Transnational Post-Shoah and Postwar Family Stories as Detective Fiction. Descendants as Detectives in Irene Dische, Jurek Becker, Clemens Eich, and Tanja Dückers DAGMA R C .G. LOR ENZ Univ ersity Of Illinois At Chicago In different ways German-language literature has become a part of transnational communication to such an extent that the term «transnational» applied to contemporary writing is almost a contradiction in terms. Likewise, the topics and techniques of crime and detective fiction, genres that traditionally were not considered serious, proliferated in international prose narratives and filmmaking. From the wealth of possible examples I have selected works by four authors of different generational and national affiliations. All of them are linked to the aftermath of the Third Reich through their family histories. Jurek Becker, born 1937 in Poland, was a child survivor of the ghetto Lodz and several concentration camps; Irene Dische, born in 1952 in New York, is the daughter of refugees from Nazi Germany and Poland; German- Austrian author Clemens Eich, born in 1954 in Germany and raised in Austria, was the son of the racially persecuted poet Ilse Aichinger and acclaimed German preand postwar author Günter Eich. The youngest author, Tanja Dückers, was born in Germany in 1968. Her career includes international experience in the US and other countries. Her fiction has been characterized as Enkelliteratur, grandchildren literature, by Mila Ganeva, or Third- Generation-literature from the vantage point of the Second World War or the Shoah. Becker and Dische focus on parent-child relationships that are overshadowed by a past of persecution, which the parents keep a secret. The grandchild-grandparent relationships in Eich and Dückers involve former Nazi supporters that did not reveal their stories and politics past and present - for good reason since they are situated in the Federal Republic and the Second Republic of Austria respectively. In other words, the prose narratives in question center on family histories. At some point the younger characters, descendants of the Nazi-era generations, become engaged in discovery projects to ascertain their forebear’s past and to establish their own identity. Beyond the mystery plot other common elements and motifs in these narratives come to the foreground. To 132 Dagmar C.G. Lorenz differentiate between the generational perspectives, Mila Ganeva assumes divergent impulses for the Nazi-era discoveries on the part of children and grandchildren, and generation-specific ways in the processing of these revelations (157). On the surface the fact-finding missions by Becker’s Hans Bronstein in Bronsteins Kinder (1986), Dische’s Charles Allen in «Eine Jüdin für Charles Allen» (1989), Eich’s Valentin in Das steinerne Meer (1991), and Dücker’s Freia in Himmelskörper (2003) involve detective work to establish «the truth» about older family members and friends, and to reconstruct their families’ cultural identity and place in history. Usually, a life-changing event precedes the discovery projects. The protagonist’s everyday routine is interrupted and his or her sense of self is severely challenged. The shock leads to the discovery of crimes - crimes committed by the respective family members or crimes perpetrated against them, or both. Personal transgressions relate back to the context of the criminal regime that was the Third Reich. In Becker, the father’s non-conformism is linked to his Jewish background, which was not welcome in the German Democratic Republic. German Jewish history was not a concern in the GDR. The topics of anti- Semitism and the Holocaust played no role in East German historiography. Here, the main issues were anti-fascism and the class struggle, and the Nazi regime was viewed as the ultimate expression of bourgeois and petty bourgeois society. Arno Bronstein’s Holocaust experience comes to light when his son Hans is confronted with the fact that Arno and his friends are holding a former KZ guard prisoner and torture him. The site of their private «camp» is the summer cottage where Hans conducts his love affair with his girlfriend, Martha Lepschitz, who, like himself, is the daughter of survivors. The discovery of the kidnapped man in his love nest ends the young man’s childhood and his illusion of being a GDR citizen like any other. In Dische, the death of his absent father Johannes Allerhand and the problematic inheritance he leaves behind sends the protagonist, young Charles Allen, on a quest that changes the way he sees himself and others. The inheritance, an antique shop in Berlin, turns out to be a front for smuggled and fenced goods and money laundering. In Allerhand’s German world, which Charles leaves in the end, nothing is real, neither the names people go by, nor the people themselves, nor the elder Allerhand’s ostensibly Jewish girl friend and business partner. In Eich, the boy protagonist Valentin learns about the East European origins and the Nazi affiliations of his grandfather Michael Hader from a manuscript containing the latter’s autobiography. Finally, he has to deal with a recent murder the old man has committed, leaving the body of a dead woman in the basement of his remote mountain cottage, where he has lived alone with Valentin since the disappearance of the boy’s parents. Transnational