Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature (Lexington Studies in Jewish Literature) 1666932515, 9781666932515

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Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature

LEXINGTON STUDIES IN JEWISH LITERATURE

Series Editor Victoria Aarons, Trinity University Jewish literature is an evolving field drawing upon a rich intersection of contexts: cultural, historical, religious, linguistic, interpretive, and political. As an essentially interdisciplinary field of study, Jewish literature transcends geographical and temporal boundaries, taking us back to ancient texts as it moves into new and evolving directions and patterns. This series welcomes original scholarship that explores a wide range of diverse perspectives, approaches, and methodologies that advance our understanding and appreciation of Jewish literature. The series will cover all geographical areas and all periods and movements in the field of Jewish literature, including such diverse areas as American Jewish literature; modern and ancient Hebrew literature; Jewish immigrant writing; Holocaust literary representation; Jewish writing around the globe; movements and theoretical approaches, such as cultural studies, psychoanalysis, feminism, gender studies, etc.; and Jewish cinema. We invite scholarly contributions that cover a range of genres: memoirs; fiction, including novels, graphic narratives, and short stories; poetry; and film. We welcome original monographs and edited volumes as well as English-language translations of manuscripts originally written in other languages. Titles in the Series Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature, edited by Alan L. Berger and Lucas F. W. Wilson Pragmatic-Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Amos Oz’s Writings: Words Significantly Uttered, by Dorit Lemberger Sacred Body: Readings in Jewish Literary Illumination, by Roberta Sterman Sabbath Reenvisioning Israel through Political Cartoons: Visual Discourses During the 2018– 2021 Electoral Crisis, by Matt Reingold Communist Poland: A Jewish Woman’s Experience, by Sara Nomberg-Pryztyk, edited by Holli Levitsky & Justyna Włodarczyk The Daniel Mendelsohn’s Memoir-Writing: Rings of Memory, edited by Sophie Vallas The Holocaust Across Borders: Trauma, Atrocity, and Representation in Literature and Culture, edited by Hilene S. Flanzbaum May God Avenge Their Blood: A Holocaust Memoir Triptych, by Rachmil Bryks, Translated Memories: Transgenerational Perspectives on the Holocaust, edited by Ursula Reuter & Bettina Hofmann

Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature Edited by Alan L. Berger and Lucas F. W. Wilson

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Alan L. Berger photograph credit: Dr. Ann Weiss. Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Berger, Alan L., editor. | Wilson, Lucas F. W., editor. Title: Emerging trends in third-generation holocaust literature / Alan L. Berger, Lucas F. W. Wilson. Description: Lanham: Lexington Books, 2023. | Series: Lexington studies in Jewish literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023016098 (print) | LCCN 2023016099 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666932515 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666932522 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in literature. | Grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. | Memory in literature. | Psychic trauma in literature. | Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. | Literature, Modern—21st century— History and criticism. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Essays. Classification: LCC PN56.H55 E49 2023 (print) | LCC PN56.H55 (ebook) | DDC 808.8/0358405318—dc23/eng/20230414 LC record available at https:​//​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2023016098 LC ebook record available at https:​//​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2023016099 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

In memory of Rachel Feldhay Brenner, z”l, whose scholarship and humanity touched so many lives

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Foreword xi Introduction: Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Representation xv Lucas F. W. Wilson and Alan L. Berger 1: Third-Generation Holocaust Inheritance in Two Graphic Narratives: A Layering of Histories and Legacies 1 Victoria Aarons 2: “Things will never be alright again”: Third-Generation German Jewish Literature and the Questions of Remembrance, Reconciliation, and Revenge 21 Luisa Banki 3: Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio: A New Turn in Holocaust Representation 37 Alan L. Berger 4: Categories of Catastrophe: Third-Generation Reckoning in Susanne Fritz’s Becoming a Child of War Katra Byram 5: The “Tumor of Memory” in Fabrice Humbert’s The Origin of Violence Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller

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6: Numbers and Portraits: Reframing Auschwitz Tattoos in Dana Doron and Uriel Sinai’s Numbered 83 Elke Heckner vii

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7: Representations of Identity and the Holocaust Archive in Third-Generation Graphic Narrative: Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home 99 Dana Mihăilescu 8: Writing Inherited Stories: A Study of Representational Anxiety in Australian Third-Generation Holocaust Literature 117 Tess Scholfield-Peters 9: Animals and the Holocaust in Nava Semel’s And the Rat Laughed Naomi Sokoloff

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10: Third-Generation Holocaust Survivors in Israel: Cultural Narratives Liat Steir-Livny

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11: Distant Relations: Third-Generation Perpetrator Descendants Writing in English 169 Sue Vice Conclusion 185 Alan L. Berger and Lucas F. W. Wilson Index 189 About the Editors

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We first want to thank the contributors for their wisdom and insight. Their essays reveal that while the Holocaust as an historical event has passed, it continues to emit traumatic shock waves in the lives of third generation writers. These essays raise fundamental questions concerning identity and the role of art in responding to tragedy. Our appreciation also to Dr. Judith Lakamper, Acquisitions Editor for Jewish Studies with Lexington Press, and to Professor Victoria Aarons, Jewish Studies Series Editor. It was a joy to work with them both. We also gratefully acknowledge Mr. Mark Lopez and Ms. Dominique McIndoe at Lexington Books for their wise shepherding of our manuscript. The FAU Foundation and The Center for the Study of Values and Violence After Auschwitz made possible the acquisition of the cover artwork, for which we are deeply grateful. Thanks as well to Ms. Virginia Gabriel, Alan’s secretary, for her help with the manuscript preparation. Finally, many thanks and more to Naomi Berger, Alan’s wife, for her love and encouragement and to Mateus Marcheti Gomes, Lucas’ partner, for his unending care and support.

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Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Representation . . . Professor Alan L. Berger and Dr. Lucas F.W. Wilson I am writing the foreword to The Emergence of New Voices in Holocaust Representations as a Holocaust scholar and as a teacher of the Shoah, at the University of Cincinnati for the past thirty-six years. I am also writing as a child Holocaust survivor and the daughter of survivors of the infamous Transnistria death camp. This makes me uniquely aware of Holocaust trauma, the persistent presence of a profound malaise connected with the threat of annihilation, not fully experienced in real time, never fully knowable and thus compulsively relived by the traumatized psyche, which is central to the Holocaust. Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Representation is a remarkable scholarly work by my colleague and fellow wordsmith, Distinguished Professor Alan Berger, in partnership with former PhD student, Dr. Lucas Wilson. This important volume turns our attention in a unique way to the emerging third-generation voices grappling with post-Shoah identity issues at a time when survivors are rapidly disappearing. Berger and Wilson’s insightful work evidences poignantly that Holocaust trauma is transmitted transgenerationally and continues to affect the families of survivors and the Jewish people as a whole. Likewise, the book reveals a keen awareness by all the authors of the psychological, religious, ethical, aesthetic, and socio-political factors at work in Holocaust remembrance and representation. The present volume includes chapters by a diverse group of authors from a number of different countries and continents who examine closely the remarkable depictions in fiction and film of Holocaust trauma symptoms, such as loneliness, yearning for completeness, emotional distance, excessive fear, guilt and shame, hypervigilance, and feelings of threat of annihilation experienced by the 3G emerging authors. xi

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Featured in the current volume are powerful essays such as “Third-Generation Holocaust Inheritance in Two Graphic Narratives: A Layering of Histories and Legacies” by distinguished Holocaust author, Victoria Aarons, and “Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio: A New Turn in Holocaust Representation” by Berger himself. Side by side with these cutting-edge essays are equally insightful chapters such as Tess Scholfield-Peters’s essay, “Writing Inherited Stories: A Study of Representational Anxiety in Australian Third-Generation Holocaust Literature” and “Third-Generation Holocaust Survivors in Israel: Cultural Narratives” by Israeli author, Liat Stier-Livny,” as well as “Animals and the Holocaust in Nava Semel’s, And the Rat laughed” by Professor Naomi Sokoloff, who sheds new light on the acclaimed Israeli author’s extraordinary work. The chapters featured in this volume use fresh investigative multidisciplinary tools and approaches to emphasize that Holocaust trauma extends to survivors’ children and grandchildren who have grown up in the shadow of the Holocaust and have assimilated the Holocaust as part of their identity. In times when the demands of intergenerational transmission of trauma, compete with the necessity of moving on with the authors’ lives without forgetting, the emerging 3G representations are moving away from the longstanding notions of traumatization and commodification. These emerging representations introduce a new attitude towards trauma and memory that goes beyond the notion of postmemory while they also remain committed to the task of remembering the past and creating ethical responses. Professor Berger’s and Dr. Wilson’s volume evidences that the emerging trends reveal a preoccupation, indeed obsession, with memory and memorialization through various modes of artistic representations that illuminate not only a traumatic history but shed light on a struggle with voids of memory, lost places of memory, and shards and ruins of family history. Through disconnected and disjoint images that lack context or continuity typical of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), the emerging 3G authors are emboldened to confront this enduring legacy in a fresh way the current challenges raised to artistic, cultural, and political discourse. The Holocaust survivor and poet, Dan Pagis, wrote: “On the Sealed Door of the Freight Car: Here, in this carload, I, Eve, with my Son Abel. If you see my older boy, Cain, the son of Adam, tell him that I. . . . ”

Professor Berger and Dr. Wilson, together with their valiant project collaborators, reveal how the emerging new third-generation voices succeed in carving their own discourse of memorializing and remembering in this un-nameable, indeed impossible to name, space beyond the three dots left on the cattle car by a mother on her way to the crematoria, and they create a unique texture to their yearning for knowledge, for keeping alive the past they have not lived and giving voice to the voids of memory.



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The authors featured in this fine volume both theorize and historicize Holocaust representation and move on flawlessly to signal to the reader fresh representation of this cataclysmic event in the history of the Jewish people. Scrupulously and honestly, the writers evidence the multilayered challenges faced by the 3G and proceed to mapping the literary trajectories of a robust sample of bold emerging third-generation authors who are unanimously animated by an imperative to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. In reading Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Representation, we learn about these young authors who come with a keen understanding that a moral debt is owed the past and that an existential debt is owed the present. Likewise, we become more keenly aware that these authors successfully strike a balance between rage and anger vs. integrating the past into the present, and establish emotional, existential and literary standards in times when representation of the Shoah are being distorted in and by popular culture. In the conclusion of The Philosophy of Art, Hegel stated that in human art “we are not merely dealing with playthings, however pleasant or useful they may be, but with the liberation of the human spirit from the substance and forms of our finite condition.” Art supplies us with the most generous reward for the severe labors of our contact with reality and “the grievous pains of knowledge.” We demand from art a cosmic image, an understanding of who we are. Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Representation expounds on what it means to be living with the “grievous pain of knowledge” that we, emancipated humans, could send innocent human beings to the gas chambers and have children turned into “wreaths of smoke” ascending through the chimneys of the habitation of death (Elie Wiesel, Night). The book indeed underscores that when considering the Holocaust, we experience a paradox. On the one hand, an impulse to heal and get some therapeutic empathy, a sort of (fore)closure, so that we could cope with the reality of Auschwitz; one the other hand, we wish to keep the memory of what happened alive so that we would not repeat ourselves in the future. Our impulse to memorialize collides thus with other, equally strong opposed impulses. Carving memorials in STONE, with WORDS, or IMAGES so that we remember that we, humans, are Auschwitz as well, is fraught with contradictions and dilemmas. In her memoir, After such Knowledge, Eva Hoffman reminds us that as the Holocaust recedes in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the next generation. She shows how this knowledge is transmitted to others and what are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors. Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Representation offers further insights about traumas of the past that change in fact the stress hormones in a survivor’s body, which is passed down and can affect their descendants’ reaction to stress. The inherited trauma makes them more likely to suffer from PTSD, anxiety, addiction, and depression. Likewise, Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Representation opens up new intergenerational conversations among third-generation Holocaust witnesses and about the responsibility of transmitting Holocaust stories

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and asks us in a poignant way to examine the complex processes through which private traumas are transmitted. As readers of diverse backgrounds and knowledge of the Shoah, we are guided in each chapter through the juncture at which living memory must be relinquished, so that we begin to think about what insights can be carried from the past to the newly problematic present, and are urged to transform potent yet fragmented stories into an informed understanding of a forbidding history. We also learn that the process of witnessing, as a 3G, is an incredibly vulnerable, sacred experience and something that cannot be taken lightly. In exploring with respect, thoughtfulness, and sensitivity “the grievous pain of knowledge” evidenced in the study of the emerging trends in Holocaust research, the authors of this volume become themselves powerful witnesses who move us in singular ways by their capacity of understanding and by their empathy. GILA SAFRAN NAVEH Ph. D. Professor Emerita Fellow of the Oxford Center for Post Graduate Jewish Studies Fellow of the Academy of Teaching & Learning Comparative Literature and Judaic Studies University of Cincinnati

Introduction Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Representation Lucas F. W. Wilson and Alan L. Berger

In Elie Wiesel’s novel The Sonderberg Case, Yedidayah (“Beloved of God”), a descendant of Holocaust survivors, states: “We don’t live in the past, but the past lives in us.”1 This statement has a profound resonance for many within the third generation, whose members include grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators. History, of course, has many tasks—both real and imagined. But none of these tasks is more urgent than “work[ing] through a past that,” as Dominick LaCapra notes, “has not passed away.”2 For members of the third generation, the Holocaust’s painful and not infrequently traumatic legacy, particularly as it relates to their individual families, endures. To varying degrees, the Holocaust’s ongoing aftermath has shaped and continues to shape how the third generation perceives themselves, their families, and the world around them. But they face a specific conundrum. They live and write at a time of “after testimony,” an era where first-person accounts of survivors are fast disappearing. But to come “‘after’ also implies an obligation to the future.”3 The third generation thus must think “about the future of Holocaust narrative and about the afterlife of Holocaust narratives in different cultures.”4 Though by no means the only custodians of Holocaust narratives, many within the third generation have assumed the mantle of keeping Holocaust memory alive today and of preserving such memory for future generations across the globe. However, the essential questions remain: What is the relationship of the Shoah to twenty-first-century life, and when survivors are no longer among us, what will become of Holocaust memory and commemoration? These are the questions the late second-generation Israeli writer Nava Semel brilliantly explores in her insightful novel And the Rat Laughed. The novel’s nameless grandmother, a child survivor of the Shoah and a victim of sexual violence, resides in Tel Aviv. She wonders about the fate of survivor testimony once it leaves the hands of its original owners and is subjected to cultural fashions, distortions, and the whims of a variety of people who either do not know or do not care about the xv

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Holocaust or its contemporary lessons and legacies. As a foundational bedrock of the third generation’s psychosocial life, the Shoah may be seen either as a harbinger of the future or as a final warning to humanity. There is an enormous difference between the three generations of those whose lives have been touched by the Shoah. The witness generation—comprised of survivors of ghettos and camps, those who were hidden, and those who were displaced and escaped the reach of the Third Reich—are like the messengers in the biblical Book of Job. They, too, can say, “I alone have escaped to tell you” (Job 1:15). Witnesses to the cruelty, depravity, and obliteration of six million Jewish lives, they can attest to the world’s indifference to the sacrality of human life and the orchestrated attempt to destroy Jewish memory. They speak with the voice of moral authority and traumatic memory. Many survivors also had enormous post-Shoah theological difficulties to confront: Had God abandoned the Jewish people? What would constitute a meaningful relationship to God after 1945? Did history have a meaning? One way of illustrating the difference between the survivor generation and their descendants on these matters is to contrast the view of Elie Wiesel and that of his son Elisha. In Night, the survivor explains: “I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.”5 Elisha, in contrast to his father, questions the very existence of the divine. What is remarkable about the witness generation is not only the physical and psychic torment they endured, a topic that has received ample scholarly treatment.6 But one needs also to appreciate their resolve to seek a meaningful post-Shoah existence. This is clearly shown in the late Professor William Helmreich’s Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America. Did the witness generation emerge wounded by their experience? Of course. But they persisted in persisting. The second generation, the children of survivors, had a different—though in some cases similar—set of characteristics and psychosocial issues with which to deal. Despite how the second generation is markedly heterogenous, as shown in, for example, Helen Epstein’s landmark work Children of the Holocaust, Aaron Haas in In the Shadow of the Holocaust explains that within the second generation we nonetheless “find common motifs, sensitivities, and conflicts in this population.”7 Largely a function of their parents’ Holocaust experiences, though of course not exclusively, many children of survivors describe having had struggles with guilt, shame, anxiety, worry, mistrust or paranoia, panic, general fear and, more specifically, fear of death, depression, sadness, apathy, and self-hatred, in addition to anger and resentment, particularly toward their parents.8 Feelings of cynicism, fatalism, vulnerability—along with feelings of weakness, inadequacy, and inferiority as compared to their parents—were also commonly reported.9 Many had recurrent daydreams, dreams, nightmares, and/ or other marginal thoughts about the Holocaust.10 Not uncommonly, survivors also made demands for symbiotic devotion between themselves and their children or reversed their family’s parent-child roles, resulting in the phenomenon of the “parentified child”—when the child became a “protector, best friend, and confidant.”11 Parent-child relationships were further complicated by parents vicariously living



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out their hopes, dreams, and desires through their children; by parents having high expectations of their children for achievement and for fulfilling family goals; by forcing children to act as mediators with the outside world; by children feeling that they needed to be happy and not be angry, so as to appease their parents; and by children feeling burdened by their parents’ belief that they survived to have children and, in a number of cases, feelings that they were intended to “replace” their parents’ murdered children and/or relatives.12 Many survivors obsessed about the health of family members; isolated themselves and their children13; feared separating from their children; and were overprotective, silent, and emotionally numb.14 As a result, many within the second generation struggled with dissociation and individuation, which gave rise to the desire to live out their parents’ Holocausts pasts as ways to undo their parents’ traumas.15 In contrast, a number of children detached and emotionally removed themselves from their parents.16 Problematically, the second generation is itself termed the “real” survivors by Artie Spiegelman’s psychoanalyst Pavel in Maus II17; they endured the experience of being parented by traumatized parents who, when they would have ordinarily learned how to become parents, were instead being beaten, starved, tormented, and punished for the “crime” of being Jewish. In many cases, their consequent legacy is one of distrust of the social world and a distrust of the Other. All this to say, the carnage of the Shoah belatedly shaped and wounded many, though of course not all, children of survivors in a multiplicity of ways. Many in the third generation were also marked and, in some cases, marred by the Shoah. However, classifying the “third generation,” like categorizing either of the preceding generations, is particularly difficult given the wide-ranging diversity within the group. As postmodern scholarship has established, categorizing an entire social group is always already a challenging, if not impossible, task, insofar as identity categories are fluid and constantly in flux. Moreover, in tandem with the fact that the third generation is markedly heterogeneous, it is a precarious undertaking to “define” this generation as a social group.18 Esther Jilovsky details why this is difficult: This generation “includes people with either one, two, three or four grandparents who survived the Holocaust. There is therefore much greater variation in family histories and personal identities of the third generation, who may not identify as third generation or even as Jewish.”19 Moreover, there are many within the third generation who claim to have neither a personal connection to the Holocaust nor a desire to connect, as well as those who actively seek to disassociate themselves from their grandparents’ pasts. Many of those individuals, however, as Nirit Pisano persuasively argues in Granddaughters of the Holocaust, often still carry with them “the residues of the Holocaust,”20 despite their claims to be unaffected and/or their desires to rid themselves of their families’ dark histories. Though some members of the third generation resist any connection to the Holocaust and/or denounce any desire to carry forth its memory, research suggests that many such individuals are nonetheless still affected by the Event—albeit, perhaps, unconsciously. There are a host of additional factors that further diversify the third generation, including individual family dynamics; religious, political, and/or social commitments; racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual

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differences; socioeconomic statuses; etc. Yet, as Golan Moskovitz rightly suggests, it is “hasty to dismiss these grandchildren’s experiences or to exclude them from critical studies of post-Holocaust positioning.”21 Further illuminating Moskovitz’s suggestion, Victoria Aarons explains: While the term third generation raises a number of complicated issues . . . , it is also a useful designation from which to discuss the perspective from which this particular generation—cultural, temporal, familial, affective, imagined—approaches the Holocaust, a generation as [Paule] Lévy argues, “already removed from, yet still haunted by the Shoah.” This is a generation approaching the Holocaust from a position that is precariously balanced between proximity and distance, a position that characterizes this generation.22

Their generational remove from the Holocaust—along with their increased ability to access a larger archive of Holocaust representation and to ask survivors more candidly about the Holocaust—largely distinguishes the third generation from the first and second. Moreover, there are a number of shared characteristics between descendants of survivors and of perpetrators; both were raised largely in silence about the specifics of their families’ experiences during the Shoah—but, of course, for very different reasons. Memories of the Shoah were frequently disguised, as the reality of the horror was kept from grandchildren. Perpetrators preferred to forget they were either murderers, bystanders, or those who remained indifferent as their former neighbors were rounded up, herded into ghettos, and/or deported to oblivion. The fate of Jews was no moral concern of theirs. Alternatively, perpetrators not infrequently lied about the role they played during the years of the so-called “Final Solution,” implying either that they behaved admirably or that they fooled Russian soldiers and helped Jewish prisoners seeking hiding places after the war. Some descendants of perpetrators had a difficult time reconciling images of evil Nazis that they had studied in school with their kind omas (grandmothers) and opas (grandfathers). Indeed, some could not help but look into their grandparents’ faces and see the image of a murderer. Third-generation perpetrator writings, collectively, reveal traces of their grandparents’ traumatic pasts, even while locating them in the present, as they seek to come to terms with their identity in a complex postmodern moment. In this context, it is helpful to acknowledge that Gottfried Wagner, grandson of the infamous composer, moved his family to Italy in order to work through his traumatic legacy. Specifically concerning the third generation of perpetrators, we note that they seek to uncover their families’ murderous pasts while trying to find their own place in such dystopian tales. Some third-generation perpetrators seek to place the crimes of their ancestors against the background of German suffering during the war. Others reflect on and stress their differences from the contradictions of their grandparents’ genocidal pasts. Whatever the specific modality, it seems certain that new ways of remembering the Shoah will emerge among the fourth perpetrator generation. Time alone will reveal how cultural factors influence their “memory.”23



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Descendants of survivors and perpetrators alike frequently sought to protect their forbearers from memories of the past, whereas survivors and perpetrators themselves oftentimes took refuge, as noted above, in silence as a way of shielding their descendants from the memories of the Holocaust. Silence in these cases was believed— falsely—to be therapeutic. However, silence in its own right does indeed send a message. Descendants report knowing that something happened, even if their parents did not articulate their experiences verbally. Moreover, there appears to have been a more open relationship between the first and third generations than that which existed between the first and the second. Scholars have suggested several possible reasons for this shift. As survivors and perpetrators age, for instance, they felt greater pressure to bear witness. Finally, the third generation did not have the often tense and frequently fraught relationship with their grandparents that their own parents had with the first generation.

THIRD-GENERATION REPRESENTATION Third-generation representation gives voice to these common characteristics of grandchildren of survivors and perpetrators. Third-generation works of fiction and nonfiction, graphic narratives, and films, in addition to other forms of representation, explore complex family dynamics, along with how the third generation navigates such dynamics, particularly in relation to the Holocaust. In Textual Silence, Jessica Lang explains how narratives written by the grandchildren of survivors include imagined endings, rewritten histories, emotionally laden textual interactions, verbal and physical interplay, interviews with relatives and strangers who are Holocaust survivors, intense and well-documented historical and archival research, travel to distant places, and feelings for their subject matter that began with a fascination bordering on obsession and often include a deeply personal brand of interest and investment.24

Though Lang is speaking specifically about authors who are grandchildren of survivors, her observations are largely applicable to authors who are grandchildren of perpetrators as well. For these grandchildren of survivors and perpetrators, perhaps to an even greater extent than the second generation, “imagination becomes a substitute, a placeholder, for memory”25 because of their increased generational remove from the events of the Shoah. As Aarons notes, writers for whom stories of the Holocaust have existed on the periphery of their consciousnesses, an outline casting remote shadows around the margins of their lives. It is this periphery upon which the third generation trespasses in an attempt to capture memory and fill the ever-widening gap between those who directly suffered the events of the Holocaust and lived to recount their experiences and those for whom that particular

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history can only be imaginatively reconstructed from an approximation of that time and place, events excavated from the “shards” of memories.26

Indeed, the third generation, to cite the late theologian Arthur Cohen’s pregnant phrase, “bears the scar without the wound.”27 Compared to its two predecessor generations, this third generation is even further removed from the Shoah both in terms of time and space. Moreover, a number in the third generation do not have living and/or well-defined memories of their survivor grandparents. Rather, their memories of survivors are often mediated through the recollections of their second-generation parents. Third-generation authors/artists—with their post-traumatic inheritances— explore the Shoah’s effects on their grandparents, their parents, and themselves, along with its enduring legacy in the twenty-first century. There are a number of recent third-generation literary/artistic productions, but arguably the most popular third-generation representation is the 2020 Netflix original, Unorthodox. This four-part miniseries has received much critical acclaim and was the nominee and winner of several major television, production, and music awards. The program is based on the memoir Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, written by Deborah Feldman, herself a member of the third generation. Unorthodox traces the exodus of protagonist Esther (“Esty”) Shapiro from her Orthodox community in Williamsburg, New York, to Berlin, Germany, where she establishes a new life beyond the confines of religious traditionalism, a restrictive marriage, and her culturally controlling community. Throughout the show, Esty begins not only to emancipate herself from the religious and cultural orthodoxy of her past, but she also begins to reckon with her family’s Holocaust history. In truth, Esty—played by the superbly talented Shira Haas, herself a granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor—expresses interest in her family’s history before she leaves for Germany. In one of Esty’s flashbacks, her bubbe (grandmother), a survivor, is listening to music and is crying. She shares with Esty: “My father loved this song. He had a wonderful voice, Esty. Your great-grandpa. All the men in his family did.” Esty, too, begins weeping. She asks, “In Hungary, before the war?” Her grandmother responds: “So many lost, but soon you’ll have children of your own.” Then, Esty’s spinster aunt Malka, her primary caregiver, barges into the room, turns off the music, and changes the subject away from the Holocaust. Malka, embodying the second generation, does not talk to her survivor mother about the Shoah, whereas Esty, representative of the third generation, asks her grandmother about the Holocaust. The phenomenon of survivors’ grandchildren being the ones to broach the subject of the Shoah with their grandparents is pervasive throughout the representation of and research on the third generation. Yet, unlike the second generation who are often preoccupied with the death and destruction wrought by the Shoah (despite not trying to ask their parents about their pasts out of a fear of reopening old wounds), the third generation seeks to learn about the Shoah without fixating on the violence of their families’ Holocaust pasts. This is illustrated when Esty and her husband, Yankel (“Yanky”) Shapiro,



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first meet. Yanky explains that his father had taken him to Europe and that they exclusively visited the graves of famous rabbis. Esty prods: “You went all the way to Europe and all you saw were graves? Nothing else?” Yanky responds: “I wanted to, but my father didn’t allow it.” Esty’s question and Yanky’s response both point to how the third generation, unlike the second, is often less interested in (re)animating the trauma of their families’ pasts as they are in finding new ways forward “After Such Knowledge,” to use Hoffman’s felicitous phrase.28 The setting of this piece of televisual third-generation representation—Berlin and its surrounding suburbs—functions as a place where Esty is free to explore not only her Orthodox roots but also her family’s Holocaust past, in order to make room for a more habitable future. When she first arrives in the capital city that will be her new home, she passes the Berlin Victory Column, known as “Goldelse” (“Golden Lizzy”), a monument to the past that, as it were, also symbolically functions as a monument to the future. Although it largely represents the history of German militarism, Goldelse also foreshadows Esty’s (at least partial) victory over or, more accurately, escape from her truncating past while simultaneously symbolizing hope and promise for a better tomorrow. Indeed, Berlin itself is the spatial embodiment of victory, hope, and promise for Esty—the place that confronts her with the past, especially as it relates to the Holocaust. But it is also the setting that offers her occasion for psychological, emotional, sexual, and physical liberation, an avenue toward existential freedom outside of orthodoxy. Even if Esty cannot fully vindicate herself from the enduring wounds of her family’s history, as well as her own personal history, Berlin becomes the place where she can begin coming to terms with her personal and family histories. Indeed, after Esty invites herself along on an outing with the group of friends who eventually adopt her into their social circle, she finds herself in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, a place that prompts her to confront her family’s Holocaust history. Though Esty’s bubbe was born in Hungary and though most Jews from Hungary were sent directly to Poland, the location of the group’s excursion to Großer Wannsee—the body of water in which they swim—assumes profound valences of meaning for Esty. Großer Wannsee looks over the Wannsee House, where the Wannsee Conference took place. The conference was organized in order to plan the implementation of the “Final Solution,” thereby sealing the fate of two thirds of European Jewry. Consequently, the friends’ beach day conjures deeply personal feelings for Esty, as it was the setting where her family’s fatal fate was determined. Slowly, Esty enters the waters of Großer Wannsee and removes her wig, revealing her shaved head. The moment she takes off her wig is when her new friend, Dasia, furtively starts looking at a photo of Esty’s grandmother that is in her envelope back on the beach. The crosscut between Esty and the photo of her grandmother in this scene is symbolic on a number of levels. First, as Esty, bald-headed, stands in the waters of Großer Wannsee, she is visually juxtaposed with the image of her Holocaustsurvivor grandmother—thereby establishing the traumatic connection between the

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generations in Esty’s family—given how Holocaust trauma of survivors (and their subsequent offspring) was a direct function of the murderous decisions made at Wannsee. Second, the family archive that Esty keeps—contained in the envelope— not only is a common trope for descendants of survivors. For Holocaust survivors’ offspring commonly collect documents and photographs to keep a record of their traumatized families. But this back-and-forth between shots of the envelope and shots of Esty in the waters of Großer Wannsee reveals how the envelope functions as an archive but, more significantly, how Esty’s own body is an archive that holds within it the trauma and the embodied experience of the Holocaust. Indeed, the crosscut signals Esty’s embodied knowledge that has become, indirectly, reanimated by and through being in Germany. Third, the crosscut of Esty in the water and of the photo of her grandmother represents the re-placing of Esty’s European family, that is, the re-situating of the family in a place that sought their demise, which negates Hitler’s “posthumous victory”29 over Jews. At the end of this scene, Esty drops her wig into the water, and it begins to float away, metaphorizing the release of her Orthodox past, before her submersion. Her underwater plunge can also be understood symbolically; she is submerged under the waters of history in a secular mikvah (ritual bath) of sorts that is connected to her family’s Holocaust past. In this scene, there is a sense of renewal, of integrating the past by directly engaging with (even accidentally) the geography and thus the memory of the Shoah. Unorthodox also explores a number of other matters concerning Holocaust memory, including those pertaining to people not biologically related to survivors. The first of these topics touches on the phenomenon of so-called “selfies” as they relate to memorial culture. Israeli Yael Roubeni, one of Esty’s new Berlin friends, jokes that the group could visit Hitler’s bunker or take “selfies at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.” Though this is meant as a joke, the suggestion points to the not-so-uncommon practice of taking selfies at Holocaust memorials and monuments, where individuals, especially those in the Millennial and Gen Z generations, place themselves in the frame of their photos. With the visibly angered Esty and the flippantly casual Yael, both of whom represent opposite approaches to the sacrality of Holocaust memory, their dialogue animates questions relating to the ethics of selfies at sites of Holocaust commemoration. Should we photographically implicate ourselves when capturing images of Holocaust memorial sites? What is the ethical relationship between the photographed subject and the Shoah, and what does taking a selfie communicate about this relationship? Ought one take selfies in front of other mass graves and/or sites of execution? This scene’s discussion of selfie culture dovetails with its conversation surrounding Holocaust humor. Not only is Yael making a casual joke about the commemoration of the Holocaust—perhaps a function of “Holocaust fatigue,” which is particularly common in both Germany and Israel—but in response to Yael, Axmed, Esty’s new queer friend, chimes in: “That, Yael, is a superb idea, and the memorial to the murdered homosexuals is just across the street. And while we’re at it there’s one to the murdered Sini and Roma nearby, too.” The group of friends, with the exception of



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Esty, laughs in response. These Holocaust-related jokes raise questions surrounding who can and/or should make such jokes, as well as the function of gallows humor as it relates to the Shoah. Yael is Jewish, and Axmed is queer, so do they have the moral authority to make such jokes given how they were not affected by the Shoah firsthand? Do individuals’ identities matter when seeking to make such “jokes,” or does one have to have been personally implicated in tragedies in order to invoke “humor”? Or as time goes on and we are increasingly temporally removed from a tragedy, does one then become increasingly able to “joke” about the Event?30 These questions about Holocaust memory, in concert with a host of others, find expression throughout third-generation representation. Indeed, such literature, films, performances, and other representations raise myriad questions about the continual unease and/or ambiguity concerning the endurance of Holocaust memory that seemingly will not go away; how Holocaust memory is deployed in a digital age for a multiplicity of purposes; how Holocaust memory is used as an analogue when compared to other atrocities in an age of genocide, including the zero-sum game of comparative suffering; etc. Third-generation texts, like Unorthodox and those discussed at length in Emerging Trends, critically examine the role of the Holocaust today while hypothesizing how Holocaust “memory” will assert itself in the future.

VOLUME OVERVIEW The essays collected in Emerging Trends build on the relatively new field of scholarship that focuses on the third generation. Beginning with Dan Bar-On’s Fear & Hope (1995) and Gabriele Rosenthal’s The Holocaust in Three Generations: Families of Victims and Perpetrators of the Nazi Regime (1997), a growing body of research has begun probing the contours of third-generation representation and identities. With more recent studies like Bettina Hofmann and Ursula Reuter’s edited collection, Translated Memories: Transgenerational Perspectives on the Holocaust (2020), research in this field has been produced across several continents. And this collection is no different. Offering a multinational perspective, contributing authors in Emerging Trends come from Britain, Canada, Australia, France, Israel, Romania, Germany, and the United States. Moreover, the primary texts examined in this collection were written/created by authors/artists from Britain, Canada, Australia, France, Israel, Germany, and the United States; even so, there appears a commonality to their visual and written representations. Our goal is not to crystallize a set of definitive characteristics of the third generation nor to pathologize the grandchildren of survivors and perpetrators. Rather, as this book’s title indicates, we seek to identify and discuss emerging trends in a range of creative responses to the Holocaust in the twenty-first century, particularly as they relate to the third generation’s epistemic, post-traumatic, and affective inheritances that stem from the Shoah. This volume endeavors to contribute to the continuing discussion of the various ways by which the Holocaust has impacted

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grandchildren of survivors and perpetrators; how the legacy of the Holocaust endures in their lives; and how these individuals have shaped and continue to shape how we honor the memory of the Holocaust. We believe this collection will prove of value in the ongoing discussion of Marianne Hirsch and Eva Hoffman’s respective heuristic tropes that have generatively helped readers understand and conceptualize second- and third-generation Holocaust representation. As noted above, Hoffman speaks of descendants of survivors living “After Such Knowledge.”31 Hirsch writes of “postmemory,” by which she means that the “memory” of the second (and, by extension, the third) generation is “evacuated” and replaced by the traumatic experience related to their survivor (grand)parents’ Holocaust experiences.32 Distinguishing Hoffman’s position from that of Hirsch, Gerd Bayer, the cinema critic, notes that Hoffman’s perspective “firmly holds on to the present and looks for a place of memory within everyday life.”33 This, attests Bayer, “guarant[ees] its place in the cultural memory.”34 A central tenet of Bayer’s position is that “postmemory changes as additional generations come to be exposed to its remembered content.”35 In line with Bayer, Christoph Ribbat helpfully suggests that Hirsch’s notion of postmemory needs revision when addressing the third generation. This generation has no postmemory per se. Grandchildren frequently did not meet their survivor grandparents, although the grandparents who were able to interact with their grandchildren did, on the whole, feel more comfortable speaking about their Shoah experience with them rather than with their own children in the second generation. Ribbat argues for what may be termed “post-postmemories.”36 By this he understands the necessity of the grandchildren filling in the gaps by, for example, doing interviews with relatives and friends, reading extensively, and/or making pilgrimages to their grandparents’ natal villages and to concentration camps. Internet searches, to a large extent, replace the role of direct conversations with their grandparents, since the survivor generation is rapidly disappearing. This third generation, as Hoffman attests, is affected by not knowing about the Shoah, yet in an imaginative sense they also “remember” it. In this volume, we ask: How does the third generation “remember” events not personally experienced? What effect does this “memory” have on their imagination and psychic life? What is its impact on the stories they tell about their families and themselves? Do these tales preclude their tellers from living a full or so-called normal life? Daniel Mendelsohn, author of the award-winning memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million, insightfully states the problem for the second generation is navigating between distance and proximity. This observation applies equally, although with different resonance, for grandchildren of survivors as well as for descendants of perpetrators. Contributors The essays in this volume provide several angles of vision. Victoria Aarons and Dana Mihăilescu, in their respective chapters, each discuss Amy Kuzweil’s Flying Couch: A



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Graphic Memoir (2016) and Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (2018)—two third-generation graphic narratives. Aarons suggests that, together, these two third-generation narratives speak to the complex web of motivations and negotiations through which the Holocaust is “witnessed” from contrasting, yet overlapping, perspectives: the point of view of a grandchild of survivors and that of a grandchild of perpetrators. Through the hybrid medium of comics narratives, both graphic memoirists call attention to their precarious positions as distanced third-generation arbiters and transmitters of Holocaust memory. Both Kurzweil and Krug, writing from an increasingly remote generational position in relation to the Holocaust and to the fragmented narratives of the events that came to shape the lives of their families, construct narratives that call attention to the artifice of telling and drawing the fractured and opaque stories of the past. Through the verbal-visual tensions and juxtapositions characteristic of the genre of the graphic narrative, these third-generation graphic artists, argues Aarons, humanize the history of the Shoah by uncovering their families’ pasts but also by confronting their own anxious places in that legacy. Mihăilescu, in her comparison of Kuzweil and Krug’s graphic narratives, explores how third-generation representation employs the Holocaust archive both similarly and differently from second-generation representation. Mihăilescu further investigates how Krug’s quest for details and concept of home (Heimat) rely on similar and divergent tropes as those from other third-generation survivors’ narratives. Naomi Sokoloff analyzes how Nava Semel’s And the Rat Laughed (2001) depicts the relationship between a Holocaust survivor who was a hidden child during the Shoah and her granddaughter. Sokoloff discusses And the Rat Laughed through the lens of critical animal studies, so as to help illuminate the role of the rat in the novel. Specifically, Sokoloff examines the rat’s enigmatic laughter that is so central to the novel, teasing out several themes as they relate to theology, interspecies contact zones, and the conundrum of what defines humanity and humanness in a setting of inhuman brutality. Sokoloff, like Mihăilescu, alerts readers to the differences between how the second and third generations respond to trauma, but her analysis also calls attention to ways that stories about hidden children can speak back against antisemitic views of Jews as subhuman. Alan L. Berger’s chapter discusses a new trope of third-generation Holocaust representation. Focusing on Julie Orringer’s epic novel The Flight Portfolio (2019), he treats the rescue efforts of Varian Fry, a gay American-born Protestant journalist who spent thirteen months in the port city of Marseilles and rescued nearly two thousand people, including intellectuals and artists such as Hannah Arendt, Claude Levi-Strauss, Marc Chagall, and Jacques Lipshutz. Orringer treats the Holocaust and homosexuality while uncovering Fry’s struggles both against the Vichy collaborationist regime, the Gestapo, and the American State Department—all of whom opposed Jews during the Shoah. Berger also discusses how Fry’s alleged queerness, in addition to making him more sympathetic to the persecution of the Other, placed great psychological stress on the man himself. Orringer, Berger argues, has written a

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novel whose perspective considerably enlarges our knowledge of the Holocaust and the range of helpers it engendered. Liat Steir-Livny’s chapter analyzes Israeli grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. For the most part born between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, these grandchildren grew up in a society immersed in Holocaust-awareness. Consequently, her essay addresses key aspects of the cultural narratives that refer to the Shoah. By analyzing examples from TV shows, literature, social media, cinema, alternative ceremonies, skits, online newspapers, and films, Steir-Livny shows how two prominent paths of commemoration are present in such third-generation works. The first path involves broadening and deepening themes that the second generation began addressing in the 1980s. The second is creating a new layer of commemoration, which includes new ways of remembering, delving into new topics that were previously overlooked or marginalized, and questioning previous assumptions. Steir-Livny contextualizes these themes within the psychological and cultural research on the Israeli third generation in Israel. Katra Byram’s contribution explores third-generation writing in the German context, wherein this generation participates in a broader trend of remembering German crimes and German civilian suffering together, as writers reflect on their family histories. While some observers see such accounts as dangerously blurring the line between responsibility and victimhood, others characterize them as highly self-reflexive negotiations of competing stories about the past. Byram reads Susanne Fritz’s Becoming a Child of War (Wie kommt der Krieg ins Kind) (2018), as participating in this trend, since it both investigates her grandfather’s possible war crimes and plumbs the history of her mother’s postwar internment in Poland. Byram argues that Fritz’s book blurs another line, too: the line between “Germans” and the peoples that the German state subjugated. Byram examines how Fritz traces the historical processes that stamp diverse experiences with national labels and highlights the continuing danger of these labels in the present. In her essay, Luisa Banki examines motifs and expressions of irreconcilability in contemporary German Jewish literature. She conceptualizes irreconcilability in connection with resentment and revenge, drawing on Jean Améry’s ethico-political stance of resentment and a discussion of some of the diverse and not always obvious forms of revenge that can be understood as Jewish reactions to the Shoah. Her readings of third-generation German Jewish authors Mirna Funk and Max Czollek is informed by the possibility of discovering forms of literary revenge. Analyzing literary expressions of irreconcilability in the writings of Funk and Czollek, she reads their works as articulations of third-generation German Jewish positions that aim to be understandable by a mainstream German speaking readership while taking a decidedly antagonistic position to the German discourse of reconciliation under the sign of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (“coming to terms with the past”). Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller’s essay explores how Fabrice Humbert’s The Origin of Violence (L’Origine de la violence) (2009) brings us back to the dark ages of the Nazi occupation of Paris. Her chapter analyzes the tensions between the second and third



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post-Shoah generations while exploring what Emmanuel Levinas called the “tumor of memory” after World War II. This piece raises essential questions regarding the different attitudes toward the recovery of the past (its uses and misuses) and the rivalry of memories that is currently taking place: Must the past rule over the present and the future or should the present only make use of the past as needed? The Vichy postmemories revealed in Humbert’s novel reflect the oppositions inherent in the history of Pierre Nora’s “Les Frances.” Additionally, the author argues that the diverse memorial experiences explored in Humbert’s text place two discrete tendencies into conflict: the revelation of collective secrets by history and the concealment of individual secrets in psychoanalysis.  Psychoanalysis, by disinterring profoundly concealed root causes of neurosis, performs on an individual level what history does on a community or social level. Sue Vice’s chapter analyzes the psychological and aesthetic responses of third-generation descendants of Nazi perpetrators who live and write in Englishlanguage contexts. While the concept of the third generation is more familiar in relation to Holocaust survivor descendants, the authors’ perspectives in these instances from the perpetrator side are sufficiently distant both temporally and geographically to allow for a searching encounter with their grandparents. Vice discusses memoirs by Martin Davidson, Derek Niemann, and Roger Frie, whose use of particular narrative strategies reflects and enhances their distance from their German forebears. By contrast, graphic novels by Serena Katt and Nora Krug set visual against textual material as a way of exposing the contradictions of their grandparents’ pasts. She concludes that the third-generation writer reflects on the ease with which individuals are overtaken by pernicious public discourses, in a way that has a cautionary relevance for the present precisely because it is unearthed in a British or North American context where that was not the norm. Tess Scholfield-Peters’s essay examines how, with the survivor generation on the edge of living memory, the urgent problem of responsible and ethical Holocaust representation must be interrogated by subsequent generations, with an awareness of how literary techniques and creative choices aid in more ethical portrayals. This chapter explores the feelings of anxiety experienced by writers of the third generation who seek to represent their grandparents’ Holocaust stories in their work. Third-generation Holocaust literature increasingly showcases techniques and styles derived from multiple genres and modalities. Scholfield-Peters argues that a fundamental characteristic of such literature is the accumulation of knowledge and narrative from diverse and often nontraditional places. Two case studies taken from Australian third-generation contemporary literature further this argument: Bram Presser’s The Book of Dirt (2017) and Cynthia Banham’s A Certain Light: A Memoir of Family Loss and Hope (2018). With these texts, the writer argues for more individualized and rigorously researched Holocaust-based narratives to secure the Event’s place in historical consciousness as we move into the post-survivor era. Elke Heckner analyzes how the Israeli documentary Numbered, which revisits Auschwitz survivors in Israel and has them recount their memories of being tattooed,

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instantiates a third-generation cinematic aesthetic that reworks second-generation approaches to representing survivors. Third-generation witnessing in this documentary deploys a radical reframing of aging survivors’ stories and bodies through a distinctively tactile quality of the camera. The photographic sessions, during which new images and portraits of survivors are shown to emerge through empowering devices such as black-and-white still photography, re-dignify survivors’ lives and demonstrate powerful transgenerational bonds as the camera conveys the feeling of a gentle, loving touch. Central to this cinematic reframing of witnessing is the film’s frank portrayal of second- and third-generation descendants of survivors who have reproduced, on their own bodies, their survivor (grand)parent’s tattoos, as a testimony to their desire for personal commemoration of their (grand)parent’s trauma and survival of trauma. It also shows how this commemoration transforms a descendant’s body into a “body memorial.” By providing a cinematic forum for survivors to share an autobiographical narration of their trauma, their coping skills, and, most importantly, their reclamation of post-Auschwitz life, Heckner argues that Numbered re-signifies the visual legacy passed on by tattooed Auschwitz survivors. The documentary redirects the viewer’s gaze from the injurious remembrance of the violation of survivors’ bodies and individuality onto their ability to transform trauma into a fully lived life after Auschwitz. Numbered itself is thus shown to be a part of the process of creating a new documentary legacy of the last members of the generation to embody the traumatic historical legacy of Auschwitz. This volume thus takes up the multiplicity of ways the third generation traces, transmutes, and treats the enduring legacy of the Shoah, mediated by way of their post-postmemories. The compiled essays offer much to consider in terms of emerging trends in third-generation representation. Yet, as much as third-generation representation has been written over the past few decades, with much still to be written and/or produced, this collection offers but an analytic starting point when exploring the vast and growing body of creative third-generation output. L. F. W. W. and A. L. B.

NOTES 1. Elie Wiesel, The Sonderberg Case, trans. by Catherine Temerson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 175. 2. Cited in Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 107. 3. Jacob Lothe, Susan R. Suleiman, and James Phelan, “Introduction ‘After’ Testimony: Holocaust Representation and Narrative Theory,” in After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future, ed. by Jakob Lothe, Susan R. Suleiman, and James Phelan (Columbus: The University of Ohio Press, 2012), 2. 4. Lothe, Suleiman, and Phelan, After Testimony, 2–3. 5. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 45.



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6. Judith S. Kestenberg, “A Metapsychological Assessment Based on an Analysis of a Survivor’s Child,” in Generations of the Holocaust, ed. Martin S. Bergman and Milton E. Jucovy (New York: Basic Books, 1982). See also Janice F. Bistritz, “Transgenerational Pathologies in Families of Holocaust Survivors,” in The Psychological Perspectives of the Holocaust and of Its Aftermath, ed. Randolph L. Braham (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). See also John J. Sigal and Morton Weinfeld, Trauma and Rebirth: Intergeneration Effects of the Holocaust (Westport: Praeger, 1989). See also Hillel Klein, Survival and Trials of Revival: Psychodynamic Studies of Holocaust Survivors and Their Families in Israel and the Diaspora (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2012). See also Gaby R. Glassman, “Survivor Mothers and Their Daughters: The Hidden Legacy of the Holocaust,” in Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust, ed. Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013). 7. Aaron Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 36. 8. See Danieli, “The Heterogeneity of Postwar Adaptation in Families of Holocaust Survivors,” in The Psychological Perspectives of the Holocaust and of Its Aftermath, ed. Randolph L. Braham (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 112, 114, 116, 122–23. See also Aaron Hass, The Aftermath: Living with the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 123, 127. See also Kurt Grünberg, Love after Auschwitz: The Second Generation in Germany, trans. Hugette Herrmann (Piscataway: Transaction, 2006), 31. See also Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, 36–37, 41. See also Nina Fischer, Memory Work: The Second Generation (London: Palgrave, 2015), 14. See also Susanna Egan and Gabriele Helms, “Generations of the Holocaust in Canadian Auto/Biography,” in Auto/Biography in Canada: Critical Directions, ed. Julie Rak (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005), 41. See also Jacobs, “The Cross-Generational Transmission of Trauma: Ritual and Emotion among Survivors of the Holocaust,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40, no. 3 (2011): 343. See also Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004), 60, 63. See also Merilyn Moos, Breaking the Silence: Voices of the British Children of Refugees from Nazism (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 258, 274. See also Arlene Stein, Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 10, 11. See also Dan Bar-On, Fear & Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 1. See also Alan L. Berger, Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 186. See also Vivian Rakoff et al., “Children of Families of Concentration Camp Survivors,” Canada’s Mental Health 14 (1966): 25. See also Victor J. Seidler, Shadows of the Shoah: Jewish Identity and Belonging (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 137. 9. See Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, 36–37, 127, 129. See also Egan and Helms, “Generations of the Holocaust in Canadian Auto/Biography,” 41. See also Robert M. Prince, The Legacy of the Holocaust: Psychohistorical Themes in the Second Generation (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1999), 50. 10. Prince, The Legacy of the Holocaust, 88. See also Jacobs, “The Cross-Generational Transmission of Trauma,” 343. 11. Helen Epstein, Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 2005), 155. See also Hillel Klein, Survival and Trials of Revival: Psychodynamic Studies of Holocaust Survivors and Their Families in Israel and the Diaspora (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 155. See also Danieli, “The

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Heterogeneity of Postwar Adaptation in Families of Holocaust Survivors,” 112, 114. See also Berger, Children of Job, 3. See also Fischer, Memory Work, 14. See also Janice F. Bistritz, “Transgenerational Pathologies in Families of Holocaust Survivors,” in The Psychological Perspectives of the Holocaust and of Its Aftermath, ed. Randolph L. Braham (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 134. 12. See Danieli, “The Heterogeneity of Postwar Adaptation in Families of Holocaust Survivors,” 114, 121. See also Hass, The Aftermath, 123, 129. See also Bergmann and Jucovy, Generations of the Holocaust, 19. See also Seidler, Shadows of the Shoah, 25. See also Marita Grimwood, Holocaust Literature of the Second Generation (London: Palgrave, 2007), 10. See also Klein, Survival and Trials of Revival, 135, 155, 159, 159. See also Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (New York: Penguin, 1988), 41–42, 170, 171. See also Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 63. 13. See Klein, Survival and Trials of Revival, 135. See also Prince, The Legacy of the Holocaust, 57. See also Moos, Breaking the Silence, 258. 14. See Klein, Survival and Trials of Revival, 135. See also Prince, The Legacy of the Holocaust, 57. See also Moos, Breaking the Silence, 245–46, 258. See also Danieli, “The Heterogeneity of Postwar Adaptation in Families of Holocaust Survivors,” 111–12. See also Hass, The Aftermath, 129. 15. See Helen Epstein, The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma (Lexington: Plunkett Lake Press, 2018), 84. See also Bar-On, Fear & Hope, 25. See also Kestenberg, “Survivor-Parents and Their Children,” 101. See also Rakoff, “Children of Families of Concentration Camp Survivors,” 25. See also Sigal and Weinfeld, Trauma and Rebirth, 22. See also Fischer, Memory Work, 14. See also Stein, Reluctant Witnesses, 10. See also Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 88. See also Epstein, Children of the Holocaust, 220, 310. See also Bergmann and Jucovy, Generations of the Holocaust, 19. See also Grünberg, Love after Auschwitz, 37. See also Berger, Children of Job, 14. 16. Stein, Reluctant Witnesses, 10. 17. Art Spiegelman, Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Knopf, 1992), 44. 18. Golan Moskowitz, “Grandsons Who Remember: Intersections of Holocaust Heritage and Contemporary Male Positioning,” MA thesis (Brandeis University, 2012), 1. See also Esther Jilovsky, Remembering the Holocaust: Generations, Witnessing and Place (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 21. See also Lang, Textual Silence, 87–88. 19. Jilovsky, Remembering the Holocaust, 22. 20. Nirit Pisano, Granddaughters of the Holocaust: Never Forgetting What They Didn’t Experience (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 18. 21. Moskowitz, “Grandsons Who Remember,” 1–2. 22. Victoria Aarons, “Introduction: Approaching the Third Generation.” Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, ed. Victoria Aarons (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), xvii. See also Lang, Textual Silence, 89. 23. Gottfried Wagner, great-grandson of the infamous composer, moved his family to Italy in order to work through his traumatic legacy. He represents a fourth-generation descendant of perpetrators. See Gottfried Wagner, Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family’s Legacy (London: Picador, 1999). 24. Lang, Textual Silence, 87–88.



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25. Victoria Aarons, “Memory’s Afterimage: Post-Holocaust Writing and the Third Generation,” in Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, ed. Victoria Aarons (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 22. 26. Aarons and Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation, 4. 27. Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 2. 28. See Hoffman, After Such Knowledge. 29. Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: HarperCollins College Div, 1970). 30. The question of humor and the Holocaust is a sensitive issue. On the one hand, there is Charlie Chaplin’s classic The Great Dictator (1940), a film portraying Hitler as a bumbling and incompetent fool. In Mel Brooks’s film The Producers (1967), Springtime for Hitler—chosen by a down-on-his-luck scheming producer as the worst script ever—plays to an appreciative and foolish audience. There is also Leslie Epstein’s novel King of the Jews (1979), a work portraying the life of Mordechai Rumkowski, “king” of the Lodz ghetto whose inhabitants refer to Hitler as Horowitz. Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997), a cinematic portrayal of life in Auschwitz, is an historically unanchored film, unencumbered by facts, which yielded an Oscar for Benigni. Additionally, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm contains several storylines, which tastelessly attempt humor about the Holocaust. They fall far short of informing people about the Shoah. Both Benigni and David’s efforts illustrate the truth of Elie Wiesel’s warning against the banalization and trivialization of the Shoah. The issue becomes even more vexing when addressing precisely what happens to the extermination of six million Jews when this horrible fact is addressed by popular culture. 31. Hoffman, After Such Knowledge. 32. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22. See also Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. 33. Gerd Bayer, “After Postmemory: Holocaust Cinema and the Third Generation.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 28, no. 4 (2010): 132. 34. Ibid., 132. 35. Ibid., 117. 36. Christoph Ribbat, “Nomadic with the Truth: Holocaust Representation in Michael Chabon, James McBride, and Jonathan Safran Foer,” in Twenty-First Century Fiction: Readings, Essays, and Conversations, ed. Christoph Ribbat (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2005), 213.

1 Third-Generation Holocaust Inheritance in Two Graphic Narratives A Layering of Histories and Legacies Victoria Aarons

Two contemporary Holocaust graphic memoirs, Amy Kurzweil’s Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir (2016) and Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (2018), together speak to the complex web of motivations and negotiations through which the Holocaust is “witnessed” from contrasting yet overlapping perspectives. Kurzweil is the grandchild of survivors; Krug is the grandchild of perpetrators. Taken together, these two graphic narratives represent two current and intersecting directions in Holocaust representation: the emergence of third-generation Holocaust writers and the evolving genre of Holocaust graphic novels. Through the hybrid medium of comics narratives, both graphic novelists call attention to their precarious positions as distanced third-generation arbiters and navigators of Holocaust memory. As child survivor Ruth Kluger admits, “We all splash in dark waters when it comes to the past, to this past.”1 Both Kurzweil and Krug, writing from an increasingly remote generational position in relation to the Holocaust and to the fragmented narratives of the events that came to shape the lives of their families, construct meta-narratives that call attention to the artifice of telling and of drawing the fractured and opaque stories of the past. In other words, the process of storytelling is thematized and structural. Both graphic novelists comment on the process of telling, calling attention to the limitations in representation and to the self-reflexive nature of drawing themselves into the stories of others. As Kurzweil concedes of her attempts to grasp the scope, extent, and specifics of her grandmother’s traumatic history, “Our conversations are always in fragments, like my knowledge of her life.”2 Her grandmother’s narratives—“so many stories . . . stories and stories”—are unending, incomplete, and ultimately unresolved.3 Felt obligations and responsibilities to the traumatic past complicate family stories and histories for both Kurzweil and Krug as they link the generations of their families to this one defining point in history. 1

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Thus, up against the limitations of direct knowledge and felt access to that history, both graphic novelists imaginatively enter the space of the traumatic past. Each, through divergent yet overlapping artistic and structural executions, attempts to compensate for her lack of knowledge as well as for the vast chasm of time and continents. Both confront the accidents of birth and incident by taking on history through direct confrontation with the stories, artifacts, and traces of the past. Guided by an array of voices and interlocutors and navigating the remnants of past history, they attempt to piece together the fading parts of the past. For, as Krug proposes, without a story, “there also was no history.”4 Through a variety of manipulations of text and image and through the verbal-visual tensions and juxtapositions characteristic of the genre of the graphic novel, these third-generation graphic artists humanize the history of the Shoah by uncovering their families’ pasts but also by confronting their own anxious places in that legacy. These are both deeply personal narratives. They bridge the temporal, spatial, and experiential divide, what Kurzweil calls “the bridge between the real and the unimaginable,” that is, between the present and the past, between the need to know and the apprehension such knowledge brings, between displacement and return, and between concealment and exposure.5 The way there, as Krug comes to recognize in Belonging, is in the process of return, both geographically and imaginatively, “to look back . . . back to the beginning, follow the bread crumbs, and hope they’ll lead the way home,” the way, that is, back to the point of traumatic origin.6 These two comics artists, through the disposition of words, images, and temporalities, and the collapsing of spatial borders, perform the intersections of histories and lives, congruent and disparate voices and narrating perspectives in response to the extended legacy of the Holocaust. Both Kurzweil and Krug, from considerably different backgrounds and vantage points, create the conditions for a reckoning with history and their place within the borders of mediated and constrained memory. These graphic memoirs are linked in a number of complex thematic, structural, and motivational ways. Both, through a different angling of vision, perform a vigilant watchfulness; they are attentive, if wary, navigators of memory. Even a continent away and years separating generations and events, the past hovers, a kind of skeletal framework for perceiving the world. What does it mean, each writer implicitly asks, to be connected to the past by longing and loss? “How do you know who you are,” Krug asks, “if you don’t understand where you came from?”7 What do we see when we look into the past, when, that is, we search the past to see ourselves, our inheritance and our future? Flying Couch presents in comics form the story of Kurzweil’s grandmother, Lily Fenster, who, as an adolescent, escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and spent the war in hiding in the Polish countryside disguised as an Aryan, an orphan peasant girl. As Kurzweil’s grandmother explains, “I had the blonde hair and the blue eyes. I looked like a shiksa, a gentile.”8 And thus her life was fortuitously spared, while the lives of her grandmother, her parents, and her siblings were lost. Of her improbable survival, a survival tinged with loss, Lily marvels, “I survived. I don’t know how. .  .  .  My



Third-Generation Holocaust Inheritance in Two Graphic Narratives 3

parents, my family, my life, would not”; “The way it happened was . . . a terrible miracle for me. God’s watching over me. I don’t know why. What did I do so good in the world? Or so bad?”9 Kurzweil concedes much of the narrative to her grandmother. Her memoir is an illustrated rendition of her grandmother’s recorded oral testimony, a story whose telling she will turn over to the survivor whose authorizing gaze gives testimony to the events she witnessed. But, given the conventions of the graphic novel, the voices both collide and harmonize, since the granddaughter “narrates” her grandmother’s story as her grandmother tells it, by providing visual clues to her testimony, an interpretation that creates a doubling of narrative voices but also a doubling of vision, a way of seeing into the past. Beginning with her prewar life in Poland, the grandmother’s narrative chronicles escalating antisemitic fervor, the Nazi occupation of Poland, hiding in fear with her family in a temporary bunker, their incarceration in the ghetto, the death of her younger sister and grandmother, and her eventual escape and flight, “her worlds . . . disappearing, one by one.”10 The frame and conceit of the graphic memoir is Kurzweil’s self-reflexively stated intention to recreate her grandmother’s stories as documented in the Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archives, the transcription to which she has been given access. The book of “Bubbe’s stories” is handed down to her by her mother, who was born shortly after the war in a DP camp in Germany and whose own narrative becomes part of the intergenerational accumulation of memories to which Kurzweil’s graphic narrative testifies.11 While her ostensible purpose is to memorialize her grandmother’s history—“to write and illustrate her life . . . polish and publish her history, immortalize it, fashion it into those stories to be imprinted upon our homes and on our gates, as we lie down and as we rise up”—the memoir that emerges from her efforts is an amalgam of histories, proximate and past, ongoing and remote, told by intersecting voices of generations colliding and enjoining.12 The story of Lily Fenster’s past does not end with her survival, with the defeat of the Nazis, with her auspicious arrival in America, and with her attempts to rebuild her life. Rather, her grandmother’s past interferes with and interrupts the present. As Kurzweil makes clear, the story of the Holocaust is ongoing, elongated, and extended, transferred to subsequent generations by stealth, by consanguineous absorption, by a haunting sense of retrieval, by shared preoccupations, and by the anxious appropriation of fear, ill-defined, “black and scary . . . spreading” into the future.13 The past exists, of course, in her grandmother’s memories—“I’ll never forget”—but also in the traumatic imprint of a past subsumed in the lives of the survivor’s daughter and granddaughter, both of whom grew up under the shadow of that haunting past.14 To make emphatic the encroachment of the past on the present, Kurzweil merges the voices and perspectives of multiple generations as they interact and mediate: survivor, second generation, and third generation. Kurzweil creates the entwining narratives of these three generations of women, whose histories both inform and are formed by each other’s lives, their preoccupations, anxieties, and memories. For the edifice of the self, the formation of character and personhood, as Kurzweil establishes early on in her memoir, is built on the stories and lives of those who came before

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and whose experiences and responses have shaped one’s own. As Kurzweil writes in the dedication to Flying Couch, the book is “for the women who made me.” These are stories that tumble and spiral their way through the generations. These are stories whose words shape, define, and give meaning to experience, stories that, as depicted in an early image in the graphic memoir, construct a “house,” a domestic space and edifice erected from the past that contains memories and lives. In the early pages of the narrative, Kurzweil draws a sequence of images of the exterior and interior of the house that she inhabits built from the originating book of her grandmother’s stories. It’s a house that is given shape and meaning by the stories that frame it. Her grandmother’s stories are the portal through which the graphic artist draws and narrates her world. And although she cannot separate herself from her grandmother’s memories, this is, fundamentally, Kurzweil’s story, a graphic account of her attempts to find her place within that legacy. Doing so requires, as Alan L. Berger suggests in a very interesting study of third-generation Holocaust narratives, “an unblinking confrontation with the facts of history.”15 The preoccupation with one’s responsibility to the legacy of the Shoah in large part defines third-generation post-Holocaust Jewish identity, an identity beholden to the traumatic past. Similarly, the preoccupation with one’s familial connections and obligations emerges as the central arbitrating conceit in Nora Krug’s graphic memoir Belonging, the self-referential extended narrative of a third-generation German born decades after the war whose quest to uncover the story of her family’s past is complicated by an unresolved sense of collective guilt and shame. For Krug, however, unlike Kurzweil, “no shared family narrative was delivered  .  .  . told over and over through generations.”16 Rather, the Krug family history was enshrouded in silence. Thus, Krug’s graphic memoir is constructed as a kind of scrapbook: bits and pieces of family lore and supposition form an accumulated flotsam of an era. Her account opens with the metaphor of a bleeding wound covered by the German made Hansaplast, “the most tenacious bandage on the planet.”17 The wound may be concealed but, once the bandage is removed, the scar remains. Thus, the book’s concluding metaphor is figured by an image of the German-produced adhesive Uhu, “the first synthetic . . . resin adhesive in the world . . . known for being able to glue together materials of any kind.” Despite its formidable components, even its strength “cannot cover up the crack,” the crack made by the open wound of history.18 Krug grew up in Karlsruhe, in the south of Germany, with parents who were direct descendants of those who lived through the war and whose participation in the Nazi Party became for Krug an uneasy and troubling enigma. Although her parents, as she says, were “raised at a time when Germany first started to confront its Nazi past . . . talking about your own family’s experience was an unspoken taboo.”19 The events of the Holocaust existed in the background of Krug’s upbringing, “present but unacknowledged,” and summoned by what seemed to the young narrator to be a dangerously unarticulated presence, something “sinister,” a presence about which, as she admits, “I was too afraid to ask, feeling that this was something embarrassing to talk about, something that grown-ups discussed in whispers, something evoking



Third-Generation Holocaust Inheritance in Two Graphic Narratives 5

[the] unsettling feeling” of menacing encroachment.20 While she was provided knowledge about the war as part of her school curriculum—information including photographic images, films, and class trips to concentration camps and museums— what was lacking in her growing awareness of Germany’s Holocaust history were the stories of her own family’s involvement in that past, stories that existed against the ominous backdrop of “war and history and guilt.”21 The shame of that history “follows her,” beyond geographical and temporal borders. Curiously, it is only after having resided in America for over a decade that she was propelled to confront her familial history. Removal from her country of origin crystallizes and distills the experience of being German. As Krug explains in an interview, I never would have written this book if I hadn’t left Germany. During my 17 years living abroad [first in the UK and then in the US], I felt more German than ever before. As a German living among non-Germans, I realized I would always be as much an individual as a representative of my country and therefore my country’s history. I was often confronted with negative stereotypes towards German cultural identity, but I was also asked sincere questions about my family’s past I didn’t know how to answer.22

It is only after relocating to New York and marrying into a Jewish family that Krug is able to reckon with her own family’s and country’s past and the ways in which the one informs and is informed by the other. Ironically, it is against the backdrop of her life in the United States that she is confronted by her German history. The cityscape of New York, where she moved from Berlin, gestures toward the looming presence and memory of the Holocaust. It is here that she encounters Holocaust survivors and firsthand accounts of their experiences, direct testimony that kindles in her that “familiar heat . . . in the pit of my stomach,” throwing into discomfiting relief her outsider position but also her unstable relation to the evidence before her: “How do you react, as a German, standing across from a human being who reveals this memory to you?”23 She becomes in this context “a German,” representative of and thus responsible for the “inherited sins” of the past, including the burdensome weight of “having to bear the consequences of another generation’s actions.”24 And despite her attempts to disguise and to reinvent herself, she feels herself to be an imposter in America, where “absolution” is given far too easily. The nagging sense of shame for crimes committed by a different generation, yet a generation just within her reach, is, as she says, paralyzing.25 It is thus in her new home, far from Germany, that Holocaust markers, as she illustrates in the opening pages of the graphic memoir, erupt from the landscape: water containers that resemble guard towers; smokestacks; bushes atop buildings that flare upward, stamped with the Nazi SS Waffen helmet insignia; red clouds of smoke hovering in the sky. Such images are ominous reminders of another world that evocatively take her back in imagined time. In the face of such fraught history, the narrator wonders, “Wouldn’t it be better to leave the past behind?”26 Yet, she cannot, for, as Krug comes to realize, “I am irrevocably intertwined with people and with places, with stories and with histories . . . the unescapability of who we are.”27 Thus,

