Beyond Political Correctness (German Monitor)

BEYOND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS REMAPPING GERMAN SENSIBILITIES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

GERMAN MONITOR No. 72 General Editor: Pól Ó Dochartaigh GDR/German Monitor founded by Ian Wallace in 1979

International Advisory Board Daniel Azuélos



Anna Chiarloni Geoffrey V. Davis Helen Fehervary Gert-Joachim Glaeßner Gisela Holfter Karen Leeder Wolfgang Schopf

Université de Picardie-Jules Verne, Amiens Università di Torino TU Aachen Ohio State University Humboldt-Universität, Berlin University of Limerick University of Oxford Archiv der Peter Suhrkamp Stiftung, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main

BEYOND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS REMAPPING GERMAN SENSIBILITIES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Edited by

Christine Anton and Frank Pilipp

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3197-5 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3198-2 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in the Netherlands

TABLE OF CONTENTS Repositioning German Identity

1

Christine Anton

Catastrophic History, Trauma and Mourning in W.G. Sebald and Jörg Friedrich

27

Helmut Schmitz

Historiography and Memory Politics: The Cultural-Historical Discourse in the Works of Bernhard Schlink

51

Christine Anton

A Different Voice: ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ in Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and unterwegs verloren

85

Norgard Klages

A Human Being or a Good Jew? Individualism in Vladimir Vertlib’s Novel Letzter Wunsch

107

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

Normalization and the Ethics of Holocaust Representation in Vilsmaier’s Leo und Claire and Comedian Harmonists

135

Muriel Cormican

Searching for Justice: Jews, Germans and the Nazi Past in Recent German Cinema

159

Sabine von Mering

Challenging Notions of Post-Wall German Identity: Minority and Migrant Voices

185

Jennifer E. Michaels

Unification and Difference in German Post-Wall Cinema

207

Susan C. Anderson

Post-Wall German Road Movies: Renegotiations of National Identity?

235

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

List of Contributors

267

Index

271

Christine Anton Repositioning German Identity The quest for a viable, distinctive and stable German sense of self is an ongoing process, and the connections to the Nazi past and the legacy of the GDR remain at the center of political, historical and socio-cultural discourses. New generations of writers and filmmakers call for a reassessment and remapping of the German past and are pushing at the boundaries of cultural taboos and political correctness, delving into the complex question what constitutes the German nation today.

Visiting Germany during the summer of 2006, one came upon a country whose usual gloom and doom was supplanted by a party atmosphere not seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Germany was hosting the soccer world championship and had invited the entire world to drop in and experience a people that was proudly waving its flag and chanting the national anthem. The event with the official motto ‘Die Welt zu Gast bei Freunden’ offered Germany a grand opportunity to present itself as a hospitable and generous country, open, multicultural, and far from being xenophobic. For four weeks the German nation became a model of perfect harmony, united within itself and united with the rest of the world. 1 The question though was whether this sense of belonging, rarely encountered among the German people, would outlast the event or national concerns about immigration, the still visible divide between East and West Germany, and the never-ending debate about the country’s identity would not take center stage once again. Certainly not everybody was pleased with the seemingly ardent display of German patriotism, dubbed by the German media as ‘partyotism,’ and warnings about the dangers of hoisting the flag on every building and singing the national anthem, exploited and infused by the Nazis with undertones of cultural supremacy, were voiced. 2 It would seem that not even an innocuous event such as a soccer game would allow the German nation some respite from questions and concerns about its past. Yet, despite the criticisms of the Germans for their open display of national pride, the tournament proved to be an immensely successful boost for Germany’s image around the world. 3

2

Christine Anton

In the last few years, headline news from Germany have indeed conveyed an impression of a progressive and open-minded society, cooperating on a global level, and trying to build economic and political partnerships with friends and foes alike. Endeavors such as changing the German citizenship laws 4 to guiding the eurozone out of a financial meltdown in 2010 and becoming the dominant force ensuring stability among European member states, illustrate Germany’s striving to exercise a leadership role in global affairs, and, simultaneously, to lead by example. Yet, despite achievements in its domestic and foreign policy, and having been world champion in exporting goods until only recently, not all is well in the republic, at least in the country’s own perception. ‘Hat der deutsche Bürger keinen Grund zum Jammern, wird er unzufrieden,’ writes Swiss journalist Roger de Weck. 5 It is no exaggeration to say that Germans have a tendency to be their own worst critics – ‘Champions im Volkssport, das eigene Land schlechtzumachen.’ 6 The nation’s biggest pet peeves to date are the ailing economy, even though this has become a worldwide phenomenon; the enormous costs gobbled up by Germany’s unification and its rebuilding of the East; outsourcing and the disappearance of jobs caused in part by globalization; a diminishing living standard especially resulting from the Hartz Reforms and their intended restructuring of unemployment and social security benefits; widespread right-wing extremism and a growing crime rate in the former East; the debate about Turkey’s ambition to join the E.U.; the constitutionality of Germany’s mission in Afghanistan; and, last but not least, the apparently unreachable goal of obtaining a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. These days, several years after having hosted the World Cup, the nation’s aura of ‘united we can’ has been replaced with what can only be called a genuine sense of apprehension and frustration. Germany is struggling with how it is perceived by the world around it, whether or not it has garnered global respect, and, moreover, how its own self-perception measures up to an objective and factual evaluation of its state-of-affairs. Much has been written in recent years about Germany’s identity crisis and quest for a viable, ‘normal’ national consciousness and platform. 7 From the politically controversial concept of ‘Leitkultur’ to Jürgen Habermas’s plea for a ‘constitutional patriotism,’ the debates about the meaning of national identity are fierce and multi-faceted. 8 One of the underlying issues is

Repositioning German Identity

3

whether or not Germany should call itself a country of immigrants, and if the concept of cultural hegemony has become a thing of the past. 9 Does, for instance, multiculturalism support the idea of indigenously controlled cultural institutions, and should immigrants be forced to integrate rather than be given time to gradually assimilate? If so, does compulsory integration into a leading culture with core beliefs and values not eventually lead to ghettoization and a degree of indigence and racial discrimination? The danger here, of course, is that social and ethnic segregation can lead to violent demonstrations and riots as has been the case in several European states in recent years (e.g., France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the Czech Republic). As in many other countries, the problem of immigration pushed the German government to come up with a sweeping reform, and after several years of negotiations between the then ruling parties of SPD and the Greens and the oppositional forces of CDU and FDP, the new immigration act took effect at the beginning of 2005, requiring immigrants to take mandatory language as well as integration courses to learn about the country’s history, culture, and laws. 10 Immigration, however, is by far not the sole factor that has forced Germans to reexamine their identity. The onslaught of debates about German identity started with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and the unification of the two Germanys. The ‘Literaturstreit’ that ignited after Christa Wolf’s publication of her book Was bleibt? in 1990, and the ensuing revelations that Wolf and other prominent dissident East German writers (most notably Heiner Müller, Rainer Schedlinski and Sascha Anderson) collaborated with the ‘Stasi,’ East Germany’s secret police, and the opening of the ‘Stasi’ files to the public in 1992, led to a whole firestorm of recriminations and defenses, and initiated a discussion about how to come to terms with the GDR past. The East German ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ regarding its socialist past in turn sparked a renewed emergence of the West German past and its significance for the present and future of a united nation. 11 It became quite obvious that the Nazi past was still an open sore in the nation’s collective psyche when the ensuing public discourse engaged in tackling issues such as how Germany has confronted its past, what Giordano calls the ‘Leichenberg im Keller der deutschen Geschichte,’ 12 what lessons, if any, have been learned, and whether or not the discussion about the Holocaust and the German guilt has reached a saturation point. In addition, a plethora of studies

4

Christine Anton

on this subject were published during the 90s, repeating the arguments put forth by the ‘Historikerstreit’ that gripped the West German nation in the late 80s. 13 The debate between the main participants Ernst Nolte and Jürgen Habermas played out mostly through newspaper articles and editorials in the FAZ and Die Zeit and centered on a couple of key issues: Were the Nazi crimes a defensive response to Stalin’s dictatorship and Soviet brutality? Was Nazism an inevitability, i.e., is there something innate in the German character that led to Hitler’s popularity? And how much responsibility does the German nation bear for the Holocaust and for how long? Thus, when a decade later Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial dissertation Hitler’s Willing Executioners was published in 1996, its author found fertile ground for his theses. Arguing that it was not only a small minority of party leaders and SS-officers who were involved in the mass killings of Jews, but that the entire nation willingly acquiesced to the extinction of millions of innocent people, Goldhagen provoked renewed engagement in an objective and moral reflection on the meaning of the Nazi past. Certainly, Goldhagen was not the first to question the actions of ‘ordinary’ citizens during the Hitler regime, but he did succeed in challenging a widespread complacency among Germans who had put the past behind them, buried it, and assuaged their conscience. 14 Undoubtedly, German ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ has undergone several stages since 1945. When in the aftermath of Germany’s capitulation Allied Forces took full control of German everyday life, one of their first initiatives was to ‘denazify’ the German population and to establish the foundation for a new democracy. Denazification, however, did not completely accomplish what was intended, namely removing all Nazi personnel from positions of influence and reeducating the populace, partly because many ex-Nazis successfully hid their true identity or escaped to countries sympathetic to the Nazi ideology, partly because by 1948 the U.S. government redirected its attention to matters of greater importance – its response to what became known as the Cold War. As a result, a number of former Nazis were reemployed in West Germany’s newly formed government, or were even hired by the U.S. for their expertise in espionage or the sciences, as in the case of the rocket engineer Wernher von Braun who in time became responsible for launching America’s space program. 15 Reconstruction efforts and the implementation of the Marshall Plan facilitated West Germany’s economic miracle in the 50s, which kept

Repositioning German Identity

5

the nation busy and made it easier to evade a constructive confrontation with its immediate past as the Mitscherlichs in their ground-breaking work Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern laid bare. 16 Consequently, the shock effect of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials from 1963 to 1965 was especially profound when it brought to light the unspeakable horrors that were committed by low ranking Nazi officials and sympathizers. If West Germans were under the illusion that the Nuremberg Trials of the late forties had put an end to prosecuting and condemning the country’s horrific crimes during the Third Reich, they now were forced to listen to an even more detailed account of what went on behind the barbed wires of the concentration and extermination camps. It was these public revelations about the Holocaust and, consequently, the exposing of ‘die zweite Schuld,’ 17 that laid the ground for Germany’s slow and arduous path towards coming to terms with its past. The West German nation’s obstinate silence and twenty-year-long cover-up of the gruesome murders shook particularly younger people into action to explore their parents’ activities during the Nazi regime. ‘Anti-fascism,’ ‘anti-establishment,’ cleaning the country of the ‘dust from thousand years’ were the slogans of the radical student movement of the late sixties. The student protests of 1968 were instrumental in giving a voice to the concerns of the second generation, those born during or shortly after the war, and who since have been the driving force for working through the legacy of Hitler’s Third Reich, the genocide of Jews, and the extermination of countless other victims of the Nazi ideology. Many expressed their anger, regret, and their mourning through writing. In the mid-70s appeared a corpus of literature known as ‘Väterliteratur’ that is a testament to the deep psychological troubles the young generation faced in uncovering their fathers’ involvement in the Nazi Party. Part fiction, part autobiography, these texts reveal a moral and ethical distancing from the generation of parents and grandparents, creating a major rift between the two generations that fundamentally shaped the direction of West Germany’s political, social and cultural future. 18 The next decade saw many attempts by the West German government to not only publicly acknowledge the country’s political and moral obligation to the victims of National Socialism, but also to apologize and to seek ways to make reparations to the surviving family members. Two events in 1985 made it clear that the German government was well-intentioned

6

Christine Anton

on one hand, but, on the other, went about it like the proverbial elephant in a china store. One was U.S. President Reagan’s clumsily planned visit of the grave site of Waffen-SS officers at Bitburg, 19 the other German President Weizsäcker’s speech at the ceremony commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II, in which he referred to it as ‘the day of liberation from the inhuman system of Nazi tyranny.’ 20 As the result of Germany’s unification, the notion of remembrance and commemoration was expanded, as similar questions about identity, growing up under a totalitarian regime, and denial of the past had to be faced and dealt with, and new impetus was given to the postHolocaust discourse. The nineties were also a time when the German nation was called upon to settle monetary claims made by Holocaust survivors as well as former forced laborers. In 1999, the German government under Chancellor Schröder announced plans to pay reparations to victims of Nazi atrocities from funds provided by some of the country’s largest companies. In August 2000, a German law establishing the foundation ‘Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft’ took effect. 21 By the end of 2006 when payments were concluded, 1.7 million survivors and their heirs in almost 100 countries had received a total of €4.47 billion. 22 While murder and torture cannot be compensated monetarily, the question remains how Germany will continue remembering its moral obligation. Consequently, since the nineties the term ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ has come under strict scrutiny because of its implication of seeking to ‘overcome or master the past,’ something that can simply never be accomplished. Nowadays, scholars increasingly use the more neutral term ‘memory acts’ when referring to the act of remembering the past. Additionally, analyzing the psychological impact of ‘postmemory’ or ‘secondary memory’ on post-war generations has become the focal point of many Holocaust studies. 23 For the last decade, the discussion about memory and mourning, postmemory and trauma has taken on a rather abstract and theoretical trait, which is troubling to an extent as it shifts the attention from palpable immediacy to the realm of intellectual and academic study. 24 Since the start of the new millennium a new phase of coping with ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung,’ which can only be summarized as the ‘institutionalization of the Holocaust,’ has entered the public consciousness. In 2001, the Jewish Museum opened in Berlin, and in

Repositioning German Identity

7

2005, the Holocaust Memorial, commemorating the murdered Jews of Europe, was inaugurated. In 2008, two more memorials were added to the list: One is dedicated to the persecuted homosexuals and was inaugurated in May of that year; 25 the other site will honor the murdered Sinti and Roma who had voiced criticism of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial as it appears to single out the Jewish victims, when in fact there were many more victims such as gypsies, homosexuals, communists, and other political and religious prisoners. 26 Additionally, the German government successfully lobbied for moving the secretariat of The Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research, initiated in 1998 by the Swedish prime minister, to its permanent location in Berlin where it opened in March 2008.27 Concentration and extermination camps such as Buchenwald, Dachau and Auschwitz have long been sites of commemoration and education, and visiting them has been incorporated into the German school curriculum for decades. Many critics fear that this institutionalization signals the end of the German attempt to deal actively with the past, while supporters believe that institutionalization guarantees the continuation of remembering the past through its de facto visibility and tangibility. Yet, it seems that even the legacy of the Holocaust and German guilt has succumbed to the Zeitgeist of political correctness as the German nation is simply trying to be all things to all people. The main objective of the foundation ‘Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft’ and the building boom with respect to Holocaust memorials certainly is the recognition of those who suffered persecution or violence during the Hitler regime, and to promote the recovery of suppressed individual and family memory. However, the emphasis on a spirit of reconciliation, harmony and pluralism is starting to have a negative effect on the distinction between the ‘real’ victims of National Socialism and those who were ‘only’ indirectly victimized. The issue thus becomes whether or not it is morally justifiable to recognize every person’s suffering, no matter to what side those who suffered the violence belonged. 28 Hence, does the German nation, too, have the right to call itself a victim of Nazism, specifically considering air attacks and bombing raids during World War II, as this particular question has become a direct by-product of the political correctness when talking about the twelve years of Nazi terror?

8

Christine Anton

In the mid-nineties it seemed there was no end in sight to the German self-flagellation over past atrocities. There had been the unexpected success of the Goldhagen book, the opening of the exhibition ‘Verbrechen der Wehrmacht,’ and the 1995 publication of Victor Klemperer’s diaries detailing everyday life in Nazi Germany. 29 Yet the overall fanfare in the media regarding these three events also resulted in opening the door to a major shift in perspective by adding a new dimension to the study of the Holocaust and Nazi ideology that has become known as ‘the partial pardoning of the German nation.’ Naturally, the insistence on examining the German past would almost automatically have to lead to an eventual evaluation of the current state of the nation by comparing and contrasting ‘Germany then’ with ‘Germany now’ as well as predictions for the country’s future. Thus, on the one hand the renewed interest in the German past thrust the German nation once again into closely examining the scale of their forefathers’ involvement with the Nazi party, but on the other it also provided the incentive to finally exonerate those who openly defied Nazism or at least covertly tried to undermine the Nazi power structure. Had the notion that Germany itself had been a victim of Nazism once been taboo, it now received what some call its ‘due attention’ not only in the press but also in films, documentaries, and in literature. In 1997, W. G. Sebald gave a series of lectures titled ‘Luftkrieg und Literatur’ at the University of Zurich in which he criticized the members of ‘Gruppe 47’ for having failed by and large to write about the German victimization in Allied air attacks. Sebald contends that this part of German war history received only sparse literary interest which amounted to a virtual taboo in German culture. Only a handful of writers constitute an exception to the rule; yet, either they did not achieve a long-lived interest among their readers or were faced with indefinite delays in the publication of their works. Though, for example, Heinrich Böll wrote his novel Der Engel schwieg as early as 1949, the book was passed from publisher to publisher until its eventual publication in 1992. Likewise, Alexander Kluge’s work Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945, written in 1970, did not get published until 1977, more than thirty years after the end of the war. Sebald’s critique is directly aimed at the passivity of German writers who, Sebald opines, chose silence over political and historical discourse. His theses sparked intense criticism from the left who ac-

Repositioning German Identity

9

cused Sebald not only of blurring the distinction between perpetrators and victims, but also of wanting to revise German history, a lashing out against the author akin to what Martin Walser experienced after his speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1998. 30 Nonetheless, Sebald has posthumously been credited for starting the literary discourse on the German trauma of World War II and the national debate about collective versus personal memory. His essay ‘Luftkrieg und Literatur,’ based on his lectures, and in particular his novel Austerlitz (2001) have tapped into a hitherto repressed chapter of wartime memory which Sebald sought to free from its taboo status in order to engage in a comprehensive dialogue about the Holocaust, its representation, and about commemoration, memory and identity. Another work that has since received a lot of attention is Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand which chronicles the Allied bombing of civilian targets during World War II. Its accusation that British attacks were a ‘sinnlose[] Vergeltungs- und Strafaktion gegen eine schutzlose Zivilbevölkerung’ was harshly reprimanded by the German media, yet the book achieved considerable literary success. 31 Thus, when Günter Grass in 2002 published his novella Im Krebsgang about the sinking of the German military ship Wilhelm Gustloff by a Soviet submarine, the deadliest disaster in sea history, the issue of collective amnesia had already been hotly debated. 32 Though tragic, the Gustloff’s close association with Hitler’s ‘Kriegsmarine’ ensured that the enormous loss of lives would not be empathetically recognized and this made the tragedy a footnote in maritime history. More than fifty years later, however, talking about this unprecedented disaster and the plight of German refugees in the latter days of the war was no longer perceived as an audacious act on part of the German people. Other significant publications over the last decade that have dealt with displacement, war refugees, and the German collective silence include Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s Der Verlorene; Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper; Reinhard Jirgl’s Die Unvollendeten; Walter Kempowski’s Alles umsonst; the four-part Spiegel series ‘Die Deutschen als Opfer;’ and the TV documentaries ‘Die Vertriebenen. Hitlers letzte Opfer,’ and ‘Die grosse Flucht.’ 33 From a psychological standpoint, Germany’s new ease with which it approaches its own memories of the collective traumatic events in the latter days of World War II should be an encouragement for the nation to engage in a mourning process and halt the transgenerational transference of a repressed trauma which, if

10

Christine Anton

unexpressed, could ‘function as a powerful transmitter of an unmastered inheritance.’ 34 A nation’s historical trauma calls for mourning, but the distinction between victims and perpetrators as to their ‘subject position’ with respect to historical trauma cannot and must not be blurred or conflated. ‘Not everyone traumatized by events is a victim,’ LaCapra writes. He continues: There is the possibility of perpetrator trauma which must itself be acknowledged and in some sense worked through if perpetrators are to distance themselves from an earlier implication in deadly ideologies and practices. Such trauma does not, however, entail the equation or identification of the perpetrator and the victim. 35

The debate about historiography, personal versus collective memory, and a German identity crisis has definitively had an effect on the German/Jewish relationship. When Walser rejected what he called the ‘Auschwitz moral cudgel,’ he was immediately labeled an antiSemite, and his earlier books were subsequently carefully re-analyzed and generally branded as being anti-Jewish. 36 Undoubtedly, Germany’s grappling with repressed memories has to be closely watched and evaluated to prevent mythologization and decontextualization of historical facts. 37 Jewish Holocaust survivors and their families in particular judge Germans’ new-found role as war victims to be a role reversal and detraction from their own status. Germany’s ‘problems with guilt, shame, and forgiveness cannot be expected to be solved by the victims.’ 38 At the same time, the neglect of these historical facts ‘would run the risk of being a distortion of historical truth.’ 39 Even taking into consideration the possible misuse of blurring the perpetrator/victim dichotomy, the necessity ‘ein […] umfassenderes Perspektivenspektrum auf jene historische Zeit zu entwerfen und dadurch ein hoffentlich vollständigeres und richtigeres Bild zu konstruieren’ is real. 40 As such the ‘current developments [are] necessary stages in the historical process.’ 41 Therefore, it is paramount that both sides engage in an open dialogue that does not perpetuate an endless cycle of blame and apologetic gestures, nor tries to whitewash history or eradicate memory. ‘If Germans feel they can criticize forms of memory or even the Jews without being accused of anti-semitism, and if Jews can criticize Germans without fear of giving rise to antisemitism, then “normal” dialogue will be possible, and resentments deriving from the suppression of true opinion overcome.’ 42

Repositioning German Identity

11

Clearly, the German government does its utmost to placate Jews and the State of Israel as well as its own Jewish-German citizens and assures them that their plight and connection to the German past and present is a constant focal point of the country’s political agenda. A milestone, albeit a contentious one as mentioned before, was reached with President Weizsäcker’s speech in 1985, another one when President Köhler gave his speech on the sixtieth anniversary of the end of WWII in which he told the assembled parliament that Germany forever bears ‘die Verantwortung, die Erinnerung an all dieses Leid und an seine Ursachen wachzuhalten,’ and that the German nation has ‘dafür [zu] sorgen, dass es nie wieder dazu kommt. Es gibt keinen Schlussstrich.’ 43 Relations between Germany and Israel have indeed undergone a transformation for the better. Next to the United States, Germany has become Israel’s most important economic partner and military ally, and Israel’s concerns are an ‘unumstößliche Maxime deutscher Politik,’ as Köhler pledged in an address to the Knesset in Jerusalem in 2005 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the State of Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany. 44 When Chancellor Merkel joined the State of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary celebrations in 2008, she was given special permission to address the Knesset in German, a decision that was certainly not unanimously approved by all members of the Israeli legislature as many still consider German to be the language of the murderers of Jews. In her unprecedented speech, Merkel stressed the uniqueness of German-Israeli ties and the moral responsibility that Germany bears for the ‘Massenmord an sechs Millionen Juden.’ 45 Israel and Germany are bonded by a shared past, present and future, and it is the past that ‘erfüllt uns Deutsche mit Scham,’ she avowed. The present, Merkel stated, is characterized by the ‘besondere[] historische[] Verantwortung Deutschlands für die Sicherheit Israels,’ a responsibility that is part of Germany’s ‘Staatsräson.’ And the priority for the future must be ‘zusammen mit der jungen Generation das Bewusstsein für eine Erinnerungskultur zu wecken, eine Erinnerungskultur, die auch dann trägt, wenn die Überlebenden der Shoah nicht mehr unter uns sein werden,’ the chancellor declared. The relationship between the two states reached yet another level of amicability when Israeli President Peres attended a special parliamentary session in Berlin at the beginning of 2010 to commemorate the sixty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration

12

Christine Anton

camp. In his speech to the German parliament, Peres expressed his country’s gratitude for Germany’s help and support, and, like Merkel, emphasized the unique friendship between the two countries. 46 German-Israeli political cooperation has never been closer – since 2008, the German and Israeli cabinets have met twice for consultations –, Jewish communities are being re-established in Germany, and Jewish life and traditions are becoming part of the German cultural landscape once again. But building a niche for their cultural identity among Germans, many of whom still feel uneasy when encountering the Jewish ‘other,’ is for many Jews a harrowing undertaking. Parallel to the German people, German Jews have had to go through their own ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung.’ Like their counterpart, the non-Jewish German second generation, it is the Jewish second and third generations who are responsible for exploring the past and coming to terms with their ancestors’ painful and tragic fate. They ‘have come to realize that the catastrophe undergone by their elders has left traces in their minds and bodies, traces that call for elaboration and interpretation.’ 47 From blaming their parents and grandparents for silently enduring the Nazi torture and failing to stand up to Hitler’s henchmen, to calling for a truce in German/Jewish relations, the emotions attached to this trauma are disparate and complex. As successors to the Holocaust generation they are ‘concerned with the fragile balancing act of living in Germany as Jews, the difficult struggle of self-definition, and the search for a Jewish identity in the country of the murderers,’ Ernestine Schlant writes. 48 Among Jewish-German authors who write about the legacy of the past, Rafael Seligmann is one who advocates a new direction in the German/Jewish dialogue. In his books and essays he examines the mechanisms of searching for a hybrid German-Jewish identity in postShoah daily life. Adamant that learning from and of the past is imperative, Seligmann, however, argues that the time has come for a new vision for the Jewish community in Germany, a vision that requires that ‘the fixation on the genocide of the Jewish people […] yield to a view that takes the full spectrum of German-Jewish history into account.’ 49 Seligmann is part of a group of contemporary German-Jewish writers who aim to transcend the psychological walls between themselves and their parents’ generation, and to break the taboos that have affected the interaction between Jews and Germans. The narrative structures these writers employ range from expressing

Repositioning German Identity

13

anger and sadness, as in Ruth Klüger’s, Barbara Honigmann’s and Esther Dischereit’s works, to using humor, sarcasm and caricature as in the case of Seligmann and Maxim Biller. 50 Writers such as Seligmann and Biller seek to alter the mindsets and attitudes in their own community as well as the feelings of Germans towards religious and ethnic minorities. Fundamentally, with a falling birth rate and an aging population, Germany needs its minorities to remain competitive in a globalized economy. With notions of ‘nationstate’ and ‘homogenous culture’ vanishing from daily discourse, it is vital for Germans to realize that their country is becoming a pluralistic nation in which minorities contribute significantly to the image of Germany in the twenty-first century. And while Seligmann mocks what he labels ‘philo-Semitism’ in today’s German society, a fascination for all things Jewish that Jack Zipes interprets as ‘alibis to the rest of the world’ and testament ‘that Germans are no longer antiSemitic,’ 51 many others fear a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the midst of widely perceived xenophobia. Right-wing violence against foreigners in Germany had increased dramatically in the late 90s, and recent years do not show a slowing trend in extremist activity. In August 2007, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights published a ‘Report on Racism and Xenophobia in the Member States of the EU,’ in which Germany was cited as one of the European countries with an upward trend in racist violence and crime. 52 According to the report, violent racism had increased by 5.3% between 2001 and 2006, whereas crimes with an extremist right-wing motive showed a staggering 12.2% increase during the same time period. In addition, anti-Semitic incidents rose by 1.7%. Though the report cautioned against drawing premature conclusions as apparent increases in violence could simply reflect better data collection rather than real increases, figures show that contemporary xenophobia and bias crimes are on the rise. Moreover, the ‘observation of this apparent upward trend in extremist activity in Germany is supported by reports of increased right-wing attacks noted by victim support organizations,’ the report states. 53 Indeed, the figures given in the agency’s updated 2009 ‘RAXEN Report’ show a sharp increase in the number of extreme right-wing (+37%) and xenophobic (+43%) crimes in Germany compared to the previous year. 54 Equally alarming are the successes of right-wing extremists in elections in the former GDR. Evoking such notions as ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ and ‘German Reich,’

14

Christine Anton

the New Right movement aims to reinstate a traditional concept of German identity on the basis of an ethnocentric nationalism. The danger for Germany in its quest for a valid identity lies in the fact that it is a small step from nationalism to fanaticism. As has been the case with the German-Jewish community, Afro-Germans, too, have had to endure racism and discrimination in their adopted ‘Heimat,’ and like German Jews they too are struggling to have their voices heard. Similarly, while the German-Jewish community, mindful of its specific relationship with Germany, is trying to determine its cultural identity without having any other comparable ethnic group on which to model its identity, so do Afro-Germans live and work in a vacuum. But what makes it even more problematic for Afro-Germans is their lack of a common history. The first Africans came to Germany during the German colonial period; others are descendants of black soldiers who fought in Germany during the two world wars. The recent majority of Africans entered the country as asylum seekers. Thus, for them, ‘reclaiming their […] history in Germany is important because of the role history plays in shaping culture and identity.’ 55 Undoubtedly, because of their visible difference, these immigrants, like Turks and Muslims, are an easy target for mob violence. Though one might wonder if ‘the growth of rightwing radicalism and neo-Nazism [has] realigned the relationship between Jews and foreigners,’ 56 there is no proof that some form of solidarity among the various minority groups has emerged. It would certainly be ‘a mistake to designate all non-Germans with the allpurpose term Ausländer and to ignore the significant differences among the various groups by race, class, ethnicity, religion, and color,’ 57 yet the question needs to be addressed whether a spirit of commonality would affect immigration and cultural policies. Since the end of World War II, Germany, the country and its people, has come a long way. Yet, even though Germans today have ‘guten Grund, stolz auf [ihr] Land zu sein,’ as President Köhler remarked in his speech commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II, 58 and even naysayers have to admit that headlines regarding recent political developments, from electing a woman chancellor to changing laws for obtaining German citizenship, have generally been rather positive, Germany cannot and should not forget about the responsibility it inherited when its elected government committed crimes against humanity several decades ago. ‘Wenn deut-

Repositioning German Identity

15

sche Verantwortung für Israel und für Juden Fundament und Dauer haben soll, dann muss sie in Deutschland von den beteiligten Generationen entwickelt und weitergegeben werden. Niemand sonst kann diese Arbeit übernehmen,’ Bodo Morshäuser writes. 59 The road ahead might be a bumpy one, unless Germany applies the lessons it learned over the last sixty-five years. This entails the acknowledgment that the country is rapidly becoming a hybrid, pluralistic nation, home to several minority groups who bring their own customs and traditions and thereby reshape the societal and cultural landscape. The very concept of nation, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the wave of independence proclamations of former Warsaw Pact nations, nowadays is defined as a changeable construct impacted by political policies and cultural impulses. And just as many other European countries, Germany too has undergone a period of national self-reflection and search for identity. It is unquestionable that the ‘Nazi regime is the greatest historical burden on German identity,’60 however, the direction in which the country is heading will be determined by present and, even more importantly, future developments. It is, in Grass’s words, the ‘Vergegenkunft’ of history that has to form the framework in which the emerging new collective consciousness of Germany will occur. 61 It is unlikely that an end to the discussions and arguments about what characterizes a practical as well as practicable German identity is in sight. It is from those verbal battles that the country benefits most on its path to redefining itself. This ‘never-to-be-resolved debate’ is what James Young calls ‘the best German memorial to the fascist era and its victims.’ 62 Adorno and Enzenberger’s critique that Germans will forever refuse to seriously work through their past, thus can no longer be accepted as the final verdict. 63 Since unification, Germany’s soul-searching has taken on new dimensions and perspectives as a result of ‘an unprecedented amount of commemoration and remembrance’ 64 after 1989. Analogous to the reassessment of the GDR history after unification, National Socialism and the German questions of guilt and shame too have undergone reanalyses from new angles. New generations of writers and filmmakers are pushing at the boundaries of cultural taboos and political correctness and probe the complex collective consciousness with a view to ascertaining what constitutes the German nation today. They are challenging the status quo of the German ‘Vergangenheitsbewälti-

16

Christine Anton

gung’ and seek to find new ways to make certain that Auschwitz will remain a ‘deeply felt obligation,’ but also no longer perceive ‘Auschwitz as a hindrance to achieving normalcy.’ 65 The younger generations in particular, whose parents and grandparents still were children during the Nazi years, differ in their historical outlook. They have enough distance to make room for the articulation of German wartime suffering and to recognize it as an integral part of Germany’s national identity. The decades-long resistance in post-war Germany to move beyond accepted views on memory, history and trauma, and on the victim/perpetrator binary has given way to experimenting with unorthodox criteria. History is after all a constantly changing construct. Certainly, ‘all of us who live in the shadow of the Holocaust are heirs to the memory of the past,’ yet at the same time we cannot refuse to accept the fact that ‘at each moment in time, this memory evolves and is newly interpreted.’ 66 This volume is a compilation of essays about Germany’s quest for a more stable and less contradictory sense of self. Outlining the increasingly open and uncensored debate about the German past, present and future, the contributions in this book discuss the possibilities and difficulties of achieving an objective and open discourse about the meaning and memory of the nation’s past – a past that many wish shall no longer solely be defined by its crimes and horrors. As such they strive to discuss important questions about German society and the very notion of what being German means in the age of globalization and the vanishing of nation-states in a continuously strengthening European Union; the question about what is German culture in a postmodern era; and how the past affects and shapes the present and future of hybrid German generations. These issues are analyzed through the perspectives of German, Jewish-German, and minority German writers and filmmakers. Notes 1

Sönke Wortmann, the director of the film about Germany’s first soccer World Cup victory in 1954, Das Wunder von Bern (2003), also made the documentary Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen (2006), highlighting the optimism and camaraderie the Germans shared during the 2006 world cup.

Repositioning German Identity

17

2

Cf. David Crossland, ‘From Humorless to Carefree in 30 Days’, Spiegel Online, 10 July 2006, at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,426063,00.html (accessed 31 December 2009).

3

In the online article ‘Soccer World Cup helps Germany challenge Britain to become world’s most valued nation brand,’ published 21 November 2006 by the British Anholt Nation Brands Index, it is reported that Germany hosting the FIFA World Cup has helped raise the country’s profile not only within its borders but most importantly abroad: ‘Germany already has a positive international image with particular respect for its governance, economy and popular brands, such as Audi, Siemens, Braun and Volkswagen. It’s not a country that’s usually associated with warmth, hospitality, beauty, culture or fun, but the 2006 FIFA World Cup™ has definitely helped not only soften and boost Germany’s image, but also show its potential as a destination for fun and friendliness’ (http://www.nationbrandindex.com/nbi_q306-uk-press-release.phtml [accessed 23 March 2008]). A more recent survey from April 2010 by GlobeScan in collaboration with the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland reports that 59% of more than 29,000 people in twenty-eight countries thought that Germany was the country with the most positive influence in the world; see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/160410bbcwspoll.pdf (accessed 31 May 2010).

4

For many decades, Germany’s immigration laws were based upon the principle of jus sanguinis, the right by which citizenship could be obtained only if one was related to a German national by blood. When the country experienced an immense influx of immigrants in the 1990s, it became paramount to overhaul the old immigration policy and facilitate the integration of foreigners by adding the principle of jus soli, which accords a person the right to citizenship on the grounds of being born on German soil, thus granting citizenship to a large portion of German immigrants and migrant workers.

5

Roger de Weck, ‘Der deutsche Frühling’, Der Spiegel, 14 May 2007, 72.

6

Ibid., p. 77.

7 See for instance Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., After Unity. Reconfiguring German Identities, Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1997; Stuart Parkes, Understanding Contemporary Germany, London: Routledge, 1997; Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, Munich: Beck, 1999; Hans Mommsen, The Legacy of the Holocaust and German National Identity, New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1999; Aleida Assmann and Ute Frevert, Geschichtsvergessenheit, Geschichtsversessenheit. Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1999; Edgar Platen, ed., Erinnerte und Erfundene Erfahrung. Zur Darstellung von Zeitgeschichte in deutschsprachiger Gegenwartsliteratur, Munich: Iudicium, 2000; Jan-Werner Müller, Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity, New Haven: Yale University Press,

18

Christine Anton

2000; Stuart Taberner and Frank Finlay, eds., Recasting German Identity. Culture, Politics, and Literature in the Berlin Republic, Rochester: Camden House, 2002; Frederick A. Lubich, Wendewelten. Paradigmenwechsel in der deutschen Literaturund Kulturgeschichte nach 1945, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002; Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past. United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich, London: Routledge, 2002; Barbara Beßlich, Katharina Grätz and Olaf Hildebrand, eds., Wende des Erinnerns? Geschichtskonstruktionen in der deutschen Literatur nach 1989, Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2006; Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grote, eds., German Memory Contests. The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990, Rochester: Camden House, 2006. 8

For an in-depth analysis of the debate about a German ‘core culture,’ see Hartwig Pautz, Die deutsche Leitkultur: eine Identitätsdebatte, Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2005; and Jürgen Habermas, Die Normalität einer Berliner Republik, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1995.

9

For many years, the German government refused to accept the notion that the country has become a nation of immigrants, which is surprising because for decades there has been a constant flow of guest workers as well as asylum seekers into the country. Today, immigrants account for about 9% of Germany’s population, among which Turkish immigrants and their descendants make up the largest group with almost two million. See the official webpage of the Federal Ministry of the Interior at: http://www.bmi.bund.de (accessed 3 January 2010).

10

A comprehensive version of the new ‘Zuwanderungsgesetz’ is available at: http://www.zuwanderung.de (accessed 3 January 2010).

11

See also Konrad H. Jarausch, Hinrich C. Seeba and David P. Conradt, ‘The Presence of the Past: Culture, Opinion, and Identity in Germany’, in: Jarausch, ed., After Unity, pp. 25-60 (here: p. 47): ‘Unification in effect doubled the burden of the German past in the twentieth century. As if the scars of the Nazi trauma were not enough, the collapse of the GDR added another failed dictatorship, set of collaborators or victims, and demands for restitution.’ 12 Ralph Giordano, Die zweite Schuld oder Von der Last Deutscher zu sein, Hamburg: Rasch und Röhring, 1987, p. 355. 13

The Historians’ Debate began when Ernst Nolte, a well-known conservative German historian, published a piece titled ‘Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will’ in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 6 June 1986. Habermas answered shortly thereafter in the newspaper Die Zeit where he rebuked what he called apologetic tendencies in post-war German historiography.

Repositioning German Identity

19

14 See also Michael Zank, ‘Goldhagen in Germany: Historians’ Nightmare & Popular Hero. An Essay on the Reception of Hitler’s Willing Executioners in Germany’, Religious Studies Review, 24 (1998), 231-40. 15

In 1944, when it became apparent that Germany would not win the war, the party leadership took steps to ensure that upon Germany’s defeat their most influential members would be able to find shelter in friendly countries. One of the most famous ‘ratlines,’ the ODESSA escape route, allowed an estimated 10,000 former SSmembers to escape prosecution. The network of escape lines was assisted and supported by South American governments, chief among them Argentina and its President Juan Domingo Perón, as well as the Catholic Church. The most notorious war criminal who was aided by ODESSA was Adolf Eichmann, who eventually was captured in Argentina by Israeli intelligence agents in 1961. For information on ODESSA consult the Jewish Virtual Library at: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org (accessed 3 January 2010). ‘Operation Paperclip’ was the code name for the transfer of German scientists and their families to the U.S. as early as summer 1945. For reference see the United States National Archives at: http://www.archives.gov (accessed 3 January 2010). 16 Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, Munich: Piper, 1967. 17 The notion of ‘zweite Schuld,’ according to Giordano, is a direct result of the primary guilt, ‘die Schuld der Deutschen unter Hitler.’ The ‘zweite Schuld: die Verdrängung und Verleugnung der ersten nach 1945 […] hat sich […] tief eingefressen in den Gesellschaftskörper der zweiten deutschen Demokratie’ (Giordano, Die zweite Schuld, p. 11). 18

These family narratives reflect, as well as archive, memory acts, the transgenerational transfer of memory, and thus play a pivotal role in examining the cultural amnesia that gripped the West German nation after World War II. Well-known ‘Väterromane’ are: Bernward Vesper, Die Reise (1977); Paul Kersten, Der alltägliche Tod meines Vaters (1978); Sigfrid Gauch, Vaterspuren (1979); Heinrich Wiesner, Der Riese am Tisch (1979); Ruth Rehmann, Der Mann auf der Kanzel (1979); Christoph Meckel, Suchbild (1980); Brigitte Schwaiger, Lange Abwesenheit (1980); and Peter Schneider, Vati (1987). 19

The Bitburg controversy started when Chancellor Helmut Kohl invited U.S. President Ronald Reagan to make a joint visit to the Bitburg military cemetery in West Germany as part of the festivities organized to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Though both Kohl and Reagan primarily viewed the visit as a symbolic gesture of friendship and reconciliation of former war enemies, the visit backfired when it became known to the public that among the German soldiers buried at the Kolmeshöhe cemetery were approximately fifty members of the Waffen-SS. Despite public outrage voiced by noted leaders within the Jewish community as well

20

Christine Anton

as American veterans and their families, and even though both houses of the U.S. Congress opposed the visit and asked the president to revise his itinerary, Reagan refused to alter his plans, yet at the last minute added a stop at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in an effort to placate his opponents. 20 Cf. Richard von Weizsäcker, ‘Rede zum 40. Jahrestag des Endes des Zweiten Weltkrieges in Europa’, at: http://www.bundespraesident.de/Reden-und-Interviews/-,1216 6/Reden-Richard-von-Weizsaecker.htm (accessed 31 May 2010): ‘Der 8. Mai war ein Tag der Befreiung. Er hat uns alle befreit von dem menschenverachtenden System der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft.’ Though at the time Weizsäcker, for the most part, won high acclaim for his speech both at home and abroad, later criticism questioned Weizsäcker’s phrasing of events: ‘Es war keine Befreiung, denn der Krieg ist von den Alliierten nicht geführt worden, um Deutschland von Hitler zu befreien. […] Dieser Tag ist auch kein Tag der Niederlage, denn da ist nicht einfach eine Armee besiegt worden. Da hat eine Volksgemeinschaft bis zum bitteren Ende gekämpft und mußte bedingungslos kapitulieren.’ See: Spiegel-Interview with Jan Philipp Reemtsma titled ‘Eine gewisse Gemütlichkeit’, Der Spiegel, 1 May 1995, at: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-9182786.html (accessed 31 December 2009). 21 A detailed account of the foundation’s purpose and its statutes can be found at: http://www.stiftung-evz.de/ueber-uns (accessed 11 August 2010). 22

See: http://www.stiftung-evz.de/eng/press/downloads/facts-and-figures (accessed 3 January 2010).

23

Marianne Hirsch, the first to use the term ‘postmemory,’ defines it as ‘distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. [...] Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.’ Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames. Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 22. Dominick LaCapra distinguishes between primary memory as ‘that of a person who has lived through events and remembers them in a certain manner,’ and secondary memory as ‘the result of critical work on primary memory, whether by the person who initially had the relevant experiences or, more typically, by an analyst, observer, or secondary witness such as the historian.’ Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998, pp. 20-1. 24

As LaCapra remarks, ‘the preoccupation with memory may indicate a failure of constructive will and divert attention from the needs of the present and the necessity of attempting to shape the future’ (History and Memory, p. 8).

Repositioning German Identity

21

25

The memorial was partially destroyed less than three months after the dedication ceremony on 27 May 2008. See the article titled ‘Politiker fordern Konsequenzen’, Der Spiegel, 18 August 2008, at: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518, 572792,00.html (accessed 30 December 2009). 26

See the article ‘Ab Februar wird gebaut’, Spiegel Online, 28 January 2008, at: http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/0,1518,531536,00.html (accessed 31 December 2009). Also Petra Bornhöft, ‘Inflation des Erinnerns’, Der Spiegel, 5 November 2007: ‘Seit einigen Jahren schon grassiert in der Hauptstadt das Gedenkfieber. […] Längst ist der Verdacht aufgekommen, die Deutschen wollten nach jahrzehntelangem Schweigen und Verdrängen nun im Gedenken die Besten sein’ (pp. 48-9). 27

See: http://www.holocausttaskforce.org (accessed 31 December 2009).

28

This subject matter shows patent similarities to the discussion in which the Spanish nation is currently involved about the country’s new ‘Law for the Recovery of the Historical Memory,’ signed into legislation by the Spanish prime minister in December 2007. The law was drafted because Spain’s civil war and the Franco regime have been a troublesome topic with which the nation never dealt publicly. Now the time has come to seriously debate this important part of Spanish history, ‘but with concern for the sensitivities on both sides on the political fence’ (Danny Wood, ‘Civil War legacy divides Spain’, BBC News, 18 July 2006, at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr//2/hi/europe/5192228.stm [accessed 31 December 2009]). Thus, the wording of the law reflects just that: the desire to be all-inclusive in every respect. Article 2, ‘General Recognition,’ states: ‘Como expresión del derecho de todos los ciudadanos a la reparación moral y a la recuperación de su memoria personal y familiar, se reconoce y declara el carácter radicalmente injusto de todas las condenas, sanciones y cualesquiera formas de violencia personal producidas por razones políticas, ideológicas o de creencia religiosa, durante la Guerra Civil, así como las sufridas por las mismas causas durante la Dictadura.’ See: http://www.mpr.es/NR/rdonlyres/ D03898BE-21B8-4CB8-BBD1-D1450E6FD7AD/85567/boememoria.pdf (accessed 31 December 2009). 29

Victor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten. Tagebücher 1933 – 1945, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1995. The Wehrmacht display was a traveling exhibition produced by the Hamburg Institut für Sozialforschung between 1995 and 1999. It showcased the extent to which the Wehrmacht was involved in carrying out Nazi atrocities on the Eastern Front. After some controversy as to the factualness of its content, the exhibition was suspended and replaced by a revised exhibition with the new title ‘Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 19411944.’ See also the official website at: http://www.verbrechen-der-wehrmacht. de/docs/home.htm (accessed 3 January 2010).

22

Christine Anton

30

Cf. MartinWalser, ‘Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede’, Acceptance Speech of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade at the Frankfurt St. Paul’s Church, 11 October 1998, at: http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/dokumente/WegeInDie Gegenwart_redeWalserZumFriedenspreis (accessed 31 December 2009): ‘Kein ernstzunehmender Mensch leugnet Auschwitz; kein noch zurechnungsfähiger Mensch deutelt an der Grauenhaftigkeit von Auschwitz herum; wenn mir aber jeden Tag in den Medien diese Vergangenheit vorgehalten wird, merke ich, daß sich in mir etwas gegen diese Dauerpräsentation unserer Schande wehrt. […] Auschwitz eignet sich nicht, dafür Drohroutine zu werden, jederzeit einsetzbares Einschüchterungsmittel oder Moralkeule oder auch nur Pflichtübung.’

31

Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945, Berlin: Propyläen, 2002; Romain Leick, ‘Die Bomber kommen’, Der Spiegel, 7 April 2007, 142. 32

Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang, Göttingen: Steidl, 2002.

33 Hans-Ulrich Treichel, Der Verlorene, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1999; Tanja Dückers, Himmelskörper, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2003; Reinhard Jirgl, Die Unvollendeten, Munich: Hanser, 2003; Walter Kempowski, Alles umsonst, Munich: Albrecht Knaus Verlag, 2007; Hans-Joachim Noack, ‘Die Deutschen als Opfer’, Der Spiegel, 25 March 2002; ‘Die Vertriebenen. Hitlers letzte Opfer’, ARD-documentary 2001; ‘Die große Flucht. Das Schicksal der Vertriebenen’, ZDF-documentary 2001. 34 Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove, ‘Introduction: Germany’s Memory Contests and the Management of the Past’, in: Fuchs, Cosgrove and Grote, eds., German Memory Contests, pp. 1-21 (here: p. 7). 35

Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, pp. 78-9.

36 See for instance the book by the cultural critic Matthias Lorenz ‘Auschwitz drängt uns auf einen Fleck’ – Judendarstellung und Auschwitzdiskurs bei Martin Walser, Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005. Also Klaus Köhler, Alles in Butter. Wie Walter Kempowski, Bernhard Schlink und Martin Walser den Zivilisationsbruch unter den Teppich kehren, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009. 37

See also Henryk M. Broder’s critical essay ‘Alles Adolf’, Der Spiegel, 17 March 2008, 171: ‘Gewiss, die Deutschen haben gelitten und Schreckliches durchgemacht, an der Front und in der Etappe, bei Stalingrad und in Dresden; wer die Bombennächte in Hamburg und Köln erlebt hat, der war schon mit einem Fuß in der Hölle, und wer den Untergang der “Gustloff” überlebt hat, der ist bis an das Ende seiner Tage traumatisiert. […] Dennoch: Alles, was die Deutschen im Krieg und nach dem Krieg durchmachen mussten, waren nur Unannehmlichkeiten gemessen an dem, wie die Nazis mit ihren Opfern verfuhren.’

Repositioning German Identity

23

38

Ulrich Baer, ‘The Hubris of Humility: Günter Grass, Peter Schneider, and German Guilt After 1989’, Germanic Review, 80 (2005), 50-73 (here: p. 68).

39

Stuart Parkes, ‘Drowning or Waving: German Literature Today’, in: Taberner and Finlay, eds., Recasting German Identity, pp. 251-66 (here: p. 259). 40 See Martin Todtenhaupt, ‘Perspektiven auf Zeit-Geschichte. Über “Flughunde” und “Morbus Kitahara”’, in: Edgar Platen, ed., Erinnerte und Erfundene Erfahrung, pp. 162-83 (here: p. 178). 41

See Gerd Steckel, ‘The German Left Post-1989: Toward an Emancipated Reading of German History’, in: The Image of Power in Literature, Media, and Society: Selected Papers of the 2006 Conference, Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, Pueblo, CO: The Society, 2006, pp. 161-5 (here: p. 164).

42

Niven, Facing the Nazi Past, p. 192.

43

Horst Köhler, ‘“Begabung zur Freiheit”-Rede’, 8 May 2005, at: http://www.bundes praesident.de/-,2.623709/Begabung-zur-Freiheit-Rede-von.htm (accessed 22 August 2010). 44

Horst Köhler, ‘Ansprache vor der Knesset in Jerusalem’, 2 February 2005, at: http:// www.bundespraesident.de/Anlage/original_622162/Rede-Knesset-02.02.2005.pdf (accessed 22 August 2010).

45 Cf. Angela Merkel, ‘Rede vor der Knesset’, 18 March 2008, at: http://www. bundesregierung.de/Content/DE/Archiv16/Rede/2008/03/2008-03-18-rede-merkel-vor -der-knesset.html (accessed 22 August 2010). 46

Shimon Peres, ‘Address at the German Bundestag’, 27 January 2010, at: http://www.bundestag.de/kulturundgeschichte/geschichte/gastredner/peres/speech.htm (accessed 31 May 2010). 47

Moishe Postone and Eric Santner, ‘Introduction’, in: M. Postone and E. Santner, eds., Catastrophe and Meaning. The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 1-14 (here: p. 1).

48

Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence. West German Literature and the Holocaust, New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 237. 49 See Detlef W. Prinz and Rafael Seligmann, ‘Turning Toward The Future’, The Atlantic Times, August 2007, 19.

24

Christine Anton

50 Equally provocative are the films by Dani Levy, the comedy Alles auf Zucker (2004) and his recent release Mein Führer. Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (2006), in which humor and mockery often hit right below the belt line and test Jewish and German sensitivities to the core. 51 Jack Zipes, ‘The Contemporary German Fascination for Things Jewish: Toward a Jewish Minor Culture’, in: Sander L. Gilman and Karen Remmler, eds., Reemerging Jewish Culture in Germany: Life and Literature since 1989, New York: New York University Press, 1994, pp. 15-45 (here: p. 21). Zipes evokes the German expression ‘Alibijude’ in his analysis of why contemporary Germans ‘like’ to relate to the Jewish culture. 52 The entire report can be accessed at: http://fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/attachments/ ar07p2_en.pdf (accessed 3 January 2010). 53

Ibid.

54 See: http://www.efms.uni-bamberg.de/pdf/Rassismus%20update%202008.pdf (accessed 31 May 2010). RAXEN (RAcism and XEnophobia Network) was founded in 2000 and is coordinated by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. 55

Jennifer E. Michaels, ‘Multi-Ethnicity and Cultural Identity: Afro-German Women Writers’ Struggle for Identity in Postunification Germany’, in: Fuchs, Cosgrove and Grote, eds., German Memory Contests, pp. 209-26 (here: p. 218). 56

Jeffrey M. Peck, ‘The “Ins” and “Outs” of the New Germany: Jews, Foreigners, Asylum Seekers’, in: Gilman and Remmler, eds., Reemerging Jewish Culture, pp. 130-47 (here: p. 131).

57

Ibid., p. 142.

58

Köhler, ‘“Begabung zur Freiheit”-Rede’.

59

Bodo Morshäuser, Hauptsache Deutsch, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1992, p. 189.

60

Parkes, Understanding Contemporary Germany, p. 140.

61

Günter Grass, Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus, Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1980; see also Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past, p. 236: ‘It may be that, as the National Socialist period recedes in time, confronting this past will be defined as much in terms of applying the lessons learnt from this confrontation, as in terms of that confrontation itself. Thus Vergangenheitsbewältigung will give way to Gegenwarts- und Zukunftsbewältigung – coming to terms with the present and future.’

Repositioning German Identity

25

62 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory. Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993, p. 21. 63

See Theodor W. Adorno, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, Vorträge und Gespräche mit Hellmut Becker 1959-1969, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1971, p. 10: ‘Mit Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit ist in jenem Sprachgebrauch nicht gemeint, daß man das Vergangene im Ernst verarbeite, seinen Bann breche durch helles Bewußtsein. Sondern man will einen Schlußstrich darunter ziehen und womöglich es selbst aus der Erinnerung wegwischen.’ Also Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Deutschland, Deutschland unter anderm. Äußerungen zur Politik, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1967, p. 12: ‘Ich habe nicht den Eindruck, daß in der Bundesrepublik irgend jemand versucht, diese Vergangenheit zu “bewältigen.”’ 64

Jan-Werner Müller, Another Country, p. 258.

65

Mommsen, The Legacy of the Holocaust, p. 15.

66

Ellen S. Fine, ‘Transmission of Memory: The post-Holocaust Generation in the Diaspora’, in: Efraim Sicher, ed., Breaking Crystal. Writing and Memory after Auschwitz, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998, pp. 185-200 (here: p. 197).

Helmut Schmitz Catastrophic History, Trauma and Mourning in W.G. Sebald and Jörg Friedrich The recent return of images of German suffering in the Second World War has been described as a renewed chance to finally mourn the German war dead. The following study critically examines the concept of trauma underlying this claim, and discusses the issue of trauma and mourning with respect to W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur and Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand and Brandstätten.

Preliminary Remarks Disciplines that participate in what we call ‘memory studies’ – i.e., historiography, psychoanalysis, social anthropology, literary studies – operate, it seems, with two distinct and largely incompatible concepts of mourning in relation to the issue of German wartime memory. The first, and most widely used, is the Freudian model of remembering, repeating and working through, originating in individual psychology; the second is an implicit model of mourning as a public and performative ritual for the containment of excessive pain and loss, rituals that through symbolic actions inscribe this loss into a meaningful collective, national (or family) narrative. Robert G. Moeller, for example, asserts that the ‘silence’ regarding German suffering is a myth, stating that both East and West Germany ‘devoted considerable energy to assessing the losses and incorporating victim status into public memory, […] in the political arena and forms of commemoration, stories of German loss and suffering were ubiquitous.’ 1 Psychoanalysis, cultural studies and public discourse, however, frequently operate on the assumption that German losses have never been ‘properly’ mourned, due to either the severe trauma of the war or the instrumentalized and increasingly binary postwar guilt discourse, or both. 2 Propagators of a theory of silence about German suffering by reason of the belated nature of trauma generally follow both Sebald’s and the Mitscherlichs’ assertion of a nexus between guilt, shame, denial and trauma, re-accentuating the Mitscherlichs’ theses about the German ‘inability to mourn’ the Nazi victims and transferring it onto the Germans themselves. 3 The Mitscherlichs were first to hint at the problem of a nexus between denial of guilt and forms of remembrance

28

Helmut Schmitz

of Germany’s own war dead: ‘Und obgleich sie ein ehrendes Gedenken finden, bleiben auch die Toten der Schlachtfelder und unserer gegen Ende des Krieges in Schutt und Asche versinkenden Städte hinter diesem Schleier des Unwirklichen.’ 4 However, they point out, the ‘settling of accounts’ mentality that was part and parcel of 1960s memory discourse is part of the narcissistic injury of losing the war and the loss of the narcissistic object Hitler: ‘Für Kriegstote, so hat man den Eindruck, wird die Erinnerung bei uns oft weit weniger aus Pietät denn aus der Absicht, Schuld aufzurechnen wachgehalten.’ 5 The feverish return of images of destroyed German cities subsequent to Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur in 1999 has been described in terms both of the return of the repressed and traumatic images and the chance for a ‘proper’ (i.e., non-instrumentalized) form of mourning. 6 Aleida Assmann perceives the return of images and memories into the mainstream of public discourse as a ‘Rückgewinnung deutscher Opfererinnerungen aus ihrer Erstarrung und Verkapselung,’ arguing that these memories ‘had no chance to be communicated in their humane dimension and shared with empathy in the public sphere,’ as their inclusion in public memory had been blocked both by right-wing political instrumentalization of these memories and by the left’s resistance to acknowledging them. 7 Cora Stephan’s review of Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand refers to the book in terms of classic rituals of mourning, as ‘ein Totengesang auf die verlorene Vergangenheit’ which ‘hinterlässt das Gefühl einer Trauer, die man teilen kann.’ 8 Mourning, however, is precisely the term Moeller uses for the public commemorative rituals of the 1950s, contending that the Germans ‘demonstrated a striking ability to mourn’ for their own losses. 9 Christian Groh testifies to an uninterrupted annual commemoration of the destruction in the city of Pforzheim, and Daniel Fulda points to the decennial commemoration of the firestorm in the city of Hamburg until 1973 when interest began to wane because of a generational shift and the aftermath of the student movement. 10 The tension or contradiction between these assessments appears to run along the fault line between a concept of mourning based on collective rites and rituals and one that operates within a framework of mass individual trauma that has not been adequately addressed due to the political instrumentalization of commemorative discourse. The argument that the commemorative rituals of the past do not constitute a ‘proper’ way of mourning as they are predominantly in the interest of nation-

History, Trauma and Mourning in Sebald and Friedrich

29

building, thereby side-stepping the issue of trauma, does seem somewhat disingenuous. Public commemorative rituals are by their very nature community-constitutive and involve political representation. In his book on funeral rhetoric, Donovan J. Ochs describes funeral rituals with their symbolic behavior and their rhetoric of consolation as ‘[a] culture’s single most potent “containment” practice.’ 11 Following David Kertzer’s definition of a ritual as ‘an action wrapped in a web of symbolism,’ Ochs comments that ‘comforting and alleviating the range of individuals’ distress, most certainly demands a “ritual wrapped in symbolism.”’ 12 Furthermore, according to Ochs, public commemorative rituals ‘also contain symbolic behaviours that redirect the participants’ future.’ 13 The frequent inscriptions of the destruction of Germany into either a Christian narrative of guilt and retribution, of apocalypse and hellfire, or a triumphant narrative of overcoming, survival and reconstruction, commonly found in both West and East Germany in the immediate post-war period, bear, one could argue, structural resemblance to symbolic and ritualized forms of mourning, with their future-oriented, tripartite structure of praise, lament and consolation that are in support of the coherence of collective and state. 14 There is, however, one central problem of inscribing post-war commemorative rituals into this tripartite structure. Due to the guilt of the war, praising the German dead as ‘Opfer’ in the sense of sacrifice was impossible. This not only left one part of the traditional tripartite mourning ritual unaddressed, it almost inevitably diverted the commemoration onto the concept of ‘Opfer’ in the sense of a passive and guiltless victim 15 of fate or violence, which brings the German dead into competition with victims of the Holocaust. W.G. Sebald and the Catastrophic Destruction of Experience With this in mind, let us turn to the issue of catastrophic history, trauma and mourning in W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur and Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand and his subsequent book of photographs, Brandstätten. Even though Sebald’s Zurich lectures of 1997, collected and extended in the volume Luftkrieg und Literatur, 16 have been extensively written on, a brief summary of his key arguments as they apply to this study shall follow. Sebald’s main thesis is that the Allied bombings have left little or no trace in both public and literary consciousness due to the orientation of the public towards reconstruction on the one hand, and the avoidance of the writers, both those of the

30

Helmut Schmitz

‘inner emigration’ and those that constituted the ‘Gruppe 47’ on the other. Though Sebald does not deny the traumatic nature of the bombing experience and its devastating impact on the individual psyche, he does not ascribe the perceived lack of the ‘tieferen Verstörungen im Seelenleben der deutschen Nation’ (LL 19) to the legacy of trauma but to the legacy of denial and the nexus between suffering, guilt and collective shame which, he argues ‘richtete die Bevölkerung ausnahmslos auf die Zukunft aus und verpflichtete sie zum Schweigen über das, was ihr widerfahren war’ (LL 16). Sebald’s assessment of the silence about the true nature of the bombings thus broadly follows the Mitscherlichs’ theses of the ‘inability to mourn.’ Sebald’s lectures have been criticized for a number of reasons. Volker Hage has taken issue with the thesis of a lack of literary representation of the bombings. 17 Susanne Vees-Gulani and William Rasch have accused Sebald of ‘underestimating the level of complexity of the postwar situation for authors in respect to both the issue of guilt and the consequences of bombing trauma,’ 18 and Anette Seidel Arpacı has linked Sebald to revisionists due to his description of the ‘Luftkrieg’ as ‘in der Geschichte bis dahin einzigartige Vernichtungsaktion’ (LL 11), a term otherwise belonging to the context of the Holocaust. 19 By taking Seidel Arpacı’s argument a step further and into a slightly different direction, one arrives at asking the question in what way, or on what axis, the ‘Luftkrieg’ might be comparable to the Holocaust for Sebald himself, and what concept of history underscores Sebald’s considerations. Sebald’s lectures certainly conflate a sociopsychological analysis with a judgment of literary history. However, the socio-psychological and historical accuracy of Sebald’s assertion is of less interest than the inquiry into the conceptual framework with which Sebald is operating. Arguably, for Sebald, the ‘Luftkrieg,’ like Auschwitz, is part of a history of modernity as traumatic catastrophe in not primarily clinical terms. The concept of trauma currently in use in cultural and literary studies on the whole originates in clinical psychology with its aim to psychically restore the traumatized subject to a future-oriented existence through a form of therapy in which the trauma can come to be ‘owned.’ 20 Cathy Caruth describes clinical trauma as a ‘breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world’ and as ‘experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and […] therefore not available to consciousness.’ 21 Sebald’s description of the bombings

History, Trauma and Mourning in Sebald and Friedrich

31

appears to fit this clinical concept of trauma. The excessive and abrupt nature of the violent exertions on the body and the senses destroys the experience of the event itself: ‘Offenbar hatte unter dem Schock des Erlebten die Erinnerungsfähigkeit teilweise ausgesetzt’ (LL 31). As a result, the content of the experience does not enter the sensoria of the survivors (LL 13). However, Sebald’s assessment of the experience of bombing victims only appears to be in keeping with a clinical concept of trauma. A clinical concept of trauma operates not only with a symptomatology that locates the authenticity of the experience in a repeated and compulsive acting out of displaced symptoms, but also operates with an ethics of listening that, at least potentially, allows for a therapeutic overcoming of the trauma in narrative. 22 None of this is of interest to Sebald since he considers the survivors to be ‘unzuverlässige, mit halber Blindheit geschlagene Zeugen’ (LL 31), attesting the survivors’ reports an ‘inhärente[s] Ungenügen’ and ‘notorische[] Unzuverlässigkeit’ (LL 86). Even though Sebald admits in the afterword that survivors’ reports might articulate ‘traumatic experience,’ he considers them useless for ascertaining the dimensions of the ‘catastrophe’ as they are full of ‘stereotypical turns of phrases’ as a result of the overlapping of coping mechanisms and the ‘inability to mourn’ (LL 86). 23 This means that in contrast to contemporary trauma theory, for Sebald the destruction of experience in the traumatic shock of the bombings is absolute. The loss of experience is irrecoverable due to the alleged lack of precise and painful memory work in the post-war period. The shock-like aspect of the experience of aerial bombings incapacitates the witnesses and thus invalidates their testimony, unlike with survivors of the Holocaust. Despite the wording of ‘einzigartige Vernichtungsaktion,’ Luftkrieg und Literatur operates with a rather clear and categorical distinction between Holocaust survivors and air war survivors with respect to testimonial authenticity. In contrast to Holocaust testimony, survivor reports of the bombings render it obvious ‘dass es unmöglich ist, die Tiefen der Traumatisierung in den Seelen derer auszuloten, die aus den Epizentren der Katastrophe entkamen’ (LL 95). Sebald’s repeatet use of the term ‘Katastrophe’ (it occurs six times in the text [LL 51; 22; 31; 70; 75; 95]) and of ‘Erfahrungsblindheit’ (LL 27) – ‘es geschieht alles zu geschwind’ (LL 29) –, as well as his focus on the body in Lufkrieg und Literatur suggest a Benjaminian

32

Helmut Schmitz

framework of both modern warfare as destructive of experience, because of its impact on the body, and of history as catastrophe: Konnte man damals nicht die Feststellung machen: die Leute kamen verstummt aus dem Felde? Nicht reicher, ärmer an mitteilbarer Erfahrung. […] Eine Generation, die noch mit der Pferdebahn zur Schule gefahren war, stand unter freiem Himmel in einer Landschaft, in der nichts unverändert geblieben war als die Wolken, und in der Mitte, in einem Kraftfeld zerstörender Ströme und Explosionen, der winzige gebrechliche Menschenkörper. 24

For Benjamin, the endless recurrence of shocks in a modernity shaped by technology destroys communicable experience because of the collapse of the mental apparatus’ protection from stimuli. 25 This destruction is final and cannot be recuperated, except through highly artificial means of concentration and memory work. Adorno has explicitly connected Benjamin’s theory of experience to World War II which begins ‘in jeder Phase von vorn’: Überall, mit jeder Explosion hat er den Reizschutz durchbrochen, unter dem Erfahrung, die Dauer zwischen heilsamem Vergessen und heilsamem Erinnern sich bildet. Das Leben hat sich in eine zeitlose Folge von Schocks verwandelt. 26

Hence, if the Holocaust contains the ‘truth of modernity’ regarding the rationalistic and bureaucratic administering of mass extermination, 27 the ‘Lufkrieg’ contains the truth about modernity as technological catastrophe: the destruction of experience. In his 1982 essay ‘Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte,’ the origin of Luftkrieg und Literatur, Sebald argues ‘dass Erfahrung im realen Sinn aufgrund der überwältigenden Rapidität und Totalität der Zerstörung schlechterdings nicht möglich war.’ 28 Sebald thus allocates the ‘Luftkrieg’ a form of traumatic excess that is analogous, though not identical, to the Holocaust as a signature of modernity’s barbarous rule by technology. In this he follows Benjamin’s and Adorno’s reading of the destructive potential of a modernity ruled by technological as inherent in its structural logic: ‘die Konsequenz der übergeordneten Produktionszwänge [...] ist die ruinierte Stadt’ (LL 72). 29 If for Sebald, technological warfare, ‘Krieg in seiner unverhohlenen Form’ (LL 27), is just as much a signature of modernity as the Holocaust, his disappointment with the available literary, historiographical and local historical material attains another dimension if placed next to his unequivocal approval of writings by Auschwitz survivors such as Primo Levi and Jean Améry and of Peter Weiss, all

History, Trauma and Mourning in Sebald and Friedrich

33

of whom feature centrally in Sebald’s literary universe. 30 In his essay on Améry, Sebald affirms the central topos of Holocaust testimony and its reception, the crediting of the survivor with the complete moral authority of witness with regard to the ‘experience’ of the camp, despite the repeated problems of ‘translating’ the traumatizing experience into language. 31 Sebald refers to Jean Améry’s ‘irreparable Verfassung […] aus der allein die wahre Natur des Terrors mit einiger Präzision sich ablesen lässt.’ 32 He points out that Holocaust survivors are plagued by ‘Hyperamnesie’ and as a result have no access to the mechanisms of denial that so characterized the post-war German mentality: ‘Im Gegensatz zu den Agenten des Terrors verfügen sie offensichtlich nicht mehr über zuverlässige Mechanismen der Verdrängung’ (N 153). What Sebald appears to miss is a narrative or representation of the ‘Luftkrieg’ that communicates the essentially disruptive and catastrophic nature on a linguistic, stylistic and intellectual level analogous to Holocaust literature. Just like Benjamin who contended that it is only the poet who can either artificially restitute the ‘narrator’ in modernity (i.e., Proust) or capture the signature of the destruction of experience (i.e., Baudelaire), it is the writers who in Sebald’s view inherit the task of communicating the dimensions of the destruction since the witnesses are all unreliable: ‘die Überladung der Denk- und Gefühlskapazität […] bedürfen der Ergänzung durch das, was sich erschließt unter einem synoptischen, künstlichen Blick’ (LL 33); or, as Sebald puts it in the 1982 essay: ‘eine Beschreibung der Katastrophe [ist] eher von ihrem Rand her als aus ihrem Zentrum heraus möglich.’ 33 The transmission of the true scope of the horrors thus needs a mediator; the ‘real’ witness to the extent of the destruction is not the survivor but the ‘Zeugenschaft der Schriftsteller’ (LL 75). 34 However, due to their concern with the retouching of their self-image in a postNazi society, the German writers fail to adequately describe ‘das, was sie gesehen hatten.’ Sebald asserts that ‘sie kaum ein Auge zu haben schienen für die allerorten sichtbaren Schrecken der Zeit’ (LL 17). Consequently, ‘was das in Wahrheit bedeutet, wissen wir nicht’ (N 5). 35 Sebald’s categorical dismissal of the writers has to be read in conjunction with his judgment of German writers’ attempts at a literary appropriation of the Holocaust. These are dismissed on the same terms as the literature on the bombings: ‘literarische Kommentare zur Endlösung (sic!), in denen pauschale und lyrische Gesten

34

Helmut Schmitz

ein genaueres Verständnis der entsetzlichen Vorgänge oft unterbinden’ (N 150). 36 Sebald’s critique of German culture’s inability to capture the dimensions of the horrors of the destruction more precisely is based on his dismissal of its attempts to inscribe these horrors into a meaningful narrative of reconstruction: ‘Nicht als das grauenvolle Ende einer kollektiven Aberration erscheint also diese totale Zerstörung, sondern, sozusagen, als die erste Stufe des Wiederaufbaus’ (LL 14). In contrast to German culture’s inscription of the ‘Luftkrieg’ into a historical narrative of reconstruction, Jean Améry’s account as an Auschwitz survivor is praised for its determined refusal to strike up a compromise with history and time, something Sebald describes as ‘ein unabdingbares Element einer wahrhaft kritischen Perspektive auf die Vergangenheit’ (N 160), and as ‘Notwendigkeit eines anhaltenden Protests, eine Dimension, die der deutschen Nachkriegsliteratur so auffallenderweise mangelte’ (N 159). The impression that Sebald equates the ethical dimensions of literature about the ‘Luftkrieg’ with those of Holocaust literature is underscored by the stylistic judgments Sebald makes on both. According to Sebald, both non-Jewish German attempts to write about the Holocaust as well as literary accounts of the bombings lack the ‘sprachliche Präzision’ (N 165), ‘Sachlichkeit’ (N 156) and ‘die dem Gegenstand angemessene Ernsthaftigkeit der Sprache’ (N 150) of Améry’s or Peter Weiss’s work from which alone, Sebald claims, a clearer image of the catastrophe can be gleaned. A brief glance at Sebald’s assessment of virtually the only form of narrative of which he unequivocally approves, a form of documentary writing, that is, confirms this point. In the 1982 essay, Hans-Erich Nossack and Hermann Kasack are praised for those parts of their texts that remain free from attempts of transfiguring the ‘alle künstlerische Imagination übersteigende Erfahrung’ into something meaningful, instead opting for a ‘“leidenschaftslose Art der Rede”’ that can give witness or ‘Rechenschaft.’ 37 Singled out in both the 1982 essay and Luftkrieg und Literatur is Alexander Kluge’s Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt that in its distanced precision reproduces the ‘entsetzensstarre [Blick] des Engels der Geschichte’ from Benjamin’s ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte.’ Simultaneously, while Kluge maintains the ‘für jede Erkenntnis unabdingbare Distanz’ (LL 73), his own self-doubts testify to the breaking down of epistemological concepts in the face of absolute and unimaginable horrors, the ‘auf keinen Begriff mehr zu

History, Trauma and Mourning in Sebald and Friedrich

35

bringende[] Welt’ (LL 17). Kluge’s text eschews both the ‘Versuch einer Sinngebung des Sinnlosen’ by mythification (LL 55), something Sebald criticizes in Kasack, Peter de Mendelssohn and others, as well as the unmediated and graphic representation of horrors which he describes as ‘voyeuristic’ and near pornographic (LL 104). This is reminiscent of Sebald’s affirmation of Améry’s account that stresses ‘eher den monumentalen Irrsinn der an ihm vorgenommenen Prozedur als das Pathos des Leidens’ (N 155) and of Peter Weiss’s distanced gaze on Auschwitz, to which Sebald explicitly refers to as ‘angemessene Darstellung’ (N l), while he refers to Kluge’s enterprise as ‘Ermittlung,’ the title of Peter Weiss’s play about the 1963 Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. 38 The Zurich lectures end with the poignant reference to thesis IX of Benjamin’s ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’ which describes the ‘storm’ of technological progress as ‘eine einzige Katastrophe, die unablässig Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft.’ 39 What Sebald misses among non-Jewish German war narratives is, firstly, the decisive creation of a form of writing that emerges in confrontation with the ethical question of rendering intelligible the catastrophe in analogy to (specifically German) Holocaust texts, such as Améry’s essayistic style or Weiss’s austere documentary aesthetics. 40 Secondly, Sebald implies that the only adequate response to the dimensions of catastrophe, both literary and philosophically, would have been a form of melancholia that denies and rejects the continuity of time after the catastrophe, a form of resentment and ‘Traurigkeit,’ he encountered in, for example, Wolfgang Hildesheimer but also in Jean Améry and Peter Weiss. Sebald’s positive assessment of Heinrich Böll’s posthumously published novel Der Engel schwieg is, again, couched in terms analogous to his writing on Hildesheimer, Améry and Weiss. Sebald speaks of Böll’s ‘von unheilbarer Schwermut geprägte Erzählung,’ its imagery typifying the ‘gegen jeden Überlebenswillen gerichteten acedia cordis, jener fahlen, nicht mehr zu behebenden Depression in die die Deutschen hätten verfallen müssen’ (LL 18). 41 Sebald, together with Kluge, laments the absence of a representation of the ‘Luftkrieg’ as ‘lesbare Chiffre’ (LL 12), as a legible sign of absence. Equally, Sebald seems to miss the absence of a foundational narrative of destruction based on never fully recuperable and translatable experiences. According to Gabriel Motzkin and

36

Helmut Schmitz

Avishai Margalit, this is the analogy between the ‘Luftkrieg’ and the Holocaust as ‘negative myth of origin,’ 42 a narrative that avoids inscription into a self-pacifying narrative of reconstruction from the ruins. Friedrich and the Recapturing of the Air War If for Sebald the true history and dimensions of the bombings are irretrievably lost, Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand is an attempt to recapture it in all its breadth and thereby provide the foundational narrative Sebald asserts is absent. 43 Historians have severely criticized Friedrich’s book for his implicit rhetorical equation of the bombings with the Holocaust, his lack of historicization and for his leveling of moral positions in suggesting that the air war was a war crime. 44 Brad Prager, for example, contrasts Friedrich’s account with Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur, arguing that Friedrich’s works ‘encourage readers to identify only with ordinary Germans’ and ‘retreat from moral selfexamination.’ Sebald’s argument in Luftkrieg und Literatur, on the other hand, is ‘well taken’ due to his insertion of the aerial bombardment into a history of catastrophic modernity that has close ties with the Frankfurt School’s reading of history. 45 While this is certainly correct, Prager underplays Friedrich’s own reliance on a reading of the air war as a culmination of the inhuman rationalist logic of modern warfare. Der Brand operates with frequent residual Frankfurt School vocabulary that inscribes the air war into a catastrophic history of modernity: the bombings are addressed as ‘Zivilisationsbruch’ (B 169) and as ‘Neo-Barbarei der Moderne’ (B 277). Friedrich focuses in detail on the scientific aspects of the development of the firestorm. The fire-bomb is the first ‘ganz und gar von Wissenschaftlern gelenkte Waffe’ which requires an ‘erdachtes Konzept der Vernichtung’ (B 25; emph. added). Apart from the suggestion that the Allies work with a concept of extreme annihilation, what is important for Friedrich’s account of the ‘Luftkrieg’ is that it is the first war that is operated and conceptualized entirely by technocrats. Friedrich’s image of the military background of the air war is that of an all-out war dominated by technological possibilities, where personal misgivings in Bomber Command or among scientists researching the firestorm have no ethical consequences (B 58). The air war is thus a ‘Verhängnis’ of modernity (B 67), a ‘Konsequenz des Industriezeitalters’ (B 76). Friedrich reads the air war as a logical

History, Trauma and Mourning in Sebald and Friedrich

37

result of the rationality of modern warfare that follows ‘Zweckmäßigkeiten’ (B 124) to the point that the Allied strategy is even applied to cities of allied France, like Le Havre, Rouen and Caen. If the air war is a logical consequence of increasing sophistication of warfare technology, the analogy with the Holocaust as an industrial form of mass extermination is almost a matter of rhetorical logic. Friedrich’s assertion that a bombing victim ‘stirbt nicht seinen Tod, denn es hat keinen’ (B 84), and his insistence on the principle of absolute equalization of bombing attacks that do not distinguish between guilty and guiltless, is a restatement of Adorno’s observation that the industrial and technological mass murder of the Holocaust represents the ‘absolute transformation’ of the individual into a nonentity destined to be exterminated. 46 Friedrich’s account is thus closer to Sebald’s than one might think at first. The crucial difference between both writers, however, apart from Friedrich’s implicit and explicit likening of the Bomber Command to war criminals, is with respect to the concept of trauma and its expressibility. While Friedrich essentially follows Sebald in his attestation of a continuing ‘Emotionslähmung’ (B 505) and the rebuilding of German cities as a form of repression (an ‘Abkehr vor der Szenerie’ [B 505]), he refers to the history of the bombings as ‘nichtangeeignete Geschichte’ (B 218) in terms of a task that the book itself sets out to master by recounting the horrors of the ‘Luftkrieg’ in the ‘Leideform’ (B 543). Moreover, in contrast to Sebald, Friedrich refers to the memories of the ‘experiential generation’ as a kind of receptacle in which the experiences lie ‘aufbewahrt,’ untouched, due to their preservation as a result of traumatic shock (B 542). This goes hand in hand with a concept of trauma that can be worked through in a therapeutic act of narration, thereby retrieving the experience in its authentic form: ‘Die erinnerten Szenen überliefern eine Folter, die nicht auf immer unaussprechlich sein wird’ (B 505). Indeed, the graphic imaginative and empathetic retelling of the plight of bombing victims aspires to be this ‘aussprechen’ itself. In a crucial shift from preterite to present and to first person singular, Friedrich’s attempt to retell the horrific excess of traumatic experience obliterates the distinction between author, narrator and victim: ‘Nur in Realzeit kann ich reagieren. […] Das Erforderliche verbringe ich wie außerhalb meiner selbst’ (B 500; 502).

