UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles
Unencumbered by History:
Identity, Modernity, and the Holocaust in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel
and Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy
in Germanic Languages
by
David Lloyd Barry
2015
© Copyright by
David Lloyd Barry
2015
!
ii!
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
Unencumbered by History:
Identity, Modernity, and the Holocaust in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel
and Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster
by
David Lloyd Barry
Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Languages
University of California, Los Angeles, 2015
Professor Todd S. Presner, Chair
In this dissertation I argue that Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster present,
comparatively, in relation to their specific authors and societies, fictive counterparts to cultural
perspectives on the National Socialist period of German history that have also been developed in
the disciplines of history, sociology, and related fields with their grounding constructs. The
explicative methodology is freely adapted from ideas by Edward Said into an analytic modality
based on the comparison of multiple critical perspectives. I propose that the sense of the works
emerges from cultural discourses and narratives of memory involving the relationship between
personal subjectivity and German cultural identity. Evaluating claims of history as narrative,
also interrogates the roles of individual and collective memory in the construction of those
discourses and narratives, as well as analyzing the "legitimizing" narratives of nation states. As
!
iii!
such, the relation of these to concepts of modernity is also an issue for discussion. That these
concepts were viewed differently in the Federal Republic of Germany and German Democratic
Republic has important consequences for literature produced in those societies, including Grass’s
and Wolf's works, in terms of narrative viewpoint and overall communicative strategies.
I argue that narratives relating to the unification of the German state reveal a desire to
become, in the name of 'normalization', finally unencumbered by a past often considered to be
one of unique criminality and inhumanity embodied in the Holocaust. I claim that Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster have continuing relevance to contemporary narratives of
these problems and to disputes over the continued importance of the Holocaust to historical
memory within German culture.
!
iv!
The dissertation of David Lloyd Barry is approved.
Kathleen L. Komar
John A. McCumber
Michael A. North
Todd S. Presner, Committee Chair
University of California, Los Angeles
2015
!
v!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract of the Dissertation ii
Acknowledgements viii
Vita ix
1. Approaching the Texts 1
1.1. Introduction 1
1.2. A Beginning 2
1.3. Text and Reading Environment 7
1.4. Discourse and Narrative 15
1.5. The World, the Text, and the Critic: Methodological Adaptation 21
1.6. An Experimental Perspective 25
1.7. Narratology and Explication 29
1.8. Further Remarks 33
2. Background: Works and Settings 37
2.1. Background 37
2.2. The Cultures 41
2.3 The Past in the Present 52
3. Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster 65
3.1. The World in the Works 65
3.1.1. The World as Intertext 65
3.1.2. Levels of Narration 82
3.2. The Reader in the Works 87
3.2.1 Dialectic and Dialogic 90
!
vi!
3.2.2 The Novels as Performative Critique 95
4. History, Memory, Narrative 100
4.1. The Problem Defined 100
4.2. History 108
4.3. Memory 115
4.4. Narrative 122
4.5 Assessment: Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster
as historiographical fiction 130
5. Identity and Subjectivity in Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster 140
5.1 Introduction 140
5.2 Identity versus Subjectivity 145
5.2.1 Identity and Subjectivity in the Secondary Literature 148
5.2.2 Identity and Subjectivity: Disciplinary Specificity 154
5.3 The Self in the Novels 164
5.4 German National Identity 175
5.5 Conclusions 184
6. Modernity and Its Alternatives 189
6.1 Issues 189
6.2 Modernity as Concept 190
6.3 Self in Society: Society in Self 197
6.4 Alternative Modernities 207
6.4.1 Two States -- Two Nations? 207
6.4.2 Grass and Wolf 228
!
vii!
7. The Holocaust: Negation, Negotiation, and Normalization 236
7.1 Problem: Nature and Scope 236
7.2 Negation 240
7.2.1 National Socialists 240
7.2.2 Perpetrators 243
7.2.3 Ordinary Germans 250
7.3 Negotiation 256
7.4 Normalization 266
7.5 Evaluations 282
Conclusion: Either/Or 291
Works Cited 305
!
viii!
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my appreciation to my committee chair, Dr. Todd Presner, for his
invaluable advice and guidance for this dissertation. I also offer my sincere thanks to the other
members of my doctoral committee, Dr. Kathleen Komar, Dr. John McCumber, and Dr. Michael
North for their insights and advice. I thank Dr. Volker Langbehn and Dr. Ilona Vandergriff of
San Francisco State University for their encouragement and support.
!
ix!
VITA
Education
B.A. Geography, San Francisco State University, 1985
M.A. Music, San Francisco State University, 1993
M.A. German, San Francisco State University, 2008
International Study
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, 2006 - 2007
Conferences and Papers
2006: Workshop co-presenter on grammatical gender constructs of the German
language and their social import. California Language Teachers’ Association Convention,
Fresno, California.
2011: “Modernity as Narrative in Cold War Era Divided Germany.” Columbia
University German Graduate Conference, “Modernity at Large” hosted by the Columbia
University Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.
2015: “Transgressing Boundaries: Self, Technology, and Transformation in the
Reception of Der Ackermann aus Böhmen.” Princeton Renaissance and Early Modern
Studies Graduate Conference, “Early Modern Print Culture” hosted by the Princeton
University Program in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies.
Collaborative Publication
Ilona Vandergriff, David Barry, and Kimberley Mueller, "Authentic Models and Usage Norms?
Gender Marking in First Year Text Books," Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German
41.2 (Fall 2008) 144-150.
Multidisciplinary
Includes commissioned cultural and geographic research, musical compositions, published music
reviews, and German translation services.
Teaching Assistant for German Language and Literature Courses
2004: San Francisco State University
2009 – 2010, 2012 - 2014: University of California, Los Angeles
!
1!
1. Approaching the Texts
1.1 Introduction
Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel was published in 1959. The seven hundred and
seventy pages of text contained in the third volume of Grass’s complete works presents the
reader with a story that seems to personalize the National Socialist period in German history.
Upon reflection, the unfolding narrative also appears to cast a cynical glance at the society in
which it was written, the prosperous Federal Republic of Germany in the 'Cold War' era. Christa
Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, published in 1976 and occupying the fifth volume of its author's
complete works, likewise relates over six hundred twenty-seven pages a personal narrative of life
during the 'Third Reich'. As with Grass’s novel it seems to embody a certain level of critique of
the society in which it was written, that of the communistic German Democratic Republic.
Given the complexities of narration and the wide range of issues into which the works seemingly
situate themselves -- historiography, personal subjectivity, national identity, even literary
analysis itself -- from what perspective(s) might one profitably approach the novels in the
twenty-first century?
Questions of whether, how, and with what content a text communicates or 'speaks',
constitute the research domain of a varied body of literary theory. Obviously, any reading
presupposes a perspective on the work under consideration, which whether realized or not,
encodes a certain set of pre-judgments or even philosophical assumptions. Whether read from,
for instance, New Critical, structuralist, New Historicist, or a deconstructive perspective, the text
is perceived to embody qualities that each perspective, as methodology, may properly recover
according to its own principles with assumed epistemological validity. Die Blechtrommel and
Kindheitsmuster may be and have been subject to very different allocations of sense based on
!
2!
methodological considerations and the present viewpoint is obviously not exempt from this state
of affairs. Exactly what is the point, then, of the endeavor?
1.2 A Beginning
Man kann eine Geschichte in der Mitte beginnen und vorwärts wie rückwärts kühn
ausschreitend Verwirrung anstiften.
1
Und wie gewöhnlich wird sich ergeben, was dir weniger unerträglich ist, durch das, was
du machst. Was du heute . . . beginnst, indem du, Packen provisorisch beschriebenen
Papiers beiseite legend, einen neuen Bogen einspannst, noch einmal mit der Kapitelzahl I
anfängst.
2
These quotes, the first from Die Blechtrommel, the second from Kindheitsmuster, viewed purely
as linguistic examples, appear to insert the process of writing, as a theme, into each work in their
respective opening pages. Inspection of the contexts of these passages reveal that each is
situated in a larger discourse framing ideas on what it means to be a responsible person, the role
of memory in that endeavor, and the urge to communicate these ideas to an audience. The
passage from Grass’s work appears to speak satirically, that from Wolf's adopts a serious tone.
Both explicitly problematize the act of narration and the position of the narrator. This further
information, however, rests on inferences about the novels' texts that necessarily become more
numerous, abstract, and increasingly decision-based as the reader attempts to glean a larger and
more precise sense of the words' import.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel (Göttingen: Steidl, 1959, 1993) 12; The Tin Drum: a New
Translation, trans. Breon Mitchell (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) 5.
Hereafter B and TD, respectively.
2
Christa Wolf, Kindheitsmuster, (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1976; Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2007) 11; Patterns of Childhood. trans. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt (New
York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980) 3. Hereafter K and PC, respectively.
!
3!
The manner in which one approaches a text inevitably signals a theoretical orientation
and possibly, particular resultant modes of explication. Regarding the quotations from Grass and
Wolf above as the starting point for analysis, as givens, entails working with a different set of
inferences and applications than beginning with the social relationships with which the novels
may be associated. The secondary literature to both novels naturally reflects varied emphases.
Early critical work on Die Blechtrommel, such as that by William P. Hanson,
3
sometimes
operated with textually centered historicist concerns, e.g. the novel's relationship to the
Bildungsroman. A paradigmatic shift in Blechtrommel scholarship occurred in the 1970's with
Georg Just's relation of the novel to reception theory. Essentially, for Just, Oskar is a culture-
critical figure precisely because his narrative position contradicts the reader's horizon of
expectations and invites reflection thereon.
4
With a nod to T. S. Eliot, Just also introduced the
concept of 'objective correlates' in relation to Die Blechtrommel.
5
The 'postmodern' trend
expressed itself in André Fischer's devaluation of previous criticism and insistence on the
aesthetic qualities of the novel exclusively, explicating them in terms of playfulness and
sexuality, with reference to Bakhtin, and denying connections with extra-textual socio-political
referents.
6
The critical literature to Kindheitsmuster runs the gamut from semi-official East German
'Marxist' interpretation to explication in relation to concerns observable in world literature
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3
William P. Hanson, "Oskar, Rasputin, and Goethe," Canadian Modern Language Review 20.1
(1963): 29-32.
4
Georg Just, Darstellung und Appell in der Blechtrommel von Günter Grass:
Darstellungsästhetik versus Wirkungsästhetik (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1972) 69-76.
5
Ibid. 112.
6
André Fischer, "Ludismus und Negativitätserfahrungen in der Blechtrommel," Inszenierte
Naivität Zur ästhetischen Simulation von Geschichte bei Günter Grass, Albert Drach und Walter
Kempowski (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1992) 95-213.
!
4!
generally. In the 1980's West German critic Margarete Mitscherlich brought psychoanalytic
theory to bear on the question of self-portrayal in her comparative treatment of Kindheitsmuster.
7
Since the 1990's, engagement with the novel has included approaches such as Lutz Köpnick's
situation of the work in relation to concepts from Walter Benjamin,
8
Michael Levine's inquiry
into the instability of personal identity within the narrative,
9
and numerous examples of feminist
explication.
In the interplay of theory and method discernible in the secondary literature to Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster a short history of initiatives within literary criticism is
discernible. The successive issues that have appeared meaningful in reflecting the concerns and
values of theorists have often been introduced as oppositional interventions against earlier ideas.
As such, each successive initiative, if widely adopted, has also tended to reflect larger
intellectual viewpoints apparent across disciplines, although these may be concurrent and
possibly conflicting. For instance, emphases that focus on the formal and autonomous
characteristics of texts comport well with the idea of discipline specificity and/or analytical
perspectives in philosophy. Much criticism, including many structuralist initiatives, extends the
broader societal drive to provide a scientific basis for intellectual endeavors. Marxism both
benefits from and creates a perspective that sees the so-called objective world as the construction
of social forces, particularly class struggle. Deconstructive theories, evincing skepticism towards
systematization, the imputation of identities, and the manner in which seeming realities may
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
7
Margarete Mitscherlich, "Die Frage der Selbstdarstellung: Überlegungen zu den
Autobiographien von Helene Deutsch, Margaret Mead und Christa Wolf," Neue Rundschau
91.2/3 (1980): 291-316.
8
Lutz Köpnick, "Rettung und Destruktion: Erinnerungsverfahren und Geschichtsbewußtsein in
Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster und Walter Benjamins Spätwerk," Monatshefte 84.1 (Spring
1992): 74-90.
9
Michael G. Levine, "Writing Anxiety: Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster," Diacritics 27.2
(Summer 1997): 106-123.
!
5!
arise from nothing more than hierarchies of relationships instantiated in language, have initiated
debate over the need for caution against overarching theoretization in many disciplines.
Perhaps a common denominator between many literature-theoretical conceptions is the
appreciation for the role of language in providing structure to human experience. Theories on
the constitution of language have regularly been at the center of debates on analytical modalities.
The linguist Dirk Geeraerts, for instance, posits parallels between practices within formal
linguistic analysis and those of literary analysis based on formal constructs.
10
The productivity
of Saussure's conception of language as a system of signs with emphasis on difference as
fundamental discriminant, is of course evident for both structuralist and poststructuralist critique.
The conception of language as a constructed medium whose meanings reflect various social,
political, or economic agencies of power may also appear within or in addition to the linguistic
contexts. The descriptors used in literary analysis reflect this process of formation and derive
originally from terminological preferences associated with certain critical stances. Terms such
as "discourse," "text," "textuality," etc., develop a technical significance beyond a dictionary
definition and describe the particular theoretic emphases of Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, or others
and are commonly used by those wishing to identify their own analytical constructs with such
emphases.
The quotations from Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster above could introduce
analyses of the respective novels of widely differing substance and purpose. For Michael
Scheffel the passage from Grass and its context signals the fictional nature of the discourse as a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10
Dirk Geeraerts, "Decontextualizing and Recontextualizing Tendencies in 20th-century
Linguistics and Literary Theory," Anglistentag 2002 Bayreuth, eds. Ewald Mengel, Hans-Joerg
Schmid, and Michael Steppat (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2003) 369-379.
!
6!
formal construct.
11
For Eung-Jun Kim the utterance ambiguates the relationship between
narrator and author and distances the reader from the narrator's implied views on history.
12
Julia
Hell focuses, in passages attending the quotation from Kindheitsmuster, above, on the
psychological import of a split between the narrated subject and the narrating subject.
13
Michael Levine's interest in these passages is the performance of self-difference through the
substitution of the second person for the first and the further divorce of both from the third
personal pronoun creating "the very différance of voices."
14
Naturally, literary analysts will
explicate texts in terms of those issues that are of compelling interest to them. Surveying literary
criticism in general and the secondary literature to Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster in
particular one finds not only variant perspectives and methodologies but divergent underlying
conceptions of the nature of knowledge and the constitution of the objects of that knowledge as
such. Thus, above, Scheffel analyzes from narratological assumptions about the structure of the
text, Kim posits both history and literature as a unified entity; Hell bases her literature-theoretical
explications on Freudian psychoanalytic theory and Levine proceeds through the use of tropes
also associated with Derrida. Not only are the different analyses varied in emphasis but indicate
possibly divergent conceptions in textual epistemology and/or ontology.
Terminological distinctions and definitions of those trends considered meaningful or
fashionable add a further layer of ambiguity to explicative perspectives. For instance, Ingeborg
Hoesterey somewhat whimsically details a debate over considering works by Uwe Johnson as
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11
Michael Scheffel, Formen selbstreflexiven Erzählens: eine Typologie and sechs exemplarische
Analysen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997) 59.
12
Eung-Jun Kim, Literatur als Historie. Zeitgeschichte in Thomas Manns "Doktor Faustus" und
Günter Grass' "Die Blechtrommel" (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2004) 65-66.
13
Julia Hell, Post-Fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East
Germany (Durham, N. C. and London: Duke University, 1997) 200.
14
Levine 111.
!
7!
well as the opening passages of Die Blechtrommel as examples of German language literary
'modernism' versus an "Amerikanistik" influenced classification of 'postmodernism'.
15
What
appears to be a banal truism, that methodology implies a particular view of the nature of writing,
might also obscure the extent to which the conception of what writing is -- e.g. author's
communication, autonomous art object, "a signifying system constituted by relation and
difference,"
16
product of social constructions, all or none of the preceding -- determines
analytical methodology. For any given critical orientation one assumes that a text is an entity
that may be analyzed in a particular manner. In this regard the passages from Grass and Wolf
quoted earlier assume a critical character. For, these begin here a critique of literary criticism
itself that is not only literal but throughout the novels, also performative. The secondary
literature to both Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster has regularly noted the manner in
which various literary trends, those that might simplistically and without distinction be
categorized as belonging to currents that one might call 'aestheticist', 'modernist', and/or 'socialist
realist', are satirized or negatively engaged.
17
Analysis of the novels individually will also show
that much in their narrative modes either contradicts or problematizes contemporaneous literary
precepts in line with the satirical or actual critique enunciated in the texts.
1.3 Texts and Reading Environment
Among the things that the passages from Grass and Wolf quoted earlier initiate, is (a) to
implicitly pose the question in regard to literature-theoretical endeavors in general: what's the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
15
Ingeborg Hoesterey, "Modern/postmodern: Eine Rezeption der Jahrestage, USA 1977,"
Johnson Jahrbuch: Band 4/1997, ed. Ulrich Fries and Holger Helbig (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
und Ruprecht, 1997) 48-55; 54.
16
M. A. R. Habib, A History of Literary Criticism and Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) 767.
17
Nury Kim, Allegorie oder Authentizität, Zwei ästhetische Modelle der Aufarbeitung der
Vergangenheit: Günter Grass’ Die Blechtrommel und Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster (Frankfurt
am Main, New York: Peter Lang, 1995) 16, 18, 242.
!
8!
point? and (b) to demarcate certain minimal spaces in which that question may be at least
tentatively answered. The relationship between (a) and (b) could be regarded as co-dependent. If
the passage from Die Blechtrommel can be viewed as one that foregrounds the novel's ensuing
narrative strategies, in essence a stance that "cannibalizes -- a range of literary, cultural, and
religious texts"
18
then (a) above becomes a concomitant of the novel's modes of writing and the
narrator(s)' declarations throughout. If the passage from Kindheitsmuster highlights the idea that
[. . .] the difficulties that force "you," the writer, to begin again are not simply
identifiable or avoidable obstacles in the way of writing but, rather, irreducible and
irreducibly conflicted aspects of the writing itself [,]
19
then the issues surrounding (a) concern the very reasons for writing. In this manner both
quotations place themselves within the context of the relation of theory to practice in literary
explication. Clearly, they do this both in terms of subject matter and in terms of temporal, i.e.
historical placement. The minimal spaces in which the tensions surrounding the topic of writing
play out in the novels would appear to be naturally enough, the texts, an assumed reader
(otherwise why address?), and the larger environment of both, evident in the novels as discursive
historical object and referent.
This 'larger environment' also houses the various critical methodologies: those that find
the main interest immanent to the text, those that find this interest in a text's structure and
function, in rhetoric, as a function of social forces, as a display of power structures, as reader
reception, of difference, and/ or other factors. In Die Blechtrommel this larger realm of literary
thinking is fantastically suspended between the opposing poles of Goethe and Rasputin; in the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
18
Sabine Gross, "Narration in the Tin Drum: A Quirky Narrator in Search of the Truth,"
Approaches to Teaching Grass's The Tin Drum, ed. Monika Shafi (New York: The Modern
Language Association of America, 2008) 75-89; 76.
19
Levine 106
!
9!
end it is possibly a figure of absolute contingency that predominates: die Schwarze Köchin.
Kindheitsmuster operates within a 'realist' literary environment showing some concern for
Marxist precepts; yet the fragmentation of the subject and the lack of closure in regard to the
stated problematic leads here also to a perception of a subtext in the novel: the paradoxes, if not
the outright failure, of theory.
In the world outside the novels, the material world of the reader and the critic, literature-
theoretical methodologies can also be seen as products of self-referential paradox. Inasmuch as
epistemic validity reflects ontological predilections, that which a theoretical perspective
produces as textual explication is an implicit restatement of those basic grounding ideas applied
to a text. When Monroe Beardsley treats the aesthetics of a text or considers modes of profitable
reading, one discerns a debt to phenomenology and analytical philosophy.
20
Explications by
Derrida reveal engagement with Nietzsche and Heidegger in addition to Saussure.
21
Tensions
between differing ideas of analysis that often also issue from fundamental differences on the
nature of reality and human experience create lively debate between the respective proponents.
In some cases critique assumes the form of an attempt to bridge the gap between differing
orientations, such as Manfred Frank's initiatives in relation to deconstructive and hermeneutical
approaches.
22
The fact that Frank, throughout his works, engages with the thought of German
Romantic thinkers, Anglo-American analytic philosophers, and French deconstructionists on an
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
20
Monroe C. Beardsley, "Aesthetic Value in Literature," Comparative Literature Studies 18.3
(September 1981) Papers of the Seventh Triennial Meeting of the American Comparative
Literature Association: 238-247; 239
21
Jacques Derrida, "The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy Before Linguistics," The Georgia
Review 30.3 (Fall 1976): 527-564.
22
Manfred Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, foreword Martin Schwab, trans. Sabine Wilke and
Richard Gray (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
!
10!
apparently equal epistemological basis
23
might seem quixotic and has been criticized as
inconsistent,
24
but testifies to an ongoing desire to find intellectual unity in a world of
fragmented perspectives.
Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster are not only situated in a larger environment
conceptually but also physically in one of time and space: the former in the Federal Republic of
Germany in the 1950s for the latter in the German Democratic Republic of the 1970s. The
reader, of necessity situated outside these spaces, may bring very different expectations to the
texts of the novels than those assumed at the times and places of writing. Engagement with the
novels situates the reader into a ‘world’ exterior to the novels and herself -- whether conceived as
an objective reality, Kantian relationship, or cognitive construct -- in the guise of history: both
socio-political and for present purposes, literature-theoretical. Concurrent with the subject
matters and production histories of Grass’s and Wolf's works cultural critics have found to be
meaningful, a partially successive and partially overlapping series of critical movements grouped
perhaps simplistically as New Criticism, Marxist approaches, psychoanalytic critique,
structuralism, reader response theory, discourse analysis, deconstruction, New Historicism, and
media studies/ 'cyber-criticism'. Techniques associated with some of these have also been
utilized in newer critical emphases: feminist, gender, and post-colonial theory. Considering that,
as mentioned earlier, the theory underpinning many of these movements encode sometimes
mutually exclusive philosophical fundamentals, and successive initiatives often claim relevance
as more sufficient, alternative, or counter explications in relation to predecessors, where does this
leave the reader searching for methodological cogency in the year 2015? Which perspectives
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
23
Manfred Frank, Ansichten der Subjektivität (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012).
24
Elías Palti, " 'Return of the Subject' as a Historico-Intellectual Problem," History and Theory
43.1 (February 2004): 57-82; 81.
!
11!
can be said to speak most coherently to the cognitive and social conditions of the twenty-first
century?
This dissertation suggests that an appropriate answer to the above is: all and none.
Implicit in this formulation is the position that all coherently crafted theories contribute
something of value about texts, on the basis of their underlying assumptions. However, this
latter qualification disqualifies any one perspective from exercising sufficiency in textual
explication. The historical situation of the reader in relation to methodological claims will also
partially determine what is valuable in any individual case. If the questions above were asked at
the time of Die Blechtrommel's and Kindheitsmuster's respective publications, the list of
perspectives considered compelling by the majority of critics would be, of course, different. The
time period between the two novels, to the extent one may generalize, witnessed several main
trends in critical discourse: a Eurocentric engagement with form and structure, Marxist analyses,
debate over the role of the sciences including skepticism of its pretensions and the pretensions of
systematization in general. These played out against the socio-political background of the Cold
War, civil rights movements, women's movement, and youth rebellion. Philosophical currents
were typified by Sartre, Quine, Lacan, the Frankfurt School, re-appreciation of Nietzsche,
Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, and beginning engagement with Julia Kristeva, Foucault, and
Derrida. It is instructive to note that Edward Said, only several years after the publication of
Kindheitsmuster lists the "progenitors" of contemporary literary theory as Saussure, Lukacs,
Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. Among those practitioners Said considers
noteworthy, not without critique, are Derrida, Foucault, and Hayden White.
25
Among a great
number of authors and literary figures, from Swift through Beckett, Said also finds the critics
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
25
Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1983) 3-4.
!
12!
Harold Bloom, Northrop Frye, Paul Ricoeur, and Michael Riffaterre significant enough for
engagement.
If one considers the enumerations from Said as a possible 'baseline' description of critical
currents at the beginning of the Reagan-Thatcher era, incorporating many of the still noteworthy
emphases of at least twenty years previous to the writing, how might such a landscape of cultural
and literary criticism appear in the second decade of the twenty-first century? The political
scene in Europe and the United States has witnessed the end of the East-West Cold War, the
collapse of most communist governments, generally conservative governance in Europe and the
United States, the rise of computer technologies, economic boom and collapse, and since the
year 2001 the threat of 'terrorism', and continuous warfare between the United States, its NATO
allies and various nations and groups of insurgents in the Middle East. This period has also seen
greater awareness of environmental issues and the drive for equality for women and minority
populations in many countries. Global consciousness both economically and sociologically is
somewhat in evidence and countries that were plundered in the age of European colonialism
have attained a degree of autonomous economic success, particularly in Asia. Multiculturalism
coexists with xenophobia; liberation movements with autocracy. Critical emphases for this
period could be those mentioned several paragraphs earlier, with the primary exception of New
Criticism.
It would be hazardous indeed to attempt a sufficient list of intellectual figures that have
contributed to cultural criticism in the last thirty years. Without distinguishing between
'philosophers' and 'theorists' one could no doubt subtract several of the older theorists (those
indebted to positivist or behaviorist analysis) mentioned earlier, move Foucault and Derrida into
Said's 'progenitors' list along with Walter Benjamin, M. M. Bakhtin, and Jacques Lacan, add to
!
13!
the list of noteworthy practitioners names like Lyotard, Deleuze, and Judith Butler, and to the list
of important contemporary theorists at least a dozen names from Agamben to Žižek. In addition
to the above, theorists that surface consistently in German critical surveys include Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Hans Blumenberg, Wolfgang Iser, Karlheinz Stierle, Niklas Luhmann, Manfred Frank,
and Peter Sloterdijk. German critics took notice of French cultural theory, early popularized in
the United States, relatively late in the twentieth century and considered the ideas treated more
consistently as issues of hermeneutics, rather than deconstruction.
The reader of Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster at this historical juncture thus finds
herself in a critical milieu that arose predominantly within the previous thirty to forty years as
supplement, corrective, or oppositional initiative to various formalist and Eurocentrically
oriented viewpoints. On the basis of works by those mentioned one can describe the concerns
evinced, often referred to as postmodernist, or even in the twenty-first century, "post-
theoretical,"
26
as the result of a long line of skepticism in reaction to the apparent failures,
paradoxes, and aporias of rationalist endeavors to formalize the semantic content of natural
language evident in the work of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, for instance. Yet subsequent
'corrective' theorizations are also not unproblematic. Critical emphases such as structuralism and
deconstruction have been criticized for reducing their objects of explication to abstractions
within self-contained systems;
27
essentially, as characterized earlier, enactments of self-
referential paradox. In one summary of the contemporary situation,
[e]ven the concept of "reality" . . . is now viewed as not only as an intellectual but also an
ideological construct, serving to privilege certain ways of viewing the world. In a strange
historical development, we have come full circle . . . we recognize not only the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
26
Habib 772.
27
Ibid. 648, 665.
!
14!
constitution of our perceptual and conceptual capacity by language but also the
constitutive role of the linguistic situation itself [. . .]
28
The purportedly liberating power of technology must deal with the circumstance that as the
"digital revolution" has "pushed us to the brink of a great age of editorial and archival
scholarship"
29
it is also one’s digitalized individual identities that are being edited and archived,
not by scholars but by corporate and governmental entities.
The 'baseline' intellectual orientation of early twenty-first century society might be seen
as one that not only unmasks the apparent contradictions of general theories and rejects meta-
narratives but also accepts the co-existence of diverse and sometimes opposing views and
supports their integration into hybrid forms so far as possible, a trend productively seen in post-
colonial literature and analyses.
30
If these are the contemporary conventions, what would be the
contextual nature of supplemental, corrective, and oppositional initiatives? Perhaps emblematic
of the time is that figure of popular culture fascination, the zombie: that which is neither dead nor
alive, neither one nor the other, the undecidable. In this connection it could be argued that Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster attain contemporary relevance as examinations of the
undecidables of authenticity and subjectivity. Yet this would require a theoretical perspective
through which to judge the meaning or cognitive import of the texts. In this intellectual climate
and referring back to the initial quotations from Grass’s and Wolf's novels, what is the point?
Through which perspective(s), then, may one profitably engage with a novel offering meta-
commentary on German history in the guise of a satire on specific forms of literary production
and another that searches for subjective unity in relation to that same history within a no longer
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
28
Ibid. 772-773.
29
Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality (New York: Palgrave, 2001) 18.
30
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) 41.
!
15!
existing society, the ideals of which the author ostensibly supported but from which she also
dissented?
1.4 Discourse and Narrative
If self-referentiality dooms all literature-theoretical methodologies to inadequacy,
wherein, then, lies the sense of a text; how does one locate meaning? Among the many
conjectural answers possible, several intriguing ideas emerge that demonstrate the connection
between textual ontology and explicative methodology. These will not be attributed to particular
critics since that would involve an extended discussion of the adequacy of attribution in each
case. In the following broadly construed alternatives, the sense of a text:
(1) resides in the text itself, either in terms of semantic, symbolic, semiotic,
or performative constructs,
(2) follows from the analysis of the text's significations within a finitely structured
framework,
(3) lies in the text's situation in the world, incorporating the circumstances of both it's
production and reception,
(4) issues from pertinent negotiations of historical, cultural, and literary interrelationships
made evident through either an ideological or non-ideological evaluative schema,
(5) consists in the interplay and potentially limitless interrelation of the series of
significations that, from this perspective, actually comprise a text.
Evaluation of these options might produce the following observations. (1) attempts to
correct overly subjective and specious interpretations of texts and works but tends to make of
these autonomous objects that somehow exist in isolation from social forces. (2) locates the
relevant information communicated through literature as functions within the structures of
!
16!
language but relies on the acceptance of that systematization for critical relevance. (3) will be
discussed shortly. (4) offers the more or less complete range of culture and perhaps especially
the intersection of institutions and local influences as pertinent background for understanding the
production of literature and its communicative valence, militating against the unwarranted
imputation of abstract identities that are separate from material contexts. Yet, as with other
emphases, either the theoretical basis requires justification or the methodology must be attributed
to analytical choice within a purely pragmatic critical stance. (5) above, ultimately interrogates
the foundations of Western thought across almost all disciplines. The various initiatives that are
congruent with this perspective allow neither unchallenged assumptions nor the imputation of
realities to mere verbal constructs, and question the concept of meaning itself. Ironically, this
system of differential and deferred meaning could be viewed as the very absolute, the possibility
of which, it programmatically denies. Of course a rebuttal to this objection is that this
perspective cognitively opens a text to the future by preventing any final closure of
interpretation. Others could argue against this, that the contingencies inherent in the sense
imparting situation of innumerable readers with innumerably diverse cognitive precepts
approaching the text within the context of the myriad circumstances of an exterior world
necessarily prevents that closure. Others could argue that it is in the nature of a text to effect at
least a quasi-closure, as Edward Said's story of Zahirite interpretation suggests.
31
It is evident
that possibilities (1), (2), (4), and (5) actually imply positions on the nature of texts, works, and
perhaps 'reality' in general that require philosophical evaluation more than pragmatic
comparison.
With option (3) a name will be associated: Edward Said. Said, in The World, the Text,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
31
Said 39.
!
17!
and the Critic describes texts as situating themselves "in the world" on the basis of interpretive
"constraints" enacted by the texts themselves.
32
His concern is the state of affairs in literary
criticism as he perceived it in the early 1980s, positioning himself in relation to Derrida and
Foucault.
33
Said's perspective, closer to the latter than the former, as he understood both at this
time, pugnaciously emphasizes the connection of the text with the "wordly" circumstances of its
production
34
to combat what he believed to be the looming cultural and political irrelevance of
literary criticism as a Eurocentric discipline of abstract methodology.
35
He therefore posits the
relation of literary production to reception "supported by a discursive situation"
36
as the
placement of the text in the world, as opposed to "an emphasis on the limitlessness of
interpretation."
37
At first glance, Said appears to work within the philosophical bounds of a
naive realism but a close reading of his texts as well as his later works demonstrates the extent to
which Said's realities rest on the creative and signifying powers of critical discourse.
38
This is
the point that interests us here. If literature-theoretical perspectives offer textual epistemologies
that need to be debated at the level of ontology to weigh their relative merits, exactly what do
these viewpoints present? Said speaks of criticism in general as a "distance" [from the text] born
of "circumstance and distinction."
39
Inseparable from these is the "discursive situation"
40
of the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
32
Ibid. 40.
33
Ibid. 3, 47.
34
Ibid. 39-40.
35
Ibid. 25.
36
Ibid. 40.
37
Ibid. 39.
38
Stathis Gourgouris, "Transformation, Not Transcendence," boundary 2 31.2 (Summer 2004):
55-79; 65.
39
Said 15.
40
Ibid. 40.
!
18!
text, which is made present in criticism.
41
Said does not go this far, but considering the
limitations of theorizing, it should not be incredible to view critical perspectives themselves as
discourses rather than scientifically or philosophically chartered world-disclosing gateways to
some deeper reality, at least not without debate in those terms.
Of the many definitions of and analyses attendant upon the concept of 'discourse' Said
follows Foucault to the greatest extent, viewing the term as denoting statements of what a
particular society or intellectual discipline considers meaningful at a particular time
incorporating "a systematic conversion of the power relationship between controller and
controlled"
42
into words. A more neutral general definition might be "a particular way of talking
about and understanding the world (or an aspect of the world)" [emphasis removed].
43
Heidegger explicates the term from Aristotle's definitions, thus.
In discourse . . . so far as it is genuine, what is said [was geredet ist] is drawn from what
we talk about, so that discursive communication, in what it says [in ihrem Gesagten],
makes manifest what it is talking about, and thus makes this accessible to the other
party.
44
Yet discourses do not arise fully formed and may be analyzed through many different theoretical
analyses exactly as literature itself. The particular way of talking evinced by a discourse can be
decomposed into the manner in which and the assumptions behind the relating of facts, purported
causations, and explanatory theories. The units into which discourse may be analyzed will be
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
41
Ibid. 51.
42
Ibid. 47.
43
Marianne Jørgensen and Louise Phillips, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (London:
Sage, 2002) 1.
44
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:
Harper and Row, 1962, 2008) 56.
!
19!
designated narratives, since they comprise a telling. Even if structured by rules of a logic, the
telling or narrative of how all elements of a situation fit together is primary and pre-discursive
since this 'original telling' will also define the terms and cognitive framework through which a
matter is perceived and considered.
Narrative, by its nature situates, in a multiple sense. Whether one fits together the
elements of a crime scene, a laboratory experiment, or a birthday party these exist as sites of
containment for those elements. Yet these elements and sites are processed and constructed in
the mind of the beholder so that cognition also becomes a site of interaction for the elemental
'facts' involved. If a literary text is the material site of presentation, the reader's cognition
becomes the site of reception and transformation, and the larger world (however constituted) is
that site from which original allusions were in most cases incorporated into the text and against
which the reader measures her understanding of the reading. From that understanding issues a
relation of the basic elements which may be built into a larger discourse both about the material
read and ultimately about optimal ways of reading, viz. a methodological perspective. In this
way discourse becomes both constitutive of and constituted by that entity considered ‘world’
rather than being wholly determined by either possibility.
45
In extrapolation from the above, a literature-theoretical perspective, resolved into its own
discourse(s), and analyzed into formative elements, becomes also the narrative of the process by
which validity claims are made on its behalf. Considering the importance of Foucault for
standard theories of discourse, it may be asked on what basis the concept of narrative is
deployed, in distinction to linguistic "rules of formation,"
46
in discursive constitution. It
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
45
Jørgensen and Phillips 19.
46
Michel Foucault, "Politics and the Study of Discourse," The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of
!
20!
becomes evident on reflection that the objects of human consciousness, whether deemed material
or cognitive, exist, through movement, in space and time. The observations of such movement
are then relatable as sets of orderings and emphases constituting narratives. Fredric Jameson, in
explicating Ricoeur, makes a similar observation, tracing the epistemic validity of narrative to
the Cartesian cogito, by way of Kant.
47
Any methodology associated with a particular viewpoint
becomes akin to a tool for telling a story of the text's relationships and its theoretical support
becomes akin to narrative emplotment. The resulting textual explication, if germane to that text,
acts as a filter by which the relation of the text to the emplotted worldview, thrown into relief,
informs the recoverable information that constitutes the analysis. Put simply, every critique is
itself the result of a relatable history of ideas and applies as well to Jacques Derrida's or Edward
Said's formulations as to those of this dissertation. In Chapter 4 of the dissertation the realization
of a material reality in time, as history, will be explored in its relation to discourse and narrative
for situating Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster into discussions of historiographic
theorizations.
If every methodology comprises, or results from discourse(s) supported by narrative, i.e.
a relating of elements, their pronouncements become incommensurable with each other except in
relation to those underlying narratives or insofar as each initiative is congruent with the others
within a larger conceptual context or discourse. This is not to say that the methodological
narratives are fictions -- only that they are extant as particular arrangements of validity claims
with particular emphases. Within this orientation one may nevertheless utilize a number of
explicative tools yielding a multiperspectival textual analysis, subject of course to compatibility
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Chicago Press, 1991) 53-72; 54
47
Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2010) 497, 551-
552.
!
21!
with the underlying conceptual orientation and in accord with principles of non-contradiction.
Even in this latter case however, the inter-discursive comparison of viewpoints not necessarily
deemed compatible might serve as meta-commentary itself, through the tensions embodied in
paradox. In this manner, one might analyze a text and a work through 'all and none' of the
serviceable perspectives, emphasizing diversity in relation to a specific philosophy but
interrogating sufficiency of explication on that level primarily. The absence of certainty would
be viewed as the presence of possibility and forms the conceptual juncture at which Edward
Said's orientation interests us methodologically. Said's emphases provide an exemplary instance,
of, in the words of Stathis Gourgouris,
[. . .] a transformative process whereby the metaphysical void is elaborated as an actual
condition in the world with definitive consequences.
48
1.5 The World, the Text, and the Critic: Methodological Adaptation
In the essays that comprise The World, the Text, and the Critic Edward Said elaborates
views that illustrate Gourgouris' observation on later work. Said's first named concern, the
world, is perhaps the most philosophically problematic. As with text and reader the term denotes
different aspects of a related complex of designations. On one level it is the material
incorporation of " 'real' history," although not directly apprehensible apart from mediation.
49
On
another level it is a process embodying "the existential actualities of human life, politics,
societies, and events."
50
Both text and reader become situated in this external medium, but
unless one is willing to argue the existence of the world as an absolutely autonomous reality it
should be apparent that it reciprocally resides in the text as reference and in the reader as life
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
48
Gourgouris 65.
49
Said 4.
50
Ibid. 5.
!
22!
experience and social cognition. The situation of the world in the text may also be effected by
inclusion of intertexts. Additionally, the material artifacts of the world may be read as texts,
even as narratives. In this sense, the world is not to be wholly identified with the physical reality
of scientific theory, which may or may not be absolutely autonomous, depending on one's
philosophical orientation.
Overall, Said's concept of the world is not stated directly but is implicitly recoverable
from the relationship between that entity and both text and critic. The world is not disclosed as
"textuality," yet may form the sole mediation for the apprehension of the "real," and,
incorporating the realia of human existence, links texts with readers and critics.
51
The world is
the site at which the interrelationship of textual production and reception is located, the
supportive medium for human agency in the temporal and historical production of literature.
52
The text, Said's second titular concern projects and is situated in "materiality."
53
It is also
a discursive entity. At the outset he privileges the spatial; texts place themselves and in so doing
constrain the sense that may be given them. The relation of production to reception is the
manner in which they place themselves, they are essentially products of power discourses, and
ultimately derive from the "realities"
54
of human life. The text is thus the site of a certain
ambivalence and even ambiguity. What Said has to say about professional criticism, the titular
stated concern, is often transposed onto the concept of textual reception as such. The "critical
consciousness" is part of the surrounding social realities and capable of exerting influence.
55
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
51
Ibid. 3-5.
52
Ibid. 152.
53
Ibid. 150.
54
Ibid. 5.
55
Ibid. 24-26.
!
23!
Criticism is situated in the world but also constitutes a "cognitive activity."
56
The 'reader', here
under the guise of 'critic' participates in giving sense to the text. Perhaps Said's most succinct
pronouncement on the relation of text to reader requires one
[. . .] to view the text as a dynamic field . . . [which] has a certain range of reference, a
system of tentacles (which I have been calling affiliative) partly potential, partly actual:
to the author, to the reader, to a historical situation, to other texts, to the past and
present.
57
The third concern of The World, the Text, and the Critic, is that of the professional critic
at the beginning of the decade of the1980s. Said compares his prescriptions for theorization,
which he believes will re-invigorate the complacent field of professional criticism, to those of
other critics and theorists, indicating his agreements, disagreements, and points of (dis)similarity.
Considering the historical setting there are, not surprisingly, comparisons with New Critics such
as Northrop Frye, some with Marxist critics, e.g. Gramsci and Lukács, and a very sizable amount
with Derrida and Foucault. It is, of course, Foucault's discourse-analytical formulations that
frequently serve as rationales for Said's observations on situating the text.
Edward Said's approach to criticism is referenced here precisely because there appear
points of contact between his concerns and those perceivable in the novels of Grass and Wolf
and their further relation to contemporary problematics. Chief among these is the recognition (a)
of the social dimension of literary production and communication, (b) of the relative degrees of
independence and interdependence of world, text, and critic, (c) of the role of discourse in
shaping critique, and (d) of the oppositional nature of such explications.
58
There are also aspects
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
56
Ibid. 224.
57
Ibid. 157.
58
Ibid 29.
!
24!
of critique in The World, the Text, and the Critic that do not appear applicable to the present
enterprise. Said's signature emphasis on post-colonial theory will receive less attention due to
the nature of this work. Deficiencies in Said's early work, from a twenty-first century
perspective also include lack of definitional specificity and, perhaps as an artifact of its time,
lack of the appreciation of the role of gender in the formation of "critical consciousness."
If one were to find continuing relevance in Said's sober assessment of the theoretical
issues of thirty years ago, in what way could his observations be applied to explications of Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster? To begin with, considering the imaginative nature and
broad allusive scope of the novels, their 'situating' properties might be said to consist in
establishing the "priority"
59
of how the text or work defines itself as a "field of sense"
60
more
than establishing restraints. Factors establishing this definition (or definitions) may be judged on
the basis of the myriad references to: (1) historical events, e.g. the defeat of France by the
German forces in 1940 (Die Blechrommel),
61
(2) memory, for instance its relation to
documentation (Kindheitsmuster),
62
(3) narrative relations in both novels on the basis of the
unusual position of the narrators as well as direct treatment of the subject, e.g. Oskar's
prologue,
63
and (4) concern for the sociological basis of fascism as evidenced by the placement
and description of formative events in both works within a particular stratum of society.
Passages like these, as well as implied appeals to the reader and the large corpus of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
59
Compare: Karlheinz Stierle, "Werk und Intertextualität," Dialog der Texte, eds. Wolf Schmidt
and Wolf-Dieter Stempel (Vienna: Institut für Slawistik der Universität Wien, 1983) 7-26; 15.
60
Ibid.
61
B 345/TD 249.
62
K 512/ PC 329.
63
B 12/TD 5.
!
25!
intertextual associations would, in their "interplay"
64
to use Said's term, seem to extend the
concept of situating somewhat beyond his parameters of the relation of speech to text. Yet it is
plain that Said's concern is with the relation of production to reception and the ability of that
discursive relationship to place the text in the world.
65
Taken metaphorically one might consider
Said's title to refer to a complex consisting of an external world, the text in production, and the
'critical' reader and take the interrelationship of these, from the foregoing, as the novels' own
sense allocating categories. Of necessity, the placement of the texts in the world also involves
assessment of the "world's attention,"
66
that is, of the discourses in which Grass’s and Wolf's
novels may be found within the major critical literature.
67
1.6 An Experimental Perspective
A perspective may now be enunciated, that to be sure is not Said's, but which will be
developed as elaboration of referenced interests in The World, the Text, and the Critic on the
basis of perceived congruence with ideas in Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster. Said's title
is adapted into a triple interpretive schematization, the elements of which consist of that which is
external to the text, that which pertains to the text, and that which pertains to the 'critical' reader.
One then explores the qualities within this relationship that mutually situates each element
relative to the others. Re-arranging Said's order and beginning with the text, as that which is the
given for inspection, one interrogates this as terminological construct, the product, itself, of a
literature-theoretical discourse. This discourse naturally has its own history and variant
developments each of which voices sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
64
Said 40.
65
Ibid. 40.
66
Ibid. 40.
67
Ibid. 50.
!
26!
assumptions on the constitution of its object of enunciation. Terms involved thus require
definition in regard to their actual usages. The locus for this process would be an inspection of
the assumptions about language as medium for the work, the writing, or the text, depending on
one's terminological preference in this regard.
The various critical perspectives, projected methodologies, and supporting philosophies
alluded to earlier are, according to Said a part of an "actual social world."
68
In that sense, one
concludes that they too incorporate the tensions and formative power relationships of that world
and make claims for validity also as discursive constructions as their situating property therein.
These constitutive tensions, contexts, and cultural conventions may be analyzed as sites of
ideological negotiation, not necessarily equally between the parties,
69
effectively bracketing the
oppositional elements involved.
In adapting and extending Said's ideas one can list the following as elements with which
broad agreement is registered. From his remarks the text may be considered a continuum of
levels of cognition. At one extreme it is material, tangibly embodied, possibly recognizable
through its paratexts: it is the work itself whether manufactured or conveyed electronically. At
the other extreme it is a conceptual abstraction, a cognitive construction consisting in semantics,
semiotics, aesthetic qualities, and perceived discourse(s): in other words that which is properly
designated text. Alongside these also lie the actual and potential ranges of reference, to use
Said's terms, that, in interplay with reception, situates the text in an external reality. It is within
this continuum [perhaps the better analogy would be, from mathematics, the complex number:
the sum of both a real and an imaginary part] that sense-allocating priorities are set in
cooperation with the critical reader. While the text situates itself in the world the relationship
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
68
Ibid. 16.
69
Ibid. 45.
!
27!
should be viewed as reciprocal, an idea not developed by Said whose point of departure appears
as the "location" of culture.
70
However, since the social dimension in which the text situates
itself is by that process incorporated into the text, it becomes also a site for emplacement of
worldly concerns. Citing Foucault, he tacitly admits as much.
71
Despite the privileging of the
spatial dimension in conceptualizing the literary work, the text is also an "event,"
72
a spatio-
temporal entity whose emplacement can never be static as both its material and cognitive
dimensions change in both production and reception. Said, again citing Foucault, sees the text's
discourse as a power relationship, that of controller to controlled,
73
the history, or formative
dynamics of which presents an implied narrative, subject always to re-contextualization, as the
ultimate controller for any discourse.
For Said, professional criticism is skeptical, secular, and self-critical. The same
assumptions may not be made of the reader at large. The situation of the reader in relation to text
will vary according to one's situation in the world and the part that plays in forming one's
"horizon of expectations,"
74
to use Jauß’s term, with which one confronts the text. It might be
problematic to insist that these expectations will exclude extraneous psychological factors in
favor of literature-theoretical categories as Jauß seems to believe,
75
unless one assumes, similar
to Said, the ideal reader to be the literary historian, bound by the canonical procedures of the
discipline. This objection could be rebutted by the claim that the 'reader' is also a collective
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
70
Ibid. 8.
71
Ibid. 215.
72
Ibid. 4.
73
Ibid. 47.
74
Hans Robert Jauß, "Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft,"
Literaturgeschichte als Provokation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970) 144-207; 169.
75
Ibid. 173.
!
28!
term, situated in the society the literary history of which produced the work in question. The
point here is not to argue an orthodox position but to explore alternative theoretical discourses
from the history of criticism that might prove compatible, even in their difference, with Said's.
The purpose here is to recover from Said's disquisition, in comparison with other theorists, some
ideas on the reception process for literature, valid not only for a specialist but also for that person
termed the critical reader. A figure wholly missing from The World, the Text, and the Critic is
Mikhail Bakhtin. Yet it could be claimed that Bakhtin is present through a negative reading
inasmuch as dialogism offers another mode of situating a text in the world
76
and as incorporated
into reception theory,
77
a means to emplace also the critic and ordinary reader into a relationship
with text and world. The reader may be considered as receptive counterpart to the text,
compounded also of materiality and abstraction, both situated and situating (in this sense also
productive) in relation to text and world.
How, then, does one elucidate and make evident the above relationships as they appear
within and are perceived as pertinent to Grass’s and Wolf's novels? Obviously, analysis of these
works could consist of a number of critically attested procedures: the explication of textual
themes and structures, semiotic relationships, or the identification of various cultural emphases.
From this viewpoint, the works are regarded as the localization of an interaction of texts, their
historical and material referents and allusions, and the understanding of the recipient, such that a
process of continuous discussion about the interrelation and sense of each comprises the analysis.
Viewing explicative procedures as integrative processes of allocating information affirms the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
76
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, "The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the
Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis," Speech Genres and Other Late
Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1986) 103-131; 125-126.
77
Jauß 169.
!
29!
compatibility of diverse forms of analysis as alternative facets of a multidimensional whole. The
rationale for this approach is the recognition that any methodology situates analysis into a
universe of cognitively contingent relationships in the guise of linguistically and culturally
constituted categorizations. In this sense the methodology becomes experimental in the
interdiscursivity -- the articulation of different and not obviously compatible viewpoints. Thus,
as noted by Julia Hell, an important passage in Kindheitsmuster may be analyzed in terms of
narrative "voice"
78
but the family tensions so signified communicate the relevant information
regarding understanding of Nelly's psychological development. The function of critique then is,
borrowing a phrase from Jerome McGann, "not to define a meaning or a state of the system as
such . . . but to create conditions for further dynamic change,"
79
in this case, between the textual,
receptive and referential/signifying elements (also regarded as 'text') of the explicative apparatus.
Approaching Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster in this manner presents a special
relationship between perspective and theoretical constructs. Against the materiality of the works
the intellect applies the abstract typological categorization of narrative structure as one
possibility. Narrative has, in the most general sense, often been defined as "story." On the one
hand the dissertation's perspective resolves both critical methodology and the sense of a text
recovered as dependent on a particular discourse and ultimately an underlying narrative that
validates that discourse for the critic. On the other hand, the objects of analysis in this case are
also seen as either wholly or partially "narrative" texts.
1.7 Narratology and Explication
Classical narratology views texts as structures that may be analyzed formally and
'scientifically'. In recent years some practitioners have sought to incorporate the insights of post-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
78
Hell 202.
79
McGann 218.
!
30!
structuralist thought into narratological analysis. Validity claims for structural analysis of texts
need to be debated in terms of the underlying assumptions that yield such a discourse. For us,
the terminology of narratology provides only a set of definitions for reference. Among
narratologists, Mieke Bal defines a narrative text as one in which an "agent or subject" conveys a
story to a reader in "language, imagery, sound, buildings, or a combination thereof."
80
Gérard
Genette distinguishes between storytelling or the discourse that relates the evental material, its
content or the discursive subjects, and the act of narrating.
81
Franz Stanzel's point of departure is
the "gestaltete Mittelbarkeit" of the material of which a narrative is formed.
82
All three work
within the limits of narratology and their explications are discourses that reveal the structuralist
bases of how they relate textual relationships and the way in which they define narrative itself.
Bal focuses on the text as a sign system, the narrator as a function, focalization and
foregrounding, and the speech varieties (direct, indirect) of levels of narration. Other important
considerations are the timings, sequential orderings, narrative spaces, and character construction
within the related story, as well as the functions of constituent elements (fabulae, actants, etc.)
Genette discusses narrative, including Bal's concerns as functions of temporality: ordering,
duration, frequency, mood and voice. A particular emphasis concerns the temporality of written
text as conditional, existing only in space, its temporality being a metonymic construction of the
traversal of that space in reading. Stanzel covers the material with reference to mediation as a
function of narrative, the relationships between narrators and characters, and different levels of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
80
Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 3rd. ed. (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2009) 5.
81
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans, Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1980) 25-26.
82
Franz K. Stanzel, Theorie des Erzählens, 8th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008)
17.
!
31!
perspective (inner/outer). The desire for a "narratology of culture"
83
or a "socionarratology"
84
supplemental to the structuralist roots of such analysis and broadened to include the "narratives"
of material culture, has also been articulated in a number of writings. Throughout the dissertation
"narratological" terms may be used for clarity without imputing further validity to these or any
particular theory of narrative analysis. A fuller discussion of narrative within Die Blechtrommel
and Kindheitsmuster in relation to non-fiction concerns will be undertaken in Chapter 4 of this
dissertation. The interest for this type of narrative resides in its ability not to fictionalize but to
attain coherence through emphasis, ordering, and de- and re-contextualizing commonly accepted
factual elements.
To explicate Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster as narrative historical fiction, a
cultural narrative analysis derived from the foregoing discussion will be employed. The
analytical constructs will be regarded as contingent relationships, however, rather than scientific
structures, or even functions, in 'dialogic' relation to the reader and to other disciplines implied
by the text [primarily history and sociology], and to the memory of experiences and material
artifacts of culture that underlie the constructs of historical narratives.
85
Narrative is not
regarded as an exclusively textual phenomenon but inheres also in all media through which the
human mind constructs stories. This materialist and cultural orientation allows, on the basis of
the contingent nature of the narrative relationships, an openness of literary explication in
distilling a sense of the text. Thus, the constellation of all elements are mutually and recursively
informing, negotiating new relationships with the remembered experiences at the root of any
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
83
Wolfgang Müller-Funk, "On a Narratology of Cultural and Collective Memory," Journal of
Narrative Theory 33.2 (Summer 2003): 207-227.
84
David Herman, "Toward a Socionarratology," Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative
Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999) 218-246.
85
Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts,
trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) 56.
!
32!
configuration of these.
86
A superficial example of this theoretical perspective in practice might allow the account
of a Holocaust survivor’s experience
87
to be given sense in terms of the obvious distantiation
from the story by the third person narrator compared to the harrowing experience of the survivor.
The passage might be further considered, through the secondary literature, in terms of, on one
account, the inability of the non-Jewish German narrator to approach the subject with any
resource except irony.
88
This contrasts with the idea from a different perspective, namely that
such grotesquerie actually "probes the limits of representation . . . in order to present the grim
reality."
89
The tension between these two views also informs the reception. Additionally, a
counter or elucidating narrative might be revealed through cultural memory in the witness of a
Holocaust survivor with experience relevant to the fictive account, such as depicted in Claude
Lanzmann's film Shoah.
90
Finally, the reader in reception of the text might re-configure any of
these narrative elements on the basis of individual apprehension and experience. The
relationships and significations of all may be continually shifting in newly created hybrid
semantic fields in a mutually informing dialogue of all elements. Of significance here, is the
manner in which the narrative defines the situation, prioritizes the events as a relationship
between fiction and a presumed facticity accessed by the reader either in memory or education
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
86
Stierle 7.
87
B 543/TD 394.
88
Hamida Bosmajian, "German Literature about the Holocaust: a Literature of Limitations,"
Modern Language Studies 16.1 (Winter 1986): 51-61; 57.
89
Peter Arnds, "On the Awful German Fairy Tale: Breaking Taboos in Representations of Nazi
Euthanasia and the Holocaust in Günter Grass’ Die Blechtrommel, Edgar Hilsenrath's Der Nazi
und der Friseur, and Anselm Kiefer's Visual Art," The German Quarterly 75. 4 (Autumn 2002):
422-439; 425.
90
Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: The Complete Text of the Film, trans. A. Whitelaw and W. Byron
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1985) 111ff.
!
33!
and thus sets boundaries for the operation of any meta-commentary derivable from the text.
1.8 Further Remarks
In the transformation of Said's ideas in The World, the Text, and the Critic into world,
text, and 'critical reader' there may appear to be correspondences with established literature-
theoretical emphases. What is distinctive in this approach is the uniting of aspects of these
emphases on the basis of their constitution as discourse composed of narratives, effecting the
complementation of one theoretical direction by the others. Yet world, text, and reader retain
their own characteristics and set the priority of their characteristics against each, as demarcation
of discourse boundaries, on the basis of predominate influence in any given situation, building on
Said's ideas of textual constraint. The positing of such interrelationships may seem like
Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenological considerations of the epistemological
"pseudoproblem"
91
of object autonomy, the problem since Kant, of the unknowability of the
thing-in-itself, or even its essential inexistence, pace Derrida, outside a "chain of differences."
92
The point being that nothing is knowable except in interrelation since one can neither step
outside thought nor withdraw from that which thought posits as exterior.
But if meaning is only constituted by a "system of differences and metaphors"
93
then
interrelationship indeed dissolves into endless difference and in so doing loses the specificity
through which differentiation is even possible. In another context, if one thinks oneself in
relation to the 'other', be it person, text, or world, without imputing autonomy at some level to
that other, then one thinks only oneself in relation to oneself, de-defining the concept of
otherness. In both cases a conceptual impasse arises through self-contradiction. However, if one
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
91
Heidegger 50, 91-92.
92
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997) 49, 90.
93
Ibid. 89.
!
34!
views this impasse as arising from, in Said's terms, a "telling"
94
that relates details in a particular
manner, then that narrative constrains both the interrelationships and the degrees of autonomy of
the involved elements (world, text, reader) to that which is narrativizable. Narrative as the
invariant relationship becomes the initiator of interdiscursive comparison, the platform for
discussion of philosophical consistency or paraconsistency in textual explication. In other
words, dialogicity extends also to a work's explications, as elements of the work's extended
narrative within the material world. It will be argued in Chapter 3 that the resultant explicative
polyvocality and polysemy may also be viewed dialectically as alternatives to be resolved or
accepted in paradox by the reader.
In practice, if passages from Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster are explicated in
relation to the situational concerns of Said and the narratological concerns of Bal or Genette, the
interest becomes the narrative of how these emphases supplement, complement, contrast with or
contaminate each other or discovery of the extent to which both are consonant with a third
concern. In the case of these two examples one could remark that the ideas of Said constitute the
larger, more general framework; those of narratologists the more specific, typologically oriented
structuring. Said actually indicates interest in just this form of analysis although pointing out
that it is not his.
95
Criticism at the time of Said's initial writing found its problematics in the
consideration of hybridity, intertextuality, and the way discourses both hide and allocate
hierarchies of power in relation to older dynamics of authenticity, interpretation and meaning,
objectivity, subjectivity, and the constitution of narrative and historical reflection on history
within literature. The methodology of this dissertation asks the place, if any, of these latter
concerns in relation to the former as the established emphases in literary and cultural criticism,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
94
Said 41.
95
Ibid. 130.
!
35!
as does a growing body of twenty-first century criticism and philosophy.
One may object that traditional discourse theory does not envision its composition by
narratives, i.e. arrangements of materials susceptible to variant orderings under various
presentations. Yet a discourse is by its nature an attempt at enacting a teleology, the antecedents
of which need to give an account of themselves for the discursive goal to make sense. One may
also object that the idea of placement or situation lacks dynamism or critical force. There are at
least two rejoinders to this objection: one formal and one substantive. Formally, the tools of logic
and rhetoric that are supposed to provide critical qualities are themselves derivative of the spatial
metaphor: Greek thésis, from tithénai, to place, Latin propositio, from propōnere to place before,
etc. Substantively, the identification of sites at which such rhetoric occurs, viz. the world, the
text, the critical reader, together with the implied corollary that all discourse is situated, actually
displaces metaphor in favor of specific emplacement(s) of communicative elements. To the
extent that any of these sites incorporate a physical presence, the resultant discourses necessarily
locate themselves materially therein.
The dissertation attempts to synthesize Edward Said's insights with a larger body of
criticism and (a) posits the reciprocal emplacement of world, text, and critical reader, (b)
distinguishes degrees of objectivity/subjectivity for the elements of critique, (c) appreciates the
narrative and contingent construction of discourses, and (d) makes clear the oppositional stance
of the texts, their ability to set priorities through decontextualization and recontextualization
within the reader's horizon of expectations. It is not intended to adopt Said's perspective, but
rather invoke his example in placing the elements listed above in relation to a wider range of
perspectives. Such secondary viewpoints will be regarded as akin to filters through which to
view the texts, realizing that they recover only such information as allowed by their underlying
!
36!
assumptions. Even in this capacity they are necessarily part of the social situation of the texts
and novels with importance for the reader's horizon of expectations thereby.
In plain language, the work is analyzed in relation to its contexts, its structures,
semantics, and significations, and its cognitive processing by a reader, emphasizing the mutual
influence of each on the other. Demarcation of discursive limits, choice of explicative tools, and
relative weighting turns the situation of world, text, and reader into a sense-imparting critical
apparatus for any given set of contingent configurations that allows a text truly to 'speak' of the
material relations referenced by its linguistic embodiment. The perspective employed seeks to
locate Grass’s and Wolf’s novels in relation to variant methodologies and modes of reception by
comparing compatibilities but finding, amidst the undecidable issues and the great diversity of
possibilities, greater explicative potential in probing the apparent contradictions. If by one
analysis Die Blechtrommel is an exemplary exercise in Vergangenheitsbewältigung and by
another the novel is a purely aesthetic construct without social implications, the measure of the
distance between these and their underlying assumptions becomes the most potentially revealing
narrative element in the discourse of the work’s modes of communication. In this view,
whatever answers literature and its analysis provide comes by a questioning that situates the
materials into a variety of contexts in order to elicit and structure debate over the possibilities
involved.
!
37!
2. Background: Works and Settings
2.1 Background
Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel brought immediate fame and in some quarters,
notoriety, to its thirty-one year old author.
1
Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster added to the
reputation of an author who had shown some independence from official policies of the GDR.
2
Grass’s novel appeared near the beginning of a "critical reevaluation of the Nazi past"
3
in the
FRG. A similar project of reevaluation, almost twenty years later in the GDR and guided by
official interpretations, forms the immediate backdrop to Wolf's book.
4
In Grass’s case, biographical details situate the reader of the Die Blechtrommel not only
into the social milieus of its narrative descriptions but also places one into contact with aspects of
controversy. Biographies and analyses of Grass’s works written before 2006 have usually
related his youth in Danzig, wartime experiences, and those in the early years of the Federal
Republic of Germany as key determinants of the Blechtrommel's ultimate enframing. Preece, for
example, begins under the byline of "Biographies real and imagined"
5
with the observation that
although the Nazi period determined the engagement of his writing, Grass belonged to a
generation too young to be held accountable for its crimes. Preece then presents the particulars
of Grass’s biography: birth in Danzig, present Gdańsk, in 1927, member of the Jungvolk and
Hitlerjugend, wartime activity as Luftwaffenhelfer, in the Arbeitsdienst, and references Grass’s
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Julian Preece, The Life and Work of Günter Grass (New York: Palgrave, 2001) 34-35.
2
Annette Firsching, Kontinuität und Wandel im Werk von Christa Wolf (Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 1996,Würzburger Beiträge zur deutschen Philologie, Band 16) 70.
3
Jürgen Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship in Modern German Society (Hanover and
London: Brandeis University Press, Historical Society of Israel, University Press of New
England, 2010) 77.
4
Firsching 70fn.
5
Preece 1.
!
38!
own description of brief military service in a tank division near the end of the war in 1945.
6
That
this service is ultimately acknowledged for the first time in Grass’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel as
transpiring in a unit of the Waffen-SS
7
places Preece's opening evaluations and Grass’s admission
of childhood peccadilloes under Nazism,
8
into a far more nuanced and controversial discussion
of responsibility and the right to judge.
9
The irony is only heightened by the observation that
Grass regarded the biographies of those who lived through the Nazi years, and their
understanding of these, as a measure of their character.
10
The postwar biography of Grass, up to the time of the writing of the Blechtrommel finds
him in Düsseldorf, in the new West Germany, working as stonemason and sculptor, attempting
to find a place as artist, poet, or playwright. He also attended meetings of the Gruppe 47,
coming into contact with later notables of the German literary world: Ingeborg Bachmann,
Heinrich Böll, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, and Martin Walser. After the
modest reception of a volume of poetry and drawings, the production of several plays, and
mention in a few journals, Die Blechtrommel became Grass’s first critical success.
11
Christa Wolf's life story preceding the publication of Kindheitsmuster also orientates the
reader to material counterparts of, the at least generationally descriptive, if not completely
autobiographical,
12
novel's fictive landscapes and their inhabitants. Born Christa Ihlenfeld in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
Ibid. 2.
7
Günter Grass, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2006) 126ff.
8
Preece 5.
9
"Ein globaler Schock," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Feuilleton, eds. Werner Dinka,
Berthold Kohler, Günther Nonnenmacher, Frank Schirrmacher, and Holger Steltzner, 13 August
2006. Web.
10
Preece 17.
