"Dealing with National Socialism" - essay [German.1]
Чтобы и вы, и я понимали, чем я вообще занимаюсь с утра до ночи, кроме посещения языковых классов, тусовок и непонятных семинаров, я решила выкладывать сюда свои эссе по мере их написания - в конце концов, у меня тут ЖЖ литератора, сами понимаете.
Представители приемных комиссий университетов, куда я буду поступать в докторантуру - изучение моих плодов труда и последующее отправление мне пригласительных писем в университеты горячо приветствуется))) Равно как и любой feedback.
Если же вы не хотите никуда меня приглашать, а просто читаете, то очень прошу - мой академический английский и мои интеллектуальные усилия мне ужас как дороги - поэтому не забывайте, что все они, конечно же, (c) Olga Breininger
Dealing with National Socialism
Time has come to say, with absolutely no emotional censure, that German literature needs to stop the cultural speculation in (and on) its past. However harsh it may sound, the several decades-long path of re-evaluation and justification of its Nazi past has led Germany into an impasse, political and cultural, and the post-war search of new German identity has brought the nation into denial and an even greater loss of identity in the thicket of eclectic multiculturalism.
Coming to terms with the Nazi past has become the “cornerstone of German national identity” (Fuchs 2008: 1) as the three postwar generations were trying to give different answers as to what it means to be a German today.
The most characteristic trait of the works of the authors of the first, “Hitler Youth” generation such as Günter Grass, Martin Walser, Joachim Fest and Siegfried Lenz, is the reflexive denial of guilt (Norbert Frei 1996), sometimes grossly exaggerated in their attempts to create “einen Opferkult, der das deutsche Volk als stigmatisiert darstellt.” (Wehler 2003) In contrast, Ulla Hahn, Bernhardt Schlink, Uwe Timm, Winfried Georg Sebald, all born roughly around 1940s, authors of the second, so-called “sceptical” generation, whose “critical engagement with the Nazi period was a defining experience”(Fuchs 2008: 5), occupy a different position. Having been only discursively touched by National Socialism through the memories of their parents' generation, they are trying to find an equilibrium between blame and justification, developing morally dubious characters and exploring ethical dilemmas. One of the factors having shaped this generation's idiosyncrasies is also its being profoundly influenced by the “1968-Bewegung” which explains the scrutiny of National Socialism past through the prism of intergenerational conflicts. The works of third-generation authors, the “Enkelliteratur” represented by Marcel Beyer and Tanya Dückers among others, demonstrate a firm emotional and cognitive distance from the Nazi Past since the “immediacy of first-hand memories of this period is being lost and replaced by new forms of mediated and, at times, imaginary memories.” (Fuchs 2008: 5) The third-generation authors, therefore, create a sort of simulacrum of postwar literature, being largely preoccupied with the symbolic representation of National Socialism and the resonance of war memories in the contemporary “Weltanschauung”.
Epistemologically, these are the authors of the second generation who occupy the most advantageous position for establishing the subtle balance between the denial and the acquittal of the Third Reich past, and it was exactly this generation that made the most valuable contribution to the relevant field of contemporary German literature. I am speaking of W.G. Sebald's “Austerlitz”, which is, arguably, the acme of all German fiction devoted to the National Socialism past. This modernist novel furnished the most synthetic, architectonically complicated and extensive picture of the Holocaust, keeping a masterly balance between documentary and imagined. Sebald's fictional work is amplified by an influential essay, “Luftkrieg and Literatur”, where he implements a tactful attempt of “introducing the question of German suffering without removing it from the greater context of German crimes in the Holocaust.” (McGlothlin 2006: 202)
In my essay I will, however, have a more precise look not at Sebald's works but at two different novels by second-generation authors, Uwe Timm's “Am Beispiel meines Bruders” and Bernhardt Schlink's “Der Vorleser”. Compared to the works of G. Grass and W.G. Sebald these are obviously second-rate works. The motive driving my choice of reading is that while the perfection of the first-rate works usually occludes any non-aesthetic discussion, and with “Austerlitz” one is tempted to speak more about its narrative structure and style, these are exactly the less sophisticated writings that give the possibility to observe the political and social motives underlying them.
