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 criti- cal 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 collec- tive 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 mem- oirs, diaries, and autobiographical works. In the 1980s, Aleida Assmann writes, the need to preserve memory, to have a renewed chance to tell one’s story, became important for both perpetrator and victim alike: “Die Gattung ‘testimony’ gewann einen sakrosankten Status. Das Brechen des Schweigens wurde zu einer religiösen Pflicht; die eigene Geschichte musste erzählt, die Erinnerung an die Toten wach gehalten werden, um ihren zweiten Tod im Vergessen zu verhindern.”12

9 Habermas, “What Does ‘Working Off the Past’ Mean Today?” p. 19. 10 This dialectical movement of admission and denial has continued up to the presence with the controversial speeches of Martin Walser (1998) and Martin Hohmann (2003), which attempt to create an intact German national identity free of the detri- tus of the past without necessarily confronting the enormity of the Holocaust. 11 Aleida Assmann writes, “Seit der Mitte der achtziger Jahre ist der bevorzugte Anstoß zu solcher Erinnerung der Skandal gewesen, Skandal im Sinne der Erregung öffentli- chen Ärgernisses und öffentlicher Aufmerksamkeit—man denke an Regans Besuch in Bitburg (1985), den Historikerstreit (1986), die Jenninger-Rede (1988), das Buch und die Lesereise von Goldhagen (1996), die Ausstellung über Verbrechen der Wehrmacht (1997).” See Aleida Assmann and Ute Frevert, Geschichtsvergessenheit— Geschichtsversessenheit: Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999), p. 21. 12 Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit, p. 102. 6 Chapter 1

The works discussed in this study belong to this sea change of evolv- ing mentalities. The human rights movement with its attendant interest in minorities, the ascendancy of post-national thinking, the growth of the victim cult—these were some of the reasons for the emergence of a readership that seemed to approach history and culture from the stand- point of the oppressed. More specifically, the publication of these works coincided with the reunification of Germany, which suggested that a reunited Germany had a moral imperative to confront its recent past:

Nach 1989, nach dem Ende der Nachkriegszeit, haben sich die Gedächtnisrahmen noch einmal deutlich verschoben. An Bedeutung gewann, wie die Mitscherlichs es ausdrückten, eben jene “Weltöffentlichkeit, die keineswegs das, was im Dritten Reich sich zugetragen hat, vergessen hat noch zu vergessen bereit” war. Unter dem Eindruck dieses transnationalen Rahmens verlor in Deutschland allmählich die Schuldabwehr an Bedeutung gegenüber neuen Formen der Schuldannahme und der persönlichen Auseinandersetzung mit der negativen Erinnerung, wie sie sich beispielsweise im Zusammenhang der Lesereise von Daniel Goldhagen und den Wehrmachtausstellungen in den 1990er Jahren entwickelten.13

This development is connected with another phenomenon that is understandably more pronounced in Germany than in other European countries—the discourse of philo-Semitism. An established cultural tradition in Germany with respect to representing Jews, dating back, as Anthony D. Kauders points out, to the seventeenth century, philo- Semitism became an integral element in the cultural identity of the genera- tion of 1968, which now posited the demonized “other” as the sanctified “other” without changing any of its intrinsic properties or qualities.14 The

13 Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit, p. 113. 14 Anthony D. Kauders initiates a debate about the nature of philo-Semitism, argu- ing that that the concept has never been adequately defined and that its use in post-war German society has been tainted by what he calls “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” which essentially means that those who have employed the concept essentially have suspected that philo-Semitism is based on the belief in its opposite, i.e. anti-Semitism in “History as Censure: ‘Repression’ and ‘Philo-Semitism’ in Postwar Germany,” History and Memory 15, no. 1 (2003): 108. Kauders’ essay is in many ways a pioneer study, maintaining that the traditional concepts—repression Introduction 7 rootless, international, left leaning intellectual of Jewish descent was no longer the enemy of the Volk, in cahoots with world capitalism or com- munism, but, instead, was a hero, a martyr to the cause of progress and the Enlightenment. The fact that he or she died in a concentration camp or committed suicide or was forced to emigrate adds a further nimbus to his or her persona. For those who are familiar with the representation of the American Indian, this is all too familiar. Guilt can be a prime mover of art or at least of sublimation. Faced with extinction, the victim is suddenly transformed by the perpetrator into a tragic, even heroic figure, morally superior to those who have attempted to exterminate him.15 Since the Holocaust became an established narrative in America before being introduced to Germany, it is tempting to see its emergence (even the word has been appropriated in German) as an accepted discourse in Germany not only as a confrontation with the past, but, more impor- tantly, as another example of the Americanization of the Holocaust.16 The readers of the works being discussed here, however, are not the same viewers of the television series on the Holocaust a generation earlier. More removed in time, they can more easily place the Nazis into a slot of villains without an individual face, who hardly resemble their own compatriots any longer. On the other hand, the victim narrators of these works are all educated and cultivated, people whom we could easily learn to admire and respect. In fact, they are very much like us, modern people who rep- resent the humanist credos of the West. Thus, a process has unfolded in which the narrator and reader of Holocaust literature, instead of being separated by ethnicity or culture or politics, share a common frame of

