A German Jewish Double Bind: Anja Lundholm's Novel Ein Ehrenhafter Bürger or how a Jewish Daughter (Barely) Survives her Nazi Father

Abstract

Anja Lundholm, the daughter of an "Aryan" father and a Christian mother of Jewish descent, was born in 1918 in D?sseldorf, Germany. In 1941, fleeing the Nazi regime, she went to Rome, where she joined the Italian resistance movement. In 1943 she was arrested and taken to the concentration camp at Ravensbriick, which she survived more dead than alive. After the war, she first moved to Brussels, and, following her marriage to a Swedish steel merchant, went on to Stockholm and London. In 1953 she returned to Germany, and has been living there since?with a Swedish passport?as a free-lance author in Frankfurt. For a long time, Anja Lundholm was not as well known in her "homeland" Germany as abroad, where her books were translated into English and Swedish. Not until her 75th birthday in 1993 were honors bestowed upon her in Germany. She gave a reading in Frankfurt at the famous Paulskirche, a documentary film about her was broadcast, and she was awarded a medal in appreciation for her resistance against the Nazi dictatorship. Altogether, more than a dozen of Lundholm's novels have been published by the prestigious German publishing house Rowohlt, among them Narzi? postlagernd, Briefe einer Ehe, Mit Ausblick zum See, Die ?u?erste Grenze, and Das H?llentor. Bericht einer ?berlebenden. Eight works deal with the period between 1932 and 1946, four of them with the trauma of surviving, both during and after the Holocaust. The novel Ein ehrenhafter BiXrger (An