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The cultural memory of German victimhood in post-1990 popular German literature and television |
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| Published 1-1-2010 23 Views, 304 Pages ANJA PAULINE EBERT Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan |
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| Introduction My dissertation explores how the collective memory of Germans as victims of World War II and the Third Reich is currently being constructed in and through popular literature, television and mainstream cinema. The MLA bibliography lists over 1,200 articles, monographs and edited volumes on the subject of collective or cultural memory and over 10,000 entries on memory. My dissertation contributes to this expanding and intrinsically interdisciplinary discourse of cultural memory studies by arguing (with Kansteiner 2006) that the dominant research focus be changed from canonical literature to both popular media and their reception as these constitute the primary indicators of cultural memory. My dissertation furthermore contributes to the interdisciplinary research on the Third Reich and the Holocaust by analyzing their representation in German cultural memory, particularly in the memory of post-1990 united Germany. Canonical Holocaust discourse has recently been challenged by claims that many (non Jewish) Germans¹ also constitute victims of the Third Reich and the Second World War. This highly charged and complex debate about Germans as victims, which takes place not only within academia but also in the public sphere, includes a discussion of whether Germans can be ascribed the subject position of victim. Contemporary German memory discourse primarily focuses on the experience of German suffering as a consequence of the war and the Third Reich. It reflects a wider trend in Western culture in that the subject position of victim is increasingly claimed as the core determinant of group (Lockhurst 2003; Alexander 2004). To recast Germans, who have until recently been exclusively conceptualized as the Täternation, as victim is highly problematic since the discursive position of victim is already occupied by those people who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis. The discourse as to whether ordinary Germans constitute victims of the Second World War and the Third Reich originated immediately after the end of the war and was highly popular in Adenauer’s West Germany of the 1950s. Between the 1960s of the student revolution and the Wende, the claim to collective German victimhood existed predominantly in right wing movements, such as the Vertriebenenverbände, and in the personal narratives in families (Welzer, Moller, Tschuggnall 2003). In other words, before 1990, the discourse claiming Germans to be victims constituted vernacular memory – expressed in the form of communicative memory in small groups like families or non-dominant organizations – and functioned as a form of conservative-reactionary counter-memory, challenging the official collective memory. After the Wende, the Opferdebatte increasingly moved into the realm of official memory particularly because of Helmut Kohl’s efforts to establish a whitewashed German past as a source for the national identity of the newly unified Germany. The victim debate was (re-)ignited in 1997 when W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur discussed Germans as victims of Allied bombings and shortly thereafter the debate expanded to also include German POWs in Soviet captivity, German Wehrmacht soldiers on the Eastern front, the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia, and German women as victims of rape by occupation soldiers. Before 1990, there were hardly any publications about German wartime suffering, but since then, the subject has been center stage in a flood of memory artifacts, such as high and popular literature, movies and television programs. The dissertation explores the central aspect of post-unification cultural memory, namely the transition from the collective subject position of a Täternation to the claim of collective German victim status. I will analyze this collective identity transition via both the analysis of dominant cultural artifacts as well as their audience reception. The analysis focuses on popular culture artifacts as memory media which reflects the argument of prominent German historian Wulf Kansteiner (2006) who advocates that cultural memory studies should describe with more precision how such memory emerges in the process of media consumption. Such large-scale imagined communities (Anderson 1991) as nations construct shared discourses about their past via cultural artifacts. However, it is not so-called high culture but rather popular media, such as television, commercial cinema and popular literature, which exercise the greatest influence on how the national past is remembered. I follow Kansteiner (2006) in arguing that in order to explore German cultural memory, we analyze not only popular media but also their reception. He stresses that in the analysis of cultural memory, the focus on the discourses of elite groups, such as historical scholarship, political culture and canonical literature should be replaced by an analysis of the contribution mass media make to cultural memory construction. The majority of highbrow artifacts do not reach the general public; Kansteiner estimates 25% at most as an audience. Only interpretations of the past that become part of the mainstream national media coverage and are thus consumed by a wide audience have a chance to influence historical consciousness. The artifacts reaching the widest audience are popular culture media. My analysis is therefore primarily based on popular literature, television and commercial cinema.