The abandoned child in contemporary German literature and film

This dissertation examines the motif of the abandoned child as a symptom of postwar German memory culture in German literature and film from the late 1980s to the second decade of the 21st century. As part of German postwar memory culture, the abandoned child motif emerged in the early postwar years and established itself in German memory discourse as Kriegskind (war baby), while representing certain war-related experiences of victimization. This study focuses on the change the motif reflects against the backdrop of Germany's unification, the surge toward normalization, and globalization. The abandoned child motif in German cultural texts at the end of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century is a threshold figure which is symptomatic of the past as well as the present, of the victim and the perpetrator, and of suffering as well as guilt. It therefore serves as a sensitive indicator of how these aspects of German memory culture are negotiated against the backdrop of contemporary national and global events. The works in Chapter 2 are anchored in the experience of postwar childhood abandonment and parental conflicts. The abandoned child motif in these texts from the dawn of, and during the post-Wende years reflects attempts at breaking away from the generational conflict and the West German postwar perspective. The texts discussed in Chapter 3 fulfill the detachment from the second generation's parental conflict by creating a narrative construct that reflects a generational shift. The abandoned child in these texts still emphasizes the familial connection to World War II and the Holocaust, but reveals an increase in generational perspectives as well as Jewish victim perspectives. The texts in Chapter 4 continue the trend towards the multiplication of perspectives. Rather than the familial involvement in the past, the abandoned child motif in the texts of Chapter 4 pertains to more general questions, addressing Germany's role in facing the global challenges of the beginning of the 21st century, all the while still considering the country's past.

THE ABANDONED CHILD IN CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LITERATURE AND FILM by Heidrun Jadwiga Kubiessa Tokarz A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Languages and Literature The University of Utah August 2016 Copyright © Heidrun Jadwiga Kubiessa Tokarz 2016 All Rights Reserved The University of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Heidrun Jadwiga Kubiessa Tokarz has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Katharina Gerstenberger , Chair 02/18/2016 Date Approved Joseph Metz , Member 02/18/2016 Date Approved Karin Baumgartner , Member 02/18/2016 Date Approved Esther Rashkin , Member 02/18/2016 Date Approved Maeera Shreiber , Member 02/18/2016 Date Approved and by Katharina Gerstenberger , Chair/Dean of the Department/College/School of Languages and Literature and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the motif of the abandoned child as a symptom of postwar German memory culture in German literature and film from the late 1980s to the second decade of the 21st century. As part of German postwar memory culture, the abandoned child motif emerged in the early postwar years and established itself in German memory discourse as Kriegskind (war baby), while representing certain war-related experiences of victimization. This study focuses on the change the motif reflects against the backdrop of Germany's unification, the surge toward normalization, and globalization. The abandoned child motif in German cultural texts at the end of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century is a threshold figure which is symptomatic of the past as well as the present, of the victim and the perpetrator, and of suffering as well as guilt. It therefore serves as a sensitive indicator of how these aspects of German memory culture are negotiated against the backdrop of contemporary national and global events. The works in Chapter 2 are anchored in the experience of postwar childhood abandonment and parental conflicts. The abandoned child motif in these texts from the dawn of and during the post-Wende years reflects attempts at breaking away from the generational conflict and the West German postwar perspective. The texts discussed in Chapter 3 fulfill the detachment from the second generation's parental conflict by creating a narrative construct that reflects a generational shift. The abandoned child in iv these texts still emphasizes the familial connection to World War II and the Holocaust, but reveals an increase in generational perspectives as well as Jewish victim perspectives. The texts in Chapter 4 continue the trend towards the multiplication of perspectives. Rather than the familial involvement in the past, the abandoned child motif in the texts of Chapter 4 pertains to more general questions, addressing Germany's role in facing the global challenges of the beginning of the 21st century, all the while still considering the country's past. For Kaia and Gwendolyn CONTENTS ABSTRACT…...……..……………………………...……..…........................................iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………..………………………………...………….vii 1 INTRODUCTION……………..………..………………………………………....……1 2 BEYOND THE SECOND GENERATION: TEXTS BY WENDERS, TREICHEL, AND SEBALD……………....…………………………..………………………….…...41 Wim Wenders's Der Himmel über Berlin.............................................................47 Hans-Ulrich Treichel's Der Verlorene..................................................................77 W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz......................................................................................95 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...122 3 THIRD-GENERATION PERSPECTIVE AND FEMALE VOICES: THE ABANDONED CHILD IN NOVELS OF THE 2000S….....…………………………..126 Katharina Hacker's Die Habenichtse..................................................................133 Jenny Erpenbeck's Heimsuchung........................................................................165 Julia Franck's Die Mittagsfrau…………..…………..……………………...….183 Conclusion…………………………………..………………………………….196 4 HISTORICIZING, CONTINUITIES, AND A NEW GENERATION'S PERSPECTIVE IN THE 2010S: ABANDONMENT IN TEXTS BY HERRNDORF, KRECHEL, AND LEO…..……………………………………………………………..199 Wolfgang Herrndorf's Tschick.............................................................................209 Ursula Krechel's Landgericht..............................................................................226 Per Leo's Flut und Boden and Der Wille zum Wesen..........................................251 Conclusion...........................................................................................................277 5 CONCLUSION.............................................................................................................279 WORKS CITED..............................................................................................................285 Chapters ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My deep gratitude goes to my advisor Dr. Katharina Gerstenberger, who expertly guided me through this project. Her excellent feedback and unceasing encouragement gave me the resources to compose a research project of this size, and I appreciate all the hard work and time she invested in helping me finish this dissertation. I regard her as a model professional who has significantly contributed to my improvement as a scholar. Other members of my advisory committee have greatly contributed to this study with their professional guidance and constructive criticism. I would like to particularly thank Dr. Joseph Metz for his invaluable mentor work in the early stages of this project and for helping me refine my ideas about Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire. I would like to thank Dr. Esther Rashkin for her feedback regarding psychoanalytical aspects and childhood development, and Dr. Karin Baumgartner and Dr. Maeera Shreiber for supporting this dissertation as members of my advisory committee. For numerous inspiring conversations and their unwavering support, I would like to thank Dr. Valentin Rauer and Veronica Peselmann. Finally, I would like to thank my entire family and friends in Germany and the USA for their love and support throughout all these years. My husband Pablo Tokarz and my daughters Kaia and Gwendolyn deserve particular thanks for their unconditional love, unending patience and support throughout this entire project and especially during the most difficult phases. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In September 2015, during the year's climax of Syrian refugees trying to seek protection in Europe from their war-torn home, an image of a drowned Syrian child went around the world. Like thousands of other refugees that year, the child's family had attempted to cross the Mediterranean Sea in a rubber dinghy to reach Greece and therefore the European Union. Yet the boat capsized, leading to the drowning of the boy among other children and adults. In the public imagination, the image of the boy came to represent the human catastrophe of thousands of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean Sea on their way to Europe in particular, and the situation of refugees at the beginning of the 21st century in general. The image had a remarkable impact in social media and circulated under the hashtag Humanity Washed Ashore, describing the situation of the child, as well as the refugees he represents, as abandoned by humanity (Humanity Washed Ashore Huffington Post). Studies have shown how the image not only drew attention to the humanitarian crisis surrounding the refugees, but altered the public opinion of many Western nations regarding immigration and thus served as a means to spur empathy toward refugees among Westerners (unfortunately, skepticism or even xenophobia has been spurred otherwise as well) (Tragic Boy Aylan's Image Saw 'Refugee' Word Outstrip 'Migrant' in Tweets - Study Press Association). The image of the dead child quickly led to accusations about humanity's failure in the face of human suffering. Failure of humanity is most commonly associated with the Holocaust, explaining perhaps why Germany is accepting refugees in numbers that far exceed those admitted by its European and other Western equivalents. It is not far-fetched to speculate that rather than coming from an untainted altruistic conviction, Germany's political decision to open its borders to Syrian refugees may still be a response to the country's past. The motif of the victimized child, which is so powerfully invoked in the picture of the drowned Syrian boy, within the context of German cultural memory is inseparably linked to the Nazi past. Originating in the experience of the German Kriegskind (war baby), the abandoned child has emerged as a motif to describe perceived victimization of Germans. Even though it underwent significant generational and political changes, the motif of the abandoned child as a symbol of German victimization lasts into the postunification period. This study examines the abandoned child as a site and symptom of conflict in contemporary German literary texts. By examining the motif of the abandoned child in post-Wende German cultural texts, this dissertation traces the evolution of the abandoned child motif as a symbol of German victimhood in texts written against the background of the unification, Germany's surge toward normalcy, contemporary global conflicts, and immigration. Who, in these texts, receives the empathy the motif of an abandoned child evokes, and how do this empathy and its receiver stand in relationship to Germany's past? With its origin in German victim discourse, the image of the abandoned child is a complex motif that lends itself to evaluating Germany's responses regarding contemporary events and its relationship to its troubling past. 2 3 * In order to better grasp the complex concept of the postwar abandoned child in the German context-a victim among the perpetrators-, I shall provide insight into the impact World War II had on (German) children. In her preface to Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II, Zarah Tara points out that World War II is notorious for the suffering of children, identifying it as a conflict with "unprecedented violence against children": Contemporaries often described the Second World War as a "war against children." The plight of Europe's so-called "lost children" during World War II- children who were hungry, displaced, orphaned, murdered- will be familiar to anyone who has seen images of children in contemporary zones of crisis. (ix) Of the children who survived this conflict, Tara illustrates that in Europe an estimated 15 million children were displaced and about 13 million children lost one or both of their parents in the war (4, 6). Undernourishment, illness, and psychological trauma affected nearly all of these children.1 Beyond the immediate impact by persecution and war, the loss of a parent, a sibling, or home, the effects caused by this crisis lasted far into the postwar years and affected familial life such as parent-child-relationships (Tara 6). I will describe these effects of war with the term abandonment, as they entail the intentional or unintentional 1 Tara highlights that due to being a target of German persecution and systematic killing, Jewish children only accounted for a small percentage of the surviving children, and had generally gone through a larger period of suffering due to persecution and displacement that had started years before the actual war (Tara 11). Also, children of Nazi-occupied Eastern European countries suffered for longer periods of conflict starting with the occupation of Poland, while German children did not begin to be affected in large numbers until the beginning of the allied air raids of Western Germany in 1942, continuing throughout the capitulation in 1945 and the expulsion from the Eastern territories (Stargardt 12). According to L. Shields and B. Bryan's article The Effect of War on Children: The Children in Europe after World War II published in the International Nursing Review, 100% of all children in war-affected Europe were undernourished, 80% of the children in Czechoslovakia alone were infected with tuberculosis, and Zara Tara provides anecdotal accounts of children's mental health through letters and other statements of care takers and counselors of displaced children of the time (Shields and Bryan, 90, 92, and Tara, 7-10). 