The Holocaustand the TêxtSpeaking the Unspeakable

Edited byAndrew LeakandGeorge Paizis

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in association withTHE INSTITUTE FOR ROMANCE STUDIES ANDTHE INSTITI.ITE FOR ENGLISH STUDIES, SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDYTHE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, AND THE WIENER LIBRARY

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27 'Book-Keeping of Torture', Sunday Times, 70 April 1988, cited in TonyKushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagínation: a Social and CulturalHistory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 799\, p. 19.Ronald Sharp, 'Steiner's Fiction and the Hermeneutics of Translation', inReading George Steiner, p. 208 and pp. 205-29. This is one of the first essaysto treat Steiner's fiction with the seriousness it deseñes. See also, in thisregard, Sara R. Horowitz, Voicíng the Void: Muteness and Memory in HolocaustFicfion (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), pp. 173-80.'Postscript' (196ó) in Language and Silence, p. 193 and Joseph Lowin,'Steiner's Helicopters', Jewish Book Annual, vol. 41 (1983-4), pp. 48-56.Afrer Babel: AsPects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1975), pp.27 and29.Alvin Rosenfeld, Imagining Hifler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1985), pp. 83-702. See also Hyam Maccoby, 'George Steiner's "Hitler"',Encounter, vol. 58, no. 5 (May 7982), pp.27-34.This argument was first made in detail in In Bluebeard's Castle, p- 40 and

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26pp. 31-48.

27 Steiner, Real Presences, p. 93 and Finkelstein, The Rîtual of New Creatíon,

28293031JL

p-98-Enata, pp.137-9 and L26-8 arrd Martin Heídegger (London: Fontana, 1975).Quoted in Finkelstein, The Ritual of New Creation, pp. 99-7OO.Enata, p. 758.I owe this discussion to Finkelstein, The Ritual of New Creation, p. 100.'A Responsion', p. 277 and 'Our Homeland the Text' (1985) in No PassionSpent, p.324.

33 'A View from Without', The lewish Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 4 (1968-9), p. 4and pp- 3-5 and vol. 77, no. 1 (1969), pp. 3-9.

The Holocaust as Seen throughthe Eyes of ChildrenAndrea Reiter

A small number of books for an adult readership present the Holocaustor the events leading up to it through the experience of children: forexample, Anna Gmeyner's Mania (1938), Ilse Aichingels Die gröl3ere

Hoffnung (1948), Elie Wiesel's La Nuit (1958), Ruth Klüger's weiter leben'Eine lugend (7992), Binjamin Wilkomi¡ski's Bruchstücke: Aus einerKindheít 1g3g-1g48 (1995), Imre Kertész' Sorstalanság (1975).1 Ail of theabove authors were in one way or another personally affected by theHolocaust, they share the Jewish fate, and their texts share the auto-biographical experience. While it is difficult enough for writers of campmemoirs to present their selves in a different state, it is even mole prob-lematic to present the childhood self. It seems almost inevitable thatadult views are placed in the children's minds.

As the texts vary in degree of fictionality, the time they werewritten, and the personal circumstances of thei¡ authors, they have inthe past been assigned to separate cateSories such as exile literatule(Gmeyner), memoirs (Klüger, Wilkomirski, Kertész) and HolocaustIiterature (Aichinger, Wiesel). It seems to me, howevet, that thei¡common denominator, namely the perspective of the child, meritsdiscussing them as a Sroup - in particular as they have a special wayof presenting the historical event.

Until now, the diffe¡ence between fictional and non-fictional repre-sentation of the Holocaust was assumed to be one between innovationand tradition. Memoirists almost invariably follow the fo¡m of thereport and show little inclination to innovative language¡ eventhough in trying to speak the 'unspeakable' they risk trivialization.Only a minority of survivors is concerned about the potential repeat-ability of an event that can be nar¡ated. In contrast, fictional accountscan be more inventive. They may try to find a 'new' language, new

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forms of expression for the unprecedented experience. They are notconstrained by truth, realism and objectivity.3

