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Band 48 2015 Heft 3 Harald Höbus ch, Linda K . Worle y (Hr sg.) ISSN 0010-1338 Band 48 T h e m e n h eft: A H a unting Pa s t in A u s tria n a nd G e rm a n L ite rature a nd F ilm G a s th e ra u s g e b e r: J o s e ph W. M o s e r, M a rg a rete L a ndwe hr, a nd L a ura D etre J o s e ph W. M o s e r, M a rg a rete L a ndwe hr, L a ura D etre: I ntrod u c tion J o a c him Wa rmbold: M a ju b s R e i s e - F ro m Colon y to Con c e ntration C a m p . A N ew A p p ro a c h at N a r ratin g G e r m a n y ’ s Colonial Pa s t ? L a ura D etre: You A re th e M u rd e re r s : G e r m a n G uilt in Pete r L or re ’ s D e r Ve rlo re n e D a gm a r C . G . L ore n z : E volvin g M e m or y N a r rative s : T h e Tra n s form ation s of R uth K lu g e r ’ s A utobiog ra p hi c al Writin g M a rg a rete L a ndwe hr: H a u ntin g s of th e Tra u m ati c Pa s t in M a a s ’ s F ilm Two L iv e s : I n divid u al a n d Colle c tive M e m or y J o s e ph W. M o s e r: H a u ntin g Poli c ewor k in A n d rea s P ittle r ’ s B rons tein D ete c tive S e rie s periodicals.narr.de C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a t i o n a l e Z e i t s c h r i f t f ü r G e r m a n i s t i k I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k BAND 48 • Heft 3 Themenheft: A Haunting Past in Austrian and German Literature and Film Gastherausgeber: Joseph W. Moser, Margarete Landwehr und Laura Detre Inhalt Introduction: A Haunting Past in Austrian and German Literature and Film Joseph W. Moser, Margarete Landwehr, Laura Detre � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 153 Majubs Reise — From Colony to Concentration Camp. A New Approach at Narrating Germany’s Colonial Past? Joachim Warmbold � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 159 You Are the Murderers: German Guilt in Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene Laura Detre � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 171 Evolving Memory Narratives: The Transformations of Ruth Kluger’s Autobiographical Writing Dagmar C. G. Lorenz � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 183 Hauntings of the Traumatic Past in Maas’s Film Two Lives : Individual and Collective Memory Margarete Landwehr � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 197 Haunting Policework in Andreas Pittler’s Bronstein Detective Series Joseph W. Moser � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 219 Autorenverzeichnis � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 229 Introduction 153 Introduction: A Haunting Past in Austrian and German Literature and Film Joseph W. Moser, Margarete Landwehr, Laura Detre West Chester University This special issue of Colloquia Germanica is based on three panels from the 2015 German Studies Association Conference in Arlington, VA , which brought together twelve papers exploring innovative techniques, perspectives, and themes in German-language fiction, autobiography, and film dealing with hauntings of West and East Germany’s as well as Austria’s past in the twentieth century. The twentieth century was undoubtedly one of the most troubled for German-speaking Europe. This was especially true during the traumatic years between 1914 and 1945, which may have been the worst time in Central Europe since the Thirty Years War. However, even before World War I, social inequities and injustices in the German Empire and Austria-Hungary presented contemporaries with tremendous challenges. Wilhelminian Germany was actively pursuing an agenda of conquering overseas colonies and engaging in an arms race with Britain while Austria-Hungary was struggling with maintaining its territorial integrity in the light of growing Nationalism. Following World War I, the Weimar Republic in Germany and the First Republic of Austria initially presented a hopeful glimpse at a more democratic and open-minded future that was ultimately thwarted by Fascism and genocide. The second half of the twentieth century was spent recovering from this haunting past, while still struggling with the aftermath of 1945 and the Cold War. Germany was left divided, while Austria became a neutral country that belonged to neither side of the Cold War. Left to its own devices it also did not reckon with its own past until the 1980s. For more than a quarter of a century since German reunification in 1990 and Austria emerging from its neutral isolation to becoming a member of the European Union in 1995, German-speaking Europe has come a long way in confronting a difficult and multifaceted past. Literature and film have played a crucial role in working through this complex and daunting past, through Germany’s and Austria’s darkest cultural heritage; a past and heritage to be analyzed and understood so that it may never be repeated. 154 Joseph W. Moser, Margarete Landwehr, Laura Detre The five contributions in this issue are organized chronologically and explore a diverse set of haunting pasts from the period of German Colonialism, the Holocaust, postwar anxieties, as well as issues of reckoning with the Nazi period and the GDR . In addition, they investigate the transgenerational trauma passed on to the second and third postwar generations in Germany and Austria. In the first contribution, “ Majubs Reise —From Colony to Concentration Camp: A New Approach at Narrating Germany’s Colonial Past? ,” Joachim Warmbold shows how this haunting past can be intertwined with multiple layers of German history as he studies a recent documentary by German filmmaker Eva Knopf that deals with Mohamed Husen, an African-German actor who played alongside Hans Albers in the 1941 anti-British propaganda film Carl Peters � Warmbold reveals not only the complexities of an actor of African descent in a Nazi-era propaganda film that was both anti-British and romanticized Germany’s role in Africa, but also shows how Knopf ’s documentary distracts the audience via several unnecessary historical narratives. Warmbold deconstructs this contemporary documentary film and identifies the shortcomings in its attempt at coming to terms with the multiple layers of trauma in Germany’s past, which is especially poignant given that Husen died in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen in late 1944. For Warmbold, Knopf ’s documentary does an admirable job of introducing viewers to this previously unknown figure and acknowledging that he played a complex role in Nazi-era film, but fails as a biography, in part because the subject is one that Germans have heretofore not examined in detail. The German colonial experience was short and overshadowed by domestic events and therefore not canonical history until recently. Knopf, Warmbold argues, is not equipped with the tools that she needs to fully understand and explain the life of an African man in Nazi propaganda, and she therefore turns to speculation and a broad view of history to try to make sense of Husen’s life and death. While it is not surprising that it would be difficult for any film to do justice to that many layers of history, Warmbold’s analysis shows how important it is for scholars and students of German history and culture to not lose sight of ambivalencies in deconstructing the past. Following this first film essay is Laura Detre’s analysis of Peter Lorre’s 1951 film Der Verlorene in “You Are the Murderers: German Guilt in Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene .” Lorre, who became world famous for his leading role in Fritz Lang’s M, emigrated to the United States as a result of the Nazis’ takeover in Germany. He returned to Germany when he was at a crossroads in his career and his personal life and directed his only postwar German film—a film noir reminiscent of those that had helped to make him famous in the U. S. While Der Verlorene examines a fairly mundane murderer, the story reminds all Germans of their complicity in the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis. Needless to say, this Introduction 155 is a message that Germans were not ready to accept in the immediate postwar period. Lorre’s attempt at returning to Germany is fascinating, as it is fraught with hopes of returning to a life in German film, which 1950s Germany was not going to let come true. Lorre was not the only émigré to attempt such a return. Bertolt Brecht returned to East Germany because of the McCarthy era’s witch hunt on Communists, but most famous German writers, artists, and filmmakers did not. Thomas Mann, for instance, was not welcomed when he returned for a visit to his hometown of Lübeck in 1953, and ultimately Lorre was forced to return to the U. S. to earn money in low-budget science fiction and horror movies, not the art films that he had so hoped to make himself. Lorre died in 1964 from a heart attack, prior to which he had been suffering from depression and a morphine addiction that originated from a surgery that had been performed on him in Switzerland in 1925. Lorre’s attempt to return to Europe, Detre concludes, would not have been possible during his lifetime as Germans of his generation were not ready to confront their haunting past in the first two decades following the war. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz examines a more successful interaction between an Austrian émigré and Holocaust survivor and her German readers in “Evolving Memory Narratives: The Transformations of Ruth Kluger’s Autobiographical Writing.” When Ruth Kluger published her memoir weiter leben in 1992, it was met with tremendous interest by her German readership. What had changed? Forty-seven years and nearly two generations after World War II, Germans were eager to learn about a Holocaust survivor’s memoir. However, as Lorenz points out, weiter leben was also written in a more conciliatory tone than her later English-language edition Still Alive , first published in 2001. Kluger did not just translate her memoir from German to English, but actually rewrote the book for a different readership almost a decade later, which gives a significant insight to the fact that when one confronts a difficult past, the relationship between the author and the reader is as crucial as the expectations that both have of one another. Kluger wrote two books for different audiences, and it was not just her expectation of what her German and American readers could handle, but she herself had lived through another decade by the time her book was published in English. During that decade, her mother had died, a fact that greatly influenced the English-language version of her book. While she had striven, unsuccessfully, to keep the German book from her mother’s attention in California, the English book was written without her mother as a possible reader in mind. Kluger’s memoir continued to evolve as she published a sequel unterwegs verloren in 2008. Lorenz chronicles and analyzes how Kluger’s memoir evolved and even became subject of Renata Schmidtkunz’s 2011 film Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger . Kluger’s writing shows how meaning and understanding can change 156 Joseph W. Moser, Margarete Landwehr, Laura Detre over time and how incidents and places that once were central to how we view the world can become tainted or can slip into irrelevancy as we reexamine the past. She gives us a unique opportunity to see how one survivor of the Shoah reappraised her experiences and produced multiple documents of her life that both relate to one another and, at times, tell a radically different story. Dealing with multiple layers of history is also central to Margarete Landwehr’s article “Hauntings of the Traumatic Past in Maas’ Film Two Lives : Individual and Collective Memory,” which examines the 2012 film Zwei Leben / Two Lives by Georg Maas. The film combines two traumatic pasts, the Nazis’ so-called “Lebensborn” program that was aimed at creating a superior race matching mostly SS men with Northern European-looking women. This program was particularly active in Norway, where after the war many Lebensborn infants were left orphaned. The film, which is set in Norway, combines this history with Lebensborn children being raised by the GDR ’s Stasi (secret police) to become Cold War spies in Norway, which ultimately points to how Germany’s haunting past affected not only the German-speaking countries. Maas’s film is also symptomatic of how this traumatic past is analyzed in the twenty-first century. With time, the events of both the Second World War and the Holocaust have come to be seen not just as German issues, but instead they are viewed as international, both in that they were carried out on a transnational stage and because the perpetrators were not exclusively Germans. This project also shows us that the events of the Second World War did not end in a great caesura in 1945. The war and Nazi-era policies had deep ramifications for Europe and continued to impact generations that came of age long afterward. With more distance to actual historical events, it is now possible to better see how various layers of history could intersect, and it also demonstrates how one trauma can build on another. The final article in this volume—Joseph W. Moser’s “Haunting Policework in Andreas Pittler’s Bronstein Detective Series”—also explores a literary and cultural product of the twenty-first century. The seven-part Inspektor Bronstein series of crime novels features an Austrian Jewish police detective working in Vienna between 1918 and 1955, surviving the Holocaust in French exile, and returning to the city right at the end of the war to once again solve murders. Being part of a recent trend to reexamine culture and history through the medium of crime fiction, this series takes the genre to another level by critically examining the past in a way which would have broken many taboos only three decades earlier. In the 1980s, any suggestion that many Viennese supported the Nazis before the Anschluss and even after 1945 would have caused outrage, much as it did when Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek criticized their home country’s past in their writings. However, the German-speaking countries have come a long way since 1945, and an open and frank discussion of a difficult past that Introduction 157 educates future generations so as not to repeat their ancestors’ errors is welcomed. The protagonist, David Bronstein, while not observant of his faith, is not cryptically Jewish, as many other characters in post-war German and Austrian media have been. He is a fully formed, openly Jewish character who experiences anti-Semitism in a realistic way and, despite being fictional, the description of his life in twentieth-century Vienna is deeply rooted in historical events. He also represents an international trend to use the genre of period detective fiction to better understand both the past and the present. In this respect Pittler’s novels could be compared, as Moser does, with the ITV series Foyle’s War , or even with Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins novels, which also shed light on the past through the investigations of a fictional character. The five contributions in this special issue therefore reflect a common desire to explain how cultural productions from the German-speaking countries during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have tried to educate people about a difficult past. The works examined here range from documentary film and autobiography to entertainment film and popular literature, but they all share the common element of reexamining a past that has left Central Europe dramatically changed, often in ways that the people of post-war Austria and Germany struggled to understand. They illustrate the conflict between wanting to build a so-called normal future, while continuing to be plagued by a dreadful past. This is, at least in part, the story of post-World War II Europe and how these events continue to shape the continent’s future. Majubs Reise—From Colony to Concentration Camp. A New Approach at Narrating Germany’s Colonial Past? Joachim Warmbold Tel Aviv University Abstract: In her documentary film Majubs Reise , released in 2013, Eva Knopf offers a glimpse at a little-known chapter in German history: the fate of an African actor in Nazi-Era Germany. By painstakingly reconstructing Majub’s life with the help of historical documents, photographs and film clips, Eva Knopf succeeds in providing a compelling case for linking Germany’s colonial and Nazi past to the present. Her documentary can be seen as an important contribution to German postcolonial discourse. There is, however, also room for criticism. Despite its obvious qualities Majubs Reise suffers from a number of shortcomings which should neither be overlooked nor dismissed as minor flaws. Keywords: History-Germany-Africans, Germany-Africans-Film, Nazi Germany-Afro-Germans, Postcolonial Discourse-Germany, Majubs Reise We all know from experience that sometimes even the most carefully prepared lesson can take a totally unexpected turn. While teaching a seminar on German colonialism at Tel Aviv University during the 2015 spring semester, I included a discussion of the German colonial film industry, in particular the infamous 1941 anti-British propaganda film Carl Peters , starring Hans Albers as “Eroberer von Deutsch-Ostafrika.” 1 Young German filmmaker Eva Knopf ’s freshly released documentary Majubs Reise , which explores the life of Majub bin Adam Mohamed Hussein a. k. a. Mohamed Husen, an African-German actor who played the part of Carl Peters’ guide and servant Ramasan, seemed like the perfect addition—if not counterpoint—to the original Nazi production. And yet my students’ reaction to the Knopf documentary was radically different from what I had anticipated. What, then, had gone wrong? I shall return to my students and their comments and criticism in coming sections, and will begin with a short 160 Joachim Warmbold synopsis of the film as well as a closer look at the motivation and intentions of its director. At first sight, Majubs Reise comes across as a meticulously researched biopic carefully reconstructing the life of the aforementioned Majub bin Adam Mohamed Hussein. His Reise , or journey, covers exactly forty years; it begins in 1904, the year of his birth, in the former German protectorate Deutsch-Ostafrika , and ends in 1944 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In 1914 Majub, together with his father, joined General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s Schutztruppe , the German colonial militia, and thus became a Kindersoldat fighting the invading British forces. His father died in battle, but Majub was lucky enough to survive, and in the late 1920s found employment as a steward with the Deutsche Ost-Afrika-Linie. In 1929 he decided to stay in Germany; he changed his name to Mohamed Husen and settled in Berlin, having also lived in Hamburg for a time. His demands for financial compensation for his and his late father’s army service were rejected by the German authorities. Similarly, his request for the Frontkämpfer-Abzeichen was declined as well. In order to make a living he worked as a Swahili instructor at the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen at the Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Universität , Berlin. He also joined, in the role of the treue Askari , the Deutsche Afrika-Schau and other procolonial events as well as a number of variety shows, and also began to work as an ’exotic’ extra in the film industry. Alongside well-known stars like Zarah Leander, Heinz Rühmann and the aforementioned Hans Albers, he appeared in numerous productions, including propaganda films championing the return of Germany’s former overseas protectorates. In 1932, Husen met Maria Schwandner, a young German woman who had moved from Bohemia to Berlin, and in January 1933, the two were married. Husen and Schwandner had three children all of whom died very young; Heinz Bodo, born by Marta Lotta Holzkamp, with whom Husen had entertained a love affair while already enganged to Schwandner, was eventually adopted and raised in lieu of the deceased children. In 1941, apparently because of an affair with a German woman who was also working as an extra on the set for the Carl Peters film, Husen fell foul of the Nazi race laws and was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he died in 1944. Majubs Reise is Eva Knopf ’s debut documentary; she presented the biopic for her final exam at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg , Ludwigsburg, in 2013. In an interview with David Denk in the Berlin daily taz published on 14 September 2013, she admits that “in Detektivarbeit die Spuren dieses Lebens wie ein Puzzle zusammenzusetzen” presented a formidable challenge. “Dass es bis auf einen unbeschriebenen Briefbogen keine persönlichen Hinterlassenschaften gibt” forced her “die wenigen Spuren, die Majub hinterlassen hat, immer wieder zu drehen und zu wenden, um mir einen Reim auf sein Leben mit all seinen Majubs Reise —From Colony to Concentration Camp 161 Brüchen und Widersprüchen zu machen” (Denk). Sukhdev Sandhu, in his review of Majubs Reise in The Guardian , confirms that “Husen’s life is rich in mystery. No diaries, correspondence or personal photographs appear to have survived.” Sandhu goes as far as calling Husen “a ghost” and Knopf “a kind of surveillance operative” determined “to liberate Husen from anonymity.” He acknowledges the effort Knopf undertook to piece Husen’s life together and states: “Other film-makers might have portrayed Husen as a pioneer or hero, a symbol of Germany’s far-from-glorious relationship with people of African descent. Knopf ’s screenplay is spare and ruminative, as keen to point out how little is—and could be—known about him as it is to celebrate his life” (Sandhu). The lack of traces left by Husen apparently inspired Knopf to add a second narrative to her documentary. “Weil es Knopf an Bildern für ihren Film mangelte,” writes ZEIT critic Anke Schwarzer, “verfiel die Filmemacherin auf ausrangierte Plastiken aus einem Schuppen der Hamburger Sternwarte: einen erlegten Löwen aus Bronze. Den Kolonialgouverneur Hermann von Wissmann. Einen Askari zu seinen Füßen.” With the help of these “Assistenzfiguren” (Schwarzer) Knopf not only manages to bolster her screenplay with more Bilder and thus substance, but also provides an additional narrative focusing on the history of the so-called Wissmann-Denkmal . Originally inaugurated in Dar es Salam on 3 April 1909, in honor of the former governor of German East Africa, Hermann von Wissmann, the statue and its three components—governor, Askari and lion—provide Knopf with ample opportunities to reflect on German colonialism in general and its aftermath in particular. Repeated shots of the statue and references to its history, including its final demolition in front of Hamburg University by students in 1968, become intertwined with Husen’s personal history and clearly add an explicitly critical anti-colonial twist to the documentary. Sandhu quotes Knopf in his review as follows: “I didn’t know much about Africans in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s […]. It seems like German people’s awareness of colonialism was washed away because of the second world war [sic] and the Holocaust. We lost our colonies after the first world war [sic], so we felt we didn’t have to deal with them any more. Our history with them didn’t reach into the 1950s and 1960s like it did in many other European countries.” Statements like these make abundantly clear that Knopf means well and, in addition to recreating a lost life, wishes to contribute to a better understanding of Germany’s colonial past. Yet she was also wise enough not to turn Husen into a kind of personal hero. “I don’t know if I liked him,” she tells Sandhu, “he wasn’t what the Nazis wanted him to be—a proper Askari. But nor was he what we want him to be—an anti-colonial freedom fighter or anti-fascist. Indeed, by the mid-1930s, he was dressing up in military gear and appearing at rallies in 162 Joachim Warmbold front of banners bearing the slogan Germany needs colonies . He went his own way. He doesn’t fit any clear-cut patterns of how we might think about history” (Sandhu). Knopf ’s endeavors to liberate Husen from anonymity, making his “ghost” appear again, and thus adding him and his world to “all these histories and tragedies and lost voices and souls that also shape the way that our world is today” (Sandhu), yet at the same time her decision not to hide her very personal ambivalence vis-a-vis Majub and his actions make Knopf ’s documentary an impressive multi-layered achievement indeed, and no doubt a worthwhile contribution to the German post-colonial discourse. Unsurprisingly, Knopf managed to secure the support of prestigious institutions like the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung and the Goethe-Institut, the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and the SWR Südwestrundfunk Baden-Baden , and equally unsurprisingly, her documentary has won critical acclaim at various national and international festivals, e. g., the Deutscher Nachwuchsfilmpreis FIRST STEPS Award and the Japan Media Arts Festival Jury Selection , both in 2013, in Ludwigsburg and Tokyo respectively. The story about “Mohamed Husen: the black immigrant actor who carved out a career in 1930s German cinema” (Sandhu) has been screened in cinemas, on television, and during special events like the 11 . Jahrestag der Stiftung Erinnerung Ulm whose organizers chose the film as a basis for a public discussion on the discrimination experienced by Africans in contemporary Germany, and who advertised the screening on their information flyer as follows: “Der Film bietet vielfältige Denk- und Gesprächsimpulse in historischer, filmdokumentarischer und gegenwartsbezogener Hinsicht. Er berührt grundlegende Fragen zum Rassismus in der deutschen Gesellschaft und zur Identität und Situation von Afrikanern in Deutschland / Ulm—auch heute” (Stiftung). Since 2014, Majubs Reise is also available on DVD , with subtitles in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and with worldwide distribution via the Goethe-Institut � Let us return now for a moment to my seminar and the reaction of my students after their viewing of Majubs Reise. All of my students conceded that Majubs Reise offered highly useful information in addition to the Carl Peters film. They praised the choice of subject, the plot of the documentary. They commended the choice of archival material, the historical film clips, the documents and photographs, the music, and they were clearly impressed by the wealth of information assembled by Knopf. Favorable comments like these were expected. I was, however, quite unprepared for a much longer list of critical and negative reactions which contrasted sharply with the overwhelmingly positive reviews offered by professional critics. Most of my students found the extra story line—the history of the Wissmann statue—superfluous, distractive and even confusing. Several of them voiced mild, and others strong objections to the way Majubs Reise —From Colony to Concentration Camp 163 Knopf created—or rather re-created—Husen’s life solely on the basis of secondary sources, assumptions and speculations often based merely on his roles and presence on screen; they ridiculed the abundant use of the adverb “vielleicht” by the voice-over commentator and described the use of stills and photographs in cases where they clearly show an individual other than Husen, but are used by Knopf to narrate a certain event in Husen’s life or support a certain interpretation of hers as deceptive or, worse, as deliberately misleading. Some questioned the use of the term Reise in the film title and asked why Knopf does not call her protagonist Mohamed, or Husen, but rather Majub. Yet, much to my surprise the most scathing form of criticism was reserved for Knopf ’s uneasiness regarding Husen’s engagement for the Nazi propaganda machinery. Why, my students asked, does Knopf not even attempt to go beyond the obvious and ask for possible motives of her protagonist’s behavior? Perhaps as “schwarzer Lieblingskomparse der Nazis” (Denk) Husen did not have any other choice? What about his family life? What is known about his wife? Was he perhaps part of a larger community of African émigrés, and if so, what was their fate in Nazi Germany? Why was Husen sent to Sachenhausen because of an affair with a girl on the set while, at the same time, he was married to a German woman and nobody seemed to bother? Many more questions were raised, but answers seemed elusive. As for myself, I was of course simultaneously thrilled with the interest and lively discussion that the Knopf documentary had evoked, and at the same time somewhat at a loss as how to proceed. Very clearly Majubs Reise was deserving of more time, more attention, and a decidedly more critical approach than the first impression—and the hitherto published critiques—might suggest. The most valuable source for additional information about Knopf ’s protagonist and his life and times is undoubtedly Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst’s biography of Mohamed Husen entitled Treu bis in den Tod. Von Deutsch-Ostafrika nach Sachsenhausen—Eine Lebensgeschichte , published in 2007. Knopf does in fact mention this publication in the Abspann , i. e., the credits of her film, and also acknowledges the book as a source of inspiration in the taz interview. It seems somewhat odd, though, that Bechhaus-Gerst, a professor of African Studies at the University of Cologne, and her work on Husen do not feature more prominently in Knopf ’s documentary and do not receive more credit, since quite positively all of the material Knopf claims to have painstakingly researched and collected—and actually a plethora of additional facts and figures—can be found in Bechhaus-Gerst’s excellent Lebensgeschichte , the only exception being, understandably, the film clips. Equally peculiar seems Knopf ’s tendency to oversimplify when dealing with issues that clearly require a more complex focus. And worse: in some instances a comparison between the book and the film gives rise to the suspicion that Knopf did not hesitate to bend the facts. 