For Whom Does One Remember ? : Autobiographical Perspectives on Fascism in German Literature

In 1992, Ruth Klüger, author and Auschwitz survivor, polemically stated in her autobiography To Go On Living. The Early Years: ‘Wars belong to men, therefore so do the war memories. Even fascism, whether one was for or against it, is purely a male business. Besides, women have no past. Or, at least, they don’t have to have one.’ This article analyses the autobiographies of three women who experienced fascism, examining texts by a Jewish survivor, Hilde Huppert; a resister, Greta Kuckhoff; and a member of the Hitler Youth, Melita Maschmann. I will investigate the publishing history of the texts, their reception and the textual construction of memory. In remembering the past, these women question dominant views about the past, even the view they seem to hold themselves. The memories are constructed in such a way that the addressees to whom the protagonists want to belong prove to be problematic in terms of gender. I hope to draw conclusions about the different perspectives encapsulated within the texts in order to address the question for whom does one remember?

The narrative frequently moves between different time l evels.One identity of the adult protagonist is created in the narrative present of 1963, as are the identities of an 'innocent' childhood protagonist and a teenage protagonist in the Hitler Youth.In the text, this fragmented narrative voice speaks predominantly through the older narrator, whose narrating time is in 1963.Fundamental to this narrative construction of the protagonist's identities is the concept of generation.The story claims not to be just an autobiographical report of an individual, but the story of the youth of a nation.Such a collectivised narrative depiction blurs the diversity of experience of those within the group of Nazi supporters.An authoritarian concept of memory then makes explicit claims to the truth and representativity of these generalised memories.The narrative construction of the memories in terms of generation has many consequences.Firstly, there is a focus on collective identities, which in turn foregrounds the age of the protagonist and her contemporaries; secondly, the notion of an elite generation is created along clearly demarcated national and racial lines; and thirdly, various tropes of victimhood are then transposed onto this generation concept.
Firstly, I will focus on the construction of collective identities, especially those of the public sphere.The figures of authority described in the text, the prominence of which Niethammer defines as being characteristic of female National Socialist autobiographies, are not familial but state ones. 6The narrator generally refers positively to her superiors within the Nazi Youth Movement, stressing their hard-working, self-sacrificing natures.In contrast, the description of the traditional familial role models, her parents, is more ambiguous.The text repeatedly stresses that the politics of the protagonist's parents were responsible for transferring a preconditioned feeling of nationalism onto their daughter: When my brother and I were in my seventh year, we were woken one night by our parents […].It was midnight.This was when the occupying forces began their withdrawal from the Rheinland […].There were tears in the eyes of the parents, and the hearts of the children filled with a suspicion that this Germany must be a frighteningly, wonderful secret. 7e suggestion of such parental influence is contrasted with the parents' subsequent absence from the rest of the text.This fact can be linked to the narrator's condescending attitude to those who were not to become 'real' Nazis.The narrator patronisingly examines, 'how difficult it must be […] for elderly people trying to grow into National Socialism'. 8is elitism highlights the second consequence of the narrative focus on generation: it means that, on one level, age, and not gender, is thematised.For example, the narrator more frequently refers to the protagonist as a member of the Hitler Youth as opposed to the League of German Girls, the women's branch of the Hitler Youth.The emphasis on the youth of the protagonist and her compatriots mirrors, and contributes to, a post-war discourse that held that youth and naivety precluded responsibility for actions during fascism.The protagonist's self-definition in terms of generation, thirdly, creates the clearly opposing Other outside the elite generation, which is still reflected in the present narrator's consideration of the events of the past.The prominence of the protagonist's feelings of racial and national superiority is significant when the political and historical context of the text's publication is considered.The suggested inherent, but misguided, goodness of a group of SS men is contrasted with a negative depiction of American soldiers.The narrator draws on a childhood memory of meeting black American soldiers after the First World War and comments: 'I can still remember a shudder, as if Germany's misery was personified in this dark-skinned man.' 9 Such a comment by the adult narrator of 1963 must be viewed against a background of the fascist equation of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, especially as this experience is paralleled in the narrative depiction of the end of the Second World War.American soldiers discover a secret hospital in which the protagonist was hiding: 'one of the two men was a Mexican, and almost Negroid in colour.In no time at all he was drunk and became so wild that his white comrade fled the house.The drunkard suddenly burst through the door into my room and almost immediately laid himself and his weapon down beside me.' 10 Given the date of the text's publication, when the Cold War and pro-American sentiments were at their height in West Germany, such a negative, contrasting depiction can be understood, in the light of the protagonist's racist nationalism.She transfers her anger at the defeat and occupation of Germany onto the black soldiers.Through the gendered nature of the suggested threat to the protagonist (i.e.rape by the solider) the concept of nation, as personified by the protagonist, becomes feminised.
