Sparing the Child

Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature about Nazism and the Holocaust

Hamida Bosmajian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135720377
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bosmajian explores children's texts that have either a Holocaust survivor or a former member of the Hitler Youth as a protagonist.

CHAPTER ONE

Official Histories and Counter-Texts: Literature for Youth about Nazism

The wishful thinking that zero-based 1945 as das Jahr Null (the year zero) soon faded as Germans realized that the Third Reich, the war, and the Holocaust could not be conveniently annulled by a mathematical metaphor. “Memory,” reflects Christian Meier in 40 Years after Auschwitz, “includes not only consciousness of history, but also what has been repressed subconsciously in ways that make it continually present.”¹ German history as such, argues Meier, is somehow colored by the events of the Holocaust, “even when a direct causal relationship cannot be established. While Auschwitz could not have been the goal of German history, it casts a very dark shadow over it, afterwards.”² Much of postwar German writing about the National Socialist era in the social sciences, history, literature (including literature for the young), and literary criticism is less of an attempt of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a coming to terms with the past, than an effort to raise and retain consciousness about the Nazi era. And yet, raising into consciousness implies metaphorically that much will remain submerged and that official history will have gaps and subtexts that inevitably stimulate the creation of counter-texts. Such texts are not necessarily correctives to official history; they can also project unrestrained desires, evident, for example, among various neo-Nazi groups that tend to attract alienated German youths.

In general, Germans have been faulted for their inability to grieve authentically over their losses and over the crimes perpetrated against the victims of Nazism. It is indeed possible for an individual to experience a meaningful grieving process after a personal traumatic loss that leads through anger and resignation to wholistic acceptance. Such authentic mourning may even be possible in a small community, but it is unlikely to occur in a mass society. There is no historical precedent for such authentic grieving. Nation states may come “to terms” with their losses and crimes, but, as Ernestine Schlant observes in her study of postwar German literature, that “is not equivalent to ‘working through,’ and it leaves the victims and the crimes as unmourned as they always have been.”³ Moreover, such Trauerarbeit, the grief work, would have to have been two-pronged for Germans, each prong being ethically problematic. First, there would have to have been the public expression of grief over the defeat of Nazism. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich explored that impossibility in The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior where they argue that in Germany the inability to mourn the loss of the Führer “is the result of an intensive defense against guilt, shame and anxiety, a defense that was achieved by the withdrawal of previous power libidinal cathexes. The Nazi past was de-realized, i.e. emptied of reality.”⁴ As a “collective ego ideal,” the Führer was loved and “personified a new conscience.”⁵ The individual who valued the collective felt “if I identify with him with all my strength, I feel the oppression he exercises not as a burden but as a joy” and “obedience to [the Führer] becomes a pleasure, a mark of distinction that will go down in history.”⁶ After the war, Germans who had been fervent adherents to the regime denied the reality of their affective adherence to Nazism and were capable of turning resolutely to new economic and political ideologies and realities while memories of Nazism were defined in terms of “the theory of enforced obedience” where the leaders “were alone responsible for putting genocide into practice when in fact all levels of society, and especially those in positions of leadership … had given the regime their decisive and enthusiastic support.”⁷ Perhaps this is inevitable, for “the burden of guilt which they faced was so irreconcilable with the self-esteem essential for continued living.… Time not only heals wounds, it also lets the guilty die,”⁸ especially if they see themselves as victims of evil forces.

