Abstract
At the age of eight, Polish-Jewish child survivor Jurek Becker settled with his father in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Berlin, later becoming a professional writer in the German Democratic Republic. He left after a series of protests by artists and intellectuals against the expatriation of dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, and took up residence in the Federal Republic of Germany. The author of the present study addresses Becker’s short story “Die Mauer” (The Wall) and testimonial essay “Die unsichtbare Stadt” (The Invisible City), along with Frank Beyer’s 1991 film Wenn alle Deutschen schlafen (While All Germans Are Sleeping), based on “The Wall.” In particular, the author analyzes all three works in relation to other fictional representations of the Holocaust and discourses of childhood, imagination, and play. It draws on M.M. Bakhtin’s theories of narrative strategy and Johan Huizinga’s ideas about the “ludic element” (essentially, play) needed to survive totalitarian systems such as Nazism, to argue for valuing such works as important expressions by child survivors.