The experiences of the protagonist are argued as being representative of a generation, these experiences then becoming symbolic of the experiences of a nation.Both concepts (generation and nation) are then subject to a universalised victimhood which ignores questions of responsibility, and distorts the specificity of victim experiences: 'allow me, if you will, a rather daring metaphor.One has to tear away the colourful petals, in order to be able to see that the roots were poisonous.Millions of people died because of this poison, including soldiers and victims of the bombing raids.' 11 Such a notion of universalised victimhood is epitomised by the form of the text -it is written as a letter to a Jewish school friend.This highly problematic textual addressee once again emphasises the youth of the protagonist during fascism.The narrator continually collectivises their fates and even goes as far as to state to her friend that 'even you had it in you to become a murderer!'. 12 The protagonist argues that she and her compatriots were not just victims of fascism but also victims of their essential, inherent goodness: 'One fears for the goodness of all good people everywhere in the world.Not just in one's own people.' 13 The text here widens its addressee and in doing so universalises experiences.Such internationalism serves to exonerate the protagonist and her contemporaries by denying the specificity of the Holocaust.The protagonist's memories are constructed in such a way as to argue that the protagonist and her female compatriots were also victims of patriarchy.It is this relationship between the narrative construction of gender and memory which makes apparent many of the text's contradictions.The protagonist claims that fascism forced to her repress her 'real', female self.The narrator describes how the protagonist had to adopt a 'a rigid mask' 14 in order to fulfil her duties of 'men's work' 15 in occupied Poland.The involvement of the protagonist in the expulsion of the civilians is described by the narrator through military images and there is an equation of the girls with soldiers who had to kill in spite of the fact that 'they were sensitive, considerate and helpful by nature'. 16In order to show that this behaviour was at odds with their natural disposition, the present narrator uses an emotive image of self-rape and an essentialist notion of gender to suggest that the girls were the victims: 'the task [the girls] were confronted with forced them to rape themselves in order to play a male military role.' 17 As if to emphasise this gender contradiction, the protagonist is described as having armed herself with 'a powerful clothes iron', which she calls her 'Amazonian weapon' in order to protect herself during the action against the Poles. 18Thus, whilst evincing the imposition of a male military role, the narrator then creates the positively gendered image of an heroic female fighter.
The argued necessity of assuming this patriarchal mask can be linked to the numerous references to the protagonist's 'blindness' (thus evoking the tragic notion of 'innocent guilt') and the setting up of multiple dichotomies.Binary oppositions of good and bad are linked to a continual fight between the purity of the soul and the dangers of technology, and a textual division between the political and the personal.A tension becomes apparent in the text between the legitimising passages and the textualisation of the fascination that fascism exerted, and arguably still exerts, on the protagonist.In the construction of the narrative however, the text repeats these very patterns that the narrator has highlighted as being characteristic of fascist, patriarchal suppression; for example, the narrator claims that all 'personal feelings' have been eliminated from the text. 19The protagonist maintains that she became the victim of fascism as a woman, yet still defines herself in terms of a degendered collective generation/nation concept.The protagonist criticises the restriction of the female role in fascism to domestic tasks, claiming that she wanted her work to be 'more political', yet there are several episodes which suggest that the family is the site of positive, ethical values.The effect of constructing an essentialist notion of woman with private feelings that are supposedly eliminated from the text is to place a symbolic notion of woman outside the historical setting and thus outside responsibility.
It can be argued from this analysis that Maschmann's text universalises in order to claim representativity for the youth of a nation, and to remember on behalf of her contemporaries -especially those women of the Hitler Youth.However, as has been shown, the text is not restricted to the national addressee, with the lines between national and international becoming blurred.The exonerating effect that such a construction of memories has does not accord with the repeated claims and title of the book, not to be an attempt at 'justification'.