and philo-Semitism—employed in understanding Vergangenheitsbewältigung, are faulty and should be supplanted by a discourse analysis approach. 15 On the imagined kinship of Germans with the American Indian, see Alfred Vagts, “The Germans and the Red Man,”American–German Review 24 (1957): 13–17 and Jonathan Boyarin, “Europe’s Indian, America’s Jew,” in Karl Kroeber, ed. American Indian: Persistence and Resurgence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 198–223. 16 See Lilian Friedberg, “Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust,” American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2000): 353–380. 8 Chapter 1 reference—i.e. membership in the international Western community, aligned against its antithesis—the murderous barbarism that has found its ultimate incarnation in the evil Nazi. It is a truism by now that no narrative emerges in a vacuum. Meanings thrive as long as forms of human society, however damaged, still remain. The problem for writers on the Holocaust in the early post-war years, as Andrea Reiter notes, was the question of finding an adequate liter- ary form for their experiences: “Wie stelle ich die Schrecken meiner Konzentrationslagerschaft so dar, daß sie glaubwürdig sind?”17 This raises the issue of acquiring a readership. Who will believe such a tale and who is even interested in exposing themselves to such accounts of human depravity and corruption?18 In addition, Reiter poses once again the question of the singularity of the Holocaust with respect to those writers who had been liberated from the camps and who were now faced with the challenge of wresting meaning from these events: “Es gebe keine Vergleichsbilder aus dem Leben jenseits der Konzentrationslager, die das dort Erlebte wahrheitsgemaß beschreiben könnten.”19 The thesis of singularity will always remain a source of controversy, especially in an era where more and more people are writing their own tales of victimization, based on the belief in their own unique situation or condition. The thesis of how and even whether personal testimony is the most accurate and reliable means of recording the truth of what happened in the concentration camps has not only been regarded with scepticism by historians. Jeremy D. Popkin writes, “Autobiographies are

17 Andrea Reiter, “Auf dass sie entsteigen der Dunkelheit”: Die literarische Bewältigung von KZ-Erfahrung (Vienna: Löcker, 1995), p. 22. 18 The theme of combating the culturally imposed silence surrounding the Holocaust can be used as a rhetorical device in Holocaust narratives. For example, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch writes, “Ich weiß, dass Menschen sich vor zu viel Wissen schützen möchten, und auch, dass Angst herrscht, durch Fragen Erinnerungen zu wecken, die einen aus dem Gleichgewicht bringen können. Das Resultat ist: SCHWEIGEN.” Then the narrator proceeds to define herself by her obligation to bear witness. See Ihr sollt die Warheit erben: Die Cellisten von Auschwitz, Erinnerungen (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2007), p. 25. 19 Reiter, “Auf dass sie entsteigen der Dunkelheit,” p. 29. Introduction 9 individual stories, not collective enterprises, and they are based at least in part on evidence that is not available to examination by anyone except their author—namely, personal memory.”20 What is interesting here is that the authors of Holocaust testimony have actually believed that they have been conveying an absolute, untarnished version of the truth. As a result of their tribulations, they have frequently invested themselves with an almost priestly authority that brooks no dissenting opinions.21 That their readership, depending on the culture in which it found itself, initially found their accounts unwelcome or inopportune or impossible to accept made their predicament as writers tenuous at best, but it did not question these writers’ belief that they were actually giving a faith- ful rendition of an event to which only they had access. Sometimes, as in the case of Jean Améry, it bestowed upon their lives a new meaning, a prophet-like identity impelling them to rail against non-believers and ideologues, regardless of which political camp, to instill in them the awareness of the enormity of the catastrophe and the chance of attaining a new level of moral consciousness and humanity. The belief that the teller is actually telling the unadulterated truth of an event is fundamental to our culture. If this were not an embedded axiom, we could not have news reports, trials, or what we still consider to be works of non-fiction. In the case of the Holocaust, who is ready to doubt the veracity of a survivor’s account after learning about the master plan for genocide? Yet we know from the considerable literature on narrative

