Three Generations Remember the Holocaust:
Hilsenrath, Becker, and Seelich
by Dagmar C. G. Lorenz

At first glance, Edgar Hilsenrath (Leipzig, 1926), Jurek Becker (Lodz, 1937), and Nadja Seelich (Prague, 1947) seem to have little in common. Different in age, national and social background, appearance, interests, and lifestyles, these three writers/film makers/intellectuals yet share one common experience: their lives and their art have been profoundly affected by the Holocaust. It is at the core of their art, a common theme, which even when the artist ostensibly turns into a different direction prevails in a disguised form. For instance, Hilsenrath's most recent book project deals with the mass murder of the Armenians by the Turks; and in Seelich's latest film, a children's movie, a positive witch character is central and introduces the theme of century-old discrimination. During spring and summer 1986, 1 had the opportunity to meet and discuss with these three artists, who in their major works try to come to terms with the Nazi past and the extermination of the Jewish people, a past that shaped the present. Hilsenrath, born in Leipzig, was taken by his mother to Czernowitz in 1938, because she believed Rumania safer than Germany. He survived the ghetto and started an odyssey that took him to Palestine, Paris, New York, Munich, and finally Berlin. He was reunited with his parents in Paris after the war. He moved on to New York, where he completed Nacht (Night), his first, autobiographical, somewhat confessional novel, which he had begun in Paris because he felt the urge to verbalize the experiences of the past. According to Hilsenrath, Nacht initially had a therapeutic function. He wrote in order to survive mentally and intellectually. Via Munich-he wrote his second novel, Der Nazi und der Friseur (The Nazi and the Hairdresser) in Schwabing-he moved to West Berlin, where he now lives.1

Jurek Becker was born in Poland. When he was two years old, he and his mother were taken to the Ghetto Lodz. His father located him after the war through an international agency much in the way in which Aron, the protagonist of the novel Der Boxer (The Boxer), finds his son. Becker's mother and most of his family were killed during the Holocaust.

Becker's first language was Polish. He learned Yiddish at the age of nine. His father knew only a little German, the language of the country where he and his son had come to live as a result of the Holocaust. In the German Democratic Republic, German became his everyday and his literary language. Becker now lives and works in West Berlin.

To Nadja Seelich, born and raised in Prague, the Holocaust is a part of her family's collective memory. Many of her relatives were taken to concentration camps. Her father survived and she admires him for his inner strength and the cunning with which he outwitted the Nazis many times, but the majority of her family were murdered. Seelich remarked about the filming of a memorial service at Mauthausen in the movie Kieselsteine (Pebbles):

The strangest feeling to me was that I could walk in and out of this horrible gate without being stopped-so unlike my uncle who had died in this very camp as a result of pseudo-medical experiments performed on him.... But then, while we were filming, I repeatedly had the sensation that he was standing behind me, grinning, very glad that I was able to be here, free, and making my movie. (Vienna, 17 April 1986)

Evidently the views of the three artists on the Holocaust, their attitudes toward their Jewishness, and their relationship to German culture and language are motivated by their personalities and individual experience. However, they are also indicative of their respective generations and may be prompted by their closeness to or relative distance from the Holocaust.

The fact that Hilsenrath needed a German-speaking environment to be able to continue his work as a writer was the prime motivating factor for his move to West Berlin. He wanted to be an author-more specifically, an author in the German language. He had begun writing his novel Nacht in France, where he was given electroshocks as therapy for his ghetto-trauma.

He continued his novel in Manhattan in all-night cafeterias, where he made first contact with the media, intellectuals, and writers through the Goethe House. The New York immigrant scene, which he later satirizes, was hardly his kind of environment. He felt as little at home in New York as he had in Palestine, where he had made a living jobing-at times in the company of writer Jakov Lind.

Much to Hilsenrath's own surprise, his first novel turned out to be exceedingly controversial. It did little to help establish him as a German writer. He had to witness that his book, which he had written with the intention of telling how it had been-naively assuming that the German public in fact wanted to know-met with resistance and rejection on various levels.

Accepted by the Kindler Verlag for publication, the novel was undercut by its own publisher. It had appeared on such a small first printing without advertising that it remained virtually unnoticed until the Literarischer Verlag Helmut Braun acquired the rights and published it in 1978. By this time Hilsenrath was well known. Nacht had appeared in several languages, including English and French, and Der Nazi und der Friseur (published 1977) had become a cult book.

Content and mode of Hilsenrath's Nacht make it easy to understand why the German reading public and critics alike tended to be shocked, even at the later publication date, well after the 1968 student movement and an increased production and reception of Holocaust documentaries, fiction, and films.

