View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Birmingham Research Archive, E-theses Repository NEGOTIATING GERMAN VICTIMHOOD IN THE AMERICAN MISERY MEMOIR by DIETLINDE SCHMUCKER A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY College of Arts and Law Department of Modern Languages German Studies University of Birmingham December 2017 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This study brings together for the first time four non-canonical memoirs written by women from various backgrounds who emigrated from Germany to the United States in the early post-war years and whose texts were published in English in the United States between 2004 and 2011: Irmgard Powell, Don’t Let Them See You Cry: Overcoming a Nazi Childhood (2008); Irmgard A. Hunt, On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood (2005); Maria Ritter, Return to Dresden (2004); Sabina de Werth Neu, A Long Silence: Memories of a German Refugee Child 1941-1958 (2011). The memoirs chosen for this study were written by women who were born in Germany between 1932 and 1941. These memoirs address an American readership and entered the American public sphere via the popularity of the contemporary misery memoir. I demonstrate how the trope of the innocent child, articulations of citizenship and confessions to guilt and shame construct the necessary framework of German culpability for the Nazi past to enable a testimony to the victimhood of the protagonists, their families and, in part, the wider German population. The memoirs of childhood are, therefore, expressions of personal, collective and transnational memory. This study contributes not only to memory and literary studies but also to a historiography of National Socialism that includes diverse individual stories from the bottom up, of women belonging to the Kriegskinder generation who now live in the United States. ii In memory of my parents Rita and Herbert Stoerzer iii Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Joanne Sayner, for her excellent guidance, constructive criticism and patient support throughout the various stages of my thesis. Many thanks also go to Dr. Nicholas Martin for his advice, support and encouragement in the last stages as well. Last but not least, I thank my brother, Karl, and my friends who have cheered me on from the beginning and believed in me. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction 1.0 Eyewitnesses within German and American Discourse 1 1.1 Crossing Borders: The Framework of Transnational and 4 Transcultural Memory 1.2 The Memory Boom and the Misery Memoir in an American Context 6 1.3 The Transnational Figure of the Child and the Witness 9 1.4 Confession, Testimony and the Therapeutic American Culture 10 1.5 German Kriegskinder as Witnesses and a “culture of victimhood” 13 1.6 Gender and the Stories of Others 17 1.7 Contemporary German Discourse on Suffering and Victimhood 19 1.8 A “universal victim narrative” and Narrative Empathy 23 1.9 The Rhetorical Function of the Epistolary, Photographs and Paratexts 26 1.10 Conclusion: Chapter Overviews 30 Chapter Two: A Quest for Self-Rehabilitation 2.0 Introduction 34 2.1 The Initial Paratextual Construction of the Naïve Child 35 2.2 “The trap of Hitler’s hateful ideology”: Ambiguous Family Identities 38 2.2.1 “Oma” and Midwives: Nanna Conti and Narrative Silence 38 2.2.2 “Two Men”?: The Narrative Construction of Leonardo Conti 43 2.2.3 The Trope of “politics”: The Dubious Identity of Elfriede Conti 48 2.3 The Unknowing Child and the “Conti girl”: Identity Constructions 53 of the Child and Young Protagonist 2.4 “Nightmares”: Stories of Bombings 61 2.5 Representations of the Enemy Other: ‘The Slavs’ and the Conti 64 Household 2.6 “We would never be a family again”: Suicide and the Epistolary, 1945 65 2.7 “No future in Germany”: The Construction of the Protagonist as an 71 American and Lack of an Echo from American Readers 2.8 Conclusion: A Cathartic Ending? 74 Chapter Three: Guilt and “Ordinary Citizens” 3.0 Introduction 77 3.1 Politics and Paratexts: The Protagonist as a “true little Nazi child” 80 3.2 German Stories and the American Audience: A “mixed bag” 84 and the Theme of Powerlessness 3.3 The First World War, Weimar and Family History: Early Victimhood 88 3.4 A Family’s Dissonant Ideological Identities 92 3.4.1 A Staunch Supporter and Reluctant Soldier: The Protagonist’s 92 Father 3.4.2 “An average German woman”: Nazi Ideology and a Mother’s 94 Transitions 3.5 “We, Hitler’s Children”: Early Beginnings of Ideological Socialization 103 3.5.1 The Influence of “Nazi Fanatics” 105 3.5.2 From Early Anti-Semitism and Racist Conditioning to New Perspectives 110 v 3.5.3 An Indecisive Young Protagonist and the Influence of Non-Supporters 114 3.6 Children, Refugees, Russians and Rape: Stories of Suffering 118 3.7 Conclusion: “Hitler’s war” and Powerless Germans? 