Some memoirs published during the past few years, however,require us to rethink this distinction. These authors, who havereached the age of grandparenthood,4 had survived the camps as chil-dren and now, 50 years on¡ revisit their childhood experience. Eventsin the camps have imprinted themselves in many people's minds:documentaries, Hollywood films (such as Holocaust and Schíndler'sList) and, of course, the concentration-camp reports themselves havecontributed icons through which we remember the Holocaust.Through this a point of saturation has been reached; in other words aclimate has been created that gave the publication of a book likeDaniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners the impact of a bomb-shell: not that Goldhagen had any new facts, but it was not least theway he expressed them that contributed to the stir.s

I would like to argue that this is also t¡ue fo¡ some of the latest child-hood-in-camp memoirs. Like the authentic memoirists, Klüger,Wilkomirski and Kertész tell us the story of their own survival of acamp; but like the authors of fictional accounts they do so in a waythat forces the reader to look at the narrated events with new eyes. Toall three, perspective is of the utmost importance for its impact on thereader: it is the gaze of the child that allows us to see in a new way thatwhich we think we already know. In psychoanalytic theory t}:'e'gaze'is associated with parental power, which the growing child internal-izes but can never really meet.6 Unlike the authoritarian gaze of theparent, the child's gaze is naïve but accurate. The child's experiencewith adults in the camps does not invite internalizing the parentalgaze. Binjamin Wilkomirski is haunted, even afte¡ release, by thebetrayals of the adults which he witnessed in the camp. His funda-mental trust in them has vanished. On his arrival in Switzerland afterthe war he draws parallels:

I gasped for air - more children were led away by grown-ups - andI could not see where they were taken. This was the way it had beenbefore, too. Only then it was gray uniforms that took them awaywith angry gestures. The gray uniforms carried sticks and whips.The ones they took away never came back.... Maybe this is all justto confuse me; it's dangerous when grown-ups are friendly to chil-dren, I say this to myself.... So - careful! The friendly grown-ups arethe most dangerous, they are best at fooling you, I thought.(Wilkomirski, Fragments, pp. 15-18)

Andrea Reiter 85

In the camps Wilkomirski has learned that the adults not only betraychildren but they kill them. Even the apparently friendly ones cannotbe trusted - indeed, the child has to be especially wary of them.Nevertheless children who were not in immediate danger such as chil-dren in hiding like little Maciek in Louis Begley's Wartime lies dididentify with the enemy. A futile battle with bedbugs

provided, in addition to a temporary material improvement in ourcomfort, another war game...: in this limited sphere, I could be a

hunter and an aggressor, like SS units destroying partisans in theforest, very soon, rebellious Jews in the ghetto of Warsaw. The SS

sometimes had to act in secret. So did we. Our landladies ¡esentedany mention of bedbugs on their premises....7

Child¡en were more likety to be impressed by the smart uniforms ofthe SS. They were captivated by the position of power their tortu¡ersrepresented. Imre Kertész's nat¡ator reports how he was relieved to see

the German soldiers at his arrival at Auschwitz: 'because they lookedsmart, clean, and they were the only ones in this mess who seemedcalm and firm' (Kertész, Sorstalanság, p. 91).8 When he undergoes theinfamous selection he feels immediate trust in the doctor, because ofhis pleasant appearance and his likeable face (Kertész, Sorstalanság,p. 9S). Watching the doctor 'at wotk' he quickly realizes the logicbehind the exercise: the strong and able-bodied go to the right, whilethe very young, the elderly and the frail go to the left. Claiming to beolder than he actually was, the narrator is waved to the dght. The boyidentifies with the selector to such an extent that he is annoyed withhim when he sends one of the men to the right who he thought wasnot fit (Kertész, Sorstalansá9, p. 100).

In their unprejudiced and uninformed attitude, children not onlynotice details which escape the adult but interpret them in a waywhich makes them seem even more horrific. Wilkomirski reports anencounter with a rat in a dead woman's body: the child knows thewoman's body swells when she carries a baby and he also has vaguerecollections of having been told that the belly begins to move whenthe baby is ready to be born; when he witnesses this happening witha dead woman his reaction is puzzlement but also curiosity.Eventually a rat appears from a big wound on the side of the woman'sbelly. 'I saw it, I saw it! the dead women are giving birth to ¡atsl'(Wilkomirski, Fragments, p. 86).He is horrified but not so much at thesight as at its implications. If what he iust witnessed was true then

86 The Holocaust and the Text

mothers did not only bear children but also the worst enemies of theiroffspring: Wilkomirski relates how the rats bit young children duringthe night thus inflicting wounds on them that, in the camp situation,meant certain death. Remembering the sight of his dying motherwhom he had been able to visit shortly before, he wonders about hisown identity: 'I touch my legs again and again. I undo the rags aroundmy calves and feel the skin. Is it skin or do I actually have gray fur?Am I a rat or a human? I am a child - but am I a human child or arat child, or can you be both at once?' (Wilkomirski, Fragments,pp.86-7). Even much later, when his own son is born, the unexpectedsight of hair on the baby's emerging head brings back the painfuluncertainty about his own identity.

