Lebendiges Erinnern: Wie Geschichte in Literatur verwandelt wird by Sabine Scholl

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lebendiges Erinnern: Wie Geschichte in Literatur verwandelt wird by Sabine Scholl Vincent Kling Sabine Scholl, Lebendiges Erinnern: Wie Geschichte in Literatur verwandelt wird. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2021. 234 pp. Readers can be daunted by the immense literature that draws on history and by the academic journals devoted to the connections between them, especially when emphases change. In recent decades, writers have traced the experience of second-and third-generation Holocaust survivors, narrators traumatized in the aftermath of genocide and extermination. Novels otherwise as different as Maja Haderlap’s Der Engel des Vergessens and Doron Rabinovici’s Suche nach M. give accounts of devastation long after the immediate horrors, just as Georges Perec’s great autobiography W ou le souvenir d’enfance documents the nightmarish disorientation caused by a child’s loss of his father in war and mother in the camps. These works are grounded in what Sabine Scholl in Lebendiges Erinnern calls “die sogenannte Generationenerzählung, eine [End Page 152] Darstellung der Vergangenheit vermittelt durch Geschehnisse der eigenen Familiengeschichte” (12). The passage of time is erasing the possibility of so immediate an approach; events fade, but not their scars. Scholl links the work of this generation’s writers, mostly women, to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” (The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust), whereby “Nach-Erinnerung bedeutet keine leibhaftige Verbindung zur Vergangenheit, sondern wird mittels Imagination, Projektion und Kreation hergestellt” (11). “Autorinnen der Nachfolgegeneration bewegen sich frei durchs Material, verfügen darüber wie ein Regisseur” (11). Invention does not require the authority of documentation or depiction from sources; the imagination is a force powerful enough to recreate history as an author may experience it emotionally without personal involvement, as Hilary Mantel’s novels set in Tudor England testify. Accordingly, Scholl provides a “Kompendium,” an inventory of approaches and strategies that document the versatile means with which history is treated in literary contexts (10–11; 217–222). These range much more widely than would a commitment to documentary verifiability, from the relatively objective (“das Historische in Details, wie Farben, Kleidung [ . . . ] sichtbar machen,” 219) to the admittedly subjective (“das Ich des Autors als Ausgangs-und Endpunkt einer sich entwickelnden Geschichte in den Text einbringen,” 220). Clearly, then, Scholl’s operative word is “verwandelt,” accuracy being only one possible aim among a large array of strategies for requisitioning history. “Gerade die Leerstellen des Erinnerns fordern Autorinnen dazu auf, geschichtliche Ereignisse mit fiktionalen Mitteln zu rekonstruieren” (12), writes Scholl, as if this process were a brand-new development. But she might have traced an important continuity by referring to Perec’s book (1975), brilliantly “answered” by Laurent Binet in HHhH (2009). Her more immediate concern, however, is to help break the silence, the persistent, crippling, deliberate amnesia. As children, she and her contemporaries “erlebten vor allem gesammeltes Schweigen, das es erschwerte, Beziehungen zwischen den Generationen aufzunehmen, die Auseinandersetzungen ermöglicht hätten” (9). Hence the need for free invention and imaginatively grounded filling of gaps. This book is mainly the result of a series of conversations and interviews Scholl conducted at Vienna’s Alte Schmiede from October 2020 through September 2021 (230), and she is continuing with this project. The “forerunners” of the authors interviewed are Heimrad Bäcker and Edmund De Waal, among others, whom she discusses in her section “Verfahren und Vorfahren” (17–84) [End Page 153] as examples of authors faithful to history through individually guided, strongly imaginative reordering and focused concentration on one strategy. Bäcker’s approach in nachschrift, for instance, is “Sprache konzentrieren und ausstellen”—words come fully into their own when arranged as calligraphy and objects for display; De Waal draws on “Taktiles Erinnern” for historical truth in his acclaimed memoir Der Hase mit den Bernsteinaugen. The section based on the interviews is titled “Aus der Werkstatt” (85–216). In each chapter, Scholl records her interview with the author and precedes it with a short essay of orientation and commentary. What emerges is admirable for her succinct but clear way of introducing each work and author and a sense that she has gone to the essential questions about form and structure in each case. The range of topics, time...