Literature and Memory After 1945
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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 1 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: 2 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 3 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,