The child looks with the curiosity of the artist, with the burningeyes of the witness. Jehuda Bacon, who was deported to Terezin at theage of 13 and transferred to Auschwitz a yeat later, compares himselfwith other survivors: 'There I realized that - because I was a potentialartist - I was seeing things totally differently, perhaps more inten-sively. Even then I wanted to keep everything in my eyes, I had tokeep it. This unconscious: to keep, to remember. Why, I did notknow.'e The child often does not understand what it sees. And becauseits mind, unlike the adult's, is not yet guided by logic, it is 'thepictures that remain fixed in your head' as Wilkomirski observed in arecent interview.l0 This inability to interpret and the lack of compre-hension have a parallel in the adult's failure to express. The child'ssituation thus can be used by the adult author to compensate for thisshortcoming.ll

In addition to the problem of comprehension there is the questionof memory. It is a recognized fact that even adult survivors remembercertain experiences better than others. Some they have forgottencompletely. Child-protagonists not only witnessed the camps differ-ently but they also remember them differently. The younger the childduring the ordeal, the more gaps in the memory. Wilkomirski, whosurvived the camps as a very young boy, only recalls glimpses, frag-ments which consequently also make up his book. He freely admitsbouts of amnesia and uncertainty, often switching into the presenttense when he wants to relate something that stuck in his mind mostclearly. Especially in the early parts of his book, which cover the boy'stime in a Swiss orphanage, his memory would be jolted by an event towhich he reacted as he would have done in the camp, thus provokingirritation among his carers. Imre Kertész's narrator, on the other hand,never departs from the perspective of the child narrator, nor explains

Andrea Reiter 87

that with hindsight he knows better. 'The Roman eines Schicksallosenwas not meant to contain a single sentence from beyond [the child,sperception]. Only from the perspective of the natural naïveté of mancan be told how Auschwitz was possible.'l2 Through this techniqueKertész pulls his readers into the closed world he creates in the noveland does not allow them an escape. It is only at a different level -namely the narrator's choice of incidents, some of which have gainedarchetypal status (like the selection at the Rampe of Auschwitz) - thatthe superior insight of the adult author becomes obvious. Here, thechild's perspective works both against and with the knowledge of thereader - the discrepancy between the two creates the charged atmos-phere in the book and its impact. We would not be so horrified at theboy's identification with the SS doctor if we did not know already theimplications of the selection.

In the Roman eines Schicksallosen, the narrator's abstention f¡omqualifying the child's ideas, impressions and judgments thus becomesa literary pose. Additional proof of this pose is found in repeatedremarks like 'versteht sich' (it is clear), 'natürlich' (naturally), ,das sahich ein' (I realized that), etc., which in semantic terms can be called'supersigns'. Collectively they constitute a meaning in direct opposi-tion to that which the narrator claims to attach to his experiences.The literariness of these supersigns becomes further obvious when oneremembers that Kertész has translated the prose writings of theAustrian postwar writer Thomas Bernhard, of which similar supersignshave been recognized as a hallmark.13

Literariness was defined by the Russian Formalists as 'a function off}r.e differentíøl relations between one sort of discourse and another,.14It is the contrast of poetic language to practical language which makesfor the status of a text as literature. The Formalists called this tech-nique 'defamiliarization' or 'estrangement'.15 In poetry, for whichFormalist analysis was originally designed, defamiliarization makesfamiliar words look new, as it were, and thus noticeable. Similarly, aprose text is defined as an assemblage of devices which are seen byboth author and reader against the background of the tradition ofstyle and genre. For the reader a genre, for instance, raises certainexpectations. In everyday conversation they are usually fulfilled inorder to permit the exchange of information. Literary discourse, onthe other hand, frustrates these expectations. The degree to which thisis the case has been taken as a measure of the literariness and ultim-ately of the quality of the text. Analogous to the distinction betweenpractical and poetic language in poetry, the Formalists distinguish

