Syllabus¹ for My Mother
Catalog Number GerLit 090-490
Academic Year 1948-2019
Course Title Witnessing Destruction
Instructor
Your older daughter. You used to call her “the absent-minded professor,” because she kept forgetting her gym bag and her arts supplies, because she was happiest inside her head. You bought her books from which to build that internal world, bricks for a fort in which to hide. Your instructor began to catalog all the books when she was seven, after a friend first led her up the concrete steps to your town’s library. She walked into that story scent, the promise of living a thousand imagined lives, ran fingers along smooth spines aligned on shelves, and envied the women behind the counter, who could spend their days making order, stamping return dates, writing call numbers in a log. Your younger daughter soon bounced her shoulders off the doorframe to your instructor’s room, right, left, right, left, intoning “I’m bored! Tell me what to read!” You started asking that question four decades later, on the phone, after your younger daughter’s children went off to boarding school. By then, your instructor had become a professor in a far-away land, but you’re unsure what that means or what she does.
Office
3000 miles away. You have seen it, once, during your only visit to America, twenty years ago. You remember your astonishment at how there could be so much light at the end of a dark, ugly hallway. You try to imagine your instructor there, backlit by tall windows.
Phone
When you call the office line, your instructor knows something is seriously wrong. Now that you’ve figured out how to push the green receiver symbol on WhatsApp, you wait for her to call you that way. She usually does. You miss her as soon as you hang up, wonder about her after one week, start worrying after two. You never call just because you feel like it, because you vowed you’d never press your daughters for calls or visits in the way your own mother hounded you. You feel stupid when you can’t find the little camera symbol for the fifth or seventh time. Your instructor will tell you not to worry, but, until her video feed pops open on your screen, you will picture her as rolling her eyes.
Meeting Times
This hybrid course will be offered in the form of two-week intensive in-person consultations during Winter and Summer Breaks. During the academic year, your instructor will be available via phone and WhatsApp.
Meeting Locations
Car. Dinner table (you cook). Bed. Walking path around the duck pond. Ironing board (you iron). Doctors’ waiting rooms.
Catalog Description
An exploration of novels by female authors² who lived³ through the bombings of Germany during World War II.⁴ We will read stories left out of Volker Hage’s Witnesses of Destruction,⁵ a work often considered to represent the literary⁶ canon⁷ on the bombings from a German⁸ perspective.⁹
Prerequisite
A hunger for written words. Remember how your mother wanted you to stay in school? You fled what could have been a college track at age ten. You say you panicked, because you couldn’t bear the thought of failing your first English class. You had to stay home for six whole weeks with, of all things, plantar warts—so bad, so painful, that you could not take a single step. You could not walk towards the words you needed then. Or maybe your feet tried to protect you, because they knew you weren’t yet ready for the words. Your fifth-grade teacher rode the streetcar all the way to the end of the line, an hour each way, then walked from the stop, another half hour, to your house—all to convince you that you could catch up. You refused, dissolved in tears. School was over for you at age fourteen. Your spirit has been starving since. You sent your daughters out into the world to collect the words and pillows for your sleep, like mothers before you sent their daughters after herbs for healing salves.
Corequisites
SLP101-103. Taught by your younger daughter, who holds three different diplomas as a Sleep Expert from bedding institutes in Switzerland and spends her days selling and delivering beds. She will scan your vertebrae, test the tension in the slats that hold up your seven-layer mattress, order pillows with numbered systems of support, adjust the warmth and breathability of your blankets and your sheets. Can you take a break from words, trusting that neurons inside your brain will figure out new ways of holding hands, new patterns in their electric dance?
Trigger¹⁰ Warning
Some stories and images will cause flashbacks, bad dreams, and sleepless nights. You will toss off your special blanket, wonder about yet another kind of pillow, remember things you did not know you knew.
Course Goals
Up to you: Where does it hurt? What feeds you? How much pain is too much?
