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Beyond Closure: the Artistic Re-Opening of Holocaust Trials in Works by Hannah Arendt, Peter Weiss, Roland Suso Richter, and Uwe Timm

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Beyond Closure: the Artistic Re-Opening of Holocaust Trials in Works by Hannah Arendt, Peter Weiss, Roland Suso Richter, and Uwe Timm Beyond Closure: The Artistic Re-Opening of Holocaust Trials in Works by Hannah Arendt, Peter Weiss, Roland Suso Richter, and Uwe Timm Kerstin Steitz Berlin, Germany M.A., University of Virginia, May 2008 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures University of Virginia May 2014 ii © Copyright Kerstin Steitz All Rights Reserved May 2014 iii Abstract This dissertation examines how the twentieth and twenty-first century German and German-Jewish authors and filmmakers Hannah Arendt, Peter Weiss, Roland Suso Richter, and Uwe Timm engage with historical Holocaust trials: the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1963), the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (1963-1965), and the Hamburg trial (1967). The legal and literary trials have the same subject, the Jewish genocide committed by the National Socialists, but they treat the subject in different forms: the Eichmann and Auschwitz trials were legal criminal trials, Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1965) is a report, Weiss’s Die Ermittlung (1965) is composed in the form of the oratorio, Suso Richter’s film Nichts als die Wahrheit (1999) is a courtroom drama, and Timm’s Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003) is a memoir. The analysis and juxtaposition of legal trials and literary engagements from both first- and second-generation writers and filmmakers seeks to answer the question of how literary, theatrical, and filmic trials can commemorate and convey dimensions of the Holocaust that do not fit easily into the judicial concepts, practices, and purposes of the legal trials. Drawing from Aristotelian definitions of judicial and epideictic rhetoric in his Rhetoric, this study argues that the legal and literary trials function in a structural relation to one another, thereby complementing each other. The artistic works criticize and correct what they consider the pitfalls of the legal proceedings. Beyond Closure: The Artistic Re-Opening of Holocaust Trials argues that the Holocaust narratives created by the legal trials shape in significant ways the literary trials which adapt certain judicial concepts and practices, while simultaneously moving beyond the accusatory and punitive purpose of the legal trials to more fully understand, commemorate, and mourn the suffering of the victims and connect them to the present age. iv Für Mama und Papa v Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: Aristotelian Tragedy v. Brechtian Epic Theater: The Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem (1963-1965) and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1965) 21 Chapter Two: Juridical v. Epic Distancing: The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963-1965) and Peter Weiss’s Lehrstück-Oratorio Die Ermittlung: Oratorium in 11 Gesängen (1965) 68 Chapter Three: Confronting the Spectators with Their Own Corruptibility: Roland Suso Richter’s Courtroom Drama Nichts als die Wahrheit (1999) 120 Chapter Four: Uwe Timm’s Memoir Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003): Reflecting on the 1967 Hamburg Trial and Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (1993) as Ways to Investigate One’s Connection to the Past 166 Conclusion 201 Works Cited 206 vi Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been possible without the intellectual and emotional support of various people and programs, and I want to express my gratitude to them. I would like to thank my dissertation director, Jeffrey Grossman, for his careful reading, insightful feedback, and guidance on this project. I thank my dissertation committee, Lorna Martens, Gabriel Finder, and Alon Confino, whose knowledge and advice were invaluable for this project. I am deeply indebted to Renate Voris for her close reading of the dissertation and for patiently teaching me how to read and write. A heartfelt thanks to Manuela Achilles, Benjamin Bennett, Chad Wellmon, Dana Elzey, Janette Hudson, William McDonald, and Sybil Scholz for teaching, challenging, mentoring, and supporting me. I am grateful for the support of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia for providing me with wonderful learning opportunities, especially the invaluable experience to teach the course “The Holocaust in Literature, Film, and Law” based on my dissertation topic in the fall semester of 2011. I thank my students for the insightful and inspiring discussions from which I learned so much. I am especially grateful for the intellectual, emotional, and moral support in the early stages of the dissertation, which I received as a guest lecturer in the Amerikanistik at TU Dortmund, Germany, during the Winter- and Sommersemester 