11
Ibid. 19-23.
12
Firsching 71.
!
39!
Landsberg an der Warthe, today's Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland in 1929, Wolf's childhood
was also, similarly to Grass’s, marked by a National Socialist education, membership in the
Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM), belief in the certainty of German victory in World War Two, and
saw Wolf relocate with her family to Bad Frankenhausen in Thuringia, commence studies in
Marxist theory, and participate in the communist Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) youth
organization. In early 1949, she joined the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), the
Communist Party within the Soviet Occupation Zone, which on 7 October of that year became
the German Democratic Republic.
13
In the ensuing years Wolf continued her education in Weimar and Leipzig, married, her
husband Gerhard being also a Party member, and began a career as literary critic with a position
in the official East German Schriftstellerverband. Here she made the acquaintance of prominent
older writers, returned from exile, such as Anna Seghers.
14
From the middle 1950's she held
editorial positions with publishing houses and the literary journal Neue deutsche Literatur. Her
first published work of fiction, Moskauer Novelle [Moscow Novella] appeared in1961.
15
Der
geteilte Himmel [Divided Heaven] in 1963, along with a filmed version, and Nachdenken über
Christa T. [The Quest for Christa T.] in 1968 brought critical notice and readership outside the
GDR. Both of these works have been analyzed as projecting, in differing ways, an authorial
focus on the individual in relation to socialist society, and in the case of the latter,
16
somewhat at
odds with it. Wolf's incorporation of reflection and life experience finds its next major
expression in 1976 with Kindheitsmuster.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
Ibid. 40-44.
14
Ibid. 45-63.
15
Firsching 19.
16
Anna Katharina Kuhn, Christa Wolf's Utopian Vision: from Marxism to Feminism (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1988) 17-18, 80.
!
40!
The publication of both Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster correlate chronologically
with trends in the FRG and GDR respectively, to begin the inspection of the Nazi era and its
relationship to postwar society. The historian Jürgen Kocka lists Grass’s novel among literary
works that typified the initiation of examination of guilt and responsibility in West Germany, the
tangible expression of which included the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in 1963.
17
It is in relation
to uncovering latent fascist associations in the Federal Republic that Grass’s previously cited
interest in his contemporaries' life histories is situated. For, one of the earmarks of the trend
toward introspection that also coincides with Grass’s political activity in support of social
democracy, was the questioning of the propriety of maintaining administrators with National
Socialist Party backgrounds in West German government positions, including that of the nation's
chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger in 1965.
18
Kocka also remarks that no such trend of disclosure occurred at this time in the GDR.
Considering the differing constitutions of the two Germanys this could hardly have been
otherwise as the East reacted to the perceived threats of Cold War tensions and accelerated flight
of citizenry westward by the consolidation of SED power structures behind the Berlin Wall after
1961.
19
It is thus later, in the 1970's that the official idea of citizens of the GDR having
overcome fascism as "Sieger der Geschichte"
20
gave way in literature to an examination of that
which had been repressed,
21
namely one's own memory of the Nazi era including one's place
within it. To a limited extent, this also included recognition of authoritarian continuities in the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
17
Kocka 77.
18
Preece 17.
19
Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literatur Geschichte der DDR, expanded edition (Leipzig:
Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1996) 176.
20
Ibid. 318.
21
Firsching 70.
!
41!
postwar world, particularly evident in works of figures such as Heiner Müller.
22
Ironically, Wolf
and other East German intellectuals would face a moral challenge in relation to these continuities
during the year of Kindheitsmuster's publication, through the regime's forced expatriation of
Wolf Biermann.
2.2 The Cultures
Before the establishment of either the Federal Republic or the German Democratic
Republic a post-World War Two cultural scene existed already in occupied Germany. The
framework for critical evaluation of production and reception in the arts and literature has shifted
between competing paradigms over the years. At first, one spoke of a Stunde Null or 'zero hour'
of German culture,
23
a time to discard past, morally compromised aesthetics and to create with
new sensibilities freed from tradition. Recent explications of this time period have questioned
and largely abandoned this conceptual framework, yet it cannot be denied that artistic emphases
underwent "significant modification"
24
at the end of the war, however continuous with the past
the substance may have been. This is also not to deny that after 1949, in the West German
literary world, there existed among younger writers a "Stunde-Null-Bewußtsein"
25
or zero-hour-
consciousness without concrete manifestation in the society as a whole.
In the immediate postwar years cultural production was subject to differing degrees of
censorship and support within the respective allied occupation zones. Popular authors included
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
22
Emmerich 318.
23
Sabine Eckmann, "Ruptures and Continuities: Modern German Art in between the Third Reich
and the Cold War," Art of Two Germanys, eds. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (New
York: Abrams, in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009) 49-63; 49.
24
Ibid.
25
Nury Kim, Allegorie oder Authentizität, Zwei ästhetische Modelle der Aufarbeitung der
Vergangenheit: Günter Grass’ Die Blechtrommel und Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster (Frankfurt
am Main, New York: Peter Lang, 1995) 29.
!
42!
those who had published in Germany before and during the Nazi years such as Gottfried Benn,
Werner Bergengrün, Hans Fallada, Ernst Kreuder, or Ernst Wiechert. Many of these claimed
moral earnestness as representatives of an 'inner emigration' by having refused support or worked
against the regime at an intellectual level. Ernst Jünger, forbidden to publish after the war
through his identification with militarist themes, was nevertheless published abroad and retained
a presence within the German literary world. Authors of the exile literature, among them Alfred
Döblin and Thomas Mann produced critically acclaimed works but encountered difficulties and
controversy in public reception. Thomas Mann's famous remark concerning works published in
Germany during the Nazi era as "weniger als wertlos und nicht gut in die Hand zu nehmen"
26
is
indicative of the cleft between positions.
Yet there were also younger, more experimental writers, and changes of emphasis. The
first postwar writers congress in 1947 issued a declaration acknowledging a responsibility for
truth and educational goals in writing. Wolfgang Borchert's enigmatic play Draußen vor der Tür
(1947) suited the immediate postwar mood of disillusionment, a feeling, as Borchert put it, of
being a 'lost generation'. The writer Alfred Andersch tried to bridge the gap between the authors
of exile and those of the inner emigration and gave voice to the outlook of Borchert's generation,
of which Günter Grass might be also counted a younger member, in his essays and as member of
the editorial staff of the journal Der Ruf, in the American occupation zone.
27
Andersch and
others associated with the journal would be instrumental in forming the Gruppe 47.
A notable feature of the post-World War Two period was the exercise of cultural politics
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
26
Thomas Mann, "Offener Brief für Deutschland," quoted in Klaus Wagenbach et al., eds.,
Vaterland, Muttersprache. Deutsche Schriftsteller und ihr Staat von 1945 bis heute (Berlin:
Wagenbach Verlag, 1979) 48.
27
Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will, "In Search of German Culture: an Introduction," The
Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture, eds. Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der
Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 1-19; 11-13.
!
43!
by the Allied nations to promote German reception of either capitalist or socialist culture. This
enterprise continued even after the creation of the respective client states, West and East
Germany, and places the further inspection of contemporaneous cultural developments within the
paradigm of Cold War tensions.
28
In the western zones the project of 're-education', of changing
what was felt to be the German national character, formed a part of the campaign to instill an
appreciation for democratic values. Methods employed in this undertaking included the
licensing of publications, some reputedly CIA funded, censorship of undesirable ideas in the
media, both fascist and communist, and promotion of Western, particularly American, cultural
products, although not always work by those deemed suspect in the McCarthy era, such as the
playwright Arthur Miller.
29
In the eastern, Soviet zone, the watchword was "ant-fascist --
democratic renewal."
30
Goals included the denazification of the society, partial consolidation of
industrial production under state control, land redistribution, and promotion of socialist values.
The drivers of this cultural change included the Soviet military, the SED (after 1946), and
returning communist intellectuals and administrators who had found refuge in the Soviet Union
during the Hitler years. Some, such as Johannes R. Becher, were acclaimed authors during the
years of the Weimar Republic. In the immediate postwar atmosphere, these returning exiles
initially re-established relationships with previous colleagues, even in the West, such as Erich
Kästner and Ernst Wiechert, accepting their contributions to newly founded eastern zone
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
28
Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, "How Good Are We? Culture and the Cold War," The Cultural
Cold War in Western Europe, 1945-1960, eds. Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam
(London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003) 269-282; 274.
29
Wolfgang Beutin, Klaus Ehlert, Wolfgang Emmerich, Christine Kanz, et al., Deutsche
Literaturgeschichte: von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart, Weimar: J. B. Metzler
Verlag, 2001) 488.
30
Ibid. 486.
!
44!
journals.
31
In the Bundesrepublik or Federal Republic of Germany, established officially in May
1949, cultural life proceeded in both traditional and experimental directions. In the fine arts
there existed a "spectrum of artistic possibilities"
32
between older and newer forms of expression.
The form of choice in critical circles quickly became the 'internationalist' style of abstract
expressionism, exemplified in West Germany by the works of Fritz Winter. Abstract
expressionism's non-ideological constitution, an idea that has been questioned as an implicit anti-
communist ideology itself, could be seen as German acceptance of internationalism and a turn
away from totalitarianism, as evinced by both fascist and socialist realisms.
33
Beginning in the
1960's Josef Beuys, proponent of 'social sculpture', the artist as shaman, environmental
consciousness, and direct democracy, gained fame internationally as representative of new and
experimental West German art. In the music world, audiences attended classical concerts;
Wagnerites from around the globe once again flocked to Bayreuth. Composers whose works had
been debuted during the national socialist years, like Carl Orff, continued to be performed. In
experimental circles, the emerging engagement in Western countries with total serialism found
its leading West German proponent, and ultimately seminal figure of electro-acoustic music, in
Karlheinz Stockhausen.
34
The literary scene of the developing West Germany exhibited similar tendencies towards
division as the other arts. On the one hand, authors produced works of inwardness, of seeking
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
31
Ibid.
32
Susanne Leeb, "Abstraction as International Language," Art of Two Germanys, 119-133; 119.
33
Ibid. 120-128.
34
Erik Levi, "Music in Modern German Culture," The Cambridge Companion to Modern
German Culture, 233-255; 251-252.
!
45!
the spirit, and of a new Goethean classicism.
35
On the other, were writers who at least called for
a new beginning and a reckoning with recent German history in terms of responsibility. Among
those were authors of the exile who found little real acceptance in the FRG. Reflecting political
trends that emphasized conservative polity under the Adenauer administration and even
legitimized a re-constituted 'national socialist' political party, the Sozialistische Reichspartei,
36
Alfred Döblin commented in 1951 that there had never been such a nationalistic and reactionary
situation in Germany.
37
Whether one could credit that opinion literally or not, tensions in the
world of letters may be illustrated by considering some authors as examples.
Gottfried Benn, the expressionist poet and essayist whose volume Morgue and Other
Poems (1912) shocked his contemporaries, pursued an artistic credo of personal aestheticism and
social pessimism. His initial enthusiasm for and disillusionment with Hitler
38
imparted a
complexity to his literary reception that did not prevent the awarding of the Federal Republic's
highest literary honor, the Büchner Prize, in 1951. Ernst Jünger, the author of In Stahlgewittern
[In Storms of Steel], the laudatory novel of World War One, whose work tended "to glorify an
ethos of strenuousness . . . and aesthetic transcendence"
39
privileging a vitalist and heroic
outlook, also found continued acceptance within West German literary circles. The interest in
the canonical rehabilitation of writers such as Benn and Jünger lies in the Blechtrommel's
critique of the tone of aestheticism, escapism, and denial of socio-political realities imparted
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
35
Kim 29.
36
Peter Wulf, "Deutschland nach 1945," Deutsche Geschichte: von den Anfängen bis zur
Gegenwart, 3rd ed., ed. Martin Vogt (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 2006) 776-
887; 819.
37
Alfred Döblin, Briefe, ed. Heinz Graber (Freiburg: Olten, 1970) 429.
38
Karen Leeder, "Modern German Poetry," The Cambridge Companion to Modern German
Culture, 193-212; 201.
39
Martin Swales, "The Development of German Prose Fiction," The Cambridge Companion to
Modern German Culture, 172-192; 186.
!
46!
thereby to the cultural sensibility of the early Federal Republic,
40
and the manner in which Die
Blechtrommel becomes a site for engagement with this state of affairs.
Younger writers of various artistic and political stances, e.g. Wolfgang Koeppen and
Arno Schmidt, also produced work. These included those associated with the Gruppe 47: Alfred
Andersch, Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Böll, Max Frisch, Uwe Johnson, Marcel Reich-
Ranicki, Hans Werner Richter, Martin Walser, and many others in its twenty year history.
Günter Grass first met with the group in 1955, encountering individuals with whom he would
become friends and in some cases rivals.
41
Much of the work produced by these authors pointed
to the perceived hypocrisies of the society of the Wirtschaftswunder, or even the other Germany,
the GDR.
42
Many concentrated on new formal possibilities. A brief look at several of these will
assist in locating Grass’s work within the context of his contemporaries.
Arguably symptomatic of the position of women in West German society, Ingeborg
Bachmann was viewed primarily as a poet of language until the publication of her short stories in
1961, Das Dreißigste Jahr [The Thirtieth Year]. These, which foreground the sensibility of the
feminine, required the later engagement of feminist critique to be widely appreciated.
43
With the
benefit of more critical analysis it is possible to see Bachmann's works from the 1950's as also
socio-politically engaged, perhaps bearing some affinity with the aesthetics of Brecht.
44
Heinrich Böll, emerging after the war as a writer of so-called Trümmerliteratur, or literature of
the rubble, such as Wanderer kommst du nach Spa . . . , as well as several early novels,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
40
Kim 37.
41
Preece 21.
42
Swales 187.
43
Sara Lennox, "The Feminist Reception of Ingeborg Bachmann," Women in German Yearbook
8 (1992): 73-111; 73.
44
Karen Achberger, "'Kunst als Veränderndes': Bachmann and Brecht," Monatshefte 83.1
(Spring 1991): 7-16; 7-9.
!
47!
thematized the evils of militarism and the propensity of society to shirk moral responsibility,
from the perspective of a Christian humanist of leftist political orientation. Billard um halbzehn
[Billiards at Half -past Nine], published in 1959, the same year as Die Blechtrommel, chronicles
a family's disintegration under the impact of and parallel to, Germany's recent history. His later
call for a fair trial for Ulrike Meinhof and other 'terrorists,' along with his associated writings,
outraged many West Germans in the 1970's. Martin Walser's Ehen in Philippsburg [Marriages
in Philippsburg] (1957) critiques the hypocrisies of middle class life amid West Germany's
postwar prosperity and is stylistically notable for complex narrative perspective that becomes
more highly developed in succeeding works. In later years Walser's engagement with the topic
of German guilt led to a degree of public controversy, discussed in Chapter 7 of this dissertation.
Through the above associations, then, Die Blechtrommel as text, may be located among works,
by authors of relatively close association, some of which may display thematic similarities and
others not.
Cultural life in the German Democratic Republic was designed to edify the citizen in her
self-discovery as a fellow builder of the socialist community -- constituted by the antifascist
state.
45
It is interesting to note that in this society of censorship and self-censorship, the
enthusiasm of building a socialist society could convert both those activities into simply the
perception of benign guidance by critics, such as the young Christa Wolf.
46
Most of the leftist
artists and writers who fled Germany before World War Two returned to the Soviet occupation
zone or later, to the GDR. Many had been influenced by the debates over expressionism versus
realism of the 1930s but by the time of the founding of East Germany Soviet approved socialist
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
45
Julia Hell, Post-Fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East
Germany (Durham, N. C. and London: Duke University, 1997) 17.
46
Magenau 64-65.
!
48!
realism formed the official aesthetic option, although work was sometimes produced outside this
stricture.
47
Outwardly, cultural life followed a pattern of conformity to official policies,
interrupted by some amelioration then renewed controls, after Stalin's death in 1953, after the
New Economic Course in 1963, and again after Erich Honecker's ascendancy to power in 1971.
Along the way, artistic discussion moved between orthodox socialist realism, Lukács' later
theories and modifications
48
to, by 1989, an uneasy tension between officialdom and aspects of
modernism within various artistic subcultures.
49
Visual artists who returned to the GDR rather than the FRG included Hans and Lea
Grundig, John Heartfield, and Horst Strempel. Both Grundigs had been in concentration camps,
were able to emigrate and returned to their home city of Dresden with art professorships in the
local academy. Heartfield, a founding member of the German Communist Party and early
opponent of Nazism, was denied membership in the SED for internal political reasons. Strempel
was at first acclaimed in the East, then looked upon with suspicion; he fled to the West in 1953.
50
Over the years a number of younger artists attained recognition and some, like Gerhard Richter,
ultimately emigrated to the West. In music, the composers Paul Dessau and Hanns Eisler
returned from the United States, Eisler having been expelled from the country after testimony
before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating communist affiliations.
Literary personages returning from abroad and taking up residence in the East include Bertolt
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
47
Ursula Peters and Roland Prügel, "The Legacy of Critical Realism in East and West," Art of
Two Germanys, 65-83; 65-66.
48
Lukács was effectively 'excommunicated' from GDR culture over his role in the 1956
Hungarian uprising and purported East German associates investigated and tried for attempted
liberalization of socialist realist aesthetics; cf. Emmerich 126.
49
Peters and Prügel 66-73.
50
Eckhart Gillen, "Scenes from the Theater of the Cold War of the Arts," Art of Two Germanys,
277-293; 280.
!
49!
Brecht, Johannes R. Becher, the GDR's first minister of culture, Stephan Hermlin, Wieland
Herzfelde, brother of artist John Heartfield, Stefan Heym, Anna Seghers, Friedrich Wolf, and
Arnold Zweig, besides the philosopher Ernst Bloch, who however, resettled in the FRG after the
construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Unlike the situation in West Germany, the Weimar
Republic exiles initially formed the foundation of cultural life in the GDR, although working
within the prescribed and proscribed limits of the governing ideology -- art in support of the
political, as set forth in 1951 by GDR President Otto Grotewohl.
51
Christa Wolf's relationship to this older generation varied by person. She attended the
lectures of Hans Mayer, onetime colleague of Georges Bataille, on world literature in Leipzig in
1951, but not the contemporaneous courses of Ernst Bloch.
52
As her literary career advanced,
naturally Wolf came to know the authors and works of the small and regulated literary
community. Two writers of the older generation, with whom Wolf maintained collegial
relations, present a study in contrast: Anna Seghers and Stefan Heym. Anna Seghers, whose
1942 novel The Seventh Cross, written in English, became an international bestseller as anti-
fascist testament, pursued an aesthetic aim of nurturing socialist consciousness
53
in the new and
'humane' socialist state.
54
Die Toten bleiben Jung [The Dead Stay Young], published in 1949 is
viewed as a seminal work of heroic antifascist literature, yet one which by some readings
implicitly privileges a communist, if not Stalinist, "motherhood"
55
as ordering principle. Her
1959 novel, Die Entscheidung [The Decision] focused on individual responsibility. Seghers
argued against Lukács and dogmatic constructions of socialist realism, expressed some criticism
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
51
Otto Grotewohl, quoted in Kim 117.
52
Magenau 57.
53
Ibid. 214.
54
Swales 188.
55
Hell 64ff.
!
50!
of official decisions, but retained and worked within state positions, including president of the
Schriftstellerverband. Wolf credited the influence of Seghers for much of her conception of
subjectivity.
56
Stefan Heym became a United States citizen in exile, published in English and
German, frequently criticized the regime, and was among those, with Christa Wolf, who
protested the ouster of Wolf Biermann from the GDR. His novel Goldsborough casts striking
coal miners in Pennsylvania in a heroic 'proletarian' role. In 1977 the SED brought charges
against Heym over copyright irregularities with his novel Lasalle, published in West Germany.
57
Themes of literature in the German Democratic Republic during the 1950s often revolved
around antifascism and the planned economy.
58
Notable also were the theatrical productions of
the Berliner Ensemble under Brecht and the publication of the journal Sinn und Form featuring
also Western contributions.
59
Wolfgang Emmerich's timeline of major writing in East Germany
between the years 1950 and 1959 shows that most were by members of the exile or Nazi period
resistance community. Among those on Emmerich's list beginning writing careers at this time
are Franz Fühmann, Uwe Johnson, Irmtraud Morgner, and Erwin Strittmatter. Franz Fühmann
wrote both adult and children's fiction, held political posts within the GDR but became gradually
disillusioned with the regime.
60
Uwe Johnson criticized the hypocrisy of the GDR regime in
guaranteeing civil rights, constitutionally, and in practice denying these. His Mutmaßungen über
Jakob [Speculations about Jacob] was published in the West in 1959, the same year that he left
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
56
Christa Wolf, quoted in Magenau 214.
57
Magenau 307.
58
Emmerich 530-536.
59
Stephen Parker, "Peter Huchel and Sinn und Form: the German Academy of Arts and the Issue
of German Cultural Unity," German Writers and the Cold War 1945-6, eds. Rhys W. Williams,
Stephen Parker, and Colin Riordin (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 1992)
132-158; 132.
60
Emmerich 333.
!
51!
East Germany. Johnson was a member of the Gruppe 47 and a friend of Günter Grass. Irmtraud
Morgner's work focused a sensibility for myth and fantasy on daily life rather than simply
mirroring reality as a given socialist aesthetic norm.
61
Erwin Strittmatter was actually the
earliest of the above to attain some renown with novels and a play (Katzgraben) that
affirmatively dealt with changes in village and agrarian life under the socialist system.
62
In 1959 the Bitterfeld Conferences elaborated the Party's desire for literature to reflect the
aspirations and concerns of the state's workers, to erase the division between art and production,
between poet and worker, in a true proletarian literature. Accordingly, writers would become
erstwhile industrial workers and workers also writers, coached by established authors.
63
Two
notable novels from this program were Erwin Strittmatter's Ole Bienkopp and Christa Wolf's Der
geteilte Himmel, both appearing in 1963 after the building of the Berlin Wall and Cold War
tensions began increasingly to isolate East Germany from the West. As the decade progressed,
and into the early 1970s works from some GDR authors began to observe the human dimension
of life under 'real existing socialism', its past, and its contradictions. These included Jurek
Becker's Jakob der Lügner [Jacob the Liar], Günter de Bruyn's Buridans Esel [Buridan's
Donkey], Hermann Kant's Die Aula [The Lecture Hall], Ulrich Plenzdorf's Die neuen Leiden des
jungen W. [The New Sorrows of Young W.], and, perhaps as chief exemplar, Christa Wolf's
aforementioned Nachdenken über Christa T. The later 1970s witnessed a counterpoint between
critique and government repression but the period also gave rise to expanded themes and
techniques, especially in the theater pieces of Heiner Müller. On balance, it has been said that
East German literature, constrained by censorship and allowable subject matter, was
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
61
Ibid. 287.
62
Ibid. 199.
63
Magenau 91ff.
!
52!
nevertheless ethically oriented. Its communication was considered practical rather than
theoretical, and signaled coming changes in societal attitudes through subtlety in depiction of
social experience.
64
It is also notable that women writers produced a large proportion of
literature in the GDR. In the interaction of these authors, Christa Wolf is credited with playing a
central role.
65
Comparatively, an overview of West German literature after the publication of the
Blechtrommel reveals increasing politicization. The Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt impelled a
greater coming to terms with the Holocaust and the Nazi period, in works like Peter Weiss' Die
Ermittlung [The Investigation]. Themes in the works of other writers, for instance Heinrich Böll
and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, revolved around repression of dissidence, criticism of FRG
authoritarianism, student protest movements, and the Viet Nam War. During the time of the
genesis of Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, literary currents in the West saw interest build for social
concerns surrounding the women's movement, as revealed by Verena Stefan's Häutungen
[Shedding] and the early work of Elfriede Jelinek, and renewed interest in subjectivity, as in the
work of Thomas Bernhard. The major works of Günter Grass during this period consist of the
continuing thematization of Danzig in Katz und Maus [Cat and Mouse] and Hundejahre [Dog
Years], Örtlich betäubt [Local Anaesthetic] a satire on West German society in relation to the
Viet Nam war and other issues, and Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke [From the Diary of a
Snail] his reflections on his support of and campaigning for social justice, West Germany's
Social Democratic Party, and its candidate for chancellor, Willy Brandt.
2.3 The Past in the Present
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
64
Ursula Heulenkamp, "Was bleibt - Versuch einer Bilanz nach vielen Kontroversen," Der
geteilte Himmel, Literatur und ihre Grenzen in der DDR, ed. Martin Sabrow (Leipzig:
Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 2004) 49-74; 55.
65
Swales 189.
!
53!
The extent to which, or even if, Grass’s Blechtrommel and Wolf's Kindheitsmuster serve
as loci for the discursive reflection, beyond the denoted story elements, of the tensions in the
societies in which they were produced, depends on the orientation of the reader to a number of
factors. These are (1) the text, as a site of significance; (2) the temporality and thus
immediacy/non-immediacy of the referenced society for the reader; (3) the discrimination of
material traces of these as in some sense for the reader factical, as opposed to the manipulation
and ambiguation of the relation of 'fact' to narrative by textual and authorial design; and (4)
discrimination between modes of determining such manipulation. The sum of which implicates
the reader's relation to the above as also object for explication, accorded space contingently
within the narrative whole. Exploring the texts from the interrelationships of these viewpoints
will also have consequences for the inquiry into critical perceptions of the German nation,
National Socialism, and questions of guilt and responsibility.
From this multiperspectival orientation Die Blechtrommel may be read as commentary on
the West German society in which it was written -- indeed it has been argued that this is a
primary reading
66
-- through various correspondences. Overt thematization of post-World War
Two issues occurs naturally in Book Three of the novel following the essential chronology that
orders the surface features of the narrative. Covertly, this commentary begins already at the
conclusion of Book Two, when we are informed that Oskar will begin a new and adult life,
having added a small amount of height to his still comparatively slight stature. The parody here
of a Stunde Null mentality that regards slight advance as real growth in moral and intellectual
outlook would seem obvious.
67
This conceit continues with Oskar's admission that he has lost
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
66
Nury Kim 40.
67
B 564/TD 409.
!
54!
interest in being a grown-up.
68
If this passage is correlated with the previous aside concerning
the nostalgia of later West Germans for the immediate postwar years,
69
years that in reality were
ones of privation and even starvation, it then becomes clear that the real trajectory of collective
memory, of which that nostalgia is symptomatic, is a forgetting that aims back towards the pre-
war era of fascist hegemony.
In Book One, at the beginning of the Schaufenster ["Shop Windows"] chapter, Oskar
muses from the vantage point of the mental institution on his drumming under grandstands, thus
disrupting Nazi rallies, as on a level with acts of Resistance. With undisguised irony he
compares his fantasy world to those who claimed to have stood against the regime internally in
both local and psychological senses.
Von Geist des Widerstandes spricht man, von Widerstandskreisen. Man soll den
widerstand sogar verinnerlichen können, das nennt man dann: innere Emigration.
70
Situating the tone of disdain in the extra-textual world of at least purported facticity, is Grass’s
avowed respect for Alfred Döblin,
71
genuinely and necessarily an exile. In Book Three, detailing
his night school education in the British Occupation Zone, Oskar mentions Borchert's Draußen
vor der Tür, in passing, linking the play to his negligible experience of the theater, in general,
and to his rather uninformed appreciation of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
72
Regarding Oskar, a
symbolic figure with shifting signification throughout the novel, both narrator and narrated, here
as exemplar of at least a segment of the postwar German populace, the text constitutes implicitly
a short discussion of the lack of artistic appreciation accorded the new and the unreflective
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
68
Ibid. 572/417.
69
Ibid. 570/415.
70
Ibid. 157/111.
71
Preece 23.
72
B 571/TD 416.
!
55!
reverence for familiar figures; even if, or even because, like Gründgens, they could be identified
with the common experience of the ordinary person in the Third Reich.
Die Blechtrommel presents a picture of a traditionalist and politically apathetic Federal
Republic. The text queries where those who turned the gas valves might be hiding
73
and portrays
the citizenry as unable to express their emotions without synthetic stimulation in the "Onion
Cellar."
74
Much of the satire directed at this society is placed within imagery of, and allusions to
the artistic and cultural currents of the time, and often only briefly, in passing. The early linking
of Rasputin and Goethe as the poles of Oskar's education, the less than exalted evaluation of the
latter
75
and subsequent allusions could be seen as a 'deflating' satire on the Goethe cult in FRG
scholarly circles. A deeper repudiation of that mentality arises if the reader associates the novel
as a whole with the genre of the Bildungsroman and notes the extent to which the text represents
a continual travesty of any Goethean harmony of life and outlook. Of course, as Oskar romps
through the cultural milieu of the Federal Republic, it is not just the traditional and aesthetized
that is parodied but also the faddish and profit motivated art world itself, underlined by the
superficiality of figures such as Klepp, Lankes, and Ulla. Yet allusions to a more serious reality
situate the reader among the discursive tensions of this world in the discussion over whether
one's wartime conduct was, passé.
76
A chilling reflection of this period,
77
placing the text
momentarily into relation with a work like Wolfgang Koeppen's Tod im Rom [Death in Rome], is
the attempt in the postwar world of West Germany to carry out a military execution order from
1939.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
73
Ibid. 263/188.
74
Ibid. 685ff./497ff.
75
Ibid. 111f. /78.
76
Ibid. 718/520.
77
Ibid. 757/547-548.
!
56!
The reader schooled in the personal histories and works of the Gruppe 47 authors, might
make cases for various allusions also to these and many other personages and subject matters in
the Blechtrommel. The stylistic and aesthetic properties of the novel might be considered a
statement either for or against literary currents of the time, and/or the realist, modernist, or
magical realist novel. One area for further investigation might be that of locating the author
within the discourses that arise from the narrative thread(s). For instance, Günter Grass has
blamed the "irrational" tradition in European culture for the calamity of Nazism and has stated
his intent to combat that tendency in his works.
78
Searching for the significations that give rise
to this discussion as integral to the sense allocation of the narrative, also necessarily situates the
author into the text as proper object of narration.
The societal backgrounds and reception histories of Die Blechtrommel and
Kindheitsmuster are integral to sense allocation and as narrative extension of the novels
themselves, may be regarded as conditioning factors for the reader's expectations regarding the
texts. The publication of the former novel occasioned lawsuits and withdrawal of prize offers.
79
The first critical reactions to the work were naturally reviews, both positive and negative.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki faulted the novel for excesses including lack of taste, a stance he later
explained as the product of a critical method that must also be subject to self-critique.
80
Negative sentiments usually centered on the novel's depiction of crudities and sexuality, lack of
respect for authority and religion, and generally reflected the opinions of regional press and
conservative news media. Positive criticism appears to foreshadow critical directions taken by
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
78
Günter Grass, quoted in Kim 41.
79
Preece 47.
80
(a) Marcel Reich-Ranicki, "Auf gut Glück getrommelt," Hamburg: Die Zeit, 1 January 1960,
"Die Blechtrommel," Attraktion und Ärgernis: ein Kapitel deutscher Literaturkritik, ed. Franz
Josef Görtz (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1984) 116-120; (b) "Selbstkritik eines Kritikers," Cologne:
Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 22 May 1963, broadcast, Görtz 151-157, print.
!
57!
subsequent Blechtrommel scholarship.
81
The links between the German lower middle class and
the success of Hitler is mentioned in one article.
82
Hans Magnus Enzensberger noted parallels
between the novel and the Bildungsroman, credits Grass with formal invention, and perceived in
Oskar the "mouthpiece" also of contemporary Germans.
83
Siegfried Mews observes that although Die Blechtrommel was not published in the
German Democratic Republic until 1986, there was deprecatory comment from that quarter also.
He cites a later review as being more positive with the criticism, however, that Grass had anti-
communist views.
84
With the publication of Ralph Manheim's English translation The Tin Drum
in 1963, reviews in the United States perceived the novel, contrary to its German reception, as an
apolitical text with undefined stylistic characteristics.
85
A compilation of newspaper and
magazine reviews from this time reveals a wide variety of viewpoints. Time magazine linked
Grass with Heinrich Böll and Uwe Johnson as authentic voices in a new German literature and
praised The Tin Drum, characterizing its stylistic features however as "gaudy."
86
Clifton
Fadiman compared the work favorably to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain
87
while a review in
the Los Angeles Times was much more guarded in its evaluation, describing the work as
containing the type of satire found in the old Simplicissimus magazine combined with the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
81
Siegfried Mews, Günter Grass and His Critics: from the Tin Drum to Crabwalk (Rochester,
NY: Camden House, 2008) 16.
82
Joachim Kaiser, "Oskars getrommelte Bekenntnisse," Munich: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 31
October/1 November 1959, Görtz 52-57.
83
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Wilhelm Meister auf der Blechtrommel," Stuttgart:
Süddeutscher Rundfunk, 18 November 1969, broadcast, Görtz 62-69, print.
84
Mews 17.
85
Ibid. 18.
86
n.a., "The Guilt of the Lambs," Time, 4 January 1963, Ray Lewis White, Günther Grass in
America: the Early Years, Germanistische Texte und Studien 12 (Hildesheim, New York: Georg
Olms Verlag, 1981) 2-3.
87
Clifton Fadiman, Review, Book-of-the-Month Club News, March 1963, White 7.
!
58!
"nightmare element" of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
88
Consideration of the many reviews of
Die Blechtrommel in the various world languages, e.g. those attendant upon the novel's
translation by Jean Amsler into French in 1961 as Le Tambour, are obviously beyond the scope
of the present work.
Kindheitsmuster functions as the fictive autobiography, albeit one that deconstructs, or
perhaps better restructures, identity, not only of an individual but of a generation. Yet it also
restructures the relationship between socialist artist and official socialist art not as outright
critique but as a
[. . .] Spannungsfeld, in dem Kulturpolitik und literarisches Werk aneinanderprallen und
dadurch negative oder . . . positive Folgen in Sachen der Literatur entstehen [. . .]
89
Thus, in 'authentically', i.e. as self revelation, coming to terms with an individual's, a
generation's, and by implication a nation's National Socialist experience, Kindheitsmuster
situates that process, and the reader, within the socialist society, comprehended in the state, as
typified by the earlier reference to Otto Grotewohl. Implicitly this arrangement also locates the
state within the discourse of authoritarianism, which must be carefully channelled under the
production conditions of the GDR, such as by the 1970s, the critique of Stalinism, as evidenced
in the short fabula of Herr X, the ark, and the impossibility of honest communication in an "age
of suspicion."
90
Also placing the work within its societal setting, and part of the narrative by
extension into the material world, is the reception history. Upon publication, some GDR
reviewers criticized the complexity of the novel as 'formalist'. Others deplored its failure to
articulate the GDR's socialist constitution. In the West reviewers faulted Wolf's failure to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
88
Robert R. Kirsch, "Rebirth of German Novel Hailed in Puzzling Work," Los Angeles Times, 6
March 1963, White 9-10.
89
Kim 133.
90
K 561f./PC 361f.
!
59!
criticize the Communist system; others disliked the self-reflective mode of narrative.
91
Behind
the former criticism one detects echoes of a narrow versus a broad engagement with Lukács'
ideas on historical biography and its relation to the life of the people and economic reality,
92
and
the absorption into a human and flawed subjectivity and thus the negation, of any heroic model
within the form of the novel.
93
Kindheitsmuster, like many East German works thus finds a
place for itself by both conformity and nonconformity to official artistic doctrines, in the society
at large, generating the fields of tension referred to earlier as determinants of the work as site for
engagement with the discourses resulting from those incongruities.
Kindheitsmuster, in challenging the reader to compare her recollections of Nazi
Germany, and one's place and attitudes within it, with those of the characters in the novel,
94
also
challenges dogmatic versions of such recollections and creates a distinct conceptual space for
itself in relation to some members of the older communist generation. Anna Kuhn hypothesizes
that the novel's initial disclaimer of facticity parallels that of older writer Wolfgang Joho's
similar disclaimer in his novel Klassentreffen [Class Reunion] that conventionally, for GDR
orthodoxy, defines the Federal Republic as the heir to the Third Reich.
95
Kindheitsmuster,
however, thematizes the varying constitutions of concepts of truth and reality in conjunction with
the thought that a book, for instance, may begin to be falsified, unremarked, already before its
material development.
96
A similar thought links Wolf's formulation with one of Anna Seghers
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
91
Kuhn 107.
92
Georg [György] Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln,
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) 333-334.
93
Ibid. 347.
94
Kuhn 106-107.
95
Ibid.
96
K 115/PC missing.
!
60!
that the depiction of characters as typical actually imposes a preconceived idea on a particular
representation of reality.
97
Seghers not only argued with Lukács' dogmatic attitude in privileging
bourgeois realism as literary model but also supported the idea of formal experimentation
98
and
re-valued the German Romantics, an attitude productively developed in Wolf's later, Kein Ort.
Nirgends [No Place on Earth].
99
Wolf's editing of Segher's essays published as Glauben an
Irdisches possibly afforded opportunity to thereby interrogate the orthodox socialist realism on
the basis of its deviation from realism itself and to consider the central role of Erfahrung in
determining an orientation to any putative reality.
100
Thus the legacy of the returned exiles
becomes internalized in Kindheitsmuster as aesthetic tension embodying a history of debate
between differing positions.
Kindheitsmuster's relation to Christa Wolf's own generation of writers might be regarded
as analogous to the novel's narrative strategy. The first person is missing from the memories of
the Nazi era, positing a "nonidentity of child and adult,"
101
in other words a discontinuity
between the 'then' and the 'now' which questions the possibility of unification of the two, except
through a complete honesty in remembering that refuses to deny unpleasant historical facts.
102
It
is just this honesty that demands the realization that the narrating 'I' of the historical author's own
life, is like most humans, not wholly continuous between life stages. It should therefore not be
surprising to realize that Kindheitsmuster stands at the end of a conceptual development that
encompassed early on the typically expected official viewpoints from a member of the SED,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
97
Anna Seghers, quoted in Kim 142.
98
Ibid. 141.
99
Kuhn 142-143.
100
Kim 142-143.
101
Hell 201.
102
Ibid. 204.
!
61!
expressing itself in a socialist fervor that initially claimed the territory of protecting society from
the low standards of Americanization and Westernization of culture.
103
Perhaps tellingly, she
valued Strittmatter's Tinko, with its emphasis on human failings on the road to socialism, rather
than heroic success.
104
A trace of this attitude might be found in Kindheitsmuster's seventh
chapter with the question, "Was heißt: sich verändern?"
105
The difficulty or even impossibility
of real change in character was the special province of Franz Fühmann and some critics, such as
Kim, see his influence in Kindheitsmuster's devaluation of the official transformed antifascist
resistance fighter,
106
in favor of the posited discontinuity of personae between Nelly and the
fictive author. As Wolf's artistic maturity proceeded, her relations with members of her society
and particularly professional colleagues, form a part of her life narrative that relativizes and
ironicizes the quotation concerning the impossibility of honest communication in an "age of
suspicion." In 1959 she began functioning, like many East Germans, as an Inoffizielle
Mitarbeiterin, or unofficial coworker with the state security apparatus, the so-called Stasi, after
an initial period of observation.
107
This fact, revealed decades later in Was bleibt, ultimately
became the proximate grounds for denial of status as an independent intellectual among some
critics. What is germane here, are not questions of ethics but the realization that this baggage is
carried, and is obscured in relation to the creative work, perhaps tangentially touching certain
areas, in much the way that Grass’s service in the SS is obscured in relation to his.
The orientation to Kindheitsmuster's creative setting that is most distinctive is that of the
feminine viewpoint. Whether viewed as an elaboration of a "paternal family narrative" or as a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
103
Magenau 70-71.
104
Ibid. 73.
105
K 223/PC 141.
106
Nury Kim 156-157.
107
Magenau 85-87.
!
62!
link with a broader community through memory,
108
the subjectivity is always that of a gendered
individual in personal development, in relation to particular histories and memories constituted
in the male dominated world, are processed either in accord with, in opposition to, or in a manner
that blurs these distinctions, as also those of genre and actants.
109
The secondary literature to Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster comprises, as is the case with
Die Blechtrommel, a voluminous amount of material in various genres. Already between 1973
and 1975 reviews appeared commenting on the progress of the novel's writing, often based on
Wolf's public readings of excerpts.
110
1976 witnessed both pre- and post-publication
announcements, discussions, events, and reviews in East and West Germany. Initial reviews
appeared in the GDR in periodicals such as Freiheit, Neues Leben [periodical of the FDJ, the
party youth organization], and Vorwärts. Klaus Jarmatz, in the SED party organ Neues
Deutschland faulted the novel's treatment of "anti-Fascist resistance."
111
Hermann Kant praised
the content of the novel while faulting the complexity of its style.
112
In the FRG Hans Mayer,
Wolf's former professor of literature, registered skepticism of Kindheitsmuster's premise that
Nazi and Communist totalitarianism really differed and criticized Wolf for insincerity.
113
Marcel
Reich-Ranicki reviewed the work partially positively for its abandonment of the heroic
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
108
(a) Hell 199; (b) Kathleen L. Komar, "The Communal Self: Re-Membering Female Identity
in the Works of Christa Wolf and Monique Wittig," Comparative Literature 44.1 (Winter 1992):
42-58; 45.
109
Hell 137.
110
Henk de Wild, Bibliographie der Sekundärliteratur zu Christa Wolf (Frankfurt am Main:
Peter Lang, 1995) 335.
111
Klaus Jarmatz, "Kindheitsmuster. Zu Christa Wolfs Roman," Neues Deutschland 32, 5/6
March 1977: 14.
112
Hermann Kant, "Eine Kindheit wird besichtigt," Der Bienenstock 113 (1977): 8.
113
Hans Mayer, "Der Mut zur Unaufrichtigkeit," Der Spiegel 31.16 (11 April 1977) 185ff.
!
63!
protagonist but negatively for naivete in the face of the GDR dictatorship.
114
Soon reviews
appeared internationally, such as the positive evaluation of W. V. Blomster focusing on Wolf's
modes of narration
115
and Stephen Spender's essay on the social significance of the work from
the English translation.
116
A translated review of Alexander Stephan gives the novel lukewarm
praise while questioning its sincerity in criticism of the East German governing regime.
117
Substantial critique also materialized. In East Germany, Heinz Plavius praised the work
for, among other qualities, its expansion of literary realism and intergenerational
understanding.
118
Annemarie Auer, on the other hand, criticized the novel for lack of class
consciousness and overly subjective perspective.
119
Other authors and critics such as Wolfgang
Hegewald and Stephan Hermlin defended Wolf and Kindheitsmuster and attacked Auer's
position as dogmatic.
120
Sigrid Bock evaluated the novel positively as the culmination of Wolf's
literary strivings to that point
121
and Therese Hörnigk explored the work's contributions to the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
114
Marcel Reich-Ranicki, "Christa Wolfs trauriger Zettelkasten," Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung (19 March 1977): 5.
115
W. V. Blomster, "Review, Christa Wolf, Kindheitsmuster," World Literature Today 51.4
(Autumn 1977): 611-612.
116
Stephen Spender, "The Mortal Sin of Our Time, a Model Childhood, by Christa Wolf," The
New York Times Book Review 85.41, 12 October 1980: 11,34.
117
Alexander Stephan, a) "Review: Kindheitsmuster by Christa Wolf," trans. Biddy Martin, New
German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 178-182; b)" 'How did we become as we are?' The
Treatment of Fascism in GDR Literature," trans. Ian Wallace, GDR Monitor 3 (Summer 1980):
5-16; c) Christa Wolf, 4th ed., (Munich: Beck, 1976, 1991).
118
Heinz Plavius, "Gewissensforschung; Christa Wolf: Kindheitsmuster," Neue Deutsche
Literatur 25 (1977): 139-151.
119
Annemarie Auer, "Gegenerinnerung; Gedanken beim Lesen," Sinn und Form 29.6 (1977):
847-878.
120
Wolfgang Hegewald, Stephan Hermlin, Kurt und Jeanne Stern, Helmut Richter, Dieter
Schiller, Leonore Krenzlin, Preface by Wilhelm Girnus, "Briefe an Annemarie Auer," Sinn und
Form 29.6 (1977): 1311-1322.
121
Sigrid Bock, "Chista Wolf: Kindheitsmuster," Weimarer Beiträge 23.9 (1977): 102-130; 103.
!
64!
topic of fascism within GDR literature.
122
Hans Richter, of Jena, however, faulted both the lack
of political commitment and narratorial innovations.
123
Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster are thus situated within discourses that defined
the societies in which they were produced. Of interest is what they disclose about the processes
by which these societies also situated themselves into and within discourses that defined their
relationship to history and to themselves. . In both cases, the signifying potential of also that not
said, supplies a cognitive commentary sotto voce on the trajectory of the story in print across the
page.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
122
Therese Hörnigk, (a) "Das Thema Krieg und Faschismus in der Geschichte der DDR-
Literatur," Weimarer Beiträge 24.5 (1978): 73-105; (b) "Kriegserlebnis und
Wandlungsgestaltung in der frühen DDR-Literatur," Literatur im Wandel; Entwicklungen in
europäischen sozialistischen Ländern, eds. Ludwig Richter, Heinrich Olschowsky, et al. (Berlin,
Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1986) 223-246; c) Christa Wolf (Berlin: Volk und Welt, Göttingen:
Steidl, 1989); d) "Gespräch mit Christa Wolf," in (c) Christa Wolf, 7-47.
123
Hans Richter, "Moralität als poetische Energie," Sinn und Form 29.3 (1977): 667-678; 678.
!
65!
3. Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster
3.1 The World in the Works
At the most immediate level of reading, Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster tell
thought provoking stories about the relationships of their various figures. Yet any adequate
allocation of sense to these stories and the events of, and emplotments in which they consist,
places the reader into contact with the significance of extra- and intertextual relationships
revealed through close reading of all narrative elements. These, in turn, further situate the texts
and reader into categorical perspectives within which, and in counterpoint with the primary
surface elements, alternative narrative configurations suggest themselves.
The novels present meta-textual
1
social commentary as allusions; alternative narrative
modes are also encountered. In the following discussion the terms 'allusion' and 'reference' are
used (contra Genette) in the sense of explicit denotation. The dissertation privileges and
modifies a perspective derived from Edward Said as well as Bakhtin's dialogic principle as a
basis for relating texts, readers, and perceived 'realities.' In searching for these relationships, as
grounds for counter narrative or explicatory sub-commentary on societal discourses in Grass’s
and Wolf's works, the inquiry will be restricted to specific perspectives suggested by the texts.
3.1.1 The World as Intertext
Of the several means by which texts may be in dialogue with each other, that of marked
intertextuality is readily evident in Grass’s and Wolf's novels. As Die Blechtrommel relates the
story of Oskar Matzerath, born in Gdańsk [then Danzig] and raised during the National Socialist
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Accepting Genette's taxonomy for purposes of labelling. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests, trans.
Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,
1997) 4.
!
66!
years, at the narrative surface, one also becomes aware of the "copresence,"
2
to borrow a term
from Genette, of other texts. Early in the novel, in the story of Oskar's firebrand Grandfather
Koljaiczek, the semiotic productivity of inserting song titles and lyrics into descriptive prose may
be observed in the fantasy stream of consciousness parody of German patriotism with a naval
motif such as,
[. . .] Promenadendeck, Heil dir im Siegerkranz [italics added], die Göschflagge des
Heimathafens, Prinz Heinrich steht am Steuerrad [italics added] und mein Großvater
Koljaiczek barfuß [. . .]
3
The passage continues with the line from the latter song, "ein Volk das solche Fürsten hat" which
in the original concludes the sentiment with "das leidet keine Not."
4
Koljaiczek thus escapes the
thoroughly mocked German authorities as Oskar's narrative reduces the verities of national pride
simultaneously to slapstick comedy and bitter irony.
The unfolding tale situates Oskar in a specific and symbolic social setting. One learns
that during the First World War Oskar's mother Agnes has entered into a romantic relationship
with her cousin, Jan Bronski, but in 1923 marries Alfred Matzerath, a Rhinelander, who,
convalescing from a wound, stays on in Danzig after the war. Thereafter, Agnes, Alfred, and
Jan, also married but opting for Polish citizenship, form a personal and political ménage a trois
that becomes a conceptual framework for the orientation of the reader within the peculiar and
fateful geopolitical circumstances of the 'free city of Danzig' and its national client relationships.
If "history is in the detail"
5
in the Blechtrommel so also is milieu and the work abounds in the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2
Ibid. 1.
3
B 36/TD 23.
4
Breon Mitchell, "Glossary," TD 580.
5
Preece 39.
!
67!
particulars of material culture, such as description of contemporary stamps, which with their
political import might give a little insight, at least sensorily, into the everyday world of the
characters.
6
The paramount artifact might be the tin drum itself, which wholly other than a
material prop, becomes, in a passage parodying the Nietzschean will to power, the support for
and objective embodiment of, Oskar's refusal to develop into an adult.
7
At the age of three Oskar decides to stop growing, as a protest against the adult world,
and lives a life of willfulness and egocentricity as he explores and makes his way in that world.
The primary tools that assist him in his idiosyncratic life path initially are his toy drum and his
glass-shattering voice. Assisting the narrative and underlining character relationships in the
passages that describe Oskar's transformation is an allusion to Johann Strauss' Der
Zigeunerbaron along with Biblical and liturgical references. Although the written passage with
Agnes at the piano and Jan at her shoulder mentions only the operetta,
8
the extension of the
narrative in Volker Schlöndorff's film, naturally enough quotes a specific musical passage -- one
that would seem to both ironicize and signify, the lovers' belief in the rightness of their
relationship.
9
When Oskar's voice shatters the glass of the household clock, the narrator satirizes
the dependency of adults on their creations by referring to Jan Bronski's silent intonation of
liturgical formulae, whether as supplication or imprecation is somewhat unclear.
10
Later, the re-
functioning of a biblical passage concerning Sodom and Gomorrha serves as a sarcastic
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
B 48/TD 32.
7
(a) Ibid. 70/48. (b) Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1988)
70.
8
B 72/TD 50.
9
Schlöndorff, Volker, dir, Die Blechtrommel, 1979, film.
10
B 79/TD 55.
!
68!
comment on the relations of the adults and their acquaintances in Oskar's world.
11
Oskar grows up in a lower middle class milieu of rough children, self-indulgent adults,
and Nazi ideology. His own self-indulgence actually makes him somewhat immune from the
pretensions of adults, whom he continually disdains and shocks. The minutiae of daily life, such
as Oskar's kindergarten experience of popular religiosity, signified by Aunt Kauer's singing and
demeanor,
12
create a feeling for authentic childhood experience, albeit one that never seems to
miss an opportunity to mock the grownups. Although not intertextual in the strict sense, the
mention of numerous literary and popular works and figures announces a perspective for
associated figures in the Blechtrommel, such as the pedophilic greengrocer and scoutmaster
Greff, and chronicle Oskar's own cynical self education as he manipulates people for his
purposes.
13
Other signifying strategies include allusions to Faust within the context of Goethe as
a Biedermeier rather than a classically transcendent figure and possibly Oskar's own bargain with
the tin drum.
14
Goethe and Rasputin become the antipodes of Oskar's education,
15
a dualism
made much of in the literature on the novel,
16
making of Oskar also a Faust surrogate
17
with his
two souls. When Sigismund Markus woos Agnes with the declaration that Germany will be
successful and Poland will not, that is, Jan Bronski will never amount to much, the narration
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11
B 82/ TD 57.
12
B 90/ TD 62.
13
Ibid. 107-118/75-83.
14
Ibid. 118/83. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, "Vor dem Tor," v. 1112, Faust II, Act 1,
"Finstere Gallerie," v. 6212ff., Faust: die Tragödie erster und zweiter Teil, ed. Erich Trunz
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 1986) 41, 191.
15
B 112/TD 78.
16
Siegfried Mews, Günter Grass and His Critics: From The Tin Drum to Crabwalk (Rochester,
NY: Camden House, 2008) 22-24.
17
Judith Ryan, "The Revocation of Melancholy: Günter Grass' The Tin Drum," The
Uncompleted Past: Postwar German Novels and the Third Reich (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1983) 56-69; 61.
!
69!
conjoins Oskar's drumming with musing on the historically fragile independence of Poland
through a burlesque of yet another line from Goethe and one from the Polish national anthem.
18
The readily readable literary and cultural allusions become rather sparser as the Tin
Drum's narrative proceeds. The text throughout the novel delights in the small detail such as the
Hitler Youth "Eastwind" song allusion, satirically suggesting that an ode valorizing German
aggressive designs on Eastern Europe actually floats more flags and banners than any other, in
precisely the scene in which Oskar prepares to bring disorder to the festive proceedings at the
grandstand.
19
In the same manner, Oskar's estimation of the Hitler Youth wind band's offerings
as cacophony, the production of which suggested to him that the heroes of National Socialism as
typified in the films SA Mann Brand and Hitler-Junge Quex, had, contrary to their slogans,
indeed died in vain.
20
In the following chapters of the novel, Parzival is invoked as symbolic
stand-in for Jan Bronski and still later Oskar conceptualizes himself with a Christ-like persona
while his mother is in the confessional, all structured with reference to the Roman Catholic
mass.
21
By 1937 Oskar's mother, deeply depressed and encumbered by an apparently inescapable
sexual objectification, loses the will to live and obsessively overdoses on fish. This sub-narrative
is initiated and signified by, eels caught in a decomposing horse head, their incorporation by
Oskar's father as soup, and the nausea which envelopes Agnes which is subsequently projected
into marital discord. At the appropriate moment of flaring tempers the "Huntsmen's Chorus"
from Weber's Der Freischütz signifies the wound inflicted by Matzerath on Agnes as Agathe, but
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
18
B 134/TD 95; Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, Entrance monologue; Polish national anthem.
19
B 149/TD 105.
20
Ibid. 152/107.
21
Ibid. 182-183/129-131.
!
70!
the banging of the piano lid and the clatter of the fallen stool ensure that there will be no ultimate
happy ending here.
22
After her death, Oskar's childhood world disintegrates. The Jewish toy
merchant Sigismund Markus, from whom Oskar obtained his tin drum, commits suicide after
Kristallnacht. Matzerath and Bronski, estranged after Agnes' death, keep their own separate
company in a relationship alluded to by the "eternal feminine" of Faust II.
23
Jan Bronski is
executed by German troops after the siege of the Polish post office, marking the beginning of
World War Two. After seventeen days Poland capitulates and the pathos of Polish cavalry
fighting German armored units is signified in the Blechtrommel as inversion of the Don Quixote
tale, in Polish Pan Kiehot [Kichot]: tilting at Panzers believing they are windmills.
24
The occurrence of major specific literary or other media based quotation or reference
continues its metacommentary at irregular intervals. After Oskar's father hires a young woman,
Maria, to care for the teenage Oskar, whose stature is that of a small child and thus considered
handicapped, both Oskar and his father eventually have sexual intercourse with her. In 1941
Maria bears a child, Kurt, who is either Oskar's son or half-brother. Almost predictably, the
characters involved in this situation evade seriousness, accomplished by Oskar in one instance,
through the drumming of variations on a popular tune about the sea war against England after
radio news of German U-boat victories conveniently defuses an awkward sexual situation.
25
Oskar partakes of military service by joining Bebra, a little person and circus clown, entertaining
the German troops in France. The persistence of the wartime mentality in the later Federal
Republic of Germany is foreshadowed by anachronistic reference to a post-war American hit
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
22
Ibid. 202/143-144.
23
Ibid. 272/196.
24
Ibid. 324-325/234.
25
Ibid. 376-377/271-272.
!
71!
song,
26
along with the fact that characters and locale also resurface in the 'West German' chapters
of the novel. Oskar's romantic interest, Roswitha, is killed in an Allied attack after the D-Day
invasion. Oskar eventually makes his way back to Danzig as the war turns against Germany. He
arrives home from his odyssey, but dissimilarly to Ulysses finds life there relatively unchanged.
Biblical passages, liturgical references, and recall of Oskar's childhood frame his renewed
metonymic encounter with 'Jesus' as statuary, in a passage dissociating the narrative voice from
Oskar and intermittently identifying the latter with St. Peter and ultimately with Jesus himself.
27
From this point Die Blechtrommel employs marked intertextuality in the form of
references to a Christmas carol, Goethe, Wolfgang Borchert, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, the
Bible, Dante, and a Church symbol. Oskar's father swallows and chokes on his Nazi party pin
when Soviet forces arrive, precipitating his shooting by a Soviet soldier in the confusion. At
Matzerath's funeral, Oskar starts growing again and becomes hunchbacked. This section is
introduced by a recapitulative history of Danzig, through which Oskar historicizes his life, times,
and decisions that includes an ironic mention of city native Johannes Falk, author of "O du
Fröhliche."
28
Particularly poignant is the arrival of Mariusz Fajngold, escaped from Treblinka.
29
Oskar, Maria, and Kurt then flee to the West where he enters a sanatorium. He is released in
1946, undertakes vocational training and apprentices as a stonemason. The text exhibits
acquaintance, satirically, with post-war society by referencing Gustav Gründgens, successful
before, during and after the Third Reich, in his performances as Tasso and Hamlet, as well as the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
26
Ibid. 449/323.
27
Ibid. 468-471/336-340.
28
Ibid. 522/378.
29
Ibid. 543-544/394-395.
!
72!
sensation caused by Borchert's Draußen vor der Tür.
30
Oskar's commentary on the contemporary
art scene likewise satirizes various shallow attitudes as the text throws names such as
Raskolnikov into the aesthetic mix, with contextually dependent implications of unspecified
crimes and punishments. Thereafter, in the early years of the Federal Republic he encounters
acquaintances from his military service, including Bebra, and plays in a jazz band in the 'Onion
Cellar' nightclub where patrons may peel onions in order to cry.
When Oskar's dog finds a woman's severed ring finger, he is charged with murder and
committed to a mental institution from which he narrates and is discontinuously narrated by, the
voices of his story. As these tell of Oskar's flight to Paris two years earlier, the fact that the date
of narration is his thirtieth birthday brings once again comparison with Jesus.
31
Before his arrest,
Oskar fantasizes himself as Dante ascending from the Paris metro as from hell, on an escalator,
interviewed by reporters from Der Spiegel.
32
Oskar's concluding peroration, begun in the
manner of the Apostle's Creed, voices his now open identification with Jesus, summarizes his
life through many of its objective correlates, and ends with renewed and perhaps final
confrontation with the Schwarze Köchin, Oskar's ultimate alibi for historical causality and human
responsibility.
33
Kindheitsmuster or Patterns of Childhood tells the story of Nelly Jordan's childhood in
Nazi Germany as "[d]er ganz normale Alltag des Faschismus."
34
The narrative is related by the
fictive author (in process of writing the 'memoir'), the narrating subject, presumably the mature
Nelly, the narrated subject, in the course of a car trip with her family to her hometown, G.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
30
Ibid. 571/416.
31
B 764/TD 553.
32
Ibid. 771/558.
33
Ibid. 776-779/561-563.
34
Firsching 69.
!
73!
[Gorzów Wielkopolski], in Poland, the former L.[Landsberg an der Warthe] in pre-war
Germany. The work consists of eighteen chapters, which in the edition of the year 2000 and
later have descriptive titles in a table of contents. The English translation of 1980 has no such
table of contents and deletes a number of passages found in the German edition.
The story, extant on several time planes, is thus discontinuous as a linear narrative. The
plot is overlain with myriad discussions of history, humanity, memory, and writing and these are
introduced and illustrated most often by allusions to or quotations from various works of
literature and popular culture. Similarly to their use in Die Blechtrommel, such references locate
the characters within certain social settings and open up discussion on the nature of those settings
for both the textual figures and the reader. Unlike Grass’s work, Kindheitsmuster largely
foregoes the satirical stance and employs intertextual reference to interrogate history and
memory as discourses of lived events for both fictive characters and reader. Essentially, Nelly
Jordan spends the first sixteen years of her life suspended between family life and Nazi
indoctrination. These two poles become conflated in her memory so that thoughts of one are
associated with the other. At the publication of the novel one might assume a similar
psychological process for many readers whose subjective experience of the Nazi period might, at
least in memory, have paralleled the constructs of Kindheitsmuster's figures. The many allusions
to childhood songs, nursery rhymes, and their juxtaposition with counterparts in National
Socialist ideology situate the characters and older readers into a world constructed by memory
and its discontinuities. For the reader with no direct experience or memories of Nazi Germany,
for instance a younger generation typified in the novel by the fictive author's daughter, Lenka,
there exists also a set of extra-textual allusions and references thematizing the tension between
experiencing, remembering, and then communicating the childhood years under Nazism.
!
74!
Explicitly marked intertextuality in Kindheitsmuster begins before the beginning of the
tale itself with an epigraph from Pablo Neruda's El libro de las preguntas or Book of Questions
framing, with perhaps some degree of pathos, the discussions to come.
Where is the child I used to be,
still within, or far away?
35
At the beginning of the narrative proper the fictive author begins the act of writing, in the third
person, dissociated from Nelly who as a child finds her place in the family as an I. Yet exactly at
the beginning, the initial sentence, in free translation from Faulkner, seems to bridge that
dissociation in acknowledgement of the presence or perhaps better 'present-ness' of the past.
36
In
the following chapters the gradual Nazification of Nelly's hometown is recounted against tales of
family genealogies, fights with other children, and family gatherings. There are SA and SS
parades and memories of her younger brother Lutz. On a different time plane there are
discussions between the narrator, her daughter Lenka, and H., Lenka's father. All these
happenings are placed in textual and conceptual proximity to a huge array of references to texts
within the mundane situations of the novel's characters. In addition to the childhood songs,
songs and sayings of fascist indoctrination, and newspaper articles, there are citations of world
events in the 1970s, the Vietnam War, the assassination of Allende in Chile, the Watergate
scandal, and even the death of Ingeborg Bachmann. Already in the first chapter of the novel the
narrator interrogates the accuracy of memory followed by a quip that her daughter might forget
the present news of the United States bombing of North Vietnam.
37
Memory produces cognitive
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
35
Pablo Neruda, from Book of Questions, trans. attributed to Margaret Sayers Peden, Patterns of
Childhood, front pages.
36
K 11/PC 3. Compare "[t]he past is never dead, it's not even past," William Faulkner, Requiem
for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951) Act 1 Scene 3.
37
K 19/PC 8.
!
75!
artifacts of Nelly's existence as the fictive author probes the childhood locale. Nursery rhymes
and folk songs illustrate the tenor of that existence and delineate the experiences that shape
Nelly's awareness and memory of family, external history and their respective emplacements.
In some instances the correlation of family, memory, dreams, and the contemporary
world of authorship become also for the English reader a correlation with concerns of text
translation. In a passage citing memories of Nelly's mother, Charlotte, conflated with a dream of
the neighbors house burning, compared with 'forgettable' news such as an earthquake in
Nicaragua, the magnitude of bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong expressed as double the explosive
force of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, and leading into a dictionary definition of memory, the
English translation leaves out the paragraph on catastrophe and war, even transposing the initial
mention of the narrator's soothing warm drink to a passage four paragraphs later.
38
The ensuing
etymological disquisition on memory, quoting from Albrecht Haller's "Trauerode" of 1736, has
likewise failed to materialize in the English translation.
39
The fictive author muses on titles, on
the way in which life and behavior, particularly that of a child is regulated, often by a Muster or
pattern, from Latin monstrum, and with the coming of fascism, the regulation of the adult world
also in terms of the loss of the freedom of the press or of assembly, hardly noticed immediately
by the populace at large.
40
The narrative voices of Kindheitsmuster interweave witness, memory, and reflection as
German society succumbs to National Socialism. The process evinces a certain discursive
'authenticity' in its many references and allusions to and from the material, tangible world. There
are newspaper accounts of local and world events and statistics of political affiliations as
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
38
Ibid. 58-61/33-35.
39
Ibid. 62/missing.
40
Ibid. 65/36.
!
76!
reference to Nelly's vague notion that people called Communists existed and were being attacked
by members of the SA.
41
Intimately bound up with this idea is the reflection, in answer to the
question of Kasimierz Brandys, that what accustoms people to dictatorship is possibly the
limiting of "their curiosity to realms which are not dangerous to them."
42
Or [b]rauchen wir
Schutz vor den Abgründen der Erinnerung?
43
-- a thought correlated with rumors of peace in
Vietnam from January 1973 and reflection on the 'hypocrisy' of the American president, as well
as Nelly's family life in the 1930s. To President Nixon's proclamation that at no time in the post-
war world was a lasting peace as possible as now (February 20, 1973), the fictive author asks
herself if indeed crises have been abating in recent years, if this has affected her writing, her
sense of life's timing, and further if Bertolt Brecht's pronouncement on the attainment of
importance through thematic living may be credited. Rejecting this idea, the contemplative
thread weaves Nelly's father's incorrect recitation of Schiller's Das Lied von der Glocke together
with reflections on the sheer volume, contingency, and entanglement of thought and experience,
all of which is reflected at some level in writing, which must cut through it all by balancing
"seriousness and recklessness."
44
Ultimately, unlike the flight and return of Apollo 14, there is
no possible calculation of the trajectory of one's own life, and like certain Soviet cosmonauts
who died during their punctual return to Earth, no celebration of tragic failure in a world of
military heroes and rock stars.
