World War II in Contemporary German and Dutch Fiction

The Generation of Meta-Memory

Jan Lensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367473730
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000350050
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Segunda Guerra Mundial

World War II in Contemporary German and Dutch Fiction: The Generation of Meta-Memory offers a comparative study of the construction of World War II memory in contemporary German, Flemish, and Dutch literature. More specifically, it investigates in what ways the large temporal distance to the historical events has impacted how literary writers from these three literatures have negotiated its meaning and form during the last decades. To that end, this book offers analyses of nine novels that demonstrate a pronounced reflexivity on the conditions of contemporary remembering. Rather than a dig for historical truth or a struggle with historical trauma, these novels reflect on the transmission, the narrative shapes, the formation processes, and the functions of World War II memory today, while asserting a self-conscious and often irreverent approach toward established mnemonic routines, practices, and rules. As the analyses show, this approach is equally articulated through the novels' poetics, which are marked by a large formal diversity and a playfulness that highlights mnemonic agency, a posttraumatic positioning, and the ascendency of the literary over the historiographical. Based on these findings, this book proposes the emergence of a new paradigm within the postwar cultural assessment of World War II: the generation of meta-memory.

Part I

Of Perpetrators and Victims

One of the central tenets in the postwar literary engagement with the memory of World War II is the engagement with the collective identities of perpetrators and victims of this war. More than often, literary authors have focused specifically on these identities in order to probe the nature of violence and suffering and to demonstrate their extreme but also often complex dimensions. Famous examples from German literature are, for example, Anna Seghers’s Das Ende (1945) and Der Mann und sein Name (1952), Wolfgang Koeppen’s Der Tod in Rom (1954), Gert Ledig’s Der Stalinorgel (1955), and the work of Walter Kempowski, Uwe Johnson, Edgar Hilsenrath, Günter Grass, and many others. In the Netherlands, these identities were scrutinized by Harry Mulisch in Het stenen bruidsbed (1959), by Willem Frederik Hermans in De donkere kamer van Damocles (1958) and De tranen der acacia’s (1966), and by Armando in het gevecht (1976). In Flemish literature, the critical engagement with these identities can be found in works by Gerard Walschap (Zwart en wit, 1948), Louis Paul Boon (Mijn kleine oorlog, 1950), and Hugo Claus (De verwondering (1962) and Het verdriet van België (1983). Through this commitment, these novelists have offered normative models for readers to gauge the nature of perpetration and victimhood, their inherent complexity, as well as their mutual relation.

The tension between perpetration and victimhood is of crucial importance in recent fictions of memory too – even beyond the literatures under discussion in this book. Prominent examples are Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) and The Zone of Interest (2014), Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (1995), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002), Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room (2001), Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (2006), John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), Laurent Binet’s HHhH (2010), and Judi Picoult’s The storyteller (2013) – just to name a few. In these novels, questions of historical understanding remain important, yet they also focus intently on the construction and renegotiation of the identities of perpetrator and victim over the course of the postwar period. In light of the many judicial procedures, the profuse amount of historical research, and the critical debates about these identities as well as about the complexity of their relation, this shift of attention should not come as a surprise. Once most of the historical facts have been unearthed and discussed, the questions of who did what to whom and why is gradually replaced by concerns about the motivations behind these questions and what blind spots they may have caused.

In the first part of this study, I focus on three novels from German and Dutch literature that engage these mnemonic dynamics in the construction of the identities of perpetrators and victims: the German novel Flughunde (1995) by Marcel Beyer, Marcel (1999) by the Flemish novelist Erwin Mortier, and De joodse messias (2004) by the Dutch-Jewish author Arnon Grunberg. I have chosen these three novels specifically because they attentively challenge ingrained memory practices in relation to these identities and reveal the negative social and political impact of these practices on their respective memory communities in the present.

