Reconstruction 7.4 (2007)
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Social Mnemonics of Style: A Comparative study of Günter Grass' novella Crabwalk and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial / Jaroslava Gajdosova
Abstract: Sociological studies of collective memory have pointed out that forms, such as commemorative genres or the narrative styles, can influence how societies interpret and remember their pasts. [1] While drawing from these studies and from Hayden White's theory of the narrative tropes this essay compares the mnemonic work of style in two works of art - in Günter Grass' novella Crabwalk and in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. Both artifacts share attributes that are sociologically interesting: they are social testimonies about a difficult past, though the difficulties that German and American societies experienced are of different kinds, and they address that past via an ambivalent artistic style. Arguing that styles, whether we study their linguistic or their visual expressions, have significant effects on the social construction of memory this essay will ask whether and how can the ambivalence of a narrative trope or a commemorative genre facilitate the articulation of the conflicting memories that different communities circulate about their common past. While leaning on Hayden White's thesis about the prefiguring capacity of the narrative tropes, this essay will examine the novella Crabwalk as a text that anticipates future developments in the German leftist memory about the World War II.
I would like to understand why, in this decade, the past is being presented as never before.
Martin Walser
The only way writing after Auschwitz, poetry or prose, could proceed was by becoming memory and preventing the past from coming to an end.
Günter Grass
<1> Both statements pertinently articulate a contemporary German dilemma about the way of remembering the country's National Socialist past. Should German society be forward looking or should it continue to derive its identity from the negative images about its Nazi past? In the speech delivered on the occasion of receiving of the Peace Prize of German Book Trade German novelist Martin Walser pointed out the limits of the narrative about German guilt for war and the Holocaust when he maintained that the recurring discussions of the Holocaust produced the conditions under which Germans could no longer reflect upon their own past. [2] He denounced all public manifestations of guilt in Germany nowadays, including the decision to erect the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, as empty clichés that are hollowed out of their existential weight. Walser, who argued that guilt can be sincerely dealt with only on the level of individual consciousness, thus suggested to erase it from German collective memory. His insistence on individual guilt poses a pertinent challenge to the contemporary German consciousness yet it is a misleading moral stance for a society that needs to address its difficult past collectively. Contrary to Walser his literary peer and a renowned leftist intellectual Günter Grass believes that Germany's past cannot be separated from its present. For decades, Grass has dealt extensively with German war past and has been an outspoken proponent of the thesis about German guilt. However, in his latest novella Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang, 2002) Grass returns to a war past in order to address the theme of German war suffering. He reiterates the memories of an old woman who survived the sinking of a ship that toward the end of war transported German refugees from Polish territories. Woman's story is framed with the interpretations of her son, a leftist journalist and a former follower of the Students' Movement who has consistently refused to take his mother's memories public. By intertwining these two contradictory discourses - one that recalls war as a period of German suffering and the other that de-legitimizes those memories by highlighting the suffering that Germans inflicted upon other people - Grass' book opens up a dialogue between two mnemonic communities that for decades have stood in a stark opposition to each other.
<2> I would argue that this shift in the leftist memory of war, from the emphasis of German guilt to the acknowledgement of German war suffering, is in Crabwalk facilitated by the use of irony which is the novella's main narrative trope. Irony, which Hayden White characterizes as the most assimilative trope, shows a tentative mode of inclusion of the narrative of suffering in the leftist in discourse where those memories were disregarded, or not permitted at all. This integrative move in the book challenges the preponderance of guilt in the leftist discourse and may even anticipate its future reiterations. Generally, ambivalence in artworks has a mnemonic function. This functional perspective reveals an analogy between the ironic trope in Grass' novella and the ambivalent commemorative style of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The Memorial and the novella address the causes that, for decades, have divided the collective memories of both societies. German war past and the collective memory about it is undoubtedly a more complex issue and its moral weight raises legitimate concerns that the reiterations of war past from the perspective of German suffering may reinforce a contested legacy of German inability to mourn [3] or that they may blur the boundaries between Jewish and German victims of war. [4] Contrary to these concerns, but not dismissing them, this analysis wants to emphasize that Crabwalk for the first time includes the theme of German war suffering vis-à-vis the notion of guilt and not as its surrogate. It further wants to point out the prospective consequences of such juxtaposition.
The Literary Field as a Mnemonic Community
<3> Collective memory consists is an assemblage of different and often conflicting memories about the same past that various social groups articulate and perpetuate. In her analysis of memory frames Iwona Irwin-Zarecka characterizes collective memory as a specific type of understanding of the past which "refers to the past event but does not convey its meaning." (29) While the event constitutes the memory, the meaning given to that event constitutes a particular mnemonic community that frames that event. Zarecka defines public framing of remembrance as a process that endorses or discourages particular ways of seeing the past and it therewith creates "an altogether new community of memory, where bonding extends well beyond individuals' own experience." (56) She maintains that the differences among mnemonic communities do not arise from the similarity of their lived experiences but from the particular perspectives of the past that those communities share and articulate. Common attitudes towards the past distinguish the communities of memory from generations whose members are bonded by the same past and its 'Zeitgeist', even if they remember and understand that past differently. For instance, while the German war generation was bonded by the same National Socialist past its members, who belonged to the different socio-cultural groups, were divided by their experiences of that past - Germans experienced it differently from German Jews or the followers of the regime experienced it differently from its opponents. When different experiences are communicated through a story, they can divide a single generation into the mnemonic communities with irreconcilable memories.
