Theory and Reflection in Gorra's "The Bells in Their Silence"

The Bells in their Silence by Michael GorraFor my second book on this blog, I took Steve’s suggestion and read The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany by Michael Gorra. Written in 2004, the book is able to offer a refreshing perspective (at least for me) on Germany. Then, in this book, Germany is not constructed in terms of a decadent 1920’s veering on a depressed 30’s and ending in the Third Reich. Rather, Germany is granted a level of modernity only because Gorra allows Germany the agency of reflection. I would argue that the main issue surrounding seeing Germany as a premodern place, as many North Americans (tourist or otherwise) have seen or continue to see it, lies in believing that Germany has in no way looked upon its past in a critical way. I remembering seeing this Family Guy episode after having returned from Germany and being frustrated by the common, while simultaneously humorous, portrayal of Germany as a nation that only exists currently because of a renunciation of its past. Similarly, I find that the members of my family who identify as Jewish, especially ethnically/culturally Jewish, refuse to believe that Germany has entered the modern era. I really liked this blog post by Emily-Kate for discussing the problems of representation that pervade American logic. While she worked to debunk the epistemic violence of the production of Africa and Vietnam as “HIV/AIDS hot spots” through comparative statistics, I believe that, while it might be possible to do the same for Germany by looking at this data-collection in the U.S., it is more effective to analyze works such as Gorra’s to see exactly how the culture of Germany is produced in terms of a reflection on (as opposed to a manifestation or denial of) it’s complicated past.
The book is written in the first-person. Gorra, an English professor at Smith, is writing his travelogue about Germany based on what he justifiably notes as a lack of literature on the subject. As an English scholar, though, Gorra is thankfully entrenched in the discursive production of Germany vis-à-vis literature, especially modern literature. In his preface, Gorra writes “[travel books] foreground the search for understanding [thereby they] shift our attention to the quest for knowledge and away from its final fruits” (xvi-xvii). With this in mind, Gorra is approaching the writing of his “extended essay” with a self-reflex uncommon to travelogues. He is not only trying to document his metaphorical travel to an understanding, but also trying to “pierce the wanderer’s fog” or debunk the discourse around Germany.
For examples of this type of work, I look to the chapter entitled “The Dentist’s House,” in which he explores several works that have specifically influenced how Germany is thought of. He critically engages with a 1996 bestseller entitled Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Goldhagen apparently belabors the point that Hitler’s S.S. could have only existed because of Germans having a deep-rooted hatred of Jews that they chose to exercise. It seems that while Goldhagen could have taken an approach that assessed the psychological and sociological operations of people, especially people with their own lives at risk, or even through an assessment that simply problematized the often-debunked equation of Germany as a natural killing zone, even then, Goldhagen would much rather offer a much simpler argument that systematically prevents Germany from escaping itself, as he might imagine it trying to do. Then, Gorra is fairly quickly able to explain just how Goldhagen’s argument is insufficient. Goldhagen attempts to theorize that Germans suffered some type of autism that did not allow them to rationally conceive their own crimes as crimes. In exploiting this section of the text, Gorra can justifiably point to how Goldhagen must draw upon work that isn’t reliant a natural connection of “German” to “Nazi.” (80-82).
But Bells does not simply engage in some type of survey of recent German literature, he also does much more theoretical work. Gorra’s piece made me rethink topics such as the project of memorialization. Referring again back to Gorra’s preface, he writes that he imagines his book as analogous to “countermonuments” (as theorized by James Young). That is, as a countermonument, Bells is able to exist as a “brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial [space] conceived to challenge the very [premise] of [its] being” (xvii). I understand this to mean that his novel works against prior notions but would not exist without these prior notions. He is deconstructing but, by doing so, is actively acknowledging a construction. This is an incredible notion, but one that might seem difficult to grapple with.
In trying to deal with this complicated figuring of the text, I look to a passage in the very first chapter, “Cultural Capital” in which Gorra discusses the museum Buchenwald (formerly the Nazi work camp Buchenwald). He assesses that “the exhibits at Buchenwald began to note both the East German omissions and the Soviet Crimes” (20). Because the museum itself serves as a nationalist display of Germany’s success over fascism, those who died and were imprisoned in Buchenwald become political prisoners rather than the targets of (otherwise) irrational, hate crimes. Bells memorializes the lives that have been lost through critiquing an existing monument who may counter-intuitively have been missed or misrepresented.
I, then, figure this on a trajectory of colonialism that I have been attempting to configure throughout this semester in order to help me try to assess the current ways that Germany operates. I feel that I can see a modern construction of Germany that is based in, first, a Medieval, then Renaissance past that I simply do not have the education to discuss, then moved through conflict with Prussia and Austria, bursting into the modern age through colonialism in the 1870’s when these other conflicts had been settled. Then, in its exploitation of African land and people, Germany situated itself as culturally-proper as compared to the rest of Europe until the Third Reich burned out with the invasion of the U.S. and Russia at which point Germany itself became a colonial site. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, Germany was divided under Russia, and is therefore a current postcolonial site. While its transition into being understood as culturally-relevant (to the West) has been eased by being of the West and therefore operating on similar historical, literary, and relational logics, that does not change the fact that there is still much work to be done. I rather like the idea of using Germany as a model for postcolonialism, which is not to say that there is not a great deal of critique to be said of this model. I simply think that if we, being of the West and being white, analyze the representational violence that has befallen Germany since the Third Reich, we can understand how we might also try to analyze the type of violence that has befallen the great majority of Africa, Latin America, Hawai’i and our own Native population in a way that, perhaps, we could use constructively. However, I’ll admit the obvious critique upfront: Germany would like to be recognized in terms of being in line we proper Western modernity, whereas these other nations need to be understood with different analytic tools that do