Transforming Ritual Across Continents: Anna Mitgutsch’s Narrative of Memory Wenn du wiederkommst

CHRISTINA GUENTHER* Bowling Green State University, Ohio Transforming Ritual Across Continents Anna Mitgutsch’s Narrative of Memory W enn du wiederkommst 1 Jewish tradition and ritual figure prominently in the novels and documentaries of contemporary Austrian and German Jewish artists. Barbara Honigmann, formerly of East Germany and now living in France, opens her 1991 novel Eine Liebe aus nichts [A Love Made Out of Nothing]2 with the funeral of her protagonist’s father. Novelist Vladimir Vertlib centers his 2003 mystery novel Letzter Wunsch [Last Wish]3 on the difficulties a son faces in granting his father’s request for proper burial beside his wife. Filmmaker Ruth Beckermann’s documentary Zorro’s Bar Mitzvah (2006)4 celebrates bar and bat mitzvahs in twenty-first century Vienna. With their insistence on uniting past and future by means of the rituals of death and mourning, the three most recent novels of Austrian writer Anna Mitgutsch (b. 1948) offer post-Holocaust narratives for families lost from the continuity of generations. Known among literary scholars as grand “narratives of memory,” Haus der Kindheit [House of Childhood] (2000), Familienfest [Family Gathering](2003), and Wenn du wiederkommst [When You Return](2010),5 identify the on-going practice of ritual as the dynamic connecting a past remembered to a life fulfilled. All three of Mitgutsch’s latest novels counter death and loss with narratives of Jewish family tradition and ritual and, incidentally, are set primarily in the United States. In House of Childhood, protagonist Max Berman is the youngest son of Jewish immigrants who escaped the fate of their extended family murdered by the National Socialists. Able finally to reclaim and restore his mother’s family home after a lengthy legal battle, * cb Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License Email: 1 I would like to extend special thanks Nancy Michael, Margy Gerber and the anonymous readers for their helpful comments and suggestions. 2 Barbara Honigmann, Eine Liebe aus nichts (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1991). 3 Vladimir Vertlib, Letzter Wunsch (Wien: Deuticke, 2003). 4 Ruth Beckermann, Zorros Bar Mitzwah/ Zorro’s Bar Mitzvah (Austria 2006) Director/Writer: Ruth Beckermann; Cinematography: Leena Koppe; Production Company: Ruth-Beckermann-Filmproduktion. 5 Anna Mitgutsch, Haus der Kindheit (München: Luchterhand, 2000); Familienfest (München: Luchterhand, 2003); Wenn du wiederkommst (München: Luchterhand, 2010). 88 andererseits Vol. 3 Berman returns to Austria and reestablishes the suppressed history of the Jews by chronicling the individual life stories of members of Jewish families who had lived in the region for over seven centuries. As surrounding novel, House of Childhood forms its own commemorative frame-story to broaden the scope of Max Berman’s “Chronicle of Jewish Life.” As Regina Kecht argues, Mitgutsch’s novel belongs to the tradition of Yizkor Bikher, or memorial books for future generations, which document and describe Jewish communities in Eastern Europe destroyed during the Holocaust.6 Family Gathering, the story of an immigrant family that spans the 20th century, embodies their reenactment of the Pesach Seder and contrasts it with an American Thanksgiving dinner.7 In this novel, Mitgutsch explores how consecutive generations living in the United States perceive and adapt to their evolving sense of a transnational Jewish identity. Central to When You Return are the Jewish rituals of mourning, and this article will focus on how Mitgutsch translates the practice of these rituals into the art of narrative. When You Return begins in Boston with an April encounter between the European protagonist Michal and her Jewish-American ex-husband Jerome, both well past middle age and exploring the tenuous rebirth of their love. The rest of the novel is devoted to the protagonist’s response to the sudden death of her ex-partner, the father of her only child. In the attempt, written in the first person, to fathom the loss of the most significant person in her adult life, Michal initially realizes that the rupture of death has left her speechless and helpless. Indeed, the novel represents the narrator’s work of mourning or Trauerarbeit, her attempt to process her traumatic loss by writing her way out of the dark silent void into which her beloved friend’s death plunges her.8 Clearly, the work of grieving is by necessity creative work, as Michal continually probes the limits of human understanding, of what can be explained or articulated in the face of death. In the initial stages of mourning Michal’s approach to the death of her ex-husband Jerome must follow other narratives of death, as her 6 Regina Kecht, “Traditionen des Gedenkens: Anna Mitgutsch, Haus der Kindheit,” Chilufim: Zeitschrift für Jüdische Kulturgeschichte, No. 6 (2009), 17-74: 25. 7 For a discussion of ritual in Familienfest, see Christina Guenther, “The Poetics of Ritual in Diaspora: Anna Mitgutsch’s Familienfest and Vladimir Vertlib’s Letzter Wunsch,” Journal of Austrian Studies, Vo. 45 (2012), 93-118. 8 The protagonist manifests the features that Sigmund Freud identifies as central in the grieving work that must be completed if an individual is to reach closure, i.e. for the ego to become free and uninhibited again. (Sigmund Freud, “Trauer und Melancholie (1917),” in Das Ich und das Es: Metapsychologische Schriften. Ed. Alex Holder (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2007): 171-189. 2013 GUENTHER: Transforming Ritual Across Continents 89 daughter Ilana surmises.9 The grieving Michal thus places herself implicitly in the role of Orpheus in pursuit of his beloved Eurydice;10 like Orpheus, she comes to realize that in the face of death both present and future stand foreclosed. Mourning her beloved, Michal hovers at first in a space beyond reason and language. Struggling to articulate what the death of her dearest friend means, she describes that loss as “inconceivable, the elusive and most alien strangeness . . . [I]n the face of death, words lose their meaning; only silence is appropriate.”11 She finds, however, that through words she can, to a degree, keep him present by describing spaces they inhabited together: Boston and the park bench where they met for the last time, the events and discussions that make up a lifetime. Photographs and possessions, too, allow her to re-imagine his life and to recall their life together. Ultimately, the novel represents Michal’s process of remembering, indeed reviving, her life partner Jerome, a mode of repeating both their life together and her loss translated and adapted into a literary form. The process of translating, and taming, the past into a literary present allows the narrator space and time to begin to work through and gain what Dominick LaCapra calls “a critical distance . . . to be able to distinguish between the past, present and future.” 12 Michal never truly transcends the traumatic loss of her life partner in the novel, however. The past, to (...truncated)