A different Optic – Challenging Collective Scripts and Templates

The following section focuses on Rosa’s inherently transnational narrative in the context of contemporary German Holocaust remembrance and (post-)Soviet narratives about the Second World War. I will argue that the issues of Holocaust remembrance and Jewish identity bring out the full force of Rosa’s contrapuntal memory, which serves to decentralise and destabilise core assumptions connected to these two issues. Rosa’s recollection contextualises the Holocaust within a transnational network, in which various instances of anti-Semitic violence intersect with major events of 20th_-

421 _{Sebastian Wogenstein, ‘Topographie des Dazwischen’, p. 78.} 422 _{Terri Tomsky, ‘From Sarajevo to 9/11’, p. 49.}

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century Russian and Eastern European history. Rosa’s transnational narrative contributes to a decentring of the genocide of Europe’s Jews as the pivotal experience of Jewish suffering in the 20th century. It furthermore exposes the ritualised and exculpatory dynamics that underlie Germany’s efforts to come to terms with the past, alongside the blindspots of (post-)Soviet memory discourses.

Rosa’s birth coincides with a major pogrom, and this constellation foreshadows her life story, which is shaped by recurring experiences of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism: “Der Anfang? Die erste Erinnerung? Der Schrei eines Kleinkindes. Das Kleinkind bin ich. Das Klirren der Fensterscheiben in der Synagoge am anderen Ende der Stadt” (DbG, 41). The pogrom emerges as a key topos and event in her life story. Rosa is subjected to various forms of prejudice and persecution, ranging from everyday racism, verbal and physical abuse, and targeted discrimination to policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Holocaust appears as the climax of a long and ongoing narrative, in which certain patterns of exclusion, persecution and violence seem to endlessly repeat themselves. Rosa’s narrative perspective thus queries the status of the Holocaust as the traumatic core of 20th-century Jewish existence. Her perspective reflects the fact that she only experienced the Holocaust from a geographical distance – being trapped inside the Siege of Leningrad, she is not present when the German troops murder her parents and wipe out her birthplace. While Rosa is therefore not a first-hand witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust, she is directly and physically affected by the pogroms during the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War. These experiences constitute her indelible life trauma which is suppressed by herself and her husband Naum, and finds expression in physical symptoms, nightmares and behavioural patterns that are transmitted transgenerationally: “Jahrzehntelang habe ich mich bemüht, die Bilder jener Zeit aus meinem Gedächtnis zu bannen. In meinen Träumen suchen sie mich heute noch heim” (DbG, 85). On the rare occasions when Rosa remembers the pogroms, many of the scenes resemble the established iconography of the Holocaust: windows are shattered, Jews are shown hiding in the attic, they are rounded up in a synagogue before being burnt alive (DbG, 85ff.). One could argue that, by using these topoi in a different setting, Rosa’s narrative places the Holocaust in a historical, visual, and narrative continuum that turns the anti-Semitic pogroms into premediations of the genocidal atrocities that followed.423 _{The Holocaust}

423 _{On the concept of premediation see Astrid Erll, ‘Remembering across Time, Space, and Cultures:}

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is bound up in an exchange of images that reaches across time and space, and this entanglement questions both the event’s unspeakability and its singularity.

However, Rosa’s experiences of suffering are not exclusively tied to her Jewishness. The construction of her life-narrative is centred on the German invasion of Russia and the Siege of Leningrad, which make up a significant part of her story. This is noteworthy, since Rosa does not suffer as a Jew, but as a Russian in these sections of her narrative. Nonetheless, her Jewishness still plays into her experience of the war, as it makes her more vulnerable – for the Germans, she is not just an enemy, but also a possible target of extermination policies. However, Rosa’s hatred of the Germans, and her refusal to speak German although she is a translator, is motivated by the cruel and inhumane behaviour of the German troops towards the Russian – not the Jewish – population:

Ich denke an die Deutschen, die wenige Kilometer entfernt in ihren Unterkünften sitzen und warten, bis es uns nicht mehr gibt [my emphasis]. Sicherlich essen sie Sauerkraut und Würste, trinken Bier und lachen über die russischen Untermenschen, die lieber in ihrer alten Hauptstadt krepieren, anstatt sich zu ergeben. Ich gebe mir das Versprechen, keinen deutschen Satz mehr zu übersetzen. Kein deutsches Wort soll jemals wieder über meine Lippen kommen (DbG, 272).

