Viola Roggenkamp

Last updated
Viola Roggenkamp
ViolaRoggenkamp2005.jpg
Viola Roggenkamp in 2005
Born(1948-04-15)15 April 1948
Occupations
  • Journalist
  • commentator
  • feminist activist
  • author
Parent
  • Paul Roggenkamp (father)

Viola Roggenkamp (born 15 April 1948) is a German journalist-commentator and writer. The themes to which she most often returns are those surrounding Feminism and Judaism in Germany during and following the brutish middle years of the twentieth century. Although these topics have been much revisited by scholars and critics throughout her lifetime, several of Roggenkamp's own perspectives and conclusions are well outside the mainstream. Her output includes (but is not limited to) literary portraits, essays, opinion pieces and novels. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Contents

Life and works

Viola Roggenkamp was born and grew up in Hamburg. [1] Although she has relocated abroad at several points during her adult life, it is to Hamburg that she has always returned, despite having a somewhat conflicted and at times alienated relationship with the city. [3] [6] It was in Hamburg that her parents had ended up "following the liberation" in 1945, having lived "illegally" in Polish Silesia during the wartime Polish occupation. After her father died (but while her mother was still alive) she explored her parents' lives during the war years in her 2011 semi-novel, "Tochter und Vater". [7] Discussing the book with an interviewer she later explained that "the daughter is not me, but the father in the novel is my father. My father did all the courag[e]ous and unbelievable things [as a secret member of the Polish resistance in Kraków] that Paul, the father in the novel, did". [4]

She studied Psychology, Philosophy and Music and then set out on her travels. During the later 1970s she visited India where she stayed for seven or eight months, living under the simplest of conditions and producing reports and stories about her surroundings for a German readership. She returned to Hamburg, but there have been frequent return trips to south Asia since then. Every time she returned to Germany, she told an interviewer later, the conditions back home came as a shock. She would notice how much more thinly spread the human population was in Hamburg than in India, and how the German supermarkets seemed troublingly overstocked. [3] For two years between 1989 and 1991 Roggenkamp lived in Israel. [2]

Throughout her itinerant years she worked as a free-lance journalist, regularly contributing thoughtful well-researched pieces in the (West) German press, most notably and regularly for the Hamburg-based weekly mass-circulation national newspaper Die Zeit, for which she wrote regularly between 1976 and 2013. [8] In 1977 Roggenkamp was a founder member of the team around Alice Schwarzer that created the magazine EMMA. [9] (The name of the magazine is a wordplay based on the word "emancipation". [10] ) She worked for EMMA as a free-lance reporter till the early 1990s. [1] For four years between 2000 and 2004 she provided a regular column for the progressive centre-left cooperative-owned newspaper "taz". [5] [11] Since 1990 she has been writing for the Berlin-based weekly publication die Jüdische Allgemeine. [5] [12] [13] In 2016 she became, in addition, a regular contributor to the monthly magazine, Cicero. [3]

"I am a German Jewess. I am the daughter of a Jewess. And in my judgment Judaism is no mere question of belief.”
"Ich bin deutsche Jüdin. Ich bin die Tochter einer Jüdin; und meiner Meinung nach ist Judentum keine Glaubensfrage."
Viola Roggenkamp in conversation with Michael Wolffsohn and Andreas Main
Deutschlandfunk radio interview, 22 September 2016. [14]