Flughunde challenges routine definitions of perpetrators and victims in two ways. Firstly, the novel tackles a highly controversial topic in the German Vergangenheitsbearbeitung, i.e. what Aleida Assmann has referred to as the ‘incompatibility of guilt and suffering in German memory’ (2006, passim). More specifically it addresses the question of how to imagine the German war victim and how it can be thought of alongside German perpetratorship. In my analysis, I focus on how Beyer engages with German victimhood through the fictional rendering of Helga Goebbels, the eldest daughter of the Reich’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Previous readings of the novel acknowledge this preoccupation with victimhood, yet they disregard the particular kind of victimhood Beyer addresses as well as the complexity of the protagonist’s victim identity. Helga – in contrast to other German victims in contemporary fictions of memory – is not victim to intrusions from outside of Germany (such as the allied bombings and expulsion at the end of the war) – a topic discussed in Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang (2002) or Julia Franck’s Die Mittagsfrau (2007) – but to her parents and to Hermann Karnau, guard of Hitler’s bunker and the second protagonist in the novel. In doing so, Beyer seeks to engage how Germans who were affiliated with National Socialism could indeed become victims of Nazi rule. Secondly, rather than being an icon of pure victimhood, Helga Goebbels’s identity, the novel demonstrates, is thoroughly impacted by this spatial and familial affiliation. Through patterns of mimetic behavior and language use, she, too, becomes implicated in NS-perpetration, and Flughunde offers a sophisticated exploration of this implication. The novel, in other words, shows the possibility of victimhood at the core of German perpetration, yet it also demonstrates that this identity remains highly ambiguous.

In my second analysis in this section, I will explore the literary renegotiation of perpetration and victimhood in quite a different historical and cultural context. The novel Marcel (1999) by the Flemish author Erwin Mortier engages the legacy of Flemish nationalist collaborationism during World War II and how it continues to impact Flemish nationalist aspirations today. More particularly, the novel critically engages with the continued stigmatization of collaborationism in terms of perpetratorship as well as with the persistent self-imagining of ex-collaborationists in terms of victimhood in Flanders during the sixties. Identifying suppression and melancholia as unproductive mnemonic practices within this community, the novel argues on behalf of an intergenerational dialogue about this history – one that requires the resolve of those involved in collaborationism to face and work through this past as well as their descendants’ need for a more objective assessment of the historical circumstances and for what Lewis Ward calls ‘transgenerational empathy’ (see Ward 2008). This appeal suggests that such a dialogue is necessary to stop this memory from haunting the collective memory of World War II in Flanders. While presenting these reflections at the level of content, the novel gives shape to this empathy through the use of autodiegetic narration and irony. As I show in my analysis, both devices present a counterweight to the gravity of public and private discourses about the past in Belgium and reflect a mnemonic attitude that continually questions its own position and refrains from unilateral judgments.

The third novel in this section, De joodse messias (2004) by the Dutch-Jewish author Arnon Grunberg, confronts the sacredness of Jewish victimhood of the Holocaust and the way it determines contemporary visions of Jewishness. It does this through a satirical rendering of the Jewish-Orthodox community, which the novel depicts as no longer invested in the trauma of World War II, as well as of the community of perpetrator descendants, which is determined by a treacherous mix of anti-Semitic revisionism and philosemitic phantasies. The novel’s protagonist, Xavier Radek, believes that his life task is to comfort the Jewish people for their sufferings, yet his philosemitic idealism is pervaded by the latent legacy of National Socialist anti-Semitism of his grandfather, a former SS-officer, whom Xavier’s parents continue to depict as a war hero. The result is a highly suspicious idealism that will turn out to be as threatening to the Jewish people as the Holocaust.

Grunberg offers an allegory of the negative consequences of the perception and presentation of the Jewish community as perpetual victims. The novel is, however, not just relevant for its concerns about identity politics in the context of World War II memory. In sketching a satire about the Jewish-Orthodox community, it not only debunks the sacral nature of the latter’s identity as a result of its historical victimhood; it also provokes the sacred character of Holocaust victimhood by means of its form. Through its use of irony, absurd humor, hyperbole, elements from the grotesque, and a fantastical plot, De joodse messias aims to undermine the seriousness of discourses about the Holocaust and therefore fits in with a larger tendency in contemporary Jewish literature that Matthew Boswell has termed ‘Holocaust impiety’. With this term, he refers to works that resist the notion of ‘Holocaust piety’, a concept coined by Gillian Rose in reference to ‘particularly sentimental or sanctimonious approaches to the genocide’ (Gillian Rose, quoted in Boswell 2012, 1). In my analysis, I will argue that De joodse messias challenges such approaches toward Holocaust memory in an attempt to loosen rigid definitions in which Jewish identity is inextricably linked to Holocaust victimhood.

