The “Genius” of Vergangenheitsbewältigung

In 1963 Walter Jens published a short work, Herr Meister: Dialog über einen Roman (Mr. Meister: Dialogue about a Novel), that, in the form of an exchange of letters between a novelist (called A) and a literary critic (called B), considered the usefulness of melancholy traditions for the contemporary novel concerned with the memory of the Holocaust. The letters are not fictional but showcase an intellectual exchange that took place between Jens and the German-Jewish writer Wolfgang Hildesheimer in the years 1961 and 1962 (HM, 11). Hildesheimer, correspondent A, was interested in melancholy discourses at this time, as his fascination with Shakespeare's Hamlet and his later novels Tynset (1965) and Masante (1973) demonstrate.

Despite the fact that Herr Meister commemorates Jews in the Holocaust, it is a minor text that has not been accorded much attention in discussions of postwar German literature. However, its scholarly focus on the aesthetic possibilities of different melancholy traditions for developing a literary discourse of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—a problematic appellation that delineates the task of coming to terms with the Nazi past and the Holocaust and that for all its inadequacy will be used throughout this book to designate questions of remembrance—renders it an appropriate starting point for the present study. Born under Auschwitz examines melancholy self-fashioning in works by Günter Grass, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Peter Weiss, W. G. Sebald, and Iris Hanika, all of whom, in their reflections on the poetics of remembrance after the Holocaust, revive and subvert European melancholy traditions.