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between the events and their reconstruction in prose: between theføbula and the suiet. 'The suiet creates a defamiliarizing effect on thefabula; the devices of the suiet arc not designed as instruments forconveying lìhe fabula, but are foregrounded at the expense of thefabula.'76 This understanding also shapes the Formalists' attitudetowards reality: literature is taken to be non-Iefelential, their preoccu-pation with literariness excludes mimesis; reality, as viewed by theiormalists, is one of the components of the work and not a referent'17This is obviously where the writers we have been considering differ intheir texts. For them the creation of literariness is not an end in itself.It becomes a means to cast a fresh light on the suffering in the campsduring the Holocaust.ls Certain images - such as the piles of corpseswhich were filmed by the Allied Forces at the liberation, the shoes,suitcases and other artefacts at the museum in Auschwitz - have,despite their horror, lost their effect because we have become used tothem. Film-makers have noticed a similar saturation with certainimages. Recent films about the camps thus make a point of avoidingthem.19

Defamiliarization in Holocaust literature

Linked with the defamiliarizing quality of the Holocaust nallativef¡om the perspective of the child is the presentation of questionshitherto deemed taboo. In Wilkomirski's as well as in Kertész's book,violence - even that perpetrated by Jews - is presented, as are apathyand unwillingness to comprehend. The way in which the stories are

told, however, prevents them from slipping into pornography of thekind that is present in John Sack's much condemned journalisticpresentation of Jewish revenge in An Eye for an Eye.zo On the otherhand 50 years after liberation Jewish guilt is admitted by othersurvivors; by Roman Frister, for example, who was a boy of about thesame age as Kertész when he was deported.2l He relates his survival as

a success story, tainted only by the fact that he caused the death of a

fellow inmate by taking his cap after his own was stolen by the Kapowho had raped him. While the child perspective adopted by KertészIeaves no doubt as to who is to blame, even if his iuvenile nalratolseems to identify with his persecutors, Frister's traditional auto-biographical approach invites the reader to absolve the narrator -which in itself, implies an admission of guilt on his behalf. In othe¡words, where Kertész presents, Frister argues and explains. And thismakes for the different literary quality of the two books.

Andrea Reiter 89

The devices that characterize the concentration-camp texts with achild perspective are, first, the detailed report of specific incidentswhich shaped the child's view of life even beyond liberation(Wilkomirski, Frøgments) and, secondly, the naïve interpretation andadoption of a simpleton's attitude towards the experiences in camp,inviting the reader to perceive the presentation as ironic (Kertész,Sorstalanság). Both devices violate our expectations as readers. Whenwe dare imagine the fate of children in the camps, we anticipate senti-mentality. When a child suffers, the reader sympathizes more readily.A tortured child mobilizes our instincts to protect, to care for, to save.Showing the impact of the persecution of the Jews, or effects of intern-ment and war on the child¡en, thus facilitates a stronger statement.The innocence of the children makes the brutality of the Nazi regimenot only more obvious but also more i¡rational. The sentimentalrepresentation, however, distracts from the fact that the child's suffer-ing is not intrinsically different f¡om that of the adult and secondlyseems to suggest that adult suffering is somehow more justified.Whe¡e the child is, however, presented as naively identifying with thepersecutor, as shown in the example from Kertész's novel, the reade¡¡eacts with repulsion. Being deprived of sentimental identificationand the chance to feel pity causes irritation. It is thus not surprisingthat the history of publication of Kertész's Roman eines Schicksallosenis one of swings and roundabouts. When the novel was finished in1973 no Hungarian publisher wanted to take it. It was not publisheduntil 1975 and it took another 20 years for it to be t¡anslated intoGerman. Only then did the book suddenly make an impact, puttingKertész's name on the literary map.22

The Viennese-born Ruth Klüger deploys yet another device whenpresenting herself as a child in Terezin, Auschwitz and Christianstadt(an auxiliary camp of Gross Rosen). Klüger, who is Professo¡ ofGerman at the University of California at Irvine, discovered feminismin the 1960s, and it is with the eyes of a feminist that she views he¡childhood in camp. This includes a critical assessment of he¡ relation-ship with her mother, with whom she survived, and of the role of thewoman in the Jewish religion ('I do not want to lay tables and lightshabbat candles, I want to say kaddish' (Klüger, Weiter leben, p. 23)),as well as a controversial defence of the women among the camporde¡lies.23 What is relevant to our discussion is that Klüger, unlikeKe¡tész o¡ Wilkomirski, does not try to speak solely through the mindof the child; rather, she overlays it with the insights she has gained inadult life. Klüger, who since the publication of he¡ memoir has been

