GER305: Final Paper

Sarah Bernold, Lauren Brewer, and Thomas Hopkins

W hat is the nature of trauma and how can survivors write about it?
Can they even write about it at all? We have posed these questions or permutations of these
questions throughout the semester. There are multiple issues we can address. In the texts
that follow, we each analyze three different aspects of this representation: the similarities
between female and childhood trauma, the portrayal of perpetrators, and the unassimilable
nature of a traumatic childhood. Perhaps our volume here is not a singular work for the
differing approaches each paper takes, but we maintain some grounding through a similar
text. Sarah Bernold analyzes Still Alive by Ruth Klüger; Lauren Brewer looks at The Reader
by Bernhard Schlink; Thomas Hopkins discusses Pavel’s Letters by Monika Maron. We all
compare our respective text with Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone in order to gain wider
perspective on trauma and the many ways of approaching it.

table of contents
Still Alive: Female and Childhood Experiences, Sarah Bernold page 2
The Portrayal and Perpetration of Violence, Lauren Brewer page 5
Assimilating the Unassimilable: Trauma in Childhood, Thomas Hopkins page 10
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Still Alive: Female and Childhood Experiences

Sarah Bernold
It may seem that accounts of male Holocaust survivors are more numerous than those from women.

While this may be true, women did share their personal stories of their experiences during the Holo-

caust. One example is Ruth Klüger’s autobiographical text, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered,

that was published in English in 2001. She writes in what seems to be a stream of consciousness, creating

an illusion that the reader is having a conversation with Klüger as she narrates her life before, during, and

after the Holocaust, interjecting thoughts as she recalls them. Setting Klüger apart from other Holocaust

survivor authors are the facts that she is female and she was also a child in the camps that survived the

tragedy. Similarly, in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier author Ishmael Beah tells his story of

being a child soldier in Sierra Leone at the age of 12 and explains how he ended up in America. Klüger

divides her book into five sections: Part One:Vienna, Part Two: The Camps, Part Three: Germany, Part

Four: New York, and the fifth part is the Epilogue. Part One begins in Vienna, Austria, in which Klüger

gives the reader an insight into her life before her transport to three concentration camps: Theresien-

stadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Christianstadt. Part Two encompasses her life during her stay in There-

sienstadt, which she calls a “ghetto,” although it is viewed today as a concentration camp. Klüger also gives

accounts of her stay in Auschwitz- Birkenau and Christianstadt. The story of her escape is told in Part

Three, and Part Four tells about her life in New York and her new home, the United States of America.

Writing this narrative because she felt, “comfort through projection,” Klüger expresses her story and re-

lated experiences that occurred after gaining her freedom (Klüger 98). Some may say that women were

not treated as brutally as men during the Holocaust, but, as seen in events throughout Klüger’s writing,

women were treated as brutally as the men. Their individual experiences were different.
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Women have, in the past, been stereotypically seen as small, weak, nonthreatening and the like. Be-

cause of this, some believe that in the concentration camps, women were treated better and endured less

than the men. Instead, the truth is that the treatment of women was equally as cruel as the men, but the

women just “had different survival capabilities,” such as forming bonds and helping one another (Ringel-

heim 170). Readers see an example of this in Klüger’s new “sister,” Susi, who Klüger’s mother effectively

adopts in a camp—they form a bond in which they share food and support each other.

There is a similar case in A Long Way Gone, demonstrating that this does not make women less

capable than men. Joan Ringleheim explained that the “women’s relationships with other women were

significantly different from those of men with other men” (Ringelheim 175). The men were seen to have

“fought” for their freedom alone and to have relied only on themselves, but for Beah it was different. Al-

though he walked and made part of his journey alone, he attempted to find his friends and family. With

his friend, Kaloko, he “looked in the thick forest for Junior and our friends,” but only found a family they

knew (Beah 45). He and his friends traveled to different villages in search of their families; they did not

want to be alone, so he and his friends stayed together as long as they could, surviving off of each other,

just as the women did.