4 neglect of the needs and care of a child. Although many scholars have elaborated on the silencing of experiences related to the war and the Holocaust by victims as well as perpetrators, the childhood experience made its way into German postwar memory culture fairly soon, perhaps as part of denying the confrontation with one's guilt. On the side of Jewish victims, only a handful of texts have become well-known. Ilse Aichinger expresses Jewish childhood experience under Nazi occupation in Austria in her 1948 novel Die größere Hoffnung, and Jurek Becker's much later debut novel Jakob, der Lügner (1969) deals with life in the ghetto of Łodz, Poland during the German occupation. Becker's novel includes an abandoned child, yet the protagonist and narrator is an adult. Ruth Klüger reveals her childhood experience in Terezin and Auschwitz much later in her 1992 autobiography Weiter leben. Eine Jugend. The few postwar German-Jewish accounts of literary abandandoned children reflect the decline of German-Jewish (literary) voices due to the Holocaust in general. Many more accounts of non-Jewish experiences of childhood abandonment entered the realm of German writing. Wolfgang Borchert's well-known short story Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch... illustrates an image of a child who not only is gravely traumatized by the impact of aerial warfare but, as he stands guard to ward off rats from his dead younger brother's body beneath the rubble, he is abandoned in the midst of (post)war chaos: Und du passt nun auf die Ratten auf? fragte der Mann. Auf die doch nicht! Und dann sagte er ganz leise: Mein Bruder, der liegt nämlich da unten. Da. Jürgen zeigte mit dem Stock auf die zusammengesackten Mauern. Unser Haus kriegte eine Bombe. Mit einmal war das Licht weg im Keller. Und er auch. Wir haben noch gerufen. Er war viel kleiner als ich. Erst vier. Er muss hier ja noch sein. Er ist doch viel kleiner als ich. (Borchert 5 Gesamtwerk 296) (So you're on guard for the rats? Asked the man. Not for the rats! And then he said it very softly: My brother. He's lying under there. There. Jürgen pointed at the collapsed wall with the stick. A bomb hit our house. All of a sudden the lights went out in the basement. And him, too. We called and called for him. He was a lot smaller than me. He just turned four. He has to be there somewhere. He really is much smaller than me [Translation by Robert Painter Exchanges Literary Journal]). Although the boy finds an adult who befriends him, Borchert's war scenario describes a situation in which a disruptive event in history impacts the life of a child in that he suffers great emotional neglect.2 However, the ethical implications of the experience of the German child are highly ambivalent as the depiction of abandoned German non-Jewish children needs to be placed in relationship to German responsibility. Due to the potentially sentimentalizing power of the image of a suffering child, texts that employ these images run the risk of distorting the victim-perpetrator relationship. As part of West Germany's memory culture from the 1960s, Marcel Reich-Ranicki criticizes in Deutsche Literatur in West und Ost: Prosa seit 1945 Heinrich Böll's early depiction of victims of war (mainly women and children) as a distorted focus that evades the real postwar problem of commemorating the victims of the Holocaust apropriately (132-33). Nevertheless, the war-related experience of childhood abandonment remains profoundly important in German postwar memory culture, and evolves, as I will elaborate in more depth later, into a cultural motif which, directly or as subtext, not only permeates literature but German postwar film as well.3 2 Donald Winnicott describes holding environment as the ordinary circumstances in which a child's needs for physical and emotional care and attention are met in order to develop a healthy object-relationship (see The Child and the Family and the Outside World). 3 The German journalist Sabine Bode elaborates in her 2004 book Die vergessene Generation: Die Kriegskinder brechen ihr Schweigen the childhood memory of Kriegs- und Flüchtlingskindern (children who experienced war and expulsion) based on interviews and conversations. Bode focuses on traumatic war experiences, such as loss of family members, injury, hunger and homelessness under the aspect of 6 The motif is not only limited to the experience of individuals but expands to a more abstract level, representing an entire generation. Thus the motif of the abandoned child in German postwar memory culture--often referred to as Kriegskind (war baby)--has been a significant site of interpretation of the past. Like memory culture itself, the motif of the abandoned child evolves with time. Several scholars have outlined the relationship between the depiction of a child and the cultural background of the text. Debbie Pinfold illustrates in her book The Child's View of the Third Reich in German Literature: The Eye among the Blind (2001) that the understanding of the nature of the child and its depiction in Western culture has undergone continuous changes with time, underlining that the depiction of the child as literary motif is imbued with cultural values.4 Elizabeth Goodenough, Mark A. Heberle, and Naomi Sokoloff state in their introduction to Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature (1994), [T]he experience of childhood is unutterable und thus lost to the adult: the child goes through it but lacks the language to convey its reality to others, while the adult writer commands the full resources of language but is largely cut off from children's consciousness….The relative inarticulateness of children makes any representation of their consciousness necessarily a tentative and fundamentally artificial construction of adult writers and audiences. (3) One's inability to retrieve childhood experience and portray it authentically turns the child into a highly attractive and powerful symbol of adults' "fantasy, fear, and desire," recovering silenced and repressed trauma of an aging generation. Bode's book gained high popularity among Germans and reached a 20th edition in 2014. 4 Pinfold describes how in Western culture children have been endowed with the idea of innocence and vulnerability since Rousseau's Emile contested the idea of the Original Sin and promoted the notion of innate human goodness (10-11). Romanticism picked up on the idea of innocence and introduced the child figure of redemptive qualities (12-13). Although the cultural perspective of the child has gone through changes since then, the idea of innocence and vulnerability has endured. Although psychoanalysis challenged the notion of innocence in that it declared the child a sexual being and blurred the border between childhood and adulthood, at the same time, it emphasized the notion of vulnerability due to the concept of childhood trauma (20-25). 7 as Marianne Hirsch puts it (The Generation of Postmemory 162). Goodenough, Heberle, and Sokoloff go on to say that "many texts written from a child's viewpoint are brilliantly creative, subversive, or compensatory precisely because children speak from a realm as yet unappropriated, or only partially appropriated, by social or cultural intentionality" (4). Thus, the abandoned child as literary motif lends itself particularly well to expressing what the British scholar Terry Eagleton calls a "'symptomatic' point of ambiguity…which we as readers are able to ‘write' even if the novel itself does not" (155). The abandoned child in postwar German literature provides important clues to the unconscious aspects, the subtexts, as Eagleton calls them, that are deeply connected to current German memory culture.5 As an expression of a culture's "yet unappropriated, or only partially appropriated" fantasy, fear, and desire regarding its past, this study focuses on the depiction of the abandoned child in German literary texts produced shortly before the country's unification in 1989 through the 21st century (Goodenough, Heberle, and Sokoloff 4). The motif of the abandoned child does not merely provide another child perspective, but rather, due to the situation of abandonment, victim status is immanent to it. Within the German postwar context, considering Germany's guilt and responsibility, it means it is a motif fraught with tension. This study examines the motif in contemporary literature in order to show how current German memory culture negotiates the tension between victim and perpetrator by recontextualizing the motif in ever changing 5 In his elaboration on the psychoanalytical approach to literature in Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton describes a subtext as "a text which runs within [the novel], visible at certain 'symptomatic' points of ambiguity, evasion or overemphasis, and which we as readers are able to ‘write' even if the novel itself does not. All literary works contain one or more such sub-texts, and there is a sense in which they may be spoken of as the ‘unconscious' of the work itself. The work's insights, as with all writing, are deeply related to its blindnesses: what it does not say, and how it does not say it, may be as important as what it articulates; what seems absent, marginal or ambivalent about it may provide a central clue to its meanings" (155). 8 generationanal and political frameworks. While the motif of the abandoned child represented in West German postwar literature a German victim status that was related to war or fascism, this project--by examining the abandoned child motif in contemporary German memory culture--seeks answers to questions like the following: What kind of transformations has the motif undergone? Who is portrayed as (child) victim? Do other historical or social events, such as the fall of the Wall, cause abandonment and what would that tell us about German memory culture? How often is the Kriegskind still used in German cultural texts after the Wende and how is it portrayed from the perspective of further generations in a unified Germany? The motif of the abandoned child in German cultural texts after the late 1980s reflects the multiplication of perspectives on the past in German memory culture of the last three decades. The depiction of the abandoned child in recent texts lends itself particularly to expressing views that go beyond previous perspectives of victimhood and perpetratorship, reflecting political changes, generational shifts, and, particularly against the backdrop of globalization, a larger variety of ways to identify with the past. * As the motif of the abandoned child this project examines is rooted in war or immediate postwar experience, and, as I argue, has developed a continuity as a German postwar motif, it is crucial to provide a brief review of the motif in texts of the postwar decades from 1945 through the 1980s. This review will discuss texts that have played an important part in shaping the motif. The first postwar decade witnessed a fair number of mostly young German writers 9 who dealt with their war experiences as returning soldiers, delivering a literary image of Germany in rubble, which has become commonly known as Trümmerliteratur (Schlant Language of Silence 22). Aside from Wolfgang Borchert, whose Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch… I mentioned earlier, Heinrich Böll addresses children's war experience in his work, which contributed greatly to shaping the narrative of German war experience through the perspective of the child. Ernestine Schlant notes in her renowned 1999 study of West German literature The Language of Silence that Many Germans identified with his little guys in the difficult years following the end of the war. Böll wrote about the soldiers at the front and returning home to cities in ruins and without food, and about the deprivation of those living in the rubble and trying to cope despite their traumatized state. (36) Among these "little guys" Böll's early work frequently illustrates the war-affected life of literally little guys: German childhood disrupted by war and particularly by parental abandonment due to war circumstances. As the weakest link in the social structure of the family, children portray the magnitude of the postwar chaos due to loss of family members and the general state of emergency. In Haus ohne Hüter (1954), Böll describes two German families that suffer the loss of their fathers due to the war. The families, although from different economic backgrounds, are structured according to the common expectations of gender roles of that time. While the mothers not only struggle with their personal loss but also with redefining their role as mothers without the husband on their side, the children in the two families struggle with the loss of their father figure, the grief and preoccupation of their mothers, and a premature demand of replacing the paternal role. Böll's short story Lohengrins Tod also describes the life (and death) of an abandoned boy taking over a parental role for his siblings during the chaotic postwar years (published in Wanderer kommst du nach Spa… 1950). After falling off a coal train, 10 the boy (Lohengrin) suffers severe injuries from which he dies. While Lohengrin is already abandoned by his parents, his treatment at the hospital after his accident reveals a cruel postwar world, lacking compassion especially toward children. In addition to disrupted families, the chaos renders a lack of empathy and an infrastructure working on its bare minimum. Also Böll's Und sagte kein einziges Wort (1953), another novel about a German postwar family, shows abandoned children in the early postwar years. Although both parents are present, the Bogner family--poverty stricken--lost its home during an air raid and lives in a dilapidated apartment in the destroyed city of Cologne. The father, traumatized by war experience, is an alcoholic and starts to beat his children. He leaves his wife and the children to prevent further abuse. The social environment of the Bogners shows other cases of postwar hardship and abandoned children, making abandoned children and struggling families a common theme of postwar Cologne. Böll portrays children as victims whose innocence reflects the violence of the disruption caused by the war, which, considering the popularity of his writing, possibly helped establish the motif of the abandoned child in postwar German memory culture. Schlant underlines Böll's focus on the victimization of the little guy, opposing "[h]is negative characterization of Germans who had been in positions of power during the Nazi regime and were maneuvering to regain these positions [which] echoed the sentiment of many" (36). The superior vs. inferior distinction regarding the distribution of responsibility places the underdog in Böll's texts in a child-like and the superior in a traitorous but parental position, solely responsible but abandoning the inferior in the postwar misery. The association of the underdog with an innocent child who was betrayed receives further weight in Böll's short story Wanderer kommst du nach Spa… 11 (1950). A seriously injured youth soldier is admitted to a military hospital which the protagonist recognizes as the former Gymnasium (secondary school) he attended just a few months earlier because he sees the writing on the blackboard. The title of the short story is an incomplete sentence, which the protagonist's philology teacher had written on the black board and which is still visible at the time of the soldier's medical treatment. It alludes to the humanist focus of the school and belies the prewar glorification of military service.6 Furthermore, he juxtaposes the soldier's recent situation as a child with his now mutilated body and soul as a war veteran (Baumbach "'Wanderer kommst du nach Sparta'" 2-3). Böll emphasizes the young age of many soldiers and thus the betrayal of these young men but also facilitates a reading of soldiers as innocent and betrayed victims. This constellation allows for a reading that places child victims and adults in an equal category of victims. Böll's early texts may have contributed to a discourse of Germans as victims in which the traumatized child is a central figure. Centralizing the abandoned child as a national postwar German figure encourages the opportunity for postwar German society to view itself as an abandoned child and therefore as innocent. After the division of Germany in 1949 the deprivation of the early postwar years turned into vigorous nation-building efforts in both East and West Germany. The West received financial support through the Marshall Plan and started to prosper quickly. Schlant summarizes that this period saw "much pride in the speed and thoroughness of the recovery, in the work ethic, and the country's economic success, but no questions were asked about Germany's role in the war that now led to this frantic activity," which 6 The title of the short story refers to a distich by Simonides as translated from ancient Greek by Friedrich Schiller: "Wanderer, kommst du nach Sparta, verkündige dorten, du habest / Uns hier liegen gesehn, wie das Gesetz es befahl." It is the inscription of a Greek monument commemorating and praising the heroic death of Spartan soldiers during the war against Persia 480 BC (Baumbach 1). 