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being away brings her back to a narrative of return. The impulse to return, “before it’s too late,” becomes a turning away from, an interruption in the throes of her lived existence, the exigencies, the requirements, and the messiness of proximate negotiations and accommodations that would caution against such detours. Narratives of return are a recurring trope in the literature of third-generation Holocaust writers. Characteristically, the literature by the grandchildren of survivors takes the form of return narratives, writers as literary sleuths, returning to the site of the traumatic origin of their extended family’s past, “digging around in the ruins of memory,” to borrow a phrase from the survivor Ida Fink.28 Third-generation quest narratives take the grandchildren of survivors to those sites of prewar life, but also to those places of rupture and displacement: ghettos, deportation centers, concentration camps and killing centers, forests and ravines.29 Such quests reveal the impulse to return to the scene of the crime and thus unearth family histories that were otherwise lost in order to achieve some measure of disclosure, arbitration, resolution, and restitution. These are very personal quests that begin and end with the stories of individual family members, an arduous, fraught, and uncomfortable process of interviewing both willing and reluctant witnesses, searching through archives, collecting data, uncovering artifacts, documenting traces, mapping experiences.30 Such a process of recovery and retrieval provides the conditions for vicariously shared memory, but also for structuring one’s own identity, a backdrop against which to negotiate and navigate the uncertain future. For the grandchildren of survivors, such narrative quests hope to secure some relief from the anxieties and apprehensions that accompany the absence of memory and also from the knowledge of the forming influences of a remote but contiguous past, a shadow world adjoining the ordinariness of the present. Krug’s graphic memoir Belonging, her narrated journey to uncover her family’s ties to National Socialism, is motivated by a similar set of impulses and anxieties. Here, of course, concerns about not knowing are balanced by—outdone by—fears of knowing, fears, that is, of what the granddaughter will uncover after volumes of meticulous research into the documents and artifacts of the Nazi era. What she wants to uncover is the extent of her family’s involvement in the war in part to “break the silence” and so to absolve them of their complicity, and, if not, to expiate, to atone for their crimes. She returns to the towns in Germany in which her extended family lived for “proof ” of their and her own “place” in that history, not necessarily to free herself of the burden of “inherited memory” and the sense of collective guilt and shame that her generation has been bequeathed, but rather to reckon with the past.31 As Krug explains, Over the years, I felt a growing urge to tackle my country’s history in a new way. I realized that to overcome the collective, abstract shame I had grown into as a German two generations after the war. . . . I needed to go back and ask questions about my family, my hometown, those questions I was too unreflective as a child and too afraid as a teenager to ask.32



Third-Generation Holocaust Inheritance in Two Graphic Narratives 7

Her quest for discovery begins with unarticulated questions and with the scantest understanding of her family’s past, their memories long “buried.”33 The war existed in the backdrop of Krug’s childhood, “present but unacknowledged,” there but out of sight, secreted away “like the heirloom lion’s head tureen stored behind [the] usual dishware.”34 The Nazi era was the stuff of history, but not story, not family narrative. As Krug explains, “We never learned about what happened in our own hometown.”35 She illustrates this sense of vagueness and hazy, remote distance from events in a replication of the nineteenth-century romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich’s oil painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, in which a lone man stands poised atop a rock formation looking down on a cloudy, undiscernible landscape. The romantic image represents a longing to enter the unknown but also poises the individual as sole proprietor of that imagined space; the sojourner is looking both down into the mist and ahead toward the mountain peaks in the distant future. Krug will later in the graphic memoir return to this image in a watercolor self-portrait in which it is she atop the rock formation, her back to the reader, as she gazes into the clouds, looking into the unknown future but also, as we are meant to understand from the replication of the earlier image, back to the homeland, a murky landscape that extends before her. The graphic artist imagines herself as setting forth, walking stick in hand, as she looks down from her rocky, precarious peak, suggesting at once control over the journey—she will forge the path into the hazy distance— and her sense of isolation; it is she alone who will be the instrument of discovery. She will bridge the distance by stepping down from the precipice and making the trek to Germany, to the home of her paternal grandparents and father in the small town of Külsheim, and to her maternal grandparents’ hometown of Karlsruhe in search of her legacy. Her journey involves an accumulation of fragments, bits and pieces that patched together might provide evidentiary adjudication: extensive research into existing archives documenting the fate of the lost Jewish communities; accessing records pertaining to her relatives’ involvement in the war (newspaper articles, letters, military registers); interviews with people who might have some knowledge of the events of the increasingly remote past, as well as conversations with long-estranged relatives; unearthing artifacts, “flea market finds,” photographs, memorabilia, and other tangible objects of real lives lived under the Nazi regime, material evidence of her family’s activities as the events of the war escalated and unfolded. What Krug uncovers is not entirely surprising but a discovery hard-won. Both grandfathers were members of the Nazi Party, although the extent of her maternal grandfather’s affiliation remains hazy. And her father’s older brother Franz-Karl, the uncle who died before her father was born and for whom her father was named, was killed fighting for the Nazis, shot down over Italy at the age of eighteen. Krug’s fears are thus materialized through the accumulation of the wreckage of the past, “fragmentary stories, photographs, and documents [that] rose back to the surface like bloated corpses.”36 But the evidence she so determinedly pursues is contradictory: different people, all with something risky at stake, tell conflicting stories; the passage of time has erected deep defenses;

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documented files throw disquieting questions on individual testimonies; personal histories are slippery, unweighted by concrete truths; and the purchase on the past is provisional, short-lived. Thus, despite her found knowledge, Krug’s narrative remains incomplete, fragmented. As she admits, “I slowly begin to accept that my knowledge will have limits, that I’ll never know exactly” what transpired, that is, the exact account of her relatives’ participation in the war, their motives and their actions, as well as the extent to which they were conditioned by the culture and ideology of the time.37 Her efforts are thus foiled by persistently nagging questions. Was her mother’s father, Willie Rock, the grandfather she knew, a “Major Offender” or a “Mitläufer,” a “follower . . . a person lacking courage and moral stance”? Is there an in-between position in which one is not quite villainous? While Krug’s mother is convinced that her father “never did anything really horrible,” is that enough? How is Krug to reconcile the young uncle, who, even as a young schoolboy, composed antisemitic screeds and who died fighting for the Nazis, with his solicitous letters from the front and the obituary composed by loving family members, the uncle whose memory is affectionately kept alive by his sister? Do his motives make a difference? Does his youth? As Krug admits, “I’ve excavated the shards of my relatives’ existence, but I don’t know yet how to piece them back together.”38 The haziness of her vision is illustrated in a concluding image of her maternal grandfather, drawn on the left-facing side of a two-page spread. As the graphic artist tries to imagine him, his pale photograph is set against a backdrop of a snow-covered forest as he stares straight ahead, his distinct gaze looking directly at the reader. His face retains its youthful guilelessness, yet his expression hints of concealed knowledge. The reproduced photograph both exposes and conceals. The graphic artist cannot see beyond the exterior, material frame that disguises the interiority of her grandfather’s subjective disposition. Here he stands, a moment suspended in time even as it dissolves. For his image is vague, watery, and insubstantial; his figure is partially erased, his shoes barely visible, covered in the shimmery whiteness of soft snow, but also in memory. He exists on the page as a barely imagined man, who recedes in the narrator’s vision even as she envisions him. For, on the facing page, his image disappears entirely, and all we see is a vast whiteness, a hint of memory that dematerializes as Krug draws his likeness. What remains is thus an enigma over which she has no artistic control: “What does it take to reconstruct a fractured family?” she asks. “Who would we be as a family if the war had never happened?”39 What remains at the heart of the matter for Krug is the way in which she has been shaped by the defining aspects of the culture into which she was born. She is preoccupied with the relation of identity and place, that is, the influence of one’s cultural, geographical, and inherited roots on the making of character, of personhood, and of one’s disposition toward the familiar that defines and contextualizes one’s perspectival and psychological orientation. If she can’t quite get at the characterological disposition of her distant relatives, then she might, after all, be able to wrest the making of her own character as it emerged from the inherited bits and pieces of the past. What



Third-Generation Holocaust Inheritance in Two Graphic Narratives 9

she really seems to be asking is “where am I in relation to them?” The original title of Krug’s graphic memoir is Heimat, the complicated German term for homeland, for both a specific location, the place of one’s origins, but also a deeply embedded sense of belonging. Quoting from the German Brockhaus encyclopedia, Krug defines Heimat as an identification and association “imparted across generations, through family and other institutions, or through political ideologies.”40 While typically translated as “home” or “homeland,” Heimat, as Krug makes clear, is a much more complex and unsettling notion than geographical location or place of birth might suggest. Instead, Heimat, that concept that Krug attempts to unspin and disentangle throughout the graphic narrative, refers to the cultural imprint of the landscape— existential, imaginary, actual—on one’s emerging identity, ego-formation, and character. Locating this sense of cultural belonging is, in large part, Krug’s project for the graphic memoir. As she explains, The collective and the individual cannot be separated. . . . We are deeply impacted by the particular country and time we grow up in and the cultural perspective of our families. We need to be aware of where we come from and what our heritage means to us. Recognizing we are deeply informed by the society we grew up in is important because it allows us to distance ourselves from it and recalibrate what we believe to be our place in the world.41

One thus must know one’s Heimat, that is, one’s cultural inheritance, in order to repudiate it or navigate it. Krug seems to suggest that postwar generations of Germans are mortgaged to the collective history and consciousness of their homeland. As Krug emphasizes, “the idea that it is our responsibility to face up to our past is deeply embedded in [our] psyches.”42 Such belonging thus carries with it the ethical obligation to reckon with the history that one inherits, to stand in judgment of that history. The trope of inherited memory, a recurring pattern in post-Holocaust literature, speaks to the ways in which identity is fundamentally determined by the traumatic imprint of past history, memories transferred, embedded in the interiority of the body. Both Kurzweil and Krug draw, not without irony, upon the trope of blood, of a shared genetic disposition to the past, in defining their proximate relation to their families’ histories. As Kurzweil’s narrator, in describing her developing consciousness, puts it, she was formed by fear, her growing-up years predicated on the “persistent conviction that something black and invisible dwelled in my bloodstream.”43 Her link to her grandmother’s disposition is carried in the body, “in the blood.”44 In tracing her lineage, Kurzweil explains in an interview: my grandmother was literally running from Poland to Germany, the memory of Nazis fresh, when my mother was a fetus. My mother was raised by two parents who had lost everyone in their respective families. .  .  .  My grandmother’s fragmented memories of hunger and loss echo in my early childhood memories. . . . We all grow up either hearing the stories of our parents, or at least feeling their effects. . . . I say these stories are inherited like DNA, because the emotions of these stories live in our bodies.45

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The body thus becomes, epigenetically, the locus of fear and of symptomatic transference and anxiety. Krug similarly draws upon the trope of genetic infection in an attempt to particularize and reify the ways in which memory is absorbed in the body. As Krug’s narrator puts it, “history was in our blood . . . shame in our genes.”46 It’s interesting to reflect on both the similarities and essential difference between Krug’s reference to history “in our blood” and Art Spiegelman’s analogously structured metaphor of his father, the survivor, who “bleeds history.”47 There is an important distinction to be made here between history in the blood and history bled out, hemorrhaging from the body. The difference is one of agency, that is, of history made and history violently severed. “In the blood” suggests a genetic disposition toward domination, innate, inherent, and defining (and also evokes the deeply disturbing Nazi ideology related to bloodlines and eugenics). If history is in the blood, then it is inescapable, but the vestiges of history are also in the blood as a genetic disorder, the stain of evil.48 Consequently, the victim of that history, as Spiegelman suggests, bleeds, bearing on his body an open wound that will not heal. But also, as the trope signifies, the survivor of the Holocaust, as represented by the figure of Spiegelman’s father, exudes history, bleeding onto and into subsequent generations. His Holocaust history extends not only within him but beyond him. Krug can’t excise the history that is “in the blood,” but she can expose and reckon with it. The way she positions herself in relation to that history is a protective impulse. After all, as she acknowledges, “even inherited memory hurts.”49 The legacy that Krug anxiously bears is one of collective guilt and shame, complicated by her family’s implication in that history. And thus she turns the focus of her investigation inward. Krug, in an attempt to control and mitigate the enervating and persistent sense of shame and guilt associated with being a German of her generation, that is, a German descended from those who were part of the genocidal zeitgeist, will wrest collective shame from abstraction; she will personalize collective shame and guilt by giving it a face and thus face it head-on, “to move beyond the abstract . . . and ask those questions that are really difficult to ask—about my own hometown, about my father’s and my mother’s families. To make my way back.”50 The history that both Krug and Kurzweil confront is one far larger than their own, a history that threatens to subsume and overshadow them. In an attempt, as Kurzweil suggests, to bridge the gap “between all we’ve lost . . . and what we can’t get rid of,” both third-generation graphic artists, through temporal and spatial juxtapositions and the interplay of text and image characteristic of the hybridity of long-form comics narratives, from what otherwise might seem to be dueling perspectives, reconstruct their families’ Holocaust histories by carefully, ethically navigating the stories of the past. In doing so, both graphic memoirs implicitly ask the following questions: What do we see when we look into the past? What is the gaze in the image? There is a telling moment in Kurzweil’s Flying Couch when the autobiographical narrator, the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, looks with startling and uncanny recognition into her grandmother’s dark glasses. Reflected there is not her own image



Third-Generation Holocaust Inheritance in Two Graphic Narratives 11

mirrored in the lenses of her grandmother’s sunglasses, but rather, the image of the great-aunt she never knew, her grandmother’s younger sister who died of starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto. Looking into the reflection in her grandmother’s glasses, the grandchild sees an image of the remote past, a reminder, as she says, “of things we’d rather have forgotten  .  .  . or couldn’t understand.”51 Her grandmother’s reflective lenses are windows of signification for the young narrator, who, in attempting to locate her place in the legacy of the Holocaust, finds her own image, insubstantial against and subsumed by the weight of history, concealed by the traumatic past. Her own image is eclipsed as if a shade is drawn down covering the present. The quest to uncover and memorialize her grandmother’s history causes the third-generation narrator to lose sight of herself in relation to the enormity of her family’s Holocaust history. “Why,” she asks, “does it feel like I’m not the protagonist of my own life?”52 The narrator loses herself in her grandmother’s gaze as it is reflected back to her. At the same time, she sees herself in the image of the other, that is, the self she might have been save for the accidents of birth. This is a complicated exchange. Her grandmother’s traumatic history is imprinted on, seared on, the lens of her memory and her vision. While the grandchild sees the great-aunt whom she never knew mirrored back at her through the lens of her grandmother’s dark glasses, so, too, the survivor looks at her grandchild and sees another person and another time, the younger sister Masha, whose eyes resemble those of her daughter and grandchild. Interrupting the narrative, Kurzweil’s grandmother arrests the temporal moment by interjecting in accented English, “Did I ever tell you dat you have my sister’s eyes? My baby one—mit BLECK eyes. . . . Just like my baby sister mit does eyes.”53 Thus, the sister’s legacy is passed along genetically, the child who, in the ghetto, “vas zo hungry. She ask me: Lily, please, for a piece of bread. Just for a piece of bread before she closed her eyes” and perished.54 There is a kind of urgency in her declaration of familial resemblance. What is it that the grandmother sees when she looks at her adult daughter and grandchild? And what does the granddaughter see when she looks at her grandmother? Lily’s impression is transmitted to her granddaughter, who “sees” the past through the mediating lens of her grandmother’s stories. The past is contained in and circumscribed by the lenses of the glasses that structurally encircle the dual images of the deceased child who lives again in the memory of the survivor and now in the granddaughter’s sensory apperception, the implied relation of what she has heard to what she now sees. The child’s image is fleeting, momentarily reflected in the grandmother’s lenses, for when we turn the page the image is gone, the grandmother’s glasses once again dark. Thus, it is an image that must be seized before it disappears entirely. As Walter Benjamin has suggested, “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. . . . For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”55 The survivor’s granddaughter, in a moment of uneasy identification, is thus transported to another time and place, her grandmother’s stories materialized in the lenses of her sunglasses,

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whose darkness signifies an opening to the past. The image reflected in the dark glasses functions as a metaphor for memory much as a photograph does, both representing, as Susan Sontag suggests, “a thin slice of space as well as time.” These images, stills, instants of time captured for the moment of exposure, as Sontag explains, “do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality,” that is, reality reduced in the aperture of the camera’s lens.56 Such economizing of experience, focusing in on the moment, is a structural conceit of comics that, as cartoonist and comics theorist Scott McCloud explains, create “amplification through simplification . . . stripping down an image to its essential meaning.”57 As we see in Kurzweil’s black-and-white drawing, the scope of what the survivor sees when she looks at her granddaughter, that is, when she perceives the future, is a moment in the past, a single, isolated, minimized image that, in its simplicity, represents a vast scale of suffering and loss. In Holocaust narratives, understatement typically creates magnification through what is left unspoken in the ellipses, that which is suspended, unarticulated, an absent presence, performed in the graphic narrative in the gaps between word and image, or in the gutters, the spaces between panels, or the distinct, silent image unmediated by text. The understatement implicit in the minimalized image of the child contained in the spherical lens, magnifies as it shrinks. The effect of shrinking the image also mirrors, in effect, the way in which memory works as it recedes through time. The compressed image in the lens of the survivor’s dark glasses figuratively enlarges, establishing a synecdochic widening of history. To reflect is to mirror, to throw or cast back, and to fold into. In this instance, the reflection in the lens throws the present back into the past and the past into the present, conflating the two temporalities, creating the conditions, as Spiegelman has suggested, for a “a different present,” the “super-present” in which temporality is not depicted in linear terms but rather contiguously, concurrently, layered.58 Time is thus held in the balance, a collapsing of both temporal and spatial borders. This scene therefore exists both in the present and in the past. Unlike the present, however, in which the granddaughter, her mother, and grandmother in contemporaneous narrative time are walking through the neighborhood, when Lily, unprompted, comments on the familial likeness of her daughter and granddaughter to the sibling who perished in the ghetto, the super-present shifts the narrative tempo. The super-present moves out of “the temporal space in which the everyday takes place, in which life is lived.” Rather, as Erin McGlothlin suggests, the super-present, seems to occupy a place outside the movement of life, in a static space that is not the antithesis of life, but a place where life’s ebb and flow do not reach. . . . This super-present is not the present that is usually experienced, but a place apart from the temporal logic of the rest of the book, one that occupies a metaposition with regard to the conventional temporal flow of the present; in short, a sort of timelessness.59

Such a condition created by the performative aspects of comics—the disposition of contiguous images, the visual imposition of images from past and present embodied in the same frame, the superimposition of one image onto another, the textual



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interruptions and mediations—shifts the narrative perspective, but also establishes a perspectival reach, a stretching and widening of perspectives. The proximity of the quotidian is thus destabilized by radical spatial and temporal intrusions. For as Kurzweil’s young narrator, tying to secure safe passage into her own as yet unformed, inchoate life, comes to see it, “The ordinariness of life was a ruse. Perilous dramas hid under the surface of everything.”60 The mirroring effect in the reflection in the survivor’s glasses creates the transitional moment for turning back. The image reflected is one given back, but to reflect is also to give evidence as well as to contemplate. Thus to reflect is to cast one’s gaze in two directions: back in time, and forward, into the future. This is a very uncomfortable moment for the young narrator in Kurzweil’s graphic memoir, who is made all the more uneasy by the dual reflections created by the juxtaposition of the doubling of images in the two lenses of her grandmother’s sunglasses. In the left-facing lens, the young child Masha is reflected siting on the ground, hunched over, arms encircling her knees, which are drawn upward, her chin resting on her chest, her face concealed. In the right-facing lens, Masha raises her head and yet her eyes, either cast down or closed, are concealed. Kurzweil establishes implied motion from one lens to another, an implicit movement that the viewer completes in looking at the image. Although we are looking at the image as a whole, we instinctively see the left-facing lens first, and thus we view the child in motion as she raises her head. Kurzweil thus moves us into a present that takes place in the past, a past in motion even, tragically, as it presages the child’s death. For later in the narrative, Kurzweil will return to this first image of the hunched child as a prelude to her death. As Lily remembers, “Masha. It was the spring, she just fell in the street and she didn’t wake up. She was blue. Her lips blue. And the eyes. Black eyes and blue lips. She had blonde curly hair and she used to wear a little red shirt. The eyes is the thing.”61 The accompanying image shows Lily covering her dead sister’s eyes with her outstretched hand, her own eyes closed in grief. As she says, “the eyes is the thing,” the seeing eye of testimony, extended transference, and projection. And thus, as Rocco Versaci suggests, we are “assaulted by the image,” assaulted, that is, by history and memory.62 In this third-generation graphic memoir, the trope of witnessing, a recurring preoccupation in the literature of descendants of Holocaust survivors, is materialized and made emphatic by the conventions of the medium of comics narratives. Here the trope of witnessing, seeing “with my own eyes,” is refracted, angled to illustrate the way in which memory is passed down, transferred intergenerationally.63 The refraction changes direction, moving the temporal and spatial direction from the present to the past. The experience for the grandchild is transformative, moving her beyond, to the other side of her present circumstances. But also it’s a matter of crossing generations, carrying the image, the memory, across from one generation to another. In the image of the past mirrored in the grandmother’s reflective glasses, the third-generation “witness” to the past sees through the eyes of another, of the other, the witness who experienced the received events firsthand, as they happened, and as they happen again in memory. The conceit of borrowed memory, a secondhand or

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tertiary witnessing through the imagination, is conjured by the graphic novelist in the fleeting instant of the image held transfixed in the lens of the other, the originating source of the traumatic imprint of the Shoah. Since it is, as Shoshana Felman suggests, “in reality impossible to testify from inside otherness,” here the graphic novelist, through the refracted image of the past, figures witnessing by positioning the receiver of such information in the gaze of others, a seeing into the past through the lens of the present.64 To witness is thus to see but also to testify, to lay claim to historical accuracy. Thus, witnessing is an ethical as well as an aesthetic measure, to enter ethically into the space of the past by attempting to locate the vision in the eyewitness. As Lawrence Langer has suggested, “Testimonies are human documents rather than merely historical ones.”65 In creating a material picture of witnessing, Kurzweil thus gives a face to history and to memory. Krug’s Belonging turns on a similar structural conceit. Early on in the graphic memoir, Krug reproduces a photograph of her uncle Franz-Karl, the uncle she never knew but who figures prominently in the graphic artist’s quest to uncover her family’s roots in Germany. Her uncle, born in Külsheim in 1926, became a committed member of the Nazi Party. One of Hitler’s soldiers, he was killed in battle in 1944 at the age of eighteen and buried in a military cemetery in Italy that interred the bodies of German World War II soldiers. Of her Nazi uncle, Krug writes, “War and death were the only things I associated with him.”66 But even before his death, the young Franz-Karl exhibited fanatic zeal for the National Socialist cause. Krug uncovered a handful of photographs and Nazi propaganda penned by her uncle, and he remained in many ways, as Krug admits, “a complete stranger to me.”67 All that remains of his brief life are the scantiest of artifacts and his grave upon which is inscribed, uncannily, his name, as Krug explains “the name that my uncle and my father had always shared.”68 Born two decades apart and sharing little other than their parentage and their name—the younger Kranz-Karl having none of the ideological proclivities of his older brother—the siblings nonetheless share the same ancestral origins. Save for the vagaries of timing, coincidence, and upbringing, their lives might have intersected more directly. Their shared patrimony is not lost on the graphic novelist, who looks in their reflected image for evidence of the generational transmission of the legacy that she, too, uncomfortably bears. Krug represents this overlapping of histories and patrimonies in her imaginative reproduction and transposition of two corresponding photographs of her father and her uncle on the occasion of their First Communion. Although separated by twenty years, the two photographs show the boys in nearly identical poses. Each stands in ceremonial attire holding in his right hand a First Communion candle festively decorated and in his left a hymnbook. The photographs coexist on a two-page spread. Each photograph is centered on its respective page, the narrator’s uncle on the left and her father on the right. Each boy is facing forward and framed by the white borders of the photograph. And while their haircuts and clothes reflect the fashions and dispositions of their respective eras, they are similarly disposed. Both boys have a vague look about them of self-conscious awkwardness and anticipation,



Third-Generation Holocaust Inheritance in Two Graphic Narratives 15

as if they are holding still for the moment of the commemorative photograph but are anxious to shed their formal clothes and starched demeanor and return to their daily pursuits. Their likeness, emphasized by the visual placement of the two photographs on adjacent pages so that we view them side by side, is a reflection of their shared histories and their consanguinity as well as the unspoken intimation that, save for the accidents of birth, their lives might have existed contiguously. Thus, Krug will merge the two photographs, superimposing the one on top of the other so that the one boy is indistinct from the other, an amalgam of the two, twin photographs that, “placed on top of each other, match perfectly.”69 They inhabit the same space and the same body. Fusing the photographs, projecting the one onto the other, blurs and obviates temporalities. Both visually figured images are extended metaphors of legacy transferred and projected. As Krug writes, “The new face that emerges looks directly at me,” an invitation to look for her own image in their joined reflection. In this photo, the ellipsis is the imagined face of the author that she seeks in the faces of those who came before her, a projection of generational transference and a layering of histories. The images are superimposed, but also the one is imposed upon the other in a collapsing of time and a blurring of boundaries of what is possible and imaginary. Not unlike Kurzweil’s image of the lenses of dark glasses that reflect the past, the image of the transposed photograph represents temporal and generational intersections and layering. Kurzweil’s autobiographical narrator looks into her grandmother’s reflective lenses to see herself but sees instead the great-aunt who might have been, the child who perished in the ghetto. Krug sees her uncle in her father, her father in her uncle, and herself as a projection outward, into the future. Such visual metaphors that expose the hidden past ironically evoke something concealed in the past, something dangerous and darkly buried. What, both writers implicitly ask, is reflected back at us when we see into the past? What do we, as descendants of a Holocaust legacy, project onto the imagined past? What do we project onto ourselves? For both third-generation graphic novelists, the desire to know is complicated by the fear of what such knowledge may bring. For the grandchild of survivors, personalized stories of past trauma—“so many stories . . . A thousand and one stories,” as Kurzweil’s grandmother avows—reveal both the singular weight of devastating individual loss, but also the extended, widening magnitude of such loss, its tentacles that reach into the future gaze. The narratives of isolated individuals are openings for a reckoning of the scope, the extent of such rupture: the vastness of millions lost and also the devastation of Jewish life and culture. These are stories, “strands of darker stories,” that, as third-generation novelist Julie Orringer’s young narrator puts it, were “absorbed . . . through her skin.”70 Such knowledge carries with it the obligation to bear witness to that memory. What’s known, finally, cannot be unknown. Thus, the magnitude of loss, its attendant grief and despair, and the traumatic rupture in the lives of those who carry with them the memory of these events are passed along intergenerationally; they become part of the narrative of the lives of post-Holocaust generations.

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For the grandchild of perpetrators, too, such knowledge is defining. Krug also fears the very knowledge that she seeks. But she enters the narrative of the past deeply apprehensive of her family’s legacy of culpability and of her own extended accountability by a linking sense of consanguinity and belonging, of Heimat. At the close of the graphic memoir, her wish for her unborn child is to be untainted by the collective history of Germany, to emerge into a new era “with no consciousness . . . pure and undisturbed as the surface of freshly fallen snow.”71 But whether such amnesia—a kind of sinister generational obliviousness—is possible or even desirable is doubtful. Indeed, such forgetfulness may, in fact, be a requirement for the rise again of some of history’s worst moments and impulses. After all, Krug’s wish for her unborn child and future generations evokes the earlier image of her grandfather whose deceptive and unfathomable image is covered by the freshly fallen snow, his true identity concealed and hidden. And thus Krug’s narrative concludes uneasily, with a cautionary gesture toward “The 2017 national election in Germany [that] has given rise to a new right-wing party . . . the extreme right [that] has claimed seats in parliament again, for the first time in more than half a century.”72 The current ideological shift in power thus suggests a precarious future, a new generation born into an unstable world haunted still by the ghosts of the genocidal past. As Krug writes, “Drawing is an act of witnessing,” one that, as these two graphic memoirs suggest, reaffirms the artists’ generational place in the traumatic history of the past.73 Both Krug and Kurzweil—the former, the grandchild of those who perpetuated the war; the latter, the grandchild of its victims—attempt to place themselves in the framework of their families’ histories and lives and, thus, from decidedly different positions, take on the legacies that they bear. These are both, finally, testimonies to memory, to reckoning, and to the obligations of future generations to bear the weight of the past, to recite the story, “to immortalize it, fashion it into those stories to be imprinted upon our homes and on our gates, as we lie down and as we rise up,” to teach our children.74

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aarons, Victoria, and Alan L. Berger. Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Adorján, Johanna. An Exclusive Love: A Memoir. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010. Apruzzese, J. P. “The Universal Memoir: An Interview with Nora Krug, The NBCC autobiography award winner on Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home,” May 5, 2019, www​.publicseminar​.org​/2019​/05​/the​-universal​-memoir​-an​-interview​-with​-nora​-krug​/. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. Berger, Alan L. “Life After Death: A Third-Generation Journey in Jérémie Dres’s We Won’t See Auschwitz.” In Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, edited by Victoria Aarons, 73–88 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016). de Waal, Edmund. The Hare with Amber Eyes. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.



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Dreifus, Erika. Quiet Americans: Stories. Boston: Last Light Studio, 2011. Felman, Shoshana. “The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah.” In Testimony: Crises  of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 204–83 (New York: Routledge, 1992). Fink, Ida. “A Scrap of Time,” in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories. Translated by Madeline Levine and Francine Prose, 3–10 (New York: Pantheon Books/Random House, 1987). Halfon, Eduardo. The Polish Boxer. Trans. Daniel Hahn, Ollie Brock, Lisa Dillman, Thomas Bunstead, and Anne McLean. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2012. ———. Monastery. Trans. Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2014. ———. Mourning. Trans. Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2018. Kluger, Ruth. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 2001. Krug, Nora. Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home. New York: Scribner, 2018. Kurzweil, Amy. Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir. New York: Catapult/Black Balloon, 2016. Langer, Lawrence. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: William Morrow/HarperCollins, 1993. McGlothlin, Erin. “No Time Like the Present: Narrative and Time in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” Narrative 11, no. 2 (2003): 177–98. Mendelsohn, Daniel. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Mouly, Françoise. “The Bracing Honesty of ‘Belonging,’ a Graphic Memoir About German  Identity,” Interview with Nora Krug, The New Yorker, July 31, 2018, www​ .newyorker​.com​/culture​/culture​-desk​/the​-bracing​-honesty​-of​-belonging​-a​-graphic​-memoir​ -about​-german​-identity. Oltermann, Philip. Interview, “Nora Krug: ‘I would have thought, what’s left to say about  Germany’s Nazi past?’” The Guardian, October 3, 2018, www​.theguardian​.com​/ books​/2018​/oct​/03​/nora​-krug​-germany​-nazi​-past​-heimat​-memoir​-author​-illustrator. Orringer, Julie. The Flight Portfolio. New York: Knopf, 2019. ———. The Invisible Bridge. New York: Knopf, 2010. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 2001. Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Vol. I. New York: Pantheon, 1986. ———. The Complete Maus (CD-Rom). New York: Voyager, 1994. Versaci, Rocco. This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature. New York: Continuum, 2007. Wagman, Elisha. “Q&A with MFA Alum Amy Kurzweil.” Creative Writing at The New School, November 9, 2016. Wiesel, Elie. Night, trans. Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.

NOTES 1. Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 2001), 19.

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2. Amy Kurzweil, Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir (New York: Catapult/Black Balloon, 2016), 32. 3. Ibid., 58. 4. Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (New York: Scribner, 2018), n. pag. 5. Kurzweil, Flying Couch, 47. 6. Krug, Belonging, n. pag. 7. Ibid., n. pag. 8. Kurzweil, Flying Couch, 61. 9. Ibid., 95, 159. 10. Ibid., 66. 11. Ibid., 50. 12. Ibid., 50–51. 13. Ibid., 14. 14. Ibid., 218. 15. Alan L. Berger, “Life After Death: A Third-Generation Journey in Jérémie Dres’s We Won’t See Auschwitz, in Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, ed. Victoria Aarons (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 73. 16. Krug, Belonging, n. pag. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Françoise Mouly, “The Bracing Honesty of ‘Belonging,’ a Graphic Memoir About German Identity,” Interview with Nora Krug, The New Yorker, July 31, 2018, www​.newyorker​.com​/culture​/culture​-desk​/the​-bracing​-honesty​-of​-belonging​-a​-graphic​-memoir​-about​ -german​-identity. 20. Krug, Belonging, n. pag. The trope of unspoken but uncannily present background noise of the past is a characteristic conceit among third-generation Holocaust writers, the grandchildren of survivors. Having been raised against the background of concealed memories, the grandchildren nonetheless or perhaps even more so desire access to that which they believe themselves to be outside of. We see a similar conceit in Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir of his distant relatives’ fate during the Shoah, The Lost, in which he recalls as a child overhearing his family talk in whispers, “the uncomfortable ripple in the air,” “stories of strange and epic journeys” (Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million [New York: HarperCollins, 2006], 7, 160). 21. Krug, Belonging, n. pag. 22. J. P. Apruzzese, “The Universal Memoir: An Interview with Nora Krug, The NBCC autobiography award winner on Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home,” May 5, 2019, www​.publicseminar​.org​/2019​/05​/the​-universal​-memoir​-an​-interview​-with​-nora​-krug​/. 23. Krug, Belonging, n. pag. 24. Ibid. 25. Philip Oltermann, Interview, “Nora Krug: ‘I would have thought, what’s left to say about Germany’s Nazi past?’” The Guardian, October 3, 2018, www​.theguardian​.com​/books​ /2018​/oct​/03​/nora​-krug​-germany​-nazi​-past​-heimat​-memoir​-author​-illustrator. 26. Krug, Belonging, n. pag. 27. Ibid. 28. Ida Fink, “A Scrap of Time,” in  A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, trans. Madeline Levine and Francine Prose (New York: Pantheon Books/Random House, 1987), 3.



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29. We find this pattern in, for example, Eduardo Halfon’s interrelated collections of stories, The Polish Boxer (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2012), Monastery (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2014), and Mourning (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2018); Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); Johanna Adorján, An Exclusive Love: A Memoir (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010); Erika Dreifus, Quiet Americans: Stories (Boston: Last Light Studio, 2011); Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge (New York: Knopf, 2010), and The Flight Portfolio (New York: Knopf, 2019); Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010); and other third-generation works that draw upon a wide range of genres, literary conceits, and narrative voices in an attempt to uncover their family histories against the backdrop of the larger history of the Shoah. 30. For an in-depth study of third-generation Holocaust literary representation in the writing of the grandchildren of survivors, see Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017). 31. Krug, Belonging, n. pag. 32. Apruzzese, “The Universal Memoir.” 33. Krug, Belonging, n. pag. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Apruzzese, “The Universal Memoir.” 42. Mouly, “The Bracing Honesty of ‘Belonging,’ a Graphic Memoir About German Identity.” 43. Kurzweil, Flying Couch, 20. 44. Ibid., 51. 45. Elisha Wagman, “Q&A with MFA Alum Amy Kurzweil.” Creative Writing at The New School, November 9, 2016. 46. Krug, Belonging, n. pag. 47. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Vol. I. New York: Pantheon, 1986, 7. 48. Of course, ironically, the Nazis accused the Jews of carrying the scourge of their bloodline. This discussion is far too complicated and intricate in terms of the background and implementation of genocide and the historical conditions of tyranny and nation-building to pursue in the context of my analysis here. 49. Krug, Belonging, n. pag. 50. Ibid. 51. Kurzweil, Flying Couch, 44–45. 52. Ibid., 245. 53. Ibid., 44–45. 54. Ibid., 45. 55. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255. 56. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 2001) 22, 4.

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57. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: William Morrow/ HarperCollins, 1993), 30. 58. Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (CD-Rom) (New York: Voyager, 1994). 59. Erin McGlothlin, “No Time like the Present: Narrative and Time in Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” Narrative, 11, 2 (2003): 11, 2. 60. Kurzweil, Flying Couch, 21. 61. Ibid., 87. 62. Rocco Versaci, This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature (New York: Continuum, 2007), 98. 63. Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 32. 64. Shoshona Felman, “The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), 231. 65. Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), xv. 66. Krug, Belonging, n. pag. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Orringer, The Invisible Bridge, 596. 71. Krug, Belonging, n. pag. 72. Ibid. 73. Apruzzese, “The Universal Memoir.” 74. Kurzweil, Flying Couch, 51.

2 “Things will never be alright again” Third-Generation German Jewish  Literature and the Questions of Remembrance, Reconciliation, and Revenge Luisa Banki In the summer of 2018, young German Jewish writer Max Czollek published a polemical essay titled Desintegriert Euch! (Disintegrate!), in which he severely criticizes German commemorative culture and articulates a position of Jewish irreconcilability: “I demand an addendum to the constitution’s eternity clause: Things will never be alright again.”1 In Desintegriert Euch!, which received widespread attention in German newspapers and cultural circles, Czollek reflects on his both Jewish and German identity, articulates a self-assertively Jewish position, and calls for solidarity between different minorities in Germany. In his frequently quite bellicose argument, he declares Jewish irreconcilability in the face of mainstream German “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (“coming to terms with the past”) and takes issue in particular with notions of non-Jewish Germans of his own generation that the past of National Socialism and the Shoah should now quite definitely be considered accounted for. Over against such notions, Czollek invokes the presentness of that past, the fact that these past events continue to affect his own life and times. Similarly, Mirna Funk, another young German Jewish author, explores in her literary as well as journalistic writings the achievements and the shortcomings of the German Jewish reconciliatory relationship in Germany. Funk particularly addresses the imbalance between third-generation descendants of survivors and of former perpetrators, campaigning for more education not only of Shoah history in general but of individual family history so as to make understandable the direct connections of those born many decades later to these events. While Funk clearly argues in a reconciliatory manner in the sense that she wants to strengthen Jewish life in contemporary Germany, she still holds fast to an irreconcilable rift between Jewish and German cultures of remembrance, which she sees perpetuated in the (lack of a) perception of personal immediacy, of the acknowledgment that the memory of National Socialism and of the Shoah pertain also to those born generations later.2 21

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In what follows, I examine motifs and expressions of irreconcilability in German Jewish contemporary literature. I want to discuss irreconcilability in light of two other concepts, resentment and revenge, that share with it their sense of time and their conviction of the necessity to keep the past present and to acknowledge its effects in and on the present. In order to better understand how irreconcilability is expressed in the works of third-generation authors, I first consider some earlier reflections, in particular Jean Améry’s ethico-political stance of resentment, and also discuss some of the diverse and not always obvious forms of revenge that can be understood as Jewish reactions to the Shoah, before discussing my literary examples, namely Funk’s debut novel Winternähe as well as the poem “A.H.A.S.V.E.R.” and two essays by Max Czollek. Irreconcilability, resentment, and revenge share an insistence on the knowledge of guilt and guiltlessness and have to find forms of expression for this knowledge. Literature is one such form.

GENERATIONS In examining the question of reconciliation and of (fantasies of ) revenge in particular, this essay considers a very recent trend in German Jewish contemporary literature. It seems that the writings of the second and first generations were, for different reasons, not dominantly concerned with questions of revenge.3 Both Czollek and Funk belong to the third generation; they are the grandchildren of survivors who in their writing explore the present effects of that past persecution.4 It is worthwhile to linger a moment on this familiar generational paradigm: Labeling authors as belonging to the first, second, or third generation posits the Shoah as the beginning of a new temporal and generational reckoning. From this perspective, the Shoah is an event that changed time, world, and family so fundamentally that we all define ourselves on the basis of this change. Insisting that this event necessitates a new temporal and generational reckoning correlates with the transgenerational influence of the experience of persecution and murder. Hannah Arendt’s famous dictum in a conversation with Günter Gaus in 1964—that Czollek repeatedly invokes5—continues to hold true: Before that we said: Well, one has enemies. That is entirely natural. Why shouldn’t a people have enemies? But this was different. It was really as if an abyss had opened. Because we had the idea that amends could somehow be made for everything else, as amends can be made for just about everything at some point in politics. But not for this. This ought not to have happened. And I don’t mean just the number of victims. I mean the methods, the fabrication of corpses and so on. . . . This should not have happened. Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us ever can.6

A first crucial insight is that this “we” of those who cannot reconcile themselves to what happened refers to both the survivors and—as we know by now—their



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descendants. The children and grandchildren of survivors cannot re-present, i.e., make present again in their minds, the events of the past through direct remembrance; but they can be confronted with “postmemories” that, as Marianne Hirsch has shown, they inherited and that are perpetuated in families through stories, images, objects, and behaviors.7 Postmemories keep past events present and can influence the lives of those who never themselves lived through them to such an extent that they preserve episodes of their parents’ experiences as equal to or even more defining than memories of their own lives. While Hirsch conceptualized postmemory with a view to the second generation and thus had in mind mostly an intergenerational exchange founded in direct confrontation between survivor-parents and their children, her idea also offers significant insights into transgenerational modes of remembrance.8 Postmemory lets us understand the psychological effects of Shoah remembrance through the familial generations; however, by now such remembrance goes decidedly beyond the scope of memorial practices confined to the family. There are specifics of third-generation memorial practices and concerns that need to be taken into account in addition to the psychological effects explained by Hirsch. A decisive difference between second- and third-generation memorial practices lies in the engagement with broader forms of societal, collective memory that accompany the practices of remembrance of the individual or individual family: ritualized, institutionalized, commodified, even instrumentalized forms of remembrance that, in particular in contemporary Germany that lauds itself as “world champion of remembrance,”9 play an important role in shaping both affirmative and critical engagement with Shoah remembrance. Besides the confrontation with the Shoah itself, the lives and works of third-generation authors are concerned with its afterlife and continuing effects: For the third generation, what is added to the necessity of confronting what Arendt called the impossibility of reconciling ourselves to these events, is the critical engagement with the so-called “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (“coming to terms with the past”) and with the reconciliatory claims of a contemporary culture of remembrance? For contemporary German Jewish literature, the discourse of reconciliation in the context of the German culture of remembrance is a necessary backdrop against which critical positions stand out.

RESENTMENT However different literary works on the (remembrance of the) Shoah may be in form, content, or artistic approach, they all share the recognition of the continuing presence of that past. Explicitly or implicitly, overtly or subtly, literary confrontations of the Shoah and/or its afterlife exhibit a sense of time wherein chronology is disturbed. In first-generation reflections of survivors, such a sense of time that is dominated by the traumatic events plays a central role. In an essay titled “Resentments” from his book Beyond Guilt and Atonement (1966), Jean Améry unsparingly confronts his

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own “reactive grudge” that he feels not only with regard to his own former—and, psychologically speaking, continuing—position as a victim but also to the lack of admissions of guilt on the part of the perpetrators.10 What Améry felt as a “grudge” and analyzed psychologically and morally as “resentment” revolves around a sense of time that is out of joint and therefore “mad” (as is implied in the original German expression “ver-rückt” that means both displaced or dislocated and insane): It has not been lost on me that resentment is not only an unnatural but also a logically contradictory state of mind. It nails each one of us down on to the cross of our destroyed past. . . . I know that the sense of time of the one trapped in resentment is out of joint, mad [verdreht, ver-rückt], if you like, because it demands the doubly impossible, the return to what was lived through and the repeal of what occurred.11

Améry juxtaposes the “social,” “biological,” and/or “natural” perception of time with a “moral” sense of time: “What happened, happened: this phrase is as true as it is hostile to morality and thought. .  .  .  The moral man demands the revocation of time—in the particular case here discussed: by nailing the perpetrator down on to his misdeed.”12 As the survivor remains “nailed down on to the cross of his destroyed past” so, too, demands Améry, the perpetrator has to be “nailed down on to his misdeed.” Faced with a young German Federal Republic whose blooming development was largely undisturbed by efforts of de-Nazification, Améry is confronted with his resentment and articulates a demand that he explicitly also addresses to those born later: That the young are free of individual guilt as well as of collective guilt that is the sum total of individual guilts stands to reason. . . . However, one can in any case demand of this youth that they not invoke their guiltlessness quite so briskly and jauntily. . . . As long as the German people including their young and youngest cohorts do not decide to live without history altogether . . . , they have to bear the responsibility for those twelve years that they did not end themselves. The German youth cannot invoke Goethe, Mörike, the Baron vom Stein and leave out Blunck, Wilhelm Schäfer, Heinrich Himmler. It is not acceptable to claim national tradition where it is honorable and to deny it where it forsook all honor and excluded a probably imaginary and certainly defenseless opponent from the community of men. If being German means to be descendant from Matthias Claudius, it must also mean having the NS-party poet Hermann Claudius as a forebear. . . . Hitler and his deeds henceforth belong to German history and German tradition.13

What Améry is demanding here is neither punishment nor retribution but remembrance. He demands responsibility be taken by remembering the crimes and misdeeds, not only because the guilty owe this but because he fears National Socialism and the Shoah might become history in the sense that they lose their singularity and become just one among many dramatic historic episodes.14 It is to prevent this that Améry holds on to his resentment: he reinterprets resentment and irreconcilability as modes of remembrance based on a sense of time that is out of joint or mad



“ Things will never be alright again” 25

[ver-rückt] insofar as it adheres to the past crimes that have not been, and perhaps cannot be, atoned for. Resentment, in Améry’s conception, perpetuates the knowledge of the Shoah as well as that of guilt and guiltlessness.

REVENGE For Améry, resentment remains on the level of an emotional response and the psychological as well as moral analysis motivated by it. It is, however, possible for resentment to become the motivation and motif of an act outside of analytical or literary interpretation, an action that transposes the “grudge” and the knowledge of guilt and guiltlessness into the desire for retribution in the form of either atonement or revenge. If atonement is impossible because the guilt incurred is too great, the guilty are too many, or attempts to achieve justice by way of the law are futile, revenge is the remaining option. With regards to its sense of time and its relation to the past, revenge is similar to resentment insofar as it adheres to the past. Like resentment and unlike its counterpart forgiveness, revenge holds fast to the past by upholding the relation between perpetrators and victims. Unlike resentment, that in Améry’s description “nails” the affected to his or her past and thus represents an involuntary (though possibly voluntarily deliberated) mode of remembrance, revenge is an active, intentional form of adhering to the past. By their adherence to the relationship to the accused and to the past, both resentment and revenge effect a continuous presence of that past. They are, for this reason, memorial practices, as Berel Lang explains in an essay on “Holocaust Memory and Revenge”: If one thinks of memory . . . as a construct rather than as a natural faculty or repository waiting to be filled, then revenge can well be understood, with the temporal extension it presupposes, as a means of creating memory: not just a particular memory, but memory as such, and so also the sense of personal or collective identity for which memory is a necessary condition.15

In his reflections on revenge after the Shoah, Lang begins with the well-known observation that the “most notable aspect of the place of revenge in the aftermath of the Shoah is its absence—both as a topic of discussion and, before that, in its occurrence.”16 Few actions and plans of Jewish revenge after 1945 are known—such as the group DIN (an acronym meaning “judgement” in Hebrew of Dam Yehudi Noter, i.e. the blood of the Jews avenges) that formed around the partisan leader Abba Kovner in Bukarest in 1945 planning among other things to poison German cities’ water supplies. For the most part the desire for revenge expressed itself not in acts of retaliation but in other, displaced, forms. In his examination of the seeming lack of Jewish revenge after 1945, Lang discusses “the ‘displacement effect’—the appearance of revenge in other guises.”17 The

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term “displacement,” as Lang himself explains, refers to Sigmund Freud’s discussion in The Interpretation of Dreams of the possibility that an idea’s significance and intensity can be detached from it and changed over to another one that is connected to it by a chain of associations.18 Displaced forms of revenge do not pursue manifestly vindictive aims or openly announce their vengeful intent; rather, they effect revenge in a quiet or concealed manner. For example, the Morgenthau plan of turning defeated Germany into a demilitarized, deindustrialized, and partitioned agrarian state can be understood as displaced revenge. Similarly, Lang explains, the refusal to buy German goods or to travel to Germany can be viewed as forms of displaced revenge.19 Displaced revenge takes an ambivalent position between resentment and vengeance, between the exclusively psychological (the emotion and its moralizing analysis) and the exclusively physical (the overt action of retaliation). The displacement effect to which Lang draws our attention allows for a perception of the appearance of revenge in “other guises”: literature can be one such guise. In now turning to the examination of expressions of irreconcilability in German Jewish contemporary literature written by members of the third generation, our attention needs to be on the possibility of such displacement effects, on the appearances of revenge in the disguised form of literature.

LITERATURE AS DISPLACED REVENGE In their writings, third-generation authors Max Czollek and Mirna Funk explore the continued presentness of the past events of the Shoah. They share the conviction of an undiminished urgency to confront this past in the present—or, more precisely, to acknowledge that they and, they argue, their contemporaries are confronted by it. In their works, Czollek and Funk confidently and self-assertively articulate young Jewish writers’ positions within the German contemporary cultural scene. These positions are founded on the heritage of the past persecution and murder of their families two generations before, which means that both authors are always already in an antagonistic position vis-à-vis the mainstream German memorial discourse of reconciliation. Notwithstanding such an antagonism to German memorial culture, both Czollek and Funk seek and promote German-Jewish understanding: they want for the third-generation Jewish positions that they represent to be understood. Understanding here must not be confused with conciliation given how at the hearts of Funk’s and, even more radically, of Czollek’s literary projects stands an implacable insistence on the presentness of the past that divides Jewish from non-Jewish positions. This insistence is directly antagonistic to the wish for closure and the desire to declare the past over once and for all that many of their non-Jewish German contemporaries express.



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Funk, who was born in 1981 in East Berlin, is a journalist writing for German daily and weekly newspapers and journals. In all her writing, she continuously campaigns for the visibility of Jewish life in Germany and clearly addresses herself to a readership that knows little or nothing about Judaism or Jewish culture in contemporary Germany.20 Her intention is thus didactic when she describes and explains her life as a patrilineal Jew in today’s Berlin. In much of her journalistic writing, she seeks to present herself as approachable and relatable, using a decidedly colloquial style of writing, frequently emphasizing the autobiographical elements in her texts, and establishing an author-persona who is often less intellectual than “hip.” The Jewish position that Funk articulates in her writing does not demand atonement but acknowledgement of the radically different worlds of experience of descendants of Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. Czollek, who was born in 1987 also in East Berlin, expresses his irreconcilability directly and explicitly, finding a poetic mode for it that can, with Lang, be read as displaced revenge. Inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), Czollek stylizes himself as an “Inglourious Poet” who champions solidarity between different minorities in Germany and criticizes the discourse on integration.21 Czollek is convinced that different minorities must not allow German mainstream society to force them into roles that only strengthen the self-image of the majority that views itself as the “norm”: “If what I write is Jew-poetry, then everyone else is writing potato-poetry!”22 Czollek aims, as such provocative formulations indicate, at a radical criticism of the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that dominate both the literary scene and German society as a whole.

JEWISH LIFE AND GERMAN DEATH: FUNK’S WINTERNÄHE In her debut novel Winternähe (roughly translated as “closeness of winter” though the untranslatability of this German compound noun plays a role in the novel itself ), Funk’s protagonist Lola is not only confronted with antisemitic prejudices and attacks that cause her to leave her native Berlin for first Tel Aviv and then Thailand before ultimately returning to Berlin. She is also confronted with different and conflicting modes of remembering the Shoah, which she can clearly identify as “German” and “Jewish” respectively.23 Lola herself, as a patrilineal Jew born in the German Democratic Republic, has an ambivalent relationship to both her Jewish and her German identity. As a child, she was made “Holocaust-fit”24 by her father but was really brought up by her grandmother, a survivor, “who always and everywhere saw harbingers of a sequel to the Holocaust.”25 As an adult Lola is confronted with antisemitism within the liberal, hip Berlin scene of creative professionals, an antisemitism that grows on the basis of a self-righteous position dependent on the declaration of successful reconciliation and supposedly “coming to terms with the past.” The novel delegitimizes such a position with its depictions of antisemitism and its protagonist’s reflections on the enduring

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significance of history: “To remember is to understand that we have become what we are, thought Lola.”26 In Winternähe, Funk investigates the status of the Shoah for her own generation. The novel opens with a description of the present that laconically maps contemporary German culture around the fact of the Shoah, dividing German society into those on the “the-Holocaust-is-so-over-side” and those on the “we-must-neverforget-what-happened-side.”27 Besides these two “sides” of those who do not want to be reminded of the Shoah and those who wish to actively remember, however, there is another position of those who feel they have no choice but to remember, since their sense of the present is permeated by a sense of history. Lola certainly does not find it possible to forget, nor does she wish to. Indeed, it might be said that since her Jewish identity is neither founded in nor actively lived as a religious identity, it is instead based on the remembrance of the Shoah. In a conversation with her Israeli lover Shlomo, Lola articulates this identity of remembrance in strikingly concrete terms. Reflecting on the question whether “the ashes of the dead Jew are drifting through the air in Germany,” Lola paints the German land- and cityscapes as covered in the material residues of the murder of Jews: Of course they are. Everywhere. They lie on the car roofs, the tramway tracks, they float in the lakes and ponds, they lie on the hills and mountains. They lie as dust on the shelves in every apartment of every German.28

The very materiality of the residue of the past events guarantee for Lola their continued existence. She imagines the ashes as the very stuff of the past that is inevitably ingested by all who live in Germany: “Every time I breathe the air in Berlin or in Munich or in Hamburg, I know that I am breathing the ashes of the dead Jews. The only thing I don’t understand is why the Germans have not long since suffocated on these ashes.”29 Shoah remembrance and knowledge about its continuing influence are here connected with Lola’s claim that she is reflexively aware of every breath she takes in her native Germany. This illustrates not only the inevitable necessity to remember but also explains her sense of irreconcilability. In Lola’s hyperbolic and at the same time concretely materialistic conception of remembrance, remembering is less as an intentional act than rather a necessity, a reflex like breathing. For her, German history is quite literally in the air in Germany and she is, she claims, aware of it with every breath she takes. That this awareness is a “Jewish” position is made clear when Lola juxtaposes it to a wish to forget that she calls “German”: Too many dead people, too many names. What remains is memory. The Germans have always misunderstood this and continue to do so to this day. For the survivors it was never about causing feelings of guilt or condemning the ordinary German for all eternity, but about remembering the dead. It is this remembrance, this covenant of remembrance between God and men, that characterizes Judaism and the Jewish tradition.



“ Things will never be alright again” 29 The Germans know no remembrance, also because there is no dialogue between God and men in Christianity. Forget everything. As quickly as possible.30

In the description of the effect this wish to forget has on contemporary German society, Funk has her protagonist combine elements of dystopian storytelling and social criticism: Germany is smooth, do you know that? Germany has been planed down, and after that it was gone over again with sandpaper until there was nothing to see anymore: nothing evil. If you plane down evil completely, you also get rid of vital traits that are not evil at all. All the edges, all that is angular or weird, for example. All that is different. They have been trying for seventy years to plane out the war and everything and to create security. And what was the result? That people here in Berlin prefer to talk about the newest Nike sneaker and people in Botrop about Sunday’s episode of Tatort. . . . It is unbearable. It is disgusting. . . . I call this braindead. A country full of zombies. Just take care not to step out of line, never to say anything crazy. Never mess about. Stay in line. All we need now is to step out of line. Never again step out of line! NEVER AGAIN! What I have always loved about Israel is that nobody can afford to be braindead here because you are constantly in existential danger. I prefer missiles to zombies, Shlomo. Honestly. I prefer missiles to zombies. Here, there is life, here, you can still hear a heartbeat.31

Here, the imperative “never again Auschwitz” is linked precisely not to an ethico-political stance of remembrance as it is attributed within the discourse of reconciliation to the “world champion of remembrance”; rather, it is the expression of a German dead-heartedness, an inability to feel or think. By juxtaposing Jewish remembrance and German “brain death,” Funk’s novel not only formulates a literary position of irreconcilability, but also of displaced revenge in which Jewish life triumphs over German death as “the Germans” as “braindead zombies” are trapped in a state of death.

“INGLOURIOUS POET”: CZOLLEK’S LITERARY REVENGE Max Czollek is just as unwilling to give up the knowledge of former perpetration and victimization or to transform that knowledge into a discourse of reconciliation. In his poetry as well as his prose writing, he dedicates himself to a program of “disintegration.” Disintegration aims at a critique of what Czollek, drawing on the work of Michal Bodemann, calls the “commemorative theatre” of a German reconciliatory culture of remembrance.32 Within what for Bodemann and Czollek is a performative culture of remembrance, clearly delineated parts are assigned to “reformed [geläuterte] Germans” on the one hand and “good victims” on the other: Jews continue to move within a coordinate system that is determined by the desire of a German position. This desire constricts the representation of Jewishness to experiences of antisemitism, a particular stance towards Israel and a possible familial or artistic

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connection to the Shoah. A little bit of religion and a little bit of a (successfully managed) history of migration add a little flavor but do not allow for a breaching of the set framework.33

With his polemic Desintegriert Euch!, Czollek aims at the conception of alternative models to this “commemorative theatre” that neither exhaust themselves in providing non-Jewish German identity formation with an “Other,” nor let themselves be reduced to one “Jewish” position belying inner-Jewish heterogeneity. The articulation of such counter-models is what Czollek calls “disintegration.” One example for disintegrative processes is poetic revenge: Both revenge acts and revenge art . . . stand in subversive tension to the commemorative theatre because they present a counter-figure to the peaceful and defenseless Jewish victim. By preserving the memory of the almost forgotten Jewish reactions to German crimes, revenge art is an archive of resistance. By opening up a space for reflection on the ways in which the violence of extermination has written itself into the Jewish body, psyche, and language, it is a space of mourning. And by providing a legitimate psychological processing mechanism, it is a form of self-empowerment.34

As an example of revenge art, Czollek offers his own poem “A.H.A.S.V.E.R.” that first appeared in his collection of poems Jubeljahre in 2015 and a year later as a stand-alone publication accompanied by an essay and a transcribed conversation with German Jewish pedagogue and philosopher Micha Brumlik and publisher Jo Frank. Thus, surrounded by helpful commentary, the hermetic poem can be read fairly straightforwardly as an attempt at poetic revenge, as a radical expression of irreconcilability. At the heart of the poem stands the figure “Josef, Iosif, Joseph” that oscillates between the biblical Josef, Iosif Stalin, and Joseph Goebbels: josef, iosif, joseph who were you who did you become?35

This figure of threefold disunity is connected to that of the Wandering Jew and his many imaginations and interpretations in Christian theology, antisemitism, and general literary history. According to Christian legend, Ahasver was an onlooker while Jesus carried the cross to Calvary, denied him a request for rest, and instead taunted him, whereupon Jesus cursed him to eternally wander the earth. What fascinates Czollek about this legend is its showcasing of the power of words, namely curses. He takes up this conviction that words can condemn—perhaps especially in cases when other ways of condemnation are barred—and assigns a central place within his poetic project to the power of words to exact revenge or, as the case may be, liberate. In doing so, Czollek declares himself an heir to the most sharp-tongued German Jewish poet,



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Heinrich Heine, whose warning at the end of his Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (Germany. A Winter’s Tale), “Affront the living poets not,” Czollek likes to quote:  

And yet there are hells form out of whose clutch There’s no escape to heaven; No prayers there avail, and powerless tooIs the Saviour’s pardon even. Is Dante’s hell to thee unknown, With its terrible trinary verses? The man whom the poet there has shut up Will never escape from his curses.36

Czollek’s “A.H.A.S.V.E.R.” dedicates itself to such a damnation. It is aimed at Stalin and Goebbels, who represent the perpetrators of the twentieth century: josef, awake! you must hurry if only a joke about a rabbi already damns to eternal wandering, how much more then is it your due to tread the earth with your feet?37

  This damnation that Czollek envisions for the murderous antisemites of the twentieth century excludes any notion of reconciliation: amongst your dead there was no savior, not one of them returns when what was divided will come together and what was gaping will close. your testimony brings you no mercy no time of atonement is appointed to walk through the desert again and again.38

The poem follows a program of disintegration, insofar as it separates the legend of the Wandering Jew from its traditional context of Christian theology and antisemitism and transposes it into a new, self-assertively Jewish context. At the same time this articulation of Jewish self-empowerment, the writing of a poem condemning antisemites, is itself a form of displaced revenge. It is in this sense that Czollek himself writes in his essay “Inglourious Poets. Revenge as a Topos of Jewish Self-Empowerment” that is both a commentary on his own poem and the subject of Jewish revenge: “As soon as I write disintegratively, I evade a German position seeking reconciliation. The topos of Jewish revenge for instance  .  .  . is one that cannot be integrated into it.”39 Revenge is what disturbs reconciliation. Revenge poetry thus is not only an example of a literary form of

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disintegration, but is, as self-assertive Jewish poetry in German, also an artistic act of displaced revenge. Concerning the writing of Jewish literature in German, Czollek is convinced that “Celan [was] an optimist, when he believed that there was a possibility of reconciling mother tongue and murderers’ tongue.”40 Czollek therefore writes German poems that less recount history than invoke it, echo it, make it heard presently: “To write a poem after Auschwitz is not possible without invoking the language of Auschwitz again and again!”41 It is precisely this repeated invocation that is at issue in his writing; his poems are a call for the acknowledgement of the presentness of the past and of the power of words. By not letting his readers forget about history, the history of the very language he writes in, Czollek takes his revenge. It is in this sense that his statement “revenge is a poetic stance” is to be understood: “Poetry is obsessively plucking at the sutures between yesterday and tomorrow. The dead talk away endlessly through language. Writing, for me, means to take their salute from the pulpit of my presence.”42 Here, a third-generation poet expresses a sense of connectedness to his (literary, but also familial) forebears that explains the seamlessness with which he reacts to the wrongs done to them—or, more in keeping with Czollek’s own metaphor, it explains the very intensity with which he feels the seams that connect him with the dead of the past. His desire for revenge is not only on behalf of the dead, however; it is also his very own. With a view to his family history of persecution during the Shoah and its continuing effect on him, the grandchild, Czollek expresses a relentless sense of irreconcilability and states that he feels “no need for normalization” within the framework of contemporary commemorative culture: I cannot share the joy about the new Germany. This is also due to the fact that I perceive the murder of my people as a fundamental insult. It cannot possibly be forgotten because of some field of stelae [the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin consists of more than 2700 stelae, L.B.] or remembrance days. . . . If any Germans of my generation today want to tell me that they have had enough of remembering National Socialism, I experience this a continuation of that insult. And as a lack of respect towards the dead. The “German Homeland” is for me a deeply ambivalent, violent, and traumatic place.43

Czollek’s irreconcilability leads him to political solidarity with other minorities in today’s Germany and to his literary mode of revenge poetry that aims at not letting the past be forgotten nor past actions stand without present reactions.

CONCLUSION In the writings of third-generation German Jewish authors Mirna Funk and Max Czollek, irreconcilability is a powerful motif. Funk’s protagonist appears as a proponent of resentment reminiscent of Améry’s conception and goes on to paint



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dystopian pictures of Germany (the land of ashes) and Germans (braindead zombies) that can be read as revenge fantasies. In Czollek’s poem as well as his essays, revenge is declared a poetic principle promoting the autonomy of Jewish positions in Germany (especially positions that the majority of German readers might not want to read). For both authors, the German discourse of reconciliation under the sign of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung“ (“coming to terms with the past”) presents the negative foil against which they articulate their respective positions. In contrast to authors of the first or second generations, third-generation German Jewish authors know that their readers want to see themselves as having successfully “come to terms” with the past and, thus, for the past to be firmly over and done with. Funk and Czollek in both their writings and their performances as author-personas counter this wish with a repudiation that, while it wants to be understood, nonetheless insists on its own position: “Things will never be alright again.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Améry, Jean. “Ressentiment.” In Werke 2, edited by Gerhard Scheit, 118–14. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002. Arendt, Hannah. “‘What remains? The language remains’: A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in: Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954. Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, edited by Jerome Kohn, 1–23. New York: Schocken, 1994. Arendt, Hannah, and Günter Gaus. Gaus im Gespräch mit Hannah Arendt, RBB Interview-Archiv: Sendung vom 28.10, 1964, https:​//​www​.rbb​-online​.de​/zurperson​/interview​_archiv​/arendt​_hannah​.html. Assmann, Aleida. Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur. Eine Intervention. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013. Banki, Luisa. “Actuality and Historicity in Mirna Funk’s Winternähe.” In German Jewish Literature after 1990, edited by Katja Garloff and Agnes Mueller, 169–86. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018. Belkin, Dimitrij. “Jüdische Kontingentflüchtlinge und Russlanddeutsche,” Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, https:​//​www​.bpb​.de​/gesellschaft​/migration​/kurzdossiers​/252561​/ juedische​-kontingentfluechtlinge​-und​-russlanddeutsche. Berger, Alan L. “Life After Death. A Third-Generation Journey in Jérémie Dres’s We Won’t See Auschwitz.” In Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, edited by Victoria Aarons, 73–87. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Biller, Maxim. “Der diensthabende Dichter.” In Hundert Zeilen Hass: Erstmals komplett. Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 2017, 90–92. Bodemann, Y. Michal. Gedächtnistheater: Die jüdische Gemeinschaft und ihre deutsche Erfindung. Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1996. Czollek, Max. A.H.A.S.V.E.R., Berlin: Verlagshaus Berlin / Edition Binaer, 2016. ———. “‘Das Gedicht ist ein Symptom der Geschichte—nicht ihrer Heilung!’ Ein Gespräch zwischen Max Czollek, Jo Frank und Micha Brumlik im Studio Я des Gorki-Theaters in Berlin im März 2015.” In A.H.A.S.V.E.R. Berlin: Verlagshaus Berlin / Edition Binaer, 2016, n. pag. [Kindle Edition].