20 Jeremy D. Popkin, “Holocaust Memories, Historians’ Memoirs: First-Person Narrative and the Memory of the Holocaust,” History and Memory 15, no 1 (2003): 50. 21 Irene Heidelberger-Leonard writes in reference to Ruth Klüger’s achievement: “Der Leser, an den sich der Überlebende richtet, wird in der Regel als unwürdi- ger Empfänger ausgeschlossen, denn nur derjenige, der Auschwitz am eigenen Körper erlitten hat, ist in der Lage, das Beschriebene nachzuvollziehen. Jeden Vergleich wehrt der Autor ab. Die Möglichkeit zum konstruktiven Austausch mit der Täterseite ist von vornherein nicht gegeben.” See “Ruth Klüger weiter leben— Ein Grundstein zu einem neuen Auschwitz ‘Kanon?’” in Stephan Braese, et al., Deutsche Nachkriegsliteratur und der Holocaust (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1998), p. 159. See also Popkin: 51. 10 Chapter 1 and truth that even such accounts may be intrinsically subject to fabri- cation and invention.22 As Herbert Leibowitz argues, “Autobiographers and their exegetes agree on one point, that the truth is a cunning snare, sometimes ‘a crystal residue, indissoluble in memory’s stream,’ as Virgil Thomas puts it, and at other times a comedy of delusions that also bears witness to a historical epoch’s contradictions.”23 Arguing more concretely, Paul John Eakin maintains that “fiction can—even must—play a decisive role in the implementation of a referential aesthetic.”24 Eakin is not imply- ing that autobiography is rooted in mendacity or invention. “Fiction” is simply an ordering principle that helps to shape and invest the stuff of memory with meaning and significance for the teller as well as for the reader, which does not ultimately detract from the autobiographer’s cul- turally entrenched commitment to render a truthful account. Antje Kley sums up this aspect of the relationship between fiction and truth in the autobiographical endeavor: “Der Versuch, die Spaltung zwischen vergan- genen Selbst und zum Zeitpunkt des Schreibens gegenwärtigen Selbst zu schließen oder damit umzugehen, definiert das autobiographische Projekt und unterläuft es gleichzeitig.”25 By definition, then, autobiography is a hybrid construct, comprising both empirically verifiable and imaginative

22 Raul Hilberg, the eminent historian of the Holocaust, points to the frequent unreli- ability of Holocaust narratives: “I opened the book [in this case what was supposed to be a novel] at random and discovered more than a whole page containing my translation of a German document that this author had lifted from a document book I had compiled. Together with this real record, he presented fictional texts of bureaucratic correspondence that he had made up to complete his amalgam of history and fantasy. The reader, however, was not informed that my document was fact and that the other, apparently verbatim passages were the author’s inventions.” See The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago: Dee, 1996), p. 139. 23 Herbert Leibowitz, Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. 3. 24 Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 40. 25 Antje Kley, “Das erlesene Selbst” in der autobiographischen Schrift: Zu Politik und Poetik der Selbstreflexion bei Roth, Delany, Lorde, und Kingston (Tübingen: Narr, 2001), p. 2. Introduction 11 elements, all subsumed under the general pledge that the account pre- sented is the truth, all the while knowing that truth is an ideal to aspire towards and not a readily achievable goal. Given these caveats, some scholars have moved away from narrative considerations of autobiography and have preferred to see autobiography as a societal act: “The autobiographer considers the composition of the intended audience, the current climate of opinion, concerning what is an acceptable self, and the conventions of storytelling and autobiography.”26 Influenced by Erving Goffman, Diane Bjorklund regards autobiography as a form of self-presentation having more to do with establishing a social consensus and achieving success and status among one’s peers than with necessarily adhering to principles of truth. This also applies to the writer of Holocaust literature, who has traditionally been working within a social consensus rooted in the twin constraints of taboo and guilt:

Der tradierte Erzählgestus in der Literatur zu Vergangenheitsbewältigung ist bekannt. Handelt es sich um einen nichtjüdischen Autor, so nähert er sich seinem Thema ehrfürchtig, mit Betroffenheit bis Pathos, Mythisierung bis Tabuisierung. Die Zeit ist damals, das Geschehen abgeschlossen. Das Opfer wird sakralisiert, der Täter dämonisiert.”27

Similarly, the Jewish author in Germany has in part based his or her lit- erary identity and work on the changing valuations of Jews and victims in German society. Although as Hartmut Steinecke points out, a new found confidence and vitality caan be found in German-Jewish writ- ing, the critical establishment, most notably those scholars affiliated with the institutions of Germanistik, have found it difficult to acknowl- edge this development: “Bis weit in die achtziger Jahre herrschte die Vermeidung dieser Adjektive [German-Jewish] vor, um nicht in den

26 Diane Bjorklund, Interpreting the Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 17. 27 Heidelberger-Leonard, “Ruth Klüger weiter leben …,” p. 159. 12 Chapter 1

Verdacht zu geraten, man führe, und sei es unbewusst, nationalsozialis- tische Etikettierungen fort.”28 Despite the vital interest in autobiographical literature, more recent research has not only pointed to the inherent unreliability of narrative and more specifically of autobiographical narration, but has also dem- onstrated how autobiographical literature has traditionally been riddled with subterfuge and deceit. As Timothy Dow Adams writes, “Not only do authors sometimes have difficulty in determining precisely what genre they are working in, but they also deliberately blur the genre for rhetori- cal effect.”29 In other words, according to Adams, for the writer engaged in autobiography, “Is it more important to be true or to ring true?”30 Certainly, manipulation can be unconscious or conscious and in some cases both processes are working. But what about the case of an author actually refashioning a new personal identity and then, as in the case of Bruno Dössekker alias Binjamin Wilkomirski, of writing his memoirs based on this invented identity?31 Even this, as Adams points out, may not be terribly novel. Concentrating on American autobiographies of the Twenties of the last century, he argues, “Other writers [in addition to Gertrude Stein] of the era wrote fictionalised collaborative autobiogra- phies and passed them off as straightforward autobiography.”32 Does the fact that these authors frequently left clues that their accounts should not be read as traditional autobiographies exculpate them from embroidering an obvious deception, even when it is shared by the initiated reader? Autobiographical literature is supposed to conform to certain stand- ards of truth testing, but these standards often defy verification. The case

28 Hartmut Steinecke, “‘Deutsch-jüdische’ Literatur heute: Die Generation nach der Shoah; zur Einführung,” in Sander L. Gilman and Hartmut Steinecke, ed. Deutsch-jüdische Literatur der neunziger Jahre: Die Generation nach der Shoah (Berlin: Schmidt, 2002), p. 11. 29 Timothy Dow Adams, Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 8. 30 Adams, Telling Lies, p. 9. 31 Binjamin Wikomirski’s book, Bruchstücke (1995), will be considered in the second chapter of this study. 32 Adams, p. 19. Introduction 13 of the fraudulent autobiography of Howard Hughes serves as a good example. The author, Clifford Irving, obtained an interview with Hughes and one of his personal aides and transformed it into what was deemed as an authoritative autobiography. The facts presented in the narrative appeared to be plausible, as far as what was generally agreed to be known about the mysterious recluse. More importantly, the self presented in the text also appeared to capture what was believed to be Hughes’ quirky, idiosyncratic style. In other words, on the basis of what was passed off as reliable evidence, a convincing case was made for the existence of a legiti- mate, authoritative autobiography. The only problem was that this could not be determined conclusively. Only when the forgery was uncovered by painstaking investigation was one finally able to declare that this was a fiction or a biography or, according to the law, a hoax. As G. Thomas Couser notes, “It shows how difficult it is to determine the authority of autobiography even in relatively favourable circumstances, for this elusive phenomenon is ultimately a function of a constellation of factors.”33 The reader, in other words, does not have the resources to establish the authenticity of an autobiographical narrative, i.e. the reader can nei- ther verify the facts being told nor establish the congruence of author and narrator. In the same way, the authors themselves are not always capable of determining the veracity of their narratives. As Adams points out, “How would readers know if they were reading the truth, and how could writers separate poetic truth from factual truth, psychological truth from family truth?”34 What remains is a narrative couched in the expectation that what is being revealed has a certain truth value, however fragile. The authors of Holocaust testimony are faced with an additional challenge. Bound by the obligation to tell of an incomparable evil, they are also compelled to resort to literary models in order to present their horrific experiences, thus implicitly questioning whether their narratives are without precedent in the history of the human condition. Thus, what is postulated as the incomprehensible and indescribable horror of the

