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From: Susan Boettcher
<susan.boettcher@MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU>
List Editor: Susan Boettcher <susan.boettcher@MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU>
Editor's Subject: REV: Gunther on Liebster, Milton (children's
Holocaust memoirs)
Author's Subject: REV: Gunther on Liebster, Milton (children's
Holocaust memoirs)
Date Written: Tue, 18 Sep 2007 02:26:17 -0500
Date Posted: Tue, 18 Sep 2007 02:26:17 -0500
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H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (September 2007) Simone Arnold Liebster. _Facing the Lion: Memoirs of a Young Girl in Nazi Europe_. Abridged edition. New Orleans: Grammaton Press, 2004. xvi + 192 pp. Illustrations, notes, index, appendix. $6.95 (paper), ISBN 0-9679366-9-1. Edith Milton. _The Tiger in the Attic: Memories of the Kindertransport and Growing up English_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xi + 242 pp. Illustrations. $22.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-226-52946-0. Reviewed for H-German by Stefan Gunther, Summer Sessions, George Washington University The Vagaries of Memory and Memorialization In a well-known article in _Critical Inquiry_, Karl J. Weintraub elucidated the utility of historiography and autobiography for the process of understanding and interpreting events. At the same time, he pointed to the narrative limitations inscribed in these genres: "History and autobiography derive their value from rendering significant portions of the past as interpreted past; for both the incoherent realia of life have been sorted out and those selected have been assigned their fitting place in a fuller pattern of meaning."[1] Memoirs, as narratives that we tell about ourselves, partake of this desire to reveal larger conclusions from the minutiae of individual existence (perhaps especially when they unfold against the backdrop of momentous historical moments). Yet, they also invariably reveal the individual memoirist's interpretive filter as it is applied to life's "incoherent realia." Both memoirs reviewed here display this dialectic process of, on one hand, employing details from the realm of personal experience to illuminate larger historical processes, and, on the other, demonstrating that those very processes have also imposed themselves indelibly on the author. Simone Arnold Liebster's memoir of growing up as a Jehovah's Witness in National Socialist Germany has the distinction of providing specific information about the Nazis' persecution of this religious group. It provides ample details about how this persecution affected Liebster's family's life. Thus, although it does not offer an analysis of larger events, the memoir does draw scholarly attention to a facet of Nazi oppression hitherto inadequately covered.[2] Volumes like _Facing the Lion_, by virtue of their potential popular appeal, could serve as a means to intensify sustained research into the fate of groups like Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany. Liebster's memoir covers a two-year period during World War II (1943-45, during which the author's native province of Alsace-Lorraine was under German occupation), as well as the immediate postwar period. Liebster describes in detail her family's conversion from Catholicism; their refusal to respond to the then-customary "Heil Hitler!" greeting; the imprisonment of her father; her own removal to a juvenile detention center based on a provision in the German Civil Code regarding putative adolescent welfare; her brutal treatment in the center; and her release and eventual emigration to the United States. At the core of Simone's experience is the refusal by Jehovah's Witnesses to submit to worldly authority. Witnesses maintained that the end of time was approaching, that the secularizing influences of the world were to be renounced and that Witnesses were to serve only Jehovah, not worldly governments. At the beginning of her memoir, Simone sounds this theme: "[W]e were Jehovah's Witnesses, and our religious convictions would not let us accept Hitler or any other man as our Savior" (p. 1). This view certainty permeates the memoir in its entirety, providing a feature that sociologist Anthony Giddens calls "ontological security."[3] This sense likely provided the spiritual resilience Jehovah's Witnesses displayed when juxtaposing allegiance to their faith with the ideological adherence the Nazi state tried to enforce. In showing how individuals and communities could resist Nazi terror, Liebster makes a valuable contribution to social history. Her account delineates personal choices and their consequences, which sets it apart from works with more sweeping social, ideological, or economic analyses of the same subject. In this respect, this memoir succeeds in posing questions that can be pursued in more depth in the scholarly literature. However, this strength also represents a certain weakness. The genre of memoir consistently struggles with reconciling the past with the present; the interpretive framework the adult author imposes on the narrative unavoidably conflicts with the lived experiences of the author-as-child. With its occasionally awkward shifts between adult and child narrative voices, _Facing the Lion_ at points loses its rhetorical and structural unity. For instance, when analyzing specific Nazi policies and their application to the Witnesses, the adult author's sophistication intrudes on the experience of the younger Simone, whose narrative voice is employed elsewhere. Edith Milton's memoir, _The Tiger in the Attic_, provides a more unified, sustained narrative voice. Despite the work's subtitle, the _Kindertransport_ itself is barely mentioned; the book primarily concerns itself with "growing up English," or, more specifically, with the nature of memory itself as it recalls the experiences described. As the author states, "Memory ... is a fickle tool--made even more unreliable by the very instruments we use to secure it, to hold the evidence in place for future use when we write the reports and histories and biographies that document the past.... One must, of course, acknowledge the concrete and irrefutable evidence of snapshots, of news accounts, and of other people's recollections--but they should take their place humbly in the framework of whatever fiction memory insists on" (pp. 167-170). This assessment, of course, in no way qualifies the veracity of Milton's account. Her memoir brilliantly traces her early years in Karlsruhe (where she grew up in a Jewish family); her evacuation to England; her formative years there and the education she received from her Anglican foster family; and her eventual passage to the United States to re-join her mother, who had managed to escape Nazi Germany. Milton's philosophical digressions about remembering and memory, which interrupt the generally linear narrative flow of her account, serve as a powerful reminder of the instability of all attempts to construct a sense of identity through the stories we tell. In Milton's account, the "incoherent realia" Weintraub evokes time and again manage to break the smooth surface of the narrative and inject doubt about the reliability of patterns of meaning that align too perfectly. And certainly this interplay between surface narrative and epistemological disruption of that very narrative would be an appropriate tool to reflect the experience of a woman whose identity was shaped by being Jewish, German, English, Anglican, and American all at once. Liebster's and Milton's memoirs, then, will be read most profitably for separate purposes. _Facing the Lion_ is an example of "grassroots history" that impels us towards more scholarly research about those victims of the Nazis whose fates have been insufficiently examined; _The Tiger in the Attic_ allows us to ponder the complexities of identity formation and memory against the backdrop of displacement during World War II. Milton enjoins us to ponder the hermeneutics of memory by exposing the constitutive features of witness accounts/memoirs, while Liebster reminds us that memorialization itself has its own contingencies and blind spots. Notes [1]. Karl J. Weintraub, "Autobiography and Historical Consciousness," _Critical Inquiry_ 1 (1975): 827. [2]. Historian Sybil Milton has argued that "[d]espite new sources, research about Jehovah's Witness in Nazi Germany has barely begun, and the complexities and contours of this subject will have to be explored in future historical research. After more than half a century, we must concede that despite some improvements, the subject of Jehovah's Witnesses is still missing in most literature about Nazi Germany"; see Sybil Milton, "Jehovah's Witnesses as Forgotten Victims," in _Persecution and Resistance of Jehovah's Witnesses During the Nazi Regime_, ed. Hans Hesse (Bremen: Edition Temmen, 2001), 141-148. [3]. Anthony Giddens, _ Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age_ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Copyright (c) 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
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