Universiteit Gent
Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte
2009-2010
Beautiful and true:
Reality and Fiction in Jonathan Safran Foer’s
‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’
Supervisor: Bart Lievens
Paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the
requirements for the degree of ‘Master in de
Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels-Nederlands’ by
Lize Chielens
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS________________________________________
I would like to thank my supervisor, Bart Lievens, for helping me come up with
the topic of my dissertation, for sharing his knowledge on the subject, and for
being enthusiastic and supportive of my ideas. I appreciate the time he has made
to guide me through the process of writing this dissertation.
I would also like to thank all the literature professors I have met at this
university; especially Prof. Dr. Bart Eeckhout and Prof. Dr. Yves T’Sjoen for
their courses on Literature and Trauma; and Prof. Dr. Kristiaan Versluys for his
courses on Jewish-American literature and New York. They have inspired me,
and added to my appreciation of literature.
I want to thank my father and brother who bore with me through what
turned out to be a long and often difficult period. The numerous discussions on
our Wednesday night diners have motivated me, and over and over again they
have given me the insights I needed. Their love for literature and history have
always inspired me.
I also want to thank my friends and cousins for always believing in me.
Their support has been indispensable.
Finally I want to mention my Mum, in loving memory of the woman who
has been my strongest supporter for the first twenty years of my life.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS__________________________________________
1. INTRODUCTION
4
2. PLOT
8
3. STRUCTURE
11
4. CHARACTERIZATION
13
A: OSKAR SCHELL
13
B: GRANDPA AND GRANDMA SCHELL
19
C: TRAUMA THEORY
21
5. GENRE
28
A: HISTORICAL FICTION
28
B: REALISM AND MAGIC REALISM
32
6. COMPARING FACTS
36
A: NEW YORK 2001
36
B: DRESDEN 1945
38
C: HIROSHIMA 1945
40
7. AUTHENTICIY, SOURCES, FICTIONALIZATION
43
A: PERSONAL SOURCES
44
B: HISTORICAL SOURCES
45
- LOTHAR METZGER
47
- OTTO SAILER-JACKSON
48
- EDDA WEST
49
- KINUE TOMOYASU
52
C: FICTIONAL SOURCES
- DRESDEN (2006)
D. THE WORLD WIDE WEB
54
54
56
8. CONCLUSION
61
9. NOTES
63
10. APPENDIX
71
11. BIBLIOGRAPHY
89
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INTRODUCTION________________________________________________
Growing up in the once war-torn “Westhoek”, I have always been reminded that
war cannot be forgotten. Rows of white stones, unnaturally round ponds, which
are in fact bomb craters, and an abundance of memorials are some of war’s
mementos. A more subtle reminder of the First World War is the literature it
produced. Until this day, people all over the world are writing about this tragedy
of the beginning of the twentieth century. Some texts are patriotic and defend
the motives of war, others are manifests against war, filled with anger. And
another category is stripped of politics and anger; these texts tell the people’s
story of desperation and loss. This last type of text is what I wanted to study in
this dissertation: another time, another war, but the same grief.
An additional requirement in my search for a topic for this dissertation,
was that I wanted to analyze a great piece of literature. During my years at
university I discovered my love for contemporary Jewish-American literature,
and specifically New York fiction. The work of Philip Roth especially has
always intrigued me. His ability to merge an enjoyable reading experience with
fascinating subject matter and fabulous literary writing is brilliant.
The novels by Jonathan Safran Foer lived up to all of my wishes. Jonathan
Safran Foer (°Washington D.C. 1977) is a Jewish-American author who lives in
Brooklyn, New York. So far, he has published three bestselling books: two
novels, ‘Everything is illuminated’ (2002) and ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly
Close’ (2005), and one piece of non-fiction, Eating animals (2009). Foer’s
debut novel has been made into a film by director Liev Schreiber, starring actor
Elijah Wood. Director Stephen Daldry (‘Billy Eliott’ (2000) and ‘The Hours’
5
(2002)) is developing the film based on his second novel, which is to be
released in 2012.
Foer’s enormous popularity is a proof that reading his books is an
enjoyable experience. And just like Roth, Foer also receives universal critical
and academic attention. He is revered and criticized for his innovation, his
experiments, and his sometimes-daring subject matter. Another reason why I
chose to discuss this author is his contemporary view on history. Foer is 33
now, and was 25 when his first novel was published. He grew up with the
Internet and television, and his writing is shaped by these very present media.
Through his contemporary eyes he looks at past tragedies that happened during
the Second World War. His Jewishness is also important in this context. In both
of his novels Foer chooses to write about the present day on the one hand, and
the Second World War on the other hand.
In this dissertation, I will analyze Foer’s second novel, ‘Extremely Loud
and Incredibly Close’. A historical novel on the subject of the events of 11
September, 2001. Two other historical events in the novel are the firebombing
of Dresden in 1945 and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima of that same year.
Foer’s choice to incorporate these past traumas of the Second World War is a
sensitive one in a post-9/11 America, as it portrays two tragedies that were
inflicted by the Allied Forces, and by Americans.
In 2005, when the book was published, Americans were still very much
affected by this trauma. Former president Bush’s was waging his war on terror
and Ground Zero was still a crater. Photographs and videos of the incident had
been broadcasted all over the world. Books on the topic were being published,
films were being released, but when ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’ was
6
published, many readers and critics were shocked. Foer’s novel was one of the
first fictional works on 9/11i; it did not present the reader with a detailed
description of what happened that day, nor did it mention the political side of
9/11. ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’ shows the effects of this tragedy
on a child who is traumatized by the loss of his father, who died in the World
Trade Center on that day. The young narrator tells the story of his fantastical
search for answers about the death of his father in his own peculiar way. The
book is filled with images and has an experimental typography. Many reviewers
have critiqued the youthfulness of the novel’s protagonist, and they deemed
Foer’s dealing with this monstrous drama playful, whimsical and too cute. They
thought it did not do justice to the cruel reality of 9/11, and considered it
disrespectful to insert unreal characters and magical elements into a story about
9/11.
This made me wonder about how Foer incorporates reality into his novel:
on the one hand a reality he experienced himself, 9/11, and on the other hand
the past reality of the second world war. The opening line of “The Anxiety of
Authenticity”, an essay by Maria Margaronis on historical fiction is: “To write a
historical novel is to enter a no-man’s land on the borders of fact and fantasy.”ii
Fact and fantasy are key in this dissertation. I want to perform a literary analysis
of this novel, while focussing on the link of the book with reality. I want to look
into the believability of Foer’s characters as real human beings. I want to prove
to the reader that parts of this novel are very realistic, and explain that the
fantastic and unrealistic elements in the book serve a purpose: a symbolical
purpose on the one hand; or on the other hand, they help convey the real
emotions of people after tragedies. I will argue that Foer’s prime goal is not to
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tell a story of absolute realism, but his purpose is to tell a story of true emotions.
I also want to take a closer look at Foer’s writing process, how he as a novelist
integrates reality into his work of fiction.
After two short chapters on plot description and the rather complex
structure of the novel, I will go on with a characterization of the three narrators.
I will focus on why Foer chose these characters and what makes them real. A
considerable part of this chapter will analyze the characters with the use of
trauma theory. I will show that all three characters are believable
representations of traumatized people. Chapter five deals with genre. I will
argue that ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ is an unconventional historical
novel. I will also take a closer look at the specifically realistic passages of the
novel and at the magic realist side of the novel. In chapter six I will give an
objective – insofar as objectivity is possible – picture of the three major
historical events Foer writes about: the attacks on the Twin Towers and the
bombing of Dresden and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during WWII. I will
also explain why Foer chose to put 9/11 and these two historical tragedies side
by side. In chapter seven I want to take a closer look at Foer’s writing process,
his way of merging reality with a fictional world. I specifically focus on the
chapters about Dresden and Hiroshima. How does a writer who comes 60 years
after, write about these atrocities of history?
