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Chapter 7 - Martin Walser???s Ein springender Brunnen (A Gushing Fountain)
- Edited by Stuart Taberner, University of Leeds
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- Book:
- The Novel in German since 1990
- Published online:
- 07 September 2011
- Print publication:
- 01 September 2011, pp 108-122
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Summary
In his 1998 ‘Peace Prize Speech’, Martin Walser complained that authors today are judged primarily for their public statements whilst their literary works are disregarded. This may indeed be especially true for Walser himself, who has the dubious honour of having had two media debates in unified Germany named after him: the ‘Walser–Bubis debate’, or ‘first Walser debate’, which followed his polemic on the way National Socialism is remembered in the same speech, and the ‘second Walser debate’ concerning his novel Tod eines Kritikers (Death of a Critic, 2002) regarding the question of anti-Semitism in this book. His 1998 novel Ein springender Brunnen (A Gushing Fountain) is closely linked to the first debate: the author’s speech can be read as his response to the reception of his autobiographical novel about a childhood and youth during the Nazi period. Literary works, therefore, do form a part of the discussions about the author, but in his opinion reviewers and commentators put contemporary social and political concerns ‘before aesthetics’ and thus neglect the specific quality of literature. Walser’s critique of memory in the Peace Prize Speech runs parallel to this distinction: the ‘spirit of the time’ demands political correctness and creates a hegemonic discourse about the past, which in Walser’s view is opposed to personal and literary memory but also to what he terms German ‘normality’. In this way aesthetics and politics are uncomfortably intermingled in Walser’s controversial speech. The author’s insistence, however, that works of art should be viewed on their own terms is of course one with which literary scholars tend to agree. Questions of aesthetic autonomy are especially pertinent and sensitive when a fictional text depicts a politically contested past. The following analysis asks, then, what the specific qualities of Walser’s literary form of memory are and whether his aesthetic approach is indeed free from memory politics.
Authorial commentary – presenting the past
One of the distinctive features of Walser’s Ein springender Brunnen is the voice of an authorial narrator offering meta-fictional commentary in three short chapters, each entitled ‘Past as present’, at the beginning of each of the three parts of the novel. The narrator describes an aesthetics of presenting the past to which the whole novel corresponds. The past is literally intended to appear as present, as direct experience, unfiltered through later knowledge or judgement. The narrator coins the phrase ‘disinterested interest’ (‘interesseloses Interesse’), which is reminiscent of Immanuel Kant’s theory of aesthetics, often summarised as ‘disinterested pleasure’. The notion of a detached aesthetic perception is applied to the writer’s relationship to the past. This idealist concept of the reception of art, however, cannot easily be transferred to the reconstruction of history with its various political and moral implications and the conflicting interests arising from them. Walser’s narrator, too, knows that it can only be the ‘aim of wishful thinking’ (283) to be able to recreate the past – that is, in the case of Ein springender Brunnen, the experiences of a five- to eighteen-year-old in the years 1932 to 1945 – as present. Yet the narrator maintains that there is a difference between his own approach and other versions of a shared memory of the past. For the latter he uses the metaphors of the museum and play-acting to characterise, first, the fossilising and thus distorting nature of public memory (9), the museum being one of its institutions, and second, the way in which the past is all too often modified to fit present-day requirements (282).