<4> While generations are not primarily communities of remembrance, the social groups that share the same perspectives about the past are the primary mnemonic communities 'tout court'. [5] It is a moral trauma that binds these groups together and it is usually the second generation that increasingly enters the memory community and searches for ethical answer, as was the case of young Germans who asked their parents about their Nazi pasts. Sociological studies show that defeat and moral doubtfulness of war usually signify a contested past which "divides rather than unites the memories of social groups." (Pacifici & Schwartz 379) They are the sources of a moral trauma which, according to Zarecka, has a cohesive effect - it binds the members of the primary community and it reaches out to other mnemonic groups. (Zarecka 47-48) In postwar Germany, moral trauma was triggered by the exposure of German war crimes and the Holocaust. For intellectuals like Theodor Adorno or Karl Jaspers those crimes symbolized an ultimate failure of the democratic traditions of the Weimar Republic, and for Heinrich Mann they epitomized the collapse of German humanism. Group 47, which was the first literary association in West Germany, was one of those primary mnemonic communities that were bonded by a moral trauma. [6] The Group united writers like Heinrich Böll, who spent the World War II on the front, with their younger colleagues, the former members of Hitlerjugend like Günter Grass, who went to the front at the very end of war. For Group's writers the crimes and the recent memory of Nazism symbolized the decline of the German literary traditions and of German language. The writers were thus numbed by their only mean of expression - by language in which, as Adorno claimed, it was barbaric to write poems after Auschwitz. (Adorno 1974) However, Grass recalls that:
No one had the desire or ability to keep silent. It was our duty to take the goose steps out of German, to lure it out of its idylls and fogged inwardness. We the children who had our fingers burned, we were the ones to repudiate the absolutes, the ideological black or white. Doubt and skepticism were our godparents and the multitude of gray values they present to us.....Despite Adorno's verdict or spurred on by it. The only way writing after Auschwitz, poetry or prose, could proceed was by becoming memory and preventing the past from coming to an end. (Grass 1999:2)
<5> Arguably, the process of dealing with Nazi past yielded to Group 47 not only the moral trauma but also the literary success. The works of its writers received a considerable public exposure , which included also Grass' literary debut The Tin Drum (1959). The novel was the first literary articulation of German guilt that reached beyond a narrow discourse of literary criticism to a broader public and, in addition to its aesthetic qualities, The Tin Drum was instrumental for the construction of the leftist memory. Its thematic and its structural patterns pre-configured the leftist narrative about German guilt for the Holocaust, which during the sixties the writers of Group 47 developed into an explicit literary theme. [7] Their works produced a consistent literary narrative about German guilt for war and the Holocaust and their literary narrative significantly framed the official memory of war in the Federal Republic. [8]
<6> Notwithstanding its framing capacity, literature has an ambiguous position in the sociology of collective memory which it mainly owes to its non-performative nature. While sociologists of memory emphasize or exclusively focus on the performative aspects of the collective memory - such as commemorative rituals or calendrical cycles of anniversaries - given a non-performative and an individual mode of its consumption literature stays on the margin of most sociological inquiries. [9] Yet, being a recorded collective memory, literature is a framing device par excellence in the production of society's mental structures. Paul Connerton's classification of memory types as personal, cognitive, and performative is instructive in this respect. Connerton equates personal memory with personal history that can be reflected only by an individual herself, cognitive memory with knowledge which can be remembered without context, and habitual memory with the reactivation of past knowledge through the performance. (Connerton 22-27) Zarecka uses a similar typology when she distinguishes between the phenomenological domains of collective memory, such as individual experiences or cultural sensibilities that inform the structures of memory, and its discursive sphere in which these domains interact. (Zarecka xi) Both typologies underline the capacity of literature to connect personal and cultural memories and to transform them into a performative memory. Literature cuts across all three types of memory - personal, cognitive, and performative (or cultural) - since the literary text needs social context in order to be interpreted on the one hand, and it shapes our understanding of that context on the other. In other words, literature is a framing device that also needs to be framed. The literary framing takes place not only through the story itself but also through the literary figure (trope) in which that story is narrated. The narrative trope thus fulfills an interactive function similar to that of a commemorative genre because the trope guides reader's understanding of the text in a similar way like the style of the commemoration guides audience's understanding of the event that it celebrates. From this perspective, the trope functions as a literary substitute for the commemorative genre.