During her first trip back to Germany since her immigration to America, Klüger encounters a

woman, referred to by Klüger as Gisela, who believes that the camps, and what the captured Jews en-

dured, were not that terrible, (Klüger 73). Gisela also says that “Auschwitz … must have been a pretty

tough place for a young girl,” creating a boundary between treatment of genders (Klüger 79). While, in

comparison to the death camps, Theresienstadt may not have been as awful, these two statements by

Gisela are incorrect. In Theresienstadt, Klüger was kept in a small room with many girls, and in Aus-

chwitz “sexual distinctions … were totally eliminated” (Ringelheim 175). This was done in many ways,
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such as by cutting off the women’s hair. The reason for this might be to minimize physical differences

between the men and women or to take away the dignity of the women. For Beah, it was not too differ-

ent. Those killing the people did distinguish between men, women, or children. If they were not part of

their group then they were killed. Beah and his friends experienced this first hand when a village had just

been under attack and they saw, “more than twenty people lay[ing] facedown in the earth. They were all

lined up, and blood [was] still pour[ing] out of their bullet wounds” (Beah 94). Witnessing this, as an

adult or a child, is unimaginable.

This did not stop the women or Beah and his friends from being strong and forging through. Even

though the difficulty of the jobs the men were assigned to do is widely known, the women did the same.

Klüger, along with many others, were “assigned to do men’s work,” and successfully completed the tasks,

just as the men did (Klüger 119). Although the Nazi women had fewer opportunities to “commit crimes,”

the Nazi women “were just as wicked as the men,” says Klüger (Klüger 115). The women and Beah and

his friends fought just as hard as the men for their lives. Beah and his friends walked for days and weeks

to reach humans and hopefully be safe, but instead they found an army that they were essentially forced

into joining and brainwashed, violent, and emotionless

On many accounts, Klüger has shown that women are not meek, helpless humans, but strong, able

people. Ruth Klüger provides her accounts in a different way than usually expected—dramatized and

ending with the liberation—by adding in her thoughts of her life after her liberation. While the men typ-

ically perform the more difficult tasks, women in the Holocaust, although overlooked, experienced what

the men did in regards to work and treatment. Even though the women creating what could be described

as little families—and could be said as a result of their weakness—it was their way of survival. Through

her narrative, Klüger has represented women, specifically during and after the Holocaust as strong and
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capable of anything. This has some similarities with Ishmael Beah’s time as a child soldier, where he, too,

banded together with other boys for support in a time of unimaginable crisis, indicating that the differ-

ence between men and women in these crises is more individual than gender-specific.
annotated bibliography
Ringelheim, Joan Miriam. “The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the
Holocaust.” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, Vol. 1. Chappaqua, NY: Rossel
Books, 1984.
Ruth Klüger is a female victim who Ringelheim addresses in the excerpt. I will use this piece to help illustrate the differ-
ences between how the men and women acted in the Holocaust, the similarities and differences of how Klüger, and Beah
acted as children.
Klüger, Ruth. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New York:
The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 2001. Print.
I will be discussing memory, similarities in how the experiences have changed them, and self-representation written in
first person in Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive and Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone.

The Portrayal and Perpetration of Violence

Lauren Brewer
Both The Reader by Bernhard Schlink and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael

Beah discuss the perpetration of violence and trauma as well as their aftereffects. The Reader is set in a

post-World War II Germany where a young boy (and later, a grown man) forms a relationship with a

woman whom he later finds out participated in the mass killings of the Holocaust. Ishmael Beah’s novel

is the story of an adolescent boy thrown into a violent war between the Sierra Leonean government and

a group named the Revolutionary United Front. This novel is a recollection of his experiences in the

middle of the violence and later as a perpetrator of violence, ending with his rehabilitation. Both promi-

nent characters in these novels commit violent acts without being portrayed as inherently violent, evil

individuals, although their situations and time periods are vastly different from one another.

In The Reader, the protagonist falls in love with an older woman named Hanna Schmitz and later

finds out, during a war crimes trial he observes, that she was previously a concentration camp guard dur-

ing the second World War. She and five other women are put on trial for allowing the Jewish women they
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commanded at the camp to die in the fire of a locked church during the evacuation of the camp. During

the trial, Hanna is asked about the reasoning behind her joining the SS.