45
The voluminous correlation of narration and citation continues with Lenka singing the
spiritual "O Freedom" during the 1971 car trip, Nelly finding she is unable to keep her arm raised
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
41
Ibid. 65/37.
42
Ibid. 110/67 quotation as given.
43
Ibid. 114/missing.
44
Ibid. 150/94 quotation as given.
45
Ibid. 151-152/94-95.
!
77!
in salute during the singing of "Deutschand über Alles," musings about Lenka's concept of truth
in relation to Nelly's elucidated by her reaction to the suicides of her German instructor and
friend. These are referenced through Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and the suicides of
Kleist and Henriette Vogel.
46
The context presents further reflection on Nelly's childhood
encounters with truth and lie at school, containing yet another juvenile song (substituted in the
English translation by one that rhymes in English) and poem.
47
Nelly is exhorted by her teacher
to hate Jews and Communists, and discovers she cannot. Eventually she internalizes conflicted
and sexual associations with Jews but also, after Kristallnacht empathy also. This conceptual
conflict and its memory is contextualized by anti-Semitic doggerel, as common at the time as
well-known rhymes such as "Maikäfer flieg!" The fictive author contemplates the psychological
normality of Adolf Eichmann and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, Nazi news agency
accounts of the bombing of Guernica -- actually, torched by Soviet forces (!) -- and the launching
of the 'Strength through Joy' ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff. News reports of Stalin's purges bring
embarrassment to the fictive author, as a committed communist, in explaining this historical
period to her daughter, Lenka, relating the idea of personal change also to memory and its
physiological basis.
48
Kindheitsmuster's Chapters 6 and 7 reflect on German nationalism and
anti-Semitism culminating in Nelly's memories of Kristallnacht, 8 and 9 November 1938. These
are cognitively associated with a radio speech the year before by Joseph Goebbels, triggered also
by memories of a fire in her own home -- a wicker chair -- and her brother burning his hand on
an electric stove.
49
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
46
Ibid. 153-170/96-106.
47
Ibid. 182-187/114-115.
48
Ibid. 203-233/128-148.
49
Ibid. 249-255/158-162.
!
78!
Kindheitsmuster's Chapter 8 begins with Ingeborg Bachmann's citation of Flaubert, on
experience and knowledge, [m]it meiner verbrannten Hand schreibe ich von der Natur des
Feuers.
50
Authenticity becomes the issue with allusions to world crises, the beginning of the
war in Vietnam, the assassination of Salvador Allende in 1973, and the realization that the
socialist bloc of nations did not aid the leader of Chile's Communist Party, Corvalán.
51
How
does one mediate, in writing, the past and present, in what does this consist, is it a dialogue? In
this manner the fictive author begins her chapter on the beginning of World War Two and its
effects on Nelly's family.
52
With the coming of war, her father enters military service; he returns
almost unrecognizable near the end of the novel. An inventory of citations, through which a
dialogic relationship between Nelly's past and the fictive and also real author's present might be
established includes: (1) a speech by Goebbels announcing the realization of the greater German
Reich through the Anschluss of Austria, (2) the correlation of German children losing their
fathers in war with Arab and Israeli children losing theirs similarly in the conflict of October
1973, perhaps even someone who survived a German concentration camp, (3) news accounts of
the war's progress in 1939, (4) official versus real intentions by wartime leaders, with
contemporary allusion to the 'Pentagon papers' made public by Daniel Elsberg, (5) the
generational exhaustion of terms of disgust, and (6) the reporting of the "persecution of Jews" in
a small town in Germany in 1973.
Nelly experiences the rites of passage from childhood in Nazi Germany: membership in
the Hitler Youth, for girls the Bund Deutscher Mädel and at Nelly's age specifically, the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
50
(a) Ibid. 256/163; (b) Karen Achberger, Understanding Ingeborg Bachmann (Columbia, S.C.:
University of South Carolina Press, 1995) 132.
51
Robert J. Alexander, rev. of Chile, Corvalán, Struggle, by Viktor Shragin, trans. Yuri
Sviridov, The Hispanic American Historical Review 62.1 (Feb. 1982): 159-161.
52
K 256-281/PC 163-179.
!
79!
Jungmädel organization. Meta-commentary in the form of a quotation from an English story
situates the fictive author into Nelly's complicity with National Socialist goals: "I was a nice girl,
wasn’t I?"
53
The different semantic levels and social situations on and for which this phrase,
with its evocation of dissolute innocence and shocked regret, could function as intertext,
highlight the dilemma. As an eager member and leadership candidate
54
in the official youth
group of a government that fostered euthanasia for those it deemed unworthy of life, a fact
touching also her extended family,
55
Nelly has thus sold, if unwittingly and under legal
compulsion, her moral selfhood for the solidarity of the organization and the social acceptance
that entailed, a fact made evident through a youth leader's intoning of verses from a Nazi song
that extols the merging of the 'I' with the 'we'.
56
Ultimately, reference to a television show about
youth drug addiction in the United States underscoring the necessity of recognizing that one
needs help as prerequisite to recovery, frames the question for the fictive author: how did we,
meaning also I, become who we are presently?
57
Nelly's awareness of puberty is conditioned also by National Socialist models including
awareness of a woman's sexual role from the perspective of the SS newspaper Schwarze Korps
and infatuation with her own role model, teacher Julianne Strauch, a leader in the National
Socialist Women's organization, couched once again in remembrance of poetry recitations.
58
The narrator-author recalls the "final solution" in Hitler's Germany in the contexts of Nelly's
knowledge of the dismissed Professor Lehmann protesting that he is not Jewish, of Lenka's
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
53
Ibid. 295/189.
54
Ibid. 296/189.
55
Ibid. 308-310/196-198.
56
"Vom Ich zum Wir," Heinrich Annacker, Ibid. 299-298/191.
57
Ibid. 328/209.
58
Ibid. 331-348/212-222.
!
80!
school studies about the Holocaust in the 1970s GDR, and historical discussion of the culpability
of German manufacturers for genocide. Among the material referents for this discussion are
Lenka's school history book with a picture of Auschwitz-Birkenau, some statistics of genocide,
and a map of concentration camps, all of which the narrating fictive author finds insufficient with
its non-mention of Eichmann and general lack of detail.
59
Nelly's own awareness of I.G. Farben
is as a firm employing Germans repatriated from the East and is correlated with reference to
Rudolf Höss's specifications of exactly how Zyklon-B gas was used for extermination purposes.
A discussion between Lenka and her mother about differences of opinion with others brings up
Mann's Mario and the Magician. The narrator-author's dream of the victims of Stalin leads into
a citation of Meister Eckhart. Immediately the rosy picture of life, reinterpreting evident war-
time privations, presented by Nazi Germany's news and entertainment media is credited with
developing a penchant for utopian thinking. A newspaper photo from 1974 of the former vice-
president of Chile under Allende on the "concentration camp" island of Dawson, imprisoned by
the military junta, leads into a discussion of the 1963 'Auschwitz trials' in Frankfurt and the
complicity of I. G. Farben in technical arrangements for maximizing work forces, i.e. knowledge
of the liquidation of less productive workers.
60
Nelly's confirmation in the Church takes place in a ceremony compared to hypnosis --
duly defined in both a Random House Dictionary and the Kleine Deutsche Brockhaus -- and is
employed in Chapter 12 of the novel as metaphor for the exercise of power, even that of military
provenance, over unsuspecting subjects.
61
In the ensuing chapters of Kindheitsmuster references
to sources similar to those described to this point comment upon, illustrate, and underline the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
59
Ibid. 366-368/234-236.
60
Ibid. 367-389/235-248.
61
Ibid. 394 ff., 422/252ff., 270.
!
81!
discussions of memory, its loss, and its importance for conceptualization and personality
development. As Germany is defeated, Nelly and her mother flee west, through Brandenburg
into small towns and villages in Mecklenburg. The hardships of those times and depiction of the
Soviet occupation as well as assertions of continuity between the Nazi past and the socialist
present, challenged official East German precepts concerning fascism and the Holocaust.
Privileging the feminine perspective
62
seems to indicate subtle discord with official formulations,
although notably, the persecution of Communists under the Nazi regime is, naturally, referenced.
The fictive author-narrator broaches, in 1974, the topic of the sterility of life in a socialist
society dominated by a production mentality at environmentally degraded worksites, with the
reproach from her daughter that those few, like the author, who can work in personally
rewarding occupations, are an imposition upon the rest of society who labor in industry. Back in
1971, on the trip to G. formerly L., a reference point for the mother daughter relationship is
formed by mention of Joseph Roth's Job, unread due to over tiredness from the journey. In
1974, General Pinochet's assumption of the Chilean leadership along with the names of four
murdered Chilean citizens is immediately juxtaposed with Nelly's local newspaper's list of
prominent Germans whose citizenship had been revoked, e.g. Bertolt Brecht, Erika Mann,
Friedrich Wolf, and others, in the 1930s. When Soviet forces reach the Oder reference is made to
the blindness of Hitler to impending collapse, as detailed in the memoirs of General Guderian
and a memorandum by Albert Speer.
63
Other major quotations and marked referents in Kindheitsmuster involve verses of a
bawdy song with allusions to the German ‘conquest’ of Poland illustrating the loutishness of East
Germans on vacation in Prague; Goethe's paradoxical saying that he had written much in order to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
62
Hell Post-Fascist Fantasies 200.
63
K 431,440/276, 282.
!
82!
have something on which to base his memory; a definition of verfallen as one's own consent to
ruination; verses from the fictive author's memory of Goethe's Masonic ode "Symbolum;" the
Moscow history professor, quoting Montesquieu's valorization of reason; and Paul Fleming's
"An sich," in relation to the acceptance of self; a North Vietnamese offensive into South
Vietnam. The list continues with Schiller's dictum that truth lies in the abyss; selections from
Ernst Busch's Songs of the International Brigade from the Spanish Civil War; the offense to Nazi
authorities of Schiller's Don Carlos and William Tell in their mention of freedom of thought; and
finally Nelly's incomprehension of Goethe's Iphigenie in relation to Julianne Strauch's reading of
the accessible and stirring "Feiger Gedanken," as portent of that change which must ultimately
produce the mature fictive author and mark the boundary of discontinuity between the two.
64
3.1.2 Levels of Narration
What purpose do such citations really serve, viewed thus abstractly, as a list,
disconnected from the narrative, in both Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster? What actual
and/or symbolic distances are traversed that could not otherwise be approximated in original and
homogeneous textual formulations for communicative ends? Certainly the texts abound also in
metaphors, similes, and myriad examples of unmarked intertextual references, requiring only the
reader' to construct conceptual bridges between the disparate elements. In making sense of the
works as a mutual dialogue, that is a negotiation of constantly reconfiguring difference, between
text, reader, and perceptual or material constructs, i.e. a 'world,' the various explicit references to
other literatures may be regarded as the atoms of meta-textual discourses and significations, as
indicated earlier, themselves in a state of flux within certain limits, dependent on the changing
moments of reception and circumstance.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
64
Ibid. 447-612/286-392.
!
83!
Of particular interest is the effect such citations have on narrative relationships.
Intertextual associations directly affect the more pivotal of these, those involving the narrator in
relation to story, to reader, to history, politics, and other matters. Die Blechtrommel's narrator is,
at the textual level, a complex of voices embodied in the first person narration of Oskar
Matzerath, the third person narration about Oskar Matzerath, which is sometimes self-reflexive,
and presentations of secondary narrators. It may be argued that these voices are all simply the 'I-
narrator'
65
Oskar but inasmuch as the configuration of narrating voice(s) usually analytically
implicates narrative veracity it has been widely observed that in the Blechtrommel it is just this
quality that cannot be relied upon for representational stability.
66
By one analysis, Oskar is a
variably embodied allegorical figure representing the social factors that enabled the success of
National Socialism and after the war hindered the ability of the populace to overcome its
influence.
67
When ones correlates Oskar as narrator with associated intertextual allusions he also
becomes an interdiscursive storyteller as textual denotations acquire additional and/or possibly
contradictory connotations when brought into the conceptual proximity of referenced intertexts.
For example, the passages in which the narrator relates with quasi-innocence the wonderment of
Oskar at the Roman Catholic liturgy and its symbols of faith
68
voices a much different discourse
when articulated as a category. In this case the encounters with religious language, devotional
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
65
Bal 20ff.
66
Amir Eshel, "The Past Recaptured: Günter Grass and Alexander Kluge at the Turn of the
Century," Deutsche Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen
Literatur, ed. Moshe Zuckermann (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003) 181-203; 187.
67
Nury Kim 82.
68
B 182f./TD 114f.
!
84!
statuary, and allusions to biblical stories underscores Oskar's self-identification with Jesus.
69
An
interesting feature of this textual complex is the decisive role played by the activity of drumming
for such identification and the implication of that activity as a mode of discourse in its own right,
here, as one of legitimization. Thus the 'atomic' intertexts from liturgical and devotional
literatures [and in keeping with materialist interest, their objective referents] as category, form
one or more meta-discourse(s) in relation to the text's narrative surface, but always in reception
in process of modification by the degrees of connectivity imputed to the dialogical relationships
between both semantic and signifying elements.
Noteworthy also are the terms in which the intertextual relationship has been introduced
into the critical literature. Julia Kristeva's reading of Bakhtin preserves and re-interprets both the
socio-theoretical implications of communication and the semiotics of the text's linguistic
substrate.
70
Within Bakhtin's vision of the dialogic as the polyvalent determinant of
communication and concomitantly, social structure as such,
71
Kristeva emphasizes the critical
potential inherent in its generalized application to the text as a "mosaic of quotations"
72
and the
writer as "no more than a text re-reading itself."
73
Considering all writing as a mosaic of
associative intertexts could obviously be applied as an elucidating strategy also to Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster. These presuppose a consciousness on the part of the reader
of a wide range of associations and the desirability of correlating these with the text, often even
with apparent banalities, throughout the reading.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
69
Ibid. 468ff./336ff.
70
Julia Kristeva, "Word, Dialogue, and Novel," The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986) 34-61; 37-40.
71
Bakhtin, "The Problem of the Text” 124ff.
72
Kristeva 37.
73
Ibid. 56.
!
85!
When the Blechtrommel's narrator relates the news that the German lines are
experiencing "erfolgreiche Frontverkürzungen"
74
associations that might come to mind would be
the possible contexts of the concept of "successful," those of shortening of fronts, the vehicle for
delivery, presumably the military communique, and the implications of the reasons behind this
action, questioning why success in the larger conflict, one of expansion, should entail a line
contraction, even if successful at that level. The reader is asked to correlate the grammatical
semantics with the signification of what is not stated, based on presumed knowledge of an actual
historical situation, for a differentiation of sense that traditionally would be referred to as irony.
Similarly, when in Kindheitsmuster the narrating voice editorializes, as Nelly's own realization,
that Nelly had lived for twelve years in a dictatorship "anscheinend ohne es zu merken"
75
the
irony here issues from a universe of intertexts (particularly in German Baroque literature) on the
problematic of reality and appearance, Sein und Schein, and the possible contexts of noticing,
with two further implications in German: (1) why was a Diktatur not merkwürdig, was it not
sufficiently unusual? and (2) what else was not noticed by Germans like Nelly in this period and
why?
The dependence of these types of allusions on the cognition, where conjectural, and the
recognition where intentional, of the reader might invite a more structured approach to the
consideration of intertextuality. Of course, this structured approach is itself only a way of
relating elements in the context of philosophical precepts that validate the procedure. In that
sense, methodological comparison becomes an element of the works' extended narrative within
the world of literary criticism. Gérard Genette's approach to intertextual resources reveals
refinements of previously mentioned concerns as well as shifts of emphasis. In Palimpsests, in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
74
B 434/TD 312.
75
K 616/PC 394.
!
86!
application of these resources to the literary canon, he categorizes "transtextual" relationships as
a series of delimitations, only the first of which he is prepared to call intertextuality.
76
Defining
the relationship between texts that comprise this category as "copresence" Genette includes here
the allusion, the plagiat, and the quotation.
77
For the more general perceptions of intertextuality
Genette distinguishes relationships in four additional increasingly abstract categories.
If one were to analyze the texts of Kindheitsmuster through Genette's taxonomies, the
results might comprise the following distinctions. The category of intertextuality should be very
close to the marked citations and allusions discussed earlier in this chapter, augmented by all
obvious borrowings. Paratextual analysis will vary among the editions of the novel, with the
primary English edition presenting more minimal desiderata in this category than the primary
German edition. Metatextuality might be apparent in Kindheitsmuster to the extent that one
perceives a commentary on the Blechtrommel itself by parallels and contrasts across the range of
narrative categories. Gentte's hypertextuality would be observable as the conjectural
transformation of texts possibly by an earlier writer like Anna Seghers, or more plausibly Wolf's
own 'illness' fabulae of Nachdenken über Christa T. into those of Kindheitsmuster's constituent
texts. Architextuality might be evidenced by Wolf's novel in relation to the Bildungsroman on
the unspoken correlation of Bildung with Muster in relation also to generic similarity at the
levels of both content and structure.
78
The practical consequence of this kind of analysis is (1) to
effect a certain elucidative order through prioritization in regard to possible relationships
between texts, as Genette makes clear in discussion of his category of "hypertextuality"
79
and (2)
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
76
Genette 1-2.
77
Ibid. 2.
78
Ibid. 3-5.
79
Ibid. 394-395.
!
87!
to limit or at least systematize the anarchical tendency toward infinite semiosis inherent in the
unbounded proliferation of contexts into which textual significations may be situated, as
diagnosed by Derrida.
80
3.2 The Reader in the Works
Of course, long before the term 'intertextuality' came into use, writers indicated
relationships between texts by which denotation and connotation, signifier and signified, could
extend, complement, and contradict primary meaning. Metaphor, metonym, synecdoche and
utilization of allusion, parody, pastiche, quotation, and travesty, all of which are to be found in
the Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster, extend the semantic range of the narrative and must be
considered as constituents of the story-bearing text in terms of the etiology of their inclusion
within the text. At this point these latter terms coalesce with the broader concept of
intertextuality in their dialogic relationship to each other and to their location within the text of
the novels, the cognition of the reader, and the extra-textual environments of all. It is in fact the
inter-distribution of symbolic figures that construct the polysemic bases of both works.
Inspecting these, it is apparent that sense allocation through intertextual analysis is for these
works in no way forced. Indeed it might be possible to read both, through implication, as
treatises on the subject considering the large corpus of citations evident. Based on the readings
of the allusions and their contextual relationships as developed here as well as in Chapters 2 and
4 of this dissertation, a general feature of such hypothetical treatises would be, agreeing with
Stierle, that the problematics of the texts control and delimit the semiotic range of sense afforded
by allusive and symbolical resources.
81
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
80
Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context," Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff, trans. Jeffrey
Mehlman and Samuel Weber (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988) 1-23; 12.
81
Stierle 15.
!
88!
At this juncture, the relationship between texts and reader needs further consideration.
For Said, as discussed previously, texts exist cognitively as materially situated discursive
entities.
82
Since they reflect the "realities"
83
of life, they exert a claim upon the reader
embodying the power relationships of those realities, however tenuous or ambiguous. In a
supplementary manner, Jauß draws attention to the extent to which the reader's perceptions of a
particular text are also conditioned by previous literary experience.
84
As developed in Chapter 1
the relationship between text, reader, and concerns external to both presents a mutual situation of
each in the other with mutual claims and limitations. Within this framework it is still possible to
conceive the literary work as the sum of innumerable intertexts but through 'worldly' and textual
constraints on sense allocation the underlying contingency derives from the unconstrained
variations of the reader's imaginative appreciation of these. Yet unconstrained does not mean
uninfluenced and as both Said and Jauß from separate perspectives indicate, the texts of works
may partially constitute such influencing factors. Without the cumulative literary experience of
the reader, Die Blechtrommel's allusions to Goethe, Rasputin, and other entities, and
Kindheitsmuster's myriad evocations -- Faulkner, Ingeborg Bachmann, for instance - would
communicate no sense. To the extent that all are constellated in the works in a specific spatial
and temporal manner, communicates a specific sense contingent upon the reader's previous
experience, imagination, and fantasy, as modes of personal explication.
Of course it may be objected that both world and text are primarily cognitive constructs
of the reading subject. At issue are positions in ancient but still current debates on the relative
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
82
Said 150.
83
Ibid. 5.
84
Jauß 169.
!
89!
independence of 'realities' and 'things' from the human mind and/or their constitution through
language.
85
Specifically, these include ideas about the nature of the artwork [including Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster as literary fiction] in relation to the participation of the
viewer, listener, or reader in its realization. Much of immediate philosophical background to
these issues may be found in the writings of, among others, Heidegger, Sartre, and Adorno. Die
Blechtrommel, in particular, references the position of the visual and plastic arts in post-war
West Germany. This discussion is, however, not enjoined in Kindheitsmuster. In the interval
between the publication of Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster the art world in the United
States, with the participation of Western Europe, witnessed debate on the 'autonomy' of the
artwork in relation to the beholder as argument about the then new current of Minimalism.
86
Neither of the novels addresses these issues directly. Grass’s work situates these references for
the most part satirically but with some recognizable connection to theories on art, e.g. Oskar's
experience with Professor Kuchen and 'expression'.
87
Wolf's work usually disguises such
remarks as subtle comments underlining a point enunciated in connection with another issue.
For instance, Nelly's non-acquaintance with the word 'panic' is paired with remarks on Picasso's
Guernica as an ironic reproach against the brutalities of humanity as "homo faber."
88
Both Grass and Wolf have commented on the relationship between life and art to the
effect that the author or artist is both a product and a contributor to the outlook of society.
89
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
85
Derrida Of Grammatology 22ff.
86
Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood" (1967), Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
87
B 606-607/TD 441-442.
88
K 229/PC 145. Wolf's friendship with Max Frisch adds an extra intertextual layer of
explication for this phrase.
89
(a) Günter Grass,"Die Meinungsfreiheit des Künstlers in unserer Gesellschaft," Der
Schriftsteller als Zeitgenosse, ed. Daniela Hermes (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag,
!
90!
Christa Wolf's ideas regarding the role of the reader have been expressed as belief that methods
of narration are conditioned "durch den geschichtlichen Kontext, in dem der Künstler wirkt und
seine Zeitgenossenschaft bestätigt" [emphasis added].
90
Günter Grass attributes to Döblin the
conception with which he agrees that "[d]er Leser in voller Unabhängigkeit einem gestalteten
gewordenen Ablauf gegenüberstellt: er mag urteilen, nicht der Autor."
91
These brief quotations
would seem to encapsulate attitudes close to Sartre's conception of the human being as the
initiator of relationships called 'reality'. Specifically "[r]eading seems . . . to be the synthesis of
perception and creation."
92
Unlike Sartre
93
, neither Grass nor Wolf draws a clear line in these
contexts between artist and author.
3.2.1 Dialectic and Dialogic
Following the lead of Kindheitsmuster, with its often close juxtaposition of seemingly
unrelated objects, one might also correlate text with intertext in modified Benjaminian terms as a
constellation of objects in the 'now' forming a dialectical image.
94
Re-interpreting Benjamin:
[. . .] image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form
a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation
of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what has been to the now is
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1996) 112-124; 113. (b) Christa Wolf, Lesen und Schreiben, Aufsätze und Prosastücke
(Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1972) 203.
90
Peter Beicken and Rolf J. Goebel, "Erzählerische Selbstverständigung: Christa Wolf zwischen
Moderne und Tradition," Monatshefte 74.1 (Spring 1982): 59-71; 60.
91
Günter Grass, quoting Alfred Döblin in "Über meinen Lehrer Döblin," Über meinen Lehrer
Döblin und andere Vorträge (Berlin: Literarisches Colloquium, 1968) 7-26; 11.
92
Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: The Philosophical
Library, 1947) 43.
93
Ibid. 7.
94
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) 462.
!
91!
dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural [. . .].
95
Considering the relation of text and intertext to also be one that imparts sense by coming together
“in a flash” the text replaces what Benjamin would have regarded as the “purely temporal” or
historiography, here re-interpreted as the purely literal. The process of sense allocation, between
text and intertext is the “relation of what has been to the now;” it replaces, or better extends,
Benjamin’s concept of history. What remains the same is the radical contingency of the process
as that which was hidden or devalued within the text, or on the part of the reader, or within real
world referents, comes to the fore and militates against any overarching or eternally valid
interpretation. If, for Benjamin, image replaces narrative as history, and as re-interpreted above,
image replaces interpretation within narrative, then narrative becomes a broader construct than
either with the proviso that such must retain both the "now of a particular recognizability"
96
and
the materialist sifting that uncovers the historical or cultural 'detritus' that occasions the
destabilizations in play.
Returning to the idea of the dialogic relationship of all elements and parties to literature,
in which each requires the others, one might consider that both this theorization and the
immediately foregoing are in fact variant roads to a similar if not the same destination. The
points of comparison are: (a) both the dialectic and the dialogic embody discourses or language
usages that derive from specific histories, or formative elements, that are related as stories, even
if issuing from some definition of factual circumstance and (b) the polyvocality and resultant
polysemy of dialogism, instantiated in Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster through both
intertextuality and narrator problematization, instigate a semantic debate between the alternatives
represented by the respective voices. Situating both methodologies in a 'worldly' manner (Said)
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid.
!
92!
the narrative substructure becomes more important than the definitional superstructure precisely
by involving the reader, through negotiation of the conceptual distances between these as
"historical and social actors"
97
within those relationships.
It is true that Bakhtin devalues dialectics, almost facetiously defining it as an abstraction
of dialogue devoid of "living words and responses."
98
Certainly this critique is at least partially
aimed at the dogmatic uses of the term within officially sanctioned Soviet cultural analyses.
Benjamin, on the other hand, understands dialectics as the most adequate descriptor of
humanity's social journey. Mediated by Marx's materialist and economic explications, Hegel's
conception of the dialectical changes in thinking, language, and the "realization of . . .
freedom"
99
in history becomes for Benjamin the observation that
[j]ust as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical
periods, so too does their mode of perception.
100
Beginning the essay with a short disquisition on the dialectical relation of Marx's concepts of
base and superstructure, Benjamin adduces the relevance for culture in general.
101
In so doing,
he attempts to distinguish 'genuine' Marxist ideas in their complex comprehension of social
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
97
Said 15.
98
Bakhtin "From Notes Made in 1970 – 71," Speech Genres 147.
99
G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans.
Robert S. Hartman (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997) 78, 79.
100
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Second
Version," The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings
on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund
Jephthcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others (Cambridge, Mass.. London:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008) 19-55; 23.
101
Ibid. 19.
!
93!
structures from simplistic interpretations.
102
The beginning of Kindheitsmuster's eighth chapter is illustrative of the above
possibilities. It not only presents the following complex as voices and significations in dialogue:
relation of experience to authenticity, the appreciation of war by those who have experienced it,
the inability of the socialist nations to aid Allende and Corvalán in Chile, the question of how
past and present may be mediated; it also cognitively opens a dialectic of possible alternatives
for one to consider in mediation.
103
The idea, posited earlier, that the texts under consideration
may be regarded as sites of theoretical negotiation for sense allocating discourses, whether
conceived as meta-commentary or as "dialectics at a standstill" (or one defined as the other),
contains the corollary that the intertextual elements as atoms of those discourses may also be
thought as points, or singular emplacements, defining, symbolically, a discursive non-stable
'topology' of the textual sites that may be analyzed across discourses and even works in terms of
configurations denoting similarity and difference. The narratives thus affected will then take on
certain configurations either in the conceptual realm, the material realm, or both, depending on
whether the intertextual elements reside more in one area or the other. For instance, in the
Blechtrommel the arrangement of figures and actions could produce a mental map of
relationships for readers but an analysis of the work based on referenced places could extend the
narrative into the realm of geography. In the case of Kindheitsmuster a similar observation could
be made but if the myriad items, e.g. journal articles, etc. named actually exist in archives which
the reader could inspect, the narrative would become similarly extended into the material realm
and perhaps analyzable in terms of the placement and provenance of the items.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
102
Rainer Nägele, "Body Politics: Benjamin's dialectical materialism between Brecht and the
Frankfurt School," The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 152-176; 160.
103
K 256/PC 163-164.
!
94!
Analyzing the novels in terms of the emplacements of the various references and citations
could thus produce narrative perspectives in terms of those references and citations. Surveying
the references in both the Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster reveals cases of similar allusion.
The chapter that concludes Book One of the former is named "Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe" the
Biblical faith, hope, and love from 1 Corinthians 13 v. 13. The same phrase occurs in
Kindheitsmuster on German grave monuments that have been vandalized.
104
Is there a
relationship between the two that would profitably elucidate either novel? There is certainly
difference. Die Blechtrommel's chapter is structured primarily in terms of the fairy tale formula,
es war einmal . . . that contains the bitter denunciation of the nation that believed the "Gasman"
to be Santa Claus and that mocks the faith, hope, and love sentiment.
105
Both passages begin in
cemeteries, but from that commonality formally diverge into separate fabulae. Analysis in terms
of the rather slight quotation would thus appear forced, except for the fact that both use the
biblical conceit to thematize important aspects of coming to terms with the Holocaust. In Die
Blechtrommel the focus becomes the willful childishness of a nation that accepted and
participated in genocide. In Kindheitsmuster the fictive author, through the cemetery experience,
develops empathy for the victims of genocide and their descendants who have vandalized the
grave markers. Another candidate is comprised by the category of quotations from, or allusions
to Goethe. What differences, similarities, or outright non-sequiturs would characterize not just
an analysis of the way both works cite Goethe, but a narrative structure in which for each the
cited materials determine the discourse by which the narrative is emplotted? The same could be
done for concepts denoted by words such as Gedächtnis and Geschichte. Would it be possible or
desirable to map the elements (usages) of either of these words (as concepts) from one narrative
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
104
Ibid. 489/314.
105
B 261ff./TD 187ff.
!
95!
onto another in such a way that an intelligible relationship would be seen to operate between
them under transformation of contexts as narrative perspectives in their own right? These lines
of thought provoke speculation on the extent and limits of narrativity and the elements from
which it arises.
Regarding Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster as contributing to discussions of
history and memory through narrative constructs, entails interrogating these simultaneously in
their most concrete and abstract manifestations, viz. real world and historical referents and
intertextual associations and conceptual re-constellation of these into dialectical or speculative
configurations, in that these activate the story-telling process that constitutes the novels'
contributions to the allocation of sense for the constitutive problems raised by those stories.
Ultimately this involves situating all elements and parties to these narratives dynamically in
relation to each other without precluding the contingencies of hybrid relationships between the
world, the text, and the reader that would actuate such sense, or (after Said) to activate "critical
consciousness" as "an unstoppable predilection for alternatives."
106
3.2.2 The Novels as Performative Critique
The implied discourses on history and society projected by Die Blechtrommel and
Kindheitsmuster also performatively embody literature-theoretic critiques. In referencing
debates current at the time of writing, whether directly, through intertexts, or by more general
implication, the works obviously situate themselves -- and the reader -- into the respective
critical milieus of their time. For Grass’s work this included the German post-World War Two
mixture of theoretizations including those dating from the Weimar era and before, as well as the
larger European intellectual sphere mentioned earlier. For Wolf's novel the immediate
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
106
Said 247.
!
96!
background resides in the negotiations of norms and strictures of East German society,
officialdom, and intelligentsia in relation to her own purposive contributions to these.
107
Obviously the more general theme is the role of art and literature in socialist society under
various conceptualizations, including those of Lukács. The sense of the term 'performativity'
employed here is the observation that Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster (a) generally,
intervene in the world beyond just description as instruments of meta-commentary and its effects
on the reader, and (b) specifically, constitute 'writing acts' that through their respective narrative
methods and structures present correctives to those alternatives that are the objects of their
critiques. Instance (a) comprises the research agenda of this dissertation as a whole, including
the analyses to this point, of interest here is the nature of the works' performativity as described
in instance (b).
Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster exemplify their implied critiques through
narrative techniques primarily in terms of the theory of the novel, the treatment of historical
materials, engagement with subjectivity, and the questioning of the relationship between the Nazi
era and post-World War Two German society. Grass has described the former work as having
an "ironisch-distanzierten Verhältnis" to the Bildungsroman.
108
Others have seen the work as a
parody of the genre.
109
In this regard, the ambiguities of Die Blechtrommel's non-linear narrative
method, common to much modernist literature, may be viewed as a challenge to the Goethe cult
and its emphasis on formal harmony in post-war West German literary scholarship. The
necessity of dealing with a world that is not whole requires a methodology that reflects this
social situation and finds its expression, as Adorno proposes, in an aesthetic distance that varies
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
107
Magenau 249-250.
108
Heinz Ludwig Arnold, "Gespräch mit Günter Grass," Text und Kritik 1/1a (1971): 1-26; 6.
109
Nury Kim 43.
!
97!
throughout.
110
This variation or disunity of perspective is incorporated in the unreliable narrator
Oskar reflecting on the act of narrating
111
as also the object of narration. Oskar viewed as a
symbolic and constructed figure in relation to the real world situations referenced alongside the
intertextual allusions presents a challenge to the nature of literary construction. To the extent
that the text reflects on particulars, e.g. history, subjectivity, this challenge extends to the nature
of historiographic and socio-psychological writing as well. Another aspect of the variation in
aesthetic distance, the inclusion of magical, mythical, and fairy tale tropes as structural elements
runs counter to literature that associated these with the irrationalism of fascism. Adorno's
musings on the folk play as projecting a world wherein
[. . .] the preindustrial way of life, was of greater value than the city . . .that rough and
ready fisticuffs was the proper response to sophisticated civilization [. . .]
112
is also applicable to the prose medium. If the horrors of Nazism lie outside the scope of realistic
depiction, as Adorno avers,
113
then the evocation of the irrationalities within the world from
which the horrors issued turns the folk work, as Adorno again detects in relation to Brecht, into
its opposite,
114
through ironic implication.
Kindheitsmuster's enactment of critique through methodology takes place against the
background of allowed and/or favored artistic norms within the socialist state of East Germany in
addition to the larger world of European aesthetics. By the 1970's the authority of Lukács,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
110
Theodor W. Adorno, "The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel," Notes to
Literature, Volume 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1991) 30-36; 34.
111
B 12/TD 5.
112
Theodor W. Adorno, "Reflections on the Volksstück," Notes to Literature, Volume 2, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) 334-
335; 334.
113
Ibid. 335.
114
Ibid.
!
98!
Wolf's early mentor,
115
was officially no longer acknowledged due to his support of the reform-
minded Hungarian regime of Imre Nagy.
116
Nevertheless, official prescriptions for artistic
endeavor emphasized the popular, the typical, and attitudes on life deemed optimistic and
edifying for the socialist citizen,
117
very much like Lukács' ideas on these topics.
118
Kindheitsmuster's negotiation of these facts is realized as both assent to and dissent from official
doctrines. This occurs through the injection of personal experience into the commonly accepted
historical realities as authentic typicality. The very nature of authenticity and objectivity are
dialogue between present and past?
119
The exploration of one's growth from fascist youth to mature anti-fascist communist
through the artifice of discontinuous narrative voices contraposes a new subjective 'socialist'
novel against that of Lukács and others. Wolf's novel does not tell a story or recount a human
experience so much as it interrogates the nature of telling and of being human within the
framework of an ethically engaged socialist society as implied, if unrealized, ideal. A
particularly poignant aspect of this type of narrative is the manner in which the body becomes
metaphor for society and writing becomes therapy.
120
Thus, like other GDR writers,
Kindheitsmuster exposes a widening gap between official strictures and authors'
methodologies
121
already seen in Wolf's earlier novel, Nachdenken über Christa T. Wolf has
recounted her (and her colleagues) hopes for a reformed and culturally open GDR since the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
115
Magenau 48.
116
Ibid. 84.
117
Ibid. 257.
118
Lukács 332ff.
119
K 256/ PC 164.
120
Magenau 259.
121
Hell 16.
!
99!
1960's and the disappointments in that regard.
122
Thus Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster appear to embody correctives to some of
the objects of their critiques in terms of writing methodology as well as subject matter. In so
doing they raise questions concerning that subject matter: the constitution of history and its
transmission in relation to the nature of subjectivity and its relation to moral agency during the
National Socialist era and after. In raising such questions they present the possibility of
narrativizing perceived facts in ways that may constitute historical and sociological discourses
more varied than or even in opposition to those accepted by Grass’s and Wolf's societies. The
works therefore situate world, text, and critical reader into contingently new cognitive versions
of their subject matters.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
122
Christa Wolf, "Rummelplatz 11. Plenum 1965," Auf dem Weg nach Tabou (Munich:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996) 58-70; 62.
!
100!
4. History, Memory, Narrative
4.1 The Problem Defined
Both Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster clearly situate themselves in discourses of
history and its perceptions. This is not merely to posit that the works comment upon history, or
make historical events into a portion of the novels' subject matter. Rather, the works become
sites wherein the texts, their historical referents and allusions, and the experiences of the reader,
interact in ongoing debate about the relationships between and the significance of these elements.
As such, they constitute, in narrativized form, fictive counterparts to historiographical accounts
of these relationships.
The abstraction, history, finds concrete expression in Grass’s and Wolf's texts through
various means. For both, a kind of 'social history' picturing details and material artifacts of
particular milieus forms a significant substrate of the narrative structure. Against the background
of a general historical process, the Nazification of Germany, the surface features of both Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster often reflect the interplay of the remembered or constructed
experiences of childhood games, adult love affairs, and the paradoxical small (and large)
brutalities of everyday life. These are all placed in recognizable locales and vivified by allusions
to material artifacts such as clothing, photographs, and the general accoutrements that
accompany the prosecution of daily life.
Looking at the novels individually, the Blechtrommel's sense of temporality alternates
continuity with discontinuity. Anachronisms such as the crosscutting of Oskar's family history
with 'historical' digressions and reflections from the vantage point of his incarceration in a
mental institution, in the narrative present,
1
are abundant. In the novel, one might initially group
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Neuhaus 23-25.
!
101!
historical allusions into categories such as symbolic representation, chronology, documentation
(in one instance), and of course narrative, to the extent that this latter may be separated from the
others.
Nury Kim argues that the entire work, as engagement with history, is structured
allegorically. The characters, the narrated events, and in a complex and multifaceted manner, the
narrator -- Oskar Matzerath -- all function as illustrations of the principle "etwas anders bildlich
zu sagen."
2
Additional desiderata include (1) intentional relationship between verbal picturing
and significance, (2) rational explicability of details (of correspondence), and (3) provocation to
reflection. In Kim's typology the figures fulfill the prerequisites of allegory through embodiment
of the social attitudes, in a consistent and rational manner, historically associated with segments
of the German lower middle class amenable to Nazi ideology.
3
The particulars of the characters'
private lives stand for historical events. For instance, the ménage à trois of Agnes, Alfred, and
Jan and their respective power relationships, picture the political realities of the Free City of
Danzig caught between Germany and Poland.
4
Oskar, according to Kim, both as figure and
narrator, embodies a parody of every relationship with which he may be associated.
5
As such, he
becomes the figural illustration of aggression,
6
of the infantilism of the German population of his
time and place,
7
and in the very synthetic quality of this role, an allegory of West Germany's
post-World War II flight from engagement with the recent past into the escapism of cultural
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2
Nury Kim 69.
3
Ibid. 71.
4
Ibid. 80.
5
Ibid. 81.
6
Ibid. 83.
7
Ibid. 85.
!
102!
aestheticism.
8
Volker Neuhaus refrains from using the term allegory in explication of the previously
cited examples [except in quotation of other analyses] but concentrates instead on the
relationship between abstract chronology in the novel and its materialization in the lives of the
characters. In his view it is the constellation of the not merely symbolic but concrete details of
life's relationships that delineate the political tensions germane to the era.
9
Whatever the
terminology employed, it should be apparent that actants in the Blechtrommel may be analyzed
in terms of a wide range of symbolic and semiotic allusions to memories of historical events,
placing those associations into dialogue with such memories. That the propensity to analyze
symbolically is also a function of the analyst's experiences, expectations, and decisions may be
inferred by careful comparison of Kim's and Neuhaus's accounts, aligned with the emphasis of
Julian Preece that "[h]istory is in the detail in The Tin Drum."
10
A case in point is the fairy tale
beginning of the passage "[e]s war einmal ein Blechtrommler" which develops almost as a
theological treatise on the credulous Volk who believed in the Weihnachtsmann who was really
the Gasmann.
11
Of particular interest is that this disquisition follows the discovery by Oskar of
the dead Sigismund Markus
12
accompanied by the shift from first to third person narrator that
continues throughout the Gasmann episode. One might ask if these passages merely chronicle
persecution and pre-figure genocide. Certainly the latter passage would seem to also pre-figure,
through narrator detachment, that same distancing from the memories of the events that post-war
Oskar, as 'every-German,' parodies in relation to these brutal manifestations of German history.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8
Ibid. 89.
9
Neuhaus 39, 58.
10
Preece 39.
11
B 261-262/TD 187-188.
12
B 260/TD 186.
!
103!
Die Blechtrommel presents its stories very much with a sense for dates, supplying an
abstract background against which the concrete details of the characters' everyday lives may be
projected.
13
By another perspective, these details, when correlated with purported historical
events implicitly illustrate aspects of accepted chronology.
14
Yet the fantastic nature of many of
these stories and the quasi-nihilistic narrative view as a whole suggest that Oskar is once again
ridiculing: this time, that version of historiography that sees itself in Mary Fulbrook's words as
"retrieving the evidence and reconstructing the past"
15
in an unproblematic manner.
A sample of the comparison of Die Blechtrommel's 'narrated family history' with
'textbook history' demonstrates the way the former is often situated in discussions provoked by
the latter. At the beginning of Oskar's tale he places his grandmother, Anna Bronski, in a potato
field outside Danzig in October 1899.
16
A few pages later, the coincidence of this occurrence
with the Boer War is made explicit, becoming also the historical referent of the conception of
Oskar's mother, Agnes. This is followed by a satirical allusion to the Biblical Immaculate
Conception and birth of Jesus, with description of Agnes' astrological natal chart thrown in for
good measure.
17
Further on, the group wedding photograph of Oskar's mother at age twenty-
three betrays the year, is situated narratively in conjunction with the Treaty of Rapallo, and
descriptively presages the relationship of Agnes, Alfred, and Jan.
18
Even without explicit dating, events such as Kristallnacht, the beginning and some of the
conduct of World War II, and other recorded occurrences are deducible from the text. Many are
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
Neuhaus 39.
14
Preece 39-40.
15
Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) 13.
16
B 12/TD 10
17
B 23-24/TD 13-14.
18
B 62-63/TD 43-44.
!
104!
given at least general dates. An important episode, Oskar's sexual awakening, is placed in July
1940 and correlated with the overrunning of France by the German army.
19
1949 finds Oskar
playing in a jazz band at the Onion Cellar nightclub
20
but the founding of the two German states
in that year is not specifically mentioned. In one passage historical artifact appears to actually
materialize on the page. The model and real world referent for the official looking
announcement of Jan Bronski's execution,
21
is presumed to be a similar document sent to Günter
Grass’s aunt
22
which, through alteration, might be said to function as counterpart to source
criticism at the fictional level. In Kindheitsmuster, similarly, commonly accepted historical
details are clearly evident.
23
History is presented on three levels, the past of the Nazi period to
1945, the past of the car trip of 1971, and the present of authorship, 1972 to 1975.
24
These
historical levels are paralleled by the narrative voices: Nelly, the mature fictive author who
meditates on Nelly and her past, and the same with family on a remembered journey.
25
Julia Hell places the analysis of Kindheitsmuster within her psychoanalytic study of East
German literature. Her explication of the work and its author is further situated in a discourse
that she designates as one of the GDR's "foundational narratives of antifascism" [italics in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
19
B 345/TD 249.
20
B 685/TD 497.
21
B 321/TD 231.
22
Janina Gesche, Aus Zweierlei Perspektiven . . . : Zur Rezeption der Danziger Trilogie von
Günter Grass in Polen und Schweden in den Jahren 1958-1990 (Stockholm: Almqvist and
Wiksell International, 2003) 120.
23
K 257/PC 164.
24
Hell 201.
25
Ibid.
!
105!
original].
26
In this account, the adoption of a post-fascist identity by East German citizens
problematized the psychic dimension of the parent-child relationship and made "sexuality the
privileged terrain of subject constitution."
27
This perspective, which will be discussed further in
Chapter 5 of this dissertation, opens Kindheitsmuster's window on history. The split subjectivity
of narrative voice is thus the result of the history that Wolf's generation lived and is accessible
only in memory. The conflicts of the memory of this history are processed within the body as
site of resistance to Nazism.
28
For Hell, then, Kindheitsmuster's historical engagement is
determined as an attempt to recover a lost psychic unity sundered through trauma.
Kim situates the discussion of Kindheitsmuster's historical dimension within the attempt
by critical authors in the German Democratic Republic to account for the authoritarian character
of their nominally socialist and egalitarian society as a consequence of an incomplete coming to
terms with the National Socialist past and inherited 'Prussian' behavioral norms.
29
He locates this
discussion more narrowly in terms of Christa Wolf's efforts to accomplish just this in the work as
fictive autobiography, narrativizing the recent past as personal experience
30
in a signature
manner that has become known as 'subjective authenticity.' As subjective literature the story
focuses on Nelly and her family and their reactions to events. Adding an authentic, e.g.
documented, historically grounded, remembered, as opposed to fabulous, element to this
allows the literature to cognitively link with those members of society harboring memories and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
26
Ibid. 17.
27
Ibid. 132.
28
Ibid. 200-212.
29
Nury Kim 115.
30
Ibid. 169.
!
106!
tales of similar experiences, across several generations.
31
Historical engagement in the novel is
consequently structured by Nelly's own engagement with the values of National Socialism and
their intuited contradictions. These contradictions are then imputed by the mature fictive author
to be still present, under socialism, through textual linking with acknowledged contradictions in
communist society, such as Stalinism.
32
Annette Firsching reflects on issues common to both Hell and Kim. Her approach
emphasizes the novel's attempt to make sense of the "completely normal everyday life under
fascism"
33
and to make this experience comprehensible to the generation of East Germans
coming of age in the 1970's. This appraisal comes from working through different levels of
memory
34
and projects into the mother-daughter relationship as empathy and onto the societal
level as attempt at enlightenment, especially for the young, through historical consciousness.
35
The anguish and utopian striving evident in Kindheitsmuster has not been without its critics,
however. Anke Pinkert raises the objection that even though the novel's superficially exemplary
working through the past "undermines the GDR's abstract and depersonalized discourse of
fascism,"
36
it fails to question the power bases that excluded certain discussions, such as personal
suffering, from communist accounts of history at the outset.
37
Kindheitsmuster makes of historical consciousness a principal theme through its often-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
31
Nury Kim 176.
32
Ibid. 199-200.
33
Firsching 69.
34
Ibid. 86.
35
Ibid. 98-101.
36
Anke Pinkert, "Pleasures of Fear: Antifascist Myth, Holocaust, and Soft Dissidence in Christa
Wolf's Kindheitsmuster," The German Quarterly 76.1 (Winter 2003): 25-37; 30.
37
Ibid. 30.
!
107!
quoted first lines.
Das Vergangene ist nicht tot; es ist nicht einmal vergangen. Wir trennen es von uns ab
und stellen uns fremd. Frühere Leute erinnerten sich leichter: eine Vermutung, eine
höchstens halbrichtige Behauptung.
38
Befitting a work that probes the significance of the past through childhood memory and its
repression, this novel, like Die Blechtrommel re-presents that experiential matrix as a type of
familial social history punctuated by an empirically articulated historiography of the Nazi period.
Unlike Grass’s novel, the latter unfolds this matrix as two narrative pasts and a narrative present,
as indicated earlier. These levels also delineate a tripartite emplotment in which Nelly's story,
the car trip, and the writing of the fictive novel proceed by their own chronologies. The fictive
author, as narrator, dates the beginning of writing at November 3, 1972. Initial musing on the
past and its relation to memory leads to recall of the automobile journey of the summer of 1971
to L., now G., activated by an image split between geographical memory and the facing of
practical and political concerns such as the need for visas and dealing with the Volkspolizei.
39
Through the agency of memory the scene shifts immediately to Nelly's world, thirty-six
years earlier. The second chapter commences with a reflection on the flight of Nelly's mother
from the advancing Soviet forces in January1945. This reflection is linked shortly with the
ability of the fictive author's daughter to quickly sketch a family tree in December 1972. This, in
turn, leads to the introduction of Nelly's family members in 1932, their later fates, and a lesson in
ethnic slurs for the narrator's daughter. Later in the same chapter the etymology of the word
Gedächtnis is pursued to the year 1350 and linked with a verse from Albrecht Haller's
"Trauerode" of 1736 illustrating the word's sense in this context of thought about earlier
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
38
K 11/PC 3.
39
Ibid. 11-13/3-4.
!
108!
experiences.
40
Within a very few passages attention shifts to the vote tally in March, 1933 for
Communist, National Socialist, and Social Democratic parties in the town L.
41
with the
revelation that Nelly's parents usually voted social democratic. As the novel proceeds,
narratives, constituted from memories of experiences are projected onto a large background of
intertextual references, including the Vietnam War and the assassination of Chile's Salvador
Allende, and frequently dated historical references and chronologies. This structure would seem
to question the theoretical basis of historical perception in the same way narrative perspective in
the work questions subjectivity.
4.2 History
In considering Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster as fictively analogous to
historiography it would be well to remember, that among historians, there is great diversity of
opinion on the constitution of historical representation. This diversity has been demonstrated
through the adoption of different forms of historicism, social historical emphases, Marxist
viewpoints, and post-structuralist formulations.
42
Even with the application of secular and
nominally objective criteria to the description of history in the late eighteenth century,
43
historians' theoretical emphases obviously define the field of inquiry. In the nineteenth century
Ranke's conception of history "as it actually was"
44
underlay a research interest that regarded the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
40
K 62/PC missing.
41
K 65/PC 37-38.
42
Joachim Eibach, "Sozialgeschichte," Kompass der Geschichtswissenschaft, eds. Joachim
Eibach and Günther Lottes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2002) 9-22; 10.
43
Fulbrook 12.
44
Ibid. 13.
!
109!
state as the primary actor within the field.
45
Treitschke's paradigm posited history as the product
of the actions of "great men."
46
In Germany after about the year 1890, critique of this style of
historicist thinking centered on problems typified by the foregoing examples, namely the
preference for description over analysis, imputation of uniqueness to historical events, and
general methodological subjectivity.
Throughout the twentieth century perspectives on social history posited the whole of
society as proper object of historical investigation and did so with their own distinctive
approaches including comparative analysis and quantitative methods of description.
47
Sometimes allied with and contributory to these is Marxist historical analysis. Separating this
theoretical emphasis as practiced by historians from Marxism as a movement or from state
sponsored interpretations and strictures, is itself not always an easy task.
48
Underlying
assumptions for Marxist historiography include concepts of historical progress, explications in
terms of "social and economic 'laws,'"
49
and the importance of "revolutionary 'praxis'"
50
as agent
of historical change. The many strands of historical analysis have included those centered
around psychoanalytic interpretations, after Freud, emphasis on sociological empiricism as with
the Annales movement in France, and a number of hermeneuticist, structuralist and
poststructuralist methodologies.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
45
Andreas Wirsching, "Internationale Beziehungen," Kompass der Geschichtswissenschaft, eds.
Joachim Eibach and Günther Lottes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2002) 112-125;
112-113.
46
Eibach 10, 11.
47
Ibid. 20.
48
Matthias Middell, "Marxistische Geschichtswissenschaft." Kompass der Geschichts-
wissenschaft, eds. Joachim Eibach and Günther Lottes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht,
2002) 69-85; 70-71.
49
Fulbrook 14.
50
Ibid.
!
110!
Among the historians referenced in this dissertation Mary Fulbrook argues for a dialogue
between differing historiographic emphases as "social constructions which are open to debate,
revision and advancement."
51
Fulbrook seeks principles to serve as evaluative guides for
historical practice in light of contradictory views of historicity. Is there a profitable way to
negotiate the difference between history as a 'true' account of past events (even if variously
interpreted) and history as present day construction or narrative rather than re-assemblage in the
present of a knowable past? Her ultimate answer is a qualified yes, resulting in a practical
methodology that posits the desirability of re-presenting the past with acknowledgement of the
inevitability of its continuous construction in the present through the most "value neutral"
52
working procedures possible.
Jürgen Kocka, from the perspective of social history, has sought to negotiate a response
to "changing cultural needs"
53
while preserving his own distinctive outlook. Kocka views
various post World War II trends in historical research, e.g. political history, social history,
cultural approaches, and transnational emphases, as a manifestation of continuous change of
interest within the profession.
54
He believes the 'fashionableness' of new trends needs to be
effectuated within a conception of history as an "empirical discipline"
55
with definite truth
procedures, even if always "selective and relational."
56
Kocka is particularly interested in the
historical trajectory of civil society as a public sphere of rights and responsibilities encompassing
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
51
Ibid. 188.
52
Ibid. 187.
53
Kocka Civil Society 115.
54
Ibid. 110-111.
55
Ibid. 113.
56
Ibid.
!
111!
all citizens equally and its relation to that of the German Bürgertum.
57
That he traces both of
these to the values of the Enlightenment reflects his longstanding interest in the manner by which
values of the period: rationality, self-understanding demythologization, and (theoretically)
human rights
58
were formative also for history as an academic discipline. Here, Kocka probes
the extent to which these principles project themselves into later times, including their potential
for informing discussion of collective identity and historical memory, particularly as situated
within the debates of the West German Historikerstreit of the 1980's.
In his essays published in English as The Practice of Conceptual History, Reinhart
Koselleck investigated and formulated "anthropological" and "conceptual" concerns in
historiography.
59
He proposed that these concerns require a "theory of periodization,"
60
in large
part to be able to investigate the diachronic changes in language and conceptions of time in
relation to the effect of such changes on historical consciousness.
61
These include the
importance for historical conceptualization of temporality through spatial metaphors.
62
In a later
essay the relationships between temporalization and politics and of events to social structures are
explored.
63
Koselleck posits the non-productivity of regarding history through the lens of
"chronological sequence"
64
and warns against seeking causality through ideological
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
57
Ibid. 16-22.
58
Jürgen Kocka, "Geschichte und Aufklärung," Geschichte und Aufklärung: Aufsätze
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1989) 140-159; 140-143.
59
Koselleck 1-19.
60
Ibid. 4.
61
Ibid. 5.
62
Ibid. 7.
63
Ibid. 115-130.
64
Ibid. 8.
!
112!
interpretation.
65
Also, the importance of the consideration of language as mediator for
historiographic representation is thematized in his essays. Interestingly, for Koselleck "'[h]istory
is and remains a 'science of experience,'"
66
even if construed by competing methodologies.
Specifically he draws parallels between Kant's ideas on experience, "embracing both reality and
its knowledge"
67
and the contemporary emergence of 'history' as an analogous concept that
merges event with experience. Koselleck felt that history is unified through "anthropological
commonalities,"
68
including the utilization of individual or generational experience in the
formation of historical constructs.
69
Hayden White vigorously develops the application of literary theory to historiography.
White champions the interpretation of history as narrative, with events perceived as emplotted
and explicated through figural language with comparability to categories of literary genre.
70
Considering the importance of narrative to this dissertation, it is worth examining these ideas in
some detail. White has suggested that narrative is a "meta-code, a human universal"
71
for
transmitting a "shared reality."
72
Inasmuch as history does not present itself as a coherent and
meaningful story, there has been a tendency to ascribe meaning through narrativization in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
65
Ibid. 11.
66
Ibid. 47.
67
Ibid. 47.
68
Ibid. 48.
69
Ibid. 54.
70
Hayden White, "Storytelling: Historical and Ideological," The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on
History, Literature, and Theory, 1957-2007, ed. Robert Doran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2010) 273-292; 280.
71
Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) 1.
72
Ibid. 1.
!
113!
recounting the past.
73
In White's view, given that for the historian who works with narrative "the
form of the discourse adds nothing to the content of the representation,"
74
if such narrativization
is congruent with events portrayed, it may be considered valid.
White further avers that historical discourse is only viable if one considers it possible to
discuss history meaningfully.
75
Historical discourse creates neither the events nor the knowledge
thereof but rather their interpretation which is disclosed as narrativization. Therefore, according
to White, modern literary theory is relevant to historiography at precisely that point where the
philosophy of history needs to probe the relevance of language and textuality for an
understanding of historical data as representation that possibly "constructs its subject matter in
the very process of speaking about it,"
76
where the "form of a discourse might be one of its
contents."
77
The adjective 'modern' is important for White's formulation in that it is only the
intellectual horizon implicit in literary modernism with its conceptual ambiguities and
discontinuities, requiring the appropriate tools by which to give sense, that is capable of dealing
with history and its narrativizations apprehended similarly.
Hayden White is not the only theorist to present challenges to traditional historiographic
assumptions. F. R. Ankersmit, for instance, argues that history is akin to a mirror in which one's
own cultural identity is reflected back at the researcher.
78
The narrative description of history
has been a topic of some debate among historians. Critics have questioned this position as
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
73
Ibid. 24.
74
Ibid. 27.
75
Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999) 1.
76
Ibid. 4.
77
Ibid. 21.
78
F. R. Ankersmit, "Hayden White's Appeal to the Historians," History and Theory 37.2 (May
1998): 182-193; 193.
!
114!
meaning, essentially that there is no difference between historical, literary, and fictional
narrative.
79
The test case for this avers that such a model of historiography could produce a
narrative of the Holocaust that could devalue the memories of those who experienced its
effects.
80
White has answered this kind of criticism through seeking norms by which to
distinguish narratives that may be ideologically rather than historiographically motivated
81
and
others that might be considered incoherent at the semantic level through incomplete or
contradictory emplotment.
82
The writing of history is not the monopoly of Western Europe and the United States.
Christa Wolf came to artistic maturity in a country, the German Democratic Republic (GDR)
whose historiographic practice was shaped by its identity as a self-consciously socialist state. In
theory, the GDR's ruling Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) supported historical
interpretation based on Marx's precepts. In practice, Marx's empirical critique and dynamic
conception of progress were often changed into static, and statist, justification of present
conditions. Although official emphases for historians evolved over time, specifically Marxist
ideas at the root of East German historiography included an objective theory of history, the
contemporary political productivity of the discipline, and belief in generalizable principles to
explain the course of history.
83
Within this framework, the development of history as a discipline in the GDR is
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
79
Lubomir Doležel, "Fictional and Historical Narrative: Meeting the Postmodernist Challenge,"
Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 1999) 247-273; 251.
80
Ibid. 251-253.
81
White Content of the Form 77.
82
White Figural Realism 33.
83
Helen Bridge, Women's Writing and Historiography in the GDR (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2002) 11, 12.
!
115!
described as commencing with an initial optimism over contributing to the construction of the
socialist society
84
and the ability to concentrate on traditionally neglected areas of social
research.
85
Thereafter, following a protracted period of conforming to governmental strictures,
East German historiography was credited with developing a more scientifically oriented and less
dogmatic approach, although in no sense independent of official positions -- essentially from the
1970's to its demise in 1990.
86
Literature in the GDR was also viewed as a tool for teaching
historical truths.
87
There was thus always a cognitive tension in the society between an objective
institutionalized historical reality and its more ambiguous depiction in historical fiction,
providing at least occasionally a forum for the questioning of official orthodoxy.
88
4.3 Memory
Whatever the merits of the many diverse viewpoints on historiography, most in their own
way acknowledge some form of communal memory as one vehicle of cogent interpretation or
representation of history. Fulbrook argues that while professional historians proceed from an
empirical base considered from idiosyncratic theoretical perspectives, the societies in which they
live orient themselves to history primarily in terms of a collective memory that derives from
personal, public, and political perceptions.
89
Similarly, within a somewhat different frame of
reference, Hayden White discusses the relation of memory to history in his essay on Paul
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
84
Stefan Berger, "Former GDR Historians in the Reunified Germany: an Alternative Historical
Culture and Its Attempts to come to Terms with the GDR Past," Journal of Contemporary
History 38.1 (January 2003): 63-83; 76.
85
Ibid. 70.
86
Ibid. 63.
87
Bridge 12.
88
Ibid. 25.
89
Mary Fulbrook, "Re-presenting the German Nation: History and Identity in East and West
Germany," Representing the German Nation, eds. Mary Fulbrook and Martin Swales
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000) 172-192, 185-186.
!
116!
Ricoeur's La mémoire, l'histoire, et l'oublie.
90
White notes that while historians may fashion for
society a "public (or 'collective') memory"
91
from documents, facts, and recollections, memory is
more dependent on emotion than any objective consideration.
92
Kocka broaches the subject in terms of German society's memories of the Nazi and
Communist dictatorships and their comparability, as well as of the Holocaust and the possible
commensurability thereto of the sufferings of the German citizenry during the war. From his
perspective, the institutional dimension of Holocaust memory in public commemoration has a
counterpart in and competes with, communal memories that seek to engage some of the other
concerns mentioned. Kocka cautions that these explorations must always be clearly situated in
discussions of German aggression as ultimate bearer of responsibility for the remembered
horrors of World War II.
93
In the essays cited here, Koselleck does not address the issue of memory but rather that of
experience. Specifically, he identifies experiences communicated inter-generationally through
language as the primary means of historical representation. From this perspective, historiography
is essentially the narration of these and may be considered to form several categories.
94
These
might be referred to as experiences which are (1) individual and unique, (2) repeatable and
generationally transmissible, and (3) transformable and transformative in longer time spans.
Type (1) in Koselleck's view, conditions even the historian personally and might exert influence
on choice of methodology. Type (2) experiences are collected, transmitted, and used by
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
90
Hayden White, "Guilty of History? The longue dureé of Paul Ricoeur," The Fiction of
Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957-2007, ed. Robert Doran (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) 318-339.
91
White, "Guilty of History?" 323.
92
Ibid.
93
Kocka, Civil Society 88-95.
94
Koselleck 27, 50.
!
117!
communities as bases against which to judge other experiences. Type (3) are those macro-
temporal occurrences such as the decline of empires that have the potential to provide alternative
explanations, even metaphorical or religious, than would ensue from judging events merely from
the other two modes of experience and their processing.
95
Thus even though Koselleck does not
use the term 'memory,' the role that he assigns to experience as constitutive of historical
perception clearly overlaps with Fulbrook's and Kocka's conceptions of societal memory. These
ideas as a whole situate themselves well within the present theoretical perspective, which, in
privileging the contingency of reception, assumes experience, as either Erfahrung or Erleben (in
Koselleck's terms
96
), to be pre-processed by individual memory, as the mode of non-immediate
access to events. Judgments about these remembered experiences are then inseparable from their
collection and transmission as history as well as the cognitive framework in which even
documentary evidence is evaluated.
Wolfgang Müller-Funk distinguishes between Erinnerung and Gedächtnis in terms of
their respective import for historiography and literary theory. Müller-Funk admits the difficulty
of distinguishing between these in a cultural context but attempts, in English, to relate the former
to theories of Maurice Halbwachs as shared collective memory based on common narratives.
The latter he relates to theories of Jan Assmann as cultural memory based on impersonal
perceptions of events.
97
As caution against drawing precise conclusions from this terminology it
should be observed that other writers have designated the distinctions referenced somewhat
differently, e.g. kollektives Gedächtnis and kommunikatives und kulturelles Gedächtnis,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
95
Ibid. 50-56.
96
Ibid. 46.
97
Müller-Funk 215-218.
!
118!
respectively.
98
Be this as it may, Müller-Funk pursues his initial distinction arguing that
Halbwach's concept of collective memory is rooted in the social relationships that transpire
between individuals, is predominantly oral, and substantially ends with the generation to which it
belongs. The long term cultural memory that is said to derive from Assmann's ideas does not run
contrary to those of Halbwach's but extends the reach of memory by acknowledging the
durability of documentation, ritualization, and mythologization in transposing the memory of
experienced events beyond their initial temporal framing.
99
The implication is that these two types of societal memory are associated with different
modes of historical narrative. On the one hand, according to Müller-Funk, Erinnerung
personalizes history and allows one to feel part of a community that remembers. On the other,
Gedächtnis chronicles the communal memory, which then also becomes the disputed object of
definition and control through the generations.
100
If, as Fulbrook believes, "[h]istorical
consciousness, national identity, and collective memory"
101
are interconnected by story in a
"framework of meaning for salient events in a common past"
102
can fictional stories privileging
modes of societal memory, such as those of Günter Grass and Christa Wolf function also, in
some sense, as historiography? If so, are there genre specific limitations: e.g. what does one
make of mythic or subjective elements within the semantic restrictions of historical fiction, and
must this designation be rigorously upheld to qualify a work as historiography?
If one locates Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster within the preceding discussions of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
98
Jens Loescher, "Kultur als Gedächtnis: Deutungskämpfe im literarischen Feld der
Nachwende," Kulturpoetik 8.1 (2008): 86-104; 88.
99
Müller-Funk 215-217.
100
Ibid.
101
Fulbrook, "Re-presenting the nation" 185.
102
Ibid. 186.
!
119!
the relation of history to memory certain correspondences could be noted. Since both works are
fiction, by definition one expects to find kinship with those theorizations that emphasize the
narrative aspect of historical reflection. Beyond that basic tautology, what do the works actually
say about the history-memory connection? No doubt both Die Blechtrommel and
Kindheitsmuster are analyzable in terms of all the theoretical perspectives outlined initially. An
interesting example, for instance, from the latter work is the extent to which it openly muses on
the way emotion influences memory, differentiating it from documentation,
103
a perspective that
suggests some of Hayden White's ideas.