Mnemonics of Genres and Tropes
<7> The similarity between the mnemonic effects of Crabwalk and of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial lies in their ambivalent mode of addressing the war pasts. This analysis of the mnemonic function of the commemorative style of the Memorial leans on the case study by Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz. I do not want to equate the two wars, since their motives and their consequences are incommensurable, but I wish to point out the resemblances in the collective memories about them. The representations of both causes are still highly contested ones and there is a similarity in the structures of responses to both causes. The Memorial and the novella recall the past that neither unites the group nor does it renew its sentiment of unity. (Pacifici & Schwartz 379) Their commemorations cannot produce a spirit of collective effervescence that is generally constitutive of a community because they recall the events that are either doubtfully heroic, as was the Vietnam War, or indeed not heroic at all, as was the end of World War II for Germans. Instead, both causes constitute the mnemonic communities that are bonded by a moral trauma rather than by a collectively shared pride. In both cases, it was the second generation that increasingly entered into the communities of remembrance and challenged war past and its proponents.
<8> The Memorial study shows that the defeat in the Vietnam War divides American society mainly because it brings up the question of moral legitimacy of the war. Contrary to the Vietnam War, the German defeat produces an odd unity of those who are aware of an ultimate moral failure of the cause itself and of German society at large, or of those who tacitly mourn the defeat. As far as the two past events are concerned, the artistic style has been instrumental in the shaping of the memories about them. The Vietnam Memorial study reveals that it is the form that provides the context for the commemoration. The memorial consists of two walls bearing the names of the fallen soldiers and of a realistic sculpture and a flag added to the original design. However, as Pacifici and Schwartz observe: "It is the design of the wall - specifically its list of names - that induces these affective reactions. The names are the objects of a ritual relation that no other part of the memorial site can sustain." (404) A non-heroic design, its minimalistic style, its non-metaphoric symbolism that disables any metaphysical representations, are the factors that determine how the visitors relate to the Vietnam War and how they understand and remember it. Most importantly, it is a reflective mode of remembering that the Memorial inspires. The walls can be paralleled with the literary text because they involve reading and invoke sentiments which are "experienced in seclusion but shared collectively, on an abstract level." (403) The physical make-up of the walls functions as a narrative figure (trope) because their non-heroic and non-representational design evokes a contemplative mood that encourages visitors to produce their own understandings of the commemorated event instead of adopting a ready-made narrative that the conventional war memorials generally convey.
<9> Though the Memorial is a major commemorative site of the Vietnam War, it is not its only cultural symbol. Many films about the Vietnam War were also made with the ambition to embrace the memories of different mnemonic communities. In her analysis of most exposed films about the war, Marita Sturken notices a consistent effort to reunite the divided memory of the nation. [10] Sturken observes that:
Films....presented the war of the indecisive American psyche, the country that could not agree on a narrative under which to fight, the war of the grunt, struggling for survival, versus the antiwar protesters at home - that is the war produced by the American public's collective guilt over having allowed the war to happen and then mistreating or ignoring the veterans on their return. (106)
<10> The films spoke to the proponents and to the opponents of war because they revived the memories and the attitudes from the times when American public was divided by the war. Generally, they followed one of the three objectives: to increase the identification of the audience with the mission of the soldiers (by maximizing the audience's experience of the 'real' war), to contest the moral legitimacy of the war, or to "heal the consciousness of American public from the trauma of the lost war and of its moral doubtfulness". (Sturken 102) The healing mission, which most films brought forth, reveals a parallel with the Memorial site where the therapeutic process is also carried out on an individual basis. In the movies, such process unfolds through the audience's identification with the main character - generally portrayed as a positive hero whose moral standards, patriotic enthusiasm, warrior skills, but also whose moments of weakness and disenchantment the audiences keenly embrace. However, there is one important difference between the individualism featured in the films and the one put forth by the Memorial. In the films, the individual becomes a symbol of the war, whether it is defined as a righteous or as an unjust cause. Depending on the movie's aesthetics, the protagonist's heroism is portrayed more ostentatiously or more subtly and the loss of his life is mourned by a patriotic rhetoric about the 'sons of the nation' and their sacrifices for a 'higher good'. On the other hand, those movies that express the attitudes of the anti-Vietnam mnemonic community condemn the waste of the young lives that were lost in the cause that had no moral legitimacy or that simply went wrong. This symbolic role of individual emerges from the stylistic canon of war film as a genre which mourns (or celebrates) the past of the community and not the past of the subject.
<11> On the Memorial's site, the healing of the trauma occurs on a very different plane. The commemorative style of the Memorial works from a different concept of individual(ism) than the war films or the conventional war memorials. The Memorial represents the individual only by his name. He is not a symbol but an anonymous, private being who cannot be easily integrated into the collective representation or a narrative about Vietnam. Sturken argues that the "Memorial prompted a complex nostalgia for the intense experiences of the war while providing a space to mourn its loss." (99) Contrary to this suggestion, the Memorial actually mourns the loss of individual lives, as Pacifici and Schwartz observe: "To list the names of every fallen soldier, with no symbolic references to the cause or country for which they died, immediately highlights the individual." (400) The walls of the Memorial convey this reversed hierarchy of collective and individual needs with particular salience; at their site the commemoration of the individual trauma stands above the collective/national one. The films, it can be argued, lack the open-endedness of the Memorial because they attempt to consolidate conflicting memories about the war into a single narrative.
