Ritter’s narrative is the only one in this study that makes use of the journey as a framework to discuss memories of childhood. As a narrative device the physical journey encompasses the physical displacements of the protagonist and her family during the war and the memories of suffering associated with them. The narrator, as physical traveller and survivor perpetrator, contextualizes her childhood memories within this framework and intervenes throughout the temporal levels of the psychological journey to remember and comment from this perspective. The notion of the “survivor perpetrator” functions as part of the framework of culpability, sets up her psychological journey into the past and enables a discussion of silence, silencing, and the victimhood of the protagonist, her family and by extension Germans generally. As a survivor and Zeitzeuge her victim status is guaranteed although she notes that she is “not seen as a victim in the eyes of the world” (p. 137; Stargardt, 2006, p. 7; Müller, Pinfold and Wölfel
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2016, pp. 419-420). However, the narrative constructs the protagonist as such, beginning with the paratext and throughout the text in representations of suffering and traumatic events.
The trope of the child victim stands in for innocent war children as survivors, as opposed to the guilt of the parents’ generation. The voice of the present narrator refers to this early in the introduction by claiming she cannot find justification “for their vision or blindness,” or “their political conformity,” enabling a testimony to suffering within the framework of culpability (p. xx). However, ambiguous and conflicting constructions of family members indicate a wavering stance towards culpability. For example, although the narrative characterizes Germans generally as citizens of a nation “that had started the war under an evil leader and had created blind followers,” her parents and Germans generally are described as having followed the “evil orders of Hitler” and thus without responsibility (p. xviii). The narrator explains that voicing criticism was too dangerous because the regime targeted “internal enemies” such as “grumblers” and “outspoken church members,” indirectly indicating her father could not criticize openly (pp. 63-64). Irmgard Hunt also mentions that under National Socialism “Schwarzseher […] were severely punished, often with death” (2005, p. 13, emphasis in original). Ritter’s narrator constructs Germans as complicit but concurrently exempts them from responsibility based on their victimization by the regime. For example, her father is cast as a drafted soldier whose goal was to protect his family and country from the Bolsheviks. Her mother is described as a heartbroken widow and courageous woman for having saved her children in a time described as an “odyssey of terror” and “famine” (pp. xvii-xviii). Both parents are described as deeply religious, having primarily their congregation and the safety of their family at heart. They are not characterized as perpetrators but as victims and members of what the narrator calls a “misguided nation”
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subject to “destructive forces,” indirectly referred to as “the attempt of a few individuals to seize power through domination,” in this case the Nazis (p. xv; p. xvii; p. xix).
A reader claims that Ritter “recalls the horrors and devastation brought to her homeland through the Hitler regime and the post-WWII years under the communists. […] Dealing with the reality that her father may never return to them, her brave mother takes the initiative to escape to the west, leaving behind loved ones in the east during the post-war years. Coming to terms with much of the heartbreaking events she suffered as a young child, make this read
a
heart rending and touching memorial to all the innocents who have had nothing whatsoever to do with politics and war” (Peck, 2004). Another reviewer notes that “[i]t was eye opening […] to learn about the raw experience of war itself” and “the struggles and shame after the war. Issues that are complex for anyone, let alone a child who was given no explanation.” The same reviewer goes on to praise this “story of survival and the resilience of the human spirit.” (JZ, 2004) These remarks emphasize that the reviewers experience what Keen terms “emotional fusion” with the child, family and Germans more generally. Such affect is based on the narrator’s accounts of their suffering in the text and due to the destruction of war, particularly the helplessness of small children. They also indicate that the text did indeed raise awareness of the experiences of Germans, particularly German children in the war.As I have shown, the present narrator seeks to retain a framework of German culpability while simultaneously relating stories of German suffering. In contrast to her brother, Klaus, who is constructed as still complicit in German silence, the German-American narrator claims to seek answers to the “German question” which encapsulates German guilt but is also defined by her as unanswerable. As Gillian Lathey convincingly states, a child cannot “be expected to share the guilt of its parents’ generation, but a contemporary audience
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demands that it be acknowledged” and Ritter does this very forcefully at the beginning of the text (1999, p. 60). I suggest that this is especially important given the prominence of the Holocaust in North American collective memory. However, blurring the boundaries between survivor victims and survivor perpetrators in order to tell her story of German suffering to invite empathy from the reader equates the suffering of all and relativizes German crimes. Although the text is framed as a psychological journey to work through the traumatic events of her childhood it is also a very public commentary on German victimhood and an effort to raise awareness through the use of broadcast empathy, particularly in the story of Dresden. By dedicating the memoir to her children, the author wishes to leave a legacy to her American children 57 whom she claims “needed to hear the stories of their grandparents and parents” because of the “deep unspoken grief that was never expressed openly,” alluding to the silence of the parental generation that had been passed on to her.
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