12 was a position much supported by Konrad Adenauer's conservative politics of the time (52). These recovery efforts in West Germany have become known as a means to repress the war and the Holocaust and addressing Germany's guilt. During the Adenauer administration West German postwar memory culture coined the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung, expressing, as Christine Anton describes it in her introduction to Beyond Political Correctness: Remapping German Sensibilities in the 21th Century, the desire "to overcome or master the past" similarly to the economic recovery and physical reconstruction of the 1950s (6). At the height of the West German economic recovery, the depiction of the child as victim transforms into a chiffre of conjured ignorance to avoid taking responsibility in Günter Grass' Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum 1959). The novel features Oskar Matzerath, a child born during the Nazi period, who refuses to grow up. Debbie Pinfold states that, aside from his repellent dwarf appearance, Oskar Matzerath's "mental processes too are extremely disconcerting, for this pseudo-child assumes the apparent ignorance of childhood to distance himself from the events around him, disclaiming all knowledge and responsibility" (147). Thus, Die Blechtrommel addresses, from a critical perspective, the desire to evade questions about one's responsibility by assuming a child-like status and therefore responds indirectly to the postwar image of the child victim as portrayed in Böll's early texts that allows for a wide spectrum of identification among postwar German society. Die Blechtrommel was one of the first self-critical texts, which became internationally acclaimed, addressing Germany's past in a wider context of responsibility and the repression thereof in West Germany. 13 * In the 1960s in West German literature, the motif of the abandoned child moved into the focus of intergenerational conflicts involving the generation that witnessed the war as adults and their children. Part of this conflict was the confrontation of the war generation with their involvement in the war and the Holocaust, as events such as the Adolf Eichmann trial (1961) in Jerusalem and the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt/Main (1963-65) increased attention toward German responsibility. As Stuart Parkes observes, after the Auschwitz trials "awareness of the past was growing among younger people" who started to challenge their parents' generation's silence about the war and the Holocaust, leading to increasing dissent with West German politics (Writers and Politics 75). The generational discord was mostly felt in the student protest movement in West Germany at the end of the decade. While a large number of the student movement settled with the political shift in the Federal Republic from the conservative CDU government to the Social Democrats (SPD) in 1972, splinter groups transferred their fervor into political terrorism. The students' protest against their parents' generation was informed by themes of the postwar West German abandoned child, as the political stance was often influenced by the personal grievance about the perceived failure of the parents regarding their parenting methods (Schlant 82). Yet the abandoned child motif behind this conflict comes to the fore in this generation's literary assessment of their parental conflicts, in many of which the writers draw a connection between their childhood and upbringing and their adult conflicts with the parents. Ernestine Schlant elaborates, in her third chapter of The Language of Silence, how a number of former members of the student movement rendered belatedly a large amount 14 of prose text expressing their challenge with their parents.7 This so-called Väterliteratur (which addresses both parents but shows a stronger emphasis on the patriarchal role of the father) is in many cases autobiographically motivated and revolves around a personal challenging of the parents' generation, their involvement in the war as perpetrators, victims, or bystanders, or blurred versions of several of the above (Schlant 81). Following the model of Bernward Vesper's 1971 Die Reise, in which the late author attempts to understand the role and the National-Socialist conviction of his father, several authors-mostly male-chose a literary path, often after decades of silence, to start a dialogue with their fathers' role in the family and during the Nazi era (many of whom had been already deceased) (85). As part of this literary confrontation, Schlant continues, many authors critically assess their parents' childrearing practices, which are portrayed as ideologically influenced by fascism and therefore as psychologically and physically abusive, as not meeting the child's needs, frigid and lacking in compassion (85).8 In his novel Vaterspuren (Father Traces 1979), Siegfried Gauch tries to understand the development of his father's Nazi career by studying documents of that time, remembering conversations with his father and by imagining his late father's answers to the questions 7 See chapter three, Autobiographical Novels: Generational Discords, in Ernestine Schlant's The Language of Silence. 8 Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich elaborated on the socio-psychological background of German guilt in their groundbreaking 1967 study The Inability to Mourn (English translation 1975). The Mitscherlichs discuss the psychological conditions behind the silence of the majority of the German war generation. After Germany's surrender, when confronted with the international perspective on Germany's war atrocities, the condemnation of former ideologies, and the sudden loss of the leader figure, many Germans, according to the Mitscherlichs, discovered the evil in what was loved and lost, and "thus the evil in oneself" (xi). According to the authors, many chose a separation of "acceptable and unacceptable memories" in order to cope with this psychic conflict (xii). Due to the psychic energy invested in the separation of memory, a large group of the war generation suffered from what Mitscherlich calls "psychic numbing" (xii). This state of preoccupation, according to Mitscherlich, can be generally understood as the resistance to building psychic bonds with people and other aspects of life that could potentially challenge the separation of acceptable and unacceptable memories. Yet, the Mitscherlichs' study also illustrates that the relationship between the first postwar generation and their parents might have been shaped by the sense of abandonment due to the reduced psychic interaction, blocked empathy, and thus silence between parents and children. 15 he has. Yet the barrier between son/author and father persists throughout the novel. Gauch describes the father as dogmatic, stalwart, and self-opinionated, remaining a figure embodying the Nazi past despite Gauch's attempt to understand. While Gauch's novel focuses on the father's role during World War II, Christoph Meckel's 1980 novel Suchbild: Über meinen Vater provides detailed insight into his childhood relationship with his father, who is described as a Nazi follower. Meckel draws a melancholic picture of a loveless childhood in which the father showed little interest in the children and corporal punishment happened on a regular basis. In Väterliteratur, the abandoned child is the narrating voice: many of the authors see themselves as victims of the type of upbringing and generate a sense of childhood abandonment as one of the major identity forming aspects of their lives (86-89).9 Moreover, in congruence with the preceding political upheaval against the government, the generation of Väterliteratur conflates the experience of childhood abandonment with a rather abstract level of national identity. The relationship between the abandoned child experience and the political development of the West German nation gets further emphasis in the evolution of postwar West German film. Similarly to postwar West German literature, postwar West German film reflects issues related to generational conflicts. The motif of the abandoned child can be found in numerous films. Wenders's Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities, 1974) deals with the search for a nine-year-old's mother who left her daughter alone with a strange man. In Helma Sanders-Brahms's Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother, 1980), Anna, a Kriegskind (war baby), deals with the effects of 9 Schlant also points out that many of the protagonists show signs of an inappropriate style of child rearing or even abandonment of their children themselves, as, i.e., Vesper takes his three-year-old son on a drug abuse spree through Europe before he leaves him with relatives and commits himself to a mental institution (89). 16 her missing father, his postwar brutalization, and the emotional aloofness of her mother. Films that do not have child lead roles often involve children as extras, underlining the prevailing hypersensitive and vulnerable mood of the films by contrasting the innocence of childhood against a harsh, often postwar, adult world.10 In addition, as Sabine Hake points out in her book German National Film (2002), New German Cinema frequently depicts a young adult lead (often male) in a crisis-laden child-parent relationship, either with an actual parent or parent-type (patriarchal) figure. This relationship gives rise to the atmosphere of melancholy, alienation, and loneliness typical for New German Cinema (Hake 173). The motif of the abandoned child not only relates to the literal childhood experience but also to the postwar development of the group of German filmmakers associated with New German Cinema. This heterogeneous group holds, as Thomas Elsaesser argues, opposing positions. According to Elsaesser, liberal internationalism and conservationist regionalism are directly or indirectly negotiated among the films: "A common stock of motifs, quotations, autocitations and oppositions suggest that the films, together, form a kind of synthetic mythology, restating, but also not altogether contained within, the master-narrative of the ‘German question'" (214). Elsaesser isolates three concerns from the narrative of New German Cinema: 1. The question of continuity/discontinuity, mostly in respect to fascism; 2. The family as concerned with personal identity and patriarchal authority; 3. Legitimacy, which overarches the previous two complexes as it deals with film as "social text and symbolic action" (Elsaesser 214). 10 Margarete von Trotta's Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane 1981) is based on the lives of Christiane and Gudrun Ensslin, the latter of whom was radicalized in the Red Army Faction. Gudrun had a son with Bernward Vesper who is portrayed at a young age as being exposed to and negatively affected by the disturbances of his parents' life. 17 At the center of these complexes one finds an underlying key figure: the abandoned child whose continuous mission appears to be to "master the past" (215). Elsaesser identifies the motif of the abandoned child as one of the few pervading commonalities in the diversity of New German Cinema. Yet the motif is not only a filmic one, but rather permeates film, its makers, and their social surroundings, all of which are "layers of social texts and symbolic actions" (Elsaesser 214). Elsaesser mentions the abandoned child within the context of the role that Lotte Eisner, a German Jewish director and film critic living in Paris, played for most of the NGC filmmakers.11 In 1974, Werner Herzog finished Kaspar Hauser (a film about the German mythos of the abandoned child par excellence) and traveled with his film by foot to Paris to visit Eisner. He presented his film to her, as if, as Elsaesser says, to receive "her blessings, by assuring him that his work was once more ‘legitimate German culture'" (215). Elsaesser interprets Herzog's highly symbolic gesture as "a founding myth of origins and identity," with which he made Eisner the "super-mother" of the abandoned child: postwar young German film (215). Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother thematizes the filmic equivalent of issues of the second generation from a female perspective: the physical absence or loss of one or even both parents due to the war. In what might be read as a typical evolution of family dynamics from the war to the postwar period, the film's depiction of the family reveals multiple facets of the issue. The plot revolves around the family's life during the war and in the immediate postwar period. Anna's parents, Hans and Lene, meet shortly before the war. Soon thereafter Hans has to leave as he is conscripted into the 11 Lotte Eisner was a historian of Expressionist film, émigré Jew, and friend of F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, as well as a mother-figure for young German filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s (Elsaesser 215). 18 Wehrmacht. Anna is born during the war and while mother and daughter struggle to survive, they develop a close relationship with one another. After the return of the father in the postwar years, the parents are unable to rekindle their love and Anna's postwar childhood is overshadowed by her mother's depression and her father's abuse. Anna also plays the narrator commenting on her childhood and parental relationships from an adult perspective. This constellation reveals various aspects of Anna's continuous struggle with the impact the war had on her parents, which results in the emotional inaccessibility of either parent after the war. The struggle of the abandoned child in Sanders-Brahm's film culminates in a symbolic scene of archival footage portraying an interview of a young abandoned child in the rubble fields of early postwar Berlin in search for both of his parents, who have been missing for days. Using archival documentary footage and creating an intertextual reference to Borchert's Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch…, Sanders-Brahms conflates, as Anton Kaes notes, the individual, private case of Anna with the national level: "Sanders-Brahms dramatizes this dialectic between the public and the private spheres" (From Hitler to Heimat 154). Similar to the family situations described in Väterliteratur, which stand in close connection to the public student protests, Germany, Pale Mother addresses the private experience which, at the same time, stands for national experience, as the film's title indicates. Through Anna's concrete family situation, the film addresses on an abstract level a whole generation that felt abandoned after the war, and who felt abandoned by the politics of their nation when they came of age. Anna's case plays a synecdochic role for the prevailing theme of the postwar abandoned child (Kriegskind), which resonates with many German postwar family narratives. 19 Following the abstraction of the abandoned child motif form the private postwar family situation to West Germany's second generation as a whole, the motif of the abandoned child also applies to the professional level of the filmmakers associated with New German Cinema. National Socialism drove the German film fathers away, and the immediate postwar film industry was, as mentioned above, still strongly influenced by the spirit of Nazi filmmaking and thus rejected by filmmakers of the second generation. Instead, several directors of European art cinema, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Frederico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and a number of Hollywood filmmakers, including Douglas Sirk and John Ford, served as role models for them. The frustration with the ongoing Nazi-taint of Germany's postwar culture led the rising generation of filmmakers, unlike in any other media industry, to cutting their ties with their German film "fathers,"12 via the Oberhausen Manifesto.13 * Both German literature and German film of the late 1960s and 70s show attempts at coping with a conflict-laden parent-child relationship or a lack of a trustworthy guardian and role model. The experiences are often rooted in what has been perceived as a traumatizing childhood related to the war or postwar years and are transferred onto more metaphorical levels. In their metaphorical meaning, these experiences refer to a 12 The West German film industry of the 1950s and 60s, still influenced by former Nazi filmmakers. 