"The perspective of children after 1945", so literary scholar Klaus Briegleb, writing about what is called German post-war literature, "enjoys the highest prestige". And Tanja Hetzer calls the child’s perspective a "typical way of writing about remembering" for the generation of authors who grew up under the swastika and later (re-)constructed the Nazi period in literature. The idea of the child as an "uninvolved observer" was one of the main reasons why, after 1945, there was a plethora of literary memoirs of childhood in German literature. Hetzer surmises that the fact that non-Jewish authors chose the child’s perspective reflected the desire to assume a "position of innocence" in history and thus ward off questions about anti-Semitism in everyday life and about their involvement in the Nazis’ politics of persecution and extermination. This desire contrasts sharply with the experiences of Jewish children of the same age.
The very title of Hetzer’s study – "Children’s Perspectives on the Shoah" – indicates that her Focus is on texts in which the authors do not avert their gaze. "Forms of memory in the works of Ilse Aichinger, Hubert Fichte and Danilo Kis" is the subtitle, naming three authors who were themselves threatened, as children or youths, by the Nazis’ politics of persecution and extermination. Ilse Aichinger, born in 1921 in Vienna – her mother a Jewish physician, her father a non-Jewish teacher – was defined by the "race laws" of the Nazi authorities as a Mischling ersten Grades, a "first degree half-breed". She published her first work – an autobiographical novel entitled Die groessere Hoffnung (The greater hope) – in 1948 at the age of 27. Hubert Fichte, born 1935, was spared the official classification as a Mischling ersten Grades, because his Protestant mother was able to conceal the Jewish background of Fichte’s father, who had fled to Sweden. Fichte’s first novel, the literary memoir of childhood Das Waisenhaus (The orphanage), was published in 1965, the year in which Garten, Asche (Garden, ashes) by Danilo Kis also appeared. Kis, a Yugoslavian born in the same year as Fichte with an Orthodox Christian mother and a Jewish father, survived because he was also baptized as a Christian and was able to flee. His father "disappeared" – Kis’ own description of his father’s death in the Nazi death machinery.


Menacing images

In Garten, Asche, the second part of a novel trilogy (published prior to parts one and three), Kis Focuses on the search for his lost childhood, unfolding his story primarily from the perspective of the boy Andi. It is the story of the Sam family from Novi Sad, told before the backdrop of World War II. With the help of his own memories and imagined encounters, Andi conjures up the life of his Jewish father Eduard, whose disappearance is documented by the existence of a postcard thrown from a deportation train.
Die groessere Hoffnung, a novel in which Ilse Aichinger "juxtaposes ... play sequences, dream sequences, and sequences from the outer world" without "a continuous narrative being of any consequence", tells of a girl who experiences how separation and leave-taking go hand in hand with the destruction of her daily life. Ellen’s Jewish mother disappears overnight as an emigrant, her father – a Nazi officer – abandons her, and her childhood friends are deported. The eleven year old girl is also forced to part from her grandmother, who evades deportation and her fear of death by committing suicide.

Leave-taking and loss, the traumatic experiences of a so-called "half-Jewish" child also play a central role in Hubert Fichte’s Waisenhaus. The novel is told from the perspective of an eight year old boy. Detlev has just spent one year in a Bavarian orphanage and is awaiting the arrival of his mother, with whom he will return to Hamburg. In this short waiting period, dream-like memories of this past year surface in the boy, menacing images in a muddled temporal sequence seize hold of him. As a hal-orphan, northern German and supposed Protestant, he is an outsider among the orphans in Catholic Bavaria, who confront him with mistrust and animosity. Chosen by the mother as a place of shelter to aid in covering the traces leading back to Detlev’s Jewish father, the orphanage instead becomes for the boy a place where fear reigns.


