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Second-GenerationHolocaust Literature

Legacies of Survival and Perpetration

Erin McGlothlinElijah Visible, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Robert Schindel's Gebürtig, Katja Behrens's "Arthur Mayer oder das

Schweigen," Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder, Peter

Schneider's

Vati, Niklas Frank and Joshua Sobol's Der

Vater, Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser, and Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders - finding that an anxiety with signification resounds in the narrative structure of these works, revealing the extent to which the literary texts themselves are marked by the continuing aftershocks of the Holocaust. Erin McGlothlin is assistant professor of German at

Washington University in St. Louis.

McGlothlinCamden House

668 Mt. Hope Avenue

Rochester, NY 14620-2731

and P.O. Box 9Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com and www.camden-house.com9 781571 133526

ISBN 1-57113-352-6

Among historical events of the twentieth century, the Holocaust is unrivaled as the subject of both scholarly and literary writing. Literary responses include not only thousands of autobiographical and fictional texts written by survivors, but also, more recently, works by writers who are not survivors but nevertheless feel compelled to write about the Holocaust. Writers from what is known as the second generation have produced texts that express their feeling of being powerfully marked by events of which they have had no direct experience.

This book expands the commonly used definition

of second-generation literature, which refers to texts written from the perspective of the children of survivors, to include texts written from the point of view of the children of Nazi perpetrators. With its innovative focus on the literary legacy of both groups, it investigates the ways in which second-generation writers employ similar tropes of stigmatization to express their troubled relationship to their parents' histories. The figure of the stigma, tied etymologically to the experiences of both perpetration and victimization, functions as a signifier for the parents' legacies of suffer ing and violation. For the children of survivors, the legacy is one of unintegrated trauma and rupture in familial continuity; for the children of perpetrators, it is of unintegratable violation and brutality. The events that have shaped both legacies are fundamen tally inaccessible to the second generation, yet the mark left by the Holocaust remains, resulting in a truncated relationship between original event and traumatic effect and in a corresponding crisis of signification.

Erin McGlothlin examines nine American, German,

and French literary texts - Thane Rosenbaum's (continued on back flap)

Jacket design: Lisa Mauro

Jacket image: Photo of "Fallen Leaves" at the Berlin Jewish Museum

©Aidan O'Rourke 2006.

I "This book is a gem. International and interdisciplinary in content, it sheds new and important light on the continuing legacy of the Holocaust for those who come after the event but continue to live in its unending shadow." - Alan L. Berger, Florida Atlantic University

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Second-Generation Holocaust Literature

Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

Second-Generation

Holocaust Literature

Legacies of Survival

and Perpetration

Erin McGlothlin

CAMDEN HOUSE

Copyright © 2006 Erin McGlothlin

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

First published 2006

by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.

668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA

www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited

PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK

www.boydellandbrewer.com

ISBN: 1-57113-352-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McGlothlin, Erin Heather.

Second-generation holocaust literature: legacies of survival and perpetration / Erin McGlothlin. p. cm. - (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-57113-352-6 (hardcover: alk. paper)

1. German literature - 20th century - History and criticism.

2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature. 3. Children of Hol

ocaust survivors, Writings of. 4. Children of Nazis, Writings of. I. Title. II. Series: Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture (Unnumbered)

PT405.M3877 2007

830.9'358 - dc22

2006016730

Illustration credits - 1 and 3: From

MAUS II: A SURVIVOR'S TALE/AND HERE

MY TROUBLE BEGAN by Art Spiegelman, copyright © 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Ran- dom House, Inc.; 2: From

MAUS I: A SURVIVOR'S TALE/MY FATHER BLEEDS

HISTORY by Art Spiegelman. Copyright © 1973, 1980, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. UK permissions pending from the Wylie Agency. A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

This publication is printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America.

