A Past Without Shadow: Constructing the Past in German Books for Children

by Zohar Shavit

A Past Without Shadow examines 50 years of German children's books in which the darkest horrors of the Third Reich have routinely remained hidden. The horrors of the Third Reich are systematically screened and filtered, allowing the darker, bleaker parts of history to escape illumination. Here Zohar Shavit explores 345 German books for children describing the Third Reich and the Holocaust, and finds a shocking distortion of the past: a recurrent narrative which suggests that the Germans themselves had no hand in the suffering inflicted on the Jews. These books, Shavit argues, have created the false historical lesson that the real victims of Hitler's crimes were the German people themselves.

First published to great acclaim in Hebrew and now available in English, this book is a wake-up call for anyone concerned about German children's literature and its responsibility to past and future.

353 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Zohar Shavit incumbent of the Porter Chair of Semiotics and Culture Research, Vice dean for research, a full professor at the School for Cultural Studies and the Chairperson of the Program in Research of Child and Youth Culture at Tel Aviv University. She is an internationally renowned authority on the history of Israeli culture, child and youth culture, and Hebrew and Jewish cultures, especially in the context of their relations with various European cultures.

She is the author of ten books, among them:The Literary Life in Eretz-Israel, 1910-1933,The Construction of Hebrew Culture in Eretz Israel,A Past without Shadow, and German-Jewish Literature for Children and Adolescents

Reviews

[Manybooks · Rating 2 out of 5]

While Zohar Shavit does indeed make some (and actually a good many) astute and important observations in A Past Without Shadow, and certainly speaks more than a bit of truth with regard to recent historical fiction German language children's books that are set in the Nazi era rather too often and sadly being a bit too adamant about wanting to portray protagonists as heroes/heroines, who might be German, but who are first and foremost totally against Hitler and Naziism (as while for me as a German, these types of scenarios might be more pleasant to read than narrative situations in which the characters either agree with National Socialism or do not ever do anything much to rock the proverbial boat so to speak, the reality is that heroics, although they did occasionally happen, were in fact and indeed few and far between), the extreme and vehement one-sidedness of the author, and basically Zohar Shavit brooking no argument towards assertions that German children could of course not in any manner have also been victims of the Nazis, that attitude is not only woefully unbalanced at best (as German children were also the victims of Hitler, not ever of course as much victims as in particular the Jews, but nevertheless victims), A Past Without Shadow tends to also feel (and most frustratingly and uncomfortably) as though I am reading an authorial attitude that no matter what, ALL Germans both then and now are potential National Socialists and that even those of us born decades after WWII are at best tainted and at worst even now, even in 2018 and beyond just as equally guilty of Nazi atrocities, of the Holocaust, as Hitler, as Goebbels, as Himmler, as the individuals who actually and in fact organised and carried out the genocide(s).

And really, in some ways (and I write these words knowing full well that they will probably chafe and even feel offensive to some if not perhaps even many) A Past Without Shadow has actually rather chillingly and frighteningly reminded me with its often aggressively condemning and viscous tone of voice, expression and mindset of precisely some of the putrid and racially horrifying pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish philosophies and propagandistic literary "theories" that I had to read at university, when we were studying and discussing, critically analysing the Third Reich in literature and philosophy (in other words, Zohar Shavit does in my opinion far too frequently make academic use of some of EXACTLY THE SAME rhetoric against Germany, against seemingly ALL Germans, past and present, that the National Socialists and their propagandists used against Jews, against Gypsies, against Social Democrats, against anyone not deemed by them as "German" enough, really frustrating and majorly annoying, saddening even, as the oh so very many good points and important observations the author does make in A Past Without Shadow are unfortunately more than somewhat lost and drowned out in and by her seemingly actively despising anyone who is German, as while I have most certainly found A Past Without Shadow interesting and very much enlightening to a point, it also has from page one felt as though Zohar Shavit totally really does seem to actively despise me simply because of my ethnicity, simply because I am, just because I happen to be German, and with that attitude, Shavit's tone totally reminds me of Adolf Hitler and company).

And yes, I do find it both ironic and more than a bit problematically worrisome that some of the works most vociferously condemned by Zohar Shavit as according to her wrongfully also showing that German children were equally victims of Hitler and the Nazis have also often been similarly and equally despised by the extreme RIGHT WING in Germany as being "traitorously" critical of Hitler, as being supposedly anti-German (for it has certainly thrown me for a major loop to have Zohar Shavit and extreme Neo Nazi German right wingers both and with rather the same types of words condemn Sybil Gräfin Schönfeldt's 1979 novel Sonderappell which describes a teenaged girl's experience in the BDM and her increasingly critical attitudes towards Hitler, as well as her feelings of guilt, with basically pretty much an identical critical vehemence and downright evil sounding rhetoric). Still somewhat recommended, but with in my opinion very definitely necessary required reservations and the further caveat that A Past Without Shadow is also penned in a dense, literary theory jargon-thick academic snobbery type of style (and of course, I also cannot tell if it is Zohar Shavit's original Hebrew text, Aaron Jaffe's translation or both which are stylistically overly convoluted and generally too intellectually heavy duty to be an easy and above all approachable reading experience).