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

This volume discusses the literary legacy of writers marked by the Holocaust, explicitly focussing on works that access this experience from the perspective of both survivors and perpetrators. Broadening the common definition of second-generation literature, which refers to texts written by both the children of Holocaust survivors and Jewish writers who write from the same point of view, McGlothlin also includes texts that so far have been identified as Väterliteratur.

In an extensive and insightful introduction the author provides a discussion of important concepts and research contributions that inform the larger context of second-generation literature. She argues that although each group of writers deals with experiences most different in nature, their attitudes towards their parents’ and the first generation’s past are similar. Both groups and their texts are marked by a past event they have not experienced themselves but that continuously invades their present lives. The trope of marking as a figure of stigmatization is thus “operative” in the texts of both groups of writers in that it expresses their particular position towards their unlived past. Interestingly, the figure of stigmatization in these texts of second-generation literature not only takes hold of the struggling “second-generation body” on the thematic level of the narratives. It is also understood to be inscribed onto the body of the text itself and into its narrative structure, where it expresses a “narrative crisis” parallelling a “crisis of signification” in which narrative conventions are “transgressed or radically reshaped” (12). As a result, the narrative organization of the texts functions as a site at which the reader can trace the writers’ fractured condition of signification caused by a traumatic yet inaccessible event.

This study contains perceptive analyses of nine literary works and one theatre adaptation published between 1987 and 2003. Its two main parts correspond to the respective legacies: Part I, consisting of four chapters, discusses five texts by Jewish writers that deal with a range of experiences relating to the Holocaust and the legacy of survival; part II, consisting of three chapters, discusses four texts by non-Jewish writers (where one writer has also adapted his text into a play) that more specifically deal with the legacy of perpetration and its role in the postwar German family. The texts range especially in terms of the national backgrounds of their authors (German, Austrian, American, French, and Israeli) and the genres they represent. The reason for this is the author’s attempt to group texts not on a thematic basis but because they outstandingly and in various interesting ways address the problems of the second generation’s dealing with the Holocaust. She has certainly achieved her goal of providing the reader with a “mosaic-like image” (37) of the manifold ways in which the Holocaust becomes a theme in the second generation.

In part I, McGlothlin’s analysis of Thane Rosenbaum’s collection of short stories Elijah Visible deals with the rupture in Jewish identity caused by the Holocaust, while Art Spiegelman’s comic novel Maus is discussed as a narrative that displays the impossibility of keeping the Holocaust past from invading the present. In the chapter on Robert Schindel’s novel Gebürtig, the author focusses on the problematic role of the second-generation witness, while in the analysis of Patrick Modiano’s novella Dora Bruder and Katja Behrens’s short story “Arthur Mayer, or The Silence,” the discussion is directed at the narrative creation of “postmemorial lexica and atlases” that attempt, though unsuccessfully, to recover the lives of people whose memory has been eradicated by the Holocaust.

In part II, McGlothlin interprets the failure of the narrator in Peter Schneider’s Vati to come to terms with his father’s past to point at the text’s deconstruction of its own project of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. In the discussion of Niklas Frank’s Der Vater, the focus lies on the role of the mother within Väterliteratur who performs the...