Eva Hoffman: Good evening.
My name is Eva Hoffman and I want to welcome you most warmly to this conversation
with Eva Figes and Ruth Kluger, a Jewish Book Week event co-sponsored
by the British Association of Wizo.
Certainly I have found the books under discussion this evening powerfully
stimulating, thought-provoking, disturbing and affecting. It is really
my great pleasure and privilege to be here with Ruth Kluger and Eva Figes.
I am just going to make some brief biographical introductory remarks,
in part because the biographical context in this case is important for
the books in question.
Eva Figes was born in Berlin in 1932 and arrived in England in 1939 as
a refugee, with her parents and younger brother. Her grandparents stayed
behind ,and perished after being deported to a camp located in Poland,
Trevniki. Eva has lived in London since then, has studied literature at
the University of London, and has worked in publishing and translating.
She is the author of numerous novels and books of non-fiction, including
Patriarchal Attitudes which has become recognised as a key feminist text,
and Little Eden, a memoir of her early years in England and her evacuation
to the English countryside. Among her other achievements Eva has begun
a literary dynasty as she is the mother of the writer and journalist Kate
Figes and the historian Orlando Figes.
Ruth Kluger was born in Vienna in 1931 into an 'emancipated but not assimilated'
Jewish family, as she herself puts it. Her father was a doctor who had
to flee the country in 1940 and subsequently perished. In 1942 she was
deported with her mother to Theresienstadt and subsequently to Auschwitz,
later still, to a labour camp called Kristienstadt which was a sub-camp
of … In 1947, after beginning her studies in Germany, she immigrated
to America where she became a distinguished professor of German. She is
the author of five volumes of German literary criticism, feminist criticism
amongst it. Interestingly, both writers have written books of feminist
reflections. She has also published some poems in German and in English.
She is currently professor emerita at the University of California and
a frequent guest professor at the University of Göttingen. The book
that we are going to be talking about this evening, Landscapes of Memory,
has been published in several languages and received international acclaim
and a number of very prominent prizes in Germany and also France.
So the books we are going to be talking about this evening are both memoirs
of childhood shadowed by the Holocaust, and of the long shadow cast by
that event on the subsequent lives of those who have endured and survived
it. This is clearly a very sombre subject, but for me both books are animated
and illuminated by a great acuity and richness of perception, and a great
care for the beauty of language. They are very much writers' memoirs,
and they are very different in form and approach. I am going to ask both
Ruth and Eva to read short fragments, just to give you a hint of the voice
and texture of each memoir.
Ruth Kluger's memoir, Landscapes of Memory, takes us from a childhood
in an increasingly Nazified Vienna into the very vortex of the concentration
camp universe, and then, through an emergence from it, to a life in America.
It does this with a rigorous insistence and precision, not only about
the details of the experiences Ruth describes but also about the meanings,
motives, reflexes and feelings of the people involved, and with an equally
rigorous refusal to offer easy consolation or to yield to sentimentality
or mythology or really any simplifying formulas about the Holocaust. It
is a challenging book which demands that we imagine and think about the
stark history anew. I now will ask Ruth to read a fragment from it.
Ruth Kluger: [Of three passages suggested, she will read the 'middle'
one.] The middle one - fine. Well the middle one isn't really fine. It's
not fine in the sense that it's a passage about the trip (if one can call
it a trip): deportation from Theresienstadt, which was called a ghetto
at the time, now it's called a concentration camp, to Auschwitz, which
of course was a death camp.
'If I look at a map today I see that the distance from Theresienstadt
to Auschwitz is not very great. Yet it was the longest trip I have ever
taken. The train stood around. It was summer. The temperature rose. The
still air smelled of sweat, urine, excrement. A whiff of panic trembled
in the air. It's from this experience that I think I have an idea of what
it must have been like in the gas chambers, the feeling of having been
abandoned, which is not the same as having been forgotten. We knew we
hadn't been forgotten because the railroad car stood on rails and the
direction would arrive. But abandoned in the sense of discarded, separated,
trashed and tossed in an old crate, like last birthday's worn-out toys.
