliography in Germans as Victims. Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, ed. Bill Niven (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 276–282. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma. An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. Rachel Gomme (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 21. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (eds), 7 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991) vol. 1.1, 304; Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2009), 125–126. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 16. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘R. W. Fassbinder. Prodigal Son, Not Reconciled?’ in Brigitte Peucker (ed.), A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 45–52, 50. Fassin and Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma, 58–97. For a detailed discussion of the comic aesthetic in Fassbinder’s films see Stephanie Bird, ‘The Funny Side of Fassbinder: From Melodramatic Vicious Circles to Comic Double Vision’, The Modern Language Review, 105, 4 (2010), 1087–1104. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Berlin Alexanderplatz (Second Sight, 2007) [DVD]. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London: Routledge, 1992), 264. Paul Coates, ‘Swearing and Forswearing Fidelity in Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz’, in Peucker, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 398–419, 410. John David Rhodes, ‘Fassbinder’s Work. Style, Sirk, and Queer Labor’, in Peucker, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 181–203, 197. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 124. LaCapra, History and Its Limits, 65. Mary Cosgrove, Born Under Auschwitz. Melancholy Traditions in Postwar German Literature (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014), 22. Ibid., 7. Ricoeur, Memory, 68–80; Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 23. See also LaCapra,

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History and Its Limits, 63. Here he confirms the view that melancholy is like ‘the affect or “feel” of aporia and absolute paradox’, but while he argues that it may ‘block any significant [...] working through traumatic symptoms, however hesitant, limited, or self-critical’, he also sees the positive benefits of melancholy in that it ‘prevents closure or turning the page of the past’. Volker Koepp, in interview with Rainer Rother, 5 May 2006, Schattenland, 20:40 [DVD] Volker Koepp, Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann, in the ‘Volker Koepp Kollektion’ (Berlin: Edition Salzgeber, 2010) [DVD]. Volker Koepp, Uckermark, in the ‘Volker Koepp Kollektion’ (Berlin: Edition Salzgeber, 2010) [DVD]. Peter Braun, ‘Von Europa erzählen. Über die Konstruktion der Erinnerung in den Dokumentarfilmen von Volker Koepp’, in Tobias Ebbrecht et al. (eds), DDR – erinnern, vergessen. Das visuelle Gedächtnis des Dokumentarfilms (Marburg: Schüren, 2009), 71–91, 71. Volker Koepp, Memelland (Berlin: Edition Salzgeber, 2010) [DVD], Stefan Reinecke, ‘Das Land, das einfach verrostete’, in TAZ, 28 January 2010, 15. Koepp, interview with Rainer Rother, 26:30. Ibid., 32:45. LaCapra, History and Its Limits, 53–54; Ricoeur, Memory, 69–80. LaCapra, History and Its Limits, 84. Michael Mulkay, On Humor: Its Nature and Its Place in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 219. Simon Critchley, Ethics – Politics – Subjectivity. Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999), 230.

11

Disturbing Anselm Kiefer Caitríona Leahy

I There is a certain disturbing irony that inheres in the idea of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade1 even before it is awarded. The German State’s most important peace prize, awarded every year since 1950, is essentially a prize for remembering. In the first instance, it remembers the Second World War and the symbolic role played by the banning and burning of books in that catastrophe. Beyond that, there is also a broader import to the prize, however, because in making an initially restricted historical link between books and peace, it sets up the claim that all wars, be they physical or cultural, can be linked to one another through their common investment in the idea of the freely spoken word. So, for example, the censorship of the Nazi period directly experienced by such early recipients of the prize as Nelly Sachs and Ernst Bloch finds echo in the communist censorship of 1989 Peace Prize recipient Václav Havel, or the Chinese censorship of 2012 recipient Liao Yiwu. It is further implied that a common point of reference for appeals to freedom of the word is the book burnings of May 1933 that preceded the Holocaust’s burning of people. In the Peace Prize, all wars, all unfreedoms now partake of the Holocaust as a possible conclusion, because the Peace Prize remembers where the censorship of words may lead. We know, of course, that the narrative that binds freedom of the word to the freedom of man is an older one in German culture, marked in its most conspicuous articulations at one end by Kant’s definition of enlightenment as the freedom to speak for oneself, to be governed by one’s own word, and at the other end by Adorno’s theory that the Holocaust happens when enlightenment consumes itself.2 Both of these names feature prominently in the official narratives that surround the Peace Prize, and Werner Spies, in the course of his laudation for the 2008 recipient, Anselm Kiefer, put it succinctly when he described the common goal of the prize and Kiefer’s artwork being ‘to fight against forgetting and for enlightenment in a spectacular and irksome way’.3 We could say, then, that the purpose of the prize is to keep disturbing our present with ‘irksome’ reminders of its links to and potential repetitions of the past. And in creating that continuity between wars past and wars present, it keeps things disturbing – it refuses to make peace with war. The irony that inheres in this exercise and is common to many forms of commemoration derives from the fact that the process of commemorating the disturbance itself mitigates it – the same gesture that

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names and brings into presence the disturbing thing smoothes over its jarring notes, making the past more acceptable simply by saying solemnly, publicly, it’s not. This is the dynamic that I wish to explore here. I want to trace how – here specifically in the case of Anselm Kiefer – the memorial impetus may work against its own irksome, enlightening objective by overlaying history with under-theorized modes of relating the past to the present, and disparate events and voices to one another. For while historiography has been greatly enriched by analysis of its dependence on the conditions of narrative, and of its interrelationship with the workings of memory and of trauma, the open interdisciplinary space in which the disturbing events of history now fall to be analysed and commemorated brings both opportunities and dangers. A significant opportunity for a more textured and multi-faceted understanding of past events and their present impact is given by interdisciplinary exchange, but methodologies whose contribution lies in their capacity to reach across fields and events, bringing different events into mutually productive dialogue with one another, may risk neglect of the singularity of events and experiences they set out to understand. That singularity is an important component of their historicity. If Tolstoy’s claim that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way is applied to the disturbances of the past, then the methodologies with which we probe those disturbances must be mindful of their own limitations. While expanding the field of vision, seeing the past more clearly because we see it from the perspective of different disciplines, and seeing too how disciplines interact with and create the object of their own vision, it is important not to neglect the justification of our comparisons and to be attentive to their homogenizing effect on the parties to the comparison. Otherwise, in seeing correspondences and similarities everywhere, moving between times, cultures, events and disciplines, we fail to see what does not correspond. If historicity since Walter Benjamin has moved into the domain of correspondences, of relations across time and space, let us not forget that it also resides in difference, in the stubbornness of the particular, in what is not subsumed into the generality of likeness and commonality. In my analysis, the question of what resides beyond and is resistant to the domain of association is approached as a question of ownership. These very broadly sketched developments in the disciplines that take as their object the disturbing events of the past and, in self-reflective mode, their own representation and analysis of disturbing events, are central to the work of Anselm Kiefer. Externally, they define the critical context of his academic and popular reception – Kiefer is inextricably linked to the culture of cultural memory; internally, they define his aesthetic – his work establishes correspondences between different epistemologies, art forms, events and people. The object of this chapter will be to explore Kiefer’s representation of Germany’s disturbing past and to argue that this representation is, in itself, a source of disturbance. It will argue that over the course of the past forty-five years, a shift has taken place in Kiefer’s work, and that the artist’s manner of rendering present the German past now serves to mitigate the disturbance of history. While 1960s Kiefer provoked his contemporary audience by confronting it with the open wound of a past that would not pass, by the 1990s his work was painting over its historical object. Instead of history cut open, his audience was now offered the aesthetic and ethical pleasures of tasteful commemoration. For contemporary Kiefer, history is explored as a series of evocative associations; this, I contend, is disturbing.

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It should be stated at the outset that this is an interpretation that is significantly at odds with the popular reception of Kiefer. The more popular view is that Kiefer has made history possible again for art, that in turning away from the abstractions of much of the twentieth century he returns to a more directly representational aesthetic, painting recognizable things, saying recognizable things about a recognizable world. Robert Fleck articulates some commonly held views in this regard, claiming, for example, that Kiefer is concerned with ‘collective history’, with ‘the direct representation of thinking’ and that ‘the reason for the broad international reception of Anselm Kiefer’s work lies in his achievement of having recaptured history for expression in the visual arts’.4 Kiefer himself has been reinforcing this view over many decades. Interviewed by Donald Kuspit in 1987, he confirmed that Germany is the central theme of his work, and went on to say that art must take historical responsibility, that the beauty of art should lie in its historical justification and that art is ‘at its best when it responds to things outside of art’.5 For Andreas Huyssen, ‘Kiefer’s fires are the fires of history’;6 while Nicole Fugmann argues that Kiefer uses the thinking of postmodern philosophy to turn art back towards history: ‘he historicizes the sublime as a phenomenon that is never innocent, but always a function of the society that deploys it’.7 Austrian novelist and playwright, Peter Handke, has also embraced the historicity of Kiefer’s work, claiming it to be so much of its own historical world that it belongs outside, in the open air, participating in the public sphere as would any other sign of the age. Central to this historicity, for Handke, is Kiefer’s ostensible disjunction from the age: in returning to a kind of painting that the twentieth century had cast off, in returning painting to painting, he appears to leap – either backwards or forwards – out of his own historical moment.8 This last point, that there is a return to more traditional modes of representation in Kiefer’s engagement with history – indeed that it is a perceived break with contemporary representational practices that defines his engagement with history – is widely made in Kiefer criticism. His newness – according to Handke, the invention of ‘a kind of new alphabet for art’ – is his return to the old.9 Kiefer was awarded the Peace Prize in 2008, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1933 book burnings. He was the first-ever visual artist to be awarded the prize and, for this reason, particularly given the amplified focus on the importance of the book in the anniversary year, much attention is paid to dissolving the difference between word and image as potential signs of peace. For this prize, in this year, Anselm Kiefer’s artworks are to be made into honorary books. And so, according to the text of the award, it has been his achievement: to develop a visual language that makes a reader out of the viewer. Because the extent to which Kiefer confronts literature and poetry is illustrated not just by his installations, which invariably refer to great works of literature. Kiefer has made the book itself, the book form, into a significant statement in itself. His monumental lead tomes are presented as shields defending against the defeatism that sees no future for the book and for reading.10

Here then is the war zone of the 2008 Peace Prize: not, this year, a zone of political censorship or oppressive governance. This year, it is the peacetime language of

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contemporary culture itself that is in focus; the enemy is an attack on reading, and the defence is mounted by reading and readable Anselm Kiefer. Now, as in 1933, culture is in crisis; and because history teaches us that the consequence of cultural crisis may be a full-blown crisis of civilization, now is the time for intervention. In the domain of the visual arts, the end of reading appears in the guise of ‘the dictatorship of uncommitted abstraction in post-war art’11 – in other words, a loss of the direct connection between representation and reality, between art and history. Kiefer is cast as ‘an ingenious, self-conscious conqueror’12 who plunders art history, seizing an older language of expression that is engaged with and committed to reality, and hauling this loot back to the present to wage war against the failures of the present – namely, its abstractions. Kiefer’s Peace Prize, then, is cast, as peace prizes must be, as the celebratory recognition of a justly waged war. In the foreground, this is a war about the languages and forms of artworks and their capacity to represent the world; in the background, this war is implicitly linked to the present state of Germany and its ethical demand, as formulated by Adorno, to remember its disturbing past.13 The overall claim being made in the award is that it is Kiefer’s mode of representation – his direct engagement of history as art in the redemption of the present – that fulfils that imperative. He re-commits art to an older language that has the capacity to bring history back. As ‘ingenious, self-conscious conqueror’, Kiefer boasts a double conquest here: he has defeated the end of art, and he has defeated Germany’s disturbing past.14 He has defeated it in the sense that he has made it possible again for art; he has neutralized its disturbance by representing it, where representation is tantamount to conquest. This paper will now focus on two significant moments in his work, each of which is defined by its relationship to war. The first is his 1969 photographic series Besetzungen (Occupations), the second is the text of his 2008 Peace Prize Acceptance Speech. Taken together, these moments exemplify Kiefer’s changing mode of representing Germany’s disturbing past and the changing claims of ownership he thereby makes over the territory of the other. To the extent that his historical, memorial aesthetic consumes15 the objects it represents, owning them, precluding them from speaking in enlightened mode for themselves, Kiefer’s art, I argue, is disturbing.

II There are very many ways in which Germany is evoked in Kiefer’s work. From the outset, it has defined his subject matter. He has depicted Nazi architecture, Germanic mythology and German landscapes – forests, burnt fields, the river Rhine – as historical palimpsests; he has painted and invoked the defining figures of Germany’s history, philosophy and literature; and as part of or counterpart to this, he has explored Jewish mysticism, the role of jewishness in German thought and – primarily through the symbolism of Paul Celan’s poetry – the Holocaust. For an artist so involved with national identity, national history and with the very contemporary questions emerging from the disciplinary meeting points of art and history – how can we remember? how can we represent our remembering? – it is hardly surprising that the German State itself has become part of his audience. Apart from the Peace Prize, he has also been

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awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Merit); his work is displayed in the German Parliament; and, in 2010, Chancellor Angela Merkel formally opened his Europa exhibition. German Foreign Minister, Guido Westerwelle, in presenting Kiefer with the 2012 Leo Baeck Medal (for German-Jewish reconciliation) declared: ‘Germany as a country found hope in Anselm Kiefer’s work. Kiefer’s preoccupation with German and Jewish culture and the Holocaust has helped us to better address our Nazi past. It is partly because of Anselm Kiefer’s relentless dialogue with the past that Germany eventually found its way to an unambiguous confrontation with National Socialism.’16 This view is supported by Kiefer’s own repeated assertion that his work attempts to reunite the German and Jewish spirits.17 But while it is a claim that might be considered problematic on the grounds that it repeats the dualist logic of 1930s German antisemitism, the Leo Baeck award and the choice of Kiefer to inaugurate a new wing of the Tel Aviv Museum suggest that perhaps Jewish as well as German cultural politics is positively disposed to it. The French and Austrian States, too, have officially honoured Kiefer, France awarding him the Adenauer–de Gaulle Prize for services to Franco– German dialogue.18 Cumulatively then, notwithstanding voices to the contrary, it is clear that many of those states with a direct interest in Germany’s disturbing past are supportive of what they perceive to be the cultural peace-politics of Kiefer’s work. More than that, the perceived political import and actual political capital of Kiefer’s work is as an internationally traded marker of a new German identity with a new relationship to the past. ‘My biography is the biography of Germany’, says Kiefer.19 This is untrue in some very obvious ways. Born in 1945, Kiefer’s emergence into the world in the final days of the war cuts him off from the experience that defines twentieth-century Germany, first in the living of it, then in the suppressing of it. The disturbing past of Germany, in bald terms, is not his. It is the case, however, that Kiefer has defined himself in terms of his generational position and insists on the closest possible relationship between his person and his art.20 In this sense, his position is complex: his participation in Germany’s disturbing narrative is defined by the tension that inheres within it between the participant and the witness, between the protagonist and his impotent successor. This can be readily seen in what might be termed his inaugural act as an artist – his 1969 photographic series Besetzungen (Occupations). The photos, which were presented at the time as part of Kiefer’s assessment for his degree in fine art, featured the artist himself posing in Nazi uniform making the Nazi salute at various locations throughout Europe. Some locations (such as the Parc Peyrou in Montpellier) were of national or military significance; others, in the generality of their location (on the seashore, for example) appeared to make reference to the idea of world domination rather than a particular instance of it. The work met with critical outrage, initially within the institution and, in the years that followed, amongst a broader audience. The outrage rested on a reading of the photos that chose to interpret Kiefer’s Besetzung as a repetition of Hitler’s; it cast Kiefer as a neo-Nazi, whose re-visitation of the crimes of the past lacked propriety and failed to acknowledge the gap that Adenauer’s Germany had opened up between the peaceful present and the disturbing past. It suggested continuity, in other words; it suggested that the new generation had donned the garb of its forefathers, and would repeat their actions.

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To read the Besetzungen in this way is to ignore much of their import. In Kiefer’s original iteration of the theme of the Nazi salute, the uniform is worn in artistic rather than military fashion, the wearer is unkempt, always alone and, even if we disregard the possibility of irony, verges on the desperate or the ridiculous. These features, which insist on the gap between the original Nazi gesture of conquest and Kiefer’s reenactment of it, become more pronounced in subsequent iterations of the same theme in Heroische Sinnbilder (Heroic Symbols) and Für Genet (For Genet), both also dating from 1969. The latter collections feature not just photographs, but also watercolours; they show Kiefer always making the Hitler salute, sometimes standing in a bathtub, sometimes on a kitchen table, sometimes wearing women’s clothes. In the paintings, the figure of the artist gets smaller, while the landscape becomes bigger and the claim of occupation – the Besetzung of both territory and gesture – is diminished in its grandiosity to the point of ridicule. It is not then a Besetzung in Hitler mode that is being represented here, but a Setzung – a symbolic pose and proposition – of a different kind.21 Its self-consciously enacted difference from Hitler’s territorial occupations and the cultic imagery of mass-spectacle to which they gave rise suggests that Kiefer’s occupation of the past sets itself (setzen) against that past. It will repeat the past against itself – if first as tragedy, then as farce – and not as naive continuity. The focus then must be on the gap that separates past from present; and countering the powerful gestural language of the past in Kiefer’s representation of it is the overt reference to the present. The presence of the present is partly achieved, it might be said, by Kiefer’s 1969 hair, but more significantly by the contemporary resonances of the title Besetzungen, a word which in the course of the 1960s had itself come to realize its own multiplicity, to expand and occupy its own linguistic territories. Besetzung, of course, names the cast of a dramatic performance, where players inhabit and bring to life the words and deeds of others in the form of a repetition. Indeed, it is easy to see the performative aspect of Kiefer’s enterprise: in posing for the camera himself, he defines the image as a role,22 and in posing in different places and in different costumes, the endless repeatability of his performance is to the fore. With that focus on performance as repetition, but as repetition that is never identical to the original, Kiefer keeps open the gap between each successive performance and it is in that gap – between then and now, or between this time and the next time – that learning or understanding can occur. In part, this is similar to the logic outlined earlier that underpins the Peace Prize: it too sees wars to some extent as historical repetitions. Kiefer’s particular interest in exploring the nature and possibilities of such repetitions in Besetzungen is to answer questions that are both personal and generational, namely: would I have been/could I be a fascist? In Besetzungen, the past is inhabited in a game of dress-up; it is pulled out of history and into the present, but the performance always leaves both past and present visible. They interact with one another, but are never conflated: neither fully occupies the other. We can say then, that Kiefer’s method is to arrive at a better understanding of the present through an acknowledgement of both the repetitions of history and the temporal and experiential difference that divides the present from its disturbing past. The what if? questions that inhere in this exercise are not just in Kiefer’s photographs, they are in the air in 1969 as the cast and crew of the 1968 generation are infusing

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(besetzen) Besetzung with a new resonance: occupying universities and streets,23 demanding that their place and their authority within the system be recognized, calling for an honest confrontation (Auseinander-setzung) with the past. The sit-ins, the walkouts, the call to remember, reclaim, re-occupy the silent territories of the past and so to free the present – all these belong to the disturbances of 1969. In other words, by 1969 Besetzung is not just about the occupation of places and spaces, it is about the maturity (Kant’s enlightened Mündigkeit) of a whole generation, claiming and occupying its own moment in history and its own right to forge the present. In yet another idiom, this whole disturbance of the present by the past is invoked in the Besetzung of psychoanalysis, initially used by Freud to denote the investment of a person, thing or idea with an emotional charge, and (controversially) translated by James Strachey as the rather opaque ‘cathexis’. The term and the phenomenon featured again prominently in Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s 1967 analysis of the contemporary state of the German psyche Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (The Inability to Mourn. Principles of Collective Behaviour).24 The book explored Germany’s collective suppression of Nazism and the consequences of that suppression for its political, social and emotional development. Its concerns therefore coincide with and are influential within the student movement of 1968 – the Mitscherlichs share the student view that the German present is hostage to its past and that the key to its release is the revisiting of its emotional investment in Hitler and all that he represented. Germany’s inability to mourn, they argue, petrifies its present, lodging it in a no-man’s-land where time stands still even as the decades pass, and present collective behaviours and social norms are trapped in the repetitive logic of their past causes. Seen against this backdrop, the Besetzung of Kiefer’s Hitler-salutes invokes not just the territorial claim of the Nazis, not just the self-conscious performance of the (illegal) gesture, not just generational claims and demands, but also the libidinal significance of each of these aspects. It names a charge, the pathway of a nerve – both the cathexis that produced Hitler as phenomenon, and the cathexis that now demands his suppression and punishes his mention. Kiefer’s Besetzungen straddles both sides of this divide; the images re-awaken the original in the present and spark – now, again – a renewed demand for silence. It enacts the disturbance of the present as a disturbance from the past and with the forms of the past, but bearing the stamp of the present. Kiefer thus occupies territory by invoking the other claims and competing references of the overly determined word Besetzungen, linking them to one another in their common concern with the past, while yet upholding the temporal difference between the past in the past and the past as reiterated in the present. That temporal gap between past and present on which Kiefer insists in Besetzungen defines his project in freudian terms not as a repetition, in which the re-enactment occupies the same territory as the original, but as part of a working-through, in which the re-enactment takes place at a critical distance from the original. Here, at a critical remove from the past, there is a drive to knowledge and self-understanding, to enlightenment through Vergangenheitsbewältigung – a conscious confrontation of the past. In what follows, it will be argued that in the decades since 1969 another kind of occupation (Besetzung) has taken hold (Besetzung) in Kiefer’s work, and that this other

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mode of occupation is disturbing in a different way to that just described. This other Besetzung is described by Kiefer himself in his 2008 Peace Prize Acceptance Speech.

III Besetzung in the first instance is about space, and Kiefer begins his acceptance speech by attending to the space in which he is standing – the Church of St. Paul in Frankfurt. The historical significance of St. Paul’s is important here: it was built in 1789, served as the venue for the first German parliament in 1848, was birthplace of the first German constitution, destroyed in 1944 and rebuilt in 1949. It is regarded as the symbolic home of German democracy, and it is because of this symbolism that the Peace Prize is awarded from here. That the building is so inextricably defined by, not to say preoccupied (besetzt) with Germany’s troubled history, makes Kiefer’s re-writing of its significance all the more audacious. For him St. Paul’s is not a space already full of history, but a space waiting to be inhabited: We are here in an empty room ... To me it is like the entrance to a mine. I see the colours of the sediments, the black-violet of Nelly Sachs, who stood here in 1965, the ultraviolet of Ernst Bloch from 41 years ago. When we speak of descending into history, of descending into ourselves, into our innermost being, I see the mine of Heinrich von Ofterdingen and the mines of Falun, as described by E. T. A. Hoffmann or Johann Peter Hebel, before my eyes.25

Much of what Kiefer has to say in his speech could be described in terms of two repeated moves: he empties out and fills up spaces. These moves, which are akin to the action of an occupation, are preceded (in the written version of the speech) by a description of the very full space of an abandoned barracks in Trieste in which ‘an eccentric professor’ stored ‘untold amounts of war material’. The professor’s intention was that a war museum that offered sight of his collection would generate such horror of war that it would ‘usher in an era of everlasting peace’.26 The juxtaposition of this space full of war, whose ultimate aim is to empty the world of war, with the empty space of St. Paul’s is telling. While the link is not made explicit, the audience may assume that if the museum was to be an artistic space containing the arranged remnants of history, then this is also how Kiefer wishes to characterize St. Paul’s. Supporting this view is his attention to rubble in his opening paragraphs. The professor’s collection of war rubble is implicitly linked to that other, poetic rubble that will fill the space of St. Paul’s. Poems, he says: ‘are the points amidst the infinite vastness at which something masses together out of interstellar dust, a bit of matter in the abyss of antimatter. Sometimes the rubble of things past coalesces into new words and associations.’27 The rubble of things past in the opening paragraphs of Kiefer’s acceptance speech bears the names Ingeborg Bachmann, Nelly Sachs, Ernst Bloch, Novalis, Hoffmann, Hebel and Goethe. It is a list that will continue to extend as the speech progresses. While it could not be argued that Kiefer is here replacing history with poetry in any kind of crude way, his descent into history is decidedly literary. What he ‘sees’ when

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he ‘penetrates into the depths’ of this originating space of German democracy is not history, it is fiction – the imagined worlds of the poets and philosophers, and not the real worlds which engendered them. For Kiefer, in this re-imagined space of St. Paul’s, such a descent into other worlds is in truth an ascent, for in descending into our sedimented, unconscious selves we ascent, he claims, to our higher selves. It is right then, in the name of the future, that poetry should compete with history in occupying (besetzen) the space of the past. It is right that the Peace Prize of the book traders, the purveyors of imagined worlds, should occupy the space of St. Paul’s, the remnant of the once really destroyed world of German democracy. And then, by way of association, Kiefer places himself biographically in this space: I grew up ... in a wonderful, empty space. Into this empty space fell the words, the not-yet consumed sentences of the poets and philosophers, voices from the Paulskirche ... The voices fell into this empty space like drops in a cave, building the stalactites out of which I am made today ... I feel that I belong to the Paulskirche, this special space; indeed I am made of it. I was made from the thoughts contained in it.28

One of those voices from St. Paul’s, that of the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, is singled out. According to Kiefer, Buber had chronicled a primal tale of fullness and emptiness from Hassidic legend. The legend tells how every child before its birth is in possession of all knowledge of past and future. An angel saves the child from the consequences of this knowledge by smacking the child and causing it to forget what it knows. It comes into the world, therefore, ‘at once empty and full’. The full, empty life of the child, the life that awaits both filling up and the re-emergence of traces of the once lost knowledge becomes the grounding trope, the original, repeatable narrative of Kiefer’s argument. The empty but full space of St. Paul’s evokes the empty but full space of Germany’s post-war beginning, the empty but full space of German democracy, of German literature and philosophy, of Kiefer’s own biography, of his own self and of his own language. This string of evocations and suggested similarities leads the reader into a web of repetitions, the precise nature of which is unclear. Kiefer’s brush strokes here are broad and the moves between different discourses, from poetry to religion to science, are only vaguely delineated: ‘The angel’s smack on the nose: the Stunde Null (zero hour, 1945) in Germany?’29 It is tempting to follow Kiefer’s question with ones of our own: what kind of understanding emerges in the reading of historical events through religious legend? And is the border between one discourse and the other preserved or suspended when Kiefer encourages us to move freely between them? Kiefer’s question may be a question about art, but echoed by us, it is also a question about disciplinarity. In the disciplined thought of disciplines, Kiefer’s colon will separate Hassidic legend from historical event. It seems clear, however, that Kiefer’s own undisciplined intention is to juxtapose the sides of that sentence for purposes of mutual contamination. Each side is to penetrate and occupy the other, so that history appears as the realization of a mythical prophesy. When Kiefer goes on to answer his own question in the negative, what is denied is not the posited (gesetzt) equivalence between myth and history, but rather the much narrower claim that Germany’s ‘zero hour’ was as empty as the hour of the angel.

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We know, of course, that discourses and disciplines create and describe the world in different ways, that they create their objects and themselves in the same movement and in the image of one another. To some extent at least it may be said that history produces the past, psychoanalysis the unconscious, that critics, viewers, readers produce works of art. Inherent in this perspective is a certain flattening out of temporality; the temporal embeddedness of the object is compromised by its being seen and interpreted by a later moment. Kiefer’s description of his own thinking in this speech betrays some of these characteristics. He writes as a reader; first as a reader of poetry, then history, theology, science, art. In each of these readings, his object is re-created for his purpose; it is shaped by the role it plays in rendering his art in the image and likeness of his Peace Prize. It seems to me that this works in two ways: firstly, each text is filtered through Kiefer himself, and secondly, they are filtered through one another, each read in the light of the other. The declaration ‘I think in images. Poems help me do this’30 precedes his quotation of Ingeborg Bachmann’s poem Das Spiel ist aus (The Game is Over). Her imagery is then his thinking from the outset; but it is his thinking that blends her image into St. Paul’s, which then becomes the space of German literature, which then becomes the space of Kiefer’s childhood, which becomes the space of Buber’s legend, which becomes the ‘zero hour’ ... and so on. And in all of these elisions and associations and transformations the process of emptying out and filling up is repeated. St. Paul’s is emptied of history and filled with literature, legend is emptied of theology and filled with history, and finally, emptiness itself is emptied out and re-filled: ‘An empty space? It would appear that there are no empty spaces in our material world. In one cubic centimetre of air ... there are roughly 45 billion atoms whizzing around. This unimaginable abundance is at the same time an inconceivable emptiness ... We consist of empty space.’31 In Kiefer’s dizzy universe, emptiness is full and fullness is empty. And this applies in science as in literature as in history; the movement of emptying out and filling up is perpetually repeated in affirmation of a universal principle of indistinction. He continues: ‘According to the laws of nature on the preservation of matter, no atom is ever lost ... Within ourselves, we carry atoms from the beach at Ostia and the stones of the Gobi desert, atoms from dinosaur bones as well as some from Shakespeare, from Martin Luther, from Einstein and from the victims and oppressors of centuries past.’32 For Kiefer, the implications of this logic are far-reaching. It is not just a matter of literary history that Shakespeare is preserved and re-animated in the present; he is not just metaphorically alive in being read, or quoted, or even absorbed into present language or thinking; he is, as a matter of science, atomically present. As a matter of history, we must then alter our view of time – no longer to be conceived as a series of endings, beginnings, eras and ruptures, but now as continuous flow and evolution. For Kiefer, the substance of the present is the substance of the past, and all matter participates in the universal process of endless transformation. At the level of the atom and therefore also at the levels above that, there can be no identity, no ownership of the self: ‘We are connected to each other via atoms in a very material way. I feel connected with human beings both alive and dead, with Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, with Ernst Bloch, Isaiah and the last Psalmists. I feel connected to people and stones that existed long before me and will continue to do so after I am gone.’33

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One consequence of this logic is that the claim Kiefer makes on the words and ideas of others is greatly strengthened. Carrying the atoms of Bachmann as his own extends to carrying her words as his own. There can be no private property where everything one owns is inherited and bequeathed. In creating, writing, living, we give expression to our inheritance and our legacy, and bear witness to the universal truth of repetition and transformation. In a world of no ownership, there can be no borders, a claim, that like so many others, Kiefer will root in his own biography: ‘I grew up on the Rhine, the border river.’ This border river, it is quickly pointed out, was fluid and prone to flooding; it moved and invaded, drowning its own capacity to mark a fixed point of reference. For Kiefer, that fluidity is a feature of borders per se: ‘Where are our own borders? Are we blocked off from the environment, nature and the cosmos? ... From the thoughts of other people? From the influences of the living and the dead?’34 In this borderless noman’s-land Kiefer then proceeds to invoke (here as elsewhere35) Bachmann’s Böhmen liegt am Meer (Bohemia Lies on the Sea), a poem about the nature of borders and about poetry as the positing (Setzung) of borders, the inhabiting (Besetzung) of spaces and about the destabilization of both of these activities. Kiefer’s interest in Bachmann’s interest in borders is telling: in its substance, what Bachmann adds to his thinking on borders is what he terms an ‘existential aporia’,36 namely that existence requires borders, even as it denies them; in its methodology, his invocation of Bachmann illustrates that substantive insight in action. He breaches Bachmann’s border and appropriates her words in order to agree with her that borders merit creative destruction. And as Bachmann herself inherited her imagery here from Shakespeare, Kiefer’s point is more general than specific: ‘Artists are border dwellers, experts in transgressing boundaries as well as specialists in drawing borders.’37 What kind of an occupation is this? We have seen already the extent to which the term Besetzung marries its invocation of territorial claims with linguistic claims, not just in the sense that the latter often follow upon the conquest of new territories. We have seen how the word itself stretches as it carries ever more meanings and becomes the site of something of a Besetzung itself. In Kiefer’s speech – and the speech describes what goes on in his work – this enactment of Besetzung at the level of language takes on an intensified form in which it is no longer just a matter of multivalency. He moves here in and out of the territory of others’ words, asserting at one and the same time his own ownership of these words and the loss of all ownership in a community of association. Association is the key term here. Kiefer’s associative logic produces a series of claims that make up the substance of his speech and that describe his creative methodology. These claims are: German history is an empty space waiting to be inscribed; in this space other voices inhabit me; the voices of the past are stored in material, sedimented form; I participate in the process of saving and storing voices; I speak with the voices of Nelly Sachs, Martin Buber, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Ernst Bloch; I am made of the atoms of the past; I bequeath the past to the future. What Kiefer is describing and engaging in then, is a much larger project underpinned by much larger philosophical claims than even the charged, expansive significance of the term Besetzung first leads us to believe. Kiefer describes and enacts a movement through the landscape of human and natural history, and through the various disciplinary territories from which humankind has attempted to understand his own

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temporal, physical and metaphysical existence. He moves from the macro to the micro, from past to present, from history to poetry to theology to science, collapsing time into an eternal present and into what Kiefer has repeatedly referred to as the great metabolism of nature. For Kiefer, the relentless metamorphosis of nature decrees that there is no beginning and no end, there is only the circular logic of transformation, in which atoms, materials and words are reclaimed and recycled. Here is no matter, no voice, no time, no space that is not of and through Kiefer; he is the medium by which all things have their being. All are co-opted through their posited participation in the circular logic of the universe – all atoms are shared, all things are of other things, all voices of other voices – into Kiefer’s theory of everything.38 But before we accuse Kiefer of a kind of boundless occupation of all languages and meta-languages, we must consider the extent to which he simply uses the tools of his trade. In the domain of literature, there are many established ways of accounting for the close association of words and things across territorial borders. One of these is metaphor; another is intertextuality. In its simplest form, metaphor names a likeness that helps us to understand the nature of both parties to the posited likeness, so that each, we can say, impacts upon the other. If each is read through the other, then in our present idiom, we might say, the very substance of literature is involved in the logic of Besetzung. The likenesses we posit in language as a means to greater (self) understanding will always involve an invasive lurch into the territory of the other. And this being so, Kiefer’s Besetzung, it might be argued, does no more than enact the logic of representation per se: it shows the creation of meaning in action as an occupation of new territories, an invasive positing (Setzung) of likeness-to-self. A logical extension of this, it could be said, is Kiefer’s copious use of intertextuality – another standard tool of the literary trade. Invoking, quoting, appropriating the words and metaphors of others is nothing new; indeed, it is arguably the newness of theories of intertextuality as formulated in the 1960s and 1970s that they admit to the limits of newness in creativity. Taken as a monolith, intertextuality breaks down the borders of every text by showing the processes and forms of inheritance that belie them. In this sense too, Kiefer’s understanding of the creative process – a process understood as the invention of new spaces – is of his time; he has made no secret of his use of the words of others. In our present context, the general statement ‘Nobody creates alone, and especially not ex nihilo’39 precedes his appropriation of the past voices of St. Paul’s, while elsewhere many more specific claims suggest a liberal understanding of how much territorial latitude this general principle allows for: ‘In my work, I have often brought together Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann because I knew they would resonate with one another. It’s possible that I may occasionally have attributed a poem by one of them to the other ... Sometimes my mistakes are highly significant.’ By way of justification for this inattention to the ownership of sources, he says of Bachmann: ‘the mesh of associations has become so dense that I believe I engage in a correspondence with her in my pictures. This is despite the fact that she is long dead and therefore, strictly speaking, no longer exists as an individual.’40 This is provocative indeed and helps to clarify the terms of my argument here. Kiefer’s Besetzung of (in this instance) Bachmann goes beyond the borrowing or recycling of the words or tropes of another artist. It also goes beyond the critical

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account of newness that is given in the theories of intertextuality, and beyond the interdisciplinary readings which Kiefer inscribes in his works and requires of his viewers. ‘Strictly speaking’ Bachmann is dead; but less strictly, apparently not. In Kiefer’s world Bachmann lives on, an independent party to the correspondence that passes between them. She provides the titles and inscriptions for many paintings; he dedicates individual works and entire exhibitions to her. She has corresponded with him, and he has responded; his artwork is that response: ‘In my studio I am constantly surrounded by observers ... people who observe and judge the painting ... One of the harshest critics is Ingeborg Bachmann ... she looks over my shoulder ... It is actually like a production company.’41 The critical aspect of this enterprise is its loss of the sense of temporal distance that once characterized Kiefer’s Besetzungen, both as artwork and as methodology. Bachmann herself is not carried into the present as a dead person. Instead she is reanimated in the mode of ventriloquy, made to live and speak in a time that is not her own, co-opted into Kiefer’s production company in the role of a critical but willing collaborator. There is thus no visible gap between Kiefer’s present purposes (his repetition) and her past independence of him (the original). It is a technique that fails to acknowledge the distance (of space, time and identity) that separates Kiefer from his once living material. This is no dialogue; it is a heedless occupation. To cast Bachmann as part of his theatrical Besetzung as an internal interlocutor and critic of his work works contrary to the cause of criticism. It collapses the space of temporal, aesthetic and discursive difference out of which all newness and understanding arises. That same collapsing of spatial and temporal difference, it could be argued, is Kiefer’s consciously stylized Peace Prize gesture. Insofar as war is about territorial ownership, he has abolished along with all difference, all borders and the ownership they facilitate, the very basis for war. In fact, however, as the final part of his Peace Prize speech makes clear, the war in which Kiefer engages has simply been relocated. No longer a matter of externalities, Kiefer’s war is the ‘war in the mind’ of the artist, ‘the war Heraclitus was referring to when he said that war was the father of all things’.42 In Kiefer’s radically internalized world, which conceives of no time and no space outside of itself, war is reduced to the conflict between potential works of art all vying for life, fighting to be brought into being by the artist who then suffers ‘despair over the loss of so many works that must perish in the inner battle’.43 My argument is that this radical internalization, this Besetzung that describes the participation of all things in the Kiefer artworld, represents a loss of ownership per se, and a loss of the singularity of and differences between plundered things. Everything that enters Kiefer’s digestive tract merges with his grand theories, and loses its capacity to be itself, to own itself, to be other than Kiefer’s theory of everything. Everything is already owned, already foreseen and foreclosed by Kiefer’s universal. This is not war; it is peaceful, unresisted, perhaps irresistible, occupation. And so we return to the beginning, and to my assertion that Kiefer’s art lessens the disturbance of the past – it makes the past better – and that this is in itself disturbing. Andrea Lauterwein describes Kiefer ‘inviting poets, authors and thinkers from all over the world to come and take their places in his artistic universe’44 – or we might say to become part of his Besetzung. Included in this, I would argue, is the viewer.