Roggenkamp's first published "novel" appeared only in 2004. "Familienleben" ("Family life"), which can be described as an "autobiographically inspired novel", was well received by leading critics. [15] Recommended to television viewers by the influential presenter and literary critic Elke Heidenreich, it quickly proved a commercial success, notwithstanding its unfashionable length. [15] It runs to more than 400 pages and has been translated into a number of different languages. [16] [17] The narrator-protagonist is a 13-year-old child called Fania. Fania is the younger of the parents' two daughters. The narrative deals with the daily life of a German-Jewish family living in Hamburg in 1967. In her powerfully positive review of the book in Der Spiegel, Jana Hensel provides a little context: "For three decades Viola Roggenkamp kept her project for a novel to herself. The result, now, is an almost eerily perfect book ... All the characters in it are perfectly defined with great dramatic clarity, replete with their psychological contradictions". [15] The relationship between holocaust survivors and their children in Germany was the underlying theme both of "Familienleben" and of Roggenkamp's next book, "Die Frau im Turm" ("The woman in the tower") which appeared in 2009. [18] "Tochter und Vater" (2011) again incorporated as its starting point and at its core, the author's own experiences, and what she had discerned of her parents' lives in Silesia during the war. [7] Her mother was dead by the time she started writing this third book, and had, with tact but also evident difficulty, refrained from asking questions about the earlier work, "Familienleben" after Viola had admitted that she was writing it. Nevertheless, the author sent her mother a copy in the mail and was surprised by the reaction: "After she read the book, she told me she was surprised to discover that I was aware of the trauma she carried with her. She always thought she protected me and my sister from all that." [4] The three books driven by her own experiences of growing up as the child of holocaust survivors in Hamburg only came after years of soul searching and quiet enquiry about the experiences of German Jews who had grown up in Germany as the children of holocaust survivors. By the end of the twentieth century there had been plenty published by then children of parents who had perpetrated holocaust killings and other acts of persecution – or simply quietly colluded, taking care not to follow up the rumours of what was going on in the camps. But there had been virtual silence from the children in Germany of holocaust survivors who simply wanted to forget, and lived under the shadow of a deeply entrenched terror that somehow, it could all happen again one day. There were, in any case, not too many holocaust survivors who had ended up bringing up children still living in Germany. From the perspective of a writer with insights to share, as Roggenkamp has told at least one interviewer, her "family suffered, but [she is] lucky to have [her] non-typical background." [4] But her experiences are nevertheless in many respects far from unique: before publishing the three books based on her own childhood experiences she had already, in 2002, published "Tu mir eine Liebe. Meine Mamme" (loosely, "Be a love... My mummy"). [19] The subtitle is more enlightening than the main title: "Jüdische Frauen und Männer in Deutschland sprechen von ihrer Mutter" ("Jewish women and men in Germany talk about their mothers"). The volume is based on 26 interview-portraits in which higher-profile Germans talk about their mothers, all of whom are holocaust survivors. The interviewees include Stefan Heym, [20] Esther Dischereit, [21] Wladimir Kaminer, [21] Rachel Salamander, [21] Stefanie Zweig, [20] and Michael Wolffsohn. [20] Most of these are members of Roggenkamp's own generation or younger, and so unable to remember the holocaust on their own account: yet all of them have had their lives defined by the holocaust, primarily through the effect the experiences of it had on their mothers. Survivor guilt is, perhaps, the most frequently recurring of the Leitmotiven identified in the interviews. [3] [4] [19] Prior to the volume's publication the interview-portraits had already been published individually in Jüdische Allgemeine. [22]

Erika Mann controversy

In 2005 Viola Roggenkamp published a lengthy essay – some identify it as a short book – on Erika Mann, a daughter – probably her father's favourite daughter – of Thomas Mann. The essay was entitled "Erika Mann. Eine jüdische Tochter": it reignited the smouldering controversy about Erika Mann's own attitude to her mother's Jewish ancestry. For many people Thomas Mann was the greatest German language writer of the twentieth century. Roggenkamp's contribution concerning his attitude to his wife's Jewish provenance was bound to attract attention. Roggenkamp asserted that although much had been written about Thomas and Katia Mann, Katia's Jewish ancestry had been very little delved into, beyond bald statements recording the fact that she had, like her mother and like her children, been baptised (as a Christian). Roggenkamp was particularly critical, in this respect, of so-called "Mann-experts" such as Heinrich Breloer, as well as Inge and Walter Jens. Roggenkamp contended that the tendency of the Mann family (along with their many admirers and other researchers) to ignore the Jewish roots of Thomas Mann's wealthy father-in-law, Alfred Pringsheim amounted to denial and was deeply damaging. [23] From California, the scholar (and Vienna-born holocaust survivor) Ruth Klüger summarized Roggenkamp's position for readers of Die Welt: [24]

Klüger is strongly positive about Roggenkamp's imputations as to Erika Mann's inner thoughts and beliefs. Her insistence that much of the book's explosive impact comes from a wider context, in which discussion of the fate of German Jewry during the post-war period has been suppressed, is a judgement that Roggenkamp self-evidently shares. The summary to her review is overwhelmingly supportive: [24]

Another expatriate observer, Manfred Koch, writing in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, was less sympathetic: [25]

Commentators piled in on both sides. (Some were even content to try colonizing the middle ground.) Viola Roggenkamp's public profile, along with appreciation of her insights, were permanently raised and enhanced. Roland H. Wiegenstein applied a little psychological interpretation of his own in Die Berliner Literaturkritik, suggesting that Roggenkamp's decision to share her conclusions on Erika Mann's denial of her Jewishness was,

Tilmann Lahme, who provided his review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, is deeply underwhelmed. He does not think that Roggenkamp had found out too much about why Erika Mann, like her mother before her, wanted nothing to do with her Jewish roots. But he has discovered plenty about Roggenkamp's own grief over the loss of Jewish lives in Germany, and about her anger, "although it remains unclear why this is principally directed against Thomas Mann". [27]