Greta Kuckhoff.
My second text is by Greta Kuckhoff, who was born in 1902.Her autobiography, From the Rosary to the Red Orchestra was first published in East Berlin in 1972, and the text was followed by a West German edition two years later.'Red Orchestra' was the name given by the Gestapo to the resistance movement of which Greta Kuckhoff and her husband were members. 20Adam Kuckhoff was executed while in prison after the group was broken up by the Nazis.
Kuckhoff's memories can be largely divided into three time periods: the protagonist's early life, life under fascism, and events after 1945.The narrative switches between these different time levels and identities of the protagonist in order to interact with contemporary discourses (i.e. from 1972) about the past.The context of the Cold War therefore becomes crucial in an examination of the construction of the protagonist's memories.The text challenges prevalent contemporary narratives in West Germany in 1972 on antifascist resistance, as well as engaging with official East German antifascism.It is these narratives that I shall examine in my consideration of the question for whom does one remember?
The designation of Kuckhoff's group of resistors as traitors by West German historians and their exclusion from the public antifascist remembrance in West Germany is addressed by the text.The narrator condemns the 'slander' inherent in the public discourse which re-appropriated the anti-Semitic 'stab in the back' argument.This had been used by right winges to blame the Revolutionaries for the defeat in the First World War. 21This discourse, which Peter Steinbach claims led to the 'exoneration of a generation from their responsibility', is challenged by the narrator through the protagonist's own deliberations on resistance. 22Likewise, the text engages with East German public remembrance of fascism and antifascist resistance, constructing narratives which contradict public discourse.For example, official GDR antifascism focused on only those who, by state definition, had 'actively resisted fascism'.This led to the marginalisation of others persecuted by Nazism.Kuckhoff's text, in contrast, mentions in detail the progressive persecution of the Jewish population (for example, the effects of the Nuremburg laws and the increasing number of deportations), thus rehabilitating these memories.
The narrative shows the diversity of experiences among the antifascist resistors, mentioning those who spent time in exile, in prisons, or in concentration camps.The text does not therefore fall prey to universalised generalisations about antifascist resistance.Kuckhoff's text does not generalise about those responsible for following fascism either, a criticism of GDR antifascism being that it focused too much on the role of the bourgeoisie and distorted the role that the working class played in fascism.The narrator explicitly examines the persuasive appeal of authoritative bureaucracy and employment for the working classes.
An analysis of the construction of the protagonist's political identity reveals both an adherence to and an antagonism with official East German antifascism.The text begins with the young protagonist's experiences during a visit to the United States being juxtaposed with comments on wider issues, reflecting the political stance of the present adult narrator.For example, an examination of institutional racism in the United States follows the description of an invitation the young protagonist receives from a black student and the text continues: […] at that time, I would never have believed, or suspected, that we would have to instigate an international movement of solidarity for many victims of terror in the USA.Though I would also have found it more impossible to believe, […] that in my own country […] racist hatred and racist destruction would rage like a plague and claim millions of victims.
I visited the Ford factories […].When, almost deafened by the noise, I asked what was being done to apply the health and safety regulations […] no one could name a sum spent on that.It was predominantly women who were employed -their wages didn't correspond in any way to those of the men […]. 23 can be seen here how temporal links are made between the issues of race and capitalism, fascism and patriarchy.By the 1970s Dimitrov's theory on the inextricable link between fascism and capitalism had become part of the official theory of fascism within GDR discourse and embedded in the context of the Cold War. 24e retrospective narrative contains a teleological progression of coherent political thought and the proleptic style of the narrative highlights a suggested development of the protagonist's political identity (from the Rosary to Marxism to the Comintern).However, running contrary to these narratives are comments by the present narrator which create a tension with the unifying political teleology running through the text.It becomes apparent that there are different voices within the narrative.For example, just before the protagonist decides to join the antifascist resistance, the narrator states: 'The debate over the individual versus the collective took me an improperly long amount of time to work out.' 25 A judgement has been made about how long it took her to reach her political conclusions, and the narrative suggests that the judgement is not her own.While the narrative does not attribute a source to these divergent voices, I would argue that a division could be made along gender lines.The narrative contains authoritative political statements of a kind that have been shown to be characteristic of the men in the group.In comparison, these are juxtaposed with more critical self-examination, which often concludes with reflections about the protagonist's naivety and lack of political development.
