Hilsenrath 1

PETER ARNDS Kansas State University

On the Awful German Fairy Tale: Breaking Taboos in Representations of Nazi Euthanasia and the Holocaust

in Giinter Grass's Die Blechtrommel, Edgar Hilsenrath's Der Nazi & der Friseur, and Anselm

Kiefer's Visual Art

Among those representations of the Ho- locaust in literature, painting, cartoon, and film that share the characteristic of mixing the sublime with the profane and hence op- posing Theodor Adorno's famous statement that writing a poem after Auschwitz would be barbaric, there is in Germany a group of texts and films in which Nazi atrocities are represented within the context of German mythology and the German fairy-tale tradition. The fictionalization of such a largely unrepresentable historical event as the Ho- locaust and its aftermath is, of course, prob- lematic. If writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, what is writing fairy tales after 1945, particularly fairy tales in the context of the Third Reich and the Holocaust?

In her recent book The Language of Si- lence: West German Literature and the Holo- caust Ernestine Schlant argues that West German literature has largely remained si- lent about the topic of the Holocaust.' The silence about the Holocaust that may pervade the works Schlant analyzes is, however, shat- tered in quite a few other works of art in Ger- many, not only in textual representations of Nazi atrocities that make use of the fairy tale, but also in the work of artists and filmmakers such as Anselm Kiefer and Hans- Jfirgen Syberberg, the two enfants terribles "of an otherwise reputable culture", as An- dreas Huyssen has pointed out.2 Although Schlant briefly discusses G(inter Grass's Die

Blechtrommel, she ignores the fact that a close reading reveals it to be a text in which there is definitely no silence about Nazi atrocities (69-71). Although it is true that the persecution of Jews and their elimina- tion in concentration camps is not a central theme in this novel, it is in its entirety a text about the persecution of another minority group that the Nazis considered artfremd, the physically and mentally handicapped, exemplified by the dwarf Oskar Matzerath.

I want to explore the use of fairy tales in Die Blechtrommel and Edgar Hilsenrath's Der Nazi und der Friseur in the context of the Nazis' ethnic cleansing. Questions this essay attempts to answer are: what makes Hilsenrath's use of fairy-tale material more provocative than Grass's, so that German publishers rejected the manuscript until 1977, six years after its original appearance in the US; and what links Hilsenrath's and Grass's texts to some of the satiric paintings and photographs of Anselm Kiefer? The fairy tale in Germany in the 20th century is an ideal genre for showing how history de- termines the uses and abuses of fiction and how then this very fiction can be used in different ways to represent history. The tales of the Brothers Grimm had become politicized during the years of the Weimar Republic as progressive writers and conservatives fought over their legacy.3 For the Nazis the fairy tales became the prime vehicle in supporting

The German Quarterly 75.4 (Fall 2002) 422

ARNDS: Grass, Hilsenrath, Kiefer 423

their Aryan policies. As a consequence, the entire field of Volkskunde became ideologically polluted far into postwar Germany. Fol- lowing this abuse of folklore in support of the Nazis' racist and imperialist ideology, in 1945 the Allied Forces briefly banned the publication of the Grimm tales in Germany because they associated the horrors expressed in many a fairy tale with violence in the death camps.4 Such postwar authors as Arno Schmidt, Giinter Grass, Edgar Hil- senrath, Rolf Hochhuth, most recently Ingo Schramm, and filmmakers like Alexander Kluge, Volker Schl6ndorff, and Helma San- ders-Brahms have all re-claimed the Ger- man fairy-tale tradition for their works in order to exploit the artistic potential of the connection between this genre and the Third Reich. In tales like Hidnsel und Gretel, Dau- merlings Wanderschaft, Vom Fischer und seiner Fru, and Frau Holle they see ways of speaking the unspeakable. It seems that through two of its attributes, its violence and its unreality, the fairy tale lends itself to a representation of just that--extreme political violence and the victims' loss of reality. The reaction in Volker Schl6ndorff's film The Ogre of the French protagonist Abel (played by John Malkovich), as he witnesses Goering's eccentric hunting orgies, that it was so unreal he thought he was in some sort of fairy tale holds true especially within the context of the Holocaust. Yet other aspects of the fairy-tale world reoccur in texts and films after 1945. What the Nazis eagerly embraced for their nationalist politics-such motifs as the "Faustian" quest of the Germanic fairy- tale hero, the housekeeping skills of such a figure as Frau Holle, and the German fairy- tale forest as a symbol for national identity and unity-becomes a target for artistic reappropriation that often parodies the Nazis' abuse of the genre.

One phenomenon that becomes appar- ent in many of the postwar texts that employ the fairy tale in connection with the Third Reich is that the genre no longer seems to promise an intact order in which moral val- ues can be re-established. Although the orig-

inal Grimm tales were ideally suited for the conservative Adenauer period, as Jack Zipes argues, a text like Arno Schmidt's Das steinerne Herz (1956) clearly deconstructs the conservative message of the patriarchal, moralistic fairy tale, as I have shown else- where.5 The fairy tale as an intertext in the belles lettres thus undergoes a literary treatment similar to that of the Bildungsroman. The 19th century's quest for an organic unity and a metaphysical totality for which the Nazis ideologically exploited both genres, the fairy tale and the Bildungsroman, is no longer possible after 1945. Whereas in the proletarian fairy tales of the 1920s and the anthologies in the Third Reich, the tales' teleology serves political purposes, in the Federal Republic this dimension of hope dis- appears almost entirely from fairy-tale re- writings in the belles lettres and can only be found in fairy tales for children. In West Ger- many there is little experimentation in fairy tales for children from 1945 to 1968. Due to the anti-authoritarian attitude of the stu- dent generation, after 1968 the fairy tale was no longer considered sacrosanct and it became a target for increasing experimentation.6 As for fairy tales within the belles lettres, there is some early experimentation, for example in Arno Schmidt's Das steinerne Herz or Giinter Grass's Die Blechtrommel. The main phase of experimentation with regard to representations of the Holocaust does not start until the late seventies, i.e., ten years after the increase of experimentation with children's tales. Undoubtedly, this phenomenon results from the fact that, with an increasing discourse on the German past, the fairy tale has become a more acceptable vehicle for speaking about the Third Reich and the Holocaust: the later Grass, Edgar Hilsenrath, Rolf Hochhuth, Alexander Klu- ge, and Helma Sanders-Brahms must be mentioned here. A film like Benigni's Life is Beautiful, which not only conjoins the Holo- caust with a fairy-tale imagery but fills the representation of the Holocaust with a great deal of laughter, would have been as shock- ing in the Germany of the late 1960s as was

424 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Fall 2002

the provocative Holocaust art of Anselm Kiefer and Edgar Hilsenrath.7 The reception history of some of the provocative works or art by Kiefer as well as the publication history of Hilsenrath's Der Nazi und der Friseur reflect this development. Hilsen- rath's and Kiefer's unrealistic representation of the Holocaust in the context of fairy tale and myth, particularly their use of the macabre, was ill received in Germany unlike, for example, Jurek Becker's Jakob der Luig- ner (1969), whose conflation of the sublime with laughter was accomplished more subtly. Ironically, in the philo-Semitic climate of the Germany of the 1970s German publishers told the Jew Hilsenrath, who at that time still lived in the US, that they considered his novels Nacht (1964) and Der Nazi und der Friseur unacceptable because of their inher- ent anti-Semitism.8 Similarly, Anselm Kie- fer's paintings and his photographs Occupa- tions (1975), a series of Hitler salutes, were taboo breakers in Germany throughout the 1970s and were interpreted as "the sarcasm of a young artist directing his questions toward a pernicious iconography."9 These works consequently experienced a sort of ex- ile existence outside of Germany. While Hil- senrath had not become successful in Ger- many until the 1990s, which experienced a renaissance of Jewish culture, Anselm Kie- fer's art had to "migrate" to and through the States before returning to Germany, where it had never been fully recognized until his 1991 exhibition in Berlin. As Andreas Huys- sen points out, "[t]he timing could hardly have been better: Kiefer comes to Berlin, the political and cultural capital of the new, re- united Germany."'• It is clearly due to the earlier openness of discourse on the Holo- caust in the United States and this country's appropriation of the Holocaust as a cultural icon that the German Holocaust art of the '60s and '70s, with its transgression of the limits of representation, was forced to "emi- grate" to the US. 11Before the 1980s there was no significant discourse on the Holo- caust in Germany. Consequently, when the United States witnessed the awakening of

