Appropriated Memory

Germans Writing about the Holocaust

Growing up in Germany in the 1960s, people did not talk much about the Holocaust, with the brief exception of the Auschwitz trials, when stories of atrocities were reported for the first time and the term “Auschwitz” became anchored in the public mind. Later, in the 1980s, instruction about the Nazi period was required in schools, but not so back in the 1960s, during my school days. Instead, there was silence, and if anyone did talk about the Hitlerzeit (Hitler period) as they called it then, they would focus on the schlechte Zeit (bad time) following World War II (WWII), when food rationing had been implemented. It was not until I started teaching in the United States that I began to recognize the enormous interest Americans still have in the Nazis. While looking for an appropriate text for a class on the Holocaust, I came across Wolfgang Koeppen’s 1992 book Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch (translation: Jakob Littner’s Notes from a Hole in the Ground), which seemed a perfect text to encapsulate the Holocaust experience from a survivor perspective. Since Holocaust courses in the United States are taught in English and Koeppen’s book was only available in German, I contacted the publisher, Suhrkamp, to request permission to translate the text. When Suhrkamp declined my request with an evasive response, my curiosity was aroused, and I began to investigate possible reasons for their reluctance. Since it seemed obvious that Koeppen could not have invented Littner’s experience considering its many personal details, I investigated whether a real Littner had existed and whether he had written a memoir.

As I explore in greater detail in the chapter on Wolfgang Koeppen, I suspected a cover-up that involved the author, the publisher, and a trusting readership who accepted the official version that Koeppen had written a detailed and moving novel about a Jewish survivor. After I determined that Littner’s unpublished manuscript Mein Weg durch die Nacht (Journey Through the Night) was the source for Koeppen’s book, Berlin’s Metropol Verlag released it as a book, which started a discussion about whether Koeppen had been authorized to republish Littner’s book as a novel under his own name. This “Koeppen affair” went on to tarnish the reputation of the aging author who had all but disappeared from public life and was now in the limelight again. Critics connected his hidden authorship with the scandal surrounding Binjamin Wilkomirski’s 1995 book Bruchstücke (Fragments), in which the author assumed the fake identity of a Jewish survivor. The hostile reaction to both books made it clear that a line was crossed whenever a German-language, non-Jewish author assumed the life of a Jewish victim.

The discussion surrounding both books revealed fundamental issues with Germans addressing the Holocaust in literature. The discussion began with critics asking why Koeppen had assumed Littner’s authorship for the re-publication and then questioning the reason Swiss citizen Wilkomirski had adopted the identity of a Holocaust survivor. Both actions – hiding Jewish authorship and inventing a Jewish life – indicated the troubling relationships these authors had with the Holocaust past and was also seen as a sign of a new sensibility Germans were developing toward Holocaust victims. Koeppen’s rewriting of Littner’s manuscript was regarded as his insensitivity to the complexities of the Holocaust, which revealed a generational lack of empathy toward Jewish suffering.

After I had tracked down Littner’s unpublished manuscript at his nephew’s apartment in Maryland, I was asked by journalists about potential connections between Koeppen and Wilkomirski. The commonalities between the two adaptations of Jewish survivor stories made me curious to explore whether there were more recent adaptations of Jewish survivor stories by non-Jewish German authors with a Nazi background that could be compared with Koeppen’s and Wilkomirski’s texts. Instead of using the term Germans with a Nazi background, I adopted the term “first and second perpetrator generation,” which could be compared with the “first and second victim generation.”1 Bernhard Giesen sees the guilt of Germans in acknowledging their spectator role as a decisive element in the creation of an intergenerational identity between the first generation and their children.2 Although most Germans should be seen as spectators, or bystanders (“Mitläufer”), using the term “perpetrator” will help recognize the existing dichotomy as one between victims and perpetrators. These two poles are needed to describe the focus of this study, which negotiates the comparison between original Jewish and modified German texts.3 The scope of this comparative research approach can be summarized in three questions:

• –Does an invisible ban on German authors against fictionalizing memoirs of Holocaust victims exist that differs from that imposed on non-German authors?
• –Is there a difference in writing about Holocaust victims between authors of the current, second, or third generation and members of the perpetrator generation, such as Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Alfred Andersch?
• –How do second-generation or third-generation German authors address the perpetrator trauma in their writing, and does this difference reflect a new voice in addressing the Holocaust?

