On the campaign trail, she’s Mrs. Bill Bradley, wife of the former U.S. senator who hopes to topple Al Gore from the Democratic ticket in 2000. But take her away from politics and Mrs. Bradley becomes Dr. Ernestine Schlant, whose book “The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust” was published last month.
“Now that the book is done, I’m more than happy to give whatever time I can to the campaign,” Schlant said earlier this month in San Francisco. Her Bay Area visit held a dual purpose — her book tour neatly dovetailed with her husband’s campaign fund-raiser at the Palace Hotel. On the whole, though, they’re not coordinating appearances, she said.
Outfitted in beige corduroy slacks, a tweed jacket and a flowered scarf, the German-born Schlant looked nothing if not professorial as she sat in the hotel’s Garden Court sipping herbal tea. “I consider myself volunteer No. 1,” she said of her husband’s campaign.
In “The Language of Silence,” she examines what she refers to as “blind spots” in the way post-war German writers deal with the Shoah. Literature, she said, “is the seismograph of national consciousness.”
Born in the 1930s in the southeastern German town of Passau, Schlant, who is not Jewish, followed a high school history syllabus that “stopped at Bismarck.” She wrote the book out of a conviction that Germany needs to “break its silence and express remorse” over the Holocaust. These days, she said, “The Holocaust is taught in schools, but I’m not sure how well.”
In the book, she identifies several phases in modern German literature. Writers like Heinrich Böll and Wolfgang Koeppen in the first postwar decade “examined the rubble” left by the war. But rather than dealing directly with the Holocaust, Schlant said, these writers fell back on “stereotypes and symbolic locutions.”
In Böll’s 1950 short story “Across the Bridge,” for example, a clerical worker says of a set of folders that “I don’t know what was in them…all I remember is that the folders were yellow.” The color yellow refers to the stars worn by Jews during the war, yet “if you don’t understand what that means, the story’s lost on you,” Schlant said.
In the second phase, inspired by the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and the 1963 to 1965 Auschwitz trials in Germany, legalese provided a “ready-made language” that authors began to appropriate. Works by Rolf Hochhuth and Martin Walser received wide attention, but in literary terms, “the language was inauthentic,” Schlant said.
And while Schlant feels recent works such as Bernard Schlink’s “The Reader” have been written with more sensitivity, she criticized Schlink’s decision to make the novel’s SS guard — a key character — illiterate.
“Is Schlink trying to say that only people with deficiencies joined the SS? If so, he’s clearly wrong. And if it’s an accident that she’s illiterate, why give it so much prominence?”
After 10 years of researching and writing “The Language of Silence,” Schlant said she was glad to see more openness emerging in Germany. She’d found two post-unification novels, Peter Schneider’s “Couplings” and W.G. Sebald’s “The Emigrants,” that deal more directly with Holocaust issues, and she praised an exchange program in which German high school students speak in American schools.
“These young people are not wallowing in self-pity or using the Holocaust as a club with which to beat their parents; they’re speaking as young Germans, attempting to show their sorrow and be understood.”
Schlant herself will be lecturing until the end of the semester at Montclair State University in New Jersey, then joining the campaign full time. Giving a rallying speech might not demand as much subtlety as lecturing on literature. But she was looking forward to the challenges ahead.
“It’s a unique and tremendous experience. I could only feel terrible if I didn’t give my all to it.”