Post-Shoah and Postwar Family Stories 133 Like in Becker and Dische, his findings destroy any sense of security young Valentin had and propel him into an uncertain future. In Dückers the probe of the grandchild, Freia, into her family history is contextualized with several deaths that include the grandparents’ death and the mother’s suicide. Another factor in finding an existential anchor by way of her investigation is Freia’s pregnancy. Through documents and pictures Freia learns about the grandparents’ Nazi affiliation which was suggested to Dückers’ readers all along: the convictions held by the old people included racism, German supremacism, and Social Darwinism, ways of thinking that allowed them to live with their memory of supporting the Nazi regime and taking advantage of their privileged position, most notably to ensure their survival in 1945 by exchanging their guaranteed places on the ill-fated German refugee ship Gustloff for a transfer on a smaller, better equipped boat. Thus they sent another family to their deaths. As Freia and her twin brother Paul learn the truth about their grandparents’ positive relationship with the Third Reich, they abandon their bizarre guises - she had shaved herself bald, he colored his hair solid black - and come into their own. In Dische’s novella «Fromme Lügen» the hidden family history, exile and the Holocaust, took an emotional toll on the refugee family living in the United States. In Dückers, it is the unspoken Nazi past that has the power to drive Freia’s mother to suicide. In both cases the past only loses its grip on the descendants when the facts are articulated, explained, and accepted. In the four novels at hand the discovered crimes become the crucible to test the protagonists’ character. Will they side with the offenders or the victims? Will they break out of the cycle of violence or acquiesce and allow it to continue? Arguably the preoccupation with crime and criminals after World War II in German and Austrian literature is the product of the growing awareness of the criminal character of the Third Reich, confirmed in a long line of Nazi trials starting with the Nuremberg war crime tribunals of 1945/ 6 and followed by the trials of the 1960s to the 1990s - the Jerusalem Eichmann trial, the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, and the case of Cleveland auto worker John Demjanuk. Cultural and media events complemented the ever more sophisticated legal discourse on the Holocaust. In international debates the issue of German and Austrian criminality continued to be a red button issue. The Diary of Anne Frank and the following feature films, Peter Weiss’s documentary drama The Investigation, the TV miniseries Holocaust, Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance, Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah, and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, as well as the Wehrmachtsausstellung «War Crimes of the Wehrmacht» showcased Nazi German atrocities 134 Dagmar C.G. Lorenz but at the same time celebrated the heroism of the rare and exceptional individuals, survivors, non-conformists, or resisters. In the novels discussed here, such outstanding individuals are not in evidence. The gap separating right from wrong seems but small, a dilemma that presents the family detective with additional difficulties. The preoccupation with crime, law enforcement, and organized crime in US popular culture, film, and fiction, is likely to have been a contributing factor in the fascination with crime, also in German-language works, but this issue will not be examined here. The increasing body of literature on the topic of German crime and guilt reveals what Ganeva terms a veritable «obsession with the past» among the grandchildren generation. During the postwar era, according to Ganeva, a somewhat hesitant attitude towards the «recent past» prevailed. At that time the events seemed still accessible, and the persons involved were alive and active members of postwar society (Ganeva 160). Yet, the works discussed here do not bear out Ganeva’s assertion that a more optimistic outlook prevailed in the 1968 Father-and-Mother literature, based on the belief that making a clean break with the past was an option. For example, Hans Bronstein’s melancholy and Charles Allen’s return to the United States point to unmanageable difficulties with the past. More recent characters, Ganeva holds, «seem to be skeptical that they will ever find definite answers or any sense of closure» (160). At the same time, she notes, the grandchildren, who seemingly accept the burden of the past, enter their mission of discovery with abandon. This would not be surprising in light of the changed historical situation. The majority of the wartime generations are gone, as is the case in Eich and Dückers, where the grandparents pass away before their Nazi past riddled with opportunism and deception, including a recent murder committed by the grandfather in Eich’s novel, comes to light. Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox’s film Walk on Water, an Israeli-German co-production, provides a striking image for the situation: in a wheel-chair with an IV bag by his side, the halfdead Nazi grandfather is wheeled into his adult children’s festively decked out salon just to meet his death at the hands of his oh-so-gentle, gay grandson, whose entire existence appears like a protest against his Nazi-friendly parents. In Bronsteins Kinder and «Eine Jüdin für Charles Allen» the family detectives face similar situations. Shortly before the death of Aron Bronstein, a concentration camp survivor and currently the kidnapper of a former KZ guard, his son Hans comes to acknowledge the indestructible ties that bind him to his family’s Jewish past. These ties are immediately manifest on the level of language: the old men under the leadership of his father speak Yiddish, and Hans, who never studied the language, is able to follow their con- Transnational Post-Shoah and Postwar Family Stories 135 versation without difficulty. After Aron Bronstein’s death Hans no longer needs to make the difficult decision outlined by his sister Elle as follows: Dieser fremde Unmann oder unser Vater es gibt dabei Nichts Drittes da kann es dir Nicht schwer fallen zu entscheiden … Der Augenblick liegt erst noch vor dir in dem du tust was du tun must erst dann aber stellt sich heraus ob du ein Blauer bist oder ein Gelber (Becker 282). Hans’s isolation from his Jewish friends and position apart from the German mainstream society suggests that he is emotionally not up to the task of taking an unequivocal position. The same applies to his sister Elle, who lives in a mental institution on neutral ground so-to-speak. Before Dische’s Charles Allen, Catholic by faith, Jewish by descent, is called to Berlin to accept his paternal bequest, his father is already dead. The son is therefore at liberty to examine closely the legacy of his father, the small-time crook Johannes Allerhand who in Berlin went by his original German name. As is usually the case in fiction involving a parent-child conflict, the child becomes embroiled in a crime of his own: Hans Bronstein abets his father’s crime, failing to inform the GDR authorities to end the torture of a captured man, and he acts as the latter’s accomplice by letting him escape. Charles Allen commits rape after unmasking the false Jewess Esther Becker, who turns out to be the daughter of former Nazis and, in order to take advantage of Germany’s restitution policies, poses as a Jewish woman. Valentin in Eich’s novel conceals the murder committed by his grandfather even after the latter has died; he buries the victim in the basement of the old house, and, still a minor, takes off on what will likely turn out to be a suicide mission. Only in Dückers do alternatives emerge: for Freia motherhood arises as an option whose viability, to be sure, remains unexplored and Paul seems to have found partnership and a home with his gay lover in Paris. Still, Dückers’s twins break with tradition and seek emotional and geographic distance from their family and national legacy. Freia’s alternative involves a repositioning by way of her Polish ancestry. Her opting for the Other, the unknown, calls to mind the escape attempted by Eich’s Valentin, who departs for the Alpine plateaus near the German border. Readers are drawn into the role of detective as they trace the tribulations of the rather distinct fictional characters. All of the narratives discussed here raise questions about continuity and loyalty; they problematize the transmission of patterns from the older generations to the younger ones. Even in the works that do not thematize procreation as a possible path to libera- 136 Dagmar C.G. Lorenz tion, as is the case in Dückers’ Himmelskörper, the continuity of memory is thematized. Occupying a different plane than the fictional characters the readers receive clues from the behavior and appearance of the fictional characters. For example, in Becker there is the mistaken notion that Hans Bronstein is circumcised, while Hans denies his Jewish identity, his social life in Jewish circles, and tidbits from his father’s past serve to position him within the survivor collective despite his self-identification as a GDR citizen. In Dische, the traditionalist demeanor and conservative old world apparel of Charles Allen as well as his shyness and asceticism stand in contrast with the flamboyant performance of Jewishness by Esther Becker, whose real name is Margret. In Eich the sickliness of the awkward boy Valentin, and in Dückers the eye-catching gender bending by the unconventional twins suggest incongruence to the readers and point to an unprocessed past. Indeed, in Eich and Dückers the protagonists’ traits clash with the aspirations and convictions of the grandparents. Eich’s Michael Hader wants his grandson to become a skiing champion and tries to instill in him notions of discipline, victory, and triumph. In Dückers the grandmother tries to indoctrinate the children with Nazi gender role expectations and a beauty ideal associated with the Aryan stereotype, while the grandfather imparts to them his Social Darwinist tenets (Mattson 199). In general, the grandchildren characters of Third-Generation writers exhibit curiosity and detachment rather than the Betroffenheit and shame typical of the protagonists in the works of Bachmann, Bernhard, and Handke. In part this development reflects the progressing debates at the end of the twentieth century. By then it was an established fact that the vast majority of Central Europeans had been victimized under National Socialism