104
In Wolf's novel, the process of finding oneself and recovering repressed memories
105
is
not only character (and by implication author) specific but presents the described experience as
the "kollektive Erfahrung einer Generation."
106
In this respect, Nelly's experiences as part of the
Hitler Youth organization
107
are not only individual but also obviously collective for her
generation of Germans. The memories of experiences in this section of Kindheitsmuster,
Chapter 9, remind one of Koselleck's analyses in that they initially involve surprise,
108
are
tolerated upon reflection, and are transmitted across generations. The reflections themselves are
actually withheld from transmission, a fact that highlights the trauma of remembrance to the
fictive author. It is the relating of personal experience of the National Socialist past as common
experience, and the relevance of both perspectives to the author's socialist present in the German
Democratic Republic, that characterizes the relationship between history and memory in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
103
K 512/ PC 329.
104
White, "Guilty of History?" 323.
105
Firsching 70.
106
Ibid. 71
107
K 295ff./PC 188ff.
108
K 295-315/PC 188-201.
!
120!
Kindheitsmuster. This fusion of self-analytic, societal critique, and didactic is particularly
evident through the linkages of past and present in Chapter 18. Here questions of economics,
social justice, wartime memories, political liberation, and the ability of language to order
contingent events into these categories traverses the worlds of Nelly, the fictive author, and her
daughter, Lenka, revealing the interrelationship of all three.
109
Grass’s work proceeds, similarly to Wolf's, as conceptual bifurcation. Written in a
superficially realistic style, the underlying tone of irony and fantastical emplotment have been
said to explore the "limits of representation."
110
The self-disclosure of the narrator impeaches the
truth-value of the narrative, yet as demonstrated, the story depends on both an implicit and
explicit historicity for the power of its symbolical elements to be realized. This essential
historical dimension is also realized as bifurcation: the implied possibility of historicity for the
fictive individual and family chronicles, as symbolism, displayed against the explicit historicity
of their 'real world' framing events. In this sense, Die Blechtrommel's relation of history to
memory may be seen from the perspective of Müller-Funk's division of Erinnerung and
Gedächtnis, as the personal and the communal perception of history, or in his terms the
"collective" and the "cultural," respectively.
111
The terms employed might seem antithetical until
traced to their sources. Müller-Funk's alignment of Erinnerung with Halbwach's collective
memory defines this personalization as also a group function for choice of and contextualizing
framework for, even individual memories.
112
The subsumption of Gedächtnis under Assmann's
cultural memory places it in the realm of the formal, the contemplated, the ritualized, the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
109
K 613-618/PC 392-395.
110
Arnds 425.
111
Müller-Funk 217.
112
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992, 38.
!
121!
debated:
113
in short the institutional memory of a society both in mythos and logos. Die
Blechtrommel advances Oskar's narrative in short, self-contained, episodes, the majority of
which reflect Müller-Funk's definition of memory as Erinnerung as typifying the typical, if
sometimes bizarre, manifestations of Oskar's social milieu. These include, of course, Oskar's
family history and relationships, childhood experiences, and adult life. In the remembered
experiences of the private and personal aspects of German lower middle class life and outlook,
Grass finds the nascent fascist society. The fact that these are the memories of a patently
unreliable narrator obviously distinguishes Die Blechtrommel from Kindheitsmuster. If the
former were viewed as the common experience of a generation similarly to the latter, the points
of comparison and the purpose of the satirical mode of representation need to be made clear.
The extent to which Grass’s novel presents history in line with Müller-Funk's view of
Gedächtnis, is apparent in the evental framing and its interpretation mentioned earlier. A more
special connection to this aspect of societal memory might well be in the aura of fantasy and
magical imagining that adhere to the narration. Both this feature and the underlying allusions to
historical, semi-historical, and fairy-tale features and personages allow the novel to be itself a
chronicler of cultural memory at the level of mythic interpretation of the history in which it is
situated.
Thus, in answer to the question posed earlier, historical fiction, here incorporated in the
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster, does indeed serve, at least in this way, as a counterpart to
historiography. More precisely it functions as a metahistorical commentary, in its capacity to
allocate sense to the inter-generationally transmitted memories of cultural experience and
institutionally collocated historical accounts. This is accomplished through the projection of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
113
Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka, "Collective Memory and Cultural Identity," New German
Critique 65 (Spring - Summer 1995): 125-133; 129.
!
122!
personal experience and memory, even the subversively aberrant, as true typicality, into the
representation of those macro-level accounts, both as overt and covert commentary. In this
regard one might re-function, to use Brecht's term, as caveat, one of Foucault's formulations to
describe the working of Grass’s and Wolf's novels as in this manner.
Commentary . . . gives us the opportunity to say something other than the text itself, but
on condition that it is the text which is uttered and, in some ways, finalised.
114
To which one inserts before the word text in each instance the word historical.
4.4 Narrative
The communication of this commentary in Grass’s and Wolf's novels is embodied in the
modes of their narration. In Die Blechtrommel, Oskar's sarcastic self-centered story-telling
reflects his symbolic positioning. Whether regarded as 'every German,' an individualist among
conformists, or even the 'little Hitler,' Oskar's figure undermines representational stability and
casts doubt on all associations.
115
In Kindheitsmuster the narrative perspective initially
ambiguates subjectivity but ultimately communicates a sense of assurance to the World War
Two generation that the communal psychic dislocations, guilt, and trauma are shared and
describable. The split in the novel's and many readers' sense of self, thus becomes the authentic
linkage with the surrounding culture. The historico-social sense of the narratives requests
consideration by the reader of possibly tendentious ideological evaluations. Examples might be,
in the case of the former, "dispelling pious dishonesties"
116
about the relation of National
Socialism and post-war Germans, and in the case of the latter, not only this, but also the relating
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
114
Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language," The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M.
Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972) 215-237; 221.
115
Glenn A. Guidry, "Theoretical Reflections on the Ideological and Social Implications of
Mythic Form in Grass' Die Blechtrommel," Monatshefte 83.2 (Summer 1991): 127-146; 138.
116
Günter Grass, "Looking Back at the Tin Drum," Encounter (July 1976): 84-88; 84.
!
123!
of both to communist society. The positions of the reading subject on issues thus become the
actual objects of discussion implicating the consequences of this fact for one's life-world as
consequences also of, and reciprocally as cognitive constructs for, Grass’s and Wolf's texts.
Considering formal analysis, briefly, as an aid to understanding, one may return to Bal's
definition of a narrative text, quoted previously in Chapter 1, as a narrator relating a story in
"language, imagery, sound, buildings, or a combination thereof."
117
Bal no doubt has in mind, in
addition to literal description, practices such as decoding the story in a painting or reading a
cityscape as text.
118
Through an extension of this idea, one may view Die Blechtrommel and
Kindheitsmuster as consisting in 'combinations' of such narrative elements, the reading of which
discloses the essential features of and semantic levels in, the story. Viewed this way, Grass’s
narrative unfolds through combinations of readings: of the rhetoric of fantasy, of sometimes
grotesque imagery, and of the milieus of various locales and their histories. Likewise, Wolf's
novel relates its tale through the combined readings of subjective discontinuity, of the imagery of
war, anxiety, and alienation, and of the environments and associated histories against which all
elements interact.
The problematic position of the narrator in both novels has been noted. Die
Blechtrommel is related alternately in the first and third person, presenting its protagonist, Oskar
Matzerath, as both narrator and character reflecting on the act of narrating,
119
underlining his
symbolic and conceptual construction, but also questioning the nature of literary construction
and its relation to historiography.
120
Oskar's mode of narration, incorporating his drumming, has
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
117
Bal 5.
118
Andreas Huyssen, "The Voids of Berlin," Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 57-81.
119
B 12/TD 5.
120
Eshel 186.
!
124!
been described as a code outside of language.
121
To the extent that Oskar as storyteller
incorporates both the story and the means of its expression, the reliability of the narrator and the
truth-value of the narration are compounded of a mixture of, as Amir Eshel puts it, "[d]oubt,
contradiction, and skepticism [... ]."
122
This quality becomes even more pointed with the
addition of secondary narrators Bruno Münsterberg, Oskar's "keeper"
123
and Gottfried Vittlar, the
dubious friend who relates Oskar's legal troubles.
124
Certainly alternation of narrative perspective
in a conventional novel, and one might argue here also, does not replace a unified viewpoint and
allows an abstract 'narrator' to nevertheless communicate no matter how quantitatively
fragmented. In Die Blechtrommel, however, alternation of person conflicts with and destabilizes
local significations, even if a global semantic associated with narration remains in place.
In Kindheitsmuster the narrator(s) are, as in Die Blechtrommel, character associated,
comprising a tripartite figural estrangement that is resolved, only tentatively, at the end of the
novel. The fictive author describes the present and remembers the past in the second person, the
child Nelly is described in the third, but narrates from the past in the first. The lack of cognitive
identity
125
between the citizen of the GDR and the child of the Third Reich is thus embodied in
the narrator as distinct voices, in dialogue with each other, and with the broader community of
which she is a member.
126
Thus, a distinction in narrator focalization may be drawn between Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster. In the former, the shifting diegetic markers situate the
reader cognitively into a historical discourse of equal ambiguity. In the latter, the several
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
121
Ibid. 185.
122
Eshel 187.
123
B 9/TD 3
124
Ibid. 745ff./539ff.
125
Hell 200.
126
Komar 45.
!
125!
narrating voices that recognizably, for the reader, signify ambiguities in the human condition,
127
place her both cognitively and affectively into a discussion of shared history, and that which
privileges the feminine perspective. In this regard, Hell makes the point that it is the voice of
Nelly's mother that is crucial for the narrative perspective of that figure.
128
Die Blechtrommel's, 'rhetoric of fantasy' referred to above, manifests itself in language
that often traduces expected communicative functions. Assuming a conventional narratological
paradigm in which events unfold with an expected logic,
129
is contraindicated from Oskar's
introduction onward. This is evident also as one senses the extent to which the narrative simply
parodies -- case in point: the mock suspense of the over long passage in which Oskar's rented
Rottweiler, Lux, finds the ring finger, through the artifice of an almost excruciating delay in
acknowledgement of that find.
130
A similar principle extends to the text's descriptive practices.
Analysis of this narrative facet for purposes of delineating functions, focalization, and character
motivation
131
must contend with passages that question, even mock, more than answer. The
description of Oskar climbing the Stockturm, through repetitive construction, suggests both
determination and futility -- for the act, as described in a sentence as labyrinthine as the
referenced staircase, is itself a type of tower-building at the personal level -- the absurdity of
which is proclaimed already in the text.
132
In addition to foregrounding Oskar's traits of willful
obstinacy and rebelliousness, the description exteriorizes (it is the stairs which have "given
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
127
Nury Kim 187.
128
Hell 205.
129
Bal 7.
130
B 738-742/TD 534-537.
131
Bal 35-46.
132
B 128-129/ TD 91.
!
126!
up"
133
) the motivational contradictions embodied by this figure. It also invites the reader to
interrogate the relationships described: the significance of pigeons, tower, Oskar, climbing,
drumming, their constellation in the text, and ultimately to question the commonly accepted
grand efforts of humanity, be they in architecture or human will.
Not only the depictions of events draw the reader's attention to the narratives but also
the manner of their unfolding. Certainties are undermined through rhetorical questions and
negative representation, and emphases indicated through anaphora and repetition. It has been
remarked that such rhetorical devices focus attention more on the act of narration than on its
objects.
134
The neologisms, variant word orderings, and idiosyncratic punctuation in Die
Blechtrommel undermine standard reading habits and elicit concentration on the text. In a very
real sense, then, focalization provided by unaccustomed expression becomes transferred to and
dependent upon the attention of the reader.
135
Theories, sometimes conflicting, have explored
the work's relation to the Bildungs- and Pikaroroman as a kindred, if ironic, essay in fictive
autobiography.
136
Mythological, literary, and fairy tale allusions are plentiful and much
discussed in the literature.
137
Narratologically, one might consider these aspects of textual
expression as determinants of structural or functional layers of described events with distinctive
inflections corresponding to particular typologies, e.g. fabula, story and narrative text.
138
Alternatively, one could analyze in terms of emplotment and genre demarcation. Considering
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
133
Mitchell translates, "[b]ut the stairs had tired too soon" TD 91.
134
Georg Just, Darstellung und Appell in der Blechtrommel von Günter Grass:
Darstellungsästhetik versus Wirkungsästhetik (Frankfurt a. M.: Athenäum, 1972) 102-108,
quoted in Neuhaus 5-6.
135
Neuhaus 7; compare Bal on the effect of information manipulation for the reader, 164.
136
Arnds 425, Nury Kim 42ff., Neuhaus 28 ff., Preece 46.
137
See Neuhaus 52-56 for primary loci and secondary literature.
138
Bal 5, 75, 181.
!
127!
the contingent nature of categorizations, there should also be no conflict in correlating the
structuring strategies with the signifying import of the intertextual references. The point is to
find or distill a discourse, or its absence, on the themes of history and memory in relation to the
Nazi period and its crimes, through an analysis of the narrative relationships that places the
reader and her environment into a meaningful relation with that discussion.
The subjective discontinuities evinced by Kindheitmuster’s narrating voices are
analyzable as tokens of different narrative levels. The fictive author muses, however, somewhat
disparagingly on this strategy, one of converting the entangled threads of life into "die lineare
Sprache."
139
The language which gives rise to such entanglement, one, in Levine's phrase of
"pronominal coordinates"
140
might also be viewed, after Hell's suggestion, as sliding between
different semantic levels, as with her example of the changing meaning and familial import for
Nelly of the voice and its use.
141
Already at the beginning of the novel this organ is identified as
the bearer of memory and the arbiter of a sense of self
142
and which, similarly to language in the
Blechtrommel, reflexively voices both the narrative and itself.
Of a piece with the discontinuity of subjectivity in Wolf's work, is that also of time. The
fictive author inhabits the temporal present of autobiography. She and her family comprise the
discursive interlocutors of the remembered automobile trip to Poland. Nelly is extant only as the
dissociated memory of the fascist era and its aftermath. Oskar, in Grass’s work, orders events in
a manner suitable to his temperament, narrative rhythm is frequently uneven, and anachronies of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
139
K 424/ PC 274.
140
Levine 109.
141
Hell 202-203, K 56-57/PC 32-33.
142
K 12/PC 4.
!
128!
character histories abound. By comparison, the figures of Kindheitsmuster are not only
differentiated and self-differentiated linguistically but also temporally, and are self-evidently the
actantial embodiments of those constructions alongside their anthropomorphic status as
subjectively authentic characters in a historical setting. Exactly the relationship between the
abstraction in memory and the concretion of the figures in the material world forms the basis of
Kindheitsmuster's many discussions on history, humanity, and memory and their intertextual
associations. In effect, the fictive author appears to seize upon that perhaps inexpressible
relationship, as determinative of the possibility or not of re-integrating the discontinuities of
narrative and life.
143
For both Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster, additional narrative elements, including
imagery, and extratextual/intertextual referents (assessed in Chapter 3) could all be explored at
length, the integrative readings of which, were posited earlier as essential to the storytelling
process itself. Some short examples should suffice as illustrations. Much imagery in Grass’s
work, ranging from the picturing of the deformed and the coarse, to symbolic representation of a
postwar West German society in flight from reality,
144
signifies through antithetical reflection
and inversion of values, e.g. the valorization of the sanatorium's environment in relation to the
outside world.
145
The novel abounds in striking word pictures, frequently coarse or grotesque:
the moth and the light bulb, Dr. Hollatz' shattered specimen collection, the eels in the horse head,
the disgusting soup; all placing concepts of purity, particularly of childhood, gravely in doubt.
Kindheitsmuster's imagery often points to the genesis of figural estrangement and alienation,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
143
K 638/PC 406-407.
144
Nury Kim 23.
145
Neuhaus 27.
!
129!
picturing the body as site of ideological conflict.
146
Striking imagery often pertains to the body:
the feel of the Führer in the stomach, the incident of adult exposure woven into a complex of
images associated with antisemitism, the final emaciation of Nelly's mother, the dream of the
tortured man on the narrator's bed; all picture the story of fascist trauma in the body, both
individual and communal.
Material referents that possess obvious narrative functions in the Blechtrommel include
not only the narrated locales and their histories, but also objective correlates that signify the
inner state of characters or a particular narrative perspective. Several of these are: playing cards
(the ménage à trois of the Matzeraths and Bronski), Anna Bronski's broad skirt (refuge, security,
the womb), Maria's 'triangle' (death linked with sexuality), and die Schwarze Köchin (variously
theorized as a nihilistic or existential quality of society or life in general
147
),
148
certainly not a
material object but perhaps the key figure in Grass’s novel. Considering also the tin drum as an
objective correlate combined with the act of drumming as narration in itself
149
raises the
possibility that subtextual significations and focalizations of such objects create latent narratives
in their own right. In Kindheitsmuster, the exterior environments of the story include its locales
and their histories [the change of Nelly's birth place from German to Polish sovereignty
implicates the entire history of the time], material items such as photographs as stand-ins for
memory, and hypothetically, the linkage of Nelly, phonetically close to Netty, with Wolf's
mentor Anna Seghers [born Netty Reiling] one of whose works appears thematically close to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
146
Hell 209.
147
Nury Kim 96.
148
Neuhaus 45ff.
149
Ibid. 36.
!
130!
Kindheitsmuster's "problematic of identity."
150
The influence of Anna Seghers on Wolf has
been attributed as catalyst for Wolf's critique of and moving away from socialist realism.
151
Seghers showed skepticism, in a letter exchange with Lukács, over totalizing formulations of
genre and the prescription that the artwork should be an objective reflection of reality.
152
In the
same vein Christa Wolf criticized the artificiality and irreality of the compulsion to realism
153
and in Kindheitsmuster directs a critique in coded phraseology of the official tendency to falsify
history through dogmatism.
154
4.5 Assessment: Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster as historiographical fiction
The dissertation regards Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster as sites of interaction
between the texts, their historical referents and allusions, and the experiences of the reader, such
that they constitute, in narrativized form, fictive counterparts to historiography. This wording
reflects the view that all elements of and parties to the novels are brought together in the text, as
places of theoretical interaction. Here sense is made of communications through recognition of
the manner in which each element involves the others for this task. The theoretical assumptions
underlying this perspective were elaborated earlier.
In what ways then, if at all, does Die Blechtrommel, with its mixture of quasi-
autobiographical allegory, fairy tale, and mythological allusions and dimension, interact, or
better, intersect, with mainstream historiographic thinking? What does it say about history?
Superficially the novel could be viewed as relating personal and familial histories, in Fulbrook's
sense, that resonate in both collective memory for the war generation and received cultural
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
150
Hell 215.
151
Nury Kim 142.
152
Anna Seghers quoted in Nury Kim 141.
153
Nury Kim 143.
154
Bridge 67; K 561/PC 361.
!
131!
memory (to use Müller-Funk's distinctions) for the post-war generation. One of these 'memories
of events' is Oskar's flight from Danzig in a boxcar,
155
reprising the refugee experience of
many.
156
On another level, the narrative, split into the narrating and narrated, the remembering
and remembered I, undergoes a further remove as a story told originally to and now recounted by
Oskar's attendant. This story is situated in the double frame of the narrating-I in effect, narrating
myself, narrating myself. The linking of this double distancing from the actual events questions
not only the reliability of the narrator but his ability for affective involvement in the events as
constituted in history. This feature is normative for the novel throughout, as evidenced even in
the switching between first and third person narration. The uncertainty of perspective is not
merely a matter of related events, but is embedded, formally, in the narrative process itself, as
mode of communication.
157
On the intertextual plane, relationships may be correlated in
reception with the historical documentation and memories of experiences of refugees from the
East, along with the political implications of the so-called Ostvertriebene organizations in the
FRG, to the present time.
158
More pointedly the historical documentation and memories of
experiences of Jewish individuals who travelled in boxcars to the East, to Auschwitz, for
instance, are also inescapably signified,
159
negatively implicating a level of historical discourse
in relation to the story explicated by the text. More disturbingly for a sense of what Die
Blechtrommel contributes to the reader's processing of history is die Schwarze Köchin. Whether
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
155
B 551ff./TD 400ff.
156
Björn Schaal, Jenseits von Oder und Lethe: Flucht, Vertreibung, und Heimatsverlust in
Erzähltexten nach 1945 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2006) 42.
157
Stanzel 273.
158
Martin Vogt, "Deutschland von der Bonner 'Wende' zu den Problemen der Einheit," Deutsche
Geschichte: von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Martin Vogt, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: J. B.
Metzler, 1997; Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2006) 888-970; 937.
159
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: the Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1958, 1986) 18.
!
132!
viewed as an abstract causal entity or allegorical embodiment of the omnipresence of fascism in
society,
160
this principle of terror running through history seems almost as a vampire, to extract
from Oskar's and our world,
161
all sense, perspective, and hope.
162
The reception and perception of levels of historical discourse in Kindheitsmuster will of
course be conditioned by the reader's experience, which even if part of German culture will be,
and would be at the time the novels were written, of a generational nature. The 'subjective
authenticity' of Kindheitsmuster initially addresses those whose experiences could be told
parallel to the narrator's telling.
163
For others, the "split temporal framework"
164
and split
subjectivity may carry more existential than historical consciousness with it. As with Die
Blechtrommel, Kindheitsmuster's thematic configurations could also be viewed as intersecting
with historiographic concerns referenced earlier. The text's reader finds herself constantly
situated in discussions of the construction and fragility of individual and collective memory, the
role of gender and trauma in the formulation of these, and the impossibility of objective
representation. Wolf's work, unlike Grass’s, relates its tale earnestly rather than satirically. It
does so through serious, rather than disturbed narrators, and it voices its contemporary critique
through regret, rather than distantiation.
Chapter 8 brings together important elements of Kindheitsmuster's historical
consciousness as relationships between the memories of experiences and the possibilities of their
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
160
Kim 95-98.
161
B 779/TD 563.
162
Preece 46.
163
K 256-257/PC 163-164.
164
Levine 106.
!
133!
expression.
165
The author concedes that the past, as memory, cannot be described in objektivem
Stil.
166
Questioned is the adequacy of writing for mediation, in several senses of the word, as re-
presentation for another, as reconciliation, or strictly as dialogue between past and present. If,
after Stanzel, one considers the goal of narrative modes that of mediating the fictional material in
such a manner that the reader has the illusion of unmediated perception of a fictional world,
167
i.e. a reality effect, what form of communication suffices for the fictive author's purposes? As
answer, the productivity of formal structures only for distantiation and their divorcement from
the nackte[n] Willkür
168
of life points back to the quotation from Bachmann privileging the
subjectivity of experience and its communication. The passage also evokes Koselleck's
disquisition on the linguistic bases of historical representation to the effect that non-experienced
linguistic representation exists only in the formal and by implication, distanced, medium of
writing after the event, a condition which requires Kindheitsmuster's narrative modalities to
consider intergenerational differences in the apprehension of historical subjectivity and
authenticity for effective communication of those attributes, the discussion and illustration of
which comprises Chapter 8 in its entirety.
Koselleck's discussion of the relation of historicity and its expression seems particularly
apt as a conceptual framework for the historical consciousness of Die Blechtrommel and
Kindheitsmuster.
What belonged together, and how it did so, in eventu can only be determined by linguistic
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
165
K 256-257/PC 163-164.
166
K 256/ PC 164.
167
Stanzel 71.
168
K 257/ PC 164.
!
134!
evidence post eventum; depending on how these linguistic records, this oral or written
tradition, are handled, the most different genres move more closely together and others
move apart.
169
This addresses the question in Kindheitsmuster Chapter 8, of the ability of the written, in this
case fictional, formulation to mediate past and present -- to make the former, if not present in
some sense, at least actual -- for the latter. This constitutes an epistemological problem of
considerable dimension for it interrogates not only the reliability of memory but the extent to
which the historian's craft may be viewed as scientific and the objects of its research as verifiable
data. Thus the apparent inability to step outside one's own consciousness in the present, except
by analogy, questions the concept of truth, and on a large scale the concept of truth in history.
Historians and theorists have grappled with this problem by advancing solutions that retain
substantial commitments to an objective theory of history through analytical evidentiary
procedures, those that view history as more of a construction, or narrativization, and those that
seek to mediate in some degree, the different orientations.
The idea of the non-correspondence of human cognition to a verifiable reality, aside from
linguistic construction, and the implications for concepts of truth and representation, when
transposed into the realm of literature, have produced a wealth of literary works and theoretical
formulations that elaborate on and explore that idea and those implications. A list of such works
might include Beckett's The Unnamable, John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, Gabriel
Garcia Márquez' A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, or Salman Rushdie's Midnight's
Children. The relating of the latter to Die Blechtrommel has become commonplace
170
and it
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
169
Ibid.
170
Preece 35.
!
135!
requires very little imagination for the reader to see correspondences with the others also.
171
Relating Kindheitsmuster similarly may be questioned. Wolf's novel certainly belongs here
formally in terms of narrative experimentation, and is arguably material for its exploration of a
personal reality of "self-difference."
172
Theorists critical of the application of narrative analysis to historiography have sought to
maintain a distinction between fictional and non-fictional discourse. Marie-Laure Ryan argues
for such distinction through defining "criteria of validity."
173
Building on 'possible worlds'
theory derived from modal logic, both Ryan the linguist Lubomir Doležel have discussed
minimum conditions for both fictional and historical narrative.
174
In this scheme 'fictional
worlds' have essentially no restrictions on content and create their own reality but 'historical
worlds' must not comprise physical impossibilities or non-natural agency. The use of this type of
construct illustrates well one of the central points of the dissertation: literature-theoretic
formulations disclose underlying philosophical principles. In this instance, the question of how
thoroughly Doležel wishes to validate Kripke’s possible worlds semantics as a philosophy of
language in general, arises from the use of the construct in a literary context.
175
From the
present perspective all theorizations, whether fictive or not embody particular discourses that
may be analyzed further into processes of, and grounds for development, constituting narratives
of formation. These are essentially movements of the objects under consideration, actants, and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
171
For instance, comparison of the narrating-I in the Blechtrommel with that of The Unnamable,
Stanzel 117.
172
Levine 109.
173
Marie-Laure Ryan, "Postmodernism and the Doctrine of Panfictionality," Narrative 5.2 (May
1997): 165-187; 180.
174
(a) Doležel 253-261; (b) Marie-Laure Ryan, “Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations: A
Semantic Typoloty of Fiction,” Poetics Today 12.3 (Autumn 1991): 553-576.
175
Compare Scott Soames, Philosophy of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2010) 50-56. Soames prefers the term "world-states" to "worlds."
!
136!
viewpoints in space and time, which specify how a discourse situates a theorization, as a text,
into the or a factual world as a relationship between these and a recipient. In this case, the
question of historiographic sufficiency emplaces itself into the world of practical consideration
by way of and in prioritizing a disquisition on the nature of reality and its import for both
fictional and non-fictional applications. At issue for Die Blechtrommel more than for
Kindheitsmuster is the extent to which historical narrative may present impossible and
counterfactual events and still be perceived as historical reference, rather than as purely a fable.
In other words: what is the communicative function of varying degrees of fantasy, mystification,
or even polyvocal subjectivity that seek to comment seriously on history?
Answer: the provocation of the question itself. The modes by which the texts, the
recipient, and her cognitive environment, interact to situate all within the dynamics of the text
operates precisely by raising the question of the instability of the historical referents and their
modes of narration and reception. It is at this point that the "discursive situation," in Said's
terms,
176
provides the support, through reference and both positive and negative signification, to
emplace the text in an exterior conceptual/material framework or world, through a measure of
the distance between fantasy and the facticity (however defined) that constitutes the narratives
underlying historiographical discourses. Additionally, the linguistic giveness of the narrative,
that which Bakhtin characterizes as the "unrepeatable event of the text,"
177
essentially reveals its
temporal dimension in reception, its spatial dimension through material reference, and both
through its further working in broader contexts, which in an extended sense also become part of
the narratives. This is simply to say that the reader of Die Blechtrommel, for instance, who rents
the film, itself an extension of the story, and is cited by law enforcement authorities for
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
176
Said 25.
177
Bakhtin, "The Problem of the Text” 107.
!
137!
possessing possibly illegal material within some jurisdiction,
178
becomes in a very real sense a
part of that story. In a similar sense, Christa Wolf becomes herself the narrated author of Was
bleibt in the Literaturstreit of the immediate post-Wende years. The material events regarding in
the first case, the recipient, and in the second, the author, become a part of the texts, as
cognitively and dialogically constituted through the horizon of expectations of knowledgeable
subsequent readers and retains the ability to situate these also into further material events of
narrative extension.
It is thus as sites for thought experiment in dialogue with historical events, both those to
which the novels refer and their further evental productivity that marks Die Blechtrommel and
Kindheitsmuster as fictive counterparts to works, that is sites, of evidentiary evaluation, whether
objectively or narratively construed, that define themselves as historiographic in the strict sense.
It will be apparent that in this theorization, certain analytical configurations will differ from the
expected. One of these involves an ambivalent relation to the insights of Foucault, e.g. the
devaluation of the author as the text's unifying function.
179
From this viewpoint, accepting the
utterances of Günter Grass and Christa Wolf on their intentions in their works, as an extension of
the narrative, would be problematic, especially if the novels' narrating voices were identified
with the authors.
Addressing this criticism involves positing the coherence of the practice as an underlying
level of communication in each novel. Nury Kim identifies and documents from the works,
traits that he believes are common to both Grass and Wolf and to others of their generation as the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
178
Richard Weisberg, "Why They're Censoring 'The Tin Drum: Kristallnacht' Reflections on the
End of the Epic," Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 10.2, Tenth Anniversary Volume
(Winter 1998) 161-181; 161.
179
Foucault 221.
!
138!
result of the chidhood trauma of the Nazi era. Among these is skepticism towards generalized
structures and totalizations, the accentuation of the personal and individual, the continued effects
of the past in the present,
180
and "[d]as aufklärerische Bewußtsein des zeitgenössischen Ich
[italics and capitalization in original]." In Kim's view, the author, the actants, and implicitly the
reader are contemporarily linked in communication as an act of historical enlightenment.
181
In
the present model similarly, auctorial elaboration is integral to the narrative, as communicative
extension, particularly when the author is no longer contemporary, becoming also object of the
expressed history. Secondly, the decentering function of Foucault's formulations is superseded
in the present model by the decentering effect of the contingencies of and in reception.
Ultimately, the mutual constitution of world, text, and reader accommodates the author as
writing subject as much as the recipient as reading subject, if indeed an author is extant within
this relationship.
The alternative structuring of historical discourse through narrative procedures in Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster also situates these into discussions surrounding the further
implications of the historiographical practices to which they function as discursive counterparts.
The theories of Ankersmit, Fulbrook, Kocka, Koselleck, or White, ideas on the constitution of
history and how it is transmitted necessarily raise questions about concepts of agency and
subjectivity as well as the sociological contexts in which they operate. The problems
surrounding the narration of selfhood and certain contextual milieus in the referenced novels
have been explored above in relation to the consciousness of history and its memory. What do
the works as metahistorical commentary indicate about a sense of self in relation to agency in
history? Do they illuminate debates between essentialist and anti-essentialist conceptions of the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
180
Nury Kim 213-240.
181
Ibid. 240-242.
!
139!
self? Does 'collective memory' relate to 'collective identity' and to a sense of selfhood, however
constituted? The manner in which Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster are germane to these
issues becomes the next focus of attention.
!
140!
5. Identity and Subjectivity in Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster
5.1 Introduction
Reading Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster closely and comparatively discloses
cultural discourses and constitutive narratives that relate personal subjectivity and German
cultural constructs. In this chapter these constructs will be seen to operate through individual
and collective memory privileging certain forms of cultural awareness, including the contentious
concept of national identity.
1
In the following chapter, discussions of the constitution of
'modernity' will emerge as descriptors that form links between ideas of subjectivity, identity,
culture, and state and the differentiation of these concepts in German society.
Certainly one of the discussions into which Grass’s and Wolf's novels mutually situate
the world, the text, and the reader concerns the relationships between the sense of human
selfhood and the socio-historical scenes against which it is projected. Illustrative of the concerns
with which the last chapter concluded, are the following passages from the works. The opening
words of Die Blechtrommel, "Zugegeben: ich bin Insasse einer Heil- und Pflegeanstalt [. . .]"
2
and an early passage from Kindheitsmuster,
Du aber hast eine . . . Original-Erinnerung zu bieten, denn es ist mehr als unwahrschein-
lich, daß ein Außenstehender dem Kind . . . später berichtet haben soll, wie es da vor
seines Vaters Ladentür saß und in Gedanken das neue Wort ausprobierte, ICH ICH
ICH ICH ICH [. . .]
3
ineluctably define the priority of the narrating subject within the respective tales -- but why? The
following investigation will inquire into the manner in which Grass’s and Wolf's novels situate
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999)
15.
2
B 9/TD 3.
3
K 14/PC 5.
!
141!
personal subjectivity, on the basis of the preceding questions, in relation to society and the
communities of readers.
The context of the Wolf quotation above shows that it might be considered the
culmination of a short disquisition on authorial agency and the introduction to a narrative section
comprising the rest of the chapter, incorporating a disquisition on memory and the recovery of a
personal history. These concerns are framed performatively in terms of the initial considerations
of the constitution of a 'self'. These begin with the specification of the quest for the child one
once was in the Neruda epigraph. It is made clear at the beginning of the novel proper that
alienation will mark this quest even to the point of fragmenting narration into first, second, and
third personal pronouns, as well as a proper name. The complete otherness of the object of
narration, as an earlier self, in relation to the narrating subject, precludes the use of the first
personal pronoun. Memory, as the basis of the unfolding story is thus extant as separate voices,
in the text and in the consciousness of the narrating fictive author.
4
These rhetorical gambits
locate the text within discussions of subjectivity and their place in the external world. The
ambiguity of writing in the second person implicates not only narrator but also reader, as does
the reader's prior expectations concerning the issues and their constitutive elements. In
Kindheitsmuster the treatment of self unfolds as story situated in the universe of narratives, not
all considered fictional (e.g. psychological, sociological data), by which discourses of selfhood
are ultimately fashioned, and recursively also the reader's conceptualization of these.
In contrast to Wolf's negative problematization of subjectivity, Grass’s novel
accomplishes a feat of subjective disorientation similar to hers through the very ubiquity of the
first personal pronoun situated in communicative contexts of uncertain signification. The first
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
K 9, 11-14/PC np., 3-5.
!
142!
sentence sets the tone with the narrator's concession that he is the inmate of a care facility
constantly observed by an attendant who also serves as audience for the narrator's
reminiscences.
5
Not only this concession but also the early association of the attendant with
artistic endeavor raises the question of the reliability of the story and its teller while hinting at the
underlying interrogative paradigm: aesthetization. As the somewhat puzzling associative
contexts in Die Blechtrommel multiply, as narrative voice switches between first and third
person, and as the narrative figure merges with the activity of drumming, the text places itself
and the reader into an implied discussion not only of German history but, in the words of Amir
Eshel, that of a "latent order that has as its referents the activity and effects of figuration itself . .
."
6
That the experience of the Third Reich is conveyed through the modality of incongruous
subjectivity, implies from the beginning the importance of that subject and presumably also that
incongruity, for the relating of the experience.
The relationship between the self, the incongruous, and society frames Die
Blechtrommel's second chapter. Here, Oskar, from the vantage point of the mental institution,
continues the tale of his origins with further tragicomedic events from the lives of his maternal
grandparents, Anna Bronski and Joseph Koljaiczek. But at this point, Oskar, as narrator,
paradoxically ascribes the narration to his drum, imputing 'reality' creating powers to the
instrument without which he would not have "nachweißliche Großeltern."
7
Yet the family
adventures are immediately placed within the context of a wider world. The mention of Paul
(Ohm) Krüger (also Kruger) dates Oskar's story to 1899 and the Second Boer War. Yet the date
is mentioned in the text -- obviating reference for purely historical reasons. In the ensuing
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5
B 9/TD 3.
6
Eshel 186.
7
B 23/TD 13.
!
143!
chapters, Oskar's family history emerges from collections of fabulae punctuated by similar
descriptive snippets of historical events. Ultimately, in Book Three the technique encompasses
also life in the post-war Federal Republic of Germany. In this regard, it is not difficult to
ascertain the outline of a discourse on the rise of National Socialism, that in defeat nurtures an
apathy towards adjudicating the same,
8
arising from the myriad details and narratives of Oskar's
lower middle class origins, as indeed also its source.
9
The narrator, fragmented and unreliable,
by definition a "character effect"
10
rather than a person, ultimately provides unification and
focalization for the disparate themes and happenings within the novel. In so doing, Die
Blechtrommel utilizes the purported consciousness of an acknowledged 'defective' self to make a
statement about that self's society by situating both within an implied discourse interrogating the
constitution of historical, reliable, and normative constructs and thereby the nature of subjectivity
itself in relation to these.
Kindheitsmuster presents in its opening pages a rough parallel to some of the above
elements discernible in Die Blechtrommel: the placement of the protagonist as child within a
family, the shifting of narrative levels, the temporal movements between the past of a fascist
society and the present of a post-war world still too connected thereto and split into capitalist and
socialist camps.
11
Perhaps the most significant factor is the precarious position of the narrator, a
medley of textual voices. The details of these correspondences diverge rather markedly from the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8
Ibid. 570-571/415-416.
9
Eung-Jun Kim 170.
10
Bal 113.
11
Kristin Felsner, Perspektiven literarischer Geschichtsschreibung: Christa Wolf und Uwe
Johnson (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2010) 551.
!
144!
former novel, naturally enough. Admittedly autobiographical in substance,
12
dealing with
authentic personality conflicts, the overarching trajectory of elucidation focuses on self-
awareness more than negative signification of social deficits through parody and incongruity.
According to Wolf, it is the experience of her generation that divides the consciousness of self,
that precludes the identification of the mature author, and in the novel the mature fictive author,
with the child of the fascist era. Thus, in Kindheitsmuster, there moves in counterpoint to the
strategies that mutually emplace the world, the text, and the reader in discussions of history,
those that displace these elements from more usual discussions of subjectivity. Formally these
consist of the division of the narrating subject into differing personal pronouns; substantively this
is also accomplished through the exploration of the aporias of memory. For if memory prevents
our being strangers to ourselves, as the narrator muses,
13
the knowledge of its construction for
that purpose
14
re-instates that estrangement, when as with Nelly and the mature fictive author,
the construction of memory, by evocation of trauma, reveals its incapacity to establish a
stabilizing identity between earlier and later incorporations of the subject.
15
The stances of Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster on the nature of the self and its
place in, and import for larger society situate themselves into broader discussions and therefore
into larger contexts within the world exterior to the text, not solely through the representations of
the text but also somewhat contingently through the emplacing choices of the critical reader.
One can comparatively read the respective novels' figures in a range of constructions: from the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
12
Christa Wolf, "Eine Diskussion über Kindheitsmuster," The German Quarterly 57.1 (Winter
1984): 91-95; 95.
13
K 12/PC 4.
14
Ibid. 59-60/34.
15
Ibid. 17/7
!
145!
allegorical
16
to the (magical) realist
17
and the subjectively authentic
18
to the embodiment of
Derridean différance.
19
Yet the novels also set certain priorities as text and the placement of
these into wider discussions situate both reader and work into the extended intellectual
environment.
5.2 Identity versus Subjectivity
In Chapter 4 of Die Blechtrommel and Chapter 2 of Kindheitsmuster the diversity of
possible sources against which Oskar and Nelly respectively reflect on themselves is given
concrete expression in an object -- the family photo album. For Oskar this collection provides a
springboard initially for self-absorption and reflection on photographic adventures with his
friend Klepp in the post-war world. This gives way to musings on the album as chronicle of
history, the family in relation to fashion and popular culture, and reminiscences of interpersonal
relationships. Oskar's consciousness remains the primary focus of its own attention, a
consciousness that ultimately distances itself from its subject in third person narration. Nelly has
already been distanced from the adult narrator, no longer a permutation of a self with which the
adult can identify, as Christa Wolf later explained of her own childhood.
20
What the photo
album reveals is subsumed under the question of how the memory functions, introduced with the
observation that in German the words for thinking, thinking of in the sense of remembrance, and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
16
Nury Kim 57.
17
Sien Uytterschout, "An Extremely Loud Tin Drum: a Comparative Study of Jonathan Safran
Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Günter Grass's The Tin Drum," Comparative
Literature Studies 47.2 (2010): 185-199.
18
Nury Kim 112.
19
Levine 111.
20
Wolf 95.
!
146!
thanking all come from a common root.
21
The narrator makes the point that in remembrance,
with its emotional connections also, of a happy childhood, the vocabulary itself provides the
further connotation of thankfulness within the overall cognitive processes and militates against
any questioning of this arrangement.
22
With the old photos as a guide to memory,
Kindheitsmuster's narrator describes Nelly's family relationships. These associatively enjoin the
nature of life in the home region, including that under National Socialism, situating its discussion
into the narrator's 1971 car trip with her own family.
23
While both Oskar's and Wolf's narrator's
photo albums place the reader into a discourse on memory, the former's egocentric approach to a
construction of self contrasts with the latter's consciousness of a place in society and the
ramifications of memory, both its construction and suppression.
Formally, the concept of self and the problem of its relation to society are identifiable in
European culture at least from the Classical period.
24
Given this time span it is not surprising
that 'selfhood' and associated concepts have been, and continue to be situated in a diverse
number of sometimes overlapping areas of intellectual inquiry. Questions concerning the
constitution of such an entity arise in connection with ideas concerning the nature of existence,
of consciousness, of experience, of human relationships and their depictions in the arts.
Interrogation of what self means or signifies is spread over fields as diverse as philosophy,
psychology, sociology, political science, and aesthetic theory. Yet there is no reason to assume
out of hand that the historical vocabulary contains either the logical or signifying relationships
that would allow a meaningful discussion of ideas about the self across all time periods.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
21
K 45/PC 25.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid. 46-78/26-46
24
Frank, Ansichten der Subjektivität 37-38.
!
147!
Reinhart Koselleck makes this point in regard to the development of a sense of history, aided by
linguistic usages, as comparative temporality.
25
Manfred Frank traces the concept of subjectivity
in philosophy from an intellectual kernel in Parmenides to the more fully developed elaborations
of twentieth and twenty-first century thinkers like Heidegger and Derrida.
26
The narrating fictive
author in Kindheitsmuster, similarly to Koselleck, reflects on the role of language in creating
concepts and questions this process, here, in relation to the constitution of memory,
27
which in
exemplary fashion informs the last passages of the novel as one of the bases, although highly
ambiguous, for the integration or re-integration of experience into the sense of self of the mature
fictive author.
28
Dealing with the concepts surrounding the idea of the self requires terminological
differentiation. The use of differing referential expressions between disciplines [and sometimes
within the same discipline] regarding selfhood and its manifestations, places this and its
associations into many different discourses or if viewed as a unity, into a highly fragmented
discourse. One issue is the use of the terms identity and subjectivity to indicate specific
perspectives. Terminology denoting either or both these concepts may vary in their English and
German usages, related ideas, and connotations. A general definition from the Compact Oxford
English Dictionary [unabridged] states that the former term may denote the "sameness of a
person . . . at all times . . . the condition or fact that a person . . . is itself and not something else;
individuality, personality."
29
Similarly this source supplies for the latter term a "conscious
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
25
Koselleck 161-162.
26
Frank, Ansichten der Subjektivität 37-50.
27
K 59, 78 /PC 34, 46.
28
Ibid. 637-638/406-407.
29
"Identity, 2.a," The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, prep. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C.
Weiner, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1991) 811-620.
!
148!
being"
30
which refers more specifically to the 'subject', i.e. "the thinking or cognizing agent; the
self or ego."
31
The Duden Deutsches Universalwörterbuch emphasizes the complete correspondence of
a person or thing with itself, or in relation to something else, or in the field of psychology
expresses the definiens als Selbst erlebte innere Einheit der Person
32
for its entry on Identität.
Subjekt is defined as a mit Bewusstsein ausgestattetes, denkendes, erkennendes, handelndes
Wesen
33
and Subjektivität is considered primarily the condition of regarding as a Subjekt.
34
More
precise definition is available in the various technical literatures. Definitions, as abstractions
from linguistic usage, merely situate the terms into particular discourses. Some degree of
pertinence for these terms may be assessed from within the secondary literature to Grass’s and
Wolf's novels, which forms a part of the novels' story in its interaction with the 'world'.
5.2.1 Identity and Subjectivity in the Secondary Literature
A number of analysts of Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster cited in this dissertation
work with concepts of personal, cultural, and/or national 'identity' or similar constructs, including
those also implied by the German term Identität. Ursula Mahlendorf (1981) provides a review of
German literature that engages with the fascist era; Kindheitsmuster is one of two works where
she diagnoses an 'identity' problem. Mahlendorf's use of the term indicates the divorcement of
the narrator from her childhood in the Nazi period and links the genesis of this situation to the
prohibition of accepting and expressing true emotion in childhood that she posits as typical of an
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
30
Ibid. "Subjectivity, 1.b," 1944-33.
31
Ibid. "Subject, 9. Modern Philos." 1943-28.
32
Duden: Deutsches Universalwörterbuch, Kathrin Kunkel-Razum et al., eds., 6th edition
(Mannheim: Dudenverlag, 2007) 866.
33
Ibid. "Subjekt," 1642.
34
Ibid. "Subjektivität."
!
149!
entire generation. This type of "conditioning" ultimately leads her and her generation to "a
denial of herself as a person with an identity and judgment of her own"
35
prone to leave
questions of moral import to perceived appropriate authorities. Mahlendorf also obliquely
alludes to the narrator's diagnosis of the presence of this condition already at the linguistic level
by citing the passage that places responsibility for a "happy"
36
family on the child not making the
parents unhappy, the very trope with which the discourse opens at the commencement of
Kindheitmuster's second chapter.
Glenn A. Guidry (1991) analyzes the figure of Oskar in Die Blechtrommel as analogous
to a mytho-poetic hero figure, compounded of both positive and negative attributes. Guidry then
assesses the function of this character in literature to be congruent with the role of such figures in
tribal societies.
37
In this regard Oskar is both the "trickster" and the messianic figure,
identification with which, enables members of a society to seek communal solidarity. Guidry
diagnoses difficulty among Germans in 'identifying' with their national history, due to its
problematic nature. He then views Oskar as that mythic archetype through which the national
history becomes a narrative that allows Germans to a lesser or greater extent to achieve a sense
of community through identification with commonality of experience.
38
Guidry views identity as
a need for the individual to find an explicatory narrative of self by positing an entity of sameness
at successively higher levels of abstraction, ranging from the hero as ideal 'other' to the nation as
ideal community.
Nury Kim (1995) reads Die Blechtrommel as allegory. As such, the figures represent
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
35
Ursula Mahlendorf, "Confronting the Fascist Past and Coming to Terms with It," World
Literature Today 55.4 (Autumn 1981): 553-560; 557.
36
Ibid. 558; K 45/PC 25.
37
Guidry 129ff.
38
Ibid. 141ff.
!
150!
respective societal attitudes whose personal dynamics are negligible.
39
Kim reads
Kindheitsmuster as culmination of the poesy of subjective authenticity. The work is viewed
from this perspective as an engagement with both past and present authoritarian societies, the
place of the individual within these, and as counter project to 'socialist realism.'
40
The subjective
personal dynamics of an I-narrator as a self, discontinuous with its Nazi period past is taken to
also define the authenticity of narration in its generational salience. This split consciousness is
analyzed by Kim as a problem of Identität in almost every pertinent passage.
41
Michael G.
Levine's (1997) analysis of Kindheitsmuster's narrative techniques includes also a look at the
consequences of these for the concept of identity within the novel. Levine views the
fragmentation of narrating voice as not only obscuring the narrator's sense of personal identity
but also calls preconceived ideas thereof into question. The shifting pronominal levels serve as
indicators of self-difference rather than self-sameness.
42
At the same time, the ability of
movements such as National Socialism to instill a sense of collective identity through rituals of
group solidarity forms a thematic counterpoint to the narrator's loss of personal continuity from
childhood to maturity.
Other analysts, alternatively, privilege the idea of subjectivity/Subjektivität -- sometimes
in comparison with identity and other constructs (e.g. Bewusstsein, etc.). Peter Beicken and Rolf
J. Goebel (1982) treat Wolf's works, among them Kindheitsmuster, within the familiar trope of
subjektive Authentizität and generally use the idea of Subjektivität within the parameters of the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
39
Nury Kim 70.
40
Ibid. 183-185.
41
Ibid. 185ff.
42
Levine 107-117.
!
151!
Duden definition referenced earlier denoting the perspective of the subject.
43
On this initial basis
the authors describe Wolf's literature-theoretical orientation as an attempt to synthesize historical
materialist poetics with a fully modern sense of the epistemic subjectivity of writing. They
contrast Wolf's valorization of the author's mediation of experience with Robbe-Grillet's
separation of narrator and conscious self behind the text.
44
In Kathleen Komar's (1992) analysis,
Wolf's subjective emphasis leads to the placement of the self within the community through
doubled memory; in this case that of the mature fictive author and her discontinuous former self,
Nelly. Komar designates the process as revising "the identity of another female subjectivity by
fusing the writer's consciousness with it [. . .] ."
45
Ultimately personal identity becomes the
hallmark of a selfhood constituted through memory and language inter-subjectively within the
community, in relation to the "social responsibility" inherent in this situation.
46
Sabine Wilke (1993) looks at several works by Christa Wolf, among them,
Kindheitsmuster and detects within these, parallels between historical consciousness and
"Subjektkonstitution und Geschlechtbestimmung."
47
Wilke works with both the concept of
Identität, particularly in relation to issues of gender realization and also Subjektivität, especially
in regard to Lacanian theories of personality development through which she approaches the
problem of the novel's fragmented narrative voice.
48
Wilke situates Wolf's historical constructs
into the Benjaminian discourse of dialectical images in counterpoint with language. She then
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
43
Beicken and Goebel 63.
44
Ibid. 64-65.
45
Komar 42.
46
Ibid. 57.
47
Sabine Wilke, Ausgraben und Erinnern: Zur Funktion von Geschichte, Subjekt und
Geschlechtlicher Identität in den Texten Christa Wolfs (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann,
1993) 9.
48
Ibid. 100ff.
!
152!
transposes this approach from the archaeology of historical memory to that of personal memory
within the Lacanian discourse of a dialectic of image and méconnaissance ["Dialektik von Imago
und Verkennung."]
49
Julia Hell (1997) organizes her analysis of East German literature into categories
consonant with psychoanalytical constructs. Kindheitsmuster is dealt with in Chapter 5, "The
Paternal Family Narrative as Autobiography and as Parable: Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster and
Kassandra." For Hell, the themes are "voice and body"
50
as sites of differentiation of self from
paternal, and thus male authoritarian, narratives of family, Party, and society.
51
In this
schematization the fictive author is the narrating subject and Nelly, the child, the narrated
subject. The non-identification of the two bespeaks an estrangement that may only be overcome
through the recalling of the voices from the past, the carrier of remembrance, through which the
subject's memory may be rewritten as a unity.
Walter P. Rankin (1999) approaches Kindheitsmuster by situating it within the discourse
of autobiographical selfhood that arises from consideration of the implications of Barthes'
divorcement of "signifying I" from "signified I" and Foucault's "banishment of the writing
subject by the written object."
52
Rankin views the gap between author and protagonist or
narrator in Wolf's novel as giving rise to even greater "ontological" tension for signification and
further complicated by a perspective on temporality that considers the past as coextensive with
the present through memory. Ultimately any existential unification of Kindheitsmuster's
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
49
Ibid. 10.
50
Hell 200.
51
Ibid. 199.
52
Walter P. Rankin, "Autobiographical Fiction vs. Fictional Autobiography: Christa Wolf's
Kindheitsmuster and J. M. Coetzee's Foe," Comparative Literature Studies 36.4 (1999): 306-
319; 307-312.
!
153!
narrating voices that overcome the subject's "splintered identity"
53
must occur within the
recognition that the voices of memory are also inventions of memory: reflections rather than
reality.
54
Discrepancies between reflection in memory and assessment of historical reality form the
basis of Anke Pinkert's (2003) trenchant critique of Kindheitsmuster. Pinkert analyzes the novel
as an expression of "soft dissidence" in which Wolf, the author, and the East German state exist
in a "symbiotic" relationship of mutual need. Pinkert's interest is the constitution of the anti-
fascist self as ideological model for the regime and its modifications in Wolf's novel.
55
She
believes that while the East German government's commitment to commemorating the Holocaust
was based on a self-serving paradigm of the socialist struggle against fascism, Kindheitsmuster
projects an affective processing of Anti-Semitism based on an empathy born of commonality that
"invites the reader's identification with both the perpetrators and the victims."
56
Wolf's writing
thus seeks to resolve the problem of self-alienation by the creation of a subject that wishes the
preservation of the Angst at the root of the narrator's split subjectivity.
57
In this view, the novel locates the dynamic of estrangement within the self in order to
preserve the socialist "revolutionary project" as system, upon which her and its existence depend,
as instantiations of ant-fascist subjectivity and power structure, respectively.
58
Pinkert
summarizes the problem for Kindheitsmuster's sense of self by asking, through quotation of
Judith Butler, if "complicity" is the "basis of political agency" how then, one might partake of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
53
Ibid. 309.
54
Ibid. 314.
55
Pinkert 25, 34.
56
Ibid. 30.
57
Ibid. 31.
58
Ibid. 34.
!
154!
that agency without "subordination."
59
Eung-Jun Kim deals with the problem of Subjektivität
within Die Blechtrommel in relation to the historical consciousness of Oskar in which no
identifiable relation to "empirical reality" is detectable but only an ironicization of a "modern"
perspective that values narrative anachrony.
60
In counterpoint to this parodistic and allegorical
relation to history
61
Kim views the objective correlates of the novel as aids in realizing the
former of two goals: (1) the author's intention to realistically portray historical events and (2) the
portrayal of Oskar's subjective outlook on history.
62
The writers cited in the foregoing paragraphs situate the problem of self that appears in
the two novels into discussions of identity or subjectivity or both. Their terminological choices
and associations also discursively position the authors in relation to the technical literature of a
number of disciplines. Investigating how Grass’s and Wolf's texts deal with these ideas requires
looking at some of the specific perspectives that relate terminology and literature-theoretical
analysis.
5.2.2 Identity and Subjectivity: Disciplinary Specificity
Theories of personal and collective identity, have found optimum expression in
philosophy and the social sciences.
63
Discussions often employ the term identity in ways that
may not, strictly speaking, be compatible, even less identical, with similar usages across different
fields or disciplines. A mathematical definition illustrative of the idea that a = a, defines identity
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
59
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997) 29 in Pinkert 34.
60
Eung-Jun Kim 62.
61
Ibid. 65.
62
Ibid. 68.
63
Karen Cerulo, "Identity Construction: New Issues, New Directions," Annual Review of
Sociology 23 (1997): 385-409; 385.
!
155!
as "the fact of being the same individual,"
64
a canonized idea since at least the time of Aristotle.
65
In classical logic the principle also implies that something cannot be simultaneously itself and
itsnegation, and by the principle of the excluded middle, must be either one or the other.
66
However well suited these ideas may be to mathematics and formal logics, they, when applied
unreflectively to imputed properties, including and perhaps especially those of persons, may
form the justification for rigid and divisive categorizations divorced from experiential validity.
A number of philosophers recognize problems with these formulations, including Hegel
67
who
posits the measure of identity as difference, situating the concept in relation to discourses of self,
skeptical of mere analysis by identification.
The problem of personal identity, as a psychological study, is thematized in both Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster and, as shown earlier, forms the basis of a number of
explications. In the first novel, obviously the opening lines and all those that throughout the
story associate Oskar with mental imbalance focus attention on psychoanalytical explicative
models, as does also the dissociative narrative perspective and the personal stories of figures like
Oskar's mother. In the second work, it is not only the mature narrator's loss of identification with
her earlier self, including the sense of alterity thus created, that foregrounds the figures' implied
psychological constitution. The title of the novel itself, in some usages may simply serve as a
term for child development, e.g. a 1975 study includes a discussion of narcissistic disturbances in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
64
E. J. Borowski and J. M. Borwein, eds., The Harper Collins Dictionary of Mathematics (New
York: Harper Collins, 1991) 279.
65
Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Richard Hope (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Ann
Arbor Paperbacks, 1960) 166.
66
Richard Purtill, "Principle of excluded middle," The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed.
Robert Audi, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 738.
67
G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences
with the Zusätze, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1991) 185-186.
!
156!
relation to "die 'klassischen' psychischen Kindheitsmuster."
68
The psychoanalytical discussion
into which Grass’s and Wolf's works situate the constitution of the "self" is bounded on the one
side by the insights of Freud and on the other those of Lacan.
In Die Blechtrommel many of the psychological states and conditions from which Freud
drew inspiration for his theories of identity are on display: narcissism, fetishism, Oedipus
complex, etc.
69
Of special note are the many objects and figures with which Oskar identifies or
fixates upon in his development, e.g. the drum, female genitalia, Jan Bronski, among others.
Also in Kindheitsmuster, Nelly's maturity is marked by a similar trajectory of adolescent
experience, albeit constituted by less extravagance of ego. In this instance the linkages with
Freudian theories of identity come from the structure of the family, its reflection in society, the
importance of dreams and figures of affection such as Juliane Strauch, as well as the anxiety
proceeding from the many conflicts between the interplay of all these psychic factors. The
reinterpretation of Freudian constructs by Lacan has been applied to Grass’s novel quite aptly in
terms of the ambiguity of shifting between the Imaginary and Symbolic orders in the
presentation of the work's perspective(s) on the historical material.
70
The Lacan-derived
"spekuläre Logik"
71
behind the development of Nelly's sense of self, in Wolf's novel, can then be
regarded as an element that re-situates the issue terminologically from a discourse of identity to
one of subjectivity.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
68
Thomas Ziehe, Pubertät und Narzissismus: Sind Jugendliche entpolitisiert? (Hamburg:
Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1975) 107.
69
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (New York, London: W. W. Norton,
1960) 20-24.
70
Katharina Hall, Günter Grass's 'Danzig Quintet': Explorations in the Memory and History of
the Nazi Era from Die Blechtrommel to Im Krebsgang (Frankfurt, New York: Peter Lang, 2007)
36ff.
71
Wilke 100f.
!
157!
In the field of sociology the concept of identity has been termed a "central" theoretical
emphasis.
72
Formulations of selfhood and identity concepts by influential theorists like Mead,
Cooley, and Erikson focused attention primarily on the issue of individual sense of self, often in
conjunction with childhood and adolescent developmental psychology. The distinctive feature of
the resultant sociology is the hypothesis that identity forms in relation to one's perception by
society, mediated by language (Mead, Cooley
73
) and in stages of development through which
one perceives the continuity of the social system in the self (Erikson
74
). Engagement with these
ideas also informed West German intellectual life through the philosophical critiques, privileging
the reciprocity of language competencies for personal identity through mutual understanding, of
Jürgen Habermas.
75
Contemporary sociological studies have not been oblivious to newer ideas
informed by social movements, technology, and 'poststructuralist' sensibilities. Research
emphases responding to these concerns have reflected (a) the ability of oppressed peoples to
identify themselves apart from standards of their oppressors, (b) the relation of identity to
gender, ethnicity, and class, (c) reassessment of processes of identity formation, and (d)
interrogation of the significance of virtual or cyberspace identities.
76
One line of continuity between older and newer ideas in sociology is the situation of
identity into a discourse of community. Despite the inversion of emphasis between Mead's
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
72
Cerulo 385.
73
(a) George Herbert Mead, "A Behavioristic account of the Significant Symbol," Journal of
Philosophy 19 (1922): 157-163; 160, The Mead Project, Brock University, 2007. Web. b)
Charles Horton Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1922; Schocken, 1964) 184.
74
Erik H. Eriksen, Identität und Lebenszyklus: Drei Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973) 107.
75
(a) Jürgen Habermas, "Moralentwicklung und Ich-Identität," Zur Rekonstruktion des
Historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976) 63-88; 67ff. (b)David Ingram,
Habermas: Introduction and Analysis, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010) 28,
309n3.
76
Cerulo 386.
!
158!
construction of the individual through the "generalizing of himself in his attitude of the other"
77
and the twenty-first century in the "conscious sense of group as agent"
78
in identity politics, most
sociological theories regard the individual in relation to communities of other such individuals
with shared characteristics.
79
The implications of the collectivization of attributes, whether
considered essential or constructed, as identifying factors of and for individual members,
regularly spawn narratives that place the concept of identity into discussions invoking, by some
estimation, the incorporation into the individual's identity of "[t]he family, the neighborhood, the
peer group, the generation, the nation, the culture."
80
By this schematization the member
participates in each community through the internalization in memory of the history of each
community with greater or lesser identification.
Regarding the self, contemporary literary theory, although sometimes borrowing from
sociological constructs of identity, also privileges a line of thought running from Hegel to
Derrida: sense of self as subjectivity. As with identity, the concept of the subject arises from the
philosophical discourse of the dichotomy between subject and object, between thinker and
thought. Ultimately, one's view of the subject determines one's perspective on issues such as the
relation of mind to body, the existence or not of a reality external to the mind, and the
correspondence or non-correspondence of language to such a reality. Kant's response to these
Enlightenment problematics was an epistemology in which the mind only apprehends
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
77
Mead 161.
78
Cerulo 393.
79
Ibid. 387.
80
Aleida Assmann, "Transformations between History and Memory," Social Research 75.1
Collective Memory and Collective Identity (Spring 2008): 49-72; 52.
!
159!
appearances; the things-in-themselves are unknowable directly.
81
Fichte asserts in his
Wissenschaftslehre that the ‘I’ posits itself.
82
This positing is even a performative act and one
through which the ‘I’ is the arbiter of identity as such. Hegel's complex and variously interpreted
philosophy has been regarded as containing elements that seek to overcome this state of affairs.
Certainly this comports with the previously quoted Hegelian idea of identity in diversity. When
aligned with the propositions that reason is temporal and history itself rational, one should be
able to conjecture with some confidence that, for Hegel, the human subject within this history,
the goal of which is freedom, is posited not abstractly but constituted in relation to the temporal
and social setting in which she is situated.
83
In much the same way Marx posits the worker as a subject in relation to labor and in
terms of labor's total demands on the worker, a subject that is alienated from products, from
nature, and ultimately self.
84
Theoretically, the real condition of the individual embodies the
"ideal totality -- the subjective existence of thought and experienced society present for itself."
85
Heidegger, in Being and Time appears to dissolve the radical distinction between subject and
object into an ontology that defines the relationship of object to subject as two aspects of a
condition of usefulness in which both attain existential specificity.
86
Variations on this theme
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
81
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and London:
Hackett, 1987) 176.
82
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, Schriften zur
Wissenschaftlehre, ed. Wilhelm G. Jacobs (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2007) 63-97;
69.
83
Hegel, Reason in History 25, 37.
84
Karl Marx, "Estranged Labor," Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the
Communist Manifesto, trans. Martin Milligan (Amherst NY: Prometheus, 1988) 69-84; 72.ff.
85
In the work cited, "Private Property and Communism," 99-114; 105.
86
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:
Harper and Row, 1962, 2008) 66-69, 85.
!
160!
could be recovered from later works also such as "The Question Concerning Technology." In
the foregoing configurations of the subject, it is viewed as an unstable entity, the effect of a
relationship or of a certain discourse. For contemporary literature-theoretical projects the main
interest resides in the radicalization of the above explorations. Hegel's 'identity as difference'
notwithstanding, the two concepts have traditionally been aligned as oppositions. Horkheimer
and Adorno address an aspect of this idea when they decry the distance between subject and
object as an abstraction born in domination of the latter by the former.
87
Edward Said addresses
another aspect in criticizing the tendency of 'difference' to imply 'opposite' rather than simply
'other' in the comparison of Eastern and Western cultures.
88
In both cases oppositional difference
militates against any consideration of shared identities.
In a different tradition Paul Ricoeur hoped to recover the stability of self within the given
contingencies of existence in narrative identity. For Ricoeur, personal identity derives from a
sense of permanence that comes through the integration of all the variables and contingencies of
life into an emplotted narrative.
89
Borrowing from Greimas the conception of character, in this
case as self, that far from being static is as much an active plot as the actions to which this
normally refers,
90
Ricoeur posits personal identity as the unity derivable from the narrative of a
life with all its discontinuities. In this sense "chance is transmuted into fate."
91
Of course in
fiction all identity is narrative, raising the question of the relation of fiction to reception as
paradigm for emplotment of one's life. To assess this question definitively would require a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
87
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) 9.
88
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978) 46.
89
Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1992) 140ff.
90
Ibid. 143.
91
Ibid. 45.
!
161!
corpus based study of case histories on the relation of reading (and by extension movie viewing
and perhaps computer game playing) to how one views oneself and in what temporal units that
perspective is maintained. Anecdotally it has been maintained that at least since the
Enlightenment the individual experiences herself in the novel.