taboo-breaking Holocaust art (e.g., Spiegel- man), in Germany there was still a sort of hidden censorship that produced the language of silence of which Ernestine Schlant speaks. Although this silence was also bro- ken in the documentary drama of Peter Weiss and Rolf Hochhuth, their plays do not contain Holocaust humor or parody. While their representations remain within the limits of realism, German-Jewish authors like George Tabori, Jakov Lind, Soma Morgen- stern, and Edgar Hilsenrath broke the silence in their works through humor, parody, and grotesque fantasy. This difficulty of find- ing an adequate language forwriting about the Holocaust was a point of discussion between Hilsenrath and Jakov Lind when they lived in Israel. Hilsenrath, who spent the years from 1941 to 1944 in the Ukrainian ghetto of Moghilev-Podolsk, describes this meeting with "Joseph Lindberg" in his novel Die Abenteuer des Ruben Jablonski (1997). Lindberg says to him: "Heute musst du rea- listisch schreiben, wenn du ernst genommen werden willst. [...] Ich meinerseits schreibe humoristisch mit einem Zug ins Groteske. [...] Irgendwann wirst du es in dir spilren, dass die Zeit reif ist. Und dann setzt du dich auf deinen Arsch und legst los. Alles muss fliel3en. Es muss aus dir herausflieBlen wie aus einer Quelle."12 Hilsenrath must have heeded Lind's words because in most of his works he too chooses a grotesque form of representation over a realistic one. In Der Nazi und der Friseur he completely desta- bilizes the sacrosanctity of the fairy tales. They were considered untouchable by the Nazis because of their typically Germanic features but also after the war when they became important for "the healing process necessary for the rebuilding of a humanist culture."13 While one can still see Die Blech- trommel and its fairy-tale subtexts as a con- tribution to this reconstruction of a humanist culture, Hilsenrath's novel, which is possibly one of the strongest satires of the Grimm folktales, eludes this process. By transmogrifying Frau Holle into a prostitute, Der Nazi und der Friseur becomes a re-


action to the Nazis' perception of Frau Holle as a symbol of fertility from Germanic mythology and an archetypal figure to be emu- lated by all German women. Furthermore, he places Hdnsel und Gretel into the context of genocide. Despite all the debunking of fairy tales in Germany after 1968 this sort of transgression of the representational limits was ahead of its time.

Grass uses the fairy-tale tradition in the context of the Holocaust in a much subtler and less cynical way than Hilsenrath. While Hilsenrath's view of the German fairy tale is entirely negative because in Jungian fashion he associates with it the realization of myth during the Third Reich and sees reflected in the fairy tale the spirit ofWotan, Grass's perception of the German fairy tale changes from Die Blechtrommel to his later work. It is precisely the concatenation of a historical event of such utter hopelessness as the Holo- caust with the fairy tales, whose predomi- nant message is one of hope, that leads the Nobel Laureate in the course of his ceuvre to an increasing sense of doom. His adaptations of fairy tales reflect his skepticism about the possibility of a German reunification and the idea of historical progress. In Der Butt (1977), his adaptation of the Grimm tale Vom Fischer und siner Fru, he argues that male rather than female greed led to the catastro- phes of the twentieth century. In this novel the Faustian quest of the Nordic man, which the Nazis read into the German folktale, leads toward the Holocaust as a culmination before the decline of humanity. In Die Rdttin (1986) Grass develops -among many other fairy-tale motifs-a link between Nazi Ger- many and the legend of The Pied Piper of Hameln, with Hitler as the seductive flute player who takes rats (Jews) and children (the Germans) to their doom. In this novel the pessimism is even more pronounced. It harks back to the Nazis' perversion of folklore primarily through the motif of the Ger- man fairy-tale forest, a chief emblem for national identity during the Third Reich, which is itself endangered now in light of Ger- many's ecological crisis. In Grass's Rdttin,

not only are the German forest and German national identity about to vanish, the fairy tales themselves are. The end of the fairy tale announces the end of humankind.

His earlier and no doubt most famous novel, Die Blechtrommel, does not yet contain this dark fairy-tale world. On the con- trary, far from his later pessimism and Hilsenrath's cynicism concerning the Ger- man fairy-tale tradition, reviving the Ro- mantic dwarf tale allows Grass to recover a deeply humanitarian aspect of the Romantic Age. In Die Blechtrommel Grass addresses the persecution of the mentally and physically disabled, of schizophrenics, thieves, aimless wanderers, and the so-calledArbeits- scheuen under the Nazis' sterilization laws and euthanasia program. Die Blechtrommel probes the limits of representation by employing elements of folk culture--the fairy tale, a carnival ambience, the archetype of the trickster, and the literary genre of the picaresque novel-in order to represent the grim reality of the National Socialist euthanasia program as well as the discriminatory practices of a post-fascist West German society.14 Although the novel conflates the sublime (the Holocaust) with the profane (folk humor), in doing so it attempts to revive some of the grotesque forms that the Nazis had tried to eliminate. Die Blechtrommel is an elaborate Tom Thumb tale that directs our attention to the Nazis' misuse of folklore for their racial theories.15 Through his dwarf Oskar Matzerath Grass comments on the Nazis' narrowly defined idea of the Faustian quest pertaining only to the Nordic man of classical beauty, a limitation that nourished their concept of life unworthy of life. In re- claiming the fairy-tale tradition from its ideological abuse during the Third Reich Grass harks back to the liberal tradition of the Romantic period and the Weimar Repub- lic, which expressed solidarity with the physically and racially different Other. Moreover, Die Blechtrommel is a picaresque satire on the Bildungsroman that questions Goethe's concept of Bildung, of man's perfectibility, thus casting doubt on the classical notions of


stability, health, and harmony, the Apolline spirit that also informed the racial eugenics of National Socialism. Like the constantly endangered Tom Thumb of the fairy tale, Oskar Matzerath is not only physically chal- lenged, he is also a thief, a trickster, and a seemingly aimless wanderer. These categories make him into the kind of social outsider that the Nazis targeted. Through its revival of different forms of folk culture repressed or manipulated by the Nazis for ideological purposes, Die Blechtromnmel is a major contri- bution to German Vergangenheitsbewialti- gung.1l

It is the story of Oskar Matzerath, who decides to stop growing at age three. He lives in Gdansk during the Nazi years, where he keeps beating on his tin drum and shattering glass with his miraculous voice, all in protest against the adult world. After his mother dies from unhappiness and compulsive fish consumption, Oskar leaves home and joins his friend Bebra, a circus midget, in order to perform before the Nazis at a warfront theater in France. He then returns home to his father, whom the Russians kill as they over- run Poland. At his father's funeral Oskar decides to grow a few more inches, he develops a hunchback, then temporarily becomes a successful entrepreneur in the early Federal Republic and finally ends up in a madhouse after being charged with murder. The tale of Tom Thumb occupies a central place in this Bildungsroman parody. Like Wilhelm Mei- ster, who is influenced for the remainder of his life by a puppet play, Oskar's development is substantially impacted by a theater performance:

Es wurde das Marchen vom Daumeling gegeben, was mich von der ersten Szene an fesselte und verstandlicherweise per- sbnlich ansprach. Man machte es ge- schickt, zeigte den Daumeling gar nicht, liel3 nur seine Stimme horen und die er- wachsenen Personen hinter dem unsicht- baren aber recht aktiven Titelhelden des Stiickes herspringen. Da saB3 er dem Pferd im Ohr, da lieB er sich vom Vater fuir schweres Geld an zwei Strolche verkau-

fen, da erging er sich auf des einen Strol- ches Hutkrempe, sprach von dort oben herab, kroch spiter in ein Mauseloch, dann in ein Schneckenhaus, machte mit Dieben gemeinsame Sache, geriet ins Heu und mit dem Heu in den Magen der Kuh. Die Kuh aber wurde geschlachtet, weil sie mit Daumelings Stimme sprach. Der Ma- gen der Kuh aber wanderte mit dem ge- fangenen Kerlchen auf den Mist und wurde von einem Wolf verschluckt. Den Wolf aber lenkte Daumeling mit klugen Wor- ten in seines Vaters Haus und Vorrats- kammer und schlug dort Larm, als der Wolf zu rauben gerade beginnen wollte. Der SchluB war, wie's im Marchen zu- geht: der Vater erschlug den basen Wolf, die Mutter offnete mit einer Schere Leib und Magen des FreBsacks, heraus kam Diumeling, das heiBt, man horte ihn nur rufen: "Ach, Vater, ich war in einem Mau- seloch, in einer Kuh Bauch und in eines Wolfes Wanst: nun bleib ich bei Euch." Mich rfihrte dieser SchluB [...], und als ich zu Mama hinaufblinzelte, bemerkte ich, daB sie die Nase hinter dem Taschen- tuch barg, weil sie gleich mir die Hand- lung auf der Bifihne zum eigensten Erleb- nis gemacht hatte. Mama liel3 sich gerne rithren, driickte mich wihrend der fol- genden Wochen, vor allen Dingen, solan- ge das Weihnachtsfest dauerte, immer wieder an sich, kiiB3te mich und nannte Oskar bald scherzhaft, bald wehmittig: Diumling. Oder: Mein kleiner Ddiumling. Oder: Mein armer, armer Daumling.17