Equality and female emancipation are considered by the narrator throughout the text.The roles of women who 'would certainly have liked to learn more than was offered to them', but who instead became 'good wives and mothers and self-sacrificing sisters', are looked at critically. 26The protagonist's role is examined against the expectations of her father: 'he had imagined the life of his daughter quite differently -with the nice job of teacher, with an intelligent husband and two or three healthy, rosy-cheeked children […].Actually, the dream had disintegrated long ago.This girl, who looked so sweet, would not obey.' 27 While criticising the patterns that perpetuate female inequality and domestication, the narrator often describes the protagonist repeating these patterns within the resistance group: 'faces were serious.I didn't ask.Although it was sometimes extremely hard, I remained resolutely disciplined and kept to our agreement that I would only be involved in certain tasks.' 28 These gender issues (along with those of race) are however ultimately considered within Kuckhoff's text as falling under the auspices of the class struggle and the immediate fight against fascism.
Kuckhoff's text thematises how antifascist remembrance of East and West Germany during the 1970s gave prominence to specific groups.By interacting with contemporary antifascism the text reveals the political stance of the present adult narrator, a stance which both accords with and opposes the contemporary (ie.1972) hierarchy of remembrance.Diversity and specificity of experience are juxtaposed with a unifying political teleology which creates an arguably gendered tension within the narrative, encapsulated within the framework of the memories of fascism.

Hilde Huppert.
The publishing history of my third text is the most complex.Hilde Huppert was a Czech, Jewish survivor of the concentration camps, born in the 1910s.She wrote her autobiography, entitled We Were Exterminated, in Palestine in 1945.She chose to write her book in German, in spite of this not being her first language, and asked the famous German Jewish author Arnold Zweig, who had survived exile in Palestine, to prepare her manuscript for publication.This he did in 1946, adding a preface and conclusion.The text was first distributed as a photocopy, in 1947 in Egypt, in a British prisoner of war camp for German soldiers, after it was refused by publishers in Germany.Before its dissemination in the camp, Arnold Zweig added a second preface addressing these problems of publication.At this stage the title was The Narrow Path to Freedom.Recordings by Hilde Huppert about her Experiences in the Nazi Death Camp and her Wondrous Escape from Bergen-Belsen. 29 Following Zweig's return to East Germany, the text was subsequently republished in 1951 and again in 1961 under Zweig's name and with the title Journey to Acheron. 30Zweig made several alterations to the text at this stage.
Following an interview between Huppert and her son in Israel in 1977, Shmuel Huppert began work on a 'Hebrew version' of the book, making many changes and omitting Zweig's preface and conclusion. 31This version was published in 1978 in Tel Aviv, entitled Hand in Hand with Tommy. 32Ten years later this version was translated into German and published in West Germany along with a preface and epilogue by Shmuel Huppert. 33The third edition of this 1988 version was printed in Germany 1997 entitled Hand in Hand with Tommy.An Autobiographical Report 1939-1945. 34In the meantime, the original manuscript from 1947 was published in Berlin in 1990.This was published as part of a series of texts on 9 November, the date of the pogrom against the Jewish Community in 1938.The choice of this date signifies an hierarchical placing of the 1938 events over the other events with which the date is associated (the 1918 November Revolution, the 1923 Hitler Putsch, and the day the Berlin Wall fell in 1989).This illustrates that in the context of the 1990 publication, the publishers ('Kontext' aided by the Jewish Community in Berlin), wanted to raise the prominence of the Jewish perspective contained within this narrative.Interestingly, neither preface in the republished original version nor in the translated Hebrew version acknowledges the existence of the other publication.
The different publishing contexts of Huppert's text raise many questions about the identity of the author and protagonist, in particular with respect to gender and Jewishness.The different versions of the text give rise to contrasting answers to the question for whom does one remember and these publications need to be examined against the changing international political constellations, involving both the former East and West Germany, the reunified Germany and Israel.
