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REQUIM FOR FANNY GOLDMANN
What is the capacity of womankind for survival of war and love? Where is the line between cruelty and carelessness? Ingeborg Bachmann, through the guise of Fanny Goldmann in her novel Requiem for Fanny Goldmann asks these questions in a spectrum of ways. Her novel and her life have an eerie number of similarities, making this work inextricable from her story. The connection to outsiders, for Ingeborg Bachmann, was very close to her own life and her narrative.
Bachmann was born in the south Austria region of Carinthia in 1926. During her teen years, in 1938, Hitler�s troops arrived in her hometown of Klagenfurt. Bachmann would later write that this event �destroyed her childhood.� After the war, she was dismayed with the events within Europe. Strongly affiliated with Willi Brandt and the German Social Democrats, Bachmann allowed her views to be reflected though she did not fill her writing with political messages.
Obsessed with striving for the harder, deeper literary work, Ingeborg Bachmann later gave up poetry to work with prose. She believed that writers should avoid what comes too easy. This led to her first novel and later the trilogy Todesarten, from which come the unfinished novels of The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. Todesarten literally means Way of Death in German. Bachmann�s central theme of the destruction of the female in a patriarchal society is strongly evident in both of the books.
Tragically, Bachmann�s life ended suddenly, eerily like the stories she was writing. A fire started in her apartment in Rome while she was sleeping, and she suffered severe burns. Three weeks later she died of these complications. An excerpt from Malina raises the question of whether it was a suicide or an accident. �I have to watch out that I don't fall face first onto the hot plate, that I don't disfigure myself, burn myself, then Malina would have to call the police and the ambulance, he would have to confess his carelessness at having let a woman burn halfway to death.� This quote suggests that such ideas had at least occurred to the author. Others suggest that Bachmann fell asleep while smoking and the tragedy occurred then. Literary opinions go both ways.
During the period in which Bachmann lived, war was almost always an issue. Bachmann went through childhood in occupied Austria, emerged from that into the Cold War era, and Vietnam was not yet over when she died. The effects of World War II, capitalist fears of communism, and nuclear secrets filled the world she lived in. In Requiem for Fanny Goldmann this awareness of war never leaves the stage. Everyone has a link to the wars, even Karin, the child of the Nazi regime. Fanny herself worked as a antiaircraft gun helper, and later in a writer�s union passing out red cards so they might have the right to a room. Her past was linked to the past, even to the suicide of her father, felt to be a patriotic death to keep secrets from the enemies. This heroic aspect of war is false, though. Colonel Wischnewski had played a double role in the death of Dollfuss. He died a vain death and a scared death.
Requiem for Fanny Goldmann covers the deepest emotional pain of betrayal of a loved one in intimate detail. The movement through the story of the main character, Fanny Goldmann, follows a very stumbling, though linear progression. Having taken a younger man for a lover, Fanny does not have any plans for their future together. She loves him and helps him, and is in most ways a mentor. However, when her lover Toni Marek gains his own fame he sees her as a threat, and removes himself to another woman. His cruelty or carelessness finds a niche in Fanny that cannot accept that the man she loved would do this to her. In her attempts to rediscover the man she felt she knew, she only learns more pain and humiliation.
Fanny becomes a pariah in her desire to be loved by Toni. She sinks into a state of depression and alcoholism gradually. Her friends and acquaintances feel that she should be �moving on� with her life instead of waiting for Toni to return to her. This patriarchal setting removes Fanny from the good graces of nearly everyone. She has violated the law which allows a man to leave a woman without explanation, no matter how generous and good she was to him. She seems to want an explanation or apology, in the beginning. Later, she becomes so confused by her fervent feelings she is unable to understand or accept any aspect of the affair.
