LITERATURE AND MEMORY AFTER 1945

Dr Alex Lloyd |St Edmund Hall & Magdalen College | [email protected] Taylor Institution Main Hall | Friday 12-1, Weeks 1-8, Michaelmas Term 2017

OVERVIEW

These lectures will examine the relationship between literature and memory in post-war and post- Wende German culture. We will consider different ‘modes of remembering’ (Astrid Erll), such as those developed by Maurice Halbwachs, Jan and Aleida Assmann, Pierre Nora and Marianne Hirsch, as well as key issues relating to the politics and ethics of memory in the post-war period. Literary examples will be drawn from works published between 1945 and 2006, by writers including Heinrich Böll, Christa Wolf, Martin Walser, Monika Maron, Tanja Dückers, and Günter Grass. These lectures will be of particular interest to those studying post-war literature, ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, and/or German remembrance culture for Papers VIII, X, XII, and XIV.

WEEK ONE | GENERAL INTRODUCTION

We will begin the course by exploring the importance of memory in our own culture and the dominance of the memory boom in post-war German literature and film. Second, we explore Pierre Nora’s concept of ‘lieu de memoire’ [sites of memory] by taking a virtual tour of Berlin, passing landmarks such as the Neue Wache and the Palast der Republik.

Introductory reading: Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), esp. ‘Literature as a Medium of Cultural Memory’, pp. 144-72 Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead, Theories of Memory: A Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) Anne Whitehead, Memory (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2009) Eric Langenbacher and Friederike Eigler, ‘Introduction: Memory Boom or Memory Fatigue in 21st Century Germany?’, German Politics and Society, 23.3 (2005), 1-15 Jay Winter, ‘The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 27 (2000), 69-92

On sites of memory: Etienne François and Hagen Schulze (eds.), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols (Munich: Beck, 2001) Neil Gregor, Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) Sharon MacDonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013) ---., Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008) Karen E. Till, ‘Staging the Past: Landscape Designs, Cultural Identity and Erinnerungspolitik at Berlin’s Neue Wache’, Cultural Geographies, 6 (1999), 251-83

WEEK TWO | DEFINING TERMS IN POST-WAR GERMAN MEMORY CULTURE

We consider different forms of memory such as communicative, collective and cultural memory, drawing on theories by Aleida and Jan Assmann. We also explore the juxtaposition between ‘Erinnerung’ and ‘Gedächtnis’ as thematised by Günter Grass in his autobiography Beim Häuten der

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Zwiebel (2006) and consider the politics of memory through the example of Martin Walser (1927-), his infamous Friedenspreisrede delivered in 1998 and his autobiographical novel Ein springender Brunnen, which was published the same year.

On collective memory [kollektives Gedächtnis]: Susan A. Crane, ‘Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory’, The American Historical Review, 102.5 (1997), 1372-1385 Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, ‘Collective Memory: What is it?’, History and Memory, 8.1 (1996), 30-50 Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris: Albin, 1997 [1950]) Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, Daniel Levy (eds.), The Collective Memory Reader (New York, NY: OUP, 2011)

You might also like to listen to The Why Factor on cultural and collective memory, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p014knyn [accessed 1 September 2016].

On cultural memory [kulturelles Gedächtnis]: Astrid Erll, Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005) ---. and Ann Rigney (eds.), Mediation, Remediation and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2012)

On Walser: Reinhard Baumgart, ‘Epen in Wasserburg. Martin Walser verteidigt seine Kindheit’, Die Zeit, 6 August 1998 Stephen Brockmann, ‘Martin Walser and the Presence of the German Past’, German Quarterly, 75 (2002), 127-43 Amir Eschel, ‘Vom eigenen Gewissen: Die Walser-Bubis Debatte und der Ort des Nationalsozialismus im Selbstbild der Bundesrepublik’, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 2 (2000), 333-60 Anne Fuchs, ‘Towards an Ethics of Remembering: The Walser-Bubis Debate and the Other of Discourse’, German Quarterly, 75 (2002), 235-46 Christoph Parry, ‘Die Rechtfertigung der Erinnerung vor der Last der Geschichte’, in Grenzen der Fiktionalität und der Erinnerung, ed. by Christoph Parry and Edgar Platen (Munich: iudicium 2007), pp. 98-111 Frank Pilipp (ed.), New Critical Perspectives on Martin Walser (Columbia/SC: Camden House, 1994) Stuart Taberner, ‘A Manifesto For Germany’s “New Right”? - Martin Walser, the Past, Transcendence, Aesthetics, and Ein Springender Brunnen’, German Life and Letters, 53.1 (2000), 126-41

WEEK THREE | AESTHETICS OF MEMORY AND WOMEN’S WRITING

In this lecture we begin by considering the depiction of memory and memorial processes in selected literary works from antiquity to the present. We then go on to examine metaphors used by women writers in the post-war period exploring their childhood experiences under Nazism in autobiographical works: Christa Wolf (1929-2011), Kindheitsmuster (Munich: Luchterhand, 2002) and Eva Zeller (1923- ), Solange ich denken kann: Roman einer Jugend (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981).