“‘I … I mean … so what would you have done?’ Hanna meant it as a serious question. She did not

know what she should or could have done differently, and therefore wanted to hear from the judge,

who seemed to know everything, what he would have done” (Schlink 111).

This example of Hanna’s lack of understanding clearly illustrates the fact that she did not join the SS out

of an evil malice and disregard for human life, but rather as a lack of a better alternative.

“‘There are matters one simply cannot get drawn into, that one must distance oneself from, if the

price is not life and limb. […] So should I have … should I have not … should I have not signed up

at Siemens?’” (Schlink 112).

Throughout the rest of the trial, the acts that Hanna allegedly orchestrated are bought forth to the

court and most of the audience reacts in horror. The readers, along with the protagonist, are eventually

led to the realization that Hanna was and is illiterate. Instead of letting this be revealed to the court,

Hanna repeatedly admits to various acts that could have only been committed if she could read and

write; she is eventually sentenced to life in prison because of this. Despite her violent associations in the

past, Michael Berg, the protagonist, continues to have conflicted feelings toward her.

“No, Hanna had not decided in favor of crime. She had decided against a promotion at Siemens,

and fell into a job as a guard. … She must have been completely exhausted. Her struggle was not

limited to the trial. She was struggling, as she had always had struggled, not to show what she could

do but hide what she couldn’t do” (Schlink 134).

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Michael’s opinion of Hanna is in stark contrast with other observers of the trial, who view her as a sadis-

tic individual that murdered out of personal desire.

A Long Way Gone is the personal memoir of Ishmael Beah, who, during a national conflict in his

home country of Sierra Leone, is forcibly conscripted into the army and taught how to become a ruthless

killer as a young teenager. Beah describes the moment when he is given the “choice” to become a soldier or

leave on his own without food or knowledge of his surroundings: “‘The rebels will kill anyone from this

village because they will consider us their enemy…’ We had no choice. Leaving the village was as good as

being dead” (Beah 107). Ishmael is supervised by adult guards who teach him how to kill without think-

ing and become desensitized to violence and gore.

“Suddenly, as if someone was shooting them inside my brain, all the massacres I had seen since

the day I was touched by war began flashing in my head. Every time I stopped shooting to change

magazines and saw my two young lifeless friends, I angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and

killed more people” (119).

Ishmael is not ideologically opposed to his enemies, or even seemingly in fear of being killed himself.

He doing exactly what his captors had planned for him to do: become a blind killer against those who are

allegedly to blame for all the violence around them, those who “do not deserve to live” as described by a

military leader (108). Instead of fighting for a cause he believes in, Ishmael has become a political pawn

for the government that captured him and forced him to kill.

In a selection from her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt describes the normalcy of

those individuals who perpetuate mass murders in the context of war: “… many were neither perverted

nor sadistic, … they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal” (Arendt 249). This is a common
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theme in both A Long Way Gone and The Reader; the two individuals that committed acts of violence in

the novels were not driven by sadistic desire but rather by outstanding forces that may have been able to

be avoided but were not chosen in any respects.

Although Ishmael is not regarded as guilty in any sense in A Long Way Gone, Hanna is indeed tried

as a war criminal. In his article, “Trauma and Transference,” Saul Friedlander quotes Dominick LaCapra:

“The Holocaust presents the historian with transference in the most traumatic form conceivable –

but in a form that will vary with the difference in subject position of the analyst. Whether the

historian or analyst is a survivor, a relative of survivors, a former Nazi, a former collaborator…”

(Friedlander 206).

The retelling of memory and its discussion will vary greatly depending on who is telling the account and

who is listening, especially when the event is extremely traumatic and personal. Hanna’s account of the

evacuation of the concentration camp naturally differs greatly from the account of a woman who survived

the fire. Both of these perspectives are also different from Michael’s, who was not even alive at the time

the event occurred. He only knows of the situation through other accounts and has a personal interest in

Hanna. To the survivor, Hanna is extremely evil and warrants no sympathy, but Michael fantasizes about

being with her: “I dreamed of Hanna and myself in a house in the autumn-blazed hills that were lining

our route. … My longing for Hanna became so strong it hurt” (Schlink 210–211).