Rosa’s use of the personal pronoun “uns” demonstrates her strong identification with the plight of the Russians – she sees herself not as a Jewish Holocaust survivor but as a Russian survivor of the Siege of Leningrad: “Man sprach von mehr als sechshunderttausend Verhungerten und von über neunhunderttausend Gefallenen. Gefallenen an der Leningrader Front. Für uns, die Überlebenden [my emphasis], war jeder Morgen, an dem wir aufwachten, ein Sieg” (DbG, 283). Her memories of the German invasion and the siege of Leningrad unsettle the idea that Rosa’s suffering is necessarily and exclusively tied to Jewishness,424 further decentring the Holocaust as the most incisive experience of Rosa’s Jewish life. This gains further importance in the context of Germany’s culture of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, in which Rosa is repeatedly assigned the role of Jewish victim. Casting herself as a survivor of the siege allows her to destabilise the nexus between Jewishness and suffering, while also

Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, pp. 109-138, and Astrid Erll, ‘Literature, Film,

and the Mediality of Cultural Memory’.

424 _{Stuart Taberner arrives at a similar evaluation when he stresses that Rosa’s “persecution as a Jew” is}

“emphatically not the only” element that constitutes her personal history, see Stuart Taberner, ‘Vladimir Vertlib, Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur: Performing Jewishness in the New Germany’, in: Stuart Taberner and Lyn Marven (eds.), Emerging German-language Novelists of the Twenty-first

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integrating her experience into a more heroic narrative: she reads her survival as a “Sieg” – she is a victor, not a victim. While the connection to Leningrad stabilises a heroic self-image, it also allows Rosa to distance herself from the provincial, backward and blatantly Jewish shtetl identity that she grew up with: “Ach, wie haßte ich diese Provinzjüdlein mit ihrer behäbigen Selbstgefälligkeit und dieser Städlpanik, so als wäre die Zeit der Verfolgung nicht allemal vorbei” (DbG, 123). Rosa despises the

shtetl Jews, who have not yet understood that a new era has dawned. For her,

Leningrad embodies the utopia of a cosmopolitan socialism, which knows no Jews but only good Soviet citizens and promises to break the shackles of provenance, prejudice, and persecution. These hopes are crushed as the narrative progresses, but Rosa’s positive identification with Leningrad (not the Soviet Union!) remains unchanged. This underscores the importance of local attachment in Rosa’s otherwise transnational story, demonstrating the need for what Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney have called “multi-scalarity” in the context of transnationalism.425 _{They promote an approach that}

assumes the “mutual construction of the local, national and global” instead of seeing them as separate entities.426 Such a perspective is useful for Rosa’s narrative, which is defined by clashes between various memorial cultures and national outlooks, alongside strong localised tension between the periphery – as a space of tradition, backwardness and inescapable persecution – and the centre as a space of cosmopolitanism, Jewish emancipation, and an urban bourgeois culture that promises to level out all differences. Finally, Rosa’s focus on Leningrad introduces her German listeners – and the reader – to a contrapuntal perspective on the Second World War. Brigid Haines points out that Rosa’s “different optic […] illuminates one of German historiography’s blind spots: the genocidal Leningrad siege”.427 _{While the image of the “blind spot” is}

exaggerated in the case of Leningrad,428 it is true that Rosa’s interpretation of the war experience deviates from the German script. The Russian perspective is exemplified

425 _{Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney, ‘Introduction’, p. 5.} 426 _{Ibid., p. 5.}

427 _{Brigid Haines, ‘Poetics of the “Gruppenbild”’, p. 237.}

428 _{The status of Leningrad within the broader framework of Hitler’s destruction campaign has been}

hotly debated among German historians, as the following article demonstrates: Gerhart Hass, ‘Die deutsche Historiografie und die Belagerung Leningrads (1941-1944)’, Zeitschrift für

Geschichtswissenschaft 54.2 (2006), pp. 139-162. A growing awareness of the genocidal strategy

driving the siege has trickled down from the realm of academia into the broader cultural arena, as is shown by the following two articles in major German newspapers: Jörg Ganzenmüller, ‘Ein stiller Genozid’, DIE ZEIT Online, 15 January 2004 <http://www.zeit.de/2004/04/A-Belagerung_L> [accessed: 23 June 2016]; Oliver das Gupta, ‘Als die Menschen Leim und Ratten aßen’, Süddeutsche

Zeitung Online, 24 January 2014 <http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/blockade-von-leningrad-im-

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in Rosa’s summary of a speech delivered by Stalin on the 3rd _{of July 1941, shortly after}

the end of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact:

‘Wir müssen alle unsere Kräfte mobilisieren, um den bösartigen und hinterlistigen Feind aus unserem Land zu verjagen, wir müssen in zertreten wie eine Schlange, ihn vernichten wie unsere Vorfahren im Mittelalter die Armeen des Deutschritterordens vernichtet hatten, die Nowgorod bedrohten! So wie wir Napoleon 1812 verjagt haben. Seid standhaft, Brüder und Schwestern!’ So oder so ähnlich sprach der Diktator (DbG, 235).