38

Helmut Schmitz

The very opening of Friedrich’s book is indicative of his endeavor to reproduce an account of the air war ‘as it really was.’ Friedrich begins in medias res – there is no foreword, no discussion of method, no narrative distance. The lines between historiography and fictional narrative are continuously blurred by the use of an experiential present tense. The reader is plunged right into the events: ‘In dem Bombenvisier einer viermotorigen “Lancaster” ist eine Stadt wie Wuppertal aus sechstausend Meter Höhe nicht sichtbar. Die Bewohner haben sie abgedunkelt, ein Dunstschleier hüllt die Talmulde ein’ (B 13). Throughout, Friedrich’s account is interspersed with unreferenced witness statements. Der Brand is characterized by a narrative voice that seamlessly blends a variety of styles from documentation and reporting to omniscient narration and free indirect style. His use of present tense and jump cuts approximates the narrative to the type of contemporary documentary television drama that switches between witness statements and re-enacted events. The center of Der Brand is the section titled ‘Land’ which makes up more than a third of the book (B 177-370). ‘Land’ recounts in detail, and in exhaustingly repetitive fashion, the destruction of over thirty German cities from Aachen to Xanten. The lamenting tone of this section recalls the beauties and cultural treasures of the destroyed cities, the churches, libraries and public buildings, and has afforded the book the epithet of a ‘Totengesang auf die verlorene Vergangenheit,’ a ‘pilgrimage’ in Robert G. Moeller’s words. 47 The description of the destruction of cities like Bremen, Lübeck and Paderborn is combined with references to a long historical memory regarding the history that produced the cities’ cultural treasures: Paderborn lies ‘an den Quellen abendländischen Gedenkens’ (B 200), Hildesheim is ‘das Kleinod der deutschen Städtefamilie’ (B 207). Throughout the text, the bombings are likened to both the destruction visited upon Germany by the Thirty Years’ War and the Huns’ sacking of the Rhine and Mosel region in the fifth century. Friedrich’s appeal to Germany’s medieval and seventeenth-century history has two functions. First and foremost, it creates a historical analogy whereby the British bombers, throwing fire from the air, appear as the real Huns. 48 Secondly, the grief over the disappearance of the medieval, renaissance and baroque beauty of Germany’s cities insinuates an unbroken, homogeneous historical continuity that turns the air war into an unparalleled loss of history. Friedrich refers to the

History, Trauma and Mourning in Sebald and Friedrich

39

‘Einheit von Raum und Geschichte’ (B 519) present before the air war, suggesting that the purpose of the bombings was the final destruction of Germany’s historical identity (B 177): ‘Deutschland wird verwüstet wie noch keine Zivilisation zuvor’ (B 120). The repeated descriptions of the lost German treasures can be read as a form of lamentation, an attempt to re-cathect the lost historical substance, similar to a litany. In this, Der Brand can be partially configured along the lines of ‘funeral rhetoric’ with its tripartite structure of praise, lament and consolation. And, like funeral rhetoric, Der Brand operates with a concept of a rather homogeneous cultural collective, the ‘Wir.’ Not only is ‘Wir’ the title of one of the book’s sections, it also intimates a collective that excludes everything and everyone that was not the target of the bombs and that erases the heterogeneity of the dead, Friedrich otherwise asserts. 49 However, whereas in the 1950s it was the aspect of praise that was missing from rituals of public mourning, Friedrich’s focus on traumatic excess refuses the consolation that is part of funeral rhetoric. Friedrich’s book of photographs Brandstätten repeats this rhetorical structure. 50 The book opens with a section titled ‘Früher’ that features the ‘whole’ German cities with their scenic old centers. This is contrasted with a section titled ‘Heute’ at the end of the book which juxtaposes old city centers with their contemporary counterparts. The juxtaposition of medieval, renaissance or baroque splendor with postmodern non-spaces that make up contemporary city centers willfully obscures the history of city planning between 1950 and 1990, and stages the air war as the sole origin of the contemporary lack of spatial identity. The rhetorical function of Friedrich’s positioning of the photographs is, again, to eschew the consolation of the ‘Wiederaufbau’ that characterizes so many earlier accounts. Rather than being triumphant documents of post-war reconstruction, the photographs of contemporary German cities, set against their pre-war ‘wholeness,’ testify to the continuity of trauma. It also becomes evident that the ugly inner cities of contemporary Germany are the symbolic expression of the state of the collective German spirit become concrete: ‘Das Narbengewebe, das die Brache des Luftkriegs bedeckt, ist auch der Überzug der deutschen Seelenlandschaft’ (BS 225). Wedged in between the sections ‘Earlier’ and ‘Today,’ at the heart of Brandstätten is the section ‘Bergung’ which exhibits excruciatingly painful photographs of dead bodies, charred remains and mass graves.

40

Helmut Schmitz

It is these photographs that lend Friedrich’s book its notoriety and which are supposed to bolster Friedrich’s rhetoric of a continuity of trauma. In 2001, Habbo Knoch published his monumental study of the history of transmission of Holocaust images and their role in public memory Die Tat als Bild. 51 There is as yet no study of the role of photographs of German suffering (war, bombings, flight and expulsions) in post-war German memory discourse. With regard to the ‘Luftkrieg,’ and before the publication of Brandstätten, public visual memory of the bombings was predominantly occupied by images of ruins, not of corpses. In contrast to the visual memory of the Holocaust which is dominated by bodies, skeletal dead bodies in mass graves or emasculated survivors, the visual memory of the bombings is determined by pictures of destroyed cities. There are probably a number of reasons for this, not least the tight control that the Nazis exerted over who was allowed to photograph bombing sites. 52 Assuming that contemporary visual memory of the bombings is correct, the extraordinary thing about Brandstätten is that the shocking photographs in the section ‘Bergung’ are an attempt to re-cathect the visual memory of the air war with photographs of dead and burned corpses, to reinsert the corpses, so to speak, into collective memory. However, a number of pictures used by Friedrich had been published previously: Olaf Groehler’s 1990 book Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland shows both photographs of charred and disfigured bodies after the Hamburg firestorm in 1943 and of the Dresden pyres (with a reference to the SS unit from Treblinka which erected the pyres, a detail that Friedrich chooses to obscure). 53 David Irving’s Und Deutschlands Städte starben nicht (1967) uses the same photograph of the Dresden pyres, again without the SS context, but contains otherwise only two photographs of dead bodies in the entire photographic section of 262 pictures. Hans Brunswig’s 1978 study Feuersturm über Hamburg contains a number of photos of bodies and mass graves, as well as charred remains, some of which are reused by Friedrich. 54 The same is true for Gerhard Sollbach’s 1996 volume Dortmund 1939-48 and the 1993 re-edition of Hans-Erich Nossack’s Der Untergang which displays photos by Erich Andres that were sponsored by the Hamburger Abendblatt for the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the firestorm. 55 Indeed, the mid-1990s with their series of fiftieth anniversaries could well be described as the first opening of the ‘floodgates’ of memory.

History, Trauma and Mourning in Sebald and Friedrich

41

Even though the photographs were available, and many of them had been previously published, they were frequently restricted to local and obscure publications. What is new in Friedrich’s case is their visual re-cathexis within a context of traumatic excess that is determined by an almost complete absence of a narrative ‘containing’ these photographs. While the gruesome images in Brunswig, Groehler, or Irving are either ‘framed’ by a narrative or an overwhelming number of pictures of destroyed buildings, or otherwise ‘contained’ by their size, Friedrich’s photographs frequently take up half or even one whole page. They confront the viewer as part of an entire section dedicated to these images and are framed by the sparsest captions that state little more than place, date and time, or unreferenced and unframed witness statements, thus re-creating the narrative immediacy of Der Brand. Friedrich’s photographs aim at breaking through the ‘cordon sanitaire’ (LL 103) that nations erect around the representation of their own war dead in any but the most dignified form. Friedrich’s unmediated focus on images of disfigured and charred bodies in Brandstätten is, therefore, an attempt to effectively cathect these images with the traumatic intensity that produces a sense of rupture in the present. 56 Their ultimate reference is, as Heinz-Peter Preußer has demonstrated, Holocaust imagery. 57 The purpose of Friedrich’s photos is to produce a reaction analogous to concentration camp photographs, in order for the viewer to ‘bear witness to the air war,’ as Brad Prager asserts. 58 The horrific photographs of the human victims of the bombings are thus an essential prerequisite for Brandstätten’s argument of a continuing trauma in the German people. 59 According to Shoshana Feldman and Dori Laub, the listener to traumatic testimony ‘comes to be a participant and co-owner of the traumatic event […] by extension, […] through his very listening, he comes to partially experience trauma himself.’ 60 Though this equation of victim and listener has been rightfully criticized, 61 it is exactly this bizarre and, as Sebald remarks, voyeuristic sense of participation, something that Dominick LaCapra has termed a participation in the ‘negative sublime’ and ‘entry into the extraordinary,’ that animates Friedrich’s visual and narrative representation of excess. 62 Friedrich’s account is in stark contrast to Sebald’s emphasis on sobriety, distance and secondary witnessing. Thus, in contrast to Sebald, who through his style keeps a kind of shocked distance, Friedrich tries to directly render the horrors through narrative immediacy. In Dominick

42

Helmut Schmitz

LaCapra’s terms, Sebald undergoes a form of ‘muted’ trauma or ‘empathetic unsettlement’ that is mindful of the distance between himself and the historical event, while Friedrich’s account – maybe not altogether dissimilar to Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) – can be described as a form of ‘acting out’ that aspires to an entry into the extraordinary. 63 Brad Prager argues that Friedrich wishes to shift the terms from ‘divine violence to mythic or Greek violence,’ i.e., from the post-war idea that the bombings in their apocalyptic dimension were akin to the divine destruction of Gomorrah as a form of punishment for sin, to a war of mythical and historical dimension which ‘calls for witnesses, in both text and image.’ 64 This is correct inasmuch as mythical narratives are by their very nature foundational.65 The story Friedrich tells in Der Brand and Brandstätten is that of a foundational trauma, a rupture of German history that has not yet healed but one that can be captured in narration. By contrast, Sebald’s image of the ‘Luftkrieg’ is that of a negative myth of origin, something that, similar to the Holocaust, cannot be fully rendered in language and which, due to a lack of appropriate literary attempts, cannot even be read as absence. Notes 1

Robert G. Moeller, ‘The Politics of the Past in the 1950s: Rhetorics of Victimisation in East and West Germany’, in: Bill Niven, ed., Germans as Victims, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 26-42 (here: pp. 27-8).

2

See for example Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt. Memories of War in Germany and Japan, London: Cape, 1994, p. 303: ‘But the mourning of the German dead – the soldiers, and the civilians killed by allied bombs or by vengeful Polish, Czech or Slovak neighbours, who drove them from their homes – such mourning was an embarrassing affair, left largely to right-wing nationalists and nostalgic survivors, pining for their lost homelands.’ See also Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit, Munich: C.H.Beck, 2006; and Susanne Vees-Gulani, Trauma and Guilt. Literature of Wartime Bombing in Germany, Berlin and New York: deGruyter, 2003. Both Assmann and Vees-Gulani argue that mourning and communication of the war experience had been silenced due to the issue of guilt and trauma. 3 See Assmann, Der lange Schatten, pp. 108-12; Stuart Taberner, ‘Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s Der Verlorene and the Problem of German Wartime Suffering’, Modern Language Review, 1 (2002), 123-34 (here: p. 126); Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch, ‘Introduction’, in: W. Wilms and W. Rasch, eds., Bombs Away! Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006, pp. 7-21; Werner

History, Trauma and Mourning in Sebald and Friedrich

43

Bohleber, ‘Trauma, Trauer und Geschichte’, in: Burkhard Liebsch and Jörn Rüsen, eds., Trauer und Geschichte, Cologne: Böhlau, 2001, pp. 111-27. Vees-Gulani argues that the ‘lack of attention to the topic’ [of traumatic experience in the air war], whose psychological consequences ‘have not been sufficiently explored in Germany […] can be explained both by coping mechanisms involving denial and suppression and the complicated issues of German guilt, shame and responsibility’ (Trauma and Guilt, p. 191). 4

Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, Munich: Piper, 1967, p. 46.

5

Ibid., p. 46. Marcel Atze has shown that the German public reception of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial several years before the publication of the ‘Inability to mourn’ was redolent with polemic and counter-argumentative memories of Dresden, arguing that paradoxically it was the confrontation with the Holocaust that reawakened a German victim narrative. Inasmuch this takes the form of a ‘public debate,’ or even a ‘Schmerzensspur’ that Sebald suggests is absent from German public memory, remains arguable. See Marcel Atze, ‘“…und wer spricht über Dresden?” Der Luftkrieg als öffentliches und literarisches Thema in der Zeit des Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozesses 1963-1965’, in: Marcel Atze and Franz Loquai, eds., Sebald. Lektüren, Eggingen: Edition Isele, 2005, pp. 105-15.

6 Since 2003, the Wartberg Verlag has, for example, published a series of coffee-table documentations of German cities in the bombing campaign, sometimes in conjunction with local newspapers. The series subtitled ‘Deutsche Städte im Bombenkrieg’ comprises about a dozen volumes. These are for the most part titled ‘[X] im Bombenkrieg’, ‘[X] im Feuersturm’, or ‘Die Nacht an dem [X] unterging’ ([X] represents the corresponding name of a city). 7

Assmann, Der lange Schatten, p. 186; and Aleida Assmann, ‘On the (In)Compatibility of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory’, German Life and Letters, 2 (2006), 187-200 (here: pp. 191-2).

8

Cora Stephan, ‘Wie man eine Stadt anzündet’, in: Lothar Kettenacker, ed., Ein Volk von Ofern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940-45, Berlin: Rowohlt, 2003, pp. 95-102 (here: pp. 98; 102).

9

See Robert G. Moeller, War Stories. The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001, p. 174.

10 See Christian Groh’s article ‘Expressions of Memory in Pforzheim, a City hit by Air War’, in: Anette Seidel-Arpacı and Helmut Schmitz, eds., Narratives of Trauma: Discourses of German Wartime Suffering in National and International Perspective, Amsterdam: Rodopi, (forthcoming 2010), pp. 75-87. Daniel Fulda, ‘Abschied von der

44

Helmut Schmitz

Zentralperspektive. Der nicht nur literarische Geschichtsdiskurs im Nachwendedeutschland als Dispositiv für Jörg Friedrichs Der Brand’, in: Wilms and Rasch, eds., Bombs Away!, pp. 45-64 (here: p. 46). 11

See Donovan J. Ochs, Consolatory Rhetoric. Grief, Symbol and Ritual in the Greco-Roman Era, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993, p. 25. Ochs asserts that ‘funeral rituals also contain symbolic behaviours that redirect the participants’ future’ (p. 31).

12 Ibid., p. 22. See also David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics and Power, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988, p. 8. See also Robert Blauner’s assertion that the ‘impact of mortality must be contained’, Psychiatry, 29 (1966), 379-80 (quoted in Ochs, Consolatory Rhetoric, p. 25). 13 Ochs, Consolatory Rhetoric, p. 31. See also Ernest Qu. Campbell, ‘Death as a Social Practice’, in: Liston O. Mills, ed., Perspectives on Death, New York: Abingdon Press, 1969: ‘Our common tendency is to perceive grief and funeral practices as oriented toward the past. […] But a more useful view is to see funeral rites and death attitudes as serving the purpose of assisting the survivors to restructure their relational system. The vital functions of these ceremonies relate to the future, and not to the past’ (quoted in Ochs, Consolatory Rhetoric, p. 30). 14

See Ochs, Consolatory Rhetoric, p. 73. The original model for this kind of public commemoration of the war dead is the Athenian state funeral, a ‘direct and directed effort to restore social cohesion after losing family members in war’ (Ibid., p. 64). Ochs states: ‘The living, too, must be addressed, shared values voiced and reinforced, loss recontextualised, and consolation sought’ (Ibid., p. 67).

15

On the ambivalence of the German term ‘Opfer’ and the consequences of this for the post-war memory discourse see Assmann, Der lange Schatten, pp. 72-6. 16 W.G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur, Munich: Hanser, 1999. Quotes are from the paperback edition: Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2001. All further references in the text as: LL. 17

See Volker Hage, Zeugen der Zerstörung. Die Literaten und der Luftkrieg, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2003. 18

Vees-Gulani, Trauma and Guilt, p. 120. This argument is also put forward by Wilfried Wilms, ‘Taboo and Repression in W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction’, in: J.J. Long and Anne Whitehead, eds., W.G. Sebald. A Critical Companion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, pp. 175-89. 19 See Annette Seidel Arpacı, ‘Lost in Translations? The Discourse of “German Suffering” and W. G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur’, in: Helmut Schmitz, ed., A

History, Trauma and Mourning in Sebald and Friedrich

45

Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007, pp. 161-80. 20

See Vees-Gulani, Trauma and Guilt, pp. 11-37.

21

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 4.

22

Ibid., pp. 8-10; and Vees-Gulani, Trauma and Guilt, pp. 30-7.

23

In this context it is worth pointing out that Uwe Timm arrives at the same conclusion: ‘Das Eigentümliche war, wie der Schock, der Schreck, das Entsetzen durch das wiederholte Erzählen langsam in seinen Sprachformeln verblasste.’ Uwe Timm, Am Beispiel meines Bruders, Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003, p. 39. 24

Walter Benjamin, ‘Erfahrung und Armut’, in: Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften II.1, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991, pp. 213-9 (here: p. 214). 25

See Walter Benjamin, ‘Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire’, in: Gesammelte Schriften I.2, pp. 605-53: ‘Je größer der Anteil des Cholmomentes an einzelnen Eindrücken ist […] desto weniger gehen sie in die Erfahrung ein’ (p. 615). 26 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, in: Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1998, p. 60. 27

See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001, p. 6. 28

W.G. Sebald, ‘Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte’, in: Sebald, Campo Santo, Munich: Hanser, 2003. Quoted from the paperback edition: Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2006, pp. 69-100 (here: p. 90).

29

This is taken verbatim from the 1982 essay ‘Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte’, p. 97. On Sebald’s indebtedness to the Frankfurt School and Benjamin see also Colette Lawson, ‘The Natural History of Destruction: W.G. Sebald, Gert Ledig and the Allied Bombings’, in: Stuart Taberner, ed., Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009, pp. 2941 (here: p. 31). 30 Even though Weiss escaped Nazi persecution due to his family’s emigration in 1934, he describes himself as having been ‘destined’ for Auschwitz, ‘eine Ortschaft für die ich bestimmt war und der ich entkam.’ See Peter Weiss, ‘Meine Ortschaft’, in: Weiss, Rapporte, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1968, pp. 113-24 (here: p. 114). Weiss’s novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands is one of the central intertexts for Sebald’s novel Austerlitz.

46

Helmut Schmitz

31

See for example Wilfried Wilms who opens his essay on Luftkrieg und Literatur with Elie Wiesel’s assertion of a gap between traumatic violence and ‘the transformation, and ultimately transfer of that violence into readily communicable forms of expression.’ Nevertheless he argues that ‘unmediated knowledge […] can only come from the victim’ who is the ‘ruler in the kingdom of memory.’ Wilfried Wilms, ‘Taboo and Repression in W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction’, in: Long and Whitehead, eds., W.G. Sebald, pp. 175-89 (here: p. 175). See also Jean Améry’s assertion that ‘[t]he crimes of National Socialism had no moral quality for the perpetrator […]. Only I possessed, and still possess, the moral truth of the blows that even today roar in my skull, and for that reason I am more entitled to judge.’ Jean Améry, ‘Resentments’, in: Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980, pp. 62-81 (here: p. 70).

32 W.G. Sebald, ‘Mit den Augen des Nachtvogels. Über Jean Améry’, in: Campo Santo, pp. 149-70 (here: p. 151). Further references as: N. 33

Sebald, ‘Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte’, p. 82.

34 Anita McChesney quite mistakenly argues that Sebald ‘denounces the spectrum of representation as a whole.’ She reads Sebald (and his texts) as a chain of media transmitters that are in accordance with Marshall McLuhan’s theory not ‘bearers of meaning, but always only contain other media.’ This, however, overlooks that for Sebald there is an ‘appropriate’ form of writing that not only is capable of giving an impression of the dimensions of the destruction but, first and foremost, is an ‘appropriate’ aesthetic and stylistic response to the catastrophe. See Anita McChesney, ‘On the Repeating History of Destruction: Media and the Index on Sebald and Ransmayr’, Modern Language Notes, 121 (2006), 699-719 (here: p. 704). 35 In this context it is worth pointing out that the nexus of ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ is a recurrent trope in literary testimony of Jewish Auschwitz visitors, such as Peter Weiss, Hans Mayer and Erich Fried. See Thomas Jung, ‘Ortschaft Auschwitz: Topographie der Erinnerung. Diskurse der Annäherung und Erinnerung an Auschwitz aus der Perspektive der Nicht-Dabeigewesenen’, in: Edgar Platen, ed., Erinnerte und erfundene Erfahrung: Zur Darstellung von Zeitgeschichte in deutschsprachiger Gegenwartsliteratur, Munich: Iudicium, 2000, pp. 31-48 (here: p. 44). 36

See for example Christina M.E. Szentivanyi who argues that for Sebald both Levi and Améry represent a ‘far more authentic voice of a witness’ than post-war nonJewish German literary engagements with the Holocaust. However, she does not apply her assessment to Sebald’s treatment of German writers on the air war. Christina M.E. Szentivanyi, ‘W.G. Sebald and Structures of Testimony and Trauma: There are Spots of Mist that No Eye can Dispel’, in: Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh, eds., W.G. Sebald. History – Memory – Trauma, Berlin and New York: deGruyter, 2006, pp. 351-63 (here: p. 352)

History, Trauma and Mourning in Sebald and Friedrich

47

37

Sebald, ‘Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte’, pp. 80 and 86. The words ‘leidenschaftslose Art der Rede’ are Nossack’s own. See Hans-Erich Nossack, Der Untergang, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1963, pp. 27-8. Again, there is an analogy to Holocaust literature in Sebald’s consideration of tone of voice. Cf. Primo Levi’s reference to his sober tone as the only tone appropriate for a witness in his book If this is a Man, London: Abacus, 1987, p. 382. 38

Sebald, ‘Zwischen Geschichte und Naturgeschichte’, p. 90.

39

Walter Benjamin, ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, in: Gesammelte Schriften I.2, pp. 691-704 (here: p. 697). Significantly, both the references to Benjamin’s angel and the one to Kluge’s own epistemological doubts are absent from the 1982 essay which differs from Luftkrieg und Literatur in its distinctly less catastrophic tone and vocabulary, despite referring to ‘kollektive Katastrophe’ five times on twenty-five pages. 40

Todd Samuel Presner argues that Sebald’s essays themselves represent such a narrative. See Presner, ‘“What a synoptic and Artificial View Reveals”: Extreme History and the Modernism of W.G. Sebald’s Realism’, Criticism, 46 (2004), 341-60.

41

In this context it is more than astonishing that Sebald made no reference to Wolfgang Koeppen’s three novels Tauben im Gras (1951), Das Treibhaus (1952) and Der Tod in Rom (1955), all of which articulate a profound melancholia through their protagonists’ desperate desire to exit from history. 42 See Avishai Margalit and Gabriel Motzkin, ‘Der Holocaust. Zur Einzigartigkeit eines historischen Geschehens’, lettre international, 35 (1996), 23-7 (here: p. 27). 43 Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945, Munich: Propyläen, 2002. Quotes are taken from the paperback edition: Munich: List, 2004. All references as: B. 44

See for example Robert G. Moeller, ‘On the History of Man-Made Destruction. Loss, Death, Memory and Germany in the Bombing War’, History Workshop Journal, 61 (2001), 103-34.

45

Brad Prager, ‘A Collection of Damages: Critiquing the Violence of the Air War’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 3 (2005), 308-19 (here: p. 312). 46

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, p. 355: ‘Daß in den Lagern nicht mehr das Individuum starb, sondern das Exemplar, muß das Sterben auch derer affizieren, die der Maßnahme entgingen. Der Völkermord ist die absolute Integration, die überall sich vorbereitet, wo Menschen gleichgemacht werden, geschliffen, wie man beim Militär es nannte, bis man sie, Abweichungen vom

48

Helmut Schmitz

Begriff ihrer vollkommenen Nichtigkeit, buchstäblich austilgt. Auschwitz bestätigt das Philosophem von der reinen Identität als dem Tod. […] Was die Sadisten im Lager ihren Opfern ansagten: morgen wirst du als Rauch aus diesem Schornstein in den Himmel dich schlängeln, nennt die Gleichgültigkeit des Lebens jedes Einzelnen, auf welche Geschichte sich hinbewegt.’ 47

Moeller, ‘On the History of Man-Made Destruction’, p. 117.

48

Friedrich’s suggestive use of the image of the Huns goes to the heart of his book’s rhetorical gambit. According to a Cologne legend, St. Ursula and 11,000 virgins were martyred and killed by the Huns when they passed the city of Cologne on their way from Rome back to Brittany. Reminding the reader that the British epithet ‘Hun’ for the German aggressor originates in emperor Wilhelm’s II self-description, Friedrich then turns this on its head. The legend of St. Ursula illustrates that the Hun is an abomination before man and god as he kills the innocent. The Huns were thus ‘geborene Kriegsverbrecher.’ While Friedrich’s carefully ambiguous wording might imply a reference to the Nazis, the concluding sentence produces an equivalence between the British and the Huns: ‘Noch 1940 bis 1945 hat Churchill die Kölner, die Berliner, die Dresdner als Hunnen beseitigt. In Köln zwanzigtausend’ (B 258). This implicit equation of the 20,000 bombing victims in Cologne with St. Ursula’s 11,000 virgins turns the British into the real Huns and thus into war criminals.

49 For a critique and deconstruction of ‘we,’ see Moeller, ‘On the History of ManMade Destruction’, pp. 119-25. 50

Jörg Friedrich, Brandstätten. Der Anblick des Bombenkrieges, Munich: Propyläen, 2003. All references as: BS. 51

Habbo Knoch, Die Tat als Bild. Fotografien des Holocaust in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001. 52 53

See Groh, ‘Expressions of Memory in Pforzheim’.

Olaf Groehler, Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1990, pp. 111-7 and pp. 412-3. Friedrich uses the picture on pp. 111 and 412 (BS 126 and 134). Curiously, Groehler’s monumental study Die Geschichte des Luftkriegs, Berlin (Ost): Militärverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1981, contains no photographs of Dresden and only one photograph of Hamburg after the firestorm and depicts a street strewn with bodies (p. 380, caption: ‘Hamburg nach der Operation “Gomorrah”’). The section ‘Der westalliierte Fernluftkrieg’ spans merely twenty pages (pp. 373-96), although, in line with the GDR narrative about Dresden, the attacks are described in two lines as ‘Terrorschläge, […] obwohl angesichts der Agonie des faschistischen Regimes keine militärische Notwendigkeit mehr bestand’ (p. 458). On Groehler’s representation of the ‘Luftkrieg’ see Bas von BendaBeckmann, ‘Imperialist Air War. East German academic research and memory

History, Trauma and Mourning in Sebald and Friedrich

49

politics reflected in the works of Olaf Groehler’, in: Seidel-Arpacı and Schmitz, eds., Narratives of Trauma, pp. 33-58. 54

See Hans Brunswig, Feuersturm über Hamburg, Stuttgart: Motorbuch Verlag, 1978, pp. 231; 236; 238; 275; 278. Friedrich uses the pictures on pp. 236 and 278 (see BS 119 and 124). Interestingly, none of Brunswig’s photos are re-used in Christian Hanke and Joachim Paschen’s 1993 volume Hamburg im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945, Hamburg: Medien-Verlag, 1993, a book of photographs which contains only one single picture of a mass grave on page 118. 55

Gerhard E. Sollbach, ed., Dortmund. Bombenkrieg und Nachkriegsalltag 19391948, Hagen: Lesezeichen Verlag, 1996, pp. 177; 179; 183; 197. Friedrich uses the picture on page 179 (see BS 133). The picture, which in conjunction with three other photographs takes up less than 25% of a book page in Sollbach, is reproduced on one entire page in Friedrich’s book. Hans Erich Nossack, Der Untergang. Hamburg 1943. Fotos von Erich Andres, Hamburg: Ernst Kabel Verlag, 1993, pp. 130-1 (see BS 122) 56 It is a frequently repeated trope that any confrontation with Holocaust photographs ruptures or arrests the flow of time. See for example Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Doubleday, 1989, pp. 19-20. Also Martin Walser’s insistence: ‘Seit Auschwitz ist noch kein Tag vergangen.’ Martin Walser, ‘Auschwitz und kein Ende’, in: Walser, Deutsche Sorgen, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997, pp. 228-34 (here p. 228). 57 See Heinz-Peter Preußer, ‘Regarding and Imagining. Contrived Immediacy of the Allied Bombing Campaign in Photography, Novel and Historiography’, in: Schmitz, ed., A Nation of Victims?, pp. 141-60 (here p. 146). Walser, ‘Auschwitz und kein Ende’, p. 228. 58

Prager, ‘A Collection of Damages’, p. 317.

59 It is noteworthy that most of the picture books of the aforementioned Wartberg Verlag reiterate the narrative of the ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ regarding survival and success and which is criticized by Sebald, yet photographs of disfigured corpses are strangely absent in them. 60 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 57. 61

See for example the opening section of Vees-Gulani, Trauma and Guilt, pp. 18-25.

62 See Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, p. 23. 63

Ibid., p. 78. For LaCapra’s critique of Goldhagen see pp. 114-40.

50

Helmut Schmitz

64

Prager, ‘A Collection of Damages’, p. 317.

65

See Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, Munich: Beck, 1997, pp. 75-8.

Christine Anton Historiography and Memory Politics: The CulturalHistorical Discourse in the Works of Bernhard Schlink

Since the publication of his best-selling novel Der Vorleser, Bernhard Schlink has been heralded as the new voice of German conscience. In his works, Schlink explores the legacy of the Holocaust and German history since World War II, delving into problematic moral and philosophical questions about collective guilt, memory, identity and trauma. This analysis examines how contemporary memory politics affect and shape Schlink’s stories and assesses the location of Schlink’s plots in the ‘gray zone’ of Holocaust literature. It further investigates Schlink’s use of a middle-voiced position through which the author generates a poly-perspective approach to deciphering a multi-dimensional past.

The current state of memory politics, the context, mode and purpose of memorizing the dramatic historic events of the twentieth century, in unified Germany can be exemplified by taking a brief glimpse at the commemoration events of 2009. On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German government declared 2009 to be celebrated as a ‘year of freedom and unity.’ 1 With a program consisting of public addresses, panel discussions and museum exhibitions, the German nation commemorated two main chapters in its sixty-year history as a once divided but now unified country: the beginnings of the West German democracy in 1949 with the drafting of the federal republic’s constitution, and the peaceful demonstrations in the GDR that led to the collapse of the SED regime in 1989 and ultimately the reunification of West and East in 1990. Yet 2009 also marked the anniversary of an altogether different kind of unification effort, i.e., the country’s attempt at unifying all of Europe under the banner of National Socialist ideology. Thus, the fact that it had been seventy years since the outbreak of World War II could not be ignored; hence the commemorative events planned for that year also included photo exhibitions about atrocities committed by the German Wehrmacht in Poland and a ceremony remembering the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp, to name but a few. The juxtaposition of commemorating these vastly divergent yet defining moments in Germany’s history is not all coincidental and warranted simply because of their historical dates. If one takes a look

52

Christine Anton

back at the last decade of the twentieth century, it becomes apparent that a new voice in the discourse on German memory culture has emerged, one that not only attempts to encapsulate the criminal past in the wider context of a democratic Germany’s success story, but one that also draws attention to Germany’s own traumatic victimization during World War II and the sacrifices the German people had to make in their ardent quest for a new national identity. 2 Beginning with the end of the socialist regime in the former GDR and the ensuing unification of the two Germanys, memory politics in the unified Germany have shifted dramatically inasmuch as the ‘Wende’ of 1989/90 necessitated a thorough reexamination and redefinition of socio-cultural values and identity markers. In addition, unification became the vehicle for a renewed engagement with Germany’s National Socialist past. Historical memory, according to cultural critic Jan Assmann, is rediscovered when a significant break occurs within established cultural traditions and social structures. As past, present and future are interconnected, their confluence and interrelation mutually reinforce each other and in time will result in a reconstruction of memory. 3 Reconstructing memory, however, does not inadvertently generate a rewriting of what is being remembered, even if it holds that potential. For that very reason, the concept of memory and the question how a reunified Germany could and would ensure a continued debate of its past turned into a hotly discussed subject matter soon after the watershed events of 1989. 4 The entire decade following unification saw a resurfacing of repressed war-time memories and a re-festering of old wounds. Most prominent conduits were the opening of the ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’ exhibition (1995-99), the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996), Martin Walser’s speech in the Frankfurt Paulskirche (1998), and the fierce debate about the construction of a Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Additionally, the task of remembering the Holocaust materialized as an essential component of the political culture in unified Germany. A nation’s collective memory, a term used since the 1920s, 5 is driven by memory politics, i.e., the cultural and political forces that determine what is remembered, the purpose of remembering, and how it is communicated on a social, political, and cultural level. Memory politics thus is the catalyst for creating and shaping the continuum on which a collective national consciousness and identity are instituted. Memory,

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

53

however, is not a static formation but fluid and elastic. It is dependent upon contemporary socio-political conditions and perspectives which in turn influence the mechanisms that are used to shape and alter the cognitive processes involved in obtaining and storing memory. Unification also opened the doors to broadening perspectives on German remembrance culture as the unified nation not only would have to determine how to chart a common future but how to share a collective history as well. In the wake of public debates about Germany’s past, the reassessment of German history and reprocessing of the country’s historical heritage have prompted the cultural trend of turning the investigative gaze inward and to extensively review one’s own family background and build a database of first-person memories. Clearly, at a time when more and more members of the first generation, the victims, perpetrators, witnesses and bystanders are passing on, recording biographical accounts for future generations ‘for whom the past is purely historical’ 6 has become even more important. The intensified public discourse about the past and its lasting implication for the twenty-first century has found its counterpart in the wave of literary and cinematographic endeavors that continue to thematize the Third Reich in films and books. 7 Most renowned and successful – and in Grass’s case also most scandalous 8 – among a plethora of postmillennium publications on Germany’s Nazi past were Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang (2002) and Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006), Bernhard Schlink’s Liebesfluchten (2000) and Die Heimkehr (2006), W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2002), Reinhard Jirgl’s Die Unvollendeten (2003), Uwe Timm’s Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003) and Halbschatten (2008), Tanja Dücker’s Himmelskörper (2003) and Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand (2004). These authors are viewed as some of the most well-known sounding boards for Germany’s rekindled interest in its recent past, an interest that has started challenging the conventional perspective on the dichotomy between victims and perpetrators as one between a ‘bad’ German collective versus purely innocent victims of the Holocaust. Since Walser’s notorious ‘Friedenspreisrede’ and his argument against the instrumentalization of Auschwitz and plea for a more normalized treatment of the past, though widely critiqued for its subtle right-wing undertones, 9 it has become quite apparent that the German nation has added a different viewpoint to its remembrance culture, a view that allows remembering the country’s own traumatization by Nazi terror.

54

Christine Anton

With an oversupply of memory, discussions about Germany’s handling of its ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ have been intense and often querulous, both on a national and an international level. Debates have centered on two primary issues in the nation’s victimization discourse: one asks the question ‘to what extent Germans could legitimately cast themselves as victims, and whether any equivalence of suffering […] could be construed with other victims of the period 1933-45’; 10 the other strives to analyze the public discourse of guilt and shame, memory and trauma, and the willingness of post-war generations to uphold the moral obligation toward the dead and their descendants. Hirsch’s groundbreaking work on the concept of postmemory, her understanding of the inter- and trans-generational transmission of trauma and coded memory, and the intrinsic dilemma of historical relativism have been fictionalized in such books as Schlink’s best-selling novel Der Vorleser (1995) and, more recently, in his book Die Heimkehr. The former has catapulted Schlink, by profession a law professor and judge of constitutional law, to international stardom when he wrote a story about the difficulties that postwar generations had coming to terms with the crimes and guilt of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, the generations of perpetrators and Nazi collaborators, and the psychological rifts between guilt and innocence, love and hate, pity and condemnation. Through his fictional writings and his numerous essays on the Holocaust and Germany’s haunted history, Schlink has indeed become the voice of a nation that continues to grapple with its inherited Nazi past. 11 Striving to address the prevailing Zeitgeist regarding the validity of miscellaneous perspectives on the topics of German guilt and victimhood, Schlink’s works render the current state of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ into textual form and provide a snapshot of the German discourse on memory, remembrance, trauma, and the formation of a national identity in the shadow of the Holocaust. Arguably, his stories are greatly influenced and framed by today’s politics of memory, yet the author’s own position cannot be easily pigeonholed, as this analysis will show. Right after its first publication, Der Vorleser was initially heralded as a more nuanced and innovative approach to illustrating ‘the psychological difficulties involved in coming to terms objectively with Nazism,’ 12 and its author was praised for ingeniously provoking readers to question their own actions if confronted with such moral

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

55

and political conditions. 13 However, as soon as Schlink’s collection of short stories Liebesfluchten appeared, Der Vorleser underwent a second wave of reviews, and critical assessment of Schlink’s work swapped over to the other side. All of a sudden, critics condemned the author for being ‘pernicious’ 14 in his apparent attempt at historical whitewashing through ‘the inversion of guilt and shame.’ 15 Critics have particularly been irked by the unwarranted degree of sympathy Schlink allegedly shows to the figure of Hanna, a concentration camp guard, whose guilt, the first-person narrator contends, is essentially mitigated by her concealed illiteracy. Yet, illiteracy, Schlink’s critics insist, was not very common in Nazi Germany. ‘It is well known […] that “ordinary Germans” had the highest rate of literacy in Europe,’ Ruth Franklin writes, and therefore Schlink’s concoction of Hanna’s ‘alibi’ is nothing but a historical lie. 16 Of course, no reader should ever make the mistake of confusing an author with the characters he creates; still, as Schlink himself acknowledges, a work of art often, if not always, contains autobiographical elements. This observation certainly holds true for Schlink’s own novel: there is the location of Heidelberg where the story takes place, a town in which Schlink grew up and where he attended university as a law student; the fact that, like Michael Berg’s father, Schlink’s father was a professor; the narrator’s age and generation is that of the author Schlink; and last but not least, both narrator and author are legal scholars. Though Schlink has never admitted that Berg’s affair with an older woman was something moulded after his own life’s experiences, he did concede that Hanna was modeled after a co-worker he once met when he was a university student. 17 But would it be correct to equate the protagonist’s ruminations – his conflicted feelings about his condemnation of Hanna’s activities on one hand, and his need to understand her predicament on the other – with Schlink’s personal belief? 18 Is Michael Berg a convenient mouthpiece for the author through whom he perpetuates his own agenda? In other words, to what degree does Schlink reflect on factual realities concerning contemporary German sensibilities in this novel and how does he relate to them? Many scholars have interpreted the story as an allegory of Germany’s relation to its haunted past at the end of the twentieth century and the nation’s yearning to move beyond it. 19 In part, Schlink himself supported this reading when he said in an interview that ‘the relationship between Hanna and the boy represents the relationship between the first and second

56

Christine Anton

generation, who loved their parents innocently and then, when faced with irrefutable proof of Nazi atrocity continued to love them.’ 20 The crux of the matter is the problematic relationship between the first and the second generation and the search for answers to the question of how to access and cope with a past in which family members committed horrible crimes, in short, the structure and scope of what Giordano called Germany’s ‘zweite Schuld.’ 21 As such, Metz argues, the book represents a ‘“crisis text” or a text in crisis: a text shot through with the crisis of German post-Holocaust discourse and, especially, response.’ 22 Confronting the sins of the fathers (and mothers) and condemning the war-time generation for their political and ideological engagement in the Third Reich is not a new topic in post-war German literary history. A plethora of (auto-)biographical texts that constituted the emerging genre of ‘Väterliteratur’ in the seventies already explored Germany’s obligation to paving a path to opening up the public dialogue about the ‘largely unresolved consciousness of the Holocaust’ and putting an end to the ‘language of silence.’ 23 But while the authors of these texts set out to attack and summarily convict an entire generation, Schlink, although of the same age and generation, employs a different strategy, one that moves beyond rehashing customary binary oppositions by constantly shifting, redefining and renegotiating the relationship between the two generations. Schlink aims, as one critic notes, ‘to move his readers away from easy condemnation into a deeper and more meaningful reflection of the moral dimensions of the Holocaust, where condemnation is the result of reflection rather than a barrier to it.’ 24 Told retrospectively by Michael Berg, the story encompasses thirty-five years in the life of the protagonist who was directly and indirectly, dramatically and traumatically affected by his relationship with a Nazi criminal. The novel’s three parts correspond to three distinctly different responses to the dealings between the generation of perpetrators and members of the second generation. It can be argued that form and content of Schlink’s book resemble the structure of Hegelian dialectics. The narrative proceeds from thesis, Michael’s love and lust for Hanna, to antithesis, his hate and contempt for her criminal past, to synthesis, his eventual acceptance that existence cannot be neatly compartmentalized into balance sheet format. The tectonic layers of life, Berg realizes, ‘ruhen so dicht aufeinander auf, daß uns im Späteren immer Früheres begegnet, nicht als Abgetanes

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

57

und Erledigtes, sondern gegenwärtig und lebendig’ (V 206). Der Vorleser delves into what LaCapra calls the ‘gray zone’ by shifting the angle of perspective away from portraying simplistic dichotomies of good and evil which constitute the customary tenor in Holocaust literature. This ‘gray zone’ is one in which the demarcations between victim and perpetrator are not clear-cut; however, ‘it does not imply the rashly generalized blurring or simple collapse of all distinctions, including that between perpetrator and victim.’ 25 As LaCapra implies, it is still essential that distinctions between victims, perpetrators, and bystanders not be obfuscated nor relations be disarticulated, 26 and it is with respect to this crucial distinction that Schlink walks a fine line. Hanna’s position as abuser of Michael and war criminal is never contested; 27 her sentence of eighteen years behind bars is both ‘natürlich und richtig,’ Michael asserts (V 93). Still, Hanna’s handicap and the wrong accusations made against her by her fellow guards, as well as the fact that Berg starts doubting the severity of her punishment, ostensibly make her a victim of jurisprudence if not of historical circumstance. Furthermore, Berg does not reveal Hanna’s illiteracy to the presiding judge, and by not helping her case he victimizes Hanna even further. But the longer Michael attends the trial, the more he identifies with his ex-lover. He finds himself reluctant to categorically condemn Hanna and in turn takes on the role as her co-defendant on the basis that he once loved her and drove her away when he betrayed her love to his friends. He feels guilty of having loved a criminal and of having made her life more miserable (V 129). Berg’s dilemma, that is, his inability to simultaneously convict and empathize, symbolizes the second generation’s impasse with regard to coming to terms with the past, in particular with their forefathers’ entanglement in it, with understanding it and moving beyond it. 28 Schlink blames the ‘human dimension’ for his own generation’s ongoing struggle to escape the bounds of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung.’ In an interview with Der Spiegel, Schlink states: Wenn es nicht die menschliche Sicht auf die Täter gäbe, hätten wir kein Problem mit ihnen. [...] Wir hätten doch mit den Tätern schon lange abgeschlossen, wenn es wirklich alles Monster wären, ganz fremd, ganz anders, mit denen wir nichts gemein haben. 29

Of further interest for analyzing the second generation’s position is LaCapra’s comparison between historical trauma and structural

58

Christine Anton

trauma. Historical trauma stems from a specific historical loss (such as the Shoah) whereas structural trauma cannot be determined by a traumatic event but is an anxiety-producing condition: Historical trauma is specific, and not everyone is subject to it or entitled to the subject position associated with it. [...] Everyone is subject to structural trauma. But with respect to historical trauma and its representation, the distinction between victims, perpetrators, and bystanders is crucial. 30

Michael Berg is a prime example of someone suffering from structural trauma. Especially in his behavior towards women he exhibits classic symptoms of a traumatized person. He feels shame, guilt, betrayal, at times humiliation, all of which eventually contribute to Michael becoming a man who is distant and aloof and has a severe detachment deficit. His involvement with Hanna, her sexual exploitation of him and her betrayal ultimately leave him with a damaged core. 31 Historical trauma, however, can only be attributed to a far lesser degree and only through Michael’s association with Hanna. Its symptoms become manifest in Michael’s identification with his former lover and in his behavior of acting out, that is, when he conflates and confuses self and other and transfers Hanna’s guilt and culpability onto himself, while Hanna, the real perpetrator, remains stoic, unresponsive and unremorseful throughout her trial. The use of Michael’s self-condemnation and the role reversal of victim and perpetrator as narrative devices undermine customary divisions between those who are unequivocally judged to be guilty and those who are innocent. This subjects the novel to criticisms of fitting into ‘a worrying new trend in German culture, whereby Germans are presented as victims, of circumstance, of Nazism, and even of the Allies.’ 32 Schlink himself admits that he feared his audience would ‘misunderstand’ his intention: ‘I believe in punishment, there must be punishment’; and further: ‘I was very, very worried. In the beginning, I was afraid that I might be misunderstood, that people might think it was a whitewashing book. I was constantly torn.’ 33 Many critics reprove the book for provoking questions without providing answers and for taking roads that ultimately lead nowhere. ‘Anhand der Geschichte von Michael und Hanna rollt Schlink eine Reihe von Fragen und Themenkomplexen auf, die allesamt angesprochen, aber nicht aufgelöst werden,’ Helmut Schmitz writes; 34 and according to Martin Swales ‘the governing register is one of not

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

59

knowing, not understanding, not remembering, not reflecting. In consequence, the narrative is and remains something curiously undigested.’ 35 Yet, challenging the very notion that there is a handy formula for capturing every thread in the intricate web of a burdened and traumatic past is arguably the strength of the book’s nonlinear composition. ‘The seemingly straightforward plot, its seemingly simple and honest protagonist, are deceptive,’ Mahlendorf writes, ‘because at every turn of the narration new contradictions, ironies, and complexities demand reevaluation of the reader’s earlier position.’ 36 Several narrative elements contribute to the story’s defamiliarizing effect. First, the reader is confronted with an anti-heroic first-person narrator, who, although he tells his story from the distance of time and space, has not achieved emotional distance from his earlier self. Michael’s past still overwhelms him in his present situation as is evident in the shift from past tense to present tense whenever Michael reflects on his memories. 37 Even if the act of writing and remembering should produce an existential catharsis which would enable Berg to free himself of his memories (V 206), his salvation lies beyond the confines of the story itself. 38 Schlink’s protagonist finds no closure and neither does the narrative. This non-closure essentially leaves readers unsatisfied and equally robbed of a cathartic completion. Second, Schlink evokes a Brechtian ‘alienation effect’ by chronicling a story that is both foreign and inconceivable to most people. While some readers might identify with the storyline and its protagonists, neither the narrative’s cold and sober tone, nor the presentation of a novella-like ‘unerhörte Begebenheit’ – the sexual bondage between a teenager and an older woman – make room for immediate identification. Moreover, both Michael and Hanna are unlikeable characters and do not readily invite empathy from readers: he is a traumatized man who remains trapped in his anger, regret and melancholia, and she is a violent and sadistic person who ‘flies into cruel and unexpected rages’ 39 without a moment’s notice. 40 Schlink employs the didactic use of distancing techniques to provoke a critical view of the story and to force his readers to rationally reflect on the concept of historical memory as the impetus for the formation of present-day concepts of guilt, shame and identity. As a result, while Michael is caught in the circular motion of acting out and his compulsiverepetitive recalling of his memories, the reader takes on the psychological process of working through on an analytical and an intellectual

60

Christine Anton

level. 41 Placing ‘the burden of evaluating’ 42 the many twisted and multifaceted philosophical, psychological and ethical issues on his readers is perhaps Schlink’s greatest achievement with this story. 43 Der Vorleser has been translated into dozens of languages and has made Schlink an internationally recognized best-selling author. Though the majority of his audience knows Schlink primarily by this book, to his German readers Schlink has long been known as a writer of detective stories which have earned him several literary awards. Like his well-known novel, Schlink’s trilogy about private detective Gerhard Selb, too, ‘pushes at the boundaries of post-war cultural taboos’ 44 and tackles similar issues, i.e., the inevitable presence of the past and the (im)possibility of atonement. Selb shares the plight of many of Schlink’s other protagonists, who all are left in an existential void, alienated and disoriented by the subversive influence of an unresolved past and guilt. On first glance, the grandfatherly private detective Selb (he is sixty-eight in the first book), whose personal past includes employment as a ruthless prosecutor during the Third Reich, 45 seems to have become a model of moral integrity, a person who is aware of the errors of his ways and who abhors, even kills, those who are still deeply entrenched in Nazi ideology. 46 But upon further reflection, Selb is revealed as unlikeable a character as Michael Berg, or, indeed, as Hanna Schmitz: he is a womanizing, alcoholic exNazi whose past has left him psychologically stunted and emotionally bitter, yet, a past he has never even remotely tried to work through – ‘ich mochte mich nicht erinnern,’ he categorically states (SM 89). Contrary to Berg, however, Selb is a member of the first generation, and for him penitence is out of reach even if he keeps on trying to correct his past wrongdoings by doing justice in the present. Selb becomes increasingly disillusioned with his existence and with himself because every case he solves reminds him of his former life, his unsolved ‘Lebenslüge’ (SB 238). His past and his memories keep chipping away at the foundation of his self-identity that he took on after 1945 when he was no longer needed (SJ 146). Selb’s plan to live in peace with his past, one in which ‘Schuld, Sühne, Enthusiasmus und Blindheit, Stolz und Zorn, Moral und Resignation […] in ein kunstvolles Gleichgewicht gebracht [waren]’ (SJ 255), is consistently overpowered by the unpleasant reality of his dreadful memories. By the end of book three, Schlink’s detective has realized that his notorious past keeps catching up with him at every

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

61

turn and that he has run out of time to atone for his crimes. Likewise, he has finally come to accept the fact that vigilante justice and bending the rules of morality and humanity is as wrong when it is done under the banner of a racist ideology as when it is done in the name of justice itself. Selb’s self-righteousness makes it impossible for him to develop from guilty perpetrator to a truly reformed and thoroughly denazified ‘good German’ who assents to his moral accountability. By not having confronted his personal history, Selb is caught between feeling melancholic about his past and longing for an undefined and unspecified ‘Unbekannte[s]’ (SB 175). Denying himself the need to work through his past memories – ‘Ich mag die alten Zeiten nicht, habe sie weggepackt und zugedeckt’ (SJ 17) – he locks himself, to borrow from LaCapra, in an ‘endless acting-out of unresolved aspects of the past in the attempt to create a positive […] identity in the present – an attempt that must fail insofar as what has not been worked through returns to create new sources of disorientation and misguided action in the present and future.’ 47 Selb is the quintessential representative of the first generation, a generation that vehemently defied an open and public post-war debate about collective guilt and shame. Despite frequently criticizing the nation’s emotional numbness and unwillingness to mourn, Selb too proves incapable of overcoming his amnesia and fully acknowledging his personal guilt: with ‘sweeping statements [he] cover[s] over specific crimes and responsibility.’ 48 Schlink’s depiction of the elderly Selb is not unproblematic, particularly with regard to using elements of humor and hilarity in the portrayal of the private detective and his amusing cat Turbo. Not only does the image of Selb as a quaint character, a ‘Seelchen’ (SJ 115), risk erasing the reader’s reluctance to identify with an ex-Nazi, the vivacious Selb also comes across as decent and honest and ‘morally superior’ 49 compared to other former Nazis depicted in the trilogy. 50 Schlink clearly pushes the envelope of tact and sensitivity in a scene in which Selb assumes a victim status when he gets attacked by a bunch of neo-Nazi hooligans (SM 90-3). The juxtaposition of the innocent ex-Nazi Selb and the malicious group of young skinheads resembles the contrastive picture Schlink paints between Hanna and her fellow guards in Der Vorleser when Hanna, like Selb, appears as one of the ‘good’ perpetrators as opposed to the true evil ones. Following this overly simplistic narrative logic that Schlink sets forth, one is left with two possible conclusions: either

62

Christine Anton

Schlink strives for moral relativism in his assessment of the notion of collective guilt, or the scene should simply be analyzed as one of poetic justice. 51 After all, Selb has never been put on trial for his deeds, and thus the fact that he is ridiculed and punished by a gang of thugs who idolize a regime and ideology that Selb himself once represented is clearly a symbolic gesture. It would certainly be wrong to convict an entire generation from a point of pre-established judgments and pre-conceived notions without distinguishing between perpetrators committed to the Nazi doctrine and passive bystanders. Yet, with respect to the historical dimensions of the Holocaust, a sense for what constitutes perpetrator victimhood and its traumatizing factors versus the brutal victimization of innocent millions is morally imperative. Besides, eroding the fault lines between perpetrators and victims runs the risk of neglecting the true victims of Nazi terror by not giving them their due voice. It is indeed a troubling aspect of Schlink’s novels that in his stories ‘the true victims of the period, those who died and those who survived, have no face; their suffering, though conceded, remains abstract and evokes no emotion in the reader.’ 52 To date, Schlink’s story ‘Die Beschneidung’ from Liebesfluchten is the only narrative that includes a fully developed Jewish character. 53 It is a story about a doomed relationship between a German man and an American-Jewish woman set in New York City. Confronted with prejudices about their respective cultures, Andi and Sarah, the two main characters, are soon overwhelmed with resentment for each other and the culture each of them represents. Andi believes Sarah and her family see him as an ethnic caricature of everything that is bad about Germans. His every word and gesture is prejudged and found wanting, he tells himself (B 241-2). Being German equals being a Nazi which in turn equals being the murderer of millions of innocent Jews: ‘Vor allem begegnet ihr mir mit Vorurteilen. Ihr wißt schon alles über die Deutschen. Also wißt ihr auch schon alles über mich. Also müßt ihr euch auch nicht mehr für mich interessieren’ (B 236), Andi berates Sarah. While he is overly self-conscious about his ‘Germanness,’ Sarah’s name calling – she ridicules his orderliness as ‘der Nazi in dir’ (B 239) – does not help mending fences. The situation comes to a boiling point during a trip to Germany. Though Sarah initially shows some joyful curiosity about ‘das Spielzeugdeutschland’ (B 219), the topics of their conversations soon turn to more serious matters. They plan to visit the concentration

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

63

camp in Sachsenhausen and stay with Andi’s uncle in Berlin. In the course of their visit they discuss the war, the Holocaust, and the legacy of the Shoah, and all three of them heatedly argue their different viewpoints. In the ensuing squabble, Schlink evokes the arguments of the ‘Historikerstreit’ when he situates Sarah and the uncle on opposite ends of the debate. The uncle wants the past to let be, a position that Sarah vehemently derides (B 225-6), while Andi, like Michael Berg, takes a middle position and argues against the limitations of an either/or position (B 229). In his views on memory, remembrance, historicization and normalization, Andi echoes Schlink’s arguments from his 2001 essay ‘Von der Notwendigkeit und der Gefahr der Beschäftigung mit dem Dritten Reich und dem Holocaust’ published in Der Spiegel. 54 In that essay, Schlink discusses both sides of the debate on Germany’s collective guilt, the Holocaust’s bequest to the country’s self-perception, and the German desire for normalization as part of a process of historicization and detraumatization. In Schlink’s view, coming to terms with Germany’s Nazi past did not become an issue until the second generation took the task to clean out the ‘stagnant odor of a thousand years’ upon themselves, thereby lifting the veil of collective amnesia that had comfortably settled over the nation. While the first generation denied its collective shame by repressing all memories and destroying all ‘affektiven Brücken zur unmittelbar hinter ihnen liegenden Vergangenheit,’ 55 the second generation tore down the wall of silence and started a process that is still on-going more than sixty years after the end of World War II. ‘Für die meisten von uns war die Vergangenheit des Dritten Reichs und des Holocausts prägend,’ Schlink writes. ‘Sie stand im Zentrum unserer Auseinandersetzung mit den Eltern und unserer Absetzung von ihnen; unter ihrem Schatten gewann unser Bild der deutschen Geschichte seine Gestalt.’ Though Schlink sees the insistence on remembering the past as paramount and warns against any attempts to cynically trivialize it, he picks up Walser’s contested train of thought when he pleas for a timely and gradual ending of reproaches, both those from outside the country as well as those stemming from the German nation’s own selfblame and self-castigation. The passage of time implies that the past will no longer hold the same significance for coming generations, Schlink claims. Thus, it would not be just to burden future generations with the culture of guilt and shame when ‘in die Schuld […] schon die

64

Christine Anton

dritte Generation kaum noch verstrickt [ist], und die folgenden Generationen […] es gar nicht mehr sein [werden].’ Normalizing the tenor in post-Holocaust discourse entails, according to Schlink, historicization of the past and detraumatization of the nation: ‘Wenn ein kollektives wie auch ein individuelles Ereignis Geschichte ist, dominiert es die kollektive beziehungsweise individuelle Biografie nicht mehr, sondern ist in sie integriert.’ Historicization ensures permanence because ‘die Zukunft der Gegenwart der Vergangenheit ist die Geschichte,’ Schlink writes. This process has to be accompanied by a concerted effort of allowing the nation to work through its own traumatizing events. Germany’s engagement with its past has reached a level where the task of remembering a traumatic past has become an anxiety-producing condition in itself, Schlink argues. Working through the historical trauma with the goal of overcoming it is a worthwhile undertaking but it is hindered by obstacles that first need to be acknowledged. Yet, how can Germans legitimately justify their own traumatization when the real victims of National Socialism are still fighting for their dues? There is an inert risk that Germany’s appeal for selfaffirming normalization is carried out at the expense of historical distortion and denial as such ‘attempts at transcendence or salvation may lead to demonization and scapegoating of those on whom unavoidable anxiety is projected.’ 56 This is precisely the problem with Schlink’s proposal when he accuses ‘die andere Seite’ – an underhanded rhetorical if not anti-Semitic attack against ‘die Gruppe der jüdischen Opfer und ihre Nachfahren’ 57 – of keeping the trauma alive by way of constant claims, charges and demands. But while the other side is yet to step beyond the post-traumatic phase of acting out, Schlink reasons, Germany has already arrived at the next phase of working through, and consequently has the right to further their psychological healing without being delayed by the other side. Schlink points to recent cultural and political developments as proof, ‘dass die Vergangenheit für die andere Seite noch traumatisch ist.’ Moreover, Schlink challenges the point that detraumatization requires a formal context of continuous communication as ‘Enttraumatisierung geschieht zugleich im Dialog und je für sich, und die eine Seite muss nicht warten, bis sie auf der anderen Seite gelingt. Man kann sich im Warten aufeinander auch wechselseitig im Trauma festhalten.’ Even if Schlink does not omit praising the significance of bilateral respect,

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

65

obligation, and dialogue, he walks a slippery slope with his passiveaggressive accusations. Lack of dialogue and mutual understanding prevents both sides from transcending history, and neither closure nor closeness can be obtained as long as either side fails to acknowledge the other’s concerns both objectively and compassionately. Schlink’s stories attest precisely to this dilemma. Andi, for example, emerges as a would-be victim of anti-German sentiments ostensibly exhibited by Sarah and her Jewish family, a disconcerting role reversal of the perpetrator/victim binary evocative of Schlink’s reasoning and likewise indicative of Germany’s victimization discourse. Furthermore, the overall problem of understanding and compassion is not only the cause for Michael Berg’s predicament but also the main reason that Andi and Sarah, too, part ways after Andi’s symbolic act of getting circumcised misses its goal of bringing both partners together as equals. 58 Detraumatization and transcending a painful past prove to be an elusive enterprise for all of Schlink’s protagonists. Clad in the role of detectives, they search for determinate answers to an indeterminate past. 59 Their investigative journey into history finds them thrust into a maze of riddles that need to be solved and questions that require a response. But the core that houses the solution to their query can only be reached after having run into a multitude of dead ends. Still, even the final destination of their quest does not remain a constant signified as its meaning changes because the experiences and setbacks that Schlink’s protagonists encounter on their journey alter their sense of self and identity. While the past implicitly and explicitly provides the backdrop for the process of molding consciousness and historical awareness, at any given moment in time the concept of history and its constituents are in flux as cultural, social and political trends determine its validity. Consequently, its very indeterminacy problematizes and eventually destabilizes the formation of a coherent and secure identity as it is continuously constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed. Thus, seeking to recreate and understand an objective history beyond the confines of postmemory and the spatiotemporal distance of one’s own biography ultimately becomes too much of a task. Left behind is a fractured individual condemned to an endless hermeneutical circle of redefining and renegotiating the standpoint of one’s perspective.