² The first chapter contextualizes the dissertation in the increasingly expansive discourse of cultural memory. I will discuss the collective memory concept and the distinction of collective into communicative and cultural memory (Assmann 1995). While communicative memory describes the construction of a shared discourse about the past through social interaction within small groups like families (Halbwachs 1980, 1992; Welzer 2002), cultural memory, on the other hand, is embodied in and disseminated through cultural artifacts, like literature, film, TV, monuments, and memorials, and in large-scale imagined communities like nations. My analysis emphasizes cultural rather than either individual or communicative memory since I explore how societies remember their past. After fine-tuning the methodological tools for this project, I will trace the discursive history of how the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and particularly the claim to collective German victimhood have been represented in the cultural memory of both West Germany and post-unification Germany in the second chapter. The core of the dissertation (chapters three, four and five) explores the cultural memory of Germans as victims embodied in and disseminated through post-unification popular cultural artifacts. Since German unification, when there no longer were two German states, who could each blame the other as the heir of National Socialism, the collective German past had to be renegotiated. And the claim that many Germans too were Nazi victims took center stage in postunification discourse. The new discourse has been embraced as official German memory in vast numbers of widely consumed cultural artifacts, including canonical literature but particularly in popular literature, commercial cinema and a wealth of semi-documentary and documentary television programs. Chapter three examines how German women are depicted in the popular literary text Eine Frau in Berlin, which is the diary of an anonymous woman who was raped by soldiers of the Russian Army occupying Berlin in 1945. Originally published in 1959 in West Germany and subsequently translated into English, it caused a heated debate among American and German historians about the role of women in the Third Reich but did not reach a wide audience and quickly went out of print. However, when it was re-released in 2003, the text became a bestseller in Germany. My analysis focuses on how the anonymous author represents herself as a victim in the diary and how the official and vernacular reception of the memoir reflects and in turn reinforces the current notion of collective German victimhood in the public sphere. As the text was recently adapted into a movie which premiered in November 2008, I extend the analysis to both the film itself and its reception. In chapter four I argue that not only ordinary Germans but even a perpetrator has been represented primarily as a victim. Bernhard Schlink’s bestselling novel Der Vorleser (1995) – which reached millions of German readers and became a bestseller in the United States too after it was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show – exculpates a former concentration camp guard on the dubious grounds that her illiteracy made her morally illiterate, i.e., unable to distinguish right and wrong (Swales 2003). The analysis of the novel and its reception will be extended to the American film adaptation, which was released in German theaters in February 2009. Chapter five analyzes how Germans are depicted as victims in one core example of the newly created and widely popular genre of the so-called TV-Event-Movie. After defining and conceptualizing the new genre and its implications, I will analyze the two-part mini series Dresden, which was broadcast in 2006 on the ZDF channel. It constitutes Germany’s first TV feature film about the Allied fire bombing of the city of Dresden. The series focuses almost exclusively on the figure of the ‘good German’ and turns bystanders into victims. Concomitantly, Dresden conceals German crimes as the fate of the six million Jews and of other Nazi victims and hence, obliterates the question of German guilt. Chapters three, four and five also analyze the depiction of Jewish victims of the Holocaust – or, in most cases, the lack thereof – in these popular culture artifacts. After all, conceptualizing Germans as victims necessitates displacing Nazi victims from their discursive position as the victim position is claimed by Germans. The analysis of how the collective subject position of ordinary, i.e., non-persecuted, Germans is re-conceptualized from bystanders and perpetrators to victims in popular culture artifacts and their reception is supplemented by exploring the subject in teaching materials that are designed to discuss these particular texts, television series, and movies in German classes of the Gymnasium and Realschule. The classroom is an important place for students to learn about World War II and the Third Reich, and teaching materials are essential tools for shaping the collective memory of young Germans. In Chapter four, I will also evaluate student-generated websites in order to find out not only how teachers are instructed to discuss Der Vorleser in the classroom but also the reception of the novel among students. In order to understand how these popular embodiments of the post-unification cultural memory have influenced how Germans remember this part of their national history, their reception has to be explored (Kansteiner 2006). It is very difficult to determine the precise effect of these media events on the consumer because as instances of collective conscience they cannot be grasped and analyzed directly. Nevertheless, reception processes and the effect of massmediated representations of the past on individuals cannot be excluded from collective memory studies (Kansteiner 2006). Therefore, chapters three, four and five analyze how audiences interpret the films, TV programs and texts since not only the media themselves but the rituals of consumption they underwrite constitute the most important shared component of people’s historical consciousness. Each chapter, therefore, not only analyzes how Germans are transformed into victims in the artifacts themselves but also and especially how these artifacts have been consumed by audiences. The reception analysis will answer the question of how the German public engages with the discursive transformation of Germans into victims. In other words, do they consider the diary, the novel, the TV-Event movie and historical feature film historically accurate and authentic depictions of their collective past (Fluck 2003)? As part of the reception analysis, I examine newspaper and online reviews which represent the official mode of reception. In addition, I discuss how viewers and readers interpret these popular artifacts. There is a variety of sources to consult in order to explore the audience’s reception: Leserbriefe sent to the authors, and in the case of TV programs and films, to the directors or studios; viewer opinions and statistics, compiled as reports of phone calls to the TV stations about particular programs; Leserbriefe published in newspapers; and entries in Internet discussion forums. However, analyzing the reception of these popular artifacts poses methodological problems. When I was exploring how the literary, filmic and cinematic representations had been received by audiences, I encountered some major drawbacks, neither newspapers nor publishing houses nor TV stations nor film studios archive letters nor calls from readers and viewers. Newspapers do not keep Leserbriefe; only those few letters that have