Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006
_______________________________________________________________
Seifener,
Christoph. Schauspieler-Leben: Autobiographisches Schreiben und Exilerfahrung.
Frankfurt a.M.., Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien.
Peter Lang Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2005. 386 p.
Paperback ISBN 3-631-53828-6. Price:
$62.95 € 56.50
Reviewed
by
Indiana
University Southeast
Autobiography
is a curious genre: neither fish nor fowl, a hybrid between fiction and
non-fiction, it imposes narrative structure on life and attributes meaning
retroactively. But what if life is disrupted so violently that the genre’s
traditional pattern of growth and continuity, which it shares with the classic
bildungsroman, can no longer provide coherence?
This
is one of the questions that Christoph Seifner explores in Schauspieler-Leben:
Autobiographisches Schreiben und Exilerfahrung,[i] a study of more
than two dozen autobiographies of actors and actresses whose life came to a halt
when they had to leave Nazi Germany for racial or political reasons. At the core
of Seifener’s argument is the question whether the traumatic experience of
exile can be contained within the literary framework of this genre. In a concise
but effective introduction, he argues that the dependence of autobiography on
fictional patterns makes it a literary rather than a historical genre.
Therefore, his study investigates the authors’ narrative negotiations between
literary form and individual life story. His focus is on the tensions resulting
from the discrepancy between the genre’s demand for coherence on the one hand,
and the disruption and discontinuity of their lives through persecution and
emigration on the other. In fact, Seifener anticipates certain textual breaks
and incongruities which he sets out to describe circumstantially in nine
chapters (Chapter One being the introduction, Eight the conclusion, and Nine the
list of works cited) to demonstrate that the genre of autobiography is hardly
expedient for the exiles’ reflections on their political implication, guilt
and responsibility.
The Second Chapter, “Erinnerung
und Gedächtnis” (recollection and memory)
provides the theoretical underpinnings of Seifener’s study. He
discusses the current scholarship on memory in various disciplines, including
literary, social and psychological studies. In an impressive sweep through the
scholarly literature--from Paul de Man to Maurice Halbwachs, Alida and Jan
Assman and Stefan Granzow, to name just a few--, he carves out his own position
which links memory and identity and conceives of both as socially mediated
rather than individually generated. He finds pertinent theoretical support in
Peter Sloterdijk’s socio-literary approach which introduces the concept of
“Störerfahrung” (disruption experience) as a suitable tool to investigate
the representation of exile in autobiography. For Seifener the autobiographies
of the actors and actresses he selected have special historical significance:
they connect the history of the Third Reich with post-war Germany from the
viewpoint of the victim and thus to prevent forgetting
while challenging the interpretive authority of the perpetrators (“Täter”).
His carefully crafted theoretical framework provides a valuable reference point
to which the reader can return whenever the argument appears submerged by the
numerous examples in the following chapters.
The question to what extent the
genre itself may have shaped the representation of exile
is at the center of the Third Chapter. Seifener explores how much room is
given to exile in each narrative, i.e. whether it is considered marginal or
central to the writer’s history or, as in some cases, almost completely left
out. This chapter is challenging for the reader, for Seifener keeps adding
several qualifiers and categories (such as the differentiation between communist
and ‘bourgeois’ positions, between Jewish and communist exile, and the
writers’ ability to connect the personal story with the larger political
context or not). While such subtle differentiation is laudable because
inclusiveness and particularization may do justice to the complexity of the
subject, it can be demanding for the reader, who might have been better served
with more summarizing or exemplary case demonstrations. One may also wonder
whether it would have been helpful to provide short biographies of the many
actors and actresses, whose names maybe familiar to the German readers but
(except for Marlene Dietrich) not to an international audience.
