Chapter Three - Specters

Summary

Chapter Three applies spectral theory to the study of literature on veterans and survivors of absolute war. I claim that veterans are haunted by memories of the horror they have seen or performed, while at the same time they constitute haunting entities for those who surround them back home. In the introductory pages I suggest the deployment of a hauntology of war. Then my attention falls, first, on the return of the specter as treated in Wolfgang Borchert’s Draußen vor der Tür (1947) and Heinrich Böll’s Der Engel schwieg (1992), as well as the trauma of prisoners of war and veterans as depicted in novels by Josef Martin Bauer, Henry Green, and Rose Macaulay. The spectrality of bombed-out cities and their inhabitants is my next focus. I concentrate particularly, if not only, on testimonials written by Japanese survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hans Erich Nossack’s Nekyia. Bericht eines Überlebenden (1947), and Hermann Kasack’s Die Stadt hinter dem Strom (1947). This chapter ends with a spectral analysis of the exorcism of the ghosts of war as performed in Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and Walter Kolbenhoff’s Heimkehr in die Fremde (1949).