Here are my highlights and notes. At the top I put the most meaningful idea, for me anyway, from the book. I am excited to begin the novels.
"The Enlightenment faith in progress is shattered, and consecutive,
redemptive time is annihilated. The Holocaust as absolute discontinuity and
break in civilization has destroyed humanity’s earlier conception of itself. A
realm of negativity, unrelieved by any hope and therefore timeless in its
condemnation, is all that is left."
The Language of Silence: West German
Literature and the Holocaust
Ernestine Schlant
Last accessed on Wednesday January
31, 2024
91 Highlight(s) | 14 Note(s)
It is my contention that in its
approach to the Holocaust, the West German literature of four decades has been
a literature of absence and silence contoured by language.
the enormity of these crimes and
their legacy have become part of German self-understanding.
This study is premised on the
privileged position of literature as the seismograph of a people’s moral
positions.
literature is the seismograph of a
people’s conscience,
Theodor Adorno, the eminent social
philosopher and a returned exile, stated that “to write poetry after Auschwitz
is barbaric.”
They explained this need for an
idealized leader as resulting from a historically conditioned weak national ego
that sought refuge in obedience, resented this obedience, and overcame the
aversion to it by increased idealization of the leader to whom it was obedient
(22) and with whom it identified narcissistically
Yet this avoidance came at great
cost.
“what happens to the individual may
not be purely individual, for it may be bound up with larger social, political,
and cultural processes that often go unperceived.”
Note: Social psych
despite increasingly available
knowledge about the Holocaust, Germans individually and collectively have been
unable to work through and to mourn the crimes
The Holocaust has shattered all
previous assumptions about the nature of humankind and the perfectibility of
society, creating, in the words of the Israeli and German historian Dan Diner,
a “break in civilization.”
Note: And post modern lit
“it may well be that
[deconstruction] has arisen as an attempt to come to terms with the holocaust
as a radical disruption produced as a logical extension of Western thinking.”
This desire for continuity can be
seen as an attempt to deny the radical break constituted by the Holocaust.
Alexander Kluge radically subverted
the supposed objectivity of documents, showing that even documents are manmade
and hence serve the specific interests of those who create them.
Early postwar literature, whether as
“literature of the rubble” or on its quasimystical journey, focused
predominantly not on the Nazi atrocities but on the wartime and postwar
travails of the German population.
indicts all of German society, in
the sense that they continue their compulsive work, value order and cleanliness
above any warmth or human contact, and act as if the past ten years had not
happened.
Böll’s protagonist is representative
of the many other “lowly” Germans who pretended ignorance because they felt
powerless against the Nazi regime; they were afraid of shedding their passivity
and ended by creating a complicity of silence.
the answer of the epigraph takes
refuge in an alibi that seemingly submerges the individual in the enormity of
the world war.
circles the problem of the
individual’s responsibility in confrontation with an overwhelming machinery
without a conclusion:
When the young officer sees the
tailor in his environment, he sees what the author has been taught to see. The
brief description of the old Jew and of the townspeople is unreflected, and
this lack of critical reflection demonstrates precisely the power of
indoctrinated stereotypes.
The ambivalence of the answer to the
question “And where were you, Adam?” which uses the overwhelming power of the
war as an excuse for what was done, is here particularly poignant,
There remains, however, an inherent
irresolution: the question addressed to “Adam” as an individual is answered
with the alibi of war. Yet “war,” as Böll shows in this novel, is not only the
all-embracing, monolithic event that smashes the innocent victims like Ilona
and Feinhals. “War” is also composed of the many actions of individuals, and
these individuals have options, as Böll shows in the drivers of the van.
the Catholic Böll could include Jews
among Hitler’s victims only when they were converted, female, and unattached.
That this should be the case in a writer with an acute moral conscience shows
how deeply ingrained and unconscious the prejudices against Jews were and how
silently they operated.
His preference for a sophisticated
literary language and techniques that reconnected to the little beloved Weimar
Republic reminded his German readers that they had welcomed Hitler as one who
would replace the chaos of democracy and avant-gardism with the order of
dictatorship,
high-ranking members of the Nazi
regime, including the military, qualified for sizable pensions, while inmates
of concentration camps received minimal restitution.
Note: yikes
Koeppen anticipates the debates on
post-Enlightenment that would focus on the shattering realization that the
Holocaust has destroyed Enlightenment faith in progress.
