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Witnesses to War: Changing Perspectives on the Literature of the Second World War and the Kindertransport

THE Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II, edited by Marina Mackay, outlines the literary and filmic responses to the Second World War generated by a range of nations and cultures. With unavoidably broad brush strokes, it sweeps across works produced in the heat of the action and on the home front, during the conflict and in later years. In Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust, Phyllis Lassner trains a narrower critical lens on the female children of the Kindertransport*Jewish girls sent to Britain to escape Nazi persecution and their descendents. Despite obvious differences in scope and subject matter, both works are preoccupied with the continuing aftermath of the Second World War, the shock waves still felt in the literary realm as well as in politics and culture. In an introduction which deftly outlines the ethical stakes of the Cambridge Companion, Mackay challenges the Allied temptation to mythologize what has come to be held in the popular imagination as ‘a kind of gold standard for ‘‘just war’’’, ‘an epic struggle of good against evil’ (Mackay: 3). Rightly acknowledging that it would be ‘criminally perverse’ (Mackay: 3) to downplay the atrocities committed in the name of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan, Mackay nonetheless argues for a more balanced critical approach to the many and varied aspects of what Elizabeth Bowen called an ‘uncontainable’ war (quoted in Mackay: 1). Lassner’s analysis of the Kindertransport is more determinedly revisionist; it not only disrupts complacent views of Britain as the benevolent host nation for Jewish refugees, but also identifies disquieting antisemitic parallels between Nazi ideology, on the one hand, and British racial history and collaboration in the Channel Islands on the other. Mackay and Lassner frame their respective projects with an appropriate awareness of the Second World War as relatively recent history. Marina Mackay, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II, Cambridge University Press, 2009, £17.99 paperback 978 0 521 71541 6. Phyllis Lassner, Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, £50.00 hardback 978 0 23