If you are particularly interested in this topic, you might also look at the following:

Ingeborg Drewitz, Gestern war heute (Munich: Goldman, 1980 [1978]) Melita Maschmann, Fazit: Mein Weg in der Hitler-Jugend (Munich: DTV, 1979) Carola Stern, In den Netzen der Erinnerung: Lebensgeschichten zweier Menschen (Reinbek bei Hamburg:

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Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2007 [1986]) General reading: Margaret Higonnet et al. (eds.), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987) Marie-Luise Gättens, Women Writers and Fascism: Reconstructing History (Gainesville: Florida University Press, 1995)

On Wolf: Elizabeth Boa, ‘Wolf, Kindheitsmuster’, in Landmarks in the German Novel 2, ed. by Peter Hutchinson and Michael Minden (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 77-92 Anna K. Kuhn, Christa Wolf’s Utopian Vision: From Marxism to Feminism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) Michael G. Levine, ‘Writing Anxiety: Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster’, Diacritics 27.2 (1997), 106-123 Michelle Mattson, Mapping Morality in Postwar German Women’s Fiction: Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Drewitz, and Grete Weil (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), see esp. chapter on Kindheitsmuster, pp. 96- 142 Michael Minden, ‘Social Hope and the Nightmare of History: Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster and Stadt der Engel’, Publications of the English Goethe Society 80.2-3 (2011), 196-203 Birgit Neumann, ‘The Literary Representation of Memory’, in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 333-45 Marilyn Sibley Fries (ed.), Responses to Christa Wolf: Critical Essays (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989) Elizabeth Snyder Hook, Family Secrets and the Contemporary German Novel: Literary Explorations in the Aftermath of the Third Reich (Rochester, NY; Woodbridge, UK: Camden House, 2011)

On Zeller: Elaine Martin,‘Victims or Perpetrators? Literary Responses to Women’s Role in National Socialism’, in Facing Fascism and Confronting the Past: German Women Writers from Weimar to the Present (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 61-85 ---., Gender, Patriarchy, and Fascism in the Third Reich: The Response of Women Writers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993) ---., ‘Patriarchy, Memory, and the Third Reich in the Autobiographical Novels of Eva Zeller’, Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture, 6 (1991), 47-62

WEEK FOUR | ETHICS OF MEMORY AND THE HOLOCAUST

This week we explore the ethics of memory by examining post-war writing about the Holocaust. Who gets to remember what and about whom? To what extent can and should certain topics be appropriated by writers without personal experience of the events they describe? We examine in detail extracts from weiter leben: Eine Jugend (München: dtv, 2008 [1992]) by Ruth Klüger (1931-), and the infamous ‘false’ autobiography Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit 1939-1948 (1995) by Binjamin Wilkomirski/Bruno Doesekker (1941-).

On Klüger: Stephan Braese and Holger Gehle, ‘Von “deutschen Freunden”: Ruth Klügers “weiter leben – Eine Jugend” in der deutschen Rezeption’, Deutschunterricht, 47 (1995), 76-87 Carolin Duttlinger, ‘The Ethics of Curiosity: Ruth Klüger, weiter leben’, Oxford German Studies, 38 (2009), 218-32 Alexandra Lloyd, ‘Writing Childhood in Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben: Eine Jugend’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 49 (2013), 175-83

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Caroline Schaumann, Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008) ---., ‘From weiter leben (1992) to Still Alive (2001): Ruth Klüger’s Cultural Translation of her “German Book” for an American Audience’, German Quarterly, 77 (2004), 324-39 Jennifer Taylor, ‘Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben: eine Jugend: A Jewish Woman’s Letter to Her Mother’, in Out from the Shadows: Essays on Contemporary Austrian Women Writers and Filmmakers, ed. by Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1997), pp. 77-88

On Wilkomirski: Blake Eskin: A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski (New York and London: Norton, 2002) Daniel Ganzfried (ed.), ...alias Wilkomirski: Die Holocaust-Travestie (Berlin: Jüdische Verlagsanstalt, 2002) ---., ‘Die geliehene Holocaust-Biographie’, Die Weltwoche, 27 August 1998, p. 45 Melissa Katsoulis, Telling Tales (London: Constable, 2009), see chapter 8 Berel Lang, Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005) Stefan Mächler, Der Fall Wilkomirski: Über die Wahrheit einer Biographie (Zurich: Pendo, 2000) ---., The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, trans. by John E. Woods (New York: Schocken, 2001) Susan R. Suleiman, ‘Problems of Memory and Factuality in Recent Holocaust Memoirs: Wilkomirski/Wiesel’, Poetics Today, 21 (2000), 543-59 Anne Whitehead, ‘Telling Tales: Trauma and Testimony in Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments’, Discourse, 25.1&2 (2003), 119-37 Melissa Hogenboom, ‘Why does the human brain create false memories?’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24286258 [accessed 20 September 2016] In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg, ‘Truth, Lies and Fiction’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00545lr [accessed 25 September 2016]

