Introduction 153 Introduction: A Haunting Past in Austrian and German Literature and Film Joseph W. Moser, Margarete Landwehr, Laura Detre West Chester University This special issue of Colloquia Germanica is based on three panels from the 2015 German Studies Association Conference in Arlington, VA , which brought together twelve papers exploring innovative techniques, perspectives, and themes in German-language fiction, autobiography, and film dealing with hauntings of West and East Germany’s as well as Austria’s past in the twentieth century. The twentieth century was undoubtedly one of the most troubled for German-speaking Europe. This was especially true during the traumatic years between 1914 and 1945, which may have been the worst time in Central Europe since the Thirty Years War. However, even before World War I, social inequities and injustices in the German Empire and Austria-Hungary presented contemporaries with tremendous challenges. Wilhelminian Germany was actively pursuing an agenda of conquering overseas colonies and engaging in an arms race with Britain while Austria-Hungary was struggling with maintaining its territorial integrity in the light of growing Nationalism. Following World War I, the Weimar Republic in Germany and the First Republic of Austria initially presented a hopeful glimpse at a more democratic and open-minded future that was ultimately thwarted by Fascism and genocide. The second half of the twentieth century was spent recovering from this haunting past, while still struggling with the aftermath of 1945 and the Cold War. Germany was left divided, while Austria became a neutral country that belonged to neither side of the Cold War. Left to its own devices it also did not reckon with its own past until the 1980s. For more than a quarter of a century since German reunification in 1990 and Austria emerging from its neutral isolation to becoming a member of the European Union in 1995, German-speaking Europe has come a long way in confronting a difficult and multifaceted past. Literature and film have played a crucial role in working through this complex and daunting past, through Germany’s and Austria’s darkest cultural heritage; a past and heritage to be analyzed and understood so that it may never be repeated. 154 Joseph W. Moser, Margarete Landwehr, Laura Detre The five contributions in this issue are organized chronologically and explore a diverse set of haunting pasts from the period of German Colonialism, the Holocaust, postwar anxieties, as well as issues of reckoning with the Nazi period and the GDR . In addition, they investigate the transgenerational trauma passed on to the second and third postwar generations in Germany and Austria. In the first contribution, “ Majubs Reise —From Colony to Concentration Camp: A New Approach at Narrating Germany’s Colonial Past? ,” Joachim Warmbold shows how this haunting past can be intertwined with multiple layers of German history as he studies a recent documentary by German filmmaker Eva Knopf that deals with Mohamed Husen, an African-German actor who played alongside Hans Albers in the 1941 anti-British propaganda film Carl Peters � Warmbold reveals not only the complexities of an actor of African descent in a Nazi-era propaganda film that was both anti-British and romanticized Germany’s role in Africa, but also shows how Knopf ’s documentary distracts the audience via several unnecessary historical narratives. Warmbold deconstructs this contemporary documentary film and identifies the shortcomings in its attempt at coming to terms with the multiple layers of trauma in Germany’s past, which is especially poignant given that Husen died in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen in late 1944. For Warmbold, Knopf ’s documentary does an admirable job of introducing viewers to this previously unknown figure and acknowledging that he played a complex role in Nazi-era film, but fails as a biography, in part because the subject is one that Germans have heretofore not examined in detail. The German colonial experience was short and overshadowed by domestic events and therefore not canonical history until recently. Knopf, Warmbold argues, is not equipped with the tools that she needs to fully understand and explain the life of an African man in Nazi propaganda, and she therefore turns to speculation and a broad view of history to try to make sense of Husen’s life and death. While it is not surprising that it would be difficult for any film to do justice to that many layers of history, Warmbold’s analysis shows how important it is for scholars and students of German history and culture to not lose sight of ambivalencies in deconstructing the past. Following this first film essay is Laura Detre’s analysis of Peter Lorre’s 1951 film Der Verlorene in “You Are the Murderers: German Guilt in Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene .” Lorre, who became world famous for his leading role in Fritz Lang’s M, emigrated to the United States as a result of the Nazis’ takeover in Germany. He returned to Germany when he was at a crossroads in his career and his personal life and directed his only postwar German film—a film noir reminiscent of those that had helped to make him famous in the U. S. While Der Verlorene examines a fairly mundane murderer, the story reminds all Germans of their complicity in the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis. Needless to say, this Introduction 155 is a message that Germans were not ready to accept in the immediate postwar period. Lorre’s attempt at returning to Germany is fascinating, as it is fraught with hopes of returning to a life in German film, which 1950s Germany was not going to let come true. Lorre was not the only émigré to attempt such a return. Bertolt Brecht returned to East Germany because of the McCarthy era’s witch hunt on Communists, but most famous German writers, artists, and filmmakers did not. Thomas Mann, for instance, was not welcomed when he returned for a visit to his hometown of Lübeck in 1953, and ultimately Lorre was forced to return to the U. S. to earn money in low-budget science fiction and horror movies, not the art films that he had so hoped to make himself. Lorre died in 1964 from a heart attack, prior to which he had been suffering from depression and a morphine addiction that originated from a surgery that had been performed on him in Switzerland in 1925. Lorre’s attempt to return to Europe, Detre concludes, would not have been possible during his lifetime as Germans of his generation were not ready to confront their haunting past in the first two decades following the war. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz examines a more successful interaction between an Austrian émigré and Holocaust survivor and her German readers in “Evolving Memory Narratives: The Transformations of Ruth Kluger’s Autobiographical Writing.” When Ruth Kluger published her memoir weiter leben in 1992, it was met with tremendous interest by her German readership. What had changed? Forty-seven years and nearly two generations after World War II, Germans were eager to learn about a Holocaust survivor’s memoir. However, as Lorenz points out, weiter leben was also written in a more conciliatory tone than her later English-language edition Still Alive , first published in 2001. Kluger did not just translate her memoir from German to English, but actually rewrote the book for a different readership almost a decade later, which gives a significant insight to the fact that when one confronts a difficult past, the relationship between the author and the reader is as crucial as the expectations that both have of one another. Kluger wrote two books for different audiences, and it was not just her expectation of what her German and American readers could handle, but she herself had lived through another decade by the time her book was published in English. During that decade, her mother had died, a fact that greatly influenced the English-language version of her book. While she had striven, unsuccessfully, to keep the German book from her mother’s attention in California, the English book was written without her mother as a possible reader in mind. Kluger’s memoir continued to evolve as she published a sequel unterwegs verloren in 2008. Lorenz chronicles and analyzes how Kluger’s memoir evolved and even became subject of Renata Schmidtkunz’s 2011 film Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger . Kluger’s writing shows how meaning and understanding can change 156 Joseph W. Moser, Margarete Landwehr, Laura Detre over time and how incidents and places that once were central to how we view the world can become tainted or can slip into irrelevancy as we reexamine the past. She gives us a unique opportunity to see how one survivor of the Shoah reappraised her experiences and produced multiple documents of her life that both relate to one another and, at times, tell a radically different story. Dealing with multiple layers of history is also central to Margarete Landwehr’s article “Hauntings of the Traumatic Past in Maas’ Film Two Lives : Individual and Collective Memory,” which examines the 2012 film Zwei Leben / Two Lives by Georg Maas. The film combines two traumatic pasts, the Nazis’ so-called “Lebensborn” program that was aimed at creating a superior race matching mostly SS men with Northern European-looking women. This program was particularly active in Norway, where after the war many Lebensborn infants were left orphaned. The film, which is set in Norway, combines this history with Lebensborn children being raised by the GDR ’s Stasi (secret police) to become Cold War spies in Norway, which ultimately points to how Germany’s haunting past affected not only the German-speaking countries. Maas’s film is also symptomatic of how this traumatic past is analyzed in the twenty-first century. With time, the events of both the Second World War and the Holocaust have come to be seen not just as German issues, but instead they are viewed as international, both in that they were carried out on a transnational stage and because the perpetrators were not exclusively Germans. This project also shows us that the events of the Second World War did not end in a great caesura in 1945. The war and Nazi-era policies had deep ramifications for Europe and continued to impact generations that came of age long afterward. With more distance to actual historical events, it is now possible to better see how various layers of history could intersect, and it also demonstrates how one trauma can build on another. The final article in this volume—Joseph W. Moser’s “Haunting Policework in Andreas Pittler’s Bronstein Detective Series”—also explores a literary and cultural product of the twenty-first century. The seven-part Inspektor Bronstein series of crime novels features an Austrian Jewish police detective working in Vienna between 1918 and 1955, surviving the Holocaust in French exile, and returning to the city right at the end of the war to once again solve murders. Being part of a recent trend to reexamine culture and history through the medium of crime fiction, this series takes the genre to another level by critically examining the past in a way which would have broken many taboos only three decades earlier. In the 1980s, any suggestion that many Viennese supported the Nazis before the Anschluss and even after 1945 would have caused outrage, much as it did when Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek criticized their home country’s past in their writings. However, the German-speaking countries have come a long way since 1945, and an open and frank discussion of a difficult past that Introduction 157 educates future generations so as not to repeat their ancestors’ errors is welcomed. The protagonist, David Bronstein, while not observant of his faith, is not cryptically Jewish, as many other characters in post-war German and Austrian media have been. He is a fully formed, openly Jewish character who experiences anti-Semitism in a realistic way and, despite being fictional, the description of his life in twentieth-century Vienna is deeply rooted in historical events. He also represents an international trend to use the genre of period detective fiction to better understand both the past and the present. In this respect Pittler’s novels could be compared, as Moser does, with the ITV series Foyle’s War , or even with Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins novels, which also shed light on the past through the investigations of a fictional character. The five contributions in this special issue therefore reflect a common desire to explain how cultural productions from the German-speaking countries during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have tried to educate people about a difficult past. The works examined here range from documentary film and autobiography to entertainment film and popular literature, but they all share the common element of reexamining a past that has left Central Europe dramatically changed, often in ways that the people of post-war Austria and Germany struggled to understand. They illustrate the conflict between wanting to build a so-called normal future, while continuing to be plagued by a dreadful past. This is, at least in part, the story of post-World War II Europe and how these events continue to shape the continent’s future.