13 In 1962, a group of winners of international festivals, spearheaded by Alexander Kluge, took an independent stance away from the former industry. The twenty-six filmmakers drew up a manifesto (Oberhausen Manifesto) in which they outlined a program of requirements addressed to Ministry of the Interior (Elsaesser 21). One of the requirements was a new governmental funding system under the name of Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film (later referred to in English as Young German Film), which allowed for successful production of full length films (Elsaesser 22; Knight 14). One of them was Alexander Kluge's Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl, 1966), which represents the Young German filmmakers' way of eschewing mainstream film conventions. Many of the Young German films disrupt the viewer's expectations of plotlines, soundtrack, and character development and therefore create a disjointed and estranged feeling in the spectator (Kaes, 20; Knight 14). 20 whole generation and its political strife with the German nation. I categorize the experiences under the literary motif of the abandoned child as a symptom of history and am interested in how these symptoms have developed since the unification and through the second decade of the 21st century. The generational conflict between Germany's second generation and the war generation is part of a timeframe, in which West German postwar memory culture was officially referred to as Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with, or, more literally, mastering the past). Since then German memory culture has undergone many changes, including a much-needed name change. Many scholars have identified the events that contributed to changes in German memory culture most of all within the context of Germany's unification and the events leading up to it. The motif of the abandoned child and its continuation in various forms after the Wende has received little scholarly attention. The motif of the abandoned child originated in a time when West Germany still tried to "master its past." Thus it is a motif that has a history of its own as it played a significant role throughout West German postwar memory culture. Due to its historical background, examining the motif of the abandoned child in German cultural texts from around the turn of the millennium renders far-reaching and comprehensive insight into contemporary German memory culture. Against the background of a generational shift, a nation grappling with a newly unified identity and a strongly accelerating globalization after the fall of eastern European communism, the motif of this era reflects, due to its West German postwar history, a unique interplay between contempoaray issues and the role Germany's past continues to play. 21 * For a better understanding of German cultural memory texts originating around the time of the unification and into the 21st century, I shall provide an overview of some of the cultural memory debates of that time and the events that triggered them. One of these events was the airing of the US-produced docudrama Holocaust in West Germany in 1979. Along with a growing number of American productions on German television in the late 1970s and early 1980s, docudrama made it into mainstream television with an unprecedented viewing rate (20 million) in West Germany. Congruent to its viewing rates the miniseries further spurred the debate of Germany's past, and, as Erin McGlothlin notes in her 2006 study Second Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration, "introduced the term ‘Holocaust' into everyday German usage, making it a watershed event in German postwar discourse about the genocide of the Jews" (146). Ernestine Schlant marks the impact of the docudrama also as a turn of perspective on the Holocaust: "In the novels written by Germans the concern is never with the Holocaust for its own sake; the emphasis lies on using the Holocaust to accuse the parent" while "[t]he fact that [Holocaust] was foreign-made and sentimentalized apparently removed inhibitions and allowed response to the "other's" story" (96). Thus the docudrama marked the beginning of an era when not only "personal memories […] were giving way to public memory, provided primarily by books, films, the media, museums, and the education system," as Stuart Parkes remarks, but stories from the victims' side became part of postwar German memory culture (Writers and Politics in Germany 1945-2008 165). Thus sources other than the family line provided access to the past, increasing interest in gathering knowledge about it and initiating public debates (165-66). 22 At the same time, the late 1970s and early 80s witnessed a political strengthening of the conservative party CDU (Christian Democratic Union) due to the so-called Tendenzwende, pushing toward "normalizing" Germany's postwar national identity.14 Thus, while the Holocaust became a widely accepted public discourse, the 1980s witnessed intensified debates about West Germany's national identity, roughly forty years after the war. West Germany's return to "normalcy" in order to secure a powerful position among Western nations was the focus of the public debate between intellectuals from both sides of the political spectrum, the so-called Historikerstreit (Historians' Debate) in 1986. The first impulse for this discussion was Chancellor Helmut Kohl's invitation to U.S. President Ronald Reagan to visit the military cemetery at Bitburg as part of celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II. The Kohl administration viewed the visit as a gesture of reconciliation, signaling that German Wehrmacht soldiers should be commemorated in an equally honorable fashion as soldiers of the Allied forces. The public found out, however, that among the buried soldiers were about fifty former members of the Waffen-SS. Yet, Kohl, "[u]ndeterred by the difficulties over the visit, […] revealed his intention to obliterate the horrendous uniqueness of the Holocaust" (Schlant 190). After an international outcry against the Bitburg visit, several conservative scholars published articles in defense of the Kohl administration and relativized the Holocaust. In their articles, the conservative historians portray the Second World War and the Holocaust as a "comprehensible" consequence to the crimes 14 The Tendenzwende initially referred to a number of writers shifting their former left-of-center position toward a more conservative one, criticizing Willy Brandt's foreign policy in communist Europe (Compare Stuart Parkes, Writers and Politics in Germany 1945-2008, 93). Later followed public attacks on West German leftist intellectuals blaming them for the ongoing terrorist attacks and kidnappings by the RAF culminating in the terrorism crisis in the Fall of 1977 with the killing of Hanns Martin Schleyer (Parkes 100-103). The criticism was extended onto the governing Social Democratic Party at that time under chancellor Helmut Schmidt who was particularly criticized by the conservatives for his handling of the kidnapping of Schleyer and his foreign policy decisions regarding the Cold War (Schlant 185) 23 committed by and the threat coming from the Soviet Union (Parkes 165-66). In an expansive public media correspondence, scholars from the liberal side of the political spectrum, such as Jürgen Habermas, responded to the conservative commentaries in defense of emphasizing German responsibility for the most horrific atrocities of human history. As part of the agenda toward "normalizing" Germany's past, the Kohl administration also emphasized German wartime and postwar suffering as a means to achieve its political goals. For one of his preunification speeches held in December 1989, Helmut Kohl chose the ruins of Dresden's famous Frauenkirche as his background. The ruin of the church served Kohl as a reminder of German prewar urban beauty and Germanic Christian tradition as well as a reminder of allied aerial warfare and German war experience, as the church ruin was an important symbol for the terror of war in general and the air raid on Dresden in February 1944, and therefore German suffering in particular. The ruined façade of the church facilitated Kohl's political agenda to reach Germans from the East and the West, as well as a large international audience, and helped promote the idea of a well-deserved unification of the two countries.15 15 The ruined church façade in the background enhances Kohl's address to the international community, with members such as France's president François Mitterand and Margaret Thatcher who were critical of the idea of unifying Germany. The setting allows him to refer to the past in a twofold way. Firstly, with the church ruin as a reminder of war, he uses an emotionally charged pledge of peace that seems aimed at affecting his international listeners and colleagues primarily: "And here before you today, I would like to expand this oath in declaring: German soil/ground will have to, always, generate peace - this is the goal of our unity." The bold oath of "German ground/soil" as the origin for eternal peace may have played a role in reducing international criticism (dw-world.de "Helmut Kohl - Kanzler der deutschen Einheit"). Secondly, Kohl engages the church ruin as a symbolism of loss and suffering of the German population and points out: "Here, in front of the Frauenkirche, the memorial for the victims of Dresden, I just laid a wreath - also in remembrance to the suffering and the dead of this wonderfully beautiful old German town." Kohl's ability to integrate the discourse around German suffering caused by Allied warfare into his pre-unification speech may have not only affected his countrymen but also his colleagues from the former allied nations. Against the backdrop of Great Britain's and the United States's own critical voices concerning the ethical issue of the bombardment of Dresden, Kohl's speech may have initiated a sense of 24 Corresponding to the controversial visit at Bitburg's Wehrmacht cemetrary and the rededication of Berlin's Neue Wache into an all-encompassing war memorial, commemorating victims of the Holocaust along with German victims of Wolrd War I and II, Kohl's speech suggests that the topic of German wartime suffering would no longer be excluded from the public discourse. Kohl's attempt at endorsing German wartime experience as part of the public memory discourse contributed, as Schmitz remarks, to "[t]he pluralization of memory in post-1990 Germany [which offered] the chance, for the first time, to represent German losses side by side with German resposnisibilities" (A Nation of Victims? 17). German suffering thus played a crucial part in Kohl's agenda of "normalizing" the past in order to promote a unified German national identity, and it has since been an integral part of German post-Wende postwar memory culture. Moreover, Kohl reflects his agenda of normalizing Germany's position as a Western nation in the motivation of redeeming conflicts. At the end of his Dresden speech, Kohl takes advantage of the upcoming Christmas holiday as a powerful symbol for his idea of German unification, and concludes that Christmas is not only a celebration of peace but also a celebration of the family. Kohl describes how families come together at Christmas, filled with the joy of seeing each other again (mdr.de "Kohls schwierigste Rede"). Here, Kohl establishes an allegory of East and West Germany as the "German family" whose members finally, after a long time, on Christmas, get to see each other again. Kohl ends his speech with greetings to East and West Germans, wishing them a peaceful Christmas and a happy New Year in 1990 (mdr.de "Kohls schwierigste Rede"). As reconciliation is an important point on Kohl's agenda, it reaches from international responsibility and guilt for German suffering among the former allies, and thus a willingness to act politically in Kohl's favor. 25 reconciliation to German wartime suffering to reuniting East and West Germans down to the smallest social unit, the family. Given the context of the late 1960s and 70s, the reunited family as an allegory suggests not only redeeming family members separated by the inner German border but also suggests the settling of generational conflicts that have stricken West Germany in the previous decade. Kohl's speech in front of Dresden's Frauenkirche illustrates the chancellor's introduction of German suffering into official post-Wende postwar German memory discourse. This development is particularly important in regard to examining the motif of the abandoned child in German memory starting with the Wende, considering the motif's ambivalence as victim within the perpetrator culture. This project examines through the motif of the abandoned child the impact caused by the surge toward unity and normalization. It seeks answers to questions whether attempts at making amends and promoting unity have redeemed feelings of abandonment or whether the possible resistance toward unity or political changes such as the abrogation of East Germany might have revealed new situations of rupture and abandonment. However, while the political agenda toward unity resulted in the unification of the two German nations, the debates did not end. Quite to the contrary, as Helmut Schmitz describes in A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present (2007), It is not only that the Third Reich is the last moment of shared history between the two partial German states, in both the Federal Republic and the GDR memory of the Nazi past was tied up with both national and Cold War commemorative politics….After 1990, the memory of Nazism returned to the cultural sphere with unprecedented force. (3) Schmitz argues that this resurgence of cultural memory at the time of reconfiguring a 26 German national identity led to two diverging modes of commemoration in the newly unified country: a highly institutionalized and ritualized memory culture surrounding German responsibility, and private communicative memory of personal accounts of German wartime suffering (4). At the center of the diverging memory culture, disputes arose over the national memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (Mahnmaldebatte), Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners, Martin Walser's acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1998 followed by the Walser-Bubis Debatte, as well as the traveling exhibition Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941-1944, "[exposing] the rift between official public memory of the Nazi past and private or family memory" (4-5). Due to its dual background as child victim of the war on one hand and as denouncer of the Nazi parents on the other hand, the abandoned child motif is situated right between the two sides that Schmitz describes. In German texts dealing with the questions concerned with these debates, the abandoned child motif serves as a microlevel indicator as to how the text balances its perspective regarding these questions. While the decade after the unification saw a rise in conflicting perspectives in the public debates, some scholars observed a change toward productive dialogue between opposing sides. Stuart Taberner and Karina Berger argue in the introduction to German as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic that the debates have created a space from which a discourse has emerged that "acknowledges both the complexity and fundamental