In spite of the fact that an enormous amount of Holocaust texts appeared immediately after the war, only few reached the German reading public. The German readership at large was more interested in reading about the returning veterans, refugees from the Russian Zone, POWs kept in Soviet labor camps, the bombings of German cities, the plight of German mothers, and the like. Such texts were often void of any historical context. For instance, Beckmann in Borchert's radio play DrauBen vor der Tuir (The Man Outside), an all-time postwar favorite, literally steps on the scene from out of nowhere. While innumerable references are made to his suffering as a former German soldier, it is nowhere spelled out what caused the misery.2 Questions as to what German troops were doing in Russia and other foreign countries in the first place or which system they served are not raised, and the pathos of innocent suffering pervades the text. Jews are mentioned only in passing in a highly ambiguous, if not hostile, context. The enthusiastic reception of such texts indicates the postwar state of mind. Reports such as Ruth Andreas-Friedrich's Der Schattenmann: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen 1938-1945 (Shadow Man: Diary Entries 1938 1945, originally published in 1947), texts with precise historical context, would hardly have found the readership they did in 1983, limited though it remained.3 This applies also to other, similar texts that appeared briefly and vanished into obscurity until rediscovery at a later date, among them the poetry of Nelly Sachs. While World War II was a popular topic in West German fiction, the Holocaust was not. Only the most mystical, symbolic treatment of the topic had a chance on the book market. Realism was the prerogative of historians such as Hans Gunter Adler, Hans Langbein, Egon Kogon, and others who published documentary works to inform interested readers and scholars about the true nature of the SS-State.

Hilsenrath's novel portrays the Rumanian ghetto Mogiljow/Podolsk between the Bug and Dniester rivers in drastic terms. His narrative techniques, his relentless descriptions of death, disease, brutality, and misery, are equaled only by Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird.4 Hilsenrath's readers are drawn into a maelstrom of misery and cruelty. At the same time his characters never lose their individuality. Not even Ranek, his protagonist, undergoes a complete personality change before his death. There is no amorphous mass of Jews, as critics have claimed

There are humor of the crudest kind, hunger for entertainment and information in the pitiful "coffee house," and the will to survive even in the most wretched Muselman. Yet civilization's superficial refinement has vanished, and with it the finer things in life. The ghetto brings out the worst in people.

Hilsenrath's ghetto-it lasted from 1941 to March 1944 until the arrival of the Red Army-is quite different from Becker's Polish ghetto in Jakob der Lagner (Jacob the Liar).5 It belongs to the burnt-out ruin cities where the Rumanian Jews were rounded up and left to starve unless they fell victim to the nightly raids conducted by the local militia. In Nacht, the Jews are isolated among themselves: no German, no German administration building in sight. The ghetto police are recruited from prisoners. The German military responsible for the ghetto remain behind the scene. They leave it to the victims to destroy one another.

Nacht shows Jews inflicting pain and injustice on other Jews. Hunger and pain reduce the prisoners' identities beyond recognition. As Hilsenrath maintains, his text is less about suffering Jews than about starving people. The memories of life before the camp avail them nothing. Their education, former family ties, their loves and hates have become meaningless. Those left to starve in the ghetto are faced with a situation categorically and beyond words different. Ruth Angress puts it this way:

Like all survivors I know that Auschwitz, when the Nazis killed Jews there, felt like a crater of the moon, a place only peripherally connected with the human world. It is this "otherness" of the death camps that we have such difficulty conveying. But once the killing stopped these former camps became a piece of our inhabited earth again.6

Ranek, however much he tries to talk himself into it, never musters the callousness and brutality, the readiness to use anyone at any time to his advantage. In order to survive, however, he would have to do just that: change, forget, become mean and ruthless. Characters with criminal and sociopathic tendencies prove to be at a clear advantage over Ranek, a man who cannot shake his middle-class values. The Nazi philosophy leaves its imprint on the prisoners, because it forcibly determines their lives. Whoever cannot conform to the superimposed system of the survival of the fittest-in the ghetto environment it translates into the survival of the meanest and toughest-will die the soonest.

The situation in Hilsenrath's novel resembles closely Joan Ringelheim's description of the ghetto. In her essay "Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research."7 Ringelheim holds that the "experiences and perceptions of Jewish women have been obscured and absorbed into descriptions of men's lives." She suggests that because of their sexuality, for instance their maternal responses, women were especially vulnerable to abuse. They were faced with rape, child murder, and prostitution. Women speak of sexual humiliation, rape, sex exchange, pregnancy, and abortion, but also of the shame of being nude, shaved all over, observed by men. Sex was a commodity in ghettos. Women often survived by male connections: "Jewish men used the ghetto, the Judenrat ran it." Yet, as Ringelheim points out, sex stories are hard to come by. The women's silence may be motivated by the fear of desecrating the memory of the dead, or the Holocaust itself; or the sex- related occurrences are seen as trivial compared with mass murder.

Hilsenrath breaks this taboo. He portrays the situation of men and women as different. He does not shy away from exposing the sexual exploitation of women in the ghetto. To be sure, it is only one facet in the spectrum of abuse and suffering, but an important one. Yet his women figures, just as Ringelheim observes, tend to preserve their integrity better than men. They never quite lose their concern for others, even under the worst of circumstances when the male characters deteriorate into scavengers.

Hilsenrath focuses on the collective experience. Personality and individuality have been wiped out along with the sense of privacy and shame. Persons are identified by their clothes. They seem to have become the attributes of their clothes, not vice versa-a result of extreme poverty. The rags the dead people leave behind are more valuable than the human beings. When Ranek picks up the dead man's hat, he becomes like him: one doomed for destruction. Phantasy figures such as Deborah, Ranek's Laura so to speak, become more real than the living dead. Deborah becomes visible and, in the end, physically present, as Ranek is losing touch with reality, his grip on life. Dreams take on an individuality; the living-soon no longer living-are interchangeable. Only the most ruthless, the best-fed ones are able to afford the luxury of an identity.