Reconstructing a child’s horizon

Tanja Hetzer’s focus on the question of how children experience and interpret National Socialism and what is unique about this perspective in turn implies the question of how the horizon of a child’s perception and experience is (re-)constructed in the three novels. According to Hetzer, "memories of childhood are structured in images. The images of memory are evoked by specific objects, smells or scenes of play." Since, however, the lives, the daily routines of the children change dramatically without their being able to explain these events as a part of historical changes, menace is written into the images of memory but these images ultimately can "only be described and the historical references can only be introduced after the fact, with the knowledge of adults and from the adult’s perspective". One of Hetzer’s central theses is that the emotional reaction of the reader, her/his irritation is more intense, the greater the distance between description, on the one hand, and knowledge after the fact, on the other.
What does it mean to reconstruct a child’s horizon of perception and experience in a work of literature? Hetzer utilizes theories of literature and memory to explore what it means for survivors and for those who later write about their survival to recall the traumatic experiences of childhood. These memories of childhood are always bound up with memories of tormenting fear and the process of remembering is based on an unsolvable contradiction, namely, the contradiction between wanting to defy oblivion with memory and, on the other hand, the inability to endure memory. As Hetzer illustrates, the texts of Fichte, Kis and Aichinger all speak to these questions. Hetzer shows, for example, which techniques the protagonist develops in Das Waisenhaus to ward off memories. Whenever the fear which accompanies remembered images threatens to overwhelm Detlev, he turns them into the imaginary, manipulating the images as if they were toys, like building blocks with pieces of a different picture puzzle on each side, so that a particular image disappears when the blocks are turned. Or he confronts the tormenting images of memory with sentences in the subjunctive mood, which aim to deny the reality of the frightening experience on which they are based.
Furthermore – and this shift from the level of the literary figures to that of their creators is perhaps problematic, because it takes place uncommented – Hetzer points out the role which irony plays for Danilo Kis as a writer, as an element of style in connection with the process of memory. According to the author of this study, Kis "breaks the moments of horror with irony" ... ironic moments allow him to tell the horrifying story of his father without sentimentality and a cheap display of emotion and to endure the memories.
"One doesn’t survive everything that one survives." Ilse Aichinger’s sentence points to the biographical trauma of having witnessed how her grandmother, who later died in a concentration camp, was deported. In her novel Die groessere Hoffnung, Aichinger departs from the biographical "truth" insofar as she writes that Ellen’s grandmother chooses suicide before being deported and thus does not follow her into the camp, thereby "marking", as Hetzer notes, "the beginning of her own self-definition as a writer".


The traumatic experience of anti-Semitic foreign rule

These child protagonists – who, like their creators Aichinger, Fichte and Kis, belong to the so-called first generation – lose Jewish friends and relatives through deportation, exile or murder and are themselves exposed to anti-Semitic hostilities. Thus, the children directly experience the breach in Jewish tradition and existence. Since these children are neither embedded in Jewish family tradition, nor in the Jewish religion and perceive their Jewish parent primarily in relation to his/her absence, they experience their Jewishness, so Hetzer, via the "traumatic experience of anti-Semitic foreign rule." In other words, their knowledge of what it means or might mean to be Jewish is formed by negative attributions.
Hetzer’s re-reading of these three novels, her analysis of the authors’ method of writing, her scrutiny of those parts of the novels in which the breach is at the center of attention, and her search for "glimpses of fragmentary ciphers which stand for Jewish tradition and existence" have an underlying motive: the desire to reveal that a sense of Jewish community and continuity is formulated in the texts which is divorced from anti-Semitic definitions – in spite of the fact and because these texts mark the blank spaces. According to Hetzer, the texts describe what has been lost, thereby confronting annihilation with memory. In this process, it is precisely the child’s perspective which serves to "visualize what has been lost".


The legend of children as uninvolved observers

Tanja Hetzer, historian and literary scholar, aims to take the historical background into consideration in her interpretation of the three novels. Thus, the parts of her study in which she refutes psychologizing interpretations are therefore especially plausible and convincing. For example, she demonstrates that to interpret Detlev’s fear solely as a child’s Urangst of losing its mother, as some literary scholars have proposed, would mean de-historicizing the novel and leaving out "the core of disquiet, for which Auschwitz stands". The tangible reason for Detlev’s fear is the fear of being discovered as a Jewish child. His "Aryan" mother protects him from the Nazis, her loss could mean his death.
Tanja Hetzer refutes, in an equally convincing manner, the legend of children under the Nazi regime as "uninvolved observers", who, so the words of Martin Broszat in a letter to Saul Friedlaender, "were not yet or only marginally drawn into political actions and responsibility". Hetzer’s analysis of these three novels, all told from the perspective of persecuted children, points up the fact that children could indeed pose a threat to victims of persecution. In Die groessere Hoffnung, Nazi children take the Jewish children in the attic by surprise, beat up an old man, and demolish the room. In Das Waisenhaus, Catholic children torment the outsider Detlev with their internalized anti-Semitic and racist ideology. And in Danilo Kis’ novel, Andi’s father Eduard Sam is nearly lynched by the fascist village youths. While the childhood memoirs of the "perpetrators and the generation which followed them" continue to write a history of daily life characterized by normality and continuity, from the perspective of persecuted children, so Hetzer’s assertion, terror springs up from their devastated daily lives.

Translation from German: Paula Bradish

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