66

Christine Anton

The notion of movement and traveling beyond the constraints of space and time is deeply entrenched in the language of Schlink’s narratives. Schlink’s protagonists are permanently on the go, drifting from one location to the next, never resting at one place for long as their futile search propels them ever forward. Many critics have pointed to Schlink’s propensity for appropriating Homer’s Odyssey as an apparent leitmotif in his works. 60 Ulysses’ voyage, his trials and tribulations, the obstacles he meets and has to overcome, runs like a meta-text through Der Vorleser. Michael Berg frequently refers to it as his favorite text in which he finds solace after his divorce and for which he seeks to find correspondences in his own life (V 42; 66; 1734). As a child, Michael reads Homer’s epos as the archetypal story of homecoming, the return to a utopian state of wholeness. Michael derives new meaning from the Odyssey upon re-reading it after Hanna’s trial. After his traumatic encounter with Hanna’s past and subsequent confrontation with questions about shame, guilt and compliance has left him ‘caught up in a melancholic feedback loop,’ 61 Michael slowly comes to realize that the past can only serve as a reference point, but that bridging the divide between history, memory, and postmemory requires perpetually upending fixed positions. The tale of Ulysses is not a lesson in homecoming but one of departure, Berg now understands. Homer’s hero does not return to stay home, but to head off, again and again, as his is a story of motion, ‘zugleich zielgerichtet und ziellos, erfolgreich und vergeblich’ (V 173). The term ‘homecoming’ is closely linked to the notion of ‘Heimat,’ a uniquely German word that encapsulates not only geographical but also cultural, social and historical factors. The idea of ‘Heimat’ has seen a renaissance in recent years as more and more young Germans are willing and eager to reconnect to a place that evokes a sense of belonging and identity. Yet, the painful loss of ‘Heimat’ after World War II still remains part of the psychological and emotional make-up of the first and second generations. The dissolution of their homeland has caused ‘das intellektuelle Lebensgefühl der Ortlosigkeit und Ungebundenheit,’ Schlink writes in his essay ‘Heimat als Utopie.’ 62 The horrors and atrocities committed in the name of ‘Volk und Vaterland’ robbed the German people of all positive associations – hopes, longings and dreams – usually connected with one’s home, and as a result, Schlink reasons, the concept of ‘Heimat’ as the place of happy childhood memories can only be defined as an imagined place

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

67

in the post-war German vocabulary: ‘Heimat ist Nichtort […]. Heimat ist Utopie,’ Schlink avows. 63 But if ‘Heimat’ is a no-place, the return to it is likewise unachievable, and the notion of homecoming itself becomes utopian, a problem that Schlink’s protagonists regularly encounter on their journey. 64 In essence, Schlink’s protagonists are engaged in a twofold quest: the search for home, love and a sense of belonging on one hand, and the hunt for the elusive past on the other. The inherent futility of this undertaking is at the heart of Schlink’s works and forms the story line in his novel Die Heimkehr. 65 The book is a kaleidoscopic meditation on history, justice and the nature of evil. Revisiting the same themes – the burden of post-Holocaust guilt; the desire for atonement; the problem of identity; Homer’s Odyssey as central leitmotif – already explored in Der Vorleser and Liebesfluchten, the novel resembles a formulaic conglomeration of Schlink’s previous subject matters. In addition, Schlink returns once more to his predictable penchant for rendering his main characters as stereotypical members of their respective generation. 66 The reader learns about a grandfather whose obsession with German military history inadvertently paves the way for his son’s indoctrination into Nazi ideology; the son who subsequently escapes prosecution and continues to spread his deviant views under the guise of a reputable scholar; a mother who is unwilling to confront the past and be accountable for it; and the narrator who compulsively searches for the missing and forgotten details of his father’s existence but who is ultimately denied access to his parents’ memory of the past. Die Heimkehr with its complex relationship between a son and his father serves, much like Der Vorleser, as a symbolic backdrop for the unresolved trauma stemming from twelve years of Nazi terror and the significance of Holocaust memory for current and future generations of Germans. The story is written from the perspective of a dysfunctional first-person narrator Peter Debauer who was born in 1945, raised in Germany by his mother, and whose Swiss father was killed in the latter days of World War II before Peter’s birth. During school breaks, young Peter spends many happy days at his paternal grandparents’ place in Switzerland, and it is here that he comes across a manuscript from an unknown author, a find that will have significant ramifications for the rest of Peter’s life. His grandparents are editors of a pulp fiction series called ‘Romane zur Freude und zur guten

68

Christine Anton

Unterhaltung’ (H 18), reminiscent of the periodicals known as ‘Moralische Wochenschriften’ published in Germany through the greater part of the eighteenth century. They regularly give the discarded galley proofs to their grandson for scrap paper on condition that Peter will not read the novels written on the back (H 32-3). Of course, one day the curious child does take a peek and Peter finds himself fascinated with a story about the German soldier Karl who escapes from a Russian POW camp and makes his way home to be reunited with his wife, a story much like Josef Bauer’s 1955 novel So weit die Füße tragen (H 98). However, the last pages of the soldier’s homecoming tale are missing, and what follows is Peter’s life-long obsession to find the author and to discover how his story ended. In the course of his long investigation, he eventually unearths the identity of the writer: he is a Nazi ideologue who fled to America and lives and works there under an assumed name. John de Baur, said former Nazi, a.k.a. Johann Debauer, Volker Vonlanden and Walter Scholler, has become an infamous political science professor at Columbia University where he teaches deconstructionist legal theory (H 259). And, it turns out, he is Peter’s real father. Despite this overtly straight-forward plot, the novel meanders through the protagonist’s life with frequent contrived digressions into irrelevant subplots while simultaneously covering the last fifty years of German and, to a lesser degree, American history. Chance encounters propel the story forward, providing a manufactured unity to seemingly disconnected story fragments. 67 What holds the main story line and its various secondary plots together is, once again, Homer’s Odyssey and Debauer’s fascination with the notion of coming home and finding his roots. 68 The hunt for the author of the soldier’s story is intrinsically connected to Debauer’s search for his father, his origins and his identity. Difficulties arise, however, through Peter’s own unstable character which turns his quest into an erratic pursuit for the meaning of his life. Repeatedly, he maintains that he is unable and unwilling to participate and engage in reality (H 200; 228; 235), and, as a result, bounces from one profession to the next and hops from relationship to relationship. Unsatisfied with the direction his life has taken, Schlink’s protagonist desperately tries to pattern it after Homer’s epic (H 139-43) in hope of bringing some kind of order to his erratic behavior. Much like Michael Berg, Peter finds existential sustenance in the book during troubled times (H 138). For every new stage in his life, Debauer enacts a new

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

69

persona, incapable of conjuring up a continuous sense of self. By emulating his hero Ulysses, Debauer’s legitimate quest for ‘ein[] Leben[] des Gleichmaßes’ (H 36) becomes increasingly more deceitful. Unaware of the fact that he resembles his father in more than one aspect, Peter’s chameleon-like behavior mirrors that of his father who too switched numerous identities: from zealous Nazi supporter to communist sympathizer, from being a Jew and Auschwitz survivor (H 218) to becoming a radical professor at an American institution. For Peter’s father the end always justifies the means, and neither deceit nor duplicity can be considered morally or ethically wrong if the outcome provides the desired results. De Baur constructs his life according to the principle of the ‘iron rule,’ a theory that permits the bearer of an action to do unto others what one is willing to undergo oneself (H 167). His book ‘The Odyssey of Law’ (H 258) uses the dogmatic logic of the iron rule to argue that good and evil, truth and deception, justice and law have no fixed connotations but are elusive abstracts determined by subjective interpretations (H 292), 69 a concept he applies equally to the teaching of law and justice and their value both for the societal collective and the individual’s pursuit of happiness. De Baur’s field is deconstructionist legal theory which denies the idea that texts project an authentic definitive meaning since meaning is unstable and fluid and dependent upon each reader’s preconceived notions. Derivative of the writings of Barthes, Derrida and de Man, de Baur’s theory takes deconstruction to the utmost extreme by calling into question the perception and understanding of reality. 70 He reasons that reality functions just like any text inasmuch as it is open to unlimited differing interpretations. If what we perceive as reality is nothing more than a phenomenon, as Kant put it, it implies that notions of conscience, meaning and values are misleading illusions, and traditional binarisms of good and bad merely subjective expressions of varying degrees of likes and dislikes. De Baur’s assertion that reality, and by inference history and ethical and moral values as well are superficial man-made constructs, devoid of any objective and factual meaning, inserts a neo-fascist undertone and infuses the narrative with a subtext suggestive of historical revisionism. Another disconcerting aspect of Schlink’s novel revolves around the depiction of National Socialism personified in the figure of de Baur. Compared to his lifeless and passive son, de Baur’s zest for life, reminiscent of Schlink’s portrayal of Gerhard Selb, notwithstanding its selfish and

70

Christine Anton

devious nature, appears more captivating and charismatic, indeed ‘likable,’ than Peter’s own meekness. Equally troubling is the fact that major historical events are only alluded to in the abstract and seem to evoke no emotional response in the narrator. The Holocaust itself, the immediate impetus for Debauer’s lunge into his family’s secrets, remains on the periphery, insinuated but not illustrated, and Bartov’s criticism of Schlink’s Vorleser could just as well be applied to this book. 71 In the end, the past remains shrouded in lies and deception as fragmentary memories are only partially exposed and only inequitably resolved. Fragmentation, intertextuality and interreferentiality are both embedded in the narrative form as well as in the content of the text. According to Froma Zeitlin, post-Holocaust stories typically employ postmodern distancing techniques in an attempt to bridge the gap between memory and postmemory, factuality and fictionality, thereby ‘refusing the ordinary expectations of fiction through discontinuities in sequence, shifts in narrators, fragmentary discourse and planned incoherences.’ 72 On many levels, the novel is paradigmatic of this kind of fictional discourse. Peter Debauer’s story, for example, is interspersed with essays penned by his unknown father which interrupt the coherent flow of the narrative and illustrate the commanding control the past holds over the present. Moreover, Debauer’s lack of substance and the instability of his identity compel him to take on multiple personas which do not put him on a path to self-discovery and the creation of an authentic self but leave him fragmented and incomplete. The traumatic experience of having met his father and discovered the extent of de Baur’s involvement in Nazi ideology has certainly changed him, but Peter stays emotionally trapped in the circle of deception and denial that his father has created. And even though Peter eventually denounces his father’s machinations as modern intellectual fascism (H 373), he completely fails in openly confronting him about his past. Coming back to Barbara and the promised routine of love is an inauspicious return from missed opportunities and unfinished business. There is no catharsis at the end of Debauer’s journey, and his romanticized concept of homecoming bears evidence of Schlink’s assessment of ‘Heimat’ as but an unattainable utopia. Peter will continue to struggle with his identity, but at least he has come to the realization that a viable redemption only lies, as does Michael Berg’s, in telling his story as a medium for working

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

71

through the traumatic encounter with the past even if his hope of mastering the past will remain nothing but a longing for an idealized conclusion to his life’s mission (H 374-5). Schlink’s narrative about Debauer’s quest reads like a postmodern anti-‘Bildungsroman.’ From early childhood on Debauer sets out to find the truth – initially about the German soldier and later on about his father and his involvement in Nazi practices. Yet, at the end he has not managed to mature from naïve innocence to responsible adulthood. As his silence and his reluctance to publicly condemn his father have made him an implicit accomplice in de Baur’s schemes, his father’s guilt has been transferred onto him and has become part of his own biography. As a result, Peter has become yet another victim of the past. By failing to directly engage his father in a discourse about his former life, Debauer has impeded his own process of coming to terms with the traumatic past. Evasion and repression, according to LaCapra, will block mourning and instead cause endless melancholia, an impasse of transforming or understanding history, thus prohibiting ‘critical judgment and a reinvestment in life.’ 73 Not only has Debauer become ‘Opfer der zweiten Schuld,’ 74 he also puts himself in a situation in which he verges on repeating the failings of his parents’ generation, i.e., their silence and repression of their culpability. He is guilty in part because of the historical legacy that is bequeathed onto him, and partly because of his ennui and indifference toward history. Debauer’s non-committal take on life is one of ‘live and let live,’ an attitude that allows him to stand in the middle, neither condemning nor absolving (H 223). By releasing his father of the charge against him and taking the responsibility of indicting him onto himself, he has become heir to the burden of traumatic memory but without the provision of a legitimate and constructive psychological outlet for the unresolved issues concerning his family’s history. It has been argued that Schlink’s stories express unmitigated sympathy with those involved in the Nazi machinations; that he reshuffles established distinctions between victims and perpetrators; that he tries to rewrite history. I would argue, however, that by and large Schlink’s fiction generates what LaCapra calls a ‘middlevoiced’ 75 position with respect to the discourse of overcoming the burdened German past. The ‘middle voice’ in post-Holocaust discourse is utilized to investigate unusual and ‘unheard of’ situations from a viewpoint of undecidability and between the ‘modulations of

72

Christine Anton

proximity and distance, empathy and irony’ without excluding ‘all forms of objectivity and objectifycation.’ 76 This in-between stance allows Schlink to invite his readers to interpret the plot detached from and even opposed to the narrative’s possible hidden implications and to fill discursive gaps with their own understanding and responses. The convergence of intertextual codes (both readerly and writerly) reassigns the reader’s role: the reader is no longer merely one who consumes the text, but, according to Roland Barthes, one who becomes its producer. 77 This process releases the author from the responsibility for the views expressed in the narrative and puts it in the readers’ hands. It is therefore no coincidence that Schlink’s work creates poly-perspectival analyses that cover the entire spectrum of literary criticism. As involved co-authors of the fictional discourse, its content and intent, readers of Schlink’s texts are given the dual task of acting out and working through the historical trauma and its fictionalized representation. When the text transfers its mission of being the locus for representational historical exploration and interpretation onto society itself, and discourse analysis becomes synonymous with interpreting history, readers find themselves provoked to not only engage in fathoming the meaning and significance of a fictional story but that of history as well. Hence, coming to terms with the past, rediscovering traumatic memories, and exploring the means that can be used to reconstruct, model and alter cultural memory become a creative collaboration between the text and the individual. Schlink invites his audience to recuperate lost memories and bridge the gaps in historical discourse, and in so doing, to construct a more thorough and correct map of Germany’s cultural heritage. History and memory not only require preservation and conservation, they also necessitate a process of re-contextualization which has to take into account ‘the present state of knowledge.’ 78 Certainly, allowing for multiple subjective viewpoints runs the potential risk of including falsification, denial, and political uncorrectness, yet the sum of individual experiences of memory will ensure the presence of collective memory which, in turn, influences and directs contemporary memory politics. Openly confronting its haunting past has become a Sisyphean task for the German nation. Each new generation has to find and define its own access to the past, the way it will preserve historical memories, and how it will deal with the transfer of trauma from current gen-

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

73

erations to future ones. At present, it is the members of the second and third generation that ‘have come to realize that the catastrophe undergone by their elders has left traces in their minds and bodies, traces that call for elaboration and interpretation.’ 79 The historical foundation on which a new national identity has to be constructed is undoubtedly affected by the legacy of Auschwitz. It is this legacy, its commemoration, the obligation toward its remembrance, and its intergenerational transference that will shape the current and future identity of the German nation. Additionally, the temporal distance makes it increasingly easier to remove the taboo that is attached to the subject of trauma and victimhood in narratives that concern the fate of the perpetrators and their descendants. As a result, many Germans nowadays have the necessary historical and emotional distance, ‘um nicht nur die deutsche Täterschaft zu thematisieren, sondern auch Deutsche als Opfer wahrzunehmen; […] und anzuerkennen, dass diese Tatsache zur deutschen nationalen Identität gehört.’ 80 They are the ones who dare push against the boundaries of cultural and historical taboos and political correctness, and to question what archetypal categories are present in situations that test our humanity and our values. The tone of exasperation and open yearning for normalization in post-Holocaust German discourse is clearly tangible in all of Schlink’s works. He addresses such topics as justice and punishment, accountability and law and asks questions aimed at the very core of German self-identity: How should Germany deal with the burden of the Holocaust? How can generations born after the war reconcile with their knowledge of their forefathers’ guilt? What memories are preserved and how? Has national atonement reached a saturation point more than sixty years after the war? The allure of his books derives from the fact that his themes are, albeit uniquely German, universal as they are fundamental. And even though Schlink’s works should not be read without due criticism, he manages to make his readers take a long look into the proverbial mirror and ask the painful question what they would have done. Notes 1 See the following link to the official government website at: http://www.freiheitund-einheit.de (accessed 2 February 2010).

74

Christine Anton

2

See, for instance, President Köhler’s address on the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II: ‘Wir werden die zwölf Jahre der Nazidiktatur und das Unglück, das Deutsche über die Welt gebracht haben, nicht vergessen, im Gegenteil: Wir fassen gerade aus dem Abstand heraus viele Einzelheiten schärfer ins Auge und sehen viele Zusammenhänge des damaligen Unrechts besser. Aber wir sehen unser Land in seiner ganzen Geschichte, und darum erkennen wir auch, an wie viel Gutes wir Deutsche anknüpfen konnten, um über den moralischen Ruin der Jahre 1933 bis 1945 hinauszukommen. Unsere ganze Geschichte bestimmt die Identität unserer Nation. Wer einen Teil davon verdrängen will, der versündigt sich an Deutschland’ (http://www. bundespraesident.de/Reden-und-Interviews-,11057.623709/Begabung-zur-Freiheit-Re de-von.htm?global.back=/-%2c11057%2c41/Reden-und-Interviews.htm%3flink%3db pr_liste [accessed 29 March 2010]). Similarly Chancellor Merkel’s speech at the ceremony to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the beginning of WWII: ‘Es ist ein Wunder, dass wir in diesem Jahr nicht nur an die Abgründe europäischer Geschichte vor 70 Jahren denken müssen. Es ist ein Wunder, dass wir auch an die glücklichen Tage denken können, die vor 20 Jahren zum Fall der Berliner Mauer, zur Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands und zur Einheit Europas geführt haben’ (http://www.bundes regierung.de/Content/DE/Rede/2009/09/2009-09-01-bkin-danzig.html [accessed 29 March 2010]).

3

Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, Munich: Beck, 2007: ‘Jeder tiefere Kontinuitäts- und Traditionsbruch kann zur Entstehung von Vergangenheit führen, dann nämlich, wenn nach solchem Bruch ein Neuanfang versucht wird. Neuanfänge, Renaissancen, Restaurationen treten immer in der Form eines Rückgriffs auf die Vergangenheit auf. In dem Maße, wie sie Zukunft erschließen, produzieren, rekonstruieren, entdecken sie Vergangenheit’ (p. 32). Though Assmann distinguishes between three levels of memory – the individual, communicative, and cultural – this article uses the concept in more general terms.

4

In recent years, memory has yielded a vast scientific field of inquiry. The fast growth of memory culture may, according to Marianne Hirsch, ‘be a symptom of a need for inclusion in a collective membrane forged by a shared inheritance of multiple traumatic histories and the individual and social responsibility we feel toward a persistent and traumatic past.’ See Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today, 29 (2008), 103-28 (here: p. 111).

5

Maurice Halbwachs is commonly credited with having coined the term ‘collective memory.’ See his book, Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire, Paris: Félix Alcan, 1925.

6

Helmut Schmitz, ‘The Return of the Past. Post-Unification Representations of National Socialism: Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser and Ulla Berkéwicz’s Engel sind schwarz und weiß’, in: Clare Flanagan and Stuart Taberner, eds., 1949/1989 Cultural Perspectives on Division and Unity in East and West, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000, pp. 259-76 (here: p. 259).

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

75

7

A list of popular movies and books that made their debut during the 1990s includes, but is not limited to: Stalingrad (Joseph Vilsmaier, 1992); Comedian Harmonists (Joseph Vilsmaier, 1997); Viehjud Levi (Didi Danquart, 1999); Aimée und Jaguar (Max Färberböck, 1999); Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde (1995); Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara (1995); Dieter Forte’s Der Junge mit den Blutigen Schuhen (1995); Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (1995); Martin Walser’s Ein Springender Brunnen (1999); Winfried G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999); Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe (1999). 8

Grass caused an enormous stir with his novel Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Göttingen: Steidl, 2006) when he revealed his service in the Waffen-SS as a young man. The scandal after the publication of his book erupted not because Grass served in the notorious German army, but because Grass had concealed this fact after having presented himself as the conscience of post-war Germany for the last few decades.

9

Walser’s polemic speech and the controversy it incited is known as the so-called ‘Walser-Bubis Debate,’ based upon the response to Walser’s remarks by Ignatz Bubis, the late president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. For a thorough discussion see the article by Anne Fuchs, ‘Towards an Ethics of Remembering: The Walser-Bubis Debate and the Other of Discourse’, German Quarterly, 75 (2002), 23546. In the meantime, literary studies too have adopted the ‘Case Walser.’ See, for example, the book by cultural critic Matthias Lorenz, ‘Auschwitz drängt uns auf einen Fleck’ – Judendarstellung und Auschwitzdiskurs bei Martin Walser, Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005.

10 Jan-Werner Müller, Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 60. 11

The Atlantic Times, a monthly newspaper distributed abroad by the German government, for example, headlined a recent article on the author by calling him ‘An Expert in Being German’ (April 2009, p. 17).

12

Bill Niven, ‘Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser and the Problem of Shame’, Modern Language Review, 98 (2003), 381-96 (here: p. 389).

13 See for instance Tilman Krause, ‘Welt-Literaturpreis für Schlink’, Die Welt, 16 October 1999, at: http://www.welt.de/print-welt/article587728/Welt_Literaturpreis_ fuer_Schlink.html (accessed 2 February 2010): ‘Und nicht zuletzt fordert Schlink dadurch den Leser heraus, weil er als Ich-Erzähler berichtet, also durch Ungeschütztheit die vergleichende Frage nahelegt, wie man selbst wohl in den geschilderten moralisch-politischen Prüfungen bestanden hätte.’ 14

In her book review, ‘Immorality Play’, The New Republic, 27 December 2001, at: http://www.powells.com/review/2001_12_27 (accessed 29 March 2010), Ruth

76

Christine Anton

Franklin, the associate literary editor of the conservative semi-monthly magazine, sees in Schlink a ‘bewildering incompetence,’ and condemns his work as one that is ‘not only mediocre, it is also pernicious.’ 15

Agnes C. Mueller, ‘Forgiving the Jews for Auschwitz? Guilt and Gender in Bernhard Schlink’s Liebesfluchten’, German Quarterly, 80 (2007), 511-30 (here: p. 515). Similarly, John E. MacKinnon, ‘Crime, Compassion, and The Reader’, Philosophy and Literature, 27 (2003), 1-20 (here: p. 16): ‘Schlink’s novel is committed to […] erode distinctions between the guilty and innocent, between perpetrators and victims.’ 16

Franklin, ‘Immorality Play’.

17 Cf. Schlink-Interview with Charly Rose on 23 December 2008, at: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9877 (accessed 2 February 2010). Schlink replied to Rose’s question ‘how autobiographical is this novel’ by saying, ‘when I was later working as a student in a factory, I knew someone from whom I’ve taken some elements of Hanna. As I have taken other elements from other people I met and knew.’ 18 All citations are taken from Bernhard Schlink, Der Vorleser, Zurich: Diogenes, 1997. The novel is referred to as: V. 19

See Niven, ‘Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser’, p. 389; Schmitz, ‘The Return of the Past’, p. 262; Froma Zeitlin, ‘New Soundings in Holocaust Literature: A Surplus of Memory’, in: Moishe Postone and Eric Santner, eds., Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 173-208 (here: p. 202). Also Franklin, ‘Immorality Play’.

20

Interview with Josephine Hart, ‘The Reader; the Writer’, at: http://josephine hart.co.uk/the reader.htm (accessed 29 March 2010). 21 Ralph Giordano, Die zweite Schuld oder Von der Last Deutscher zu sein, Hamburg: Rasch und Roehring, 1987, p. 359: ‘Die Verantwortung der schuldlos Beladenen [sons, daughters and grandchildren] beginnt bei der Frage, wie sie zur Schuldbelastung ihrer Großeltern und Eltern stehen, zu dem, was diese getan und was sie gelassen haben. Bei der Frage, wie sie zum jüdischen und nichtjüdischen Holocaust stehen und zu seiner Voraussetzung, dem deutschen Angriffskrieg, zur Schuldverdrängung und –verleugnung ihrer Erzeuger und Mütter nach 1945, zum großen Frieden mit den Tätern und dem Verlust der humanen Orientierung – kurz, zur zweiten Schuld, deren Opfer sie selbst sind.’ 22 Joseph Metz, ‘“Truth Is a Woman”: Post-Holocaust Narrative, Postmodernism, and the Gender of Fascism in Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser’, German Quarterly, 77 (2004), 300-23 (here: p. 303).

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

77

23 Cf. Schlant’s study of post-war literature from Heinrich Böll to W.G. Sebald which she describes as a literature of absence and of silence. Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence. West German Literature and the Holocaust, New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 237. 24

Daniel Reynolds, ‘A Portrait of Misreading: Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser’, Seminar, 39 (2003), 238-56 (here: p. 240).

25

Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, p. 79.

26

LaCapra, Writing History, p. 64.

27

See also Jeremy P. Conway, ‘Compassion and Moral Condemnation: An Analysis of The Reader’, Philosophy and Literature, 23 (1999), 284-301. Conway argues that the novel ‘never backs off the judgment that Hanna acted knowingly and wrongly. It never finds excuses for her deeds. Michael never contests, for example, the eighteenyear sentence that Hanna receives. The story acknowledges Hanna’s moral guilt and finds room for compassion nonetheless’ (p. 298). 28

See also Schmitz, ‘The Return of the Past’, p. 261; and Stuart Parkes, ‘The Language of the Past: Recent Prose Works by Bernhard Schlink, Marcel Beyer, and Friedrich Christian Delius’, in: Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes and Julian Preece, eds., ‘Whose Story?’ – Continuities in Contemporary German-Language Literature, Bern: Lang, 1998, pp. 115-32 (here: p. 118).

29

See Spiegel-Interview with Bernhard Schlink titled ‘Ich lebe in Geschichten’, 24 January 2000, at: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-15502682.html (accessed 29 March 2010).

30 31

LaCapra, Writing History, pp. 78-9.

See Jon Mills’s book, Treating Attachment Pathology, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Patients with structural trauma see themselves as damaged and defective, Mills writes. Their sense of devaluation comes from heightened feelings of shame and misplaced guilt; detachment and mistrust are ‘common defensive organizations’ (p. 78). See also Ursula R. Mahlendorf’s assessment of Michael’s damaged self in her article, ‘Trauma narrated, Read and (Mis)understood: Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader: “…irrevocably complicit in their crimes…”’, Monatshefte, 95 (2003), 458-81 (here: pp. 470-1): ‘[…] [H]e has been preoccupied for forty years with a woman whose existence has brought him nothing but abuse, betrayal, anger, fear of intimacy, guilt, self-blame, alienation, and inability to experience any meaningful relationships […]. His identification with Hanna, […] his sense of guilt and self-blame […] are, of course, the pathology of a victim of abuse.’

78

32

Niven, ‘Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser’, p. 381.

33

Interview with Hart, ‘The Reader; the Writer’.

Christine Anton

34

Helmut Schmitz, ‘Malen nach Zahlen? Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser und die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern’, German Life and Letters, 55 (2002), 296-311 (here: p. 299). 35 Martin Swales, ‘Sex, Shame and Guilt: Reflections on Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (The Reader) and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace’, Journal of European Studies, 33 (2003), 7-22 (here: p. 13). 36

Mahlendorf, ‘Trauma narrated’, p. 461.

37

Cf. Michael’s introduction to the second part of his story: ‘Ich frage mich auch, ob die glückliche Erinnerung überhaupt stimmt. Wenn ich länger zurückdenke, kommen mir genug beschämende und schmerzliche Situationen in den Sinn und weiß ich, daß ich die Erinnerung an Hanna zwar verabschiedet, aber nicht bewältigt hatte’ (V 84).

38

See also Stanzel’s differentiation between ‘ein erzählendes Ich’ and ‘ein erlebendes Ich’ in what he calls ‘quasi’ autobiographical narratives in his book Theorie des Erzählens, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985, p. 273: ‘Je kürzer die Erzähldistanz, je näher das erzählende Ich dem erlebenden Ich steht, desto enger ist der Wissens- und Wahrnehmungshorizont des erlebenden Ich und desto geringer ist die Wirkung der Erinnerung als Katalysator, der die Erinnerungssubstanz zu klären imstande ist.’ 39

Mahlendorf, ‘Trauma narrated’, p. 466.

40

On this point I disagree with several critics who blame Schlink for propagating his alleged revisionist ideas through the use of a sympathetic narrator. See, for example, William Collins Donahue, ‘Illusions of Subtlety: Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser and the Moral Limits of Holocaust Fiction’, German Life and Letters, 54 (2001), 6081. Donahue finds Michael to be a ‘likeable narrator’ (p. 60), ‘an object of sympathetic identification’ (p. 61), and simply ‘attractive’ (p. 74). Reynolds reads Hanna’s story as one that ‘elicits sympathy’ (‘A Portrait of Misreading’, p. 244). 41 LaCapra explains the difference between ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ in an interview for Yad Vashem not as binary oppositions but as correlated developments in overcoming trauma. He says: ‘In acting out, one relives the past as if one were the other, including oneself as another in the past […]; and in working through, one tries to acquire some critical distance that allows one to engage in life in the present, to assume responsibility – but that doesn’t mean that you utterly transcend the past. It means that you come to terms with it in a different way related to what you judge to be desirable possibilities that may now be created, including possibilities that lost out

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

79

in the past but may still be recaptured and reactivated, with significant differences, in the present and future’ (Writing History, p. 148). 42

Reynolds, ‘A Portrait of Misreading’, p. 255.

43 Similar interpretations are given by Beate M. Dreike, ‘Was wäre denn Gerechtigkeit? Zur Rechtsskepsis in Bernhard Schlinks Der Vorleser’, German Life and Letters, 55 (2002), 117-29 (here: p. 118); and Zeitlin, ‘New Soundings in Holocaust Literature’, p. 200. 44

See Katharina Hall, ‘The Author, the Novel, the Reader and the Perils of “Neue Lesbarkeit”: A Comparative Analysis of Bernhard Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and Der Vorleser’, German Life and Letters, 59 (2006), 446-67 (here: p. 457). 45

The trilogy consists of Selbs Justiz (written with Walter Popp), Zurich: Diogenes, 1987; Selbs Betrug, Zurich: Diogenes, 1992; and Selbs Mord, Zurich: Diogenes, 2001. The novels are abbreviated in the text as: SJ, SB, and SM, respectively. In the first book, Selbs Justiz, the reader learns about Selb’s past: ‘Nach Kriegsende wollte man mich nicht mehr. Ich war überzeugter Nationalsozialist gewesen, aktives Parteimitglied und ein harter Staatsanwalt, der auch Todesstrafen gefordert und gekriegt hat. [...] Ich glaubte an die Sache und verstand mich als Soldat an der Rechtsfront’ (SJ 146).

46

Selb murders his one-time friend and ex-brother-in-law Korten, general director of a large chemical company, RCW. Through his investigation, Selb learns about Korten’s involvement in Nazi exploitation of Jewish slave laborers and in the deaths of RCW scientists. Eventually, Selb takes it onto himself to punish Korten for his past crimes, notwithstanding his own guilty part he played in prosecuting the denounced scientists.

47

Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998, p. 59.

48

See William Collins Donahue, ‘The Popular Culture Alibi: Bernhard Schlink’s Detective Novels’, German Quarterly, 77 (2004), 462-81 (here: p. 466). 49

Ibid., p. 466.

50

Hall, ‘The Author, the Novel’, provides a corresponding analysis: ‘Selb is accorded a nobility and moral integrity that Korten lacks’ (p. 452). 51 52

See also Donahue, ‘The Popular Culture Alibi’, pp. 475-6.

Omer Bartov, ‘Germany as Victim’, New German Critique, 80 (2000), 29-40 (here: p. 33).

80

Christine Anton

53

‘Die Beschneidung’ is among Schlink’s collection of seven short stories titled Liebesfluchten, Zurich: Diogenes, 2000. The story is referred to as: B. For an in-depth analysis of Schlink’s short story see my article, ‘The Quest for a National Identity: Images of Germany in the Works of Bernhard Schlink’, The International Journal of the Humanities, 5 (2007), 105-16. Also Matthias N. Lorenz, ‘Political Correctness als Phantasma. Bernhard Schlinks Erzählung “Die Beschneidung” und die Frage nach Literarischem Antisemitismus nach Auschwitz’, ZiF, 3 (2007), 9-18. 54 Bernhard Schlink, ‘Von der Notwendigkeit und der Gefahr der Beschäftigung mit dem Dritten Reich und dem Holocaust’, Der Spiegel, 7 May 2001, at: http://www.spie gel.de/spiegel/print/d-19120366.html (accessed 29 March 2010). Following quotes are taken from this article. 55 Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, Munich: Piper, 1967, p. 38. 56

LaCapra, Writing History, p. 84.

57

Lorenz, ‘Political Correctness als Phantasma’, p. 16.

58

See also Tilman Krause’s review of ‘Die Beschneidung’ titled ‘Schwierigkeiten beim Dachausbau’, Die Welt, 29 January 2000, at: http://www.welt.de/print-welt/ article499765/Schwierigkeiten_beim_Dachausbau.html (accessed 2 February 2010): ‘Schlink […] inszeniert das diffuse Überdrussgefühl als Parabel, in der ein junger Deutscher das Festgelegtwerden auf Nazi-Stereotypen nicht mehr hören kann und sich seiner jüdischen Freundin zuliebe schließlich beschneiden lässt. Doch das Ritual verfehlt sein Ziel, die Partner im Zeichen der Gleichheit einander anzunähern, weil es darum gehen muss, Fremdheit auszuhalten, nicht aufzulösen.’

59

Cf. Mueller, ‘Forgiving the Jews for Auschwitz’. Mueller argues that all of Schlink’s narratives make explicit use of ‘the notions of indeterminacy and indirection’ (p. 517).

60 Eleni Georgopoulou, ‘“Brichst du auf gen Ithaka…”: Erinnerung und Reflexion in Bernhard Schlinks Der Vorleser’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 3 (2004), 123-42. 61

LaCapra, Writing History, p. 21.

62

Bernhard Schlink, Heimat als Utopie, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2000, p. 15.

63

Ibid., p. 32.

64 See also Klaus Köhler’s succinct statement: ‘Angesichts der deutschen Geschichte kann Heimkehr nur Umkehr heißen.’ Klaus Köhler, Alles in Butter. Wie Walter

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

81

Kempowski, Bernhard Schlink und Martin Walser den Zivilisationsbruch unter den Teppich kehren, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009, p. 290. 65

Bernhard Schlink, Die Heimkehr, Zurich: Diogenes, 2006. The novel is abbreviated as: H. 66

Further recurring motifs and narrative elements are the geographical locations in and around Heidelberg (see V), Berlin (see SM), and New York (see B); the painting ‘Mädchen mit der Eidechse’ (H 46) from the short story with the same title in Liebesfluchten; the political ideology of Carl Schmitt who once was Selb’s professor in Berlin (SJ 100); the nature of justice and law; the act of telling stories to the object of one’s affection (H 125); the narrator as detective; the prominent status of dreams as hidden clues to the story. 67 See also Gieri Cavelty’s review, ‘Die Odyssee als Obsession’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 22 April 2006, at: http://www.nzz.ch/2006/04/22/fe/articleDLKTE.html (accessed 29 March 2010): ‘Sosehr jedoch Schlinks jüngstes Werk ein bemerkenswertes intellektuelles Abenteuer darstellt, so fragwürdig erscheint die literarische Qualität. Die Handlung wirkt konstruiert, Schlinks Figuren sind blosse [sic] Ideenträger, erinnern allzu sehr an die Pappfiguren in Peter Debauers Spielzeugkiste.’ Also Peter Parker, ‘Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink translated by Michael Henry’, The Sunday Times, 27 January 2008, at: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article3246357 (accessed 29 March 2010). Parker gives a similar review, criticizing that ‘as Schlink’s book progresses, it becomes increasingly implausible, relying too heavily on coincidences and crude plot contrivances. Furthermore, its many twists and turns can mostly be seen coming a long way off, and one is left with the impression of someone doggedly working though a scheme that has been rigidly imposed on the novel.’ Also Volker Weidermann’s review, ‘Odyssee des Bösen: Bernhard Schlink auf Irrfahrt durch den Dschungel der Geschichte’, FAZ, 15 March 2006, at: http://www.faz.net/s/ Rub79A33397BE834406A5D2BFA87FD13913/Doc~E08F28E788239467FBA7FC2 F4F9BECD48~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html (accessed 29 March 2010). Weidermann dismisses Schlink’s novel, calling it a ‘Buch des Grauens, das alles will und nichts erreicht.’ 68

There are indeed numerous homecomings in Schlink’s novel: Karl’s flight from Russia to Germany (H 61-5); the grandfather’s return from America to Switzerland (H 15); Barbara’s, Debauer’s on-and-off again lover, coming back from Kenya (H 105) and, at a later point in time, from New York (H 172); her husband’s ill-timed homecoming (H 127-8); and, last but not least, Peter’s own return back home and back to Barbara after his fruitless sojourn in New York where he had planned on confronting his father (H 370). 69 De Baur’s annual experiments with groups of students in the boonies of the Adirondacks are self-servingly arranged in order to justify his fabricated life history and to

82

Christine Anton

provide fictitious evidence for his viewpoints. De Baur’s experiment is based on the findings of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram who conducted a series of psychological experiments focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience in the early sixties. In Milgram’s experiment, some participants, so-called ‘teachers,’ were asked to administer electric shocks (up to 450 volts) to another group, the ‘learners,’ as punishment. Though the victims were played by paid actors, and no real electric shocks were given, the ‘teachers’ were not aware of this fact. Some were initially worried about possible harmful effects on their victims, but after having been assured that the experimenter assumed full responsibility, 65% of the teachers showed no other apparent hesitation inflicting pain on another human being. In the wake of the Eichmann trial, Milgram wanted to demonstrate that most people would not resist authority when given orders, even if the commands are immoral and inhumane. For further information, see Stanley Milgram’s report on his experiment titled ‘Behavioral study of obedience’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67 (1963), 371-8. 70

Several book reviewers have pointed to the fact that the story invokes the biography of Paul de Man. See, for instance, Carole Angier, ‘An Abstract Debate’, The Spectator, 9 January 2008, at: http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/books/ 438356/an-abstract-debate.thtml (accessed 29 March 2010); Michael Dirda, ‘A young German struggles to find the painful truth about his father – and himself’, The Washington Post, 6 January 2008, at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2008/01/03/AR2008010303150.html (accessed 9 March 2010); Uwe Wittstock, ‘Immer Neue Odysseen’, Die Welt, 4 March 2006, at: http://www.welt.de/ print-welt/article201466/Immer_neue_Odysseen.html (accessed 9 March 2010); Cavelty, ‘Die Odyssee als Obsession’; Weidermann, ‘Odyssee des Bösen’. 71

Also Klaus Köhler, Alles in Butter, p. 291: ‘Das nationalsozialistische Deutschland ist als ausdrücklicher Gegenstand nur en passant präsent; als indirekter Bezugspunkt des Vordergrundgeschehens bildet es aber den eigentlich zentralen Subtext.’

72

Froma I. Zeitlin, ‘Imaginary Tales in the Land of the Perpetrators’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 5 (2006), 213-28 (here: p. 226). 73

LaCapra, History and Memory, p. 45.

74

Giordano, Die zweite Schuld, p. 21.

75

LaCapra, Writing History, p. 201.

76

Ibid., p. 30.

77

Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, New York: Hill and Wang, 1974, p. 4.

78

Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Routledge, 2002, p. 5.

Historiography and Memory Politics in Schlink

83

79 Moishe Postone and Eric Santner, ‘Introduction’, in: Postone and Santner, eds., Catastrophe and Meaning, pp. 1-14 (here: p. 1). 80

Jens Stüben, ‘Erfragte Erinnerung – entsorgte Familiengeschichte. Tanja Dückers’ “Wilhelm-Gustloff”-Roman “Himmelskörper”’, in: Barbara Beßlich, Katharina Grätz and Olaf Hildebrand, eds., Wende des Erinnerns? Geschichtskonstruktionen in der deutschen Literatur nach 1989, Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2006, pp. 169-89 (here: p. 171).

Norgard Klages A Different Voice: ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ in Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and unterwegs verloren As a Holocaust survivor, Ruth Klüger adds a new facet to the discourse about the Shoah and its aftermath in weiter leben and unterwegs verloren by offering a victimoriented perspective. She contributes significantly to Holocaust discourse and to Germany’s process of identity formation by engaging readers in a literary and poetic account of events to remind them of the Shoah victims’ perspective. Art opens the way for her to give voice to her unique Holocaust experience, overcome the silence imposed by society’s recent focus on the victimization of the perpetrators, and promote a continued dialogue about the past.

The literary discourse of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ in German literature has been part of the so-called ‘Väterliteratur’ influenced greatly by the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The ‘Väterliteratur’ consisted of autobiographical accounts, written primarily by children of Nazi supporters, and dealt with the authors’ father figures and their role during the Nazi regime. These private accounts drew attention to the politically important issue of a public discourse about the past. Although these autobiographical writings were discussed widely in academia, they never found a broader audience in Germany until Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben (1992) turned into a national bestseller. 1 This autobiographical book and the later volume unterwegs verloren (2008) 2 present a departure from the ‘Väterliteratur’ literature’s focus on second-hand accounts that sought to understand the role of the perpetrator. Klüger instead highlights the victim’s perspective, a view she believes has been silenced in Holocaust discourse. Furthermore, Klüger’s identity as a Jewish woman shapes the voice she brings to the discussion of the Nazi past. This essay examines weiter leben and unterwegs verloren and the process and concerns related to conveying a Holocaust account in an artistic format. It also considers Klüger’s use of poetry to come to terms with her survivor experience. In addition the essay analyzes how Klüger constructs and defines her identity which shapes her social interactions and her perceptions of discrimination. It concludes with a discussion of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ and the importance of

86

Norgard Klages

artistic endeavors, such as Klüger’s, for fostering public debate that contributes to national identity construction. Weiter leben is an account of Klüger’s childhood in Vienna and her horrifying experiences surviving several concentration and work camps during World War II. In unterwegs verloren, she focuses on her years as a student and scholar of German literature at various American institutions and in visiting positions at the Universities of Göttingen and Vienna. 3 Both works feature flashbacks to her time in the concentration camps and her reflections on the nature of memory. Critics have pointed out that Klüger took over forty years to put her experiences into words and write a comprehensive account about her Holocaust experiences. According to recent research on trauma studies, which focuses on the delayed response with which experiences are grasped and memory is recalled, however, this time lag is not an uncommon occurrence. 4 Klüger’s ability to write about the suffering of the Jews not only constitutes for her a means to come to terms with the past, it also provides, as she says, a voice for the dead, thus ignoring the longstanding taboo surrounding autobiographical narratives that deal with the Third Reich. 5 For decades, the dead were not part of public discussion; rather, the discourse concentrated on the Nazi past, particularly on the role of Nazi fathers and their guilt. Klüger herself often faced this taboo when confronted with public reactions to the number tattooed on her forearm signifying her stay at a death camp: ‘Die Überlebenden der KZ […] sind allen frei gebliebenen Menschen ein Dorn im Auge’ (wl 59). 6 Klüger fights this taboo surrounding the dead by giving a literary voice to the Shoah victims. She reminds readers of, and includes, the dead when she details the horrors of concentration camp experiences. For example, in a reference to Theresienstadt she writes: ‘Transporte kamen an, andere wurden abgeschickt, Betten leerten sich, wurden wieder gefüllt. Die Todesnachrichten rissen nicht ab, gehörten zum Alltag’ (wl 84). Later, in unterwegs verloren she remarks on the dead of Auschwitz when she describes the slave quarters she saw during a cruise excursion to a Senegalese island: Ich bin der einzige Mensch hier, ob Touristen oder Einheimische, ob Männer oder Frauen, der sich daran erinnert, was Sklavenarbeit ist. Persönliche Erfahrung, nix Vorfahren und 18. Jahrhundert. ‘I was a slave girl’. Die Baracke im Auschwitzer Frauenlager, wo ich als Zwölfjährige die letzten paar Nächte vor dem Abtransport

Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and unterwegs verloren

87

nach Gross-Rosen mit vier anderen Frauen auf der untersten Liege der dreistöckigen Pritsche verbrachte, voll Angst vor dem Tod, bis der Schlaf die Angst ablöste, die dann am Morgen wiederkam. (uv 234-5)

The question arises as to how one can possibly find words to speak of the unspeakable atrocities witnessed during the Shoah. The answer for Klüger lies in poetry – during her camp experience and afterward. To cope with the chaos of the camps, Klüger writes about how she recited Schiller’s ballads to give some structure and order to her world. 7 Later, when writing about her traumatic experiences, Klüger employs her own poetic language and writes her poetry to create a voice for her experiences. In her books, her descriptions of her childhood in the concentration camp are followed by poems (uv 110-1), thereby, as Klüger explains, creating a counterpoint to the disorder of life: Man muss die abgenützten Worte auf die Waagschale legen als wären sie neu, was sie dem Kind ja waren, und dann muss man die Schlauheit durchschauen, die es mir eingab, das Trauma der Auschwitzer Wochen in ein Versmass zu stülpen. Es sind Kindergedichte, die in ihrer Regelmäßigkeit ein Gegengewicht zum Chaos stiften wollten, ein poetischer und therapeutischer Versuch, diesem sinnlosen und destruktiven Zirkus, in dem wir untergingen, ein sprachlich Ganzes, Gereimtes entgegenzuhalten. (wl 126-7)

Elie Wiesel concludes that concentration camp survivors can only accomplish the feat of talking about the Holocaust by inventing new language to express the inexplicable. 8 While working through her memories, Klüger comments on the creative process of finding new words to tell her story: ‘Jetzt wollte ich dem Kamin selbst eine Stimme geben, die Entmenschlichung verginglichen, indem ich sie in einer Sache verkörperte und die Todesmaschine als Herr der Lager, und zwar an Stelle der Sonne, auftreten liess’ (wl 125). Writing poetry is part of the process by which Klüger handles the traumatic experiences in the concentration camps and subsequently works through her memories and feelings of guilt caused by her status as a survivor. About the therapeutic effects of writing poetry she states: ‘Ich hab den Verstand nicht verloren, ich hab Reime gemacht’ (wl 128). Some critics have interpreted Klüger’s act of writing poetry as an act of resistance that defies Adorno’s famous pronouncement: ‘Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch.’ 9 Klüger herself mentions Adorno’s remarks on poetry and comments: ‘Die Forderung muss von solchen stammen, die die gebundene Sprache entbehren

88

Norgard Klages

können, weil sie diese nie gebraucht, verwendet haben, um sich seelisch über Wasser zu halten’ (wl 127). 10 Although Klüger’s remarks suggest that she opposes Adorno, Elaine Martin offers a different reading and argues that Adorno’s comments were taken out of context and widely misinterpreted. According to Martin, Adorno did not intend to silence artists: Adorno’s pronouncements were never meant as silence-inducing taboos, but rather as concrete theoretical reflections upon the moral status of art in the aftermath of the Shoah and as warnings of the moral peril involved in the artistic rendering of mass extermination. […] [T]he incapacity to represent the events cannot be used as grounds for the abandonment of art. 11

Despite the possibility of being labeled ‘barbaric,’ Klüger embraces poetry as the means to process and express her Holocaust experiences. For her, the art of poetry, the attempt to find new words of expression and to create a unique poetic language means to transcend traumatic memories. In connection with Holocaust memories, concerns about truth and fiction invariably arise, especially in light of recent invented stories about concentration camps that have made international headlines. 12 Klüger’s works make constant references to the complexity as well as to the elusiveness of memory and, by extension, truth. A quote from Emily Dickinson’s ‘After a Hundred Years’ precedes the first part of weiter leben: ‘Instinct picking up the Key / Dropped by memory’ (wl 7). With this quote, Klüger highlights her awareness of the unreliability and sketchiness of her own memory. While the memory of ‘normal’ events is organized by the brain and ready for recall, trauma itself is not made readily available for recollection but rather recurs as flashbacks, reenactments and sensations. 13 It is in this flashback fashion that Klüger intersperses memories and scenes from the times in the camps throughout unterwegs verloren. 14 Interpreting autobiographical works raises concerns about their ambiguities, the unreliability of memory and the precarious relationship between truth and fiction. Although autobiographical writings contain elements of inaccuracy or fictionalized reality, the true experience is the formative element of an autobiographical text according to critics such as Bernd Neumann. 15 Literature is assumed to express some kind of truth (‘Wahrheitsgehalt’), and the validity of Klüger’s autobiographical accounts of her concentration camp experiences has

Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and unterwegs verloren

89

not been questioned. In still alive, the English version of weiter leben which Klüger wrote nine years after the original, she has admitted that some of those experiences eluded her memory: ‘Looking back, I see Theresienstadt as a broken chain of memories. Lost friends, threads that split off the spindle.’ 16 Here, some of the memories are worded to adjust to an American audience, while others are selected and shaped through her changed perspective on life. 17 Central to the discussion on theories of autobiographical writing is the subjective, current view of the author: So unterschiedliche Disziplinen wie die Individual- und Sozialpsychologie, die Neurobiologie und die Literaturwissenschaft stimmen mittlerweile darin überein, dass autobiographisches Erinnern niemals eine Rekonstruktion eines ‘so Gewesenen’ ist. Autobiographisches Erinnern ist vielmehr eine Neuordnung und Interpretation der vergangenen Ereignisse, die an den Deutungsanspruch der Gegenwart angepasst werden. Die Ereignisse der Vergangenheit werden im Akt autobiographischen Erinnerns ständig reorganisiert. 18

With still alive, Klüger does not offer a translation, but rather a transformation of the text to better address an American audience: she refers to sites familiar to American readers; she omits references to German authors and instead quotes American ones. 19 In addition, she reflects on her relationship with her mother from a new and more forgiving stance. These changes illustrate that the self in an autobiographical account is always portrayed to an outsider, the reader (in this case the German or American reader). It differs from the image of the self looking into a mirror, because the representation of the past is filtered in anticipation of the judgment of the readers, and thus statements are adjusted to meet those expectations. Both accounts, however, are true to the experiences as far as memory is able to reconstruct the events. Klüger makes explicit reference to the shortcomings of her memory: ‘So verführen gerade die genauesten Erinnerungen zur Unwahrheit […]’ (wl 30). Unlike many other writers of Holocaust accounts, as a literary critic, Klüger is well aware of the ‘autobiographical pact’ she makes with the reader.

90

Norgard Klages Possessed with the understandable notion of a duty to bear witness, many authors of survivors’ texts focused on issue of testimony and did not engage in questioning the stability of their autobiographical narrative. Of course, the narratability of the Shoah has always been an intensely debated question, but this was often not problematised in the autobiographical narratives themselves. But Klüger’s different autobiographical pact, which includes sharing the problem of autobiographical writing with the reader, as well as her explicitly feminist stance, sets her text apart from the majority of autobiographical writing on the Shoah which had been published up until the early 1990s. 20

Klüger’s theoretical essay ‘Fakten und Fiktionen’ comments on aspects of fact versus fiction in autobiographical writing. There she writes: ‘Interpretiert muss trotzdem werden. Das reine Faktum gibt es ja für den menschlichen Verstand nicht. Wer immer sich wie immer mit dem Holocaust abgibt, interpretiert.’ 21 Her stance reflects current autobiographical studies that have moved away from historical truthfulness and interpret autobiographical writings within the realm of literature. 22 Klüger thus also agrees with Paul de Man’s position which assumes that any attempt at re-creating reality is always fictional, coming full circle to Goethe, who famously named his autobiographical writing Dichtung und Wahrheit, having changed the order from the original Wahrheit und Dichtung, thereby putting the emphasis on fiction. 23 As noted above, Klüger’s two books with their emphasis on the victim perspective are a departure from the prevalent ‘Väterliteratur.’ But they are also different from the other sub-genre of books on the Holocaust, the so-called testimonials. She does not factually list events in chronological order; rather, she elaborates on the nature of remembering. She broaches the issue of perspective and how her own view as a mature woman influences her narrative. The act of interpretation of a recalled event is always determined through the lens of the person remembering. It is the perspective and the unique voice of the person that she has become that determines what is recollected and how: Je größer die zeitliche Distanz, desto unverständlicher wurde das Geschehen jener Jahre. Auch mir scheint es manchmal, dass die Erinnerungen, die ich im Gedächtnis herumtrage, mir fremd sind, nämlich sie sind der Person fremd, die ich seither geworden bin. 24

Hence, the voice with which Klüger narrates is one of a mature, feminist literature professor, not that of a twelve-year-old girl. She is

Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and unterwegs verloren

91

looking back, reflecting from today’s perspective, thus adding a layer of interpretation to the events that differentiates her account from testimonials about the Holocaust. Klüger addresses the subjectivity of her accounts with a quote by Simone Weil at the very beginning of weiter leben: ‘Das Missverhältnis zwischen der / Einbildung und dem Sachverhalt’ (wl 7). Weiter leben is a sophisticated narrative fabric consisting of flashbacks, poetry, references to German literature and hindsight. By pointing out the unreliability of remembering, she critically reflects on the act of remembering, deconstructing the rhetoric of an autobiographical book. The perspective of a literary critic working on an autobiographical ‘project’ looking back is the determining force for her autobiographical memory. 25 In unterwegs verloren, Klüger goes beyond a search for lost memories – she discusses lost relationships with friends, with her sons, with her husband, with colleagues. Her quotation from Herta Müller – ‘einmal ging ich unterwegs verloren / einmal kam ich an wo ich nicht war’ (uv 7) – alludes to a loss of identity and sense of belonging. In trying to define and simultaneously construct her identity, Klüger oscillates between collective experiences of the Holocaust and her personal ones after the Holocaust. Both, however, are representative of and influenced by her interpretation of self as a Jewish woman. When Klüger writes about her identity as a Jew she often ties it to her identity as a woman. She rejects Judaism as a male-centered religion based on the exclusion of women in prayer. It is through this opposition that she develops a Jewish feminist identity: Indeed, [Klüger’s Jewish feminism] is closely connected with the interpretation of cultural identity as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault saw it: as a non-essential entity that constantly changes and renews itself, gaining its shape in the relationship with other identities, that is, by differentiating itself from them. Jewish identity exists as does female identity, only in opposition to other identities. 26

Writing her book in German and publishing it in Germany could thus be understood as Klüger creating her identity in opposition to the perpetrators and their language. She writes as a representative of the oppressed, in this case Jewish people and women. In weiter leben, Klüger quickly learns that the discrimination against women continues after the war when she experiences condescending behavior towards her at school and at the university level in Germany (wl 206-7).  In the

92

Norgard Klages

United States she has similar experiences with women being pushed into subordinate positions, even after the women’s movement raised public awareness of inequality. A female acquaintance is told: ‘Wozu brauchen Sie ein Doktorat? Sie sind doch kein Krüppel!’ (wl 232). Women are not expected to become professors: ‘Auch mit noch so guten Referaten blieb man als Frau Dilettantin’ (uv 101). Klüger’s constant reflections on issues of anti-Semitism and gender discrimination in unterwegs verloren illustrate the dual insults she faces as a Jew and as a woman. 27 Jennifer Taylor writes that Klüger is ‘faced, both as a woman and as an Austrian woman, with the task of carving out an original voice’; 28 of the three major facets that make up her identity, her ethnicity, nationality and gender, the consequences of being Jewish and a woman are the main focus of her works. The interchangeability of discrimination against Jews and women culminates in Klüger’s experiences during a semester at the University of Vienna: Und so denke ich manchmal rückblickend, vielleicht wäre es doch besser gewesen, als Bibliothekarin weiterzuarbeiten, als sich in einem von Männern beherrschten Beruf durchzuschlagen, in dem überdies Juden nicht immer und überall gern gesehen waren. (uv 143)

And: Dieses Wiener Gastsemester war ein Paradebeispiel dafür, warum ich Diskriminierung von Juden und von Frauen oft durcheinanderbringe. Zwar bin ich mir sicher, dass das Germanistische Institut mich lieber nicht dagehabt hätte, doch weiß ich nicht, ob die Herren keine Frau oder keine Jüdin haben wollten. (uv 2067)

In defining her identity, Klüger describes it in terms of what it is not, what it rejects. She points out that she does not belong to the Austrians. As a young girl she is already isolated because of the stringent rules set up by the Nazis. Her place in academia is also filled with rejection and reprimands caused by actions and words of Germans, Austrians, as well as Americans. It is indeed difficult for her to establish a distinct Jewish identity; on the one hand, she herself rejects certain Jewish customs that she deems too anti-feminist, and on the other feels rejected even by other Jews such as her colleague at Princeton who accuses her of anti-Semitism, even though it is never made clear what his exact words were (uv 58). As a member of the middle class in Vienna she grew up with a Viennese brand of ‘high

Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and unterwegs verloren

93

German,’ not Yiddish. Thus, even before the Holocaust her identity and voice are not explicitly linked to Judaism. Later in life she refuses to follow the Jewish tradition of naming her sons after her father because she does not want them associated with the victims of the Shoah. 29 Any kind of discrimination against Jews and women is not all that surprising. The inability to connect to her original roots as an Austrian, however, might be less expected. ‘Und nun, als mein ungefestigter Glaube an Österreich ins Schwanken geriet, wurde ich jüdisch in Abwehr’ (wl 41). At age seven, after the annexation of Austria in 1938, Klüger no longer wishes to be called ‘Susi’ and changes her name to ‘Ruth’: ‘Einen jüdischen Namen wollte ich, den Umständen angemessen’ (wl 41). The rejection by her Austrian homeland not only shapes her childhood experiences but becomes a recurring theme in unterwegs verloren: ‘Wo immer ich in Wien hingehe, berühre ich eine wunde Stelle. […] Wiens Wunde, die ich bin, und meine Wunde, die Wien ist, sind unheilbar. Läppisch gerät jeder Versuch, Versöhnung anzustreben’ (uv 200). In an interview with Renata Schmidtkunz, Klüger makes no secret of her aversion towards Vienna, the city of her childhood: ‘Ich habe Wien als eine judenfeindliche Stadt erlebt, als eine Stadt, wo man nie sicher war. Als eine Stadt, aus der man heraus wollte. [...] Eine zutiefst unfreundliche, feindselige Stadt.’ 30 It is possibly for that reason that Klüger writes the autobiographical account of her childhood initially in German, chooses Göttingen, a small town in former West Germany, as her second residence, and decides to have her book issued by a German publishing house. She thus trusts the West Germans to have made some significant changes and to possess the ability to engage in a meaningful dialogue about the Holocaust. Hence, as Pascale R. Bos asserts, it ‘suggests that in some ways, the cultural climate in Germany after 1945 was perceived to be more receptive to Jewish input than that of Austria.’ 31   Initially, Klüger was not quite sure why she chose German over English, apart from the fact that the German language has more words as she observes, but she finally realizes the motivation for her choice: Die deutsche Sprache, latent im Gehirn, aber noch immer robust, hatte mich gewählt, nicht umgekehrt. Wenn man sich intensiv auf die Kindheit besinnt, dann sinniert man in der Sprache der Kindheit, und das war natürlich für mich das wienerische Hochdeutsch. [...] Und so schrieb ich schließlich einen Satz, den Ilse

94

Norgard Klages Aichinger zu meiner Freude öfters wohlwollend zitiert: ‘Wien ist die Stadt, aus der mir die Flucht nicht gelang’, was gleichzeitig bedeutet, dass Wien mein erstes Gefängnis war. 32

Klüger comes to the conclusion that she cannot deny the language of her childhood, that her origin and cultural upbringing still define her. They are part of her identity, and as much as she attempts to deny that part of her identity, it still defines her voice. The complexity of that voice – Viennese ‘Hochdeutsch’ rather than simply German; her first book publication in Germany rather than Austria; residing in the United States, but yet working in the field of German language, literature and culture – makes her ego boundaries fluid and her voice multifaceted, a phenomenon not uncommon among Holocaust survivors. Despite her innate Austrian voice she rejects the idea of an Austrian identity for herself. Her status as a person in exile is what defines her complex voice and identity. As Marianne Hirsch points out, postwar European Jews are bound to remain ‘in a perpetual temporal and spatial exile. Our past is literally a foreign country we can never hope to visit.’ 33 Caroline Schaumann builds on Hirsch’s statement and argues that Klüger shares a ‘migratory identity, not because of a general sense of postcolonial uprootedness but because of the specific experience of the Holocaust.’ 34 The title of Klüger’s second autobiographical account, unterwegs verloren, points to this dilemma. The answer in Klüger’s case is encapsulated in a whole string of losses, such as the loss of her childhood, her home, her father and brother, her marriage, her friendships. Her language, however, has not been lost. Autobiographical writing has traditionally been an identityforming process. In light of the author’s statements, however, one has to ask whether identity is an attainable goal at all in a postmodern, post-Shoah world. At least for Jews it seems to be impossible, as Pascale Bos points out. Because of the Holocaust, […] the political and legal failure of German-Jewishness as a viable national identity seemed underscored. As a result, the majority of German and Austrian Jews in the first decades after 1945 saw themselves as having to make a choice. They would either live as Jews, but no longer in Germany or Austria […], or have to renounce Jewishness and live as Germans or Austrians only. 35

While one could argue that Klüger does indeed give voice to her identity as a Jewish woman due to her criticism of anti-Semitic and

Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and unterwegs verloren

95

anti-feminist attitudes, the transcendence of place is unique in her case and points to the absence of a national identity. Frederick Lubich argues that Klüger’s self is primarily defined by being Jewish and being a woman, not by being Austrian, German or American. 36 Her life, consisting in large part of fleeing and seeking shelter, illustrates her search for ‘Heimat’ and identity. 37 In denying herself a national identity she may be emphasizing conflicting issues beyond national borders, such as discrimination against women and Jews that can be found in Germany and Austria as well as in the United States and many other countries. Klüger’s constant search for a new ‘Heimat’ and her movement westward, eventually to California, to the country of orange and lemon trees, as she calls it, evoking Mignon’s longing in Goethe’s famous poem, supports this argument (wl 280). It is ironic that, although a survivor of the Holocaust, Klüger has denied the notion that remembering and dealing with the past is a necessity. In a 2002 commentary on ‘Forgiving and Remembering,’ she writes: ‘The present memorial cult seeks to inflict certain aspects of history and their presumed lessons on our children. But its favorite mantra, “let us remember, so the same thing doesn’t happen again,” is unconvincing.’ 38 Klüger does not seem to give herself enough credit for significantly contributing to a re-emerging discussion of the Holocaust. Yet, she does indeed have an impact on the political and literary discourse in Germany simply by writing about her Holocaust experiences. When the Order of Merit First Class was bestowed on her by the Federal Republic of Germany in 2002, it was ‘for helping a generation “confront history again and again, and on such a very personal level.”’ 39 Her influence on the political and literary discourse in Germany also becomes manifest in that Klüger herself wants to involve the German people in a dialogue about the Holocaust. She does this by addressing her German audience explicitly in her books and challenges them to react in form of a constructive debate: ‘[…] [I]ch schreib es für Deutsche. […] Werdet streitsüchtig, sucht die Auseinandersetzung’ (wl 142). Judging by the multitude of violent acts committed by extremist right-wing individuals and groups since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Klüger’s observation that attempts at ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ have had little impact may appear to have validity. Bos suggests that unification and a general feeling of national pride brought with it a climate that ‘allowed Holocaust revisionism, foreigner hate and neo-

96

Norgard Klages

Nazi groups to flourish.’ 40 Similarly, Werner Bergmann points to the fact that ‘anti-Semitism is tightly interwoven with right-wing, nationalist attitudes’ resulting from Germany’s negative national self-esteem in the wake of World War II. 41 Another factor, however, may play a role in the right-wing demonstrations and neo-Nazi activities that occurred after unification. Most of these events took place in parts of former East Germany, in Leipzig, Dresden, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and also in Austria where rascist transgressions were incited by the late populist politician Jörg Haider. These actions may reflect the differences in the way different nations choose to deal with the Holocaust. For example, former West German schools took great pains in educating children about that subject. In contrast, in the GDR public discussion of the Nazi past was avoided as the socialist government felt that, on the basis of its political orientation alone, it had achieved an ample distance from National Socialism. Austria, however, assumed the role of a victim after World War II, and hence tried to deny its role in the Holocaust. ‘Significantly, in Austria there was no Leftist movement comparable to that in West Germany during the 1960s and 1970s.’ 42 An effective effort to deal with the past never took place in Austria, whereas a literary discourse influenced greatly by the student movement in West Germany adamantly insisted on it. It may be for that reason that Ruth Klüger has been able to engage her German audience, encouraging them to listen and respond to her, and to instigate a dialogue. The fact that weiter leben was an instant bestseller might be attributed in part to the high praise it received from Marcel ReichRanicki, one of the most influential German literary critics. But its success might also be due to the groundwork laid by previous public discourses about the Nazi past which had ‘conditioned’ Germany to be open to yet another account of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ such as Klüger’s. For example, part of that groundwork included a revisionist movement that claimed that the Holocaust was a reaction to Stalin’s threat and that it was not a single incident of horrific dimensions but rather one of many. This discussion was followed by the victimperpetrator debate of the 1990s which focused on the suffering of Germans during and after World War II. 43 In a detailed study on antiSemitic attitudes in Europe, Werner Bergmann from the ‘Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung’ in Berlin suggests that such discussions play a role in constructing national identity:

Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and unterwegs verloren

97

A threat to group identity emerges, on the one hand, in those countries that were in some way involved in the Holocaust for the Holocaust attacks national ‘honor.’ And on the other hand, it emerges in those societies who consider themselves to be victims of National Socialism, for this generates a ‘rivalry for claiming victim status’ with the Jews, which confuses the national self-image. 44

Since intermittently it seemed as if the fight for a German identity had to be coupled with the inability to acknowledge the guilt and switching the perpetrator for the victim role, it was time again to remind the Germans of what a true victim is. Klüger provides a Jewish voice to redirect the discourse into ways that were not widespread or prevalent in the German literary market. 45 It is therefore remarkable that Klüger searches for a connection to Germany, attempting, with her explicit dedication, to bring about a dialogue with the German people. With the exception of the Walser-Bubis debate, there had rarely been a direct dialogue between Jewish and German citizens about their mutual past. Reich-Ranicki and Paul Spiegel, for instance, both published their autobiographies after Klüger’s. 46 Although Klüger had often tried to initiate dialogues about her Holocaust experiences, for example in talks with the wife of a colleague or in conversations at dinner parties, she frequently felt she had to censor her descriptions. As a consequence, she refrained from detailing experiences such as the unsanitary conditions and particulars about human excrements during the transport to concentration camps: ‘Dieses Erlebnis ist nicht salonfähig. […] Ich erzählte also stattdessen etwas anderes […]’ (wl 110). Yet, gruesome minutiae about the bombings of German cities and depicting Germans as victims are acceptable topics during those same dinner-time conversations, she complains. It is only in her writing that she can freely express the details of her own suffering during the Holocaust years. 47 As a way to convey her attempts at entering into a dialogue with Germans, Klüger depicts her relationship with two people: Her friend ‘Christoph’ – in weiter leben still disguised but later in unterwegs verloren exposed as the writer Martin Walser – and ‘Gisela,’ the wife of a colleague, whose remarks exemplify the reactions from other Germans to which Klüger is subjected: ‘Theresienstadt sei ja nicht so schlimm gewesen […]’ (wl 85). Klüger can only deduce that comments like this have one purpose – to relieve guilt from the German conscience: ‘Alle Kriegserlebnisse sollten auf einen einzigen Nenner,

98

Norgard Klages

nämlich den eines akzeptablen deutschen Gewissens, zu bringen sein, mit dem sich schlafen lässt’ (wl 85). It is this kind of mindset among many Germans that Klüger addresses with her writing. However, her relationship with Walser is of a different nature. They met when they were both students in Regensburg after the war. Because of her desire to preserve their sixty-year-long friendship, Klüger initially kept silent after Walser’s contentious speech at the Frankfurt Paulskirche in 1998, a speech that was followed by a public debate about whether a collective victimization of Germans was justified. 48 After the publication of Walser’s Tod eines Kritikers, however, Klüger no longer remained quiet and called the book anti-Semitic in an open letter to Walser which was printed in the Frankfurter Rundschau and reprinted in full in unterwegs verloren (uv 170-6). 49 In her book, she comments on the loss of her friendship with Walser with the short but poignant commentary: ‘Ging unterwegs verloren’ (uv 169). In a later interview with Der Spiegel she draws on the similarities between her relationships with Walser and with Germany: Er hat mir wirklich etwas bedeutet. Ich wollte diese Freundschaft eigentlich nicht loslassen. Aber jetzt ist es endgültig vorbei […]. Das ist ein enormer Verlust. Das Ganze beschreibt auch die Ambivalenz, die ich immer wieder gegenüber Deutschland habe. Man weiß halt nicht, was einem dort passieren kann. 50

Klüger feels silenced; when people talk about claustrophobia, she is unable to talk about the crowded conditions during the transport to Auschwitz in a cattle car: ‘Diese Geschichte hätte das Gespräch derart gedämpft. […] Ich erzählte also statt dessen etwas anderes […]’ (wl 110). To be able to voice her experiences and convey her thoughts in a meaningful way Klüger always resorts to her prose. For example, in her conversation with Gisela, Klüger is paralyzed when Gisela argues that the stay in Auschwitz did not last that long and that everything turned out relatively positive – after all they were able to emigrate to America and did not have to suffer the fate of German women who had to experience the aftermath of the war (‘Nachkriegselend’). Klüger responds to these arguments by writing: ‘Aber ich will euch erzählen, dass meine Mutter kein Glück gehabt hat im Leben. [...] Das möchte ich euch erzählen, so dass ihr versteht, warum Giselas Vergleich hinkte […]’ (wl 93). Through her works, Klüger challenges readers to rethink and deal with the past in a direct and honest way. In other words, art is the only medium through which the silence can be

Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and unterwegs verloren

99

broken, the unspeakable be expressed: ‘Unübersteigbarer Stacheldraht zwischen uns und den Toten. Ich hatte schon früher versucht, sie in Bilder und Worte zu bannen. “Mit erfrorenen roten / Händen schaufelt mein Bruder sein eigenes Grab”’ (wl 98). Klüger’s relationship with Austria seems similarly burdened with the issue of mastering the past which has not successfully been dealt with in Austria. In unterwegs verloren she addresses an Austrian audience and voices her criticism regarding honoring an anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger. Employing Viennese ‘Hochdeutsch,’ she states: ‘Schämt sich denn niemand ein bissel für die dreifache Ehrung?’ (uv 198). And again, entering the ‘Judenplatz’ in Vienna, she remarks: ‘[…] [J]edes Mal wenn ich auf den Judenplatz ging, dachte ich ans Ertrinken. Hört sich an nach Gedicht, ich versuchte es […]’ (uv 203), and follows it up with a poem that expresses her troubled thoughts. The Holocaust memorial in Berlin, in contrast to the Vienna ‘Judenplatz’ memorial, is in a prominent place, close to the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag and the German parliament building, and its dimensions far exceed the one in Vienna. 51 Frederick Lubich points out that city centers in most state capitals are usually ‘designed to display monuments of national pride,’ but the center of Berlin ‘will become a place displaying lasting national shame and disgrace.’ 52 Coincidently, Martin Walser spoke against the prominent presence of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin during his controversial speech at the Frankfurt Paulskirche, calling it ‘a concrete nightmare the size of a football field.’ 53 The Holocaust memorial, a monument to the more or less overt and ever-present guilt, is an outward sign of the fact that the German nation engages in a public discourse which keeps revolving around the Holocaust. As such, it certainly creates a different climate and national identity than what is seen in Austria where the right-wing FPÖ party (‘Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs’/Freedom Party of Austria) and the success of right-wing extremists indicates the presence of a disquieting political and cultural climate. It is therefore not surprising that to this day anti-Semitic views have been more prevalent in Austria than in Germany, which makes a constructive dialogue about the Holocaust much more difficult there than in Germany. For the longest time, Austria assumed the role of victim of the ‘forced’ annexation and thus, similar to the GDR, had no ongoing national reflection about its role during the Nazi regime. Hence, while until recently the Jewish population in Germany has been increasing, the

100

Norgard Klages

Jewish population in Austria and Eastern European countries has been on a steady decline since World War II. 54 Whereas Klüger seems to be able to take on some form of dialogue with a German audience, she resents the way in which Austria has dealt with the past and has voiced her worries about the state of democracy in Austria. 55 In summary, as a feminist German literary scholar, Klüger chooses autobiography and poetry, both genres in which women have traditionally been well represented, to transcend her existence in the concentration camps, following the feminist insight that the private is public. As a survivor of the Holocaust, she finds a new voice by focusing on the victim’s perspective rather than on the perpetrator’s role. She accomplishes this through art, namely poetry, with which she constructs her identity as a Jewish woman. Her work is designed to open up a dialogue with not only the German people but also, by publishing an English language version of her memories, with a much larger international audience. In doing so, she gives herself a voice that is part Jewish, part feminist, and encourages a discourse about the importance of dealing with the past. As she repeatedly emphasizes, she is not speaking for herself – she is not a victim but the dead are. 56 Ruth Klüger expands and opens up the dialogue and challenges the dehumanization induced by the Holocaust and its violation against humanity by giving a voice to the living and the dead. Notes I wish to thank Frank Pilipp for his insightful comments and Susan Opt for her many suggestions and careful reading of several versions of this essay. 1

Ruth Klüger, weiter leben. Eine Jugend, Munich: dtv, 1994 (first published in 1992 by Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen). Abbreviated in the text as: wl.

