The Continued Presence of the Past: New Directions in Holocaust Writing?

Abstract

The Continued Presence of the Past:New Directions in Holocaust Writing? Christine Berberich German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust. Pascale R. Bos . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xiv + 143. $65.00 (cloth). Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945–1954. Jay Howard Geller . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii + 330. $24.99 (paper). Holocaust Poetry: Awkward Poetics in the Work of Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison and Ted Hughes. Antony Rowland . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Pp. vii + 192. $80.00 (cloth). Hitler’s Künstler: Die Kultur im Dienst des Nationalsozialismus. Hans Sarkowicz , ed. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 2004. Pp. 453. €24,80 (paper). Seeing Hitler’s Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich. Kristin Semmens . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xiv + 263. $74.95 (cloth). In My Brother’s Shadow. Uwe Timm . Anthea Bell , transl. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. Pp. 148. $18.00 (cloth). 2005 was a year of commemoration and remembrance. Sixty years since the end of the Second World War. Sixty years since the liberation of Auschwitz. Sixty years of trying to comprehend and deal with the extent of organized mass-murder committed during the twelve years of Nazi dictatorship. [End Page 567] On the publishing front, 2005 saw a renewed upsurge in scholarly titles dedicated to the Holocaust and the Third Reich in what seems a general reorientation for new perspectives. The ranks of actual witnesses to and survivors of the Holocaust are inexorably thinning, and instead of new memoirs by survivors one now increasingly finds second- or third-generation, postmemory, or fictional accounts of the Holocaust alongside scholarly treatises on varying aspects of the Third Reich and its reign of terror. The books discussed here are indicative of this broad range of themes and approaches that can presently be found in Holocaust and Third Reich writing; they range from traditional literature analysis (albeit with new perspectives and/or examining hitherto neglected authors) to historical discussions about Jewish life in postwar Germany and, intriguingly, tourism during the Nazi era. While this interesting scope of themes and topoi can potentially be explained with market demand, the question of positionality should not be forgotten. Borrowed from feminist studies, where positionality is used to address questions of identity construction of individual gendered subjects, it has recently been applied to Holocaust studies to address the potential problems of author background, origin, and writing incentive.1 It acknowledges that, in Holocaust studies and literature, the background of the author does, indeed, matter, despite Barthes's concerted efforts to disregard the author's life in literary analysis.2 In Holocaust studies, disregarding the author will not do. It clearly, and literally, matters where authors come from, which position they are writing from: are they survivors of the Nazi atrocities? Are they children of survivors who have grown up with their parents' memory? Are they non-Jewish? What is their incentive for writing on and researching the Holocaust? Questions such as these have become particularly pertinent since the advent of poststructuralism in Holocaust studies and the accompanying disturbing claim that Holocaust literature is a genre that can be studied and imitated—a claim that endangers the automatic right to authenticity of Holocaust memoirs but that has, since Binjamin Wilkomirski's fake memoirs Fragments (1995; 1996 in English translation), been substantiated.3 Positionality thus affects the way the subject of the Holocaust is dealt with. The issue of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—coming to terms with the past—is approached and dealt with differently depending on the writers' backgrounds. The books of this review all demonstrate how writers from different backgrounds approach similar topics in very different ways. Crucially, though, the authors, despite their different perspectives, arrive at similar conclusions. And these point squarely at Vergangenheitsbewältigung: how does, in particular, the new, reunited Germany deal with its past? Kristin Semmens's book Seeing Hitler's Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich is a fascinating account of how the Nazis used travel and tourism to indoctrinate the German people. It covers such diverse topics as the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) movement, the Kinderlandverschickung (a program sending thousands of children to the relative safety of the countryside), commercial and international...