University of Cincinnati

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date: November 8, 2005 I, Susanne Lenné Jones , hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: Doctorate of Philosophy in: German Studies It is entitled: What’s in a Frame?: Photography, Memory, and History in Contemporary German Literature This work and its defense approved by: Chair: Dr. Katharina Gerstenberger Dr. Sara Friedrichsmeyer Dr. Todd Herzog Dr. Richard Schade WHAT’S IN A FRAME?: PHOTOGRAPHY, MEMORY, AND HISTORY IN CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LITERATURE A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) In the Department of German Studies of the College of Arts and Sciences 2005 By Susanne Lenné Jones M.A., University of Cincinnati, 1999 M.A. (equivalent), Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, FASK Germersheim B.A. (equivalent), Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, FASK Germersheim Committee Chair: Dr. Katharina Gerstenberger, Associate Professor University of Cincinnati ii Abstract During the past two decades, a vast body of German literature has appeared that is interested not only in the Holocaust but also in the way Germans have dealt with the legacy of National Socialism over the last sixty years. Especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification, a number of literary works have appeared that use photographs to approach this limit-event and its remembrance in German national and private discourses. At the same time, the scholarly attention given to questions of memory and its representation has also sharply increased over the last few decades. Such debates have brought forth a number of demands in order for Holocaust literature to become productive for remembrance as well as for the creation of the present and the future. The following study investigates works by Monika Maron, W. G. Sebald, and Irina Liebmann. Of particular interest is the question of how these authors have integrated photographs within their texts in order to address and overcome the problems of Holocaust representation: the generational distance, absences and silences as well as the institutionalization and instrumentalization of memory. The first chapter lays out the theoretical framework that informs the discussion of the most vital concepts treated in this study: fact and fiction, history and memory, photography and text. The subsequent three chapters investigate the respective works written by the three authors: Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe (1999), W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten (1992) and Austerlitz (2001), and Irina Liebmann’s Stille Mitte von Berlin (2002). I maintain that the complex and paradoxical nature of photography, most significantly its simultaneous claim to truth and to deception, renders it a particularly fruitful means to negotiate questions of factuality and fiction as well as memory and history. It allows these authors iii to engage the reader in a problematization of the concept of truth as well as the constructedness of all forms of representation. iv © Susanne Lenné Jones, 2005 All Rights Reserved v Contents Introduction 2 1. What’s in a Frame?: Photography, Memory, and History 9 2. “The Quest for Memory is the Search for one’s History:” 42 Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe 3. Poetics of Uncertainty: 103 W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz 4. Path(s) to the Truth: 167 Irina Liebmann’s Stille Mitte von Berlin Conclusion 218 Bibliography 226 Appendix: 240 Interview with Irina Liebmann 1 Introduction The recent surge of German literature interested not only in the Holocaust but also in the way Germans have dealt with the legacy of National Socialism over the last sixty years has received much critical and scholarly attention. Especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification, a number of literary works have appeared that deal with this limit-event1 and its remembrance in German national and private discourses. One phenomenon, however, has not received substantial scholarly consideration: a significant number of these works offer new and complex approaches not only through their narratives, but also through an additional level of reading. Several of these works, such as Marcel Beyer’s Spione (2002), Stephan Wackwitz’ Ein unsichtbares Land (2005) as well as the four works discussed in this study, include photographs and reproductions of other documents such as diaries, letters and postcards. While these “stranded objects” (Eric Santner) are often a marginal part of the discussion or have become the topic of individual articles, no major study has linked the inclusion of photographs to the self- reflexive memory projects that German literature has brought forth during the years before and shortly after the turn of the millennium. While German fiction has seen the inclusion of photographs before,2 it has never occurred with such frequency, never in such a complex way that not only cashes in on the medium’s referentiality but also questions its ability to authenticate. It is no coincidence 1 In Probing the Limits of Representation Saul Friedländer describes the Holocaust as a “limit-event” which lies outside the limits of our comprehension and thus forces us to find new ways of representing it. 2 Especially during the seventies, it was quite popular to reprint photographs within literary texts. See for example Thomas Brasch’s Kargo (1977), Jürgen Becker’s Eine Zeit ohne Wörter (1971), and Peter Handke’s Als das Wünschen noch geholfen hat (1974). 2 that such a twofold approach emerges at a time when dealing with the past has become the focus of public and scholarly attention. Especially the ceremonies commemorating the fifty-year-anniversary of the end of the Nazi regime and World War II in the mid- nineties have fueled criticism of the institutionalization of Holocaust memory. Yet, at a time when the victims, perpetrators and witnesses of Nazi crimes become fewer and fewer, a renewed interest in preserving the memories of the victims of the Holocaust as well as of the crimes committed by the perpetrators surfaces. It is no longer the first- generation writers, that is, survivors or witnesses of the Jewish genocide, who put to paper such accounts. Instead, second- and third-generation authors look back on a time they did not consciously experience themselves, but to which they have access only through the historical or memory accounts of others. Born in the final years of World War II, Monika Maron, Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald, and Irina Liebmann all belong to this second generation of authors. Their parents experienced the effects of the Nazi persecution and the war to a greater or lesser degree through the loss of loved ones, through exile or even through the total destruction of their living space by way of the Allied bombings. All three authors grew up in post-war Germany, where the effects of this catastrophe were much felt, but little talked about. Silence permeates their childhood experiences and finds its way into their narratives in forms of gaps and voids. Consequently this second-generation perspective shapes their works in important ways: Maron’s Pawels Briefe (1999), Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten (1992) and Austerlitz (2001), and Irina Liebmann’s Stille Mitte von Berlin (2002) are characterized by these silences and by a historical and generational distance to their subjects. This study is interested in how these authors attempt and 3 manage to overcome the afore-mentioned distance and silences: How do they write in the face of silence and how do they approach and appropriate a history that they have not personally experienced? How do they transform this part of history into a personalized narrative that defies the institutionalization and instrumentalization of memory, of which all three are so weary? The three authors chosen for this study share yet another experience. Maron, Sebald and Liebmann all have distanced themselves from their homelands and exchanged it for another. Maron and Liebmann were dissatisfied with the GDR regime they had grown up in and emigrated to the West just a year before the fall of the Wall. Sebald left Germany for Great Britain in the late nineteen sixties. This experience of emigration grants these authors a unique perspective: They share a critical and somewhat distant stance to Germany and its public (memory) discourses. All four works, then, also represent personalized alternatives to public commemoration ceremonies of a country (East and West Germany respectively) with which these authors have (had) conflicted relationships. As a result, it is not surprising that these books are in part autobiographical. We know that inquiries into the past are equally informed by present needs and desires. The kinds of breaks and turning points that characterize the Germany of the second half of the twentieth century are also reflected in the personal lives of Maron, Sebald and Liebmann: the post-war years, the Cold War, the fall of the Wall and the “Aufbruchsstimmung,” as the time after German reunification in 1990 is often called. Especially for Maron and Liebmann, whose homeland no longer exists in the form in which they had left it, the 4 search for their private and public past is also a search for their present selves, for their post-GDR identity. By tying their narratives closely to their own life stories, Maron, Sebald, and Liebmann are able to tell the history of the twentieth century as one marked by breaks and gaps. Due to their own fragmented nature, photographs can dramatize such fragmentation as well as the attempts to overcome the discontinuities. At the same time, because photographs are able to withstand the total integration of their visual and spatial content into a temporal narrative, this medium allows the authors to draw attention to the impossibility of establishing continuous narratives that will make sense and provide closure to this troubling and haunting past.

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