2

Ruth Klüger, unterwegs verloren. Erinnerungen, Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2008. Abbreviated in the text as: uv.

3

Klüger was, for instance, chair of the German Department at Princeton, and, among other appointments, a professor at the University of Virginia, the University of Ohio, and the University of California at Irvine.

4

Pascale R. Bos, German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust. Grete Weil, Ruth Klüger, and the Politics of Address, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 15-6.

Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and unterwegs verloren

5

101

Bos, German-Jewish Literature, p. 43.

6

Klüger finally has the tattoo surgically removed when she no longer feels she is obliged to honor his memory because he would have reached an age in which he no longer could expect to live much longer: ‘[…] [J]etzt, sag ich dem Schorschi, dem Bruder, sind deine dir von der Bibel zugestandenen 70 oder 75 Jahre abgelaufen […]. […] Und so kam es, dass ich dir, dir und deinesgleichen, die KZ-Nummer nicht mehr schuldig zu sein meinte’ (uv 11-2).

7

Sandra Alders, ‘Voices from a Haunting Past: Ghosts, Memory, and Poetry in Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben. Eine Jugend (1992)’, Monatshefte, 100 (2008), 519-33 (here: p. 521).

8

Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today, trans. Marion Wiesel, New York: Random House, 1978, p. 200.

9 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, in: Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10.1., Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1977, p. 30. 10

References to Adorno are from the German version and have been cut in the English publication, possibly because Adorno’s works may not be as widely known in the United States as they are in Germany. 11 Elaine Martin, ‘Re-reading Adorno: The “after-Auschwitz” Emporia’, Forum, 2 (2006), 1-13 (here: pp. 2; 7). Available online at: http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/archive/ 02/martin.pdf (accessed 10 April 2010). 12

There are indeed a number of literary ‘Holocaust hoaxes,’ as Melissa Katsoulis points out in her article, ‘Why would any writer make up stories about the Holocaust?’, at: http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=11490 (accessed 26 August 2010). Among the authors who have made false claims about their experiences during the Holocaust, Katsoulis lists Binjamin Wilkomirski, Misha Defonseca and Herman Rosenblat. Wilkomirski’s book Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood 1939-1948, New York: Schocken Books, 1996, proved to be a fraudulent rewritten account of his life as an orphan in Switzerland and not, as he alleged, as a Jewish orphan in Nazi concentration camps. Similarly, in Defonseca’s Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, Boston: Mt. Ivy Press, 1997, the author details an account of her escape from Nazi persecutors which she later admitted was a fantasy tale and excused her falsification by professing her difficulty in telling ‘the difference between what was reality’ and what was her ‘interior universe.’ See: http://www.theage.com. au/news/world/author-admits-holocaust-wolf-memoir-partly-made-up/2008/03/01/120 4227047858.html (accessed 26 August 2010). Rosenblat is one of the most recent cases of authors who fabricate their autobiography. After Rosenblat gave excerpts of his memoir titled Angel at the Fence about a childhood in Buchenwald at various TV

102

Norgard Klages

shows, it was exposed as a concocted story, and Berkley Books canceled their plans to publish the book (see: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/books/31opra.html [accessed 26 August 2010]). 13

For a detailed discussion of memory and trauma, see Karein K. Goertz, ‘Body, Trauma, and the Rituals of Memory: Charlotte Delbo and Ruth Klüger’, in: Julia Epstein and Lori Hope Lefkovitz, eds., Shaping Losses. Cultural Memory and the Holocaust, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001, pp. 161-85.

14 In reference to the dispute with a colleague at Princeton, she writes: ‘Weiß der nicht, mit wem er spricht? Wo ich herkomme? Eine Wiener Jüdin, die um ein Haar als Kind in Birkenau vergast worden wäre’ (uv 57). And after the birth of her first child: ‘Ich dachte viel an die Frauen, deren Kinder im Holocaust umgekommen waren, und mit Grauen an die, denen man die Kinder wörtlich an der Rampe weggerissen hatte’ (uv 84). 15

Bernd Neumann, Identität und Rollenzwang. Zur Theorie der Autobiographie, Frankfurt/Main: Athenäum Verlag, 1970.

16 Ruth Klüger, Still Alive. A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2001, p. 74. 17

The book was translated, or re-written as Ruth Klüger calls it, and published in the U.S. in 2001 under the title Still Alive. Klüger wrote: ‘What you have been reading is neither a translation nor a new book: it’s another version, a parallel book, if you will, for my children and my American students’ (Ibid., p. 210).

18

Karolin Machtans, Zwischen Wissenschaft und autobiographischem Projekt: Saul Friedländer und Ruth Klüger, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2009, p. 13. 19

For a detailed discussion of the two texts and their differences, see Caroline Schaumann, ‘From weiter leben (1992) to Still Alive (2001): Ruth Klüger’s Cultural Translation of Her “German Book” for an American Audience’, German Quarterly, 77:3 (2004), 324-39.

20

Andrea Hammel, ‘The Destabilisation of Personal Histories: Rewriting and Translating Autobiographical Texts by German-Jewish Survivors’, Comparative Critical Studies, 3 (2004), 295-308 (here: p. 303).

21 Ruth Klüger, Gelesene Wirklichkeit. Fakten und Fiktionen in der Literatur, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006, p. 85. 22

See James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972; Paul J. Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography, Princeton:

Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and unterwegs verloren

103

Princeton University Press, 1985; Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 23

Machtans, Zwischen Wissenschaft und autobiographischem Projekt, p. 29.

24

Klüger, Gelesene Wirklichkeit, p. 56.

25

Machtans, Zwischen Wissenschaft und autobiographischem Projekt, p. 243.

26 Andrea Reiter, ‘“Ich wollte, es wäre ein Roman”. Ruth Klüger’s feminist survival report’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 38 (2002), 326-40 (here: p. 335). 27 Ursula März, ‘Nur Versöhnlichkeit hilft weiter’, Die Zeit, 9 October 2008, 4. Available online at: http://pdf.zeit.de/2008/42/L-Klueger-Besuch.pdf (accessed 20 May 2010). 28

Jennifer Taylor, ‘Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben: eine Jugend: A Jewish Woman’s “Letter to Her Mother”’, in: Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, ed., Out From the Shadows. Essays on Contemporary Austrian Women Writers and Filmmakers, Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1997, pp. 77-87 (here: p. 78). Taylor argues that silence is a ‘marker of a Jewish woman’s identity’ and continues her argument with a comparison of weiter leben to Kafka’s ‘Brief an den Vater.’

29

See Dagmar Lorenz, ‘Imagined Identities: Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors in Literature’, in: Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove and Georg Grote, eds., German Memory Contests. The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006, pp. 169-92. Lorenz discusses the difficulty for Holocaust survivors to form a Jewish identity after the Shoah and concludes that ‘most German Jewish writing casts Jewish identity as a position of an isolation impossible to overcome except on a personal level, an isolation so great that it undermines any vision of a larger community’ (p. 189). 30

Renata Schmidtkunz, Im Gespräch / Ruth Klüger, Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2008, p. 14. 31

Bos, German-Jewish Literature, p. 96.

32

Klüger‚ ‘Wien als Fluchtpunkt’, in: Gelesene Wirklichkeit, p. 101.

33 Marianne Hirsch, ‘Postmemories in Exile’, Poetics Today, 17:4 (1996), 659-86 (here: p. 663). 34

Schaumann, ‘From weiter leben (1992) to Still Alive (2001)’, p. 329.

35

Bos, German-Jewish Literature, p. 2.

104

Norgard Klages

36

Frederick Lubich interprets the central theme of Klüger’s autobiography as ‘the German Jewish longing for a lost Heimat.’ Frederick Lubich, ‘Surviving to Excel: The Last German Jewish Autobiographies of Holocaust Survivors Ruth Klüger, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, and Paul Spiegel’, Modern Judaism, 25:2 (2005), 189-210 (here: p. 204). 37

Ibid., p. 194.

38 Ruth Klüger, ‘Forgiving and Remembering’, PMLA, 117 (2002), 311-3 (here: p. 313). 39

See: http://www.zotzine.uci.edu/2009_03/kluger.html (accessed 10 April 2010).

40

Bos, German-Jewish Literature, p. 71.

41

Werner Bergmann, ‘Anti-Semitic Attitudes in Europe: A Comparative Perspective’, Journal of Social Issues, 64 (2008), 343-62 (here: p. 358). 42 Dagmar Lorenz, ‘The Struggle for a Civil Society and Beyond: Austrian Writers and Intellectuals Confronting the Political Right’, New German Critique, 93 (2004), 19-41 (here: p. 25). 43

For an extensive discussion of the post-war victim-perpetrator debate in Germany, see the essay collection German Memory Contests edited by Fuchs, Cosgrove and Grote.

44

Bergmann, ‘Anti-Semitic Attitudes in Europe’, p. 353. Bergmann, however, does not distinguish between Germany’s Eastern and Western parts, nor does he see a difference between Germany’s and Austria’s ‘issues of guilt and responsibility for the murdering of European Jews’ (p. 354). 45

There was not a wide range of publications of Holocaust memories in Germany as was the case in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. German narratives depicted the German experience with a focus on its role as victims rather than perpetrators. The Holocaust and the death of millions of Jews, on the other hand, frequently remained obscure. 46

Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Mein Leben, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999; Paul Spiegel, Wieder zu Hause? Erinnerungen, Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 2001. 47

Bos therefore called it a ‘reluctant dialogue’ (German-Jewish Literature, p. 81).

48 See Martin Walser’s speech at the Frankfurt Paulskirche, 11 October 1998, at: http://www.hdg.de/lemo/html/dokumente/WegeInDieGegenwart_redeWalserZumFrie

Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and unterwegs verloren

105

denspreis/index.html (accessed 20 May 2010). It stirred a large controversy with Ignatz Bubis, the president of the ‘Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland’ who accused Walser of trying to eliminate remembering and ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ altogether. 49

In an interview with Der Spiegel in 2008, Klüger depicts the deterioration of their friendship: ‘Er war freundlich und liebenswürdig. Aber ich fand seine Politik immer unmöglicher und habe mit ihm gestritten. Dann, nach dem Erscheinen seines Buchs “Tod eines Kritikers”, habe ich gedacht: “Jetzt geht es wirklich nicht weiter, er ist politisch wirklich ein bisschen dumm und verdrängt so viel. Er versteht einfach nicht, was da läuft”. Dieses Buch ist meiner Ansicht nach bösartig – und antisemitisch. Ein jüdischer Großkritiker vernichtet hier die armen arischen Schriftsteller. Darüber komme ich nicht hinweg’ (Spiegel-Interview, ‘Man ist irrsinnig indiskret’, Der Spiegel, 11 August 2008, at: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-58853033.html [accessed 20 May 2010]). 50

Ibid.

51

The Holocaust memorial in Berlin is 205,000 square feet (19,000 square meters) and made up of 2,711 gray stone slabs. See: http://www.reuters.com/article/ idUSL2145284120080121 (accessed 10 April 2010). The Holocaust memorial in Vienna, on the other hand, has the ‘Nameless Library’ with much smaller dimensions: 32 feet by 23 feet and 12 feet high. See: http://abcnews.go.com/International/ story?id=82284&page=1 (accessed 10 April 2010). 52

Lubich, ‘Surviving to Excel’, p. 202.

53

‘Die Betonierung des Zentrums der Hauptstadt mit einem fußballfeldgroßen Alptraum.’ See Walser’s speech at the Frankfurt Paulskirche. 54

See: http://www.zentralratdjuden.de/de/article/764.html (accessed 10 April 2010): ‘Die Zahl der Mitglieder der jüdischen Gemeinden in Deutschland ist zwischen 1955 und 2004 von 15920 auf heute 105733 gestiegen. Das entspricht einer Zunahme um fast 700 Prozent.’ Regarding the numbers of Jews in Austria, see Holocaust Victims’ Information and Support Center at: http://www.restitution.or.at (accessed 10 April 2010): ‘Heute leben in Österreich ca. 15.000 Juden, um 10.000 weniger als 1946.’ 55

Schmidtkunz, Im Gespräch / Ruth Klüger, pp. 17; 23.

56

Ibid., pp. 41; 58.

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz A Human Being or a Good Jew? Individualism in Vladimir Vertlib’s Novel Letzter Wunsch Vertlib’s novel Letzter Wunsch explores the far-reaching effects of the Nazi regime on the son of a German-Jewish survivor through the ongoing debates within the Jewish community in light of new Eastern European arrivals and the conflicts in the Middle East, as well as the easily awakened anti-Semitism in the dominant society. Rather than celebrating a renewed Jewish post-Shoah life, Vertlib writes about laying the foundation that would allow the children and grandchildren of survivors to shape their own individual lives with the full knowledge of the past. This includes a Jewish identity, but not necessarily a particular community.

Vladimir Vertlib’s prose fiction broke new ground in Jewish writing at the beginning of the new millennium. His works do not derive from the German or German-Jewish tradition, but neither can they be read in the context of his native language and culture, Russian, which he left as a child as a result of biographical and historical circumstances. Vertlib represents a literary position according to which identity in a postmodern sense is a dynamic concept associated with opportunity, choice, and performativity. 1 Foregrounding the individual, community in Vertlib’s texts is treated as a negotiable commodity. His justification for living in Salzburg (rather than Vienna or elsewhere) sheds light on this position: For me, Salzburg is above all a place of work rather than leisure. Almost all my texts have been written in this city. […] Here I find the necessary distance to myself. […] It was also in Salzburg that I officially joined the Jewish community, though more as a matter of principle than for religious reasons. 2

In this passage and in his fiction, the notion of choice and purpose rather than ‘belonging’ is of primary importance. Based on a sense of self that lacks the deliberate sophistication of earlier literary nomads such as Stefan Zweig, Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger or Hilde Spiel, Vertlib articulates the increasingly common migrant experience that has been the destiny of masses of powerless people since World War II: displaced persons, exiles, refugees, illegals, and migrant workers. His nomadic memories lack the elements of privilege and choice. They are void of the earlier

108

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

prominent exiles’ longing for their lost homeland that prompted the return of, for example, Anna Seghers (to East Germany), Holocaust survivor Edgar Hilsenrath (to West Berlin), and Friedrich Torberg (to Vienna), i.e., to the land of their native language. These authors, even if they had been children when they were forced to leave, felt compelled to go back to their country of origin. In contrast, Vertlib and his family ended up in Austria and, although hesitantly, stayed there. He then studied in Vienna and became a German-language writer. At the core of Vertlib’s autobiographical-historical writing is the author’s desire to take stock, to examine his origins mindful of the adverse conditions that shaped Jewish life in Russia, Germany, and Austria since the nineteenth century, and to understand the response patterns these conditions produced. Vertlib explores the long-term effects of anti-Semitism, identifying in some of his characters’ selfcentered and self-defeating responses such as narcissism and paranoia. Others respond to their plight by developing a remarkable resourcefulness and detachment that help them withstand oppression and discrimination. The historical panorama of Vertlib’s novels extends from Imperial Russia, World War I, the Russian Revolution, postrevolutionary Russia, the Stalinist era, World War II, the German invasion of the Soviet Union to the bleak postwar and the Cold War era. The notion of individualism in his works involves historical and cultural specificity. Vertlib’s first work of fiction, Abschiebung (1995), deals with the international wanderings of a Jewish family from Leningrad and culminates in their deportation from the United States when their application to immigrate is turned down. 3 The narrative is based on Vertlib’s odyssey since leaving the Soviet Union in 1970. Flashbacks and retrospectives provide insight into the boy protagonist’s perceptions and constitute a critical commentary on the plight of migrants without connections or means. 4 In his Dresden Chamisso Lectures on Poetics, Vertlib discloses how he shapes autobiographical material into fiction in what seems an act of self-empowerment. Liam Harte’s observations on the autobiographical writing of underprivileged Irish migrants shed light on this process as well: Issues of subjectivity, authority and agency must be central to any reading of first person accounts by members of dispossessed or subordinate groups, as they must be to readings of proletarian autobiography in general, a category into which

Vladimir Vertlib’s Letzter Wunsch

109

many Irish migrant memoirists fall. The process of seizing what Edward Said calls ‘the power to narrate’ is an inherently political act which transforms the subject from an anonymous object of speculation into a known narrator of specific personal histories. 5

Vertlib goes beyond recording his personal history. Transforming his recollections and his post-memory into fiction, he takes authorial control by reshaping the historical and autobiographical material, thereby practising the autonomy he was denied in his early years. 6 Contained in Abschiebung is a mosaic of stories that are elaborated upon in his later novels. Shaped by the perspective of Jewish dissidents and refuseniks, the information in Vertlib’s fiction is at variance with the official narratives of the countries in question. Letzter Wunsch (2003) is set in Germany and focuses on German Jews in the fictitious town of Gigricht, home to an old Jewish community. The novel explores the limited options available to Gabriel Salzinger in this somewhat provincial environment and traces his path toward a radically individualistic mode of living. Even though Gabriel is not registered with the Jewish community, he is aware, although by no means proud, of his Jewish background. His father’s death makes it necessary for him to interact with the Jewish authorities, and as a result of the ensuing conflict he makes choices that define him increasingly as an individual without obligations to any group. After the Holocaust, Jewishness and membership in the Jewish community were redefined to meet the circumstances after 1945. In a way, these changes marked the end of the German-Jewish tradition since the Enlightenment. After German unification further adjustments had to be made to absorb newcomers from Eastern Europe to ensure the future of the Jewish community. Gabriel’s story exposes the powerlessness of an individual caught up in ideological and social paradigm changes, and it depicts his futile struggle against policies and protocols. At the same time, his precarious situation enables him to live as an individual and to take matters into his own hands. The risks he takes which contribute to his personal growth are at the center of the novel. A driving force behind Vertlib’s writing is social criticism. Abschiebung exposes the arbitrary decisions of international authorities. For example, in their struggle with the United States Immigration Service, Vertlib’s protagonists realize that the classification as Russian Jews makes them unwelcome aliens in the eyes of anti-Semitic and

110

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

self-hating Jewish immigration officials. Also Gabriel in Letzter Wunsch, a German citizen, experiences the effects of labeling. David Salzinger, his father, is denied a burial next to his wife in his hometown of Gigricht because his grandmother converted to Judaism with a Reform rabbi, the only rabbi who would grant her a conversion after 1933. In Nazi Germany she was a regular member of the ‘Israelitische Kultusgemeinde,’ the official Jewish community, but this is irrelevant to the orthodox ‘Einheitsgemeinde’ (Unified Community) established to accommodate orthodox Jews as well. Attempting to have his father buried on the Jewish cemetery according to his last wish, Gabriel seeks support from Jewish dignitaries and the German public in vain. Finally, not without trepidation, he deposes of his father’s body himself in defiance of convention and the law. 7 The following article will examine Letzter Wunsch in the context of Central European Jewish writing after the Holocaust. A close reading of the text will show the innovative perspectives Vertlib brings to the current conversation about identity. By engaging with the situation in Germany and Austria and introducing Russian memories as well as the post-memory of the third post-Holocaust generation, Vertlib establishes a position of agency with a transnational outlook. Writing in German but not in Germany allows for greater openness, and ‘[…] um meine inneren Welten abzuschreiten, in denen ich als Schriftsteller meine Geschichten entwickle. Hier finde ich die nötige Distanz zu mir selbst.’ 8 Similar to Vertlib’s own experiences, the options opening up to Gabriel seem limitless. Rejections by others, groups or individuals, do not result in tragedy but rather lead to a reorientation in accordance with the ever changing realities. Vertlib’s explorations do not lead up to a vision of a utopian Europe as a new ‘Jewish space,’ as HansJoachim Hahn suggests. 9 Instead, Katrin Molnár’s assessment that Vertlib’s narrator is emotionally positioned in a world in-between and defies binary oppositions and either-or-questions about identity is more to the point: ‘Regardless on which territory of collective identity the narrator finds himself, something alien attaches itself to his and other people’s perception of him.’ 10 Molnár aptly points out that Vertlib explains his move to Salzburg in completely private terms, as a decision he makes because of a personal relationship. 11 In his autobiographical statements as well as in his fiction, concerns of the individual take precedence over questions of belonging and identity. Avoiding co-optation by a given collective does not prevent Vertlib’s

Vladimir Vertlib’s Letzter Wunsch

111

narrators from developing a partial sense of home as is the case in the Zwischenstationen, Molnár observes. 12 Vertlib is keenly aware of the power of the collective, but his main focus is the process of individuation. The hallmarks of personal freedom, choice of lifestyle, country and place of residence, are major concerns in all of his works and associated with the protagonists’ nonconformism. These motifs are already present in Abschiebung along with the emerging cosmopolitanism, the right to cross boundaries as desired and needed. In Letzter Wunsch, Vertlib follows his protagonist on his path to self-liberation, first through transgression and later through writing. Writing is a lonely and painful but vital occupation for Gabriel: Seit etwa Viertel nach vier bin ich wach. Ich sitze vor meinem Computer. Ich habe Gliederschmerzen, vielleicht der Beginn einer Grippe, und meine Hände zittern, so dass ich oft auf die falschen Tasten drücke, immer wieder ganze Zeilen löschen und neu schreiben muss. Ich habe mich dennoch entschlossen, alles, was vorgefallen ist, so genau wie möglich zu dokumentieren. (LW 18)

Gabriel Salzinger’s life and his identity problems are part of the legacy of the German-Jewish past, the Holocaust, and the displacements during and after the Nazi years. Even though his grandmother, ‘Hermine Salzinger, vormals römisch-katholisch,’ and her son David, Gabriel’s father, converted to Judaism, Gabriel learns that the conversion was invalid since it was not supervised by a ‘thoragläubiger Jude’ (LW 132-3). 13 At the same time, German identity is a problematic issue for the Salzingers, and Israel is no less so. Hermine relocated to Israel, never setting foot in Germany again (LW 84), while David, who had witnessed atrocities by Jewish soldiers, returned to Germany. His mother viewed Germany as the land of the murderers, but he has similar feelings about Israel as well and maintains that Israel is no country for Germans (LW 58). Gabriel obviously concurs. After a trip in 1984, tracing his father’s life in Israel, he shows no inclination to make Aliyah (LW 91), i.e., to ascend to the Land of Israel. Gigricht, however, proves challenging for father and son as well. They live on the social margins and in their isolation and both take up writing at different stages in their lives (LW 30). Gabriel becomes gradually disentangled from collective structures such as family (after his divorce and his father’s death he is the last Salzinger in Gigricht), his work place (after a media scandal following

112

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

his father’s aborted burial he quits his job [LW 324-5]), and his loose network of acquaintances. Breaking these ties seems at times a matter of choice, at other times unavoidable. The opening chapter shows Gabriel at the end of his quest still wrestling with the aftershocks of his radical decisions and in fear of the possible consequences. In his nightmares he is confronted by his father’s ghost whose body he subjected to the most un-Jewish of burials, a burial at sea. However, he has also determined that the method of coming to terms with his trauma is by writing. Rather than the search for a community outside the dominant German and Austrian paradigms as sketched in Jewish texts of the 1980s by authors like Lea Fleischmann, Barbara Honigmann and Ruth Beckermann, the solution in Vertlib’s novel is an individualistic one. Suggesting that the writer’s radical loneliness is a path to self-determination is reminiscent of the proverbial loneliness of Franz Kafka and distinguishes Vertlib from other Jewish authors in search of a community to resolve their dilemma of identity. 14 Cautioning that liberal individualism has become ‘severely shaken,’ Pierre Birnbaum and Jean Leca suggest that ‘the legitimation of Individualism seems to have become much stronger: in Europe, Fascism, traditionalism, Christian democracy, personalism, and Marxism are in decline (if not disappearing completely).’ 15 Anything but naïve, Vertlib depicts the freedom of individualism as tricky business. In contrast to postwar writers influenced by existentialism who, like for example Ilse Aichinger, rejected political ideology of any kind after witnessing totalitarian rule, Vertlib, in the age of globalization, calls into question the possibility of personal autonomy. At the same time, he embraces the concept of individualism as the only possible alternative to cooptation with capitalist or socialist ideology. 16 His characters often end in a state of extreme loneliness. Yet, even within group settings – family, work environment, religious community – all group members are at odds with one another. Hence the individual is alone with his or her feelings as is the case with the boy protagonist in Abschiebung. For Gabriel both the family and the larger collective structures become intolerable. Vertlib’s novels propose a kind of individualism that arises from a progressively reduced sense of belonging. It causes discomfort but is ultimately the lesser evil; nonconformism is seen as preferable to belonging at all cost. At the end of a character’s individuation stands a

Vladimir Vertlib’s Letzter Wunsch

113

wider, more flexible sense of self. As Tom Palmer observes, a radical individualist has no place that he can consider home: The collectivist/communitarian approach implies that cultures are hermetically sealed one from another, that if you and I are in the ‘same culture,’ we must have the same ‘self-understandings,’ such that together we form a ‘self,’ differentiated from other selves by bounds that […] are not given by the physical, bodily differences between individual human beings, but by the capacity of the self through reflection to participate in the constitution of its identity, and where circumstances permit, to arrive at an expansive self-understanding. 17

In Letzter Wunsch, individualism implies the rejection of claims to exclusivity on the part of religion, family and the nation state. Rather than endorsing static identity paradigms, Vertlib uncovers transformative processes that build, dissolve and reconfigure identity. Before entering into a more detailed discussion of key aspects of individualism in Letzter Wunsch, let us examine Vertlib’s position between different literary traditions in order to identify some of the paradigms that inform his writing. Having started his literary career after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, Vertlib positioned himself within the emerging cosmopolitan literature of Central Europe. Born in Leningrad in 1966, he has lived in Austria since 1981 with literally no home town or country to return to. As Matti Bunzl observed about Austrian Jewish authors of diverse background, Vertlib, too, adopted aspects of a specifically Viennese Jewish identity. 18 Not without selfcriticism he notes: Ich bin tatsächlich zum Österreicher geworden, besser gesagt, zum Wiener. Ich muß Wien verlassen, um zu begreifen, daß ich im Laufe der Zeit alle Vorurteile dieser Stadt übernommen habe – die Selbstgefälligkeit, Überheblichkeit, Egozentrik und narzißtische Haßliebe, die Verachtung der ‘Provinz’, ein Minderwertigkeitsgefühl gegenüber dem Ausland und nostalgische Verklärung der einstigen Bedeutung als Metropole. 19

Mirroring his own transformations, Vertlib attributes to his protagonists, including Gabriel, a triple identity. In Gabriel’s case it is that of a German Jew returning from Vienna, shaped by his German socialization and his student experience and marriage in Vienna. As if to draw attention to Viennese Jewish writing since 1980, Letzter Wunsch contains a digression about a coffee house, Café Baum, which, though located in Gigricht, calls to mind similar passages on Vienna coffee houses in the fiction of Robert Schindel

114

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

and Doron Rabinovici, and in the films of Nadja Seelich and Ruth Beckermann, where they play an important role. 20 Gabriel is a regular at the centrally located venue with the Jewish-sounding name ‘Baum,’ and furniture dating back to the time of the Empire (LW 81). This traditional semi-public venue offers Gabriel and his eccentric friend Michael a place for introspection while experiencing the bustle of the outside world (LW 82). The description of the coffee house reads like a tribute to the writers who initiated the new Jewish intellectual culture in 1980s Vienna, the very time and place where Vertlib situates Gabriel (LW 237), who has gone to Vienna despite his father’s objection that Germans and Austrians, especially the Viennese, share the same negative traits and history (LW 238). For Jewish writing in Germany and Austria after 1945, American and British literature provided important impulses. The stark realism and the strong language reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and James Jones, in combination with satire and black humor, are evident in Edgar Hilsenrath and Jakov Lind. Vertlib employs similar strategies, which, along with his lack of sentimentality and predilection for the grotesque, call to mind those younger Jewish survivors and exiles. At the same time, his psychologically precise portrayal of interpersonal relationships, notably the father-son relationship in Letzter Wunsch, and his attention to social dynamics link him to East German-Jewish authors such as Anna Seghers, Stefan Heym and Jurek Becker. Like the latter, Vertlib bases his novels on a comprehensive historical framework. He also draws on his expert knowledge as a demographer, namely, his observations on population shifts in the twentieth century. 21 Vertlib’s fiction is furthermore connected with Central European Jewish writing rooted in pre-Holocaust culture by the way characters are shaped as distinctive individuals. Linguistic border crossing and multilingualism have traditionally figured in the cosmopolitanism cultivated in the former Habsburg Empire and the neighboring countries, where speaking more than one language was a necessity. Vertlib, like Joseph Conrad, Elias Canetti and Iljia Trojanow, chose, but was not ‘born to,’ his literary language and could conceivably have chosen a different one. His free choice of language corresponds to his non-committal manner of writing, appropriate to the topics of migration, transformation, and detachment. His crisp and direct articulation of ideas and events, tabooed in the dominant culture,

Vladimir Vertlib’s Letzter Wunsch

115

places him in the vicinity of modernist writers like Elias and Veza Canetti and, among the younger generations, Schindel and Rabinovici. The bizarre events in Letzter Wunsch lead to an exploration of German society in which neither German intellectuals, liberal and conservative, nor the pillars of the Jewish community are spared. Vertlib shows a predilection for eccentric characters, bizarre plot developments, and unflattering descriptions and names. The latter include stereotypical Jewish-marked names for the Gigricht Jews (Leo Kohn, Samuel Roth, Rabbi Rosenzweig, Isaak Ascher) and ridiculous ones for Germans in professional and public life (male fertility specialist Dr. Birgit Mötschelmayer-Ivanovic, editor of the Gigrichter Tagblatt Karl-Heinrich Dirnhofer, moderator Tobias Muxeneder, anti-Semitic shop-owner Voller). Equally hilarious are the names of the fictional towns of Patsch, Oberpatsch and Gigricht, suggestive of the provincial mentality of their citizens, while the institutions and the apparently sizeable Jewish community, a magnet for East European immigrants, point to Munich, the capital of Bavaria. In addition, Russian literature must be mentioned as an important influence in Vertlib’s writing. Like Central European modernist writing, Russian literature is known for its memorable characters and intricate story lines merging realistic, psychological and fantastic elements. 22 Similar textual strategies inform Vertlib’s literary production. Vertlib’s protagonists usually embark upon a quest evolving from being denied their freedom of choice, equal opportunity, and access to the goods mainstream society has to offer. Exclusion and persecution by the dominant society in turn foster a negative attitude toward religion and estrangement from Jewish society because of the latter’s perceived weakness. Abschiebung and Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur trace the effects of the constant struggle against antiSemitism in the Soviet Union, a struggle that destroys certain characters psychologically. Letzter Wunsch, with its focus on the postunification era, reveals that also in the new Germany it is impossible for descendants of survivors and exiles to dissociate themselves from the Jewish past. With reference to Jakob Wassermann’s GermanJewish autobiography of 1921, 23 Gabriel remembers that he came face to face with his Jewishness for the first time as a boy at his father’s work place: ‘Das Erlebnis in Vaters Fabrik war der erste unrühmliche Höhepunkt in meinem Leben als Deutscher und Jude’ (LW 230). Wassermann’s classic title serves as a reminder of the continued anti-

116

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

Semitism in the general public. In a society virtually without Jews, Gabriel encounters the term ‘Jude’ as well as the insult ‘Saujud’ (Jewish pig) reminiscent of Nazi speech at age five (LW 225; 229). It is not surprising that during a field trip to the local synagogue (LW 253) he behaves like a casual visitor and later in life avoids discussions about Jews and Germans (LW 231). Gabriel positions himself as a secular person of Jewish descent, but this is a one-way street: when he steps out into the public he is immediately identified as a Jew. A listener of the radio program where he appears as the featured guest asks him: ‘“Herr Salzinger, können Sie mir sagen, warum Sie eine etwas fremde Aussprache haben? Sie sind doch in Gigricht geboren. Hat das etwas mit dem Jiddischen zu tun?,”’ and speculates: ‘“Tragen Sie einen Kaftan und einen Hut und diese Locken über den Ohren?”’ (LW 312). The mere notion that Gabriel is Jewish mobilizes stereotypes familiar from Nazi propaganda. Language, as Sander Gilman discusses in Jewish Self-Hatred, 24 and dress play a foremost role in the anti-Semitic imaginary. Some callers ostensibly express sympathy with Gabriel in order to vent their antiJewish sentiments with impunity; for example: ‘Ich bin schockiert, dass ein Volk, das jahrtausendelang verfolgt wurde, gelitten hat und vor gar nicht langer Zeit aus rassischen Gründen beinahe ausgerottet worden ist, selbst auf eine so abscheuliche Weise rassistisch sein kann’ (LW 304).

Others are more direct: ‘“In Deutschland darf man ja nichts Negatives über Juden sagen, sonst wird man sofort als Antisemit gebrandmarkt”’ (LW 307). Such sentiments seem to have become more common after unification, and the taboo of anti-Semitism has weakened. 25 Vertlib, a keen observer of public speech, incorporates some of his personal impressions in Letzter Wunsch: In der Hauptstadt ist der Antisemitismus (nicht immer, aber oft) versteckter und subtiler als in Salzburg, wo meist ziemlich direkt und unreflektiert auftritt. Seine Ausdrucksformen sind oft dermaßen lächerlich, dass man als Betroffener eher amüsiert als verletzt ist. 26

Brigid Haines remarks upon Vertlib’s strategy of storytelling by way of the protagonist’s family, which she takes for an emphasis on collective belonging. 27 Contrary to Haines, who views such a collective identity as positive, it appears that Vertlib reviews different postHolocaust assumptions about Jewishness held by Jews and non-Jews

Vladimir Vertlib’s Letzter Wunsch

117

with a critical eye and eventually dismisses or suspends all of them. In ‘Jude, wie interessant,’ Vertlib states his point of view directly: Doch wenn für jemanden der Jude in mir interessanter ist als meine menschlichen Eigenschaften, ist es ohnehin gleichgültig, was ich sage. Egal, ob ich von Streitereien innerhalb der Kultusgemeinde oder israelischen Kriegsverbrechen, vom Antisemitismus in Österreich oder meinen Jugenderlebnissen erzähle, man wird meine Worte in ein Interpretationskorsett pressen, um eigene Vorstellungen zu bestätigen. 28

Already in Abschiebung Vertlib problematized the father’s memory of the pre-Stalinist and Stalinist era, his narratives of Germany’s genocidal past, and the claims of freedom and equality in the U.S. constitution, all of which clash with the real-life hostility the boy protagonist encounters while waiting in vain for an immigration visa. The only contacts he is allowed outside the bureaucratic system and his nuclear family are other disadvantaged children. The Boston Public Library becomes his refuge and his education consists of his unsupervised reading. The boy’s inner monologues with their sardonic comments on people, places and events reveal a rebellious mind and a growing distance to his parents, his society of origin, and his new environment. His silent dissent helps the fourteen-year-old emancipate himself despite his legal and financial dependence on his parents and the powerful immigration system. In the shadow of family and politics he experiences an exponential personal growth that culminates in a dream in which he destroys the divine as imagined in Western culture: a brown-haired, blue-eyed Jesus. After this cataclysmic vision he is poised to face life on his own terms, free of any imposed super-ego. In his pre-2000 publications, Verlib mapped the panorama of his nomadic wanderings. Leaving his Russian-Jewish childhood, his journey took him to many different countries because his father considered every country that would take him unacceptable. In Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur (2001), Stalin and the Stalinist USSR still loom large, overshadowing German history and the Holocaust, which affected the Russian immigrant less immediately than the Bolshevist past. 29 Eventually, the memory of Jewish suffering in Soviet Russia merges with that of the Holocaust in the prose text ‘Wo die Lebenswelten sich berühren.’ 30 Here, Vertlib uncovers a cultural and historical continuum from the destroyed Burgenland shtetl Mattersburg to the unmarked shtetl sites in Russia and Ukraine, which became inaccessible after the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986.

118

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

In Letzter Wunsch, Vertlib shifts focus again to examine the aftereffects of the Nazi past on younger German Jews and the complex identity issues they face due to the destruction of Jewish society and the unprecedented gap between the generations raised before and after the Holocaust. Along with the topics of exclusion and extraterritoriality, Vertlib addresses discontinuity that Jews experienced in the Federal Republic of Germany. Gabriel Salzinger, who learns he is infertile, becomes a symbol of the German-Jewish predicament: he is the last of his family and emblematic of the end of German-Jewish culture since the Enlightenment, a tradition in which David had been raised. To Gabriel’s surprise, David possesses a basic knowledge of Judaism and the Hebrew language, while Gabriel’s ‘Jewish’ knowledge consists mainly of accounts about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (LW 135-48). Moreover, Gabriel has one to whom to transmit his residual Judaism. Letzter Wunsch is set at the juncture when the collective memory of Germany’s diverse Jewish culture is being dislodged by the collective memory of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Although different, the two sets of memory share as a major element their uprootedness from an existing political reality: Pre-Nazi German Jewry and Russian Jewry were devastated by totalitarian regimes intolerant to religion. Jewish Socialism tied up with the Russian revolution comes to an end as well because Socialism, with which many East European Jews had identified, was discredited after the Cold War. Gabriel’s notion of being a secular German Jew remains intangible as well in the absence of secular Jewish life. The paradigms of Jewishness after the Holocaust and German unification differ from the earlier ones since at each juncture new realities had to be considered for the community to survive. Vertlib’s Russian characters are a case in point for Sander Gilman’s thesis that Russian-Jewish immigrants, in order to fit in, have to become Germans first in order to become Jewish. They must develop a Jewish identity according to the norms of the German-Jewish community at the turn of the millennium. 31 The highest priority for the newcomers is to learn German. The command of German and the willingness to pay membership fees, however, are not enough to qualify a German citizen for membership. The meeting between Gabriel and Rosa Masur shows that different standards apply to different groups. Gabriel is a secular German with a Jewish awareness. Dan Diner’s thesis according to which the Holo-

Vladimir Vertlib’s Letzter Wunsch

119

caust has created a negative German-Jewish symbiosis and separate collective Jewish and German memories applies to Gabriel and his third-generation mentality. 32 The 94-year-old Rosa is according to her Russian documents a Jewish national. While the prevailing policies allow for her acceptance into the fold, they exclude Gabriel. Yet, the conversation between the two reveals common traits and interests on the individual level. Their intellectual affinities appear more significant than their differences – age, gender, and nationality – all of them beyond their control. Not coincidentally, Gabriel and Rosa meet in the lounge of the Jewish center, a ‘neutral’ place to socialize. Here, Rosa succinctly defines the alternative Gabriel faces in his identity crisis: he can choose between being a good Jew and a human being. 33 She advises him to empirically explore his options, adding that success is not the measure of all things: ‘“Manchmal ist es wichtiger, in Stücke gerissen zu werden”’ (LW 259). During his quest, German and Jewish society become unacceptable to Gabriel. His new assertiveness ultimately costs him the little acceptance the two communities had been willing to grant him. The extreme extraterritoriality expressed by David Salzinger’s makeshift burial at sea mirrors the isolation that comes with Gabriel’s individualism. Letzter Wunsch begins by revealing Gabriel’s alienation as he confronts his father’s ghost in his nightly dreams about a struggle with a bureaucratized world and its computers. At the same time, the opening chapter introduces Gabriel’s solution: writing about his experiences to achieve closure and shape his own life’s narrative. It is a private and painful solution but the only possible way out of the impasse. The most obvious problem affecting the Salzinger family is that of identity in terms of nationality and culture. The markers on the Gigricht cemetery seem unequivocal proof of the family’s ‘Germanness’ (LW 65). Gabriel mentions graves of relatives murdered by the Nazis, and the fact that the family of his father had lived in Gigricht for three, that of his mother for four generations. When his doctor asks him about his nationality, Gabriel spontaneously agrees that he is German (LW 192). This certainty, however, is destabilized by several contradictory elements. For example, Gabriel’s mother looked ‘Jewish’ rather than ‘German’ (LW 85); according to her, this was a German rather than a Jewish problem. Her pronouncements suggest that not only the dominant society but also the Salzingers operate with the categories of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ Germans and Jews. Another remark

120

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

about Gabriel’s mother shatters the notion of a uniform German identity altogether: ‘Sie hätte nie was Ernsthaftes mit einem Goj angefangen. Mit diesen Hunden vergnügt man sich, erklärte sie, aber man heiratet sie nicht’ (LW 86). The disregard father and son Salzinger have for the German educational system, through which they could attain access to a more privileged position in keeping with their potential is further proof of their self-imposed exclusion. On the one hand, David’s return from Palestine suggests an affinity for Germany – he had fled in 1939 and returned shortly before the founding of Israel (LW 58). On the other hand, David’s decision not to resume his education so as to avoid examinations with German teachers, and his taking an inferior factory job instead, signal suspicion and alienation (LW 32). Gabriel, following his father’s example, does not study in Germany but also drops out of the University of Vienna (LW 34), and takes a low-paying, virtually redundant job. Both father and son furthermore display a similar attitude toward health and health care, be it because of an inner resistance to the healthy-body-and-mind concept reminiscent of Nazi ideology, or be it that they do not trust German doctors. David avoids physicians despite his heart condition and dies of a heart attack (LW 34-7). Gabriel shares these self-destructive tendencies; he is unable to quit smoking and experiments with prescription drugs and alcohol (LW 17; 18; 42-6). His new passion, writing, transposes him into a Kafkaesque state that resembles a sickness (LW 18). These examples suggest that a transference has taken place between father and son and show Gabriel’s character largely as the product of a family history entwined with the Holocaust. This psychological framework, his German linguistic identity and his Jewish responses in the absence of a Jewish education are the basis on which Gabriel’s individualism develops. The Salzingers’ Jewish identity is as tenuous as their Germanness. The prewar ‘Kultusgemeinde’ had been diverse, contrary to the uniform ‘Einheitsgemeinde,’ where Gabriel is excluded unless he converts with an orthodox rabbi. Even his grandmother Hermine is excluded posthumously. 34 Gabriel’s ideas about his family and Jewish history derive from accounts that he has internalized. Overtly, however, he avoids things Jewish because of the negative associations the term Jew carries (LW 225-7). He associates Jewishness with being vulnerable to aggression and insults (LW 229), and he is mortified

Vladimir Vertlib’s Letzter Wunsch

121

when old Mr. Mautner at the synagogue, whom he considers embarrassing with his wrinkly face and a crinkly sports coat, identifies the name Salzinger as Jewish, even Eastern European Jewish (LW 558). His intellectually and emotionally most gratifying encounter with a Jewish person seems to have been the one with Rosa Masur mentioned earlier (LW 254). Through his father, Gabriel is emotionally tied to the multifaceted Jewish prewar tradition. The intellectualism Rosa represents is likewise the product of modernity, hence the affinity between the two otherwise very dissimilar individuals. With their critical attitude they lambast even such Jewish cultural icons as Stefan Zweig and question religious tradition. Gabriel asserts that ‘“[a]uch die jüdischen Gesetze und Gebete sollte man übersetzen und dabei wohlwollend interpretieren [...].”’ Rosa disagrees, noting that in ‘“Witschi, meinem weißrussischen Geburtsort [...] haben die Männer jeden Tag Gott dafür gedankt, dass sie nicht als Frauen auf die Welt gekommen sind,”’ and articulates her feminist protest: ‘“Ich bezweifle, dass man ein derartiges Gebet wohlwollend interpretieren kann”’ (LW 255). The ensuing postmodern conversation about the construction of meaning and interpretation sets them apart from Jewish and non-Jewish environment. Their intellectual Jewish home lies beyond the confines of organized religion. Gabriel also stands apart from German society. While soccer and the pub – ‘die Kneipe’ – provide the social glue for large segments of the German population, Gabriel’s attitude to these mainstays of German masculinity is perfunctory at best. He gives his ticket for an important match between the ‘Gigrichter FC’ and the ‘SC Patsch’ to someone else (LW 20). He is also an outsider to the pub culture; his domain is the coffee house. After a short visit to the pub, he is glad to escape the noise and to be back in the street (LW 48-9). Overall, there seems to be little to keep Gabriel in Germany, but he also fails to develop ties anywhere else. When in 1984 he explored Israel, perhaps to trace his father’s life or in search of a more agreeable place to live, he seems to have found his father’s assertion confirmed that Israel was no country for Germans (LW 58). Soon thereafter he went to Vienna to study Economics but eventually broke off his Viennese ties and, without real commitment, returned to Gigricht. An important factor in David and later Gabriel Salzinger’s choice of where to live seems to be the trauma associated with a particular place. The detailed narratives about the older Salzingers’ persecution

122

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

in Nazi Germany and the devastation of the Jewish community seem to preclude Jews from living in Germany again. However, Israel also represents a site of trauma for David, and he characterizes the ideology of the Jewish state as aggressive and militant. Gabriel has internalized his father’s pronouncements and his criticism of the kibbutzim and Israeli nationalist speech. According to David, Zionist rhetoric with its clichés and declamatory tenor – ‘Man erzog nicht die Jugend, sondern schuf einen “neuen Menschen”’ (LW 106) – seems to have been a factor in his return to Germany. Most important, the aforementioned gun fight marked the turning point for him (LW 93106). After shooting an unarmed man, his comrade Schlomo maintains: ‘“Wir müssen so werden wie alle Völker. Sonst bleiben wir für immer das auserwählte Volk, das Opfervolk [...]”’ (LW 105). The concluding statement in the episode that after the murder David returned to the ‘Land der Mörder’ (LW 107), is profoundly ironic and recalls Edgar Hilsenrath’s satirical novel Der Nazi und der Friseur (1977) 35 and its harsh message that all post-Holocaust countries are countries of murderers. Hilsenrath’s protagonist, a Nazi mass murderer, is transplanted to Israel, where he becomes a model citizen. Hilsenrath’s and Vertlib’s narratives imply that individuals must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis to determine who the murderers are. Both dismiss the ideological condemnation or glorification of any collective. David Salzinger’s discomfort with Germany and Israel – according to Gabriel he never felt at ease in either country – is the reason why the son chooses the ocean as the last resting place for his father. Gabriel recalls that what David enjoyed the most after escaping from Nazi Germany was the voyage across the Mediterranean (LW 69). 36 Gabriel’s reciting Kaddish in this key episode reveals that he is cognizant of the Jewish son’s duty to say this prayer for his parents, while the ‘burial’ off the shore of the North Sea attests to his casual attitude toward ritual. It does mirror, however, the attitude of his father who poked fun at religious people (LW 45). As he goes along, Gabriel creates his own religious practices, adhering to some of the traditional elements and dismissing others. He treats religion as a personal matter. Again, the similarity between father and son is striking: despite his alienation from organized religion, David owned books on Jewish topics, even books in Hebrew, a fact that he did not discuss with anyone. This solipsistic approach to religion becomes

Vladimir Vertlib’s Letzter Wunsch

123

problematic when Gabriel is faced with his father’s remains. Remembering some of the ritual requirements, he makes superficial attempts at cleaning the body (LW 42-3), but realizes that he needs help as he is incapable of fulfilling his father’s last wish and the ritual requirements by himself (LW 44-5). At this point, he contacts the Jewish authorities after being rejected by them. Gabriel then still needs Michael’s help for the secret burial at sea. Vertlib’s choice of basic human situations – the relationship between father and son, death and burial – that traditionally require community involvement puts the concept of individualism to the test but points to a community crisis as well. The latter is caused by the disaffection or indifference of young people toward religious life justified, in part, by the rigidity of the religious establishment. Already David participated only hesitantly in community affairs, for example, commemorations for Holocaust survivors, as he maintained that ‘“[e]s war immer zu spät”’ (LW 75). Gabriel was raised outside the Jewish community and is a stranger to it, but he has no place among his German contemporaries either. His dealings with the Jewish community and the German public both make him realize that he stands alone (LW 59; 61). The marginal position of the Jewish community before and after the Holocaust shows how extreme Gabriel’s position as a Jewish outsider actually is. The imbalance between Jews, Roman Catholics and Protestants is readily apparent from their respective cemeteries. The Catholic part has ‘ein imposantes, weiß gestrichenes Tor, über dem zwei rundbäuchige Engel thronen’ (LW 65). The Lutheran part is more modest, but the small Jewish section is surrounded by a stone wall two meters high – begging the question whether this is to protect the graves or to ensure that the dead will not return. At the Jewish community center Gabriel notices the tight security which signals the exceptional status of the venue (LW 61). He then learns that without the new minority population of Russian immigrants, the end of the community of twenty or so German Jews, most of them advanced in years, would be in sight (LW 54). Among the two minorities at the center, Gabriel, who does not fit into either group, constitutes a minority of one. His situation at work is similar. Gabriel is treated like an outsider and his termination is expected any day. Indeed, his job at the insurance company seems unnecessary. He, in turn, is reminiscent of the

124

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

protagonist in Heinrich Böll’s short story ‘Es wird etwas geschehen’ (1956) in his lack of work ethic and professionalism (LW 25). 37 When he does leave his job after the radio show because he cannot bear the pressure any longer, he is not replaced (LW 322; 324-5). 38 Only at that point does Gabriel notice that he, like his father, worked in a hostile and latently anti-Semitic environment (LW 327). The motif of being unaware of one’s outsider position calls to mind Jurek Becker’s protagonist Hans in Bronsteins Kinder, who realizes only after his father has kidnapped a former Kapo to take revenge, how closely his own existence is tied up with the Nazi past and the Holocaust and how little he is integrated in the East German ‘Workers’ and Farmers’ State.’ 39 The fact that Vertlib resumes the theme of Jewish otherness and exclusion in Letzter Wunsch, which appeared seventeen years after Becker’s novel, and is set in a Western-style democracy rather than an Eastern Bloc country, signals that he regards anti-Semitism as a continually active and ubiquitous force. The Salzingers’ marginality is further expressed in geographical terms, by the location of David Salzinger’s apartment at the edge of a dilapidated housing development, a ‘sozialer Wohnbau’ (LW 29). Since his wife’s death, David lived as a widower (similar to Becker’s Arno Bronstein), and his relationship to his son is not particularly close. The constellations in the Salzinger family in general undermine the cliché of the close-knit Jewish family. Letzter Wunsch discusses the disintegration of the family in geographic, political and personal terms. David and Gabriel and son do not know the majority of their relatives, most of whom reside abroad and bear a resentment against Germany: ‘Meine Großmutter hatte mich, den Zweijährigen in den Armen gehalten. “Es ist eine Schande, daß aus diesem Kind ein Deutscher wird”, soll sie gesagt haben’ (LW 84), Gabriel remembers. The motif of growing up without a mother is an important theme as well and again calls to mind Becker’s Bronsteins Kinder. Motherlessness is the ultimate expression of the male protagonist’s isolation in his incomplete family with its disturbed gender balance – unlike Becker’s Hans Bronstein, Gabriel does not have a sister. Yet, he notes that he did not experience being without a mother as a disadvantage. At school he found it easy to win his teachers’ good graces, and his mother’s lady friends doted on him (LW 87). In contrast, Gabriel’s ties to his relatives were always weak. He resents his eccentric Uncle Robert for being an embarrassing freeloader, and the latter’s daughter

Vladimir Vertlib’s Letzter Wunsch

125

avoids him. There is no communication between Gabriel and his ‘transatlantic’ relatives (LW 31). The incompatibility of the family members and Gabriel’s earlier positive associations with other people seem to support individualistic notions that place friendship above family ties. Yet, this assumption is revoked when in the face of catastrophe all of the casual associations break down, except the friendship with Michael. The institution of marriage is also put to the test. Whereas David’s last wish (‘“[…] In Mutters Grab”’ [LW 38]) suggests a special bond between husband and wife, the notion that marriage is a site of intimacy and gratification is questioned throughout the novel. Gabriel’s mother seems to have married David because eligible Jewish men were hard to find, and she would not marry a non-Jew. Thus two fundamentally different people entered a union: a sociable vibrant woman and a withdrawn man, who did not like his wife’s friends (LW 84). His statement, ‘“[d]eine Mutter beherrscht meine Erinnerungen, aber nicht meine Träume”’ (LW 89), suggests that he may have felt oppressed in the relationship. Gabriel, who knew little about his father’s intimate life, is disappointed to find out that his mother was something like a femme fatale, perhaps even a home wrecker (LW 86). He is no less surprised to learn that his father, instead of remarrying, was the regular client of a prostitute (LW 89). These instances indicate that even the members of a nuclear family are strangers to one another. Gabriel’s conflict-ridden Viennese marriage is another example. When the couple realizes that they will not have children due to a genetic defect that afflicts Gabriel, they divorce ‘amicably’ (LW 198; 202). It appears that the mutual project of having a child, rather than genuine affection, provided the bond between them. The events leading up to Gabriel’s discovery that he is fated to be the last of the Salzingers (LW 199) are narrated with black humor free of mawkishness. Gabriel’s discovery is connected to allusions to the demise of the Jews of Vienna. The site where Gabriel struggles with the diagnosis of infertility is Vienna’s Second District, where, as he recalls, ‘Vor ihrer Vertreibung oder Ermordung waren hier die meisten der zweihunderttausend Wiener Juden zu Hause’ (LW 200). The connection Vertlib draws between Gabriel’s personal misfortune which absolves Gabriel from the community ties he may have felt until that point, and the genocide with its catastrophic consequences

126

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

for Jewish culture brings to the fore the incongruities of the world in which Gabriel lives and with which he must come to terms. The father-son relationship takes priority over the mother-child relationship, but it is a problematic relationship. Because of Gabriel’s inability to have sons, its significance seems reduced to irrelevance. While David still has a son to say Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, for him Gabriel does not. 40 Gabriel cannot fight David’s legacy on the physical level: he is becoming more and more like his father in his gestures, his ‘Jewish appearance,’ and his diction (LW 116). This resemblance intensifies with age, and reveals an affinity based on the genetic makeup and socialization. These represent elements in the mosaic of Gabriel’s individuality but, as the narrative reveals through its complexity, they are by no means the only or the most important ones. Vertlib also explores sexuality as a defining factor in his protagonist’s personality. It is apparent that Gabriel’s relationships are casual and produce no lasting bonds. He has a lover, Christine, a divorcee, who cannot be counted on as a partner and whose life seemingly revolves around her appearance (LW 43). They have an afternoon affair, and Gabriel does not even know her living quarters (LW 84). Another woman, Ute, had a crush on him since high school, but her background poses a problem as she is the daughter of a Nazi (LW 82). Gabriel has a one-night stand with her that does not lead to a continued relationship. Neither woman, both of whom he considers close friends, are able to offer him much-needed support in his crisis (LW 329-30). A psychological trait shaping Gabriel’s intimate life is his dislike of physical closeness, which suggests a reason for his failing relationships. ‘Gibt es einen schamloseren Eingriff in die Privatsphäre als die Berührungen eines Menschen, der einem nicht nahesteht?’ (LW 108), he asks and takes even the social hugs of acquaintances as an affront. He also avoids being touched by his physician (LW 193). Maintaining his personal space and boundaries, keeping other people at bay, Gabriel seeks to avoid physical or emotional closeness. To him friendships, like the one he forges with Michael, are alliances based on mutual interests. Gabriel’s infertility constitutes the primary instance of involuntary isolation. While his divorce does not seem to have affected him very much, he notes that he stayed married for as long as he did for fear of having to start all over again. However, he stresses that he wanted

Vladimir Vertlib’s Letzter Wunsch

127

children more than anything (LW 195). In the Jewish tradition procreation is, as Cynthia Cohen writes, inseparable from social goods and relations. Having children, forming a family, and, more broadly, a people who as heirs will prosper is essential to Jewish thought. Procreation is the primary purpose of marriage in the Hebraic tradition. […] Having children is the way to social identity and to the survival of Israel as a people. 41

Hence, Gabriel, by virtue of his physical makeup is excluded from forming a complete Jewish social identity. A process of exclusion conducive to his individuation also occurs in the public sphere. Gabriel is denied support in his conflict with the Jewish community. Two factors work in his disfavor: After the Holocaust, Germans, notably public figures, are hesitant to take sides against Jewish organizations but others still harbor anti-Semitic perceptions and attitudes. The editor of the Gigricht newspaper wants to avoid controversy because he is afraid of retributions for publishing ‘Negativpropaganda’ against the Jewish establishment (LW 267). A leader in the Jewish community, Rabbi Pinchas Horowitz, albeit socially more skillful and superficially more welcoming, puts Gabriel in his place by engaging him in a philosophical conversation over dinner without offering an acceptable solution or even a compromise (LW 298). Finally, Gabriel’s public exposure provokes anonymous calls and death threats (LW 318-9). The friendship between the two outsiders Gabriel and Michael invites a re-examination of the attempted alliance between Jews, who grew up after the Holocaust, and members of the new German Left of the 1968 student movement. Jewish authors, among them Lea Fleischmann in Dies ist nicht mein Land (1981) and Ruth Beckermann in Unzugehörig (1989) had considered this rapprochement, which appeared natural at the time, a failure because of the young antiFascists’ indifference toward the Holocaust and anti-Semitism under the guise of anti-Zionism. 42 Vertlib revisits these issues by identifying the nonconformist remnants of the Hippie generation as the only possible ally for his disaffected Jewish protagonist, not because the two have so much in common, but because Michael represents the ‘ideale Mensch, mit dem man schweigen kann’ (LW 82). Contained in this assessment is an acknowledgment of the differences between Gabriel and Michael that have to remain unspoken. More importantly,

128

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

it recognizes the common interests arising from both men’s condemnation of the Nazi past and those who want to ignore or rehabilitate it. In other words, Michael’s silence is far preferable to the talk of revisionists. The constellation Gabriel/Michael is a hidden tribute to the highly productive collaboration between Jewish authors and filmmakers and non-Jewish liberals and leftists in Austria since the 1980s. Even though this relationship has often not been acknowledged in the earlier critical Jewish publications of the 1980s, when the distinctive character of Jewish intellectual life needed to be emphasized, it was through the sustained cooperation of non-Jewish artists and the joint projects by Lukas Stepanik, Bernd Neuburger, Wilhelm Pevny with Jewish authors and filmmakers such as Ruth Beckermann, Robert Schindel, and Nadja Seelich that a prolific Jewish intellectual scene was established. During and after the Waldheim affair in 1986 and the ensuing scandals involving the so-called ‘Freedom Party,’ a highly visible debate culture formed in Vienna in which Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals participated side by side, for example Elfriede Jelinek, Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer, Marlene Streeruwitz, Robert Menasse and Doron Rabinovici. 43 The Bohemian character of this movement and its members is suggested by the freewheeling lifestyle of Gabriel and Michael. The latter is unmarried, perhaps even a virgin; he lives in a tiny apartment, does not care for his appearance, and is often taken for a bum. His chosen occupation as a carpenter and his hobby as a sailor leave him a maximum of independence (LW 82). This representative of a discredited counterculture and the elusive secular Jew turn out to be more compatible in the age of globalization than they seemed before the end of the Cold War. The constellation of Gabriel and Michael as complementary nomadic outsiders, calls to mind the motif of the male pair in search of new horizons, which has become a favorite topos at the turn of the millennium, for example Doron Rabinovici’s Suche nach M. (1997), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002), Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road (2007), and Ilija Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler (2006). The protagonists of these international works represent the ultimate social drop-out. In Foer and Vertlib, the death of a father-figure is the occasion when illumination occurs and new paths for the protagonists open up. The film version of Everything is Illuminated (dir. Liev Schreiber, 2005) ends with the burial of a grandfather, the last link to the survivor generation as well as the

Vladimir Vertlib’s Letzter Wunsch

129

Nazis and Bolsheviks. Unraveling his life story and eventually the old man’s suicide sets the perplexed protagonist free to become his own person. Vertlib’s novel ends with Salzinger’s calling out ‘Kaddish’ at the North Sea – the very ocean to which Heinrich Heine, who stood at the beginning of the history of Emancipation and German-Jewish literature, devoted his Nordsee cycle of poetry. Letzter Wunsch, while not offering an optimistic ending, conveys a cautious affirmation of Gabriel’s new individuality: For the first time in a long time, he says, he has a feeling of being entirely one with himself (LW 380). Rather than celebrating the renewal of Jewish community life or the integration of a stray individual into the fold, Vertlib’s novel about illicit border crossings and a secret burial calls for a cosmopolitan individualism based on a supranational, supra-sectarian model. Notes 1

Bethan Benwell and Elizabeth Stokoe, Discourse and Identity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006, observe: ‘The modern era in which we currently live has been defined as de-industrialized “high,” “late” or “post”modernity (end of the twentieth/early twenty-first century), and frequently characterised by fragmentation, relativism, a merging of the public and private sphere and a de-centering or “dislocating” of the self […]. The processes of globalization arguably compound this dislocation. Such processes are characterised by faster and closer connections across geographical space […] and an increase in the mediation of experience by, for instance, mass printed and electronic media […]’ (p. 22). 2

Vladimir Vertlib, ‘Jude, wie interessant!’, in: Helga Embacher, ed., Juden in Salzburg, Salzburg: Pustet, 2002, pp. 104-11 (here: pp. 109-11): ‘Doch Salzburg ist für mich in erster Linie ein Ort der Arbeit und nicht der Muße. Fast alle meine Texte sind in dieser Stadt entstanden. [...] Hier finde ich die nötige Distanz zu mir selbst, denn im Unterschied zu Wien, Boston oder Rom ist für mich Salzburg “neutrales Territorium” […]. In Salzburg bin ich auch, mehr aus grundsätzlichen denn aus religiösen Gründen, der Kultusgemeinde beigetreten.’ 3

Vladimir Vertlib, Abschiebung. Erzählung, Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1995. Other texts discussed are: Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur, Vienna: Deuticke, 2001; Letzter Wunsch, Vienna: Deuticke, 2003. All further references of Letzter Wunsch in the text as: LW.

4

Vladimir Vertlib, ‘Das gebrochene Bild des Eigenen. Wie aus Emigrationserfahrungen und Familienlegenden “historische Romane” entstehen’, in: Vertlib, Spiegel im fremden Wort. Die Erfindung des Lebens als Literatur. Dresdener Chamisso-Poetikvorlesungen 2006, Dresden: Thelem, 2007, pp. 68-114, discusses the

130

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

relationship between his experiences and his writing. These lectures also provide information about the author’s approach to transforming autobiographical and historical material into fiction and about the temporal structure he had in mind (pp. 71-2). 5

Liam Harte, ‘Migrancy, Performativity, and Autobiographical Identity’, Irish Studies Review, 14:2 (2002), 225-38 (here: p. 226).

6

Marianne Hirsch, ‘Moving Beyond the Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today, 29:1 (2008), 103-28, defines postmemory as follows: ‘Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right’ (p. 103). In this manner, Gabriel relates the fate of his great-grandmother Konstanze Lindenthaler and other family members before and under the Nazi regime, replete with details that only an eyewitness can know (LW 135-48).

8

Vertlib, ‘Jude’, p. 110.

9

Hans-Joachim Hahn, ‘“Europa” als neuer “jüdischer Raum”? – Diana Pintos Thesen und Vladimir Vertlibs Romane’, in: Helmut Schmitz, ed., Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur. Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009, pp. 295-310 (here: p. 310).

10

Katrin Molnár, ‘“Die bessere Welt war immer anderswo”. Literarische Heimatkonstruktionen bei Jakob Hessing, Chaim Noll, Wladimir Kaminer und Vladimir Vertlib im Kontext von Alija, jüdischer Diaspora und säkularer Migration’, in: Schmitz, ed., Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur, pp. 311-36 (here: p. 326): ‘Egal, auf welchem Territorium kollektiver Identität sich der Erzähler bewegt, stets bleibt eine Fremdheit in Eigen- wie Fremdperspektive an ihm haften.’

11

Ibid., p. 328.

12

Vladimir Vertlib, Zwischenstationen, Vienna: Deuticke, 1999. See Molnár, ‘“Die bessere Welt war immer anderswo”’, p. 328. 13

‘“Ihre Großmutter ist für uns offiziell immer noch Nichtjüdin, und somit ist auch Ihr Vater kein Jude”’ (LW 132). Regarding the concept of ‘thoratreu’ in contrast to ‘orthodoxe Siedler in den besetzten Gebieten im Westjordanland und im Gazastreifen,’ see Claus Nordbruch, ‘Ein ästhetischer Genuß’, Deutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2-4 (2006), 34-9. 14 Lea Fleischmann, Dies ist nicht mein Land, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1980; Cordelia Edvardson, Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer, trans. Anna-Liese Kornitzky, Munich: Hanser, 1986; Barbara Honigmann, Roman von einem Kinde, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1986; Ruth Beckermann, Unzugehörig, Vienna: Löcker, 1981.

