The cover of THE LANGUAGE OF SILENCE tells the story. It is a memorial wall at a Grunewald, Germany, train station. The solid wall surrounds cut out forms of people looking as if they are the ones at the front of the line ready to board the trains. But there are no actual people there, just their remembered shapes.
In an erudite exploration of West German literature, Ernestine Schlant details how the Holocaust has been covered or ignored by authors representing various generations from the ones who were adults during that time to their grandchildren. The differences are stark.
Immediately following the Holocaust, authors tended to either ignore what happened to the victims, mostly Jewish for the purposes of this book, and, at times, focused on the suffering of the Germans: Their leader died, their cities were bombed, they lacked the food and other goods. Many Germans continued to be anti-Semitic. The few Jews who were mentioned had often converted and were unattached to the Jewish community. This matched the reality of the society. Many of the perpetrators, especially civil servants, judges, and military personnel, retained their jobs, received pensions while the survivors of the concentration camps received little compensation, if any.
It was only when the younger generations, especially those who were born long after the Holocaust, began their writings, did they begin to examine what happened to the Jews and why. Distance determined how close they got to the subject as well as how they portrayed both the Germans and the Jews: Who were the victims? What did the others do? Why?
A video of Schlant discussing the book is available at http://www.c-span.org/video/?155648-1/book-discussion-language-silence. ( )