Journeys of Remembrance

Representations of Travel and Memory in Post-war French and German Literature

Kathryn Jones

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351196130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Literature

"The Second World War was a common experience of cultural and historical rupture for many European countries, but studies of this period and its after-images often remain locked in national frameworks. Jones' comparative study of national memory cultures argues for a more nuanced view of responses to shared issues of remembrance. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, two decades of great change and debate in French and German discourses of memory, it investigates literary representations of the Second World War, and in particular the Holocaust, from France and both Germanies. The study encompasses thirteen works representing a variety of genres and divergent perspectives, and authors include Jorge Semprun, Peter Weiss, Georges Perec and Bernward Vesper. Addressing the underlying theme of travel as a means of exploring the past, it contrasts the journeys made by deportees and post-war visitors to the camps with the use of the journey as a literary device."

Chapter 1
Remembering the War Years in France, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the German Democratic Republic from the Late 1950s to 1980

Memories and debates surrounding them do not take place in a vacuum, but in specific historical circumstances. The historical and cultural contexts are therefore of central importance to this study of literary representations of memories, which accentuates the centrality of history to an understanding of literary texts. The concern of this study does not lie in dichotomized constructions of ‘history' versus ‘memory’, but rather in the multiple ways in which memories are influence by, engage with, and inform wider historical narratives about the past. By focusing on the intersections between personal memory and public history, the analyses highlight the interrelationship of individual and collective processes of remembering. This study brings into play the wider social and cultural frameworks of remembrance against which the individual literary memories are compared.

This chapter calls into question prevalent assumptions regarding the nature and evolution of the different discourses of memory concerning the Second World War and the Holocaust in France and in East and West Germany. In analyses of such debates, in addition to major and dominant voices, it is also necessary to draw attention to the presence of more marginal voices that at times represent opposing views. Until recently, critical material has characterized pre-1968 West Germany in terms of a collective silence and widespread amnesia. The East German ideology of anti-fascism has been portrayed as entirely monolithic. In terms of French representation, debates regarding Vichy and Occupied France have been perceived as completely dominated by narratives of resistance before 1968. Such interpretations and assumptions neglect wider and conflicting memory discourses and reactions which occurred in post-war French and West and East German societies. This overview will examine key historical events and debates for the period of publication of works surveyed in detail in this study, namely from 1962 until 1980. There will also necessarily be some reference to the 1950s in order to establish how these literary works relate to and engage with what was discussed and written previously. This synopsis of key debates draws attention to the varying agents, forms, and practices of memory at work in society.

The Federal Republic of Germany

Several recent studies have demonstrated that the conservative Adenauer era from 1949 to 1963 was far more complex, contradictory, and full of events than the prevalent misconception of widespread silence regarding the Nazi past would imply.¹ This silence was only ever selective, and National Socialism constituted a central literary topic after 1945 in various forms. Public and private West German memory focused on German suffering as collective innocent victims of the war, highlighting civilian experiences of bombings, escaping the advance of the Allies, and expulsions, whereas victims of racial and political persecution were not discussed to the same extent.² A hierarchy of victims of fascism privileged ordinary citizens and innocent German soldiers. Best-selling war novels focused on these groups and their experiences, and dealt with National Socialism in an allegorical and historicizing way.³ Official Erinnerungspolitik [memory politics] concentrated on the integration and amnesty of former Nazis, while also pursuing a foreign policy of reparations.⁴ In contrast to the situation of the majority in France and the GDR, after 1945 most West Germans did not identify with those who had actively resisted National Socialism.

At the end of the 1950s a change occurred in the climate of debates on the Nazi past, and the 1960s witnessed a change of subject matter from victimhood to persecution and resistance. Scandals concerning personal and institutional continuities from the ‘Third Reich’ provided the impulse for a new phase in dealing with this past.⁵ From 1958 onwards, writers, journalists, and historians had begun to debate the use of the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung [a mastering or coming to terms with the past] as a means of expressing the need to break with the ‘unmastered past’ of certain continuities from the National Socialist era.⁶ The latter concept was sharply rejected by conservative critics, who began to speak of a Vergangenheitsbewältigung industry.⁷ Theodor W. Adorno’s 1959 influential radio lecture ‘Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?’ [What does ‘working through the past’ mean?] drew attention to a lack of clarity and consensus regarding the meaning and use of the term, as it was interpreted both as the need to reflect critically on the past on the one hand and to draw a line underneath it and forget it on the other.⁸ A wave of anti-Semitic acts towards the turn of the decade changed the reluctance of the political elite to deal with the Nazi past. On Christmas Eve 1959, swastikas were daubed on the newly inaugurated synagogue at Cologne by members of the far right, and 470 acts of anti-Semitism followed in early 1960.

