eJournals Colloquia Germanica 48/1-2

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/61
2015
481-2

Germans as Victims in 1995

61
2015
Robert C. Holub
The lasts two decades have witnessed a growing debate on German victimization. While some commentators noted a shift toward the foregrounding of Germans as victims after 1990, these views came under increasing criticism during the past decade. More recent observers have rightfully noted that the discourse of German victimization has been present and continuous in writings dealing with Vergangenheitsbewältigung. What changed, I argue, was the nature of victimization: prior to 1990 German victims were rarely juxtaposed to the most obvious victims of the Nazis: those who suffered and were murdered in the Holocaust, especially the Jews. Three works that appeared in 1995 demonstrate different ways in which victimization took shape in the post-wall era: Christoph Ransmayr’s novel The Dog King, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s faux memoir Fragments, and Bernhard Schlink’s bestseller, The Reader.
cg481-20023
Germans as Victims in 1995 Robert C. Holub The Ohio State University Abstract: The lasts two decades have witnessed a growing debate on German victimization. While some commentators noted a shift toward the foregrounding of Germans as victims after 1990, these views came under increasing criticism during the past decade. More recent observers have rightfully noted that the discourse of German victimization has been present and continuous in writings dealing with Vergangenheitsbewältigung . What changed, I argue, was the nature of victimization: prior to 1990 German victims were rarely juxtaposed to the most obvious victims of the Nazis: those who suffered and were murdered in the Holocaust, especially the Jews. Three works that appeared in 1995 demonstrate different ways in which victimization took shape in the post-wall era: Christoph Ransmayr’s novel The Dog King , Binjamin Wilkomirski’s faux memoir Fragments , and Bernhard Schlink’s bestseller, The Reader � Keywords: victim, victimization, German, postwar, crime For the past two decades debate has flourished about the change in the status of Germans during the Second World War and its aftermath. A popular view that emerged during the 1990s was that a formerly contrite Germany, which had accepted responsibility for the atrocities committed during the war years and identified itself as a nation of perpetrators, had changed and begun to consider itself the victim of the Hitler regime, or even the Allies. The perception of a shift is not implausible. In the 1960s we frequently encounter scholarly and cultural works that endeavored to expose the heinous crimes of the Third Reich. Often we can detect in these writings an attempt on the part of a generation that did not participate directly in the war to level accusations at an older generation that did not protest against the injustices of the Hitler regime and either participated in criminal activity or passively allowed such activity to occur. This 24 Robert C. Holub generational conflict, which can surely be observed in the student movement, became explicit in the writings associated with “Väterliteratur” in the late 1970s. We find in these novels, and in the writings of the most prominent intellectuals in the Federal Republic, such as Günter Grass or Jürgen Habermas, a heavy emphasis on moral condemnation of perpetrators, an almost complete refusal to acknowledge German suffering, and a belief that Germany as a nation occupies a special place in the international community and has responsibilities that extend beyond those of other countries. The 1980s and 1990s appear to bring a different tone into this conversation on Vergangenheitsbewältigung . We begin to hear more clearly a call for normalization in the observations on the past. Among mainstream intellectuals there are no Holocaust deniers or individuals who dismiss German responsibility for criminal actions. But we find a recognition that Germans also suffered during the war and in the postwar years. Exemplary in this regard are the focus on the Dresden bombings in the work of historian Jörg Friedrich and of the novelist W. G. Sebald, the renewed interest in the violation of women during and after the war in a film like BeFreier und Befreite (Helke Sander, 1992), and the general belief, articulated in political discourse, that the passage of time allows Germans to put the past to rest. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the emphasis on Stasi oppression also assisted in displacing attention from Nazi to communist crimes. Thus if we look at the discourse of “mastering the past” from the tumultuous 1960s to the times of a newly unified Germany, we can certainly construct and discern a shift toward victim status for Germany and Germans during the Berlin Republic. A bit more reflection on the matter, however, has caused a reconsideration of this preliminary assessment and the perception of a tendency toward considering Germans as victims. Once commentators examined more critically the span of postwar discourse, it became evident that victimization had always been a theme in German reflections on, and representations of, the Third Reich. Recent reflections on the course of Vergangenheitsbewältigung have therefore called into question the shift that at first seemed so evident. In the introduction to his collection of essays on Germans as Victims from 2006, for example, Bill Niven disputes the notion that victimization has been a “taboo,” stating that all the contributors to the volume “test the relative validity of the ‘taboo’ claim in the case of political, social and cultural discourse in both Germanies” (21). The common conclusion, Niven tells the reader, is that “discourse on German victimhood was always a feature of memory of the Second World War in West and East Germany alike” (22). Indeed, one could argue that the founding myth of the German Democratic Republic was the victimization of Germany and of all Europe through Hitler as the aggressive representative of capitalism. In the West, as the historian Robert G. Moeller points out, “rhetorics of victimization were central parts of the civ- Germans as Victims in 1995 25 ic culture of the early Federal Republic” (33). He contends further that “on both sides of the border, Germans made the transition from the racially defined ‘community of the people’ of the Third Reich to the community of victims of the war for which they accepted no responsibility, to the community of survivors that gradually emerged from the ruins, ready to preserve and rebuild what remained of the ‘good’ Germany” (38). Indeed, the first feature film in postwar Germany, The Murderers Are Among Us ( Die Mörder sind unter uns, Wolfgang Staudte, 1946), features two victims of the Nazi regime, Susanne Wallner and Hans Mertens, who ultimately come to terms with their own sufferings and hold the promise for a brighter German future. The early postwar works of writers like Heinrich Böll and Wolfgang Borchert are similarly populated by individuals who have experienced suffering in the war and under Hitler. Even the sixty-eighters can be integrated into a consistent concern with victimization: their attempt to expose the crimes of their parents can be regarded as part of the burden Germany and the second generation have had to bear. From this perspective, postwar Germany and the sixty-eighters become victims of their parents’ participation in the activities of the Third Reich, and their efforts consist of not only accusations directed at the elders, but also self-reflections on the misfortunes they as Germans have experienced in the wake of the National Socialist legacy. While we can undoubtedly detect a continuous discourse of victimization in German public and cultural life from the end of the war through the first decades of the twenty-first century, it also seems apparent that something changed in the nature of this discourse at about the time of German unification. Victims in the early years were German soldiers and prisoners of war, such as we find populating the aforementioned works of Wolfgang Borchert or Heinrich Böll; Hans Mertens was similarly involved in combat, where he experienced the moral depravity of his superiors and of the army battalion to which he was attached as staff physician, and Susanne Wallner is shown as a former concentration camp prisoner, although the reasons for her incarceration under the Nazis remain vague. Frequently throughout the years in the Federal Republic, Germans displaced after the war are regarded as victims, and several commentators have noted that the motif of victimization is a constant in their reflections and statements. Often women, children, and older Germans on the home front were recognized for the suffering they had to endure. The discourse on victimization that was acceptable and widespread for many decades in postwar Germany was one that focused on Germans as the direct victims of Nazi policies and Allied actions in the postwar era. There was no attempt to compare the suffering of Germans with non-German victims of the Third Reich, or to exonerate perpetrators because they were somehow victims too. “Good” Germans were generally categorized as victims of the war and its aftermath. 26 Robert C. Holub What changes around 1990 is not that the non-existent taboo of regarding Germans as victims is violated, but that Germans are more often juxtaposed with acknowledged victims of the Third Reich, especially those who suffered in concentration camps. This juxtaposition of two classes of victims was truly a taboo that was broken in the Berlin Republic. When it had surfaced in earlier decades, it was the cause for disgust and censure. Thus when Martin Heidegger in a speech from 1949 compared blockades and famine in the postwar world with gas chambers in extermination camps (“Das Ge-Stell” 27), or when in correspondence with Herbert Marcuse he compares the murder of Jews during the Third Reich with the misfortunes of Eastern Germans driven from their homes after the cessation of hostilities, 1 he received and merited vilification. When several decades later, Andreas Hillgruber published a short volume under the title Zweierlei Untergang , which included reflections on the destruction of the Third Reich and the demise of European Jewry, he earned the wrath of public intellectuals who found the juxtaposition of these two events highly offensive. 