unknowability of the past - of the individual's subjective perception of his or her ‘objective' reality - and the consequent, and perhaps even productive, tension between judgement and empathy" (3). Rather than forming rigid camps of viewpoints in 27 these debates, an open-mindedness toward plurality within the discourse has developed. Christine Anton likewise emphasizes in her aforementioned introduction that Germany's past in post-Wende memory culture [has] undergone re-analyses from new angles. New generations of writers and filmmakers are pushing at the boundaries of cultural taboos and political correctness and probe the complex collective consciousness with a view to ascertaining what constitutes the German nation today. They are challenging the status quo of the German "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" and seek to find new ways to make certain that Auschwitz will remain a "deeply felt obligation," but also no longer perceive "Auschwitz as a hindrance to achieve normalcy." (15-16) Thus in its complexity and plurality post-Wende German memory culture seeks the status of normalcy. However, as normalcy is the goal of German politics of national identity, incidents show that Germany continues to attract national and international attention in association with its horrific past. As Bill Niven proposes in his 2002 study Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich, "[i]f Germans feel they can criticize forms of memories or even the Jews without being accused of anti-Semitism, and if Jews can criticize Germans without fear of giving rise to anti-Semitism, then ‘normal' dialogue will be possible" (192). Yet, while one might question criticism based on general categories such as "Jewish" or "German" -regardless of the Holocaust-, 21st-century events show that political situations still become overshadowed by the past, making "normal" dialogue a goal yet to be attained. In his political prose poem Was gesagt werden muss published in the German daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2012, Günter Grass claims to be breaking a long-lasting German taboo of criticizing Israeli foreign politics, specifically Israel's nuclear armament and its potential deployment against Iran. Grass concludes with the undifferentiated claim that Israel is a 28 threat to world peace (Süddeutsche Zeitung online). The poem initiated an international furor, in which the inappropriateness of Grass's poem was debated. Grass's publication culminated in a travel ban by the Israeli government against him, proving "normalcy" not yet achieved. However, the public debate revolving around Grass's poem exemplifies German memory culture: while increasing in differentiation, it remains ambiguous. While Grass's poem receives support from the radical left and right, scholarly and moderate public voices view the poem critically yet in a highly discerning way. While some call the poem anti-Semitic, the majority of criticism is directed at its undifferentiated and monolithic tone. Stuart Taberner describes Grass's posture as public intellectual expressed in the poem as obsolete as "[h]e may now truly be the ‘Alte', ‘Dinosaurier' or ‘letzter Mohikaner' that he styles himself as, and in a fashion that is most likely experienced by an ever more digitally-literate and diverse public as merely irritating rather than productively challenging" (‘Was gesagt werden muss' 530). Taberner's analysis of Grass's poem illustrates the changes that have happened in German memory culture since the 1960 and 70s when Grass used to be a major voice in West Germany's postwar memory discourse: It is in itself much too diverse and differentiated to still accept monolithic statements such as Grass's poem. The still relevant connection of Germany's past and the nation's situation today, which Grass's 2012 publication revealed, is fundamental to my analysis of the literary motif of the abandoned child in German literature and film after the Wende. The motif reflects the change toward plurality, complexity, and differentiation as it signals a literary deposition of identity, social constellation and historical context. Thus, the motif reveals 29 a significant change from being a tool for expressing rather judgmental, self-serving, and often binary viewpoints as in Väterliteratur. Aside from representing an outdated flare-up of monolithic perspectives on German memory culture, Grass's poem indicates the increasing influence of global conflicts on post-Wende Germany in general and German contemporary memory culture in particular. Thus, contemporary global and local developments may involve decentralizing the motif of the abandoned child from its World War II context toward an increased diversity of situations causing childhood abandonment. The increased responsibility toward the well-being of children in contemporary childhood culture makes the image of the abandoned child a particularly powerful cultural indicator of responsibility and commitment. The motif lends itself to exploring questions regarding what Germans see as their moral commitment and responsibilities and whom they see as victims within the context of contemporary German (memory) culture.16 * German post-Wende fiction has reflected the development of contemporary German memory culture in great quantity, and a large array of literary scholarship exists accordingly. In order to situate this project's contribution to the literary scholarship of post-Wende and postwar German memory culture, I shall provide a brief summary of previous findings. German fiction dealing with the Nazi past before the Wende focused 16 Childhood studies emerged as its own discipline during this decade and academic programs dedicated to children as an independent social group emerged at Brooklyn College in 1991. Furthermore the UN Conventions of Children's Rights, signed in 1989 and effective in 1990, additionally expresses a global trend in increased cultural focus on childhood (Mayall 5). Kate Douglas mentions in her groundbreaking 2010 study Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma, and Memory how childhood experiences -- often challenging -- started to soar in cultural texts of the early 1990 (2). Moreover, Douglas not only describes the increase of childhood experience in Western cultural texts and thus the increased investment in childhood but also the growth of complexity of the concept of childhood as cultural construct. She goes so far as to say childhood depiction in cultural text and history stands in a synecdochic relationship with the past (9). 30 largely on the German experience of witnessing and its way in which the witnessing has been conveyed or not. (Susanne Vees-Gulani and Laurel Cohen-Pfister Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture 6). Therefore West German postwar writing before the 1980s shows two general characteristics: Firstly, it is largely directed at the democratic future of the country, and thus the Holocaust itself plays a minor role. As historical witnesses, often returnees from exile, these writers are "ever-conscious of this history" and thus "informed by a politically committed humanist ethics" (Cambridge History of German Literature 442). Secondly, the German witnessing and the silencing thereof rendered a focus on the family line as connection to World War II, often emphasizing the male perspective (Vees-Gulani and Cohen-Pfister 7). The 1980s and 90s changed this picture: "German society turned toward the Nazi and Holocaust past as never before," Erin McGlothlin writes in her book Second Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (200). By quoting Bill Niven, McGlothlin states that [t]he various debates and events [of the 1980s and 90s]…reflected a willingness on the part of the German public both to confront more directly German crimes during the Holocaust and at the same time to move beyond an obsession with the perpetrators to consider their victims as well. (201) While the suffering of victims of Germans finally receive attention so do German victims. Karina Berger and Stuart Taberner explain in their aforementioned introduction to German as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic that, [o]ne of the truly novel aspects of the changed manner in which the Nazi past is discussed in today's Germany is the integration of narratives of German wartime suffering…the bombing, mass rape and expulsion endured by millions of Germans during the closing phase of the war are now very much part of public discourse. Yet, in contrast with previous periods, it is widely acknowledged that representations of such horrors are not per se "revisionist" but rather, in the main, an invitation to reflect on the sequencing of the "German" experience: Germans 31 as aggressors, Germans as perpetrators…, Germans as victims of the furious response provoked by their aggression, Germans as members of a vanquished nation. (4) Berger and Taberner illustrate how the former dichotomy of victims and perpetrators undergo much more differentiated scrutiny in the literary work after the Wende, and thus fall in line with a general tendency toward increased complexity and diversity within contemporary German memory culture. Studies focused on generational shifts provide one explanation for the growth of diversity and broader bandwidth of perspectives in a society's memory culture. Situated in the field of trauma studies, Marianne Hirsch's work emphasizes the second generation's memory of their parents' trauma and revolves around the term postmemory, which Hirsch created: The term "postmemory" is meant to convey its temporal and qualitative difference from survivor memory, its secondary or second generation memory quality, its basis in displacement, its vicariousness and belatedness. Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through representation, projection and creation. (Surviving Images 9) Due to the belatedness, the succeeding generation's dealing with their inherited memory is about memory and requires the application of imagination in the attempt to make up for the belatedness. McGlothlin responds to postmemory in the context of her study of second-generation Jewish and German writers that "[s]econd-generation literature thus becomes the arena in which the creative imagining, the rupture and repair of the Holocaust past take place, the garment that the writer simultaneously rends and mends" (12). Thus the fictionalization of the work of the succeeding generation, and therefore the source for creating new perspectives, is paramount to the memory culture of a society in a postconflict era. 32 In Germany's current situation, the second generation and their production of cultural texts has been joined by the third generation, which involves generational change as well as increased temporal distance. Vees-Gulani and Cohen-Pfister point out in 2010 that "[m]ore than sixty years after the end of the Second World War, fifty since the first waves of immigration, forty since the student movement, and twenty since the fall of the Wall, time alone guarantees new generations who look back on these events with distance" (1). The distance has even increased since then, allowing for the emergence of voices of the fourth postwar generation in recent years and thus an even more diverse spectrum of perspectives. In one of his introductions to German literature after 1990, Stuart Taberner underlines "[d]iversity [as] one of the defining characteristics of contemporary German-language literature," which requires a "more subtle, more differentiated, and certainly more cautious" reading. Today's literary scholar is challenged, according to Taberner, to fully [grasp]…the complex interaction between these "structures of feeling" and a much wider range of authors as they inflect discourses of self, identity and "posture" within local contexts and in relation to the broader transformation of the world in an age defined by globalization, religious and ethnic confrontation, and astonishing shifts in social, political and economic power. (The Novel in German since 1990 4-5) The broader transformation of the world as Taberner describes it and the generational distance make up Germany's cultural memory profile today. German literature of today negotiates this interplay of generational shifts and transformation of the world often against the backdrop of the paramount rifts and ruptures created in the 20th century. Generational shifts and world transformation also play an important role in Friederike Eigler's study Gedächtnis und Geschichte in which she explores narratives of the past written from vicarious perspectives in contemporary German multigeneration 33 novels. Eigler examins auf welche Weise Generationsromane die Erbschaft des Nationalsozialismus, DDR-Sozialismus und der west-deutschen Protestbewegung der 68-Generation literarisch gestalten und kommentieren...Anhand der literarischen Darstellung von Generationsverhältnissen-dieser Nahtstelle zwischen individueller und kollektiver Geschichte-lassen sich Brüche und Leerstellen in den Erinnerungsdiskursen, aber auch deren Identifikationangebote und Sinnentwürfe darstellen. (10-11) (the ways in which generational novels represent and comment on the historical inheritance of National Socialism, East German communism, and the West German student movement of the 68er generation…The literary representation of generational relationships-the interface between individual and collective history-faciliates the retracing of not only ruptures and gaps within memory discourses, but of also the emergence of various ways to identify with and of making sense of the past. [translation mine]) Eigler illustrates how narrative strategies in the analyzed novels meander between the family legacy and contemporary cultural memory discourses and reveal creative "Erinnerungspraktiken and Vergangenheitsentwürfe" (methods of commemorating and conceptions of the past) at the turn of the millennium. "Vergangenheitsentwürfe" (conceptions of the past) also play a significant role in Debbie Pinfold's aforementioned study. Pinfold examines the child's perspective on the Third Reich as a literary device in postwar German literature. Pinfold suggests that the child perspective serves as a "plausible outsider figure" for modern authors since "while [the child] is still being socialized it may be considered as existing on the margins of adult society…. Using the child's viewpoint is a particularly effective defamiliarizing device, for a child has not had time to be jaded by the process of habitualization" (4). Given the premise of examining a literary device rather than a psychologically plausible child figure and given the historical event that contextualizes the figure, Pinfold finds that the child perspective in German postwar literature is not clear-cut but often represents 34 ambivalent and complex images of that time (5-6). Like Eigler and Pinfold I am interested in perspectives of Germany's past. As in Eigler's study, multigenerational constructs play an important role in the texts I analyze. Yet the focus on the abandoned child allows me to break away from the generational construct. The abandoned child motif lets this analysis consider situations that may not be related to the past, representing other current social issues and thus representing new ways of identification within contemporary German memory culture. Thus the motif I analyze reflects generational narratives but also other contemporary cultural and socio-political issues such as immigration that resonate with the past but are not necessarily situated within the context of generation and family-line. Debbie Pinfold's study and mine have the child's perspective in common. However, while Pinfold's work focuses on German literature from the 1950s through the mid-1990s, my study picks up on the unification as a major transformative event reflected in perspectives on the past in succeeding literature. Moreover, my analysis follows