The shadow of history lurks behind Helga Schneider’s 1998 memoir Let me go, a text that illustrates the oblivion regarding the suffering and grief of the Germans that W.G. Sebald in Luftkrieg und Literatur (On the Natural History of Destruction) and Gunther Grass’s «Ich erinnere mich…» disclosed after many years from the end of World War II. The openness of Sebald’s and Grass’s autobiographical narratives have created in time a space in which legacies of perpetration could be exposed after years of denial. Subsequently, a spate of Familienromane or Generationenromane responded to the earlier texts of the so-called Väterliterature and commented upon «the history of engagement (and non-engagement) with Germany’s legacy of perpetration» by unveiling how shame and guilt were feelings actively repressed in the effort to resume an ordinary life. While such repression is often witnessed in many survivors of the Shoah similarly to that observed in war survivors, the added psychological layer these works expose is the emotional hardship of coping with the «loving attachment» narrators feel for their relatives, usually fathers, as men’s historical role in Nazi politics was officially and juridically recognized. Schneider’s contribution to the transnational literary dialogue between Italian and German cultures certainly goes beyond her intimate narrative of the abnormality of her life as the daughter of a female Schutzstaffel (SS) volunteer and elicits ontological as well as ethical questions.
The Ethics of Retelling: Attachment and Abandonment in Helga Schneider’s Let me go Special Issue ed. Enrico Mattioda, http://journals.openedition.org/laboratoireitalien/4641 ISSN: 2117-4970
lucamantePrimo
2020-01-01
Abstract
The shadow of history lurks behind Helga Schneider’s 1998 memoir Let me go, a text that illustrates the oblivion regarding the suffering and grief of the Germans that W.G. Sebald in Luftkrieg und Literatur (On the Natural History of Destruction) and Gunther Grass’s «Ich erinnere mich…» disclosed after many years from the end of World War II. The openness of Sebald’s and Grass’s autobiographical narratives have created in time a space in which legacies of perpetration could be exposed after years of denial. Subsequently, a spate of Familienromane or Generationenromane responded to the earlier texts of the so-called Väterliterature and commented upon «the history of engagement (and non-engagement) with Germany’s legacy of perpetration» by unveiling how shame and guilt were feelings actively repressed in the effort to resume an ordinary life. While such repression is often witnessed in many survivors of the Shoah similarly to that observed in war survivors, the added psychological layer these works expose is the emotional hardship of coping with the «loving attachment» narrators feel for their relatives, usually fathers, as men’s historical role in Nazi politics was officially and juridically recognized. Schneider’s contribution to the transnational literary dialogue between Italian and German cultures certainly goes beyond her intimate narrative of the abnormality of her life as the daughter of a female Schutzstaffel (SS) volunteer and elicits ontological as well as ethical questions.
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