92
Ricoeur appears to validate the
idea that the manner in which fiction handles narrative may be instructive for the subject's
identity constructs, on the example of reaction to the Ichlosigkeit of Musil's Der Mann ohne
Eigenschaften.
93
If one reads Kindheitsmuster's crisis of stable identity into Ricoeur's paradigm
as tantamount to the concept of subjective authenticity, one might read Die Blechtrommel's
traduction of subjectivity and authenticity as a limit case, similar to Musil, whereby the reading
subject experiences the narrative stability of an identity in relation to the instability of the
narrative read.
94
Foucault's genealogical approach attempts to uncover the unequal distribution of power
relationships between subject and object in terms of identity and difference. For Foucault,
identity is not essential but inheres in discursive situations in which difference marks the level of
discrimination between what would otherwise be uniform entities and is therefore decisive in
subject formation.
95
But the discourses, be they scientific or literary, in relation to which the
subject is formed are themselves the result of power structures within society that have exercised
control over the formation of these through formulation of rules, promulgation by institutions,
restriction through taboo, and many other procedures.
96
The sovereignty of the subject
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
92
Beutin et al. 172.
93
Ricoeur 166.
94
Ibid.
95
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1970) 54-55.
96
Foucault, "The Discourse on Language" 216-219.
!
162!
discernible in its identity and discriminated in its difference is therefore shown to be an illusion,
a creation of institutionalized discourse within society. Jacques Derrida's signature emphases on
the play of signs, différance, and the trace likewise deconstruct any Enlightenment model of the
sovereign self. The subject as discursive entity becomes dependent on ever shifting
significations in the deferral and temporalization of sense. The practical application of this line
of thought is displayed in The Other Heading where personal and cultural identity paradoxically
can only be considered as one "of the difference to oneself."
97
In the wake of Foucauldian and Derridean emphases, philosophers and theorists of many
orientations have defined subjectivity in terms of processes of formation in relation to: social,
pragmatic, or performative discourse. One sideline to the consideration of subjectivity in these
terms is the question of the persistence of agency as an aspect of the postmodern decentered
subject or as satirically put, after the "death of the subject."
98
The question of agency brings into
focus a number of underlying issues for literary analysis. This concept would seem to be one of
those factors that take a text's dissolution into abstractions of function such as narrator, focalizor,
and actant or those of relationship such as intertext, sign, and subject and resolves it symbolically
as a discussion of the nature of causation within a given text. This is essentially a discourse
about discursive constitution itself, composed of complexes of narratives (as ways of relating
ideas) that span the field from: (1) subjectivity as a "function of systems of differential
relationships"
99
to (2) the necessity of the subject for agency and responsibility.
100
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
97
Jacques Derrida, (a) Speech and Phenomena, trans. D. B. Allison (Evanston IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1973) 85-86; (b) "Signature Event Context" 6-7; (c) The Other Heading:
Reflections on Today's Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington
IN: Indiana University Press, 1992) 10.
98
Palti 57-59.
99
Ibid. 58.
!
163!
The implications for 'real world' assessments of historical and political responsibility
raised by perspectives on subject and agency are readily apparent in questions concerning the
entanglement of event in the language of its description and the determination of political
repression and liberation in a discursively constituted world.
101
Implications also exist for
perspectives on Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster. If a symbolical correspondence
between the former novel's figures and objects of narration and the citizenry that embraced
Hitler as well as the West German economic miracle is postulated, under what constellation of
subject and agency does the symbolism collapse? In Wolf's novel, at what point does
subjectivity disappear into a linguistic code or become 'inauthentic' (by some definition) as a
play of signs? For Die Blechtrommel the question of agency is paramount precisely because a
realist reading of the novel denies its efficacy. Oskar's implicit unreliability, the shifting of
narrative voice, the unreflective manner in which figures negotiate their lives, the Schwarze
Köchin, all ironically signify, through the imputation of absence, the actual presence, whether
acknowledged or not, of a causality and a responsibility for historical events which could more
complacently be written off as merely contingent. For Kindheitsmuster the matter becomes
urgent for the fictive author, as for a reader who might see herself in the same position, as an
attempt to grapple at a personal level with the question of how ‘I’, and ‘we’, became as we are
and if continuities with former selves from the fascist past play a role yet in our lives.
The relationships of the concepts of identity and subjectivity can be seen as the
contextual products of discourses, often discipline specific, that arise from the expression of data
analysis (and creation) across many fields of inquiry and linguistic usages. Present concern is
with their contribution to an allocation of sense in the works by Grass and Wolf and what they
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
100
Ibid. 60.
101
(a) Koselleck 29, (b) Palti 58.
!
164!
disclose, in narrative, concerning the sense of self and its relation to the wider community.
5.3 The Self in the Novels
In the opening passages of Die Blechtrommel a first person narrator confronts the reader
from the first word with an unexpected concession of existential liminality: confinement in a
mental institution and constant observation by an attendant.
102
It becomes apparent that the text
is generating a character effect from a figure that projects its position as a subject on the basis of
that liminal condition. The narrator elaborates with the self-identificatory specification that he is
blauäugig and therefore innocent and believable in relation to his brown-eyed attendant (in a
play on the German idiom of eye color usage for personal characteristics). But the expected
idiomatic correspondence is turned around and subtly perverted through the irony that it is the
blue-eyed subject who is inscrutable. Both the reliability of the narrator and the grounding of
Die Blechtrommel's protagonist, Oskar Matzerath, as narrative subject, are undercut from the
beginning of the novel as functions of self-referential paradox.
Yet the paradox upon which Oskar's subjectivity is founded actually plays a
superordinating role in the novel. For it places the various problematical objects of discussion,
e.g. modes of narration and communication, the rise of Nazism, hypocrisies within post-war
German society, the nature of ethical reflection, etc. into a discourse on veracity, which, based on
narrative components compounded of liminal human experience must provoke from the reader a
process of questioning to fill the voids left by the absence of verifiable epistemic coordinates.
When Oskar identifies his bed in the institution as his achieved goal that also could become his
faith if only the railings would extend higher to keep others out,
103
the text transparently and
simplistically satirizes the propensity of Germans to seek comfort in materiality and to isolate
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
102
B 9/TD 3.
103
Ibid. 9-10/3-4.
!
165!
themselves behind religious and ideological barriers from the disturbances of any real world
outside these parameters. When conjoined with the description of the attendant Bruno
Münsterberg as silent frustrated artist
104
a symbolic portrait emerges of West German society as
complacently materialistic, culturally insular, ethically obtuse, and intellectually shallow. What
is interesting as a mode of narration is that the symbolism for the novel's characters and states of
affairs proceed from the semantic import of the first sentence, which is not only continuously
implied but enacted throughout the text: this sentence is not true.
In effect the narrator says that the narrator is not reliable. In this way the text situates the
problem of the self into a number of different but related discourses. In one of these the factor of
unreliability may be assessed only as complex irony rather than outright traducing of narrative
cohesion, judged on the basis of an applicable standard, e.g. the apparent thwarting of authorial
intention by the narrator,
105
or perhaps a conceptual metaphor for a post-war Germany that
rhetorically thwarts attempts at veracity concerning its immediate past. In another discourse the
narrator's inconstancy may be regarded as that constancy which defines an identity. In this
model Oskar, even as narrator, derives an identity from the story -- be it one of reliability or
otherwise;
106
in this case perhaps that of the reliably devious or consistently naive, as picaro,
107
inviting intertextual comparison with other such figures. In yet another placement, the deficits of
Oskar's projected personality actually invite questions of what a trustworthy, psychologically
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
104
Ibid.
105
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd. ed., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983) 159.
106
Ricoeur 147-148.
107
Hans Wagener, "Simplex, Felix, Oskar und andere -- Zur barocken Tradition im
zeitgenössischen Schelmenroman," Literarische Tradition heute: Deutschsprachige
Gegenwartsliteratur in ihrem Verhältnis zur Tradition, eds. Gerd Labroisse and Gerhard P.
Knapp, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik 20 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988) 117-
158.
!
166!
intact narrator would bring to the tale. How would the story be told if by a unified voice?
Decisions concerning the relative defensibility of the various interpretive choices derive from the
reader's ability, based on her experience of the interplay of texts and world, to attribute overall
coherence.
If the imputed selfhood of Die Blechtrommel's narrator appears caught up in self-
referential paradox, what does this say about, or where does this discursively emplace issues of
history and memory? Viewing the unreliability of Oskar's narration as a structuring device
invites one to read the textual level at which this occurs against that level incorporating
commonly accepted accounts of history, philosophy, or sociology. When Oskar and other
figures in the novel are either referenced in relation to, or as is the case with the scenes from the
representation of Kristallnacht
108
and the siege of the Polish Post Office
109
inserted into,
historical events, these are destabilized through conversion from the objects of historical
discourse in the classic sense into objects of narrative.
110
As such, they reflect the imputed
cognition of the narrator as paradox, transposing the events from the world's mythic "cultural
memory" onto the personal but social "collective memory" (to use Müller-Funk's terminology,
citing Halbwachs
111
) of a fictive outsider witness whose testimony impeaches its truth value.
Oskar commences his tale as an "I" that posits itself yet functions symbolically as a creation of
socially embedded values that play out in the reader's recognizable real world.
The figure Oskar Matzerath thus occupies a conceptual space between subjectivity and
identity that basically inverts some sociological models. In contrast to Mead's discovery of self
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
108
B 260/TD 186
109
Ibid. 285ff./205ff.
110
Compare Hayden White, The Content of the Form 2-4.
111
Müller-Funk 216.
!
167!
through others, Oskar discovers others through self. Perceived, for instance by Uytterschout, as
genuine subjectivity, his "underdevelopment" grants him "uncommon insight into life behind the
scenes."
112
As a symbol however, he and other characters do not derive their identity from
communal agency but the identity of the community is reflected back from the positions
occupied as critique and satire. The critical assessments referenced earlier by both Guidry and
Nury Kim are constructed in differing ways around this idea. In the former, society derives its
identity from the mytho-poetic narrator conceived at ever higher levels of abstraction.
113
In the
latter, specific identifying societal attitudes define the characters.
114
Whether one credits any of
the above critical viewpoints with greater or lesser degrees of legitimacy will be a matter of
interpretation. Underlying all, however, is the recognition that Oskar's myriad narrative
destabilizations of conventional outlook discursively bracket the relationships between self and
society, as different modes of memory, and the perception by society of itself, in terms of exactly
what experience defines a society and what agency, if any, determines these and the narratives
thereof.
One group of personal remembrances that define Oskar's subjectivity, forming a thematic
thread with implications also for collective memory consists of the protagonist's sexual
proclivities and observations. The novel presents women in stereotypical gender roles and most
often as objects for satisfaction of the male gaze and libidinal appetite. Arguably this may
represent behavioral standards at the time Die Blechtrommel was written but given the
destabilizing principle of negative implicature throughout the work, on the basis of the
paradoxical narrator, it would not be rash to suppose that here also the apparent crassness
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
112
Uytterschout 189.
113
Guidry 141.
114
Nury Kim 71.
!
168!
diagnoses and exposes. The diagnosis becomes another example of the roots of fascism in the
attitudes of the Kleinbürgertum through the sexual reification of Oskar's mother, Agnes, and its
role in her demise.
115
In another instance the greengrocer Greff becomes a symbol of
acquiesence to Nazism through the necessity of hiding his homosexuality.
116
The paradigm of
sexual objectification continues with Maria during the war and is projected again onto Sister
Dorothea in post-war society; the latter instance read as the exposure of pre-war attitudes
continuing in West German society under the guise of voyeuristic refinements.
Oskar's sexual development initiates a discussion of what a society expects from this
human function. The encounter with Maria's nudity connects the text dialogically with other
depictions and experiences of youth's experimentations in the guise of low comedy.
117
Yet the
instinctual aggressivity of Oskar's reactions implies also society's sanction for sexual violence as
normative. The larger implications of the novel's depiction of sexual experience thus interrogate
its significance as historical construct. Depictions of Anna Bronski, Agnes, Maria, and Sister
Dorothea delineate a historico-cultural trajectory of stereotypical sexual functions: fertility
goddess, mistress, submissive, and murder victim. In this way the text situates the typical facets
of male dominated sexual fantasy into a discourse on the role of gender in European society.
The question for the critical reader is: to what end? If the personal memory of Oskar reflects a
Halbwachsian collective memory of lived experience, in what way would and should this
experience be processed as cultural memory for the reflection of later generations for whom the
evental material will be perceived as history?
The sexual basis of Oskar's subjectivity and identity might be analyzed in fairly
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
115
B 206/TD 147.
116
Nury Kim 74-75.
117
B 348/TD 251.
!
169!
straightforward Freudian terms. It would be easy to say that Oskar is one for whom the
normative sexual development has failed. He appears to have an Oedipal complex and sees in all
women the renewing of the love bond with the mother. His fantasizing and behavior with Sister
Dorothea indicates possibly the presence of paraphilia,
118
or as Freud quaintly put it, "perverted"
object choice.
119
In this connection, the objective correlates, particularly the tin drum, form
material extensions of Oskar's consciousness and body. In their communicative functions and as
sensory objects they too serve as allusions to the psychosexual dimension of life. Yet even by
Freudian standards Oskar's aberration from normative development is simply that which defines
Oskar as a character: a failure of maturation.
120
When one adds identification with Jesus Christ
121
to Oskar's sense of self, a subjectivity
emerges with deeper implications for the processing of German history. On one level rests the
body, its personal experience and social connections. On another level stands an abstraction, the
person as messiah figure. Müller-Funk suggests that a similar abstraction of the personal body to
the "virtual body of the nation" is a possible outcome of the transference of personal/collective
memory to long-term cultural memory,
122
the abuse of which has been made evident in
totalitarian governments.
123
Die Blechtrommel suggests something very similar. Viewing Oskar
throughout the novel as a symbolic figure,
124
imputes to the subjectivity of those individuals for
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
118
(a) Sigmund Freud, "Lecture XXI: The Development of the Libido and the Sexual
Organizations," Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1966) 397-420; 409ff; (b) B 646-647/TD 470-471.
119
Freud, "Lecture XX: The Sexual Life of Human Beings," 375-396; 378.
120
Ibid. 385.
121
B 778/TD 562.
122
Müller-Funk 218.
123
Ibid.
124
Nury Kim 70.
!
170!
whom Oskar is considered representative, this projection of the personal body to the collective
body then to the messianic body, or Führer for that collective entity. Interestingly, these
elements are combined in almost precisely this form, as a failure of maturation of a nation, in the
artifices of the chapter "Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe."
125
The governing dynamic of Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster is not the reliability of the
narrator but the existential constitution of that voice altogether. Already near the beginning of
the text, beneath the problem of the difficulty of commencing a memoir, appears the relation of
language to self and by implication also to memory and its recollection of the self in the world.
Specifically, the personal pronouns I, you, and she are conceived as expressions of mutual
alienation,
126
theoretically unified only by memory, "[u]nd die Stimme, die es unternimmt, davon
zu sprechen."
127
But if memory is constructed in the present
128
from a past that is presently
painful to remember, what voice suffices to unify the two, to proffer an identity that covers
different life stages of a human being, particularly when at a succeeding stage, one ethically
rejects the self of a preceding? The ontological question is whether there is continuity between
past and present and if so, how does one become an entity of that present in differentiation from
an entity that situates itself to the present consciousness only as memory and as language. The
provisional solution of Kindheitsmuster's principal narrative voice, the adult fictive author, is to
forego the device of a unified narrator and by implication, through avoidance of the first personal
pronoun, the identity of voices within a unified subjectivity.
129
The novel thus explicitly
provokes a discourse of the proper relationship between world, its history and governance; text,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
125
B 253-264/TD 181-189.
126
K 11/PC missing.
127
K 12/PC 4.
128
Ibid.
129
Compare Levine 109 for an elaboration of this idea.
!
171!
its constitution in language; and reader as repository of experience accessible only in memory.
In Kindheitsmuster, the technical means for coping with the conflict surrounding
narrative voice is the form of expression that, as Nury Kim states "eine authentische Gestaltung
des gespaltenen Ich ermöglicht."
130
In this respect it is authentic to the author both fictive and
real but also to the society of the German Democratic Republic as an artifact of that history
underlying both personal alienation and political separation of a people that had once been a
unified nation. It could at least be supposed that the narrator's subjectivity might correspond
with those of many readers to the extent that some would feel alienated from former lives under
National Socialism either by a sense of guilt or just embarrassment. In the GDR the disposition
of one's life could depend on one's past and present attitude to these matters in terms of reward
and punishment.
131
In a society that regarded itself as constitutively legitimated through its 'anti-
fascist' ideology
132
the differentiation between the subject under National Socialism and the new
subject of Marxist-Leninist socialism would be also pragmatically important. Literature that
signaled a profitable engagement with that dynamic would therefore engage an authentic
situation in relation to the possible concerns of prospective readers.
133
In this manner the novel
situates itself into the discourse of cultural and national (for the GDR strongly emphasized
nationalism) identity as that for which the reader could find a degree of sameness with the
characters in the novel and the author herself, especially with the beguiling use of the pronoun
"du" as the narrator's preferred form of self-address.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
130
Nury Kim 186.
131
Emmerich 36.
132
Ibid. 38.
133
Heulenkamp 50.
!
172!
When Nelly is described as split into two persons in relation to anti-Semitic doggerel
134
as well as her adolescent confusion at the application of the term 'Nazi' to an instructor, the
deformation of subjectivity in relation to matters that normally would reflect a formation of
subjectivity as exploration of normal relationships (a small child to nursery rhyme, an adolescent
to teacher) is implied.
135
Wolf has averred that this situation was the common experience of her
generation of Germans.
136
The role of history as formative agent for the sense of self is
omnipresent in the novel. The question of how we became what we are presently
137
is implicit
throughout in the wealth of historiographical allusion (as detailed in Chapter 3 of this
dissertation) and direct engagement with the encoding of experience as history within memory.
An important factor for the formation of the fictive author's sense of self is revealed in the fabula
of the absence of reflection and unconcern at the plight of Ukrainian forced laborers by Nelly.
138
A noteworthy point is that Nelly's fascist subjectivity is not demonized as cruelty. It becomes
merely the logical consequence of her difference and greater value according to Nazi racial
ideology. Situated in a chapter that begins with the recognition of Nazi genocide of Europe's
Jewish population much of the root of the fictive author's alienation from her girlhood self is
here exposed. Yet history operates also contemporaneously and like Grass in Die Blechtrommel
in relation to the FRG, the failures of the socialist outlook in the GDR and their implications for
subjective honesty are also explored.
139
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
134
K 209/PC 131.
135
Ibid. 537/345.
136
Wolf 90.
137
K 328/PC 209.
138
Ibid. 389/249.
139
Nury Kim 158.
!
173!
With the image of the child Nelly sitting and probing the uses of the pronoun "I"
140
the
philosophical implications of Kindheitsmuster's problematizations become more apparent. For
Nelly the first personal pronoun seems to posit itself. At least, Nelly, as an "I," posits herself as
subjectively identical with the pronoun. In Mead's sociological account of personality
development the important pronoun becomes the "me" as object of one's own discourse
extending to oneself the conceptual space with which earlier only the 'other' had been
addressed.
141
Similarly, the supposition that the Marxist narrativization of history proceeds
initially from the perspective of the third person (Jameson in application of Benveniste on
literary style) provides an insight into Kindheitsmuster's dichotomy of self between fascist and
ideal socialist, even if the latter is critiqued in practice.
142
In this sense, Nelly is actually not that
distant from Oskar in Die Blechtrommel. Kindheitsmuster's etymological inverstigations
connecting Muster with Latin monstrum
143
inevitably signifies the state that one who followed
such a fascist model would become, a noun also applied to Oskar Matzerath. The mature
narrator of Kindheitsmuster is socially enagaged even to the point of implicitly criticizing the
failure of socialist nations to meaningfully aid kindred movements in Latin America.
144
The
distinctions drawn between the historical discontinuity of a sense of self, imply in
Kindheitsmuster, the existence of the subject to a position against Die Blechtrommel's more
pronounced Theoriefeindlichkeit, as Eung-Jun Kim puts it.
145
Yet this dichotomy should not be
too sharply enforced considering that the relevant material in Wolf's work would appear to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
140
K 14/PC 9.
141
Mead 162.
142
Jameson 550f.
143
K 62-63/PC 36.
144
Ibid. 283/180.
145
Eung-Jun Kim 184.
!
174!
question the meaning of the concept of 'authenticity'.
146
In Kindheitsmuster the personality forming aspects of Nelly's sexual development are
chronicled as psychologically normative experiences such as the youthful attachment to her
teacher, Julianne Strauch.
147
The social implications, however, are purely those of National
Socialist provenance. The teacher, despite her decidedly 'non-Aryan' appearance functions
within the parameters of the system. The attitude of pupil to teacher is strongly aesthetized;
poetry epitomizes the relationship. Nelly also considers herself from the perspective of an SS
publication's call for "unconditional submission."
148
In the secondary literature, as noted, Hell
undertakes a psychoanalytic reading in which "the sexual body functions both as a part of her
[Nelly] which is drawn to this male universe and as the site of its spontaneous refusal."
149
Physical symptoms result from 'impermissible' feelings, the body becomes the "locus of
memory,"
150
which functions through the evocation of voices more than images.
151
Within this
dispensation, Hell detects the privileging of the mother's voice as least complicit in National
Socialist crimes in a culture of paternalism in which
[. . .] the novel's most fundamental fantasy about the sexual body, the opposition between
a complicit, fascist male sexuality and a female sexuality linked to fascism through the
utopia of chastity [italics in original]
152
is subverted by Nelly's realization that the object of her infatuation, Julianne Strauch, despises
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
146
K 256ff./PC 163ff.
147
Ibid. 345/220.
148
PC 223/K 349.
149
Hell 212.
150
Ibid. 213.
151
Ibid. 202.
152
Ibid. 212.
!
175!
being a woman and thus a part of the official paradigm.
153
This line of thinking testifies once
again to the ability of totalitarian thinking to project a corporate identity, literally and by
definition, on the metaphor of the individual body.
154
The path to a nominal, in this case also pronominal, reconciliation of self-alienation is
thus long and difficult. If language divides might it not also unite? After all, it was the adult
who abandoned the child,
155
how hard should it be to become re-acquainted? Yet the difference
appears too great;
156
a narrative of reconciliation should be possible but narrative levels,
structures, do not correspond with life.
157
The real world in the guise of death actually structures
the narrative. As if in a long Freudian 'talking cure' the fictive author asks if memory has been
effective or merely misleading, confirming the desire not really to interrogate one's past and
existence? At the end of the novel the fictive author regains the use of 'I' but as indicated by the
"[i]ch weiß es nicht,"
158
a sense of closure is elusive.
5.4 German National Identity
The phrase national identity would seem to validate one of the central tenets of this
dissertation: perceived realities are not necessarily based on material facts but arise as discourses,
analyzable into narratives of relationships between 'facts' and events. Reinhart Koselleck
illustrates the discursive placement of identity into the realm of historiography through the
objectification of identity in material artifacts, such as war memorials, supposedly showing
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
153
Ibid.
154
Müller-Funk 218.
155
K 17/PC 7.
156
Ibid. 190/119.
157
(a) Ibid. 424/272; (b) 601/385.
158
Ibid. 638 /406.
!
176!
solidarity by survivors with the causes for which the dead paid with their lives.
159
Such
solidarity with causes and their dead (or conversely through the lack of or pejoritivization of
such), as past events, are only present in memory and remembrance as narratives. Does this type
of solidarity ultimately become a discourse of collective identity, or in the case of a nation state,
that of national identity, with supposed defining characteristics that may be imputed externally
and/or internally?
160
Mary Fulbrook points out that "[n]ational identity does not exist,"
161
certainly in no essential or quantifiable way, but if there is one, it results only from the desire to
believe in a collective identification with shared institutions of culture.
Are there reasons to believe that individuals living within the nation state Germany
actually identify themselves as part of a society with identifiable common affinities? What are
the definitions involved, what constitutes a national or a cultural identity and how may this be
quantified? Exactly what demographics form the research group for these questions and what
methodologies are employed in analysis? A number of studies have been performed seeking to
elucidate exactly these questions, among others, that can be regarded, at least, as narrative
attempts by the involved researchers at correlating the data that each consider relevant. The
sociologist Michael Klein approaches the topic of German national identity in terms of one's
"commitment" to a specifically German identity.
162
Areas of research include topics like social
identity, collective identity, feelings of pride/shame over being German, perceptions of German
history, the concept of patriotism, and perceptions of and by the immigrant community and
ethnic minorities within Germany. The study, based on statistical data, found that 82 percent of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
159
Koselleck 288.
160
Müller-Funk 221.
161
Fulbrook, German National Identity 1.
162
Michael Klein, Die nationale Identität der Deutschen: Commitment, Grenzkonstruktionen und
Werte zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhumderts (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2014).
!
177!
the research population felt themselves either strongly or very strongly to be German. The study
also found that many agreed that a 'typical' German conforms to various stereotypes to a greater
or lesser degree, e.g. prefers rules and order: 90 percent; prefers one's Heimat region and
observes traditional customs: 82 percent; is a democrat: 79 percent; is no longer just national in
outlook but open to the world: 58 percent; among many other characteristics.
163
A large number
of such studies indicate that the concept of German 'national identity' presently subsists within
the current intellectual milieu outside of philosophical debate concerning wherein exactly the
term may consist and its proper range of reference.
Mary Fulbrook surveys the topic of German national identity "after the Holocaust" and
thus in relation to that event, within a framework focusing on the role of memory, "historical
consciousness," and differences in outlook between citizens of the FRG and GDR, based on
documentary sources and standard empirical evaluative methodologies. Fulbrook outlines her
programmatic approach as developing
[. . .] a non-essentialist definition of 'nation' as a self-identifying community of common
memory and common destiny, which under certain conditions -- such as warfare and
external threats -- can command a remarkable emotional power, political shape, and mass
following.
164
Fulbrook believes that any sense of national identity for post-war Germany was "uniquely
problematic" based on the fact that after the Nazi era any consideration of German nationalism
was not acceptable to the world at large.
165
This stipulation therefore specified how Germans
were supposed to regard themselves and led to official discourses of identity in both Germanys
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
163
Ibid. 103.
164
Fulbrook, German National Identity 21.
165
Ibid 19.
!
178!
and fractious debate between representatives of disparate cultural and political backgrounds.
West Germans could claim solidarity in achieving economic prosperity, evincing some feeling of
shame for Nazism, and as heirs to positive aspects of German history (variously defined) within
an essentially ethnic definition of citizenship. East Germans should feel unity in a peasant and
workers society, as victors over fascism (viewed as capitalist in origin), and ultimately as heirs to
a German history of progress towards socialism as the touchstone of citizenship.
166
The idea of German national identity being both unique and problematic is of course not
new. The historical background of any subjective feeling of solidarity among people defining
themselves as German consists of the fragmentation of political entities within this cultural/
linguistic area well into the nineteenth century, in contrast to countries like England or France, a
relatively large number of invasions from outside forces, redistributing cultural and political
power centers (Thirty Years War, Napoleonic Wars), the failure of the nineteenth century
German bourgeoisie to establish effective and cohesive 'national' unity in 1848, and the uniting
of the disparate political entities under a more authoritarian and militarist regime in the form of
Prussia in 1871. Add to this the loss of two world wars and it becomes not surprising that
Kindheitsmuster will include the passage about a certain "Herr X" who cannot accept German
war atrocities because "[d]azu hatten wir ja auch gar nicht die Zeit."
167
The absence of apparent
empathy and denial of agency would seem to reflect the mentality of one who continuously loses
the more desperately one tries to succeed, signified by Herr X's earlier observation that 'we' even
failed to produce an atomic bomb.
168
Quite aside from the unwillingness to accept responsibility
there lurks under the surface of the text a hint also of the effect of that which is undecidable: the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
166
Ibid. 20.
167
K 559/PC 360.
168
Ibid.
!
179!
constitution of truth. The manner in which the novel in the following passages links this episode
with the ideological falsification of history yields perhaps a portrait in Herr X of that German
whose national identity equals solidarity with a people who, under continuous reversals of
perceived verities, have lost the ability to deal with their actions except through their own
optimal narrative constructions.
Critical emphases have also posited the uniqueness of the German situation in European
history in variations on the Sonderweg thesis. Kocka points to pre-cursors of the idea among
nineteenth and early twentieth century nationalists who attributed a positive advantage to the
vagaries of German history, favorably opposing German "Kultur" to Western "Zivilisation"
among other observations.
169
The more usual version of the 'special path' of Germany among
nations is however, the post-World War Two question of why Germany submitted to totalitarian
rule as opposed to countries that did not. Most proponents of the idea point to the historical
factors mentioned earlier in combination with
[. . . ] the short-term factors of the 1920s and 1930s [which] helped explain the early
collapse of the Weimar Republic and analytically separable the rise and triumph of
National Socialism. The Nazi dictatorship with its catastrophic consequences brought the
German Sonderweg to its nadir, but also contributed to creating the preconditions for
ending it . . . after World War II in the Federal Republic of Germany. [. . .] whose self-
image no longer fed on a "contrast to the West."
170
Kocka critiques the thesis of the German Sonderweg both positively and negatively but it is this
concept of self-image that is of interest here, since therein resides the projection of individual
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
169
Jürgen Kocka, "Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg,"
History and Theory 38.1 (February 1999): 40-50; 41.
170
Ibid. 42-43.
!
180!
subjectivity onto the corporate entity of the state for purposes of identification.
It is also the projection of Oskar and Nelly, along with other characters, mere textual
effects with imputed subjectivities, as surrogates for real-world Germans, onto the national
socialist and post-war German societies and states that problematizes the relationship between
individual self-image and individual agency in society. In this regard it is very much the relative
allocation of the 'I' and other pronouns that specifies the overall dynamics. When Oskar shifts
between narrating subject and narrated subject the contrast implicates alienation. Likewise, the
estrangement of Nelly from the mature fictive author follows from that allocation of the first
person to the former and the second person to the latter, as discussed. Dialogically, however, the
pertinent texts of both novels include other voices that inform the implied discussion. Lacoue-
Labarthe and Nancy credit the German Romantic movement in literature with, after Fichte,
affirming "the absolute Self as Selbstbewusstsein."
171
The Romantics, within a "speculative
idealism" convert "the Kantian subject (i.e. the moral subject) into the ideal of a subject
absolutely free and thus conscious of itself."
172
The "systematic programming" therefore "makes
the world itself into a corollary of the subject,"
173
giving rise to a "social ontology grounded in
the subject . . . insofar as it possess all truth . . . and all authority."
174
Oskar asks the reader not to
worry about his compromised position, he is always in charge, even comparing himself to
divinity. The mature fictive author notes that the child that has felt the thrill of pronouncing the
first personal pronoun will not be called back by the mother.
175
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
171
Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard
and Cheryl Lester (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988) 33.
172
Ibid.
173
Ibid.
174
Ibid. 34.
175
K 16/PC 6.
!
181!
Thus behind Oskar's incessant first person claim of authority and perhaps to a lesser
extent Nelly's first person experimentation lies also the voice of sovereignty. Giorgio Agamben,
from a different perspective, interrogates the concept of sovereignty as it relates to Carl Schmitt's
theorization of the 'state of exception.' Agamben begins, "[t}he paradox of sovereignty consists
in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order."
176
Schmitt
delivers pronouncement on the law and conditions under which it may be suspended. Yet the
logic also works for the individual. In this case the dynamics of subjectivity resides in the
"situation"
177
created by the sovereign self. Oskar and Nelly order the space around them, they
create an exception to societal, and in the case of Oskar, existential rules. Nelly, of course
submits to socialization within the family and society; Oskar, to a very great extent lives in a
permanent 'state of exception.' Agamben references Hegel for the insight that
[l]anguage is the sovereign who, in a permanent state of exception, declares that there is
nothing outside language and that language is always beyond itself.
178
Oskar would seem to embody this thought in regards to his self-expression through drumming as
an analog to language. These additional voices are incorporated into the discussion for the
purpose of asking: is it not the projection of the absolute sovereign self into the constitution of
the state that defines totalitarian government? Certainly the permanent state of exception defines
the legal order of such regimes. But the power of this arrangement comes from an inversion of
the sovereignty of self into an absolute subjection of self, in acceptance or promulgation of such
totalitarian government as an object of identity.
Fulbrook looks at the development over time of a sense of common identity in the two
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
176
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) 1.
177
Ibid. 16.
178
Ibid. 21.
!
182!
Germanys after the war. She quotes opinion sampling by the Allensbach Institute for
Demoscopy that found in 1955 that 48 percent of West Germans believed Hitler to be "one of the
greatest statesmen ever" if he had not initiated and lost World War Two.
179
On another topic, the
Allensbach Institute found that the younger generation of West Germans in 1976 did not
especially desire the re-unification of Germany, as opposed to support ranging from moderate to
overwhelming among those between thirty and sixty-plus years of age. The younger
demographic also found less attraction to concepts like 'fatherland' and gave more importance to
the idea of being a European.
180
Regional identification has also always been strong in the
German language area, often more so than feelings of national solidarity. The majority of the
inhabitants of East Germany in the 1950s, despite the country's economic orientation in
opposition to Western capitalism, paradoxically seemed to believe that the division of Germany
would be short-lived.
181
By 1968 and continuing into the 1990s it is believed that the majority of
East Germans who were born after the war considered themselves as GDR citizens primarily and
members of a larger cultural imaginary, Germany, only secondarily.
182
Yet by 1990 the majority
of Germans in both East and West appeared to favor unification, including Jürgen Kocka for
whom this event becomes a "vindication" of democratic values.
183
Günter Grass and Christa
Wolf were among those who opposed unification, the former from the conviction of the
perpetual immaturity of the German political psyche, the latter from a desire to pursue a genuine
non-totalitarian socialist society in a 'reformed' German Democratic Republic.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
179
Fulbrook German National Identity 169.
180
Ibid. 199.
181
Ibid. 193.
182
Ibid. 195-197.
183
Jürgen Kocka, Vereinigungskrise. Zur Geschichte der Gegenwart (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
and Ruprecht, 1995), cited in Fulbrook 186.
!
183!
The interaction of figural subjectivity and historiographic reflection in Die Blechtrommel
and Kindheitsmuster occur on differing conceptual levels. The selves appearing from the
consideration of the narrator and figures as characters might be viewed as operating within the
realm of Müller-Funk's concept of Erinnerung (after Halbwachs), the situation of the personal
within the "remembering community."
184
Kindheitsmuster's 'subjective authenticity' would
appear to function most tellingly at this cognitive level, essentially the story of Nelly and her
family under National Socialism that much of the novel's readership might recognize as personal
experience also. The referenced traces of historical occurrences in both Kindheitsmuster and Die
Blechtrommel could be related to Müller-Funk's parallel concept of Gedächtnis (after Assmann),
the situation of those occurrences within the community of "remembrance."
185
To the former
concept adheres the spirit of irony and skepticism distilled from the existential uncertainties of
the narrator's position. Inherent within the latter concept is the tacit assumption of the possibility
of consensus on the existence of its referenced historical constituents. Indeed this aspect of
communal memory constitutes the factor that compiles the constellation of personal experiences
into a more abstract "cultural memory," which in Müller-Funk's view relates "to human beings'
capacity to construct [cultural and national] identity in narrative structures."
186
In Wolf's novel, communal memory is also partially specified by socialist concerns such
as the failure to support the revolution in Chile. More official, 'party-line' narratives of
Gedächtnis are sometimes subverted, however, as evidenced by the conversation about the
falsification of history.
187
In Die Blechtrommel the paradox of Oskar's subjectivity presents the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
184
Müller-Funk 216.
185
Ibid.
186
Ibid. 218.
187
K 561/PC 361
!
184!
narrator as simultaneously a member of a culture and nation by definition but by virtue both of
this subject's opacity of self-disclosure and the liminality of its personal experience, places Oskar
also into the position of an outsider. From this doubled position the narrator's idiosyncratic
Erinnerungen do not compile themselves into a cultural Gedächtnis immediately compatible
with the narratives adopted by German society at large. Rather, they function as meta-
commentary on the bases of that cultural memory by provoking, through their evident
incongruity, interrogation of the proffered connections between the two types of memory and
associated historiographic constructs. Thus Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster, each in a
different manner, situate the problematic of selfhood within historical (wordly, to use Said's
term) contexts in relation to the experiences of the reader that through relative weighting and
demarcation of narratives to specific constitutive elements, allows the novels to speak to the idea
that individual subjectivity may become an identity that influences the cultural and political
choices made by a community organized into a nation state.
5.5 Conclusions
Both Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster narrativize life in National Socialist
Germany from the perspective of individual experience encoded in memory. Consequently, they
situate themselves into discussions of the relation of fictive to non-fictive techniques of historical
description. The presumption has been that "real events do not offer themselves as stories"
188
and as such properly lack reference to narrators. Fictional works whose raison d'être is
commentary on history through the relating of its elements as stories commonly employ
narrative voices, which when localized also as figures in the narrative may be interrogated as
subjectivities in terms of their psychology and sociological import. To the extent that these
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
188
Hayden White, Content 4.
!
185!
comport with recognizable human constructs these fictive characters may also, through their
imputed psychological and sociological configurations, function as implied commentators on the
histories that form the subject matters of the works under consideration.
The narrative voices of Grass’s and Wolf's novels, constituted figurally, offer
correspondences with general problematics of identity and subjectivity in various disciplines.
Surveying the critical literature to the works, as indicated above, also demonstrates a lack of
unanimity about just what this entails in each case. Depending on the critical apparatus
employed, the figures may be considered to embody this or that theory in philosophy,
psychology, or sociology. On the one hand there is the unreliability of Oskar's fantasizing, on
the other the memory of a childhood lost in the aporias of language and memory as forming
rough counterparts to historical scholarship. A certain relationship between these is, however,
recoverable from this state of affairs. Koselleck says the historian must make sense of the
linguistic representation of the event, after the event,
189
and without resources of
contemporaneous memory. The measure of the distance between historiograhical work and the
proffer of the fictive narrators to accomplish essentially the same task situates the events
(considered in a text) into particular relationships with both the reader and exterior world in such
a way that a certain sense of these texts may be drawn. Essentially this is also the same with
decoding the subjectivities of the figures. In the case of Oskar the answer may be the question
itself or at least the provoking of the question. In the case of Wolf's narrative voices a closer
correspondence with recognizable human experience may be found -- or perhaps not. Another
measure of distance and sense between fictionalized history and historiography issues from the
agreement between the historiographic description of "entanglements, structures, processes, and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
189
Koselleck 28.
!
186!
interrelations,"
190
as Kocka expresses it, and similar micro-historical accounts in fiction.
One area where the distance between established theories and the experience of fiction
may be bridgeable concerns the uses of memory in relation to the community in which the
literature was produced. Both Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster privilege personal
memory as indicated. In accord with Müller-Funk's appropriation of Halbwachs it is also plain
that these individual memories implicate the larger community, in effect a collective memory. If
this were not so there would be no point of comparison for Grass’s satires or Wolf's
'authenticity'. The further idea that this immediate collective memory may be abstracted over
time into a generalizing cultural memory [Assmann] with which members of the society
subjectively identify finds an echo in Fulbrook and Koselleck that a sense of common ownership
of certain human traits or historical events may form a collective identity
191
or at least a
"common identification."
192
Fulbrook, as historian, presents critiques of Halbwachs and prefers
to consider such memories as "current discourses"
193
leading to "'historical pictures' into which
the individual memories are reinserted and endowed with wider significance."
194
In the fictive
counterpart to this process Nury Kim proposes that although both authors are a part of the history
of which they write, their works differently purposed aesthetically, have the common goal of
enlightening their contemporaries about the events in which all participated.
195
This process
depends for success on narration by a contemporary 'I' which position is occupied by the fictive
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
190
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 107.
191
Fulbrook, German National Identity 17.
192
Koselleck 309.
193
Fulbrook, German National Identity 144.
194
Ibid. 146.
195
Nury Kim 240.
!
187!
narrators of the respective works.
196
The technique could be described in Fulbrook's terms as
reinserting fictive but compelling memories into historiographic tableaux; the comparison with
'textbook' accounts endows them with wider significance for individual reader processing of
those accounts. The content of that wider significance includes the failure of totalizing thought,
the continuation of past negativities into the present time, and the denial of utopia.
197
The real
world discourse into which the novels situate the reader is the authors' experience of German
history, which, like the evocation of the burned hand,
198
leads them to these insights.
Exactly what the novels 'say', that is, how sense is allocated to the situation of world, text,
and critical reader leads once again to the 'question as answer' dynamic and the issue of
undecidability. If the 'I' posits itself, then what is its relation to an other except in
instrumentalization for its own purposes? Conversely, if the self is viewed as a relationship to
others or as a construction of language of which there is nothing outside,
199
then the inability of
either the 'I' or the other to be a self-in-itself, that is, exhibit autonomy within some material or
conceptual construction contradicts the principle of difference upon which each is predicated.
Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster enter into the discussion of this paradox by positing
composite selves of alternative voices in the texts, that throw personal subjectivity in relation to
identity, and particularly national identity into bold relief, as argued earlier. Exactly what
configurations of identity-in-difference or self-within-the-community allows sufficient empathy
for another human to prevent the extermination of those outside the proximal perceived
groupings of social homogeneity? What intersections of self and nation are requisite to restrain
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
196
Ibid.
197
Ibid. 225-238.
198
K 256/PC 163.
199
Derrida, Of Grammatology 49.
!
188!
the desire to be unencumbered by a national history that includes the Holocaust? These
questions, expressed differently, form much of the meta-commentary delivered in Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster. Yet paradox remains. Die Blechtrommel concludes with the
Schwarze Köchin as apparent causal agent. Kindheitsmuster asks, rather than asserting, whether
the voices of self, that are also the voices of history, may be integrated. All remains undecidable.
!
189!
6. Modernity and Its Alternatives
6.1 Issues
Disputes among historians on the relationship between the concept of national identity
and that of modernity,
1
often spawn disagreement, as is the case with David Blackbourn and
Jürgen Kocka on the subject of the relative modernity of the German Kaiserreich.
2
The
comparative analysis of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic
on the question of the relative modernity of each state has spawned much inquiry and debate. A
focal point for such discussions is the interrogation of the proposition that the development of
cultural and national consciousness proceeds as a concomitant of a realization of living in a new
time: a dissociation of present and past -- a sense of the modern. For their own interests both Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster reflect also on this sense, occasionally directly, but most
often through implication. The former novel generally uses the word modern satirically as in the
early passage that proposes that one "kann eine Geschichte in der Mitte beginnen . . ." which
continues in the next sentence,
[m]an kann sich modern geben, alle Zeiten, Entfernungen wegstreichen und hinterher
verkünden lassen, man habe endlich und in letzter Stunde das Raum-Zeit-Problem
gelöst.
3
Wolf's novel treats the term, modern, only descriptively in commonplace comparisons of
new and old objects. Kindheitsmuster works with the problematic more specifically as the
consciousness of the present in relation to the past and of both to memory. This is usually
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Fulbrook, German National Identity 13.
2
Katherine Pence and Paul Betts, "Introduction," Socialist Modern: East German Everyday
Culture and Politics, eds. Katherine Pence and Paul Betts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2008)1-34; 15.
3
B 12/TD 5.
!
190!
accomplished as confrontation between the fictive author and her earlier self but also surfaces in
passages where present society is considered by a character to be more economically and socially
advantageous
4
than earlier times, or more pertinently, where the idea is proffered that
[w]ir leben in einer schneller verderblichen Zeit, in einer Zeit aus anderem Stoff als jene
haltbaren früheren Zeiten. (Wegwerf-Zeit). Die verschiedenen Zeiten, die verschieden
schnell fließen.
5
Throughout both works passages like these clearly demonstrate a perception of a 'modern' time
and both novels make substantive associations between the concept of modernity and ideas about
the nature of society, history, and subjectivity in relation to the German cultural experience.
Essentially the novels situate the rise of National Socialism and the reverberations of its
overtones in post-1945 Germany at the intersection of petit bourgeois social milieu,
aggrandizement of historical narratives in relation to cultural identity, and the fracture of the
moral self under the pressures exerted by the former elements. The common denominator is, as
Koselleck points out, the consciousness of living in a time of new social realities -- sometimes
embraced, sometimes rejected -- and denoting these through a particular word: modernity. Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster situate discussion of the root causes of National Socialism
within the historical and sociological dimensions of that modernity, with particular attention to
details of class structure, collective identity, family power relationships, and intellectual currents
of irrationalism.
6.2 Modernity as Concept
Description and evaluation of the concept of modernity is enormously varied. When
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
K 238/PC 151.
5
Ibid. 599-600/384.
!
191!
Koselleck locates its "beginning"
6
in the eighteenth century he is contaminating the concept with
complexes of thought often associated with the term enlightenment, both as concept and
historical period. This might, at first glance, appear to be a felicitous correlation, considering the
currency of discourses regarding the liberating potential of both the idea and epoch. Horkheimer
and Adorno however, regard the perversion of the originally liberating project of enlightenment,
through its emphasis on rationalization and calculability to lead eventually to the "reification of
human beings in factory and office."
7
In enlightenment the "awakening of the subject is bought
with the recognition of power as the principle of all relationships."
8
The "essence of things" as
an abstract changeless identity "constitutes the unity of nature."
9
This identity when applied to
the human self, privileges it with the "legal right to record and systematize."
10
Die Blechtrommel
and Kindheitsmuster undercut this complex of thought throughout. Wolf's fictive author affirms,
"'Life,' the real process, is always steps ahead [of narrative]"
11
impossible to catch hold of and by
implication to categorize.
In Horkheimer's and Adorno's view, in economic terms and following Marx,
12
the entire
trajectory of the original liberation of the self ends in self-alienation in adaptation to the
"technical apparatus"
13
of the capitalist economic system. However one evaluates this critique, it
is undeniable that the period in European history that witnessed theoretical support for liberties
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
Koselleck 154
7
Horkheimer and Adorno 23.
8
Ibid. 5.
9
Ibid. 6.
10
Ibid. 20.
11
PC 272/K 424.
12
Marx “Estranged Labor” 74.
13
Horkheimer and Adorno 23.
!
192!
also did so in an atmosphere of political repression not always obvious from a superficial reading
of the philosophers of the period. Both Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster may be read as
novels that deny the validity of overarching and deterministic ideologies as explanation for
human behavior,
14
particularly in light of authorial statements on the topic.
15
Yet both novels
indicate, and both authors express a desire to communicate, some type of 'enlightenment' about
twentieth century German history and culture.
16
Jauß traces the discrimination between newer and older cultural concerns to antiquity.
He attributes the use of the words 'modern' and 'modernity' to the early Middle Ages and
nineteenth century respectively.
17
He remarks on the fully contextual and imprecise meaning of
such appellations as designating something that is always in a state of being re-defined in the
present. For this reason he locates modernity not only chronologically but conceptually, as the
antithesis of the classical or the idea of the timeless and unchanging.
18
Jauß’s concern is not
historical; it is the intellectual history of European aesthetics in their influence on contemporary
thinking. Ultimately he locates the proximal genesis of modernity in Baudelaire whose concept
of transcendent beauty within the contingent and changing symbolizes for Jauß the awareness of
that dichotomy as the basis of perceiving modernity as periodization.
19
It is precisely against this
aesthetized conception of modernity that Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster oppose a gritty,
and in the case of the former, fantastical, reality composed of the commonplace and even the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
14
Nury Kim 228-229.
15
Ibid. 229.
16
Ibid. 240.
17
Hans Robert Jauß, "Modernity and Literary Tradition," trans. Christian Thorne, Critical
Inquiry 31. 2 (Winter 2005): 329-364; 329-331.
18
Ibid. 332.
19
Ibid. 362-363.
!
193!
tawdry.
Both Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster appear to evince skepticism toward ‘grand
narratives’, notwithstanding the latter’s validation of Marxist thought. The degree to which such
determinations may be made, based on concepts that postdate the works in question is a matter of
debate. This also becomes problematic to the extent that the authors' biographies become an
element in each work's narrative, considering their own political and social commitments.
Suggested contemporaneous influences on Grass have included Albert Camus and for Wolf,
Ernst Bloch.
20
Kocka, as historian, interrogates the productivity of the Enlightenment as period and
enlightenment as attitude and manner of thinking, from the eighteenth into the twentieth
centuries in his essay "Geschichte und Aufklärung." In linking Aufklärung with the Moderne he
probes the conceptual bases of a process that culminates with the European history of scientific
thought, industrial technologization, and rational governmental administration, as well as the
critique of that process and those resultants.
21
The designation of aufklären as semantic vehicle
for this complex of European intellectual history dialogically adduces other associations of the
term in appropriate contexts. On the one hand there is Kant's overcoming of self-imposed
immaturity
22
and on the other Grass’s intention to enlighten (perhaps 'clarify' would be a better
or at least additional translation) by broadening the conceptual horizon through artistic means.
23
Nury Kim expresses the situation thus.
Grass und Wolf klären also den Leser durch ihre jeweils provozierende bzw. heilende
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
20
Nury Kim 240.
21
Jürgen Kocka, "Geschichte und Aufklärung" 145-146.
22
Immanuel Kant, "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?" Was ist Aufklärung? Thesen
und Definitionen, ed. Ehrhard Bahr (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974) 9-17; 9.
23
Günter Grass quoted in Nury Kim 241.
!
194!
Kommunikationsweise auf und fördern ihn dabei, eine angemessene Einstellung zur
Vergangenheit und Gegenwart zu finden.
24
This statement expresses much of what criticism understands by the term modernity, viz. the
goal of enlightenment, aesthetic and communicative means, and the challenge to situate oneself
in terms of that goal and through those means in relation to history and society.
Koselleck invests the term, modernity, with historical consciousness of a new period of
time, as an epistemological construct of the eighteenth century, distinguishing itself as an era
from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation.
25
The conceptual formulation that
interests Koselleck is that through which Modernität as chronological construct becomes a "shift
in experience" signified by Neuzeit. As the periodization of history gains currency the number of
attributable periods proliferates in scholarly discourse. Koselleck finds in this phenomenon
another hallmark of modernity: temporal acceleration.
26
In this manner a terminological
construct for historical periodization becomes the cognitive construct for a qualitative change in
the perception of lived experience, as modernity. A similar idea in Kindheitsmuster was cited
earlier.
27
For Koselleck the point is that the apperception of time, in the eighteenth century
becomes a historical dynamic in its own right. The future is regarded as open inasmuch as the
temporal dynamic should continue to bring forth ever newer "innovations and discoveries,"
creating the anticipation of progress.
28
By contrast the temporal conception of Kindheitsmuster
is pessimistic. The present is disposable. Time does not comprise an arrow of progress
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
24
Nury Kim 243.
25
Koselleck 160-162.
26
Ibid. 165.
27
K 599-600/PC 384.
28
Koselleck 165.
!
195!
expanding into the future but is merely variable. It may move faster and slower depending on
frame of reference and memory becomes the arbiter of temporal perception.
29
The
Enlightenment perspective is traduced; the past may be described and made sense of, the present
may only be "filled in."
30
In these passages time is the province of human subjectivity but what
appears as a new topic in the novel, at the conclusion of these musings is plausibly the last word
on the matter. The narrative, the expression of memory in time, is ultimately regulated by an
external factor: death, "a reliable contemporary."
31
Habermas regards modernity as an "unfinished project" and seeks to preserve the
liberating aspects of intellectual and societal rationalization while combating its acknowledged
deleterious effects. To the charge, common to critics of enlightenment, that "rational
secularization" of religion and traditions destroys ethical values without replacing them,
Habermas, in the 1980s, proposed in The Theory of Communicative Action that although formal
reason is not sufficient to supplant the mytho-poetic, meaning imparting function of traditional
value systems, an aesthetically oriented, linguistically activated, secular rationality embodying
"objective experience" and "social solidarity" would suffice in this regard.
32
Habermas' ideas
have evolved over the years but remain generally faithful to the position that there is a
"normative content" of modernity that "has to be acquired and justified from the rational
potential inherent in everyday practice" accessible through
[. . .] a communicative reason that transcends subject-centered reason . . . [that] is in
tended to lead away from the paradoxes and levelings of a self-referential critique of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
29
K 599-600/PC 383-384.
30
PC 384/K 600.
31
Ibid. 385/601.
32
!(a)!Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 1;(b)!Ingram!320ff.!
!
196!
reason.
33
Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster contradict the claim to rational wholeness and
communicative sufficiency by the manner in which they locate these narratives in their fictive
worlds. Yet neither do they privilege perspectives of irrationalism as cultural norm. Grass’s
work, in its narrative privileging of the irrational and mythic actually throws into greater relief
that which is actually missing, namely the critical and social. This is the root of Grass’s avowed
goal to "de-demonise"
34
the engagement with the fascist past and in writing Die Blechtrommel to
have "den Versuch unternommen, dem Irrationalismus das Wasser abzugraben."
35
Wolf's novel
more clearly indicates the fault lines between the rational and irrational apparent in the societal
attitudes of Nelly's fascist youth and also through narrator editorializing, some of those also
evident in the socialist culture of the modern German Democratic Republic. The mature fictive
author discloses her and her generation's quest for healing and wholeness as narrative theme,
however much she may also evince skepticism of its attainment. The structural framework of
twentieth century modernity is evident in Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster in the character
relationships and the implication that their deficits of humanity are not just personal but also
endemic in the social milieus they inhabit. The novels therefore invite the reader to, as Stathis
Gourgouris says of Said,
36
engage with the voids in the narrative, in this case rational, scientific,
and pragmatically ethicized social structures and what their absence means and has meant
historically, for the content of modernity.
The variant theorizations of modernity surveyed above have elements in common. They
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
33
Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 341.
34
Preece 45.
35
Ekkehart Rudolph, "Günter Grass," Protokoll zur Person, Autoren über sich und ihr Werk, ed.
Ekkehart Rudolph (Munich: List Verlag,1971) 59-72; 67.
36
Gourgouris 65.
!
197!
all propose a discourse of European history that generalizes localized changes in living patterns,
technological development, and cognitive constructs over several centuries into one overarching
narrative of the rise of ‘modernity’. Alternative ways of constructing this discourse consist of
proposing developmental lineages into the present from events and conditions such as the
ascendance of print media, the Protestant Reformation, the proliferation of the novel, the utility
of mechanization, and the rise of capitalism, in short, all those historical factors that become
objects of investigation within ‘early modern’ studies. Another commonality among the
theorists mentioned is the identification of the modern as concomitant of the eventual social and
political dominance of European society by the bourgeoisie and their ideals. In this regard, the
idea of living in a new time acquires the added associations of rationalization, technologization,
and individualization of experience. This complex is then wielded as a conceptual weapon
against the dominance of the aristocracy and their rule by fiat. The plays of Lessing and Schiller
as well as the subjectivity of Goethe’s Sturm-und-Drang period all make an implicit claim for a
mode of living grounded in a constellation of rational, ethical, economic, and civil rights
regarded as normative by the standards of the newly influential middle class.
6.3 Self in Society: Society in Self
The overarching problematic for Kindheitsmuster is arguably the much quoted last
sentence of the ninth chapter, "[w]ie sind wir so geworden, wie wir heute sind?"
37
The opening
chapter of Die Blechtrommel, with its narrative discontinuities, implies the same question -- with
the exception that Oskar egocentrically believes there is an audience for the story of how he
became what he presently is -- which, viewing him as figurative corporate identity, amounts to
the same. In both cases a singular character either directly identifies with or by implication
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
37
Ibid. 328/209.
!
198!
embodies the aspirations of a community, in the former novel to understand and in the latter to
advertise, itself. As discussed in Chapter 5 of this dissertation, consciousness of societal and/or
national identity, as discursive formulations, appears to be complexly interwoven with the
representations of personal identity, even if tenuous and discontinuous in direct
correspondence.
38
The question is whether there is a relationship in Grass’s and Wolf's novels
between subjectivity, cultural identity, aspects of modernity, and the historical circumstances of
Nazism in which they are set.
In Fulbrook's opinion representations of identity through the "sense of a common past"
may proceed from collective internalization of specific narratives of unity, with cohesive
affective content.
39
After the fall of the Berlin Wall a certain temporary feeling of German unity
created a popular discourse of a unified people. Lived experience shortly began to show
fractures in this consensus, giving rise in popular parlance to the designations 'Ossis’ and
'Wessis'.
40
Even more ominous was the realization that a certain segment of the population
would resort to violence and murder to promulgate a renewed völkisch vision of a united
Germany.
Fulbrook also believes a sense of collective identity may occur in relation to political
legitimation claims, shared values including the myth of a common history, and a sense of
common destiny, often in relation to an enemy or a population deemed to be outside the
community. These may vary in emphasis and degree of affirmation between social groups and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
38
Mark Hewitson, "Nation and Nationalismus: Representation and National Identity in Imperial
Germany," Representing the German Nation: History and Identity in Twentieth-century
Germany, eds. Mary Fulbrook and Martin Swales (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2000) 19-62; 20.
39
Fulbrook,"Re-presenting the Nation” 185.
40
Ibid. 188.
!
199!
generations within a society.
41
Although these observations are made in the abstract, as qualified
generalizations, it is apparent that all may be applied specifically at various times to the German
nation as well as others. Die Blechtrommel caricatures many of these tokens of communal
solidarity: Matzerath in his party uniform,
42
the rally at the Maiwiese, the common traditions of
the Advent season juxtaposed against the Kristallnacht pogrom and its easy acceptance by the
nation as a whole. Kindheitsmuster describes these elements realistically as the manner in which
Nelly's family acquiesces to Nazi authority, the solidarity gained through indoctrination of youth,
and the identification of an 'outsider' enemy, the Jewish population, that one is supposed to hate.
Adduced also in both novels are the many songs, and allusions to literature as demonstrated
earlier in Chapter 3, that re-enforce a sense of shared culture, markedly nationalistic in tone.
Kocka has pointed out that in the case of Germany, collective memory and consciousness
has not historically been spatially or temporally coextensive with a nation state.
43
The impetus to
express these views resulted from the West German Historikerstreit of the 1980s; the burden of
his argument was the defense of the Federal Republic as a liberal democratic state against
conservative historians proffering nationalist narratives of German history. Kocka advises a
nuanced and cautious approach to ideas of cultural and national identity. Building on the idea
that identity may be based on a common history, he qualifies this idea with the stipulation that
this must include acceptance of responsibility for the catastrophic consequences of much of
Germany's search for identity. Kocka offers a vision of a shared cultural understanding based on
the clarifying and enlightening function of history that contributes to an identity formation
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
41
Fulbrook, German National Identity 16-18.
42
B 146/TD 106.
43
Kocka, “Geschichte und Aufklärung” 151.
!
200!
process, that is pluralistic, consensus derived, and critical.
44
Although these goals are inarguably
those also of Grass and Wolf, the novels position these issues in relation to those Germans for
whom the loss of Heimat through shifting borders conditions a part of the collective memory.
45
Regional consciousness has been an important element in German society throughout
history. The spoken language has been and to a great extent continues to be extant in local
dialects and the concept of a regional Heimat has had a particular resonance with the average
German's self-image. In Die Blechtrommel, Oskar and his family are residents of the Danzig
area and stem from the mix of cultures and ethnicities historically comprised by that area, a mix
of German, Kashubian, and Polish. The surviving members from World War Two flee to
western Germany and settle in Düsseldorf as did Günter Grass himself. In Kindheitsmuster
Nelly and the mature author are from L., today G., Christa Wolf's home town of Landsberg an
der Warthe, today Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland. Like Wolf, Nelly flees from the advancing
Soviet forces in early 1945 to locations in Mecklenburg. In Die Blechtrommel Oskar's that
portion of Oskar's subjectivity that appears more human than symbolical derives in great part
from his relationship to Danzig. Geography, locations, legends, and regional sociology situate
the textual figures into a vision of a vanished world and situate the reader likewise into a
relationship with that world and its figures as outsiders, which is the position the figures,
particularly Oskar, occupy in the post-World War Two German social structure.
Engagement with themes and characters concerning Danzig/Gdańsk has become a
lifelong project in multiple novels for Grass. For Wolf, specific engagement with her birthplace
occurs in only one major novel, Kindheitsmuster. That engagement, as a journey of memory,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
44
Ibid. 152-155.
45
(a) K 189/PC 129; (b) Schaal 2.
!
201!
chronicles not the desire, common among members of the nationalistic Ostvertriebene Verbände
to repossess the lost Heimat, but to recover the wholeness of a personality fractured by the early-
learned necessity to repress memories.
46
Thus, in Die Blechtrommel something akin to Kocka's
position on the diversity, based on the historical record, of the constitution of German society
comes into play as reproach to the legacy of Nazi exclusivist ideology still observable in the
nascent Federal Republic. In Kindheitsmuster, the more personal focus transforms the inchoate
and repressed childhood emotions of loss
47
into empathy for the victims of German aggression,
whose retribution account for the loss of Heimat by the fictive author and Germans like her.
In the relation of the individual to modern German history, two fundamental orientation
points stand out. The first is the campaign, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, for the
establishment of a unified German state and embodies the ‘material narrative’ that links
modernity with discourses of German cultural and national identity in tandem with issues of
constitutional government and the emancipation of the bourgeoisie, issues that became critical in
the revolution of 1848.
48
The second, since the end of World War Two, is the Holocaust. Kocka
believes that the same mechanisms by which individuals form themselves into "Social groups
with some cohesion" applies also to the "European bourgeoisie as it emerged as a postcorporate,
supralocal social formation" during the Enlightenment and post-Napoleonic eras.
49
Historian
Michael Behnen adds the following concerning this period.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
46
K 91-92/PC 56-57.
47
Ibid. 429/275.
48
Michael Behnen, "Deutschland unter Napoleon. Restauration und Vormärz," Deutsche
Geschichte: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwärt, ed. Martin Vogt et al., 3rd. ed. (Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002) 397- 450; 444ff.
49
Kocka Civil Society and Dictatorship 12.
!
202!
In all seinen Ausprägungen . . . wurde das Bürgertum zum Ausgangs- und
Kristallisationspunkt für den technischen Fortschritt, für den Leistungswillen, . . . für die
öffentlichen Debatte als Ausdruck politischer Partizipation.
50
The claims for common societal identity within the discussion of this unfolding
'modernity' also included a dialectic of exclusion [often on the basis of racial theories of German
ethnic purity
51
] and incremental inclusion of Jews and other minorities within German society.
52
The conflation of the concept of common culture and nation state in the mid-nineteenth century
produced, according to Hewitson, the idea of German nationality as the basis of citizenship
within the state. Historians of the period increasingly considered the 'nation state' to be the
normal type of political entity through which narratives of progress and constitutional
governance, ideals benefitting the social and economic position of the bourgeoisie, could be
fulfilled. When Germany was unified under Prussia in 1871, the fact that "Germanness . . . had
not been associated with a territorial nation-state"
53
ultimately produced a concept of citizenship
based on ethnicity, jus sanguinis, codified in 1913
54
and remained in force [as default after 1945]
until reforms in1999. The problematic nature of emancipation and the full implementation of
the bourgeoisie's ideal of "civil society," but excluding women, minority ethnic groups, and often
the lower economic classes from the voting franchise, became even more problematic within
Germany than other European countries during this time.
55
Nevertheless, the process of societal
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
50
Behnen 444.
51
Hewitson 25.
52
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 21-22.
53
Hewitson 25.
54
Ibid.
55
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 21.
!
203!
modernization came to understand itself as a more socially concerned and inclusive project, thus
broadly speaking 'democratic', increasingly during the Kaiserreich and with force of law after
World War One in the Weimar Republic, although with decreasing popular support.
56
A controversial theme of German history arises from the separating of the discourses of
inclusivity and greater democratization from the project of modernity, so understood, in fascist
and communist dictatorships, during the Third Reich and the forty-year history of the German
Democratic Republic. The overall issue, important for Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster,
is the manner in which individual Germans saw themselves in relation to their society in its
several permutations. Already in the nineteenth century there was awareness of the discursive
rather than the essential, constitution of national identity. Sources of identification could be
quite various including lifestyle and language. With the great range of lifestyles and languages
available to the European citizenry as the result of the technical and educational benefits
attendant upon industrialization, some wondered, at the turn of the twentieth century, wherein
any national 'identity' could exist.
57
In Germany, narratives of so-called German traits had been circulating for decades before
the founding of the nation. Well-known are Fichte's valorization of the German language as
imparting a greater clarity to German thought
58
and the anti-Semitic writings of Richard Wagner.
Aside from such extreme manifestations, many historians believe that an intricate and self-
reinforcing set of circumstances including wide-ranging philosophical debate and popular media
representations contributed to a consensus, that more than nationalist sentiment, culture
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
56
Ibid. 28.
57
Hewitson 19ff.
58
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, "Fourth Address," Addresses to the German Nation, trans. R. F. Jones
and G. H. Turnbull (Chicago and London: Open Court Publishing, 1922) 52-71; 67.
!
204!
"constituted the core of German national identity."
59
This narrativized discourse could be
molded by those representing the major power interests of society into a changing set of cultural
definitions throughout German history. As in most other countries, the average German, in
addition to belonging to a family, a region, or a religion would also encounter in daily life
discursive ideals that suggested one's incorporation into a specific culture that partially allied one
with European culture in general and partially separated one on the basis of ideas about and pride
in, what might be considered specifically German.