the aspect of abandonment, which includes considering the victim-status as well as the "legacy" of the motif origination in the early postwar years as described in Böll's texts and Väterliteratur. Finally, while I analyze the abandoned child in contemporary German texts that deal with the past, it is not necessarily the child's view on the Third Reich, as is the parameter of Pinfolds analysis, but instead includes the conception and portrayal of the child as a symptom of history and politics. This dissertation examines the motif of the abandoned child in texts of the three post-Wende decades. The motif allows a perspective on the past that deviates from the generational pattern and the family line, and thus permits us to look at constellations that 35 may be deemed more appropriate to reflect German memory culture in the new millennium. The abandoned child motif allows us to consider Germany's cultural status in regard to responsibility and victimhood against the backdrop of World War II and the Holocaust, the country's unification, as well as contemporary national and global events and their social challenges. * The texts of this project depicting the abandoned child motif are organized chronologically and thematically into three chapters. Chapter 2, "Beyond the Second Generation: The Abandoned Child in Texts by Wenders, Treichel, and Sebald," deals with a group of texts closest to the event of Germany's unification. In Wim Wenders's film Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire 1987) (hereafter abbreviated as Der Himmel), Ulrich Treichel's Der Verlorene (Lost 1999), and W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001) (Austerlitz 2003) the abandoned child motif represents the main protagonist's and the German second generation's perspective. In these texts childhood abandonment is informed by experiences of the war or immediate postwar years as well as a generational conflict with the parents' generation. All of the texts show a desire to depart from the binary parameters of postwar West German memory culture in general and of the generational conflict in particular. While they share the same desire for departure, the motif of the abandoned child in these texts reveals different ways of expressing it. The earliest texts, Wenders's film Der Himmel predates Germany's unification by a couple of years. The abandoned child motif plays a symbolic role in the film, representing West Germany's second generation as a pars pro toto of the nation as a whole and its postwar struggles. The film deals with 36 phantasmagorical themes of change, coming together, and a new beginning. Corresponding to these themes, the narrative offers gestures of reconciliation toward Germany's main group of victims, the Jews, suggesting a rather one-sided and self-serving solution to Germany's postwar melancholia. The abandoned child in Treichel's Der Verlorene is situated within the setting of the West German postwar family of the 1950s. In many ways, this setting resembles the social dynamic represented in Väterliteratur. However, Treichel's text acknowledges and discusses German wartime suffering, thus adding another element to the familial conflict. The consideration of the parents' suffering diffuses the intergenerational frontiers along the victim-perpetrator binary. The German second generation abandoned child in Sebald's Austerlitz deflects his postwar struggles by focusing on the story of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, who mirrors, however, the German postwar abandoned child just as much as the Holocaust. The texts discussed in Chapter 2 show only limited success at breaking away from the binary dynamic of the generational conflict dominating the self-referential perspective of the second generation. They are still overshadowed by events experienced during the war or in the immediate postwar years, by the bipolar pattern of the parental conflict and its focus on the male voice. In several ways, the set of texts in Chapter 3, "Third Generation Perspective and Female Voices: The Abandoned Child in German Novels of the 2000s," might be read as a counterpart to the texts of Chapter 2. The antithetical relationship between the two chapters is mostly based on the generational shift between the authors discussed in each chapters. Moreover, the texts of Chapter 3 show a significant increase in female voices. The abandoned child is contextualized within these shifts and thus reflects an altered 37 outlook on the past. Related to the generational shift from the second to the third generation (the so-called Enkelgeneration [grandchildren's generation]), the abandoned child motif in the texts of Chapter 3 shows an increase of generational perspectives on the past. Childhood abandonment is less dominated by the binary structure of the parent-child relationship and not only represented by one character. Instead multiple characters often show aspects of childhood abandonment which have various causes. While the Holocaust and World War II is still central in the texts of Chapter 3, childhood abandonment is no longer only a symptom of this event but includes other causes as well. In Katharina Hacker's 2006 novel Die Habenichtse (The Have-Nots, 2008), the abandoned child motif reveals insight into how the German past affects the life of a well-to-do young German couple, and shows how their prosperous life has played a role in repressing the burden of the past. While the abandoned child motif in Jenny Erpenbeck's 2007 novel Heimsuchung (Visitations, 2009) illustrates the disruptions caused by political changes and atrocities throughout the 20th century, it reveals an East German perspective. Yet, here also, the abandoned child motif alludes to unresolved burden of the past, which entails aspects of East German memory culture. While also depicting the chain of disruptive events of 20th century German history, the abandoned child motif in Julia Franck's 2007 novel Die Mittagsfrau (The Blind Side of the Heart, 2009) serves as a means of explaining the breaches that happened due to the disruptions. In all three novels, the situation of abandonment is interwoven into a larger historical network of causes and effects. Furthermore, in most of the texts the time window to the past has become larger, often including prewar history in their development of narrative. However, while the perspectives on the past increase and the time frame these novels cover goes beyond 38 World War II, the familial lineage to World War II or the Holocaust is still important in all three texts. Despite the familial link from the present to the past, the novels represent a heterogeneous group of related and unrelated characters and thus include a larger spectrum of different voices. Aside from the strong female voice, the abandoned child motif in the texts of Chapter 3 reveals Jewish and former East German perspectives as well. More so than the texts of Chapter 2, the novels of the second chapter disrupt former dualities of gender, Germans and Jews, and victim and perpetrators, generating dual, thus hybrid identities. As the novels' perspective is less restricted to binaries, their approach to the Holocaust and World War II is more nuanced. However, while on one hand showing a freer approach to the past, the abandoned child motif in these texts shows nonetheless the burden of the past passed on to the third generation. The texts of Chapter 4 continue to embed the abandoned child motif in a more nuanced approach to the past. Wolfgang Herrndorf's Tschick (2010) (Why We Took the Car 2014), Ursula Krechel's Landgericht (2012), and Per Leo's Flut und Boden (2014) and Der Wille zum Wesen (2014) show in "Historicizing, Continuities, and a New Generation's Perspective in the 2010s: Abandonment in texts by Wolfgang Herrndorf, Ursula Krechel, and Per Leo," even more increase in the diversity of childhood abandonment's causes and continue to represent hybrid voices. Childhood abandonment in Herrndorf's coming-of-age novel Tschick is situated in a multicultural setting in 21st-century Germany, showing contemporary issues, some of which have roots in the past beyond World War II and the Holocaust. While Tschick pays less attention to the Holocaust and World War II, Landgericht depicts a situation of abandonment in a 39 German-Jewish family during the time of the Holocaust and West Germany's postwar years. However, the parents in Krechel's text suffer more from abandonment than the children, reflecting reconsidering the second generation's perspective. Leo's texts, Flut und Boden and Der Wille zum Wesen, also focus on World War II and the Holocaust, yet, while Flut und Boden portrays abandoned children, the abandoned child motif in Der Wille zum Wesen plays an abstract role. Read as corresponding texts, Flut und Boden and Der Wille zum Wesen show an abandoned child motif, which illustrates a German tradition of thinking that contributed to Nazi ideology and Third-Reich racism. The abandoned child motif in the texts of Chapter 4 no longer outlines a generational pattern, and neither is World War II or the Holocaust a common focus of abandonment. While the novels of Chapter 3 all reveal in various ways the third-generation perspective or autobiographical ties to the past, the generational perspective and autobiographical aspects of the writers discussed in Chapter 4 play a less important role in the portrayal of the abandoned child. Even more than in the texts of Chapter 3, the abandoned child motif in the texts of the third chapter shows an increased distance and further detachment from World War II and the Holocaust. In all three texts, the abandoned child motif is part of portraying a large historical framework, often based on thorough archival and academic research, reflecting on German-specific historical continuities which still show relevance in 21st-century Germany. Thus, while the texts of Chapter 3 show a more nuanced approach to the past, the abandoned child motif in Herrndorf's, Krechel's and Leo's texts demonstrate a refined outlook on the past, which portrays World War II and the Holocaust more like a historical topic rather than familial or generational memory culture. The abandoned child motif in these texts reflects upon 40 Germany after twenty-five years of unification and indicates that the country entered a new era, in which more general questions arise. While less oriented toward family and generational issues, these questions pertain to Germany as a country, its contemporary position as a strong political and economic power and to being a country of immigration, while considering both, the contemporary global context and Germany's yet problematic past. CHAPTER 2 BEYOND THE SECOND GENERATION: THE ABANDONED CHILD IN TEXTS BY WENDERS, TREICHEL, AND SEBALD Describing his childhood relationship with his father and the father's role in the family, second generation author Christoph Meckel writes the following description of his childhood in Suchbild: Über meinen Vater (1980), Die große, umfassende Freude war nicht da. Sie fehlte an allen Tagen, in allen Nächten, bei allen Gelegenheiten, zu jeder Zeit .... Es fehlte das unbelastete Atmen und Träumen, es fehlte die unbedachte Zärtlichkeit .... Der begeisternde Anlass. Es fehlten die unbedenklichen Wörter und die schwerelosen Unterhaltungen, es fehlten Lässigkeit, Langmut und Frivolität. Es fehlte ein Vorschuß an Sympathie für den Vater, ein laisser faire für die Schwächen seiner Kinder, es fehlte das grenzenlose Verzeihen und also die Liebe. (97) (General, all-embracing joy was not there. It was missing on any day, any night, in all situations, at any time … There was no unencumbered breathing, and there were no dreams, no spontaneous affection or enthusiastic moments. There was a lack of carefree words and jovial conversations, of nonchalance, patience, and triviality. The love for the father was not a matter of course, and he lacked a laisser-faire attitude toward his children's idiosyncrasies; unconditional forgiveness, therefore simply love, was missing [translation mine). Meckel's image of a postwar childhood deficient in emotional care is primarily focused on the nuclear family and on the father's inadequate methods of childrearing. As the Der Spiegel quote on the verso of Meckel's Suchbild states, "Meckel beschreibt freilich kein exotisches 42 Ungeheuer, sondern den Druchschnittstyp einer Generation und einer Klasse" (Meckel surely doesn't describe an exotic monster, but the average persona of a specific generation and of a certain social class [translation mine]) whose lack of empathy in their childrearing methods is-in their literary description-usually placed in relationship to their involvement in fascist Germany. As generic as the father in Meckel's character description is, Meckel's text as a genre example of West German Väterliteratur during the late 1970s and 1980s is "marked by a preoccupation with Germany's fascist past … [and] explore[s] thematically the legacy of the Nazi past on the most intimate level of transmission - that of the postwar family" (McGlothlin 145). The biographical tie to the war, the postwar family setting, and the parent-child conflict of Väterliteratur dominate the perspective on the past, whereas the parent-child conflict is anchored in the child's feeling of abandonment due to the parent's lack of attention and love. Following the time period of Väterliteratur and originating against the backdrop of the political development surrounding Germany's unification, the three texts discussed in this chapter have in common a decisive impulse to break away from the German postwar family-based desolation. Wim Wenders' 1987 film Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire), Hans-Ulrich Treichel's 1998 novel Der Verlorene (Lost, 1999), and W.G Sebald's last novel Austerlitz of 2001 (Austerlitz 2003), in various ways, tie into the issues of the (German) postwar family-particularly the situation of childhood abandonment-and suggest means of transforming these issues. Similar to the thematic parameters of Väterliteratur, the topic of childhood abandonment in the three texts is imbedded in the biographical experience of war or the immediate postwar years; the texts' thematic focus is set on the war-affected family or generation. Thus the abandoned child is the postwar child. Moreover, the authors of the three 43 texts, born between 1943 and 1952, belong to roughly the same age-cohort as the writers associated with Väterliteratur and belong to the so-called German second generation. However, all three texts reveal in their depiction of the abandoned child of the postwar family a distinct moment of departure from the previously described features of the West German postwar child. While some protagonists seek conciliatory fantasies to overcome the past and issues of childhood abandonment, others attempt a new approach of considering and acknowledging multiple factors that may have led to the abandonment, such as the parents' own difficult situation. Wim Wenders' Der Himmel über Berlin (hereafter abbreviated as Der Himmel) originated during the transitional period between West Germany's political change toward conservativism in the beginning of the 1980s and the country's unification. The film places the (West) German postwar abandoned child on a metaphorical level, representing not only the German second generation but the divided nation in general. Wenders resolves abandonment in a conciliatory fantasy, reflecting preunification desires for normalization and unity. Contrary to Wenders' film, Treichel's Der Verlorene and Sebald's Austerlitz, having originated roughly a decade after unification, reflect a much more ambivalent position in their departure from the postwar family situation. While both texts show a distinct detachment from the way the postwar abandoned child has been portrayed in Väterliteratur, the experience of abandonment is described as lingering, albeit in altered form. While