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———. “A.H.A.S.V.E.R.” In Jubeljahre. Berlin: Verlagshaus Berlin, 2015. ———. “Inglourious Poets. Rache als Topos jüdischer Selbstermächtigung. Gedanken zum A.H.A.S.V.E.R.” In A.H.A.S.V.E.R. Berlin: Verlagshaus Berlin / Edition Binaer, 2016, n. pag. [Kindle Edition]. ———. Desintegriert Euch! Munich: Hanser, 2018. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated and edited by James Strachey London: George Allen & Unwin, 1945. Funk, Mirna. Winternähe. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2015. Heine, Heinrich. Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen. Edited by Werner Bellmann. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001. ———. Germany: A Winter’s Tale. Bilingual Edition. Translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring. New York: Mondial, 2007. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Lang, Berel: “Holocaust Memory and Revenge: The Presence of the Past.” Jewish Social Studies 2, no. 2 (1996): 1–20. Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. “Displacement.” In The Language of Psychoanalysis, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, 121–23. London: Karnac Books, 1973.

NOTES 1. Max Czollek, Desintegriert Euch! (Munich: Hanser, 2018), 182, emphasis in the original. (Unless noted otherwise, all translations from the German are my own.) An English translation by Jon Cho-Polizzi is forthcoming with Restless Books in 2023 under the title De-Integrate! A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century. 2. German Jewish contemporary literature is as diverse as is German Jewish contemporary life: Thanks to the immigration of some 220,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union mostly during the 1990s, it is estimated that 90 percent of the members of the Jewish communities in Germany today are migrants. See Dimitrij Belkin, “Jüdische Kontingentflüchtlinge und Russlanddeutsche,” Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung: www​.bpb​.de​/gesellschaft​/migration​/kurzdossiers​/252561​/juedische​-kontingentfluechtlinge​-und​-russlanddeutsche. German Jewish literature, too, is for a large part migrant literature as a significant number of authors were not born in Germany and did not learn German as their first language. Insofar as they have no family history of migration, Czollek and Funk, who were both born in the GDR, are almost atypical for contemporary German Jewish writers. It is important to remember that their positions are situated within the diverse and at times conflicted field of historical and familial remembrance, generational reckoning, and literary influences that is contemporary German Jewish literature. 3. The notable exception to the claim that revenge was not a prominent theme in secondgeneration writing is Maxim Biller, who established himself as Jewish German writer insisting on explicating his irritating and at times explicitly vengeful presence: “Ich bin nur der Rache-Biller, den ihr alle hasst” (“I am only Revenge-Biller whom you all hate”). Maxim Biller, “Der diensthabende Dichter,” in Hundert Zeilen Hass: Erstmals komplett (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 2017), 92.



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4. In both cases, questions of belonging to either “the Germans” or “the Jews” are further complicated as Czollek and Funk are each descendant from both Jewish and non-Jewish German families. 5. Czollek, Desintegriert Euch!, 163. See also Max Czollek, “Inglourious Poets: Rache als Topos jüdischer Selbstermächtigung: Gedanken zum A.H.A.S.V.E.R.,” in A.H.A.S.V.E.R. (Berlin: Verlagshaus Berlin / Edition Binaer, 2016), n. pag. [Kindle Edition]. 6. Hannah Arendt and Günter Gaus, “Gaus im Gespräch mit Hannah Arendt” (RBB Interview-Archiv: Sendung vom 28.10, 1964), https:​//​www​.rbb​-online​.de​/zurperson​/interview​_archiv​/arendt​_hannah​.html. See also Hannah Arendt, “‘What remains? The language remains’: A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 1994), 13. 7. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press 2012). 8. Alan L. Berger’s similar argument may be found in “Life After Death: A Third-Generation Journey in Jérémie Dres’s We Won’t See Auschwitz,” in Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, ed. Victoria Aarons (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 76. 9. Aleida Assmann, Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur: Eine Intervention (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013), 59. 10. Jean Améry, “Ressentiment,” in Werke 2, ed. Gerhard Scheit (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002), 119. 11. Améry, “Ressentiment,” 128. 12. Améry, “Ressentiment,” 133. 13. Ibid., 140. 14. Ibid., 145. 15. Berel Lang, “Holocaust Memory and Revenge: The Presence of the Past,” Jewish Social Studies 2, no. 2 (1996): 16, emphasis in the original. 16. Ibid., 1. 17. Ibid., 3. 18. Ibid., 10. See also Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1945). See also Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Displacement,” in The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1973), 121–23. 19. Lang, “Holocaust Memory and Revenge,” 11. 20. See for instance Funk’s regular column for the German edition of Vogue called “Jüdisch heute” (“Jewish Today”), www​.vogue​.de​/die​-redaktion​/mirna​-funk. 21. See Czollek, “Inglourious Poets,” n. pag. 22. Max Czollek stated this about his volume of poems during a conversation at the Berlin Gorki Theatre transcribed as “‘Das Gedicht ist ein Symptom der Geschichte—nicht ihrer Heilung!’ Ein Gespräch zwischen Max Czollek, Jo Frank und Micha Brumlik im Studio Я des Gorki-Theaters in Berlin im März 2015.” See Max Czollek, A.H.A.S.V.E.R., Berlin: Verlagshaus Berlin / Edition Binaer, non.pag. [Kindle Edition]. 23. See my more detailed reading of Funk’s novel that I draw on in the following: Luisa Banki, “Actuality and Historicity in Mirna Funk’s Winternähe,” in German Jewish Literature after 1990, ed. Katja Garloff and Agnes Mueller (Rochester, NY: Camden House 2018), 169–86. 24. Mirna Funk, Winternähe (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 2015), 124.

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25. Ibid., 19. 26. Ibid., 218. 27. Ibid., 21. 28. Ibid., 311. 29. Ibid., 312. 30. Ibid., 217. 31. Ibid., 214. 32. See Y. Michal Bodemann, Gedächtnistheater: Die jüdische Gemeinschaft und ihre deutsche Erfindung (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1996). 33. Czollek, Desintegriert Euch!, 28. 34. Ibid., 157. 35. Max Czollek: “A.H.A.S.V.E.R.,” in Jubeljahre (Berlin: Verlagshaus Berlin, 2015), 32. 36. Heinrich Heine, Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen, ed. Werner Bellmann (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001), 75 (Caput XXVII, 81–88). See also Heinrich Heine, Germany: A Winter’s Tale: Bilingual Edition, trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring (New York: Mondial, 2007), 119. 37. Czollek, “A.H.A.S.V.E.R.,” 38. 38. Ibid., 40. 39. Czollek, “Inglourious Poets,” n. pag. 40. Ibid. 41. Max Czollek said this in the conversation transcribed as “‘Das Gedicht ist ein Symptom der Geschichte—nicht ihrer Heilung!’ Ein Gespräch zwischen Max Czollek, Jo Frank und Micha Brumlik im Studio Я des Gorki-Theaters in Berlin im März 2015,” in Max Czollek: A.H.A.S.V.E.R., n. pag. 42. Czollek, “Inglourious Poets,” n. pag. 43. Czollek, Desintegriert Euch!, 174.

3 Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio A New Turn in Holocaust Representation Alan L. Berger

The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Julie Orringer is an award-winning writer, a university professor, and the recipient of many literary fellowships and prizes. Her first two highly acclaimed novels, How to Breathe Underwater (2003) and The Invisible Bridge (2011), were each listed among the New York Times Notable Books and subsequently translated into twenty languages. The former volume also received notice as the San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year and won the Northern California Book Award. She is also the recipient of the  Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize. Her writings have been widely anthologized. Her newest work is The Flight Portfolio (2019). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. In addition, she was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Among the universities at which she has taught are Columbia, Princeton, and the University of Michigan. Orringer currently teaches fiction at Brooklyn College and through Stanford University’s New York Program. Orringer is a prolific author. Her first novel How to Breathe Underwater contains nine short stories dealing with childhood/young adult challenges of trauma, loss, and sibling battles. Especially noteworthy is “The Smoothest Way is Full of Stones,” which details the anguish resulting from the failure of religious and moral codes to protect and offer succor  to a group of Orthodox adolescent girls who discover the awesome power of their sexuality. The Invisible Bridge is based on Orringer’s Hungarian grandparents’ Holocaust experiences and focuses on the struggle of an individual against the ominous tides of history. The metaphysical bridge invoked in the title leads both away from and toward the Jewish affiliation of the various cast of characters. Professor Victoria Aarons describes the novel as a “characteristically thirdgeneration narrative. It reaches into the past to extend the memory of the Shoah and 37

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to give weight and presence to those otherwise lost to history.”1 Orringer’s grandfather, Andres Levi, was an architecture student forced to leave his studies in Paris and return to fascist Hungary. There, he was sentenced to a slave labor camp, where his two brothers were murdered. He and his wife, Klara, a dancer, married after the Shoah. Orringer’s great-uncle Alfred Tibor was a famous sculptor. The author’s tracing of the antisemitic legislation and the Nazi occupation provide the (novel’s) “theatrical landscape.”2 She, like many members of the second generation, makes a European pilgrimage—in Orringer’s case, to Hungary—and interviews her family and their friends to provide important details. Orringer herself attests that “she was able to appreciate more fully the intersection of the personal and the collective.”3 This intersection is clearly seen in her latest novel. The Flight Portfolio is taken from a project initiated by Varian Fry, the American Protestant rescuer, to help raise funds to aid additional refugees. The novel differs from the author’s 2011 work in four important ways. Her focus is on Varian Fry, rather than on Jewish victims, although the reader learns a great deal about their imperiled existence as well. The site of the novel’s action is France (Western Europe), specifically the port city of Marseilles and not Hungary (Eastern Europe). The focus is on rescue rather than on destruction. Consequently, it raises the eternal moral question faced by rescuers, of who should live and who should be abandoned. Finally, the novel imagines the impact of the stress on Fry because of his alleged homosexuality. Orringer had come across Fry’s name when writing The Invisible Bridge but concluded that the vast amount of material, including twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s correspondence at Columbia University’s Butler Library, warranted the writing of a fully independent novel. While I alluded to her earlier novels, this essay seeks to articulate a fresh angle of vision concerning Holocaust representation. Julie Orringer utilizes two tropes not typically associated with the Shoah: American rescuers and homosexuality. The Flight Portfolio is an epic 555-page thirty-nine-chapter piece of historical fiction, and some prefer terming it a fictional biography4 that focuses on a thirteen-month period in the life of Varian Fry. Fry, born (1908) in New York, was the son of a New York City stockbroker. The heroic rescuer Fry was a journalist, a Harvard graduate, and a classics scholar. Moreover, he was the first American to be designated “Righteous Among the Nations” [Hasidei Umot Ha Olam] by Yad Vashem. In August 1940, he went to Marseilles under the auspices of the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) and with the blessing of Eleanor Roosevelt and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, among others. He had only three thousand dollars taped to his leg and believed his mission would end in a matter of weeks. At the time of his arrival the Marseilles in which Fry found himself was populated by blackmailers, gangsters, murderers, and thieves. However, the population also consisted of thousands of desperate refugees awaiting rescue. He was expelled to America thirteen months later. In the interim he had saved the lives of nearly two thousand people; most, but not all, were Jews. The rest were anti-Nazis.



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The trope of rescue in The Flight Portfolio focuses on Fry in his bold, complex, and dangerous rescue mission. The picture that emerges is of a courageous and resourceful, yet self-deprecating, man who lived by his wits and was supported by a strong but informal committee of helpers. Among the latter was Hiram “Harry” Bingham, the American consul in Marseilles who was subsequently demoted and sent to Portugal by his State Department superiors because he assisted Fry and was too concerned about the fate of European Jews. Later, Fry recalled hearing that when Avra Warren, the Chef of the State Department Visa Division, had toured Europe in the summer of 1940, he had told the American consul at Lisbon to make sure that not a “single goddam Jew” got to America.5 Fry numbered the United States State Department among the enemies of democracy. The second trope refers to the twice-married Fry’s alleged homosexuality. This possibility of queerness, too, reveals the steep emotional price Fry must have paid during an historical period when cultural norms were decades away from supporting or even accepting gay relationships. Consequently, Orringer’s portrayal of Fry as feeling great anxiety and vulnerability. She invents the fictive Elliott Grant, Fry’s former biracial Harvard roommate and lover. Elsewhere, Orringer also invokes the names of Lincoln Kirstein, with whom Fry founded a journal The Hound and Hare, devoted to left-wing avant-garde themes. It is also known that in Marseilles, Fry was intimately involved with Stéphane Hessel, who later became a French diplomat. I note that the issue of the Holocaust and homosexuality has been treated en passant by the late Israeli second-generation novelist Nava Semel. Her title story in A Hat of Glass deals with the kindness of a Jewish prisoner who relied on her lesbian relationship with a German guard to aid an older and ill Jewish female prisoner. There are of course many studies of the torture and imprisonment of homosexuals by the Nazis.6 However, the Shoah and homosexuality have generally not been represented in the manner which Orringer’s grand novel imagines. The trope of the “Righteous Among the Nations” entails a movement away from survivors themselves and focuses instead on the very few who helped rescue them. Many second-generation artists and filmmakers have written and made documentaries paying tribute to the lifesaving efforts of the moral minority. Immediately one thinks of Pierre Sauvage’s Weapons of the Spirit (1989), which treats the rescue efforts of the largely Protestant (Huguenot) village of Le Chambon sur Lignon, located some three hundred kilometers from Paris in the south central part of France. Another prominent example of the same genre is Myriam Abramowicz and Esther Hoffenberg’s As if It Were Yesterday (1980), which deals with rescue efforts in Belgium and includes Jewish self-help in that country. These two examples reveal the differences existing among rescuers. In Le Chambon, helpers were largely unorganized but led by the example of their charismatic pastor, André Trocmé; his wife, Magda; and Trocmé’s assistant, Pastor Edouard Theis. Madame Trocmé insists that if the villagers had been organized, they would have never succeeded. Of course, the Protestant Huguenots had a long history of persecution for being “other” in largely Catholic France. Their community

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distinguished themselves by offering shelter to those in need, especially refugees fleeing the ravages of the Spanish Civil War. Ironically, notes the novelist Dara Horn, “Sauvage’s parents went to Le Chambon after being rejected for rescue by Fry.”7 The situation in Belgium was very different with a highly organized and official resistance. In the first place, Belgium was a primarily urban as opposed to a rural and isolated village setting. Moreover, among the rescuers were social workers, dressmakers, and priests. The documentary As if it Were Yesterday also focuses on hidden children. Consequently, women played an outsized rescue role. They could push a baby carriage without attracting attention. Unlike today, a man pushing a carriage would at that time be a red flag to informers. Moreover, many of the rescued children remained in the country following the Holocaust. In addition to these above noted films are the Canadian actor Saul Rubinek’s So Many Miracles (1987) and the American-born Debbie Goodstein’s Voices from the Attic (1988). These documentary tributes to the righteous are both paeans of thanks and attempts to more fully embrace the filmmakers’ post-Holocaust Jewish identity. Both of these documentaries’ creators go on a pilgrimage to Europe and speak with the descendants of the rescuers. Consequently, they learn additional information about their parents and the traumatic situation in which they were placed during the Holocaust. Occasionally, readers of third-generation literature discover hints of those who helped during the time of testing. One thinks of Johanna Adorján’s memoir An Exclusive Love (2009). Adorján is a Danish Christian journalist whose paternal grandparents were survivors and immigrants. After the war, they immigrated to Denmark, where they subsequently committed suicide. Her father’s life was saved immediately after his birth in Budapest. In addition, Erika Dreifus’s collection Quiet Americans contains a story, “For Services Rendered,” which tells the tale of Doctor Ernest Waldmann, a German Jewish refugee pediatrician. Dreifus imagines that her paternal grandparents received a warning from Emma Göring, Reichsmarsall Herman Göring’s wife, who was grateful for the care that a Jewish pediatrician had given Edda, her young daughter. It was time, attested Emma, for Jews to leave Germany. This was not the first time Emma had intervened. Her actions greatly offended the Nazi hierarchy. The doctor and his wife migrated to America in the late 1930s. Much against his wife’s wishes, the doctor even wrote a letter of support for Emma, who was on trial in postwar Germany. Further examples of helpers in third-generation fictional writing include Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, which focuses on a grandson’s fruitless search for Augustine, a mysterious woman who may have rescued his grandfather; Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love, which treats a second-generation member whose father had been rescued; and Krauss’s Great House, which consists of a series of interconnected stories, tells of Jewish self-help—and one of these stories speaks of Lotte Berg. Lotte, an aging survivor and Alzheimer’s victim who came to England on one of the last Kindertransport voyages, had saved her infant son’s life by giving him away to a Christian couple, a fact she had concealed from her husband.



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Collectively, rescuers symbolize the promise of a future as opposed to the certainty of doom. Oskar Schindler offered hope amid a sea of despair, as did Raul Wallenberg, Chinue Suigihara, and several other diplomat-rescuers who consequently lost their positions for aiding Jews. Disobeying their governments’ orders saved many lives. It is interesting to note a certain irony here. The infamous lower-ranking Nazis officially responded to their crimes against humanity with: “I was just following orders.” This is the same defense used by American diplomats. Rescuers demonstrate by their actions that Jews were not entirely abandoned and alone. Moreover, there are both theological and moral dimensions to their efforts. In an illuminating essay, “Two Sides of One Coin: Hillul Hashem and Kiddush Hashem” [profanation and sanctification of God’s name], Rabbi Gilbert S. Rosenthal approvingly cites the late Rabbi Louis Jacobs, who contended that “God needs humans for his purpose to be fulfilled, and helping God by making His presence felt in the world is behind the doctrine of Kiddush Hashem.”8 As Susan Sontag wrote: “At the center of our moral life and our moral imagination are the great models of resistance: the great stories of those who have said ‘No.’”9 Those who possess the moral courage it takes to defy the mores of one’s “tribe” incur the wrath of an “offended majority.”10 In Frankfurt, Schindler was spat upon in public. As noted previously, most diplomat rescuers were forced to resign in disgrace by their respective governments. It is not unusual to pay a steep moral, emotional, and material price for negating tribal norms. Furthermore, it is obviously the case that there would have been no second or third generations of Jews if the Nazis had succeeded in dominating Europe and fulfilling their mad scheme to exterminate every living Jew. The few non-Jews who responded by becoming their brothers’ keepers reveal both that resistance was possible, and that the actions of a single person can literally be lifesaving. Elie Wiesel makes this clear by way of his poignant aphorism: “The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference.” Fry was driven to help and was in no way indifferent to the fate of the Jews and others who opposed Nazism. Orringer starkly illuminates the difference between Fry and other Americans during the time of testing. He was an idealist helper who viewed his mission as “winn[ing] an all-out race against the Nazis for the lives of Jews.”11 This contrasts with Schindler, who became an opportunist responder/helper. Initially viewing his help as a money-making opportunity, he changed his point of view when he saw the cruelty of the Nazi persecution of Jews. Fry was very conscious of the seriousness of his mission. During a chess game, speaking to Captain Deschamps, commander of one of the underground rescue ships, Fry commented: “We’re talking about the intellectual flower of Europe. . . . You can have a hand in saving it” (FP 259). This stands in stark contrast to the lack of understanding and commitment displayed by most American officials. Orringer treats this fact in an imagined discussion Fry had with Jay Allen, the clownish and self-serving person who had been sent to replace him. Rescue efforts were expected, and the ERC wanted “more bang for their buck.” “Einstein,” Jay Allen attested, was “worth about a hundred thou in fundraising

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speeches, give or take a thou.” In a cynical utterance, Allen noted, “Picasso would be worth fifty thousand, if we could get him. However, Werfel, Mann, and the one with the unpronounceable name scarcely brought in ten together” (FP 323). Varian, writes Orringer, “had to stifle a laugh. So, this was what had been going on in New York: this calculation, this rendering of lives in dollars, give or take a thou. Varian realized with great clarity that the people in New York ‘had no bloody idea, no concept at all of what was really going on in France’” (FP 323). Continuing with the trope of rescue and expressing his support for the surrealist artists on his list and his contempt for Jay Allen’s buffoonish hubris, Orringer describes an imagined dinner party which Fry hosted in “honor” of Allen. The guests all appeared in the nude, much to the chagrin and embarrassment of Fry’s replacement. After a period of time the surrealists and other guests reappeared fully clothed. Allen, donning an ill-fitting costume, angrily stormed out of the party. Breton exclaims: “‘Et voilà. . . . Au revoir, Monsieur Allen. Justice is done” (FP 350). The guests had a good laugh, which in those terrible times could itself be a life-sustaining experience. Fry on his own expanded his mission to include “ordinary” Jews, the non-Jewish anti-Nazis and others, whose lives were imperiled by National Socialism’s murderous ideology abetted by the notorious “surrender on demand” provision. This coda, which Hitler compelled France to accept, required France to turn over any individual Hitler demanded. The traitorous Marshall Pétain was only too willing to implement this clause. In effect, Fry officially represented the ERC. But he also established a separate rescue committee (Centre Américain de Secours [The American Relief Center]) whose mission was to save those people whose names did not appear on his original lists. Fry muses: If I have any regret at all about the work we did, it is that it was so slight. In all we saved some two thousand human beings. We ought to have saved many times that number. But we did what we could. And when we failed, it was all too often because of the incomprehension of the government of the United States. It was not until 1944 that the President created the War refugee Board, to do in a big way, and with official backing, what we have tried to do in our little way, against constant official opposition. But then it was too late.12

But Fry was successful in rescuing Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Max Ernst, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lipchitz, Alma Mahler-Gropius, and Franz Werfel, among others At least part of Orringer’s third-generation rationale for writing The Flight Portfolio stems from what Aarons terms the “gap” in the story of the Shoah. A paucity of information about organized rescue efforts, especially by a very few non-European governments, reveals the overwhelming extent to which Jews had been abandoned during the Holocaust. While this abandonment is unhappily a fact, it does not represent the entire history of the period. Moreover, it needs to be stressed that while the existence of a precious few rescuers does not cancel the deeds of the far more



Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio 43

numerous murderers; the former need to be acknowledged not only for the sake of historical accuracy but for the health of our souls. To this day, very few Americans are familiar with Fry’s name and his deeds. Motivations for the rescuers’ lifesaving activity varied. In Fry’s case, his reluctance to be indifferent to injustice manifested itself when he was a student. He had objected to the hazing policy practiced by the Hotchkiss School which he had attended and subsequently left. Moreover, as an outcast due to his queerness, he more easily could identify with Jews and anti-Nazis who were marked for extermination because of their perceived difference. Fry’s mission was abetted by rescuers who came from a variety of backgrounds and social strata. His Marseilles staff included Marion Davenport, a patron of the arts. As an art historian, she advised Fry if someone claiming to be an artist had any talent. If so, that person would be helped. Mary Jane Gold—a wealthy heiress—helped finance Fry’s mission. Jean Gemähling, a multilingual assistant, also proved invaluable. The same could be said for Otto Hirschmann (“Beamish”) and Charlie Fawcett, a heartbroken young Texan who spoke only English but whose doorman’s uniform impressed those waiting to be interviewed by Fry. In addition, the superbly talented Bill Frier, who subsequently was interned in a death camp, but survived the war, provided the refugees with impeccably forged identity documents. However, all final decisions lay in Fry’s hands. He was the commander-in-chief of the operation. Among his tasks was to identify escape routes that offered a likely chance of success crossing the rugged Pyrenees mountain ridges. These trials required great physical stamina, a trait lacking in many of the refugees. For example, Franz Werfel, the distinguished author, possessed neither energy nor stamina. He was almost completely out of shape. Orringer writes that Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler-Gropius, were accustomed to taking a cab wherever they went, including a trip around the block. Many of the rescued were middle-aged and very far from being in top physical condition. Moreover, Fry arranged illegal passage on ships bound for the West and provided for various “safe” houses where those hunted by the Vichy government and the Gestapo could stay. Walter Benjamin, the brilliant literary critic, and one of Fry’s “clients,” was told that the Spanish border was closed. Consequently, he took his own life at Port-Bou. The important scholarly manuscript on which he was working was never recovered. Dealing with the refugees presented problems especially at the inception of Fry’s rescue mission. Not only were there considerable logistical issues to confront, but in addition many of the recused were initially unwilling to leave. Marc Chagall, the great artist, was convinced that his reputation would save him from the Nazis and their Vichy accomplices. Finally, Chagall understood that he was being persecuted not because he was a famous artist but because he was Jewish. Chagall was reassured when Fry told him there were cows in America. The artist subsequently spent much time in Connecticut painting his iconic animals. However, personality clashes and self-interest impeded the completion of the Flight Portfolio (the Flight Portfolio being the art project, envisioned by Fry, in order to collect funds to further assist in the rescue of European Jewish refugees). For

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example, although Chagall eventually contributed a sketch, it was unsigned—at the insistence of his wife. There were feuds among some of the intellectuals which made it impossible for them to contribute to the project if their antagonists were also included. The petty squabbles intensified the difficulties Fry faced when attempting to collect material for his project. The same is true for the relationship between Fry and those whom he rescued. Their interpersonal exchanges were tainted by what Horn describes as “something inherently shameful in the rescuer-rescued relationship—the humiliation of being reduced to dependence on another person for survival—and the shame expresses itself in resentment toward rescuers.”13

CONCLUSION Fry was in Germany in 1935. Two significant events occurred at that time. He interviewed Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengel who preceded him at Harvard by a decade. Hanfstaengel now served as Joseph Goebbels’s minister of propaganda. He told Fry of two factions in the Nazi Party: the moderates and the radicals. The former wished to deport Jews. The latter were calling for the physical extermination of the Jews as soon as possible. The second event was captured by Fry in an article he wrote in the New Republic, “The Massacre of the Jews” (December 21, 1942).14 Fry writes of the S.A. (Brown Shirts) who staged their first pogrom in Berlin seven years earlier: I saw the S.A. men . . . throwing chairs and tables through the plate-glass windows of Jewish-owned cafes, dragging Jewish men and women out of buses and chasing them up the streets, or knocking them down and kicking them in the face and belly as they lay prostrate on the sidewalk. And I heard them chanting their terrible song: “When Jewish blood spurts from the knife then everything will be fine again.”15

The Flight Portfolio is a complex novel executed in different and imaginative genres: history, fiction, war novels, and spy stories. Fry’s rescue efforts expanded. He worked for a time for the British, helping their downed fliers escape. Consequently, the interaction of these at times competing narrative strategies raise many questions such as the relationship between history and literature, the impact of a solitary individual battling against the threatening tides of history, good versus evil, and a single individual’s determined struggle with his moral mission of rescue and informed by the complexity of his sexual orientation. Moreover, the novel’s very size makes of its prose a mixture of soaring passages and those whose literary value at times seems to bend under the weight of its historical burden. The novel’s underlying question is: What is the worth of a human life? Cynthia Ozick in her insightful 2019 New York Times review of Orringer’s novel points to this issue which limits not only the ERC’s plan but also rescue. “World-famous Chagall—yes,” she writes. “A pious 15-year old in an obscure town in the remote Carpathians, who will one day be known as Elie Wiesel—no.”16 Questions arise, should the famous be privileged over the unknown? How are such decisions to be reached? Are those with young children to be saved



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at the expense of the childless? What criteria should be employed to make such distinctions? Fry passed away in 1967. At that time, he was teaching Greek and Latin at the Joel Barlow High School in Connecticut. Unhappily, the fame and honors he so richly deserved were not forthcoming during his lifetime. There was, however, one exception to his obscurity. The French Government belatedly recognized him as a “Chevalier de la legion d’Honneur,” one of the few Americans Charles de Gaulle agreed to honor for work on behalf of France during World War II.17 But the United States government was very slow in acknowledging Fry’s remarkable rescue feats. It took until the tenure of Warren Christopher as American Secretary of State to publicly proclaim Fry’s rescue activity and to publicly apologize for the State Department’s abominable treatment of Fry during the Shoah. Orringer’s description of Fry’s relationship with Grant can be exquisite: “How could this person evoke in Varian a series of feelings so uncontrollable as to seem a threat to his sanity . . . Under the present circumstances, and considering the weight of responsibility he bore, how could he find himself thrilled like a plucked string at the prospect of meeting Grant at the Vieux Port?” (FP 69–70). They can also verge on the mundane: “For Grant  .  .  . he could imagine doing the unthinkable: living outside of what the world prescribed, even if they looked at him the way they looked at men like him, even if they called him all the worst names: ‘invert,’ ‘faggot,’ ‘abomination’” (FP 393). In her “Author’s Note,” Orringer confides her aim in writing The Flight Portfolio: “I’ve portrayed a real history—Varian Frey’s heroic lifesaving mission in France— alongside an imagined one, his relationship with the entirely fictional Elliott Grant” (FP 557). By pointing our attention to this relationship between fiction and history Orringer considerably problematizes the relationship between the two. Against Ozick’s dictum—“When a novel comes to us with the claim that it is directed consciously toward history . . . then the argument for fictional autonomy collapses, and the rights of history can begin to urge their own force”18—Orringer agrees that tragedy should not be aestheticized. “Nor,” she continues, “should we rob historical figures of their full complexity, which means being rigorous in our research, especially when elements of our subjects’ lives have been misrepresented in the past.”19 The issue of Fry’s sexual orientation and its relation to his rescue efforts is also complex. On the one hand, Orringer in her “Author’s Note” cites Andy Marino’s biography A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry. Marino attests “the skills Fry developed to . . . express his deviance from the norm over the years may have stood him in good stead for the illicit and secret activities he took to so naturally and performed so extraordinarily well in France.”20 On the other hand, Orringer, in contrast, believes that this case is more complicated. She writes: “Fry’s perception of his own difference, and his need to hide it, sensitized him to the plight of others who were persecuted and made to fear for their lives.”21 “His sexuality,” she continues, “happened to resist easy categorization.”22

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Specifically addressing third- and succeeding post-Shoah writers, Orringer notes that she envisions Fry as a brave and brilliant person whose sexual orientation was not a simple matter to determine.23 In addition, she expresses the hope that he’ll be celebrated that way in the twenty-first century and beyond. Time alone will tell Orringer’s many readers if the novelist’s hope is realized. Concerning the complex issue of Fry’s sexual orientation, there are two opposing approaches. On the one hand, Ozick expresses skepticism that Fry was a gay man. On the other hand, James, the rescuer’s son, is convinced that his father was indeed gay but contends that this should not muddy the waters of moral clarity that drove his father’s rescue efforts. Orringer appears to offer a response, which verges on the perception that she is utilizing fiction to advance a particular sociopolitical agenda. She comments: “When I learned about Fry’s relationships with Kirstein and Hessel, I felt I would have been committing a crime against history—and against the LGBTQ community—if I’d suggested that his heterosexual relationships, most notably his marriages to two accomplished and erudite women, the intellectual [an editor at The Atlantic] Eileen Hughes and [the philosophy professor] Annette Riley, represented the sum total of his adult sexual and emotional experience.”24 On the one hand, I do not believe that Orringer is consciously seeking to manipulate history, although I do have a concern that in the hands of a less talented writer, one who seeks to advance a certain political point of view, this could be a danger. Nevertheless, Orringer’s novel has set a very high moral standard for those who will seek to fictionally explore the issue. On the other hand, as the Shoah recedes in time and the witness generation disappears, the novelist who engages the lessons and legacies of the Holocaust will increasingly be compelled to turn to history—and literature—to tell the story of the Jewish catastrophe. The third generation, and beyond, will also be greatly influenced by literature and its interplay with history. Orringer is correct in her attestation that the novel “thrives on intellectual and creative freedom. A sensitive novelist uses this freedom to shed light on truth.”25 Orringer’s novel raises the fundamental question of how to incorporate memory into history, especially at a time when survivor testimony is disappearing. As Eva Hoffman contends, in terms of the third generation there is the phenomenon of “transferred history.” This is the generation that is “affected by not knowing.”26 Consequently, the task of research is more thoroughly fraught than at any time in the past. The fog of history may overwhelm those who seek to uncover its secrets even while demanding that the third generation search ever more vigorously to understand the catastrophe that proceeded its birth by two generations. Yet the genies of distortion, trivialization, and misinformation have been let loose. Today, seven decades after Fry’s expulsion from France, we are still in a race against time between those seeking truth and those who distort truth. Moreover, The Flight Portfolio was completed in 2019, when the United States was in a complicated and dangerous political moment and at risk of easily becoming corrupted. Since then, the situation has dramatically deteriorated. The issue raised by The Flight Portfolio is that loyalty to a preconceived ideologically based dogma will outpace loyalty to lifesaving



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actions. Orringer’s novel is an excellent work, which lays out the parameters for those wishing to accurately acknowledge the interplay between fiction and history when treating the Shoah’s inheritance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aarons, Victoria, and Alan L. Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Greer, Andrew S. “Homosexuality, the Holocaust, and Historical Fiction: An Interview with Julie Orringer,” The Paris Review, May 30, 2019, https:​//​www​.theparisreview​.org​/blog​ /2019​/05​/30​/the​-holocaust​-homosexuality​-and​-historical​-fiction​-an​-interview​-with​-julie​ -orringer​/, n. pag. Hoffman, Eva. “Question and Answer with Eva Hoffman.” Northwestern University Holocaust Educational Foundation, May 18, 2021. Horn, Dara. “On Rescuing Jews and Others,” in People Love Dead Jews. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021. Marino, Andy. A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Newsome, Jake. Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022. Orringer, Julie. “Author’s Note.” In The Flight Portfolio. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019: 557–62. ———. The Flight Portfolio. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. Ozick, Cynthia. “Cynthia Ozick Reviews Julie Orringer’s ‘The Flight Portfolio.’” New York Times, May 2, 2019. https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2019​/05​/02​/books​/review​/flight​-portfolio​ -julie​-orringer​.html. Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals. New York: Henry Holt, 1986. Press, Eyal. Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extremist Times. New York: Picador, 2012. Rosenthal, Gilbert. “Two Sides of One Coin: Hilul Hashem and Kiddush Hashem.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 55, no. 3 (2019): 415–36. Sauvage, Pierre. “Varian Fry in Marseille.” In Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, edited by John K. Roth and Elizabeth Maxwell, 347–77. London: Palgrave, 2001. Scheck, Raffael. “The Danger of Moral Sabotage: Western Prisoners of War on Trial for Homosexual Relations in Nazi Germany.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 29, no. 3 (2020): 418–46. Zarrow, Rachel. “Book Review: The Flight Portfolio.” The Coachella Review, July 5, 2019.

NOTES 1. Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 198.

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2. Ibid., 213. 3. Ibid. 4. Rachel Zarrow, “Book Review: The Flight Portfolio,” The Coachella Review, July 5, 2019, 4. 5. Andy Marino, A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 271. 6. See, for example, Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals (New York: Henry Holt, 1986). See also Raffael Scheck, “The Danger of Moral Sabotage: Western Prisoners of War on Trial for Homosexual Relations in Nazi Germany,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 29, no. 3 (2020): 418–46. See also Jake Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022). 7. Dara Horn, “On Rescuing Jews and Others,” in People Love Dead Jews (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021), 111. 8. Gilbert Rosenthal, “Two Sides of One Coin: Hilul Hashem and Kiddush Hashem,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 55, no. 3 (2019), 433. 9. Cited in Eyal Press, Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extremist Times (New York: Picador, 2012). 10. Cited in Press, Beautiful Souls, 182. 11. Julie Orringer, The Flight Portfolio (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 430. Hereafter this work will be cited as TFP, page numbers in parentheses in the text. 12. Pierre Sauvage, “Varian Fry in Marseille,” in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, vol. 2, eds. John K. Roth and Elizabeth Maxwell (London: Palgrave, 2001), 369. 13. Horn, “On Rescuing Jews and Others,” 152. 14. Varian Fry, “The Massacre of the Jews,” in The New Republic, December 21, 1942, 816. 15. Fry, “The Massacre of the Jews,” 816 16. Cynthia Ozick, “Cynthia Ozick Reviews Julie Orringer’s ‘The Flight Portfolio,’” New York Times, May 2, 2019. https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2019​/05​/02​/books​/review​/flight​ -portfolio​-julie​-orringer​.html. 17. Marino, A Quiet American, 349. 18. Julie Orringer qtd. in Andrew S. Greer, “Homosexuality, the Holocaust, and Historical Fiction: An Interview with Julie Orringer,” The Paris Review, May 30, 2019, https:​//​www​ .theparisreview​.org​/blog​/2019​/05​/30​/the​-holocaust​-homosexuality​-and​-historical​-fiction​-an​ -interview​-with​-julie​-orringer​/, n. pag. 19. Orringer qtd. in Greer, “Homosexuality, the Holocaust, and Historical Fiction,” n. pag. 20. Julie Orringer, “Author’s Note,” in The Flight Portfolio (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 558. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. “Fry,” notes Orringer, “participated . . . in Alfred Kinsey’s project . . . and he kept an article by Kinsey that suggested that attraction between men was far more common than generally acknowledged—that ‘the picture is one of endless intergradation between every combination of homosexuality and heterosexuality.’” See Orringer, “Author’s Note,” 558. 24. Orringer qtd. in Greer, “Homosexuality, the Holocaust, and Historical Fiction,” n. pag. 25. Ibid. 26. Eva Hoffman, Northwestern University Holocaust Educational Foundation, May 18, 2021.

4 Categories of Catastrophe Third-Generation Reckoning in Susanne Fritz’s Becoming a Child of War Katra Byram

Midway through her 2018 book Becoming a Child of War [Wie kommt der Krieg ins Kind], Susanne Fritz relates her two brushes with violent death, a car accident caused when an oncoming motorcycle crossed into her lane and a savage beating by neo-Nazi skinheads.1 These events, she writes, activate “an ancient feeling: my line in the sand doesn’t matter. It has always been crossed. From my first breath, I was at the mercy of stronger people” (177). The book attributes this feeling of imminent existential threat to the trauma that Fritz has inherited from her mother, who, beginning at the age of fourteen, spent four years in the 1940s in the work camps of Potulice and Chwaliszewo in Poland. Enthusiastic reviews of the book, which would go on to be long-listed for the German Book Prize, identify this familial transmission of trauma as the core of Fritz’s story.2 The concepts of intergenerational and postmemorial trauma were developed in studies of second-generation Holocaust witnesses and have become core components of the field. Fritz, however, is not a descendent of Holocaust survivors, but a German author, journalist, director, and performer from the Black Forest region. Her mother’s family was expelled from Poland in 1945, and her mother was incarcerated alone in work camps after being separated from her mother and sister. Fritz is, thus, the child of a survivor, but she is also a member of the third generation, as postwar generations are counted in Germany. There, members of the first generation are those who bear potential responsibility for National Socialism or its crimes, so that Fritz’s grandparents belong to the first generation, while her mother, fourteen at war’s end, is too young to be held accountable. Fritz’s book thus participates in a trend that, since the early 2000s, has been associated frequently with third-generation German writing: an upsurge of media and literary representations of German civilian suffering during and immediately following World War II. For many observers, this perceived shift was a dangerous indication that, sixty years after the end of the war, 49

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the essential “difference between perpetrators, victims, and bystanders [was being] blurred” in contemporary German memory culture.3 In this chapter, I depart from this concern and from Fritz’s reflections on “lines in the sand” to sketch common conceptions of third-generation writing in Germany, limn the central concerns of Fritz’s book, and suggest that, in addition to exploring the relationship between German guilt and German suffering, it also blurs another set of lines: it challenges the “German” identity that is treated as self-evident in literary memory work and academic memory studies alike. From the 1980s until at least 2000, public German memory culture centered on an admission of German responsibility for National Socialism and its crimes; its core was, as sociologist Harald Welzer writes, the “commandment ‘Never again Auschwitz.’”4 Beginning with the controversial publications of works such as Günter Grass’s novella Crabwalk in 2001, however, observers noted increasing numbers of historical representations that resisted the moral imperative to focus on German guilt. This trend led commentators like Welzer and the historian Norbert Frei to diagnose a fundamental “turn” or “paradigm shift” in German memory culture, toward a “reinterpretation” of World War II history that “centers around Germans as victims.”5 Frei and Welzer, among others, expressed alarm at this shift in discursive norms, often casting the public articulations of German suffering as a violation of long-standing taboos. In fact, stories of Germans’ losses and traumas have been a continual part of public discussion and understanding since the end of the war,6 and the notion that its avoidance in official memory culture has entailed its silencing in other domains suggests that memory culture in Germany has been imagined as more monolithic and homogenous than is warranted. As the critic Ulrich Raulff put it, “It’s in no way a question of breaking taboos, but more of breaking a dam.”7 The difference was not in kind, but in volume. In addition to criticizing the blurring of lines between perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, some commentators bemoaned the emotional coloring of many of these accounts. A history of rationality was being overtaken by a “felt history” driven by familial loyalty and affections, rather than facts and analysis.8 This shift was not exclusive to third-generation writing—far from it. Its onset, for instance, is often associated with a novella by Grass, a paradigmatic representative of the generation just coming of age in 1945.9 A frequently cited sociological study by Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall found that, in family conversations, both the children and grandchildren of eyewitnesses tend to emphasize family members’ suffering and to transform them from passive bystanders or participants in National Socialism into victims or heroes of resistance.10 Finally, in a screed that highlights the gendered undertones of the critique of “felt history,” Thomas Medicus locates an emotional approach in books written by second-generation women.11 Still, many third-generation writers have produced novels and memoirs that belong to this trend, and reactions to it often have become entangled with commentary on third-generation writing. In a 2003 article titled “The Grandchildren Want to Know,” for instance, Volker Hage contended that the war generation’s “silence was



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being broken for the first time in conversations between eyewitnesses and their grandchildren”—despite the fact that three of the novels he discusses are by authors who could reasonably be argued to belong to the second generation.12 While the study by Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall sees both the second and third generations participating in a private whitewashing of familial history, those who cite it often emphasize the third generation’s role in the phenomenon; no doubt the title, “Grandpa Was No Nazi,” shaped this reception. In the talk of a “turn” in memory culture that coincided with the emergence of prominent third-generation writers, distinctions between the turn and the subgroups participating in it were often lost, and novel aspects of both conflated. Shortly after the initial wave of critical responses to this “turn” in memory culture, however, a more positive view emerged regarding its empathetic and emotional engagement with family members’ experiences. Rather than considering it a violation of a moralized “commandment” of memory and history, this view saw a new breed of literary treatments promising a new avenue for addressing the past and its relationship to Germany’s present. Anne Fuchs, Friederike Eigler, and Aleida Assmann variously termed this subgenre “memory contests” (Fuchs), the “new generational novel” (Eigler), and the “new family novel” (Assmann), but all three delineate very similar sets of characteristic features for these works.13 Among these are the same concern with German suffering that so consternates Welzer and Frei, and the same emotional involvement that Medicus decries. Instead of reading these features as symptoms of a reactionary turn against notions of German guilt and responsibility, Assmann, Eigler, and Fuchs see in these twinned tendencies a reckoning with the degree to which present-day Germans and their society continue to be shaped by their families’ painful, shameful histories. In these books, they argue, German writers admit that Germans today still feel the legacy of this era. The descendants of perpetrators as well as of civilian enablers, bystanders, and victims, they admit that they cannot cut themselves off from it and consider it their parents’ or their grandparents’ problem. Indeed, more than a decade before Fritz’s novel, these scholars identify a pattern in which novels depict a “telescoping of trauma” through generations of Germans.14 Assmann, Eigler, and Fuchs, argue, however, that this concern with German suffering is integrated with others that temper its reactionary potential. Family history in these novels is, they maintain, not only “felt,” but also reflected and interrogated. The authors and narrators display a high degree of self-reflexivity, ruminating on the processes of memory, history, and narrative as they investigate, reconstruct, and write their stories.15 Meike Herrmann has come to view this grounding in the narrative present, in which texts “expose their strategies of knowledge acquisition, narrative, and reconstruction and increase their metareflection,” as the key identifying feature of recent literature of cultural memory.16 Contrary to Welzer’s fear that private memories of family members’ suffering or heroics are overtaking a public memory focused on German responsibility,17 Fuchs maintains that the new family novels exhibit “memory contests,” in which writers negotiate the conflicts and discrepancies

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between various public and private standpoints. In her view, this new approach to German history is a “particularly productive form of cultural memory.”18 These scholars do not define the new family novel as a third-generation phenomenon. On the contrary, many of their examples are written by members of the second generation. Again, however, the description of this genre coincided with a wave of third-generation contributions to literary German cultural memory, so that this “new” generation of writers and the new mode of approaching the topic have become associated. Moreover, some of these third-generation authors have spoken of their writing in terms that resonate with this salutatory picture of the new family novel. Tanja Dückers, whose book Himmelskörper [Heavenly Bodies] tells the story of a fictional German family marked by its flight from Poland,19 expresses the hope that her generation will write about the National Socialist past “more prosaically and level-headedly” than the second generation, which was caught up in its anger against its parents, or the first generation, which was preoccupied with justifying and feeling sorry for itself.20 Similarly, Thomas Medicus maintains that, as the second generation’s grip on national memory loosens, a new type of memory will be able to emerge, in which a more distanced view and a combination of fiction and fact will offer a newly nuanced view of history.21 “It is time,” he writes, “that new narratives should replace emotionally overpowering, inescapable fate with contingent historical constellations.”22 Whether or not third-generation writers actually produce texts that are less emotionally entangled and more grounded in the historical record than their second-generation peers is debatable. As I have pointed out, descriptions of the new family novel are based largely on second-generation writing, and, as is the case with memory culture more broadly, the German literature of cultural memory has always been more heterogeneous than most literary historical accounts acknowledge.23 Numerous self-reflexive, metahistorical second-generation texts had been published in previous decades but were screened out of accounts of literary cultural memory by gendered genre conventions and expectations, for instance.24 Third-generation writing cannot claim a universally cool and distanced stance, either; observers make the case that Dückers’s novel, for example, displays its own generational conflict and intense emotionality.25 Within genealogical frameworks, generations are clearly calculable successions of progenitors and offspring. On a societal level, generations are age cohorts whose members may share certain historical experiences. Recently, however, it has been argued that such social, synchronic generations are primarily symbolic constructs;26 the key event is not a certain historical experience that produces certain characteristics and opinions, but an influential declaration that an event has influenced an age cohort in a particular way. Such declarations are often used to justify young adults’ claims to social and political power, as was the case in Germany when young veterans of World War I introduced “generation” as a sociological term and, simultaneously, declared themselves the vanguards of a new society.27 Sabrina Wagner argues that, in the case of twenty-first-century literary culture in Germany, the early 2000s saw



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a market-driven heralding of a new generation of writers who, unlike their forbears, were supposed to be free of the compulsion to write doggedly political literature.28 Touted by the publishing industry as a breath of fresh air on the literary scene, they were billed as producing “clear, well-told stories” about love and sex and the wide world of the present, rather than the German past.29 Scholars and authors pushed back against this characterization of the new generation’s writing as politically disengaged; it was not so much apolitical, they argued, as post-ideological, committed to complex reflection and to acting as “a bridge, an intersection, an intermediary between the private sphere and society.”30 Dückers surmised that previous generations’ celebration of a supposedly more disinterested and uninhibited treatment of the past was rooted in a desire for external absolution.31 Identifying new trends in a new generation’s writing served more than a descriptive function. Whether or not they are generation-specific—or adequate to describe the writing of an entire generation—many of these trends are visible in Fritz’s book. First, as I showed at the outset, it rejects a strict demarcation between the perpetrators and victims of the war era, portraying Germans as victims of violence and bearers of trauma. The book consists of five sections of unequal lengths. The opening and closing sections relate the story of the mother’s postwar suffering and its reverberations in the author’s life. In the opening section, broad brushstrokes and family communications evoke the outlines of the mother’s ordeal and the impact it had on her relationship with her children. The conclusion, which is supported by extensive research, enumerates the details of the family’s flight and the mother’s internment. The short, penultimate section dramatizes the continuing emotional impact of this history, as it relates the author’s own life-threatening experiences and her response to them. The book does not call for passionate response, however, but for reflection and questioning. Throughout, Fritz ruminates on her position as a writer telling the stories of family members she never knew and of events that her mother both referred to constantly and refused to discuss. In what almost seems an echo of Dückers and Medicus, she thinks of her project as an attempt to “defuse an emotionally charged history” (61). She undertakes this task both by confronting its psychological consequences and by supplementing her mother’s stories and their emotional legacy with archival research, interviews, and wide reading. Recognizing the perils of presenting Germans as victims, Fritz constructs the book to counterbalance any reactionary potential. From the beginning, her mother’s suffering is framed as the consequence of German actions, rather than as a victimization of Germans by others. In the first section, Fritz informs readers that Germans had built the camp of Potulice, where her mother was imprisoned, to incarcerate Polish civilians: “The camp was a German invention” (26). The mother herself regards her survival as an act of mercy by her captors, who had been victims first: “The violation of her rights was only right, she said” (43–44). The second and third sections of the book tell this backstory of German oppression and persecution. Fritz begins by questioning whether her grandfather participated in atrocities in his wartime role as policeman. Eventually, she expands her inquiry by considering the possible National

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Socialist sympathies of all her family members. She writes that, having begun to conduct research, “the path of retreat into a purely private memory culture is cut off. Family history has to be integrated into its time: here, a National Socialist scenario” (125). In her case, as in many other new family novels, re-creating her family’s “historical constellation” entails confronting responsibility and guilt, whether potential or certain. Assimilating German suffering and German responsibility into the same story, Fritz joins other writers of the last twenty years in deliberately crossing one normative line of postwar memory culture. Unlike nearly all of them, however, she also questions the category that makes this combination controversial in the first place: the “German” experience and memory it relates. Astrid Erll writes that, while modern theorists like Maurice Halbwachs began by recognizing multiple and overlapping frameworks of social memory, these were overtaken by a notion of memory “communities” as stable entities concerned with maintaining a shared identity.32 In the 1990s and early 2000s, Erll argues, this notion and the example of Pierre Nora’s Lieux des Memoires became the foundation for a second phase of memory studies, one organized around the idea of distinct, and distinctly identifiable, cultures. For the most part, these “cultures” are organized by the “assumption of an isomorphy between territory, social formation, mentalities, and memories”—in other words, they are so-called “container cultures” that rely on the concept of the nation.33 Thinking in terms of “container-cultures” both obscures the diversity of memory cultures within a single society and prevents the perception of memory’s travels across borders, times, and social groups. Increasingly, German-language writers, and perhaps third-generation writers in particular, are working across these boundaries. Many tell the stories of German families whose home was in Poland, for instance, an undertaking that sometimes entails traveling to Poland, interacting with Polish interlocutors, and reflecting on Polish relationships to the past. In Dückers’s 2003 novel, the narrator goes to Poland to try to understand the suicide of her mother’s Polish cousin, and she and her mother later return to visit the scene of the family’s departure from Gdansk. Stefan Wackwitz’s book Ein unsichtbares Land [An Invisible Country], published in the same year, recounts his grandfather’s role in the colonialist occupation of Poland.34 More recent books have explored World War II’s intrusion into the complicated multiethnic relationships and history of Eastern Europe. Maja Haderlap’s Angel of Oblivion, published in 2011, illustrates the wreckage caused by National Socialist persecution and collaboration in Slovenian communities in Austrian Carinthia.35 Katja Petrowskaja’s 2014 Maybe Esther unravels the submerged and repressed history of a Soviet family with Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian roots.36 These later books aim to educate a German reading public about the histories of the places that the Germans invaded, histories that remain relatively unknown in Germany. In long historiographical passages, they remind their German readers that World War II history is not just a story of German invasion and atrocity on one side and Jewish suffering on the other—or even a story of the homogenous suffering of an indistinguishable



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mass of conquered peoples. German aggression and policies entered an already complicated political, ethnic, and social landscape, in which existing relationships and conditions helped to shape the events and disasters that followed. Fritz’s book, which devotes a long section to recapitulating the history of multiethnic coexistence and tension in Poland, belongs to this group. While such examples suggest that these “containers” are eroding slowly in the literature of German cultural memory, the vast majority of works—and the scholarship of cultural memory that examines them—continue to operate with the idea of a distinct German memory culture. Indeed, by and large, even these texts take the category of “German” to be self-evident. Wackwitz’s grandfather views himself as a missionary of German culture in Poland, and the history Wackwitz tells serves to elucidate this German mindset, not to question the category. Dückers’s novel gestures toward a more complicated reality, since the narrator’s mother maintains contact with her Polish cousin and visits there frequently, rejecting her parents’ anti-Polish attitudes. Still, the family’s German identity is never in question. Even in the books by Haderlap and Petrowskaja, which delve into entangled histories and identities, Germans are the clear and unquestioned outsiders.37 The German “container” remains remarkably intact. In fact, Dan Diner has argued that critical remembrance of National Socialism in Germany has had the perverse effect of perpetuating the ethnic definition of German identity that stood at the core of National Socialist ideology. Since contemporary German identity is defined partly by the legacy of responsibility for National Socialism and its crimes, those who do not share this legacy are excluded from the community of memory and the collective that it signals.38 The many people who have arrived in Germany over the last sixty years—particularly those from Muslim-majority countries, to whom antisemitic sentiments are often imputed—have been effectively barred from full belonging in German society. Writing in 1990, the Turkish-German author and intellectual Zafer Şenocak made the case that second-generation Turks like himself had to engage with Germany’s past, as a corrective to dominant German memory practices bent on forgetting and as a means to integrate fully into Germany.39 Twenty years later, Michael Rothberg and Yasmin Yildiz maintain that immigrant communities have begun to integrate themselves into memory culture in Germany in a variety of ways, laying claim to full citizenship as they do so.40 While such work destabilizes a simple “German” memory and identity by illuminating the diversity brought by immigration, Fritz’s book disassembles the German “container” from the other direction—from “within,” so to speak. Like other books, it places German memories in a larger context by relating the German departure from Eastern Europe and highlighting the experiences and relationships of the peoples that German armies subjugated. Unlike these other books, it questions when and how a clear distinction between “Germans” and “subjugated peoples” arose. This project begins in the first section, where Fritz illustrates the mother’s identification with Poland and Polish culture. Fritz emphasizes that this is not a nostalgic, reactionary stance like that assumed by some expellee organizations, but a continuation

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of human connections: “We didn’t cultivate a frozen image of loss and an irrecoverable homeland, we lived out friendships” (22). Polish family friends belong to the day-to-day of the narrator’s childhood, and the mother maintains a strong bond not only with fellow inmates from her time in prison, but also with one of her former guards. In Germany, the children felt and appeared as outsiders. “Polish life accompanied our life in the Black Forest as a matter of course, in the trappings of folk culture,” she writes (23). When the next section takes up the history of German, Polish, and Jewish relations in Poland, Fritz’s narrative and imagery assert a fluidity of belonging and of identities. Initially, as she relates western Poland’s transitions from Prussian territory in the pre–World War I era to its status as an independent state in the interwar period and then to its defeat and subjugation by Nazi Germany, she uses the metaphor of the kaleidoscope to illustrate the dramatically shifting configurations of society and of individuals’ positions within it. At each transition, “the kaleidoscope turns” (74, 83); with each “turn” the world changes (69, 111), as those formerly at the top of the social and political hierarchy find themselves at the bottom, and others rise to the top—although this position of dominance rotates only between the Poles and the Germans, never the Jews. This image of the kaleidoscope suggests the vibrantly colorful beauty of a diverse society, but also the perennial uncertainty of ever-shifting configurations. Because the beauty of a kaleidoscope derives from the sharp lines between particles of different colors, it suggests clear-cut divisions between the constitutive groups, but other elements undercut this notion. Discussing the transitions from Prussian territory to Polish state in 1919 and from Polish state to German occupation zone in 1939, Fritz stresses the family’s accommodation and changing self-presentation. Under the terms of Polish statehood in 1919, longtime ethnic German residents were given the choice to leave for Germany or to stay and become Polish citizens; although his siblings leave, Fritz’s grandfather and his parents stay. Street signs and government forms change their languages, but so does the signage on the family’s bakery. In Fritz’s great-grandfather’s lifetime under Wilhelmine rule, signs advertised the business in both German and Polish. After World War I, when the grandfather assumes the family business, he has the building painted. In striking block capital letters, Fritz reports that “the German BÄCKEREI [bakery] becomes a Polish PIEKARNIA, and the German GEORG becomes JERZY” (76). After the German invasion of September 1939, the Polish is replaced with German, and the “obligatory addendum is affixed: GERMAN ESTABLISHMENT” (85). The family also operates with both languages in their private life. Most of the bakery and household employees are Polish, and family and staff all live together in the same building. Following the Nazi occupation, strict rules decree that contact between Germans and Poles is to be kept within “professional and economic” bounds, the “key directive” being the command “to widen the gulf between Poles and Germans as much as possible” (136). But family and employees continue to speak Polish with each other in private, and the grandfather carries on an affair with



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the Polish housekeeper. Fritz recognizes the power imbalance in this relationship and the possibility that the housekeeper was coerced. Still, she maintains that “in spite of the order for racial segregation, the borders are still fluid. The little house on the market square is lively and colorful” (138). This, then, is the second line that Fritz’s book blurs: that between the seemingly self-evident categories of German and Polish. Earlier, I characterized the book’s last section as offering a detailed account of the mother’s internment. In truth, this describes only the first two-thirds. The last twenty-two pages of the book discuss Fritz’s family’s 1940 applications for inclusion in the Deutsche Volksliste (German National List). Fritz reports that this list “drew a line” through the region’s “multicultural society” (257), dividing its population into full German citizens, those with (revocable) German nationality, and those who fell outside these categories and had no protection under the German law of the day. To do so, it required applicants not only to provide proof of their “Aryan” heritage back two generations, as was the case within Germany proper, but also to demonstrate their commitment and sense of belonging to the German people. As Fritz notes, applicants understood the far-reaching consequences of their answers about club memberships and languages spoken, and her family’s answers accorded with what the regime wanted to hear. Each member reports consistent identification with German culture: membership in German clubs, attendance at German schools, persecution suffered as Germans in Polish society. Fritz never suggests that these answers are false, but she does imply that they do not tell the whole story. Her grandfather always demanded that his children show politeness to everyone, and, although Fritz will never know whether he witnessed or participated in persecution or atrocities later, in 1940 he declared without reservation that “any city resident” could vouch for the veracity of his answers (256). This was the reality of the family’s life in a multicultural society where “domestic and foreign, private and public, difference and belonging [is] a difficult balance to be struck every day” (257). Fritz presents the German National List as the death knell of that society. With its appearance, the city’s population is “sorted and separated . . . divisions are created and cemented, determining who belongs to society and who doesn’t” (257). The list fixes what had been an ongoing negotiation of identity and social position. Fritz’s story undermines this dramatic characterization of the list somewhat. After all, in 1919, Poland somehow identified all the German residents who were forced to choose whether to be “repatriated” to Germany or to remain and assimilate into Polish society. In Fritz’s telling, however, the explosiveness of the line lies less in its artificiality than in the reach of its consequences. Under the National Socialists, it became the basis for the disenfranchisement, persecution, abuse, and murder of millions. The book’s final chapter reflects on its long afterlife. The chapter begins with Fritz’s return to the file and the passport photo of her mother as a nine-year-old that it contains. She speculates about the day it was taken and looks at the innocent little girl “imprisoned in her photograph . . . imprisoned a second time in the file, a third time in the archive that preserves the file” (258). This captivity is not just metaphorical. A page later, Fritz reminds her readers that this file, recovered from

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a Polish archive, was the basis of the mother’s postwar conviction for treason and her internment in the prison camp. Having once secured her privilege and safety, its classification of her as German is used a “second time to convict her and revoke her rights—as before the people who were not included in the list had been convicted and had their rights revoked. The National List as the hand of fate, as stigma, as (death) sentence” (260–61). The Nazi classification of individuals thus continues to divide people and bear consequences into the postwar era. This division occurs not only in the early years, or on the oppressive side of the Iron Curtain. When she first introduces the list, Fritz informs her readers that it served as key documentation when Germans who were expelled from Eastern Europe after the war sought reparations for their losses from the West German state (245–46). West German processes relied on National Socialism’s racialist designations of citizenship; in fact, it was not until 2000 that citizenship law in Germany was reformed to allow citizenship for those without ethnic German background, including those born in Germany. Finally, while the list itself may (or may not) have lived out its function, the line that it creates or reinforces continues to be asserted. As reviewer Fritz Stephan points out, Poland’s contentious 2018 law forbidding statements that implicate Poland or Polish citizens for complicity in the Holocaust once again makes use of the hard line between Germans and Poles for the purposes of politically driven national self-definition. While the book’s central story may be about guilt and suffering and transgenerational trauma, then, the conclusion’s focus on the German National List leaves readers to think about the social designations and political and bureaucratic processes that laid the groundwork for the disaster of the Holocaust and the brutal Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. The final sentence returns once again to the mother’s passport photo in the file: “A child looks at me. A child, imprisoned in her passport photo, smiles. She smiles the same way at everyone who looks at her, no matter their intentions” (264). Fritz maintains that the differences the file cements are artificial. Uncorrupted by adult machinations, the child smiles at everyone, no matter who they are. In places like Poland, she contends, people have adapted and identified flexibly through time. Reflecting on the sense of precarity she experienced when her own “red line” of danger was crossed, she writes that lines “are conceptual models divorced from life, conjured in moments of danger or imposed and instrumentalized to threaten others. . . . We aren’t born with lines around us. We come into the world naked, in a moving, three-dimensional space where we are not alone” (179–80). Humans, she insists, are born existentially vulnerable into a shifting world filled with other human beings. The dividing lines come afterward. Having been imposed on the world, they can serve nefarious intentions. The first two sets of people who viewed the mother’s file were inhumane at best, and murderous at worst. Fritz is obviously a different kind of observer, and the file’s dangerous potential would seem to have passed. When the conclusion is read as a bookend to the opening chapter, however, it suggests that these kinds of designations never cease to be a threat. Just a page long, this first chapter relates an occurrence in Fritz’s



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present-day life. Preparing to board a flight at a US airport, she is stopped and questioned rudely by TSA agents because she has forgotten to remove a tissue from her pocket before entering the body scanner. She laughs the incident off, but her mind immediately registers the situation as threatening. Her face has been photographed, her fingerprints scanned. She has been stripped of her shoes, her means of communication, and her identification. She is identified and catalogued, and, at the same time, is no one in a no-man’s-land. “We will get [our things] right back,” she tells herself, “But is that so certain? Once again, I’m lucky, receive my passport, put on my belt and my shoes and continue my trip in freedom” (7). Read in terms of the central story, this episode points to the transgenerational trauma that leads Fritz to see danger lurking in this public space. Read in connection with the closing emphasis on the bureaucratic procedures that led to her mother’s internment and to the deaths of millions of victims before it, it becomes a commentary on the all-too-great relevance of Fritz’s story to today’s world. The biodata has been collected, and the systems for monitoring people and rendering them defenseless are in place. In Fritz’s book, this observation is more than a contemplative engagement with the intersection between private experience and public world. Published in 2018, it must be read in the context of the surge of right-wing populism in Germany and much of western society since 2015. In Germany’s 2017 national election, the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany achieved third place with 12 percent of votes; in two 2019 state elections in eastern Germany, it received approximately a quarter of all votes and catapulted to second place. In the early 2000s, some believed that the trend of discussing Germans as victims was enabled by the stable institutional and cultural situation; a strong European framework and underlying German acceptance of responsibility meant that German suffering could be acknowledged without fear that it would stoke dangerous tendencies.41 This book can no longer take the political and institutional landscape for granted. It embeds its story of German suffering in a critique of nationalist designations of identity, at one end, and a warning about modern systems of surveillance, on the other. In the present context, such framing is not post-ideological. It is a declaration against right-wing ideology. Reviewer Fritz Stephan sees Fritz’s book as drawing attention to the rise of the right, illuminating “the pathology of a country that is in the process of jeopardizing hard-won postwar certainties.”42 Pointing to recent right-wing rhetoric about refugees and the World War II–era German army, he suggests that German society is newly willing to entertain National Socialist thinking in an updated guise. And he is not alone. In September 2019, controversy ensued when Ursula van der Leyen, incoming President of the European Commission, established a European Commissioner for “Protecting Our European Way of Life” whose portfolio includes migration and security. In the eyes of many, such a move amounts to the European Union adopting the far right’s framing of migration and reinforcing racialist conceptions of European identity. Fritz’s book contends that we have never stopped relying on National Socialist categories. We have been operating with their definitions all

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along, and these definitions were always waiting to be weaponized again. Neo-Nazi skinheads attacked her for entering their bar with a foreigner in the 1980s, not 2018. In arguing about whether Germans can be victims—or under what conditions it is permissible to talk about them as victims—we have taken the category of German for granted, precisely as National Socialist rhetoric taught. This is not a problem of the right. This has been a practice of left, right, and center. And, I would add, of most third-generation writing, its self-reflexive excavation of the National Socialist backdrop of present identities notwithstanding.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Assmann, Aleida. “Limits of Understanding: Generational Identities in Recent German Memory Literature.” Translated by Michael Ritterson. In Victims and Perpetrators: 1933– 1945: (Re)Presenting the Past in Post-Unification Culture, edited by Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Dagmar Wienroeder-Skinner. Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies (IGCS): 2, 29–48. Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter, 2006. ———. “On the (In)compatibility of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory.” Translated by Linda Shortt. German Life and Letters 59, no. 2 (2006): 187–200. Bagley, Petra M. “Granny knows Best: The Voice of the Granddaughter in ‘Grossmütterliteratur,’” In Pushing at Boundaries: Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck, edited by Heike Bartel and Elizabeth Boa, 151–65. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Benninghaus, Christina. “Das Geschlecht der Generation: Zum Zusammenhang von Generationalität und Männlichkeit um 1930.” In Generation: Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs, edited by Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt, 127–58. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005. Brandstädter, Mathias. Folgeschäden: Kontext, narrative Strukturen und Verlaufsformen der Väterliteratur 1960 bis 2008. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010. Byram, Katra. “Challenging Generational Memory Culture: The Case of Mother Books.” German Studies Review 41, no. 1 (2018): 41–59. Diening, Deike. “Die Ahnungsforscher.” Tagesspiegel, 1 November 2018. Diner, Dan. “Nation, Migration, and Memory: On Historical Concepts of Citizenship.” Constellations 4, no. 3 (1998): 293–306. Dückers, Tanja. “Der Schrecken nimmt nicht ab, er wächst.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 27 2002. ———. Himmelskörper. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2005. ———. “Abschied vom Aktivismus.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 24, 2004. Eigler, Friederike. Gedächtnis und Geschichte in Generationenromanen seit der Wende. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2005. ———. Heimat, Space, Narrative: Toward a Transnational Approach to Flight and Expulsion. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014. Erll, Astrid. “Travelling Memory.” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011/11/01 2011): 4–18. Frei, Norbert. “Gefühlte Geschichte.” Die Zeit, October 21, 2004. Fritz, Susanne. Wie kommt der Krieg ins Kind. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018.



