In the middle of the 1930s, Britain released its first formal statement about air raid precautions (civil defense) and acknowledged that it could offer no guarantee of immunity for civilians in a future war that might involve both air power and chemical weapons. At the start of the decade, Britain had begun to create civil defense for chemical warfare by cultivating first aid for civilians facing chemical arms and continuing to test both chemical weapons and anti-gas protection. It had not yet decided whether to provide gas masks to its entire civilian population. The official release of civil defense measures in 1935 led to vocal opposition from a variety of groups including feminists, socialists, scientists, and religious pacifists like Quakers. Then, the return of the use of chemical weapons in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935–36 dramatically altered the public conversation about the use of such weapons and the devices to protect against them. The return of aerial bombardment to Europe with the Spanish Civil War alongside the use of chemical arms served as a catalyst for developing anti-gas protection as a key component of civil defense preparations for the war to come.

Chapter 2 shows how the arrival of lethal chemical warfare at the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915 led to the invention of anti-gas protection. It traces the crucial role played by women in this initial process and how the prospect of gas masks for civilians slowly emerged during the First World War and then continued in the war’s aftermath. The prospect of a future war of aero-chemical annihilation motivated feminist antimilitarists and others demanding the curtailment of chemical arms. Nonetheless Britain continued in both the metropole and empire to develop both such weapons and equipment to protect individuals from poison gas. Chemical weapons also had defenders, and the debate over their legitimacy played out in public even as government officials, who were inventing civil defense in secret in the 1920s, incorporated individual anti-gas protection into their calculations.

The trial run of civil defence and the gas mask in September 1938 yielded several important lessons for the government. One was that it urgently needed to solve the absence of anti-gas protection for infants and toddlers, which it did by the time Britain entered the Second World War in September 1939. Until the outbreak of war, it continued to encounter resistance to these measures, and when war broke out, some conscientious objectors used their refusal to accept their gas masks as a sign of their commitment to oppose all war. As for the majority who accepted the mask as the gift of a benevolent state, the issue became whether or not they would follow instructions to carry them whenever they left their homes. The government soon came to see gas mask carrying not only as a mark of good morale, but also as indicating whether or not someone was being a good wartime citizen, willing to follow instructions in order to keep the entire civilian population safe. Mass Observation delegated respondents to survey who carried their masks, and they recorded these efforts as mapping onto attitudes towards the war effort. When the worst of the Battle of Britain had subsided with a decrease in devastating aerial attacks by April 1941, the government launched a concerted campaign, using posters, film, and staged gas mask drills to encourage the population to remember that “Hitler Will Give No Warning,” so everyone had to accept the obligation always to have a gas mask at the ready. Carrying and caring for the gas mask became a sign that you accepted your duty to participate in the war effort.

VLADIMIR VERTLIB's LITERARY PRODUCTION provides fascinating insights into Russian society under the Soviet regime, diverse aspects of Israel, and the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in Austria and Germany, as well as the segmentation of Jewish communities in postwar Germany and Austria. Vertlib is one of the Austrian-based Jewish-identified writers and artists, a list that includes Anna Mitgutsch, Robert Schindel, Robert Menasse, Ruth Beckermann, and Doron Rabinovici, who started to write in the 1980s. According to Christina Guenther, these writers continue to reflect on what it means to be Jewish in contemporary Austria and to project Jewish identity as multiple and non-hermetic, not constrained within Austrian national or cultural boundaries. Indeed, Vertlib is concerned with the delicate position of Jews living in Austria—a country that has been reluctant to admit its guilt in the Holocaust. Austria's cultural memory regarding the Holocaust differs considerably from Germany's tradition of Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Austria began the process of dealing with the traumatic past very late and hesitantly. Relying on the so-called “Unschuldsmythos” (myth of innocence), the political elite of Austria succeeded in constituting themselves as victims of Nazi Germany, as having been the first country to have been occupied by the Nazi forces. With the Anschluss, or annexation, Austria dissolved as a state, a fact that gave the postwar Austrian Second Republic a pretext to claim it was innocent of Nazi crimes. Only with the “Waldheim-Affäre” in 1986 was public attention drawn to the country's role in the mass destruction of European Jewry. During Kurt Waldheim's 1986 election campaign for the office of Federal President, allegations surfaced that he, as an officer in the German Wehrmacht in the Balkans during World War II, had committed war crimes. In spite of this scandal, Waldheim won the campaign; but, as a result, Austria was isolated by the European community until the end of his presidency in 1992. Only in 1991 did Chancellor Franz Vranitzky, in a declaration before the National Assembly, admit that some Austrian people were guilty in the murder of European Jews, without, however, admitting that Austria as a whole was guilty.