Fanny is in the beginning described as a woman that all would believe would have a right to heaven. She again becomes a famous person after her death. But in between these times, Fanny is obsessed with Toni Marek. During the scenes following Toni�s departure, the thoughts brought most often before the reader are thoughts of Toni�s commercialization of Fanny�s life. Her thoughts and memories are laid bare though the filter of Toni by means of his novel. At times, it is hard to determine how Bachmann intends the reader to interpret the digressions about money, for it is certain that Fanny spent money on Toni in the literal sense. Yet she also gave him the subject matter and connections for his novel. In both meanings, Fanny has funded Toni�s apartment and dinners that she so often mentions. Images of the money filter through in nearly every scene. Through the literal mention of money, Bachmann also wants the reader to understand Fanny�s emotional investment.
The moment Fanny passes through more than two or three days of confused mourning, she becomes an outsider. She ceases to be seen as a sympathetic character with her peers, but was instead labeled as morose, teary and frantic. These terms would easily describe any mourning person, but Fanny is not allowed to maintain them after her first stage of grief. She is expected to move on. The following passage describes the behavior of Fanny�s friends:
�Three or four of their old friends now saw Marek, whom earlier they had known only in passing or had known only through her, but who now stopped calling her altogether. The others at least stayed in touch at the beginning, felt sorry for her, understood, didn�t understand, said it simply was meant to be, the usual, what a sham, etc. Fanny, however, was stubborn, for she demanded generally, since in fact there was little she could demand, that these old friends stand by her, and that they would still see her and let her know how sad they were about all that happened. But no such thing happened. These old friends, who perhaps had never been friends at all, but whom Fanny had though were friends out of the desperate need for love, they were not against Fanny, but rather against the absent and sad Fanny so unlike the Fanny they once knew.� (Bachmann, 196)
Though Toni, called Marek in this passage, is clearly in the wrong, he is forgiven because he moves on. Fanny�s obsession with their relationship is considered wrong and covers up the cause of the obsession, omitting Toni nearly entirely from the guilt. Also ignored is Fanny�s previous relationship that she recovered from exceedingly gracefully. This crime of love committed against Fanny is completely ignored in Toni�s case, and Fanny is punished for wishing to understand her anger, frustration, and pain. Just before Fanny�s death, she wishes for Toni to murder her, so that the world could see in reality what had happened much earlier.
Bachmann�s commentary on the social structure that isolates and damages women is profound. Fanny�s life is investigated through many lenses and gives a very powerful case against the �moving on� clich�. However, Bachmann does not push Fanny onto the reader as a martyr. Fanny�s obsession and wasting away do not achieve a purpose. In the end, Toni still does not appear to hold much grief or guilt about the affair. Her friends attend her funeral and say decent things about her, but she is not around to hear them. And still, no one acknowledges Fanny�s statement of anger and frustration. Bachmann notes this, and does not make Fanny�s life an ideal. This author seems to say that Fanny took herself too seriously in dying for a self-pitying dead love affair.
This does not nullify the strength of Fanny�s story. Fanny exemplified the male view of an ideal woman. She was kind, she didn�t make her man uncomfortable, she even let him stay at least one night after he told her he was going to marry a girl he�d been cheating on her with. Fanny is almost unreal in her openhearted acceptance and love of Toni, and before him, Harry Goldmann. She even needs him, relies on him. Her only apparently unsupported jealousy occurred during her marriage to Goldmann, in the form of Maria Malina.
Fanny is viewed in a very favorable light following her divorce from Goldmann. People are delighted with the attitudes of Fanny and Goldmann, as they announce their divorce among friends at a dinner party. The following passage expresses the feelings of delight everyone felt as the couple easily, even happily, tell their news.
