On the Awful German Fairy Tale: Breaking Taboos in Representations of Nazi Euthanasia and the Holocaust in Gunter Grass's 'Die Blechtrommel', Edgar Hilsenrath's 'Der Nazi & der Friseur', and Anselm Kiefer's Visual Art

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USACCII text omitted) Among those representations of the Holocaust in literature, painting, cartoon, and film that share the characteristic of mixing the sublime with the profane and hence opposing Theodor Adorno's famous statement that writing a poem after Auschwitz would be barbaric, there is in Germany a group of texts and films in which Nazi atrocities are represented within the context of German mythology and the German fairy-tale tradition. The fictionalization of such a largely unrepresentable historical event as the Holocaust and its aftermath is, of course, problematic. If writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, what is writing fairy tales after 1945, particularly fairy tales in the context of the Third Reich and the Holocaust? In her recent book The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust Ernestine Schlant argues that West German literature has largely remained silent about the topic of the Holocaust.1 The silence about the Holocaust that may pervade the works Schlant analyzes is, however, shattered in quite a few other works of art in Germany, not only in textual representations of Nazi atrocities that make use of the fairy tale, but also in the work of artists and filmmakers such as Anselm Kiefer and Hans-- Jurgen Syberberg, the two enfants terribles "of an otherwise reputable culture", as Andreas Huyssen has pointed out.2 Although Schlant briefly discusses GUnter Grass's Die Blechtrommel, she ignores the fact that a close reading reveals it to be a text in which there is definitely no silence about Nazi atrocities (69-71). Although it is true that the persecution of Jews and their elimination in concentration camps is not a central theme in this novel, it is in its entirety a text about the persecution of another minority group that the Nazis considered artfremd, the physically and mentally handicapped, exemplified by the dwarf Oskar Matzerath. I want to explore the use of fairy tales in Die Blechtrommel and Edgar Hilsenrath's Der Nazi and der Friseur in the context of the Nazis' ethnic cleansing. Questions this essay attempts to answer are: what makes Hilsenrath's use of fairy-tale material more provocative than Grass's, so that German publishers rejected the manuscript until 1977, six years after its original appearance in the US; and what links Hilsenrath's and Grass's texts to some of the satiric paintings and photographs of Anselm Kiefer? The fairy tale in Germany in the 20th century is an ideal genre for showing how history determines the uses and abuses of fiction and how then this very fiction can be used in different ways to represent history. The tales of the Brothers Grimm had become politicized during the years of the Weimar Republic as progressive writers and conservatives fought over their legacy.3 For the Nazis the fairy tales became the prime vehicle in supporting their Aryan policies. As a consequence, the entire field of Volkskunde became ideologically polluted far into postwar Germany. Following this abuse of folklore in support of the Nazis' racist and imperialist ideology, in 1945 the Allied Forces briefly banned the publication of the Grimm tales in Germany because they associated the horrors expressed in many a fairy tale with violence in the death camps.4 Such postwar authors as Arno Schmidt, Gunter Grass, Edgar Hilsenrath, Rolf Hochhuth, most recently Ingo Schramm, and filmmakers like Alexander Muge, Volker Schlondorff, and Helena Sanders-Brahms have all re-claimed the German fairy-tale tradition for their works in order to exploit the artistic potential of the connection between this genre and the Third Reich. In tales like Hansel and Gretel, Daurerlings Wanderschaft, Vom Fischer and seiner Fru, and Frau Holle they see ways of speaking the unspeakable. It seems that through two of its attributes, its violence and its unreality, the fairy tale lends itself to a representation of just that-extreme political violence and the victims' loss of reality. …