UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Unencumbered by History: Identity, Modernity, and the Holocaust in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel and Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5wk2r483 Author Barry, David Lloyd Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Unencumbered by History: Identity, Modernity, and the Holocaust in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel and Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Languages by David Lloyd Barry 2015 © Copyright by David Lloyd Barry 2015 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Unencumbered by History: Identity, Modernity, and the Holocaust in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel and Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster by David Lloyd Barry Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Languages University of California, Los Angeles, 2015 Professor Todd S. Presner, Chair In this dissertation I argue that Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster present, comparatively, in relation to their specific authors and societies, fictive counterparts to cultural perspectives on the National Socialist period of German history that have also been developed in the disciplines of history, sociology, and related fields with their grounding constructs. The explicative methodology is freely adapted from ideas by Edward Said into an analytic modality based on the comparison of multiple critical perspectives. I propose that the sense of the works emerges from cultural discourses and narratives of memory involving the relationship between personal subjectivity and German cultural identity. Evaluating claims of history as narrative, also interrogates the roles of individual and collective memory in the construction of those discourses and narratives, as well as analyzing the "legitimizing" narratives of nation states. As ii such, the relation of these to concepts of modernity is also an issue for discussion. That these concepts were viewed differently in the Federal Republic of Germany and German Democratic Republic has important consequences for literature produced in those societies, including Grass’s and Wolf's works, in terms of narrative viewpoint and overall communicative strategies. I argue that narratives relating to the unification of the German state reveal a desire to become, in the name of 'normalization', finally unencumbered by a past often considered to be one of unique criminality and inhumanity embodied in the Holocaust. I claim that Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster have continuing relevance to contemporary narratives of these problems and to disputes over the continued importance of the Holocaust to historical memory within German culture. iii The dissertation of David Lloyd Barry is approved. Kathleen L. Komar John A. McCumber Michael A. North Todd S. Presner, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2015 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract of the Dissertation ii Acknowledgements viii Vita ix 1. Approaching the Texts 1 1.1. Introduction 1 1.2. A Beginning 2 1.3. Text and Reading Environment 7 1.4. Discourse and Narrative 15 1.5. The World, the Text, and the Critic: Methodological Adaptation 21 1.6. An Experimental Perspective 25 1.7. Narratology and Explication 29 1.8. Further Remarks 33 2. Background: Works and Settings 37 2.1. Background 37 2.2. The Cultures 41 2.3 The Past in the Present 52 3. Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster 65 3.1. The World in the Works 65 3.1.1. The World as Intertext 65 3.1.2. Levels of Narration 82 3.2. The Reader in the Works 87 3.2.1 Dialectic and Dialogic 90 v 3.2.2 The Novels as Performative Critique 95 4. History, Memory, Narrative 100 4.1. The Problem Defined 100 4.2. History 108 4.3. Memory 115 4.4. Narrative 122 4.5 Assessment: Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster as historiographical fiction 130 5. Identity and Subjectivity in Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster 140 5.1 Introduction 140 5.2 Identity versus Subjectivity 145 5.2.1 Identity and Subjectivity in the Secondary Literature 148 5.2.2 Identity and Subjectivity: Disciplinary Specificity 154 5.3 The Self in the Novels 164 5.4 German National Identity 175 5.5 Conclusions 184 6. Modernity and Its Alternatives 189 6.1 Issues 189 6.2 Modernity as Concept 190 6.3 Self in Society: Society in Self 197 6.4 Alternative Modernities 207 6.4.1 Two States -- Two Nations? 207 6.4.2 Grass and Wolf 228 vi 7. The Holocaust: Negation, Negotiation, and Normalization 236 7.1 Problem: Nature and Scope 236 7.2 Negation 240 7.2.1 National Socialists 240 7.2.2 Perpetrators 243 7.2.3 Ordinary Germans 250 7.3 Negotiation 256 7.4 Normalization 266 7.5 Evaluations 282 Conclusion: Either/Or 291 Works Cited 305 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my appreciation to my committee chair, Dr. Todd Presner, for his invaluable advice and guidance for this dissertation. I also offer my sincere thanks to the other members of my doctoral committee, Dr. Kathleen Komar, Dr. John McCumber, and Dr. Michael North for their insights and advice. I thank Dr. Volker Langbehn and Dr. Ilona Vandergriff of San Francisco State University for their encouragement and support. viii VITA Education B.A. Geography, San Francisco State University, 1985 M.A. Music, San Francisco State University, 1993 M.A. German, San Francisco State University, 2008 International Study Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, 2006 - 2007 Conferences and Papers 2006: Workshop co-presenter on grammatical gender constructs of the German language and their social import. California Language Teachers’ Association Convention, Fresno, California. 