121 Chapter Four: The War Child as “Survivor-Perpetrator” 4.0 Introduction 129 4.1 Dresden and the Paratextual Construction of the Traumatized Child 133 4.2 Layers of Silence: The Silenced Child and Silent Adult 136 4.3 “Survivor Perpetrators,” Survivor Victims” and the Mitzvah: 141 Framework of Culpability 4.4 Dissonant Communities: German-American and German Personal 143 Memory 4.5 The Church, Anti-Semitism and Vaterlandsliebe: Ambiguous 148 Constructions of a Family 4.5.1 Hitler and God’s Punishment: Construction of Paternal Grandfather 148 4.5.2 “A Man of the Cross” and “Hitler’s Soldier”: The Conflicting Narrative 150 Identities of the Protagonist’s Father 4.5.3 “The central person”: The Protagonist’s Mother 155 4.6 The Innocent Child?: The Anti-Semitic Protagonist 159 4.7 The Victors, German Suffering and Punishment 161 4.7.1 A Critique of the Allies 161 4.7.2 Americans and the “good war”? 166 4.7.3 The Russian Other and the Suffering of Refugees 168 4.8 Germany’s Victims and German Victims as a Group of Survivors 170 4.9 Conclusion: A Blurring of Boundaries 172 Chapter Five: A Universal Victim Narrative 5.0 Introduction 176 5.1 The Paratextual Construction of the Silent German and Thankful American 178 5.2 The Trope of the Artichoke: Silence and Identity Problems 183 5.3 The Protagonist as Hitler’s Victim 189 5.4 The Refugee Trek: Parallel Stories of Suffering 191 5.4.1 A Personal Story of Rape and the Russian Other 197 5.5 Benevolent American Soldiers as “children of Uncle Marshall” 203 5.6 Denazification as a Turning Point 205 5.7 A Courageous Fighter: The Protagonist’s Mother 207 5.8 Male Figures of (No) Authority: The Casanova, the Freidenker, 209 the un-German and Gay Uncles 5.9 Conclusion: “In war all are victims” 213 Chapter Six: Conclusion 217 Endnotes 240 Bibliography 246 vi CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1.0 Eyewitnesses within German and American Discourse This study brings together for the first time four non-canonical memoirs published in English in the United States between 2004 and 2011 by women who experienced the Second World War in Germany as children and later emigrated to the United States. The memoirs were published for an American readership in the midst of what Andreas Huyssen has called “a memory boom of unprecedented proportions” in the United States (1995, p. 5). They have also been published during a concurrent memory boom in Germany in which the testimonies of the last eyewitnesses to the Second World War have been published in recent years responding to a pressing need to record them for posterity (Stargardt, 2006; Bode, 2011; Assmann, 2016; Müller, Pinfold and Wölfel, 2016). Francis Russell Hart defines memoir as “the personal act of repossessing a public world, historical, institution, collective […] The memoirs are of a person, but they are ‘really’ of an event, an era” (Hart cited in Buss, 2002, p. xi, emphasis in original). In today’s “era of the witness” individual stories of the Second World War and Nazism such as the memoirs in this study are valued for their contribution to a more comprehensive historiography of those years (Müller, Pinfold and Wölfel 2016, p. 418). Scholarship in history, memory and literary studies has dealt extensively with German working through the past and the relatively recent re-emergence of discourses of wartime suffering (Niven, 2004; Cohen-Pfister, 2005; Assmann, 2006b, 2006c, 2016; Stargardt, 2006, 2007; Schmitz, 2007a, 2007b). Research on Germans who experienced the Nazi regime and subsequently emigrated to the United States is, however, rare and has only been done in oral 1 history projects (Freund, 2002, 2008).1 Therefore, it has largely gone unnoticed in the extensive scholarship on the diverse roles of Germans during the Hitler regime that the children of the former enemy and members of a “‘symbolic’ nation of perpetrators” who emigrated to the United States are also seeking to inscribe their stories into the historiography of the Second World War (Cohen-Pfister and Wienroeder-Skinner, 2006, p.