Bayerisches Viertel is an upper-middle class residential area in Schöneberg, a southwest borough of Berlin. On a warm Sunday in August, the streets are almost empty and except for some cafés and Spätkaufs (bodegas), all the shops are closed. It feels distant spatially and spiritually from the internationally celebrated areas of Berlin — the traffic and energy of Kreuzberg, the young-family-brigade of Prenzlauerberg, the old grandeur of Museum Insel. The bullet-holed and graffitied aesthetic that so typifies a city whose history can feel almost convulsively exteriorized is absolutely absent here; instead one finds well-groomed green lawns, cream and rose apartment buildings with decorated balconies, and quiet tree lined streets, and almost all of the very few people out walking or cycling are elderly and white. Barbarossaplatz, for instance, is a perfectly pleasant place to sit with a brötchen and enjoy the wind in the leaves. The street leading there, Barbarossastrasse, is a street like many others, in other family neighborhoods, in any other city: you see a mother and baby on the street, an older couple on their patio reading the paper, children’s bicycles in a pile, and a colorful, well-displayed street sign with a cat on it, the other side of which reads: “Juden dürfen keine Haustiere mehr halten,” which translates as, “Jews may no longer own pets.”
Twenty years ago this summer, German artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, installed their “Places of Remembrance,” 80 street signs with images or symbols on one side, and a particular anti-Jewish (and sometimes anti-Polish) Nazi law on the other. Stih and Shnock proposed this project in 1991 as their submission to a competition calling for ideas for a memorial in the neighborhood’s central square, right off Martin-Luther-Strasse. By unanimous vote, the jury — consisting of artists, historians, city planners, and representatives of the Jewish community in Berlin — opted for Stih and Schnock’s controversial, non-traditional memorial over the more palatable, reassuring option of a centralized monument. In 1993 the signs went up.
In interviews the artists suggested they wanted to make a memorial that would adequately reflect the ways in which the alienation, harassment, and eventual deportation of Berlin’s Jewish residents was not a sudden, immediately recognizable, or universally resisted attack on the community, but instead operated as a kind of integrated and initially subtle management of daily life and routine. Schöneberg was known in the 1920’s as “Jewish Switzerland” thanks to its largely wealthy Jewish residents, yet it is also remembered as a culturally diverse community enjoying an intellectual climate: it was one of the first gay neighborhoods during Berlin’s Golden Years, and thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein lived here. What Stih and Shnock’s work seeks to bring out, however, is that non-Jewish Germans met the anti-Jewish laws, not with great resistance but accommodation (though of course there was some organized resistance, notably the Social Democrats, the Communist party, and workers unions). Where a single, discrete, and perhaps noble memorial might suggest a single, discrete, and perhaps terrible event, peppering an ordinary neighborhood with inconspicuous (until you read them) signposts suggests a different kind of integration into history, and demands a different kind of negotiation in the present.
German has two words that we might translate as memorial in English, though exactly where to draw the conceptual distinctions is not obvious even to native speakers. A Denkmal is a memorial or monument whose purpose is to remind us of something that has happened or someone who has lived. Denken is the German verb “to think,” so a Denkmal stands as a testament to something on which we have a duty to reflect. Denkmals can be bloated and grand — as in the Soviet Memorial in Berlin or Mount Rushmore in South Dakota — or sombre and respectful — as in the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, a black wall engraved with service members’ names, dedicated to honoring those who fought in the war.
A Mahnmal is something subtly different, and we have no readily available English translation. Mahnen means both “to admonish” and “to remind;” it is often paired with the idea of caution or observance, as when one urges someone to take caution or be vigilant. A Mahnmal, then, is something meant both to remind and to warn, it pleads for remembrance not for the purpose of glory but for the purpose of heedful acknowledgment, even shame. A Mahnmal takes the idea of “never again” and gives it shape.
Berlin has an impressive Mahnmal culture. The most famous is the Holocaust-Mahnmal, or the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, a vast grid of concrete vertical slabs arranged on rising and falling ground. Across the street stands the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism, a concrete cube with a small window into which one can look and see a video of men kissing (following protest, the video now changes every two years and includes lesbians as well). There are also the Stolperstein — “stumbling stones” — the some 30,000 gold bricks lain in the streets that note the name, address, and place of death for those Jewish Berliners murdered by the Nazis. Again, it isn’t immediately evident that these works would count as Mahnmal rather than Denkmal; for some people I spoke with, a Mahnmal calls to mind something rather imposing or commanding in structure, while the Stolperstein, for instance, are anything but. But one can argue that a Mahnmal is a work the purpose or effect of which is not to communicate historical knowledge but to occasion a new commitment to hold in mind the difficulties of reality and history.