164 Joachim Warmbold Evidence to support these allegations can be found in abundance. The following examples, in no particular order, may suffice for clarification. According to Knopf, Husen’s decision to leave his homeland and move to Germany was a straightforward move. “Irgendwann,” she informs her audience, “muss Majub die folgende scheinbar gute Idee gehabt haben, wie er an etwas Geld herankommen kann” ( MR 11: 07). 2 She continues: “Er heuert als Steward auf einem Schiff an und fährt von Ostafrika bis nach Hamburg” ( MR 11: 15), and only “wenige Tage später,” Knopf states, “klopft er in Berlin beim Auswärtigen Amt an die Tür und verlangt seinen ausstehenden Sold” ( MR 11: 20). With a clear reference to the situation in present-day Germany, Knopf ends her sequence saying: “Und wie das in Geschichten so ist, in denen ein Afrikaner ohne Papiere beschließt, nach Europa zu reisen, wird er wieder zurück nach Afrika geschickt” ( MR 11: 50). Bechhaus-Gerst offers a rather different account of the events. She informs her readers that Husen’s decision to seek employment with the Deutsche Ost-Afrika-Linie as a steward “ist nachvollziehbar,” as “im Gegensatz zum Maschinenpersonal erging es vor allem den Kellnern und Stewards auf den Schiffen deutscher Reedereien nicht schlecht” ( BG 53). 3 In addition to a regular monthly salary, stewards could “mit Trinkgeldern durch die Passagiere rechnen” (BG 53). Not “irgendwann,” as Knopf states, but very likely as early as in 1925, Husen began working on the Hamburg-East Africa route, which included services to Durban and Cape Town in South Africa, and regularly visited Germany “bei Landgängen” ( BG 53). As Bechhaus-Gerst rightly points out, Husen arrived “in einer Zeit des wirtschaftlichen Niedergangs” ( BG 53) with hardly any prospect of finding work in Germany proper. At the end of 1929 he tried his luck at the Foreign Office in Berlin, and although there was an attempt to send Husen back, Bechhaus-Gerst clearly contradicts Knopf by stating: “Er ließ sich nicht abschieben, sondern blieb in Berlin” (BG 57). Only in the summer of 1934, while the first German colonial propaganda film entitled Die Reiter von Deutsch-Ostafrika was being filmed with Husen playing the part of Signalschüler Mustapha , “kehrte er vermutlich noch einmal für kurze Zeit in seine Heimat zurück” ( BG 111), since part of the shooting took place in British Tanganyika, as the former German colony was then called. 4 “Ohne Papiere,” as Knopf claims, this would have been nearly impossible. As Bechhaus-Gerst explains, most of the Africans from former German territories possessed “deutsche Ausweise, in denen jedoch der Zusatz ’Unmittelbarer Reichsangehöriger’ oder ’Deutscher Schutzbefohlener’ zu finden war” ( BG 67). Husen actually claimed to have had a German passport until 1933, “eine Behauptung,” as Bechhaus-Gerst emphasizes, “die das Auswärtige Amt widerspruchslos akzeptierte” ( BG 78). Even if one takes into account that Africans, beginning from the mid-1930s, did have their original travel and identification documents confiscated and replaced by so-called Fremdenpässe , Husen was clearly not “ohne Papiere” and, although eventually staatenlos , hardly at risk of being deported. With regard to background information about Husen, there is in fact much more available than Knopf in her various interviews with the media—and, consequently, the critics as well—seems to suggest. Bechhaus-Gerst describes in detail the recruiting campaign undertaken by Governor Hermann von Wissmann, who preferred “Landfremde” for his “Söldnertruppe” ( BG 19) and—with the help of the German consulate in Cairo—conscripted the first six-hundred men, most of them Sudanese and Ethiopians, in the Egyptian capital. According to Bechhaus-Gerst, Husen’s father, Adam Mohamed, was among these recruits. Equally enlightening are her accounts of the training and deployment of Kindersoldaten in the German colony, Husen’s attempts at finding employment after the war, and his travels to the island of Zanzibar, where he hoped to find work as a teacher. With the help of the International Red Cross, Bechhaus-Gerst even succeeded in establishing contact with Husen’s Tanzanian nephew Omary Hassan, whose memory, as the author ascertains, “funktioniert auch in seinem 87. Lebensjahr immer noch ausgezeichnet” ( BG 164) and who, in a series of personal interviews, provided highly valuable information about his uncle and his African family. Perhaps Knopf considered such particulars superfluous from a cinematographic-artistic point of view and therefore decided to ignore them. But why then does she declare in her documentary: “Spuren von Majub haben wir hier [in Tanzania] nicht gefunden” ( MR 10: 36)? As for Husen’s detention by the Nazis during the shooting of the Carl Peters film and his subsequent incarceration, Knopf simply informs her audience: “Während der Dreharbeiten beginnt er eine Affäre mit einer jungen Deutschen. Er wird daraufhin aufgrund von sogenannter Rassenschande angezeigt und schließlich im Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen inhaftiert” ( MR 39: 57). As to be expected at this point, in this context Bachhaus-Gerst’s research provides a far more nuanced and complex picture. The “junge[.] Deutsche[.]” was no other than “eine Münchener BDM -Maid” according to one of the witnesses quoted by Bechhaus-Gerst, and another “Zeitzeuge berichtet, dass aus dieser Beziehung wieder ein Kind hervorging” ( BG 137). Although Husen was indeed denounced on the basis of Rassenschande , Bechhaus-Gerst insists that “keine Grundlage für ein Verfahren wegen ’Rassenschande’ vorhanden war” ( BG 141). She explains: “Es gab zwar das Eheverbot, das nicht nur Juden, sondern auch Afrikaner betraf. Vom Sexualverbot waren diese aber ausgeschlossen.” And she continues: “Warum im Gesetz diese ’Lücke’ gelassen wurde, lässt sich nicht erklären. Aus den begleitenden Kommentierungen wird aber deutlich, dass es sich nicht um ein versehentliches ’Vergessen’ der Einbeziehung von Afrikanern gehandelt ha- Majubs Reise —From Colony to Concentration Camp 165 166 Joachim Warmbold ben kann” ( BG 141). Further important details are provided by Bechhaus-Gerst. Husen spent the first two months after his arrest, i. e., August and September 1941, “im berüchtigten Gestapo-Gefängnis am Alexanderplatz” and was only saved from prolonged imprisonment in this horrendous jail precisely because of any “fehlende rechtliche Grundlage für eine Anklage wegen Rassenschande” (BG 142). In a letter from the Gestapo dated 15 October 1941, Husen’s former employer at the university was informed: “Gegen Husen konnte ein Strafverfahren wegen Rassenschande nicht eingeleitet werden. Er wurde am 27. 9. 1941 dem Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen überstellt. Der Zeitpunkt seiner Entlassung ist unbestimmt” ( BG 142). As Bechhaus-Gerst correctly points out: “Die Einweisung in ein Konzentrationslager ohne formelle Anklageerhebung stellte zu diesem Zeitpunkt keine Ausnahme dar—im Gegenteil” ( BG 143), since in cases when the legal basis for prolonged incarceration was lacking, Nazi law offered a highly convenient alternative, the so-called Schutzhaft . This notorious legal construct allowed for “eine Einweisung ins Konzentrationslager auf unbestimmte Zeit” ( BG 143), often under the pretext “die Häftlinge würden vor dem ’Volkszorn’ oder gar vor sich selbst ’geschützt’” ( BG 143). One can easily imagine how tempting the concept of Schutzhaft must have been, first and foremost among informers, and therefore it comes as no surprise that Bechhaus-Gerst muses extensively about possible initiators and their reasons for denouncing and eliminating Husen. She identifies three highly likely main sources, namely Husen’s wife, art dealer and journalist Hans von Hellfeld, and Professor Martin Heepe. “Gerüchteweise hieß es in der Nachbarschaft […], seine eigene Ehefrau hätte ihn bei der Gestapo angezeigt” ( BG 137), writes Bechhaus-Gerst; Maria Husen had no doubt found out about her husband’s affair with the girl on the set and might have simply decided to put an end to her marriage. Her decision to file for divorce just two weeks after her husband’s arrest appears as “logische Konsequenz” ( BG 151), so Bechhaus-Gerst. Hellfeld, on the other hand, found himself in professional conflict with Husen. Eager to improve his income, in 1941 the latter published an advertisement offering his services as a casting agent and boasting about a complete list of all “Afrikanern und Afrikanerinnen in Großdeutschland” ( BG 138). Hellfeld, keen on obtaining a license for “Arbeitsvermittlung für Exoten” ( MG 138) and achieving a good profit, obviously regarded Husen as a rival, and therefore it cannot be ruled out, argues Bechhaus-Gerst, “dass Hellfeld durch eine Anzeige den missliebigen Konkurrenten ausschalten wollte” ( BG 138). The third candidate with a convincing—in this case personal—reason for denouncing Husen was Heepe, his superior at the university, an active member of the SA and NSDAP , who out of sheer malice interfered in every attempt by Husen to earn extra money outside the language institute. In April 1941 Husen resigned from his job at the university, accusing Heepe of serious injustices in his letter of resignation to the dean. “Möglich scheint es also durchaus, dass es Heepe war, der [Husen] bei der Gestapo denunzierte und sich so für dessen Beschwerde beim Dekan grausam rächen wollte” ( BG 140), concludes Bechhaus-Gerst. Of course, nobody would expect Majubs Reise to match Bechhaus-Gerst’s exquisitely researched book. After all, the film does not pretend to be a scholarly work; one certainly must not forget that it is the graduation project of a young filmmaker, aimed at a wide audience with presumably hardly any previous knowledge about the subject. Neither should one overlook all the positive elements of the documentary. And yet, one cannot help but wonder why Knopf vigorously promoted effect over substance. “Ich will ihm posthum seine erste Hauptrolle geben,” Knopf proudly proclaims in her taz interview. But why then spend so much time on the Wissmann statue, ponder the fate of the lion, the pose of the governor, the gaze of the Askari, or mull over a fainted soldier during a military parade in present-day Tanzania? Although Husen undoubtedly deserves playing, at least, the main part, Knopf conveniently conceals the fact that her protagonist was by no means the only African actor who made a living from joining the Nazi film industry. Nor was he the sole African Swahili instructor at the Orient Institut. Like Husen, thousands of Africans were living in Germany, many of them married to German spouses, most of them victims of “everyday racism and abuse, ever-narrower opportunities to earn a living, and physical terror in the face of threat of sterilization and the prospect of arbitrary internment and forced labor” ( AR 20), 5 as Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft assert in their outstanding research on Black Germany. The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884 — 1960 , published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. Unfortunately, Majubs Reise does not even hint at these themes. Only once, while presenting a scene from the Carl Peters film involving a great number of African warriors approaching the German expedition, Knopf explains that these half naked, spear wielding extras had been recruited from the pool of French-Togolese POWs, that they were suffering from cold, undernourishment and maltreatment, and that Husen and others tried to help them by collecting money, food and cigarettes from colleagues on the set. Knopf thus confirms, albeit unknowingly it seems, the widely held notion that the film set “provided a temporary safe haven and occasions for solidarity” ( AR 258). Aitken and Rosenhaft quote Dorothea Diek, a young Cameroonian-German actress, with the following statement: It was cosy on the film set. In the breaks the Africans would often get out their drums and we’d sing in front of the studios. People from all the other productions would come running … We earned good money, had fun, and didn’t think twice about it … Majubs Reise —From Colony to Concentration Camp 167 168 Joachim Warmbold It was cheerful and cosy; no politics, no Nazis, just happy people. We were all together—young and old Africans. ( AR 258—59) Werner Egiomue, another German-African extra, even went so far as to claim: “In the studio you were safe … outside of the door you could be arrested but inside you were as safe as in a bank” ( AR 259). Hence the film studio resembles, in more than one aspect, a Third Space as defined by Homi Bhabha, a safe environment where a black actor could dare start an affair with a German BDM girl, where oppressed and oppressor could interact freely without fear of possible repercussions. That the films produced in theses studios were mostly propaganda films, that African actors consequently became part of the Nazi propaganda machinery although they were actually victims of the regime, only reinforces the notion of the hybrid character of such places. It seems unfortunate that Majubs Reise does not include the testimony of Husen’s colleagues from the UFA studios. The film could have profited substantially by widening its focus, albeit not by rearranging the fragments of the Wissmann statue but by comparing Husen’s fate to the hardship and suffering of other German-Africans. After all, Knopf was not dealing with a hitherto totally unknown subject. Even if she personally “did not know much about Africans in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s,” as she confesses in her interview with Sandhu in The Guardian , she did know—and was, in her own words, inspired by—Bechhaus-Gerst’s publication. Why Knopf chose to disregard the extensive bibliography in this work, why she refrained from quoting Husen’s biography or any other readily available publications on the subject of Black German actors and cinema, why she promotes the—clearly false—impression that Majubs Reise is the result of her own meticulous archival research, remains an open question which only Knopf herself will be able to answer. My students were quite unforgiving in their final judgment about Majubs Reise . All of them—even those who had initially voiced more praise than criticism for the film—gave Knopf ’s documentary two thumbs down. This might seem rather unfair, especially in view of the many favorable reviews in the media and the various awards. However, I would agree with my students that the film is perhaps best shown as a ’starter,’ e. g., with the specific aim of initiating a discussion like the one organized by Stiftung Erinnerung Ulm , or, of course, within the framework of a seminar or workshop, and in this case definitely not without additional source material. 6 I would argue, from a teacher’s point of view, that not least because of its obvious flaws and the irritations it evokes among a critical audience, Majubs Reise is actually an extremely useful teaching tool. My students would have hardly invested so much time and thought into the subject of Africans in German cinema if Knopf ’s film had satisfied their curiosity and earned their unconditional approval. It remains to be seen if colleagues and students in other locations share these impressions and conclusions or whether Majubs Reise is perceived—and received—rather differently. Notes 1 Directed by Herbert Selpin. The German premiere was on 21 March 1941. For more information on Peters see, for example, Baer and Schröter 89—92. 2 MR — Majubs Reise ; the figures stand for minutes and seconds on the DVD � 3 BG —Bechhaus-Gerst. 4 Directed by Herbert Selpin, starring Sepp Rist and Ilse Stobrawa. Die Reiter von Deutsch-Ostafrika was Selpin’s first colonial propaganda film, financed by the Reichskolonialbund . The German premiere was on 2 November 1934. Ironically, “the film was banned by the Nazi government in December of 1939 as pacifist, and by the Allies after the war as military propaganda” (Hull 59). 5 AR —Aitken and Rosenhaft. 6 My students also found Theodor Michael’s autobiography entitled Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu higly informative and useful in connection with their discussions on Majubs Reise. Works Cited Aitken, Robbie, and Eve Rosenhaft. Black Germany. The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884—1960 . New York: Cambridge UP , 2013. Baer, Martin, and Olaf Schröter. Eine Kopfjagd. Deutsche in Ostafrika . Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2001. Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne. Treu bis in den Tod. Von Deutsch-Ostafrika nach Sachsenhausen—Eine Lebensgeschichte . Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2007. Denk, David. “’Ich wollte ihm posthum seine erste Hauptrolle geben.’” taz. die tageszeitung 14 Sept. 2013. Web. 2 Sept. 2016. Hull, David Steward. Film in the Third Reich. A Study of the German Cinema 1933—1945 . Berkeley / Los Angeles: U of California P, 1969. Majubs Reise. Dir. Eva Knopf. Goethe-Institut Munich, 2014. Video. Michael, Theodor. Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu. Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen � Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2014. Sandhu, Sukhdev. “Mohamed Husen: the black immigrant actor who carved out a career in 1930s German cinema.” The Guardian 13 Nov. 2014. Web. 2 Sept. 2016. Schwarzer, Anke. “Mehr als ein Statist.” Zeit Online 12 Apr. 2014. Web. 2 Sept. 2016. “Stiftungsjahrestag 2014.” Stiftung Erinnerung Ulm 14 Feb. 2014. Web. 2 Sept. 2016. Majubs Reise —From Colony to Concentration Camp 169 Introduction 171 You Are the Murderers: German Guilt in Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene Laura Detre West Chester University Abstract: Peter Lorre’s film, Der Verlorene (1951), was one of the first to take a critical view of the Nazi period in the post-war era. He used his extensive knowledge of the crime thriller, a genre that was largely absent from German film in the early 1950s, to examine the impact of Nazism on German society. In effect, he told a story about a mundane killing, but that crime, and the events that followed, were symbolic of the ways that the Nazi regime turned average Germans into murderers. Today the film stands as an interesting artifact of the postwar era, reflecting the anger and anxiety that victims of Nazism had toward a region that was rapidly distancing itself from a troubling past but not yet ready to examine what that history meant for the present and the future. Keywords: Peter Lorre, Film Noir, Crime Thriller, Post-War Era, Survival, Guilt, Anger Today Peter Lorre is best known as the bug-eyed character actor who appeared in numerous thriller and suspense films from the 1930s to his death in the mid- 1960s, but in the early 1950s Lorre was at a crossroads both personally and professionally and looking for new opportunities. In 1951 he made his one and only foray into directing, the German film Der Verlorene . Essentially a film noir (the genre with which Lorre was most closely associated,) this film focused on Dr. Karl Rothe, a scientist working for the Nazi regime. When he discovers that he has been betrayed both romantically and professionally by his fiancé, Dr. Rothe murders her, revealing a side of his personality that had remained submerged to this point. Lorre’s film was one of the first to take a critical view of the Nazi period in the postwar era. He used his extensive knowledge of the crime thriller, a genre that was largely absent from German film in the early 1950s, to examine the impact of Nazism on German society. In effect, he told a 172 Laura Detre story about a fairly mundane murder, but that murder, and the events that followed, were symbolic of the ways that the Nazi regime turned average Germans into murderers. Peter Lorre made a career in crime film, starting with his debut in the 1931 Fritz Lang film M . It was a genre that suited him well—his physical presence was not that of a typical leading man and he had a gift for understanding the psychology of the social outcasts whom he so often portrayed. This talent was established early in Lorre’s career when he worked with noted psychiatrist Jacob L. Moreno, the founder of psychodrama, and then nurtured when Lorre became a member of Bertolt Brecht’s ensemble, starring as Galy Gay in the first production of Mann ist Mann (Thomas 15). Lorre had high hopes for his career, both on the stage and in film, but global politics conspired against him and he was forced out of German-language productions by the rise of the Nazi regime. After making a handful of French films, Lorre made his English-language film debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much � The combined success of M and The Man Who Knew Too Much meant that when Peter Lorre arrived in Los Angeles in 1935 he was already reasonably well known to American audiences. Cementing his reputation as a sinister figure, his first U. S. film to be released in theaters was the horror thriller Mad Love. 1 With a few exceptions, the rest of Lorre’s career was spent playing psychotics and criminals, most of whom harbored the potential for murder. This was both a blessing and a curse—the late 1930s into the 1950s was a golden age for American crime films. This era saw the birth of film noir and Lorre was inextricably tied to the genre. Throughout the 1940s Lorre found regular work, particularly when he was under contract at Warner Bros., and most of his roles were in crime dramas, the genre most associated with the Warner Bros. studio. Lorre’s fortunes began to change after the war, for a number of reasons. During World War II and in the run-up to the war studios had been eager to hire many of the émigré actors, directors, and other film professionals who arrived in Hollywood. When the war ended, and particularly after studios stopped making topical films dealing with the Nazis and the war in Europe, many of these émigrés were released from their contracts and struggled to find work. Peter Lorre was no exception. Studio heads were eager, or at least willing, to cast him when they needed a sinister European in their latest war drama, but they were less interested in him as film began to focus on domestic American issues. Lorre’s film begins in a DP camp near Hamburg. We immediately meet Dr. Neumeister, played by Lorre, and follow him as he treats the residents of the camp. The doctor is vaccinating patients in the camp when his new assistant, a man calling himself Nowak, arrives and unsettles the doctor. He flees from the clinic and anxiously walks alongside a train track as a train approaches. You Are the Murderers: German Guilt in Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene 173 Neumeister later returns to the camp where he meets with Nowak over drinks. The two reminisce, and Neumeister starts to tell Nowak the story of how he ended up at the DP camp. The scene switches to a flashback, in which we see Neumeister, then known as Dr. Karl Rothe, at work in his lab, assisted by Nowak who went by the name Hösch. The two are discussing their previous work with the now-deceased Colonel Winkler and it is clear that Dr. Rothe’s research is important to the Nazi regime. After Winkler leaves the lab Hösch pulls Rothe aside to discuss the doctor’s girlfriend, Inge Hermann. Hösch asserts that Hermann is a spy and that she has been using her relationship with Dr. Rothe to gain access to his research and transmitting vital information to the Allies. Hösch makes it clear that Rothe should end the relationship, as it compromises their work. Rothe then heads home, where we learn that his girlfriend is also the daughter of his landlady and that they all live together in the same apartment. He confronts Hermann about her betrayals and, after a long discussion, mostly off-camera, things seem to be resolved to both parties’ satisfaction. But when Hermann begins to flirt with Rothe, he strangles her to death, an act that seems out of character for the intellectual doctor. This incident, understandably, transforms Rothe. He is initially stunned by his own actions but quickly comes to realize that no one suspects his involvement in the crime. Additionally, other than Inge’s own mother, no one particularly mourns the loss of the young woman, so life goes on as normal. Frau Hermann rents Inge’s room to a young woman named Ursula Weber and Rothe begins to grow close to her. At the same time, Rothe continues to carry Hermann’s necklace in his jacket pocket and fondles it whenever he is feeling unsettled about events. He wanders the streets at night, menacing a prostitute who claims to see murder in his face. At this point he throws away Inge’s necklace, perhaps trying to rid himself of ties to this tragic event, but to no avail. Later that night he boards a train and is engaged in conversation by a gregarious woman who laments not having a man around, due to the war. When the air raid sirens go off the other passengers evacuate the train, but Rothe and the buxom woman remain behind. She continues to flirt with him, but this enrages him, as she reminds him of the disingenuous Inge, and he murders the nameless woman, leaving her body to be discovered by train passengers when the all clear is issued. With this second killing Rothe has crossed a line and his personality seems permanently altered. He could justify Inge’s murder to himself, saying that she was a traitor and that her love for him had not been genuine. The stranger on the train, however, had committed no such transgression. She was an innocent woman who had only wanted an uncomplicated relationship with a convenient man, but she meant him no harm. By killing her, Rothe has been transformed into an irredeemable murderer. He returns to his laboratory, where he burns all 174 Laura Detre of his research notes and takes the pistol that Hösch had hidden in a drawer. Then, in a somewhat bizarre turn of events he arrives at Colonel Winkler’s villa with the intention of murdering Winkler for turning him against Inge, but finds that the house is quite busy. He overhears an officer enter the house with a password and then uses that password himself to gain entry. Inside he finds a political conspiracy—we are never made privy to the ultimate goal, but these scenes certainly make the viewer think of Claus von Stauffenberg and the conspiracy to kill Adolf Hitler. Rothe first stays with the conspirators, then drives frantically through the streets of Hamburg to a rendezvous that never happens. Eventually, several of the plotters are shot by the authorities. Rothe returns to Magdalenenstrasse, where he had lived with Frau Hermann and Inge, but when he arrives he realizes that their apartment building has fallen victim to the previous night’s bombings. At this point Rothe seizes on an opportunity to leave behind his old identity. He adds his name to the list, on a nearby chalkboard, of those who died in the bombing, allowing him to leave behind his old life and attempt to move forward with a new life. The film ends with Dr. Rothe shooting Hösch after the latter mocked the doctor’s story. He then walks to the same train tracks that we saw him walk alongside at the beginning of the film. Here Dr. Rothe stands in place, casually smoking a cigarette, as a train approaches him from behind, and he is presumably killed. There are many reasons why Peter Lorre became interested in directing a German-language film in the late 1940s. The war’s conclusion made it possible for him to return to Europe and had diminished Hollywood studio executives’ interest in Central European performers. Lorre had been a contract player for Warner Bros. during the war, but the arrangement was never a comfortable one. Lorre was pulled between his new friendship with Humphrey Bogart, arguably the studio’s most important star, and his long-standing relationship with playwright Bertolt Brecht who arrived in California in 1941 (Youngkin 286). Lorre still held out hope that he would be cast as a leading man and the studio made some attempts in that direction, paring him with Sydney Greenstreet in a handful of noir films, but overall Lorre felt constrained within the Hollywood studio system. There is another way in which Warner Bros. may have disappointed Lorre. As Sarah Thomas notes, there was a clause in his contract with the studio that allowed the option to direct one film per year. Warner Bros. never invoked this option and this may have played a role in the actor’s disillusionment with Hollywood (117). He had always wanted to play more significant roles in more artful films (as well as expressing interest in returning to more prestigious stage work) but the studios Lorre worked for never gave him those opportunities. This failure to progress in his career caused Lorre to fall back into destructive behavioral patterns. Beginning in 1925, Lorre had struggled with morphine addiction and his career disappointments in the postwar period may have contributed to his relapse and his overuse of the drug. The stress of work also exacerbated growing fractures in Lorre’s marriage to Karen Verne. A second marriage for both, the couple pinned a great deal of hope on having a child together and their failure to achieve this goal drove a wedge between them that would ultimately lead to their separation and divorce (Thomas 304). Added to this mix of disappointments, Lorre also found himself in a tricky political situation in postwar America. Although he had been fairly apolitical, Lorre had ties to many artists with leftist beliefs and this made him vulnerable to anti-Communist forces both in the government and within the entertainment industry. He was never called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee ( HUAC ) (although that may just have been a question of timing) but he was certainly the topic of suspicion, not just for his ties to Brecht but also because he was connected with American actors, such as Bogart, who took strong stands against what they saw as government overreach (Thomas 296). This combination of personal and professional setbacks drove Lorre both into greater and greater drug use and away from Hollywood, which he blamed for the majority of his problems. After declaring bankruptcy, he made his way to Europe (Thomas 309). 2 Lorre certainly needed a change from the Southern California culture that Brecht felt so strongly was sapping his friend’s artistry, but it was not at all clear that the actor set off for Europe with the intention of directing a feature film. His first step was a ten-week tour of Great Britain, which was, by all accounts, a great success as he was received enthusiastically by British audiences. He then proceeded to meet his wife at Dr. Wiggers Kurheim in Garmisch-Partenkirchen for what was intended to be a period of relaxation and a chance to repair their crumbling marriage. Quickly though, their stay devolved into another stint in drug rehabilitation for him and contributed to the end of their relationship. Karen left to find work on her own and Lorre began to think about what his next project would be (Thomas 313). 3 As a film, Der Verlorene is a classic example of film noir. Most of the action takes place at night and in locations where respectable people would not want to be seen. There is a femme fatale, as well as other women of dubious morals, who work on the psyche of the protagonist. That protagonist also fits the definition of a film noir antihero—he gives the appearance of being an unprepossessing physician, but we the viewers know that he is hiding a terrible secret. Finally, at no point in the film is there any suggestion that things could end well for our central character. What sets Lorre’s film apart from the other films noir of the period was the setting. While film noir derived from German Expressionism and many Central You Are the Murderers: German Guilt in Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene 175 176 Laura Detre European directors perfected the genre in the United States, there are few examples of true film noir in German-language film. Some scholars argue that the film that introduced Lorre to international audiences, Fritz Lang’s M is a film noir, but it is missing a few noir elements, such as a femme fatale. Perhaps noir would have developed in Germany in the following years, but the rise of the Nazi regime stunted the film industry. Many talented filmmakers left the country and those who remained were hamstrung by the demands of the government. Films that depicted, and, in some cases, glorified the criminal underworld were not something that the Nazis were eager to fund. Consequently, the genre did not develop in Central Europe. In the postwar period there were films noir made about Central Europe and even some, such as The Third Man , made in the region, but none made by German-speaking filmmakers. Der Verlorene is one of the few, if not the only, film noir made in Germany by a Central European cast and crew in the 1950s. Some might argue that it belongs in the category of Trümmerfilm, the film genre perhaps most closely associated with the period immediately after the end of the Second World War. As Amanda Z. Randall notes, “German film critics first coined the term Trümmerfilm to describe films set among the ruins of bombed-out Berlin and other German cities, expressing a German affect of loss rather than German politics. But by 1947 the term had taen on a pejorative connotation, once audiences tired of their prototypically dark aesthetic and heavy-handed moralizing” (Randall 576). Lorre’s film is undoubtedly dark and clearly moralizing, but there are several things that keep this film out of the category of Trümmerfilm . The first is timing— Der Verlorene was released in 1951 and Trümmerfilm as a genre is really associated with the second half of the 1940s. By the time Lorre finished his film Germany was recovering and the Wirtschaftswunder was on the horizon. More importantly, Der Verlorene is different in tone from the Trümmerfilm that preceeded it. Many of those films took the position that World War II , and by extension the Holocaust, were catastrophies that befell the German people. The best example may be the 1946 film Die Mörder sind unter uns . This film, like Der Verlorene , is about a doctor struggling to cope with his new reality after the war, but the message of the two films are decidedly different. In Die Mörder sind unter uns , Dr. Hans Mertens, a good man who is haunted by the crimes that he has witnessed, is determined to take action to right the wrongs of the past when he discovers that his former commander has survived the war. In Der Verlorene , Peter Lorre depicts Dr. Karl Neumeister (an alias filled with meaning) as a broken man, not particularly interested in addressing past wrongs but instead simply going through the motions of a normal life while silently wracked with guilt. Both men are disturbed, but Neumeister is a clear antihero, whereas Mertens symbolizes the good German, victimized by a minority of monsters. Gerd Gemünden highlighted the differences between these two films, stating “ Der Verlorene comes across as far less conciliatory and forward-looking, squarely refusing then-common gestures of vergeben, vergessen, verdrängen (forgiving, forgetting, repressing)” (336). He goes on to say that Lorre’s film is far more pessimistic than the Trümmerfilm with which he compares it and that it lacks the hopefulness of a forward-looking Stunde Null. What most academics and critics have missed about Der Verlorene is that Lorre’s vision of postwar Germany goes beyond just pessimism. There is a layer of anger seething through the whole work. Anger is a somewhat common characteristic in Lorre’s characters. We certainly see it in characters such as Hilary Cummings in The Beast With Five Fingers and Janos Szabo in The Face Behind the Mask, but the ire that pervades Der Verlorene is not just the affectation of an actor playing a role. This is the very real anger of a man who was on the cusp of greatness and had his whole world turned upside-down by the murderous impulses of his fellow countrymen. This is not Dr. Rothe’s rage we see on the screen, but rather that of Peter Lorre himself. Sarah Thomas has written extensively about Der Verlorene in her book, Peter Lorre: Face Maker . She challenges the assessment of the film as a reflection of Lorre’s feelings about his emigrant status. Instead, she shows how Lorre used his well-established screen persona and its association with murderers and psychopaths as a tool to investigate the nature of violence in the Nazi regime (125). But it is possible to view the film through both the lens of Lorre’s personal biography and also as an examination of the everyday evils of Nazism. A great deal of attention is paid to Lorre’s status as an emigrant artist, but critics sometimes forget the reasons for his emigration. He was not, like Marlene Dietrich, a gentile whose conscience would not allow him to work within a political system that they found repellent. He was a Jew, who like many other refugees of the period, had little choice about the path that he had to take. It is easy to forget this fact, since he was not a religious person and did not always self-identify as a Jew, but the fact remains that had it not been for the rise of Nazism and its anti-Semitic laws, Peter Lorre would have had a very different life. His career was disrupted by Nazi anti-Semitism, he was forced into a migration that he was certainly not ready to undertake at exactly that moment, but that was not the end of Lorre’s distress. Perhaps even more importantly, he was separated from his family with the very real threat that they would be murdered. When he came to the United States, Peter Lorre left behind his father, stepmother, and two brothers in Budapest. His younger brother, Francis, reported that after the collapse of the Miklos Horthy regime in 1944 the family found themselves in grave danger. Their father, Alois, was sent to a Hungarian forced labor camp, their grandfather and aunt were taken away by the Gestapo, another aunt was You Are the Murderers: German Guilt in Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene 177 178 Laura Detre sent on a forced march to Auschwitz, and their grandmother attempted suicide, prompted by their stressful family situation (Youngkin 234). Add to that the fact that Lorre’s image, in clips from M , was used in the Nazi propaganda film Der Ewige Jude to represent the archetype of the murderous Jew. By 1951, Peter Lorre had reunited with his family, but the knowledge of what had happened to them as well as his understanding of how Nazi anti-Semitism had shaped his own life influenced the way he viewed Central Europe. Thomas also challenges the idea that Lorre’s career was defined by his relationship with Brecht. This is not to say that Brecht was not a major influence on the Lorre. The two friends were close and it is possible to find many ways in which the playwright swayed the actor and vice versa. However, one could easily say that Lorre was impacted as greatly or even more so by his collaboration with Jacob L. Moreno (Thomas 18). As Moreno’s widow, Zerka, told Lorre biographer Stephen Youngkin, “there is little doubt that Moreno was one of the sources of his awareness of human psychology and its role in acting” (18). As an actor, particularly in the mid-twentieth century, Lorre was exceptionally well versed in psychology and brought that understanding of the human mind to all of his roles. This emphasis on the psyche of his characters influenced Lorre as a director. Dr. Rothe is not only a disturbed individual who carries out despicable acts, but he also is conscious of his failings. This understanding of his moral lapses drives him to despair (and in some cases further acts of evil.) By contrast, Hösch appears to be an amoral figure who is not conscious of the implications of his actions. Hösch never questions his past. He represents the unrepentant German who not only fails to atone for Nazi atrocities but who may silently still believe that genocide was justified. Dr. Rothe, on the other hand, is not only an intellectual, but he examines his feelings and his reactions to events. He is tormented by his past and feels that he deserves to be punished. Rothe is the redeemable German, the one who understands that there is guilt to go around in the aftermath of the Holocaust, but does not see a path forward. It is not even too much of a stretch of the imagination to picture Dr. Rothe in therapy, discussing his troubled past, but since that option was not available the character takes the only action he feels will set things right and commits suicide after killing Hösch. At no point is the word Holocaust used or is the genocide even alluded to in euphemistic terms, but that is to be expected for the early 1950s. The murder of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis and their allies was not generally referred to as the Holocaust until the 1960s and was rarely a subject of academic interest, let alone popular culture, until the broadcast of the American television miniseries Holocaust in 1978. Lorre did not have the vocabulary or a willing audience to address the Shoah in 1951, but he did have personal feelings on the subject, as did all victims of Nazi persecution, and he clearly believed that the German public had some soul-searching to do. Lorre himself identified the Guy de Maupassant story La Horla as the inspiration for his film, but, while it may have been the director’s initial source, his final film is far from the early horror classic. De Maupassant’s story (which also inspired H. P. Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu ) is the story of a man who is driven mad by a supernatural creature, eventually determining that either he or the creature (or both) must die in order to end the torment. The idea of a man who is plagued by madness and prepared to take drastic actions to end his suffering is certainly a part of Der Verlorene , but Lorre is not genuinely suggesting that Nazi evil was the result of supernatural possession. He was well aware of the story, having performed it just a few years earlier on the 1947 radio series Mystery in the Air , but Lorre was also infamous for telling interviewers exactly what they wanted to hear. It would have been out of character for Lorre to have told a reporter that his film was about German guilt and that it was an indictment of the whole society, not just of those who had been involved in genocide. Also, the Maupassant story shared this emphasis on psychology (a term that would not have been known to Maupassant himself.) Both main characters are aware that they have lost control and behaved with uncharacteristic violence. Each of them might have benefitted from psychological therapy, but lived in contexts that made that impossible. They both saw themselves as a threat to their communities and ultimately ended their lives both as punishment and to protect those around them. Many people involved with the production of Der Verlorene had either been émigrés in the United States or Great Britain during the Nazi period, or had been open opponents of the regime from the inside. Lorre wrote the story upon which the film is based, but he collaborated with Axel Eggebrecht to create the screenplay. Eggebrecht is an interesting figure in media history as he had a varied career, working on many influential projects. He also had a, quite frankly, bizarre personal political history, having participated in the 1920 Kapp Putsch, a right-wing monarchist and nationalist attempt to overthrow the newly formed Weimar Republic. By 1923 he identified as a Communist and travelled to the Soviet Union. Once there, he became disillusioned with Bolshevism, but he remained somewhat committed to left-wing causes. In 1925 he began working as an assistant director at UFA and then moved toward journalism and film criticism. By 1933, he ran afoul of the new Nazi regime and spent several months in the Hainewalde concentration camp. After that, Eggebrecht had difficulty finding work, but eventually he was able to write again, this time working on screenplays. He was particularly associated with director Willi Forst and wrote some of his most famous films, including Bel Ami , Operette , and Wiener Blut � In You Are the Murderers: German Guilt in Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene 179 180 Laura Detre 1945 Eggebrecht turned his attention back to journalism and helped to found the Nordwestdeutsche Rundfunk ( NWDR ). Another veteran of Willi Forst’s films to work on Der Verlorene was composer Willy Schmidt-Gentner. Schmidt-Gentner was a logical choice for Lorre’s film in that he was perhapas the foremost film composer in Central Europe at the time, but unlike both Lorre and Eggebrecht, there was no hint of rebellion against the Nazi regime in his resume. Schmidt-Gentner had joined the NSDAP in 1933 and left the party in 1934, but that was because he relocated to Vienna, not because he had a crisis of conscience. He was responsible for composing the music for many of Willi Forst’s biggest hits, including Operette and Wiener Blut , but he was also involved with several of the most notorious propaganda films made in post-Anschluss Austria, such as the Paula Wessely vehicle Heimkehr and the anti-Semitic film Wien 1910 . His work history stands in stark contrast with that of Peter Lorre but also with the life and work of the film’s producer, Arnold Pressburger. Pressburger was a renowned independent producer. He was perhaps best known for producing the early films of Michael Curtiz (then Mihály Kertész) including Sodom und Gomorrah and Die Sklavenkönigin , but Pressburger worked with a diverse group of directors including Anatole Litvak, Fritz Lang, and Detlef Sierck. After 1937 the Nazi regime dissolved his production company, and Pressburger left for Great Britain and then later the United States. His most noteworthy film in Hollywood was Hangmen Also Die! , Bertolt Brecht’s one attempt at working in Hollywood. Directed by Fritz Lang, the film depicts the aftermath of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and was reasonably well-received at the time, earning an Oscar nomination for composer Hanns Eisler. There are most definitely elements of film noir in Hangmen Also Die! and it is reasonable to conclude both that Pressburger brought an understanding from that film to Der Verlorene, but also that Lorre, who was close with Brecht during his exile in California, had extensive knowledge of the production. Lorre had clearly learned much about film noir from his work in the United States and much of the imagery in the film is classic noir, relying heavily on light and shadow to create atmosphere. The whole project has a trans-Atlantic tone, combining Central European talents with an American art form to critique a difficult epoch in German history. This was a message that few people in Central Europe wanted to hear in 1951 and the film was a commercial failure when it debuted. As Stephen Youngkin noted, “tired of ’accusatory’ films, moviegoers thirsted for escape from their problems” (352). This was the era of the Heimatfilm , a genre full of happy rural idylls. German-speaking audiences had had enough of war and death. They wanted escapist entertainment that did not fill them with guilt and this was exactly what those in charge of the German film industry intended to give them. Illustrating this, when Lorre requested that Der Verlorene be submitted as one of two German entries to the Venice Biennale the committee told him that they did not think they would have access to a good print of the film in time for the festival, which was clearly a lie, and they submitted the films Lockende Gefahr and Das doppelte Lottchen (the inspiration for Disney’s film The Parent Trap ) instead (Youngkin 348). Nevertheless, today the film stands as an interesting artifact of the postwar era, reflecting the anger and anxiety that victims of Nazism had toward a region that was rapidly distancing itself from a troubling past but not yet ready to examine what that history meant for the present and the future. Notes 1 Lorre also played the role of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment that same year, but Mad Love beat Crime and Punishment to theatrical release. The actor had hoped that a romantic leading role, like Raskolnikov, would help him to escape typecasting, but it was not to be. 2 Lorre had formed his own production company after leaving Warner Bros. and lost a lot of money in the process. 3 Karen eventually traveled to East Berlin to ask about the possibility of joining Brecht’s newly formed Berliner Ensemble. Works Cited Gemünden, Gerd. “16 February 1952. Peter Lorre Leaves Germany Again.” A New History of German Cinema. Ed. Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael David Richardson. Rochester, NY : Camden House, 2012. 335—40. Kapczynski, Jennifer M., and Michael David Richardson, eds. A New History of German Cinema. Rochester, NY : Camden House, 2012. Randall, Amanda Z. “Austrian Trümmerfilm? What a Genre’s Absence Reveals about National Postwar Cinema and Film Studies.” German Studies Review 38.3 (2015): 573—95. Thomas, Sarah. Peter Lorre: Face Maker: Constructing Stardom and Performance in Hollywood and Europe. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. Youngkin, Stephen D. The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre. Lexington, KY : The UP of Kentucky, 2005. You Are the Murderers: German Guilt in Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene 181 Evolving Memory Narratives: The Transformations of Ruth Kluger’s Autobiographical Writing183 Evolving Memory Narratives: The Transformations of Ruth Kluger’s Autobiographical Writing Dagmar C. G. Lorenz University of Illinois at Chicago Abstract: Kluger’s self-writing is shaped by the memory of the Shoah. The respective works reflect the transformation of memory over time in different cultural contexts. Written for a German readership, weiter leben , confronts the author’s experience in Nazi concentration camps and her liberation and recovery process in Germany until new beginning in the United States. Still Alive , mindful of the American readership, sets counterbalances the experiences of the Shoah with those of Kluger’s life in California, while unterwegs verloren highlights Kluger’s more recent experiences interspersed with observations that suggest the lasting impact of the Shoah. The film Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger (Landscapes of Memories) with Kluger as resource person and narrator synchronizes aspects of her self-writing . My article analyzes the evolution of Kluger’s narratives with respect to their cultural settings, language, and time frames as well as interlocutors, target audiences, and medium. Keywords: Shoah, memory, self-writing, identity, feminism The autobiographical publications and statements by Ruth Kluger, a Shoah survivor from Vienna, who after her liberation and relocation to the United States made a name for herself as a scholar of German literature and a university professor, profoundly influenced the discussions about gender and women in the Holocaust since the 1990s. Considering the expanding scope of Kluger’s German and English language publications the term ’autobiographical project’ seems more appropriate to her writings after 1992 than ’memoirs.’ Kluger’s self-writing transcends genre boundaries and targets audiences in different cultural spheres. It is exemplary of processual memory construction and representation according to the pathbreaking research and experiments on memory, notably traumatic memory, by Frederic Bartlett and Jean Piaget. Kluger’s writing reflects 184 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz time and culture specific memory constructions as it elicits forgotten or suppressed episodes in conjunction with a shifting memory landscape. Kluger left Germany in 1947 and completed college and university degrees in library science and German literature in New York and California. Her academic training and interests shape her narratives, and her expertise as a literary scholar and critic adds critical and literary dimensions to her work that are generally not found in memoir literature. From a feminist perspective Kluger references critical literature on National Socialism and the Shoah, and she includes theoretical perspectives from memory and post-memory studies, international literature and films. In particular her critical commentaries address earlier approaches to the Holocaust, developed from a male perspective. She dismisses assumptions made by many male authors about the female Holocaust experience or writers who consider the male point of view as the normative ’human’ experience. Kluger characterizes herself as a product of the gendered society of prewar Jewish Vienna shaped by its distinct gender roles (Klüger 1992, 42—43). She points out that for the most part she lived with women in her home environment, in the gender-segregated concentration camp universe the Nazis had created, and in the United States (Klüger 1992, 229). She describes the situation as follows: I had spent my life among women, and this didn’t change in New York. In my family, in the camps, and even after the war, men had been at the periphery of my life. It was true that from that periphery they called the shots because they had the power, and my mother never ceased to assure me that a woman needed to marry someone who’d provide for her. But her own example was different. (Kluger 2001, 179) Stuart Tabener aptly observes that the feminist perspective dominates Kluger’s first autobiography weiter leben, and he agrees with Andrea Reiter that “this perspective affects the fabric of the narrative itself ” (Tabener 102; Reiter 327). However, it would be incorrect to assume that with the advancing of old age Kluger deemphasizes the category of gender in her life review. As a feminist Kluger is highly interested in the gendered social construction of aging (Tabener 101). At no point does she endorse a gender-neutral or ’male’ viewpoint, although she conceptualizes gender in conjunction with the experience of aging and the social repositioning this entails. “Alte Leute behandelt man wie Kinder” [Old people are treated like children], her friend Maria observes during a cruise and terms the cruise ship a “schwimmendes Altersheim” [a swimming retirement home] (Klüger 2008, 225—26). Kluger also remarks upon the physical effects of aging: “Im Vergleich zu den Menschen, denen wir auf unserer Reise begegnen, sehen wir mehlig aus mit unförmigen Körpern, während die ihren geschmeidig Evolving Memory Narratives 185 und sportlich wirken” [Compared to the people we meet on our journey, we look pasty with our shapeless bodies, while theirs appear supple and athletic] (Kluger 2001, 226). Feminism provides the dominant point of view in Kluger’s German language autobiography weiter leben, in the English adaptation Still Alive, and it informs unterwegs verloren with the added critical perspective on aging and age discrimination. These trajectories also inform her statements in interviews, presentations, and essays. However, the tenor and urgency of these positions change over time. As a public intellectual, Kluger would be right in considering her feminism to be a known fact. Moreover, after the millennium feminist approaches to the Holocaust were no longer revolutionary—they had become firmly ensconced in the critical discourse to which Kluger herself had made major contributions. Additional structural principles in Kluger’s writing include attention to the phases in an individual’s life; in Kluger’s case, the transition from girlhood to adulthood during the Holocaust, the student years and married life in the United States, motherhood, her academic career and her later life as an autobiographer. These phases are set off by turning points that call for reinterpretation in her different accounts. Also important are geographic, cultural, and linguistic touchstones. With Vienna as her point of departure, Kluger remembers her deportation to the Nazi camps—a German-dominated sphere—, and her relocation from postwar Germany to the United States and into the English language. Her moves from the East Coast to the West Coast and back and forth within the United States, her intermittent stops in the Midwest and her move to Germany, her development as a writer and her visits to Vienna and return to the United States pattern her life story. Kluger herself expresses the divide within her identity in her statement that she is the mother of two “American sons,” who, in turn, stress their mother’s European character in the film by Renata Schmidtkunz. Kluger lives in two languages, German and English and is versed in Yiddish, which she picked up in the camp Christianstadt and which she avoids because of its negative cultural connotations (Klüger 1992, 176). The title of Kluger’s first autobiography weiter leben (1992), which Linda Schulte-Sasse translated as “Living On” may signify the author’s resolve to lead her life to the fullest after surviving Auschwitz. It may also indicate that as an American professor in Göttingen she found herself embarking on a new path, that of an autobiographer and public speaker. Stuart Tabener notices an element of passion as the driving force in Kluger’s ’life review’—her “outrage directed against (male) colleagues and publishers and her family” and the pleasure she takes in her late successes (Tabener 105). For Tabener the latter seems connected to Kluger’s search for meaning: 186 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Klüger’s almost teleological narration of her journey from academic outsider to bestselling author and media personality not only suggests the older woman’s pleasure in her belated success. It also invests her otherwise often sorrowful narrative of exile and dislocation with a retrospective coherence and meaning. (Tabener 107—08) Unsurprisingly, Kluger’s autobiographical project started later in life, when it was possible to survey the past and, more importantly, when the author had become capable of articulating her traumatic memory. At age sixty-one she published weiter leben without having achieved a Goethean, quasi-Olympian position, from which she could authoritatively assess her life. Instead, she blends memory strains and recent experiences, impressions of new and old friends, professional and personal conflicts, changing constellations within her family and prospects for the future. The autobiographical project has an experimental character and often Kluger’s strongest assertions turn out to be provisional. In Kluger memory is tied to the experience of the present moment. In unterwegs verloren this anchoring in the present is evident from certain assertions: “Es ist uns schon schlechter gegangen” [there were times when we have been worse off] in association with her memories of being a ’slave girl’ and her empathetic terror during her visit at the Senegalese slave trade center Île de Gorée during a cruise with her friend Maria (Kluger 2010, 232; 235). At such moments, Kluger’s focus on the present serves as a barrier against the memory of her own suffering. Already weiter leben spans Kluger’s life before and after the Nazi concentration camps and thus exceeds the scope of a typical Holocaust memoir. The episodes associated with the different life spheres do not invalidate others, but they do relativize them. The reflections about the abrupt end of her childhood in her Viennese middle-class family and those succeeding Kluger’s liberation are equally pertinent to the construction of the autobiographical self. Kluger mediates her life through different genres, and she targets different audiences. The published versions of her life story reveal the expanding memory work. The first autobiography appeared in German in 1992, in post-unification Germany, under the title weiter leben: Eine Jugend [Living On. A Youth], in Göttingen. In a biographical and a historical sense the theme of renewal dominates, autobiography being a new genre for Kluger, and she wrote in and for the new united Germany. Even her venue, the Wallstein Verlag, founded in 1986, was a relatively new company. The modified and expanded English-language version Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered followed in 2001 and was geared toward English-speaking audiences. The publisher was the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, and the American novelist and translator Lore Segal provided the introduction. Like Kluger, Segal is a native of Vienna. Segal had left Ger- Evolving Memory Narratives 187 man-occupied Austria on a children’s transport to England and thus constitutes a complementary voice to Kluger’s, who was deported to Theresienstadt. Kluger states her regrets over having been prevented from leaving Austria: her mother had kept her from joining a children’s transport to Palestine as a last chance to escape. Kluger surmises that she would have taken that chance and become a different, presumably freer, person under more favorable circumstances (Klüger 1992, 62). Throughout her writings this missed chance is a recurring theme and a factor in the resentment toward her mother. In 2008 Kluger published unterwegs verloren with the Vienna Zsolnay Verlag. Continuing Still Alive , the book reviews Kluger’s life and career in the United States. In many ways unterwegs verloren is a book of farewells. For one thing, Kluger tries to explain her decision of having the Auschwitz number on her arm surgically removed. The associated memories are associated with her mother, whom she now reevaluates. Alma Klüger, née Hirschel, died at the age of ninety-seven in 2000. Kluger records the mental and physical changes affecting the old woman, who is no longer the tyrannical mother of her younger years but has turned into the childlike great-grandmother of Kluger’s granddaughter. Kluger also abandons the sentiments encapsulated in the German and Austrian term “Heimat” [home country] and affirms the emotional distance to her familiar but not beloved native Austria, her former ’home,’ without identifying another place to call home. Kluger’s nomadism clearly comes across in the chapter “Sterben im Exil” [Dying in Exile] (Klüger 2008, 38—52). The closest the author comes to a sense of home is in her condominium in Irvine, California, the setting of large segments in Renata Schmidtkunz’s Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger (2013, Landscapes of Memories: The Life of Ruth Kluger). The first two publications focus on the author’s childhood in her female-dominated family, which in hindsight she characterizes as neurotic, and her adolescence in Nazi concentration camps. Not until her almost fatal accident in Göttingen’s Jüdenstrasse [ Jewish Street] did her childhood and Holocaust memories assume such urgency that she felt compelled to record them. After almost four decades her near-death experience in Germany, where she served as the Director of the University of California’s Study Abroad Program, transformed her sense of identity and mission. The change of her married name Ruth Angress back to her family name Klüger is an outward expression of her transformation. The autobiographies are written with an eye towards the countries that shaped Kluger’s personality, Germany, the United States, and Austria, all of which contain lived and unlived life alternatives. Speculations about the latter play an important role in all of her autobiographies. Kluger subtitled weiter leben “Ein deutsches Buch” [A German Book] and dedicated it to her friends in Göttingen at a time when she attached no irony 188 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz to this term. Later, disillusioning experiences in Göttingen precluded such an attitude of optimism and good will toward German post-Shoah society. At no point does Kluger’s attitude arise from naiveté as the critical framework of her first autobiography already suggests. Through references to Fascism theory, studies about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, weiter leben establishes a critical subtext and relates it to the author’s life experience. Kluger challenges common assumptions about gender and gender roles, and she reexamines historical narratives by German intellectuals (Lorenz 1993, 207). Luna Filipovic’ in her study on memory maintains that bilingual memory processing occurs interdependently, but admits the possibility of separate storage. Thus bilingual memory may be privy to both common and separate store options, which account for variations in the respective languages (Filipovic’ 2011, 472). Filipovic’s assumptions explain some of the variations between Kluger’s autobiographies in German and English. Other variations are obviously deliberate, aiming at accommodating readers of German and, alternatively, of English. Still Alive follows the same chronological-geographic structure as weiter leben with Kluger’s Viennese childhood as the point of departure, followed by the deportation and prisoner experience, and the survival of the camps Theresenstadt, Auschwitz, and Groß-Rosen. The segment on the United States is extended in the later book, where the Göttingen episode is condensed and configured as ambiguous. Germany is no longer a possible destination despite the fact that Kluger had acquired a home in Göttingen. While telling the same life story, many of the examples and comparisons in Still Alive differ from the German text. The fact that Still Alive appeared almost a decade after weiter leben accounts for the expanded time frame and shift in focus from Göttingen to California. unterwegs verloren is marked by yet another shift in positionality. Vienna, past and present, takes on greater significance than before. The chapter “Wiener Neurosen” [Vienna Neuroses] captures the author’s ambivalence toward the city of her childhood. The emphasis on friendships with other Austrian expatriates and the mottos taken from Central European women writers are further expressions of the preoccupation with Austria. Tabener discusses the structural significance of the mottos from the post-Shoah authors Ilse Aichinger, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Herta Müller in light of the Central European experience, and Kluger’s own place within this experiential landscape: The choice of these particular writers is significant, of course. To state the obvious, all three are women. Just as important, however, Aichinger and Bachmann were both Austrian—Aichinger was of Jewish descent and Bachmann the daughter of convinced Nazis whose postwar love affair with the returning Austrian Jew Jack Hamesh brought Evolving Memory Narratives 189 about an early confrontation with her time in the Bund Deutscher Mädel. Bachmann, moreover, was also close to Paul Celan, the German-Romanian-Jewish poet whose work revolves around the Holocaust and exile. Herta Müller, in contrast, is originally from Romania. Like Klüger, she lives in a form of exile from her native country following her experience of state persecution during the communist period, although in contrast to Klüger her minority status was as a member of an ethnic German community that had been largely Nazi during the war years. As a matter of fact, Müller’s father had been in the SS . (Tabener 109) Referencing these writers Kluger affirms her embeddedness in the cultural world shaped by the legacy of the Austro-Hungarian multination state and the destroyed Christian-Jewish symbiosis of which Vienna had been paradigmatic until its annexation by the Third Reich in 1938. The German-Austrian documentary film Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger, directed by Renata Schmidtkunz, adds further insights as it expands the scope of Kluger’s books. The medium of film creates a virtual immediacy between the cast and the viewers, and it concretizes the spoken words by showing, for example, Kluger’s childhood home in Vienna or her apartment in Irvine. The film derives its dynamic from the interactions between Kluger and her interlocutors, including her two sons, colleagues, and students. Their visual presence creates the film’s multiperspectivism. In her narratives Kluger controls the text, but the images of actual persons, settings, and sceneries engender processes in which Kluger functions as the central, but by no means, the only or even the authoritative figure. As Kluger’s life review has evolved, new layers of memory have emerged. Shifts in her geographic orientation and frequent dramatic turning points produce directional changes and the recurrence or resumption of motifs provide continuity; for example, the episode of being tattooed upon entering Auschwitz in weiter leben is seemingly resolved in unterwegs verloren when Kluger has the tattoo removed (Klüger 1992, 115; Klüger 2008, 11). Another circle closes when the overpowering mother figure of weiter leben appears transformed in Still Alive: she “looked small and shriveled,” and the author, now acting as a mother, encouraged her to take some fruit juice. Kluger concludes: “She had died like an old cat” (Kluger 2001, 211). Kluger’s life story is replete with momentous incidents. For instance, the intervention of an unknown female clerk makes Kluger’s survival in Auschwitz possible: she tells the girl to say that she is fifteen rather than thirteen, which qualified her to work (Klüger 1992, 132—133). Another lifesaving moment is the decision to escape from a death march (Klüger 1992, 166). Another near-death and survival episode is the accident in Göttingen, a lifechanging event and the 190 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz beginning of Kluger’s confrontation with the ’ghosts’ of her past (Klüger 1992, 279). In Still Alive she elaborates: But the memories remained, like cave paintings […]. They had at last caught up with me; in my hospital bed I had been their prisoner. […] How did I come to write this story? For a long time I had wanted to, but didn’t because other urgencies interfered and because other books had appeared and seemed to have done the job. Now, while I still felt the presence of the angel with the ambiguous face, whom I have known all my life more intimately than I wished, I began. (Kluger 2001, 208) Previously known as the scholar Ruth Angress, Kluger emerged during her convalescence as Ruth Klüger—her memories had arisen with such intensity she had to write her life story. As Roger Woods points out, her decidedly subjective position as a memoir writer precludes finality. “Following Kluger’s writing across the sixteen years between weiter leben (1992) and unterwegs verloren (2008) demonstrates not merely the absence of resolution, but also the emerging certainty that there can never be any kind of resolution” (Woods 183). The concept of landscape in the English title of Schmidtkunz’s film, Landscapes of Memories visualizes the mind as a terrain to be explored. Indeed, Kluger’s autobiographical practice follows the model of an exploratory excursion rather than that of a teleological narrative. The pertinent sites are named in weiter leben as “Theresienstadt,” “Auschwitz-Birkenau,” “Christianstadt (Groß-Rosen),” while Still Alive defines them generically as “Ghetto,” “Death Camp,” “Forced Labor Camp.” The settings of Kluger’s post-Shoah life in postwar Germany, New York, and 1980s and 1990s Göttingen, likewise represent memory landmarks in conjunction with a chronological nexus. In unterwegs verloren the spatial order intersects with thematic structures propelled by reversals and new beginnings. The removal of the Auschwitz number is such an instance of bundled memory themes: the mother’s aging and dying, and the decision to erase and reinterpret traces of the past. The granddaughter, on the other hand, is proof of hope and continuity. She connects across the generational divide with her great-grandmother in ways Kluger could not. Finally, Schmidtkunz’s film explores Kluger’s life story through the medium of film. The effect is expansive and mosaic-like. Different interviewed persons provide insights about Kluger based on their own experience. With every additional work Kluger’s narrative scope has expanded, partly because of the passing of time, partly as a result of the changing social and political context. Language plays an important role in Kluger’s writing. weiter leben, which postdates the death of Alma Hirschel, Kluger’s mother, is written in German, presumably because Kluger did not want her mother to read candid passages about the problematic mother-daughter relationship. “I thought if I wrote in Evolving Memory Narratives 191 German, my mother wouldn’t see it, as she had no contact with things German and even considered my career as an embarrassment” (Kluger 2001, 210). In unterwegs verloren , Kluger revises this assertion: “Meine Antworten auf diese Fragen waren nicht immer dieselben, weil ich selbst nicht genau wußte, warum ich das Deutsche mit seinem bekanntlich bedeutend kleineren Wortschatz gewählt hatte. […] Die deutsche Sprache, latent im Gehirn, aber noch immer robust, hatte mich gewählt, nicht umgekehrt” [I did not always respond to these questions in the same way, because I myself did not know exactly why I had chosen the German language, which has, as is well known, a considerably smaller vocabulary. […] The German language, latent but still robust in my brain, had chosen me] (Klüger 2008, 213). Still Alive uses proper names with greater transparency than the earlier works. In weiter leben Kluger conceals the identity of her postwar friend Martin Walser under the pseudonym of Christoph. In Still Alive she refers to him by his real name, Martin, and in unterwegs verloren she identifies him as the famous postwar author and mentions her open letter in which she criticizes him for his blatant anti-Semitism in the novel Tod eines Kritikers (2002). She even associates him with Herta Müller’s poem “Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen.” Linking elegance and polite manners with latent violence as is the case with Müller’s image of gentleman hunters, who wear a fuse cord on their hats, undoubtedly appealed to Kluger as an expression of Walser’s ambiguous character. In her Walser passages Kluger announces the end of her friendship with the celebrated author and former Nazi Party member (Kluger 2001, 168—69). Kluger contrasts the untenable relationship with Walser with her continued bond with her Californian colleague, Herbert Lehnert, who, like Walser, has a Nazi past. Yet, in the film the dialogue between Kluger and Lehnert reveals how much good will and effort is required to maintain this difficult friendship, for which, Kluger notes, the only possible place is the United States. The film uncovers paradoxes in Kluger’s experience, which often goes against the grain and challenges the collective German memory as well as American versions of the Shoah. In unterwegs verloren Kluger often assumes the role of a concerned observer because of her special position toward Germany, Austria, and the United States. Aware of the contradictions in her self-representation she insists on synthesizing the disparate elements because she refuses to compartmentalize her life. “Mein Leben als Mutter ist untrennbar vom Rest. Ich bin nicht auf der einen Seite Germanistin und Autorin, auf der anderen Seite Frau mit Kindern” [My life as a mother cannot be separated from the rest. I am not a German scholar and author on the one side and on the other side a woman with children] (Klüger 2008, 140—41). This synthesizing approach is