You had no time to read, yet you kept books on shelves with which you’d lined your living room. Around age twelve or thirteen your instructor found your copy of A.S. Neill’s Summerhill¹¹: a magical Easter egg filled with a nougat of utopias. Who knew that schools were mutable? Who knew that you could make your own? Sometime around that year you also dragged your daughters into a back room behind the crafting goods store, into what must have been your medieval town’s very first yoga class. A decade later, in America, in graduate school, your instructor ran from lab to yoga studio and thought: this, this right here, is how I want my school to work—
Walk in because you want to learn.
Take off your shoes.
Notice the stretch. (Only you can know how far to stretch.) Hold it right there.
Trust that freedom lives inside the breath, between the pain and flinch. Do you want to hang in a little longer, stretch a little deeper?
Tell your circling thoughts to wait outside, by your dirty sneakers, like large and shaggy dogs: So flea-ridden. So faithful.
Begin again tomorrow. Reopen the frightening book. Always begin again.
Learning Outcomes
As a result of taking this course you will:
say that sleepless nights of rising memories are worth it, because “so much good comes back with all the bad.”
learn to distinguish past from present tense.
sit through entire family meals without jumping up and running off to the kitchen.
turn around at a restaurant table and start talking to the couple behind you, when you overhear them mentioning that they, too, never once talked to their parents—or anyone—about the war.
tell your best friend, who is in therapy with severe depression, that it’s time to tell her therapist not only about her husband’s and son’s suicides, not only how difficult it is to talk to her distant daughter, but also about what happened on your friend’s month long childhood trek from East Prussia to the West, when she fled from the Red Army at age ten. You will tell her that you are feeling better now that you have told some stories of your own.
Teaching Philosophy
You instructor has a wish for all people to be free, including mothers and daughters. She learned this from you. (Yes, a child can learn a wish. A hunger for missed words.) You say you learned how to wish for your children’s freedom from Mrs. Gerhart, who taught a course on pregnancy, birth, and baby care. Mrs. Gerhart suggested you read Kahlil Gibran, but what is the mystery that allows us to hear the right thing in our own heads as we read, just at the time when we need it?
Grading:
See teaching philosophy.
Texts
These will arrive at your door, in packages from Amazon.de or from bookstores specializing in things long-out-of-print. The address stickers will spell out your name, but your instructor will call before they arrive, so that you won’t refuse acceptance of suspicious merchandise you don’t remember ordering. She will tell you that the books inside the package really are for her, but that you are welcome to open the box and read anything you like.
Course Calendar:
1948-2011
You know how to read, but you won’t read anything that touches upon war. After television appears in your home, leave the living room if the news or any movies mention war. Skip entire sections of the newspaper. Skip reading newspapers altogether. Appoint your husband as Chief Curator of your media content.
2011
Open packages and ponder trigger warnings in the syllabus. Read jacket covers. Say “yikes” and close the box. Put it in the basement, until your instructor comes home for Christmas.
2012-2013
Open more packages. Read some more jackets. Don’t mind that some of the books in there are just for kids. Trust that an author’s inner child might write to yours.
Read Asta Scheib,¹² who turned six in 1945, born the same year as you:
There was the war. As long as I had been able to think, there had been the war. The war wrapped itself over my head like a potato sack. Everything around me, the houses, the people, seemed to detach themselves from me, became strange, blurry, and finally vanished. I was alone in a kind of chaotic dream, from which I probably still haven’t fully woken.
Ponder the potato sack. Ponder the dream from which you never woke. Does it matter, now, to have another little girl, your age, show you the sack in words? To name the dream as dream?
Read Helga Schütz,¹³ who was eight at the end of the war, just two years older than you. Read how Eli, Schütz’s child protagonist, survives the bombings, barely, just like you. How she, too, finds herself in an orphanage. How she, like you, is found, how she, too, has a grandfather who keeps her safe. Like you, Eli feels too stupid to succeed in school, is told to do things, during her apprenticeship, that make no sense—and finally finds her own way to subvert the rules. There is a way to name the way, yes? Even if there is no way?
Note how Draginja Dorpat¹⁴ picked nettles for soup, instead of spinach, just like you. Notice how being six years older that you helped Dorpat to escape Scheib’s “potato sack,” to convert chaotic dreams to theory, to push them into thought:
At first, when the war began, I thought there’s always a war, in any century. Wars aren’t anything special. As soon as one is over, the next one starts.
