German Culture and the Uncomfortable Past

Representations of National Socialism in Contemporary Germanic Literature

Helmut Schmitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351933827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Beginning with the question of the role of the past in the shaping of a contemporary identity, this volumes spans three generations of German and Austrian writers and explores changes and shifts in the aesthetics of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). The purpose of the book is to assess contemporary German literary representations of National Socialism in a wider context of these current debates. The contributors address questions arising from a shift over the last decade, triggered by a generation change-questions of personal and national identity in Germany and Austria, and the aesthetics of memory. One of the central questions that emerges in relation to the Hitler youth generation is that of biography, as examined through Günter Grass' and Martin Walser's conflicting views on the subject of National Socialism. Other themes explored here are the conflict between the post-war generations and the contributions of that conflict to (West)-German mentality, and the growing historical distance and its influence on the aesthetics of representation.

Soundscapes of the Third Reich – Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde

Helmut Schmitz

The success of Marcel Beyer’s second novel Flughunde¹ is further evidence that there can be little suggestion of the National Socialist past having been put to rest by the events of 1989, both within German literature and a wider reading public. In the two years after its initial publication the book sold 25,000 copies and was widely translated.² Insofar as the fall of the wall coincides with a generation shift, Beyer’s novel signifies a ‘postunification’ transformation in the literary representation of National Socialism towards a ‘literarization’. Flughunde occupies a unique, strange and curious position in contemporary German literature and among representations of National Socialism in particular in that, similar to Ulla Berkéwicz’s novel Engel sind schwarz und weiβ (1992), it is a work of fiction set during the Nazi period written by someone without any direct biographical experience of it. In contrast to Berkéwicz, Beyer, born in 1964, is not one, but two stages removed from biographical involvement in National Socialism. Flughunde differs from Berkéwicz’s novel, and from almost any other literary treatment of National Socialism, in that its narrative concern is not the problem of either a failed or yet to be accomplished ‘Bewältigung’ or ‘Aufarbeitung’ (coming to terms). While Berkewicz’s Engel sind schwarz und weiβ and Schlink’s Vorleser belong to a way of representing National Socialism that aims at understanding their narrators’ own historical implications and thus continue a tradition of awkwardness towards their subject that ultimately derives from a feeling of personal guilt and shame, however mitigated, Beyer’s narrative is predominantly driven by historical interest and fascination. It is thus comparatively free of the overdetermination that usually characterizes literary approaches to ‘coming to terms’. In an essay entitled ‘Eine Haltung des Hörens’ Beyer says of the Third Reich: ‘Ich weiß nicht, wie es mich bedingt – ich möchte zunächst zur Kenntnis nehmen, daß es mich bedingt.’³ The novel’s greatest difference from the literature of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the absence of any Zerknirschungsmentalität, its lack of psychological topicalization or allegation of guilt may also be part of its great success with a younger audience for whom the past can be experienced as relatively disconnected from personal life and questions of personal guilt.

Ever since the Mitscherlichs, extrapolating from individual studies, presented the continuing presence of sedimented fascisms as a problem of collective psychology in their seminal study Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern,⁴ the literary treatment of National Socialism has largely focused on the relationship between the individual and the social structures facilitating National Socialism, exploring the relationship between memory and the ‘inability to mourn’. The second generation which had to come to terms with their parents’ involvement in National Socialism addressed the legacy of the Third Reich by and large as a problem of individual and family biography and personal affliction, exemplified by the series of novels about dead parents from the mid-1970s onwards. The focus of this sort of Bewältigungsliteratur is the present identity of the narrating subject in relation to his/her forbears.⁵ The shift in focus from the Third Reich to the present means that, aside from an essential marginalization of NS victims, the problem of National Socialism hinges on a successful integration of a psychological trauma entailing the possibility of an end to engagement with the past.⁶ In the essay mentioned above, Beyer rejects the reduction of confronting the past to a set of family problems when he maintains that the legacy of National Socialism ‘läßt sich nicht als Thema des Generationenkonflikts abschließen’.⁷ He alleges that the (West) German discourse of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, resulting from the silence of what he refers to as the ‘Schweigegeneration’ and the reaction of their children, silences the victims of National Socialism once more. Due to the silence of the parents, the second generation had to construct all the answers on its own; it turns into the ‘Antwortgeneration’. In the course of this process it ‘verlernt […] langsam das Hören’ because ‘zu hören gibt es ja nichts’. However, these answers conceal another kind of ‘Schweigen’, that of the victims and the survivors who either cannot speak any more or cannot speak about their experience, which is beyond expression.