33 G. Thomas Couser,Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 11. 34 Adams, p. 8. 14 Chapter 1

Holocaust is conveyed in the form of narratives known to the authors as well as to their readerships. For example, Andrea Reiter points out that the earliest Holocaust authors couched their suffering in the form of Chassidic fables or the travel book.35 Louis Begley’s arguably autobio- graphical novel, Wartime Lies (1991), although proclaimed to be written in a cosmological and hence narrative vacuum, turns out to resemble the familiar picaresque novel.36 Other works resemble rags to riches tales, tales of redemption, Bildungsromane, initiation narratives, narratives of return, and a host of other narrative forms. One example illustrates the diversity of narrative production on the Holocaust. Hans Frankenthal’s memoir—Verweigerte Rückkehr (1999)—encompasses the period from 1933 to 1995, beginning signifi- cantly with his liberation from Theresienstadt in 1945 and invoking a motif found in myth and epic poetry of complying with his father’s last wishes by returning to his birthplace in Schmallenberg, a small village near Dortmund. The succeeding chapters follow chronologically Frankenthal’s path of suffering to Theresienstadt via Auschwitz-Monowitz, describing the death marches and all the other depredations suffered by Jews at the hands of the Nazis.37 Curiously enough, the chronological narrative is eclipsed by a typological or thematic narrative of the familiar atrocities perpetrated upon Jewish Holocaust victims, so that Verweigerte Rückkehr not only can be approached as an individual memoir, but also as an edu- cational primer on the Holocaust. Furthermore, what distinguishes this book from many other Holocaust memoirs is that the Holocaust is not foregrounded as the most salient chapter in the history of anti-Semitism

35 Reiter, pp. 84–99. 36 Louis Begley, Wartime Lies (New York: Ballantine, 1991). 37 There are an interesting number of memoirs and autobiographical works couched in the narrative of return by native German speakers written in English, who managed either to emigrate in time or to conceal themselves successfully from their persecutors. Among the most noteworthy are Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory, previously referred to, and Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (1999). On memoirs written by historians on their experiences in Nazi Germany, see Jeremy D. Popkin, “Holocaust Memories, Historians’ Memoirs: First-Person Narrative and the Memory of the Holocaust”: 49–84. Introduction 15 in Germany. Instead, Frankenthal’s memoir bestows equal weight on the post-war period, which proves to be a continuation of chicanery and discrimination against Jews, once again both by the state and more significantly by civil society.38 Frankenthal’s memoir is, in other words, not only a Holocaust memoir, but also an indictment of the Federal Republic, which, accord- ing to Frankenthal, is not only incapable of administering justice to the victims, but has also permitted and condoned the perpetuation of discred- ited prejudices. The shift in the center of gravity of the narrative from the Holocaust to the post-war period raises the question of authorship, since although Hans Frankenthal is listed as the author, three other names are mentioned as collaborators. In addition to Frankenthal’s memoir, there is also an afterword illuminating the genesis of the work, suggesting whether the work can be said to have a group authorship:

Hans Frankenthal nahm unseren Vorschlag an, seine Biographie zu schreiben. Wir führten mit ihm ein mehrtägiges Interview, dem weitere folgten. Auf Grundlage einer gemeinsamen konzeptionellen Diskussion wurden die transkribierten Tonbänder von Babette Quinkert literarisch umgesetzt. Der biographische Text wurde mit Andreas Plake und Florian Schmalz in enger Kooperation mit Hans Frankenthal in seine Endfassung gebracht.39