WEEK FIVE | COMPETING MEMORIES OF THE GDR AFTER THE WALL

In this lecture we examine retrospective writing about the GDR in different literary modes and consider contrasting approaches, focusing in particular on the idea of memory as an archive. We discuss two texts in detail: first, Monika Maron (1941-), Stille Zeile Sechs (1991) which explores how the nation’s history is presented after the Wall, and in particular the interplay between personal and official narratives of history; second, Günter Grass (1927-2015), Ein weites Feld (1995).

General reading: Elizabeth Boa and Janet Wharton (eds.), Women and the Wende: Social Effects and Cultural Reflections of the German Unification Process (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994) Stephen Brockmann, Literature and German Unification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Nick Hodgin and Caroline Pearce, The GDR Remembered: Representations of the East German State Since 1989 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011) Karen Leeder (ed.), ‘From Stasiland to Ostalgie: The GDR Twenty Years After’, Oxford German Studies, 38 (2009) Dora Osborne (ed.), Archive and Memory in German Language and Visual Culture (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2015) Renate Rechtien, and Dennis Tate, Twenty Years On: Competing Memories of the GDR in Postunification German Culture (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011) Stuart Taberner (ed.), The Novel in German since 1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011)

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On Maron: Deirdre Byrnes, Rereading Monika Maron: Text, Counter-Text and Context (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011) Sigrun Leonhard, ‘Sehnsucht nach der großen Tat: Monika Marons Roman “Stille Zeile Sechs”’, German Studies Review, 27 (2004), 289-305 Elke Gilson (ed.), Monika Maron in Perspective (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002)

On Grass: Stephen Brockmann, ‘Günter Grass and German Unification’, in The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, ed. by Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 125-38 Britta Kallin, ‘“Ist Hoftaller besser als Tallhover?” Eine vergleichende Figurenanalyse zwischen Hoftaller in Günter Grass’s Ein weites Feld und Hans Joachim Schädlichs Tallhover’, New German Review, 13 (1997-98), 98-112 Oskar Negt (ed.), Der Fall Fonty: ‘Ein weites Feld’ im Spiegel der Kritik (Göttingen: Steidl, 1996) Beatrice Pelz, ‘Günter Grass since the Wende: German and International’, German-Language Literature Today: International and Popular?, ed. by Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes and Julian Preece (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 67-84 Julian Preece, ‘Seven Theses on “Der Fall Fonty”’, in 1949/1989 Cultural Perspectives on Division and Unity in East and West, ed. by Clare Flanagan and Stuart Taberner, German Monitor 50 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 215-31 Dieter Stolz, ‘Nomen est Omen: Ein weites Feld by Günter Grass’, in Whose Story?: Continuities in Contemporary German-Language Literature, ed. by Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes and Julian Preece (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 149-66

WEEK SIX | FAMILY STORIES AND INTERGENERATIONAL MEMORY

This week, we explore intergenerational memory and the depiction of communicative memory in the post-war and post-Wende periods. We begin by examining a post-war family novel: Heinrich Böll (1917- 1985), Billard um halb zehn (1974). We then analyse extracts from two more recent works which have been read as part of the ongoing debate about German civilian suffering during World War II: Tanja Dückers (1968-), Himmselskörper (2003), and Günter Grass (1927-2015), Im Krebsgang (2002)

On Böll’s Billard um halb zehn: Victor Böll and Jochen Schubert, Heinrich Böll (Munich: DTV, 2002) Michael C. Eben, ‘Heinrich Böll’s Billard um halbzehn: The Step beyond the Static’, Neophilologus, 70 (1986), 592-602 Richard Hinton Thomas and Wilfried van der Will, The German Novel and the Affluent Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), pp. 40-68 Robert C. Conard, Understanding Heinrich Böll (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 70-79

On Grass: Aleida Assmann, ‘On the (In)compatability of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory’, German Life and Letters, 59.2 (2006), 187-200 Herman Beyersdorf, ‘Von der Blechtrommel bis zum Krebsgang: Günter Grass als Schriftsteller der Vertreibung’, Weimarer Beiträge, 48 (2002), 568-93 Frank Brunssen, ‘Tabubruch? Deutsche als Opfer des Zweiten Weltkriegs in Günter Grass’ Novelle Im Krebsgang’, Oxford German Studies, 35 (2006), 115-30 Laurel Cohen-Pfeister, ‘The Suffering of the Perpetrators: Unleashing Collective Memory in German Literature of the Twenty-First Century’, FMLS, 41 (2005), 123-35

