Adrian Del Caro, Janet Ward, eds. German Studies in the Post-Holocaust Age: The Politics of Memory, Identity, and Ethnicity. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003. xiv + 244 pp. $21.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-87081-719-9.
Reviewed by Bryan Ganaway (Department of History, Presbyterian College)
Published on H-German (December, 2003)
In the preface to this sprawling volume, Adrian Del Caro throws down the gauntlet and proclaims, "it is high time that German studies made itself more accessible, and it is totally unacceptable to retreat into the high ivory tower of high German whenever our profession falls under scrutiny" (p. viii). Although this book is ostensibly about teaching and researching the German language in the wake of the Holocaust, it is perhaps more insightful for the light it sheds on current methodological divisions within the field of German language and literature. Starting as early as the 1920s, most teachers in this field working in North American universities were Germans trained in Germany. When they came to North America, they shared their impressive learning to the benefit of all. They also brought a German conception of the university as a place solely concerned with the production of knowledge, an idea that has perhaps outlived its usefulness. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, non-native specialists broke into the field and shifted the focus of debate beyond linguistics and into literary criticism, anthropology, history, philosophy, mass media, gender, and post-colonial studies. In part this move reflected understandable attempts to halt sliding enrollment and placate angry deans, but it is also a reaction against the mandarins who believed that German had relevance to modern society because it was German.
This volume thus contains the possibility of highlighting the ways German Studies contributes to an understanding of our own multi-cultural society. It also could have set new parameters for debate by staking out terrain on important issues that scholars across disciplines can engage. In Shattered Past, Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer recently accomplished this impressive feat for historians; by surveying the major issues and suggesting interpretive strategies they have provided an invaluable framework for discussion. Unfortunately, the volume under review does not quite reach that level. In the face of the Holocaust industry it is hard to say anything new and original. While the contributors offer some interesting case studies, they do not move conceptually beyond territory already brilliantly covered by Zygmunt Baumann, Christopher Browning, Saul Friedlander, Primo Levi and Peter Novick. Del Caro and fellow editor Janet Ward had the unenviable task of organizing and circumscribing twenty-three short articles of varying quality from scholars in different fields. Based on a conference organized at the University of Colorado, Boulder in the mid-1990s, the contributors give the reader a good idea of the diversity of German studies, but not necessarily of its sharpness.
For example, the short articles are divided into four broad categories, the first of which deals with cultural philosophy and the ideologies of identity. Rainer Hering explores the persistence of Nazi judges into the early years of the Federal Republic. One, Enno Budde, opportunistically joined the Nazis in May, 1933, and then quietly survived their demise. No one paid any attention to him until he refused to prosecute a case against a man accused of distributing anti-Semitic propaganda. Then Hamburg's state Parliament realized he had published his own anti-Semitic articles prior to 1945. They quietly moved him to a civil chamber where he toiled in non-embarrassing obscurity until his retirement. Hering gives us the disturbing image of a man who happily and successfully functioned as both a Nazi and a democrat. In a short, eight-page article he has no time to indicate how representative Budde was or assess the broader significance of this single case study. This article was preceded by historian Robert Pois's piece, The Great War and the Holocaust. Limited to less than ten pages, the author bravely forges ahead and argues that World War I served as a crucible forging hard men who would be able to participate in committing the atrocities of the Holocaust. Pois is to be commended for pushing the explanatory power of this line of reasoning, but it is not a new argument. Vejas Liulevicius's War Land on the Eastern Front (2001) explored it more eloquently and critically. Unfortunately, Pois does not cite Liulevicius or any other source published after 1992, and so fails to address the Goldhagen controversy, Peter Fritzsche's focus on mass politics and the nation, or Alf Luedtke's theory of Alltagsgesichte. His article seems strangely parochial in a volume designed to show the wider relevance of German studies.
The following three sections on post-Holocaust identity debates, poetry and imagery after Auschwitz, and sites of meta-German multiplicity show the same combination of potentially strong articles mixed with weaker contributions. Ward carefully shows how Ray Mueller's film biography exposed Leni Riefenstahl's efforts to control her image in the same way that a director shapes a movie. Riefenstahl's chosen medium of the silver screen becomes the vehicle for a critical examination of her enthusiastic and unrepentant embrace of Nazism. In the same section, Adrian Del Caro usefully employs Paul Celan to point out that speaking German does not make one a German. He argues powerfully that language can be used to engage critically with and challenge the nation as the framework for study. If intellectuals all over Europe spoke German, Del Caro suggests, we need a trans-national framework to understand them. These and similarly intriguing contributions are juxtaposed with straightforward factual essays dealing with Heinrich von Kleist or Norwegian literature of the Nazi period that are only of interest to specialists. While I greatly admire the editors for their commitment to a democratic framework of scholarly production, they may have tried to do too much. By including people from diverse disciplines, scholars young and established, and topics rich and varied, they achieved range at the expense of deep analysis. If the published volume had been limited to eight or nine excellent papers of fifteen or twenty pages, this book could have stood up as a German studies answer to Jarausch and Geyer (speaking of native Germans who have deftly moved beyond a national framework in their scholarship to the benefit of all). Nonetheless, Del Caro and Ward have done a service by suggesting some of the possibilities.
Copyright (c) 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-german.
Citation:
Bryan Ganaway. Review of Caro, Adrian Del; Ward, Janet, eds., German Studies in the Post-Holocaust Age: The Politics of Memory, Identity, and Ethnicity.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2003.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8499
Copyright © 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.