Koeppen radically insists on
discontinuity in face of the continuity that has appeared to carry the day; he
all but abandons any hope that the Germans will ever come to reflect on the
Nazi past, let alone mourn it or work through it. Koeppen’s conclusion is
stark: the Germans are already dead and inhabitants of hell.
these crimes will not go away and
will haunt future generations in their attempts at self-definition.
The nihilism, hopelessness, and
despair that many have seen in this novel result not only from the realization
of the enormity of the crimes but from the desire to annihilate oneself in
response to them.
Koeppen’s novel has been
interpreted, along the lines of postwar existentialism, as an expression of
Sinnlosigkeit, an existential meaninglessness.
it seems to be the only response
possible to a realization of the atrocities of the Holocaust and the current
political maneuverings.
Note: poetry after Auschwitz is
barbaric - Adorno
The Enlightenment faith in progress
is shattered, and consecutive, redemptive time is annihilated. The Holocaust as
absolute discontinuity and break in civilization has destroyed humanity’s earlier
conception of itself. A realm of negativity, unrelieved by any hope and
therefore timeless in its condemnation, is all that is left.
The Eichmann trial of 1961 in
Jerusalem and the Auschwitz trials from 1963 to 1965 in Frankfurt/Main made
public the atrocities of the Holocaust. The dramatic courtroom testimonies were
of an immediacy and directness that left no room for repression, and the
historical documentation and the authority of the witnesses allowed for no evasion
or subterfuge.
chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger in
his state of the nation address in 1968; Kiesinger tried to defuse criticism of
the United States’ escalating war in Vietnam by saying: “We especially have not
the slightest reason to lord it over the United States.” Martin Walser, who
reports this incident, then editorializes: “Which means, of course: we have
committed genocide, they are committing genocide, and one crow should not pluck
out the eyes of another one.”6
He dismisses the differences between
literary and documentary texts to show how any sort of discourse expresses the
interests of those who create it.
Portraying an individual in the environment
that shapes him/her requires an enormous amount of information on the diverse
aspects of the individual’s societal existence. Moreover, each bit of
information is itself “interested” in that it has invariably been put together
by someone or some entity with a specific point of view, so that to arrive at
any factuality innumerable fragments are needed to supplement and/or
counterbalance each other.
Kluge’s undermining of the narrative
boundary between “documents” and “fiction” further reflects his skepticism
about the “narratability” of events, scenes, portraits—a skepticism premised on
what the historian Hayden White calls “cognitive disorientation and a despair
at ever being able to identify the elements of the events in order to render
possible an ‘objective’ analysis of their causes and consequences,
Note: we are bound by perspective, no
person can take a god's eye view of events or history.
Despite the narrative fragmentations
and the discontinuities associated with it, the Holocaust demands the adoption
of a moral position.
Note: As an amoralist, I disagree. We can
confront the Holocaust from a public health perspective, and from an
ethical-relativist perspective.
Kluge here presents the dialectics
of individual responsibility versus the safety (even enjoyment) of anonymous
obedience and shows that both shirk responsibility for their acts.
a camp administrator in the grip of
capitalist thinking when the man inveighs against the loss of human energy
because the prisoners have to stand by the hour in freezing weather; he does
not want a more humane but a more energy efficient treatment of the prisoners.
Yet this sketch can serve to refute the Marxist claim that fascism is a
late-stage development of capitalism, because, as the example shows, the
madness of Nazism could not
be tamed by considerations of
economic efficiency.
he has a theory about what made the
war with its disasters possible; he finds in imperialism as a late phase of
capitalism a shortcircuited answer that allows him to demonstrate how in a
system of technological and economic predominance people become functionalized.
Picaros— socially peripheral
characters, who have the power to observe but lack the commitment or the
knowhow to take a stand—were a widely preferred character choice in early
postwar fiction, and irony was the preferred mode of presentation.
recognizes Auschwitz (and by
extension all the concentration and extermination camps) as “a deep and
irredeemable rupture in the history of civilization.”
Grass seems hopeful that Germany may
learn, at a snail’s pace, to be a genuine democracy, and that it will slowly
shed its fanaticism and intolerant idealism, which, in the narrator’s terms,
brought about the disaster of the Holocaust.
paradoxes in the relation of the two
generations: while the young vehemently attack the parent generation, the two
generations are tied together in their self-perception as “victims” who cannot
be held accountable for their deeds. The older generation saw itself as “duped”
and “betrayed,” and thus victimized, by Hitler and Nazism;
All the narrators are socially aware
enough to know that
authoritarianism and obedience to
mindless and brutal treatment is inculcated by education (in school as well as
in the home) and through the internalization of social pressures and roles.
