ATENAS EN LA SEGUNDA MITAD DEL SIGLO VII A.C.

The present narrator claims that spontaneous writing had allowed the “small child” within her, “the one with the timid voice, to be heard, because writing starts with silence” (p. 109). The tropes of silence and silencing in the narrative have various layers and are part of an overall framework suggesting culpability for the past. Such tropes appear throughout the text, and are included in sections covering different temporal levels of her psychological journey. The young protagonist’s silencing is incorporated within a general silence amongst the German population after the war, with both functioning to enable the narrator’s story of suffering. Her silencing is first thematized in the acknowledgements and referred to by the narrator as a leitmotiv (p. xi). The introduction contains the subtitle “A Small Voice” (p. xv, emphasis in original) and appears again in the description of her text as “the story of [her] childhood, a small voice telling of trauma, loss, silencing and homecoming in the face of a diabolic history and its aftermath” (p. xix). According to the narrative, the protagonist’s family and many other Germans “entered a conspiracy of silence” due to guilt and shame (pp. xv-xviii). The present narrator remembers that: “After the war no one took the time to talk to [her]” about

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“the horrors” she had witnessed and her “mother was more worried about where the next loaf of bread would come from” (p. xvi). She claims the trauma and losses as a family had never been “felt through, talked about, sorted out” (p. 2011, p. 28). This reflects Sabine Bode’s observation that: “Die Kriegskindergeneration litt – weit mehr als die ihrer Eltern – darunter, dass sie einem Volk angehörte, das Hitler an die Macht gebracht hatte. Scham und Schweigen erschwerten den Zugang zu den eigenen seelischen Verletzungen durch Gewalt und Verlust.” (2011, p. 28).

The silencing of the young protagonist was apparently part of a wider pattern of socialization and its roots can be found in the world of what the narrator terms a “necessary and prescribed silence” in her early childhood (p. 64). The perspective of her brother Klaus is included early in the narrative to explain that: “Under Hitler everyone was afraid to speak openly to their neighbors, even to members of their own family. You could be reported as an enemy of the state, and deported to a labor camp – killed!” (p. 17) This particular quote echoes Irmgard Hunt’s description of almost reporting her grandfather to her Nazi teacher and the consequences this would have had for him. Inviting the reader into her thought processes early in the text, the narrator reflects on silencing in a stream of consciousness mirroring Klaus’s observation that: “The fear of spies in your own neighborhood and the presence of the Gestapo silenced all of them, including our parents. It was intended also to silence me. Fear silenced my heart and would do so for many years.” (p. 17, emphasis in original) In a later chapter “The Open Window” which finds the adult protagonist in Breslau in 1998 the present narrator notes that “[s]ilencing started early on in [her] life. [They] were told not to say anything about [their] family life or whatever was discussed at home out of fear of being spied on, first by the Gestapo, then later on by the Communists” (p. 109). This silencing is again thematized within the silence of her parents and the narrator claims that her parents “did

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not and could not talk about what they thought and felt about the political regime” due to fear of the Gestapo, which mirrors claims made about German powerlessness by Hunt and constructs them as victims of the regime (p. 64). However, as Ernestine Schlant argues, the supposedly omniscient power of the Gestapo has been challenged by historians, including Robert Gellately, who in 1990 stated that: “[t]he regime’s dreaded enforcer would have been seriously hampered without a considerable degree of public co-operation” (Gellatey cited in Schlant, 1999, p. 149).

In the post-war years silence took on the form of suppression. The present narrator claims in the introduction that: “As a nation of perpetrators we […] entered a conspiracy of silence even about our own pain.” (p. xv) Such words echo the claim by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich that Germans were not only unable to mourn the suffering they inflicted on others but also unable to mourn their own losses (Schwab, p. 75) Her family is described like “many other Germans” who “hid under the ruins of a noxious national glory forever wrapped in shame” (p. xv). The narrator remembers that since “no one answered [her] cautious questions” as a child she came to the conclusion that “guilt and shame were fitting punishment for having been part of a nation that had subscribed to evil and destruction” (p. xviii). Thus, she remembers feeling that she “had no right to “talk about [her] story” (p. xviii).