In the 1960s, historical and moral debates on National Socialism became of central importance. The trial of Adolf Eichmann held in Jerusalem between 11 April and 11 December 1961 promoted a new awareness of the history of the Holocaust in both German states and attracted a great deal of attention in the Federal Republic. The French historian Annette Wieviorka maintains that the Eichmann trial led to a changed perception of and improved status for witnesses and Jewish victims of the Holocaust by means of its valorization of victim testimony.⁹ In the field of literature from the beginning of the 1960s onwards, the journal Merkur regularly published articles on the memory of Nazism and the Holocaust. Günter Grass’s novel Die Blechtrommel (1959) and Heinrich Böll’s Billard um halbzehn (1959) were significant departures in their broad-based critical examination of the National Socialist past, and Alexander Kluge’s documentary work Lebensläufe (1962) explored how a series of individuals were marked by their acts and roles during the Nazi regime.¹⁰ Mass media also began to affect public consciousness of the Nazi past. The television series Das Dritte Reich was watched by a fifth of the West German population in 1961. Nevertheless, as Detlef Siegfried notes, this willingness to watch should not be equated with a readiness to confront crimes committed by the National Socialists, as the series focused on the period as a success story.¹¹

The creation of a West German body to prosecute National Socialist crimes in 1958, the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung national-sozialistischer Verbrechen [Central Authority of the State Judicial Administration to Investigate National Socialist Crimes], led to a new prominence being accorded to questions of guilt in the 1960s. Public attention was focused on prosecution and denazification failures, as the press became more critical and vocal in its call for Vergangenheitsbewältigung. At the beginning of the 1960s, a large number of trials of Germans involved in extermination and concentration camps, including those of Dachau, Mauthausen, and Treblinka, were initiated by the West German judicial system, and Peter Reichel has termed these the ‘core’ of West German Vergangen-heitsbewältigung.¹² Most attention was given to the Auschwitz trial, held in Frankfurt am Main from 20 December 1963 until 20 August 1965 with twenty-two accused from all levels of the camp organization. The main significance of the trial was its demonstration for the first time in a German court of the Holocaust as a system of extermination. This in turn prompted a new historical awareness of the Holocaust, in addition to some advances in its historiography. One of the original aims of the trial was to correct the previous deficit, as before 1962 no German scholarly study on Auschwitz had been published.¹³ The trial was also significant in the importance accorded to the three hundred and fifty witnesses and their testimony. Auschwitz had thereby already achieved its full potency as a symbol for National Socialist crimes and a metaphor for evil by the mid 1960s. In addition, memorial sites at the former concentration camps of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen in West Germany were opened in 1965 and 1966. The Auschwitz trial was given a great deal of media coverage, and was attended by over twenty thousand visitors in the court. Documentary dramas such as Rolf Hochhuth's Der Stellvertreter (1963) and Peter Weiss’s Die Ermittlung (1965) took the Holocaust and the Auschwitz trial as their central themes, and Auschwitz was used as a setting for the first time.¹⁴ The trial generated a large-scale resonance and great interest among the West German public. Edgar Wolfrum states that these debates, along with the trials, marked the first time that the German public had been confronted with Nazi crimes to a large extent, as the discourse of Germans as victims changed to that of Germans as perpetrators.¹⁵ However, it should also be noted that public opinion was influenced negatively to some degree by the trials, as is demonstrated by the growth in calls for a Schlußstrich [drawing a line under the past].¹⁶ Until the late 1960s, half of West German citizens believed National Socialism to be a good idea badly executed.¹⁷ Parliamentary debates on extending the statute of limitations for Nazi crimes in 1965, 1969, and finally 1979 highlighted the gulf between the political consensus in favour and the public majority (60%) against.¹⁸

A political escalation of debates on National Socialism and a demand for historical Aufklärung [elucidation, explanation] on the conditions and consequences of the period occurred between 1966 and 1969. Novels of the 1960s and 1970s contained more direct references to the past and were situated in contemporary West Germany. To take one example, Siegfried Lenz’s novel Deutschstunde (1968) had sold over eight million copies in West Germany alone by 1974 and was translated into nineteen languages.¹⁹ Lenz deploys the microcosm of a small German-Danish town in order to offer a critical examination of the mental and social attitudes that gave rise to the atrocities of the Nazi era. This increasing awareness in the 1960s has been attributed to the emergence of a new generation of critics and commentators in public debates.²⁰ One of the main accusations made by the student movement against the parental generation was their silence over the National Socialist past and their ‘inability to mourn’. This was the title of an influential 1967 psychological study by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich that applied a model of individual repression and denial to the collective West German attitude towards the fascist past in the 1950s and early ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Remembering the War Years in France, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the German Democratic Republic from the Late 1950s to 1980
• 2 'A New Mode of Travel': Representations of Deportation in Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz et Après and Jorge Semprun's Le Grand Voyage
• 3 Visiting the Camps in 1960s and 1970s Travelogues by Horst Krüger, Günter Kunert, Rolf Schneider, and Peter Weiss
• 4 Fictional Representation of the Holocaust in H. G. Adler's Eine Reise and Georges Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance
• 5 Conversations with the Father in Elisabeth Plessen's Mitteilung an den Adel, Bernward Vesper's Die Reise, and Patrick Modiano's Les Boulevards de ceinture
• 6 German Origins and Exile: Évelyne Le Garrec's La Rive allemande de ma mémoire and Maren Sell's Mourir d'absence
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index