Like the stumbling stones, Stih and Shnock’s signs are effective precisely in their unobtrusiveness. In both cases, one can fail to notice these small pockets of admonishment, and indeed this possibility of failure, this ever-present capacity for not seeing, is exactly what is being consecrated with these works. Where a Denkmal asks us to remember some thing, person, event, or place, a Mahnmal reminds us of the fact of our not having seen, recognized, acknowledged, or acted, the fact that when what is being memorialized was live or happening, it went unattended. In calling to this historic inattentiveness, these works complicate and darken our present willingness to pay attention; unlike a Denkmal which can make us feel edified or exhilarated in our remembrance, a Mahnmal tends to make you sick, suddenly exhausted, borne down upon. In this way a Mahnmal calls not just to the past but to the present, making an intervention not just in history but in reality.
There are 80 signs in Schöneberg, 80 images and 80 laws (of more than 400 such laws), extending over many blocks. Hardly any attention is given to them now, though at the time they were erected there were protests, both anti-Nazi and anti-Semitic. On the Sunday I visited, I rode up to Bayerisches Platz on my bike and scanned the streets, unsure what exactly I was looking for or even if I would find them. The first sign I saw was bright blue with a cartoon loaf of bread. Its banality is heart stopping. On the back it specifies that Jews are only allowed to buy groceries between 4:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon. The more signs I saw — signs forbidding Jewish children from public schools or the employment of Jewish actors and actresses, signs demanding that jewelry owned by Jews be turned over to the state and that Jews without Jewish-sounding names adopt either “Sarah” or “Israel” — the more ill I felt. There is a sign with an enthusiastic Welcome mat on one side (“Herzlich Willkommen!”), and the following law on the other: “to avoid giving foreign visitors a negative impression, signs with strong language will be removed. ‘Jews unwelcome here,’ will suffice.”
Speaking with German and non-German Europeans, some young people expressed some exasperation with efforts like this. The thought is essentially, “we know that this took place, that these laws were enacted and were evil — we’ve been remembering for decades now. But we have to move on eventually.” Stih and Schnock’s signs, though, have much less to do with memory and the disseminating of history than these reactions would suggest. There are other ways to learn about the history of anti-Semitic Nazi laws: the excellent Jewish Museum in Berlin, for instance, has a wealth of information. But the placing of signs in a residential neighborhood outside the main drags of the city, their pop-art colors and present-tense phrasing, all works to do something other than bring the past to us in the form of historical fact. The impatient desire to move on from the past can only arise from the belief that the past and present are neatly separable, that there is some discrete event or time to move on from and somewhere beyond to move on to; if anything these signs assure us that this is not possible. But again, they don’t do this by reminding us of something — something that happened, that was done by some to some others — but by placing a possibility, or better a reality into the present. And by articulating that reality with punchy color and bitter humor — “Welcome!” — it becomes harder to assure ourselves that what’s done is done, or that we can move on now, or that only unusually cruel humans, which we certainly are not, could do such things (just think of Russia’s new law banning “gay propaganda”).
On that Sunday in August, Stih and Schnock’s signs were competing for attention with others kinds of signs; not only traffic and city regulations, but massive political posters in anticipation of Germany’s upcoming national election. In other neighborhoods — Wedding, Kreuzberg, and Neuköln especially — one finds alongside the political posters signs both in support of and critical of the crowded refugee center in the suburb of Hellersdorf, where many asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan are housed. Berlin has recently seen a rise in visible neo-Nazi activity; this month, NDP party supporters showed up in Hellersdorf to protest the arrival of asylum seekers, carrying signs saying, “Tolerant today — tomorrow we are strangers in our own country,” and “Maria, not ‘Sharia,’” accompanied by a picture of a flaxen-haired German woman juxtaposed with a woman in a niqab. In bars now it is common to see signs out front stating “Nazis are not welcome.” In such a climate, Stih and Schnock’s work no longer seems like a relic, but instead as a voice in a contemporary and frightening contest for allegiance, as part of reality as history.
In his radio lectures titled “At the Mind’s Limits,” the Jewish French intellectual and Holocaust survivor Jean Améry said that he holds onto his resentment so that the crimes against him can become a “moral reality,” in order that “history become moral.” Améry was concerned, skeptical, and furious that the German and international community seemed to so swiftly embrace a culture of forgiveness, before the scope and reality of the harm and brutality of the Nazi regime was acknowledged, before any responsibility or guilt was shouldered. Decades on, there is a no-less-urgent need to acknowledge that reality, to challenge ourselves to recognize that we haven’t yet, cannot ever, fully appropriate responsibility for that reality, don’t yet know what proper acknowledgment would mean. Stih and Schnock’s work seems to be part of that effort to make history moral, to make reality moral.