<12> I would argue that it is precisely this open-ended (re)presentation of the event and the narrative about it that the Memorial and Grass' novella have in common. The walls can be literally and metaphorically understood as a text within the context of the Memorial's site. Their interactive capacity with the public is similar to that of the literary text because by reading the names of the fallen soldiers and by recalling the memories about them, or by imagining their fates, the public relates to the walls as it would relate to a book. The walls thus incite an imaginative process that is more open-ended than the one triggered by the book.
The Ironic Trope in Crabwalk
<13> How do tropes relate to memory and how can they determine what we remember and how? The studies of collective memory have shown that our remembrance of the past is always shaped by the present contexts, outlooks, cultural sensitivities, values, and practices. Since the past is lost, we can only replace it with our representation of it. But how is the representation possible if the past is gone? Paul Ricoeur believes that what is irretrievably lost is the reality of the past event but not the past itself. The past leaves the trace which represents it but not in the sense of Vorstellung, of a direct representation in mind, but in an indirect sense of Vertretung, as a trace which takes place of the past but which is not identical with it. Ricoeur identifies this trace as the absent past which, at the same time, is always an absence of particular memories. (1984:2-3) Yet, we can recreate the past by telling a story. In the story, the past appears not as a fixed representation but in a form of being-as. "If the event is told in a narrative, the things must have happened as it is stated in the narrative." (1984:3) This being-as of the past event is, according to Hayden White, brought to language as a figure or a trope. The interpretation of the past reaches beyond the semantic (contextual meaning) of a word or a sentence into the semantics of the whole text. It is no longer only the context of the sentences but the context of the whole text which represents the past event and which conveys its meaning. On a symbolic level, the commemorative rituals or the sites that evoke responses from their audiences are social texts with a performative character. Every performative act needs interpretation and every publicly performed act brings forth multiple interpretations about its meaning and. In this respect, "every act of remembering is multivocal and discursive". (Pacifici & Schwartz 408) The discursiveness is more salient when the past is contested because a difficult past provokes the debates about how should it be interpreted and understood. These debates, written or symbolic, produce social text about the process of remembering.
<14> According to Hayden White, the meaning of the past is encoded in a particular trope which we choose to tell the story. In his analysis of the historical narratives White identifies four tropes in which historical accounts are presented - metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony - and argues that each trope has an explicitly representative function. According to White's typology, metaphor is re-presentational, metonymy is reductionist, synecdoche is integrative, and irony is negational. (White 1973:34) In other words, it is no longer only the epistemology of the event, such as the collection of the historical facts, but the tone of the narrative, the chosen figure, which opens up or closes our access to the past. White's theory of tropes in historical narratives, which he extended to the text in general, is illuminative also for the literary text which deals with the past. [11] There are two important aspects to be mentioned. The trope precedes the narrative by organizing the events, by 'emplotting' them according to a chosen figure. (White 1973:29) Though the intention always is to tell what really happened, the story is continuously prefigured; it is preceded by the trope which will shape the narrative. What guides the author's choice of a trope or of a commemorative genre? It can be assumed that the author is informed by the context of the present - s/he is framed by it. In her frame analyses of memory Zarecka attends to "dormant framing strategies" which are introduced in disagreements and invite multiple interpretations. (8) With the choice of the trope the author of the narrative, being it a literary or a symbolic one, unites these conflicting opinions by organizing them, by attributing different degrees of relevance to them. What makes Grass' text sociologically interesting is that while emplotting his story Grass conveys meanings which are latently present in the structures of the German leftist memory but not yet articulated.
<15> Grass' latest return to the past addresses long-buried wartime memories of the sinking of a German ship carrying thousands of German refugees. The plot, which is situated in Poland toward the end of war and in contemporary Germany, revolves around the ship which Hitler named in commemoration of a Nazi general assassinated by a Jew. The main character is Tula, a survivor from the sunken ship, who passes her memories to her grandson Kony. Tula's horrifying story of the torpedoing of the ship is contrasted by her idyllic account of the earlier times when the ship, owned by the Nazi Labour Front, was a place of leisure and entertainment. Tula's memories inspire Kony to design a right-wing chat room where he names himself after the Nazi general and where he meets with David who identifies himself as a Jew. Kony's father, himself a left-wing journalist, watches with alarm as the two arrange to meet. In face-to-face interaction Kony's determination to kill David vaccilitattes however, he cannot do otherwise but unleash his retribution for the assassination of the Nazi general, for the injustice done to his grandmother, for the vilification of his country. The absurdity of Kony's act reaches the climax when the Jewish identity of David is reveald as fake.
<16> A glance at Crabwalk reveals an ironic tone of the book. The trope looms in the confusion of Kony's parents, offspring of the Students' Movement, but particularly in the testimonies of Kony's two teachers who spoke at the court.