The narrator identifies a pervasive silence not only within families but also in schools and remembers that after the war children were taught to “be silent and critical” and not proud of Germany (p. 110). History lessons “stopped either with Bismarck or with the end of World War I” (p. 109). According to the narrator: “[Their] teachers did not talk to [them] about their past experiences. It seemed that they were not allowed to mention anything that had to do with the Hitler years” (pp. 109-110). In the prologue, which finds the adult protagonist in Dachau, the present narrator wonders why “our parents did not urge us to visit this part of the

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German past and our teachers did not take us on a history class outing” (p. xxiv). Björn Krondorfer suggests that this changed in the late 1960s with the student rebellion, when an “awareness of German fascism and the destruction of European Jews” grew (Krondorfer, 1995, p. 33). The “Final Solution,” according to Krondorfer, was rarely mentioned in German schools until then and was slowly integrated into school curricula (1995, p. 33).45 Krondorfer claims, however, that in the late 1960s “the teaching of the Holocaust remained awkward” (1995, p. 33). It was “tucked away in the general history of World War II, mentioned as an especially gruesome aberration of the Nazi regime, or called a by-product of Hitler’s dictatorship” (1995, p. 33). He remarks that what he and other students learned were “some basic data and facts,” but “nobody taught us how to relate to the Shoah emotionally” (1995, p.33). Gabriele Schwab claims much the same and describes silence in Germany as “not a withholding of facts” but rather the “absence of any kind of emotional engagement at both the personal and collective levels,” which is reminiscent of claims made by Adorno and the Mitscherlichs (Schlant, 1999; Moeller, 2005, 2010, p. 11; Schwab, 2010).

Schwab argues that the historical legacy of the parental generation of children like Ritter is “difficult because [they] need to face a legacy that has been passed down in complicated, subliminal, and, to a large extent, entirely unconscious ways” (2010, p. 80). The narrator distances herself from her parents’ generation and speaks “of the lingering sense of shame, the forced and self-imposed silence, and the feeling of responsibility for the acts of a dead generation” (p. 205). According to Schwab, “the integration of historical trauma means stirring up the past in order to help the postwar generation work through the ghostly legacies of their parents” (2010, p. 80). This, as she notes, is “indispensable for allowing the children of perpetrators to address the unfinished business of their parents,” a claim the narrator makes and seeks to address (p. 80). Schwab continues: “Silencing or covering up violence, refusal to

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take responsibility, and failure to acknowledge guilt and shame are major factors in sustaining and passing psychic damage on to subsequent generations.” (2010, p. 101) Such a process is thematized by the narrator in the description of her own silencing. The narrator remembers that she too “joined this massive chorus of silence” (p. xvi). With her mother’s death in 1983 she remembers that “[t]he final silence fell over [her] (p. xvii). In now breaking her personal silence, the present narrator claims that she writes for her children so that they can understand how the unspoken grief and avoidance of memories can lead to “silent burdens” (p. 205).

Ritter’s discussion of silence in Germany in the post-war years echoes a text published by Ursula Hegi in 1997. Hegi, who was born in 1946 and emigrated to the United States in 1982, includes her own story in her collection of interviews with post-war German immigrants. She remembers that she grew up with evidence of war around her, yet her parents and teachers “only gave [her] reluctant answers about the war. Never about the Holocaust. We suffered, too” (1997, p. 15). According to Hegi, the silence she encountered was related to culpability and what she fittingly terms an “incomplete lens” (1997, p. 15). She notes that if Germans had spoken to their children of their “responsibility for their actions or lack of action” and grieved for Germany’s victims this would have created a “total lens” (1997, p. 15). Hegi attributes silence to the parent generation’s efforts to create a “heile Welt” which she claims further contributed to the horrors of the Holocaust because it was based on lies (1997, p. 15, emphasis in original). She maintains that this, however, was “held up to many of [her] generation as the only lens to see through” (1997, p. 15, emphasis in original).

