Jurek Becker. Bronsteins Kinder. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 1986. 302 pages.
Much has been written about the victims and survivors of the death camps, that generation which was directly exposed to Hitler's "final solution." Most Jews herded into the concentration camps of the Third Reich did not survive the ordeal. The few who did tried to return to some degree of normalcy after their liberation. Their attempts, however, were in most instances hampered by their anxieties and their inability to forget. Elie Wiesel, perhaps the internationally most famous Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, described the dilemma:
Survivors we were, but we were allowed no victory. Fear followed us everywhere, fear preceded us. Fear of speaking up, fear of keeping quiet. Fear of opening our eyes, fear of shutting them. Fear of loving and being rejected or loved for the wrong reason, or for no reason at all. Marked, possessed, we were neither fully alive nor fully dead. People didn't know how to handle us. We rejected charity. Pity filled us with disgust. We were beggars unwanted everywhere, condemned to exile and reminding strangers everywhere of what they had done to us and to themselves.1
Yet in spite of all difficulties, the survivors struggled to reestablish themselves in some meaningful way in the aftermath of the great debacle. The majority of the older generation, weakened by years of deprivation and saddened beyond measure by the loss of relatives and friends, soon died out. Many of the younger and stronger ones, however, resolved to get married despite their negative experiences in order to have families and children of their own. They wanted to prove to themselves, if not to the world, that the forces of life were stronger than those of death and destruction.
Some attention has been focused on this second generation, appropriately called children of the Holocaust, who had grown up in the intervening years. A recent German novel, Bronsteins Kinder (Bronstein's Children), deals with the problem area of Holocaust survivors and their offspring in a most perceptive manner. What gives this novel special appeal is its author, Jurek Becker: he is a Jewish deathcamp survivor. just as interesting is the fact that he is also an acculturated German who wrote his novel for a German-reading public, which includes at least in part, the very perpetrators of the crimes committed and their offspring. Becker is also one of a growing number of gifted East German writers who were forced by political circumstances to break with the regime of the German Democratic Republic for ideological reasons.2 Both his already noted Jewish descent and his Polish origin make him quite different and unusual.
Jurek Becker was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1937, two years before German and Russian armies overran and dismembered his homeland. Subsequently he spent his early childhood first in Jewish-Polish surroundings, then in Hitler's concentration camps. He had only the slightest recollection of his mother. He was not to see his father again until he was seven. In an autobiographical sketch entitled "Mein Judentum" (My Jewishness), he notes with subtle irony that his birth into a Jewish family was not to be inconsequential for his future development: "When I was two years old, my parents and I were inhabitants of the Lodz ghetto. . . . There followed stays in the concentration camps of Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen"3 As a result of the implementation of Hitler's "final solution," Jurek's originally rather large family was reduced to only three surviving members: his father, an aunt, and himself. All other relatives, including his mother, had been murdered by the Nazis. The very fact that young Jurek was reunited with his father after their liberation from different concentration camps was the result of investigations by an American search committee, without whose efforts they might never have found one another again.
Because of deprivation and the repression of his horrifying experiences, Jurek has very little recall of the first seven years of his life. He learned German only after the war, when his father and he settled in the Soviet sector of Berlin. He comments in his autobiographical sketch regarding this circumstance: "In my extremely intensive preoccupation with that language, I saw the only means of escaping mockery and the disadvantages resulting from my being the only eight-year-old who could not speak properly."4 His delayed intellectual development notwithstanding, he was able to graduate from the Gymnasium (the elitist preparatory school in German-speaking countries) and entered the university with the intention of majoring in philosophy.
Although Becker was unable to finish his studies, he managed to land a job as a movie scriptwriter for Defa, the main East German motion-picture studio. This was to be the beginning of his career as a freelance writer. His first novel, in fact, Jakob der Lugner (Jacob the Liar, 1969), was a rewritten rejected movie script. It tells the story of a ghetto inhabitant who becomes entangled in his own web of lies for the sake of the greater good. He proclaims himself the owner of a radio, which by Nazi law and under penalty of death he, as a Jew, is not permitted to have. But his contention is untrue, and all the news he conveys from the outside world to his fellow inhabitants, who are also shut off from all external contacts, is based on his vivid imagination. Nonetheless he manages to imbue them with new hope and courage.