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Elizabeth Dye, ‘“Weil die Geschichte nicht aufhört”: Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang’, German Life and Letters, 57 (2004), 472-87 Anne Fuchs, ‘From “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” to Generational Memory Contests in Günter Grass, Monika Maron and Uwe Timm’, German Life and Letters, 59 (2006), 169-86 Nicole Thesz, ‘Against a New Era in Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Continuities from Grass’s Hundejahre to Im Krebsgang’, Colloquia Germanica, 37 (2004), 291-306 Gary L. Baker, ‘The Middle Voice in Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang’, The German Quarterly, 83 (2010), 230-44

On Dückers: Fuchs, Anne, Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse: The Politics of Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) – see chapter 3: ‘Family Narratives and Postmemory: Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang, Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper and Marcel Beyer’s Spione’, pp. 45- 74

WEEK SEVEN | LITERATURE, POSTMEMORY, AND PHOTOGRAPHY

In this lecture we examine Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, first used in a scholarly discussion of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus (1980-1991). We examine the use of photography in autobiographical and fictional works about Germany’s recent past: Monika Maron (1941-), Pawels Briefe (1999) and W.G. Sebald (1944-2001), Austerlitz (2001).

On postmemory: Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012) ---., ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today, 29 (2008), 103-28 ---., ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 14 (2001), 5-37 ---., Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (London: Harvard University Press, 1997) Brett Ashley Kaplan, Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory (London: Routledge, 2011) Catherine Keenan, ‘On the Relationship between Personal Photographs and Individual Memory’, History of Photography, 22 (1998), 60-64

See also: Marianne Hirsch, http://www.postmemory.net/ [accessed 1 September 2016]

On Maron’s Pawels Briefe: Michal Ben-Horn, ‘“Memory Metonymies”: Music and Photography in Ingeborg Bachmann and Monika Maron’, German Life and Letters, 59 (2006), 234-48 Katharina Boll, Erinnerung und Reflexion : Retrospektive Lebenskonstruktionen im Prosawerk Monika Marons (Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2002) Deirdre Byrnes, Rereading Monika Maron: Text, Counter-text and Context (Bern: Lang, 2011), chapter five Friederike Eigler, ‘Engendering Cultural Memory in Selected Post-Wende Literary Texts of the 1990s’, The German Quarterly, 74.4 (2001), 392-406 Owen Evans, Mapping the Contours: Subjectivity, Truth and Fiction in Recent German Autobiographical Treatments of Totalitarianism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), chapter 8: ‘“Mutmaßungen über Pawel”: Monika Maron, Pawels Briefe: Eine Familiengeschichte (1999)’ Elke Gilson (ed.), Monika Maron in Perspective:‘dialogische’ Einblicke in zeitgeschichtliche, intertextuelle und rezeptionsbezogene Aspekte ihres Werkes (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002) Silke Horstkotte, Nachbilder: Fotografie und Gedächtnis in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009), pp. 147-85 on Pawels Briefe and Die Ausgewanderten

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J. J. Long, ‘Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe’, in German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006), pp. 147-69 Andrew Plowman, ‘Escaping the Autobiographical Trap? Monika Maron, the Stasi and Pawels Briefe’, in German Writers and the Politics of Culture: Dealing with the Stasi, ed. by Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 227-42 Julian Reidy, ‘“(More) Problems with Postmemory”: Pervertierte Erinnerung in Monika Marons Pawels Briefe (1999)’, German Life and Letters, 65 (2012), 503-17 Caroline Schaumann, Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 253-89

On Austerlitz: Carolin Duttlinger, ‘Traumatic Photographs: Remembrance and the Technical Media in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz’, in J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead (eds), W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 155-71. ---., ‘W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz’, in Landmarks in the German Novel, vol. 2, ed. by Peter Hutchinson (Oxford: Lang, 2010), pp. 111-27 Anne Fuchs, ‘Phantomspuren: Zu W. G. Sebalds Poetik der Erinnerung in Austerlitz’, German Life and Letters, 56 (2003), 281-98. Silke Horstkotte, ‘Fantastic Gaps: Photography Inserted into Narrative in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz’, in Christian Emden and David Midgley (eds), Science, Technology, and the German Cultural Imagination (Oxford: Lang, 2005), 269-86. Russell J. A. Kilbourn, ‘Architecture and Cinema: The Representation of Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz’, in J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead (eds), W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 140-54.

WEEK EIGHT | THE FUTURE OF MEMORY

In the final lecture of the series we review the material covered in previous weeks and consider the most recent developments in German memory culture as well as scholarly interpretations, particularly Amir Eschel’s study Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (2013).

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