�A cabaret performer returned to the subject at hand and said that he thought it was the most marvelous Viennese divorce he�d seen in a long time, a superb example for an old, cultured city, something that could only happen in Vienna, and that Harry had to agree that it had been worth the return to his birthplace, for he had married the most beautiful woman in Vienna and happily divorced her and again envied her, the performer�s voice hitting each note with great skill as he sang �When It�s All Over.� Meanwhile, Fanny continued to beam until she sat with Goldmann in the car and he slowly tired to insert the key, missed, then tried again. Don�t ever leave me, said Fanny quietly.� (Bachmann, 165)
Fanny recovered from her marriage to Goldmann. But as the last sentence in the above sentence expresses, Fanny had much the same risk of losing herself with Goldmann as she did with Toni. However, the manner in which her lover conducted himself made the difference and allowed her to truly continue her life. Goldmann�s understanding of her was not hampered by the patriarchal view that she should let go and move on in her life. Despite the fact that he had cheated on her, like Toni later would, he helped her move through her emotions and gradually eased away from her so that she could continue her life. He did not cease to be a part of her life, though he moved away. She maintained his name even before they were married, as stated, �Goldmann was the only man who had been good to her. Because of that, before she was even married to him, she had used his name for her debut performance�� (Bachmann, 215)
Bachmann believed in everyday fascism, or that it began with ordinary acts of hate. "Since long have I pondered the question of where fascism has its origin. It is not born with the first bombs, neither through the terror one can describe in every newspaper ... its origin lies in the relations between a man and a woman, and I have tried to say ... in this society there is war permanently," Bachmann said. Her idea of a society at war with itself is fascinating. Her study of it within Requiem for Fanny Goldmann, as discussed in the case of Toni�s hatred for Fanny, gives the book an even deeper meaning. Fanny�s discussion of her desire for Toni to kill her is her acknowledgment of this war between them. She is a casualty. Having become an outsider, dead to her community, Fanny is unable to reenter. It is truly her perception of this that removes her even further. Through Fanny�s own narrative, Karin is also an outsider. Her Nazi family history and Nazi name are viewed as bad taste. Her marriage to Toni gives her a veneer of respectability, but even Toni in the end treats her poorly, uses her. Still, she does not realize she is an outsider, at least in Vienna. Part of Fanny�s dislike of the German girl and her name may be her childhood in which her father committed suicide the night before Nazi�s took over Austria. This is a dramatization of reasons of why Bachmann does not take to Germany in her own life.
Bachmann used some of her own experiences in the structure of this story. In her life, there were two significant lovers. The first, who can be compared to Goldmann was a man by the name of Paul Celan. Like Goldmann, he had Jewish roots. His parents had died in a Romanian concentration camp, and Paul felt guilt over their deaths. Her second major love affair was with a man named Max Frisch. Very much as Toni used Fanny�s life and memories for his book, Max Frisch used Bachmann�s letters to him as a source in his book. Bachmann well understood Fanny�s situation of betrayed trust.
The fascism of the family and the fascism of lovers inhabits Bachmann�s thoughts and work. Through her search to understand the wars within, she found that society is not ready to accept women as equals, though they are held as such in laws today. The man grieving for his lost girlfriend will not endure the same depth of criticism as a woman who does not let go of her errant boyfriend. The world makes more space for error for the male population, and Bachmann and Fanny recognize this fact. The everyday fascism as seen through the eyes of Ingeborg Bachmann gives this story an eerie view of the world but it is very important to understand in the context of women and the way in which the world accepts them.
THE NAZI DEHUMANIZATION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLES
The row of Holocaust books in the library is actually quite small. But as I faced it and was trying to make my selection on what topic I would pick for my final paper, I was overwhelmed by the choice in front of me. More than any other topic in recent history, I was blithely shuffling through books that contained answers in them, testimonies written by people horribly wronged, accounts of gruesome acts. Who was I to make the decision of what to read and not read? The few shelves in Haggard 3 suddenly seemed necessary to read, to take in. To understand all of these books in order to fully comprehend, or more fully comprehend, the history and actions in the Holocaust as well as their affects on their victims�. I felt like I had met a woman in the grocery store; several women in fact, who needed to tell me about their recent loss of a loved one. I felt rude for turning aside one book in favor of the other, as if all of them should be understood and accepted. It was a personal feeling, one I could not pass off easily. These books need to be read, to be understood in context of history and personal lives. This could be referred to as a re-humanization.