The second prong is grief over the fate of the dead and the surviving victims of the Shoah. It is deeply ironic that what Aaron Hass terms “the inhibition of the mourning process”⁹ for Holocaust survivors is, for different reasons, also applicable to the German inability to mourn the victims. Holocaust survivors often feel that they cannot mourn the loss of their families because that loss is small compared to the millions who were murdered.¹⁰ The Holocaust survivor, in a sense, chooses not to work through the disastrous losses because that would inevitably initiate the process of forgetting, a process that time may make unavoidable but that is inadmissible to the ethical consciousness. For Germans, a collective and eventually successful grieving, while it temporarily raises the past into consciousness, would ultimately lead to the repression of memory as the working through ends in a kind of meaningful closure that is at best problematic. The inhibition of the mourning process of Jewish survivors and Germans differentiates itself in that the Holocaust survivor chooses not to reach such closure for the sake of those who died, whereas Germans have generally not made such a conscious and ethically determined choice. As a result, the narrative voice in German literature, for adults and for young readers, is always more or less conscious of both the inability and the inhibition to mourn.

The study by the Mitscherlichs established an official explanation of Germany’s inability to mourn collectively, but neglected to question if such grieving is possible in mass societies. After all, German fascism (grounded as it was in Germanic nationalistic myths and ideologies that had existed for well over a century) was empowered by the techniques of total and unceasing propaganda where the Führer was a carefully constructed libidinal projection to which alienated individuals responded in the equally carefully constructed context of the national and racial community (Volksgemeinschaft) into which they had been or were to be politically co-ordinated (gleichgeschaltet). The very artificiality of propaganda as a belief structure may well have enabled many Germans, who succumbed to it or went along with it opportunistically, to officially and quickly reject Nazism after 1945 and diminish their complicity to the sentimental melancholy of nostalgia.

Postwar German historians and social scientists have persistently researched, analyzed and interpreted Nazism, the “Final Solution,” and the resulting Holocaust, though there prevails an objective distancing in such accounts of the disaster, a distancing that inhibits mourning.¹¹ Nevertheless, much of postwar German literature has probed the individual’s experience and reaction to Nazism along with the inevitable alienation felt after the collapse of the regime. The point of moral vulnerability in that literature creates a textual gap that can be attributed to a conscious or pre-conscious repression of the memories of Nazism and the Holocaust but also to a moral inhibition. The theatricality of Nazi monumentalism, the attractions it held, and the enthusiasms it provoked cannot be imitated through representations that effect a positive reader response. Instead, the spectacles of Nazism are depicted through ironies or the corrective militancy of satire. In short, National Socialism must be uninspiring in postwar literature that tries to compensate for the past.

The blanks regarding the Holocaust originate from a different moral inhibition on the part of German writers. Most of the authors writing after the war, Günter Grass for example, were too young to participate in the persecution and murder of the Jews, but they were in the Hitler Youth, volunteered for the Wehrmacht (the armed forces), or were drafted at the end of the war. These authors feel that they must be knowledgeable about the Shoah, but have no entitlement to appropriate imaginatively the suffering of its victims. There is also the notion that the act of writing has potency in manifesting, if not creating, the traumatic situation once again. The Holocaust survivor who writes in her memoir about her parent or brother or friend going to the gas chamber fixes that event in a permanent now on the printed page as she commemorates it. For the German writer who grew up in the Third Reich the act of writing about the center of atrocity would not be an act of testimony but one of continued perpetration. A third point of vulnerability is a denial of grief not over a lost ego ideal, but over personal sufferings and losses of German lives in the war. The textual gaps in German literature are, therefore, due to a denial of memory, as well as a deliberate inhibition of both personal and acquired historical memory.

Literature for the young, too, is inhibited. While Nazi monumentalism held a very real attraction for the youth of the Third Reich, “fascinating fascism”¹² could not be made attractive to postwar young readers, instead it became unofficial memory, thereby reducing if not de-politicizing the Nazis and the Hitler Youth. Narratives for the young about the Holocaust are similar in that the young reader is spared descriptions of ultimate horrors. Both types of narratives share a decidedly pedagogical motive undercut by the sparing of the reader, for that sparing always contributes to a de-realization of the matter of history, a crucial though unintentional irony in texts written to raise consciousness about history, retain memory, develop empathy, and enable critical judgment.

