remembering the revolt: stephan hermlin's ‘die zeit der gemeinsamkeit’ (1949)

German Life and Letters 492 April 1996 0016-8777

REMEMBERING THE REVOLT: STEPHAN HERMLIN’S ‘DIE ZEIT DER GEMEINSAMKEIT’ (1949)

JONATHAN Ross

In 1949, two years after his move from Frankfurt a. M. to settle in the Soviet Occupation Zone, Stephan Hermlin took advantage of an official invitation from the Polish Military Mission in Berlin, and travelled, for the first time, east of the Oder.’ Whilst in Poland, he visited places whose names have become bywords for the history of suffering under, and resistance to, Nazism. He went to Krakow, and on to Auschwitz, documenting his responses in the poem ‘Die Asche von Birkenau’ and the essay ‘Auschwitz ist unvergessen’.’ Hermlin also spent the early summer in Warsaw, viewing the recently constructed Ghetto Monument3 and the vast landscape of rubble surrounding it, the remnants of the Ghetto decimated by the Germ- ans and their East European henchmen in an attempt to quell the Uprising of Spring 1943. On the basis of his personal impressions and extensive research, including conversations with participants in the revolt, Hermiin was to create two literary memorials to the Uprising: a reportage for the magazine Start, ‘Hier liegen die Ge~etzgeber’,~ and the short story, ‘Die Zeit der Gemeinsamkeit’,’ published in 1949 by East Berlin’s Verlag Volk und Welt.

‘Die Zeit der Gemeinsamkeit’ is, as far as I can ascertain, the only work of German fiction to focus on the events of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.‘ Yet in spite of this literary-historical status it has attracted scant critical

’ I would like to thank Stephan Hermlin for this and other information which he provided during an interview in Berlin on 21 November 1995. * ‘Die Asche von Birkenau’ (1949), first published in part in N m s Dcufschland, 1 September 1949, 3; in full in Stephan Hermlin, D n Flug &r Taubc, Berlin 1952; ‘Auschwitz ist unvergessen’ (1949), first published in Stephan Hermlin, Dit Sack &s Fticdcnr, Berlin 1953.

The Warsaw Ghetto Monument, designed by the Warsaw-born Jewish sculptor Natan Rapoport, was unveiled on 19 April 1948, the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the Uprising. On the history of the Monument and of the memorialisation of the Uprising see James Young, The Tcxturc of Mmg, New Haven / London 1993, pp. 155-84. ‘ Stephan Hermlin, ‘Hier liegen die Gesetzgeber’, Sfarf, I5 July 1949; reprinted in Stephan Hermlin, A@emgm 1!M4-1982, Berlin 1983, pp. 99-104.

Stephan Hermiin, ‘Die Zeit der Gemeinsamkeit’, first published together with three other short stones in Stephan Hermlin, Dic Znl dn Gncinradeit, Berlin 1949. All page references in this article refer to the reprint in Stephan Hermlin, Erziihlrndc Proso, Berlin 1990, pp. 247-310.

In Rmolfc der Hcifigem, first published in Mexico in 1944, Ernst Sommer depicts a rebellion by predominantly orthodox Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland, but Sommer’s novel is set in the small town of ‘L.’, rather than in the capital. Wolfgang Schreyer’s Unfcmhmm 77umakr~fonn (1954) deals with the 1944 Uprising in the so-called ‘Aryan’ area of Warsaw.

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STEPHAN HERMLIN’S ‘ZEIT DER GEMEINSAMKEIT’ 257

response.’ And in recent years, ‘Die Zeit der Gemeinsamkeit’ has been deployed purely as evidence of (what has been regarded as) Hermlin’s boundless commitment to Marxist dogma of the Stalinist variety, and of the writer’s uncritical acceptance of a pro-Soviet Communist view of the past.*

In the following article I offer a counter-reading which seeks to do justice to the complexity of Hermlin’s text, and accentuates its value as more than simply an example of propagandistic historical fiction. Whilst highlighting the short story’s attributes as the creation of a German Communist who identified wholly with the socialist project being realised in Eastern Germ- any, I shall argue that, and illustrate why, ‘Die Zeit der Gemeinsamkeit’ can also be regarded as the work of a writer conscious of his own Jewishness. For one thing, the short story testifies to an unmistakably ‘religious’ conception of socialism. Moreover, Hermlin was eager to highlight the Uprising’s place within a particularly Jewish tradition of militant resistance to oppression, and to articulate the perspective of people of Jewish origin such as himself, who had escaped the Holocaust, but survived to bear the remembrance of suffering and heroism past. This latter dimension has seldom been acknowledged, its literary representation rarely investigated. In an attempt to redress this deficiency, I will devote considerable attention to Hermlin’s treatment of the issue of remembrance.

Hermlin’s move to the East, his rejection of the infant capitalist system in the West, was by no means a spontaneous decision; as early as 1931, at the age of sixteen, the schoolboy Rudolf Leder, who was later to adopt the pen-name Stephan Hermlin, had joined the youth-wing of the KPD. Whilst employed as a printer in Berlin from 1933 to 1936, he was involved in underground political activities for the Party, and he continued to be engaged in the anti-Fascist and pro-Communist struggle following his escape from Germany in 1936. Like many of his exiled comrades, Hermlin was constantly on the move, spending periods in Egypt, Palestine, England and France. And he was active not just on the cultural front against fascism,

