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At latest since US-American series Transparent, a central sis of epigenetics has arrived in popular knowledge: idea that traumatic experiences can enroll in human genetic material and thus transfer to next generation.
At Susanne Fritz, this relatively young part of inheritance doctrine is only mentioned in a subsidiary. What is really amazing – because in your book how comes war into child is all about influence of trauma on subsequent generations. But wher se are genetically inherited or rar transferred to family memory, author leaves open.
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Since childhood, 1964, born in Black Forest, knows anecdotal fragments from her mor’s memory Arsenal, which refer to an indeterminate earlier: shameful procedure of bald-cutting, “Turn on command” in crowded sleeping places. Long before fragments result in a coherent narrative, Fritz meets anor Boomerang from past: with onset of puberty, mor dissociates herself from her, as if she wanted to take daughter in a kind of extended clan. “Captive Child” is chapter heading, which refers both to inaccessible, taboo past, as well as to feeling of young, to be stuck in parents ‘ silence. It can be classified and processed in a literary process, experience, said, and especially unspoken years after death of mor.
Search and reminder Process
A fingerprint, left on a well-seventy-year-old document, makes research roll. In April 1945, Fritz’s mor, who is fleeing from Red Army with her family, is arrested by Soviet secret police. Five years earlier, as or members of her family, she had been included in German People’s list as a Polish citizen. An act which now, with collapse of Third Reich, is interpreted as “waste from Polish nationality” and “popular treason”. Her far, a member of NSDAP and a temporary police officer, is already dead in her capture. The 14-year-old has to pay for attitude of her parents: she is brought to labour camp Potulice and provides three years of forced labour on a Polish Staatsgut before she is released 1948 to Germany and sees her family again.
How comes war in child is denied illusion of being able to produce a coherent narrative in retrospect. Instead of ATVs found pieces chronologically, Fritz lets ir readers participate in ir own search and remembrance process, in short sections, in which present and past collide with each or, sometimes even against one anor. She travels to Poland, researches in archives, interviews historians, contemporary witnesses and still living family members. Realistic prose à la Ralf Rothmann, who brings her ancestors to life fictitiously, author provides us only in a few passages – and always with reference that it could also have been quite different.
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Especially her grandparents, Jerzy and Elzbieta, Georg and Elisabeth, quickly gain in shape. If you are at first “locked up a story that escapes me, prisoners of a language I do not speak”, you will soon be aware of how you manage grandfar’s bakery in Swarzędz. At same time, small town near Poznan reflects changing history of Poland: Every few years streets and squares are renamed; Schwersenz becomes Swarzędz, Schwaningen and Swarzędz again. From September 1939, Nazis are rehearsing segregation, expulsion and annihilation, which will also be implemented in German Reich. Georg, Elisabeth and her children belong to German minority, which now enjoys privileges and reaches some prosperity. However, y maintain mode of concealment and silence, wher it is about purchase of a vacuum cleaner (n a luxury), Georg’s activity as a protective policeman or handling of Polish employees.
The silence command goes through generations and paralyzes author’s writing process in now: “I want to tell something and I can’t.” Although mor can no longer forbid her mouth in real terms, “with death do not end relationship and mutual agreements”.