An old woman who sat next to my mother gradually fell apart. First she
cried and whimpered, and I grew impatient and angry with her, because
here she was adding her private disintegration to the great evil of our
collective helplessness, a defence reaction. I could not face or assimilate
the reality of a grown-up losing her mind before my eyes. Finally this
woman pushed herself onto my mother's lap and urinated. I still see the
tense look of revulsion on my mother's face in the slanting twilight of
the car, and how she gently pushed the woman from her lap, not brutally,
and without malice.
At that moment my mother became a role model for me, which she generally
was not. It was a pragmatic, humane gesture, like a nurse might employ
to free herself from a clinging patient. I thought my mother should have
been indignant, but for her the situation was beyond anger and outrage.
I've just described an unforgettable event in my life, and yet I hardly
ever get a chance to speak of it. It doesn't fit the framework of social
discourse. For example, after I had written this, while in Germany, I
visited friends and we talked about claustrophobia. People mentioned incidents
where they had got stuck, and described feelings of panic or near panic.
There was talk about the Chunnel, the rail connection between Britain
and France which wasn't quite finished then, and whether the average person
would be able to stand the confinement or freak out.
There was a man who once couldn't get out of an elevator and half the
company remembered the air-raid shelters of their childhood. Meanwhile
I had this transport to Auschwitz on my mind, but didn't contribute it
because, if I had, it would have effectively shut up the rest of the company.
They would have been bothered, troubled, sympathetic and thoroughly uncomfortable.
There would have been no further discussion of the way space affects us,
which had been our subject. They would have resented me as a spoilsport.
It had been an occasion for reminiscing. But there are limits. And so
my childhood falls into a black hole.'
Eva Hoffman: Thank you. I am just going to ask you one question
before we go on. You are describing a very harrowing moment here, and
a moment which is really very difficult to transpose into the terms of
ordinary experience, of any other experience, and therefore to somehow
contain in the imagination. Yet I must say that as I read the early sections
of your book, the sections dealing with your childhood in this increasingly
Nazified Vienna, and with the increase of petty, ugly, terrible, intimate
antisemitism, and then later the more harrowing episodes in the camp,
I am amazed by a kind of precocious consciousness on the part of the child
you describe, and a precocious defiance really. It seems to me that your
response to the increase of antisemitism in Vienna was to say: Well,
in that case I'll be more Jewish.
Ruth Kluger: Absolutely. My middle name was Susan. When the Germans
came, I was seven at that time, I decided I wanted a Jewish name, so I
insisted that everybody call me Ruth, which was my first name but which
wasn't used. I managed to get people to do this. I managed to get the
family to do this. Nobody had read the Bible well enough to tell me that
Susannah was a biblical name as well! So I have this incident to prove
that what I'm writing is correct. I really did decide that from now on
I was going to be Jewish, without really knowing what that meant. But
I found out in due course of time.
Eva Hoffman: Right. Now it seems to me that you, Eva, are dealing
in a sense with a much more elusive experience, an experience of the childhood
condition of both knowing and not knowing. You left in 1939. Your parents
didn't tell you much about what was going on, and so it seems to me that
your book partly arises out of this kind of haunting: an experience perhaps
more familiar also to children who are born after the war, and therefore
one with which I feel some affinity.
Also it seems to me that it is a difficult experience to find a form
for, but that you have found a very original and innovative form and wonderfully
evocative and lyrical and distilled language in which to speak about it.
So, let us have a fragment.
Eva Figes: I have never got over the loss of my grandparents,
and becoming a grandmother myself has brought it all back. So I have done
it in the form of talking to my own grandchildren and this evoking all
my memories, and the whole thing is interspersed with Grimm's fairy tales
which are, in a way, reinterpreted according to 20th century history.
So I'll read a small passage. I've just taken a child to the zoo and we've
come home.
'After tea we settled down on the sofa to read a story. She's very tired
and snuggles against me, looking at the bright simplified pictures. The
wolf, wearing her grandmother's frilly nightcap, looks comical. A wolf
in human clothing. The child is duly deceived.