AS EXPLAINED ABOVE, the eastern expansion of the EU turned its memory politics into a contest in which two different frameworks of memory battled for predominance: a Western framework adhering to the “uniqueness-of-the-Holocaust frame and an Eastern framework espousing the “Communism-equally-evil frame.” In part II I will ask what happens to these opposing perspectives when they are taken out of the political realm and negotiated in fictional writings. The authors analyzed here—Vladimir Vertlib, Katja Petrowskaja, and Barbara Honigmann— seek to re-create a multilayered understanding of European histories by “bring(ing) disparate histories into contact with each other,” namely the histories of Nazism and Socialism. By narrating individual experiences of atrocities and war in the Eastern and Central European areas, their literatures of mnemonic migration crucially destabilize traditional modes of selection and amnesia that have governed the Western imagination of Europe. In the vein of Ann Rigney's theory, I suggest that Vertlib’s, Petrowskaja’s, and Honigmann's writings exemplify artistic works that are consciously shaped to promote understanding between different “zones” of Europe, explicitly using literature as a means of “encouraging people to look beyond their present social frame of reference.” Vertlib's autofictional protagonists interconnect several of these “zones” through an ongoing process of migration in which the protagonist accumulates various private and collective memories, thus in the sense of Rothberg bringing memories from the Soviet Union, Israel, Austria, and the USA “into contact with each other.” In addition, Vertlib employs the genre of the historical novel, which, according to Rigney, tends to act “in crucial ways as a mediator or ‘connector’ between different mnemonic communities.” Petrowskaja writes history by establishing a complex metalanguage that allows her to reconstruct the amnesia about the Holocaust in the (former) Soviet Union in general—and the Ukraine in particular—as well as to trace the close interconnection between victimization and perpetration in Eastern Europe. Whereas Petrowskaja seeks to uncover the murder of her great-grandmothers at Babi Yar and deals with society's and her family's distortion of the past, Honigmann redefines her family history as a gradual process of decay of the family's essential Jewish identity and reintroduces the tradition of endless travel from exile to exile that her parents had tried to end.

THIS BOOK HAS PRESENTED the argument that both memory politics and literary writings respond to the profound geopolitical revolution that was a consequence of the dissolution of the Eastern bloc. Each in their own way, the political and aesthetic spheres deal with the mnemonic division of the European continent that prevails beyond the creation of the European Union and that, after the Eastern expansion of the EU, stirred memory contests between the “Nazism-and-Stalinism-equally-evil frame” and the “uniqueness-of-the-Holocaust frame.”

The various examples of literature of mnemonic migration discussed here illustrate the capacity of literature to engage in the construction of transcultural memory by making Eastern European memories “travel” to the German-speaking area and thus traverse the mnemonic borderline between Europe's formerly socialist East and the capitalist West. By representing characters who live through the experience of mnemonic migration, understood as the emigration into the Western framework of memory, literature of mnemonic migration tests the version of European history that has been written in accordance with the Auschwitz paradigm, which has dominated memory politics in Germany and the EU since the 1980s. As I showed in part I, up until the EU's eastern expansion in 2004 and 2007, the Holocaust was acknowledged as a “negative benchmark for European identity” and had been anchored in “the institutional setting” by a European-wide Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, and by the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which was shaped to carry the memory of the Holocaust across the threshold of the new millennium. The Stockholm Declaration, which was adopted in 2000 as the founding document of the IHRA, confirmed the official perception of the Holocaust as a singular event and a pivotal caesura in European civilization.

With the eastern expansion of the EU, new memory entrepreneurs entered the field of the EU's memory policy, demanding acknowledgment of the Communist regime as “equally evil.” The various initiatives launched by the European Commission in order to strengthen common knowledge of Stalin's totalitarian regime in Western Europe eventually failed to shape a more pluralistic perception of European memory, as the proponents of the “uniqueness frame” outnumbered and were also much better organized than those propounding the similarity of the two totalitarian systems.

