RESOLUCIÓN N.º 402/SSASS/

Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur comprises of 21 chapters, most of which

are narrated by Rosa as a gifted first-person storyteller who recounts her life from her childhood in a shtetl in Belarus to roughly the end of the Stalinist era in Russia, mostly in chronological fashion. Rosa’s style is witty, anecdotal and digressive, and presents the reader with a series of flashes, curious incidents, and vignettes rather than a coherent life story. Her inconsistent narrative is further broken up by frequent shifts in tense, combining past and present tense. While Rosa’s use of the present tense usually points to dangerous situations and painful memories, signalling heightened emotional involvement and immersion, this is not always the case. The embedded, first-person narrative of Rosa’s life is framed by four chapters, told by a highly ironic third-person narrator who alternates between internal and external focalisation. These chapters provide background information on why Rosa came to Germany, what motivated her to take part in the book project and what happens to her after the project ends prematurely. In the course of the novel, Rosa’s first-person narrative is repeatedly broken up by additional third-person chapters or paragraphs, which provide the reader with a critical glimpse into her and other Russian Jewish immigrants’ everyday lives in Germany. Chapter 16 comprises a letter from Rosa addressed to her dead friend

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Mascha.

The intimacy and emotional transparency found in the letter to Mascha contrasts with the high degree of mediation and manipulation that characterise Rosa’s other recollections. As mentioned before, Rosa remembers and narrates her life as part of an interview process, conducted by Dimitrij Silberman, a young man commissioned by the municipality to translate her Russian narrative into German. However, Dimitrij is by no means a neutral vessel, as Rosa points out:

Damit möchte ich nicht behaupten, seine Rolle sei eine rein passive. Er übersetzt alles, was ich ihm erzähle, in ein gepflegtes Deutsch. Er hat Wiederholungen gestrichen, zeitliche und inhaltliche Sprünge bereinigt und einzelne Episoden in Kapitel zusammengefasst. Ich habe diese deutsche Version gelesen. Der junge Mann hat sich bei der Übersetzung einige Freiheiten erlaubt (DbG, 312f.).

It never becomes entirely clear which version of Rosa’s story we read as part of the novel: is it the recordings or transcripts of Rosa’s narration or the edited translation by Dimitrij? However, Dimitrij’s interventions are not the only instances of manipulation: in the third-person frame narrative we find out that Rosa is primarily interested in the book project because it will bring an overall reward of 5,000 DM which will enable her to pay for her son’s coveted trip to Aix-en-Provence. As Kostik grows increasingly depressed in his new German environment, Rosa is under pressure to raise the money for a journey that she hopes will make her son happy.

When Rosa arrives at the building where the interview takes place, she realises that achieving her goals will be harder than she initially thought. The competition is tough, as several Russian-Jewish immigrants are waiting to undergo an absurd casting process. The project leader, Dr. Karolin Wepse, makes impossible demands on the applicants: “[S]ie müssen sowohl durch sogenannte typische Merkmale ihrer Gruppe als auch durch etwas Individuelles und über das gewöhnliche Maß Hinausgehendes beeindrucken” (DbG, 36). In Rosa’s case the stakes are even higher because, as a Jewish survivor, she needs to exemplify a heightened degree of universality: “[G]erade in den jüdischen Biographien [sollen] die Tragik, die Umbrüche und Hoffnungen des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts erkennbar werden [...]. Die Höhen und Tiefen der Zeit exemplifiziert am Beispiel einer persönlichen Erfahrung, wo sich in der Einzigartigkeit das Allgemeingültige widerspiegelt” (DbG, 37). This “Einzigartigkeit” should, however, not shatter people’s preconceived ideas of the Holocaust and Eastern European Jewry. The participants’ stories must therefore conform to the notion of critical openness which characterises German memory debates, while not seriously

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threatening the overall intention to produce a “nettes Büchlein” (DbG, 36).

While others react to this catalogue of requirements with sheer exasperation, Rosa immediately understands that she must sell her story if she wants to be successful. She therefore spices her Eastern European Jewish narrative with a good mix of folklore,

shtetl romance and suffering, while also playing into some of the stereotypes that

