Entangled Memories in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay

Abstract

This chapter will examine the mnemonic connections established between the Holocaust and histories of (post)colonial suffering in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1998 [1988]), another novel which reflects and elicits a relational understanding of trauma. Baumgartner’s Bombay recounts the tragic life and violent death of Hugo Baumgartner, a Jew who emigrates from Nazi Germany to India in the late 1930s, thus escaping the Holocaust in which his mother will be killed—or so we infer from the fact that the last sign of life he receives from her is a postcard sent from a Nazi concentration camp dated February 1941 (his father gassed himself to death before Baumgartner’s departure following temporary detention in Dachau). However, he finds himself imprisoned as an enemy alien in a British internment camp for the length of the war. When finally released, he is delivered into the chaos and escalating violence of pre-Partition Calcutta. He flees to Bombay, where he spends the rest of his life, only to have Germany catch up with him in the end: in the late 1980s the elderly and impoverished Baumgartner is stabbed to death in his apartment by Kurt, a young German drug addict.