Seifener’s description of different patterns of identification (with
collective or individual histories and with the profession) among the exiles
leads over into Chapter Four, where he introduces a major premise of his study,
i.e. the link between literary strategies of autobiography and the specifics of
the theatrical profession. Such
relationships between text and life are shown on several levels. For instance, a
great number of emigrants who fled to the United States were unable to
assimilate successfully because of their almost snobbish claim to high art,
their own celebrity, and a professional training that did not fit the different
performance styles on Broadway or in Hollywood. Professional identification also
appears to be relevant as a textual strategy, since several writers use
theatrical forms of representation (such as ironical distancing or alleged
spontaneity) to “stage” their own lives for an audience. But, as Seifener
shrewdly observes, the autobiographers’ aestheticization of their lives often
prevents a critical perception of the political dimensions and, therefore, an
effective analysis of the larger historical context.
In Chapter Five, Seifener modifies his investigation to ask whether the authors
may still create a meaningful and continuous life story despite the fragmenting
and disruptive experience of exile [“sinnhafte, individuelle Kontinuitäten
bezogen auf ihr Leben als Ganzes”(211)]. Here, his differentiation between ‘bourgeois’ and communist actors
proves to be helpful and relevant. It comes as a surprise to the reader that
communist writers can successfully apply the traditional (‘bourgeois’)
bildungsroman model to create consistent and continuous life stories. Seifener
finds the reason for this in their handling of exile as part of an ongoing
political engagement which began before their emigration and continued on their
return to (communist) East Germany. Since these actors and actresses always
understood their profession as a political mission, they are also able to unify
their personal, professional and historical experience in their autobiographies
under the banner of their ideology. Differently, their bourgeois colleagues (who
mostly returned to West Germany), could not apply the traditional literary
patterns as successfully because they could not unify their lives in coherent
political or ideological terms. Thus their autobiographical texts reveal a
greater number of gaps and tensions.
Seifner also dedicates a small
portion of this chapter to gender differences. He basically confirms the
findings of two scholars (Sabine Backhaus-Lautenschläger and Heike Klapdor) who
have investigated the special situation of women in exile. As observed in the
autobiographies of most actresses, Seifener claims,
women tend to subordinate their own experience to that of their male
partners. Granted that gender is not a major focus in this study, one may
wonder, though, if a closer look at the extensive and differentiated scholarship
of the female bildungsroman (which obviously uses different strategies than the
male model) may have yielded more interesting results.
In the next chapter Seifener further
investigates how the autobiographers’ language--or lack thereof (“Sprachlosigkeit”)--affects
the evaluation of their lives in larger historical or political terms. The
frequent use of mythological or even supernatural terms in reference to Hitler
and Nazi Germany reveals that few actors and actresses have been able to
rationalize the political side of their experience. Several of them simply avoid
political issues or resolve them in individual and personal terms. But, as
Seifener is ready to point out, there are also significant exceptions, such as
Fritz Kortner and Walter Wicclair, whose autobiographies connect their
own lives critically with larger psychological
and political contexts.
Towards the end, Seifener includes a
brief analysis of the authors’ experiences in their exile countries, which he
sees as an important condition for their more or less successful return to
Germany after the war. Because of the central role of language in their
profession, the actors and actresses who emigrated to the United States had more
difficulty adapting to the new culture and, especially, the theater, while those
who spent their exile in Switzerland could continue their career with less
interruption. It maybe interesting for most readers to learn that the return of
the exiles, especially to West Germany, could be an alienating experience. Not
only did they find it difficult to reconcile past and present from their émigré
position, but their re-entry was further complicated when the theater community
showed a certain reluctance to welcome or even give jobs to these expatriates.
Therefore, several autobiographies treat the return as a continuation of exile.
Finally, Seifener pulls together the
complex and sometimes lengthy case studies in a pointed and effective
conclusion, which gives the reader a clear overview of the main arguments. In
fact, introduction and conclusion provide the reader with the necessary
framework from which to re-enter the book’s detailed descriptions with more
focus and understanding. All told, Schauspieler-Leben: Autobiographisches
Schreiben und Exilerfahrung is a valuable contribution to the scholarship of
exile, theater, and genre that helps scholars understand yet another aspect of
Germany’s relationship with its difficult past.
[i]
A rough translation of the title could be “Life of actors:
autobiographical narrative and the experience of exile.”[CZ]