also a concession to life changes that occur in different ways. Self-determination, reason, and 192 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz logic make it possible to overcome the position of victimhood, but Kluger also envisions factors beyond her control such as chance and fate. Both coincidence and choice play a role in her survival—even the notion of fate occasionally arises as a possibility. Göttingen represents a major turning point. In the 1980s Kluger had begun to offer seminars on Holocaust literature, and in 1985 she published the pathbreaking article “Discussing Holocaust Literature.” Yet, these were scholarly projects, but the autobiographies are deeply personal as statements such as the following reveal: “Wiens Wunde, die ich bin und meine Wunde, die Wien ist, sind unheilbar” [Vienna’s wound, which I am, and my wound, which is Vienna, cannot be healed]. In her conversation with Schmidtkunz, Kluger expresses her emotional ambivalence about Vienna and its relevance to her sense of identity: “[…] ich gehöre ja irgendwie hierher […] ich gehöre eigentlich nicht hierher, ich nehme das sofort zurück, nachdem ich es gesagt habe, aber es stimmt und es stimmt nicht” [I belong here somehow […] actually, I do not belong here. I retract my statement immediately after making it] (Schmidtkunz 2008, 123). Her reception in Vienna seems an external confirmation of her diffidence: In public she was feted as a celebrity, but as a colleague and visiting professor she was ignored. She considers this treatment proof that a Vienna-born Jew and Shoah survivor is still not welcome in Vienna. Her presence, she surmises, exposed the dark side of the glamorous city (Klüger 1992, 68; 2008, 214). Adding to the complexity of her position, Kluger points out that she holds Austrian and US dual citizenship. She rationalizes her decision to accept Austrian citizenship with the advantages of an EU passport, but more important seems her right to restitution: “Ich habe ein Recht auf diese Staatsbürgerschaft, man hatte sie mir genommen, warum sollte ich sie mir nicht zurückholen, schließlich bin ich dort geboren worden und kann wie die Einheimischen sprechen” [I have a right to this citizenship; one had robbed me of it, why should I not get it back. After all, I was born there and can talk like the native Austrians] (Klüger 2008, 214). In her conversation with Schmidtkunz she expresses this thought as well: “Wien ist die einzige Stadt in der Welt, der einzige Ort in der Welt, wo die Leut’ so reden wie ich, obwohl man mir sagt: Wie ich spreche, ist ein Schönbrunner Deutsch oder etwas ganz Altmodisches” [Vienna is the only city in the world, the only place in the world, where people talk the way I do, even though one tells me: The way I talk is Schönbrunner German or something very old-fashioned] (Schmidtkunz 2008, 23—24). The response Kluger attributes to her Austrians contemporaries is on the one hand an acknowledgment of her Austrian identity, but at the same time it relegates her to a bygone era and social order. Evolving Memory Narratives 193 Schönbrunn, the palace of the Habsburg rulers, evokes Vienna’s imperial past, the expelled aristocracy, and the murdered Jews. Kluger’s intent is to articulate her personal memory rather than writing a historical account—the record of history was firmly established at the time weiter leben appeared. Still, her accounts are critical of the familiar cultural narratives. They are oppositional, as she herself as a young person often turned to oppositional behavior as a survival strategy. As a child, she emphasizes, she did not accept her powerlessness, but, unable to escape her predicament as a Jewish girl, she protested against her circumstances by changing her name Susi, which sounded too German to her, to Ruth, in memory of Ruth, the Moabite, who chose her own identity (Klüger 1992, 40; 2001, 42). The resentment because of her mother’s decision to keep her from leaving Vienna resurges as late as in the Jerusalem segment of Schmidtkunz’s film. Kluger imagines how she might have thrived as a citizen of Israel until her idealized image of the Jewish State fades in light of the gender inequality she observes and because of the oppression of the Arab population. The process of disillusionment she displays is comparable to Kluger’s disenchantment with Göttingen and Vienna. Also in these cases her initially positive impressions yield to the less than glamorous reality. In the Jerusalem episode she exonerates her mother at least momentarily by acknowledging that her ideal society, a fair and just Israel, does not exist, and that consequently she can no longer blame her mother for destroying her life. In the final section of unterwegs verloren , “Kreuzfahrt” [Cruise] Kluger asserts: “I was a slave girl” (Klüger 2008, 232). The excursion to the Senegalese slave trade center Île de Gorée elicits this statement in association with Kluger’s own concentration camp memories. She contextualizes her own and others’ suffering with the failure of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment project documented by the mass-captured women during the Middle Passage and the Holocaust. Elements immediately present intrude upon these thoughts to reveal the complexity of reality: a game of Black Jack, a conversation about shoes bought in Vienna for the African cruise, and allusions to alternative constructions of history such as the “myth of the Stunde Null” (Klüger 2008, 235). Kluger’s narrative defies the boundaries of time and space as it links distinct sets of the past through memory. At the time of the visit at Île de Gorée the author was already a retiree, but the earlier memory of the camps arises with greater immediacy than that of her professional life. At the former epicenter of the slave trade, she is overcome with disgust at the bondage of the African slaves, with whom she identifies because of a partially shared fate, and she associates her own memory with this site. An additional memory association arises as she contemplates the fate of her cousin Herbert, who left on a “Kinder- 194 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz transport” [children transport] only to be classified a hostile alien in England and shipped off to Australia (Klüger 2008, 228—29). There is no ’happy’ ending to Kluger’s journey, as the final question “Hat sich die Reise gelohnt? ” [Was the trip worth it? ] at the end of unterwegs verloren suggests (Klüger 2008, 234). No healing or reintegration has taken place after the Holocaust. Kluger notes that despite the fact that former Nazi victims and perpetrators lived under identical conditions during the postwar era, they remained permanently separated by their history. Mainstream Germans may have taken the same escape routes as she did on her flight from the death march, but the circumstances were different: “They were mourning their losses, the possessions they had to leave behind, and grieving for the homeland they wouldn’t see again, while we were happy to have left our prisons and to have gained so much, that is, our naked existence” (Kluger 2001, 137; compare: 1992, 173). Throughout, Kluger’s life review documents the rift between the perceptions of the survivors and dominant narratives confirming Dan Diner’s thesis about the divided Jewish and German and Austrian post-Shoah memory in his study “Negative Symbiosis.” In Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger , the exchange between Kluger and her colleague Herbert Lehnert documents this divide Diner postulates. Lehnert insists that the Third Reich and the Holocaust were mere episodes in German history, and he characterizes his friendship with Kluger as a continuation of the pre-Nazi German-Jewish symbiosis. Kluger, in contrast, stresses the strictly personal aspects of their friendship rejecting her colleague’s notion that their Jewish-Gentile relationship signifies a victory over Hitler’s ideology. She notes that this friendship could only occur in California ( Das Weiterleben ), but that she cannot even trust the United States to be a safe haven. In her California home, she reports, she was slighted by an English professor from Germany, who did not acknowledge or greet her although he attended a party that she hosted. “Weil man mit Frauen und Juden so umspringen kann? Die Frau als Opfer, der Jude als Frau […]. Ich werde oft gerügt, wenn ich über Diskriminierung gegen Juden und gegen Frauen in einem Atemzug rede, aber so hab ich’s erlebt” [Because women and Jews can be treated this way? The woman as victim, the Jew as woman […]. People often criticize me when I speak of the discrimination of women and Jews in the same breath, but this is the way I have experienced it (Klüger 2008, 155—56). In weiter leben Kluger’s experience in Göttingen ends on a positive note; she even acquires a second residence in the German university town, because she obviously felt at home there. In Still Alive the episodes featuring her friends in Göttingen seem shorter and more sober, and in unterwegs verloren her attitude has taken a negative turn in light of several disturbing occurrences: A financial Evolving Memory Narratives 195 consultant embezzled her savings and a student harassed her. “’Deutschland’. Und wieder ’Deutschland’. Immer wieder. Sicher ist es ein Rechtsstaat und man kann sich Recht verschaffen, wenn man es richtig anstellt. Oder schwelt noch was? Mit Ausländern, mit alten Frauen, mit Juden? ” [’Germany.’ And again ’Germany.’ Time and again. No doubt a state under the rule of law, and one can litigate, if one proceeds properly. Or is there something still smoldering? Something concerning foreigners, old women, Jews? ] (Klüger 2008, 192). In an effort to establish a balance, Kluger occasionally revises some of her harsh earlier assessments. For example, in weiter leben she surmises that the young man who caused her near-fatal crash was ruthless and aggressive: “[…] ich meine, er verfolgt mich, will mich niederfahren […] den Kampf verlier ich, Metall, nochmals Deutschland, was mach ich denn hier, wozu bin ich zurückgekommen, war ich je fort? ” [I think he pursues me, wants to run me down […] I’ll lose this fight, this metal, again Germany, what am I doing here, why did I return here, did I ever leave? ] (Klüger 1992, 271—72). “Und diese Vorstellung, oder auch nur Einbildung, daß mich der Sechzehnjährige aus Aggression umgefahren hat? Nicht aus aggressivem Denken, wohl aber aus aggressivem Instinkt, wie die Buben hinterm Steuerrad eines Autos” [And this notion, perhaps only imaginary, that this sixteen-year old ran me over out of sheer aggression? Not out of aggressive thinking but out of an aggressive instinct, like a boy behind the steering wheel of a car] (Klüger 1992, 272). In Still Alive , Kluger is understanding towards the boy: “I had been in Germany for only a few months when a teenage bicyclist ran me down one evening as I was crossing the street in a pedestrian zone. […] The boy was sixteen. He wasn’t acting out of ill will, I am sure, just feeling the exuberance of being on a vehicle that was fast—much faster than the old bikes used to be, more like being behind the steering wheel of a car—and perhaps some impatience with the old woman in his way” (Kluger 2001, 205). The film Das Weiterleben der Ruth Kluger thematizes Kluger’s multifaceted persona; the opening shots show Kluger as makeup is applied to her face prior to a public presentation. Later she appears as a casual, private person in her kitchen in the company of her sons. The comments of Percy and Dan Angress, Kluger’s self-characterizations, and the statements of her friends and colleagues expand the scope of Kluger’s life world and problematize issues that go unchecked in Kluger’s self-narratives. With the addition of the elements in the film, Kluger’s autobiographical project offers a dynamic identity model, provisional and inclusive, and in its fluidity appropriate to the exponentially expanding post-millennium experience of reality. 196 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Works Cited Angress, Ruth K. “Discussing Holocaust Literature.” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 2 (1985): 179—92. Bartlett, Frederick. Remembering. Cambridge ( UK ): Cambridge UP , 1932. Diner, Dan. “Negative Symbiose. Deutsche und Juden nach Auschwitz.” Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte? Ed. Dan Diner. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1987. —. Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse. Über Geltung und Wirkung des Holocaust. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007. Filipovic’, Luna. “Speaking and remembering in one or two languages: bilingual vs. monolingual lexicalization and memory for motion events.” International Journal of Bilingualism 15.4 (2011): 466—85. Klüger, Ruth. weiter leben. Eine Jugend. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992. —. unterwegs verloren. Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 2008. Kluger, Ruth. Still Alive. A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2001. Kurz, Joachim. “Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger. Erzählungen einer Überlebenden.” kino-zeit.de , n.d. Web. 19 Dec. 2014. Lanzmann, Claude, dir. Shoah. Les Films Aleph, 1985. Lorenz, Dagmar C. G. “Memory and Criticism: Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben .” Women in German Yearbook 9 (1993): 201—24. Müller, Herta. “Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen.” Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen. Gedichte. Munich: Carl Hanser, 2005. Piaget, Jean. Memory and Intelligence. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Reiter, Andrea. “’Ich wollte, es wär ein Roman’: Ruth Klüger’s Feminist Survival Report.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 38.3 (2001): 326—40. Schaumann, Caroline. “From weiter leben (1992) to Still Alive (2001): Ruth Klüger’s Cultural Translation of Her ’German Book’ for an American Audience.” German Quarterly 77.3 (2004): 324—39. Schmidtkunz, Renata, dir. and writer. Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger. Kairos Film, 2011� —. Im Gespräch—Ruth Klüger . Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2008. Schulte-Sasse, Linda. “’Living on’ in the American Press: Ruth Kluger’s ’Still Alive’ and Its Challenge to a Cherished Holocaust Paradigm.” German Studies Review 27�3 (2004): 469—75. Sheridan, Ruth S. “The Intersection of Gender and Religious Language in Ruth Kluger’s Still Alive .” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender 27.3 (2014): 75—96. Taberner, Stuart. Aging and Old-Age Style in Günter Grass, Ruth Klüger, Christa Wolf, and Martin Walser � The Mannerism of a Late Period. Rochester, NY : Camden House, 2013� Walser, Martin. Tod eines Kritikers. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002. Woods, Roger. “Ruth Kluger. Autobiography and Remembering the Holocaust.” German Life and Letters 66.4 (2013): 173—86. Evolving Memory Narratives: The Transformations of Ruth Kluger’s Autobiographical Writing197 Hauntings of the Traumatic Past in Maas’s Film Two Lives: Individual and Collective Memory Margarete Landwehr West Chester University Abstract: Based on the novel Ice Ages by German journalist Hannelore Hippe, Georg Maas’s thriller Zwei Leben / Two Lives (2012) was inspired by the stories of Lebensborn children with German fathers and Norwegian mothers, who were taken from Norway and raised in East German orphanages. The film’s protagonist represents those “orphans” who returned to Norway as Stasi spies. The film’s key theme, the return of the repressed, plays a central role both in individual and collective memory. In this article, an overview of the Lebensborn program, particularly in Norway, and the Stasi exploitation of Lebensborn orphans, will provide the context for a discussion of the film. An analysis of the repression of individual traumatic memories and of the appearance of involuntary memories (flashbacks) is based on recent neurobiological findings. The cinematic depiction of flashbacks will be examined and followed by a discussion of the collective postwar amnesia of the Norwegian collaboration in the program and the reprehensible treatment of Lebensborn children and their mothers by the Norwegian government and its citizens in the postwar years. Keywords: Lebensborn program, Norwegian collaboration, trauma, collective memory, “Two Lives,” (title of film) Stasi spies Georg Maas’s thriller Zwei Leben / Two Lives (2012) explores the history of the Lebensborn or war children, born from unions between German SS or army officers and Germanic or Nordic women during the Nazi era. It is based on a then-unpublished novel, Ice Ages , by German journalist Hannelore Hippe. The story was inspired by cases of Lebensborn children taken from Norway and raised in East German orphanages, who returned to Norway as Stasi spies, and of other GDR citizens who ’stole’ the identity of a Lebensborn child in order to infiltrate western societies such as Norway. The film depicts the traumatic life of 198 Margarete Landwehr a German orphan indoctrinated as a Stasi spy who poses as a Lebensborn child in Norway. The film’s key theme, the return of the repressed, plays a central role both in individual and collective memory. An overview of the Lebensborn program, particularly in Norway, and the Stasi exploitation of Lebensborn orphans, will provide the context for a discussion of the film. An analysis of the repression of individual traumatic memories and its cinematic depiction will be followed by a discussion of the collective postwar amnesia of the Norwegian collaboration in the program and the reprehensible treatment of Lebensborn children and their mothers by the Norwegian government and some of its citizens. Lebensborn , which means “fountain or well(spring) of life,” was a state-sponsored project founded by Heinrich Himmler in December 1935, the year the Nuremberg Laws outlawed intermarriage between so-called “ethnic” Germans and Jews. Promoting extramarital relations between “Aryan” partners and large families for women who were considered “racially worthy” while preventing the birth of “undesirable” children through abortions, sterilizations of “unfit” persons, banning of relations between “Aryans” and “racially inferior” partners, and euthanasia constituted two aspects of the Nazi eugenics plan for a so-called “Master Race” ( Joshi 834). With Munich as its administrative center, the Lebensborn office was part of the SS Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt ( SS Ancestral Office of Race and Settlement) that was transferred in the fall of 1936 to the Hauptamt Persönlicher Stab Reichsführer-SS (Personal Staff of the Reichführer-SS). Himmler required all officers attached to the four central SS departments to join the program and to make monthly payments to it. By January 1939, the society reported 13,000 members of whom 8,000 members were in the SS (Thompson 62). Funds also came from the party and Reich Finance Minister. Himmler’s goal was to reverse the decline in the birthrate among Germans after World War I and increase the Nordic / Germanic population of Germany. Thus, the Lebensborn program constituted racial engineering towards a “desired stock” in which the German Reich was supposed to reach a population of 120 million by 1980 (Henry and Hillel 56). In order to achieve this goal, the program was to give welfare assistance to SS families with a large number of “racially valuable” children and to create maternity and childcare facilities for single and married expectant mothers. SS (Schutzstaffel) and Wehrmacht (army) officers were encouraged to have children with chosen “Aryan” women. Both parents needed to pass a “racial purity” test with a physical examination, a detailed family history and a medical record. Blond hair and blue eyes were preferred traits and family lineage had to be traced back at least three generations. The racial requirements for mothers were so stringent that only forty of every one hundred applicants were accepted (Thompson 66). The Lebensborn homes deliv- Hauntings of the Traumatic Past in Maas’s Film Two Lives 199 ered children and provided preand post-natal care, and protected the mothers by offering privacy, psychological support, and economic security ( Joshi 838). The majority of mothers in these homes were unmarried. As Joshi (837) reports, the percentage of unwed mothers ranged from 47 % (1938) to 56 % (1939) to 58 % (1941) and reached a high point in 1942 of 71 %. Many Lebensborn mothers were also relocated and provided with jobs, often within the Lebensborn homes ( Joshi 839). Between 1936 and 1944 there were nine Lebensborn maternity clinics in Germany. The Lebensborn agency also developed foster child and adoption programs. While supporting a child’s right to stay with its biological mother, the agency, however, would not allow a mother to keep her infant unless she met certain moral and economic criteria. If she was judged morally unfit to be a mother, lacked the financial means to support her child, or, if she worked and couldn’t provide adequate childcare, Lebensborn would house an infant for at least a year in children’s homes that were built for this purpose. If the mother still was considered unqualified to take care of the child after a year, the agency placed the child in an SS foster home. Speculation that the Lebensborn program sponsored illicit sexual liasons, i. e., “breeding farms,” have proven to be unfounded as stated in the “Ru SHA Case,” Case 8 of the Nuremberg Trials. With the outbreak of war, German soldiers were encouraged to fraternize with native women of occupied countries as well as Germans. On 28 October 1939, Himmler sent a message to the members of the German Police and his SS men encouraging them to leave their mark in occupied territories not only as soldiers, but also as fathers ( Joshi 833). Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy for Party affairs, dealt with the topic of illegitimate births through the German News Agency ( DNB ) in the form of a letter to a German mother that was published in the 1939 Christmas edition of newspapers: “Thus, if racially impeccable young men who go into the battlefield leave behind children who transmit their blood to future generations, children of equally genetically healthy girls of equivalent age with whom marriage is for some reason not immediately feasible, this will secure the maintenance of this valuable national possession. Scruples, which in normal times might be justified, must be put aside” ( Joshi 835). Because of this fraternization between occupying forces and native women, Lebensborn homes were established in occupied Europe including the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and Norway (Henry and Hillel 207). If both parents received racial certification, then the foreign mothers were forced to enter Lebensborn maternity homes or were sometimes transported to homes in the Reich to have their children. These Lebensborn homes received an unstipulated number of children between two and six years old who were considered to have a suitable ethnic German background for “re-Germanization” for eventual 200 Margarete Landwehr placement in German foster homes. (These children were described as “Wiedereindeutschungsfähige.” When they learned that their illegitimate children were to be placed in foster homes by Lebensborn , most mothers refused to cooperate (Thompson 72).) One of the worst aspects of this program was the kidnapping of children deemed “racially valuable” (rassisch wertvoll) in the eastern occupied territories, particularly from Poland, Russia, and Ukraine after 1939, although children were also taken from France, the Benelux countries, Denmark and Norway. Although some were orphans whose parents died during military operations or who were executed by the occupation forces (Thompson 73), many were stolen from their parents. Between 1939 and 1945 about 250 children were kidnapped from Eastern Europe and brought to German Lebensborn homes (Schmitz-Koester 214). They were “reeducated” and then Lebensborn found foster or adoptive parents for them. A vigorous procreation campaign with intensive propaganda was established among German troops who occupied Denmark and Norway in spring 1940 as Nazi race theorists placed great value on Nordic women for reproductive purposes (Henry and Hillel 118). Himmler believed that Norwegians (and Danes), as direct descendants from the Vikings, were genuine “Aryans,” genetically predisposed to being physically and mentally strong and courageous; desirable traits for future German warriors (Macolo and Schumacher 72). Thus, many of the over 400,000 German soldiers who occupied Norway after the invasion on 9 April 1940 had relationships with Norwegian women (Macolo and Schumacher 73). In accordance with the slogan “After the victory on the battlefield comes the victory in the cradle,” the Germans began planning a mother and child welfare program primarily for unwed Norwegian mothers during the autumn of 1940 as few German fathers married their Nordic partners (Olsen 19). In February 1941 Himmler met with Reichskommissar Josef Terboven, the chief of the German civil administration in Norway; German SS leader in Norway Wilhelm Rediess; and Max Sollmann, the director of the Lebensborn program in Germany, and launched the Lebensborn program in Norway. The first Lebensborn home opened near Oslo in August 1941 and nine to ten maternity homes were established in Norway, the most of any German occupied territory (Olsen 20). As in Germany and other occupied countries, the mothers and children were cared for and the Germans paid for their medical expenses. (Kunst 2; Olsen 19—20). The European Human Rights Court has estimated that between the end of 1940 and 8 May 1945 approximately 10,000 to 12,000 children were born with Norwegian mothers and German fathers (Koop 224). Total estimates run as high as one million in Europe of such children who were born from German fathers (Grover 25). Hauntings of the Traumatic Past in Maas’s Film Two Lives 201 The German authorities considered all children of German fathers and Norwegian mothers as German citizens (Olsen 22). Thus, the Nazis deprived Norwegian courts of jurisdiction over cases in which the child’s father was German, and Norwegians could not adopt a child with a German father without the permission of the Lebensborn (Henry and Hillel 120). When their mothers agreed to give the