Becker's second novel, Irrefuhrung der Behorde (Deception of the Authorities, 1973), is more personal and contemporary. It exposes his past difficulties in expressing himself freely as a literary artist in East Germany and confirms his intellectual break with the Communist regime. The book describes the struggle of a young writer who opposes and fights the blatant opportunism, entrenched bureaucracy, and narrow-mindedness of the political orthodoxy prevalent in the German Democratic Republic.
In his third novel, Der Boxer (The Boxer, 1976), Becker makes an attempt to become more imaginative. Thematically, this book returns to problems arising from the Nazi era. Yet it is written in the style and form of a query and invites the reader to use his imagination and deductive powers. The question is posed about the meaning of life for a man who was able to survive the concentration camps, found his son again, but lost him later, even though he had struggled for years to gain the child's love. This highly personal theme, quite reminiscent of and analogous to the fate of Becker's own father, appears to be also a somewhat modified and updated version of the lot of the biblical Job. The God of our days is mute, however, and no longer reveals himself. The reader is forced to draw his own conclusions.
When Der Boxer appeared in print, the author's father had already been dead for four years, having passed away in 1972, when Jurek Becker was in his mid-thirties. As the author later confessed in his autobiographical sketch, there had never been an open and profound relationship between them. He bemoaned the lack of meaningful communication with his father and called it "a state of speechlessness. " The older Jurek got, the more painfully aware he became of the void that this condition had created for both of them. But he found himself unable to bridge it: "I was capable of only inventing a dialogue between us, to portray a relationship I would have wished for us. This, to be sure, did not make it any easier for my father, but it helped me."5 Becker's father had lived to experience the publication of Jakob der Lugner and was very much upset by it. In fact, he was so riled at his author-son that he refused to speak to him for a full year. The son stood accused of having written the book behind his father's back. The author comments about this strained relationship: "My father told me, 'You can fool other people, but not me. I am a witness; I know what happened there. Maybe other people will believe what you write, but I don't."6 Evidently, the lack of communication between them had intensified beyond the breaking point. But who was at fault?
Becker's latest novel, Bronsteins Kinder, tries to deal with the answer to this question belatedly. He wrote it after three intervening books of lesser significance: Schlaflose Tage (Sleepless Days, 1978), Nach der ersten Zukunft (After the First Future, 1980), and Aller Welt Freund (Everybody's Friend, 1982). The action of Bronsteins Kinder takes place in East Germany in 1973 and 1974, when the author still lived in the German Democratic Republic in relative agreement with the regime and when the death of his father still weighed heavily on his mind. Jurek Becker has two grown sons of his own now. While writing Bronsteins Kinder, he was left to cope with the many unanswered questions about his own past as a child in Hitler's concentration camps and thereafter. He had not dared to approach his father with any of the questions while the latter was still alive. The only way to come to grips with the resulting problem of not knowing and to resolve it, was, by his own admission, through writing. This aspect of the father-son conflict in his life and in his work brings Kafka to mind. Becker needed more than a decade, as it were, to bring himself to tackle the task. His original intention was to call his novel Wie ich ein Deutscher wurde (How I Became a German). He dedicated it to his nonJewish wife Christine, who in concerted action with friends and the publisher persuaded him to change the title.
Becker relates his story in two exact time frames, fluctuating from one level to the other in the process. The narrator, young Hans Bronstein, tells about his experiences in August 1974 in the present tense. He also recounts his life in 1973, when his father, Arno, was still alive and the two of them shared a common household. After his father's death, Hans gave up the apartment they had shared together, sold the country cottage his father had bought earlier with money made in illegal black market deals, and moved in with the Jewish Lepschitz family of his girlfriend Martha. She is older and more experienced than he and actively pursues a career as a fledgling movie actress. From the very beginning, the reader is made aware that Hans and Martha are drifting apart.
