McGlothlin, Erin. Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration

Among the critical historical events of the twentieth-century, the Holocaust has been unrivaled as the subject of both scholarly and literary writing.  Literary responses to the Holocaust include not only thousands of autobiographical and fictional texts written by Holocaust survivors, but also, more recently, a significant number of works by writers who are not survivors but who nevertheless feel compelled to write about the Holocaust.  In particular, writers from what is known as the second generation have produced a significant body of texts that express their feeling of being powerfully marked by events of which they have had no direct experience.  Second-Generation Holocaust Literature expands the commonly used definition of second-generation literature, which refers to texts written from the perspective of the children of survivors, to include texts written from the point of view of the children of Nazi perpetrators.  With its innovative focus on the literary legacy of both groups, this book investigates the ways in which second-generation writers employ similar tropes of stigmatization in an attempt to express their uneasy relationship to their parents’ respective histories.  The figure of the stigma, tied etymologically to the experiences of both perpetration and victimization, functions as a signifier for the parents’ legacies of suffering and violation; for the children of survivors, the legacy is one of unintegrated trauma and rupture in familial continuity; for the children of perpetrators, it is of unintegratable violation and brutality.  The events that have shaped both legacies are fundamentally inaccessible to the second generation, yet the mark left by the Holocaust remains, resulting in a truncated relationship between original event and traumatic effect and in a corresponding crisis of signification.  The author demonstrates how an uneasiness with signification is manifested in the very structure of second-generation literature through readings of nine American, German and French literary texts (Thane Rosenbaum’s Elijah Visible, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Robert Schindel’s Gebürtig, Katja Behrens’ “Arthur Mayer oder das Schweigen,” Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder, Peter Schneider’s Vati, Niklas Frank’s and Joshua Sobol’s Der Vater, Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser, and Uwe Timm’s Am Beispiel meines Bruders).  Echoes of this anxiety with signification resound in the texts’ narrative structure, revealing the extent to which the literary text itself is marked by the continuing aftershocks of the Holocaust.

Erin McGlothlin, Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006.