“Even the word ‘und’ has to be re-invented somehow”: Quoting the Language of the Perpetrators in Texts by Anne Duden

Summary

When I listen to Hitler’s or Goebbels’ speeches I am still shocked that I speak the same language, inevitably have to use the same words they use. And I have to re-use them, there aren’t other words. So I have to re-invent them; even the word ‘und’ has to be re-invented somehow.

THIS STATEMENT BY Anne Duden suggests not only the need to be constantly aware of the connections with the language of the National Socialist past but the self-imposed task of re-writing German itself, an endeavor that Duden recognizes as not really possible, and one that places her writing at times on the boundary of incomprehensibility. For Duden, existence is Schreibexistenz, only possible in language, in her German mother tongue, so the ethical questions surrounding how to inhabit the German language in the post-Holocaust world are fundamental to her oeuvre. This essay analyzes the different techniques and approaches she used in texts written in the 1980s and 1990s, from her short story collection Übergang (1982), and the novel Das Judasschaf (1985), to her poetry collection Steinschlag (1993).

Übergang: Using Words with History

Übergang comprises eight short texts that all have in common a crisis or breakdown of the narrating self. For instance, in the first text, “Das Landhaus,” the narrator is isolated in a country house and experiences terror as boundaries collapse. In the central text, also called “Übergang,” the narrator is attacked and her face smashed; the writing interrogates the pain and experiences of the body. It is here that historical connotations are evoked in flashbacks, printed in italics, which represent the narrator’s memories while she is in her hospital bed. In these italicized sections clues as to the nature of and reason for the narrator’s sensitivity and breakdowns occur. There is a mixture of personal anecdotes, which appear to be personal and fragmented memories, and cultural memories in the form of quotations from contemporary films and popular music. One of the techniques that emerges is the use of words that we associate with genocide, but which are not applied to direct representations of specific historical realities:

Ich war gerade dreiunddreißig Jahre alt geworden, als ich mir endlich eingestehen konnte, was ich lange schon geschluckt hatte, nämlich daß es um Ausrottung ging.