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The critic/viewer/reader is invited – required – to become part of the work, to be an alibi to its physical and metaphysical enormity. In Kiefer’s Peace Prize speech (as in countless interviews) he tells his audience where his work comes from and what it means. Werner Spies, in his laudation, claims that Kiefer’s artworks are like doors that don’t shut properly, that keep banging, keep disturbing. My counterclaim is that they have no doors, because they are without thresholds and lay claim to the whole world; their world is one in which there are no borders between science and mysticism, between writer and reader, past and future, history and art, above all between the artist and his materials. These materials are merged into indistinction, bound together by Kiefer’s assertion of endless, circular likeness: Kiefer is like Bachmann is like Celan is like Buber; art is like theology is like science. The loss of singularity that this implies marks also a loss of historical and disciplinary embeddedness – a loss of the difference between different times and spaces, and a loss of the viewer’s capacity to stand apart from the work. In occupying the past on these terms, Kiefer suspends its difference, and with that, its capacity to speak for itself from a distance. That’s not enlightenment; and it is disturbing.

Notes 1 2

3

4

5

6 7 8

9

Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels. Immanuel Kant, ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’ in Wilhelm Weischedel (ed.), Werkeausgabe, vol. 11 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964), 53–61; Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981). Werner Spies, Laudatory Speech: Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2008. The Peace Prize speeches are available in German and in English translation online: http://www.friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de/445722/. Unless otherwise stated the official translation is used. Here translation is by Caitríona Leahy (C. L.) Robert Fleck, ‘Anselm Kiefers imaginäre Dialoge’, in Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ed.), Anselm Kiefer: Am Anfang. Werke aus dem Privatbesitz Hans Grothe (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2012), 69–73, 15. ‘A Dialogue with Donald Kuspit at Documenta in 1987: Anselm Kiefer’, in David Craven and Brian Winkenweder (eds), Dialectical Conversations. Donald Kuspit’s Art Criticism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 71. Andreas Huyssen, ‘Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth’, October, 48 (Spring, 1989), 25–45, 45. Nicole Fugmann, ‘The Gestalt Change of Postmodern Critique: Anselm Kiefer’s Spatial Historiography’, New German Critique, 75 (Autumn, 1998): 90–108, 108. ‘Painting-narrating, was that still conceivable, even now at the end of the twentieth century? Was it still possible? After Manet, Cézanne, Picasso, Jackson Pollack, could there still be something new to come, or something old regenerated?’ Trans. C. L. from Peter Handke, ‘Anselm Kiefer oder Die andere Höhle Platons’, in Meine Ortstafeln. Meine Zeittafeln 1967–2007 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 600. Ibid., 608. For an alternative version of this argument, see also John Walsh, ‘History Painting after Two World Wars. Anselm Kiefer’s Die Ungeborenen’, Lecture 12 in the

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10 11 12 13

14

15

16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29

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series Let This Be a Lesson: Heroes, Heroines, and Narrative in Paintings at Yale Art Gallery, available online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OJNMyQhF4A Urkundentext. Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels 2008. Trans. C. L. Ibid. Ibid. Cf. T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 358. ‘Hitler has forced a new categorical imperative upon human beings in their unfree state: to so modify their thoughts and actions that Auschwitz cannot be repeated, that nothing similar can happen again.’ Trans. C. L. An early water colour of Kiefer’s depicting a setting sun entitled Die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter (Art doesn’t quite go down) is suggestive in this regard. His later work, as well as his own commentaries, repeatedly assert the belief that new beginnings follow on the end of time and that art survives and represents many putative ends of civilization. Kiefer has repeatedly used metaphors of consumption and digestion to describe the participation of all things and all epistemologies in his works of art. He describes his 2007 Monumenta exhibition in Paris, entitled Falling Stars (Chutes d’étoiles/ Sternenfall) as an attempt to represent the ‘universal metabolism’ of nature and the stars. Cf. available online: http://www.grandpalais.fr/en/The-building/History/Theevents-staged-in-the-Grand-Palais/Arts/p-597-lg1-Monumenta.htm (accessed 15 February 2015). See also Philippe Dagen, Anselm Kiefer. Sternenfall/Chute d’étoiles (Paris: Editions du Regard, 2007), 56. Available online: http://www.lbi.org/2011/12/leo-baeck-medal-awarded-artistanselm-kiefer/ (Accessed 15 February 2015). See Leo Baeck Prize acceptance speech available online: http://www.lbi.org/2011/12/ leo-baeck-medal-awarded-artist-anselm-kiefer/ and Kiefer’s claim in interview with Donald Kuspit: ‘I want to embody, as did Heinrich Heine, both German intellectuality and Jewish morality’. In Craven and Winkenweder, Dialectical Conversations, 69. Cf. Matthew Biro, Anselm Kiefer (London and New York: Phaidon, 2013), 142–144. Quoted in Andrea Lauterwein, Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan. Myth, Mourning and Memory (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 23. This is evidenced most recently by the publication of a volume of notebooks. Cf. Anselm Kiefer, Notizbücher Vol. 1, 1998–1999 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011). Robert Fleck refers to Kiefer’s work as ‘one of the most significant symbolic propositions of our age’, in Anselm Kiefer. Am Anfang, 15. Trans. C. L. Unlike, for example, Gerhard Richter’s Onkel Rudi photos from 1965, in which reality, or the life experience of a generation is depicted. I am indebted to Lauterwein for the connection between Kiefer’s Besetzungen and the occupations of the student movement. More generally, Andreas Huyssen also reads Kiefer’s early work against the backdrop of the student revolts. Cf. Huyssen, ‘Terror of History’, 30. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich: Piper, 1991). Anselm Kiefer, Acceptance Speech. Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, 1. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 1–2. Ibid., 2.

196 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43 44

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Ibid., 1. Ibid., 3. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 3–4. See, for example, Kiefer’s letter to Jean-Marc Terrasse quoted in: Germano Celant, Anselm Kiefer (Bilbao: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 2007), 416: ‘I can hardly grasp why on the topic of borders I didn’t immediately think of Ingeborg Bachmann ... I’m in constant contact with her (and only for outsiders is this sentence metaphoric).’ Ibid. Kiefer, Acceptance Speech, 4. In physics the theory of everything posits the possibility of accounting for all physical phenomena in one theoretical framework. While there is much to be said about Kiefer’s interest in force and magnetism that would be relevant in this regard, the concept is used here simply to invoke what is earlier termed a ‘universal metabolism’ – that is to say, Kiefer’s invocation of a unifying theory that encompasses all matter and all epistemologies. Kiefer, Acceptance Speech, 2. Quoted in: Annette Gilbert, ‘ “Es ist erstaunlich, wie man oft eben das findet, was man sucht”. Anselm Kiefer im Gespräch mit Ingeborg Bachmann über Geschichte, Zeit und Utopie’, in Brigitte E. Jirku and Marion Schulz (eds), ‘Mitten ins Herz’. KünstlerInnen lesen Ingeborg Bachmann (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009), 75. Trans. C. L. A disturbing aspect of this is the manner in which Kiefer insinuates himself as a third party into the relationship and what Sigrid Weigel has termed the ‘poetic correspondence’ between Bachmann and Celan. Cf. Ingeborg Bachmann und Paul Celan: Poetische Korrespondenzen, ed. Sigrid Weigel and Bernhard Böschenstein (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). ‘The Distance between Idea and Result. Interview by Anselm Kiefer with Boris Manner’, in Celant, Anselm Kiefer, 471–475, 474. Kiefer, Acceptance Speech, 5. Ibid. Lauterwein, Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan, 15.

Part IV

Better Futures? (Dis) Placing Identities

12

German Tourists in Europe and Reminders of a Disturbing Past Julia Wagner

A mere decade after being defeated in the Second World War, Germans from both parts of their now divided country (re-)discovered a zest for international tourism. By the mid-1950s, according to West German opinion polls, going on a holiday was no longer considered a luxury and travelling abroad became more popular.1 Every year, hundreds of thousands of people from the German Federal Republic (FRG) flocked into Austria, Italy and other European countries to enjoy the climate, culture and attractions. Later the numbers amounted to millions. By 1968 a majority of the population was spending its main annual holiday trip abroad. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), tourism patterns were significantly different due to restrictions on free travel and foreign exchange. Nevertheless, there were bilateral agreements with Poland and Czechoslovakia which boosted foreign tourism and, following the construction of the Berlin wall in 1961, travel to Comecon countries became easier. In the 1970s the number of GDR citizens undertaking foreign travel amounted to a quarter of the entire population. Thus, despite differences between East and West, Germans had, by this time, become the ‘world champions’ in travelling.2 Many German tourists, from either side of the internal frontier, chose to spend their holidays in European countries that, not so long ago, had been trampled by ‘German soldiers’ boots’.3 During the Second World War the inhabitants of these countries had suffered brutal persecution and had come close to starvation. Millions had died in the fighting and in the bombing raids; Jewish populations had been deported and murdered. A great many cities, towns and villages had been destroyed, together with much of the countries’ infrastructures. For many years after the war, the effects of destruction were still visible in many parts of Europe, and memories of wartime violence remained fresh. But now, people in these once devastated countries were encountering Germans again – this time not as soldiers but as paying guests. The circumstances had changed. It was in the pursuit of tourism that large groups of Germans first met their former enemies after the war. This chapter explores the link between tourism and the reverberations of the Second World War in Europe. It is based on readings of 254 descriptions of journeys undertaken in the thirty years after 1945, found in letters, diaries, travelogues, oral

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history interviews and autobiographies – sources of the sort frequently termed ‘ego documents’. Analysing these sources, I will outline how German tourists experienced, and reflected on, the striking incongruity between enjoying a holiday abroad and being confronted with reminders of the violent past. Most tourists set out simply to have a good time: they wanted to lay aside the problems of everyday life for a while. However, they often encountered reminders of the Nazi past during their stays abroad, which challenged their holiday intentions and expectations. These reminders could include incidents in which resentments surfaced: there might be name-calling, dismissive hand gestures, refusals of service, or, in rare instances, even physical assault. Yet, most of the time, encounters with the reverberations of war and violence were more subtle, such as when the subject was mentioned in discussions with locals or when the tourists came across memorials and cemeteries. They triggered reflection about the events which had happened in Europe under the Nazi regime. I will argue that these reminders – often unexpected and unwelcome – were disturbing experiences for German tourists on several levels. First, they challenged the expectations they had had for their holidays and their understanding of touristic roles. Secondly, these reminders were difficult to reconcile with the dominant, socially acceptable narrative of ‘a happy holiday’. And finally such encounters with the past raise questions about the construction of post-war German identities. By analysing travel narratives and exploring how tourists sought to make sense of the dissonance between reminders of war and violence and simply enjoying the present in their travel narratives, this chapter thus explores post-war tourism as an arena for negotiating expectation, experience and identity.

Burning to get away One of the most striking aspects in accounts that describe journeys abroad in the 1950s and early 1960s is a sense of urgency. Martha Weber (born 1905), a retired seamstress from Pforzheim in south-west Germany, sums up how she felt about her first trip out of the country in the mid-1950s: I had a lot of catching up to do, because there had been a standstill because of the war and the need to work: we had missed out on pleasure. The desire to have more time to see, hear and understand had never been stifled. So I made a resolution: ‘Once you get your pension and have paid off most of your debt, you’ll fly away as frequently as your wallet and physical and mental strength will permit.’4

Martha Weber’s interpretation of the early post-war years in terms of standstill and deprivation is echoed in many other accounts. The period is generally described as a time of austerity and knuckling down. Now, new, better times had begun; and going on a holiday became a symbol of this change. From the early 1950s onwards, when the economic situation improved in West Germany, there are increasing references in the sources to ‘new opportunities’, to ‘new horizons’, and to an ‘atmosphere of departure’. Weber refers to a renewed ‘zest for life’,5 and this was translated into an eagerness to

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try out new things, get away, and discover new destinations. This sense of urgency comes across in the travel narratives of all generations, but is especially prominent in journeys described by West German men born in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Heiko van Dieken, from Warstade in Lower Saxony, was born in 1929 and explains how his ordered and idyllic childhood life came to a sudden halt when the war began. It ‘changed everything’. Once it was all over and he was studying at university to become a teacher, van Dieken was keen to travel: ‘After the war new possibilities to get to know the world opened up.’6 Another student, Robert Lehle, born in 1933 and specializing in engineering at Mannheim, wrote: ‘I was fascinated by the challenge of embracing the unknown and overcoming difficulties and hardships.’7 Oss Kröher, born in 1927, shared this desire for adventure and set off on an extended trip, despite the fact that he had no money. Kröher had been called up at the very end of the war and had served as a naval cadet before being injured and serving time as a British prisoner of war. After his return to Germany, he trained as an industrial clerk and then enrolled at university. He describes what impelled him and his friend to take a break from studies and travel through Europe and Asia: ‘We were both burning to get away from this Germany that was in such a sorry state. Throughout our entire youth we had been imprisoned and could never travel abroad – the most we could do was climb in the Austrian Alps.’8 Now Kröher and his friend Gustav wanted to leave the memories of the past behind and go out to explore the world: ‘We wanted to make friends with coloured [sic] people of good will, see coconut palms sway in the monsoon, ride elephants and watch tigers in the long grass. In short, we wanted to leave grey, war-weary Europe behind and “taste” the freedom of the world.’9 Enthusiasm for travelling gripped East and West Germans alike; but for East Germans travel options were much more limited. In their accounts the urgency to travel is therefore expressed in a more muted way. But an eagerness to go abroad as soon as possible is a central theme in many GDR accounts. For some the desire to travel was so strong that they decided to visit Western Europe in secret, despite the effort and risk this involved. In an oral history interview, Irene B. (born 1910), from a village near Potsdam, describes the elaborate preparations she and her husband made when planning a clandestine trip to Great Britain in 1957. The first step was to apply for Western passports during a visit to West Germany. The couple obtained permission to stay in the Federal Republic for six weeks, and set off on a motorcycle that had been passed down to them by friends who had moved to West Germany. They crossed the border at Helmstedt and spent a few days with people they knew in Bochum while waiting for their British friends to wire across money to pay their fare to England. Leaving the motorcycle behind in Bochum, they continued their journey by train and ferry, and entered Britain on West German passports. Throughout their stay they never let on that they were from the GDR: ‘We stayed for six weeks and got to know post-war England a little. We had to be very careful. We were not allowed to say that we were from the GDR – that was just impossible at the time. Nevertheless, we had a great time.’10 After their return home, the couple did not dare tell anyone about their journey, and they left all photos and souvenirs with family members in West Berlin. East Germans who were not prepared to take such risks often had to wait much longer to travel abroad and could only choose from a limited number of acceptable destinations. Hans-Otto Klare (born 1949) speaks for many GDR tourists when, in

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an interview, he says that he had come to the following conclusion: ‘I cannot go to the West, but the East is big enough and surely there must be beautiful places there too.’11 This is symptomatic of the pragmatic attitude towards constraints on freedom of travel that was widespread in the East.12 While they did not necessarily approve, many GDR citizens came to terms with the restrictions, and focused on positive aspects instead of rebelling against them. Despite the different economic and political circumstances in East and West, going on a holiday became standard practice in the lives of a majority of Germans during the first three post-war decades. Travelling abroad became an increasingly attainable goal for the various groups of society. For many Germans, this was a sign that different times had begun and that the past could be counted as over and done with. Very few travel narratives mention any doubts or misgivings based on the recent experience of conflict. The general consensus in both East and West German accounts is that Germans were by now fully ‘rehabilitated’ (as one FRG tourist put it) and that the events of the war were (in the words of an East German tourist) ‘[f]orgotten and forgiven’.13

The happiest weeks of the year? Journeys take travellers outside the realm of everyday life and are therefore thought of as especially interesting and meaningful. Many twentieth century tourists documented their experiences in diaries, and in letters and postcards to friends and family at home. Or they related their stories in person after their return, often aided by photo albums or slide shows. Some others revisited their travel experiences years, even decades, later when working on their memoirs. Besides relating specific experiences, holiday narratives communicate a mass of information that lies under the surface. Tourism scholars have noted how much holiday choices reveal the way tourists want to be perceived by their peer group at home and how they see themselves. Even the choice of vacation – a budget holiday on a Spanish island, a river cruise in France, or backpacking in India – yields clues about age, financial situation, social status and educational background. As Christoph Henning observes in his essay ‘Reiselust’, the intended audience of holiday narratives are usually those who stayed at home – friends, neighbours, colleagues and relatives. Travel narratives need to meet the standards of this reference group. Stories, photos and souvenirs are important proofs of having had a successful holiday.14 At the same time, holiday narratives convey the tourists’ aspirations and dreams. Tourists believe that, during their holiday, when they are free of the constraints of everyday life, they can be their ‘real selves’. According to Henning, they use holidays as a space where they can act out their fantasies. Aspects of the self which are allowed no place in everyday life, and are consigned to dreams and imaginations, can be realized in travel: ‘Modern tourism is about experiencing imagination in real life; for a few weeks each year phantasies can become reality.’15 Sabine Gorsemann notes that the tourist’s experiences are measured against values and standards based on an assumed dichotomy between ‘everyday life’ and ‘holidays’. While everyday life is associated with duty, effort, hassle and monotony, holidays represent the ‘great, true and beautiful’. Holidays are expected to meet these

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exceptionally high demands. Gorsemann asks: what happens, ‘if happiness does not appear?’ The answer is: ‘This must not and therefore usually cannot be.’16 The two perspectives outlined above – tourism as a means of confirming social distinction and the concept of the holiday as an expression of the ‘true self ’ – explain an important convention present in touristic accounts: holiday narratives need to be success stories. While there is great variation within the post-war travel narratives, most follow this basic rule. Many accounts concern themselves primarily with holiday exploits and adventures – sightseeing, exploring or shopping. Tourists often note down what they feel to be achievements, such as the number of kilometres they have hiked, cycled or driven on a particular day; or they give detailed accounts of what they have purchased or eaten. This kind of narrative leaves little room for the exploration of negative or complicated experiences, thoughts and feelings. The legacies of war and violence were ugly, awkward and brutal; they did not fit with the conception of a happy, successful holiday. Furthermore, any discussion of the war and its legacies meant confronting difficult questions about armed aggression, the Holocaust, and responsibility for the fates of the many victims. Though tourists visit destinations to experience difference, they look at their surroundings through the lens of their expectations. In other words, they bring with them many stereotypes, images and ideas that amount to ‘invisible luggage’, as the journalist August Scholtis has termed it.17 Studies have very convincingly argued that the preconceptions tourists bring with them are actually more important than the reality they experience. The literary critic Stephen Greenblatt agrees that travelling heightens perception of our surroundings as well as our imaginations. But he warns: We never travel without expectations, never without a sequence of inner images which we hope to confirm, never without a screenplay which we follow halfconsciously. In most cases, actual experiences cannot dislodge our phantasies, they persevere.18

There are several central themes in post-war travel accounts in which the nature of these ‘phantasies’ are apparent. They influenced how post-war tourists perceived reminders of the past and represented them in their holiday narratives. A very prominent theme is the connection between holidays and a desire for freedom. Holidays were considered a temporary liberation from the problems and constraints of everyday life. They offered tourists the opportunity to sleep in, dress more casually, spend money more freely, eat differently, pursue their hobbies and, in some cases, experience romantic adventures. For East Germans the weeks spent away also offered the chance of temporary escape from the scrutiny of a state which sought to invade and regulate the private lives and thoughts of its citizens. Holidays were thought of as a means of breaking free from the oppressive past. For many members of the older generation, as Alon Confino has shown, the ability to go on holiday signified a return to normality and a chance to forget all the bad things that had happened.19 For those in the younger generation – like Kröher and Lehle – holidays were often conceived as a rebellion against the lifestyle of the parental and grandparental generations who had been involved in the war. These young people wanted to see the world not as soldiers, but as peaceful tourists.20

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Another important theme in post-war travel narratives is the idea of finding authenticity. ‘Authenticity’ here did not mean getting to know the gritty reality of the host country but, rather, sharing the experience of unspoilt nature, the simple life and primitive living conditions in which simple, good people lived in symbiosis with their surroundings. To this end, many travellers deliberately opted for destinations that were remote and ‘uncivilized’. They were looking for a counterworld to modern life, full of its cars, machines, pollution and noise; and at the same time for a counter-world to war and destruction. The tourists wanted to find places where the world was intact and peaceful, places that were beyond history, untouched and pure. Even though reminders of war and violence were ubiquitous and the vast majority of tourists would certainly have encountered them, the war is not a subject raised in the majority of post-war holiday narratives. The vast majority make no reference to the war, military occupation, the Holocaust or the legacies of these events. Even though the 254 narratives selected for analysis here therefore constitute a minority, they provide fascinating insights into how a wide range of tourists negotiated reminders of the war and its violence, and how they integrated them into descriptions of their present experiences. As David Picard has argued, tourism is an excellent field for studying ‘the articulation between personal subjective experience of the world and collective emotional and cognitive cultures through which this experience is framed, learnt and put into meaningful words, images and categories’.21 When tourists discussed the legacies of war and violence in their holiday narratives, they attempted making sense of them, creating narrative bridges between past and present, and integrating dissonant aspects into their ongoing lives and identities.

Narrative strategies Travelling abroad inspired many tourists to reflect on the foreign and the familiar, the present and the past. Inevitably they drew comparisons. The experience of being away from home and exposed to foreign surroundings seemed to require a response, a positioning, an articulation of their assumptions. Local reality could come as a surprise, or even a shock. For the tourists, travelling, after all, meant leaving their comfort zones, their peer groups and the familiarity of everyday life. Especially among those who had not booked an all-inclusive package deal, it meant becoming vulnerable – outsiders exposed to a foreign culture, an unintelligible language, unfamiliar cuisine, different customs and unknown spaces. Often, in post-war Europe, foreign travel also brought confrontations with reminders of war and violence, and these could disturb the images the travellers had entertained of a carefree holiday amid beautiful scenery. There were visual reminders, such as the still-present scenes of destruction caused by bombing and land-warfare;22 there might be conversations with locals in which the events of the war were brought up; 23 and sometimes tourists encountered hostility or aggressive behaviour from their hosts, which they attributed to resentment stemming from the war years.24 In addition, more subjective triggers, like hearing something on the radio or seeing a photo, could bring past events to mind.25 Thus, despite their intentions

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when setting off, many tourists found they could not, after all, separate holidays and the real-world problems thrown up by Germany’s recent past. It is possible to identify certain narrative strategies German tourists resorted to when they recounted holiday experiences involving encounters with the past. In the following sections, I will focus on four patterns appearing across the range of sources.

Omissions The majority of German post-war travel narratives resolutely ignore any effects of the recent conflict seen or encountered on travels abroad. However, we cannot infer from this that the tourists who wrote accounts did not think about past events at all. As we saw above, there were reasons to leave out references to war and violence that can be traced back to narrative conventions and to touristic expectations and images. Furthermore, the after-effects of war were often perceived as too common and familiar to warrant much commentary. This may partially account for the absence of references to wartime destruction. Bombing and artillery fire had left gaping holes in the streets of many towns and cities. They had damaged factories and infrastructure, and had sometimes obliterated entire villages or districts. In many cases the scars remained visible for decades. So rubble and ruins were an everyday sight.26 As Christoph Henning observes, even the most well-informed and interested tourists only register a small amount of what is in front of them. They prioritize aspects that differ from their own everyday reality and filter out the rest. Picturesque scenes, exotic nature, historic buildings and folklore are of more interest than supermarkets and factories.27 The same kind of filtering may well have been applied to war damage. In the memoirs of the East German ophthalmologist Georg Günther, there is a description of how he travelled to Switzerland in 1951 to attend a medical congress and spend a few relaxing days in the countryside afterwards. ‘It was to be my first trip abroad after the war, at a time when the experience of war had not yet paled; and the ruins around me kept reminding me of it.’ This sentence suggests that Günther found the sight of rubble at home oppressive. When he finally arrived in Zurich, which had been untouched by war, he felt elated at the sight of a city that looked so different: I had travelled very little in my life and on my excursions to the Western occupation zones I had seen the rubble and ruins of the past war. It is therefore understandable that I was stunned by the intactness of the world surrounding me; my enthusiasm may have perhaps led to an overestimation of what I was seeing.28

The last phrase of this extract may have been added to placate the East German censors, but it is nevertheless clear that Günther found the absence of destruction more remarkable than its presence. If war damage is mentioned in travel narratives, then, it is usually for one of two reasons. The first of these is astonishment at the extraordinary scale of destruction in certain places: there are several examples of tourists to Warsaw in the 1950s who were stunned by the magnitude of the devastation there.29 The second is when tourists saw

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destruction in a place they had known before the war, or a ruined building that had once been considered of particular beauty or cultural value, such as a church or castle.30 Interpreting omissions in ego documents is very challenging. We have very little outside the tourists’ own accounts to help us establish what exactly they experienced or did not experience during their holidays, and how they reacted to whatever reminders of the past they came across. So we cannot say with certainty why there are omissions in their holiday narratives. However, there are cases where it is possible to recognize elements that were almost omitted. An interesting example emerges in an oral history interview Dorothee Wierling made in 1987 with a woman from the GDR. When asked whether the subjects of National Socialism or the war ever came up during her many holiday trips abroad, Hildegard C. (born 1920) at first denied this: ‘in my experience, [the hosts] did not bear any grudges against us tourists who were Germans from the GDR’. The interviewee insisted that she was always treated in a polite and friendly manner. However, when the interviewer questioned this point, Hildegard C. corrected herself and recounted an episode that had occurred in the late 1950s when she had travelled through Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union on board a ‘friendship train’. As the party of Germans went through Poland, the local people threw tomatoes and other things at them. Hildegard C. thought this was characteristic of the general atmosphere in Poland at the time, where there was considerable anti-German sentiment. She goes on to make it clear how very strongly she reacted to the incident, which had made her feel ‘bitterly alienated’.31 She told her interviewer that, on subsequent trips to Poland, she was welcomed in a more friendly fashion, ‘but in the background there was often the feeling that they were not able to forget what happened there. [...] Yes, that is what we picked up.’ It is difficult to pin down the reason why Hildegard C. was at first reluctant to discuss being at the receiving end of resentment. It could be that she had forgotten the incident in question until the interviewer brought the subject up. It is also possible that she felt it inappropriate to discuss an encounter that was clearly at odds with the state propaganda of friendship between socialist countries. (In the propagandist mythology, the GDR was the state promoting communist resistance to Nazism, and all the old Nazis had gone to the West.) But clearly, it was also an uncomfortable memory, which she may have wanted to repress. In Hildegard C.’s case it was the persistence of the interviewer that prompted the person reminiscing to reconsider and amend her narrative. Interviewees who talked about their experiences many years later sometimes commented on their own failure to notice or remark on reminders of the war at the time. Dagmar D. from West Germany was born in 1954 and visited France as a schoolgirl. In an oral history interview recorded in 2013 she stated that at that time she was ‘apolitical’ and ‘completely oblivious’ of the historical context. Instead she had ‘focused on the positive aspects’ of her journey.32

Happy endings The memoirists studied sometimes wrote a long while after their travels, drawing on notes or diaries written in the past and oscillating between the perspectives of their older and younger selves. This is so in the memoirs of Hugo Wilhelm Jung (born 1939) from West

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Germany. Many years after the event, he describes what happened when he participated in a school exchange programme to France in 1952. He got along very well with his host family, who took him on several excursions which he greatly enjoyed. He was therefore taken by surprise when, on one of their trips, an old Frenchman confronted him: However, happiness is never perfect and I vaguely understood this when an old Frenchmen in a beret called me ‘boche’ on the quay wall; when Claude’s father heard this word he took [the man] to task. At the time I was not even familiar with this term; today I would wonder what this man had experienced in the long centuries of dispute between France and Germany to utter something so negative and baseless to a young inexperienced boy – unless it was just stupidity and the bigotry of old age. 33

It is clear from the language and tone in this passage that even decades later, Jung was still rattled and furious at the memory of this encounter. Though he concedes that the man may have had his reasons for being angry, he insists that he should not have called a young boy ‘boche’ – a common wartime insult for German soldiers. Jung puts this experience into perspective by describing how the father of his host family chided the old man for his inappropriate behaviour. He also affirms that his holiday in France was otherwise ‘perfect’ and that this was just one small glitch. Thus, by downplaying the incident, Jung brings the narrative back into line with the story of a happy, successful holiday. This is a very common narrative strategy, which we find employed in several accounts relating unwelcome encounters.34 Framing incidents of resentment within a positive context allowed tourists to adhere to narrative conventions and conform to the ideals governing their role. This pattern is discernible across most of the accounts that record travellers meeting hostility. Even when they are indignant and feel unfairly treated, they tend to begin and end their story in a more positive way, maintaining that the overall experience of their holiday has been positive. This is particularly evident in the case of R., a West German tourist who visited Norway in 1970 and afterwards wrote a letter of complaint to the Foreign Office to report a ‘really terrible incident’. In this R. describes how his party went to a restaurant in Bodø for lunch, but the staff deliberately ignored them and refused to serve them. He cannot comprehend why they got this treatment. ‘We want to forget the unfriendliness and affronts from the restaurant staff in Bodø, but we expect the same [forgiveness] from them.’ The writer refers to the good political relationship between Norway and the FRG, shown in a recent state visit by the West German head of state, stating that, in the light of this, ‘one would think the war was over by now’.35 The purpose of this letter is clearly to complain about what happened. Nevertheless, R. repeatedly emphasizes that the remainder of the trip was very good, and that, with this one exception, the locals were hospitable and pleasant. Even though R. practically demands that the Bodø locals should ‘forget’ and move on, thereby practically equating the snub at the restaurant with years of occupation, it is evident that the experience of war still mattered in touristic encounters. Expressions of resentment made it plain that the legacies of war still rankled, even in supposedly apolitical spheres. This was a challenge to the way tourists understood themselves.

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Despite the fact that they brought money to their hosts, they were not always welcome guests, since they could be seen as representatives of the former enemy power. Being treated with disrespect was a humiliating experience. By describing the acts of resentment as isolated incidents and the people who insulted them as backwardlooking bigots unrepresentative of the general population, German tourists were able to dismiss these incidents without further reflection and maintain the pretence that their visit was apolitical.

Comparisons Inspired by the experience of visiting foreign destinations, tourists very often compared their own circumstances, values, habits and conceptions of history with those observed abroad. This was a way of putting their experiences into perspective and making sense of them. They tried to establish a framework of interpretation that made an unfamiliar situation understandable and manageable – it provided a degree of security. A particularly interesting case in this respect are travel accounts written by tourists from the FRG who visited socialist countries during their vacations. The regions of Eastern or South-eastern Europe appeared less familiar, not just because of the political divide during the Cold War, but also because they were not among the classic travel destinations and not much represented in the media and popular culture. So many West German tourists who visited dictatorships resorted to their own experience of a dictatorship as a reference point – they made comparisons with the Third Reich. Yugoslavia was a popular destination for West Germans. It had opened its doors to tourists from Western countries more readily than had other states in the Eastern Bloc, and its image was less tainted by Cold War politics. In fact, of the tourists who came to Yugoslavia, Western visitors far outnumbered those who came from the East: Germans and Austrian headed the table.36 Some of the West German tourists, mainly concerned to get a good value beach holiday, were not even aware of the country’s political situation. In a report published by the Studienkreis für Tourismusforschung,37 a participant observer named Alfred Degen noted that many of the tourists in his party did not know they were going to a socialist country until they arrived there. ‘Only a few had chosen this place deliberately; most of them simply wanted to go south and there was nothing else available at the travel agency’; the brochures made no mention of political circumstances. Most of the tourists were not bothered by the discovery that they had come to a socialist state and ‘carried on as usual without giving much thought to it’. However, the older German tourists were reminded of Hitler’s Germany when they saw all the portraits of Tito in public places. Degen overheard one of them remark: ‘Just like Adolf!’ The stay also aroused the curiosity of some of the younger tourists in the party, who posed questions about the country’s political and economic situation, and its history, to the tour guide and to an older German-speaking man who often visited the hotel. Degen reports that the interactions between the German tourists and their hosts were largely ‘amicable’. The tourists were on friendly terms with the hotel staff and frequently engaged in conversations with the Yugoslavs who accompanied them on excursions. In the evenings, the two groups drank and sang together, and

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the young people danced. However, there was one incident when a Yugoslav called a misbehaving German student a ‘Nazi pig’. Both the parties involved apologized later on and the conflict was settled.38 Several other accounts from tourists visiting Yugoslavia remark on perceived similarities between the leadership cult around Tito and that of Hitler and other Nazi leaders. In his description of a road trip through Yugoslavia which he undertook with a friend in 1956, Konrad Bogner (born 1931) observes that Tito reminds him of Hermann Göring, both in his looks and in his reportedly ‘ostentatious’ lifestyle. This is not the only reference he makes to the Third Reich. At one point he suspects that the cook in a restaurant, ‘a plump woman exuding vitality’, is overcharging; moreover she laughs about her German customers. Bogner and his friend then begin referring to her as ‘partisanka’ between themselves, because ‘this is what we imagined partisans to be like’ – and they leave in a huff.39 However, this is the only occasion when Bogner feels resented as a German. In his memoirs he quotes from the diary he kept at the time: generally he is ‘happy not to see any antipathy against Germans’. However, they also realize that past events are not forgotten. Even though the young men try to avoid tricky subjects like the war and politics, these are the topics that keep coming up in conversations with locals. After several long conversations with a Yugoslav woman about the war and the partisan movement, Bogner concludes that the German occupants had ‘not really proved very skilful’ in winning the support of the population. In his attempt to understand Tito’s actions after 1945, Bogner compares the ‘elimination of partisans who did not suit him’ to what happened among the National Socialists in Germany: In every revolution there are powers that are useful in the first phase, but cease to be so later, and are therefore eliminated to keep the revolution ‘pure’. We thought of the National Socialist revolution which had been supported by many elements who did not meet the ideals of the ‘National Socialist’ German, but were kept within the party and the organization. An exception was the SA, which was disempowered during the Röhm Putsch, due to profound differences in opinion between it and the NSDAP. Anyway, Tito had thoroughly cleaned up his area.40

In his memoirs, Bogner admits that he has never read or followed up anything about Yugoslavian history and politics, either before or after his trip. The conversations he had during his holiday in 1956 were his only source of information. The diary entries Bogner quotes show very clearly that, more than a decade after the war, the National Socialist worldview this man had absorbed as a child continued to influence his outlook. It was still the lens through which he tried to make sense of what he saw in a foreign country. Even decades later, when writing his memoir, Bogner does not feel the need to correct or amend his assessments.

Avoidance Like Bogner and his friend, many German tourists abroad tried to avoid the tricky subjects of politics and the recent war. Some even went as far as concealing their

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nationality or lying about it, so as to avoid difficult questions relating to the past. In 1953 Heiko van Diecken whom we encountered earlier in this chapter, went on a bicycling tour in the Netherlands. In his memoir, he recalls a conversation with a local which took place when he asked for directions: ‘Oh, are you German?’ the local asked. ‘I’m East Frisian,’ I replied, sure that this would lead to benevolence in the north of the Netherlands. In this Frisian area I even got the impression that a mysterious blood-bond existed between all Frisians [...] working across national borders. However, the Dutchman replied cynically: ‘That’s what you all say when in Holland. But you cannot fool us. You’re Germans!’41

The young man was confronted with the past at several moments during his trip. When visiting Groningen, students showed him where they used to hide from the Germans to avoid being deported to Germany as slave labourers. In Franeker, he heard about the shooting of Dutch hostages by the SS. However, van Diecken only briefly mentions those, while describing a very different experience in much greater detail. One evening he entered an inn which lay along his route. The local farmers who sat at a corner table found it ‘amusing’ to see the young cyclist. Soon they began talking about their experiences during the German occupation. To van Diecken’s amazement, one of the regulars loudly praised the behaviour of the German occupation soldiers which he deemed ‘decent’. By contrast, he had no sympathy for the Dutch resistance or for the forces who liberated the country, especially the Canadian soldiers who had ‘taken advantage’ of the local girls. The farmer told the innkeeper to offer the young German cyclist a room. The next morning van Diecken was served an ‘ample breakfast’. Van Diecken comments: ‘I was so grateful both to this nice patron and to the German soldiers who remained decent and demonstrated that there were also good Germans.’42 In 1951 when another student Oss Kröher (born 1927) motorcycled across Europe with a friend on the way to India, the pair stopped in Rome. Here they busked on the streets and in cafes to raise money for their onward journey. One night, a visitor at one of the bars asked them where they were from. Without hesitation they pretended to be Dutch. In his memoir, Kröher explains: ‘I did not want to admit that I was German – the Nazi spook was still too close to everyone.’ However, when a woman from another table asked for a Tyrolese song and Kröher obliged, happily yodelling away, he realized he had blown his cover. He laconically comments: ‘Now everybody would know that I am no “flying Dutchman”.’ Despite this, the students made good money that night.43 Both van Dieken and Kröher are completely unapologetic about their attempt to conceal their Germanness. Their tone is nonchalant and humorous. Their decision to give a ‘creative answer’ about their nationality was a matter of easy opportunism and they present it as no more than a witty ruse. Clearly they had used this strategy successfully in the past. Their excuse is that they were young and did not want to be weighed down by history – though in Kröher’s case there was also the calculation of making more money. Neither Kröher nor van Dieken minded especially when their bluff was called. Both accounts also mention situations where their Germanness played to their advantage. Kröher and his friend were for example happy to accept free food

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and accommodation from a group of Neo-Fascist students in Bari who helped them because they felt ‘connected with Germany as brothers in arms and in ideology’. ‘Why be impolite?’ Kröher writes. On other occasions they also befriended people who had been forced to emigrate from Germany on racial grounds and former slave labourers without hesitation.44 Their main concern was to have a good time. Depending on the situation and whom they met, they admitted to or lied about their nationality without thinking twice about it. A very different situation is described in an account by Elisabeth Dryander, who visited Greece in the late 1950s. She encountered reminders of the war at several points on her trip, and recounts two situations where the locals asked directly what her nationality was. On an excursion to the mountainous north of Greece, an area tourists had not then discovered, Dryander encountered people from a nomadic tribe of shepherds. As strangers rarely came to this area, her arrival caused a small sensation. The shepherds were very hospitable and intensely curious about her, so she spontaneously decided to spend a few days with them. They showed her around their huts and told her about the surrounding land: ‘During the war the xeni [strangers] came up here and demanded to have a sheep slaughtered; and once, over there – they pointed to the face of a mountain – they shot two men. The Germans, yes, may they be damned.’45 Elisabeth Dryander recalls how, when she heard this, she suddenly felt cold and alone. After her hosts had shared a meal with her, the elder asked her to tell them about her home. All of them huddled together as, in her basic Greek, the visitor described green pastures, large trees, rivers with plenty of water and houses with high roofs. The shepherds listened with wonder and remarked what a blessed country this must be. Finally they asked her the question she had been dreading: ‘What is it called?’ ‘Germania,’ I replied in a muted voice. I think I looked at Artemis [...]. But nothing happened. They just shook their heads and the one with the goatee said: ‘They came from such a blessed country to our poor mountains? Why?’ I did not know the answer. We sat in silence. Suddenly a voice said: ‘The devil seize[d] the[ir] souls. We don’t know why.’ ‘Yes,’ Xenopohon nodded. ‘And she does not know either.’ He was pointing at me. Then nobody said anything about it any more. They just wanted to know how far away Germany was, how much the trip cost, whether you could get work there.46

Dryander only revealed her nationality when asked explicitly, and when she did so, her hosts immediately made the connection between her presence and the actions of the soldiers who had ravaged the area years earlier. When they asked for an explanation, the German visitor did not attempt to provide one. The situation was resolved when one of the elders concluded that the soldiers must have been possessed by the devil, thereby letting his guest off the hook. It is striking that Elisabeth Dryander does not attempt to justify the crimes committed by fellow Germans or hasten to change the subject. Her reluctance to reveal her nationality was born not of opportunism, but from shame and an awareness of what the crimes committed in Greece had resulted in.

