TY - CHAP
T1 - What Exactly is Vergangenheitsbewältigung?
T2 - Narrative and Its Insufficiency in Postwar Germany
AU - Fritzsche, Peter A
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - One year after Stalingrad, Victor Klemperer imagined how the war would be represented once it had ended. He transcribed into his diary the story of Horst-Siegfried Weigmann, whose death had been announced in the local paper on 19 January 1944, with a swastika inside the Iron Cross at the side of the notice. The announcement read: “Ordained by fate, my only dear son, student of chemistry, Lance Corporal Horst-Siegfried Weigmann, volunteer, holder of the Iron Cross, Second Class, participant in the Polish and French campaigns, was suddenly and unexpectedly taken from this life in the midst of his studies at only twenty-four years of age.” The death notice is signed “in deep sorrow” by his father, Bruno Weigmann, a musician from Munich. Klemperer continues in his diary to explain that some of Klemperer's friends knew the family and recalled that the mother was divorced from the father, and was Jewish. She had been among the Jews arrested in what Klemperer refers to as Dresden's “letzter Aktion” (last action). The son found out, posed as a Gestapo officer, and managed to speak to his mother in order to smuggle her out of prison and into hiding. Klemperer adds that there are said to be many Jews in hiding, particularly in Berlin. At the entrance of the prison, however, mother and son ran into a Gestapo officer who knew Weigmann and thus discovered the ruse. The mother was sent to Theresienstadt, and the son hanged himself in his prison cell.
AB - One year after Stalingrad, Victor Klemperer imagined how the war would be represented once it had ended. He transcribed into his diary the story of Horst-Siegfried Weigmann, whose death had been announced in the local paper on 19 January 1944, with a swastika inside the Iron Cross at the side of the notice. The announcement read: “Ordained by fate, my only dear son, student of chemistry, Lance Corporal Horst-Siegfried Weigmann, volunteer, holder of the Iron Cross, Second Class, participant in the Polish and French campaigns, was suddenly and unexpectedly taken from this life in the midst of his studies at only twenty-four years of age.” The death notice is signed “in deep sorrow” by his father, Bruno Weigmann, a musician from Munich. Klemperer continues in his diary to explain that some of Klemperer's friends knew the family and recalled that the mother was divorced from the father, and was Jewish. She had been among the Jews arrested in what Klemperer refers to as Dresden's “letzter Aktion” (last action). The son found out, posed as a Gestapo officer, and managed to speak to his mother in order to smuggle her out of prison and into hiding. Klemperer adds that there are said to be many Jews in hiding, particularly in Berlin. At the entrance of the prison, however, mother and son ran into a Gestapo officer who knew Weigmann and thus discovered the ruse. The mother was sent to Theresienstadt, and the son hanged himself in his prison cell.
KW - Nazism
KW - narratives
KW - Jewish peoples
KW - Holocaust
KW - World wars
KW - Sons
KW - Complicity
KW - Mothers
KW - German history
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84940494083&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84940494083&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:84940494083
SN - 9781571133243
T3 - Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture
SP - 25
EP - 40
BT - German Memory Contests
A2 - Fuchs, Anne
A2 - Cosgrove, Mary
A2 - Grote, Georg
PB - Boydell and Brewer Ltd
ER -