The Child's View of the Third Reich in German Literature: The Eye among the Blind (review)

Although variable in quality, this book is, in sum, a crucial study of a major topic—the role of young people in the imaginative writing dealing with the Third Reich. The strengths of this scholarly tome, in fact, far outweigh its weaknesses. The study's first two chapters, along with its excellent introduction, which comprise two-thirds of the body of the text, are path-breaking and most important in their discussion of such major authors as Christa Wolf and Günter Grass and such neglected ones as Gert Hofmann and Anna Gmeyner. Most importantly, Pinfold never boxes herself into a corner or becomes reductive: by juxtaposing the corrupted child of the first chapter with the more innocent child of the second chapter, she is able to create a dialogue that sheds new light on her theme. As the despotism of the Third Reich and its ensuing World War and the Holocaust were, alas, supreme equalizers, children along with adults would fall victim to the events between 1933 and 1945 and it is the specific treatment of these young people, by an authoritarian and eliminationist regime, as depicted primarily in post-war imaginative writing, that so effectively engages Pinfold.

She begins with an apposite and seamlessly written contextual introduction (1-32), tracing the role of the child in European thought and culture over the last centuries, thus preparing the reader for the study's first two dialogical chapters. Beginning with a liberating Rousseau, and going on to such important Romantics as Wordsworth and Jean Paul, she concludes with Freud and the importance of an eroticized adolescence in twentieth-century thought and culture.

The heart of the first chapter is a synthetic treatment of Nazi propaganda on the importance of the child in a National Socialist state (50-68) and Pinfold's respective discussions of Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster (68-72) and Gert Hofmann's Unsere Eroberung and Veilchenfeld (72-88). Both authors explore the educational system which is described as indoctrinating students and employing them for its nefarious purposes. As Pinfold states: "It is natural that children brought up at this time should feel a more passionate attachment to the ideals of the Nazi era than their parents, for this is their normality and they know no other" (71). Pinfold is to be congratulated particularly for her in-depth treatment of the often neglected Hofmann—he died in 1993—who repeatedly uses the narrator's voice to take on the direct qualities of children who have eyewitnessed historical tragedy. She wisely employs Walter Grünzweig's view of Hofmann as critiquing Helmut Kohl's rationalizing notion of the "Gnade der späten Geburt" ("the innocence of being born late") and shows that the post-war concept of "Stunde Null" ("zero hour") was unsuitable for a generation that had been educated in Nazi schools, because in many cases they "'had unconsciously inherited Hitler's legacy that determines present society'" (76).

In the second chapter, Pinfold draws attention to another overlooked writer, Anna Gmeyner whose Manja. Ein Roman um fünf Kinder was published in 1938 (98-113). Appearing just prior to the outbreak of war, the novel "is a piece of perfectly sincere wishful thinking that portrays the values Gmeyner hopes will prevail in Germany to avoid catastrophe" (110). Pinfold's ten-page continued discussion of Kindheitsmuster is most convincing: she analyzes Nelly Jordan's "inner space" (131) or the Wordsworthian "eye among the blind," of the study's sub-title, to show how Nelly's humanity allows her freedom to remain, in part, uncorrupted (125-35). The chapter's final ten pages (147-58) deal with Oskar's role in Günter Grass's Die Blechtrommel. As an extension of her discussion of Grass's Hundejahre from earlier...