’ It is treated most thoroughly in Christine Schmelzkopf, Zur Gestaltung jiidischcr Figurm in dcr dculschprachigm Litcratur nach f945, Hildesheim / Zurich / New York 1983, pp. 2247; Irena Regina Onelek, ‘Das Warschauer Ghetto in der Literatur Polens und der DDR, in Porsdnnur Forschungm dcr Piahgogischm Hochschulc ‘Karl Licbknccht’, Potsdam 1984, pp. 127-40 (‘Die Zeit der Gemeinsamkeit’ is, in fact, the only example of belles-lettres from the GDR, the other texts being prefaces to and reviews of historical works); Silvia Schlenstedt, Stcphan Hcnlin, Berlin 1985, pp. 147-65; and Silvia Schlenstedt, ‘Die Erinnerung. Ein Motiv des Schreibens von Stephan Hermlin’, in Jens Stuben et al. (eds), Wir tragm a h Zcflclkastm mit a h Skckbriefm unscrcr Frcundc, documentation of the symposium ‘Beitrage jiidischer Autoren zur deutschen Literatur seit 1945’ (University of Osnabriick, 2-5 June 1991), Darmstadt 1994. Otherwise, the short story is mentioned only briefly in surveys of Hermlin’s work: Bernd Witte, ‘Stephan Hermlin’, in Kritisches L c x i b n zur dcufschprachigm Gcgouuartslifwahr, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Munich 1978; Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Dcutrchc Lifwahrr in Ost wd West, Munich 1983, pp. 386-410; Klaus Werner, ‘Bilder von Leben, Sterben und Widerstand. Versuch iiber Hermlins Enihlungen’, WB, 4 (1985), 602-20. 8Hans Dieter Zimmermann, ‘Der Dichter und die Partei: Stephan Hermlin’, TK, 108 (1990), 48-59; Thomas C. Fox, ‘A “Jewish Question” in GDR literature?’, GLL, 44 (IW), 58-70.

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258 STEPHAN HERMLIN’S ‘ZEIT DER GEMEINSAMKEIT’

but served in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and in the French army from 1940 to 1944.

Evidently, by the time of ‘Die Zeit der Gemeinsamkeit’, Hermlin had become a devoted Communist. ‘Devoted’ being the operative word, as it suggests a quasi-religious degree of emotional commitment, and Hermlin’s relationship to the Party then was apparently as unconditional and intense as that between a devout individual and a religious institution. In a recent discussion with Fritz J. Raddatz, he admitted that the term ‘Religiositat’ summed up his relationship with the Party for a good part of the GDRs history: ‘Selbstverstandlich hat diese Partei immer die Zuge einer Kirche gehabt. Und die Mitglieder der Partei haben sich mehr oder wenig daruber Rechenschaft abgelegt, und es war mir auch nicht angenehm, daB es so war.’’

Hermlin was furthermore fully aware of the extent to which the ideology of socialism derived from Judaeo-Christian doctrine:

Obwohl die meisten Kommunisten, wenn ihnen dieses Wort von der Kirche entgegengeschleudert wurde, heftig protestiert haben, ich fand nie irgendeinen Grund, dagegen zu protestieren. Einfach deshalb, weil ich mir immer im klaren dariiber war, daB alles das, was unter modernem Sozialismus lauft, also der Marxismus, aus den Evangelien herkommt und sogar vor den Evan- gelien aus den Propheten. DCT ZusammnJlang zwischcn grojen Rcligioncn und Sozialistnus stand mir immer absolut UOT Augen (my emphasis).”

He readily accepted this doctrinal kinship. It was, and still is, a conspicuous feature of his personal, remarkably idealistic, brand of socialism: ‘Ich bin im Grunde genommen ein religioser Atheist. Religiose Gedanken und religiijse Vorstellungen spielen in meinem Sozialismus- und Kommunismusver- standnis eine sehr groBe Rolle.’”

As Heinrich Detering has demonstrated, Hermlin’s anti-Fascist poetry from the late 1930s and early 1940s offers ample evidence of such ‘religious atheism’. l2 Detering examines the writer’s deployment of religious (primarily Jewish) myths and Biblical (mainly Old Testament) references. He argues that Hermlin did not incorporate Jewish mythological and literary phenom- ena in his exile poems merely for ornamental purposes. Neither did he intend to convey the momentousness of current history and the archetypal attributes of the actors in this history by shrouding contemporary events and individuals in a religious aura. Detering claims that religious motifs play a ‘pivotal’ role in Hermlin’s early poetry. And this is a reflection

Stephan Hermlin, ‘Was wissen die Jiingeren von unseren schweren Kimpfen?’ (Discussion with Fritz. J. Raddatz), DL Zuit, 14 April 1995, 51-2. lo Ibtd., 52.

Stephan Hermlin, in convenation with Herlinde Koelbl, in Herlinde Koelbl, Jiidirchr Portraik Pbtqraphin und I n h i n v r , Frankfurt a. M. 1989, p. 112. l 2 Heinrich Detering, “‘Die Stimme im Dornbusch”. Jiidische Motive und Traditionen in den Exilgedichten Stephan Hermlins’, in Itta Shedletzky and Hans Otto Horch (eds), Deutrch-jiidische Exil- und Emigmtionrlilnahrr tm zwanzigsten Jahrhndcrt, Tiibingen 1993, pp. 253-69. Q Blachuell Publishers Ltd 19%.


of the pivotal role which religious ideas assume in Hermlin’s socialist ‘Weltanschauung’: ‘Hinter den politischen Zustandesbestimmungen, Bekenntnissen und Appellen wird ein religioser Horizont sichtbar, von dem diese erst ihre Kontur ge~innen . ’ ’~

The ‘religious’ Communism embodied in the early poetry was not a revised version of a pre-existing, more traditional religious outlook. Hermlin had had little opportunity to develop such an identity; his father was a thoroughly assimilated, non-practising German Jew, and his mother an English Gentile. The values which prevailed in the Leder household were those of the German secular ‘Bildungsbiirgertum’, l4 and the young Rudolf Leder came to the Bible in the course of his general education, rather than through absorption in a Jewish cultural milieu. He acknowledged the Scriptures’ central position within the European cultural tradition, and, more specifically, recognised the influence of Jewish-historical precedents and religious concepts such as messianism, ‘the promised land’, ‘the chosen people’, on classical Marxism.