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2. PLOT_________________________________________________________
‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ consists of the accounts of three related
narrators, Oskar Schell and his grandparents: Thomas and “Grandma” Schell,
who have each lost loved ones in two tragic events: the 1945 bombing of
Dresden and the events of the 11th of September, 2001. The protagonist of the
book is Oskar, a nine-year-old boy who lives in Manhattan with his mother, and
his overly protective grandmother, who lives across the street. He has lost his
father, Thomas Schell Jr., in the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001. A
year after 9/11 Oskar finds a key in an envelope marked ‘Black’ in his father’s
wardrobe. He believes this key to be a clue in the last “Reconaissance game”
organised by his father. These games were thought up by father Schell to send
his vigorous son out on various expeditions. In an attempt to make sense of the
sudden loss of his father, Oskar goes on a quest through New York, in search of
a person named Black and the matching lock for the mysterious key. He starts
with Aaron Black in Queens, planning to finish with Zyna Black. He does
everything on foot and occasionally takes a cab, because of his fear of public
transport. This is one of the several fears Oskar developed after being
traumatized by the attacks on the Twin Towers. Elevators, airplanes, fireworks,
“Arab people on the subway (even though I’m not racist),”iii and unattended
bags are only a few items on his list of fears. One of the people he meets on his
quest is Mr. Black, whose first name the reader never learns. Mr. Black lives in
the apartment one floor above Oskar’s and has not left the building since the
day his wife died, twenty-four years earlier. Oskar decides he wants to help this
man out of his loneliness and asks him to come along on his quest, and he
agrees.
9
Interwoven with Oskar’s story, is the history of Oskar’s paternal
grandparents. His grandfather, Thomas Schell Sr., and grandmother were born
and raised in Dresden, Germany. During the Second World War Schell Sr. has
Jewish sympathies and befriends Simon Goldberg, a Jewish intellectual. On the
day of the Allied firebombing of Dresden he loses his pregnant girlfriend, Anna.
He is left traumatised and due to this trauma he loses his words one by one;
“Anna” is the first to go. He starts writing down everything in notebooks. Later
Thomas Schell moves to New York “lonely, broken and confused”, where he
unexpectedly meets the younger sister of his lost love. Soon after their
encounter they decide to get married, not out of love, but out of a shared trauma,
the shared loss of Anna. They agree, as a rule, never to have children. Later
however, when he finds out his wife is pregnant, Thomas Schell abandons her
and leaves New York to go back to his native town. From Dresden he writes a
letter to his abandoned child every single day, but never manages to send any of
them. Years and thousands of unsent letters later, when he finds out about the
death of the son he has never met, Schell returns to New York and moves back
in with his wife, who is now Oskar’s Grandmother.
Grandma wants to keep Schell and his grandson away from each other out
of fear her husband will leave once more. Grandma tells Oskar that a renter is
living in her guestroom. Initially Oskar supposes “the renter” is Grandma’s
imaginary friend, until one day he meets him in Grandma’s apartment. By now
Mr. Black has given up joining Oskar on his strenuous quest. Oskar, who cannot
talk to his Mom nor Grandma about his secret quest, and who has no peers who
understand him, turns to this stranger, who is actually his grandfather. Oskar
does find the Black to whom the key belongs, but his quest has brought no
10
solution, no answers to the questions about the death of his father. “The renter”
and Oskar decide to dig up the empty coffin of Oskar’s father, whose body was
never found after 9/11. Oskar wants to observe the truth about the emptiness of
the coffin, hoping this will be “a simple solution to an impossible problem”.iv
“The renter” tells Oskar he has lost a son whom he has written suitcases full of
unsent letters to, so they fill up the coffin with the letters.
A solution is impossible for Grandpa. A day after he has dug up the grave
of his deceased son, he leaves for the airport. Grandma is afraid he is going to
abandon her again, so she follows him. Although it can only be temporary,
Grandma and Grandpa decide to spend their life in the airport, not in Dresden,
nor in New York, the two cities where they have lost his love, her sister, and
their child, but in a place where everybody is arriving or leaving.
For Oskar the reburial gives him a certain peace of mind. He returns home
to his Mom, and for the first time since the day his father died, he opens up to
here. On the last written page of the novel Oskar reverses history. He turns back
time until the evening before September 11th, and ends with “We would have
been safe.” The final pages of the book are a reversed flipbook of a falling man
out of one of the Twin Towers, so that he appears to be going up.
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3. STRUCTURE__________________________________________________
‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ is divided into seventeen chapters, nine of
which are narrated by Oskar Schell. Oskar’s chapters are alternated with
chapters that are narrated by either one of his paternal grandparents. Grandpa,
Thomas Schell, and Grandma each narrate four chapters. The sequence goes:
Oskar – Grandpa – Oskar – Grandma – Oskar... The structure of the book
already reveals Grandpa and Grandma’s distance – both physical and
psychological – from each other in the novel.
The nine Oskar chapters are mostly set between September 2002 and
September 2003, when the quest takes place. The story starts when Oskar finds
the key one year after his Dad has died, and ends on the 12th of September 2003.
The chronology is scrambled all over the book; Oskar hops through time. An
example of this scrambled chronology can be found near the end of the novel,
when Oskar first tells what happened the day after “the renter” and him dig up
Dad’s grave, to finish off with the symbolical digging and returning home to his
Mom. Oskar’s story is also packed with flashbacks to the “worst day” (meaning
9/11/2001), to the evening before the worst day, when his father is telling him a
bedtime story, to the day of his father’s funeral, and to other memories. Oskar
talks about the same memories in different flashbacks. For example, the account
of the evening of 10 September, 2001, is spread over three chapters.
The Grandpa chapters are all titled ‘Why I’m not where you are’ followed
by a date. The four chapters represent the thousands of unsent letters, addressed
to the son he has left behind. Grandpa wants to explain why he left, and via this
way the reader learns more about his past: his youth in Dresden, the bombings
of the city, his reality after this trauma, and his relationship with Grandma. The
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first letter is written on the 21st of May 1963, the day he left his pregnant wife to
move back to Dresden, the first letter he ever wrote to his (unborn) child. The
letter is spread out over the first two Grandpa chapters. The second letter is
written on the 12th of April 1978. Thomas Sr. deems his fourteen-year-old son
old enough to know about his experiences in Dresden. In this overwhelming
letter he tells him all about it. Later in the dissertation I will call this the
Dresden chapter. The last Grandpa chapter is called ‘Why I’m not where you
are 9/11/03’, the day Oskar and Grandpa dig up the empty coffin of Thomas
Schell Jr.
The four Grandma chapters are also epistolary. They are all part of the
same letter she sends to her grandson on the 12th of September 2003, when she
decides to stay with Grandpa at the airport. The chapters are all titled: ‘My
Feelings’. In a way she does the same as Grandpa, she explains why she left, to
her grandson in this case.
A final part of the structure is the collection of images that can be found
all over the novel. They are part of a scrapbook Oskar made: “Stuff that
happened to me”. The images are photographs he makes on his quest, mixed
with images out of newspapers and from the Internet.
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4. CHARACTERIZATION________________________________________
‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ is a homodiegetic first-person narrative
with internal focalization, told by three different narrators/focalizers. This
chapter will focus on these three narrators. I will start off with a characterization
of the main character, Oskar Schell. I will focus on Oskar’s peculiar personality,
on the fictitiousness and realism of the character and on the reason Foer chose a
nine-year-old character to tell this story. Finally I will make the comparison
with another famous novelistic Oskar: Günther Grass’ Oskar Matzerath. In the
second part of this chapter I will take a closer look at the secondary narrators:
Oskar’s grandparents. Grandpa and Grandma Schell’s lives are branded by two
major dramas: the bombings of Dresden and the loss of their son on September
11th, 2001. In a third part of this chapter I will analyse the novel’s characters
with the use of trauma theory.
A. OSKAR SCHELL
The protagonist of the novel is brainy nine-year-old Oskar Schell. Since his
father’s death he is raised by his mother, and paternal grandmother, who lives
across the street. Oskar is a self-called “inventor, jewellery designer, jewellery
fabricator, amateur entomologist, Francophile, vegan, origamist, pacifist,
percussionist, amateur astronomer, computer consultant, amateur archeologist
[and] collector”. He wears only white and carries around a tambourine. Oskar
speaks his own language, punctuated with French words and made-up
expressions. Making his mother and grandmother happy is one of his “raisons
d’être” and wearing “heavy boots” means he is depressed; “Succotash my
Balzac, dipshiitake.” probably needs no further explanation.
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Readers often tend to dislike his smart kid brutality and know-it-all
behaviour. On the other hand the grounds for his demeanour are quite clear and
understandable: the traumatic events of September 11 made him into a
vulnerable and anxious child, who has a hard time connecting with other people,
especially peers; and who tries to immerse himself in – trivial or significant –
facts to “help compensate for his loss”v.