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Conclusion ‘War is one thing and holiday is another. We should not mix the two.’ These words, said by a young West German woman holidaying in Yugoslavia in the early 1960s, are representative of a widespread conviction amongst German holidaymakers that holidays were exclusively for enjoyment and pleasure – that they were inherently nonpolitical. Most German tourists were determined to ignore anything that threatened to spoil their hard-earned breaks from everyday routine. However, as the examples above show, reminders of the past were ubiquitous and could often disturb the idyllic holidays the tourists had planned. The young woman cited above is a good example. In conversation with another holiday-maker, a participant observer from the Studienkreis für Tourismusforschung, she also mentioned that her father had been deployed in Yugoslavia as a soldier during the war. He had told her many stories about this time, and now refused to visit the Balkans for holidays, preferring Italy.47 This example, alongside numerous incidents described in post-war travel accounts, suggests that, despite their best efforts at making foreign holidays the symbol of a fresh start, Germans abroad could not escape the shadows of the past. Disturbing reminders of wartime brutality and aggression were not only at odds with touristic expectations and difficult to speak about at home, they also called into question the very fundaments on which German post-war identities were based. Tourists from West Germany – the land of the ‘economic miracle’, now firmly integrated into the Western Bloc – found that, in foreign encounters, the new international politics and economic cooperation had not fully erased the past: the legacies of war and violence still mattered. Similarly, East Germans were not always received with open arms by their socialist ‘friends’. The travel accounts also show awkward continuities in terms of worldview and language. Many of the stereotypes foreigners had about Germans, and Germans about foreigners, can clearly be traced back to the ideology and propaganda of the Third Reich. People’s memories of this period still served as a framework for making sense of national differences.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6

See Hasso Spode, Wie die Deutschen ‘Reiseweltmeister’ wurden. Eine Einführung in die Tourismusgeschichte (Thürigen: Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2003), 144. Hasso Spode, ‘Vorwort’, in Hasso Spode (ed.), Goldstrand und Teutonengrill. Kulturund Sozialgeschichte des Tourismus in Deutschland 1945 bis 1989 (Berlin: W. Moser, 1996), 7–9, 7. Axel Schildt, ‘ “Die kostbarsten Wochen des Jahres” – zum Urlaubstourismus’, in Axel Schildt (ed.), Moderne Zeiten. Freizeit, Massenmedien und ‘Zeitgeist’ in der Bundesrepublik der 50er Jahre (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1995), 180–208, 69–70. Deutsches Tagebuch Archiv [DTA] 1040I, Martha Weber, Meine Lebenserinnerungen 1905–1998, 57. Ibid. Heiko van Dieken, Wallhecken & Wolkenkratzer. Erinnerungen an Reiseerlebnisse im 20. Jahrhundert (Leer: De Utrooper Verlag, 1999), 7.

German Tourists in Europe and a Disturbing Past 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21

22

23

24

25

26

213

DTA 992, Robert Lehle, ‘Geh Deinen Weg’. Erinnerungen aus dem ersten Leben 1939–1958, 37 (unpublished manuscript). Oss Kröher, Das Morgenland ist weit. Die erste Motorradreise vom Rhein zum Ganges (München: Goldman Verlag, 1997), 12. Ibid. Interview with Irene B. 21.3.2013 and 26.3.2013. Archiv Deutsches Gedächtnis [ADG], Collection: Speziallager, interview transcript, Hans-Otto K., 8.2.1991, interviewer: Alexander von Plato. This is a very common theme. See, for example, ADG, Collection: DDR 87, interview transcript Tora E., 18.6.1987, interviewers: Alexander von Plato and Karl Laux, Nachklang. Autobiographie (Berlin: Verlag der Nationen, 1977), 428 and DTA 822,1, Rudolf S., Damals – meine Lebenserinnerungen 1933–2002, 37. ADG, Collection: DDR 87, interview transcript, Konrad R., 2 April 1987 and 30 April 1987, interviewers: Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato and Dorothee Wierling. Christoph Henning, Reiselust. Touristen, Tourismus und Urlaubskultur (Frankfurt am Main: Leipzig, 1997), 50–51. Ibid., 101. Sabine Gorsemann, ‘Bildungsgut und touristische Gebrauchsanweisung: Reiseführer als Vermittler zwischen dem Alltag der Leser und der bereisten Fremde’, in Christiane Cantauw (ed.), Arbeit, Freizeit, Reisen. Die feinen Unterschiede im Alltag (Münster, New York: Waxmann, 1995), 83–91, 83–84. August Scholtis, Reise nach Polen (München: Biederstein, 1962), 34. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Warum reisen?’, in Tobias Gohlis, Christoph Henning, H. Jürgen Kagelmann, Dieter Kramer and Hasso Spode (eds), Voyage. Jahrbuch für Reise- & Tourismusforschung 1997. Schwerpunktthema: Warum reisen? (Köln: DuMont, 1997), 13–17, 15–16. See Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance. Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 246–247. See, for example, Rainer Schönhammer, ‘Unabhängiger Jugendtourismus in der Nachkriegszeit’, in Spode, Goldstrand, 117–128, 118. David Picard, ‘Tourism, Awe and Inner Journeys’, in, David Picard and Mike Robinson (eds), Emotion in Motion. Tourism, Affect and Transformation (Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 1–19, 2–3. For example, Kasimir Edschmid, Europäisches Reisebuch (Hamburg: Paul Zsolnau, 1953), 77, ADG, Collection: Nachkriegseliten, interview trascript Otto P., 11 August, 21 August and 1 September 1988, interviewers: Nori Möding, Alexander von Plato and Elisabeth Dryander, Briefe aus Griechenland (München: Prestel-Verlag, 1959), 11–12. For example, Interview with Wolfgang G. 4 April 2013 and ADG, Collection: Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet (LUSIR), interview transcript Trude R. 21 July and 10 August 1987, interviewer: Almut Leh. For example, DTA 1638, 3–1638,4, Irmela S., Erinnerungen 1949–1957 and Joachim Seyppel, Griechisches Mosaik. Impressionen und Analysen. Ob es überhaupt ein ganzes gibt oder nur sehr viele Teile, die einander widerstreben (Berlin: Volk und Welt 1970), 34. For example, Oda Schaefer, Die leuchtenden Feste über der Trauer. Erinnerungen aus der Nachkriegszeit (München: Piper 1977), 140 and DTA 1895/II, 2, Annerose N., Briefe 1953–1972, 202 and Gerhard Deesen, Forte die Marmi. Ferien mit einem Kind (Kaufbeuren: self-published, 1960), 19–20. See, for example, Siefke’s description of Hannover in Wilhelmine Siefke, Erinnerungen (Leer: Schuster, 1979), 184.

214 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Christoph Henning, ‘Das Rätsel Reiselust’, Die Waage, 37, 1 (1998), 2–7, 7. Georg Günther, Gewinne das Leben. Autobiograpie (Berlin: Verlag der Nationen, 1989). See, for example, Jan Petersen, ‘Das Leben besiegte den Tod: Ein Reisebericht über das neue Warschau’, Neue deutsche Literatur. Zeitschrift für deutschsprachige Lieteratur und Kritik, 1 (1953), 121–130, 124 and Scholtis, Reise nach Polen, 48. See, for example, Hans Otto Meissner, Unbekanntes Europa. Ein Brevier für Abenteuer abseits der großen Straßen (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1959), 104. ADG, Collection: DDR 87, Interview transcript Hildegard C. 27 and 29 July 1987, interviewer: Dorothee Wierling. Interview with Dagmar D., 11 April 2013. DTA 1183, Hugo Wilhelm Jung, In der Welt zu Hause – im Hanauerland daheim, 26. This pattern can be found in a wide range of accounts. See, for example, Angelika Petershagen, Entscheidung für Greifswald. Autobiographie (Berlin: Verlag der Nationen, 1981), 275; Gerhard Joop, ‘Stadt in der goldenen Muschel. Siziliens Hauptstadt Palermo’, Westermanns Monatshefte, 3 (1956), 14–20, 20 and ADG, Collection: Nachkriegseliten, interview transcript Otto P. 11 August, 21 August and 1 September 1988, interviewers: Nori Möding and Alexander von Plato. Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes [PAAA] B 57 873, R. to the Foreign Office, 9 December 1970. PAAA B57 268, Deutsches Konsulat Zagreb to Auswärtiges Amt, 5 May 1961. The Studienkreis für Tourismusforschung was founded in Starnberg am See in 1961 to ‘encourage analysis of travelling in the social and cultural sciences’. The Studienkreis initiated and published several academic studies on tourism. Several big tour operators supported this endeavour by offering free places on package holiday trips. The participant observers were for the most part were academics from various disciplines, including psychology, pedagogy, theology and sociology, set out to ‘get to know the characteristics of the holiday destination and to study the behaviour of travellers and natives’. After their return they wrote reports which were published. See Rolf Fuchs, Urlaub in Loano. Beobachtungen eines Psychologen an der italienischen Riviera (München: Studienkreis für Tourismus, 1961), 5–6 and Heinz-Günter Vester, ‘Kollektive Mentalitaeten im Tourismus’, in Armin Günther, Hans Hopfinger, H. Jürgen Kagelmann and Walter Kiefl (eds), Tourismusforschung in Bayern. Aktuelle sozialwissenschaftliche Beitraege (München, Wien: Profil, 2007), 57–66, 57. Alfred Degen, Urlaub auf Korcula. Beobachtungen eines Gruppenpädagogen in Dalmatien (München: Studienkreis für Tourismus, 1962), 21–22. DTA 917 I/II/III Konrad Bogner, Autobiographie: 1. Die Schule des Lebens 1931–1958; 2. Der Weg zur Reife 1958–1962; 3. Pflicht und Verantwortung bis 2002, 156, 163. Ibid., 164. Dieken, Wallhecken & Wolkenkratzer, 55–56. Dieken, Wallhecken & Wolkenkratzer, 57. Kröher, Das Morgenland ist weit, 50–51. Kröher, Das Morgenland ist weit, 53, 56, 69. Dryander, Briefe aus Griechenland, 25. Ibid., 26. Fritz und Hildegard Wüllenweber, Urlaub in Opatija. Beobachtungen eines Pädagogen-Ehepaares an der jugoslawischen Adria (München: Studienkreis für Tourismus, Dezember 1964), 45.

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Reverberations of a Disturbing Past: Reconciliation Activities of Young West Germans in the 1960s and 1970s Christiane Wienand

Introduction This chapter explores reconciliation activities of young West Germans from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. These activities originated during voluntary work stays in Auschwitz and other former extermination camp sites in Poland and continued in the form of political and social activism in the Federal Republic afterwards. I argue that these reconciliation activities and the ways in which the young West Germans and others tried to make sense of them are reverberations of a deeply disturbing past that is mirrored in the history of Auschwitz: the violent German occupation regime in Poland and the Holocaust. My analysis extends over four parts. In the first part, I explore how the young West Germans and those who organized their work stays perceived and appropriated the confrontation with the remains of the disturbing past at the former camp sites. My analysis in the second part focuses on the ways in which the confrontation with the past was turned into calls for political action during the work stays. In part three I concentrate on the after-effects of the work stays back home in West Germany and demonstrate what young West Germans made of their experiences in Poland in discursive and practical ways. Finally, I explore how in the course of their work stays and their continuing political activities in the Federal Republic the young volunteers perceived Auschwitz in different ways, both as an actual and a symbolic site. By placing these analyses within their contemporary contexts, the chapter contributes to our understanding of the relations between Poland and West Germany on the civil society level, of the after-history of Auschwitz as a contested ‘site of memory’, of the ways in which West Germans dealt with the Nazi past in the aftermath of the students’ revolt of 1968, and of the increasing political mobilization among West German youth at the time. The empirical examples stem from youth groups who travelled to Poland under the aegis of the German organization Aktion Sühnezeichen (Action Reconciliation), which was founded by Protestant church functionary Lothar Kreyssig in 1958 with the aim

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of atoning for the National Socialist crimes by committing hands-on reconciliation work. The organization soon became well-known as an agent for reconciliation within civil society, and was able to gain publicity for its activities. Although Aktion Sühnezeichen was not a church organization, it had strong links to Protestant circles in West Germany. It also became the most successful West German organization with respect to organizing reconciliation activities in Poland: between 1967 and 1989 16,500 young West Germans visited former Polish concentration camp sites through Aktion Sühnezeichen.1 From 1967 onwards the West German branch of Aktion Sühnezeichen was permitted to organize two-week voluntary work stays for young West Germans in Auschwitz, and from the 1970s onwards also in Majdanek and Stutthof. The young people who went to Poland on work stays organized by Aktion Sühnezeichen were of a diverse background. The organization’s staff arranged these work stays for youth groups, including but not limited to church groups from all parts of the Federal Republic. Different from the activities of Aktion Sühnezeichen in other countries, such as in France, Norway and the Netherlands, where the young Germans lived and worked at memorials, in social institutions and in the case of Israel also in Kibbutzim for several months, the work stays in Poland were limited to two weeks only. Since 1971, these short work stays in Auschwitz also became part of the one-month preparation seminars for Sühnezeichen groups which then travelled to Israel for their long-term volunteer service.2 And from 1979 onwards a stay in Auschwitz became obligatory for a while as part of the preparation for all Sühnezeichen volunteer groups.3 The West German youth groups travelling to Auschwitz with Aktion Sühnezeichen were not the only youth groups visiting Auschwitz in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1959 and 1960, the Socialist youth group Die Falken from West Berlin visited Auschwitz in order to commemorate the crimes Germans had committed during the years of German occupation in Poland and to advertise the wish of German youth to bring about peace.4 Various other German youth groups – from worker’s youth groups to church groups and students – followed in the years after,5 and from 1965 until 1967 youth groups who travelled with the East German branch of Aktion Sühnezeichen worked in Auschwitz.6 Groups from Poland, from various European countries and from the Soviet Union also made their way to Auschwitz and linked their visit to public demonstrations for peace, understanding or reconciliation.7 These youth groups formed various coalitions: in September 1969, an anti-war rally at Auschwitz brought together some 10,000 young people from the Socialist countries Poland, the Soviet Union and the GDR.8 And in July 1970, the 450 members of an international boy scouts meeting in Auschwitz, with participants from East and West Germany, France, Romania, Sweden, Vietnam, Italy and the Soviet Union, formed a group that transcended the Cold War borders.9 Thus, the activities of young West Germans who came to Auschwitz via Aktion Sühnezeichen were part of a wider historical phenomenon. This phenomenon in turn was shaped by discourses about the role of youth for the reconstruction and transformation of the post-war societies in Europe.10 By focusing on the West German groups travelling under the aegis of Aktion Sühnezeichen, I concentrate on the particular West German context. What makes these groups relevant for consideration here is that they combined

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their work stays with distinct pleas for reconciliation and political activism, which in various ways extended into the West German society.11

Confronting the past The practical work done by young Germans in Auschwitz, and later in Majdanek and Stutthof, focused on conservation measures to preserve the former camp sites. Young volunteers cleaned remains of buildings or did repair works on the site. The groups also participated in guided tours through the museum, watched documentaries, studied history books and memoirs of survivors, and worked with the files at the museum’s archive. In the evenings, the young Germans met for discussions with former Polish camp prisoners. Apart from these activities, the work stays were accompanied by trips to surrounding cities, where the Sühnezeichen organization had organized gettogethers between the young Germans and Polish youth groups and members of the ZNAK, a Catholic laymen organization. Usually, the youth groups had also visited preparation seminars before they went to Poland. In reports written partly during and partly after their trips, the volunteers provided descriptions of their work in Auschwitz, and how they perceived their activities at the time. Talking about her reconciliation work in Auschwitz in 1969, the volunteer Elisabeth K. reflects upon her findings there: We work at the third crematorium in Birkenau [...], to the right of the ramp and the memorial. [...] Our findings attracted the most attention: buttons, combs, pieces of mirrors, pieces of china and glass, spoons, knives, scissors, razors, pencils, shoe soles and much more, also coins – from all over Europe. At another spot we excavated remains of Hebrew bibles and Polish diaries. These are the relics of the saints and martyrs of our days.12

In this passage Elisabeth refers to a tangible confrontation with the past, or better: its remains. While we do not know Elisabeth’s exact age, her social or religious background, we can assume that Elisabeth herself was born either shortly before or after the end of the war and that her family in Germany had in some way lived through the ‘Third Reich’. Thus, in one way or another, Elisabeth had personal links and emotional connections to the time during which the crimes took place, the traces of which she excavated in Auschwitz. Historical knowledge of the National Socialist crimes and the Holocaust among West German youth was growing during the 1960s, but young West Germans in the 1960s were far less acquainted with images of the Nazi crimes and the Holocaust (real and fictional ones) than later generations.13 Given this background, it would be plausible to expect Elisabeth to express a sense of being disturbed by her confrontation with the belongings of people who were murdered in Auschwitz. Instead, Elisabeth interprets them from a bird’s eye perspective using symbolic and religious language. Elisabeth’s example is not unique in this respect, as a similar level of abstraction can be found in many of the volunteers’ reports.14 Another

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recurring narrative pattern used by the reconciliation activists was the idea that with their work they were uncovering the past, and thereby getting rid of the grass that had already grown over its remains, both in a literal and in a figurative sense:15 The reason for our work lies in the past, and we face the entire brutality of this past particularly at this place. We do not want to let grass grow over this chapter of German history, but we want to see it as an appeal to the present and the future.16

This idea of ‘getting rid of the grass’ reflects the idea of reconciliation as a status that can be achieved through political and social action.17 The motive of uncovering the past with the own hands displays the idea of challenging the present situation in order to bring up to light the disturbing past. As I indicated in relation to Elisabeth K.’s report, what is largely absent from these reports are descriptions of emotional or physical reactions to their confrontations with the past. Another aspect that was omitted in the reports are reflections about personal ties to the past: The young Germans did not refer to the involvement of their own parents, grandparents or other family members in the National Socialist regime when recounting their experiences and findings. It is therefore necessary to turn to other sources that indirectly reveal something about the ways in which the young Germans might have emotionally responded to their experiences in Auschwitz and the former camps in Poland, and whether the past left them disturbed. Internal reports and guidelines of the Sühnezeichen organization suggest that there was high consumption of alcohol among the young West Germans during their stays in Auschwitz.18 While we have to take into account that the young Germans presumably also used the time away from the strict eyes of their parents to indulge, the alcohol consumption could also be interpreted as an alternative way of processing the difficult experiences they made during their work stays.19 There are several other possible explanations for the fact that the German volunteers in their reports focus on the overall meaning of their work – be it in a religious or in a political sense – rather than on their personal impressions and emotions. I would like to propose the following three explanations here. The first is given by the activists themselves in their reports. According to them, a common reaction was the sense of being speechless in the face of what they experienced in Auschwitz and other former camps.20 This inability to express in words their emotional reactions to what they saw in the camps is crucial for understanding why these reports were written in such a distanced manner. Instead of including their emotions into their reports, some Germans who had worked in Stutthof tried to express their feelings through poems. They indirectly commented upon this attempt to overcome the speechlessness when they state: ‘the [...] poems mirror our shock [Betroffenheit] and they show how personal our experiences were’.21 The second reason can be found by looking at the communicative and institutional framework within which these reports were written. The Aktion Sühnezeichen organization and its functionaries actively encouraged the volunteers to reflect upon their work stays in the form of these reports, and several of the reports were later published, for example in the organization’s newsletter. Thus, the reports were written with a specific audience in mind.

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Finally, with their reports the reconciliation activists and the group leaders sought to justify the work stays in Auschwitz as important and meaningful. In their own understanding, the young people not only uncovered the remains of the past and helped to restore these reminders of the atrocities. Fundamental to the particular meaning of their stays was also the idea of reconciliation and more specifically reconciliation as political action. Some youth group leaders even explicitly encouraged the young people to overcome ‘their emotional distress and helplessness through political considerations and statements’.22 With their work, they believed they were contributing both to the process of learning a lesson from this disturbing past and to reconciliation in the future. Thus, through the overarching narrative of reconciliation, the confrontation with a disturbing past was transformed into a positive and constructive narrative in the present. The idea that a confrontation with the past in Auschwitz and in other extermination sites in Poland had the potential to disturb the young activists was also reflected among the Sühnezeichen functionaries back home in West Berlin. In an article published in 1974, two senior executives of Aktion Sühnezeichen, Franz von Hammerstein and Volker von Törne, described the intended impact of a work stay in Auschwitz on the young volunteers: It is not by chance that the volunteers frequently go to Auschwitz as preparation for their long-term volunteer services. Auschwitz serves as a vital lesson that profoundly affects people and deepens their historical awareness [literally: that goes below the skin: unter die Haut gehende[r] Anschauungsunterricht]. Without historical consciousness peace service is not possible.23

Thus, the functionaries not only presumed that the confrontation with the past in places like Auschwitz was deeply affecting the young volunteers, but they instrumentalized their response in order to foster the actual ‘Auschwitz experience’. This should then serve as a basis for the young Germans’ long-term activities for peace and reconciliation in other countries. But then we might ask: reconciliation with whom?

Politicizing the past At the end of their work stays, most of the Sühnezeichen groups wrote down resolutions in which they linked reflections of their reconciliation work with distinct political claims.24 The following resolution was written by a German youth group working in Auschwitz in July 1969. It was subsequently made public by sending it to the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag, the largest meeting of Protestant laymen in the Federal Republic: Facing this place where we currently work [Auschwitz], we claim: [...] – the acknowledgement of all existing borders in Central Europe, particularly of the Polish Western border; – efforts to create friendship with our Eastern neighbours, including the GDR.25

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These claims make reference to political topics which were fiercely discussed in the Federal Republic at the time. As a result of the lost war and the Potsdam conference, Germany was not only put under Allied occupation and subsequently divided, but also lost her former eastern territories East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania, large parts of which were added to Poland. Millions of ethnic Germans in these areas were expelled from their homes and resettled in other parts of Germany. The experiences and memories of flight and expulsion among post-war Germans, the experiences and memories of the invasion of Poland by the German Wehrmacht among post-war Poles, and the subsequent violent German occupation regime were a burden on the relations between West Germany and Poland in the post-war decades. It is therefore not surprising that the claims expressed in the resolution by the young Germans (official recognition of the existing borders; creating understanding with the eastern neighbours) were highly contested among many West Germans. Particularly among those who did not want to abandon the former German regions in the East, who highlighted the suffering which the Poles had inflicted on the German expellees, and who did not acknowledge the factual existence of two German states. Writing their resolution in the summer of 1969, the young reconciliation activists placed their own activity and their claims within this ongoing public debate. Some of the resolutions were pitched in direct response to those voices from Germany who spoke against the acknowledgement of the post-war borders (particularly the Oder-Neisse line), such as the West-German expellee organizations, whom the young Germans accused of pursuing ‘a policy that bears imperialistic traits’.26 With their activities in Auschwitz and their resolutions, the young activists also contributed to an ongoing public debate in West Germany about how to reach a mutual understanding with Poland. On the level of the civil society, this debate was largely shaped by the churches and church-related groups in West Germany and Poland. From the early 1960s onwards, bishops, church functionaries and laymen published statements and resolutions campaigning for German-Polish reconciliation, organized Sühnewallfahrten (atonement pilgrimages) to Auschwitz and provided financial aids for Polish victims of the Nazi regime.27 Some of these public statements and activities were aiming at dialogue and reconciliation more in religious and non-political terms, such as the letter written by Polish Catholic bishops to the German Catholic bishops and their answer in 1965.28 Other memoranda, written by Protestant and Catholic laymen or officially produced by the church authorities, explicitly summoned West German politicians to accept the Oder-Neisse line as Western border of Poland and to take up diplomatic relations with Poland in order to secure reconciliation and peace between the two states.29 Shortly after the young Germans visited Auschwitz in the summer of 1969, Willy Brandt was elected West German Chancellor and subsequently introduced his Ostpolitik, characterized by the catchphrase Wandel durch Annäherung (Change through Rapprochement) with respect to Germany’s eastern neighbouring states. Brandt’s kneeling gesture at the site of the memorial for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising at the occasion of the signing of the Warsaw Treaty in December 1970 was the symbolic – though in Germany and Poland contested – visualization of his political efforts for atonement and reconciliation.30 And in the course of the 1970s, exchange forums

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for officials from the Federal Republic and Poland were held to foster dialogue and understanding.31 To be sure, activities on the level of civil society campaigning for a better understanding between Germany and Poland did not cease with these political and diplomatic successes. And the youth was ascribed an important role for the continuing work for reconciliation and peace. In 1971, an alliance of West German youth organizations, including Aktion Sühnezeichen, organized a two-day conference in Frankfurt am Main under the slogan Friede mit Polen (Peace with Poland). The congress brought together around 900 participants from Poland and Germany, most of them young people.32 The conference took place after the signing of the Warsaw Treaty in December 1970, but before the treaty was ratified in both parliaments.33 Yet also these continuing activities for dialogue and reconciliation with Poland as well as Brandt’s government policy remained controversial among parts of the West German society, and were rejected by right-wing extremist groups such as the Aktion Oder-Neiße e.V. and the expellee associations.34 Although such groups only represented a minority of West Germans, they nevertheless still exerted political influence, particularly on conservative circles. Thus, we can see in the statements and the resolutions by the Sühnezeichen activists written in the early and mid-1970s that they see their claims for reconciliation as an ongoing political fight. This also becomes apparent in these guidelines for the Sühnezeichen work in Poland in 1974, produced by functionaries in Berlin: The stays of our groups at the Polish memorial sites can be understood politically, for they document our solidarity with the victims of fascism and the resistance fighters.35

The statement is insightful also in another respect as it leads us back to the question posed earlier: with whom exactly did the young Germans want to reconcile? In this quote, as in other reports written by the young people, reconciliation is understood as the reconciliation between Germans and Poles, and the Poles are referred to as the victims of Auschwitz, or the ‘victims of fascism’ and the ‘resistance fighters’. The resolutions with their clear-cut political aims and claims did not refer to or mention the Jews and the Jewish victims of Auschwitz – despite the fact that Jews made up over 90 per cent of those who were murdered there.36 Content and rhetoric of these resolutions fit with the existing narrative about Auschwitz in Poland at the time, which consisted of a communist and a Polish-national strand. According to this narrative, Auschwitz was a site of anti-fascist communist resistance, and a site of suffering of the Polish nation, a birthplace of Polish martyrdom and heroism.37 And not only Auschwitz, but also Majdanek and Stutthof were preserved by the Polish government as ‘places of Polish martyrdom’,38 and not as sites of the Shoah, the murder of the European Jews. The fact that both Aktion Sühnezeichen functionaries and the German youth groups left the Jews out of their statements and reports – while at the same time they made use of the Polish national narrative and the antifascist rhetoric – is irritating. This is particularly so as the organization was at the same time also working with Holocaust survivors and for Christian-Jewish understanding in other countries, including Israel. This omission

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can at least partly be explained by the fact that in order to secure the opportunity to send groups to Poland the Sühnezeichen functionaries worked closely with various Polish authorities and organizations and with the International Auschwitz Committee and thus with institutions for which the Polish victims of Auschwitz, yet not the Polish Jews, were of central importance. The association’s statements were controversial at the time, partly among the youth groups travelling with Aktion Sühnezeichen,39 but particularly among Jewish supporters of the organization, who also criticized the statements in the light of contemporary anti-Semitic actions in Poland.40 For the young German reconciliation activists, Auschwitz was not only a call for political action in the present, but also seen as a legacy for the future, as various reports demonstrate:41 Auschwitz is a legacy for all people, who – as thinking human beings – want to live within their social systems. Auschwitz not only demands that we finally pursue a clear and explicit Ostpolitik, i.e. that we recognize the Oder-Neisse-Line, but also demands political engagement from each of us and from all groups in our society.42

Situated within these wider political discourses, the actual Auschwitz site was invested with meanings that reached well beyond the personal emotions and responses of the volunteers. For the young German reconciliation activists and the Sühnezeichen functionaries, Auschwitz became much more than a memorial for the past, much more than a site at which the young Germans were tangibly confronted with the past. Auschwitz was transformed into a symbol for the crimes of the National Socialists, a development we can observe in public discourse in Poland from the early postwar years onwards and later also in Germany and other countries.43 Thus for these young Germans specifically, Auschwitz became both a general symbol and an actual experience, which for them combined to become a strong and convincing call for future political action.44 This political understanding of reconciliation, and the political importance attached to the work stays in Auschwitz and other sites in Poland made the reconciliation activists and their supporters reject the idea that these work stays could simply be a phenomenon of mass (youth) tourism to Poland; the stays were rather understood as ‘qualified atonement tourism’.45 In this context, it was made clear that the German youth groups were working in Auschwitz as part of the moral and political endeavour of reconciliation, and not as ordinary tourists.46 In his book Versöhnung hat politische Gestalt, pastor Rudolf Dohrmann (b. 1931) made this point. Dohrmann had led the first West German Aktion Sühnezeichen youth group to Auschwitz in September 1967. While he saw ordinary German tourists as a danger for the relationship between Germany and Poland, he called upon the German youth to tread another path, namely ‘to face the Poles honestly and with the will for reconciliation’.47 And Sühnezeichen functionary Volker von Törne argued that a ‘mere touristic German-Polish youth encounter’ could not bring about understanding between Germans and Poles.48 The idea that the young West Germans who worked in Auschwitz were not mere tourists can also be found among the recipients of the reconciliation activities. Referring to a critique of tourism to Auschwitz and of inappropriate behaviour of young tourists at

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the Auschwitz museum site, published in the German magazine Stern,49 the General Secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee clarified his viewpoint about the young West Germans working in Auschwitz: ‘They are not tourists – they are students of a history, which is particularly striking at this very place and which speaks to them in a particularly clear way.’50 And Polish journalist Jerzy Piorkowski, who referred to the young Germans as ‘modern [...] apostles’, expressed his estimation of their work stays by pointing to the fact that ‘they did not come to us in luxurious cars and as dollar tourists, but with the train such as millions travel in our country’,51 and thereby regarded them as equal to ordinary Poles. These affirmations that the work stays served the higher moral and political purpose of reconciliation are at least partly contradicted by the actual behaviour of some groups, which at times appeared to be rather inappropriate. In the bus on their way to Auschwitz, in the presence of a Polish Auschwitz survivor and other Poles, one group passed the time singing German songs like O Du schöner Westerwald – a popular song among German Wehrmacht soldiers marching through Europe – and the cheery carnival song Humba Täterä.52 And some of the girls wore Bikini tops while working at the museum site.53 Matthias K., who worked for Aktion Sühnezeichen and guided several groups in Auschwitz, even explicitly referred to tourism when he wrote that some of the group members travelling to Auschwitz showed a ‘distinct willingness for taking holidays’ and that many young people made use of Aktion Sühnezeichen as a ‘cheap travel agency’.54

Challenging the present Apart from the resolutions they wrote in Poland, several youth groups who went to Auschwitz and to other former camp sites in Poland with Aktion Sühnezeichen continued to link their confrontations with the disturbing past with a political engagement once they were back home in West Germany.55 The Polengruppe der Propstei Pinneberg, a Protestant youth group from the northern German town of Pinneberg, was a case in point. This group consisted mainly of school students who had travelled to Poland with Aktion Sühnezeichen. They had worked in Majdanek and Stutthof several times during the mid-1970s, and had also visited Auschwitz during their trips to Poland. The group was very active in reporting their experiences in Poland after their work stays: they produced documentations and published reports in the school’s newspaper. The texts produced by the group show that they explicitly wanted to foster reconciliation between Poles and Germans through their work in Poland and through political activism at home. In their texts they refer to common narrative patterns also used by other young West German reconciliation activists to explain the motivation behind their reconciliation activity: the young people refer to themselves as members of the young generation, who explicitly reject the notion of responsibility or guilt for the past, but who emphasize their responsibility to confront the past in order to achieve reconciliation.56 The members of the Polengruppe also participated in local debates about the National Socialist past by writing letters to the local newspaper and they

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publically substantiated their viewpoints with the experiences they had at the former concentration camp sites in Poland.57 In January 1975, the Polengruppe organized a panel discussion in order to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. On a flyer that advertised the event, the young Germans made several statements about the actuality (Aktualität) of Auschwitz; in particular, they prompt the Germans to ‘confront [their] history in order to find a real understanding with our neighbours, particularly with the Peoples’ Republic of Poland. Part of this confrontation is to admit our guilt [...].’58 Here again, the young people emphasize that reconciliation can only be built up after bringing to light the disturbing past and an admission of guilt. The group had invited local politicians, a former political prisoner of the Neuengamme concentration camp, and a theologian to participate in this discussion. The discussion was interrupted by a group of young neo-Nazis who vociferously entered the school building, threw stink bombs, denied the gassings in Auschwitz and insulted the Neuengamme survivor. After the discussion was over, the neo-Nazi group painted a swastika and the words Juden raus on the school walls.59 These events in Pinneberg even made it to the national press. The newsmagazine Spiegel included the incident in an article about the rise of the ‘new Right’, also referring to other recent occasions when members from the radical Right (the ‘Rechtstrupps’ as the Spiegel called them) violated public events and threatened people who belonged to the political Left.60 In the local newspaper and in other local public forums in Pinneberg, the discussion organized by the Polengruppe also provoked a heated debate.61 The debate ignited following a report of the event in the Pinneberger Tagblatt which did not criticize the neo-Nazis and their violent behaviour, but instead criticized the young members of the Polengruppe. According to the article, the young people had prevented the discussion chair from mentioning the suffering of German expellees and German POWs in Poland, and had thereby provoked strong disagreement among the audience.62 Other Pinnebergers joined this criticism by referring to the suffering Poles had inflicted on the Germans in the course of or after the war, also mentioning riots against German minorities and the expulsion of Germans from Poland.63 As the content and tone of the letters demonstrate, these people clearly disagreed with an interpretation of the past that highlighted the Germans as perpetrators and not as victims. This clash of diverging ways to interpret the Nazi past and its after-effects was not limited to the local debate in Pinneberg.64 In (partly anonymous) letters sent to the Sühnezeichen headquarters in West Berlin,65 but also to youth groups who had travelled to Poland,66 the same points – German suffering and the unatoned crimes of the Poles – were put forward as an argument against the reconciliation efforts of Aktion Sühnezeichen in and with regard to Poland. These reactions made youth pastor Eberhard F. consider the reverberations of a trip of his parish youth group to Auschwitz: ‘Those who travel to Auschwitz realize quite quickly upon their return that they have provoked their environment. Apparently, they have touched a sore point.’67 With their political activity the Polengruppe and other German youth groups returning from Auschwitz challenged a view of the German past that was deeply rooted in parts of West German society: according to this view, the Germans were primarily victims of the war and its aftermath.

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Looking closely at the actors involved in the discussion event and the subsequent debate, it becomes clear, however, that it did not mirror a mere generational conflict. Other Pinnebergers aligned themselves with the youth of the Polengruppe. Among them was a former Wehrmacht officer who in his letter to the newspaper rejected the notion that Auschwitz had just been a legend (as a women had written before) and indicated that he had seen the most horrible things during his 4-year military service.68 Conversely, some of the neo-Nazis who had interrupted the discussion event were young people, who even went to the same local gymnasium as members of the Polengruppe. The events in Pinneberg and the antagonist groups that met there were not limited to this particular town, but can be seen as an expression of wider socio-cultural and political developments in the Federal Republic. By 1975, when the Pinneberg discussion took place, West German schools had already for a number of years been places where the political mobilization of West German youth became visible and where diverging political opinions clashed.69 In the late 1960s, the school protest groups which campaigned for a democratization of the school system were not limited to the (radical) Left, but spanned a wide spectrum of various political directions and social groups.70 The early 1970s witnessed the rise of a nation-wide school student movement on the right. Or as the weekly magazine Stern hyperbolically described it in 1974: ‘Shift to the right. After the sex-wave and the leftist period of defiance now CDU and NPD are chic at German schools.’71 The continuation of right extremist thought, also among young Germans, manifested itself at different times from the late 1950s onwards.72 Contemporary pollsters observed an authoritarian radicalization of young West Germans in the late 1960s,73 and in the 1970s, a militant scene of neo-Nazis, ostentatiously making use of Nazi rhetoric and Nazi symbols established itself in the Federal Republic.74 This growing political mobilization of West German youth did not necessarily result in a deeper knowledge of the Nazi past or in a political understanding of reconciliation that was based on acknowledging the guilt of the past as advanced by the Polengruppe. Those who called for a ‘Schlussstrich unter die Vergangenheit’ (drawing a line under the past) and who did not see the need to confront the past in order to reach reconciliation were not limited to members of the war generation, but can also be found among the younger generations.75 The young West Germans who went to Poland on a reconciliation trip and who continued with their political engagement did not represent ‘the West German youth’. Nor were West German youth of the mid-1970s represented by the young people on the extremist right. Thus, the ‘young generation’ in the Federal Republic at the time did not speak the same language, share the same ideals and advance the same claims with respect of how to deal with the Nazi past. As has been shown, through their continuing efforts to learn from the legacy of Auschwitz the young members of the Polengruppe confronted their contemporaries with the long-term impact of the Nazi past. Through this confrontation they challenged those who refused reconciliation with Poland by pointing at the unatoned suffering of German expellees and those who tried to deny the Holocaust. As a result, people who advanced these opinions merged into a surprising transgenerational coalition against the political reconciliation claims of the Polengruppe in Pinneberg. The debates

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and events in Pinneberg mirror the existence of a highly torn and fragmented West German society of the mid-1970s: a society that was still struggling with its Nazi past and with acknowledging its legacies.

