Viola Roggenkamp

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.{{cite web|url=https://www.eimsbuetteler-nachrichten.de/veranstaltungen/viola-roggenkamp-erinnerung-an-juedisches-familienleben-in-hamburg/|title=Viola Roggenkamp: Erinnerung an jüdisches Familienleben in Hamburg|work=Im Rahmen der Ringvorlseung „Schauplatz Hamburg vom Barock zur Gegenwart" ist die Autorin Viola Roggenkamp am 11. Dezember an der Universität Hamburg zu Gast.|author=Alana Tongers|date=22 November 2019|publisher=Eimsbütteler Nachrichten |accessdate=15 August 2021}} 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".{{cite web|title=Acht Jahre lang täglich ein Held Literatur |work=Kompositorisches Kunststück und filmreife Detektivgeschichte: „Tochter und Vater“ erzählt von einer Hamburger Juristin, die sich nach Papas Tod auf eine Reise in die Erinnerung begibt. |url=https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezensionen/belletristik/viola-roggenkamp-tochter-und-vater-acht-jahre-lang-taeglich-ein-held-literatur-11508619.html |author=Hans-Jürgen Schings|date=27 October 2011|publisher=Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung|accessdate=15 August 2021}} 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 Kraków] that Paul, the father in the novel, did".

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.

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.{{cite web |url=https://www.zeit.de/autoren/R/Viola_Roggenkamp/index.xml?p=23 |publisher=Die Zeit (online) |work=(Artikel von Viola Roggenkamp auf Zeit Online) |title=Viola Roggenkamp ... Artikel |accessdate=15 August 2021}} In 1977 Roggenkamp was a founder member of the team around Alice Schwarzer that created the magazine EMMA.{{cite web |title=Viola Roggenkamp zum Thema Ein journalistisches Doppelleben .... Schreiben für Die Zeit und Schreiben für Emma |work=publicity for a university event |url=https://www.uni-giessen.de/ueber-uns/veranstaltungen/vortraege/AnkndigungRoggenkamp.pdf |publisher=University of Giessen |year=2015 |accessdate=15 August 2021}} (The name of the magazine is a wordplay based on the word "emancipation".{{cite web|author1=Kristina Wydra|title=For women, by women – Alice Schwarzer and the feminist magazine EMMA|url=http://www.alumniportal-deutschland.org/en/germany/article/emma-alice-schwarzer-feminist.html |publisher= Alumni Portal |accessdate=14 November 2014}}) 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".{{cite web |url= https://taz.de/!734194/ |title=Betr.: Viola Roggenkamp |work=taz archiv |publisher=taz Verlags u. Vertriebs GmbH , Berlin |date= 30 June 2004 |accessdate=15 August 2021}} Since 1990 she has been writing for the Berlin-based weekly publication die Jüdische Allgemeine.{{cite web|title=Jüdische Polemik und deutsche Streitkultur|work=Meinung .... Wir brauchen mehr Lust an der Auseinandersetzung |url=https://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/politik/juedische-polemik-und-deutsche-streitkultur/|date=4 September 2017 |author=Viola Roggenkamp|publisher=Jüdische Allgemeine, Berlin |accessdate=15 August 2021}}{{cite web|title=Flüchtlingspolitik: Die Diktatur des Guten |work=Deutschland muss endlich aufhören, Größenfantasien zu erliegen |url=https://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/kultur/die-diktatur-des-guten/ |date=19 January 2016 |author=Viola Roggenkamp|publisher=Jüdische Allgemeine, Berlin |accessdate=15 August 2021}} In 2016 she became, in addition, a regular contributor to the monthly magazine, Cicero.

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:"I am a German Jewess. I am the daughter of a Jewess. And in my judgment Judaism is no mere question of belief.”

:"Ich bin deutsche Jüdin. Ich bin die Tochter einer Jüdin; und meiner Meinung nach ist Judentum keine Glaubensfrage."