situated within the circumstances of the immediate postwar nuclear family, Der Verlorene reveals a more nuanced picture of the postwar social dynamics than texts associated with Väterliteratur. The abandoned child, who is the text's narrator, reflects a 44 higher degree of emotional distance to his neglect as revealed in his ironic depiction of his family situation. At the same time the text considers the parents' own traumatic war experience while not downplaying German responsibility. The text's point of departure from the postwar childhood abandonment lies thus in letting go of the rigid judgement of the parents through the notion of accepting the past as a complex and irresolvable-yet shifting-issue, which nevertheless continues to accompany one's life in one way or another. Treichel's later texts further support the ever changing role of the past by repeating similar themes from a succeeding generational viewpoint. Rather than a text by a member of the German second generation reflecting on his postwar family life, Sebald's novel moves the focus of childhood abandonment onto the experience of a Jewish Holocaust survivor who reflects on his traumatic experience of abandonment in conversations with his German friend, the novel's narrator. In the wake of the opening of the Eastern European borders Sebald boldly creates the situation of a German-Jewish friendship which intermingles Jewish victim legacy with German responsibility in a problematic way. While revealing the far-reaching consequences of abandonment of the Jewish child victim, Sebald's empathetic engagement with the Jewish victim legacy repeatedly points to his, or his narrator's, own postwar experiences. The three texts discussed in this chapter reflect different stages of the political change associated with the Wende. Although released before the fall of the Wall, even prior to the East German rise, Der Himmel captures high hopes likely to be evoked by the political stirring in the Soviet Union after Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika and Glasnost reforms, as well as by the agenda of the Kohl administration for a stronger national identity. The film reflects the utopian desire for an end of a perceived German postwar melancholy, or even 45 torment; a condition, I argue, that is closely connected to the experience of the abandoned postwar child and which Wenders' film transfers onto a national, preunification stage. Separated from Der Himmel by the event of the Wende, Der Verlorene and Austerlitz must be read within the post-Wende context and its various debates. As Konrad Jarausch, Hinrich Seeba, and David Conradt phrase it in their book chapter The Presence of the Past: Culture, Opinion, and Identity in German: "With the fall of the Wall, history returned with a vengeance…unification in effect doubled the burden of the past...[and] [s]ince the shadows of the past could hardly be exorcised in general, [its] reconsideration surfaced in several specific debates" (After Unity 47-48). Rather than univocal reconciliation with the difficult past, the unification, with its demand for reconfiguring German national identity, led to a multiplication of perspectives of the past. In German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990 (2006), Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove describe post-Wende German memory culture as an expanding "gendered and generational memory map," encompassing controversial debates revolving around German war atrocities, Germany's victims, the longing for normalcy, and German war experience (2). The motif of the abandoned child in Treichel's and Sebald's texts faces the challenge of finding its place within the heterogeneous topography of this map. Thus, in their portrayal of the motif, these texts reflect the direct or indirect negotiation of these memory debates, rendering it a complex junction of memory discourse. While the abandoned postwar child in Treichel's text is heavily backlit by the parents' own traumatic experience of expulsion and loss, the responsibility of the parents' generation is not dismissed. Helmut Schmitz argues in A Nation of Victims? Representation of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present, "the cultural hegemony of the liberal 46 left after 1968 resulted in a broad scale de-legitimization of empathy for and articulation of the German experience of suffering, creating a rigid classification of perpetrators and victims that excluded ambivalences" (11). Treichel's inclusion of German suffering in the heretofore rigidly judged image of the postwar family while simultaneously incorporating the issue of German responsibility is not only evidence of re-evaluating the "student movement and its role within the commemorative culture of the federal Republic," but also reflective of a broadening understanding towards the past (Schmitz 11). Also Sebald's Austerlitz reflects the post-Wende plurification of the understanding of the past. Sebald is one of the first ones among non-Jewish German writers who focuses on the Jewish victim perspective. However, when read against the backdrop of Sebald's previous publication, Luftkrieg und Literatur (On the Natural History of Destruction), a text based on his 1997 lecture on the effect of allied aerial warfare, the negotiation and reflection of German responsibility and suffering, even the German experience of abandonment, play an important role in Austerlitz. The narrator, simultaneously friend of and counterpart to the Jewish victim, is a reference to the German experience discussed in the novel and other important works by Sebald. While the juxtaposition of the Jewish victim and the second generation German narrator on one hand attest for the above-mentioned broadening of understanding toward the past, the close proximity of the two characters is nonetheless fraught with tension. Stuart Taberner and Karina Berger discuss the broadening understanding in German as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic and rightly state that it "needs to be set within an ethical framework that wards against the risks of relativization and revisionism" (Taberner and Berger 4). While showing, on one hand, comprehensive awareness for that ethical framework, on the other hand Sebald, possibly due 47 to his own unsettling and unresolved experience with the impact of World War II, comes close to pushing this framework's boundaries. All three texts (Der Himmel, Der Verlorene, and Austerlitz) portray the motif of the postwar abandoned child within the context of social and political change. Whereas in Wenders' Der Himmel this change is merely an imagined one and thus serves only the protagonist's fantasies and desires, Treichel's Der Verlorene and Sebald's Austerlitz reflect the social implications of the change having happened. The two latter texts reveal the challenges of the increased heterogeneity of the post-Wall memory culture as the abandoned child motif in these texts negotiates several perspectives of the post-Wende memory culture, such as the discussion of German suffering as well as exploring experiences of Germany's victims. Yet all three texts reflect the authors' own historical entrenchment in and dependence on the perception of abandonment as second-generation Germans. Wim Wenders' Der Himmel über Berlin Wim Wenders, born in 1945, is commonly associated with the group of postwar West German filmmakers known as New German Cinema. Wenders started his filmmaking career in the late 1960s and founded, with several other contemporary filmmakers, the independent film distribution company Filmverlag der Autoren in 1971. Generally, this group of young filmmakers are associated with the German second generation's generational conflict with their parents, the war generation. More specifically, this group's attempt was to establish a culture of German art film after the war, a genre which had been greatly tainted and disrupted by Nazi politics, and therefore was lacking adequate role models in the parents' generation of German filmmakers. Thus Wenders' oeuvre needs to be placed within this situation of 48 cultural abandonment. Like his filmmaking colleagues, Wenders grew suspicious of traditional German culture in his adolescent years due to its relationship with fascism (Roger Cook and Gerd Gemünden The Cinema of Wim Wenders 11). Under American occupation, American pop culture became prevalent in Germany and offered a popular alternative to German culture. Several American directors served as ersatz fathers in Wenders's professional life (11). In 1977, following an invitation by Francis Ford Coppola to collaborate on a production which was later released as Hammett (1982), Wenders moved to the United States. He returned to Germany in the early 1980s upon which he started working on Der Himmel über Berlin. Der Himmel reflects the desire for change which conflates aspects of the German second generation's experience of postwar abandonment and parent-child conflicts with national themes. The change is portrayed as a form of redemption through unity with another person, which offers reconciliation with the past as well as a promising future. The metaphorical quality of this change allows applying these aspects to the state of the (two) German nations. On one hand, redeeming postwar uneasiness of West German second generation cultural production and the notion of finding closure to the difficult past makes the film a problematic political statement. On the other hand, the film's idea of overcoming the state of separation and abandonment expresses the desire to transform the idea of West German postwar suffering and represents a transition to different ways of coping with the past. The protagonist who represents the change is an angel named Damiel dwelling in the skies above Berlin in a timeless, isolated, melancholic black and white world from which he witnesses history and human life but painfully lacks the ability to interact with humans. 49 Archival footage of bombed urban landscapes and child victims of war underline the angel's witnessing of history and their timeless existence. Only children, who are strongly represented in the cast, are able to see the angels. Damiel yearns to leave the world of the angels behind and dreams about human life and its sensual stimulation. He falls in love with a French circus artiste named Marion. He finally leaves behind his fellow angel, Cassiel, to give up his angelic state of being. His transformation happens by crossing the line of the Berlin Wall in a still-divided city scarred by its history. Damiel's transition to human is accompanied by a poem about childhood and the first people with whom he interacts are children, drawing a significant connection between Damiel's role and the child. Without his omniscience, it takes Damiel time to find Marion. He wanders the city until he finds her. The union is poetically underlined by close-ups and strong colors and sets a stark contrast to the black and white outlook of the angels and the dismal city life around Damiel and Marion. The main plot is accompanied by side stories, such as the US-American film production happening at a former air protection bunker in the center of the city. The film being shot there is a detective story situated in the early postwar years. The lead in the American film is Peter Falk, playing himself in the diegesis of Der Himmel über Berlin. Damiel has his first adult human interaction with Falk in the form of an appeasing handshake. Falk plays some sort of mentor role in Damiel's transformation to human since Falk himself is portrayed as having been an angel. A third figure who receives recurring attention while he wanders around the urban landscape is Homer, an old man and long-time Berlin resident who calls himself a storyteller and who is mostly depicted reflecting on the past and being on the search for the epic of peace. Yet, in the end, all side stories and surrounding figures lose their significance. Only the focus on Damiel and Marion's union 50 remains. * Wenders returned to Germany and started working on Der Himmel shortly after the conservative party (with Helmut Kohl as chancellor) gained the majority in the German parliament. After thirteen years of Social Democratic government (SPD), Kohl's remembrance politics indicated an emphasis on returning (West) Germany to an unquestioned, powerful Western nation. One of the most controversial political gestures of commemoration during the Kohl administration was Ronald Reagan's visit to the Wehrmacht-cemetery in Bitburg. The controversy over this visit, as mentioned above, ignited the Historians' Debate between intellectuals from both sides of the political spectrum. The conservative representatives in this debate, the most well-known being Ernst Nolte, argued for historical revision of the Holocaust and World War II. The gist of their argument was that the Holocaust and World War II should be viewed as a causal reaction to the supposedly viable threat of communist Russia. Thus the conservative historians attempted to place the Holocaust in a chain of historical causes and effects, equalizing its impact with that of other genocides in the 20th century. Their argument might be read as a means of trivializing, or at least relativizing, Germany's horrendous past in order to strengthen a new national confidence and empower the country's political standing in the order of Western democracies. While some distinct motifs associated with German film of the sixties and seventies are still alive in Wenders' 1987 release, they are renegotiated against the new political background of the conservative and conciliatory politics of the Kohl administration, which aimed at a "normalized," unified, and flourishing German nationhood. I will examine the 51 motif of the abandoned child in Der Himmel über Berlin in relationship with history, family, and identity within the cultural crosshairs of a new political era of neoconservative forces, a changing Soviet world, and revived nationalism in the dawn of Germany's unification. It appears that the new political circumstances in Germany not only drastically influenced the means of production of German films, but also, in Wenders' case, led to fantasies of unity and reconciliation including the redemption of the abandoned child. As part of New German Cinema, Wenders' early career and oeuvre consistently offer images that can be read as versions of the abandoned child. As Cook and Gemünden describe in their introduction to The Cinema of Wim Wenders, Gemünden discusses Wenders' "fatherlessness" and the subsequent influence of American culture in more detail in Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (2010). Gemünden explains here that Wenders' oedipal relationship to America is reflected in the number of American male supporting roles in his films (Framed Visions 161).1 According to Gemünden, these American male figures (Sam Fuller in The State of Things and The American Friend, Nicholas Ray in The American Friend, Peter Falk in Wings of Desire) appear as influential, generalized image-producing or -selling males with an untroubled masculinity (Framed Visions 166). Wenders' male leads, however, struggle with their masculinity. They are often portrayed as introspective, in a state of transition, and in an estranged relationship with a woman. Gemünden goes on to say that while father figures are often "borrowed" from American culture, Wenders' male-centered narratives reveal a significant lack of women, and love for the female is often replaced by an infatuation with (American) pop culture (Framed Visions 167). Moreover, Wenders' films repeatedly 1 Gemünden describes the relationship to the American male figures as one that gets resolved in a male friendship, or, as Gemünden puts it, in an "oedi-pal" relationship that replaces the patricide (167). 