Universalizing Auschwitz The discussion event organized by the Polengruppe in Pinneberg is not only insightful because of the incidents during the panel discussion and the reverberations of this event, but also because it shows how the young school students processed their experiences in Poland and how they narratively transformed these experiences into a reference system that legitimized their political activities. The flyer that was used by the Polengruppe in order to advertise the discussion event is significant in this respect: ‘Chile and the shift to the Right in the Federal Republic demonstrate that the fascistoid structures of Auschwitz are still alive.’76 Referring to the political situation in Chile, where the autocratic military regime of General Pinochet had taken power through a coup d’etat in September 1973,77 the young students equate the autocratic Pinochet regime with the Federal Republic. What makes this quote interesting in our context is not only this problematic comparison, but the way in which Auschwitz is reduced to the ‘fascistoid structures of Auschwitz’.78 Auschwitz no longer functions as a symbol linked to the actual history of the site. Nor is it understood as a symbol for the suffering and the martyrdom of the Polish nation, as a symbol for the Shoah, or as a call for political action to bring about German-Polish reconciliation. Rather, Auschwitz has become de-contextualized and placed into a contemporary political context; it thus appears as a synonym for a critique of the current political situation.79 In this way, the universalization of Auschwitz is further extended: a universalization which is identifiable even in the reports and texts about Auschwitz as an actual site, a site where the young Germans conducted their reconciliation activity.80 The narrative of Auschwitz in this historically decontextualized form can also be found among other youth groups who returned from work stays in Poland. The Protestant youth group Junge Gemeinde in Berlin Schlachtensee had travelled to Poland in 1971. Subsequently its members wrote a lengthy reflection about the meaning of their stay, whereby they accurately differentiated between Auschwitz (without quotation marks) – the place where they had worked – and ‘Auschwitz’ (with quotations marks) – which they synonymously also referred to as the ‘Auschwitz structures’ or the ‘Auschwitz ways of behaviour’.81 In the eyes of the Junge Gemeinde members, having experienced the Auschwitz of the past helped to identify the ‘Auschwitz’ of the present and formed the foundation of political activism: ‘Having been to Auschwitz and having identified “Auschwitz” today means to fight now.’82 The ways in which the young people dealt with Auschwitz meant that Auschwitz not only lost its historical context, but also became exchangeable, as becomes clear when looking at another report from the Pinneberg Polengruppe. In 1976 the group went to Stutthof for another work stay, and upon their return adapted their universalized reference to Auschwitz to Stutthof: ‘We think that co-responsibility also means [...] that we have to take stand in order to prevent a new “Stutthof ” .’83 Such

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universalization of Auschwitz accompanied the political mobilization of young West Germans from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. It resulted in a decontextualization of Auschwitz as an actual site with a particular history, and in making – for the good cause of reconciliation – political use of a place at which over one million individual people from all over Europe had experienced unimaginable violence and suffering. This decontextualization and the usage of Auschwitz (or ‘Auschwitz’) for political purposes raise wider ethical questions of how to ‘adequately’ represent and deal with the history of Nazi violence.

Concluding remarks The disturbing past of Auschwitz and other camp sites in Poland reverberated through the various ways in which young West Germans pursued and talked about their reconciliation activities. The first part of this chapter showed how the idea of reconciliation enabled the young volunteers to turn their confrontations with the remains of a deeply disturbing past into a positive experience, into a narrative in which that past forms the ground for acting towards a better future. Sühnezeichen functionaries even explicitly took into account the troubling character of the ‘Auschwitz experience’ in order to provide the volunteers with a ‘lesson that goes under the skin’. The second part traced the ways in which the activists and functionaries transformed the confrontation with the past into calls for political action and how they related these calls to the wider historical context of the political relations between West Germany and Poland at the time. This understanding of reconciliation as a political endeavour influenced the portrayals of the work stays as meaningful, ‘non-touristic’ activities, despite the instances in which the actual behaviour of the volunteers contradicted this image. Yet crucially, the political understanding of reconciliation resulted in omitting the Jewish victims of Auschwitz in the resolutions and public statements of the reconciliation activists. Part three demonstrated how, with their continuing political activities after their work stays, the young people unsettled parts of the West German society by challenging contemporary narratives of the past in which Germans appeared as victims and not as perpetrators. Finally, the analysis of the various perceptions and interpretations of Auschwitz, understood both as an actual and a symbolic site, shows that in the course of the short timeframe discussed in this chapter, Auschwitz was more and more decontextualized from its actual history, and thus used as legitimization for the young West Germans’ political endeavour of reconciliation.

Notes 1

For the history of Aktion Sühnezeichen, see Anton Legerer, Tatort: Versöhnung. Aktion Sühnezeichen in der BRD und in der DDR und Gedenkdienst in Österreich (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2011); Gabriele Kammerer, Aktion Sühnezeichen/Friedensdienste: Aber man kann es einfach tun (Göttingen: Lamuv, 2008). The Poland trips of Aktion Sühnezeichen are also explored in Corinna

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Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Felsch’s PhD thesis, forthcoming in autumn 2015 as Reisen in die Vergangenheit? Westdeutsche Fahrten nach Polen 1970–1990. See report Dieter H. no. 32/71, EZA 97/391. See Kammerer, Aktion Sühnezeichen, 168. Michael Schmidt, Die Falken in Berlin. Antifaschismus und Völkerverständigung – Jugendbegegnungen durch Gedenkstättenfahrten 1954–1969 (Berlin: Elefanten Press Verlag, 1987); Jonathan Huener, ‘Antifascist Pilgrimage and Rehabilitation at Auschwitz’, German Studies Review, 24 (2001), 513–532. Katarina Bader, Jureks Erben. Vom Weiterleben nach dem Überleben (Frankfurt/ Main: Kiepenheuer, 2010), 92–93; Arkadiusz Stempin, Das Maximilian-Kolbe-Werk: Wegbereiter der deutsch-polnischen Aussöhnung 1960–1989 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006), 99; Informationsbulletin of the International Auschwitz Committee no. 10, October 1966, 1. Legerer, Tatort: Versöhnung, 295–296. Informationsbulletin no. 6–7, June–July 1967, 1; no.12, December 1968, 1; no. 10, October 1970, 4; Jonathan Huener, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), 79; Imke Hansen, ‘Nie wieder Auschwitz!’ Die Entstehung eines Symbols und der Alltag einer Gedenkstätte 1945–1955 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 279. Informationsbulletin no. 9, September 1969, 3. Informationsbulletin no. 9, September 1970, 4. See Jamie Fisher, Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007); Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation. Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Richard Ivan Jobs, Riding the New Wave. Youth and the Rejuvenation of France after the Second World War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). The activities are well documented in the Evangelisches Zentralarchiv Berlin (EZA). I thank Aktion Sühnezeichen/Friedensdienste e.V. for granting access to these files. See EZA 97/1630. All German quotes are translated by the author. Huge public attention with respect to the Holocaust emerged among West Germans in the course of the broadcasting of the American TV series Holocaust in 1979. A youth group from Berlin Schlachtensee states that its members could only bear Auschwitz ‘quite unemotional’ and ‘with a certain objectivation’; the group then decided to write up several Thesenreihen (sets of hypotheses) in order to process their experiences, see Bericht von einer Fahrt nach Polen im April 1968, EZA 97/1630. See statement by Günter L., published in Rudolf Dohrmann, Versöhnung hat politische Gestalt. Stimmen zur Begegnung mit Polen (Hamburg: Evangelischer Verlag, 1968), 57. Huener, ‘Antifascist Pilgrimage’, 523, also explored the usage of the grass metaphor. Letter An die Leitung des Museums Oswiecim, 21 July 1969, EZA 97/1630. This political understanding of reconciliation also challenged the religious framework of the work stays. Before holding a joint prayer, one group working in Auschwitz in August 1970 discussed whether the preparations for the prayer were a waste of time and whether the group’s behaviour was too apolitical, see EZA 97/1631, fol. 30. See report in EZA 97/1633, fol. 48, and report Matthias K., 5 August 1971, in EZA 97/1632, fol. 77.

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High alcohol consumption was not limited to the youth groups. According to Jerzy Hronowski, who accompanied many West German youth groups, Sühnezeichen functionary Volker von Törne was so overwhelmed from the ‘Auschwitz experience’ every time he visited the place that he got drunk with vodka; see Bader, Jureks Erben, 232. See the report describing a visit in 1974: ‘The tour through the concentration camp Auschwitz I and Birkenau [...] resulted in general speechlessness’, EZA 97/1635. Gedichte in Stutthof, AG Friedensdienste Stuttgart, EZA 97/1727. Report from 10 August 1970, EZA 97/1631, fol. 30. Franz von Hammerstein and Volker von Törne, ‘Jugend zwischen Geschichte und Zukunft’, in Hildegard Hamm-Brücher (ed.), Auftrag und Engagement der Mitte (München: Piper, 1974), 23–38, 33. See letter by Gisela A. from 5 December 1968 who mentions that her group send a resolution to the West German government, EZA 97/1630; see also letter by Eberhard F., 30 July 1970, EZA 97/1631, in this file also an open letter to Chancellor Willy Brandt, 16 November 1971. See copy of the resolution in EZA 97/1630. See Resolution 1 Zur Politik des Bundes der Vertriebenen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland by a youth group working in Stutthof, 3 August 1971, in EZA 97/1632. See the Catholic organization Maximilian-Kolbe-Werk (founded in 1960) and the Protestant organization Zeichen der Hoffnung – Znaki Nadziei (founded in 1977); for the Catholic activities see Stempin, Das Maximilian-Kolbe-Werk. While in the long run these letters were seen as a step towards reconciliation, the response in Poland at the time was quite negative. See Basil Kerski, Thomas Kyvia and Robert Żurek (eds), ‘Wir vergeben und bitten um Vergebung.’ Der Briefwechsel der polnischen und deutschen Bischöfe von 1965 und seine Wirkung (Osnabrück: FibreVerlag, 2006); Corinna Felsch and Magdalena Latkowska: ‘Brief der (polnischen) Bischöfe und Willy Brandts Kniefall. Verfrühte Helden?’, in Hans Henning Hahn and Robert Traba (eds), Deutsch-Polnische Erinnerungsorte. vol. 3: Parallelen (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012), 396–414. See the Tübinger Memorandum (1961), written by Protestant laymen, the memorandum of the Protestant Church in Germany Zur Lage der Vertriebenen und des Verhältnisses Deutschlands mit seinen östlichen Nachbarn (1965), and the Bendsberger Memorandum (1968), produced by Catholic laymen. About the kneeling and its impact see Michael Wolfssohn and Thomas Brechenmacher, Denkmalsturz? Brandts Kniefall (München: Olzog, 2005) and Felsch/ Latkowska, ‘Verfrühte Helden?’, 405–412. Krzysztof Ruchniewicz, Zögernde Annäherung. Studien zur Geschichte der deutschpolnischen Beziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Dresden: W.E.B. Universitätsverlag, 2005), 293–303. Rudolf Dohrmann and Klaus Würmell, Friede mit Polen (Hamburg: Hubert Reich Evangelischer Verlag, 1971), 5–6. See Dohrmann and Würmell, Friede mit Polen, 12–13. See Alexander Behrens (ed.), ‘Durfte Brandt knien?’ Der Kniefall in Warschau und der deutsch-polnische Vertrag. Eine Dokumentation der Meinungen (Bonn: Dietz, 2010). See ASF Richtlinien für die Arbeit von Gruppen der Aktion Sühnezeichen im Sommer 1974 in Polen, EZA 97/1635. Between 1.1 and 1.3 million people were murdered in Auschwitz of which Jews made up the vast majority, see Franciszek Piper, Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz.

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Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Aufgrund der Quellen und der Erträge der Forschung 1945 bis 1990 (Oświęcim: Staatliches Museum, 1993). For post-war interpretations of Auschwitz, see Huener, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979 and Hansen, Nie wieder Auschwitz. See Habbo Knoch, Die Tat als Bild. Fotografien des Holocaust in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001), 771, 775. One youth group leader observed that ‘the West German Sühnezeichen advisors appear to be more communist and dogmatic in their statements than the Poles’, see report from July/August 1974, EZA 97/1635. See Legerer, Tatort: Versöhnung, 240–248 for a detailed exploration of this topic. For the anti-Semitic actions in Poland at the time see Robert Blobaum (ed.), Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). Apart from the following quote see statements by Udo G. and Norbert H., both cited in Dohrmann, Versöhnung hat politische Gestalt, 54–55. Ulrich K., EZA 97/1630. For the development of Auschwitz as a symbol in post-war Poland, see Hansen, Nie wieder Auschwitz; for the West German discourse see Norbert Frei, ‘Auschwitz und Holocaust. Begriff und Historiographie’, in Hanno Loewy (ed.), Holocaust: Die Grenzen des Verstehens. Eine Debatte über die Besetzung der Geschichte (Rowohlt: Reinbek, 1992), 101–109; for the Israeli context see Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 4, 126. Huener is right when he observes the instrumentalization of the Auschwitz museum site as a ‘stage for the presentation of a new German youth’, see Huener, ‘Antifascist Pilgrimage’, 527. I wonder whether this instrumentalization has a redemptive character as Huener suggests, or whether the continuing political activism in Germany reflects the opposite: the wish not to be redeemed from guilt, but to take up responsibility. See the protocol of a meeting in October 1968, quoted by Legerer, Tatort: Versöhnung, 232. For German post-war tourism, see Chapter 12. Dohrmann, Versöhnung hat politische Gestalt, 11/12. Volker von Törne, Zwischen Geschichte und Zukunft. Aufsätze, Reden, Gedichte (Berlin: Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, 1981), 24. Erich Kuby, ‘Nachbar Polen. Zoppot, Weltbad ohne Welt’, Stern, 23, 35 (1970), 118; on tourism in Auschwitz see Huener, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979, 185–188. Informationsbulletin, no. 10, October 1970, 2. Monatsschrift Polen, 1, 161, January 1968, 15. See report Matthias K., 5 August 1971, EZA 97/1632, fol. 76. In May 1972, Matthias K. expressed his fear that the people in Poland could associate the singing of these ‘good old songs’ with the German occupation, see letter in EZA 97/1633. Report Matthias K., 5 August 1971, EZA 97/1632, fol. 78. Ibid., fol. 76, 78. For an overview over several activities see Diskussionsgrundlage, 5 July 1974, 7–8, EZA 97/1635. See Gestern – Heute – Morgen. Dokumentation der Polengruppe, 2, and an article by A. Claussen, H. Lehming and E.-M. Möckelmann to the school student newspaper DORN, 6, December 1975, both EZA 97/1727. See also my exploration of young West German reconciliation activists in the German-Israeli context in Christiane Wienand,

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‘From Atonement to Peace? Aktion Sühnezeichen, German-Israeli Relations and the Role of Youth in Reconciliation Discourse and Practice’, in Birgit Schwelling (ed.), Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory. Transnational Initiatives in the 20th and 21st Century (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012), 201–235. In fall 1974, the group participated in a debate in the local newspaper about the question whether Germany should finally draw a line under its Nazi past, see copies in EZA 97/1727. Leaflet in EZA 97/1727. ‘Wie tot ist Hitler?’, Stern, 15 May 1975 and the leaflet Provokation der Neonazis, copies in EZA 97/1727, fol. 36 and 36r. ‘ “Wir handeln nur über Kimme und Korn”. Im politischen Untergrund formiert sich eine Neue Rechte’, Spiegel, 25 August 1975, 28–30. An article in Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt conveyed the scary atmosphere at the event, 2 February 1975, 2, copy in EZA 97/1727. The local communist party DKP not only reported about the provocations of the neo-Nazis, but used its report to criticize contemporary West German government policy; see leaflet Provokation der Neonazis, EZA 97/1727, fol. 36r and 37. Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt, 2 February 1975, 2, copy in EZA 97/1727. Similar arguments against German-Polish reconciliation and against the political activism of the Polengruppe had already been made in the local newspaper in fall 1974. In April 1974, a similar incident had happened in Berlin where Aktion Sühnezeichen and another youth organization showed an exhibition about the German occupation of Poland, including pictures of Auschwitz, which were besmeared by right-wing radicals; see Diskussionsgrundlage, 5 July 1974, 4/5, EZA 97/1635. See the collection of hate letters in EZA 97/582. See letter Gerhard H. from Aktion Oder-Neiße e.V. to Eberhard F., 14 July 1970, copy in EZA 97/1631. See report by Eberhard F. in EZA 97/1631. See copy in EZA 97/1727. Axel Schildt, ‘Nachwuchs für die Rebellion – die Schüler-Bewegung der späten 60er Jahre’, in Jürgen Reulecke (ed.), Generationalität und Lebensgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert (München: Oldenbourg, 2003), 229–252. Linde Apel, ‘Die Opposition der Opposition. Politische Mobilisierung an Oberschulen jenseits der Protestgeneration’, in Massimiliano Livi, Daniel Schmidt and Michael Sturm (eds), Die 1970er Jahre als schwarzes Jahrzehnt. Politisierung und Mobilisierung zwischen christlicher Demokratie und extremer Rechter (Frankfurt/ Main: Campus, 2010), 57–72. Quoted according to Ulrich Konitzer, Schüler machen Politik. Schülergruppen von rechts bis links (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 1976), 37. For instance during the anti-Semitic wave in 1959/60 in which many youngsters aged 14 to 30 were involved, see Bundesregierung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ed.), Die antisemitischen und nazistischen Vorfälle in der Zeit vom 25. Dezember 1959 bis zum 28. Januar 1960 (Bonn: Bundesregierung, 1960), 15; Daniel Schmidt and Michael Sturm, ‘ “Wir sind die, vor denen Euch die Linken immer schon gewarnt haben”: Eine Einleitung’, in Livi, Schmidt and Sturm (eds), Die 1970er Jahre, 7–30, 20. See Detlef Siegfried, ‘Vom Teenager zur Pop-Revolution. Politisierungstendenzen in der westdeutschen Jugendkultur 1959 bis 1968’, in Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried (eds), Dynamische Zeiten. Die 60er Jahre in den beiden deutschen Gesellschaften (Hamburg: Christians, 2000), 582–623, 617.

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Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Schmidt and Sturm, ‘Eine Einleitung’, 21. Examples in Knoch, Die Tat als Bild, 881; Wienand, ‘From Atonement to Peace?’, 217. Copy of the flyer in EZA 97/1727. The violent coup d’état led to an international solidarity movement for the Chilean people, for which also the young West German reconciliation activists campaigned; see report Andreas S. in EZA 97/1726, 62. The adjective ‘fascistoid’ was used to describe all aspects of the ‘alienated present’ and became a buzzword in the late 1960s, not least at German schools, see Axel Schildt, ‘Die Eltern auf der Anklagebank? Zur Thematisierung der NSVergangenheit im Generationenkonflikt der bundesrepublikanischen 1960er Jahre’, in Christoph Cornelißen, Lutz Klinkhammer and Wolfgang Schwentker (eds), Erinnerungskulturen. Deutschland, Italien und Japan seit 1945 (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2003), 317–332, 327. See also report in EZA 97/1633, fol. 89r: ‘Auschwitz is [....] a warning to us all, to unmask every new Auschwitz.’ The youth groups thereby carried forward an ‘instrumental interpretation’ of Auschwitz developed by the German students and intellectuals of the 1960s, when ‘Auschwitz [...] became a general symbol of recurring fascism’; see Habbo Knoch, ‘The return of the images. Photographs of Nazi crimes and the West German public in the “Long 1960s” ’, in Philipp Gassert and Alan E. Steinweis (eds), Coping with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955–1975 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 31–49, 45. See report in EZA 97/1632, fol. 031 See EZA 97/1632, fol. 35r. The decontextualization of the National Socialist regime reemerged in the late 1970s when the radical Left criticized the West German authorities with headlines such as ‘Endlösung: Mord in Stammheim geplant’’; see Stephan Linck, ‘ “Jetzt hilft nur noch eine Flugzeugentführung!” Die Radikale Linke und die Evangelische Studierendengemeinde in Hamburg 1973 bis 1978’, in Klaus Fitschen, Siegfried Hermle, Katharina Kunter, Claudia Lepp and Antje Roggenkamp-Kaufmann (eds), Die Politisierung des Protestantismus. Entwicklungen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland während der 1960er und 70er Jahre (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 77–89, 80. See EZA 97/1727, Gestern – Heute – Morgen, 2.

14

Disturbing Pasts and Better Futures: A Comparison of Recent Approaches to the Past among Bukovina Jews and Bukovina Germans Gaëlle Fisher

In 1996, a group of eight students from the Institute for East European Studies of the Free University (FU) in Berlin set off on a trip to a town in western Ukraine called Chernivtsi. This town is better known by its Austrian name of Czernowitz dating from when it was the capital of the Habsburg province of Bukovina. Following their lecturer’s lead, and thanks to her previously having established contact with a key member of the Jewish cultural organization, Mathias Zwilling, they were going to spend two weeks interviewing some of the last German-speaking ‘Bukovinians’ – or rather, Czernowitzer – in the city, survivors of both Soviet terror and the Romanian Holocaust. Upon their return to Berlin, the students self-published an edited collection of the interviews – seventeen short biographies focusing on the period of the war – in German and Ukrainian.1 This small bilingual booklet was targeted at a specialist audience. But a couple of years later, in 1999, the volume was republished, this time only in German, with the assistance of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung.2 Released together with Volker Koepp’s endearing documentary film Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann, which featured two of these ‘last Bukovina Jews’, it was a small success. The book even went out of print and as a result, ten years later, a third edition with a CD containing some of the recordings and a couple of additions, was published with the help of the Potsdam-based organization Deutsches Kulturforum östliches Europa.3 This book not only introduced Bukovina to a wider audience in Germany, but it also attracted the attention of Czernowitzer living in Israel. A number of them wrote to the students to say that they too were Bukovinians and would be glad to share their experiences with them.4 In 2000, therefore, the students went to Israel and carried out another set of interviews – this time over fifty. This resulted in a second book, which came out in 2003 with the large German publisher Böhlau Verlag.5 Because of the number of interviewees, the format was somewhat different: rather than a collection of life-stories, it was written as a collective biography of the group. Organized thematically, topics such as the pre-war, the war and its aftermath were treated by drawing on the statements and experiences of different people.

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Encouraged by their publishing successes, the students then turned to the case of Bukovina Germans with a view to producing a third volume.6 They too had lived in the region until the Second World War when most of them were resettled Heim ins Reich by the Nazis. In fact, the students’ first volume had included the biography of one ethnic German who had remained in Czernowitz (Soviet Chernovtsi and Ukrainian Chernivtsi) after the war, Johann Schlamp. As such, members of the region’s German minority had also been a part of the exceptional multi-ethnic make-up of pre-war Bukovina; they too had witnessed a period of extreme political upheaval and suffered loss, disruption and displacement at the mercy of different regimes and governments. Yet the book on Bukovina Germans, contrary to those on Bukovina Jews, was never written. In fact, the students gave up after just a few interviews. Questioned in 2013, Gaby Coldewey, one of the students, gave a range of reasons for this: firstly, they had not been able to find a publisher; secondly, ‘the students’ were by then quite a bit older and had lacked the time for this. She added that ‘the Germans’, despite being in Germany, were rather difficult to locate and reach in the small towns in which they lived dotted across the country. But in particular, she explained the interviews had been different: of course these people had also been displaced and suffered; but somehow, the accounts had had a different quality.7 The juxtaposition of these two cases can be contested on a number of grounds, not least insofar as it amounts to a comparison of Holocaust survivors and German victims of the war linked in complicated ways to what can be described as the side of the perpetrators.8 But such a comparison of the narratives does give insight into the history and legacy of multi-ethnic Bukovina in particular and that of the Second World War in general. At the very least, this situation begs the question of what we mean when we speak of a ‘disturbing past’. Is it a past that keeps on haunting the present or one that cannot be spoken about? In what follows, therefore, I begin by outlining the particularity of the case of Bukovina and then go on to look in more detail at some of the interviews conducted by the students with both Bukovina Jews and Bukovina Germans keeping in mind the outcome of their projects. With this, I am aiming to show that any conception of disturbance needs to take into account experience, its interpretation and its reception. In this sense, it cannot be separated from the notion of identification, namely the idea that history should be put to the service of a better future.

The case of Bukovina The historical region of Bukovina, situated today between Romania and Ukraine, was once a province of the Habsburg Empire and its features continue to shape the image of the region in the present. Bukovina was not only the most eastern, but also the most ethnically diverse (and, with 10 per cent of Jews, also the most Jewish) territory of Cisleithania, the Austrian half of the Monarchy. Some 120,000 Jews lived alongside more numerous Romanians and Ukrainians as well as small groups of Poles, Hungarians, Armenians, Russians and some 80,000 ethnic Germans. The elite was German-speaking, but ethnically diverse as well, drawn from all over the

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empire. Bukovina was the paramount example of ‘internal colonialism’.9 But, as a result of its diversity, it is often invoked for both its tolerance and the multi-ethnic or even ‘multicultural’ character of its society. Since Bukovina is often thought of as the ultimate site of German-Jewish symbiosis, the figure of the German-speaking, liberal, bourgeois and emancipated Jew has come to epitomize this image in particular.10 In many ways, this contributed to blurring the radical difference between the cultures of Bukovina Germans and the Bukovina Jews who continued to identify as ‘Bukovinians’ after they left the region. Yet, their histories were very different. Having arrived in the region starting in 1780s, either as members of the administrative elite or, and overwhelmingly so, as farmers who came as settlers, the ethnic German community aligned itself with Nazism in the late 1930s under pressure from policies of Romanianization.11 In 1940, following the Soviet invasion of the North of the region, the vast majority of ethnic Germans chose to be resettled in the context of Hitler’s Heim ins Reich operation. The Nazi idea was that ‘this valuable human material’ would be redeployed to Germanize newly conquered areas of Europe.12 In theory, this meant obtaining German citizenship and compensation for the land and houses they had left behind. In practice, it meant undergoing racial and ideological screening on Nazi terms, remaining in temporary accommodation for months if not years and eventually being compensated with the goods and properties of expelled Poles and murdered Jews.13 In 1944/45, they also joined the ranks of millions of other ethnic Germans fleeing or expelled from their homelands in Central and Eastern Europe arriving as homeless refugees in defeated Germany. This was the fate of some 70,000 Bukovina Germans who survived the war. The experiences of Bukovina Jews were far more harrowing still. Numerous in the region since the mid-nineteenth century, when they were drawn to it by its famed tolerance, but subject to growing anti-Semitic discrimination in Romania in the interwar period, the Jews of Bukovina became subject to more direct persecution as the Second World War began and progressed.14 In 1940, the Soviets invaded the north of region, including Cernăuți (the Romanian name for Czernowitz), where the majority of the Jews lived and thousands of ‘wealthy’ Jews were deported to Siberia. But worse was still to come. In 1941, when the Romanians regained control over the whole of Bukovina with German assistance, many Bukovina Jews were murdered or ghettoized and later deported to the Ukrainian region of Transnistria where they were left to fend for themselves on a war-torn landscape, falling prey to the cold, illness, hunger and random executions and massacres. Some 15,000 Jews, regarded by the Romanians and the Germans as essential to the economy, survived the war in the city of Cernăuți. However, there too the situation was highly precarious and volatile with the Soviets reentering in 1944 and imposing their own form of terror. Many Jewish survivors from Bukovina (some 40,000 people) sought to leave their native region as soon as possible, even if not all of them were able to.15 In light of this, it is clear that the particularity of Bukovina resides in its afterlife as an idealized space for much of the twentieth century. As the German literary critic Winfried Menninghaus noted, Czernowitz and Bukovina were for a long time not on the map of the Holocaust.16 For the Germans in West Germany organized in the the homeland society of Bukovina Germans (Landsmannschaft der Buchenlanddeutschen),

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it was the nostalgic alte Heimat. Contrary to other expellees however, Bukovina Germans did not aspire to return or adopt revanchist rhetoric. They considered the homeland as irremediably lost after it was invaded by the Soviets in 1940. Their wartime experiences, if bemoaned, were read as salvation – ‘ultimately for the best’17 – and instead, energy was invested in rebuilding the community in West Germany.18 Similarly, rebuilding their lives in Israel, the United States or Western Europe after the war, many Bukovina Jews, organized around the World Organization of Bukovina Jews (Landsmannschaft der Juden aus der Bukowina) based in Tel Aviv, focused on their ‘absorption’.19 Survivors met to speak German, maintain old friendships and discuss old Czernowitz, but contentious or painful questions were mostly avoided.20 As such experiences in the war played both a central and an understated role in the post-war approaches to the past among Bukovina Jews and Bukovina Germans. A number of scholars have suggested that the silences and the idealization were symptomatic of the disturbance. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer have argued that the silence among Bukovina Jews can be understood as a ‘traumatised silence’ and their nostalgia as ‘ambivalent’.21 Florence Heymann has written about the biased relationship to a homeland, which no longer is one.22 As for the Bukovina Germans, the Austrian literary scholar Martin Hainz has argued that the mythicization of Bukovina and, in particular, Czernowitz primarily served to show that Germans could get along with ethnic others in some parts of Europe and as such, was an ‘incongruent form of compensation’.23 Many others have denounced the celebration of Bukovina’s multiculturalism as an exaggeration.24 Ultimately, idealization and silence during the Cold War served to sustain positive collective identities as Bukovinians in their respective post-war settings. The 1990s and 2000s heralded major changes. The wider causes for this juncture have been discussed at length elsewhere and do not need repeating here.25 But what resulted was the forefronting of first-person accounts and in the case of Bukovina, increasing discussion of the silenced issues of resettlement (die Umsiedlung) and the Holocaust. In many ways, the students’ project was a product of its time. The ‘biographical turn’ raises interesting and important questions about the concepts of ‘memory’ or ‘collective memory’ as they are widely used today. And here, the case of Bukovina and Bukovinians is quite enlightening. At the source of the narratives are of course the experiences of real people. But conveyed experience is always already interpreted experience. The importance of a receptive audience whether for commercial, familial or ethical reasons, who elicit and relate to the experiences, then, cannot be sufficiently underscored.  In turn, the authentic accounts are subject to influences that cannot be ignored. As Lynn Abrams has argued, the oral history interview is a three-way conversation for the speaker – with oneself, the listener and culture at large.26 The narratives are not only important for what they relate about the past, but also for the meaning that they generate in the present and what they tell us about existing relationships. In this sense, they are not only performative but normative too.27 As Iwona Irwin-Zarecka has argued, we therefore need to reflect on how the ‘future – as a vision  – enters the process of constructing and framing “realities of the past” ’.28 These could be called the dialectics of speaking, listening and remembering. What is needed is a conceptualization of ‘memory’ or ‘the past’ that actually allows for that to be analyzed as well.

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In what follows, the term memory is not used but the terms ‘narrative’ and ‘approaches to the past’ are used instead. Narrative emphasizes the constructed nature of the memories of experience and their narrativized form; ‘approaches’ captures the uses to which memories are put. The relationship between the two serves to capture the relationship between ‘communities of experience’ and ‘communities of identification’ as outlined by Mary Fulbrook.29 These terms point to the contingent, presentist and political nature of the discourse on Bukovina. I argue here that approaches to the past among Bukovinians and non-Bukovinians alike in the last three decades relate in complex ways, as others have argued, to Jewish self-confidence, German and European identity and wider internationalist discourses.30 The expression ‘collective memory’ often assumes the existence of a united collective as carrier of discourse or practices without being explicit about who this actually is. There are certainly discourses that are shared by a smaller or greater number of people. However once more, the case of Bukovina points to both the diversity of approaches to the past and their mutual interaction. This chapter discusses who is disturbed, who disturbs and why one is disturbed with regard to the history of Bukovina and Bukovinians. For this, it focuses on four different interview transcripts provided by the former students: Anna Rosenberg, born 1922, who was interviewed in Chernivtsi in 1996; Martin Dawer, born 1926, who was interviewed in Haifa in 2000, Edith Schütrumpf, born 1928, who was interviewed in Berlin in 2003; and Paula Tiefenthaler, born 1918, who was interviewed in Munich in 2004.31 As the students themselves came to realize, testimony is a conscious selection of evidence and on this, it is legitimate to comment. This is what justifies the comparative approach. Comparison is rarely a feature of cultural historical undertakings. As the prerogative of social historians, it often suggests drawing parallels and equating different variables. And such a premise, in a cultural-historical context, is highly problematic. In many ways, the comparison of Germans and Jews after 1945 can be viewed as scandalous. Yet values, and not the experiences, are the crux of the comparison. As Gabriele Rosenthal has argued, ‘Although it is impossible to compare the war experiences of accomplices and perpetrators with the suffering endured by Holocaust survivors, it is possible to ask how German accomplices and perpetrators deal with the traumatic situations in their lives.’32 This is not about comparing the experiences of Bukovinians as such but about how meaning, and what meanings and identities are generated from experience in hindsight. This is the basis for the postulation of categories such as ‘victim’, ‘perpetrator’, ‘accomplice’, ‘bystander’ or ‘resister’. In other words, this has to do with what Dominick LaCapra has called the ‘ethico-political concerns’ inherent to all approaches to the past and approaches to the Holocaust in particular. 33

A comparison of the narratives of Bukovina Germans and Bukovina Jews and their reception There is no doubt that the experiences of Bukovina Jews were deeply disturbing to narrate. At the centre of all the accounts was the experience of the war, with its massive disruption to their lives and families, and its painful aftermath.34 These were terrifying

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and tragic experiences. Anna Rosenberg, for example, explained she had lost her father, her brother, her mother and her sister in Transnistria, during the deportation one after the other. She then was prevented from emigrating from the Soviet Union. Now she could leave, she felt too old. She concluded sadly, ‘So, that’s it, that is our misfortune.’ Many Bukovina Jews had not spoken about their experiences before they spoke with the students. Although Martin Dawer had been one of the Bukovina Jews in Israel who had written to the students to ask for an interview, he claimed he had hardly ever spoken to his wife about Transnistria and that the two students interviewing him undoubtedly now knew more than his own daughter. He explained, ‘until today, the whole period, I always tried to isolate the memories like in a box, put them aside in order to be able to go on. That’s a way to ... how should I say? Defense, protection, an instinct, a survival instinct.’ There were still things he was unwilling to speak about. When telling them about the death of some of his friends when the Romanians first invaded his hometown of Cernăuți in 1941, he said, ‘many fell [in the river] swam farther and drowned. Various friends of mine. But I would rather not speak about this. It does no give anyone any credit.’ Many survivors asked themselves, why they had survived and others had not. The narratives of Bukovina Jews are not only indicative of a deep sense of vulnerability, disruption and loss, but also of the troubling awareness of the existential threat the Holocaust had posed to them and their community as a whole.35 Among Bukovina Germans too, speaking about the past appeared to be a source of disturbance. Many Bukovina Germans placed the war, resettlement and displacement in the foreground of their life-stories. Both of the interviewees the students spoke to argued that their experiences had been deeply disturbing – difficult, humiliating and lastingly scarring. Paula Tiefenthaler spoke of the episode of resettlement and, in particular, of the ‘obtaining of citizenship’ (die Einbürgerung) as ‘the hardest time’. Since she had a Polish mother and was only regarded as ‘half German’, she was placed in the third – namely the ‘least reliable’ – group of Germans. During this selection process, resettlers had been housed in temporary accommodation in the Polish city of Łodz (Litzmannstadt). There, Paula Tiefenthaler had been separated from her parents, banned from speaking to the Poles and closely watched. In addition, she underwent a medical examination, naked among SS officers, and was later tattooed with her blood group on arm. She described this as ‘terrible’ and ‘terrifying’ and said: ‘I can’t explain, I just can’t say, to no one, no one can understand, who did not experience this’. Edith Schütrumpf was also very vocal about how disturbed she felt by the experience of resettlement as a whole. She said that with resettlement, her family had lost its unity and she had lost her ‘sense of security’ (Geborgenheit) as well as her ‘innocence’ (Unbefangenheit). She found it difficult to speak about her experiences. She said, ‘It bothered me then and it still bothers me today’. The disturbance of Bukovina Germans when narrating thus seems comparable to that of Bukovina Jews. However what Paula Tiefenthaler and Edith Schütrumpf ’s unease demonstrate here had more to do with their awareness of how the Nazi system had operated – its criminal and cynical aims – and the place of ‘resettlers’ within this than their experience as such. This was the real source of their disturbance and also the reason the episode was for a long time not openly discussed. There were also significant differences in the way in which Bukovina Jews and Bukovina Germans remembered the period before the war and this can tell us more

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about the nature of the disturbance. Approaches to the pre-war can be linked to what Michael André Bernstein has described as ‘backshadowing’. This had very different effects on the narratives of Bukovina Jews and Bukovina Germans. Bernstein defines the process as follows: [A] kind of retroactive foreshadowing in which the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events by narrator and listener is used to judge the participants in those events as though they too should have known what was to come.36

In other words, backshadowing highlights the importance, for what is said about the earlier past, of the awareness of the impending catastrophe of the Shoah. Bukovina Jews emphasized that it could not have been predicted. Anna Rosenberg, for instance, remarked, ‘the last years, when Hitler was already in power, the Romanians treated the Jews badly ... they were beaten’. But she also highlighted her inability to know what would happen. She remembered fondly her Christian friends with whom she shared a house and whom she visited for Christmas. As she explained, the Jews watched as their German and Romanian neighbours left in 1940 for Germany and Romania respectively and added, ‘We did not know back then that we would also have to leave, nobody did.’ Martin Dawer said he had ethnic German friends and gave the following explanation: They were from the suburb of Rosch. There were only Germans there and they had beautiful gardens and fruit ... The Emperor Franz Josef brought them over. The motto was ‘divide et impera’, ‘divide and rule’. Through the fact that you divide people you can rule them. This is why they brought Germans to Bukovina.