In memory of my father,

Charles Holton McGlothlin (1929-1996)

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Rupture and Repair:

Marking the Legacy of the Second Generation 1

Part I. The Legacy of Survival

1: "A Tale Repeated Over and Over Again":

Polyidentity and Narrative Paralysis in

Thane Rosenbaum's Elijah Visible 43

2: "In Auschwitz We Didn't Wear Watches":

Marking Time in Art Spiegelman's Maus 66

3: "Because We Need Traces":

Robert Schindel's Gebürtig and the Crisis

of the Second-Generation Witness 91

4: Documenting Absence in Patrick Modiano's

Dora Bruder and Katja Behrens's

"Arthur Mayer, or The Silence" 125

Part II. The Legacy of Perpetration

5: "Under a False Name": Peter Schneider's

Vati and the Misnomer of Genre 143

6: My Mother Wears a Hitler Mustache:

Marking the Mother in Niklas Frank and

Joshua Sobol's Der Vater 174

viii CONTENTS

7: The Future of

Schlink's Der Vorleser and Uwe Timm's

Am Beispiel meines Bruders 199

Conclusion: The "Glass Wall":

Marked by an Invisible Divide 228

Works Cited 233

Index 247

Acknowledgments

AM INDEBTED TO several institutions that supported me at the various stages of this book. To the faculty of the Department of Germanic Lan- guages and Literatures at the University of Virginia I am grateful for their support of my research and for helping me conceive and define this project. My colleagues in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis, along with the administration there, provided the financial assistance and time necessary to expand and refine the manuscript, and were additionally generous with advice and mentoring. I would also like to thank the Washington University Center for the Humani ties and the Visiting Scholars Program at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies for their finan- cial support of the final stages of the publication process. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the contribution of the following people who have played a role in the development of this manuscript: Renate Vor is, Jeffrey Grossman, Benjamin Bennett, Allan Megill, Walter Grünzweig, D an Bar-On, Janette Hudson, Joshua Kavaloski, Catherine Keane, Lynne Tatlock, Pamela Barmash, and the participants of the 2003 Seminar on Literature and the Holocaust at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, especially Geoffrey Hartman, Sara Horowitz, and Elizabeth Baer. In particular, I would like to give my most heartfelt thanks to my close friend and colle ague Dorothe Bach, who over the years has been my best and most reliable reader. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Dick, Theodore Jackson, Anna Leeper, and Tracy N. Graves, who assisted me with translation, editing, and indexing. Jim Walker at Camden House has been the most helpful editor

I could have wished for; he made the en

tire process enjoyable with his gen- erous guidance and wisdom. Finally, I would like to recognize my friends in St. Louis and elsewhere for their unfailing confidence in my ability to make this book happen. I also wish to thank my brother Drew and sister Cara for their love and support. To Bruce Ponman I give loving thanks for his belief in me and his patience during the entire process. And last, but certainly not least, I wish to ac- knowledge my mother, Velma, for her en couragement, her tireless efforts to help me achieve my goals, and her generous love. She remains a role mode l for me.

E. McG.

May 2006

I

Introduction:

Rupture and Repair: Marking the

Legacy of the Second Generation

For what crime did he have to atone? He didn't know. What did he have to conceal, to mask, to erase? What secret lay unconscious in him that, with the least modification in his life, would surface like a corp se - a corpse that a murderer had been tempted to drown in a lake. It was his special fate to play a bit part in a play he hadn't written, a play performed years before his birth, with its own actors and audience. And once the curtain was down, he had to remain on the stage with the oth- ers, like him, born after the performance, or during, or before, remem- bering the play they had seen or acted in, as torturer or as victim. Was he waiting for the curtain to go up again? - Henri Raczymow,

Writing the Book of Esther

Stigmata of the Unknown

N THE WAR AFTER: LIVING WITH THE HOLOCAUST (1996), Anne Karpf writes of growing up as the child of Holocaust survivors in postwar Eng- land, an experience that, as she discovers as an adult, has profoundly shaped her identity and her understanding of the world around her. For much of her childhood, youth, and early adulthood sh e is plagued by excessive fear of potential danger to her family, anxiety about breaking her close but at times stifling bond with her parents, and unfocused rage at having been bequeathed such a difficult and often incomprehensible history of family trauma. She struggles with what she sees as two contradictory pressures: on the one hand, she wishes to respect her parents' legacy of the Holoca ust, which she believes requires her to preserve her "undifferentiated" (105), "unicellular" (102) relationship with th em, fulfill a self-imposed mission to somehow redeem their experience by becoming successful and happy, and suppress her own negative emotions. On th e other hand, she desires to break the symbiotic bond with them and discover her own path in life, unimpeded by a family trauma that has deeply affected her but that she has not per son- ally experienced. Her sense of self is built not on her own lived experi ence but rather on a largely unknown event that preceded her birth: "It se emed then as if I hadn't lived the central experience of my life - at its heart, at mine, was an absence" (146). Her difficulty in claiming an independent I