The present narrator notes that: “Each section of the book struggles with the burden of the political events during the Nazi regime” and poses “nagging questions” with regard to what her parents knew at the time and “how they might have subscribed to Hitler’s ideology.” (p. xx) In order to deal with the historical legacy of the parental generation and her own

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silence the present narrator seeks to gain agency by claiming that “[e]ach survivor needs to speak and be heard.” The narrator therefore divides the world of survivors into the “survivor victim” and the “survivor perpetrator” with the hope of an eventual “frank dialogue” between them (p. xix).

4.3 “Survivor Perpetrators,” “Survivor Victims” and the Mitzvah: Framework of Culpability

In order to reinforce her wish for a dialogue between these two groups of survivors the narrator appropriates the trope of “The Mitzvah,” title of both the prologue and the epilogue (p. xxiii, p. 209, emphasis in original). The trope is central to the narrative, symbolizing the Holocaust and German guilt, and it figures prominently in the narrative. In the prologue, the present narrator begins her story by depicting a scene in the adult protagonist’s office in San Diego in 1998, in which she is given a Mitzvah by a Jewish patient (p. xxiii). According to the narrator “Mitzvoth are regarded as profound obligations, inescapable burdens, yet must be performed not from a sense of duty but a ‘joyous heart’” (p. xxiii).46 The Mitzvah, a dollar bill, is to be given to a needy person and the adult protagonist is sent “on a holy mission” which represents her upcoming trip to Germany and its sanctioning by the patient. However, the protagonist asks herself: “Didn’t she know how many million bodies lie between her, a Jewish woman and me, her German therapist? Surely she could not have forgotten, nor could I. I would never forget,” a statement that emphasizes German guilt and reinforces the framework of culpability (p. xxiv).

In the introduction to the text, the present narrator claims that the “history of the Holocaust can never be forgotten” and the “stories of human suffering would be told from one generation to the next,” highlighting the prominence of the Holocaust in American collective

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memory (p. xxiv). The Jewish patient, who stands in for the Jewish community, however, is described as having stepped over what the narrator calls the “human abyss,” symbolizing the Holocaust, and having given her a blessing to embark on her journey with a smile on her face (p. xxviii). This exchange between the German therapist and Jewish patient in San Diego emphasizes the beginnings of the hoped-for dialogue between both groups of survivors and legitimates the journey into her past by revisiting the locations linked to her childhood and youth in Germany and to speak of her suffering as a German child to an American readership. The adult protagonist is also given the key to her grandmother’s destroyed house in Dresden where she and the protagonist’s aunt died. It is described as a “gift from the ashes but a grim reminder of fire and destruction, a mandate to tell the story” and serves to symbolically unlock the door to her past (p. 86). Both are important as the key symbolizes a need to testify to suffering and the trope of the Mitzvah functions as part of the framework of culpability enabling this.

The epilogue finds the protagonist once again in her office with the Jewish patient. The protagonist shows her the first pages of the manuscript for the memoir and explains to the patient that she is writing about her history and childhood in Germany. The patient tells her: “You know, it really is not a problem for me to be here with you […]. The Holocaust happened in a different generation […]. Only one time in Germany, I took the train and felt almost sick to my stomach, thinking about the many Jews that had been transported by train to the camps. But I see you as a person. It sounds as though it is still a problem for you […]. But the healing happens between two persons at a time” (p. 210). This scene echoes Hunt’s claim that some Jews she met accepted her as a person, but not Germany as a nation (2005, p. 267). The remark made by the patient that what had transpired had happened in a “different generation” is included to distance the protagonist from the parental generation. It emphasizes

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that this Jewish woman does not hold the adult protagonist personally accountable for the Holocaust and alludes to the opening of the hoped-for dialogue that the present narrator often refers to in the text. Her hope is that through her own process of speaking and being heard, a dialogue between victims and perpetrators could be initiated and suffering could be shared (p. xix). The present narrator describes this process as finding a way to “find colorful remnants of life” and weave what she terms a “new tapestry” from the “threads of mercy and hope” (p. xxi). This hope for a dialogue and mercy mirrors Alexander Freund’s observation that some of the German immigrants he interviewed in North America “have interpreted the welcome of their Jewish friends as ‘absolution’ from collective guilt” (2002, p. 56).

4.4 Dissonant Communities: German-American and German Personal Memory