This novel is densely intertextual not only with two different versions of the Grimms' Tom Thumb folktale, Daurmesdick and

Daumnerlings Wanderschaft, but also with other fairy tales about dwarfs, first and foremost Wilhelm Hauff's Der kleine Muck and Zwerg Nase.18 Grass regener- ated, as it were, what the Nazis had perceived as degenerate, the grotesque body and the grotesque Romantic fairy tale.19 A close reading of the novel reveals that Grass adopts a structure shared by at least these four dwarf tales: (1) the reduction of the dwarf to his grotesque body, (2) the mockery and public display of the dwarf,


(3) the public's understanding of the dwarf's size as a reflection of mental inadequacy, (4) the dwarfs desire to hide from harassment and persecution, (5) his col- laboration with criminals as a form of self- protection, (6) the questionability of his parents' love, and (7) his wandering in search of happiness. The tales thus become a vehicle for historical representation.20

Like Tom Thumb, Oskar is in constant danger because of his size. Like Tom Thumb therefore, Oskar repeatedly has to hide in places that symbolize the protectiveness of the mother's womb. He hides under his grandmother's skirts, inside a rostrum during a Nazi party gathering, in war bunkers, closets, etc. He joins a band of criminals, the "Stdiuberbande" and the Nazis themselves, in order not to be crushed by them. Although he is the size of a thumb, Tom Thumb's jour- ney reflects his pursuit of happiness. Grass elaborates on this concept and contextuali- zes it with the historical background of euthanasia. The external arresting of Oskar's growth stands in direct contrast to his inner life. The association of arrested intellectual growth with arrested physical growth becomes a critical comment on the condemna- tion of the disabled by the Nazis as dead souls and therefore "life unworthy of living. " Oskar's rich inner life exposes the enormity of Nazi crimes against the mentally and physically handicapped, who were sent into the gas chambers after "a perfunctory medi- cal test."21 What have been literary topoi for centuries-society's contempt for the dwarf, the view that his physical shortcomings sig- nal mental inadequacy, his uselessness for society other than for the purpose of display-are paradigms we can observe not only in the above-mentioned dwarf fairy tales but also in such novels as Par Lager- qvist's Dvdirgen (1944) and Ursula Hegi's Stones from the River (1994). These literary topoi became gruesome realities under Nazi euthanasia. Leni Yahil points out that "Ster- behilfe became Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens and the extension of such life was de- noted unsozial" (307). While euthanasia

aims at alleviating the suffering of the individual, "racial eugenics was to develop and improve the human race and, in light of this seemingly noble aim, the individual and his suffering became insignificant. [...] People who were no longer useful to the state were perceived as "monsters" in contrast to "true human beings" (Yahill 307). They were de- scribed as geistig Tote, "alien growth[s] in human society, and of a lower level than animals" (Yahill 307). It is only a short step from this concept to the denial of the right to exist. According to these theories it was suggested by Professor Ernst Bergmann as early as 1933 "that a worldwide campaign should be launched against the retarded, habitual criminals, and all degenerates. He recom- mended 'quietly throwing away onto the garbage heap a million of the human refuse in the large cities"' (Yahil 308). Yahil goes on to describe the implementation of the euthanasia program in Nazi Germany. She ex- plains how the Sonderbehandlung, i.e., the gassing and subsequent cremation, of unde- sirable Ballastexistenzen originated as the central operation of the euthanasia program in 1940 before it was used in concentration camps. After public protest against these practices, the Nazis halted the euthanasia operation and the gassing installations were officially closed down. In practice, however, the operation continued in the form of the so-called wild euthanasia, that is, killing in special, locked-up institutions in which victims were put to death individually by injec- tion, sleeping pills, or starvation. The starvation method was particularly popular in the case of mentally defective and physically disabled children-the number of such victims is estimated at twenty thousand. Persuasion and deception were practiced particularly in the case of child victims: parents were informed that the child had been transferred to a special institution for special treatment (Yahil 309), from which they never returned. Rather than employing a 'language of silence' in Die Blechtrommel, Grass explicitly addresses these concepts of (a) Sonder- behandlung, (b) Ballastexistenz, (c) the per-


ception of the handicapped as monsters at a lower level than animals, (d) their perception as mentally dead, and (e) their consequent institutionalization. Oskar's friend, the dwarfBebra, refers to the concept of Sonder- behandlung when he says:

"Unsereins darf nie zu den Zuschauern gehoren. Unsereins muB auf die Btihne, in die Arena. Unsereins muB vorspielen und die Handlung bestimmen, sonst wird unsereins von denen da behandelt [my italics]. Und jene spielen uns allzu gerne uibel mit!" Mir fast ins Ohr kriechend, fliisterte er und machte uralte Augen: "Sie kommen! Sie werden die Festplitze besetzen! Sie werden Fackelziige veran- stalten! Sie werden Tribiinen bauen, Tri- biinen bevolkern und von Tribuinen he- runter unseren Untergang predigen. Ge- ben Sie acht, junger Freund, was sich auf den Tribiinen ereignen wird! Versuchen Sie, immer auf der Tribilne zu sitzen und niemals vor der Tribiine zu stehen. [...] Kleine Leute wie wir finden selbst auf iiberftilltesten Tribiunen noch ein Platz- chen. Und wenn nicht auf der Tribuine, dann unter der Tribiine, aber niemals vor der Tribiine." (92f)

The difference between Bebra and Oskar is that in order to survive, the circus dwarf will, as he says, sit on the rostrum, i.e., side with the Nazis for self-protection, whereas Oskar initially puts up some resistence to the Nazis by sitting inside the rostrum. We may all remember the famous carnivalesque scene in which Oskar drums apart a party gathering from within the band- stand. Sitting inside this rostrum like Jo- nah in the whale corresponds to the inte- rior spaces in the Tom Thumb tale, the cow's and the wolf's belly, from which Tom Thumb liberates himself through his own activity. Although he initially practises political resistance, Oskar later joins Bebra in performing before the Nazis at the warfront in France. Oskar would lose his life if it were not for his "usefulness" to the Nazis as an entertainer at the front. As long as he entertains the Nazis he can

escape from being classified as Ballast- existenz. He survives thanks to his voice, the miracle weapon that enables him to scream glass to pieces. By shattering glass he also becomes an accomplice to the Nazis in the sense that this activity is associated with the Reichskristallnacht. This com- plicity with the Nazis once again recalls Tom Thumb, who for self-protection also joins a gang of thieves.

That Oskar is persecuted is easy to miss in the novel. After his return from France Oskar is in danger of being taken to an institution, and not simply because the question of who Oskar's father is remains unresolved in his life. Oskar would not be taken to an or- phanage, although Matzerath's dubious fa- therhood is used by the authorities as a rea- son for Oskar's planned institutionalization:

Ein Mann vom Gesundheitsministerium kam, sprach vertraulich mit Matzerath, aber Matzerath schrie laut, dass man es h6ren konnte: "Das kommt gar nicht in Frage, das habe ich meiner Frau am To- tenbett versprechen miissen, ich bin der Vater und nicht die Gesundheitspolizei." Ich kam also nicht in die Anstalt. Aber von jenem Tage an traf alle zwei Wochen ein amtliches Briefchen ein, das den Mat- zerath zu einer kleinen Unterschrift auf- forderte; doch Matzerath wollte nicht un- terschreiben, legte aber sein Gesicht in Sorgenfalten. (286)

Oskar has become a public health issue. In the chapter entitled "Die Staiuber" this letter is mentioned a second time:

Es hatte mich also alle Welt verlassen, und nur der Schatten meiner armen Mama, der dem Matzerath idhmend auf die Finger fiel, wenn er ein vom Reichsge- sundheitsministerium verfaBtes Schrei- ben unterzeichnen wollte, verhinderte mehrmals, daB ich, der Verlassene, diese Welt verlieB. (299)

Although Matzerath's position as father is a weak one, his reaction to the letter is healthy:


Das geht doch nich. Man kann doch den eigenen Sohn nich. Selbst wenn er zehn- mal und alle Arzte dasselbe sagen. Die schreiben das einfach so hin. Die haben wohl keine Kinder. (298)

It is Maria, Oskar's first love and later stepmother, who is not as sure about keep- ing Oskar at home as is Matzerath. She would not mind seeing him disappear in an institution. Her vacillation already becomes evident upon Oskar's return from France. Her reception of him is far less emotional and is accompanied by the comment that he has given them plenty of trouble (286). Although she claims to hope that they will not put him in an institution, she adds: "Vaidient hastes ja. Laifst davon und sagst nischt!" (286) She shows the same kind of ambiguity at the second men- tion of the letter. In response to Matze- rath's healthy reaction that he can't send his own son away she says:

Nu beruhje dir doch, Alfred. Du tust grad so, als wiird mir das nuscht ausmachen. Aber wenn se sagen, das macht man heut so, denn weiB ich nich, was nu richtig is. (298)

The "modern way to do" this, is, of course, to kill the likes of Oskar. Despite the appar- ent ambivalence of Maria's reaction, she tries to exert some pressure on Alfred and push him into signing the letter, quite possibly not so much to get rid of Oskar as to get rid of the trouble he causes them. Matzerath seems almost shocked at her willingness to get rid of Oskar and he bursts out: "Agnes [Oskar's real mother] hatte das nie gemacht oder erlaubt!" (298). Maria's reaction to this is quite in- teresting because it expresses an idea with which we are familiar from the fairy-tale world: "Na is verstindlich, weil se de Mut- ter war und immerjehofft hat, dasses bes- ser mecht werden mit ihm. Aber siehst ja: is nich jeworden, wird iiberall nur rum-

jestoBen und weiBl nich zu leben und weiBl nich zu sterben!" (298). This is undoubtedly the 'evil' fairy-tale stepmother want-

ing to do away with the real mother's child[ren]. But in this very comment the fairy-tale world also collides with the historical reality of euthanasia. Apart from the fact that she is wrong because Oskar knows very well how to live, she adopts the Nazi party's own reasoning that because there is no visible physical growth, a crip- ple like Oskar has no life inside and should therefore be put out of his misery. This is the very idea implied by the euthanasia program, under which the disabled were considered geistig tot. Ernst Klee has col- lected a large amount of historical documents that reflect such attitudes. He quotes, for example, from Karl Binding's and Alfred Hoche's book Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens. Ihr Ma/3 und ihre Form (1920):

Sie haben weder den Willen zu leben, noch zu sterben. So gibt es ihrerseits keine be- achtliche Einwilligung in die Titung, an- dererseits stS6t diese auf keinen Lebens- willen, der gebrochen werden mif3te. Ihr Leben ist absolut zwecklos, aber sie emp- finden es nicht als unertraiglich. FUr ihre Angehorigen wie ffir die Gesellschaft bilden sie eine furchtbar schwere Belastung. Ihr Tod reil3t nicht die geringste Liicke -

auBer vielleicht im Gefuihl der Mutter. [...] Wieder finde ich weder vom rechtli- chen, noch vom sozialen, noch vom sittli- chen, noch vom religiosen Standpunkt keinen Grund, die T6tung dieser Men- schen, die das furchtbare Gegenbild echter Menschen bilden und fast in jedem Entsetzen erwecken, der ihnen begegnet, freizugeben.22

Euthanatos, the beautiful death, was in store for those who were considered mar- ginal existences between life and death, neither quite alive because they were considered geistig tot nor quite dead because physically they were still alive. Oskar as- serts his existence in opposition to Maria's words by taking refuge in his two gifts, the drum and his voice, "mir jedoch war Os- kars Stimme iiber der Trommel ein ewig frischer Beweis meiner Existenz; denn so-


lange ich Glas zersang, existierte ich, so- lange mein gezielter Atem dem Glas den Atem nahm, war in mir noch Leben" (299). These words are, of course, also a reference to his earlier 'usefulness' to the Nazis at the warfront, because Oskar has survived this long solely because of his strange gift of shattering glass with his voice. Maria's disparaging words have a strong impact on Oskar. In a way they dis- illusion him about her and his love for her as becomes clear from his vision of the clinic, which evokes the Nazi euthanasia institutions:

[er] sieht sogar heute noch, sobald ihm Maria unter die Augen kommt, eine wun- dersch6ne, in bester Gebirgsluft liegende Klinik, in dieser Klinik einen lichten, modern freundlichen Operationssaal, sieht wie vor dessen gepolsterter Tiir die schtichterne, doch vertrauensvoll ldi- chelnde Maria mich erstklassigen Arzten tibergibt, die gleichfalls und Vertrauen er- weekend lacheln, wahrend sie hinter ihren weiBen, keimfreien Schiurzen erst- klassige, Vertrauen erweckende, sofort wirkende Spritzen halten. (299)

The Nazis' euthanasia methods of camouflaging their activities as well as using in- jections are both addressed in this passage. The neglect that Oskar experiences from his stepmother Maria nearly causes his death, were it not for the good angel of his mother and Matzerath's persistent reluctance to sign. Finally, however, Matze- rath gives in when, after Oskar's trial for his and the 'Stauberbande's' desecration of the Church of the Sacred Heart, an official in civilian clothes approaches him,

iibergab dem ein Schreiben und sagte: Sie sollten sich das wirklich noch einmal tiberlegen, Herr Matzerath. Das Kind mu3 von der StraBe fort. Sie sehen ja, von welchen Elementen solch ein hilfloses Ge- schapf mifbraucht wird. (319)

The official's comment is again a reference to Oskar's mental deadness and echoes Maria's earlier words that he's always be-

ing pushed around by others, i.e., that he has no will of his own. Both are wrong since we know that Oskar is the gang leader, the brain behind all of its activities. Yet the authorities now have two reasons to institutionalize Oskar and dispose of him. Not only is he considered a public health threat because of his physical im- perfection, now he also falls under the cat- egory of criminal, another type of Unter- mensch that the Nazis were eager to eliminate. This time Matzerath ponders for ten days as to whether or not he should sign the letter before he finally gives in. Yet luckily for Oskar

lag die Stadt schon unter Artilleriebe- schuB, und es war fraglich, ob die Post noch Gelegenheit fainde, den Briefweiter- zusenden. (319)

The end of the war saves his life. It is little surprise that Maria, who almost

causes Oskar's premature death, becomes the chief representative of the postwar afflu- ent bourgeoisie which contrasts sharply with the institutionalized Oskar. Although Oskar proposes to her, their marriage seems out of the question. In a moment of rage she had once reduced him to the kind of monster mentioned earlier. Bindingund Hoche called people like Oskar "Menschen, die das furchtbare Gegenbild echter Menschen bilden und fast injedem Entsetzen erwecken, der ihnen begegnet" (Klee 22). Maria calls him

eine verfluchte Drecksau, einen Gift- zwerg, einen fibergeschnappten Gnom, den man in die Klappsmiihle stecken miisse. Dann packte sie mich, klatschte meinen Hinterkopf, beschimpfte meine arme Mama, die einen Balg wie mich in die Welt gesetzt habe und stopfte mir, als ich schreien wollte, es auf alles Glas im Wohnzimmer und in der ganzen Welt ab- gesehen hatte, den Mund mit jenem Frot- tierhandtuch, das, wenn man hineinbil3, ziher als Rindfleisch war. (238)

Although she failed to see him institutionalized during the Third Reich, she witnesses how this is finally accomplished in


the Federal Republic. Thus in the end she finds her theory confirmed that he is an "iibergeschnappter Gnom, den man in die Klappsmiihle stecken miisse." By calling him a gnome she reduces him to a fairy- tale creature, an otherwordly being, strip- ping him of his humanity, in the same way the Nazis placed the disabled and the Jews at a level lower than animals. Art Spie- gelman's caption to his Maus series may also come to mind in this context, Hitler's words "The Jews are undoubtedly a race but they are not human." This view applied to both the Jews and the disabled, who were primarily considered a health hazard and fell victims to the politics of racial hygiene. Like Tom Thumb, chased by his Master's wife with a rag, Maria threat- ens to gag Oskar with a towel. The rag in the fairy tale and the perception of the physically handicapped as monstrous are also linked to Oskar's famous comment on Goethe:

der Goethe hitte [...] in dir [Oskar] nur Unnatur erkannt, dich als die leibhaftige Unnatur verurteilt und seine Natur [...] hitte er mit tibersiilhem Konfekt geffittert und dich armen Tropf wenn nicht mit dem Faust dann mit einem dicken Band seiner Farbenlehre erschlagen. (72)