Western Europeans harbour about Russia and the Eastern bloc. She garnishes this mix with an extraordinary “Trumpf” (DbG, 39), which comes in the form of an alleged personal encounter with Stalin. And it works: Rosa not only gets the job, she also positively enthrals her audience: “Frau Wepse ist so begeistert von ihrer Geschichte und auch der Doktor Sambs, unser Chef, vor allem aber der Kulturstadtrat und erst der Bürgermeister – der ist richtig drauf abgefahren!” (DbG, 313). Amongst her Russian friends Rosa is unashamedly open about her intentions and her calculating attitude: “Jeder Tag bringt 50 Mark und das nütze ich natürlich aus. Je mehr ich erzähle, umso besser” (DbG, 108). Rosa’s penchant for digressions and anecdotes is therefore not only an expression of her personal narrative style, but part of a larger scheme to extract as much money as possible from the project. She thus assumes the role of a Russian- Jewish Sheherazade, who tells intricate and captivating stories, not to save her life, but to be able to afford “eine hauchdünne Scheibe von dem, was man gemeinhin als Glück bezeichnet” (DbG, 40). To this end, she is also not afraid to bend the facts in a manner that benefits her story. And yet, Rosa’s approach towards her story and the interview process becomes more complex as the novel progresses. Her hard-nosed and calculating attitude eventually crumbles, as the recollection of painful events begins to take its toll, leaving her increasingly unable to ward off the ghosts from the past. Rosa begins to suffer from nightmares and a growing sense of temporal disorientation, while also becoming more and more dependent on a weekly routine that she anticipates and dreads: “Mit jedem Mal fürchtete sie sich mehr und konnte noch weniger darauf verzichten” (DbG, 402). When the 750th _{jubilee turns out to be based on a forged}

charter and all the festivities and projects are called off, Rosa is left with a sense of despair that exceeds the financial repercussions (she can keep what she has earned on a day-to-day basis, but will not get the reward of 5,000 DM).

Rosa’s scheme also reflects on her German environment in which the Other is stereotyped and in which Jewish stories of suffering have become a commodity. The

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casting process situates her story within a larger “trauma economy”,415 _{forcing her to}

compete against the other migrants and their hardship and suffering. She successfully highlights her unique selling points, presenting herself and her story in terms of a tradeable good. Her calculating attitude is thus the flipside of a German approach which also commodifies stories of hardship and suffering and distributes recognition and empathy accordingly. The novel demonstrates how this climate hinders the development of empathy, which requires a willingness to listen and a dialogic openness, which are not possible within the framework of the book project. Vertlib’s text criticises a broader German discourse in which the Other is perceived primarily as a victim or a folkloristic attachment to a politically prescribed “Fremdenliebe” (DbG, 416), which masks an ongoing culture of xenophobia, as I will demonstrate. As Brigid Haines has argued, even the title of the project, Fremde Heimat. Heimat in der Fremde, leaves the binary division between the Self and the Other and the politics of exclusion untouched,416 _{despite the institutionalised displays of xenophilia. Rosa’s cool}

examination of the rules of this game and her decision to play along exposes these underlying scripts in a highly ironic and effective fashion.

The narrative presents Rosa as a fundamentally unreliable narrator on several levels.417 Rosa’s narrative is predominantly based on her personal recollections; it is well-known that autobiographical memories are inherently malleable, prone to factual errors and geared towards and influenced by the contexts in which they are produced.418 Further to this, the reader is also confronted with the broader framework of Rosa’s story, in which she acts as a modern-day Sheherazade intent to tell and sell her story. As a result, we can at no point in her narrative determine with any degree of certainty whether she is telling the truth or whether she is relaying what the audience wants to hear. Rosa’s narrative constantly walks the thin line between affirming and subverting stereotypes, between pandering to and deliberately disappointing her audience’s expectations. Brigid Haines is therefore correct in pointing out that “the

415 _{Terri Tomsky, ‘From Sarajevo to 9/11’, p. 49.}

416 _{“The title of the volume in which Gigricht immigrants’ stories are to be published, Fremde Heimat.}

Heimat in der Fremde, while professing inclusivity, actually preserves the binary divide between those

who belong in the town, and those who do not”, see Brigid Haines, ‘Poetics of the “Gruppenbild”: The Fictions of Vladimir Vertlib’, German Life and Letters 62.2 (2009), pp. 233-243, p. 238.

417 _{For an introduction to the issue of unreliability in narration see Dan Shen, ‘Unreliability’, The Living}

Handbook of Narratology, 27 June 2011 <http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/unreliability>

[accessed: 6 March 2017].

418 _{For an in-depth exploration of autobiographical memory see Hans-Jürgen Markowitsch and Harald}

Welzer, Das autobiographische Gedächtnis. Hirnorganische Grundlagen und biosoziale Entwicklung (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2005).