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Fuchs, Anne. “From ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ to Generational Memory Contests in Günter Grass, Monika Maron and Uwe Timm.” German Life and Letters 59, no. 2 (2006): 169–86. Gerstenberger, Katharina. “Fictionalizations: Holocaust Memory and the Generational Construct in the Works of Contemporary Women Writers.” In Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture, edited by Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Susanne Vees-Gulani, 95–114. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. Haderlap, Maja. Angel of Oblivion. Translated by Tess Lewis. New York: Archipelago Books, 2016. Hage, Volker. “Die Enkel wollen es wissen.” Der Spiegel, March 17, 2003. ———. “Ganz schön abgedreht.” Spiegel Online, March 22, 1999. Heer, Hannes. “Literatur und Erinnerung: Die Nazizeit als Familiengeheimnis.” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 53 (2005): 809–35. Herrmann, Meike. Vergangenwart: Erzählen vom Nationalsozialismus in der deutschen Literatur seit den neunziger Jahren. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010. Jeismann, Michael. “Voodoo Child: Die verhexten Kinder.” Literaturen 5 (2005): 15–19. Jureit, Ulrike, and Michael Wildt. “Generationen.” In Generationen: Zur relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs, edited by Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt, 7–26. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005. Knittel, Anton Philipp. “Traumata überleben.” Literaturkritik.de 20, no. 10 (October) (2018). Kümmel, Anja. “Die Traumata schreiben sich fort.” Zeit Online, June 21, 2018. Lepsius, M. Rainer. “Kritische Anmerkungen zur Generationenforschung.” In Generation: Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs, edited by Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt, 45–52. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005. Medicus, Thomas. “Im Archiv der Gefühle: Tätertöchter, der aktuelle ‘Familienroman’ und die deutsche Vergangenheit.” Mittelweg 36 15, no. 3 (2006): 2–15. Moeller, Robert G. War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Petrowskaja, Katja. Maybe Esther: A Family Story. Translated by Shelley Frisch. New York: Harper, 2018. Raulff, Ulrich. “1945: Ein Jahr kehrt zurück.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 30, 2003. Reidy, Julian. Vergessen, was Eltern sind: Relektüre und literaturgeschichtliche Neusituierung der angeblichen Väterliteratur. Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2012. Roth, Johanna. “Von der Privilegierten zur Feindin.” tageszeitung, September 6, 2018, 16. Rothberg, Michael, and Yasemin Yildiz. “Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany.” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011/11/01 2011): 32–48. Schaumann, Caroline. “A Third-Generation World War II Narrative: Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper.” Gegenwartsliteratur: A German Studies Yearbook 4 (2005): 259–80. Şenocak, Zafer. “Germany—Home for Turks? A Plea for Overcoming the Crisis between Orient and Occident.” Translated by Leslie A. Adelson. In Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture, 1990–1998, 1–9. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Stephan, Felix. “In wessen Händen will man die Geschichte sehen?” Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 26, 2018. Stone, Katherine. Women and National Socialism in Postwar German Literature: Gender, Memory, and Subjectivity. Boydell & Brewer, 2017. doi:ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcen tral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4939461. Wackwitz, Stephan. Ein unsichtbares Land. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005.

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Wagner, Sabrina. “Distanziert, nüchtern, unbefangen? Zur Konstruktion und Zuschreibung ‘generationentypischer’ Emotionen im Diskurs um eine Erinnerungsliteratur der ‘Enkel.’” In Familiengefühle: Generationengeschichte und NS-Erinnerung in den Medien, edited by Jan Süselbeck, 45–64. Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2014. Weigel, Sigrid. “‘Generation’ as a Symbolic Form: On the Genealogical Discourse of Memory since 1945.” Germanic Review 77, no. 4 (2002): 264–77. Welzer, Harald. “Schön unscharf: Über die Konjunktur der Familien- und Generationenromane.” Mittelweg 36 13, no. 1 (2004): 53–64. Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall. “Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2002.

NOTES 1. Susanne Fritz, Wie kommt der Krieg ins Kind (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018). All parenthetical references refer to this text. All translations of this and other texts are my own. 2. See Deike Diening, “Die Ahnungsforscher,” Tagesspiegel, 1 November 2018; Anton Philipp Knittel, “Traumata überleben,” Literaturkritik.de 20, no. 10 (October) (2018); Anja Kümmel, “Die Traumata schreiben sich fort,” Zeit Online, 21 June 2018; Johanna Roth, “Von der Privilegierten zur Feindin,” tageszeitung, 6 September 2018; Felix Stephan, “In wessen Händen will man die Geschichte sehen?,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 26 June 2018. 3. Norbert Frei, “Gefühlte Geschichte,” Die Zeit, October 21, 2004. 4. Harald Welzer, “Schön unscharf: Über die Konjunktur der Familien- und Generationenromane,” Mittelweg 36 13, no. 1 (2004): 54. 5. Frei, “Gefühlte Geschichte.” “Paradigm shift” is Welzer’s term. Welzer, “Schön unscharf,” 54. 6. On the continual presence in West Germany of discussion about German suffering, see Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). One of the many places such discourse has remained present is in memories of women. See Katra Byram, “Challenging Generational Memory Culture: The Case of Mother Books,” German Studies Review 41, no. 1 (2018); Katherine Stone, Women and National Socialism in Postwar German Literature: Gender, Memory, and Subjectivity (Boydell & Brewer, 2017). 7. Ulrich Raulff, “1945: Ein Jahr kehrt zurück,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 30, 2003. 8. See Welzer, “Schön unscharf,” 53; Frei, “Gefühlte Geschichte”; Thomas Medicus, “Im Archiv der Gefühle: Tätertöchter, der aktuelle ‘Familienroman’ und die deutsche Vergangenheit,” Mittelweg 36 15, no. 3 (2006). 9. Sigrid Weigel has termed this cohort the “zero generation.” “‘Generation’ as a Symbolic Form: On the Genealogical Discourse of Memory since 1945,” Germanic Review 77, no. 4 (2002). 10. Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, “Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2002). 11. Medicus, “Im Archiv der Gefühle: Tätertöchter, der aktuelle ‘Familienroman’ und die deutsche Vergangenheit.” 12. Volker Hage, “Die Enkel wollen es wissen,” Der Spiegel, March 17, 2003.



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13. Aleida Assmann, “Limits of Understanding: Generational Identities in Recent German Memory Literature,” in Victims and Perpetrators: 1933–1945: (Re)Presenting the Past in Post-Unification Culture, ed. Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Dagmar Wienroeder-Skinner, Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies (IGCS): 2 (Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter, 2006); Anne Fuchs, “From ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ to Generational Memory Contests in Günter Grass, Monika Maron and Uwe Timm,” German Life and Letters 59, no. 2 (2006); Friederike Eigler, Gedächtnis und Geschichte in Generationenromanen seit der Wende (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2005). 14. Fuchs uses this term, which she adapts from Sigrid Weigel; the other two see a similar phenomenon. See Assmann, “Limits of Understanding,” 34; Eigler, Gedächtnis Und Geschichte, 26, 29; Fuchs, “Generational Memory Contests.” 15. Eigler, Gedächtnis Und Geschichte, 26, 61; Fuchs, “Generational Memory Contests,” 181. 16. Meike Herrmann, Vergangenwart: Erzählen vom Nationalsozialismus in der deutschen Literatur seit den neunziger Jahren (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010), 264. 17. Welzer, “Schön unscharf.” 18. Fuchs, “Generational Memory Contests,” 181. 19. Tanja Dückers, Himmelskörper (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2005). 20. “Der Schrecken nimmt nicht ab, er wächst,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 27 2002. 21. Meike Herrmann characterizes fact and fiction as “friendly neighbors” in recent works. Herrmann, Vergangenwart, 81. 22. Medicus, “Im Archiv der Gefühle: Tätertöchter, der aktuelle ‘Familienroman’ und die deutsche Vergangenheit,” 15. 23. As an example, two studies critiquing the literary historical term Väterliteratur (father literature) expose the frequent flattening of difference in literary studies. Mathias Brandstädter, Folgeschäden: Kontext, narrative Strukturen und Verlaufsformen der Väterliteratur 1960 bis 2008 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010); Julian Reidy, Vergessen, was Eltern sind: Relektüre und literaturgeschichtliche Neusituierung der angeblichen Väterliteratur (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2012). 24. See Byram, “Mütterliteratur.” 25. Caroline Schaumann, “A Third-Generation World War II Narrative: Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper,” Gegenwartsliteratur: A German Studies Yearbook 4 (2005); Sabrina Wagner, “Distanziert, nüchtern, unbefangen? Zur Konstruktion und Zuschreibung ‘generationentypischer’ Emotionen im Diskurs um eine Erinnerungsliteratur der ‘Enkel,’” in Familiengefühle: Generationengeschichte und NS-Erinnerung in den Medien, ed. Jan Süselbeck (Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2014). 26. Weigel, “Generation.” 27. Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt, “Generationen,” in Generationen: Zur relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs, ed. Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005). On the post–World War I establishment of the term, see 10–14. In generational definitions, too, heterogeneity tends to be overlooked, as a certain type of experience is cast as “the” experience of a generation, while the diverse experiences associated with gender, class, ethnicity, etc. are ignored. See ibid., 17–19; Christina Benninghaus, “Das Geschlecht der Generation: Zum Zusammenhang von Generationalität und Männlichkeit um 1930,” in Generation: Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs, ed. Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005); M. Rainer Lepsius, “Kritische Anmerkungen zur Generationenforschung,” ibid., 51.

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28. Wagner, “Distanziert, nüchtern, unbefangen?.” For an example of a statement of this common wisdom, see Petra M. Bagley, “Granny knows Best: The Voice of the Granddaughter in ‘Grossmütterliteratur,’” in Pushing at Boundaries: Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck, ed. Heike Bartel and Elizabeth Boa (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). 29. Volker Hage, “Ganz schön abgedreht,” Spiegel Online, March 22, 1999. 30. See Katharina Gerstenberger, “Fictionalizations: Holocaust Memory and the Generational Construct in the Works of Contemporary Women Writers,” in Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture, ed. Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Susanne Vees-Gulani (Rochester: Camden House, 2010). The quotation is from Tanja Dückers, “Abschied vom Aktivismus,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 24, 2004. 31. Tanja Dückers, “Der Schrecken nimmt nicht ab, er wächst,” ibid., April 27, 2002. 32. Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 10. 33. Ibid., 6–7. 34. Stephan Wackwitz, Ein unsichtbares Land (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005). 35. Maja Haderlap, Angel of Oblivion, trans. Tess Lewis (New York: Archipelago Books, 2016). 36. Katja Petrowskaja, Maybe Esther: A Family Story, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York: Harper, 2018). 37. I would argue that, for the most part, a similar approach appears in Friederike Eigler’s book on the concept of Heimat (homeland) in the transnational context of postwar memory in Germany and Poland. See Friederike Eigler, Heimat, Space, Narrative: Toward a Transnational Approach to Flight and Expulsion (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014). 38. Dan Diner, “Nation, Migration, and Memory: On Historical Concepts of Citizenship,” Constellations 4, no. 3 (1998): 301–3. 39. Zafer Şenocak, “Germany—Home for Turks? A Plea for Overcoming the Crisis between Orient and Occident,” in Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture, 1990–1998 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 6–7. 40. Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz, “Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011). 41. For estimations of the situation of German memory culture along these lines, see Aleida Assmann, “On the (In)compatibility of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory,” translated by Linda Shortt, German Life and Letters 59, no. 2 (2006); Gerstenberger, “Fictionalizations”; Hannes Heer, “Literatur und Erinnerung: Die Nazizeit als Familiengeheimnis,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 53 (2005); Michael Jeismann, “Voodoo Child: Die verhexten Kinder,” Literaturen 5 (2005). 42. Stephan, “In wessen Händen will man die Geschichte sehen?.”

5 The “Tumor of Memory” in Fabrice Humbert’s The Origin of Violence Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller

If, in the French national consciousness, the memory of the years 1940–1944 is both permanent and enduringly conflicted, it is because this period is shrouded by conscious or unconscious memory lapses, by state secrets, and by the most persistent Pétainist and Gaullist myths feeding the official postwar memory.1 Ultimately, that “history-memory” (Pierre Nora) was demystified at the beginning of the 1970s when France’s active collaboration with Nazism during the Vichy regime reappeared in the national consciousness, at the same time as the resurgence of Jewish memory. The national myths that had relegated Vichy France to a mere parenthesis within the history of the French Resistance crumbled because of this. Nevertheless, it is only with Jacques Chirac’s speech of repentance on July 16, 1995, that the French state officially recognized its culpability during the Vichy regime2 by affirming its responsibility in deporting Jews and its complicity in the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. Yet, prior to the historical recognition of this national amnesia, collaboration and its repression became subjects of postwar literary fictions, confronting history head-on and facing smoldering taboos. These works of fiction contradict the alleged suppression of the Shoah and confirm François Azouvi’s theory of the “myth of the great silence.”3 These literary representations of French society as sclerotic in its internal tensions help disclose the ambiguities and ethical contradictions inherent in both collaboration and Resistance during that time.4 Published in 2009, The Origin of Violence (L’Origine de la violence) by Fabrice Humbert5 is part of this literary tradition, which is informed by an “ethics of restitution”6 regarding history and its memories and which bears witness to the World War II experience. Starting with an exhumed family secret, Humbert takes the reader through the dark years of Nazism and the inglorious years of Vichy’s fascism. During a school trip, the narrator (an alter ego of the author, who belongs to the third generation post-Shoah) discovers, thanks to a photograph exhibited in the Buchenwald 65

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concentration camp museum, the identity of his actual grandfather, David Wagner, of whose existence he was previously unaware. After weeks of research and despite the disappearance and silence surrounding Wagner’s existence, the narrator goes back to that hidden branch in his family tree, exhumes his cryptic Jewish origins and discerns within his own family three faces of memory: that of the victim, that of the perpetrator, and that of the system that enabled the crime to take place. The unveiled family secret is, in my view, an allegory of cryptic national history reflecting the amnesia imposed after the Vichy regime (1940–1944) through the Résistancialisme promulgated by De Gaulle and the Communists in France. Levinas’s statement in Proper Names marks not only the foundation but also the framing of my chapter, and his questions gain relevance in Humbert’s narrative: “Over a quarter of a century ago, our lives were interrupted, and doubtless history itself. There was no longer any measure to contain monstrosities. When one has that tumor in the memory, twenty years can do nothing to change it. . . . Should we insist on bringing into this vertigo a portion of humanity whose memory is not sick from its own memories? And what of our children, who were born after the Liberation, and who already belong to that group? Will they be able to understand that feeling of chaos and emptiness?”7 Being at the heart of today’s reflections on the “duty of memory,” “abuses of memory”8 and the rivalry between memories currently taking place, The Origin of Violence explores different attitudes toward the recovery of the past, its uses and misuses. In other words, rediscovering the past is indispensable, but must the past rule over the present and the future? Or should the present only make use of the past at its discretion? To grasp these essential questions, I will analyze in this essay the tensions between different generations9 within the Fabre family (the narrator’s family), starting from the sealed secrets and forbidden deciphering, from the “tumor of memory” that Levinas discusses after World War II, and the right to forget questioned by Humbert’s text. The heterogeneity of Vichy’s postmemories10 revealed through the Fabre generations reflects the oppositions inherent in the History of “les Frances” as Pierre Nora defines it. These generations represent the differend (or dispute) engendered by latent or diffuse “dominant” (official) memories with regard to history and an impossible collective memory. Nevertheless, as I suggest in my analysis of Humbert’s book, these different memorial experiences place in contradiction two discrete discursive tendencies regarding the secret of memory: the revelation of collective secrets by History and the concealment of individual secrets in psychoanalysis create a tension underlying the generational conflict, even though these two disciplines of memory grant a prominent place to the past. However, by exhuming profoundly concealed root causes of neurosis (such as the narrator’s uncontrollable violence), psychoanalysis performs on an individual level what history achieves on the level of the society and community. In The Origin of Violence, a dialectic struggle takes place between these conflicts of generations, memory, and discourse, arising from the following: an unknown grandfather who disappears without a trace; the erasure of family memory into an oblivion whose manifestations, paradoxically, do not cease through transgenerational



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transmission; and finally, the denied and repressed memories that the narrator decrypts and that I will explore in this chapter.

EXHUMING THE FAMILY SECRET Was there something else? Something in my original research, something which coalesced in a photo in which a father mirrored his son who mirrored his son. (257)

Written against the grain of time, The Origin of Violence introduces a narrator who is a writer and a teacher, and who—starting with an unveiled family secret—discovers within his own family the face of the victim and the executioner at the time of the Vichy regime that made the crime possible. During a school trip with his students at the Buchenwald concentration camp, the astonished narrator notices a photograph in which a deportee surprisingly reminds him of his father. However, because his father was born in 1942, and as far as he knew, neither his grandfathers nor great-uncles had been deported, his astonishment could have stopped there. Nonetheless, this photograph turns into an obsession because of the strange resemblance to his father. This is the beginning of the story, which haunts the narrator and spurs him on to unravel the mystery: “the photograph spoke to me, as though one of my family might have been here” (12). In the narrative, the author exploits the pivotal role of photography and its new contribution to the age of testimony to postmemory. Despite being fiction, it is significant that he includes this photographic testimonial, which marks the postwar age, as Marianne Hirsch argues.11 As a crucial point of contact, the photo anchors fiction to a plausible reality, which becomes even more plausible considering that Humbert himself takes inspiration from his own family biography. Not only was Humbert’s grandfather deported, but the writer also visited Buchenwald concentration camp with his students, where he saw photos of camp dignitaries and deportees. Furthermore, Humbert confesses that he is no longer able to distinguish fiction from reality in his book.12 Photography is, therefore, the ultimate referent for the postmemory of the Shoah, which inevitably brings readers back to what Barthes defines as the “thing that has been there,” a concept that influenced Hirsh as well: I call “photographic referent” not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. . . . In Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. . . . The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. . . . The photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light . . . is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.13

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Certainly, for Humbert this is an experience that he reports in his fictional narrative, which places the photograph in a sort of mise en abyme evoking Barthes’s “photographic referent.” The “umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing” not only to the gaze of the narrator Fabre but also to the unknown side of his family. This allows him finally to cross-reference the missing pieces of his secret genealogy thanks to archives and collections of testimonies—including one by a Buchenwald survivor. The person in the photo is David Wagner, the narrator’s true grandfather, deported to Buchenwald in August 1941. The photo was shot in Buchenwald on December 20, 1941. By shedding light on his family tree, the narrator discerns the three faces of memory imprinted on that photograph: the victim David Wagner, who intensely observes his executioner Erich Wagner, his namesake who made him the target of his brutality; and the system of the Buchenwald camp where the photo is stored: I wanted to know what became of the guilty because the memory of the dead has two faces: that of the man who died and that of the man who killed him. Around them is the system that made the crime possible. It is these three aspects of memory that interest me. (115)

Under Vichy France, these faces of the victim and the executioner met when two French families, the Fabres and Wagners (the latter being Jewish), crossed the Lachmanns, a German family (the family of Sophie, the narrator’s partner) after the war. While courting Clémentine Fabre, David Wagner, a French Jew of Polish origin, fell deeply in love with Marcel Fabre’s wife, Virginie Fabre, with whom he had a passionate affair. In 1942, Adrien Fabre, the narrator’s father, was born from this union. Adrien never met his real father—who died in Buchenwald shortly before he was born—and barely knew his mother, who was afflicted with schizophrenia and died in 1952. This is the end of the tragic story of a “prisoner in the concentration camp” and a “prisoner in the asylum” (249). It narrates an illegitimate lineage from which women are absent: a grandmother who died too young and a mother barely mentioned. For this reason, Marcel Fabre raised Adrien Fabre like his two other sons, and told him the truth about his origins when he came of age. This secret affair would have been without significance, had it not led, on March 21, 1942, to David Wagner’s death at the Buchenwald concentration camp. His death was “utterly without consequence while also being the greatest tragedy in History” (293). The family secret, or the well-hidden historical secret of Vichy, both shatters and reveals human baseness and its collaborations. Because of David Wagner’s early deportation date, the narrator deduces that it was the result of an individual’s will. It took place before the Nacht und Nebel directive issued on December 7, 1941 against the enemies of Germany, and before the mass deportations of Jews from France. Afterward, he discovers that David was deported because great-grandfather Fabre, a fanatical antisemite who wanted to get rid of a Jewish intruder within his family, denounced him as the Vichy regime rounded up French Jews prior to the Nazi order:



The “Tumor of Memory” in Fabrice Humbert’s The Origin of Violence 69 As Adrien said the words, the folly of the period was revealed to me in all its vile duplicity. A bourgeois man of the 1930s, a respected doctor, sent a man to his death out of anti-Semitism and self-interest. . . . It was not an anonymous letter. A lot of neighbors, rivals and unpleasant sons-in-law were got rid of that way. (292)

The third-generation narrator progressively deciphers the family secret buried with David Wagner. However, this lineage, disavowed and buried in shameful secrets, weighs on him and is passed on to him in the form of visceral and reckless violence, which he inherits: “and although the origin may be found in my family destiny, the violence was passed on to me, probably hidden in my father’s silences” (147). This transgenerational violence originates in the collective murder of World War II. The narrator is not able to “bury it deep within him until it eats away at him, until it invests every sentence of this work of the unconscious that is writing” (145). Around the violence of the unveiled secret gravitate the confessions of Adrien and Marcel Fabre. His double family acquires an historical dimension with the denunciation, the revelation of a victim (the grandfather, David Wagner) and an executioner (the great-grandfather Fabre), and the death at Buchenwald.

GENERATIONS IN CONFLICT As Tzvetan Todorov argues, “memory is in no way the opposite of forgetting. The two terms that contrast with each other are disappearance (forgetting) and preservation. Memory is always and necessarily an interaction of these two” (Abuses, 12). This interaction marks precisely what is at stake in Humbert’s book because it represents the generational conflict of the memories of post-Vichy France through the figures of the grandfather (Marcel Fabre), the father (Adrien Fabre), and the narrator. The postmemory condition is not self-evident because it lies between the erasure and the preservation of the past: the Jewish memory of the victim is inscribed in David Wagner’s story; the memory of the executioner is embodied by the Nazi characters Erich Wagner (direct murderer of David Wagner) and Fredrich Lachmann; and collaboration is embodied by great-grandfather Fabre. The memory of the system that “made the crime possible” falls within the ambiguity of this tri-generational conflict and within the postwar climate that the author recounts in the book. However, despite the duality of the system between Nazism and Vichy Fascism described through its embodiment in the characters, it is striking that Humbert passes over Vichy in silence. References to Vichy occur only three times in the entire novel, though Humbert spends several pages describing Hitler’s Nazism. The word “Vichy” remains unuttered in the narrative, except when personified by “Maurice Papon,”14 whom the narrator holds responsible for the crime of his grandfather (David Wagner), even while his father blames Nazism. Furthermore, in the Fabre family, the clash of perspectives between the notions of complicity and guilt signals the differend taking place at a national level. It summarizes postwar Résistantialisme’s differentiation

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between collaboration out of personal interest and ideological collaboration, in an attempt to reduce the significance of French participation. Thus, through the Fabre family, the “Vichy syndrome” spreads. As part of the upper Norman bourgeoisie, the Fabre family is one of the richest Norman families after the war and perfectly represents the families that had supported and contributed to the Vichy regime: We, the Fabres, belong to our family. Our past clings to us, constrains us, we are the past of this part of Normandy and a little of the history of the country. Our family is a building, a building buttressed with no crevices since we seal up every crack. . . . We are still strong and we are wary of weaknesses: secrets, fears, defeats are never spoken of. (25)

In 1940, Marcel Fabre was a sous-préfet and pursued his career within the administration of the préfet “Maurice Papon” under the Vichy regime. The intrusion of the historical figure of Papon, who played an essential role in the deportation of Jews from France, revives the memory of Vichy’s political collaboration. The character of Marcel Fabre was not terribly concerned when Liberation happened, but he was evidently worried during Papon’s trial in 1998. He abruptly declares to his grandson who is investigating and recovering the family’s erased past: It was impossible to judge history after fifty years, that even the most well-intentioned judges were incapable of untangling the precise roles of the protagonists at a time when “attitudes were not the same.”  .  .  . “You don’t understand the situation, you weren’t there. Do you really think you can understand something that happened half a century ago?” . . . “In any case,” he repeated, “I’m unassailable.” (220, 217)

Of course, Marcel Fabre is “unassailable” according to the justice of bygone days that was complicit with historical amnesia. Nevertheless, he has now to give a report to the next generation, specifically to his grandson. The two generations are thus divided: the one bears witness to an epoch yet refuses to communicate it; the other is represented by the narrator, who insists on the recovery of the past in order to rescue endangered memory. Because the erasure of memory relates specifically to totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century, as Primo Levi correctly writes, “the entire history of the brief ‘millennial Reich’ can be reread as a war against memory.”15 However, during this exchange, not only does the narrator exhume memory from oblivion, but he also makes it contemporary through the obsession with violence that has haunted his dreams and writing since his youth: “These things didn’t happen fifty or sixty years ago. They’re happening now. They’ll always be happening. . . . I was in a position to judge” (217, 220). Understanding the past, for the narrator, means to develop self-knowledge and master his “intoxication of destruction” (146), because the past also has its effect on the self within the meanderings of the unconscious. Contrary to his grandfather, whose family memory coincides with national memory in oblivion, the narrator revives the past because it determines his present. The representation of this indelible past constitutes his individual and collective



The “Tumor of Memory” in Fabrice Humbert’s The Origin of Violence 71

identity. Therefore, it consists of that memory, that “exemplary memory,” which Todorov reclaims, because it is at times a principle of action for the present, but also redeeming, thanks to its ethical demands: “The pattern or model use, on the other hand, allows the past to be used with the present in mind and serves as an example of experienced injustices that may help to combat those taking place today, a way of abandoning the self in learning to reach out to others” (Abuses, 20). This is precisely what the narrator accomplishes when he tirelessly writes about contemporary victims, either fictional or real: the young woman raped, Richard persecuted, or Illan Halimi tortured to death in the Parisian banlieue in 2006. All these emblematic victims reflect the multiple forms of David Wagner, who disappeared in Buchenwald. Nevertheless, when it comes to the Vichy past, Marcel Fabre is inflexible: it is necessary to exorcise it to better forget it! He is, therefore, the keeper of the official memory, and he symbolizes the repression of a certain category of people from his generation who are not willing to confront their familial and national past. In this way an arrangement emerges in which the refusal of memory resembles the refusal of justice; the narrator throws himself up against this denial. The strong silence of the bourgeoisie reinforces postwar amnesty by fostering the forgetting of family history as well as of national history. Yet, as Paul Ricoeur convincingly argues: Amnesty, as institutional forgetting, touches the very roots of the political, and through it, the most profound and most deeply concealed relation to a past that is placed under an interdict. The proximity, which is more than phonetic, or even semantic, between amnesty and amnesia signals the existence of a secret pact with the denial of memory.16

In other words, this forbidden past needs to remain encrypted through the secret pact that ties it to oblivion. Humbert uses clichés of Résistancialisme, such as Vichy’s “particular historical circumstances” (217) or the “attitudes” that “were not the same” (220), to better dismantle them. Oblivion is the golden rule for Marcel Fabre. And secrets are not at all meant to indicate failures of memory due to insurmountable traumas occluded by Marcel Fabre. On the contrary, the secret of the Fabres reveals that it is necessary to consciously forget repressed memories by burying them; memories need to be entombed, and oblivion is a necessity in order to survive the guilt of such a disturbing complicity: “It’s best to forget,” states Marcel Fabre against our contemporary understanding that claims the “duty to remember” as the prime injunction: Forgetting is the best thing ever discovered for secrets. It’s not cowardice, it’s just the voice of life. Listen to me now, because I’m going to tell you a real secret: memory is for the dead and the dying, forgetting is for the living. It’s as valid for nations as it is for individuals. (217)

He clearly claims the right to forget, but the reader as well as the narrator is entitled to question his motivations. Does he demand oblivion so that the third generation does not bother or judge him, or because he fears what this generation would do?

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When he confesses, Marcel does not deny that recovering the past is indispensable, but according to him, this cannot rule over the present of those still living. And this is what clearly distinguishes oblivion from amnesia (that is, in opposition to knowledge, without which historical truth cannot emerge). Moreover, the risk of worshipping memory is that it does not always serve the right ends; the past, put in parentheses as Marcel wishes, allows him to live in peace, forgetting hatred: But I’m not asking you to know, I am asking you to know but to set that knowledge aside, which isn’t the same thing. It’s important to know, I agree with you about that, truth is essential, but it must be forgotten, that is something else I know, something I am convinced of. . . . What’s important for me is forgetting, it is the right place for the past, somewhere between the conscious and unconscious. (223–24)

The stakes of oblivion revolve around Marcel’s perspective, which is opposed to his grandson’s. To face the future, forgetting the past becomes a pressing need. Oblivion is a protection against the ruminations (or recurrences) occasioned by regrets, against the resentment or vengeance that a violent memory feeds with its thunderous judgments. While the narrator wishes to restore the memory of the dead in the name of justice, Marcel sanctifies oblivion for the sake of the peace of the living. He is on the side of “dominant memory” (official memory) as opposed to “diffused memory,” which consists of several individual stories, and rekindles Levinas’s question: “Should we insist on bringing into this vertigo a portion of humanity whose memory is not sick from its own memories?” In fact, Levinas fears that the sickness of memory, which he calls “rumination” (“ressassement”), may affect subsequent generations. Marcel links forgetting to protecting the future. He is not against the knowledge of the dead, but he supports life: “the most important thing is to forget, to know everything so you can forget because life is in forgetting” (245). He recommends that the narrator opt for the right to forget. Dwelling on the past is a neurosis, which the two previous generations, Marcel and Adrien respectively, refused to pass on to the narrator so that family memory, as well as national memory, might not become “sick from its own memories” (Names, 120). Yet, oblivion is also symptomatic of the sickness shared by people like Marcel, who live in peace and who believe themselves untouchable when it comes to their memories, as if those memories had already become gangrenous. But this “gangrene,” as Benjamin Stora calls it, consumes Marcel because the past cannot forget us, and, as the narrator demonstrates, it always catches up with us. Modiano well described this amnesiac society, of which grandfather Fabre is a prime example: “Those who lived in that Paris wanted to forget it very quickly. . . . This layer, this mass of oblivion that obscures everything, means we can only pick up fragments of the past, disconnected traces, fleeting and almost ungraspable human destinies.”17 But what does Marcel need to forget, if not the active participation of the French state under German occupation and the direct or indirect collaboration of French families? The character David Wagner represents the troublesome memory of a familial and national past, guilty of cowardice. Wagner is, indeed, an allegory of Jewish presence within the



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family, a microcosm of the French state that tries to eliminate the Jewish “intrusion” during the time of Vichy: The story of David Wagner weakens us. . . . Everyone. You, me, your father, the family. The story of David Wagner is a stain on our history, on our unity as a family. . . . But he’s not one of us. He’s a Wagner, not a Fabre. . . . David is the dark side of our history. (214–15)

The story of David Wagner, silenced within the Fabre family, speaks of the schemes of Vichy’s state secrets. The fascists questioned the “coherence” of the state that set up the embarrassing Jewishness, an incoherence that David Wagner introduced within the Fabre family. Vichy and its official history, jammed up in the euphemisms of its responsibility, speak through Fabre, the grandfather: Wagner is not “one of us,” so he has to go and with him all traces of his passage, for he embodies “the dark side” of Vichy. Yet, keeping the secret means completing the work of the executioners and their destruction, which manifests itself through the narrator’s “sickness of destruction.” Defeated, the executioners triumph once again in a way through the narrator’s contemporary violence, which he describes in many of his works. General amnesia means erasing Wagner’s identity, with this worsened by the hatred of his persecutors and the silence of his relatives. Consequently, it reminds us of Elie Wiesel’s statement: “To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”18 As for Adrien Fabre, the narrator’s father who “hid[es] away with his silences and his secrets” (290), he embodies the “latent memory,” which partitions memories through repression and the unsaid, by positioning itself next to official history with the law of omertà. Ultimately, Adrien is the most affected by the family secret— which is beset by the 1940s resurgence—especially because, as the son of David Wagner and Virginie Fabre, he is the illegitimate child in the story. In other words, he is the Jewish element that sullies the Fabre family and whose existence recalls David Wagner’s tragic destiny. Nonetheless, when he was young, Adrien Fabre began searching for his real father and became the youngest Nazi hunter on the trail of the executioner—the namesake Erich Wagner—who killed his father in Buchenwald. Contrary to the narrator, this encounter with the past and confrontation with his father’s executioner contributes to Adrien’s isolation from the world and his muteness, caused by post-traumatic shock. Adrien represents the second generation, which in the 1970s discerned the sad reality of a mystified official memory. He witnesses the mystification of the heroic image of France, created by Gaullists and Communists after the war. One must wait for the third generation, embodied by his son, to mourn a mystified nation and explore its collaborationist side. Collaborationists, like great-grandfather Fabre, were not mere opportunists, but made a political choice. Because of his double Wagner-Fabre origins, Adrian fights against memory and oblivion. Nevertheless, by doing so, he unconsciously reiterates the Pétainist ideology that sanctified the family by glorifying the homeland, and he protects these two institutions through his muteness. Adrien

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makes it a personal issue, and thus he preserves the reputation of his family, a microcosm of France, by concealing his own secrets as he keeps the secrets of the state. Yet, when he decides to keep quiet about his father’s death, he remains holed up in his solitude. Moreover, to the great astonishment of the narrator, he wished to find the person responsible not out of filial duty through revenge or out of affection toward his father, David Wagner, but for his soul’s own rest. So, Adrien joins Marcel Fabre in his attitude toward the truth about the past, because while recovering it is indispensable, it does not have to reign over the present; as Marcel says: “truth is essential, but it must be forgotten. . . . Forgetting is the right place for the past, somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious” (223–24).

HUMANISTIC DISCOURSES IN CONFLICT Under history, memory and forgetting. Under memory and forgetting, life. But writing a life is another story. Incompletion.19 Paul Ricoeur

The dialectic of the recovery or the preservation of the past “between consciousness and unconsciousness,” and the right to forget is particularly fascinating in Humbert’s novel. Adrien Fabre’s will to remain quiet becomes the beginning of a generational conflict between father and son, which first forcefully reveals itself with their diverging views on literature’s role in this historical moment. As human sciences, history, literature and psychoanalysis are the disciplines of memory par excellence. Paradoxically, History’s divulgation of national or collective secrets collides with the dissimulation of individual secrets in psychoanalysis. If the repression of the past at the individual level is conscious memory’s defense mechanism to repress traumatic or unsettling events in the unconscious, it is also the cause of neurotic disorders that only seek to be reincorporated into consciousness. Therefore, healing depends on the recovery of suppressed memories; once recovered, these memories can be neutralized and isolated by consciously mastering oblivion. This is exactly what happens to Adrien Fabre, who tries to live in peace for the ease of his soul, marginalizing the past with no resentments. The right to forget authorizes, in the affective life of the individual, the protection of intimate secrets. On the contrary, the narrator, who considers literary writing as the work of the unconscious mind, strives to exhume family memory for therapeutic purposes. Literature stands alongside psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experiences in the complex relationship they both establish with knowledge and the impossibility of knowledge. The term “trauma” or “wound” in Ancient Greek originally refers to a plague inflicted on the body. However, in later usage of the word, specifically in Freud’s works, it designates a wound in the psyche whose triggering event would



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not be immediately available in the consciousness unless it manifests again through repetition. Ineluctably linked to a secret, this unknown trauma defies reason, resists comprehension but requires, nevertheless, the witnessing of this secret and forgotten wound. However, what haunts the victim is the incompleteness of the knowledge eternally deferred, due to the process of the trauma itself that demands nonetheless to be phrased through speech. In this way the ineluctable connection between psychoanalysis and literature—which narrates the history of traumas inevitably tied to the return of lost referents—is explained. What arises in the heart of traumatic narratives is the unstoppable oscillation between the unbearable nature of the event and its survival afterward (the return of the repressed): Adrien’s crying wound.20 In Humbert’s novel, Adrien Fabre’s wound, which he unwillingly transmits to the narrator, comes from the traumatic experience of David Wagner’s deportation. To fight erasure, literature makes use of multiple memories that inevitably come from individual experience, which is in constant evolution and, therefore, differs from History because of its heterogeneity. “Writing life is another story,” states Ricoeur, while History “is a scholarly and theoretical reconstruction and as such is more apt to give rise to a substantial, durable body of knowledge. .  .  .  History has a more universal, if not more ecumenical, purpose.”21 Adrien Fabre refuses fictional writing as a way to describe this dark Vichy period. It is necessary to leave the dead buried in a secret corner: You’ve been poking your nose into things that don’t concern you. Being a writer doesn’t mean poling about in other people’s lives, it means having imagination, inventing things. . . . You’re snuffling around the dead. This is our family history. I forbid you to write about it. You will not use it to promote yourself. I won’t tolerate it. (70)

For him, literature does not have to explore historical or individual revelations and must adhere to fictional invention. Reliving the memory of the dead father in Buchenwald is dangerous for his son, for the memory of the Fabres, and, consequently, for the entire French nation. “Silence is much more restful” (289), he says, and to justify his silence, he tells his son: “I was trying to protect you” (276). Absolute transparency, the main concern of the contemporary age, is challenged in psychoanalysis because, despite being legitimate in some cases, it risks turning into an “evil for evil’s sake” in the shocking revelation of trauma. Adrien believes that it is better not to transmit family evil. Feeling the shame of being the illegitimate son and the flagrant shame of an undigested traumatic past, he no longer chooses denial, but rather repression. Is it worth waking up the ghosts and exacerbating the tumor of memory? This tumor is wide open since the revelation of the secret that has imprisoned that lone wolf. Yet, “sick of his own memories,” he leaves the legacy of his internal violence to his son. While the narrator tries to discover the past in order to apprehend his present violence, Adrien struggles to forget. Their quest is opposed in a generational conflict, which Krzysztof Pomian analyzes: “A bygone era begins, when its time comes, to function as a screen on which generations that follow can project and objectify

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their contradictions, rifts, and conflicts.”22 The father and son are both formed by events that happened before they were born because individuals are influenced and constituted by the History that preceded them. This is called “transgenerational”23 in psychoanalysis; in other words, it is the way in which family history—its silences, shames, guilt, and secrets—skips a generation and affects the following one. Revealed by Jacques Derrida, the work of Hungarian psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok is illuminating in this regard. Their notion of “crypt at the core of the Self ” (“intrapsychic tomb”) indicates the exhumation of a shameful experience or a hidden trauma, and the effects across generations of this unspeakable secret, which they call “the work of the Phantom in the unconscious” (Shell 164). A family’s trauma and mourning, whose secrecy is at the same time the symptom, exercises a transgenerational influence on the children who in turn suffer from psychosomatic disturbances: The words that cannot be uttered, the scenes that cannot be recalled, the tears that cannot be shed—everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss. . . . Reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes and affects, the objectual, correlative of the loss is buried alive in the crypt as a full-fledged person, complete with its own topography.24

The metonymy of the “phantom,” which evokes “a whole world of unconscious fantasy . . . , one that leads its own separate and concealed existence”25 defines the influence of an ancestor’s shameful secret, unconsciously passed down. Therefore, the narrator wonders: “Why had I been fascinated with the Nazis since I was a teenager? . . . I probably sensed by the animal antennae of the subconscious that some part of my history was buried there” (191). However, this transgenerational trauma is accompanied by an inherited guilt and an ethical responsibility imposed by the historical context: “I had a family debt to settle” (190). For this ethical obligation, he restores the forgotten memories of previous generations through writing, by engaging with the perspective of the victims’ memory. The narrator is himself invested in this violence from the past: “with no boundaries, no limits, a violence that quietly advances down the ages, occasionally raising its hissing, snake-like head” (147). He inherited this violence, which his book witnesses: Violence has never left me. . . . I constantly write about violence. . . . I am my grandfather given over to executioners, I am my father trembling with suicidal violence, I am the heir to an immense violence which haunts my dreams and my writings. (147)

The narrator internalizes the victims’ violence—respectively David Wagner and his father—and sheds light on Marcel Fabre’s remarks: “These things didn’t happen fifty or sixty years ago. They’re happening now. They will always be happening” (217). Literature has the role of filling in the gaps of history and the past through the narrative of individual memories. For the narrator, who devotes himself to “clarifying a



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page of our family history in a concentration camp” (73), literature is a catharsis even if the secret that is indissolubly linked to literature remains forever sealed by death: Proof of the prophetic power which some, including Victor Hugo, attribute to the act of writing, a power I believe in simply because this meticulous task, when every sense is focused on the page, causes inchoate secretes to rise, reveals hidden regions which are crucial and bound to come to light. (73)

Therefore, literature has to discern, within its own limits, the individual memories and realities kept secret. It replaces the unsaid with traces and snatches of the past, “lost and gone, dust to dust, all that will remain of him, in spite of the testimonies, is a shadow” (115). However, this “shadow” of the past allows an escape from repression and initiates the process of mourning through the “work of memory” advocated by Ricoeur. This work of memory is different from the “duty of memory,”26 which has been institutionalized and reified as the consecration of collective memory, risking through its ritual the cult of historical atrocities. This injunction of the “duty of memory,” which Primo Levi encouraged,27 incited the survivors of the concentration camps to testify to the unspeakable and fight against postwar society’s generalized skepticism. Nevertheless, this injunction was gradually transformed over the years into a veneration that obstructed the real goal of the ethical obligation demanded by Levi.28 Contrary to the “duty of memory,” the “work of memory,” between firsthand memory and reported memory, connects present and past through literature, working toward the “restitution” of a lost past, and reestablishes the importance of testimony as lived experience. In addition, the work of memory leads to the mourning that in turn authorizes the “forgiveness” suggested by Ricoeur; this is contrary to amnesty, which is merely a simulation. In Humbert’s book, the forgiveness that fights resentment occurs through Marcel’s act of adopting Adrien, despite his pain, and inviting his grandson, the narrator, to take care of his wallet after his death. It is also the immense tenderness that Adrien and his son feel while looking at grandfather Fabre, despite the revelation of the secret: “Just because people are guilty doesn’t mean we don’t love them” (221). But above all, the narrator’s literary endeavor, in the name of his people, aspires, via a form of unsentimental reparation through writing, to fashion a tomb for the unknown dead. Like Antigone, he offers in tribute to David Wagner the tomb he was never allowed to have: But I am committed to the memory of David Wagner. . . . I had a sort of moral duty, as in a Greek tragedy where the dead must be buried, I paid my respects, I buried the man and I asked my questions. My question. David Wagner had never had a grave and I knew now that I would be the one to write his tome, his epitaph, something which my father, I though, had never done, and which had walled him up in his perpetual walks, his silence, his denial. (115, 171)

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The “moral duty” that he imposes on himself is precisely this work of memory that involves the burial of the dead without a tomb, and the process of writing through which he pays homage to David Wagner, who died in the greatest banality “utterly without consequence, while also being the greatest tragedy in history” (293). Humbert’s book is the cenotaph awarded to the deportees, which allows mourning through the acknowledgment of individual memories. Without contradicting David Rousset, according to whom “the pain of concentration camps is without measure if compared to any other”29 and the human degeneration inflicted upon the deportee is not a common injustice, Humbert places these individual memories at the service of justice, as theorized by Todorov, so that they can have an impact on the present: Those who, in one way or another, know the horror of the past have a duty to raise their voices against another horror taking place now a few hundred kilometers away—indeed, several dozen meters from their home. Far from remaining prisoners of the past, we must put it to the service of the present, just as memory—and forgetting—should be used in the service of justice (Abuses 21–22).

However, the enigma of death remains the most undetectable secret: an abyss into knowledge that cannot be reduced to testimony. In literature, the experience of death is inextricably linked to secrets; as the guardian of secrets, literature has the responsibility of testimony, which remains precarious because unverifiable according to Derrida: “For it to be assured as testimony, it cannot, it must not be absolutely certain, absolutely sure and certain in the order of knowing as such.”30 Unlike his father and grandfather, the narrator is ready to embrace his ethical responsibility, configuring what escapes testimony in the “poetic experience of the language,” and “insist[ing] on bringing into this vertigo a portion of humanity whose memory is not sick from its own memories” (Names 120). Nonetheless, he never claims to have knowledge of the experience of concentration camps and death, neither of David Wagner’s nor of those of the real victims who remain in the unrepresentable of the past. In addition, he anticipates objections against his narrative about Buchenwald: And then because concentration camps are an emotive subject and one, it sometimes feels, that only those who were in them can talk about. . . . Some people say that the enormity of the crime means no comment or story is possible unless it is direct testimony. I admit that when such comments don’t come from people who were in the camps, they don’t move me. And I truly believe that art has a gift of clairvoyance and that my childhood fears, my violence, are means of access to Buchenwald. (81)

However, despite the “impossibility of transmitting” what he did not directly experience, the narrator transmits “a different form of experience. And in fact, if memory died as generations died, humanity would no longer exist” (82). This transmission requires a contact between past and present events that establishes “exemplary



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memory” (Todorov) without erasing the specific identity of these events, and without falling into universal analogies or dangerous amalgams. Preserving the memory of the past means acting on the present when new situations appear before our eyes—like racism, antisemitism, or xenophobia—situations that are similar but not identical because extermination camps and roundups of Jews no longer exist. Thanks to literature’s “gift of clairvoyance,” the narrator imagines the way toward the unsaid, in order to prevent the “tumor of memory.” Therefore, he is engaged on the side of the postmemorial experience of the Shoah because the absolute and obsessional presence of the past recurs in contemporary violence, which he evokes throughout his quest for that violence’s origin. The destiny of David Wagner, who died in Buchenwald, is inexorably tied to today’s victims, both real and fictional, and constitutes a new aspect of transmission to the third generation, to which the narrator belongs. The memory of David Wagner extends as a continuum in this frenetic search for the executioner, which allows the narrator to channel his own violence through the act of writing. This memory continues through the emblematic figures of the victims that the narrator encounters in the newspapers, and through the character-victims that he invents in his books: a young girl raped and abandoned in a vacant lot of a city, Richard bullied at school, or the tragic and real history of Ilan Halimi tortured to death in the suburbs of Paris in January 2006. Humbert’s narration elaborates a question about the poetics of a “just memory” between the denial of the first generation and the abuses of memory and oblivion in our time. However, the event of the Shoah and its repercussions are endless. Despite some pernicious and excessive commemorations from the “politics of recognition,” we are currently living in a new phase. The recovery of the past and the “work of memory” should persist from one generation to the next, in the multiple experiences that contemporary literary works like Humbert’s novel depict without being captive to the cult of memory. The perseverance required for preserving the past is the sine qua non for neutralizing the “tumor of memory” as well as the tumor, no less widespread, of its erasure, in order to transition to the right to oblivion and achieve the “politics of just (or righteous) memory,” of which Ricoeur, by ethical demand, is the defender.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrahm, Nicholas, and Torok, Maria. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Azouvi, Francois. Le Mythe du grand silence, Auschwitz, les Français, la mémoire. Paris: Fayard, 2012. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Macmillan, 1981. Bourdieu, Pierre. La distinction. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979.

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Derrida, Jacques. “‘A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text’: Poetics and Politics of Witnessing.” Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today, edited by Michael P. Clark. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Hirsh, Marianne. “Surving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 5–37. ———. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 103–28. Ledoux, Sébastien. Le devoir de mémoire: Une formule et son histoire. Paris: CNRS, 2016. Levinas, Emmanuel. Proper Names. Translated by Michael B. Smith. London: Athlone Press, 1996. Modiano, Patrick. “Nobel Lecture.” The Nobel Prize. Translated by James Hardiker. 7 Dec. 2014, https:​//​www​.nobelprize​.org​/prizes​/literature​/2014​/modiano​/25238​-nobel​-lecture​ -2014​/. Accessed 18 June 2020. Pomian, Krysztof. “Les avatars de l’identité historique.” Le Debat 3 (July–August 1980). Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. ———. La hantise du passé. Paris: Textuel, 1998. Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Uses and Abuses of Memory.” Translated by Lucy Golsan. In What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought, edited by Howard Marchitello. London: Routledge, 2014, 11–39.

NOTES 1. This is what historians call Résistancialisme. The primary meaning of this term, coined at the Liberation by opponents of the purge, refers to the Resistance fighters; the secondary meaning indicates the official and dominant myth whose goal is to diminish the importance of Vichy’s regime by presenting it as a parenthesis within the history of France. This political myth makes the Resistance into the only memory to be celebrated, representing the majority of the French people. It is embodied in certain locations and within Gaullist and Communist ideologies. See Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Harvard University Press, 1991. 2. Chirac delivered this speech of repentance during the commemoration of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup that took place on July 16 and 17, 1942, in Paris and its suburbs. The French police, led by René Bousquet, Secretary-General of the National Police, conducted the Roundup following the orders of Vichy and sent more than 13,000 “stateless” or foreign Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp. 3. Azouvi, François. Le Mythe du grand silence, Auschwitz, les Français, la mémoire. Fayard, 2012. According to Azouvi, in France there would have been a “Vichy syndrome,” but not a “Shoah syndrome.” 4. See authors such as Claude Simon, Patrick Modiano, Georges Pérec ou Pascal Quignard. Since the 2000s, see Grimbert, Philippe. Un Secret. Grasset, 2004; De Rosnay,Tatiana. Elle s’appelait Sarah. Héloïse d’Ormesson, 2006; Sansal, Boualem. Le Village de l’Allemand. Gallimard, 2008; Marie-Odile Beauvais, Le secret Gretl. Fayard, 2009. 5. Humbert, Fabrice. The Origin of Violence. 2009. Translated by Frank Wynne. Serpent’s Tail, 2011. All the references to this book will be included as in-text citations.



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6. Viart, Dominique. “Témoignage et restitution; le traitement de l’histoire dans la littérature contemporaine.” Présences du passé dans le roman français contemporain, Gianfranco Rubino, 2007, 45. 7. Levinas, Emmanuel. Proper names. 1976. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Stanford University Press, 1996, 120. 8. Todorov Tzvetan. “The Uses and Abuses of Memory.” Translated by Lucy Golsan. In What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought, edited by Howard Marchitello, Routledge, 2014, 11–39. 9. According to Bourdieu, the most important criterion for identifying a generation consists in common historical experiences. Bourdieu, Pierre. La distinction. Editions de Minuit, 1979, 530. 10. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today, 29:1, Spring 2008, 103–28. Postmemorial work embodies “more distant social/national and archival/cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation” (111). The link to the past exists through imagination, creation and projection. Postmemory is an approximate memory “in its affective force” (109). 11. Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 5–37. 12. www​.web​-tv​-culture​.com​/infos​-le​-livre​-l​-origine​-de​-la​-violence​-de​-fabrice​-humbert​ -171​-113​.html 13. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, 1981, 76, 80–81. 14. The politician Maurice Papon was accused in 1983 and then prosecuted in 1998 for crimes against humanity because he participated in the deportation of Jews while he was Secretary for the Police of Gironde from 1942 to 1944. 15. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. 1986. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. Simon & Schuster, 2017, 21. 16. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer. University of Chicago Press, 2004, 453. 17. Modiano, Patrick. “Nobel Lecture.” The Nobel Prize. Translated by James Hardiker, 7 Dec. 2014, www​.nobelprize​.org​/prizes​/literature​/2014​/modiano​/25238​-nobel​-lecture​-2014​/. 18. Wiesel, Elie. The Night. 1958. Translated by Marion Wiesel. Hill and Wang, 2006, xv. 19. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer. University of Chicago Press, 2004, 506. 20. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 1–9 21. Rousso, Syndrome, 2. 22. Pomian, Krzysztof. “Les avatars de l’identité historique.” Le Débat, 3, July–August 1980, 117. 23. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. 1987. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Nicholas T. Rand. University of Chicago Press, 1994. 24. Abraham and Torok. The Shell and the Kernel, 130. 25. Ibid. 26. Ricoeur, Memory. 27. See Ledoux, Sébastien. Le devoir de mémoire: Une formule et son histoire. Paris, CNRS, 2016.

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28. Rousso, Henry. La Hantise du passé. Textuel, 1998, 43. 29. Rousset, David et al. Pour la vérité sur les camps concentrationnaires. Ramsay, 1990. 30. Jacques Derrida. “‘A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text’: Poetics and Politics of Witnessing.” Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Revenge of the Aesthetic” The Place of Literature in Theory Today. Edited by Michael P. Clark. University of California Press, 2000, 182.

6 Numbers and Portraits Reframing Auschwitz Tattoos in Dana Doron and Uriel Sinai’s Numbered Elke Heckner

Numbered,  a critically acclaimed 2012 Israeli documentary about new transgenerational kinships and future legacies of tattooed Auschwitz survivors, draws on Primo Levi to make the case for how Auschwitz tattoos might continue to bear witness in the present.  It  articulates a specific third-generation cinematography in which the camera engages in a multilayered process of capturing survivors’ relationships  to their Auschwitz tattoos while  simultaneously  creating a new visual archive of living embodied memory. As such, Numbered turns the lens onto the physicality of survivors’  Auschwitz tattoos—unapologetically zooming in  on their aging arms and thereby conveying an irresistible demand for new ways of looking and of listening to survivors’ own stories. Largely composed of interviews, this documentary seeks to pioneer these new ways as it records the complicated ties connecting survivors to their tattoos—specifically, to original Auschwitz tattoos but also to reproductions by second- or third-generation descendants of survivors. The repeated click of the camera and the old-fashioned rewinding noise that is heard throughout the documentary signifies to the audience that the past is being rewound to generate a new, different history—a history in the process of being made as evidenced by stunning black-and-white art photography of survivors’ portraits that denote resilience, strength and dignity. Offering snapshots of survivors’ histories and memories narrated in the present, the new documentary record that is being created is also durational as the camera accompanies survivors and their descendants in their daily environments inside and outside their homes. Most significantly, the lens focuses on re-dignifying survivors and their representations by presenting the former as having reclaimed life, love, and subjectivity. By tracing how Numbered enacts a specifically third-generation aesthetics—which engages with the second-generation focus on affectively (re)experiencing survivor trauma while simultaneously breaking with this second-generation aesthetics—this chapter will draw attention to the central 83

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role of the camera as it reframes aging survivors’ stories and bodies. My analysis of Numbered’s third-generation aesthetics will pay particular attention to the possibilities and limits of the resignification of tattoos, especially their transformation from marks of indelible shame into marks of courage and honor.

THIRD-GENERATION AESTHETIC: INVITATION TO DIFFERENT MODES OF LOOKING AND LISTENING Numbered foregrounds its third-generation aesthetic by filming intimate portrait-style sequences in a studio setting, thereby strikingly breaking with the representational taboo on coming too close to an Auschwitz tattoo—of appearing to be intrusive and voyeuristic. Rather, the film suggests that we cannot get close enough to Auschwitz tattoos and that their bodily, faded presence is central to our understanding of individual survivors’ stories of how they accomplished the very act of surviving. The camera zooms in on the fading tattoos on survivors’ arms, making their tattoos visible and inviting contemporary viewers to become belated witnesses to the fleshly presence of Auschwitz tattoos. Primo Levi’s quotation, which ushers in Numbered, acts as a philosophical signpost raising the question of how Auschwitz tattoos might function as witnesses. The camera’s proximity to the tattoos does not feel intrusive but rather comes across as attentively observing Auschwitz survivors’ numbers at the beginning of the film, as the bearers of tattoos seem to reenact a version of the camp roll call, albeit in the safe environment of the photo studio. As the numbers populate the screen while each survivor speaks their number, the survivor’s name appears behind the number, indicating that the film will literally bring to light the individual life stories compressed into and concealed by the numbers. Numbered begins with brief, intense shots of survivors stating their number in German, Hebrew, and Polish before the opening title and credits, thus powerfully setting the scene for survivors’ recollections of the very act of being tattooed at Auschwitz. While the first survivor in this sequence, Leo Luster, states his name and his number, a subsequent survivor only states his number B2896—to which he refers as his name—and another unnamed survivor remarks: “When people see the number, they know that this person has endured a great deal. But for that person, the number holds no greatness.” These powerful initial interviews provide a range of individual recollections, some more expected, such as Gita Kalderon’s voice-over: “It was like I was no longer human, they branded us like cattle”—others taking viewers by surprise, for instance when Daniel Chanoch, a Lithuanian survivor, states: “I do not see it as a scar; for me it’s a medal.” Daniel will be shown later in the documentary to have turned his status as Auschwitz survivor into a form of social capital: “I have a number, I am a celebrity”—which piques viewers’ curiosity about his assertive act of re-signifying Auschwitz tattoos. It becomes quickly clear that each survivor’s hi/story is uniquely singular in terms of how the act of tattooing is recalled.1 As the documentary moves into longer, interwoven interviews, Zoka Levy points out that



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she twisted her arm when she was tattooed so the mark would be hidden on the inside of the arm, if she ever made it out. Like Primo Levi, she was asked repeatedly why she didn’t get it removed, and she replied “Should I be ashamed of it? Those who did this to me should be ashamed.” These remarkable life stories thus take as their point of departure the very tattoo that has so painfully tied survivors to their experience at the most notorious death camp, and the camera zeroes in on this man-made corporeal mark that functions as an intermediate cause of obscured biography. In doing so, this innovative documentary shatters the taboo on representing Auschwitz tattoos in close-up as etched into survivors’ arms in an environment that is not explicitly curated and framed by the context of a museum, a memorial, or an artwork—even though the documentary, once finished, will also constitute a kind of artwork and historiographical record. But as a documentary, the film works with the present in the present during the filming process, and within this present, it articulates an invitation to really look, see, and listen. Coming too close to a survivor’s real Auschwitz tattoo—and not merely its representation—would have seemed inappropriate or potentially voyeuristic, and even daring from the point of view of second-generation aesthetics. Challenging the cultural taboos of Holocaust representation, this third-generation documentary seems to have found a way to recalibrate viewers’ often awkward relationship to survivors’ tattoos—awkward, since looking at these tattoos often runs the risk of functioning as voyeuristic gaze, or at least or it is understood as doing so. However, the film clearly avoids any suggestion of the camera lens conveying the voyeuristic gaze by casting its interviewees as empowered survivors—as people sharing their intimate stories and the ways in which the Auschwitz tattoo affects them as individuals. And as they verbally author their biographies, their present-day bodies become subjects of a stunning black-and-white photography that reveals them along with their tattoos as protagonists of their own biography and that amplifies their complexity. The documentary, in a reflexive camera-within-the camera modality, shares with the viewer a step-by-step sequence of photos being taken—indicated by noises replicating the click of the shutter and the rewinding of the film—as well as the result of this documentary activity: What has been produced by means of black-and white photography is a series of intimate portraits rendered as spectacular works of art and embodied historical records.2 By zeroing in on the fading tattoos on the arms of different survivors, the film raises the question of whether previous viewers had been protected by certain conventions and the limitations of secondgeneration codes of representation. In other words, the film asks how the respectful and seemingly appropriate visual distance to survivors’ tattoos, or the very assumption of the “unspeakability” of survivors’ own life stories and the “unrepresentability” of their experience,3 has so far shielded us from the actuality of an Auschwitz tattoo as it means, still today, to those whose bodies bear them?

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DORON’S UNTOLD THIRD-GENERATION STORY This very question lies at the heart of the genesis of the film. The making of the film was prompted by a medical encounter between codirector Dana Doron, in her capacity as an emergency room physician in Safed, and an eighty-three-year old woman Auschwitz survivor who presented herself repeatedly to the emergency room due to heart troubles. Doron describes being shocked when her patient displayed the tattoo since Doron “had never been that close to a tattoo in my life.”4 The elderly woman’s repeated return to the emergency room and her asking Doron whether she knew what the tattoo stood for led Doron to conclude that this medical encounter was about much more than the patient’s heart trouble: It was a call for listening to the stories that poured out of the patient. Some have claimed that the elderly patient was simulating her symptoms,5 yet it is worth noting that cardiological symptoms are often closely related to what is literally dear to one’s heart. The cumulative effect of severely stressful life events has been shown to take a toll on cardiovascular health.6 Being listened to as a form of stress relief from symptoms is not to be underestimated, and it seems that this act of empathetic listening to a survivor’s story was precisely what Doron was performing. Doron’s reaction of shock and fascination when confronted so closely with her patients’ tattooed arm from which she had to draw blood, left her wondering “what was her [the survivor’s] relationship to the number and what did people make of it? Did she eat ice cream with that arm? Had anybody ever kissed the number? And when she looked at it, did she feel that it was the mark of Cain or it was like a superhero insignia?” The tension between survivors’ interpretation of their tattoos as marks of shame and their potential resignification into “medals of honor” (Daniel Chanoch) is continually negotiated in Numbered, even though the documentary does not speak to the deeply transformative encounter between the woman Auschwitz survivor and Doron. Moreover, Numbered does not address that this ER encounter facilitated Doron’s belated awakening to a repressed part of her own family history: Doron’s own grandmother had been imprisoned in Auschwitz; however, she never shared her experience and did not have a tattoo.7 As for herself, Doron recounts, she wanted nothing to do with these stories and in fact had turned her back on them from age five on, when she had to look at disturbing images of the Holocaust at school. Doron states that she felt highly uncomfortable with commemorations that highlighted the “sense of being victimized because we were Jewish.”8 Her encounter with the elderly female Auschwitz survivor, however, completely changed her perspective, both as a physician and, it seems, as a third-generation granddaughter of an Auschwitz survivor. The physical proximity to the tattoo and listening to the patient’s story made Doron wonder how many tattooed Auschwitz survivors were still out there at this point, potentially in social isolation, with an urgent need to be listened to. I do bring up this point because for her collaborative film with Uriel Sinai—a professional photojournalist who works for Getty Images—Dana Doron sought out fifty Auschwitz survivors to interview them,



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but as they were doing the documentary, they went beyond merely documenting and creatively reframing Auschwitz survivors’ relationships to their tattoos, which have been, for many, a part of their post-Holocaust lives. Without ever referring to her own family history, Doron’s and Sinai’s interview film seeks to present survivors in a different light—one that speaks to their enduring resilience and empowerment. The film can also be more specifically understood as the quest of a third-generation descendant of Auschwitz survivors to discover, however belatedly, what survivors today actually think and feel about their own Auschwitz experience. As such, this quest ends up being highly successful in that it re-dignifies and revalorizes survivors and their stories, which are divulged and revealed on camera, often as the result of a dialogue between survivors and their family members of the second and third generation. It could be argued that the survivors featured in the film become speakers for those who don’t speak, because they won’t or can’t, or maybe choose not to, or because they may have survived Auschwitz but not old age; their tattoos become representative of those that have been erased and removed; their being there on camera speaks to their ability to serve as proxies that also resonate with Doron’s own family history and thus speak to the creation of a shared sense of community defined by the sense of what having survived Auschwitz means for the present and the future. Just as Doron’s own familial entanglement with the Holocaust is absent from the film, the interviewers remain off camera, ceding the stage fully to survivors and their initial sharing of memories of the act of being tattooed—their innermost thoughts, fears, and retrospective takes on the act. Interestingly enough, it is the work of the camera that provides Doron’s and coproducer Sinai’s unique third-generation perspective: The camera stands in for the filmmakers’ look but is also able to record the process of rediscovering survivors’ Auschwitz tattoos. This look does not flinch or turn away but rather gets close and conveys the seeing with fresh eyes of something long hidden and hiding—abstracting—the life it conceals beneath. At the same time, a deep emotional connection is made that extends beyond Doron’s singular encounter with her elderly female patient to the community of Auschwitz survivors still living and alive. As the camera performs its work, it mediates connections that establish new transgenerational affinities and bonds.