60
Of course, the extent to which one
internalizes such ideas as an aspect of one's own subjectivity depends on the individual. It may
be a matter of conscious choice or it may be modified or actually controlled by either willing or
coerced conformity to societal norms.
The manner in which the discursive ideals of German cultural and national identity were
harnessed for purposes of world domination and genocide, as well as the continuation of
attitudes associated with those goals into the postwar period, form the subject matter of Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster. Grass’s and Wolf's novels situate these elements in terms of
particular individuals, social strata, regional and religious affiliation, intellectual development,
orientations to popular culture, nature and degree of conformity to societal and political norms,
and the nature of these norms. Thus Oskar and his family are initially situated relative to
narratives of pre-World War One constructs of life in the German dominated city of Danzig, his
grandmother a peasant woman, his presumptive grandfather evading conscription into the
German army. The contrast between this elemental and earthy life and the post-war city life with
its commercialism, educational opportunities, organizations like the Boy Scouts, and means and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
59
Hewitson 27.
60
Ibid. 35-57.
!
205!
opportunities for amorous fulfillment contributes to a sense of the modernity of daily life. The
social milieu of the Kleinbürgertum with its provincial outlook becomes, with Grass’s intention,
the locus of those feelings and viewpoints that undergird the acceptance of fascism.
61
This social
problematization connects the narrative of fascism with the 'modernity project', motivated by the
values of the bourgeoisie proper. In comparison, the lower middle classes lived in relative
economic, educational, and social insecurity
62
with affective distance from the values
promulgated by the traditionally more socially secure.
63
Nelly and her family come from the same background but are situated realistically rather
than (or as well as) symbolically into a social setting in Kindheitsmuster. Both novels depict the
education system's proffering of solidarity with their compatriots through exposure to Kultur, in
the form of German literature and music. Nelly's education focuses rather more on the uses
made of traditional culture for purposes of Nazi indoctrination. Neither Grass nor Wolf treats the
petite bourgeoisie in an overtly Marxist manner, as counter revolutionaries in the class
struggle.
64
A reader of Marxist orientation might assume this relationship as background within
her horizon of expectations. The emphasis, whether expressed symbolically or realistically, is
the personal and the manner and degree to which they respond to the claims of their society upon
them. The protagonists then re-assemble the memory of personal and national histories into
narratives from which new discourses of dealing with the Nazi period issue: the one a fantastical
negative signification, the other a search for authentic personal and social integration. There is,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
61
Eung-Jun Kim 148.
62
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 11.
63
Eung-Jun Kim 170.
64
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei in Marx and Engels,
Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, Grundsätze des Kommunismus (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999)
19-56; 31.
!
206!
however, an aporetic dimension to the conclusion that the authors, aside from the novels,
unproblematically adopt a stance of discursive construction in relation to German identity.
Günter Grass opposed German re-unification with statements in 1967 and 1990 indicating a
belief that some aspect of being German would cause any unified German nation to fail.
65
The second fundamental discourse in which any 'identity' of the German speaking nations
resides after World War Two is the collective and cultural memory of the Shoah: the inescapable
event in relation to which the process of formation of German national identity continues to be
narrated.
66
From Adorno's interrogation of both nationalistic and devaluative stereotypes
surrounding the concept of German 'national character’ to Kocka's invocation of the
"transnationalization" of memory and identity within historiographic and cultural studies,
67
the
Holocaust, as touchstone for narratives of subject formation, continues to engage the
imagination. The manner in which Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster deal with the
Holocaust, in implicit relation to attitudes in the FRG, the GDR, and post-Wende Germany will
be explored in Chapter 7 of this dissertation. Discussions of the nature and effects of the concept
of modernity will continue to constitute one of the loci for tensions attendant upon the idea of the
'normalization' of German history.
It should be clear that discourses of modernity, identity, and subjectivity and their
relation to ideas of cultural and ‘national’ experience and memory, are just that: discourses based
on a particular situation and relating of presumed facts under guiding principles by the theorists
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
65
Günter Grass, "Short Speech By a Rootless Cosmopolitan," Two States -- One Nation? The
Case Against German Unification, trans. Krishna Winston and A. S. Wensiger (London: Secker
and Warburg, 1990) 5-6.
66
Fulbrook, German National Identity 19.
67
(a) Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Question: ‘What is German’,”Critical Models – Interventions
and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) 205-
214; (b) Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 97.
!
207!
named. Additionally, the critical reader brings her own experience, value judgments, and
guiding principles to bear upon the literary material and theorizations. Thus, in the foregoing
sections a certain dialogical relationship might be discernible between the ideas of Horkheimer
and Adorno, Fulbrook, Habermas, Jauß, Kocka, Koselleck, and possible similarities or
dissimilarities in Die Blechtrommel and/or Kindheitsmuster. These will make possible the
assessment of relationship as significance in difference between the perspectives. A dialectical
engagement with the questions raised by these differences, as developed in Chapter 3 of the
dissertation, regarding possible instantiation of these within the texts, considers the alternatives
to apparent contradictions, in relation to the underlying principles evinced, on the basis of both
the contingency of recipient cognitive construction and the delimitations imposed by the
‘material narrative’ of their emplacement in the world.
6.4 Alternative Modernities
6.4.1 Two States -- Two Nations?
Koselleck, in different essays, situates the conception of time as a "force of history"
leading to the idea of the future as open and not pre-determined, into the same chronological and
cognitive constructs that characterize the name Enlightenment, "given by a small group of
literary figures, authors, critics, and philosophes" to their time as an appreciation of modernity.
68
Koselleck places also the idea of emancipation within this complex of thought.
Only since the Enlightenment does the privilege of exercising power over human beings .
. . become a general right: that rule could henceforth only be self-rule by mature human
beings (first men and. then later, women too) over themselves.
69
Viewed thus, there are narratives that comprise discourses on enlightenment and, in association,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
68
Koselleck 168-169.
69
Ibid. 250.
!
208!
modernity, yielding a universal claim to emancipation as ethical content and a sometimes
totalizing drive towards greater rationalization and systematization as structural dynamic. To the
extent that the conception of modernity took on many of these intellectual properties,
emphasizing various aspects or considering them dialectically, it became possible, particularly in
the mid-twentieth century, for sociologists to speak of modern societies on the basis of certain
requirements, i.e. a process of rationalization of societal structures such that their modernization
may refer, as Habermas puts it,
[. . .] to the formation of capital and the mobilization of resources; to the development of
the forces of production and the increase in the productivity of labor; to the establishment
of centralized political power and the formation of national identities; to the proliferation
of rights of political participation . . . to the secularization of values and norms [. . .]
70
after which it is possible to categorize those societies that do not exhibit a sufficient number of
these characteristics as pre-modern or in some way outside a line of presumed normal
development seen in European and American modernity. If one evaluates the ethical perspective
of enlightenment from the vantage point of cultural difference the project of modernity loses its
Eurocentric teleology. The question arises, exactly which societies should be included in this
paradigm, however. Those outside Europe might fit well but Nazi Germany was in Europe and
its crimes against humanity were so great that surely comparison with formerly colonized nations
is both incoherent and demeaning to those nations.
From the above perspective, Nazi Germanyand in some ways also the Soviet Union and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
70
Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 2.
!
209!
East Germany
71
might be viewed as representative of an aberrant or even anti-, modernity.
Clearly, the National Socialist state cannot be situated within Koselleck's paradigm of
emancipation.
72
There are those such as Ernst Nolte, and others prominent in the Historikerstreit
of the 1980s, whose narrativizations of historical data have produced discourses whereby
European fascism and Hitler's aggressions are viewed as a defense of 'Western' values in the face
of communist expansionism.
73
Nevertheless, National Socialism by self-profession denied the
desirability of civil society virtues of tolerance and universal rights and relegated the idea of
emancipation to the Volksgemeinschaft rather than the individual.
74
Official ideology affirmed
that national socialist German society, purified from 'foreign' elements would strive for a
classless society conducive to individual economic and social mobility in conjunction with
technological modernization, within the framework, however, of a Führerstaat with elite
governance.
75
The national socialist society is therefore, in regard to emancipatory claims, a
contradiction in terms.
Viewing modernity as an awareness of living in a new epoch, without privileging ethical
constructs, one may of course consider the modernity of fascist, communist, and totalitarian
societies on the basis of structural rationalization and scientific and technological orientation.
Some have regarded the rise of Nazism and particularly the execution of the Holocaust as an
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
71
Beate Ihme-Tuchel, Die DDR (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002,
Kontroversen um die Geschichte, eds. Arnd Bauerkämpfer, Peter Steinbach, and Edgar
Wolfrum) 92.
72
Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the
Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
73
Ernst Nolte, "Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6
June 1986.
74
Wolfgang Michalka, "Das Dritte Reich," in Vogt et al., 694-775; 711.
75
Ibid.
!
210!
actual aspect of the concrete manifestation of the abstract concept of modernity.
76
But what of
the case of divided Germany after World War Two? Does the Enlightenment-derived dynamic
of 'civil society', that Kocka defines as one in which a particular type of social action is possible:
[. . .] oriented towards toward conflict, compromise, and agreement in the public sphere; .
. . stresses individual independence and collective self-organization; . . . is nonviolent; . . .
recognizes differences and plurality as legitimate; [. . .]
77
leading to a society that implements, with acknowledgement of differing ideas, goals for the
common good, apply also to the two Germanys? Do these characteristics exclusively define a
society as modern and does it matter? What do Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster
contribute in meta-commentary to any discussion of these issues and its constituent narratives?
Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster enter into this discussion in several ways. In
general terms, as indicated earlier, the novels situate the protagonists into a world cognizable as a
product of modernity as defined by the sources referenced. This includes obviously the history
and social relationships that either discursively characterize or issue from those definitions and
constitute the surface narratives as described in previous chapters of this dissertation. More
specifically, that the novels engage these topics by problematizing human subjectivity and
cultural solidarity/national identity, both during the Nazi period and in the two post-war
Germanys, implicitly interrogates the constitution of modernity as a discourse in which this
manner of conceptualizing history, the individual, memory, the nation, and their
interrelationships arose. An even more specific connection between the novels and discourses of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
76
(a) Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000)
247; (b) Detlev J.K. Peukert, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science,”
Nazism and German Society 1933-1945, ed. David F. Crew (London and New York: Routledge,
1994) 274-299; 285.
77
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 19.
!
211!
modernity occurs, in the case of Grass’s work, by implicitly imputing an association between
fascism and a legacy of aesthetic and intellectual irrationalism, a perspective shared in somewhat
different contexts by Horkheimer and Adorno, as well as Thomas Mann in Doktor Faustus.
78
In
both Grass’s and Wolf's novels, blame is also given to totalizing ways of thinking.
79
To answer
the questions posed above in greater detail requires inspecting the histories of the two Germanys
in relation to narratives in Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster over the pertinent time spans.
A synopsis of cultural life within both East and West Germany was given in Chapter 2 of
the dissertation. As noted in Chapter 4, if Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster are analyzed
as fictive counterparts to historical narratives, the authors, as participants, become integral to
their own telling of that history as part of the complex of elements that emplace their fiction
within the larger world. Aligning these concerns with the history of the Nazi era is not the focus
here; although interrogating the concept of 'fascist modernity' might prove productive on some
level, the coherence of the definition was impeached, above, on the basis of the criteria
considered. The novels, in their written form, are not products of that era, a fact underlining an
important consideration in the works' genesis: the process by which the authors could come to
write the works, considering the constitution of their respective personal histories and
subjectivities as young people in the Third Reich. Pertinent intertextual and symbolic aspects of
the stories relating to Oskar's and Nelly's youth under Nazism were outlined in Chapter 3. To the
extent that the novels reveal an intent to inform, portray, and 'enlighten' also post-war German
attitudes,
80
the world into which the texts situate the reader is that of the FRG and the GDR in the
Cold War era of European history.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
78
(a) Horkheimer and Adorno 152; (b) Eung-Jun Kim 127.
79
Nury Kim 41; 225.
80
Ibid. 240-241.
!
212!
Considering narrative as inherent not only in language but also in the movements of
materiality through space and time as history, means that any interrogation of the relative
modernity of the two German states requires investigation of the narrativizations of that history
from which such discourses arise. Therefore the following discussion of the political and civil
history of the two Germanys is undertaken in some detail, in comparison also with that history’s
fictive retelling in Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster. Considering the minimum
qualifications advanced by Kocka, Koselleck, and others for the defining of a society as modern,
the extent to which the two societies conformed to these will become obvious. At the end of
World War Two Germany was divided by the Allies into four occupation zones: American,
British, French, and Soviet. Territories east of the rivers Oder and Neiße were placed under
Polish and Soviet administration pending a permanent peace treaty. The Allied Control Council
abolished Prussia as an internal state and both re-created and created political entities, the
Länder. As relations between the Soviet Union and Western powers deteriorated, the American,
British, and French zones of occupation were readied for the creation of a demilitarized,
democratic nation.
The Federal Republic of Germany was established on 8 May 1949. The Soviet Union
had also been preparing its occupation zone for self-government and this became the German
Democratic Republic on 7 October of the same year.
81
The narrative thread of Die Blechtrommel
covers this time period first in the voice of Bruno Münsterberg, Oskar's institutional attendant,
and then, beginning Book Three of the novel, in Oskar's third and first person alternation. The
former covers the Matzerath family's refugee journey from Gdańsk to Düsseldorf in which Oskar
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
81
Edgar Wolfrum, Die geglückte Demokratie: Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von
ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2006) 20-41.
!
213!
grew a little in stature.
82
The latter follows Oskar and his family through the year 1947 with
allusions to the privations of the era, including black market activity.
83
Also at this time, Oskar
becomes a stonemason employed carving grave monuments. Die Blechtrommel notes the
introduction of the Deutsche Mark in the 1948 with the observation that this time "included all
the necessary preconditions for the current blossoming of bourgeois comfort."
84
As West
Germany begins its legal history, Oskar Matzerath becomes a model at the art academy, satirizes
current artistic sensibilities, and pursues his infatuation with Sister Dorothea.
85
The Federal Republic of Germany adopted a constitution specifying an elected
parliament, the Bundestag elected directly, and a separate constitutional body, the Bundesrat,
with members appointed by the Länder governments. The federal government would be headed
by a chancellor, the first being Konrad Adenauer of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The
head of state would be the president, a largely ceremonial office. The FRG did not enjoy
sovereign authority as a nation until 1955 when the Occupation Statute lapsed.
86
Since the first
election, a large number of political parties were represented in the Bundestag, including those
from the far right and also the Communist Party (KPD). In 1951 the neo-Nazi, Socialist Reich
Party was charged with anti-constitutionality and banned a year later. At the same time the KPD
was similarly charged but legal proceedings delayed its prohibition until 1956.
87
Gradually, the
FRG became a member of the leading European economic associations. Oskar is occupied with
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
82
B 551-564/TD 400-409.
83
Ibid. 567ff./413ff.
84
Ibid. 604 /440.
85
Ibid. 670/488.
86
Mary Fulbrook, A Concise History of Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991) 212.
87
Wolfrum 65.
!
214!
his own problems during this time, fleeing a murder charge in 1952; his friend Klepp distributes
illegal Communist Party literature in West Germany.
88
During the 1950s West Germany underwent great economic growth, the so-called
Wirtschaftswunder associated with Adenauer's Economics Minister and later Chancellor Ludwig
Erhard. Economic policy was guided by the theory of a 'social market economy', a capitalist
system with substantial concessions to social welfare concerns.
89
As Die Blechtrommel ends, on
Oskar's thirtieth birthday in 1954, West Germany re-surfaces on the international scene and
prepares to undertake responsibilities that many thought impossible and inappropriate at the end
of World War Two. On 4 July of the year, the West German national team wins the soccer
world championship in Bern, Switzerland, popularly referred to as the 'miracle of Bern'. In
October the Paris Accords are signed, officially ending Allied occupation, restoring sovereign
authority to the country, and committing it to NATO as a military power.
90
The following year a
new military, the Bundeswehr, was inaugurated.
Through satire and parody Die Blechtrommel unmistakably pillories West German
society. The re-emergence of Oberleutnant Herzog,
91
as well as Bebra,
92
as continuity with the
National Socialist past, thematize the hypocrisy between public and private stances in relation to
the Nazi period. The underlying societal tendency implicated is that of political apathy in a
bourgeois, neo-biedermeierliche Gesellschaft that could re-lapse into fascism.
93
In a global
sense the novel's perverse relation to the Bildungsroman gleefully insults the society's
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
88
B 88/TD 61
89
Wolfrum 75-88.
90
Ibid. 130.
91
B 717/TD 519.
92
Ibid. 730/528.
93
Nury Kim 41.
!
215!
valorization of Goethean harmony at the cost of acknowledging the past. Die Blechtrommel's
stylistic anomalies, nihilistic spirit, ironic tone, and sexually scandalous allusions in some sense
also signifies the society from which it sprang, in that it did become published, subject more to
censoriousness than censorship, and the vagaries of the publishing industry.
94
In the Soviet zone of occupation, the period from 1945 to 1949 witnessed a restructuring
of the economy. Large landholdings were liquidated and land redistributed with support from
the Social Democratic (SPD) and Christian Democratic parties working with the KPD. Large
industries were nationalized and war reparations exacted. Much of this activity could be justified
on the basis of the legal expropriation of former Nazi Party members' property. Effective
administrative control over the Eastern Zone was in the hands of the Soviet Military
Administration or SMAD. In 1946 the KPD was merged with the SPD to form the Sozialistische
Einheitspartei Deutschlands or Socialist Unity Party (SED). By 1948 the Soviet Zone affiliates
of Western parties such as the Christian Democrats were also effectively being coordinated by
the SED.
95
The permanent division of Germany was not the initial object of the victor nations.
The general tensions of the developing Cold War between East and West as well as specific
problems involving the occupation, e.g. currency reform in the western zones not acceptable to
the Soviets and resulting blockade of Berlin in 1948 and the respective developing economic and
military alliances with the West and the East Bloc nations. Re-unification talks as late as 1952
were unproductive.
96
Kindheitsmuster portrays the defeat of Nazi Germany, Allied occupation, and life in the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
94
In this connection it should be remarked that the first American edition contained substantial
deletions in translation.
95
Hermann Weber, Geschichte der DDR (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999) 65-
101.
96
Fulbrook, A Concise History 211.
!
216!
Soviet zone in Chapters 13 through 18. The narrative, of course, is divided into three voices
forming three textual layers, running contrapuntally: that of Nelly, 1945 to 1947, that of the
mature fictive author's family trip to G. formerly L. in 1971, and the fictive author's novel
writing between 1972 and 1975. The narrative is thus not linear and the events described relate
to each other by association rather than chronologically. Beginning in January 1945, Nelly's
family flees westward with other refugees as Soviet forces advance. The reality of war impacts
Nelly's world as the fictive author associates this occurrence with the beginning of the war in
1939, and further, in conjunction with the world of 1974 with wars on Cyprus, in Vietnam,
torture in Chile, and disasters in Yugoslavia and Bangladesh.
97
Ultimately, Nelly and her family
end up in the town of Bardikow in Mecklenburg. During their flight Nelly also comes face to
face with the reality of the concentration camps.
Under American occupation, Nelly and her compatriots experience the shock that people
seen as pillars of the community are considered by the occupiers to be Nazis and criminals.
98
British forces briefly occupy Bardikow and then the Russians. Kindheitsmuster mentions
purported Soviet brutality but points out the brutality that had been directed at them by the
Germans. The novel does not perpetuate a conventional propagandistic narrative of kind and
helpful Russian forces with the observation that a "salvation army" could not win a war.
99
Kindheitsmuster illustrates the chaotic circumstances of life and subtly implies the persistence of
the Nazi regime through the story of the area's "Red Commandant,"
100
a German impostor.
Soviet troops are generally sympathetically portrayed in their cultural difference. The novel
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
97
K 443ff. /PC 284ff.
98
Ibid. 531-538/342-345.
99
Ibid. 556-557/358-359.
100
Ibid. 563-576/ 363-370.
!
217!
imputes puritanical attitudes to a Russian woman doctor charged with investigating the extent of
local venereal infection and enunciates in this connection a main underlying theme of the work.
"Zum erstenmal sah Nelly mit an, wie Frauen ausbaden mußten, was die Männer angerichtet
hatten."
101
Kindheitsmuster closes the immediate postwar period with Nelly being treated for
tuberculosis. With the return of Nelly's father, starving and almost unrecognizable, the previous
quotation gains explicatory significance by presaging Nelly's self-differentiation from the
paternal, authoritarian narratives of the Nazi era and her place within it.
102
The constitution of the German Democratic Republic specified a government with a
president as head of state, a prime minister as political leader, the first being Otto Grotewohl, a
parliament with one chamber representing the people, the Volkskammer, and one, the
Ländekammer, representing the Länder, which were dissolved into smaller administrative units
in 1952. The Ländekammer was merged with the Volkskammer in 1958. The constitution, in
principle, was based on the Marxist-Leninist idea of "democratic centralism" in which parties
had allotted seats in parliament with the SED in effective control.
103
One of the parties, the
National Democratic Party (NDPD) derived its support, purposely, from former Nazi Party
members. These individuals could not belong to other parties. The NDPD never failed to
support the SED during its forty-year history but projected a controlled nationalist tone to appeal
to that segment of the East German body politic.
104
In 1990 it became part of West Germany’s
Liberal Democrats (FDP). From 1950 effective leadership of the country was vested in the First
Secretary of the SED, Walter Ulbricht. In 1952 a year-long SED campaign against the Protestant
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
101
Ibid. 571/368.
102
Hell 199-200.
103
Fulbrook, A Concise History 211-213.
104
Weber 105.
!
218!
Church was launched.
105
Widespread popular dissatisfaction with raised production quotas
precipitated strikes and civil unrest on 17 June 1953. This was put down with the aid of Soviet
military forces. Thereafter a general purge of SED membership, many formerly Social
Democrats, strengthened Ulbricht's position.
106
With the death of President Wilhelm Pieck in
1960 the office was abolished and replaced with the Staatsrat, a small collective of governmental
and political functionaries whose chairman was First Secretary Walter Ulbricht.
107
In 1958 Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev agitated for the end of the four-power Allied
administration of Berlin. There followed several years of deteriorating relations with the West.
These years witnessed increased economic hardships in East Germany following the agricultural
collectivization program, and the steady loss of skilled workers through defection to the West by
way of the open border in Berlin. Between 3 and 5 August 1961 the Party Secretaries of the
Warsaw Pact considered a number of proposals, including obstructing air and ground traffic from
the West. The solution adopted was the building of a wall between East and West Berlin and
was implemented beginning in the night of 12 - 13 August.
108
Over the years the wall was
strengthened and expanded. Free passage between East and West Berlin was not restored until 9
November 1989. Although East German society became increasingly isolated from the West,
apparently the building of the Wall
[. . .] improved conditions for East Germans in the 1960s. This was the decade of the
'scientific-technological revolution', when opportunities for fulfilling careers in the GDR
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
105
Weber 158-159.
106
Ibid. 163-200.
107
Ibid. 216.
108
Ibid. 218-222.
!
219!
appeared to be opening up.
109
Throughout the 1960s centralized economic planning was eased and achievement incentives
supported.
Kindheitsmuster does not address this period in the German Democratic Republic in any
detail. Two previous novels by Christa Wolf, Der geteilte Himmel (1963) and Nachdenken über
Christa T. (1968), do, however. The former attempts to engage the reader in solidarity with
socialist society despite the disappointments and hardships. The latter appears to chide that
society for losing sight of the human dimension in its socialist institutionalization. The picture
presented of the GDR includes the tacit assumption of an industrial landscape re-building from
the devastation of World War Two, vicarious participation in Soviet scientific achievements,
adequate educational resources, and a social setting of supportive human interaction.
Negatively, work place intrigues, party-line dogmatism, lack of individual fulfillment, and even
environmental pollution are also described. Differences with the West appear in the depiction of
life in a planned economy, of industries owned by the 'people', and the overt devaluation of the
West's hedonistic materialism, a viewpoint also familiar in literature throughout the world.
In 1969 Social Democrat Willy Brandt became Chancellor of West Germany, ending
twenty years of fairly conservative and staunchly anti-communist governance by the Christian
Democrats. Brandt repudiated the Hallstein-Doktrin, under which West Germany might retaliate
against countries that recognized the sovereignty of East Germany as a nation, and opened new
initiatives towards the East Bloc nations. After Ulbricht was replaced by Erich Honecker under
pressure from Moscow in 1971, the FRG and GDR concluded a treaty of mutual recognition. In
1973 both countries were admitted to the United Nations. Under Honecker, East German
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
109
Fulbrook, A Concise History 215.
!
220!
economic policy attempted to address the issue of consumer goods production but an initial
liberalization of ideological conformity disappeared in 1976 with the forced expatriation of Wolf
Biermann
110
and subsequent protest by East German intellectuals, including Christa Wolf.
111
The writing of Kindheitsmuster was thus situated in a tumultuous period and reveals those
tensions in the relationships between world, text, author, and ultimately, reader.
Kindheitsmuster places the adult fictive author and her family, both during their car trip
in 1971 and as the novel is 'being written' -- until 1975 -- within the Honecker era in East
Germany. While there are no direct political observations on the GDR, general allusions to the
quality of life are often reflected in conversations with the fictive author and her daughter Lenka.
Some of these draw a generational comparison between mother and daughter: the concept of
Heimat is meaningless to Lenka; she is depressed and uncertain about the possibility of her
generation participating in genocide;
112
she is shocked that a top student in her class at school
suggests forcible starvation for the elderly and ill as a solution to world famine.
113
A more
telling commentary on East German society resides in Lenka's observation that seventy-five
percent of the citizenry, industrial workers, do not have jobs that are personally fulfilling and
asks whether it is not an imposition on society that others, like her mother, as author, insist on
rewarding work. While admitting that under socialism pay is good and prices are low she is
enraged when malfunctioning machinery ruins her work assignments, when her co-workers
abandon their stations in favor of television. At issue is whether a lifetime of labor under
substandard and even hazardous working conditions is really worth the economic and social
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
110
Ibid. 217-218.
111
Magenau 271.
112
(a) K 191/PC 120; (b) Ibid. 281-282/179-180.
113
Ibid. 616/393-394.
!
221!
compensations.
114
The fictive author herself often muses on her position and future in a society
in which the remnants of the culture of Stalinism are still evident and historical memory becomes
lost in uncritical conformity.
115
Some have viewed the former Soviet bloc nations such as the German Democratic
Republic as embodying an "alternative modernity" to that of the Western democracies.
116
One
aspect of this modernity included the training of African and Asian health care workers
ostensibly accompanied also by much "politicization of development discourse."
117
From Julia
Hell's perspective comparison between the FRG and GDR reveals similarity within difference
more than a relationship of modernity to pre-modernity as some suggest.
118
Despite the fact that
it was founded as, and remained a political dictatorship, it was a society that also, in Kocka's
view, privileged reason and science and the implementation of industrial production for the
betterment of society through rationalization of life ways and governmental structures.
Functionally this meant that the ruling SED controlled all facets of society and culture with the
aim of eventually implementing a communist society and "the formation of a new personality
(neuer Mensch) by political means."
119
East German consumer culture was ideally oriented
toward equality of opportunity and practicality of goods. In practice, privilege accrued to Party
functionaries, the intelligentsia, and citizens with relatives in the FRG, after the normalization of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
114
Ibid. 425-426/273-274.
115
Ibid. 383-384; 561-562; 617-618/245; 361; 394-395.
116
Pence and Betts 11.
117
Young-Sun Hong, ""The Benefits of Health Must Spread Among All': International
Solidarity, Health, and Race in the East German Encounter with the Third World," Pence and
Betts 183-210; 194.
118
Hell 6-7.
119
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 41.
!
222!
relations during the Brandt administration made possible gifts and Western currency.
120
The regime both relied on and distrusted its technical corps and intelligentsia. Distrust of
the inclinations of the citizenry at large, perhaps not without grounds considering the history of
Nazism, led the regime to invest heavily in sociological research and culminated at one point, in
Ulbricht's "Ten Commandments for the New Socialist Person," a set of rules for "everyday
decency and discipline."
121
Socially deviant behavior was originally considered an aspect of
class struggle but over time, the "comprehensive systems theory of GDR reality defined
asociality as its own social subsystem."
122
One way of controlling this 'subsystem' was to
develop among the citizenry a system of inoffizielle Mitarbeiter to collaborate with the
Staatssicherheitsdienst (Stasi) in identifying problematic individuals.
123
Capital punishment was
in effect until 1987 and attempts to flee the country were frequently fatal.
The GDR could also be anti-Semitic in practice if not in theory.
124
The focal point for
this assessment is the fact that while communism theoretically espouses the equality of all, the
practical overcoming of centuries of prejudice often appeared to lack any official support. In
1950 the regime designated Jews as victims of the Nazi regime but enacted no substantial
financial restitution.
125
As a communist bloc nation, East German foreign policy frequently
aligned itself with states at war with Israel, in socialist solidarity. East German Jews perceived
to be supporting Israel were therefore under suspicion and became subject to harassment and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
120
Ina Merkel, "Alternative Rationalities, Strange Dreams, Absurd Utopias: On Socialist
Advertising and Market Research," Pence and Betts 323-344; 340-341.
121
Greg Eghigian, "Homo Munitus: The East German Observed," Pence and Betts 37-70; 44-45.
122
Thomas Lindenberger, "'Asociality' and Modernity: The GDR as a Welfare Dictatorship,"
Pence and Betts 211-233; 220.
123
Eghigian 54.
124
Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard University Press, 1997) 106ff.
125
Ibid. 95.
!
223!
imprisonment.
126
From a purely social viewpoint, historical prejudice continued.
127
As in West
Germany, a number of government officials and bureaucrats had held similar positions during
the Nazi era.
128
At its beginning, the GDR’s Jewish population included prominent returnees
from exile like Ernst Bloch, Hanns Eisler, and Anna Seghers. After the denunciation for
espionage, expulsion from the SED, and imprisonment of returned communist activist exile Paul
Merker, in the early 1950s, many in the Jewish community fled to the West.
129
The net result
was to render concern about specifically Jewish issues, e.g. the Holocaust and support for Israel,
effectively nonexistent in GDR political discourse.
Discourses on the constitution of society in the Federal Republic of Germany frequently
involved the narrative of belonging to Western civilization with appropriate contemporary
political ties.
130
The country became integrated into the European Economic Community and
began a program of reparations payments to victims of German aggression during World War
Two.
131
A further unifying narrative involved the idea of the "defense of freedom" against
Soviet aggression, yet there was also a strong support for neutrality, and to some extent
consideration, albeit diminishing, of the FRG as a continuation of 'traditional' German society,
re-vivified if not re-instituted after interruption by the Third Reich. There was also a desire to
differentiate the culture from American influence regarded ambivalently as the expression of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
126
Ibid. 132-134.
127
Ibid. 106.
128
Ibid. 188.
129
Jeffrey Herf, East German Communists and the Jewish Question: the Case of Paul Merker,
Fourth Alois Mertes Memorial Lecture, German Historical Institute Occasional Paper No. 11
(Washington, D. C.: German Historical Institute, 1994) 15ff.
130
Wolfrum 109.
131
Ibid. 177.
!
224!
progress or the epitome of soullessness in the technological age.
132
By the end of its first decade West German society substantially conformed, in Kocka's
estimation, to the civil society ideal.
133
As the society became more prosperous and with a
generous commitment to social welfare, class antagonisms receded,
134
but women remained less
integrated into the workforce than in East Germany.
135
The West German constitution abolished
the death penalty in 1949 and the system of justice conformed to European principles.
Ironically, in the 1970s, during the era of liberalizing tendencies under the Social Democratic
administrations of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, the nation witnessed an outbreak of left-
wing political violence by Marxism-inspired youth such as the members of the Red Army
Faction. Much of this energy was fueled by disgust with the U.S. war in Vietnam and dismay on
first learning of the older generation's full involvement in the Holocaust.
136
At the same time and
throughout the separate history of West Germany and still today, neo-Nazi movements and
parties as well as anti-Semitic outbreaks continued and have continued to attract adherents.
137
Considering these narratives concerning the nature of life in the two Germanys during the
Cold War era the question of the distinction of their relationship to the concept of modernity
would appear to be contingent upon the manner in which each nation conformed to ideals of
emancipation of their citizenry within the construct of a pluralistic 'civil society'. For Kocka the
FRG strove to fulfill Enlightenment ideals and indeed derived identity from continuity with this
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
132
(a) Fulbrook, German National Identity 61; (b) Wolfrum 181-184.
133
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 30.
134
Alf Lüdtke, “The World of Men's Work, East and West," trans. Katherine Pence and Paul
Betts, Pence and Betts 234-249; 242-244.
135
Katherine Pence, "Women on the Verge: Consumers between Private Desires and Public
Crisis," Pence and Betts 287-321; 287.
136
Wolfrum 265-271.
137
Ibid. 132, 180.
!
225!
emphasis in Europe as a whole and the pre-National Socialist history of Germany in particular.
138
The GDR was, however, a dictatorship:
[. . .] slightly disguised one-party rule by the Socialist Unity Party [SED] without party
competition and democratic elections, and without legitimate opposition.
139
Kocka is clear, however, that comparability to Hitler's dictatorship, in terms of motivation and
brutality is unsubstantiable.
140
Kocka sees this society as not one purely of dominance but of "asymmetric symbiosis"
between the state bureaucracy and its citizens.
141
Yet the degree to which government permeated
the lives of the citizens leads him to view the GDR as possibly more "totalitarian" than the Nazi
dictatorship.
142
From the perspectives considered, the German Democratic Republic could not
be considered an example of pluralistic civil society based on its own description of striving for
the "building of a post-bourgeois, socialist, finally communist society and the formation of a new
personality . . . by political means . . . ."
143
The question of its relation to 'modernity' and the
concept of emancipation may not be thereby settled, however.
Adjudicating the conflicting and competing claims of the constitution of Enlightenment-
derived civil society, degrees of personal liberty, and the relation of both to the concept of
modernity resides in the realm of historical and philosophical analysis. These narratives and their
discourses become situated dialogically among an array of significations and dialectically among
an array of choices and their possible integrative (or irresolvable) interactions. Die
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
138
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 29-31.
139
Ibid. 40.
140
Ibid. 35.
141
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 43.
142
Ibid. 56.
143
Ibid. 41.
!
226!
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster as fictional counterparts to historiography perform these
functions also, emplacing the reader, the texts, and the surrounding worlds relative to these
arrays of significations and choices, in this case regarding the constitution and import of 'modern'
processes in the two Germanys. The problem with the entire analysis is that it assumes at the
outset one grand narrative of ‘modernity’ based on the history and values of the rise of the
bourgeoisie, of which it is also a product and as such, a completely tautologous construction. To
the definition of modernity as the ‘consciousness of living in a new time’ has been added the
accidents of certain Enlightenment values to the exclusion of alternative possibilities.
Edward Said trenchantly critiqued the logic whereby Ernest Renan analyzed the religion
of Islam "as a postscript to a postscript, a trace of a trace."
144
Similarly, Homi Bhabha questions
a European modernity based on the constant "reconstruction and reinvention of the subject" in
relation to a "contra-modernity"
145
of colonialism in which liberating potential is denied to non-
Europeans within the paradigm of rationalization and scientism characterizing greater freedoms
in the West.
146
It could be argued that an echo of this problematic may be found in Grass’s
exploration of culturally dominated European ethnic groups, such as the Kashubian and Polish
populations. Wolf directly criticizes American attitudes of superiority to and actions regarding
Vietnam and its people.
147
There appears also more than an echo of this dynamic in the
expression of the way the capitalist West is related to the socialist Eastern bloc in Wolf's work.
Yet neither Grass nor Wolf are advocating a right wing theory of Germany as a victim of
colonialism. From the late twentieth century to the present, issues of identity and difference
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
144
Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic 281-282.
145
Bhabha, The Location of Culture 344.
146
Ibid. 345.
147
K 600/PC 384.
!
227!
have sensitized world culture to exclusionary narratives. This sensitivity may partially inform
the comparison of distinct political entities, the FRG and GDR, within one cultural unit, the
German language sphere, during the Cold War.
There are two principal ways that societies could be said to embody, as political entities,
alternative modernities: (1) through variant and conflicting validity claims for the
implementation of the goals of a commonly agreed upon modern society, and (2) variant
definitions of the constitution of a modern society. The theoretical models surveyed to this point
were derived initially from Western European sociological constructs and utilize these, although
with great modification over the years, as measures of modernity.
148
Kocka has viewed the GDR
as modern in its centralized government, efficient bureaucratic administration, industrialization,
and its break with traditional gender and family roles. He universalizes to a greater or lesser
extent the constructs through which he measures the problem. Paradoxically, the governing
forces within the GDR acquiesced in measuring their culture by the same standards of ‘capitalist
modernity’.
149
They claimed they had a better way to a similar goal.
From the universalist perspective, a society that sees itself as representative of a ‘new
time’ and desired to live in the openness of a non-deterministic future, would appear to be less
than modern if it devalued the specific additional civil and technological characteristics imputed
by Western theorists thereto. The idea that such constructs may themselves be anti-modern in
actually precluding access to a more socially fulfilling, non-deterministic condition, although a
minority discourse at intervals, has not been seriously entertained in the West for most of the
period since the end of World War Two. The universalist view, critical to establishing
replicability of results in the sciences, is, in philosophy and sociology, a descendant of Kantian
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
148
Pence and Betts 15.
149
Ibid. 17, 19.
!
228!
precepts in which “human actions” even though manifestations of “freedom of the will [italics
removed]” are “determined . . . in conformity with universal natural laws.”
150
Marxist positions,
building on the Hegelian skepticism toward abstract universals,
151
posit the social construction of
‘reality’, but are also conflicted over the import of modernity. The goals of communism did not
preclude the continuity of technologization when machines become the “property of the
associated workers.”
152
Communist governments actually practiced the same rationalizing
organizational measures as their capitalist counterparts; the only anti-modern representatives
were regimes based on local traditionalist cultures and murderous variants like the Khmer Rouge.
In a country like East Germany civil society and the rights of the citizenry were differently
defined than in the West and often denied in practice. For many, like Christa Wolf, in
comparison to the Nazi regime and the competition oriented capitalist world, a society that
provided for its citizens’ wellbeing and extended the hope of a future open to the generalization
of this condition to humanity as a whole, could evoke disillusionment but not the loss of utopian
striving.
153
6.4.2 Grass and Wolf
Die Blechtrommel, expresses its commentary on modernity and its constituents most
often through the media of irony and satire, which as expressed earlier, posits the validity of that
which is absent in the text, essentially through negative signification. Kindheitsmuster adopts
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
150
Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent” (1784), trans. Ted
Humphrey, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays: on Politics, History, and Morals, ed. and trans.
Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis,Cambridge: Hackett, 1983) 29-40; 29.
151
Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic 296-299.
152
Karl Marx, “Capitalism, Alienation, and Communism,” from The Grundrisse [selections],
The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd. ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York and
London: W. W. Norton, 1978) 221-293; 292.
153
Magenau 381.
!
229!
this strategy in regard to certain problematics, like the nature of subjectivity, but in other areas,
such as the advancement of world peace and human rights (from the narrator's perspective) there
is usually direct commentary, although often of an ambivalent import in relation to the
shortcomings of GDR society. In this manner both novels narrativize historical data and so
situate the elements of their stories that two similar but ultimately different discourses of
personal and societal emancipation, and thus two views of modernity, communicate themselves
to the reader.
In Die Blechtrommel one gains a sense for the outlines of a positive German cultural
identity on two levels. The first issues from the conception of a society opposite the satirical
picture painted in the novel, one that faces its past honestly, that abjures the popular and
intellectual cultural narratives of irrationalism and aestheticism and accepts responsibility for
historical actions. The second is the figure of Oskar re-imagined as divested of nihilistic,
megalomaniacal traits in favor of individualistic, irreverent, somewhat anarchical attitudes
transforming the character into a figure more reminiscent of, for instance, Till Eulenspiegel. In
this mythic culture hero role Oskar discomforts the comfortable and challenges the conventional
through the unceasing questioning of German society's foundations and goals. In
Kindheitsmuster, the vision of a positive cultural identity first involves making whole the split
personal subjectivity born of guilt. The second is the integration of such whole persons within a
culture that is equitable, i.e. socialist but also allows for the development of the individual in free
association with others, and in the accomplishment of these goals throws off the burden of what
Julia Hell refers to as "the paternal family narrative."
154
Given the nature of the two Germanys, on what bases may the works invoke the images
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
154
Hell 198.
!
230!
of such different 'just' societies? A partial answer might be recovered by viewing the works as
products of authors as members of a specific generation of Germans. Wolf's fictive
author/narrator in particular, foregrounds the issue of generational attributes.
155
Die
Blechtrommel is of course not an autobiography but nevertheless depends on Grass’s life
experiences and observations for its detail.
156
Kindheitsmuster, also not an autobiography,
closely reflects Wolf's experiences and personal concerns.
157
In Chapter 2 of the dissertation
brief biographies and sketches of the cultural scene of the FRG and GDR were presented. The
works of Grass’s and Wolf's contemporaries, those mostly born in the 1920's, raised under
Nazism, or like Paul Celan having suffered under Nazism, reveal different and often conflicting
responses to that experience that situate history, subjectivity, and identity (cultural and national),
in short the hallmarks of enlightenment and modernity, into a nexus that defines different views
of the constellation of these elements and their potential for liberation from the effects of their
fascist and war ravaged youth.
Although Wolf's work in particular has been tagged with the label 'subjective
authenticity' the writings of most of this generation have the potential to engage the
consciousness of the reader of similar background. If Günter Grass and Siegfried Lenz write of
their displacement due to the redrawing of international boundaries, there exists an audience with
similar experience.
158
As a measure of the 'difference in similarity' of conceptions of society and
the intellectual's place within it, as the space that overcomes the fascist past, it can be noted that
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
155
K 198, 233/PC 125, 148.
156
Julian Preece, "Biography as Politics," The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, ed.
Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 10-23; 10.
157
Wolf, "Eine Diskussion über Kindheitsmuster" 93.
158
Stuart Parkes, "Günter Grass and his contemporaries in East and West," The Cambridge
Companion to Günter Grass, ed. Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009) 209-222; 220.
!
231!
most of this generation became politically engaged; Grass, in the FRG, as member of the Social
Democratic Party and friend of Willy Brandt and Christa Wolf, in the GDR, as member of the
Socialist Unity Party, and acquaintance of the prominent leaders, including Erich Honecker.
159
It
would appear, however, that if each writer inhabited a definitionally modern society one would
at least have to constrain that definition with the modifier: alternative. A number of issues arise
in this connection. As Kocka points out, the concept of an open civil society, descended from
Enlightenment ideals, has been just that, an ideal, imperfectly implemented in practice in any
society. The descent of these ideals through Marxist channels has also, knowingly, [e.g. Marx's
‘third stage’ of communism: “the positive transcendence of private property . . . the real
appropriation of the human essence by and for man”
160
italics in original] never been practically
implemented.
It is therefore possible to view Wolf's commitments as embodying unrealized hopes for a
modern society superior in promoting equity and justice to those of the West, and as such the
epitome of emancipatory modernity beyond the level of its inception by the eighteenth and
nineteenth century bourgeoisies. In this respect, as Anke Pinkert observes,
In contrast to the GDR state's mythologizing of the communist resistance to fascism,
Kindheitsmuster suggests that a full and truthful account of Germany's national socialist
past would lead to a more conscientious socialist present and serve to guide future-
oriented action.
161
Wolf recalls in her collection of essays Auf dem Weg nach Tabou that she and other East German
intellectuals wished, with strengthened socialist principles to make the GDR into a real
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
159
Magenau 289-290.
160
Marx,“Private Property and Communism” 102.
161
Pinkert 26.
!
232!
alternative to the capitalist FRG. The irony is that these thoughts were recorded on the occasion
of the eleventh Party Plenum in 1965 at which she realized that this possibility was being
submerged in totalitarian and ideological control by the Party Central Committee.
162
Pinkert’s
diagnosis of this dilemma is that East German intellectuals, including Christa Wolf, entered into
a “symbiotic” relationship with the state in which they both supported and sought to “corrode the
authority of the state”
163
in strategies of only “soft dissidence.”
164
Wolfgang Emmerich asks if Christa Wolf's continued validation of a utopian outlook
within a repressive regime invalidates her aesthetics and message, linked as they are.
165
Wolf’s
publication in 1989 of the short novel Was bleibt was the occasion in Germany for an outpouring
of criticism and prolonged debate on the responsibilities of the writer. Seeing the protagonist of
the novel as identical to Wolf herself, the journalist Ulrich Greiner attacked her sincerity in
portraying herself as a victim of state control while enjoying privileges as, in Greiner’s words a
Staatsdichterin.
166
Frank Schirrmacher used the occasion to question the integrity of leftist
intellectuals in the GDR and, as the Literaturstreit escalated, Greiner called into question the
position of post-war West and East German attempts at Vergangenheitsbewältigung as
Gesinnungsästhetik, that took as its themes the fight against fascism, Stalinism, traditionalism,
etc. all of which he characterized as illegitimate concerns of literature.
167
Günter Kunert, an
emigré from the GDR, announced the return of l’art pour l’art as the proper realm of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
162
Wolf, Auf dem Weg nach Tabou 60-62.
163
Pinkert 30.
164
Ibid. 25.
165
Emmerich 277.
166
Ulrich Greiner, “Was bleibt. Bleibt Was? Pro und Contra: eine ZEIT-Kontroverse über C.W
und ihre neue Erzählung,” Die Zeit, 1 June 1990.
167
Ulrich Greiner, “Deutsche Gesinnnungsästhetik, noch einmal Christa Wolf und der deutsche
Literaturstreit: Eine Zwischenbilanz,” Die Zeit, 2 November 1990.
!
233!
literature.
168
The second Literaturstreit began a little later with revelations of cooperation between the
Stasi and East German intellectuals such as Sascha Anderson, Heiner Müller, and Christa Wolf,
the latter as Inoffizielle or Informelle Mitarbeiterin between 1959 and 1962.
169
The first of these
‘literature disputes’ was transparently an effort by conservative publicists to devalue and bring to
a close any continuance of deep engagement with the National Socialist past in the new, united
Germany. In its own way, unification would be a new Stunde Null in which the triumph of
capitalism and traditional values would obviate a need for the encumbrance of historical guilt.
This, of course was part of a larger effort by ‘neo-conservatives’ throughout Europe and the
United States to exercise political power on the strength of discourses that proclaimed an end to
historical and cultural competition and diversity on the basis of the absolute ascendancy of the
capitalist West, as proven by the collapse of communism within the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe. The literary aspect re-played the long running debate over the pertinence of the socially
‘committed intellectual’, ongoing since Sartre. The separation of art and life is exactly the
attitude of established writers in the early years of the Bundesrepublik that Grass satirizes in Die
Blechtrommel. Both Grass and Wolf had elaborated artistic credos that described themselves as
politically engaged citizens who were also writers.
170
The cooperation of East German intellectuals with the State Security apparatus
potentially raises more questions about writers regarded in the West as dissidents, and about
Christa Wolf as feminist author. This discussion glosses over the extent to which intellectuals
who participate in the life of their countries with any attitude except dissidence are enveloped in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
168
Günter Kunert, “Der Sturz vom Sockel. Zum Streit der deutschen Autoren,” Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 September 1990.
169
Beutin et al. 665-667.
170
Nury Kim 241.
!
234!
responsibility for the actions of the respective governments. Western intellectuals, including
Grass, are believed to have knowingly received support from the CIA during the Cold War
period.
171
When the Wall fell, many in the West were perplexed by the continued commitment
of East German writers like Wolf and Müller and Volker Braun to a ‘reformed’ communism.
Doing otherwise could be construed as merely opportunistic. It is a matter of record that Wolf
was under state surveillance and she and her husband had certainly received reprimands and loss
of positions for the degree of dissidence they did practice. In her writings on German problems,
she is, as a socialist able to reference the fact that many if not most of the independence
movements throughout Africa and Asia were opposed by the 'enlightened' democracies of
Europe and the United States until quite late in the Cold War era, as well as narratives of
patriarchal domination. Such arguments are perhaps irresolvable, they form the material for the
reader’s construction of discourses about the issues involved in consideration of the pertinent
issues and alternatives. The controversies thus constitute a part of the extended narratives
associated with Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster. A question implicitly posed by this
situation is one more commonly applicable to charges of complicity in the Holocaust: what
would you have done?
Since the 1980s and 1990s many writers have experimented with ‘aestheticist’ concerns,
sometimes de-politicized, sometimes not. Both Grass and Wolf have passed from the scene but
German literature, like world literature in general, is extremely diverse and includes continued
engagement with social issues, particularly among authors from an immigrant background; one
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
171
Sven Hanuschek, "Der Fund for Intellectual Freedom: Ein Propagandainstrument des Kalten
Kriegs?" Schriftsteller als Intellektuelle: Politik und Literatur im Kalten Krieg, Studien und
Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur, Band 73, eds. Sven Hanuschek, Therese Hörnigk, and
Christine Malende (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000) 285-306; 286.
!
235!
thinks of Herta Müller or Emine Sevgi Özdamar, whose productions could hardly be subsumed
under the heading of l’art pour l’art. Self-expression through internet social media also arguably
comprises a type of literature in the twenty-first century and that expression is highly politicized
and representative of many perspectives on the political spectrum. How one narrativizes one’s
interactions with the world and expressions of opinion communicated by many means in relation
to one’s own self-perception and role in a society are ultimately the issues of the contemporary
world into which Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster conceptually emplace the reader as the
legacy of the alternative embodiments of modernity.
!
236!
7. The Holocaust: Negation, Negotiation, and Normalization
7.1 Problem: Nature and Scope
Since the end of World War Two the discourses that have most characterized the cultures
of Germany and Austria are those surrounding the Shoah. Into the present time cultural memory,
intellectual discussion, and governmental policies have been marked by their relationship to this
horrific event.
1
Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster therefore not only cannot avoid
reference to the Holocaust, but at the conceptual level, if not formally, each takes this event as a
central focus of the narratives comprising the novels’ various discourses. Neither novel is
explicitly about the Holocaust per se but each fashion their narratives into fictive
historiographical and sociological metacommentaries that link societal experience and its
memory, as history, with the constitution of particular subjectivities, and locate these within the
socio-political concept of modernity in such a way, that genocide becomes the cognitive
focalizer for all the novels’ discussions of ‘normal’ life in Nazi Germany. In this sense, the
novels’ situation of narratives detailing attitudes of conformity, indifference to the fundamental
precepts of a civil society, opportunism, patriarchal domination, the perversions of national and
cultural consciousness, and the progressive exclusion of those deemed not to truly belong to
German society culminate in the logic of extermination. The delineation throughout the
dissertation of these factors as chapter specific problematics leads to an appreciation of the
conceptual centrality of the Holocaust in Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster.
The Holocaust emerges as an implied organizing principle of both novels through four
layers of enagagement. The first is the latent effect of the many covert allusions and implications
to the Holocaust as well as the frequently unspoken question of where the trajectory of lives
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Müller-Funk 210.
!
237!
becoming more organized around conformity, nationalism, and the drive for purity actually
leads. The second layer of Holocaust engagement in the novels is explicit reference. The third
layer is the moral challenge apparent in Die Blechtrommel’s ironic descriptions and in
Kindheitsmuster’s more direct ruminations on attitudes in the postwar Germanys. The fourth
layer is constituted by the authors’ awareness of personal entanglement in aspects of the National
Socialist societal death machine.
Of the four modes of Holocaust presence in the novels, the first three will figure
prominently in the explorations of this chapter; the fourth will be pursued more fully in the
“Conclusion” to the dissertation. The substantiality of mode number one in the novels is
apparent as a measure of the totalitarian nature of the Nazis’ grip on German society and the
dialogical connections between language and events that reflect that grip.
2
When Nelly
confronts the ideology encapsulated in a song by the construct ‘from the I to the we’ the void
signifying those who are not ‘we’ is filled by the victims, the Jewish population primarily. The
impossibility of that population being included in the construct, has, in conjunction with the
other elements of Nazi ideology only one logic: extermination. Every aspect of Oskar’s life and
transgressions in the Third Reich becomes the signifier of the real world solution to his
maladjustments: euthanasia. Mode number two finds much of its expression, similar to the
novels’ modes of historical reflection, in detail. In Die Blechtrommel this might be the
historicity of the Treblinka revolt, in Kindheitsmuster the functionings of Auschwitz. For both,
the process of Nazification is made real at the level of the lives led by individuals and families,
their fears and motivations. Mode three reflects the novels’ moral challenge to the reader and the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2
Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: A
Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (New York: Continuum, 2006); Klemperer’s
opinions are here considered instructive although not definitive.
!
238!
urge to enlighten. If fascism situates itself into the traditional structures of society with its
reverence for authority, its conformity, its rewarding of opportunism, and the primacy of
‘feeling’ over critical reflection, then the reader is faced with an existential ‘either/or’ choice of
life paths. The allocation of sense to the texts, as indicated in previous chapters of the
dissertation, also partakes of the decisional problematic – or else abandonment in the face of the
undecidable. The authors both face and faced the same choices involving honesty and
authenticity in their writing and in real life, respectively. This fact gave credence to the position
of Grass, Wolf, and other members of their generation as a collective moral authority. The basis
for such stature resides in the requirement that each, with complete candor, come to terms with
individual ancillary entanglement in the perpetration of mass murder.
The decisions made by Germans individually and collectively about how to regard
themselves in the past, in the present, and into the future have varied since defeat in World War
Two. It was once commonplace to observe that immediately after the war, the Shoah was little
mentioned either by survivors or perpetrators. This assertion has been questioned on the basis of
literature and accounts from the period. Perhaps more evident is the attempt by many in the non-
Jewish German population to minimize the suffering inflicted and project a Verharmlosung of
Hitler’s goals, in essence to negate the effects of genocide if not its factual basis. Later, of
course, both Germanys began to honestly come to terms with recent history and to negotiate a
way forward with acceptance of responsibility. Since unification, Germany has debated what a
narrative not of its ‘special’ status but as a ‘normal’ European nation might entail. Viewed in
this manner the dissertation will probe the societal import of such negation, negotiation, and
possible normalization on the basis of their salient characteristics in Grass’s and Wolf’s novels.
In doing so, the conceptual framework will be the intersection of these categories with the
!
239!
aforementioned three modes of engagement through which the Holocaust is everywhere in the
texts made present.
The fictive author’s interrogation in Kindheitsmuster of how “we became as we are” and
Oskar’s forcing of his personal history upon the reader in Die Blechtrommel also implicitly
comprises the question, in relation to the Holocaust, “how could we, as Germans, initiate and
prosecute mass murder on a hitherto almost unimaginable scale?” This is perhaps the single
most important rationale for designating the Holocaust as the central concept in the novels. If it
were not for the encumbrance of a brutal and genocidal history, on a scale that many have
thought unfathomable, there would be little point in writing of a society-wide guilt capable of
deforming individual personalities as a historical tragedy. Narratives of the Nazi era and
conceivably of the war would come together in discourses of the relative merits of the various
solutions to the societal problems of the mid-twentieth century: a debate between the alternatives
of communism, New Deal or Keynesian economics, and fascism. The novels explore Wolf’s
author’s question by situating the reader through their texts into worlds in which genocide could
be possible. The world in which the Holocaust was not only possible but actually occurred, has
been described by witnesses, victims, chroniclers, and historians. The discourses of these groups
differ from those of fiction, even though based on narrativization of data, in that they claim a
truth-value for their descriptions located in the materiality of genocide itself. In relation to these
the discourses of fiction work at the conceptual level, engaging the reader’s imagination for
processing ideas not only of what occurred but also of what could have occurred and in what
way.
Although direct reference to persecution and genocide in Die Blechtrommel and
Kindheitsmuster is sparse the novels instantiate a typology that subsumes the essence of real
!
240!
world evental history. The novels eschew answers to Wolf’s author’s question, above, in
disquisitions on the large movements of history – defeat in the First World War, despair during
the Great Depression, deep-seated anti-Semitism – as abstract undertakings. Die Blechtrommel
and Kindheitsmuster approach the issues from the perspective of the individual and the family,
from the perspectives of the narrative voices. The typology broadly reflects (1) the acceptance of
Nazism by the population in 1933 and over the years, (2) the perpetration of crimes against
humanity, and (3) the complicity, at some level, of the populace in these crimes. These
categories are reflected here under the subheadings: “National Socialists,” “Perpetrators,” and
“Ordinary Germans.” To the extent that the paucity of Holocaust references causes the novels to
seemingly disappear into their real world contexts, those same referents emerge as the real loci of
the narratives, transpiring in the mind of the reader on the basis of the known history.
7.2 Negation
7.2.1 National Socialists
Reading the novels against non-fictional explications demonstrates some of the
complexities of coming to terms with the rise of Nazism and the implementation of the
Holocaust. In Die Blechtrommel “the era of torchlight parades and grandstand assemblies”
3
is
predicted by Bebra as a time of pogrom yet he advises a strategy of survival through assimilation
to the mass culture.
4
Oskar’s German father, Matzerath, joins the Party in 1934, having
“recognized the forces of law and order relatively early on [. . .].”
5
Significantly, these
passages are placed within the larger context of Sigismund Markus’ warnings to Agnes, from the
previous chapter, to side with the German, Matzerath rather than the Pole, Bronski, for the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3
TD 102/B 144.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid. 103/146.
!
241!
Germans are “going to be on top, sooner or later [. . .].”
6
In Kindheitsmuster the coming to
power of the National Socialists in the town L. is presented with a torchlight parade on a
particular day, March 17, 1933. The fabula in which this event is embedded also presents the
driving of the German Communist Party out of L., forced recantation by its leaders, and
jubilation by the majority of the town’s citizens.
7
The historical record shows that throughout
Germany in the month of March 1933, the Nazi regime effectively seized power in all parts of
Germany, imprisoning known and suspected opponents. The father of Heiner Müller, a Social
Democratic activist, was arrested on 9 March.
8
While these types of actions are met cautiously
by Nelly’s parents and even with a certain foreboding by her mother, a glimpse into what
National Socialism could mean to some is more evident in the passages surrounding the figure of
Juliane Strauch, Nelly’s teacher.
The character Dr. Juliane Strauch, intellectual, unmarried, yet proponent of the “ideal
German woman”
9
counterbalances the ideological instrumentalization of women for
reproductive and nurturing purposes in the service of an ‘Aryan’ nation and signifies the
possibility of seeing in the National Socialist völkisch organizing principle a greater chance for
personal attainment than under traditional or socialistic orientation,
10
also for women. Thus, in
addition to Nazi affiliation as a vehicle to unleash brutality born of deep-seated anti-Semitic
hatred, a discourse emerges, not only in fiction but also historiographically, of individuation and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
TD 94/B 133; TD 103/B 146.
7
K 87-88/PC 53-54.
8
Jan-Christoph Hauschild, Heiner Müller oder das Prinzip Zweifel: eine Biographie (Berlin:
Aufbau Verlag, 2003) 26.
9
PC 219/K 344.
10
Michalka 700-701.
!
242!
a feeling of security within the goal-oriented society of the Volksgemeinschaft.
11
For
Kindheitsmuster’s narrative the unremarkable texture of life for non-Jewish Germans within this
society has been referred to by the signature phrase, “der ganz normale Alltag des Faschismus.”
12
Ultimately, ‘normality’ included the ability of large sectors of German civil society, viz.
academia, the churches, the business community, even the traditional representatives of the labor
force, to accommodate themselves to the new order.
13
By comparison, perusing relevant historical data on the Nazification of German society
raises questions and might elicit some surprise at the scope of the involvement of ordinary
Germans. For instance, the famed organist and Protestant church composer Hugo Distler joined
the Party,
14
as did a law student named Kurt Georg Kiesinger, Chancellor of the Federal
Republic from 1966 to 1969,
15
also Martin Heidegger. In the general elections of 1932 the
National Socialist Party received 33% of the vote with 79.9% voter participation. An increase in
nationalist sentiment on the whole was observable in the electoral results, even if not specifically
for the Nazis.
16
Aside from sociological theories of group behavior, the question remains why
individuals associated themselves with Nazism. The novels pursue the theme with the stories of,
for instance, greengrocer Greff, Matzerath, and trumpeter Meyn, in Die Blechtrommel and
Nelly’s parents and social circle in Kindheitsmuster. There are generational differences in the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11
Ibid. 701.
12
Firsching 69.
13
Michalka 704.
14
Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (New
York, London: Oxford University Press, 1997) 165.
15
Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Kurt Georg Kiesinger,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, web.
16
Martin Vogt, "Die Weimarer Republik (1918-1933)," Deutsche Geschichte: Von den Anfängen
bis zur Gegenwärt, ed. Martin Vogt et al., 3rd. ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch
Verlag, 2002) 616-693; 690.
!
243!
novels and in reality; the motivations of the World War One generation, the parents of Nelly and
Oskar, differ from those significantly younger, particularly those coming to maturity under
National Socialism who had few other standards for opinion formation.
One perhaps unavoidably evaluates by categorization. There are the leaders of the
regime, tried at Nuremberg, and their personal histories and psychologies. There are those who
staffed the concentration camps. There are the leaders of industry, also professional people,
academics, and research scientists. For many, Party membership or identification with its goals
was necessary or desirable for a successful career. There are intellectuals, writers, and
journalists, some of whom claimed, in their quietism, to have exercised an ‘inner emigration.’
There are some who resisted in various ways or were able to emigrate. There are those who
were murdered. How does one regard the others? A standard answer situates the majority of the
German populace into discourses of apathy and political naiveté. Grass’s and Wolf’s novels
attempt to explore the dynamics behind these.
7.2.2 Perpetrators
In Kindheitsmuster, Nelly gradually comes to the awareness that the members of L.’s
Jewish community, although not even communists, were effectively becoming outcasts from the
larger community. Although no relevant body of law existed in 1933, it is clear that the entire
program of the National Socialist Party regarding the Jewish population falls under the present
legal definition of genocide. The specifications adopted by the United Nations in 1948 identifies
the crime as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious
group” through killing, “[c]ausing serious bodily or mental harm; . . . inflicting conditions of life
calculated to bring about . . . physical destruction; . . . [i]mposing measures intended to prevent
!
244!
births,” and “[f]orcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
17
All these
measures were, of course, implemented as policy by Hitler’s regime at some point between 1933
and 1945. With progressive codification of restrictions on Jewish Germans, including the
Nuremberg laws of 1935,
18
all non-Jewish Germans were aware of the official policies and
conducted their daily lives with that knowledge. By Saul Friedländer’s analysis the majority of
the German populace, although traditionally anti-Semitic and not averse to segregating the
Jewish population, “shied away from widespread violence against them, urging neither their
expulsion from the Reich nor their physical annihilation.”
19
Friedländer in no way minimizes by
this statement, the extent to which average citizens and institutions acquiesced, after somewhat
tepid remonstrance, in the growing persecution of Jewish Germans.
20
Kindheitsmuster treats Kristallnacht in some detail, giving also statistics on the
destruction. The story is embedded within a disquisition on Nelly’s acquaintance with fear,
fostered by propaganda, but not with compassion.
21
Nelly goes to the site of the local synagogue
after it burns and witnesses members of the congregation attempting to save valuables and
religious heirlooms.
Um ein Haar wäre Nelly eine unpassende Empfindung unterlaufen: Mitgefühl. Aber der
gesunde deutsche Menschenverstand baute eine Barriere dagegen, als Angst.
22
The passage parenthetically suggests that one who as a child has been forced to have feelings of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
17
Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide” (New York:
Harper Collins, 2002) 57.
18
Michalka 716.
19
Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1 (New York: Harper Collins, 1997); 4.
20
Ibid. 49-54.
21
K 246 -250/PC 156-159.
22
Ibid. 253/160.
!
245!
compassion displaced by fear and hatred may also lack compassion for oneself as well as others.
Die Blechtrommel references the November pogrom within the chapter “Glaube
Hoffnung Liebe” beginning,
[e]s war einmal ein Musiker, der hieß Meyn und konnte ganz wunderschön Trompete
blasen [,]
23
and continues with fairy tale like parallelism, “[e]s war einmal en SA-Mann, der hieß Meyn[,]”
and “[e]s war einmal ein Blechtrommler, der hieß Oskar[,]” etc. The chapter develops the tale of
SA-Mann Meyn, who attempts to kill his cats but fails, is expelled from the SA [Sturmabteilung]
but redeems himself by participating on Kristallnacht in the burning of the Langfuhr synagogue
and later the vandalizing of businesses in the Jewish community. In the end he joins the Home
Guard, which becomes part of the Waffen-SS.
24
The toy merchant Sigismund Markus, the
source of Oskar’s drums, commits suicide as his shop is assaulted by SA thugs. The extension of
the fairy tale conceit to the picturing of an immature populace believing in the Weihnachtsmann
who is actually the Gasmann places the narrative at the threshold of the ‘Final Solution’.
