Abstract
Much has been written about the indirect traumatisation of the postwar generations that have no direct memory of the war and the Holocaust. From a psychoanalytic perspective, many Germans who were born shortly before or after the end of the war introjected a stigmatised identity precisely because the war generation could not confront the question of personal and collective guilt head on. Gabriele Rosenthal conducted a comparative study of intergenerational communication in families of Jewish Holocaust survivors and German perpetrators.1 Although the silence in both groups was motivated by diametrically opposite factors, namely trauma on the one side and guilt on the other, the children and grandchildren developed similar symptoms. Second and even third generation descendants in both groups were often locked into strong feelings of guilt, episodes of depression and serious psychosomatic disturbances. Rosenthal’s book is one of many studies of such phantomatic legacies that operate across generational thresholds.2 These underline that silence is a potent carrier of communicative memory. One approach offering a more nuanced understanding of such transgenerational transmission is the psychology of Vamik Volkan and his team.3 Their concept of ‘the chosen trauma’ helps to explain how it can be that later generations may remain bound to collective identity, even when the experiences that are at the core of this identity are discursively rejected.
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Notes
Gabriele Rosenthal (ed.), The Holocaust in Three Generations: Families of Victims and Perpetrators of the Nazi Regime (London: Cassell, 1998).
This was first studied with reference to survivor guilt in the descendants of Holocaust survivors. See William C. Niederland, ‘Psychiatric Disorders among Persecution Victims’, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders 139 (1964): 458–74;
C. Niederland ‘Clinical Observations on the “Survivor Syndrom”’, International Journal of Psycho -Analysis 49 (1968): 313–16;
Rafael Moses (ed.), Persistent Shadows of the Holocaust: the Meaning to Those Not Directly Affected (Madison, CT: International UP, 1993).
Vamik D. Volkan, Gabriele Ast and William F. Greer, The Third Reich in the Unconscious: Transgenerational Transition and Its Consequences (London: Brunner-Routledge, 2002).
Dirk A. Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 35.
Ann Rigney, ‘“All This Happened, More or Less”: What a Novelist Made of the Bombing of Dresden’, History and Theory 47 (2009): 5–25 (here 9).
Manfred Küchler, ‘Nachwort’, in Kurt Vonnegut, Schlachthof 5 oder Der Kinderkreuzzug, trans. Kurt Wagenseil (Berlin: Verlag und Volk, 1976), 225–36.
William Rodney Allen (ed.), Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1988), 94.
Christina Jarvis, ‘The Vietnamization of World War II in Slaughterhouse Five and Gravity’s Rainbow’, War Literature and The Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities 15 (2003): 95–117 (here 96).
Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 85–258 (here 100).
All quotations are taken from the following edition and are referenced as SF with the page number: Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death (London: Vintage, 2000).
Vonnegut’s conception of time has attracted much attention. For a Bergsonian interpretation of non-linearity as duration see Philip M. Rubens ‘“Nothing is Ever Final”: Vonnegut’s Concept of Time’, College Literature 6 (1997): 64–72.
For a narratological interpretation see Daniel Curdle, ‘Changing of the Old Guard: Time Travel and Literary Technique in the Work of Kurt Vonnegut’, The Yearbook of English Studies 30 (2000): 166–76.
This has been debated with reference to Holocaust testimonies. See James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990);
Dominick La Capra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001);
Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering: History: Heterology and the Nameless Others (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998).
See William Gowers, ‘The African Elephant in Warfare’, African Affairs 46 (1947): 42–49
Rainer Pöppinghege, Tiere im Krieg: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009).
Lutz Heck, Tiere–Mein Abenteuer: Erlebnisse in Wildnis und Zoo (Berlin: Ullstein, 1952), 97.
W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 93.
Marcel Beyer, Kaltenburg (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2008), 15–16.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998).
See Durs Grünbein, Nach den Satiren. Gedichte (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1999), 151.
See Durs Grünbein, ‘Europe After the Last Rains’, in Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 140.