Whilst the returning exile was not Jewish in an orthodox religious sense15 and was without any Jewish cultural background, he could hardly help being aware of his situation as a Jew in Germany after the Holocaust. For one thing, he felt that he had a responsibility to previous generations to restate the claim of Jews to live in Germany. This claim (and Hermlin’s romantic patriotism) was later to be articulated with great intensity in ‘Ruckkehr’ (1981):

Ich habe kaum gefragt, ob ich in Deutschland willkommen sein wiirde. Ebensowenig fragte ich, ob Deutschland mir etwas schulde, denn ein Land, sein Himmel, seine Wilder, sein Licht kann einem einzelnen nichts schulden.. . . Ich war zuriickgegangen aus einem gewissen Trotz, weil ich alte Rechte zu wahren hatte, nicht nur das Recht meiner Geburt, sondern auch das meiner Vorfahren, die vor fast zwei Jahrtausenden hierher kamen, vor den meisten Deutschen, gemeinsam mit den Romern.’‘

What is more, being himself a ‘rassisch Verf~lgter’,’~ as well as the son of a victim of Nazi anti-Semitism - his father was murdered in Sachsenhausen - Hermlin could not fail but be sensitive to the extraordinariness of recent Jewish experience, to recognise that his father’s fate might easily have been his own, and that his biography differed enormously from that of the vast majority of Germans. As he admitted in 1989, Hermlin possessed a

Is Ibid., pp. 267-8. ” For autobiographical depictions of Hermlin’s familial environment, see Stephan Hermlin, Abendlicht, Berlin 1979; Bcstimnucngsorte. Funf ErzNungm, Berlin 1985. Is According to the laws laid down in the Talmud, a person is only considered Jewish if (s)he has a Jewish mother; this was not the case for Hermlin. I6 ‘Riickkehr’ (written 1981, first printed in NDL, 8 (1983)), reprinted in Stephan Hermlin, I n cinn dunklm Wclt, Leipzig 1993, pp. 39-66, here p. 66.

Stephan Hermlin, ‘Das hier ist es’, SuF, 2 (1987), 274-84, here p. 275. 0 BlsdtweU Publishers Ltd 1%.


‘bestimmte[s] historische[s] Gedachtnis, das ich nicht ableugne, sondern dessen ich mir bewuIjt bin.’ls

Even before he learnt of his father’s death, Hermlin had been preoccupied with tackling the subject of Jewish suffering. During the war, he had contemplated writing a fantastic short story illustrating the persistence of anti-Semitism. l9 Although this plan never came to fruition, Jewish life- histories occupy an important place within Hermlin’s anti-Fascist prose.20 The author has in fact claimed that approximately half of his narrative works deal with the problem of anti-Semitism.*’

We can now turn to examine how Stephan Hermlin - as a ‘religious’ Communist with a ‘certain (Jewish) historical memory’, writing in the era of Stalinism - handled the subject of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. As a starting point, it is arguable that the title of the short story is rather misleading; not only is more than one ‘time’ depicted in the text, but also numerous forms of ‘togetherness’. Moreover, ‘Gemeinsamkeit’ does not connect individuals existing at just one time in one place, but links generations in different periods of history. Indeed, Hermlin’s complex intenveav- ing of time layers and representation of a multiplicity of types of togetherness is certainly one of the main strengths of this work.

The most palpable ‘time of togetherness’ is the armed Uprising by the population of the Ghetto. This is recorded in a letter-chronicle, which, at first, appears to be the work of a participant in the revolt. Whilst the Jews’ physical resistance may be the most concrete realisation of ‘Gemeinsamkeit’ at the time level of the Uprising, it is not the only one; the story also indicates how the Ghetto’s inhabitants are empowered through their shared culture. And numerous passages in the short story convey the warmth of inter-personal relationships within the Ghetto, in particular that between the letter-writer and his newly-found partner, Franka.

The theme of ‘Gemeinsamkeit’ also emerges in the shape of remembrance, that is, the mental connection, constructed by present generations, to prede- cessors to whom they feel themselves indebted. For the letter-section is not the totality of the short story, but is framed by a text in which an anonymous narrator recalls a visit to Warsaw in the late 194os, and in particular his response to the spoors of the history of the Uprising. Few critics have commented at any length on this frame-section, a neglect which is rather surprising, since the frame-section offers an unusual and strikingly poetic

‘8Koelbl (1989), p. 112. ”See ‘Gesprich mit Stephan Hermlin’, in Schlenstedt (1985), p. 23. 2o In ‘Reise cines Malen in Paris’ (1947), Hermlin depicts the deportation of Jews fmm an unnamed internment camp in France to the East, and hints at the horror awaiting them (ErziMde Prom, pp. 158-232). In ‘Die Zeit der Einsamkeit’ (1948), the central figure, Norbert, a German Communist in exile in France, has a Jewish partner, Magda. Magda lives under the constant fear that she will end up ‘going up the chimney’. This docs not happen, but her fate is clearly meant to characterise the extreme suffering of European Jews in the era of fascism; she is raped by an anti-Semitic French bureaucrat, and then dies from the aftereffects of an abortion (Erzih.hh Prom, pp. 199-246). I ’ Stephan Hermlin, ‘Was wissen die Jiingeren ...’, 52. 0 Blsckwcll PuMishers Ltd 19%.