Unanimously...the two educators said that the banned reports had been severely infected with National Socialist thinking... For reasons of educational responsibility it had been necessary to prevent the spread of such dangerous nonsense, the more so because there was a growing number of boys and girls, in both schools, with radical right-wing tendencies. The East German teacher emphasized in his concluding remark his school's "antifascist tradition", while all that occurred to the West German teacher was the fairly overused Ovid quotation, 'Principiis obsta! - Beware the beginnings!' (Grass 2002:202-3, emphasis added)
<17> Grass' text addresses several important social facts: that after the unification the neo-Nazi tendencies have grown in both parts of Germany and not only in the former Eastern lands, as was often argued in the nineties when the rise of right extremism was ascribed to the newly assumed freedom of speech and to the massive social problems that the eastern lands faced. The second fact is brought in via the tone that introduces the teacher's quotation. Grass' faint sarcasm enhances an unintelligible rhetoric and a routine into which the anti-Nazi education has slid down in contemporary Germany. The text can be read as an implicit critique of the educational discourse, and of the leftist discourse in general, which focus on keeping up the awareness about National Socialist past more than on explaining or understanding it. The quotation itself highlights the irony of the situation. Despite having been aware of the beginnings - after all, Kony's report was banned and the spread of neo-Nazism was circumvented - the consequences were tragic. The quote encourages a doubt whether the endless re-emphasis of the awareness of a dark past is sufficient for averting its tragic consequences.
<18> Grass' text invites ambivalent thoughts and questions. Is it not ironic that the parents of a young neo-Nazi assassin Kony are the former members of the Students' Movement and politically still on the left? The text of the novella speaks of the failure - personal and collective: "Nothing absolves us. One can't blame everything on Mother or on the teacher's moralistic rigidity. During the proceedings, my ex and I...had to admit to our mutual failure." (198) Is it not ironic that Kony, in his hatred of Jews, killed somebody who was almost a friend and who, as it turned out, was not a Jew? Is it repulsive that grandmother Tula overlooks Kony's right-extremist advancements as a trade off for the exposure of her story about the ship catastrophe? Is it permissible that the parents of the victim are not outraged by Tula's testimony, expressed in a revengeful tone, but show a moderate sympathy with her war fate? Mother of assassinated David uttered: "Your son's grandmother is certainly a remarkable person, but she makes an uncanny impression on me, somehow..." (201) Ultimately, is it not ironic that the confusion of David's parents about their son's choice of Jewish identity reveals their own ignorance of the country's Nazi past? After the hearings, David's parents confessed to Kony's father:
Herr Stremplin told me that it had probably been his...overly detached attitude toward certain historical events that had resulted in the alienation between him and his son - which had reached point at which they stopped to speak to one another...And Frau Stremplin expressed the opinion that Wolfgang had always been an oddball...But relatively early he adopted the name of David and became so obsessed with thoughts of atonement for the wartime atrocities and mass killings, which, God knows, were constantly harped in our society. (Grass 2002:199, emphasis added)
<19> The attitudes of David's parents provide valuable insight in the contemporary German society because they poignantly reveal the suppression or the diminution of the discomforting historical fact about Nazi past by its liberal strata. The irony of the story of both young protagonists is that the ignorance of David's parents added to his tragic end just as the political zeal of Kony's parents added to his fatal misstep.
<20> What makes irony a suitable literary figure for Crabwalk? Hayden White maintains that though different tropes offer different degrees of confinement irony is the most reflective form of speech because it introduces a negative note, a second thought or a doubt into the narrative. It continually recalls the "problematic nature of language as whole" in which sense irony is metatropological. (White 1978:222) Elsewhere in his writings, Grass refers to themes of lost homeland and of expulsion but these themes are mentioned as historical facts and they lack a dimension of individual memories and experiences that Grass brings up in Crabwalk. [12] In White's terms, we can speak of a tropological absence of the theme of suffering in Grass' earlier writings. Grass recalls in an interview with Alan Riding that:
In West Germany, it was possible to speak of it [German suffering] and some documentary work was done, but not in a literary form. In general, it was the first responsibility of Germans to speak about German crimes. The question of German suffering was of secondary importance. No one really wanted to speak about it.
