Traces of Absence and Places of Shame: Situation-Splitting in the Lindenlied and Am grünen Strand der Spree

At the climax of the first story in Hans Scholz’s bestselling 1955 novel Am grünen Strand der Spree, Wehrmacht soldier Jürgen Wilms witnesses the mass murder of hundreds of Jews by a Sonderkommando. As he watches the men, women, and children walk silently to the mass grave where they are gunned down, his mind whirrs with shame at his past and current failure to act. Interlaced among these stream-of-consciousness thoughts is a reference to a well-known medieval poem by Walther von der Vogelweide, Under der linden. In the song, a female narrator coyly describes an illicit tryst. She, and the evidence that she points to, are vestiges of a former presence, faint life marks (Savoy, 2021), veiled by layers of space, time, and performance dynamic. The female narrator is thus shielded from scrutiny by rhetoric that focuses attention on the performer. This web of revelation and concealment offers an intriguing framework for understanding the discursive effects of Scholz’s narrative, which is conveyed predominantly through the diary entries of Jürgen Wilms and, like Walther’s song, relies on surrogacy and performance frames. We “hear” Wilms’s voice only through his diary entries as they are read aloud to a group of friends by another POW to whom Wilms entrusted his writings. Like Walther’s female narrator, Wilms is a trace of a former presence. Scholz’s technique allows the author to address Germany’s murderous past, while discursively walling off ‘everyday’ Germans such as Wilms from all but the most remote complicity in the Nazis’ crimes.