At eight, your instructor, too, had theories on war. She deduced that all humans had to survive one war within their life. She thought that you were lucky that you had gotten yours over with when you were small. She waited for her war to hit. An eight-year-old girl inside your instructor’s mind is still watching for bombs to start dropping on her house. Your instructor wonders if that girl is you.
Next, learn from
Else Hübner¹⁵ how to use teenage belligerence to push against the war. Listen to Hübner’s protagonist, Elfi, complain to her mother:
I don’t want to pray! Never again! Because it makes no sense. Back when the war started, I prayed every night for our soldiers not to die, and for us to win, because our history teacher said one was supposed to. Win, I mean. And I prayed in the bomb cellar for nothing to happen. And once I prayed for an English bomber not to be shot down by our Flak. And then he fire-bombed our house. Prayer never fixes anything. Everyone always says, in church, and you, too, that God is almighty and can do anything. And so, what’s he doing now? Why doesn’t he just end this stupid war?
Notice how Elfi sounds like the conversation with your mother that you never had during your teenage years, in 1950s Germany: the silent time, when no one spoke about the war. Let Elfi help you find the helpless rage you never knew to name, to send it through a voice box valve, a stream of words to hiss like steam. There is a teenage girl inside you who will use those words to push the lid off fear, who needs this steam to stomp from scared to free.
2014
“Mom,” your instructor will say on the phone, “I’ve just read a really great book¹⁶ I think you’d like.” “That’s great,” you’ll say, “let me grab a pen.” “But it has two chapters about the war. But I think you might still be able to read it, because of the way it’s written.” “That’s okay,” you’ll say, “I can read that now.” Read how a woman can come of age, can act on what she thinks and feels is right, even in the face of wrong. See how chapters IX and X, about the bombings of Berlin, work like a hinge, connecting injustice and violence of the past to their continuation in the present tense. Learn how you need that hinge—to open and to close. To have the world make sense.
Never
Read a single book featured in Hage’s Witnesses of Destruction.¹⁷
Occasionally
Mention to your instructor that you’d like her opinion on another text that tugs inside your mind, books you’d love for her to read. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s best seller.¹⁸ Rafik Schami’s stories¹⁹ of arriving in Germany from Syria, post war. Masha Kaléko’s poetry²⁰:
Mein schönstes Gedicht My best poem ever?
Ich schrieb es nicht. I wrote it never.
Aus tiefsten Tiefen stieg es. From deepest depths uprushed it.
Ich schwieg es. I hushed it.²¹
Always
Send another WhatsApp, or mention, gently, in a video call, that you are almost out of things to read. Know you don’t need to stand in the doorway, bouncing off your shoulders, right-left, right-left. Know your message will send your instructor scrambling, in the midst of a hectic day, for pages that might mean freedom, or delight. Know she will be feeling, yes, rushed, yes, sometimes, frantic—know that, as her fingers chase across the keyboard or brush along the book spines on her shelves, she will always, always, smile.
Final Exam
When your instructor first understood, at some point before her tenth birthday, that all mothers, eventually, die, she was convinced that, by age twenty, she would surely know how to pass that test. Thirty-five years after this imagined “due by” date, she remains unconvinced that she could be ready in another year, or ten, or thirty-five. And, too, she knows that a bulge on an artery in her own brain could mean that, most unfairly, there is a chance that she might never need to take that test—that she may make you take it in her stead. She watches news of war, of broken agreements, of who holds the nuclear codes. What we know, for sure: Either one of us might inhale a virus that could end our words. We know: We have more books than time. We know: Any ending will be a pile of words we’ll wish we’d shared.
syl·la·bus /ˈsiləbəs/ noun: (1) an outline of a course of study. (2) a summary of points, decided by papal decree, regarding heretical practices.
Until recently, Germany had a law that first names must be unambiguous gender-identifiers. This allowed your instructor to make a spreadsheet in EXCEL, enter the name of each woman listed as a “German Author” on Wikipedia, and spend much of a sabbatical year figuring out which women wrote about huddling in basements as their cities shook and burned above them.
Wikipedia has most authors’ years of birth and death.