REFRAMING WITNESSING Much of Numbered resonates with the Primo Levi quotation that introduces the film: “With time, my tattoo has become part of my body. I do not display and do not hide it. I show it unwillingly to those who ask out of curiosity, readily and with anger to those who say they are incredulous.” Featuring a wide spectrum of survivors’ reactions and reflections on their Auschwitz tattoos, Numbered performs a succinctly third-generation modality of witnessing—one that highlights the historical significance of survivors keeping their Auschwitz tattoos thus defying the call for

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their erasure. The documentary is, in certain ways, a third-generation response to a question that Levi describes. Having been often asked by “young people” of why he does not have his tattoo erased, Levi replies: “This surprises me: why should I? There are not many of us in the world to bear this witness.” Levi’s assertion that survivors’ tattoos bear physical witness to Auschwitz is being reframed in Numbered as the third generation inventing its own audiovisual modalities of witnessing survivors’ tattoos and their narrated biographies. Third-generation witnessing in this documentary, I argue, deploys a radical resetting and reframing of the scene of photography from the very beginning. While the initial sequences in which survivors introduce themselves by way of their own number seems reminiscent of a Nazi roll call, this specific invocation of a past, injurious history is setting the stage for the telling of a different story, one of coping and healing from the point of view of the present. It is important that these interviews are conducted and filmed in color in the safe place of the studio setting to portray survivors’ stories in a different light. The studio’s black screen ensures that viewers’ attention is focused exclusively on survivors’ aging faces and tattooed arms. Close-ups of survivors’ faces and the distinctly tactile quality of the camera panning over the tattoo with what comes across as a gentle, loving touch are distinct characteristics of this third-generation cinematography. The reframing of survivors’ stories is indicated on an auditory level through the camera’s shutter clicks and rewinding noises that convey to viewers that new exposures are literally taking shape as viewers are watching. This is quite evident from the sequence of still photos introducing the three consecutive survivors Jacob Zawadzi, Menachem Sholowicz, and Asher Ud, who were next to each other in line when the tattoos were etched into their arms but had no relation to each other in the camps and only met by accident in Israel. The filmmakers lined them up in the same order they would have their received their tattoos. As their photos are taken, the clicking of the camera can be heard, and viewers see their black-and-white individual and group photos with their outstretched arms and tattooed numbers. In this participatory third-generation perspective, viewers can imagine themselves as a virtual-cinematic witness as they watch the visual process through which new images and oral archives of Auschwitz survivors and their tattoos are being created. What is central to this seemingly iterative restaging of the Nazi roll call is its profound temporal and spatial difference and distance from its historical precedent. It is no longer Nazi photographers filming the making of their own lethal history and documenting their victims through mug shots. Rather, the documentary constitutes an attempt in the present to undo and mediate by means of an empathetic camera the psychic injuries inflicted on Auschwitz survivors. Having survivors remember and speak their Auschwitz number in the safe setting of the studio, reimmerses them one last time, and only for the documentary record, in a past that they survived and from which they moved on. This powerful moment of reimmersion that lets viewers partake in the innermost feelings and thoughts of survivors when the tattoo was etched into their forearms represents a quintessentially second-generation scenario of



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witnessing in the sense of Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory.9 It temporarily conjures up the painful and pained experience of survivors and creates in the shared audiovisual moment of that historical experience an affective-immersive empathetic space of listening and watching—one that has the potential to instantiate viewers as empathic virtual witnesses. Needless to say, this tele-cinematic modality of witnessing is fleeting—and yet it serves to expose viewers to the kind of “cutting” experience Susan Sontag mentions when she discusses the long-lasting impact of her seeing for the first time photographs from the concentration camps.10 Several moments stand out from these initial scenes in which survivors hold out their tattooed forearms and say their numbers in German, Polish, and Yiddish—languages spoken in the concentration camps. Zoka Levy states that it is impossible for her to say her number in Hebrew. Barely audible but with a chilling effect, one unnamed male survivor literally says that his name is his number B2896—phonetically confounding the word for name and number (“Name/Nummer”). A voice-over of a survivor describes having tears in her eyes at that very moment of being tattooed because she felt like they were no longer human. Most remarkably, the documentary also features serial tattoos of two sisters who survived, Hanna and Sarah Tessler, though Hanna cannot remember her number anymore. Another survivor, Vera Rosenzweig, also states that she does not recall her number and adds that perhaps she does not want to remember it. This raises the question of whether having an Auschwitz tattoo not only implies the power of forgetting but also of intentional resignification of the original meaning of the Auschwitz number. The cumulative effect of these interviews is powerful, performatively passing on to viewers the traumatic affect that emerges in survivors’ narrative reenactment of the roll call. However, at the portrait sessions of the two sisters Hanna and Sarah remind us, the sharing of their innermost thoughts at the moment of having the numbers etched into their arms, is preceded by their loving sisterly embrace and laughter—thus emphasizing the healing from trauma while recalling their struggle for survival at Auschwitz. It is a specific characteristic of Numbered’s third-generation approach, that survivors’ revisiting of their traumatic past is frequently embedded within a larger context of having moved forward through the passage of time and to new loves and families. This by no means implies that the traumatic impact of survivors’ Auschwitz experience does not continue to haunt survivors. As much as this re-immersive individualized moment serves to document the very process and odds of surviving Auschwitz, it also signifies the crossroads at which survivors are shown to have reclaimed their lives, re-signified their tattoos, and made their own histories—in spite of the numbers that were to condemn them to death at Auschwitz. As discussed earlier, this process of having reclaimed their lives is signified photographically through the stunning black-and-white images taken during the interview sessions, producing memorable moments that re-dignify survivors as agents of their own post-Auschwitz history. One survivor in particular, Daniel Chanoch, an exuberant, skilled storyteller who credits his survival to having outsmarted the Nazis due to his “superiority” as a boy, describes his tattoo as a “medal” and even as

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a “sign of prestige.” In distinction to other survivors who keep their Auschwitz tattoo hidden for fear of being misread as a criminal, Daniel discusses publicly flashing his tattoo, saying: “I have a number, I am a celebrity.” The camera shows him as a bon vivant sipping wine on the veranda with his feet up—a shot accompanied by musical chords denoting Western films—and follows him gazing into the wide-open landscape. These peaceful scenes of living life to the fullest indicate that Daniel has managed to regain an equilibrium between his present life and his jarring past, as narrated to high school classes. The representation of Daniel’s tongue-in-cheek persona and lighthearted take on his tattoo is a case in point that articulates the new third-generation perspective, which is cognizant of second-generation processing of survivor history, but which does not prioritize the moment of traumatic reenactment. In both, Claude Lanzmann’s cinematography of reenacting survivor history in situ (e.g., Shoah) and Marianne Hirsch’s second-generation concept of postmemory, the (re)creation of temporary scenarios of re-traumatization is central to the articulation of a second-generation position of belated witnessing.11 The third-generation perspective featured in this documentary clearly moves away from the arduous process of painfully working through past trauma that has characterized much of the theory and cinematography of the second generation.12 At the same time, as I will discuss shortly, the transgenerational setting of the interviews as well as the choreography of the camera highlight a significant generational difference between the second and third generations—most noticeably among descendants of survivors and the broader Tel Aviv youth tattoo culture. It is clear that the filmmakers Doron and Sinai are drawing on the traditions of second-generation visual representation of the Holocaust, especially in the initial roll call enactment that seems reminiscent of Lanzmann’s cinematography of reenactment. However, it quickly becomes clear that here survivors restage their experience of original trauma only in order to redirect injurious remembrance of the violation of body, individuality, and autonomy onto a different trajectory. In other words, this sequence performs the movement from second- to third-generation cinematography and does not dwell on the second-generation invocation of the temporary reliving of a traumatic past. While the concept of second-generation postmemory focuses on the continuing affective effects of histories of loss by intertwining the project of mourning with a seemingly unending trauma anchored in the past, this third-generation filmmaking highlights survivors’ agency and their ability to transform trauma into lived biography—potentially still steeped in precariousness but nevertheless replete with a life reclaimed after Auschwitz.



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ENABLING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATION— THE THIRD-GENERATION CAMERA Several survivors communicate on camera how they tried to protect their children from the burden of sharing their Auschwitz experience, or also, how talking about their Auschwitz number to their families was too traumatic for them. Gita Kalderon, a survivor who is shown being treated for cancer, kept her story hidden from her children, and she would not answer their questions about her tattoo. While painting a picture of flowers, she says, “I thought that telling them about the horrors I had endured would make them sad, and I didn’t want that. I used to sing to them; my heart would be crying while my mouth was singing.” Gita did not share her experience for fear of passing on the burden to the second generation. She describes how performing “happiness” for her children was emotionally traumatic. The process of showing her painting in a home full of bright colors implies that the process of coping with trauma is still ongoing. Jacob Zawadzki, one of the three survivors with consecutive numbers, describes the “gentleman’s agreement” between him and his children so they would not ask or talk about the tattoo since he “could not finish a single sentence without crying three times.” Narrating their experience at Auschwitz to their children—the second generation—clearly constitutes an undue emotional burden for survivors, one that risks re-traumatizing them in the very act of telling their stories about Auschwitz—a place that Gita characterizes as a non-world: “I come from the farthest reaches of the world, where there is no more world.” These and other interviews suggest that when an empathetic but neutral—i.e., non-family, unrelated—observer, the third-generation camera, steps in, some survivors feel enabled to share what previously they could or would not. This new perspective allows for the reception of autobiographical narratives that would have been difficult or impossible to disclose in the family setting. It thus bridges a crucial generational gap between survivors and their descendants, as the former tell their previously unspeakable stories and the latter listen. The assumption that stories of survival at Auschwitz as mediated through the tattoo would be shared at home clearly starkly varies from survivor to survivor. In fact, it seems as though the family can in certain instances prove rather constraining and prevent survivors from telling their stories due to complicated family dynamics. This is what makes Doron’s and Sinai’s critical intervention and reframing of survivors all the more important. Survivors’ decision to keep their experience to themselves is also a coping mechanism designed primarily to protect their psyches from further traumatization. Zwi Steinitz remarked that shared knowledge in this case does not alleviate suffering, but on the contrary: “The more you know, the more you suffer.” Numbered’s third-generation perspective also reveals a striking range of societal misinterpretations of survivors’ Auschwitz tattoos, thereby complicating Primo Levi’s strong preference to keep the tattoo in order to have it bear witness. Given the numerous unconscious or conscious misreadings that survivors with Auschwitz tattoos are exposed to in the public, it is questionable whether survivors should be repeatedly

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subjected to injurious misinterpretations. Ideally, the Auschwitz number should be legible as such and perceived for what it is in Israel, even though Jacob Zawadzki remarks: “When people see the number, they know that person has endured a great deal, but for that person, the number holds no greatness.” Even if others think of the tattoo as a symbol of honor, resilience, and pride, the tattoo engraved in the skin also serves as a constant reminder of the “dark times” survivors endured. In fact, it is often children and young people who misinterpret the tattoos. Menachem Sholowicz, one of the three survivors with consecutive numbers, recounts how he was approached by children in Haifa when he wore a short-sleeved shirt. They asked him: “What’s that number for? Were you in prison? Were you a thief?” He comments: “I stopped wearing short-sleeved shirts ever since.” This is an example for why survivors choose to hide their tattoos or remove them permanently, since they could attract negative attention. Vera Rosenzweig gives another, less hurtful, example of historical ignorance. This incident happened in the United States. A young female teller at a bank commented on Vera’s and her friend’s Auschwitz tattoos, mistaking them for self-selected expressions of personal taste and artistic preference: “Yours ends with a 4, hers with a 5. That’s cool!” Vera played along, saying “Yeah, that’s cool. That’s from a different period in my life.” In contrast to Daniel Chanoch’s open flaunting and showcasing of his tattoo, other survivors, such as Menachem Sholowicz, prefer to hide their Auschwitz tattoos, for example, under clothing, so as to avoid any confrontations or assumptions they might generate. For some survivors, the tattoo signified a mark that labeled survivors and allowed judgment to be passed on them. Toward the beginning of the film, a camera-shy Ruth Bondy—who became a judge—shares with the interviewers her reasons for having her tattoo removed: For her it was a constant reminder that she, in the eyes of other Israelis, must have survived Auschwitz by compromising herself. “The popular opinion at the time was ‘Darwinistic,’ that only the cruel survived, those willing to tread over the bodies so I decided to remove it.” Interestingly enough, Ruth waves away the camera that is taking new pictures of her, telling it off with a “all right, enough already.” Ruth gives powerful reasons, challenging Primo Levi’s point of view, for why survivors ought not be resubjected to misinformed societal opinion and judgment simply for having survived. She calls into question the historical weight of the Auschwitz numbers, stating: “Compared to the countless who were killed, who lost their children. What’s in a number? It’s just a number.” At the same time she also recalls that the physician at a hospital in Haifa who removed her number mentioned that it was “a mark of honor.” However, Ruth insists that to her it was no mark of honor. Ruth remains the only interviewee in the film who shares her reasons for having the number removed. As mentioned earlier, Zoka Levy describes how she deliberately rotated her arm when the tattoo was etched into it, so that if she were to ever get out of the camps, it would not be as visible. Zoka reports that it was her children, in particular, who asked her whether she would not get the tattoo erased. She also shares the impact the tattoo had on her four-year old son when he asked her about it and she explained that “bad



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people did it.” The son, asking whether there had not been any “Maccabees” (Jewish warriors) around to protect her, then proclaims that he will have children who will become “Maccabees” to protect Zoka. She adds melancholically: “A Maccabee he became,” and the viewer is led to infer that he lost his life in defending Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Numbered accompanies Zoka on several shopping trips to the mall, revealing that her compulsive shopping for clothes can be read as a continued (and continually failing) attempt to come to terms with her experience at Auschwitz—of never having to feel cold again, as she states—a coping mechanism that also sets in as she describes mourning the loss of her son.

SECOND- AND THIRD-GENERATION REPRODUCTIONS OF SURVIVOR TATTOOS One of Numbered’s numerous breathtaking moments is its featuring of Hanna Rabinovitz’s desire to have her father’s (Leon Klinger) Auschwitz tattoo reproduced on her ankle. As she is shown to intently listen to her father’s voice recordings from her computer, it becomes clear that her decision to have her father’s tattoo etched onto her body is very much driven by the desire of an intergenerational connectedness, an emotional bond that signifies both her father’s experience at Auschwitz but also the more banal ways in which his number was “tamed” in the context of the family—for instance, when it became the code for the family safe. Hanna keeps insisting that her father’s Auschwitz tattoo was an essential part of him, just “as his freckles,” and that she decided a “few days before he died” that she “wanted that number to be tattooed on me too”—even though, she intersperses, her father most likely would not have approved of her decision to do so. Hannah clearly asserts her second-generation autonomy in not seeking her father’s approval and describing in detail what the very act of reproducing her father’s Auschwitz number means to her. The very fact that she consented to having the producer’s camera accompany and record her experience in the Tel Aviv tattoo parlor, with the ironic twist of getting her father’s number wrong the first time so that it needs to be corrected, makes this segment a documentation of her unique second-generation experience. The camera’s documentation of her physical pain as she endures having the incorrect tattoo blotted out and the correct number tattooed on her ankle very much resonates with Marianne Hirsch’s insight that second-generation memory seeks to temporarily reenact, or relive with a difference, a survivor parent’s experience of trauma. At the same time, however, such resonance even in Hanna’s otherwise clear-cut case is somewhat complicated by various factors that undermine any claim to an easy classification. For example, even though Hanna copies her father’s number onto her own body to acknowledge and in a way share and relive his horrific traumatic experience, she also displaces it onto her ankle, thereby transforming it partly into something else: a personal commemoration of her father, a memento mori, that occupies the space usually reserved for ornamental anklets. This strategic displacement renders the

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tattoo invisible under everyday clothing and thereby gives Hannah the power to control the effect its reproduction might elicit in public. As such, the tattoo does not make Hanna’s body subject to the kind of public interpellation that is typical of third-generation descendants who frankly flaunt their Auschwitz-commemorative tattoos (as exemplified by Ayal Gelles, Abramo Nascon’s grandson, also featured in the film, who will be discussed below). Second, the scene essentially includes the contemporary tattoo artist who has a commercial interest when providing tattoos and who, in Hanna’s case, is quite nonchalant and ahistorical as he wields the tools of his trade. He searches for a suitable font on the internet to reproduce the number’s historicity and then suggests blotting out the mistaken number with the colorful image of a snake, as if hers was a nothing but a mundane, ornamental tattoo. Hanna responds to his suggestion: “It’s about the Holocaust, after all.” Whether or not the tattoo artist understands what that means to her, the scene’s very setting illustrates the historical contingency of the Auschwitz tattoo and the precariousness of its readable specificity. There is—today—nothing like a universal readability of the Auschwitz tattoo. This observation seems confirmed by many of the survivors who testified in Numbered about how their numbers have often been misread in public. Moreover, even in Israel, it seems that the significance of the Auschwitz tattoo has been forgotten by recent public youth cultures; in fact, it seems it has essentially been erased from the scope of what interests (even Israeli) youth. It could thus be argued that the specificity of the Auschwitz tattoo and its cultural meaning has been displaced and supplanted by the arrival of a modern, more cheerful, youth tattoo culture. The brief interchange between Hanna and the tattoo artist (clearly a representative of such a modern youth culture) that follows his successful etching of the correct number onto her ankle, is highly instructive. When she exclaims, “I finally did it,” the tattoo artist responds, “No, I did it”—missing the point that Hanna’s comment was not about the physical act and expertise of reproducing her father’s tattoo but about her own “wish fulfillment” and taking on the burden of familialhistorical memory—about a second-generation dream having come true with all manner of detours and aberrations. While Numbered only features one example of second-generation reproduction of tattoos (Hannah’s story), the contrast with the third-generation reproduction of a grandfather’s Auschwitz tattoo also featured in the film could not be starker. This contrast illustrates the stakes of the shift from second- to third-generation memory. In a stunning shot, a beaming Ayal Gelles showcases his third-generation tattoo with his arms interlocked with his grandfather, Abramo Nascon, as they compare their tattoos. Like his grandfather, Ayal has numbers tattooed on the underside of his forearm—in the same spot where his grandfather’s arm is marked by the Auschwitz number. But in Ayal’s case the font is clearly enlarged, presumably for everybody to see. Most strikingly, Abramo examines his grandson’s tattoo approvingly and states in response to Ayal’s comments that he got it “so [he] won’t forget”: “You and all of us. And if anyone asks you, you tell them, ‘My grandfather was in the Holocaust, that’s why I did it,’ so they remember. So that they know and never forget.” Having



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Abramo’s tattoo reproduced is clearly a matter of familial pride for both. Ayal’s very public display, which is meant to invite responses, can be thought of as a publicly legible body memorial. The shots of Ayal’s and Abramo’s interlocked arms, Abramo’s powerful endorsement of the third-generation appropriation of his tattoo, and Ayal’s engaged transmission of his grandfather’s story—these documented moments manifest a touching transgenerational bond and the instance of an ethics of care that seem to be a feature of third-generation memory. One could argue that, from a generational perspective, the third generation was spared the trauma of growing up with a survivor parent and, consequently, the relationship between grandchildren and grandparent survivors is marked by an emotional ease, pride in one another and, most noticeably, an interaction not overwhelmed by historical trauma. Such new relationship bonds engaged in by survivors, which emphasize present-day living and emotional connectivity, permeate the film. The fact that Daniel Chanoch can be represented in the film not just as a survivor but as a survivor who is also a bon vivant—as the sequence that introduces him sipping wine on a lush veranda illustrates—is a characteristic of third-generation documentary filmmaking. What are some of the elements of third-generation cinematography as made manifest throughout Numbered? There is the focus on showcasing individual and collective video and photo portraits of survivors as well as cameras and recording devices, which are in full view, even while the film’s directors are noticeably absent from any of their shots. This seems to imply that even though the event is clearly staged for a public audience to see, it is not directed by auteurs who prescript the scene. The loving care we are invited to witness is not the effect of artifice even though it owes its visibility to the constraints of art and technology. The last scenes illustrate the poignancy of current transgenerational bonds between subjects as the directors capture survivors’ individual and collective experience by recording their comments. They range from Sara Tessler—one of the sisters with a consecutive number—anxiously observing that her tattoo is barely visible, to a survivor inquiring whether anybody from the Yavoshna camp is among those gathered. The absence of response, and Gita Kalderon’s comment that she has been unable to locate anybody of her original family, paired with her statement, “Thank God for the small new family. There are not many, but thank God,” drives home the point that this generation of survivors assembled for Numbered, is the last generation to livingly embody the historical legacy of Auschwitz—while, most important, Numbered itself is shown to be in the process of creating new documentary legacies. The defiance shown by survivors as they all turn their tattooed arms to the camera is breathtaking, illustrating that they managed to re-signify the Auschwitz tattoo and reclaim their lives.13 As the camera pans across their tattooed arms and smiling faces, the configuration of survivors evokes the figure of a ship at sea—an image which is then powerfully shown as the last black-and-white still of a legacy defined by survivors themselves. Despite the somber atmosphere and the Chaim’s song of lamentation commemorating those who died in the Nazi concentration camps, Daniel Chanoch’s tongue-in-cheek manner manages to insert humor as he cracks yet another joke about Hitler. Daniel’s spoofing of the

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Hitler greeting exemplifies some of the healing power that parody and comedy can bring to those, at least, who manage to survive. The documentary makes clear that, behind each individual Auschwitz number, there is a trove of individual experience and memories. And while the film focuses on the Auschwitz tattoos of survivors who are still alive, it necessarily must account also for those who died or who passed away in the meantime. The most important accomplishment of this documentary may be its intervention into the very present, defined as a moment when Auschwitz tattoos are slowly fading from general social legibility, even as their abstract and gruesome universality is commemorated at Holocaust memorials and museums. The living-on of survivors’ history and individual memory necessitates innovative approaches, and Dana Doron and Uriel Sinai managed to create a third-generation blueprint for modes of documentary filmmaking still to come.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baron, Lawrence. “The Wandering Review: ‘Numbered,’” San Diego Jewish World, December 25, 2012. www​.sdjewishworld​.com​/2012​/12​/25​/the​-wandering​-review​-numbered​/. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Explorations in Memory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Heckner, Elke. “Whose Trauma Is It? Identification and Secondary Witnessing in the Age of Postmemory.” David Bathrick, Brad Prager, Michael Richardson (eds). Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008, 62–85. Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory.” Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001, 215–46. Numbered [Sfurim]. Dana Doron and Uriel Sinai, 2012. Pfefferman, Naomi. “Scars of Israel’s ‘Numbered’” Jewish Journal, April 10, 2013. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1989. Steir-Livny, Liat. Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third-Generation Survivors in Israel. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019. Steptoe, Andrew, and Mika Kivimäki. “Stress and cardiovascular disease.” Nature Reviews Cardiology 9.6 (2012): 360.

NOTES 1. In her excellent survey of recent third-generation documentaries in Israel, Liat Steir-Livny argues that Numbered “undermines the term Holocaust survivors” as a one-size-fits-all identity designator since it “introduces [survivors as] a heterogeneous group in which there are more differences than similarities.” Steir-Livny, Liat. Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third-Generation Survivors in Israel. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019, 140. 2. In an interview with the Jewish Journal, codirector Uriel Sinai, an award-winning photographer with Getty Images, mentions that Dana Doron and he first considered a book on Auschwitz survivors. However, since he “had just received a new Canon EOS 5D camera” which enabled him to take both still images and shoot video clips, he suggested to



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Doron to use both techniques to represent the survivors. Naomi Pfefferman, “Scars of Israel’s ‘Numbered’” Jewish Journal, April 10, 2013. 3. In her edited volume Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth makes an important argument for the incomprehensibility and unspeakability of survivors’ trauma. Her discussion of Claude Lanzmann’s cinematic approach to Shoah highlights the very limits of representation and speakability. “Recapturing the Past: Introduction.” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1995), 153–55. Third-generation documentary filmmaking in Numbered does not negate Caruth’s argument. Rather, it makes visible the very conditions under which survivors’ narration of their experience at Auschwitz can take place. Thus, Numbered can be said to deconstruct the dichotomy between, on the one hand, discourses of unrepresentability and unspeakability—often asserted by survivors themselves—and, on the other, the unique third-generation aesthetics that draws on photography and film in order to enable survivors’ speech about their experience at Auschwitz in non-injurious terms. 4. Naomi Pfefferman, “Scars of Israel’s ‘Numbered’” Jewish Journal, April 10, 2013. 5. See Steir-Livny, 137. 6. Steptoe, Andrew, and Mika Kivimäki. “Stress and cardiovascular disease.” Nature Reviews Cardiology 9.6 (2012): 360. 7. Naomi Pfefferman, “Scars of Israel’s ‘Numbered’” Jewish Journal, April 10, 2013. 8. Naomi Pfefferman, “Scars of Israel’s ‘Numbered’” Jewish Journal, April 10, 2013. 9. Hirsch, Marianne, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory.” Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001): 215–46. See also my article on Marianne Hirsch: Heckner, Elke. “Whose Trauma Is It? Identification and Secondary Witnessing in the Age of Postmemory.” David Bathrick, Brad Prager, Michael Richardson (eds). Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory (Rochester: Camden House, 2008): 62–85. 10. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1989), 19, 20. Also quoted in Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” 215. 11. See my discussion of belated witnessing in “Whose Trauma Is It? Identification and Secondary Witnessing in the Age of Postmemory,” 66–71. 12. See also Steir-Livny’s discussion of the difference betwen second- and third-generation documentary Israeli film in her Epilogue, 242–47. 13. See also Lawrence Baron’s comments on how the survivors featured in the film reclaimed their lives: “Whatever psychological and physical wounds these survivors still bear, they reentered the ranks of the living and became citizens of states and the spouses and parents of a new generation of Jews. Numbered restores their individuality in another way by shattering our stereotypes of survivors.” Baron, Lawrence, “The Wandering Review: ‘Numbered,’” San Diego Jewish World, December 25, 2012.

7 Representations of Identity and the Holocaust Archive in Third-Generation Graphic Narrative Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home Dana Mihăilescu

Important scholarly works have mapped the contours of third-generation literary narratives over the last decade (Berger 2010; Aarons 2016; Aarons and Berger 2017). This paper builds on the features of third-generation literature identified by the abovementioned scholars, using a broad understanding of the third generation as encompassing anyone born after the immediate post–World War II decades, i.e., after the mid-1960s, as grandchildren of victims, (co-)perpetrators, and/or bystanders who were also shaped by other factors like gender, class, family status, genealogy, religion, or other individual circumstances. This is an eclectic category characterized by vastly different experiences and legacies in connection to the Holocaust past (Schaumann 15–16, 223–24). While existent studies have primarily focused on the writings of grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, I will address a less-explored path and examine the representations of German and Jewish identity and the Holocaust archive in a graphic narrative by a granddaughter of (co-)perpetrators. This will extend the findings of Erin McGlothlin (2006) and Caroline Schaumann (2008) on the legacies of perpetration in second-generation literature. More precisely, I will examine how Nora Krug, a third-generation artist of German background, who married an American Jew, uses the Holocaust archive similarly or differently from the second generation, as a marker of identity, in her widely acclaimed graphic narrative, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (2018). Her book has won, among many other titles from prestigious US cultural magazines and outlets, the 2019 National Book Critics’ Circle Award and the 2019 Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize from the Pennsylvania Center for the Book. I investigate if Krug’s quest for details and concept of home (Heimat) rely on similar or divergent tropes as 99

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those from third-generation witnesses’ narratives. I will also explore to what extent her concerns and visual narrative strategies are like those of third-generation Jewish American artists like Amy Kurzweil, a granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, as they emerge from Kurzweil’s graphic review of Krug’s book, “From the Notebook of a Fellow Graphic Memoirist” (2018). In that, I echo Caroline Schaumann’s vantage point from Memory Matters that only a dialogue between Jewish and non-Jewish perspectives, as well as a juxtaposition of memories of Nazi German perpetrators and those of the victims of the Holocaust, can foreground “reciprocal connections and discrepancies” and offer a nuanced framework of reference on victimhood, collaboration, and instances where both intersect (Schaumann 5–6). This applies to Nora Krug’s narrative, as she starts the book with a prologue in which soon after her arrival in New York, she remembers meeting an elderly woman who asks her where she comes from. Once she answers Germany, the woman, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, tells her how she also lived in Germany “[a] long, long time ago” and she survived a concentration camp because one of the female guards who “had exhibited merciless violence toward everyone else in the camp” rescued her from the gas chamber “sixteen times at the last moment,” most likely because she had a crush on her (Krug, n.p.). This opens Krug’s own reckoning as a German with the possible perpetrator past of her family as well as with how one could assess incongruities of people’s behavior like that of the female guard. For scholars of literature by the third-generation grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, the main signposts characterizing this generation’s works refer to their functioning as “narratives of collision and collusion” that “give voice to absence” and “pay homage to that which was tragically lost” in the Holocaust (Aarons, Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives, xv), just as they resist the idea of “the Shoah existing as the singular marker of Jewish history and identity” (Aarons, ThirdGeneration Holocaust Narratives, 20). Rather than putting the focus on imagining the events of the Holocaust, they capitalize on the effort to put together, coherently, bits of information from various types of documents, archival research sources, and narrative fragments (Aarons and Berger 5–7; Aarons, Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives, 21). Overall, third-generation narratives “are primarily interested in locating and shaping an appropriate response to living in a post-Holocaust world” (Aarons, Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives, 33) while being aware that the Holocaust is balanced by other important histories (Aarons and Berger 11). As such, an ethical response and responsibility to link the Holocaust tragedy with present and future problematic events seems to be the driving force behind the literature of the third generation (Bayer 117; Larkey, “Transcending Memory in Holocaust Survivors’ Families,” 224; Mihăilescu 107–8), in which the trope of the quest intersecting history and personal stories shapes the plot (Aarons and Berger 12). In focusing on second-generation children of survivors and perpetrators, Erin McGlothlin’s Second-Generation Holocaust Literature underscores the trope of the World War II stigma as the structurally analogous, albeit indirect, extreme experience of trauma and violence marking their lives. McGlothlin argues that, for children of



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survivors, the World War II stigma was linked to their shame for lack of agency and the “unintegrated trauma and rupture in familial continuity” (5–6). For children of perpetrators it was linked with guilt for the parents’ refusal to admit responsibility for their complicity and abuse of agency, in addition to shame about “the family’s unintegratable history of violation and brutality” (McGlothlin 10). In ending her book with some passing notes on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, McGlothlin also touches on third-generation literature. For McGlothlin, the specifics of Foer’s third-generation novel is represented by a shared quest and the creation of a common space to review the past on the part of a grandchild of survivors and one of a co-perpetrator, one “produc[ing] a shared narrative of both the Holocaust and the present” (McGlothlin 232). Caroline Schaumann expands McGlothlin’s brief ideas on Foer. Most broadly, Schaumann identifies the characteristic feature of third-generation grandchildren of perpetrators as represented by two vectors. One is their “post-unification perspective that includes inquiries into both perpetration and victimhood in Nazi Germany and the postwar era” (Schaumann 225). The other vector is the fact that, for the third generation, “the Holocaust is not the only historic condition: there are other important historical turns, caesuras, and losses” (Schaumann 226). Schaumann identifies three main dimensions of representing the Holocaust specific to third-generation works: first, openly drawing attention to and scrutinizing the processes of communication, mediation, distortion, and selective remembrance and forgetting for recuperating this past; second, moving beyond “the dual victim-perpetrator typology” toward an emphasis on “intertwined, multifaceted” aspects and ethical concerns; and third, “in Germany, the generation of grandchildren seems especially interested in how the Nazi legacy connects to similarly ordinary family memories and stories” (242–43). Krug’s visual narrative Belonging foregrounds all these three points identified by Schaumann. Krug does this by building on what Schaumann calls the struggle of the third generation (those born in the 1970s–1980s) to discuss the discrepancy between what one learned about the Holocaust in school and at home, including the public memory and the family’s memory of the Holocaust. Krug especially decries how teaching the Holocaust in German schools resisted mentioning German suffering and presenting its relation to family, everyday life, although this was an important aspect of the World War II experience (Schaumann 265, 301–2). Krug also pinpoints how in school the focus was placed on German perpetration in broad terms, including sophisticated analyses of Hitler’s speeches and engagement with Jewish survivors who came to class giving their testimonies. Meanwhile the everyday, local Holocaust happenings remained silent: We prepared questions for the old women who traveled from America to tell us about the camp, but we never thought to ask about one another’s grandparents. . . . We didn’t learn that tens of thousands of Germans had been killed for resisting the Nazi regime (because it would have made our grandparents who didn’t resist look guiltier in comparison?), or that 150,000 men of Jewish descent had fought in the WEHRMACHT (because their participation would have made us feel less guilty?); we learned little about

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the losses endured during the Allied bombings, or about the millions of Germans who had been displaced from Germany’s former eastern regions after 1945 (because we knew that feeling sorry for ourselves was wrong?). Because we never learned about contemporary Jewish culture, we associated the word JUDE strictly with the Holocaust and we understood that it could be uttered only in a whisper. We never learned about what happened in our own hometown. We never learned the lyrics to our national anthem. We never learned old folk songs. We struggled to understand the meaning of HEIMAT. (Krug, n.p.)

For assessing the above-decried gaps of Holocaust education in 1980s Germany, Krug roots her narrative in the tradition of American graphic narratives popularized by Art Spiegelman’s Maus about his father’s experiences during World War II, following the second-generation son/cartoonist’s struggle with the “impact [of the Holocaust] on the survivors and those who survive the survivors” (Spiegelman, Metamaus, 73). Like Spiegelman, who expressed these concerns by means of the animal metaphor, with mice standing for Jews and cats for Nazis, Krug initiates her concern about the Holocaust with a question she asked her mother on returning from religious school, in which she was told that “Jews killed Jesus” (Krug, n.p.). Once home, the girl, dressed in a panther costume, asks her mother: “Are Jews evil?” (Krug, n.p.). The mother sharply discards the question, “Of course they aren’t!! Who told you that?” and the parent’s anger leads to the girl’s conclusion that “Jews—all Jews—were good” (Krug, n.p.). As this dialogue occurs, Krug draws herself in a panther costume she used to wear at the time, one that the mother had sewn for a carnival, while the mother is depicted as a wolf, with a cat [sic] drawn on her greenish apron. In this panel, Krug’s representation of her mother as a wolf makes use of two representational practices linking wolves and Jews since medieval times, which also inspired Sigmund Freud’s inquiry into a patient’s dreams by calling it the “Wolf Man” case. Freud recalled the case in his 1918 The History of an Infantile Neurosis, but the connection between wolves and Jews also functioned as an autobiographical context for Freud’s coming-of-age. These representational practices have followed moments when wolves have embodied humans in the Judaic and Christian traditions. On one hand, in the Judaic tradition wolves have stood for “potentially compassionate” beings that might stand for the more vulnerable members of a community, as Jews often were. On the other hand, the Christian tradition has drawn wolves as “the consummate embodiment of the Jewish threat” (O’Donoghue 555). This Christian legacy of representing a particular connection between Jews and wolves continued in the era of the Nazi genocide “when all Germans, adults as well as children, were expected to read Grimms’ Fairy Tales” with the official version of “Little Red Riding Hood” featuring the six-pointed star-of-David on the wolf in grandmotherly disguise, “a projection of a belief in the shared proximal malevolence of wolves and Jews” (O’Donoghue 561–62). Krug’s drawing of the mother as a wolf reverses the Christian legacy of connecting wolves with the Jewish threat as she depicts the German mother as the wolf and not Jews; this manages to single out the mother’s assumed guilt for what happened in the Holocaust and correct it through her sharp



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attitude dismissing the antisemitic rhetoric. Moreover, the mother as a wolf stands for a compassionate, anti-racist person who teaches the same values to her daughter in a fairy-tale-like structure that runs against the grain of German religious education in post-Holocaust times, suggesting how remnants of the Nazi era have continued to remain part of the Christian tradition taught in Germany after the end of the Holocaust. Given these structuring choices, on the one hand, like her fellow third-generation graphic artist Kurzweil in her series of semi-autobiographical comics GutterFace, Krug here borrows from Spiegelman the use of “animal allegory to shed light on, and ponder over, humanity’s flaws and foibles” (Mihăilescu 94). On the other hand, again like Kurzweil, as a member of the third generation, she extends its use in comparison to the second generation by developing and openly assuming its fairy-tale imaginary contours for their childhood selves, giving to it a play-like quality which was absent for the second generation and which exudes from the page setup, the style of drawing, and the ample use of color, reminiscent of illustrations from children’s books. Krug’s dreamscape, children’s-book style is like the equally richly hued colored pencils of another third-generation artist born in Germany in the 1970s, Maureen Burdock. In her 2022 graphic memoir Queen of Snails, Burdock explores another difficult family history connected to Germany and World War II, as it deals with intergenerational trauma, the quest for identity, and the concept of home for the artist who grew up queer alongside a religious mother who emigrated with her to Chicago to escape domestic violence, and there joined her grandmother, a former Nazi youth leader, Holocaust minimizer, and Nazi nostalgic. As in the case of Burdock and Kurzweil, this drawing style openly signals the metacritical dimension at the basis of third-generation narratives, one that draws attention to the artists’ conscious act of framing the family members as characters in their narratives (Mihăilescu 98). This strategy allows third-generation artists to highlight the performativity of identities for family members who lived during World War II or in its shadows, allowing them to navigate the norms of the various societies in which they lived. Krug primarily contributes to the third generation’s representation of the relation between the Holocaust and identity by broadening the scope of the concept of home. As Tahneer Oksman has thoughtfully demonstrated, the home functions as a significant element in the visual constructions of Jewish American women’s identities and is a link that enables the new generations to relate to other women in their lives (Oksman 5–6). In the case of Jewish American artists, this stands for the idea of the family home and intergenerational transmission. Kurzweil, for instance, uses it as a chapter-by-chapter means of structuring her graphic narrative Flying Couch by comparing her own experiences in her parents’ home and her grandmother’s home in the United States with the grandmother’s experience of loss of home and family members during World War II (Mihăilescu 106–7). The concept of home functions differently for German American Krug, in connection to the German concept of Heimat standing for the German homeland and with the artist’s choice to include, as

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structuring elements of her visual narrative, eight entries taken “from the notebook of a homesick émigré” that connect with eight “Things German” numbered from 1 to 81 and six entries taken “from the scrapbook of a memory archivist” that connect with six “flea market find” numbered from 1 to 6.2 As such, Krug’s narrative highlights the topical, thorny issue of migration and displacement in relation to that of Jews’ deportation and death during World War II in her repeated emphases on “the notebook of a homesick émigré.” The German artifacts she mentions therein run the gambit from positive (efficient, comfort-supporting, or tasty) objects to the possible danger of “the forest” (which was a common site used by Nazi soldiers to murder Jews surreptitiously in various regions during World War II) and the stereotypical antisemitic contours of “the poisonous mushroom” which was one of the marks branding the Jews as inferior in the popular imaginary in Germany following the 1938 German publication of a collection of antisemitic children’s stories. Krug connects all this, in chapter 2, with her privileged status of an émigré to the United States, as “from this safe distance, I allow myself to see the loss it [Germany] once endured” (Krug, n.p.). These representations thereby emphasize the need to address local practices of engaging with the Nazi policies and Jewish neighbors during World War II in Germany, engagements which were largely kept unaddressed in German society as the artist grew up. To give further weight to this idea, the “flea market finds” at the basis of her “scrapbook of a memory archivist” represent a large collection of World War II memorabilia from Germany. They emphasize many average individuals’ indoctrination with Nazi policies from as early as the primers they studied in school that led to the creation of a strong squad of “Hitler Youth[s]” (Krug, n.p.). They also comprise people’s attempts to hide their connection to the Nazis in postwar times, some everyday snippets of life and concerns some of the Germans who became soldiers and prisoners of war were contemplating in photos and letters sent to their family members. This collection of artifacts that Krug connects to the idea of an archive with a large potential of expansion suggests that, for the third generation, to address the Holocaust and the concept of Heimat means to inquire into both perpetration and victimhood in Nazi Germany and the postwar era. It also means to closely scrutinize Germans’ involvement in World War II happenings and their postwar memory at the local and family level, without which there could only be an unproductive assessment of this dark episode of history. Krug brings to light two family histories involving familiar perpetrators. One is that of her maternal grandfather Willi Rock, who worked as a chauffeur for a Jewish salesman, voted for Social Democrats in 1933, and joined the Nazi Party a few months later. The other is that of her paternal uncle Franz-Karl Krug, a fervent National Socialist who died of a bullet to his chest at eighteen years old as he was fighting in Hitler’s army in Italy in 1944. Franz-Karl’s death occurred two years before the birth of Krug’s father, who was named after him. This latter case is the hardest to assess, as her father knew nothing of his elder brother, and in 1975 he broke with his eighteen-years-older sister, Annemarie, perhaps on account of this dead brother, with Krug reconnecting with her only in her



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eighties to prevent letting the uncle’s memory be “buried” (Krug, n.p.). Meanwhile, both Annemarie’s children and a 1961 questionnaire from the uncle’s hometown, Külsheim, that Krug finds in the archives attest to their ignorance of “the Jewish question,” a continuing veiled sense of prejudice toward Jews, and a simplified view of how the local Jews were treated well by their German neighbors during World War II. This view is reinforced when Krug meets local historian Hans who started interviewing local people in the 1980s and they initially claimed never witnessing any openly anti-Jewish act. Hence, the quest and flexible concept of Heimat Krug puts forth in her narrative emerges. Krug adds another layer of narrative strategies through the choice of an introduction, fifteen chapters and an epilogue in which she divides the book and especially the titles she gives to the chapters. These read: 1. “Early Dawning”; 2. “Forgotten Songs”; 3. “Poisonous Mushrooms”; 4. “Keeping Time”; 5. “Unhealed Wounds”; 6. “Looking Inside”; 7. “Closing In”; 8. “Fathomless Forests”; 9. “Melting Ice”; 10. “Looking for Traces”; 11. “Soft Return”; 12. “Following the Flock”; 13. “Peeling Wallpaper”; 14. “Blinding Whiteness”; 15. “Shaking Hands.” On the one hand, the title of chapter 1 is meant to anchor the narrative into a cerebral mode of development and the titles from chapters 6, 7, 10, and 12 put forth the third-generation trope of the quest intersecting history and personal stories to shape the plot (Aarons and Berger 12). On the other hand, the rest of the chapter titles imbricate descriptive, nostalgia-related titles about Germany as a pastoral home (like those from Chapters 2 and 8) sustaining the traditionally constructed notion of Heimat “as an aggregate concept for sentimental longing, idyllic landscapes, and idealized relationships freed of conflict” (Larkey, “New Places, New Identities,” 24) with the descriptive title of chapter 3, “Poisonous Mushrooms” (suggesting antisemitic stereotypes) and the trauma-based or action-instilling titles of chapters 4, 5, 9, 11, 13, and 15. This nexus disrupts any smooth recuperation of a romantic, fairy-tale-like representation of Germany in light of its World War II past, following Krug’s confession at the end of chapter 2, before she embarks on her quest to get as many details about her family’s implication in World War II, that “a nagging sense of unease won’t disappear. Perhaps the only way to find the HEIMAT that I’ve lost is to look back; to move beyond the abstract shame and ask those questions that are difficult to ask—about my own hometown, about my father’s and my mother’s families” (Krug, n.p.). Alongside this text, Krug repositions the cover image of herself looking away toward her hometown—one which is repeated several times in the narrative proper—away from its traditional romantic overtones through adding the note “as I look, I feel as though someone were watching from behind” (Krug, n.p.). Her note suggests multiple perspectives and gazes signaling the fragmented nature of knowledge. Krug’s narrative thereby reconfigures Heimat as an inquiry into one’s identity, the co-implication of multiple directions of being, and the need to rely on reflection and self-reflection as means of investigation while being aware of belatedness, uncertainty, and partiality. Krug offers this nuanced approach by first trying to learn something about her paternal uncle after whom her father was named, the 1926-born

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Franz-Karl. She gets only secondhand information about this relative from people who did not know him personally. Furthermore, it is only coincidentally that she discovers on the family’s trips to Italy that he was buried in a military cemetery from Italy to which the father decides to take her, her mother and brother. On finding the only remnants of his physical existence in his photos and sixth grade exercise books, she tries “to find him somewhere in between the lines of his propagandistic essays” (Krug, n.p.). Krug is initially struck by the boy’s essays including Nazi symbols and dutifully replicating the era’s Nazi leaders’ ideas. The perusal of this schoolboy’s racist essays convinces Krug of the Führer’s indoctrination success, which seems to validate their announcement that 90 percent of those born in 1926 had been recruited into the Hitler Youth (Krug, n.p.). Of particular relevance is how Krug develops the growing practice of linking comics and photography established by early influential graphic artists. Krug follows a similar pattern of using photos as Jewish American Diane Noomin in her comic spread “I Was a Red-Diaper Baby.” This graphic spread presents Noomin’s experiences as a girl born in 1947 who grew up as the daughter of Jewish communist-sympathizers in America. Noomin uses personal photographs of herself at various ages and public images to foreground the dangers of the artist’s communist upbringing in a Jewish American family from the 1950s within an American community that perceived such radical views as a threat to Jews’ hard-won integration and to American democracy. Ofra Amihay brilliantly discusses the meaning of using the red color for the title of Noomin’s graphic spread as well as for retrospectively coloring the diapers from a black-and-white photograph of Noomin as a baby. In Amihay’s reading, the choice of red for retrospectively coloring past photos suggests that Noomin’s radical approach in adult life was not only the result of “an involuntary indoctrination or brainwashing of an innocent baby” to the left-wing ideology by the parents (“Red Diapers, Pink Stories,” 47). It also marked the artist’s own voluntary choice on becoming aware of it (Amihay, “Red Diapers, Pink Stories,” 47). Krug, too, retrospectively colors just parts of black-and-white family photos as an act of her reckoning with the past. Therefore, Krug’s visual narrative builds upon previous graphic narratives, using photographs in which personal stories centered on the Holocaust expose a public outing meant to address post–World War II German everyday life and identity. This represents a defining trend of graphic narratives about the Holocaust by contemporary third-generation artists, as identified by Assaf Gamzou: “the addition of color and fiction,” “formalistic attributes [that] mark the medium going beyond testimony, beyond the boundaries of the established genre” (236). In Krug’s narrative, this act of retrospective coloring relates especially to her adding the color green to some twenty black-and-white pictures of her maternal grandfather Willi, her paternal grandfather Alois, and her paternal uncle Franz-Karl, as she discovers documents from the archive connecting these relatives to the Nazi war machine. Krug first colors in green the soldier outfit of her paternal uncle in a photo depicting him with another soldier in chapter 3. She also uses it for coloring the soldier outfit of the paternal grandfather, Alois, a farmer in Külsheim who died in 1947



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when Krug’s father was an infant. Alois left behind photos of him as a soldier and the Kriegstagebuch, a diary given by the Führer as a gift to soldiers. Commenting on his photos, Krug notes that, despite his Hitler mustache, “he looks like an actor playing a Nazi in a foreign WWII comedy, his small, stout body unintentionally ridiculing the self-important gallantry of the soldiers surrounding him” (Krug, n.p.). In these depictions, Krug uses theatrical staging to suggest how both she and her father never really knew Alois firsthand. As such, Krug’s use of coloring supports Gamzou’s claim about contemporary comics in which “the manufactured, mass-produced, artificial, color medium is the place to create a work that distances itself from historical truth and personal testimony, to subvert and examine the place of Holocaust memory today” by primarily “deconstructing its aftermath in the personal and national realms of memory” (Gamzou 235). In chapter 4, Krug continues the same practice of using the green color for the outfit of her maternal grandfather, Willi, at the mechanical workshop where he originally worked, then as a chauffeur for a Jewish linen salesman for whom he allegedly worked in the 1930s and later as a driving teacher for soldiers on the home front, being thus spared of his duty on the front line. This use of green for Willi occurs after she first colors the entire photo of the grandfather’s face at the beginning of chapter 4, “Keeping Time,” in which a text bubble is overlaid on his face, preventing us to see him, suggesting the artist’s initial acknowledgment of her lack of knowledge about his past. This is related to Willi’s death in 1988, when Krug was eleven, after his wife died in 1982, and the paternal grandparents had died before the artist’s birth, with silence about their pasts reigning in the family as she grew up. The subsequent greening of Willi’s outfits as those of a Nazi soldier mirrors Krug’s textual and archival sources accompanying the images that she comes across on her quest to determine his adherence to the Nazi ideology. In chapter 10, she conjoins the grandfather’s guilt with the color green she uses for the outfit of Robert Wagner, the Nazi officer charged with implementing the town's burning of its synagogue and elimination of local Jews, one whose portrait opened the 1933 phone book for Karlsruhe. This relates to how Willi’s driving school office was opposite the synagogue that was burnt on the Night of Broken Glass (November 9–10, 1938), making Krug wonder if Willi was there and saw anything or if he might have been among the cheering crowd or those who tried to help—ideas that he never mentioned to his family. Krug also includes Willi’s US military file for which he answered 313 questions on January 10, 1946, and another forty-one questions from April 23, 1946. Therein he stated that he voted for the Social Democrats in 1932 and 1933, that he was an NSDAP (Nazi Party) member from 1933 till 1 August 1940, without holding any high rank, and that he was an officer in the Wehrmacht from 1 August 1943. Overall, he ranked himself as a Mitläufer, a follower, what Krug calls “an in-between man” (Krug, n.p.). In a letter from January 22, 1946, to the Mayor of Karlsruhe Willi explains joining the Nazi Party because the car of the Reich Governor, Robert Wagner, was in the garage and his “acquisition of the business was made dependent” (Krug, n.p.) on his joining the Nazi Party, yet he never held any office or wore the

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uniform. But Krug finds photos of Willi in the uniform, proving he included at least this lie in his 1946 letter. She further conjectures Willi’s buying the business and becoming a Nazi member as a matter of opportunism, imagining other possibilities he could have followed to get his own driving school business without having to join the party if he had really wanted to. She equally finds five testimonies from respected people who knew, worked, and were neighbors with Willi, including a known communist and someone married to a Jewish woman. All of them attested to Willi’s only joining the Nazis because of the time’s conditions and pressure but never really being a true believer. In May 1947, Willi is deemed an offender and only after he insists that his case be reconsidered, as he cannot reclaim his profession and upkeep his family, he is downgraded to the rank of a follower on August 16, 1947. In chapter 12 about how her maternal grandfather is finally deemed as a follower of the Nazi regime in the postwar period, Krug conjoins the testimony about Willi’s innocence from his neighbor Albert, married to a Jewish woman, with a photo in which she retrospectively colors the grandfather’s outfit no longer in the Nazi-associated green but in a white shirt and brownish pants. Meanwhile Krug wonders how the final verdict was both a relief for Willi but also a hard life track to continue on, as a follower meant someone lacking courage and moral stance. Furthermore, Krug tracks Albert’s son, Walter, now living in Florida and manages to call him. Walter tells her about the mixed Jewish family’s war life in Karlsruhe and how they were helped by many local Germans, surely also including her grandfather, Willi, despite his own self-interest. By the end of the narrative, Krug restores the use of green for Willi’s outfit in photos but as a vest while working in the garden in chapter 12, and in the Epilogue, she describes how, on becoming an American citizen, she was also asked to answer the same question as the grandfather in 1945 of whether she had been part of the Nazi Party. This accumulation of retrospective coloring of photos with green represents a highly efficient means for Krug’s drawing the readers’ awareness of her own implication in the past. It also signals her realization of her relatives’ difficult decisions and postwar life paths and at least their partial uptake of the Nazi ideology considering the documents she comes across during her quest and which accompany her use of this incriminating color in the photos. She further expands the technique of using the color green as a sign of the widespread lure of Nazism in Germany resulting in adherence to the Nazi doctrine by drawing other pages under a green background. She particularly presents the gradual indoctrination of average Germans with the Nazi ideology via textbooks, toys, teachers, discourses, and artifacts by drawing green silhouettes of local children, firefighters, soldiers, etc. Additionally, like Diane Noomin, Krug retrospectively adds the color red to connect two photos of her mother as a teenager. In chapter 3, Krug uses a 1953 black-and-white photo of her mother at the time she was a teenager dressed in a poisonous mushroom costume made by her mother. The mother’s connection to this photo, even in the present, simply involves remembering how, as a girl, she felt disappointed for not being dressed as a princess instead. In chapter 12, Krug includes a black-and-white photo of the same mother who is still dressed in her poisonous



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mushroom costume while she seems to happily contemplate a streetscape indicating her comfortable, peaceful, worry-free everyday life. Only for the latter photo does the artist retrospectively use the color red, just as she uses it for the book’s cover by transforming the poisonous mushroom dress into a poisonous mushroom cardigan that the pondering artist wears as she contemplates, from a hilltop, her hometown of Karlsruhe. This is to suggest the third-generation artist’s proneness to a rational understanding of the Holocaust past for her family in Germany in comparison to the second-generation mother’s decision to completely ignore her family’s life during that period of time and to only emphasize other, happier aspects, standing for a discrepancy in attitude between the third and second generations. Finally, the conjoining of a 1936 photo of Krug’s Uncle Franz-Josef and a 1956 photo of his namesake, Krug’s father, also underlines the rational, nuanced approach of the third generation. Krug uses these photos three times. The first use occurs at the beginning of chapter 3, as a two-page spread with these photos of uncle and father in a similar posture of being dressed in an elegant suit while holding a communion candle in the right hand and a hymnbook in the left one, at similar ages. The text underneath them reads: “All throughout my father’s childhood, my mother told him that his brother had been a sweet and well-behaved boy, unlike my father, who was a stubborn and ill-tempered child. My father skipped days of kindergarten, then skipped school, playing all by himself on the grounds of Kulsheim’s medieval castle” (Krug, n.p.). The placement of these photos as mirror images of one another and the text accompanying them suggest the parents’ attempt to keep Krug’s father as a replacement child for the older son they lost in the war. Their mourning practice largely replicates that of surviving Jewish adults who lost children during the Holocaust and then used their postwar born children as “memorial candles” (Wardi 27), stand-ins for the deceased offspring. In the case of Jewish survivors, the emphasis falls on the psychological burdens of the second generation who are oftentimes found at fault in comparison to an older sibling who has become a perfect offspring but, alas, one who perished during World War II. Therefore, for children of Jewish survivors, the Holocaust becomes a paralyzing event from before their birth that impacts their whole development and sustains their own sense of trauma (Wardi). In the case of Nazi-related families, Krug emphasizes the selective memory of these children’s parents that keep them as perfect but dead offspring yet refuse to engage with the children’s problematic embrace of the deadly Nazi ideology that might have also been their own. This latter attitude prolongs another type of paralysis toward their postwar children because of a lack of acknowledgment and confrontation with all the aspects of their dead children’s and their own World War II past. In contrast to this hiding practice of the first and second generations that prolongs secrets about the Holocaust, the third-generation Krug uses these photos a second time in the attempt to understand the family’s role in World War II Germany. She includes them at the end of the same chapter that focuses on the artist’s realization of her uncle’s indoctrination to the Nazi ideology from his own notebooks containing swastikas and anti-Jewish texts like “The Jew, A Poisonous Mushroom” written by

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the twelve-year-old Franz-Karl on January 20, 1939. This time they do not appear separately, but the artist superimposes them on each other, indicating how “they match perfectly” and how “the new face that emerges looks directly at me.” This restaging of the photo emphasizes a possibly similar Nazi trajectory of the father to that of the uncle, had he been born prior to World War II, as a result of the main coordinates of German culture to which a child could have been exposed. The third time the two photos are used occurs in the last chapter, “Shaking Hands,” after Krug manages to finally meet her aunt Annemarie, her father’s sister who knew her paternal uncle. Annemarie interprets his photos and frequent letters from the front line as instances of his homesickness. At the end of the chapter, on one side of the page we get the left half-cut photo of the uncle and on the other side of the page the right half-cut photo of the father. The pictures are accompanied by the questions that linger for Krug after getting the closest she could to her paternal uncle: “What would Annemarie and my father’s relationship be like if my uncle hadn’t died in the war? What would it be like if big Franz-Karl—what would it be like if he were sitting in the living room with us right now?” (Krug, n.p.). The cutting fragment is a key added element suggesting the third generation’s awareness of the fractured, fragmented nature of their relation to the Holocaust past. It also signals incompleteness as an unescapable part of their relation to this dark past because of the passage of time and their belatedness to members of their own families that passed away before they could recuperate further information to assess their decisions and actions during World War II. As a result, Krug notes in the Epilogue “that HEIMAT can only be found again in memory, that it is something that only begins to exist once you’ve lost it” (Krug, n.p.). Nora Krug’s graphic narrative thus shows how the third-generation artist representing a grandchild of perpetrators shares concerns that are similar to those of her Jewish peers, namely ethical responsibility for connecting the Holocaust with other problematic events of the present and future and the quest-like plot interspersing personal creation with the ample use of archival documents. Josh Lambert dubs this latter the “archive fever” of contemporary Jewish authors as a result, in part, of “the positioning of creative writers within the university and on academic payrolls,” which results in the lengthening of the acknowledgments sections and “the citation of archival and multilingual research” in their books (“Archive Fever”). Like Jewish contemporary artists, Krug is an associate professor in the Illustration Program at the Parsons School of Design in New York. Krug also mirrors some concerns of another artist and fellow academic, Amy Kurzweil, the granddaughter of a Jewish survivor, who in her graphic review of Belonging ends with the statement: “Reading Belonging was like reading my own history’s shadow. Krug is not looking for heroes or villains. She does not recount the past to ask for pity or pardon, but so she can walk into a new life, as unbroken and unburdened as possible” (“From the Notebook of a Fellow Graphic Memoirist”). Though also emphasizing the “different challenges” to be faced by a grandchild of perpetrators, Kurzweil well identifies here the shared concern of this generation, an ethical reckoning with the past “through our own shame,”



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beyond simplifying binaries, by scrutinizing the overlapping aspects of the Holocaust and its aftereffects for assessing their own sense of identity. Kurzweil is also spot-on in identifying Schaumann’s abovementioned main signposts of third-generation literary works as the building blocks of Krug’s visual narrative: “With flea market finds, family photos, letters, documents, drawn and written memories and imaginings, Krug tells the story of a German family fractured by war, and one artist’s fastidious quest for repair and relief through archival labor” (“From the Notebook of a Fellow Graphic Memoirist”). As Krug confesses in an interview with John Apruzzese, her narrative is an attempt to use the sense of guilt over Nazi Germany in a constructive way, to “overcome the collective, abstract shame I had grown into as a German two generations after the war,” an “empty paralysis” due to the faulty German educational system and family response at the time she grew up (Krug Interview with John Apruzzese). She tries to change it into a form of active, responsible agency by asking questions about her family and hometown she was “too unreflective as a child and too afraid as a teenager to ask” (Krug Interview with John Apruzzese). This involves acts of recalibration and revision of institutional and family remembrance from the perspective of the third generation that especially rely on the above-analyzed strategy of using photos in which retrospective coloring works together with the artifacts and documents that Krug discovers in her quest to understand her ancestors’ World War II past and by extension that of average Germans who lived during the war. To that end, Krug’s graphic narrative has a complex structure veering from a family album to a diary or, perhaps most obviously, a scrapbook. This complexity primarily follows from the English-language titles of the book in the UK and the United States. In the UK, it was published as Heimat: A German Family Album, a close replica of the German-language title, drawing readers’ focus on its function as a photo album from Germany that links the personal with the political. In the United States, it was published as Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, eschewing a clear identification of a genre as a filter through which the readers are invited to consider Krug’s narrative. The complicated overlaying and palimpsestic nature of Krug’s Belonging is another specific vehicle of addressing the Holocaust on the part of the third generation. This was also evinced in Kurzweil’s Flying Couch, especially by the technique of visually juxtaposing the archival testimony of the artist’s Holocaust surviving grandmother and the US popular culture tropes of “Holocaust (celebrity) survivor” and “Jewish mother” with the artist’s metanarrative concerns (Mihăilescu 97–104). Krug’s strategy also represents the equivalent of similar overlays in third-generation films, such as Radu Jude’s experimental documentary film The Dead Nation (2017). The movie addresses Romania’s public memory of discrimination, persecution, and murder of its Jewish population during the war by overlaying three types of discourses. First, Jude uses pages from the wartime diary of Emil Dorian, a Jewish physician from Bucharest who became the secretary general and, later, director of the documentary libraries and archives of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania

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in 1945–1946.3 Second, he employs photos taken at the time by Costică Acsinte, a local photographer from Slobozia. Third, he adds radio recordings from World War II Romania including fascist political speeches and propaganda songs retrieved from the National Archives in Bucharest. This technique makes historian Diana Popescu call the film an example of documentary and independent art happenings “designed as social interventions with a participatory and active public” (1). For the film, “Jude selected those notes [from Dorian’s diary] which illustrate the unfolding of anti-Jewish measures culminating in episodes of extreme cruelty and torture” (Popescu 7). He juxtaposed them with Acsinte’s photos of the same period that excluded the experiences of discrimination and violence rendered by Dorian. Acsinte’s photos focused on everyday life fragments for Romanian women, men, and children as examples of “parallel lives” (the film’s subtitle), and only featured some armed men in military uniform. Additionally, the movie soundtrack consists of sound clips including “speeches by King Carol II, and by Marshal Ion Antonescu, radio news reporting the heroic deeds of the Romanian army, the conquest by Romanian and German troops of Odessa, and many patriotic songs [featuring slurs against the Jews and Roma] aimed to mobilize the Romanian army in the national war against what Antonescu viewed as its worst enemy, Russian Bolshevism” (Popescu 7). These aggresive-sounding, Nazi-supporting propaganda speeches and tunes take the place of a film’s conventional musical soundtrack and bear symbolical witness to the dangerous conditions in which the Jews and Roma were living and resisting their fate in World War II Romania. Jude’s technique of juxtaposing two or more conflicting shots especially signals how the time’s photographs and soundscapes in Romania were fabricated performances that excluded the Jewish and Roma experiences and the violence perpetrated against them from the telling. The movie convincingly constructs the persecution of Jews and Roma in World War II Romania as a parallel unsettling universe that was silenced by the mainstream Romanian society (Martanovschi and Mihăilescu 93–101). For the third-generation director, this palimpsestic technique equally pinpoints the new generations’ need to grapple with their uncertainty about the grandparents’ beliefs, actions, and implication in regards to this dark past. Likewise, Krug’s narrative is meant to intervene in the public memory of the Holocaust in Germany by a dialectical montage of photographs, archival documents, texts, and illustrations for children’s books. In Romania, third-generation Jude uses juxtaposition to emphasize a macro-level approach focusing on Romanians’ complicity as perpetrators in the Holocaust, explainable for a country that was very late to officially acknowledge this implication, in 2004. Third-generation Krug from Germany uses juxtaposition to focus on the micro-level approach to the Holocaust. She especially contemplates the need to acknowledge one’s family’s implication in World War II in a country in which the macro-level acknowledgment of perpetration and complicity has been thoroughly taught and assumed. Krug invites the readers to face up and acknowledge the various facets of the engagement with the Nazi past on the part of average Germans, including one’s family, following the US army questionnaire at the war’s end. The questionnaire identified five categories for



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assessing Germans’ political involvement under the Nazi regime: Exonerated Persons (19 percent), Followers (51.1 percent), Lesser Offenders (11.2 percent), Offenders and Major Offenders (2.5 percent). Krug primarily focuses on Mitläufer, “followers” of the Nazi regime, “the gray mass,” as “it is exactly this category we need to examine closely because it’s the one that teaches us most about how dictatorial regimes come to be. These are the people who voted for Adolf Hitler. They chose him as their leader out of their own free will. To understand how this could happen, we need to understand their motives, what they thought, what concerned them” (Krug Interview with John Apruzzese). By focusing on members of her own family that were such “Mitläufer” or “co-perpetrators,” Krug reinforces lawyer Saira Mohamed’s argument that perpetrators’ traumas draw our attention that such people are not just “monsters” different from ordinary people. On the contrary, “they are real people who do terrible things” and we might share in this dark aspect of humanity, an unsettling position that “forces us to examine the choices they made, and the paths that led them to commit their crimes” (Mohamed 1165). Mohamed considers that these nuancing aspects come to light by taking the perpetrators away from their courtroom stance and legal accountability. Once perpetrators are invited to stage their past actions in a contemporary art performance (using, as in trials, re-creation of past experiences, and mediated truth), they can prompt a form of grassroots accountability as offered by Joshua Oppenheimer in his acclaimed documentary The Act of Killing (2013) (Mohamed 1161–63). In Oppenheimer’s film, the perpetrator is depicted as having full agency in committing terrible crimes by also experiencing them as trauma (1179), thereby treating “trauma as a category with no predetermined moral status” (1208). Krug’s visual narrative shows that this also happens within a family context via a genealogical reckoning initiated by the third generation. The artist equally complicates the quandary of who owns suffering beyond the dialectic of victims/perpetrators and the widespread understanding that trauma is the property of victims, a moral category clinging to the recognition of the subject as worthy of respect, attention, and empathy rather than a neutral category of assessment (Mohamed 1172–73). Krug starts by assuming this widespread position of assessment involving the incongruity of perpetrator trauma and remains uncomfortable throughout to bypass the moral compass, given her biological/genealogical connection to co-perpetrators, thereby complicating Mohamed’s argument. For someone like Krug who feels co-implicated in the Holocaust via her lineage, the perspective veers away from that of Oppenheimer who depicts perpetrators’ traumas and relation to their past deeds by complete ignorance of the cultural, ideological, and political context for their actions. By contrast, Krug’s engagement with her grandparents’ implication in the Holocaust and World War II primarily involves the granddaughter’s constant, serious archival research attempting to re-create the political, ideological, and cultural context of the grandparents’ lives and choices in order to understand, as much as possible in hindsight, their choices and actions and those of others with a similar behavior during the war. In that, Krug’s visual narrative

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supports Larkey’s claim about the third generation of Jewish Holocaust witnesses being in possession of “transmemory,” a “memory” made up of “reverberations of memories from past generations” and characterized by attempts at “contextualizing their family history in a geohistorical and political framework” in order to “make the memory of the Holocaust relevant for today and the future” (Larkey, “Transcending Memory in Holocaust Survivors’ Families,” 224). Krug’s narrative shows that this also holds in relation to (co-)perpetrators’ descendants. As such, Krug does not level the distinctions between perpetrators and victims but finds them inadequate for her self-reflective endeavor. She therefore reconfigures her discussion of her family’s engagement with World War II from the perspective of the “implicated subject” position as developed by Michael Rothberg. In contrast to the clear-cut, “ideal,” and absolute notions of perpetrators, victims, bystanders from human rights discourse, in Rothberg’s formulation, “implicated subjects are morally compromised and most definitely attached—often without their conscious knowledge and in the absence of evil intent—to consequential political and economic dynamics” (Rothberg 33). This is what Krug’s narrative reveals about her grandparents’ generation, how they were likely to be at least implicated subjects who took advantages from the political power structure in Germany. Krug keeps the focus on collective responsibility for the legacies of the past by drawing our attention to how some average Germans like her relatives were beneficiaries of Nazi Germany in the war’s aftermath and how they might have shaped the societies in which they lived for keeping their privileges during and after World War II. In that, as Mihaela Mihai well argues, we should “conceptualise complicity in terms of the agent’s relational positionality, which affects the resources her memory can summon, the scope of her imagination, the courage of her hopes and the direction of her engagement with the world” (13). As I have shown in my analysis, Krug does just that in her graphic narrative via two main visual narrative strategies: the retrospective coloring of black-and-white photos and the juxtaposition of these with fiction, artifacts, archival documents, etc. Acknowledgment: Research for this paper was supported by two grants of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, UEFISCDI, grant PN-IIIP1-1.1-TE-2016–0091, no. 5 / 2018, Transcultural Networks in Narratives about the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, and grant PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020–1631, no. 101 / 2021, Familiar Perpetrators: On the Intimacy of Evil in Contemporary American Literature and Popular Culture.

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Oksman, Tahneer. “How Come Jewish Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?” Women and Contemporary Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Popescu, Diana I. “Staging Encounters with Estranged Pasts: Radu Jude’s The Dead Nation (2017) and the Cinematic Face of Public Memory of the Holocaust in Present-Day Romania.” Humanities 7, no. 2 (2018): 1–18. doi.org/10.3390/h7020040. Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. Schaumann, Caroline. Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. Spiegelman, Art. MetaMaus. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011. Wardi, Dina. Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust. London: Routledge, 1992.

NOTES 1. These are hansaplast, a bandage brand; der Wald, the forest; das Pilze-sammeln, the poisonous mushroom; der Leitz-Akternordner, the binder; die Warmflasche, the hot water bottle; das Brot, bread; die Gallseife, a soap made of ox gallbladder; der Uhu, the first synthetic adhesive in the world. 2. These are artifacts for “Child’s Play” including a caricature of a Jew, a toy of a firing soldier in honor of the Führer’s birthday, Hitler Youth trading cards, brooches in exchange for Winter Relief donations, a primer; artifacts about “Bomb Blasts”; artifacts about “Postwar Captivity” of prisoners of war; artifacts displaying “Erasure” of swastikas or incriminating photos; letters and a dried edelweiss flower representing “Fragments from the Front Line”; photos of “Soldiers at play.” 3. Emil Dorian kept a diary from 1937 until his death, in 1956, which was posthumously published by his daughter, in three volumes, in Romania. The first part of it, covering the war years, was also translated into English and published in the United States in the early 1980s, as Emil Dorian, The Quality of Witness. A Romanian Diary 1937–1944, edited by Marguerite Dorian, transl. from Romanian by Mara Soceanu Vamos (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982).