Goethe's vision of the "klassisch Gesun- de" as a seedbed for the racial eugenics of the Nazis is undoubtedly a provocative thought. Yet in postwar German culture Grass's novel is not alone in its recourse to the picaresque and its parody of German high culture and the Enlightenment concept of Bildung. In this regard, Die Blechtrommel can also be compared with such works as Thomas Mann's Felix Krull, Arno Schmidt's Das steinerne Herz, Edgar Hilsenrath's Der Nazi und der Friseur, and some ofAnselm Kiefer's provocative visual art. In their return to the world of fairy tales and myth for the representation of the Holocaust and post-Holocaust Ger- man society these artists were all supporters of Richard Alewyn's warning to all Germans in 1949 that Buchenwald lies "zwischen uns

und Weimar."23 Much has been written on Grass's use of the picaresque and his parody of Goethean Bildung, yet these categories have not been discussed in the context of the Nazis' oppression of the grotesque and of low culture.24 By recovering what was considered an inferior genre throughout the 19f century (except in the Romantic Age), name- ly the picaresque tradition, i.e., by salvaging the degenerate and grotesque not only in the human body (Oskar) but also in the literary form, Grass's Die Blechtrommel becomes one of the great humanitarian novels of our time. I would argue, however, that Grass's use of the fairy-tale tradition in the context of Nazi euthanasia and criticism of German Bildung is, on the whole, subtler and less cynical than that of his contemporary Edgar Hilsenrath. Although Die Blechtrommel has received very controversial reactions, the au- thor's cautious and non-provocative treatment of the theme of euthanasia in the context of folk culture did not overtly break any taboos.25

This does not hold true for Hilsenrath and Kiefer. Jennifer Taylor has correctly ar- gued that while Elie Wiesel "writes to struggle with his madness Edgar Hilsenrath writes to assert his claim to his own German cultural past, as well as to redefine his postwar identity as a Jew. Writing is for him an act of assertion or even of revenge which allows him to reclaim some of the German cultural inheritance taken from all German Jews by the Nazis."26 She is referring to the German high culture that Hilsenrath's use of the grotesque transforms into a sort of Unterkultur. He does so by displacing the Brothers Grimm with his own fairy-tale versions and by parodying the Goethean Bil- dungsroman. Hilsenrath's principle tech- nique is one of inversion. As he inverts high culture into low culture, he inverts the posi- tions of Ubermensch and Untermensch. Max Schulz, a non-Jew who looks like a Jew, is one of these lowly creatures. Allegedly raped by his stepfather when he is seven weeks old, he becomes a mass murderer in a concentration camp. After the war he recreates himself as


his former Jewish neighbor and Holocaust victim Itzig Finkelstein, goes to Tel Aviv, and becomes a well-respected barber. The two main fairy tales that intertextually pervade the structure of the first half of this novel are Frau Holle and Hdnsel und Gretel. Though the reluctance on the part of German publishers to publish the book in the early 1970s was attributed to its alleged anti-Semitism, Hilsenrath's provocative reappropriation of German culture may have something to do with their refusal to accept the novel. As I pointed out, the fairy-tale tradition was at best considered beneficial for the process of healing the great German wound. Through his use of the fairy tale, Hilsenrath reopens this wound and throws salt into it. Hilsen- rath's Frau Holle has little in common with the benevolent woman of the original tale, who was considered a role model for all women in the Third Reich. With the figure of Frau Holle we transcend the boundaries of folklore and enter the realm of Germanic mythology. As an archetypal figure of Ger- manic mythology that has survived in the folktale she was of particular interest to the

Nazis.27 No doubt Hilsenrath's Frau Holle is inspired by the Nazis' obsession with her origin in Norse mythology and her function as a model for the good mother and Hausfrau. The Norse goddess Hel was a figure associated with death and rebirth, which we see reflected in the fairy tale's image of the well through which the two daughters enter Frau Holle's underworld and exit from it. Cater- ing to Nazi ideology, Maria Fuihrer says of the Norse goddess that she "nahm zwar die Ver- storbenen in Empfang und hielt sie streng gefangen und verhiillt in den Tiefen ihres unterirdischen Reiches; sie barg aber auch die Lebenskeime in ihrem muitterlich nih- renden SchoB" (82). In his parody of Frau Holle Hilsenrath works with these two func- tions, that of guardian of the dead and the archetype of the life-giving mother. Her "mfit- terlich niihrender SchoB3" is perverted into that of a prostitute. That she has only one real leg makes her the object of sexual desire for an American major, who is incapable of

making love to two-legged women and ends up making love to her wooden, non-Aryan leg. After he dies from too much sex with the wooden leg, Frau Holle guards his dead body in her "underworld," her bombed-out base- ment apartment. Particularly through the revisionist tendencies of his Frau Holle, Hilsenrath alludes to the Nazis' ideological abuse of this tale and their appropriation of what for them was a typically Germanic myth:

"Ich kenne keine Juden," sagte Frau Hol- le. Frau Holle wollte weitergehen, aber der Junge sagte dann noch: "Die kommen doch jetzt aus den Lagern zuriick!" "Du meinst - die - die noch da sind?" sagte Frau Holle. "Ja, " sagte der Junge, " - haben Sie die Zeitung gelesen?" "Ich lese keine Zeitungen," sagte Frau Holle. "Ist sowieso alles Schwindel." "6 Millionen er- morderter Juden," sagte der Junge. "Al- les Schwindel, Willi," sagte Frau Holle.28

This was possibly a key passage contribut- ing to the publishers' rejection of the book.

Yet even more iconoclastic in the eyes of the German publishers may have been the associative proximity of the text's Hansel und Gretel version to the concentration camps. When Max Schulz returns from the war he tells the Triimmerfrau Frau Holle a Hansel-and-Gretel story that happened to him deep in the Polish forest. Like Giinter Grass's fairy-tale forest in Die Rattin, Hil- senrath's forest is far from being the emblem of national unity that the Nazis saw in the German forest.29 Hilsenrath's fairy-tale forest transcends the original danger of the Grimm Brothers' forest by referring to the horrors Germany committed in Eastern Eu- ropean forests during WW II. As Schulz is fleeing the Russians he manages to hide during the winter in the hut of an ancient Polish woman, Veronja, who in return for giving him shelter and food expects sexual service from him seven times a night. As he chances upon her cabin he describes it in ominous terms that conjure up the crematoria:

Ich sah zuerst nur ein Dach [...] ein schie-


fes Strohdach mit einem kurzen Schorns- tein aus gepreBtem Lehm. Schwarzer Rauch stieg aus dem Schornstein, kriu- selte Uiber dem Strohdach, verfing sich in den Baumwipfeln in der Nihe des Daches, l1ste sich bei neuen WindstiBen und stieB himmelwarts. Ich folgte den Rauch- schwaden mit meinen Blicken, guckte in den Himmel, ohne zu wollen, und er- schrak. Denn der Himmel iiber dem Strohdach sah wie Eis aus. Blaues Eis mit einer eingefrorenen Sonne [...] Plitzlich ging eines der Fenster auf. Ich sah ein Ge- sicht. Das Gesicht eines Hutzelweibes. Ein uraltes Gesicht. [...] [D]ann ging die Tiir auf. Ganz langsam ging die auf. Und knarrte. Ganz komisch knarrte die Tiir. "So wie bei Hinsel und Gretel," sagte Frau Holle. "Mich gruselt's richtig. "Mich hat's auch gegruselt," sagte Max Schulz. "Da stand sie pl6tzlich auf der Tiirschwel- le. Eine uralte Frau. Eine, die ganz komisch grinste. So ein Grinsen hatte ich vorher noch nie gesehen [...]. Die grinste wie ein Menschenfresser" (100-01).