2 INTRODUCTION

identity is thus compounded by the uncanny feeling that she is forever c ut off from the meaning of a past event that grounds her present life. Karpf's dilemma becomes acute when she falls in love with a non-Jewish man, a situation that is directly at odds with her parents' attempts to pre- serve the family's link to Jewish tradition. Eventually, her struggle with these competing claims manifests itself physically as a severe rash: I tried repeatedly to reconcile these warring views until, eventually, it all extruded through my hands, unerring somatic proof (the body being an incorrigible punster) that I couldn't in fact handle it. Beads of mois- ture appeared, trapped beneath the skin, on the palm of one hand, and with them came a compelling urge to scratch. Then I started to claw at my left hand with the nails of my right until blood ran. This mania of scratching continued until the whole surface of the hand turned raging, stinging scarlet and there came, despite the wound (or perhaps because of it), a sense of release, followed almost immediately by guilt. This sequence was repeated many times until the palm was florid with yellow and green crests of pu s. The other hand also became in- fected. They seemed like self-inflicted stigmata, visible and so particu- larly shaming. (98) Karpf's struggle to make sense of an unlived event that has molded he r life and to integrate her two irreconcilable desires, namely, to connect to t he legacy of her parents' Holocaust memory and to search for a viable identity of her own apart from this memory, erupts into a full-blown somatic disor- der. Her body becomes the battlefield onto which the conflict is displac ed, and her frantic scratching becomes an evocative expression of her inner tur- moil. Her hands, the parts first afflicted by the disorder (later it spreads to her entire body), enact the dual nature of her dilemma; just as each ha nd takes on the roles of both perpetrator and victim (each aggressively scratch- ing the other in turn, each displaying the wound caused by the other), she herself is an actor with two contradictory roles in an ambivalent drama of aggression and victimization. On the one hand, she expresses intense fee lings of guilt about her love for a non-Jew, perceiving her independence as bo th the cause of rupture in a family that has already been devastated by the Holocaust and a betrayal of Jewish tradition. In this scenario, she casts her- self as her parents' tormenter, one who renews the suffering and sorrow they experienced in the Shoah. On the other hand, she feels closely tied to h er parents' traumatic experiences and marks herself as the inheritor of a legacy of suffering and loss that she can barely comprehend. She performs the roles of both perpetrator and victim, categorie s that are defined as diametrically opposite and thus resist integration. Karpf's schizoid identifications with the extreme poles of violence and trauma mark her troubled relationship to family memory and history, erupting c ontinually into a conflict in which she declares war against herself. Her body becomes the arena in which this en-

INTRODUCTION 3

gagement is staged, and the psychic conflict that turns into a physical malady leaves the trace of this struggle in the form of the wound. Karpf is thu s marked by her difficult relationship to the Holocaust; her own body be- comes a secondary site of the ongoing tr aumatic effects of the Holocaust, an event that no longer poses a real physical threat to its victims. She designates her wounds stigmata, a term that bea rs powerful connotations, evoking both the Christian notion of martyrdom and suffering in the figure of Jesus, whose wounds of crucifixion are resembled by Karpf's own hands, and the marks of shame that in ancient Greece were cut or burned into the body, signifying that the bearer was a member of a marginalized group, either a slave or a criminal. Stigmata are thus used to identify both sufferer and male- factor, or, translated into the language of the Holocaust, both victim and perpetrator. For this reason, Karpf's choice of the designation stigmata for her wounds is fitting, for it expresses her schizoid identification with both roles and her precarious relationship to her parents' Holocaust past. Fur- thermore, her lesions are particularly striking because they are hauntingly reminiscent of the marks branded into he r mother's skin at Auschwitz, the legendary tattooed number that represente d the Nazis' radical objectification and dehumanization of Jewish prisoners: "After years of my scratching, a close friend asked whether the place on my inside forearm that I was repeat- edly injuring wasn't the same place, indeed the very same arm, where my mother's concentration camp number was inked" (106). However, un like her mother's markings, which were made against her mother's will a nd sig- nify her mother's immediate experience and survival of the Holocaust, Karpf's stigmata are self-inflicted. Significantly, it is Karpf herse lf who in- scribes a stigma into her own body, branding herself in a public way and linking her own identity with her parents' Holocaust past. However, h er physical marks remain signifiers without referent, for, unlike the tatto oed numbers of her mother, they do not refer directly to any Holocaust exper i- ence. In this way, Karpf violently and masochistically transforms her body into a site marked by a Holocaust trauma that she cannot directly access, a locus of remembrance that has no recou rse to lived memory. Furthermore, her literal marking of the body, in which her struggle with her parents' past manifests itself physically, is echoed by her writing, in which she atte mpts to inscribe into narrative an experience that is not her own. Her book, which attempts to integrate her parents' experience in the Holocaust with her own legacy of that experience, thus also represents an act of marking, one in which the text, much like her body, takes on the trace of her struggle w ith the past.