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able to establish herself as a feminist critic,z4 managed to pick up thepieces after liberation and lead a life seemingly untainted by her campexperience. If it had not been for a near-fatal road accident inGöttingen in November 1988 we would not have her account. It wasonly during her slow recovery that she started writing about her child-hood experience.

If one thing unites these three books on childhood in the camps,it is the absence of sentimentality. It is as if the authors could notafford self-pity. They needed to protect their psychological balance byspelling out even the most horrific experiences in ironic detachment,by detailed account or qualified by a theoretical frame. Thus theadoption of a defamiliarizing mode of representation by the survivor-narrator could have personal reasons as well as narratological ones. Afamous exception to this is Elie Wiesel's account of his survival.However, Wiesel was one of the very few survivors who successfullyturned their experience into an actual novel.

As in the scene in Wiesel's Nigftf where the little boy is hanged,sentimentality seems to reign in fiction and turn the books into best-sellers; other examples are Bruno Apitz's Nackf unter WöIfen and AndréSchwartz-Barl's The Last of the lust.zs Anna Gmeyner's Mania alsobelongs to this group, even if it did not achieve the sales of the othertwo, perhaps because it was published at the wrong time and by thewrong publisher. A notable exception among the fictional concentra-tion camp texts is Ilse Aichinger's Die gröPere Hoffnung, which displaysa surrealist approach to the theme. The superficial similarities of thelatter two texts on the level of content underline the difference in thenarratological approach of the two authors. Hence a comparison of

Andrea Reiter 97

not directly comparable to the camp literature which I discussedabove. Whe¡e the two novels differ most radically from each other isthe way in which they go about telling their stories. Gmeyner doesnot shrink from employing stereotypes (the beautiful Jewess, themisshapen but intelligent Jew, the successful and sometimes exploita-tive Jewish businessman, the Nazi caricature - bulldog body,underprivileged but aspiring and cowardly). Because the children inManja are portrayed as the mouthpieces of their parents, Gmeynerundermines the potential of the child perspective. However, thismight be explained, at least to some extent, by the circumstances ofthe book's production and publication. It was written in exile andpublished by Querido in Amsterdam,26 its author relying on literaryrealism not only to depict contemporary history, but also possibly tosti¡ her ¡eaders into action.

On the othe¡ hand, Aichinger is less concerned with historicaldetails.2T She does not refer to the facts nor does she use the expectedterms (she talks about the Jewish children as those who have 'fourw¡ong grandparents', and the Hitler Youth as those who wear auniform and carry daggers). Where Gmeyner characterizes the chil-d¡en in a metonymic fashion, through their language and their games,Aichinger shows their unfulfilled wishes in thei¡ dreams - the mediumthrough which the adult can represent the child's mind. It is thedreams that demarcate the children from the adults: in children,distinctions between dream and reality are less clear cut:

'Dreamt?'Ellen exclaimed. 'No way! I would also have dreamt thatthe children do not want to play with me, then I would also haved¡eamt that my mothe¡ was expelled, and that I have to stay backon my own, I would have dreamt that nobody guarantees for me, Iwould have only dreamt that you have hidden the map and thatmy visa was not granted'. (Die gröl3ere Hoffnung, p. lO)

The children cling to the dreams because they do not want to knowthe truth of harsh reality (p. 77); it is only in their dreams that theycan cross the bo¡ders into safety (chapter 3 'Das heilige Land' ('TheHoly Land')). On waking they must realize that the undertaker whotook their money has d¡iven them around in circles. D¡eams in Diegröf3ere Hoffnung are not escape routes for the children but constitutetheir true selves. In them the children are shown as autonomous andnot subject to parental guidance and influence.

