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Reviewed by:
  • Persistent Legacy: The Holocaust and German Studies ed. by Erin McGlothlin, Jennifer M. Kapczynski
  • Elizabeth R. Baer
Persistent Legacy: The Holocaust and German Studies.
Edited by Erin McGlothlin and Jennifer M. Kapczynski. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2016. vii + 319 pages + 27 b/w illustrations. $99.00.

Persistent Legacy: The Holocaust and German Studies emerged from a 2014 symposium held at Washington University, where both the editors of this pioneering text serve as professors. The symposium, Crossing the Disciplinary Divide: Conjunctions in German and Holocaust Studies, featured sixteen invited speakers from German Studies, Holocaust Studies, Jewish Studies, and a range of other disciplines; they represented academic institutions in Germany, Israel, and the USA. Most of those speakers contributed essays to this anthology.

Editors McGlothlin and Kapczynski provide a solid and insightful Introduction, which opens with this stated goal: “The purpose of this volume is to assess the manifold ways in which German studies today engages with the Holocaust and its legacy” (1). They divide the fifteen following essays into six parts: Abiding Challenges; The Holocaust in German Studies in the North American and German Contexts; Disentangling “German,” “Jewish,” and “Holocaust” Memory; Descendent Narratives of Survival and Perpetration; Remediated Icons of Memory; Holocaust Memory in Post- Holocaust Traumas. The titles of these sections reveal the emphasis in the essays on familiar tropes in Holocaust Studies: memory; the limits of representation; memoirs by survivors and, increasingly, by children of perpetrators such as Uwe Timm; the generational impact of trauma; a globalized perspective on the Shoah. The editors assert that “Germanists bear a particular duty in the classroom to address the cultural products and legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust” (1–2), and they devote the volume to “a concerted effort to overcome this disciplinary divide and to provide a productive interface between the fields of German and Holocaust Studies” (5).

The first two essays in the text, by the editors themselves, present the reader with intriguing takes on Holocaust discourse. Kapczynski entitles her chapter “Never Over, Over and Over” to signal her query regarding German society: “Is there an element of infinite deferral inherent in the declarations of ‘never over’?” (21). Or, alternately stated, “one way to read the refrain of ‘never over’ is as a reference to this enduring metadiscursive preoccupation” (22) rather than to view Vergangenheitsbewältigung as a meaningful engagement with the past. Probing the work of Günter [End Page 292] Grass and Frank Schirrmacher, as well as the recent film Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter, and contemporary writers Eva Menasse, Michael Kumpfmüller, and Juli Zeh, Kapczynski is careful to make clear that “coming to terms with the past has great [continuing] merit” and it is “integral to the ‘persistent legacy’ invoked in our title” (21). She concludes with sympathy for an approach to the Holocaust which evolves through generational changes.

McGlothlin, too, engages with generational shifts in scholarship. She opens her essay with a brief and astute account of difference between historians and literary scholars in early approaches to the Holocaust: while the former focused on perpetrators and their documents as authentic sources, the latter studied and taught the narratives of survivors. “For the most part,” she claims, “scholarship views these two dominant subject positions in isolation from each other” (35). To demonstrate the usefulness of juxtaposing the voices of these two groups, McGlothlin analyzes the performance of the “Treblinkalied,” the camp anthem that Jewish prisoners were “forced to sing at daily roll calls” (36), in two films. In Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), the song is vigorously rehearsed aloud by Franz Suchomel, a former SS guard at the Treblinka death camp; McGlothlin describes this performance as a “cruel parody even as it claims documentary value” (38). In the more recent Just the Two of Us (2011), directed by Tzipi Baider, two former prisoners of Treblinka return to the camp and, with some reluctance and in a Yiddish accent, sing the song they had been forced to sing seventy years earlier. McGlothlin notes the value of examining the intertextuality thus demonstrated between the two films. Considering “the narratives of the perpetrators alongside those of the survivors” will “invariably expose the phenomenological gulf that...

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