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Sparing the Child: Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature About Nazism and the Holocaust

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Sparing the Child: Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature About Nazism and the Holocaust Sparing the Child Children’s Literature and Culture Volume 16 Children’s Literature and Culture Jack Zipes, Series Editor CHILDREN’S LITERATURE NARRATING AFRICA COMES OF AGE George Henty and Toward a New Aesthetic the Fiction of Empire by Maria Nikolajeva by Mawuena Kossi Logan REDISCOVERIES IN TRANSCENDING BOUNDARIES CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Writing for a Dual Audience of by Suzanne Rahn Children and Adults edited by Sandra L. Beckett REGENDERING THE SCHOOL STORY CHILDREN’S FILMS Sassy Sissies and History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory Tattling Tomboys by Ian Wojcik-Andrews by Beverly Lyon Clark RUSSELL HOBAN/FORTY YEARS WHITE SUPREMACY IN Essays on His Writings for CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Children Characterizations of African by Alida Allison Americans, 1830–1900 TRANSLATING FOR CHILDREN by Donnarae MacCann by Riitta Oittinen RETELLING STORIES, EMPIRE’S CHILDREN FRAMING CULTURE Empire and Imperialism in Traditional Story Classic British Children’s Books and Metanarratives by M. Daphne Kutzer in Children’s Literature by John Stephens and A NECESSARY FANTASY? Robyn McCallum The Heroic Figure in Children’s Popular Culture THE CASE OF PETER Rabbit edited by Dudley Jones and Changing Conditions Tony Watkins of Literature for Children by Margaret Mackey HOW PICTUREBOOKS WORK by Maria Nikolajeva LITTLE WOMEN AND and Carole Scott THE FEMINIST IMAGINATION Criticism, Controversy, Apartheid and Racism in South Personal Essays African Children’s Literature, edited by Janice M. Alberghene 1985–1995 and Beverly Lyon Clark by Donnarae MacCann and Yulisa Amadu Maddy IDEOLOGIES OF IDENTITY IN ADOLESCENT FICTION SPARING THE CHILD by Robyn McCallum Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature about Nazism and the Holocaust by Hamida Bosmajian Sparing the Child Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature about Nazism and the Holocaust Hamida Bosmajian Routledge New York and London Published in 2002 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Copyright © 2002 by Hamida Bosmajian All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bosmajian, Hamida. Sparing the child : grief and the unspeakable in youth literature about Nazism and the Holocaust / by Hamida Bosmajian. p. cm.—(Children’s literature and culture ; v. 16) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8153-3856-2 1. Children’s literature—History and criticism. 2. Young adult literature— History and criticism. 3. National socialism in literature. 4. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in literature. I. Title. II. Children’s literature and culture (Routledge (Firm)) ; v. 16. PN1009.5. N36 B67 2001 809'.93358—dc21 2001019481 To Haig, Harlan and Vilka— In this our life and time This page intentionally left blank Contents Series Editor’s Foreword ix Sparing the Child: An Introduction xi Chapter 1 Official Histories and Counter-Texts: Literature for Youth about Nazism 3 Chapter 2 “A Hitler Youth Does Not Cry”: Text and Subtext in Der Hitlerjunge Quex 29 Chapter 3 Melancholy Detachment: The Narrative Voice in Richter’s Trilogy about Hitler Youths and Young Soldiers 49 Chapter 4 Hitler Youths with Private Values: Barbara Gehrts’s Don’t Say a Word and Horst Burger’s Why Were You in the Hitler Youth? 77 Chapter 5 Doris Orgel’s The Devil in Vienna: From Trope into History 103 Chapter 6 Holocaust Narratives for Young Readers: The Construction of an Enabling Rhetoric 125 Chapter 7 Ruth Minsky Sender’s Memoirs and the Construction of the “Holocaust Lady” 151 vii viii Contents Chapter 8 Acquired Knowledge about the Holocaust in Fictional Narratives: Heroic Gestures and Unredeemable Ironies 179 Chapter 9 Hidden Grief: Maurice Sendak’s Dear Mili and the Limitations of Holocaust Picture Books 215 Conclusion “. And There Remains the Story That Can Be Told” 241 Bibliography 253 Index 265 Series Editor’s Foreword Dedicated to furthering original research in children’s literature and cul- ture, the Children’s Literature and Culture series includes monographs on individual authors and illustrators, historical examinations of different periods, literary analyses of genres, and comparative studies on literature and the mass media. The series is international in scope and is intended to encourage innovative research in children’s literature with a focus on interdisciplinary methodology. Children’s literature and culture are understood in the broadest sense of the term children to encompass the period of childhood up through late adolescence. Owing to the fact that the notion of childhood has changed so much since the origination of