Beyer’s novel is an attempt to sidestep the tradition of German Bewältigungsliteratur,⁸ an attempt to listen to the ‘Schweigegeneration’, or rather, make it speak and thus make audible the silenced voice of its victims. Flughunde explores the world of National Socialism from the ‘perspective’ of its acoustic manifestation. At the end of the novel it becomes clear that ‘hier nichts Zurückliegendes besprochen wird als eine abgeschlossene Zeitspanne’.⁹

The sound of National Socialism

Flughunde is a narrative in two voices. One belongs to the sound technician Hermann Karnau, the other to Helga Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister’s eldest daughter. Through his obsession with sound, recording and the human voice Karnau gets involved in SS experiments on human beings. Goebbels’s children meet him at several stages and tentatively strike up a relationship until they meet in the final stages of the Third Reich in Hitler’s bunker in Berlin where the children are murdered. The novel concludes with Karnau, having survived the war, listening in 1992 to recordings he made of the children during the last days in the bunker, suggesting that he is heavily implicated in the poisoning of Goebbels’s children.

Flughunde is a novel about the ‘Alltag im Faschismus’ a book about the last days of the war in the Führerbunker, a story about the murder of Goebbels’s children. Above all, it is a novel about the relationship between National Socialism and the acoustic medium of sound recording and sound technology, a novel about the interplay of recording and sound reproduction technology, surveillance and the domination of the human voice, a narrative about the subject which becomes the fascist subject and the subject of fascism. Flughunde charters Karnau’s increasing Faschisierung from hesitant Mitläufer to bestial human experimentor.

Beyer plays a complex narrative game with the boundaries of truth and fiction – the historical Karnau was a guard in Hitler’s bunker, the questions around the poisoning of Goebbels’s children have never been satisfactorily resolved – which leaves the reader in doubt as to the authority of the narrative. The uncertainty is increased by the narrative perspectives, which remain unidentifiable as regards their narrative origin. Not only do both Karnau and Helga narrate their stories in the first person in the present tense; their narratives shift between acute perceptions, dialogue, reflections and recollections. All of this, together with a series of structural devices from repetitions of vocabulary and entire grammatical constructions by several characters to the obviously extradiegetic ordering of both narratives continuously draws attention to the novel’s own constructedness and serves to undermine the authenticity of the voices presented. I will return to this point at the end of this essay.

‘Eine Stimme fallt in die Stille des Morgengrauens ein.’ (9) The opening sentence establishes the world of National Socialism as sound intrusion, facilitated by a pioneering modern technology of loudspeakers and radio which, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, becomes the ‘universalen Maul des Führers’.¹⁰ The novel opens with the main character, Akustiker Hermann Karnau, preparing a stadium for a speech by the Führer. Every corner of the stadium is to be enclosed by the technologically enhanced voice of the speaker:

Allein hier am Rednerpult braucht es sechs Mikrophone: Vier für die Lautsprecherblöcke, welche aus jeder Himmelsrichtung auf das Gelände ausgerichtet werden. Eins dient zum Auffangen von Sonderfrequenzen. Während der Ansprache wird es fortwährend austariert, um bestimmte Effekte der Stimmführung hervorzuheben. (10)

With the help of further hidden ‘Schallempfänger’ an ‘angemessener Raumklang’ is produced. The domination of the enhanced voice even grips the deaf-mute amongst the wounded soldiers present at the rehearsal who cannot hear the speaker but sense him via the vibration of the speakers:

Wenn sie nicht den Sinn der Töne auffassen können, so wollen wir ihnen die Eingeweide durchwühlen. Wir steuern die Anlage aus: die hohen Frequenzen für die Schädelknochen, die niedrigen für den Unterleib. Tief in die Dunkelheit des Bauches sollen die Geräusche dringen. (14)

Beyer topicalizes the essential connection between Hitler’s rise to power and the technological development of sound recording and broadcasting which was then in its infancy. Karnau proudly remarks

Ob er [Goebbels] sich wohl jemals Gedanken darüber gemacht hat, daß er, der große Redner vor den Massen, von solch unbedeutenden Leuten wie mir im höchsen Maße abhängig ist? […] Daß ohne Mikrophone, ohne die riesigen Lautsprecher ihm niemals sein Erfolg beschieden worden wäre? (147–148)

However, whereas Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment interpret the mass media intrusion into everybody’s life as an impoverishment of their subjectivity by the colonizing power of Nazi language,¹¹ Beyer is concerned less with language than with pure sound, volume and pitch of the amplified and recorded voice. Flughunde explores the consequences of National Socialism for the human voice and the human body; the intrusion into the mind is analogous to the sound-wave intrusion into the body. Through Karnau’s sensitive ear National Socialism is above all experienced as a distortion of the voice, the education towards the sound of the Herrenmensch: ‘Wie können diese Kinder noch vor Tagesanbruch solch ein schrilles Organ über sich ergehen lassen […]? Sind sie der festen Überzeugung, daß sich mit der Zeit eine ebensolche Stimme in ihren Kehlen einpflanzen wird?’ (11)