The core of the unfolding action, however, is not centered in this slowly dissolving love affair between two children of the Holocaust. In a deliberately unimaginative, almost dry, and matter-of-fact tone, Becker focuses in Bronsteins Kinder on the Kafkaesque tale of the previous capture, torture, and quasi-imprisonment of a former concentration camp guard by a small band-three in all-of selfappointed Jewish vigilantes. This story within a story- slightly reminiscent of the initial chapter of Kafka's fragmentary novel, Der Prozess (The Trial, 1925)-provides the axis of the over 300-page book. To be more precise, it is the novel's central happening, around which the remaining action revolves, very much in the vein of the nineteenthcentury German novella.7
In recurring flashbacks, the narrator reveals that the three menhis father and the father's two Jewish friends, Kwart and Rotsteinkept the ex-guard, who had changed his name from Arnold Hermann to Arnold Heppner, locked up in the father's small country house. There, in the middle of a forest, this man had been shut off from the outside world for weeks. Bound and handcuffed to an iron post, he was left to lie in his own excrements.
The three vigilantes, all former inmates of Nazi concentration camps and advanced in years-as was their prisoner-obviously intended to settle a private score with Heppner. He had previously revealed his former identity over too many drinks during a card game in a neighborhood pub. His captors visited him quite frequently, usually at night, and occasionally even beat him. Apart from the obvious seeking of revenge, they purported to keep their helpless victim in such a demeaning state in order to extort information from him. The latter, who did not give the appearance of a major war criminal and was more likely a minor cog in Himmler's death camp machinery, seemed to prefer his present condition to the possibility of being turned over to the East German authorities. For this reason, he did not cry for help when he was left alone in the cottage, often for days on end. His three captors were equally unwilling to hand him over to public justice. They did not trust the German authorities. In fact, they had little confidence in the German people as a whole:
It was, to be sure, correct that the guard would be severely punished if they were to hand him over to a court, but why? Evidently only because the one occupation force conquered the country and not the other. If the border were slightly different, then the same people would be of a contrary opinion, here as well as there. Whoever was strong enough could impose his convictions on this German riff-raff, whether his name was Hitler or whatever. If there were a court in which they could put their trust, they would never have even thought of such a thing.8
Thus a strange kind of bond was forged among the four of them that developed almost into an interdependency. An unwritten agreement sufficed to keep the relationship on a firm footing. However, the men acted out their reversed roles with anything but theatrical perfection. They were, to say the least, confused. The ex-guard acceded to play the part of the prisoner, although he had hardly ever anticipated such a role; and the former concentration camp inmates reluctantly performed the multiple roles of warden, interrogator, and guard in one, doing their best to exude an air of conviction and expertise.
As the reader soon discovers, all was not well in this setup. There was a price to be paid for such unrealistic and illegal political theater. The narrator's father became a heavy drinker. His overindulgence and subsequent, ever more intensified bouts with alcohol caused him eventually to suffer a stroke and die in the presence of the tied-up Heppner. Prior to this tragic outcome, however, young Hans had stumbled on the prisoner while visiting his father's cottage secretly, without realizing the intricate connections. Hans, who was born after the war in the early fifties, had deliberately been kept in the dark by his father about he latter's concentration camp experiences. Nor had he been told much about his Jewishness. The little information his father did impart to him was confusing, if not damaging:
One theory of my father's, which I heard at various occasions, was: There were no Jews at all. Jews were an invention. Whether it was a good one or a bad one was subject to argument. To be sure, it was a successful invention. The inventors had spread their rumor with such force of conviction and stubbornness that even the ones affected by it and suffering the consequences, the alleged Jews, had been taken in by it and asserted with vigor that they were Jews.9
Hans was consequently ill prepared to deal with his father's illegal action and far removed from understanding and accepting it. He simply could not bring himself to share his father's view of taking justice into his own hands. Before these dramatic events unfolded, he secretly had a second key made to the cottage, to be able to spend nights there with his girlfriend Martha. His father was unaware of his clandestine activities. Most likely, the father would have disapproved of his son's sexual encounters in the family retreat.