2 German victimization itself was rarely criticized in the postwar era; if Heidegger had merely referred to the sufferings of Germans after the war, he might have been considered impolitic, but he would not have earned such a strong rebuke from later observers. If Hillgruber had not chosen to publish his two essays in the same volume, pitting the demise of the Third Reich against the destruction of European Jewry, he would have attracted no attention. The violation of the taboo was not victimization as such, but juxtaposing the fate of those who suffered at the hands of Germans with the suffering experienced by Germans during and after the war. The novel turn in Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the 1990s was not a focus on victimization, but an implicit comparison of victimization according to which German victimization was positioned next to the sufferings of those victimized by Germans. The juxtaposition of victims finds expression in an unusual trio of books published in 1995. The first is a novel by the Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr entitled Morbus Kitahara (in the English version The Dog King, 1997). The conceit that structures the narrative is that after the war the Allied forces, and in particular the Americans, turn German-speaking countries into deindustrialized wastelands. Instead of the Marshall plan, the United States implemented the Morgenthau plan. Our attention is focused on one isolated Austrian town, Moor, and on three inhabitants: the son of the village blacksmith, Bering, who eventually becomes bodyguard to Ambras, known as “The Dog King.” Ambras is a liberated slave laborer and former photographer, who currently manages the granite quarry in which he worked during the war. The third protagonist is Lily, also known as the Brazilian, a refugee “from the rubble wastelands of the city of Vienna” (87), whose father was a former commander of a concentration Germans as Victims in 1995 27 camp. After the Allies capture Lily’s father while seeking to escape with his family to Brazil, Lily is left in Moor and eventually makes a living smuggling goods between the towns of the region. There is no doubt that Ambras was a victim, and that he retains the scars of his suffering. He is punished arbitrarily while working in the quarry on the infamous swing or Schaukel , whereby the arms of the victim are tied behind him and extended while supporting his entire body weight; after this torture he is no longer able to raise his arms above his head. The effects of his enslavement at the hands of the Nazis have resulted in both physical and mental deformation, since Ambras is consumed by feelings of rancor toward the town and its inhabitants. Unable to relate to the human beings in his surroundings, he lives as a recluse in the company of a pack of feral dogs. In an act that vacillates between compensation and vengeance, he was appointed the head administrator of the quarry nine years after the cessation of hostilities—the end of the war in Ransmayr’s novel is marked by the Peace of Oranienburg, which was the site of an actual concentration camp under the Nazis (Sachsenhausen) and which, during the 1930s, imprisoned mostly political detainees. The authority in charge of Moor and the occupation forces in Moor at the start of the novel is Major Elliot, who is feared by the town’s inhabitants, over whom he exercises absolute authority. He is responsible for everything that occurs in Moor, including Ambras’s appointment to his management position. Elliot makes sure that justice reigns in this small Austrian town. Victims and perpetrators have exchanged roles in this novel, and one of the functions of the occupation is to make certain that the native population is reminded of the crimes committed in the name of the previous regime. We thus find in Ransmayr’s novel a quite unusual reflection on the place and nature of Vergangenheitsbewältigung . Definite rituals meant to recall the past and admonish the inhabitants of Moor are strictly enforced by Major Elliot, who acts in the name of Lyndon Porter Stellamour, the Supreme Court Justice from Poughkeepsie responsible for sending the German-speaking lands back into the stone age and an obvious allusion to Henry Morgenthau Jr., who died in Poughkeepsie in 1967. Elliot transforms part of the quarry into a monument to the victims by having the inhabitants erect a huge inscription announcing the deaths of 11,973 laborers at the hands of “the inhabitants of this land.” Despite protests, claims of innocence, and even sabotage, Elliot remains committed to turning “the whole mountain range into a monument” (24), and his threat to create “new and even worse indictments” “inscribed on cliffs and hillsides” (25) eventually compels the population of Moor to acquiesce in its fate. Elliot also berates the