8 Writing Inherited Stories A Study of Representational Anxiety in Australian Third-Generation Holocaust Literature Tess Scholfield-Peters

It is too late. What’s left to fill the silence is no longer theirs. This is my story, woven from the threads of rumour and legend, post-memory.1

Contemporary literature written by the third generation often sits at the intersection between various genres and forms. Historiography, journalism, reportage, travelogue, fiction, memoir, (auto)biography: There is a characteristic indeterminacy in literature written by the third generation, which is, I argue, a necessary and significant feature of these texts. This burgeoning group of writers acquire knowledge and narrative from countless sources in order to imagine into the gaps left by time and silence. Given the privileging of firsthand witness testimony as the most important representative mode of Holocaust narrative, literature by the third generation is doomed to fall short. But that lessens neither its inherent value nor its necessity. In this chapter, I interrogate feelings of representative anxiety present in much literature written by the third generation, feelings that I have felt personally during the conception of my own third-generation text. This anxiety stems from feelings of imposture, from temporal and cultural distance, and from the sense of urgency we feel to preserve these Holocaust stories that dwindle on the edge of living memory. Representative anxiety manifests in a number of ways—equal only to the number of individual stories from the Holocaust period and those carried down generational lines. In the chapter that follows, I analyse two recent Australian texts written by grandchildren of Holocaust survivors: Bram Presser’s novel The Book of Dirt (2017) and Cynthia Banham’s memoir A Certain Light: A Memoir of Family, Loss and Hope (2018). Interestingly, while each text exhibits characteristics that are undoubtedly Holocaust-related, it is dubious whether either author would categorize their work as Holocaust literature. Scholar Ruth Franklin writes that while third-generation writers touch on the subject of the Holocaust, “tangentially or more directly, it is 117

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never their main focus. Indeed, this is part of their literary liberation.”2 I posit that the texts explored in this chapter are written by grandchildren of Holocaust survivors who would not identify as “Holocaust writers”; instead, the Holocaust is an important but peripheral aspect of their family history stories. The Book of Dirt is a hybrid work that uses fiction, Jewish and Czech myth and folklore, documentary, memoir, and travelogue. Similarly, A Certain Light is a hybrid work of memoir and documentary, with elements of fiction. Crucially for this chapter, both books situate the author within the text and transparently exhibit third-generation anxieties of trespassing, appropriation, and guilt. For both authors, only after the death of their grandparents did their research commence. Additionally, both texts use images—archival and the writer’s own—in-text as narrative devices and as bridges between the past and the present moment. The writers include images from their travels back to their grandparents’ places of origin and Holocaust traumas, a technique referred to by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer as a “post-memorial act of reframing.”3 Finally, what these two contemporary texts exhibit is the re-situation of the Holocaust within the context of other traumas and contemporary narratives. In The Book of Dirt, this is shown through drawing similarities between other global genocides and making the Jewish wartime experience of discrimination and segregation figuratively comparable to other, broader narratives of discrimination, as well as contextualizing Jewish persecution through historic and folkloric heritage stories. Presser’s “quest narrative”4 runs alongside his fictional retelling of the family’s history. In A Certain Light, the connectedness of trauma is inherently personal: It is through uncovering her grandfather’s survival story and mother’s immigration story that Banham is able to come to terms with her own trauma. Displacement is experienced down generational lines, and she finds resolution in the universal commonality of suffering and the resilience shown by her family. These texts exhibit authorial voices that are self-reflective and inherently concerned with the philosophical and contemporary issue of the Holocaust’s relevance moving into the future: Why must we continue to represent the Holocaust through art when humans historically do not learn from past mistakes? Why continue to indulge society’s morbid curiosity with the Holocaust? Why create work on the backbone of our grandparents’ traumas? As a member of the third generation, I frequently think about these questions. To my anxious brain, I reply: We must continue to represent the Holocaust because humans do not learn from their mistakes, and they are also prone to forgetfulness and misrepresentation. The more unique, individualized, and thoroughly researched Holocaust-based narratives there are in our literary landscape, the more cemented the Holocaust will be in historical consciousness moving into the future. The heavily mediatized narrative around the Holocaust, as well as the tendency toward trauma voyeurism in popular representations, threatens to collectivize the diverse scope of Holocaust experiences and diminish the period’s inherent complexity. Third-generation voices should be concerned not only with securing individualized stories, but also about voicing the stories of trauma’s far-reaching effects



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on subsequent generations, how it manifests, and why. There must be critical and imaginative voices at the helm of Holocaust representation as we fast approach the post-survivor era. Again, it is doubtful whether society’s proclivity for trauma consumption will ever be satiated or reframed—perhaps the antidote to this is innovative representation by the third generation. I posit that literary hybridity and the simultaneous use of archival and contemporary narratives within a text offers depth, empathic resonance, and relevance. The ethics of trauma appropriation—using our grandparents’ trauma in our own work—can be addressed through a sound awareness of the ethical issues at stake. The two case study texts in this chapter use a transparent, self-reflective, and at times vulnerable narrative voice, one that conveys self-doubt and frustration at the impossibility of knowing the whole story. The third generation collects pieces of their narrative from across mediums, genres, and time. They thread together stories real and imagined, lean into their uncertainty and use it as narrative strength. These works are increasingly characterized by anxiety of representation, but it is this anxiety that propels our desire for historical accuracy, innovative literary hybridity, and unique narrative voice.

MY RESEARCH IN CONTEXT: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION My grandfather Harry Peters was born in 1920 and grew up in a secular Jewish middle-class household in central Berlin. His parents, my great-grandparents, were an Iron Cross decorated surgeon and a former nurse with an advancing auto-immune disease. In the mid-1930s, as normal life for German Jews became impossible, my great-grandparents enrolled my grandfather in a Jewish-run agricultural training school called Gross Breesen, one of the few non-Zionist agricultural farms for Jews at that time. There he studied and learned farm skills until November 9, 1938; Kristallnacht. Consequentially, my grandfather and the other male students over eighteen were imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp. After a month he was released on the condition that he leave Germany within a fortnight. He said goodbye to his parents for the last time and left for Holland where he waited for an immigration permit. Finally, he was assigned a guarantor in Australia. In Australia my grandfather worked on various farms until he joined the Australian infantry and eventually became a doctor and medical administrator of Prince of Wales Hospital. He spent his twilight years in Kiama, a coastal town in southern New South Wales, and passed away in February 2021 at one hundred years of age. Beneath this extremely shortened summation lies a world of events, people and factors that encompass my grandfather’s survival story. His identity as a German-Jewish refugee was evidenced in his strength, his attitude toward work (he retired when he was ninety-two years old), and his silence about many aspects of his life. Only much later in his life did my grandfather talk to his children about his Holocaust experience. Because of my generational distance, in earlier years I had little trouble asking my grandfather about his old life in Germany, his parents and

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their fates, and his experience of the Holocaust. His already tenuous recollection of memories grew more distant because of his age and encroaching dementia, and with his vast collection of old letters, photographs and his recorded testimony for the Shoah Foundation, in later years it seemed senseless to propose to him further conversation about the most traumatic time in his life. I felt a strong sense of responsibility as his granddaughter to ensure his story was preserved. Through my doctoral research, which takes the form of a documentary fiction text, I seek to thread available archival images, documents, and letters together to form my own reconstruction of my grandfather’s story. This hybridity—the blend of fictional and documentary elements in one cohesive work—is exemplary of the necessarily fragmentary voice of the grandchild researcher/writer. My research is fundamentally concerned with contemporary trends in Holocaust representation and how these trends are influencing and reframing its wider narrative. As I previously stated, it is uncertain whether documenting stories of individual historical trauma will have any tangible impact on that fact that we are again witnessing the rise of far-right extremism and antisemitism, and there are currently 70.8 million displaced persons worldwide as a result of persecution.5 As theorist Anne Rothe asserts: “Although the frequently cited number of one to one-and-a-half million Jewish children has prompted many a sentimental tear, it has had no effect on the fact that as many children die worldwide annually of the effects of malnutrition and preventable diseases.”6 However, as Franklin states: “It is no accident that those who oppose the idea of literary representation of the Holocaust tend also to be those who argue for the Holocaust’s uniqueness. For literature, whatever its specific details, ultimately makes a case for universality.”7 With Franklin, I argue that this is the key reason for the continuation of art around traumatic history, specifically the Holocaust, despite the intangibility of outcome. Through art we can “emphasize the fundamental sameness of the human condition,”8 incite empathy, and continue to weave the threads of the past through the present. Further, Dr. Wendy Michaels, Conjoint Fellow at the University of Newcastle, Australia, asserts that “the strangeness of the past, even the most proximate past, presents a conundrum: those foreign worlds no longer exist. Yet, we seek to comprehend not only our own pasts, but also those of our grandparents, and other people.”9 It seems that while the journey is fraught, the practice of reinterpreting the past through art, specifically through words, will continue to be an essential aspect of cultural and literary life.

BRAM PRESSER’S THE BOOK OF DIRT The first novel from Australian writer and lawyer Bram Presser is The Book Of Dirt, a work of documentary fiction. Presser uses real documents—letters, photographs, emails and records—as narrative devices, as tools with which he reconstructs his grandparents’ stories. In an email correspondence Presser explains his decision to write in the documentary fiction genre:



Writing Inherited Stories 121 I had gathered a lot of information and decided that it should probably be a book. But I wanted to weave creative narrative around it because I didn’t have enough to be entirely sure of the veracity of every step along the trajectory of their wartime experience. . . . I wanted it to be their story both in terms of historical record but also capture their essence as people.10

Presser’s work spans fiction, memoir, travelogue, and documentary. The novel is dense with Jewish and Czech myth and folklore, intricate webs of characters, para-textual insertions of letters, email exchanges, records, images, maps, abstract creative excerpts, and harrowing imagined constructions of Terezín and Auschwitz concentration camps. Presser’s research, as he recounts in the novel, was prompted by an article in the Australian Jewish News about his grandfather, Dr. Jacob Randa, published after his death. The article speaks of Dr. Randa’s involvement in a committee called the Talmudkommando, which was supposedly a group of Jews instructed by the Nazis to archive and catalog important artifacts that would comprise Hitler’s Museum of the Extinct Race. Presser writes: “There is no documentary evidence, it is all hearsay. And yet the Museum of the Extinct Race has become the central pillar of the collective Czech memory.”11 Presser’s grandparents specifically chose not to share their stories while they were alive, but Presser makes the decision to embark on a research journey when it becomes clear that the published version of his grandfather’s story is completely foreign to Presser’s knowledge of his grandfather. The use of memory as a tool alongside imagination and research is established by Presser at the novel’s commencement: “This is a book of memories, some my own, some acquired and some, I suppose, imagined.”12 The significance of this sentence to the work, and to the wider field of third generation Holocaust theory, cannot be overstated: It prefaces the text as a fragmentary and pieced-together work encompassing the inherited and acquired memories from family members and research, memories of the author as well as the imagined aspect of such work. The reader is shown photographs of both Presser’s grandparents and learns about each person comprehensively—this foundational, factual information provides the historical framework from which Presser imagines his grandparents as young people. Presser also incorporates email correspondences between himself and his grandfather at different points in time with Beit Terezín and Yad Vashem archives; letter correspondence written by his grandmother Daša and her sister Irena “in pencil on brittle, grainy paper”13; as well as letters Presser writes himself in the voices of other characters Františka, Daša, Jakub, Georg, and Shmuel: “All other letters . . . were written by me. I hope that I’ve been true to their voices.”14 A key example of Presser’s characteristic narrative transparency in the face of representative anxiety is his construction of the character Mr. B., a neighbourhood boy who was a friend of the family, who supposedly watched over Presser’s relatives in Terezín. Presser’s Uncle Pavel dies before he can question him about this enigmatic character further: “I had hoped to give what they could not—gratitude, recognition, for their lives, for my own—but now there is no way of knowing who he was. I settle on a name, one that did not exist, one that can be demonstrably proven false by the

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simple act of running your eyes down these two lists.”15 Presser continues: “A man whose name was, like so many others, Bohuš.”16 Through fictionalization Presser is able to further interrogate and engage with the story of an otherwise unknowable person. Even though this character might be fictional, naming this “representative construct”17 and identifying him as a character fills a gap in the story that would have otherwise been left blank. The potential for factual inaccuracy is stated clearly: “Perhaps Uncle Pavel was mistaken. He was desperate to help me, so he drew together long forgotten stories, stories that he had only half-heard and, spurred on by his own insistence my encouragement, unwittingly created a composite of his own.”18 Bohuš is everyone and no one, symbolic of immeasurable loss, unknowable stories, and fiction’s strength as a narrative bridge in this kind of third-generation writing. Earlier in this chapter I referenced Ruth Franklin, who asserts that those who argue for the Holocaust’s uniqueness are often those who oppose its literary representation.19 Presser is writing directly against this idea: By deeply interrogating his family’s Holocaust trauma, as well as referencing other global crises that have come after, his work exhibits the continued resonance of the Holocaust in the present. Human cruelty is universal, as is the “vacuum”20 created by silence and unknowable stories inherited by subsequent generations. The mention of other historical genocides within the text furthers this notion of universality: We, who have been entrusted to perpetuate their memory, to uphold the great refrain of “Never Again,” who have stood and watched in horror as it has happened again and again, in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in the Former Yugoslavia, in Darfur, in the Middle East, are left impotent in their silence. . . . And we have stood in its vacuum for too long. We didn’t question. We were too young to understand. We thought them immortal.21

With age and understanding the third generation inherits the responsibility of speaking and preserving stories from the past. Presser deals directly with the Holocaust trauma of his family and its extended network of relatives and friends, and yet he does not consider the book a Holocaust text. In email correspondence Presser writes: “To me the Holocaust is merely the context for the story. It just so happens that my family’s story is a Holocaust one. What I was really writing about was memory, identity, and the way we come to tell stories.”22 If we consider that the Holocaust is the context through which we can view stories both personal and from the broader, global landscape, it might lead to more complex and individualized narratives, instead of writing about the Holocaust in ways that exploit the trauma and simplify the narrative into a marketable commodity. Themes of loss, love, family, dispersion, otherness, and ordinary people experiencing the extraordinary pervade the text and align it with other crises relevant to our contemporary global landscape. For instance, Presser writes of the Jewish school where his grandfather taught in Prague:



Writing Inherited Stories 123 Up front were the Czech children, who considered themselves above this corral of foreigners. They still had parents, homes, a semblance of a settled life. . . . The German and Austrian refugees gathered in the third row, looking as confused as they had on the day they arrived. . . . Their expulsion at the end of the previous school year had been a relief, and they looked forward to finding their feet at a Jewish school in which they would be the superior class. The reality, however, proved a shock: they were jeered by their Czech classmates. Cast adrift in a hostile city, they would often speak of their homeland, but they meant Palestine, not Hitler’s vile dominion.23

This passage is comparative to countless other stories of racism, classism, immigration, and discrimination in schools and in wider communities. Again, the universality of displacement and discrimination is evident. I note that this is not to lessen the profundity of the Holocaust, but arguing for its uniqueness, its sanctity, its otherness, diminishes the fact that real people experienced it, real people have inherited the trauma, and real people are going through and will continue to experience persecution at the hands of other humans in historically varied yet inherently universal ways. Anne Rothe emphasises this notion: “establishing the Holocaust as the ultimate embodiment of evil is unethical in itself because it minimizes all other instances and forms of oppression, victimization and atrocity.”24 If the Holocaust is representationally inaccessible, how can it be remembered? Presser is brazen in his tackling of the pinnacle sites of his relatives’ trauma—Terezín and Auschwitz—and he uses fiction, collected memories and documentary artifacts to gain access. His work is rigorously researched, and he is open about the innate uncertainty and potentially erroneous depictions of the past: “All I shall ever know will be hearsay. I turn back to that line in the letter to Yad Vashem. ‘Unfortunately it contains many inaccuracies.’”25 Presser’s voice as author presents itself in the fiction passages at times, reminding the reader that this is all his own creation. It is as if he is floating above the scene, observing and recounting in real time: It seems I have almost lost sight of Jakub Rand. Can this be? This whole story, for nothing? Wait. There! The corner of his head. A pant leg. Shoes not yet polished, scratched and dusty from his travels. . . . But for now, I pull back. The staffroom, the corridor, the stairs, the door, the pale façade of the school, Jachymova Street itself, Pariszka, the Old City, Prague.26

The filmic pullback, like a wide zoom out, is a repositioning of perspective—a third-generation writer’s witnessing of the past. The reader follows Presser’s imaginative construction, these flickers of images projected through the text, which gives a sense of the fragmented, jarring experience that comes with trying to create a scene from nothing but imagination. Presser uses this wide-lens filmic perspective and flash-forward effectively to give a sense of horror that might be overwhelming or gratuitous if labored over for more than a few lines: “‘Let’s see what horrors our people have caused this week,’ said Jakub R, the rabbi’s son, who will die peacefully, hours

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after sucking on a wet ball of cotton, but who is now making mischief.”27 Presser is clever in his use of imagery, using intense bursts that allow the reader to imagine a larger surrounding scene for herself. Presser’s perspective becomes focal, his bird’s-eye observation of a moment from a kind of past from which we gain a sense of this character Jakub, his grandfather. As a third-generation author, Presser is ethically obligated to reveal his authorial position as such. The complex position of the third generation is addressed by Presser with frustration and anger: What arrogance to say that we, not those who survived, know better. . . . Who are we, the ones reaping the benefit of their sacrifice, to dare suggest that their view was obscured by the plumes of smoke wafting skywards with the souls of their children? . . . And yet . . . it is our duty to confront the silences, to break open the cracks that have thus far only allowed flashes of light to pass.28

The author includes a “Note on Historical Sources” section at the back of the text, a feature more akin to an historiographical study than a novel. His authorial transparency is paramount to the text’s success as a referential artifact and piece of fiction; writing his process into the text exemplifies the idea that as third-generation authors write their version of their grandparents’ history, they are simultaneously writing their own history. Past, present, and future coalesce in the text, highlighting trauma’s lingering resonance and what it means to walk along the “historiographical tightrope.”29 Throughout this chapter I refer to the “quest narrative,” a significant trend in third-generation writing, which conveys the practice “in which the grandchild of survivors returns to the grandparents’ place of residence before the onset of the Holocaust or to the site of the grandparents’ displacement and harrowing experience.”30 Presser revisits his grandparents’ places of origin, using imagination in the place of memory: “I wander the streets of the Old City hoping to find them. Could it be that, in walking where they, too, once walked, I might feel them again, in a warm gust of air, a tightening of the hand, a familiar scent drifting from a nearby restaurant?”31 Presser’s use of images as narrative devices—archival and ones he takes on his travels—blends the real and imagined, a crucial feature of literature by the third generation. For instance, he writes: “As the leaves turned yellow, the laughter of young girls danced on the cool Milicin breeze. They tried to outdo each other on their adventures.”32 Underneath the text is an image and the reader can assume that pictured are the characters Marcela and Irena—Presser’s grandmother’s sisters, his great aunts. He creates life, sound, and story out of the imagined periphery of the photograph. Presser continues: “For those short visits they forgot the occupation, forgot what it meant to be a Jew, and when it came time to leave, their souls were light and their cases heavy.”33 The incorporation of his imaginative reconstruction fills in the gap left by time and untrodden paths of memory. Instead of interrogating the factuality of this glimpse of internal life, the reader is immersed in these passages as fact and fiction



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work together to form the essence of Presser’s characters. The effect of the photographs when worked into the text is an acute awareness of time and of Presser’s position in the present. Photographs—both archival and those taken by the author—exemplify the dissonance felt from searching for these inaccessible places in the present. The reader accompanies Presser as he attempts to imagine: “Inside, it was dark and musty. . . . There was an eerie silence, broken only by the odd snatch of wind that sounded disconcertingly like a voice. I tried to imagine the paratroopers, knowing they were surrounded, wading through.”34 His travelogue-style prose while at Terezín is accompanied by a photo he took of the place itself in the present, a “vast plague of emptiness,”35 a foreign place to the wartime Terezín: “To imagine it full, pulsating—I could not.”36 Presser muses about his position as a third-generation writer throughout the text: “But even then we are left to wonder: Whose stories are they; who owns the experience; to what end can it all be used?”37 When writing the trauma of others, we must all ask ourselves this question: To what end can it all be used? Perhaps we can find an answer by looking at the alternative: To allow the Holocaust to recede into history with no attempt at contemporary representation. Given the current climate, “where objective fact is overshadowed by emotion and rhetoric,”38 there is a greater need to create texts that convey the realities of history, without exploiting the experiences and memories of those about whom we write. In an email exchange I had with Presser, he offers insight into how we should approach writing trauma moving forward: I think it’s important to be honest without appearing to feast on the details. . . . Also, if the trauma you are writing relates to actual people, be sure to be honest in the telling, and be honest with the reader as to what actually is true and what is a narrative device. . . . I think that’s what it comes down to: transparency and honesty with your readers, and honouring the trauma and those who lived through it.39

Transparent narrative voice, showcasing multiple perspectives, and literary hybridity are techniques that third-generation authors use as they grapple with problematic historical representation. The Book Of Dirt is an immense work that spans multiple genres and uses fiction to illustrate inherent truth inaccessible through factual evidence alone. Presser combats representational anxiety through writing his own personal narrative alongside his fictional constructions of history; the use of archival images and documents to bridge past and present; fiction and fact; and the distance between the event and the contemporary moment.

CYNTHIA BANHAM’S A CERTAIN LIGHT Australian journalist and lawyer Cynthia Banham writes her documentary memoir A Certain Light: A Memoir of Family, Loss and Hope for her young son, so that he will one day know the stories of his mother and family.40 Banham is different from

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Presser in that she is herself a survivor of immense trauma, and she uses this as a connecting force between her and her grandfather’s survival story. In 2007, while on assignment in Indonesia, Banham was in a plane crash that claimed both her legs and left 60 percent of her body covered in full-thickness burns. This trauma divested her of the self she had worked hard to create—the confident, successful athletic woman who boarded that flight did not survive it: “Sometimes, I felt that I also died with other passengers on that plane.”41 Only a decade after the accident did Banham feel psychologically strong enough to write and revisit this trauma, showing the significance of temporal distance in readdressing moments of extreme pain. She is acutely aware of intergenerational trauma and its potential to permeate generational lines: “Trauma, it is said, can haunt later generations, can be ‘remembered’ by those who did not live it or know it in their own bodies. . . . How can I stop myself transmitting my trauma to you and prevent such a sad inheritance?”42 Publishers approached Banham to write about her extremely traumatic experience; however, Banham was unwilling to contribute to the already saturated trauma memoir genre. She writes: “A book about a plane crash seemed utterly pointless to me. What would it be? A voyeur’s account for those people who, as one publisher put it, ‘have always wondered what it would be like to be in a plane crash?’”43 Instead, as both an antidote to the “voyeuristic” tendency of trauma memoirs and as a way to locate her experience on the broader spectrum of her family’s narrative, Banham chooses to undertake research into her family’s history: her grandfather, Alfredo; Alfredo’s sister, Amelia; and her own mother, Loredana. The Holocaust permeates the text, yet it is not the focal subject. Instead, its residuary lines—often thin and buried deep—are connected by Banham as she makes a case for the connectedness of her family trauma and resilience, and the universality of suffering, shame, and displacement. Banham decides that if she writes a book in which she explored her own trauma experience, the plane crash could not be its central concern. She writes: “it would have to be about something else.”44 The book becomes a vestige of her own past life and her family’s history, commencing with her journey back to Europe—to Italy, Germany, and Austria—beginning in Trieste, where Banham retraces her mother’s birthplace and acquires stories from her Italian relatives. She experiences some relational tension when trying to acquire stories from these relatives about Amelia. What she intends to be an open, cooperative conversation is instead “a frustrating night of contradictory memories, of stories reluctantly given, of the questioning of my motives.”45 Discordant recounts and perspectives on the past are marked trends in generational life writing and are amplified in Banham’s context because she herself did not know Amelia at all—all she has to go off is hearsay and borrowed memories. Banham’s curiosity regarding her grandfather’s survival story begins in high school, when she is first shown his POW tag: “Nonno retrieved the metal tag from its place in his cupboard to show me one Saturday afternoon following lunch. I remember his pale blue eyes filling with tears.”46 The significance of this small artifact is immense for Banham—so much so that she includes a photograph of it in the



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text. The weighted meaning of small historic relics is also explored in Presser’s text through the author’s captivation with his grandmother’s gold ring, “the touchstone of her legend—stories of courage, of strength, of devotion—and yet it seemed so insignificant, resting there in my hand.”47 Banham reflects on her relationship with her grandparents, her early childhood, and the missed opportunities to talk to them about the past: “I planned to turn on a tape recorder and interview her about her life, about Nonno, about Amelia’s role in his survival during the war . . . the interview was never conducted.”48 Evidenced here is the guilt that she left it too late; had she conducted those last interviews, more stories might have been salvaged. Banham situates the beginning of the story at her grandparents’ house in Campsie, “home to a shifting tide of migrant groups”49 in Sydney pre- and post–World War II. Banham’s Italian heritage is entrenched in her memories of childhood, primary school, and issues with self-worth that, she reflects, began very early on and flooded her psyche after the plane crash. In assessing her own reaction to trauma, Banham draws comparisons to other survivors: This feeling is connected to the inevitable question that follows such an event. Why me? . . . Having read so much about the experiences of my grandfather and people in his situation, I know that such feelings are not uncommon among survivors of trauma. A loss of agency, a crushing of personality, a deep sense of shame no matter how irrational affects many survivors.50

Banham’s grandfather was an Italian Military Internee (IMI) after capture by the Germans in September 1943. At nineteen years old Alfredo worked as a forced laborer at Alkett factory in Borsigwalde, Berlin. In recounting Alfredo’s experience, Banham cleverly switches between known facts: “Tuberculosis was rampant, and bodies of the dead lay unburied in the mortuary for weeks,”51 and her imagining of her grandfather’s experience that “he himself may already have been sick.”52 Informed assumptions and Banham’s gathered perspectives from other IMIs are crucial to her conception of what Alfredo experienced as a POW. Similarly to Presser, Banham decides to visit key locations of the family’s narrative and archives to aid in her own research project, common activities in thirdgeneration quest narratives. Banham notes the continued resonance of past conflict in Germany while walking the streets of Luckenwalde: We passed along “Peace Street,” a reminder of Luckenwalde’s years under the Soviets, and some fresh graffiti: “Refugees Welcome.” It was a month since the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, pledged to accept Syrian refugees—fleeing the violence and destruction of protracted civil war—who made it to Germany.53

Banham references the Syrian refugee crisis and the potential for it to impinge upon her own travel plans. However, she resolves that conducting her research trip amid the “biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War”54 seems fitting and heightens the overall significance of her endeavor.

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Banham describes the “unsettling” sensation of envisioning the wartime brutality experienced at Luckenwalde with its present-day beauty and tranquility. This difficulty in reconciling a place with its history creates an effect of temporal dissonance and can be likened to Presser’s experience of retracing Terezín concentration camp. Of her visit to the Alkett factory, Banham muses: “What was I hoping to find there? What clues did I imagine would reveal themselves to me?”55 Banham includes an image of “Alkett today,”56 and the effect on the reader is not dissimilar to what Banham herself might have felt as she looked at the building: of unfamiliarity, banality, and the realization of the distance between her experience of Alkett and her grandfather’s.57 When Banham shows her mother, Loredana, the photo of Alkett, Loredana admits that when she thought of her father’s wartime experience, she “pictured Auschwitz,”58 having gleaned most of what she knew of the Holocaust from popular documentaries. Banham writes: “I realised how fragile my mother’s memories of her father were as my investigations began to destabilise them.”59 Here, the author highlights the impact of popularized representations of the Holocaust on reception and engagement and the threat it poses to individualized stories. She also highlights the importance of images—whether they come from the media, archives, or inherited from other family members—in conceiving of the past. Hirsch writes that photographs “affirm the past’s existence and, in their two-dimensionality, they signal its unbridgeable distance.”60 Hirsch and Spitzer further write that for post-Holocaust generations of artists, photographs, or what they term “haunting spectres,” signify not only a “visceral material connection to the past and carry its traces forward, but they also embody the very fractured process of its transmission.”61 In both Banham’s and Presser’s texts the reader experiences the fractured nature of archival images shown alongside contemporary narrative; this dissonance is an enthralling and crucial aspect of third-generation writing. A Certain Light includes archival images of Amelia, Alfredo’s sister, which Banham collects on her visit to Trieste, her family’s place of origin. Photographs as well as fragments of preserved knowledge are the tools Banham uses to create Amelia. Through these images and visits to her place of origin, Amelia becomes “more real” to Banham. Amelia becomes “a flesh-and-blood woman, not just a mythical figure from the distant past.”62 Hirsch and Spitzer reaffirm this notion: “In relation to memoir and testimony, and to historical accounts and scholarly discussions, as within new artistic texts, archival images function as supplements, both confirming and unsettling the stories that are explored and transmitted.”63 The inclusion of archival images in third-generation texts at once bolster the historical meaning of the narrative, while also problematizing intergenerational transmission. Photographs can offer new meaning and new ambiguity, which characterize the third generation’s position of proximity and distance. Third-generation author Daniel Mendelsohn in his novel The Lost writes of this paradoxical nature of archival photographs for the third generation: “unknown and unknowable: this could be frustrating, but also



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produced a certain allure . . . their unsmiling, unspeaking faces seemed, as a result, more beguiling.”64 As Banham is herself a survivor of immense trauma, she uses her own experience to make important insights about the connectedness of these experiences despite the significant contextual differences. In an email interview I conducted with Banham, I asked her how she dealt with the ethical dilemma of representing the trauma of her relative, particularly when they were not alive to give permission. She writes: This was very difficult with respect to the WW2 portion of the story because I could not seek permission from my grandparents to tell Alfredo’s and Amelia’s stories as they were no longer alive. I did however seek permission of both my grandparents’ children (my mother and aunt). It’s difficult not to feel some level of discomfort given how important it was to me as a trauma survivor to tell the story in exactly the way that I wanted to, whereas I could not offer that same choice to either my grandfather or his sister.65

The author’s contemporary concerns are expressed in the backlight of the Holocaust. She draws affective comparisons between the pain, shame, violence, and isolation that all manifest down the generational line. She writes: “While I do not compare my trauma to that endured by the brutalities of wars, I identify with some of the feelings they experienced, including loss of identity and dignity.”66 It is through the realization of trauma’s universality that she finds a kind of resolution. Corporeal trauma—as well as psychological—is an obvious repercussion of Banham’s experience. Banham describes the violent pain she endures during her rehabilitation: “The vibrations inside my legs feel like drilling jackhammers or firing electric currents . . . the pain is like a sharp blade slicing through the length of my limbs, over and over.”67 She experiences phantom pain unique to her body—no one around her can begin to meaningfully empathize with it. The singularity of her trauma isolates her, and only later does she begin to draw similarities between herself and others who have experienced such trauma of the body. For instance, during a visit to the state archives in Berlin, Banham looks at a photograph showing two soldiers who had lost their legs: “War wounds, I thought. How did I end up with war wounds?”68 Later, Banham likens the excruciating thirst she experiences waiting in a hospital hallway to the thirst felt by victims of war,69 showing a lingering resonance of corporeal rupture that characterizes her experience as a trauma survivor.70 The transcendental nature of suffering is the connector for Banham that allows her to bridge the generational divide between her and her grandparents and to find meaning in an otherwise meaningless and horrific experience. The Holocaust for Banham is a backdrop she uses, along with her family’s migration story, to contextualize her own trauma and other contemporary concerns. Situating the Holocaust as a peripheral narrative in her text, researching her grandfather, and journeying to Europe to search for his story act as mechanisms through which Banham contextualizes and finally broaches her own story of immense suffering. Banham most likely would not consider her memoir a Holocaust text, and perhaps this is an emerging trend in itself. Like Presser, who states that the Holocaust is the context through

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which he explores his family’s story, Banham’s book is a personal memoir about how she found her way through the darkest moments of her life. Yet she could not reconcile her own story without including her family’s Holocaust trauma. It is clear that the repercussions of the Holocaust, however peripheral, continue to pulse through generational lines and influence the stories we choose to tell. In the context of this third-generation work, the Holocaust’s inclusion signifies the certainty of time’s passing even against immeasurable trauma. Her inclusion of archival images strengthens this connection and offers a new dimension of interpretation of history in her contemporary text. Simultaneously, the images symbolize the inaccessibility of the past—people and places frozen in time, immovable—and invite the third generation to wonder, research, and imagine stories around them, creating narratives from these fragments. I plan on undertaking fieldwork for my own research project, back to Berlin, where my grandfather was born, and where my great-grandparents lived. I want to visit Terezín and Auschwitz, where my great-grandparents perished. I want to walk along the same streets that my grandfather did when he was sixteen and to visit the Tiergarten in Berlin where my grandfather and childhood friends walked and played. I want to visit Wieringen in Holland, where my grandfather began his immigration journey to Australia. But as I think about going to all these places, I also feel the sense of futility that others of my generation feel. These places are not those that my grandfather knew. Those places are gone; for me they will never be accessible. Hirsch confirms this notion: “‘Home’ is always elsewhere, even for those who return to Vienna, Berlin, Paris, or Cracow, because the cities to which they can return are no longer those in which their parents [and grandparents] had lived as Jews before the genocide, but are instead the cities where the genocide happened and from which they and their memory have been expelled.”71 What is the significance of visiting these places, walking along the same pavement my grandfather did nearly a century ago? What do I think I’m going to find? Perhaps it isn’t about finding anything, nothing tangible, anyway. These pilgrimages represent a commitment to memory despite the futility of accessing the past in the contemporary moment. For me, visiting these sites represents recognition—not understanding, because I don’t think I could ever fully understand—of the immensity of my grandfather’s loss, and as Banham and Presser both affirm in their texts, visiting these sites shows that while history is ever-present, it can only be accessed through the observer’s lens. These third-generation narratives show flickers of past stories in reconstructed forms and the reality of their historical and life writings: fragmented, discordant and incomplete, inevitably calling for a hybrid approach.

CONCLUSION Transparency and honesty with the reader about the motivations and intentions for the work are crucial aspects which should frame third generation work. The Book of



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Dirt and A Certain Light broach Holocaust narrative differently, yet the two texts exhibit important trends in this burgeoning genre. Presser uses his distance from the Holocaust as narrative strength—his plight to find out more, to search for clues, often to no end or to a completely different answer, is an act of transparency with the reader as she is invited along with him on this research journey. Banham similarly uses a transparent and considered voice which carefully explores familial traumatic history alongside her own personal identity story. Imagination is a crucial part of these works, as each writer speculates about the past informed by source material and memory. Neither writer was able to cross-check facts with their grandparents, and both writers had to form their own ethical judgments about what to include and what to omit in their texts. The hybrid spanning of genres, a reflective and vulnerable narrative voice and the use of archival images as catalysts for character and fiction creation are key tools that third-generation Holocaust writers can use to address the inevitable complications in representing historical trauma. Each author writes themselves and their own experience of writing, a technique used to convey their proximity to and distance from the Holocaust simultaneously. As we write the stories of our grandparents in the contemporary moment, we are actively repositioning the Holocaust in the present, reminding the reader that while the event is accessible only in history, the traumatic effects continue to resound, manifesting in different ways and to varying degrees down the generational lines. Honesty, transparency, and an engaged understanding of the ethical obligations of both the writer and the reader should be key concerns of the third-generation writer as we move forward into the post-survivor era.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aarons, Victoria, and Alan L. Berger. Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, Memory. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Banham, Cynthia. A Certain Light. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2018. Franklin, Ruth. A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Hirsch, Marianne. “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile.” Poetics Today 17, no. 4, (1996): 659–86. ———. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Harvard University Press, 1997. Hirsch, Marianne, and Leo Spitzer. “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5, no. 2 (2006): 229–52. Mendelsohn, Daniel. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. New York: Harper Collins, 2006. Michaels, Wendy. “Pillaging the Past: History, Fiction and Crossing the Rubicon.” ISAA Review: Journal of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia 9 (2010): 37–60. Northover, K. 2018. “Lunch with Bram Presser: There’s an essential truth in fiction,” Sydney Morning Herald, 4 May, viewed 24 September 2019, https:​//​www​.smh​.com​.au​/entertainment​/lunch​-with​-bram​-presser​-theres​-anessential​-truth- in-fiction-20180430-h0zge2.html.

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Presser, Bram. 2019, Bram Presser, viewed 23 September 2019, from brampresser.com/ about-bram/. ———. The Book of Dirt. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2017. Rothe, Anne. Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Scholfield-Peters, Tess. “But Do You Actually Care? A Study of Precarious Empathy and Performance at #Auschwitz.” Cinder Journal, no. 2 (2019): 1–10. Scholfield-Peters, Tess. “Interrogating the Ethics and Intentions of Family Life Writing Relating to the Holocaust.” Life Writing 20, no. 1 (2023): 61–77. UNHCR 2019, Figures at a glance, accessed 20 September 2019, from: www​.unhcr​.org​/en​ -au​/figures​-at​-a​-glance​.html.

NOTES 1. Bram Presser, The Book of Dirt (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2017), 188. 2. Ruth Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 237. 3. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “What’s Wrong with This Picture?,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5, no. 2 (2006): 243. 4. Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, Memory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 12. 5. UNHCR official website states that there are 70.8 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. Accessed 25 September 2019 from: www​.unhcr​.org​/en​-au​/figures​-at​-a​-glance​ .html. 6. Anne Rothe, Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 14. 7. Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses, 242. 8. Ibid. 9. Wendy Michaels, “Pillaging the past: history, fiction and crossing the Rubicon,” ISAA Review: Journal of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia 9 (2010): 38. 10. Presser, 2020, pers. comm., 25 March. 11. Presser, The Book of Dirt, 22. 12. Ibid., 9. 13. Ibid., 293. 14. Ibid., 294. 15. Ibid., 165. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses, 242. 20. Presser, The Book of Dirt, 80. 21. Ibid. 22. Personal communication with Bram Presser, 25 March, 2020. 23. Presser, The Book of Dirt, 121–22. 24. Anne Rothe, Popular Trauma Culture, 14. 25. Presser, The Book of Dirt, 80.



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26. Ibid., 52. 27. Ibid., 3–4. 28. Ibid., 69. 29. Ibid. 30. Aarons and Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation, 12. 31. Presser, The Book of Dirt, 72. 32. Ibid., 113. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 73. 35. Ibid., 183. 36. Ibid., 182. 37. Ibid., 69. 38. Tess Scholfield-Peters, “But Do You Actually Care? A Study of Precarious Empathy and Performance at #Auschwitz,” Cinder Journal, no. 2 (2019): 5. 39. Email interview with Bram Presser, 26 March 2020. 40. Tess Scholfield-Peters, “Interrogating the Ethics and Intentions of Family Life Writing Relating to the Holocaust,” Life Writing 20, no. 1 (2023): 71. 41. Cynthia Banham, A Certain Light (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2018), 35. 42. Banham, A Certain Light, xvi. 43. Ibid., 9. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 72. 46. Ibid., 7. 47. Presser, The Book of Dirt, 157. 48. Banham, A Certain Light, 13. 49. Ibid., 14. 50. Ibid., 20. 51. Ibid., 171. 52. Ibid., emphasis my own. 53. Ibid., 172. 54. Ibid., 178. 55. Ibid., 190. 56. Ibid. 57. Scholfield-Peters, “Interrogating the Ethics and Intentions of Family Life Writing Relating to the Holocaust,” 73. 58. Ibid., 40. 59. Ibid. 60. Hirsch, Family Frames, 23. 61. Hirsch and Spitzer, “What’s Wrong with This Picture?,” 237. 62. Banham, A Certain Light, 94. 63. Hirsch and Spitzer, “What’s Wrong with This Picture?,” 245. 64. Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 7. 65. Email interview with Cynthia Banham, 6 January 2021. 66. Banham, A Certain Light, 20. 67. Ibid., 21.

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68. Ibid., 196. 69. Ibid. 70. Scholfield-Peters, “Interrogating the Ethics and Intentions of Family Life Writing Relating to the Holocaust,” 74. 71. Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today 17, no. 4 (1996): 662.

9 Animals and the Holocaust in Nava Semel’s And the Rat Laughed Naomi Sokoloff

Friendships with animals figure prominently in accounts of hidden children who survived the Holocaust. For instance, in his memoir The Story of a Life, Aharon Appelfeld recounts how he sought refuge from the Nazis in forests, fields, and barnyards. He notes: “Sometimes it seemed to me that what saved me were the animals I encountered along the way, not the human beings. The hours I spent with puppies, cats, and sheep were the best of the war years.”1 Similarly, writing of her time spent hiding on a farm, Alona Frankel remarks in her memoir, Girl, “The pigs were my best friends.”2 Kristine Keren, who lived in a sewer under Lvov for fourteen months, recalls: “The rats were all over us—each one was about a foot long. But we weren’t afraid of them; we played with them.”3 Second-generation author Nava Semel grapples creatively with this same kind of phenomenon in her novel, And the Rat Laughed (2001). Her text revolves around the experience of a little girl hidden in a cellar, who finds companionship with a rat. Years later, after leading a full life, this character struggles to convey to her granddaughter what it was like to inhabit an ambiguous space between human and nonhuman realms. Reading this material through the lens of critical animal studies can help illuminate the role of the rat and its enigmatic laughter so central to the novel. My discussion takes into account three concerns of animal studies: challenges to the species divide; the ways that representations of nonhuman creatures are used to explore human identity; and animal behavior. These considerations suggest how, by exploring interactions between human and nonhuman creatures, And the Rat Laughed wrestles with the conundrum of what defines humanity and humanness in a setting of inhuman brutality. The author’s treatment of the third generation is integral to the novel’s presentation of these matters and its artistic achievement. Semel’s focus on differing generational responses to the Holocaust shines a spotlight on hidden children and their legacy. The novel guides us to ask: How did these hidden children 135

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grapple with a hostile world that cast Jews as subhumans and dehumanized victims, and how will they be remembered?

THE RAT, OR CROSSING THE SPECIES DIVIDE One fundamental focus of animal studies has been on contact zones “where lines separating nature from culture break down, where encounters between Homo sapiens and other beings generate mutual ecologies and coproduced niches.”4 Semel’s novel constructs just such a hybrid space by situating a child and a rat together in a potato pit, keeping one another company underground. And the Rat Laughed thus invites a kind of scrutiny that the field of animal studies has applied widely to fiction: scholarship in this area is keen on examining how literary texts rethink species boundaries.5 In the novel, the grandmother (the “girl-who-once-was”) is reticent to speak of what happened to her during the war. The liminal zone of hiding she once occupied has remained hidden from those who know her. However, her twelve-year old granddaughter plays a pivotal role in eliciting her memories and uncovering her subterranean past. Conducting an interview for a school assignment, the teenager begs to hear about the Holocaust, and her insistence serves as the catalyst for multiple narratives in distinct sections of the novel. To begin with, chapter 1 (“The Story”) presents the old woman’s obsessive anguish over what, if anything, to tell, and how. Chapter 2 (“The Legend”) is narrated by the granddaughter, who reports to her teacher what she has learned about her family roots. While, in chapter 1, readers are privy to some of the survivor’s inner world, it is up to the third generation in chapter 2 to transmit knowledge of the past to a wide audience. The granddaughter tells others about the rat, and it is she who makes known the relationship of human and nonhuman beings that was so foundational to the survivor’s experience. The open and affectionate relationship between grandmother and granddaughter facilitates their communication. In this regard, Semel’s novel features qualities typical of third-generation art. While second-generation writing and film has often portrayed family relationships fraught with anger and guilt, third-generation work tends to be lighter in tone. Writers and filmmakers from that cohort report being on easier terms with the first generation than the second generation was.6 The grandchildren emphasize that they recognize grandparents not just as Holocaust survivors but as individuals with complex lives—lives that continued unfolding long after liberation. Semel forthrightly raises this issue when she has the teenaged character remark that Grandma is “not what you’d expect from a survivor”; she’s cheerful, even “happy-go-lucky” and sociable (71). The survivor’s active, rewarding life is not defined exclusively by her traumatic childhood. She works in an X-ray lab, she’s open to new ideas (such as using the internet), and she’s “cool”—meaning she is accepting of body piercings and new fashions in clothing. However, the relatively lighthearted mood of this portrayal quickly gives way to a much darker one, when more details of the past are disclosed. The granddaughter discovers that the girl-who-once-was



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suffered horrendous sexual abuse while in hiding. She was raped by the son of farmers who took her into their house and trapped her in the cellar. At the time the novel was published, Semel’s treatment of this topic was pathbreaking; it anticipated attention that third-generation art has now paid to gendered experiences of the Holocaust. In particular, Semel helped break silences surrounding the topic of sexual assault against women and girls.7 The novel emphasizes that this story of the hidden child is so awful that it can scarcely be told. The grandmother divulges only fragments of her childhood. In this regard, Semel’s work parallels any number of third-generation texts in which characters born decades after the war can never put together all the facts of what happened long ago. In And the Rat Laughed, the granddaughter learns more than her own mother ever did; indeed, the mother appears only briefly, and she is emblematic of a member of the second generation unwilling to listen to the first. All the same, what the granddaughter hears is highly redacted, filtered through legend. The survivor is willing to share her story only in an indirect way that is meant to shield an adolescent from too much horror (106–14). Eventually she relates a kind of fable—a genre known to feature talking animals and to fill a particular literary niche as it offers a moral. Here, she tells the tale of a rat who, at the time of creation, wants to learn to laugh. God agrees, but on one condition: Another subterranean creature must laugh first. The promise goes unfulfilled but not forgotten, and, after many eons, a distant descendant of the original rodent meets up with the girl in hiding. He befriends her, hopping about and eating out of her hand, trying to make her laugh (111). His efforts are to no avail, and the moral seems to be that the child inhabits a world too bleak for laughter. Clearly, Semel’s storyteller here is more concerned with what is psychologically true than with historical facts. That narrative quality is one shared with many texts that deal with the third generation. As Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger have documented, third-generation authors such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Joseph Skibell have ventured away from verisimilitude in their writing. Giving rein to imagination in order to confront horror, to fill in missing memories, or to pose theological questions,8 some writers have turned to magical realism, some to myth, and some to Jewish mysticism. In Semel’s novel, the grandmother’s recourse to legend recalls especially the young adult novel by Jane Yolen, Briar Rose. There a grandmother tells her grandchildren a fairy-tale version of her life, using elements of the Sleeping Beauty myth to refer to her survival during the gassings at Chelmno. Like Semel’s character, who engages with animal fable, Yolen’s communicates what happened to her through a protective screen of make-believe, incomplete information, and archetypal plots. In And the Rat Laughed, the granddaughter’s response to the legend of the rat is telling. Her impressions emerge in the normative context of a classroom assignment. (The setting is Tel Aviv, in the year 1999.) Within this framework, the teen expresses ordinary assumptions about daily life and conventional understandings about animals. These then become instrumental in leading readers to insights about the first generation and the highly abnormal circumstances in which children lived during

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the Holocaust. Importantly, the granddaughter sees rodents as disgusting (89–90). She shudders when her grandmother first mentions there was a rat in the pit. “What a repulsive animal,” she thinks, “disgusting as they get.” She adds that living with a rat would be a nightmare, and she later elaborates, insisting that rats carry disease and that the Bible designates them as vermin causing desecration of both humans and dishes (99). Her negative reaction is compelling, precisely because it contrasts with and puts into relief that the grandmother has her own, distinctive mode of perception. Grandma seeks out underground creatures. During a visit to a pet shop, while the twelve-year old takes interest in puppies, the old woman inquires about snakes, moles, and worms. The young narrator observes, “I got the feeling she was even talking to them” (74). The salesman, too, recognizes a special quality in the grandmother. He remarks that “some people just have a knack with animals and they could be lion tamers in the circus or jungle explorers,” to which the granddaughter replies, “my grandmother could have been Mowgli” (74). Like Mowgli, the feral child of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, the girl-who-once-was experienced a childhood that blurred boundaries between human and nonhuman beings. She learned to coexist with the rat on respectful terms, and she found him “an animal that’s anything but dumb” (113). Moreover, since she had entered his territory rather than the other way around, she adapted to his world and behaviors (110). Her experience calls to mind Aharon Appelfeld’s boyhood. In his memoir, writing of cows and sheep, he states: “I would blend with them until I was part of them” (102). Similarly, Alona Frankel’s Girl notes that she identified with pigs, and she admired their intelligence. Kristine Keren said of her time in the sewers, “I felt like an animal, ruled by instinct” (29). These narratives of hidden children present Jews who were hunted like animals, but who, denigrated by Nazi ideology as subhuman, drew strength from relationships with nonhuman creatures. They considered members of other species as part of their family, sometimes as substitutes for relatives they’d lost. Such construction of fictive kinships disrupts any simplistic human/ animal dichotomy, and it carries multiple implications. First, connection with farm animals and other creatures could be therapeutic. Physical proximity and touch helped the children through the war.9 In addition, through their encounters with nonhuman life, children developed imagination, empathy, and survival skills.10 In the case of Semel’s novel, as Emily Ronay Johnston astutely notes, although the child character suffers dehumanization, she also becomes empowered: her subterranean experience stretches her range of perception. She gains “a sensory mode beyond the human realm” that strengthens her ability to respond to danger, to “hear the unhearable and detect the undetectable.”11 These abilities allow the girl-who-once-was not just to avoid danger in the moment, but to be aware of a wider spectrum of existence than people ordinarily perceive. She is alert to dimensions of reality that others are not. In later life, when she takes her granddaughter to the pet shop, she perceives a “real zoo” underground and announces: “Every city has an under. Wherever there are people there’s an underthe-ground” (74–75). She may be referring to subterranean creatures such as worms



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and moles, and she may be referring also to human behaviors that are dark and hidden. Her comments align with observations promoted by scholars of critical animal studies, who have argued that identification with nonhumans broadens the ecology of selves. When people acknowledge members of other species as kin, humans themselves become part of a bigger, transhuman family.12 With her atypical kinship network, Semel’s character carries a sense of belonging to a larger phenomenon beyond the usual boundaries of societal convention. That reality includes the kinds of animals conventionally considered repulsive (such as rats), along with evil people and the kinds of extreme experience often considered unspeakable. Such extraordinary perception is indeed difficult to convey in ordinary language. Impressive as it may be, it is inseparable from the horror that prompted it. Carried over from a realm of trauma, it cannot be put into words, because trauma’s impacts bypass the areas of the brain associated with language and with story. As neuroscientist Bessel A. Van der Kolk puts it, “trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past.”13 Strikingly, he also refers to the part of the brain activated in post-traumatic flashbacks as the “animal” brain.14 In Semel’s novel, as in the memoirs by Appelfeld, Frankel, and others, the hidden child who has entered into an animal habitat and who finds comfort in a more-than-human world has also drawn closer to the sphere of “animal” response: experiencing terror that resists the mediation and comforts of words. Theirs is a realm of extreme experience that is simply beyond normative expression. In And the Rat Laughed, most horrifyingly of all, the ecology of selves and the altered kinship network that the girl acquires includes the farmer’s son who tortures her: “the Stefan.” Inhabiting an interspecies contact zone, a nether world which blurs the boundaries between human and nonhuman, he, too, presents as a hybrid being. Tellingly, a euphemistic reference to sexual assault describes him as ratlike, having a tail between his legs and burrowing a hole inside the little girl (10). In this subterranean world, beasts are companions; humans are bestial. However, when the granddaughter stumbles upon this truth, she does not fully grasp it. At first, on hearing her grandmother’s testimony, she is frustrated by how little factual information she receives, and she announces that she is too old for fairy tales. Accordingly, she is pleased when she manages to glean one name, Stefan, from the story. But this new knowledge leads to misinterpretation (112). Concluding erroneously that Stefan was the name of the rat in the cellar, she draws comfort from the false idea that the farmer’s son had been a protective adoptive brother to the girl in hiding. The granddaughter reports to her teacher, “I was so happy that there was something human in the pit with her” (117). Painful ironies emanate from this comment. On one hand, she is simply mistaken. Stefan was tormentor, not comforter. On the other hand, Stefan, while not the rat, is the brute, so the granddaughter’s assessment is valid. And, at the same time, the statement that there was something human in the pit with her suggests the rodent was more humane than the man. Altogether, the story contains a source of consolation, just not what normative expectations would assume. Furthermore, the girl’s mixture of insight and error gains

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special impact because this passage appears as the final paragraph of chapter 2. Placed at a sensitive narrative site, an ending where readers expect closure, these lines carry conclusive weight. The ambiguities they generate leave the reader with lingering, troubling questions: Who is human? Who is a beast? The priest who eventually rescues the girl from the pit struggles with these very issues. In the fifth and final section of the novel Father Stanislaw acknowledges confusion he suffered when he first encountered the child. She was filthy, mute, and unresponsive as she climbed out of a hole in the ground. Addressing God, Stanislaw writes in his diary: “Do not forgive me Father, for I have sinned. I doubted her being human” (126). Later, hoping to reclaim his own humanity, he tries to find common ground with her. She can trust him only when he imitates the rat she trusted, and so he accommodates her by crawling, burrowing, and pretending to wag a tail. Blurring boundaries between human and nonhuman beings, he hops and sniffs in an attempt to make her laugh, calls himself her “human rat” (235–36), and asks, “Who am I? / In whose image am I being created now?” (224). Through this allusion to Genesis, he highlights uncertainty over what it means to be human, and he repudiates the atrocities of the human world. Semel raises here the issue central to critical animal studies: How to rethink species boundaries and so to reassess “the scope of the concept ‘person.’”15 To address this challenge, the novel creates multiple contexts for interspecies contact—from the rat as living creature who befriends a child, to the rat as character in legend who aspires to laughter, to the metamorphosis of Father Stanislaw that merges human traits with rat traits. Each example, in its own way, reevaluates the centrality of the human, whether acknowledging the sentience and value of a nonhuman animal or acknowledging the value of a marginalized human who has been debased and treated as vermin. An extensive field of discourses stretching back for millennia “links animals to persons who embody non-normative traits, dispositions or capacities,”16 and animal studies scholarship aims to develop analytical frameworks that respect the rights of both. Concerned with animal welfare and the welfare of marginalized humans, this field advocates for repositioning outsiders as inside members of communities. Such a shift of awareness takes place explicitly in Appelfeld’s childhood, as recounted in Story of a Life; there Appelfeld explains how his wartime companionship with nonhuman animals led him also to identify with humans who were disabled or slow to speak.17 In And the Rat Laughed, the emphasis on trans-species relationship and on a realm that is more-than-human similarly makes room for the nonnormative as it reconceives the idea of what is human; Father Stanislaw, the granddaughter, and the pet shop salesman all demonstrate acceptance of traumatized people, of people who live with enduring impacts of trauma on their “animal brain.”



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THE BEAST OF MEMORY, OR METAPHORS, MEMES, ICONS, AND SYMBOLS While Semel does not use the same terms as neuroscientists who identify the “animal brain” as the seat of traumatic memory, her novel And the Rat Laughed does express the idea that memory can be beastly and ferocious. Father Stanislaw puts this point poignantly into words. After he has done all he can for the girl and relinquished her to the care of others, he remains tormented by what he has seen. He writes, in anguish, “The beast of memory will remain trapped in the lair of my body, sinking its teeth into me and biting” (271). Semel herself offered a similar remark in a 2008 interview, relaying, “Memory is alive [like] a live animal banging at my door.”18 With these words the author suggests that rodents serve as metaphor in And the Rat Laughed. The field of critical animal studies has commented at length on literary representations of nonhuman animals and how they function to explore human identities; Semel’s novel quite deliberately creates such imagery and highlights that the rat in this fiction appears not only as a living character but also in a figurative sense. The rat is the beast of memory in another sense as well. It is an animal remembered and misremembered many times, appearing in each generation. Chapter 4 of the novel (“The Dream”) emphasizes this theme. The chapter reports on a far-distant future in which the tale of Girl and Rat has spread far and wide, spurred by poems that the third generation circulated online. By the end of the twenty-first century, the meme has emerged in multiple versions, including popular song and anime renditions. Images of Girl and Rat have become fashionable and pervasive; they show up as icons on clothing and notebooks. At theme parks, Mickey Mouse has morphed into Mickey Rat. In those various iterations of the Girl and Rat legend, historical fact is lost. What has captured the imagination of the public is myth, unmoored from its original context, endlessly configured and reconfigured. Sometimes victims are even identified as perpetrators, and vice versa. As a number of readers have noted, through these details Semel offers a cautionary tale about misrepresentation and misappropriation of the past.19 She thereby moves beyond focus on postmemory—that is, the impact of the Holocaust on the second generation—and emphasizes instead prosthetic memory—an identification with memories of others as a result of exposure to mass media.20 “The Dream” thus presents a future world which has evolved less out of Holocaust memory than out of the third generation’s legacy, and out of ongoing responses to the catastrophe. In contrast to other chapters (“The Story, “The Legend,” “The Diary”) which call attention to the realm of the more-than-human, “The Dream” portrays post-human existence. Drawing on conventions of science fiction, the author imagines people in the year 2099 who have undergone “genetic repair,” who no longer laugh or cry (186), and who communicate through networks of “brainmails.” They experience the physical world remotely, rather than firsthand. Yet the narrator of this chapter—Y Mee (Why Me) in English or Lima (What’s It to Me) in Hebrew—feels compelled to travel interstellar distances to the site of a

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church in Poland in order to investigate the actual origins of the Girl and Rat legend. Authenticity matters to this character, even though it inflicts pain. Remembering is difficult and demanding. About physical travel she says, “It hurts so much. My entire being is torn apart” (193). Her choice to explore the material world and to seek truth conveys a humanistic message about guarding memory. It stresses the imperative of respecting first-generation witness and disallowing misinformation or distortion of history. Her choice is also a profoundly humane gesture, in its return to touch and personal encounter. As such, it reinforces the emphasis achieved at the end of chapter 2, “The Legend.” The closing passage there—the one that raises those troubling, confusing questions about who is a beast and who is a human—also presents the first and third generation hugging. The granddaughter feels the grandmother’s warmth and necklace as they embrace, and this scene of closeness expresses a need for touch, for comfort, and compassion. Again, the third generation helps set out a central theme of the novel, one made more intense because this generation may be the last to have physical contact with survivors. In chapter 4, rats function as beasts of memory in yet one more sense as well. This species itself no longer exists physically, following widespread extermination in the year 2037. As a result, no longer living but existing only as a memory, this animal takes on symbolic dimensions. In particular, it hints at Jewish history. Unjustly blamed for spreading disease, rats have suffered persecution that parallels the genocide of the Jews (157–58). Then the parallel with Jews deepens, for a remnant survives; a few rats continue to accompany humans, even into space as stowaways on rockets, so the animals serve as symbols of persistence. Reading through the lens of animal studies highlights those themes, which might otherwise recede from view among the multiple facets of Semel’s narrative. Animal studies as a field aims to foster respect for the natural world and often expresses great concern over threats to ecological balance; bearing those values in mind, readers are likely to discern how Semel’s foray into dystopia postulates equivalence between rats and Jews.21 While positing likenesses between animals and Jews might prove problematic and draw criticism (as was the case with Art Spiegelman’s Maus and its use of mice as stand-ins for Jewish characters), the post-humanist dimensions of And the Rat Laughed are more likely to elicit sympathy for rats and elevate their status than to demean human beings. The “beast of memory” in And the Rat Laughed is thus highly multivalent; it functions as metaphor, meme, icon, symbol, and disrupter of normative hierarchies that insist on an opposition between human and nonhuman animals.

THE LAUGHTER, OR WHAT’S ZOOLOGY GOT TO DO WITH IT? What then of laughter? What is its role in the novel? Is it another metaphor, symbol, or other figurative reference? It does appear in legend and surfaces as meme and icon in the future world of “The Dream,” but above all, it remains enigmatic.



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The third generation highlights this theme. After hearing the legend, the granddaughter explicitly raises the question: “Why did the rat laugh?” (116). She cannot provide an answer, but she is haunted by laughter from the past, sensing it as something vague, something frightening, transmitted to her in a visceral way. It makes itself known in the dark entry hall to her grandmother’s apartment building, and she feels as if laughter is echoing in the stairwell (122–23). Other young people of her generation have similar intuition. This point emerges when they begin to post poems on the internet, creating a series of variations on the theme of Girl and Rat. One of those teenagers feels like crying all day—and yet, she hears herself making a strange sound, “as if a weird creature was laughing somewhere in the dark.” Her experience, conveyed in chapter 3 of the novel (“The Poems”), puts into relief that laughter is not easy to interpret. It is something odd, felt deeply by the third generation, but not understood. That sense of anomaly is in effect suggested by the very title of the novel in the original Hebrew, Tschok shel akhbarosh [Rat’s Laughter or Laughter of a Rat]. Unlike the English title, which implies a singular event, the Hebrew presents a perplexing noun phrase that begs for definition as it asserts the existence of something mysterious and incongruous. Varied clues as to what the laughter entails arise throughout the novel. Among its many qualities, rat laughter is associated first and foremost with humanity. After all, the point of departure for the legend is a rat’s desire to be like humans and to laugh like they do (253). Father Stanislaw, for his part, underscores laughter’s desirability and its connection to the human realm when he says, “God did not create it. Laughter is created by magic and God saw that it was good. Whenever we laugh, we remind Him of our presence below and repair the damage that He Himself wrought” (257). This statement casts laughter as redemptive. Indeed, as the priest works to redeem the little girl he has rescued and so return her to human interactions, she demands that he teach her to laugh. He wishes to comply, but knows it will not be easy. To laugh in complete darkness is madness. Still, he is willing to try and asserts, “Blessed is the child who has heard the laughter of a rat” (251). Other passages suggest other, contradictory qualities associated with laughter. Consider an entry in Stanislaw’s diary from Christmas day, 1944, which describes him sitting in his church. There, in a niche, the girl has drawn a picture of the Madonna together with a rat. The priest perceives the rat laughing, but with a laugh neither mirthful nor derisive. He observes, “the rat’s mouth is gaping at the horror of that which will be and that which has been. It is the laughter of those who accompany the dead, as they stare into the pit” (272). Such laughter is decidedly not redemptive: it is a desecration, a disgrace, a horror. Yet another aspect of laughter is its connection to memory. When Stanislaw at the end of the war reluctantly turns the girl over to Jewish authorities reclaiming hidden children, he hopes she will remember him and even, one day, forgive him for abandoning her. If that happens, he declares in his diary, “I will rise out of the Tohu and Bohu within you, I will stretch out my rat tail, and I will laugh to you” (277). Here he describes a life-affirming laughter that insists on the importance of memory at a

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personal level. He also connects laughter with remembrance of collective history, as is clear when he continues:   “Even if we ourselves never laugh [the laughter of the rat], we will always hope that someone else might, no matter what happens, in spite of everything. . . . The Jews did exist. The little girl does exist. Against all forgettings, this memory shall prevail. (276)  

In Hebrew, the insistence that memory shall prevail has heightened impact because of the phrase “af al pi chen” (“in spite of everything”). These words echo a Zionist motto from turn of the century Hebrew literature. The saying “nevertheless” valorized Jewish continuity and commitment to Jewish identity no matter how uncertain the future might seem. Accordingly, even as the priest’s diary is steeped in Christian imagery, his statements become a vehicle for recalling particular Jewish history. Similarly, in “The Dream,” Y-mee reaffirms the message of “nevertheless” when she travels to the historical source of the Girl and Rat legend. Despite the pain she feels, she declares, “If the little girl was laughing, then so can I” (193). In short, laughter signals disgrace, yet also potential forgiveness, redemption, commemoration, courage, and Jewish continuity. It denotes neither unalloyed joy nor absolute derision, but seems to encompass both at times. It implies horror as well as healing. In addition, it comes to signify a special kind of hilarity that erupts in defiance of absurdity. This is the strange laugh that the granddaughter observes in her grandmother and that she describes this way: “Really quiet, no sound, all you see is the way her mouth twitches, and the little muscles around her mouth. A silent laugh as if it isn’t coming from her throat, or from her stomach, or wherever people usually laugh, but from somewhere completely different” (116). Strikingly, the twitch calls to mind the movements of a rat, but even more striking is what the grandmother laughs at: someone on TV who is talking about acupressure massage as a way to relieve trauma. This is a therapeutic technique that neuroscience today has both endorsed and popularized.22 However, Semel’s former hidden child finds the idea amusingly preposterous. Evidently, her pain exceeds any such treatment, so she laughs for the sake of comic relief. Laughter, she muses in chapter 1, is a weapon of self-defense and something every story demands or else the listener would “panic and flee” (54). Furthermore, the novel suggests that her paradoxical laughter is the laughter of af-‘al-pi-hen, nevertheless, a laughter that responds to overwhelming terror.23 When profoundly threatened, a sentient being may not be able to do anything to defend itself, but by laughing it affirms its own sentience, asserts agency and, announces, “I am still here.”24 The very extremity of this character’s past has led her to embrace life, to keep on living despite everything. Indeed, this reading of Semel’s text recalls an interpretation of the Akedah that Elie Wiesel offers in an essay titled “The Sacrifice of Isaac: A Survivor’s Story” (1976). That discussion asks why Isaac, “the most tragic



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figure” in the Bible, is called “He who will laugh” (95). The answer, Wiesel suggests, is that laughter signifies defiance, the preservation of decency, and protest against God: “As the first survivor, [Isaac] had to teach us, the future survivors of Jewish history, that it is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime and still not give up the art of laughter.” The son of Abraham, who faced death on Mt. Moriah, could never afterward free himself from trauma, but he neither rebelled against life nor broke with society, and “in spite of everything, he did laugh” (97). Wiesel’s exegesis exhibits openly theological dimensions that Semel’s text does not, and Semel’s novel features its own distinctive narrative techniques and tone, but similar, life-affirming implications emerge in both. Yet a further example illustrates the complex, contradictory nature of laughter in Semel’s novel. Unlike the grandmother, who laughs frequently, the rat laughs only once. According to the legend, it happens for the first and last time when the girl-who-once-was emerges from the pit and steps into the sunlight. At that point, she thinks the rat might be the happiest of animals, but the earth opens up and swallows him, burying him “without a trace” (115). That is to say, his laughter—something exceptional, triumphant, “gaping,” horrifying—surfaces but quickly recedes into a nether region, buried like the girl’s trauma, itself. The laughter of the rat remains associated with a realm of extreme horror, beyond the limits of normative experience. Nevertheless. In the empirical world, laboratory data has corroborated the existence of rats’ laughter. Neuroscientists have demonstrated that rats do laugh, albeit at frequencies difficult for humans to grasp. Experiments that involve tickling have shown that rodents emit giggling sounds audible to humans only through transponders. Furthermore, scientists conducting this research conclude that, as humans engage with rats playfully, the rats come to respond in a positive way. They begin to trust people, seek out their company, become companions and playmates.25 In other words, science clearly documents what may seem an improbable kind of interspecies friendship and communication. Long before these ideas became widespread in the popular press, Semel was on to something. She presents the hidden child as having a story beyond frequencies that can easily be heard. By delving into the unspeakably horrible experience of the girl-who-once-was, Semel indicates how the stories of hidden children remained hidden for many years. That concealment was thorough, in part because children survived by suppressing speech and behaving in ways that would not get them noticed. That kind of behavior had been a necessary, adaptive strategy during the war; after the war, what had been a necessity continued, manifesting as a habitual inclination to keep a low profile. Furthermore, as adults, many former hidden children were not widely recognized as “survivors.” Until the 1990s they were routinely told they had not suffered like children who had been imprisoned in camps. Consequently, many

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stayed quiet, their experiences went largely unheard, and, as a group, they remained invisible for decades.26 In Semel’s novel, hidden childhood comes into the open, thanks to the third generation—the granddaughter who coaxes the story out and then (for better or for worse) passes along the legend of Girl and Rat to others. Cast in the form of fable, a version of the truth opens up possibilities for wide audiences to become aware of the nonnormative, extreme realm inhabited by the girl-who-once-was: the underworld in which Jews, considered subhuman, found companionship with rats, a space where cross-species communication took place. The novel in its entirety grows out of that pivotal function played by the third generation. In And the Rat Laughed, art strives to make perceptible, or at least call attention to, a buried, subterranean world and to the realm of the “animal” brain where trauma registers. Even while recognizing the limitations of words to convey trauma, and even while cautioning against misappropriation of Holocaust memory, the novel uncovers something that had been concealed for a long time. As Father Stanislaw writes, “Maybe history is a kind of story, a kind of poem, a collection of legends or dreams that people tell themselves at night. And these stories and legends and poems and dreams embody the truth, in a code that few will want to decipher” (275). His reflections serve as comment on the novel itself, which offers five distinctive chapters named for genres of writing: story, legend, poems, dream, and diary. Each features a separate narrator and vantage point. None is sufficient to convey trauma or its ongoing repercussions, but, by combining different artistic approaches, Semel gestures toward the challenge of representing trauma.27 Pairing innovative storytelling with animal imagery and blurred boundaries between human and nonhuman experience, Semel aims to stretch the limits of representation, to venture into a realm beyond ordinary human language which is the locus of rat’s laughter. And the Rat Laughed thereby aims to sound suppressed voices and to counteract silence surrounding Holocaust victims and surviving generations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aarons, Victoria; Berger, Alan L. Third Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Aini, Leah. “Until the Entire Guard Has Passed.” Trans. Philip Simpson. In New Women’s Writing from Israel, ed. Risa Domb. London and Portland, OR: Valentine Mitchell, 1996. Appelfeld, Aharon. Sippur hayim. Jerusalem: Keter, 1999. ———. The Story of a Life. Trans. Aloma Halter. New York: Schocken, 2004. Berger, Alan L. “The Holocaust Novel from Israel that America Can’t Handle.” Forward, Oct 26, 2009. ———. “The Future of Holocaust Memory: Nava Semel’s And the Rat Laughed,” Literature and Belief, 2018: 101–24.



