Holocaust Literature: Breaking Taboos and Dealing with the Past | Books | '
"How did you, an American Jew, become an ambassador of German literature?" Since the start of the ‘ project "100 good books", for which I explain in 100 videos German books that have been translated into English, this question was asked exactly zero times.
In Berlin, where I live, it never occurred to anyone to ask. For one thing, most Germans whom I met in my ten years in Germany know Jews more as a historical concept than as a living person with such a treacherous name as mine. To be fair, most would most likely not see a contradiction in it.
Nevertheless, the Holocaust is at the top of our list of topics. So, when we presented the project in my home country, the US, at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley, California, I expected that the question mentioned above would come up. She did. But only in my head.
Literary bridges between California and Germany
I imagined a kind of connection I could have to Jewish and other persecuted authors on our list who fled to California before the Holocaust. Some of them started successful careers in Hollywood. California was just a temporary home for Alfred Döblin, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann and Klaus Mann. For Heinrich Mann, Vicki Baum and Lion Feuchtwanger it became the terminus.
"One smiled at the fact that now the domesticated pet, the petty bourgeois, threatened to return to its wolfish nature," wrote Lion Feuchtwanger in his novel "Die Geschwister Oppermann" in 1933, shortly after Hitler took power. In the same year the author left Germany. Feuchtwanger's novel is an example with which my colleague Sabine Kieselbach and I illustrate the early hunches of German-Jewish authors who saw the horror come.
Today the situation is different, more and more Jews are moving to Germany. And in Berkeley, famous for its left-wing intellectuals – many of them Jewish -, festivalgoers asked us about complicity under the Nazi regime, not to blame, but to point out their own fears, idly watching while democracy eroded in the US and melting the polar ice caps.
Overcoming the past as an export product
The crash course in German literature given by Sabine and myself, with or without reference to the present, bore the weight of two world wars, genocide and a socialist dictatorship.
A brief breather gave us the US talk show presenter Jimmy Fallon and the German-Austrian actor Christoph Waltz. The clip we showed has nothing to do with history; Waltz tests Fallon's knowledge of long German words like Sitzpinkler or Bezirksschornsteinfegermeister. But the video is also a perfect springboard to another long German word that is essential to understanding German literature and modern history: overcoming the past. If countries around the world can import German cars, then, I think, they could treat themselves as another import good also the critical view of their own history.
One of the newest voices in German coping with the past is not even German: The Jewish author Katja Petrovskaya, born in Kiev, said at a panel discussion in Berkeley: "There were 100,000 deaths in my city, in the middle of the city. Accordingly, I was struck that everyone knew it in Germany. " In her novel "Maybe Esther" (2014), one of our hundred German compulsory readings, it is about Petrovskaya's attempt to summarize the history of her own family of Holocaust victims and survivors. She wrote the book in German, which she learned as an adult to try to liberate the language from her own story.
Overcoming the past as a complex process
The two authors born in Germany, Nora Krug and Takis Würger, criticized in the same discussion round their country's efforts to deal with the past. Krug, the creator of the fantastically illustrated memoir "Heimat – A German Family Album", said that she could not begin to fully embrace her Germanness years after moving to the US.
David Levitz and author Katja Petrovskaya at a reading at the Bay Area Book Festival
Krug's book begins with a conversation with an elderly woman in New York. Asked if she had ever been to Germany, the woman replies that she survived a German concentration camp because one of the guards rescued her sixteen times from the gas chamber and sent other inmates in her place. Krug, whose husband is Jewish, wrote the book to investigate the complicity of her own family under National Socialism, but, as she emphasized at the festival, "not as an attempt to overcome my guilt or understand what it means to speak German be or feel less guilty. "
Krug's text, like Petrovskaya's novel, does not seek simple, definitive or complete answers, but assembles the fragments of memory and history as it finds them. Her colleague Takis Würger agreed with Krug that overcoming the past is a process that too often lacks a personal component.
Taboo breaking literature
"You are not encouraged to investigate in your own family," said Würger, whose grandfathers served in the Wehrmacht. "My own great-grandfather died in a gas chamber and I did not find it until I was 28."
Würger's second novel "Stella", which was published in German this year, is based on the true story of Stella Goldschlag, a Jewess who has betrayed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other Jews to the Nazis. German critics panned the book because of its entertaining style in the face of historical tragedy.
Maybe this taboo still makes sense. But if the project "100 good books" has taught me one thing, then it is that the last six decades of German literature show that taboos are made to be broken.
Biting Satire: "The Nazi & the Barber"
Nobody had written with humor and rudeness about the Second World War before Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass 1959 "The Tin Drum" published. The Holocaust survivor Edgar Hilsenrath found no German publisher until 1977, six years after it appeared in English, for his biting satire "The Nazi & the Barber."
At the festival, a young woman asked for book recommendations to help her understand the experiences of her grandmother who had survived the bombing of Dresden. A few decades ago it would have been hard to recommend many titles to her. For stories about German suffering in the Second World War were not an issue for decades. One exception: "A woman in Berlin", the report on mass rapes by Soviet soldiers. When the book first appeared in German in 1959, it quickly disappeared from the book trade and was relocated again in 2003.
After the festival, I was invited to dinner in a real Berkeley community, the way I thought it was a thing of the past. At a dinner with lentils and quinoa, one of the 17 hosts, a teacher named Nina, asked me questions about my talk. I explained this series of broken taboos and how Bernhard Schlink's 1995 book, later edited by Kate Winslet, "The Reader" broke another one by portraying a former concentration camp guard not as a monster but as a complex human being. "That's so important," Nina said, adding quickly that her own mother had escaped the Nazis as a girl in Paris. She said it was important to look beyond the permanent names of the victim and the perpetrator because the roles could be switched too easily. Maybe, I thought, it's not just about being a Jew or a German. The best we can do is continue to work it out together.
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