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German authors: We suffered too

Literature of German suffering seeks to divert attention from the Germans’ victims in WWII

BERLIN - The literature of German suffering, which has emerged in recent years in response to the literature of the Holocaust, seeks to divert attention from the Germans’ victims in the Second World War and to give legitimacy to discussion of German suffering.

 

The horrors of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Allied aerial bombardment, the destruction of German cities, and the mass deportation of Germans from countries liberated from Nazi occupation have provided fertile ground for German authors who write personal memoirs or quasi-documentary fiction.

 

Two of the major post-war German authors - Nobel Prize laureate Gunter Grass and Georg Sebald, who died five years ago - are among the most prominent writers of this genre.


Dachau, Germany, 1945

 

Grasse served in the German army in the last years of the war. Sebald, though born a year before the war ended, defined himself as a “product of German fascism.” His entire life he felt alienated from his German identity, but in the last years of his life he referred to the Allied aerial attacks as a “war of destruction” while making a comparison between the fate of the Jews and that of the Germans.

 

Dr. Galili Shahar, a lecturer in German literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has studied this issue through an examination of the works of Grasse and Sebald.

 

Shahar is a research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature at the Free University of Berlin, and will soon be teaching in the German Studies Department at Stanford. Shahar is 36 years old, born in Tel Aviv, the child of Iranian Jews who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s. He stresses that “my interest in German culture is purely intellectual. I have no baggage from the past.”

 

You write of the desire of history to be rewritten. Isn’t this the desire of the Germans to rewrite history?

 

“History is stronger than man. You could say, of course, that Grasse and Sebald are trying, at the last moment of their careers, to correct something that they believe hasn’t been dealt with properly in German literature: the catastrophe of the Germans. The fact that they seek to deal with this does not disgust me or worry me. I understand that their discussion of Germany’s past cannot help but be part of their treatment of the past in general.”

 

Doesn’t this stem from an inner desire to correct history?

 

“I think that this tension is actually productive, particularly for Sebald. His treatment of the issue of the past and its frameworks is universal and humanist. That being the case, Sebald is not entitled to ignore the suffering of the Germans. It’s precisely his deep humanism that allows him to deal with German suffering without hesitation.

 

"There are those who think that German literature has ceased to take responsibility. I believe that this is an incorrect interpretation. Responsibility that comes from an external source is not always voluntary. The discussion of guilt in Germany is partly artificial, and it encourages false, philo-Semitic identities, which do not contribute to a genuine process of clarifying the past. A public discussion that appears uncooperative and anti-Semitic is actually likely to serve as fertile ground for dealing with the issue.”

 

Isn’t that liable to be too dangerous?

 

“I see many contradictory things in German society. Even if the Germans declared a thousand times that they have no interest in the past and that they want to draw a line on this issue, it doesn’t mean that they are ‘exempt’ from the past. These questions continue to define them both externally and internally.

 

"I wouldn't avoid the understanding that in Germany, too, there is a process of self-criticism. Is it enough? No. Are there also signs that German society is attempting to stop answering for the past? Of course. But this does not exhaust the discussion or the ability of the past to come back from all sorts of places and disturb German society for decades to come. Therefore, there is no need to harass the Germans or prevent them from forgetting. Such an action is liable actually to lead to evil forms of forgetting and forgetfulness.”

 

Sebald presents the Jew as an entity outside of time and place. This type of approach is common among anti-Semites, who tend to see Jews as something amorphous, disconnected.

 

“In my opinion this is one of the main problems of cultural sciences in the 20th century. It’s an insight that also existed among Jewish men and women of letters on their way back to Judaism - philosophers like Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, writers like Franz Kafka and Elsa Lasker-Schuller - who adopted, to a certain extent with enthusiasm, even - the most anti-Semitic insights on Judaism and attempted to give them a progressive interpretation.

 

"After the Second World War philosophers in France and Germany returned to the anti-Semitic discussion about Judaism and attempted to give a progressive interpretation to the images of the Jews as amorphous, disembodied, eternal wanderers, traitors to the political order. This was in order to create the new European spirit. Sebald takes this approach in order to create the ideal victim. Ultimately, he creates the German victim who suffers from uprooting and expulsion.”

 

To what extent is post-war German literature divorced from the entrenched anti-Semitism of German society?

 

“I’m not looking for signs of anti-Semitism, so I don’t see them. I think that putting this question aside is likely to make it possible to see additional complexities in literary or cultural discourse, from which anti-Semitism is not separate, but which it does not exhaust. The alacrity with which we get to the issue of anti-Semitism is one of the things that cause Israel not to understand Europe, and Europe not to understand Israel. I don’t say that you need to end the discussion of anti-Semitism. That would be a very serious mistake. I am talking about putting it aside in order to make it possible for things to appear. This could be one of the ways of dealing with anti-Semitism.”

 

Which is to say?

 

“To sit down and discuss it with experts in German literature who are making conscious or unconscious use of anti-Semitic insights, to allow them to talk about this and to see the connection that is created with their identity crisis. This is one of the only ways that would make it possible to deal with this baggage. Not to run and silence it, because then they won’t talk, or they’ll talk in a much emasculated way, and this happens very often. This causes anti-Semitism to come out of other places.”

 


פרסום ראשון: 07.18.06, 21:25
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