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Fogelman, Eva. “The Psychology Behind Being a Hidden Child.” In Jane Marks, The Hidden Children: The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust, 292–307. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993. Frankel, Alona. Yaldah. Tel Aviv: Mapa, 2004. ———. Girl. Trans. Sondra Silverston. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Gorman, James. “Oh For the Joy of a Tickled Rat,” New York Times, November 10, 2016. www​.nytimes​.com​/2016​/11​/11​/science​/tickling​-rats​-neuroscience​.html. Hedgepeth, Sonja M., and Rochelle G. Saidel, “Nava Semel’s And the Rat Laughed: A Tale of Sexual Violation.” In Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., 205–20. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2010. Herman, David. “Animal Worlds in Modern Fiction: An Introduction,” Modern Fiction Studies 60:3 (Fall 2014), 421–43. ———. Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Johnston, Emily Ronay. Split Wounds: Diverging Formations of Trauma in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders v, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, And the Rat Laughed, and Once Were Warriors. Dissertation: Illinois State University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2016. 10154258. ISBN 9781369188127. Lassner, Phyllis. “The American Voices of Hidden Child Survivors: Coming of Age out of Time and Space.” In New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literatures: Reading and Teaching, eds. Victoria Aarons and Holli Levitsky, 47–58. Albany: SUNY Press, 2019. Liebrecht, Savyon. “Morning in the Park among the Nannies.” Trans. Marganit Weinberger-Rotman. In Apples from the Desert, 181–92. New York: Feminist Press, 1998. Manheim, Noa. “Dor shlishi lochets escape.” Yediot acharonot. Ynet, December 23, 2001. Haaretz, Musaf sefarim 465 (January 23, 2002): 6, 12. Marks, Jane. The Hidden Children: The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993. Rudin, Shai. “The Poetics of Horror: Representations of Violence against Women in Israeli Women’s Literature.” Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal 9, no. 1 (Spring 2012). Semel, Nava. Tsehok shel akhbarosh. Tel Aviv: Yediot acharonot—Sifre Hemed, 2001. ———. And the Rat Laughed. Trans. Miriam Shlesinger. Hybrid Publishers, 2009. Sokoloff, Naomi. “‘The Pigs Were My Best Friends’: Animals and the Holocaust in Alona Frankel’s Memoirs.” In Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making, eds. Nancy E. Berg and Naomi B. Sokoloff, 163–82. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020. ———. “The Nazi Beast at the Warsaw Zoo: Animal Studies, The Holocaust, The Zookeeper’s Wife, and See Under: Love.” In Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, eds. Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner, 91–109. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2020. Steir-Livny, Liat. Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third-Generation Survivors in Israel. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019. Tec, Nechama. “A Historical Perspective: Tracing the History of the Hidden-Child Experience.” In Jane Marks, The Hidden Children: The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust, 273–91. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993. van der Kolk, Bessel A. “Trauma and Attachment with Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.” 2012 Eau Claire, WI: CMI/Premier Education Solutions. ———. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.

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Wiesel, Elie. “The Sacrifice of Isaac: A Survivor’s Story.” In Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, 69–97. New York: Touchstone, 1976.

NOTES 1. Appelfeld (2004), 101–2. 2. Alona Frankel (2016), 21. 3. Keren’s account appears in Marks (1993), 26–33. See also Ava Kadishson Schieber’s autobiographical story, “Rabbit,” an account of hiding in a chicken coop (Soundless Roar), as well as Phyllis Lassner’s analysis of it (2019). 4. Kriksey and Helmreich (2010) cited in Herman (2018), 94. 5. Herman (2014), 425. 6. For commentary on these different trends in second and third generation work, see Aarons and Berger (2017) and Liat Steir Livny (2019). In Israeli fiction, a few precedents from the 1990s treated themes of sexual abuse, though not in so open or explicit a way as Semel’s novel. See, for instance, Savyon Liebrecht’s “Morning in the Park among the Nannies” and Leah Aini’s “Until the Entire Guard Passes By.” 7. Steir Livny discusses this gender emphasis, evident not only in the attention to sexual assault but also in the closeness and symbiotic relationship of grandmother to granddaughter. That symbiosis resembles the generational dynamics depicted in the Israeli documentary film, “Oy Mama.” Shai Rudin (2012) has analyzed the representation of sexual violence and the artistic challenges in Semel’s novel. 8. Aarons and Berger (2017), 108. 9. Herman (2018), ch. 3, discusses at length the roles that nonhuman animals can play in therapeutic settings. They often reduce stress and facilitate talk; similarly, when projecting positive feelings onto animals, children may find calm and the ability to feel trust. 10. Sokoloff (2020a) elaborates how the child’s imagination grows from her interactions with animals. 11. Johnston (2016), 139–41. She refers, for example, to p. 23 in the novel. 12. Herman (2018), 87–114. 13. Van der Kolk (2014), 43. 14. Van der Kolk (2012). 15. Herman (2014). 16. Herman (2018), 90. 17. The theme of animal welfare does come up explicitly in Alona Frankel’s memoirs. The author there clearly links her experience as a hidden child with her commitment to caring for animals, as well as for powerless or downtrodden people. 18. Cited in Hedgepeth and Saidel (2017), fn. 15. 19. Berger (2018), makes this point eloquently in his indispensable thematic overview of the novel. Semel is centrally concerned with how the transmission of trauma goes wrong. 20. In contrast to Berger, Johnston focuses on the transmission of trauma as a collective experience—one that impacts not just survivors but all those who come in contact with the survivor and all those who deal with prosthetic memory. Her argument is that trauma cannot be reduced to individual experience—which is a valuable insight, but one that underestimates the ways And the Rat Laughs highlights the theme of misappropriation. 21. Animal studies and achieving ecological balance.



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22. Van der Kolk (2012) demonstrates the technique of tapping various parts of the body to regain calm. 23. Van der Kolk reports that survivors of trauma often display “a wry sense of humor and a delicious take on human folly” (2014), 316. 24. My thanks to Gabriel Skoog for his discussions with me on this topic. 25. The topic of rat laughter gained visibility in the general press in 2016. See, for instance, Gorman (2016). Less widely seen accounts appeared earlier, but still some time after Semel’s novel. 26. See discussions by Tec (1993) and Fogelman (1993) on the history and psychology of hidden children. 27. Semel is not alone in approaching such themes. Within Hebrew literature, quite a few other texts combine animal themes with Holocaust themes. For discussion of artists who blur boundaries between human and nonhuman characters in order to respond to the Shoah, see Sokoloff (2020) and Sokoloff (2020a).

10 Third-Generation Holocaust Survivors in Israel Cultural Narratives Liat Steir-Livny

Third-generation Holocaust survivors in Israel who were born between the late 1960s and the early 1980s grew up in a society immersed in Holocaust awareness.1 Since the late 1990s, they have related to the Holocaust in a variety of cultural fields.2 This chapter addresses key aspects of the cultural narratives in which they refer to the Holocaust and its memory. By analyzing examples from TV shows, literature, social media, cinema, alternative ceremonies, skits, online newspapers, and films, it shows how two prominent paths of commemoration are present in their works. The first involves broadening and deepening themes that the second generation began to represent in various cultural fields as of the 1980s. The second is creating a new layer of commemoration that includes new ways to remember, delving into new topics that were previously overlooked or marginalized, and questioning previous assumptions. These themes are contextualized in the chapter within the empirical psychological and cultural research on the third generation in Israel.

THE THIRD GENERATION: TRANSGENERATIONAL TRANSFER OF THE TRAUMA The study of third-generation survivors began in the 1980s when psychologists in the United States who were treating a seven-year-old grandson of Holocaust survivors noted he had been strongly affected by the Holocaust and that the issue deserved comprehensive treatment within the psychiatric community.3 Since then, psychologists and psychiatrists have debated the term third generation and the characteristics of those individuals who fall into this category. The numerous studies dealing with biological grandchildren reflect three main schools of thought. Some researchers claim that the trauma of the Holocaust transfers to the second and third 151

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generations and that it is manifested in a number of symptoms that differentiate them from other similarly aged groups.4 The second school of thought maintains that the third generation has no distinguishing traits relative to the trauma, and that there is no difference between the biological grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and others whose grandparents are not.5 The third school of thought acknowledges the existence of a wide spectrum of reactions to the Holocaust which do not justify viewing the third generation as a homogeneous group, but warrants using this term, and acknowledges that there are various forms of transgenerational transfer of post trauma to grandchildren.6 Several recent books draw on third generation narratives from several continents, and highlight both the diversity of inherited memory and the transgenerational transfer of trauma, as well as elements they share. These texts show how a variety of cultural and historical factors have shaped the third generation by examining how their grandparents’ survival experiences and their integration after the war have impacted the diversity of the third generation. Cultural and political factors, as well as forms of Holocaust commemorations in various countries and communities, have also been influential.7 Other studies have expanded the definitions of the third generation beyond genetics, by suggesting that they can also be cultural terms, especially in Israel, a society that is imbued with its trauma and where Holocaust awareness is more intensive and comprehensive than elsewhere in the world.8 The Holocaust was and remains a central wound in Israel’s national consciousness. The memory of the trauma has not faded over the years; rather, Holocaust representations and the public dis­course about the Holocaust have only grown stronger in recent decades. Research indicates that Holocaust memory is a cross-generational defining trait of the Jewish population. Scholars have noted that Israeli media, education and culture, as well as public discourse in Israel tend to frame the Holocaust as a current, ongoing local trauma rather than an event that ended decades ago in another place.9 In Israeli collective memory, the trauma of the Holocaust is not derived solely from the events of World War II. The sensitive relationship between Israel and the Arab nations, the decades-long Jewish-Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the threat of annihilation, the continuing terrorist attacks and intifadas have all contributed to creating an atmosphere of constant vigilance, politicization of the Holocaust and ongoing anxiety. For example, a 2015 survey found that 43 percent of all Jewish Israelis believe that a second Holocaust could be perpetrated by the Palestinians.10 In this historic and cultural environment, second-generation and third-generation are cultural as well as biological terms. In this chapter, I use the term third generation to designate the biological grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, but also Jewish Israelis who grew up between the late 1960s to the 1980s in an environment immersed in Holocaust awareness, anxiety, and stress.11 I discuss the ways in which third-generation cultural products reflect the way they are influenced by Holocaust awareness and simultaneously influence this awareness and cause it to change. I explore the two main paths of commemoration



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that have emerged through their impetus which involve expanding previous narratives and pushing the boundaries of Holocaust commemoration.

EXPANDING SECOND-GENERATION NARRATIVES Holocaust memory in various forms has been one of the key components of Israeli identity since the establishment of the state. Starting in the late 1970s, the cultural and political aspects of the Holocaust have taken on growing importance. When the right-wing Likud Party came to power for the first time in 1977, the Likud-directed Ministry of Education made the Holocaust a permanent feature of high school curricula and matriculation exams as of the 1980s. High school delegations first began to travel to the former concentration camps in Poland in 1988. To date, thousands of Israeli high school students take part annually. These trips have become one of the most intensive means of educating future generations about the Holocaust.12 In addition, during the 1980s, many Holocaust survivors began to write their memoirs. Second-generation survivors entered the cultural sphere and contributed to increasing Holocaust awareness by expressing their postmemory13 in a range of cultural fields (literature, poems, films, theater, and others). They positioned the survivors and themselves as protagonists through the telling of individual stories. Their works portrayed the new lives the survivors had created for themselves but also their emotional scars, the transgenerational transfer of the trauma to the second generation, and the complex relationships between these parents and their children. Both rightand left-wingers politicized the Holocaust to fit their opposing agendas. Certain members of the second generation also began criticizing features of Holocaust commemorations such as the educational trips to the former concentration camps in Poland, the intense acting out of the trauma, and the politicization and instrumentalization of the Holocaust, at times through previously taboo genres such as Black humor, satire, and parody.14 Thus, the third generation in Israel grew up in a culture of increasingly intense Holocaust awareness. In their narratives, the third generation has mostly refrained from focusing on the testimonies of survivors or restoring the complex relationship between survivors and their children but have reinforced debates on Holocaust commemorations in Israel initiated primarily by the second generation. Many cultural third-generation works follow in the footsteps of the second-generation critical narratives but root them in new cultural arenas such as social media.15 The following subsections present the most dominant themes.

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“ACTING OUT” THE TRAUMA IN ISRAEL: THE BLACK HUMOR PERSPECTIVE For many years, Israeli culture recoiled from dealing with the Holocaust through Black humor, satire or parody, out of concerns that a humorous approach would violate the sanctity of its memory, be perceived as disrespectful, or hurt survivors’ feelings. This all started to change in the 1990s.16 The Chamber Quintet (Hahamishia Hakamerit [‘Matar’ Productions, Channels 2-Tela’ad, Channel 1, 1993–1997]) was the first TV satire that criticized official Holocaust commemoration in Israel.17 The third generation has vastly extended the use of Holocaust humor introduced by the second generation.18 In the last two decades, third-generation works have employed Black humor and satire to reflect the intense and exaggerated ways the Israeli society is submerged in Holocaust awareness.19 For example, Adir Miller20 and Ran Sarig, the creators of the successful sitcom Traffic Light (Ramzor [Keshet Broadcasting, Channel 2, 2008–2014]), integrated Black humor Holocaust associations into many episodes, thus underscoring the extent to which Holocaust recollection is an integral part of Jewish-Israeli lives. The series revolves around the lives of three thirty-ish men in contemporary Israel. Amir, one of the main characters, uses the Jewish Partisans’ hymn as the ringtone when his mother calls. In one episode, one of the protagonists takes his wife to a bed-and-breakfast where they learn that the place has strict rules, including no cell phones. In a scene reminiscent of Holocaust film escape scenes, they decide to flee amid images of barbed wire and watchtowers, with dogs barking in the background. Ran Sarig’s book Chaim Shtaim21 is a collection of short stories about ordinary people living in contemporary Israel which is suffused with the traumatic memories of the Holocaust past. The short story “The Metamorphoses of the S-Word” (where the “S” refers to the Shoah), revolves around how Israeli society has made the Holocaust an Israeli “religion” by obsessively reliving its “memory” and transmitting the trauma to the next generation. Sarig deliberately employs Black humor and fantasy to deal with the imprint of the trauma on the Israeli present. One of the characters is an Israeli child who speaks German, uses Nazi expressions, and acts as though he was living in Germany of the 1930s and 1940s. He develops a highly charismatic personality and grows a little moustache; Sarig calls him “the Führer of Holon.” In the story, all the Jewish-Israelis are variants of this child: they live the Holocaust in the present, after having absorbed it since childhood. Sarig goes so far as to make the outrageous claim that “Auschwitz is the Jews’ Euro Disney” (63). In a black postmodern fantasy, he imagines that children in the near future will be taught the alphabet using a Holocaust-infused version of Naomi Shemer’s well-known Hebrew alphabet mnemonic song: “A is for Auschwitz / B is for Birkenau / C is for Camp, be it large or small / And what is D? It stands for Dachau, the first of all to open” (49). In 2013, comedian Tal Menkes uploaded his song “Stop” to YouTube, that satires the way young Jewish-Israelis use Holocaust semantics to describe their daily lives. His ridiculously tiny guitar that plays deliberately mournful music undermines the



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lyrics, and his weirdly high voice make the point that when Jewish-Israelis use the word “Nazi” to describe a policeman handing out a traffic fines, a teacher who gives a bad grade on an exam, or a bouncer who will not let someone into a party, it trivializes the trauma. “It is not a Holocaust. This is the Holocaust,” he sings while moving from scenes describing contemporary Israel to footage that was shot when the Allies liberated the camps. “This is not a Nazi. This is a Nazi,” he sings while panning from scenes of everyday Israel to scenes of Hitler.22 The song confirms that the trauma remains an integral part of the current generation’s identity and its acting out does not contribute to its commemoration but rather vitiates it.

POLITICIZATION OF THE TRAUMA Since the founding of the state, the Israeli ethos has been to “learn from the Holocaust,” so that no one will ever be able to destroy the Jewish people. One of the major “lessons” was to fight back rather than go to death “like lambs to the slaughter.”23 Research suggests that these notions have also influenced the attitudes of Jewish Israelis toward the Israeli-Arab conflict.24 From the late 1940s until the late 1970s, Israeli culture drew clear-cut parallels between Arabs and Nazis.25 From the 1970s, as Israel’s right wing continued to adhere to this comparison, the Left— many of whom were second-generation—rejected this view and criticized what they considered to be a politicization of the Holocaust. Simultaneously, however, some created their own new equation, which also politicized the Holocaust to fit their own agenda, in particular by drawing a parallel between the Holocaust and the Nakbah. Comparisons between the behavior of Israel Defense Force (IDF) soldiers in the occupied territories and Nazis were also made.26 Since the new millennium, third-generation members on the Left and the Far Left have contributed to expanding this narrative. For example, Noam Hayut’s novel My Holocaust Thief,27 presents a portrait of IDF soldiers (including the author) committing Nazi-like acts in the occupied territories. Hayut claims the book is autobiographical and is the outcome of his awareness of the Holocaust and its impact on his life, from infancy to maturity. He describes how he was raised in a culture where the Holocaust dictated his life. As a child, he mourned being part of a people that were slaughtered “while the world was silent” (20−21). He wanted to be different: a Jew with a weapon which he found “sexy” (31). He was positive that Zionism was justified and believed the Nazis were the epitome of evil until he served in the West Bank, where Hayut witnessed what he considered brutality by the IDF. He says that what changed the way he perceived the Holocaust memory was the terrified expression of one little Palestinian girl. From a gung-ho soldier he morphed into someone who saw himself and his fellow soldiers as brutal tyrants. He had always thought of the Nazis as evil incarnate, but he suddenly understood: “For that girl, I was the absolute evil” (63). He fills dozens of pages with

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soldiers’ testimonies about violent acts in the West Bank. Hayut concludes the book by addressing that nameless Palestinian girl: I know that I’m the absolute evil for you. . . . When I was your age, there was also an absolute evil for me. Though I never came face to face with it, like you did, I inherited its memory. . . . When I confronted you . . . I said goodbye to the absolute evil of my childhood . . . when I became absolute evil myself. . . . Now I’m a free spirit, because I’ve lost my Holocaust. . . . There’s no weapon in my hands, and I’ll never rule over anyone else. And it’s because of you. If you could steal the Holocaust from all the hundreds and thousands of IDF soldiers, you would certainly liberate the whole of Palestine. . . . My apologies again, your evil Noam. (221−24)

Yishai Sarid’s novel The Memory Monster takes the form of a letter written to Yad Vashem by a Holocaust researcher who accompanies students on educational trips to the former concentration and death camps. The distraught academic expresses his opinion that the Holocaust has become a “career path”: the subject matter for computer games, a gimmick to represent Israeli military power, and a leisure activity for Jewish-Israelis touring Poland. “Look, there’s Ikea!” a tourist enthusiastically comments to her friend on their way to Auschwitz-Birkenau, as the guide talks about the mass murder of the Jews (118–19).28 For years, Nazism was referred to in Israel as “the Nazi beast.” In Sarid’s book, the researcher’s son hands him a drawing of a red and black monster confronting a small human figure. “This is you, Daddy, fighting the monster,” he says (78). According to Sarid, the intensity of Israeli Holocaust commemoration has created a “memory monster” which feeds on victimization, hate, violence, and anxiety. He feels that this has filled the younger generations with antipathy toward the Other, and that the Israeli establishment has “infected” Jewish Israelis with a “memory virus” (74), releasing the “monster” within them. Sarid argues that Jewish-Israelis have been imbued with Nazi traits with regard to the ‘other,’ whether they are Palestinians or “the Ashkenazi left-wing.” Sarid maintains that the collective “lesson” of the Holocaust had encouraged the distorted emergence of the younger generations who are in favor of Nazi-like acts against the Arabs. At the end of the trip, one of the students says to the guide: I think that to survive, we should be a little bit “Nazi” ourselves. We need to be able to kill without mercy. . . . If we are too soft we won’t stand a chance. . . . Sometimes we have no choice and we must hurt civilians as well. It is hard to differentiate between terrorists and civilians, and a child who is a child today can become a terrorist tomorrow. This is a war of existence. It is either us or them. We will not let it happen to us again. (102–3)

The shocked protagonist then says: “Dear teachers, you can report that the message has been assimilated. Only power. No conscience, no manners, no confusions. . . . ‘We need to be a little bit Nazi.’ You finally said it. You understood correctly,



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children; well done” (104). Thus, Sarid, like many other members of the third generation, calls for a change in Holocaust commemoration.29

PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES OF HOLOCAUST COMMEMORATION IN ISRAEL The third generation grew up in an era of tremendous sociopolitical and cultural changes in Israel. In terms of Holocaust awareness, today’s Israeli society differs considerably from the Israel of their parents.30 The third generation has been educated in a society that had modified its problematic stance toward Holocaust survivors. The divisive perceptions commonplace during the first decades of the state of Israel’s existence, such as the dichotomy between the European Jews who had resisted the Nazis and those who had not (and the question of how and why they survived), were replaced by the view of survivors as heroes who had proven their ability to overcome the atrocities they had endured. The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors grew up in a sheltered atmosphere with a generation separating them from direct trauma, unlike their parents, who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust in their homes.31 Second-generation rhetoric, esthetics, and thematic key factors, which were revolutionary when they appeared in Israeli culture, were considered a given in the world in which the third generation grew up and what was once a novelty was trivial and overly familiar. Thus, in many cases, members of the third generation deliberately neglect the usual bank of images and narratives created by the second generation and devise points of view that push the boundaries of Holocaust commemoration.32

REMEMBRANCE IN THE LIVING ROOM Official ceremonies marking Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day have been part of Israeli canonical memory since the 1950s.33 Held every year on the Jewish date of 23 Nissan, they take place on the eve and the morning of Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day. The ceremonies include lowering the flag to half-mast, singing “Hatikva” (the national anthem), and reciting prayers for the dead, readings of Holocaust survivor testimonies, texts, poems, and music, dance, or dramatic segments appropriate for the day. The Zionist lesson of the Holocaust and the importance of the state of Israel are stressed. During the 1990s, alternative ceremonies, which were the initiative of the second generation, moved away from the Zionist lessons of the Holocaust. The speakers at these ceremonies were usually younger and the topics more diverse than at official observances. Nevertheless, the structure of the ceremony still replicated the top-down distribution model of the canonical ceremonies in which the audience does not take an active part in constructing the content, but rather sits and listens.34

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Remembrance in the Living Room is a third-generation social initiative which provides an intimate format for commemoration on the eve of Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day. Adi Altschuler, the initiator of the project, is a social entrepreneur. Altschuler says that she started Remembrance in the Living Room as a response to her own experience on the eve of Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day in 2010 when she came to the conclusion that her generation was not responsive to the ceremonies or to the alternative ceremonies that had appeared since the late 1990s. While driving home after a hard day of work, she heard sad songs on the radio and realized that she had completely forgotten it was Holocaust Remembrance Day. At the invitation of her mother, Altschuler went to an alternative ceremony at the Hacameri theater, where she noticed that she was the only one in the audience below the age of fifty. She began to wonder: How did we get to such a problematic state? Is it because canonical ceremonies are too bombastic? Maybe these ceremonies don’t speak our language? Maybe it is not the ceremonies but us; maybe we are indifferent? Or are we simply scared to let the sadness interfere with our daily life? And if I’m so detached from that day, how will my children experience it?35

The following year, Altschuler and her partner Nadav Ambon decided to organize a social encounter in their living room to mark the day where people could gather to discuss the Holocaust in a freer and lighter atmosphere, which would include beer and snacks. They listened to the testimony of a Holocaust survivor, played instruments and sang, and afterward had a meaningful discussion on the effects of the trauma. It was a great success. The following year, Altschuler contacted other well-known young public figures in Israel, told them about the new initiative, and asked them to host gatherings in their living rooms. Many agreed. In 2012, Remembrance in the Living Room took place in twenty private homes in Israel. Since then, the word has spread, and these gatherings tend to overshadow other alternative ceremonies. In 2019, approximately one million Jewish-Israelis (in Israel and abroad) attended. The Department of Education recommended that high school students take part in these evenings, and since then, the Presidents of Israel, hold a Remembrance in the Living Room gathering at the presidential residence.36 The founders refer to their project as a “social initiative” and to the encounters in the living rooms as “gatherings” or as “evenings” to show that these are not “regular” alternative ceremonies. They encourage people to either host or join a neighborhood group. The hosts and participants sign up on a Facebook page or on the project’s website. Altschuler and her associates refer to Remembrance in the Living Room as an “open code” in that they supply a framework people can use in different ways. On their website and Facebook page, they make suggestions as to how the evening should be conducted. They divide it into three parts: testimony (of a survivor or a member of the second generation, or a researcher), expression (the participants are invited to express their feelings and emotions through singing, dancing, poetry



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reading, painting, storytelling, or drama), and discussion (open debates which enable the participants to voice their opinions and listen to others). Rather than being passive observers, the attendees become the collective memory agents themselves. They ask, share, create, talk, and express their opinions, thus opening these gatherings to a much wider set of voices and opinions.37 The success of these gatherings derives from the technological revolution of the Internet, and especially the interactive zone of social media. Remembrance in the Living Room appeals to the younger generations (including the fourth generation, most of whom are currently high school students), who are less interested in top-down performative ceremony models.38 In Israeli ceremonial terms, this constitutes a revolution.

GETTING TO KNOW THE “OTHER SIDE” In general, the second generation was so concerned with the victimization of their parents as well as their own suffering that they rarely looked at “the other side”: the offspring of the perpetrators and the ways they deal with the past. By contrast, the third generation has addressed the complex topics of the perpetrators’ offspring as well as the non-Jewish population under the Occupation and the encounters of Jewish-Israelis with them, in both serious and humoristic texts. For example, “The Berlin Museum” skit (Museon Berlin, 2008) by the comedy group The Tross Brothers, tells the story of a third-generation Jewish Israeli woman visiting a museum in Berlin. The explanations are provided by Franz, a young German museum guide, who is very kind to her, but she misinterprets his innocent explanations as being submerged in Nazism. For example when he says, “Hi,” the woman hears “Heil,” when he points to a painting high up on a wall, she thinks his hand gesture is the Nazi salute, when he explains abstract paintings, he briefly blurts out expressions such as “the supreme race” as though he were barking commands, and he requests her to leave her camera at the entrance “next to the pile of glasses and shoes.” The woman feels very uncomfortable around him. “I have a problem,” she says. “Every problem has a solution. A final solution,” he replies. In order to calm her down, he promises to tell her a knock-knock joke: “Knock, knock,” he starts. “Who’s there?” she replies. “The Gestapo!” he shrieks. She turns out to be a Mossad agent and searches him (“What are you searching for?” “Antisemitism!”). She eventually finds a mobile phone: “Third generation,” he exclaims. This softens her attitude. “I’m third generation too,” and the two reconcile on these grounds. This skit draws attention to the ways in which the Holocaust has been engraved into the third generation’s identity (in particular, the woman is nameless thus represents a group and not an individual). In this skit and others, third-generation comedians use selfdeprecating humor to criticize themselves and show how the Holocaust dominates their perspective in every way, making them fearful of German authority figures and preventing them from normalizing their relationship with Germany.

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Third-generation films deal with another topic that often surfaces when offspring of survivors meet offspring of perpetrators; namely, the complex attitudes of Nazi descendants toward their familial past. Contemporary documentary cinema has addressed these problematic issues by representing descendants who express shame, guilt, or even a desire to atone for their family members’ doings (Chanoch Ze’evi’s Hitler’s Children [Yaldei Hitler, 2011]), alongside denial of the familial past (Arnon Goldfinger’s The Flat [Hadira, 2011]), an inability to fully understand their parents’ role in the atrocities (Maya Sarfaty’s The Most Beautiful Woman, [Hayafa banashim, 2016]), or a general resentment of the German educational system’s misplaced preoccupation with the Nazi era (Michelle Stein Teer’s Kleiner Rudi, 2006).39 Even though romantic relationships between Germans and Jewish Israelis has existed for decades, it was marginalized in Israeli culture. These encounters, whether friendly or romantic, and whether they unfold in Germany or Israel, have been depicted in several contemporary Israeli films. For example, Ophir Raul Graizer’s fiction film The Cakemaker (Haofe, 2018) describes a homosexual love affair between Oren, a Jewish Israeli who is married with children, and Thomas, a German baker he meets on his business trips to Berlin. After Oren is killed in a car accident, Thomas the baker goes to Israel, locates Anat, Oren’s widow, begins working for her in her coffeehouse, and has a love affair with her, since she is unaware of his relationship with Oren, her dead husband.40 In Tomer Heymann’s I Shot My Love (2009), gay director Tomer Heymann returns to Germany seventy years after his grandfather escaped. He is there to screen his film, Paper Dolls, at the Berlin International Film Festival, but while there he meets Andreas Merk, a young German dancer. What begins as a one-night stand turns into a romantic liaison. In both these films, the third generations from both sides are depicted as overcoming the past. The trauma is there, but relationships are formed. A contrasting portrayal is presented in Noga Netzer’s documentary The Handyman (Hachaver hagermani sheli, 2019). Netzer, who is both the director and the protagonist, is a third-generation who lives in her grandmother’s house in a moshav (a rural Israeli community), after her grandmother moves into a retirement home. Netzer hires a German tourist to work for her as a gardener. What begins as a love affair develops into a troubling documentation of abuse as the Holocaust hovers over the twisted relationship. At first, the German (who remains nameless throughout the film, symbolically representing all Germans) seems bashful. He courts Noga gently, and as the love affair between them develops, he moves into her house. Gradually, however, as more and more of his dark, brutal, and violent side is revealed, the relationship begins to deteriorate. The relationship is studded with clear-cut Holocaust associations. The German yells abusively at Netzer and orders her to obey him. “Don’t make it difficult all the time, just follow the rules I make for you,” he snaps. Most of the time, she is the victim, silent and passive. He voices antisemitic statements when he scolds her because she is not tidy and informs her harshly that he will teach her to get rid of her “obsession with madness and dirt” and adds “It’s in your genes.” While he tries to get rid



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of the fire ants in the yard, the German describes, with great relish, how he smashes them and tries to devise other methods of killing them (poison, drowning), especially the queen. His desire to exterminate them echoes the dehumanization of Jews by the Nazis and brings to mind the Nazi metaphor of Jews as parasites. The clashes between them reach their peak on Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day, when he yells that “it’s a beautiful day.” After a long period of abuse which shifts from the psychological to the physical, Noga buys pepper spray and, during one of his brutal outbursts, sprays him, locks him inside, and runs outside to call the police. The gassing symbolism is a reference to the past, except that in this case a Jew is using it to defend herself. “What happened?” asks the police officer. “He is German,” Noga says. “I understand,” says the policeman, as though this explains everything.

GERMANY AS HOME FOR JEWISH SURVIVORS AND THEIR OFFSPRING Young Jewish Israelis began moving to Berlin in the 1990s, and in greater numbers in subsequent decades. In 2017, approximately 10,000 Israelis were living in Berlin. There are larger Israeli communities in other localities such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley, but the community in Berlin has attracted the most attention, given its symbolism. Spitz Magazine, an online magazine created by Israelis in Berlin for Israelis in Berlin, describes itself as follows: The first Hebrew magazine in Berlin (and Germany) for many decades. It combines useful information with relevant articles on various cultural, political, historical and societal themes. . . . It is deeply connected to the glorious Hebrew past Berlin has had, but at the same time, is contemporary and facing forward. It is part of the growing Berlin-based Israeli community, but is, at the same time, a tool to observe and document it. It is an island for Hebrew readers/speakers, and also a cultural, political and social bridge to understanding Germany and Germans.41

The magazine is the initiative of the third-generation journalist Tal Alon, who moved to Berlin with her husband and two children in 2009. The articles cover topics of interest to the former Israeli community living in Berlin such as culture, events, food, and politics, and addresses the complexity of being an Israeli in Berlin in the shadow of the past, the antisemitism of the present, and the complexity of interactions with Germans (business, friendly, and/or romantic relations).42 Recent films on these subjects depict previously taboo topics such as the inability of Jews who were forced to immigrate from Germany in the 1930s to detach themselves from their beloved homeland (Goldfinger’s The Flat), survivors who decided after the Holocaust to return to Germany and live there for the rest of their lives (Ruth Shiloni’s Address Germany [Hactovet germania, 2017]), or the third generation who decides to settle in Berlin (Yael Reuveny’s Farewell Herr Schwartz [Heye shalom peter schwartz, 2013]).

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CONCLUSION Overall, the cultural works of the third generation in Israel reflect the zeitgeist of a generation who grew up in a society with intense Holocaust awareness. This article demonstrates how in certain ways such as the critique of Holocaust commemoration, acting out the trauma, Black humor, and politicizing the Holocaust, the third generation follows in the footsteps of the second generation by probing the narratives that preceded it more deeply. At the same time, members of the third generation have pushed the boundaries of Holocaust commemoration and have begun representing themes that were previously marginalized, or even taboo. They have revitalized narratives and performances, redefined ceremonial conventions, and forced Israeli society to deal with marginalized topics such as Germany as a home for the survivors and their offspring (past and present) and relationships and intimacy between third generation survivors and young Germans, as well as the complex attitudes of descendants of Nazis toward their past, thus creating a new layer of commemoration in Israel.

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Shohat, Ella. Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation. Raanana, The Open University, 2005 [Hebrew]. Steir-Livny, Liat. “From Victims to Aggressors: Cultural Representations of the Link between the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 7, no 2 (September 2016): 123–36. ———. “Alternative Memory: Alternative Ceremonies on Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day.” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 28 (2016): 131–50 [Hebrew]. ———. “Remembrance in the Living Room [Zikaron b’Salon]: Grassroots Gatherings Creating New Forms of Holocaust Commemoration in Israel.” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 25, 2018. ———. “The Image of Anne Frank: From a Universal Hero to a Comic Figure,” Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust, edited by David Slucki, Gabriel Finder, and Avinoam Patt, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020. ———. Is It O.K to Laugh About It? Holocaust Humour, Satire and Parody in Israel Culture. London: Vallentine Mitchell Press, 2017. ———. Let the Memorial Hill Remember. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2014. [Hebrew]. ———. Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third-Generation Survivors in Israel. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019. ———. Two Faces in the Mirror: the representation of Holocaust survivors in Israeli cinema. Jerusalem: Eshkolot-Magness, 2009 [Hebrew]. Telem, Yahav. “Encounters with the Third Generation.” Yediot Acharonot. July 4, 2013, 4–5 [Hebrew]. Zandberg, Eyal. “’Ketchup Is the Auschwitz of Tomatoes’: Humor and the Collective Memory of Traumatic Events.” Communication, Culture & Critique (2014): 1–16. ———. “Critical Laughter: Humor, Popular Culture and Israeli Holocaust Commemoration.” Media, Culture & Society 28, no. 4 (2006): 561–79. Zertal, Idith. The Nation and Death. Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1993 [Hebrew].

FILMOGRAPHY, TV AND SOCIAL MEDIA Address Germany (Hactovet germania, Ruth Shiloni, 2017). “The Berlin Museum” (Museon berlin, The Tross Brothers, 2008) The Cakemaker (Haofe, Ophir Raul Graizer, 2018) The Chamber Quintet (Hahamishia Hakamerit [‘Matar’ Productions, Channels 2-Tela’ad, Channel 1, 1993–1997]) Farewell Herr Schwartz (Heye shalom peter schwartz, Yael Reuveny, 2013). The Flat (Hadira, Arnon Goldfinger 2011) The Handyman (Hachaver hagermani sheli, Noga Netzer, 2018). Hitler’s Children (Yaldei Hitler, Chanoch Ze’evi, 2011). I Shot My Love (Tomer Heymann, 2009) Kleiner Rudi (Michelle Stein Teer, 2006) The Most Beautiful Woman (Hayafa banashim, Maya Sarfaty, 2016) Traffic Light (Ramzor [Keshet Broadcasting, Channel 2, 2008–2014])



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NOTES 1. Oren Meyers, Motti Neiger, and Eyal Zandberg, Communicating Awe: Media Memory and Holocaust Commemoration (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 2. Liat Steir-Livny, Let the Memorial Hill Remember (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2014) [Hebrew]. 3. Perihan Aral Rosenthal and Stuart Rosenthal, “Holocaust Effects in the Third Generation: Child of Another Time,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 34, no. 4 (1980): 572–80. 4. Miri Scharf and Ofra Mayseless, “Adolescents’ Attachment Representations and Their Capacity for Intimacy in Close Relationships,” Journal of Research on Adolescence 17, no. 1 (2007): 23–25; Miri Scharf and Ofra Mayseless, “Disorganizing Experiences in Second- and Third-Generation Holocaust Survivors,” Qualitative Health Research 21, no. 11 (2011): 1539– 53; Miri Scharf, “The Trace of Trauma: Third-Generation Holocaust Survivors,” Development and Psychopathology 19, no. 2 (2007): 603–22. 5. Eve Fogelman, “Third-Generation Descendants of Holocaust Survivors and the Future of Remembering,” Jewcy, May 1, 2008, jewcy.com/jewish-religion-and-beliefs/third_generation_descendants_holocaust_survivors_and_future_remembering; Abraham Sagi-Schwartz, Marinus van IJzendoorn, and Marian J. Bakermans-Kranenburg, “Does Intergenerational Transference of Trauma Skip a Generation? No Meta-Analytic Evidence for Tertiary Traumatization with Third-Generation Holocaust Survivors,” Attachment and Human Development 10, no. 2 (June 2008): 105–21. 6. Tal Litvak-Hirsch and Dan Bar-On, “Rebuild Your Life: A Follow-Up Study on Intergenerational Transference of Trauma of the Holocaust,” Megamot: Journal of Behavioral Sciences 45, no. 2 (2007): 243–71 [Hebrew]. 7. Esther Jilovsky, Jordana Silverstein, and David Slucki, eds., In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2016); Victoria Aarons, ed., Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016); Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 2017). 8. Iris Milner, Torn Past (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2003) [Hebrew], 19–35. 9. Amos Goldberg, “Introduction,” in Writing History, Writing Trauma, by Dominick LaCapra (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 7–28; Dalia Ofer, “The Past That Does Not Pass,” Yalkut Moreshet (2010): 7–39. See 10–11; Meyers, Neiger, and Zandberg, Communicating Awe. 10. Idith Zertal, The Nation and Death (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1993) [Hebrew]; Daniel Bar-Tal, Living with the Conflict (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2007) [Hebrew [; Daniel Bar-Tal, “‘Why don’t you want peace?’” Haaretz, September 2, 2016, 54–56. 11. On the similarities between biological third-generation Holocaust survivors and other Jewish-Israeli groups of people their age who are not biological grandchildren of survivors, see Alon Lazar, “Lessons from the Past and a Glance toward the Future,” Drachim Mitztalvot, edited by Tal Litvak Hirsch and Julia Chaitin, 35–44, Be’er Sheva: Ben Gurion University, 2011 [Hebrew]. Especially 35 and 37. 12. Jacky Feldman, Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), xv. 13. Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives, First Memories in Exile,” Poetics Today 17, no. 4 (1996): 659–67. 14. For more on these issues, see, for example: Dina Porat, The Smoke-Scented Coffee: The Encounter of the Yishuv and Israeli Society with the Holocaust and its Survivors (Tel Aviv

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and Jerusalem: Yad Vashem and Am Oved, 2011) [Hebrew], 357–78; Liat Steir-Livny, Two Faces in the Mirror: The Representation of Holocaust Survivors in Israeli Cinema (Jerusalem: Eshkolot-Magness, 2009) [Hebrew], 96–204; Milner, Torn Past, 19–35; Yosefa Loshitzky, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2001), 32–71; Ofer, “The Past,” 15–31; Gulie Ne’eman Arad, “Israel and the Holocaust: A Tale of Multifarious Taboos,” New German Critique 90 (Autumn 2003): 5–26. 15. Lia Friesem, “Holocaust Tweets as an Act of Resistance,” Israel Studies Review (September 2018): 85–104; Liat Steir-Livny, “The Image of Anne Frank: From a Universal Hero to a Comic Figure,” Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust, edited by David Slucki, Gabriel Finder, and Avinoam Patt, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 16. Liat Steir-Livny, Is It O.K to Laugh About It? 17. Eyal Zandberg, “Critical Laughter: Humor, Popular Culture and Israeli Holocaust Commemoration,” Media, Culture & Society, 28(4), (2006): 561–79. 18. Eyal Zandberg, “‘Ketchup Is the Auschwitz of Tomatoes’: Humor and the Collective Memory of Traumatic Events,” Communication, Culture & Critique (2014): 1–16; Liat Steir-Livny, Is It O.K to Laugh About It? Holocaust Humour, Satire and Parody in Israel Culture (London: Vallentine Mitchell Press, 2017). 19. On its representations in Holocaust-related video art of the third generation, see Gershenson Olga, “Meta-Memory: About the Holocaust in New Israeli Video Art,” Jewish Film & New Media 6, no. 1, 2019, Article 3. 20. Miller’s mother was a baby when the Nazis deported the Jews of Budapest to Auschwitz. She was saved by her mother. See Liat Levi, “Mama Miller,” Makor Rishon, July 12, 2020 [Hebrew] www​.makorrishon​.co​.il​/nrg​/online​/54​/ART2​/131​/735​.html 21. Ran Sarig, Chaim Shtaim (Jerusalem: Ceter, 2005). 22. Sagi Ben Noon, “Most People are Ignorant. We Know Nothing About the Holocaust,” Walla, May 4, 2016 [Hebrew] e.walla.co.il/item/2957211. 23. Dan Bar-On, Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich (Be’er Sheva: Ben-Gurion University, 1997), 4. 24. Alon Lazar, “Lessons from the Past.” 25. Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Raanana, The Open University, 2005) [Hebrew], 68–122; Daniel Bar-Tal, Living with the Conflict (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2007) [Hebrew]. 26. Liat Steir-Livny, “From Victims to Aggressors: Cultural Representations of the Link between the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 7, no. 2 (September 2016): 123–36. 27. Noam Hayut, My Holocaust Thief (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 2010). 28. Yishai Sarid, The Memory Monster (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 2017). Severe critique against the educational journeys to Poland is also to be found in the third-generation documentary #Uploading Holocaust (Sagi Bornstein and Udi Nir, 2016), which is compiled of YouTube videos pupils have uploaded to YouTube during these trips. 29. For other numerous examples see Liat Steir-Livny, Let the Memorial Hill Remember. 30. Tal Litvak-Hirsch and Dan Bar-On, “Rebuilding Your Life: A Follow-Up Study on Intergenerational Transference of Trauma of the Holocaust” Megamot: Journal of Behavioral Sciences 45, no. 2 (December 2007): 243–71. 31. Julia Chaitin, “Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors Coping with the Holocaust: Paradoxical Relevance,” in Childhood in the Shadow of the Holocaust, edited by



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Zehava Solomon and Julia Chaitin (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2007), 418–35; Yahav Telem, “Encounters with the Third Generation,” Yediot Acharonot, July 4, 2013, 4–5. 32. Liat Steir-Livny, Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third-Generation Survivors in Israel (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019), 11–25. 33. The terms “official ceremonies” or “canonical ceremonies” refer to ceremonies that take place in the public sphere in Israel and are organized by state representatives, the educational system, local municipalities, youth movements, and the IDF. 34. Liat Steir-Livny, “Alternative Memory: Alternative Ceremonies on Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 28 (2016): 131–50 [Hebrew]. 35. Adi Altschuler, “A suggestion for alternative encounters to commemorate the Holocaust, YNET, April 7, 2012 [Hebrew]. Accessed July 1, 2016. www​.ynet​.co​.il​/articles​/0​ ,7340​,L​-4216611​,00​.html. 36. Liat Steir-Livny, “Remembrance in the Living Room [Zikaron b’Salon]: Grassroots Gatherings Creating New Forms of Holocaust Commemoration in Israel,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 25, 2018. 37. Altschuler says that at the first gathering she conducted in her house, which set the tone for this social initiative, she deliberately offered her guests beer and snacks to “remove the ‘holiness’ which is always a part of the ceremonies on Holocaust and Heroism eve.” See Michal Reshef, “Remembrance in the Living Room: A Different Way for Survivors to Talk and Youngsters to Listen,” Walla, April 27, 2014 [Hebrew]. Accessed April 25, 2014. e.walla. co.il/item/2740979. 38. Liat Steir-Livny, “Remembrance in the Living Room.” 39. Steir-Livny, Remaking Holocaust Memory, 188–241. 40. Nirit Andeman, “The Sad Story behind the most successful Israeli Film of this Time,” Haaretz, February 21, 2018 [Hebrew] www​.haaretz​.co​.il​/1​.5567342. 41. spitzmag.de/english. 42. spitzmag.de/.

11 Distant Relations Third-Generation Perpetrator Descendants Writing in English Sue Vice

The notion of considering the descendants of Holocaust perpetrators, using the terminology and model derived from that of survivors, was first put forward in relation to the second generation. In that context, it has taken such varied forms as psychological studies of the two groups,1 comparisons of cultural production,2 and the representation in literature and film of individuals from the two “sides” encountering each other.3 However, the “major reorientation”4 necessitated by approaching the third generation has yet fully to take place in relation to perpetrator descendants, while the unexpected phenomenon of psychic and aesthetic responses by grandchildren in British and North American contexts far removed from those of their grandparents’ wartime lives has not yet been considered. It is on these representations that the present chapter focuses. Questions about the very nature of a third-generation perpetrator perspective are raised explicitly in several of the works by the descendants themselves as discussed in the present chapter. None of these writers assumes an easy parity with survivor descendants, in awareness of the diametrically opposed “moral context” in each case.5 Indeed, the designation “third generation” can, as Joanne Pettitt has argued, “create an artificial perception of hereditary origination” on either side, with the effect for perpetrator descendants that “an indelible link” is posited “between individuals and the atrocities in which they played no active part.”6 Nonetheless, the confrontation with a wartime legacy of silence about the events of the Holocaust years, albeit experienced from opposite positions in relation to a “vast and chilling” gulf,7 can generate the sense that such histories, especially in cases where there are common German origins, are “intertwined.”8 In other instances, such intertwinement occurs in relation to a Lithuanian heritage,9 starkly so where the third-generation North American writer has both perpetrator and Jewish forebears.10 Yet the emotional content of the silence in each case is very different, even where such shared formations as guilt, shame, and 169

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loss are evident. Rather than a response to a specific moral or legal transgression, of the kind faced by the eyewitness perpetrator generation, for their grandchildren guilt takes the form of “affect or feeling,” and is more likely to be openly acknowledged by the third than members of the first generation.11 While the aftereffects that might be denied, repressed or go unformulated are those of humiliation, fear, and survivor guilt in relation to the third-generation survivor’s inference or intuition about a grandparent’s experience, for the third-generation perpetrator they relate rather to inherited responsibility for the “moral degradation” of assenting to, undertaking, or not protesting against atrocity.12 In the case of perpetrators in particular, where grandparents lived into old age, the grandchildren’s generation will be the last to experience a “close emotional connection” to the first. It is one often consisting of a loving personal memory,13 without being subject to the burdensome expectation of “repairing their parents’ past” as experienced by the second generation, or feeling “torn” between “love for [a] father and uncertainty about what he did.”14 In her consideration of second-generation Nazi descendants, Katharina von Kellenbach identifies a response to the eyewitnesses beyond the more customary ones of inherited complicity, silence, or revulsion: that of accepting the historical burden of perpetration’s legacy in the wake of “meticulous historical truth- and soul-searching.”15 However, such a response seems more likely to characterize the grandchildren, in particular those whose cultural distance enhances the generational one. In such cases, the conclusion drawn by Harald Welzer, in his study of the third generation in German families, that “a comprehensive historical knowledge of Nazi crimes paradoxically evokes a need to remove one’s relatives from this framework of knowledge,”16 is absent. By contrast, the grandchildren brought up outside Germany learn about Nazi crimes in the very process of reinserting their relatives into that framework. Such a standpoint, distanced from the war generation in both generational and geographical terms, is consonant with broader changes over time in relation to Holocaust memory, characterized by incorporating the “individual and even the anecdotal” into otherwise “abstract” studies, and with a focus on unearthing factual detail not only for its own sake but for that of a “future-oriented” and transnational ethics.17 These effects are enhanced in specific narrative, visual and linguistic ways in the Anglophone contexts inhabited by the third-generation descendants discussed here. In her account of being a Holocaust studies scholar from a non-Jewish German background, Sonja Knopp puts the ethical impulse to devote her intellectual life to this topic in specifically generational terms. She argues that the imperative to demonstrate the “solidarity” of “responsibility and response” toward the victims of historical atrocity by devoting one’s life to studying it is one that obtains “especially” in cases where the individual “cannot exclude the possibility that—in this case—your own grandfather could have pointed the gun.”18 The figure of the “grandfather” invoked here is structural, signifying the state of being a third-generation member of the perpetrator nation in relation to someone who is, in all the cases discussed here, a male forebear. Katt’s Ingeborg’s Reise (2010) is an exception, a prequel to the graphic



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memoir about her grandfather, in which the granddaughter adds illustrations to the text of letters sent by her maternal grandmother to her husband as she fled back to Germany from Czechoslovakia in 1945, as a way to address her questions about the eponymous Ingeborg’s “beliefs and complicity with the fallen Nazi regime.” The figure of a grandparent conveys intimacy, as Knopp suggests: the very fact that she has no awareness of any “prominent perpetrators from my family,” given that “I barely know what my grandfathers did during the war,” makes her suspicious, “feeling that something is missing” from the family record.19 The examples discussed in this chapter differ from Knopp’s case in their role as perpetrator descendants living outside a German national and memorial context. Although Knopp’s reflection on her position was written in English for an Anglophone readership, those analyzed here are by third-generation descendants whose first language is English, all of whom were born in the UK. In the concluding section, I also consider a North American example of this kind, where the individual lives in an Anglophone setting and writes in English, but his connections to Germany include linguistic fluency and the greater closeness of having two German-born parents. In all these Anglophone cases, the third-generation features of historical knowledge alongside silence about what is “missing” from the family record are thus exaggerated, yet open to exploration. As the Brooklyn-based but German-born artist Nora Krug puts it of her third-generation graphic memoir Heimat: A German Family Album: “If I had stayed in Germany, I would have never thought of writing this book.”20 The change in location within Krug’s own biography, arising from leaving her native Karlsruhe for the UK and then the United States, provides her with the impetus to view the history of her grandfather, great-uncle, and even uncle, as well as her own relationship to that history, from a defamiliarized perspective.21 Indeed, as Roger Frie argues in his study Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (2017), had he grown up in Germany rather than in Canada, he might have accepted the “inevitability” of a Nazi past rather than experiencing it as an almost unassimilable shock.22 The kind of nagging awareness mentioned by Knopp was often absent in each of the present examples as a result of geographical and linguistic distance, leading to the questions posed in the present discussion: whether the émigré status of the grandchild enables them more fully to investigate and relate the detail of the grandparent’s past; if their ways of doing so are distinct from those that have taken place in a German national context; and what kind of look back at the war generation is enabled by their location outside Germany. Thus in Martin Davidson’s The Perfect Nazi: Uncovering My Grandfather’s Secret Past (2010) and Derek Niemann’s A Nazi in the Family: The Hidden Story of an SS Family in Wartime Germany (2015), the grandson-narrator recounts the process of uncovering a family secret in a British setting quite divorced from that of their German forebears, while Serena Katt, in her graphic novel Sunday’s Child (2019) also located in a British context, uses stylized illustration to take the place of her German grandfather’s first-person utterance.

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Frie’s Not in My Family accords with his professional role as a psychologist in tracing the psychic implications of confronting the responses on the part of his forebears and their homeland. Krug’s Heimat is a touchstone throughout, although its generational and cultural hybridity—her explorations encompass her uncle as well as her grandparents, from her perspective as a German émigré rather than an Anglophone native—distinguishes it from the other texts.

HISTORY AND THE INDIVIDUAL: MARTIN DAVIDSON’S THE PERFECT NAZI (2010) The titles of Davidson’s The Perfect Nazi and Niemann’s A Nazi in the Family highlight the memoirs’ discursive modes of distance and depersonalization, one that is analytical in Davidson’s case, wryly comic in Niemann’s. Both authors write from a position of sufficient embeddedness in the British social fabric, Davidson as a commissioning editor for the BBC, Niemann a natural history writer and former employee of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), that the Nazism of a grandparent might at first appear simply incongruous. In this respect, these memoirs’ titles and perspectives differ from such German accounts as Jennifer Teege’s My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me (2015), about her grandfather Amon Göth, or Reglindis Rauca’s ongoing project “My Grandfather’s Crimes: Searching for Traces in Lithuania” (2020), about Helmut Rauca. These narratives convey the personal and emotional cost of discovering and contemplating being the grandchild of Göth, the commandant of the concentration camp at Plaszów, or of Rauca, the SS officer in charge of the Kovno Ghetto, who are individually notorious and their deeds sufficiently well documented that there is no question, as there is for Davidson and Niemann, about whether they took an active part in genocide. Davidson’s The Perfect Nazi appears to substitute the forensic eye of history for personal reflection, as well as using the historical record to stand in for the missing details of the wartime career of his grandfather Bruno Langbehn. As Davidson puts it of the investigation undertaken by him and his sister, “All we had to go on was his date and place of birth—July 27, 1906, in Perleberg, a town 90 miles north-west of Berlin—and his final SS rank of Hauptsturmfuhrer.”23 The “uncovering” of the book’s subtitle takes place through a mixture of research into a great variety of documentary sources, ranging from Bruno’s SS curriculum vitae to a study of the fate of all of Berlin’s Jewish dentists; such literary techniques as reconstruction, by describing what Bruno is likely to have done; and incorporating the memories of witnesses such as Bruno’s daughter, the author’s mother. The book thus follows a double process of personal and historical exploration, which reveals the outer facts of Bruno’s wartime past as a member of the SD, and his internal life as a Nazi apologist until his death, as Davidson quotes him saying to his grandson “All we wanted was an empire too; like your Churchill’s.”24 Bruno’s attempt rhetorically to shrink the distance between Germany and Britain might make the reader reflect on the role



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of British myths of wartime moral superiority, which, while enabling a critical look back at German forebears, risks obscuring more general ethical conclusions. It might seem that Davidson’s reliance on historical narration is a defensive measure, occasioned by and expressing the author’s third-generation position. In this sense, it is a mediating device, as well as an acknowledgment of personal and political remoteness, since we learn that it was hard to find out certain facts. However, Davidson’s methodology, rather, emphasizes the very entwinement of the historical and the personal. He describes the account as a “dual exploration,”25 proceeding by means of a parallel analysis of what the eponymous “perfect” or typical party member would have done during the Nazi era, and the specific detail of his grandfather’s life. Bruno’s career is presented as inextricable from the chronology of the Nazi state and its repercussions, as the final chapter headings suggest: “War! 1939–1945,” “Endgame 1944–46” and “Aftermath: 1946–1992.” Although this is a way of revealing that, in Sybille Bedford’s phrasing, Bruno’s life history was, “bound to that of our times” (1990, 219), it also demonstrates the historicizing imperative guiding Davidson’s narrative. The “shock” that he experienced on learning from his mother that her father had been a member of the SS prompted him to investigate “What kind of person” had Bruno been, but also, as he adds, “I was motivated by a larger question—what was a Nazi?”26 It is hard to imagine such a question being posed by Teege or Rauca, yet in a British context this suggests a corrective to any generalized or triumphalist view of Nazi monstrosity or power in its recourse to exploring one of the “countless functionaries” without whom, as Mary Fulbrook claims, “Hitler could never have wrought such mass destruction.”27 Krug describes her view of the German focus on public history at the expense of “what happened in your own city, or your own family,” as one that prompts a “very generalising sense of guilt” that her graphic memoir sought to make more specific.28 Yet, the British context and implied Anglophone readership of Davidson’s memoir mean that such a pattern is reversed, since the personal history of his grandfather is the prompt for a wider-ranging inquiry. Although such a history does provoke Davidson to pose questions about personal ethics and historical agency, the difference in geographical and cultural location means that this does not necessarily entail the “guilt” to which Krug refers. Welzer notes of successive generations in Germany that, “The deeper the knowledge of history, the greater the subjectively felt need to protect one’s own family from this knowledge.”29 In a British scenario, by contrast, there would be no expectation that education about the war, or that about the Holocaust which has formed part of schools’ National Curriculum since 1991, would entail familial investigation. The answer to Davidson’s dual investigation, about his grandfather’s interiority and the political significance of being a Nazi, emerges in his account that Bruno was ideologically committed from the earliest days of the Nazi Party until his death in the early 1990s. In practical terms, Bruno underwent almost the whole possible range of Nazi experience: “He had been a storm trooper, street brawler, ideologue, policy intellectual, biological warrior, acolyte, soldier, snitch, spook, bureaucrat, arbiter of

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social policy—in short, the perfect Nazi.”30 The ironic designation of “perfection” conveys not a third-generation horror at being related to a notorious individual, but an understanding of the crucial contribution of a low-ranking party member. Although Bruno was, Davidson concludes, “neither a camp Kommandant nor an architect of the Holocaust,” he was nevertheless “an enabler of evil, one of its indispensable, and very active minions.”31 By contrast to the granddaughters’ accounts of Göth or Rauca, or by great-nieces to high-ranking Nazis such as Katrin Himmler and Bettina Göring, it is the implications of revealing Bruno’s “obscurity”32 that gives The Perfect Nazi the potential to be a paradigmatic Anglophone narrative. Davidson’s invocation of the paternal Scottish side of his family might likewise appear to be a reassuring narrative defense, in contrast to Teege’s anguished sense of her part-Ghanaian heritage, but it is drawn on rather in relation to a sense of his own personality or potentiality split along genealogical lines. What Welzer calls the often-repeated “legitimating” third-generation question, “What would you have done?”33 is blended here with one that views the past from a non-German perspective, so that, as Davidson puts it, “The German part of me has to face that question: what would I have done?”34 This is to look backward to the historical record in first-person terms, acknowledging that “the German part of me” stands for a human potential for evildoing.

COMPARATIVE IRONY: DEREK NIEMANN, A NAZI IN THE FAMILY (2015) The distinctive construction of a British third-generation perspective is apparent in those features that Davidson’s account shares with Derek Niemann’s A Nazi in the Family. In each case, a second-generation parent migrated from Germany to Scotland, where their children grew up, and a grandchild then investigated the wartime past. Although Davidson’s grandfather did not die until 1992, Niemann never met his grandfather Karl. Like Davidson’s mother, who allowed her son to think that his grandfather had spent the war as a German dentist, Niemann’s father described his own father Karl as just a “bank clerk, a pen-pusher.”35 Neither story was untrue, except by omission, since it left out precisely what the third generation has chosen to unearth. Like The Perfect Nazi, Niemann’s account seems at first to be characterized by what could be called defensive narrative measures. Where Davidson relies on historiography, in A Nazi in the Family Niemann constructs an ironic narrative voice. Such irony is not only stylistic but part of his method of relating wartime Germany to postwar Britain. In an interview, Niemann puts the facts motivating his memoir in stark terms: “Three years ago [in 2012] I found out the truth about my grandfather—he was a committed member of the Nazi party, an SS officer, a manager of slave labour in Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and other concentration camps.”36 Niemann discovered that at Karl’s postwar tribunal, some former political prisoners in Dachau



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had testified in his favor, claiming that he had them released in order to work with him. But, while admitting that he hoped to uncover a moment of redemption or rescue on Karl’s part, Niemann adds that his grandfather was “passive” in the face of Nazi atrocities in general and showed no remorse at his trial.37 These are versions of the paradigmatic moments that constitute the working-through process of a third-generation descendant. The confrontation with what is “missing” from the record, in Knopp’s phrasing, takes the initial form of discovering a grandparent-figure’s unacknowledged membership of the Nazi Party or the SS, a formal designation that instigates the exploration of subjective allegiance and identity. Niemann’s verdict of “passivity” is equally an instance of a struggle shared by the other third-generation writers considered here to describe a state of acquiescence or participation. This struggle to identify an appropriate term for the nature and level of a grandparent’s dedication to Nazism characterizes Frie’s study, leading to his conclusion that his grandfather’s role was that of an “enabler” or an “accomplice” (222), as it does Katt’s, where the epithet “Sunday’s child” is used ironically of a teenage Hitlerjugend recruit. In Heimat, Krug endorses her grandfather’s confessing to his own “weak-mindedness” by choosing from the options on his postwar denazification questionnaire that of “Mitläufer” or “follower,” glossed by her as “a person lacking courage and moral stance” and illustrated by a full-page drawing of a sheep.38 Yet the very existence of an expansive narrative in each of these cases confounds the usefulness of any such limited label. However, in Niemann’s memoir an uncompromising portrayal of the facts is narrated in a mode that threatens to offset its horror, in the effort to convey to an Anglophone readership the nature of Karl’s wartime behaviour. Niemann highlights and punctures his grandfather’s aspirations by asking of a photograph of Karl, a rotund figure in his Nazi Party uniform, if it shows him as “Oliver Hardy or Nazi enforcer?”39 Indeed, such discourse has a more pointed rhetorical significance than at first appears. The very act of relating Karl to the details of everyday life does not soften the effect of atrocities, but brings Nazism closer to home. In such a way, Niemann describes a photograph of his father’s older brother Dieter, who died in a tank brigade at the war’s end, showing a teenager “wearing what looked like some kind of Boys’ Brigade uniform.”40 This invocation of the youth group, founded in nineteenth-century Scotland to “develop Christian manliness,” sounds a cautionary note precisely because of its almost comic nature. Any hint of bathos or misrecognition is banished when the reader learns that Niemann’s German grandmother possessed a memorial photograph of her dead son in his Waffen SS uniform, on which she had obliterated the SS flashes with a pencil, symbolically restored by Niemann in the present book’s illustrations. The resemblance to the Boys’ Brigade vanishes when historical accuracy is acknowledged, yet only the restoration of the SS runic symbols differentiates it in Niemann’s eyes from the semi-military Christian youth movement familiar from his youth. Continuing this interplay between comparison and differentiation, the Scottish element of Niemann’s background is invoked to a different effect from that in

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Davidson’s memoir. While Davidson’s mother Frauke traveled from Cold War Germany to Edinburgh in 1958 to learn English, and to evade her tyrannical father, Niemann’s father followed his sister to Glasgow, since she had married a Scottish soldier stationed in Berlin’s British sector. For Davidson, the Scottish grandfather Donald, from whom his surname originates, represents the possibility of an entirely different and irreproachable path in life. Donald unexpectedly shared a taste for reading the fiction of the early twentieth-century Scottish writer Neil Gunn with his daughter-in-law’s German father, whom he never met, yet Davidson claims that he was “divided [from Bruno] by the widest chasm of incomprehension it is possible to conceive.”41 For Niemann there is less of a sense of Scottish exceptionality, and he emphasizes the poverty and religious prejudice amid which his aunt and parents lived. Their new home in Larkhall on their arrival in Britain was located in what he describes as “the most bigoted place in Scotland”42 due to its sectarian division between Catholics and Protestants. His father Rudi was appointed to a job for an engineering company in Motherwell, since his answers inadvertently suited the interviewer’s bias. Thus the interviewee responded indignantly that he would not give any spare money to the Orange Lodge, without being aware of its status as a Protestant fraternity, and encountered almost universal friendliness at work despite his German origins, since many of his colleagues believed that there was a “greater enemy,” as Niemann puts it: “Rudi could have been English.”43 These vignettes neither domesticate Nazism nor do they wholly imply that nationalism and sectarianism are its equivalent. Rather, they highlight the wider significance of apparently everyday choices, to the effect of diminishing the gulf between “Gorbals” and “Goebbels,” in Niemann’s wife’s phrase about her husband’s “pedigree.”44 The homonymic connection between the notoriously impoverished Glasgow suburb and the Reich Minister of Propaganda is presented as a warning against national complacency rather than simply an absurd coincidence. Niemann’s concluding description of his wishing to shout to the visitors at Dachau concentration camp, “Don’t distance yourself,” is also an implicit address to the implied Anglophone, particularly British, reader.

