Difficult Heimat

This book is largely about West Germany, whose question with a superb appraisal of Weimar— in confronting the past—damned if they do, confused sense of identity long had to defer to the centre of Weimar classicism, of the republic damned if they don’t. ‘The physical reconstruction the sensitivities of the outside (Western) world. whose failure led directly to the Third Reich, of pre-Nazi Germany is to deny a loss and make There is an instant discrepancy in writing a re- and of Buchenwald. But also Weimar, the Euro- the past unhappen’: (89) at least the second half view about a book interrogating a country where pean Cultural City of 1999. of this assertion is hard to square with architec- for decades little beyond a ‘black armband’ Beyond the usual apparatus, a useful glossary tural ﬁdelity outside Germany (for example, the

ROGER HILLMAN version of history was deemed tolerable. In of German terms and abbreviations enhances Old Town Square of Warsaw). Australia, shifting memories have been dammed the book. Its one technical blemish to my mind The author’s gaze extends beyond the Shoah at the highest level by a refusal to countenance is that cross-referencing to other chapters is to other groups often eclipsed by its historical germany, a ‘black armband’ version of our own history. sometimes awkward. It ranges across a number shadow, to a range of nationals working at the Yet affinities may extend past mere architectural of German place names, combining the already Salzgitter Reichswerke, and to survivors of the difficult heimat parallels between our new National Museum and demonised—Ravensbrück, Buchenwald—with camps. To balance the opening of this review, Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. others that have no particular connotations with Neumann also broaches the important topic of They certainly reach to one of the finest novels regard to the Nazi past. But that is precisely the ‘The East German State and the Shoah 1955– about postwar Germany, Rachel Seiffert’s The point, the interchangeability of case studies, their 90’. (119ff.) He further implies historical arches KLAUS NEUMANN Dark Room (2001), written by a young author spread across a whole postwar landscape, their without overkill: he retains the German Ruhe Shifting Memories: The Nazi Past in the New whose father is Australian. The subject matter relevance for whole communities beyond me- for a civic orderliness, which also evokes the Germany of Klaus Neumann’s book also has implications morial sites, law courts, and archives. And for uppermost duty of the trusty nineteenth-century University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2000 far beyond Germany, just as its case studies, and an economical volume wisely dealing with more Bürger. But the vestige of nineteenth-century ISBN 0-472-08710-X then its reflections on the discourses emerging or less representative examples, the ground romantic nationalism in lex sanguinis definitions R RP US$26.95 (pb) from these, go far beyond a reworking of all- covered is impressive. of German-ness could have evoked a far stronger too-familiar territory. In Chapter 2, ‘A Hasenjagd in Celle’, the author sense of notions of identity still flavoured, for For a start, Shifting Memories lends real his- reminds us of a major time lapse in memory any outside view, by the Nazi past. torical depth to themes more often present in from roughly the late 1940s to the 1980s. Else- For much of this book the style is not unlike popularised form. The banality of evil pervades where he also readjusts any notion that the Peter Weiss’s inexorable masterpiece of short many of these studies without being reducible ‘incapacity to mourn’, as the Mitscherlichs called prose, Meine Ortschaft [My Place], in which the to such a catchphrase, and hence its presence it, set in immediately after the war (for example, author documents the outer reality of the site is all the more insidious. Where Vilsmaier’s film the dedication of the Lappenberg memorial in of Auschwitz, twenty years after war’s end, as The Comedian Harmonists pleads for the German- Hildesheim). By this timeframe, memories were someone destined to end there himself, but ness of these celebrated musicians (who also not just a product of greater immediacy, but of whose appointment with destiny had failed to visited Australia) on the cusp of the Nazi take- de-Nazification processes from outside. The materialise. Without in any sense succumbing over, Neumann throughout stresses the German- author’s birthplace, Hildesheim, receives a broad to national (self-)loathing, Neumann is unspar- ness of German Jews, then and now. While the social history analysis. From this emerge clearer ing. But just as Weiss’s autobiographical narrator question of how the nation of Goethe and Schil- contours of the ‘reception’ of the Shoah, far is ultimately unable to separate his subject matter ler could be capable of the Shoah can provoke beyond debates about the limits of representa- from outer emotion, with a rumination on the a parading of aesthetic and ethical outrage, tion. At the same time, some of the bolder claims total senselessness of it all, Neumann is strongly Chapter 8 grounds and thereby legitimates the reinforce the unenviable choices facing Germans affected by the case of the twenty children of