The historical record of Kristallnacht reveals the vicious opportunism of the Nazi regime
in seeking excuses to harm Jews. Toward the end of 1938 the Nazi regime attempted to
repatriate Jews of Polish origin but the government of Poland initially refused their return
creating an uncertain future for several thousand individuals consigned to refugee camps. On
November 7, 1938 the son of one of the affected families assassinated a German diplomat in
Paris. Between 8 and 10 November the Nazis used this as pretext to initiate a pogrom that
resulted in the vandalizing of thousands of Jewish businesses, the burning of hundreds of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
23
B 253/TD 181.
24
Ibid. 258-259/185.
!
246!
synagogues, many deaths, and incarceration numbering in the tens of thousands of members of
the Jewish community in concentration camps.
25
The history of the Holocaust is unevenly partitioned between Grass’s and Wolf’s novels.
In Die Blechtrommel, overt mention centers on the figure of Mariusz Fajngold, a former inmate
of the Treblinka death camp. In Kindheitsmuster, there are numerous entries referencing
concentration camps, prominent figures such as Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Höss, first
commandant of Auschwitz, and the program of genocide in which they participated. The subtitle
for Chapter 11 is “Final Solution.” With the beginning of World War Two the Nazi regime
considered a number of strategies to both dispose of German, and increasingly European Jews
and possibly to use them for diplomatic and military advantage. In the end, plans for mass
removal from Europe came to nothing. Jews in areas occupied by German forces were confined
to ghettos or deported to concentration camps where they died of starvation, illness, and
maltreatment.
26
Kindheitsmuster’s recognition of this history is, as with other significant ideas in
the novel, situated in relation to the bifurcation of Nelly and the adult fictive author. For the
former there is, on the occasion of her confirmation in 1943, the lack of knowledge of the
Warsaw ghetto uprising and the resistance activities of Roman Catholics, Sophie and Hans
Scholl in Germany. For the latter there is not only knowledge but the at least partial equation of
the living conditions of African-Americans with those of Jews in the ghettos and ascription of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
25
(a) Karol Jonca, “Kristallnacht,” The Holocaust Encyclopedia, ed. Walter Laqueur (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001) 385-391; 390 (b) Michalka 717.
26
Shlomo Aronson and Peter Longerich, “Final Solution: Preparation and Implementation,” The
Holocaust Encyclopedia, ed. Walter Laqueur (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2001) 184-198; 188.
!
247!
complacent racism to white Americans in not believing uprisings to be possible against their
hegemonic rule.
27
The implementation of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” is considered to have
begun with the murder by Einsatzgruppen [mobile killing squads] of targeted groups, then ever
larger segments of populations, at first by shooting, then in mobile gas vans by carbon monoxide
gas, and ultimately in camps with Zyklon-B gas. Wolf’s fictive author comments on her
daughter’s generation’s affective distance from the Holocaust through discussion of the I. G.
Farben company’s support for human experimentation at Auschwitz. A map of concentration
camps elicits the observation that trains bound for Chelmno, Majdanek and Treblinka probably
went through the town L. Yet Nelly never heard of such transports either during or after the
war.
28
The adult author’s knowledge also encompasses the end result of not being that which
Nelly knew she had to be: normal. The adult knows that methods pioneered in the Nazi
euthanasia program were transferred to technology for the extermination of millions.
29
In this
material fact, illustrated also by the need of some characters in Kindheitsmuster such as the
Lehmanns to justify themselves as ‘Aryans’
30
the author implicitly knows a truth of Nazi
ideology, expressed by Omer Bartov.
In this quest for perfection, everyone was potentially tainted, and no proof of
ancestry could protect one from allegations of pollution . . . . The boundless
definition of "purity" therefore made for an endless pool of potential victims [. . .] .
31
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
27
K 400-401/PC 257.
28
K 367-369/PC 235-236.
29
Ibid. 310/198.
30
Ibid. 371-373/238-239.
31
Omer Bartov, “Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust,” The
American Historical Review 103.3 (June 1998): 771-816; 786.
!
248!
The danger of euthanasia is very real for ‘abnormal’ Oskar in Die Blechtrommel. Considering
the range of symbolism embodied by this figure -- ‘every German’, a little Hitler, the outsider
and non-conformist, etc. – the threat of annihilation effectively signifies the threat of the fascist
personality to its own different manifestations and through externalization, the threat to
exterminate others, for the imaginary ‘impurity’ that one cannot abide in oneself.
In Kindheitsmuster, the fictive author notes that at about the same time and on the same
route that Nelly flees west from the advancing Soviet forces, SS units marched 30,000 prisoners
from Sachsenhausen concentration camp and killed almost 10,000 on the way.
32
Surviving
concentration camp inmates were evacuated in the wake of advancing Soviet forces during the
last winter of the war, creating effectively death marches, in which malnourished and brutalized
individuals could not but succumb.
33
The awareness of genocide on the part of the reader is
assumed rather than detailed in Die Blechtrommel.
Katharina Hall has called the passages in Die Blechtrommel depicting Sigismund
Markus’ death in the context of the 1938 November pogrom
and Mariusz Fajngold’s experience
in Treblinka “the moral heart of the novel.”
34
In the “Glaube Hoffnung Liebe” chapter the moral
culpability of the German nation is clearly set forth.
35
In the postwar world Oskar dates the
beginning of his “complex” to the pogrom but admits he failed, like most Germans at the time, to
see the event as a portent of things to come.
36
In the analysis of Jack Zipes,
[. . .] Markus incorporates the German-Jewish symbiosis: he is in love with Oskar's
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
32
K 498/PC 320.
33
Aronson and Longerich 197.
34
Hall 68.
35
B 253-264/TD 181-189.
36
Ibid. 268-269/194-195.
!
249!
mother and the city of Danzig, but this love is unrequited and . . . he eventually takes his
own life. This loss, according to Grass, must be made good somehow by Germans,
disturbing German amnesia and complacence.
37
Fajngold, deeply traumatized, carries with him the memory of the dead – still alive and present to
consciousness. His condition bears, in Hall’s words, “witness to the Holocaust from the
alternative perspective of the Jewish survivor [. . .] .”
38
As the death of Sigismund Markus in the November pogrom attempts to situate the reader
into the world in which the Shoah begins, the introduction of Fajngold attempts the same for the
end product of the horror. The killing center of Treblinka II was established in 1942 about a
mile from the previously built Treblinka I, a forced labor and labor education camp. Treblinka II
had a small staff of German SS and police officials augmented by auxiliary units of former
Soviet prisoners of war as well as Polish and Ukrainian civilians. German personnel from the T-
4 euthanasia program were also present at Treblinka. Gas chambers ran on carbon monoxide and
bodies were burned and buried in mass graves. In 1943 Treblinka was the site of a prisoner
revolt but the majority of escapees were re-captured and killed. Later that year Treblinka II was
closed. Estimates of the numbers killed at the camp range from 800,000 to over 900,000. There
were fewer than 70 known survivors.
39
In Grass’s novel Fajngold is one of several inmates
whose regular job of disinfecting the compound allowed them, according to witnesses, to fill
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
37
Jack Zipes, “Contested Jews: The Image of Jewishness in Contemporary German Literature,”
South Central Review 16.2/3 (Autumn 1999): 3-15; 11.
38
Hall 70.
39
(a) Judith Tydor Baumel, “Extermination Camps,” The Holocaust Encyclopedia, ed. Walter
Laqueur (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001) 174-179; 179. (b) United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Treblinka,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, http://www.
ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005193, accessed 25 May 2015.
!
250!
their pumps with flammable fuel and set fire to the camp during the August 1943 revolt. Names
mentioned in the text in connection with this event, such as engineer Galewski, are also based on
eyewitness accounts.
40
Oskar, characteristically, displays no propensity for critical evaluation of
Fajngold’s story.
41
The reader must situate the text within the world-context.
7.2.3 Ordinary Germans
As moral challenge to her compatriots, Kindheitsmuster’s adult narrator develops the
discussion of the negation of responsibility in the guise of reading the notebooks of Rudolf Höss
while taking a cure at a medical spa. She notes the calm and scientific manner in which her
doctors view the book. She notes how her own logical mind absorbs and incorporates the facts
of genocide. But she juxtaposes against this habituation the psychological effects of horror
apparent in dreams and the cognitive associations of words and phrases that recall the gassing of
millions. It then occurs to her that the medical staff with whom she works could dispassionately
have participated in the Holocaust. Indeed, this event is characterized by
[. . .] not only crimes committed against masses of people but also a massive surge of
perpetrators and accomplices.
42
Bartov notes that Germans perceived themselves toward the end of the war also as victims and
“postwar Germany strove to neutralize the memory of the Jews' destruction so as to ensure its
own physical and psychological restoration.”
43
Although concentration camps were officially
overseen by units of the SS (and other police units), the removal of the Jewish population of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
40
(a) B 543-544/TD 394-395; (b) Yad Vashem, The Nizkor Project, Proceedings of the Fourth
Yad Vashem International Historical Conference: Jewish Prisoner Uprisings in the Sobibor and
Treblinka Extermination Camps, Jerusalem, 1980, 1984; web.
41
B 523-550/TD 379-399.
42
PC 240/K 376.
43
Bartov 788.
!
251!
Europe to killing centers such as Auschwitz and Treblinka, as well as camps with less official
genocidal designations like Bergen-Belsen and Dachau required significant expenditure of
German personnel and material resources. It also required the coordination of transportation and
the initiation of diplomatic measures between the German Foreign Ministry and the governments
of occupied nations.
44
In the opinion of Raul Hilberg, the Holocaust was facilitated by the successful
organization of individuals willing to be complicit in murder.
Whether they were in command or lowly placed, in an office or outdoors, they all did
their part, when the time came, with all the efficiency they could muster."
45
Jürgen Kocka writes that “[t]he large majority of Germans . . . remained indifferent, cautious,
disoriented or defensive, and, from a national point of view, defiant.”
46
Perhaps Die
Blechtrommel’s major contribution to this line of thought are the significations, considering
Oskar as symbolic stand-in for the ordinary German, inherent in Oskar’s slight but measurable
growth in stature that terminates with the formation of a hump.
47
In both Western and Soviet occupation zones Nazi activists and leaders were dismissed
from positions and often tried for war crimes. Statistical summaries vary in relation to those
sought, those tried, and those punished. Kocka states that in the Western zones approximately
5,000 individuals were convicted of war crimes. Of these around 800 were sentenced to death
and approximately 500 actually executed. In the Soviet zone around 13,000 were convicted with
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
44
Aronsen and Longerich 193-197.
45
Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders (New York: Harper, 1992) 28.
46
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 71.
47
B 551-564/TD 400-401.
!
252!
no enumeration of punishments.
48
Edgar Wolfrum states that by 1948 about 520,000 suspect
individuals had been dismissed from public offices and private industry, most successfully in the
Soviet zone. He notes however, that by the beginning of the 1950s very many former Nazis
were able to regain prominent positions in government and industry.
49
Mary Fulbrook cites a
study of women’s immediate postwar diary entries as evidence that at least a segment of the
population at the moment of defeat, had “an almost total incapacity to think of any future beyond
Nazism.”
50
Wolfrum estimates that there were at this time approximately 6.5 million Nazi party
members.
51
For those actively interested in a new beginning, the necessity of re-building cities and
creating new governmental structures meant that experienced professionals could be accepted
into positions of responsibility with little attention to denazification procedures.
52
Die
Blechtrommel summarizes the tenor of this period by Oskar’s continuation of education at night
school, “in the company of thousands determined to learn.”
53
In an implied challenge to the
reading audience for sincerity Oskar, like others, discusses
[. . .] collective guilt with Catholics and Protestants, shared that guilt with all who
thought: Let’s get it over with now, be done with it, and later, when things get better,
there’ll be no need to feel guilty.
54
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
48
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 72.
49
Wolfrum 27.
50
Fulbrook, German National Identity 168.
51
Wolfrum 44.
52
Konrad H. Jarausch, “The Conundrum of Complicity: German Professionals and the Final
Solution,” Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture, 11 June 2001 (Washington, D.C.,
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001) 13.
53
TD 415/B 570.
54
Ibid. 416/570.
!
253!
By 1947 Oskar is through with school and “Pastor Niemoeller” as symbol of a reformed
ecclesiastical establishment that earlier had been strongly nationalistic but after the war moved
toward acknowledgement of guilt and fostered ecumenical associations.
Julia Hell imputes to the conceptual constitutions of East and West Germany a "founding
discourse" of anti-fascism.
55
At the founding and re-founding of German political parties at the
end of 1945 in the several zones of occupation all major entities repudiated not only National
Socialist policies but also its implied thought associations. An appeal to the citizenry from the
Christian Democratic Union includes the following acknowledgement.
Groß ist die Schuld weiter Kreises unseres Volkes, die sich nur allzu bereitwillig zur
Handlangern und Steigbügelhaltern für Hitler erniedrigten.
56
A similar document by the Free Democrats places blame on the imperialist “Zwangsstaat” but
reassures the German people that they should not lose confidence in themselves or their ability to
produce a truly democratic German “Reich.”
57
The Social Democratic Party, as champion of the
working class but eschewing class warfare, agreed also that Germans must bear the
consequences of the Nazi war of aggression and its victimization of other nations.
58
The
Communist Party addressed itself to workers somewhat more stridently than the Social
Democrats and declared that most Germans bore a significant portion of guilt and accountability
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
55
Hell 2.
56
Theo Stammen, ed., “Aufruf der Christlich-Demokratischen Union an das deutsche Volk,”
Eingkeit und Recht und Freiheit: Westdeutsche Innenpolitik 1945 – 1955 (Munich: Deutscher
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1965) 82-85; 83.
57
Ibid., “Programmatische Richtlinien der Freien Demokratischen Partei vom 4. Februar 1946,”
108-110; 108.
58
Ibid. “Politische Leitsätze der SPD vom Mai 1946,” 120-126; 120.
!
254!
for Nazi crimes in proportion to their support for the regime.
59
In the West, accountability became submerged rather quickly in apathy about the Nazi
past amid the economic concerns attendant upon the creation of material prosperity.
60
The
inability of ordinary Germans to authentically come to terms with the Nazi period and their own
feelings, be they of guilt or loss, is parodied in Die Blechtrommel’s “Onion Cellar” chapter,
which concludes with the focus not on this idea but rather how easily the patrons revert to
infantile behavior in company to Oskar’s drumming.
61
The contingencies of the developing Cold
War between the Soviet Union and the Western powers also dampened enthusiasm for
denazification. One form of the abnegation of responsibility asks how one may be accountable
for actions that were also engaged in, if not initiated, by large numbers of professionals -- some
convicted war criminals, others untried -- who were welcomed into the military and industrial
establishments of the Allies for the exploitation of their accomplishments (e.g. rocket
technology, nerve gas development) during the Third Reich.
In the East, anti-fascism became the structural core of official ideology.
62
As such it
could foster a negation of responsibility by emphasizing the very real victimhood of workers,
socialists, and Communist Party activists under Nazism and connecting these survivors with the
establishment of the East German regime. In this way every conscientious East German citizen
became heir to Nazi victimization without needing to claim any particular solidarity, other than
pro forma, with the murdered Jewish population of Europe. Kindheitsmuster adopts a dual
situating strategy for this problematic. On the one hand the novel details examples of anti-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
59
Ibid., “Aufruf des Zentralkomitees der KPD vom 11. Juni 1945,” 127-133; 128.
60
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 75.
61
B 704-706 /TD 510-511.
62
Ihme-Tuchel 18.
!
255!
Semitism and refers to Jewish victims at appropriate points in the narrative.
63
On the other hand,
freed concentration camp inmates that Nelly meets in her flight are not characterized, other than
to note their indifferent demeanor. This passage does, however become an attempt by Nelly to
feel empathy with these individuals.
64
At other points such inmates are described as
Communists.
65
The adult fictive author shows empathy in her analysis of survivor’s guilt among
former inmates in a passage referencing Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, by implication, Jewish
survivors.
66
On ideological and economic grounds the GDR could also distance itself from culpability
through the interpretation of Nazism as still latent in the West, as a legacy of capitalism.
67
In
Wolf’s novel, there is empathy for those who against their will became Nazis only because they
were poor.
68
The placement of this passage, commencing with Lenka showing surprise that their
could be National Socialist Party members who were not convinced Nazis, appears to mirror the
Soviet zone categorization of ‘active’ and ‘nominal’ Nazis.
69
In the same way, the FRG could
claim, as a “founding myth” its economic success as simultaneously the product of its antipathy
to the “totalitarian” GDR
70
and grounds for absolution from the guilt of Nazi era crimes. None
of this should cast doubt on the earnestness of ordinary Germans on both sides of the Cold War
divide who accepted versions of these narratives combined with genuine anguish about the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
63
K 507-508; 520/PC 326-327; 334.
64
Ibid. 504 /324.
65
Ibid. 517/332.
66
Ibid. /334-335.
67
Fulbrook, German National Identity 49.
68
K 531/PC 347.
69
Fulbrook, German National Identity 54.
70
Ihme-Tuchel 19.
!
256!
Holocaust; of interest is the process of narrativization itself from which disparate discourses of
cultural and national identities could be introduced into political parlance.
7.3 Negotiation
With the beginning of the Cold War era, the respective governments of the two separate
German nations with two officially different identities, in the words of Jürgen Kocka, “made
their peace with the mass of former small and not so small Nazis.”
71
In small ways at first, then
more fulsomely as time passed, Germans began to negotiate, more than deny the significance of
the Nazi era for their present and their future. In the Federal Republic the 1950s continued to be
a period of “relative silence about and denial of the Nazi past.”
72
Although segments of the
press, scholars, writers, and artists began discussing the legacy of crimes, victims were seldom
heard. Under Law 131 civil servants of the Third Reich could continue employment or receive
pensions in the Federal Republic.
73
The Adenauer administration initiated restitution payments
to the government of Israel but in general, West Germans spoke more of their sufferings than
those they had caused during World War Two.
74
Fulbrook asks how restitution
[Wiedergutmachung] could possibly be made for the millions of lives lost. She also critiques the
state documents involved in this transaction as indicative of drawing a firm distinction between
‘Germans’ and ‘Jews’.
75
In the German Democratic Republic, the imputation of the causes of Nazism to the
capitalist system signified the innocence of the socialist citizenry in this regard. The Holocaust
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
71
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 74.
72
Ibid. 75.
73
Fulbrook, German National Identity 60.
74
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 76.
75
Fulbrook, German National Identity 65-66.
!
257!
was therefore primarily perpetrated by others representing powerful interests and there was little
reason to consider us guilty in any significant way.
76
Fulbrook describes the situation thus.
As far as their own roles were concerned, there was a real (if often idealized) basis for the
founding anti-fascist myth of the GDR. But along with the (in most cases well deserved)
myth of heroism and resistance of the communist leaders went the myth of innocence of
the workers and peasants.
77
East Germany did not participate in financial restitution. After the free elections of March 1990,
however, the Volkskammer issued a declaration acknowledging shared guilt for the crimes of the
Nazi era.
78
In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s a fuller engagement with the Holocaust
occurred in West Germany precipitated by events such as the capture and trial of Adolf
Eichmann and the so-called Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt. The Ludwigsburg Center for
Judicial Inquiries and Research on Nazi Crimes had already begun amassing evidence against
ordinary citizens who might have committed war crimes. This resulted in a series of trials
running from 1963 to 1965, 1965 to 1966, and 1967 to 1968 charging 25 defendants [20, 3, and
2, respectively] under German penal law for their roles as mid- to lower-level officials at
Auschwitz-Birkenau. This began a period of public discussion about the Holocaust and German
guilt in the media, in the courts, and in parliament.
79
In Kocka’s words,
[. . .] these were the arenas in which the identity of the Federal Republic was, in a way,
renegotiated in the 1960s and 1970s by changing its collective memories, its relation to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
76
Ibid. 75.
77
Ibid. 55.
78
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 81.
79
Ibid. 77-78.
!
258!
the Nazi past.
80
The student rebellions of the late 1960's and 1970's manifested in Germany also as the post-
World War II generation's reproach of their elders both for having committed such crimes and
for failure to be honest with their children about their roles during the war. Most of the focus of
this time period was perhaps less on Nazi genocide than the evils of militarism, Americanism,
and the consumer society. Willy Brandt initiated a policy of acknowledgement of German war
guilt and became the first German chancellor to visit Israel.
The 1978 American television series Holocaust, was seen also in West Germany and
provoked further discussion of German guilt and attitudes. This occurred in a national mood of
searching for roots and traditions as a way to achieve a cultural identity, in both Germanys, East
and West, and concern [Betroffenheit] for the events of the Holocaust was identified in the media
as a necessary part of forming the German cultural or national identity. During this period
memorials began to be planned for victims. On the 40th anniversary of the surrender of
Germany President Richard von Weiszäcker spoke of that date as' liberation' rather than
'capitulation' as his predecessors had.
81
In the 1980s, during the so-called Historikerstreit some
German historians argued that the crimes of the Nazi era were not unusual, were comparable to
purported Soviet crimes under Stalin, and could be regarded as defensive measures against the
extension of communism into Germany. Socially concerned historians and philosophers argued
against this view and any relativizing of German responsibility for World War Two and
genocide.
82
Although taking place thirty years ago, the impact of this debate is evident in the
manner in which German culture processes the memory of the Holocaust in the twenty-first
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
80
Ibid. 78.
81
Ibid. 79-80.
82
Ibid. 81.
!
259!
century.
Negotiation with the significance of Nazi instigated crimes against humanity occurred
also in the arts and literature. Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster, to the extent they deal
with the Holocaust, situate themselves relative to other such works. Serious writing on the
Holocaust might be divided into two main categories: (a) that by victims, survivors and their
descendants, (b) that by non-victims, perpetrators, and their descendants. There is a qualitative
difference between the two. Writing by survivors encompasses witness and the processing of
deep trauma from the infliction of horrific cruelty. The Holocaust depictions by non-Jewish
Germans are differentiated from the former group in terms of perspective. For the non-Jewish
German author who was not in a camp, or who may have been among, or at least affiliated with
the perpetrators of atrocity, the sources and nature of trauma are much different. In particular,
identification with victims raises deep ethical questions. Among second-generation non-Jewish
German writers there is an attempt also to appropriate and alleviate their own sense of trauma, or
even their sense of victimhood, breaking the taboo of identification with the victims, as a form of
expiation of guilt.
Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster may be linked dialogically at different levels of
reader cognition and textual allusion to representative texts that form the genre of Holocaust
literature as such. Textually, however, both works are situated within the historical
circumstances of their production and the resultant ‘archive’ of texts by and narrated from, the
perspective of non-Jewish Germans who were adolescents during the Nazi regime and whose
treatment of the Holocaust is embedded in a larger narrative. Obviously, this is a narrow subset
of German language and world Holocaust literature. Within this subset, contemporaneously with
works in the broader genre by survivors, exiles, and the persecuted, Ilse Aichinger, Paul Celan,
!
260!
Nelly Sachs, and Manès Sperber, as well as the early versions of Elie Wiesel’s Night, the
treatment of Nazi crimes in non-Jewish German literature was expressed more narrowly and
more in terms of perceived societal interests. A popular genre for dealing with the war
experience in all zones and later in both Germanys was the war novel centering on the usually
innocent but dutiful German soldier.
83
Indeed the first film produced in occupied Germany after
the war, Wolfgang Staudte’s The Murderers are Among Us (1946), depicts a guilt-ridden soldier
returned to civilian life, who plots revenge on his Nazi commander who forced him to execute
innocent civilians. The pervasiveness of the theme of the ordinary soldier’s innocence is
illustrated by the dictum of Karl Jaspers that the soldier who served faithfully “darf etwas
Unantastbares in seinem Selbstbewußtsein bewahren.”
84
With the publication of over 350 West
German war novels in the 1950s it has been observed that in official, popular, and literary
discourse only the voices of the victims were silent. During the 1950s in works like Wolfgang
Koeppen’s Tod im Rom, Albrecht Goes’ Das Brandopfer, Heinrich Böll’s Billard um halb zehn,
and Grass’s Die Blechtrommel, some of the voices of some victims appear, if fleetingly.
The manner in which Die Blechtrommel incorporates sensitivities involved in the figural
depictions above into its alternative historiography has raised questions. Ernestine Schlant, finds
in the novel "an insensitivity to those who suffered . . . in a language where silence is veiled in
verbal dexterity . . . rooted in pre-Holocaust aesthetics."
85
Dagmar Lorenz, analyzes the
appropriate sections of the novel in terms of narrative conceptualizations that she feels are
problematic for the depiction of Jewish individuals in this novel and often in German literature
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
83
Helmut Peitsch, “Towards a History of Vergangenheitsbewältigung: East and West German
War Novels of the 1950s,” Monatshefte 87.3 (1995): 287-308; 289.
84
Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Frage (Zürich: Artemis-Verlag,
1946) 42.
85
Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust
(New York, London: Routledge, 1999) 71.
!
261!
as a whole. Reading the texts portraying Sigismund Markus closely, one sees the toy dealer, in
the descriptive detail for which the novel is known, as a stereotypical character. He is a
merchant, he is obsequious, he speaks a Jewish dialect, he is physically unappealing and
obviously unsuccessful in romance.
86
The serious critique involved here is the assertion that the
figure Markus “defines the range of what and who is German”
87
in Die Blechtrommel. One
could reply that the Markus figure as stereotype and as a member of the community at that level,
compels the reader to consider what an ethical consideration of the display of otherness, entails.
The obvious stereotyping might be said to ironically foreground the racism of the society
through negative signification. If one negates the diversity of cultural manifestations what is the
point of an inclusive society? All would simply be reflections of oneself and would in no way
challenge one to accept difference. Does the lack of compassion shown by Oskar become
symptomatic of the Germans' progressive inability to admit feeling anything as brutalities
multiply [compare Bauman's idea of progressive depersonalization of anti-Semitic measures
under the Nazi regime]?
88
Amir Eshel provides perhaps a twofold riposte to the thrust of this
critique. Namely, in “acting out the world’s chaos” Oskar’s role is that of observer, not analyst,
and his reflections are not only on German history and society but “’about’ the process through
which categories such as ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’ are constructed and construed[,]”
89
and by
implication also the categories of ‘difference’ and ‘compassion.’
Fajngold as figure is the signifier that points to the Shoah as that which German society
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
86
Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, “Teaching the Tin Drum from the Perspective of Jewish Cultural
Studies and Holocaust Studies” Approaches to Teaching Grass's The Tin Drum, ed. Monika
Shafi (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2008) 150-163.
87
Ibid. 156.
88
Bauman 75ff.
89
Eshel 186.
!
262!
refuses to see in itself in its prewar future and refuses to admit to itself in its postwar past. The
historicity of the Treblinka revolt registers as an intimation of the ‘real’ in the midst of the more
comfortable ‘magical realist’ mode of narration. Yet Fajngold is also a Jewish stereotype with
stereotypical behaviors.
When Herr Fajngold saw the corpse, which he had turned on its back, he clasped his
hands to his head in the same expressive gesture Oskar had seen his toy merchant,
Sigismund Markus, make years ago.
90
That these stereotypes were extant in the Bundesrepublik of the 1950s, and later, is well
documented.
91
It could be argued that the manner in which Jews are depicted in Die
Blechtrommel merely exposes that fact. At what point however, does evocation of the
stereotypes of German cultural memory, even as narrative distantiation, actually marginalize
anew, as a speech act, the Jewish community in the mind of the reader, discursively denying
centuries of cultural and social interactions that obviate essentialist distinctions between various
traditions in German society? Lorenz finds her position summarized by the following.
Grass uncovers plenty of malice among Germans of the Nazi era, which is why his novel
is generally considered socially critical. But drawing an extensive social portrait of
Germans, he does not explore Jewish German history.
92
Zipes, to cite a different perspective, situates himself by positing that post-World War Two non-
Jewish German writers, including Grass, have been primarily interested in how the historical
experience has unfolded from the perspective of non-Jewish Germans and the manner in which
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
90
TD 380/B 524.
91
Wolfrum 178-179.
92
Lorenz 162.
!
263!
they “have used Jews to identify themselves.”
93
Zipes uncovers the heart of the matter by
referencing the works of Peter Härtling, which, he believes, in consideration of the presence and
contributions of members of the Jewish community in and to German society, “forces readers to
ask why Germans want to distinguish themselves from Jews.”
94
At the time Christa Wolf began writing Kindheitsmuster both German and world
literature had witnessed many substantial attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust. German
language contributions, to mention only some of the better known, included Rolf Hochhuth’s
Der Stellvertreter, Peter Weiss’ Die Ermittlung, and Jean Améry’s Jenseits von Schuld und
Sühne [At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities].
Even in East Germany the 1970s witnessed engagement with the Nazi era on a broader level than
the ‘victory of socialism’. Jurek Becker’s Jakob der Lügner was published in 1969 after its
screenplay had been rejected by DEFA, the East German movie studio. DEFA filmed the novel
in 1974. Yet despite debate and writing on the theme of the continuation of the fascist mentality
in the GDR by authors like Franz Fühmann, Hermann Kant, Heiner Müller, Anna Seghers, and
Christa Wolf, Wolfgang Emmerich concludes that the boundary of this engagement was and
remained the mass murder of the Jewish population, so that the Shoah was relegated to a
subordinate roll in picturing the fascist past.
95
In Kindheitsmuster Nelly finds that she cannot hate on demand.
96
The fact that her hatred
should be directed against both Jews and communists enlarges the official GDR roster of victims
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
93
Zipes 7.
94
Ibid. 13.
95
Emmerich 319-320.
96
K 203-204/PC 128.
!
264!
of Nazi aggression to actually include Jews.
97
That she eventually produces mental images of a
described Jewish youth in association with an image of an earlier encounter with an exhibitionist
is meant to show the manner in which racist irrationality begins. In distinction to Die
Blechtrommel the narrator of Kindheitsmuster actually describes the genesis of hate. The same is
done with Nelly's experience of Kristallnacht where empathy becomes submerged in fear.
98
The
reader may compare her own experiences with indoctrination and the necessity to live a split
existence.
99
It could be argued that there is a contradiction in the authenticity of this affective
appeal for tolerance. Christa Wolf has admitted that as a girl, at the end of the war, she did not
personally have the maturity to see things in this light.
100
In fact, it is this admission that
establishes subjective authenticity with a broader audience, in that few also saw things so clearly
at the time. It is the fictive author/narrator who transposes the empathy back into the voice of
Nelly as a strategy to overcome the discontinuity engendered by fascism. As noted, the attempt
to negotiate the gap in authenticity makes the affective appeal rather ironic. There is thus a
"linguistic impotence"
101
at work, that opposes a 'split life' to character development over time,
and thus despite all intentions to the contrary [e.g. Kindheitsmuster, Chapter 15] makes
association with the National Socialist past ambivalent, in this reading. In other words, through a
perverse signification by absence, the narrator's inability to say 'I' in relation to the figure Nelly,
might communicate not necessarily that the 'I' has changed but that the narrator never was the 'I'
of that youth in any meaningful way and therefore not culpable in the present.
Yet as seen earlier Kindheitsmuster does present the circumstance of a youth
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
97
(a) Herf, Divided Memory 164; (b) Pinkert 25.
98
K 253/PC 160-161.
99
Firsching 77.
100
Wolf, "Eine Diskussion über Kindheitsmuster" 91.
101
Pinkert 25.
!
265!
indoctrinated in Nazism as a manifestation of guilt and the proximal source of the discontinuity
between childhood and adult consciousness. The chapter on the ‘Final Solution’ is
straightforward in its reflection on the Holocaust and in its own way conceptually, if not literally,
parallels the “Glaube Hoffnung Liebe” chapter in Die Blechtrommel. Wolf’s novel dwells at
length on the psychology of Adolf Eichmann, the role of I. G. Farben as proprietor of the Buna
plant at Auschwitz-Monowitz, human experimentation, the distribution of concentration camps
throughout Europe, and the use of poison gas for extermination of Europe’s Jewish
population.
102
Neither does the novel spare the bigotry of Nelly’s relatives nor the role of Nelly
herself. An episode is recalled in which she assisted in the potato harvest with Ukrainian women
forced laborers. Would she have shared her more nutritious meal with them? The thought
simply did not occur to her; the “temptation” for altruism was no longer a part of her thinking or
behavior.
103
Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster may bear criticism for lack of direct involvement
with genocide; it is also the case that the Holocaust has been called “an event without a
witness.”
104
Agamben characterizes the concentration camps as so exceeding the "juridical
concept of crime" that the judicial structure in which the crimes took place is insignificant.
105
If
much writing by survivors encompasses witness and attempts to come to terms with individual
and communal trauma born of terror, much writing by those whose compatriots inflicted the
terror can only search for an adequate expression. Even the witness of a survivor, in the
estimation of Katja Garloff must somehow re-invest a language debased by “bureaucratically
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
102
K 365-379/PC 233-242.
103
Ibid. 389-390/248-249.
104
Katja Garloff, "The Emigrant as Witness: W. G. Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten," The German
Quarterly 77.1 (Winter 2004): 76-91; 77.
105
Agamben 166.
!
266!
administered genocide” with the ability to address anew in order to recover its lost "ethical
dimension."
106
In line with that thought Ruth Klüger re-purposed her weiter leben. Eine Jugend
in English as Still Alive: a Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. In so doing she must face once
again the trauma of Auschwitz and address a new audience with what she feels is the appropriate
content to communicate her experience.
107
That this experience will be conveyed differently to
the American audience is a part of the intertextual history of the works, by which the author's
relative engagement with the memory of trauma between the two editions may be gauged.
Reading Kindheitsmuster against Klüger’s work, with a twenty-year interval between their
respective publications, illustrates the enormity of fiction’s task to find communicative
sufficiency to cogently address concerning, and to appropriately situate the critical elements of,
the issues embodied by the memories of the lived Holocaust event.
7.4 Normalization
The question of reception for the modes of expression utilized by Die Blechtrommel and
Kindheitsmuster to convey a sense of the Nazi era and address anew does not escape the novels.
Oberleutnant Herzog, thoughts revolving around strategies whereby the German military had
repulsed the Normandy invasion, would seem to typify an individual immune from the insights
that Die Blechtrommel attempts to find in recent history.
108
Herr X telling the narrator in
Kindheitsmuster that Germans did nor commit war crimes because they had no time and such
things weren’t part of the German nature,
109
suggests the question: whose narratives ultimately
constitute the cultural memory and for what purposes are they compiled? The narrator
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
106
Garloff 77.
107
Rosa Pérez-Zancas, "Von weiter leben zu Still Alive: Ruth Klügers fortgesetzte
Unvollständigkeit," Revista de Filologia Alemana 16 (2008): 211-228; 212.
108
B 718-719/TD 520.
109
K 558-560/PC 360-361.
!
267!
transposes the unwillingness of Herr X to come to terms with German guilt into a disquisition on
the “falsification of history” within Soviet apologetics. With a jab at Communist Party insularity
and dogmatism she enunciates a principle that applies in both cases, that
[. . .] the honest speaker depends on an honest listener, and . . . the person who hears
the distorted echo of his own words eventually loses his honesty.
110
To consider the question that Herr X refuses to consider: “the possibility of the German debt
being greater, if it ever came to a settling of accounts”
111
is at the root of the larger question of
the historiographic normalization of the German cultural and national experience. To approach
this question, following Wolf’s reasoning, one must not depend for dialogue on the reflected
echoes of one’s own preconceptions.
The term ‘normalization’ when applied to German post-World War Two cultural and
political history can mean different things depending on context. William Collins Donahue
refers to the double usage of the term to signify the Federal Republic’s official and ceremonial
acknowledgement of guilt and simultaneous historicized distancing from Nazi perpetrators, as
well as the opinions of those who view the term as essentially denial of responsibility.
112
Many
within late twentieth and early twenty-first century German language culture find the legacy of
the Holocaust to be too restrictive a narrative in relation to which a cultural and national identity
should be constructed. The desire to have a national discourse that treats Germany as a ‘normal’
nation is of course, not new. The relatively late emergence in 1871 as a nation state, compared
to other European nations and the Sonderweg thesis, whether viewed positively or negatively,
underline the fact that Germany has been considered in some sense special throughout much if
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
110
PC 362/ K 562.
111
Ibid. 361/561.
112
William Collins Donahue, Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink's 'Nazi' Novels and Films
(Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010) 2-3.
!
268!
not most of its history. The formal unification of the two Germanys on 3 October 1990 gave
renewed impetus for the review of that problematic narrative. The relationship between Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster and this newer issue is one in which the novels of necessity
become latent influences rather than active participants. In this regard they form part of the
reader’s horizon of expectations in regard to later texts and, to use Said’s term, ‘worldly’
problematics.
Already in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s attempts were made to emplot the narrative of
World War Two in a more favorable and ‘normal’ manner regarding Germany. The West
German historian Ernst Nolte argued that the Holocaust was unique only in the means used, that
it was comparable to other genocides such as in the Soviet Union and Cambodia and constituted
a defensive action against a Soviet threat.
113
Andreas Hillgruber published essays asking
empathy for German soldiers on the Eastern front as defenders against communism and
essentially characterizing the Holocaust as an event comparable to the expulsion of Germans
from Eastern Europe.
114
Another conservative, Michael Stürmer called for, in Fulbrooks words,
“the reappropriation of history for the construction of national identity.”
115
These ideas were
countered by Habermas and historians Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen, and Hans-Ulrich
Wehler, among others. Hayden White answered on the basis of his theories of narrative history
that conservative attempts at relativization of Nazi crimes and consequent normalization of
German history were contradictory and incoherent as narrative.
116
Yet even Broszat had argued
for a more normal historiography of Germany that removed the uniqueness of German wartime
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
113
Nolte.
114
Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das
Ende des europäischen Judentums (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1986) 64f.; 98-99.
115
Fulbrook, German National Identity 126.
116
Hayden White, Figural Realism 32-33.
!
269!
conduct in relation to other nations. In response, Saul Friedländer worried that Broszat’s call for
a more technical and “refined evaluation” [Fulbrook’s phrase] of the Holocaust might lead to the
historiographic diminution of its criminality.
117
As the ‘historians’ dispute’ subsided, newly unified Germany engaged in finding a new
place in the world and a valid conception of itself. This endeavor has included a public
commitment to an open, tolerant, and inclusive civil society against outbreaks of xenophobic,
anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic, as well as anti-Muslim demonstrations and violence. The
1990s witnessed the popularity among the young of ‘neo-Nazi chic’ in music, clothing, and
vocabulary. Many older Germans also re-evaluated whether Germans could appropriately mourn
their losses in World War II and ask if the Allied bombing campaign did not make them also
victims of the war. Popular discussion of these topics prompted writers like Günter Grass [Im
Krebsgang] and W. G. Sebald [“Luftkrieg und Literatur”] to express themselves also on aspects
of German history that many regarded as having been unjustifiably repressed. Jürgen Kocka has
addressed the view that Allied bombing was equivalent in some manner to the Holocaust. Kocka
calls the bombing "cruel, devastating, and morally questionable" but designed to hasten the end
of the war’s "senseless and criminal mass murder."
118
According to Kocka, Germans must be
clear about "responsibility and consequences"
119
in that they were the initial aggressors.
Edgar Wolfrum has pointed out that the media has become a strong influence on the
memory of the Holocaust. Movies such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and Bernd
Eichinger’s Der Untergang (2005) became international hits and prompted much discussion in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
117
Fulbrook, German National Identity 128.
118
Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship 95.
119
Ibid.
!
270!
Germany. Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, despite methodological
controversy, became a generally successful media and marketing event in Germany as elsewhere.
Wolfrum believes that the memory of the Holocaust is becoming internationalized as an
abstraction, an exemplar of genocide in general, and often as a banality obscuring the events of
which it consists.
120
Since German unification, Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Peter
Eisenman’s design for the Berlin Holocaust Memorial have been realized. The German
government liberalized the legal procedures for obtaining citizenship and has participated in
international efforts to relocate refugees and asylum seekers. After the September 11, 2001
attack on New York City, Germany participated militarily as a NATO member in the U. S. led
war in Afghanistan, but not in Iraq. The country has continued to have demonstrations and
counter demonstrations against a perceived threat to the integrity of the culture from the
acceptance of immigrants, as have other nations such as France, the United Kingdom, and the
United States.
Sigrid Weigel posits that views on the place of the fascist past in the discourses of
German history divide along the fault lines of generational difference and sometimes, conflict.
Weigel defines ‘generation’ as “jahrgangsverwandte Kohorte” whose lives at a certain point
were affected in commonality by a defining historical experience.
121
The generation born around
the time of World War One fought the Second World War and preferred not to communicate
their experiences in meaningful ways to their children, who were generally born during or
around the end of the war and afterward. This second generation of heirs to the Nazi legacy
were those who were generalized as rebellious, politically left leaning, skeptical, and harshly
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
120
Wolfrum 497-498.
121
Sigrid Weigel, Genea-Logik: Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur- und
Naturwissenschaften (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006) 50.
!
271!
critical of their parents’ acceptance of Nazism and silence about their complicity. Not all
members of this generation fit that description. Some, were rather conservative, and others,
became critical of the so-called ‘68ers’ (after the student protests of 1968) in their maturity.
Interposed between these generations are those born in the 1920s, the so-called Flakhelfer or
Hitlerjugend generation, raised under National Socialism. This is the generation that has
elucidated most consistently and critically the horror of Hitler’s regime and the Holocaust as
politically ‘engaged’ intellectuals and public figures. In common estimation, this generation as a
whole, dominated the discourse about the Nazi era until relatively recently,
122
the legitimacy of
which is increasingly being questioned, primarily by those younger than the generation of 68ers,
as their contribution to Holocaust discussion.
123
The protagonists of Grass’s and Wolf’s novels
also record generational discord. Nelly has little respect for her father, the compliant citizen and
soldier. Oskar’s symbolic relationship to his supposed German father is literally fatal.
By the end of the twentieth century the political consciousness of the second generation
after the war, now in late middle-age, was relatively mixed but certain intellectuals found their
niche in relation to their elders by breaking taboos, which by this time were typified by the
relatively liberal views promulgated by the Hitlerjugend generation. Those who attained
prominence after 1968 were often influenced by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault more than
Marx and Adorno, and became fascinated once again, after a brief radically ‘modernist’ phase,
with the once discredited charms of aestheticism.
124
Botho Strauß for instance, has probed the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
122
Fritz J. Raddatz, “Warum die Alten an der Macht bleiben,” Cicero – Magazin für politische
Kultur , 28 September 2005, web.
123
Stephan Braese, “Im Schatten der ‘gebrannten Kinder’,” Chiffre 2000 – Neue Paradigmen der
Gegenwartsliteratur, eds. Corina Caduff and Ulrike Vedder (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag,
2005) 81-106; 90.
124
Beutin et al. 645.
!
272!
productivity of mythology for engagement with modern life in the revivification of suppressed
codes. Strauß’s quest to jettison the restrictive aporias of Enlightenment thinking has led to
charges that he also wishes to deny normative values of humanity embodied therein.
125
He has
supported the idea that German consciousness of the Holocaust should move away from a stance
of collective shame toward a more ‘normal’ cultural disposition.
126
On the other hand, W. G.
Sebald dealt with German war trauma and associated themes in a manner considered exemplary
by many critics in an aesthetically creative writing style. The Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek
has maintained a socially committed and feminist cultural-critical stance throughout her career.
The daughter of a Jewish father and Catholic mother, she has opposed relativization of Holocaust
responsibility in any form. While Die Blechtrommel certainly probes the productivity of myth in
conceptualizations around Niobe and the Schwarze Köchin, attempts to disengage from social
issues was not greeted favorably by Grass the author as demonstrated in works such as Mein
Jahrhundert [My Century (1999)]. Wolf’s Kassandra and Medea actually present intensified
social engagement as feminine consciousness of patriarchal subjugation.
Verena Stefan’s 1975 Häutungen [Shedding] became an important work within the
feminist movement. In 2011 she co-edited a study on Jewish exiles from Nazi Germany living in
Canada. Cultural critic and philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, working with Nietzschean themes, has
steadily moved toward a conservative stance on major issues. His Zorn und Zeit [Rage and
Time] employing the concept of ressentiment ends with a call for an “open culture of ambition”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
125
Michael Wiesberg, Botho Strauß, Dichter der Gegenaufklärung, Perspektiven, Band 3,
Karlheinz Weißmann and Götz Kubitschek eds. (Dresden: Edition Antaios, 2002) 15, 88.
126
Botho Strauß, “Anschwellender Bocksgesang,” Der Spiegel 6/1993 (8 February 1993): 202-
207.
!
273!
which balances “elitist and egalitarian forces.”
127
An article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung characterized European social democracy as a “fiscal kleptocracy.”
128
Sloterdijk
supports allowing Germans to view themselves as heirs to a normal European culture and
history. In 1995, a German jurist of moderate views, Bernhard Schlink, an exact contemporary
of Strauß and Sebald and slightly older than Sloterdijk, published a novel which re-imagined, as
part allegory and part wish fantasy, the identity of the Nazi perpetrator in relation to that of the
postwar generation. Der Vorleser [The Reader], attained marked popularity, particularly in the
United States and became an equally popular film in 2008. In the intervening interval, however,
it was a member of Grass’s and Wolf’s generation, Martin Walser, a literary colleague in the
project of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, whose remarks on the place of Holocaust memory in
German cultural life sparked dismay and debate.
Amir Eshel has recounted and analyzed the so-called Martin Walser - Ignatz Bubis
debate in 1998. In that year Walser was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In
his acceptance speech in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt he denounced Germany’s memory culture
in relation to the Holocaust by averring that Auschwitz should not be a routine threat or a moral
club. Walser proposed that the continual linking of the Holocaust with German culture was a
ploy by unnamed forces to damage Germany and that it was now time, not to view the pictures
of atrocities any longer but to look away.
129
Eshel gives the following synopsis.
[. . .] the chronic injury inflicted by the moral weapon called Auschwitz must be healed,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
127
Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time, trans. Mario Wenning (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010) 229.
128
Peter Sloterdijk, “Die Revolution der gebenden Hand,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 13
June, 2009, web.
129
Amir Eshel, Jewish Memories, German Futures: Recent Debates in Germany about the Past
(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana State University, 2001; Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish
Studies Program) 10-11.
!
274!
and the rituals of memory must cease. Proceeding from the philosophy of Martin
Heidegger, Martin Walser then completes his decisive argumentative turn: no one should
involve himself in questions of other people’s consciences.
130
Walser’s formulation and other incidental remarks repudiated the concept of the politically
engaged intellectual and particularly the narrative of national identity centered on the
Holocaust.
131
Walser had said that when confronted with pictures from Auschwitz, Germans
must not look away.
132
Ignatz Bubis, Chair of the Central Committee of Jews in Germany
registered disagreement with Walser in strong terms in a press release, resulting in a running
debate between the two over a two month period. Walser’s position was that Bubis had
misunderstood. Eshel interprets this as signifying that to Walser one who interprets Walser
differently "places himself outside the national discourse."
133
Eshel then diagnoses a "tendency
toward hermeticism within German public discourse"
134
that excludes those with variant
interpretations from appreciating the claimed intent. Eshel delineates the debate as
representative of two divergent perspectives: “Walser’s right to personal memory and a solitary
conscience” versus “a culture of memory . . . [that understands] the past as eternally present” and
that the Nazi era “must remain . . . an immanent piece of the present.”
135
Could this analysis also reflect the manner in which language is used in Die
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
130
Ibid. 11.
131
Thomas Kovach and Martin Walser, The Burden of the Past: Martin Walser on Modern
German Identity -- Texts, Contexts, Commentary (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008) 89-90.
132
Eshel, Jewish Memories 10.
133
Eshel, Jewish Memories 13.
134
Ibid. 12.
135
Ibid.
!
275!
Blechtrommel? On the one hand arguments of similar 'hermeticism' are parodied in the work
136
but on the other, the aforementioned depiction of Jewish individuals such as Markus and
Fajngold, also partake of Walser's arguments in their inability to really understand -- which
condition separates them from the German nation. From another perspective, Wolfgang Müller-
Funk, in explicating the concept of cultural memory, addresses Walser's aims, in his later novel,
the roman à clef Tod eines Kritikers [Death of a Critic], to subvert "the common sense of
political correctness in German cultural memory."
137
While denying the use of anti-Semitic
material the novel uses pejorative phraseology reminiscent of anti-Semitic language. Müller-
Funk faults Walser for his "inability to work out the critique" without hurting victims of the
Holocaust,
138
which seems a very diplomatic appraisal of patently offensive material. Much the
same might be said of Die Blechtrommel, if such apologia is needed.
139
In 2008 Martin Walser produced an essay titled “Über Erfahrungen mit dem Zeitgeist” in
which he complains that through the years he had been misunderstood, that he had been correct
in championing German re-unification, that his work had been unfairly critiqued by Marcel
Reich-Ranicki, and – in opposition to prevailing leftist sentiment, citing Sloterdijk – he had been
right about normalization of German history, only ten years ahead of the public mood.
140
With Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser (The Reader), the second generation of non-
Jewish Germans after the Holocaust, the 1968ers, come to terms with their parents' perpetrations
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
136
Preece Life and Work 45.
137
Müller-Funk 213.
138
Ibid. 214.
139
Eshel’s argument above provides counterbalance here.
140
Martin Walser, “Über Erfahrungen mit dem Zeitgeist,” Kinderspielplatz (Berlin: Berlin
University Press, 2008) 33-70; 39, 49, 56, 70.
!
276!
of and apathy towards mass murder.
141
In this reading, the protagonist, Michael Berg, as
representative of his generation, may also claim victimhood by both validating the trauma of the
Jewish people and allying himself with them, as a temporally delayed victim at the psychological
level.
142
Although technically a 'realist' novel, there is obviously much allegory.
143
The
perpetrator in this novel, Hanna Schmitz fulfills a condition not noted by real life perpetrators, at
least not to such an extent: she is illiterate. Symbolically for her generation, she is morally
illiterate.
144
Taken as a statement on perpetrator guilt, the novel enacts a legal obfuscation.
Hanna may not be legally or at least exclusively guilty of the crimes for which she is convicted
but psychological factors, viz. defensiveness about her illiteracy and her compulsion for
preserving order, which is also the basis for the commission of her crimes, prevent a defense. Is
this an implied philosophical explanation for Holocaust perpetrators in general? Berg knows that
Hanna is illiterate, what is his responsibility to inform the court?
145
Donahue observes that Berg follows the Kantian categorical imperative and thus respects
Hanna’s wishes, as a morally autonomous human being. Donahue also argues that this fact
makes Hanna and by implication the perpetrator generation responsible for their own deeds,
freeing the 1968ers from complicity or even responsibility. They are “morally enjoined not to
intervene.”
146
Walser’s Friedenspreis speech echoes this point, that each person’s conscience is
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
141
(a) Donahue 129; (b) Erin McGlothlin, Second Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of
Survival and Perpetration (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006) 203.
142
Donahue 130.
143
Ibid. 124.
144
Bill Niven, “Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser and the Problem of Shame,” The Modern
Language Review 98.2 (April 2003): 381-396; 383.
145
Bernhard Schlink, Der Vorleser (Zürich: Diogenes Verlag, 1995) 104-157.
146
Donahue 104-105.
!
277!
inviolable.
147
The real narrative here is actually, similar to Walser but in a more humane
manner, the normalization of the Holocaust problem. Saul Friedländer cites a letter from Hannah
Arendt to Karl Jaspers to the effect that humans are not equipped to deal with guilt (of the
perpetrators) that exceeds the definition of crime, and innocence (of the victims) that likewise
exceeds all concepts.
148
Berg is ultimately faced with an "impossible dilemma"
149
:
comprehending the incomprehensible and drawing lessons from his parents' generation's
crimes.
150
This impossibility absolves him and his generation not only of those crimes but
allows him and them to reconcile with the parents' generation, denying the 1968ers' rebellion as
self-righteous. In his monograph Guilt About the Past, Schlink makes this point in another
context as an expression of his overall philosophy.
[. . .] the years of moral and political zeal, and the naive belief that the older
generation is guilty and principally in the wrong and our young one is innocent and in the
right were over.
151
While this statement may reflect the realities faced by an aging idealist in the face of the
requisite level of cant and hypocrisy for success in a professional career, it also evokes Wolf’s
lament about the inability to be honest in her East German and Soviet dominated society.
Essentially Berg is Kindheitsmuster's Nelly, generationally once removed. His life is
similarly split between attachment to Hanna, symbolizing the older generation, who victimized
him by passing down collective guilt as cultural memory and legal/ethical precepts that define
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
147
Eshel, Jewish Memories 11.
148
Saul Friedländer, “History, Memory, and the Historian: Dilemmas and Responsibilities,” New
German Critique 80 (Spring – Summer 2000): 3-15; 8.
149
Donahue 148.
150
McGlothlin 204.
151
Bernhard Schlink, Guilt About the Past (Toronto: House of Anasi Press, 2010) 115.
!
278!
his professional and personal development. Julia Hell registers the following opinion on the
(in)equations implied in Schlink’s novel.
One can speak of the traumatic experiences on the part of non-Jewish Germans, as long
as the differences between these incompatible historical experiences [of the Jewish
survivors] are not forgotten and, most importantly, as long as the trap of transforming
Germans into the victims of National Socialism is avoided.
152
Analysts have situated Der Vorleser into a number of problematics and interpretative schemata.
Donahue avers that the questions raised must be individually answered.
153
Citing authorial intent
he views the effect of the novel as reducing focus on Holocaust victims in favor of a discussion
of the costs to ensuing generations of non-Jewish Germans of a continuous legacy of shame, that
would prevent their attaining “a healthy sense of national identity.“
154
But how can this be
achieved?
Regardless of authorial intention or other obvious parallels, the text situates the non-
Jewish German reader into the world of the Shoah by means of a thought experiment that re-
narrativizes select contrary-to-fact aspects of that world in order to instantiate a discourse on the
limits of responsibility and for those not responsible but contingently associated, shame. If there
are no limits and responsibility and shame are collective and eternal then considering the
magnitude of the Holocaust as a crime, the “greater debt” of Christa Wolf’s “settling of
accounts” becomes too onerous for the individual and too destructive for German society in
fracturing social relationships. It is this conceptual impasse that becomes the narrative of post-
Holocaust German identity for succeeding generations, more than the Holocaust itself. Berg and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
152
Julia Hell, “Eyes Wide Shut: German Post-Holocaust Authorship,” New German Critique 88
(Winter 2003): 9-36; 14.
153
Donahue 151.
154
Ibid. 8.
!
279!
his generation are subjectivized in relation to their inability to reconcile the irreconcilable. Then,
as German citizens thus delivered, through the impossibility of its moral demands, from the
Holocaust as their narrative of identity, a normal state of cultural memory, unencumbered by
historical associations with criminality, is finally attained.
Not all post-Holocaust authorship by second generation non-Jewish Germans seeks to
ambiguate issues of guilt and responsibility. Katja Garloff comments on one of W. G. Sebald’s
works as follows.
Die Ausgewanderten has been hailed as a book that balances the claims of memory with
the injunction against Holocaust representation, and the desire to understand the victims
with the necessity to avoid a facile identification with them.
155
The same could be said of another work, Austerlitz, which chronicles the search of a Jewish man
Jacques Austerlitz, sent to England in the 1930s on one of the children’s transports, for evidence
of his family and his past, of which he has no memory. The novel consists of prose deeply
layered with multifaceted significations for German and European history. Its text is augmented
by photographs, focalizing the concept of the ‘gaze’ and the implications of voyeurism in
relation to Holocaust representation throughout. Austerlitz visits Terezín in the present Czech
Republic, the Theresienstadt concentration camp. At Terezín the dead are present through
signification by absence, which purports to be chronicled photographically.
Sebald commented in an interview, "[t]he moral backbone of literature is about that
whole question of memory.”
156
Memory is also the hallmark of identity. Since Austerlitz lacks
his early memories, he lacks true self-knowledge and therefore a stable identity. He is alienated
from the society in which he finds himself and subject to debilitating bouts of depression. His
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
155
Garloff 76.
156
Maya Jaggi, "The Last Word," The Guardian, 21 December 2001.
!
280!
assumed identity crumbles with the dissolution of the props, adopted family, schooling, and
friends that gave an illusionary viability to his life. As clues to Austerlitz' true identity come into
his life, he begins to recover memories. His resolve to face the past without repression of
memory leads him to Prague, where he begins to recover his language, personal history, and a
modicum of true identity. Yet his memory is even more of a reconstruction than the average
person's since it consists in possibly relevant photographs and descriptions by strangers who
knew his family. The novel is far too complex to adequately explicate here with its evocations of
Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the places of Nazi brutality such as the fortress at
Breedonk. What Sebald accomplishes is the mixture of fact, fiction, and historical frames, not in
order to represent or identify with the victims of the Holocaust, whose trauma could not be
shared, but to bring the present generation into contact with the artifacts of that trauma for the
purpose not of German identity affirmation but of questioning. Nor is this necessarily a negative
stance; perhaps Sebald’s contribution is typified by a quote from another work. “The depiction of
calamity encompasses the possibility of its overcoming.”
157
The Holocaust continues to engage the attention of German citizens. This engagement is
frequently in the form of television or film dramatizations like the 2013 Zweites Deutsches
Fernsehen (ZDF) production of the miniseries Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter, released in the U. S.
under the title Generation War. Although well received by German audiences the production
provoked protests from the government of Poland for its portrayal of wartime anti-Semitism in
Poland and complicity in the murder of Jews by Polish freedom fighters. Without addressing the
weaknesses of a plot that finds five young Germans, one of them Jewish, at the beginning of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
157
W.G. Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks: Zur Österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis
Handtke (Salzburg: Residenz, 1985) 12; quoted in Amir Eshel, “Against the Power of Time: The
Poetics of Suspension in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz” New German Critique 88 (Winter 2003): 71-
96; 96.
!
281!
World War Two constantly and ‘randomly’ finding each other on the Eastern Front while
disobeying their superiors’ orders to kill civilians, the following from a review in the English
language edition of Der Spiegel addresses not only the movie but reveals something of the state
of present day Vergangenheitsbewältigung in popular discourse.
Perhaps the most forceful lesson that the five friends . . . convey is the critical question
asked by future generations: "What would I have done?" And it is stripped of any moral
pretension, even exposed as ultimately banal or at least marginal. No one, even the most
sophisticated, decent, well-meaning or well-educated, would have remained untouched.
As in Jean-Paul Sartre's play "Dirty Hands," there is no hero who can remain clean under
such circumstances. Everyone becomes guilty to varying degrees.
158
Except perhaps the victims -- and those who did resist or were able to emigrate?
The review says relatively little about the miniseries itself but proceeds with an essay
recapitulating the stages of Holocaust awareness in Germany from the end of the war to the
present. It posits the idea that since the facts of the Holocaust are so well known, the factor that
will facilitate the “transfer between generations” of that knowledge in today’s world is emotional
involvement.
159
The characters in the drama are thus presented as ordinary individuals with
whom one can readily identify. The problem is, none of the five appear to be convinced Nazis,
although there are quite a few lurking behind the scenes making life miserable for the principal
figures. The article concludes that the Nazi era must not be forgotten but “we must put an end to
guilt.”
160
The essay finishes with the idea that Germany’s permanent “culture of atonement”
must not be allowed, by becoming perfunctory, to paralyze a real engagement with responsibility
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
158
Romain Leick, “Next-Generation WWII Atonement,” trans. Christopher Sultan, Der Spiegel
28 March 2013, web.
159
Ibid.
160
Ibid.
!
282!
for actions.
161
7.5 Evaluations
What then can be said about the place of Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster in the
linked discourses of German cultural and national identity, Holocaust remembrance, and
individual responsibility for political actions? The works have been praised for acknowledging
the role of the individual German in the implementation of the policies of Nazism. This idea
found its real world situation in the controversies over Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men
and Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. From the vantage points of the societies
in which they were produced, a number of Grass’s and Wolf’s novels provoked a level of
discomfort and controversy. Some of this appears retributive for unpopular stances on issues of
critical importance such as German unification. Grass’s opposition to this event on the basis of
German political immaturity seemed to be well founded in the wake of the outbreaks of anti-
immigrant violence and murder in the 1990s. Wolf’s opposition in the name of a reformed
communism found resonance as resentment between ‘Ossis’ and ‘Wessis’. Kindheitsmuster’s
pointed reference to slave labor and human experimentation by German firms found concrete
expression in the refusal of German industry to admit complicity and the refusal of German
courts to award reparations. Lawsuits from the United States representing victims were needed
to force policy and legal changes whereby “ein ‘in finanzieller Hinsicht abschließendes Zeichen
ihrer moralischen Verantwortung für die damaligen Geschehnisse’” was accomplished.
Die Blechtrommel’s “Onion Cellar” referenced the trope of the inability to mourn a
decade before its sociological explication by the Mitscherlichs.
162
Critics have questioned these
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
161
Ibid.
162
Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkei zu Trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven
Verhaltens, 21st ed. (Munich: Piper, 1990).
!
283!
achievements, differently for the two works, at the level of tone and distance from the memories
of Holocaust victims.
163
A number of questions may only be answered by the manner in which
the critical reader situates the textual problematics within the perceived facticities of the world
around her. Some of these issues are instances of whether a work of art, in enacting a critique,
vitiates its own oppositional stance through that enactment. Others involve the use of
stereotypes in Die Blechtrommel and yet others involve Kindheitsmuster's self-admitted
accomodations with the limits of communication (and by implication the social structure of its
society). Do the communicative strategies of certain German works, more than in other
literatures, signify a linguistic "hermeticism" or cognitive impasses for sensitive issues? In one
sense, the former may be seen as symptom of the latter. In Die Blechtrommel and
Kindheitsmuster this impasse may manifest itself in paradoxical portrayals. In works such as
Walser's Tod eines Kritikers the impasse becomes denial of paradigm validity altogether; public
critique of the speech of the private conscience to itself becomes illegitimate, if it questions the
legitimacy of the narrative that grounds that conscience’s subjectivity: cultural identity.
In Schlink's Der Vorleser the post-Holocaust non-Jewish German generation becomes
victim, temporally delayed, but victim surely in needing to construct subjectivity in relation to a
cultural identity whose 'normal' state appears to be the acceptance of irreconcilability of
viewpoints and the continual negotiation of difference in narrative perspective, in regard to the
National Socialist era and the Holocaust. Interestingly it is Christa Wolf and Günter Grass as
persons who situate themselves in relation to this problematic. Wolf’s Stadt der Engel [City of
Angels] reveals the quest to understand how one became and becomes as one is, as a lifelong
project. Considering the multigenerational longevity of this quest in relation to the fascist past,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
163
(a) Schlant 71;( b) Pinkert 32.
!
284!
as revealed in various media, her story would seem to parallel the interests of many Germans yet
today.
Grass’s admission of service in the Waffen-SS demonstrates already before Schlink’s
generational difficulties, the impossibility of reconciling, for Grass’s Flakhelfer cohorts, two
mutually exclusive paths in life: Nobel prize winning moral authority and undisclosed soldier in
the Waffen-SS.
164
In the wake of criticism that followed upon this disclosure and Grass’s
subsequent admission of shame too great to admit, it went largely unnoticed that this fact situates
Grass into the problematic presented in Der Vorleser. Perhaps fittingly, considering his in-
between generational status he partakes of both Hanna Schmitz’s conundrum and Berg’s
inability to reconcile incommensurables. Yet this may be exactly what defines Grass and his
generation as members of and witnesses to the degradation of the past, without which status they
would possibly have had no specific moral authority in relation to their fellow citizens since they
would not have shared the common experience. Grass always admitted to being a convinced
National Socialist yet the failure to admit the modality, when that was required of those he
criticized, adds the charge of hypocrisy to his pronouncements. That this hypocrisy was perhaps
a generational attribute gains currency by the imputation of similar associations for other
members of that generation including also Martin Walser.
165
In the wake of the controversies involving those that conservative commentators like
Frank Schirrmacher had seen as too young to be guilty and liberals as too committed to an honest
accounting to be questioned, younger German theorists have declared the Hitlerjugend
generation to be irrelevant to the continued project of coming to terms with the past. As persons,
this is no doubt true. Christa Wolf died on 1 December 2011, Günter Grass on 13 April 2015.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
164
Parkes 209ff.
165
Ibid. 220.
!
285!
Stephan Braese in 2006 essentially declared the end of this generation’s importance as societal
influence by virtue of their presence in the Nazi era. Braese felt that the entire enterprise is now
one of history, that literary interest in the Holocaust has become localized and Europeanized. The
de-emphasis on German specificity demarcates the end of an era; “[s]ie is vergangen aber nicht
hintergehbar.”
166
There is no way to foretell what authors will continue to have relevance or after long
periods of eclipse have their reputations revived. Without the ability to see what significance a
future generation accords the works of Grass and Wolf, one can nevertheless assert that they
embody in Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster the historical record of their generation’s
experience with the phenomena of fascism and genocide in ways that for the Cold War era,
secured the moral authority of the works and their authors within and without their respective
societies. What the novels accomplish in their different manners is to so narrativize the facts of
the Nazi era in relation to their contemporary societies, German history, constructs of
subjectivity, cultural and national identity, and the Holocaust that they produce conceptual
discourses of dialogical significations and dialectical alternatives, that fictively parallel
historiographical, sociological, and political discourses on these topics in German society.