Stalin’s speech draws on a deep-seated “narrative template” in Russian collective memory which the sociologist James V. Wertsch calls the “Expulsion of Foreign Enemies”:429 _{throughout history, Russia has been repeatedly and unlawfully attacked}

by various outsiders (including the Deutschritterorden, Napoleon and now the Germans) and brought to the brink of utter destruction. However, in the end, Russia always heroically prevailed, rising from the ashes as an even greater nation. We can clearly detect elements of this template in Stalin’s speech and in Rosa’s description of the siege, which also delivers a tale of heroic defiance and survival. As Aleida Assmann has pointed out, this template has led to a specific perspective on the Second World War in the Soviet context, which is diametrically opposed to the German way of dealing with the past:

We can distinguish today between two memory policies, a traditional and a new one. The traditional one is based on pride and the fortification of a positive and heroic self- image. The new one is more complex, as it includes also the responsibility for historical crimes, thereby acknowledging the victims of former state terror. In Germany the globally recovered memory of the unprecedented crime of the Holocaust has led to the historical novelty of adopting a ‘negative memory’ premised on guilt and responsibility.430

Although the Russian template has probably changed with the collapse of the so-called Iron Curtain, Rosa’s narrative confronts her (intra- and extradiegetic) German audience with the problematic tale of “pride and the fortification of a positive and heroic self-image”. By bringing Rosa’s Russian perspective together with the German approach, the novel stages a struggle between these two templates, which brings into focus their very existence. As the decentring counterpoint to the German discourse of guilt, responsibility and atonement, Rosa’s Russian angle foregrounds the siege of

429 _{See James V. Wertsch, ‘Collective Memory and Narrative Templates’, Social Research: An}

International Quarterly 75.1 (2008), pp. 133-156, pp. 142f.

430 _{Aleida Assmann, ‘Europe’s Divided Memory’, in: Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind and Julie}

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Leningrad and tales of heroic survival. Her narrative demonstrates that the perception and memory of historical events is often mediated by powerful templates, which do not necessarily function on a conscious level.431 Rosa’s particular and “contrapuntal” memory therefore exposes the (unconscious) scripts that underlie personal and collective acts of remembrance, both in the Russian and the German case.

While challenging the German, guilt-centred script, Vertlib’s novel is equally wary of the heroic Soviet narrative: whereas Germany’s memory of the Second World War is dominated by an awareness of Jewish victimisation and German perpetration, the official post-war stance in the Soviet Union was for a long time premised on the suppression of Jewish suffering.432 Rosa experiences this first-hand when she visits her home town of Witschi after the end of the war, whose Jewish community has been completely wiped out (except for one survivor). She decides to commission a commemorative plaque for the Jewish victims, among them her parents, and comes up with the following text: “An dieser Stelle wurden im August 1941 alle Juden von

Witschi von den faschistischen Unmenschen ermordet. Sie wurden Opfer des deutschen Hasses und Rassenwahns [italics in the original text]” (DbG, 294).

However, this dedication is inacceptable for the new director of the Witschi sovkhoz who instead wants to commemorate “die in den Jahren der deutschen Besatzung 1941-

1944 in Witschi von den Faschisten ermordeten 1483 Sowjetbürger [italics in the

original text]” (DbG, 298). When Rosa insists on the particularity of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, the official reacts with anger and anti-Semitic prejudice, which creates a parallel between German and Soviet traditions of anti-Semitism: “Warum wollt ihr Juden immer etwas Besonderes sein? Selbst im Leid wollt ihr besser sein als wir!” (DbG, 305). This episode highlights the specific dynamics of the Soviet and, more broadly speaking, Eastern European post-war discourse, which was dominated by heroism and competitive victimhood. The general refusal to remember the genocide of the Jews also resulted from the population’s complicity in some of the Nazi’s

431 _{This point is also stressed by Wertsch who states that narrative templates “operate at a level that can}

be called ‘deep collective memory’”, and are thus not easily accessible on a conscious level and usually resistant to change, see James V. Wertsch, ‘Collective Memory’, in: James V. Wertsch and Pascal Boyer (eds.), Memory in Mind and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 117-137, p. 130.

432 _{For a concise introduction to Holocaust memory and historiography in the (post-)Soviet context see}

John Klier, ‘The Holocaust and the Soviet Union’, in: Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the

Holocaust (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 276-295 and Thomas C. Fox,

‘The Holocaust under Communism’, in: Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust, pp. 420- 439.