He also remembered them singing Nazi songs in the street: After ‘33, ‘35, the Germans were recognized as ‘ethnic Germans’ (Volksdeutsche) and they sung these Nazi songs in the German House on the High Street (Herrengasse) and wore brown shirts, the whole thing. They weren’t allowed to stay in contact with Jewish colleagues. But they weren’t aggressive, because still, we had grown up together. But they did distance themselves from us. And then they were all taken out, ‘39 they were resettled, to Germany.

Like Anna Rosenberg, the way he spoke about the past was to suggest one could not have imagined what followed – namely the destruction of their community and the entire culture to which they belonged with the support of their former neighbours. Backshadowing also played a role in the narratives of Bukovina Germans but it had quite a different effect. For them, discussing the inter-war period, and interethnic relations in particular, was highly sensitive and contentious. This manifested itself in contradictory statements and silences. So, for instance, on the one hand, Paula Tiefenthaler idealized the region of her birth. She said she was nostalgic for it and praised the character of inter-ethnic relations, those between Germans and Jews in particular. According to her, they ‘got on fantastically well’, not least because

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‘the Jews spoke German’ and were ‘great businessmen’. She mentioned a number of Jewish friends and colleagues from school and university. But on the other hand, she also stressed, by repeating this a number of times throughout the interview, that the Jews ‘kept to themselves’. She also naively could give no details about the political radicalisation in her hometown and euphemistically stated regarding her Jewish friends and acquaintances, ‘they went’; ‘they disappeared’; ‘I never saw them again’ without asking herself why or mentioning even once their persecution or suffering let alone their deportation to Transnistria. In this respect, Edith Schütrumpf ’s narrative was somewhat different. She came from a town of 7,000 in Northern Bukovina. Trying to account for the diversity of the population and its composition, she recalled: ‘in my class, out of about thirty students, that was 1933/35, there were fifteen Ukrainians, about seven Poles, five or six Jews, one German – me – two Romanians and one Armenian’. She said her town was home to just 42 Germans and some 700 Jews and that her father had had a Jewish business partner. She even tried to relativize the idealization of the peaceful coexistence in Bukovina: In these books, one always reads that we got on so well and it always gives me a bit of a tummy ache. You should not believe that it was a great love story, joy ... the main thing was respect for each other ... The recognition of otherness. Tolerance, although perhaps that is too little ... to tolerate is to put up with. But yes, tolerance was there, a lot, and especially respect.

She also pointed out that social hierarchies were very important even if ethnic ones cut across them. Edith Schütrumpf was very aware of what had happened later to the Jews, made frequent references to Transnistria and the Holocaust and as such, did not allow herself to celebrate the period before the war in a naïve manner. However, neither Edith Schütrumpf nor Paula Tiefenthaler were willing to make more than generalizations or problematise concretely the situation of Germans and Jews before the war such as identifying a turning point in the relationship. For Bukovina Jews, in contrast, the pre-war and wartime period were completely separate. The degree of disruption meant Bukovina Jews tended to have both very precise and mostly positive memories of the pre-war period. For Bukovina Jews, testimony was a way of bringing back a lost world: the people they had known, the languages they had spoken, the things they had done and objects they had owned. Anna Rosenberg, for instance, began her account by describing her parents’ workshop, kitchen and house as well as her hobbies, her friends and her summer holidays. Similarly, Martin Dawer spoke at great length about sports activities in Cernăuți (which he, of course, called Czernowitz). So much so, that at the end of the interview, the students even commented, ‘Why did you say you have no memories? You still remember everything perfectly well!’ To this he answered, ‘My childhood was undoubtedly nice, nice and happy.’ In many ways, knowledge of what was about to happen not only gave these memories huge significance, but also made them more positive. Anna Rosenberg recalled being frequently ill but nevertheless described her life before the war as ‘easy’ and spoke enthusiastically about it. Most Bukovina Jews underplayed their dissatisfaction with their situation in inter-war Romania. As others

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have pointed out, there is much evidence to the effect that many rejected the status quo in inter-war Romania, seeking to study abroad, emigrate or simply by speaking German.37 But in light of what followed, this could all be put into perspective. It was, for example, the students that had to remind Martin Dawer with a question that he was in fact banned from speaking his mother tongue, German, in public. Only then did he mention he had indeed actually been fined for this once and discuss the discrimination against Jews in Romania in general. By comparison, these were still very good times. Among Bukovina Germans the fact that the period before the war was perceived as the prelude to the shameful episode of the Holocaust meant it was not only a contentious period to discuss, but it was also remembered in quite a negative manner. Within a few minutes of starting the interview, Paula Tiefenthaler explained that, [a]nd then in 1940, we then went to Germany. Because it was a time ... there was nothing better to do ... it was the only thing that this stupid Hitler actually achieved, that he took us out of there, because if the Russians had come there and the whole war, it would have been very bad for us, because the whole of Bukovina became Romania in 1918 and 1923/24, there the people, who worked there, they all had to speak Romanian. And they had to manage with this.

She stressed that Germans had been discriminated against and oppressed because of the obligation to speak Romanian. She explained that her father, who was a lawyer, had had to leave his position in the administration in the 1920s because he did not want to learn Romanian. This largely resonated with the discourse of the West German expellee organization, the Landsmannschaft, of which Paula Tiefenthaler was a key member. Socialized in the GDR, Edith Schütrumpf rejected this account of resettlement as ‘salvation’. For her, it had been unquestionably mistaken to follow the Nazi call. However she did not discuss her family’s response to the idea of resettlement either. Bukovina Germans’ statements about the inter-war period tended to be rather patchy and confused. Paula Tiefenthaler simply stated, ‘Suddenly we were all nationalists’. She argued Bukovina Germans had felt Austrian rather than German and said: ‘We only became Germans in 1940’ but did not say why this was. Although she was born in 1918 and was therefore old enough to form her own opinion and although her father was the chairman of the German Association (Deutscher Verein) in her hometown of Suceava in southern Bukovina, she claimed not to know who had organized or encouraged the resettlement operation in 1940. She was also unable or unwilling to give significance to events that may have explained this transformation such as the Nazification of the German minority. These gaps and lack of precision can be read as the result of feelings of guilt and the search for excuses but are also perhaps simply the result of the continuity, at least in terms of language, culture and the people around them, which prevented Bukovina Germans from looking back in as clear a way as Bukovina Jews. Backshadowing therefore not only functioned differently for Bukovina Jews and Bukovina Germans, but was a source of dissonance in their recollection of shared experiences.

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Beyond these factual divergences it is important to note the radically different role played by the act of speaking among Bukovina Germans and Bukovina Jews. For the Jews, testimony was a way of gaining recognition.38 For Mathias Zwilling, who put the students in touch with interview partners and attended all of the interviews in Chernivtsi, it was fundamental to encourage Bukovina Jews to speak about their suffering and promote knowledge about the horrors of Transnistria.39 He concluded his own contribution in the first book by saying, ‘There is a lot to say: funny things, sad things, unfortunately more of the sad things. We were not lucky in life. But now that we can speak about it, it is easier.’40 The eagerness of Bukovina Jews from Israel to share their experiences is also a case in point. Testimony was about retrieving agency.41 Anna Rosenberg asked rhetorically, ‘Now, how can I say, how could we survive?’ She explained she had traded things, made things out of crochet and knitted capes she then sold for food. Martin Dower explained, ‘These were hard times but we had resistance, and we had hope we would survive.’ This is also why interviewees often referred to people whose help they had secured or that they themselves had been in position to help. Anna Rosenberg, for example, mentioned a doctor who had not sent her to forced labour and thereby saved her life and an uncle who welcomed her in his home after the war and looked after her. She also mentioned a starving man she had given food to in the harsh winter of 1946/47 despite the fact that they were starving too. She explained he was hugely grateful for her assistance and commented, ‘that was so nice’. These accounts served to both restore a sense of human dignity and were testimonies of the humanity that survived in the midst of all the horror. Recognizing the importance of their experiences for their lives was not only a matter of biographical coherence but also the opportunity to demonstrate human courage. Agency played a radically different role in the narratives of Bukovina Germans. Their aim was less to play it up than to play it down. Both Paula Tiefenthaler and Edith Schütrumpf were somewhat insecure, at the start of the interviews, about what they should be talking about and what they could contribute. Paula Tiefenthaler feared to disappoint the students because she was not from Czernowitz and Edith Schütrumpf asked whether her family history she had launched herself into was of any relevance. The question of agency was acute at particular moments in the narratives. Frau  Schütrumpf, for example, thought she had seen the ghetto of Litzmannstadt in March 1941. She remembered fences, a crossroad and many people with a distinguishing sign on their clothing, which she later realized was a star. She compared the sight to the scenes of Schindler’s List and The Pianist. She said ‘I saw exactly that, in 1941, in March’. She then added, ‘but without knowing where I am or what it is. We did not know what ghettos were or anything else. It also was not a topic of discussion until much later.’ But as she then went on to talk about a singing competition she took part in in Litzmannstadt at the time, it appeared she was not as clueless as she had suggested: it was such an EXPERIENCE! But that nearby, in Litzmannstadt, was the ghetto and the fact that nearby, in Pabianice, we stood up there in our uniforms, yes, that is what is grotesque about all of this. And these were wonderful experiences. So we did not go around with our heads down and constantly thinking: ‘Oh god, we are

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in Poland and the poor Poles and the poor Jews’. But it did cross our minds now and then, and we felt this time and again.

It was difficult for her to reconcile her past experiences of fun and present feelings of shame but she exculpated herself on the basis of age and inability to make sense of the circumstances: we could not analyze it all, for that, we were too silly when we were twelve. But later, it was possible to draw conclusions. These pictures remained and could be made sense of [einordnen] at a later point in time.

Edith Schütrumpf thereby proved she was reflective about her experiences. But highlighting her helplessness was necessary to her biographical coherence. The case of Paula Tiefenthaler is also interesting. As she had explained how humiliated she had felt by the racial screening the interviewers had asked her what her classification in the third group (a racially inferior one), had meant for her in practice. She answered: I was not one to duck down [eine Duckerin], I often spoke out but I always tried to speak out without disturbing the methods of the Third Reich. For that which is right, what is right in the world. Then I often spoke out.

With this, she gave the example of when she had protested against being called-up, while she was living in Austria, to read the letters of French PoW and ultimately had obtained what she wanted - namely release. She recalled what she had told the Army General responsible for her work: You know, I am a resettler. I was resettled from Romania to Germany. We were told it would all be great here in Germany, for us all. I have now obtained citizenship. I have wasted two years of university. I have been here for a year. I always acknowledged my Germanness in Romania. I was one year in a camp and worked there. I am now in a camp again and working. I AM a German. But I have done more for the German Reich than so many other women of my age! Have girls been taken out of school? Can’t you just find someone else who speaks French? There are many people in Vienna and in Austria who speak French and many who would be glad to come here because they don’t want to work [elsewhere].

More than the ability to oppose the system, this statement revealed her ability to use its principles to her advantage. Most interesting here is that even sixty years later, she felt proud of her response and did not see the implications. Paula Tiefenthaler also unselfconsciously concluded her interview: ‘Yes, you know, when the times are so bad, more or less, one simply adapts. You are scared but you say, it does not matter, what will be will be.’ In light of what is known today about bankruptcy of the resettlement programme, what it meant to go along with the reality of Nazism in general and

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what was happening to the Jews in the same period, this statement could seem rather uncritical and shallow. These words are also not comparable to those of someone who's life is truly threatened. Paula Tiefenthaler’s lack of reflexivity was disturbing, if not for her, then at least for others. Indeed, these interviews and the outcome of the publication and their success – or lack thereof – cannot be explained without accounting for the perspective of the listeners. The students had set off to interview Bukovinians, German and Jewish, not as ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ or even ‘war victims’ and ‘Holocaust survivors’. Yet in both cases, the narratives of Bukovinians are accounts of experience and ways of engaging with a history of injustice. In short, these were very different kinds of witnesses. With Bukovina Jews, the students had the sentiment of doing something for their interview partners, bringing their story to light, giving them the recognition they deserved.42 Moreover the backshadowing, which serves to qualify the haunting sense of catastrophe impending in the lives of Bukovinians before the war also, meant there was something deeply fascinating about the stories of Bukovina Jews that made them intrinsically interesting. These were witnesses, not only to the horrors of the past, but also a lost world of Central European culture. Beyond the traditional trace, they were its living embodiment. These were tragic but inspiring accounts. In the foreword to the second book in particular, the students voiced some critical remarks about the way Jewish Bukovinians used this – the obvious idealization and contradictions – but they also realized this was a form of compensation for suffering and loss and welcomed the often self-conscious irony with which Czernowitz was ‘the lost paradise’ where they had closely escaped extermination. They recognized that backshadowing with its attendant dramatization, but also its inherent nostalgia, was an important act of commemoration. In this sense, the case of Bukovina Germans was truly different. As Saul Friedlaender has argued, if the disturbance of perpetrators can appear to be as strong as that of the victims, it nevertheless has a very different source.43 The disruption had come not with displacement as such, but when, exploited and disappointed by the Nazis, their convictions had crumbled and feelings of shame and guilt had developed. As Gabriele Rosenthal who has compared in her work the retrospective narratives of families of victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust has explained, there is a radical difference between the traumatized silence of the victims and the silence of the perpetrators that serves to conceal.44 She also warned against the verbosity characteristic of many perpetrator accounts in which the role of the victim or Holocaust imagery is used to deflect or even blame the victims. The students had been wary of interviewing Bukovina Germans from the outset. As they explained to Edith Schütrumpf after they had got to know her a little better: [W]e should also concede: There are our Jewish interviewees who we are very fond of, who were very interesting and generally very well-read. At the very least, they had a very interesting and disrupted fate. So now, with Bukovina Germans, we did wonder: ‘how will they be?’ And so we had – and to an extent, we still have – certain prejudices, linked to the Landsmannschaft. I mean we do not know this group, but Sudeten Germans, and I myself have relatives in East Silesia

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and from there, I am familiar with the strong and externally grafted (von außen aufgepfropfte) identification with Germany. And that as a result many other aspects are downplayed.

The students had warmed to Edith Schütrumpf. They concluded, ‘However you have now rid us of our prejudice.’ Perhaps if there had been more people like her, the students would have written the book. Edith Schütrumpf was indeed different to most Bukovina Germans insofar as she explicitly expressed her antipathy to the apologetic discourse of the Landsmannschaft and demonstrated and even close friendships with Jewish Bukovinians. As such, her world had also been destroyed. However, the best illustration of what the students were looking for was the case of Johann Schlamp, the only Bukovina German included in the first volume of biographies and therefore the only Bukovina German life-story to have been published in a book.45 He proved that what the students were after was not a matter of ethnicity, and not even one of a specific experience as such. Born in 1914, Johann Schlamp was a convinced Communist. Under Romanian rule, in the 1930s, he had even been imprisoned for his political convictions. In 1940, when the Germans and his own family were resettled to Germany, he refused to join and fled to the Soviet Union. There, he was arrested for being an ethnic German. Johann Schlamp finally returned to his hometown, then Soviet Chernovtsy, in the 1950s, married a Russian woman and never left. Though he was in fact German, he was also atypical. Tellingly, the title of his contribution was ‘I had few friends among the Germans’. Johann Schlamp may not have been a Holocaust survivor, but he was a survivor: He had been at the mercy of oppressive regimes and always opposed to their measures. From an ethical standpoint, he had been on the right side of history. The case of most Bukovina Germans was more complex and murky. They were victims, but not absolute ones, and insofar as they were regarded as perpetrators or accomplices too, they were not necessarily repentant. Their narratives could not offer a truly redemptive form of identification and in this sense, their narratives could not be the basis for a better future.

Conclusion The return of Bukovina to Europe after 1989 was largely a ‘Jewish return’. Today, the most visible presence of Bukovinians in libraries, films and online is that of Bukovina Jews. In effect, by the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, an environment has been created in which Holocaust survivors are not only enabled to speak, but encouraged to do so. This is certainly to be welcomed. But in the process, a disturbing past has become the source of pride and self-worth and in contrast, that same environment has prevented others from working through their experiences in a critical manner. This is not least because as an audience, we make a difference. The question is, then, what is this difference? It certainly relates to the incomprehensible, unspeakable character of the ‘crimes of Auschwitz’. There is, as established, an important moral-political dimension to

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Holocaust testimony; it is not merely historical evidence but a symbol of the fight against indifference.46 But this does not mean testimony is beyond politics. As others have noted, this resonates with a conception of human rights, which corresponds to cosmopolitan ideas of freedom and equality.47 Bukovina Jews, as Sander Gilman has said of the Jews in general, stand for not only ultimate victims but also the ‘models for the multicultural’.48 Identifying with them is elevated to a redemptory act for the future of society. Identifying with Bukovina Germans, in contrast, bears the risk of condoning the unspeakable. This correlates closely with different conceptions of Germanness, with a radically different connotations which particularly in the case of Bukovina play an important role. But we need to question why we feel disturbed reading or speaking with ‘perpetrators’, but reinforced in our humanity by speaking to the ‘victims’. Arguably, there is something much more human in the blindness and cowardice of the accomplices of a criminal regime than in the amazing resistance and courage of those who were persecuted and survived an ordeal. If the question is what lessons can be learnt from the horrors of the Holocaust, then I would argue there is in fact perhaps more to learn from the former. As Ervin Staub has shown, evil also deserves to be discussed.49 We should be wary, as some have argued, of the conflation of memory with morality and heroes with victims. As Dominick LaCapra has argued, workingthrough is a necessity for both perpetrators and victims and analysts should work to overcome these categories: It is the grid that locks together perpetrator, collaborator, victim, bystander, and resister, and that also threatens to encompass the secondary witness and historian. A goal of working-through should be the better understanding of this grid and the attempt to overcome it toward a more desirable network of relations.50

Commenting on the post-war silence, Dori Laub explained the need for ‘communities of telling’ but also ‘communities of asking’ and ‘communities of knowledge’.51 This highlights once more the fact that narratives do not exist independently of their transmission and reception. Any serious conceptualization of disturbance, then, needs to take into account this reciprocity as well. The unease of our approaches to the past should be problematized together with the narratives themselves.

Notes 1 2 3

Gaby Coldewey et al. (eds), ‘Czernowitz is gewen an alte, jidische Schtot.’ jüdische Überlebende berichten, 1st ed. (Berlin: Selbstverlag, 1996). Gaby Coldewey et al. (eds), ‘Czernowitz is gewen an alte, jidische Schtot.’ jüdische Überlebende berichten, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 1999). Gertrud Ranner et al. (eds), ‘... und das Herz wird mir schwer dabei.’ Czernowitzer Juden erinnern sich, 3rd ed. (Potsdam: Deutsches Kulturforum östliches Europa, 2009). The title was changed following feedback that the Yiddish accented phrase suggested that this was the prevalent style of German spoken in the city. A quote in

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7 8

9

10

11

12

13

14

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16 17

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‘high German’ was therefore found to be more appropriate; an interview with the writer Josef Burg was also added. See foreword to the third edition, Ranner et al., ... und das Herz, 7. Gaby Coldewey et al. (eds), Zwischen Pruth und Jordan: Lebenserinnerungen Czernowitzer Juden (Köln: Böhlau, 2003). This is mentioned in the foreword to the third edition, see Ranner et al., ... und das Herz, 7. Gaby Coldewey also contributed with a piece on Bukovina Germans entitled ‘Die Deutschen in der Bukowina zwischen An- und Aussiedlung’ in the volume by Martin Pollack et al., Mythos Czernowitz: eine Stadt im Spiegel ihrer Nationalitäten (Potsdam: Deutsches Kulturforum östliches Europa, 2008). Gaby Coldewey, interview with author, Skype, 18 July, 2013. On this, see Rainer Schulze, ‘Forgotten Victims or Beneficiaries of Plunder and Genocide? The mass resettlement of ethnic Germans “heim ins Reich”’, Annali dell’Instituto storico-germano in Trento, XXVII (2001), 533–564. The term was coined by Michael Hechter. Here quoted in Valentina Glajar, The German Legacy in Central Europe as Recorded in Recent German Literature (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 2004), 6. This is particularly the case because of German-speaking Jewish writers who became prominent in the twentieth century. Markus Winkler, ‘Czernowitzer Judentum: ein Mythos am Rande Europas?’, OWEP 3 (2008), available online http://www.owep.de/ artikel/68/czernowitzer-judentum-mythos-am-rande-europas (accessed 2 August 2014). See Mariana Hausleitner, Die Rumänisierung der Bukowina: die Durchsetzung des nationalstaatlichen Anspruchs Großrumäniens 1918–1944 (München: Oldenbourg, 2001); Hildrun Glass, Zerbrochene Nachbarschaft: das deutsch-jüdische Verhältnis in Rumänien 1918–1938 (München: Oldenbourg, 1996). See Isabel Heinemann, Rasse Siedlung und deutsches Blut: das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die Rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003). Markus Leniger, Nationalsozialistische ‘Volkstumsarbeit’ und Umsiedlungspolitik 1939–1945: von der Minderheitenbetreuung zur Siedlerauslese (Berlin: Frank und Timme, 2006). On the Jews of Bukovina before the First World War, see David Rechter, Becoming Habsburg: The Jews of Austrian Bukovina, 1774–1918 (Portland, OR.: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013). See also Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2000). On this see range of contributions from proceedings of the scholarly conference ‘The fate of the Jews from Bukovina and Transnistria, 1940-44’, which took place on 8 October 2007 at the Yu. Fedkovich Chernivtsy National University, published in Holocaust and Modernity. Studies in Ukraine and the World, 2, 8 (2010). Winfried Menninghaus, ‘ “Czernowitz/Bukowina” als Topos deutsch-jüdischer Geschichte und Literatur’, Merkur, 53, 3–4 (March–April 1999), 345–357. See for instance various contributions on the history of the region by Rudolf Wagner, for example, Rudolf Wagner, ‘Probleme zur Umsiedlung der Deutschen aus der Bukowina, Südost- Heimatblätter, 4 (1955), 168–174. This was captured in their bi-monthly and later monthly publication Der Südostdeutsche.

248 19 20 21 22 23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond See Hugo Gold, Geschichte der Juden in der Bukowina, vol. 1 and 2 (Tel Aviv : Ed. Olamenu, 1958 and 1962). This was captured in their monthly publication Die Stimme. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010). Florence Heymann, Le Crépuscule des Lieux: Identités juives de Czernowitz (Paris: Editions Stock, 2003). Martin Hainz, ‘Nostallergie. Die Czernowitzer Inkongruenzkompensationskompetenz’, CAS Working Paper, 1 (2010), 1–23, 3. Klaus Werner, ‘Euphorie und Skepsis: waren die Bukowina und Galizien “inter”kulturell? Anmerkung zu einer Debatte’, in Ibid., Erfahrungsgeschichte und Zeugenschaft: Studien zur deutsch-jüdischen Literatur aus Galizien und der Bukowina (München: IKGS Verlag, 2003), 11–22. See, for example, Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London: Routledge, 2002); Bill Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Ruth Wittlinger, German National Identity in the Twenty-First Century: A Different Republic after All? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Norbert Frei, 1945 und wir: das Dritte Reich im Bewusstsein der Deutschen (München: C.H. Beck Verlag, 2005). Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), 54. Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 9. Ibid., 101. See Mary Fulbrook, ‘History Writing and “Collective Memory” ’, in Stefan Berger and Bill Niven (eds), Writing the History of Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 65–88. See, for example, Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2001). All transcripts are courtesy of the private collection of Gaby Coldewey; the interview with Anna Rosenberg was published in nearly identical form in the students’ first publication. See Ranner et al., ... und das Herz, 121–31. Extracts from the interview with Martin Dawer were published in their second book, Coldewey et al., Zwischen Pruth und Jordan. Extracts from the interviews with Bukovina Germans were published in the journal Spiegelungen: ‘Es hat mich belastet, es bewegt mich noch heute, ‘Edith Schütrumpf erinnert sich. Erlebnisse einer Bukowinadeutschen in den Kriegsjahren 1939-1945’, Spiegelungen, 55, 2 (2006), 39-53; ‘ “von der Rumänisierung zur Eindeutschung” Dr. Paula Tiefenthaler erinnert sich an ihre Jugend und die Umsiedlung der Bukowinadeutschen’, Spiegelungen, 56, 2 (2007), 178-90. Gabriele Rosenthal, The Holocaust in Three Generations: Families of Victims and Perpetrators of the Nazi Regime, 2nd ed. (Opladen: Barbara Budrich, 2009), 30. See Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press 1998). The structure of the contributions to the first book published by the students, a collection of short, five- or six-page biographies, was always the same: childhood, youth and education; wartime experiences, suffering and persecution; post-war lives and developments including emigration. The second volume, though written

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36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46

47

48 49 50 51

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in a different format, as collective biography of Czernowitzer in Israel, also had this same structure. The chapters were entitled: ‘The Years before the War’, ‘The Year under Soviet Rule’, ‘Czernowitz 1941–1944’, ‘Transnistria 1941–1944’, ‘The End of the War and the Immediate Post-war’, ‘Paths of Emigration’, ‘Life in Israel’. In both cases, the Holocaust was at the centre. A text by the writer Edgar Hilsenrath entitled Transnistria added at the end of the second volume also pointed to this emphasis and the centrality of this topic. As Lawrence Langer has argued, these were not only testimonies to survival but also to destruction. Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimony: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 34–5. Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1994), 16. See Hirsch and Spitzer, Ghosts of Home; Heymann, Crépuscule. See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). Interview Coldewey. Ranner et al., ... und das Herz, 182. See, for example, Nancy Goodman and Marilyn Meyers (eds), The Power of Witnessing: Reflections, Reverberations and Traces of the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 2012). Dori Laub even identifies three dimensions to witnessing in Laub, Testimony, 75. Saul Friedlaender, Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 124. Rosenthal, The Holocaust in Three Generations, 18: 29. Ranner et al., ... und das Herz, 152. See Dori Laub in Mary Marshall Clark, ‘Holocaust Video Testimony, Oral History, and Narrative Medicine: The Struggle against Indifference’, Literature and Medicine, 24, 2 (Fall 2005), 266–282. See Levy and Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory. See also Jay Winter, ‘Human Rights and European Remembrance’, in Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind and Julie Fedor (eds), Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 43–58. Sander Gilman, Multiculturalism and the Jews (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2006), 179. See Nancy Goodman and Marilyn Meyers (eds), ‘Bystandership: One Can Make a Difference. Interview with Ervin Staub’, in The Power of Witnessing, 335. LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, 41. Laub in Clark, ‘Holocaust Video Testimony’, 280.

15

How to Cope with It? The Steuben Society of America’s Politics of Memory and the Holocaust Julia Lange

Whereas the First World War and its repercussions for German American life has been the topic of numerous publications,1 the effects of the Second World War on German American groups and their identity politics in the, by now, seventy years following the end of the war have received only scant critical attention. This holds especially true for the changing responses from German American organizations towards the commemoration of the Holocaust. Limited as the political clout of German American organizations admittedly was, they still participated in the dominant discourses of the time, mostly being shaped by and, to a much lesser extent, themselves influencing US domestic and foreign policy issues, that is, first and foremost, interethnic relations with Jewish American groups as well as transatlantic relations between the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany. In their exchanges with other agents manoeuvring the political field, the memory of the Holocaust was, for most of the time, considered a perennial disconcerting factor, an outright liability, in fact, by many German American leaders who were pushing for an enhanced public visibility and national recognition of their ethnicity. The objective of this paper is to examine the memory politics of the Steuben Society of America, a major German American umbrella organization, in order to illustrate the nexus between an increasingly successful German American recognition politics and the dynamics of Holocaust memory in the United States. The paper is divided into two parts. Taking the Steuben Society as a case in point and focusing on a number of selected milestones in the trajectory of American Holocaust remembrance, I investigate the ramifications the Holocaust and its rising public commemoration has had on German American selfrepresentation. How did the Steuben Society of America manage its political identity in light of persistent public references to a perceived disturbing German past? How did the Steuben Society itself disturb the past, that is, produce revisionist counter-narratives so as to rehabilitate German Americans and reclaim discursive power over the representation of its ethnicity in the American public sphere? And, finally, how did the Steuben Society negotiate its subject position within the network of German American societies and clubs? The second part of the paper transcends the narrow focus on the Steuben Society’s memorial politics and situates it in the wider scope of a German American ‘recognition

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politics’2 that, after being abandoned as a viable political strategy during the Second World War, gradually re-emerged in the wake of the civil rights and roots movements in the 1960s and 1970s and, influenced by a growing Holocaust consciousness, gained additional momentum in the 1980s and the post-Cold War era. Ultimately, the aim of this paper is to bring two timelines into dialogue that have hitherto been mostly explored in isolation: the post-Second World War trajectory of German American identity politics and the dynamics of Holocaust remembrance on both sides of the Atlantic.3 The Steuben Society of America was founded in 1919 as a ‘patriotic organization comprised of American citizens of German ancestry’.4 Its self-proclaimed target was to support the constitution of the United States of America, to unite Americans of German descent, and to counter anti-German sentiment, which had run high since the entry of the United States into the First World War. Since its inception, the Steuben Society’s political outlook has been conservative, its preference lying with the Republican Party in the United States and the Christian Democratic Party in post-Second World War Germany. The choice of Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a former Prussian officer who had served as a general to George Washington in the Revolutionary War, as a namegiving patron to the society reflected the Steuben Society founders’ intention to stress their loyalty and allegiance to the United States, a loyalty that had been questioned by American authorities during the First World War. Today, the Steuben Society is the oldest existing umbrella organization of Americans of German descent. It consists of approximately twenty-four units spread across the country with a geographical focus on the east coast, where its headquarters in Patchogue, New York, is also based.5 In 1999, its official organ, The Steuben News, a bi-monthly, formerly monthly, publication which continues to the present day, had a circulation of 3,500.6 Together with the German American National Congress, founded in Chicago in 1959, and the United German-American Committee of the USA, established in Philadelphia in 1977, the Steuben Society of America has traditionally been one of the leading organizations aimed at unifying and representing Americans of German descent on a national level. The Steuben Society’s record for the period from 1933 to the end of the Second World War is a mixed one. When Hitler’s National Socialist Party ascended to power in 1933, the society initially opposed the anti-German boycott that was initiated by Jewish businessmen in New York City and supported a boycott of the boycott that was instigated by German American businessmen as a counter-measure in late 1933. After reports on the massive persecution of Jews in Germany gradually became public, and especially after the Reichskristallnacht in 1938, the Steuben Society distanced itself from the racist ideology propagated by pro-Nazi groups operating on American soil, such as the German American Bund. With the US entry into the war in 1941, the Steuben Society quickly adopted a firm pro-American stance and supported the war effort.7 In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the Steuben Society was instrumental in the set-up of the American Relief for Germany, Inc. that raised relief funds for Germany and lobbied for the needs of Germans expelled from eastern territories. The Steuben Society also advocated for a readjustment of the Oder-Neisse line and successfully supported measures to adjust the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 so as to increase the number of visas allocated to persons of German ethnic origin.8

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When reports on the War Trials in Nuremberg became public between 1945 and 1949, the Steuben Society dismissed the trials as biased and unfair. Several articles in the Steuben News denigrated the verdicts against Germans as victim’s justice and criticized the vindictiveness of American prosecutors that allegedly led to gross injustices comparable to those committed by the accused German war criminals themselves.9 In contrast, in 1961, when the Eichmann trial generated headlines worldwide, the Steuben Society adopted a different strategy. Instead of condemning the trial and questioning the legitimacy of the proceedings in front of an Israeli court, an issue raised by critical voices on both sides of the Atlantic, the Steuben News simply pretended that the trial did not happen by refraining from commenting on it at all.10 The integration of West Germany into the Western alliance and its emergence as a powerful NATO ally in a Cold War framework led to a decrease of war-engendered tensions. With the enemy image having shifted to the Soviet Union in American public perception, attitudes toward Germany and everything German began to mellow. As a result, German American clubs and organizations began to stage their ethnic identity in more visible terms. Celebrations of German food, drink, and song, often labelled as Oktoberfests, increased. Picking up on the upsurge in German-themed festivities, prominent members of the Steuben Society supported the inauguration of the first Steuben Parade in New York City in 1957.11 The society’s local chapters in Chicago and Philadelphia soon followed suit and were instrumental in initiating their own Steuben parades in 1966 and 1970, respectively.12 The launch of the parades testified to a reawakening of German American public self-representation after the war.13 To this day, the annual Steuben Parade in New York City remains the largest and most visible display of German American pride in the United States. The first major outcry from members of the Steuben Society against the way the Holocaust was represented and given increased media attention was triggered by the TV broadcasting of the NBC miniseries Holocaust in 1978 which was viewed by over 100 million Americans and subsequently broadcast in Germany in 1979. Initially, the response of the Steuben Society leadership was a unified one, with various articles calling for an end to the anti-German propaganda that they associated with the sensationalized, fictional treatment of the Holocaust on American primetime TV. In a letter to NBC, later reprinted in the Steuben News, Steuben Society member Karin Stulz asked the television network to cancel the rerun of Holocaust ‘precisely one week prior to the celebration of Steuben Day on September 15’, for she feared ‘that countless idiots will make the mistake of equating the words German and Nazi. I believe NBC’s decision is a malicious and uncalled for attack on German-Americans.’14 Whereas Stulz’s rhetoric was comparatively moderate, more drastically formulated letters with radical content were soon to follow. The first explicit Holocaust-denial article in the generic form of a reader’s letter with the telling title ‘Holocaust “A Hoax” ’ appeared in the Steuben News in the November/December issue of 1979.15 In the year 1980, several explicit Holocaust-denial advertisements for the Institute for Historical Review, a pseudo-intellectual, right-wing, anti-semitic organization founded in Torrance, California, in 1978, featured in the newspaper.16 Whereas between 1945 and 1978 anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic statements were largely absent from the Steuben News, the situation changed with the broadcasting of the NBC miniseries Holocaust.