2011: “Modernity as Narrative in Cold War Era Divided Germany.” Columbia University German Graduate Conference, “Modernity at Large” hosted by the Columbia University Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. 2015: “Transgressing Boundaries: Self, Technology, and Transformation in the Reception of Der Ackermann aus Böhmen.” Princeton Renaissance and Early Modern Studies Graduate Conference, “Early Modern Print Culture” hosted by the Princeton University Program in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Collaborative Publication Ilona Vandergriff, David Barry, and Kimberley Mueller, "Authentic Models and Usage Norms? Gender Marking in First Year Text Books," Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German 41.2 (Fall 2008) 144-150. Multidisciplinary Includes commissioned cultural and geographic research, musical compositions, published music reviews, and German translation services. Teaching Assistant for German Language and Literature Courses 2004: San Francisco State University 2009 – 2010, 2012 - 2014: University of California, Los Angeles ix 1. Approaching the Texts 1.1 Introduction Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel was published in 1959. The seven hundred and seventy pages of text contained in the third volume of Grass’s complete works presents the reader with a story that seems to personalize the National Socialist period in German history. Upon reflection, the unfolding narrative also appears to cast a cynical glance at the society in which it was written, the prosperous Federal Republic of Germany in the 'Cold War' era. Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, published in 1976 and occupying the fifth volume of its author's complete works, likewise relates over six hundred twenty-seven pages a personal narrative of life during the 'Third Reich'. As with Grass’s novel it seems to embody a certain level of critique of the society in which it was written, that of the communistic German Democratic Republic. Given the complexities of narration and the wide range of issues into which the works seemingly situate themselves -- historiography, personal subjectivity, national identity, even literary analysis itself -- from what perspective(s) might one profitably approach the novels in the twenty-first century? Questions of whether, how, and with what content a text communicates or 'speaks', constitute the research domain of a varied body of literary theory. Obviously, any reading presupposes a perspective on the work under consideration, which whether realized or not, encodes a certain set of pre-judgments or even philosophical assumptions. Whether read from, for instance, New Critical, structuralist, New Historicist, or a deconstructive perspective, the text is perceived to embody qualities that each perspective, as methodology, may properly recover according to its own principles with assumed epistemological validity. Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster may be and have been subject to very different allocations of sense based on 1 methodological considerations and the present viewpoint is obviously not exempt from this state of affairs. Exactly what is the point, then, of the endeavor? 1.2 A Beginning Man kann eine Geschichte in der Mitte beginnen und vorwärts wie rückwärts kühn ausschreitend Verwirrung anstiften.1 Und wie gewöhnlich wird sich ergeben, was dir weniger unerträglich ist, durch das, was du machst. Was du heute . beginnst, indem du, Packen provisorisch beschriebenen Papiers beiseite legend, einen neuen Bogen einspannst, noch einmal mit der Kapitelzahl I anfängst.2 These quotes, the first from Die Blechtrommel, the second from Kindheitsmuster, viewed purely as linguistic examples, appear to insert the process of writing, as a theme, into each work in their respective opening pages. Inspection of the contexts of these passages reveal that each is situated in a larger discourse framing ideas on what it means to be a responsible person, the role of memory in that endeavor, and the urge to communicate these ideas to an audience. The passage from Grass’s work appears to speak satirically, that from Wolf's adopts a serious tone. Both explicitly problematize the act of narration and the position of the narrator. This further information, however, rests on inferences about the novels' texts that necessarily become more numerous, abstract, and increasingly decision-based as the reader attempts to glean a larger and more precise sense of the words' import. 1 Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel (Göttingen: Steidl, 1959, 1993) 12; The Tin Drum: a New Translation, trans.