Reinventing Invented Tradition: Vergangenheitsbewältigung and the Literature of Melancholy

Summary

Since The Publication In 1964 of Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl’s landmark iconological study of melancholy from antiquity to the early modern period, Saturn and Melancholy, interdisciplinary scholarship on literary melancholy in the field of German Studies has thrived. Despite the many studies on literary melancholy since the 1960s, however, melancholy, understood as a set of traditions in Western writing and culture from antiquity to the present, has yet to be identified as a feature of German literature that deals with the legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust. This oversight arises, to some degree, from the scholarly association of German melancholy traditions predominantly with the early modern period, the baroque period, Romanticism, and also the fin-de-siècle crisis of modernity; indeed, most postwar publications on melancholy in German literature stop their analysis before the twentieth century. Consistent with the view of the Holocaust as a radical caesura in the history of Western civilization, this lapse implicitly suggests that melancholy traditions in Western writing since antiquity and writing on the legacy of the Holocaust circumscribe two separate kinds of literary aesthetics, one that belongs to a distant and archaic world untainted by knowledge of the Holocaust, and one that emerges in the post-1945 world that is overshadowed by the legacy of Auschwitz. As I show in the following, German and German-Jewish writers after 1945 often adapt the melancholy traditions of a pre-Holocaust world to address, broadly speaking, from the perpetrator and victim perspectives, the problems of representation, literary language, and epistemology that the Holocaust poses. In so doing, they reinvent the invented traditions of melancholy in order to create a novel ethical poetics for a new historical context in which, from the 1960s on, the victim’s perspective becomes paramount. They thus undermine the concept of a, to paraphrase historian Dan Diner, “Zivilisationsbruch” (rupture in civilization) after 1945, suggesting instead the importance—and not the bankruptcy—of established Western cultural traditions for a postwar literary ethics of memory.

One name for the new aesthetics of ethical literary engagement after the “caesura” of Auschwitz is “Vergangenheitsbewältigung.