5 - Uncanny Legacies: Gender and Guilt in Tanja Dückers's Himmelskörper (2003)

Summary

INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, women continued to be marginalized in family and cultural memory about National Socialism. As historian Margit Reiter observed in a series of interviews with the second postwar generation, the majority still construe the Third Reich as the past of their fathers and grandfathers; “die Mütter werden hingegen marginalisiert oder sie bleiben sogar gänzlich ausgeklammert” (mothers, by contrast, are marginalized or they are completely disregarded). The family stories that do feature women tend to focus on their fortitude and suffering during the war rather than on their political agency or complicity. At first glance, contemporary novels that revisit the Nazi past from a female perspective unfold along similar lines. They frequently foreground the hardships endured by women during the Second World War and the occupation era. For example, novels including Larissa Boehning's Lichte Stoffe (Light Materials, 2007), Kathrin Gerlof's Alle Zeit (All the Time, 2009), and Annette Pehnt's Chronik der Nähe (Chronicle of Closeness, 2012) depict women's struggles to bring their family through the war and the chaos of its aftermath. Others turn in more detail to women's experience of flight, expulsion, and wartime rape, notably Günter Grass's Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002), Reinhard Jirgl's Die Unvollendeten (The Incomplete, 2003), and Tanja Dückers's Himmelskörper.

The ubiquity of fictional and nonfiction reassessments of the past in 2003 alone caused journalist Ulrich Raulff to christen it the year “in dem 1945 zurückkehrte…. Ein Jahr, das man zu kennen glaubte, und das auf einmal in neuem Licht dasteht” (in which 1945 returned…. A year that we thought we knew and that has suddenly appeared in a new light). The sheer number of writers to reassess the Nazi past at such a historically insignificant moment, without an obvious public prompt, betokens the inadequacy of official memory narratives (molded around anniversaries) that decree what is to be remembered, when, and how. Raulff suspects that rhetorical rituals of Vergangenheitsbewältigung sidestep the issues that touch the emotional core of individual and communicative memory. If the recent eruption of memory narratives can be considered a “return of the repressed,” then, we are talking about repressed emotions as well as forgotten topics. The idea of a “historical uncanny” has been more explicitly invoked by literary scholars in the past decade.