Image courtesy the author
Last month, a group of women between the ages of 25 and 35 got together in Los Angeles to talk about Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom. I was one of these women. I loved the idea of getting together to discuss a big book, one that people across the nation were also buying, and reading, and meeting to talk about. It felt like we were participating in a cultural moment–it was like getting a Cabbage Patch Kid in the 1980s. Plus, there would be snacks.
Patty! I’m with you on the Autobiography. (Mistakes Were Made? Was Patty a twenty-something blogger?) Less with you on believable–when I read Freedom (which I loved), I thought a lot about why I was so riveted by a book whose main character seemed so… unlikely.
With the exception of Melissa the coed, the women in The Corrections felt more plausible to me.
By the way, it comforts me to know that there was extended confab about what Patty actually looked like. Franzen was not forthcoming on this subject, except about height and toned arms. I need visuals!
I kept thinking about his portrayal about the interior life of a depressed woman. I thought he got Richard’s depression in a way that he never got Patty’s. He described her actions as the actions of a depressed woman (namely, drinking too much) but we never really got to see her disillusionment in a way that felt real to me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the book, and I loved the autobiography, but it was a woman as described by a man, for sure.
I think Franzen is not terribly good at women. Patty’s great. But the others? What inner life is Hallberg talking about? I wrote about it on my blog so I won’t go into detail here (it’s at http://chelseyhotel.blogspot.com/2010/10/writerly-spectacles.html), but overall I think the characterizations are reductive and thin.
The book group is in LA and you didn’t relay the requisite closing question: who would be cast as each character? Careful, that omission could get you thrown out of tinsel town. In the midst of my multi-hour LA based discussion, I asked whether a men’s book group would focus so much on Patty or would they see more in Walter and Richard, who we found a bit stereotypical and flat. SPOILER ALERT: I found the ending unrealistic and that caused a flurry of discussion until I asked “would you get back together with your ex-husband?” At which point every divorced woman in the room (whether she wanted the divorce or not) looked horrified.
As a writer, I’d say that when it comes to the inner lives of women, Franzen can’t hold a candle to Trollope.
Just to stir up the pot, a few obvious questions:
1. Apart from Franzen, are there any living male writers who write well about women?
2. If there are, what makes them different from men who don’t write well about women?
3. Joyce Carol Oates and Pauline Kael both said that the greatest writers are neither particularly male nor particularly female in their viewpoint. Any thoughts on this? Is it just the rationalization of an older generation of women who were trying to get the male literary establishment to take them seriously, or is there something worthwhile to their opinion?
4. Is Franzen being scapegoated for larger issues — the sexism of society in general and of the literary establishment in particular? Or are there good reasons to hold him particularly accountable as a symbol of these issues?
Thanks for all your comments. Chelsey, I really enjoyed your blog post–very well said! We talked a lot about Connie in the group. Some of us found her to be a cipher, and only a cipher. Others found her cipher quality to be incredibly complicated and fascinating. We all wanted more Jessica, and we wondered at her absence of perspective.
Lydia, I agree that The Corrections had better female characters overall. I still think of Denise when I’m cooking…
Kim, our club actually talked a lot about Walter and Richard’s relationship, and we did wonder how male readers reacted to their conflict and connection. Someone wondered if Franzen had considered a particular gender for his reader. That is, is this a book written for men? Or was that not a question in his mind? He certainly had his misgivings about going on Oprah (the first time) because he’d had the hope of getting men to read fiction.
Great questions, Bill! Everyone in my group thought men could write about women, and women could write about men. If not, then we would have very little faith in fiction. But what one woman finds believable, accurate and complex about a male-created female character might strike another female reader as unbelievable, inaccurate, simplistic, and so on. I mean, one’s consciousness isn’t wholly defined by gender, and not all women think the same, nor do all men think the same. So it’s murky territory.
I think Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn is a great example of a believable and nuanced female character. I think Tom Drury’s female characters are great too, and Dan Chaon’s, Charles Baxter’s, William Styron’s. These are just from the bookcase next to me! It’s harder to pinpoint why some writers can’t write characters–it has less to do with gender, in my mind, and more about a failure of imagination and deeply inhabiting that character’s consciousness. It’s as if the writer can’t truly get into that character’s experience of the world, can only see it through a veil of assumptions, stereotypes, etc. Perhaps, a male writer who writes a female character poorly cannot see beyond her body and what he perceives as her feelings for men–she is wholly created by the men around her. Of course, women writers could also be guilty of this. And, some women might actually be like this.
Your third question is really making me think. I hope someone else weighs in on it!
I certainly think Franzen’s been blamed for a whole lot that has nothing to do with him and the book. It’s not his fault who does and doesn’t get reviewed in the NY Times, for instance.
My response to Franzen’s work is that Sartre was right: hell is other people.
like totally?
this article reads like a tell-all about justin beiber
worth mentioning.
Totes. I wish Franzen Fever sounded as good as Beiber Fever.