Oskar is also very mature for his age, even unbelievably so, according to
several critics. In “Like Beavers”, a review of ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly
Close’, Wyatt Mason mentions an inconsistency in the character of Oskar,
noticed by “a number of American reviews”:
(…) a nine-year-old who knows, thanks to the wonders of the internet,
what cum is, would also know that a pussy isn’t only a tabby; and no
nine-year-old, however brainy, would have the emotional maturity to
observe of his sudden, post-traumatic tendency to use valuable stamps
from his collection on common mail that it ‘made me wonder if what I
was really doing was trying to get rid of things’vi
Oskar Schell is not a real nine-year-old boy; he is a fictional character.
Furthermore, he is not even a realistic character at all times. Writer and critic
Brian Reynolds Myers overstates it when he says Oskar “never seems human
for a moment.”vii However, confirmation of Oskar’s humanness can be found in
the countless studies and analyses of his psyche. Scholars like Sien
Uytterschout, Matthew Mullins and many others have considered Oskar Schell a
victim of trauma. By the use of the trauma theories of Dominick LaCapra,
Cathy Caruth and Pierre Janet, they portrayed him as a complex and profound
characterviii, a “melancholic” and a “mourner”ix. I will go into this at the end of
this chapter.
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Slate’s cultural editor Meghan O’Rourke points out another proof of
Oskar’s believability as a human being. Oskar’s most convincing moments are
his fits of fury. She brings up the moment when “Oskar tells his mother that if
he could have “chosen, I would have chosen you”— meaning he wishes she’d
been the parent to die on 9/11.”x I would like to add Oskar’s visits to his
therapist and his imaginary outbursts of anger towards him as very credible
behaviour for a traumatized child.
Nevertheless, Oskar is not constantly realistic throughout the book. He has
a certain “magnified precociousness”xi as Matthew Mullins states it; or he
“sounds like a sweet preschooler and a pompous college student at the same
time”, in the words of B.R. Myers. xii In an interview with Robert Birnbaum,
Jonathan Safran Foer argues it was not his intention to create a realistic child.
What was important in the creation of Oskar was the believability of his
sentiments. “Something that you could really empathize with, someone whose
journey you wanted to be along for.”xiii What is key is the real effect fiction can
have on a reader; it can even change people’s lives. The fictional emotions of
this traumatized child cause real emotions in the reader. Furthermore, Oskar’s
precociousness serves an important purpose. Oskar needs to be intelligent
enough to tell an interesting story, to make it possibly for the adult reader to
identify with him. Oskar’s quest and remarkable conversations and thoughts are
a huge part of the book. In the following I will explain, why Oskar also needs to
be a child.
A problem for some critics is why Foer chose a nine-year-old narrator. In
his review late writer and critic John Updike suggested a sexual character
16
should tell the story, because a child lacks property and therefore rides along
“on the imperatives and compromises of others”.xiv But Updike disregards the
interesting aspect of the use of a child-narrator: that what a child does not know
and is not supposed to know. Foer is allowed to make certain statements and
comparisons; he has the freedom to say certain things, because of the naivety of
the unknowing child. For example, because of his ignorance it is permitted for
Oskar to make a link between 9/11 and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He
compares his suffering to the suffering of a mother, Kinue Tomoyasu, who has
lost her child in Hiroshima. Perhaps it might not be tolerated for an adult to
make this connection. The horrific and overwhelming nature of trauma
necessitates a careful approach to the subject. Comparing traumas might be
considered ethically distasteful, because that would disregard the uniqueness of
every traumatic event. Oskar’s lack of knowledge about the historical
background and scale of the bombing of Hiroshima and his just being a child
allow him the freedom to express the link between the victims of a trauma
inflicted by Americans and a trauma inflicted upon Americans.
Secondly, it is more convincing for a child (than it is for an adult) to talk
about 9/11 while leaving out the political side of the story. Foer did not want to
write a purely political, a social or a merely historical account; he did not aim
for a sheer realistic description of the incident. He wanted to write about the
effects of 9/11 on survivors, and their imaginations above all. Foer wanted to
create “a rich imaginative world out of the debris of 9/11”, as Meghan
O’Rourke puts it. And what better way to do this than through the voice of an
inventive and imaginative child?
17
A last justification of Foer’s choice for a young Oskar is the character’s
degree of sincerity, which is only fitting for a child. ‘Extremely Loud &
Incredibly Close’ focuses on emotions and sentiments, and hope. O’Rourke
refers to a poem by W.H. Auden to indicate one of the novel’s key messages:
“We must love one another or die”.xv The characters’ love for one another is
often articulated in the course of the novel. The most obvious illustration of this
are the inventions Oskar comes up with to keep his loved ones safe – “What
about frozen planes, which could be safe from heat-seeking missiles?”xvi – and
to make the world a happier place to live in – “What about a teakettle? What if
the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a
mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up
with me?”xvii Some might call this sticky sentimentality; others will agree that
the novel embraces and encourages the expression of emotions and suggests
hopefulness after 9/11. An adult would not get away with this emotional
explicitness. A child on the other hand can drop the irony and roughness an
adult is expected to have; there is no need for a child to put everything into
reasonable perspective.
A final element of Oskar Schell’s character I would like to bring to light is
the obvious reference to Oskar Matzerath, the protagonist of Günther Grass’
‘The Tin Drum’. Foer’s references to this source are very literal and hard to
overlook. The most obvious reference is of course his first name. Secondly,
Oskar Schell carries around a tambourine, which refers to Oskar Matzerath’s tin
drum. For both Oskars the instrument stands for self-preservation. Oskar Schell
plays the tambourine on his trips through the five boroughs in order to feel safe,
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and as a way to remind him he is still him. Thirdly, Oskar Schell and Oskar
Matzerath are both quirky outsiders, who do not act their age and have trouble
connecting with peers. Matzerath has the appearance of a three-year-old, but the
perception of an adult. Similarly, Oskar Schell has child and adult
characteristics.
Another link between The Tin Drum and ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly
Close’ is the Second World War. A part of ‘The Tin Drum’ is set in Danzig
during the Nazi invasion of Poland. In Foer’s novel the attack on Dresden
during WWII is a major theme. Both novels give a detailed description of the
atrocities of war. Literary editor at the New Republic Ruth Franklin takes it even
further when she finds proof of textual reference between Foer’s chapter on the
Dresden Bombing and a famous passage by Grassxviii, “in which the line
between real horror and fantasy shivers and finally dissolves”xix. I will not
discuss the passage of ‘The Tim Drum’ here, as I will focus on the sources for
the Dresden chapter in chapter seven of the dissertation.
A final link between the novels seems like a minor detail, but actually
illustrates an important message of the novel. Oskar Matzerath loses his love,
Roswitha, during the invasion of Normandy by Allied troops. Similarly, the
bombing of Dresden, during which Thomas Schell’s love Anna gets killed, was
another Allied attack. ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ wishes to expose –
what Matthew Mullins terms – the “myths of America as lone victim”xx. By
focusing on the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, Jonathan Safran Foer
demonstrates that the status of victim is not restricted to post-9/11 Americans.
Furthermore, it were Americans who caused the tragedies of Hiroshima and
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Dresden; Foer thus blurs the boundaries between victims and perpetrators.xxi I
will take a closer look at Mullin’s text in chapter six, “Comparing Facts”.
B. GRANDPA AND GRANDMA SCHELL
The second narrator of ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ is Oskar’s paternal
grandfather, Thomas Schell. As I have mentioned, the Grandpa chapters are
letters addressed to Oskar’s father: the first letter is written to his “unborn
child”, the last to his deceased son. The third narrator is Oskar’s paternal
grandmother. Her chapters are also letters, in this case addressed to Oskar. Both
of these narrators try to write down what they cannot tell their loved ones.
Grandma’s name is never once mentioned in the book. She is always
someone’s sister, wife, mother or grandmother. Also, she is always telling
someone else’s story. “I did not need to tell him my story, but I needed to listen
to his. I wanted to protect him, which I was sure I could do, even if I could not
protect myself.”xxii And when Schell encourages her to type down her story, she
merely produces blank pages. We later find out the reason was not the missing
ribbon of the typewriter and her “crummy eyes”xxiii, as Schell suspected, she
admits to only having hit the space bar. About her relationship with her husband
she says: “I would have done anything for him.