Aichinger is concerned with language, about which she theorizes in

the two novels can further illustrate our argument.In both texts a group of children is at the centre of the story, with

the difference being that Gmeyner also gives us the previous life of thechildren and the narration does not focus on them until the middle ofthe book. In both texts the main protagonists are girls (Manja andEllen) who die on a bridge (Manja drowns, Ellen runs into an explod-ing shell). These parallels between the two novels, which werepublished ten years apart, should not obscure the differences: they donot cover the same time period, and the girls die for different reasons.Even the child perspective is used to different ends: Gmeyner presentsa sociographic portrait of the interwar years in Germany, Aichinger a

surrealist panorama of death and survival in the hinterland during theSecond World War. Although the camps feature in both, neithe¡ isprimarily concerned with them, and for this reason they are perhaps

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texts written after the novel.28 Her surrealism is rooted in her critiqueof a language that had been corrupted by the Nazis.ze According toFreud, dreams assimilate the poetic process. For Lacan the correspon-dence of displacement and condensation to metonymy and metaphorties them in even more closely with literature. In the novel they areassociated with ciphers like the visa Ellen tries to obtain, whichchanges from a means to escape to one that facilitates self-assertion;the star which is at the same time a sign of hope and pride and one ofstigmatization and destruction; and Ellen, who stands for a life of self-determination which becomes fulfilled in her death.3O The authorherself has never been in a camp but she witnessed the deportation ofher maternal grandmother, incidentally the only event in Aichinger'sbook (apart perhaps from the children's birthday party) which isdepicted in a truly sentimental mode and is thus distinct from the restof the novel.31 Hidden in Vienna, Aichinger survived the Nazi regime.But with the experience she gained, hers was obviously a different taskfrom that of Gmeyner's ten years earlier. Ellen, who has only two'wrong grandparents', is not deported with the other children. And so,after the suicide of her grandmother, she decides to follow them. Theincident in which she meets up with one of her friends is depicted inyet another dream in the chapter named 'FÌügeltraum' ('Dream ofWings'), which starts off with a typical childish wish-tulfilment dreamthat the train driver of aJewish transport forgets where he is supposedto go. In the whole chapter dream and reality merge. Aichinger'spoetic imagination shows the influence of Sigmund Freud. Many yearslater the fusion of dream and reality will be seen as the essence of thecultural scene in Vienna at the turn of the century and referred to intitles of exhibitions and books.32

There is one section in her novel which curiously echoes a para-graph in Gmeyner's book. A comparison will, at once, show thediffe¡ences between the two texts: Ernst Heidemann, a medical doctorand father of one of the five children in Maniø, through whomGmeyner herself speaks to the reader,33 keeps a diary while recoveringfrom tuberculosis in a Swiss resort in which he records the followingthoughts:

In a more poetic way, the narrator in Aichinger's text expressessimilar insight:

Skyblue the sky was smiling. But they did not permit themselves tobe misled. This clear, frank blue, the blue of the sky, the blue of thegentian and the blue of the blaue Dragoner reflected, in the sunlight,the blackness of the universe, this endless, unimaginable blackness,behind the frontiers. (Die grö$ere Hoffnung, p. 67)

These two quotations are in their turn paradigmatic of the two texts.Where Gmeyner in a prophetic insight identifies the war machineryas the ultimate threat which the rising National Socialism poses,Aichinger does not actually name the forces that have already begunto destroy the innocence of childhood. The blue of the gentian as wellas the blue of the blaue Drøgoner is reflected by the sun. The sun doesnot discriminate: hope and desire - represented by the mythical blueflower, the symbol of the German Romantic - as well as of destruction- symbolized by the uniforms of the soldiers (Die blauen Dragoner is asoldier's song also popular among Nazi troops3a) are equally mirrored.While Heidemann's thoughts on the state of the sky in Gmeyner,sbook give a realistic representation of one character,s propheticinsight, and thus have no further structural relevance, the counterpartin Aichinger's text is linked through its symbolism with other parts inthe book, indeed it is linked with the theme of the whole work. Thequotation appears in the fourth section with the title ,Im Dienst einerfremden Macht' ('in the service of a foreign power') which containsthe encounter between the group of Jewish children with the HitlerYouth. Ellen, whose hope of obtaining a visa to follow her motherinto the safety of exile has been shattered, now lives for the greaterhope which is vaguely but repeatedly connected with the blue of thesky. It can only be a 'greater hope' which the children attach to theblue sky because experience does not allow them any illusion aboutthe treachery of this colour. Its fragility, of which the reader isconstantly reminded, prepares her for the end of the text where Ellen,jumping off the destroyed bridge, reaches out for blue sky.