Hilsenrath's novel does not criticize the corruption in the ghetto or the Jews who break down under the unbearable pressures. The ghetto represents the most radical form of capitalism: a capitalism without goods or capital, since the people in the ghetto are left to their own devices. Robbed of their belongings, they are enclosed behind barbed wire. They do not receive food, money, or clothes.8 Hilsenrath's criticism is directed at a system that causes people to become victims of their natural human frailty, hunger, and greed. There is nothing inhuman about them; Hilsenrath's characters would have to be superhuman or inhuman if they could preserve their integrity. Integrity in Nacht goes hand in hand with a decent life, a full stomach, security, and equal rights for all.

It would be a grave error to read a condemnation of the characters into Nacht. Such a condemnation on the part of the reader would imply the same error which many a Nazi soldier may have committed when he classified ragged, miserable Jews as subhuman, while it was his government and his own conduct that had reduced them to what he considered life unworthy of living.

Hilsenrath's basic ideas are present in Der Nazi und der Friseur, although in a very different form. The novel is a satire, a rare genre in German literature. Hilsenrath was severely criticized for supposedly treating the Holocaust frivolously. A closer inspection reveals that the novel does nothing of the kind. It does not make light of the Holocaust, but rather of the various forms of discourse about it. Hilsenrath is very well versed in theories about the Holocaust. He is also widely read in Holocaust fiction and poetry. Both the scholarly and the literary discourses entered into this book about a Nazi mass murderer, Max Schulz, who assumed his dead neighbor's and friend's name, Itzig Finkelstein, to escape prosecution and to start a new life in Israel.

Hilsenrath satirizes the nineteenth-century tradition of the parallel biographies, a Jewish one and a Christian one; for example, Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben (Credit and Debit) or Wilhelm Raabe's Der Hungerpastor (The Minister of Hunger). The negative Jewish stereotypes of this fiction, which is often classified as Realism, found their way into Dinter's Die Sande wider das Blut (The Sin Against the Blood) and Streicher's infamous paper Der Sturmer.9 In Hilsenrath, the Aryan boy comes from a background of debauchery and corruption. He grows up to be a despicable creature and a mass murderer-and he survives. The Jewish boy-in a reversal of Nazi racist doctrines-is blond and blue eyed, a Nordic beauty, whereas Max is an antisemitic stereotype. As an SS-man, Max kills Itzig and Itzig's family, from whom he experienced only kindness. There is no poetic justice: the brute lives, his gentle friend dies.

Not only anti-Jewish fiction and racist theory but also German contemporary literature are targets of Hilsenrath's book. There are numerous allusions and parallels to Grass's Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum). However, the petit-bourgeois milieu, which Grass describes with a certain unsavory nostalgia, appears merely disgusting and appalling in Hilsenrath, whose drastic language and explicit sex scenes by far outdo Grass.

Der Nazi und der Friseur also satirizes the antifascist discourse, particularly that of the Frankfurt School.10 The grossly exaggerated atrocities to which Max is subjected at the hand of his stepfather can only fill the reader with a macabre amusement and doubt as to the validity of the equation that brutality invariably generates brutality; that is, child abuse causes mass murder. In various scholarly texts by Adorno, Canetti, Miller, and others,11 at times such simplistic causality is thinly veiled by academic rhetoric. Hilsenrath's novel is void of such rhetoric. It advances monocausal arguments in the crudest form, exposing the weakness of any single attempt at explaining the Holocaust, which, after all has been said, leaves more questions than answers.

The text frustrates any attempt at polarization. There is nothing monolithic about past and present. The Nazi can become a Jew, the Jew look like the traditional enemy of the Jews, and the former killer of Jews marries into a large Israeli clan and is actually a good husband to his wife, a former Nazi victim. The Nazi definitions of Jews and Aryans are discarded as fictitious. Yet the text heightens the reader's awareness that the stereotypes of Jews and Aryans are anything but a thing of the past. While they are not founded in reality, prejudice and the power structures are real: the Nazi state, capitalism, and later the state of Israel. Real are the wars and the killing; and above all, real is the money for which the killing takes place.

Hilsenrath makes the economic motivations for the success of the Nazi movement plain. Not idealism, not the promise of being of the master race, but rather the possibility of taking over Finkelstein's hair salon motivates Schulz's Nazism. The little treasure from the dead Jews' gold teeth makes it easy for Max to forget his previous convictions and to make a fresh start after the war. Schulz's story as an average citizen after 1945 and his wife's recovery from bulimia after the Six-Day War indicate an appeal for the Jewish State. Its existence and its stability transform the murderer and heal the suffering. The Jewish State means safety and a place of refuge.

Reading Der Nazi und der Friseur, one has no reason to assume people have improved after 1945; structures, however, have. Without major self- improvement and repenting, Max can live in Israel and lead an average life. He finds it easy to slip into a Jewish identity-just as easy as slipping into an SS- uniform. The structures shape the person.