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genocidal atrocities. The sole Witschi survivor, Isaak Beigel, repeatedly points this out to Rosa, but she recoils from acknowledging the full extent of this collaboration, by refusing to listen to him. Yet, she cannot avoid the personal confrontation with this legacy of complicity, prejudice, and suppression, which effectively hinders any public or private acknowledgement of her losses. Unable to properly mourn the death of her parents, she is forced into melancholic isolation: “Ich war allein [….], weil ich das Denkmal nun immer in meinem Inneren tragen musste, bis an mein Lebensende” (DbG, 306).

It is therefore important to differentiate between various forms of decentring: on the one hand, Holocaust memory is being re-calibrated via Rosa’s narrative which serves a critical purpose in the context of German Holocaust remembrance; on the other hand, the marginalisation of the Holocaust is part of a larger politics of relativisation and suppression in the Soviet context, coupled with a fervent nationalism and continued anti-Semitism. These lines of continuity become apparent in Stalin’s ethnic cleansing campaigns which, for Rosa, conjure up painful memories and comparisons: “[D]ie judenfeindlichen Karikaturen in der Prawda unterschieden sich nur wenig von jenen in Naziblättern, der Antisemitismus auf den Straßen wurde kaum mehr geahndet” (DbG, 353). The Stalinist purges shake Rosa’s belief in a socialist utopia and open her eyes to the realities of totalitarianism. These various levels of comparison and re-calibration need to be disentangled more carefully, by comparing the German and the Soviet position towards Jewish Holocaust victims in the novel: whereas Rosa’s status as a Jewish victim of the Holocaust is not acknowledged in her Soviet environment, her new German surroundings cast Jews as the primary victims of National Socialism, to the extent that no other identity position is available to Rosa as a Jew: “Frau Masur, wie ist es eigentlich für einen russischen Juden, wenn er gerade nach Deutschland übersiedelt, ich meine, nach allem, was Deutsche den Juden angetan haben?” (DbG, 25). Whereas the Soviet discourse seeks to erase all traces of Jewish victimhood, German culture zooms in on Rosa’s Jewish suffering. Rosa is thus forced into a position as the victim par excellence, although the experience of victimisation is not defining for her.

Against this backdrop, Rosa’s unsettling Eastern European perspective has to be understood as an intervention into the dynamics of “a well-intentioned but unreflective

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German culture of Holocaust remembrance” in the book,433 centred on Jewish suffering, German guilt, and a longing for redemption. Many of the elements in Rosa’s story clash with the cornerstones of this culture – the Holocaust is not the single most awful event in Rosa’s Jewish life, Germans are not the only perpetrators and victimisation does not always and automatically connect to Jewishness – and it is only through these deviations from the official script that the latter’s underlying mechanisms become clear. Vertlib’s novel conceptualises Rosa’s transnational memory as a contrapuntal memory, in the sense that its messy entanglements and complications collide with the templates of a deeply ritualised and ossified German memorial culture. We can therefore distinguish between what I would call monologic

marginalisation in the (post-)Soviet case – certain forms of suffering are blocked out

in a competitive manner, shutting down the conversation – and the dialogic decentring that results from Rosa’s narrative. By irritating our conventional perspective and shifting the emphasis, Rosa’s narrative creates a space for communication and criticism, which calls into question the viability of all master narratives, be they German or Russian.

The German memorial template is questioned by showing that Germany’s guilt- centred script has given rise to an empty rhetoric. A ritualised display of sympathy with the Jew as the victim has replaced any actual empathy towards the Jew as the Other: Rosa’s friend Chawa also wants to come to Germany as a ‘Kontingentflüchtling’. To legally settle down, she needs to prove her Jewishness to a member of the German consulate back in Moscow. When confronted with her experiences in the ghetto of Minsk, the official reacts with what Chawa mockingly portrays as an automated and formulaic response:

Als er vom Ghetto und vom Schicksal meiner Familie hörte, senkte der Beamte die Augen. Er, als Deutscher, trage, wie übrigens alle Deutschen, eine große Schuld für das, was den Juden in deutschem Namen angetan worden sei, hat er gesagt. Seine Eltern seien allerdings Nazigegner gewesen (hätte mich schon gewundert, wenn das nicht gekommen wäre), und er sei froh darüber, diese Zeit nicht persönlich miterlebt zu haben (DbG, 225).

Chawa’s ironic comment reveals the mechanisms underpinning the ritualised German discourse on Vergangenheitsbewältigung – a formulaic admission of collective guilt, coupled with a repudiation of any personal responsibility. The official’s tone and

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behaviour changes when he finds out that, due to the destruction of the Holocaust, Chawa has lost all documents or relatives that could prove her Jewishness: “Da war er