BARBARA HONIGMANN GREW UP in the former German Democratic Republic as the child of Jewish Communist parents who survived the Holocaust in British exile. Born in 1949, she is one of the oldest representatives of the second generation of German-Jewish authors. Despite the fact she neither hails from outside the German-speaking area nor has moved to Western Germany like the other authors examined in this study, I consider Honigmann's texts as Jewish literature of mnemonic migration. Even though Honigmann left Germany altogether and migrated to Strasbourg, France, she, also in her own view, remains a German author. As a German author with origins in the GDR, her writing contributes to the importing of topics related to socialist Eastern Europe into the German-language book market. As I have argued above, it is not the age of the author but the author's experience of growing up in a country dominated by a Communist mindset that constitutes their ability to articulate the mnemonic borderline between Communist East and capitalist West. Honigmann is widely considered to be a German- Jewish author who deals primarily with Jewish identity, exile, and return to Judaism and only secondarily with the experience of growing up and living in the GDR. My reading does not aim to diminish the importance of her existential search for identity and her consideration of the ethics of exile, but highlights aspects of her writings that have hitherto not been sufficiently explored.

Even for those who did not move to the West, the dissolution of the GDR and the unification caused a transformation of the economic, social, and mnemonic environment that is comparable with the experience of migrating. Indeed, the unification not only liberated the GDR's citizens but also deprived them of their lifeworld. It is thus highly relevant to consider former East German writers as producing a particular category of literature of mnemonic migration that expresses the collision of their memories of Socialism with the West German social and mnemonic context into which they were transferred.

Wolfgang Emmerich has suggested that reunited Germany is a microcosm of the unified Europe, in that the former East and West Germany, like Europe as a whole, are still divided by a mnemonic borderline even after unification.

THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 changed Europe fundamentally and brought a loss of “master ideological narratives” that had previously governed the bipolar world order. This monograph considers Jewish migrant authors from Eastern Europe who are writing in the aftermath of this profound political change. Having migrated from the Soviet Union, Russia, or post- Soviet societies to the German-speaking area, they articulate an Eastern European perspective on Europe's traumatic history that implicitly or explicitly contributes to reordering European memory and intervenes in a political memory contest that arose as a side effect of the political changes. In particular, the ending of the bipolar world order led to uncertainty regarding hitherto binding understandings of the past and of national and transnational identities. The Western European countries struggled with the loss of the East as a fundamental “other” that hitherto had constituted their identity as liberal and democratic nations.

On the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain, the disappearance of the myth of common resistance to the fascist West, especially in the newly constituted post-Soviet states, dissolved definitive political markers. Thus, besides being an economic and political revolution, the dissolution of the Eastern bloc also revolutionized transnational collective memories in East and West. The countries on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain share some political markers that justify the division of the European continent into two mnemonic entities. While 1945 meant liberation from the Nazi regime and invoked the creation of new European cooperation in the “Atlantic” Western part of Europe, for the countries occupied by the Red Army 1945 meant “the beginning of a different oppressive regime.” Despite internal antagonism between the countries, this memory of double victimization “constitutes a common feature” that unites the Eastern nations in “a bond of ‘tragic fate,” setting the entire region apart from Western Europe.

The need of nation-states on both sides of the Iron Curtain to reconfigure their shared memories after 1989 and 1991 can be explained by Jan Assmann's theory of cultural memory, which posits that “Gesellschaften brauchen die Vergangenheit in erster Linie zur Selbstdefinition” (societies primarily need the past to define themselves).

LENA GORELIK WAS BORN in 1981 in what was then known as Leningrad and came to Germany in 1992, where she and her family were accepted as Jewish quota refugees. The present chapter is concerned with Gorelik's two autofictional writings Meine weißen Nächte (My White Nights, 2004) and Lieber Mischa … du bist ein Jude (Dear Mischa … you are a Jew, 2012). Meine weißen Nächte is Gorelik's first novel and tells the experience of migration through the naive point of view of a child. By representing the child's astonished perception of Germany, Gorelik reflects the immense economic and cultural difference between the socialist East and the capitalist West in an amusing manner. A satirical novel in the form of a fictional letter to her son, Lieber Mischa is concerned with Germany's memory culture with regard to Judaism and the Holocaust. Gorelik shows that the dominance of the “uniqueness-of-the- Holocaust frame” leads to an exaggerated philo-Semitism that once again excludes the Jews. The fictional letter ridicules the German population's rituals of remorse, which turn the Jews into a community of victims.

