 |
|
|
Home | Search | Site Index | Site Map | Directories | |
|
|||
 |
Susan Figge, whose special interests include German folk and fairy tale literature and Germany’s continuing cultural confrontation with the Nazi era and the Holocaust, is a professor of German and former dean of the faculty at The College of Wooster. Before arriving at Wooster in 1977, Figge received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She earned her master’s degree and her Ph.D. from Stanford University. The author of numerous publications about gender in relation to writing, Figge’s articles include "Jurek Becker’s Bronstein’s Kinder as Novel and Film: Gender, Genre, and Unification," with Jenifer K. Ward in Germanic Review, and "Fathers, Daughters and the Nazi Past: Father Literature and its (Resisting) Readers" in Gender, Patriarchy and Fascism in the Third Reich: The Response of Women Writers. In collaboration with Ward, Figge is currently pursuing a project on the film adaptations of major post-war German novels that deal with the Nazi era. Figge has received several awards, including a Fulbright Scholarship to Germany, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for graduate study, and the Henry Luce Fund for Distinguished Scholarship at The College of Wooster. |
More than half a century after World War II, Germany is still coming to grips with the Nazi era. Susan Figge, professor of German at The College of Wooster, has taught and written about German literature and Germany’s continuing cultural confrontation with the past. In this column, she addresses the role of literature in helping the German people deal with the Nazi legacy. Since World War II, most Americans seem open to discussing Nazism and the Holocaust. How has German literature dealt with the Holocaust and the Nazi era? German literature about the Holocaust and the Nazi era has consistently attempted to break through the silence about these events and to explore the beliefs, the cultural assumptions and political attitudes that led to them. Post-war German writers and filmmakers portrayed the experiences of Germans on the home front, on the battlefields, and in prisoner of war camps. Jewish writers who survived the Holocaust forged a new poetic language in which to bear witness to the unspeakable. In the 1950’s major West-German novelists like the Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass portrayed "ordinary Germans" as silent partners in a Nazi Reich that ultimately destroyed what had seemed innocent dreams of personal and national prosperity and pride. In the former GDR, literary and cinematic treatment of the death camps and the ghettos suggested relationships between fascism and capitalism and portrayed the persecution of socialists as well as Jews under the Nazis. Everywhere literature raised the question, "How did this happen?" How has literature overlapped with the public discussion of the Holocaust in Germany? Throughout the ‘50s and early ‘60s immense energy was devoted to recovery and rebuilding and then to the politics of the Cold War. War crimes trials and the literary work based on them led to new public awareness. The German student revolt and the terrorist incidents of the 1970s prompted renewed discussion about the legacy of Nazism in German society. The 1979 German broadcast of the American television mini-series The Holocaust provided another turning point in the confrontation with the past. Hundreds of Germans called open hotlines to describe their grief and report their own experiences of the Nazi era. In the 1970s and 1980s, adult Germans of the second generation began in fiction and memoir to question their parents and to express their own shame. At the same time, children of Holocaust survivors living in the United States wrote about their own experiences of families coping with trauma, grief and loss. Remarkably, many of these experiences overlapped. Meetings between the children of Nazis and children of survivors were recounted in widely read books. The atmosphere of the Nazi era was very patriarchal. Was this true of literature produced during this time? Nazi ideology was a potent blending of the cult of the Führer with Prussian patriarchal attitudes toward the family, society and the state. It also represented the conservative reaction to the liberal policies of the Weimar Republic, including those on reproductive freedom, sexuality, and the family. Nazi ideology mingled sexism with racism. So-called Aryan women were glorified as mothers and wives and were seen as tools for maintaining and protecting the "Aryan" bloodline. At the same time they were denied meaningful roles in the Party and the state. Officially sanctioned literature and film of the Nazi era either followed that prescribed ideological course or functioned merely as pure escapist entertainment. Are there remnants of the Nazis’ patriarchal language or ideology in contemporary German literature? During the 1970s and 1980s German feminist writers analyzed familial, social, and state patriarchy as features of Nazi ideology and as continuing sources of sexism and other oppressions in contemporary German society. Fiction and film also began to tell the stories of women’s experiences during the Holocaust, the Third Reich, and the War. It is the power of these narratives with their implicit critique of ideology that continues to compel and challenge readers. Were there any writers who challenged the idea of the Fatherland? During the Weimar Republic, major works of German literature critiqued and satirized cultural attitudes that had bolstered the militarism of the German Empire prior to WWI. This literature was banned immediately in 1933, but it continued to be read in other European countries and abroad. There were active groups of German exile writers in Holland, France, Latin America, and the United States, and German language resistance literature was published throughout the Nazi era. Some of this material made its way back into Germany and received underground circulation. Well-known writers like Thomas Mann broadcast speeches to Germany by radio from the United States. In Hollywood exiles like Bertolt Brecht helped make films that raised American consciousness about Nazi oppression. How do contemporary German authors deal with Nazi Germany in their writing? The implications of German unification have captured the attention of many German writers. At the same time, Germany is now a multicultural nation, and new work by Turkish-German, Afro-German, and other German ethnic minority writers has emerged. Even as Germans struggle toward a new identity, however, issues of the past continue to loom large in literature and culture, as witness Bernhard Schlinck’s 1995 best selling novel The Reader. Is there any contemporary literature that Germans consider inflammatory or advocating a return to Nazism? Certainly no literature in the cultural mainstream. There is always the radical fringe that circulates its own written material to followers, but there is a law in Germany against denying the Holocaust. The debate about how the experiences of the Nazi era and the Holocaust should be represented has not abated, however. German poets, novelists and filmmakers continue to seek new language and forms adequate to the task. Is there any contemporary literature that Germans consider inflammatory or advocating a return to Nazism? Certainly no literature in the cultural mainstream. There is always the radical fringe that circulates its own written material to followers, but there is a law in Germany against denying the Holocaust. The debate about how the experiences of the Nazi era and the Holocaust should be represented has not abated, however. German poets, novelists and filmmakers continue to seek new language and forms adequate to the task. |
 |
 |
 |
| Last updated: January 10, 2006 · For more information, contact John Finn | ||