Note: Social psych
Why don’t the narrators subject
these clichés to critical analysis? Why don’t they investigate how these
clichés serve as alibis and placebos? Here, perhaps, was a missed opportunity
for the younger generation to learn instead of judge, to listen instead of
accuse, and to feel sorrow for themselves as the children of these mechanized
parents, sorrow for the parents, and ultimately sorrow for the victims and
shame for what had been done to them. But this road was too arduous for those
traveling with the heavy baggage of anger and fury; indeed, the heavy baggage
could serve as a demonstration of “good intentions” and simultaneously as an
excuse not to look any further. As a result, the younger generation remained as
locked in their position as were the parents in theirs.
Note:yikes
Ortheil’s writings attest to an
undiminished need to arrive at a definition of self against the background of
the Nazi regime.
Before coming to any understanding
of the historical past, Fermer must overcome the authoritarian conditioning of
his own personality.
Ortheil relates Fermer’s six-month
journey under the guiding principle of two qualities that permeate German
society and that establish a continuity from prewar to postwar times: they are
order or orderliness and Geborgenheit, a complex noun that denotes the sense of
well-being that comes from feeling sheltered and protected.
One of the merits of Fermer is the
demonstration that no personal characteristic or act is merely personal;
characteristics and acts have social implications and political results that
may, in the end, even be contrary to their initial purpose.
Note:social psych and also why
personal beliefs are a public health issue.
The successor generations are thus
imprinted not only with the fear of chaos but with the desire for protection
from chaos in Geborgenheit, and with the means by which this chaos is
tamed—namely, rigid order.
he must learn to recognize as
temptation (and reject) the conviction that rigid order is necessary and that
compliance with the established order promises comfort and Geborgenheit.
he comes to understand the “pleasant
feelings” culminating in Geborgenheit as a cover-up for a deeply hidden
fear—the fear of independence, of personal responsibility, of open-endedness.
the establishment of barriers cannot
safeguard Geborgenheit, since the fears and concealments come from within.
the relation between the two words
also suggests that one feels safe and comfortable only when one is hidden away.
they know that their youth is
conditioned, even traumatized by their parents’ past.
Instead, one acquired a kind of
inner protection, a delicately woven enclosure made up of reading, cultured
education and lifestyle”
Note: bildung
The narrator here implicitly
projects the mother-son relationship onto the political plane, where an entire
nation was willingly seduced and protected, therefore less horrified at “the
most horrible things,
the father’s story of the night
reconnaissance covers an underlying secret that nevertheless reveals its
presence; the story’s function is to hide what he saw, and the act of hiding
leaves its traces.
In bad moments it appeared to me as
if human history, with these persecutions, had come to its end.
Note: Adorno and death of Renaissance
progress
The split of narrative consciousness
into dialoguing voices; the displacement of events as if seen through the wrong
end of a telescope and, alternatively, the magnification of certain moments
into epiphanies of exquisite simplicity or shocking horror; and the tensions
created between subjective experience, intense remembrance, and a distanced,
becalmed narrative all suggest the deliberations of a literary practitioner.
For those who demand a description
of “that” in all its horrifying aspects, Lenz will fall short, for he is not a
chronicler of events but a chronicler of how the events affect the individual.
Note:which is all one CAN describe -
there exists no god's eye view of events, there is no true objectivity.
Lenz is in fact an author with
post-Holocaust sensitivities. He knows that he cannot describe “that. Just the
way it is” and continually alerts the reader that his (and his protagonist’s)
position is one of subjectivity.
Rather, the novel presents a
constant challenge, urging the reader to ask the very questions that the
protagonist has already answered with his (passive) behavior. What, except
passive resistance, was possible under Nazism for someone already marked by
withdrawal from the world into an inner-directed counterreality?
“them”
Note:Das man, the they, everywhere
and nowhere
This minute scene raises the very
question that has haunted postwar attempts to look at the German past: why were
so many people so prepared to cooperate with the Nazis even when they were not
coerced?
We have no standard anymore for
anything, ever since human life is no longer the standard.
Gert Hofmann burrows deeply into the
consequences of denunciations as they are inscribed upon the victims and as
they destroy not just individual lives but the very concept of a common
humanity.