<21> If we asked how irony could diversify the discourse of the leftist memory, the answer would be: "through representation". Crabwalk represents in an inclusive sense because it juxtaposes two incompatible narratives - of guilt and of suffering. Like the Vietnam Memorial, the novella brings together conflicting views, sentiments, political meanings, and historical interpretations without resolving them. (Pacifici & Schwartz 392) Crabwalk points to the limits of the premise of guilt today when it failed to speak to young Germans and it calls attention of German left, literary, intellectual, and political, to the limits of its own memory which excluded those Germans who suffered during the war. [13] This exclusion was not without consequences. Many expulsed Germans considered themselves the 'last victims' of Hitler and did not participate on the revision of Germany's war past in the sixties. Not only they ignored their Nazi affiliations they did not even view them as morally doubtful. In their political and cultural seclusions, the expulsed Germans fostered the memory of an undifferentiated victimization of Germans - the memory which erased the boundaries between Nazis and their opponents. [14] Grass' novella draws attention to the effects of this collective memory on today's generation of young Germans for whom guilt is an obscure and a detached concept. Does Crabwalk prefigure German collective memory, whose memory is it and how it will be transformed? By raising these questions, the novella encourages a dialogue across the mnemonic and the political spectrum of German society. The multivocality of the book enhances the ambivalent thoughts and reader's imagination. We may concur with Pacifici and Schwartz that: "This ambivalence is not necessarily something the individual feels. It is a social fact, an outcome of the incompatible commemorative viewpoints that were held and the measures that were taken by different constituencies." (407)
<22> We may, perhaps legitimately, challenge Grass' intentions in Crabwalk as a writer as well as his political and intellectual responsibility for the legacy of guilt in the German collective memory. Such doubts were voiced after Grass revealed to the German media his recruitment in Waffen SS - Nazi corps that played an important role in the Holocaust and other atrocities. The revelation, which preceded the release of his autobiography Peeling the Onion (Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, 2006), received an enormous exposure in German public sphere and brought forth the debate that bared the shock and the outrage of those on the left but also of many others who had seen Grass as a person of high moral stature. [15] Some of Grass' literary peers, like Walter Kempowski or the literary critic Hellmuth Karasek, thought that the revelation came a "bit too late" and purportedly so, for Grass did not want to risk the award of the Nobel Prize. For others, the revelation ended Grass' position of a moral symbol when they argued that: "one cannot separate a person from his work". [16] According to Martin Walser, Grass' revelation was symptomatic of the normative ideology and the hypocritical rhetoric in German discourse of the mastering of the past (Vergangenheitbwältigung). On the other hand, the responses of German historians have shown an interesting contrast to the outrage of the literates. The most prominent historians, like Hans Mommsen, Norbert Frei, or Eric Nolte, whose positions on guilt vary from its endorsement to its passionate refutation, either defended Grass or they abstained from voicing their opinions. Nolte, in particular, praised Crabwalk for breaking the silence within the leftist intellectual mainstream about German victims of war. He also made an interesting existential insight about Grass' mistake when he said that it would "make this symbol of German conscience a more humane and vulnerable person, just like all those who also erred". [17]
<23> Grass' own attitude was, undoubtedly, a key moment in the whole debate. In the interview for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Grass downplayed his voluntary recruitment in Waffen SS as an "idiotic pride of a youngster." [18] Yet, to the question why it took him 60 years to make the revelation Grass provided an intriguing answer. He attributed his decision to his own naivety but he went far beyond the conventional understanding of the concept and he fully loaded it with existential weight. He asked himself in retrospect: "How could I have been so naïve and follow this ideology? Why had I no questions when my Polish uncle was shot...or when my Latin teacher disappeared because he doubted our victory in war?" [19] When recalling his own thoughtless embrace of National Socialist ideology Grass reemphasized what he has always said in his novels, namely that we should never abstain from doubt and stop asking questions. In the debate Grass did not, and probably could not, step out of his role as an educator and a moralizer only this time he used his own dark past as an instructive example. Does Grass' revelation invalidate his life-long political commitments, from his campaigning for SPD in the sixties until nowadays, when he still addresses the problems that the united Germany has faced vis-à-vis its ethnic minorities, its immigration politics, and its memory of war? [20] Peter Gay, a historian and a Jew who grew up in Nazi Germany, offers a tentative answer when, for him, Grass remains an educator of the generations and a moralizing critic of German prosperity. Gay argues that: "whatever Mr. Grass has said in election campaigns...or in his powerful novels, all essentially on the present or the recent past, retains its value." [21]
<24> A more extensive analysis of the media discourse might show that Grass' revelation did not relativize the discourse of guilt, in contrary - it reinforced it. Grass' role in the debate resembled the discourse of his books in which he mobilize the alertness and the doubt of Germans qua their own past - individual or collective. Above all, Grass communicated to his fellow Germans that moral icons can also have dark pasts and that they cannot be absolved from guilt. I would argue that Grass's input in the debate and in the German collective memory was that of a public intellectual with the mission to preserve the discourse of guilt. I would further argue that such mission collides with his dilemma about the suffering that he raised as an author of Crabwalk. Arguably, the two positions lack consistency but, most importantly, the tension between them provokes questions about the discourse of guilt and the tentative developments in the German leftist memory. The revival and the political instrumentalization of German suffering demands a response from the left, as Crabwalk allows a survivor from Gustloff to speak:
Never, he said, should his generation have kept silent about such misery, merely because its own sense of guilt was so overwhelming, merely because for years the need to accept responsibility and show remorse took precedence, with the result that they abandoned the topic to the right wing. This failure, he says, was staggering... (Grass 2002:103)
<25> Perhaps the leftist concept of German identity based on the premise of guilt has reached the point of saturation. The move from the narrative of guilt should be acknowledged as a social fact yet it should not imply that the Holocaust and other war crimes would be erased from the German collective memory. They may be remembered differently and yet remain embedded in the collective consciousness that will continue to bear a heightened awareness of responsibility. This move may indicate a shift from the emphasis on guilt toward a more general imperative that the Holocaust, in any conceivable form, will not happen again and elsewhere.