:::Viola Roggenkamp in conversation with Michael Wolffsohn and Andreas Main
Deutschlandfunk radio interview, 22 September 2016.{{cite web |url=https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/religionskritik-wie-geht-das-richtig-auch-juden-duerfen.886.de.html?dram:article_id=365911 |work=Religionskritik – wie geht das richtig? .... Viola Roggenkamp und Michael Wolffsohn im Gespräch mit Andreas Main |title=Auch Juden dürfen kritisiert werden |date=22 September 2016 |publisher=Deutschlandradio, Köln |accessdate=16 August 2021}}}}

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.{{cite web|title=Im Garten ist die Welt zu Ende|work=Viola Roggenkamp erzählt in ihrem späten Romandebüt »Familienleben« eindrucksvoll über eine jüdische Kindheit im Hamburg der sechziger Jahre|volume=16/2004 |date=9 April 2004|url=https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/im-garten-ist-die-welt-zu-ende-a-837b4710-0002-0001-0000-000030458471?context=issue|publisher=Der Spiegel (online)|author=Jana Hensel|accessdate=15 August 2021}} 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.{{cite web |publisher=Bildungswerk der Erzdiözese Köln e.V. ("Domradio"), Köln |url=https://www.domradio.de/radio/sendungen/autorengespraech/viola-roggenkamp-ueber-ihre-deutsch-juedische-familie |title=Viola Roggenkamp über ihre deutsch-jüdische Familie .... |date=3 June 2011 |work=Rezension |accessdate=15 August 2021}}{{cite book |publisher= Perlentaucher Medien GmbH, Berlin & Arche Verlag, Zürich – Hamburg 2004

|isbn=9783716023259 |title=Viola Roggenkamp: Familienleben |work=Rezensionen von 2004 |year=2004 |url=https://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/viola-roggenkamp/familienleben.html |accessdate=15 August 2021}} 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.{{cite web |title=Viola Roggenkamp besucht eine Frau im Turm |date=18 July 2009 |author= Ruth Klüger |url=https://www.welt.de/kultur/literarischewelt/article4133161/Viola-Roggenkamp-besucht-eine-Frau-im-Turm.html |work=Rezension |publisher=Axel Springer SE (Welt und N24Doku), Berlin |accessdate=15 August 2021}} "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").{{cite web |url=https://www.zeit.de/2002/17/55893 |date=18 April 2002 |author=Elisabeth von Thadden |title=Viola Roggenkamp: Tu mir eine Liebe. Meine Mamme. Jüdische Frauen und Männer in Deutschland sprechen von ihrer Mutter. |work=Rezension |publisher=Die Zeit (online) |accessdate=16 August 2021}} 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,{{cite web |url=https://www.paderborn.de/guiapplications/newsdesk/publications/Stadt_Paderborn/109010100000122220.php |title="Tu mir eine Liebe – Meine Mamme" Eine Lesung mit Viola Roggenkamp über die jiddische Mamme |date=24 October 2003 |work=Pressemitteilung: Dienstag, 4. November, 19.30 Uhr in der Stadtbibliothek (Pre-publicity for a lecture to be delivered in the Paderborn city library by Viola Roggenkamp |publisher=Amt für Öffentlichkeitsarbeit und Stadtmarketing, Paderborn |accessdate=16 August 2021}} Esther Dischereit,{{cite web |url=http://www.viola-roggenkamp.de/Tu%20mir%20eine%20Liebe.html |work=Rezension |title= Was gehen einen die Mütter von Juden in Deutschland an? .... 14 Töchter und 13 Söhne |publisher=Mosse Verlag Berlin, 2002 & Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag Frankfurt a. M. 2005 |author=Elisabeth von Thadden |accessdate=16 August 2021}} 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.{{cite web |url=http://www.viola-roggenkamp.de/Biographie.html |title=Viola Roggenkamp |work=Biographie |author=Claudia Jürgens |accessdate=16 August 2021}}

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.{{cite web |url=http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/26753 |title=Über das verleugnete Jüdische. Viola Roggenkamp ermöglicht einen neuen Blick auf die Familie Mann-Pringsheim .... Rezension: Viola Roggenkamp Erika Mann – Eine jüdische Tochter. Über Erlesenes und Verleugnetes in der Familie Mann-Pringsheim|year=2006|author=Isabel Rohner|publisher=Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (Komparatistik Online) |work=Click on "Download full text files" |accessdate=16 August 2021}} From California, the scholar (and Vienna-born holocaust survivor) Ruth Klüger summarized Roggenkamp's position for readers of Die Welt:

• "According to Roggenkamp Erika Mann consistently denied her Jewish provenance on her mother's side, in the sense that she never classified herself as Jewish. This denial came close to becoming a piece of psychological repression in a Freudian sense, which then worked itself out destructively – or at least negatively – in Erika's life, her writing and her thinking. You can, to be sure, pick out and question individual details on this hastily written polemical little book, but the author is certain correct to feel the need to raise questions if the daughter of a prominent and only partially assimilated [Jewish] family (Katia – Erika's mother – had been baptised into Christianity, but Old-man Pringsheim had not), during a period of very great persecution of Jews to which she might easily have fallen victim, should have set aside her Jewish heritage. ....so this highly gifted woman gradually became Thomas Mann's daughter, and nothing more. Her exceptionally close relationship to an exceptionally self-centred father blocked her own path to a life of her own".{{cite web |title=Verleugnetes Judentum |work=Rezension – Ruth Klüger hat Bücher von Frauen gelesen|date=31 December 2005 |author=Ruth Klüger |url=https://www.welt.de/print-welt/article187395/Verleugnetes-Judentum.html|publisher=Axel Springer SE (Welt und N24Doku), Berlin |accessdate=16 August 2021}}

Klüger is strongly positive about Roggenkamp's imputations as to Erika Mann's inner thoughts and beliefs. Her insistence that much of the book's explosive impact comes from a wider context, in which discussion of the fate of German Jewry during the post-war period has been suppressed, is a judgement that Roggenkamp self-evidently shares. The summary to her review is overwhelmingly supportive:

• "Roggenkamp irritates and provokes. But it is difficult to resist the urgency and topicality of the irritations. By sharing her insights and conclusions on the German-Jewish relationship within the cultural élite, the author has shown no small courage in opening up a hornets' nest.

Another expatriate observer, Manfred Koch, writing in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, was less sympathetic:

• "The writer's judgmental attitude is astonishing. From the outset, she does not shy away from placing anyone who might criticise her case under suspicion of antisemitism. Roggenkamp eulogises a vague 'essentialism of Jewishness', which spares her the necessity of coming up with any more precise historical analysis. .... At the launch of the German empire almost two-thirds of Germany's Jews were part of an economic and cultural elite; they had left religious constraints and lifestyles behind. .... The lack of interest in their Jewish heritage that the Pringsheims, like many others like them, took is not the result of some pathological repression or betrayal. Erika Mann fought against antisemitism whenever she encountered it. That she thought of herself not as a Jew but as a democratic humanist like any other ... who should blame her?"{{cite web|title=Die Amazone des Zauberers: Neuerscheinungen zu Erika Manns 100. Geburtstag .... Einseitige Perspektive |author=Manfred Koch |publisher=Neue Zürcher Zeitung & Arlindo Nogueira Marques Correia |date=5 November 2005 |url=https://arlindo-correia.com/040106.html |work= Erika Mann. Eine jüdische Tochter von Viola Roggenkamp: Rezensionen/Reviews |accessdate=16 August 2021}}

Commentators piled in on both sides. (Some were even content to try colonizing the middle ground.) Viola Roggenkamp's public profile, along with appreciation of her insights, were permanently raised and enhanced. Roland H. Wiegenstein applied a little psychological interpretation of his own in Die Berliner Literaturkritik, suggesting that Roggenkamp's decision to share her conclusions on Erika Mann's denial of her Jewishness was,

• "... certainly all of a piece with the historical illuminations that the author has previously shared in her novels of family life. .... For Viola roggenkamp, Erika Mann becomes a kind of flawed role model ("Identifikationsfigur"), just as Rahel Varnhagen was for the young Hannah Arendt. Roggenkamp conducts a phoney battle with her heroine and wishes the matter could be other than it is".{{cite news|title=Verdrängt – und doch stets anwesend |author= Roland H. Wiegenstein|publisher=Die Berliner Literaturkritik}}

Tilmann Lahme, who provided his review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, is deeply underwhelmed. He does not think that Roggenkamp had found out too much about why Erika Mann, like her mother before her, wanted nothing to do with her Jewish roots. But he has discovered plenty about Roggenkamp's own grief over the loss of Jewish lives in Germany, and about her anger, "although it remains unclear why this is principally directed against Thomas Mann".{{cite web |author=Tilmann Lahme |title=Wotans Tochter |url= https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezensionen/sachbuch/wotans-tochter-1282869.html?printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_0 |publisher=Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung |date=9 November 2005 |work="Was für eine sonderbare Familie sind wir! Man wird später Bücher über uns – nicht nur über einzelne von uns – schreiben." Eine hellsichtige Prophezeiung Klaus Manns: Längst sind die Manns literarischer Pop. Das hat seine Schattenseiten: Wer ein ihm auf den Nägeln brennendes Thema popularisieren möchte ... |accessdate=16 August 2021}}

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Category:1948 births

Category:Living people

Category:Writers from Hamburg

Category:20th-century German women writers

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