Poland and Post-Memory in Second-Generation German Jewish Fiction

This article discusses three contemporary German Jewish novels by second-generation writers that describe the search of their middle-aged protagonists, also children of Holocaust survivors of Polish descent, for their parents' traumatic past. This search takes the protagonists of Jeannette Lander's Die Töchter [The Daughters], Lothar Schöne's Das Jüdische Begräbnis [The Jewish Burial], and Minka Pradelski's Und da kam Frau Kugelmann [Here Comes Mrs. Kugelmann] on a journey to Poland. These fictive journeys into the past are, like the organized group tours to the death camps, structured around destruction and redemption. Poland and Israel, as diametrically opposed spaces, represent the past and the future of Jewish life respectively. Although only in Und da kam Frau Kugelmann is this redemption associated with Israel, in all three texts the journey to Poland is portrayed as a prerequisite for healing transgenerational trauma and for facilitating new self-understanding. The article demonstrates that this belief in the redemptive power of the journey to Poland is grounded in the authors' generational affiliation as well as in their intimate connection to Poland.