Maybe that was my
sickness.”xxiv Her decision to get pregnant, against her husband’s will, is a
decision out of “need”. Grandma cannot live by or for herself; she has to live in
function of somebody else. When Thomas Sr. has left her, she lives for her son.
Her relationship with Oskar is much the same. After the death of Thomas Jr.,
she dedicates all of her time to her grandson. Because they live across the street
from each other, Grandma and Oskar communicate through two-way radios.
20
Oskar explains: “She was always waiting for me on the other end. I don’t know
how she knew I’d be there. Maybe she just waited around all day.”xxv They hear
and see each other every day, but she never talks about herself. Oskar has the
feeling he does not really know her: “I didn’t know anything about what it was
like when she was a kid, or how she met Grandpa, or what their marriage was
like, or why he left.”xxvi Grandma also has a low self-esteem. For example,
when Oskar asks his grandmother about her opinion: “‘I’m not very smart,’ she
said, insulting herself like she always does before she gives an opinion.”xxvii
Grandma’s self-implied irrelevance is also illustrated when she writes about
Dresden, when she was a young girl. She seems to be an observer of other
people’s lives, especially the life of her sister Anna. The only thing she tells
about herself is one of her hobbies, which is concerned with the lives of others:
she collects letters of all kinds of people - a murderer, a prisoner of war, her
father, her grandmother... Again, her name is mentioned in none of these letters;
they are addressed “To Whom Shall Receive This Letter”, to “Darling” or “To
Anna’s sweet little sister”xxviii. She shuffles the letters around, trying to make
connections and to find out as much as she can about the authors of the letters,
but the reader never finds out about her life.
Grandma and Thomas Schell are two very troubled characters. For two
periods of time, they live together in an apartment in New York. However hard,
Thomas Schell and his wife try to find a way to coexist: “everything between us
has been a rule to govern our life together”xxix. One of those rules is the division
of the apartment in “Nothing Places, in which one could be assured of complete
privacy,” and “Something Places”. They can only be together in the Something
21
Places; Nothing Places are areas where they can cease to exist for a while.
Schell also mentions the rule to never talk about the past. But the truth is that
they are both unable to articulate what they went through, because they are both
traumatised.
C. TRAUMA THEORY
Trauma theory can help make sense of the Schells’ strange ways of
communicating, or rather, their lack of communication. Quite a few scholars
and critics have written about trauma in ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’.
That is why I have chosen to confine the subject to merely a subchapter of this
dissertation. More elaborated texts to read on this subject are “Melancholy and
Mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close” by
Sien Uytterschout, “Philomela revisited: traumatic iconicity in Jonathan Safran
Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” by Philippe Codde and “A rose is
not a rose is not a rose. History and language in Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Extremely loud and incredibly close” by Kristiaan Versluys. I did not want to
leave out the subject altogether, because trauma is a very important topic in the
novel. The best way to shed light on the characters of Thomas Schell Sr. and
Grandma is with the use of trauma theory. Furthermore, the fact that these
characters can be analyzed with the use of trauma theory brings them closer to
reality: it makes them credible as real human beings.
Several trauma theorists have studied the traumatized persons’ inability to
talk about their traumatic past or their feelings. Trauma has a “numbing” effect,
in the words of Cathy Caruth.xxx Walter Benjamin calls it “das
Ausdrukslose”xxxi, or the “expressionless”. But it is only when the victim
22
manages to transform trauma into a narrative, that the endless reliving of the
events through intrusive thoughts, dreams or hallucinations will come to an end.
Only then will the victim be able to integrate the trauma into one’s ownxxxii, and
to start a life after trauma. It is only when “traumatic memory” is transformed
into “narrative memory” that a trauma victim will overcome his dissociation
from reality.xxxiii
Some traumatized people will never be able to put their experiences into
words, into ordinary language. They will try to find a different way to
communicate. Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart suggest an
alternative approach to representing traumatic experiences: “The experience
cannot be organized on a linguistic level, and this failure to arrange the memory
in words and symbols leave it to be organized on a somatosensory or iconic
level,”xxxiv or in other words in the form of images.
This is exactly what Oskar does in his “Stuff that happened to me”, a
scrapbook of collected images that are imprinted in Oskar’s mindxxxv: images
that remind him in some way of his father and of “the worst day”. The images –
of locks, keys, New York buildings... – are scattered all over the book. They are
an expression of what goes on in the traumatized mind of this nine-year-old, and
a step on the way to making sense of it all. But they are not an effective way of
communicating, in this case with the reader. A lot of criticism has been directed
at the photographs in the novel. People found them inappropriate when dealing
with a serious subject like 9/11. Especially the flipbook at the end of the book is
called whimsical and pointless. The flipbook reverses the order of a series of
photographs of a man falling from the WTC, so that he appears to be rising.
Most readers fail to see that this is the world we live in. Pictures and images
23
were all over the Internet after 9/11. It is the way people, including Oskar, learn
about what happened. It makes people think and ask questions. And reversing
the pictures gives the reader a new way to look at things. It can be perceived as
“wrong” or “distasteful” to publicize a picture of a falling man on the Internet or
in this novel, but it is a completely different kind of “wrong” to make him rise
back into a building.xxxvi It is also Oskar’s means of communication; reversing
the pictures is Oskar’s way of saying that closure is impossiblexxxvii. But this
message is misunderstood by many readers.
Communication in ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ fails time and
again. It is impossible for Thomas Schell and his wife to communicate about
what really matters.
When your mother [Grandma] found me in the bakery on Broadway, I
[Grandpa] wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I’d been able to, we
could have lived differently, maybe I’d be there with you now instead of
here. Maybe if I had said, “I lost a baby,” if I’d said, “I’m so afraid of
losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,” maybe that would
have made the impossible possible.xxxviii
Never once do Grandma and Grandpa open up to each other. Apart from their
psychological inability to talk to each other, there is Schell’s aphasia, his loss of
words, which makes communication even harder. He has to come up with
alternative ways to talk to people: he has “yes” tattooed on his right hand and
“no” on his left; and he always carries around a pencil and notebook to write
down short sentences. But these alternatives to speech fail as well. When
Thomas Schell runs out of paper in his notebooks, he flips back to sentences,
which more or less describe what he wants to say. For example, when Grandma
asks him to marry her, he flips back to “I’m sorry, this is the smallest I’ve got.”
and to “I’m not sure, but it’s late.” Schell also runs out of paper when he is
24
writing a letter to his son. “What am I going to do, I need more room, I have
things I need to say, my words are pushing at the walls of the paper’s edge.”
Schell wishes for “an infinitely blank book and the rest of time,” but he ends up
writing sentence upon sentence, filling black illegible pages. Pages he would not
have posted anyway. Thomas Schell Sr.’s attempt at communication with his
son fails on several levels. If Schell Sr. manages to write a readable letter, he
leaves out parts of the story; and more crucially, he never actually sends the
letters. Grandma also hinders the communication between father and son, she
never shows the empty envelopes to Thomas Schell Jr.
When Thomas Schell Sr. finally returns from Dresden, after forty years of
separation, he calls his wife to tell her everything, to “reveal the sum of his life
to her”xxxix. But being unable to speak he pushes the buttons on the telephone; it
turns out in an endless stream of numbers, all of which are included in the book,
This code is undecipherable for Grandma, and for the reader – many have tried.
According to an anonymous source on an Internet forum, Foer said about this
that the number patterns are meaninglessxl. Some parts of the book are meant to
be question marks. In this and several other cases the communication with the
reader fails as well.
Extremely silent and incredibly far away is what the Schell’s are to each
other. Silence and distance are a traumatized couple’s reality. Sien Uytterschout
categorizes Grandpa Schell as a “melancholic”, in the terms of Freud. He is
“acting out”, as Dominick LaCapra would call it.xli The melancholic cannot turn
his traumatic memory into narrative, and endlessly relives his traumatic past.
Thomas Schell cannot and does not want to forget about Anna, out of a feeling
of guilt because he survived Dresden. He cannot live with, nor love anybody
25
else than Anna. He says: “I can’t live, I’ve tried and I can’t. If that sounds
simple, it’s simple like a mountain is simple. Your mother [Grandma] suffered,
too, but she chose to live”xlii.
Grandma chooses to have a son and a new life in New York. As
Uyterschout states, she seems to be “working through” (La Capra) the trauma,
she seems to have formed a narrative memory of the past and seems to be
consciously living in the present, which would make her a “mourner” (Freud).