Both novels could be classified as following the tradition of “Väterliteratur” of the 1980s, (although attributing Schlink's novel to this current is disputable and will be accounted for later) along with Uwe Tellkamps' “Der Turm”, Jenny Erpenbeck's “Heimsuchung”, Ulla Hahn's “Unscharfe Bilder”, Dagmar Leupold's “Nach den Kriegen”, Meckel's “Suchbild” etc. All of these novels share a common view of family as “not a safe but a dysfunctional site governed by repression, denial and displaced longings” (Fuchs 2008: xiii), sending back to Kafka's “Brief an der Vater” in portraying a repulsive figure of an authoritarian father. The specificity of “Väterliteratur” lies in trying to tie together the individual and communicative memories of the war past putting the father in charge of the family's inability to return to habitual life with the end of the war and, thus, letting the Nazi past ruin the family.
Although a number of scholars give a high appraisal of “Väterliteratur”, particularly because “in contrast to the older literature, the new family narrative tends to be sceptical towards all ideological offerings, underlining the historical pessimism that characterizes our global age” (Fuchs 2008: 8), I consent with a more critical view expressed by Ernestine Schlant in “The language of silence”. One of the key points of her criticism suggests that, generally, “Väterliteratur” novels “are full of one specific sort of affect - anger against the parent and rage at the mistreatment of the child - there is a curious lack of affect when it comes to the Holocaust.” (Schlant 1999: 92-93) This charge can be validated by a closer look at Uwe Timm's “Am Beispiel meines Bruders”.
Anna Fuchs argues that in this novel the figure of father, key for “Väterliteratur”, is substituted by the image of his brother, Karl-Heinz, a member of Waffen-SS. Yet Erin McGlothlin, whom I tend to agree with, suggests that it is still the narrator's father who is a central figure in the novel. The figure of Karl-Heinz serves rather a structural role being the pivot of the family's collective memory, around which the story deploys. Uwe, his younger brother, publishes Karl-Heinz's diaries after the death of all other members of his family. Re-reading and commenting on the notes his brother made while at the eastern front, Uwe explores how the cult of Karl-Heinz, inculcated by his father, ruptures the family from within. For the father, Karl-Heinz's participation in the Waffen-SS is not a crime but a sign of manliness and a reminder of his own First World War past. Yet Uwe is suspicious of the perfect image of the noble warrior. His brother's diary entries look cold-hearted and cruel at times, with terse notes of the seen movies alongside with scornfully calling all Russians “Iwan” and “ein Fressen für mein MG” (Timm 2003: 19) - this phrase becomes a prevailing motif of the novel. However, the question that worries Uwe most of all is whether his brother took part in the Holocaust crimes. The last words written in Karl-Heinz's diary are very equivocal, casting Uwe in life-long doubts about the moral image of his brother yet not letting him liberate himself from Karl-Heinz's shadow. Even years after his brother's death Uwe still defines his relationship with the father and even his own personality relative to Karl-Heinz: “Und erst mit dem Entschluss, über den Bruder, also auch über mich, zu schreiben,” (Timm 2003: 19) “Über den Bruder schreiben, heißt auch über ihn schreiben, den Vater. Die Ähnlichkeit zu ihm, meine, ist zu erkennen über die Ähnlichkeit, meine, zum Bruder. Sich ihnen schreibend anzunähern ist der Versuch, das bloß Behaltene in Erinnerung aufzulösen, sich neu zu finden.” (Timm 2003: 21)
It is notable that for the narrator the proof of his brother killing Jews would be a relief rather than a cause for grief. Will all his brotherly love, his narration is driven by the latent desire to find evidence of the brother's fault and, thus, prove to his father and himself, that he, Uwe, was not the inferior “Nachkömmling” but the better one of the two sons. The underlying motif of the novel is, thus, the accusation of his father of depriving his two other children of the space for self-identification and letting the controversial Nazi past of Karl-Heinz dominate their lives.
The same can be said about Bernhardt Schlink's novel “Der Vorleser”, a long-term world bestseller in this thematic field which can be explained by certain simplicity and primitivity of its style as well as by the piquancy of the plot. Although “Der Vorleser” lacks the typical figure of a dominant father, it also portrays the generational conflict over the Nazi crimes. From the moment the protagonist Michael Berg meets former Auschwitz guard Hanna Schmitz, twenty-one years older than him, he becomes her emotional prisoner. Hanna's domination over Berg gradually grows more and more suffocating as their relationship goes through different stages.
