THESIS The Stories we Carry Part I: A Novel Seabirds of Jutland Part II: Exegesis Family Archives, the Writing of Absence and the Second World War in Europe. A thesis submitted towards the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. Author: Elizabeth Anne Bostock Date: February 2018 Abstract This thesis is engaged with a critical exploration of and creative response to family archives. Presented in two parts, the thesis is first a work of fiction, a novel, which was initially inspired by my own Danish family history during the Second World War, but soon found a life of its own. Set in a small provincial town in Jutland, the novel explores themes of loss and connection, as well as those of loneliness and compromise. The second part is an interrogation of the stories we carry: stories from history, stories from the family archive and stories conjured up from the imagination alone. In the Holmboe family archive, I discovered forty- two volumes of Christian Holmboe’s journals and among them the list of the dead in the family’s home town of Horsens in early September 1943. Ebbe Holmboe, my great-uncle, was murdered at the age of twenty-three in a Nazi concentration camp. Signs in this Danish archive led me to a diverse selection of accounts written across Europe during and after the Second World War and included the archival research, journals and creative responses of Élisabeth Gille (the daughter of Irene Némirovsky), Georges Perec and Jacqueline Mesnil- Amar among others. Their unique works of memoir, documentary journal and imagined biography confront the annihilation of family during war and seek to articulate the aftermath that endures far beyond the events themselves. The thesis ends with a reflection on the prose fiction of W.G. Sebald and Anne Michaels, two novelists who show how imagined stories can fill the silences left by history and create new memories. For my family, the living and the dead. Acknowledgements I would like to offer my warmest thanks to my supervisors, William Fiennes and Linda Anderson, for their patient guidance during the years of this project. In addition, my gratitude goes to my mother, Jette Evans, as well as to my uncle, Lars Holmboe, and others in my extended Danish family who have shared their memories and thoughtful observations throughout. With limited Danish, I was appreciative of the help and advice given by Danish family members in translating documents from the Holmboe archive. I am also grateful to Dr. Nathaniel Hong, an American academic, who sent me photographs of several hundred pages of Christian Holmboe’s dagbøger and, most generously, many of his own notes and English translations. His book, Occupied, Denmark’s Adaptation and Resistance to German Occupation 1940–1945, also formed an important part of my background research. In the novel, Seabirds of Jutland, I have quoted from The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. The story about the mythical seal- women is based on the Faroese folk tale about ‘selkies’, seals who shed their skins and came onto land as human women. The list of human values is closely based on a list made by Christian Holmboe in 1937. Arne Sejr’s ‘ten commandments’ are taken from the original, which was widely circulated in Jutland at the start of the occupation, and was translated with the help of Jette Evans. Although the idea for the novel found its origin in Holmboe family history, the characters in the novel are products of my imagination and any perceived resemblance is coincidental. Table of Contents The Stories we Carry Part I: A Novel. Seabirds of Jutland ................................................................................. 1 Part II: Exegesis: Family Archives, the Writing of Absence and the Second World War in Europe. ............................................................................................................... 181 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 185 Chapter 1. The Holmboe Family Archive ........................................................... 193 Chapter 2. The Memory of Paper ........................................................................ 223 Chapter 3. The Naming of Absence .................................................................... 237 Chapter 4. Signs ................................................................................................. 257 Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 275 Table of Figures ................................................................................................. 281 Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 283 Part I: A Novel. Seabirds of Jutland 2 A shadow falls from every life into other lives, and the heavy are bound to the light as they are to air and earth. Swansong 1945, Walter Kempowski1 1 Walter Kempowski, Swansong 1945, p. 396. 3 4 March 1947 Shall I start now? (Silence) Jesper? If you’re ready. So how are you going to do this? I’ll ask questions. You answer them. What do you want to know? (Pause) I want to know about the boy who was shot. You mean Søren Juhl? Far said you might not want to talk about it. What do you want to know? (Pause) What did he look like? Don’t you remember him? He used to come to your Far’s butchery. No. He was tall. Pale face. Pale hair. Pigeon-toed. Long legs. He could run. I told you that, didn’t I? I used to watch him out there on the beach. He liked to run right at the water’s edge, where the sand was the hardest. (Silence) Is it true that his Far tied him to a bed for two days? Yes, when he was very young. Left him with nothing to drink, nothing to eat? So it seems. 5 * They called it the white hour, when the sea fret had transformed overnight into fog. At sunrise, it covered the fjord, enveloping everything in a layer of cloud. It advanced inland in rolling drifts, engulfing first the beach and then the dunes and the collection of wooden summerhouses that ran along the Jutland coast. All sound was muted and the wind stilled, even the gulls were silent. On a day like this the only thing that could be heard was the muffled rumbling of the sea, unseen somewhere out in the whiteness. Ellen Pedersen stood in the doorway of the summerhouse known as Søvindhuset, House of the Sea Wind. She blinked several times as if to clear the fog, then closed her eyes, relishing the damp caress of the air. It was strangely consoling to be back, she thought. A little unexpected. But what exactly had she expected? The small summerhouse stood apart from the others towards the tip of land called Swan Point that marked the end of the fjord and the beginning of the Kattegat Sea. A blanket hung loosely from Ellen’s shoulders. She wore no shoes, just the thick socks that she’d found stuffed into an old pair of clogs at the back of the house. Had they belonged to Per, the man who’d once been her lover, or to the boy, Søren Vitus Juhl, her sea-urchin boy? As she walked around the side of the house, a memory of summer three years earlier returned, luminous and sharp. Per and Søren sitting with their backs against the sun-warmed wall, raspberries in their mouths. They watched the seabirds as they gathered restlessly on the shoreline. And voices came back to her too. Per’s earnest talk about his work at the paint factory, his experiments into viscosity, the effect of temperature on pigments, drying times. He had been a man obsessed with his work. And Søren, the sea urchin boy with hair of white clouds, who spoke each word as if it were a gift, naming the seabirds as he lifted his hands to follow their flight. They had been her makeshift family. The traces of them remained in this place, like the pulse of the tideline bleeding into the beach. Many years earlier her father told her how a Norse goddess and guardian of the graves took only a part of those who have died. The shifting forms that remained would roam forever among the living. He’d told her this to comfort her, a ten-year-old child grieving for her mother. They’d been walking along the beach at Skagen, the most northerly tip of Jutland. He, with his worn geologist’s boots with measured stride, prodded the sand in front of him with his stick as he talked. Now, as a grown woman, Ellen was happy to imagine the story of the goddess to be true and that here, close to the fjord, the spirits of Per and Søren still floated over the sand dunes and through the pines. 6 She picked out a stick from the collection gathered in the porch and walked towards the water’s edge, jabbing at the sand. She missed them. Mor, Far, Søren, Per. Had she been unlucky to have lost so many people she loved? Doktor Frandsen thought as much. Unlucky. What a word. It didn’t seem to be a question of luck to her. For Per and Søren at least it was just the consequence of the times they’d lived through. We live in difficult times, that was what everyone said. Peering into the whiteness, she tried to make out the form of Alrø in the fjord. She had a fondness for the dark island with its abandoned lime-washed church and shallow marshy inlets, passed by pods of seals that pulsed through the seaway in muscular bursts, searching out mackerel, sand eel, flat fish. She walked further along the beach, waiting for the fog to lift. Ellen had arrived the previous night taking the last train from Copenhagen. Better to arrive quietly. Better not to draw attention to herself. At least not yet. She collected a cargo bicycle that she’d arranged to have left for her at the station. Henning Bornholm had dropped it off.