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PARTISAN REVIEW
daily life as well as in religious practices. Still, as Rosenberg's writers also
observed, people's relations to German-Jewish culture differed greatly
between subgenerational groups, depending upon the age of arrival in
America, on whether they were married there or here, had American–
born children or themselves were born in America. Moreover, the
younger people
all
along were moving away from Washington Heights
long before the 1970s, and "German Jewishness is very much attenuated."
Thus Lowenstein's prediction that "the thousand-year-old German-Jewish
tradition" will merge into the larger American Ashkenazic Jewish tradi–
tion jibes with the
Testimonies
and the
Legacies.
Puntigam
or
the Art of Forgetting
is a novel about former Nazis and
collaborators from Graz, Styria - one of the strongholds of National
Socialism both before and during Hitler's reign. Enthusiastic Nazis, fel–
low travellers, convinced communists and would-be dissidents are repre–
sented as the protagonists in this lively story by Gerald Szyszkowitz, a
novelist, television producer and playwright. He is "imagining" the distaff
side of the Holocaust, mentioning it in passing, as the death of the Jew–
ish Dr. Wertheimer is reported after
Kristallnacht,
as one or another sol–
dier talks about the "camps" to Marianne, the daughter of the mill
owner who had been an illegal Nazi until the day the Germans marched
in and he became aware of their true colors. Though based on actual
and creditable characters, from Marianne whose bent for truth no longer
allows her to continue as a journalist after the Anschluss, to her cousin
Friedemann who always knew how to swim on top of the tide, to the
courageous communist Mattl, and to Thaya, the author does not pull
any punches. He makes clear that there were few Austrians dauntless
enough to oppose the Nazis, to join a resistance movement, and that the
myth of Austria as the first of its victims served not only the former Nazis
who came back
en masse
to take public office but helped the country get
on its economic feet.
This book deserves mentioning because it is one of the few that
deals with the most dishonorable part of Austria's past - a past that hit
the headlines when Bundespresident Kurt Waldheim's shameful lies about
his active collaboration were disclosed and, unaware that sometimes the
truth does surface, some of his countrymen began to ask the questions
their German brothers had been asking for some time.
Together, these books represent a cross-section of Holocaust liter–
ature. From Bauman's abstract theorizing to Lowenstein's empirical
study of one emigrant community, from Rosenberg's writers' and
Szyszkowitz's imagining of victims and perpetrators to the reconstruc–
tions by some of Rosenberg's and
all
of Peck's contributors, we learn
more than we want to know about the Holocaust. Since I am one of
