Maria Ritter. Return to Dresden. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. xxviii + 210pp. $28.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57806-596-7.
Reviewed by Andy Spencer (Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures, Ohio State University)
Published on H-German (March, 2005)
A Therapeutic Memoir
Maria Ritter's memoir Return to Dresden will be of interest to those who believe in the agency of angels and the likelihood of miracles, as both are called upon to explain the seemingly intractable. Let us be clear at the outset, and also fair to the author, and stress that Ritter did not set out to create a work of historical research, nor, indeed, an example of popular history writing, but rather a book that recounts "an effort to create a witness for healing and living" (p. xxi). She calls her memoir a "reconstructed, subjective autobiography" (p. xx), the writing of which clearly functioned as a form of therapy for the writer, who has never been able to reconcile the trauma of her childhood first under the National Socialists, and then the occupying Soviet forces, with the knowledge that she is "not seen as a victim in the eyes of the world" (p. 137). Graham Greene, albeit in a different context, also called writing "a form of therapy," but neither this aspect of the memoir, nor the foregrounding of the subjective, excuse the sloppiness which sees Kristallnacht dated as October 1939, or the vague allusion to Leipzig's Völkerschlachtdenkmal as "a huge war memorial from Napoleon's time erected during the last century" (p. 118). Kristallnacht was, of course, in 1938, and the memorial, while commemorating victory over Napoleon, was officially opened by the Kaiser in October, 1913, one hundred years after that victory. Attentive editors are, apparently, hard to find, but more crucially, these slips are simply the most obvious examples of the dangerously loose way in which historical references are treated as addenda to Ritter's own recreated history.
Ritter is a clinical psychologist who lives in San Diego but was born in Breslau (Wroclaw) in 1941. Her father was a minister in the Methodist Church, as was her maternal grandfather, and as is her husband. After her father had been drafted into the German army, the remaining family members, Maria, her mother, and her three older brothers, fled the city in May 1944. They made their way to Dresden to Maria's maternal grandmother, only for the raids of February 1945 to lay waste to their home there and kill both the grandmother and an aunt. From there it was on to Leipzig and the paternal grandfather and then, in 1949, over to the West, where Maria's mother was to run a children's home sponsored by the Methodist Church. Maria's father never returned from the war and the family later learned that he had been killed in April 1945. In 1965 Maria married and the following year she and her husband emigrated to the United States.
Such is the historical framework for the story Ritter tells. The impetus for committing this attempt at a family history to paper was a visit to Dachau undertaken in 1996 and the inevitable questions that visit prompted: How much did my parents know? Why, as people of faith, did they not protest? Why were the children told so little? Most importantly, Ritter wants to investigate the psychological trauma she herself has suffered as a result of her own ignorance, which cloaks her earliest experiences.
Thus, in 1998 Ritter and her husband set off for Europe to visit the sites of her childhood and it is this trip that serves as the organizing principle for the book's narrative. Again, this technique might have proved effective were it not for the fact that it is clear already from the introduction and the prologue, in which Ritter is given a mitzvah for her journey by a Jewish patient (a patient who, predictably, reappears at the book's conclusion to offer "closure" to the narrative), that this is most emphatically the story of a successful quest by the writer. The effect of this technique on the work is to smooth over and neutralize those incidents and insights which threaten to derail that quest. One method, alluded to at the outset of this review, is to ascribe supernatural agency to events: Ritter's mother's assertions that their survival in Dresden "was a miracle" and that "Maybe God saved us for a purpose" are allowed to stand (p. 86). Alternatively, at certain moments when a line of enquiry appears to be leading to a challenging insight, Ritter breaks off the narrative with a reference to a transparently innocent and wholesome panacea: a children's game, for example, or a home-cooked meal. Nowhere is this pattern more jarringly obvious than at the end of the last chapter, which finds Ritter ruminating on her quest. It is as if the author recognizes the shortcomings of her own work as the pondering writer--instead of pursuing her thought process further--is called back to "reality." The chapter concludes with the lines: "We better get going, Maria! Friedel is waiting with supper for us. She promised Dampfnudeln, dumplings, and Weinsosse" (p. 208)! However uncomfortable things might become, there will always be a Friedel in the kitchen to cook up the local specialty of dumplings in wine sauce.
When no such evasions are possible, Ritter is not averse to unquestioningly offering a contentious rationale deserving of closer scrutiny. She relativizes the support of the Methodist Church for the Nazi regime (her own grandfather is quoted as having described Hitler as a "corner stone--a miracle before our eyes" (p. 63)), by arguing that the genocidal policies of the government were "not widely known," that "nobody was allowed to talk about any suspicions they had" (p. 63), that "the slightest comments were punishable by arrest and prison" (pp. 63-64). Proof of these claims is offered in the form of the fates of the July 20, 1944 conspirators. In the face of this evidence Ritter draws the disappointing conclusion that "there are no answers to be found" (p. 64) to her own questions. To further illustrate her point, on the same page she goes on to compare implicitly the "necessary and prescribed silence" of those times with regard to the political situation with an anecdote about her father returning on furlough from the front with a goose and admonishing the children to say nothing about it lest the neighbors "be jealous or invite themselves to the feast" (p. 64). The narrative theme is silence as a game. When everything is shrouded in this way, to speak of singular or infamous events is to paint a one-sided picture.
Such platitudes regarding the National Socialist period have been heard many times before, and while the reader can certainly empathize with Ritter's attempts to come to grips with her own history, recent works by writers from Günter Grass to W. G. Sebald show that this is an extremely complex issue, an issue in need of a much more nuanced treatment than is to be found here.
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Citation:
Andy Spencer. Review of Ritter, Maria, Return to Dresden.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10289
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