216 VOLUME9 NUMBER1 MAY2003 ROGER HILLMAN—GERMANY, DIFFICULT HEIMAT 217 This book is largely about West Germany, whose question with a superb appraisal of Weimar— in confronting the past—damned if they do, confused sense of identity long had to defer to the centre of Weimar classicism, of the republic damned if they don’t. ‘The physical reconstruction the sensitivities of the outside (Western) world. whose failure led directly to the Third Reich, of pre-Nazi Germany is to deny a loss and make There is an instant discrepancy in writing a re- and of Buchenwald. But also Weimar, the Euro- the past unhappen’: (89) at least the second half view about a book interrogating a country where pean Cultural City of 1999. of this assertion is hard to square with architec- for decades little beyond a ‘black armband’ Beyond the usual apparatus, a useful glossary tural ﬁdelity outside Germany (for example, the

216 VOLUME9 NUMBER1 MAY2003 ROGER HILLMAN—GERMANY, DIFFICULT HEIMAT 217 Bullenhuser Damm, his apt choice for attempt- is made that ‘a disciplinary unease exists between 1. Shuddhabrata Sengupta, ‘Borders: Walking Across, in Sydney, which is documented in this reader. See as Opposed to Flying Above’, in C. Plate (ed.), also . ing to ‘remember and mourn those murdered the field of memory and academic history’.2 Borderpanic Reader, ANAT in association with the Per- 2. The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement did in the genocides of Jews, Sinti, and Roma’ (137) Shifting Memories is not conventional academic formance Space, Sydney, 2002, p. 18. Sengupta was away with trade tariffs between Mexico, the USA and a participant in a recent meeting of border activists Canada. via representative figures, rather than through history, and yet it is to be hoped that it will have unfathomable statistics. This is the real focus a regenerative influence on academic history. of Neumann’s approach to his own process of Going beyond the book’s chosen frame are documentation, the underpinning of memories issues that would lend those treated here still that may shift, but must not be allowed to reduce further contours: memorialisation as an insti- to a faceless abstraction. His earlier tone, often tution in Germany, extending to the celebratory outwardly dispassionate, is forsaken totally as pathos of the Wilhelminian era; the place of he bares his own emotions, and his simultaneous memorialisation in other European countries, distrust of them, when he first visits the site of particularly those which have faced their past the children’s murder. His whole enterprise, less than Germany has; further contextualisation realised so successfully in this book, is conveyed of these discourses among others in everyday in a mix of defiance and respect: ‘Those remem- life in Germany of the 1990s and the new mil- bering the children today foil the intention of lennium; different aspects of ‘The Nazi Past in the SS. Every occasion when their names are the New Germany’ such as Christo’s wrapping recited contradicts their murderers’ scheme.’ of the Reichstag; the effect of greater European (155) integration on the national elements of such dis- As the book progresses, the author abstracts courses; and perhaps the treatment of these shift- more discourses from his welter of materials, ing memories in the arts (Verhoeven’s film The while also drawing together the threads of his Nasty Girl, plus Marcel Ophüls’ Hotel Terminus, own discourse of moralising, in a still-respectable for a start). sense. The in-built historical freshness of memo- In the closing pages the author lifts the veil rials is their ongoing reception; the layers of a little on his own identity, beyond the snippets response they accrue, an archaeology of identity that have slipped out along the way. ‘I have politics. The more theoretical issues opened up written this book as somebody who for many by this book hold for related areas like museum years has lived outside Germany but grew up studies. Compare Dipesh Chakrabarty’s descrip- as a non-Jewish German’. (259) This formulation tion of the District Six Museum in Cape Town, alone is typical of the book’s understated inci- the once ‘mixed’ neighbourhood that was ‘whit- siveness, the tacit reminder by inversion of a ened’ in apartheid days: ‘Started in 1994, the stage of history when to be Jewish was deemed museum developed into a site for communal to be non-German. The back cover completes memory, not a nostalgic monument to a dead the picture: ‘Klaus Neumann … has lived for past but a living memory that is part of the most of his adult life in Australia, Papua New struggle against racism in post-Apartheid South Guinea, and New Zealand’, which frames his Africa.’1 Elsewhere in the same article the claim ideal perspective for the complex subject matter,