Within these two novels, certain individuals that commit grave, violent acts against a plethora of

victims are given a chance to be seen through a deeper perspective than that of a mere listing of their

crimes. Yet, in A Long Way Gone, some soldiers are not portrayed as being forced to be killers:
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“…suddenly three rebels rose from behind the dried grasses and pointed their guns at Gibrilla,

who was in the front. They cocked their guns, and one of them placed the muzzle of his gun under

Gibrilla’s chin. ‘He is scared like a soaked monkey,’ the rebel laughingly told his companions” (Beah

31).

This portrayal of other criminals as inherently violent, self-serving individuals is somewhat echoed in

The Reader, although not as directly.

“Once Hanna admitted having written the report, the other defendants had an easy game to play.

When Hanna had not been acting alone, they claimed, she had pressured, threatened, and forced

the others. She had seized command” (Schlink 135).

Is this the same oversimplification of all malefactors as being inherently evil or purely the honest recol-

lection of events?

Hannah Arendt argues that simplifying all criminals into unnatural, mentally ill individuals is com-

forting to the majority of humanity in that it is much easier to imagine that the world is just and that

those who deviate from behavioral norms and commit violence must be inherently different. However, as

The Reader and A Long Way Gone illustrate, there are many more factors involved in deciding whether

one person becomes a murderer than simply their own innate desires and temperament. Both Hanna

and Ishmael were victims in the sense of their social situation; with Ishmael, this is obvious as he is physi-

cally captured and forced to kill. Hanna was also heavily influenced by a variety of factors that may have

encouraged her criminality, such as her fear of being exposed as illiterate in a modern society and her

lack of education. A clear, well-defined line between “those who victimize” and “those who are victims”

cannot easily be drawn by only taking one perspective into account. In this sense, the ability to overcome
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past trauma and accurately represent different historical experiences, such as with the Holocaust or any

incident of genocide, does not solely lie in the punishment of the perpetrators, but rather in the analysis

of the social forces and government actions that contributed to the beginning of conflict and encouraging

of personal violence.

annotated bibliography
Arendt, Hanna. “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings.
Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. 246–251.
“Eichmann in Jerusalem” discusses perpetration of mass violent crime and whether individuals who commit
these crimes are sadistic and mentally ill or instead normal individuals that have become desensitized to
radical behaviors. In comparing and contrasting The Reader and A Long Way Gone, this article will
facilitate the discussion of perpetrators and their motivations.
Friedlander, Saul. “Trauma and Transference.” The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings.
Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
In this essay, “Trauma and Transference” is used to illustrate the ways in which personal perspectives
of one event can be wildly different. Friedlander discusses the ways in which, depending on the position
of the one analyzing the event, broad differences in understanding can create fragmentation and even a
misrepresentation of the occurrence.
Schlink, Bernhard. The Reader. New York: Vintage, 1998.
With The Reader, Schlink creates a sympathetic female perpetrator character and with this explores the por-
trayal of women in Holocaust literature. Within this essay, The Reader will be compared and contrasted with
A Long Way Gone and its depiction of both female characters and violent perpetrators.

Assimilating the Unassimilable: Trauma in Childhood

Thomas Hopkins

Childhood is a unique period. This is true in many senses. From a biological perspective, childhood is

unique even among primates, a group including species as diverse as tarsiers, gelada baboons, chimpan-

zees, and, of course, humans. Other primates spend a longer time as infants and adolescents, but, as

Meredith Small argues in her book Kids, they are never children. Consistent with this, zoologists and

primatologists describe non-human primate life stages with words like “infancy,” “juvenile,” and “adult-

hood.” Childhood is not among them. Primates have a longer period before adulthood because we, on
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the whole, need more time to become acquainted with the complex social interactions that are a hallmark

of our order. Clearly, humans take these social actions to an extreme. Clearly, children are part of what it

means to be human.

Children possess an amazing capacity for gaining this acquaintance with the world around them.