2010/2011. I am deeply grateful to Walter Grünzweig for his comments on early chapter drafts, his friendship, unconditional support, and encouragement. The discussions about writing with Sina Nitzsche and Katherine Thorpe in the dissertation-writing group were crucial for this dissertation, as was writing with Selma Erdogdu, and the feedback on my dissertation prospectus I received from everyone in the Oberseminar. I thank my students in the Proseminar “Affact: Mourning and Memory in Literary and Filmic Treatments of Holocaust Trials” for their intellectual curiosity in the subject. I am lucky to have had various opportunities to present my work and receive constructive criticism. Jennifer Geddes’s comments on an early draft of my first chapter as part of the Jewish Studies Fellows Meeting were insightful and invaluable. James Loeffler, Asher Biemann, and the Jewish Studies Fellows provided extensive comments on the overall project. My teachers Kerstin von der Krone, Uffa Jensen, Hans-Joachim Hahn, and Toby Axelrod, and fellow students at the Leo Baeck Summer University 2012 generously shared their knowledge and advice and provided encouragement. The dissertation also greatly benefitted from the feedback I received on presentations on early chapter drafts at the German Studies Association and graduate student conferences at the University of Virginia and Rutgers University. I want to thank the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Virginia for awarding me with a Rachel Winer Manin Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship of Jewish Studies during three years of my dissertation. I am honored to be part of this wonderful group and so grateful for the generous intellectual, emotional, and moral support everyone in the program has given me. Jewish Studies truly became my home at UVa. I am deeply grateful to everyone at the Teaching Resource Center for making my last year at UVa so enjoyable. I want to especially thank Dorothe Bach for being such a wonderful and understanding friend and mentor and for making me laugh. For their friendship, listening, and caring, I would like to thank Anna Baker, Kathrin Große, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, Katja Hempel, Clare Johnson, Verena Kollig, Jessica Oelkrug, Stefanie Parker, Rebekah Slodounik, Adriana Streifer, Raphaela Tkotzyk, and Helena Wittkowski. vii I am grateful for having such wonderful families in Germany and the US. I thank my parents, Gabriele und Gerhard Steitz, for their love and everything they have always done for me. Jonathan Stocking deserves the greatest thank you for making my life beautiful. Steitz 1 Introduction What are literary, theatrical, and filmic trials able to articulate that legal trials cannot, and vice versa? How can these artistic trials commemorate and convey dimensions of the Holocaust and the National Socialist past that do not fit easily into the concepts, practices, and purposes of legal trials? The question of the capabilities and limitations of law and literature lies at the center of the judicial attempts to work through the National Socialists’ crimes. In a letter to Karl Jaspers from August 17, 1946, published in Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel 1926-1969, Hannah Arendt addresses the dilemma of legal trials against Nazi perpetrators, beginning with the Nuremberg trials (1945-1946), but anticipating the later Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1963) and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (1963-1965); she notes the necessity for legal prosecution and punishment of the Nazi perpetrators on the one hand, but underscores the inadequacy of legal concepts, such as “kriminelle Schuld,” and legal practices to sentence mass murderers with regard to the Holocaust on the other: Mir ist Ihre Definition der Nazi-Politik als Verbrechen (“kriminelle Schuld”) fraglich. Diese Verbrechen lassen sich, scheint mir, juristisch nicht mehr fassen, und das macht gerade ihre Ungeheuerlichkeit aus. Für diese Verbrechen gibt es keine angemessene Strafe mehr … Das heißt, diese Schuld, im Gegensatz zu aller krimineller Schuld, übersteigt und zerbricht alle Rechtsordnungen. … Mit einer Schuld, die jenseits des Verbrechens steht … kann man menschlich-politisch überhaupt nichts anfangen. … die Deutschen sind … mit Tausenden oder Zehntausenden oder Hunderttausenden belastet, die innerhalb eines Rechtssystems adäquat nicht mehr zu bestrafen sind … . (91) Steitz 2 According to Arendt, the Nazi atrocities exceeded the existing legal concepts and practices. She raises the question of what other terms and practices besides legal and political ones could adequately describe, judge, and pass sentence on the Nazi perpetrators, which ones may be able to represent the atrocities of the Holocaust more fully than the existing options. Jaspers disagrees with Arendt’s rejection of the legal concepts and practices as means of working through the Nazi atrocities. In his letter from October 19, 1946,
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