by Ian Buruma
Along the cobblestoned road to the camp, about half a mile from the main gate, stood Sylvia’s Sauna and Fitness Center. Opposite Sylvia’s Sauna was a half-finished modern building. It was meant to be a brand-new supermarket, the first ever in Fürstenberg. But Gertrud Müller, chairwoman of the German Camp Society Ravensbrück, protested: “This memorial place must never be desecrated.” She used the word entweihen (to rob something of its sacred nature). More protest followed, almost entirely from the western part of Germany, and the supermarket project had to be abandoned. The government of Brandenburg took swift action to avoid further embarrassment. A new supermarket was to be built elsewhere. A pleasant spot was selected near a large cemetery and crematorium on the other side of town. The controversy died. Later on, one of the guards of the cemetery told a German magazine reporter that this pleasant spot was where the SS had burned the bodies of their prisoners, when Ravensbrück still lacked its own ovens.
“It is barbarous to write a poem after Auschwitz,” wrote Theodor Adorno. People have interpreted this in different ways. What I think he meant was that the poet, wrapped up in “private and complacent contemplation,” could never find words to express the mechanized, soulless, industrial brutality of Auschwitz. Besides, poetry is a creation of pleasure and beauty and thus inappropriate as an expression of mass murder.
There is much to be said against Adorno’s statement, which, in any case, he revised himself in later years. But it does appear as though German artists—filmmakers, playwrights, novelists, as well as poets—have, with very few exceptions, taken his words to heart. There are hardly any novels, plays, or films that deal directly with the Holocaust, neither in East Germany, where there were political reasons, nor in the West, where there were none. I do not mean documentaries, history books, exhibitions, or witness accounts. There has been no lack of these, in the former Federal Republic at any rate. I am speaking only about works of the imagination.
The exceptions are interesting for what they reveal about the silent or at best the oblique mainstream. The most famous poem about the death camps is “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue,” 1945) by Paul Celan. It is written in the lilting rhythm of a dance tune, echoing the cruel game played by the camp Kommandant in the poem, who orders Jews to play music as others dig their own graves: “Jab your spades deeper there, you others play on for the dance.”
“Todesfuge” has become a classic, published in West German schoolbooks. Every educated German knows the famous line: “Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland” (“Death is a master from Germany”). But its reception in Germany has been ambivalent. Was the poem perhaps a bit too lyrical, a bit too pleasurable to the ear? Did it not end up sweetening the horror instead of expressing it? Paul Celan himself felt ambivalent, and in the late 1960s he asked editors to remove it from anthologies. And yet Celan’s poem remains, for me, the most moving statement on the Holocaust. Its beauty as a poem does not anesthetize the sense of horror it conveys. On the contrary, it makes us feel it all the more.
Paul Celan was not only outside the mainstream of postwar German literature because of his work; he was not even German. He was born in Romania of Jewish parents. His mother taught him German, the language of those who would later order her death. Celan said that German passed “through the thousand darknesses of death-dealing utterance.” He traveled to Germany, to visit friends, to collect prizes. But language really was his only link, language and history, of the most devastating kind. In 1970, he killed himself in Paris.
Peter Weiss wrote a play based on the testimonies in the Auschwitz trial, entitled Die Ermittlung (The Investigation, 1965). It is a kind of prose poem, using mostly documentary material. But although it describes in detail the atrocities that took place, it is written from a Marxist point of view. The specific suffering of the Jews is dissolved into a general narrative of class struggle. The words “Jew” and “Jewish” (let alone “Gypsy”) are not mentioned anywhere. As Peter Demetz puts it in his book After the Fires, Weiss has reduced “Auschwitz to a place without Jews.”
Like Celan, Weiss was Jewish. And like Celan’s, his relationship with Germany was tenuous. Weiss lived abroad much of his life and for some time wrote in Swedish. He did not, in his work at least, identify with the victims of Auschwitz as a Jew. Nor, ostensibly, did he regard Auschwitz as a specifically German crime. He was too much of a Marxist for that: he thought in terms of structures, economics, and class interests, not nations or cultures. But he was interested in the postwar German “identity” nonetheless. Weiss saw structural and philosophical continuities of the Third Reich spilling into the Federal Republic. He wanted his play to be the beginning of a mass movement in West Germany. Only through years of massive “spiritual labor,” he thought, could the German people free themselves from their “psychosis.” Weiss, then, did believe in a national psyche.