inhabitants of Moor on loudspeakers and reinforces the “Stellamour” plan with derisive harangues. He insults the inhabitants, calling them “riffraff” 28 Robert C. Holub and proclaiming the “re-education and conversion of warmongers into swineherds and asparagus diggers! … back to the fields! … with oats and barley among the ruins of industry … cabbage heads, dunghills … and steaming cow-pies in the lanes of your autobahn, where potatoes will grow next spring! ” (32). And he stages quarterly reenactments of the hard labor to which the former victims were subjected, all carried out by the town’s current citizens. “Instead of letting things take their course, letting the horrors of the war years gradually grow pale and indistinct, Elliot constantly invented new rituals of remembrance for these parties” (34). The head of the occupation forces is a stickler for detail. Costumes for Moor’s inhabitants in which they dress as Jews, prisoners of war, communists, and race defilers must be entirely realistic; and while he does not insist that the native population stand half-naked in the snow, he does stage roll calls at which they stand for “horrible, icy, unbearable hours” (35). He does not force his subjects to carry the heavy stones, but merely makes certain that the burdens they bear from the quarry resemble the stones of former times. “Elliott simply wanted the pictures [from then and now] to look alike and did not insist on the unbearable weight of reality” (36). But there are no indications that this enforced “coming to terms with the past” meets with any success. The commemorative activities rapidly degenerate into empty rituals, especially once the occupation forces leave the area. The inhabitants increasingly treat them with cynicism or indifference; even the inscription about which Elliott was so insistent is ultimately overgrown with moss and rendered illegible. Representative for this change from forced penitence to hackneyed tradition are the concerts held at the empty hangar of the local airport. Under Elliot’s authority the makeshift hall was decorated with banners reading “ Never Forget and other Stellamour slogans” (116); a giant tent at the entrance to the hangar contained a constant screening of documentary films detailing the crimes of the previous regime. Since Elliot’s departure, however, there were no banners and the films were discontinued, so that the concerts that served as reminders of past crimes “degenerated into poorly attended ceremonies put on by Societies of Penitence” (116). These official organizations of Vergangenheitsbewältigung continue to exist, but shrink in size and are not “disbanded only because even from a distance the army continued to support the organized activities of all penitents” (117). Ransmayr’s dystopic vision is nonpartisan; there are no moral prerogatives propounded in the novel. Coming to terms with the past is treated with cynicism and exposed at times as the ritual it has often become in postwar years. The perpetrators have become victims, but the current perpetrators are merely imitating or even staging the victimization of the past. Perpetrators from the past are not condemned; in their vengeful actions victims exhibit a mentality that resembles their Nazi predecessors. The Germans as Victims in 1995 29 current victimization is portrayed as simply a fact, eliciting as little compassion as the sufferings of the past. A second work of 1995 that juxtaposed victim status in a completely different fashion was the book Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood by Binjamin Wilkomirski. With the appearance of Fragments we are concerned more with an event or series of events, which unfolded in the subsequent years, than with an actual literary work. As we have learned through assiduous research and documentation, we are really dealing with a Swiss musician born Bruno Grosjean, adopted by a family named Dössekker in 1945 and given their patronym, who published a book of memoirs in which he claimed to be a Jewish child from Poland, Binjamin Wilkomirski, who had experienced the horrors of the concentration camps. “Wilkomirski” insisted that that these memories were eventually dislodged from his unconscious by therapy and that there was subsequently a conspiracy of sorts on the part of Swiss officials to deny his true identity. There is no reason to rehearse or debate the facts of this strange case: Stefan Maechler’s thorough study of The Wilkomirski Affair recounts in patient detail the story of Bruno Grosjean and his adoption, the composition of the text, and the historical facts that have established beyond any reasonable doubt that Fragments is a fiction and not the recollections of a Polish child caught up in the Holocaust. 