This comparison shows that it is the devices employed by the twoauthors rather than the content of their works that distinguishAichinger's Die gröl3ere Hoffnung from Gmeyner's Manja. WhileAichinger has used the child-protagonists to give us a child,s perspec-tive and thus a strange insight into the Holocaust, Gmeyner did notexploit this potential. Although very different in many respects,

I know that this sky, in whose perfect blue I do not tire to look, tofollow the course of the birds and clouds, I know that this is thesame sky, in which the squadrons of war planes will meet. I see theblue with the knowledge of how poisonous and gray it can darken.(Manja, p.167)

Andrea Reiter 93

94 The Holocaust and the Text

Aichinger's novel has an effect on the reader which is remarkablysimilar to that produced by the works discussed above. Like theirauthors she achieves this by defamiliarizing the events. The history ofher novel's reception shows some similarities with that of Kertész'sand Wilkomirski's. As well as being criticized for its lack of realism,3sit has been acknowledged as 'literature' through the award of prizes.Nevertheless, the book never gained the recognition and readership itdeserves. Choosing defamiliarization rather than sentimental repre-sentation can gain the author literary recognition, but is, at the sametime, more of a risk in market terms, and it is with the employment ofchild-protagonists that this becomes more readily apparent.

Notes1 Anna Gmeyner, Manja (Amsterdam: Querido, 1938; repr. Mannheim:

Persona, 1987); Ilse Aichinger, Die gröl3ere Hoffnung (Amsterdam: Bermann-Fischer, 1948; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschbuch Verlag, 1986); ElieWiesel, La Nuit (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1958) and Nigftf (New Yo¡k: Hilland Wang, 1960); Ruth Klüger, weiter leben: Eine lugend (Göttingen:WalÌstein, 1993); Binjamin Wilkomirski, Bruchstitcke: Aus einer Kindheit1939-1948 (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995) and Fragments:Memories of a Wartime Childhood (New York: Schocken, 1996); Imre Kertész,Sorstalanság (Budapest: Szépirodalmi 1975) and Roman eines Schicksallosen(Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1996).

2 For a detailed discussion of this, see Naomi B. Sokoloff, Imagining the Childín Modem fewish Fiction (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1992) esp. part I: 'Representing the Voice of the Child'. I also oweimportant suggestions to Catherine Mowbray's unpublished paper on'Representing Children in Literature of the Holocaust'.

3 For a discussion of authentic versus fictionalized accounts, see AndreaReiter, ' Auf dalS sie entsteigen der Dunkelheit'. Die literarische BewäItigung vonKZ-Erfahrung (Vienna: Löcker, 1995).

4 On the role of grandpa¡ents in the discourse about the Shoah, see Spurender Verfolgung. Seelische Auswirkungen des Holocaust auf die Opfer und ihreKinder, edlted by Gertrud Hardtmann (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1992).

5 DanieÌ Goldhagen, Hitler's WiIIing Executíoners: Ordinary Germans and the

Andrea Reiter 95

Mit einer Textliste zum gleichnamigen Film und Beiträgen von Susanne Benölrund Thomas Mitscherlich (Bremen: Donat, 1997), p. 38.Anne Karpf, 'Child of the Shoah, The Guardian: G2, 1I February 7998,pp.2-6.See Sokoloff, Imagining the Child, p. 75.Iris Radisch, 'Hiob von Ungarn', Die Zeit, 21- March 1997, p. 73.See Gudrun Kuhn,'Ein philosophisch-musikalisch geschulter Sänger'.Musikästhetische Úberlegungen zur Prosa Thomas Bemhards, Epistemata.Wùrzburger wissenschaftliche Schriften. Reihe Literaturwissenschaft 183(Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1996).Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) p.5.See Victor Shklovsky, 'Art as Techniqte', Russian Formalist Criticism: FourEssays, translated and with an introduction by Lee T. Lemon and MarionJ. Reis, Regents Critics Series (Lincoln and London: Universìty ofNebraskaPress, 1965) pp.3-24.Ann Jefferson, 'Russian Formalism', Modern Literary Theory, edited by AnnJefferson and David Robey, 2nd edn (London: Batsford, 1986) p. 31.Ib\d., pp.26f .

