Forgiving the Jews for Auschwitz? Guilt and Gender in Bernhard Schlink's Liebesfluchten1

Bernhard Schlink's international bestseller Der Vorleser (1995) sparked an important scholarly discussion on guilt, shame, and the so-called "Vergangenheitsbewaltigung." In this debate, the text received praise for candidly taking on the subject of post-WWII German guilt and shame (Bartov, Niven, and Schmitz), yet was criticized for reintroducing familiar or tainted cliches and for affording Germans an easy way out of their feelings of guilt by turning them into "victims" of the Nazi regime (Schlant, Arnds, Donahue, Metz). These debates have not reached any definite conclusions for two reasons. First, they are intrinsically connected to how we read and how we identify with literary texts, urgent questions when it comes to literature dealing with the Holocaust, as Dominick LaCapra's work on writing trauma reveals convincingly.2 secondly, and perhaps more importantly, if we understand literature to be the turf on which important matters of memory and identity are teased out and negotiated, and the interpretation of literature (by scholars and critics) as the field where this negotiation is further reflected upon, then the continued debate on guilt and shame in Der Vorleser points to the fact that the difficulties Germans have with their history, memory, and identity are both ongoing and in need of further exploration. This is supported by findings of the Berlin "Zentrum fur Antisemitismusforschung," namely that the "new" antisemitism3 seen in Germany as of a few years ago may be rooted in a "secondary" antisemitism that is in part caused by those very issues of guilt and shame. These issues are prevalent both in Schlink's text and the literature engaging with it. secondary antisemitism can be defined as a hostility against Jews that grows from the fact that the Holocaust reminds Germans of their guilt and thus precludes a positive identification with their German identity (Gessler, 12) .4 Can the Germans, therefore, "never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz"?5 Instead of reiterating the debate on Der Vorleser, this essay will consider two additional texts by Schlink, and move the focus to an investigation of this notion of secondary antisemitism and how it relates to current perceptions of Jews, German identity, and gender. Both short stories, "Das Madchen mit der Eidechse" and "Die Beschneidung" from Schlink's collection Liebesfluchten (2000), deal with the German past, and are characterized by textual polyvalence and indeterminacy regarding the location of Jews and gender. Thus, a close reading of the short stories sheds new light on how today's memories of the German past and the Shoah are intertwined with subliminal notions of gender and antisemitism. My discussion places special emphasis on the dimension of gender, a category so far insufficiently invoked in many deliberations of German memory and identity,6 since the short stories situate Jews and Germans within a grid of gendered identities. More specifically, there seems to be a curious link between guilt and gender identity in both texts that requires analysis. As Ernestine Schlant has observed succinctly, in all texts dealing with the Shoah, identity matters: distinctions between Jewish and non-Jewish writers are essential, since "the eliminations of the crucial distinction between victims and perpetrators can itself be viewed as an attempt to level and equalize their separate histories" (6). This is not to say, as some German scholars seem to feel, that non-Jewish writers and critics have less of a right to speak and be heard-quite the opposite. But it is important to note that Schlink's position is that of a non-Jewish West-German male, and that his protagonists, who are non-Jewish West-German males, offer that particular perspective, while at the same time vigorously invoking gender binaries as well as binaries of Jewish vs. non-Jewish identities. A number of publications point to the fact that Der Vorleser is concerned mostly with the second generation's feelings of guilt and/or shame towards the Holocaust, i. …