and that there were perpetrators among their forebears, or both. Nazi-era family secrets had become unexceptional. The eagerness Ganeva observes in the grandchildren generation to disclose the past seems a product of the passing of time. The growing detachment from the past diminishes the compulsion to conceal it, thus allowing for a sense of normalcy to take hold among the descendants of the traumatic European past. Post-Shoah and post-WWII memory in writers of the third post-1945 generation is becoming increasingly diffuse, not surprisingly, considering the mounting layers of opaqueness. In the first generation the issue was deliberate deception in order to avoid exposing an unpalatable past. In the second generations the misconceptions created by the denial and lies of the first generation were either deliberately perpetuated or cast in a somewhat favorable light, while the following generations are faced with an unmanageable memory discourse that contradicts historical research and defies Transnational Post-Shoah and Postwar Family Stories 137 documentation, hence the preoccupation with «collective memory» rather than history. Second-Generation accounts reveal that the children of perpetrators as well as those of Holocaust survivors had received little, and often distorted information about the Nazi era and the fate of their families. Much like the «collector» in Liev Schreiber’s Everything is Illuminated (2005), who is a young American of East European Jewish background, the descendants of perpetrators and victims assume the role of history detectives to uncover their family’s past in order to discover themselves, as the identity issues dominating these works suggest. Often the uninformed descendants are faced with unwilling resource persons, they make uncomfortable discoveries, and are uncertain which ghosts they fight - and ghosts are conjured up, as is literally the case in Irene Dische’s story «Fromme Lügen». Not every protagonist goes around collecting evidence like Jonathan Safran Foer’s and Liev Schreiber’s protagonist, who carries plastic evidence bags with him at all times to piece together the mosaic of his lost history. German and Austrian narratives problematize the obstacles standing in the way of the missions of discovery. The obstacles include historical and social change, repression, forgetfulness, and deliberate deception. The latter may, as in Becker and Dische, involve the characters of former Nazis, whose postwar existence would be threatened if they were known, children of Nazis, who find the association with the victims troublesome, and survivors of Nazi persecution, who consider the humiliation they endured shameful and want to make a clean break with the past. In all cases, confusion is the result for the later born, who are unsure how to interpret their parents’ and grandparents’ silence and unable to make sense of the uncontextualized tales and anecdotes of their elders. Oftentimes the protagonist-detectives end up within an imaginary community of victims or within the perpetrator collective - often with disastrous consequences. Ganeva points to a seemingly self-destructive tendency in either case: «As darker moments are exposed from the family’s past, the grandchildren become even more strongly committed to their project of digging into their ancestors’ history and transmitting it to the generations to come,» she writes (160). The works discussed here and the tendencies they represent reveal that the Nazi past still looms large in the German and Austrian imaginary and that no end is in sight to the now decades-old literary tradition associated with it, ranging from Ingeborg Bachmann to Günter Grass, Thomas Bernhard, Robert and Eva Menasse, Doron Rabinovici, Robert Schindel, Anna Mitgutsch, Vladimir Vertlib, and Julia Franck. In each of the post-1945 generations the kind of affectedness and the motivation for delving into the past 138 Dagmar C.G. Lorenz differ as do the post-mortem relationships the protagonists are shown to forge with their victim or perpetrator ancestors. Likewise, the motives for finding out about ancestral crimes or victimhood may differ as the distance to the historical events increases, but in light of Germany and Austria’s association with the Third Reich in the global context these quests continue to play a significant role. Works Cited Becker, Jurek. Bronsteins Kinder. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988. Dische, Irene. «Eine Jüdin für Charles Allen.» Fromme Lügen, Trans. Otto Bayer and Monika Elwenspoek. Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1994. 7-74. Dückers, Tanja. Himmelskörper. Berlin: Aufbau, 2004. Eich, Clemens. Das steinerne Meer. Gesammelte Werke I. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2008. 5-312. Ganeva, Mila. «From West-German Väterliteratur to Post-Wall Enkelliteratur: The End of the Generation Conflict in Marcel Beyer’s Spione and Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper.» Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 43.2 (2007): 149-62. Mattson, Michelle. «The Obligations of Memory? Gender and Historical Responsibility in Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper and Arno Geiger’s Es geht uns gut.» German Quarterly 86.2 (2013): 198-219. Walk on Water. Dir. Eytan Fox. Israel: Lama-Productions, 2004.