Postmemory and Implication: Susanne Fritz Revisits the Post/War Period in Wie kommt der Krieg ins Kind (2018)

Friederike Eigler

doi:10.3390/h10010023

Abstract

After providing an introduction to German language family narratives of the past forty years and discussing the relevance of Michael Rothberg’s notion of the “Implicated Subject” for the study of these narratives, this article presents a detailed analysis of Susanne Fritz’s German-Polish family history Wie kommt der Krieg ins Kind (How does the war get into the child, 2018). Exemplifying the archival turn in postmemorial writings, the book draws on multiple sources and makes a compelling case for a broader public acknowledgment of the incarceration of German civilians (including the author’s mother) in post-war Polish labor camps, to this day a little-known aspect of German wartime suffering. The article examines on the one hand the intertwined nature of the mother’s wartime memories and the daughter’s postmemories and, on the other, questions of “implication” at the historical and the textual level (i.e., regarding the ancestors’ involvement in Nazi Germany and regarding the narrator’s positioning vis-à-vis her family history). The central challenge the narrative grapples with is how the suffering of Germans can be addressed within a larger perpetrator heritage. In its critical examination of archival materials and its multi-faceted examination of implication, the book makes a significant contribution to the collective memory of the (post-) war period as well as to the academic study of memory.

Highlights

Exemplifying the archival turn in postmemorial writings, the book draws on multiple sources and makes a compelling case for a broader public acknowledgment of the incarceration of German civilians in post-war Polish labor camps, to this day a little-known aspect of German wartime suffering
With reference to Germany and Europe, Anne Fuchs speaks of a shift from a “divided to a pluralistic memory culture”—a pluralism that results from dissonant voices and memory contests in the public sphere (Fuchs 2020)
Literature and the other arts have played a central role in these changes, sometimes leading the way to new developments in collective memory, at other times incorporating or critically reflecting on trends in trans/national memory cultures

Summary

Shifting Paradigms in Memory Studies and Family Narratives

Among scholars in memory studies and in German studies there is broad consensus that since German unification and the end of the Cold War we have witnessed significant shifts in German and in European and global memory cultures. I suggest pondering the following questions when examining family narratives that look back at How do these texts attend to the agency of historical subjects and to their implication in the violent history of Nazi Germany while portraying German wartime suffering and the lingering effects of postmemories?. Wie kommt der Krieg ins Kind is a book about the past and addresses its continued effects on the present This two-pronged emphasis is reflected in the title: At the most immediate level it references the traumatic experiences of the author’s mother (Ingrid) who, at the age of fourteen, was captured by the Soviet army during the family’s westward flight from Posen/Poznań, and kept in a Polish labor camp from 1945–1949 Far from lacking unity or organization, the book’s circular structure captures the nonlinear process of reconstructing the ancestors’ lives and the unfinished attempts of comprehending aspects of the past and their effects in the present

Postmemory

Implicated Subjects

Cultural Memory and the Responsibility for Narrating a Multifaceted Past