These form a constellation that leads through the steps indicated by the dissertation’s
individual chapter problematics to an analysis of Grass’s and Wolf’s novels as essentially a
narrative that uncovers the fact of the Holocaust at the conceptual core of each novel despite few
explicit references to the event itself. This constellation functions such that: (1) the magnitude of
the Holocaust event implicates its presence negatively, as the void in all discourses throughout
Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster in which historical circumstances, the problematics of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
166
Braese 105-106.
!
286!
the texts, and/or the horizon of expectations of the reader will plausibly read its absence as an
aporia within the cognitive constructs under consideration, (2) this constellation (from Chapter 3)
recognizably signifies the Holocaust as a whole, in such a way that a choice of response is posed
to the reader, a type of dialectical image, that situates the reader in a particular manner (such as
one’s recognition and cognitive response to a ‘racist’ remark) to all elements, and (3) the novels’
levels of engagement with the Holocaust [latent, explicit, as moral challenge] parallel and have
relevance as argued for the historical record of German society’s engagement, here encapsulated
as negation, negotiation, and normalization.
Of course this configuration and constellation of elements is wholly the product of the
dissertation’s set of narratives worked into a discourse on the location of the Holocaust at the
effective heart of Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster. There is no claim to absolute truth
value here, the thesis is explored rather than ‘proven.’ This is the natural result of a
methodology that recognizes the self-reference inherent in the relation of theory to its results and
has chosen to accept the contingency and sometimes the paradoxes present in any configuration
of world, text, and reader as also a theoretical construct of the texts themselves (as noted for Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster in Chapter 5 of the dissertation). The epistemic validity
claimed in analysis is that derivable from a process, as outlined in Chapter 1 of the dissertation of
situating the elements into a number of contexts in order to call forth and configure discussion
over the possibilities and their supporting assumptions.
The critical reader will thus determine whether Grass’s and Wolf’s novels have continued
relevance to contemporary problems. A question of relevance is always one of for whom and on
what basis? When Braese, cited earlier, diagnoses the ‘Europeanization’ of the Holocaust
discourse, he refers to Imre Kertész’ Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which he saw Auschwitz
!
287!
as a human problem rather than a unique occurrence.
167
Other examples exist of the localization
and universalization of the Holocaust problematic, e.g. Jan Gross’ Neighbors. No doubt memory
of the Shoah among non-Jewish Germans will fade over the years and be re-narrativized in
literature and media. One need only look at the historical literature about the American Civil
War and European Middle Ages, not to mention the literatures from and about the long recorded
histories of China, Japan, and other countries to see that changes of emplotment from one
generation to another often reverse the roles of heroes and villains, or at least convert the latter
into empathetic figures.
The longing for a narrative of a normal German history congruent with the generalized
discourse of the formation of the European nation state bespeaks, as noted, a number of
motivations. At one level is the understandable desire by succeeding generations of Germans not
to have their culture, their nation, and by implication, themselves, defined by a historical event,
that as time proceeds may or may not be viewed as a unique occurrence that was the product of a
much earlier generation. Most Americans and Europeans to not wish to be defined by the
narratives attendant upon the institutions of colonialism and slavery. Yet history, as Koselleck’s
memory of experience,
168
is sometimes an unforeseen encumbrance when one attempts to move
beyond historical controversies, e.g. the role of the Confederate battle flag in American culture
or the commemoration in Northern Ireland of the battle of the Boyne. In both cases issues that
have become latent over time re-surface in uncomfortable ways in relation to certain discourses
of cultural identity. At another level, ‘normalization’ becomes the default logic of the intolerable
situation of being guilty of nothing but being subjectively determined by the guilt of others, as
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
167
Imre Kertész and Ivan Sanders, “Eureka!: The 2002 Nobel Lecture,” World Literature Today
77.1 (April – June 2003) 4-8; 7.
168
Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts,
trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) 56.
!
288!
diagnosed of Schlink’s protagonist in Der Vorleser. At yet a third level appears the desire to
maintain identity with cultural traditions, but those somehow cleansed of criminal complicity, as
evidenced in the Historikerstreit.
For contemporary German discourse normalization may be the equivalent to the presence
of the Schwarze Köchin. This shadowy figure has been variously described as a destructive
power in life, an abstract existential force, a fairy tale figure, and the symbol of specific
historical features. The figure has been interpreted as indicating a pessimistic fatalism or even a
complete nihilism in regard to the historical process.
169
Giving full weight to either of these
extremes obviates the need to write a novel like Die Blechtrommel except as an act of masochism
on the part of the author. Grass has said that the figure grows with the times.
170
In this sense
growing with the times unfolding in the twenty-first century may be the rejection of moralistic
viewpoints and a conception of the Holocaust as an unparalleled act of evil.
171
The Schwarze
Köchin as a type of Zeitgeist then becomes a signifier for the epistemic problem of
differentiating a ‘real’ among seemingly infinite differences of opinion. In this case
Kierkegaard’s existential ‘either/or’ becomes the undecidable of that which is neither one nor the
other or perhaps something in between or paradoxically both at once, as intimated earlier in the
dissertation. Later in the “Conclusion” it will be apparent that Die Blechtrommel and
Kindheitsmuster situate themselves also into this complex of themes. Ultimately becoming
disentangled from unwanted historical influence may involve a rejection of the paradigm
altogether.
At some point Grass’s and Wolf’s works and those of the Hitlerjugend generation will
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
169
Nury Kim 96-109.
170
Ibid. Grass quotation 98.
171
Leick.
!
289!
cease, if they have not already, to engage the intellectual needs of the future but engagement with
and narrativization of the Holocaust as material event will only cease to have relevance when,
like other historical tragedies, the likelihood of its recurrence and the hatreds that enabled it,
have also ceased to be an actual threat within German, European, and world societies. Saul
Friedländer reminds us that we must not forget the victims’ testimonies.
[. . .] they put Nazi behavior in its full perspective; they describe the face to face
encounter of the perpetrators with the victims during the persecutions, the deportations,
and the killings.
172
This may be a challenge for non-Jewish Germans over time, perhaps too great a challenge in
terms of costs and benefits to the society.
Garloff suggests that "rather than more exacting words, we need new communal and
communicative relations to get beyond the impasses of Holocaust representation."
173
She
believes Sebald accomplishes this task in Die Ausgewanderten precisely by "accepting the gap
between the speechless and the speaking" rather than trying to erase the difference between the
experiences of Holocaust victims and perpetrators.
174
A younger generation, however, skeptical
of all that has gone before and perhaps measuring experience against its own mirroring in digital
and social media, may find such ameliorative strategies uncongenial to its sense of self. It may
be that a societal need for an unproblematic collective memory or ‘picturing’ (to use Fulbrook’s
term) of German history will lead to a general acceptance of Karl-Heinz Bohrer’s claim that the
entire discussion in both historiographic and literary terms has been too moralistic and has
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
172
Friedländer, “History, Memory, and the Historian” 15.
173
Garloff 87.
174
Ibid. 88.
!
290!
distorted the perception of German history.
175
One ‘take-away’ from Die Blechtrommel and
Kindheitsmuster might be that those who seek to become unencumbered by history must guard
against “[h]istory’s accursed tendency to repeat itself.”
176
In evaluating the relevance of
historical narratives suitable for the informing of a discourse of ‘normalization’ one might
consider whether true disentanglement from the Holocaust involves a paradoxical abandoning of
the quest and an embrace of the inability to forget, as a cultural and national ‘identity’. Edgar
Wolfrum summarizes the debate thus.
Deutschland hat keine Aussicht darauf, eine “normale Nation” zu werden. Aber benötigt
die Welt noch eine weitere “normale Nation?”
177
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
175
Eshel, “The Past Recaptured” 181.
176
PC 170/K
177
Wolfrum 496-497.
!
291!
Conclusion: Either/Or
What, then, has been gained through the foregoing approach to Die Blechtrommel and
Kindheitsmuster, what have the novels communicated? In exploring these through a perspective
conscious of its own narrative construction, areas of concern suggested by the texts have been
related to each other in a way that situates the works within their respective societies and the
wider critical literature, and inserts them into discussions of critical issues for twentieth century
historiography: the rise of National Socialism and the implementation of the Holocaust. They do
so by problematizing human subjectivity, the family, and the relationship of both to the historical
experience and cultural memory of German society. Viewing the novels through the
comparative lenses of multiple theoretical constructs also foregrounds the differences in their
respective textual ontologies. The two novels obviously function in different ways. Ultimately
both attempt to situate their worlds, their texts, and the reader rather differently but with
differences, similar to the separate societies in which they were produced, that exhibit
commonalities. These are revealed in the underlying communicative strategies of Die
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster. Both are in search of a language and a mode of expression
that is capable of addressing the Nazi period and the horror of the Holocaust while
simultaneously critiquing their respective postwar societies.
The solution in each novel regarding the situation of the reader’s horizon of expectations
is to present a paradoxical either/or appeal to reader decision-making. Either Die
Blechtrommel’s outlook is nihilistic or it seeks to enlighten by negative valorization, purposely
creating conceptual voids whereby the reader must engage the problematic. Either Oskar’s
narrative modalities can be regarded as performative critiques of the ‘aestheticist’ literary trends
of figures like Gottfried Benn and others of the ‘inner emigration’ still prominent in postwar
!
292!
Germany
1
or as a response to Adorno’s ‘crisis of the novel’
2
or perhaps both at once. Similar
analyses may be found for Kindheitsmuster. Wolf’s novel seeks to either convince that re-
narrativization of memory allows one to come to terms with oneself, even oneself incarnated as a
Hitler Youth member – to heal the rupture between child and adult – or that the “limits of the
expressible”
3
doom the enterprise from the beginning. The interrogatory is the novels’ modus
operandi throughout. The decision belongs to the reader. Locating the sense of the texts as a
calculus between the cognition of the reader, the construction of the text, and the materiality of
the social environment also locates the raison d’être for the writings themselves within the
authors’ biographies.
Considering their experiences and the manner in which they inform the novels’ character
and plot development these biographies become conceptual surrogates for coming to terms with
personal involvement, even if at a more or less remote level, in a genocidal regime. The
mechanism that determined the authors’ actual life trajectory might be seen as a continual
negotiation of an ‘either/or’ principle. The realization of the factors involved in life directions,
whether purely contingent or a matter of choice, place the authors into a state which radicalizes
and ironicizes Kierkegaard’s dictum that “if a person could continually keep himself on the spear
tip of the moment of choice . . . there could be no question of a choice at all.”
4
For Grass and
Wolf making an absolute choice for themselves, authenticity in the existential sense becomes an
endeavor fraught with fear that the forces of history actually make the choices, dismay, guilt, and
shame over where earlier choices actually led them, and anxiety that one is always “on the tip of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Nury Kim 27ff.
2
Eshel, “The Past Recaptured” 184.
3
PC 407/K 638.
4
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part II, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987) 163.
!
293!
the moment” and must make the right choices to “come to grips with oneself”
5
as the Schwarze
Köchin comes nearer.
6
The relationship between author biography and textual inception is, of course, a standard
ingredient in explications of Kindheitsmuster.
7
Making this claim for Die Blechtrommel requires
explanation. Looking at Wolf’s novel and her own life history reveals the material and
conceptual similarities. Wolf sets the novel in her birthplace where her childhood was, like
Nelly’s, molded by National Socialism, membership in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM), and
flight to Mecklenburg as Soviet forces advanced.
8
Like Nelly, Christa Wolf was treated for
tuberculosis in a sanatorium in 1946. The car trip to Gorzów Wielkopolski in 1971 is likewise
autobiographical as an event, as are, broadly, the reading tours and general travel itineraries
referenced in Kindheitsmuster. The reflections of the fictive author in writing the novel are,
naturally, Wolf’s reflections adapted to the purposes of narrative structuring. That structuring
encompasses, obviously, the setting of events into three time levels, three narrative voices,
progressive revelation and interrogation of the role of memory in establishing a personal history
and sense of self, and critically, the influence of early exposure to fascist behavior patterns in
determining that subjectivity.
The two end timepoints for the adult fictive author, 1971 and 1976 thus encompass the
real personal history of Christa Wolf, as briefly outlined in Chapter 2 of the dissertation, to each,
as implied experiential background. Wolf said in 1984 that she could not express the figure
Nelly as an “I” since Wolf no longer was that child and no longer identified with that character.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5
PC 406/K 638.
6
TD 563/B 779.
7
Firsching 71.
8
Magenau 32-33.
!
294!
Wolf averred that since 1946 she fully identified with her life choices and any subsequent
autobiographically influenced writing would not need to be in the third person.
9
It is not
apparent from a surface reading of Kindheitsmuster that the time periods in Wolf’s life ending in
1971 and 1976 respectively, encompassed an interval in which she became not only a successful
author, with a following in the West but that these included several rebuffs from the East
German regime and gradual disenchantment with governmental decisions, as well as outright
protest over the Wolf Biermann affair.
For Wolf, the young idealistic supporter of the ‘victory of the proletariat’, whose
intellectual background in the 1950s, like others in the GDR, was euphorically shaped not only
by Marx and Lenin but by the spirit of the young Goethe, Lenz, and Sturm-und Drang,
10
the
question of subservience raised in Kindheitsmuster
11
becomes a self questioning of the stakes
involved in living in an uncomfortable society in the hopes of a future utopia. The issue of
whether dependence on ideology and regimes is a psychological trait instilled early in life is still
current for Wolf in her last major work. But here she sees dependence as an integral aspect of
Western culture; only conformity to societal ideals are possible, the society limits even the
concept of utopias to either ‘more’ or ‘less’ of the same but not anything outside the system.
12
The childhood patterning of Nazi Germany left one dependent on a political regime that used
absolute obedience as the tool of mass murder. In Wolf’s mind, after the war she chose political
engagement by joining the Communist Party in response to the passive complicity of her parents
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
Wolf, "Eine Diskussion über Kindheitsmuster" 95.
10
Magenau 47.
11
K 295ff./PC 188ff.
12
Christa Wolf, Stadt der Engel oder the Overcoat of Dr. Freud (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010) 88-
90.
!
295!
with fascism.
13
The either/or dynamic became critically important for the development of an
ethical self-image.
In Kindheitsmuster the West is pictured as insufficiently aware of and only tepidly
repentant about the facts of the Nazi era. The implication is that the East, with its imperfections,
is at least not a society that prominently harbors those who visited the Nazi horror not only upon
its victims but also psychologically upon its children. As adults they will be suspected and will
suspect themselves of a degree of complicity and will be unable to trust their judgments about
the proper response to authority. In this respect, the Holocaust functions as the basis of the
writing itself, having for Wolf a therapeutic function,
14
an overcoming of self-alienation rooted
in the knowledge of her childhood assent through indoctrination to a genocidal culture, a
knowledge that does not indicate Mitschuld but certainly Mitverantwortung.
15
Günter Grass also attaches this latter word to himself and his generation in the
autobiographical Beim Häuten der Zwiebel [Peeling the Onion].
16
Considering the drastic
difference in writing style between Kindheitsmuster and Die Blechtrommel the issue arises of
biographical elements that might be determinative for the genesis of the text as personal
testament also in the latter novel. Quite aside from debates on the irrelevance of an author to a
text, Grass has proven an unreliable source over the years for answering this question, by his
own account. In 1976 he denied that he wrote the novel for any type of
Vergangenheitsbewältigung but rather, initially, for the ability to set narrative to prose. Yet even
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
Magenau 44.
14
Wolf, “Eine Diskussion über Kindheitsmuster” 95.
15
Ibid. 92.
16
Günter Grass, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2006) 127.
!
296!
this disclaimer is qualified by allusions to ‘personal’ reasons and keeping some information from
the reader.
17
In short, the successful author is here playing the part of one who cannot resist the
lure of telling a good story. There are not really parallels between Oskar and Grass in Die
Blechtrommel but a distillation of life experience that informs the text in terms of birthplace,
family origins, observations on the Nazification of the German citizenry, adult travels, etc.,
18
from which the figure Oskar emerges as symbolic stand-in for a wide range of authorial
fantasies.
Chief among these is the idea that Oskar, always the child, is not accountable for either
his or society’s misdeeds. Preece notes that this makes Oskar “a wishful retrospective self-
projection”
19
for Grass and for those artists who have claimed freedom from responsibility.
Assembling this idea with Grass’s self-declarations one could paint a portrait of Grass as purely
motivated by the lure of authorial invention and the need to make money as the main motivating
factors for writing. This view, if valid, would convert the novel into an opportunistic and
ethically undeveloped appropriation of the Nazi period within a setting of pure irony.
Interestingly, the absence of any moral perspective or ‘enlightening’ purpose would, considering
the subject matter, foreground these very qualities through absence. It would also read into
Grass’s interviews and utterances more than they actually say and confuse the idea of initial
intent with a gradual realization of purpose during the four-year span of the novel’s writing.
Such a view makes nonsense of Grass’s readings of Camus, association with others in the
Gruppe 47, acquaintance with Paul Celan, and affinity for Döblin. It also makes insincere and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
17
Grass, "Looking Back at the ‘Tin Drum’"84-88.
18
Grass, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel 242.
19
Preece, "Biography as Politics"12.
!
297!
craven Grass’s story of gradual acknowledgement of German war crimes after the Nuremberg
trials.
20
Thus Grass’s comments in 1976 and others similar, actually accentuate comparison with
Oskar, reveling in the role of unreliable narrator. This role, both in Die Blechtrommel and in life
seems to combine elements both shamanistic and Socratic: the effort to enlighten proceeds by
forcing the reader to resolve Grass’s paradoxes and in so doing examine one’s own life and
attitudes. In this respect the moment of choice is transferred to the reader.
Not acknowledged by Grass until 2006 is his wartime service in the Waffen-SS. The
controversy produced by this late life revelation occasioned both condemnation and apologetics.
Taberner analyzes Grass’s disclosure from two perspectives. On one side, the reader might
accept Grass’s apologies for not relating the matter earlier on the basis of too great shame,
realizing that the actual service was the result of youthful foolishness by one indoctrinated and
hoping to escape a stultifying home environment. In seeming exculpation Grass reminds one
that he was not alone and that his entire generation shares “joint responsibility” for such
attitudes.
21
Considering similar pronouncements from Christa Wolf, Magenau suggests that
generational solidarity becomes a strategy for the ambiguation of individual responsibility.
22
In
Taberner’s view, Grass’s identification in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel with the common experience
of Germans his age coupled with his repudiation of the Nazi era and life of humanistic
engagement, actually, in Grass’s own view, enhances his stature as representative moral
authority, even if the average reader might see this as finessed hypocrisy.
23
The second
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
20
Volker Neuhaus, Günter Grass: Schriftsteller, Künstler, Zeitgenosse (Göttingen: Steidl, 2012)
87, 146.
21
Stuart Taberner, “Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion,” The Cambridge Companion to Günter
Grass, ed. Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 139-150; 141-143.
22
Magenau 28.
23
Taberner 143-144.
!
298!
perspective suggested by Taberner sees Grass’s life and obfuscations,
[. . .] defined by the errors of his youth and subsequently (and literally) writ large as
representative of an entire nation’s folly, and as a reflection on the personal cost of
this.
24
One subtext of Die Blechtrommel, then, is the author’s knowledge, that he was not, like Oskar,
the wartime entertainer, but also not a resister to a system of atrocities. Indeed as envisioned in
the later Kopfgeburten [Headbirths], if Grass had been a little older with the same martial
attitudes, he could have become a perpetrator of atrocities. The entire Flakhelfer generation,
from former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope
Benedikt XVI, stood at the tip of this divide, and when called to service, the moment of choice.
Considering the stakes for the authors’ lives the Holocaust cannot but be the underlying
principle behind the writing of both Wolf’s and Grass’s novels as well as the chief element that
conceptually situates the critical reader into their world. The authors, like many others, refer to
the rule of the National Socialist Party as fascism. This appellation, borrowed from Mussolini’s
National Fascist Party and its successors and emulators, denotes an authoritarian, nationalist,
corporatist, and traditionalist ordering of society that theoretically describes also the government
of Nazi Germany. What distinguishes the latter, however, is obviously the fostering and
implementation of industrial scale genocide and the either willing or passive involvement of the
German citizenry as a whole in significant aspects of the program. In acknowledging this fact,
Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster, in their separate ways, implicate aspects of traditional
German life and attitudes, as well as the behavior patterns of segments of the early twentieth
century populace as explanatory paradigms for Nazism and its crimes. Locating ‘failures’ of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
24
Ibid. 150.
!
299!
German society in this way invites comparison with real world explanatory paradigms.
In Chapter 7 it was noted in passing that controversy had been aroused by two studies in
the 1990s dealing with such explanatory paradigms: Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men and
Daniel J. Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Browning’s work comprises an
investigation into the mass killings of Jews in Poland in 1942 by a unit of the German Order
Police. Goldhagen sets the same information within a larger historical perspective on anti-
Semitism in Germany. Both studies attempt to understand the motivations of ‘ordinary’
Germans to participate in the Holocaust. At this level, one could draw a general parallel with the
approach in fiction of Grass and Wolf. Browning even evokes Grass by averring that such
research into human behavior requires the “rejection of demonization.”
25
In the end, the author
concludes (to oversimplify) that peer group pressure played a large role in impelling the
particular individuals involved to murderous action they might not have engaged in under other
circumstances and in justifying their behavior to themselves.
26
Goldhagen describes his objectives as an attempt to answer three primary questions:
“Did the perpetrators of the Holocaust kill willingly? If so, what motivated them to kill and
brutalize Jews? How was this motivation engendered?”
27
Goldhagen’s findings are based on a
methodology that self-consciously seeks to foreground perpetrators, their backgrounds, and the
nature of German society under Nazism, more than abstract causes or actions.
28
He concludes
(again to oversimplify) that the Holocaust was the result of a culture of German anti-Semitism
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
25
Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution
in Poland (New York: Harper, 1992, 1998) xx.
26
Browning 188-189.
27
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(New York: Vintage/Random House, 1996, 1997) 375.
28
Ibid. 5-8.
!
300!
that, instrumentalized by the Nazis, allowed an entire generation of Germans to sanction and
engage in genocide without moral qualms.
29
Despite much criticism by historians, Goldhagen’s
book was received in Germany with some interest by readers, allowing them, in Fulbrook’s
opinion, to measure their own attitudinal distance from the World War Two generation.
30
Even
here, there is an apparent ‘either/or’ dynamic. Either one subscribes to a functionalist or an
intentionalist account of the Holocaust. Validating the former might allow some measure of
compassion for the perpetrator generation. Accepting the latter makes this a more difficult
proposition. Is there a range of options?
Peer pressure, the drive to conform, and anti-Semitism form much of the implied and
actual discourses in Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster. This literature derives from the
historical experience and narratives of Holocaust perpetrators and can never acquaint the reader
with the trauma apparent in the literature of survivors. The perpetrators’ perspective might be
said to actually aid in imagining what has been described as unimaginable. One is aware of
murderous ethnic hatreds throughout the world and throughout history into the present time.
Goldhagen’s thesis gains plausibility when one considers the depredations of majority against
minority populations at particular times, or over particular time spans, and places. Yet there is
the residual feeling that the Holocaust is somehow different and perhaps inexplicable in that
difference. Some, like Zygmunt Bauman, have sought explanation in the workings of
technological and bureaucratized ‘modernity’. At the temporal remove of the twenty-first
century all explanations are competing or complementary narratives of available data. More
precise elucidations require historical analysis, which in turn, must secure its foundations in
order to claim more than narrative veracity. Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster present
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
29
Ibid. 28; 416ff.
30
Fulbrook, German National Identity 230.
!
301!
fictional explications, located within certain problem areas of German society as their authors
saw them. Perhaps more pertinent issues involve the use that will be made of these into the
future.
Yet the either/or motif, the figure of absolute choice might appear not only too stark a
dichotomy for a generation that has no problem with the concept of virtual reality but is also
undercut in Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster by the significance of the protagonists
themselves. Oskar as multivalent figure and polysemic narrator is a challenge to literary theory.
He is neither a victim nor a perpetrator, a symbol of every German or a willful child, he is all of
these and more. The figure contravenes logical principles: it may simultaneously be itself and its
opposite, it may simultaneously signify something and its opposite. Likewise Kindheitsmuster’s
three voices, although ostensibly the historical stages of one personality, question the concept of
integration altogether and suggest that their configuration rests with the interplay of chance and
choice. If Nelly, and Wolf, had been slightly older, would they have become secretaries in the
office of a Nazi functionary and shared a disgraced or criminal fate at the end of the war? What
of the reader of the novels, seeking sense and navigating the decision making process between
alternative scenarios? Neither Oskar nor Nelly are contradictions; they extend the range of sense
and often by throwing that which they are not into bold relief by comparison. Against all
constellations of either/or within Grass’s and Wolf’s novels there is one problematic that, after
Kierkegaard, serves no secondary or pragmatic purpose as a choice, that is absolutely senseless
as a rational decision, that always positions the authors, their worlds, the texts, and the reader at
the point of the “moment of choice” – something that it is absolute to itself and offers no real
choice to accept or not: the experience of the Holocaust.
The manner in which the Holocaust experience is central to both Die Blechtrommel and
!
302!
Kindheitsmuster was explored in Chapter 7 of the dissertation as three levels of engagement with
the issue. The fourth, only implicitly articulated in the texts, is the authors’ ancillary engagement
with and entanglement in the Holocaust as those who assented, for whatever reasons, to Nazi
ideology. For Grass and Wolf the proximity to genocide and the possibility of their full
complicity is that which in the texts subtracts itself from all rhetorical devices. For the authors,
nearness to mass murder is the impasse of metaphor and symbolism. It is not like walking on the
edge of a precipice blindfolded, it is walking on the boundary of precipitous consequences
without moral insight. When such is gained there is no possible relativization of the situation.
Considering where their early choices could have led Grass and Wolf, the Holocaust is that
which stands out in the novels, against the many levels of signification, as the ‘real’.
For the generations that come later, the interconnections of history, memory, and
narrative, whether refracted through the metaphorical prisms of Fulbrook’s historical pictures or
collective discourses,
31
Koselleck’s collective experience,
32
or Halbwach’s and Assmann’s
collective and cultural memories, respectively, will always lead, by the contingency of new
experience, to new configurations of cultural and historical consciousness. Often, regarding the
Holocaust, this manifests itself as a desire to manage the past. Germany has, and continues, to
dedicate monuments to the memory of victims. Yet the 1997 exhibition on Wehrmacht war
crimes sparked outrage and demonstrations.
33
Müller-Funk suggests that Holocaust memory in
the German cultural area should be allowed to become “latent,” rather than obviously present,
that new “narrative strategies” are required more than a focus on the events themselves,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
31
Fulbrook, German National Identity 146.
32
Koselleck 51.
33
Fulbrook, German National Identity 230.
!
303!
spawning perpetual right-wing reaction.
34
Latent memories are essentially dormant memories,
which like the debate about totalitarianism in the 1990s may be reawakened, but what of the
issues in the meantime?
New narrative strategies must, like Kindheitsmuster’s narrative voices, overcome
historical divisions and the alienation of communities in order to even be new narrative
strategies. The drive for purity and division is the hallmark of failed options. To be latent means
by definition that there are not circumstances in play that prevent latency, namely the
actualization of a problem. Thus for Holocaust memory and associations to become suitably
latent requires a modicum of the absence of associations (e.g. anti-Semitic discourse or other
xenophobic or politically repressive initiatives) that keep Holocaust memory actual, not as
Walser’s Moralkeule but as an alarm that rings too often for comfortable dormancy to transpire.
This is not a peculiarly German issue. Germany is the place where the world encountered a
particular form of genocide carried out with modern industrial and institutional tools. Perhaps
one measure of the internationalization of Holocaust perception should be the re-thinking of the
event as a sign not only of a localized experience but of a potential more generally present when
appropriate alarms are allowed to fall silent. Whether discourses on the National Socialist past
and its genocide recoverable through readings of Die Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster will be
relevant to the contingent configurations of future socio-political landscapes is an open question.
If allowed to become dormant one may imagine their latent influence, as with older authors,
become once again actuated in response to issues optimally situated within the novels’
discourses. To the extent that the constellation of world, texts, and readers are able to recover
from these novels a sense of the proximity to the almost unthinkable, the Holocaust, Die
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
34
Müller-Funk 224.
!
304!
Blechtrommel and Kindheitsmuster will continue to offer something determinate in a world of
seeming infinite indeterminacy.
!
305!
Works Cited
1. Primary Literature
Grass, Günter. Beim Häuten der Zwiebel. Göttingen: Steidl, 2006.
- - - . Die Blechtrommel. Göttingen: Steidl,1959, 1993. The Tin Drum: a New Translation.
Trans. Breon Mitchell. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.
- - - . "Die Meinungsfreiheit des Künstlers in unserer Gesellschaft." Der Schriftsteller als
Zeitgenosse. Ed. Daniela Hermes. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996. 112-
124.
- - - . "Looking Back at the Tin Drum." Encounter (July 1976): 84-88.
- - - . "Short Speech By a Rootless Cosmopolitan." Two States -- One Nation? The Case
Against German Unification. Trans. Krishna Winston and A. S. Wensiger.
London: Secker and Warburg, 1990. 5-6.
- - - . "Über meinen Lehrer Döblin." Über meinen Lehrer Döblin und andere Vorträge. Berlin:
Literarisches Colloquium, 1968. 7-26.
Wolf, Christa. Lesen und Schreiben, Aufsätze und Prosastücke. Darmstadt and Neuwied:
Luchterhand, 1972.
- - - . Kindheitsmuster. Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1976. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2007. Patterns of Childhood. Trans. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt. New York:
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980.
- - - . "Eine Diskussion über Kindheitsmuster." The German Quarterly 57.1 (Winter 1984): 91-
95.
- - - . "Rummelplatz 11. Plenum 1965." Auf dem Weg nach Tabou: Texte 1990 – 1994.
Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996. 58-70.
!
306!
- - - . Stadt der Engel oder the Overcoat of Dr. Freud. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010.
2. Secondary Literature
Achberger, Karen. "'Kunst als Veränderndes': Bachmann and Brecht." Monatshefte 83.1 (Spring
1991): 7-16.
- - - . Understanding Ingeborg Bachmann. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press,
1995.
Adorno, Theodor W. “On the Question: ‘What is German’. ”Critical Models – Interventions and
Catchwords. Trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
205-214.
- - - . "Reflections on the Volksstück." Notes to Literature, Volume 2. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann.
Trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 334-
335.
- - - . "The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel." Notes to Literature, Volume
1. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1991. 30-36.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Alexander, Robert J. Rev. of Chile, Corvalán, Struggle, by Viktor Shragin. Trans. Yuri
Sviridov. The Hispanic American Historical Review 62.1 (Feb. 1982): 159-161.
Ankersmit, F. R. "Hayden White's Appeal to the Historians." History and Theory 37.2 (May
1998): 182-193.
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Trans. Richard Hope. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Ann
Arbor Paperbacks, 1960.
!
307!
Arnds, Peter. "On the Awful German Fairy Tale: Breaking Taboos in Representations of Nazi
Euthanasia and the Holocaust in Günter Grass’ Die Blechtrommel, Edgar Hilsenrath's
Der Nazi und der Friseur, and Anselm Kiefer's Visual Art." The German Quarterly 75. 4
(Autumn 2002): 422-439.
Arnold, Heinz Ludwig. "Gespräch mit Günter Grass." Text und Kritik 1/1a (1971): 1-26.
Aronson, Shlomo and Peter Longerich. “Final Solution: Preparation and Implementation.”
The Holocaust Encyclopedia. Ed. Walter Laqueur. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2001. 184-198.
Assmann, Aleida. "Transformations between History and Memory." Social Research 75.1.
Collective Memory and Collective Identity (Spring 2008): 49-72.
Assmann, Jan and John Czaplicka. "Collective Memory and Cultural Identity." New German
Critique 65 (Spring - Summer 1995): 125-133.
Auer, Annemarie. "Gegenerinnerung: Gedanken beim Lesen." Sinn und Form 29.6 (1977): 847-
878.
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. "The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the
Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis." Speech Genres and Other
Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1986) 103-131.
Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 3rd. ed. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2009.
Bartov, Omer. “Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust.” The
American Historical Review 103.3 (June 1998): 771-816.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.
!
308!
Baumel, Judith Tydor. “Extermination Camps.” The Holocaust Encyclopedia. Ed. Walter
Laqueur. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. 174-179.
Beardsley, Monroe C. "Aesthetic Value in Literature." Comparative Literature Studies 18.3
(September 1981) Papers of the Seventh Triennial Meeting of the American Comparative
Literature Association: 238-247.
Behnen, Michael, "Deutschland unter Napoleon. Restauration und Vormärz." Deutsche
Geschichte: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwärt. Ed. Martin Vogt et al. 3rd. ed.
Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002. 397- 450.
Beicken, Peter and Rolf J. Goebel. "Erzählerische Selbstverständigung: Christa Wolf zwischen
Moderne und Tradition." Monatshefte 74.1 (Spring 1982): 59-71.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
- - - . "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Second Version." The
Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on
Media. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund
Jephthcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others. Cambridge, Mass.,
London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. 19-55.
Berger, Stefan. "Former GDR Historians in the Reunified Germany: an Alternative Historical
Culture and Its Attempts to come to Terms with the GDR Past." Journal of
Contemporary History 38.1 (January 2003): 63-83.
Beutin, Wolfgang, Klaus Ehlert, Wolfgang Emmerich, Christine Kanz, et al. Deutsche
Literaturgeschichte: von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Stuttgart, Weimar: J. B.
Metzler Verlag, 2001.
!
309!
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Blomster, W. V. "Review, Christa Wolf, Kindheitsmuster." World Literature Today 51.4
(Autumn 1977): 611-612.
Bock, Sigrid. "Chista Wolf: Kindheitsmuster." Weimarer Beiträge 23.9 (1977): 102-130.
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Borowski, E. J. and J. M. Borwein, eds. The Harper Collins Dictionary of Mathematics . New
York: Harper Collins, 1991.
Bosmajian, Hasmida. "German Literature about the Holocaust: a Literature of Limitations."
Modern Language Studies 16.1 (Winter 1986): 51-61.
Braese, Stephan. “Im Schatten der ‘gebrannten Kinder’.” Chiffre 2000 – Neue Paradigmen der
Gegenwartsliteratur. Eds. Corina Caduff and Ulrike Vedder. Munich: Wilhelm Fink
Verlag, 2005. 81-106.
Bridge, Helen. Women's Writing and Historiography in the GDR. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2002.
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in
Poland. New York: Harper, 1992, 1998.
Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997.
Cerulo, Karen. "Identity Construction: New Issues, New Directions," Annual Review of
Sociology 23 (1997): 385-409.
Cooley, Charles Horton. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1922; Schocken, 1964.
!
310!
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997.
- - - . "Signature Event Context." Limited Inc. Ed. Gerald Graff. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and
Samuel Weber. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988.
- - - . Speech and Phenomena. Trans. D. B. Allison. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press,
1973.
- - - . The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael B. Naas. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1992.
- - - . "The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy Before Linguistics." The Georgia Review 30.3
(Fall 1976): 527-564.
de Wild, Henk. Bibliographie der Sekundärliteratur zu Christa Wolf. Frankfurt am Main: Peter
Lang, 1995.
Dinka, Werner, Berthold Kohler, Günther Nonnenmacher, Frank Schirrmacher, and Holger
Steltzner, eds. "Ein globaler Schock." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Feuilleton 13
August 2006. Web.
Döblin, Alfred. Briefe. Ed. Heinz Graber, Freiburg: Olten, 1970.
Doležel, Lubomir. "Fictional and Historical Narrative: Meeting the Postmodernist Challenge."
Herman. 247-273.
Donahue, William Collins. Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink's 'Nazi' Novels and Films.
Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010.
Eckmann, Sabine. "Ruptures and Continuities: Modern German Art in between the Third Reich
and the Cold War." Art of Two Germanys. Eds. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann.
!
311!
New York: Abrams, in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009.
49-63.
Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Kurt Georg Kiesinger.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Web.
Eghigian, Greg. "Homo Munitus: The East German Observed." Pence and Betts. 37-70.
Eibach, Joachim. "Sozialgeschichte." Kompass der Geschichtswissenschaft. Eds. Joachim
Eibach and Günther Lottes. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2002. 9-22.
Emmerich, Wolfgang. Kleine Literatur Geschichte der DDR. Expanded edition. Leipzig:
Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1996.
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. "Wilhelm Meister auf der Blechtrommel." Stuttgart: Süddeutscher
Rundfunk, 18 November 1969, broadcast. Görtz 62-69, print.
Eriksen, Erik H. Identität und Lebenszyklus: Drei Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973.
Eshel, Amir. “Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of Suspension in W. G. Sebald’s
Austerlitz.” New German Critique 88 (Winter 2003): 71-96.
- - - . Jewish Memories, German Futures: Recent Debates in Germany about the Past.
Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana State University, 2001. Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish
Studies Program.
- - - . "The Past Recaptured: Günter Grass and Alexander Kluge at the Turn of the
Century." Deutsche Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen
Literatur. Ed. Moshe Zuckermann. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003. 181-203.
Fadiman, Clifton. Review. Book-of-the-Month Club News, March 1963. Ray Lewis White 7.
Felsner, Kristin. Perspektiven literarischer Geschichtsschreibung: Christa Wolf und Uwe
Johnson. Göttingen:V&R unipress, 2010.
!
312!
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. "Fourth Address." Addresses to the German Nation. trans. R. F. Jones
and G. H. Turnbull. Chicago and London: Open Court Publishing, 1922. 52-71.
- - - . Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre. Schriften zur Wissenschaftlehre. Ed.
Wilhelm G. Jacobs. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2007. 63-97.
Firsching, Annette. Kontinuität und Wandel im Werk von Christa Wolf. Würzburg:
Königshausen und Neumann, 1996. Würzburger Beiträge zur deutschen Philologie,
Band 16.
Fischer, André. "Ludismus und Negativitätserfahrungen in der Blechtrommel." Inszenierte
Naivität Zur ästhetischen Simulation von Geschichte bei Günter Grass, Albert Drach und
Walter Kempowski. Munich: Fink Verlag, 1992. 95-213.
Foucault, Michel. "The Discourse on Language." The Archeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M.
Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. 215-237.
- - - . The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New
York: Vintage, 1970.
- - - . "Politics and the Study of Discourse." The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality. Eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991. 53-72.
Frank, Manfred. Ansichten der Subjektivität. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012.
- - - . What is Neostructuralism? Foreword Martin Schwab. Trans. Sabine Wilke and Richard
Gray. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Freud, Sigmund. "Lecture XX: The Sexual Life of Human Beings," Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. 375-
396.
!
313!
- - - . “Lecture XXI: The Development of the Libido and the Sexual Organizations." Introductory
Lectures. 397-420.
- - - . The Ego and the Id. Trans. Joan Riviere. New York, London: W. W. Norton, 1960.
Fried, Michael Fried. "Art and Objecthood" (1967). Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Friedländer, Saul. “History, Memory, and the Historian: Dilemmas and Responsibilities.” New
German Critique 80 (Spring – Summer 2000): 3-15.
Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews. Volume 1. New York: Harper Collins, 1997.
Fulbrook, Mary. A Concise History of Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
- - - . German National Identity after the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.
- - - . Historical Theory. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
- - - . "Re-presenting the German Nation: History and Identity in East and West Germany."
Representing the German Nation. Eds. Mary Fulbrook and Martin Swales. Manchester
and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. 172-192.
Garloff, Katja. "The Emigrant as Witness: W. G. Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten." The German
Quarterly 77.1 (Winter 2004): 76-91.
Geeraerts, Dirk. "Decontextualizing and Recontextualizing Tendencies in 20th-century
Linguistics and Literary Theory." Anglistentag 2002 Bayreuth. Eds. Ewald Mengel,
Hans-Joerg Schmid, and Michael Steppat. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2003. 369-
379.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1980.
!
314!
Gesche, Janina. Aus Zweierlei Perspektiven . . . : Zur Rezeption der Danziger Trilogie von
Günter Grass in Polen und Schweden in den Jahren 1958-1990. Stockholm: Almqvist
and Wiksell International, 2003.
Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C. E. "How Good Are We? Culture and the Cold War." The Cultural
Cold War in Western Europe, 1945-1960. Eds. Giles Scott-Smith and Hans
Krabbendam. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003. 269-282.
Gillen, Eckhart. "Scenes from the Theater of the Cold War of the Arts." Art of Two
Germanys. 277-293.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust: die Tragödie erster und zweiter Teil. Ed. Erich Trunz.
Munich: C. H. Beck, 1986.
- - - . Iphigenie auf Tauris. Annotated: Joachim Angst and Fritz Hackert. Stuttgart: Reclam,
1993, 2001.
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
New York: Vintage/Random House, 1996, 1997.
Gourgouris, Stathis. "Transformation, Not Transcendence." boundary 2 31.2 (Summer 2004):
55-79.
Görtz, Franz Josef, ed. "Die Blechtrommel." Attraktion und Ärgernis: ein Kapitel deutscher
Literaturkritik. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1984.
Greiner, Ulrich. “Deutsche Gesinnnungsästhetik, noch einmal Christa Wolf und der deutsche
Literaturstreit: Eine Zwischenbilanz.” Die Zeit. 2 November 1990.
- - - . “Was bleibt. Bleibt Was? Pro und Contra: eine ZEIT-Kontroverse über C.W und ihre
neue Erzählung.” Die Zeit. 1 June 1990.
!
315!
Gross, Sabine. "Narration in the Tin Drum: A Quirky Narrator in Search of the Truth."
Approaches to Teaching Grass's The Tin Drum. Ed. Monika Shafi. New York: The
Modern Language Association of America, 2008. 75-89.
Guidry, Glenn A. "Theoretical Reflections on the Ideological and Social Implications of Mythic
Form in Grass' Die Blechtrommel." Monatshefte 83.2 (Summer 1991): 127-146.
Habermas, Jürgen. "Moralentwicklung und Ich-Identität." Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen
Materialismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976. 63-88.
- - - . The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge,
Massachussetts: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Habib, M. A. R. A History of Literary Criticism and Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1992.
Hall, Katharina. Günter Grass's 'Danzig Quintet': Explorations in the Memory and History of the
Nazi Era from Die Blechtrommel to Im Krebsgang. Frankfurt, New York: Peter Lang,
2007.
Hanson, William P. "Oskar, Rasputin, and Goethe." Canadian Modern Language Review 20.1
(1963): 29-32.
Hanuschek, Sven. "Der Fund for Intellectual Freedom: Ein Propagandainstrument des Kalten
Kriegs?" Schriftsteller als Intellektuelle: Politik und Literatur im Kalten Krieg. Studien
und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur, Band 73. Eds. Sven Hanuschek, Therese
Hörnigk, and Christine Malende. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000. 285-306.
Hauschild, Jan-Christoph. Heiner Müller oder das Prinzip Zweifel: eine Biographie. Berlin:
Aufbau Verlag, 2003.
!
316!
Hegel, G. W. F. Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences
with the Zusätze Trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1991.
- - - . Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Trans. Robert S.
Hartman. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997.
Hegewald, Wolfgang, Stephan Hermlin, Kurt und Jeanne Stern, Helmut Richter, Dieter Schiller,
Leonore Krenzlin, Preface by Wilhelm Girnus. "Briefe an Annemarie Auer." Sinn und
Form 29.6 (1977): 1311-1322.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New
York: Harper and Row, 1962, 2008.
Hell, Julia. “Eyes Wide Shut: German Post-Holocaust Authorship.” New German Critique 88
(Winter 2003): 9-36.
Hell, Julia. Post-Fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East
Germany. Durham, N. C. and London: Duke University, 1997.
Herf, Jeffrey. Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard University Press, 1997.
- - - . East German Communists and the Jewish Question: the Case of Paul Merker. Fourth Alois
Mertes Memorial Lecture. German Historical Institute Occasional Paper No. 11.
Washington, D. C.: German Historical Institute, 1994.
- - - . Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Herman, David. "Toward a Socionarratology," Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative
Analysis. Ed. David Herman. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999. 218-246.
!
317!
Heulenkamp, Ursula. "Was bleibt -- Versuch einer Bilanz nach vielen Kontroversen." Der
geteilte Himmel, Literatur und ihre Grenzen in der DDR. Ed. Martin Sabrow. Leipzig:
Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 2004. 49-74.
Hewitson, Mark. "Nation and Nationalismus: Representation and National Identity in Imperial
Germany." Fulbrook and Swales. 19-62.
Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders. New York: Harper, 1992.
Hillgruber, Andreas. Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das
Ende des europäischen Judentums. Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1986. 64f.
Hong, Young-Sun. "The Benefits of Health Must Spread Among All': International
Solidarity, Health, and Race in the East German Encounter with the Third World."
Pence and Betts. 183-210.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund
Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Hörnigk, Therese. Christa Wolf. Berlin: Volk und Welt, Göttingen: Steidl, 1989.
- - - . "Das Thema Krieg und Faschismus in der Geschichte der DDR-Literatur." Weimarer
Beiträge 24.5 (1978): 73-105.
- - - . "Kriegserlebnis und Wandlungsgestaltung in der frühen DDR-Literatur." Literatur im
Wandel; Entwicklungen in europäischen sozialistischen Ländern. Eds. Ludwig Richter,
Heinrich Olschowsky, et al. Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1986. 223-246.
Hoesterey, Ingeborg. "Modern/postmodern: Eine Rezeption der Jahrestage, USA 1977."
Johnson Jahrbuch: Band 4/1997. Ed. Ulrich Fries and Holger Helbig. Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1997. 48-55.
Huyssen, Andreas. "The Voids of Berlin." Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 57-81.
!
318!
Ihme-Tuchel, Beate. Die DDR. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002.
Kontroversen um die Geschichte. Eds. Arnd Bauerkämpfer, Peter Steinbach, and Edgar
Wolfrum.
Ingram, David. Habermas: Introduction and Analysis. Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 2010.
Jaggi, Maya. "The Last Word." The Guardian 21 December 2001.
Jameson, Fredric. Valences of the Dialectic. London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2010.
Jarausch, Konrad H. “The Conundrum of Complicity: German Professionals and the Final
Solution.” Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture, 11 June 2001. Washington,
D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001.
Jarmatz, Klaus. "Kindheitsmuster. Zu Christa Wolfs Roman." Neues Deutschland 32, 5/6 March
1977: 14.
Jaspers, Karl. Die Schuldfrage: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Frage. Zürich: Artemis-Verlag, 1946.
Jauß, Hans Robert. "Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft."
Literaturgeschichte als Provokation. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. 144-207.
- - - . "Modernity and Literary Tradition." Trans. Christian Thorne. Critical Inquiry 31. 2 (Winter
2005): 329-364.
Jonca, Karol. “Kristallnacht,” The Holocaust Encyclopedia. Ed. Walter Laqueur. New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2001. 385-391.
Jørgensen, Marianne and Louise Phillips. Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. London:
Sage, 2002.
Just, Georg. Darstellung und Appell in der Blechtrommel von Günter Grass:
Darstellungsästhetik versus Wirkungsästhetik. Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1972.
!
319!
Kaiser, Joachim. "Oskars getrommelte Bekenntnisse." Munich: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 31
October/1 November 1959, Görtz 52-57.
Kant, Hermann. "Eine Kindheit wird besichtigt." Der Bienenstock 113 (1977): 8.
Kant, Immanuel. "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?" Was ist Aufklärung? Thesen
und Definitionen. Ed. Ehrhard Bahr. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974. 9-17.
- - - . Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis and London: Hackett, 1987.
- - - . “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent” (1784). Trans.Ted Humphrey.
Perpetual Peace and Other Essays: on Politics, History, and Morals. Ed. and trans. Ted
Humphrey. Indianapolis,Cambridge: Hackett, 1983. 29-40.
Kater, Michael H. The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich. New York,
London: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Kertész, Imre and Ivan Sanders. “Eureka!: The 2002 Nobel Lecture.” World Literature Today
77.1 (April – June 2003) 4-8.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or, Part II. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Kim, Eung-Jun. Literatur als Historie. Zeitgeschichte in Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus und
Günter Grass' Die Blechtrommel. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2004.
Kim, Nury. Allegorie oder Authentizität, Zwei ästhetische Modelle der Aufarbeitung der
Vergangenheit: Günter Grass’ Die Blechtrommel und Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster.
Frankfurt am Main, New York: Peter Lang, 1995.
Kirsch, Robert R. "Rebirth of German Novel Hailed in Puzzling Work." Los Angeles Times. 6
March 1963. White 9-10.
!
320!
Klein, Michael. Die nationale Identität der Deutschen: Commitment, Grenzkonstruktionen und
Werte zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhumderts. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2014.
Klemperer, Victor. The Language of the Third Reich, LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: A
Philologist’s Notebook. Trans. Martin Brady. New York: Continuum, 2006.
Kocka, Jürgen. "Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg."
History and Theory 38.1 (February 1999): 40-50.
- - - . Civil Society and Dictatorship in Modern German Society. Hanover and London: Brandeis
University Press, Historical Society of Israel, University Press of New England, 2010.
- - - . "Geschichte und Aufklärung." Geschichte und Aufklärung: Aufsätze. Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1989. 140-159.
- - - . Vereinigungskrise. Zur Geschichte der Gegenwart. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht,
1995.
Kolinsky, Eva and Wilfried van der Will. "In Search of German Culture: an Introduction." The
Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture. Eds. Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van
der Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 1-19.
Komar, Kathleen L. "The Communal Self: Re-Membering Female Identity in the Works of
Christa Wolf and Monique Wittig." Comparative Literature 44.1 (Winter 1992): 42-58.
Köpnick, Lutz. "Rettung und Destruktion: Erinnerungsverfahren und Geschichtsbewußtsein in
Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster und Walter Benjamins Spätwerk." Monatshefte 84.1
(Spring 1992): 74-90.
Koselleck, Reinhart. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts.
Trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
!
321!
Kovach, Thomas and Martin Walser. The Burden of the Past: Martin Walser on Modern German
Identity -- Texts, Contexts, Commentary. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008.
Kristeva, Julia. "Word, Dialogue, and Novel." The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986. 34-61.
Kuhn, Anna Katharina. Christa Wolf's Utopian Vision: from Marxism to Feminism. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Kunert, Günter. “Der Sturz vom Sockel. Zum Streit der deutschen Autoren.” Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 September 1990.
Kunkel-Razum, Kathrin et al., eds. Duden: Deutsches Universalwörterbuch. 6th ed. Mannheim:
Dudenverlag, 2007.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute. Trans. Philip Barnard
and Cheryl Lester. New York: State University of New York Press, 1988.
Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah: The Complete Text of the Film. Trans. A. Whitelaw and W. Byron.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
Leeb, Susanne. "Abstraction as International Language." Art of Two Germanys. 119-133.
Leeder, Karen. "Modern German Poetry." The Cambridge Companion to Modern German
Culture. 193-212.
Leick, Romain. “Next-Generation WWII Atonement.” Trans. Christopher Sultan. Der Spiegel 28
March 2013. Web.
Lennox, Sara. "The Feminist Reception of Ingeborg Bachmann." Women in German Yearbook
8 (1992): 73-111.
Levi, Erik. "Music in Modern German Culture." The Cambridge Companion to Modern
German Culture. 233-255.
!
322!
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: the Nazi Assault on Humanity. Trans. Stuart Woolf. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1958, 1986.
Levine, Michael G. "Writing Anxiety: Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster." Diacritics 27.2
(Summer 1997): 106-123.
Lindenberger, Thomas. "'Asociality' and Modernity: The GDR as a Welfare Dictatorship." Pence
and Betts. 211-233.
Loescher, Jens. "Kultur als Gedächtnis: Deutungskämpfe im literarischen Feld der Nachwende."
Kulturpoetik 8.1 (2008): 86-104.
Lorenz, Dagmar C. G. “Teaching the Tin Drum from the Perspective of Jewish Cultural Studies
and Holocaust Studies” Approaches to Teaching Grass's The Tin Drum. Ed. Monika
Shafi. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2008. 150-163
Lukács, Georg [György]. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln,
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
Lüdtke, Alf. “The World of Men's Work, East and West." Trans. Katherine Pence and Paul Betts.
Pence and Betts. 234-249.
Magenau, Jörg. Christa Wolf: eine Biographie. Berlin: Kindler Verlag, 2002.
Mahlendorf, Ursula. "Confronting the Fascist Past and Coming to Terms with It." World
Literature Today 55.4 (Autumn 1981): 553-560.
Mann, Thomas. "Offener Brief für Deutschland," quoted in Klaus Wagenbach et al., eds.
Vaterland, Muttersprache. Deutsche Schriftsteller und ihr Staat von 1945 bis heute.
Berlin: Wagenbach Verlag, 1979. 48.
!
323!
Marx, Karl. “Capitalism, Alienation, and Communism.” The Grundrisse [selections]. The Marx-
Engels Reader. 2nd. ed. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York and
London: W. W. Norton, 1978. 221-293.
- - - . "Estranged Labor." Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist
Manifesto. trans. Martin Milligan. Amherst NY: Prometheus, 1988. 69-84.
- - - . "Private Property and Communism." Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. 99-
114.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei in Manifest der
Kommunistischen Partei. Grundsätze des Kommunismus. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999. 19-56.
Mayer, Hans. "Der Mut zur Unaufrichtigkeit." Der Spiegel 31.16, 11 April 1977: 185ff.
McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
McGlothlin, Erin. Second Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and
Perpetration. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006.
Mead, George Herbert. "A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol." Journal of
Philosophy 19 (1922): 157-163; 160. The Mead Project, Brock University, 2007. Web.
Merkel, Ina. "Alternative Rationalities, Strange Dreams, Absurd Utopias: On Socialist
Advertising and Market Research." Pence and Betts. 323-344.
Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics: from the Tin Drum to Crabwalk. Rochester,
NY: Camden House, 2008.
Michalka, Wolfgang. "Das Dritte Reich." Deutsche Geschichte: von den Anfängen bis zur
Gegenwart. Ed. Martin Vogt, 3rd ed. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1997; Frankfurt a. M.:
Fischer, 2006. 694-775.
Middell, Matthias. "Marxistische Geschichtswissenschaft." Eibach and Lottes. 69-85.
!
324!
Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete. Die Unfähigkei zu Trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven
Verhaltens, 21st ed. Munich: Piper, 1990.
Mitscherlich, Margarete. "Die Frage der Selbstdarstellung: Überlegungen zu den
Autobiographien von Helene Deutsch, Margaret Mead und Christa Wolf." Neue
Rundschau 91.2/3 (1980): 291-316.
Müller-Funk, Wolfgang. "On a Narratology of Cultural and Collective Memory." Journal of
Narrative Theory 33.2 (Summer 2003): 207-227.
n.a., "The Guilt of the Lambs." Time, 4 January 1963. Ray Lewis White, Günter Grass in
America: the Early Years. Germanistische Texte und Studien 12. Hildesheim, New
York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1981. 2-3.
Nägele, Rainer. "Body Politics: Benjamin's Dialectical Materialism Between Brecht and the
Frankfurt School." The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Ed. David S. Ferris.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 152-176.
Neruda, Pablo. “Dónde está el niño?” El libro de las preguntas [Book of Questions]. Trans.
Margaret Sayers Peden (credited in Patterns of Childhood); no Library of Congress
listing. Compare Book of Questions. Trans. William O’Daly. 2nd
ed. Port Townsend,
Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2001. 44.
Neuhaus, Volker. Günter Grass. 3rd. ed. Stuttgart, Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2010.
- - - . Günter Grass: Schriftsteller, Künstler, Zeitgenosse. Göttingen: Steidl, 2012.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Zur Genealogie der Moral. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1988.
Niven, Bill. “Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser and the Problem of Shame.” The Modern
Language Review 98.2 (April 2003): 381-396.
!
325!
Nolte, Ernst. "Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6
June 1986.
Parker, Stephen. "Peter Huchel and Sinn und Form: the German Academy of Arts and the Issue
of German Cultural Unity." German Writers and the Cold War 1945-6. Eds. Rhys W.
Williams, Stephen Parker, and Colin Riordin. Manchester, New York: Manchester
University Press, 1992. 132-158.
Parkes, Stuart. "Günter Grass and his contemporaries in East and West." The Cambridge
Companion to Günter Grass. Ed. Stuart Taberner. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009. 209-222.
Palti, Elías. " 'Return of the Subject' as a Historico-Intellectual Problem." History and Theory
43.1 (February 2004): 57-82.
Peitsch, Helmut. “Towards a History of Vergangenheitsbewältigung: East and West German
War Novels of the 1950s.” Monatshefte 87.3 (1995): 287-308.
Pence, Katherine. "Women on the Verge: Consumers between Private Desires and Public
Crisis." Pence and Betts. 287-321.
Pence, Katherine and Paul Betts. "Introduction." Socialist Modern: East German Everyday
Culture and Politics. Eds. Katherine Pence and Paul Betts. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2008. 1-34.
Pérez-Zancas, Rosa. "Von weiter leben zu Still Alive: Ruth Klügers fortgesetzte
Unvollständigkeit." Revista de Filologia Alemana 16 (2008): 211-228.
Peters, Ursula and Roland Prügel. "The Legacy of Critical Realism in East and West." Art of
Two Germanys. 65-83.
!
326!
Peukert, Detlev J.K. “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science.” Nazism
and German Society 1933-1945. Ed. David F. Crew. London and New York: Routledge,
1994. 274-299.
Pinkert, Anke. "Pleasures of Fear: Antifascist Myth, Holocaust, and Soft Dissidence in Christa
Wolf's Kindheitsmuster." The German Quarterly 76.1 (Winter 2003): 25-37.
Plavius, Heinz. "Gewissensforschung; Christa Wolf: Kindheitsmuster." Neue Deutsche
Literatur 25 (1977): 139-151.
Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” New York:
Harper Collins, 2002.
Preece, Julian. "Biography as Politics." The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass. Ed. Stuart
Taberner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 10-23.
- - - . The Life and Work of Günter Grass. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Purtill, Richard. "Principle of excluded middle." The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Ed.
Robert Audi. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 738.
Raddatz, Fritz J. “Warum die Alten an der Macht bleiben.” Cicero – Magazin für politische
Kultur. 28 September 2005. Web.
Rankin, Walter P. "Autobiographical Fiction vs. Fictional Autobiography: Christa Wolf's
Kindheitsmuster and J. M. Coetzee's Foe." Comparative Literature Studies 36.4 (1999):
306-319.
Reich-Ranicki, Marcel. "Auf gut Glück getrommelt." Hamburg: Die Zeit. 1 January 1960.
Görtz 116-120.
- - - . "Christa Wolfs trauriger Zettelkasten." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 19 March 1977: 5.
!
327!
- - - . "Selbstkritik eines Kritikers." Cologne: Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 22 May 1963,
broadcast. Görtz 151-157, print.
Richter, Hans. "Moralität als poetische Energie." Sinn und Form 29.3 (1977): 667-678.
Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1992.
Rudolph, Ekkehart. "Günter Grass." Protokoll zur Person, Autoren über sich und ihr Werk. Ed.
Ekkehart Rudolph. Munich: List Verlag, 1971. 59-72.
Ryan, Judith. "The Revocation of Melancholy: Günter Grass' The Tin Drum." The Uncompleted
Past: Postwar German Novels and the Third Reich. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1983. 56-69.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations: A Semantic Typoloty of
Fiction.” Poetics Today 12.3 (Autumn 1991): 553-576.
- - - . "Postmodernism and the Doctrine of Panfictionality." Narrative 5.2 (May 1997): 165-187.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978.
- - - . The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. What is Literature? Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: The Philosophical
Library, 1947.
Schaal, Björn. Jenseits von Oder und Lethe: Flucht, Vertreibung, und Heimatsverlust in
Erzähltexten nach 1945. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2006.
Scheffel, Michael. Formen selbstreflexiven Erzählens: eine Typologie and sechs exemplarische
Analysen. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997.
Schlant, Ernestine. The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust. New
York, London: Routledge, 1999.
!
328!
Schlink, Bernhard. Der Vorleser. Zürich: Diogenes Verlag, 1995.
- - - . Guilt About the Past. Toronto: House of Anasi Press, 2010.
Schlöndorff, Volker, dir. Die Blechtrommel. 1979. Film.
Sebald, W.G. Die Beschreibung des Unglücks: Zur Österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis
Handtke. Salzburg: Residenz, 1985.
Simpson, J. A. and E.S.C Weiner, prep. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed.
Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1991.
Sloterdijk, Peter. “Die Revolution der gebenden Hand.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 13 June
2009. Web.
- - - . Rage and Time. Trans. Mario Wenning. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Soames, Scott. Philosophy of Language. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. 50-56.
Spender, Stephen. "The Mortal Sin of Our Time, a Model Childhood, by Christa Wolf." The
New York Times Book Review 85.41, 12 October 1980: 11,34.
Stammen, Theo, ed., Eingkeit und Recht und Freiheit: Westdeutsche Innenpolitik 1945 – 1955.
Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1965.
Stanzel, Franz K. Theorie des Erzählens. 8th ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008.
Stephan, Alexander. Christa Wolf. 4th ed. Munich: Beck, 1976, 1991.
- - - . " 'How did we become as we are?' The Treatment of Fascism in GDR Literature." Trans.
Ian Wallace. GDR Monitor 3 (Summer 1980): 5-16.
- - - . ."Review: Kindheitsmuster by Christa Wolf." Trans. Biddy Martin. New German
Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 178-182.
Stierle, Karlheinz. "Werk und Intertextualität." Dialog der Texte. Eds.Wolf Schmidt and Wolf-
Dieter Stempel. Vienna: Institut für Slawistik der Universität Wien, 1983. 7-26.
!
329!
Strauß, Botho. “Anschwellender Bocksgesang.” Der Spiegel 6/1993. 8 February 1993: 202-207.
Swales, Martin. "The Development of German Prose Fiction." The Cambridge Companion to
Modern German Culture. 172-192.
Taberner, Stuart. “Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion.” The Cambridge Companion to Günter
Grass. Ed. Stuart Taberner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 139-150.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Treblinka.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. http://www.
ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005193. Accessed 25 May 2015.
Uytterschout, Sien. "An Extremely Loud Tin Drum: a Comparative Study of Jonathan Safran
Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Günter Grass's The Tin Drum."
Comparative Literature Studies 47.2 (2010): 185-199.
Vogt, Martin. "Deutschland von der Bonner 'Wende' zu den Problemen der Einheit." Deutsche
Geschichte: von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. Martin Vogt. 3rd ed. Stuttgart: J.
B. Metzler, 1997; Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2006. 888-970.
- - - . "Die Weimarer Republik (1918-1933)." Deutsche Geschichte: Von den Anfängen bis zur
Gegenwärt. Ed. Martin Vogt et al. 3rd. ed. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1997; Frankfurt a. M.:
Fischer, 2006. 616-693.
Wagener, Hans. "Simplex, Felix, Oskar und andere -- Zur barocken Tradition im
zeitgenössischen Schelmenroman." Literarische Tradition heute: Deutschsprachige
Gegenwartsliteratur in ihrem Verhältnis zur Tradition. Eds. Gerd Labroisse and Gerhard
P. Knapp. Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik 20. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1988. 117-158.
Walser, Martin. “Über Erfahrungen mit dem Zeitgeist.” Kinderspielplatz. Berlin: Berlin
University Press, 2008.
!
330!
Weber, Hermann. Geschichte der DDR. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999.
Weigel, Sigrid. Genea-Logik: Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur- und
Naturwissenschaften. Munich:Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006.
Weisberg, Richard. "Why They're Censoring 'The Tin Drum: Kristallnacht' Reflections on the
End of the Epic." Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 10.2, Tenth Anniversary
Volume (Winter 1998) 161-181.
White, Hayden. Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect. Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999.
- - - . "Guilty of History? The longue dureé of Paul Ricoeur." The Fiction of Narrative: Essays
on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957-2007. Ed. Robert Doran. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2010. 318-339.
- - - . "Storytelling: Historical and Ideological." The Fiction of Narrative. 273-292.
- - - . The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
White, Ray Lewis White. Günter Grass in America: the Early Years. Germanistische Texte und
Studien 12. Hildesheim, New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1981.
Wiesberg, Michael. Botho Strauß, Dichter der Gegenaufklärung. Perspektiven, Band 3. Eds.
Karlheinz Weißmann and Götz Kubitschek. Dresden: Edition Antaios, 2002.
Wilke, Sabine. Ausgraben und Erinnern: Zur Funktion von Geschichte, Subjekt und
Geschlechtlicher Identität in den Texten Christa Wolfs. Würzburg: Königshausen und
Neumann, 1993.
Wirsching, Andreas. "Internationale Beziehungen." Eibach and Lottes. 112-125.
!
331!
Wolfrum, Edgar. Die geglückte Demokratie: Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von
ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2006.
Wulf, Peter Wulf. "Deutschland nach 1945." Deutsche Geschichte: von den Anfängen bis zur
Gegenwart. 3rd ed. Ed. Martin Vogt. Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 2006.
776-887.
Yad Vashem. The Nizkor Project. Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International
Historical Conference: Jewish Prisoner Uprisings in the Sobibor and Treblinka
Extermination Camps. Jerusalem, 1980, 1984. Web.
Ziehe, Thomas. Pubertät und Narzissismus: Sind Jugendliche entpolitisiert? Hamburg:
Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1975.
Zipes, Jack. “Contested Jews: The Image of Jewishness in Contemporary German Literature.”
South Central Review 16.2/3 (Autumn 1999): 3-15.
