Viola Roggenkamp

In 2005 Viola Roggenkamp published a lengthy essay - some identify it as a short book - on Erika Mann, a daughter - probably her father's favourite daughter - of Thomas Mann. The essay was entitled "Erika Mann. Eine jüdische Tochter": it reignited the smouldering controversy about Erika Mann's own attitude to her mother's Jewish ancestry. For many people Thomas Mann was the greatest German language writer of the twentieth century. Roggenkamp's contribution concerning his attitude to his wife's Jewish provenance was bound to attract attention. Roggenkamp asserted that although much had been written about Thomas and Katia Mann, Katia's Jewish ancestry had been very little delved into, beyond bald statements recording the fact that she had, like her mother and like her children, been baptised (as a Christian). Roggenkamp was particularly critical, in this respect, of so-called "Mann-experts" such as Heinrich Breloer, as well as Inge and Walter Jens. Roggenkamp contended that the tendency of the Mann family (along with their many admirers and other researchers) to ignore the Jewish roots of Thomas Mann's wealthy father-in-law, Alfred Pringsheim amounted to denial and was deeply damaging. From California, the scholar (and Vienna-born holocaust survivor) Ruth Klüger summarized Roggenkamp's position for readers of Die Welt:

Roggenkamp's first published "novel" appeared only in 2004. "Familienleben" ("Family life"), which can be described as an "autobiographically inspired novel", was well received by leading critics. Recommended to television viewers by the influential presenter and literary critic Elke Heidenreich, it quickly proved a commercial success, notwithstanding its unfashionable length. It runs to more than 400 pages and has been translated into a number of different languages. The narrator-protagonist is a 13 year-old child called Fania. Fania is the younger of the parents' two daughters. The narrative deals with the daily life of a German-Jewish family living in Hamburg in 1967. In her powerfully positive review of the book in Der Spiegel, Jana Hensel provides a little context: "For three decades Viola Roggenkamp kept her project for a novel to herself. The result, now, is an almost eerily perfect book ... All the characters in it are perfectly defined with great dramatic clarity, replete with their psychological contradictions". The relationship between holocaust survivors and their children in Germany was the underlying theme both of "Familienleben" and of Roggenkamp's next book, "Die Frau im Turm" ("The woman in the tower") which appeared in 2009. "Tochter und Vater" (2011) again incorporated as its starting point and at its core, the author's own experiences, and what she had discerned of her parents' lives in Silesia during the war. Her mother was dead by the time she started writing this third book, and had, with tact but also evident difficulty, refrained from asking questions about the earlier work, "Familienleben" after Viola had admitted that she was writing it. Nevertheless, the author sent her mother a copy in the mail and was surprised by the reaction: "After she read the book, she told me she was surprised to discover that I was aware of the trauma she carried with her. She always thought she protected me and my sister from all that." The three books driven by her own experiences of growing up as the child of holocaust survivors in Hamburg only came after years of soul searching and quiet enquiry about the experiences of German Jews who had grown up in Germany as the children of holocaust survivors. By the end of the twentieth century there had been plenty published by then children of parents who had perpetrated holocaust killings and other acts of persecution - or simply quietly colluded, taking care not to follow up the rumours of what was going on in the camps. But there had been virtual silence from the children in Germany of holocaust survivors who simply wanted to forget, and lived under the shadow of a deeply entrenched terror that somehow, it could all happen again one day. There were, in any case, not too many holocaust survivors who had ended up bringing up children still living in Germany. From the perspective of a writer with insights to share, as Roggenkamp has told at least one interviewer, her "family suffered, but [she is] lucky to have [her] non-typical background." But her experiences are nevertheless in many respects far from unique: before publishing the three books based on her own childhood experiences she had already, in 2002, published "Tu mir eine Liebe. Meine Mamme" (loosely, "Be a love... My mummy"). The subtitle is more enlightening than the main title: "Jüdische Frauen und Männer in Deutschland sprechen von ihrer Mutter" ("Jewish women and men in Germany talk about their mothers"). The volume is based on 26 interview-portraits in which higher-profile Germans talk about their mothers, all of whom are holocaust survivors. The interviewees include Stefan Heym, Esther Dischereit, Wladimir Kaminer, Rachel Salamander, Stefanie Zweig, and Michael Wolffsohn. Most of these are members of Roggenkamp's own generation or younger, and so unable to remember the holocaust on their own account: yet all of them have had their lives defined by the holocaust, primarily through the effect the experiences of it had on their mothers. Survivor guilt is, perhaps, the most frequently recurring of the Leitmotiven identified in the interviews. Prior to the volume's publication the interview-portraits had already been published individually in Jüdische Allgemeine.

Throughout her itinerant years she worked as a free-lance journalist, regularly contributing thoughtful well-researched pieces in the (West) German press, most notably and regularly for the Hamburg-based weekly mass-circulation national newspaper Die Zeit, for which she wrote regularly between 1976 and 2013. In 1977 Roggenkamp was a founder member of the team around Alice Schwarzer that created the magazine EMMA. (The name of the magazine is a wordplay based on the word "emancipation".) She worked for EMMA as a free-lance reporter till the early 1990s. For four years between 2000 and 2004 she provided a regular column for the progressive centre-left cooperative-owned newspaper "taz". Since 1990 she has been writing for the Berlin-based weekly publication die Jüdische Allgemeine. In 2016 she became, in addition, a regular contributor to the monthly magazine, Cicero.

She studied Psychology, Philosophy and Music and then set out on her travels. During the later 1970s she visited India where she stayed for seven or eight months, living under the simplest of conditions and producing reports and stories about her surroundings for a German readership. She returned to Hamburg, but there have been frequent return trips to south Asia since then. Every time she returned to Germany, she told an interviewer later, the conditions back home came as a shock. She would notice how much more thinly spread the human population was in Hamburg than in India, and how the German supermarkets seemed troublingly overstocked. For two years between 1989 and 1991 Roggenkamp lived in Israel.

Viola Roggenkamp was born and grew up in Hamburg. Although she has relocated abroad at several points during her adult life, it is to Hamburg that she has always returned, despite having a somewhat conflicted and at times alienated relationship with the city. It was in Hamburg that her parents had ended up "following the liberation" in 1945, having lived "illegally" in Polish Silesia during the wartime Polish occupation. After her father died (but while her mother was still alive) she explored her parents' lives during the war years in her 2011 semi-novel, "Tochter und Vater". Discussing the book with an interviewer she later explained that "the daughter is not me, but the father in the novel is my father. My father did all the courag[e]ous and unbelievable things [as a secret member of the Polish resistance in Krakow] that Paul, the father in the novel, did".