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Subsequently, hints at a Jewish revenge for the Holocaust were dropped in several articles of the Steuben News that surmised a Jewish American influence behind the negative depiction of Germans in Hollywood movies and popular TV productions such as the NBC miniseries.17 More subtle techniques of relativizing the atrocities of the Holocaust were also put into practice. In one of his regular weekly columns Karl T. Marx, for instance, lamented that ‘Pope Paul II visited only Auschwitz ... not Katyn Forest where about 15,000 Polish (non-communist) officers in 1940 were massacred by the Russians to assure a Poland subservient to Russian Bolshevism [...]’.18 Equating the significance of the Nazi genocide of the Jews with the atrocities committed by Russian troops under Stalin, Marx drew on anti-communist rhetoric and firmly grounded his argument in the framework of the Cold War. Later in the article, Marx further refined his strategy of relativizing the Holocaust by reclaiming a German victim status that effectively obliterated any difference between perpetrators and victims. Whilst equating German and Jewish suffering, Marx, at the same time, introduced a binary opposition that undermined the possibility of a hybrid German Jewish identity: ‘Germans and Jews, two people who have suffered from hate, discrimination and brutality [...]’.19 Although the majority of voices in the Steuben News uttered disapproval and frustration at the greater role the Holocaust was being accorded in American living rooms and articles that expressed animosity against organized Jewry increased, with time elapsing and the controversy over the NBC Holocaust miniseries slowly abating, a few dissenting voices, representative of the more moderate faction of the Steuben Society, also began to speak out and were given a platform in the society’s newspaper. In the Steuben News’ September/October issue of the year 1980, Ilse Hoffmann, Chairlady of the Steuben Society National Council’s Public Affairs Committee, wrote a critical response to a letter published in the preceding issue of the Steuben News by Otto Burgdorf,20 in which Hoffmann attacked him for his advocacy for a Holocaustdenial institution. In the same article, Hoffmann embraced Willy Brandt’s politics of reconciliation with regard to Israel as well as the German Federal Republic’s more recent efforts to face up to and come to terms with its problematic past. Hoffmann further argued for the need to promote genocide prevention programmes and supported the inclusion of the topic of the Holocaust and other genocides in school textbooks, an issue that had previously drawn much criticism from members of the Steuben Society and the wider German American community.21 The heated debates surrounding the broadcasting of the Holocaust miniseries also led to the foregrounding of narratives in the Steuben News that emphasized tensions with Jewish American groups. At Captive Nations Week in New York City in July 1979, an event aimed at bringing ‘together in one place German ethnics who remember the fate of the 17 million eastern Germans who were expelled from their homeland in 1945’,22 a mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral that formed part of the programme of Captive Nations Week was, according to an eye-witness report by Caspar Scheiper, Chairman of the New York State Council of the Steuben Society of America, which was later published in the Steuben News, ‘disturbed by the unwelcome visit of a group of young hoodlums who were alleged to be members of the so-called Jewish Defense League. They slashed several banners and a member of the congregation before they were captured.’23 Putting aside the question of the historical accuracy of Scheiper’s account,

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the fact that the story of the confrontation between some German Americans and Jewish Americans was stressed as opposed to silenced in Scheiper’s report is indicative of a general tendency of the Steuben News of the time, namely to magnify incidents in which Jewish Americans were involved. In these accounts, Jewish Americans were frequently represented as aggressors and German Americans, in an inversion of the roles traditionally accorded to Jews and Germans in memorializing discourses on the Holocaust, were re-cast as victims. In the 1980s, the Bitburg controversy and the German Historikerstreit took centre stage. The Steuben Society strongly supported President Reagan’s visit to the military cemetery at Bitburg at which German soldiers of the Waffen-SS were buried. In its advocacy for the president’s visit to Bitburg, the Steuben News published articles that accused American Jews of exercising revenge upon Germans and German Americans by attempting to prevent the president from paying a visit to the cemetery. In these articles, the usual charges were brought against American Jews who were accused of manipulating the image of Germans in the American media, which they allegedly ran, by producing movies that perpetuated anti-German sentiment and stereotypes.24 At the time of the Bitburg crisis, the Steuben Society also gave increased advertising space to pseudo-academic Holocaust-denial organizations such as the German American National Political Action Committee (GANPAC), thereby, if not implicitly endorsing their radical positions, at least tolerating the promotion of their views under the first amendment.25 In this context, the personal contingencies between the Steuben Society and the Institute for Historical Review were equally striking: one of the founders of the Institute for Historical Review, Austin App, was also a prominent member of the Steuben Society after whom the Washington, DC branch of the organization is named to this day.26 At the same time as the outrage over the growing public remembrance of the Holocaust increased on the part of the Steuben Society, the 1980s equally marked the beginning of an increasingly successful German American recognition politics. In the wake of the 300th anniversary of German immigration to the American colonies, the Steuben Society joined the Society for German American Studies to push for greater public awareness and recognition of German American contributions to the United States. In 1982, after a visit by Chancellor Helmut Kohl to Washington, DC, President Reagan put in place a Presidential Commission for the GermanAmerican Tricentennial and on 20 January 1983, based on Senate Joint Resolution 260, pronounced the year 1983 as the ‘Tricentennial Anniversary Year of German Settlement in America’.27 In 1986, Don Heinrich Tolzmann, President of the Society for German American Studies and a long-time member of the Steuben Society, took a key role in launching an initiative to introduce a German American Day that would celebrate and promote awareness of German American contributions to the United States. The Steuben Society supported the initiative together with other German American organizations. The joint effort finally led to a formal recognition of German American Day by the US Congress and a proclamation of German American Day by President Reagan on 6 October 1987 at a ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House.28 In order to better represent their common interests in the future and to further the advocacy for German American Day, the Steuben Society joined forces

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with two other leading German American organizations, the German American National Congress (DANK) and the United German-American Committee of the USA, to form the German-American Joint Action Committee (GAJAC) that was formally established in 1988.29 Representatives of the Steuben Society, together with other members from the newly founded German American Joint Action Committee, attended the GermanAmerican Day celebrations at the Rose Garden of the White House and were given a copy of Reagan’s speech that he had delivered at the cemetery at Bitburg in 1985.30 The gesture was a symbolic one: Reagan’s politics of ‘conciliation’ towards Germany and, by implication, its past was strongly supported by German American umbrella organizations such as the Steuben Society. The fact that Ronald Reagan redistributed his speech and thereby, in a sense, if not voiced, then at least redelivered it in gestural terms two years after his notorious trip, affirmed the president’s pragmatic position on the transatlantic partnership that encompassed a politics of the outstretched hand with regard to the German past and convinced German American leaders attending the White House ceremony of the righteousness of their own memory politics. German American ethnic history, a narrative uniquely positioned between the two nations of Germany and the United States, thus transcended the narrow scope of American identity politics and became functionalized as a tool for regulating the bilateral relations between West Germany and the United States. Considering the centrality of the Holocaust discourse to American public debates at the time, it was little surprising that the legacy of the Nazi past would be invoked at the German-American Day ceremony. The German American Information and Education Association, a partner organization of the anti-Semitic German American National Political Action Committee had not been officially invited to the German-American Day celebrations at the White House, but having learned about the event, sent out a rallying call to its members to travel to Washington, DC, so as to promote their agenda at a ceremonial dinner organized by the Tricentennial Foundation at the Marriott Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in honour of German-American Day.31 The internal German American debate about how to cope with the memory of the Holocaust thus continued and was, if not literally carried onto the turf of the White House, at least taken very close to it. One year later, on 15 November 1988 the German American Friendship Garden, established in 1983 and commissioned to commemorate the arrival of the first German immigrants to the United States, was inaugurated by President Ronald Reagan in attendance of Chancellor Helmut Kohl. In the years 1989 and 1990, the Steuben Society enthusiastically supported German unification and critically commented in its editorials on reports that voiced fears of a potential neo-fascist revival in Germany.32 In 1993, as the Holocaust Memorial Museum opened on the National Mall in Washington, DC, the Steuben Society refrained from making any comments. In contrast, when the transfer of land for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was first announced in the Washington Post in March 1983, editorial staff writer Karl T. Marx published an article in the Steuben News that critiqued the idea of a Holocaust museum at the heart of the nation’s capital. Marx argued that a Holocaust museum would trigger heightened anti-German sentiment and that rather than obsessing about the Holocaust, public attention should be equally directed

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at more recent genocides closer to the present.33 The Steuben Society’s position thus echoed the one of the German Federal government under Kohl, which was, if not openly averse to the construction of the museum, at least strongly advocating for an inclusion of a narrative about the transformation Germany had undergone in the last decades so as to become a democratic country and a reliable partner of the United States.34 Although the German government’s efforts to influence the image of Germany represented in the museum were largely doomed, it continued to pursue its agenda of promoting a counter-narrative of the German national past and present. In 1994, it organized an exhibit at the Library of Congress with the title ‘Against Hitler: German Resistance to National Socialism, 1933–1945’. The exhibition was strongly criticized for its alleged rewriting of history and drew particular fire from a journalist from the Washington Post as well as a representative of the USHMM at a scholarly conference on the German resistance movement that was organized by the German Embassy in Washington, DC, in connection with the opening of the exhibition.35 German American leaders like Don Heinrich Tolzmann, President of the Society for German American Studies and an honorary member of the Steuben Society, voiced their indignation about the, as they argued, illegitimate criticism of the exhibit by both the national press and the representative from the USHMM.36 The memory of the Holocaust thus continued to disturb relations between Germans in the United States and American Jews by pitting two conflicting versions of the German past in close proximity to each other at the commemorative centre of the nation’s capital – one at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at the National Mall, the other at the Library of Congress on the Hill. Being largely viewed as a folkloristic event without a clearly stated political agenda, the Steuben Parade in New York, for most of its history, failed to draw major criticism for the way it fashioned and marketed its German culture to the wider public. In 1995, however, a controversy erupted over the use of imagery that supposedly invoked the Nazi past. Uwe Westphal, chief editor of the German Jewish newspaper Der Aufbau, had written an article on the Steuben Parade of 1995, in which he made an analogy between the weapon-carrying mountain troops from Bavaria that participated in the parade and Hitler’s army. Westphal’s article generated widespread indignation on the part of the leaders of the Steuben Society who dismissed his claims as ‘abominable hatepropaganda’.37 The debate even crossed the Atlantic and made its way into a plenary session of the German Bundestag where it was questioned whether the German state’s support for the parade was adequate in light of the recent incident and the revisionist attitude towards the German past that was allegedly promoted at the parade. In the end, Westphal had to publicly apologize to the organizing committee of the Steuben Parade and lost his job as chief editor of Der Aufbau.38 The 1990s marked a shift in the Steuben Society’s strategy of reclaiming a victim status. Whereas from 1945 until 1990, articles in the Steuben News mostly referred to the expulsion of ethnic Germans from former German territories in Eastern Europe, references to the internment of German Americans within the United States later served as a complementary strategy to contend a German victim status. According to Charles S. Maier, the discourse of victimization had become a crucial feature in US public life by the mid-1990s and resulted in a perverse logic of recognition politics

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on the part of ethnicities and other marginalized groups vying for the status of the most oppressed or victimized group.39 German American leaders joined the trend and endorsed the new rules that dictated how to ask for increased social recognition. In other words, whereas previously the ideological confrontation between the East and West or, differently put, capitalism versus communism, dominated the cultural and political setting that, in turn, determined the discursive strategies available for claiming a victim status, now human rights violations moved centre stage. And leaders of German American umbrella organizations quickly adapted to the new discursive framework and altered the German American narrative of victimization so as to inscribe it into the new paradigm. It is significant that the mid-1990s also marked the beginning of a period of increased public recognition for German Americans on the regional and national level, the hopes of German American leaders to achieve some greater visibility and a more positive representation of their ethnicity in the American memorial landscape finally materializing. As a consequence, many German American memorials were rededicated, several German American ethnic museums opened in various parts of the country, including the first national German American Heritage Museum of the United States in Washington, DC, in March 2010, and the Hermann Monument in New Ulm, Minnesota, was officially recognized by the US Congress in the year 2000 as a national symbol of the contributions of Americans of German descent to the United States.40 While it is by no means the sole factor, I would like to advance the thesis that there is a close connection between the evolution of German American recognition politics, with its comparatively late successes, and the way the Holocaust has been commemorated in the United States. Whereas the initial upsurge in German American ethnic consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s was most probably predominantly a result of the civil rights movement and the ensuing ethnic revival in American society as well as of the integration of Germany into the Western Alliance, the latest achievements of German American identity politics since the 1980s have also been influenced by changes in the status of the Holocaust in American life. The increased awareness of the Holocaust in American public memory since the 1970s may have paradoxically not prevented but, on the contrary, enabled and catalysed the recent successes of German American identity politics. Having been predominantly associated with the German war crimes for many decades, German Americans were at last able to redefine their collective identity in more positive terms not in spite of but precisely because of the growing significance of the Holocaust in American life, since the burden of Holocaust remembrance had shifted to the American public as a whole. The recognition of the Hermann Monument in New Ulm (Minnesota) by the US Congress as a national symbol of German American contributions to the United States in the year 2000 and the opening of the first national German American ethnic museum in Washington, DC, just a few blocks off the National Mall and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are merely two of the most prominent examples of the latest achievements of German American identity politics that suggest an interrelation between the American Holocaust discourse and the representations produced by German American institutions of their ethnic past.

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In fact, the struggle over the interpretation of the German past persists even today  — a struggle in which German American organizations keep participating. Germany’s image in the United States continues to be haunted by a lingering antagonism between German American organizations and US Holocaust institutions that often times produce conflicting memory cultures. In other words, German American organizations and US Holocaust institutions continue to compete for the interpretive power over the German past. To name only one example, the existence of the pro-Nazi German American Bund is not mentioned in the German American ethnic national museum in Washington, DC. In contrast, a few blocks away, in the USHMM the German American Bund receives ample discussion on the museum website where we can also find a general comment about rising anti-Semitism on a global scale, including Germany, ‘also in the lands where the Holocaust happened’.41 Whereas the German American ethnic museum opts for relinquishing unpleasant moments of German history from its narrative and stresses the image of a democratic, reformed ‘New Germany’, the USHMM, on the contrary, seems to put special emphasis on the legacy of the Nazi past and the on-going threat, potentially emerging even from a modern democratized Germany. Related to this observation is the idea mentioned earlier that, since the 1990s, German Americans have increasingly turned towards commemorating their own ethnic discrimination within the borders of the United States during the Second World War instead of relentlessly drawing attention to the expulsion of the Germans in Eastern Europe. This shift in commemorative practice, I argue, is a direct result of the end of the Cold War. As Walter Benn Michaels pointed out in his ‘The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the “End of History” ’, the end of the Cold War marked a final end of ideological debates that were superseded by postmodern debates over identity.42 Basing his argument on Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History’,43 which according to Fukuyama, had occurred after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Michaels both critiques Fukuyama’s exaggerated triumphalism and at the same time endorses Fukuyama’s idea that the end of the Cold War marked the victory of liberalism and liberal concepts of identity. According to Michaels, when liberalism ‘succeeds’ as an ideology, there is no longer a pressing need to juxtapose it with the competing ideologies of socialism or communism. As a consequence, identity — predominantly understood as an ethnic construct — emerges as a central category in relation to geo-politics. In other words, the relation of the past to the present is now defined via memorial as opposed to historical discourses. Applying this insight onto the history of reception of the Holocaust, it has thus been suggested that the end of the Cold War marked a paradigm shift in representations of the Holocaust because it dislocated mass murder from debates over history and ideology and framed it in the emerging discourses of memory and identity. The dynamic described is evident in the changing ways the Holocaust was discussed before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As Susanne Rohr and Andrew Gross argue in ‘Comedy-Scandal-Avantgarde. Remembering the Holocaust after the End of History’:44 Until 1989 the conflicting ideologies of the Cold War provided a convenient framework for both explaining the past and locating it in relation to the

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contemporary geopolitical situation. The West understood totalitarianism to be the culprit behind genocide, and pointed to the Soviet Union and the Gulag as its modern incarnations. The East characterized the concentration camps as a system of slave labor, and pointed to capitalism – and by extension the West – as its once and future cause. [...] The fall of the Berlin wall cut the Holocaust loose from its geopolitical moorings, so that it was no longer understood to be a symptom of capitalism or communism, but as a fundamental ‘Zivilisationsbruch’, calling into question our very means of representing it. Disaster went from being ‘over there’ to being everywhere and nowhere. The Holocaust no longer has a place within a Cold War history and geography, but in its very unsignifiability it has become a universal (and universally unspeakable) experience. (19–21)

This also explains why German Americans, up until 1989, were merely claiming a victim status for expelled Germans from former German territories in the East when claiming a German victim status as opposed to addressing their own discrimination because of the internment of approximately 11,000 Germans and German Americans by the American government on American soil during the Second World War.45 It was only when the Holocaust was freed from its fixed locus in a Cold War narrative and ethnic memory as opposed to political history became the norm for addressing the past, that German American ethnic leaders were enabled to foreground German Americans’ own ethnic victim status within the United States. Whereas Japanese Americans were not associated with the Holocaust and could thus successfully claim reparations for their unjustified discrimination during and after the Second World War as early as the late 1970s and 1980s, this commemorative strategy was not available to German American organizations, since German Americans continued to be associated with the Holocaust and were thus bearing a fair share of the burden of remembering the Holocaust in the United States. German American organizations thus had to follow the rhetorical rules and converse about the Holocaust in terms that located the Holocaust in the discourse of the Cold War. It was only in the early 1990s and with the paradigm shift from history and politics to memory and group identity, and thus an emergent, increasingly powerful human rights discourse, that German Americans gradually began to claim their own victim status in the United States by referring to some German Americans’ unjustified internment during the Second World War. Interestingly enough, several new German American organizations with explicit political goals have emerged since the turn of the twenty-first century. The effect is a fragmentation of German American identity politics. Long-established organizations like the Steuben Society of America have lately suffered severe membership loss, since many of their members passed away and not enough young people joined the association, which, in turn, led to a depoliticization of the Steuben Society’s agenda in recent years. Consequently, new, more radical organizations with specific political goals such as the German World Alliance that lobbies for human rights for Germans worldwide have emerged that continue to perpetuate German American identity politics. However, many German American leaders have memberships in more than one German American association. Marianne Bouvier, for example, is on the board of the German World Alliance, Executive Director of the Institute for German American

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Relations, and a member of the German American Joint Action Committee. In her various functions, she is at the forefront of a cross-organizational initiative that works towards a formal recognition of a German victim status during the First and Second World Wars.46 That such initiatives turn out to be successful becomes evident if one contemplates the more recent special exhibits that are being incorporated into US Holocaust museums, such as the one from the Spy Museum in Washington, DC, in which the internment of German Americans on US territory during the Second World War is explicitly talked about.47 The narrative of German Americans as victims of the Second World War thus seems to have gained in acceptance in US mainstream public culture, thereby echoing the ‘New German discourse of victimization’ that has begun to gain ground in the Federal Republic of Germany on the other side of the Atlantic and that legitimizes talk about German suffering during the Second World War, without – as many historians argue – contextualizing the fate of individual German histories of victimization enough; the narratives thus often times being highly problematic for bordering on historical revisionism. In spite of the tensions and controversies that induced German American organizations like the Steuben Society to take an outspoken stance against Holocaust commemoration events in the United States, the picture may be changing off late. In 2009, the Steuben Society supported the reintroduction of the Wartime Treatment Study Act – HR 1425 in the US Senate that was aimed at establishing ‘commissions to review the facts and circumstances surrounding injustices suffered by European Americans, European Latin Americans, and Jewish refugees during World War II’.48 Moreover, the German-American Heritage Foundation of the USA, the official successor organization of the United German-American Committee, together with the German Embassy in Washington, DC, has recently sponsored films at the Jewish Film Festival in DC that openly addressed the Second World War and the Holocaust as well as more general topics related to the theme of German atoning. Finally, I would like to briefly point out an incident that occurred at the Steuben Parade in New York in 2010. In 2010, for the first time in history, a single person with a banner advertising German Jewish American pride was part of the ceremony. One year later, in 2011, four people were marching to commemorate German Jewish contributions to America. In 2012, 2013 and 2014 the Jewish contingent entered the parade yet again.49 The Steuben Society of America’s politics of memory regarding the Second World War and the Holocaust, which has for a long time been marked by a defensive stance against any public mention and commemoration of the event, may thus ultimately be turning into a politics of reconciliation.

Notes 1

Jörg Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten im Krieg: ‘feindliche Ausländer’ und die amerikanische Heimatfront während des Ersten Weltkrieges (Hamburg: Hamburger Ed., 2000); Michael Wala, ‘Reviving Ethnic Identity: Foreign Office, Reichswehr, and German Americans during the Weimar Republic’, in Wolfgang Helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner (eds), German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative

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4

5 6 7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Perspective (Madison, WI: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, 2004), 326–342. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). In his monograph Michael Schuldiner examines the tensions, debates and controversies over the Holocaust between German American and Jewish American groups from 1933 to the early 1990s, see Michael Schuldiner, Contesting Histories: German and Jewish Americans and the Legacy of the Holocaust (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011). In spite of the many insights that the book undoubtedly offers, Schuldiner fails to consider the diverse positions existing vis-à-vis the Second World War not only between but also within the ‘two camps’, as Schuldiner conceptualizes the two groups of ‘German Americans’ and ‘Jewish Americans’. Such a homogenizing approach towards ethnic history of conflict fails to consider the high number of American Jews of German descent who do not fit Schuldiner’s binary logic and ultimately reduces a complex history of relations to a simple antagonism between two opposing camps. For a critique of Schuldiner’s work; see review of Jacob Eder, Sehepunkte 14 (2014), Vol. 12 [15 December 2014], available online: http:// www.sehepunkte.de/2014/12/24374.html (accessed 6 January 2015). Randall J. Ratje, ‘Part V: A Brief Outline of the History of the Steuben Society of America’, in The Official History of the Steuben Society of America: 1919 to 2009 (n.p.: Steuben Society of America, 2009), 1–18; 1. Steuben Society of America, Members page, available online: http://www. steubensociety.org/Members.htm (accessed 31 January 2015). Quoted in Schuldiner, Contesting Histories, 110. Figures on the Steuben Society of America’s exact current membership are unavailable. Gregory J. Kupsky, ‘The True Spirit of the German People’: German Americans and National Socialism, 1919–1955 (Ohio State University, 2010), 103–118, dissertation, available online: https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap:10:0::NO:10:P10_ETD_SUBID:71012 (accessed 10 January 2015). Ibid., 120–121. Hamilton Fish, ‘Legalized Murder Three Years after the War’, The Steuben News, March 1948, 4; William Henry Chamberlain, ‘Vengeance, Not Justice’, The Steuben News, June 1949, 3. This conclusion is based on an evaluation of all issues of the The Steuben News published from January to December 1961. Ratje, ‘Part V’, 3. Ibid., 4. Don Heinrich Tolzmann, German-American Achievements: 400 Years of Contributions to America (Bowie: Heritage Books, Inc., 2001), 121. Karin Stulz, ‘More “Holocaust” ’, The Steuben News, September/October 1979, 4. Otto Burgdorf, ‘Holocaust “A Hoax” ’, The Steuben News, November/December 1979, 4. Institute for Historical Review. Advertisement, The Steuben News, April 1980, 7. Karl T. Marx, ‘Peace in the Middle East: Reality or Dream?’ The Steuben News, May/ June 1979, 2. Karl T. Marx, ‘Salt II Signing Inspires Some Peppery Remarks’, The Steuben News, July/August 1979, 7. Ibid. Otto Burgdorf, ‘Steubenite Deplores Lack of Political Involvement’, The Steuben News, July/August 1980, 4.

How to Cope with It? 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34

35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

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Ilse Hoffmann, ‘Lay Holocaust to Rest Urges Writer’, The Steuben News, September/ October 1980, 4. ‘Captive Nations Week Recalls Suffering of East Germans’, The Steuben News, September/October 1979, 1. Ibid. Karl T. Marx, ‘Is Justice Blind?’ The Steuben News, April 1985, 2. German American National Political Action Committee (GANPAC). Advertisement, The Steuben News, April 1985, 7. ‘Unit Renamed in Honor of Dr. App’ The Steuben News, November 1985, 3. Don Heinrich Tolzmann, German-American Achievements: 400 Years of Contributions to America (Bowie: Heritage Books, Inc., 2001), 122. Karl T. Marx, ‘Witness to a Historic Occasion’, The Steuben News, November 1987, 1. German American National Congress, ‘About DANK’, available online: http://www. dank.org/history/ (accessed 12 January 2015). Marx, ‘Witness to a Historic Occasion’. The Steuben News, November 1987, 1. Stanley Rittenhouse. Letter to members, 28 September 1987. Historical Society of Greater Washington, D.C. MS. 536, German American Heritage Society of Greater Washington, D.C., Collection, container 4, folder 83. Ilse Hoffmann, ‘How 4th Annual German-American Day Was Celebrated in Washington’, The Steuben News, November 1990, 1. Karl T. Marx, ‘Holocaust Museum’, The Steuben News, February 1993, 4. Shlomo Shafir, Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany Since 1945 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 352; Jacob Eder, “Holocaust-Erinnerung als deutsch-amerikanische Konfliktgeschichte: Die bundesdeutschen Reaktionen auf das United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.”, in Jan Eckel and Claudia Moisel (eds.), Universalisierung des Holocaust? Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik in internationaler Perspektive (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 109-134. Marc Fisher. “The Rewriting on the Wall?”, The Washington Post, 24 July 1994, G1. Don Heinrich Tolzmann, letter to Dr. James Billington, n.d. Historical Society of Greater Washington, D.C. MS. 536, German American Heritage Society of Greater Washington, D.C., Collection, container 3, folder 68. Karl T. Marx, ‘Holy Grail’, The Steuben News, November 1995, 8. Maria Kühn-Ludewig, ‘Zweimal Aufbau – unerfreulich’, Neuer Nachrichtenbrief der Gesellschaft für Exilforschung e.V, 7 (June 1996), 8–9; 8. Charles S. Maier, ‘A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy and Denial’, History and Memory, 5 (1993), 136–151; 138. Julia Lange, Herman the German: Das Hermann Monument in der deutschamerikanischen Erinnerungskultur (Münster: LIT, 2013), 103. ‘About the Museum’, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, available online: http://www.ushmm.org/museum/about/ (accessed 28 December 2010). Walter Ben Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, 16 (Summer 1989), 3–18. Andrew Gross and Susanne Rohr, Comedy – Avant-Garde – Scandal. Remembering the Holocaust after the End of History (Heidelberg: Winter, 2010). The overwhelming majority of the interned people of German ancestry were German nationals. Only a small number of the interned German ethnics were US citizens,

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Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond that is either naturalized or native-born, and would thus formally be subsumed unter the term ‘German Americans’ (as opposed to ‘Germans’). For a critique of the early scholarly literature published on the topic of the German American internment in the mid-1990s, see Jeffrey L. Sammons’ review, ‘Were German-Americans Interned during World War II? A Question concerning Scholarly Standards and Integrity’, The German Quarterly, 71, 1 (Winter 1998), 73–77. ‘Letters from IGAR Demand Public Acknowledgement of Atrocities Commited against German Citizens During & After WW2 by Soviets’, The Steuben News, November/December 2004, available online: http://steubensociety.org/News/ NovDec2004.htm (accessed 10 January 2015). “Spies, Traitors and Saboteurs: Fear and Freedom in America.” Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, Skokie, IL. Special exhibition, created by the International Spy Museum, on display from 15 July 2012 to 6 January 2013. German American Internee Coalition, ‘Wartime Treatment Study Act’, available online: http://www.gaic.info/ShowPage.php?section=Legislative_ Efforts&page=Wartime_Treatment_Study_Act (accessed 10 January 2015). Originally introduced as the European Americans and Refugees Wartime Treatment Study Act in 2001, the renamed Wartime Treatment Study Act has been introduced for the fourth time in 2009 at the beginning of the 111th Congress. So far it never came to a vote in either the House of Representatives or the Senate. Rick Landman, ‘Is It Too Soon for a Jewish Contingent in the Steuben Parade?’, infotrue.com, 21 September 2013, available online: http://www.infotrue.com/ vonsteuben.html (accessed 9 January 2015). Landman bemoans the reluctance of German Jewish institutions in America to actively support his initiative which resulted in his walking in the parade by himself in 2013 and 2014.

Afterword: Hauntings and Revisitings Lisa Appignanesi

Disturbing Pasts, the richly textured subject of this volume, has long been a personal and intellectual preoccupation of mine. It colours my fiction and non-fiction alike. You could even say that memory and its overt and ghostly transmissions, as well as the way the past is disturbed every time you root around in individual or collective roots, is something of a family business. But then, forgetting and remembering is a family matter for all immigrants. Nation builders, commissioners of monuments, of political agendas, memorials and memoirs, have a part in it too. In one of my recent novels, The Memory Man, set around the millennium, the aging hero, Bruno Lind, a memory or neuroscientist of some renown is invited to Vienna, the city of his birth from which, as a Jew, he had been chased away as a child back at the time of the Anschluss. He has been invited back to Vienna to give a keynote address at an international conference of memory researchers. He works on the plaques and materials that probably create the forgetting disease, Alzheimer’s, as well as on those drugs that might enhance cognition. Bruno speculates that the city fathers, having long conveniently forgotten him, have now remembered him because they have particular uses they want memory to be put to. These are not only scientific. The conference has an ‘only slightly hidden political intent’ and he will allude to that in his remarks. Keeper of the new analogue neurosteroids that promised so much for the ageing individual’s cognitive powers, he had been brought here to prod Austria’s sluggish, often faulty, collective memory into action. Or at least to make it appear to the rest of Europe that Austria wanted to prod at it a little herself, so as to become an acceptable member of the wider European and world community.

Part of that ‘prodding’ has to do with the country acknowledging that it was not solely a victim of Nazi annexation, but a willing collaborator. Austria, Bruno muses, needs to cease to hide behind its victim status: in other words, it needs to acknowledge its collusion in wartime atrocities and the theft of never returned properties. Only with an agreed upon ‘memory’ that takes account of what has been suppressed is there a genuine possibility of community. That entails disturbing the past. But events, an accident in front of the old family home, collude to make Bruno late for his conference address. His own memory has suddenly become uncontrollable, spurred by once familiar places. He begins to wonder whether he has really travelled to his childhood home to serve as the subject of his own memory experiment.

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A scientist’s ultimate challenge had always been to test his hypotheses by performing his experiments on himself. If he travelled the byways of his past, he could assess whether new memories cropped up, and by what they were triggered, see too whether old recollections were altered, and decay had set in ... or perhaps decay had already set in and he could no longer monitor himself.

Memory, as the memory scientists now all attest, does not exist like some vast storehouse in which the contents are never altered. Its objects, its scenes, film reels and photographs are subject to decay. Various rememberings will recall each event differently, perhaps also shift, sift and distort these scenes depending on the emotions in play, and thus re-inflect the scenes for future rememberings. What triggers the recall also colours the memory and gives it varying intensity. Then, too, in the brain, there is no easy way of distinguishing between a memory based on lived experience and a borrowed memory lived in fantasy, imaginatively or virtually. Watching say the Twin Towers tragedy or concentration camp atrocities at one remove and experiencing them results in the same patterns of activation in the brain  – when recalled. (Something Freud predicted, you might say, from his reminiscing patients on the couch.) Although there is no direct, simple translation here from personal memory into collective history and history’s own form of rewritings, it’s quite clear that collective recollections also emerge for different uses, whether in the interest of contemporary political expedience, nation building, war mongering or the diktats of power. We may not go as far as the total re-writings, distortions or lies that various forms of Stalinism can be prone to. But in order to build a contemporary feminist movement, say, we need to unearth buried or forgotten parts of women’s history. Gays, nationalists, Eurosceptics, Poles and Serbs ... all engage in similar processes of historical remembering and reconfiguration of a prior historical agreement. For instance, it was only after 1990 and the fall of Communism, which had written its own triumphalist history of the Second World War, that the Poles were able properly to excavate the part the Polish resistance had played, and to memorialize ‘heroes’ effectively occluded by the post-war civil war and the Soviet ascendancy. Of course, this in turn can result in re-inflections that hide or repress parts of the past. The punning title of this volume, Disturbing Pasts, could of course refer, in our post-Freudian age, to every human experience. For Freud, a near neighbour of my Memory Man hero, all pasts are disturbing. They are filled with the wishes and fears of the child, ever vulnerable to the terrors of (family) life, as he progresses into adulthood: forbidden wishes and acts that induce guilt and perhaps displace it, murderous desires and fantasies, the breach of taboos, envious or envied siblings, the heartache of displacement or loss – these are the common matter of early childhood. Luckily, you might say, it’s all forgotten if not necessarily overtly repressed by the very fact of growing up and growing into language. So we all have disturbing and disturbed pasts, though we may eventually remember them with compassionate understanding or even nostalgia. You may think this recourse to Freud is just a Central European trope. But Christopher Robin in the sweet wonders of the Hundred Acre Wood came from the

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pen of the same A.A. Milne, as James James Robertson Robertson Weatherby George Dupree who at the age of three loses his mother to the horrors at the end of the town, where she wanders off without consulting her little oedipal son. I mention Freud because he is, of course, one of the early thinkers about the past and the ways in which it shapes the individual present, about the distortions and pitfalls of memory and how it configures who we are, whether unwittingly or consciously. In his wonderful book, Re-Writing the Soul (1995), The philosopher of science, Ian Hacking, asks why so many of our present projects are organized in terms of memory; why memory has become an approach to so many of the problems of life from childrearing to patriotism, from aging to anxiety. He hypothesizes that the whole subject of memory and how or why and the ways we remember the past and attribute significance to it took on new moment in the latter part of the nineteenth century when a scientific world view and secularization were spreading. William James, Jean Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, Freud, Proust are only a few of the greats of that period to see in memory a way through which individual identity is constructed. With scientific, literary, philosophical and medical attention given to it, memory becomes the new site of soul. The past becomes the ‘container’ of a psychological trauma, a lesion of the soul that needs repair or assuagement or redress. And both the individual and the collective take on their identity, are constituted by memories – the memories of our forebears, our ethnicities, our cultural and genetic inheritance. ... a new science, a purported knowledge of memory, quite self-consciously was created in order to secularize the soul. Science had hitherto been excluded from study of the soul itself. The new sciences of memory came into being in order to conquer that resilient core of Western thought and practice. That is the bond that connects, under the heading of memory, all those different kinds of knowledge and rhetoric ... When the family falls apart, when parents abuse their children, when incest obsesses the media, when one people tries to destroy another, we are concerned with defects of the soul. But we have learned how to replace the soul with knowledge, with science. Hence spiritual battles are fought, not on the explicit ground of the soul, but on the terrain of memory, where we suppose that there is such a thing as knowledge to be had.1

We are in a moment such as this now. Our disturbing pasts pre-occupy or haunt us: from the holocaust and other genocides to wartime rape and forced migration, to child abuse, remembered sexual assaults and past harassments that disturb the present, all cluster into this domain of memory and have a widely disseminated discourse of trauma to legitimate the trouble stirred. Meanwhile our neuroscientists explore not only how and why we remember but why we forget and that ultimate forgetting disease, Alzheimer’s. It’s as if our computers those ultimate memory tools have got us worried about their human counterparts: they perform the task of remembering so well, that they seem to rob us of our own ability. It’s interesting to pause and reflect why Freud became so pre-occupied with ‘disturbing pasts’ and the whole conundrum of remembering (consciously and unconsciously)

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and forgetting; why he saw his early hysterics as suffering from their reminiscences, in other words how their symptoms – coughs, tics, muteness, paralyses  – were the expressions of buried disturbances or conflicts from the past. We could postulate that Freud – who is after all the thinker who effectively taught the twentieth century and so far our own, too, how to think autobiographically and construct narratives of our lives – had good reason to construct his own self-narrative around a disturbed past. And just consider how emblematic a narrative it is for the twentieth century, a century of dispossession and movements of peoples. As a child, the first of eight, Freud was wrenched from an early country idyll in Moravia (now Czechoslovakia, then an outpost of Austrian Empire) and transplanted into the poverty of a multi-ethnic capital. He lost his first home and language – or languages if you throw Yiddish into the brew. No wonder that early country childhood, for all its poverty, felt paradisial. He was a migrant from a despised people – the Jews – whom custom contemned and laws ostracized, so that even when a new liberalism prevailed, shades of this nether status troubled. In The Interpretation of Dreams – that modernist classic of an autobiography, Freud’s very own A La Recherche du temps perdu, in which he reflects on memories, dreams, desires, sexual and other ambitions, all in the wake of his father’s death and the mourning it casts him into – he tells the story of when as a small boy he was walking through the streets of Vienna with his dad, and a passer-by knocked his father’s hat off his head. Instead of behaving like the lordly, all-powerful father little Siggy considered him, Papa Freud docilely picked up his hat and walked on. He didn’t fight back ... So little Siggy dreamt of becoming a Hannibal – that great Carthaginian and hence Semitic general who marched his troops across the Alps to conquer northern Italy – instead of a cowardly Jew like his father. I mention all this because it seems to me that in many respects – not all that often stated – Freud’s own narrative and the psychoanalytic thinking that came out of it, is a crucially modern narrative of dispossession and migration. The movement of people from country to city that accompanied Freud’s youth, and the twentieth-century mass movement of people displaced by war or economic hardship, may be one of the reasons that Freudian ideas still carry sway. More and more of us are haunted by disturbed pasts that can sometimes (amidst the prejudice of new lands) mask themselves as lost paradises – if only the paradise of a childhood with parents, or a time before conflicting desires, occupiers, civil war and genocide. Through the work of memory, this past may, of course, show itself to be not as paradisial as all that and in some intricate way responsible for present ills.

My own work of memory began around the turn of the century and led to my family memoir Losing the Dead. Both my parents were Polish Jews, born respectively in 1915 and 1917. They were newly married and had a two-month-old child, my brother, when the Second World War broke out. By a mixture of wit, cunning and great good luck, they managed to get

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through the war years in Poland, survive the Nazi occupation, the race laws and the ghettos. Somehow they avoided ending up in the death camps where many of their relatives perished. They masqueraded as Poles, changed their names often, lived apart, though at times with my maternal grandmother who insisted on keeping the Sabbath. They watched various members of their families die in the typhoid epidemics that swept small towns. Others simply disappeared. They came out scathed, marked if you like, but only in those ways that are not immediately visible, certainly not visible to their children. I decided to work on a memoir for many reasons. All books are to a certain extent over-determined. The political or collective reason, you might say, is that I had grown worried by the then politics of Jewishness and the Second World War. I was uncomfortable with what I understood as a largely American discourse that made the children of so-called survivors – a collective noun my parents only used for the survivors of natural disasters – preternaturally damaged by their parents’ experience or indeed the collective experience of Jews. The many varieties of this experience were subsumed in the word Holocaust. The Holocaust in turn had acquired an aura of piety; had become something like an object of worship. So big, so hideous, so sacred, so immoveable, the Holocaust took on a hegemonic effect and subsumed much of the rest of Jewish experience. It nullified any other particular experience of the war years that Jews might have had. It was the worst, an absolute. Of course, it was unquestionably Europe at its nadir. But other war experiences did exist. As a writer, a novelist, it’s the particularity of experience that fires the imagination. It also fills out the historical record. With my historian’s hat on, I was worried about the aura of piety that surrounded the Holocaust. Not only did it discourage difficult questions, it also seemed to generate wound envy, so that all kinds of other collectivities began to mass around competing wounds and wrongs suffered – from slavery for American blacks, to the Nanking Massacre for Chinese Americans. The piety also often brought in its train an unwillingness to think critically about Israel, whose founding myth redeems the Holocaust through the bold struggle of creating the new nation. But one doesn’t write memoirs or indeed novels for those kinds of generalizing political reasons. Rather they grow out of individual experience. The experience that precipitated mine was what we understood at that time to be my mother’s dotage. This expressed itself in innumerable phone calls, various strange hallucinations and acts, as well as war-time stories repeated over and over. The stories themselves had grown fetishized in the course of her life and thinner than they had once been. Core amongst her repeated hallucinations was that she would see her heroic lost brother everywhere. He had disappeared during the war years, having saved according to story a great many people including my mother, father and brother. We’d be watching television en famille and she would point, say, to a news commentator and excitedly exclaim, ‘There! There’s my brother. Phone the BBC. Quick’. ‘Oh gran’, my children would respond. ‘That can’t be him. He’s too young.’ My mother would insist, and only after much persuasion acquiesce, ‘well, maybe it’s his son’ and still urge contact with the broadcaster.

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Here’s how – in Losing the Dead – I conceived of my sudden need to explore the parental past I had stopped paying attention to long, long ago in the midst of adolescent rebellion: It can hardly be coincidental that I want to remember, to uncover, to know, at the moment when my last gateway to family memory – my mother – is losing hers. Her bewilderment, as I try to press her on facts and dates which are always just out of her reach, is painful. She can only return and return again to what she has already told me, scraps of unruly experience which refuse the consecutive shape of story. Her memory has taken on the randomness of dream, unconstrained by any order or external prodding. Keeping pace with the increasing limitations of her daily life, it has also grown poorer in detail, so that I have to fill in from previous tellings the gaps in hers. Many still remain and have to be leapt over like holes in a worn pavement. Sometimes her body remembers more than her mind: she will look up at me from eyes that are still deeply blue and strike a coquettish pose as if she were addressing some ghostly admirer whose name and face and place have long vanished. I can read more from these startling gestures than from her words. She talks often to her father and to mine, she tells me, as if one could phone the dead on a daily basis, but too often they speak to her only of the weather. Perhaps in her dotage – that nice word which takes a cup of tea to senility and wraps a scarf round the cold throat of Alzheimer’s – she has finally become English. It is to anchor myself against the rudderless ship of her mind, that I finally decide to write all this down. Writing has to entail some kind of order, even if the voyage into the past is always coloured by invention. Memory is also a form of negotiation. There is more. In an act of reparation – since I am a bad daughter who refuses her mother both her present and much of her presence – I would like to give my mother’s past back to her, intact, clear, with all its births and deaths and missing persons in place. The task, I know is impossible. The dead are lost. But maybe, nonetheless, it makes a difference if by remembering them we lose them properly.2

The process of conceiving, structuring and writing the book wasn’t easy. I have to confess I was very reluctant to go into a terrain I’d always shunned. Nor am I one of the world’s natural confessors of family intimacies. My daughter and I started by asking my mother to write down what she remembered. It was an attempt both to give her something to do and to structure her narratives. What we hadn’t realized was that her decline was too far-gone. She could only talk to listeners, to that living attention that is a long way from the blank page. So I made a kind of list of her wartime stories and started doing research to try and flesh out the family’s individual path and see where it coincided with what was generally agreed. In

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other words, I started to marry memory with history, the various stages of occupation, the Nazi rules, the particular ghettos, the camps and so on. Then I went to Poland to see what documentation I could unearth and to visit the sites of parental memory. I had lived in Poland, but only until the age of two, so apart from the occasional smell I had no memories of my own. But you never know what being surrounded by the language itself might stir. Despite the research, despite the detective game of chasing ever-receding documents, despite the fleshing out of my mother’s stories, the material wouldn’t gel into a book I felt I wanted to write ... It took me a while to realize that for me the path into memory and history was to explore the reverberations of family experience as they played themselves out on my brother’s and my childhood. In other words, I needed to investigate the myths and hauntings that make up family life. I started to think about my own childhood, sometimes even remember scenes. It was a childhood I had never been particularly interested in. I had always considered it boring in its Canadian ordinariness. Beneath the boredom, there was discomfort. My parents were after all immigrants. They didn’t belong. After the war and its difficult aftermath in Poland, they had gone to France where nuns, who dot this very Jewish story taught me a very proper Parisian. Then we had all moved to Canada. Like all immigrants, my parents brought their disturbing past with them. In the Preface to the Polish Edition of Losing the Dead, I wrote: Displacement from one language and culture into another, an experience so very common in our centuries of migration, always has resonances down the generations. Children grow up Janus-faced. One face looks back into a parental past mired in a confusion of memories and forgettings, often scarred by the wounds the worst of life brings. The other face refuses that history for a future resolute with belongings. Both carry a quota of the imaginary. Losing the Dead was my way of navigating through the shoals and rapid, let alone the whirlpools of that past and arriving at some kind of plateau of relative equanimity.