STEPHAN HERMLIN’S ‘ZEIT DER GEMEINSAMKEIT’ 26 1

portrait of a returning German-Jewish exile encountering the tragic yet heroic recent history of Polish Jewry amidst the ‘brave new world’ of socialist Poland.

In the frame-fragment prior to the letter, the narrator communicates a favourable impression of the course of socialist reconstruction, defining the extensive development of Warsaw as ‘das Sterben des Todes’ (p. 248), with ‘Tod’ signifjring the devastation perpetrated under German occupation. He suggests that the tragedy of the near annihilation of Warsaw’s Jewish population would be compensated by the revolutionary changes in Poland, to which the Uprising had contributed:

Nur noch das Monument auf dern Platz wurde laut in alle Ewigkeit mit all seinen Lettern reden: Dem judischen Volk seine Kampfer und Martyrer. Aber den Toten, so schien mir, wiirde diese Last leicht sein: die Stadt, die uber ihnen drohnen und lieben wurde - ware sie moglich gewesen ohne ihr Sterben, das die Welt zu noch griiI3erer Entschlossenheit gezwungen hatte? Zum erstenrnal jetzt, nach ihrem Tode, wurde die Stadt Warschau, in der sie ja nie ganz heimisch gewesen waren, ihre wahre Heimat sein. Die Toten selbst, sagte ich rnir, sind es, die die Decke aus Beton uber sich ziehen, um unter den Riesenbauten ihrer Kinder und Freunde auszuruhen. (p.252)

The image of the Jewish corpses willingly providing the foundations for the new Warsaw can only be described as grotesque. I t even serves as a poignant though unintended metaphor for the displacement of any compre- hensive ‘Vergangenheitsbewaltigung’ by energetic reconstruction in Europe, particularly in the two Germanies, in the wake of the Holocaust. The final sentence apparently flies in the face of historical fact. The dead left behind few children, as they too perished in Treblinka and elsewhere. As the narrator admits, insecurity was the lot of Warsaw’s Jews prior to the arrival of the Germans; how many friends would the Jews have left behind ? Yet despite their optimism, the narrator’s words do not evince unreflected dogmatism. They are tempered through the inclusion of phrases emphasis- ing subjectivity (‘so schien mir’, ‘sagte ich mir’) and through the pensive question ‘ware sie moglich.. .?’ The narrator’s response to the new Warsaw connotes that he is in the process of coming to terms with the past and of accepting the present. He has yet to adopt a mentality of unbridled enthusi- asm for real-existing socialism.

Indeed, as the frame-section progresses, the narrator becomes increasingly preoccupied with historical matters and distracted from contemporary devel- opments. This corresponds to the change in his physical location. At the beginning of the narrative he finds himself in what was previously the ‘Aryan’ quarter of Warsaw, which has been transformed into a frenetic building site. He then goes to look at the Monument, finally coming to lie down amidst the rubble in the area of the former Ghetto. To paraphrase the narrator - he moves from the realm of life to the province of the dead.22

*‘At the end of his walk through Warsaw, the narrator comments: ‘Hier stand nichts zwischen den Toten und mir, wie auch in dieser Stadt nichts zwischen dem Leben und mir gntanden hatte’ (p. 253).

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Even so, having reached his destination, he is not entirely captivated by its melancholic aura, and, at one point, contemplates returning to the ‘new’ Warsaw:

Ich sagte mir in diesem Moment, daB es nun eigentlich genug sei an planlosem Schweifen und Traumen. Deutlich sah ich mein Hotel vor mir mit dem Speisesaal und der Tanzkapelle, und ich uberlegte, wo ich ein Taxi wiirde nehmen konnen; schon hatte ich es mit dem nachsten Gedanken gefunden, stieg aus, setzte mich an einen Tisch zu meinen Zufallsbekanntschaften. Den ich jedoch in meiner Vorstellung sah, war bereits ein Fremder, der mir noch ahnelte, aber schon begonnen hatte, sich unwiderruflich von mir zu trennen, und den ich vielleicht nur mit dieser geheimen und schlecht verborgenen Ungeduld begleitete, um ihn schneller verlassen zu konnen. (pp. 251-2)

Given the status of ‘planning’ in Soviet-Communist dogma, the self-accu- sation of ‘planlosc[s] Schweifen und Traumen’ (my emphasis) has considerable gravity. It could be interpreted as intimating that the narrator considers his ‘Schweifen und Traumen’ to be an affront to the planned development underway in the ‘living’ part of Warsaw. And yet, despite his anxiety, the narrator does not follow the example of his imaginary persona, who re- enters Warsaw’s social life. O n the contrary, he feels the gulf between his real and imagined self to be widening (‘aber schon begonnen hatte, sich unwiderruflich von mir zu trennen’). He is alienated twice over; like the persona in his vision, he is a ‘Fremder’ in Poland, but, unlike him, he cannot easily blend in with the everyday life of contemporary Warsaw. So the narrator persists in his passive, seemingly asocial activity - he allows the Ghetto to ‘take possession’ of him (p. 252), rejects any thought of returning to the new town (ibid.) and gives himselfover to the ‘unablassige[n] Spiel der Gedanken und Assoziationen’ (p. 254).

There are further indications that the narrator is not quite ‘at one’ with the new ‘Aufbau’ era. As early as the second line, he suggests that his visit to Warsaw has a clandestine feel to it, in that he likens himself to ‘ein gehnmer Kundschafter des voneitigen Sommers’ (p. 247, my emphasis). A comparable intimation occurs further on in the narrative, when the visitor describes his emotions upon taking a taxi in the direction of the former Ghetto: ‘Mein H e n schlug schneller, als ich mir vorzustellen suchte, daB ich einer gchnmcn Verabredung nachkame in dieser Stadt, in der ich niemanden kannte, in der ich nie zuvor gewesen war’ (p. 248, my emphasis). This remark is particularly significant, given that it falls only a paragraph after the narrator’s assertion that the ‘Vorgange in den StraBen’ amount to little less than ‘das Sterben des Todes’(ibid.). Whilst he acknowledges the objective achievements of existing socialism, the narrator confesses his subjective difficulties with accommodating himself to this new reality.