Michael Morpurgo, An Elephant in the Garden (London: Harper Collins, 2010).
Katharina Döbler, ‘Forchtbar klassisch’, Die Zeit, 26 January 2006.
Jürgen Verdofsky, ‘Trauer mit Goldrand’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 19 October 2005.
Thomas Steinfeld, ‘Bomben, blankpoliert’, Die Süddeutsche Zeitung, 6 October 2005.
See Wilhelm Reich, Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1971)
Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich: Piper, 1967).
Wilfried Wilms, ‘Taboo and Repression in W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, in J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead (eds)
W. G. Sebald A Critical Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004), 175–89;
Anne Fuchs, ‘A Heimat in Ruins and the Ruins as Heimat: W. G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur’, in Fuchs, Cosgrove and Grote (eds), German Memory Contests, 287–302;
Carolin Duttlinger, ‘A Lineage of Destruction? Rethinking Photography in Luftkrieg und Literatur’, in Anne Fuchs and J. J. Long (eds), W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2007), 163–77.
On this issue see Anne Fuchs, ‘From Vergangenheitsbewältigung to Generational Memory Contests in Günter Grass, Monika Maron and Uwe Timm’, German Life and Letters 59 (2006): 169–86 (here 176–79).
Hermann Lübbe, ‘Der Nationalsozialismus im politischen Bewußtsein der Gegenwart’, in Martin Broszat (ed.), Deutschlands Weg in die Diktatur (Berlin: Siedler, 1983), 329–49 (here 335).
Durs Grünbein, Grauzone morgens. Gedichte (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988). Henceforth cited as Gm in main text.
In his lecture on poetics Grünbein states: ‘das waren […] Tagelieder aus einer sich in Alltagsgrau hüllenden sozialistischen Lebenswelt, nur daß ihr Sänger nicht als erinnerungsseliger Troubadour umherging, sondern als verdeckter Beobachter, der aus der Jackentasche heraus seine Photos schoß. Das waren fast allesamt ziemlich verwackelte Schwarzweißaufnahmen’ (They were morning songs from a socialist reality covered in an everyday greyness; the only difference being that their singer did not walk about as a nostalgic troubadour but as an under-cover observer, taking shots from his jacket pocket. Nearly all of them were rather blurred black-and-white photos). See Durs Grünbein, Vom Stellenwert der Worte. Frankfurter Poetikvorlesung 2009 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2010), 24.
Rolf Goebel, ‘Gesamtkunstwerk Dresden: Official Urban Discourse and Durs Grünbein’s Poetic Critique’, German Quarterly 80.4 (2007): 492–510 (here 503).
Durs Grünbein, ‘Mein babylonisches Gehirn’, in Gedicht und Geheimnis. Aufsätze 1990–2006 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2007), 19–33 (here 22).
Amir Eshel, ‘Diverging Memories? Durs Grünbein’s Mnemonic Topographies and the Future of the German Past’, The German Quarterly 74.4 (2001): 407–16 (here 410).
Gerrit-Jan Berendse, Die ‘Sächsische Dichterschule’: Lyrik in der DDR der sechziger und siebziger Jahre (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1990).
Renatus Deckert, Ruine und Gedicht: das zerstörte Dresden im Werk von Volker Braun, Heinz Czechowski und Durs Grünbein (Dresden: Thelem, 2009), 75.
See Kurt Vonnegut, Schlachthof fünf oder der Kinderkreuzzug, trans. Kurt Wagenseil with an afterword by Manfred Küchler (Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1976).
Durs Grünbein, Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2005). All quotations refer to this edition and to the numbered poems rather than page references as these are not given in the volume.97. On the conversion of Dresden’s industry for war production see Frederick Taylor, Dresden, 148–65.
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© 2012 Anne Fuchs
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Fuchs, A. (2012). Literary Voices II: War Memories in Kurt Vonnegut, Heinz Czechowski and Durs Grünbein. In: After the Dresden Bombing. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230359529_6
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