One of the most famous plays about the destruction of the Jews, Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy, 1963), was written by Rolf Hochhuth, a German Gentile and a Protestant. It is a flawed piece, in which the Jews are mere pawns in a bitter critique of the Vatican’s complicity in their murder. The theme is not so much historical, cultural, or national as theological: the struggle between God and the devil in the hearts of priests. The scenes set in Auschwitz, in which Dr. Mengele is cast as a seductive Mephistopheles in a black silk cape, are clumsy. And yet the play was a rare and brave attempt at imagining Auschwitz, which in Germany received a frosty critical reception. One of Hochhuth’s few literary supporters at the time, the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, wrote that German writers had been reduced to an uncomfortable silence by Hochhuth’s play, because they were aware of their own failure to address the theme at all.
But it is also true that, as Peter Demetz says, “there is not a single aspect of German life and letters that remains unaffected by the legacy of Auschwitz.” At least it was true of the Federal Republic. There are many references to the Holocaust in postwar German fiction, but most are oblique or metaphorical. Writers in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Heinrich Böll and Siegfried Lenz, were even reluctant to refer to the Nazis by their name. Böll called them “the buffalo eaters” and their victims “the lambs.” Lenz, in his novel Deutschstunde (The German Lesson, 1968), wrote about “the men in leather coats” or simply “the authorities in Berlin.” In 1964, Alexander Kluge, a filmmaker and writer of the early postwar generation, talked about his difficulty in depicting the Holocaust: “One cannot really describe it,” he said. “However, it is possible, even terribly necessary to take stock. Make inventories. I attempt to erect fences. I hope that the reader’s imagination can move between those fences.”
Certainly a well-chosen metaphor can stir the imagination more than a direct description. The sudden whistle of a train on the sidings of the Oswiecim (Auschwitz) railway station evokes more menace than a tour of the museum. But the reluctance in German fiction to look Auschwitz in the face, the almost universal refusal to deal with the Final Solution outside the shrine, the museum, or the schoolroom, suggests a fear of committing sacrilege. It is as though the anus mundi were the face of God, as though any attempt to draw the image of the unimaginable or inexpressible would trivialize its sacred nature. It is all right to let the witnesses speak, in the courtroom, in the museums, on videotape (Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah has been shown many times on German television), but it is not all right for German artists to use their imagination.
In the winter of 1992 a film entitled Hitlerjunge Salomon (Hitler Youth Salomon) was shown in Germany. This movie, entitled Europa, Europa elsewhere, was a success in the United States. The story was based on a true survivor’s tale.
Salomon Perel was born in Germany as the son of a Polish Jew. He escaped to Poland with his family and survived the war by pretending to be an overseas German, a Volksdeutsche. He was adopted by a Nazi officer, who placed him in a Nazi elite school. There is some wallowing in Nazi kitsch here: absurd uniforms and demented speeches, forest love scenes with blond Nazi maidens, and Hitler
Youth singing about Jewish blood splattering from German knives. But much of this was true to the facts.
During his school holidays, Salomon tried to get a glimpse of his lost parents by riding a tram through the Lodz ghetto, where he thought they might be. The tram windows were painted white, so that German passengers were spared the sight of dying Jews, but Salomon manages to see through the cracks, and so does the audience. What we see is neither a cliché nor kitsch, but an impression of reconstructed hell. The picture ends with an appearance of the real Salomon Perel, in Israel, where he now lives. He sings a Hebrew song. (Now, this was kitsch.)