been published once in an issue are – like regular articles – available online for a fee. TV stations usually summarize the calls and letters from viewers in a short report. While these summaries give a broad idea of how a TV production was received by the audience, they do not cite actual quotes and note only the gist of the most important comments. Publishers usually send all Leserbriefe to the authors. However, in the case of Eine Frau in Berlin, the author is not only anonymous but has also passed away. Hence, I contacted the custodian of the manuscript, Hannelore Marek, who told me that such Leserbriefe do not exist: neither for the 1959 nor for the 2003 publication. In order to look at letters that readers had written in response to Der Vorleser, I visited the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. The Literaturarchiv manages Bernhard Schlink’s correspondence concerning the novel. However, I was only granted access to the letters after Bernhard Schlink granted me this permission. Furthermore, I was not allowed to take any notes or to make copies of the Leserbriefe unless I also had written authorization from those who had written the letters due to copyright issues. It not only took a long time to receive the responses but also many letter writers had moved or even died; after all, Der Vorleser had been published in 1995, and the letters had been written between ten and fifteen years ago. After I was able to provide the institute with some consent forms, they copied and sent me the material for a fee. After I had finished writing the chapter, I had to send all quotes from those letters that I had used for my analysis to Bernhard Schlink in order to get his final authorization. However, in the end, he refused to give me his consent because the reader responses I had cited did not reflect his own interpretation, and I was not able to use any Leserbriefe about Der Vorleser in this dissertation. I extend this reflection on methodological problems in the respective chapters in order to indicate the practical difficulties of exploring the audience reception of popular culture artifacts. Instead of using letters sent to the authors, TV stations, newspapers or production companies, I had to focus almost solely on Internet resources, which turned out to be a rather abundant source for viewer and reader reviews. I analyze discussion forums on movie websites and on TV channel websites, and the customer review sections on websites that sell books and DVDs. Another useful source for viewer and reader opinions is the on-line comment section following film reviews or newspaper articles. The Internet is such an easy and anonymous tool that it prompts users to share their opinions openly and honestly. The advantage of using the Internet for exploring audience reception is that users have the option to react to earlier comments, which can result in discussions. However, since Internet users have usernames that obscure their real identity, it is sometimes impossible to determine if the user is female or male or to find out to which generation he/she belongs. In the end, the Internet turned out to be a helpful tool in exploring how these artifacts have been consumed by audiences. However, since it constitutes a relatively recent medium, there are no reader comments on Schlink’s novel available from the mid-1990s. Despite these methodological difficulties, it is significant to analyze how audiences interpret and perceive popular literary texts and filmic representations and what role popular media play in shaping the collective memory of their consumers. The reception analysis provides access to the actualization of the memory artifacts’ potential and highlights how select audiences consume mass media and how this in turn affects their view of the collective German past. |
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| ¹ In this dissertation, the term “German victims”
refers to
non-Jewish German victims. I am aware of the problematic dichotomy
between “German victims” and “Jewish
victims.”
After all, many Jewish victims were Germans, too. ² Although my dissertation explores popular culture media, it does not call into question the importance of canonical literature, literary scholarship of the canon/s or historical scholarship. I do, however, argue that when we seek to understand how imagined communities remember their pasts, we need to focus on popular culture media and, furthermore, not limit the analysis to the media characteristics but extend it to their colloquial reception. |
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| _________________________
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| After some
contectualizing historical information on the occupation of Berlin in
1945, the
teaching handbook offers various primary sources to complement the
discussion of the film, including an excerpt, entitled “Ein
Tagebuch aus männlicher russischer Sicht”
from Wladimir Gelfand’s Deutschland-Tagebuch
1945–1946.
Aufzeichnungen eines Rotarmisten.³ Gelfand was a Russian soldier who experienced the occupation in Berlin firsthand and his was the first diary by a Russian soldier published in German. In the diary, which was published in 2005, he writes that during the occupation of Berlin he had many girlfriends but that he has never raped a woman. The information about Wladimir Gelfand and the excerpts from his book depict a cultivated, friendly and intellectual man, rather reminiscent of the film’s idealized depiction of Anonyma’s protector. Gelfand does admit that Russian soldiers had raped girls and women and that he was offered sexual favors in return for protection, which he did not accept as this violated his code of honor as a soldier. While he tells honestly about the crimes which had been committed by his comrades, like the film, Gelfand’s diary misrepresents the extent and extreme brutality of the mass rapes. Critically thinking teachers may incite their students to question the relationship between Gelfand and his many ‘girlfriends’ as probably at minimum also involving barter of sex for food, alcohol, and cigarettes, the latter of which functioned as a currency of sorts on the black market which enabled the women to survive and was thus far less voluntary than Gelfert may like to think. However, such a critical perspective is not included in the teaching materials, where Gelfert’s diary rather seems to function to support the historical accuracy of the representation of Anonyma’s cultivated protector in the film. |
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| ³ Gelfand, Wladimir. Deutschland-Tagebuch 1945–1946. Aufzeichnungen eines Rotarmisten. Berlin: Aufbau, 2008. | ||
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