Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany Series editor: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Cornell University Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought publishes new English- language books in literary studies, criticism, cultural studies, and intellectual history pertaining to the German-speaking world, as well as translations of im- portant German-language works. Signale construes “modern” in the broadest terms: the series covers topics ranging from the early modern period to the present. Signale books are published under a joint imprint of Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library in electronic and print formats. Please see http://signale.cornell.edu/. Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust Sonja Boos A Signale Book Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library gratefully acknowledge the College of Arts & Sciences, Cornell University, for support of the Signale series. Copyright © 2014 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2014 by Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boos, Sonja, 1972– author. Speaking the unspeakable in postwar Germany : toward a public discourse on the Holocaust / Sonja Boos. pages cm. — (Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5360-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8014-7963-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Influence. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)— Public opinion. 3. Speeches, addresses, etc., German—History and criticism. 4. Germany (West)—Intellectual life. 5. Public opinion—Germany (West) I. Title. II. Series: Signale (Ithaca, N.Y.) D804.3.B66 2014 940.53'180943—dc23 2014030965 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In memory of José Camejo Strange, not to have wishes any more. To see, where things were related, only a looseness fluttering in space. —Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies Contents Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations xi Introduction: An Archimedean Podium 1 Part I. In the Event of Speech: Performing Dialogue 1. Martin Buber 25 2. Paul Celan 52 3. Ingeborg Bachmann 70 Part II. “Who One Is”: Self-Revelation and Its Discontents 4. Hannah Arendt 87 5. Uwe Johnson 114 Part III. Speaking by Proxy: The Citation as Testimony 6. Peter Szondi 137 7. Peter Weiss 159 Conclusion: Speaking of the Noose in the Country of the Hangman (Theodor W. Adorno) 195 Bibliography 211 Index 225 Acknowledgments I began this project at Princeton University, where I was fortunate to have the intellectual support of many remarkable colleagues and friends. I am deeply indebted to Barbara Hahn, whose thoughtful and constructively critical com- mentary repeatedly renewed my enthusiasm and confidence in the project. I am especially thankful for her ability to see the potential of this project, which I was unable to fully articulate in its earlier stages. I am also extremely grateful that she remained an exceptionally accessible colleague and close friend despite her geo- graphical and institutional remoteness. Most importantly, I want to thank her for teaching me how to write. Brigid Doherty came to this project when its concep- tual framework and the composition of a first draft were already well advanced, and I am still amazed at how quickly and naturally she became not only a crucial interlocutor, who steered me toward pertinent questions and relevant literature, but the project’s intellectual anchor sine qua non. I can only attribute this to her extraordinary intelligence and intellectual flexibility, as well as her truly effortless kindness and grace. I would also like to thank Michael W. Jennings, who has been an extremely important teacher and mentor throughout these years. Words are not enough to express how grateful I am for his unending support and friendship. Thomas Y. Levin has been an inspiration, both personally and professionally, and I am very appreciative of his readiness to serve as a reader and for his outstanding intellectual generosity. Arnd Wedemeyer has read and commented on my work at regular intervals, and my writing has greatly benefited from his critical intellect and ency- clopedic knowledge. Finally, I would like to thank the following colleagues and dear friends who have read and edited portions of the manuscript of this book and offered valuable criticisms, many of which I have incorporated into my text: Jutta Adams, Leora Batnitzky, Dorothee Boos, Katra Byram, Kaira M. Cabañas, Lisa Cerami, Stanley Corngold, Nikolaus Wegmann, and Tobias Wilke. Others, though not directly involved in this project, have gone out of their way to provide emotional support and intellectual stimulation (be it through ongoing conversa- tions or professional collaborations) during my time at Princeton: Florian N. Becker, Kerry Bystrom, May Mergenthaler, Sarah Pourciau, P. Adams Sitney, and Susan Sugarman. My sincere thanks go to those people who were involved in the final stages of this publication. My colleagues at Oberlin College—Grace An, Elizabeth Hamilton, Steve Huff, Heidi Thomann Tewardson, and Katherine Thomson-Jones—have x Acknowledgments helped me bring the manuscript to completion through their intellectual generos- ity and warm friendship. I also wish to thank Kizer S. Walker, managing editor of the Signale series, for his many insights and patient guidance throughout the process, and Marian Rogers for her thorough and rigorous work on the manuscript as an editor. The publication of this book was supported by the Oregon Humanities Center and the University of Oregon College of Arts and Sciences. I am, finally, deeply indebted to my parents, Dorothee and Theo Boos, and my sisters, Katrin Back-Schück and Irene Gräfin von Schwerin, who have shaped me, and continue to shape me, in ways I am still discovering. Abbreviations AN Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries EA Theodor W. Adorno, Education after Auschwitz GB Uwe Johnson, Georg-Büchner-Prize acceptance speech GC Ingeborg Bachmann, German Contingencies GD Martin Buber, Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace HC Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition HP Peter Szondi, Hope in the Past IN Peter Weiss, The Investigation IT Martin Buber, I and Thou KJ Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers: A Laudatio LL Peter Weiss, Laocoon or the Limits of Language ME Paul Celan, The Meridian OH Hannah Arendt, On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing WP Theodor W. Adorno, The Meaning of Working through the Past Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany Introduction: An Archimedean Podium Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth. —Archimedes, quoted by Pappus of Alexandria, Synagoge, book 8 In the short autobiographical prose piece Ein sehr junges Mädchen trifft Nelly Sachs (A Very Young Girl Meets Nelly Sachs), Esther Discherheit reimagines her first encounter with a German-Jewish poet, Nelly Sachs, which took place in 1965.1 Discherheit remembers that she had been deeply impressed by this “meeting,” which, albeit mediated through television, nevertheless had the effect of momen- tarily breaking her and her mother’s isolation and loneliness by way of triangu- lating them with a person with whom they had something in common: like her mother, Sachs had been brought up as an assimilated Jew in the cultivated milieu of Berlin’s affluent bourgeois society. Both Sachs’s and Dischereit’s mothers had responded to the anti-Semitic movement with initial disbelief, and both had sur- vived the Holocaust at the cost of lifelong despair. As the offspring of a Jewish sur- vivor, Dischereit had herself suffered considerably, most notably from the covert 1. Esther Dischereit, Übungen jüdisch zu sein (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998), 9–15; unpublished translation by Kizer Walker. 2 Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany anti-Semitism and open hostility she faced growing up in postwar German society. She thus described Sachs’s appearance on German television as an eye-opening and truly dramatic experience: I sat practically with open mouth in front of the TV, watching high-ranking Ger- man politicians giving standing ovations to a Jew. They honored her with a matter- of-factness, which was in complete contradiction to my life and experiences up to that point. That’s what it was to me—I was thirteen years old. That was the first unbe- lievable thing I experienced in connection with this event. Next I heard Nelly Sachs speak. She, a Jew, was able to talk in Germany in a loud and clear voice, with her head raised, and the way she was speaking, Jewish in a completely obvious way, was some- thing that had never existed, not for one day, in our house.2 Young as she was, Dischereit had been unaware that in 1965, Sachs’s receiving and accepting a major award in Germany was by no means an exceptional occur- rence. In the preceding decade, a number of Jewish Holocaust survivors had already been honored by German institutions, and many of these honorees had seized this opportunity to publicly address a broader German audience. But this does not take anything away from Dischereit’s astute perception and understanding of the sig- nificance of Sachs’s intervention.