'She shouldn't talk to strangers,' had been her only comment so far, when
Red Riding Hood met the wolf on her walk through the wood and told him
where she was going. 'My mummy says not to.' 'Quite right,' I remarked,
breaking off from my reading. 'If she hadn't told him where she was going,
her granny would have been all right.' 'Yeh, maybe, but…' 'Did her
mummy not tell her about the wolf?' 'No, she didn't.'
My tone is apologetic. 'Perhaps she did not know about him, or she didn't
want to frighten her little girl.' I glanced down at her thoughtful, piqued
face, and realised she was considered the possibility that parents did
not always tell their children the whole truth. Cowardly, I returned to
the printed text, using my story voice. Rather to my surprise, she accepted
the emergence of Red Riding Hood and her grandmother from the wolf's stomach,
not so much as a toothmark on either of them, without question. And when
the wolf collapsed and died because his belly was full of heavy stones,
she laughed heartily. She found his death unambiguously comic and began
to mimic the situation by staggering around the room holding her belly
and pulling faces.'
Eva Hoffman: Well, you also add words to fairy tales several times
in your book, Ruth, and it's sort of interesting how well, in a sense,
the universe of fairy tales, with its dark terrors and its cruelties and
violence, transposes itself perhaps not to the experience itself, but
to a child's consciousness of that experience. But in your book, Eva,
fairy tales are very crucial and very central. In a sense, I wonder how
you came to that and what meaning these fairy tales…
Eva Figes: Well I think in part I came to it because obviously,
if you are talking to a child, fairy tales are very much part of the interaction
with a child. But it also struck me that, firstly, Grimm's fairy tales
are very Germanic. They are very realistic in a way, because if you grow
up in Berlin you are surrounded by forests and all that means. But also
it struck me that these are actually horrendous stories. They involve
children who go through terrible experiences. They involve infanticide,
cannibalism, child abuse, all sorts of terrible things. Then there are
these happy endings tagged on. One of the things that I explore is the
fact that, ok, there's a happy ending. It was a happy end for me and there's
a happy ending for Ruth. But it's not all happiness. There is no way a
child can go through the forest and have the huntsman try and kill her
and not come out of that without some sort of damage and some sort of
wound which will not go away. So I sort of interpret that.
Ruth Kluger: Can I just say something? Well, this is the problem
with any kind of survival story: that you start writing these things in
order to illustrate the horror and the destruction that you escaped from,
and it ends up with the escape, and so there is a sort of an upbeat feeling
to it which isn't intended, but yet you cannot get around it. I discussed
this a little in my book, but it is still there. It's the only problem
I see with Polanski's film The Pianist, that at the end of the war he
sits down and plays music again as if the whole thing had been an episode.
Eva Hoffman: Although of course he did in fact, and there was
that factuality of it, which perhaps may be misleading as to the actual
states and the actual meanings of the event.
Ruth Kluger: This is true, but it is a weak ending, it seems to
me, to a very powerful movie. Though I don't see what he could have done
with it.
Eva Hoffman: Well, both of you refuse happy endings in a way,
quite resolutely. I wanted to shift away perhaps from the texts themselves
just for a minute, although I want to come right back into them, and ask
a prior question, which is: Your book came out in its German version in
1992, yours is just being published now, so, respectively, 50 and 60 years
after the events, and I wanted to ask: Why now, or then? That is, what
prompted the writing of these books, and the sense, was the time between
the postponement, the waiting, necessary?
Eva Figes: I found that, about five or six years ago, I suddenly
could not think about anything else, and I know that as one gets older,
one tends to regress towards the past, and the past gets more immediate.
And you always think it happens to other people but not to you. I found
that I could not think about anything else. I was crying a lot. In 1945
I did not cry at all. I realised that, as I was a writer, I would have
to do something with this material, and that is how it began.
Ruth Kluger: There are really a lot of people who are doing it
now or have done it in the last few years. There is a flood of memoirs
coming out, and what I like to think about is that among the many good
stories in the bible, there is this story that the Jewish people were
in the desert with Moses for forty years. Now if you ever go through this
desert, you know you cross it in a bus in a few hours, and, even with
babies and goats, it couldn't have taken them longer than two weeks. So
the meaning of this story, it seems to me, is that it takes that long,
it takes a couple of generations, to overcome trauma sufficiently to deal
with it.