Vladimir Vertlib’s Letzter Wunsch

131

15

Pierre Birnbaum and Jean Leca, ‘Introduction’, in: P. Birnbaum and J. Leca, eds., Individualism. Theory and Methods, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. 1-14 (here: p. 4). 16 In Ilse Aichinger’s narrative Die größere Hoffnung, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1948, the protagonist Ellen, who, like Vertlib’s Hermine Salzinger, can choose between a Jewish and a non-Jewish identity, chooses the former and enters on a path of selfrealization based on free choice. Vertlib, in contrast, presents multiple factors contributing to his protagonist’s individuation, many of them not of his own making and choice. 17 Tom G. Palmer, ‘Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and Personal Identity’, Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, 5:2 (2003), 1-15 (here: p. 9). Available online at: http://www2.units.it/~etica/2003_2/palmer.pdf (accessed 14 November 2009). 18

Matti Bunzl, ‘Counter-Memory and Modes of Resistance; the Uses of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna for Present-Day Austrian Jews’, in: Dagmar C. G. Lorenz and Renate Posthofen, eds., Transforming the Center, Eroding the Margins. Essays on Ethnic and Cultural Boundaries in German-Speaking Countries, Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998, pp. 169-84 (here: p. 172). 19

Vertlib, Zwischenstationen, p. 291.

20

Robert Schindel, Gebürtig, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1994; Doron Rabinovici, Suche nach M., Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997; Ruth Beckermann (dir.), Die papierene Brücke, Vienna: filmladen, 1987; Lukas Stepanik (dir.), Kieselsteine, Satel Film, 1982.

21 Vertlib’s first publication is a research report titled Osteuropäische Zuwanderung nach Österreich (1976-1991), unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der jüdischen Immigration aus der ehemaligen Sowjetunion: quantitative und qualitative Aspekte, Vienna: Institut für Demographie, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1995. 22

Mikhail Bulgakov, Ivan Turgenev, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky come to mind. At a presentation at the University of Illinois at Chicago on 16 November 2004, Vertlib mentioned that Russian authors, with whose works he grew up, influenced his writing considerably. See also Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, ‘Vladimir Vertlib, a Global Intellectual: Exile, Migration, and Individualism in the Narratives of a Russian Jewish Author in Austria’, in: Todd C. Hanlin, ed., Beyond Vienna. Contemporary Literature from the Austrian Provinces, Riverside: Ariadne, 2008, pp. 230-61. 23

Jakob Wassermann, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude, Berlin: Fischer, 1921.

132

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

24

Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

25

Hermann Kurthen, Werner Bergmann and Rainer Erb, ‘Introduction’, in: H. Kurthen, W. Bergmann and R. Erb, eds., Antisemitism and Xenophobia in Germany after Unification, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 3-19, examine the complex situation in the old and new German ‘Bundesländer’ and, while acknowledging the presence of anti-Semitic attitudes in West and East, argue that these attitudes are decreasing (pp. 3; 5). 26

Vertlib, ‘Jude’, pp. 107-8.

27 Brigid Haines, ‘Poetics of the “Gruppenbild”: The Fictions of Vladimir Vertlib’, German Life and Letters, 62 (2009), 233-44. Russian literature with which he had grown up was an important influence in his writing. See also Lorenz, ‘Vladimir Vertlib, a Global Intellectual’, pp. 233-4. 28

Vertlib, ‘Jude’, pp. 108-9.

29

See Vertlib’s lectures on poetics, Spiegel im fremden Wort. Die Erfindung des Lebens als Literatur, Dresden: Thelem, 2007, where he comments as follows: ‘In der Abschiebung wird eine Zeitspanne im Sommer und Herbst 1980 beschrieben, aber es gibt Rückblenden, die bis in die Kriegszeit zurückreichen’ (p. 71). Referring to Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur, he remarks that the framing narrative is set in 1999, but the episodes in the main part date back to the years 1910-53. 30 Vladimir Vertlib, ‘Wo die Lebenswelten sich berühren’, in: Barbara Tobler, ed., Mattersburg. Literarische Stadtbilder. Bibliothek der Provinz, Weitra: Bibliothek der Provinz, 2002, pp. 93-105; see also my translation of this text, ‘Where Life-Worlds Converge: Reflections on a Visit To Mattersburg’, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 25:1 (2006), 5-15. 31

Sander L. Gilman, ‘Becoming a Jew by Becoming a German: The Newest Jewish Writing from the “East”’, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 25:1 (2006), 16-32, writes that ‘these new German Jews, mainly from the Soviet Union perpetuate an ethnic identity for the Jews (in the older vocabulary a “national” identity as inscribed on their passports). The value of such an identity, in their focus on transforming themselves into Jews in Germany, is that it is malleable. Indeed, they believe that they can become Jewish by becoming German […]. Becoming Jewish means becoming German, or at least becoming Jewish in the sense of a German Jewish sensibility’ (p. 16). 32

Dan Diner, ‘Negative Symbiosis: Germans and Jews after Auschwitz’, in: Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, eds., The Holocaust. Theoretical Readings, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003, pp. 422-30.

Vladimir Vertlib’s Letzter Wunsch

133

33

‘“[...] Was wollen Sie in erster Linie sein? Ein Mensch oder ein braver Jude?”’ (LW 258). 34

See the quote in note 13.

35

Edgar Hilsenrath, Der Nazi und der Friseur, Cologne: Literarischer Verlag Braun, 1977.

36 ‘An der Reling stehen und das Meer betrachten, die schäumenden Wellen, die Möwen im Sturzflug, den Nebel am Horizont’ (LW 69). 37 Heinrich Böll, ‘Es wird etwas geschehen: Eine handlungsstarke Geschichte’, in: Böll, Nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit, Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1974, pp. 81-6. 38

He feels as he imagined his grandfather felt during the Nazi era (LW 324).

39

Jurek Becker, Bronsteins Kinder, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986.

40

On the significance of a son’s speaking Kaddish for his parents see Ismar Ellenbogen, Der jüdische Gottesdienst in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung, Hildesheim: Olms, 1995, p. 95.

41

Cynthia B. Cohen, ‘Religious Belief, Politics, and Public Bioethics: A Challenge to Political Liberalism’, The Park Ridge Center for Health, Faith, and Ethics, at: http:// www.parkridgecenter.org/Page509.html (accessed 14 November 2009). 42 43

See Jean Améry, ‘Der ehrbare Antisemitismus’, Die Zeit, 25 July 1969, 16.

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, ‘Gedächtnis und Generation: Historisches Gedächtnis im jüdischen Schreiben der Zweiten Republik’, in: Heidemarie Uhl, ed., Transformationen gesellschaftlicher Erinnerung. Studien zur ‘Gedächtnisgeschichte’ der Zweiten Republik, Vienna: Turia & Kant, 2005, pp. 191-217.

Muriel Cormican Normalization and the Ethics of Holocaust Representation in Vilsmaier’s Leo und Claire and Comedian Harmonists Scholars of German film rightly concern themselves with the possibility that German narratives about the Holocaust normalize the German past, help their recipients forget as much as they help them remember, and fail to represent the Holocaust responsibly. This article suggests that a bird’s eye perspective on German Holocaust Cinema has emerged, resulting in a reduction of productive, thorny, and complex details of individual films. Arguing for a supplementing of this perspective, it offers close analyses of two Vilsmaier films, revealing their sophisticated, self-reflexive character and thus the director’s investment in and struggle with the ethics of Holocaust representation. ‘[…] know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same time never will you know’ (Maurice Blanchot) 1

Many Holocaust scholars have long seen fictional literature about the Holocaust as disquieting. Saul Friedländer, Lawrence Langer, Raul Hilberg, and Irving Howe, among others, have questioned or contested the use of the Holocaust as the subject of, or a figure in, fictional literature. Irving Howe argues, for example, that the literary imagination could not possibly ‘intelligibly render the gassing of 12,000 people a day at Auschwitz.’ 2 There has been much support for Elie Wiesel’s famous aphoristic rendering of the relationship between the literary imagination and the Holocaust: ‘A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel, or else it is not about Auschwitz.’3 Many critics fear that a temptation for fiction authors would be ‘to search for some redemptive token, some cry of retribution, some balancing of judgment against history’s evil, some sign of ultimate spiritual triumph. It is as if, through the retrospect of language, they would lend a tragic aura.’ 4 How much more so then would Holocaust films have to be questioned for their visual representations? Film offers the same kind of fictionalization that concerns critics in literature and adds a visualization and dramatization of the kinds of events that many argue cannot be adequately represented or visualized. For Irving Howe, any work

136

Muriel Cormican

about the Holocaust is always already deprived of one of the driving forces of fiction and certainly the driving force of many recent German films about the Holocaust, namely drama. The dramatization of the events of the Holocaust is, in and of itself, a problem because it must necessarily falsify, he argues. It must create a pretense that people had some choice in their actions, some permission and ability to make decisions when, in fact, ‘[t]he basic minimum of freedom to choose and act that is a central postulate of drama had been taken from the victims.’ 5 In the foreword to Annette Insdorf’s Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel addresses the medium of film specifically and criticizes what he sees as its excessive tendencies. He does allow, however, for some exceptions: Certain productions dazzle with their authenticity; others shock with their vulgarity. Night and Fog on the one side, Holocaust on the other. Up against Hollywood super productions, can poetic memory hold its own? Me, I prefer it. I prefer restraint to excess, the murmur of documentary to the script edited by tearjerk specialists. To direct the massacre of Babi Yar smells of blasphemy. To make up extras as corpses is obscene. Perhaps I am too severe, too demanding, but the Holocaust as filmed, romantic adventure seems to me an outrage to the memory of the dead, and to sensitivity. 6

Wiesel’s reduction of film to two possibilities, ‘the murmur of documentary’ and ‘the script edited by tear-jerk specialists,’ is questionable because it inaugurates a juxtaposition in which one side always represents sensitive documentation that reveals good intentions and the other manipulative fictionalization that exposes bad intentions. It privileges the voices of historians, critics, poets, and documentary filmmakers over those of other filmmakers and disregards the fact that the latter might share the desire to try to understand that which can possibly never be understood and to express that which can possibly never be adequately expressed. It denies that these filmmakers too might be constantly returning to the site of trauma in an attempt to deal once and for all with that which can never be dealt with definitively. The ubiquitous assumption that testament, historical writings, and documentary films about the Holocaust are not susceptible to the much feared search for redemptive meaning or spiritual triumph in which feature films and fiction might indulge is surely problematic. If the extremity of the experience of the Holocaust is ineffable, then all forms of representation, including our own

Vilsmaier’s Leo und Claire and Comedian Harmonists

137

critical analyses of Holocaust fiction and film, must be susceptible to similar problems. Although the kinds of criticisms of fiction and film about the Holocaust sketched in broad strokes here ring true to some degree, the discourse takes recourse to the same rhetoric and sentimentality of which it accuses fiction and film, creating an aura around the Holocaust by referring repeatedly to its ineffability and reducing it to gut-wrenching, pithy phrases such as ‘12,000 people a day at Auschwitz.’ 7 It is hardly possible to read this phrase and not experience a visceral reaction; yet, an emotional response cannot be attributed simply to Irving Howe’s manipulation of his readers. Rather, an emotional response seems unavoidable in the face of a series of extreme events to which one does not easily become inured. As critics we are, of course, not beyond the kind of manipulation (unintentional or other) often imputed to fiction authors or feature film directors. Potential manipulations aside, it is difficult to conceive of a way of giving testament, writing historical narrative, writing a novel, or directing a film about the events of the Holocaust that will not stir the emotions of any thinking and feeling human being. To neatly split off non-fictional discourse as a site of documentation that does not run the same risks as the literary or filmic imagination is not credible. To see only the literary and filmic imaginations as manipulative and thus read any emotional responses they might evoke as directly related to manipulation and to see historical and critical discourses as sober and thus read any emotional responses they might evoke as an unavoidable side-effect of documenting the Holocaust sets up a series of tidy but ultimately false binaries. This is not to say that there are not always questions that must be asked about feature films’ representations, indeed about all representations, of the Holocaust. How accurate, sensitive, ideologically and politically sound are their depictions of the relationships between Germans and Jews? Do they partake in the commodification of the Holocaust as some recent German-Jewish critics such as Esther Dischereit and Rafael Seligmann have argued? Seligmann, speaking not only of German Holocaust films but also of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and Benigni’s Life is beautiful (1997), accuses filmmakers in general of being ‘eine Reihe von Trittbrettfahrern, die den Holocaust als Investition, als eine “gute Aktie” betrachten.’ 8 In an article entitled ‘Jakob und seine Brüder,’ Georg Seeßlen discusses the wave of Holocaust films then emerging, the American Jacob the Liar

138

Muriel Cormican

(Kassovitz, 1999), Der Vulkan (Runze, 1999), Aimée und Jaguar (Färberböck, 1999), and Gloomy Sunday: Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod (Schübel, 1999). 9 Just as other critics have questioned the suitability of treating the Holocaust in literature, he questions the suitability of treating it in film. Criticizing German film for being a profit-making, co-opted part of the popular culture industry, Seeßlen argues that it has neither a didactic nor social utopian impetus. For him, these films are nothing more than an attempt to entertain and to help viewers forget as much as, or more than, they remember. 10 The GermanAmerican scholar Lutz Koepnick has also been at least implicitly critical of German films set in the 1930s and 1940s, arguing that they offer ‘panoramic views of the German past’ as ‘[t]hey resort to Hollywood conventions and elaborate special effects so as to reinscribe blocked national narratives and transform the work of memory into an overwhelming ride through space and time.’ 11 Koepnick’s conceptualization of the films as ‘a ride through time and space’ points fairly obviously to a comparison with the rides in an amusement park. Though he does not come right out and say it in this particular essay, he implies that these films are made for entertainment and commercial purposes primarily and that they may – though Koepnick seems at pains to avoid making judgment on the aesthetic qualities and political agendas of the films he mentions – be problematically participating in what has derogatorily been termed ‘Shoah business.’ 12 The GermanJewish feuilletonist Henryk Broder argues, by contrast, that a movie theater is not a correctional facility and cannot be expected to constantly impart weighty and politically correct messages. 13 What are we to do then with this variety of positions on Holocaust films? Is it a problem that since the nineties German cinema in general, in films such as Das schreckliche Mädchen (Verhoeven, 1990), Rosenstraße (von Trotta, 2003), Gloomy Sunday, Aimée und Jaguar (Färberböck, 1999), Comedian Harmonists (Vilsmaier, 1997) and Leo und Claire (Vilsmaier, 2001), has started to depict love relationships between Germans and Jews in the 1930s, offer redemptive depictions of Germans during the Holocaust, focus on German suffering as well as German culpability, and, most recently in Das Wunder von Bern (Wortmann, 2003), revisit the kind of feel-good national successes that for so long were too reminiscent of the fascism of Hitler’s Germany to be widely accepted? If the majority of Holocaust films currently being produced in Germany, whether based

Vilsmaier’s Leo und Claire and Comedian Harmonists

139

on truth or not, downplay the murderous role of Germans in the Holocaust and normalize relations between Germans and Jews instead, can that be linked to the establishment of a problematically selfredemptive national narrative? Do such films participate in reactive cultural politics? Do they, whether inadvertently or not, confer a certain fictionality on events of the Holocaust? These important questions have already been asked of most German Holocaust films and tend to yield similar answers: problems exist. Perhaps there is something to be gained, however, from attempting to read German Holocaust films beyond these pre-established contexts, as individual works rather than merely as signs of a potentially problematic, selfdefensive surge in nationalist sentiment. When we read these films as texts that tell us something about contemporary memory making in Germany and its tie to the emergence of a more positive national narrative, we ourselves engage in the construction of yet another German national narrative, one that pathologizes Germans by seeing their interest in remembering the Holocaust as always already suspicious. In doing so, we use a filter that blinds us to aspects of these films. What is presented as the analysis of how these films participate in the construction of a national narrative becomes itself the construction of a counter-narrative with its own particular problems and limitations. In the discussions of individual German Holocaust films in Germany and elsewhere, there has certainly been criticism of the content and tendencies of such films. Esther Dischereit abhors Max Färberböck’s depiction of Felice Schragenheim in Aimée und Jaguar and sees no positive potential at all in the film, and Wolfgang Benz rails against what he sees as the historical inaccuracies of von Trotta’s Rosenstraße. 14 But the more common motivating factor in these criticisms of Holocaust films seems to be the films’ ties to big money, commerce and the popular culture industry. At stake is perhaps in the end the split between High and Low culture and the pervasive idea that that which is academic and reaches an educated audience has less chance of being co-opted and corrupted than that which is accessible and reaches a wide, paying audience. This perspective supports readings of these films that overlook their modernist and postmodernist aspects, their self-reflexive acknowledgement of their participation in potentially problematic representational practices and of their own complicity in the staging and thus potential commodification of the

140

Muriel Cormican

Holocaust. 15 A further problem hearkens back to the overly simplistic split between representational modes and its concomitant division of people into two groups: filmmakers and fiction authors who use and abuse the Holocaust for financial gain and serious scholars, historians, and documentarians who act as the ethics police and hold these filmmakers and authors accountable. Despite the fact that German Holocaust films tend to be part of a popular culture industry that is driven by financial concerns, several of them constitute evenhanded responses to the Holocaust and offer serious and worthwhile vehicles for thinking not only about the Holocaust but also about the very ‘demands of Holocaust representation’ about which critics agonize. 16 To be sure, one of the issues that heavily influence the readings of Holocaust films is that they are a medium in which the real world and the diegetic space of the film become inextricably intertwined. Critics have, for example, invoked historical narratives and have drawn lists of the films’ deviations from and adherences to traditional historical understandings of the event(s) they seek to represent, interpreting perceived inaccuracies as the filmmaker’s conspiratorial rewriting of history in the interests of a normalization of the German past. 17 It is implausible to attribute to the filmmakers who make these films less concern with propriety and with remaining eternally vigilant than to the critics who write about the films. Seeing critics and filmmakers as good and bad carriers of the message of the Holocaust respectively gives way to a false dichotomy, dividing them into two distinct groups: those (critics) who understand the demands of Holocaust representation and those (filmmakers) who do not but who represent the Holocaust anyway. Close readings of several films beyond the context of a problematic construction of a new national narrative need not minimize the concerns expressed within the discourse on that construction but can reveal that German filmmakers and the critics are often struggling with the same pitfalls and aporias. Whatever their shortcomings, several recent German Holocaust films are important individual narrative pieces in an enormous and inexhaustible narrative about the Nazi genocide. Two of Vilsmaier’s films about the Holocaust: Comedian Harmonists (1997) and Leo und Claire (2001) can serve as cases in point. 18 Both focus on German civilian life during the Third Reich and in particular on relationships between individual Germans and Jews, between bystanders and victims of the Holocaust. Inscrutable and

Vilsmaier’s Leo und Claire and Comedian Harmonists

141

mystifying to many scholars of the Holocaust, the bystander is a phenomenon that has been of interest to German filmmakers in the last decade, perhaps as a result of, or at least in direct response to, Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) and the Goldhagen debate in Germany. Notably, Vilsmaier’s films depict love relationships and friendships between Germans, generally bystanders, and Jews, in an odd and possibly inflammatory inversion of the dominant political and public relationship of Germans to Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. Clearly, in ideological and political terms, GermanJewish relations during this period are anything but a love story. The Nazis declared war on and committed genocide against the Jewish people. And yet, the simple premise of the relationships depicted in these films is fairly obviously a truism: even in times of war in which one group or nationality depicts and treats another group as the vile enemy that must be conquered and even, as was here the case, eradicated, relationships between individuals from these different groups can contradict the overriding political and ideological national paradigms. To that extent, these films would simply seem to depict one of many potential private relationships between individuals. Leo und Claire amounts to a filmic investigation of the central premise of Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners and reveals the director’s struggle with what Michael Rothberg identifies in his book Traumatic Realism as the: three fundamental demands that confronting the Holocaust makes on attempts at comprehension and representation: a demand for documentation, a demand for reflection on the formal limits of representation, and a demand for the risky public circulation of discourses on events. 19

In his study of life in the small courtyard in Nürnberg, a microcosm of Germany as it were, Vilsmaier attempts to document how ordinary Germans, concerned with the usual human vanities, became eager helpers in the Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Central to Leo und Claire is the examination of the tense escalation of petty resentments on the part of neighbors and how these resentments merge with, and are legitimized by, Nazi ideology. Absent – with few exceptions – the traditional iconography of Holocaust films (images of Hitler; large red flags with Swastikas; marching columns of Nazis; the Nazi youth), Leo und Claire focuses the viewer’s attention on how basic human

142

Muriel Cormican

indignation and parsimoniousness can grow into murderous conviction. Four motifs resonate meaningfully in the depiction of life in this enclosed space: the various prostheses made by Häberlein (from glass eyes to entire limbs), sexuality, mirrors, and voyeurism. This constellation provides a number of suggestive inroads into the problems of personal and national identity that precipitated ordinary Germans’ embrace of National Socialism in all of its murderous intent. Prostheses point toward a lack of something basic that others have and, at the same time, to an extension of the self, the attempt to make oneself whole again or to cover up a glaring difference or disability. They draw attention – literally and metaphorically – to the losses Germany experienced in World War I and to how those losses inaugurated a self-definition based on artificial constructs such as ‘Aryanism.’ Häberlein produces, repairs and sells these prostheses to his community and, at the outset of the film, seems to be the only person in the courtyard who is neither particularly disturbed nor titillated by Irene Scheffler’s arrival. He represents the only member of the courtyard who does not use her as a kind of sexual prosthesis. While all the other men, and even Magda, the Steinheils’ daughter, are shown seeking out good vantage points for the show through Scheffler’s window – she can be seen in the nude either washing herself or dancing – Häberlein goes about his business as usual, adjusting and building artificial limbs. He even defends Irene to his wife early on when she tries to blame her for Alex’s awakening sexuality: ‘Was kann die junge Frau denn dafür, wenn der Saubub schmutzige Gedanken hat.’ The Steinheils all have a reason to dislike Irene from the beginning: she distracts Alex’s attention away from Magda and she arouses Herrn Steinheil who subsequently rapes his wife. Mother Maisel does not like her because she distracts the son she has molded into her personal slave. Each person’s dislike for Irene grows out of a threat to their identity and to their understanding of their place within the world of the courtyard. Their hatred is then gradually deflected onto Leo Katzenberger because he has invited in, and has access to, the thing that threatens them all; although hatred of Irene is not legitimized by the state, hatred of Leo is. The completely irrational nature of their projections is highlighted in what marks Häberlein’s eventual turn against Leo. As he sits on the bed picking the lint from

Vilsmaier’s Leo und Claire and Comedian Harmonists

143

between his toes and listening to his wife blame Irene Scheffler for the stains in her son’s pajamas, he angrily shouts that Leo Katzenberger is responsible for his constipation too. Though seemingly disinterested in the interactions between Leo and Irene up to now, Häberlein quickly becomes the one who takes the leading role in asking Leo Katzenberger to deal with the problems Scheffler is perceived to cause and the leading role in denouncing Katzenberger for breaking curfew, a denouncement that results in his murder. Häberlein’s readiness to interfere can be seen as a mirroring of his business practice. He makes his living by manufacturing and selling prostheses – profiting from others’ shortcomings or losses. Now that it has become financially beneficial to him, he is also willing to deal with their social and psychological shortcomings. Vilsmaier carefully examines how the threat to one’s identity, grounded as it often is in questions of sexuality and clearly established social status and roles, can swell to genocidal dimensions in a pressure-cooker environment in which these fears are granted legitimacy. He thus suggests what Rothberg argues for in Traumatic Realism, that understanding the Holocaust involves overcoming the binary oppositions that govern much of Holocaust discourse: the typical (human resentments) versus the unique (genocide), the banal versus the extraordinary, and the comprehensible and documentable versus the incomprehensible und undocumentable. 20 In the scenes in the courtyard, Vilsmaier focuses our attention on mirrors and voyeurism from the beginning, and these reflective surfaces and acts serve as parallels to the film itself and to the film viewer’s role as a voyeur, consuming images of worlds to which one would normally be denied access. When Irene first enters the courtyard, we see her briefly on screen causing heads to turn. Our first sight of her is followed by a cut to her reflection in mother Maisel’s mirror and a cut back to Alex kneeling before her sexualized shins and grasping at the prosthetic eyes he has dropped all over the ground in front of her. This cross-cutting underscores the related roles of mirror and camera; the false eyes, one of which Alex playfully inserts into his own eye socket, suggest impaired or limited vision. Whereas mother Maisel’s access to the scene depends on the mirror that reflects the world of the courtyard that she cannot enter and the window that opens on to that courtyard, ours depends on the camera, the film. Both her and our views are also limited by the four sides of the frames

144

Muriel Cormican

provided us. Instances of voyeurism and scopophilia permeate the first twenty minutes of the film and impress on the viewer the manner in which looking and being looked at in such tight confines lead to a communal definition of individuals based on what is reflected, refracted, seen, and not seen. Even within the diegesis of the film, Leo Katzenberger refers to the courtyard as ‘unser kleines Welttheater,’ claiming that Frau Maisel has the best seat (‘den Logenplatz’) in it. Thus, in a variety of ways, Vilsmaier draws attention to his own staging of the Holocaust and to his grappling with questions of Holocaust representation, its potential, and, most importantly, its limits. Like many Holocaust films, Leo und Claire is a flashback film, showing the story ostensibly from the perspective of Leo Katzenberger’s youngest daughter Lilo, now a woman in her eighties who has returned from Israel to Nürnberg and narrates the events of her father’s life, persecution, and murder to a young German journalist. 21 Much of what she tells cannot have been experienced directly by her, and the film productively underscores and investigates how her personal memories combine with her prosthetic memories or postmemory to form her father’s story. 22 Two sequences in the film stand out from the rest and go a long way toward further demonstrating Vilsmaier’s sensitivity to the demands of Holocaust representation. The first is a relatively short one: a number of Jewish men are picked up one morning by the Nazis and driven to a remote location outside of the city where they are beaten, kicked and abused. The other is the much lengthier final courtroom sequence in which Leo Katzenberger is condemned to death. The former is mute, the latter filled with the aggressive, blatantly prejudicial and evil shouting of the judge who has become the stereotype of Nazi officials. These stereotypically mean and vindictive Nazi lawyers and judges whose entire focus is on shouting their prejudices about Jews rather than on listening to anything being said or done in the courtroom allows Vilsmaier to emphasize that in Nazi Germany, in a court of law, a Jew was always already guilty. Both of these scenes represent a dominant cultural memory of the Holocaust, namely that of the easily distinguishable, physically and verbally abusive National Socialists. Vilsmaier’s exaggerated theatricalization of both underscore that these particular sequences are clichés, and he is thereby able to differentiate formally between the phenomena of personal and cultural memory. He reveals how our memory of the Holocaust is generally composed of a

Vilsmaier’s Leo und Claire and Comedian Harmonists

145

mixture of, on the one hand, stereotypical, recurring, and often questionable images that represent a bird’s eye view of the events and that perpetuate the notion that the Nazis, not the Germans in general, were responsible for the Holocaust, and, on the other hand, flashes of personal stories or testament that represent a more particular vision and points to the overwhelming complicity of ordinary Germans. Leo und Claire is far more than a naively realist presentation of images and a story in that it engages critically with the very process through which it presents those images and that story and with how its own presentation relates to other presentations of details, images, and memories of the Holocaust. Similarly based on real events, Comedian Harmonists tells the story of Harry Frommermann, a Berlin musical arranger who founded a sextet modeled on the American group The Revelers that quickly rose to fame and fortune in the late twenties and early thirties in Germany. The film depicts a before and after: a period before Hitler’s rise to power (1927-33) and a short period thereafter (1933-5) and thereby a transition from a time in which Harry’s Jewishness does not figure in his relationship to anyone close to him other than his deceased parents to a time in which it is the dominant aspect of his relationship to everyone from members of the ‘Reichskulturministerium’ to his lover, Erna. The public and ideological changes in Germany encroach on the private circles in which Harry moves. Vilsmaier’s depiction of the group as one in which nobody is interested in the religious affiliations of the others to one in which religious affiliation means everything demonstrates on a small scale the accelerated construction of race under the Nazis and the forcing of Nazi race discourse into the forefront of German politics and into life in general. Vilsmaier is careful not to suggest that antisemitism started with Hitler, but he does point to an increasingly rapid and destructive intensification of antisemitism once Hitler took power. Hans’ inexcusable but physically non-threatening antagonism toward Harry for visiting Erna and thus demonstrating his interest in her, for example, once validated by political discourse and law, leads to a series of violent acts on the sextet and the Grünbaums. The film has been heavily criticized by Lutz Koepnick in his essay ‘Honor Your German Masters.’ 23 Because this particular essay provides an example of how the meta-narrative on the German national narrative of redemption influences the reading of an individual film in

146

Muriel Cormican

a way that is both fruitful and questionable, it will be productive to discuss several parts of the essay in detail. Koepnick’s reading seeks to expose and oppose the construction of a national narrative of selfredemption in Germany. Interpreting the normal technologies of filmmaking as meaning something completely different when employed by Germans in a German context, Koepnick pathologizes Germans: In an international perspective, Vilsmaier’s professional use of digitized sounds and images, to be sure, is hardly remarkable. Digital enhancement today has become a staple of mainstream commercial filmmaking. When seen in the particular German context, however, Vilsmaier’s digitization of German history strikes some more problematic cords, not because special effects here may blur the lines between the real and the imagined but because sophisticated technologies of representation shroud sites of traumatic rupture and displacement in fantasies of wholeness and historical mastery. Though the film intends to narrate the historical blockage of German popular culture due to the rise of German fascism, that is, the splitting of the popular into Nazi mass culture and Jewish exile, digital memory in The Harmonists ends up denying any anxiety that memory of this traumatic past may incite. It subjects trauma to the pleasure principle rather than to working through and mourning the lasting traces of suffering in German twentieth-century history. 24

Persuasive at first and intelligently and cogently constructed, this argument constitutes, in the end, a kind of sophisticated digitization itself. It masks something less polished: too many unexplained assumptions and absolutes. To assume that a German making a film about this aspect of German history must approach it differently than anyone of another nationality establishes a very particular and distinctive group that is genetically, socially, or historically predisposed to have a problematic relationship to Holocaust memory. Koepnick ascribes an odd and unquestioned manipulative power to digital enhancement and glosses over Vilsmaier’s frequent undermining of ‘the pleasure principle’ at work in the musical interludes. In Vilsmaier’s defense, one would have to say that if he is to be able to articulate loss and ‘sites of traumatic rupture,’ he must surely also depict ‘fantasies of wholeness,’ something valuable whose loss will appear significant. The very concept of ‘traumatic rupture’ depends, after all, on the presumed existence of something that is not already ruptured. Hence, if Vilsmaier shows moments in which the audience and the musical group seem to unite in their mutually pleasurable experience of music, and if he thereby invites the viewer into the same experience of plenitude and pleasure, it is necessary if he is to

Vilsmaier’s Leo und Claire and Comedian Harmonists

147

demonstrate loss and rupture. Had Vilsmaier not used the digitally enhanced sounds of the Comedian Harmonists, one might have legitimately criticized him for fictionalizing the real by incorporating actual recordings into a dramatic work. No direct correspondence exists, in other words, between a specific mode of representation and ethical intention. 25 As Koepnick implies above, he see the film’s ‘[t]riumphant images of German-Jewish collaboration’ as normalizing. 26 But to say that Vilsmaier offers us ‘triumphant images of German-Jewish collaboration’ is a simplification. He could hardly make a film about the Comedian Harmonists without dealing with collaborative efforts between Jews and Germans, but he also documents how fascist leanings on both a national and a personal level led to the rapid and absurd destruction of any such collaboration. The closing concert sequence juxtaposes scenes of apparent normality with scenes of threatening somberness by simply changing perspective repeatedly. When the concert hall is shown from behind the sextet, we see a group performing in what seems like a normal situation. When the concert hall is shown from the perspective of the audience, however, we see a group of six men dwarfed by the large red flag with the swastika at its center. The centrality of the National Socialist flag and its presence as the literal and metaphorical background to this song of parting undercut the pleasure principle at work in the musical space that, up to now, had constituted a safe space. Though acknowledging in this manner the very decisive role the backdrop of National Socialism played in the break-up of the sextet, Vilsmaier does not depict the collaboration as otherwise sound. Rather, he intimates that Bob’s megalomania threatened it from the very beginning. In order to allow himself to believe that he and Harry thought of the idea for the sextet at the same time, Bob must repress the advertisement that Harry placed in the paper and the many sheets of musical arrangements Harry had already drawn up before he met him. There is a period in which Harry, Bob and the others are shown to work well and easily together, but Bob’s predilection for taking credit for the work and imagination of his Jewish colleague, his attempts to steal Harry’s girlfriend, to push his own agenda, and to exaggerate his own importance cause numerous difficulties throughout their time together. Furthermore, the film does not end on a high note, celebrating the collaboration, but on a low note, emphasizing the

148

Muriel Cormican

senselessness of the construction of race in Nazi Germany and the cowardice of the German colleagues who simply show up to bid goodbye to the friends whose departure on a train becomes a jarring reminder of the trains most Jews left on during Hitler’s reign. The very last image points to that which we cannot understand and makes a simple train chugging through the German countryside into a symbol of ineffable tragedy – something that certainly cannot be interpreted as normalizing. Invoking familiar discourses on Holocaust representation and its demands, Koepnick continues his criticism: ‘There is surely no conceptual reason why digital representation and prosthetic memory today could not capture historical experiences of trauma and question totalizing notions of history as reconciled.’ 27 But Comedian Harmonists’ depiction of history is not one of history reconciled, and the film does not leave viewers with an easily assimilable narrative. In its final scene, the film points to what it does not explicitly address: the employment of ordinary technology in the extraordinarily systematic murder of the millions of people who, unlike Harry, Roman and Erich, did not get out on time. While there may be redemptive moments in it, the film as a whole must be read as an analysis of German passivity, in particular of Bob’s passivity, and as a criticism of Bob’s national and familial allegiances over broadly human ones – a fundamentally fascist response to the world. Oblivious to Harry’s warnings and even accusing him of ‘Verfolgungswahn,’ he chooses his mother and home country over his Jewish colleagues and their livelihoods and eventually, of course, over the lives of Jews in general. When the Grünbaums’ store is desecrated by a gang of uniformed Hitler supporters, Robert Biberti (Bob) stands up to the attackers and suffers the consequences. Harry, like the Grünbaums themselves, is reduced to a passive bystander, looking on helplessly while two Aryan Germans, Erna and Bob, resist the Nazi attack. Bob invokes his physical powers and fights with the youths, and Erna spits in one of their faces. They both suffer physical injury and hobble away together, explaining dismissively to Harry that they now live together. This image of the Jews as passive, incapable of resistance, and of two German non-Jews as the heroes of the moment may leave some viewers feeling uncomfortable in its apparent reproduction of the problematic stereotype of a European Jewry that went like lambs to the slaughter and in its emphasis, at the same time, on German non-

Vilsmaier’s Leo und Claire and Comedian Harmonists

149

Jewish resistance to the Nazis. However, if read in relation to the two preceding sequences, Roman and Mary’s wedding and a boxing match, it forms part of a mini-narrative that points to the solidification of relations between non-Jewish Germans through participation in shared acts of violence. The transition from Mary und Roman’s wedding where men and women, both ‘Aryan’ and Jewish, dance together in friendship to the boxing match in which Bob and Erna look on as two men beat each other up – the boxers suggest a match on Bob and Harry with Bob defeating Harry – emphasizes the glorification of physical strength and brutality in 1933 German culture, a culture in which masculinity was tied to a competitive physicality. Bob embraces this physicality and explains to Erna that she should see the fact that she is the first woman he has taken to a boxing match as a sign of the intensity of his feelings for her. The two sequences that precede the destruction of the Grünbaums’ store offer an explanation then for Bob’s behavior that, far from valorizing it, suggests a criticism of it and, indeed, of Erna. Bob’s actions at the Grünbaums’ store, though no more productive than anything Harry or the Grünbaums do, establishes his masculinity for Erna. He has taken care of her, as it were, watched out for her; Harry, like the defeated boxer, is the victim of the physical match. Bob does not intervene out of sense of justice for the Grünbaums but out of a libidinal attachment to Erna and he is rewarded for it. He is shown both at the boxing match and here as taking advantage of the privileges the culture currently affords him and of thereby winning Erna over in a somewhat sneaky and unfair fashion. He betrays Harry in private even as he performs a defense of him in public. Erna too comes off in a negative light. In keeping with the prevailing German national ideology of the time, she favors the physically aggressive, self-assertive ‘Aryan’ over Harry. Harry has gone from being her interesting, gentle, talented friend and lover to an inadequate and passive impostor of sorts. 28 Just as Bob pushes himself as the financial representative of the group, he pushes himself on Erna and wins. Far from being depicted as a nice guy with whom Harry easily collaborates, Bob, from the very beginning, represents the kind of opportunism and self-interest that culminate in his choice of mother (blood relations) and country over the safety of his Jewish colleagues. The only other non-Jewish German in the group, Erwin, similarly abandons his Jewish wife in favor of country and career. Just as Bob

150

Muriel Cormican

and Erwin, both complicit, stand and passively wave off their friends and colleagues, so too ordinary Germans stood by and looked on as their neighbors, friends and compatriots were transported away and killed. In the remainder of the passage quoted above, Koepnick conflates narrative theory’s attempt to account for lived experience with actual lived experience: Traumatic events, we should recall, rupture the fabrics of narrative, memory, and historical experience. As they destroy the sense of continuity or tradition, historical traumas erase what may enable us in the future to narrate our present as a meaningful past. Trauma, then, means to live through extreme experiences without really experiencing them. Because the traumatic challenges the very texture of memory and narrativity, any recollection of traumatic histories must negotiate the aporia of narrating what, ultimately, cannot be narrated. 29

The idea that traumatic events ‘rupture the fabrics of narrative’ is itself a constitutive part of a meta-narrative. In an attempt to understand and explain how people fail to experience, repress, and yet forever return to disturbing and painful events in their lives, theorists have come up with a narrative representation of trauma, suggesting that there is a relatively smooth narrative called life into which enters an event that tears everything apart in a way that never allows it to be put back together again. But traumatic events cannot really be seen to ‘rupture [...] historical experience.’ Historical experience is always already ruptured; structure and coherence are imposed through language and narrative. This ‘sense of continuity’ that Koepnick refers to is already an imposition of discourse. Lives and events unfold and are formed retrospectively into rationalized narratives of development, talked about and revived within narrative, but no narrative can exhaust or do justice to the complexities and inconsistencies of lived experience. It would be questionable to compare the experience of the Holocaust to ‘normal,’ lived experience, and this is not what is at stake here. It behooves us, however, to underscore that an insistence on the problems of representation as pertaining only to the Holocaust is unfeasible and inaugurates a false opposition between that which can be accurately and adequately narrated and that which cannot. Acknowledging the Holocaust as radically different from ‘normal’ experience does not depend on a falsification of normal experience and its own complexities and lack of coherence and consistency. On the one hand, Koepnick seems to be saying that the Holocaust can

Vilsmaier’s Leo und Claire and Comedian Harmonists

151

never be represented. On the other, he seeks to establish some modes of not truly representing it as superior to others, some narrative constructs – a narrative construct that mimics trauma and ruptures is still a narrative construct – as more suitable failures than others. The depiction, he argues, does not correspond to the real events, but no depiction, it seems, can. While there may be some sense in differentiating between various failures of correspondence, a failure of correspondence in and of itself should not be enough to undermine a film or to interpolate it into a narrative of national redemption since, within this model, all films are destined to have the same shortcoming. Many of the intensely negative aspects of this reading of the Comedian Harmonists can be traced back to a bird’s eye view of contemporary German Holocaust films. Approaching individual films with an already established and overarching framework for thinking through the German representation of the Holocaust makes it easy to overlook subversive details of an individual film and difficult to focus on a close reading of the mise-en-scène, cinematography and framing that point beyond but do not necessarily invalidate the concerns articulated in the metanarrative on normalization and redemption. Koepnick accuses Vilsmaier of ‘reinventing and repressing history’ and sees Comedian Harmonists as part of ‘the new fixation on the nation’s past.’ 30 But Germany has surely been fixated on the past since at least 1968, perhaps not in film but certainly in literature, and Germans have embraced foreign cinema and television about the Holocaust since at least 1979 and the first airing of the American series Holocaust on German television. One might also ask what the alternative to such a fixation might be. Were German filmmakers not to reflect on or depict this particular aspect of the German past, one might accuse them of having a blind spot that can be construed as a similar redeeming of the past in its failure to acknowledge that past. In many ways, American and other national cinemas have normalized the German past to an even greater degree than German cinema – Holocaust (NBC’s 1978 miniseries), Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1993), the American Jacob The Liar (Kassovitz, 1999) – without becoming the target of the same kinds of pathologizing narratives. Comedian Harmonists is a perceptive elegy that juxtaposes the love story between Harry and Erna to that of the relationship between Germans and Jews in which the Germans, unlike Erna, do not make the right choice in the end. The entire final concert scene constructs

152

Muriel Cormican

the German-Jewish relationship as a love story. Reading the letter from the ‘Reichskulturministerium’ and telling the audience that it means that he and Roman and Erich will be leaving them and Germany tonight, Harry introduces their first and last song: ‘Gib mir den letzten Abschiedskuss, weil ich dich heute verlassen muss, und sage mir Auf Wiedersehen, Auf Wiedersehen, leb Wohl.’ Given the context, the ‘Dich’ of this song cannot but be construed as Germany. It is less clearly Erna because the cross-cutting between Bob and Erna as he sings ‘Wir haben uns gefunden, geküsst und heiß geliebt, es waren schöne Stunden, die man nicht mehr vergisst, ein Märchen geht zu Ende, d’rum reich mir deine kleinen Hände!’ intimates that the personal goodbye will take place between them and not between Harry and Erna. The construal of German-Jewish relations as a love story is also referred to by Roman earlier in the film when Harry begins the discussion of possible emigration. In response to Erich’s admission to being frustrated that he is labeled a Jew in Germany even though he does not see himself as a Jew, Roman argues that the situation is even worse for him: ‘Ich fühle mich als Jude aber ich liebe Deutschland.’ The film’s documentation of German-Jewish relations is relatively complex and intricate, drawing our attention to both the possibility of seeing German-Jewish relations as a kind of shattered love story and, at the same time, the problems of seeing it as such. In the three-minute opening sequence of the film, Vilsmaier addresses, quite literally, his own staging of the Holocaust. After a series of cross-cuts between the audience’s and the group’s preparation for a concert, the camera shows a medium long shot of the stage. As viewers, we are thrust into an identificatory position with the audience, and the curtain that rises on the concert is the same curtain that rises on the film. The opened curtain creates the space in which the camera can zoom in on Harry. The close-up of his face dissolves into the first image in the film’s staging of Harry’s story. As in Leo und Claire, just by different means, Vilsmaier reminds the viewers of their role as consumers of these images and of his role as creator of them. If the diagetic audience has come to see the Comedian Harmonists perform, then we, the extra-diegetic audience, have come to see the Comedian Harmonists performed. In Traumatic Realism, Michael Rothberg discusses what he sees as the two primary trends within Holocaust discourse: realist and antirealist. The former he associates with the ideas on representing the

Vilsmaier’s Leo und Claire and Comedian Harmonists

153

Holocaust generally advocated by historians, namely that it is possible to represent the truth and facts of the Holocaust through a ‘scientific’ accumulation of events and numbers that, molded into an historical narrative, provide access to what really happened. The latter he associates with survivor testimony and the discussions and ideas of literary theorists and critics. It involves claims to the ineffability and unrepresentability of the Holocaust and a propensity to characterize the Holocaust as rupture/trauma and as unique and beyond comprehension. He goes on to point out that the discourses such as those of Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann, Arthur Cohen and Jean-François Lyotard, namely the discourse ‘of “transcendence,” “obscenity,” “tremendum,” and irresolvable “differend” detaches the extreme from the everyday and seeks to disable established modes of representation and understanding.’ 31 In the end, Rothberg summarizes, everyone is asking how one can represent the Holocaust sensitively and accurately and some, such as Lanzmann, have an investment in staking out their own territory, in pushing representational exigencies that correspond to and privilege their own particular approach. Rothberg advocates a more inclusive understanding of Holocaust representation, contending that ‘in confronting such a history, we all share the need to find an adequate form of narrating and understanding an extraordinary series of events.’ 32 It seems only fair to assume too that German filmmakers are neither indifferent to nor ignorant of the demands of Holocaust representation, and close readings of these two Vilsmaier films suggest that this is true of him. Both Leo und Claire and Comedian Harmonists are at once a representation and an exploration of the possibilities and pitfalls of a representation of the Holocaust. They may have problematic aspects, representational weak points, but in them, Vilsmaier is attempting to combine the ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the uniquely evil, in ways that promise to increase the popular understanding of academic conversations about Holocaust representations. Admittedly his films may present us with a somewhat easier case for analysis than many since they do not visit the concentrationary universe. They depict instead events that lead up to the genocide and nod to but leave the rest off screen. Be that as it may, if the eternal vigilance that writers like Blanchot advocate is to be promoted and maintained, there have to be people who convey the events and horrors of the Holocaust to those who do not move in the

154

Muriel Cormican

relatively closed and isolated circles that academics inhabit. 33 And perhaps what we do in fact have in what some see as a worrisome number of German films about the Holocaust since 1990 is not so much the persistent attempt to create a narrative of national redemption – such an argument has to, after all, ignore many details of each film – but an attempt at a kind of eternal vigilance. An exclusive focus on one possible and decidedly negative motive for the preponderance of German films about the Holocaust since the 1990s has altered our perspectives in a way that has led to the imposition of very similar readings on a variety of German film about the Holocaust. It is possible, however, that this repetitive and seemingly obsessive return to Germany’s genocidal past in German cinema is indicative of trauma and reveals a traumatic structure to contemporary memory making in Germany. It might prove productive if such an understanding opened up a context in which close readings of individual films could replace – or at least supplement – global perspectives on German Holocaust film production. Notes 1

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, p. 82. 2

Irving Howe, ‘Writing and the Holocaust’, in: Berel Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988, pp. 175-99 (here: p. 187).

3

Elie Wiesel, ‘For Some Measure of Humility’, Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility, 5 (1975), 314-5 (here: p. 314).

4

Howe, ‘Writing’, p. 190.

5

Ibid., p. 189.

6

Elie Wiesel, ‘Foreword’, in: Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows. Film and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. xi-xii (here: p. xii).

7

See Erin McGlothlin’s recent article on Der Nazi und der Friseur for an excellent discussion of how a religious rhetoric has ‘increasingly come to dominate critical discourse about the Holocaust and its representational limits.’ Erin McGlothlin, ‘Narrative Transgression in Edgar Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi und der Friseur and the Rhetoric of the Sacred in Holocaust Discourse’, German Quarterly, 80 (2007), 220-39 (here: p. 225).

Vilsmaier’s Leo und Claire and Comedian Harmonists

155

8

‘Trittbrettfahren mit dem Holocaust’, a 2001 interview with Rafael Seligmann at: http://www.antisemitismus.net/ns-vergangenheit/seligmann.htm (accessed 18 January 2010).

9

Georg Seeßlen, ‘Jakob und Seine Brüder. Neue Spielfilm-Bilder von Faschismus und Holocaust’, Die Zeit, 11 November 1999, 43.

10

Ibid.

11

Lutz Koepnick, ‘Redeeming History? Foster’s Dome and the Political Aesthetic of the Berlin Republic’, Germanic Studies Review, 24 (2001), 303-24 (here: p. 301). 12

In a later essay on Vilsmaier’s Comedian Harmonists, he is far more explicitly critical. See Lutz Koepnick, ‘“Honor Your German Masters.” History, Memory, and National Identity in Joseph Vilsmaier’s Comedian Harmonists (1997)’, in: Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, eds., Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003, pp. 349-75. 13 Henryk Broder, ‘A Hopeless Enlightenment’, in: Sander L. Gilman and Lilian M. Friedberg, eds., A Jew in the New Germany, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004, pp. 80-5 (here: p. 85). 14

Esther Dischereit, ‘Methode Stille Post: Wem gelten die Tränen bei “Aimée und Jaguar”? Ein Versuch, dem Leben der Berliner Jüdin Felice Schragenheim doch näher zu kommen als die bekannten Klischees bislang offenbaren wollen’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 12 February 1999, 8; and Esther Dischereit, ‘Die Geschichte hinter der Geschichte von Aimée und Jaguar: Zwischen Abhängigkeit, Prostitution, und Widerstand’, at: http://www.hagalil.com/archiv/99/10/jaguar.htm (accessed 18 January 2010); Wolfgang Benz, ‘Kitsch, Klamotte, Klitterei. Die Legende von der “Rosenstraße,”’ Süddeutsche Zeitung, 18 September 2003, at: http://www.klick-nachrechts.de/ticker/2003/09/rosenstrasse2.htm (accessed 18 January 2010). 15

See the introduction to Michael Rothberg’s Traumatic Realism for an excellent discussion of the demands of Holocaust representation and their relationship to realist, modernist and postmodernist practices and concerns. Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 16

This is borrowing the subtitle of Rothberg’s Traumatic Realism.

17 Recent examples include Wolfgang Benz’s reaction to von Trotta’s (‘Kitsch, Klamotte, Klitterei’), and Beate Meyer’s ‘Geschichte im Film – Judenverfolgung, Mischehen und der Protest in der Rosenstraße, 1943’, H-German, H-Net Reviews, July 2004, at: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=763 (accessed 18

156

Muriel Cormican

January 2010). See also Stuart Taberner’s ‘Philo-Semitism in Recent German Film: Aimée und Jaguar, Rosenstraße and Das Wunder von Bern’, German Life and Letters, 58 (2005), 357-72. 18

Comedian Harmonists, dir. Joseph Vilsmaier, Senator Film, 1997; Leo und Claire, dir. Joseph Vilsmaier, Odeon Fim, 2002. 19

Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, p. 7.

20

Ibid., p. 3.

21

There is some question in my mind as to whether ‘Holocaust film = flashback film’ has not become a prescript in Germany, a narrative structure invoked as a protection against potential criticisms that the director claims to present facts or truth. Within the flashback structure, one can always argue that what is represented is memory which does not necessarily coincide with history. 22

For a discussion of the concept of postmemory see Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames. Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. See especially Chapter 1, ‘Mourning and Postmemory’, pp. 17-40.

23

Koepnick, ‘“Honor Your German Masters”’.

24

Ibid., p. 365.

25

The potential problem of including the ‘real’ in films and narratives about the Holocaust is addressed by Rothberg in his discussion of Schindler’s List and Thomas Keneally’s book of the same title (Traumatic Realism, pp. 238-40). 26

Koepnick, ‘“Honor Your German Masters”’, p. 353.

27

Ibid., p. 365.

28

Harry himself later suggests that Erna’s choice represents self-interest and a reluctance to endure the hardships that a relationship to Harry might now entail. When he discovers, upon returning from their trip to the United States, that Erwin has chosen to divorce Ursula, his Jewish wife, he reads both Erna’s and Erwin’s abandonment as symptoms of the culture at large: ‘Seltsam nur, dass ihr uns ausgerechnet dann fallen lasst, wenn wir in Schwierigkeiten sind, Erna mich, du Ursula.’ 29

Koepnick, ‘“Honor Your German Masters”’, p. 365.

30

Ibid., p. 353.

31

Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, p. 5.

Vilsmaier’s Leo und Claire and Comedian Harmonists

32 33

157

Ibid.

In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot exorts the reader to be watchful, watchful of forgetting and of attempts to recollect. Sara Guyer summarizes in her article ‘The Pardon of the Disaster’: ‘How can we watch over in thought that in which everything, including thought – a watchful thought that could see and save – was lost? How can we witness the disaster although it can neither appear nor not appear? How can we attend the memory of what one never will know?’ Sara Guyer, ‘The Pardon of the Disaster’, Substance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, 35:1 (2006), 85-105 (here: p. 97).

Sabine von Mering Searching for Justice: Jews, Germans and the Nazi Past in Recent German Cinema In unified Germany, Jews and non-Jews alike continue to struggle with what Caroline Pearce calls the ‘dialectic of normality,’ i.e., the desire for normalization that is irreconcilable with the dual burden of Holocaust crimes and present continuity of antiSemitism. While Pearce and others deplore the instrumentalization of the Holocaust by Jews and non-Jews alike, a number of recent German films express variations of this dialectic. Filmmakers Michael Verhoeven, Malte Ludin, Robert Thalheim, Dani Levy and Oliver Hirschbiegel demonstrate how searching for justice requires a continued effort of revealing the truth about the past while conceding that there are limits to understanding it.

Michael Haneke’s Oscar-nominated film Das weiße Band (2009) 1 demonstrates that in their search for a normal identity each new German post-war generation is confronted anew with Saul Friedländer’s conclusion that ‘a nation that committed these crimes is not so normal after all.’ 2 The German desire for a ‘normalized’ national identity continues to clash with the need to remember the crimes of the Holocaust and even has intensified since unification. According to Caroline Pearce, this ‘dialectic of normality’ 3 is compounded by many forms of Holocaust instrumentalization such as the German government’s use of references to the Holocaust as justification for the intervention in Kosovo, or as means for improving Germany’s international image as well as the interests of German businesses abroad, to name but a few. 4 Jewish critics like Maxim Biller and Henryk Broder frequently contend that non-Jewish Germans are flaunting their Holocaust trauma in a questionable attempt to bolster German national identity. 5 Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times draws the same conclusion in his report on the educational use of the new Holocaust-cartoon The Search which chronicles the lives of young Jews in Nazi Germany: ‘Germans still seem to grapple almost eagerly with their own historic guilt and shame.’ 6 Yet, Y. Michal Bodemann levels his charges against Jews in the U.S. and Israel who, he opines, continue viewing ‘Holocaust commemoration as a negative civil religion’ 7 and who deny the existence of a new Jewish diaspora in Germany and Europe. Ostensibly, historian Dan Diner’s 1986 verdict

160

Sabine von Mering

that the Holocaust had forged a ‘negative symbiosis’ on Germans and Jews after 1945 still stands today. 8 Ending the silence about crimes and complicity in World War II and the Holocaust and beginning an open dialogue about the Nazi era was undoubtedly one of the major achievements of the rebellious German student movement of 1968. Along with the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (1963-5) and the publication of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s ground-breaking sociological study on the collective German Inability to Mourn 9 the loss of the beloved ‘Führer,’ the events of that pivotal year are seen as the main impetus that compelled the German nation to engage in a public discourse on ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung.’ In the aftermath of the student protests West Germans set off working through their past, and in so doing established a myriad of memorials and changed history textbooks as well as school curricula. Scholars and ordinary Germans seem to disagree, however, about the extent to which the West German population attempted to come to terms with its past. Although breaking the silence about the Holocaust was part of the protesters’ main goals, the student movement initially did very little to compel the majority of West German families to uncover ‘de[n] Leichenberg im Keller.’ 10 Arguably the students’ aggressive public outrage and, in some cases, their self-righteousness may well have been partly responsible for the continuation of the silence in the private sphere, thus allowing the nation to avoid any honest discussion about personal responsibilities. The more recent ‘victim debate’ in Germany, which found its most controversial expression in Martin Walser’s Peace Prize speech in October 1998, proved symptomatic of the problematic relationship many Germans have with the memory of World War II and the Holocaust even after several decades of improved Holocaust education and public commemoration. German Jews, too, continue to struggle with the legacy of the past. Some Jewish European scholars agree with Y. Michal Bodemann’s more positive assessment of a significant revival of public interest in Jewish affairs in what he calls a ‘Judaizing milieu’: ‘[…] this revival – whatever one may think of it – is unthinkable without what I would describe as a Judaizing milieu: a broad periphery of non-Jews interested in or fascinated by Jewish traditions and religion.’ 11 However, scholars in Israel and the U.S. are instead more prone to citing surveys that indicate a general lack of knowledge about the Holocaust and

Jews, Germans, and the Nazi Past in Recent German Cinema

161

overall negative attitudes towards Jews among young Germans today. 12 There is no question that the official stance of the German government has consistently been pro-Jewish and pro-Israel – West Germany has been Israel’s loyal military and economic partner since the 1950s – and the current government under Chancellor Angela Merkel (who grew up only a few miles away from the former concentration camp at Ravensbrück) continues to reiterate the same benevolent rhetoric, attesting to its ‘special responsibility’ towards Israel and articulating the continued need to speak about the Holocaust. On the sixty-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II, the German chancellor told the Süddeutsche Zeitung in an interview: Was wir stets erreichen müssen, ist, dass verstanden wird, warum es für unser Selbstverständnis und unsere Zukunft unverzichtbar ist, wenn wir über den Nationalsozialismus und die Ermordung der Juden sprechen. Niemand braucht dabei die Sorge zu haben: Finde ich die richtigen Worte? Wer diese Sorge hat, findet sie erst recht nicht. 13

Still, actual German attitudes are more accurately represented, critics claim, in news coverage of Israel by Germany’s left-leaning media which tends to be pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist. Susanne Urban of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, for example, writes that Germans today are quick to compare Israel to Nazi Germany, continuously pointing out Israel’s failings as signs ‘that “they” [the Israelis] did not learn the lessons of the Shoah; whereas Germans see themselves as having learned the lessons by being watchmen against “immoral” politics.’ 14 At the same time, Urban points out, the continued anti-Semitism is in stark contrast to German public commemorations of the Holocaust: Germany is a country with far more memorials and museums for the concentration camps, as well as Jewish museums, than other European countries. The volume of Holocaust education in schools and other educational institutions, the number of conferences and workshops devoted to the subject, seems close to unique in Europe. 15

But despite Germany’s unceasing efforts to uphold its responsibility towards the victims of the Nazi regime, Urban concludes, ‘wellintended rituals and remembrances have not proved an effective shield against anti-Semitism and the rewriting of history.’ 16 Certainly, the rise of radical right-wing political party officials to elected seats in a number of state parliaments in Germany is worri-

162

Sabine von Mering

some as this might reflect not just the attitude of a few who will never learn, but in fact represent the values and beliefs of a significant portion of German society today. 17 At the same time, Germans can hardly be accused of willfully denying the Holocaust. Any cursory look at German TV programs, cultural events as well as popular movies leaves no doubt that the Holocaust is a highly visible topic and well-represented in German public discourse. Daniela Berghahn therefore locates the problem not in a strategy of avoidance but instead in an overexposure that unfortunately has had an opposite effect and resulted in collective amnesia. ‘Paradoxical though it may seem, the obsessive engagement with the past signifies a form of remembering that in fact approaches forgetting,’ Berghahn states. 18 Especially in recent German films, Berghahn claims, memory has been replaced by a heavily mediated ‘post-memory.’ Using Lutz Koepnick’s label ‘heritage cinema,’ 19 or ‘making bad history into a good story,’ she analyzes the past as one that is ‘re-imagined rather than remembered.’ 20 According to Lutz Koepnick and Stephan Schindler, successful popular German films such as Joseph Vilsmaier’s Comedian Harmonists (1997), Max Färberböck’s Aimée und Jaguar (1999), or Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstraße (2003) epitomize the notion of neo-philosemitism by minimizing the plight of Holocaust victims and favoring heroic portrayals of ‘good Germans.’ Since unification, the production of Holocaust literature and film, already quite substantial in Germany for some time, has reached a new climax and Germany ‘has become host to a virtual memory boom,’ 21 as Lutz Koepnick bemoans: In the second half of the 1990s German cinema has witnessed a surge of historical melodramas in which the quest for popular appeal coincides with the attempt to convert German history, in particular that of the Nazi period, into flamboyant spectacles of sight and sound. Domestic feature productions […] thrive on panoramic views of German-Jewish history. 22

For Koepnick and Berghahn, these post-unification ‘heritage’ films are foremost about ‘recapturing glorious moments of German-Jewish collaboration prior to Nazism.’ 23 They create a non-existent continuity that erases the Nazi past and ‘remember the harrowing events and divisions of German history in order to forget them.’ 24 According to Robert and Carol Reimer, the obsessive engagement with the Nazi era in postwar German cinema reflects a ‘morbid

Jews, Germans, and the Nazi Past in Recent German Cinema

163

fascination for a time and place that scarred a nation’s psyche.’ 25 Using the term ‘Nazi-retro’ for films which are characterized by ‘exploitation and trivialization for commercial purposes of the suffering caused by fascism,’ 26 they contend, as does Berghahn, that German society continues to be drawn to the Nazi era due to an insatiable ‘nostalgic allure of the past for those who lived through it and for the post-war generations who did not. It suggests history shot through a colored lens, showing the period not as it was but as the audience would like to remember it.’ 27 The claim that there is a tendency among post-war German generations to reinvent the Holocaust and portray World War II in a more positive light is supported by findings published in a sociological study by Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller and Karoline Tschuggnall and presented in the 2002 volume Opa war kein Nazi. 28 Based on 142 interviews with members of forty different families, the authors give a detailed description of how ‘communicative memory’ of World War II continues to experience cross-generational mythologization, even among families who are open to speak about the past (as opposed to the majority who are not) and who see themselves critical of their family history. Wulf Kantsteiner suggests that escaping into a collective guilt and an obsession with the Nazi era is utilized as a vehicle to avoid confronting personal/private responsibilities: ‘On an abstract, metaphorical level, the German focus on memory politics can be described as the result of an unusual phenomenon – the successful sublation of large-scale personal and political guilt into collective symbolic guilt.’ 29 To Kantsteiner, Germany’s situation is unprecedented: West German society – first through its representatives and then on a broader scale – has accepted long-term, collective moral responsibility for genocide. But for lack of precedents, the precise nature of this responsibility has remained unclear. Although standards and procedures for dealing with personal criminal guilt are well established, the process of dealing with symbolic collective guilt is uncharted territory. Therefore, no one has been able to define the end point of this obligation. 30

The majority of Germans would likely fervently reject any accusations that they are not knowledgeable or do not sufficiently care about the Holocaust and Nazi crimes. On the contrary, many Germans would probably contend that there is too much Holocaust education and commemoration in Germany today to which Marian Marzinsky, producer of the documentary A Jew Among the Germans (2005), 31

164

Sabine von Mering

would agree. The documentary details Marzinsky’s 2005 visit to Berlin where he sets out to scrutinize opinions on the erection of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. Though filled with initial trepidations about going to ‘the land of the perpetrators,’ the filmmaker finds unexpected comfort among young Berliners. From his interviews he learns that many young Germans are truly committed to studying their country’s history and preserving the memory of the Holocaust. The only problem, Marzinsky states, is that young Germans refuse to feel guilty, preferring to use the neutral term ‘responsibility’ for their country’s guilt, whereas to him ‘guilt’ would be the only correct sentiment to acknowledge their ancestors’ crimes. When he is met by what can only be described as ‘shrugged shoulders’ in response to his plea for ‘a good guilt,’ Marzinsky realizes that non-Jewish Germans do not look at their country’s past through the eyes of a Jew. One of his interviewees, Christine Jackob-Marks, the artist who won the original competition for the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, confirms: ‘Most Germans never meet any Jews.’ 32 Hence, unless cultural changes are brought about and ritualized commemoration becomes anchored in true empathy, Marzinsky concludes, well-meaning compassion and Holocaust commemoration will forever remain disconnected from Jewish suffering. Marzinsky’s interviewees point to the incredible success that Jewish-themed memoirs, films and music enjoy in Germany. In addition, they tell him, every year dozens of young German men decide to become active in organizations such as ‘Aktion Sühnezeichen’ 33 or go to Israel and Poland to complete their civil service instead of serving in the military, an indication, they claim, that official commemoration is not exclusively fuelled by strategies of avoidance. Certainly, continually insisting that Germans feel guilt does not take into account how it affects young Germans who grow up in a country in which they ‘stumble’ over memorials to the murder of six million Jews, artistically embodied in Gunter Demnig’s ‘Stolpersteine’ memorial. The issue is further impacted by the fact that Germany’s Jewish population continues to be small, and family members who could have provided a personal connection to the period of World War II are no longer among the living. Two recent German films show the difficulty of overcoming the silence and the artificial memorialization of the Holocaust. Contrary to the glamorous Holocaust movies of the 1990s, these films revisit the

Jews, Germans, and the Nazi Past in Recent German Cinema

165

past ‘up close and personal.’ in Zwei oder drei Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (2005), 34 Malte Ludin confronts his three older siblings about their father Hanns Ludin, an officer in Hitler’s SS and Nazi ambassador to Slovakia, and Robert Thalheim takes the viewer on an unexpected visit to the concentration camp memorial at Auschwitz in Am Ende kommen Touristen (2007). 35 Determined to confront their German and foreign audiences with the complex issues of guilt, remembrance and ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung,’ both Ludin and Thalheim employ novel strategies to accomplish these goals. Malte Ludin In Zwei oder drei Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß, Ludin (born 1942) chronicles his investigation into his father’s Nazi past. Ludin’s documentary is a painful tour-de-force of emotional interviews with his sisters about the uncomfortable facts regarding their parents’ enthusiasm for Hitler and their father’s personal involvement in deportations as the Nazi envoy to Slovakia. Several narrative lines intersect and the interviews are interrupted by shots of archival materials that prove their father’s involvement in the war machinery. One line follows the parents’ lives from their early devotion to Hitler in the 1920s to the father’s execution in 1947; the second line deals with Malte’s research in German and Slovakian archives in 2006; the third narrative includes interviews with his three living siblings, their spouses and children during that same period. Ludin himself is present as the off-screen narrator and as interviewer on screen. The film’s emotional tension derives from the director’s juxtaposition of his family’s resistance to accept the truth about Hanns Ludin’s responsibility and the proof of concrete evidence found in old files and the testimonies from several survivors. To underscore how difficult it is to approach the disturbing aspects of his father’s past, Ludin uses distorted non-diegetic music and unusual camera angles: A slightly out-of-tune marching band serves as a leitmotif – the music becomes increasingly disturbing to the viewer as its initial cheerful tune deteriorates paralleling Ludin’s discovery of the documentation that proves his father’s involvement in deportations of Jews. The camera angle often obscures rather than illuminates a scene, showing documents upside down, partly obstructed by other objects, or at times much too briefly to be fully understood. Through the use of these tools, Ludin emphasizes the difficulty of his endeavor. He intentional-

166

Sabine von Mering

ly causes discomfort in the viewer who constantly strains to understand and is asked to piece information together from incomplete sources, thereby identifying with the filmmaker who, too, has to assemble his evidence in painstaking research and against the dominant family discourse. Robert Thalheim While Ludin remains true to his generation’s style of confrontation – he charges his audience directly, aggressively and, at times, quite selfrighteously with their collective complicity in Nazi crimes – Robert Thalheim (born 1974) chooses a different approach. Thalheim’s Am Ende kommen Touristen (2007) is a feature film, not a documentary, that seeks to reach out to the generation of young Germans in their difficulties to engage with a subject that seems increasingly remote to their own lives. It traces the experience of young Sven who arrives at the concentration camp memorial at Auschwitz in order to complete his civil service. Timid and unsure of his role, Sven at first passively observes what happens at the concentration camp memorial, while trying his best to meet his supervisors’ expectations. He acts like any normal teenager just out of high school – he meets other people his age and falls in love with a young Polish translator. Slowly, Sven begins to form a bond with taciturn Stanislaw Krzeminski, a surviving Polish prisoner, who stubbornly insists on ‘repairing’ the concentration camp inmates’ suitcases that are sent to him for conservation by the memorial curators. When Sven acts on behalf of Krzeminski and steals a suitcase for him, his superiors reprimand him and he decides to quit. However, in the end he decides to join those who work to bridge the gap between the camp’s brutal history and the visiting students’ ignorance and indifference. Thalheim’s choice of Auschwitz/Oswiecim as the setting for his film is based on his personal experience at the Auschwitz ‘Begegnungsstätte’ during his own civil service. Contrary to his protagonist, however, Thalheim overprepared for the job by reading numerous books on the subject, as the director explained in an interview at a screening of the film at Brandeis University. 36 Thalheim presents his lead character Sven as a compilation of stereotypical German visitors he encountered at the memorial. Unlike Ludin, Thalheim chooses a more gentle approach in his work. He allows the viewer to identify with Sven who slowly begins to question the concentration camp’s

Jews, Germans, and the Nazi Past in Recent German Cinema

167

function as a tourist attraction and in turn becomes critical of the way Germany commemorates the Holocaust. The climax of the film weighs Sven’s newfound loyalty to Krzeminsky against the official line of German Holocaust commemoration personified in Andrea Schneider, a visiting German business executive – poignantly played by Lena Stolze (who had portrayed Anja Rosmus in Verhoeven’s Das schreckliche Mädchen [1974] 37 and Sophie Scholl in his Die Weiße Rose [1982]) 38 – whose company builds a memorial on the site of a former forced labor camp. Schneider’s half-hearted attempt to embrace the victims’ account of the past by inviting Krzeminsky to speak at the opening of the new memorial, only to push him aside when his talk becomes too detailed in her view, triggers Sven’s first open confrontation with her and the museum’s authorities. Sven reproaches her and the hypocrisy of her action, arguing that she should have let Krzeminsky continue. Although Schneider ostensibly engages in memorializing the horrors of the Shoah, she is unable and unwilling to face the truth and remains unapologetic. Sven challenges her determination to control what and how the Holocaust is remembered with a simple directive: He tells her to listen to Krzeminsky, the survivor; to hear what he has to say and not to cut him off in mid-sentence. The scene transmits Thalheim’s assertion that Germans can only begin to understand the consequences of World War II and the Holocaust by paying careful attention to painful descriptions of daily camp existence. The casting of Lena Stolze in the role of Schneider clearly affects the viewer’s interpretation of this pivotal scene, as the subtext of her role as the ‘good German woman’ (i.e., Sophie Scholl and Anja Rosmus) in Verhoeven’s films calls the general approach to German Holocaust commemorialization into question. 39 Yet, Thalheim’s film does not foreground Krzeminsky’s memories but focuses instead on the young couple of Sven and his Polish girlfriend Ania who grew up in Oswiecim. On the one hand, Ania helps Sven escape the grim presence of the camp when he moves in with her and establishes a life away from his work at the memorial. On the other hand, Ania’s and her brother’s dependence on the camp memorial for their employment, and Krzeminsky’s insistence on staying at Auschwitz to work in spite of his deteriorating health, cause Sven’s awareness that neither the survivors nor those growing up and living in the region around Oswiecim will ever be free from the