But actually Grandma has more of the characteristics of the melancholicxliii. Just
like her husband, Grandma is unable to talk about the past. When she tries to
write down her life story, she ends up only hitting the space bar. And her letter
to Oskar is for the most part white. Sentences and paragraphs are very short, and
separated by a lot of blank space. It is a “filled-in emptiness”xliv, in the words of
Kristiaan Versluys. The whiteness on the page represents Grandma’s silence.
Furthermore, there is also numbness in Grandma’s emotions. And although the
fact “that she spent her life learning to feel less”xlv, has made it possible for
Grandma to live on after Dresden and 9/11, this detachment is also a posttraumatic state of mind, which prevents her from truly moving on. Grandma is
haunted by the past in nightmares, and is suicidal: “I [Grandma] was going to
walk to the Hudson river and keep walking.
I would carry the biggest stone I
could bear and let my lungs fill with water.”xlvi and “I [Oskar] saw her carrying
a huge rock across Broadway.”xlvii Her inability to talk about the traumatic past
and her reliving of it in her dreams are characteristics of the melancholic. But
unlike her husband, Grandma formed a new life in New York and is trying to
live in the present day.
26
Sien Uytterschout goes on with an analysis of Oskar’s behaviour and
categorizes him as both a mourner and a melancholicxlviii. In the beginning of
the novel Oskar shows most characteristics of melancholia. Oskar is depressed,
wearing “heavy boots” all the time, and giving himself bruises when he feels
bad about something. He has a hard time connecting to his peers, feeling
misunderstood by all of them. Oskar does not want to open up to his therapist
about his father. And he rarely talks about how he feels to his Mom and his
Grandma, and keeps silent about his quest altogether, because he does not want
them to worry. He never tells his mother about the phone messages he found on
the answering machine, left by his father on the worst day. Being unable to talk
about it, he tries an alternative language to communicate with his mother. He
converts his Dad’s last message into Morse code, which he then turns into a
beaded bracelet for his Mom to wear on the funeral. “Dad would have
known.”xlix But Mom does not understand. Uytterschout also mentions his fits
of rage as a result of his inability to testify about his traumatic experiencesl. And
just like Grandma, Oskar has nightmares. And it takes him very long to get to
sleep pondering on worst-case scenarios about the people he loves.li Towards
the end Oskar changes. After he has dug up his father’s coffin, he returns home
and tells his Mom everything that has happened. It turns out she knew all along,
but the act of opening up is a huge step towards successful mourning.
Traumatic experiences have changed the three narrators of ‘Extremely
Loud & Incredibly Close’. Analyzing them with the help of trauma theory can
help make sense of their actions and personalities. At the start of the novel, all
three characters are unable to talk about their traumatic past and their feelings.
27
Their alternative methods of communication fail as well. In the end Grandpa
and Grandma Schell are still melancholics, living in the past. Oskar Schell on
the other hand, is moving towards successful mourning. Trauma theory has
produced models to understand, examine and help real life victims of trauma.
The fact that these fictional characters can be studied with the use of these
models establishes a degree of believability towards them as real traumatized
people.
28
5. GENRE_______________________________________________________
It is hard to pin Jonathan Safran Foer’s books down to one particular genre. His
latest book ‘Eating Animals’ for example, is a piece of journalistic writing with
a twist. The book deals with vegetarianism and offers the reader an insight in
the American meat industry. The obviously biased author tries to teach and
convince his readers. But ‘Eating Animals’ is more than an advert for
vegetarianism. The book reads like a novel, because a lot of storytelling is going
on. Foer’s personal life and experiences and the stories of the people he meets
on his quest to know the truth about meat, are a huge part of the book.
The same can be said about his novels. In this fourth chapter I will argue
that ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ is an unconventional historical novel.
After that I will focus on the realism and magic realism in the novel.
A. HISTORICAL FICTION
‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ is a fictional narrative, which is based on
historical facts, and can thus be labelled a historical novel. The main factual
reference and a significant theme of the book are the events of 11 September,
2001. Foer establishes a link between this contemporary trauma, which he went
through himself, and the past traumas of Hiroshima and Dresden during the
Second World War.
These historically pivotal events are prominent in the novel and are
clearly important to the writer. Foer wants to put across the effect of 9/11 on
New Yorkers while keeping the memory of the past alive. The knowledge of
past events can help make sense of the present. The necessity of remembrance is
a major concern in Foer’s entire (mini-)oeuvre. The Second World War and the
29
Holocaust - in his debut novel ‘Everything is Illuminated’ - are essential to his
writing as a Jewish-American author.
But Foer’s prime goal is not to inform the reader about what exactly
happened, he is not teaching history. Foer writes fiction in order to move his
public and possibly change its way of thinking. He is a literary writer as
opposed to a historian, in the terminology of Amos Oz.lii And Foer even takes it
one step further. The way in which he communicates his message of
remembrance – and how he refers to the events to remember – is not
conventional, not even for a novelist. In the following I will explain the nature
of this unconventionality.
In a letter to Ruth Franklin Meghan O’Rourke suggests that 9/11, this
recent trauma of tremendous proportion, “seems to call for an investment in
social realism”. ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ is not at all times a
realistic novel. And it definitely departs from social realism. A discrepancy
exists between Oskar’s story and the reality of post-9/11 New York. An element
of magic is added to fictionalize what really happened. And this new ingredient
reduces the sense of reality.
Many Americans critiqued the improbability of the characters and of
Oskar’s quest. An unsupervised nine-year-old child goes knocking on doors all
over New York – on foot – in search of a certain person with the name of Black,
he meets all kinds of peculiar people and ends up digging up his father’s coffin
with the help of a stranger, who turns out to be his grandfather. This excavation
proves to be the “simple solution to an impossible problem”liii for Oskar. For
Grandpa, filling the coffin with the unsent letters to his abandoned son, is a
30
symbolical final handing over of the letters. Symbolic endings and simple
solutions seem restricted to the world of fairy-tales, not of reality or even of
historical fiction.
Also the voices telling the story are unconventional. The unreliability of
the narrators, which has been dealt with in the previous chapter, deepens the gap
from reality. All characters present their own interpretation of the events.
Through the language and the imagination of the narrator, the reader receives a
distorted representation of the facts. For Foer memory is storytelling, a very
personal and verbalized version of what happened adjoined by a considerable
amount of imagination. A nice demonstration of this is Foer’s use of subjective
sources when writing about historical events. He does not present us with a
history book telling of the attack on Dresden, nor of the attacks on Hiroshima or
the Twin Towers. Foer draws on his own experiences when he talks about 9/11,
and he often literally cites existing eyewitness accounts in the Hiroshima and
Dresden chapters. (I will talk about this more extensively in chapter seven.)
In an essay on Foer’s debut ‘Everything is illuminated’, Katrin Amian
mentions this lack of the expected references to history in his first novel. She
also mentions that the experimental form of the novel amplifies this “farreaching challenge to the notion of historical referentiality”liv. The same is true
for ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’. Both novels are told out of different
perspectives, which are intertwined throughout the novels; this is the
experimental form Amian is talking about. These different voices at times tell
conflicting stories. In a few cases several narrators tell the same anecdote,
which time and again leads to inconsistencies in the story; the book hence
persistently questions its own reliability. An example of this is the discrepancy
31
between Grandpa’s account and Grandma’s description of meeting each other in
New York.
We met at the Columbian Bakery on Broadway, we’d both come to New
York lonely, broken and confused, I [Grandpa] was sitting in the corner
stirring cream into coffee, around and around like a little solar system, the
place was half empty but she [Grandma] slid right up next to me,lv
In Grandpa’s versionlvi Grandma proposes to him that same day, after a
conversation about the weather and tuna fish. In Grandma’s accountlvii they
equally avoid talking about their difficult past, but weeks pass before she asks
him to marry her. During these weeks she would model for him while he would
be sculpting her dead sister, his lost love. Grandma’s version appears to be more
truthful, because there are several reasons why Grandpa Schell would leave out
this part of the story. A first possibility is that some delicate matters could be
too embarrassing to talk about to his son, to whom every Grandpa chapter is
addressed. But as Grandpa continues to write these letters after his son has died,
it is more likely that some things are just too hard to talk or write about for him.
Grandpa Schell is a melancholic; he has literally lost his voice and is unable to
express what he feels.