Eva Hoffman: And of course now, from the distance of time, and
perhaps from some sense that these experiences are contained by other
experiences, for you Eva, the birth of your grandchildren was very important,
perhaps for you, Ruth, as well. In any case, from this distance of time
you are shaping your experiences. But the experiences you describe took
place in childhood, and therefore are very mediated through the adults
around you. For children, even more than for others, these enormous historical
events are mediated through intimate and immediate relationships. Both
of you describe very complicated family relationships.
You dedicate your book to your mother, Ruth, and you describe a remarkable
but a very difficult woman and a very difficult relationship. There are
moments when your mother dares you to do very dangerous things: to go
to a movie to which you are forbidden to go as a Jewish girl; later, to
lie about your age in a 'selection'. The relationship remains quite tense
and conflicted and, as we saw in the passage we read, in a sense your
observing your mother was your judgement and your scepticism.
At the same time, of course, you really travelled through the circles
of hell together. You went through depredation and concentration camp
and 'selections' and a death march. I wonder if you could just talk a
little bit about this and about how that experience of extremity affected
your life?
Ruth Kluger: My mother, who died at the age of 97 two and a half
years ago, was a nut! She was paranoid. She really was paranoid. But,
as you know, sometimes even the paranoid are persecuted, and there came
a time in history when the madness of the outside world caught up with
her particular mental disease, and she reacted pitch perfect. There was
any number of people in Auschwitz that I knew who denied that what was
going on could go on, because this was central Europe and we were in Germany,
in the heart of Europe and so on, and there were hundreds of years of
civilisation.
My mother knew immediately that she was going to be killed there. There
was no doubt in her mind. So she did everything to get out of there, to
get me out of there, and she even adopted another child in Auschwitz who
is still very close to me. So there was that part of it. I find this so
interesting, because there are people like Bettelheim and other psychologists
who seem to indicate that with a perfect education you would know, a sane
person, a rational person, would know how to switch gears and know how
to resist or how to save themselves. I don't think is true.
I think the price we pay for civilisation is that in extreme situations
we do not know how to act, and my mother did in this situation. But later
on she always thought she was being persecuted. She thought she was going
to be deported from America and she was afraid when she saw a police car.
It went on and on. It was difficult to live with this. It was difficult
for her to live with it.
One reason I wrote this book first in German was that I didn't want her
to read it, and she didn't touch anything German.
But my relationship, I guess the other thing that you asked about it,
my relationship with her was a neurotic mother and daughter relationship.
What I have told you is correct, the negative aspects of this woman. But
of course I wasn't a perfect daughter either, and I hope I didn't present
myself as such in the book. There was the usual strain which is familiar
to many women between mother and daughter. Eva Figes talks about it very
articulately too.
The thing is that many readers resent this coming up in connection with
the Holocaust. There is a feeling that within the Holocaust, victims of
the Holocaust must have stuck together and become better people. But you
don't become a better person. I mean, if you became a better person in
a concentration camp, you could say that concentration camps were good
for something. But they were not good for anything.
Eva Hoffman: Yes. Well your mother is conspicuous in the book
by her 'near absence'. I mean by this that when parents were in a good
relationship … cause of loss.
Eva Figes: Yes. Well the one thing I could relate to very instantly
was this problem of the mother-daughter relationship. My mother was certainly
neurotic, and most of my problems were during the war when I was left
alone with her for long periods. I could never understand afterwards when
my father told me, 'We all owe our lives to your mother.' She coped with
the crisis. She got me out of Dachau. She bribed the right people. She
got exit visas, blah, blah, blah. Went to embassies and all the rest of
the stuff that had to be done at that time. Because she just seemed to
not be able to cope with six years of war in Britain. My father went into
the army. My brother, whom she found hard to handle, was sent to a boarding
school and I became the whipping boy for everything that was wrong with
the world.
I had a very miserable relationship with her. On the one hand I felt
I had to take care of her, because that's what my father told me to do.
On the other hand, I really wanted to escape from her the whole time.