By the age of six or seven, human children have a brain that is basically adult-sized. Around the same

time, children of various cultures have acquired, on average, a vocabulary encompassing around ten-

thousand words, not counting children raised learning multiple languages, whose average would likely be

higher. Trauma can nevertheless problematize that development, making a consideration of past, pres-

ent, and future at best troubling. Childhood trauma may be understood differently depending on cul-

ture, but there are common elements underlying all extended childhood trauma. I contend that there is

something inherently unassimilable about childhood trauma, and written representation thereof reflects

this quality.

Monika Maron experienced trauma through the uncertain death of family members and the subse-

quent fragmentation that resulted. In Pavel’s Letters, Maron tells the history of her family as she learned

it through the testimony of her mother Hella, old letters from her grandfather Pavel, and visits to the

places in Poland where her family lived. Her grandfather, sent into exile during the second world war,

seems to be a mysterious or puzzling figure. She does not know if her grandfather was murdered during

his time in exile, though his “Jewishness” gives her cause to believe that he was. She speculates on this

point throughout the book. She is certain that he is dead; she visits his grave, but his exact manner of

death is puzzling to her. It provides the central element of her trauma.

Maron’s grandfather was a Jewish convert to Catholicism and was exiled in 1942. He died in the

same year. Her grandmother, Josefa, died in 1942 as well, leaving behind four children and one grandchild,
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Monika. In the years following her grandfather’s death, Monika moved with her mother from Berlin to live

in East Germany among the communist elite there; her mother Hella was devoted, perhaps irrationally

in her opinion, to the communist cause. The remainder of the book chronicles the narrator’s attempts to

reconcile her mother’s testimony with her grandfather’s letter as well as her growing ambivalence with

her mother.

It is important to note that Maron’s book describes her family’s history through two characters:

her mother and her grandfather. What she finds is occasionally contrasting and occasionally congru-

ous. Maron is skeptical of her mother’s testimony both because of its incongruousness and because of

her incomplete knowledge about her mother and her. The fragmented nature of her narrative indicates

that she experiences some difficulty reckoning her past and the past of her family, torn apart by war. The

competing testimony of her mother and grandfather, combined with the distance and uncertainty of her

grandfather’s life and death, combine to give her trauma.

Maron’s second-generation memories of traumatic experience compel a discussion of what Mari-

anne Hirsch calls “postmemory,” a special type of memory that is possible when one has not experienced

and indeed cannot experience now-passed events. It bears striking similarities to memory. Both involve

an active imaginative investment, and both are definitely constructed. Postmemory differs in that it tends

to be obsessive, indirect, and fragmentary. If we understand Pavel’s Letters in the same way that Hirsch

analyzes Art Spiegelman’s Maus, as the creation of postmemory, childhood trauma in the book becomes

problematic.

When we read a memoir from anyone at any age, we receive only their retrospective construction

of past events. Add postmemory and childhood to the inherent forgetting involved in the past and in

memory, and we, the readers, may have some trouble meting out what did and did not occur “in reality.”
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Childhood memories can be uniquely imperfect by the standards of an adult world steeped in substan-

tiation and rational thought. Trauma further problematizes the authenticity of narratives around child-

hood, but should readers expect authenticity?

Trauma represents a challenge for author and reader, but it is critical that we prioritize the chal-

lenge of authorship. For traumatic events, particularly if experienced in childhood, extended trauma like

the Holocaust can, as Marianne Hirsch describes in Maus, present a sense of unassimilable loss, a “past

that will neither fade away nor be integrated into the present” (Hirsch 422). Writing a memoir about

that loss requires that an author attempt to assimilate their unassimilable past and may thus render less

significant the burden of factuality.