The initial problems that the text encountered in getting published raise issues about the formation of the autobiographical canon and the link between gender and reception -i.e. who has been given the right to remember for whom.The early publishing history of the text can be examined as illustrative of, as well as contradictory to, tendencies within the antifascism of the Soviet zone and the GDR.Jürgen Danyel notes that there were 'clear tendencies of political segregation and ignorance, particularly in respect of the Jewish victims of the Nazi regime' in the immediate post-war period. 35The fact that the text was eventually published in 1951, despite the initial problems and the prevailing institutional inclination against Jewish narratives of the Holocaust, would suggest that the gender of the presumed 'author' played a fundamental role.It also illustrates how institutional political policy (i.e. the antifascism of the GDR) was instrumental in forming the autobiographical canon on experiences of fascism at this time.Such factors must be taken into consideration when claims of a post-war 'silence' about the persecution of the Jews are encountered.The text's amended publication under Zweig's name, and later appearance as another version written by Huppert's son, bring to the fore questions of authorship, the autobiographical pact, and textual claims of authenticity.In Hand in Hand with Tommy, it is Hilde Huppert's name which appears on the front cover as the author.Shmuel Huppert makes it clear in his introduction that it was she who wrote 'the first version of this report'. 36owever, he also makes it clear that it was he who wrote, and subsequently translated, the Hebrew version.Given the divergence of the two texts, which I shall shortly examine in more detail, it is questionable whether Shmuel Huppert's version of the text can be classified as an autobiography of Hilde Huppert.
The competing discourses about the gendered nature of the Holocaust experiences can be engaged with on the basis of Huppert's text, as the protagonist's memories are constructed in such a way as to demonstrate a distinctly gendered experience. 37The protagonist's identity is defined in both texts not only in terms of her femaleness but also in terms of motherhood.However, differences visible between the two versions of the text in respect of gender are epitomised by the change in the title -the later version foregrounds the relationship of Huppert and her son, Tommy (he later changed his name to Shmuel).
The differences between the two narratives become clear through a comparison of the first paragraph of each text.Hilde Huppert's text begins: 1 st September 1939.It is 6 o'clock in the morning and I am in my lovely home in Teschen […].I was born in Silesia and in 1935 I got married and moved to Czechoslovakia […].After one year I gave birth to a boy, whom we called Thomas, after the famous democrat Masaryk.But our happiness didn't last long.Friction began between the Poles and Czechs, and those of us who lived on the border suffered as a result. 38 comparison, Shmuel Huppert's version starts with: I was born in a traditionally Jewish house in the town of Bielitz in Silesia.y parents, Bluma and Selig, owned two greengrocers and delicatessens […].While my three sisters and I served customers in the shops, my brothers studied the Torah […].[Our father] made sure that we girls behaved in proper and modest way, in accordance with the Jewish tradition. 39his later version, a teleological interpretation of the protagonist's memories by the narrator links the familial, the national and the Jewish tradition.Given the publishing history of the 1970s, it is can be argued that this text is addressed to the Israeli nation, and is intended as validation for the existence of the Israeli state.
The placing of the protagonist's role as mother is at the centre of the text in the later version.This can be contrasted with a wider claim to representativity of the protagonist's fate in the original.For example, in We Were Exterminated, the text reads: 'On this night every mother pressed her child closer to her as she fell asleep.We didn't know whether the same fate awaited us tomorrow'. 40In comparison, Hand in Hand with Tommy states: 'On this night I slept more closely to Tommy.I feared that they would separate us.The eight year old understood my fear'. 41The wider claim to representativity in Huppert's original text can be linked to the need for legitimisation and the imperative of witnessing on behalf of others.However, when considering narrative claims to representativity, a hierarchy of victims must be considered.The protagonist and her son were privileged victims within the system of persecution due to their Palestinian citizenship.They were allowed to survive so that they could be exchanged with German prisoners of war and therefore accorded a status not available to most other Jewish victims.Both version of the text therefore contain a very specific narrative perspective about the Holocaust.
