Hans Scholz’s Am grünen Strand der Spree. Witnessing and Representing the Holocaust

Abstract

Am grunen Strand der Spree, published in 1955, never made it into the canon of post-war German literature. The article reassesses Scholz’s novel, which deals more directly with the Holocaust than Boll’s and Grass’ works against the background of Schlant’s book The Language of Silence. The novel’s most important episode, the diary of a German soldier, documents the development of German anti-Jewish measures in Eastern Europe from slave labor and starvation to mass killings. The diary transports its horrifying testimony with narrative and stylistic devices that attempt in vain to relativize the guilt of the writer (who considers himself a coward and a bystander) and try to lessen the impact of the witnessed events. Scholz shows how Holocaust testimony appears in German social discourse but is met with silence; he uses the diary as the starting point of a trajectory of emotional petrifaction and psychological denial.