Wikipedia and other websites have where authors lived between 1941 and 1945 and when bombs fell on those cities.
Volker Hage: Zeugen der Zerstörung, Fischer Verlag, 2003. Your instructor read this book in search of the things her grandmother did not tell her about nights spent in bomb cellars with two babies, the younger one of which was you. Your instructor discovered that Hage only included two female novelists: Gertrud von LeFort, whom he praises for not describing the hours her protagonist spends in the bomb cellar, and Ilse Aichinger, whose novel he analyses only from the perspective of Aichinger’s Jewish heritage. Your instructor next wrote to Susanne Vees-Gulani, who wrote Trauma and Guilt: Literature of Wartime Bombing in Germany, a careful, nuanced analysis, published by De Gruyter, also in 2003. Some of the twenty authors Vees-Gulani studied survived the air raids as adults, others as children. Some of them were persecuted or imprisoned. Most, but not all, were German nationals. None are female. “Did you come across any works by women that describe the air war?” your instructor’s email asked. “If so, is there a difference between male and female literary representations?” Your instructor never heard back.
lit·er·ar·y /ˈlidəˌrerē/ adjective: concerning the writing, study, or content of literature, especially of the kind valued for having a marked style intended to create a particular emotional effect. See: par·tic·u·lar /pə(r)ˈtikyələr/ from Latin, particularis: concerning a small part.
can·on /ˈkanən/ noun: Old English, rule, law, or decree of the church. From Greek kanon: any straight rod or bar, standard of excellence. Not to be confused with can·non /ˈkanən/ noun, from the same Greek root: a large-caliber, mounted gun.
Which Germans? (Consider, here, Ruth Klüger, Was Frauen schreiben, Zsolnay Verlag, 2010, p. 9: [In women’s books] the treatment of women is more respectful, the insights into their intimate lives are more convincing, women are less often relegated to supporting characters, and when they are, these are developed with more nuance and care.)
per·spec·tive /pərˈspektiv/ noun: (1) the art of drawing solid objects on a two-dimensional surface so as to give the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other when viewed from a particular [sic] point; (2) a picture drawn to enlarge the effect of distance; (3) the relation of two figures in the same plane; (4) an attitude; (5) an understanding of the relative importance of things.
Supra note 7: canon, cannon, kanon
A.S. Neill: Theorie und Praxis der antiautoritären Erziehung. Das Beispiel Summerhill. Rowolth Verlag, 1986.
Asta Scheib: Sei froh, dass du lebst. Rowolth, Berlin 2001.
Helga Schütz: Knietief im Paradies. Aufbau Verlag, 2005.
Draginja Dorpat: Und zu Küssen kam es kaum. Klöpfer & Meyer, Tübingen 2003.
Else Hübner, Tagträume und Bombennächte, Eugen Salzer-Verlag, Heilbronn, 1997.
Ingeborg Drewitz: Gestern war Heute: Hundert Jahre Gegenwart. Claassen Verlag. 1978. Note that this book has won so many prizes that your grandchildren were made to read it in school. Note that Hage, supra note 6, never mentions Drewitz.
Supra notes 6-10. Whose literature? Whose words? Whose particulars, emotions, dreams?
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: On Death and Dying. Simon & Schuster. 1969.
Rafik Schami: Die Farbe der Worte. Ars Vivendi. 2013.
Mascha Kaléko: In meinen Träumen läutet es Sturm. Dtv Verlagsgesellschaft. 2018.
Translation: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/mein-sch%C3%B6nstes-gedicht-my-best-poem-ever.html
Catharina Coenen is a first-generation German immigrant to the Northwestern “chimney” of Pennsylvania, where she teaches biology at Allegheny College. Her essays have recently appeared in The American Scholar, The Southampton Review Online, Chattahoochee Review, The 2020 Best of the Net Anthology, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Appalachian Review’s 2019 Denny Plattner Creative Nonfiction Prize, a 2020 Creative Nonfiction Foundation Science as Story Fellowship, and a Hedgebrook Residency. She is completing a memoir-in-essays on the effects of fascism and WWII across three generations of her German family.
Photo by Element5 Digital from Pexels