3 Significant in our context is the eagerness with which a German speaker, even one whose background lies somewhat outside the sphere of crimes committed during the Third Reich, readily adopts the persona of a Jewish victim of the Holocaust. In Fragments Wilkomirski was a superb imitator of Holocaust motifs, and his descriptions of purported experiences in the children’s barracks of Nazi death camps were recorded so poignantly and persuasively that he was able to deceive a major publisher and thousands of readers, including many genuine Holocaust survivors, about the veracity of his account. His narrative strategy aided his persuasive endeavors. He claims in the opening section of his “memoirs” that he has no proper mother tongue since he was placed in a camp at such an early age and never mastered any language sufficiently. The roots of his language are Yiddish, he maintains, the language of his older brother Mordechai, but the many languages of the camp and the lack of extensive verbal communication during his incarceration meant that he never developed a satisfactory mastery of any known language. His memories are thus cast in images implanted in his mind that he has subsequently “translated” into the German he has learned since he came to Switzerland. Thus in Fragments he describes his experiences from the perspective of a child without linguistic sophistication, which reinforces his victimhood, his status as a subject who is acted upon and unable to resist physically or verbally his persecutors. He fashions himself as 30 Robert C. Holub the prototypical victim of the Nazis: as Jew, as Polish, as a child, defenseless, silently bearing his torments, unable to communicate in the manner of an adult. Wilkomirski presents us with an unusual case of comparative victimhood. As a child Bruno Grosjeans was indeed a victim of sorts, being abandoned to adoption by his mother and gathering some unpleasant experiences before his integration into the Dössekker household. He may have been abused by his first foster mother, who was eventually unable to care for him and brought him back to child welfare and a children’s home. 4 Maechler describes his early life as follows: “When the boy arrived at the Dössekkers’ he was leaving behind a terrible past: conceived in ignorance, born with death hovering nearby, he had been bounced around from place to place from the start, ultimately landing in a children’s home” (20). His subsequent childhood and life, however, were relatively uneventful, and it was probably difficult for him to convince anyone of his victimhood as the son of a well-to-do physician. What is fascinating is that his status as victim becomes more real, more accepted, and more celebrated once he adopts the persona of a Jewish child in Poland. Wilkomirski accomplished something Germans appear to have been seeking in their focus on victimization: he achieves the status of the traditional victims of the Third Reich by becoming one of them, and seeks to trump that status by having to struggle to receive recognition of his past suffering, and by the continuing trauma he experiences from repressed memories. Wilkomirski thus places himself in the position of an individual who suffers twofold victimization: once as a child in the concentration camps at the hands of the Germans, and again at the hands of the unsympathetic Swiss bureaucracy, which would deny his status and prevent him from discovering his true identity. With the birth of the fictive persona Binjamin Wilkomirski, the victimhood of Bruno Grosjeans is transformed and validated, transcending the victimhood of mere Jews in the Holocaust. The third and most notorious instance of juxtaposed victim status is found in Bernhard Schlink’s popular novel, The Reader . That Schlink participates in the new agenda of German victimization is evident: both the narrator of this strange love story, Michael Berg, and the former SS perpetrator, Hanna Schmitz, suffer from the war and its aftermath. Berg never recovers from his ill-fated affair with Hanna; he leads a psychologically scarred life, in which he cannot maintain a relationship with another woman or relate openly to anyone, including his daughter. Hanna is a victim insofar as she too is unable to form any normal relationship with another human being. But the most obvious instance of her victimhood comes in the trial in which she assumes almost sole responsibility for the murder of Jews, and is thus directly victimized by her fellow SS guards. These cases of victimization are very different from the sufferings of soldiers, refugees, and concentration camp detainees in early German literature. In both Germans as Victims in 1995 31 cases from The Reader we find an implicit comparison with the more traditional victims of the Third Reich, in this case the Jews who were imprisoned and murdered by the Nazi regime. But the victim status of both narrator and protagonist are also complicated by circumstances: in the case of the narrator by what is revealed as a neurotic personality, perhaps caused, but at least aggravated, by his relationship with Hanna, and certainly evident in his relationship with his family, and his inability to confront Hanna’s crimes and disentangle her victim and perpetrator roles. For Hanna the complication arises from her illiteracy, which functions in part as a reason for her joining the SS and for her itinerant existence in the postwar years, but also as an excuse for her actions during