By contrast, the narrator does seem to have a ‘special relationship’ with the Monument and the ruins of the Jewish quarter. The former beckons to him with its shadow, and when this ‘reaches’ him, he stands and walks towards the devastated area of the Ghetto (pp. 250-1). Equally revealing 0 Blwtwcll Publishers Ltd 1996.


is the narrator’s comment that he moves around the wasteland ‘als gehorchte ich geheimen Weisungen im chaotischen Gefalle des Gesteins’(p. 251); when read with the previous allusions to ‘secrecy’ in mind, this would suggest that he has finally arrived at the location for his secret rcndez-vow.

Amidst the rubble, the narrator feels ‘heimatlos und geborgen zugleich.. . . Hier konnte die geographische Mitte meines Lebens sein, sagte ich mir’ (ibid.). This declaration opens up at least two possibilities regarding the identity of the narrator. He could simply be a sensitive, humane individual, who has come to pay homage to the participants in the Uprising, and who empathises with them to such an extent that he envisages being one himself. Many of the narrator’s comments would support such a generalised interpretation. For one thing, he reveals twice that he has never before been to Warsaw, and talks of the Poles as ‘ein ganzes Volk, dessen Sprache ich nicht verstand, dessen Boden ich niemals zuvor betreten hatte, das nur mit den Zeichen seiner Leiden und Anstrengungen zu mir redete’ (p. 254).

More cryptic, however, is the narrator’s reference to those whom he has come to mourn as ‘so viele Nahe und Unbekannte, die alle nicht in ihren Betten gestorben waren’ (p. 253). ‘Nahe’ could signify people whose death the narrator mourns simply because they were human beings. I would argue, however, that the narrator’s paradoxical labelling of the Ghetto’s dead, and his similarly paradoxical sensation when standing amidst the ruins - ‘heimatlos und geborgen zugleich’ - can best be understood if we take him to be a German Jew responding to a crucial moment in modern Polish-Jewish history. He has not experienced this moment personally, is a foreigner in this place, and therefore realises that it would be illusory to claim the Ghetto as his home.23 At the same time, he does feel a special bond to the population of the Ghetto, the bond of membership of the Jewish ‘Schicksalsgemeinschaft’. I t is this which leads him to view the Jews as ‘Nahe’, to feel safe in the historically significant location, and to conceive of the Ghetto as a station in his own life.

There are numerous grounds for considering the identification of the narrator as a German Jew. First, there is his relationship to the letter which he carries through Warsaw, but never actually reads.** The initial information concerning this letter gives the impression that it is a straightfor-

23 A further explanation for the feeling of ‘homelessness’ is that, in the mind of the narrator, the very history of the Ghetto - its establishment and then liquidation - exemplifies the insecurity of diaspora existence. *’ Schmelzkopf claims that the narrator does read the letter (Schmelzkopf, p. 34). The text suggests otherwise: in the last reference to the physical location of the letter in the opening frame-section, it is stated that it is in the narrator’s pocket (p. 255); the narrator mentions that it would be too dark to decipher the letter anyway (‘Es ware mir nicht eingefallen, daI3 man einen Brief nicht im Dunkel lesen kann’ ( ib id . ) ) ; following his ‘vision’ of the Uprising, the narrator implies that he is unaware of the content of the letter when he maintains: ‘Unverlndert gleichgiiltig war ich der Frage gegeniiber, ob das, was ich mittlerweile erfahren hatte, gerade in dem Brief enthalten war’ (pp. 309-310).

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ward chronicle, which the narrator has received through an intermediary, ‘B.’ (p. 255). However, such a conception of the letter as an authentic document is rapidly undermined. Shortly before the opening of the chronicle, the narrator divulges that the letter need not be classified as such, and that it lacks both beginning and end. What is more, he concludes by declaring that he would rather believe the letter to have been written explicitly for him, and even given to him, by someone whose features resemble those which he sees in the mirror every morning (p. 256).

This could be understood as the expression of the desire to respond to the content of the letter as one who shares the ethnic identity of the inhabitants of the Ghetto, which is reflected in their common physiognomy. But the narrator’s words might also have a more surreal significance, with the features of the letter-writer being exucfly the same as those of the narrator, because the letter-writer is in fact the narrator. In this case, the letter would be a mental fabrication on the part of the narrator who identifies with the fate of his fellow Jews to such an extent that his identity merges with that of

The content of the letter certainly sustains this possibility. For as we read deeper into the letter it becomes clear that the narrator and the letter- writer share a number of biographical characteristics. Both have memories of North German rural life: on the streets of Warsaw, the narrator encoun- ters faces, postures and gestures similar to those which he has seen ‘in einer norddeutschen Kleinstadt, in einem italienischen Hafen, an einer spanischen LandstraBe ...’ (p. 247); prior to his death, the letter-writer has a vision of his North German ‘Heimat’ (pp. 306-7), indicating that neither man is Polish.