A second example of conflicting stories is the story about how Grandma’s
father died. In her letter to Oskar, Grandma explains how the last time she saw
her father, he was lying under the rubble of a collapsed roof. “The plaster that
covered him was turning red.”lviii People outside were screaming that the rest of
the roof was going to collapse, so she had to leave. She ends her story with:
Then he said something.
It was the last thing he ever said to me.
I can’t remember it. lix
32
As a reader you would expect that Grandma’s father died under the collapsed
roof. But at the end of his Dresden chapter, Grandpa says that he “later learned
that he [Grandma’s father] survived the bombing and then killed himself.”lx In
this case it seems that Grandpa’s version is more truthful. Grandma seems to
have banned this memory, or certainly does not want to talk to her grandson
about it. Or possibly she did not even know about her father’s suicide, because
Schell goes on: “Did your mother [Grandma] tell you [Thomas Schell Jr.] that?
Does she know it herself?”lxi It does not really matter whether she knew it or
not, the reader either way gets contradictory information.
‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ is a fictionalized adaptation of
reality, predominantly on the subject of 9/11. It can be called a historical novel.
But the unreliability of the narrators - because of age, trauma, inability or
unwillingness to tell the whole story - combined with the form of the novel and
the improbability of the story make the novel unconventional.
B. REALISM AND MAGIC REALISM
In the following I will focus on several specific fragments of the text. On the
one hand I want to take a closer look at moments of convincing realism and on
the other hand at some surreal sections.
As I mentioned in the previous chapter, some aspects of Oskar’s
personality are very realistic. The troublesome relationship with his mom and
her new boyfriend Ron is very convincing. And even more so, the relationship
Oskar used to have with his father, of which we sometimes get a glimpse. For
example in the three chapters about the last evening they spent together: a
loving father telling a bedtime story to a very inquisitive son.
33
An example of realistic detail are father Schell’s phone messages left on
the answering machine on “the worst day”. For people who did not personally
experience 9/11 it makes this drama almost tangible. The reader finds the first
message on page 14, in Oskar’s first chapter. It is a realistic message, a father is
telling his family not to worry.
Message one. Tuesday, 8:52 a.m. Is anybody there? Hello? It’s Dad. If
you’re there, pick up. I just tried the office, but no one was picking up.
Listen, something’s happened. I’m OK. They’re telling us to stay where
we are and wait for the firemen. I’m sure it’s fine. I’ll give you another
call when I have a better idea of what’s going on. Just wanted to let you
know that I’m OK, and not to worry. I’ll call again soon.lxii
In the course of the novel the reader gets message per message, revealing slowly
what happened that day. Near the end of the book, on page 301, you get the
final message. Oskar is already at home when the phone rings a final time, but
he decides not to answer. “I couldn’t pick up the phone. I just couldn’t do it. It
rang and rang, and I couldn’t move. I wanted to pick up, but I couldn’t.”lxiii Dad
is already starting to panic in this message. He repeats the question “Are you
there?”lxiv eleven times, possibly starting to realise that it could be the last time
he hears his son’s voice: a piece of harsh realism.
On the other hand there are a few strikingly surreal passages. Foer loves to
use magic realism. In ‘A glossary of literary terms’ M.H. Abrams describes
magic realism:
These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched
realism in representing ordinary events and details together with fantastic
and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and
fairy tales. [... Magic realistic] novels violate, in various ways, standard
novelistic expectations by drastic–and sometimes highly effective–
experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and
fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish,
in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or
trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic.lxv
34
Foer does indeed experiment with form, temporal sequence and style. Formally
Foer experiments with the novel’s typography and with the images. The
experimental temporal sequence is the scrambled chronology and the cut-up
flashbacks. And an example of Foer’s experiments with style is each character’s
own typical way of speaking. The concept of the quest is typical for the epic
genre, for chivalric Romance and legends.
An even clearer example of the use of magic realism is the bedtime story
Thomas Schell tells his son in a chapter called ‘The Sixth Borough’. According
to this myth, New York City once used to have a sixth borough, an island next
to Manhattan. Bit by bit it floated away. New Yorkers and Sixth Boroughers
tried to stay together by the use of chains and concrete, but every effort failed.
Neighbours, friends and lovers got separated because of the unwillingness of the
Sixth Boroughers to leave their beloved island. New Yorkers wanted to keep
one memento of the Sixth Borough. With enormous hooks they pulled Central
Park, which used to be the heart of the Sixth Borough, into Manhattan.
Supposedly the island now resides somewhere in Antarctica.
Apart from being a bedtime story, this myth also has symbolic value in
the book. Literary editor Ruth Franklin regards the hole left behind on the Sixth
Borough as a metaphor for “the gaping loss in Manhattan after Sept. 11.”lxvi
Matthew Mullins regards the Sixth Borough as a symbol of other cultureslxvii.
America was once united with cultures all over the world, as New Yorkers and
Sixth Boroughers used to be. But after 9/11 Americans viewed America as a
lone victim of the attacks. Other cultures became unknowable to them and they
got separated, just like in the fable. But the fact that the heart of the Sixth
35
Borough is still in the centre of Manhattan, symbolizes that America is still
unified with other cultures.
Foer appears to be fond of magic realism. His first novel, ‘Everything is
Illuminated’, is also an example of this genre. The protagonist of the book
writes a fairytale-like story about his grandfather’s past, next to the account of
his own experiences while researching this history.
36
6. COMPARING FACTS__________________________________________
Since this dissertation deals with fact and fiction, I would like to dedicate a
chapter of it to the three major facts of history that are dealt with in ‘Extremely
Loud & Incredibly Close’. I will start off with the attacks on the World Trade
Centre in New York on September 11, 2001, a drama that is still very much
alive. I will go on with the bombing of Dresden in February 1945 and the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that same year. Time
has healed some of the wounds of these last two tragedies, of which the
numbers of casualties far exceeded the victims of 9/11. In a conclusion to this
chapter I will explain why Foer incorporates these tragedies into his book.
A. NEW YORK 2001
Researching the 2001 attacks on New York is a quest for facts in itself. Books
like Thierry Meyssan’s ‘9/11: the big lie’ (2002) and Paul Zarembka’s ‘The
hidden history of 9-11-2001’ (2006) and films like Dylan Avery’s ‘Loose
Change’ (2005) and best-known 9/11-film ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ (2004) by Michael
Moore each try to uncover the (assumed) lies told by the American government
about September 11. Though mounds of conspiracy theories have come forward
over the past nine years, I will limit my depiction of 9/11 to what is commonly
perceived as the truth, or the official report as recorded in ‘The 9/11
Commission Report’.lxviii
On September 11th at 8:46 a.m. American Airlines flight 11 crashes into
the north tower of the WTC-buildings in New York. The suicide terrorists who
hijacked the plane along with all its passengers and a number of people in the
tower are killed instantly. At 9:03 a.m. of that same day the hijacked United
37
Airlines flight 175 hits the south tower of the World Trade Centre. All on board
and numeral people in the tower die on the spot. At 9:59 a.m. the south tower
collapses and at 10:28 a.m. the north tower caves in as well. The total number of
fatalities of these two attacks, along with the victims of the other two hijacked
planes, crashed into the Pentagon and into a field near Shanksville, is set at
2976 people. The nineteen hijackers, allegedly lead by Mohammed Atta, all die
during the attacks. In the afternoon of that same day they are linked to the
militant Islamist organization al-Qaeda and its leader Osama Bin Laden.
In ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ Thomas Schell was attending a
meeting at Windows on the World when the first plane smashed into the towers.
Windows on the World was in fact a restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of
the north tower. When Oskar comes home from school at 10:18 a.m., the north
tower is still standing. He finds four messages of his father’s on the answering
machine: one at 9:12, one at 9:31, one at 9:46, and a final one at 10:04 a.m.
When he has listened to the messages the phone starts ringing again, at 10:22.
Oskar cannot pick up the phone, so his father leaves him a final message, which
is cut off at 10:24. As mentioned above the north tower was attacked at 8:46 and
came down approximately 102 minutes later, at 10:28, which corresponds
perfectly to the succession of events in the book.