So Losing the Dead turned out to be a book about transgenerational hauntings, about disturbed pasts and the transmission of memory: the way in which repeated parental habits that may look inconsequential and seem to a child odd and inexplicable, actually shape life and contain hidden or silenced meaning. The book finally found its form when I realized that my father, who had died some twenty years before, played a crucial part in the story – though he was the silent one and my mother the storyteller. As in every marriage, my father and mother had distinct, sometimes competing, points of view. They also inevitably lived a gendered – an embodied – war. It made their experiences very different. Apart from that fear-inducing wartime mark of male difference, circumcision, my father was dark, my mother blonde. Such matters of appearance in the racial context of Nazism were a matter of life and death. Even when their lives became easier, indeed successful, their attitudes and habits were marked by a kind of wartime substratum, what they had internalized during the terrors of war. Some of this, they passed down to their children.

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By probing such questions, by pitting history against memory in my family memoir, I, of course, disturbed their disturbing past. It was interesting to me that once I had done my research and begun on the book, my mother never wanted to talk about it all again. Nor, in the event, could she read the book she herself had always wanted me to write. I don’t know that she would have approved of some of my analyses. Though I think she would have been touched by the fact that her grandson made a film, Ex Memoria, inspired by her past and her fate in those last years when the forgetting disease took her over. And I think, like all people who live through war, she would have been pleased to know that her everyday acts are here and there remembered for their heroism.

Notes 1 2

Ian Hacking, Re-writing the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 16. Lisa Appignanesi, Losing the Dead (London: Virago/Little Brown, new edition 2014).

Index Note: Locators with ‘n’ denote note numbers. Σταυρός του Νότου (Koutras) 10 n.5 Γραμμές Των Οριζόντων (Papakonstantinou) 11 n.5 ‘Επιμνημόσυνη γονυκλισία Στους εκτελεσμένους του Διστόμου’ (Vrettakos) 11 n.5 Aantjes, W. 63 n.44 Abendschau (TV news) 66 Abrams, Lynn 12 n.21, 236, 248 n.26 Abzug, Robert H. 44 n.1 Adenauer, Konrad 16, 149, 185 Adenauer–de Gaulle Prize 185 Adolf, die Nazi-Sau (Moers) 165 Adorno, Theodor 163, 176 nn.11–12, 181, 184, 194 n.2, 195 n.13 Agamben, Giorgio 100 n.6 agency 23–5, 27, 88, 167, 175, 242 ‘agents’ 6–8, 67, 87, 251 Ahonen, Pertti 177 n.31, 177 n.34 Aini, Leah 87, 101 n.19, 102 n.21 air raids 39, 72, 116–17, 144, 199 Aktion Oder-Neiße e.V. 221 Aktion T4 66, 69 Albert, G. 25 alcohol 218, 229 n.19 Alex, H. 22, 25–6 Alexander I of Yugoslavia 153 alienation 51, 170, 206, 232 n.78 Allan, Elizabeth A. 153 Allan, Robert 153 Allied atrocity film screenings German civilians’ reactions to 40–4 Nuremberg defendants’ reactions to 36, 38 POWs’ responses to 34, 36, 38–40 Allied bombings 48, 114, 116–17, 166, 199, 204–5 Allied occupation 33–4, 40, 43, 205, 220

Allied re-education efforts 8, 33–44, 58 Allied war crimes 39–40, 42 Almagor, Gila 104 n.43 Almog, Ruth 100, 106 n.67 Alps 201, 268 Aly, Götz 30 n.7, 79 n.7, 81 n.23 Alzheimer’s disease 135, 265, 267, 270 Am Beispiel meines Bruders (Timm) 178 n.40 Améry, Jean 164, 176 n.21 Am Spiegelgrund reformatory 74 Amsterdam 47, 49, 54 And the Rat Laughed (Semel) 99 animalistic status of prisoners 20–2, 169 anti-authoritarianism 66 anti-communism 149, 254 anti-fascism 16, 28, 39, 111, 116, 146, 221 anti-Semitism 23, 38, 54, 59, 108–9, 112–13, 117–18, 125–6, 128–9, 132, 135, 144–5, 165, 177, 222, 230 n.40, 231 n.72, 235, 253, 256, 259 anxieties 3, 71, 85–6, 90, 94, 162, 164–5, 167, 267 Apel, Linde 231 n.70 App, Austin 255 Appelfeld, Aharon 102 n.25, 103 n.38, 105 n.62 Appignanesi, Lisa 265–72 architecture, Nazi 184 archives 6, 52, 57–8, 64 n.45, 88, 95, 103 n.33, 112, 117, 129, 143, 148, 154, 156, 217 Archives Testify 148, 152–3 Arendt, Hannah 26, 43, 46 n.33 Argentina 93, 113 art 8–9, 108, 125, 132, 145, 161–4, 171, 173, 182–6, 189–90, 192–4, 195 nn.14–15

274

Index

Art, David 122 n.56 a-socials 28 assimilation 50–1, 167 Assmann, Aleida 5–6, 11 n.14, 11 nn.16–19, 117, 122 n.52 Assmann, Jan 5–6, 11 nn.14–15 Associated-Rediffusion 148–50, 152 asylums 68 Athens 1, 10 n.5 Atlantic Ocean 145, 252–3, 261 atrocities 3, 8–9, 15, 27, 33–6, 38–42, 45 n.11, 78, 98, 109, 114, 116, 126, 154, 156, 164, 168, 174, 219, 254, 265–6 atrocity films 8, 33. See also Allied atrocity film screenings as Allied ‘propaganda’ 39, 42 American production 36, 45 n.19 Auschwitz 20, 23, 25–7, 46 n.29, 49, 55–6, 92, 107, 111, 115, 135, 154, 161–3, 165, 215–27, 229 n.19, 230 n.43, 245, 254 austerity 200 Austria Anschluss/annexation with Germany (1938) 117–20, 145, 265 anti-Semitism 108–9, 112–13 Austrian Freedom Party 113 Austrian People’s Party 108–9 complicity in the Holocaust 118–19 Declaration of Independence 117 euthansia killing centres 69 ‘first victim of Hitlerite aggression’ 107, 110 German tourists visiting 199, 201, 208 Jewish community 107–8, 113, 117 national identity 107, 113 protest movement 108 support to Western Allies 110 Waldheim affair 107–10 in Schindel’s Der Kalte 110–23 Austrian Alps 201 autobiographies 38, 47, 57, 64 n.45, 65–81, 87, 100, 102 n.29, 103 n.37, 104 n.43, 108–9, 131, 134, 200, 268 Avigur-Rotem 101 n.12 Avot, Yeshurun 85, 100 n.1

Bachmann, Ingeborg 188, 190–4, 196 n.40 Bader, Katarina 228 n.5, 229 n.19 Bakhtin, Mikhail 97, 131, 139 n.16 Balkans 109, 212 bankruptcy 243 Baram, Nir 104 n.41 Barbash, Benny 88, 93–6, 98, 100 n.8, 101 n.12, 102 n.31, 104 n.45 barbed wire 118 Bar-On, Daniel 30 n.3, 31 n.38, 105 n.64 Barthou, Louis 153 basic goods 49–50 Bavaria 257 BBC 150, 269 Beckermann, Ruth 117–18, 122 n.57, 123 n.59, 123 n.61 Behrens, Alexander 229 n.34 Beilein, Matthias 120 n.6, 120 n.8, 121 n.18 Belgium 48–9, 62 n.6, 63 n.17 Beller, Steven 121 n.19 Belsen 154, 157 Benedict, Ruth 19, 30 n.8, 44 n.5 Benjamin, Walter 167, 174, 178 n.42, 182 Berg, Mary 22, 31 n.21 Bergen-Belsen 25, 158 Berlin American sector 36 Junge Gemeinde group 226, 228 n.14 memorial landscape 28, 69 shame and shaming 40–1 Sühnezeichen activists 221, 224 Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder) 169 Berlin Wall 199, 259–60 Bernburg euthanasia killing centre 76 Bernhard, Thomas 110, 122 n.44 Bernstein, Michael André 239, 249 n.36 Bernstein, Victor 45 n.16 Berserk, P. 61 n.1 Besetzungen (Occupations; Kiefer) 184–8, 191–3, 195 n.23 Besmette Jeugd (Tames) 51, 57, 63–4 n.45 Betlejewski, Rafał 139 n.14 Bettauer, Hugo 144 Bettelheim, Bruno 24, 31 n.15, 31 n.28 Biess, Frank 30 n.2 Bijzonder Gerechtshof 63 n.28

Index bilateral agreements 199, 256 biographies 66, 70, 80 n.19, 99, 185, 189, 191, 233–4, 245, 248–9 n.34 Bird, Stephanie 1–12, 161–79 Birkenau 161, 217 Biro, Matthew 195 n.18 Blaauwendraad-Doorduijn, Duke 61 n.1 ‘black’ 40 black comedy 164 Blacker, Uilleam 9, 125–40 blackmail 51, 59 black market 21, 168 blame/incrimination 18, 24, 26, 55, 60, 92, 150, 244 Bloch, Ernst 181, 188, 190–1 Bloomaulorden (award) 65 Blumepeter (legend) 65–6 Blumepeterfest 65 Blumepeter monument 65 Boetia 1 Bogner, Konrad 209, 214 n.39 Böhlau Verlag 233 Böhmen liegt am Meer (Bohemia Lies on the Sea; Bachmann) 191 Bolsheviks 173, 254 bomb shelter 72, 116 book burnings of May 1933 181, 183 Błoński, Jan 131, 139 n.19 Böll Stiftung, Heinrich 233 Boulting Brothers 145 bourgeois capitalism 168 Bourke-White, Margaret 43, 44 n.1, 46 n.31 Bouvier, Marianne 260 Boym, Svetlana 127, 139 n.6 Brandenburg euthanasia killing centre 67, 75–7 Brandt, Willy 220–1, 229 n.24, 254 bread 22–4 Britain Cabinet 146 during Cold War 143, 149, 158 Communist Party 145, 149–51 Conservative Party 143 German embassy 149, 153 German tourists visiting 201 occupation zones in Germany 148 POWs 46 n.21, 201 and US relations 148

275

British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) 143–58 British Board of Film Classification 143 British censorship of anti-Nazi films/ projects 143–60 BBFC’s attitude to censorship 143–58 Diary for Anne Frank, A 153–8 Europe’s Fateful Hour 147 Holiday on Sylt 148–52 Operation Teutonic Sword 152–3 British Board of Film Classification 143 certificates 152–5, 157 Independent Television Authority (ITA) 143, 148–9 invitations to self-censorship 150 prompted by Foreign Office 143–4, 146–50 British-Soviet Friendship Society 148 Brokken, Corry 61 n.1 Brooks, Mel 165 Brooks, Peter 167, 176 n.18 Brown, D.D. 149–50 Brunel, Adrian 145 brutalities 1–2, 20–1, 48, 54, 60, 109, 199, 203, 212, 218, 254 Buber, Martin 189–91, 194 Buchenwald 145, 157 Buck-Zerchin, Dorothea 79 n.9 Bukovina 233–49 German-Jewish experiences 237–45 historical background 234–7 multicultural society 234–6 Nazism 235 bullying 57–8, 75, 94, 104 n.52 Bunzl, Matti 120 n.8, 123 n.62 bureaucracy 53, 75, 77 Burg, Josef 246–7 n.3 Burgdorf, Otto 254, 262 n.16, 263 n.21 Burgtheater, Austria 110, 114, 116 Burleigh, Michael 80 n.12 Calinescu, Matei 176 n.8 camp life 19–23 ‘Campo dei Fiori’ (Miłosz) 131 Canada 172, 210, 271 capitalism 16, 168, 258–60 Captive Nations Week, US 254 Caro, Klara 31 n.26

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Index

Caruth, Cathy 101 n.11, 138 n.4 casual sex 72 Catholic 48, 52, 108, 129–30, 136–7, 173, 217, 220, 229 n.27, 229 n.29 Caven, Hannah 157, 160 n.43 Celan, Paul 162, 184, 190–2, 194 cemetery 41, 125, 130, 156, 200, 255–6 Central Europe 126, 139 n.9, 219, 235, 244, 266 Cervik, Karl 80 n.23 Chamberlain, William Henry 143, 147, 262 n.9 Chamberlin, Brewster 44 n.1 Charcot, Jean Martin 267 Chernivtsi 233. See Czernowitz Chernovtsy 245 Chicago 129, 252–3 children abuse of 76, 267 books 76 bullied in school 57–8, 73–5 degradation of 20, 59, 74–5 euthanasia 67–9 excruciating experiences 26 in foster care 74 gassing of 97 Holocaust memory 130, 134–6 impact of parents’ wartime deeds 57–60 intelligence tests 73 of perpetrators 25–8, 47, 49–53, 57–61, 64 n.45, 271 sent to reformatories 74, 76–7 sexually abused 74 survivors 1–2, 25, 56, 71, 87, 90–100, 104 n.50 testimonies 57–60 therapeutic work with 87 welfare service support 76 Chile 226, 232 n.77 China 148 Chinese Americans 269 Chinese censorship 181 CID Subcommittee on Censorship, UK 146 Cieraad, Piet 52–3 City Without Jews 144 civic activists 125 civil rights 252, 258 civil society 60, 108, 119, 215–16, 220–1

Claasen, Elisabeth (Elisabeth Herrmann) 67, 71–3, 75–8 clothes, camp 20–1, 76–7, 118, 186, 242 Coates, Paul 170, 178 n.49 codes of conduct 21 coercive sterilization 67, 69 Coldewey, Gaby 234, 246–7 nn.1–2, 247 nn.5–7, 248 n.31 Cold War 50, 110, 143, 149, 157–8, 171, 208, 216, 236, 252–4, 259–60 collective guilt 33–4, 44 ‘collective history’ 183, 266 collective identity 23, 236, 258 collective memory, notion of 4–7, 10, 43, 97, 236–7, 265 Assmann’s approach 5–6 Halbwachs’s insight 4–5 Comecon countries 199 comedy representation of suffering 161–79 in Fassbinder’s films 167–70 in Kertész’s work 161–2 in Koepp’s films 170–4 pleasure at others’ pain 161–7 ‘Comedy-Scandal-Avantgarde. Remembering the Holocaust after the End of History’ (Rohr and Gross) 259–60 communicative memory 5 communism 48, 50, 133, 166, 173, 258–60, 266 ‘communities of asking’ 246 communities of connection 16–17, 26, 28–9 communities of experience 7, 10, 15–17, 19, 29, 237 communities of identification 17, 237 ‘communities of knowledge’ 246 ‘communities of telling’ 246 compassion 23, 91, 93, 98, 161, 266 comrades 15, 53, 168 concentration camps 21, 28, 33, 36–9, 43, 58, 91, 94, 110–11, 113, 135, 156, 158, 161, 216, 224, 260, 266 confessions 22, 34, 40–1, 270 Confino, Alon 203, 213 n.19 congenital diseases 65 Connerton, Paul 11 n.13 conspiracy 36

Index contemporary history (Zeitgeschichte) 6 coping 73 corporal punishment 97 Cosgrove, Mary 11 n.20, 171, 178 n.53 coup d’etat 226 ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’ (travelling exhibition) 28 Critchley, Simon 179 n.67 Crofts, Frank 154 Crote, Georg 11 n.20 cultural collections 5 cultural memory 5–7, 137–8, 182 cultural representations 2–3, 5, 9, 166, 178 n.40 Cummings, A.J. 147 Cyprus 109 Czechoslovakia 147, 199, 268 Czernin, Hubertus 109, 121 n.23 Czernowitz/Cernăuți 113, 127, 171, 173, 233–6, 240, 242, 244 Dachau 43, 108, 113 Dagen, Philippe 195 n.15 Dagmar, D. 119, 120 n.12, 121 n.14, 206 Daily Express 157 Daily Telegraph 157 Damsma, Josje 62 n.9 Danieli, Yael 105 n.64 Dapp, Hans-Ulrich 70 Das Spiel ist aus (The Game is Over; Bachmann) 190 Dawer, Martin 237–41, 248 n.31 death camps 22, 26, 127, 129, 135, 169, 269 death marches 22–3, 25, 29, 41 death penalty 53 death rates 21, 68 de Boer, Nico 61 n.1 DEFA 148, 159 defamation 114, 152–5 Degen, Alfred 208, 214 n.38 dehumanization 15, 19–23, 25, 71, 75 de-individualization 20 Delage, Christian 45 n.13 Deleuze, Gilles 170, 178 n.51 Demirski, Paweł 129 Demnig, Gunter 70 Democratic German Report 154, 156 democratization 43, 225, 259

277

Denkmal der Grauen Busse (Monument of the Grey Buses; Hoheisel and Knitz) 70 Denkmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus (Memorial against War and Fascism; Krieglach) 113, 118 deportation 20–3, 26, 48–9, 54, 67, 75–6, 99, 107, 109, 115, 161, 199, 210, 235 depression 26, 93 Der Aufbau (German Jewish newspaper) 257 Der Brand (Friedrich) 178 n.40 Der Kalte (Krylova) 9, 107–23 film adaptation 107–8 Der Untergang 177 n.27 Der Vorleser (‘The Reader,’ Schlink) 27–8 Deutsches Kulturforum Östliches Europa 233 Deutschland erwache (film) 45 n.19 diaries 22, 40, 115, 199–200, 202, 206, 209, 217 Diary for Anne Frank, A 148, 153–8 Die große Flucht (Knopp) 178 n.40 Die Hempelsche (Manthey) 67–8, 75–8 Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (The Inability to Mourn. Principles of Collective Behaviour) 187 disabilities 66–7, 69, 78 discrimination 66, 68, 77, 235, 241, 254, 259–60 disease 15, 21, 101 n.14, 135, 265, 267, 272 dismissive gestures 200 Displaced Persons Act of 1948 252 ‘Distomo’ (Rorris) 11 n.5 Distomo massacre 1–2, 10–11 n.5 disturbance/‘disturbing pasts,’ notion of 1–12, 265–6 divorce 51, 59, 150, 162, 170 documentaries 2, 43, 70, 76–7, 117, 127, 140 n.23, 143, 145, 152, 156, 167, 171, 217, 233. See also specific entries Doherty, Thomas 159 n.3 Dohrmann, Rudolf 222, 228 n.15, 229 nn.32–3, 230 n.41, 230 n.47 Domes, Robert 80 n.19 donation campaigns 39–40, 46 n.22

278 Doncaster, Carol 150 Doorn in het vlees (Tames) 52, 56 Dörner, Klaus 79 n.6, 79 n.10, 80 n.16 Douglas, Lawrence 45 n.13 Dowody na istnienie (Proof of Existence, Krall) 128, 134 Drinknall, J.K. 148–50 Dryander, Elisabeth 211 Dutch East-Indies 50 Dutch National Archives 57 Dutch Nazi collaborators. See under Netherlands in the Second World War Duvivier, Julien 145 ‘Dwarves on her Pyjamas’ (Almog) 100 Eastern Europe 103 n.37, 109, 127, 133, 171, 206, 208, 233, 235, 257, 259 East Germany (GDR) Aktion Sühnezeichen 216, 219 anti-fascism 16, 28, 241 enthusiasm for foreign trips 199, 201–3, 205–6, 208, 212 films 147–8, 151, 153–5 and guilt 15–16 involvement in genocide 143 negative view of 173–4 official culture 16, 28 sympathy for victims 28 East Prussia 171, 220 Eberhard, F. 224, 229 n.24 Echoes (Rorris, record) 11 n.5 economic crisis, pre-war 50, 59 Edschmid, Kasimir 213 n.22 Educational and Television Films Ltd (ETV) 153 Effi Briest (Fassbinder) 168 ego-documents 7, 9, 55, 166, 200, 206 Egypt 46 n.24 Eichmann trial 26, 253 Elly, G. 25 Elsaesser, Thomas 178 n.44 emails 64 n.45 embarrassment 1, 23–4, 101 n.19, 149, 152, 172 emblems, Nazi 39 empathy 15, 39, 41–2, 89, 92–3, 97, 104 n.52, 133, 138, 164, 167, 170, 175

Index enlightenment 181, 187, 194 Enning, Bram 64 n.60 Epstein, Helen 101 n.15 Etkind, Alexander 126, 139 n.5, 249 n.47 eugenics 67–9, 77 European Americans and Refugees Wartime Treatment Study Act in 2001 264 n.48 European Court of Human Rights 2 European identity and culture 3 European memory 6 Europe’s Fateful Hour (Paramount newsreel) 147 euthanasia programme 8, 27–8, 65–81 Aktion T4 66, 69 autobiographies/testimonial literature 70–8 Claasen’s Ich, die Steri 71–3 Kaufmann’s Death Cart 73–5 Manthey’s Die Hempelsche 75–8 compensation for victims 69 doctors, role of 69, 71–7, 79 n.3 gassing operations 69 historical background 68–9 killing centres 66, 69–70 laws 68–9 memorials 65–6, 69–70 memory of 67–78 of the mentally and physically disabled 66–79 Nazi policy 68–9 nurses, role of 71–2, 76 Schäfer’s case 66–7 ‘social question’ and ‘final solution’ 68–9 statistical data 69 teachers, role of (Nazi pedagogy) 71, 73–5 victims’ equal rights 69 Evening Standard 158 ‘Excision’ (Liebrecht) 88, 90–5, 98, 102 n.30, 104 n.44, 147 exclusion 15, 19, 47, 50, 56–7, 64, 66, 69, 71–2, 78, 97, 169, 267 exhibitions 28, 145, 151, 154–5, 157, 185, 193, 195 n.15, 231 n.64, 257 Ex Memoria 272 expellees 114, 144, 220–1, 224–5, 235–6, 241

Index exploitation 15, 54, 126, 168, 203, 244 extermination camps 20, 27, 46 n.21, 175, 215, 219, 244 Falch, Corinne 61 n.1 Falkenstein, Sigrid 70 ‘family crypt’ 86 family memoirs 70, 268–72 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 161, 167–70, 174–5 Fassin, Didier 166, 178 n.41 Fastnacht (shrovetide) 65 Faulk, Henry 46 n.21 Faulstich, Heinz 80 n.11 Faustrecht der Freiheit (Fox and his Friends; Fassbinder) 168 fear 18, 26, 36, 41–3, 48, 50–1, 57, 67, 71, 87, 89, 92, 101 n.19, 128–32, 136, 165, 230 n.52, 242, 253, 256, 266, 271 Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (Gross) 128 ‘Fear of the Truth’ (newspaper article) 36, 41 feature films 143, 145 Federal Cross of Merit 185 ‘Federico García Lorca’ (Kavvadias) 10 n.5 Feldman, Jackie 139 n.7 Feldman, Marcia 44 n.1 Feldman, Yael 102 n.29 Felman, Shoshana 100 n.6, 104 n.49, 138–9 n.4 fiction 8, 27, 70, 85–8, 96, 100 n.8, 104 n.51, 107, 110–11, 115, 118, 120, 127–8, 131, 145, 164, 168–9, 189, 217, 253, 265 Fiedler, Anja 246–7 nn.1–3, 247 n.5 Field, Audrey 154 Filep, Melinda 246 n.1 First World War 48, 68, 144, 146, 251–2 Fish, Hamilton 262 n.9 Fisher, Gaëlle 2, 9, 233–49 Fisher, Jamie 228 n.10 Flanner, Janet 45 n.13 Fleck, Robert 183, 194 n.4, 195 n.21 Flothuis, Marius 61 n.1 Foer, Jonathan Safran 104 n.41 food 21, 36, 49–50, 68, 94, 102 n.23, 210–11, 242, 253

279

forced labourers 28, 242 forced migration 267 Forecki, Piotr 138 n.1 foreign exchange 199 forgetting 9, 41, 66, 73, 181, 265, 267–8, 271–2 forgiveness 52–3, 119, 202, 207 Forman, Stanley 148, 153 Foschepoth, Josef 44 n.4 Foth, Thomas 80 n.12 ‘founding trauma’ 100 France Aktion Sühnezeichen 216 anti-Semitism 23 deportation of Jews from 20, 23, 25–6 execution of poet Lorca 10 n.5 German occupation 69 and German relations 207 Jews in 152 liberation 49 POWs 243 Resistance fighters 152 as tourist destination 202, 206–7 Vittel internment camp 22 youth groups 216 Frank, Anne 154 Frank, Hans 37 Frankfurt 188, 221 Franklin, Ruth 99–100, 105 n.65 Franssens, Jean Paul 61 n.1 Frau, S. 242 Free Thälmann (Brunel and Montagu) 145 Free University (FU), Berlin 233 Frei, Norbert 44 n.4, 230 n.43, 248 n.25 Freud, Sigmund 113, 122 n.45, 138 n.3, 170, 176 nn.14–15, 187, 266–8 Frevert, Ute 62 n.5 Friedlander, Henry 30 n.3, 80 n.12 Friedlander, Saul 30 n.3, 102 n.29, 244, 249 n.40 Friedrich, Jörg 178 nn.39–40 From Guilt to Shame (Leys) 29 Frost, Laura 162, 176 n.5, 176 n.9 Fuchs, Anne 11 n.20, 165, 177 n.24 Fuchs, Petra 80 n.19 Fuchs, Rolf 214 n.37 Fugmann, Nicole 183, 194 n.7 Fukuyama, Francis 259, 263 n.44

280

Index

Fulbrook, Mary 1–12, 15–31, 237, 248 n.25, 248 n.29 Fulda, Daniel 178 n.39 Fuller, Samuel 156 Funck, Walther 37 Fürst, Juliane 228 n.10 Gabriel, Eberhard 80 n.23 Gala Films 157 Galambos, Janka 20–1, 30 n.13 gas chambers 20, 22, 25, 27, 55, 67–9, 75, 77, 79 n.3, 97, 156, 161, 224 gasmask 72 Gaumont-British 144 gays 266 Gebert, Konstanty 138 n.1 Gebürtig (Schindel) 107–8, 113, 120 n.4, 120 n.9 Gehrke, Stefan 247 n.5 Gellhorn, Martha 43, 44 n.1, 46 n.32 General Speidel – the Archives Testify 153 genocide 3, 6, 27, 47, 60, 143, 158, 163, 166, 171, 254, 256, 260, 267–8 genres, literary 70, 110, 137, 162, 167, 174 Gerhard, H. 231 n.66 German American Bund 252, 259 German American ethnic national museum, Washington, DC 259 German American Friendship Garden 256 German American Heritage Museum, Washington, DC 258 German American National Congress (DANK) 252, 256 German American National Political Action Committee (GANPAC) 255 German American public selfrepresentation 253 German Book Trade 181 German Bundestag 257 German Communist Party 145 German constitution 75, 78, 188 ‘Germanendom’ 50 German films 147–58 German international tourism 199–214 avoidance to reveal nationality 209–11 comparisons with home country 208–9 enthusiasm for travelling 200–5 exploits and adventures 203

holiday choices 202 holidaymakers 212 holiday narratives 202–5 Nazi past and holiday intentions 199–200 omissions 205–6 opinion polls 199 photos and souvenirs 202 statistics 199 vulnerability to foreign culture 204 German landscapes 1–2, 28, 66, 173, 175, 184 German-manufactured goods 96 German occupation in Austria 69 in Greece 1–2 in Netherlands 48–9, 52, 54, 60, 210 in Poland 37, 126, 128–9, 215–16, 220, 231 n.64, 269, 271 in Yugoslavia 209 German Parliament 185, 188 German Tragedy, A 144 German World Alliance 260 Germany, collective guilt and shame 15–16 Gerrens, Uwe 80 n.23 Gestapo 24, 28, 74–5, 152 ghettoes 21–2, 27, 89, 129, 131–2, 220, 235, 242, 269, 271 Gilbert, Annette 196 n.40 Gilman, Sander 246 Gisela, A. 229 n.24 Glass, Hildrun 247 n.11 global memory 6 Gmünder, Stefan 122 n.42 goal rationality 19 Godesberg 147 Goethe 188 Golan, Shamai 103 n.38 Gold, Hugo 248 n.19 Golem, The 145 Goodman, Arnold 155 Goodman, Nancy 249 n.41, 249 n.49 Göring, Hermann 38, 42, 209 Gorsemann, Sabine 202–3, 213 n.16 Gosewins, Catharina 63 n.39 Govrin, Michal 100 n.8 Govrin, Nurit 103 n.34, 103 nn.36–7 Grafeneck euthanasia killing centre 66

Index Graff, Agnieszka 140 n.28 Graff, Michael 109 Grass, Günter 178 n.40 gravestones 129–30 Greece debt crisis 1 German tourists visiting 211 Jewish community 109 memorial culture 1 reparation demands for Nazi crimes 1–2 Greenblatt, Stephen 203 Grevers, Helen 62 nn.12–14, 63 n.16 ‘grey zone’ 21 Grimstad, Knut Andreas 139 n.13, 140 n.27 Groen, Koos 62 n.4, 63 n.42 Große-Böhmer, Michael 10 n.3 Gross, Andrew 259, 262 n.14 Gross, Dr Heinrich 73 Gross, Jan 128–9, 139 n.9 Gross, Raphael 46 n.30 Grossman, David 100 nn.8–9, 103 n.40 Grüner, Clara 74 guilt and shame 2, 15–31 among children/grandchildren of the Nazis 16, 27–9 among perpetrator communities, self-exculpation strategies 27–9, 126 compensation or reparations for 18 dehumanizing and transitional experiences of victims 19–23 distinctions between 17–19, 34–6 and embarrassment, distinction between 23–4 historical phenomenology of 17 Kantian approach 18 practices of blaming and shaming 18, 24 survivor 15–16, 23–7 ‘guilt culture’ 19, 44 n.5 Günther, Georg 205, 214 n.28 Haasis, Hellmut G. 80 n.19 Habsburg Empire 233–4 Hacking, Ian 267 Haider, Jörg 113, 119 Haifa 237

281

Hainz, Martin 236, 248 n.23 Halbwachs, Maurice 4–6 Halling, Axel 246–7 n.3 Hamm, Margret 80 n.14, 80 n.17 Hancock, P.F. 149 Handke, Peter 183 Hanna, Colonel 144–6 Harris, Sidney 151 Harterink, Frederik 63 nn.38–9 Hartman, Geoffrey 30 n.3, 103 n.39 Hass, Aaron 85, 100 n.2 ‘Hat of Glass’ (Semel) 99 Haupt, Stefan 2 Hausleitner, Mariana 247 n.11 Havel, Václav 181 Hebel, Johann Peter 188 Hebrew 88–9, 98, 103 n.38, 104 n.50, 217 Hechter, Michael 247 n.9 Heilbrunn, Jacob 121 n.22 Heinemann, Isabel 247 n.12 Heldenplatz (Bernhard) 110 Hell, Cornelius 122 n.39 Hemmann, Tino 80 n.21 Henning, Christoph 202, 205, 213 n.14, 214 n.27 Hermann Monument, Minnesota 258 heroism 15, 221, 272 Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann (Koepp) 172, 233 Heymann, Florence 236, 248 n.22 high art 162–4 highbrow culture 35 Hildegard, C. 206 Hirsch, Marianne 97–8, 101 n.13, 105 n.53, 105 n.57, 127, 134, 236, 248 n.21, 249 n.37 Hirschfeld, Paul 114 historical analysis 3, 34 historical diversity 6 historical knowledge 6, 217 historical revisionism 261 historical uncanny 67 Historikerstreit 178 n.40, 255 historiography 10, 34–5, 182 Hitler, Adolf 28, 42 assassination attempts on 37, 152 Chamberlain’s negotiations with 143–4, 147

282

Index

Heim ins Reich operation 235 rise to power 239, 252 Stauffenberg plot 152 visit to Vienna 119 Hitler salute 186–7 Hitler’s Reign of Terror 145 Hitler Youth 15, 74 Hodge, Herbert 147 Hoffman, Eva 85, 100 n.3, 188 Hoffmann, Ilse 188, 254 Hoffmann, Ute 79 n.6 Hogenkamp, Bert 148, 152, 159, 160 n.26 Hoheisel, Horst 70 Hohendorf, Gerrit 80 n.19 Holiday on Sylt (Thorndike) 148–53 Holland 210 Holland, Agnieszka 126 Holland & Co 153 Hollywood 155, 159 n.3, 254 Holocaust (NBC miniseries) 253–4 Holocaust denial 253, 255 Holocaust Memorial Day 96, 104 n.52 Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC 256–8 Holocaust memory 6, 78, 85, 94–5, 117, 166, 251 Holtzman, Avner 103 n.36, 103 n.39, 105 n.58 homosexuals 28 honour 19, 59, 65, 185 hostilities 1, 40, 136, 143, 159 n.3, 204, 207 House of Commons 145, 152 House of the Wannsee Conference 28 Hrdlicka, Alfred 110, 116–20 Huener, Jonathan 228 n.4, 228 n.7, 228 n.15, 230 n.37, 230 n.44, 230 n.49 humanity 21–3, 25, 42–3, 69–70, 78, 156, 164, 167, 169, 171, 173, 242, 246 human rights 2, 246, 258, 260 Humba Täterä (German song) 223 humiliation 15, 18–21, 29, 42, 48–9, 56, 59–60, 71, 94, 118, 208, 238, 243 Hundred Acre Wood 266–7 Hungarian Chorus (Schwartz) 99–100 Hungary 20 Hunt, Peter 149–50 Huyssen, Andreas 162, 176 n.7, 183, 194 n.6, 195 n.23

hybrid identity 136–7, 254 hybrid texts 70 Ich, die Steri (Claasen) 67, 71–3 Ida (Pawlikowski) 135–8 ‘identity theft’ 99 If This Is a Man (Levi) 70, 78 ill-treatment 49, 53, 57 Illustrated London News 157–8 imagery 126, 137, 175, 186, 190–1, 244, 257 imagined community 166 imagined others 18, 21 Im Krebsgang (Grass) 178 n.40 inclusion 19, 102 n.28, 165, 167, 254, 257 In Darkness (Holland) 126 Independent Television Authority (ITA) 143, 148–51, 158 India 202, 210 individual/personal memory 4–7, 86, 90, 93, 97–9, 266 In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (In a Year of 13 Moons; Fassbinder) 169 inherited shame 16 Inside Nazi Germany 145 Institute for German American Relations 260–1 Institute for Historical Review 253, 255 insubordination 74 intelligence tests 73, 75, 81 n.26 inter-generational transmission of trauma 3, 17, 85–8 definition 87 genetic transmission 87, 101 n.19 and imagined third generation 98–100 by second-generation writings 85–105 International Auschwitz Committee 222–3 International Military Tribunal (IMT) 34, 36 internment camps 22, 49, 54 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud) 268 interviews 6–7, 10 n.3, 17, 22, 25, 34, 36, 47, 51, 57–8, 63–4 n.45, 73, 103 n.40, 107, 109, 147, 149, 183, 194, 200–2, 206, 233–4, 236–8, 240–4, 248 n.31, 249 n.49 Ireland 146 irony 66, 97, 114–15, 127, 132, 168, 170, 174, 181, 186, 244

Index Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona 138 n.1, 236, 248 n.27 Isaiah 190 Israel 6, 88, 110, 113, 115, 129–30, 216, 221, 233, 236, 238, 242, 248–9 n.34, 253–4, 269 youth groups 216 Israeli literature 85–106 Italy 135, 199, 212, 216, 268 ITV 148, 150 I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany 145 James, William 267 Janet, Pierre 267 Janicka, Elżbieta 129, 139 n.12 Japan 19, 44 n.5 Japanese Americans 260 Jaspers, Karl 30 n.3 Jehovah’s Witnesses 28 Jewish Councils 24, 26 Jewish Defense League 254 Jewish Film Festival 261 Jewishness 134–5, 138, 165, 184, 269 Jews 20–2 Bukovina 233–49 German 185, 235, 251–64 Israeli 85–106 Jewish identity 135 new Jewish identity 89 Polish 125–40 Jong, Lou de 62 n.8 Judt, Tony 110, 121 n.33 Jung, Hugo Wilhelm 206–7 Kämper, Heidrun 44 n.4 Kampman, Dick 61 n.1 Kant, Immanuel 18, 181, 187, 194 n.2 Kapos 21, 24, 26 Katyn Forest 254 Kaufmann, Alois 67–8, 73–5, 77–9 Keers, Arinus 52–3, 63 n.26 Keitel, Wilhelm 37 Kennedy, James 62 n.10 Kennedy, Ludovic 149 Keren, Rivka 100 n.8, 101 n.12 Keret, Etgar 88, 96–9, 104 n.50, 104 n.52, 105 n.54 Kertész, Imre 161–3 Kettmann, George 54