On September 11, 2001 four planes were hijacked. Three of those planes were flown into buildings. Thousands of people died, people who lived average lives. Their deaths were caused by people who felt that Americans, as a whole, commit crimes against the state of Islam through national policies. This assumption is not correct, but because the perpetrators believed it, United States citizens died September 11th.
Most Americans reacted to the deaths of civilians in the World Trade Center. People responded with outrage and horror. Families across the nation donated hundred of millions of dollars to the Red Cross to aid the families of those who died. It was a national tragedy. It would be reasonable to assume most Americans felt some anger and sadness.
I am using this example to draw a fragile connection, of anger and frustration over a situation that has occurred without concessions from the victim population, between September 11th and the Holocaust. September 11th was tiny in comparison, but it is still fresh, and nearly everyone alive in the U.S. will remember that particular date throughout their lives. To begin studying the Holocaust, it might be useful to think of September 11th, but with a magnitude that boggles the mind, of millions of Jewish people killed.
To the average person alive in the United States today, the scope of the Holocaust seems beyond reach. The travesty that rocked Europe killed millions. Jews were killed simply because of their race. Gypsies and the mentally ill were targeted, as well as other people who were not felt to be fit to be part of the �master race.� People were imprisoned, tortured, and exterminated. The range of this murder is hard to imagine. Films of mass graves are but black and white, yet worse than any horror film. Human life was desecrated by people who felt they had the right to decide who was more fit to exist than the next person.
This paper will seek to fully realize the depths of the indignities and dehumanization perpetrated on the Jews by the Nazis.
The Abyss, a testimony by Elie A. Cohen, begins the story of the perpetration. Elie Cohen, before the war, was a general medicine practitioner in Aduard, the Netherlands. Dr. Cohen had grown up Groningen, which was near to Aduard. His father was a waiter in a caf�, and through his father at this caf�, was able to transfer from a secondary school to a high school. This change led his life toward medicine. By 1941, he had married and he and his wife had had a small boy.
It is easier to picture the individual. Dr. Cohen may have been a large man or a small one. That isn�t the point. He could represent anyone at all in anyone�s life, the image of the doctor with the round glasses and pretty young wife. At any rate, he was also Jewish, and at that time period, that fact was sufficient to rob him of his practice and his home. Later, it would steal his wife and son as well.
No, not because Elie Cohen was Jewish. That was not why he lost everything, why the closing chapter of his book are so filled with anguish. Being Jewish is not equivalent to suffering. His suffering was caused by an incredible bigotry that was monstrously out of control, on the part of the Nazi regime.
Throughout the more recent civilizations of European history, Jews have been persecuted for a number of reasons. Most likely the persecution began when Jews entered Europe in the role of traders. With the freedom of movement not associated with feudal Europe, Jews were able to bridge the gap between East and West, bringing valuable spices, silks, and other treasures into Europe. Their money was a ready target for jealousy. Later Jews would settle, some using the wealth of trading to set up money lending businesses. In the late Middle Ages, in a time of ever poorer noblemen, the nobles stirred mobs to raze the Jewish people and homes for money. By this time, Jews were starting to be seen as the enemy of Christianity, the killers of Christ.
This set the stage, a stage of latent anti-Semitism, brought to fruition by the heavy-featured man the world came to know as Adolf Hitler.
And so came the time of concentration camps, of ghettos and cattle cars filled with people for transportation. Doctor Cohen writes, upon his arrival to Amersfoort, �It was then that I began to look to my own protection. I called that �depersonalization.� You looked on, as though through a peephole, taking no part in things yourself. You watched. It didn�t concern you� (Cohen, 46). The �depersonalization,� as Cohen describes it, functions to keep a survival instinct alive. So long as Cohen did not become emotionally aware of the human travesties around him, he was able distance himself and to persist in his daily survival routine.