the war and a vehicle for initiating a more intimate relationship with Michael. It is also the reason that she winds up accepting chief responsibility in the postwar trial for the failure to rescue the Jewish women from the burning church. The victimization of Germans in this novel is thus associated with personal quirks or failings in the characters and is not solely the result of a criminal regime. We might say that these personality flaws and individual inadequacies led to victimhood only in the context of the horrendous Nazi violations of humanity, and that victim status was achieved only by this unfortunate constellation. Still, in the course of the narrative Michael and Hanna are juxtaposed both explicitly and implicitly with the Jewish victims of the Third Reich. Unlike the protagonists in this novel, these Jewish victims remain nameless individuals; even the daughter of the one woman who survived the church fire remains unnamed. As readers we are drawn into identification with the unfortunate fate of Michael and Hanna, made to feel empathy with their suffering and misfortune. They are flawed protagonists, to be sure, but they are therefore all the more human for their deficiencies. The very brevity associated with the inclusion of Jewish victims compared with the extensive focus on Michael and Hanna makes the victim status of the latter individuals more intricate and significant, if not of greater magnitude. But the key to this saccharine narrative is not really victimization, but psychological damage. Indeed, Michael is unable throughout the novel to recognize Hanna’s responsibility for the wayward course of his life and the psychological impairments that have accompanied him since his fateful affair with her. Hanna appears to gain some insight into the moral depravity of her past activities, but her final, tepid gesture of penitence is contrived and clearly inadequate. Ultimately, The Reader describes the fate of two psychologically damaged individuals whose status as victims is less important than their inability to overcome this damage, to confront their complicity in the crimes committed in the name of their country, and to realize a high standard of moral agency. The novel thus fits into the tendency toward victimization that we have seen as a new development in the late 1980s and 1990s, but the underpinnings 32 Robert C. Holub of the plot and the driving force of the narrative are tied more to individual limitations than to a revisionism of postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung � There are many contexts involving Vergangenheitsbewälitung that are important for the mid-1990s, and most do not entail a deviation from the consensus that had been built since the end of the war. Germany under National Socialism was still recognized and condemned as a criminal regime. The victims of the Third Reich were clearly identified as those persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, most of whom were non-Germans. In the general culture there continued to be an absolute rejection of Holocaust deniers and few concessions made to a normalization of the past, as much as it was occasionally advocated even at the highest levels of government. The discussion of German guilt and the status of Germans as perpetrators of crimes during the Second World War continued unabated in this decade. The debates around a Holocaust memorial, the controversies surrounding the Wehrmacht exhibit, the publication of Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners all provide evidence of a continuity of concerns in coming to terms with the past. But the three works discussed briefly in this essay contribute to establishing a slightly different and a slightly more differentiated context for Vergangenheitsbewältigung , one in which the status of Germans as victims, which was a standard theme since the end of the war, was slightly expanded and explored in a new manner. In very different ways Morbus Kitahara , the controversy surrounding Fragments , and The Reader indicate an increased willingness to juxtapose victims of the Third Reich with Germans who also suffered during or after the war, to see the sufferings of Germans as part of a more complex totality that is both ideological and psychological, and, as a consequence, to relativize to an extent the victimization associated primarily with the Holocaust. This new stage of comparative victimization may not change the landscape of culpability for German crimes, but it does signal a further diminution of taboos surrounding the German past that some have welcomed as a more realistic appraisal of the historical record, but others have protested as an illicit attempt to reduce moral and criminal responsibility for the past. Notes 1 The exchange of letters, edited and translated by Richard Wolin, was reprinted in English in New German Critique 53 (1991). 2 Hillgruber’s book was a main target for Habermas in the “Historians’ Debate” in the mid-1980s precisely because of its participation in what Habermas perceived as an illicit normalization of the discourse about Nazi crimes.