Notes

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    References

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    3. 1 2 3 4 5 "Deutsche Jüdin ohne Heimat". Ein Portrait der deutsch-jüdischen Schriftstellerin Viola Roggenkamp, die über 25 Jahre für die Zeit schrieb und zum Gründungsteam der Emma gehörte. Obwohl sie vor über 60 Jahren in Hamburg geboren wurde, ist sie nach langen Reisen immer wieder über die deutschen Verhältnisse schockiert. Res Publica Verlags GmbH (Cicero), Berlin. Retrieved 15 August 2021.
    4. 1 2 3 4 5 Bat-El Alon (29 November 2011). ""Viele haben noch Nazis als Eltern"". Die Buchautorin Viola Roggenkamp spricht über ihr aktuelles Buch "Tochter und Vater" und den Unterschied zwischen jüdischem und deutschem Publikum. Auf Englisch. Frankfurter Rundschau . Retrieved 15 August 2021.
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    13. Viola Roggenkamp (19 January 2016). "Flüchtlingspolitik: Die Diktatur des Guten". Deutschland muss endlich aufhören, Größenfantasien zu erliegen. Jüdische Allgemeine, Berlin. Retrieved 15 August 2021.
    14. "Auch Juden dürfen kritisiert werden". Religionskritik – wie geht das richtig? .... Viola Roggenkamp und Michael Wolffsohn im Gespräch mit Andreas Main. Deutschlandradio, Köln. 22 September 2016. Retrieved 16 August 2021.
    15. 1 2 3 Jana Hensel [in German] (9 April 2004). "Im Garten ist die Welt zu Ende". Viola Roggenkamp erzählt in ihrem späten Romandebüt »Familienleben« eindrucksvoll über eine jüdische Kindheit im Hamburg der sechziger Jahre. Der Spiegel (online). Retrieved 15 August 2021.
    16. "Viola Roggenkamp über ihre deutsch-jüdische Familie ..." Rezension. Bildungswerk der Erzdiözese Köln e.V. ("Domradio"), Köln. 3 June 2011. Retrieved 15 August 2021.
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    18. Ruth Klüger (18 July 2009). "Viola Roggenkamp besucht eine Frau im Turm". Rezension. Axel Springer SE (Welt und N24Doku), Berlin. Retrieved 15 August 2021.
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    20. 1 2 3 ""Tu mir eine Liebe – Meine Mamme" Eine Lesung mit Viola Roggenkamp über die jiddische Mamme". Pressemitteilung: Dienstag, 4. November, 19.30 Uhr in der Stadtbibliothek (Pre-publicity for a lecture to be delivered in the Paderborn city library by Viola Roggenkamp. Amt für Öffentlichkeitsarbeit und Stadtmarketing, Paderborn. 24 October 2003. Retrieved 16 August 2021.
    21. 1 2 3 Elisabeth von Thadden. "Was gehen einen die Mütter von Juden in Deutschland an? .... 14 Töchter und 13 Söhne". Rezension. Mosse Verlag Berlin, 2002 & Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag Frankfurt a. M. 2005. Retrieved 16 August 2021.
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    23. Isabel Rohner (2006). "Über das verleugnete Jüdische. Viola Roggenkamp ermöglicht einen neuen Blick auf die Familie Mann-Pringsheim .... Rezension: Viola Roggenkamp Erika Mann – Eine jüdische Tochter. Über Erlesenes und Verleugnetes in der Familie Mann-Pringsheim". Click on "Download full text files". Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (Komparatistik Online). Retrieved 16 August 2021.
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    25. 1 2 Manfred Koch [in German] (5 November 2005). "Die Amazone des Zauberers: Neuerscheinungen zu Erika Manns 100. Geburtstag .... Einseitige Perspektive". Erika Mann. Eine jüdische Tochter von Viola Roggenkamp: Rezensionen/Reviews. Neue Zürcher Zeitung & Arlindo Nogueira Marques Correia. Retrieved 16 August 2021.
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    27. Tilmann Lahme [in German] (9 November 2005). "Wotans Tochter". "Was für eine sonderbare Familie sind wir! Man wird später Bücher über uns – nicht nur über einzelne von uns – schreiben." Eine hellsichtige Prophezeiung Klaus Manns: Längst sind die Manns literarischer Pop. Das hat seine Schattenseiten: Wer ein ihm auf den Nägeln brennendes Thema popularisieren möchte ... Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . Retrieved 16 August 2021.