Sokoloff does mention the defamilia¡izing effect of the child perspective;however, she does so only in passing (see pp. 26, 35, 709).In contrast, mypoint here is that the authors, all of whom relate personal experience,chose the point of view deliberately to achieve this effect.Consider, for instance, Thomas Mitscherlich's Reisen ins Leben (7996) andWilhelm Rösing's trilogy onJewish Exiles (Emst Fedem,7992; Hans Keilson,7996; Thomas Geve, 7997).John Sack, An Eye for an Eye (New York: Basic Books, 1993).Roman Frister, Die Mütze oder Der Preis des Lebens. Eín Lebensberichf (Berlin:Siedler, 7997; original publication in Hebrew, 1993)."'Das 20. Jah¡hundert ist eine ständige Hinrichtungsmaschine": Im¡eKertész im Gespräch mit Gerhard Moser', Literatur und Kritik: Sprache undVerbrechen,31.31374 (Aprll 1997), pp. 44-9.In comparison it took only fouryears for Frister's novel to be published in German translation.For a critique of Klùger's feminist stance, see Eva Lezzi: 'weiter leben: Eindeutsches Buch einer Jüdin?', Frauen ín der Literaturwissenschaft: Rundbrief.Ethnizität,49 (December 1996) pp. 7a-20.See e.g. Ruth Klüger, Frauen lesen anders: Essays, DeutscherTaschenbuchveilag 7227 6 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchveriag, 1996).Bruno Apitz, Nackt unter WöIfen (Ftankfu¡t am Main: Röderbery, 7982);André Schwartz-Bart, The Last of the lust (London: Secker & Warburg,1961).See the preface to Man¡a by Heike Klapdor-Kops, pp. 5-12.See my article 'Narrating the Holocaust: Communicating the End or theEnd of Communication?', Pattems of Prejudice, 2912-3 (7995), pp. 75-87.See my article 'Ilse Aichinger: the Poetics of Silence', Contemporary GermanWriters: Their Aesthetics and Their Language, edited by Arthur Williams,Stuart Parkes andJulian Preece (Bern, Berlin and New Yo¡k: Lang,7996),pp.209-21,.See Aichinger, 'Aufruf zum Mißtrauen', Aufþrderung zum Mil3trauen:

10

117213

14

15

76

1718

79

2027

22

L.)

24

25

z627

28

Holocaust (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996).See Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Vísual and OtherPleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 1.4-29 . T}le term is actually takenover from the theory of non-verbal communication; see, for example,Michael Argyle, Bodily Communication, 2nd edn (London: Routledge,1988), pp. 76t,764.Louis Begley, Wartime lies (London: Macmillan, 1991; Picador, 7992),pp.93-4.Where only the Ge¡man edition has been quoted all t¡anslations are mine-Barba¡a lohr, Reisen ins Leben. Weiterleben nach eíner Kindheit in Auschwítz:

89 29

96 The Holocaust and the Text

Literatur, Bildenite Kun 1945' edlled by Otto

Breicha, Gerhard Fritsc P' 10'

See Dagmar Lorenz, Ts: Athenãum' 1981)

pp.67-76.Here I disagree with Lorenz who cannot see any sentimentality in the text:

30

31

32see Lorenz, IIse Aichinger, P' 76'Consider, for example, the exhibition T/aum1870-1930 (Vienna 28 March-6 octobel 1985), and Joseph P. Strelka,

Zwischen Wirklichkeit ,"a-f i"^' Das Wesen des Osteneichischen ín der

Literatur (Tübingen/Basle: Francke, 1994)'See the introduction by Klapdor-Kops'

st'', The Holocaust and the Literary: Yale UniversiÇ Press, 1975)' esP'

Unfulfilled: Observations on there Hoffrtun{, NeoPhilologus' 74' 3

$uly 1990) PP. 408-25.

5J3435

unil Wirklíchkeit. Wien

6From behind the Bars ofö;;i"tion Marks: Emmanuelñ;il;s's (Non) -RePresentationof the HolocaustRobert Eaglestone

ËcATB

Introduction

does this silence tell us?

Levinas, seen bY ZYgmunt Bau

pher of the twentieth century" is

ihirrk"r, from Jacques Derrida to L

1931 he was granted French citizeHaving done militarY service aCerman and Russian, he was mob

brothers Boris and Aminadab' w

97