It was what would now be called an abusive relationship. But the sad thing
is that it lasted all our life. When my father came home, there was normality
on the surface. But when he died, all the old resentments that were in
her against me all burst to the surface again. The crockery would be flying,
and she wouldn't see me for years on end. That's been for me very sad,
and I'm sure for her too. I suspect that, in fact, her keeping me at a
distance was her own guilt, because my father, after the war, told me
that he felt very guilty at having left me alone with her, and I'm sure
that he told her that on occasions when her treatment of me was not good.
Eva Hoffman: But in your book you transform this into some very
sensitive analysis about fairy tales and the relationships with mothers
in these fairy tales, so that it assumes a much larger scope.
Eva Figes: Well I felt in this particular narrative it had a limited
place, the relationship with my mother. I didn't want to start writing
yet another book about an abused childhood. This was not what this book
was about. But I think that there are things in it that come through.
Whether you like it or not, the fact that she sent me to the cinema to
see the Belsen film on my own at the age of 13, you know, people have
been shocked by that. And it was not the only thing she did. Somehow everything
was my fault.
Ruth Kluger: But my mother sent me at the age of seven to see
Disney's Snow White, and I wasn't supposed to be in the movie house as
a Jewish child, and I was recognised and I was shooed out and I had a
terrible experience. It was my first confrontation with the Nazis, being
thrown out of a movie house. My comment on this, thinking back on it,
is that this is really what Snow White is about. Snow White is about who
belongs in the king's palace and who doesn't, and both of us, the nineteen
year old who shooed me out and I, were at home in Vienna. We were both
natives, but at this point she had the upper hand, and I had to go out
into the wilderness and face it. So there again, the fairy tale context
which is so meaningful.
Eva Hoffman: But I wonder if part of the problem after the war
was the inassimilable nature of this trauma and the fact that your mother
couldn't talk about it. You say she made an art of not knowing. I don't
know whether you and your mother were ever able to talk about these experiences
and come to some sort of shared interpretation, but I wonder if this unassimilated
trauma redounded in your relationship?
Ruth Kluger: Well actually it is an interesting question, because
I wouldn't have wanted to talk to her about it. It was too intimate. I
didn't want to have any more intimacies with my mother than there were
in any case in the relationship. My tendency after the war was to pull
away from her as much as I could, and so that would be one reason why
I never, or hardly ever, talked to her about it. But when she did talk
about it, she mixed things up. She had a very mixed memory of these things.
She didn't really remember accurately.
Eva Hoffman: Of course both your stories and the stories of your
mothers - in your case, Eva, of your parents - are stories not only of
the Holocaust, but of emigration. In that sense, I wonder how much of
a part that played in their psychic trajectories and yours? I mean, it
sometimes seems to me that emigration which was so much a part of survivors'
experiences, is an underestimated part of that narrative, that of course
emigration was chosen, and it was something that people wanted. It was
not at all comparable to what had gone on before, and yet it was an experience
of new displacement and disorientation and isolation in a way.
I was very struck, if I may just continue for a moment, I mean I was
incredibly struck by your resilience as you were going through the experiences
of the Holocaust. Primo Levi and others talk about how the quintessential
injury of being in a concentration camp was the stripping away of your
identity. You seem to come 'un-nicked' in your sense of self. In a sense,
the first time you talk about a kind of danger of disintegration is when
you go to America and have an encounter with (it must be said) an exceptionally
insensitive psychiatrist. I wonder if you could say something about that.
Ruth Kluger: About identity? Well of course I admire Primo Levi,
or envy Primo Levi. I always have envied him for a great while for writing
the basic book on Auschwitz. I always envied him for the fact that he
had a firm identity, that he was an Italian with a home to return to.
For one year he was in this seething cauldron of an extermination camp,
and he returned, and was a rational, emancipated Jew of Italy again, which
I think enabled him to write this first book, Survival in Auschwitz. But
people like me still had to form their identity. I cannot really imagine
what I would have been like without this. My memory sort of snaps in two
with the invasion of Austria by the Germans. My identity is forged by
these happenings, by these seven years (I figure it was seven years) from
1938, which is when Hitler's army came into Austria, to 1945 which is
the end of the war.