By means of these three analyses, I argue that the contemporary literary engagement with the identities of perpetrators and victims in relation to World War II no longer exclusively serves the purpose of historical clarification but aims at disputing their reified conceptions as well as renegotiating their juxtaposition in cultural memory. They engage in a process of questioning these identities that collapses distinctions between what Elizabeth Snyder Hook describes as three traditional opposites: ‘guilt and innocence, victimization and participation, prosecution and defense’ (2001, 10). In doing so, Beyer, Mortier, and Grunberg represent a more general trend – in literature and beyond – in which the past is approached from the perspective of what Bernhard Giesen has called ‘a third party’, ready to engage both ‘the positions of perpetrators and victims’ (2004, 139). The historical distance allows for such a detached position in which discussions and representations of the past are to a lesser extent driven by questions of historical and moral rectification and do no longer serve ‘as proxies for […] disputes regarding ownership of the political present’, as Karina Berger and Stuart Taberner argue (2009, 2). By engaging questions of identity, these authors rather express concerns about the continuing function of war memory as a haunting legacy, as one that continuously impacts the formation and formulation of our contemporary identities, perpetuates ideological rifts, and that may stand in the way of open and nuanced debates about the history of World War II.

References

1. Assmann, Aleida. 2006 ‘On the (In)Compatibility of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory‘. German Life and Letters 59 (2): 187–200.
2. Boswell, Matthew. 2012. Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
3. Giesen, Bernhard. 2004. ‘The Trauma of Perpetrators: The Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference of German National Identity’. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Bernhard Giesen , Jeffrey C. Alexander , Ron Eyerman , Neil J. Smelser , and Piotr Sztomka , 112–154. Berkeley: California UP.
4. Hook, Elizabeth Snyder. 2001. Family Secrets and the Contemporary German Novel: Literary Explorations in the Aftermath of the Third Reich. Rochester: Boydell & Brewer.
5. Taberner, Stuart, and Karina Berger . 2009. ‘Introduction’. In Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic, edited by Stuart Taberner and Karina Berger , 1–14. Rochester: Camden House.
6. Ward, Lewis Henry. 2008. ‘Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Narratives: Towards a Theory of Transgenerational Empathy’. Dissertation, Exeter: University of Exeter. https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10036/47273.

1 ‘Ein verwandter Ton’

The (Im)possibility of German Victimhood in Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde (1995)

One of the defining characteristics of what Barbara Beßlich and others have called the ‘Wende des Erinnerns’ (2006) in German literature about World War II is the critical reassessment of the categories of ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’. Literary critics have explained this reassessment as driven by present-day concerns about the persistent definition of German collective identity in terms of collective guilt for the war atrocities. While most authors insistently scrutinize the involvement in the war by German soldiers and citizens, many of them have argued for more nuanced and less manicheistic views of this identity. This pursuit for nuance often concerns characters involved in the war events, but it pertains to present-day subjects, too: do young German citizens, connected to the historical events only through national belonging, need to share the burden of the past? Before going into this argument, we need to sketch out its historical and social roots.

The process of working through the past of World War II in Germany, commonly referred to as Vergangenheitsbewältigung or Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, has often been divided into distinct phases that overlap and often coincide with generational turnovers. In his seminal study ‘The Trauma of Perpetrators: The Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference of German National Identity’ (2004), the sociologist Bernhard Giesen describes the first phase – situated in the first two decades after the war – as one of collective silence. He diagnoses th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The Generation of Meta-Memory: An Introduction
• PART I Of Perpetrators and Victims
• PART II Memory on the Move?
• PART III The Play with Memory
• Afterword: A Move out of the Grip of the Past?
• Index