Postmodern Spain

Chapter 1 Introduction The following study examines works on the Holocaust defined by their authors as being distinct from the novel. These works include autobiog- raphies, diaries, and memoirs and in one case a biography comprising a large collection of letters composed by the person about whose life is being told. All of these works have been originally published, with two excep- tions, in the 1990s, which means that they are far removed in time from the original genocide itself.1 Nonetheless, they cannot be assigned to the so-called third generation of Holocaust literature since all their authors experienced the Holocaust either as inmates in concentration camps or as civilians living in constant danger of deportation or murder. The fact that these works have been written and published several generations after the events they describe has obviously influenced their composition as well as their reception. The works in this study have been published in German, and they have all enjoyed both critical acclaim and popular success, which means that they have entered the public discourse on the Holocaust. Their reception in the United States, where the Holocaust also occupies an established place in official commemoration, is difficult to measure. Some of these works have been translated and published in America, while others have apparently not elicited an interest in the American publishing world. It is, however, probably safe to say that none 1 I have included Jean Améry’s work as well as Martin Doerry’s Das Leben der Lilli Jahn (2002), the former because Améry’s work has engendered considerable critical attention after German unification and the latter, because Doerry’s work has been widely heralded as a classic of Holocaust literature. 2 Chapter 1 of these works have evoked the same kind of critical attention and celeb- rity as in Germany.2 The reasons for the positive critical reception in Germany are manifold. Probably one of the more obvious reasons is the notion of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. This concept is difficult to characterize. Is it a movement or a doctrine or a particular discourse? It may be all three, but at any rate it belongs to the larger mentality of political correctness that has come to pervade German society in a profound way. Helmut König characterizes this concept in the following way: Der Terminus Vergangenheitsbewältigung kam in der Bundesrepublik etwa Mitte der 50er Jahre in Umlauf und stand damals im Kontext eines theologisch und moralisch geprägten Politikverständnisses, zielte auf die individuelle Selbst- und Gewissensprüfung. Er weitete sich dann rasch über diese Begrenzungen hinweg aus und avancierte zum Zentralbegriff, mit dem generell die Auseinandersetzung der Bundesrepublik mit den Hinterlassenschaften des NS-Regimes bezeichnet wurde.3 While it is true that the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung entered the official currency in the 1950s, it certainly took a long time for this process to become entrenched. Soon after the Second World War, a consensus was reached in Germany based on public pieties and personal silence, 2 This thesis should be more carefully refined. Victor Klemperer’s diaries have received critical attention in America. The same can be said of Ruth Klüger’s memoir, which has also attracted a readership. Jean Améry has also been discovered per- haps because of Primo Levi’s essay entitled “The Intellectual in Auschwitz,” inThe Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 127–148. Améry is also a character in a well-received novel by Thane Rosenbaum, The Golems of Gotham (2002). Nonetheless, none of these writers have achieved the stature of Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi in the discussion of the Shoah. 3 Helmut König, Die Zukunft der Vergangenheit: Der Nationalsozialismus im poli- tischen Bewußtsein der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003), p. 7. As König writes, other less emotionally charged expressions have been suggested to replace Vergangenheitsbewältigung, such as Aufarbeitung or Erinnerungskultur, but these terms have not been able to establish themselves in quite the same way, which may again be the subject of another essay (pp. 7–8). Introduction 3 which continued, despite various appeals for more dialogue and openness, until the 1980s. Mary Fulbrook writes tellingly: “We have nevertheless a reaffirmation of the myth of essential innocence: whispered rumours of far-away things, utterly remote from everyday life and reality, and, even when hinted at, rapidly suppressed in front of the children.”4 Neither the perpetrators nor the victims wanted to exhume the past, the former for reasons of guilt and shame, the latter for deeper, more complex reasons, rooted in trauma. Both parties to the catastrophe were trapped in their own separate memory worlds, both desiring to forget, both choosing silence as a means of coping with a past that because of its horrendous nature could not simply disappear.5 Some critics argue that the Auschwitz trials in 1962 displaced the consensus