Hitlerjunge Salomon did not have much success in Germany. The filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff saw this as proof of a silent boycott. When it was turned down as the official German entry for the Oscar competition, the Polish director of the film, Agnieszka Holland, was outraged. It was a German production, she said, and the refusal to enter the picture was yet another German attempt to deny the past. Der Spiegel thought the film might have embarrassed people because it “broke a German taboo.” Salomon’s character didn’t fit the philosemitic image of the good Jew, a stock figure in much postwar German fiction.
It was, in fact, never clear why the film was not entered for the Oscars. The German selection committee said that since the director was Polish, the film was not technically German. The leftish Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper called this argument “formalism,” reminiscent of the “formalism of pure race.”
Perhaps the committee was being bureaucratic, or maybe the theme was too embarrassing. But it is striking how often, in conversation with Germans who had seen the film, I heard the fear of kitsch expressed. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, usually quick on the draw when German honor is impugned, ran an article saying that Hitlerjunge Salomon was simply a bad film. It was a cheap melodrama, the critic wrote, a travesty of innocent-abroad stories. The schmaltzy music and tawdry sets were not up to the theme. But what is up to the theme? There is a point at which aesthetic fastidiousness becomes an alibi for not depicting the theme at all.
But beneath the fear of bad taste or sacrilege may lie a deeper problem. To imagine people in the past as people of flesh and blood, not as hammy devils in silk capes, is to humanize them. To humanize is not necessarily to excuse or to sympathize, but it does demolish the barriers of abstraction between us and them. We could, under certain circumstances, have been them. This is not a great problem for an artist (or an audience) who identifies naturally with the victims. For a Jewish writer to imagine an SS officer at Auschwitz is not to run the risk of contamination. For a non-Jewish German, told to internalize Auschwitz as a German crime, the problem is real. It is one thing to do as many German authors, from Günter Grass in the West to Christa Wolf in the East, have done: to humanize small Nazi functionaries in provincial towns far removed from the centers of mass murder; it is quite another thing to find something in common with the butchers themselves. To pull this off one would first have to imagine the past from the point of view of the victim.
In his preface to Das Brandopfer (The Burnt Offering, 1954), “one of the very few pieces of high literature to concern itself with the full horror of the past” (George Steiner), the author, Albrecht Goes, made the following remarkable statement: “As the teller of this story … I shall never as long as I live cease to shudder at the thought that all those death orders (by Heydrich, Eichmann, et al.) were issued in the language in which I think, speak, write, and dream. Despite this, I have told my story in a hushed voice, but not without a certain strength. It is a borrowed strength, certainly—one peculiar to Israel. It is based on the bond, which has enabled the ‘children of Israel,’ also known as the ‘children of Zion,’ to survive in this world: a bond which they know lasts forever.”
The story, about a pregnant Jewish woman who is forced, on the eve of her arrest, to leave the baby carriage of her unborn child to a Gentile shopkeeper’s wife, is indeed exceptional in its choice of subject. (Das Brandopfer is the literal German translation of Shoah, or Holocaust.) But its philosemitism is not at all unusual for a German of the author’s generation. The heroine, or rather the victim, of his story is not simply a German Jewish woman; she is “a child of the prophets.” It is as though to tell the story of the Holocaust, Goes had to adopt the mythical identity of the victims.
Perhaps even more remarkable is the novel by Wolfgang Koeppen entitled Jacob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch (Jacob Littner’s Notes from a Hole in the Ground). It was published in 1948 under the name of Jacob Littner, and republished in 1992 under Koeppen’s own name. Koeppen also wrote three famous novels in the 1950s about Nazi traumas in postwar Germany.
Jacob Littner was in fact more than a literary character. He was a Jewish stamp dealer in Munich who survived the war and the “liquidation” of the ghetto of Zbaraz in Poland by bribing a Polish antisemite to allow him to live—if that is the right word—in a dark, stinking hole under the Pole’s house. He told his story to a publisher in Munich, before moving to New York. The publisher took a few notes, which formed the basis of Koeppen’s novel. Koeppen was paid for his work by Littner himself, who sent him food parcels from New York. Here, then, is a German Gentile who literally adopted a Jewish identity to tell the story of the Holocaust.
