Art of Denial

By R.Z. Sheppard

What Ernestine Schlant remembers about her childhood in Nazi Germany is, oddly, the freedom. She lived in the Bavarian city of Passau, where most mothers were working and fathers were away in the military. "We six- and seven-year-olds used to sneak into the movies to see old Shirley Temple films," says Schlant, a professor of German at Montclair State University in New Jersey and the wife of Bill Bradley, former U.S. Senator and current challenger for the White House. Later Schlant learned that less than two miles from Passau, hundreds of civilian prisoners were being worked to death at a slave-labor camp--a detail that never came up in polite conversation.

The Language of Silence (Routledge; 277 pages; $20.99) is in a sense Schlant's response to that reticence. Formally, the book is a study of postwar West German literature. But it has a stinging moral premise: that even the country's most liberal writers of the period committed sins of omission when dealing with the legacy of mass murder. Schlant's evidence is eye opening. The late '40s, for example, were dominated by a "literature of rubble," which dealt narrowly with Germany's wartime suffering. An anthology of stories published by the school of writers known famously as Group 47 contained no mention of Jews.

Schlant boldly puts a society's literature on the couch, but her underlying meaning is also strong: only individuals are capable of feeling grief and the release that comes with mourning the loss of innocence. Change, therefore, must come one good book and one generous gesture at a time.

--By R.Z. Sheppard