218 VOLUME9 NUMBER1 MAY2003 JUSTINE LLOYD—CULTURAL POLITICS ON THE NATION’S FAULT LINES 215 obsession with border transgression. Martinez low’, with articles on the distribution and re- as insider and outsider to German society, again ROGER HILLMAN teaches German studies and film demonstrates how Hispanic ‘guest workers’ seek ception of US-originated cinema in Mexico and implying the spectrum through which Jewish studies at the Australian National University. to ‘arrive’ at a place of stability and ‘deploy their of Hispanic TV in the USA, public art projects self-identification must have hurtled across the full civil rights within a responsive public sphere’ in squatter communities in Tijuana, and eco- decade or two of the Nazi millennium. Neumann in the act of migration. (54) Sadowski-Smith pro- cultural movements on the borderlands between gives a number of suggestions for future direc- 1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Museums in Late Democracies’, Humanities Research vol. 9, no. 1, 2002, p. 10. vides a history of ‘illegal’ migration into the USA Mexico and Arizona/New Mexico. Donald A. tions his impulses might take, but leaves no 2. Chakrabarty, p. 8. across both its northern and southern borders Grinde Jr’s (Yamasee) chronicle of past and con- illusions about the difficulty of the terrain: in the context of ‘contradictory conditions of tinued negotiations and transgressions of the By retreating into an indifferent silence (or border enforcement and border-free economics’. US–Canada border by Native peoples in the by keeping up a chatter about the crimes of (88) Also unravelling this sublime ‘beyond’ of Iroquois homelands around Lake Ontario fur- Nazi Germany), by making heroes out of national identity with visible and tangible ele- ther complicates any understanding of teleologi- members of the antifascist German resistance ments, Ursula Biemann’s account of her video cal movement of globalisation from first-national (or by vilifying them on account of their essay ‘Performing the Border: On Gender, Trans- to post-national subjects. political beliefs), by not listening to survi- national Bodies and Technology’, is a fascinat- All the essays are ultimately humanist in their vors (or by listening to them only in order ing take on the social and physical location of aims; their arguments affirm the intensification to hear one’s own heartbeat), and by design- women’s bodies in the transnational economy. of communal and civil society against evacua- ing elaborate tombstones (or by neglecting The subject of her provocative and self-reflexive tions of the state from the social contract (as to look after existing cemeteries), Germans essay is how the figure of the maquila (a female discussed by Traister). They demonstrate a sense have attempted to bury ‘Auschwitz.’ They worker in assembly plants which serve US-based of the multiplicity of the ways in which the border may have thereby hoped to escape from companies) is imbricated within the global com- persistently finds its way into our lives. Taken responsibility. (261–62) munications economy and within the maquila- together, the collection is a demonstration of the dora town of Ciudad Juárez, just across the Rio significance and potential of cultural studies and Klaus Neumann’s book appears in the wide- Grande from El Paso. Since 1993, more than its practice if it looks at the category of the national ranging series ‘Social History, Popular Culture, three hundred of these women, mostly internal in an extroverted way: despite all efforts to the and Politics in Germany’. It is, however, man- migrants living in shantytowns without basic contrary, ideas, thoughts, stories and images can datory reading far beyond this cluster of disci- services or public transport, have been raped and do cross the most well-policed border and plines. A couple of months ago there was a single and murdered in Juárez, and Biemann provides in ways unpredictable and uncanny. entry in the ‘In Memory’ column of the Canberra a reading of this tragedy by linking it to shifts Times, and no doubt in many papers around in global capitalism and industrialisation. (She the world. Black-bordered, the two non-English does not mention one important connection JUSTINE LLOYD is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in words in bold, it read: ‘YIZKOR/ (REMEMBER)/ between the killings and such changes, however, feminist cultural studies, University of Technology, KRISTALLNACHT/ 9–10 Nov 1938/ NEVER which is the possible common thread of labour Sydney. She is guest editing a series of articles on AGAIN’. This book does a remarkable job in activism among the murdered women.) dialogic spaces for the journal Space and Culture during tracking the historically shifting memories of Similarly, the other two sections of the book, 2003 and is a contributor to vol. 1, no. 2 of the what, as a historical necessity, must remain both titled ‘Border Communities’ and ‘Border Alli- electronic journal borderlands. in collective and personal memory. ances’, provide case studies of the US–Mexico border as instances of ‘globalization from be-

214 VOLUME9 NUMBER1 MAY2003 ROGER HILLMAN—GERMANY, DIFFICULT HEIMAT 219