Nazism is not portrayed as an ideology, but as a vehicle to satisfy the Germans' need for power, and greed for money. The latter have not vanished, whereas the Nazi Party has. Max never had a chance to develop an identity; instead, some semblance of self was beaten into him, and he remains a chameleon, reacting as his environment dictates.

Hilsenrath lives in Germany in spite of his reservations vis-a-vis the leftovers of the Nazi past, antisemitism and racism, which are anything but dead. He feels that West Berlin-and he readily admits that Berlin is an exception among the German-speaking areas-is the cultural milieu where he belongs, quite unlike his brother, who stayed in the United States, completed his education at American universities, and established himself professionally. Edgar Hilsenrath has made no such attempt.

He is, however, far from leading the staid and secure middle-class existence of many a successful senior German author. For one thing his income is far from matching that of the big best-seller writers of the postwar era, such as Boll, Grass, or Frisch.

Hilsenrath has not merged with the German mainstream-nor with any mainstream at all. His is the somewhat marginal existence of an unmarried bohemian with few strings attached, someone who could, if need be, pack up and leave any time. His place, reminiscent of Dylan songs, is inconspicuously located in a house once owned by the Berlin Jewish community. Yet he only lives there, with neighbors of different ethnic and religious backgrounds, and does not practice Judaism. He professes atheism, and upon further probing, agnosticism.

As soon as Nacht had achieved a certain prominence among the German reading public, Hilsenrath met with hostile reactions. Both street neo-Nazis and the literary establishment chose him as a target of their aggression- however different in style, similar in meaning. Specialists in German literature took exception to his work. It was said that if Der Nazi und der Friseur had not been written by someone of Jewish origin, it would not have been printed because of its supposed antisemitisma reproach that was also advanced against Seelich's film. In front of a TV audience, Peter Wapnewski, professor of German literature, declared that Hilsenrath's book had no literary value. There were, however, also positive reactions, such as Peter Jokostra's open letter in the Bdrsenblatt, which praises the book's cruel, completely unsentimental, and original style.12 Jokostra reviewed Nacht in major papers, and scholarly articles such as Peter Sternberg's "Memories of the Holocaust: Edgar Hilsenrath and the Fiction of Genocide" recognize Hilsenrath's Nacht as an entirely new expression in German Holocaust literature.13

Little wonder that even though Der Nazi und der Friseur had become rather an underground success, Hilsenrath's reintegration into Germany and German public life remains somewhat tentative. Unfortunate experiences taught the author and soon-to-be film maker-he finished the script for Der Nazi und der Friseur-to remain on his guard. One central episode is that of his mother's arrest for shoplifting in a Berlin department store during a visit in West Berlin, a situation in which both antisemitism and ageism apparently played a role. Hilsenrath was able, because of his status as an author, to resolve the situation.

On the surface the image that Jurek Becker projects is quite a different one. He lives in Berlin Kreuzberg, a neighborhood with an interesting blend of Turkish foreign workers, artists, intellectuals, yuppies, and the obligatory pubs, bars, and galleries as meeting places. Much more obviously than Hilsenrath on his guard vis-a-vis inquisitive interviewers, Becker tends to downplay the importance of the Holocaust for his texts.

In a discussion he rather stressed the here and now. But his most famous novel and movie, Jakob der Lugner, plays in a Polish ghetto. Becker also worked with Peter Lilienthal on the Holocaust film David. His novel Der Boxer (The Boxer) resumes themes from Jakob from the perspective of a survivor who lost his family except for one son in the Holocaust. Becker discusses the postwar years, the attempts of the former Nazi victims to establish a new existence, from the point of view of Aron, a camp survivor being interviewed by someone who does not share his experiences. In the course of the novel, it becomes clear that neither Aron nor his son Mark, an infant when his father lost him, was able to free himself from the burden of the past. Aron never resumed his prewar career. He becomes increasingly lonely as time progresses, more and more incapable of controlling his environment. Without admitting it, he remains a victim of fascism for the rest of his life.

Moreover, Becker's most recent book, Bronsteins Kinder (Bronstein's Children), is a Holocaust novel. It is told by a youthful narrator who observes his father making a fatal excursion into the past. Arno Bronstein has characteristics in common with the protagonist in Der Boxer.14 The narrator, Hans, is somewhat reminiscent of Aron's son Mark. Not only the survivor Arno but also his children Hans and Elle are deeply affected by the past. Elle is institutionalized; her brother, nineteen years her junior, sees his life, and with it his ideals as a young GDR citizen, go to ruin as his father and the father's friends kidnap a former camp guard from Neuengamme, hold him hostage, "interrogate" and torture him until Arno dies of a stroke.

Hans comes to realize that he is much more deeply involved with the Holocaust, his father's fate, and Judaism than he had thought. He discovers that he is proficient enough in Yiddish-he does not recall learning it-to follow Arno's conversations with his friends. When Elle in her obscure-lucid way points out that his alternatives are either to turn against the father as if Arno were a nonhuman, Unmann, or to take his father's side against the former guard and people like him, Hans realizes that he has no choice. He understands that he is much less integrated into the new German socialist society than he had thought. He has to face the fact that the past does not even stop with his father's death.