There was an obvious generation gap between father and son, keeping them from effectively communicating with one another. The severity of it, however, went beyond the age separation; it had to do with the father's Holocaust experiences. One thing he had learned in those dreadful years was to be tight-lipped. Thus later on, he could not open himself up easily, not even to his son. This fact thwarted the development of a close and open relationship between them. The son was equally into himself. Almost unwittingly, he took his cues from the father. They seemed to care for one another, but they were incapable of overcoming and bridging the basic void that separated them.
In this ambivalent psychological context, the central happening of the novel, the illegal capture and incarceration of the former concentration camp guard, failed to bring them closer together. On the contrary, it tended to drive them even further apart. Hans tried to intervene on Heppner's behalf. He saw neither his father nor himself as a victim of the Holocaust: "If I am a victim, then at the utmost the victim of my own idiocy."10 On another occasion, he observed unemotionally: "We had heard, to be sure, that the Jews were treated badly at that time and that the Nazis were unpleasant people."11 As a result, just as he could not fathom his father's emotion, he also could not empathize with his actions:
What father so pompously had called the confessions of the guard, was in my eyes an exaggerated triffle: a confession is without meaning if nothing comes of it. I saw only how my father became degenerate, how our relationship disintegrated, how his face became more and more marked each day."12
An unspoken explanation of the unbearable strain between them seemed to be that Hans, at least in his father's eyes, had himself become one of those detested Germans, as though, considering where he lived, he had had any choice.
The difficulties between father and son are even more readily comprehensible if one considers that the youngster's mother had died at his birth. They were further compounded by the existence of an older sister in the family called Elle. Bronsteins Kinder, after all, deals with more than one child of the Holocaust. At the age of three Elle was put into hiding and supposed safekeeping with a peasant before the parents were taken away by the SS to the concentration camps. The family members survived the ordeal separately. But Elle was marked forever.13 She must have been terribly abused by the peasant, because, on being reunited with her parents, she revealed herself as a social misfit, given to aggressive outbursts. Occasionally and uncontrollably, she would attack and scratch people without provocation. The parents had no other recourse but to place her in an insane asylum, where she was kept under medication. But her severe handicaps were not only psychological and emotional; she was also mentally retarded. It is easy to understand why her parents wanted another child. Hans owed his own life to this circumstance.
Almost tragically, Hans treated Elle as his confidante on his frequent visits to the asylum. It soon becomes apparent that he was doing so because of the lack of any harmonious relationship with his father. Subconsciously, he may also have elected Elle to replace the mother he never knew. Just as evident is the fact that this arrangement was unworkable and was bound to lead to difficulties for him. Elle was incapable of true sisterly love and compassion even in her lucid moments. Moreover, she could not possibly take the place of loving and caring parents. The result had to lead to deep disappointment for Hans as he soon enough realized her limitations:
What did she know about the outside? She lived beyond time, in an environment which was only in touch with the outer world through books, through father and me and through the radio, not through words. Had I become mad, to ask her of all people?! Courts, rehabilitation, culpability, . . . revenge. In her solitude there were only meals, visits, trivia. Perhaps I had deemed her an expert because of her habit of scratching a face from time to time.14
Hans, the novel's hero and antihero rolled into one, was consequently very much left to his own emotional and intellectual devices. His unfolding sexuality had driven him to the older Martha, a young Jewish woman who was herself without any meaningful bonding to the Jewish tradition and could therefore not relate to past Jewish suffering. In vain, he sought the lover as well as the mother figure in her. Her primary interest lay in advancing her budding career as a movie star. Her attraction to the younger Hans was strictly sexual. She also enjoyed being the domineering partner.
Hans, of course, was no social activist. He was a youth of average abilities. A less than brilliant student, he excelled in nothing. He led a life full of banalities, pierced only by the unusual and at the same time threatening action of his father, which disturbed and upset him. Torn by feelings of powerlessness and self-assertion, doubt and pride, deceptiveness and honesty, his views of life and self became very ambivalent. He was basically an unhappy, poorly adjusted young man. This uneasiness about life and self extended also to politics. In this regard, he reflected the frame of mind of many young East Germans of his generation. Hans was not particularly fond of the East German state-the only one he had ever known-and had many critical thoughts about it and about East Berlin, where the story takes place. On the other hand, he would never have dreamed of opposing the regime even indirectly. As a result, lie was far from giving the appearance of a political animal in the Aristotelian sense.