By analyzing the transformation of Jewish memoirs into texts by Gentile Germans, I hope to reveal how literature played a prominent role in creating a German postwar identity. Although this study focuses on the creation on creating fictional Holocaust texts by non-Jewish German authors, two Swiss authors have been included as well, Binjamin Wilkomirski and Jürg Amann, as their language background makes them a part of German literary culture. An analysis of texts by first or perpetrator generation authors plays an important part in showing the progress made by second-generation authors. Texts from authors of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) were omitted since they followed a different narrative due to the socialist foundation of the country.4

By revisiting essential phases of Germany’s postwar history, the task of the second generation of perpetrators becomes clear in contrast to the deficiencies of the first generation. In this context, the problematic publication of Koeppen’s novel Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch in 1992 can be seen as a critical event for the exploration of the difference in Holocaust identity voices. The phrase “perpetrator generation” describes Germany’s WWII generation that was active either as soldiers or supporting the war industry on the home front. Their children, the second generation, are defined as anyone born in the 1940s and 1950s, those who endured the traumatic consequences of their parents’ transgressions. These two categories – first or perpetrator generation and second or post-memory generation – constitute the core of this exploration of select works by members of the first generation, Wolfgang Koeppen and Binjamin Wilkomirski, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Alfred Andersch. Members of the successor generation are analyzed in the second part of this study (W. G. Sebald, Norbert Gstrein, and Katharina Hacker), along with more recent authors of the grandchildren generation, Kevin Vennemann and Takis Würger.

When Hamida Bosmajian realized the void that existed in addressing German post-Holocaust memory in 1979, she became one of the first to look for proper terminology to write about the Holocaust from a German perspective. Rejecting the phrase “child of perpetrators” to describe the non-Jewish German writer, she explained that due to her reluctance to be euphemistically evasive, she needed to look for a word “that includes persecutors, victimizers and bystanders, i.e., perpetrators.”5 In 1992, Marianne Hirsch suggested using the word “postmemory,” which had originally been applied as a generational term to Jewish victims as a way to address the traumatic memories of the postwar generation. Hirsch based the term on her own feelings as the child of survivor parents, who passed the effects of their trauma on to her. Hirsch perceived this generational transmission of memory as affecting both victim generations, parents and their children, whose combined experiences she described as the development of a “collective imaginary.”6 The label “postmemory generation” has since been applied to the German perpetrator generation as well, as Bosmajian had initially suggested. As this study shows, the retelling of Jewish lives has become an effective way for German authors to work through their own trauma as perpetrator children, enabling their narratives to coalesce into a collective national memory.

The manner in which German authors approach the Holocaust differs from that of non-Germans, such as American authors and researchers, since addressing their own secondary trauma is a personal issue for them. As Koeppen’s book shows, changing the text to a reflection of his own thoughts and feelings without admitting his transgression is now interpreted as evidence of his own hidden guilt. It was W. G. Sebald with his 1990s novels, especially his acclaimed Austerlitz, that abandoned Koeppen’s first-generation, self-centered guilt for a complex representation that became the benchmark for Holocaust representation in Germany. Carol Angier, a British author and daughter of Jewish refugees who had fled Nazism, recognized Sebald as “the German writer who most deeply took on the burden of German responsibility for the Holocaust” that “transmuted his adoptions into lasting art.”7 Angier cites Susan Sontag as having recognized Sebald’s literary “greatness” in “his impressive body of Holocaust literature,” which he created to manage his survivor trauma.8

To understand the impact of the current generation on shaping the country’s identity, it is necessary to look back to the early phase of German Holocaust writing, a time usually seen as “the period of Holocaust silence,” described by Cathy Caruth as the latency period essential for the country to process its collective trauma experience.9 This silence dovetailed with the continuous demand for a Schlussstrich, or “line to be drawn underneath the Holocaust,” that the perpetrator generation needed,10 that Aleida Assmann described as the leitmotif for the political debate of the 1950s and 1960s, when the country was eager to shift its focus to the future, not the past. With the Jerusalem Eichmann and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in the early 1960s, the silence began to dissolve. The discovery of the Holocaust as a scholarly subject was equally slow in Germany and began with the publication of Raul Hilberg’s ground-breaking study Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden in Germany in 1982, twenty years after it was first published in the United States.11

This collective silence about war-time activities and crimes resulted in a complete ignorance about the past among most second-generation Germans who were not told anything about their parents’ activities; even in schools, the Nazi period was not discussed. Members of the second generation replaced their parents’ self-indulgent narratives as victims of Nazi tyranny with the charge of tacit collaboration by their parents, a painful stigma that became emblematic of their generation. This charge resulted in hostile inter-generational relations and, in some cases, a complete communication breakdown between parents and their children.

While sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors empathized with their parents’ experiences, as reflected in Art Spiegelman’s iconic graphic novel Maus, children of perpetrators could not do the same. Instead of feeling empathy when confronted with their parents’ war stories, perpetrator children felt coerced into a “collective sense of guilt” (Kollektivschuld) with the Nazis. In the 1970s, a new generation of authors who had not experienced the war created a new genre, the so-called “Fathers Books,” which included Bernward Vesper’s 1977 biography Die Reise (The Journey),12 now considered an instrumental text for addressing the repressed feelings of guilt among the 1968 generation and for discussing the hidden guilt of the parents’ generation.

An important catalyst for Germans and their evolving sensitivity to the Holocaust was the 1979 broadcast of the American TV series Holocaust, a groundbreaking event that gave German youth a glimpse “into what had happened in their own hometowns” and became part of a nationwide grassroots history movement.13 According to Ernestine Schlant, the program’s success was largely due to its “prepackaged presentation” for a broader audience, which helped Germans explore their own attitudes toward the Holocaust by removing it from the real events within their own families.14 While viewers sat glued to their TV sets, watching the fate of fictional German Jews in an American-made program, they started to comprehend the magnitude of the horrors Jews had endured and were finally able to see the Holocaust as part of German history. Anton Kaes credits the broadcast for achieving “what hundreds of books, plays, films, and television programs, thousands of documents, and all the concentration camp trials have failed to do in the more than three decades since the end of the war.”15 It was this fictionalized history of a Jewish family that generated an intensely empathetic reaction from German viewers.

The second pivotal event in the Holocaust’s increased status as part of German identity was the historical address given in 1985 by Germany’s Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker at the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II, in which he stated that nobody could be complicit in crimes that took place before their birth. He also argued that Germans who grew up after the Holocaust should not be seen as “guilty of the Holocaust”:

When the unspeakable truth of the Holocaust (…) became known at the end of the war, all too many of us claimed that they had not known anything about it or even suspected anything. There is no such thing as the guilt or innocence of an entire nation. Guilt is, like innocence, not collective, but personal.16

As the second generation struggled with the inherited guilt the perpetrator generation had tried to conceal, Weizsäcker’s appeal to the successor generation to explore and accept the collective history of their country became an important game changer for reconciliation between the divided memories of the two generations.17 Weizsäcker’s speech is now considered an important part of the moral foundation for Germany’s relationship with surviving Jews and the state of Israel. It was later reinforced by Angela Merkel’s 2008 statement that considers the country’s commitment to supporting Israel as a cornerstone of Germany’s postwar identity, or as she called it, the country’s Staatsräson:

I am deeply convinced that only if Germany acknowledges its ongoing responsibility for the moral catastrophe in German history can we shape the future in a humane way. Or to put it another way: Humanity grows out of the responsibility for the past.18

This belief has since been confirmed by all successive German heads of state and has become the basis for the current generation in its approach to the Holocaust. Sigrid Weigel considers the concept of coming to terms with their parent’s role during the Nazi period the essential “cultural pattern for reconstructing history.” As members of the successor generation learn to address their memory trauma, they become mentors for the next generation in facing the historic consequences of their grandparents’ transgressions. With the generational conflict moving to the center of interpreting the Nazi period and the Holocaust, the generation born after 1945 inherited the authority to interpret history, the Deutungshoheit, which is essential in asserting their witness status. As Weigel wrote in 2002, the current generation needed to develop the confidence to claim or “own” the discussion.19

This shift from the perspective of the perpetrators to the post-perpetrator generation was an important step in replacing the parents’ detachment with an identification with the victims; the new generation learned to “shift sides,” as Bernd Giesen labeled it.20 The “clash between ‘old’ and ‘young,’ ‘guilt and innocence’” of the ’68ers represented a fresh start that created the much-needed cultural break in postwar German society.21 Assmann asserted that Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history lies at the root of this perspective; he argued that empathizing with victors benefits the rulers, whereas empathizing with the defeated equips us with the ability to acquire Deutungshoheit: “All rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostate.”22 The legendary kneeling of German Chancellor Willy Brandt at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial in 1970 symbolizes this narrative, insofar as Brandt accepted the collective guilt of the German nation and prepared the ground for a new German identity, not imposed from outside, but as part of the new national identity, Brandt helped develop.23 In their effort to find a new identity, the second generation not only needed to connect with individual stories; it was also looking for a larger concept, which Giesen saw in Brandt’s kneeling at the memorial. This radical identity change also resulted in a political shift, with the first transfer of power in West Germany from the ruling conservative Christian Democratic party, which had served as a representation of the first generation, to a coalition of the two left parties, the Social Democrats and Free Democrats. Germany’s identity was beginning to change to the point that the country was finally ready to end the postwar period and accept the borders that WWII had created. The border with Poland was recognized, and East Germany was accepted as a separate state by the West German government.