As the major influence for his career, Becker emphasizes Stephan Hermlin (born 1915, Rudolf Leder, Chemnitz; escaped Nazi Germany in 1936; lived in Palestine, Egypt, England, GDR), the famous poet who after the years of exile, like Anna Seghers, returned to East Germany. Becker thus expresses his solidarity with the tradition of the antifascist exile authors. He denounces traditional Holocaust literature filled with "piles of dead bodies." He claims to have no affinity to it; and even less so, his non-Jewish wife. The images and films of mass murders may impress partisans for the Jewish cause, and, of course, older survivors including his father. The latter was not happy with his son's first novel. He objected to the "lies," that is, the omissions of cruelty, famine, suffering, disease, and murder-omissions of which camp survivors would surely be aware.

Becker holds that most of Holocaust literature is not and should not be written for survivors, because they know. It should rather be addressed to an uninitiated audience-as a former GDR author, he presupposes more historical knowledge on the readers' part than would his West German or American colleagues. Literature, according to Becker, sensitizes. Therefore the writer of Holocaust fiction ought to be particularly aware and responsible, and not overwhelm or negatively affect his readers.

Such statements might almost be taken as an invective against authors like Hilsenrath. Becker believes that only one person at a time can have a tragic effect and move the readers, whereas masses of corpses and dying by the thousands will activate defense mechanisms. Resistance, not empathy, will be the result. The story of a resourceful individual and the theme of creating hope and the will for survival in strict confinement were the aspects that intrigued him most about the Jacob story. According to him, it was almost accidental that it took place in a ghetto among Jews doomed for deportation. On the other hand, the Holocaust, the plight of the Nazi victims, can best be shown by singling out individual figures. The historical background, figures and dates, can best be learned from documentary material.

Nadja Seelich represents yet another point of view vis-a-vis the Nazi past, one that expresses itself in her movie Kieselsteine (Pebbles). Hilsenrath and Becker are not outspoken with regard to their Jewishness, nor do they lead Jewish-identified lives. Seelich, on the other hand, freely and proudly discusses being a Jew, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and a member of an endangered people, with whom she passionately identifies.15

To Hilsenrath, the Holocaust is an integral part of his life that he was old enough to experience consciously and remember clearly, an event that deprived him of formal schooling and perhaps a university education (his mother hired private tutors for him), an unbroken cultural identity, and his physical health. Becker views the past as something to be overcome in an occasionally heroic struggle. He juxtaposes it to the concept of a "normal" human life such as he himself wants to lead. He, like many of his characters, downplays being a victim of fascism. When talking about the Nazis, he stresses their economic motives, de-emphasizing antisemitism. These facets are a part of Marxist fascism theory and are surely valid. However, as early as in the first National Socialist Party Program, February 24, 1920, Jews were the declared and singled-out targets of Nazi politics. Disregarding antisemitism means leaving out the central Nazi theme.

Seelich differs from Hilsenrath and Becker. She focuses on the Holocaust as an event of the past that, because of its unfathomability, tends to assume mythical dimensions. Like her, her somewhat autobiographical protagonist, a young Viennese Jewish woman, Hannah Stern, did not experience the Holocaust herself, but integrated it into her intellectual and emotional life as a part of her heritage. This heritage is so much alive that at times it is difficult for her to separate her own experience from that of the survivors.

Seelich's insights stem from a conscious endeavor to come to terms with a past close enough to shape her environment both in Prague and in Vienna. Like Lea Fleischmann, the writer of Das ist nicht mein Land: Eine judin verlaBt die Bundesrepublik,16 she grew up listening to the stories of her survivor relatives. Her film deals with the impact of the past and the wounds that have not healed in the present.

With the encounter between Hannah, born 1952, and Friedrich Gelpke, born 1946 and raised in the GDR, a colleague, son of a Nazi doctor, and like herself, working in Vienna for a state agency in charge of the protection of architectural monuments (Denkmalsschutzamt), begins the life-and-death struggle between a Jewish woman and a German man. Friedrich and Hannah are their parents' children, and both, in a different way, are children of the Holocaust. Both are descendants of destroyed cultures. Friedrich labors under the pain and shame of being the descendant of a destroyed master race and mass murderers-the latter aspect fills him with a sort of pride. Hannah, on the other hand, mourns the loss of her parents' world and is filled with hatred toward the perpetrators. Pebbles, the title of the movie, are her leitmotif. She rubs them during a seemingly peaceful conversation with her Austrian lover and places them on her family's tomb. Pebbles symbolize the memory of the dead. They are placed on the graves just as flowers on a Christian cemetery.

While Friedrich received from his background little more than a hollow facade of false pride and pretense-much like the military man whom Theweleit17 describes-Hannah's personality is the result of doting love and devotion, which gave her an inner strength that Friedrich does not possess. She is a spoilt child and a spoilt woman. Friedrich, however, comes from and reflects an emotional void. Both are somewhat immature, but Hannah has the chance to grow up.