Sparing the child is always a motivation when adults write for children. The following discussion will show how National Socialism, which perceived itself at a historical turning point of momentous significance (Zeitenwende), constructed its young readers and their literature in terms of the heroic gesture and image and how it repressed, or at least controlled, in its narratives the hate propaganda of racialism and anti-Semitism at the very same time when youth encountered, agreed with, and even participated in events that actualized that propaganda in daily life. After the official disintegration of the Third Reich in 1945, when the horror of the disaster was made visible to all, German literature for the young de-realized the past by focusing on Germans suffering through bombing raids or fleeing the advance of the Soviet army. Not until the 1960s were National Socialist Germany and the Holocaust subjects in young readers’ literature. To appreciate the gaps in such narratives, one must be familiar with at least some of the official history of the Hitler Youth, especially with its persistent heroic imaging, during the Nazi era and the inevitable re-interpretations afterward.

My discussion of the official definitions and subtexts of youth literature about Nazism will first address the National Socialist definitions of youth and its literature and then show how postwar youth literature about Nazism had to be a re-visioning of the Nazi era. In either case, however, literature for young readers has been deemed crucial in socializing the young in their attitudes toward Nazism.

I. The National Socialist Production of the Hitler Youth

In examining the intellectual origins of the Third Reich, George L. Mosse notes that “ever since Turnvater Jahn and the founding of the fraternity movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the cause of nationalism had aroused youth.”¹³ Youth became the vanguard of the German revolution and formed a uniquely German movement that was romantic and always political.¹⁴ The National Socialist obsession with the desirability of youth and youthfulness is well known: youth does not think critically; youth is easily incited toward a fanatic faith and blind obedience; youth is not accountable for its actions because of its immaturity. Hans Schemm, the head of the National Socialist Teachers Federation (NSLB), expressed in 1936 the mythology of youth through the triune formula of Hitler Youth–German Volk:

… National Socialism is the awakening of the youthful strength of the German Volk, regardless of the age of the individual.… All of us, spiritually viewed, were rejuvenated through Adolf Hitler and his work.… Adolf Hitler returned Germans to their childhood. Every event in our present economic, political, cultural and governmental life finds its parallels in youthful life-affirmations. We are a Germany that must always remain young.¹⁵

The Hitler Youth is the visible incarnation of this youthfulness which Baldur von Schirach, the Reich Youth Leader, celebrates in almost liturgical strains as he addresses Hitler: “You gave us your name, the most beloved name Germany ever had. Adolf Hitler, leader and flag bearer. Our youth is your name. Your name is our youth. You and the youthful millions can never be separated.”¹⁶ Hitler was the role model for all Hitler Youths. His lifestory was required reading written as hagiography or condensed into prefaces in Hitler Youth handbooks such Pimpf im Dienst (The Pimpf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Sparing the Child: An Introduction
• Chapter 1 Official Histories and Counter-Texts: Literature for Youth about Nazism
• Chapter 2 “A Hitler Youth Does Not Cry”: Text and Subtext in Der Hitlerjunge Quex
• Chapter 3 Melancholy Detachment: The Narrative Voice in Richter’s Trilogy about Hitler Youths and Young Soldiers
• Chapter 4 Hitler Youths with Private Values: Barbara Gehrts’s Don’t Say a Word and Horst Burger’s Why Were You in the Hitler Youth?
• Chapter 5 Doris Orgel’s The Devil in Vienna: From Trope into History
• Chapter 6 Holocaust Narratives for Young Readers: The Construction of an Enabling Rhetoric
• Chapter 7 Ruth Minsky Sender’s Memoirs and the Construction of the “Holocaust Lady”
• Chapter 8 Acquired Knowledge about the Holocaust in Fictional Narratives: Heroic Gestures and Unredeemable Ironies
• Chapter 9 Hidden Grief: Maurice Sendak’s Dear Mili and the Limitations of Holocaust Picture Books
• Conclusion “… And There Remains the Story That Can Be Told”
• Bibliography
• Index