168

Sabine von Mering

shadow of the Holocaust. Like his friends, young Germans, too, must acknowledge this shadow, Sven realizes, and it is this insight that finally convinces him that he must stay and accept his role in educating the German ‘Auschwitz tourists.’ The two films clearly represent a generational shift concerning post-war attitudes about the Holocaust. As a member of the generation of ’68, Ludin is primarily motivated by the attitude of wanting to ‘end the silence’ that largely defined the student revolts (and his own family). Another cause for making this film was his older sister Erica’s suicide at age forty-five, which has since been chronicled in her daughter Alexandra Senfft’s book Schweigen tut weh. 40 Like Thalheim, Ludin started his project by painstakingly researching his topic. Knowing that the confrontation with the truth would challenge his family relationships, Ludin consulted with Dan Bar-On, the late Israeli specialist on the psychology of children of survivors and perpetrators. A pioneer in the field of memory resistance and suppression, Bar-On finds that the majority of children of perpetrators lives in constant denial, and unless they speak about their parents’ crimes, will never overcome the trauma of their existence. 41 The inclusion of interviews with survivors in Slovakia puts Ludin in a situation in which he himself is confronted with the very personal experience of people whose families were killed as a consequence of his father’s actions. By admitting his own reluctance to acknowledge his ancestry and emphasizing his belief that his father never killed any Jews, Ludin confirms how powerful the need for denial can be, even for those who are prepared to meet it head-on. Nevertheless, his decision to publicly confess his own hesitation and defiance provides his viewers with a positive example of how to address the challenges such uncomfortable truths bestow. Both Ludin’s and Thalheim’s films directly challenge the viewer to acknowledge the personal, individual responsibility for the past. Ludin not only confronts his older siblings openly, but proceeds to make the family’s silence public, thereby defying his late mother’s powerful hold over the truth. 42 Thalheim reveals how Holocaust commemoration can be superficial and meaningless, even at a site like Auschwitz. Both filmmakers show that only true empathy with the victims can help overcome the mixture of denial and obsession that fuels the dilemma for many Germans today. Empathy, both Ludin and Thalheim seem to say, must be based on real feeling and cannot be obtained through reading or

Jews, Germans, and the Nazi Past in Recent German Cinema

169

studying alone. Ultimately, only personal connections with victims and their descendants can help young Germans (and their parents) to open up the dialogue. By asking questions about their families’ involvement with Hitler’s war against the Jews, they take the first step towards understanding the ongoing consequences of World War II, ranging from open issues surrounding restitution to the continued search for and punishment of fugitive Nazi criminals. Robert Thalheim sees himself as a student of the generation of the 1960s: ‘They made you want to go out and make the world a better place,’ he says of his teachers. 43 Thalheim’s intention for his first big feature film, for which he also wrote the script, was to engage in an uncomfortable topic and to improve the dialogue between victims and perpetrators. Yet, his film is not unequivocally about the victims of the Holocaust; in fact, the word ‘Jew’ is never mentioned in the entire film. Asked why he decided to make a film about Auschwitz without any Jewish characters, Thalheim explains that his goal was not to examine what happened at Auschwitz – ‘[…] [D]as haben schon andere getan, die das viel besser konnten’ – but to tackle the question as to how Auschwitz can teach a lesson for a generation that no longer has a personal (parent/grandparent) relationship to this part of German history and for whom ‘[…] Juden nur Zahlen von Toten in Geschichtsbüchern sind.’ 44 He was motivated, the director says, by the German students he met at the memorial, who came unprepared and often unsure how to deal with their country’s history. His film is aimed at reaching a specific audience of young Germans who are reluctant to engage in the topic of their ancestors’ crimes. 45 Thalheim’s decision to completely omit any mention of the word ‘Jew’ in his film certainly provokes the viewer and threatens to garner him support from the wrong audience. Yet, the silence about Jews in Thalheim’s film is symbolic of the inability of Germans to personally relate to the fate of their Jewish victims. Intimidated by the surroundings, reluctant to engage on a personal level, eager to be politically correct, Sven is a character with whom young Germans can identify and through whom they are able to see what is wrong with their understanding of the Holocaust: ‘Ich wusste, alles was wir Deutschen in oder über Auschwitz tun oder sagen ist falsch. Es muss falsch sein. Aber das bedeutet nicht, dass wir nicht immer wieder versuchen sollten, darüber zu sprechen,’ Thalheim states. 46

170

Sabine von Mering

By foregrounding the difficulties of speaking about the Holocaust, these two recent German films reach beyond the silence. They represent a critical counterexample to the forms of Holocaust instrumentalization decried by many critics. Their goal is to provoke questions and to open up an inter-generational dialogue. In contrast to the widespread public interest in ‘normalization’ or an escape into a discourse of German victimhood, these films charge Germans to acknowledge that their national guilt and responsibility parallels the pain of many who continue to suffer from the consequences of the Holocaust, even to this day. Dani Levy Dani Levy is among recent filmmakers who have tried to deal with the issue of capturing the real life experiences of Jews in contemporary Germany in cinematic form. A Swiss Jew (born in 1957) who has been living in Berlin for several decades, Levy is one of the founders of the young production team X Filme Creative Pool and is, besides, a former circus clown. In his films, Levy continuously breaks the taboos that Germans have carefully erected around their idea of the ‘proper’ representation of the Nazi past. In his most recent comedy Mein Führer. Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (2007), 47 Levy pokes fun at Adolf Hitler’s ability to mobilize the German masses, exaggerating Hitler’s self-aggrandization and mocking the Germans’ refusal to acknowledge the truth about their ‘Führer.’ Although Levy’s comedy failed at the box office, it must be considered one of the most serious attempts at approaching the ‘dialectic of normality’ albeit with a sense of humor. Indeed, the exploration of Diner’s notion of negative symbiosis has been an important theme throughout Levy’s work. In his short film Ohne Mich (1993), 48 Levy himself plays Simon Rosenthal, a young Jew who lives in a German city and is haunted by the past. Just like the Israeli car dealer Shmuel in Dan Varete’s film Metallic Blues (2004), 49 who on his first visit to Germany since his parents had to flee from the Nazis, keeps envisioning Gestapo officers behind every corner, Rosenthal has nightmares and daydreams about SS-officers and Gestapo patrols hunting Jews in the streets. In both films, black-and-white scenes interrupt the plot and highlight how difficult it is for many Jews to see modern Germany without simultaneously evoking images of the Third Reich. In Ohne Mich, Simon’s fears are compounded by news about right-wing

Jews, Germans, and the Nazi Past in Recent German Cinema

171

attacks on foreigners shown on TV, and even more so when a neoNazi moves into an adjoining apartment, spouting xenophobic slogans and holding parties with dubious bald young followers. Levy humorously portrays his protagonist’s predicament as he struggles to avoid his mother’s urgent phone calls from New York. She tells him to get out of Germany – ‘We have no business living in that country!’ – while his non-Jewish girlfriend complains about his ‘obsession’ with the Nazi past. The film, while taking into account Jewish anxiety and inability to reject the overwhelming presence of the Nazi past, still allows for a satirical exaggeration of Simon’s paranoia. Levy thus achieves what the ‘heritage’ films that Koepnick analyzed cannot achieve – he confronts the ‘dialectic of normality’ by forcing his viewers to acknowledge both Jewish and non-Jewish sensibilities about the past in the context of the 1990s racist attacks on foreigners in Germany. Judging by centuries-old contributions by Jewish writers to humorous literature in Germany, it is perhaps not surprising that Dani Levy was the first to make a post-unification German-Jewish comedy. His film Alles auf Zucker (2004) 50 was a resounding success at the German box office and won a number of prestigious awards in Germany and abroad. 51 The story takes place in post-unification Germany. The Jewish-German gambler Jakob ‘Jäckie’ Zuckermann, who lives in East-Berlin, is faced with the demands in his late mother’s will, one being to sit shiva with his estranged orthodox brother, who together with the mother had fled to the West and left Jakob behind. The news of his mother’s passing comes at a rather inopportune moment for Jakob, as the telegram finds the protagonist at a major turning point in his life – the chance of finally winning an international pool tournament that promises to end all of his financial woes forever. The conflict between the two extremely different brothers, as well as Jäckie’s creative attempts at sneaking away from the obligatory shiva to return to the tournament, present many comic highlights. The film depicts the members of this Jewish-German family, which ironically doubles as a German-German family and hence functions as a comic stand-in for the typical post-wall German family, as entirely dysfunctional and yet altogether human: From sexual promiscuity to incestuous relationships between cousins; an obsession with gambling; and, above all, the incessant need to cover over painful truths. Zuckermann’s daughter not only lives openly with another woman,

172

Sabine von Mering

she also has a child by her uptight cousin, whose turn to an ultraorthodox lifestyle is ridiculed as a rather pitiful attempt at repentance. The cousin’s younger sister, on the other hand, is eager to seduce Zuckermann’s grown-up son, who confesses to being a virgin. Zucker himself was just about to get divorced when he received the notice about his mother’s death. His non-Jewish wife (played by Hannelore Elsner), though tired of his escapades, quickly agrees to change her mind and participate in the charade of family unity in the hope of receiving a share in the mysterious inheritance. As the title suggests, Zucker is convinced that he is the victim of an intricate plot designed by his mother to make him miserable from beyond her grave. In obvious reference to Veit Harlan’s notoriously anti-Semitic Nazi era film Jud Süß (1940), 52 Levy makes fun of Zucker [sugar] as both victim and perpetrator and whose attempts at outwitting his fate keep getting squelched by an ill-disposed creator. Levy knows that his film also serves as an educational tool: Jewish customs and rituals have been eliminated from German society and culture since the Third Reich. Since most of his audience is presumably unfamiliar with the requirements of Shabbat or the tradition of sitting shiva, the film explains the wide spectrum of Jewish reality, from the ultra-orthodox cousin (who is ultimately revealed to be a fraud) to Samuel, who is an old-fashioned patriarch, though still less radical than his son, to Zuckermann himself, who has nothing at all to do with any Jewish rituals and, besides, is married to a non-Jew. Ironically, only Zucker’s Lesbian daughter and her girlfriend decide to embrace the family’s Jewish heritage. While Jakob assumes that Samuel is still in possession of the fortune he ostensibly made in the banking business, he himself has invested money in a brothel, which is threatened with closure if he does not come up with 100,000 Euros. The East-West conflict that continues to divide Germany is played out as a slow process of rapprochement. Their mother’s will moves the two brothers to begrudgingly cooperate, and her interest in seeing them overcome their feud ultimately outwits them both – when the inheritance is found out to be insignificant, Jakob and Samuel realize that their true fortune lies in their newly-established bond, even if it takes one faked and one real heart attack to get them to this realization. With his film, Levy comments on Germans’ inability to perceive unification as driven by anything but economic interests, despite the fact that both

Jews, Germans, and the Nazi Past in Recent German Cinema

173

sides are suffering from their unfulfilled emotional needs. By mockingly transforming the German-German dialogue into a Jewish-Jewish dialogue, Levy poignantly reveals the many layers of history that are being brushed aside. Furthermore, while Levy re-introduces a variety of Jewish themes and characters into the German ‘normality,’ he highlights the near impossibility of such normality through comic exaggeration. With Alles auf Zucker, Dani Levy proves that contemporary German cinema can not only be funny, but more importantly, that Germans and Jews together can laugh about life’s slapstick predicaments. As a matter of fact, his film about German-Jewish presence beat Oliver Hirschbiegel’s problematic Hitler portrait Der Untergang (2005) 53 in all categories for the 2005 German ‘Filmpreis’ – a resounding victory that led Levy’s lead actor Henny Hübchen to quip: ‘I beat Hitler.’ 54 Oliver Hirschbiegel Oliver Hirschbiegel’s one-man feature film Ein ganz gewöhnlicher Jude (2006) 55 is a ninety-minute imaginary German-Jewish dialogue. Emanuel Goldfarb is a journalist living in present-day Frankfurt am Main. When a history teacher invites him to come and speak to students about what it means to live in Germany for a Jew, Goldfarb is at first opposed to the idea. Not until he realizes that he is embarking on a soul-searching mission that he might be able to exploit in a future book project does he acquiesce and begin to tape-record his thoughts. Except for one scene at the beginning and one at the very end, the film never ventures outside the confines of the small, sparsely furnished apartment in which Goldfarb paces up and down like a trapped wild animal, pausing only to type and then re-type multiple versions of his response to the schoolteacher. During the length of the film, Goldfarb carries out a made-up dialogue with the teacher about growing up in Frankfurt, about his parents’ continuous reminders not to provoke any ‘Risches,’ i.e., anti-Semitic reactions from classmates or neighbors, and about his struggle with religious Judaism. Goldfarb faults his German compatriots for their insensitivity, their ignorance about Jews, and their phony obsession with the past. Yet, he realizes that he himself is torn between the desire to hide from and the need to explain himself to his surroundings, between embracing his Jewishness and outright rejecting it.

174

Sabine von Mering

The film shows how Goldfarb slowly traces the source of his anger to the many unresolved issues in his life, beginning with the troubled relationship with his parents, to his break with Judaism, and his failed marriage with a non-Jewish German woman. It is not until halfway through the film that the viewer learns of the existence of Goldfarb’s son. His wife’s refusal to have their son circumcised eventually ended their marriage. Goldfarb describes his disgust looking at his uncircumcised son and declares that his wife’s rejection of circumcision opened up an unbridgeable abyss between them. In the end, his unflinching self-analysis leads him to an unexpected level of self-realization. In revisiting the arguments that had seemed insurmountable in the past, Goldfarb detects a new freedom. Perhaps, he concludes, Jews can only temporarily convince themselves that it is possible to live among nonJews even though it might span a lifetime. Reviews of Hirschbiegel’s movie are seemingly influenced by the mixed reactions he received for his previous film Der Untergang which Frank Schirrmacher called a masterpiece, while Wim Wenders openly criticized it for its uncritical portrayal of the Nazi leadership. 56 Hannes Heer, one of the key historians who worked on the first ‘Wehrmacht Exhibition,’ condemned Hirschbiegel for trivializing the Nazi regime and mythologizing Hitler as the sole responsible perpetrator. In Heer’s view, Hirschbiegel’s portrayal of the Third Reich amounts to Holocaust denial. 57 Given these circumstances, it may be surprising that the Swiss-Jewish author Charles Lewinsky chose Hirschbiegel to make a film based on Lewinsky’s autobiographical novel. 58 Critics are divided about Ein ganz gewöhnlicher Jude as well. Some agree that Hirschbiegel accomplished what he set out to do. 59 Others question the film’s (and the film script’s) authenticity. Henryk Broder, for example, has little sympathy for the film: ‘Oliver Hirschbiegels neuer Film präsentiert den Juden, wie der Philosemit ihn liebt: innerlich zerrissen, mit seinem Judesein hadernd, in der Tiefe seines verwundeten Herzens aber gutmütig und kooperativ.’ 60 In his scathing review, Broder sees little difference between Hirschbiegel’s ahistorical depiction of Nazi crimes in Der Untergang and his inability to accurately present a Jewish consciousness in his latest film. Indeed, casting Ben Becker as Goldfarb probably raised most eyebrows as Becker is primarily known to German audiences as the ‘Aryan’ counterpart to Jewish lead characters in such films as Joseph Vilsmaier’s

Jews, Germans, and the Nazi Past in Recent German Cinema

175

Comedian Harmonists (1997) or Rolf Schübel’s Gloomy Sunday. Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod (1999). 61 By using Becker in the role of a Jewish character, Hirschbiegel ostensibly wants his ‘ordinary Jew’ to be first and foremost identified as an ‘ordinary German.’ His Jewishness, the film suggests, is part choice, part tradition, part genetic legacy. The film’s main goal seems to aim at educating a German audience about Judaism – Hirschbiegel lets Goldfarb describe Jewish holidays and rituals as pictured in the scene of him taking out a prayer shawl and demonstrating prayer rituals. Thus, the viewer is given a preview of what the schoolchildren will get to see when Goldfarb ultimately accepts the teacher’s invitation for a school visit. Arguably the most powerful moment in Hirschbiegel’s film is the scene in which Goldfarb attempts to explain the difference between Jewish and non-Jewish German identity. He walks into an adjoining room and pulls out an old shoebox filled with photographs. Laying picture after picture out on the sofa, he comments that Jewish and nonJewish families look at family photographs in different ways. While others would remark on a relative’s illness or business, Jews see names of concentration camps: ‘Auschwitz – Theresienstadt – ausgewandert nach Carracas – verschollen.’ The photos remind Goldfarb that his Germanness has always been a mask to him, and he comments on a childhood photograph in which he holds a ‘Schultüte’ at age six: ‘Ich […] ich als kleiner Deutscher verkleidet […].’ The film changes perspective when Goldfarb unexpectedly mentions the existence of a son (although he says he sees and talks to him quite frequently) three quarters into the film. Though Goldfarb interprets his failed marriage as evidence that relationships between Jews and non-Jews are ultimately doomed, the very existence of his son reveals a new dimension in the portrayal of German-Jewish identity. The fact that he eventually accepts the teacher’s invitation to visit the classroom should therefore not be read as any sign of capitulation, as Broder asserts in his critique, but rather as an embrace of his (and his son’s) chance at an ‘ordinary’ Jewish existence in today’s Germany. Michael Verhoeven For his latest documentary Menschliches Versagen (2008), 62 Michael Verhoeven tracked down a number of German-Jewish families whose names the Düsseldorf historian Wolfgang Dreßen found listed on files recently discovered at tax offices in Cologne. The files reveal to what

176

Sabine von Mering

extent civilian authorities (tax offices in particular) and the general public openly participated in the ‘aryanization’ of Jewish property throughout the 1930s and 40s. The film is a logical sequel to the filmmaker’s previous documentary Der unbekannte Soldat (2007) 63 and undeniably to Verhoeven’s oeuvre as a whole. Verhoeven confronted his German audience with evidence of its complicity with the Nazi regime in his award-winning film Das schreckliche Mädchen, and many of his films since have addressed the topic of German responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust. The focus of Menschliches Versagen, however, is slightly shifted. While the film, as the title suggests, deals primarily with the question of how ordinary Germans participated in and supported Nazi policies regarding Jews, Menschliches Versagen features interviews with German-Jewish emigrants as well as German Jews who are living in Germany today (for example, Munich lawyer Uri Siegel; the social worker Christiane Picard; and psychotherapist Vera Treplin). Verhoeven juxtaposes their testimonies with the film researchers’ own difficulties in their attempt to reveal the massive German collaboration in aryanization procedures. Verhoeven portrays researchers and members of the second generation in their joint operation trying to find information pertaining to the pilfering of Jewish property during the Nazi years. As the camera scans pages and pages of detailed property lists that deportees were required to provide, some of which the historians prepare for a traveling exhibit, survivors speak about the horrors their parents and grandparents experienced. Most of the interviews are conducted in Germany for which some interviewees like Bea Green, born Siegel, and Edgar Feuchtwanger, nephew of author Lion Feuchtwanger, briefly return from their exile in the U.S. or Great Britain. All of them are united by a fatalistic sense of humor as they describe their painful losses. There is no sentimentalism or sensationalism in this film despite researchers’ reports of having been met with strong animosity both from authorities and the general public who tried to put obstacles in their paths and hinder their work, stonewalling strategies reminiscent of scenes in Das schreckliche Mädchen. Seventy years after leaving her German high school to escape to England with a ‘Kindertransport,’ the film shows Bea Green’s return to visit her Bavarian school. She fondly remembers her school years and being one of only five Jewish children in her class. Verhoeven

Jews, Germans, and the Nazi Past in Recent German Cinema

177

documents her reunion with classmate Johanna Bung, who is moved to tears on this momentous occasion. While Bea Green seems to enjoy the rediscovery of her childhood memories, Johanna Bung struggles to defend her childhood (in)action. Though children asked and worried about their Jewish classmates, it was not until much later that they learned of the whereabouts of their classmates: ‘Aber wir waren eben Kinder […] und nach der Kristallnacht waren sie plötzlich weg,’ she recalls. Both Green and Bung talk about the fear of being exposed (and exposing others) to danger and the need to remain silent. When Green remembers being intimidated by girls who wore the BDM uniforms to school, the underlying tension in their conversation becomes palpable. Bung’s reassurance that they had meant her no harm sounds hollow to Bea: ‘Das hätt’ ich gern damals gewusst.’ But she immediately apologizes to the tearful Johanna when she sees the effect of her words. Verhoeven refrains from commenting as Bea Green cautiously reasserts her Jewish-German identity: ‘Ich merke einfach, dass ich noch heute eine Bayerische Jüdin bin. Ich bin eine Bayerische Jüdische Britin.’ Confronting her past, Bea realizes that she will always remain a ‘Bavarian child,’ albeit one that is now at home in London. Yet, her cheerful embrace of her Bavarian-JewishBritish identity contrasts sharply with her loss, and with her nonJewish classmate’s self-absorbed reluctance to accept any responsibility for what happened. Dan Diner’s thesis of a negative symbiosis between Germans and Jews continues to apply to post-unification Germany, as the Holocaust and anti-Semitism keep on defining and shaping Jewish-German identity and the relationships between Germans and Jews. But, as Jewish communities and an overall interest in Jewish issues in Germany expand, there are also signs of a more diverse GermanJewish identity. At the same time, however, new forms of antiSemitism still define the relationships between many Germans and Jews. The films discussed here set their hopes on the positive experience of Jews living in Germany today, on the reality of JewishGerman identity, and a future awareness among all Germans (young and old) to continue in their pursuit of truth and justice. ‘More and more young German students […] are sensitive to the idea that the subject is not just about Germans and Jews. It’s about people and life,’ writes Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times. 64 Just as Bea Green asserts her Bavarian-Jewish-British identity, Hirschbiegel’s

178

Sabine von Mering

Goldfarb accepts his in-between position, defining himself as neither an ordinary Jew nor an ordinary German. His extraordinary status offers Goldfarb a unique opportunity to make his non-Jewish environment comprehend that the Holocaust can never be understood as simply a ‘Jewish problem’ but must be acknowledged as an important part of Germany’s history. Conclusion The discussion sparked by Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) 65 represents only the most recent instance in a familiar pattern of public debate concerning the way in which Jews and Germans should (not) approach the legacy of the Holocaust in film today. 66 Tarantino’s style is certainly unique. His satirical approach reverses the usual black-and-white dichotomy of German perpetrators versus Jewish victims found in most films about the Holocaust. Here, Jewish soldiers hunt Nazis, and though the American Jews are of German descent, they do not exhibit any sympathies towards their captured Nazis nor are they plagued with conflicted feelings about their Germanness. However, most Holocaust-themed films from Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) to Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) or, for that matter, Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, do not explore the subject of German post-war Holocaust remembrance and present Jewish-German identity. Instead, these films operate under the assumption that Jewish-German identity has been successfully erased by Nazi perpetrators and can only exist either in a nostalgic amputated form (in the person of the Jewish survivor who now lives in New York or Israel) or as a cynical ‘weapon’ against former compatriots, but certainly not as a continued or renewed/renewable identity. It seems that recent German films are trying to steer away from this erasure and instead show Holocaust remembrance and present JewishGerman identity as a litmus test for German society’s ability to reveal and confront new truths about the past. The films by Michael Verhoeven, Malte Ludin and Robert Thalheim address German avoidance to confront the Holocaust by chronicling investigations into the German nation’s failure of fulfilling its human obligation and protecting its fellow citizens during the Nazi regime. Films by Dani Levy, Michael Verhoeven and Oliver Hirschbiegel present Jewish-German identity as a contemporary reality. As is the case in recent German literature (especially by Jewish-German authors from Barbara Honig-

Jews, Germans, and the Nazi Past in Recent German Cinema

179

mann and Wladimir Kaminer to Esther Dischereith), Jewish experience from circumcision to sitting shiva is reinserted into postunification German culture. Together these films demonstrate a positive engagement with the dialectic of normality in the difficult search for justice. Notes 1

Das weiße Band, dir. Michael Haneke, X Filme et al., 2009.

2

Quoted in Caroline Pearce, Contemporary Germany and the Nazi Legacy. Remembrance, Politics, and the Dialectic of Normality, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 51.

3

Ibid., p. 50.

4

Ibid., pp. 80-118.

5

See for example Biller’s interview in DIE ZEIT Online, 25 January 2005, at: http://www.zeit.de/2005/05/gespraech_joffe (accessed 28 May 2010); and Broder’s own website at: http://www.henryk-broder.de/tagebuch/karikaturisten.html (accessed 28 May 2010). 6

Michael Kimmelman, ‘No Laughs, No Thrills – And Villains All Too Real’, New York Times, 27 February 2008, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/books/27holo caust.html (accessed 30 May 2010). 7

Y. Michal Bodemann, The New German Jewry and the European Context. The Return of the European Jewish Diaspora, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 4.

8 Dan Diner, ‘Negative Symbiose: Deutsche und Juden nach Auschwitz’, Babylon, 1 (1986), 9-20. 9

Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, Munich: Piper & Co., 1967.

10

Ralph Giordano, Die zweite Schuld oder Von der Last Deutscher zu sein, Hamburg: Rasch und Roehring, 1987, p. 355. 11 12

Bodemann, The New German Jewry, p. 6.

For the most up-to-date statistics and analyses, see Jehuda Reinharz et al, eds., Aktueller Antisemitismus. Ein Phänomen der Mitte, Munich: Saur, 2010.

180

13

Sabine von Mering

‘Angela Merkel über Antisemitismus’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 8 May 2010, V2-8.

14 Susanne Urban, ‘Anti-Semitism in Germany Today. Its Roots and Tendencies’, Jewish Political Studies Review, 16 (2004), 3-4. 15

Ibid., p. 4.

16

Ibid.

17 Right-wing parties currently sit in two eastern (Mecklenburg and Saxony) and one western (Bremen, courtesy of Bremerhaven) parliament and have had other successes in eastern Saxony-Anhalt (98) and Brandenburg (99, 04), as well as western Schleswig-Holstein (92) and Baden-Württemberg (92, 96) since reunification. 18

Daniela Berghahn, ‘Post-1990 Screen Memories: How East and West German Cinema Remembers the Third Reich and the Holocaust’, German Life and Letters, 59:2 (2006), 294-308 (here: p. 296).

19

See Lutz Koepnick, ‘Reframing the Past: Heritage Cinema and the Holocaust in the 1990’s’, New German Critique, 87 (2002), 47-82. 20

Berghahn, ‘Post-1990 Screen Memories’, p. 300.

21

Lutz Koepnick: ‘“Honor Your German Masters.” History, Memory, and National Identity in Joseph Vilsmaier’s Comedian Harmonists (1997)’, in: Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, eds., Light Motives. German Popular Film in Perspective, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003, p. 349. 22

Ibid., pp. 351-2.

23

Ibid., p. 367.

24

Ibid., p. 369.

25

Robert C. Reimer and Carol Reimer, Nazi-Retro Film. How German Narrative Cinema Remembers the Past, New York: Twayne, 1999, p. 4.

26

Ibid.

27

Ibid.

28

Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller and Karoline Tschuggnall, Opa war kein Nazi. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2002.

Jews, Germans, and the Nazi Past in Recent German Cinema

181

29 Wulf Kantsteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory. History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006, p. 4. 30

Ibid., p. 5.

31 A Jew Among the Germans, dir. Marian Marzynski, Frontline, 2005, at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/germans (accessed 28 May 2010). 32

Ibid.

33

‘Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste’ is a German volunteer peace organization created after 1945. See: http://www.asf-ev.de/en/introduction (accessed 28 May 2010). 34 Zwei oder drei Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß, dir. Malte Ludin, Plan 7 Filmverleih, 2005. 35 Am Ende kommen Touristen, dir. Robert Thalheim, Bavaria Filmverleih & Produktion/Munich, in cooperation with Constantin Film, 2007. 36

Interview with Sabine von Mering on 6 April 2008, at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. 37

Das schreckliche Mädchen, dir. Michael Verhoeven, Kinowelt, 1974.

38

Die Weiße Rose, dir. Michael Verhoeven, Filmverlag der Autoren & Futura Filmverleih, 1982. 39

Indeed, Stephan K. Schindler has argued that Michael Verhoeven, too, relegates Jewish suffering to the periphery in his films. See Stephan K. Schindler, ‘Displaced Images. The Holocaust in German Film’, in: Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick, eds., The Cosmopolitan Screen. German Cinema and the Global Imaginary 1945 to the Present, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007, pp. 192-205 (here: p. 200). 40

Alexandra Senfft, Schweigen tut weh. Eine deutsche Familiengeschichte, Berlin: Claassen Verlag, 2007. The title ‘Silence hurts. A German Family History’ is a word play on the German children song ‘Winter ade – Scheiden tut weh.’

41 Dan Bar On, Legacy of Silence. Encounters with Children of the Third Reich, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. 42

How powerful she is comes out in Ludin’s remark that he could never have made it during his mother’s lifetime.

182

43

See interview with Sabine von Mering on 6 April 2008.

44

Ibid.

45

Ibid.

46

Ibid.

Sabine von Mering

47

Mein Führer. Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler, dir. Dani Levy, Senator, 2007. 48

Ohne Mich, dir. Dani Levy, Episode omnibus film Neues Deutschland (WDR), 1993. 49

Metallic Blues, dir. Danny Varete, 2004.

50

Alles auf Zucker, dir. Dani Levy, X Verleih AG, 2005.

51

It won six Lolas, including film, director, script and actor, at the 55th German Film Awards in 2005. Indeed, it won gold over Marc Rothemund’s Sophie Scholl – Die Letzten Tage (2004), which was awarded the prize in silver. In addition, the film garnered the prize for the best film script from the Association of German Film Critics, and the Box Office Germany Award for more than 1,000 viewers per film copy during its opening weekend. It won the Ernst-Lubitsch Prize 2005 for the best comedic effort in German-language cinema, and the Audience Award at the 7th Festival of German Film in Madrid. Finally, it won the German Film Prize in gold for best film and best director, best leading actor, best script, best film music, and best costumes in 2005. If all the accolades are any indication, German audiences were clearly eager to embrace a German-Jewish story that did not hinge on openly addressing the Holocaust. 52

Jud Süß, dir. Veit Harlan, Terra Filmverleih, 1940.

53

Der Untergang, dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel, Constantin, 2005.

54

See: http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/kino/0,1518,364432,00.html (accessed 28 May 2010). 55

Ein ganz gewöhnlicher Jude, dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel, NFP marketing & distribution, 2006. 56 57

See: http://www.zeit.de/2004/44/Untergang_n (accessed 28 May 2010).

Cf. Hannes Heer, Hitler war’s. Die Befreiung der Deutschen von Ihrer Vergangenheit, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2005, p. 25: ‘Mythen stifteten für Naturvölker in

Jews, Germans, and the Nazi Past in Recent German Cinema

183

vorwissenschaftlichen Zeiten Sinn und Zusammenhalt. Heute sind sie nur um den Preis der Umdeutung von Geschichte und der Verleugnung der Schuld zu haben.’ 58

Perhaps Lewinsky was more impressed by Hirschbiegel’s previous success with Das Experiment (2001), a film modeling the Stanford prison experiments and the struggle for preserving one’s humanity in an inhuman environment. 59

See for example Kathrin Buchner’s review in the magazine STERN, 19 January 2006, at: http://www.stern.de/kultur/film/ein-ganz-gewoehnlicher-jude-wie-spitzmaul nashoerner-in-afrika-553547.html (accessed 28 May 2010).

60

Review in Der Spiegel, 19 January 2006, at: http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/kino/ 0,1518,396116,00.html (accessed 30 May 2010).

61

Gloomy Sunday. Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod, dir. Rolf Schübel, Arsenal Filmverleih, 1999.

62

Menschliches Versagen, dir. Michael Verhoeven, Bavaria Filmverleih, 2008.

63

Der unbekannte Soldat, dir. Michael Verhoeven, Kinowelt, 2006.

64

See Kimmelman, ‘No Laughs, No Thrills’.

65 Compare for example Manohla Dargis’s review in the New York Times, 21 August 2009, at: http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/movies/21inglourious.html (accessed 30 May 2010), in which she criticizes Tarantino’s decision to make Nazi Colonel Hans Landa the most likeable character in the film with the enthusiastic reception of Tarantino’s film in the German press. Claudius Seidl writes in the FAZ: ‘Es ist [...] die Freude über einen Film, der den Untergang nicht als Tragödie, sondern als Farce inszeniert; der angesichts von Hakenkreuzfahnen und Uniformen nicht die Hacken zusammenschlägt und ehrfurchtsvoll den Blick senkt, der aus den Nazis nicht Dämonen macht, sondern sie als das inszeniert, was sie wohl wirklich waren: Pack, pompöser Trash, durch und durch triviale Bösewichte.’ See: FAZ, 19 August 2009, at: http:// www.faz.net/s/Rub070B8E40FAFE40D1A7212BACEE9D55FD/Doc~ECC4BD9537 C0E4AB9A40BB2557C5FA1A8~ATpl~Ecommon~Sspezial.html (accessed 30 May 2010). 66 Other examples are Stefan Ruzowitzky’s academy-award-winning film Die Fälscher (2008), and Stephen Daldry’s 2007 cinematic version of Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser.

Jennifer E. Michaels Challenging Notions of Post-Wall German Identity: Minority and Migrant Voices Since 1990, Germany has been struggling to define a new post-unification national identity and to integrate minorities and migrants into this identity. This essay addresses how in their texts minorities and migrants struggle with questions of preserving their cultural identities. The focus here is on views articulated by minorities who are German citizens, such as the African-German May Ayim and the Indian-German Sheila Mysorekar, and by migrants to Germany, such as the Turkish-German Şinasi Dikmen, the Kenyan-German Miriam Kwalanda, and the Japanese-German Yoko Tawada.

Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, observes: ‘We live in an age defined by mass migration and creative immigrants.’ 1 Over the last decades, Germany has experienced such migration consisting of among others ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, ‘guest workers’ from South and Southeast Europe and Turkey, and asylum seekers drawn to Germany’s previously liberal asylum policy. Since 1990 Germany has been struggling to define a new post-unification identity to include citizens of the former German Democratic Republic and to confront anew its National Socialist past to integrate this legacy into its new self-image. Another challenge to German notions of being German has been to integrate its own minorities and more recent migrants into this new national identity. Like other European countries, Germany, especially since the 1950s, has become an increasingly multi-ethnic society, yet some Germans still view their country as a white, culturally homogenous state. This essay focuses on texts by a variety of writers from Germany’s various minority and migrant groups. Of these, the African-German essayist and poet May Ayim (formerly Opitz) and the Indian-German essayist, poet, and journalist Sheila Mysorekar were born in Germany. The Turkish-German satirist Şinasi Dikmen, the Kenyan-German Miriam Kwalanda, and the Japanese-German novelist, poet and essayist Yoko Tawada migrated to Germany. Through their use of fictional and non-fictional texts these writers present both personal and critical perspectives that give varied insights into their

186

Jennifer E. Michaels

struggle to preserve their cultural identities, assimilate into German society, and create new identities. German politics has been slow to address migration issues and has practiced a ‘policy of procrastination.’ 2 Since many migrants came as ‘guest workers’ to help rebuild the German economy after the war – the term immigrant was not used – the government saw them as transients who would eventually return home, which has not happened. According to an article in STERN in May 2007, people with migrant backgrounds, including ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, now make up around 18.6% of the population. 3 Germany’s long citizenship policy of ius sanguinis, based on ethnicity, rather than ius soli, by birth in Germany, or ius domicilii, by residence, made it easy for ethnic German migrants to become citizens, but difficult for other migrants and their German-born children to become naturalized. Polarizing debates about the rights of migrants eventually led to the reform of the Alien Law, effective in January 1991, which allowed non-ethnic German residents over the age of twenty-three to become naturalized after they had lived in Germany for fifteen years. Their children between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three could be naturalized if they had lived in Germany for the last eight years and attended German schools for six years. The long waiting period and the requirement to give up their previous citizenship, however, discouraged many from applying. A reformed law, made effective on 1 January 2000, allows children born in Germany to non-ethnic German parents to receive German citizenship automatically, but they must decide when they come of age whether to retain their German or their parents’ citizenship. The law reduces the waiting time from fifteen to eight years for older migrants. The move from ius sanguinis to a limited ius soli and ius domicilii is a liberalization of German notions of nationality. As the German foreign ministry stated: The idea that it was possible to ground the idea of a nation on ethnic homogeneity was already an illusion. The definition of such a homogenous society was and is a construct, and a representation of the nation defined by blood ties belongs to the tragic evils of our past. 4

Some, like the Greens, who supported dual citizenship, viewed the law, which did not contain this provision, as incomplete. According to one study, 75% of Turks in Germany would like German citizenship if they could also retain their Turkish citizenship, 5 which the 2000 law

Post-Wall German Identity: Minority and Migrant Voices

187

does not allow. 6 Others, however, saw the new law as ‘a shift of seismic proportions.’ 7 Many migrants are uncomfortable with policies that call for assimilation, fearing the loss of their cultures, the ‘disappearance of Anatolian faces behind German masks.’ 8 Postmodern discourses on intercultural identity, multiculturalism and hybridity have been central to literary and cultural debates in recent decades and have become influential in Germany, especially since unification. Using the Prague German-language writer Franz Kafka as an example, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari encouraged thinking about identity, arguing that a minor literature, one that ‘a minority constructs within a major language,’ can open up new spaces. From the margins of society the writer can help ‘forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility.’ 9 The ‘glory’ of minor literature lies in its ability ‘to be the revolutionary force for all literature.’ 10 Homi K. Bhabha has been particularly influential in challenging majority discourses and criticizing the concept of nation with its implied homogeneity and exclusivity. He argues that all cultures are hybrid and that hybridity challenges notions of cultural and ethnic groups as fixed and static. In his thinking about cultural pluralism, migrants, exposed to more than one culture, play an important role in transforming and renewing culture. Such cultural discourses from the margins create a ‘Third Space’: ‘This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.’ 11 From being ‘a loaded discourse of dangerous racial contaminations,’ drawn from colonialism, hybridity becomes a force of cultural creativity. 12 Bhabha envisions a constantly mixing world in which identities are not static but fluid and evolving and in which borders are broken down. More recently, terms commonly used for literature by migrants such as ‘diasporic literature,’ ‘hybridity,’ and metaphors of ‘in-between’ have been scrutinized because they can suggest unequal relationships and essentialize otherness. 13 Metaphors of ‘in-between’ can imply, for example, ‘two fixed entities, with the migrant subject either suspended in motion or trapped between them.’ 14 Literature written in German by minorities and migrants has often been treated patronizingly, but recently German literary critics and scholars have come to appreciate such writing. 15 Terms such as ‘guest worker literature’ or ‘literature by foreigners’ separated them from

188

Jennifer E. Michaels

mainstream German traditions and insisted on their otherness. Such literature is now viewed as inter- and trans-cultural or transnational literature, as literature that transcends national boundaries, blends different cultural traditions and draws on multiple cultural identities, terms well suited to describe today’s pluralisms, disruptions, and heterogeneities. 16 Although like other European countries Germany in recent decades has become an increasingly multicultural society, many Germans still view their country as a white, culturally homogenous state. Germany has not thought of itself as a land of immigration, but the reality is otherwise. Germany’s multiple cultures are, however, not a recent phenomenon, since there have long been Polish, Lithuanian, Masurian, Kashubian and Sorbian minorities, and much of earlier German literature and culture reflects intensive mutual exchanges with other cultures. 17 Jewish Germans have long contributed to German culture, and since World War I a small number of African-Germans have resided in Germany. In recent years an often polarizing debate has been carried on between those who want to retain a national identity they perceive as culturally homogenous and those who argue for an ethnic pluralism to preserve minorities’ cultures of origin and who recognize that German individual and national identities, once thought of as fixed, constantly evolve. Şinasi Dikmen belongs to the first generation of Turks, the largest group among Germany’s minorities who came to Germany as ‘guest workers,’ a term he satirically renames ‘Work Tourists.’ Of Germany’s minorities, Turks in particular are seen as foreign, especially because of their religion, even though Turkey itself is a secular state. In ‘Die deutsche Seite unserer Familie’ Dikmen satirizes hostile attitudes to Turkey, such as that Turkey should never be allowed to belong to Europe, ‘denn die Türkei kenne die Aufklärung nicht und sei ein total islamisches Land, und die Demokratie sei der Mehrheit der Türken nicht bekannt.’ 18 Yet Turkey was the first to apply to join the EU before some countries that are now EU members were even on the map. 19 Even if Turks become citizens many Germans think: ‘Once a Turk, always a Turk.’ 20 In the early post-unification years, Turks felt as if the Wall had fallen on them because of increased competition and xenophobia. 21 Dikmen, who was born in Turkey in 1945 and moved to Germany in 1972 where he worked as a nurse, is the first Turk to write satires in

Post-Wall German Identity: Minority and Migrant Voices

189

German. Satire, he observes, is for him an act of self-defense: it helps him cope. In 1985 he founded the first Turkish cabaret in German, ‘Knobi-Bonbon’ in Ulm, and in 1997 ‘Die Käs’ in Frankfurt. ‘Käs,’ short for ‘Kabarett Änderungsschneiderei,’ refers to a common Turkish occupation in Germany, but also to the possibility of change. There is little that escapes Dikmen’s satire: he makes fun of himself, his fellow Turks, Germans, and through laughter provokes thought about social and political issues affecting Turks such as negative stereotypes and racist attitudes, both those of Germans toward Turks and of Turks toward Greeks and Kurds, and questions of identity and integration. He writes in German, he notes, because it gives him the possibility first to laugh at himself and then at others who annoy him. 22 One goal of his satire is to undermine such demeaning German stereotypes of Turks as ‘virtual moustachioed garlic-bulbs’ 23 (Knobi, the name of his first cabaret, is short for the German word for garlic). In ‘Wer ist ein Türke?’ the narrator is reading Die Zeit in a train compartment occupied also by an older German couple. A man conforming to stereotypes of Turks – he wears a green hand-knit vest, and is carrying plastic bags – asks if there are seats and is rudely told no. When the narrator asks why the woman refused the man a seat, she says she does not want to travel with such a type, namely with a Turk. But you are traveling with a Turk, he says. She refuses to believe that the narrator is a Turk because he reads Die Zeit, from which he deduces that only people who read Die Zeit can be Germans: the many millions who do not are therefore Turks. 24 In ‘Alles in Butter’ Dikmen satirizes German perceptions that all Turks live in poverty. Germans fill to overflowing a Turkish family’s apartment with shabby clothes and broken furniture and are offended when the Turkish family does not wear the old clothes. 25 In ‘Wir werden das Knoblauchkind schon schaukeln’ the narrator attends a meeting designed to address ‘Turkish problems,’ which should really be called ‘German problems with Turks.’ The more those supposedly knowledgeable about Turkey and Turks speak, the more they reveal their prejudices and ignorance. The retired teacher, for example, refers to her former Turkish pupils as ‘Knoblauchkinder.’ The narrator, the only Turk present, is not consulted about how to solve the perceived problems. 26 In ‘Der Verein und die Integration’ the narrator notes: ‘Mein Problem ist nicht der Deutsche, sondern mein Problem ist, dass ich sein Problem bin und dass ich aber daran nichts ändern kann.’ 27 In ‘Kein Geburtstag, keine

190

Jennifer E. Michaels

Integration’ the narrator finds it hard to integrate because he does not know his birth date. On a visit to his village in Turkey he tries to find out, but nobody knows for sure. Instead they associate his birth with inexact memories, such as the day when the bull ran away. Dikmen contrasts a life shaped by memories with the cold organization of the Germans. Despite being unable to find out his exact birth date, he ends by pointing out that, as with Germans, a mother gave birth to him. 28 ‘Wohnungssuche’ satirizes how, by giving convoluted excuses for not renting apartments to Turks, Germans try to avoid sounding racist. 29 In many satires Dikmen resists the pressure to assimilate, a sensitive issue for many Turks, since he believes that integration should not demand abandoning one’s culture. As Iris Young observes, assimilation requires people to change their identities, and she questions the legitimacy of such pressure: ‘Self-annihilation is an unreasonable and unjust requirement of citizenship.’ 30 In ‘Familiäre Verständigungsschwierigkeiten’ the narrator observes: ‘Die Deutschen verstehen unter Intergration, dass ich wie sie werde.’ 31 In ‘Solange man dich noch sieht’ the narrator’s Italian neighbor advises that each ‘guest worker’ should seek invisibility. Only when nobody notices, senses, or smells him is integration successful. 32 Dikmen also satirizes Turkish attempts to integrate at the expense of their own culture, which he calls ‘hyperintegration.’ In ‘Wir tun so, als ob wir Deutsche wären’ Dr. Ihsan acquires a German girlfriend, whom he treats better than his wife – an example of Dikmen’s criticism of some Turkish husbands’ treatment of their wives – and tries so hard to integrate that he yodels to Turkish melodies. 33 In ‘Brautbeschauer’ Nuri Pehlivan prides himself on his integration and tolerance, which does not prevent him from treating his Turkish wife with contempt. When his daughter wants to marry a German, he is not opposed, although his traditional wife faints at the news. In a satirical reversal of pressures to assimilate, the German parents of the daughter’s fiancé learn Turkish. They and their son convert to Islam and become so strict that they reject the Turkish woman as a bride for their son because of her ‘loose’ morals. 34 The pressure to integrate comes not only from German society, but also from the migrants’ own children and grandchildren who have grown up in Germany and are embarrassed that their parents or grandparents retain their old culture. They believe, for example, that belonging to Turkish cultural associations and taking annual vacations in Turkey hinder integration and encourage them instead to vacation

Post-Wall German Identity: Minority and Migrant Voices

191

in Germany and to give up their traditions. Grandparents are upset that their children and grandchildren have become so assimilated that they reject Turkish traditions and can no longer speak Turkish. The narrator in ‘Wieder zuhause’ remarks: ‘Mich störte schon lange, dass mein Enkelsohn immer tiefer in dem deutschen Morast versank.’ 35 Dikmen argues for retaining cultural traditions and resists an integration that requires abandoning one’s culture in order to conform to German society. In ‘Familiäre Verständigungsschwierigkeiten’ the narrator writes: ‘Ich will in Deutschland leben wie ich will, als Türke, nicht als das Bild, das der Deutsche sich von mir gemacht hat.’ 36 Dikmen examines hybrid identities and the difficulties of creating a multicultural society. He himself lives between two cultures to neither of which he truly belongs. Although he is both German and Turkish, he is also neither. When he is in Turkey he longs for Germany, but when he is in Germany he longs for an imaginary Turkey that has little to do with the country he left. 37 In ‘Das multikulturelle Leben’ he describes a sixtieth birthday party in a ‘German’ family: the children’s spouses stem from Portugal, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Spain, and Italy, their children have different ethnic heritages, and all bring their traditional foods to the party. This family seems to represent a model of multiculturalism until an argument erupts during which the multicultural food is thrown at the multicultural family members. Dikmen concludes: ‘So ist das multikulturelle Leben in Deutschland. Alle reden davon, aber keiner versteht es.’ 38 In his amusing self-portrait, however, he suggests that multiple identities can be enriching. He is a Turk who looks like a Bavarian, who, like a Czech, speaks German with a Slavic accent, who wears glasses like a Japanese, who sometimes behaves like a gentleman from Oxford and sometimes like a Swabian. His greatgrandparents came from the Caucasus, his father was Circassian and his mother half Turkish and half Circassian. His grandchildren have American, Latin American, or German fathers, and Turkish and French mothers. His personal life thus resembles the United Nations. 39 Although German citizens, African-Germans have been marginalized because of their ‘otherness.’ May Ayim belongs to the small group of native-born African-Germans and until her suicide in 1996 was one of the leading voices among Afro-Germans – their preferred name – and the group’s most prominent poet. Ayim, whose father came from Ghana and whose mother was German, was adopted by a

192

Jennifer E. Michaels

white German family and grew up in a white environment. She worked as an educational specialist and speech therapist in Berlin and was active in the women’s movement and the Black German community she helped create. She was one of the editors and a major contributor to Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (1986), 40 an influential collection of interviews, life stories and essays, wrote numerous essays exposing racism and colonialism in German society, as well as two collections of poetry, blues in schwarz weiss (1995) and nachtgesang published posthumously in 1997. While these collections also contain very personal poems, such as those dealing with love and death, critics have been most interested in those in which she depicts the black German experience. In her texts Ayim voices her feelings of not belonging in Germany, where she and other Afro-Germans encountered discrimination because of their skin color. In ‘Ein Brief aus Münster’ she points out the contradiction not only in white Germans’ minds but also in their own between a dark skin and a German passport. 41 Because they were dispersed throughout Germany, Afro-Germans had little, if any, contact with each other and grew up learning that whites were superior and blacks primitive. In her poem ‘winterreim in berlin’ she writes: ‘du bist so weiss wie schnee / und ich so braun wie scheisse / das denkst du dir.’ 42 Ayim examines the difficulty Germans have in accepting people of biracial heritage. In her poem ‘afro-deutsch I’ the white speaker remarks that some still think that mulattos cannot be as successful as whites. Having used the offensive name ‘mulatto,’ a loaded term from colonialism, the speaker tells the Afro-German woman that she is lucky she grew up in Germany and not in the bush and that if she studies hard she will be able to go back to help her people in Africa. The speaker cannot grasp that s/he is speaking to a German. 43 Ayim criticizes society’s notions that a black skin denotes an inner ugliness and moral failing. In her poem ‘sein oder nichtsein’ she writes that when she was growing up in Germany she learned that Africans smell and are primitive and lazy. She learned that backwardness could be recognized from afar by the skin color. 44 Ayim points out that racist thinking pervades language. In ‘Eistorte à la Hildegard’ she notes that ‘Eisneger’ and ‘Eismohr’ for vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce were common names that made racism tasty. 45 Ayim speaks out strongly against the racist attacks that occurred after unification and made Afro-Germans feel vulnerable. She believes

Post-Wall German Identity: Minority and Migrant Voices

193

that German unification brought for Afro-Germans, as well as for African and other immigrants, an increased sense of not belonging. In her essay ‘Das Jahr 1990: Heimat und Einheit aus afro-deutscher Perspektive’ she notes that scarcely any black Germans or other immigrants were visible in the celebrations of unification. They were considered outsiders and realized that the new German wir did not include everyone. 46 Unification, she believes, could have been a moment of critical self-examination in both parts of Germany and could have been a stimulus for change, and she regrets this lost opportunity. 47 In several poems Ayim grapples with post-unification racism. In ‘blues in schwarz weiss’ she writes that the reunified Germany celebrates ‘ohne immigrantInnen flüchtlinge jüdische und schwarze menschen / es feiert im intimen kreis / es feiert in weiß,’ 48 and in ‘die unterkunft’ she speaks out against attacks on refugees and their homes. In this poem her imagery of smoke, ashes, and burned bodies is a grim reminder of the Holocaust. 49 Against this background, Ayim struggles to create her own identity. In Germany she felt she did not belong, but when she visited Ghana, her father’s homeland, she also sensed her otherness. An essential step in defining her identity, she believes, is learning about black history in Germany. In her ‘Diplomarbeit’ in 1984 Ayim was the first to research the history of Africans in Germany, and her work provides the scholarly framework for the individual histories and poems in Farbe bekennen. She traces the presence of Africans in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present. Present-day racism in Germany, Ayim argues, stems from Germany’s colonial past. Understanding black history in Germany and the treatment of blacks under German colonialism and later in the Nazi period helped her and other Afro-Germans understand German attitudes, and her research demonstrates their long history and strong roots in Germany. Her poetry also helps her define her sense of self. Because she found no role models in Germany for her poetry she draws on African and African-American oral traditions. Although many of her poems present a bleak view of repetitive patterns of racism, many also contain hope. In ‘entfernte verbindungen’ she underscores her belief that bridges can be built between cultures, 50 and in other poems she articulates her vision of a global community of people of all colors and shows her affiliation to such writers as Sojourner Truth, Steven Biko, and Mahatma Gandhi who

194

Jennifer E. Michaels

fought for human rights, justice, and peace. 51 The poem ‘die zeit danach,’ written in memory of Martin Luther King, expresses her dream that one day people will not come into the world crying but ‘lachend / in regenbogenfarben.’ 52 Through her writing and her involvement in the Afro-German community, Ayim comes to affirm her biracial identity and views it as a source of her creativity. She refuses to be labeled either black or white and she challenges her fellow Germans. In Farbe bekennen she writes: ‘“Ja, ich bin deutsch,” sage ich vielleicht schon aus Trotz, um sie in ihrem Schwarz-weiß-Denken zu verunsichern.’ 53 By shaking up such black-and-white thinking, Ayim argues for a more inclusive multicultural society and for the freedom to develop different identities. Like African-Germans, blacks who migrate to Germany from African countries encounter stereotypes and hostility. For many Africans, Germany represents a lifelong dream and they are shocked not only by the cold weather, but also by their cold reception. In Die Farbe meines Gesichts: Lebensreise einer kenianischen Frau (1999), 54 her only publication so far, Miriam Kwalanda tells her life story. Her memoir was co-authored with her friend Birgit Koch. In her afterword to the memoir, Koch, who wrote down and organized Kwalanda’s oral account of her life, views their work together as a demonstration of a German-African friendship, an intercultural dialogue through which both learned from each other. Through the memoir Koch hopes to challenge German perceptions of Africans. 55 Kwalanda grew up in rural Kenya, fled from a brutal father, and eventually became a prostitute in the sex tourism business in Mombasa. From television and films she perceives Europe as a beautiful place filled with friendly people, and her dream is to go there. She hopes to escape from sex tourism and create a new life by, ironically, marrying one of the sex tourists. Her memoir suggests how deeply colonial thinking still pervades Africa. Like other African women, Kwalanda internalized colonial notions of beauty and self-worth. As a black person, she feels inferior and believes that a white person is better. In Africa, a lighter skin is valued more than a darker one, and women use bleach to lighten their skin. As Kwalanda observes, when she is lighter she feels more European and better. The modern sex tourism, which offers ‘erotic adventures’ in Africa, draws on continuing colonial fantasies and stereotypes that connect the exotic with the erotic. 56

Post-Wall German Identity: Minority and Migrant Voices

195

Kwalanda achieves her dream when Heinz, a sex tourist from Germany, proposes to marry her and take her to Germany, where she arrives in Dortmund in 1988. At first, however, Kwalanda likens Germany to an enormous refrigerator with people who seem frozen. Heinz, also a migrant, an ethnic German from Poland, turns out to be an alcoholic. At first Kwalanda finds it hard to adapt. In Kenya neighbors drop by, but here she feels isolated, does not understand German, and Heinz is often drunk. She continues to suffer from a lack of self-worth. Because she is black, she feels ugly and less clean than white people, 57 and it makes her ashamed that images of Africa in films and television are ones of backwardness and poverty. 58 Gradually, however, people in Germany open up to her and ease her adaptation to life there. Part of her growing self-confidence comes from her realization that women are valued more in Germany. Germany offers her an emancipation not to be found, she believes, in Kenya, where the patriarchal family structure restricts women. Kenyan men, in her experience, see women as a machine, a work animal, a tool for raising children and working in the fields. 59 In Germany, she learns to state her own opinions, but this leads to conflicts with Heinz, who prefers a submissive African wife. When she visits Kenya she enjoys Mombasa but longs for her quiet life in Germany. Torn between her heritage in Kenya and her new life in Germany, Kwalanda wonders to which culture she belongs. She succeeds in fashioning an identity that includes both lives: ‘Ich habe mir eine eigene Mischung aus Identität und Kultur geschaffen. Damit bin ich glücklich und unglücklich zugleich,’ 60 an insight she has, however, gained only with the help of therapy. Her memoir ends on a positive note. She has separated from Heinz, who was kind when he was not drunk, but who failed to overcome his alcoholism, and intends to learn a profession so she can determine her own life and be a role model for her children. She wants to be a midwife because she likes happy endings, such as putting a new baby in a mother’s arms. Like Ayim, the journalist Sheila Mysorekar, who also writes poems and essays, is politically active. She was born in Düsseldorf in 1961. Her father came from Southern India and her mother was a white German. She spent her early years in India, but went to school in Germany. She studied English and American literatures, cultural anthropology and drama at the University of Cologne and in London. She has been active in the black women’s movement in Germany and

196

Jennifer E. Michaels

Britain, and works as a freelance journalist in Latin American countries. The broad topics she covers in her articles focus in particular on questions of gender, race, politics and human rights abuses, whether by the United States in South America or by homegrown dictatorships. Her international experience gives her insights into the worldwide migrations of African and Indian peoples. Like Ayim, Mysorekar addresses in her texts the problems of growing up with a dark skin in a predominantly white environment. In her essay ‘Pass the Word and Break the Silence’ written in the early 1990s, a time in Germany of attacks against foreigners, she records her fear and rage at what she terms ‘pogroms’ and reflects that as black Germans they have no community to turn to. Most people of color in Germany grew up isolated from their Caribbean, African or Asian roots and had no older generation to serve as role models. Because of ingrained notions of a white homogeneous nation, white Germans have not viewed people of color as fellow citizens. 61 Mysorekar tried to connect to German feminism but sensed a lack of solidarity because white feminists have ignored problems specific to black women, such as racism. The xenophobic violence of the early 1990s intensified her feeling of alienation in German society. In her poem ‘Black Rage’ she expresses her growing fear in the new ‘Great Germany,’ but also her determination to defend herself: ‘But I won’t wait / until they come to get us / until our bones burn to ashes.’ 62 By referring to the Holocaust she, like Ayim, perceives the racist attacks in the 1990s as a recurring pattern in German history from colonialism to the present of violence against minorities. To combat her isolation in German society, Mysorekar formed coalitions with black Germans. As she observes in ‘Weiße Taktik,’ her definition of ‘black’ encompasses all people of color from former colonies of the ‘Third World.’ For her this a political stance, for when non-whites consciously call themselves black they oppose white dominance. She acknowledges that not all Asians want to associate themselves with ‘black’ because of its negative connotations and because in their strategies to divide and conquer, the colonial powers fomented mistrust between Asians and Africans, as for example in Guyana where Britain incited hatred between those of Indian and African descent. 63 Mysorekar believes that black people in the diaspora have had to create themselves. The diasporic experience that includes ‘dispersion from an original home, a collective myth of return’ does not exactly

Post-Wall German Identity: Minority and Migrant Voices

197

apply to those born in Germany, since ‘Black Germans share no unifying origin or home (such as Africa)’ and most ‘share no desire to return to such an imaginary or real homeland.’ 64 In ‘Pass the Word’ Mysorekar relates how she dreamed of societies such as New York, Brazil, or Cuba, where she could blend in, and she derived spiritual nourishment from such international writers of color as Marcus Garvey, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Salman Rushdie and Bharati Mukherjee, who made her realize that as blacks in Europe their connection to other continents is part of their heritage. 65 This literature connected European blacks not only to the present black diaspora, but also preserved their past and helped them form positive identities. In her essay ‘Vagabundinnen mit Transitvisum’ she notes that, like Africans, Indians have migrated to all parts of the world. There are large Indian communities in London and New York, and in countries such as Guyana or Trinidad half the population is of Indian descent. For centuries Indian merchants lived in East Africa, and Indian workers are now the backbone of the economy in the United Arab Emirates and in Singapore. Throughout these migrations, Indian women have held on to their cultural traditions, for example by retaining religious customs, cooking Indian food, and wearing saris, and in Britain a ‘Sari Squad’ of Indian women has formed to fight against racism and discrimination. 66 Because she believes that cultural differences should not be suppressed but rather serve as mutual enrichment, Mysorekar rejects the binarism ingrained in German thinking of being either Indian or German and affirms instead transnational and global identities. The streets they tread, she observes, lead them to brothers and sisters all over the world: her own family, for example, is spread over four continents. Being a vagabond, for her a positive notion, is an integral part of migrant experience. Such a ‘transnational diasporic existence’ functions as ‘an alternative political space where people of color in Germany can construct positive forms of identity.’ While she works for solidarity with other blacks in Germany, she also finds comfort and support ‘in a shared international outsiderness.’ Thus she casts ‘her net outside the German context altogether.’ 67 In ‘Vagabundinnen mit Transitvisum’ Mysorekar argues that blacks’ multicultural heritage prevents them from being forced into the corset of one culture and allows them to challenge the notion of a ‘homeland’ tied to place. This lack of a geographical homeland gives them freedom of choice.

198

Jennifer E. Michaels

With India as her fatherland and German as her mother tongue, she declares, she inhabits the whole world. 68 Like Mysorekar, Yoko Tawada explores transnational identities. She was born in Tokyo in 1960 and has lived in Germany since 1982. Her texts, for which she has won many prizes, include prose, poetry and literary essays. While she writes both in German and Japanese, in her poetry in Wo Europa anfängt (1991) she includes German and Japanese texts side by side. In her works she mingles dream-like imagery, fantasy, and poetic reflections, and explores living between national borders, cultural and linguistic dislocation, and identity. For her, flux and change are characteristic of the modern world, thus challenging fixed categories of national culture. National borders represent ‘only the edge of the lenses on the microscope that is used to study particular phenomena in more detail.’ 69 Is it possible, she reflects, to talk about German literature or even German cuisine? The potato, that staple of the German diet, for example, came from South America. She is reluctant to use such terms as ‘our culture’ because she does not know ‘who is supposed to belong to this “our culture” and who not.’ No culture, she points out, is completely isolated, but instead reacts to outside phenomena. Tawada argues that all national and regional traditions are fictive. Western culture, for example, ‘is often presented as a single line of development.’ In her view this is ‘a carefully cultivated fiction’ in which Greek culture is emphasized and Arab culture is excluded. At the end of the nineteenth century, Japan ‘re-activated ancient Shinto traditions that had not been practiced in over three hundred years’ as a strategy for creating national identity. Tawada asserts that ‘since tradition is fictive, there is no reason to feel genetically allied to a tradition. Everyone can freely choose the fictive tradition they wish to work with.’ Such thinking is liberating since it frees one from national cultures. Her notion of a multicultural society is not one where different people live side by side, for example a Turkish food stand next to an African one, but rather a society in which there are many different lives each containing different cultures within them, thereby causing boundaries to become fluid and even to disappear. She appreciates that today’s world is chaotically mixed and has no desire to construct a fixed identity for herself. 70 An important aspect of freeing herself from a fixed national culture is through language. People, she observes, often define others by language. This can be positive because a shared language can give a

Post-Wall German Identity: Minority and Migrant Voices

199

sense of belonging, but it can create barriers of exclusion. She finds writing in another language liberating since it lets her experiment more freely with images and motifs. In your mother tongue, she believes, ‘you rarely experience a playful, pleasurable sense of language’ because ‘thoughts cling so closely to words that neither can take flight independently,’ but in a foreign language ‘you have something like a staple remover: it removes what makes things cling to one another.’ 71 She is disturbed by people who speak their mother tongue fluently because they give the impression they can only think and feel what their language offers them so readily. 72 When people speak correctly, they speak mostly alike, which for her is not interesting. Instead she finds it exciting when language is broken or funny. In Germany people imply that language is a possession and believe that one can never master a foreign language like the mother tongue. For them mastery is the most important. 73 Tawada argues, however, that a completely learned language is limiting since various forms of expression become lost. 74 By distancing themselves from their mother tongue, people can think freely and creatively. In Überseezungen Tawada notes that she feels liberated because she has many souls and many tongues. 75 Tawada opposes static and fixed identities because she believes that human existence is made up of continual changes and interchanges: ‘What I refer to as “I” is made up of what I hear, what I read, what I see, and how I react to it. What I see in New York City right now makes me who I am today.’ 76 In her short novel Das Bad (1989), in which the protagonist returns to Japan after a long absence and discovers that she has become distant from her native language, Tawada questions fixed identities. She writes that since the human body consists of around 80% water, it is not surprising that every morning a different face appears in the mirror: Die Haut an Stirn und Wangen verändert sich von Augenblick zu Augenblick, wie der Schlamm in einem Sumpf, je nach Bewegung des Wassers, das unter ihm fließt, und der Bewegung der Menschen, die auf ihm ihre Fußspuren hinterlassen. 77

In another image she stresses the dynamic exchange between the individual and the social environment. She reflects that if every face can be compared to a harbor, one cannot list everything that has already arrived or will still arrive. 78 Likewise she believes that cultures and borders are fluid. Japan, she notes, is surrounded by

200

Jennifer E. Michaels

water: ‘Wie kann man wissen, wo der Ort des fremden Wassers anfängt, wenn die Grenze selbst aus Wasser besteht?’ 79 For Tawada such fluidity is liberating. She calls herself a wanderer, whose problem is that she feels at home everywhere. Her world is wherever she can talk with people about literature. 80 She enjoys her multiple identities and living in in-between spaces because they offer her both freedom and the possibility of new discoveries. She belongs to such writers as Conrad, Nabokov and Naipaul, ‘known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilisations,’ and whose imaginations drew nourishment ‘not through roots but through rootlessness.’ 81 Tawada’s is a postnational model of citizenship, essential to which is being able to choose ‘one’s own membership and freedom of action, emphasizing the active voice of transnational migrant experience.’ 82 Julia Kristeva’s observation, ‘when I say that I have chosen cosmopolitanism, this means that I have, against origins and starting from them, chosen a transnational or international position situated at the crossing of boundaries,’ encapsulates Tawada’s views. 83 As Aijaz Ahmad observes: ‘The cross-fertilisation of cultures has been endemic to all movements of people [...] and all such movements in history have involved the travel, contact, transmutation, hybridisation of ideas, values and behavioural norms.’ 84 Migration to Germany has played an important role in questioning notions of identity: ‘It is the confrontation with their foreign residents which has forced the Germans to rethink who they are and to reconceptualize their society today and for the future.’ 85 By straddling two or more cultures, the ever increasing number of non-ethnic German writers writing in German challenges notions of a unified national identity and asserts that their rich and diverse texts belong to German literature. By breaking down national and ethnic binarisms and arguing for inclusivity and flexible intercultural identities, they challenge Germans to rethink not only their own identity but also what makes up German literature and culture. Such texts challenge and redefine the boundaries of literary identities in flux across national borders. Notes 1

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely, London: Faber and Faber, 2005, p. 5.

Post-Wall German Identity: Minority and Migrant Voices

201

2

Hermann Kurthen, ‘Germany at the Crossroads: National Identity and the Challenges of Immigration’, International Migration Review, 29:4 (1995), 914-38 (here: p. 928). 3

Helmut Schmitz, ‘Einleitung: Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur’, in: H. Schmitz, ed., Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur: Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009, pp. 7-15 (here: p. 7).

4

Ruth Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, p. 217.

5

Jenny B. White, ‘Turks in the New Germany’, American Anthropologist, New Series, 99:4 (1997), 754-69 (here: p. 755).

6

Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties, p. 218.

7

Ibid., p. 221.

8

Zafer Şenocak and Bülent Tulay, ‘Germany – a Heimat for Turks?’, in: Antje Harnisch, Anne Marie Stokes and Friedemann Weidauer, eds. and trans., Fringe Voices: An Anthology of Minority Writing in the Federal Republic of Germany, Oxford, New York: Berg, 1998, pp. 256-63 (here: p. 257).

9

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986, pp. 16-7. 10

Ibid., p. 19.

11

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 4.

12

Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood, eds., Debating Cultural Hybridity: MultiCultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, London: Zed Books, 1997, p. 21. 13

Volker C. Dörr, ‘“Third Space” vs. Diaspora: Topologien transkultureller Literatur’, in: Schmitz, ed., Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur, pp. 59-76 (here: p. 64). 14

Jim Jordan, ‘More than a Metaphor: The Passing of the Two Worlds Paradigm in German-Language Diasporic Literature’, German Life and Letters, 59:4 (2006), 48899 (here: p. 490). 15 Karl Esselborn, ‘Neue Zugänge zur inter/transkulturellen deutschsprachigen Literatur’, in: Schmitz, ed., Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur, pp. 43-58.

202

Jennifer E. Michaels

16

Alexandra Lübcke, ‘Enträumlichungen und Erinnerungstopographien: Transnationale deutschsprachige Literaturen als historiographisches Erzählen’, in: Schmitz, ed., Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur, pp. 77-97 (here: p. 78). 17 Jürgen Joachimsthaler, ‘“Undeutsche” Bücher: Zur Geschichte interkultureller Literatur in Deutschland’, in: Schmitz, ed., Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur, pp. 19-39. 18 Şinasi Dikmen, ‘Die deutsche Seite unserer Familie’, in: Dikmen, Integrier dich, Opa!, Saarbrücken: Conte Verlag, 2008, pp. 9-31 (here: p. 17). 19

Şinasi Dikmen, ‘Rückblick’, Hürriyet-Europa, 20 January 2006.

20

Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties, p. 160.

21

Ibid., p. 31.

22

Will Hasty and Christa Merkes-Frei, ‘Werkstatt Gespräch mit Şinasi Dikmen am 27. 7. 95’, in: W. Hasty and C. Merkes-Frei, eds., Werkheft Literatur: Zehra Çirak und Şinasi Dikmen, Munich: Goethe-Institut, 1996, pp. 65-73 (here: p. 70).

23 Marilya Veteto-Conrad, Finding a Voice: Identity and the Works of GermanLanguage Turkish Writers in the Federal Republic of Germany to 1990, New York: Peter Lang, 1996, p. 57. 24 Şinasi Dikmen, ‘Wer ist ein Türke?’, in: Dikmen, Der andere Türke: Satiren, Berlin: EXpress, 1986, pp. 7-11. 25

Şinasi Dikmen, ‘Alles in Butter’, in: Der andere Türke, pp. 37-44.