The shrill screams of the Herrenmensch will leave incorrigible markings on the vocal chords:

Weiß er denn nicht, daß jeder Schrei, jede so laut hervorgebrachte Äußerung auf den Stimmbändern eine kleine Narbe hinterläßt? […] und solch ein Mal läßt sich nie wieder zum Verschwinden bringen, die Stimme bleibt markiert bis an das Lebensende. (14–15)

Thus history leaves its (indecipherable) trace on the vocal apparatus of victims and perpetrators alike. It is the thematization of this history that Flughunde is concerned with:

So bilden die Narben auf den Stimmbändern ein Verzeichnis einschneidender Erlebnisse, akustischer Ausbrüche, aber auch des Schweigens. Wenn man sie nur mit dem Finger abtasten könnte, mit ihren Fährten, Haltepunkten und Verzweigungen. Dort, in der Dunkelheit des Kehlkopfs: Das ist deine eigene Geschichte, die du nicht entziffern kannst. (21–22)

From Mitläufer to perpetrator

The above quote illustrates Karnau’s concern with the secret of the human voice, his desire to ‘abtasten’ the vocal chords of humans. Since a human’s personal history, in Karnau’s view, is invisibly inscribed into his/her vocal chords, Karnau’s obsession, ‘dem Geheimnis der Stimme auf die Spur zu kommen’ (48), is a search for the human soul.

At the outset of the novel, Karnau presents himself as a distanced observer of National Socialism, disliking it especially because of its acoustic intrusiveness. From this sound-world Karnau withdraws into the silence of the night and into insignificance. The Flughunde (fruitbats) of the title become a symbol for an existence in secrecy, the grey area between day and night: ‘Nachttiere, Nacht. Eröffnung einer Welt, wo es kein Kampfgeschrei gibt und keine Leibesübungen: ‘Komm schwarze Nacht umhülle mich mit Schatten.’ (20)

Karnau’s objection to National Socialism, however, is based purely on his sensitivity to sound and has no ethical dimension. He displays the same disaffection with crude sounds emitted from his fellow humans: ‘Ein Rülpsen. Da hat jemand gerülpst in meiner Nähe. Und meine Nackenhaare sträuben sich, noch bevor mir die Natur des Geräusches bewußt wird.’ (17) Karnau feels himself to be constantly standing ‘an der Hörfront’ in a war of sounds, experiencing every strong sound as an ‘Angriff’ (23). Karnau, the silent, inconspicuous Mitläufer, reproduces the extermination fantasies of National Socialism: ‘Man müßte die Laute solcher Kreaturen löschen können.’ (18) And a few pages later: ‘Löschen, alles löschen.’ (23)

The origin of Karnau’s obsession with control of the voice and the voice apparatus is an alienating childhood experience of hearing his own recorded voice. He experiences the difference between the ‘innerer Schädelklang’ and the recorded sound as disempowerment, as a lack of power over the modulations of his voice: ‘Die Stimme muß doch formbar sein. […] Es muß doch in den Griff zu bekommen sein, dieses Organ, das jeder Fremde vernehmen kann, […]. (59) The word ‘Griff is indicative of Karnau’s essential need for control, it returns throughout the novel in all its nominal and verbal manifestations in various contexts, as ‘Zugriff, ‘Angriff, ‘Eingriff, and ‘zugreifen’, ‘angreifen’, ‘eingreifen’ respectively.

His need for control leads Karnau to devise ‘[e]ine Karte, auf der auch die unscheinbarsten menschlichen Laute verzeichnet sein müssen’ (27). This acoustic cartography functions as an act of self-protection in two senses: firstly, since it identifies the ‘entstellte Laute’ from whose ‘Zugriff Karnau seeks to protect himself (27), and secondly, it protects his own voice: he is behind and not in front of the recording apparatus. This private defence carried out within the system gradually turns into an enterprise in which Karnau ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Literary Portrayals of National Socialism in Post-Unification German Literature
• Views of History, Views of the State: Günter Grass and the German Past
• ‘Deutsche Geschichte darf auch einmal gutgehen’: Martin Walser, Auschwitz, and the ‘German Question’ from Ehen in Philippsburg to Ein springender Brunnen
• ‘Das korsakowsche Syndrom’: Remembrance and Responsibility in W.G. Sebald
• ‘Die Ungnade der späten Geburt?’ The Theme of National Socialism in Recent Novels by Bernhard Schlink and Klaus Modick
• Elisabeth Reichart’s Nachtmär – The Enduring Nightmare of Austria in the 1990s
• Soundscapes of the Third Reich Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde
• Of Death, Kitsch and Melancholia: Aimée und Jaguar: ‘Eine Liebesgeschichte, Berlin 1943’ or ‘Eine Liebe größer als der Tod’?
• Journey to an Unknown Destination: Gudrun Pausewang’s Transgressive Teenage Novel
• Notes on Contributors