Furthermore, in 1949, both would have been thirty-four years old, the same age as Stephan Hermlin, who was born in 1915.26 This is not the only similarity between the narrator and the author. Most obviously, the narrator describes a visit which the author himself had undertaken. The

*) The signification of a Biblical allusion would seem to confirm that the narrator is Jewish, whilst leaving i t open whether he identifies with, or is identical to, the letter-writer. The allusion occurs towards the end of a description of noises which the narrator imagines hearing whilst lying in the rubble: ‘schon ware es ein rauschender und polternder L a m geworden, ein Prasseln, als fiele ein gigantischer Hagel uber die Stadt. Und das alles hatte mir keine Furcht eingejagt, mir, der ich den Brief die ganze Zeit in der Tasche zwischen den Fingern hielt ...’ (p. 255). A ‘gigantischer Hagel’ also occurs in the Bible - the seventh of the ten plagues sent by God to punish Pharaoh for enslaving the Jews (Exodus 1X. 18f.). The invocation of this mythical moment can be taken as signalling that the impending Uprising falls within a Jewish historical cycle of sulfering followed by liberation. In Hermlin’s secularised version, however, it is not God who will mete out punishment on the German pharaohs but the Jews themselves. it is conspicuous that the narrator asserts that he is not afraid of the oncoming hail. This would seem logical if he were Jewish, as the only people protected from the Biblical hail were the Israelites living in the region of Goshen (Exodus IX. 26). ”The narrator states: ‘Ich ging durch die unbekannte Stadt wie durch ein Panorama meiner vierunddreiRig Jahre’ (p. 257). The letter-writer tells Franka that he was twenty-four at the time of his visit to Paris in 1939 (p. 303). @ Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1996.


former refers to his extensive travels, likening the bustling street-life in Warsaw to his impressions of Alexandria, Haifa and Beirut (p. 247). All three were stations in the exile-experience of the author. Such parallels are clearly more than coincidental. As Silvia Schlenstedt notes, the visitor’s remarks concerning the letter and its creator, and the projection of his biographical data onto the letter-writer, signal the ‘unmittelbare Betrof- fenheit’ experienced by the narrator.27 It would be an over-simplification to equate this narrator entirely with Stephan Hermlin, if only because Hermlin grew up in Chemnitz and Berlin, and not in North Germany. (This said, the idyll of a cultured and environmentally unscathed Germany, which is evoked in the chronicler’s vision, is comparable to the ‘Deutschland- bild’ found in Hermlin’s later autobiographical prose.)28 Taking all this into account, I would suggest that the ‘Betroffenheit’ articulated by the narrator reflects the writer’s own response to the history manifested in the letter.

The literary representation of the Uprising is clearly the handiwork of the devoted Communist who, in the same period, composed quasi-religious hymns to Stalin and Wilhelm Pieck. The letter-writer communicates an unmistakably positive view of the Soviet Union, and accentuates the role of Communists within the Uprising. Having spoken critically of the defeatism and passivity of the Ghetto’s inhabitants, for example, the ‘chronicler’ addresses the imagined reader: ‘Aber es gibt etwas in der Welt, was ich Dir erklaren mochte, etwas Neues, das bis zu uns reicht und trotz allem den Namen Wendung verdient’ (p. 260). He goes on to identift this ‘Wen- dung’: ‘Aber es gibt etwas Neues in der Welt, das weit driiben begonnen hat, im Osten. Bei Stalingrad sind die Deutschen zerbrochen’ (p. 261).

Before the Uprising has even started, its singularity is diminished through the reference to the defeat of the German army at Stalingrad; the Warsaw events are presented in advance as echoes of even more momentous develop- ments in the East. Whilst it is faithful to history to see such a linkage, the letter-writer’s emphasis on the importance of Stalingrad as a turning- point clearly serves Hermlin’s ideological purpose of acclaiming the Soviet Union.

The letter-writer also functions as a counterpoint to Mlotek, the chief ‘positive hero’ of the short story. Whilst the former repeatedly complains of the apathy which seems to have engulfed the population of the Ghetto, himself included, Mlotek is lauded for his dynamism. And this quality becomes increasingly evident during the actual military combat between the inhabitants of the Ghetto and the SS. Mlotek is never anything but robust, and he is always sure of the next step. Even when the letter-writer is uncertain of the facts, he presumes that Mlotek is responsible for a decisive act. Thus, when chronicling the sighting of a group of German

”Schlenstedt (1985), pp. 163-4, here p. 164. See, for example, ‘Riickkehr’, ‘Das hier ist es’.

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soldiers, the letter-writer comments: ‘Man sah ihre Helme und Schultern gegen das helle Licht, und das Wogen von Schultern und Kopfen der Menschen drinnen bewegte sich auf sie und das Licht zu. Sofort hatte jemand, wahrsctuinluh Mlotck, die triibe Birne zerschlagen, die im Keller brannte ...’ (p. 289, my emphasis).

Mlotek’s influence on the letter-writer finds reflection too in the mood and form of the letter. Whilst Mlotek is alive, the text develops chronologically, consisting largely of detailed description of the fighting-unit’s manoeuvres. When he dies, the chronicler seems aimless and almost oblivious to what is happening around him. The letter registers its writer’s preoccupation with escapist memories and fantasies.

