Leseprobe

156 Loss and Memory Erika Plaut’s deeply personal impressions of her immediate environment, her description of the evolving personalities of her sisters, parents, and friends, not to mention her own years of growing up, are all inextricably bound with her observa- tions of the wider historical situation beyond the family home. Although essentially a look back at the author’s own personal memories from her childhood and youth in Dresden, Leipzig, and Paris, ‘Eri’s Autobiography 1906–1928’ is notable for the complexity of both its content and form. As such, the text cannot simply be viewed as the frag- ment of a classic coming of age story. Rather, Erika Plaut’s memoirs are an important document about her former home city of Dresden—certainly in terms of their historical significance, but also with respect to their remarkable human dimension. There is an economy to the language of the mem- oirs, with sentences kept pithily brief. The author’s uncompromisingly analytical gaze on the people around her and their wider historical context is broken down to a human scale through the use of irony. Much more than a mere stylistic feature, irony here serves to engender a sense of empathy. Erika Plaut creates a chronological account of the events of her early life against the political, eco- nomic, and social backdrop of the period span- ning the dying days of the Wilhelmine monarchy through to the middle years of the Weimar Repub- lic. In her account, she describes how the seem- ingly indestructible order that characterized her childhood years collapsed into unpredictable dis- order precipitated by the First World War. Recur- ring throughout Erika’s memoirs of her youth are a number of motifs that serve as symbols of this transformation from peace to war, order to disor- der, certainty to uncertainty. Initially charged with positive meanings, the motifs become increasing- ly laden with negative connotations by dint of association and situational context. Thus, for ex- ample, Erika describes the poppies and cornflow- ers in the fields of Berchtesgaden, an idyllic Alpine setting where she and her family were vacationing just as war broke in summer 1914. During the course of the war, the term ‘field’ ( Feld ) was often used euphemistically to denote the front. For Eri- ka, references to the war, to the ‘field’, thus initial- ly summoned up images of the flower-filled mead- ows of her summer holiday. On learning at the outbreak of war that her father, Dr Siegmund Salz- burg, would be serving in a ‘field’ hospital in France, it was those red poppies and blue corn- flowers that for her sprang to mind. It seems cer- tain that the memoirs, written some three decades after the end of the First World War, would also draw on the symbolic values acquired by the flow- ers as a result of the culture of memorialization ‘Teddy and Eri, playing Weber’s: “Song of the Mermaids” from “Ober- on.”’ Musical entertain- ment at the Salzburgs, 1915 in the villa at Mozart- strasse 3. Erika Salzburg on violin, Thekla Salzburg on piano.