Furnished with a glossary of key terms and events integral to under- standing the Holocaust, presumably written by the collaborators, along with maps of the concentration camps and documents revealing the per- secution of Jewish citizens, Frankenthal’s memoir is not only a narrative of victimization and triumph, but also an attempt to complete the task sadly neglected by both the victorious allies and the Federal Republic of

38 Other Holocaust memoirs follow the same plot. For example, Henny Brenner depicts the persecution against Jews by the authorities in the German Democratic Republic. See ‘Das Lied ist aus’: Ein jüdisches Schicksal in Dresden (Zurich: Pendo, 2001). 39 Hans Frankenthal, Verweigerte Rückkehr: Erfahrungen nach dem Judenmord (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999), p. 176. 16 Chapter 1 reeducating the German public to come to terms with recent German history. Frankenthal’s memoir leads us to the issue of mediation. Every expe- rience, regardless of how abhorrent or unusual, must be conveyed in the form of a recognizable story. When the narrative is not recognizable, i.e. when it fails to find an audience, then the experience is either forgotten or rewritten to reach an accessible audience. The temptation of kitsch becomes an issue here. Kitsch, as Saul Friedländer writes, is the celebra- tion of normality: “Universell ohne Zweifel, ist Kitsch jedoch immer auch angepaßt an den Geschmack der großen Mehrheit, getreuer Ausdruck der allgemeinen Gefühlswelt, der Harmonie, die der Kleinbürger liebt, da er in ihr die Schönheit und die Ordnung der Dinge gewährleistet sieht. Die bestehende Ordnung der gegebenen Dinge.”40 However we may define kitsch, whatever valuation we may ascribe to it, kitsch is one of the prerequisites of any communicative act. Without kitsch, we would inhabit a world of strange landscapes and indecipherable signs. Kitsch makes the world familiar and palatable. We may choose to expose kitsch for what it is, but this would then constitute a deliberate intervention in the stream of ordinary life, tantamount to what Brecht and his devotees would call Verfremdung—the intentional alienation of one’s audience for the purpose of making it aware of the putatively real conditions of everyday life. It is platitudinous to mention that art and kitsch are dichotomous values or that kitsch is the antithesis of sincerity and truth or that good taste and kitsch are mutually exclusive. Nonetheless, just as in the same nar- rative, art can suddenly or temporarily assume the trappings of kitsch, so can kitsch suddenly transform itself into a profound exploration of truth. In the case of Holocaust literature, kitsch may not only be interpreted as a severe breach with the truth or a sacrilegious violation of the memories of the six million or the cheap manipulation of the past or the contemptible

40 Saul Friedländer, Kitsch und Tod: Der Widerschein des Nazismus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999), p. 31. See also Hilberg’s commentary on kitsch as “routinely” found in Holocaust literature, i.e. in historical literature in The Politics of Memory, p. 141. Introduction 17 surrender to commercialism, but also as an attempt to salvage a form amid events that appear to undermine a coherent narrative. The need to find a familiar narrative to couch utterly strange and abhorrent experiences is but one temptation faced by both writers and readers of Holocaust literature. The second temptation occurs when this narrative is introduced to the marketplace, i.e. when it becomes a commodity. The fact that the Holocaust can be mass-produced in word and image and transmitted through a variety of media makes it almost inevitable that melodrama, cliché, sentimentality, stylization, as well as an absence of complexity, may become part of Holocaust narrative. Above all, the mechanical reproduction of the Holocaust as a commodity may result in what one scholar has noted is a characteristic of kitsch, namely, “the mechanical reproduction of standardized forms of affect.”41 If the need to comprehend a complex phenomenon is reduced to a well-nigh homogeneous product, then the response may also become predictable and one-dimensional. The result is that the Holocaust becomes a derivative artefact, removed from history and hermeneutics, subject to automatic associations and formulaic-like utterances, all designed to reinforce a socially entrenched catechism. The third temptation occurs when the recipient is eager to enter into a relationship with the work, the nature of which enables the reader to resolve certain internal conflicts and assists in creating what seems to be a worthwhile identity for the reader. This may be achieved even at the expense of the suspension of one’s critical and aesthetic faculties. In this sense the recipient is complicit in the overall desideratum of transform- ing the Holocaust into a palatable product, since the benefits accrued from sharing in the underlying value system of the narrative may lead to a diminution of guilt and a new relationship with the past, from which one has previously felt disconnected or estranged. Thus, by becoming a member of such a readership, one creates a community of believers, all