children up for adoption, the Germans sent the children they deemed “less valuable” to Norwegian families and those regarded as “more racially valuable” to German families for adoption (Olsen 22). Hundreds of Norwegian women also sought refuge from hostile families and neighbors, who despised them for fraternizing with the enemy, in Lebensborn homes in Germany (Henry and Hillel 120). Most abandoned their babies willingly or unwillingly there. Because of their “racial quality,” Nazi families eagerly adopted these babies. Between 1943 and 1945 about 200 to 250 children arrived in Germany from Norway (Schmitz-Koester 215). Vidkun Quisling’s wartime regime in Norway played a significant role in this aspect of the Norwegian Lebensborn program. No other occupied country worked with the Germans so well in this program as his collaborationist government. Sverre Riisnæs, the Norwegian Minister of Justice, signed an agreement with the Germans that essentially legalized the kidnapping of children and their transfer to Germany (Henry and Hillel 125). German and Norwegian postwar societies shunned Lebensborn children or krigsbarn (war children) and their mothers. It took decades for West German society to accept illegitimate children and to view them as morally and legally equal to legitimate ones (Schmitz-Koester 220). They often suffered from humiliation, insults and badgering because of their illegitimate birth, not their Lebensborn origins ( SK 220). In Norway, Lebensborn mothers were stereotyped as “Deutschenflittchen,” as indecent, and were regarded as betraying their country for voluntarily having sexual relations with an enemy soldier. About 14,000 women were arrested after the war and 5,000 were interned in camps where there was forced labor (Koop 222; Olsen 26). After the war, many with German boyfriends were “punished” for fraternizing with the enemy by having their hair cut off, losing their jobs, and / or being ostracized from their communities and forced to leave (Ericsson and Ellingsen 97). Some even were tarred and feathered or had a swastika cut or burned into their foreheads. Norwegian Lebensborn children also suffered humiliation and abuse. Orphans sent to Norwegian orphanages were sometimes ridiculed and sexually abused (Kammerer). The hostile attitude of the Norwegian government and some Norwegians towards the Lebensborn children was evident during the first European meeting for child relief and aid after the war. At this meeting, Norway was the only country that publically portrayed the children of German soldiers as a specific problem and as objects of national and local hatred, contempt, and suspicion 202 Margarete Landwehr (Simonsen 278). In an editorial in a daily paper, Lofotposten , from May 1945 one reads: “All these German children are bound to grow up and develop into an extensive bastard minority in the Norwegian people. By their descent they are doomed in advance to take a combative stance. They have no nation, they have no father, they just have hate, and this is their only heritage. They are unable to become Norwegians” (Ericsson and Ellingsen 94). However, in November 1947, under pressure from the Allies, the Norwegian government decided to bring back Lebensborn children with the help of the Red Cross in Germany and United Nations organizations. Of about 230 children, only 50 were brought back before the early 1950s. 24 were reported dead, 50 were not found, and 83 stayed in Germany as the authorities found them living under “good” conditions in German families or because they lived in the Russian zone, later the German Democratic Republic (Olsen 30). In the GDR some Lebensborn children, who had a right to passports from their mothers’ countries, were recruited from orphanages, along with others, by the Stasi (Staatsicherheitsdienst), the East German espionage agency, as spies. The Stasi sometimes gave those who were not Lebensborn offspring identities of Lebensborn children in order to acquire passports and infiltrate the countries of the Lebensborn mothers. In the latter case, the GDR Lebensborn children whose identities were “stolen” were prevented from investigating their origins in order to protect the false identity of the Stasi spy. The sending of spies with authentic or falsified Lebensborn identities to the West continued into the 1970s. The exact number of Stasi spies with stolen identities is unknown as most files were destroyed (Mascolo and Schumacher 73). Neither Stasi leader Erich Mielke, nor Markus Wolf, the director of the Stasi’s foreign operations, has admitted to this spy program (Mascolo and Schumacher 73). Not until after the Fall of the Berlin Wall did GDR Lebensborn children discover their identity and their mothers. In Two Lives , Vera, a woman who grew up in a GDR orphanage, takes on the identity of Katrine Evensen, a Lebensborn child, and is trained as a Stasi spy. She fakes an “escape” from the GDR to Norway, finds Katrine’s Norwegian mother Ase, and infiltrates herself into the Norwegian navy where she steals classified information, and, eventually, marries a Norwegian captain. Her deception is almost exposed when the real Katrine escapes from the GDR and arrives at her mother’s home in Norway, but is killed by a Stasi agent. This episode marks a double trauma for Vera who is brutally attacked by Katrine, yet is also indirectly responsible for her Doppelgänger’s murder. The death of this alter-ego also marks the “death” of Vera’s Stasi identity and Socialist beliefs and her eventual rejection of her Stasi mentor, who also served as a surrogate father to her. Decades later, after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, an investigation by the European Hauntings of the Traumatic Past in Maas’s Film Two Lives 203 Union that seeks compensation for Lebensborn children and mothers forces Vera, whom they believe to be Katrine, and Katrine’s mother Ase to testify in court. Vera’s false but convincing testimony triggers the revelation of her Stasi past and false identity that eventually ends her double life, but also alienates her from her chosen family. Thus, the film’s title, Two Lives , refers not only to Ase and her Lebensborn child and to Katrine and her alter ego Vera, but also to the two lives that Vera must lead: her secret past life as a former spy, which she cannot escape, and her everyday life as a Norwegian citizen. Severe trauma marks Vera’s existence, first as an orphan and then as a young recruit, who, under the control of the Stasi, witnessed their violence. The film, which filters events mostly through Vera’s perspective, does not portray her childhood, but does consist of two narratives in which memories of her Stasi past are intercut with scenes from her present life. In particular, the film narrative oscillates between an investigation into the discrimination and abuse of Lebensborn children and mothers by the European Union’s Human Rights Court with its eventual uncovering of the truth and Vera’s memories that are triggered by the investigation. These fragmented, but vivid flashbacks of her Stasi indoctrination, journey to Norway, deception, and alter-ego’s murder torment her not just because of her guilt regarding her past actions, but also from fear of the future consequences if these actions are discovered. Revelation of her secret past could destroy her relationship with her family and her life in Norway. Cinematic images and sound serve as a particularly appropriate medium in depicting these hauntings—both personal and collective—of the past. The use of montage, that is, the juxtaposition of past scenes, often depicted as the protagonist’s memories, with present ones, portrays an ever-present past lurking behind the everyday present. Vera’s detailed memories of her Stasi “life” and meeting with Katrine are portrayed as stark black and white film sequences. The grainy film stock constitutes a suitable means of portraying Vera’s flashbacks as it contrasts with “present” scenes in color, which enables viewers to distinguish between recollected past events and present ones. Such intercutting of scenes from the past into the present cinematically depicts the intrusion of her previous into her current life and the psychic splitting of traumatized survivors who live in two different worlds, the secret realm of the (past) trauma and their current, ordinary lives. Pierre Janet was the first to recognize dissociation, which Freud called “depersonalization,” as the mental mechanism responsible for this psychic splitting. Dissociation usually refers to a process or condition in which mental processes are separated from the conscious personality. For example, Janet describes a severe case of a young patient, Irene, who cared for her dying mother, yet, after her death had no conscious recollection of the death even though she automatically repeated her 204 Margarete Landwehr actions of caring for her mother after her death. In a similar vein, Freud wrote in 1936 that: “Depersonalization leads us to the extraordinary condition of double consciousness, which is more correctly described as a split personality” (Kolk and Hart 166). Irene’s amnesia of her mother’s death offers the most extreme case of dissociation, but a psychic split often manifests itself when someone has a sudden, inexplicably intense reaction to an occurrence that appears out of proportion to the event that triggered it. In such an instance, usually an aspect of an experience provokes an implicit (emotional or physical) memory of a past trauma, but may not activate a conscious memory of it. For instance, an adult who was sexually abused as a child may recoil from a sexual overture from his / her partner, but may not consciously remember the origins of his / her revulsion. Contemporary research has shown that dissociation of a traumatic experience occurs even as the trauma itself is happening. Most survivors report that they were / are automatically removed from the traumatic scene, that they look at it from a distance (Kolk and Hart 168). As Vera’s memories demonstrate, this psychic splitting can continue years, even decades after the trauma. The survivor lives these parallel lives simultaneously, because traumatic memory is, in a sense, timeless and ever-present, if not in consciousness, then in the recesses of the subconscious. Traditional psychoanalytical theories and recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and neurobiology that analyze the differences in the creation and recall of mundane and traumatic experiences offer valuable insights into Vera’s traumatic flashbacks. In “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart distinguish narrative memory from traumatic ones. They cite Janet who was the first to make the distinction between these two types of memory. Janet had claimed in 1928 that mundane experiences are integrated into one’s memory of the past, whereas traumatic ones may be remembered with great vividness, but often resist integration into one’s understanding of oneself and one’s life (Kolk and Hart 160). “Lack of proper integration of intensely emotionally arousing experiences into the memory system results in dissociation and the formation of traumatic memories” (Kolk and Hart 163). Thus, as Judith Herman observes in her landmark study Trauma and Recovery , the traumatic event is not transformed into a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into one’s life story, but is experienced as frozen in time: “It is as if time stops at the moment of trauma. The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciousness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep” (Herman 37). Herman further observes that this “encoding” of traumatic memories in the form of vivid sensations and images gives the traumatic memories a “heightened reality” (Herman 38). Hauntings of the Traumatic Past in Maas’s Film Two Lives 205 Gestalt psychology, cognitive psychology, and neurobiology elucidate these two very different ways of forming memories. In the early twentieth century, Gestalt psychology “emphasized that all experiences consist of integrated structures or patterns that must be apprehended as wholes rather than as their disconnected parts” (Kolk and Hart 170). It is now widely acknowledged that memory constitutes an active and constructive process and that remembering depends upon existing mental schemas. “A schema is formed on the basis of past experience with objects, scenes or events and consists of a set of (usually unconscious) expectations about what things look like and / or the order in which they occur” (Kolk and Hart, quoted in Mandler 263). Cognitive psychologist Daniel Schacter elaborates on this theory in his article “Implicit Memory”; Kolk and Hart summarize: “Only after an experience is placed in a meaningful context can inferences and suppositions about the meaning of an event be made” (170). In short, the mind organizes new information into preexisting patterns. The new science of neurobiology or neural networks supports this view and is based on the assumption that neurons work together to discriminate patterns (Kolk and Hart 171). Cognitive psychologists have drawn upon the theory of memory of Gestalt psychology in their explanation, important for this discussion, of why a survivor’s memory of a traumatic experience is, often, more accurate than that of a mundane one. On the one hand, everyday memories can become inaccurate when new ideas and information are combined with old knowledge to form flexible mental schemas (Kolk and Hart 171). (Much of the processing of incoming information generally remains outside of conscious awareness.) When a specific event or piece of information becomes integrated into a larger scheme, it is no longer accessible as an individual entity. Thus, memory can be distorted during the constant process of reworking or re-categorizing the specific memory into a schema. However, “[…] when there are problems with categorization [as in the case of traumatic experiences; my addition] because of difficulty in interpreting the nature of the incoming stimulus,” consciousness can be activated (Kolk and Hart 171). Thus, traumatic memories can become “fixed” in the mind and not altered in time. In studies on post-traumatic nightmares, for example, van der Kolk (1994) found that traumatic scenes were re-experienced again and again without modifications. Consequently, victims’ relived memories of traumatic experiences of ten, twenty, or thirty years ago in the form of flashbacks such as Vera’s were unchanged. However, a trauma that was experienced during childhood, such as Vera’s abandonment as a baby and any abuse she may have experienced in the orphanage, either will not be remembered or remembered differently from a trauma that one experiences as an adult. Recent research shows that chronic amnesia usually occurs after 206 Margarete Landwehr repeated traumatization in childhood whereas hypermnesia (vivid or detailed memories) is more common after one-time traumatic events, particularly in adults (Kolk and Hart 173). Drawing upon recent discoveries in neurobiology, cognitive psychologists can understand why certain traumatic experiences, particularly those in childhood, are not remembered. They have identified three ways of encoding information in the central nervous system ( CNS ): inactive, iconic and symbolic / linguistic, which, in turn, reflect various stages of CNS development. As they mature, children shift from primarily sensorimotor (motoric action), to perceptual or iconic representations to symbolic and linguistic modes of organizing mental experience. In particular, whether as a child or an adult, when someone is exposed to a severe traumatic experience, that is, a frightening, often life-threatening event outside of ordinary human experience, one experiences intense arousal, strong emotions that can interfere with proper information processing and that, consequently, “fix” memories (Kolk and Hart 173). Thus, “the experience cannot be organized on a linguistic level and this failure to arrange the memory in words and symbols leaves it to be organized on a somatosensory (corporeal) or iconic level: as somatic sensations, behavioral reenactments, nightmares and flashbacks” (Kolk and Hart 172). Children, who tend to feel more helpless than adults when confronted with an event outside their control, will more frequently react in this manner; however, depending on the intensity and duration of the trauma, adults can react in a similar way. Such implicit memories, whether emotional or physiological, are not accessible to the conscious part of the mind yet often control one’s behavior. As van der Kolk has observed, “[…] the rational, executive brain, the mind […] has a very limited capacity to squelch sensations, control emotional arousal, or change fixed action patterns” (Kolk 2006, 281). Thus, it appears likely that Vera’s inability to talk about her dishonorable past and the horrific death of an innocent young woman may stem from a physiological incapacity to formulate into words, into a narrative, the traumatic events of her previous existence. Van der Kolk (2006) has demonstrated that reminders of traumatic experiences activate brain regions that support intense emotions and decrease activation in the CNS regions that are involved in inhibition of emotions and in the translation of experience into language. Therefore, when one is reliving a trauma, there is a deactivation in an area of the left anterior prefrontal cortex called Broca’s area, which is the expressive center in the brain that enables one to communicate what one is thinking and feeling. Furthermore, under stress, one often reverts to a fixed habit in confronting a crisis. For example, in Two Lives , when Vera’s secret life as a spy threatens to be exposed, she reverts to her usual response in a crisis and contacts her Stasi superior for instructions on how to handle her dilemma instead of confessing to her family. Only when Hauntings of the Traumatic Past in Maas’s Film Two Lives 207 a decades-old television interview with the real Katrine surfaces is Vera forced to admit her deception to them and confess the truth. Finally, it is common knowledge that traumatic memories are activated by triggers, experiences that contain some similarity to the traumatic event, and are believed to be mediated through neural pathways that originate in the locus coeruleus in the brain. This part of the brain serves as the “alarm bell” of the CNS , which usually goes off only in situations of threat, but, in traumatized survivors, it is likely to respond in any triggering situation. Animal research has demonstrated that once the memory tracts have been activated under conditions of severe stress, subsequent high-intensity stimuli will preferentially travel along the same neural pathways and activate the memories that were laid down under similar conditions (Kolk and Hart 173). It is likely that in people, as in animals, long-term reinforcement of these neural connections made during intense hyperarousal is at the core of repetitive, fixed, intrusive reliving of traumatic memories when survivors find themselves in a state that resembles the traumatic episode (174). In some traumatized individuals only one aspect of a traumatic event can trigger a strong response. Triggers of an explicit (conscious) or implicit (emotional, physical) memory of a trauma include the following: The survivor is in the same location or one similar to the site of the trauma or hears a sound or melody or smells an odor that was present during the traumatic event. The survivor witnesses an action that, in some way, resembles the traumatic event. To sum up, memories are reactivated when a person is exposed to a situation or to a specific aspect of a situation (location, sounds, smell, etc.) or is in a somatic state reminiscent of the one when the original traumatic memory was stored. The most significant and intense triggering episode in the film centers on the discovery of the real Katrine’s existence and arrival in Norway, which leads to the revelation of her murder and Vera’s involvement and deception. An EU investigator who is involved in the Lebensborn case discovers a tape of a television news report in which the real Katrine Evensen, who escaped the GDR , is interviewed. With this discovery, Vera, whose name means truth, is forced to reveal her deception to her family. Her ability to break her long silence and finally narrate her story suggests the possibility of growth through acknowledging her traumatic past and true identity. As van der Kolk and Ducey observe in “The Psychological Processing of Traumatic Experience,” a sudden and passively endured trauma is relived repeatedly, until a person learns to remember simultaneously the affect and cognition associated with the trauma through access to language” (271). Indeed, the discovery of the tape and its viewing by Vera’s family triggers memories of her involvement with Katrine’s murder and its cover-up and compels Vera to reveal her Stasi past. This confession also enables her to act in an independent and responsible manner. Instead of 208 Margarete Landwehr following instructions from her former Stasi boss, her usual response when her past threatens to be exposed, she chooses an ethical course of action, that will ultimately destroy her familial relationships, but that also demonstrates a free, authentic expression of her true self. At the film’s conclusion, Vera has decided not to cooperate with the Stasi’s plan to send her to Cuba, but to turn herself in to the Norwegian authorities and reveal the truth. Yet this noble attempt to integrate her past life into her present one is tragically cut short when she dies, like her alter ego, at the hands of the Stasi. Her car brakes do not function as they, apparently, have been tampered with. Her vehicle veers off a steep road and bursts into flames. Vera’s vain attempts to stop the car’s ever faster trajectory serve as an apt metaphor for her own lack of control over her fate, which is evident during the last weeks of her life. As the EU investigation progresses, her efforts to “put the brakes” on the inquiry are futile, and the exposure of her secret identity seems inevitable. Maas’s muted cinematic portrayal of Vera’s death as an ordinary, everyday occurrence contrasts starkly with the spectacle so common in Hollywood films and actually adds to the poignancy of the scene and the viewer’s empathy with Vera. Filmed from a distance, the burning car on the deserted country road underscores Vera’s isolated, lonely existence in which she never fully belonged to either her German past or her present life in Norway. She dies as she was born, without a family or a country. When she confessed her deception to her husband, daughter, and “mother” Ase, they reacted with (understandable) shock and reject her. Vera also has cast aside her Stasi identity by refusing to cooperate any longer with her Stasi mentor, who also served as a father figure. Katrine’s and Vera’s lives reflect that of many wartime orphans just as Ase’s fate represents the lives of many Lebensborn women and partners of German occupying forces. Thus, these individual tragedies represent the collective wartime and postwar suffering of some women and children in occupied territories. Vera’s and Katrine’s life stories reflect a much larger narrative of unacknowledged and ungrieved loss and collective silence about shameful, communal “sins” that are exposed in the EU investigation. Vera’s public testimony of her (albeit falsified) past as a Lebensborn child mirrors a collective narrative of the past and offers the possibility of restitution for past communal “sins.” (One of the goals of the EU investigation is to pay reparations to Lebensborn mothers and children.) The return of the traumatic past that haunts Vera and Ase spans two generations and three political states—Nazi Germany, the German Democratic Republic, and democratic Norway. The EU investigation uncovers not only the Nazi Lebensborn program, but also the reprehensible treatment of Norwegian mothers and their children by the Norwegian government and some of its citizens after World War II . Furthermore, the GDR exploited Lebensborn children Hauntings of the Traumatic Past in Maas’s Film Two Lives 209 and other orphans in service of the state as spies. However, the mistreatment of Lebensborn mothers (and some children) is not limited to Norway, the GDR , and Nazi Germany. The revelation of the Lebensborn program and the postwar abuse of its women and their offspring also indict all wartime, collaborative governments and point to a collective need to come to terms with their past. The EU investigation with its testimony, news coverage, and reparations to victims portrays a collective obligation to confront national guilt, to admit governmental and communal responsibility for reprehensible deeds and / or neglect, and to offer an ethical response, in this case restitution to the victims. Moreover, the indoctrination and exploitation of Lebensborn offspring (and other orphans) as Stasi spies serve not only as the final chapter of the Lebensborn program, but also as a haunting repetition of the past. In particular, Vera’s Stasi involvement serves, in some aspects, as a replay of her mother’s past. In both instances, children (or women) were exploited by totalitarian regimes and given new identities for a political goal. The Lebensborn project was to increase the so-called “Aryan” population of the Third Reich; Lebensborn children, whether kidnapped or not, were to adopt a new German identity. In a similar way, the Stasi indoctrinated orphans to embrace the state as their family and to give up their identities in order to serve as spies abroad. In both instances, secrets of the past haunt individuals as well as societies. The film’s portrayal of an EU investigation into the abuse of Lebensborn children (and mothers) is based on an historical event. In 2007, the European Court of Human Rights ( ECHR ) heard the merits of the case of Thiermann and Others vs. Norway. Werner Hermann Thiermann and six other war children ( krigsborn ) born between 1940 and 1945 of Norwegian mothers and German fathers had filed a complaint that centered on the discrimination against them and the legislation regarding war children that Norway instituted in the five years immediately following the war (Grover 25—26). On 9 July 1945, the Norwegian government had set up a “War Children’s Committee” to examine the possibility of