The historian Per Leo also advocates dusting off the “routine dismay” in our culture of remembrance. Reunification, migration and post-colonial debates have changed the country, he wrote in his essay tears without sadness. The commemoration of the Holocaust is compulsive and provincial. Or, one thinks, quite concretely: nothing at all for young people.
Never again sentences and all the empty rituals are of course not only a German problem, you know – and yet you have to laugh when Yazmina Reza with her great sense of situational comedy in Serge describes a class trip once. The teacher Madame Hainaut in Auschwitz suddenly bursts out laughing hysterically because the philosophy teacher Cerezo, a “depressed Jew”, has prescribed a mournful expression since Paris. Now on the steps of the crematorium, even the teacher can no longer control it and the whole class laughs along. That’s what Margot, Nana’s daughter, told her, that’s what her classmates told her. Margot wasn’t “on the list,” Nana jokes to her brother Jean.
An envious prejudice against Jews is certainly the somehow light-footed sarcasm, the Woody Allen-esque, the neurotic-melancholic wit when it comes to illness, suffering and death, and you don’t really notice it because of the laconic tone only casually touches the heart. In short: This tragi-comic humor, which is often attributed to Jews, is also the trademark of the French star author Yasmina Reza.
her latest novel Serge is a portrait of a Jewish family in Paris, there is Jean, the Poppers’ middle son, Nana, the spoiled youngest married to a leftist Spaniard (who is notoriously a source of amusement) and Serge, almost 60, a shabby existence, His partner just kicked him out. Jean: “Our parents passed away leaving us nothing but fragments (…), it’s hard to say that we were interested in their saga.”
Meanwhile, the debates in this country, even among Jews, are still going on with hostile seriousness about who is allowed to speak at all. Some people deny the right to do so to the East Berlin publicist Max Czollek, who, like Leo, is fighting for a new “overcoming of the present”. Why? According to the writer Maxim Biller, he was not a “real Jew”, but only an “opinion and carnival Jew” – which, ironically, sounded anti-Semitic. The Central Council of Jews even intervened to clarify this question (Czollek is not a real Jew), which some say does not speak for all Jews.
It smells like sunscreen
Said more inner-Jewish dispute is interesting because Jewish identity also in Serge is negotiated, but without the cramped concern of depicting plurality in all its silliness or stereotyping. For example, when the non-practicing Jew Edward Popper suddenly becomes sentimental at the push of a button. “With Israel, we immediately ended up in bombast and pathos,” recalls Jean. Who needs Israel? Martha then asked. To which Edgar replied that the children shouldn’t listen to their mother, that she was an anti-Semite and that it was her fault that they weren’t raised Jewish. The usual exchange of blows followed, the first-person narrator recalls. Marta asked why he wasn’t a “role model”. Edgar: “Who is the mainstay in a Jewish family, Marta? The woman who lights the candles!” At the latest when the candles were lit, Jean thinks, the mother went out laughing.
Since Marta died, no ritual has held the family together. Serge’s daughter Joséphine probably pushed the siblings to travel to Auschwitz for that reason, and because Serge definitely doesn’t want to travel alone with Nana and daughter, Jean is there. It will be an unorthodox journey, a classic road trip. The reader sees all the advantages that literature has to offer here, a film is running, it doesn’t need more pictures, not even a play.
It’s going to be 25 degrees in Auschwitz, Joséphine announces, and that’s in the middle of April, after which she gives a lecture about plastic flying around in the atmosphere, and now the GPS in the Polish rental car doesn’t recognize the German name for “Auschwitz”. 25 degrees. Although Jean has no expectations, he is now disappointed by the weather. It should be cold and grey, instead it smells of sunscreen everywhere and new trees have been planted on the premises. Why?
In the case of Serge, the Poppers’ eldest son, the motives for the trip are unclear. Because of his daughter, of course, and he’s also superstitious, one can rule out that he would instrumentalize Auschwitz, to put his own shabby existence in perspective, for example to develop humility in the face of all the horror. He walks around in a black suit, boycotting the route, which Joséphine and Nana march like “obsessed” (Serge) while saying either “amazing” or “terrible”. Because Nana and Joséphine make every effort to make this trip productive. The project faces competition from all sides, there are the not-so-banal environmental concerns, stress with his Tunisian friend, Nana’s son Victor is said to be ungrateful to Uncle Serge, who doesn’t thank him for finding a job when he’s absent. Serge is only hurt in his vain pride as a man. You laugh a lot while reading, it is Reza’s art that you become very melancholic about it.
Why remember at all? So that something like this never happens again? You only have to look at Pakistan or Syria, comments Serge – or Jean, the brothers were always very close. Luckily, in this light human comedy, no one is “another human” at the end, that would be overly sentimental. And that’s not what Auschwitz is for. Jean will remain someone who occasionally grumbles about failure. Serge an old Homme à Femmes. Nana will continue to do meaningful things. But the children represent a new generation. There is no more sense to be had, that is the whole consolation.
Serge Yasmina Reza Frank Heibert, Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel (Translation), Hanser 2022, 208 p., 22 €