Yes, emigration is I think underestimated. Did you say it was voluntary?
But of course, it wasn't voluntary for Eva's family. They had to go. It
was more voluntary for me because after the war I could have stayed in
Europe if I'd wanted to, or if my mother had wanted to. I actually wanted
to immigrate to Palestine, but my mother said, 'Enough of the camps'.
The British didn't let you in at the time, so you would have had to spend
more time probably in Cyprus in an internment camp. In any case, we came
to America, and that was culture shock and it was puberty and it was a
new language and it was many things that were life-threatening in a sense.
It was the first time that I became so depressed, that I was thinking
of suicide.
Eva Hoffman: Can you describe not only the silence within your
family, but in a sense the silence within the wider culture, a kind of
lack of ground.
Eva Figes: Yes. I mean I find that my children, and presumably
their generation, when I say that these things were never talked about
for twenty years, there is total disbelief. Because now it is almost a
kind of some sort of obsession with the Holocaust and a sort of key event
in the 20th century. Yet, we didn't talk about it in the family, and what
I wanted to know from my mother was where my grandparents had ended up.
You either didn't dare mention it, or she would tell you some sort of
fantasy which clearly wasn't true. I have found now that this is a very
common way of dealing with it. In other words, it's a sort of Pandora's
Box that you don't want to open. Then, after she died and I realised that
if anyone was going to do it, I had to do it, and what's more I felt I
had a duty to do it. I found it unbelievably difficult. I kept postponing
it. When I finally did it, when I was going to begin this book and I went
to Berlin, it took me five minutes to find their names and where they'd
-
Eva Hoffman: Really?
Eva Figes: Five minutes! There's a huge memorial book and you
go to the Jewish Community Centre, and it's lying on the desk because
they get a lot of visitors. But to bring myself to the point of doing
it was terribly difficult, and I'd been told I could ring the Wiener Library.
I remember once picking up the telephone and starting to dial the number
and replacing the receiver because I simply wasn't ready to do it. But
there comes a moment when you have to do it. So there are these things
to deal with. But the thing is, obviously it is not a voluntary emigration.
You know, most emigrants go because they want a better lifestyle. In our
case it was undoubtedly a worse lifestyle. And I was very puzzled as a
small child, you know, suddenly going to England. And what is England
like? 'Well, it's rather dirty and foggy and it rains all the time and
we're going to be very poor.' So, you know, you think: Well, why are we
going there? [Chuckles] We're here, we're rich, and so on. So it was sort
of very bewildering. Then of course I found myself very isolated at school.
I didn't know I was Jewish even at that stage. I mean I got told that
by another child several years later, and I was completely bewildered
because we had no religion whatsoever at home. But when I did get slagged
off, it was not because of being Jewish, it was because I was German and
we were at war with Germany! So there was a sort of 'no win' situation.
So it was a very bewildering and very lonely time for a long time, not
made easier by the fact that the relationship with our mother got worse
and worse as the war went on.
Eva Hoffman: Of course I think the silence prevailed almost everywhere,
undoubtedly in America as well for quite a while.
Ruth Kluger: But it is useful to remember that the 20th century
was the century of refugees, that all over the world people have these
experiences. Millions of people don't live where they started out.
Eva Hoffman: Yes. I want to shift gear slightly and ask you both
about your relationship to Germany. In a way, this is a kind of imaginative
return to your time in Germany. You, Ruth, have been in Germany quite
a bit. You have taught there. Your book has been very acclaimed. I wonder
if you can talk about your relationship to Germany and the responses to
the book as well?
Ruth Kluger: Well, I have a lot of friends in Germany now, people
who are either my age or younger. With older ones I am always suspicious.
But my resentment against Germany, I guess, is as strong as it ever was
and it's not going to go away. My friendships with Germans, or my appreciation
of what is right in modern Germany, sort of run on parallel rails with
the old resentment. I think the human mind works that way. You can have
what would seem to be contradictory attitudes which simply do not overlap.
They are both there and flourish and have their own lives.
Eva Hoffman: Yes. And I do think that the great power of your
book lies partly in its acknowledgement of the contradictions and of the
contradictory attitudes.
