4 - Documenting Absence in Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder and Katja Behrens's “Arthur Mayer, or The Silence”

Summary

I have also suggested that there is such a thing as memory-envy. It shows itself in writers who seek to recover an image of their community's past — a past deliberately destroyed by others or which was not allowed to form itself into a heritage. Memory-envy also touches a generation that feels belated: the “generation after” which did not participate directly in a great event that determined their parents' and perhaps grandparents' lives.

— Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust

Detective Stories

In Katja Behrens's 1993 short story, “Arthur Mayer oder das Schweigen” (“Arthur Mayer, or The Silence,” 2002), the autobiographical narrator becomes aware of a neglected stone monument that commemorates Arthur Mayer, a Jewish doctor whose family, prior to the Holocaust, had lived in her small German town for over 200 years. The text of the monument reads: “In memory of Dr. Arthur Mayer. Born 20 January 1888, died at Auschwitz. We remember him in place of all those who lost their lives for political, racial, or religious reasons. The Citizens of Town S” (Behrens, “The Silence,” 34). The narrator is intrigued by the monument, which she had never before noticed, and its memorialization of the town's former doctor, which, although it lists his death as occurring in Auschwitz, characterizes him as the sole representative of a mass of people who died (or, as the German original phrases it, “had to leave their lives”) for unclear reasons in vague circumstances in an unnamed event.