Authors do not always write about trauma to give a testament of personal experience, and, there-

fore perfect authenticity . Leigh Gilmore interrogates this and several other issues with autobiographical

writing in her book, The Limits of Autobiography. In it, she contends that conventions of the genre of

autobiography pose several issues for authors representing traumatic experience, not least of which is the

implicit burden of factuality. Per Susanna Mintz’s reading of the text, Gilmore considers the challenges

of autobiography of trauma alongside the related demands of authenticity and jurisprudence. There are

certain circumstances, she says, where representing trauma would be impossible in the traditional auto-

biographical sense. For example, telling the story of trauma may require telling the individual trajectories

of an entire family, or, in situations where repressive governments punish individuals for testimony that

paints a ruler in a negative light, traumatic representation might require an alteration or disguise for

personal experience. Essentially this aims to say that motivation for writing about past trauma is not

singular and the results are never mono-vocal. Authenticity may then be a moot point from an author’s

standpoint.
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Ishmael Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone, provides a useful text with which to assess the com-

monalities present in representations of childhood trauma. Beah, a native of Sierra Leone, was forced

to become a soldier at the age of twelve. He recounts some of the murder he was forced to commit, but

avoids telling a descriptive tale of everything he remembers. I heard Beah speak in 2008, and at this pre-

sentation he provided a reason for the incompleteness of his book. He explained that his goal is more

activist than it is exclusively testimonial. A Long Way Gone seeks to raise awareness about child soldiers

worldwide in order that governments might put a stop to the practice.

A Long Way Gone is also more linear and unidirectional than Pavel’s Letters. Minus the break that

occurs when he leaves the rebel forces to which he is attached, Beah tells a much more direct tale than

Monika Maron, who reveals her family’s history instead through a series of what read like personal

reflections. Beah’s book also does less to place readers in the mindset of a victim, something that Maron’s

fragmented narrative, without chapters or any other distinct separations, accomplishes well. Clearly

these books hold some things in common. Both writers speak of the difficulty integrating their trauma

into their lives. The challenges of this integration are not primary in Beah’s text, but they are present.

I got up from the floor, soaked a white towel with a glass of water, and tied it around my head. I was

afraid to fall asleep, but staying awake also brought back painful memories. Memories I sometimes

wish I could wash away, even though I am aware that they are an important part of what my life is;

who I am now. I stayed awake all night, anxiously waiting for daylight, so that I could fully return to

my new life, to rediscover the happiness I had known as a child, the joy that had stayed alive inside

me even through times when being alive itself became a burden. These days I live in three worlds:

my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past (Beah 20).
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Finding a moment where Maron gives a statement about the difficulty of assimilation is a bit more dif-

ficult, and, indeed, there is evidence enough in the fragmented and non-linear nature of her narrative. We

might look at the opening section of Pavel’s Letters for an acceptable passage.

Ever since I decided to write this book, I have asked myself why now, why only now, why still now.

I have known the story for as long as I can remember it. It is the story of my grandparents and I

have never forgotten it … Why should I feel certain that I had to justify my writing this story, about

which little is certain, even now when the fate of this vanished generation, and that of their children,

has been assigned to history, where it has been entombed? … Some day, we tell ourselves, I’ll get

to know this in greater detail. Years, even decades, may pass, the thought crosses our mind periodi-

cally: one day we should take up this matter and remember somebody or something exactly. This, I

believe, is what happened to me and the story of my grandparents (Maron 1–2).

Both of these passages speak to a difficulty integrating the past into one’s understanding of the pres-

ent. Writing about it—a more permanent form of verbal articulation—can have a cathartic effect, but

it would be wrong to interpret these books as purely cathartic or purely testimonial; Gilmore’s Limits

of Autobiography is integral in reminding us that there are multiple challenges and multiple intentions

when representing a traumatic event. That these events occurred in childhood can both reinforce trauma

and increase its incubation period. The time after trauma presents the opportunity to reflect, an endless

attempt to understand—to integrate or assimilate—the haunting knowledge one then possesses. It is in

this regard that, as Cathy Caruth wrote in “Trauma and Experience,” survival itself can be challenging.

I feel a need to explain my personal connection with this topic, as my experiences make writing

about childhood trauma both poignant and difficult. When I was a child, my family underwent a trauma
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in the form of continual, pervasive verbal degradation. My mother, though a loving parent, was, in a

euphemistic phrase, not very nice to her immediate family, including her children; it is reason that I was

brought to professional counseling at the age of seven and exhibited a great, sometimes visceral, fear of

displeasing my mother. My goal in mentioning this is not to incriminate, accuse, or compare my past

with these two memoirs because I, too, feel highly ambivalent when articulating this past. Indeed, this is

one reason that I feel it remiss to mention any specific memories here. Suffice it to say that this challenge

of integration or assimilation is something with which I can personally identify.