26 Şinasi Dikmen, ‘Wir werden das Knoblauchkind schon schaukeln’, in: Dikmen, Hurra, ich lebe in Deutschland: Satiren, Munich: Piper, 1995, pp. 57-67. 27 Şinasi Dikmen, ‘Der Verein und die Integration’, in: Integrier dich, Opa!, pp. 10723 (here: p. 122). 28

Şinasi Dikmen. ‘Kein Geburtstag, keine Integration’, in: Hurra, ich lebe in Deutschland, pp. 22-34. 29 30

Şinasi Dikmen, ‘Wohnungssuche’, in: Hurra, ich lebe in Deutschland, pp. 68-74.

Iris Marion Young, ‘Social Movements and the Politics of Difference’, in: John Arthur and Amy Shapiro, eds., Campus Wars: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference, Boulder: Westview Press, 1995, pp. 199-225 (here: p. 216).

Post-Wall German Identity: Minority and Migrant Voices

203

31

Şinasi Dikmen, ‘Familiäre Verständigungsschwierigkeiten’, in: Integrier dich, Opa!, pp. 97-103 (here: p. 99). 32

Şinasi Dikmen, ‘Solange man dich noch sieht’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 2829 (2006), Beilage, pp. 3-5, at: http://www.das-parlament.de (accessed 21 January 2010). 33

Şinasi Dikmen, ‘Wir tun so, als ob wir Deutsche wären’, in: Der andere Türke, pp. 45-9. 34

Şinasi Dikmen, ‘Brautbeschauer’, in: Der andere Türke, pp. 13-29.

35

Şinasi Dikmen, ‘Wieder zuhause’, in: Integrier dich, Opa!, pp. 185-92 (here: p. 188). 36

Dikmen, ‘Familiäre Verständigungsschwierigkeiten’, p. 100.

37

Hasty and Merkes-Frei, ‘Werkstatt Gespräch’, pp. 71-2.

38

Şinasi Dikmen, ‘Das multikulturelle Leben’, in: Hurra, ich lebe in Deutschland, pp. 161-4 (here: p. 164). 39

Şinasi Dikmen, ‘Ein Selbstbildnis’, at: http://www.die-kaes.com/SinasiDikmen (accessed 21 January 2010). 40

Katharina Oguntoye, May Opitz and Dagmar Schultz, eds., Farbe bekennen: Afrodeutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte, Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1986.

41

May Ayim, ‘Ein Brief aus Münster’, in: Ayim, Grenzenlos und unverschämt, Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1997, pp. 9-12 (here: p. 10).

42

May Ayim, nachtgesang: gedichte, Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1997, p. 68.

43

May Ayim, blues in schwarz weiss: gedichte, Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1995, pp. 18-9. 44

Ayim, nachtgesang, pp. 17-8.

45

May Ayim, ‘Eistorte à la Hildegard’, in: Grenzenlos und unverschämt, pp. 49-51 (here: p. 49). 46 May Ayim, ‘Das Jahr 1990: Heimat und Einheit aus afro-deutscher Perspektive’, in: Grenzenlos und unverschämt, pp. 88-103 (here: pp. 90-1).

204

47

Ayim, ‘Das Jahr 1990’, p. 95.

48

Ayim, blues in schwarz weiss, p. 82.

49

Ayim, nachtgesang, pp. 73-4.

50

Ayim, blues in schwarz weiss, p. 29.

51

Ibid., pp. 99-101.

52

Ibid., p. 53.

53

Oguntoye, Opitz and Schultz, eds., Farbe bekennen, p. 150.

Jennifer E. Michaels

54

Miriam Kwalanda and Birgit Koch, Die Farbe meines Gesichts: Lebensreise einer kenianischen Frau, Frankfurt/Main: Eichborn, 1999.

55

Birgit Koch, ‘Nachwort’, in: Kwalanda and Koch, Die Farbe meines Gesichts, pp. 305-7. 56

Dirk Göttsche, ‘Zwischen Exotismus und Postkolonialismus: Der Afrika-Diskurs in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur’, in: M. Moustapha Diallo and Dirk Göttsche, eds., Interkulturelle Texturen: Afrika und Deutschland im Reflexionsmedium der Literatur, Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2003, pp. 161-244 (here: pp. 1701). 57

Kwalanda and Koch, Die Farbe meines Gesichts, p. 247.

58

Ibid., p. 261.

59

Ibid., p. 51.

60

Ibid., pp. 270-1.

61

Sheila Mysorekar, ‘“Pass the Word and Break the Silence” – The Significance of African-American and “Third World” Literature for Black Germans’, in: Carole Boyce Davies and ’Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, eds., Moving Beyond Boundaries, vol. 1, International Dimensions of Black Women’s Writing, New York: New York University Press, 1995, pp. 79-83. 62 Sheila Mysorekar, ‘Black Rage’, in: Boyce Davies and Ogundipe-Leslie, eds., Moving Beyond Boundaries, pp. 214-5 (here: p. 215).

Post-Wall German Identity: Minority and Migrant Voices

205

63 Sheila Mysorekar, ‘Weiße Taktik, weiße Herrschaft’, in: Ika Hügel et al., eds., Entfernte Verbindungen: Rassismus, Antisemitismus, Klassenunterdrückung, Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1993, pp. 110-5. 64

Carmen Faymonville, ‘Black Germans and Transnational Identification’, Callaloo, 26:2 (2003), 364-82 (here: p. 372). 65

Mysorekar, ‘“Pass the Word and Break the Silence”’, p. 82.

66

Sheila Mysorekar, ‘Vagabundinnen mit Transitvisum’, Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis, 27 (1990), 21-4.

67

Faymonville, ‘Black Germans’, p. 376.

68

Mysorekar, ‘Vagabundinnen mit Transitvisum’, p. 24.

69

Yoko Tawada, ‘Is Europe Western?’ Kyoto Journal, 61 (2005), at: http://www. kyotojournal.org (accessed 21 January 2010). Following quotes are from this article. 70 Cf. Christina Adomako, ‘“Jede Sprache ist für jeden Menschen fremd”: Ein Interview mit der deutschsprachigen Autorin Yoko Tawada’, Kommune, 11 (1994), 60-1. 71

Yoko Tawada, ‘From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother’, trans. Rachel McNichol, Manoa, 18:1 (2006), 139-43 (here: p. 143).

72

Yoko Tawada, ‘Das Fremde aus der Dose’, at: http://www.uni-giessen.de/~g91060/ text-tawada.php (accessed 20 January 2010).

73

Yoko Tawada, Überseezungen, Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2002, p. 110. 74

Yoko Tawada, ‘Interview mit Yoko Tawada’, Neues aus Japan, 11 (2005), at: http://www.de.emb-japan.go.jp (accessed 21 January 2010).

75

Tawada, Überseezungen, p. 70.

76

Bettina Brandt, ‘The Postcommunist Eye: An Interview with Yoko Tawada’, World Literature Today, Jan/Feb (2006), 43-5 (here: p. 43).

77

Yoko Tawada, Das Bad, Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 1989, p.

1. 78

Tawada, Überseezungen, p. 41.

206

Jennifer E. Michaels

79

Yoko Tawada, ‘Wo Europa anfängt: Erzählung’, in: Tawada, Wo Europa anfängt, Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 1991, pp. 66-87 (here: p. 68).

80

Yoko Tawada, ‘Interview’, 3 March 2007, at: http://www.foreigner.de (accessed 21 January 2010). 81

Pamuk, Istanbul, p. 6.

82

Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties, p. 229.

83

Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 16. 84

Aijaz Ahmad, ‘The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality’, Race and Class, 36:3 (1995), 1-20 (here: p. 18). 85

Sabine von Dirke, ‘Multikulti: The German Debate on Multiculturalism’, German Studies Review, 17:3 (1994), 513-36 (here: p. 515).

Susan C. Anderson Unification and Difference in German Post-Wall Cinema This article explores representations of unification in Margarethe von Trotta’s Das Versprechen (1995), Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye Lenin! (2003), Yüksel Yavuz’s Aprilkinder (1998), and Fatih Akin’s Im Juli (2000). It investigates the ways these films reveal a shift of perspective on the meaning of East-West unity in post-wall Germany. It first analyzes von Trotta’s and Becker’s approaches to unification by probing the images of division and similarity that they create or question. It next addresses Yavuz’s darker view of impulses towards unification. It then considers how Akin’s film moves ideas of unity into a European context and then dismantles them. A new concept of identity that would allow us to live together without having to sacrifice difference and personality on the altar of identity would need to have gaps through which what is different and foreign could come and go. Identity would then not manifest itself as hegemony. 1

Reflections in German film on unification and its consequences have until recently largely ignored the heterogeneity of German society and focused on the concerns of mainstream Germans from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and West Germany. This focus overlooks cultural differences in both formerly separate societies as well as the presence of different ethnic and cultural groups within Germany today that belong in neither of the former ‘halves.’ The Berlin Wall played a central role in maintaining the notion of the two halves, for it both divided and united. It divided geographically and politically, but it also offered a unifying ideal to the citizens on each side by emphasizing a collective identity based on being different from and better than those on the other side, especially with regard to the legacies of the Holocaust. Both East and West German concepts of collective identity depended on characterizing the other group as the heirs of the Nazi era. Dominic Boyer, for instance, contends that the division allowed Germans on either side of the Wall to regard those on

208

Susan C. Anderson

the other side as possessing authoritarian proclivities, as representing a national-cultural past against which to measure their ideal of serving as representatives of a future, more democratic German identity. 2 Andreas Huyssen characterizes the notion of East/West difference as also marking different those on the same side of the Wall who appeared to be aligned with those on the other side. For example, West German conservatives regarded the left as identifying with GDR socialist ideals, and East German officials accused dissidents of being inimical to socialism. 3 Any difficulties that an eastern or western German had in developing a sense of belonging were ascribed to ‘that other German: the other German as thief of one’s own potential identity.’ 4 In Huyssen’s words: National identity was always fractured in this way, and it remains to be explored to what extent the success of denationalization in both Germanys was fueled by such subterranean conflicts that destroyed older forms of national identity as much as they added another chapter to the history of German self-hatreds. 5

Huyssen calls for the democratic left to take the lead in fashioning a new national discourse. This discourse would build on the productive moves towards a national identity ‘that the democratization of Germany, indissolubly coupled with the recognition of a murderous history, has already given the new Germany.’ 6 Boyer, on the other hand, points to the difficulties in creating such a discourse by arguing that western Germans regard themselves as the only ones capable of managing the future of Germany. 7 Unification has confounded the function of East/West difference by creating one official set of Germans as heir to the crimes of the Nazi past. As a result, former East and West Germans seek to resurrect the differences they projected onto each other or to transfer those differences to others living in Germany, such as immigrants, as an avoidance measure. Boyer traces the phenomenon of ‘Ostalgie,’ or nostalgia for an idealized GDR past, to this longing for difference, especially among West Germans. ‘Ostalgie’ serves the desires of western Germans to claim a future ‘free from the burden of history’ because nostalgia for certain aspects of the GDR makes it appear as if eastern Germans are still mired in an authoritarian past. 8 Joseph F. Jozwiak and Elisabeth Mermann, by contrast, assert that both East and West German interest in ‘Ostalgie’ is ‘an expression of the destabilizing juncture between the old and the new, between a stable and

Unification and Difference in German Post-Wall Cinema

209

recognizable past in a well-defined nation state and a presently evolving culture that is in search of foundational myths.’ 9 Yet both they and Boyer limit themselves to addressing the concerns of mainstream citizens of eastern and western Germany. Huyssen broadens the investigation of the effect of unification on notions of difference by claiming that unification displaces what he characterizes as German self-hatred onto foreigners, ‘the new thieves of German identity.’ 10 He advocates a concept of nation that would ‘emphasize negotiated heterogeneity rather than an always fictional ethnic or cultural homogeneity.’ 11 Annette Seidel Arpacı proposes recognition of ‘parallel memory’ as one means of fostering heterogeneous concepts of nation. ‘Parallel memory’ is a mediated form of memory that would allow migrants in Germany to be receptive of the cultural trauma linked to Nazi Germany and of their ‘own ethnicized and precarious place.’ 12 Hindering such efforts to rethink national identity is a residue of the notion that some kind of cohesive collective identity exists or could exist. In keeping with this notion, the Wall represented a lost homogenous identity that could one day be regained. This identity would arise from a synthesis of the undifferentiated concepts of East and West, propagated in official discourse. In the ironic words of the narrator in Margarethe von Trotta’s film Das Versprechen, as long as the Wall stood, it allowed Germans to believe in the illusion that all that divided the German people was the Wall. Thus when the Wall fell this illusion contributed to the national unification process. Andreas Glaeser explains furthermore that the notion of the essential unity of the German people supported the ‘organizational form in which unification proceeded’ and helped political unification occur with such speed. 13 The immediate euphoria after the fall of the Wall led East Germans to accept ‘everything Western as a norm to which everything Eastern as deviant from this norm had to aspire.’ 14 Immigrants in the West were prone to accept the view of West German identity constructs as superior to those of former GDR citizens. As the research of Nevim Çil reveals, many of the younger generation of Turkish heritage in the Federal Republic of Germany regarded themselves as part of the ‘Mehrheitsgesellschaft’ into which the new Germans from the East would have to assimilate. 15 This illusion of multicultural identity, which mainstream western Germans did not share, soon contributed to a loss of orientation following the

210

Susan C. Anderson

‘Wende.’ In contrast to the sentiments of younger Turks in Germany, Zafer Şenocak claims that the Wall strengthened the feeling among mainstream Germans that their culture was at the center of the world and that it differed from the cultures of all the so-called foreigners living there. This cultural center expanded to include Germans from the former German Democratic Republic, although, as noted above, Germans from the West still claim dominance in this cultural center. Nevertheless, as Özlem Topcu, notes, unification redefined the distinction between ‘wir’ and the Other, pushing, for example, Turkish immigrants further to the margins as part of an undifferentiated group of Others. 16 Unification made the younger generation into ‘Turks’ for the first time, excluding them from the popular slogan ‘Wir sind das Volk.’ 17 Yet the fall of the Wall has also opened possibilities that call this center into question. In Şenocak’s words, ‘Auf die Ränder kommt es angeblich an, auf die Verschränkungen an den Rändern, mit Knotenpunkten, die unseren guten alten Zentren den Rang ablaufen.’ 18 Precisely these margins highlight the complexity of issues surrounding German unification, a complexity that is emerging more and more in German cinema. This chapter will explore representations of unification in four films made in Germany since 1990: Margarethe von Trotta’s Das Versprechen (1995), Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye Lenin! (2003), Yüksel Yavuz’s Aprilkinder (1998), and Fatih Akin’s Im Juli (2000). It will compare the first two, which question unification but still operate within a framework of ideal, albeit inaccessible, wholeness, with the latter two, which attempt to redefine the discourse of unity. Directors such as von Trotta and Becker have evoked the GDR as the embodiment of broken promises, deceptive memories, and nostalgic longing, in the form of love stories set in Berlin. The division between East and West Germans plays a central role in these films. They work in the tradition of Peter Schneider’s stories of Wall jumpers and of his claim that a ‘Mauer im Kopf’ is hindering unification. 19 For instance, Das Versprechen presents divided Germany as a pair of separated lovers, whose incompleteness is exacerbated by their idealistic attachments to the promise of socialism or capitalism. Unification in this film does not promise to overcome political and social differences. Good Bye Lenin! suggests that nostalgia for the GDR is an attempt to maintain a sense of identity while confronting the absorbing power of political unification. Yet the difference the film celebrates shares

Unification and Difference in German Post-Wall Cinema

211

many similarities with the West German culture from which it seeks to distance itself. Both films work within a nostalgic discourse that, as Julia Hell and Johannes von Moltke contend, responds to unification with afterimages of imagined utopias from the past. 20 They also participate both in upholding an ‘image of Western normality,’ as John Davidson notes about the position of foreigners and ‘Ossis’ in post‘Wende’ film, 21 and in interrogating the validity of that normality. These retrospectives of divided Germany employ the Berlin Wall as a key metaphor of that division and make little reference to Germany’s diverse cultural landscape in their efforts to question the notion of unity because they focus on mainstream representatives of East and West Germany. They implicitly uphold the hegemony of identity to which Şenocak and Bülent Tulay refer in the epigraph above. On the other hand, directors such as Fatih Akin and Yüksel Yavuz have created films about Turkish immigrants in post-Wall Germany and their interactions with each other and with other Germans. Unification between East and West Germany seems to play almost no role in these films; they present convergences between Turks and Germans in a supposedly united Germany as different ways to think about bringing together the East and the West. Yavuz’s Aprilkinder demonstrates the difficulties of intercultural encounters as it investigates pressures to assimilate and different reactions to those pressures. It conjures up notions of unity but then shows their inadequacy to address cross-cultural conflicts. Akin’s Im Juli plays with German stereotypes of the exotic East to posit a process of facing and working through stereotypes as a means of achieving cultural harmony. A closer analysis will show how the films represent competing discourses: one of wholeness and resolution versus one of incompleteness and paradox. These films reveal a shift of perspective on the meaning of East-West unity in post-Wall Germany: von Trotta’s and Becker’s probing of images of division and similarity that they create or question; Yavuz’s darker view of impulses towards unification; and Akin’s link between German concepts of Eastern Europe and German views of Turkey, which moves ideas of unity into a European context and then dismantles them. Varying shots that suggest division (walls), resemblance (similar set-ups in different frames), connection (bridges, sewers, staircases), and unity (circles, embraces) reveal all four films’ efforts to articulate post-Wall encounters that are productive without dissolving tensions.

212

Susan C. Anderson

Unification implies transformation; out of two or more parts, a new whole emerges, transcending the differences that preceded it. This transcendence may also have a coercive basis with one part absorbing the differences of the other parts. Wholeness then becomes not a merging of equals but a hierarchical reconstitution. This reconstitution in the German context echoes the pre-Wall sentiments in each Germany that it was the ‘better Germany.’ 22 Indeed, as Boyer points out, persistent emphasis on East/West differences leaves little room to challenge the fact of that difference. 23 Peter Schneider wrote in 1988 with regard to the potentially transformative aspect of unification, ‘Jedes System stellt sich als Metasystem dar, das die Lösung aller Widersprüche des anderen Systems verheißt.’ 24 Tensions between former East and West Germans attest to the consequences of one system assuming the role of meta-system in an attempt to incorporate the other. As Schneider’s novel Der Mauerspringer (1982) demonstrates, there is a ‘disease of comparison’ that hinders efforts to overcome differences, for each side competes with the other to be the ‘better’ system. The need to compare helps maintain the notion of unification as representing a superior system able to merge other discrete systems into it. Yet Schneider’s novel also shows how conflicts within each system undermine unifying efforts. 25 The value placed on unification derives from a German intellectual tradition that considers organic wholeness as the perfect condition. Helmut Müller-Sievers in an essay on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall characterizes post-Wall German culture as continuing to work within a cultural paradigm informed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt’s notions of culture, poetics, and politics as organically interrelated. In keeping with this tradition, the discourse around German unification is imbued with references to ‘growing together’ and becoming whole. It values reconciliation, organic integration, and harmony, as Müller-Sievers notes. Willy Brandt’s assertion on 10 November 1989, ‘What belongs together now grows together,’ illustrates the persistence of this discourse. 26 Yet, this paradigm binds German culture to the past, to leveling differences, and to excluding elements that cannot be seamlessly integrated. Such a paradigm is anachronistic in today’s Germany. Müller-Sievers proposes instead a forward-looking cultural politics whose ‘guiding question would not be how to integrate foreign elements but how to keep their conflicts productive.’ 27 He

Unification and Difference in German Post-Wall Cinema

213

calls for cultural debates that would ‘ask which conflicts it [Germany] can bear and which conflicts threaten to undermine the very possibility of conflict.’ 28 Such debates would question moves to portray unity as a natural state of affairs. Wholeness implies parts that can be harmoniously integrated, that share some commonalities in order to fit together. In keeping with the discourse of wholeness, the division of Germany as something unnatural underlies director von Trotta’s and screenplay co-writer Peter Schneider’s approach to these questions, which finds expression in their recourse to the trope of male and female torn apart in Das Versprechen. Yet the film also casts doubt on political unification as the antidote to the anxieties of separation. GDR socialism appears as the catalyst for rupturing unity, represented by the two parallel stories of young lovers Sophie and Konrad and Barbara and Harald. The pain of separation implies that the differences that the Wall ostensibly cements exist on the surface of some kind of basic desire to converge. The film then probes the nature of these differences and desires for oneness, beginning with scenes of division and ending with moves towards reconnection. Das Versprechen starts with news footage of the Berlin Wall going up, with scenes of separated families crying and waving handkerchiefs at each other, of an East German soldier jumping over barbed wire to get to the West, of a woman dangling from a window and then falling into the arms of West Germans below waiting to catch her. German society appears as a family torn asunder. This documentation of the Wall’s effects immediately precedes a sequence showing Sophie and Konrad’s separation, offering the couple as representatives of the division of East and West. East Berlin is the site of the break between two political systems and between people who desire to be together. The newsreel footage suggests that overpowering forces in the GDR, although with the complicity of the West, are the cause for the division of Germany, which, in turn, is the root of German suffering and anxiety represented by Sophie and Konrad’s long separation. The unnaturalness of this separation contrasts with the story’s first scene of unity: Sophie and Konrad, clasped in tight embrace on the dance floor as others twist and jump around them to American music played by an East German band. Sophie’s first words to Konrad, ‘Es geht los,’ as she pulls away from him, signal both the beginning of the narrative and the beginning of their separation, for they will not embrace again

214

Susan C. Anderson

until 1968 in Prague. The lure of Western culture, the promise of a better society in East Germany, and the East German power apparatus keep them apart, which is apparent in the next scenes showing Sophie, Konrad, and their three friends leaving the dance and attempting to escape through the sewers to the West. Konrad, who is left behind after he trips over his shoelace, falls, and loses valuable time, promises to follow the others as soon as the East German soldiers patrolling the streets go by, but his fear of the authorities, and his father and sister’s unexpected appearance at the scene, persuade him to stay. The recurring motif of Konrad’s untied shoelaces implies a persistent divisive undercurrent to overt efforts to unite. His torn allegiances to his family and to his girlfriend, to duty and to desire, unravel him. By contrast, unity leads the others to the West. Two of the friends put their hands together to try to create a complete map of the sewer system to guide them. Each of them has only a part of a map, but together they have enough to lead them to where they want to go. By having them first mistake West Berlin for East Berlin when they emerge from underground, the film suggests that East-West differences are superficial, a matter of driving a Ford instead of a Trabant, for example, thus furthering the view of an essential unity that the Wall is obscuring and that the West fosters. Yet the film also shows the consequences of the division as an increasing inability to see and to communicate from the same perspective. The division appears to fragment an otherwise unified way of seeing. In the case of Sophie and Konrad, political difference affects personal desires for unity. As the narrative develops, the concept of discrete halves that will fit back into a whole dissolves. The scene of Konrad in the watchtower peering through binoculars at Sophie, for instance, who is on the other side of the Wall peering up at him through binoculars, shows a difficulty to perceive the other clearly after only a relatively brief time apart. The vertical and horizontal distances the watchtower and the Wall create nevertheless allow glimpses of the other at this early stage of division. The rest of the film traces the growing differences and suffering arising from separation – each lover crying alone, attempts to reunite that do not work out – interrupted by one happy time in a place that is not German, but is set in the city of Prague in 1968. Division appears repeatedly in the film as the result of external factors that prevent the fulfillment of natural inclination, that is, Sophie’s and Konrad’s love for each other,

Unification and Difference in German Post-Wall Cinema

215

which suggests the desire of East and West Germans to unite. The apparent utopia of the Prague Spring, where Sophie becomes pregnant, offers a neutral ground to reunite, but circumstances, in the form of Russian tanks, drive them apart again. A sign of the confusion that the division of the two ostensible halves is prompting emerges from the sequence in which Konrad and Sophie each wait for the other in Prague under a lantern sculpture, unaware that there are two identical lanterns at two different spots in the city. As each waits alone by a lantern, the camera zooms outward and circles it (counterclockwise around Konrad, clockwise around Sophie), showing how each sculpture appears complete. Yet their settings, or contexts, make them differ. Sophie and Konrad are deceived by their belief in a notion of identity based on a common way of perceiving, for each interpreted the location of the meeting place differently. Indeed, even the descriptions they received about the sculptures, that they portray three instead of four women, were faulty. The intact lantern sculptures dispense with the notion that Sophie and Konrad represent two halves. They are two separate entities, like the sculptures. Much emphasis in the film, however, is given to the differences among East Germans, thereby offering a counterpoint to the implication in Sophie and Konrad’s story that they represent a thwarted unity. Schneider’s belief in the powerful ‘Mauer im Kopf’ extends here from a split between East and West to segmentation within the East. As the film develops, it casts doubt on the idea of East and West as two stable halves. The East turns out to be a fragmented concept, and divisions multiply. Konrad’s autocratic father, pacifist sister, rebellious brother-in-law, opportunistic colleague, and cynical boss all reveal contradictory and competing notions of what an East German is. The love story about Harald and Barbara, Konrad’s brother-in-law and sister, who is a Lutheran minister trying to change the corrupt GDR system from within, contrasts with that of Konrad and Sophie. Harald and Barbara’s union as a couple in the GDR does not bring about harmony or even common views. Barbara draws parallels between her religious views and her concept of humane socialism, both of which she hopes will spread in the future. Harald, by contrast, uses religious symbolism, for example, by enacting the crucifixion on the anniversary of the Berlin Wall, to criticize living conditions in the GDR. The division this couple represents is an internal one, one that challenges the concept of political unification as the solution to

216

Susan C. Anderson

difference. Harald does not share Barbara’s faith in socialist ideals; he rather focuses on the corrupt realities of socialism as it actually exists. He, too, appears in scenes with shots of walls and other barriers: in prison before his expulsion to the West, outside Sophie’s closed apartment door, caught between walls as he tries to slip back into the GDR. By having him killed as he crosses the Wall back into East Berlin on his attempt to return to Barbara, the film demonstrates a more nuanced view of unification than the Konrad/Sophie pairing seems to imply. Overcoming external obstacles does not necessarily result in unity. Indeed, the belief that it will can be fatal. Konrad and Sophie’s goal of being together in the West gradually loses meaning in the course of their long separation. For Barbara and Harald, however, death occurs as Harald defies division. Neither East nor West serves as a site of harmonious merging. Although presented as opposites, the two parts of Berlin and its inhabitants also share similarities. On the one hand, the depiction of the West corresponds to clichés of capitalistic decadence. West Berlin, as in so many films about the division, appears as glitzy and full of consumer delights, such as the cars and clothes Sophie and her friends acquire and further symbolized by Sophie’s apprenticeship as a fashion designer in her aunt’s business. Typical of East German stereotypes about the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), Harald, after being expelled from the GDR and entering West Berlin for the first time, encounters a run-down train station peopled with drug addicts and beggars. On the other hand, scenes of both West and East present open spaces and sunlight: Sophie’s meetings with her friends from the East, Sophie’s work as a tour guide, Konrad’s talks with Harald, his mentor Lorenz, and his wife, Elizabeth. They also show confinement: prisons in the East, Sophie crying in a dark dressing room, the stairwell of Sophie’s apartment building. Images of connection, however, highlight the fragility of moves towards unity in either direction. For instance, the shots of trains traversing a bridge leave unclear from which point the train starts and at which point it will arrive. Sophie and Konrad’s son, Alexander, throwing a ball over the Wall and receiving it back from an unknown East German border guard could signal mutual rejection because each throws the circular symbol of unity away. However, it could also show a wish to share the idea of unity. Indeed, Jenifer K. Ward maintains that Alexander is the figure who promises to create a new Germany. 29 His and Sophie’s relation-

Unification and Difference in German Post-Wall Cinema

217

ship with the French journalist Gérard, Sophie’s work leading a group of Japanese tourists through West Berlin, the man with a foreign accent who gives Konrad information about how to escape to the West in the early part of the film, and the scenes in Prague are the only references to dimensions of ‘German’ culture that go beyond the film’s concentration on ethnic Germans. However, friendly as Alexander and his mother are towards these others, the non-Germans are relegated to the background and eventually vanish from the story. The final scene on the bridge with Konrad and Sophie separated by masses of East and West Berliners going in two directions leaves open to which goal the crowds are headed. The fall of the Wall has brought East and West Germans into closer proximity, but their differences remain. The film concentrates on the longing for unity to question its possibility. For example, the shots of Sophie and Konrad’s embraces in Prague are framed by a moving camera that circles the couple as if in a dream. Their exaggeratedly enacted run up the stairs in the hotel both represents unity through the analogy of the circle and calls that unity into question by emphasizing it as a contrivance. The circle as image of completion or disrupted completion recurs throughout the film, for example, in the form of the round manhole-covers detached from their proper resting place as Sophie and her friends escape to the West or the ball that Alexander throws over the Wall. Sophie and Konrad’s potential unification in the final scene, prompted by their son Alexander’s urging them both to the bridge on November 9th, is all the more in doubt as it dispenses with circular images. The camera switches back and forth between shots of Sophie and Konrad headed in opposite directions before catching sight of each other. The film ends with Konrad calling out to Sophie over a mass of people. She turns to look at him with an inscrutable expression, and the frame freezes. Their ‘unnatural’ separation has resulted in such a deep rift that the natural child, the symbol of their oneness, cannot bring them together again. Division between East and West appears so powerful that the individual can do little but react to it. The desire for unity, as the hope that propels individuals to endure suffering while separated, has succumbed to the forces of power politics. Yet even by discounting the possibility of seamlessly integrating East and West, the film remains enmeshed in the discourse of unity. Not achieving unity still rests on an idea of unity.

218

Susan C. Anderson

The conflation of notions of unity and disunity emerges pointedly in a scene in which Konrad’s daughter, Lena, attempts to get her halfbrother Alexander to laugh at a joke about numbers. In the joke two zeroes see an eight in the desert, and the one zero remarks to the other zero that the eight is stupid for wearing a belt in such heat. The implication is that they view the eight as one of them, a zero that is artificially constricted, creating two smaller zeroes out of one. Taking off the belt would be a smart move, allowing the eight to become whole again and relieving its apparent discomfort. Yet Lena has trouble telling the joke, and Alexander does not understand it. By having the two half-siblings miscommunicate over a story idealizing wholeness as merely the removal of external barriers, the joke scene demonstrates the idea of unity as nothing more than a perspective that determines perception. The two zeroes cannot see the eight as anything but a deficient version of themselves. They cannot recognize it as a different but intact entity. Likewise, Das Versprechen shows how desires for completion are always caught up with ingrained perceptions and these perceptions in turn link division with pain. It does not offer a way out of this trap. Becker’s Good Bye Lenin! approaches the issue of unification between East and West as something undesirable. The notion of bringing two halves together becomes instead the idea of one part consuming the other and the other resisting this absorption. Resistance depends on seeing the former GDR as a unified entity. Much of the film centers on maintaining the illusion of GDR unity in the face of unification’s force to destroy that illusion. The focus of the illusion is a childlike faith in the achievability of the ideals of East German society, as the beginning scenes of Alex’s childhood show, especially the shots of the German and Russian cosmonauts as a team breaking records in space. The division of Germany in this film, as symbolized by the family, seems to allow for more harmonious relationships, for Alex’s dissatisfied father flees to the West, while Alex, his mother, and sister, Ariane, remain in the East. Division is thus not the separation of two halves but the ejection of unruly elements from the controlled unity of the GDR, or so it appears. Division results in an ever more tightly enforced illusion of unity as evidenced in the mother’s efforts to banish any desire for joining the father. Instead of trying to reunite the family, the mother creates a world in which the father no longer has a role. She unifies the family without him in her

Unification and Difference in German Post-Wall Cinema

219

ostensible struggle to help the GDR attain its socialist ideals. Thus there is no overt longing to overcome the separation between East and West. There is rather a reluctance to converge. The film presents the supposed cohesion of the GDR through a series of fictional home movies and flashbacks to Alex’s childhood, in which the family overcomes the adversity of the father’s departure and the mother’s nervous breakdown to emerge as committed supporters of GDR socialism. Alex’s later participation in demonstrations for freedom to travel outside the GDR represents his tentative attempt to separate from the illusion of the GDR for which his mother stands. The mother’s sudden appearance and collapse at the sight of her son’s challenge to the utopian dream she embodies distracts him from his efforts to rebel. Her fragility also signals that there are problems with that ideal, for, in the words of Jennifer Creech, ‘she is the site of social contradictions, the embodiment of conflict between socialist ideals, and real existing socialism.’ 30 Unification in this film unleashes anxiety over the loss of faith in GDR socialism and provokes in Alex a longing to return to an uncomplicated past where mother and children worked to make real their society’s utopian dreams. The possibility of unification causes the mother to become gravely ill, and it threatens to expose her lie to her children about her husband’s flight to the West. This fabrication is connected to her transformation into an overly dedicated supporter of the GDR. Alex’s smaller deception thus exposes this greater one, challenging the unity the mother represents. The film’s ironic tone criticizes the nostalgia for a socialist ideal of community that never existed in the GDR. Alex’s growing obsession with maintaining his subterfuge also reveals authoritarian tendencies, such as his compelling all around him to play along with the charade. Boyer sees this residue of authoritarianism as demonstrating the West German film’s complicity in disseminating the idea that former East Germans are unsuitable to be equal partners in forging a common future for unified Germany. They are made to bear the burden of the totalitarian past from which West Germans would like to dissociate themselves. 31 Alex’s nostalgic rewriting of history, according to which disenfranchised West Germans flee in droves to the East, is also an attempt to defer acknowledgment of the reality of West German absorption of the GDR into its consumerist system, represented by such ubiquitous brand names as Coca-Cola and Burger King. In fact, the fictionalized

220

Susan C. Anderson

version of the latter of these two conglomerates propels the plot towards its eventual climax of disillusionment. While unification was linked to dashed hopes for transcending differences in Das Versprechen, in Good Bye Lenin! it is a consuming force that threatens identity. Alex recreates the GDR as much to shield his sense of self as to protect his sick mother from shock at finding out that the Wall fell while she was in a coma. This microcosm of the GDR helps maintain the notion of the FRG as dangerous Other, about to destroy the unique nature of the GDR. The film uses contrasting and exaggerated shots to illustrate alleged differences, such as the pornographic video Alex sees upon entering West Berlin or his imagination of his father as a wealthy and obese person devouring a huge hamburger. These East German stereotypes in turn point to West German stereotypes of East Germans as unable to see beyond their ideological prejudices. The motif of consumption further stresses the difference between the FRG and the GDR. Alex’s fantasy world is propped up by putting West German food into East German containers, thereby switching the direction of consumption. Perhaps the strongest metaphor of consumption is Alex’s sister Ariane’s new job at a Burger King in West Berlin. With a Burger King uniform and a new boyfriend she met there, Ariane becomes a stereotype of the Americanized West in general. And only by selling hamburgers does she see the lost father, ordering from the drive-through, which initiates the eventual unification of the family, an event that is far from joyful. The western economic system appears threatening in this film, spreading its brand names all over the East, so that East becomes indistinguishable from West. Roger Cook argues that the film presents the persistent ‘German longing for a premodern, Biedermeier-like withdrawal into an idyllic domestic sphere’ to escape the forces of globalization. 32 Yet Alex’s resistance merely replicates this process in the opposite direction. Indeed, the film’s parallel scenes suggest that there are more similarities than differences between East and West. These scenes contradict Alex’s increasing focus on the uniqueness of the former GDR, of its essential difference from the West, as he seeks to maintain a sense of identity that rests on an opposition between East and West. For instance, shots of Ariane and her boyfriend in their Burger King uniforms evoke images of GDR children in their ‘Freie Deutsche Jugend’ (FDJ) uniforms. Seán Allan claims that the film compares changing ideologies to changing uniforms. 33 The red banner promot-

Unification and Difference in German Post-Wall Cinema

221

ing Coca-Cola evokes memories of red banners in praise of Lenin. The West seems to offer advertising slogans and consumer products as substitutes for socialist propaganda. As Allan remarks, both East and West use the same rhetorical strategies. 34 One could interpret the film as showing the erasure of both East and West Germany by globalized American consumerism. Individual efforts can postpone such transformations only for a short while. The gradual erosion of differences between East and West prepares the way for the final scene where a reunited family shoots the deceased mother’s ashes aloft. This parodies the space flight at the beginning that symbolized the special nature of the GDR’s difference from the West. This concluding merging of East and West suggests that the mother’s delusional view of the GDR was a key impediment to unification. Yet these delusions also help resist the West’s gobbling up of the East, including its absorption of the Russian nurse Lara. As the border between the two Germanys disappears, the difference that Lara represents also dissolves as she helps nudge Alex into breaking with his fantasies of the past and embracing a future in an ostensibly united Germany, in a Germany that will offer him new opportunities he was denied in the past. 35 Lara is confidently in place in the new Germany and sees through Alex’s efforts to hold on to the past, a past closely allied with the Soviet Union before Gorbachev’s reforms. Her relationship with Alex contrasts with the earlier ‘cosmic marriage between the Sandmann and Mascha.’ 36 This is a relationship that seeks grounding in the present instead of the future. As the story develops, the reformed perspective she reveals gradually replaces the ideals of the mother. She often appears in conjunction with the mother, either nursing her or sitting with her or appearing in parallel scenes, as in a shot of Lara sleeping as Alex departs, which cuts to a shot of the mother, Christiane, sleeping as Alex arrives. Lara represents a new kind of Russian, one who encourages connection to the West. This Russian figure serves as a helper to unification and perhaps creating new ideas, rather than as an enforcer of division related to an anachronistic utopia. This role also makes Lara an aide to the West’s overtaking of the GDR. She contradicts Alex’s lies and eventually enlightens the mother by whispering to her in the background about the stories that Alex has been inventing, so that only Alex remains with delusions that he must bring into concert with the reality of unification. As the difference between East and West blurs, so too does the

222

Susan C. Anderson

difference between German and Russian. The film traces a movement from the assertion of difference between East and West Germans to a denial of that difference as they both intermingle. It also negates other cultural differences, for despite her accent Lara appears more and more like the Germans around her. Alex eventually transfers his belief in the illusion his mother represented to a belief in the new world indicated by Lara, ignoring her difference. As Şenocak explains with regard to the blindness of those who see culture only from their own point of view: This dissolution of boundaries on our part makes us strong and often arrogant as well. We no longer perceive the other even though he stands before us. If the other wants to communicate with us, he must make our language his own. He must choose concepts that he has not developed. 37

The discourse of unification that this film explores simply excludes other types of difference in its celebration of unification between stereotypes of East and West Germans. Lara’s voice recedes into the background in this new world. Von Trotta’s and Becker’s films attempt to reorient German cultural discourse away from facile notions of unity, but their efforts retain residues of these notions. The unattainability of unification in Das Versprechen does not negate its power to shape perceptions and expectations. Good Bye Lenin!’s resistance to wholeness posits a manner of merging that recognizes rather than consumes difference, a manner that is disappearing as the East dissolves into the West. Yet that difference also makes East Germans appear unprepared for a common future because of their focus on their troubled past. Only the figure of the Russian Lara hints at other ways of imagining unification. These ways acknowledge cultural conflict, as Lara’s outsider perspective challenges Alex’s fuzzy memories and delusional moves but also supports him in his efforts to maintain his difference. However, as Jozwiak and Mermann contend, this nostalgia also creates ‘a communal/national past that functions as a mode of resistance to the Western take-over of power.’ 38 This resistance to Western power can also be extended to include western German resistance to the engulfing forces of American-influenced global consumerism – thus the sentimentality in Becker’s film, which Kapczynski claims helps to perpetuate the nostalgia it criticizes. 39

Unification and Difference in German Post-Wall Cinema

223

Other filmmakers go further in showing that unification is a matter beyond a narrow focus on mainstream East and West German citizens. They focus on the ways that ideas of unity relate to Germany’s immigrant and minority populations. As Leslie Adelson writes with respect to the Turkish residents of Germany, for example, ‘[t]he “wall in the head” between East and West Germans has a lesser known cousin, a sturdy wall of symbolic bricks between Germans and resident Turks.’ 40 Such cultural disjunctures challenge calls for cultural unity and desires for integration. Similar to Müller-Sievers’ proposal to eschew moves towards cultural reconciliation in favor of dealing productively with conflicts, Şenocak dismisses efforts to fit cultural differences into a whole, which depend on repressing conflict and difference. He asks, for example: But what happens when this ordering system fails? When the individual fragments can no longer be accommodated into a personally structured form? When the hard break lines become festering interfaces, the pain unbearable, the wounds incurable? The collision of contradictory worlds necessitates a translating power whose aim is not the leveling of differences but the transfer of different interpretations. 41

Şenocak refers to fragmented cultural entities that are collected into an ‘amalgamation,’ which provokes a state of exhaustion and ‘makes the call to unity dangerously attractive and a rigid modernity, which demands differentiation and individualization, ineffective. 42 His solution is to start an inner dialogue 43 and to jettison our notion of ‘culture’ in order to recognize the Other in his/her otherness. 44 Adelson refers to Şenocak’s ideas in her rejection of intercultural encounters that fix different cultures ‘as utterly different cultures.’ She calls for greater attentiveness to the cultural work going on within German culture, work that Turco-German literature is helping to shape. 45 She advocates ‘an epistemological reorientation to which migrants’ literature contributes at a crucial juncture in an uncharted German present.’ 46 Yavuz and Akin are also working towards this reorientation. Aprilkinder presents one way of moving beyond the discourse of unification. Turkish and Kurdish working-class immigrants and German lower-class citizens struggle to make a life for themselves on the edges of mainstream German society. Both groups face obstacles to achieving their goals, but there is little constructive exchange between them. Their depiction dispenses with notions of cultural harmony in united Germany by centering on instances of fragmentation, with any

224

Susan C. Anderson

moves to overcome cultural differences thwarted. It expands the focus from Berlin to other parts of Germany, in this case, Hamburg, placing unification and integration into a broader German context. Yavuz portrays a Kurdish immigrant family from Turkey with different members assimilated into mainstream German culture to different degrees. The film criticizes the efforts of immigrants to maintain a distinct identity through isolationism within a very different dominant culture. In tracing the doomed love story between the oldest son in the Kurdish family and a German prostitute, the film questions the moves of both Kurds and Germans to create a sense of identity in opposition to an Other that is not as stable as their stereotypes of it. Both the older son, Cem, and his German lover, Kim, share aspects that make them different from the cultures that have marginalized them. They are in low-wage positions that earn them little respect, and even scorn. Cem works in a German sausage factory; Kim is a sex worker in a brothel that caters to Turkish clients. The similarity of their names signifies parallels between their figures. Shots of them meeting in staircases, including their first and last meetings, point to their in-between status and their moves towards bridging Kurdish and German cultural differences. When they first meet, Kim leads Cem upstairs to her room. By having him ascend into the domain of a marginalized German, the film suggests the difficulties migrants face when trying to leave their place at the edge of society. Both Kim and Cem remain down and out for much of the film. Cem’s parents, however, represent immigrants determined to create a better future for their children. They are blind to the problems their isolation from Germans causes their children, but within their community, they have a respected status. Thus Kim’s intercultural relationship with Cem could be a move up for her, for she lacks a support network and eventually loses her job. Although she is part of the dominant German ethnic group, her status is closer to that of the Turkish and Kurdish immigrants who are her clients. Kim’s efforts to enter Cem’s world fail, however. And his efforts to move up in the German world also lead him nowhere. The scene where they run across a bridge and hop into a taxi expresses their conflict. The bridge suggests connection, but once in the taxi, the conversation stresses the chasm between them. Kim does not understand Turkish and thus does not know that the taxi driver, who recognizes Cem, reminds him of his upcoming arranged marriage, a marriage that Cem never mentions to Kim.

Unification and Difference in German Post-Wall Cinema

225

Their final scene together, in the staircase leading up to Cem’s family’s apartment, shows Kim’s failure to enter Cem’s world. The parents do not allow her to enter the apartment, and Cem later does not take her up to meet them. The relationship with Kim is too dangerous for the Kurdish son’s sense of self, for it would cause a rift in his relationship with his parents and in his sense of duty toward his cousin. His acceptance of his parents’ wishes to marry someone he barely knows terminates the moves towards intercultural connection that his German lover has made. Kim descends the stairs, giving up her attempts to be part of Cem’s world. The film presents Turkish and Kurdish immigrants both as fragmented and as holding onto traditional notions of community, notions that underlie their reluctance to intermingle with Germans. Kim reflects Cem’s marginalized standing in German society, a standing that would change little were he to enter into a serious relationship with her. In contrast to the ups and downs of the staircase scenes, the film evokes hopes for unity through dance scenes. Cem first encounters Kim as she dances in circles to a song on a jukebox with lyrics that repeat ‘turn around and around, and it’s always been the same. We are human […].’ The words’ emphasis on common humanity as a unifying force contrasts with the cultural and ethnic distance between Cem and Kim. When the two later go to a disco, Cem is not at first allowed inside, most likely because he is Kurdish. When he later enters, Kim is dancing alone, and he watches but does not dance with her. He leaves the disco, drunk and alone, aware of the differences that divide him from her. He does not dance until the final scene, that of his wedding, when he unveils his wife and both dance as the camera spins faster and faster in a circle to Turkish and Kurdish music. Christina Kraenzle interprets this scene as expressing ‘Cem’s disorientation and panic at the realization that any possibility of a life outside of tradition and family duty has been foreclosed.’ 47 However, he also accedes to this foreclosure by rejecting Kim. The unity to which this film’s circularity refers is that within the Kurdish community in Germany. Unification between East and West in this film of united Germany occurs between an immigrant worker in western Germany and his new bride from a Kurdish village in eastern Turkey. The dizzying effects of the Turkish wedding contrast with the leisurely pace of the film’s first shot, that of a German street. The migrant culture has moved inside, turned in on itself, and withdrawn from any interaction with German culture. As

226

Susan C. Anderson

the camera pans over the guests, viewers recognize them as the various characters from throughout the film, all of whom exist on the social fringe. United Germany appears in this film as based on the accentuation of difference to the extent that those members of the different group, either the Turkish and Kurdish working class or the German underclass, appear to share a collective identity. Yet the film shows through the different immigrant siblings and their friends how illusory this identity is. It rests on stereotypes of the Other, such as the notion that German women are immoral, and of oneself as part of a greater Kurdish community, in which all take care of each other. Cem’s mother illustrates the latter by her insistence that Cem marry his cousin to rescue her from the dangers of civil war. However, Mehmet’s, the middle brother’s, sexist and domineering stance towards the sister, Dilan, as well as his drift towards a criminal milieu, the mother’s vain efforts to control her children’s activities, and Mehmet’s critique of Cem’s work belie the illusion of group identity. Kraenzle argues that the ‘vigilant control of national, ethnic, and sexual boundaries’ in this film can be viewed ‘as an expression of a nostalgic desire for a rootedness and fixity that does not exist.’ 48 As Cem, the older son, attempts to break through stereotypes and connect with Kim as simply another person, he runs the risk of losing his sense of difference and a position of respect within the hierarchy of his family. By openly acknowledging the commonalities between himself and his lover, he would also have to acknowledge both of their positions near the bottom of a hierarchical German society. This ‘collision of contradictory worlds’ 49 cannot recover by means of the potential translating power of Cem’s and Kim’s affection for each other, because their similarities interfere with their efforts to create a better life for themselves. Their positions as objects of exploitation result, in Kraenzle’s view, in ‘a shared condition which temporarily draws characters together, but ultimately fails to create opportunities for lasting alliances.’ 50 Thus the common humanity evoked in the jukebox song proves to be subordinate to the harsh economic and social situation that both links them and repels them from each other. A greater focus on encounters among Turks and Germans as a European issue appears in Akin’s Im Juli. This film revolves around a German and Turkish couple in post-Wall Germany, each of which becomes separated. Only a journey to the East brings them together,

Unification and Difference in German Post-Wall Cinema

227

suggesting, as Barbara Kosta notes, ‘new coordinates in the formation of German identity.’ 51 In this case, union between German and Turk, or rather the German man finding and claiming the Turkish woman as his love, is thwarted by his journey through a menacing eastern Europe and the appearance of the Turkish woman’s boyfriend. Both Turks and Germans end up with partners like themselves, but in a different place, Istanbul, which seems more modern and thriving than Hamburg. This place change calls into question both the desire for the exotic East and the fear of the dangerous East in constructing a German identity that pushes immigrants into the role of Other. Im Juli presents Eastern Europe as a nightmare that must be overcome before reaching an understanding of Turkish difference and its links to concepts of Germanness. The path to this understanding leads across a series of borders, which stage a number of confrontations between the German protagonist and representatives of points East. Daniel’s misadventures include being drugged and robbed by a truck driver from the former Yugoslavia, shot at by a Hungarian farmer, and forced to bribe a Romanian border guard. As Oya Dinçer Durmus explains: Akin […] ‘does not like borders’; yet, his artistic productions examine the very borders which certainly serve to separate; but the same borders may also be perceived as meeting places; it is this double function of the borders that Akin has been exploring in his films. 52

The meetings between Daniel and various Eastern European characters help him to change his ways of seeing the East and to progress on his journey. He learns to deal constructively in resolving his conflicts with them, for example, by demonstrating to the farmer that he means no harm but is seeking a ride to Budapest. The blindness signaled by his broken glasses near the beginning of his journey develops into a new way of seeing beyond stereotypes. Fears about Eastern Europe as an intensification of anxieties about the former GDR directly affect perceptions about other cultures, especially about Turkey. The journey to Istanbul goes through Eastern Europe, as the two German figures, Daniel and Juli, as well as the two Turkish figures, Isa and Melek, travel east. The catalyst for the trip, Daniel’s desire to find Melek again in Istanbul, is based on his longing for the exotic, and his scary trip toward that goal betrays his fear of it. He must contend with both extreme views of the orient before he can unite with the woman he imagines is his destiny. This involves sur-

228

Susan C. Anderson

viving a serious of dangerous situations in increasingly strange locales. Indeed, prejudices about Eastern Europe displace fears of Turkey, which appears enchantingly alluring like the painting of the bridge over the Bosporus in the Turkish diner in Hamburg where Daniel and Melek converse. Distorted views of both Turks and Eastern Europeans prevent clear views of either. Daniel sets off after an idealized Turkish woman and hitches a ride with a Turkish man, who appears to be a criminal. Daniel later mixes Melek, his German friend, Juli, and Luna together in a hallucinatory haze. In the words of Şenocak: ‘We no longer perceive the other even though he stands before us.’ 53 Yet the film ends up bringing together Germans and Turks in a friendship among equals of different backgrounds rather than as a merging of lovers into one amorphous whole. The problem of unification becomes much more complex in this film, which reveals its transcultural dimension, linking unification to Şenocak’s focus on the margins of German culture and society. Important to note, however, is that Melek arrives from Berlin, site of the fall of the Wall. Thus Daniel’s interest in Melek links German unification with the attempt to bring together a Turk living in Germany and a German. The path towards unity is convoluted, eventually unraveling the illusion of fixed cultural identity with which the film begins. The obstacles to a harmonious relationship between Turks and Germans are the stereotypes western Germans have about Eastern Europe. These prejudices create a series of frightening encounters on the journey from Hamburg to Istanbul. These encounters are the mirror opposite of the idealized, eroticized view of Turkey that propels the main protagonist towards the East. The film continues Akin’s exploration of intercultural encounters and concepts of identity. As Durmus contends about Akin, ‘[h]is cinema demonstrates his belief that, in today’s world, identities, individual and cultural/national, are not static. They are constantly remade as people experience cross-cultural relationships.’ 54 Akin criticizes a German tendency to overlook Turks except when they mirror a desired German self-image. He uses images of the sun and moon, both signaling potential unity because of their circularity but also possessing different qualities and inhabiting different spaces and temporalities, to move beyond the idea of the Other as merely a reflection. Danger and misguidance seem connected to the symbol of the moon; enlightenment appears linked to the sun. Yet both Juli and

Unification and Difference in German Post-Wall Cinema

229

Melek are connected to the sign of the sun, a parallel that causes initial confusion. The closer Daniel gets to Istanbul, the closer he and Juli become, until they separate because of his fixation on Melek. This separation from Juli is accompanied by a solar eclipse and Daniel’s chance encounter with Isa, who will help direct him back to Juli. Isa is Melek’s boyfriend, and at film’s end, Daniel and Juli reconnect, as do Isa and Melek. Both the eclipse and Daniel’s earlier adventure with Luna redirect his journey and his ideas about others. Melek diverts the two German lovers from each other, and only finding Melek again reunites the two. The story is not a simple case of two sets of partners starting out with the ‘wrong’ person and changing to the ‘right’ one. Akin’s structuring of Turkish/German relationships is not symmetrical as there is always something interrupting the symmetry. Isa and Melek, moon and sun, alter Daniel’s ways of seeing, for nothing is as it seems. By pairing German with German and Turk with Turk in sunny Istanbul, as opposed to moonlit Hamburg, where desire was both misdirected and poised to embark on a journey to new knowledge, the film presents German fascination with Turks as blinded by misperceptions. Germans are able to achieve enlightenment only by casting off conventional ways of thinking through progressive exposure to the complexity of the East – symbolized by passing through Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria on the way to Turkey. Daniel reaches Istanbul at noon, in full sunlight, and the final shot shows the four friends driving over the bridge, connected but different. Unification between East and West is a phantom ideal in Akin’s film, because the East can mean so many things, as can the West. Turks are also part of Hamburg, but by depicting Turkish immigrants in the shadows while Daniel and Melek are out together, Akin emphasizes that they are only on the margins of Daniel’s consciousness. He needs to explore these margins in order to mature. Kosta remarks that the film ‘acknowledges the significance of Turkey in the formation of contemporary German identity.’ 55 The union of Daniel with Juli and Isa with Melek, however, also suggests a division between Turk and German that cannot be transcended by pairing a German figure with a Turkish figure. Im Juli exposes differences much more complicated than the opposition between GDR and FRG, or between immigrant and native, which a discourse of transcendence – even failed transcendence – cannot encompass. Thus Akin’s film, with its plethora of contradictions, challenges the very validity of a

230

Susan C. Anderson

focus on dissolving contradictions in order to achieve unity, a focus that blocks the protagonist from perceiving alternatives at the margins. The four films all grapple with the question of how to connect relationships between East and West to the idea of unified Germany. They partake in what Hell and von Moltke designate as the ‘Unification Effect,’ that is, ‘the shifting ground on which cultural and political interventions have taken place’ and ‘the changing stakes that these interventions have had to confront.’ 56 One attempt to sidestep the conflicts that arise when bringing together disparate cultures and histories is the subordination of differences to a universalizing concept of common humanity. Common humanity appears in Das Versprechen and Aprilkinder at first to be an antidote to the separating forces of geo-political or cultural differences. As the films develop, however, they reveal tensions and varied ways of seeing that erode the notion of a basic human identity, much less an essential German identity. Unification as an intercultural goal disintegrates through the different cinematic explorations of it. Its power to affect intercultural encounters persists, however, in the disappointment over its lack in Das Versprechen, in the fear of its absorptive force in Good Bye Lenin!, or in the frustration over its insufficiency to foster crosscultural ties in Aprilkinder. Unity’s inadequacy as a concept in these films also challenges the primacy of West German culture as the intended embodiment of unified Germany. Im Juli differs by presenting the process of attaining unity as overcoming a series of obstacles that succeeds in an unexpected way. Each of the stages towards the goal results in a shift of perception that increasingly changes the contours of the goal. When the two German figures join together in the East and then ride off with the Turkish characters, the film proffers a notion of productive convergence that is constantly under negotiation, rather than the stability of transcendent unity, as a model for intercultural relationships in the new Germany. Notes 1 Zafer Şenocak and Bülent Tulay, ‘Germany – Home for Turks? A Plea for Overcoming the Crisis between Orient and Occident’, in: Leslie A. Adelson, trans. and ed., Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture, 1990-1998, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, pp. 1-9 (here: p. 5).

Unification and Difference in German Post-Wall Cinema

231

2

Dominic Boyer, ‘Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany’, Public Culture, 18:2 (2006), 361-81 (here: p. 370).

3

Andreas Huyssen, ‘Nation, Race, and Immigration: German Identities after Unification’, in: Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 67-84 (here: p. 81). 4

Ibid.

5

Ibid.

6

Ibid., p. 84.

7

Boyer, ‘Ostalgie’, p. 373.

8

Ibid., p. 363.

9

Joseph F. Jozwiak and Elisabeth Mermann, ‘“The Wall in Our Minds?” Colonization, Integration, and Nostalgia’, Journal of Popular Culture, 39:5 (2006), 780-95 (here: p. 787).

10

Huyssen, ‘Nation, Race’, p. 81.

11

Ibid., p. 73.

12

Annette Seidel Arpacı, ‘National Memory’s Schlüsselkinder: Migration, Pedagogy, and German Remembrance Culture’, in: Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke, eds., German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Normalization, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006, pp. 105-19 (here: p. 108). 13

Andreas Glaeser, ‘Why Germany Remains Divided’, in: Sander L. Gilman and Todd Herzog, eds., A New Germany in a New Europe, New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 173-97 (here: p. 174-5). 14

Ibid., p. 176.

15

Özlem Topcu, ‘“Es geht auch uns an,”’ Die Zeit Online, 11 November 2009, at: http://www.zeit.de/2009/46/Buecher-machen-Politik-Aussenseiter (accessed 6 February 2010).

16

Ibid.

17

Ibid.

232

Susan C. Anderson

18 Zafer Şenocak, ‘Perspektiven der Mitte: Oder wo steht Deutschland auf der Welt?’, in: Şenocak, Zungenentfernung: Bericht aus der Quarantänestation, Berlin: Babel, 2001, pp. 64-6 (here: p. 66). 19

Peter Schneider, Der Mauerspringer: Erzählung, Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1984, p. 102.

20 Julia Hell and Johannes von Moltke, ‘Unification Effects: Imaginary Landscapes of the Berlin Republic’, Germanic Review, 80:1 (2005), 74-95 (here: p. 91). 21

John E. Davidson, Deterritorializing the New German Cinema, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 163. 22

Boyer, ‘Ostalgie’, p. 371.

23

Ibid.

24

Peter Schneider, ‘Berliner Geschichten’, in: Schneider, Deutsche Ängste: Sieben Essays, Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1988, pp. 6-18 (here: p. 10).

25

Susan C. Anderson, ‘Walls and Other Obstacles: Peter Schneider’s Critique of Unity in Der Mauerspringer’, German Quarterly, 66:3 (1993), 362-71 (here: p. 366).

26

Willy Brandt, ‘Berlin City Hall Speech’, in: Harold James and Marla Stone, eds., When the Wall Came Down: Reactions to German Unification, New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 42-5 (here: p. 43). 27

Helmut Müller-Sievers, ‘The Humboldt-Goethe Complex’, in: Gilman and Herzog, eds., A New Germany, pp. 89-95 (here: p. 94). 28 29

Ibid., p. 95.

Jenifer K Ward, ‘German-Germanness: On Border, Hybridity, and Sameness in Margarethe von Trotta’s Das Versprechen’, in: Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Rachel J. Halverson and Kristie A. Foell, eds., Textual Responses to German Unification, New York: deGruyter, 2001, pp. 225-32 (here: p. 230). For an analysis of the film’s evocation of residues of Germany’s fascist past see John Blair, ‘Madness and Bliss as Ideological Categories in Margarethe von Trotta’s The Promise’, JAISA, 7:1-2 (Autumn 2001-Spring 2002), 91-101. For a discussion of the film’s melodramatic elements see Kristie A. Foell, ‘History as Melodrama: German Division and Unification in Two Recent Films’, in: Costabile-Heming, Halverson and Foell, eds., Textual Responses, pp. 233-52. For an examination of the film’s representation of gender roles see Eva Kuttenberg, ‘Teaching Foreign Cultural Literacy with Margarethe von Trotta’s Das Versprechen’, Die Unterrichtspraxis, 36:2 (2003), 135-44.

Unification and Difference in German Post-Wall Cinema

233

30 Jennifer Creech, ‘A Few Good Men: Gender, Ideology, and Narrative Politics in The Lives of Others and Good Bye, Lenin!’, Women in German Yearbook, 25 (2009), 100-26 (here: p. 115). 31

Boyer, ‘Ostalgie’, pp. 376-8.

32

Roger F. Cook, ‘Good Bye, Lenin!: Free-Market Nostalgia for Socialist Consumerism’, Seminar, 43:2 (2007), 206-19 (here: p. 218). James M. Skidmore argues that such longing demonstrates the film’s participation in the cinematic genres of the nostalgic tale and of the tale of a village struggling against the forces of modernism in his essay ‘Good-bye Reality, or the Seduction of Nostalgia: Genre and the Cultural Imaginary in Good Bye, Lenin! and La Grande Séduction’, in: Wolfram R. Keller and Gene Walz, eds., Screening Canadians: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Canadian Film, Marburg: Universitätsbibliothek Marburg, 2008, pp. 119-31. 33

Seán Allan, ‘Good Bye Lenin!: Ostalgie und Identität im wieder vereinigten Deutschland’, German as a Foreign Language, 1 (2006), 46-59 (here: p. 53).

34

Ibid., p. 54.

35

Matthias Uecker, ‘Fractured Families – United Countries? Family, Nostalgia, and Nation-Building in Das Wunder von Bern and Goodbye [sic] Lenin!’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 5:3 (2007), 189-200 (here: p. 196). 36

Allan, ‘Good Bye Lenin!’, p. 51.

37 Zafer Şenocak, ‘The Concept of Culture and Its Discontents’, in: Adelson, trans. and ed., Atlas of a Tropical Germany, pp. 43-8 (here: p. 44). 38

Jozwiak and Mermann, ‘“The Wall in Our Minds?”’, p. 790.

39

Jennifer M. Kapczynski, ‘Negotiating Nostalgia: The GDR Past in Berlin Is in Germany and Good Bye, Lenin!’, Germanic Review, 82:1 (2007), 78-100 (here: p. 89).

40

Leslie A. Adelson, ‘Coordinates of Orientation: An Introduction’, in: Adelson, trans. and ed., Atlas of a Tropical Germany, pp. xi–xxxvii (here: p. xxii).

41

Zafer Şenocak, ‘Between the Sex Pistols and the Koran’, in: Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling and Anton Kaes, eds., Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 19552005, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, pp. 236-9 (here: p. 238). 42

Ibid., p. 239.

43

Ibid.

234

44

Susan C. Anderson

Şenocak, ‘The Concept of Culture’, pp. 47-8.

45 Leslie A. Adelson, ‘Against Between: A Manifesto’, in: Göktürk, Gramling and Kaes, eds., Germany in Transit, pp. 265-70 (here: p. 268). 46

Ibid., p. 269.

47 Christina Kraenzle, ‘At Home in the New Germany? Local Stories and Global Concerns in Yüksel Yavuz’s Aprilkinder and Kleine Freiheit’, German Quarterly, 82:1 (2009), 90-108 (here: p. 96). 48

Ibid., p. 104.

49

Şenocak, ‘Between the Sex Pistols’, p. 238.

50

Kraenzle, ‘At Home in the New Germany?’, p. 97.

51 Barbara Kosta, ‘Transcultural Exchange: Fatih Akin’s Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005)’, in: Steven D. Martinson and Renate A. Schulz, eds., Transcultural German Studies/Deutsch als Fremdsprache: Building Bridges/Brücken bauen, New York: Lang, 2009, pp. 239-47 (here: p. 243). 52 Oya Dinçer Durmus, ‘Fatih Akin’s Cinema: A World without Borders’, TRANS: Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, 16 July 2006, at: http://www.inst.at/ trans/16Nr/06_1/durmus16.htm (accessed 6 February 2010). 53

Şenocak, ‘The Concept of Culture’, p. 44.

54

Durmus, ‘Fatih Akin’s Cinema’.

55

Kosta, ‘Transcultural Exchange’, p. 242.

56

Hell and von Moltke, ‘Unification Effects’, p. 81.

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp Post-Wall German Road Movies: Renegotiations of National Identity? If road movies are above all about journeys of self-discovery and about conceptions of self and the nation, this would beg the question whether recent German entries in this genre can live up to that claim. This article attempts to chart the extent to which postreunification road movies transcend a dominant cinematic culture of consensus and conformity and advocate cultural plurality. Looking at a number of recent road films, the authors examine how these films explore routes by which greater cultural openness and tolerance can be embraced and differences accepted instead of rejected, thereby infusing multiculturalism into the desire for a new normalcy.

