The Language of Silence Ernestine, Schlant
1999, 20041123, 2004, 1999-03-04, 2004-11-23
eBook
Focusing on individual authors from Heinrich Boll to Gunther Grass, Hermann Lenz to Peter Schneider, The Language of Silence offers an analysis of West German literature as it tries to come to terms ...with the Holocaust and its impact on postwar West German society. Exploring postwar literature as the barometer of Germany's unconsciously held values as well as of its professed conscience, Ernestine Schlant demonstrates that the confrontation with the Holocaust has shifted over the decades from repression, circumvention, and omission to an open acknowledgement of the crimes. Yet even today a 'language of silence' remains since the victims and their suffering are still overlooked and ignored. Learned and exacting, Schlant's study makes an important contribution to our understanding of postwar German culture.
In this narrative about narrative, the pithy film summaries placed in the mouth of the eponymous cinema explainer (courtesy of "Reclams Filmführer") expose underlying narrative models: the barer the ...plot the more visible its skeleton. When the novel as a whole is stripped to its bare bones, one finds a classic "Third Reich" narrative, of a kind that may soon be extinct. Indeed, the novel attests to the fading of memory in its stylization of the "Nazi" era. In place of authentic detail it offers ("pace" the author) a moral stance on the Third Reich and a refusal of the myth of the 'good German'.
Gert Hofmanns Buch ist der erste Band der vielversprechenden Reihe "Edition Kairos: Kulturwissenschaft und Ästhetik," die sich als "Forum für wissenschaftliche Arbeiten in deutscher oder englischer ...Sprache" versteht, "die in einem transdisziplinären Ansatz den Zusammenhang von ästhetischer Kommmunikation und kultureller Praxis zum Gegenstand ihrer Untersuchungen machen" (laut Beilage). Statt dieses Theorem zu untermauern, macht Hofmann sich daran, das Subjekt gerade unter den Bedingungen seines Verschwindens in Form einer erratischen Selbstbehauptung und damit einhergehend einer Ästhetik der Ohnmacht zu denken. An die Konzeption des Bandes habe ich einige Fragen, obwohl ich grundsätzlich den mutigen großen Pinselstrich quer durch die klassische und deutsche Kulturgeschichte durchaus bewundere und für anregend erachte.