Both Ishmael Beah and Monika Maron experienced different kinds of trauma beginning in their

childhood. What they have chosen to do with or about this also differs, but there are common elements

to their respective responses to it, chief of which is this trouble understanding and integrating their

traumatic past into a continuing present. Childhood is a unique period, and trauma therein can affect

individuals in often unexpected ways because it challenges them to live further with a burden that makes

“normal” aging difficult: assimilating an unassimilable event.

annotated bibliography
Caruth, Cathy. “Trauma and Experience.” The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings.
Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. 192–198.
Caruth’s discussion of the experience of trauma vis-á-vis post-traumatic stress disorder is important for my dis-
cussion of these authors, who articulate childhood trauma. That “survival itself ” can be a challenge for individu-
als after traumatic events rings true for children in particular because it presents them with a pervasive crisis
that can extend well beyond the trauma and, indeed, childhood itself.
Gilmore, Leigh. The limits of autobiography. Cornell University Press, 2001.
I want to incorporate Leigh’s book to talk about the inherent difficulty of representing a traumatic event given,
for one, the demands of authenticity that conventional perceptions of autobiography or memoir impose. This
is exaggerated in the case of Pavel’s Letters, A Long Way Gone, and indeed many memoirs that describe a
traumatic childhood. Authors writing about their childhood can only rely on recollection and, nevertheless, may
choose to represent it in a certain, not always “factual” way because of, for example, larger personal or societal
constraints. This does not indicate an inherent seediness to childhood trauma. Rather, it speaks to the multifac-
eted difficulty that childhood trauma creates for the genre of autobiography and, indeed, for the personal act of
testimony and representation.
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Hirsch, Marianne. “Mourning and Postmemory.” The Holocaust: Theoretical

Readings. Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. 416–422.
Trauma, and particularly childhood trauma, poses numerous challenges that may only intensify after its im-
mediate occurrence expires. I am struck by a phrase Hirsch uses at the end of this essay, when articulating post-
memory through Spiegelman’s Maus: “The three photographs in Maus, and the complicated marginal narrative
of unassimilable loss that they tell, perpetuate what remains in the two volumes as an incongruity appropriate to
the aesthetic of the child survivors, the aesthetic of postmemory … They reinforce at once incomprehensibil-
ity and presence, a past that will neither fade away nor be integrated into the present” (emphasis mine).
In my reading, the representation of childhood trauma necessarily involves attempting to assimilate what may
be impossible to assimilate. I considered that I might include another discussion of Adorno’s “working through
the past,” but I feel that “working through” ignores the very real fact that intense trauma does not suddenly,
completely leave its recipients. I am not interested so much in the notion of postmemory because I intend to
discuss more personal experience and not experience as initially understood through the testimony of an elder
generation. I cannot deny that postmemory is a significant element in Pavel’s Letters but nevertheless posit that
Monika Maron has filled the book with plenty of her personal experience. Moreover, I do not mean to imply
that postmemory is in any way less genuine or more interpretive than personal experiences; it is simply an issue
that, because of constraints on time, I do not have space to explore.
Maron, Monika. The Reader. Trans. Brigitte Goldstein. London: Harvill Press, 2002.
I will use The Reader to examine the idea of childhood trauma.
Mintz, Susannah B. “The Limits of Autobiography (Book).”Biography:
An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 24.4 (2001): 917.
This is a book review of Gilmore’s The Limits of Autobiography and is, because of time constraints for this
project, integral to my understanding of the issues that Gilmore raises. I will not exclusively rely on this review,
but it is necessary that I recognize its role in guiding my unfortunately limited reading of the book.
Small, Meredith. Kids: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Our Children.
1st ed. Doubleday, 2001.
I intend to include this book for less direct reasons. It provides that childhood is a unique and universal human
quality, both from a biological and non-biological perspective.

Combined Bibliography
Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007.