Fundamental to a discussion of the different versions of the text are the accompanying prefaces and epilogues.These interpret not only to whom the text was addressed but also serve, according to Elisabeth Heinemann, as 'authenticity devices' for the time in which they were written and subsequently published. 42In her 1947 introduction, Hilde Huppert states that she has written her book because 'our neighbours must discover in which way millions of people died'. 43Her addressee is therefore the 'neighbours' of 1947.The breadth of this intended addressee is signified by her sending the text 'into the world' 44 .Shmuel Huppert states in his 1987 preface that Huppert originally wrote the book 'for all those who had not experienced it'. 45Whether this refers to those who were not in Europe during this time, or those who did not suffer the persecution is unclear.What is clear however is that she chose to write in German although she only had an 'average knowledge' of the language, and, given that her text contains numerous comments about the German people, it can be argued that this nation was her primary addressee. 46As Claussen points out in 1990, Huppert's choice of Arnold Zweig was designed to give her text some standing and enable it to reach a wider audience. 47The original readers of the text were German prisoners of war and Claussen argues that Zweig's epilogue was specifically addressed to them in order to show them the importance of Palestine and help them come to terms with the events of the war years.However, it must be remembered that the book's publication in Egypt was due to the refusal of other publishers to accept it and therefore it cannot be claimed that the prisoners of war were specifically the addressees intended by the author.Simone Barck comments, however, that Zweig altered his introductory and concluding comments in order to take into account this change in audience. 48In addition, omissions and changes made by Zweig to the original text, in particular the 'toning down' of comments about the Germans and the anti-Semitism of the Poles, and the shortening of descriptions about the American involvement in the liberation, are argued as being a response to the policy of official antifascism of the GDR.Interestingly, most of these omissions are retained in the 1990 version of Huppert's text.When the addressee of Shmuel Huppert's version is considered, we find in the prefaces of both the 1987 and 1997 versions an appeal to present generations: 'we hope that the German readers, especially the younger ones, will find this book accessible and receive it as a contribution to contemporary history.' 49 It can therefore be seen how the perceived addressees of Huppert's text vary not only according to the publishing contexts of Israel and Germany, but also depending on the political stance of those responsible for the framing of the texts, through their introductory and concluding discussions on the memories within the texts.

Conclusion.
An analysis of these texts reveals various competing answers to the question 'for whom does one remember ?'.Individual female experience is presented in all three texts as being representative of wider experience, with notions of gender, nation, class and generation providing frames of reference to interpret the protagonists' memories of fascism.In Maschmann's text, the memories are constructed in such a way that the fate of the protagonist becomes symbolic of her generation and of the German nation.In Kuckhoff, notwithstanding the narrative tensions, the political ideals of the protagonist and the comments of the present adult narrator give a definitive class-based evaluation of her childhood memories and the memories of fascism.In Huppert, the original version contains a strong imperative to witness on behalf of those who were murdered and addresses her contemporaries of the time; Shmuel Huppert's later version focuses the readers' attention on the significance of the narrative for present generations and for the Israeli nation.
The protagonists in the three texts appeal to specific audiences, inviting the addressees to identify with their interpretations of the past.When the framework of gender is considered, the addressees to whom the protagonists want to belong (a nation, a generation, antifascist resistance and the Israeli nation), prove problematic.Contradictions become apparent within all three texts, in spite of their very different narrative perspectives, between the different narrative identities and voices.In Maschmann, the present adult narrator constructs the memories of fascism in such a way as to repeat the very patterns that she criticises as being predominant within the system of fascist, patriarchal oppression that the young protagonist experienced.Memories of fascism in Kuckhoff's text reveal a gender dichotomy within the resistance group that the adult narrator has earlier criticised when describing childhood memories; the protagonist at once adheres to and resists these prescribed gender roles, and this tension is reflected in the competing voices within the text.In the different versions of Huppert's text, different constructions of the protagonist's gender role become apparent.Shmuel Huppert's version focuses much more explicitly on the protagonist's identity as mother to Tommy.The narrative places this individual story at the centre of the text and at the same time embeds it within the larger framework of the Jewish tradition and the Israeli national context.In contrast, the earlier version makes wider claims of representativity throughout.Gender differences in Huppert's text can be linked to the later version's emphasis on traditional Jewish familial roles.
The publishing histories of the books reflect the fact that addressees change according to specific historical periods, with the texts sometimes being re-appropriated in quite different contexts to the ones in which they were originally written.The context of publication also illustrates how institutional political policy is instrumental in shaping the autobiographical canon on experiences of fascism.On the basis of the publishing history of these texts, it can be argued that gender plays a significant role in the question who is allowed to speak on behalf of whom.Therefore, as stories by women remembering the past, these are significant texts considering the predominantly male canon of autobiographical writing on fascism and the Second World War.