Negotiations about the conception of German nationhood and identity in the 21st century have been reflected in intellectual debates and the cultural production of this century. This has also had an influence upon the cinematic productions since reunification – a cinema that has been termed a ‘cinema of consensus’ because it displays an intrinsic desire for normalcy. 1 Central to these debates are the relationships between Germany and other nations and between Germans and the Other, both of which are crucial in defining self-conceptions and national identity. To that end, this article will explore identity negotiations in contemporary (post-Wall) German cinema, focusing in particular on the genre of the road movie, and use select recent examples to elucidate various themes and tropes found in these films which contribute to the project of identity construction. In examining these films, three concepts that have informed much of the debates on contemporary German cultural studies appear relevant: first Stuart Taberner’s work on the move toward a ‘normalization’ of German cultural and intellectual discourse in the current era; second Eric Rentschler’s concept of a post-Wall ‘cinema of consensus’; and finally the absence of minority representation and discourses on multiculturalism that would underscore and help define the new nation in the 21st century. Cinema of the 1990s and Beyond: a Cinema of Consensus By the mid 1980s, the much heralded New German Cinema (NGC) and ‘Autorenkino’ were clearly on the decline. Critics and filmmakers themselves had begun lamenting its death as well as the lack of any

236

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

meaningful ‘wave’ or movement within the German film industry that might take its place. This situation was not limited to the cinema, rather the German cultural landscape as a whole had become, in Habermas’ words, ‘a desert of banality and bewilderment.’ 2 Particularly after the fall of the Wall, the more venerable, canonical writers and filmmakers seemed at a loss to create political and socially engaging works of art. At the same time, a new wave of popular literature and film, the so-called ‘Popliteratur’ and its cinematic cousin, the New German Comedy, supplanted these established artists and in doing so created a commercially successful literary and cinematic scene. In 2000, at the start of the new millennium, Eric Rentschler published a stock-taking of German film in the post-New German Cinema era. As an admitted ‘friend’ of the NGC, he mourned the end of an alternative cinema and in particular noted that journalists, cineastes and intellectuals at large have frequently rebuked [current] German filmmakers for ignoring the nation’s social problems and political debates. Contemporary productions, they tell us, studiously and systematically skirt the ‘large’ topics and hot issues: the messy complications of post-Wall reality, thematics like right-wing radicalism, chronic unemployment, or the uneasy integration of the former GDR into the Federal Republic. 3

Further, Rentschler sets off the ‘crude,’ ‘formulaic,’ ‘bland’ and ‘infantile’ comedies of the 1990s against the ‘rich,’ ‘challenging’ and ‘diverse’ films of the New German Cinema. He faults directors like Doris Dörrie, Sönke Wortmann and Dominik Graf for wanting to transform cinema into a ‘site of mass diversion’ instead of maintaining a cinema that can be ‘a moral institution or a political forum.’ 4 The most prominent and successful of these directors ‘aim to please,’ and have, he argues, created in the process a ‘cinema of consensus.’ This, of course, begs the question, consensus about what? Most of these directors, especially the practitioners of the romantic comedies of the 1990s, embraced genre cinema, with its traditional narratives and commercial appeal, and rejected both the thematics and aesthetics of the NGC. In doing so, they sought to bring ‘normality’ to German cinematic production by turning to Hollywood as a cultural referent instead of carrying on the traditions of the NGC. 5 Filmmakers were not alone in this search for normalcy, as there was in the literary sphere a concomitant debate over ‘Unterhaltung’ and ‘Lesbarkeit’ on the one hand and traditional German aesthetics on the other. Critics like Uwe Wittstock called for a more entertaining, readable German

Post-Wall German Road Movies

237

literature whereas the more conservative and iconoclastic Karl-Heinz Bohrer argued for a return to classical modernity with its more strict aesthetic principles. 6 As Taberner has argued, the discussions that followed this appeal [for normality] raised the question of the extent to which German literature would be able to project a distinctive profile and identity within the standardization of form and content driven by AngloAmerican ‘norms.’ 7

While young writers adopted the Anglo-American form and content under the guise of pop literature, their cinematic counterparts appropriated the dominant cinema of Hollywood. This contributed to the construction of German identity as no longer unique in its ‘Sonderweg,’ rather part of a commercialized, transnational and global system of production and consumption. 8 Despite the concern of many critics, German cinema of the 1990s enjoyed unprecedented commercial popularity at home (less so abroad), suggesting that the ‘consensus,’ which Rentschler maintains was the guiding narratological construct for these films, was that audiences indeed wanted ‘Unterhaltung’ as opposed to aesthetics. 9 In fact, there is a subtle reference to this debate in Wortmann’s 1994 hit Der bewegte Mann, a comedy starring one of the new celebrities of the 1990s, Til Schweiger, as Axel, a serial philanderer who, after being thrown out by his pregnant girlfriend, moves in with Norbert (HansJoachim Król), a shy, gay man. In one humorous scene, Norbert and his friend Walter decide to go to the cinema, and while they want to see Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, the classic 1971 Italian art film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella, Norbert’s boyfriend (Armin Rhode, who plays a crude butcher) wants to see Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo instead. Sidelined to a small theater with only a few seats, Death in Venice becomes the choice by accident for three straight drunken spectators as well, and who then complain about the slowness and ‘queerness’ of the film. While much could be said about the homophobic themes of the film (as well as the equating of art cinema with ‘gayness’), this scene nevertheless takes aim at the aesthetics of the art film as well as its non-commercial elements and limited appeal. Wortmann’s film, like many other comedies in the 1990s, takes up the theme of homosexuality as ‘otherness,’ and as Randall Halle has shown in his analysis of heterosexual desire in these comedies, Der

238

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

bewegte Mann posits heterosexuality as a normative trope and in doing so reflects a larger crisis of heterosexuality. Halle, quite rightly argues that these comedies represent ‘much more complicated sites of conflict’ than most critics have previously acknowledged. 10 In fact, it furthers the project of normalization through the equating of the art film (and by proxy the NGC) with abnormality, whereas the dominant Hollywood cinema, which Wortmann is imitating, becomes the norm. This analogy can then be applied further to suggest that the divided Germany existed in an abnormal state, whereas the new post-Wall Germany has finally achieved normalcy. As comedies, though, the point of these films, of course, is not to explore serious themes such as social injustice or immigrant and minority issues, rather to construct a narrative that will serve for comic relief. Still, as Halle points out, these films do touch on certain economic anxieties prevalent at the time, even if they are relegated to the background. In both Rainer Kaufmann’s Stadtgespräch (1995) and Katja von Garnier’s Abgeschminkt (1993), the protagonist (Katja Riemann in both films, another star of the 1990s) is threatened with dismissal unless she changes her style and improves the company’s bottom-line. Thus the pressures of American-style free-market capitalism in the New Economy are present and serve as a driving force in the narrative. Such an economic critique would have served as an axis around which NGC directors would have constructed an entire film (one thinks of the socio-political cinema of Alexander Kluge), but in these two films an exegesis on the ethics and morals of late-capitalist society is not the point, rather the comedy of romance and relationships is. Another crucial point here is that such economic pressures are felt not just by those in the dominant culture (i.e., attractive, successful thirty-something urbanites), rather by all members of German society, particularly those on the lower end of the economic scale. Yet when considering some of the most popular of the comedies from this period, we find few if any minority characters, despite the fact that the films are set in Berlin, Cologne and Frankfurt, some of the most cosmopolitan and diverse cities in Germany. In particular, Berlin and Cologne appear to be cities made up solely of white urban professionals who not only do not interact with but do not see anyone from the non-dominant culture. If in terms of sexual politics, these films represent a crisis of heterosexuality, as Halle has convincingly

Post-Wall German Road Movies

239

argued, then in terms of ethnic politics, they also represent a crisis of nationhood. It is not coincidental, then, that the rise in popular comedies came in the wake of reunification. As Taberner and others remind us, there was a desire and debate in the cultural sphere over normalcy and the issue of constructing the new German ‘nation,’ whereby many younger writers and filmmakers rejected the politics of history and memory that had pervaded cultural production in the recent past and sought instead to create a new identity for the reunified Germany as a ‘normal’ part of European society. 11 If the NGC, as an oppositional, alternative cinema, was about giving voice to underrepresented or marginalized groups, then the cinema of consensus, as Rentschler has argued, was about the collective: If anything, the current mainstream cinema longs for a German film industry as powerful and resonant as a former age’s Ufa studio. The Cinema of Consensus consciously seeks ways of saying ‘we’ in its address to German audiences. 12

This sentiment is echoed by Rainer Kaufmann, who in interviews both underscores his self-perception as an entertainment director (‘Unterhaltungsregisseur’) but also one who strives to give audiences a portrait of a normalized German society: ‘Only since reunification have we felt whole enough to make films about normal people in normal situations, to look at ourselves and say I’m OK.’ 13 The idea of telling stories of ‘normal people in normal situations’ is clearly a reference to films of the New German Cinema, which were often considered esoteric and highly political thus pointing out the abnormality of post-war German nationhood. Similarly in the literary arena, many writers in the post-war era focused on the larger ‘German’ themes of memory, collective responsibility and the division between the East and West and their political ideologies. For the average reader and viewer in the mainstream these were not topics that were particularly appealing nor part of their own conception of Germany – a view given voice by then Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmerman who in 1983 lambasted the German film subsidy system which supported films that, so he claimed, the majority of the population did not want to see. Filmmakers and writers in the 90s alike, in their quest to achieve ‘normality’ sought an end to discourses about the German ‘Sonderweg’ and the thematization of German

240

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

history. As Ulrich Greiner described it in his influential essay on the German ‘Gesinnungsästhetik’: All zu sehr waren die Schriftsteller in den beiden deutschen Hälften mit außerliterarischen Themen beauftragt, mit dem Kampf gegen Restauration, Faschismus, Klerikalismus, Stalinismus etcetera. Diejenigen, die ihnen diesen Auftrag gaben, hatten verschiedene Namen: das Gewissen, die Partei, die Politik, die Moral, die Vergangenheit. In der Bundesrepublik verwendete man dafür den Begriff der engagierten Literatur. 14

In order to distance themselves from this ‘Gesinnung’ and achieve normalcy, post-Wall writers and populist directors embraced instead a transnational aesthetic of music, fashion, nightlife and all the consumer-oriented trappings of globalized capitalism. Or, again as Rentschler has so succinctly put it, they wanted ‘the cinema to be a site of mass diversion, not a moral institution or a political forum.’ 15 The New German Road Movie One of the defining features of post-Wall cinema has been the embracing of genre cinema. From the aforementioned comedies to thrillers, romances, children’s films and historical dramas, films of the 1990s and in the first decade of this century have explored the gamut of cinematic genres. To be sure, the New German Cinema was not monolithic and was characterized by a variety of genres as well, but most were in the service of exploring German issues and themes related to the immediate past and Germany’s relationship to current political discourses. Similarly, while post-Wall films, particularly the romantic comedies, have been viewed primarily through the lens of entertainment cinema, these films too explore issues of identity and nationhood, but in a perhaps less didactic manner. One genre that was conspicuously popular in the NGC for exploring German identity was the road movie. The classic road movie, as Brazilian director Walter Salles points out, is said to reflect identity in construction or, especially in more recent decades, national identities in transformation. One of the films that defined road movies for today’s audiences, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), was about the end of innocence and the implosion of the American dream during the Vietnam years. Hopper’s film suggests that the identity crisis of the protagonist mirrors the identity crisis of the culture itself. The narrative frame of road movies is rarely guided by external conflicts; rather, the conflicts that consume their characters are internal ones.

Post-Wall German Road Movies

241

Because road movies need to trace the internal transformation of their characters, the films are not primarily about what can be seen or verbalized but about what can be felt – about the invisible that complements the visible. In this sense, the classic road movie contrasts starkly with contemporary mainstream films, in which new actions are created every few minutes to grab the attention of the viewer. In road movies, a moment of silence is generally more important than the most dramatic action. 16 The agenda of road movies is not necessarily to show normal people in standard situations, but perhaps that the nonstandard can also, and perhaps should be, part of an individual and collective (national) identity. It would seem, then, that the German road movie should have special potential to exhibit a critical edge and, especially in the post-Wall era, to comment on and redefine national sensibilities. For the most part, post-Wall cinema turns away from the country’s problematic history in favor of the here and now, 17 and represents, as Rainer Kaufmann stated, more or less everyday characters and conflicts. However, in road movies, the protagonists are usually not ordinary people but more often than not odd ones: victimized outsiders, forced outlaws, accidental fugitives or simply alienated eccentrics, constantly in motion on a – not always voluntary – journey that may or may not have a destination, and find themselves in unusual circumstances where they transcend mainstream norms. Thus, adhering to established Hollywood formulas – a brief exposition, linear story line, identifiable characters, gradual build-up of suspense and expectation and a tidy resolution of the conflict 18 – but also inspired by the spatial and social topography of a unified Germany, the road movie of the 1990s and beyond unmistakably articulates a growing frustration with everyday, norm-conformist life in Germany and its limited possibilities. The significance of the journey, specifically the road, ‘embedded in both popular mythology and social history,’ then, is ‘its obvious potential for romanticizing alienation as well as for problematizing the uniform identity of the nation’s culture.’ 19 The European road movie, as David Laderman has argued, is both a reaction to and a reformulation of the American genre. 20 Yet at the same time, he writes, ‘this reaction is driven by uniquely Continental journey narratives that explore issues of national identity, politics and philosophy.’ 21 Moreover, he notes, the classic European road film is about ‘introspection rather than violence and danger’ – citing

242

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

Wenders’ Im Laufe der Zeit (1976) as well as Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957) and Fellini’s La Strada (1954): ‘Put differently, travelling outside of society becomes less important (and perhaps less possible) than travelling into the national culture, tracing the meaning of citizenship as a journey.’ 22 While this was certainly true of the NGC road movie, German road movies since reunification, in part to emphasize the new openness, take their protagonists on travels to the edges of Germany, Europe and even the World, 23 in order to explore and reflect on Germany’s position and relationship to these entities. In Bandits (Katja von Garnier, 1997) the trip leads to the northern port of Hamburg; in Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (Thomas Jahn, 1997), the journey takes the protagonists through northwestern Germany up to the coast of Holland; Zugvögel ... Einmal nach Inari (Peter Lichtefeld, 1998) depicts a journey from Germany to northern Finland; in Im Juli (Fatih Akin, 2000) the protagonists travel to the southern edge of Europe, to Turkey; and Schultze Gets the Blues (Michael Schorr, 2003) takes the title character to America. These journeys usually lead away from city life to provincial towns and deserted landscapes, in an escape from the past toward a better future, an identity, a purpose. Comfort and stability are usually abandoned for ‘makeshift alliances forged by circumstance. Structured around these choices, the road movie often provides images of a new homeland in which all differences and difficulties could be overcome through the shared opposition to middle-class values.’ 24 Thus, these journeys take on an existential dimension in that each turns into a quest for freedom rebelling against the alienation, the conformism, the constraints and confinement that keep life at home in check. If cinema in the 1980s is seen as a period that tended to ‘recuperate patriarchal capitalism and hegemonic masculinity,’ 25 the 90s and beyond could be seen as a counter-reaction that challenges and questions these ideals. From this it would seem that the boundaries of Germans’ self-identity and German national-cultural identity are being retested and expanded in a new, post-Cold War Europe. The question remains whether these post-Wall road movies are indeed, like their NGC predecessors, journeys inward that lead the protagonists to critical self-scrutiny, selfrealization, and to reach a new level of consciousness, and thereby reflect outwardly, lending the films the critical potential to renegotiate cultural and national identity.

Post-Wall German Road Movies

243

In the 1970s, Wim Wenders broke new ground as a director of German road movies. 26 He pioneered this sub-genre with Alice in den Städten (1974) and Im Laufe der Zeit, expanded it in the vastness of the American West in Paris, Texas (1984) and, later, to a global odyssey with Bis ans Ende der Welt (1991). In his Lisbon Story (1994), the protagonist Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler, in many ways Wenders’ alter ego from several of his films) comments on national identity in a New Europe without national boundaries. As a ‘new German man [he] is a happy citizen of Europe; his new Germany is a country voluntarily subscribing to and immersed in a new, united Europe,’ 27 and Winter pretends to have gone transnational, declaring himself a European citizen and Europe – in several languages – his ‘Heimatland,’ yet is disappointed when noone wants to see his passport when he crosses the no-longer-existent national border controls. The ‘informality of national borders in the part of Europe depicted by Wenders suggests that there is no need for states and nations to defend themselves against the threat of the other, or to pronounce their difference from the surrounding nations,’ 28 which is why Winter feels no need to set his national identity apart from, or to construct it in relation to some other. 29 Winter sees Europe as one single country despite changing languages and music, often seen as the traditional constituents of a national-cultural identity, yet comments that the landscape always stayed the same: ‘[…] [I]st immer dieselbe geblieben, erzählt immer wieder die gleiche Geschichte von einem alten Kontinent, der die Kriege satt hat.’ He feels the continent is permeated by the ‘Geist der Geschichte’ – democracy and peace – yet Wenders never really tries to make statements of a political or socialcritical nature. Winter has ‘traded his German identity or, more exactly, his German identity reshaped by American culture, for a European one.’ 30 Already in Alice in den Städten, Wenders had presented images of America as ‘an offensively noisy world that bristles with the vulgar sights and sounds of pop and commercial culture.’ 31 Lisbon Story, however, posits an ‘idealised vision of new Europe’ in that it presupposes ‘a civilised, peaceful and presumably Christian Europe.’ 32 The new Europe is similarly explored in Peter Lichtefeld’s Zugvögel, the story of Hannes (Joachim Król), a truck driver in Dortmund, who unexpectedly loses his job as he travels to northern Finland in order to participate in an international contest of train

244

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

schedule experts. Like Winter in Lisbon Story, Hannes can be considered more of a European citizen; his ambition is to become a railroad efficiency expert for the European Union in Brussels and revamp the entire transportation system. 33 Here, too, the element of crime, quite often central to the road movie, is introduced when Hannes is falsely suspected of his boss’s murder and the police chase him all the way to Lapland. While a note of social criticism is introduced through the indifference and ruthlessness of Hannes’ new boss who casually fires him on claims of streamlining the company, the film’s cultural critique is mediated in more subtle ways. Hannes’ hobby of learning time tables seems rather drab and unexciting, to say the least, but it also evidences an ardent ‘Fernweh’ as well as his dormant discontent in (German) culture. Hannes does not listen to German but to Italian music. He has furnished his living room to look like an office in a train station, where he sits and memorizes train connections worldwide. Outside of his workplace he has no social contacts and, since his last girlfriend left him four years earlier, the gentle and honest dreamer is rather disillusioned with personal relationships. Even his apartment resembles more a train station than a place one would call home. Similarly, no panoramic views are ever shown of his hometown through long or panning shots; instead the city appears unappealing, downright ugly, ‘fragmented and a locus of alienation.’ 34 His days are spent among concrete, in parking lots, warehouses, loading ramps, and in-town business quarters. By contrast, the periphery, Finland and its extreme margin, Northern Lapland, ‘possesses a distinctive culture which the civilised, industrialised, urban culture of Europe lacks.’ 35 While the plot of the manhunt serves to build suspense, the film’s most notable quality lies in its images. As we accompany Hannes on his journey on trains, ships and buses, a serene silence pervades the film, effectively articulated through its picturesque images of landand seascapes. Traveling, it becomes clear, can be an immensely rewarding experience if one is willing to ‘see,’ while the act of seeing and perceiving is also an act of introspection and self-discovery. On his journey Hannes finds himself as he falls in love with Sirpa, a Finnish woman (Outi Mäenpää), whose belief in the spirituality of traveling appears to rub off on Hannes, who must question his lifelong motto, ‘Zeit ist Geld.’ The scenery becomes more and more important the more rural and marginal it becomes. 36 This tranquility and peace-

Post-Wall German Road Movies

245

fulness finally also take hold of Hannes himself as the sequences showing the Finnish countryside are increasingly mediated through subjective point-of-view shots, and in a extreme long shot we see Hannes getting off the train at his destination in Northern Lapland, where he is the only passenger disembarking and truly seems to have reached the end of the world. Swallowed up by the majestic scenery, this shot emphasizes that Hannes has indeed reached ‘das Ende der Welt’ (as Sirpa remarks), a zone of spiritual solitude. While his main motivation had always been to increase productivity – ‘Zeit sparen’ – Sirpa’s ideal is the opposite, namely to take the time and smell the roses she dreams of cultivating, and it is at that moment when she tells about her dream that Hannes begins to look inward. He realizes that the meaning in life is not derived from a structured existence dominated by schedules and productivity, but from sharing with someone one loves and trusts. On his trip he discovers the cultural curiosity and openness of Scandinavians that differs from the more materialistic and profit-oriented German mentality in that it ‘cherish[es] love, friendship and life in tune with nature more than economic success.’ 37 In the climactic scene of the movie, Hannes deliberately foregoes triumph in the contest and answers the winning question by choosing a more romantic route – the one Sirpa prefers – over the fastest one. In the process Hannes appears to undergo an identity shift from German to Finnish. 38 In a medium shot, Hannes and Sirpa are shown in front of the American contest winner, their bodies covering the oversized check. Thus Lichtefeld ‘promotes the idea of a Europe that does not want to go the American way, given that the values which Sirpa opposes are representative of the USA even more than of any European country,’ 39 but a Europe that should follow a more spiritual and introspective route. Schultze Gets the Blues constitutes a similar case, both in terms of its characters as well as its problematization of trans-Atlantic issues: an elderly, retired man (Horst Krause) leaves Germany for the first time, it seems, to attend a German music festival in Texas. He speaks virtually no English and hardly ever speaks at all, and the only limited form of expression is through his accordion. The elderly, overweight Schulze is an unlikely character for a road movie, and the way we see him in his homeland is as a normal, conforming, mainstream, petty bourgeois, whose life in a suburban, all-German environment is ruled by convention and restraint. A former miner, he, along with two of his

246

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

pals, is forced into early retirement. His new life is one of emptiness, loneliness, disconnectedness. It is ruled by mechanical habits (riding his bicycle through his deserted neighborhood, he signals turns even in curves) and petty-bourgeois conformity mediated through several still shots of Schultze’s community: the clean driveways, the orderly positioned garbage cans, the symmetrically installed mail boxes, the look-alike subdivisions with their uniform awnings, their evenly arranged foot mats, neatly drawn curtains, meticulous fences, petty window plants and – Schultze’s own – tacky garden gnomes which he washes regularly. In this community, so it seems, one obeys the rules of the German ‘Spießbürgertum,’ and if one does not it is equivalent to the ways of the ‘wild west’ – as his friend Jürgen (Harald Warmbrunn) remarks. Recalling the motto of the Adenauer era, ‘Keine Experimente!,’ no spontaneity seems to exist, everything seems prescripted, even the glee club president’s introductory remarks at the local music festival are rehearsed to the last syllable; no deviation from the norm seems permitted, everybody is expected to behave a certain (conformist) way. In this vein, it seems only a matter of time until Schultze will follow in the footsteps of his catatonic mother or his dead father. Several extended takes of Schultze in his house shot from narrow angles and through doors underscore the claustrophobic feel, the monotony and uneventfulness of his life. His bland personality is portrayed as a product of the stringent culture of a restrictive and inhibitive society. While in Schultze’s life there is little need for verbal communication, several occurrences serve as wake-up calls from his lethargy. The most important is the bayou music from America’s South on the radio, which he cannot seem to pull himself away from as it gives him a jolt of new creativity and initiative. The second is the free-spirited Frau Lorant, a resident in his mother’s retirement home, who charms Schultze with her lust for life, especially booze and gambling (but who unexpectedly dies only shortly after they meet). Then there is Lisa, an eccentric und uninhibited waitress, whose spontaneous performance of a flamenco dance in their local pub baffles Schultze and his friends. Finally, Schultze’s friend and fellow early retiree Jürgen, who vows they have all been had and that this calls for revolution, is the last in the series of catalysts that mobilize Schultze’s resistance to his state of constriction. While he had first refused to travel to their American sister city of Braunfels,

Post-Wall German Road Movies

247

Texas, because his friends disapprove of America’s materialism and use of the death penalty, Schultze now agrees to represent his club overseas. At the local music festival he promptly strays from his father’s footsteps by not playing the traditional polka but instead ‘etwas Amerikanisches.’ Although the all-German audience is confused and only hesitatingly applauds, the racist slogans that promptly become audible denouncing the piece as ‘Negermusik’ are quickly silenced by more vociferous pro-American voices. At the same time we also hear superficial clichés and stereotypes about other cultures, albeit not necessarily negative ones, e.g., when Schultze’s drinking buddies in Germany comment that Americans are very polite. The only spontaneous cultural curiosity shown in the film is the taciturn Schultze’s own, namely when the Louisianan zydeco music he hears on the radio instantly touches his soul. After arriving in the American South he breaks out of the rut of his existence completely. Instead of attending the tacky music festival, an American imitation of cheesy ‘Hofbräuhaus’ culture, he rents a boat and discovers the swamps of Mississippi and the music of the bayous. On his boat he performs calisthenics (‘Freiübungen,’ which in German also means ‘exercising being free’), and encounters various eccentric characters. As he traverses the isolated waters and deserted swamps of the Louisiana bayous, penetrating deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness, he encounters an African-American woman who lives on the river and spontaneously invites him in for dinner on her houseboat. The new environment he finds himself in is natural, and its people are open, hospitable, and welcoming. This experience clearly broadens his perspective and his cultural horizon, as he learns to move in a foreign, multi-ethnic society. He seems too overwhelmed to even realize his new-found freedom when he drives his boat down the delta to the Gulf of Mexico – the sea again as a final frontier where one encounters extreme living conditions – and, first literally, then metaphorically, runs out of gas: he suffers a fatal heart attack. One might conclude that this eye-opening experience came at too late a stage in his life and that his new freedom turned out too overwhelming. Schultze dies, seated under an American flag, a free man. After a drastic cut from the dying Schultze in America to his funeral in Germany, we see the AfricanAmerican woman again at his graveside. It seems implied that she played an active part in bringing Schultze’s body back to Germany, and as we see her in the midst of the mourners, she seems both a

248

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

cultural-ethnic outsider but also fully accepted by and spatially integrated into this German community. In the end, the images and impressions of an open-minded, generous and tolerant American society reflect back on life in Germany as portrayed in the film: a stiff, stuffy, and stifling existence (conveyed through the claustrophobic atmosphere in Schultze’s home), where alienated individuals unquestioningly adhere to prescribed norms of conduct. Perhaps Schultze has found on his journey to America what he did not know he was looking for in the first place, but does not live to tell about – in his speechlessness he probably would not have been able to do so anyway, and despite several point-of-view shots during his boat excursion his inner life remains rather inscrutable. Instead, it is the African-American woman who returns in his stead as a cultural Other, as living proof, as it were, of what Schultze encountered abroad and would have brought back with him, adding, quite literally, color to the drab cultural topography of Germany as she is welcomed into the midst of the community. Thus, Schultze’s journey posthumously changes the cultural landscape in favor of a step toward multiculturalism. However, like Lisbon Story and Zugvögel, Schorr’s film never fully addresses ‘the issue of nonWestern Europeans crossing the European borders and the encounters between citizens of the European Union and other Europeans’ or nonEuropeans. 40 Toward a Multicultural Germany Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, one of the most commercially successful of the wave of New German Comedies, deals both directly and indirectly with borders, border crossings and transgression. This tragicomedy revolves around Martin (Til Schweiger) and Rudi (Jan Josef Liefers), two terminally ill men in their thirties suffering, respectively, from a brain tumor and bone cancer. 41 They meet by accident and set out on a journey to the Atlantic Ocean in order to find peace during their remaining days on earth. In the process, they rob a bank, steal a car with a briefcase full of money in the trunk, escape the police, and flirt with disaster and self-destruction. As quasi-outlaws, they are chased not only by the police but also by two mobsters. One of the rare serious moments of the film where a critique of social institutions comes to the fore is when Rudi tries to get Martin’s medication at a pharmacy but is refused because it is a prescription

Post-Wall German Road Movies

249

drug. 42 In this scene, the otherwise mild-mannered and conformist Rudi comes to an epiphanic realization: while he first routinely acquiesces to the pharmacist’s refusal and proceeds to leave the store, he suddenly stops and, with absolute determination – emphasized through slow motion – turns around, pulls a gun and fires at the medicine cabinets (typically, humans are never victims of violence in German road movies). With nothing left to lose but his friend he chooses to put himself outside the system and embrace his outlaw status rather than to continue as a conforming citizen. This is his protest against a bureaucratic state, against ossified social structures that actually destroy lives instead of saving them. Generally, Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door deals with serious issues in a humorous way. The film features several non-German characters, and in a conspicuous nod to Hollywood features Rutger Hauer in the role of the Dutch mafia don. Characters of different ethnic origins include Abdul, one of the two mobsters in pursuit of Martin and Rudi, as well as a cursory appearance of an African(-German?) ambulance driver who does not figure into the narrative. Certainly Abdul features as the most comical figure in the film – the more so as he is played by German actor Moritz Bleibtreu – who speaks with a foreign accent and whose comical errors in his attempt to use idiomatic German make for some hilarious moments. The implication here appears to be that foreigners occupy places in all walks of German society, both those that save lives and threaten or even destroy lives. 43 This is accepted as a given reality: Germany, the film seems to say, is a multicultural society of sorts, and in passing, both positive (the ambulance driver, although no speaking part, may represent an example of an integrated foreigner) and negative aspects (the high statistics of criminally active foreigners with migrant background) are hinted at. On the other hand, director Jahn points out that one reason preventing a multicultural society from working smoothly is quite simply that prejudice exists on the part of the Germans, who stereotype and discriminate against foreigners. The film provides two examples. The first scene is when Abdul accidentally hits a young boy on his skateboard but asks him right away with real concern whether he is injured. The boy furiously yells at him, calling him ‘Ahmed,’ immediately stereotyping him as a Turk. Abdul’s accent automatically engenders disrespect from the German kid. Similarly, when the mobsters want to buy a car, the salesman responds to Abdul’s question about the price:

250

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

‘Na ja, weil Sie ein Ausländer sind, ne – und [imitating a Turkish accent] weil Ausländer hab’ es schwer in Deutschland, ne – 75.000 […] viel teuer.’ Here too, blatant irreverence toward and stereotyping of minorities becomes apparent. Admittedly, these are minor episodes in the film’s narrative and portrayed in a comical light, but they do amount to critical, if cursory, commentary. Otherwise, the film pays blunt reference to American-style consumerism – ‘lots of money buys many new things,’ as Martin remarks – but, more important, the film never ceases to pay tribute to a fun culture of ‘sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll,’ again through abundant references to American pop culture: a visual homage to Quentin Tarantino’s gangster film Reservoir Dogs (1992) and the Blues Brothers (John Landis, 1980) by means of the bumbling mafia duo; Elvis Presley and his pink Cadillac; and to Route 66, ‘The Main Street of America’ from Chicago to California, a ‘multivalent cultural symbol for every era in the life in America.’ 44 The film’s musical soundtrack features exclusively American songs, most notably Bob Dylan’s title song (appropriated, i.e., performed here by Til Schweiger himself) and Gloria Gaynor’s disco anthem ‘I Will Survive,’ underscore the film’s dynamics of the characters’ impending death and their lust for life. Thus, when in one scene the two protagonists make a wish list of things yet to do, the materialistic ideals of the New Economy are echoed yet again: Rudi wants to have sex with two women (a wish he later fulfills himself in a Dutch brothel named ‘True Romance’ 45), and Martin hopes to buy his mother a Pink Cadillac, a status symbol mixing the beat and the bourgeois. The impression one gets is that clichéd images of Americana are invoked here, glorifying America as the land of freedom and adventure, but also of danger and crime – all elements that make for an entertaining road movie. But where then does this leave minority representation in popular German cinema? If, as Laderman maintains, the road film is, in part, about tracing the meaning of citizenship, 46 and if these post-Wall road movies are about exploring questions of identity and a new normality, it is striking how little minority representation one finds in these films. Such questions and debates are, of course, not singular to German popular cinema. In the summer of 2008, Spike Lee, in a well publicized dust-up at Cannes, accused Clint Eastwood of erasing AfricanAmericans from history in his films about World War II. Representation has always been key in constructing images and narratives

Post-Wall German Road Movies

251

about both the past and present, but it has also always been a source of controversy. This is not to say that there are no German films with minority characters nor that there are no directors from the nondominant culture making films about immigrants and minorities. But with few exceptions (films by Dörrie, Akin, Andreas Dresen and the aforementioned Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door being the most notable) most popular German films in the 1990s are devoid of minority representation. And those films that do problematize immigrants or secondgeneration minority characters generally have the involvement of directors or screenwriters from the non-dominant culture or are designed as ‘Problemfilme’ in which these characters’ very status in society becomes the theme itself. An interesting example is Fatih Akin’s attempt in 2000 at combining both the romantic comedy and the road movie in Im Juli. In this film, the German Daniel initially falls for the Turkish Melek and follows her to Istanbul. Along the way, he falls in love with the German Juli, while Melek returns to her Turkish lover Isa. Much as gays serve as facilitators for a happy end for the heteros, as Halle has shown, 47 so, too, does the exotic Melek serve as a facilitator for the German Daniel to find his true love in the German Juli. In this way, the film flirts with multiculturalism and inter-ethnic relationships, but in the end, takes the conservative normative stance of having each person find happiness within his/her own ethnic group. As such this European road movie ironically contributes to a normative imagining of a German nation and helps reinscribe a more limited, narrow German identity within the context of the unstable and changing European Union. What is interesting, however, is how German society is portrayed by Akin. In an early scene showing the first meeting between Juli and Daniel at a flea market in Hamburg, the background features a multitude of characters obviously intended to represent a cross-section of German society: young and old, male and female, and, visibly, of various ethnic origins. All characters seem to coexist peacefully, without any tensions. This harmonious co-existence between Germans and minorities is further underscored in an idyllic scene that takes place on the beach of Hamburg, where people sit around a fire and a guitar plays a romantic Turkish love song to which Melek then sings. Here too, the atmosphere is placid and serene, one of a peaceful community. When Daniel tries to buy beer from the revelers, a Turk gives it to him for free, adding: ‘Die besten Dinge im Leben sind umsonst,’

252

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

as well as a complicit wink that seems to include the viewer. All Turkish characters in Germany speak perfect German, 48 and Akin obviously wants to emphasize that in his environment, the Turks, while preserving their own customs, traditions, and practices, are completely integrated into German society where they not only coexist peacefully but also enrich German culture through theirs. All the non-German characters (who reside in Germany) in Im Juli are presented as friendly, honest, and generous. Akin’s Germany, in contrast to Schorr’s and Lichtefeld’s, is represented as an open, harmoniously functioning multicultural society, where social problems and ethnic tensions do not exist. By contrast, the non-German characters outside of Germany introduced in the film tend to be ruthless, devious and corrupt, bear ill will towards German visitors and are ever ready to take advantage of them. Luna and her friends steal from Daniel, the men on the Hungarian cargo ship throw him overboard, the Hungarian farmer fires a rifle at him, the children in Budapest spray him with water, and the Romanian border guard (ironically played by Akin himself) is a sly, corrupt official who demands Luna’s/Daniel’s van as a ‘present.’ 49 But life is good in Germany for everybody, prejudice and hostility toward foreigners have no place in this society, and Daniel and his friends are openminded, tolerant and only too happy to embrace other cultures, again insinuating the utopian ideal of a multicultural society. If there are any problems, he seems to say, they are certainly not caused by Germany’s Turkish population, which, now in its second and third generation, is completely integrated into society. 50 Even Isa, Melek’s boyfriend, prefers Germany to Turkey – which he calls ‘Scheiss-Süden’ – because his home, Berlin, has ‘superviele Türken’ (and perhaps better opportunities). This may be Akin’s way of supporting Turkey’s aspiration to join the European Union, especially by portraying the characters of other countries that have already been integrated into the EU in a rather questionable light. Outlaws and the Views from Within Katja von Garniers’s sophomore work, Bandits, arguably offers the most forceful criticism of German society and is at once also the most problematic entry in the road movie race, as it gets itself tangled up in contradictions. The plot follows four escaped female convicts ‘from their dramatic prison break to their media-driven fame as punk stars

Post-Wall German Road Movies

253

and folk heroines.’ 51 As critics have pointed out, the film is in some aspects reminiscent of Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1986), especially through the themes of sexism, male chauvinism, and misogyny that pervade the film, as well as the element of female bonding. Moreover, two of the main characters, the tough-acting Luna (Jasmin Tabatabai) and the romantic, idealistic and naïve Angel (Nicolette Krebitz), appear to be patterned after Scott’s pair of heroines. Finally, the constant abuse by a patriarchal society that sends the title characters of Thelma and Louise – quite literally – over the cliff to meet their fate in the film’s final freeze-frame is repeated in Bandits, where the heroines end their quest in the same way. Contrary to Scott’s film, however, where the police inspector retains redeeming qualities in his attempts to aid the innocent runaways, here the police officer becomes ‘the instrument of their death,’ 52 once again emphasizing the film’s critique of patriarchal power structures. Convicted of crimes directed against the system, the four women stage a ‘politically symbolic’ 53 escape and attempt to reach Germany’s North Sea shore in order to catch a ship to ultimate freedom in the South Sea. Bandits constructs a narrative that strives to fulfill public demands for dramatic effect and comic relief. However, many scenes are dramatically overstated, 54 which does not support but rather subverts the film’s critical potential. Instead of a believable drama, it comes off as a watered-down musical action-comedy. Katja von Garnier herself calls Bandits a ‘rock and roll fairytale’ 55 and admits to the exaggerated, fantastic, and unreal facets of her film in which ‘narrative realism is gradually left behind in favor of lip-synching artifice, formalist musical numbers, and idealized plot contrivances.’ 56 The more popular the band becomes, the more the film becomes a road musical and a parody of itself. On the one hand the movie can be seen as ‘critically reflect[ing] on the political landscape of German national identity and culture,’ 57 focusing on the exposure of a male-dominated culture on various levels of society: as an arm of the legal authorities, there is the chauvinist police inspector (Hannes Jaenicke), who (ab)uses his female assistant as a means for self-aggrandization; as a representative of the economy there is the record producer who tries to exploit the group for personal profit; as an example of male-dominated politics there is the woman senator who desperately tries to use the Bandits as a means to polish her image for the upcoming election; and finally

254

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

there is the TV station that initially ignores their break-out and only reports on two wanted male fugitives representing the male-privileging media. While the movie seeks to formulate a critique of German social, political, and economic institutions, it at the same time seems to reject German culture as a whole, if one takes the protagonist’s fundamental aversion to German – ‘Ich sing nich’ in [sic] Deutsch’ – as an analogy of the director’s standpoint. 58 While Laderman attests to the film’s ‘earnest critique of male cultural authority’ 59 and successful exposure of ‘patriarchal oppression in many levels of German society,’ 60 it is nonetheless problematic to read the film as a consistently feminist road movie, for the female characters’ actions and dialogues undermine the film’s purported critique of patriarchy. Thus, Luna’s comment on the band’s name ‘Bandits’ suggested by Emma (Katja Riemann) – ‘Band und Tits, gut!’ – implies an objectification of the female buddies/bodies to which none of the band members seems to object. Luna’s comment actually reinforces the kind of negative gender stereotyping against which they fight. Nor does the inspector’s assistant (Andrea Sawatzki) ever protest against or resist the denigrating and humiliating treatment she receives from her boss. Instead, these scenes come across in a light and humorous way, making the inspector’s self-engrossed sexist act appear laughable and less serious. By contrast, Luna’s toughness, a character trait which, it seems, she feels compelled to prove, possibly as a defense mechanism conditioned by patriarchic authority, is exaggerated into a veritable machismo act: she uses vulgarisms both verbally and through gestures and consistently acts in a domineering, callous, selfish, aggressive and abusive way, especially toward other women. Luna’s overstated masculinity clashes with the trite and corny dialogues of other female characters. For example, when another inmate asks the Bandits, as they are about to leave for their first concert at the police ball, to bring back some cute cops (‘süße Bullen’), it is, of all people, Luna who coolly responds to this clichéd request with ‘kein Problem.’ Even if one took this question seriously and not as the playful (though rather banal) repartee as which it is intended it would merely reaffirm stereotypical female desires rather than contribute to expose patriarchal structures. Similarly, feminist issues are put into question when the Bandits are forced to take a patron from a nightclub hostage in order to escape the police; they pick their prisoner on the basis of gender, age and

Post-Wall German Road Movies

255

looks, that is, a handsome, young male. Delighted that the beau turns out to be an American tourist, both Angel and Luna seize the first opportunity to get romantically involved with him, which, again, is not supportive of a feminist critique of (German) society. Even more feminine stereotypes surface when Luna ‘betrays’ Angel by ‘stealing’ her ‘lover,’ promptly arousing Angel’s ‘jealousy.’ 61 Subsequently, their love scene is portrayed as an exaggerated slow motion music video, essentially celebrating heterosexual romance. Later, the naïve Angel lets herself be taken in by the inspector’s promises and ‘accidentally’ turns her friends in; and all Marie (Jutta Hoffmann) longs for is to be reunited with her dead (male) lover. In this way, the characters become caricatures in that they constantly disempower themselves and each other by reinforcing traditional feminine stereotypes and the patriarchal structures they try to deconstruct, thus subverting the film’s feminist-critical potential. Even the road movie theme is barely recognizable anymore: the four run from the police, visit a record company, go drinking, perform in a club or in open air, go swimming and joyriding – all of which lends the whole escape attempt an air of unseriousness and frivolity. 62 When there is movement, it is never continuous or moves in circles, and it is often unclear just which direction the bandits are taking. 63 Angel’s résumé at the end, ‘War doch’n ganz schöner Ausflug bisher,’ summarizes this road trip as but an outing or a joyride 64 during which they play a cat and mouse game with the police (the featured song is tellingly titled ‘Catch Me’), and eventually seek martyrdom in order to be reunited with Marie (who at this point in the film has already died), and, as Luna states, to perform ‘in Vollbesetzung’ again. Thus, in the end, while the Bandits are ‘martyred, victims of patriarchal abuse,’ 65 the discrepancies in the characterization and plot make the message less convincing. One might conclude that the adventures of the road exhaust themselves in romantic and sentimental clichés. In Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, the trip of the two terminally ill men serves as a journey of selfdiscovery and self-liberation. In the final analysis, however, the film, apart from taking a stab at Germany’s social (health care) laws and mocking prejudices against foreigners, is simply a fairly entertaining action-comedy and its general protest against social injustice seems almost perfunctory. The ‘potential for romanticizing alienation’ in these films is no doubt noticeable, though not to the degree of problematizing ‘the uniform identity of the nation’s culture.’ 66 These

256

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

films largely desist from pursuing social issues, as also seen in Akin’s sugar-coated images of an uncomplicated and unconflicted life in Germany, and are humorous, entertaining, and mostly up-beat (again, with the exception of some of their endings). While Zugvögel makes a successful effort to focus on the protagonist’s inner transformation shown through the interplay of scenic images and inner world, the same is at least intimated in Schultze Gets the Blues, but the critical potential of the film gets nipped in the bud as we never know what really motivates the impenetrable and non-verbal title character. While all films discussed here are at least partially designed as comedies or, as in the case of Schultze, a quirky, off-beat comedydrama, 67 they do not earnestly engage in critical discussions of German society, culture, mentality, and sensibilities. They do, however, contain some critical elements, though for the most part only in subplots or isolated scenes. While they are not driven or defined by a concrete political agenda, the general cultural-critical message implicit in these films does advocate greater cultural tolerance, openness toward multiculturalism, challenges Western materialism and questions patriarchal structures. However, their critical impulse to challenge the status quo is considerably weakened by their directors’ primary focus on entertainment value. The resulting impression is that these directors are not too bothered by social conflicts, rather they embrace them as a given, reflecting again a general consensus about society. As such they do not essentially redefine German national identity. Conspicuously, no minority characters – perhaps with the exception of Melek in Akin’s film – feature as integral part of the narratives in German road movies. They most certainly focus on the present – the past does not exist at all – reflecting popular ‘Wunschbilder’ of a new normalcy, the spirit of a new lightheartedness and flippancy that smoothes over cultural discrepancies by making light of them. Their consensus is finally also an expression of self-imposed political correctness, and the implicit message is that Germany wants to be seen as a free, tolerant and self-confident country in which nationalist thinking and racism should have no place. In this context one might recapitulate Rentschler’s critique of the state of contemporary German cinema. He rightfully asserts that the more recent German filmmakers have tried to make popular films ‘accessible and commercially viable’ and rarely ‘explore the darker side of German reality.’ 68 He generally reproaches contemporary films

Post-Wall German Road Movies

257

for ‘skirt[ing] the “large” topics and hot issues: the messy complications of post-Wall reality, thematics like right-wing radicalism, chronic unemployment, or the uneasy integration of the former GDR into the Federal Republic.’ 69 According to Rentschler, they lack ‘stylistic idiosyncrasy, narrative subversion and political rebellion,’ instead they become a ‘site of mass diversion, not a moral institution or a political forum,’ and in that they consciously solicit a new ‘German consensus’ – a cinema with a ‘decidedly affirmative calling.’ This cinema lacks the ‘oppositional energies’ and instead reflects an ‘overdetermined German desire for normalcy as well as of a marked disinclination towards any serious political reflection or sustained historical retrospection.’ 70 These films focus on identity crises which are in fact pseudo-crises for they have no depth or despair, no true suffering, no real joy, which holds true for the protagonists in the road movies discussed here. With their triangulated desires and mismatched partners, their schematic constellations and formulaic trajectories, these yuppie comedies of errors follow strictly codified patterns. 71

Rentschler admits that he is deliberately polemic in formulating his bias against contemporary German cinema and for the New German Cinema of the 60s and 70s, and does not focus on the greater ‘difference and detail’ that, for example, Thomas Elsaesser sees in this cinema. 72 Certainly there are plenty of films in contemporary cinema that do engage in German reality, only differently, less forcefully, and without an all-out critical approach. While post-Wall German cinema most definitely does contrast with the ‘cinema of disenchantment’ of the 1960s and 70s, the ‘intrinsic desire to construct a better Germany’ 73 found in much of the NGC can still be detected in post-Wall road movies/comedies, though in a much milder form and often through the use of humor and irony. 74 For example, the films discussed here all seem to share a subliminal tendency. Instead of problematizing social issues such as immigrants, migration, and minorities in general, they have their protagonists set out to expand their German-coined identity through encounters with other cultures and then bring them home to create or work towards a more tolerant, multicultural society. In Bandits, German society is criticized through the female band, who, in effect, represent the Other: they are the outlaws whose stance is anti-establishment, antipatriarchy, in fact anti-German, and from which the German public,

258

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

their numerous though faceless fans, are supposed to learn and are learning, and for whom in the end they martyr themselves. Similarly, Akin’s movie contains a pro-Turkish bias, and it is Juli who reproaches Daniel with being stuck in a bland (‘öde’) German lifestyle. By contrast, Germany’s Turkish citizens have brought their culture, mentality and sensibilities to Germany and live them, and it is this more communal, open-minded and easy-going, spontaneous lifestyle – a ‘Miteinander’ instead of a ‘Nebeneinander’ – that Akin advocates, which is why he sends his inexperienced, narrow-minded protagonist on a journey to Turkey so he can bring this ‘Lebensgefühl’ back home with him. With her open-mindedness and spontaneity, Juli represents more of a Turkish than a German lifestyle and acts as a facilitator for Daniel. In a way Akin seems to say that Germans need to broaden their cultural horizon and look to their fellow Turkish citizens (rather than their Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian neighbors), if they want to lead a more fulfilling life. 75 The same goes for both Schultze and Hannes as we have seen in their respective films; their encounters with the Other entail life-changing consequences. A commonality in these films, then, is the boredom with the cramped, ossified strictures of everyday life in Germany. Their protagonists depart on a journey in search of meaning and a positive, better future. Through their encounters with an Other – a topos fundamental to all road movies – they seek to embrace a new, multicultural identity as part of that new normalcy, which, it is implied, is already a given state of affairs. In this way, these films, despite their primary emphasis on entertainment value, do in fact make a valid attempt to renegotiate post-Wall German identity and should not be dismissed as vehicles of ‘mindless escapism and crude commercialism’ that serve only as ‘pliers of distraction’ and ‘the workings of a German culture industry.’ 76 From this perspective, it must be argued that German road movies of the last twenty years have indeed been concerned with challenging a prevailing culture of conformity. These movies are above all about new experiences, about journeys of self-discovery and about concepts of self and the nation. Further, they are about what can be learned from the Other and from those who are different and how these differences can be embraced instead of rejected, thereby serving the desire for a new normalcy. In a world that increasingly challenges norms and celebrates difference, the road movie as a form of resistance to the status quo cannot be dismissed entirely. What remains

Post-Wall German Road Movies

259

dominant is the desire to break away, the yearning for freedom from the restrictive culture at home, a romantic longing for the border; the edge, margin, and periphery of Europe, or even the United States as an extension of Western Europe, associated with the ‘romantic, dangerous, natural and spiritual.’ 77 Their goal and destination is not, as was too often the case in the NGC, to reject the German homeland and its recent history but to seek to understand and clarify Germany’s status within Europe and within a post-Cold War reality. If, however, many of these films are a popular attempt at re-writing and re-inscribing the German nation in the wake of unification, then they also reflect a crisis in an ethnic conception of nationhood. In his influential study of nations and nationalism, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991), Benedict Anderson proposes a definition of the nation as an imagined political community that is both limited and sovereign. Communities, he argues, construct and imagine conceptions of self and nationhood both through the assertion of self-determination and through opposition to the Other. In the wake of unification, critics, intellectuals and artists all sought to redefine and reconstruct the German nation after over sixty years of indeterminate or problematic status. That popular cinema has reflected a consensus of how younger directors and audiences have wished to imagine the German nation at this time is quite revealing. With regard to immigrants and minorities, it is important as well to recall the socio-political backdrop for these films in the late 90s and the debates and controversies that culminated on the one hand in the immigration reforms in 2000 as well as the infamous ‘Kinder statt Inder’ campaign of that same year. In sum, recent German comedies, the genre to which the road movies discussed here mainly belong, and the filmmakers associated with them have sought in the 1990s and beyond to construct cinematically a concept of the German nation that has been perhaps characterized by an overdetermined desire for normalcy, resulting in an imagi(ni)ng of the nation that has been quite limited and restricted and has not in fact represented the reality of Germany society. Like von Garnier’s Bandits, these films run away from Germany’s historical past in favor of a presentoriented, unburdened identity-formation. At a time when German writers and filmmakers are trying at once to distance themselves from the past and achieve a sense of normality all the while imagining the ‘new’ German nation, it is perhaps disappointing that popular cinema

260

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

is too often oblivious to the multiethnic reality that is Germany – and Europe – today. Notes 1

Eric Rentschler, ‘From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus’, in: Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 260-77.

2

Habermas, Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1996, quoted in Rentschler, ‘From New German Cinema’, p. 260. 3

Rentschler, ‘From New German Cinema’, p. 262.

4

Ibid., p. 264.

5

Rentschler notes that ‘ideological opponents’ of this new genre cinema saw ‘an overdetermined German desire for normalcy’ and a lack of any sustained engagement with politics or history (Ibid., p. 263).

6

See Jan-Werner Müller, Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification, and National Identity, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, for an excellent account of Bohrer’s influence and ideas.

7

Stuart Taberner, German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond: Normalization and the Berlin Republic, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005, p. xxi.

8 Both Eric Rentschler and Randall Halle, German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008, discuss the changes in funding and the commercialization of the German film industry in the 1990s as well. 9

See David N. Coury, ‘From Aesthetics to Commercialism: Narration and the New German Comedy’, Seminar, 33:4 (1997), 356-73.

10

Randall Halle, ‘“Happy Ends” to Crises of Heterosexual Desire: Toward a Social Psychology of Recent German Comedies’, Camera Obscura, 15:2 (2000), 1-39 (here: p. 1). Der bewegte Mann, dir. Sönke Wortmann, Neue Constantin, 1994. 11 Halle contends that this cannot simply be written off as a generational difference although most of these directors do belong to a younger generation (‘“Happy Ends”’, p. 4). 12

Rentschler, ‘From New German Cinema’, p. 275.

13

Quote in Halle, ‘“Happy Ends”’, p. 7.

Post-Wall German Road Movies

261

14

Ulrich Greiner, ‘Die deutsche Gesinnungsästhetik’, in: Thomas Anz, ed., Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf: Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland, Munich: Edition Spangenberg, 1991, pp. 213-4.

15

Rentschler, ‘From New German Cinema’, p. 264.

16 Walter Salles, ‘The Film Issue: Notes for a Theory of the Road Movie’, at: http:// query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9803E6DF173EF932A25752C1A9619C8B 6&pagewanted=2 (accessed 14 November 2009). 17

In Bandits this is exemplified when the women, looking for a buried case of cash in a forest accidentally hit upon a bomb from Germany’s Nazi past and, petrified, instantaneously run away from it. 18

It is not even uncommon for German films to have English titles, such as five of those discussed here. 19

Michael Wallis, Route 66: The Mother Road, New York: St. Martin’s, 1990, p. 1.

20

David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002, p. 276.

21

Ibid., p. 245.

22

Ibid., p. 248.

23

One of the first post-Wall road movies, Wim Wenders’ Bis ans Ende der Welt (1991), celebrates both the openness of borders as well as global fears and concerns of a new Armageddon. The following road movies will be discussed here: Lisbon Story, dir. Wim Wenders, Kinowelt, 1994; Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, dir. Thomas Jahn, Astro distribution, 1997; Bandits, dir. Katja von Garnier, Buena Vista, 1997; Zugvögel … einmal nach Inari, dir. Peter Lichtefeld, Prokino, 1998; Im Juli, dir. Fatih Akin, Senator, 2000; Schultze Gets the Blues, dir. Michael Schorr, Paramount, 2003. Two early German post-Wall road movies not discussed here, Go Trabi Go (Peter Timm, 1991) and Wir können auch anders (Detlev Buck, 1993), have been analyzed perceptively by Elizabeth Mittman in her article ‘Fantasizing Integration and Escape in the Post-Unification Road Movie’, in: Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, eds., Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003, pp. 326-47. In Go Trabi Go, an East German family takes a road trip to Italy, and in Wir können auch anders, two brothers and a Red Army deserter travel from West to East Germany and end up in Russia. Mittman reads these films as ‘complex commentaries on the promise and the impossibility of unification’ (p. 326), as they depict the protagonists’ navigation of a corrupt and chaotic capitalist landscape (p. 340). Hence, she concludes, both films negotiate cultural identities as

262

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

they imply that there are no answers to ‘unification and its representational dilemmas’ inside of Germany (p. 344). 24

Sabine Hake, German National Cinema, London and N.Y.: Routledge, 2002, p. 185. 25

Ibid., p. 205.

26

Indeed, the production company that he founded is aptly named Road Movies Filmproduktion. 27

Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, Crossing new Europe: postmodern travel and the European road movie, London: Wallflower Press, 2006, p. 203. 28

Ibid., p. 204.

29

Ibid., p. 209.

30

Ibid., p. 207.

31

John Sandford, The New German Cinema, London: Wolff, 1980, p. 107, as quoted in Mazierska and Rascaroli, Crossing new Europe, p. 203.

32

As Mazierska and Rascaroli, Crossing new Europe, point out, Wenders’ film makes reference neither to the Balkan wars raging at that time nor to Lisbon’s non-Christian Moorish heritage (p. 208). 33

Ibid., p. 211.

34

Ibid.

35

Ibid.

36

Ibid., p. 213.

37

Ibid.

38

Ibid., p. 215. Even the police inspector (Peter Lohmeyer) in pursuit of Hannes is affected by the cultural change. Although he has caught up with Hannes, he lets him participate in the contest and later lets him go free. 39

Ibid., p. 213.

40

Ibid., p. 216.

Post-Wall German Road Movies

263

41 It is typical for post-Wall films that the protagonists are presented detached from any social context, as if in a vacuum, and the viewer learns nothing about their social origins. 42

Earlier in the film, the doctor’s diagnosis of Martin’s terminal tumor is rather unsympathetic and tactless, which establishes a causal tie to this scene.

43

However, as the rules of comedy command, nobody gets hurt by the violence depicted, even in a hilarious shoot-out between the police and the mafia hit men, only police cars are damaged – perhaps another swipe against ineffectual authorities as arms of a system that has its priorities wrong.

44 Mark Alvey, ‘Wanderlust and Wire Wheels: The Existential Search of Route 66’, in: Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds., The Road Movie Book, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 143-64 (here: p. 151). The quote goes on: ‘[...] [E]merging in the wake of Ike and the Beats, arriving with JFK and a New Frontier, captures in a singular way the nation’s passage from the disquiet of the 1950s to the turbulence of the 1960s’ (p. 151). In a sense it stands as a ‘fitting metaphor for the New Frontier, manifesting an implicit optimism, a conviction that a horizon of hope, a renewal of meaning, lies just over the next hill’ (p. 158). 45

The name ‘True Romance’ may itself be a reference to Tony Scott’s eponymous road movie of 1993.

46

Laderman, Driving Visions, p. 274.

47

Halle, ‘“Happy Ends”’, p. 2.

48

Melek, too, like Akin himself, speaks perfect German without an accent and belongs to the second generation of totally integrated foreigners. 49 In Turkey, by contrast, Daniel receives hospitable treatment: he gets to ride buses for free, and the border police even leave the prison cell door open for him to escape. 50 Indeed, the only scene where there is some display of hostility is when Daniel attends a Latin-themed party where he meets with the arrogance and belligerence of a young German woman. 51

Hake, German National Cinema, p. 186.

52

Laderman, Driving Visions, p. 279.

53

Laderman calls these crimes ‘dubious’ and directed against ‘criminal male authority’ (Ibid., p. 273). This is not quite true: Luna is in jail for robbery and grievous bodily harm; Emma shot her jealous boyfriend who had beaten her to the

264

David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp

degree that she lost her baby; Marie gradually poisoned her former husband; and Angel committed repeated marriage fraud. 54

For example, Luna’s exaggerated swagger or the vastly overplayed misogynist act of the police officer in the van that triggers Luna’s reaction.

55

Katja von Garnier, ‘Interview’, at: http://katja-von-garnier.de/deutsch/interview_ interview_199808.htm (accessed 14 November 2009). 56

Laderman, Driving Visions, p. 275.

57

Ibid., p. 274.

58

Even when the film does feature German songs, they seem to ridicule German culture: a distorting punk version of the ‘Volkslied’ ‘Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär’ and a rap song that imitates American models. Also, anglicisms are rampant in von Garnier’s films; at times her dialogues even contain literal translations from English, such as ‘Fahr zur Hölle!’ (instead of the idiomatic ‘Geh zum Teufel!’) or ‘Entspann dich!’ (instead of the more idiomatic ‘Immer ganz ganz ruhig’, for example), reflecting the director’s partiality to English-stylized dialogues and American-made films. Moreover, the hostage they take in the nightclub happens to be an American named West. Clearly Bandits tries very hard to ground its identity in the tradition of the American road movie. 59

Laderman, Driving Visions, p. 274.

60

Ibid., p. 271.

61

Laderman states that West betrays Angel (Ibid., p. 278), but actually Luna seems to betray Angel. 62 By contrast, Laderman views the film as a uniquely successful road movie: ‘Driven to drive the highways, forced into a fugitive concert tour’ (Ibid., p. 271). 63 The license plates of their getaway cars defy the narrative logic in that they are either from Bavaria or fictitious. 64

Therefore, Laderman’s praise seems overstated. He views the film’s styles and techniques as ‘a politically engaged road saga that nevertheless winks at the audience. Intelligently blending rock music, Hollywood, modernist and postmodern cinematic codes, Bandits mobilizes a visionary deconstruction of culture and power’ (Driving Visions, p. 280). In contrast to Laderman’s enthusiasm, Baumgarten’s view is more on the sober side: ‘Die klaren Vorzüge von Abgeschminkt!, komische Dialoge und eine recht unprätentiöse Ausstrahlung, gehen in Bandits fast komplett verloren. Texte wirken schwunglos, Pointen bohren sich ins Zahnfleisch, die Stimmung erscheint

Post-Wall German Road Movies

265

gekünstelt. Die Szenen, in denen die Band spielt, entsprechen optisch so ziemlich genau der Wald- und Wiesenvorstellung des Videoclip-Stils oder, wie es noch waschiger heißt, der “MTV-Ästhetik” und sind somit diktiert von schnellen Schnitten, der ständig in Fahrt befindlichen Kamera und viel, viel Farbe. Das Problem dabei ist nur – weil der Rest des Films erheblich zu lahm, uninspiriert, teilweise gar steif ausfällt –, daß diese bunten Elemente wie Fremdkörper-Implantate brutal vom Rest des Films abgestoßen werden und alles andere als eine elegante Einheit bilden.’ Oliver Baumgarten, rev. of Bandits, at: http://www.schnitt.de/202,1171,01 (accessed 14 November 2009). 65

Ladermann, Driving Visions, p. 280.

66

Wallis, Route 66, p. 1.

67

This despite the fact that the three English-titled films discussed here (Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, Schultze Gets the Blues, Bandits) end in death/tragedy.

68

Rentschler, ‘From New German Cinema’, p. 266.

69

Ibid., p. 262.

70

Ibid., p. 264.

71

Ibid., p. 263.

72

Thomas Elsaesser, ‘German Cinema in the 1990s’, The BFI Companion to German Cinema, London: BFI, 1999, pp. 3-16 (here: p. 15). 73

Rentschler, ‘From New German Cinema’, p. 271.

74

Mittman, ‘Fantasizing Integration’, rightfully questions why a comedy film should not possess subversive potential and argues that precisely because of its ‘cultural specificity’ a comedy can ‘offer a legitimate forum for the expression of political and social tensions’ (p. 328). 75

Obviously Akin’s presentation of Germany’s multicultural society in Im Juli stands in stark contrast with his other films, Gegen die Wand (2006) and Auf der anderen Seite (2007), where he focuses exclusively on the problems among the Turkish population. 76

Rentschler, ‘From New German Cinema’, p. 274.

77

Mazierska and Rascaroli, Crossing new Europe, p. 202.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Susan C. Anderson, Professor of German at the University of Oregon, works on German and Austrian literature from the late 19thcentury to the present. Her current research focuses on ideas of difference and identity and on modern reworkings of epic traditions. Recent publications have addressed metaphors of seeing, the figure of the outsider, storytelling and desire, and translation. She is presently completing a book on notions of the foreign in contemporary German narrative and film. Christine Anton is Associate Professor of German and Director of the Language Resource Center at Berry College in Georgia. She has published a number of articles on 19th and 20th-century German literature, including Schiller, Eichendorff, Ebner-Eschenbach, Stifter, Rilke, and Schlink, as well as second language acquisition and teaching methodology. She is the author of Selbstreflexivität der Kunsttheorie in den Künstlernovellen des Realismus (1998). Muriel Cormican is Professor of German at the University of West Georgia. Her articles on Lou Andreas-Salomé’s fictional works, Christa Wolf, and on German film have appeared in such places as The Women in German Yearbook, The German Studies Review, Seminar and The Philological Quarterly. She is the author of the book Women in the Works of Lou Andreas-Salomé: Negotiating Identity (2009). David N. Coury is Associate Professor of Humanistic Studies (German) and Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He has published widely on contemporary German literature and cinema as well as on literature and globality. He is the author of The Return of Storytelling in Contemporary German Literature and Film (2004), and co-editor, with Frank Pilipp, of The Works of Peter Handke: International Perspectives (2005). Norgard Klages received her Ph.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1992. She has since taught German at The University of the South, Sewanee,

268

List of Contributors

UNC-Chapel Hill where she also directed the undergraduate language program, and Salem College. Her publications and presentations focus on 20th-century women’s literature, second language acquisition and teaching methodologies. She currently teaches at UNCSA. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz is Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In her research she focuses on 19th and 20th-century German and Austrian literature and culture, GermanJewish writing, and Holocaust literature and film. She was the editor of The German Quarterly from 1997 to 2003, and has held offices in major international scholarly associations. Her book publications include Keepers of the Motherland: German Texts by Jewish Women Writers (1997), and Verfolgung bis zum Massenmord. Diskurse zum Holocaust in deutscher Sprache (1992), and she edited From Fin-deSiecle to Theresienstadt: The Works and Life of the Writer Elsa Porges-Bernstein (2007; co-editor Helga W. Kraft), A Companion to the Works of Elias Canetti (2004), A Companion to the Works of Arthur Schnitzler (2003), Contemporary Jewish Writing in Austria (1999), Transforming the Center, Eroding the Margins: Essays on Ethnic and Cultural Boundaries in German-Speaking Countries, (1998; co-editor Renate S. Posthofen), and Insiders and Outsiders. Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria (1994). Sabine von Mering is Associate Professor of German and Director of the Center for German and European Studies and chair of the JewishGerman Dialogue group at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. She completed her Staatsexamen at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (1991) and her Ph.D. in German Literature at the University of California Davis (1998). She co-edited Russian-Jewish Emigration after the Cold War: Perspectives from Germany, Israel, Canada, and the United States (2006). Jennifer E. Michaels is Samuel R. and Marie-Louise Rosenthal Professor of Humanities and Professor of German at Grinnell College in Iowa. She received her M.A. degree in German from Edinburgh University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in German from McGill University in Montreal. She has published four books and numerous articles about 20th-century German and Austrian literature and culture, and has

List of Contributors

269

served as president of the German Studies Association and the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. Frank Pilipp is Professor of German at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Novels of Martin Walser: A Critical Introduction (1991), and Ingeborg Bachmanns Erzählband Das dreißigste Jahr (2001). He has edited essay collections on Martin Walser (1994), Kafka’s Legacy in Austrian Literature (1997), and coedited A Companion to the Works of Peter Handke (2004). He has published numerous articles on contemporary German and Austrian writers, the literary reception of Kafka, as well as on film. Helmut Schmitz is Associate Professor of German at the University of Warwick. He is the author of On Their Own Terms. The Legacy of National Socialism in Post-1990 German Fiction (2004) and has published widely on German cultural memory of National Socialism. His most recent publications include the edited volumes A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present (2007), and Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur. Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration (2009).

Index Adelson, Leslie, 223 Adorno, Theodor W., 15, 32, 37, 87-9 Ahmad, Aijaz, 200 Aichinger, Ilse, 112 Akim, Fatih (Im Juli), 210-1, 226-30, 242, 251-2, 256 Améry, Jean 32-5 Anderson, Bendict, 259 Anderson, Sascha, 3 Andres, Erich, 40 Angelou, Maya, 197 ‘Autorenkino,’ 235 Ayim, May, 185, 191-6

Böll, Heinrich (Der Engel schwieg), 8, 35; (‘Es wird etwas geschehen’), 124 Bohrer, Karlheinz, 237 Bos, Pascale R., 93-5 Boyer, Dominick, 207-8, 212 Brandt, Willy, 212 von Braun, Wernher, 4 Brecht, Bertolt, 59 Broder, Henryk, 138, 159, 174 Brunswig, Hans (Feuersturm über Hamburg), 40-1 Bung, Johanna, 177

Baldwin, James, 197 Bar-On, Dan, 168 Barthes, Roland, 69, 72 Baudelaire, Charles, 33 Bauer, Josef (So weit die Füße tragen), 68-9 Becker, Ben, 174 Becker, Jurek, 114; (Bronsteins Kinder), 124 Becker, Wolfgang (Good Bye Lenin!), 210-1, 218-22, 230 Beckerman, Ruth, 112, 114, 128; (Unzugehörig), 127 Benigni, Roberto, (Life Is Beautiful), 137 Benjamin, Walter, 31-4 Benz, Wolfgang, 139 Berghahn, Daniela, 162-3 Bergman, Ingmar (Wild Strawberries), 242 Bergmann, Werner, 96 Berlin Holocaust Memorial 7, 52, 164 Berlin Wall 1, 3, 51, 95, 207, 211-8, 228 Bhabha, Homi, 187 Biko, Steven, 193 Biller, Maxim, 13, 159 Birnbaum, Pierre, 112 Bodemann, Y. Michal, 159-60

Canetti, Elias, 114-5 Canetti, Veza, 115 Caruth, Cathy, 30 CDU (Christian Democratic Union), 3 Chabon, Michael (Gentlemen of the Road), 128 Çil, Nevim, 209 Cohen, Arthur, 153 Cohen, Cynthia, 127 Cold War, 3, 4 Conrad, Joseph, 114, 200 Davidson, John, 211 Deleuze, Gilles, 187 Demnig, Gunther, 164 Derrida, Jacques, 69 Dickinson, Emily, 88 Dikmen, Şinasi, 188-91 Diner, Dan, 118, 159, 170, 177 Dischereit, Esther, 13, 137, 139, 179 Dörrie, Doris, 236, 251 Dresen, Andreas, 251 Dreßen, Wolfgang, 175 Dücker, Tanja (Himmelskörper), 9, 53 Durmus, Oya Dinçer, 227-8 Dylan, Bob, 250

272 Eastwood, Clint, 250 Elsaesser, Thomas, 257 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 15 Färberböck, Max, 162; (Aimée und Jaguar), 138-9 FDP (Free Democratic Party), 3 Feldman, Shoshana, 41 Fellini, Federico (La Strada), 242 Feuchtwanger, Edgar, 176 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 107, 176 Fleischmann, Lea, 112; (Dies ist nicht mein Land), 127 Foer, Jonathan Safran (Everything Is Illuminated), 128 FPŐ (Freedom Party of Austria), 99 Franklin, Ruth, 55 Freud, Sigmund, 27 Friedländer, Saul, 135 Friedrich, Jörg (Der Brand), 9, 27-42, 53 Fulda, Daniel, 28 Gandhi, Mahatma, 193 von Garnier, Katja, 238; (Abgeschminkt!), 242; (Bandits), 252-5, 257-9 Gaynor, Gloria, 250 Gilman, Sander, 116, 118 Giordano, Ralph, 3, 56 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 90, 212 Goldhagen, Daniel (Hitler’s Willing Executioners), 4, 9, 42, 52, 141 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 221 Graf, Dominik, 236 Grass, Günter 15; (Beim Häuten der Zwiebel), 53; (Im Krebsgang), 9, 53 Green, Bea, 176-7 Green Party, 3, 186 Greiner, Ulrich, 240 Groehler, Olaf (Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland), 40-1 Groh, Christian, 28 Gruppe 47, 8, 30 Guattari, Félix, 187 Habermas, Jürgen, 2, 236

Index Hage, Volker, 30 Hahn, Hans-Joachim, 110 Haider, Jörg, 96 Haines, Brigid, 116 Halle, Randall, 237-8, 251 Haneke, Michael (Das weisse Band), 159 Harlan, Veith (Jud Süß), 172 Hartz Reforms, 2 Hauer, Rutger, 249 Heer, Hannes, 174 Hell, Julia, 211, 230 Hemingway, Ernest, 114 Heym, Stefan, 114 Hilberg, Raul, 135 Hildesheimer, Wolfgang, 35 Hilsenrath, Edgar, 108, 114; (Der Nazi und der Friseur), 122 Hirsch, Marianne, 94 Hirschbiegel, Oliver, 159, 175; (Der Untergang), 173-4; (Ein ganz gewöhnlicher Jude), 173-4, 177-8 Hoffmann, Jutta, 255 Holocaust (TV series), 151 Homer (Odyssee), 66 Honigmann, Barbara, 13, 112, 178-9 Hopper, Dennis (Easy Rider), 240 Howe, Irving, 135-6 Hübchen, Henry, 173 von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 212 Huyssen, Andreas, 208 Insdorf, Annette, 136 Irving, David (Und Deutschlands Städte sterben nicht), 40-1 Jackob-Marks, Christine, 164 Jaenicke, Hannes, 253 Jahn, Thomas (Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door), 242, 248-51, 255 Jelinek, Elfriede, 128 Jewish Museum Berlin, 6 Jirgl, Reinhard (Die Unvollendeten), 9, 53 Jones, James, 114 Jozwiak, Joseph F., 208 Kafka, Franz, 112, 187

Index Kaminer, Wladimir, 179 Kant, Immanuel, 69 Kantsteiner, Wulf, 163 Kasack, Hermann, 34-5 Kassovitz, Mathieu (Jacob the Liar), 138, 151 Kaufmann, Rainer, 238; (Stadtgespräch), 239, 241 Kawalanda, Miriam, 185, 194-5 Kempowski, Walter (Alles umsonst), 9 Kerschbaumer, Marie-Thérèse, 128 Kertzer, David, 29 Kimmelman, Michael, 159, 177 King, Martim Luther, 194 Klemperer, Victor, 8 Klüger, Ruth, 13, 85-100 Kluge, Alexander (Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt), 8, 34-5 Knoch, Habbo (Die Tat als Bild), 40 Koch, Birgit, 194 Köhler, Horst, 11, 14 Koepnick, Lutz, 138, 145-8, 150, 162 Kosta, Barbara, 227, 229 Kraenzle, Christina, 225-6 Krause, Horst, 245 Krebitz, Nicole, 253 Król, Joachim, 237, 243 LaCapra, Dominick, 10, 41-2, 57, 61, 71 Laderman, David, 241, 250, 254 Landis, John (Blues Brothers), 250 Langer, Lawrence, 135 Lanzmann, Claude, 153 Laub, Dori, 41 Leca, Jean, 112 Lee, Spike, 250 Levi, Dani, 159, 170-1, 178; (Alles auf Zucker), 171-3 Levi, Primo, 32 Lewinski, Charles, 174 Lichtefeld, Peter (Zugvögel ... Einmal nach Inari), 242-5, 248, 252, 256 Liefers, Jan Josef, 248 Lind, Jakov, 114 Lubich, Frederick, 95, 99 Ludin, Malte, 159, 165-8, 178

273 Lyotard, Jean-François, 153 Mäenpää, Outi, 244 Mahlendorf, Ursula R., 59 Mailer, Norman, 114 de Man, Paul, 69, 90 Mann, Thomas, 107; (Death In Venice), 237 Margalit, Avishai, 36 Marshall Plan, 4 Martin, Elaine, 88 Marzinsky, Marian (A Jew Among the Germans), 163-4 Menasse, Robert, 128 de Mendelssohn, Peter, 35 Merkel, Angela, 11-12, 161 Mermann, Elisabeth, 208 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarethe (Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern), 5, 27, 161 Moeller, Robert G., 27-8, 38 Moller, Sabine, 163 Molnár, Katrin, 110 von Moltke, Johannes, 211, 230 Morrison, Toni, 197 Morshäuser, Bodo, 15 Motzkin, Gabriel, 35 Müller, Heiner, 3 Müller-Sievers, Helmut, 212, 223 Mukherjee, Bharati, 197 Mysorekar, Sheila, 195-8 Nabokov, Vladimir, 200 Naipaul, V. S., 200 Neuburger, Bernd, 128 Neumann, Bernd, 88 New German Cinema, 235-6, 238-40, 257, 259 Nolte, Ernst, 4 Nossack, Ernst, 34; (Der Untergang), 40 Ochs, Donovan J., 29 Palmer, Tom, 113 Pamuck, Orhan, 135 Pearce, Caroline, 159 Peres, Shimon, 11-12