Holocaust Memory between Cosmopolitanism and Nation-Specificity: Monika Maron's Pawels Briefe and Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz's Umschlagplatz1

Without a doubt, some sixty years after the events, the Holocaust is deeply embedded in the minds of those who have no direct knowledge of the actual historical event. Stories like that of Anne Frank and images like the photographs of Hungarian Jews crowded on the Auschwitz ramp have become recognizable icons, especially for the generations who have not witnessed the past first-hand. For these non-witnesses, Marianne Hirsch suggests, the images and stories of the past which they did not experience have such a powerful appeal "as to constitute memories in their own right."2 Postmemory of the Holocaust, as Hirsch terms this phenomenon, does not represent an identity position, but, rather, is "a space of remembrance, more broadly available through cultural and public, and not merely individual and personal, acts of remembrance, identification, and projection."3 The pronounced reliance on cultural icons in imagining the Holocaust raises several important questions: If memory of this event is more readily available through public rather than individual forms of remembrance, what role do national, religious, and cultural contexts play in post-Holocaust writing? Are stories and images of the genocide, which by now have become icons of cultural memory, read and written the same way in various national contexts? In the age of globalization, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider argue, nation-transcending memories which rely on internationally recognized "memoryscapes" emerge along nation-specific memories. Influenced by the dynamic between the local and the global, Holocaust memory becomes cosmopolitanized - shared across and above national boundaries of remembrance. The preponderance of cosmopolitan memory in contemporary iconography of the Holocaust does not mean, however, that there are no distinctions between representations of this event in different countries: "The Holocaust does not become one totalizing signifier containing the same meanings for everyone. Rather its meanings evolve from the encounter of global interpretations and local sensibilities."4 In the era of the cosmopolitanization of memory, Levy and Sznaider ascertain, the interaction between nation-specific and nationtranscending representations plays a key role in the way in which the Holocaust is imagined, remembered, and commemorated. Two postmemorial texts - Monika Maron's Pavcels Briefe5 and Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz's Umschlagplatz6 - present the kind of writing which is driven by the dynamic between local and cosmopolitan models of representation and memorialization of the Holocaust. Retracing her family history back to 19th century Poland, Monika Maron poses questions about prewar lives and the premature wartime deaths of her grandparents, as well as about the aftereffects of this violent past on the surviving family members, including herself.7 The characterization of Pavcels Briefe as eine Familiengeschichte points clearly to the centrality of familial memory and history, but Maron never loses sight of the larger context of German public memory and historical consciousness. The writer's search for the traces of her personal past is embedded primarily in the discussion of memory politics in the GDR but Maron tackles also more recent German debates regarding victimhood and perpetratorship in WWII and in its aftermath.8 The latter aspect is also intimately connected to the vitriolic debates in -which Maron was involved in the early 1990s. Maron was accused of having been complicit in the GDR regime, when it became public that she served briefly in the 1970s as an informant for the East German Staatssicherheit, an aspect of her biography which she had chosen not to reveal. While Maron struggles to understand better her private history and the reasons for drastic gaps in familial but also national memories, the Polish author, Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz confronts the loss of the entire Jewish community and its memory from Poland's landscape. Rymkiewicz's novel presents one of the earlier examples in the wave of Polish texts from the mid-1980s and 1990s, which deal explicitly with the trials and tribulations of the Polish-Jewish relationship during and after the Holocaust. …