Seelich's convictions are reflected in the film: the profound cultural differences between Jews and non-Jews. Jews who, like Hannah in one phase of her life, try to assimilate themselves to the majority, have to hide their thoughts and primary reactions if they want to get along with their non- Jewish friends. In flashbacks and associative filmic digressions into Hannah's thoughts and visions, the viewer realizes that she lives in an inner space different from that of the Gentiles, that she feels protective about this space and hides it for fear of having it profaned.

Thus her memory of the memorial service at Mauthausen is only visual; she does not speak about it. She does not and cannot verbalize how she lost her innocence through encounters with antisemitism or discuss the images associated with it, the yellow star and the destroyed stained glass at her uncle's office. She cannot articulate her feelings when she hears Jewish music. We see her walking down the street and suddenly hearing familiar sounds, but there is no discussion. Hannah's visits to the Jewish cemetery, her prayers, are also her secret. She is neither formally religious nor adverse to adapting to her non-Jewish lover's way of life. He, however, disregarding who she is, tries to reshape her in his image of feminine beauty.18 Hannah's attempts at fitting in are thwarted. There is so much in the everyday life of the average Austrian that can only offend her, particularly the thoughtlessness with regard to antisemitism and the Holocaust, but also toward Hannah herself. Rarely do the young Viennese take into account that she is Jewish. They take it as a matter of course that she herself will not make a point of her Jewishness and will abandon her heritage for the sake of their precious company. This is especially obvious from the jewelry which Martin designs for Hannah: a Scandinavian style for a petite, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman.

Friedrich is the only one who has an inkling of Hannah's being different. He forces her to think through and articulate her points of view. However, he does so with the arrogance of a racist antisemite. Friedrich is deeply affected by the anti-Jewish doctrines of the Nazi era, which he inherited from his family. His insights into Hannah's psyche, valid as some of them seem, are always distorted by the stereotypes he superimposes on her. Jewelry expresses what he thinks of her; at a flea market he buys her an old filigree silver pendant, which he takes as symbolic of her fragility and typically Jewish sadness. While Friedrich only perceives Hannah's occasional melancholy, the viewer is shown Hannah's development from a carefree, happy child of a protective Salzburg family into a woman who is at times moody, at times aggressive as a result of having to deal with the Holocaust, her family's past, and the antisemitism of the present.

The film expresses the difference between Hannah and Friedrich, and Hannah and Martin on a multitude of levels: through the choice of clothes, personal mannerisms, and interiors. Friedrich's realm is that of hierarchical order. Friedrich's world is father-defined as is visible in the barren ancestral portraits on the wall of his apartment. Hannah is fond of fabrics, textures, and luxurious colors. While she lives in Martin's supermodern apartment, which is void of history, her tastes are repressed.

The most important influence in Hannah's life is her grandmother, whose love and acceptance do not cease even when she learns about Hannah's incestuous affair. During the many barroom and social scenes, the fascist nature of Friedrich's thoughts becomes manifest. He has a compulsion for making judgments. He sadistically expresses his distaste for a young homosexual, crudely condemns the piano playing of a black-haired, black- eyed artist, and simplistically voices his preference of Wagner over Verdi.

Hannah and Friedrich are prisoners of the past. While he is dominated by the ideology of his father and uncle, she is deeply absorbed by the memories of the Holocaust. Those carry additional meaning for her because of her romantic involvement with her uncle. In a flashback of an intimate encounter, he is identified as an Auschwitz survivor by the number on his arm.

That love affair was the cause of Hannah's being cast out of her protective family circle, which would not tolerate her involvement with a married relative. The loss of love and security prompted her relationship with Martin and overshadows her friendship with Friedrich. The German man is, in Hannah's mind, more than one individual. He becomes the target for her revenge for her uncle's suffering as well as for her thwarted love. Hannah, in turn, is more to Friedrich than just Hannah. She is the forbidden sex object whom he humiliates while demanding her affection.

There are many figures like Friedrich in the movie. Seelich films her own experience of being accosted in the streets of Vienna by antisemites or supposed philosernites with protestations of aggression or friendship, when she shows Hannah at the center of attentions directed toward her as a Jewish woman. Many scenes, for instance when an old bag lady performs a lewd dance for a crowd of cheering Viennese workers, expose the fascist-like corruption of Viennese society.

Hannah's inner life abounds with memories of a happy, protected childhood in a distinctly Jewish environment. She experiences antisemitism for the first time when, approximately at the age of ten, she and her uncle find the door of his office vandalized: a star of David is scratched in the glass. His flight from Vienna as a result of the shocking event taught her about her own precarious existence as a Jew. She comes to associate her Jewishness with love and destruction-associations which her non-Jewish lovers and friends cannot understand.

Seelich herself consciously claims the Holocaust as a part of her history and as a source of strength. Her family's oral tradition taught her of acts of great courage, intelligence, and heroism. She considers her self the beneficiary of that experience and a witness to the survivors' strength. She feels an obligation to live up to their legacy: "I was my parents' answer to the Holocaust, a child begotten in the aftermath of persecution and mass murder, an act of extreme courage and defiance."

She wishes at times for an opportunity to prove herself worthy of her ancestors, to equal their courage. She feels that they died and suffered so that she could live. She considers herself the product of suffering turned into love and care toward her, the child of a doomed and miraculously surviving people. She studied biblical and cabalistic traditions after she left her marriage with a non-Jewish Austrian to return ever more consciously to her heritage. After the release of her film, her feeling of alienation was intensified because of the harassment she experienced as a result of her work. She has neither an apartment nor a telephone in her name.