deporting the Norwegian war children and their mothers to Germany vs. integrating them into Norwegian society (Grover 27). In the autumn of 1945 the Committee’s report recommended against deportation and, instead, proposed a public education campaign to foster an accepting climate in Norway towards these mothers and children. In particular, a “War Children’s Act” would allow government assistance for the children. But the Norwegian government failed to implement these recommendations and justified this decision by arguing that such government assistance would draw attention to the children, which would not be in their best interest (Grover 27—28). However, as Sonja Grover argues, “sometimes the failure to advocate for the basic human rights of a vulnerable group is, ironically allegedly justified using rights rationales and rhetoric (i. e., 210 Margarete Landwehr that children’s rights / best interests will allegedly be better protected by not intervening to provide special protection as drawing too much attention to the identified group of children may further stigmatize them […])” (28). Grover further argues that “special protective measures, for example, for especially vulnerable child groups, serve to reduce the children’s marginalization by the government’s demonstrating to the community at large the positive duty of the society for the children’s well-being and inclusion” (28—29). Initially the war children had filed a lawsuit in 1999 against the Norwegian government in which they claimed that Norway had violated their human rights by failing to protect them from inhumane and degrading treatment (Grover 26). They were unsuccessful in attaining a favorable outcome. The Oslo City Court ruled on 16 November 2001 that their European Convention rights were not violated prior to 1953 because Norway was not a party to the European Convention of Human Rights until 1953 (Grover 26). The complainants appealed to the Norwegian Borgating High Court, which again ruled on 21 June 2002 that the case was inadmissible and rejected their claim that they suffered continuing European Convention violations (Grover 27). Finally, they brought their case to the ECHR , which decided on 8 March 2007 that the case was inadmissible for a hearing on the grounds that the complainants failed to exhaust domestic (state) law remedies. The ECHR accepted the Norwegian government’s “best interests of the child” rationale. However, as Grover points out, in earlier cases the ECHR commonly rejected such justifications for government non-intervention and failure to protect vulnerable children (29). Furthermore, systemic “persecution” and “degrading treatment” of war-affected civilians, especially children, are prohibited under international law and considered international crimes under the Rome Statute (Grover 30). Finally, Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights does not admit any time limits on the guilt of government delegates (and others) who have committed serious violations of citizen rights such as “crimes against humanity” (Grover 30). Why did all three courts fail to acknowledge the Lebensborn children’s valid claim of restitution for violation of their human rights? Was the legal argument based on a (deeper) motive to dismiss the reprehensible governmental neglect and maltreatment of these children and their mothers? Acknowledgement of a shameful past, whether in the form of an official history or as collective memory, often doesn’t occur for a generation or more. In the case of Lebensborn children and women in Norway it took over forty years for an official recognition of their poor treatment and the need for reparations by the Norwegian government. It was not until 2000 that the Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik apologized on behalf of Norway for its discriminatory legislation and policies in the immediate postwar years and for later governments’ Hauntings of the Traumatic Past in Maas’s Film Two Lives 211 lack of protective intervention. Although a compensation system was set up for individual war child victims, the Norwegian courts did not find the Thiermann case legally admissible (Grover 32). (One can compare this to the several generations that passed before there was an official recognition by the United States government of its shameful treatment of Native Americans, African-Americans as slaves, or Japanese-Americans who were interned in camps during World War II .) Even the ECHR itself acknowledged that Norwegian public officials, particularly clergymen and doctors, publicly denounced the war children and claimed that they were mentally and genetically defective and potential Nazi sympathizers (Grover 32). This collective “repression” of violent or other reprehensible deeds occurs both in official historical narratives, such as history textbooks, museum exhibits, or legal proceedings (for example, the Lebensborn cases), as well as in collective memory, as portrayed in works of popular culture such as films, television programs, or works of art. In order to explain this social process, I will examine the evolving views of historians regarding the distinctions between history and collective memory and then analyze explanations for this biased narrative in both. In his essay “Collective Memory,” James Wertsch distinguishes between history and collective memory (127). (Wertsch emphasizes that his descriptions of the two genres refers to “tendencies” or “aspirations” rather than “ironclad attributes.”) If history tends to be “objective” and distanced from a particular perspective, and differentiates past from present, then collective memory is more likely to be “subjective,” to reflect a committed perspective and to link the past with the present. (Wertsch’s use of quotation marks acknowledges that there is no purely objective viewpoint; conversely, a “subjective” view is often based on facts. Rather, he is presenting the two genres of narrative as on opposite ends of a continuum.) Wertsch emphasizes that a historical narrative should not reflect any particular social framework, whereas collective memory portrays a particular group’s framework. According to Wertsch, collective memory often consists of unquestionable “heroic narratives,” simple, unilinear stories that usually put the group in a positive, heroic light. In order to understand Wertsch’s concept of heroic narratives, one must grasp his distinction between specific narratives and schematic narrative templates. Wertsch defines specific narratives as the “stock of stories” that shapes a society (128). Schematic templates, on the other hand, are schematic as they “concern abstract, generalized functions,” such as the generalized functions of characters and elements of plot that the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp analyzed in fairy tales. A template consists, according to Wertsch, of “abstract structures that underlie an entire set of specific narratives” (129). These templates are specific to particular narrative traditions (such as national narratives), are closely 212 Margarete Landwehr linked to a group’s (or nation’s) identity, and operate at a level of “deep collective memory”. For example, American narratives often contain the underlying template of the “mystique of Manifest Destiny,” whereas the central narrative of Russian collective memory embodies “the expulsion-of-foreign-enemies” template, which has had a powerful influence on the state-sponsored official history of Soviet-era and post-Soviet Russia (Wertsch 131). The conservative nature of “deep memory” depicted in schematic national templates suggest that these narratives offer a distinct way of representing the past as opposed to specific memories (Wertsch 132). For example, the official history of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact has remained intact despite the discovery of archival information that contradicts the official story. In a similar way, the Manifest Destiny template justifies the US government’s appropriation of land from indigenous inhabitants. In a similar vein, David W. Blight discusses the differences between history and collective memory that focuses on the question of communal identity and the need for a heroic national narrative. Blight claims that “if history is shared and secular, memory is often treated as a sacred set of absolute meanings and stories, possessed as the heritage or identity of a community” (242—43). This memory “carries the more immediate authority of community membership or family experience” and has an “emotional” appeal as opposed to history’s more “intellectual” attraction (243). Craig W. Blatz and Michael Ross appear to question these distinctions between history and collective memory in their essay “Historical Memories.” They claim “historical memories are skewed” partly because children and adults “are presented with selective and biased depictions of the past. Educators, religious leaders, politicians, and media play an important role by influencing the knowledge available.” Historians employ the term “presentism” when explaining these biased depictions of the past. As a consequence, the official history of a nation or people will “justify and glorify the actions of their own national, ethnic, and religious groups. Episodes that highlight the superiority of the present group are emphasized; whereas episodes potentially damaging to the group’s image are deemphasized or omitted” (224). Blatz and Ross argue that this selective presentation of history occurs not only in works of popular culture (films, legends, television programs, novels), but also in official narratives such as school textbooks, museum exhibits, or legal cases. For instance, older American history books failed to mention the American government’s poor treatment of Native Americans and the appropriation of their land and the slaves’ forced abduction from their homes and the abusive conditions of their servitude. Facts are distorted or eliminated in historical narratives in order to present the “in-group” in a more favorable light. For example, only in the past few months of 2016 have Hauntings of the Traumatic Past in Maas’s Film Two Lives 213 prestigious universities admitted to their holding and selling of slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I agree with Blatz and Ross’s argument that the same bias is operating in both history and collective memory (as presented in works of popular culture). However, Wertsch’s concept of a heroic narrative as well as the idea of “presentism” offer a convincing explanation of the apparent collective amnesia of the Quisling government’s collaboration with the Nazi occupation forces in the Lebensborn program or the Norwegian government’s not acknowledging its culpability (until 2000) in the horrific treatment of the Lebensborn women and children in the postwar era. As with other official histories, the heroism of the resistance movement against the occupation forces is emphasized whereas the details of Norwegian collaboration are expunged from or minimized in national histories. (One can make the same statement about official French history minimizing the Vichy Regime’s collaboration with the Nazi regime, or the Japanese government’s refusal to publicly acknowledge and apologize for the exploitation of “comfort women” in occupied territory by its soldiers.) Thus, in the heart of Oslo there exists a museum that documents the Norwegian Resistance Movement during the German occupation that supports the “heroic narrative” of the underground fight against the occupation forces. Indeed, Syne Corell points out that Norway’s “master narrative” as a “nation in resistance” against the German occupation hardly mentions the fate of the Norwegian Jews who were deported to camps. A similar explanation can be made for the denial of the brutal treatment of Lebensborn victims. Both the Lebensborn program and the deportation of Jewish Norwegians remind one of Quisling’s collaborationist government and undermine Norway’s heroic narrative. A study done by Norwegian psychiatrists in the postwar era that intended to explain quislingism (Norwegian collaboration with the Nazis) reveals the mechanisms of this collective repression of reprehensible behavior and the emphasis of positive traits inherent in Wertsch’s heroic narratives and in historians’ concept of “presentism.” A newly liberated Norway regarded the legal settlement of the collaborators as one of its most urgent tasks in the postwar era. Most quislings or collaborators were members of the Norwegian National Socialist Party (Nasjonal Samling or NS). The NS was a legal, but small political party, which became the only legal political party during the German occupation. It is estimated that a total of only 60,000 people (about two percent of the Norwegian population) were members of this party during the occupation (Gioever 268). In the postwar reckoning with collaborators, the Norwegian government focused on NS members, propagandists, SS volunteers, informers, and Norwegian women who “fraternized” with Germans. (The informers had disclosed crucial information on the resistance whereas the Norwegian SS was comprised of 6,000 young 214 Margarete Landwehr men who volunteered for military service mostly on the eastern front [Gioever 268]). At the first annual meeting of the Norwegian Psychiatric Association after World War II on 4 September 1945, the chairman Gabriel Langfeldt presented the “most pressing” tasks for Norwegian psychiatry, which included: “Scientific investigations of the traitors, especially informers, SS volunteers, members of the Hird (a paramilitary suborganization of the NS , similar to the German SA ; my addition), torturers and fraternizers” (Gioever 269). Langfeldt viewed psychiatry as the only science capable of explaining Nazism and collaboration. Studies were done on male Nazi party members, female collaborators, SS volunteers, and “fraternizers.” The study on the NS members concluded that mental disease was much more prevalent among traitors than the average population (273), whereas the SS volunteers were found to be healthy, but under the dangerous influence of unscrupulous propaganda (276). Of the 310 “fraternizers” tested by Dr. Augusta Rasmussen, only 3 % of the women were considered to have a normal IQ , 37 % were considered “dull,” and as much as 60 % were labeled as “retarded” (278). In a similar manner, Ornulv Odegard, who acted as an expert advisor on the Government policy concerning the “War children issue,” stated that a high proportion of this group had mental defects “that not even the most thoughtful upbringing or the best of environments can improve much” (280). Odegard’s estimate of the feeblemindedness among the fraternizers was also extremely high, about twothirds (280). As Gioever points out, the Norwegian project that sought to reveal the mental “defectiveness” of most traitors had a questionable methodology that didn’t hold up to later scrutiny, which may have been the reason for the missing final report. In contrast to this study, similar Danish studies on traitors found that the frequency of abnormal mental conditions among traitors did not exceed what one might expect of an average population (285). One of these studies concluded that the collaborator problem was a “predominantly social” one. Why did Norwegian psychiatrists attempt to demonstrate the viability of their working hypothesis that a large percentage of collaborators were psychiatric cases? Gioever speculates that, when the relatively high membership figures of the Norwegian National Socialist Party was revealed, it may have been considered a threat to the new Norwegian democracy. (As a matter of fact, Norway stood alone among the former collaborationist governments to prosecute almost every single member of its Nazi party [Giover 288]). However, if it could be proven that the traitors were insane, then they could be regarded no longer as a dangerous element against democracy, but rather, as a problem for the psychiatric health service. The interesting case of the popular Norwegian author and Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun suggests another explanation. During the war Hamsun expressed his Nazi sympathies and even wrote an obituary a day after Hitler’s death prais- Hauntings of the Traumatic Past in Maas’s Film Two Lives 215 ing Hitler as a “great statesman.” Although the Hamsun case legally would have been clearly one of collaboration, he was never sentenced because forensic psychiatrists Gabriel Langfeldt and Ornulv Odegard declared that he had “poorly developed or chronically weakened mental capacities” (Giover 287). It has been suggested that Hamsun’s diagnosis may have been motivated more by political concerns than psychiatric criteria (Giover 288). However, I would like to suggest that declaring this beloved author and other Norwegian collaborators as mentally insane or, at least, defective, served another purpose. Hamsun’s diagnosis and the Norwegian psychiatric studies that linked collaboration to insanity also may have served to exculpate the general Norwegian population for any responsibility in the collaboration, because the collaborators and Norwegian “fraternizers” and their children functioned as scapegoats upon which Norwegians could project any residual sense of guilt for the Quisling government. The heroic narrative of the Norwegian resistance could remain intact and any counternarratives of collaboration or betrayal could be explained by the insanity defense. Thus if collaborators and fraternizers were regarded as not “normal” Norwegians, but defective both mentally and morally, then the rest of the population could be excused from any responsibility for the “sins” of their nation. In the case of the fraternizers and their offspring, it is a familiar tactic of blaming the victims that also rationalizes treating them poorly. Furthermore, could the demonizing, brutal treatment and neglect of fraternizers and their offspring, painful reminders of the Norwegian collaborationist government, serve as a cathartic purging of the country’s own dark past? One could pose the same question in other occupied countries such as France, in which Germans’ lovers were publicly ridiculed and tormented. However, the demands of Lebensborn children for recognition of past maltreatment and the need for reparations as well as works of popular culture such as Hippe’s novel and its film adaptation confirm that past trauma continues to haunt the survivors on an individual and collective level. As Faulkner claimed, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” Works Cited Blatz, Craig W., and Michael Ross. “Historical Memories.” Memory in Mind and Culture � Ed. Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch. New York: Cambridge UP , 2009. 223—37. Blight, David W. “The Memory Boom: Why and Why Now? ” Memory in Mind and Culture . Ed. Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch. New York: Cambridge UP , 2009. 238—51. Clay, Catrine, and Michael Leapman. Master Race: The Lebensborn Experiment in Nazi Germany . London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995. 216 Margarete Landwehr Corell, Syne, “The Solidity of a National Narrative: The German Occupation in Norwegian History Culture.” Nordic Narratives of the Second World War: National Historiographies Revisited . Ed. Henrik Stenius, Mirja Oesterberg and Johan Ostling. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2011. 101—26. Drolshagen, Ebba D. “Besatzungskinder and Wehrmachtskinder: Germany’s War Children.” Children of World War II : The Hidden Enemy Legacy . Ed. Kjersti Ericsson and Eva Simonsen. Oxford / New York: Berg, 2005. 229—48. Ericsson, Kjersti, and Dag Ellingsen. “Life Stories of Norwegian War Children.” Children of World War II : The Hidden Enemy Legacy . Ed. Kjersti Ericsson and Eva Simonsen. Oxford / New York: Berg, 2005. 93—111. Gioever, Oyvind. “The Psychiatry of Quislingism: Norwegian Psychiatric Research on the Collaborators of World War II .” Science in Context 17.3 (2004): 267—92. Grover, Sonja. “The Lebensborn Children of Norway and the Silencing of their Voices by an International Court: An Analysis of the 2007 European Court of Human Rights Decision in Werner Hermann Thiermann and Others v. Norway.” The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 5.8 (2010): 25—36. Harder, SS -Obersturmführer. “Übersicht über das Arbeitsgebiet der Abteilung C2 [Ru- SHA ] (Wiedereindeutschung).” Sept. 25, 1942. Misc. SS Files / SS -1597 / Box 5. Henry, Clarissa, and Marc Hillel. Of Pure Blood . Trans. Eric Mossbacher. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Janet, Pierre. L’évolution de la mémoire et la notion du temps . Paris: Cahine, 1928. Joshi, Vandana. “Maternalism, Race, Class and Citizenship: Aspects of Illegitimate Motherhood in Nazi Germany.” Journal of Contemporary History 46.4 (2011): 832—53. Kammerer, Steffi. “Verdammt, deutsch zu sein. Lebenslänglich Lebensborn : Wie die Kinder deutscher Besatzer in Norwegen unter ihrem Schicksal zu leiden hatten.” Süddeutsche Zeitung 7 July 2001. Web. 4 Jan. 2016. Kolk, Bessel van der. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma . New York: Random House, 2014. —. “The Body Keeps the Score: Memory and the Evolving Psychobiology of Post-traumatic Stress.” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 1.5 (1994): 253—65. —. “Clinical Implications of Neuroscience Research in PTSD .” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1071 (2006): 277—93. Kolk, Bessel van der, and Onno van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory . Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore / London: Johns Hopkins UP , 1995. 158—82. Kolk, Bessel van der, and Charles P. Ducey. “The Psychological Processing of Traumatic Experience: Rorschach Patterns in PTSD .” Journal of Traumatic Stress 2.3 (1989): 259—74. Koop, Volker. “Dem Führer ein Kind schenken: Die Ehe, satanisch.” Süddeutsche Zeitung 19 May 2010. Web. 4 Jan. 2016. Hauntings of the Traumatic Past in Maas’s Film Two Lives 217 Kunst, Lothar. “45 Jahre, kriegsbeschädigt: Über das Schicksal norwegischer Kinder deutscher Soldaten.” Zeit Online 11 Sept. 1987. Web. 4 Jan. 2016. Macolo, Georg, and Hajo Schumacher. “Kinder für Führer und Stasi.” Der Spiegel 25 (1997): 72—73. —. “Das ist wirklich bodenlos: Wie die DDR drei norwegischen Lebensborn Kindern ihre Biographie raubte.” Der Spiegel 25 (1997): 74—85. Mandler, J. M. “Categorical and Schematic Organization of Memory.” Memory—Organization and Structure . Ed. C. Richard Puff. New York: Academic, 1979. n. pag. Noakes, Jeremy, ed. Nazism 1919—1945, Vol. 4: The German Home Front in World War II . Exeter: Exeter UP , 1998. Olsen, Kare. “Under the Care of Lebensborn : Norwegian War Children and their Mothers.” Children of World War II : The Hidden Enemy Legacy . Ed. Kjersti Ericsson and Eva Simonsen. Oxford / New York: Berg, 2005. 15—34. —. Schicksal Lebensborn : Die Kinder der Schande und ihrer Mütter . Munich: Knaur, 2004. Puff, C. Richard, ed. Memory—Organization and Structure . New York: Academic, 1979. Schacter, Daniel. “Implicit Memory: History and Current Status.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 13.3 (1987): 501—18. Schmitz-Koester, Dorothee. “A Topic for Life: Children of German Lebensborn Homes.” Children of World War II : The Hidden Enemy Legacy . Ed. Kjersti Ericsson and Eva Simonsen. Oxford / New York: Berg, 2005. 213—28. Simonsen, Eva. “Children in Danger: Dangerous Children.” Children of World War II : The Hidden Enemy Legacy . Ed. Kjersti Ericsson and Eva Simonsen. Oxford / New York: Berg, 2005. 269—86. Thompson, Larry V. “ Lebensborn and the Eugenics Policy of the Reichsführer- SS .” Central European History 4.1 (1971): 54—77. Wertsch, James V. “Collective Memory.” Memory in Mind and Culture . Ed. Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch. New York: Cambridge UP , 2009. 117—37. Haunting Policework in Andreas Pittler’s Bronstein Detective Series 219 Haunting Policework in Andreas Pittler’s Bronstein Detective Series Joseph W. Moser West Chester University Abstract: Andreas Pittler depicts a haunting historical image of Vienna in his Inspektor David Bronstein detective series that reaches from the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in “Chuzpe” (2010) to the failed Nazi coup in 1934 in “Tacheles” (2008) and the Anschluss of 1938 in “Zores” (2012), as well as the end of the war and liberation by the Red Army in 1945 in “Charascho” (2014) to the time of the 1955 State Treaty in “Goodbye” (2015). All of these contextual events are narrated from the perspective of an Austrian-Jewish detective who continues to solve murders in the most difficult of times. Before the Anschluss the Jewish population accounted for about nine percent of Vienna’s population, and thus the context of a Jewish cop in Vienna before 1938 is both quite feasible and intriguing. Bronstein’s survival and return to Vienna in 1945 are a haunting reminder of the Holocaust and of the near complete destruction of Viennese Jewish culture. Keywords: Krimi, Andreas Pittler, Zores, Anschluss, Vienna 1938 Andreas Pittler is a trained historian who prior to writing fiction had made a name for himself as a writer of historical monographs. 