52 thematize the search for a missing parent or parental figure, as in Alice in the Cities, Paris, Texas, and The State of Things. Whereas in the first two films the male lead's own state of abandonment seems to be reflected in the actual portrait of a child (Alice and Hunter, respectively) looking for her/his mother, The State of Things depicts the "abandonment" of a filmmaker and his entire crew and production by their Hollywood producer. The motif of the abandoned child in the form of the lack of belonging receives further support in the tension between image and narrative that pervades Wenders' films. As Gemünden and Cook state, Wenders' early films prioritize the image over the narrative. It was his artistic philosophy at that time to convey, through the line of images, "the ineffable feel of things" and thus to "liberate spectators' visions" (The Cinema 8-19). With his focus on the image, Wenders intended to let the image "speak" and to enable "pure seeing," which is, according to Wenders, free of ideological influences and distorting narratives (Wenders qtd. in Gemünden, 20). Thus his early films tend to lack storyline and engage an open style to which the genre of the road movie lends itself. The road movie style and lack of engaging narrative in Wenders' films conjure a feeling of homelessness that he shares with the films of many of his New German Cinema colleagues. Largely due to increasing disappointment in Hollywood filmmaking, Wenders returned to Germany after several years of filmmaking in the United States in the late seventies and early eighties. Fascinated with what he saw in his country-in particular Berlin-after his extended absence, Wenders decided to shoot Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire). As Cook points out in his article "Angels, Fiction, and History in Berlin: Wings of Desire," this film indicates a shift in Wenders' work from an image-centered style to one that reveals a search for narrative (164). What evokes the motif of the abandoned child most strongly in Der Himmel is the 53 juxtaposition between the main plot line, Damiel's transformation from angel to human in this national setting of Germany's capitol, with the prevalence of children mostly portrayed in moments of solitude. Abandoned by God, the ultimate father figure, Damiel himself is an abandoned child.2 As a middle-aged man in the late 1980s, Damiel represents Germany's second generation, whose childhood was affected by World War II or the difficulties related to the postwar years. Belonging to that age cohort, Damiel might be read as one of the German postwar child victims who lost their home, one or both parents in World War II, or who suffered from postwar familial conflicts such as those portrayed in texts by Böll, Borchart, and Sanders-Brahms.3 While the plot reveals references to the socio-political circumstances of the concept of the abandoned child as a cultural symptom of Germany's second generation through its usage of archival footage of World War II, the motif interacts more significantly with prevalent national themes. From a political perspective, the abandoned child is symbolized by Damiel's pursuit of his own history/story. This endeavor includes leaving behind former father figures associated with the past and acquiring discursive power in an, expectedly united, post-Cold War, national discourse. The idea of a new national discourse might be interpreted as providing new paternal structure. Choosing the path of "growing up" in order to leave behind a traumatized childhood is paralleled by an opposing development, which involves regressing toward the innocent life of a child to the point of giving oneself up to an all-encompassing maternal body that then emerges as a strong nationalist idea. Thus, while in a large number of New German Cinema films and Väterliteratur the 2 In After Images Wenders explains that one of the first ideas for the film was the situation of angels abandoned by God in the skies above Berlin (219). 3 The "second generation" describes the group of individuals born during the last years of war or during the immediate postwar years. The impact of the war on the childhood and youth of this generation has been one of the major themes of New German Cinema. 54 abandoned-child-motif revolves around a father-centered conflict-including Wenders' own pre-1980 releases-the filmmaker offers a solution to this struggle by allowing paternal and maternal structural powers to interweave throughout the plot. The new narrative resolves the struggle and generates new ideas that-quite contrary to the legacy of New German Cinema-abide by the contemporaneous political development. The film renders, on a structural and national level, the idea of reestablished, intact familial ties, and suggests that after decades of struggle with the father figure it is time to reunite the (national) family. The new family bond offers a more forward oriented, nationally and internationally conciliatory, unifying and patriotic path, on which the task of "mastering the past" appears to be accomplishable. * A large part of the current scholarship of the film investigates Der Himmel über Berlin against the political background of the Historians' Debate. Roger F. Cook indicates that Der Himmel might be viewed as a reflection of the conservative national identity politics of the early Kohl era, since the film is infused with prevalent themes that construct a narrative about new beginnings and affirmative national identity ("Angels, Fiction and History" 182). The weaving of the narrative, according to Cook, is achieved through suture: a method of creating a narrative through the cutting and editing of film images. Jacques Lacan, according to Cook, describes suture as a major identity-forming process through which the subject gains his coherent self (165). Cook asserts that Wenders employs suture in a twofold way: as a filmic method to unfold the love story, and on a different level to weave together cultural themes in order to suture a new, undivided, coherent national identity (173). Cook elaborates against the background of the contemporary Historians' Debate the 55 danger of myth-making and revisionism in Der Himmel, as the developing love story of Damiel and Marion might be read as a positive alternative story, an "epic of peace" of national proportions that excludes the past (184). Yet Cook's main argument is that the film's ambiguities get resolved in the strong message of an epic of peace, particularly expressed by the old Berlin resident known as Homer. He claims that the key to the alternative national epic in Wenders' film can be found in the references to Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," and therefore steers the film's notion of desire for new beginnings away from the association with ongoing neoconservative revisionism and instead toward the idea of a dialectical and responsible way of dealing with the past (184). Robert Phillip Kolker and Peter Beicken focus in their 1993 book The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire on the problematic tension that arises within the overdetermined allegorical inventory of Wenders' film. The authors claim that the tension revolves around three interwoven texts: first, "an intertextual web of allusions; second, an extraordinary, quasi-documentary perspective on Berlin, rendering an array of the painful affects of modernity; third, Wenders' attempt at domesticity and at resolving the problem of gender" (138). According to Kolker and Beicken, "Wings of Desire proposes that redemption occurs with a descent into physicality" (142). Damiel's angelic desire to become flesh can thus be seen as a "reverse resurrection," which, against the backdrop of cultural and historical themes, results in "a kind of self-absorption" in a romance with melodramatic gestures (152). The interplay between the romance of "mythic and universal proportion," postmodern self-reflexivity, and Germany's past, according to the authors, leaves nothing behind but a "heavily-mediated, mass culture joke" (152). Kolker and Beicken state that juxtaposing the recurring theme of history's abyss with 56 Damiel's apotheosizing pursuit of domestic needs and heterosexual desire "trivializes [the film's] high concerns and endangers its complexity" (156). Finally, the authors point out that Wenders' film reflects the struggle of the second-generation, postwar Germans, and that it deals with central themes of contemporary impulses toward the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet, according to Kolker and Beicken, Wenders resolves these themes, detached from their social implications, in the redemptive realm of his filmic images (160). I would like to pick up on its main concerns revolving around (national) identity against the backdrop of Germany's past and the contemporary situation at the end of the Cold War, but in contrast to Cook's conclusion, I will add a perspective from which the film's themes, ideas, and images might be read as symptomatic of German postwar memory culture still in crisis. My approach is aimed at drawing attention to aspects of the film that shed light on the problematics that lie beneath the romance. Although Kolker and Beicken's essay reveals many insightful aspects of the ambiguity of the film, and although their ethical concerns regarding the film are justifiable, I argue that the film provides more than a romance embedded in a "heavily-mediated mass culture joke." On the contrary, the themes and motifs Wenders uses, the love story in particular, are overdetermined symptoms that speak in depth about the postwar West German memory crisis. The film reveals an underlying West German postwar sense of victimhood revolving around the motif of the abandoned child that the film seeks to redeem in a simplified conciliatory idea. * Although the lead roles of the film are not children, children are numerously represented among the many extras. They play an important role as they reflect the angels' troubled identification and might be read as referring specifically to the disruption of or the 57 abandonment by maternal influences. The predominance of children and Das Lied vom Kindsein (Poem of Childhood) that pervades the soundtrack evoke a strong association between the angels and childhood. Most children depicted in the film are surrounded by a subtle notion of abandonment. There is the disabled child being pushed to walk by herself on her crippled legs, children searching for something to play with in the gutters of a back alley, and another child longing to be accepted by two other children. One child, apparently left alone in a war-stricken nocturnal urban environment, screams fearfully for his mother, while another child extra, sitting alone, waiting for action at the film set, shivers from the cold. They all express a sense of solitude and melancholy which they share with the angels, especially when meeting the angel's gaze. Since no adult human ever looks directly in the angels' eyes, the shot-reverse-shots signaling the responding look between child and angel remind the viewer of a mirror reflection. It is the situation in which the angel's gaze is actually "complete," since the object, in this case the child, is looking back at him. In Lacanian terms, the fulfilled dialectic in the gaze defines the angel as what he sees, namely a child.4 The poem Lied vom Kindsein (Poem of Childhood) by Austrian poet and prose writer Peter Handke underlines the important role of childhood as it functions as a frame narrative to the film, identifying the angel struggling with his symbolic childhood. The first half of the 4 The point of departure of the mirror stage as described by Lacan is the subject's being determined by a sense of lack, the manque à être, which follows the perceived complete union with the mother and which the subject futilely pursues to regain. The component missing to overcome the constant lack, l'objet petit a, cannot be attained but remains representation. The infant's discovery of her own mirror image and her identification with it following her mother's redirection is, according to Lacan, an important moment in the child's search for compensating for her lack. At this phase, the child finds himself in a physically undeveloped situation, yet identifying with a complete but removed and thus fictional body image. Finding himself provides the child with the necessary sense of continuity: it "symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination" (Lacan as quoted in Rivkin and Ryan 179). Identification is therefore ambivalent: on one hand it renders a sense of completion in the search for unity, while on the other hand it perpetuates the sense of lack due to its alienating effect. 58 poem deals with being a child whose view of the world is not yet distorted by the conceptions of the grown-ups' world: Als das Kind Kind war, erwachte es einmal in einem fremden Bett und jetzt immer wieder, erschienen ihm viele Menschen schön und jetzt nur noch im Glücksfall, stellte es sich klar ein Paradies vor und kann es jetzt höchstens ahnen, konnte es sich Nichts nicht denken und schaudert heute davor. Als das Kind Kind war, spielte es mit Begeisterung und jetzt, so ganz bei der Sache wie damals, nur noch, wenn diese Sache seine Arbeit ist. (Wenders and Handke Der Himmel über Berlin 79) (When the child was a child, it awoke once in a strange bed, and now does so again and again. Many people, then, seemed beautiful, and now only a few do, by sheer luck. It had visualized a clear image of Paradise, and now can at most guess, could not conceive of nothingness, and shudders today at the thought. When the child was a child, It played with enthusiasm, and, now, has just as much excitement as then, but only when it concerns its work).5 The poem indicates that being a child is part of the past and evokes the sense of loss due to growing up. However, the person to whom the poem refers, who has supposedly lost his childhood and who logically would be the adult, is in the second half of the poem referred to as a child: Als das Kind Kind war, fielen ihm die Beeren wie nur Beeren in die Hand und jetzt immer noch. (Wenders and Handke 132) 5 Source of English translation: http://everything2.com/title/Lied+Vom+Kindsein 59 (When the child was a child, Berries filled its hand as only berries do, and do even now). In the end it becomes apparent that the person who once was the child, still, or again, perceives the world through a child's eyes. The poem thus represents a two-sided development of a person: growing up but simultaneously retaining childhood characteristics. Thus the text represents a longing for childhood, which Germany's second generation has claimed to be deprived of as many references to a loveless childhood in Väterliteratur indicate. The images of children, as well as Handke's poem about childhood, reflect the angel's, or Germany's second generation's, underlying experience of parental abandonment due to being born into war or immediate postwar circumstances. Childhood experiences in a not only physically shattered war-torn environment but also mentally traumatized family environment are a common theme in the memory culture of the second generation as Helma Sanders-Brahms illustrates in her 1980 release Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother). The archival footage in Der Himmel über Berlin represents the angels' historical retrospection. The footage predominantly depicts German war-torn urban structures whose visual effect culminates in the disturbing shots of several dead children on the rubble fields. These shots of innocent child-victims link the subtext surrounding the (abandoned) children to the immediate postwar period. They underline the angels' allegoric role as children of the war generation, whose first recognition of their object-world is a shattered image of their domestic environment and of Mother Earth. The disrupted motherly realm receives further weight when Damiel listens to the memories of one of the extras at the American film set, as she rem