<26> Drawing from the two artifacts - from the Memorial and the novella - this essay wanted to illuminate the relationship between the style and the collective memory about a contested past. Literary text or commemorative genre frame collective memory yet these frames are flexible; they change with each (literary) return to the past because, inevitably, every such return is informed by present outlooks, values, and norms. After German unification, war past re-opened and Grass was one of those "keen on not burying it." (Zarecka 50) Figurative styles have their limits in what they represent and how they represent and these limits are particularly salient vis-à-vis a difficult past. Grass' use of irony allowed for a kind of representation that does not resolve historical controversies but takes their memory public.
References
Adorno, Theodor. "What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?" Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective. Ed. G. Hartman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
----Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. New York:Verso, 1974.
Bayersdorf, Herman. "Von <Blechtrommel> bis zum <Krebsgang>: Günter Grass als Schrifsteller der Vertreibung." Weimare Beiträge 48(2002)4, 568-593.
Buruma, Ian. The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 1994.
Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Grass, Günter. Crabwalk. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2002.
----"Ich erinnere mich..." (Rede in Rahmen der Litauisch-deutsch-polnischen Gespräche Über die Zukunft der Erinnerung, Vilnius, 2 Oktober 2000). Ed. Günter Grass, Czeslaw Milos, Wislawa Szymborska, Tomas Venclova. Die Zukunft der Erinnerung. Göttingen, 2001.
----"To Be Continued." http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1999/grass-lecture.html
----"Laudatio auf Yasar Kemal." Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1997.
----"Rede über den Standort." Wertscheck-Leistung 'Reden der Zeit' des Reden Beraters Heft, Juni/Juli, 1997.
----Speak Out! Speeches, Open Letters, Commentaries. Transl. Manheim Ralph, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968.
----The Tin Drum. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1993 [1959].
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Hartman, Geoffrey, H. The Longest Shadow in the History of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Huysen, Andreas . After the Great Divide. Bloomington: IUP, 1986.
Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994.
Kniesche, Thomas W. "Distrust the Ornament: Günter Grass and the Textual/Visual Imagination." Gegenwarts Literatur: Ein Germanistisches Jahrbuch. Stauffenburg Verlag, 1/2002, 1-20.
Niven, Bill. Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich. London: Routledge, 2002.
Olick, Jeffery. "Genre Memories and Memory Genres: A Dialogical Analysis of May 8, 1945 Commemorations in the Federal Republic of Germany." American Sociological Review, vol.64, no.3(Jun.,1999), 381-402.
----"What Does it Mean to Normalize the Past? Official Memory in German Politics since 1989." Social Science History, 22:4 (winter 1998), 548-571.
----"The Guilt of Nations?" Ethics & International Affairs, vol.17, no.2, 2003.
Ricoeur, Paul. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991.
----Ricoeur, Paul. The Reality of the Historical Past. (The Aquinas Lecture, 1984). Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1984.
Schirrmacher, F., ed. Die Walser-Bubis-Debatte: Eeine Dokumentation. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999.
Schwartz, Barry. The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory." Social Forces 61, no.2 (Dec. 1982), 374-97.
Schwartz, Barry, Zerubavel Yael, and Barnett Bernice. "The Recovery of Masada" A Study in Collective Memory." Sociological Quarterly, 27, no.2 (1986), 147-64.
Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Wagner-Pacifici, Robin and Schwartz, Barry. "The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past." The American Journal of Sociology, vol.97, no.2 (Sep.,1991), 367-420.
White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Imagination. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978.
----Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1973.