�The Germans had a cunning system,� Cohen continues (61). �and the more I have read about it, the clearer it has become to me that it was a system. They employed it everywhere they had power, in the ghettos, in Poland, in Amsterdam, everywhere. They would say to a few people, �No, you don�t have to go on a transport, you�ll get a suspension [a Sperr was their word for it] but, of course, the other do have to go on a transport, and you�ll have to help with that.� So that�s what I did. I don�t want to say anything at all about other people, for I haven�t the right to. But I myself collaborated.�
Cohen, in this excerpt, describes a system by which Germans were able to pass some burden of guilt onto Jewish prisoners. Cohen, as a doctor, was asked to examine people to determine who was sick enough to remain at Westerbork, and who would have to continue on to Auschwitz. A similar situation is described in Joshua Sobol�s drama, Ghetto. Jews are given positions in which they can help some of their own people, but possibly only by making things worse for others. They became, to themselves, accomplices to the acts of murder. Through the Nazi program, which did seem to promote this kind of guilt, a great many people who survived would later commit suicide. The Nazis attempted to take away the vestige of human image.
The dehumanization of Jewish people appears most dramatically in the records of the perpetrators themselves. �The Good Old Days�, edited by Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess is a collection of records and statements made by Holocaust perpetrators and bystanders. The title itself, a heading on private photo album, conceals the deaths of so many Jewish people.
Words were a powerful way for the Nazis to distance themselves from the �actions� of shooting and gassing. Technical language also allowed Nazis to mask what was really going on. Eastern Territories Commander Johannes Blaskowitz (Klee, Dressen, and Riess, 5) follows this trend, noting reasons to change methods of slaughter to something more �effective,� and less noticeable.
�(a) It is hard to imagine there can be more effective material in the entire world than that which is being delivered into the hands of enemy propaganda�. particularly since the atrocities did indeed take place and cannot be disproved in any way.
(b) The acts of violence carried out in public against Jews are arousing in religious Poles not only the deepest disgust but also a great sense of pity for the Jewish population, while formerly the Poles� attitude towards the Jews was fairly hostile.
(c) The effects on the role of the Wehrmacht need hardly be mentioned�. It has irreparably lost a considerable amount of respect especially among the Polish population.
(d) The worst damage, however, is affecting Germans, which has developed as a result of the current circumstances, is the tremendous brutalization and moral depravity which is spreading rapidly among precious German manpower like an epidemic.�
A dog pictured on page 248, was set on Jewish prisoners with the words �Man, grab the dog!� To the Nazis who wrote these things, the Jews were not even to the level of criminals or murderers. Though Blaskowitz notes the murdering of Jews as �atrocities,� he doesn�t seem to really connect that to his commentary. He is more concerned about giving the enemy effective propaganda, maintaining antipathy between Jews and Poles, keeping the Wehrmacht�s status up, and sustaining the psychology of German soldiers in a healthy state. The deaths of Jews are not in themselves interesting; the primary interest is how those deaths are negatively influencing the German state.
In lists of Jews executed in Lithuania, there is a strong similarity to a grocery list. �1.9.41 Mariampole 1,763 Jews, 1,812 Jewesses, 1,404 Jewish children, 109 mentally sick, 1 German subject (f.) married to a Jew, 1 Russian (f.)� Some notations are followed with comments such as �mopping up ghetto of superfluous Jews.� Such comments are so offhand that it is hard not to see the Reich Nazis as completely inhuman themselves.