Ruth Kluger: I wrote the book for Germans, actually, for these
friends I'd made in Germany when I was there as a director of a group
of Californian exchange students, and I didn't expect it to become particularly
popular. But it seemed to many people to give them access to this experience,
that they could get beyond what I like to call the 'barbed wire curtain'
of the camps, where everything on the other side is really incomprehensible.
At the same time, the book has been criticised for being too conciliatory.
That is a criticism that hits me very hard. I don't like to hear this.
But there it is. This is supposed to be one of the reasons for its popularity.
If so, then it is based on a misunderstanding. I don't think this book
is conciliatory.
Eva Hoffman: No. Although you talk about, among other things,
the great draw of language and you have a wonderful formulation which
is that German is a 'Jewish' language! I like this formulation very much.
Ruth Kluger: Well of course you know that my language isn't Hitler's
language. I speak it much better than the Nazis did!
Eva Figes: Not difficult! I think actually a bond which can never
go away is the language because even, you know, now I could only write
books in English. Nevertheless, German is my mother tongue and it resonates
in a way for you, particularly in any relation to childhood and domesticity,
for instance. It will always evoke a chord. I find that my relationship
has changed over the years. At first there was a sort of love-hate thing.
To me Germany is just Berlin, which is anyway different from the rest
of Germany, and I like Berlin and I think Berlin is different and is not
so anti-semitic as many other parts, including Vienna, and has a lot going
for it. For a very long time I had this too, what you talk about as being
suspicious and wary of older people. Now I realise the older people are
us!
Ruth Kluger: Ah, no, I mean the ones who are still older. The
ones who could have taken part. I mean we are just barely over 70.
Eva Figes: But, I mean they are either dead or in an old age home
and gone gaga because..
Ruth Kluger: I don't go there to visit them.
Eva Figes: I mean I realised that sort of fairly recently, this
edging away from a woman with grey hair. Then suddenly I realised: Well
I don't have grey hair, but I bet she's my age! I went back to Berlin
for the first time about five years ago, just before Christmas, and I
went with my son, his wife and their two children and I thought it was
a fantastic place. I thought the atmosphere was great. I thought that
if I had another life to live I would be very happy to live here.
I have to say that politically when I saw Joske Fischer yelling at Donald
Rumsfeld and giving him a lecture in democracy, I was cheering! So I do
feel differently now. I also feel it is time, and I have been doing this
myself, it is time to stop stereotyping 'the Germans', as though they
are all the same, and to take a longer look about how these things came
about. People are always warning 'Never again' and so on and they lecture
about gas chambers. But what they don't do is that they don't look at
the history up to the Third Reich and what was going on before. And unless
you understand that you really don't understand anything, and Germany
is not the country it was in the thirties. And there were reasons for
those things happening, and I think that is what we have to do. I have
always felt that this could happen anywhere, given the right situation.
Ruth Kluger: I'd like to add a word to this. I think you are completely
correct, and one might remember that throughout the early 20th century,
antisemitism was rife everywhere. There was an enormous amount of it
everywhere. So the question is not really: Why were the Germans so anti-semitic?
But why did antisemitism reach that level in Germany? That switches the
question from a racist one to perhaps a political or historical one.
Eva Hoffman: In a sense that perhaps almost responds to the question
which is going to be my last question. I ask it with some anxiety because
you, I think so rightly and so admirably, insist on the truth lying in
specifics and in concreteness of experience. But it is an extension of
what we were just talking about, and it is the question: In a sense, what
are we to make of this history now? How are we to think about it? Is there
anything to say about this?
Ruth Kluger: Eva, you first! That's too difficult for me!
Eva Figes: That's a tough one. I think the reason it is so central
to our thinking about the 20th century is that it shows that so-called
civilisation is very thin. I remember immediately after the war that people
would say: How could these things happen in a country that gave birth
to Beethoven? It was always Beethoven, because he was the most popular
composer during the war, oddly enough, in Britain, for all sorts of reasons.