Through Mlotek, Hermlin certainly lays a disproportionate emphasis on the Communist contribution to the Uprising. None the less, it would be a denial of historical reality were one to claim that there were no grounds for a favourable depiction of Communist involvement. Of the twenty-two fighting units which constituted the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish Fighting Organisation, the main organ of resistance in the Uprising), four were under the control of the Communist Polska Partia Robotnicza (Polish Workers’ Party).29 A further four comprised activists of the pro-Soviet Zionists Hashomer Hatzair, whose leader, Mordechai Anneielewicz, was also leader of the Jewish Fighting Organisation. Memoirs by participants in the Uprising reveal that these Leftist groupings were not alone in being favourably disposed towards the Soviet Union.30

Those who have criticised Hermlin for overstating the Communist contribution have a good deal of justification. However, their anti-Communism sometimes leads them to shut their eyes to the partial historical authenticity of Hermlin’s account. Soon after the first shots of the Uprising are fired, the letter-writer comments: ‘Jetzt erst wuBte ich mit einem dummen Erstaunen, daB Mlotek als erster geschossen hatte ...’ (p. 275). Hans Dieter Zimmermann responds to this by protesting: ‘Auch hier sind es die Kom- munisten, die den Aufstand uberhaupt in Gang bringen, nicht die verzweifelten judischen Kampfer im G h e t t ~ . ’ ~ ’

Zimmermann’s criticism is flawed for numerous reasons. First, he incor- rectly implies that those Communists who did participate in the Uprising, and who feature in Hermlin’s fiction, were somehow not Jewish, in contrast to the ‘verzweifelten jiidischen Kampfer[n]’. Second, he displays ignorance of the actual events; a letter from Mordechai Annielewicz to Yitzhak Zucker- mann, the Fighting Organisation’s contact man in the ‘Aryan’ part of

L. Davidowicz, Thr War aguinrf flu Jews IB.?-I945, Middlesex 1979. ’* See, for example, Yitzhak Zuckerman (‘Antek‘), A Surplus of Memory. Ckroniclr o f tkc Warsaw Ghetto Upking, Berkeley 1993; Reuben Ainsztein, fi Warsaw Gkctto Rruoft, New York 1979. ‘I Zimmermann, 57. Reich-Ranicki (1963) also goes too far in his criticism of Hermlin’s representation of Communist involvement: ‘Entgegen der historischen Wahrheit sind es in d i e m poetischen Vision die Kommunisten, die den Aufstand organisieren und leiten’ (p. 405). @ Blackwell Publishers Ltd 19%


Warsaw, informs us that PPR units were indeed the first to attack the Germans.32

A more conspicuous fault in the criticism of Zimmermann and Fox is that they focus exclusively on the figure of Mlotek, thereby failing to mention either Hermlin’s ingenious deployment of a frame structure or the perspective and function of the letter-writer. For the latter acts not only as a mouthpiece for propaganda and as a yardstick for assessing the behaviour of Mlotek, but also as a ‘typical’ inhabitant of the Ghetto. His metamor- phosis into an armed guerrilla stands for the revolution in the mentality of the Ghetto population - from passivity to militant defiance - which began with the ‘prelude’ to the main Uprising in January 1943 (pp. 262-5).

Nevertheless, Hermlin’s representative rebel does not exude boundless optimism, and is well aware of the impotence of the Jews. On numerous occasions this awareness is conveyed explicitly, and it is also implicit in the reaction which the writer envisages on the part of the addressee of his letter. More than once, the former expresses his belief that the latter will look back on the (inevitable) destruction of the Ghetto, and, in the light of the Ghetto-inhabitants’ tragic fate, be more prepared than himself to excuse their self-delusion and fatalism. Considering the sheer hopelessness inherent in this belief, the very writing of the letter can actually be regarded as a form of resistance. It represents an attempt to bear witness, to convey the experience and message of the Uprising to later generations, and thus dismisses the Nazi aim of the total liquidation of European Jewry. It is a further type of ‘Gemeinsamkeit’ across time, a mirror image of the narrator’s ‘pilgrimage’ to Warsaw.

The letter-writer has a further function - to proclaim the intrinsic ‘Jewish- ness’ of the Uprising, by observing in the actions of his fellow Jews forms of behaviour which have a precedent in Jewish history and mythology. So on the one hand, he regards the Jews’ initial submissiveness as reflecting the characteristics of Job, the personification of patience and tolerance (p. 262). On the other, he asserts that this mask of passivity will rise to reveal the face of Bar Kochba, the leader of a Jewish slave revolt against Roman domination, which took place in Palestine between 132 and 135 CE.

Indeed, at a meeting of the Jewish National Committee, where the decision is taken to launch the revolt, the letter-writer perceives the militancy of Bar Kochba in the face of the speaker, David, who has managed to escape from Treblinka (ibid.) The speaker’s name reminds us of the second king of Israel, who also fought against a superior adversary, Goliath. What is more, according to the letter-writer David has a noticably ‘Jewish’

32 ‘I don’t know what to write you. Let’s dispense with personal details this time. I have only one expression to describe my feelings and the feelings of my comrades: things have surpassed our boldest dreams: the Germans ran away from the ghetto twice. .. . Yesterday, when we got information that fhc PPR attacked the h a n r and that the radio station Swit broadcast a wonderful bulletin about our self-defense I had a feeling of fulfillment’ (my emphasis), letter of 23 April 1943 from Mordechai Annielewicz to Yitzhak Zuckermann (original in Yiddish), quoted in Zuckermann, p. 387.

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268 STEPHAN HERMLINS ‘ZEIT DER GEMEINSAMKEIT’

physiognomy, contrasting not only with the stereotyped Germans who appear in ‘Die Zeit der Gemeinsamkeit’, but also with the non-Jewish Polish Communists Jan and S t a n i ~ l a u s . ~ ~

The ‘Jewish spirit’ of the Uprising is not only in the eye of its beholder. As the example of ‘David’ demonstrates, it is also indicated by the author’s choice of names for his characters and by his treatment of historical and religious motifs. Most significantly, the name ‘Mlotek’, being Polish for ‘hammer’, which is ‘Maccabee’ in Hebrew, denotes a link between Hermlin’s ‘positive hero’ and the liberation struggle led by a Jewish family in Palestine in the 2nd century BCE. According to Christine Schmelzkopf, such allusions amount to perversions of the original history:

Doch beide Assoziationen mit den Helden jiidischer Geschichte treffen nicht. Denn diese waren Kimpfer fiir Unabhangigkeit und religiose Eigenstandigkeit des judischen Volkes, hier aber werden jiidische Helden vorgefiihrt, die aus dem Zorn uber die jahrtausendalte Unterdriickung ihres Volkes heraus zu unerschrockenen Vorkampfern im allgerneinen Karnpf von Juden und Nicht- Juden urn eine bessere Welt ~ e r d e n . ~ ~

Admittedly, Mlotek is a Communist Party member. His occasional ideological statements reveal him to be a materialist internationalist rather than a religious nationalist; when explaining to the letter-writer ‘was die Menschen erlitten haben’ he provides the example ‘daB die Frauen um vier Uhr morgens Feuer machen mussen’ (p. 297). This universalistic ‘Weltan- schauung’ obviously diverges from the Jewish-particularist sentiment of both the Maccabees’ revolt and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Jewish Fighting Organisation, after all, was founded by Left-wing Zionist youth movements, and all but eight of the ‘fighting units’ were controlled by Zionist groupings.

Schmelzkopf rightly notes that, with his invocation of Biblical and post- Biblical emblems such as the Maccabees, Hermlin seizes upon elements of Jewish culture which lend themselves to assimilation into a universal history of the struggle against o p p r e ~ s i o n . ~ ~ In so doing, she stops short of recognis- ing these invocations as symptomatic of the writer’s belief in the affinity between ancient religions and socialism; if, as Hermlin has asserted, Biblical and historical precedents provided the backbone for modern socialism, it would be logical to claim and portray the Maccabees as ‘Vorkampfer’ for Communism.

Similarly, at one point, a description of Mlotek lecturing a group of young people on Lenin’s ‘Briefe aus der Ferne’ is juxtaposed with a reference

” Whilst David has a small, dark face, manifesting wisdom born of age (p. 267), the Germans are categorised as ‘blondhaarige[.] Muskel- und Stahlmenschen ...’(p. 266). The Poles from ‘Jenseits’ (i.e. the non-Jewish part of Warsaw) ‘waren beide blond, und ihre Augen hatten den gleichen hellen und gleichmiitigen Blick’ (p. 267).

” Ibid. 0 Blachll Publishen Ltd 1996

Schmelzkopf, p. 38.


to the reawakening in the Ghetto of the legend of the Golem (p. 266). Lenin’s work offers an evaluation of, and ‘solution’ to, a concrete historical situation - Russia following the ‘bourgeois’ February Revolution of 191 7 - whereas Rabbi Low’s medieval tale concerns a fantastic creature which will be magically brought to life at an undefined point in the future, to act as the saviour for the Jews. Despite the evident differences, there is a clear connection between the mass revolution championed by Lenin and the ‘formless mass’ envisaged by Low; they are both radical means for combat- ing oppression and bringing about a (supposedly) more humane future.

As well as betokening the relationship between socialism and ancient struggles, the Maccabees and Bar Kochba are also deployed as archetypes of Jewish resistance. By linking these historical moments of Jewish heroism with the case of the Uprising, Hermlin challenges the myth, prevalent to this day, that Jews behave innately like ‘sheep to the slaughter’. What is more, a number of cultural rites and ‘inventions’ are included in the letter and depicted in such a way as to suggest that they too are bearers of this spirit of defiance. A particularly clear example is the recurrent singing of Hirsh Glick’s Yiddish ‘Song of the partisan^'.^^ Heard three times in the course of the narrated Uprising, this song proclaims the need for the repudiation of defeatism and for constant faith in the certainty of eventual victory.

The narrator of the closing frame-section is profoundly affected by what he has ‘erfahren’ (p. 310)’ namely, his vision of the Uprising. When he concedes ‘Zugleich war mir, als miisse ich aufbrechen, ohne Verzug, irgend- wohin ...’ (ibid.), it appears as if he has overcome his earlier melancholy. He realises that, rather than wallowing in mourning for the dead fighters of the Ghetto, he should follow their example and persevere - a conclusion which echoes the optimistic outlook prevalent in anti-Fascist literature during the early years of the GDR.

We should however note that the narrator expresses this new-found resolve immediately after he has acknowledged the difficulty of ‘Hei- mischwerden in der Welt’ (p. 310). As I hope to have shown through focusing on the frame-section, the problematic process of ‘Heimischwerden’ receives substantial treatment in ‘Die Zeit der Gemeinsamkeit’. This, I

36 Sog nit kajnmol, as du gejst dem letzten Weg, Himmlen blajne ferschtellen bloje Tag Kumen wed noch unser ojsgebenkte Schoh S wed a Poik ton unser Trott: Mir sajnen do ! (first verse)

You must never say that you now walk the final way, Because the darkened heavens hide the blue of day. The time that we’ve longed for will at last draw near, And our steps, like drums, will sound that we are here.

Although ‘The Song of the Partisans’ acts as a powerful motif in ‘Die Zeit der Gemeinsamkeit’, its inclusion in the ‘erzahlte Zeit’ must be seen as an anachronism; it was actually composed by Glick, a member of the United Partisan Organisation in the Vilna Ghetto, as a rcsflonrc to the Uprising, and thcrcafir became the anthem of Jewish partisans fighting the Nazis.

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2 70 STEPHAN HERMLIN’S ‘ZEIT DER GEMEINSAMKEIT’

would argue, is a reflection of the pertinency of this problem to the German- Jewish writer himself. Furthermore, Hermlin’s account of the Uprising, as well as being a manifesto for ‘Communism with a religious face’, demonstrates poignantly that there is more to Jewish history than pathetic suffering.

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remembering the revolt: stephan hermlin's ‘die zeit der gemeinsamkeit’ (1949)

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