children’s literature, this Garland series is particularly concerned with transformations in children’s culture and how they have affected the representation and socialization of children. While the emphasis of the series is on children’s literature, all types of studies that deal with children’s radio, film, television, and art are includ- ed in an endeavor to grasp the aesthetics and values of children’s culture. Not only have there been momentous changes in children’s culture in the last fifty years, but also radical shifts in the scholarship that deals with these changes. In this regard, the goal of the Children’s Literature and Culture series is to enhance research in this field and, at the same time, point to new directions that bring together the best scholarly work throughout the world. Jack Zipes ix This page intentionally left blank Sparing the Child: An Introduction he image of the child with a gun, officially sanctioned as a combat- ready soldier, made our collective memory’s cherished romantic T image of the child unreliable. Photographs of child soldiers in all parts of the world have redefined the child as a potential and actual execu- tor of adult violence. First among such iconoclastic images of the child was the film footage of twelve-year-old Hitler Youths standing in sol- diers’ uniforms before their Führer in the early spring of 1945, ready to die for him. That blurred footage remains in our historical memory Hitler’s last public appearance, not before a mass audience but before a few soldier children, licensed and ready to kill—as they did, fearlessly and without regard for their mortality. The child with a gun startles and shocks, perhaps even more than the child as victim of starvation, rape, mutilation, or murder. We expect children to be helpless, passive, and powerless in the violent social and political worlds we have made. The child as perpetrator, the child as victim—both challenge our assumptions of and desire for a pastoral, innocent and joyous childhood. There are indeed some children who live for a time in such an age of wonder, but most children exist in the social and political realities of their contexts. Documentary footage has left us collective memories of children rushing toward helicopter gunships or throwing rocks at adult soldiers. We have seen on film ten-year-old Hitler Youths beating their drums at the party rally at Nuremberg, and we have seen the shadowy images of children being shoved into cattle cars destined for Auschwitz. xi xii Sparing the Child: An Introduction Children are used and abused in history; they have no power though they are the inheritors of the future. Adults have often feared that future. Herod ordered the slaughter of the innocents and the victorious Greeks threw baby Astyanax, the son of Hector, from the ramparts of a defeated Troy. The child is the promise of our future but also a threat to established authority. Children are socialized to repeat the patterns of the adult world, a process that has led authoritarian societies either to coordinate children politically or to eliminate them as a threat. National Socialism did both in its ideology and action; it made children a means to an end in the course of its disastrous history. The image of the child in the memories of adult witnesses haunted me in my earlier explorations of the Holocaust and Nazism in German post- war literature.1 A child plays with a red ball; an SS smashes her skull against the Black Wall of Auschwitz; a child eyewitnesses another child hanging from the gallows; a child screams “you’ll pay for this” and is carted off on a truckload of children destined for the gas chamber. The mere physical existence of the child, in all its powerlessness, inflamed with murderous license the perpetrator’s emotionally anesthetized and impotent self, a licentiousness legitimized by the state. The images of such children became a focus for me when I began to explore literature for young readers about Nazism and the Holocaust. I agree with Saul Friedlander’s insight that we must continue to address the Shoah even after we know that no new data will be added to its familiar and disastrous history. Friedlander contends, that, while we never can “master” the Nazi epoch or the Shoah, the self-awareness of the historian or critic is essential for “working through” the text. It is a self- awareness expressed through the voice that interprets texts even as it acknowledges the impossibility that neither text nor interpretation can ever represent with immediacy the trauma experienced in history.2 Friedlander urges that any “working through” must address both Nazism and the Shoah because one is incomplete without the other, even though perpetrators and victims experienced the historical moment differently.3 Michael Geyer and Miriam Hansen also advocate the discussion of such a linkage: “The Holocaust is now written into the act of representation itself.
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