Since Waldheim was elected president of Austria, the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in Vienna has worsened. In a recent letter, Seelich expressed her fears:

Moreover, as you know, while I am an Austrian citizen, I was born in Prague and still, at this point, feel like a foreigner here.... My views are not representative of any group.... I am afraid in this country, and I am miserable-as a Jewish woman, as a foreigner, as Nadja Seelich?19

I had learned that Waldheim, opposing the Socialist Kurt Steyrer, had leapt ahead in the polls after the World Jewish Congress publicized its findings. He'd omitted from the vita he sent to the UN any mention of his three years of enthusiastic service under General Alexander Uhr, executed for war crimes in 1946. There was evidence he'd aided in the deportation of thousands of Greek Jews, most of whom were gassed at Auschwitz--or at least closed his eyes to the action, since it occurred right in front of him-and that he'd passed on orders for the torture of Yugoslav civilians resisting German occupation.... Then I knew what I'd been feeling: a primitive aversion to the German language: worry that I'd irrationally assume all Austrians were anti- Semitic; and now, as well, outrage that a majority of Austrians planned to vote for a man who'd lied about his war record and served loyally in Hitler's army.21

In retrospect, Seelich's film seems like a pioneer work, introducing into the Austrian film scene the conflict between Jews and Germans without making any attempt to understand or explain away the differences. Kieselsteine is no invitation for reconciliation, but rather it is a statement why the reconciliation with former Nazis and their children from the point of view of a European Jew is virtually impossible. This hard stance is particularly remarkable because it predates the Waldheim election. The critic, journalist, and film maker Ruth Beckermann only recently finished a documentary movie, Die papierne Brucke, for which she chose her parents as a paradigm of an average Jewish couple in Vienna. She traces their fate and that of their respective communities in Vienna through Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Israel back to Vienna. An anti- Waldheim demonstration in Vienna at the Stephansplatz becomes the scene of antisernitic outbursts and physical attacks under the protection of the Vienna police. This is, it seems, a facet of the struggle-life of survivors who alongside with their Gentile neighbors worked at rebuilding the Austrian state after 1945.22

Seelich, like Beckermann, whose earlier film Wien Retour focused on the involvement of Austrian Jews in the socialist movement, does not identify with the religious aspects of Judaism. Rather, she defines being Jewish in cultural and ethnic terms as belonging to a people distinctly different from others, one that must be kept intact because it has been so diminished. She is a non-assimilationist. At the same time, she emphasizes her ties to Europe, particularly Prague, and its great Jewish tradition. Not at all a conservative, she feels distant toward the Eastern European orthodox tradition, although she loves the Yiddish language and Yiddish literature.

In Seelich's movie postwar Jews and non-Jews are separate groups. Communication, because of the emotionally charged situation and the lack of information, is hardly possible. The non-Jews know little about Jewish life, and their knowledge is of a hostile kind. Hannah, but never the non-Jews, questions the validity of the term Jew:

HANNAH: Sometimes I ask myself, when I don't consider the love able antisernites whom I meet from time to time, who declare all undesirables Jews ...
SEBASTIAN: No matter if they are Yugoslavs, Turks or gypsies, right?
HANNAH: ... Sometimes I actually ask myself: What is a Jew?
FRIEDRICH: You of all people ask yourself what a Jew is?
HANNAH: Yes, I ask myself! Are they a nation? Perhaps in Israel. Am I in Israel? A religion? I have no religion! A people? After 2000 years of diaspora?
FRIEDRICH: Then it must be the good old race in all likelihood.
HANNAH: I know you would love that.
LIESL: But there are also blond Jews. That was the greatest tragedy, for instance, in Auschwitz, that also the blond, blue-eyed children were killed .23

The Jews participate in varying degrees in the mainstream culture and at the same time preserve their identity in a quiet way while the Gentiles silently hold on to their inherited biases. Hannah is the exception by breaking the taboo of silence. When discussion cannot be avoided, the truth surfaces: both groups are in conflict with one another, a conflict with which their members cope in different wayssome aggressively like Hannah and Friedrich, some by withdrawal or even indifference like Hannah's lover, and some by separatism like Hannah's family.

Kieselsteine was viewed with mixed feeling by the Viennese Jewish community. Hannah does not conform to the orthodox ideal of femininity. Quite the contrary, she is daring, an explorer of human possibilities, one who cannot be beaten down. The last scene of the movie shows Hannah after the rape by Friedrich as she turns her coat collar up and "like Humphrey Bogart," as Seelich interprets, walks out to meet life. Her adversary and violator, on the other hand, is left crouched in a fetal position on the floor of his living room-a scene that was too much for the actor Jorg Gillner, who refused to portray it as called for in the script.

It is significant that in their first Holocaust novels Hilsenrath and Becker portray no intimate or even direct personal conflict between Germans and Jews. In Hilsenrath's Nacht the Jews are isolated. Also in Jakob der Lugner Germans play no significant role in interpersonal dynamics. They are a nuisance, the threat from the outside, but not a personal enemy. The confrontation takes place in Hilsenrath's Nazi und der Friseur and in Becker's Der Boxer, but even more so in Bronsteins Kinder, a book written around the time of the making of Seelich's film.

