Second-Generation Holocaust Literature
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Elijah Visible, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Robert Schindel’s Among historical events of the twentieth century, the Gebürtig, Katja Behrens’s “Arthur Mayer oder das Holocaust is unrivaled as the subject of both scholarly Schweigen,” Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder, Peter and literary writing. Literary responses include not Schneider’s Vati, Niklas Frank and Joshua Sobol’s Der only thousands of autobiographical and fictional texts Vater, Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser, and Uwe Timm’s “This book is a gem. International and interdisciplinary in content, it written by survivors, but also, more recently, works Am Beispiel meines Bruders — finding that an anxiety sheds new and important light on the continuing legacy of the Holocaust by writers who are not survivors but nevertheless with signification resounds in the narrative structure feel compelled to write about the Holocaust. Writers for those who come after the event but continue to live in its unending of these works, revealing the extent to which the from what is known as the second generation have literary texts themselves are marked by the continuing shadow.” produced texts that express their feeling of being aftershocks of the Holocaust. —Alan L. Berger, Florida Atlantic University powerfully marked by events of which they have had no direct experience. Erin McGlothlin is assistant professor of German at This book expands the commonly used definition Washington University in St. Louis. 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 OF RELATED INTEREST view of the children of Nazi perpetrators. With its innovative focus on the literary legacy of both groups, German Culture, Politics, and German Memory Contests: it investigates the ways in which second-generation Literature into the Twenty-First The Quest for Identity in writers employ similar tropes of stigmatization to Century: Beyond Normalization Literature, Film, and Discourse express their troubled relationship to their parents’ Edited by Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke since 1990 1–57113–338–0 Edited by Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and histories. The figure of the stigma, tied etymologically Georg Grote to the experiences of both perpetration and 1–57113–324–0 victimization, functions as a signifier for the parents’ legacies of suffering 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 fundamentally 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 Second-Generation crisis of signification. Erin McGlothlin examines nine American, German, ISBN 1-57113-352-6 and French literary texts — Thane Rosenbaum’s Holocaust Literature (continued on back flap) Camden House 668 Mt. Hope Avenue McGlothlin Legacies of Survival and Perpetration Rochester, NY 14620-2731 and P.O. Box 9 Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com 9 781571 133526 Jacket design: Lisa Mauro and www.camden-house.com Erin McGlothlin Jacket image: Photo of “Fallen Leaves” at the Berlin Jewish Museum ©Aidan O’Rourke 2006. I 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 Holocaust 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 Väterliteratur: Bernhard 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 I 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 Voris, Jeffrey Grossman, Benjamin Bennett, Allan Megill, Walter Grünzweig, Dan 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 colleague 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 entire 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 encouragement, her tireless efforts to help me achieve my goals, and her generous love. She remains a role model for me. E. McG. May 2006 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 corpse — 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 I 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.