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deceptively conventional formal composition” of this and other Vertlib novel(s) usually conceals a multifaceted and highly ambiguous narrative.419 These observations also raise the issue of authenticity and, in relation to this, questions about trauma. Although Rosa, for the most part, delivers a carefully crafted narrative, tailored to the needs of her audience, this cannot hide the fact that her life is marked by various traumatic experiences: she witnessed a string of pogroms during the Russian Civil War, lost both her parents in the Holocaust and survived the blockade of Leningrad, only to witness the deaths of her best friend and her husband. However, Vertlib’s text suggests that Rosa has no space in which to articulate her personal pain. I therefore disagree with Sebastian Wogenstein’s assessment that Rosa masters her trauma through the process of narrativisation.420 _{Such a therapeutic success would require an}

environment of empathetic listening and the possibility of some form of closure, both of which are not available to Rosa. Whereas the initiators of the book project are enthusiastically absorbing her stories of hardship and suffering, they leave her entirely alone with the side-effects produced by her descent into a painful past:

Aber daß der ganze Aufwand umsonst gewesen war! Die vielen Stunden am Institut und die Alpträume in den Nächten danach. Die Selbstüberwindung. Die Erschöpfung [...]. Sobald sie zu erzählen begann, verstärkten sich ihre Zweifel, kamen alte Selbstvorwürfe wieder hoch und der dumpfe Schmerz über versäumte Gelegenheiten. Ängste, die sie mehrmals durchlitten hatte, in der Realität des Augenblicks und danach immer wieder, unzählige Male in Erinnerungen und Träumen, packten sie, hoben Zeit und Raum auf [...]. Schon vor dem Eingang zum Institut hämmerte das Herz jedes Mal wild, etwas klopfte bedrohlich in den Schläfen (DbG, 402).

The unexpected cancellation of the book project long before Rosa has reached the end of her story deprives her of the possibility of narrative closure, which would certainly

419 _{See Brigid Haines, ‘Poetics of the “Gruppenbild”’, p. 234. This point is also stressed by Dieter}

Neidlinger und Silke Pasewalk in their exploration of Vertlib’s poetics: “Ja, es ist ein Grundzug von Vertlibs Erzählen, dass Eindeutigkeiten und eigene Vorstellungsmuster evoziert und sogleich ihrer Absurdität überführt werden, um Ambivalenz und Ambiguität der Wirklichkeit in den Geschichten (Situationen und Perspektiven) zur Sprache zu bringen”, see Dieter Neidlinger and Silke Pasewalk, ‘Die Redlichkeit des Betrugs – Literarische Erinnerung und Totalitarismus bei Herta Müller und Vladimir Vertlib’, Interlitteraria 18.2. (2013), pp. 476-492, pp. 484f.

420 _{“Der bewußte Akt des Aussprechens wird zwar als schmerzhaft dargestellt, wirkt aber für Rosa}

befreiend, weil sie damit das internalisierte Trauma [...] wiederholen muß, in eine narrative Forms bringt und damit externalisiert. Das Trauma [...] wird von Rosa durch das Erzählen kathartisch überwunden”. I also take issue with the evidence that Wogenstein cites for his hypothesis, since it is based on a misreading. Wogenstein interprets Rosa’s dead friend Mascha, who talks to her from beyond the grave, as a symptom of Rosa’s trauma; according to Wogenstein, the fact that Mascha falls silent towards the end of the narrative symbolises Rosa’s mastery of this trauma. However, what Wogenstein reads as Mascha’s lapse into silence on p. 414 of the novel is only a temporary suspension of their conversation, which is revived on p. 428, see Sebastian Wogenstein, ‘Topographie des Dazwischen: Vladimir Vertlibs

Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur, Maxim Billers Esra und Thomas Meineckes Hellblau’, Gegenwartsliteratur. Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 3 (2004), pp. 71-96, p. 77.

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be an essential component of her alleged “Selbst-Therapie durch das Erzählen”.421

While she cannot fully articulate her trauma in the official, institutionalised context of the book project, the more personal space of the family is also blocked. Being symbiotically close to her son, Rosa is estranged from her daughter and her grandson; and so it is that the interview setting becomes a – flawed – surrogate for the lack of familial tradition and intergenerational transmission. Rosa’s relationship with her first- born son Kostik is marked by his dependency on her and Rosa’s inability to let go. His aggressive anti-social behaviour as a child and his life-long battle with physical illness can be read as symptoms of intergenerational traumatisation. When Rosa, who is struggling with her young son’s behaviour, consults the so-called ‘witch’, she explains in non-clinical words that Kostik has internalised his mother’s repressed traumatic experiences: instead of taking these experiences to heart – i.e. emotionally confronting them – his ancestors let them sink into their legs. Kostik has inherited their heavy legs which contain their unaddressed issues: “Er ist zwar noch ein kleines Kind, aber er trägt schon deren [his ancestors’] Bilder in sich” (DbG, 200). Das besondere

Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur stresses the lack of genuine acts of empathetic listening

in Rosa’s life: while still living in Russia, she was confronted with the politically motivated suppression of Jewish suffering under Soviet rule that also shaped her intra- familial communication. Towards the end of her life, she comes across the very different German memorial culture, which, while centred on Jewish suffering, is unable to approach her personal trauma outside of the ritualised framework of

Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or as anything other than a marketable good in a broader

“trauma economy”.422