of silence, ushering in a new way of coping with the past. Others argue that the paradigm shift forged by the 1968 student movements led to a new approach to German history and organizing social and cultural memory. Characteristic of this change in mentality was the seminal work of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, published in 1967, admonish- ing their compatriots against the psychological and moral damage result- ing from “die Unfähigkeit zu trauern”; in other words, the inability to mourn and work through a past that seemed intolerable to confront.6 The Mitscherlichs attempted to persuade their readers that it was not only a moral failing, but also psychologically detrimental to wish to gloss over the past or to absent oneself from dialogue or even to impose one’s own version of history or memory on the horrors of Nazism, to engage in what Stephan Braese calls “die Konkurrenz der Erinnerungen.”7 4 Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge, England: Polity, 1999), p. 173. 5 Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck, 2006), pp. 98–99. 6 Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich: Piper, 1967). 7 Braese is referring here to the struggle over memory between the new post-war German literary establishment and the German-Jewish writers, for the most part émigrés, who attempted to redefine the interpretation of recent German history. According to Braese, the new German literary establishment, embodied in part in 4 Chapter 1 It took, however, some time for this message to be heard and prac- ticed. What actually happened was that instead of the therapy propagated by the Mitscherlichs, a new catechism was created. It became a moral imperative among certain groups in German society to condemn National Socialist atrocities and assume the perspective of the victims without delv- ing too deeply into the implications of belonging to a society sponsoring radical genocide as an official policy. As a result, something curiously German emerged—the invocation of Bildung. The second and third generations discovered a new Bildungsauftrag—an educational mission to understand and confront a troubling past. Jürgen Habermas illustrates this trend when he writes, “Under the conditions of postmetaphysical thinking, there exists no alternative to self-reflection when we seek self- understanding.”8 For Habermas, however, this is not merely an individual enterprise; it is part of an entire people’s obligation to achieve virtue. By seriously entering into a dialogue with the past, one can confront one’s own iniquity and as a result extricate oneself from the compromised past. Knowledge, in other words, leads to enlightenment, which in turn leads to expiation. The widely held yearning among members of the second and third generations to transcend the past can now be realized not only by confronting the crimes of previous generations, but also by scrutiniz- ing mentalities, values, institutions, sacred myths, all the stuff of which constitutes national identity: Such problems of course do not arise exclusively from the first person singular perspective in which we seek to explain our individual existence; they also arise in relation to an ethical-political self-understanding we as citizens of a community undertake from the perspective of the first person plural—especially when this community is burdened with a politically criminal past. It is one thing to conduct an unbiased historical investigation into the facts and causes of a failed political the so-called Gruppe 4, obviated any attempts by Jewish writers to mold the collective memory of the Federal Republic. See Die andere Erinnerung: Jüdische Autoren in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsliteratur (Berlin: Philo, 2001), p. 10, p. 564. 8 Jürgen Habermas, “What Does ‘Working Off the Past’ Mean Today?” inA Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, England: Polity, 1998), p. 18. Introduction 5 development; it is quite another critically to “work off ” one’s own history from the point of view of the generations involved in it. In the perspective of those involved it is a matter of identity, of the articulation of an honest collective self-understanding that simultaneously suffices as a norm for political justice and expresses the deeper aspirations of a political community shaped by its history.9 Of course, this process of self-scrutiny has not been marked by an unbroken linear development, but rather has been a dialectical movement comprising denial and silence as well as admission and insight.10 This is evident in the so-called Historikerstreit in the 1980s as well as in the furor over Bitburg, provoked by President Reagan’s visit to Germany in 1985.11 Nonetheless, a climate was created in the 1980s where the victims finally felt empowered and justified to tell their stories and where the mainstream culture was morally and psychologically willing to receive these narrations, all of which contributed to the proliferation of memoirs, diaries, and autobiographical works.

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