Another factual detail about 9/11 is when Oskar asks Mr. Black about
Mohammed Atta. Black, the owner of the apartment above Oskar’s, owns a selfmade biographical index, a cabinet full of one-word biographies of people who
seem biographically significant to Mr. Black. On Atta’s card it says: ‘war’.lxix
38
B. DRESDEN 1945
The Dresden Bombings consist of four attacks by the allied forces, between the
13th and the 15th of February 1945. The first raid is delivered by the British
Royal Air Force, between 10:14 and 10:22 p.m. on the evening of February 13th.
244 planes drop 500 tons of bombs on Dresden. Three hours later, between 1:21
and 1:45 a.m., another 529 British planes drop 1800 tons of explosives on the
city. The third and fourth attacks on Dresden are delivered by the United States
Army Air Forces. On February 14th at 12:17 a.m. the first American planes
reach Dresden. By 12:30 a.m. 316 aircrafts have dropped 771 tons of explosives
on the city. The final raid takes place on February 15th between 12:00 and 12:10
a.m. Because of the cloudy weather the bombers fail to hit the target of Dresden.
There has been discussion about the specific number of people who were
killed by the bombings. In 1963 David Irving reports 135.000 dead in his ‘The
destruction of Dresden’, but that appears to be overrated. Historians currently
agree that the number of fatalities could not have been more than 25.000.lxx
Most of these 25.000 people were civilians.
A lot of controversies exist about what happened in February 1945.
Dresden was a culturally and historically blossoming city; it used to be known
as “The Florence on the Elbe”. The city was believed to be a safe haven for
civilians to reside during the war; subsequently, many of Dresden’s inhabitants
were refugees:
women, children and elderly. There were few soldiers or
military targets, and no major economic or industrial aims. So why bombard
this city? Many survivors and historians say that the predominant reason for the
attack was to deliver a final blow to the German spirit. Among many others
39
historian Alexander McKee, eyewitnesses Lothar Metzger, Edda West and Kurt
Vonnegut have helped create this image.
American novelist Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden in
1945. In 1969 he wrote ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’, the most famous literary work
about the bombings. The novel describes the atrocities of those days; it recounts
a personal survivor story. The book is horrifying and sharply critical. Although
‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ is also highly fictional, even science-fictional, it has
helped form the widespread attitude towards the Dresden Bombings. The
autobiographical introduction and epilogue amplify the believability of the
story.
More recently, other voices have tried to break through the -what some
call- mythology of the bombings. In his ‘Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945’
historian Frederick Taylor sketches the complexity of the air raids in Dresden.
Without forgetting the tragedy and the thousands of innocent victims, he notes
that the city was strategically significant, because of several factories and an
important railway junction. Taylor also points out that Dresden was a breeding
ground for anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathy. He tells the story from the
viewpoint of the Allied army staff, without leaving out the survivors and their
stories.
This perhaps more balanced – or revisionist, as others would call it – view
is not what most people remember. The cruelty of this World War Two disaster
speaks much louder than studies like Frederick Taylor’s. Jonathan Safran Foer
also uses the Dresden Bombings as a symbol of Allied cruelty. His literal
quotations of eyewitness accounts are aimed at Americans who can only see
their own point of view.
40
C. HIROSHIMA 1945
The atomic bombings against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in
August 1945, are a tragedy of even larger dimensions. In the morning of August
6th, a bomber, called the “Enola Gay”, dropped an atomic bomb, known as
“Little boy”, on the city of Hiroshima. The bomb exploded about 580 metres
above ground level, at 8:16 a.m. The explosion lit the sky with a brilliant purple
light, followed by a gush of searing heat, a deafening blast and an enormous
shock wave. A huge fireball with a diameter of 400 meters was formed.
Everything and everyone on ground zero, the surface directly below the
explosion and the fireball, melted and turned to ashes in a millisecond. Within
minutes, nine out of ten people who were half a mile or less from ground zero
had died. People who were inside usually survived the first flash, but only the
strongest buildings endured the shock wave, so many victims died and got
wounded in collapsing buildings. Most people who were exposed to high levels
of radiation died in the weeks after the attack.
The total number of deaths is not known exactly. Figures range from
66.000 people to over 200.000. Most recent statistics, which have no stake in
the matter, seem to agree with a U.S. survey on the effects of the atomic
bombingslxxi, that the number of people that were killed by the initial blast, by
heat and radiation effect in the following weeks, goes up to 70.000 to 80.000
people.lxxii By the end of 1945 over 100.000 people would have died as a result
of the atomic bomblxxiii. The vast majority of victims were civilians.
In ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’, Oskar uses an eyewitness
account of a Hiroshima victim in a class project.
41
The Nazi Holocaust was among the most evil genocides in history. But
the Allies’ firebombing of Dresden and nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki were also war crimes... We are all capable of evil and must be
restrained by law from committing it.lxxiv
This is a quote by doctor Gregory H. Stanton, the founder and president of
Genocide Watch, an international organization that tries to predict and prevent
genocides. Stanton’s and Foer’s views are comparable. Stanton stresses that the
Axis Powers were not the only evil during the Second World War; the
genocides of Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were committed by the
Allied Forces. Foer compares 9/11 to Dresden and Hiroshima, to show that no
one is just a victim, nor strictly evil. America is not the only victim. And
moreover America is, and has been in the past, a perpetrator. Dresden and
Hiroshima were war crimes inflicted by America.
Foer makes this brave comparison in a post-9/11 America, to blur the “us”
versus them” mentality. In an interview with Robert Birnbaum, Jonathan Safran
Foer talks about this theme:
Because the way that the story of Sept. 11 was being told was with
absolute certainty. That’s the American version. It is, “This is what
happened. There is good. There is evil. There are victims and there are
victimizers. There are terrorists and civilians. There is war and there is
peace. There are Arabs and non-Arabs.” And that is not what the world is.
The world is this incredibly complicated mix of perspectives and vantages
and life experiences.lxxv
Foer offers a new point of view, a grey zone in a black and white America. This
is what Matthew Mullins talks about in his essay “Boroughs and Neighbors:
Traumatic solidarity in Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud & Incredibly
close”lxxvi. Traumatic solidarity implies that trauma can be a unifying
42
experience. Major identity markers, like gender, religion and ethnicity,
emphasize differences between people. When a significant traumatic event
occurs, these different groups of people tend to identify with each other, and
start looking for similarities. This is traumatic solidarity within a nation. For
example, after 9/11 Americans’ sense of “us” was greater than ever; there was a
collective pain that unified Americans. But this sense of unification also created
“other” identities, like perpetrators versus victims. The national solidarity in the
U.S. after September 2001 also brought about a collective anger, reinforced by
former President Bush’s speech on the “Axis of evil”, in which the new enemy
was announced: the Arab or Middle-Eastern “other”.
In ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ Foer suggests an international
traumatic solidarity, by presenting the reader with a gruesomely detailed
description of the tragedies of Dresden and Hiroshima. For his school
presentation, Oskar chooses Kinue Tomoyasu’s account as a subject, an account
of a Japanese 44-year-old woman from his grandparents’ generation. But the
one thing Oskar can identify with, the one thing Tomoyasu and Oskar share is
trauma, without either one of them loosing their own Japanese and American
identities. Traumatic solidarity occurs when trauma becomes a shared identity
marker.
In this way Foer suggests a bond between Americans, traumatized by
9/11, and the victims of trauma inflicted by Americans, because they share the
experience of trauma. Grandpa and Grandma Schell are a representation of this
bond. They have lost loved ones in both tragedies. After they have survived the
attacks on Dresden, they moved to New York. 56 years later they are retraumatized by 9/11.
43
7. AUTHENTICITY, SOURCES, FICTIONALIZATION_______________
This chapter is the key to this dissertation. It will bring the fictionality of the
novel and the reality of the facts together. I will try to answer some challenging
questions about the responsibilities of a writer of historical fiction, and
especially the responsibilities and risks for the novelist who writes about the
traumatic experiences of other people. Is it barbaric, as Theodore Adorno writes
in 1949, to write poetry after Auschwitz? lxxvii And is it acceptable to write about
the suffering of others? Can anybody who did not experience the tragedy
understand the pain of the victims? To a large extent I will follow the line of
thought of journalist and critic, Maria Margaronis, to answer these questions.
In 1962 Adorno acknowledges that his statement does not apply to
literature. “It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own
voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it.”lxxviii Most trauma
theorists agree that literature of testimony is important for survivors, looking for
closure. It is also valuable for others, and future generations. The first
subchapter of chapter seven deals with Jonathan Safran Foer as a trauma victim.