41 David Lloyd, “The Recovery of Kitsch,” in Distant Relations/Cercanías Distantes/ Clann1gCein: Chicano, Mexican Art, and Critical Writing (New York: Smart Art Press, 1995), pp. 146–155, http://www.zonezero.com/magazine/essays/distant/ zrecu2.html. 18 Chapter 1 intent on establishing a like-minded moral code more preoccupied with consensus than with truth.42 The result of this change in mentality has led German readers of Holocaust literature to search for moral absolution. They seem to be making the claim that since they have come to read this gruesome history of persecution, victimization, and unspeakable criminality, they have the possibility of attaining virtue. By reading these accounts of martyrdom, this readership can engage in what Moshe Zuckermann calls an “ideo- logical-political purification ritual ofVergangenheitsbewältigung .”43 This obviously suggests an intricate reading experience, with the reader assum- ing an equally complex role and function. Not only is the reader longing for a suitable identity involving catharsis and expiation, but he or she is also searching for a community of like-minded believers. Phil C. Langer, referring to his own experience of reading Holocaust literature, phrases it somewhat dramatically as “die mystisch-hermetischen Betroffenheitskult und projizierten Martyrerimagination.”44 Like the term Bewältigung, Betroffenheit is another concept that is difficult to translate comfortably. In Langer’s usage of Betroffenheitskult, there is an obvious hint of irony. A process is going on that is not quite genuine or serving the purpose for which it was initially conceived. In other words, the moral commitment or psychological benefit expected to be achieved after such an event has not been realized in a bona fide way. The reader belonging to such a “cult” may be susceptible to what Eric L. Santner calls “narrative fetishism,” which he defines as “the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that

42 This is the thesis offered by Peter Novick, which, simply stated, argues that the Holocaust has been appropriated and refashioned as a seminal event to reestablish Jewish identity in the wake of rapid assimilation in America. See The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). 43 Moshe Zuckermann, “The Israeli and German Holocaust Discourses and Their Transatlantic Dimension,” in Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore, ed. The German- American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures, 1800–2000 (New York: Berghahn, 2001), p. 191. 44 Phil C. Langer. Schreiben gegen die Erinnerung? Autobiographien von Überlebenden der Shoah (Hamburg; Krämer, 2002), p. 9. Introduction 19 called the narrative into being in the first place.”45 Concretely, this means “a strategy of undoing in fantasy the need for mourning by simulating a condition of intactness, typically by situating the site and origin of loss elsewhere.”46 This process is neatly contrasted with Trauerarbeit or “the work of mourning,” advocated by the Mitscherlichs, which denotes a serious working through of the traumatic event. Although many of the readers of the works discussed in this study did not experience National Socialism and the war directly, they, never- theless, experienced recent history, as Ernst Nolte has expressed it, as the “past that would not be past.” (Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will )47 National Socialism, especially the Holocaust, has continued to haunt this generation, engendering a mentality of the eternally flawed nation or what popular discourse has referred to as “die Täternation” (the per- petrator nation).48 Since Germany, according to this belief system, was irremediably sullied by her association with Nazism and Auschwitz, it could never fully take her place among the great powers, but had to con- stantly remind herself of her crimes, especially the depredations against European Jewry. Bernhard Giesen notes that not only is the Holocaust an integral part of German national identity, but also “Die Angst vor der Wiederkehr der Vergangenheit und das Bemühen von ihr los zu kommen sind heute eines der stärksten Motive der deutschen Geschichtspolitik.”49

45 Eric L. Santner, “History beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma,” in Saul Friedländer, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 144. 46 Santner, “History beyond the Pleasure Principle,” p. 145. 47 This has become almost a mantra of recent German political discourse, cited continually by critics who are attempting to examine issues related to Vergangenheitsbewältigung. See Ernst Nolte’s article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 6 (1986) that sparked the controversy entitled “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will: Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht gehalten werden konnte.” 48 Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit, pp. 83–84. 49 Bernhard Giesen, “Das Tätertrauma der Deutschen,” Marburger Forum: Beiträge zur geistigen Situation der Gegenwart 7, no. 4 (2006), http://www.philosophia- online.de/mafo/heft2006–4/Gie_Tae.htm.