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

Erin McGlothlin's Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration participates in a new era in both Holocaust scholarship and Holocaust art and literature because it risks parallel analyses of the legacies of the children of survivors and of the children of perpetrators. McGlothlin, a professor in German at Washington University in St. Louis, opens her text with two unforgettable narratives of a quite literal and certainly violent self-inflicted wounding carried out by the fictionalized representations of a child of a victim and the child of a perpetrator. McGlothlin uses these painful stigmata as metaphors for the profundity of the "mark" left by the Holocaust on subsequent generations. "Second-generation texts, whether written from the perspective of the legacy of perpetration or that of survival, access badges, stigmata, and brands that signify Holocaust memory in an attempt to find a language to express the writers' sense of rupture, as well as to build a bridge over the division between the parents' experience of trauma and violation and its effect on the children" (30). These scars reverberate throughout her book and are found among a variety of literary characters and are also written across the landscape of Holocaust memory as well.

McGlothin's solid, clearly written, and well-researched book moves through a series of analyses of second-generation survivor literature (Part I) including works by Thane Rosenbaum, Art Spiegelman, Robert Schindel, Patrick Modiano, and Katja Behrens; in Part II she works through a series of second-generation novels and plays by the children of perpetrators including those of Peter Schneider, Niklas Frank, Joshua Sobol, Bernhard Schlink, and Uwe Timm. Each of the individual, detailed, textual analyses are structured around uncovering the generational tensions that form her central theme. Her summaries of the novels (especially of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader) are graceful and convey the plots, styles, and tones of the texts well. McGlothlin is always careful to situate her readings within general theoretical questions of postmemory, trauma, and the persistence of the past in the present and she always includes sound discussions of the extant literature on any given text.

In her first analysis, of Thane Rosenbaum's Elijah Visible, McGlothlin ably incorporates her reading of the text into a discussion of the mechanisms of trauma that will reverberate throughout her other examinations. Rosenbaum himself articulates artfully how the legacy of survival and its traumatic after-effects resonate with his multiple character, Adam: "Some family histories are forever silent, transmitting no echoes of discord into the future. Others are like seashells, those curved volutes of the mind—the steady drone of memory always present. All one needs to do is press an ear to the right place" (qtd, in McGothlin 61). McGothlin traces what she terms the "double move of recording rupture and restoring continuity in second-generation Holocaust writing" (65) through Rosenbaum's work. This kind of thematization of what the writers she treats are doing offers clear-headed explications that move just slightly outside the text to investigate what they perform. But there are times when I wished she had moved slightly further outside the text. For example in her reading of Robert Schindel's Gebürtig I found myself wishing she had included a discussion of the general context of the second generation in Austria. There have been such rich works on, for instance, Kurt Waldheim and the general question of Austria's attempts to come to terms with its past, that a larger political and historical contextualization of these themes would have enriched McGlothlin's reading of the novel. Matti Bunzl's Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth Century Vienna is a book that does just this kind of work.

McGlothlin's examination of Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder beautifully incorporates the crucial geographical lens through which Modiano's narrator conducts his search for a girl lost in France during the war. Her headings "Atlas of Absence" and...