15 - “Secondary Suffering” and Victimhood: The “Other” of German Identity in Bernhard Schlink's “Die Beschneidung” and Maxim Biller's “Harlem Holocaust”
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- By Kathrin Schödel, University of Erlangen, Germany
- Edited by Stuart Taberner, University of Leeds, Karina Berger, University of Leeds
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- Book:
- Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 01 February 2009, pp 219-232
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Summary
IT HAS OFTEN BEEN CLAIMED THAT until the 1990s there had existed a taboo, or at least strict discursive rules in German public discourse, regarding depictions of “Germans as victims,” which made it difficult for Germans to remember and mourn their own wartime suffering. According to this interpretation of the history of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), the taboo was finally lifted in the years following German unification, allowing for the slow emergence of a long-neglected, more differentiated account of the experiences of “normal” Germans during the Nazi period, which is still in need of elaboration today. In this chapter, I examine this version of the history of German public memory as a construct that is closely linked to contemporary discourses of German identity but which also relies on complementary constructions of its “Other.” The obvious counterpart to the apparent new openness of the memory of National Socialism are other forms of public memory, especially the seemingly simplistic and moralistic memory of the Holocaust associated with the generation of '68. Yet I argue that the complementary Other created in recent debates about the need for greater differentiation in German memory discourse is often a particular construction of Jewish identity. To explore the connection between German “secondary suffering” — that is, the notion of a struggle with the memory of German guilt, and calls for a more complex approach to remembering National Socialismand a problematic view of Jewish identity, I examine two very different short stories: Bernhard Schlink's “Die Beschneidung” (The Circumcision, 2000) and Maxim Biller's “Harlem Holocaust” (1990).
13 - “Narrative Normalization” and Günter Grass's Im Krebsgang
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- By Kathrin Schödel, University of Leeds
- Edited by Stuart Taberner, University of Leeds, Paul Cooke, University of Leeds
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- Book:
- German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First Century
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 08 September 2006, pp 195-208
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Wie normal sind die Normalen?” — this question was raised in a 2004 poster campaign sponsored by the charity Aktion Mensch in response to the highly topical debate on the subject of bioethics. The question draws attention to the use of “normality” as a normative standard: what are the criteria by which it is defined and how reliable are they? Normality is, of course, by no means a self-evident truth. Even if the use of the term “normal” naturalizes that which is called normal, normality is a discursive construct. The distinction between the normal and the non-normal is always blurred and contested.
Is there a connection between the discussion of normality in relation to bioethics and the discourse of German “normalization” dealt with in this volume? One of the conventional denotations of “normality” is individual physical and mental health. To draw a parallel between the National Socialist concept of the “gesunder Volkskörper” and the contemporary discourse of the “normal nation” might thus not be entirely illegitimate. Less provocatively — without referring to the racist ideology of a biologically pure nation — this chapter argues that there is a close connection between concepts of a normal and healthy psychological development of the individual and conceptions of national identity within the discourse of a normalization of German history. I begin with some general reflections on the use of the term normal in this discourse and then focus on one aspect: the connection between normalization and narration in historiography and public memory.
Normalising Cultural Memory? The “Walser-Bubis Debate” and Martin Walser's Novel Ein springender Brunnen
- from Berlin
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- By Kathrin Schödel, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg
- Edited by Stuart Taberner, University of Leeds, Frank Finlay, University of Leeds
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- Book:
- Recasting German Identity
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 15 November 2002, pp 67-84
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The controversy which followed Martin Walser's speech on receipt of the Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt on 11 October 1998 was one of the first major debates on practices of remembering the Third Reich and the Holocaust in Germany after the era of Helmut Kohl (1982–1997). It was also the first full-scale discussion among intellectuals attempting to define a new German national identity — or resisting that aim — in what is now often called the Berlin Republic.
In this context it is less important, perhaps, to do full justice to the complex, self-reflexive structure of Walser's speech than to set forth the issues contested in the course of the debate, more or less irrespective of whether Walser actually intended to raise them or not. Key terms and themes of the debate are thus discussed in an analysis that looks in detail at the controversy that ensued rather than the Friedenspreisrede itself.
Walser's speech was largely concerned with a critique of the frenzy of media hype and political advantage-seeking that the author sees as characteristic of the public sphere and especially of public reflections on the Shoah. For Walser, the murder of European Jews has thus been instrumentalised by large sections of the media and by an apparently dominant left-liberal intelligentsia as a means of denying German national identity and maintaining the position of a cultural and political elite.