Unfortunately, to see the whole picture, the Nazis were not inhuman. To the people they persecuted, they may have been neighbors. In earlier generations, they may have even been in-laws. They wore similar faces as Elie Cohen. They loved and lost and were homesick. Yet they hated and killed non-Aryan people, mainly Jews. Journal entries grotesquely document this seeming contradiction. Felix Landau, a Nazi soldier, writes in his diary: �There were hundreds of Jews walking along the street with blood pouring down their faces, holes in their heads, their hands broken and their eyes hanging out of their sockets. They were covered in blood. Some of them were carrying others who had collapsed. We went to the citadel; there we saw things that few people have ever seen. At the entrance of the citadel there were soldiers standing guard. They were holding clubs as thick as a man�s wrist and were lashing out and hitting anyone who crossed their path. The Jews were pouring out of the entrance. There were rows of Jews lying one on top of the other like pigs whimpering horribly. The Jews kept streaming out of the citadel completely covered in blood. We stopped and tried to see who was in charge of the Kommando. �Nobody.� Someone had tried to let the Jews go. They were being hit out of rage and hatred.
�Nothing against that�only they should not let the Jews walk about in such a state� Camaraderie is still good for the time being. Crazy, beautiful music is playing on the radio again and my longing for you, the person who has hurt me so much, is growing and growing.� (Klee, Dressen, and Riess, 91)
Landau�s prejudice�. Even after reading everything else, the personal account of a man who sees a line of mortally injured Jews, and thinks only of the public image is horrifying. He thinks little of this, only as in a curiosity, really. He is much more concerned that his little �Trudchen� should join him in Lemberg. Attempting to understand the Nazis as more than a simple faceless evil is much much more difficult. The slaughter of Jews is even less understandable when faced with a real person who committed such heinous acts. These people were not so different, and later many blended back into society easily.
Nazis did blend back into society, were accepted and their crimes allowed to be hidden. Jews, after the Holocaust, had an enormous burden of loss and pain. Jews had had such experiences that it was difficult for the outside world to understand. Also, in post-war Europe, there was a great interest in smoothing things over, which often masqueraded as healing. Jews were not allowed to tell their stories, to purge themselves of the horrible guilt or pain that followed. Furthermore, anti-Semitism did not simply end when the war did.
Recently I chanced upon a religious channel, in which a man was educating two young boys on the failings of the Jews, and how they were punished by God for killing Christ through the Holocaust. This blanket statement covered all of Jewish history from the birth of Christ through present, and seemed very shallow. It was also very disturbing. This religious program was teaching young people that the Holocaust was the natural reaction of God to the Jews killing of Christ. It completely removed blame from the Nazi perpetrators, the German people and the world who stood by. In addition, there are several present movements, called revisionist movements, which attempt to downplay the Holocaust, or deny it entirely. The worst part of these movements is that they attempt to rewrite history in their own version. They reduce the actual suffering of Jews to a minimal amount, denying gas chambers. They have five major denial points. Hitler�s Apologists: The Anti-Semitic Propaganda of Holocaust �Revisionism,� edited by Alan Schwartz lists them as following:
I. The Holocaust did not occur because there is no single document that expressly enumerates a �master plan� for Jewish annihilation.
II. There were no execution gas chambers used for mass murder of concentration camp inmates. Rather, a combination of disease and harsh camp conditions caused the deaths of at most several hundred thousand Jews.
III. Holocaust scholars rely on the testimony of survivors because there is no objective documentation proving the Nazi genocide.
IV. There was no net loss of Jewish lives between 1941 and 1945.
V. The Nuremberg Trials were a �farce of justice� staged for the benefit of the Jews.
The revisionists once again attempt to dehumanize the Holocaust, and so the Jews, by forcing survivors to argue that the Holocaust did happen. Such groups also usually harbor anti-Semitic sentiments. The emergence of organizations with these �intellectual� aims is a puzzling and alarming trend. It indicates that the seed of fascism and anti-Semitism remains popular with some people. The Holocaust signifies the worst possible turn a society can take. Humans were made into mere things to be done away with, quickly and efficiently. Lack of respect for another�s life, comfort, or rights was the result of people who attempted to create a master race. The Holocaust also represents a story of persecuted people who were incredibly strong, resourceful, and intelligent despite all that surrounded them. Through survivors of the Holocaust come stories that bring hope, as well as horror. The Holocaust is an important part of history, one that should not be �revised� but should be revisited.
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