German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990 by Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, Georg Grote

Abstract

MLR, I03.2, 2oo8 603 German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity inLiterature, Film, and Discourse since I990. Ed. byANNE FUCHS,MARY COSGROVE, and GEORG GROTE. (Studies inGerman Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2006. viii+344pp. $75; ?45. ISBN 978-I-57I13-324-3. This volume presents a timely and comprehensive summary of the current interest (particularly inGerman Studies in theUK and theUSA) in post-unification dis courses ofmemory in relation toGermany's various 'pasts', above all theNazi past. A detailed and engaging exploration of theoretical discussions of 'culturalmemory', generation, and 'postmemory' isofferedbyAnne Fuchs andMary Cosgrove in their introduction, providing the unifying context within which the subsequent fourteen essays on diverse topics, ranging from literary reflectionson theGDR past toAfro German women writers' fiction,are tobe read.The quality of the essays isuniformly high, although some stand out as exceptional, and the degree of rigour and consis tency achieved within thevolume by its three editors is impressive throughout. The volume isdivided into four sections (the distinctions occasionally appear fairly arbitrary): 'Positions'; 'Mediations'; 'Ethnicity/'Hybridity' and 'Memory Politics'. The concern throughout iswith what the editors have termed 'memory contests', that is,with themanner inwhich any shared memory of the past in the Federal Republic is repeatedly challenged and negotiated from a variety of subject positions, including east and west German, Jewish or other ethnic-minority perspectives, per spectives informedby gender, or perspectives informedby (self-)exile fromGermany. Peter Fritzsche's essay on 'coming-to-terms with thepast' in the I950S provides a welcome re-examination of narratives dealing with theNazi era and itsconsequences in the immediate post-war period. Arguing that it isnecessary toview such narratives within their own context rather than judging them by today's standards, Fritzsche presents a convincing case thatmany post-war texts actually reflect on their own inadequacy and on their inability to depict what had just occurred and particularly German culpability. Fritzsche's essay is followed, appropriately, by two furtheressays which examine how far literaryreflectionson thepast tellus asmuch about theperiod inwhich theywere written as about the period which theypurport to narrate. Anne Fuchs's examination of post-iggo Vdterliteratur begins with Christoph Meckel's Suchbild: Uber meinen Vater (I983) in order to demonstrate just how different re cent literaryengagements with familymembers complicit inNazism arewithin the changed context of post-unification Germany (Fuchs also analyses Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders, Ulla Hahn's Unscharfe Bilder, and Dagmar Leupold's Nach denKriegen). Elizabeth Boa, on theother hand, looks at narratives concerned with the formerGDR and the extent towhich theycreate, after thedemise of theCommunist state, a sense of an 'East German' Heimat within unified Germany. In 'Mediations', StefanWiller's essay on 'multilingualism' inG. -A.Goldschmidt andW G. Sebald is the firstof three essays in the volume which deal with Sebald, reflecting the recent explosion of interest inAnglo-American German Studies in that author. Chloe Paver's essay on the Fotofeldpost exhibition, the next in the volume, is one of itshighlights, offering a contextualized analysis of how photographs have become central to the current debate on the extent towhich 'ordinary Germans' involved inwar crimes are tobe 'condemned' or 'understood'. Her essay is thought ful,detailed, and above all suitably cautious. It is followed by twomore chapters in which the significance of images within contemporary cultural memory is explored. Matthias Fiedler's examination of popular filmic representations of theNazi period (including Stalingrad, Das Wunder vonBern, Aimee und Jaguar, and RosenstraJ3e) is informative and interesting, but a little disappointing on account of its lack of en gagement with the growing body of secondary literature on the filmshe mentions. Jonathan Long's analysis ofMonika Maron's Pawels Briefe, drawing onMarianne 604 Reviews Hirsch's concept of postmemory, offers a fineexample of how theoretical approaches may be combined with detailed close readings, in this case of thephotographs which occur throughoutMaron's text. The three essays which appear under the title 'Ethnicity/Hybridity' provide some of themost fascinating reading in the volume. Dagmar Lorenz's presentation of the literary fiction by the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors assesses differentphases in the re-emergence of a literary Jewish culture after I945 but fo cuses on the contemporary period with surveys of...