And just, fyi, this post is meant to entertain and amuse.
OMG ROFLMAO
Franzin? Maybe this isn’t altogether to the purpose, but I am concerned about those brave Millions readers who fret over Franzin’s Freedom, a book that, if I have it correctly, is THE searing written record of the present day, a living chronicle of the times, yet still manage to misspell the surname of the times’ biggest star, lamentable and incredible though that stardom might be. Probably there are greater things to worry about in this world than the spelling of “Justin Bieber.” Of course there are. Sure there are those for whom the AMA’s can’t quite match up to the NBA’s, and Twitter might be just a platform for Kanye and kids with smartphones and a field of free time to play in. But the mistake, if it was one, made me feel weird. The fact that it was made twice made me feel even weirder. If the move was intentional, I withdraw the comment. If not, I join in ROFLMAO.
Edan at al: First, I loved “Mistakes Were Made” and found those sections the most compelling and insightful of the entire book. I am eager, though, to get a female perspective on those chapters, so thanks very much for the post.
You say that you “did not buy the conceit of her autobiography” and asked “Why present these words as Patty’s, when they are really the author’s, barely concealing himself?” Since I loved the autobiography, I thought the idea of Patty writing objectively about herself (at the request of her therapist, she indicates) in the third person made a ton of sense as a conceit. I would feel much more comfortable, were I to try and write a memoir, making myself a character in the narrative of my own life. I can imagine, therefore, that Patty would feel similarly — especially in regard to those episodes in her life she is ashamed of, or embarrassed to recount.
Further, is “Mistakes Were Made” all that different, in terms of form, than writing from a limited 3rd person perspective? The rest of the book, when narrated in the 3rd person, still seems to come from the perspective of one of the characters — for instance, we feel inside the head of Joey, even though he’s not actually narrating his own sections, whereas we never get inside the minds of Connie or Jenna. Is “Mistakes Were Made” so different? I appreciated the break from a true (limited) 3rd person perspective to get a more questionable blend of 1st and 3rd person narration in the form of the autobiography. The perspective is not terribly different from the rest of the book, but you feel closer to Patty’s understanding of herself. Structurally, I also appreciated the change of pace offered by the autobiography sections.
In terms of the writing itself, I never feel strongly that the narrative/writing styles of different characters need to be wildly different. (Maybe that’s intellectually lazy on my part.) I’m aware at all times that Franzen is at the wheel, while appreciating that he switches lanes, so the readers (passengers in his car) can get different perspectives from different characters. I really don’t need each section to be written in utterly different vernacular or idiom; I get what the Actual Author is doing and simply appreciate the different perspectives without concerning myself so much with form or word choice. It’s like an author telling me that a character is southern. I can hear that character just fine without needing the text itself to be full of “y’all”s and “dang”s.
Hi Martin,
Thanks for your thoughts! For me, the ‘conceit’ of Patty’s autobiography, in theory, is great–I like the idea of a first person writing in the third person, for the sake of self understanding and whatnot. It’s how Franzen executed it that I had trouble with. He didn’t really commit to the conceit, in my opinion. If Patty were truly writing this part, in the third person, about herself, it would be pretty different than the other sections in the book–if Franzen wanted this section to be similar in voice/style as the other sections, then why introduce the conceit?
I had no trouble with the other sections of the book, narratively speaking, or with their veracity of voice/character. The more elevated third person sections at the opening and ending were well-handled, and the close third person sections, with Joey, Walter and Richard, read smoothly as well. In these, yes, you get a sense that Franzen is narrating, while also channeling the character’s consciousness. A classic example of James Wood’s Free Indirect third person perspective. (I think that’s what Wood calls it….)
But with Patty’s section, I wanted more, because it was presented as a first person character writing it, in the third person. In that case, I don’t want to feel Jonathan Franzen there–I want to truly believe that Patty is writing this, that she is attempting self-presentation. But aside from a few early attempts–the random capitalization of words being the most apparent–it didn’t seem like Franzen was really invested in Patty’s consciousness, to make it believable. Perhaps he didn’t want to sacrifice the wit and skill of his prose; that’s fine, but why the conceit then? In the end, I kept feeling Franzen hijacking her voice and style, and I wondered why he didn’t just do the free indirect style, if that’s what the narrative seemed to want to do, perspective-wise.
How do you submit a book for review?
Charlotte, that info is very easy to find on the site. (Hint: click on “About”)…
Am on page 165, but from the off have been struggling to get over this whole autobiographical thing.
Seems as though every 20 pages or so, Franzen’ll throw in the occasional ‘according to the autobiographer’ line just to remind us who’s writing.
But given the amount of dialogue contained are we meant to overlook that fact?
Disappointingly not doing it for me based on that simple conundrum.
Must surely be missing something.