Born under Auschwitz: Melancholy Traditions in Postwar German Literature by Mary Cosgrove (review)

The author of Born under Auschwitz: Melancholy Traditions in Postwar German Literature is plainly aware that the melancholy trope may seem like an almost controversial topic for a literary study on German post-Holocaust memory discourses. After all, melancholy as commonly understood describes a pathological condition causing a disintegration of conscious experience and hence one that points toward an inability to engage actively with and to accept the legacy of the past. In that sense, the authors under discussion—Günter Grass, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Peter Weiss, W.G. Sebald, and Iris Hanika—would seem to use melancholy as an excuse for not rising to their obligation to acknowledge the suffering of others and for turning away from the evil perpetrated by Nazi Germany. But Cosgrove justifies the book’s focus on melancholy by clarifying how the term has narrowed in the psychoanalytical discourse since the 1960s. At that time, critics began to extrapolate out of Freud’s seminal 1917 essay on “Mourning and Melancholy” too strict a dichotomy, describing melancholy as an obscure, psychopathological mood disorder that was then pitted against the notion of mourning, which appeared clear and legible. The problem with melancholy thus understood is that it opens the stage for a “sadness without cause,” which, as Cosgrove writes, “fails to produce the alibi of a convincing lost object and thus defies rational explanation” (18). Other negative aspects of melancholy came to the fore when the Mitscherlichs, in 1967, associated melancholy with narcissism, Hitler, and the economic miracle as the external sign of repression, even while acknowledging melancholy as a crucial step in the process of mourning.

Cosgrove attempts to remedy these rather one-sided psychoanalytic representations and misconceptions of melancholy by turning her attention to the “timehonored European melancholy traditions that are often anchored in optimistic humanist periods” (2). The latter enjoyed great prominence in the early 1960s among writers and scholars working in Germany. Indeed, all the novels discussed in her book make explicit reference to iconographic renderings and historical depictions of melancholy. Most notably, the author discusses the various uses and adaptations of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I in all but one of the texts under scrutiny. What Cosgrove’s readings reveal, then, is the surprising range and the great conceptual and rhetorical significance of the melancholy tradition as a “vessel for ethical Holocaust memory” (11). As Cosgrove maintains: “The self-reflexive focus on the limitations of language in discourses on and about melancholy suggests a certain structural kinship between the age-old task of writing about melancholy and the more recent task of writing about the Holocaust” (7). This “structural kinship” is, according to Cosgrove, based on the performative potential that melancholy and memory discourse have in common. After all, they are both subjective and overdetermined in the sense that they critically reflect upon and at the same time foreground the limits of aesthetic representation. Moving beyond a merely thematic discussion of melancholy, Cosgrove thus shows how postwar German authors mobilize melancholy’s performative potential as a literary discourse that demands to be interpreted and as part of a larger quest to create an ethically appropriate poetics of post-Holocaust remembrance.

The greatest strength of Born under Auschwitz is its careful and erudite analysis of a range of thematic intricacies, such as the distinctive treatments of melancholy depending on whether the narrator (or author) speaks from the perspective of the perpetrator or the victim, as a man or a woman, as an individual or a collective, etc. Clearly, Cosgrove’s analysis goes along with a keen analytical grasp of the theoretical and conceptual issues involved in the problem of melancholy. For instance, her reading of Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance contributes to the critical discussion of melancholy, which has so far intersected with gender primarily on masculinity, by showing how Weiss’s novel foregrounds the limitations of traditional masculine melancholy while creating an image of the mother that points toward a...