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Poisonous Past, Poisoned Places

The last thing this thoughtful and ambitious book is, is an introduction to Germany for persons who have never been there. The author, Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English at Smith College, here endeavors to fuse a subgenre of pensive, deeply personal, almost haunted travel writing with critical theory of travel literature. More literary memoir than travelogue, elegantly written, his book contributes notably to several genres. The resulting chimera of a book may, however, reveal more about its author and his intellectual-moral culture than about the country in which he spent an engaged year. To those who do know the land and its people, however, his reflections must invite thoughtful ones of their own. With regard to the ongoing Opferkonkurrenz, or ‘‘competition among victims’’ (of the 1930s and 1940s), Michael Gorra clearly comes down on the side of those who see more collective responsibility than victimhood in the German nation as a whole, suggesting that the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed by the Allies’ vindictive terrorbombing and the millions who perished in the post-war expulsions (which the Allies euphemized as ‘‘resettlements’’ and are another matter of contention today) somehow deserved what they suffered in invidious comparison with the victims of Hitler’s aggressions and the Holocaust. Professor Gorra claims no deep conversance with Teutonic cultural history or German literature, knowing what he knows mostly through translations. Indeed, scholar-writer that he is, he may have spent a bit too much time reading, at Hamburg and during the years thereafter. The book’s bibliography is more impressive than its modest store of interpersonal anecdotes; its sketchy index lists far more writers than place-names. Moreover, Gorra’s extended personal dealings with contemporary Germans seem to have been pretty much limited to a few academics and professionals. He apparently spent far more time with texts, whose authors include Germans (for leading examples, Theodor Fontane, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann), earlier visitors from abroad (Stendhal and George Eliot, among others), and transnational students of culture and of flânerie (Italo Calvino, Germany’s own W. G. Sebald), and of the Nazi years and the Holocaust (M. A. Bernstein, Saul Friedländer, and Daniel Goldhagen). On each of them he offers interesting comment, and from them draws lessons for his own undertaking and toward his understanding of travel and of Germany. In their first, descriptive capacity, six of his seven chapter-essays report personal experiences and reactions not from systematic tourism, but rather from an extended visit, a year’s residence in a country he sampled and pondered. In a more profound second enterprise, he cites and emulates early-modern and twentieth-century classics of travel and memorialization, raising fundamental questions: Why do we travel? What does travel do to and for us? Most important, perhaps, what is the right relationship between ‘‘foreign’’ travelers and the history of places they visit and of people who live there (or have lived), and those