That Veronja first appears to him as a can- nibal is not only a reference to the voracity of the Grimm witch and the devouring mother archetype but can, in the context of Schulz's sexual slavery, also be read as a Freudian reference to the finger episode in the Grimm original. On the seventh night of doing seven 'numbers' with Veronja, "sieben Nummern schieben" as he calls it, Schulz has his second heart attack. He had his first one while shooting Jews at the edge of the mass grave. Instead offinding a treasure in the witch's hut, as do Hansel and Gretel, Schulz already arrives with one, a box full of gold teeth he has managed to swipe from Laubwalde, the concentration camp from which he had escaped before his encounter with Veronja. The Han- sel-and-Gretel tale is thus thematically linked to the Holocaust in a number of ways, via: (a) the black smoke from the hut,30 (b) the box of gold teeth, (c) the inversion of the status of Max Schulz: from oppressor to oppressed, from perpetrator to victim; the witch makes him the kind of

"Untermensch" (103) that he is used to seeing in others, and, most centrally, (d) the oven motif. Schulz has to clean Veron- ja's oven (110) and when it comes to the showdown in which, in order to save his gold teeth, he has to kill her, the oven again looms large:

Ich [...] zertrfimmerte den Schidel der Hexe mit drei Schligen [...] Veronjas Ge- sicht [...] rutschte zum Kiichenherd, rutschte unter die Beine der Ziege Katju- scha, die entsetzt gegen das Ofenloch sprang. Kalte Asche fiel auf Veronjas Ge- sicht. Ich holte die Kohlenschaufel, kehr- te Gesicht und Asche zusammen, warf es ins Ofenloch, machte ein lustiges Feuer. (117)

The German war crimes, primarily the Holocaust, cannot be disentangled from this fairy tale version. For a moment, Veronja as a representative for all Poles who became victims of the Nazis, can enjoy her position as oppressor and take sweet revenge.31 Yet it is above all such props as the black smoke, the icy atmosphere, the ashes, the coal shovel, and the oven that are stable reminders of the Holocaust in the midst of this carnivalesque encounter. That Schulz momentarily becomes a victim gives him the idea central to the structure of the novel of recreating himself as a Jewish victim after the war. Through the death of the witch, he experiences like Hansel and Gretel a sort of rebirth: "Ich ging dem Frithling entgegen" (118). The theme of rebirth is shared by the Grimm tale, Hilsenrath's novel, Grass's Die Blech- trommel, and some of Kiefer's work.32 Oskar, for example, repeatedly voices his eagerness to return to the mother's womb. In connection with the oven as a symbol of the motherly womb (as discussed also by Jung), Andrey Toporkov has pointed out that the Russian version of Hansel and Gretel, the Baba-Yaga tale, is related to an Eastern European rebirth ritual, in which a sick baby is placed on a shovel and shoved into a hot oven with the intention of re-


baking it, i.e., to placing it back into the womb so that it can be reborn as a healthy baby (nepeneKaHie [perepekanye]).33 This ritual evokes not only the Hansel-and- Gretel tale but also the story of Max and Moritz, who are baked into bread in the baker's oven. Their rebirth does not function, however, because they re-emerge as ill-behaved as they were before, which is why they are ultimately killed: so that the village community can be reborn. The Na- zis also thought in terms of rebirth. By get- ting rid of what was considered harmful, parasitic, diseased, and ultimately evil, they thought that Germany could be reborn, literally like Phoenix from the ashes. In the context of the Holocaust as well as against the background of the beginning of the Federal Republic as Stunde Null, the idea of rebirth becomes thematic in Der Nazi und der Friseur and Die Blechtrommel. Max Schulz's rebirth as Itzig Finkelstein can partly be seen as a sort of Holocaust denial and the repression of his own guilt. Oskar Matzerath's rebirth ironically oc- curs in the chapter in which after the war he travels west on the freight train where he metamorphizes from a mere child that had refused to grow into an ugly dwarf with a hump. His ugly hump denotes the ugliness with which German society emer- ges from the war years, the burden of its guilt which Oskar takes upon himself. That Hilsenrath's perpetrator recreates himself as a victim can even be understood as a comment on Germany's postwar philo-Semitism. Ironically, it is this very philo-Semitism, denounced by Hilsenrath, that prevents the novel from being pub- lished.34 The fact that the Hansel-and- Gretel oven is a symbol of rebirth simulta- neously pointing to the destruction in the camps moves this text onto taboo ground. The oven that destroys human life becomes the perpetrator's site for his recre- ation as victim. If in this context the protagonist Max Schulz has been understood to represent German society at large, it becomes possible to fathom why this book

has been unsuccessful in Germany. Like Grass, Hilsenrath parodies the Goe-

thean Bildungsroman and its successors in the 19th century. Particularly the beginning of Der Nazi und der Friseur, which juxtapo- ses the upbringing of the non-Jewish and the Jewish boy, their friendship as opposed to the prejudices of their parents, is intertextual with such novels as Wilhelm Raabe's Der Hungerpastor and Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben. The Ubermensch Goethe is associated with the Jews, who live in the Goe- thestraBe ("die meisten Juden [wohnten] in der Goethe- und SchillerstraBe" [20]) and are civilized people as opposed to the non- Jews like the butcher, who"wollte unbedingt aufder Goethestrasse bleiben, ich nehme an, wegen des 'Erlk6nigs,' obwohl ich nicht sicher bin, ob er Goethes Gedicht kannte" (14), and like Slavitzki who rapes his step- son.

What are the points of intersection between the visual art of Anselm Kiefer and the literary works of Grass and Hilsenrath? Like Hilsenrath, Kiefer broke taboos in rep- resenting the darkest chapter of German history. Like Hilsenrath's novels Nacht and Der Nazi und der Friseur, Kiefer's work was received triumphantly in the US while it triggered shock reactions at home. He em- ploys some of the same themes as Hilsenrath and Grass: the world of Germanic mythology, the German forest, the contrast between German high culture and the darkness of militarism and genocide. Like Grass and Hilsenrath he contrasts the classical Aryan body with the Jewish body, and in doing so, like Hilsenrath he alludes to Paul Celan's Todesfuge: "dein goldenes Haar Margarete, dein aschenes Haar Sulamit." This line from Celan's poem is echoed visually in Kiefer's paintings Margarete (1981), in Dein goldenes Haar, Margarete (1981), in Sulamith (1983), and in two books made of soldered lead and strands of women's hair (Sulamith 1990). As L6pez-Pedraza argues, "in Ger- many before Hitler, the Jewish Diaspora was driven by an unreflective love for the Ger- man culture, leading to the illusion of being


assimilated. But now we have to recognize that it was the fantasy of assimilation to a shadow-culture with Wotanic roots (L6pez- Pedraza 69)" It is this Jewish love for the German culture that Hilsenrath ironizes in his parody ofBildung and the German fairy tale. It is the rift between these two cultures that appears to us from the abysses of Ce- lan's poem and on the burnt East Prussian landscape of Kiefer's paintings. Yet while his Holocaust paintings may command one to silence, Kiefer's Occupations (1975) caused a major uproar among Germans. This is a set of photographs and paintings in which by making the Sieg Heil salute the artist "occupies" various symbolic locations in Europe, all territories held by the Nazis during WW II. According to Peter Winter "West German art critics tend to assume that Anselm Kiefer is a nationalist painter [...]. Short of banning him, the domestic critics would like at least to tell Kiefer what he ought to paint,"35 and Wolf Sch6n asked in the Rheinischer Merkur (6 June 1980), shortly after the 1980 Bien- nale in Venice: "Is this neo-Nazi Blood-and- Soil art, a relapse into the glorious past?" (cited in Winter 66). Kiefer, however, de- fended himself against accusations that his art was neo-fascist by saying: "I identify my- self neither with Nero nor with Hitler. How- ever, I must sympathize with them just a little bit so as to understand their madness" (cited in Winter 70). Kiefer's way of acting out and working through the fascist past rather than partaking of the collective amne- sia of the parent generation, is not altogether different from Hilsenrath's sarcasm, which became a means of working through his own traumatic experiences. In an interview Kie- fer once said, "you cannot show things as they are; you have to ironize them or they are not supportable. The only way to sustain life is to laugh about it."36 This stance and the responses to their work-Hilsenrath was ac- cused of anti-Semitism, Kiefer of being a Neo-Nazi-show how similar this work is.