After his father's death and in full view of the contorted corpse, Hans resolved to set the prisoner free, giving expression now to an innate sense of humaneness and basic human compassion. However, he may have freed Heppner also out of a vague concern for his dead father's reputation, or even in order to protect himself. He had after all been a witness and a witting party to illegal proceedings for some time. The reader is never fully apprised of the narrator's innermost feelings. Consequently, the rationale can also not be dismissed that he freed the prisoner at his father's death to exercise his newly gained independence and even to become exuberant over it. At the end, in the more current frame of the action, Hans has broken with other relationships of the past as well. He resolves to leave Martha, whose parents took him in after his father's death as a prospective and, considering his inheritance, not exactly impoverished son-in-law. As the main heir, he had in fact come into some wealth through the sale of the cottage and also by giving up his father's old apartment. He has also been admitted to the university after passing a number of difficult tests. But it remains doubtful whether all these changes and his belated drive toward self-assertion will really lead to new maturity and resolve, to longed-for happiness and desired personal freedom. His symbolic act of opening the prisoner's handcuffs with his father's key may or may not open up his own gateway to a happier future.
The reader is left to wonder whether Hans will fulfill the mythical role of the proverbial German Hans int Glack (lucky Hans, who survives incredible hardships) or that of the opposite symbolic figurehe is, after all, Jewish-Hans Guck-in-die-Luft (hapless Hans, who, while holding his head high and staring into the sky, is bound to take a dangerous spill). The fact that Heppner disappears without a trace after young Bronstein's generous act and can therefore not answer the pressing questions that the now-fatherless youngster would want to ask him, does not augur well for the future. The author himself thickens the plot by calling his novel "a book of perplexity."15 The pain will quite likely continue for both of the Bronstein children. The suffering may not cease. just as the older Bronstein was permanently victimized by the "final solution," so too are his children. Their mere survival does not alter this stark reality.
Jurek Becker's latest novel to date is a significant commentary on the Holocaust and its legacy by an author who is both a survivor and a member of the second generation. As a survivor, he does not shout condemnations at certain groups. He does not point an accusatory finger, nor does he raise his clenched fist at anyone. He tells his story quietly and unobtrusively. His approach is low-keyed and essentially that of the mute boy he himself was to the age of seven. Yet the book he wrote still manages to make the reader ponder the human pain and suffering that Hitler's "final solution" continues to exact. It also raises many questions, albeit unspoken ones, just as the author was "speechless" as a child. These queries, after all, can no longer be addressed to his own dead father, nor to anybody else, surely not to God. The replies would not be convincing or satisfactory even if they were given. But those unwritten, unspoken questions are nonetheless, and by design, visible and audible throughout the novel to the perceptive reader.
The central happening of the book-quite apart from its ultimate outcome-is, of course, far removed from having the emotional, psychological, and moral impact of an Eichmann trial. It is minuscule by comparison. Nor is the main culprit, Heppner, a Demjanjuk figure, an "Ivan the Terrible" unmasked. He is only a pathetic, frightened, small ex-Nazi, stripped of his awe-inspiring uniform and of all vestiges of human dignity. There are in fact no accusations, no witnesses, no reporters, no cameras. There is neither a court nor a prosecutor. There are only those three old men, Jews, who have survived the horrors of the death camps, who want their revenge now, who have at long last met and captured the enemy in person. They are intent on turning the tables on him, but they fail tragically. They lack the resolve, the will, the viciousness, the talent, and the organization to do to him what the Nazis have done to them. The most sensitive among them, the father of Hans, does more mental and physical injury to himself than he inflicts on his prisoner. He dies, whereas the latter survives. The novel begins with the tragic acknowledgment of the father's death and expands from it. The very first paragraph reads: "A year ago my father suffered the most severe form of harm imaginable-he died. The event occurred on 4 August 1973, or let us say it outright: the misfortune, a Saturday. I saw it coming."16 At the end of the novel, after much revelation, the question is also left open as to whether Heppner might become repentant, disavow his past, and now be ready to atone. His rapid disappearance and the deft covering of his tracks by his relatives provide a strong hint that he will do no such thing.