Maybe it could not—certainly in those early days—have been done in any other way. But even under a Jewish name, the author could not resist the temptation to end on an abstract, religious note. Throughout most of the book, the language is sober, the descriptions of the horror are concrete. But it ends like this: “Hate is a terrible word … I hate no one. I don’t even hate the guilty. I have suffered their persecution, but I do not presume to be their judge. My refusal and inability to act as a judge also means this, however: I must not forgive, I must not exonerate the guilty. What they did, in my opinion, is beyond human judgment. Only God is able to judge inhuman crimes …”
Three years after the war it was not up to Germans to ask for the suspension of human judgment. Only the victims could do that. But the flight into religious abstraction was to be all too common among Germans of the Nazi generation, as well as their children; not, as is so often the case with Jews, to lend mystique to a new identity, as a patriotic Zionist, but on the contrary to escape from being the heir to a peculiarly German crime, to get away from having to “internalize” Auschwitz, or indeed from being German at all.
Then came Holocaust. The virtual taboo against depicting Auschwitz was broken, not by German artists, but by a Hollywood soap opera, a work of skillful pop, which penetrated the German imagination in a way nothing had before. Holocaust was first shown in Germany in January 1979. It was seen by 20 million people, about half the adult population of the Federal Republic; 58 percent wanted it to be repeated; 12,000 letters, telegrams, and postcards were sent to the broadcasting stations; 5,200 called the stations by telephone after the first showing; 72.5 percent were positive, 7.3 percent negative. An article by Heinz Hoehne in Der Spiegel said it all: “An American television series, made in a trivial style, produced more for commercial than for moral reasons, more for entertainment than for enlightenment, accomplished what hundreds of books, plays, films, and television programs, thousands of documents, and all the concentration camp trials have failed to do in the more than three decades since the end of the war: to inform Germans about crimes against Jews committed in their name, so that millions were emotionally touched and moved.”
Holocaust was never shown in the German Democratic Republic, but people in the border areas could tune in to the Western stations. And they did, even though it was officially forbidden. In 1992 I asked a schoolteacher in what used to be East Berlin whether she had seen the series. She said she had. Was it discussed at school? No, it was not, for then teachers and pupils would have had to admit that they had broken the law. So people pretended they had not seen Holocaust? Yes, said the history teacher, but in any case “the Jewish problem did not exist for our children. Now we have to teach them about
it, but they don’t even understand what made the Jews special, or why Hitler wanted to exterminate them. You see, over here we are not very knowledgeable about the Bible, neither the Old nor the New Testament.”
In the Federal Republic, Holocaust shocked and angered a number of West German intellectuals. It was the usual fear of kitsch, as well as a suspicion of “Hollywood values,” often shorthand for “Amerika.” The Frankfurter Rundschau worried that it commercialized the horrors of the past: Auschwitz as “an article of consumption.” Edgar Reitz, the director of the far more sophisticated soap opera Heimat, complained that “the Americans have stolen our history through Holocaust,” because films in the style of Holocaust prevented Germans from “taking narrative possession of our past, from breaking free of the world of judgments.” In fact, Holocaust had done no such thing. German artists themselves had failed to find a narrative for Auschwitz.
There were hate letters sent to the broadcasters, usually anonymously, which called Holocaust a pack of Jewish lies. The whole thing was a Jewish trick to make money by having the Germans look bad. The late Prime Minister of Bavaria, Franz Josef Strauss, was of this opinion, or at least he said he was. But so, from a different angle, were some leftist intellectuals, to whom Hollywood commercialism was the root of all evil. There is a school of thought in Germany whose explanation for Auschwitz is based on a contempt for commercialism and what is loosely termed “modernity”—post-Enlightenment rationalism, mass production, capitalism, etc. “Auschwitz,” said the East German playwright Heiner Müller in an interview, “is the last stage of the Enlightenment.” More than that, “Auschwitz is the altar of capitalism. Rationality as the only binding criterion reduces man to his material worth.” Once again, forms and substance are confused: even if the methods of the Holocaust could be called industrial, even rational, the reasons for it certainly could not.