Susanne Baackmann

Background

About Susanne Baackmann

I am a long-time educator and academic researcher for whom life and work converge in meaningful ways. My training as a professor of German literature began in Germany and was completed with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. For over thirty years, I have been fortunate enough to explore questions close to my mind and my heart, such as questions of personal and collective identity, the social manufacturing of gender and power, the power of story and powerful stories of loss. My latest book "Writing the Child. Fictions of Memory in Postwar German literature" explores how (from the 1950s to now) German writers have navigated the legacy of Hitler’s murderous project in fictional narratives based on a child’s perspective, daring to fuse an “innocent” gaze with the horrors of War and Nazi perpetration. This book became a much more personal exploration of my relationship to a past I experienced only vicariously. The fiction analyzed in this book offers stories about the German child silenced by war or traumatized by silent parents – a child who maintains a tenuous dialogue with the Jewish child, the ‘other’ child, who in most cases did not survive a war in which they were targeted. These stories forced me to confront childhood silences I grew up with in Germany without having been aware of them at the time. It challenged me to reflect on how, exactly, this war has crossed my own life, my own way of being, my own thinking. How did this war shape me – a white woman born in the Ruhr Valley well after May 1945. Both my parents were tenaciously silent about their war experiences and it was time for me to finally break that silence within.