Like Grass, who returns to the Parsifal myth in Die Blechtrommel, and Hilsenrath, who plays with the figure ofFrau Holle, Kie-

fer returns to many of the Germanic myths that had been ideologically perverted by the Nazis. In his enormous painting Parsifal II (1973), for example, he does what Grass did with his "Waldoper Zoppot, wo unter freiem Nachthimmel Sommer ffir Sommer Wag- nermusik der Natur anvertraut wurde" (87): he points to Wagner as a political fore- runner of the Nazis. Both Grass and Kiefer focus on the blood in the Parsifal myth. They refer to the myth in connection with the question of guilt:

Nichts ist vorbei, alles kommt wieder, Schuld, Sfihne, abermals Schuld. [...] Kennen Sie den Parzival? Auch ich kenne ihn nicht besonders gut. Einzig die Ge- schichte mit den drei Blutstropfen im Schnee ist mir geblieben. Diese Geschich- te stimmt, weil sie zu mir passt. Wahr- scheinlich passt sie zu jedem, der eine Idee hat [.... [A]ber der Schnee war schon gefallen, der jene drei Blutstropfen auf- nahm, die mir den Blick gleich dem Nar- ren Parzival festnagelten, von dem der Narr Oskar so wenig weiB, daB er sich zwanglos mit ihm identisch ffihlen kann. (392-94)

The central terms in this passage are guilt and its return, the blood, the snow that catches the blood, the idea, and the fool. Oskar the drummer is, of course, an am- bivalent figure. He is the victim ofpersecu- tion, yet in order to escape this victimiza- tion he sides with the Nazis. This makes him a guilty "Mitliiufer." The blood is that of the victims of the Nazi crimes. The snow, he says, "das ist die Berufskleidung einer Krankenschwester" (394), i.e., the blood spilled on the white clothes of the nurse could once again be read as an allu- sion to the perversion of medicine under the Nazis. The idea is that of the Thousand Year Reich and the salvation of the Ger- man Volk by way of cleansing it from its blood pollutants. The fools are those who tried this.

Kiefer reduces the Parsifal myth to a bowl of blood in the center of an ominous, claustrophobic room with two monstrous


constructions of wooden beams that resem- ble a pair of gallows. As in some of his other paintings, Nothung (1973), Deutschlands Geistige Helden (1973), and his famous Ho- locaust painting Sulamith (1983), the design of these cavernous halls is "derived from the 'valkisch' Fascist architecture [...] and also bears connotations of the heroic past of Ger- manic legend [...] reminiscent ofValhalla."37 Over the bucket of blood one reads the in- scription: "Hdchsten Heiles Wunder! Erld- sung dem Erldser!" These words contain a good deal of irony when taken out of the Christian context and applied to the Nazi past. This must be done in Kiefer's case, especially because the "Heil" and its idea of salvation turn up in another of his paintings that mentions German cultural figures by indirectly referring to them as forerunners of Third Reich ideology: Deutsche Heilslinie (1975). Like many others this painting is based on Kiefer's vision of the Norwegian landscape, an area that was dear to German nationalists from Kaiser Wilhelm to Hitler. "Using inscriptions of their names, [Kiefer] has separated several great modern Ger- man-language thinkers into two lineages" (Rosenthal 56). Though Rosenthal mentions such social theorists as Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx he also inscribes "future oriented philosophers who believed that a kind of salvation would come about through either the emergence of an extraordinary leader re- sponsive to history or through historical forces beyond the control of any individual": Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, Jung, and Heidegger (56). The idea of the "Heil," of salvation becomes very amiguous in connection with Wagner, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, evoking the notion of "Sieg Hell" or "Heil Hitler" in the spectator.

The approximation of German high culture, its literary and philosophical figures, with WW II and the Holocaust shared by Grass, Hilsenrath, and Kiefer is possibly best exemplified in Kiefer's series of paintings entitled Wege der Weltweisheit (1976-77) and Wege der Weltweisheit: die Hermanns- schlacht (1978). One of Kiefer's favorite

themes was the German forest, the Teuto- burger Wald, much abused by the Nazis as a national emblem. Nationalists after the Brothers Grimm, like the reactionary mod- ernist Werner Sombart, had already pre- pared the ground for the Nazi obsession with the forest by distinguishing the "desert- roaming rationalist Jews" from the "sensu- ous, rooted, and forest-dwelling Germans."38 Hilsenrath turns the Nazi obsession with the forest into a grim fairy tale forest and the "Wald der 6 Millionen" which haunts Max Schulz for the rest of his life, and Kiefer com- bines the image of the forest with Germanic history, especially the "Schlacht im Teuto- burger Wald" between Varus and Hermann the German. To the Nazis, the defeat of the Romans was a symbol of German supremacy and the purity of German blood. What is in- teresting is that, like Grass and Hilsenrath, who satirize German Bildung and the Bil- dungsroman by returning to the picaresque tradition, Kiefer in his two paintings "de- picts the unreality and inflation embedded in the German tradition of knowledge. It was a knowledge that pretended to be well out of the forest and a contributor to universal enlightenment, but Kiefer places all those representative heads" back in the forest (L6- pez-Pedraza 47). Matthew Rampley argues convincingly that the Hermannsschlacht, which "was taken up early as a symbol of German identity in the growth of a sense of nationhood in the nineteenth century, [...] became an icon of Wilhelmine nationalist ideology" (Rampley 84) and that Wege der Weltweisheit, in which Kiefer places the heads of prominent German thinkers round a group of gaunt trees and the words "Die Hermann-Schlacht," "presents the ideology of Arminius and mainstream German intellectual life as inextricably linked. Indeed, Kiefer seems to imply that the world-wisdom of the Germans, through the motif of the [tree] roots, lies at the origin of the political violence and its justification symbolized in the event of the battle of the Teutoburger Wald" (Rampley 86). This thought goes beyond Adorno and Horkheimer's idea ofa dia-


lectic of the enlightenment and suggests that German romanticism too is responsible for the political violence of the Nazis. Kiefer's second painting in particular seems to support this idea, because in Wege der Weltweis- heit: die Hermannsschlacht he places figures representative of Germany's entire cultural heritage next to the two Nazi propaganda heroes Schlageter and Horst Wessel. In this sweeping defamation of German culture-of enlightenment, classicism, and romanticism -Kiefer resembles Hilsenrath more than Grass. While Hilsenrath's view of the Ger- man romantic heritage is deeply cynical in Der Nazi & der Friseur, Grass's treatment of this period is more subtle. Despite the textual proximity of the Wagner opera and the Diumling-performance in the chapter "Die

Tribiine," Die Blechtrommel reflects the deeper humanity of German romanticism, which did not reject the grotesque as Goethe did when he said "das Romantische ist krank." Grass's novel seems consciously to revive the grotesque after the Nazis had sup- pressed it as degenerate and persecuted it in all of its forms, both in the human body and in the arts. Yet there is no denying that in try- ing to articulate some of the most horrible Nazi crimes in their oeuvre, all three artists participate in what has been termed Vergan- genheitsbewdltigung. They attempt to work through Germany's past by harking back to an ideologically polluted cultural baggage: the fairy tale, Germanic mythology, the En- lightenment concept ofBildung, and the figure of Goethe.

Notes:

1Ernestine Schlant, The Language of Si- lence: West German Literature and the Holo- caust (New York: Routledge, 1999).

2Andreas Huyssen, "Kiefer in Berlin," Octo- ber 62 (1992): 85.

3For information on the fairy tale of the Wei- mar Republic see Jack Zipes (ed. and trans.), Fairy Tales and Fables from Weimar Days (Hanover: UP of New England, 1989) 3-28.

4Cf. Zipes, Weimar Days 25, and Ulrike Bas-

tian, Die "Kinder- und Hausmirchen" der Briider Grimm in der literaturpidagogischen Diskussion des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt a.M.: Haag & Herchen, 1981) 186.

5Jack Zipes, "The Struggle for the Grimms' Throne: The Legacy of the Grimms' Tales in the FRG and GDR since 1945," Reception of Grimms' Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions, ed. Donald Haase (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1993) 169; Peter Arnds, "Arno Schmidts Das steinerne Herz und Wilhelm Hauffs Das kalte Herz, oder: wie ein biedermei- erliches Mdirchen gegen den Strich gekimmt wird," Bargfelder Bote. Materialien zum Werk Arno Schmidts (Miinchen: edition text + kri- tik, 2000): 3-17.

6Zipes, "Grimms' Tales in the FRG and GDR," 173ff.

7It still does now to many critics. Cf. eg. Rich- ard Schickel, "Fascist Fable," Time (Nov. 9, 1998): 116-17: "[T]urning even a small corner of this century's central horror into feel-good popular entertainment is abhorrent. Senti- mentality is a kind of fascism too, robbing us of judgment and moral acuity, and it needs to be resisted. 'Life is Beautiful' is a good place to start."

8 Cf. Fritz Rumler, "Max & Itzig, "Edgar Hil- senrath: Das Unerzahlbare erzdhlen, ed. Tho- mas Kraft (Miinchen: Piper, 1996) 70.

