The Establishment, Dissolution, and Restoration of Heimat in German-Jewish Narratives by Stefanie Zweig and Jeanine Meerapfel

Abstract

Writers and filmmakers of second-generation Holocaust survivors often seek to establish tenuous continuities between their parents’ pre-exile Heimat and their own experiences of German culture through their artistic works. The novelist Stefanie Zweig and the filmmaker Jeanine Meerapfel, as members of the second generation, have composed narratives that create such continuities and their complexities in the search for place and the quest for belonging. This dissertation focuses on Zweig’s novels of the Rothschildallee (2008-2012) and Meerapfel’s feature film Der deutsche Freund (2012), narratives that tell stories of this quest for Heimat from the perspectives of the first and second generations, and analyzes the complexities of this search. To elucidate aspects of this search for place and belonging, this analysis works with conceptual tools borrowed from cultural geography and the Bakhtinian chronotope. The application of material and non-material traces from cultural geography in the analysis of these works reveals the unique character of German-Jewish geography as presented in these narratives. Through the Bakhtinian chronotope, an in-depth analysis of Heimat at a given time and of its changes over time reveals the complex relationships between time, space, and places in both public and private spheres. The house and the threshold emerge as the most important chronotopes in the narratives and evolve from novel to novel and from the written to the cinematic medium. This analysis discusses the challenges of establishing Heimat from the perspective of the parent generation. The house in the Rothschildallee becomes symbolic of German-Jewish culture in its negotiation between the public and private spheres while the threshold here becomes a point of momentous crossings. Furthermore, it identifies the children’s attitudes towards and expectations of the Heimat which their parents created for them. For the child generation, the threshold develops into a significant place of departures and arrivals that reveal the socio-cultural struggles for the younger Sternbergs. Over time, the chronotopes of the house and threshold respond to the processes of dissolution and restoration of Heimat, showing the interdependencies of the public and private spheres. Finally the analysis shows the difficulties in establishing and maintaining Heimat across different houses and thresholds set in various cultural geographies This analysis contributes to the study of Heimat from a German-Jewish perspective and points to developments in German-Jewish literature that has again become part of scholarly discourse in post-World War II literature and cinema. Zweig’s novels commemorate the German-Jewish Bildungsbürgertum and acknowledge the daily struggles involved in establishing Heimat. Meerapfel’s film treats the pursuit of a German-Jewish Heimat as one strand of a much broader story about the post-war quest for a place of home in two countries faced with the aftermath of exile and war crimes.