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Notes
[1] The study of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Robin Wagner-Pacifici Berry Schwartz (1991) illuminates the influence of its architectural design on the interpretation and the remembrance of the Vietnam War in American collective memory. A study of commemorations by Eviatar Zerubavel (Time Maps, 2003) explains commemorative rituals and their cohesive role that they play in collective life. Zerubavel shows that the commemorative rituals need an 'update' in order to sustain their roel, or that they are abandoned when social situation changes and the event loses its signifying power, as was the case of the October Revolution in contemporary Russia. He describes commemorative rituals as the time-maps that organize each collective life according to the calendrical commemorative cycles. The performative styles of these commemorations have signifying power since they shape society's understanding and memories of its collective past. [^]
[2] Martin Walser's speech in Paulskirche strongly resonated across the German political and ideological spectrum. The consequent debate between Walser and Martin Bubis, the former Chair of the Jewish Council in Germany, was closely followed by the media. In the debate, Bubis accused Walser from anti-Semitism and called him a 'mental arsonist' and Walser, on the other hand, replied that Bubis misunderstood his argument about the individual guilt. The camp of those who indicted Walser of (latent) anti-Semitism grew bigger but Grass dismissed such allegations as unreasonable. For the discussion between Walser and Bubis see Franz Schirrmacher, Die Walser-Bubis-Debatte. (1999). [^]
[3] The concept of the suppression of guilt and of mourning in postwar Germany was developed by Margaret and Alexander Mitcherlich in their study The Inability to Mourn (1967). Mitcherlichs' thesis was applied also to the West and the East German literatures. In her book The Language of Silence, (1999) Ernestine Schlant points out the absence of mourning in the Federal Republic, whereas Julia Hell in he r Post-Fascist Fantasies, (1997) notices the same absence in the literature of the former GDR. [^]
[4] The critics of the thesis about German war suffering point out the incomparable fates of German and Jewish victims of war and they emphasize the historical fact, namely that vis-à-vis the Jews, Germans were the perpetrators and this explicit moral stance draws the line between both categories of victims. See, for instance, a book review of Sebald's Natural History of Destruction by Jeffrey Olick in which he criticizes Sebald for "evening out" of German and Jewish victims of war. Olick, Jeffrey. The Guilt of Nations? (2003). [^]
[5] The main reason why generations do not form communities is their size and the fact that though they inform individuals' lives, they do not define them. Iwona Zarecka argues in her book that generations are unlikely to become social institutions, contrary to the (mnemonic) communities. "When some group formation occurs, it would be on a much smaller scale...Veterans of specific army formations or underground units in World War II did create an organizational framework for remembering. Civilians did not." Frames of Remembrance. (54) [^]
[6] "Die Gruppe 47" was a free and initially an apolitical association of German-writing novelists, poets, and journalists in the German Federal Republic. Though its members strongly identified themselves with the traditions of German humanism, they also critically assessed them. In the late sixties, the Group became an important platform for the interventions of the leftist intellectuals in the public sphere. [^]
[7] In the 1960s, West German writers dealt extensively with the issue of German guilt. In 1963 Rolf Hochhuth's play Der Stellvertreter (Deputy) was performed in several German cities with a tremendous success. See Andreas Huysen, After the Great Divide, 1986 (100). In 1965, Peter Weiss released his play Die Ermittlung (Investigation), and in the following years, Siegfried Lenz's novel Die Deutschstunde (The German Lesson, 1968) and 1969 Günter Grass's novel Örtlich betäubt ( Local Anaesthetic, 1969) came out. These literary works portrayed various forms in which older generation of Germans embraced National Socialism and how it participated on the practices of the totalitarian regime. [^]
[8] Geoffrey H. Hartman uses the term "official collective memory" which usually designates a single, coherent and well-established narrative about the collective past. Hartman distinguishes official memory from public memories which are pluralistic, prone to change, and less consolidated. See The longest Shadow in the History of the Holocaust, (102-7). [^]
[9] Whether they are the classical works (by Maurice Halbwachs), or most recent ones by Connerton, Irwin-Zarecka, Schwartz, Wagner-Pacifici or Zerubavel, sociological studies of collective memory focus on the performative aspects of commemorations. [^]
[10] Sturken's book is a thorough and a riveting analysis of the most significant movies about Vietnam War that were made in Hollywood around the time when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was erected. The films like Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Full Metal Jacket, or Casualties of War became cult movies shortly after they entered the theaters. [^]
[11] In his other book, Tropics of Discourse, White extends his model of figurative speech from historical writings to all types of texts. [^]
[12] All Grass' major novels address German past to varying degrees. For instance, in Hundejahre (Dog Years, 1963) Grass for the first time mentions sinking of Gustloff but he does not address the memories about the event, as he did in Crabwalk. See Herman Bayersdorf's Von Blechtrommel bis zum Krebsgang (2002). [^]
[13] While it is true that the generation of the Nazi era did not feel guilty about their own past, their children, who were born after war, did. The second generation - of the 1960s - could relate to the guilt of their parents but this became more problematic for the third generation and increasingly problematic for many young Germans today. See, for instance, Ian Buruma's analysis of German postwar identity in The Wages of Guilt (2002). [^]
[14] In the early sixties, the expulsed Germans formed their own political affiliations - Landsmannschaften. Even conservative parties(CDU, CSU), whose leading politicians like Helmuth Kohl or Edmund Stoiber have maintained their contacts with Landsmannschaften, did not include their territorial or property claims in the political agenda of German state. [^]
[15] The debate was mainly featured by the Frankfurter Allgemaine Zeitung (F.A.Z.). See: www.faz.net/s/ [^]
[16] The argument voiced Klaus Staeck, the President of the Berlin Academy of the Arts. See F.A.Z., 17.08.2006, N. 190/page 33 [^]
[17] ibid [^]
[18] FAZ.NET, 16. August 2006. [^]
[19] FAZ.NET, 14. August 2006. [^]
[20] See, for instance, Grass' speeches on German-Polish relations, (Ich erinnere mich..., 2000), or on Germany's past (To Be Continued, 1999), or on Turkish Germans and the immigration politics (Laudatio auf Yasar Kemal. 1997). [^]
[21] New York Times, August 20, 2006. [^]
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