Despite the author's theoretical statements, Becker's last novel communicates a point of view which approaches that of Seelich's movie. Hans, Becker's protagonist, realizes that when faced with the alternative of declaring his father an Unmann (nonhuman) since he kidnapped the SS-guard, or of taking his side, he can do only the latter. At the same time his loyalty toward the GDR state is weakened. He realizes that often he may have received special treatment because of his being Jewish, a special treatment which at that particular historical time was preferential. However, given different circumstances, it could be negative. Hans realizes that he is perceived as different from the outside, but his memory and awareness make him different inside as well.

His solution resembles that of Hannah: Not to forget, but to proceed with the business of living, of living as well as he can, not in spite of the past, but with and because of the past.

NOTES

1 . Edgar Hilsenrath, Nacht (Frankfurt, 1980); Der Nazi und der Friseur (Frankfurt, 1979).

2. Wolfgang Borchert, DrauBen vor der Tar (Hamburg, 1947).

3. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Der Schattcnmann: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen 19381945 (Frankfurt, 1983).

4. Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird (Boston, 1976).

5. Jurek Becker, Jakob der Lugner (1969; reprint Frankfurt, 1982).

6. Ruth K. Angress, "Lanzmann's Shoah and Its Audience," SWC Annual 3 (1986):250.

7. Signs 10, no. 4 (1985): 741-61.

8. Arnost Lustig's The Unloved: From the Diaries of Perla S. (New York, 1985) depicts a similar situation. Perla is a prostitute at the ghetto Theresienstadt. In return for her services, she receives items that outside the ghetto confines would be of little or no value, ranging from stationery to hairpins. Inside the ghetto, however, because of the extreme poverty, these objects can be used as currency.

9. Artur Dinter's Die Sanden der Zeit I: Die Sande wider das Blut (Leipzig, 1928) is the first volume of an antisernitic novel trilogy. More systematic and radical than much of the Nazi propaganda of the time, the content is based on authors such as Gobineau, Fritsch, Marr, and Chamberlain. The pseuclospiritualistic approach of Dinter's fiction is reminiscent of Swedenborg. Dinter's stereotypes are the same as those in Julius Streicher's Der Starmer, one of the official Nazi papers.

10. See Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frankel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, and Newitt R. Sanford, eds., The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950).

11. Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht (Frankfurt, 1980); Alice Miller, Am Anfang war die Erziehung (Frankfurt, 1980).

12. Peter Jokostra, "Open Letter," Borsenblatt 20 (1965).

13. Deutsche Vierteljahrsch rift (1982): 277-89.

14. Jurek Becker, Der Boxer (Frankfurt, 1976); Bronsteins Kinder (Frankfurt, 1986).

15. Judy Stone, "Contemporary Views of the Holocaust," San Francisco Chronicle, 22 Aug. 1983, writes about the series "Jewish Film Festival," as a part of which Seelich's movie is available in the United States: "The most provocative and unusual is an Austrian dramatic feature, 'Pebbles' . . . old stereotypes, inherited fear, hatred, anxiety and desire are examined sharply in a way that no other film that I can recall has dared to do."

16. Lea Fleischmann, Dies ist nicht mein Land (Hamburg, 1980).

17. Klaus Theweleit, "Zur Psychoanalyse des weiBen Terrors," in Mannerphantasien, Vol. 2 (Hamburg, 1980).

18. Seelich emphasizes this point in the program for Kieselstcine, cineart (Filmverleih Hans Peter Hofmann, 1982).

19. Nadja Seelich, letter to author, 4 June 1987; my translation. Seelich declined to participate in a conference at the Ohio State University in November 1987, stating that she was at this time incapable of speaking publicly about issues involving her situation as a Jewish artist in Austria.

20. Romain Leick, "Osterreichs Juden haben wieder Angst," Der Spiegel, 28 (July 1987): 94-97: "They receive threats, are insulted, even assaulted: the Jews in Vienna. They are a community of just 6000; once they were 180,000. While President Waldheirn was being honored at the Vatican and in Jordan as an official guest, many Jews are contemplating flight from Waldheim's country. "

21. "Analyzing Waldheim's Vienna and Freud's High Anxiety," Voice, 12 Aug. 1986, pp. 19ff.

22. Ruth Beckermann, Die papierne Brucke (Vienna: Filmladen, 1987).

23. Filmbroschure, Kieselsteine, 1982.

24. Judith Miller, "Erasing the Past: Europe's Amnesia About the Holocaust," The New York Times Magazine, 16 Nov. 1986, pp. 30ff. states: "Many Europeans have their own distinct, often suppressed memories which are at odds with those of the victors and those who suffered at the hands of the Third Reich, particularly those who survived Nazi concentration camps. ... Decency and custom have prevented these alternative memories from being expressed openly. But scratch the surface they are there." Friedrich is a vehicle to express the suppressed memory that has been transferred to the following generations in the unofficial, yet powerful education outside of the denazified German and Austrian classrooms.