283

Kiefer, Anselm 181–96 awards and honors 183–5 embeddedness 194 Europa exhibition 185 historicity of Kiefer’s work 183 inspiration 190–1 mode of representation 184–8 Monumenta exhibition 195 n.15 paintings 186, 195 n.14 photography 185–7 Besetzungen (Occupations) 185–94 Heroische Sinnbilder (Heroic Symbols) and Für Genet (For Genet) 186 theory of everything 193, 196 n.38 Kielce pogrom of 1946, Poland 128 Killick, John 154 Kindererziehungsheim (reform school) 67 Kindertransport 20 Kirkpatrick, Ivone 149 Klare, Hans-Otto 201–2 Klee, Ernst 80 n.12 Klein, Erich 122 n.55 Knittel, Susanne C. 65–81 Knitz, Andreas 70 Knoch, Habbo 230 n.38, 232 n.75, 232 n.80 Knopp, Guido 178 n.40 knowledge agency 88, 98 Koepp, Volker 167, 170–5, 179 nn.56–60, 179 n.62, 233 Kogan, Ilany 101 n.16 Kohl, Helmut 121 n.14, 255–7 Koll, Elli 75–7 Königsberg (Kaliningrad) 71 Konitzer, Ulrich 231 n.71 Korhi-Shaphir, Vera 104 n.45 Korovessi, Aggelika 1 Kosh-Zohar, Talila 102 nn.21–2 Koutras, Giannis 10 n.5 Kraków 127, 131–3 Krall, Hanna 128, 133–4, 139 n.10, 140 n.25 Krech, General Franz 10 n.5 Kreyssig, Lothar 215–16 Krieglach, Herbert 113, 116, 118 Kröher, Oss 201, 203, 210–11 Kromhout, Bas 61 n.1 Krylova, Katya 2, 9, 107–23 Kuby, Erich 230 n.49

284

Index

Kühl, Stefan 79 n.16, 80 n.16 Kühn-Ludewig, Maria 263 n.39 Kuroń, Jacek 128–9 Kushner, Tony 160 n.45 Kuspit, Donald 183, 195 n.17 Kuttenberg, Eva 122 n.53 KZ (atrocity film) 38, 45 n.19 labour camps 20, 27 LaCapra, Dominick 30 n.3, 100, 106 n.68, 137, 140 n.30, 163, 171, 174, 176 n.13, 178 n.52, 237, 246, 248 n.33, 249 n.50 Lachnit, Peter 73 Landgraf, Claudine 61 n.1 Landman, Rick 264 n.49 Landweer, Hilge 44 n.6 Landwirth, Heinz 30 n.10 Lange, Julia 2, 9, 251–64 Langer, Lawrence 30 n.3, 100 n.5, 248 n.35 Lanzmann, Claude 128–9 Laor, Dan 102 n.29, 103 n.39 Lashmar, Paul 150, 159 n.17 Laub, Dori 100 n.6, 104 n.49, 139 n.4, 246, 249 n.38, 249 n.42, 249 n.46, 249 n.51 Lautenbach, Fritz 1 Lauterwein, Andrea 193, 195 n.19, 195 n.23 Law for the Compensation of the Victims of National Socialist Persecution, 1953 69 Leahy, Caitríona 9, 181–96 Lebert, Stephan Norbert 31 n.38 left-wing groups 225 Legacies of Collaboration: the integration and exclusion of former National-Socialist milieus in the Netherlands after the Second World War 47, 61 n.2, 64 n.45 Lehle, Robert 201, 203, 213 n.7 Lehrer, Erica 139 n.7, 139 n.12, 139 n.14 Leiser, Erwin 156 Leniger, Markus 247 n.13 Leo Baeck Medal 185, 195 n.17 letters 41, 46 n.27, 53, 56, 77, 94, 149, 152– 4, 156, 196 n.35, 199–200, 202, 207, 218–20, 223–5, 229 n.24, 231 nn.65–6, 243, 253–4

Levi, Primo 21–4, 31 n.22, 42, 46 n.29, 70, 78, 161, 175 n.1 Levin, Abraham 21 Levy, Daniel 11 n.8, 165, 177 n.27, 249 n.47 Lewis, Arthur 153 Leys, Ruth 30 nn.3–4, 31 n.39 Leżajsk 128 Liao Yiwu 181 liberalism 48, 119, 132–3, 145, 192, 235, 259, 268 liberation 3, 20, 23, 33, 35–6, 38, 40, 43, 48–50, 52, 75, 94, 105 n.61, 165, 203, 210, 224 Library of Congress, US 257 lice 91–2 Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (Love is Colder than Death; Fassbinder) 168 Liebrecht, Savyon 88, 90–3, 96, 98–9, 102 n.30, 104 n.44 Lifton, Robert Jay 80 n.12 Lijphart, Arend 62 n.10 Linck, Stephan 232 n.82 Lind, Bruno 265 Lindeperg, Sylvie 158, 160 n.46 Lindt, Martijn 61 n.1 Linz 107 Lipska, Ewa 131–3 literary writings. See specific entries Litzmannstadt ghetto 238, 242 Lloyd, Selwyn 151 Lodz 238 Löhr, Alexander 109 London County Council (LCC) 153 Longerich, Peter 44 n.7 Lorca, Federico García 10 n.5 Lorenz, Dagmar 119, 120 n.12, 121 nn.14– 15, 123 n.63, 123 n.65 Losing the Dead (Appignanesi) 268–72 Lotter, Maria-Sibylla 44 n.6 Löw-Beer, Martin 46 n.30 Lublin 127 Ludin, Malte 28 Luft, Friedrich 41–2, 46 n.28 Luftkrieg und Literatur (Sebald) 178 n.40 Luiks, Ruud 61 n.1 ‘Maarten’ 59 Mad Dog of Europe, The 144–5

Index Mahnmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus (Monument against War and Fascism; Hrdlicka) 110, 116–17, 119–20 Maier, Charles 248 n.25, 257 Majdanek 127, 216–17, 221, 223 major war criminals 34, 36 Makuch, Janusz 140 n.21 Malina, Peter 68, 73–4 maltreatment 15, 74, 156 Mander, Geoffrey 145, 147 Mankiewicz, Herman J. 159 n.3 Mannheim 65–6, 201 Mannheimer Morgen (newspaper) 65 Mantel, Paul 61 n.1 Manthey, Elvira (Elvira Hempel) 67–8, 75–9 Manthey, Lisa 75–6 March of Time (TV series) 145 Margalit, Avishai 70, 81 n.24 Marion, L. 25 Marquardt, Fritz 173–4 marriage 60, 69, 71, 93, 110, 271 Marseilles 153 Martens, Michael 10 n.1 Martin, Bill 120 n.3 Marx, Karl T. 254, 256, 262 nn.18–19, 263 n.25, 263 n.29, 263 n.31, 263 n.34, 263 n.38 masochism 168–70 mass culture 162–4 mass graves 41, 156 mass murder 2, 27, 35, 38, 41, 259 Matthias, K. 223, 230 nn.52–3 Mazower, Mark 10 n.4 medals 65, 185 media 1, 5, 66, 109, 115–16, 126–7, 132, 138, 146, 208, 253, 255, 267 medical records 77, 79 n.3 megalomania 71 Megged, Aharon 88–90, 92–3, 95, 97, 102 n.27, 103 n.34, 103 nn.36–7 Mein Führer: Die Wirklich Wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler 165, 177 n.27 Mein Kampf (Leiser) 156 Meissner, Hans Otto 214 n.30 melancholia 126–7, 163 melancholy and comedy 164, 170–4

285

melodrama and comedy 164, 167–70 ‘memorial candle’ 89, 103 n.35 memorialization of victims American 251–64 Austria 117–18 Germany 16, 28–9, 69–75, 216 Greece 1 Netherlands 51 Poland 129, 217, 220–2 memory definitions 7 scripts 6–7 and trauma 73–4, 76, 86, 90–1, 93–4, 99, 101 n.14, 138, 162, 164–5, 173 memory culture 77–8, 132, 178 n.40, 259 Memory Man, The (Appignanesi) 265–6 memory studies 67, 70, 78, 166 memory tourism 129 ‘memory work’ 17, 70 Menasse, Robert 108 Mendelsohn, Daniel 104 n.41 Mendelson-Maoz, Adia 105 n.54 Meng, Michael 138 nn.1–2 Menninghaus, Winfried 235, 247 n.16 mental illness 54, 56, 60, 66–8, 71–9, 86–7, 91, 200 Merkel, Angela 185 Meyers, Marilyn 249 n.41, 249 n.49 Michaels, Walter Benn 259 Michlic, Joanna 139 n.9 Michlin, Gilbert 20, 22–3, 25, 30 nn.11–12 Midrasz (magazine) 134 migration and identity 3 Millar, Frederick Hoyer 149 Milne, A.A. 267 Milner, Iris 86, 91, 100 n.5, 100 n.7, 101 n.10, 101 n.14, 104 n.42 Miłosz, Czesław 131, 133, 139 n.18 Ministry of Justice, Netherlands 53 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete 187, 195 n.24 modernism 162–3, 268 Moeller, Robert 30 n.2, 44 n.4, 177 n.30, 177 n.32 Moers, Walter 165 Moller, Sabine 12 n.22, 30 n.3 Montagu, Ivor 145, 148 monuments 1, 65–6, 70, 110, 116–18, 130, 174, 183, 258, 265

286

Index

Morahg, Gilead 98, 100 n.5, 105 n.55, 105 n.58 moral witnessing 65, 70–1, 73, 77 Moscow Declaration of 30 October 1943 109 motifs 125, 130, 133–4, 139 n.20 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) 159 n.3 mourning and melancholia 88, 126–7, 130–3, 137–8, 167, 170–1, 174–5, 187, 268 Mr P. case 56–7 Müller, Josef Muscha 79 n.9 Müller, Ulrich 80 n.19 multiculturalism 171, 235–6, 246 Mündigkeit (Kant) 187 Munich 104 n.50, 237 Münsterland 45 n.10 Murray, Ralph 149 museums 5, 28, 88, 96–7, 104 n.51, 132, 185, 188, 217, 223, 230 n.44, 256–9, 261 My First Sony (Barbash) 88, 93–6, 101 n.12, 101 n.31, 104 n.45 myths/mythology 6, 15, 23, 107, 110, 115, 129, 136, 184, 189, 206, 236, 269, 271 Nagler, Jörg 261 n.1 ‘Name, The’ (Megged) 88–90 name-calling 200 Nanking Massacre 269 Napoleonic period 48 Nasza klasa (Our Class; Słobodzianek) 129 National Archives, Kew 143 National Council for Civil Liberties 153 national esteem 42 National Holocaust museum and archive, Israel 88 National Mall, US 256–8 National Socialism 2, 8, 39, 42, 47–50, 52, 54–6, 59–60, 69, 107–10, 112, 119–20, 166, 173, 185, 206, 209, 216–18, 222–3, 232 n.82, 252, 257 ‘national socialist morality’ 42 National-Socialist Movement (NSB, Netherlands) 48–9, 54–5, 58, 64 n.45

nation state 2 NATO 143, 152, 253 Naveh, Hannah 93, 104 n.45, 104 n.47 Nazi Concentration Camps 36–8 Nazism 39–40, 50–2, 54–6, 58–60, 112, 144, 165, 168, 174–5, 187, 206, 235, 243–4, 271 Nazi Sterilization Law 69 Neighbours: the Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Gross) 128 Neo-Fascism 211, 256 neo-Nazis 132, 185, 224–5, 231 n.61 Netherlands 8, 210, 216 Netherlands in the Second World War 47–64 anti-Jewish measures 49 anti-Semitism 54 bombing of Rotterdam 48 Dutch resistance 49, 53–6, 210 Germany invasion/occupation 48–9, 54 Holocaust 55 National-Socialist Movement (NSB) 48–9, 54–5, 58 Nazi collaborators and their families denial of guilt and shame 53–7 reintegration 50 religious conversions 52–3 shame and shaming 50–1, 57–60 wartime deeds 48–51, 53, 56, 58–60 withdrawal and silence 51–2 neutrality 48 Queen 48, 53 Sicherheitsdienst (SD) 52, 54 Neuengamme concentration camp 28, 224 Neugebauer, Wolfgang 80 n.23 Neuman, Shlomo 102 n.23 News Chronicle 147 newspapers 36, 38, 40–1, 52, 59, 65, 73, 85, 88, 113, 122 n.38, 150, 157, 223–5, 231 n.57, 231 n.63, 253–7 newsreels 143, 145, 147, 157 New Statesman 153 New York 110, 252–4, 257, 261 New York Herald Tribune, The 38 New York State Council of the Steuben Society of America 254 New York Times 109 Ney, Norbert 79 n.9

Index NFT 152 Niemoller, Martin 145 Niethammer, Lutz 12 n.22 Night and Fog (Resnais) 156–7 nightmares 26, 29, 111 Night of the Living Dead (Romero) 132 Niklashauser Fart (The Niklashausen Journey; Fassbinder) 168 NIOD 47, 64 n.45 Niven, Bill 11 n.8, 178 n.38, 178 n.40, 248 n.25, 248 n.29 Noble, Allan 151 Noc żywych żydów (Night of the Living Jews; Ostachowicz) 132 Nora, Pierre 117, 122 n.51 Nordhausen 157 Norway 207, 216 nostalgia 127, 131, 171, 235–6, 239, 244, 266 Novalis 188 novels 9, 45, 54, 88, 93–6, 98–9, 102 n.23, 103 n.40, 104 n, 104 n.41, 105 n.61, 107–8, 110–11, 113, 115, 118–19, 120 n.3, 120 n.9, 131–5, 144–5, 161 Novick, Peter 248 n.30 Nuremberg Trials 34, 41–2, 45 n.16, 69 American prosecutors 36–7 Nazi defendants’ reactions 37–8 screening of Nazi Concentration Camps 37–8 Steuben Society's reaction to 253 Nussbaum, Martha C. 44 n.6 Obermüller, Klara 122 n.43 Oder-Neisse line 220, 222, 252 O Du schöner Westerwald (German song) 223 Oliver, James 150, 159 n.17 online sources 57, 245 Operation Market Garden 49 Operation Teutonic Sword (film) 152–3 oral history 6, 17, 199–201, 206, 236 ‘Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility’ (Arendt) 43 Orich, Annika 177 n.29 Ostachowicz, Igor 132–3, 137 Ostgebiete 167, 171 Ostpolitik 220, 222 Oświęcim 127

287

Palestine 158 panic attacks 26 Papakonstantinou, Vasilis 10–11 n.5 Paramount News 147 paranoia 71 parenthood 87, 92, 96, 98, 101 nn.13–14 Paris 25, 195 n.15, 271 parody 116, 130, 175 Pasikowski, Władysław 129–30, 132–3, 136–7, 139–40 n.20 Passport for a Girl 145 passports 145, 201 Pastor Hall 145 Paterno, Wolfgang 120 n.1, 120 n.5, 121 n.17 patriotism 54, 125, 133, 252, 267 Paul, Jean 176 n.20 Pawiak prison 22 Pawlikowski, Paweł 135–8 Paziński, Piotr 134–5, 137–8, 140 n.27 Peace Prize 181, 183–4, 186, 188–90, 193–4 Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (Kiefer) 184 Peleg, Dorit 105 n.56 Pendas, Devon O. 30 n.3 Pensjonat (The Guesthouse; Paziński) 134 Perks, Robert 12 n.21 Perry, Lily 102 n.23 persecution 3–4, 8, 15, 19, 23, 26–7, 29, 56, 67–9, 71–2, 74–5, 77, 117, 128–9, 145, 164, 171, 199, 235, 240, 246, 248–9 n.34, 252 personal memory and collective memory 4–7 personal possessions, removal of 20 Petersen, Jan 214 n.29 Petershagen, Angelika 214 n.34 Petley, Julian 2, 9, 143–60 petty crimes 77 Pfirschke, Rosemarie 61 n.1 Pforzheim 200 Philadelphia 252–3 Philadelphia Inquirer 37, 45 n.15 photographs/images 36, 45 n.8, 47, 74–5, 89, 96–7, 105 n.53, 127, 131, 134, 136, 138, 157, 173, 184–6, 232 n.80, 266 physical assault 3, 49, 57, 76, 200 physical illness 25, 78, 86–7, 156

288

Index

physical returns 127–38 Pianist, The 242 Picard, David 204, 213 n.21 Pick, Helga 121 n.30 Picture Post 157 Pines, Dinora 101 n.17 Pinneberg 223–6 Pinneberger Tagblatt 224–5 Pinochet, General 226 Piorkowski, Jerzy 223 Plamper, Jan 62 n.5 Plato 162 Plato Films 147–56, 159 n.13 Podzeit-Lütjen, Mechthild 68 ‘poetic correspondence’ 196 n.40 poetry 10–11 n.5, 72, 81 n.27, 99, 108, 131, 163, 183–4, 188–92, 218 Pokłosie (Aftermath; Pasikowski) 129–30 Poland aids for victims 220 anti-Semitism 126, 128–9, 135, 222, 230 n.40, 231 n.72 Catholic activities 220 EU accession 132 fall of Communism 266 German occupation 37, 69, 126, 231 n.64, 269 German POWs in 224 and German reconciliation 215–27 Home Army 129 Kielce pogrom of 1946 128 memorials 221 Museum of the History of Polish Jews 132 opposition to communism 133 resistance 266 Soviet Union and 129 polarization 7, 109, 125, 162, 165, 167 Polengruppe der Propstei Pinneberg (Protestant youth group) 223–6 Polish culture, Jewish returns in 125–40 Catholic memorials 129 engagement with the past 130–3 fear of Jewish returns 128–30 films 128–30, 135–7 Lanzmann’s Shoah 128–9 Pasikowski’s Pokłosie (Aftermath) 129–30 Pawlikowski’s Ida 135–7

language 126, 137 language and imagery of mourning 126, 137 literature 128–9, 131–5 Gross’s Neighbours and Fear 128–9 Lipska’s Sefer 131–3 Ostachowicz’s Noc żywych żydów (Night of the Living Jews) 132–3 Paziński’s Pensjonat (The Guesthouse) 134 Reszke’s book Return of the Jew: Identity Narratives of the Third Post-Holocaust Generation of Jews in Poland 133–4 Rymkiewicz’s Umschlagplatz 131–3 Tulli’s Włoskie szpilki (Italian High Heels) 134–5 mnemonic and physical returns 127 post-memory 126, 137–8 representation of identities 126–7, 133–7 political change 43 political prisoners 58, 224 political rights 53 Polonsky, Antony 139 n.9 Pomerania 171, 220 ‘Poor Poles look at the Ghetto’ (Błoński) 131 Pope Paul II 254 popular culture 132, 139 n.20, 163, 208 post-memory 98, 127, 131, 134–5, 137–8 Potsdam 201, 233 Potsdam conference 220 POWs 33–4, 36, 38–40, 45–6 n.19–22, 46 n.24, 224 Prague 22–3 prejudices 59, 66, 78, 109, 128, 245, 268 Presidential Commission for the GermanAmerican Tricentennial 255 press articles 34, 36–7 primary sources 34, 36, 38–9, 42–3 Producers, The (Brooks) 165 Professor Mamlock 145 profil (weekly) 115 Progressive Film Institute 148 Pronay, Nicholas 146, 159 n.8 Protestants 48, 52–3, 173, 215–16, 219–20, 223, 226, 229 n.27, 229 n.29

Index Proust, Marzel 267 Psalmists 190 psychiatric institutions 54, 56, 66–9, 71–4, 76–8 Psychiatrie Verlag 72 psychoanalysis 17, 24, 70, 131, 133, 187, 190, 268 psychopathography 70 Rabinovici, Doron 108 racial hygienic policies 67 racism 22, 67–9, 112, 117, 155, 211, 235, 243, 271 Ranner, Gertrud 246–7 n.3, 247 n.4, 248 n.31 rape 166, 267 Ratje, Randall J. 262 n.4 Ratner, Tsila 2, 8, 85–106 Ravensbrück 21, 107 Ravensbrück Memorial Museum 28 Reagan, Ronald 255–6 realism 97–8, 118 Rechtman, Richard 166, 178 n.41 reconciliation activities of young West Germans 215–32 Aktion Sühnezeichen (Action Reconciliation) 215–16 in Auschwitz and Poland 217–27 for Chilean people 226, 232 n.77 conservation measures 217 Polengruppe 223–6 resolutions 219–21 ZNAK 217 Red Army 46 n.29 redress 18, 35, 42, 267 refusals of service 200 rehabilitation 73, 81 n.26, 202, 251 ‘re-humanization’ 22–3 Reichsbank 37 Reichskristallnacht 252 Reinecke, Stefan 173, 179 n.61 Reinefarth, Heinz 148–9 ‘Reiselust’ (Henning) 202 Reiter, Andrea 87, 92, 109, 120 n.11, 121 n.13 rejection 2, 15, 27, 33–4, 41, 44, 56, 60, 71, 89, 92, 99, 110, 152–3, 155, 157, 161, 164, 221–3, 225, 241 remembering 6–7, 26, 70, 118, 125, 259–60, 265–7, 270

289

repression 8, 66, 68, 73, 86–7, 91–2, 96, 104 n.4, 107, 109, 112–13, 115–16, 126, 138, 165, 170, 206, 266 resentment 128–9, 132, 145, 155, 200, 204, 206–8 resettlement programme 236, 238, 241, 243 Resnais, Alain 156 Return, The (Zucker) 140 n.23 Return of the Jew: Identity Narratives of the Third Post-Holocaust Generation of Jews in Poland (Reszke) 133–4 Reuß, Eberhard 65–6, 70, 79 nn.2–3 Re-Writing the Soul (Hacking) 267 Rhine 184, 191 Rhodes, John David 170, 178 n.50 Richards, Jeffrey 159 n.2, 159 n.4 Richter, Gerhard 195 n.22 Richter, Paul 80 n.19 Ricoeur, Paul 7, 12 nn.25–6, 171, 174, 176 n.17, 178 n.55 right-wing groups 113, 119, 221, 231 n.64, 253 Rijke, Rinnus 61 n.1 Rive, Kenneth 157 Robertson, James C. 159 n.6, 267 Robin, Christopher 266–7 Roer, Dorothea C. 80 n.17 Rohr, Susanne 259, 262 n.14 Roma 28, 67 Romania 171, 216, 233–5, 238–41, 243, 245 Romero, George 132 Romijn, Peter 62 nn.12–14 Rommel 152–3 Rorris, Arthur 11 n.5 Rosenbaum, Thane 105 n.61 Rosenberg, Anna 237–40, 242, 248 n.31 Rosenthal, Gabriele 29 n.1, 30 n.3, 237, 244, 248 n.32, 249 n.44 Rotzoll, Maike 80 n.19 Russia 23, 46 n.21, 69, 109, 234, 241, 245, 254 Rymkiewicz, Jarosław Marek 131–4, 139 n.15 SA 109, 115–16, 209 Sachs, Nelly 181, 188, 191

290 Sachsen-Anhalt 76 sadism 38, 75 Sagi, Abraham 105 n.64 Saitz 161 Salonika 109, 115 Salzborn, Samuel 166, 177 n.37 Samuel, Raphael 12 n.23 satire 115, 166, 168, 173, 177 n.27 Schacht, Hjalmar 37–8 Schaefer, Oda 213 n.25 Schäfer, Peter (Blumepeter) 65–7, 70, 79 n.3 Scheffel-Baars, Gonda 61 n.1 Scheiper, Caspar 254–5 Schildt, Axel 212 n.3, 231 n.69 Schindel, Robert 107–23 Schindler’s List 130, 242 Schlamp, Johann 234, 245 Schlink, Bernhard 19, 27, 30 n.7 Schmidt, Daniel 231 n.72, 232 n.74 Schmidt, Michael 228 n.4 Schmidt, Thomas E. 122 nn.40–1 Schmidt-Dengler, Wendelin 176 n.20 Schmitz, Helmut 177 n.33, 178 n.38 Schmuhl, H.-W. 80 n.13 Scholtis, August 203, 213 n.17 Schönhammer, Rainer 213 n.20 schools 51, 57–8, 65, 67, 73, 76, 94, 96, 102 n.28, 116, 207, 223–6, 240, 243, 254 Schramm, Hilde 28 Schubert, Helga 70, 80 n.21 Schulberg, Stuart 45 n.8 Schuldiner, Michael 262 n.3, 262 n.6 Schulze, Rainer 166, 177 n.35 Schwartz, Yigal 99–100, 102 n.25, 106 n.66 second generation perpetrator communities 16, 28 survivor communities 29, 85–106, 127, 132 second generation literary writings Barbash’s My First Sony 93–6 fictional characters 86–8 and imagined third generation 86, 88–90, 93–4, 96, 98–100 Keret’s ‘Shoes’ 96–8 Liebrecht’s ‘Excision’ 90–3 Megged’s ‘The Name’ 88–90

Index Second World War 1–2, 4, 8–10, 15, 44 n.5, 47–51, 55, 65, 88, 90, 104 n.41, 107, 109–14, 117–18, 143–4, 146, 166–7, 181, 199, 234–5, 251–2, 259–61, 262 n.3, 266, 268–9 Seeing is Believing 157 Sefer (Lipska) 131–3 Segal, Ernst 113 Seidel-Arpacı, Annette 177 n.33 self-accusations 25 self-esteem 60 Semel, Nava 87, 99, 101 n.12, 101 n.20, 102 n.23, 105 nn.59–60 Senate Joint Resolution, US 255 sensationalism 37, 164, 253 Serbs 266 sexual assaults 74, 267–8 Sfounturis, Argyris 2 Shafir, Shlomo 263 n.35 Shaked, Gershon 103 n.36, 103 n.39 Shakespeare 130, 190–1 shame and shaming 2, 19. See also guilt and shame basic considerations 34–6 Dutch Nazi collaborators and their families 47–64 German civilians in occupied zones 40–4 German POWs 38–40 Nuremberg defendants 36–8, 42 ‘shame culture’ 19, 44 n.5 shamelessness 37, 42 shared memory 5 shaving of hair 20, 104 n.43 Shepherd, Simon 176 n.19 Shoah 15, 118, 221, 226, 239. See also genocide Shoah (Lanzmann) 128–9, 136 ‘Shoes’ (Keret) 96–8 short stories 81 n.27 Shortt, Edward 146 shtetls 127 Siberia 235 Sicherheitsdienst (SD) 52, 54 Sichrovsky, Peter 31 n.38 Siebel, Rietje 61 n.1 Siegfried, Detlef 232 n.73 Sikorska-Miszczuk, Małgorzata 129

Index silencing 2–3, 8, 38–40, 42, 51–2, 66, 70, 89, 92, 95, 99, 104 n.49, 104 n.52, 105 n.65, 116, 130, 187, 211, 236, 244, 246, 255, 271 silent films 145 Silesia 220, 244 Silverman, Kaja 169, 178 n.48 Simon, John 147 Singer, Ben 176 n.18 Sington, Derrick 44 n.1 Sinti 28, 67 slave labour 20, 210–11, 260, 269 Slavs 35, 208 Sleutelaar, Armando and Hans 62 n.4 Słobodzianek, Tadeusz 129, 139 n.13 Smis, Godefridus 54–5, 63 nn.34–5 Sobibor 49 Sobolewska, Joanna 140 n.26 social benefits 53, 55 social functionalism 7 social justice 55 social status 60, 97, 202 social workers 53, 58 Society for German American Studies 255, 257 solipsism 175 Sonderkommandos 26 Song for Argyris, A (Haupt) 2 Sonleitner, Johann 176 n.20 SORA Institute for Social Research and Consulting 110 Soviet Union 55–6, 129, 145, 148, 152, 206, 216, 233, 235–6, 238, 245, 253, 260, 266 Speer, Albert 28 Speidel, Hans 152–3 Spiegelgrund, Pavillon 18 – Ein Kind im NS-Erziehungsheim (Kaufmann) 73 Spiegelgrund psychiatric institution 73 Spies, Werner 181, 194 Spitzer, Leo 236, 248 n.21, 249 n.37 Spode, Hasso 212 nn.1–2 Spruit, Inge 61 n.1 Spy Museum, Washington, DC 261 SS 1, 15, 28, 39, 51, 55–6, 59, 63 n.44, 111, 113, 119, 148, 151, 210, 238 St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York 254 St. Paul Church, Frankfurt 188–90, 192

291

stakes 117 Stalinism 266 Stalinist era 125, 136, 254 starvation 15, 21, 49, 68–9, 71, 79 n.3, 199, 242 Staub, Ervin 246, 249 n.49 Steed, Henry Wickham 147 Steele, Isobel 145 Steinhof psychiatric institution 74 Steinlauf, Michael 138 n.1 Steinlein, Rüdiger 164, 177 n.22 Stempin, Arkadiusz 228 n.5 Stenberg, Peter 164–5, 177 n.23 Stepanik, Lukas 107 stereotypes 112, 136, 165, 203, 212, 255 sterilization 28, 67–73 Stern (magazine) 223, 225 Stettin (Szczecin) 171 Steuben, Friedrich Wilhelm von 252 Steuben Day 253 Steuben News, The (US magazine) 252–7 Steuben Society National Council’s Public Affairs Committee 254 Steuben Society of America 251–64 Bitburg controversy 255–6 foundation 252 German-American Day celebrations 255–6 German-American Joint Action Committee (GAJAC) 256 Holocaust (NBC miniseries), impact of broadcasting 253–4 Jewish Americans 254–5 membership 260, 262 n.6 outrage over Holocaust remembrance 255 Steuben Parade 253 support during Second World War 252–3 support of German unification 256 support of laws 261 Steven, H. 25–6 Stevens, Pieter 63 n.28 stigma/stigmatization 47, 67–8, 78 stink bombs 162, 224 Stolpersteine (Stumbling Blocks; Demnig) 70 Stoltzfus, Nathan 30 n.3 Strachey, James 187

292

Index

Strasbourg 2 Streicher, Julius 38 Strzelczyk, Florentine 177 n.29 Stulz, Karin 253, 262 n.15 Stürmer 38 Stutthof 216–18, 221, 223, 226 sub-camps 41 subjectivity 78, 86–7 Suceava 241–2 Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) 66 Sühnewallfahrten (atonement pilgrimages) 220, 222 Suhrkamp 110 suicide 68, 86, 93–5, 101 n.12 ‘Suitcases’ (Semel) 87, 101 n.20 Sullivan, Matthew Barry 46 n.21 survivors/victims dehumanizing and transitional experiences 19–23 donations for 39–40 guilt and shame 15–31 post-war lives 23–7 psyche 93 restitution to 1–2, 28 testimonies 8, 16–17, 20–1, 24, 27–8, 57, 67–8, 70–2, 78, 86, 90, 101 n.15, 103 n.40, 104 n.46, 104 n.49, 157, 175, 237–8, 240–2, 244–5 survivor syndrome 24 swastika 224 Swastika (film) 145 Sweden 216 Swingler, Stephen 151 Switzerland 205 symbols/symbolism 2, 59, 97, 99, 184, 186, 188, 200, 217, 220, 222, 225–6 Szczęsna, Joanna 139 n.11 Sznaider, Nathan 249 n.47 Tagesspiegel 41 Tames, Ismee 2, 8, 47–64 ‘Täter’ 27 tattooed identification numbers 20, 238 Taylor, Charles 262 n.2 Taylor, Jolanda Vanderwal 64 n.47 Tel Aviv 236 Tel Aviv Museum 185

television programmes 66, 77, 92, 143, 147–53, 253, 269 Terrasse, Jean-Marc 196 n.35 terror 2, 28, 37, 41, 50, 58, 71, 118, 145, 233, 235, 266, 271 ‘Tessa’ 51, 59 Thälmann, Ernst 145 theatre 40–1, 110, 122 n.38, 147, 153, 175 Theresienstadt 23 Thieme, Wolf 81 n.29 third generation perpetrator communities 17, 29 survivor communities 17, 29, 85–106, 134, 138 Third Reich 8, 35, 68, 143–4, 147, 208–9, 212, 217, 243 Thompson, Paul 12 n.23 Thomson, Alistair 12 n.21 Thorndike, Andrew and Amelie 148, 154 thyroid disorder 65, 71 Tiergartenstraße 4 memorial 69 Times 147 Timm, Uwe 178 n.40 Titanic (magazine) 177 n.27 Tito 208–9 Todesmühlen (Death Mills, film) 33–4, 40–1, 45 n.11, 45 n.19 tolerance 35, 41, 54, 66, 235, 240, 255 Toller, Ernst 145 Tolstoy, Leo 182 Tolzmann, Don Heinrich 255, 257, 262 n.13, 263 n.28, 263 n.37 Tomer, Ben Zion 103 n.38 Toms, B. 152 Topography of Terror 28 totalitarianism 50, 260 Totenwagen. Kindheit am Spiegelgrund (Kaufmann) 67, 73–5 tourism. See German international tourism Trafalgar Square 157 tragicomedy 174 transitional justice 19 Transnistria 235, 238, 240, 242 trauma Freud’s ideas 113 ‘lacuna’ of 86, 95 and memory 73–4, 76, 86, 90–1, 93–4, 99, 101 n.14, 138, 162, 164–5, 173

Index traumatic experiences 15, 17, 29, 87, 91, 99, 105 n.65, 136, 162 ‘traumatised silence’ 236 travelling exhibition 28 travelogues 199–200 Treblinka 93, 127 Trevelyan, John 151–7 Triumph des Willens (Riefenstahl) 177 n.27 tropes 8, 189, 192, 266 Truce, The 46 n.29 ‘trump card effect’ 57 Tschuggnall, Karoline 12 n.22, 30 n.3 Tulli, Magdalena 134–5, 137–8 Tusa, Ann and John 45 n.16 Tusk, Donald 132 Twark, Jill 165, 177 nn.28–9 Twentieth Century Fox 154 Twin Towers tragedy 266 Tyrrell, Lord 145 Uchtspringe psychiatric institution 76–7 Uckermark (U; Koepp) 172–4 Uhl, Heidemarie 120 n.2, 121 n.35 Ukraine 88, 104 n.41, 127, 171, 233–5, 240 Umschlagplatz (Rymkiewicz) 131, 133–4 uncanny 67, 130 Underhill, Karen 139 n.8 United German-American Committee of the USA 252, 256, 261 United States arrival of first German immigrants 255–6 Congress 255, 258 documentaries 145 German American Day 255–6 German American identity politics 258–60 German Embassy in 261 German emigration to 22–3, 255–6 German victim status 257–8, 260–1 Holocaust memory 251–64 Jewish groups 22, 254–5, 261 Library of Congress 257 memorials and museums 257–9, 261 occupation zones in Germany 33–4, 36, 40–1, 45 n.11 POW camps 45 n.19

293

relations with West Germany 251, 256 Republican Party 252 Revolutionary War 252 Senate 261, 264 n.48 shame culture 44 n.5 ‘Tricentennial Anniversary Year of German Settlement in America’ 255 Twin Towers tragedy 266 and UK relations 148 Watch List of suspected war criminals 109 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) 256–9 Unity Theatre 153 ‘universal metabolism’ 195 n.15, 196 n.38 UN secretary general 108 ‘Until the Whole Guard Has Passed’ (Aini) 87 US Watch List 109 value rationality 19 van Beetem, Harry 61 n.1 van der Heijden, Chris 62 n.4 van Dieken, Heiko 201, 210 van Gool, Jac 61 n.1 van Kemenade, Frederike 61 n.1 Van Tienen, Paul 55–6 Vatican 109 Verboten! (Fuller) 156 Versöhnung hat politische Gestalt (Dohrmann) 222 Vickers, Paul 139 n.13 videos 97 Vienna 20, 67, 74, 108–12, 114–19, 120 n.10, 122 n.38, 131–3, 243, 265, 268 Vietnam 216 Visser, Hanna 61 n.1 visual arts 183–4 Vittel 22 Volhnia Jewry 96 von Buchholz, Dahmen 54 von Doderer, Heimito 110 von Hahn, Graf 173–4 von Hammerstein, Franz 219, 229 n.23 von Ofterdingen, Heinrich 188 von Plato, Alexander 12 n.22, 213 n.13

294

Index

von Törne, Volker 219, 222, 229 n.19, 230 n.48 Vorst-Thijssen, Trees 61 n.1 Vrettakos, Nikiforo 11 n.5 Waffen SS 55–6 Wagner, Julia 1–12, 199–214 Wagner, Rudolf 247 n.17 Wais, Johann 110–16, 119 Wala, Michael 261 n.1 Waldheim, Kurt 108 Waldheim affair, Austria 107–23 Wandering Jew, The 145 Wardi, Dina 87, 101 n.14, 101 n.16, 103 n.35 Warsaw ghetto 21–2, 127, 129, 131–5, 148, 205, 220–1 Warsaw Ghetto, The (film) 156 Warsaw Treaty (1970) 220–1 Wartime Treatment Study Act, US 261, 264 n.47–8 Washington, DC 255–9, 261 Washington, George 252 Washington Post 256–7 Waxman, Zoe Vania 30 n.14 Weber, Martha 200–1 Weber, Max 19 Week, This 149 Wehrmacht soldiers 28, 109, 119, 220, 223, 225 Weigel, Sigrid 196 n.40 Welzer, Harald 12 n.22, 30 n.3, 64 n.57 Wenzel, Mirjam 45 n.13 Werner, Klaus 248 n.24 West, Rebecca 45 n.16 Westerwelle, Guido 185 West Germany and America 256 embassy in Britain 149, 153 enthusiasm for foreign trips 199–202, 206–9, 212 expellee organizations 220, 235–6 guilt 15–16 integration into Western Alliance 253, 258 and Poland, youth reconciliation activists 9, 215–32 public culture of shame 28

Westphal, Uwe 257 What the Censor Saw (Toms) 152 Whitebait, William 153 White House 255–6 Whiteread, Rachel 117 Whity (Fassbinder) 170 Wienand, Christiane 1–12, 215–32 Wiener Library (WL) 30 n.10 Wierling, Dorothee 12 n.22, 206, 213 n.13 Wilkinson, J. Brooke 146 Williams, Bernard 18, 30 n.6 Winkler, Markus 247 n.10 Winter, Jay 12 n.24 Wittlinger, Ruth 248 n.25 Wittmann, Florian 177 n.27 Wittmann, Rebecca 30 n.3 Włoskie szpilki (Italian High Heels; Tulli) 134–5 women’s barracks 91 World Jewish Congress 109 ‘wrong past’ 51–2, 57 Würmell, Klaus 229 nn.32–3 Würzburg 148 xenophobes 119 Yad Vashem 88 Yaoz, Hannah 99, 105 n.63 Yiddish 89, 145, 246–7 n.3, 268 Young, James E. 122 n.47 Yugoslavia 109, 153, 208–9, 212 Zadara, Michał 129 Zeyringer, Klaus 176 n.20 Zionism 89, 92, 158 Žižek, Slavoj 165, 177 n.25 Zrubavel, Yael 103 n.39 Zubrzycki, Genevieve 139 n.8 Zucker, Adam 140 n.23 Zurich 205 Zweig, Stefan 122 n.38 Zwei oder drei Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (Ludin, film) 28 Zwemer, Jan 62 n.10 Zwilling, Heinrich 241 Zwilling, Mathias 233