The tendency to think that these things can happen in Africa, but that
we are civilised and we don't do this sort of thing, is the lesson that
has to be learned from it, and it is a lesson. Obviously it is a question
of degree, but that we have to bear in mind now whether it's going on
in Cuba with what the Americans are doing with people who have never been
put on trial, or whatever! Nobody is immune from mistreating other human
beings.
Ruth Kluger: Well I think that the 'thinness' of civilisation
- I guess that's what haunts me too. The terrible thing is that it is
a question of freedom. We like to think that if our kids are brought up
in a rich cultural background, with strong moral principles or, if you
wish, religious, whether Christian or Jewish background, they won't do
certain things. But human beings can choose and you don't know how they
are going to choose. It's precisely this much-vaunted freedom that none
of us want to give up that must make us aware that we cannot tell what
they are going to do.
I would like to put my hand into the fire for the fact that my two sons
would never be part of any atrocity. Really, I deeply believe this. How
could I live if I didn't? But I cannot really with certainty say it, because
what if they choose to? They are free. It's depressing.
Eva Hoffman: All right then. We will open up the floor for questions
from you.
Question 1 [Female]: I would like to ask Ruth Kluger in particular: she
makes no mention at all of her father, or if she had any siblings. And
was her mother odd or paranoid, as she said, before the advent of Hitler,
or was this caused perhaps by the camp life?
Ruth Kluger: I'll take the last part first. I don't know, you
know. That's a question I've often asked myself: What was she like? What
caused this? And I suspect that she was unstable before. But I simply
don't know. She had a very poor relationship with her own mother, I know
this much. Maybe this disaffected her as well. She was also a very generous
person in some ways.
Now my father, yes, he does play a role in the book. We didn't go into
this because we had to limit it. I saw him last when I was eight. He had
to leave Vienna within 48 hours. The thing was, you know, that a lot of
men left their children and wives behind because there was a very strong
conviction all over the place, not just in my family, that nothing would
happen to children and women. Why would they do anything to children and
women? Somehow there was a peculiar idea that the laws of chivalry would
prevail. It seems absurd to me now. But that was part of the machismo
of that period. You know, Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, says
somewhere that Jewish women have to be particularly nice to their husbands
because their husbands are exposed to antisemitism! The wives weren't.
So the last thing I want is to blame my father for getting out at that
time. He had to. And he ended up in France, and he was deported from Drancy,
and died that way. I had a half-brother who was a brother to me, six years
older. I admired him. I loved him. I looked up to him. I adored him. I
just mentioned before my depression in New York, when I was there first.
Part of the reason was that I was then the age at which my brother died.
He was killed in Riga. He was shot when he was 17, and in some way, that
confused teenage way, I thought that I had a life that he should have
had. That haunted me. In fact he has continued to haunt me until quite
recently. He is very much with me. He is one of my ghosts. But I don't
really know what he was like, because I lost him so early. He was just
'big brother'. A wonderful big brother.
Inaudible question concerning the speakers' relationships with their
own children.
Eva Figes: It's very hard to answer. Obviously I've brought up
my own children not as refugees, and not through six years of air raids,
rationing, separations and all the rest of it. I mean we have had other
difficulties, like being a single parent. But that is nothing in comparison.
One of the things that gives me satisfaction is this sense of my children
growing up in a country where they are safe and secure and feel at home,
and now another generation coming up.
Ruth Kluger: That is exactly what I would say. Absolutely the
same. You talk in your book about your grandchild and I, at the end of
my book, I talk about mine. But that doesn't mean that everything is hunky-dory.
I mean you really have to ask the kids how they feel about their mother!
Their answer might be very different!
Eva Hoffman: It seems to me that there is a wonderful reparative
urge in both your books: in your book, Eva, through the initiation of
your grandchild into knowledge, both of innocence and experience in a
gentler way. And in your book, Ruth, really through the writing itself.
Eva Figes: Can I just add one thing actually, because that meant
a lot to me. I met somebody who'd been in Auschwitz and Belsen, who said
to me at a lunch that her grandson had said to her: 'You know, if you
hadn't lived, none of us would be here.' And my grand-daughter said exactly
the same thing, and that is the best of all!
Eva Hoffman: Thank you very much. Thank you both very much for
your rich reflections.
