Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (review)

As the last generation of Holocaust survivors—who have written their memoirs, agreed to be video-taped, spoken to our students, and attended Holocaust studies conferences—departs from this earth, increasing scholarly attention has been paid to the so-called “second generation.” The term, developed by Alan Berger and Efraim Sicher, generally is used to refer solely to the children of survivors. The “postmemory generation”—as Marianne Hirsch termed it in her monograph Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory—refers to “those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.”¹

Several important texts that endeavor to analyze the memories and the memoirs, the experiences and the traumas of this second generation have appeared already. Among them are Aaron Hass’s In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (1990); Alan Berger’s Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (1997), and Berger’s more recent Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators (2001); Marianne Hirsch’s aforementioned work; and Efraim Sicher’s Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz (1998).

Erin McGlothlin makes a ground-breaking contribution to these studies in her new book, Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration. In a move that is likely to be controversial, McGlothlin juxtaposes the texts of/about the children of survivors to those of/about children of perpetrators to demonstrate the similarly damaging effects of belonging to the second generation. While psychologists and sociologists have made such comparisons, McGlothlin is one of the first in literary studies to broaden the term “second generation” to include both groups. She argues that while “the legacy transmitted to the children [is] quite different for the two groups, the general positions of the children to their parents’ pasts are quite similar: both groups feel marked by the Holocaust, an event that is ever present in their lives but not personally experienced, and both struggle to understand their own place in the world in light of their link to the traumatic past” (p. 14). McGlothlin’s treatment of these texts together offers an opportunity for new insights.

McGlothlin opens her text with a compelling examination of self-inflicted wounds as described in memoirs by members of this second generation. Anne Karpf, a child of Holocaust survivors, scratched an infection on her hand until “blood ran and the whole surface of the hand turned raging, stinging scarlet” (p. 2). Irene Anhalt, the daughter of an SS officer, scratched swastikas into her legs while chanting the names of Nazi officials: “I did not stop until both legs were smeared with blood,” she recalled (p. 4). Noting that Karpf terms her wounds “stigmata,” a word that references both the wounds of Christ and marks cut into the bodies of criminals and slaves in ancient Greece, McGlothlin argues that through these actions the women are acting out the roles of both perpetrator and victim. Echoing Hirsch’s insights about postmemory, McGlothlin interprets these physical marks as “signifiers without referents” and concludes that the two women “perform[ed] acts of remembrance that have no referent in their own memory” (p. 5).

This focus on signification is a salient feature of the nine second-generation texts that McGlothlin presents. She addresses the complexities and anomalies that she uncovers in these texts using a rich stew of theoretical approaches. To striking effect, she integrates structuralism and semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, feminist literary criticism, trauma studies, and narratology; in the many close readings she provides, McGlothlin writes like a formalist. In Part One, entitled “The Legacy of Survival,” she discusses Thane Rosenbaum’s Elijah Visible (1996); Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986, 1991); Robert Schindel’s Gebürtig (1992); Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997); and Katja Behrens’s “Arthur Mayer, oder das Schweigen” (1993). While Spiegelman...