Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: The Purposes and Problems of German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century
- 1 Life Writing and Writing Lives: Ego Documents in Historical Perspective
- 2 From Erlebnis to Erinnerung: Rereading Soldiers’ Letters and Photographs from the First World War
- 3 From Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges to Der gefährliche Augenblick: Ernst Jünger, Photography, Autobiography, and Modernity
- 4 Persuasive Illusions of the Self: Albert Speer’s Life Writing and Public Discourse about Germany’s Nazi Past
- 5 The Shoah before the Shoah: The Literary Technique of Allusion in Elias Canetti’s Autobiography
- 6 “Ich schäme mich meiner Augen”: Photography and Autobiographical Identities in Grete Weil’s Leb ich denn, wenn andere leben
- 7 “Mich in Variationen erzählen”: Günter Grass and the Ethics of Autobiography
- 8 Voyeurism? Autobiographies by Children of the Perpetrators: Niklas Frank’s Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung (1987) and Meine deutsche Mutter (2005)
- 9 Dismembering the Past, Remembering the Self: An Interrogation of Disability Narratives by Luise Habel and Christa Reinig
- 10 “Schicht um Schicht” — The Evolution of Fred Wander’s Life Writing Project in the GDR Era and Beyond
- 11 Thought Patterns and Explanatory Strategies in the Life Writing of High-Ranking GDR Party Officials after the Wende
- 12 “Ein reines Phantasieprodukt” or “Hostile Biography”? Günter de Bruyn’s Vierzig Jahre and the Stasi files
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
8 - Voyeurism? Autobiographies by Children of the Perpetrators: Niklas Frank’s Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung (1987) and Meine deutsche Mutter (2005)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: The Purposes and Problems of German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century
- 1 Life Writing and Writing Lives: Ego Documents in Historical Perspective
- 2 From Erlebnis to Erinnerung: Rereading Soldiers’ Letters and Photographs from the First World War
- 3 From Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges to Der gefährliche Augenblick: Ernst Jünger, Photography, Autobiography, and Modernity
- 4 Persuasive Illusions of the Self: Albert Speer’s Life Writing and Public Discourse about Germany’s Nazi Past
- 5 The Shoah before the Shoah: The Literary Technique of Allusion in Elias Canetti’s Autobiography
- 6 “Ich schäme mich meiner Augen”: Photography and Autobiographical Identities in Grete Weil’s Leb ich denn, wenn andere leben
- 7 “Mich in Variationen erzählen”: Günter Grass and the Ethics of Autobiography
- 8 Voyeurism? Autobiographies by Children of the Perpetrators: Niklas Frank’s Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung (1987) and Meine deutsche Mutter (2005)
- 9 Dismembering the Past, Remembering the Self: An Interrogation of Disability Narratives by Luise Habel and Christa Reinig
- 10 “Schicht um Schicht” — The Evolution of Fred Wander’s Life Writing Project in the GDR Era and Beyond
- 11 Thought Patterns and Explanatory Strategies in the Life Writing of High-Ranking GDR Party Officials after the Wende
- 12 “Ein reines Phantasieprodukt” or “Hostile Biography”? Günter de Bruyn’s Vierzig Jahre and the Stasi files
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
IN 2007 A YOUNG GERMAN WOMAN made her debut as a writer with a work that deployed the marketing strategy referred to in the film industry as “Naziploitation.” Ariane von Schirach, the grand-daughter of the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, plays in Der Tanz um die Lust (Dancing around Desire) with the voyeuristic expectations of a reading public that seems to have succumbed, sixty years after the Second World War, to fascination with a kind of magic reappearance of the perpetrators. The public response to works as different as Margret Nissen's Sind Sie die Tochter Speer? (Are You Speer's Daughter? 2004), Katrin Himmler's Die Brüder Himmler. Eine deutsche Familiengeschichte (The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History, 2005), Richard von Schirach's Der Schatten meines Vaters (The Shadow of My Father, 2005), Norbert Lebert and Stefan Lebert's Denn du trägst meinen Namen. Das schwere Erbe der prominenten Nazikinder (For You Bear My Name: The Difficult Inheritance of the Children of Prominent Nazis, 2000), Dan Bar-On's Die Last des Schweigens. Gespräche mit Kindern von NS-Tätern (The Burden of Silence: Conversations with the Children of Nazi Perpetrators, 2003), and Claudia Brunner and Uwe von Seltmann's Schweigen die Väter. Reden die Enkel (If the Fathers Stay Silent, Their Grandchildren Must Speak, 2005) suggests that there is widespread interest in the life stories of the “children of the perpetrators.”
Why do these autobiographies by the children of the perpetrators appeal so strongly to German readers? Is their curiosity about the private sphere of the perpetrators (and their families) an expression of the change in German political memory since the fall of the Berlin Wall? Is it really necessary to integrate not just the victims but also those associated with the perpetrators into the process of collective remembrance of the Second World War? One of the most successful autobiographies by the child of a perpetrator, intended by its author as a “reckoning” with his father, ends up exonerating him, as the close reading offered in this chapter shows. Rather than a focus on historical guilt, we find an expression of personal shame. But what else can a text do if it turns its readers into voyeurs of the self-humiliation of its author?
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- German Life Writing in the Twentieth Century , pp. 137 - 150Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010