Yet Bronsteins Kinder is not just another book about man's inhumanity to man. On the contrary, Becker's novel deals with the attempt of a young man, a child of the Holocaust, to assert to the extent possible his inborn sense of humanity in a most difficult situation and against nearly impossible odds. He finally succeeds by opposing his father, but the price which this action exacts is extremely high. His zeal contributes in no small way to the old man's death. Hans will most likely never be able to overcome his searing feelings of guilt completely.
Observations such as these raise Becker's novel far above the level of mere fiction for the sake of entertainment. There is an underlying, perhaps unintended, additional message of a tradition, a legacy, being lost. Both Hans and Martha have shed all of their Jewishness. They want to be likes everybody else. Elle's madness has progressed to the point where she neither knows nor cares who she is. On another, more political level, the reader also senses an indictment of the East German government and its lack of candor regarding the Holocaust. Its policy of putting the blame for all Nazi atrocities squarely on the West keeps its own youth only partly informed about the dimensions and ramifications of the debacle. Principally, though, Bronsteins Kinder appeals to the reader's conscience and moral commitment. It invites discussion by the older generations, that of Becker's father and that of the author himself, but even more by young people. The challenge to bear witness and to reflect is intended not only for German readers of all ages, who as a whole have never become fully conversant with the "final solution" their countrymen helped to unleash, but also for readers of other nationalities as well.17 Particularly with regard to the Holocaust, history will not lead to a much-needed corrective unless examined and heeded in terms that touch both the intellect and the heart. Becker's book succeeds in doing both. Far from being merely a faint evocation of the "final solution" and its aftermath, Bronsteins Kinder is a confirmation of continuing human suffering that simply refuses to go away on the part of a second survivor generation.
NOTES
1. Elie Wiesel, A Beggar in Jerusalem (New York, 1970), p. 19.
2. Although still an East German citizen, Becker prefers living in the West in order to pratice his craft more freely. He can, therefore, be grouped with those dissident East German writers such as Uwe Johnson, Heinar Kipphardt-both of whom are no longer alive-and Wolf Piermann, the erstwhile poet laureate among authors of the German Democratic Republic.
3. Excerpts from this sketch were reprinted in Volker Hage's article, "Wie ich ein Deutscher wurde: Eine Begegnung mit Jurek Becker in Berlin und Anmerkungen zu seinem Roman 'Bronsteins Kinder,' " Die Zeit 41 (1986): 25. The translation from the original German text is my own.
6. Jurek Becker, "Answering Questions About Jakob der Liigner," Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 4 (1983): 288.
7. Goethe defined the novella as "eine unerhorte, sich ereignete Begebenheit" (an unheard-of event that has acutally taken place).
8. Becker, Bronsteins Kinder, p. 80. The translations are my own.
13. Azriel Eisenberg comments in his book Witness to the Holocaust (New York, 1981), p. 304, about the plight of the children in the Holocaust:
The Nazis subjected children and adults to the same treatment. Many parents knowing that certain death awaited them in the camps, helped their children to flee, reasoning that they might have a chance to survive, even if left entirely on their own. . . . At the end of the war, Jewish organizations devoted themselves to locating, identifying, and aiding the children who had survived. ... Because of the horrors they had experienced, many of them were in a state of shock-listless, disoriented, neurotic, sometimes even half-savage-and much loving effort was necessary before they could again lead normal lives.As is apparent from the plot of the novel, Elle's psyche had been damaged beyond recovery.
14. Becker, Bronsteins Kinder, p. 68.
15. Hage, "Wie ich ein Deutscher wurde," p. 26.
16. Becker, Bronsteins Kinder, p. 7.
17. Two of Jurek Becker's novels can be read in English. His first novel appeared as Jacob the Liar (New York and London, 1975), translated by Melvin Kornfield, who also supplied a preface. Leila Vennewitz is the translator of Sleepless Days (New York and London, 1979). The author, by the way, should not be confused with the West German writer Jiirgen Becker (born 1932), who is known for his unique experimental style.