FRAGMENTARY RECALL: SERENA KATT’S SUNDAY’S CHILD (2019) The very format of Serena Katt’s graphic memoir works against the fullness of historical analysis as attempted by Davidson, or the ethical vigilance urged by Niemann. Sunday’s Child consists, by contrast, of “largely monochrome illustrations” with accompanying words used “sparingly.”45 In this way, it differs from Krug’s Heimat, which features highly colored and layered illustrations, photographs, and “meticulous handwritten” text46 that attempt to encompass, as the title suggests, a cultural climate as well as a family history. Instead, Katt attempts by means of strategically minimalist visual and verbal material to reimagine the period spent in the Hitler



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Youth by her beloved Opa, Günther Kazcinski, who was born in the Ruhr city of Wanne-Eickel, now Herne, in 1928. Her method makes the text speculative and allusive, even as its illustrations are renderings of documentary imagery from archives or family sources. The mixed-media artistic form, which Katt describes as a “collage” consisting of printing inks applied by roller for backgrounds with pencil drawing for detail, is matched by the hybrid narration.47 As Katt puts it, “The narrator is me, and the book is really a letter to my Grandfather. But the words I am using aren’t entirely mine, they borrow heavily from the Nazi propaganda of the time, and from the words my Grandfather used to record these memories,”48 including what turned out to be a highly selective account of his life written at his granddaughter’s request. As the description of the artistic method and its narrative angle suggests, Serena, as the implied narrator, anatomizes the recall of an individual about a particular historical period, from the perspective of one who, in words addressed to her grandfather, “[grew] up in England, so far away from you.”49 Even if Günther stands in for a generation of those who were children or teenagers at the outbreak of World War II, the memoir’s focus is not so much on the atrocities that were carried out in his name as on the pressures exerted on him to take part and the unacknowledged aspects of his past. We might be reminded of Niemann’s apparently bathetic comparison of a Waffen SS uniform to that of the Boys’ Brigade, in the light of the disturbing commonalities hinted at here in Katt’s exploration of masculinity and peer pressure in such a context. The memoir opens with a billboard-style slogan, consisting of extracts from a 1938 speech delivered by Hitler to NSDAP district leaders50 and rendered in the thick black lettering of Gothic script. Its message is placed as if an epigraph to the entire narrative: ‘We will have a new German youth. A violent, domineering, unafraid, cruel youth, which the world will fear. . . . They will learn to think German, act German.’51 Matching this ominous opening, the text concludes with another whole-page rendering of utterances from the same speech: “We will train them from an early age. And they will never be free again, not for the rest of their lives.”52 These words, and their position at the outset and end of the narrative, convey the granddaughter’s conclusion that, although Günther appeared to prosper in the postwar world, he was psychically trapped “for life” by his experience of Nazism, just as his story is enfolded by the lines of Hitler’s speech. For the granddaughter, recognizing this entrapment is part of the ambivalence at the heart of her research as a third-generation memoirist, which revealed “a grandfather I had never known,”53 one who was both the victim and the tool of his early education. Katt remarks that Günther’s memories and feelings were later subject to “heav[y] censoring,” in relation to what she calls “guilt for the concentration camps, obviously, but also a guilt for having enjoyed growing up during this time, a guilt for having loved Hitler, for being devastated at Germany’s defeat” (2013). It is this realm of inadmissible and persistent affect that the graphic genre of Sunday’s Child attempts to reveal, its use of pencil renderings rather than reproductions of photographic imagery itself conveying her reinterpretation.

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Such a focus on the barely accessible interiority of her former Hitlerjugend grandfather might entail a relief on Serena’s part that the memoir need not center on the events of the Holocaust, since Günther was sufficiently young that the specific questions about perpetration that beset Davidson and Niemann seem unnecessary. Yet they also arise, as Matt Reingold puts it of Krug’s Heimat, in relation to what might appear to be “a desire to see her grandfather as being a victim of history, as opposed to being a perpetrator of it.”54 Indeed, Krug’s quoting extracts from the same 1938 speech by Hitler, including his claim that the new generation of children “will never be free for the rest of their lives” (66), has a more personal significance in relation to her great-uncle Franz-Karl, since his dying in battle at the age of eighteen makes these words into an elegy. In Sunday’s Child, the granddaughter Serena addresses her grandfather in relation to his life in 1942: “You’re told that the war is nearly won. . . . (You’re not told that this is the year concentration camps turn into death camps).”55 Although the parentheses and passive construction—“You’re not told”—might seem to exonerate Günther of any active responsibility, it is rather that such usage enhances the horror of the murderous reality underlying the education that the boy enjoyed and toward which it tended. Such a concern might equally risk “displac[ing]” the events of the Holocaust itself through a focus instead on “simple generational conflicts.”56 But the implications of Katt’s memoir reach beyond that of a single family. The illustration accompanying her narrator’s utterance about the founding of the death camps increases the double-edged nature of the insight, in the form of a two-page image of a class of boys facing forward as they listen to a lecture, while a poster on the wall shows the transformation of youth into soldier accompanied by the interpellation, “You too.” The trope of the pupil shown from behind is, in its withholding the face, a visual symbol of individual and structural conformity. In this sense, it is a radical revision of the Rückenfigur, or figure viewed from behind, originating in Carl David Friedrich’s nineteenth-century landscape paintings. In the scene from Katt’s memoir, the artwork’s “internal spectator”57 takes a form that is even more compromised and reduced than its appearance in Krug’s Heimat, where a sketch of a female figure of this kind surveys a blank space in place of a sublime landscape, replaced by, on the facing page, a small black-and-white photograph of figures in a devastated postwar landscape.58 The impression of questioning past artistic representations such as Friedrich’s is more implicit in Sunday’s Child, yet redoubled by the fact that what we see over the boys’ shoulders in the classroom scene hanging from the tutor’s lectern is a large swastika. The swastika is half-obscured by the head of a pupil, yet nonetheless clearly visible. Such careful positioning emphasizes that the photographic imagery of the past is not simply reproduced, but, as Katt puts it, “distorted, cropped and altered”59 by a member of the third generation. The partially hidden swastika and the boys’ averted faces in this instance convey the emotional ambivalence of a granddaughter confronting the “censoring” conducted by her “dearest Opa,” summed up by the question she puts to him, “How much was blind willingness, or even your own



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conviction?”60 Although the victims of the Holocaust are not at the narrative’s forefront, Katt’s concern is with an element crucial to the commission of genocide and racial war, that of the psychic and ethical reeducation of a generation. The ironic designation of Günther as the eponymous Sunday’s Child, one who was “always, ALWAYS, lucky!” (4), in his sister’s words, conveys the irony that his “luck” consisted of emerging from a youth spent in a murderous regime without self-scrutiny. The graphic memoir’s mode of psychic exploration is summed up by its concluding with a two-page spread of a young boy, again seen from behind, as he contemplates a giant portrait of Hitler, cropped so that the top of the latter’s head and eyes are outside the frame (167). Such an image historicizes the young man’s experience, in relation to the detail of his undercut hairstyle and Hitlerjugend uniform with triangular neckerchief. Hitler is instantly recognizable yet anonymous in this incomplete portrait, through the signifiers of moustache, swastika armband, and Iron Cross. The facelessness of the young man, and his sharing with Hitler a Sam Browne over-the-shoulder belt and militaristic stance, represents the threat to his “established superego values” when confronted by the lure of an authoritarian father-figure who embodies the barbaric “new ideals of the Nazi Reich.”61 Although this image appears on the cover of Sunday’s Child, in an even more cropped form that excludes Hitler’s swastika, within the diegesis it constitutes the memoir’s penultimate page. Günther is nearly twenty by the end of the memoir’s tracing of his biography, but this illustration represents a flashback to his early adolescence as well as an image of his psychic life. The granddaughter reveals the absence of any full “awakening” on his part from the bondage of the Nazi era’s “perversion of ideals.”62 The brief utterance recorded on the otherwise blank verso of the image’s two-page extent is a questioning of Günther’s words, above a drawing of him as a gymnast, consisting of his verdict that, in the postwar period, “life really does begin again” (165). The narrator Serena asks, in the pale italic font reserved for her voice, “But does it, Opa?” (166). Serena’s stance, since she is never visible, sums up her role as a member of the third generation, who poses the questions she was not able to put to her grandfather when he was alive.

CONCLUSION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HISTORY AND ROGER FRIE, NOT IN MY FAMILY (2017) The three central examples of third-generation perpetrator descendant text in English as discussed here each has a British setting. The concluding example, Roger Frie’s study Not in My Family, is similarly a third-generation account written in English, but differs in relation to the details of the author’s background and the greater degree of his proximity to the German culture of his grandparents. In this respect, Frie’s exploration has elements in common with Krug’s Heimat, the latter produced by an emigré who did not leave Germany until she was a young adult, and which was issued simultaneously in English and German. Because Frie’s German-born parents

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emigrated together to Canada after the war, he was brought up with closer connections to their homeland than any of the three British descendants, having German as his first language and fond memories of childhood visits to his beloved grandparents in Hanover. These intimate connections might seem in any case more typical of North American patterns of immigrant life, so that Frie describes his allegiance to a “German cultural identity,”63 than to the expectation of “radical assimilation” (to expand Todd Endelman’s [1990] phrase beyond its Jewish reference) characteristic of that in Britain. Frie’s study is a wide-ranging analysis of the psychic and cultural memory of perpetration in Germany, prompted by and including that of his own family, in particular the wartime history of his adored maternal grandfather. The extensive engagement the text shows with such cultural and historical matters as the status of German wartime suffering and the role of present-day memorialization might seem to resemble a defense against personal remembrance. Yet Frie’s effort at self-examination means that his memoir accords with Krug’s in arguing for the importance of investigating the history of a family and hometown as well as the public record, and that addressing such topics can only be approached by means of personal exploration. The utterance that constitutes his memoir’s title, Not in My Family, is a version of that used for the German study of perpetrator descendants, Opa War Kein Nazi,64 “Grandpa was not a Nazi,” but with the crucial difference in Frie’s case that the text itself acts an extended refutation of such defensiveness. Although Frie’s grandfather is alluded to throughout, it is only in the final chapter that the full detail of his personal history emerges. We learn that, in his role as an engineer, he worked for the Luftwaffe and V-weapons project, leading to a “hauntin[ing] historical thread” in his grandson’s mind: “Goebbels, the V weapons, and my grandfather.”65 Such confrontation with the detail of his grandfather’s past includes Frie’s describing the paradigmatic moment of his readiness to be able to “recogniz[e]” a family photograph showing his grandfather in Nazi uniform, as an instance of the era’s apparently disavowed ideals persisting in the form of “mementos.”66 This entails overcoming a dissonance of the kind also evident in Katt’s memoir, as Frie describes himself viewing the eyewitness generation from the standpoint of a grandson of “loving” and “idealized, faraway grandparents” (123, 56). The gradual process of being ready to see and “register” the photograph leads to Frie’s reluctant yet deliberately factual response to his son’s fourth-generation question, reversing the disavowal of Welzer’s title (2002): “Papa, your Opa wasn’t a Nazi, was he?” . . . “Yes, he was.”67

All the memoirs discussed here are able, by virtue of their distance, to reveal the overtaking of individuals by public discourses, in a way that is cautionary precisely because it is unearthed in a British or North American context where that was not



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the norm. Niemann describes his grandfather Karl as just “a footnote in history—but what a footnote”68 and remarks of his grandparents’ first meeting that, “The woman with an overriding desire to protect those she loved walked home with a man who possessed a bedrock of obstinacy . . . under ordinary circumstances these traits would probably never have amounted to anything much.”69 The “ordinary circumstances” could be those of life in Britain or North America. This phenomenon is the opposite of what Welzer calls “cumulative heroization,”70 taking the form instead of what Davidson describes as a process of attempting to “re-nazify”71 his grandfather. The psychic freedom of the third generation is both enhanced and symbolized by their use of English in these examples. Yet despite such a cultural and epistemological distance, the attempts to look back on the third generation’s part have a personal cost, as suggested by recent accounts of the doubts and unease that continue to attend the broaching of the Nazi past in families with German antecedents even in a North American setting.72 In this way, these postmemories of perpetration function in each case as a warning for the present.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aarons, Victoria. (2021). “The Burden of the Third Generation in Germany: Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home”. In Hilene Flanzbaum, ed., The Holocaust Across Borders: Trauma, Atrocity, and Representation in Literature and Culture. Washington DC: Lexington Books, 89–112. Bayer, Gerd. (2010). “After Postmemory: Holocaust Cinema and the Third Generation,” Shofar 28 (4), 116–32. Bedford, Sybille. (1990). As It Was. London: Picador. Berger, Alan. (2010). “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and Identity in Third-Generation Writing About the Holocaust,” Shofar 28 (3), 149–58. Bergmann, Martin S., and Milton E. Jucovy. (1990). Generations of the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press [1982]. Calleja, Jen. (2019). “Home Truths,” History Today, 2 February 2019, https:​//​www​.historytoday​.com​/reviews​/home​-truths. Davidson, Martin. (2010). The Perfect Nazi: Uncovering My Grandfather’s Secret Past. London: Penguin. Endelman, Todd. (1990). Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History. New York: Wiley. Evans, David. (2015). What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy. Film, UK. Foti, Silvia. (2021). The Nazi’s Granddaughter: How I Discovered My Grandfather Was a War Criminal. Washington: Regnery History. Frie, Roger. (2017). Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press. Fulbrook, Mary. (2012), A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gabis, Rita. (2015), A Guest at the Shooters’ Banquet: My Grandfather’s SS Past, My Jewish Family, A Search for the Truth. New York: Bloomsbury. Katt, Serena. (2010). “Ingeborg’s Reise,” https:​//​serenakatt​.co​.uk​/Ingeborg​-s​-Reise​-1.

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———. (2013). “The Raw and the Cooked,” Association of Illustrators interview, theaoi. com/2013/07/26/the-raw-and-the-cooked-graduates-2013–1-serena-katt/. ———. (2019). Sunday’s Child. London: Jonathan Cape. [My page numbering.] von Kellenbach, Katharina. (2013). The Mark of Cain: Guilt and Denial in the Post-War Lives of Nazi Perpetrators. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kinstler, Linda. (2022). Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends. London: Bloomsbury. Knopp, Sonja. (2015). “My Own Transgenerational Relationship to the Holocaust and How It Shaped My Work,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 51 (2), 282–88. Krug, Nora. (2018). Heimat: A German Family Album. London: Particular Books. [My page numbering]. McGlothlin, Erin. (2006). Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration. New York: Camden House. Niemann, Derek. (2015a). “A Nazi in the Family.” Guardian, 7 March. ———. (2015b), A Nazi in the Family: The Hidden Story of an SS Family in Wartime Germany. London: Short Books. Oltermann, Philip. (2018). “Interview with Nora Krug.” Guardian, 3 October 2018, www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2018​/oct​/03​/nora​-krug​-germany​-nazi​-past​-heimat​-memoir​ -author​-illustrator. Pettitt, Joanne. (2018). “Holocaust Narratives: Second Generation ‘Perpetrators’ and the Problem of Liminality,” The European Legacy 23 (3), 286–300. Radnóti, Sándor. (2018). “Being and Nothing: Caspar David Friedrich: ‘The Monk by the Sea,’” Acta Historiae Artium: Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 59, no. 1 (2018): 219 ff. Rauca, Reglindis. (2020). “The Crimes of My Grandfather: Searching for Traces in Lithuania.” www​.reglindisrauca​.de​/litauen​-blog​/. Reingold, Matt. (2019). “Heimat Across Space and Time in Nora Krug’s Belonging,” Monatshefte 111 (4), 551–69. Rosenthal, Gabriele. (1998 [1997]). The Holocaust in Three Generations: Families of Victims and Perpetrators of the Nazi Regime. London: Cassell Sandbrook, Dominic. (2010). “The Perfect Nazi: Review,” Daily Telegraph, 27 August. von Seltmann, Uwe. (2012). Todleben: Eine deutsch-polnische Suche nach der Vergangenheit. München: F.A. Herbig. Steir-Livny, Liat. (2019). Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third-Generation Survivors in Israel. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Šukys, Julija. (2017). Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Teege, Jennifer. (2015 [2013]). My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past, trans. Carolin Sommer. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Watkinson, Laura (n.d.). “Looking for Heimat,” www​.new​-books​-in​-german​.com​/looking​ -heimat. Welzer, Harald. (2005). Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi: The Holocaust in German Family Remembrance, trans. Belinda Cooper. New York: American Jewish Committee. Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall. (2002). ‘Opa war kein Nazi’: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag Wittmann, Rebecca. (2019). ‘“The Mercy of Late Birth”: A Historian’s Professional and Personal Confrontation with the German Past.” Talk delivered at Lessons and Legacies Conference, “The Holocaust in Europe,” Munich, November 4–7 2019.



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NOTES 1. Bergmann and Jucovy 1990, Rosenthal 1998. 2. McGlothlin 2006, Steir-Livny 2019. 3. von Seltmann 2012, Evans 2015. 4. Berger 2010, 249. 5. Frie 2017, 99. 6. Pettitt 2018, 287. 7. Frie 2017, 119. 8. Ibid., 7. 9. Šukys 2017, Foti 2021. 10. Gabis 2017, Kinstler 2022. 11. Pettitt 2018, 289, Frie 2017, xii. 12. Bergmann and Jucovy 1990, 164. 13. Frie 2017, 170. 14. Bergmann and Jucovy 1990, 226; Niemann 2105b, 247. 15. von Kellenbach 2013, 160. 16. Welzer, 2005, 16. 17. Bayer 2010, 117, Frie 2017, 198. 18. Knopp 2015, 285. 19. Ibid. 20. Nora Krug, quoted in Oltermann 2018; the memoir is titled Belonging in its US version: see Watkinson n.d. on the difference between the UK and US editions. See Aarons, “The Burden of the Third Generation in Germany.” 21. Krug 2018 22. Roger Frie, 55. 23. Davidson, 2010, 23. 24. Ibid., 12. 25. Ibid., 19. 26. Ibid., 3. 27. Mary Fulbrook 339. 28. Krug, quoted in Oltermann 2018. 29. Welzer, 2005, 16. 30. Davidson 2010, 33. 31. Ibid., xvii. 32. Sandbrook 2010. 33. Welzer, 2005, 28. 34. Davidson, 2010, 19. 35. Niemann 2015b. 36. Niemann, 2015a. 37. Niemann, 2015b, 241. 38. Krug, 189. 39. Niemann, 2015b, 256. 40. Ibid., 20. 41. Davidson, 2010, 164. 42. Niemann, 2015b, 246. 43. Ibid., 233–34.

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44. Ibid., 26. 45. Cooke 2019; Katt 2013. 46. Calleja 2019. 47. Katt 2013. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 5. 50. Longerich 2019, 505–6. 51. Katt, 7. 52. Ibid., 169. 53. Ibid., 1. 54. Reingold 2019, 558. 55. Katt, 70. 56. Pettitt 2018, 287. 57. Radnoti 2018, 219. 58. Katt, 36–37. 59. Ibid., 2013. 60. Ibid., 4. 61. In Bergmann and Jucovy, eds, 1990, 161 62. Bergmann and Jucovy 1990, 177, 168. 63. Frie, 55. 64. Welzer et al., 2002. 65. Frie, 127. 66. Bergmann and Jucovy 1990, 230. 67. Welzer, 213–14. 68. Niemann, 2015b, 28. 69. Ibid., 36. 70. Welzer, 2005, 9. 71. Davidson, 2010, 32. 72. Wittmann 2019.

Conclusion Alan L. Berger and Lucas F. W. Wilson

This volume explores the multiplicity of ways that the third generation traces, transmutes, and transmits the enduring legacy of the Shoah, in tandem with revealing the impact of the intergenerational transmission of trauma on the grandchildren of survivors. This process, almost alchemical in nature, reveals the ways by which this generation’s “post-postmemories,”1 to repeat Christoph Ribbat’s previously cited phrase, emerge and are articulated in a variety of genres across geographical borders, those which touch descendants of both victims and perpetrators. Yet, as Eric Doise notes, “to say that the descendants of both suffer from trauma due to [post-]postmemory is not to erase the differences between the two. Rather, in noting the ways in which their inheritances are similar, we can most easily detect the ways in which their inheritances differ.”2 On the one hand, there are indeed a number of differences among the third generation, and it is crucial to distinguish between types of responses to the legacy of the Shoah, insofar as there is no standard third-generation response. Such responses are mediated through various cultural settings, individual temperaments, and first-generation experiences during the Shoah, whether they be experiences of victims or perpetrators. Some in the third generation, like those in the first and second, express rage and anger, whereas others seek to integrate their experiences in a manner that helps them carry their lives into the future without forgetting the past. Both of these responses embody what Eva Hoffman terms “Living After.” In general terms, descendants of survivors vary according to whether their grandparents were in death camps or in hiding, or if they fought as partisans. As for descendants of perpetrators, many seek to sort through inherited guilt and shame, not infrequently ending in denial. On the other hand, there are certain commonalities among the third generation observed throughout this study. Each of the contributors to this volume seek to 185

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negotiate the vast distance—psychological, affective, physical, and otherwise—between lived experiences in the past and the shadows it casts on contemporary life. The question becomes one of how to come to terms with the Shoah. A moral debt is owed the past. An existential debt is owed  the present. And the challenge of memory confronts the future. Another way to frame this issue is to ask: Can one integrate a traumatic past—which is not one’s own—into the present in a manner that enables life to move forward without forgetting the Shoah and its lessons? We believe that despite the plethora of third-generation responses to their Holocaust legacy, with much more expected to appear, this collection offers a helpful point of departure—a kind of literary or moral benchmark for exploring the vast and continuously growing body of creative third-generation responses while yielding possible clues that may well help us decipher and put into context the Shoah’s impact on the fourth generation. We began our volume by citing Yedidayah’s observation. Wiesel’s character sets the stage for comprehending third generation responses to their Holocaust inheritance: “We don’t live in the past, but the past lives in us.”3 A number of contributors to this volume have provided various angles of vision in illustrating how the past lives specifically in the lives of grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Illustrations of how the Shoah impacts protagonists’ lives are provided in Victoria Aarons and Dana Mihăilescu’s essays on grandchildren of survivors’ graphic novels. Naomi Sokoloff ’s innovative discussion links critical animal studies to the effect of the Shoah’s impact of what defines humanity. Alan L. Berger expands our knowledge about the Shoah by discussing the heroic efforts of a non-Jewish rescuer. Liatt Steir-Livny focuses on Israeli grandchildren’s attempt to “remember” through their impact on cultural and psychological dimensions. Tess Scholfield-Peters’s discussion focuses on case studies of the anxiety of two contemporary Australian third-generation writers.  Elke Heckner investigates, among other related topics, the phenomenon of the relationship between camera angles and the self-chosen tattooing of survivors’ Auschwitz numbers on the arms of their grandchildren. Other contributors examine the effects of the Shoah on the descendants of both German and French perpetrators and collaborators. The German context of third-generation writing is the concern of both Katra Byram and Luisa Banki’s chapters. The former deals with familial guilt while the latter analyzes the irreconcilability of contemporary life and Holocaust remembrance in German-Jewish literature. Sue Vice also discusses the psychological and aesthetic responses of third-generation descendants of Nazis, but she specifically focuses on those who live and create in the English language. Nathalie Debrauwere Miller analyzes the psychic tension between the second and third generations’ attitudes toward the collaborationist Vichy government. Memory is the touchstone of Jewish and human identity. It is that which separates us from others in the animal kingdom. Memory is a function of the so-called higher animals. But memory itself is an elusive concept, which can be trivialized, falsified, and/or altogether denied. Nevertheless,  let us accept the commandment



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to remember as a primary aim and interrogate this commandment in order to shed more light on the third generation. The biblical prophet Joel describes a prophecy in the wake of a catastrophic locust attack. He charges his elderly listeners: “Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your fathers?” (Joel 1:2). The prophet then admonishes his audience: “Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation” (Joel 1:3). This threegenerational model is a powerful one. However, let us note what it does not say and/ or acknowledge. To what will each of these generations attest? Further, what changes will inevitably occur during the passing on of testimony? Surely, third-generation witnesses, while acknowledging the Event’s impact on their sense of self, do not possess the same urgency or drama of either of its two predecessor generations. This is to be similarly expected for the fourth generation. The issue then, and the issue now, is how to negotiate the time and space between the then/there and here/now. How do succeeding generations bear witness, and to what do they bear witness? This is to a large extent the situation of the contemporary third generation. L. F. W. W. and A. L. B.

NOTES 1. Christoph Ribbat, “Nomadic with the Truth: Holocaust Representation in Michael Chabon, James McBride, and Jonathan Safran Foer,” in Twenty-First Century Fiction: Readings, Essays, and Conversations, ed. Christoph Ribbat (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2005), 213. 2. Eric Doise, “Active Postmemory: Testimony Fiction, Multiple Perspectives, and Translation in ‘Everything Is Illuminated,’” South Central Review 32, no. 2 (2015): 95. 3. Elie Wiesel, The Sonderberg Case, trans. by Catherine Temerson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 175.

Index

Aarons, Victoria, xviii, 37, 148n6; thirdgeneration Holocaust literature and, 100, 137, 186; on third-generation representation imagination, xix–xx Abraham, Nicholas, 76 Abramowicz, Myriam, 39, 40 The Act of Killing (documentary), of Oppenheimer, 113 Adorján, Johanna, 40 Against All Odds (Helmreich), xvi “A.H.A.S.V.E.R.” (Czollek), 22, 30–32 Allen, Jay, 42–43 Altschuler, Adi, 158, 167n37 Ambon, Nadav, 158 American Relief Center, Fry founding of, 42 Améry, Jean, 23; ethico-political stance on resentment by, xxvi, 22; on remembrance responsibility, 24–25; on resentment and moral sense of time, 24 And the Rat Laughed (Semel), xv, xxv; beast of memory and, 141–42; crossing the species divide in, 136–40; Girl and Rat legend and, 141–42; hidden children in, 135–39, 145–46; laughter and, 142–46 Angel of Oblivion (Haderlap), 54 animals, 148n10; Frankel on animal warfare and, 148n17; Girl on importance of, 135, 138; Spiegelman on allegory of,

103; The Story of a Life on importance of, 135, 140 antisemitism: current increase in, 120; Czollek on, 30–31; Flying Couch on Poland prewar life with, 3; Winternähe on, 27–28 Appelfeld, Aharon, 135, 138, 140 Apruzzese, John, 111 Arabs, Israel on Nazis parallel to, 155 archives: A Certain Light images of, 130; Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archives, 3; Talmudkommando of Nazi artifacts, 121; of Vashem, 121 Arendt, Hannah, xxv; conversation with Gaus of, 22; Fry rescuing of, 42; on irreconcilability, 22–23 artifacts: Belonging on German, 104, 108, 111, 116n2; Talmudkommando archive and catalog of Nazi, 121 As if It Were Yesterday (film), by Abramowicz and Hoffenberg, 39, 40 Assmann, Aleida, 51 Auschwitz concentration camp, 50, 121, 123, 130; Numbered documentary on tattooed survivors of, xxvii–xxviii, 83–96 autobiographical narration, in Numbered documentary, 85, 91–93 Azouvi, François, 65 189

190

Index

Banham, Cynthia, xxvii, 117, 127–28, 130; on displacement, 118; personal trauma of, 125–26, 129, 131 Baron, Lawrence, 97n13 Barthes, Roland, 67–68 Bayer, Gerd, xxiv beast of memory: rat in And the Rat Laughed as, 141–42; trauma and, 141 Becoming a Child of War (Fritz), xxvi, 49–52, 59–60; on family inclusion in German National List, 56–58; on oppression and persecution by Germans, 53–54; on Potulice concentration camp, 53, 56; on suffering and responsibility of Germans, 54 Belonging (Krug, N.), xxv, 1–16, 99–115; contradictory evidence in, 7–8; on German artifacts, 104, 108, 111, 116n2; Kurzweil on, 110; narrative strategies in, 105–6; research on family activities during war, 7, 99–100, 113; retrospective coloring in, 106–8; on silence in family history, 4 Benjamin, Walter, 11, 43 Berg, Lotte, 40 Berger, Alan L., 148n6, 186 Berlin, Jewish Israeli survivors in, 159, 161 Beyond Guilt and Atonement (Améry), 23–24 Biller, Maxim, 34n3 Bingham, Hiram “Harry,” 39 Black humor perspective, in Israel trauma: of Chaim Shtaim, 154; of The Chamber Quintet TV satire, 154; of “Stop” song, 154–55; of Traffic Light sitcom, 154 blood of body, 19n48; Kurzweil and Krug, N., on inherited memory in, 9–10 blood of Jews avenges. See Dam Yehudi Noter Bodemann, Michal, 29–30 Bondy, Ruth, 92 The Book of Dirt (Presser), xxvii, 117–18, 120–25 Breton, André, 42 Briar Rose (Yolen), 137 Brumlik, Micha, 30

Buchenwald concentration camp: Gross Breesen students imprisoned in, 119; Wagner, D., death at, 67, 68, 69, 71, 73, 76, 79 Burdock, Maureen, 103 The Cakemaker (film), of Graizer, 160 Caruth, Cathy, 97n3 A Certain Light (Banham), xxvii, 117–18, 125–27; archival images in, 130; photographs in, 128–29 Chagall, Marc, xxv, 43 Chaim Shtaim (Sarig), 154 The Chamber Quintet TV satire, Holocaust commemoration criticism through, 154 Chanoch, Daniel, 84, 86, 89–90, 95–96 Children of the Holocaust (Epstein, H.), xvi Chirac, Jacques, 65, 80n2 Christopher, Warren, 45 collective secrets by history, xxvii, 66 comic narratives, 13–14 coming to terms with the past. See Vergangenheitsbewältigung commemorative culture: Czollek and Funk criticism of German, 21, 26. See also Holocaust commemoration; memory culture concealed memories, 18n20 concentration camps: Auschwitz, xxvii– xxviii, 50, 83–96, 121, 123, 130; Buchenwald, 67, 68, 69, 71, 73, 76, 79, 119; Potulice concentration camp, 53, 56; Rousset on pain of, 78; Terezin, 121–22, 123, 125, 128, 130 conflict: generations in, 69–74, 75–76; humanistic discourse in, 74–79 Crabwalk (Grass), 50 Curb Your Enthusiasm (David), xxxin30 Czollek, Max, xxvi, 22, 35n4; on antisemitism, 30–31; commemorative culture criticism by, 21, 26; disintegration programs of, 29–30; displaced revenge in writings of, 26–27; German memorial culture antagonism by, 26; on irreconcilability, 27, 32; on Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 21



Index 191

Dam Yehudi Noter (blood of Jews avenges), 25 Davenport, Marion, 43 David, Larry, xxxin30 Davidson, Martin, xxvii The Dead Nation (documentary), of Jude, 111–12 deportation of Jews: of Papon from Vichy France, 70, 80n2, 81n14; in WWII, 104 Derrida, Jacques, 76 Desintegriert Euch! (Disintegrate!) (Czollek), 21 Deutsche Volksliste (German National List), Becoming a Child of War on family inclusion in, 56–58 Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (Germany: A Winter’s Tale) (Heine), 31 Diner, Dan, 55 discrimination of Jews, The Book of Dirt on, 118, 123 Disintegrate!. See Desintegriert Euch! disintegration programs, of Czollek, 29–30 displaced persons, 120, 132n5 displaced revenge: ambivalent position between resentment and vengeance in, 26; Lang, B., on, 25–26; thirdgeneration German Jewish literature on, 26–27; of Winternähe, 29; in writings of Czollek, 26–27; in writings of Funk, 26–27 displacement: Banham on, 118; Freud and, 26 Dorian, Emil, 116n3 Doron, Dana, 83–85, 88–96; thirdgeneration story of, 86–87. See also Numbered Dreifus, Erika, 40 Dückers, Tanja, 52, 54, 55 Eigler, Friederike, 51 Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), Fry and, 38, 41–42, 44–45 English-language literature, of thirdgeneration perpetrator members, xxvii English writings, of third-generation perpetrator descendants, 169–81 Epstein, Helen, xvi

Epstein, Leslie, xxxin30 ERC. See Emergency Rescue Committee Erll, Astrid, 54 Ernst, Max, 42 ethico-political resentment, Améry on, xxvi, 22 ethico-political stance of remembrance, 29 European Jews, rescue mission of Fry for, 38–39 Everything is Illuminated (Foer), 40, 101 An Exclusive Love (Adorján), 40 Explorations in Memory (Caruth), 97n3 Fabre, Adrien, 68–69, 73 Fabre, Marcel, 68, 70–72, 76 family secret exhumation, in The Origin of Violence, 65, 67–69 fascism of Vichy France, Humbert on, 65 Fawcett, Charlie, 43 Feldman, Deborah, xx Felman, Shoshana, 14 Fenster, Lily, 2–3, 11–13 Final Solution, xviii; Wannsee Conference on, xxi–xxii The Flight Portfolio (Orringer), xxv, 37, 42– 44, 47; on American rescuers, 38–41; on homosexuality, 38, 39, 45–46 Flying Couch (Kurzweil), xxiv–xxv, 1, 4–9, 14–16, 103, 111; on Fenster, 2–3, 11– 13; image of past in, 10–13; on prewar antisemitic life in Poland, 3; on Warsaw Ghetto escape by Fenster, 2–3 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 40, 101, 137 “For Services Rendered” (Dreifus), 40 France. See Vichy France regime Les Frances (Nora), xxviii Frank, Jo, 30 Frankel, Alona, 135, 138 Franklin, Ruth, 117–18, 120, 122 Frei, Norbert, 50, 51 Freud, Sigmund, 26, 75, 102 Frie, Roger, xxvii, 171, 179–81 Friedrich, David, 7 Frier, Bill, 43 Fritz, Susanne, xxvi, 51–60; on German civilian suffering, 49–50

192

Index

“From the Notebook of a Fellow Graphic Memoirist” (Kurzweil), 100 Fry, Varian, xxv; American Relief Center founded by, 42; dangerous rescue mission for European Jews by, 38–39; ERC and, 38, 41–42, 44–45; Hanfstaengel interview by, 44; Hessel and Kirstein relationship with, 39, 46; homosexuality of, 38, 39, 45–46, 48n23; The Hound and Hare journal founded by, 39; persons rescued by, 42, 43; “Righteous Among the Nations” designation of, 38, 39; support and assistance for, 39, 43 Fuchs, Anne, 51 Funk, Mirna, xxvi, 32, 35n4; displaced revenge in writings of, 26–27; German commemorative culture criticism by, 21, 26; on German Jewish reconciliatory relationship, 21 Gaus, Günter, 22 Gelles, Ayal, 94–95 Gemähling, Jean, 43 generations: Arendt on reconciliation impossibility, 22–23; Hirsch on postmemory of, xxiv, 23, 89, 90; memorial practices of, 23 generations in conflict: The Origin of Violence on, 69–74; Pomian on, 75–76 German artifacts, Belonging on, 104, 108, 111, 116n2 German guilt, German suffering relationship with, 50 German identity, National Socialism responsibility and, 55 German National List. See Deutsche Volksliste German suffering, German guilt relationship with, 50 Germany: Becoming a Child of War on oppression and persecution in, 53–54; Holocaust education gaps in, 101–2; as home for Jewish survivors, 161; national election of 2017 in, 16; reconciliation discourse of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, xxvi; right-wing populism growth in, 59;

Stephan on rise of right in, 59; WWII memorabilia of, 104 Germany: A Winter’s Tale. See Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen Girl (Frankel), on importance of animals, 135, 138 Girl and Rat legend, 141–42 Goebbels, Joseph, 44 Gold, Mary Jane, 43 Goodstein, Debbie, 40 Göring, Emma, 40 Göring, Herman, 40 Graizer, Ophir Raul, 160 “The Grandchildren Want to Know” (Hage), 50 Granddaughters of the Holocaust (Pisano), xvii Grass, Günter, 50 The Great Dictator (film), xxxin30 Great House (Krauss), 40 Gross Breesen students, Buchenwald concentration camp imprisonment of, 119 Großer Wannsee, Wannsee Conference on Final Solution near, xxi–xxii Hass, Aaron, xvi Haderlap, Maja, 54 Hage, Volker, 50 Halbwachs, Maurice, 54 The Handyman (documentary), of Netzer, 160–61 Hanfstaengel, Ernst “Putzi,” Fry interview of, 44 Hansaplast bleeding wound metaphor, in Belonging, 4 A Hat of Glass (Semel), 39 Hayut, Noam, 155–56 Heavenly Bodies. See Himmelskörper Heimat (homeland), 16; Krug, N., definition of, 9, 99–100, 103–4; Krug, N., narrative on, 105–6; on perpetration and victimhood, 104 Heimat (Krug, N.), 111, 171 Heine, Heinrich, 30–31 Helmreich, William, xvi helpers. See rescuers and helpers



Index 193

Hermann, Meike, 51 Hessel, Stéphane, 39, 46 Heymann, Tomer, 160 hidden children, in And the Rat Laughed, 135–39, 145–46; Frankel and theme of animal welfare, 148n17 Himmelskörper (Heavenly Bodies) (Dückers), 52, 54, 55 Hirsch, Marianne, xxiv, 81n10, 93; on photographs, 67, 128; on postmemory, xxiv, 23, 89, 90 Hirschmann, Otto “Beamish,” 43 The History of an Infantile Neurosis (Freud), 102 The History of Love (Krauss), 40 Hitler, Adolf: Krug, N., on followers of, 113; Krug, N., on indoctrination success of, 106; Museum of the Extinct Race of, 121 Hoffenberg, Esther, 39, 40 Hoffman, Eva, xxiv, 46 Hofmann, Bettina, xxiii Holocaust: discussion of experience of Peters on, 119–20; ethical portrayal of, xxvii; Germany education gaps regarding, 101–2; humor, xxxin30; Israel Ministry of Education school curricula on, 153; in And the Rat Laughed, 135–46; sexual assault in, 137, 148n6; silence on local happenings of, 101–2. See also post-Holocaust Holocaust commemoration: The Chamber Quintet TV satire criticism of, 154; forms of, 152; in Israel, 157; secondgeneration criticism of, 153 Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day, in Israel, 157–58 “Holocaust Memory and Revenge” (Lang, B.), 25 Holocaust narratives, xv, 12–13, 15, 106 Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archives, 3 homeland. See Heimat homosexuality, xxv; of Fry, 38, 39, 45–46, 48n23; Nazis torture and imprisonment for, 39 Horn, Dara, 40 The Hound and Hare journal, Fry and, 39

How to Breathe Underwater (Orringer), 37 humanistic discourse in conflict, in The Origin of Violence, 74–79 Humbert, Fabrice, xxvi–xxvii, 66–78; on fascism of Vichy France, 65; on just memory, 79 humor: Holocaust, xxxin30; Israel trauma perspective of Black, 154–55 IDF. See Israel Defense Force image of past, in Flying Couch, 10–13 immigrants, memory culture integration by German, 55 Ingeborg Reise (Katt), 170–71 Inglourious Basterds (film), 27 “Inglourious Poet” (Czollek), 27, 29–32 inherited memory, in post-Holocaust literature, 9 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 26 In the Shadow of the Holocaust (Hass), xvi The Invisible Bridge (Orringer), 37 An Invisible Country. See Ein unsichtbares Land irreconcilability, 186; Arendt on, 22–23; Czollek on, 27, 30, 32; in German Jewish literature, xxvi, 21–22, 24, 26; in Winternähe, 28, 29 I Shot My Love (film), of Heymann, 160 Israel: on Arabs and Nazis parallels, 155; Holocaust awareness in, 152; Holocaust commemoration in, 157; Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day in, 157–58; Holocaust representations and public discourse strength in, 152; on ongoing local trauma of Holocaust, 152; Palestinian second Holocaust concerns in, 152; politicization of trauma in, 155–57; postmemory of second-generation survivors in, 153; Remembrance in the Living Room social initiative in, 157–59, 167n37; survivors of Shoah grandchildren in, xxvi; trauma perspective of Black humor in, 154–55. See also third-generation Holocaust survivors, in Israel Israel Defense Force (IDF), behavior of Nazis comparisons to, 155

194

Index

Israel Ministry of Education, on Holocaust school curricula, 153 “I Was a Red-Diaper Baby” (Noomin), 106 Jacobs, Louis (rabbi), 41 “The Jew, A Poisonous Mushroom” (Krug, F-K.), 109 Jews: The Book of Dirt on discrimination of, 118, 123; Germany representations of, 104. See also deportation of Jews Johnston, Emily Ronay, 138, 148n20 Jude, Radu, 111–12 just memory, Humbert on, 79 Kalderon, Gita, 84, 91 Katt, Serena, xxvii, 170–72, 176–79 von Kellenbach, Katharina, 170 Keren, Kristine, 135 King of the Jews (Epstein, L.), xxxin30 Kinsey, Alfred, 48n23 Kirstein, Lincoln, 39, 46 Klinger, Leon, 93 Kluger, Ruth, 1 Knopp, Sonja, 170–71 Kovner, Abba, 25 Krauss, Nicole, 40 Krug, Franz-Karl, 109–10 Krug, Nora, xxv, xxvi, 2–3; Apruzzese interview with, 111; childhood concerns about Holocaust by, 102; death of uncle fighting for Nazis, 7–8, 14–15, 104, 105–6, 109; family narrative of unresolved guilt and shame, 4–5, 10; on followers of Hitler, 113; as grandchild of perpetrators, 1, 16; grandfathers as Nazi Party members, 7; Heimat defined by, 9, 99–100, 103–4; incomplete, fragmented knowledge of family for, 8; on indoctrination success of Hitler, 106; on inherited memory in blood of body, 9–10; marriage into Jewish family by, 5, 99; Rock as maternal grandfather of, 104, 106–8 Kurzweil, Amy, xxiv–xxv, 1–16, 100, 103; on Belonging, 110; as grandchild of survivors, 1, 16

LaCapra, Dominick, xv Lachmann, Fredrich, 69 Lang, Berel, 25–26 Lang, Jessica, xix Langer, Lawrence, 14 Lanzmann, Claude, 90, 97n3 Larkey, Uta, 100, 114 laughter, in And the Rat Laughed, 142–46 Le Chambon, Trocmé and Theis rescue efforts in, 39–40 Levi, Andres, 38 Levi, Klara, 38 Levi, Primo, 70, 77, 83–85, 87–88, 91 Levinas, Emmanuel: on rumination, 72; on tumor of memory after WWII, xxvii, 66 Levi-Strauss, Claude, xxv; Fry rescuing of, 42 Levy, Zoky, 84–85, 89, 92–93 van der Leyen, Ursula, 59 Lieux des Memoires (Nora), 54 Life is Beautiful (film), xxxin30 Lipchitz, Jacques, xxv; Fry rescuing of, 42 The Lost (Mendelsohn), xxiv, 18n20, 128 Luster, Leo, 84 Mahler-Gropius, Alma, 42, 43 Marino, Andy, 45 “The Massacre of the Jews” (Fry), 44 Maus II (Spiegelman), xvii, 102, 142 Maybe Esther (Petrowskaja), 54 McCloud, Scott, 12 McGlothlin, Erin, 12, 99, 100–101 Medicus, Thomas, 50, 51, 52 memorial practices, of generations, 23 memory, 186–87; concealed, 18n20; Humbert on just, 79; Levi, P., on duty of, 77; research travels for, 54–55, 118; Ricoeur on work of, 77; Todorov on, 69, 71, 78–79 memory culture: Bayer on, xxiv; Erll and Halbwachs on, 54; Frei and Welzer on WWII history reinterpretation, 50; German immigrant integration into, 55; German literature of, 52; National Socialism German responsibility and, 50; Nora on, 54; Raulff on, 50 Memory Matters (Schaumann), 100



Index 195

The Memory Monster (Sarid), 156 Mendelsohn, Daniel, xxiv, 18n20; on photographs, 128–29 Menkes, Tal, 154–55 Michaels, Wendy, 120 Mihai, Mihaela, 114 Mihăilescu, Dana, 186 Miller, Adir, 154 Modiano, Patrick, 72 Mohamed, Saira, 113 Moskovitz, Golan, xviii Museum of the Extinct Race, of Hitler, 121 My Holocaust Thief (Hayut), 155–56 myth of great silence theory, of Azouvi, 65 narratives, 153; Australian thirdgeneration Holocaust literature quest, 124; Belonging strategies of, 105–6; Holocaust, xv, 12–13, 15, 106; of return, in third-generation Holocaust literature, 6; third-generation Holocaust literature comics, 13–14 Nascon, Abramo, 94–95 national amnesia of Vichy France, postwar literary fictions on, 65, 66 National Socialism, 21; Diner on remembrance of, 55; first generation responsibility for, 49; German identity on responsibility of, 55; German responsibility for, 50; Germany current thinking in, 59–60 A Nazi in the Family (Niemann), 171, 174–76 Nazi Party: grandparents of Krug, N., as members of, 7; Rock joining of, 107–8 Nazis: behavior of IDF comparisons to, 155; Humbert on years of, 65; Israel on Arabs parallel to, 155; Paris occupation by, xxvi–xxvii; Poland occupation by, 3, 56–57; Talmudkommando archive and catalog of artifacts of, 121; torture and imprisonment of homosexuals by, 39; uncle of Krug, N., death fighting for, 7–8, 14–15, 104, 105–6, 109; Vichy France active collaboration with, 65, 69; wolves depiction in genocide by, 102–3 Never again Auschwitz, Welzer on, 50

new family novel, in third-generation German writing, 51, 52, 54 new generational novel, in third-generation German writing, 51, 53 Niemann, Derek, xxvii, 171 Noomin, Diane, 106, 108 Nora, Pierre, xxvii, 66; on memory culture, 54 Not in My Family (Frie), 171, 179–81 Numbered (documentary), of Doron and Sinai, xxvii, 97n13; autobiographical narration in, 85, 91–93; Levi, P., and, 83, 84, 85; photographic sessions in, xxviii, 84–86; on second- and thirdgeneration tattoos, xxviii, 93–96; SteirLivny on, 96n1; tattoo recollections of survivors in, 84–85; tattoos as physical witness to Auschwitz, 87–90; thirdgeneration story of Doron, 86–87 Oppenheimer, Joshua, 113 The Origin of Violence (Humbert), xxvi; on collective secrets by History, xxvii, 66; on ethics of restitution, 65; family secret exhumation in, 65, 67–69; generations in conflict in, 69–74; humanistic discourse in conflict in, 74–79; on psychoanalysis individual secrets, xxvii, 66; Stora on oblivion, 72 Orringer, Julie, xxv, 15, 37–47 Ozick, Cynthia, 44–45 Paper Dolls (film), of Heymann, 160 Papon, Maurice, 70, 80n2, 81n14 parent-child relationships, for Shoah second-generation, xvi–xvii Paris, Nazi occupation of, xxvi–xxvii The Perfect Nazi (Davidson), 171, 172–74 performative culture, of remembrance, 29–30 perpetrators, of Shoah: Krug, N., as grandchild of, 1, 16; Mohamed on, 113; shared characteristics of survivor descendants with, xviii; silence of, xix. See also third-generation perpetrator descendants; third-generation perpetrator members

196

Index

Pétain, Marshall, 42 Peters, Harry, 119–20 Petrowskaja, Katja, 54 Pettitt, Joanne, 169 photographs: The Book of Dirt use of, 125; in A Certain Light, 128–29; Hirsch on, 67, 128; Mendelsohn on, 128–29; Numbered sessions of, xxviii, 84–86 Pisano, Nirit, xvii poetic revenge, 30, 31–32 Poland: German Nationalist List and, 56–58; Nazi occupation of, 3, 56–57; prewar antisemitic life in, 3; Stephan on Holocaust complicity by, 58 politicization of trauma, in Israel, 155–57 Pomian, Krzysztof, 75–76 post-Holocaust: inherited memory in literature of, 9; Jewish identity, 4 postmemory: Hirsch on, xxiv, 23, 89, 90; of Israel second-generation survivors, 153; Ribbat on, xxiv, 185 post-postmemories, xxviii; Ribbat on, xxiv, 185 Potulice concentration camp, Becoming a Child of War on, 53, 56 Presser, Bram, xxvii, 117–18, 120–25 The Producers (film), xxxin30 Proper Names (Levinas), 66 prosthetic memory: Johnston on, 148n20; Semel emphasis on, 141 “Protecting Our European Way of Life,” of Leyen, 59 psychoanalysis, individual secrets in, xxvii, 66 Queen of Snails (Burdock), 103 quest narrative, in Australian thirdgeneration Holocaust literature, 124 A Quiet American (Marino), 45 Quiet Americans (Dreifus), 40 Rabinovitz, Hanna, 93–94 Randa, Jacob, 121, 123 Raulff, Ulrich, 50 reconciliation, in remembrance context, 23 remembrance: Améry on responsibility of, 24–25; Bodemann and Czollek on

performative culture of, 29–30; Diner on National Socialism, 55; ethicopolitico stance of, 29; materialistic conception in Winternähe, 28–29; reconciliation in context of, 23 Remembrance in the Living Room social initiative, Israel, 157–59, 167n37 representative anxiety, in Australian thirdgeneration Holocaust literature, 117–31 rescuers and helpers, 38; Adorján as, 40; Everything is Illuminated on, 40, 101; The Flight Portfolio on American, 38–41; Great House, The History of Love, and Quiet Americans on, 40; As if It Were Yesterday film on, 39, 40; Rosenthal and Sontag on, 41; Schindler, Wallenberg, and Suigihara as, 41; So Many Miracles and, 40; of Trocmé and Theis in Le Chambon, 39–40; “Two Sides of One Coin” on, 41; Weapons of the Spirit film on, 39–40. See also Fry, Varian research: in Australian third-generation Holocaust literature, 119–20; on family activities during war in Belonging, 7, 99–100, 113; third-generation Holocaust literature fragmented and pieced-together, 121; travels for memory, 54–55, 118 resentment: Améry on moral sense of time and, 24; Améry on remembrance responsibility, 24–25; ethico-political stance by Améry on, xxvi, 22; Beyond Guilt and Atonement on, 23–24; revenge compared to, 25; in third-generation German-Jewish literature, 23–25 Résistancialisme, 66, 71, 80n1 restitution, The Origin of Violence on ethics of, 65 retrospective coloring, in Belonging, 106–8 Reuter, Ursula, xxiii revenge: “Holocaust Memory and Revenge” on, 25; Lang, B., on absence in discussion and occurrence, 25; poetic, 30, 31–32; resentment compared to, 25; in third-generation German Jewish literature, xxvi, 22, 25–26, 34n3. See also displaced revenge



Index 197

Ribbat, Christoph, xxiv, 185 Ricoeur, Paul, 71, 74, 75, 77, 79 “Righteous Among the Nations,” Fry designation of, 38, 39 Rock, Willi, 104, 106; Nazi Party joined by, 107–8 Rosenthal, Gilbert S. (rabbi), 41 Rosenzweig, Vera, 89, 92 Rothberg, Michael, 55, 114 Rothe, Anne, 120 Rubinek, Saul, 40 rumination, Levinas on, 72 Rumkowski, Mordechai, xxxin30 “The Sacrifice of Isaac” (Wiesel), 144–45 Sarid, Yishai, 156 Sarig, Ran, 154 Sauvage, Pierre, 39 Schaumann, Caroline, 99, 100, 101 Schindler, Oskar, 41 second-generation, of Shoah: Auschwitz concentration camp tattoos of, xxviii, 93–96; Holocaust commemoration criticism by, 153; von Kellenbach on, 170; McGlothlin and Schaumann on perpetration in literature of, 99; parentchild relationships for, xvi–xvii; thirdgeneration Holocaust survivors narrative expansion, 153 Second-Generation Holocaust Literature (McGlothlin), 100–101 secrets: collective by history, xxvii, 66; The Origin of Violence exhumation of family, 65, 67–69; psychoanalysis on individual, xxvii, 66 Semel, Nava, xv, xxv, 39, 135–46, 149n27; prosthetic memory emphasis of, 141 Şenocak, Zafer, 55 sexual assault, in Holocaust, 137, 148n6 Shoah: persecution and murder transgenerational influence of, 22; twenty-first century life and, xv; witness generation of, xvi. See also perpetrators; second-generation; survivors Shoah cinematography, of Lanzmann, 90, 97n3 Sholowicz, Menachem, 88, 92

silence: Azouvi and myth of great silence theory, 65; Belonging on, 4; Hage on, 50–51; on local happenings of Holocaust, 101–2; of perpetrators and survivors, xix Sinai, Uriel, 83–96, 96n2. See also Numbered Skibell, Joseph, 137 “The Smoothest Way is Full of Stones” (Orringer), 37 social criticism, in Winternähe, 29 So Many Miracles (film), 40 The Sonderberg Case (Wiesel, Elie), xv Sontag, Susan, 12, 41 Spiegelman, Artie, xvii, 10, 12, 102, 142; animal allegory of, 103 Springtime for Hitler (film), xxxin30 Steinitz, Zwi, 91 Steir-Livny, Liat, 96n1, 148nn6–7, 186 Stephan, Fritz, 58, 59 “Stop” song, of Menkes, 154–55 Stora, Benjamin, 72 The Story of a Life (Appelfeld), 135, 140 suffering: Becoming a Child of War on German responsibility and, 54; Fritz on German civilian, 49–50; German guilt relationship with, 50; transcendental nature of, 129 Suigihara, Chinue, 41 Sunday’s Child (Katt), 171–72, 176–79 super-present, McGlothlin on, 12 survivors, of Shoah: autobiographical narrative responses of, 85, 91–93; Israeli grandchildren of, xxvi; Kurzweil as grandchild of, 1, 16; phenomenon of third generation talk with, xx, xxiv; postwar children and deceased offspring of, 109; silence of, xix. See also third-generation survivor members Talmudkommando: archive and catalog of Nazi artifacts, 121; Randa involvement in, 121 Tarantino, Quentin, 27 tattoos, of Auschwitz concentration camp: as physical witness to Auschwitz, 87–90; recollections of survivors and,

198

Index

84–85; second- and third-generation tattoos, xxviii, 93–96. See also Numbered (documentary) Terezin concentration camp, 121–22, 123, 125, 128, 130 Tessler, Hanna, 89 Tessler, Sarah, 89, 95 testimonies, Langer on witnessing and, 14 Textual Silence (Lang), xix Theis, Edouard, 39–40 third-generation German Jewish literature, 33, 34n2; of “A.H.A.S.V.E.R.,” 22, 30–32; Améry on ethico-political resentment, xxvi, 22; of Czollek, xxvi, 21, 26–27, 29–30, 32, 35n4; on displaced revenge of literature, 26–27; generations and, 22–23; “Inglourious Poet” of Czollek, 27, 29–32; irreconcilability in, xxvi, 21–22, 24, 26; on resentment, 23–25; on revenge, xxvi, 22, 25–26, 34n3; of Winternähe, xxvi, 22, 27–29 third-generation German writing: on civilian suffering, 49–50; Fuchs on memory contests in, 51; Hermann on, 51; new family novel genre, 51, 52, 54; on new generational novel, 51, 53; Wagner, S., on, 52–53 third-generation Holocaust literature, xxvii; Aarons and, 100, 137, 186; comics narratives as, 13–14; Foer and Skibell on, 137; fragmented and pieced-together research for, 121; narratives of return in, 6; witnessing trope in, 13–14 third-generation Holocaust literature, Australian: The Book of Dirt by Presser and, xxvii, 117–18, 120–25; A Certain Light of Banham and, xxvii, 117–18, 125–30; Franklin on, 117–18, 120, 122; introduction to research in, 119–20; quest narrative of, 124; representative anxiety in, 117–31 Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives (Aarons), 100 third-generation Holocaust survivors, in Israel, 162; Black humor perspective of, 154–55; Germany as home for

Jewish survivors, 161; Holocaust commemoration and, 157; Remembrance in the Living Room social initiative, 157–59, 167n37; second-generation narratives expansion, 153; thirdgeneration perpetrator offspring and, 159–61; transgenerational trauma of, 151–53; trauma politicization, 155–57 third-generation perpetrator descendants, English writings, xxvii, 169; of Ingeborg’s Reise, 170–71; Knopp and, 170–71; of A Nazi in the Family, 171, 174–76; of Not in My Family, 171, 179–81; of The Perfect Nazi, 171, 172–74; of Sunday’s Child, 171–72, 176–79 third-generation perpetrator members: “The Berlin Museum” skit and, 159; English-language literature of, xxvii, 169–81; The Handyman documentary, of Netzer, 160–61; third-generation Holocaust survivors in Israel and, 159–61; Wagner, G., as, xviii; writings of, xviii third-generation representations, xix–xxiii, 18n20, 104, 152, 169 third-generation survivor members: Aarons on, xviii; diversification of, xvii–xviii; Doron as, 86–87; as Holocaust narrative custodians, xv; LaCapra on past and, xv; Moskovitz on, xviii; phenomenon of talk with survivors by, xx, xxiv; schools of thoughts on, 152; traumatic legacy of, xv Tibor, Alfred, 38 Todorov, Tzvetan, 69, 71, 78–79 Torok, Maria, 76 Traffic Light sitcom, of Miller and Sarig, 154 “Transcending Memory in Holocaust Survivors’ Families” (Larkey), 100, 114 transferred history, Hoffman on, 46 transgenerational trauma, 58–59, 69, 185; Abraham and Torok on, 76; Banham on, 126; Burdock on, 103; Derrida on, 76; third-generation Holocaust survivors in Israel and, 151–53 Translated Memories (Hofmann and Reuter), xxiii transmemory, Larkey on, 114



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trauma: beast of memory and, 141; Israel ongoing local Holocaust, 152; Israel politicization of, 155–57; Johnston on transmission of, 148n20; personal of Banham, 125–26, 129, 131; Van der Kolk on, 139, 149nn22–23. See also transgenerational trauma traumatic legacy, of third-generation Holocaust members, xv Trocmé, André, 39–40 tumor of memory, of Levinas, xxvii, 66 “Two Sides of One Coin” (Rosenthal), 41 Ud, Asher, 88 Unorthodox (documentary), xx–xxiii Ein unsichtbares Land (An Invisible Country) (Wackwitz), 54–55 Van der Kolk, Bessel A., 139 Vashem, Yad, 38, 121, 123 Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), xxvi, 21, 23, 33 Vichy France regime (1940–1944): Azouvi myth of great silence theory and, 65; Humbert on fascism of, 65; Nazis active collaboration in, 65, 69; Papon deportation of Jews from, 70, 80n2, 81n14; postwar literary fictions on national amnesia, 65, 66; repentance speech of Chirac, 65, 80n2; Résistancialisme and, 66, 71, 80n1 Voices from the Attic (film), Goodstein and, 40 Wackwitz, Stefan, 54–55 Wagner, David, 67, 68, 69, 71, 73, 76, 79

Wagner, Erich, 68, 69 Wagner, Gottfried, xviii Wagner, Sabrina, 52–53 Waldmann, Ernest, 40 Wallenberg, Raul, 41 Wannsee Conference on Final Solution, xxi–xxii Warren, Avra, 39 Warsaw Ghetto, Fenster escape from, 2–3 Weapons of the Spirit (film), by Sauvage, on Trocmé and Theis Le Chambon rescue efforts, 39–40 Welzer, Harald, 170; on Never again Auschwitz, 50 Werfel, Franz, 42, 43 Wiesel, Elie, xv, xvi, 41, 73, 144–45, 186, xxxin30 Wiesel, Elisha, xvi Winternähe (Funk), xxvi, 22; on antisemitism, 27–28; of displaced revenge, 29; irreconcilability, 28, 29; materialistic conception of remembrance in, 28–29; social criticism in, 29 witness generation, of Shoah, xvi witnessing, in third-generation Holocaust literature, 13–14 work of memory, Ricoeur on, 77 World War II (WWII): deportation of Jews in, 104; Frei and Welzer on history reinterpretation, 50; Germany memorabilia from, 104; Levinas on tumor of memory after, xxvii, 66 Yolen, Jane, 137 Zawadzi, Jacob, 88, 91, 92

About the Editors

Alan L. Berger occupies the Raddock Eminent Scholar Chair in Holocaust Studies and directs the Center for the Study of Values and Violence After Auschwitz at Florida Atlantic University. Among the books he has written, coauthored, and coedited are Crisis and Covenant, Children of Job, Second Generation Voices, Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation, and Elie Wiesel: Humanist Messenger for Peace. He was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Honoris Causa from Luther College. 201

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About the Editors

Lucas F. W. Wilson is the Justice, Equity, and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Calgary. He writes on a variety of subjects, including Holocaust literature, pedagogy, and the New Christian Right. His academic work has appeared in Modern Language Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, The Journal of Jewish Identities, Canadian Jewish Studies, and Flannery O’Connor Review, as well as in edited collections published by The MLA of America, SUNY Press, The University of Alabama Press, and DIO Press. He is currently working on a monograph, entitled At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives (under contract with Rutgers University Press), in addition to editing a collection of short stories written by conversion-therapy survivors, entitled Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors’ Stories of Conversion Therapy (under contract with Jessica Kinsley Publishers).

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Victoria Aarons holds the position of O. R. and Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature in the English Department at Trinity University in San Antonio, where she teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. She has published over ninety articles and book chapters, and her work has appeared in a number of scholarly venues. She is the author or editor of twelve books, including A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction and What Happened to Abraham: Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction, both recipients of the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title; The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction; The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow; Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (with Alan Berger); Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction;



About the Editors 203

The New Jewish American Literary Studies; Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory; The Palgrave Handbook on Holocaust Literature and Culture; and Memory Spaces: Visualizing Identity in Jewish Women's Graphic Narratives. She serves as judge for the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, a literary prize given each year to a rising American Jewish writer of fiction. She is on the editorial board of Philip Roth Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and Women in Judaism, and she is series editor for Lexington Studies in Jewish Literature. Luisa Banki is research associate in German Literature at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, and convener of the scientific network “3G: Positions of the Third Generation after the Second World War and the Shoah in Contemporary Literature and Arts” funded by the German Research Foundation.  Her research and teaching interests include modern German Jewish literature, Shoah literature, transcultural literature, and gendered conceptions of reading. Her publications include Post-Katastrophische Poetik. Zu W. G. Sebald und Walter Benjamin (2016) and “Actuality and Historicity in Mirna Funk’s Winternähe” in German Jewish Literature after 1990 (2018). Katra Byram is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University. Her work includes a series of publications focused on the role of gender in post–World War II German collective memory, beginning with a chapter in her book Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator: Reckoning with Past and Present in German Literature (2015). Her most recent article, which appears in Poetics Today, proposes an approach to integrating systematic attention to social context into narrative theory. Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller is an Associate Professor of French & Francophone Studies, Jewish Studies, and Feminist Theory at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Envisager Dieu avec Edmond Jabès (Paris, Editions du Cerf, 2007) and the editor of The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Francophone World (New York, Routledge, 2010). She has published numerous articles in the United States, Canada, and Europe on, among others, Chahdortt Djavann, Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Maryse Condé, Edmond Jabès, Emmanuel Levinas, Bernard Lazare, Marcel Proust, Hubert Haddad, and Mohamed Kacimi. They appear in journals such as French Historical Studies, Contemporary French Civilization, Modern Language Notes (MLN), Literature & Theology, French Forum, Romanic Review, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies/Sites, Dalhousie French Studies, and in éds Minard, Lendemains, and Presses Universitaires de Vincennes. She is currently completing a manuscript on minority issues in France (Jews and Muslims), analyzing the influence of Albert Camus on Francophone contemporary playwrights who represent terrorism and the cult of martyrdom.

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About the Editors

Dr. Elke Heckner, Associate Professor of Instruction, teaches the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide at the University of Iowa. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Thinking Memories of Futurity: Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, which focuses on recent paradigm shifts in second- and thirdgeneration representations of genocide. Dr. Heckner also serves as the director of the Humanities Lab in Global Memory Studies in the Division of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Iowa. In addition to teaching courses on witnessing genocide, war crimes trials, conflict resolution and human rights intervention strategies, Dr. Heckner has published on visual culture and genocide, especially on second- and third-generation witnessing and post-memory in film and memorial architecture. Dana Mihăilescu is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Bucharest. She was a Fulbright Junior Visiting Researcher at Brandeis University in 2008–2009 and the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Crown Family Center of Jewish and Israel Studies, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University in 2021–2022. Her research interests focus on Jewish American studies, Holocaust (child) survivor testimonies, trauma and witnessing, and ethics and memory. She has published articles on these topics in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, MELUS, Shofar, European Journal of Jewish Studies, East European Jewish Affairs, and other journals. Her most recent publications include her monograph Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930: Struggles for Recognition (2018); the article “Jewish Identity amid Wars and Migration: Transnational and Transgenerational Itineraries in Julia Alekseyeva’s Soviet Daughter. A Graphic Revolution” in a special issue on Jewish comics and graphic novels edited by Victoria Aarons for Literature & Belief in 2021; and a chapter, “‘Shot in the Heart on Valentine’s Day’: Monsters, Sexuality, the Holocaust and Late 1960s American Culture in Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Book I (2017)” in Beyond Maus: The Legacy of Holocaust Comics (2021). Tess Scholfield-Peters is a Sydney-based writer and academic currently undertaking her PhD at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research is focused on third-generation Holocaust representations, family history, trauma writing, and hybrid literature. In early 2022 Tess completed a research scholarship at the National Library of Australia for her project: From Berlin to the Bush: Jewish Youth in Rural Australia 1939. Her most recent publication is a creative nonfiction essay, “An Imaginary Voyage: Pandemic Approaches to Virtual Exploration, Embodiment, and Creative Practice” for New Writing Journal (2021). Tess is currently working on a book manuscript based on the wartime experiences of her grandfather and great-grandparents. Naomi Sokoloff is Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Washington (Seattle), where she teaches Hebrew



About the Editors 205

and Modern Jewish Literature. Her most recent books include Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making,  coedited with Nancy E. Berg (SUNY Press 2020), and What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans), which was also coedited with Nancy E. Berg and which won a National Jewish Book Award (UW Press 2018). Professor Sokoloff ’s scholarship comments on a variety of writers who deal with the Holocaust, including Aharon Appelfeld, David Grossman, Gila Almagor, Primo Levi, Louis Begley, Alona Frankel, Jerzy Kosinski, Diane Ackerman, and Philip Roth. Liat Steir-Livny is an Associate Professor at Sapir Academic College and the Open University of Israel. She teaches in the Department of Culture at Sapir Academic College, the Cultural Studies MA program, and the Department of Literature, Language, and the Arts at the Open University of Israel. Her research focuses on Holocaust commemoration in Israel from the 1940s until the present. It combines Holocaust studies, memory studies, cultural studies, trauma studies, and film studies. She is the author of many articles and five books: Two Faces in the Mirror (Eshkolot-Magness, 2009, Hebrew) analyzes the representation of Holocaust survivors in Israeli cinema; Let the Memorial Hill Remember (Resling, 2014, Hebrew) discusses the changing memory of the Holocaust in contemporary Israeli culture; Is it O.K to Laugh About It? (Vallentine Mitchell, 2017) analyzes Holocaust humor, satire, and parody in Israeli culture; Three Years, Two Perspectives, One Trauma (The Herzl Institute for the Study of Zionism, University of Haifa, 2019, Hebrew) analyzes the media of prominent Jewish organizations in the United States and Eretz-Israel in the aftermath of World War II; and Remaking Holocaust Memory (Syracuse University Press, 2019) analyses documentary cinema by third-generation survivors in Israel. Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, where she teaches contemporary literature, film, and Holocaust studies. Her most recent publications include the BFI Modern Film Classics volume on Shoah (2011), Textual Deceptions: Literary Hoaxes and False Memoirs in the Contemporary Era (2014), the coedited volume Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (2013) with Jenni Adams, and Barry Hines: ‘Kes,’ ‘Threads’ and Beyond, with David Forrest (2017). Her latest book is Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ Outtakes: Holocaust Rescue and Resistance (2021).