Karpf's perception of being marked by

the Holocaust experience of her parents is evocatively echoed by a writer whose legacy comes from the dia- metrically opposite experience of Holocaust survival, that of Holocaust per- petration. Irene Anhalt, the daughter of an SS officer, describes a mark edly

4 INTRODUCTION

similar relationship to the legacy of the Holocaust, albeit it from a different perspective, in a short narrative entitled "Abschied von meinem Vater" ("Farewell to My Father"). In this letter to her deceased father, which she wrote in the late 1980s, Anhalt attemp ts to understand the effects his in- volvement in the Nazi regime and participation in Nazi crimes have had both on her childhood and on her current relationship to Germany's le gacy of genocide and violence. At one point in this necessarily one-sided dialogue, she describes a particularly striking postwar scene in which she, still a child, waits for her father, about whom she knows very little, to return from a So- viet prisoner-of-war camp: More and more often now I sat down on the damp stones that led from the courtyard to the cellar, and scratched swastikas into the dry skin of my shins. The left leg, the one that had been shot, which still dragged a little when I walked, I scratched especially deeply. I placed the crosses so close together it seemed as though they were taking each other by the hand, and all the while I whispered the forbidden names, Hitler, Stalin, Goebbels, Goering. I did not stop until both legs were smeared with blood. ("Farewell," 36) 1 The child, herself scarred by the violence of Germany's brutal war ( her foot was wounded by shrapnel while she and her mother fled westward in front of the Soviet army in 1945), performs, much like the adult Karpf, an act of self- mutilation, marking herself with a different sort of stigma - the swa stika, the powerfully evocative emblem of the vanquished National Socialist dicta- torship. Anhalt's carving of the swastika into her already marked bod y takes on a ritualistic quality as she chants the names of the Nazi leaders, th e crimi- nals whose names have become forbidden for the child to utter in postwar

Germany, a period marked by sudden soci

al amnesia with regard to Nazi crimes. Her fervid whispering functions as an incantation that is meant to conjure up her father's past, an experience that, despite the silence surround- ing it, she knows is significant, but of which she is ignorant. By invoking the unspoken and unexperienced Nazi past, the child attempts to somehow un- derstand and claim it for herself. At the same time, in her inscription of her body with the symbolic iconography of National Socialism, she tries to insert herself into her father's world of Nazi ideology. With her act of self- 1

Hof in den Keller

führten, und ritzte mir Hakenkreuze in die trockene Haut meiner Schie nbeine. Das linke Bein, das Durchschossene, das ich noch immer etwas nachzog beim Ge hen, ritzte ich besonders tief ein. Ich setzte die Kreuze so dicht nebeneinan der, daß es rte ich die verbotenen schmiert

INTRODUCTION 5

mutilation, she thus transforms herself into a site of engagement with t he

Nazi past, marking her own body as the

property of both father and Father- land. Like Karpf with her frantic scratching, Anhalt performs the roles of both perpetrator and victim with her ritualistic carving of stigmata. On the one hand, with her sadistic-masochistic cutting, she reproduces the vio- lent perpetration of the Nazis and figures herself as complicit in Nazi crimes. At the same time, however, she herself suffers from this violence and thus is marked as a victim of Nazi inscription as well. For Anhalt, as for Kaquotesdbs_dbs26.pdfusesText_32

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