Midway through Shahar Rozen's 1998 documentary Liebe Perla, the German disability rights activist and researcher Hannelore Witkofski is shown visiting the home of Wilhelm Brasse in Żywiec, Poland, not far from the town of Oświęcim and the former National Socialist killing center and labor camp complex Auschwitz-Birkenau. Witkofski has been charged by her friend, the Auschwitz survivor Perla Ovitz, with a mission: to locate film footage taken of Ovitz and her family, “the Jewish ‘Lilleput Troupe from Hungary,’” during their imprisonment in Auschwitz. As Ovitz describes earlier in the film, the SS doctor Josef Mengele, who was notorious for his deadly, pseudoscientific experiments on prisoners, took an interest in the family of entertainers because of the high rate of dwarfism within it; in fact, the Ovitz (Ovici) family was “the largest recorded dwarf family in the world.” The Ovitzes were also, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “the largest family to enter Auschwitz and to survive intact,” a phenomenon that Perla Ovitz, herself a little person, attributes to the value that the family held for Mengele's medical experimentation. At the outset of Liebe Perla, Ovitz stresses to Witkofski that she cannot criticize Mengele, because she feels she owes her survival to him; but at the same time, she describes a particularly painful and humiliating experience in which she, along with her family, was forced by Mengele to stand naked for five hours in front of a panel of doctors while being filmed with a movie camera. She then bids Witkofski to find the film that resulted from this experience and, if possible, to destroy it. Rozen's documentary focuses on Witkofski’s search for the lost footage, a quest that includes, along with what Sara Eigen describes as Witkofski's “road trip to the archives,” her aforementioned visit to Brasse, now an elderly man, whom Witkofski interviews in a local restaurant. Witkofski hopes that Brasse can give her some clue about the origins or current whereabouts of Mengele's footage of the Ovitzes. Although he acknowledges that it is possible that his then-boss or someone else participated in the filming of the family, however, he himself is able to tell her nothing—“nicht ein Wort” (not one word)—about it, since as he says, “ich war ja nicht dabei” (I wasn't there). Witkofski's visit with Brasse yields no information whatsoever about the missing footage.

I.

ONE OF THE MOST persistent challenges for scholars who research and teach about the Holocaust is the question of how to balance the voices, perspectives, and narratives of the victims and survivors with those of the perpetrators. Historians in particular, whose accounts of the Holocaust have until relatively recently relied chiefly on the prolific documents, narratives, and interpretive frames of the Nazi perpetrators, have recognized this as a recurrent dilemma attendant to their inquiry. As Mark Roseman writes, “history (outside Israel) has been particularly slow as a discipline to take the Nazi victims seriously as sources of information, and has tended to focus much more heavily on the records left behind by the perpetrators.” Jeffrey C. Blutinger attributes the bias toward perpetrators’ accounts to the nature of contemporary historiography, which tends, “particularly in classroom teaching, to focus on historical actors” and which “leads us into a false dichotomy between oppression and resistance, implicitly disparaging those who for whatever reason did not resist but who suffered and died nonetheless.” In recent years, historians of the Holocaust have made earnest and fruitful efforts to correct their partiality toward the voices of the perpetrators, as demonstrated by deliberate attempts on the part of scholars such as Christopher Browning and Saul Friedländer to write history based on Jewish testimony and collective experience. However, as Browning acknowledges, the recent historiographical turn toward the victim and survivor still presents persistent challenges:

I.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS VOLUME is to assess the manifold ways in which German studies today engages with the Holocaust and its legacy. Although from the vantage of today, the validity of the Holocaust as a subject in German studies may seem obvious, it has by no means always been a given that North American Germanists should pay deliberate attention to representations of the Nazi genocide, in either their scholarship or their teaching. In fact, the development of this disciplinary focus has a long and complex history that continues to unfold today. While it is not possible to locate the origins of this engagement in a single catalyzing moment or figure, one important starting point is the publication in the Autumn 1978 volume of Unterrichtspraxis of an article entitled “The Germanist and the Holocaust.” Written by University of Massachusetts in Boston scholar Alfred Hoelzel (1934–96), the article urges university-level instructors of German to offer general education courses about the Holocaust taught in English using chiefly literary texts. “We Germanists,” Hoelzel writes, “have a special expertise—and, therefore, a special responsibility—for teaching the Holocaust.” With this statement, Hoelzel, an Austrian-born Jew who fled Nazi persecution in 1939, argues for a deliberate and targeted introduction of Holocaust studies to the general university curriculum in the United States and elsewhere; moreover, he makes the case that Germanists, in their role as interpreters of German history and culture, are precisely the people to accomplish such a task. He maintains that scholars of German are especially poised to offer a critical introduction and evaluation of the events and experience of the Holocaust by virtue of their expertise with imaginative literature, which, according to Hoelzel, “cuts through the data, logic, and empirical evidence of the historian and the social scientist to mediate a more direct, intuitive understanding of truth and reality—particularly the inner reality of the psyche, of emotion, and of human interactions.” In addition to possessing unique facility with this material, Germanists bear a particular duty in the classroom to address the cultural products and legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust, something Hoelzel notes that his colleagues are hesitant to do or often even resist outright, preferring to focus instead on the crowning achievements of German culture.

Since the late 1980s, and especially continuing after German unification in 1990, there has been a veritable renaissance in German-Jewish literature by writers born after the Holocaust. This flowering of literature by Jews who either live in Germany or write in German has prompted some critics to posit the question as to whether one can view these developments as the resurrection of the old dream of a ‘German–Jewish symbiosis’. The notion of a symbiosis, which dominated discourse on Germans and Jews in the first half of the twentieth century, holds that the interaction betweens Jews and the greater German society in which they lived might result in mutual improvement: German culture might be enriched by its Jewish minority, while Jews in Germany might participate fully in German society and at the same time express their Jewish identity. After the Holocaust, Jewish intellectuals took a hard look at this old dream and declared it to be largely mythical; Gershom Scholem claimed that the notion of a symbiosis was a self-deceptive monologue among Jews never attended to by a German audience, while Dan Diner characterised the post-war relations between Germans and Jews as a ‘negative symbiosis’ in which the two groups were joined together in ‘a kind of communality of opposites’. But the new wave of German-Jewish writing that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, led by writers such as Barbara Honigmann, Esther Dischereit, Maxim Biller, Katja Behrens and Rafael Seligmann, seemed to indicate a sea change in the participation of Jews in German culture, giving rise to the hope for a re-establishment of a symbiotic connection and, with that, the normalisation of relations between Germans and Jews in the Berlin Republic.

Detective Stories

In Katja Behrens's 1993 short story, “Arthur Mayer oder das Schweigen” (“Arthur Mayer, or The Silence,” 2002), the autobiographical narrator becomes aware of a neglected stone monument that commemorates Arthur Mayer, a Jewish doctor whose family, prior to the Holocaust, had lived in her small German town for over 200 years. The text of the monument reads: “In memory of Dr. Arthur Mayer. Born 20 January 1888, died at Auschwitz. We remember him in place of all those who lost their lives for political, racial, or religious reasons. The Citizens of Town S” (Behrens, “The Silence,” 34). The narrator is intrigued by the monument, which she had never before noticed, and its memorialization of the town's former doctor, which, although it lists his death as occurring in Auschwitz, characterizes him as the sole representative of a mass of people who died (or, as the German original phrases it, “had to leave their lives”) for unclear reasons in vague circumstances in an unnamed event.