The overabundance of “chaotic
forces” and fragments jammed into a time frame that is “tight to burst” enacts
Hofmann’s stringent subordination of phenomenal reality to the demands of
artistic autonomy.
the culprits of the past era may no
longer be alive, their practices—and with them the attitudes and values on
which these practices are based—have survived
Hofmann demands more than an
exploration of the past and the identification of culprits. He demands
implicitly that old practices such as the violation of another person’s
humanity should cease, but he gives no glimmer of hope that this will occur.
the Holocaust and its manifold
practices of destruction beginning with the most insidious denunciations, and
with the continued violation of another person’s humanity in the present, the
world as a human universe has ceased to exist.
The omission of the ten most crucial
and painful years in the history of the destruction of the Jews demonstrates
what Klaus Briegleb meant when he spoke of “a falling silent exactly when Jews
and their annihilation are concerned” and convicts the novel in Guy Stern’s
definition of literary anti-Semitism as “an omission of a declaration of
sympathy for Jewish suffering” when such an omission “would strike a neutral
reader as a palpable gap in a literary work.”
Hofmann here makes it clear that
when people act “as if he no longer existed,” soon thereafter he indeed will
cease to exist, and he shows how quickly the victim gets blamed so that the
culprit can feel blameless.
Hofmann has, in Veilchenfeld,
restituted personal identity to a degree neither Andersch nor Härtling could
manage. This is accomplished in the dual perspective that underlies Hans’s
intimate observations: guided by his contacts with his parents and the
townspeople, he sees Veilchenfeld as “other,” but he also, unknowingly,
portrays Veilchenfeld’s humanity and shows in concrete scenes what it meant to
be a Jew in Germany at that time.
The accuracy and poignancy of the
details and the intensity of sympathy generated in witnessing the humiliation
and crushing of an individual is in my opinion unique in West German
literature.
the realization that the cold war
had made West Germany a valuable partner of the Allies, created a cynical and
self-righteous mood that helped the postwar citizenry to repress all that was
inconvenient to remember.
the Historikerstreit was fought over
the control of history—over what interpretation of the Nazi regime and the
Holocaust would best serve German self-perceptions.
he concluded that Auschwitz
constitutes so deep a caesura that the history of humankind must now be dated
as pre-and post Auschwitz.
He tried to address the fact that
Auschwitz and the crimes committed there remain incomprehensible and was now
adamant in embracing collective guilt: “I believe one is a criminal when the
society to which one belongs commits criminal acts.
And he asks a question at the core
of much contemporary engagement with the Holocaust: “How far removed does a
person have to be for his descendants to be no longer connected to him?”
In Schneider’s view, “coupling”
involves acceptance and responsibility (as when Eduard, on a personal level,
accepts fatherhood and commitment to his newly constituted family) and that
includes acceptance of and a sense of responsibility for the Nazi past.
The argument does not destroy their
friendship, but it points to the fragility inherent in any German-Jewish
coupling.
All four narratives continue the
techniques and express the post-Holocaust worldview associated with
fragmentation, disruption, severance, destruction of sequence, and a closed
universe devoid of hope.
The memoirs of her childhood and
young adult life in Steinach and Bad Kissingen, where Jews had lived since “at
least as far back as the late seventeenth century” (193) are a monument to the
Jewish culture in which she grew up. Her memoirs come from the other side of
the Holocaust, as memoirs of a culture now destroyed and recorded to conjure up
a counterworld in the face of annihilation. They are the last testimony to
pre-Holocaust life in Germany. Sebald does not usurp the mother’s voice or
persona but respects the voice of the “other” as it celebrates her own culture
and simultaneously mourns its destruction.12 Ferber’s handing these memoirs
over to the narrator is not only a sign of friendship and personal trust but a
survivor’s charge to the successor generations to honor and value what is left
of the Jewish heritage.
Sebald sees the “constant condition
of melancholy” connected to “the insight into the impossibility of redemption
Note:How do we live if there is no
salvation or redemption? A fortiori, why do we need redeemed?
No less industrious than the
generations preceding them, German teenagers now work as hard at constructing
memorials as their parents did in rebuilding the country after the war, as
their grandparents did in building the Third Reich itself.
debate militates against forgetting.
This “epidemic of commemorating” is
an indication that the Holocaust has become part of Germany’s—albeit
conflicted— historical self-understanding.