“Der Vorleser” is the novel of fear and dependence. The first part of the novel, describing Hanna and Michael's sexual relationship, is permeated by Michael's fear of their secret affair being revealed and the fear of Hanna leaving him, which eventually happens for the reasons he cannot understand. Years later, when he, as a law student, sees Hanna at the trial of former concentration camp guards, Michael faces a poignant dilemma. Suddenly realizing that Hanna is illiterate, he feels he could mitigate the verdict, based largely on the evidence of a written document attributed to Hanna. However, equally embarrassed to reveal their relationship and hesitant whether he is rightful to disclose Hanna's secret, Michael chooses to see her pronounced guilty. Michael's father, the professor of philosophy, has influenced this decision propagating non-interference into the other’s life. In this respect Schlink gives a different perspective on “Vätersliteratur”. While the father in Timm's novel aggressively inculcates the cult of his Nazi son, Michael's father chooses to ignore the moral conflicts, as if mirroring the prevailing German's position to pretend not to notice the Holocaust prosecutions.
The third part of “Der Vorleser” is imbued with Michael's remorse. He tries to make up for his silence at the trial by recording himself reading his favorite books aloud and sending the tapes to prison. When Hanna is paroled, Michael feels morally obliged to help her integrate back into her own and, as Hanna hopes, Michael's life. He, however, inadvertently demonstrates his lack of desire to indulge in any relationship with Hanna, provoking her suicide. This, again, leaves Michael with a sense of guilt for having not been faithful to Hanna for the third time in his life.
To Michael Hanna is what Karl-Heinz was for Timm's hero - an object of intertwining love, desire and hatred, a person as influential as to suppress their own personalities, a symbolic embodying of National Socialism inflicting onto them a life-long trauma.
Although it is clear that “the growing distance and Germany's new national confidence has now made room for a less accusatory transgenerational dialogue” (Fuchs 2008: 7) about the Holocaust, the two analysed writings alongside with a number of other literary works bring in action a different charge against National Socialism, a charge of depriving the German nation of self-respect and self-identity, in pushing it into the shadow of the Third Reich. However serious and righteous this charge is, the oversaturated field of fiction dedicated to these issues is only exacerbating the situation. Anna Fuchs suggested that “the period of Nationalist Socialism [...] fundamentally dislodged Germans' shared self-perception as an exemplary Kulturnation” (Fuchs 2008: 3), yet the constantly growing body of average-quality texts can add no more to the exhaustive utterances of Grass, Sebald and a limited number of other authors. Both Schlink's and Timm's accusation of the narrative insufficiency of “Vätersliteratur” and of “the shrillness of their tone” (Fuchs 2008: 20) is more than fair. Timm's work can obviously not overcome its documentary foundation, remaining artistically modest and sticking to certain cliches in portraying characters. Likewise is “Der Vorleser”, in effect, a thoroughly constructed forbidden love story with a sociohistorical appendix, robed in mediocre language. Both novels meet Schlant's criticism as “virtually formula novels” (Schlant 1999: 85), an accusation which is not at all helpful in restoring the image of “exemplary Kulturnation”. Sadly, the only full-weight thematic alternative in modern Germany is the multicultural literature which the nation gladly threw itself into, driven by the same remorse for the National Socialism past. A fruitful addition to national culture in other circumstances, today multiculturalism is more capable of ruining German identity once and for all rather than restoring it. Therefore, Germany needs to stop trying to make amends for its past but finally re-conciliate with it and give space to new sociocultural preoccupations in literature.
Bibliography
Schlink, B. (2005) Der Vorleser. Zürich: Diogenes Verlag
Sebald, W.G. (2001) Austerlitz. München: Hanser
Timm, U. (2003) Am Beispiel meines Bruders. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch
Frei, N. (1996) Vergangenheitspolitik: die Anfange der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit. München: Beck
Fuchs, A. (2008) Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse. The Politics of Memory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan
McGlothin, E. (2006) Second-Generation Holocaust Literature. Legacies of Survival and Perpetration. Rochester: Camden House
Sebald, W.G. (1999) Luftkrieg und Literatur: mit einem Essay zu Alfred Andersch. München: Hanser
Schlant, E. (1999) The Language of Silence. London: Routledge
Schmitz, H. (2001) German Culture and the Uncomfortable Past. Representations of National Socialism in contemporary Germanic literature. Aldershot: Ashgate
Taberner, S. (2005) German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond. Normalization and the Berlin Republic. Rochester: Camden House
Wehler, H-U. (2003) “Vergleichen - nicht moralisieren.” Interview with Stephan Burgdorff and Christian Habbe. Der Spiegel 2 (2003): 51-52