The writings of Olga Grjasnowa and Lena Gorelik have repeatedly been analyzed together. Indeed, there exist striking parallels in Grjasnowa and Gorelik's biographies: both were born in the Soviet bloc in the 1980s and came to Germany in the 1990s as Jewish quota refugees. The two books by Gorelik which I will consider in this chapter resemble Grjasnowa's Der Russe ist einer der Birken in several thematic areas: the sudden rise of interest in the family's own Jewish background the moment it became an entry ticket to Germany (MwN, 86; DR, 50); the protagonist's difficulty starting in a German school without knowing the language; and the subsequent resentment over being viewed as posterimmigrants, receiving compliments on their excellent German (DR, 18). Also, their texts crucially seek to represent the contrast between the perception of Jewishness as an ethnicity (Volkszugehörigkeit), as listed under Point 5 in Russian passports, and the German perception of Jews as a community of victims whose immigration is welcomed by the German government (DR, 50–51; MwN, 90; Mischa, 25).

WHEREAS THE NOVELS of Katja Petrowskaja, Vladimir Vertlib, and Barbara Honigmann, which I analyzed in part II, focus on describing the protagonist's country of origin and the ‘alien’ memories the characters have carried with them, the novels of Olga Grjasnowa and Lena Gorelik focus on the protagonist's confrontation with the host country and its specific social framework of memory. By describing the experiences of migration across the mnemonic threshold between East and West, they elaborate how contradictions between two frameworks of memories compel the protagonists to reconsider their opinions of themselves and–especially–of their Jewish identity. The intervention into the host countries’ active and passive forgetting of Eastern European history is undertaken in direct interaction with members of the majority population. Some of these characters are caricatured representations of ‘the German,’ who either (accidentally or explicitly) express anti-Semitic and xenophobic ideas or take an exaggeratedly tolerant and welcoming, philo- Semitic attitude toward the Jewish ‘foreigners,’ excluding them from German society in either case.

In the novels of Petrowskaja, Vertlib, and Honigmann, the narrator's life in the diaspora mainly appears as a frame describing the narrator's temporal position and point of view on the past. Neither the social reality of the host country in which the narrators live nor their experiences of migration are elaborated on more closely. The clash between the mnemonic frameworks is represented by constructing an implicit reader who is ignorant of the experiences of the Eastern European ‘bloodlands,’ ravaged by both Hitler and Stalin, as well as of the Communist regimes with which the migrant coped in the past. The focus of the first category of literature of mnemonic migration is thus on the forgotten or marginalized events that occurred in the Soviet Union and the GDR during and after World War II. In contrast, Grjasnowa and Gorelik represent a type of literature of mnemonic migration that combines recollection of the past in the Soviet Union with an explicit representation of the protagonist's encounter with the new environment and of the opposition between the prevalent mnemonic horizons in the country of origin and the host country respectively.

OLGA GRJASNOWA WAS BORN in 1984 in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, but at the age of eleven moved with her family to Germany. Der Russe ist einer der Birken liebt (All Russians Love Birch Trees, 2012), Grjasnowa's first novel, was very well received by the critics as well as by the German and international book worlds. There are obvious similarities between the author and the protagonist of the novel, Maria (Mascha) Kogan: both hail from Baku and migrated to Germany as children, both are of Jewish origin, and both have a grandmother who survived the Holocaust and sought refuge in Azerbaijan.

Nevertheless, the book is not an autobiography, as it foregrounds the fictional story of the death of the protagonist's German boyfriend, Elias, as a result of complications arising after an injury in a soccer game, and the protagonist's attempt to deal with her loss by moving to Israel, where she becomes preoccupied with a number of historical and present traumas. Though many elements of Grjasnowa's experiences surely have made their way into the text, Masha's experience of migration and integration does not fully coincide with Grjasnowa's own. Rather, the novel can be defined as autofiction in the sense that it has both autobiographical and fictional elements. As already mentioned in the introduction, in autofiction the reader is in doubt as to whether the author is writing about himself or herself, has invented a fictional figure, or is oscillating between fictional and autobiographical narratives. In Der Russe, the fictional plot displaces the autobiographical elements, leaving “the autobiographical pact” weaker than the fictional one.

Adrian Wanner's reading of the novel as “a successful construction of the narrative of the self in a non-native language that is a means towards integration” implies that Mascha's impressive achievement in finishing her education as an interpreter, with the highest grades possible, mirrors Grjasnowa's success in publishing books in a non-native language. However, this reading does not take into account that Mascha's success is only superficial and conceals the trauma that war and migration exerts on her. Moreover, the novel does not foreground Mascha's process of integration, which already has taken place when the novel opens.