1 The Bronstein detective series is his most successful literary oeuvre, but he continues to write other historical fiction, such as the recently published book Das Totenschiff (2016), which deals with a group of 800 Romanian Jews who tried to escape to Palestine on an overcrowded ship that was ultimately sunk with only one survivor. In his seven-part detective series featuring Oberst David Bronstein, Pittler depicts a haunting historical image of Vienna that reaches from the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in Chuzpe (2010) to the failed Nazi coup of 1934 in Tacheles (2008) and the Anschluss of 1938 in Zores (2012), as well as the end of the war and liberation by the Red Army in 1945 in Charascho (2014) to the time of the 1955 State Treaty in the final part of the series, Goodbye (2015). All of these 220 Joseph W. Moser contextualized novels are narrated from the perspective of an Austrian-Jewish detective who manages to solve murders in the most difficult of times. Pittler’s detective novels are characteristic of the early twenty-first century in the contemporary Austrian novel, since such historically accurate depictions of the cohabitation of Jews and non-Jews before and after the Holocaust would have been unthinkable in an Austrian Krimi even twenty-five years ago. Thirty years ago, the Austrian novel was still marked by Thomas Bernhard’s provocative texts, whose publication repeatedly led to public scandals, and which peaked in the 1984 confiscation of Bernhard’s novel Holzfällen . This confiscation represented a unique interference by the Austrian justice system into the freedom of speech of a writer. Even Bernhard’s roman à clef Auslöschung (1986), which examined the country’s Nazi past within the context of a single family’s history, caused a public stir that would be unimaginable today, as Austria has become more aware of its multicultural identity and more open and conscious of its past in the twentieth century ( Joseph Moser 129). The rejection of the myth of Austria as the first victim of Hitler’s aggression, whose unraveling for example in Robert Schindel’s novel Gebürtig (1992) still raised attention in the Austrian public a quarter of a century ago, is today nothing more than a nuanced and accepted historical understanding in Pittler’s detective novels Zorres and Charascho . Both works openly depict the virulent anti-Semitism in Austria before 1938 as well as the division of Austrian society at the time of the Anschluss into supporters and opponents of the Nazi regime. Bronstein’s survival and return to Vienna in 1945 are haunting reminders of the Holocaust and of the near complete destruction of Viennese Jewish culture. Vienna’s Jewish population prior to the Holocaust accounted for roughly nine percent of the population, making it the largest urban Jewish population in any German-speaking country. While two thirds managed to escape and survive, roughly a third was murdered in the Holocaust, leaving the city with only a few hundred Jews by 1943. Thus, the representation of a Jewish police detective in Vienna before 1938 is both quite feasible and intriguing. 2 Austrian Krimis have played a significant role within the genre of the Austrian novel of the last two decades. 3 The Simon Brenner hexaology by Wolf Haas represents one of the most important contemporary German-language crime fiction series with novels such as Komm süßer Tod (1998), Silentium (1999), Der Knochenmann (1997), and Das ewige Leben (2003), which were also adapted as films. Kommissar Brenner’s language as narrator, who addresses his readers with the informal German “du,” which simultaneously creates proximity and distance with his readers, underlines the social criticism and humor of an unrefined commissar and daredevil. 4 There are some similarities in this respect with David Bronstein, except that Brenner is not Jewish and thus not an outsider, but Haunting Policework in Andreas Pittler’s Bronstein Detective Series 221 an insider within his own country. Of course Brenner mostly operates in Austrian cities other than Vienna, and the Brenner hexalogy is not set in a historical context. The Bronstein series appears, however, within this context of a new creative Austrian crime fiction genre along with Eva Rossmann’s Mira Valensky series, which she has been publishing annually since 1999. The Valensky series accounts for eighteen such Krimis by 2016, ranging from Wahlkampf (1999) to Gut, aber tot (2016), of which Freudsche Verbrechen (2001) is the most important when comparing Rossmann’s Valensky series to Pittler’s Bronstein series. In Freudsche Verbrechen , the investigative journalist Mira Valensky follows up on the murder of an American student in Vienna’s Freud Museum, which ultimately uncovers a case of “Arisierung” (the Nazi term for seizing property from Jews by non-Jews) of a Viennese apartment building, and thus links history with the present. 5 This topic, which was quite difficult for many Austrians, was not touched upon in Austria until the 1990s when prominent cases of so-called “Arisierungen” of real estate and works of art were finally discussed in the broad public. By creating an Austrian-Jewish detective David Bronstein, who navigates a historically accurate context and defies many of the historical myths on which post-1945 Austria had been founded, Pittler clearly takes Austrian Krimis to the next level, a level where historical fiction is intertwined with a critical examination of the country’s past. 6 In Zores , which navigates a narrow time frame from 10 to 12 March 1938, the reader is immediately aware that Bronstein will not be able to practice his profession in Vienna much beyond 12 March 1938, the day the Nazis officially took over Austria. Furthermore, in the novels leading up to 1938, one is constantly wondering how much longer Bronstein will manage to survive in his job. In Charascho , Pittler brings Bronstein back to Vienna in 1945, which is rather unusual for an Austrian-Jew and serves as a reminder of how the Holocaust obliterated Austrian-Jewish culture in Vienna, and of how the city after 1945 was primarily shaped by a population who had more or less supported the Nazi regime. The resistance fighters in Austria were few and far between except for a few Communists, and this becomes quite obvious in Charascho as well. In creating the Bronstein figure, Pittler focuses not only on a minority figure, but also on an unusual story of a Holocaust survivor whose mere existence on Vienna’s police force after 1945 serves as a reminder of how the Holocaust nearly depleted Vienna’s Jewish population that was once had a significant presence within the city. Despite the history lessons that the Bronstein series provides, it is still primarily a detective series about an investigator whose professional integrity guides his life and work. In particular, he makes no distinction in the crimes he investigates on the basis of the ethnic or political background of the vic- 222 Joseph W. Moser tims and perpetrators. Reminiscent of Inspector Foyle in the British ITV series Foyle’s War , Bronstein investigates murder in a time in which political, genocidal, and war-related murder have become commonplace and where the work of a criminal investigator seems trivial, if not obsolete, and solving crimes seems impossible given the chaos of the times. By uncovering murder in such unusual times, both detectives remind readers and viewers that it should be perfectly normal for a detective to investigate a murder case, and thus it is not their work but the historical context that has gone askew. Of course, the main difference between Bronstein and Foyle is that Bronstein not only lives in a world that is crumbling around him, but also is targeted for his ethnic background. Bronstein, unlike Foyle, does not operate within the safe and stable context of the United Kingdom, but rather in a politically and legally most unstable period in Austria’s history. This article focuses on two novels from Pittler’s seven-part series: Zores (2012) and Charascho (2014), which deal with the events of 1938 and 1945 respectively. The novels set before 1938 all have Yiddish titles: Tacheles, Ezzes, Chuzpe, Tinnef, and Zores , which are all recognizable to Viennese readers today, as these words were absorbed into Viennese German before the Holocaust and have remained a part of the vocabulary. 7 Zores means troubles. Charascho —the title of the novel set in 1945—is Russian for “ OK , good.” The title reminds one of the fact that the Red Army was the liberator of Vienna, who brought an end to Nazism. The final novel in the series is called Goodbye (2015), in which Bronstein deals with the Allied occupation of Vienna as well as the withdrawal of the troops in 1955 following the state treaty, hence the English title. The period the Nazis named “Anschluss” (March 1938—April 1945) is characterized not only by a significant regime change and the obliteration of Austrian democratic institutions, but also the beginning of the end for all Austrian Jews as well as for people whom the Nazis deemed to be Jewish within their construct of legalized racial policies. Likewise, the liberation of Vienna by the Red Army is less of a “downfall” but rather an opportunity for a new beginning for the very few Austrian Holocaust survivors who were able and willing to return to their home country. This is an important distinction to make, as many Austrians still see the period from the end of the war to the State Treaty, i. e., 1945 to 1955, as the Besatzungszeit (the period of occupation) instead as a period of liberation from Fascism. 8 In Zores , it is abundantly clear to Bronstein that he is involved in a race against time in solving crimes as his investigations start on Thursday, 10 March 1938, one day before the evening during which Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg surrendered Austria to the Nazis. Bronstein investigates the murder of a major Nazi supporter by the name of Suchy—a fictional character—who has two major Austrian Nazis as rivals: Arthur Seyß-Inquart and Glaise Horstenau, who might Haunting Policework in Andreas Pittler’s Bronstein Detective Series 223 have had a motive to kill him. Other potential motives relate to Suchy’s devotion to his young male followers, whom he may have provided with ideological instruction, which leads to speculations about his sexual orientation. Finally, Suchy owned a cattle-trading business that involves the large-scale import of Hungarian cattle to the Viennese slaughter houses in St. Marx, thus undermining the local competition. Despite the unfolding political events, Bronstein continues to investigate Suchy’s murder, questioning many witnesses and people who may have had diverse motives or connections to Suchy. In fact, he continues his work as if the possible Nazi takeover of Austria would not affect him at all, but pursuing his work up until the last minute is the only way for him to maintain a certain level of normalcy in a time of chaos and uncertainty. One of the witnesses he interviews in his investigation tells him: “Ach, sehen Sie sich doch um, Herr Oberst. Hier geht doch alles den sprichwörtlichen Bach hinunter. Alles versinkt im Chaos. Die Regierung hat doch überhaupt nichts mehr unter Kontrolle. Das halbe Kabinett hört nur noch auf die Anweisungen aus Berlin, und die Beamtenschaft unternimmt alles in ihrer Macht Stehende, um sich auf die Seite der zu erwartenden Sieger zu schlagen. Für Österreich sind doch nur noch die Juden, ein paar unverbesserliche Monarchisten und vielleicht das Häuflein Kommunisten, das es in diesem Lande gibt” (67). Pittler’s novel makes clear that the majority of Austrians were not attached to Schuschnigg’s corporate state, as Bronstein meets characters who are joyfully anticipating the change in power. The historical irony that the Jews supported Schuschnigg’s corporate state out of fear of the Nazis and despite the corporate state’s own anti-Semitism does not go unnoticed in the novel. Schuschnigg’s Ständestaat —an authoritarian state modeled on Mussolini’s Italy—was not very popular because it failed to address current problems while denying people the freedom of democracy and crushing the Social Democrats, a potentially important ally against the Nazis. To many non-Jewish Austrians, the difference between Hitler’s and Schuschnigg’s fascism was not significant while the “Anschluss” to a Greater Germany seemed appealing to many. For Austrian Jews, however, the support of the corporate state was a matter of life and death, as there was no legalized anti-Semitism in Austria prior to the “Anschluss” to Nazi Germany. In depicting Bronstein’s investigation, Pittler uses Viennese dialect to both authenticate the situation and to show social class differences. The novel has a nine-page glossary at the end of the book to translate local terminology into High German. On 11 March 1938, the day of the evening when Schuschnigg resigned, Bronstein’s investigation takes him into Arthur Seyß-Inquart’s office— the man who would replace Schuschnigg as Chancellor briefly under the Nazis until Austria was incorporated into Germany, and who would later become a leading figure in Nazi Germany, ultimately tried and hanged in Nuremberg after 224 Joseph W. Moser the war. Seyß-Inquart’s assistant announces Bronstein: “A Itzig, Herr Doktor. Der traut si da her! ” (“Itzig” was a Nazi slur for Jew). The assistant tries to kick Bronstein out, but the latter counters: “Einen Augenblick, ja! So geht das nicht! […] das ist eine Mordermittlung, und da habe ich das Recht …,” to which the assistant replies: “A Jud hot ka Recht” (144). Beaten up and thrown out of the office Bronstein makes the following realization: “In Bronstein stieg erneut Panik auf. Es ging um seine Existenz, nicht nur um die Österreichs. Mit dem Fall Schuschniggs würde er auch fallen. Er wäre vogelfrei. Jeder könnte ihn niederschlagen, nicht nur ein verrotzter Nazi-Rohling” (147). Nevertheless, he continues his investigations and discovers that Schönberger another (fictional) Nazi killed Suchy because of internal power struggles within the party. Bronstein gets Schönberger to confess and wants to arrest him, but Schönberger tells him that Seyß-Inquart would be Chancellor by next week and that Bronstein would be incarcerated in the prison at Stein, while he would remain free. Nonetheless, Schönberger, who is actually somewhat unsure as to who is currently in power in Vienna on that day, takes flight from Bronstein who pursues him, until Schönberger is struck and run over by a streetcar. In a sense, justice is served, though the problems are just starting to mount for Bronstein, as it is evening now and Schuschnigg has surrendered Austria to Nazi Germany on the radio. It is too late for Bronstein to leave, so he goes home to wait for the morning train to Czechoslovakia. Zores concludes on Saturday, 12 March, only two days after Bronstein opened his investigation. On the radio, he hears the names of: “Hugo Jary, Anton Reinthaller, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Gegen all diese Leute hatte die Polizei noch bis vor wenigen Tagen ermittelt. Nun waren sie Minister” (222). Nazi criminals have become the leaders of a new Austria within Nazi Germany, and the honest cop Bronstein is on a train to Czechoslovakia. The novel ends with the line “Jsem obcan Ceskoslovenské republicky” (I am a citizen of the Czechoslovak Republic), which Bronstein memorized to escape to Czechoslovakia on a forged Czech passport, which his longtime friend and colleague Cerny, who is known to readers from previous novels, had provided him. This final scene seems like the obvious end of the Bronstein series with no indication of what might happen to Bronstein, but the series continues in the spring of 1945 with Charascho when Bronstein returns from exile in France to solve a murder that occurred in the final days of the war in Vienna when the city was already under attack from the advancing Red Army. Charascho is structured quite differently from Zores. While the latter unfolds quickly within a matter of two days in March 1938 with an obvious caesura caused by the Nazi takeover of Austria, Charascho presents two parallel narratives—that of the murderer, which starts during the battle for Vienna, and that of Haunting Policework in Andreas Pittler’s Bronstein Detective Series 225 Bronstein returning to Vienna two months later in May 1945. The reader knows from the onset who committed the crimes and where the murderer is hiding, and it is therefore Bronstein’s surprising return to and investigation in this wartorn city that is most fascinating, a city which is both home to him and alien after seven years of forced exile. Unlike in Zores there is no hurry to complete the investigation, in fact it seems that as the reconstruction of the city begins and the infrastructure starts to recover in rudimentary ways (resources for the police force such as basic transportation become available) that his work actually becomes more viable. What is similar to Zores for the reader is that Pittler describes a city in both novels which neither the author nor most of his readers experienced. His historically accurate depictions are largely possible because the years 1938 to 1945 are only barely Zeitgeschichte anymore. Today it is hard to imagine everyday life in Vienna in those days, since most readers only know the contemporary peaceful and prosperous city. As mentioned earlier, only three decades ago such a precise and realistic literary representation of 1938 and 1945 that shows Vienna from a very gloomy side, uncovering a haunting past, would have been taboo in Austrian literature. The temporal distance to this dark past, however, makes it possible for readers in Austria to appreciate Pittler’s descriptions of the past that do not adhere to any revisionist historical myths. Charascho delivers an interesting depiction of the long since outdated concept of the Stunde Null (zero hour). The novel starts out with a prologue set in Vienna on Thursday, 12 April 1945, in which Max Burger, a Nazi criminal and former Auschwitz guard who is making his way through and ultimately out of Vienna, is covering his traces and murdering potential witnesses. At the same time in Besançon, France, Bronstein decides to follow a group of Czech resistance fighters who want to return to Czechoslovakia. The continuities represented in the fact that Burger’s crimes were committed in the final days of Nazi rule and uncovered in the newly reconstituted Austria underscore how the concept of Stunde Null does not work historically. There was no easy way for Austrian Jews to return to Vienna in 1945, but through his connections to the Czech resistance, Bronstein can make his way back. Bronstein climbs over rubble to reach his apartment in Vienna’s Walfischgasse and adapts to life in a city to which he has become somewhat estranged. The city’s destruction and the food rationing concern him less than the closure of all Kaffeehäuser —an indication that a lack of coffee in Vienna is the real sign of the apocalypse. He returns to work as a detective for the Viennese police, now under the direction of the Communist Heinrich Dürmeyer. Burger on the other hand finds it increasingly difficult to hide in a country where nobody wants to be officially associated with the crimes committed by the Nazis, and he finds refuge in Fischamend, a town just a few kilometers outside of Vienna. Bronstein and his colleagues manage to apprehend 226 Joseph W. Moser Burger by December 1945, but Burger is not tried in Austria, because too many people in high places fear that their paths may have crossed Burger’s during the Nazi period. Since Burger is also wanted in Poland, he is extradited to bring him to justice without disrupting the new careers of former minor Nazis in Vienna. Again this novel demonstrates how there was no Stunde Null , but rather a transition, in which many so-called minor supporters of the previous regime adapted to the new circumstances. Charascho closes with Bronstein spending Christmas with his friends in Czechoslovakia. His temporary departure from Vienna in December 1945 is very different from the one in March 1938, because he knows that he will be back this time, but Vienna no longer feels like home. Charascho reminds the readers that the few Austrian Jews who survived the Holocaust were not invited back, and that the new leaders of the country had no interest in discussing the Holocaust nor did they want to atone for it. While Bronstein ekes out a living for himself in postwar Vienna, he is now even lonelier than before, as the city’s Jewish population was obliterated while the perpetrators of the genocide were not brought to justice. The Bronstein series does not end in 1945 even though its protagonist retires from his job, but continues on to 1955, which was another milestone in Austrian history when the State Treaty was signed and Austria became a neutral country modeled on Switzerland. The four Allied occupation forces withdrew in 1955, which has been mythologized in Austrian history and is also one of the major differences between postwar West Germany and Austria. Aptly entitled Goodbye: Inspektor Bronsteins Abschied (2015), this last novel in the Bronstein series deals with the final months of the Allied occupation of Austria, a historically unique situation during the Cold War in the mid-1950s because Americans and Soviets were still collaborating in Vienna’s First District, a district jointly administered by the four Allied powers. Yet this required collaboration between two rival armed forces creates the political context for a murder that Bronstein solves in this last novel. Former police chief Vinzenz Seiser, who had been a member of the KPÖ (Communist Party of Austria) and close to the Soviets in his home district of Favoriten (Soviet zone at the time), is found dead. Because his body is found in an unlikely location in the American zone the police decide not to formally pursue the matter, but Inspektor Zedlnitzky who may not officially investigate the case asks Bronstein to investigate on his own, which leads to him solving the case and confronting the murderer, who is the local chief of the American CIA � Just as the foreign ministers of the four Allied countries arrive to sign the State Treaty at the Belvedere Palace, Bronstein has a chance to take decisive action by dropping a flower pot on the perpetrator, who is not killed but injured. Much as with the perpetrator in Zores who is run over by a trolley , justice is served on a person who would not have been tried by the authorities in charge at the time. Haunting Policework in Andreas Pittler’s Bronstein Detective Series 227 Pittler’s novels are a refreshing change in historical fiction from Austria, as his books do not shy away from challenging his readers to confront the darker days of Vienna’s (and Austria’s) past. The fact that his books have been selling well in the Austrian market indicates that Austrian readers are ready to confront their history more openly, and that contemporary readers appreciate detailed historical narratives, even within a fictional framework, about what remains the most difficult part of Austria’s history. Notes 1 See Bruno Kreisky and Zwischen Feder und Fahne: Schriftsteller und Nationalismus as examples of his early non-fiction writing. 2 According to Jonny Moser there were 167,249 Jews in Vienna on 13 March 1938, two days after the Anschluss ( Jonny Moser 16). 3 See McChesney for a detailed discussion of Austrian Krimis. 4 See Nindl 13 for a detailed discussion of Wolf Haas’s use of language. 5 See O’Brien for a detailed analysis of Freudsche Verbrechen � 6 In their critical stance vis-a-vis Austria’s past Andreas Pittler’s Krimis can be compared to those by Wolf Haas and Eva Rossman ( Joseph Moser 138—39). “Tacheles reden” means to speak frankly about an issue; “Ezzes” means “good advice”; “Chuzpe” is “audacity”; and “Tinnef” is “trash.” The concept of “downfall” was recently reintroduced into German-language culture via Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Der Untergang (2004), which chronicled the final hours in Hitler’s bunker and thereby perpetuated the notion of 1945 as the year of Germany’s “downfall.” Works Cited Foyle’s War . Dir. Anthony Horowitz. Perf. Michael Kitchen. ITV , London, 2002—2015. Television. McChesney, Anita. “The Case of the Austrian Regional Crime Novel.” Tatort Germany. The Curious Case of German-Language Crime Fiction . Ed. Lynn M. Kutch und Todd Herzog. Rochester, NY : Camden House, 2014. 81—98. Moser, Jonny. Demographie der jüdischen Bevölkerung Österreichs 1938—1945. Vienna: Schriftenreihe des Dokumentationsarchivs des österreichischen Widerstands zur Geschichte der NS -Gewaltverbrechen 5, 1999. Moser, Joseph W. “Der Österreichische Gegenwartsroman: Ein Überblick über die Entwicklung des österreichischen Romans von 1992 bis heute.” Text + Kritik. Sonderband Österreichische Gegenwartsliteratur (Sept. 2015): 129—39. 228 Joseph W. Moser Nindl, Sigrid. Wolf Haas und sein kriminalliterarisches Sprachexperiment . Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2010. O’Brien, Traci S. “What’s in Your Bag? ’Freudian Crimes’ and Austria’s Nazi Past in Eva Rossmann’s ’Freudsche Verbrechen’.” Tatort Germany. The Curious Case of German-Language Crime Fiction . Ed. Lynn M. Kutch und Todd Herzog. Rochester, NY : Camden House, 2014. 155—74. Pittler, Andreas. Charascho: Inspektor Bronstein kehrt zurück . Vienna: Echomedia, 2014. —. Bruno Kreisky. Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1996. —. Chuzpe: Ein Fall für Inspektor Bronstein . Vienna: Echomedia, 2010. —. Ezzes . Vienna: Echomedia, 2009. —. Goodbye: Inspektor Bronsteins Abschied . Vienna: Echomedia, 2015. —. Tacheles . Vienna: Echomedia, 2008. —. Tinnef . Vienna: Echomedia, 2011. —. Das Totenschiff . Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2016. —. Zores . Vienna: Echomedia, 2015. —. Zwischen Feder und Fahne: Schriftsteller und Nationalismus . Vienna: Picus Verlag, 1993� Schindel, Robert. Gebürtig . Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. 1992. Autorenverzeichnis Laura Detre West Chester University Department of History West Chester, PA 19383 lauraadetre@gmail.com Margarete Landwehr West Chester University Department of Languages and Cultures West Chester, PA 19383 mlandwehr@wcupa.edu Dagmar C. G. Lorenz University of Illinois at Chicago Department of Germanic Studies 1722 University Hall Chicago, IL 60607 dcglorenz@gmail.com Joseph W. Moser West Chester University Department of Languages and Cultures West Chester, PA 19383 jmoser2@wcupa.edu Joachim Warmbold Tel Aviv University warmboldj@gmail.com Band 48 2015 Heft 3 Harald Höbus ch, Linda K . Worle y (Hr sg.) ISSN 0010-1338 Band 48 T h e m e n h eft: A H a unting Pa s t in A u s tria n a nd G e rm a n L ite rature a nd F ilm G a s th e ra u s g e b e r: J o s e ph W. M o s e r, M a rg a rete L a ndwe hr, a nd L a ura D etre J o s e ph W. M o s e r, M a rg a rete L a ndwe hr, L a ura D etre: I ntrod u c tion J o a c him Wa rmbold: M a ju b s R e i s e - F ro m Colon y to Con c e ntration C a m p . A N ew A p p ro a c h at N a r ratin g G e r m a n y ’ s Colonial Pa s t ? L a ura D etre: You A re th e M u rd e re r s : G e r m a n G uilt in Pete r L or re ’ s D e r Ve rlo re n e D a gm a r C . G . L ore n z : E volvin g M e m or y N a r rative s : T h e Tra n s form ation s of R uth K lu g e r ’ s A utobiog ra p hi c al Writin g M a rg a rete L a ndwe hr: H a u ntin g s of th e Tra u m ati c Pa s t in M a a s ’ s F ilm Two L iv e s : I n divid u al a n d Colle c tive M e m or y J o s e ph W. 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