“Un drame interdit d'accès”: Remembrance and the Prohibited Past in Barbara Honigmann's Generational Texts

Abstract

Discussions of Barbara Honigmann, both inside and outside academia, have repeatedly placed her work on the cusp of what is summarily cast as Jewish relations, thus framing her as a writer whose main artistic interest lies in the exploration of, to borrow from Homi Bhabha, hybrid or interstitial figurations of culture (see especially, The Location of Culture 1-12). This approach is anchored in Honigmann's frequently cited biography, the fact that she was born and grew up in an assimilated Jewish family in the GDR, but decided, in 1984, to leave Berlin for Strasbourg, where she has worked and lived ever since. As one of her many autobiographically inspired first-person narrators explains in Bonsoir, Madame Benhamou, a short piece at the end of her first prose collection Roman von einent Kinde (1986), this emigration amounted to a triple Todessprung ohne Netz: vom Osten in den Westen, von Deutschland nach Frankreich und aus der Assimilation mitten in das Thora-Judentum hinein (111). This heavily condensed (auto)biographeme, summarizing Honigmann's existence between a number of worlds to which she, in various ways, lays claim, has materialized as the single-most quoted sentence from her work, and not coincidentally: for it establishes, as indicated above, the basis for a certain mode of reading that is engaged in narrating and redefining identity positions outside and beyond the framework of the nation (Remmler, En-gendering Bodies of Memory 53; Guenther 216; Fiero 62),1 moreover from an emphatically gendered perspective (Lorenz 210-15). In view of this lethal leap, then, her texts are often seen as negotiating the terms of a double life, a Doppelleben, as Honigmann says herself in her acceptance speech for the Kleist-Preis in 2000 (Das Schiefe 35), which is suspended between her allegiance to German language and literature as an author writing in German, on the one hand, and her concerted efforts to reclaim an active Jewish identity moored in religious practice, on the other. My own reading, in essence sympathetic to the critical approach sketched above, seeks to delay the through which Honigmann's texts are organized thematically as figurations of Doppelleben and identitarian pluralization. It aims to effect a return to an implied moment in this discussion, namely to the by now firmly established reconceptualization of identity, to cast it in the words of one of Honigmann's critics, Christina Guenther, as process (216). Although Guenther, to stay with her example, does not seem to use these terms in a strong sense, I would like to seize upon what they propose in order to establish Honigmann's texts as acutely attuned to the challenges of envisioning and writing a possible relation between I and Other as a precarious performance in language; more specifically, as a colloquy always haunted by the prospect of failure. This is especially poignant in what could be called her or genealogical texts-i.e., essays, stories, and novels dedicated to representing complex intergenerational constellations in post-war Europe-because repeatedly, particularly due to the freighted past of the Third Reich, no exchange seems possible, let alone communication between parents and children of Jewish background, however much desired by the latter. As the first-person narrator of Graber in London, a narrative which is part of Honigmann's Damals, dann unddanach (1999), her most sustained meditation on identity in the landscape of post-war Europe, explains: Unsere Eltern sprachen nicht besonders gerne uber die Vergangenheit und schauten nicht gerne zuruck. So war unsere Herkunft eher mythischer Art, ein Geheimnis, nichts jedenfalls, das mil einem normalen Leben oder auch nur mit einem Gesprach daruber zu tun hatte (my emphasis; Damals 27). Honigmann's generational prose is full of instances that narrate or imply these impossible conversations between children and parents. In what follows, I investigate this hesitancy or even refusal to speak as a condition that lies at the heart of the communicative or dialogic of identity so patiently portrayed in many of her texts. …