9Cf. Rafael L6pez-Pedraza, Anselm Kiefer: After the Catastrophe (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996) 16. 10Huyssen, "Kiefer in Berlin" 87. 11Peter Novick has recently pointed out that

the "Holocaust, as virtually the only common denominator of American Jewish identity in the late twentieth century, has filled a need for a consensual symbol." See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Hought- on Mifflin, 1999) 7. 12Edgar Hilsenrath, Die Abenteuer des Ruben

Jablonski (Miinchen: Piper, 1999) 214-16. 13Zipes, "Grimms' Tales in the FRG and GDR" 170. 14Cf. Saul Friedlander, Probing the Limits of

Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solu- tion" (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992). 15This dimension of the Nazis' cultural poli-

tics has to an extent been analyzed by Christa Kamenetsky in Children's Literature in Hit- ler's Germany: The Cultural Policy of National Socialism (Athens: Ohio UP, 1984), and in


"Folklore as a Political Tool in Nazi Germany," Journal of American Folklore 85 (1972): 221- 35, and "Folktale and Ideology in the Third Reich," Journal of American Folklore 90 (1977): 168-78. 16Cf. Berthold Hamelmann, Helau und Heil

Hitler: Alltagsgeschichte der Fasnacht 1919- 1939 am Beispiel der Stadt Freiburg (Eggin- gen: Edition Isele, 1989) 317. Hamelmann demonstrates that the carnival was instrumen- tal to the Nazis in their foreign politics. They saw in carnival a possibility to present National Socialism as a humane (menschenfreundli- ches) system to an international audience, thus camouflaging their nefarious activities at home. The carnival and the dwarf fairy tales that were not entirely suitable for the education of the young were often omitted from anthologies. 17Giinter Grass, Die Blechtrommel (Darm-

stadt: Luchterhand, 1986) 87; further references cited parenthetically. 18The fairy-tale subtexts of the novel have

been analyzed in two articles, Janice Mouton's "Gnomes, Fairy-Tale Heroes, and Oskar Mat- zerath," Germanic Review 56.1 (1981): 28-33, and David Roberts, "Tom Thumb and the Imi- tation of Christ: Towards a Psych-Mythologi- cal Interpretation of the 'Hero' Oskar and his Symbolic Function," Proceedings and Papers ofthe Congress oftheAustralasian Universities Language and Literature Association (Can- berra, 1972) 160-74.

g1Reinhold Franke analyzes the figure of the "Daumling," in "Das Mdirchen vom Diiumling in deutscher und franzbsischer Sprache," Ju- gendschriftenwarte 43.11 (1938): 21-25. Com- paring Perrault's version of the tale with the German version, he concludes that one can recognize "im deutschen Mirchen den nordisch bestimmten, im franz6sischen den westischen Rassetyp" (25). But dwarfs or dwarf-like figures were not particularly popular among Nazi ideologues, who considered them unheroic and "artfremd." Seen in this light, Franke's analy- sis seems contrived, especially when compared with an interpretation of the tale "Das tapfere Schneiderlein." As early as 1924, Georg Schott interpreted the little tailor, who brags about his achievement of having killed seven flies, as a truculent Jew, who tricks the 'Germanic' gi- ant. Schott sees in this pattern the reflection of

a historical truth. Cf. Peter Aley, Jugendlitera- tur im Dritten Reich: Dokumente und Kom- mentare (Hamburg: Verlag ffir Buchmarktfor- schung, 1967) 103-05: "Es wire einfach er- gotzlich, zum laut Auflachen, wenn es nicht so todtraurig wdire. Denn es ist abermals unsere, der Deutschen Geschichte. Die deutschen Rie- sen: Prachtkerle, mit ihren unheimlichen Kriften. Die Welt k6nnten sie aus den Angeln heben, wenn sie zusammenstiinden. Aber alles ist umsonst; ein elender Wicht, der seinen Schabernack mit ihnen treibt, wird ihrer Herr" (104). 20The Tom Thumb tale is also a subtext in

Volker Schlbndorff's movie The Ogre. Abel (John Malkovich), who steals young boys from his parents to recruit them for an elitist Nazi School in an Eastern European forest, corresponds to the ogre of Charles Perrault's Le Pe- tit Poucet, who eats little children that get lost in the forest. Since Abel is a French prisoner of war, the French fairy tale here literally merges with the German fairy-tale world. 21 Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate ofEuro-

pean Jewry (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990) 309. 22Ernst Klee, ed., 'Euthanasie' im NS-Staat:

Die 'Vernichtung unwerten Lebens' (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1989) 22. 23 Georg Bollenbeck, "German 'Kultur,' the

'Bildungsbiirgertum,' and its Susceptibility to National Socialism," German Quarterly 73.1 (2000): 67-83. 24 See, for example, Rainer Diederichs, Struk-

turen des Schelmischen im modernen deutschen Roman: Eine Untersuchung an den Ro- manen von Thomas Mann 'Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull' und Giinter Grass 'Die Blechtrommel' (Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1971); Volker Neuhaus, Giinter Grass (Stutt- gart: Metzler, 1992); Volker Neuhaus, Giinter Grass: Die Blechtrommel (Mfinchen: Olden- bourg Verlag, 1982). 25Cf. especially the following reviews: Otto

von Loewenstein, "Der Blechtrommler in der

Kiisestadt: Wie ein Vollstreckungsrichter die Bekanntschaft von Oskar Matzerath machte," Die Zeit 7 June 1963, shows that in the Allgiu a judge considered the novel a menace to youth; Hubert Becher, "Die Blechtrommel und ihre Kritiker," Echo der Zeit 13 March 1960, calls it a barbaric book; Marcel Reich-Ranicki, "Auf gut Gliick getrommelt: Spielereien und


Schaumschliigereien verderben die Zeitkritik des Giinter Grass," Die Zeitl January 1960: 1. 26 Jennifer Taylor, "Writing as Revenge: Read-

ing Edgar Hilsenrath's Der Nazi und der Fri- seur as a Shoah Survivor's Fantasy," History of European Ideas 20.1-3 (1995): 439.

27 Maria Fihrer tried to show the connection between German folktales and the Germanic myths behind them in Nordgermanische Git- teriiberlieferung und deutsches Volksmdrchen: 80 Mdrchen der Briider Grimm vom Mythus her beleuchtet (Miinchen: Neuer Filser-Verlag, 1938). While she identifies Frau Holle as typically Germanic because of the Norse myths behind this tale (80ff, 91f.), she has almost noth- ing to say about the Tom Thumb figure (cf. page 71). In reading this work it becomes obvious that their connection with Germanic myths made some tales more useful to the education of the German youth than others. 28 Edgar Hilsenrath, Der Nazi und der Friseur

(Miinchen: Piper, 1990) 64; further references cited parenthetically.

29 The Nazis' view of the German forest to an extent harks back to Grimms's nationalistic perception of it. Cf. Jack Zipes, "The En- chanted Forest of the Brothers Grimm: New Modes of Approaching the Grimms' Fairy Tales," Germanic Review 62.2 (1987): 67: "The Volk, the people, bound by a common language but disunited, needed to enter old German forests, so the Grimms thought, to gain a sense of their heritage and to strengthen the ties among themselves. " 30 Cf. Jennifer Taylor 442. She makes a connec-

tion between "Dach" and Dachau and refers to the intertextuality between the above passage and Paul Celan's "Todesfuge." Similarly, An-

selm Kiefer appropriates Celan's poem for some of his most deeply moving Holocaust representations. 31Cf. Peter Novick 217: "Aloysius Mazewski, the president of the Polish-American Con- gress, insisted that it was Poles [... .] who de- served second place to Jews: his total of ten million Holocaust victims was made up of six million Jews, three million Catholic Poles, and one million 'other nationalities."' 32 The painting "Resurrexit" (1973), for exam-

ple. 33Andrey Toporkov, "'Rebaking' of Children

in Eastern Slavic Rituals and Fairy-tales," The Petersburg Journal of Cultural Studies 1.3 (1993): 15-21. 34 Cf. Fritz Rumler in Thomas Kraft's Edgar

Hilsenrath, 70: "'Uberempfindlichkeit der Verleger ffir jiidische Themen' und der 'ge- ftihrliche Philosemitismus, der hier so iibereifrig gepflegt wird,' vermutet Nazi-Autor Hilsenrath, habe die Buchmacher z6gern lassen." 35Peter Winter, 'Whipping Boy with Clipped

Wings,' (66-70), "Evaluating Anselm Kiefer," Art International 2 (1988): 66. 36Nan Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer: Works on

Paper in the Metropolitan Museum ofArt (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998) 10. 37Matthew Rampley, "In Search of Cultural History: Anselm Kiefer and the Ambivalence of Modernism," Oxford Art Journal 23.1 (2000): 83. 38Cf. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984) 140.

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