His personal experiences are a source for the novel.
But what about the Dresden chapter? What about a novelist who comes
after, who has not experienced what he is writing about? How important is
authenticity in writing about tragedies? In her essay ‘The Anxiety of
Authenticity’ Maria Margaronis argues that “postmodernism’s interest in
blurring boundaries, in genre games and narrative experiments, has opened a
kind of solution, a way to speak without appearing to claim authority.”lxxix One
of those solutions is to borrow the “mantle of authenticity” of survivors. And
that is exactly what Foer does when writing about Dresden. He uses the
44
eyewitness accounts of people who survived the bombings. This way he gets an
accurate representation of what really happened. Novelist Ian McEwan also
writes historical fiction about the Second World War. In this quote he explains
why accuracy of representation is so important:
It is an eerie, intrusive matter, inserting imaginary characters into actual
historical events. A certain freedom is suddenly compromised; as one
crosses and re-crosses the lines between fantasy and the historical record,
one feels a weighty obligation to strict accuracy. In writing about wartime
especially, it seems like a form of respect for the suffering of a generation
wrenched from their ordinary lives to be conscripted into a nightmare.lxxx
In the second part of this chapter I will talk about these historical sources, and
the fictionalizing changes Foer made to fit them into his narration.
And Foer even takes it one step further. In the last subchapter I will argue
that he also used a fictional source. Clearly, he does not use a fictional reference
to borrow authenticity. Nor has he a need for inspiration, because he primarily
borrows names and circumstances, while he changes the story completely; and
Foer has proven in the past that he cannot be accused of a lack of imagination. I
would argue that Foer literally borrows the names to salute his sources. He
acknowledges that he has researched his subject, that he has read several
sources. And it is also a wink to the reader who accidentally comes across a
connection between these two fictional creations.
A. PERSONAL SOURCES
Jonathan Safran Foer is not a complete outsider, nor ignorant, when talking
about the experience of trauma. A lot of his writing, he says, is shaped by a
personal trauma he went through as a child. Journalist Deborah Solomon wrote
an article for the New York Times Magazine as a result of some 150 e-mail
messages by Foer and a meeting with him. In one of his e-mails he talks about
45
“The Explosion”. On August 12th, 1985, eight-year-old Jonathan was in the
chemistry lab when one of his classmate’s project exploded. Two pupils were
critically wounded. Foer was less seriously injured, but he suffered shock for
over three years after the blast.lxxxi This traumatic experience and the years after
may well have helped him shape the character of Oskar and his post-traumatic
behaviour. It also allows him to understand universal tragedy and loss.
Secondly, Foer was in New York on September 11th, 2001. He had just
returned from a three-month trip to Spain and was sleeping off jetlag when the
first plane crashed into the World Trade Center.lxxxii So when he’s writing about
9/11 and the years following this tragedy, Foer draws upon his own experience.
Obviously this is not the case for the Dresden chapter. Foer has to use historical
sources.
B. HISTORICAL SOURCES
I will mostly talk about the historical references of the Dresden chapterlxxxiii.
The chapter is called “Why I’m not where you are. 4/12/78.” Thomas Schell Sr.
is the narrator of this chapter and as always he is addressing his child, who is
about fourteen at the time. He wants to tell his son about what happened to him
during the firebombing of Dresden in 1945. Almost the entire chapter is based
on other texts. Some passages are word for word copies of the original text.
A striking characteristic of these textual references is that they are all from
the point of view of survivors. The three texts about Dresden are eyewitness
accounts. They are a personal interpretation of the facts. Foer does not mention
the number of casualties, the amount of ammunition, the type of planes or the
Allied Forces’ objectives for bombing the city. He leaves out the statistics and
46
the point of view of the perpetrators. He only tells the story of a survivor,
Thomas Schell, who is in fact a representation of Edda West, Lothar Metzger,
Otto Sailer-Jackson and all the other survivors of the bombings combined.
Although he has an obligation to accurate representation, as Ian McEwan’s
quote puts forward in the introduction of this chapter, an objective account of
experience simply does not exist. Experience is always subjective.
This is closely linked to something Margaronis asks herself, “whether
fiction can get close to ‘the truth’, either through the subjective methods”lxxxiv or
through a “pointillist approach to verisimilitude, the correction of detail”lxxxv. In
the accuracy-subjectivity continuum Foer leans to the side of subjectivity. But
that does not make it less true. In his essay ‘The Opportunity to choose a past:
Remembering history’ Roderick McGillis writes: “Truth, in the sense of
incontrovertible accuracy of representation, has little to do with what we take to
be representation of history.”lxxxvi This is definitely true for historical fiction.
The unsettling feeling when reading the Dresden chapter brings the reader very
close to the truth of the survivors. And precisely the subjectivity of the account
adds to the verisimilitude of the text. A list of statistics is as close to, or as far
off of the truth as Foer’s text is.
However, I would like to point out that this is still a piece of fiction. Foer
stays very close to his sources, and gives a representation of what happened, but
is still writing a novel. The fictionality of Foer’s Dresden lies on the one hand in
the combination of several eyewitness accounts, and on the other hand in the
textual additions Foer makes. In the following I will take a closer look at the
texts and the fictional changes Foer makes.
47
In the appendix I have added the four source texts, by Lothar Metzger,
Edda West, Otto Sailer-Jackson and Kinue Tomoyasu. I’ve also inserted a copy
of the Dresden chapter, in which I have underlined the word for word copies of
the texts. The circles around some of the words are by Foer.
- LOTHAR METZGER
A first historical source is the eyewitness account by Lothar Metzger, written in
Berlin in 1999. In 1945 Metzger lived in Dresden with his mother and sisters;
his father was lost at war. He was nine years old when the bombs dropped.
Metzger’s account is very personal. He does not leave out the horrifying details,
but he does not dwell on the political side of the events. It is only in the last
paragraph that he briefly mentions politics: “Years later I intensively thought
the matter over, the causes, the political contexts of this night. This became very
important for my whole life and my further decisions.”lxxxvii Though the reader
can possibly guess Metzger’s ideas about the attack, he does not actually
criticize anything or anyone in particular. Foer does the same thing. Thomas
Schell’s story is a very personal and horrendous survivor story.
This is how Lothar Metzger describes the dropping of the first bombs:
“Some minutes later we heard a horrible noise – the bombers. There were
nonstop (sic) explosions. Our cellar was filled with fire and smoke and was
damaged”. Foer’s adaptation of these sentences is bit longer: “we heard a
horrible noise, rapid approaching explosions, like an applauding audience
running toward us, then they were atop us, we were thrown to the corners, our
cellar filled with fire and smoke, more powerful explosions,” and the passage
goes on for quite a while. A first difference is that the reader seems to get no
48
time to breathe in Foer’s version. As a spectator you are thrown in the middle of
this extreme and stressful situation. It is unsettling, because you seem to
undergo the non-stop explosions; you really get the feeling that a lot is
happening in a short time. The author obtains this effect because of the short
sentences and the use of only commas as punctuation. The pace of the text is
higher. Secondly he adds the assonant metaphor of the “applauding audience”.
It makes the text more poetic and more visual – or in this case more audible.
Foer is making literature out of this eyewitness account.
I would like to point out a few additional (partial) sentences, which Foer
almost literally reproduces in his novel. The sentences concern atrocious details.
I expect that Foer literally quotes Metzger here for the sake of accuracy. Also,
these horrors are too cruel to be allowed to be made up: “there were burning
vehicles and carts with burning refugees, people were screaming,” and a bit
further “dead and dying people were trampled”.
- OTTO SAILER-JACKSON
A second text that Jonathan Safran Foer probably used as a source is “Löwen
meine beste Freunde. Die Lebensdarstellung eines Tierfängers und Tierlehrers,”
the memoirs of the German animal trainer Otto Sailer-Jackson. One part of the
book deals with the bombing of Dresden. “Löwen meine beste Freunde” has not
entirely been translated into English, but some translated fragments can be
found on the Internet; I presume that these were Foer’s source. Sailer-Jackson
was working at the Dresden Zoo when the bombings happened. A lot of animals
escaped. He writes: “I had known for one hour now that the most difficult task I
49
could ever bring was facing me. (sic)
"Lehmann, we must get to the
carnivores," I called. We did what we had to do, but it broke my heart."lxxxviii
In ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ Thomas Schell is asked by a
zookeeper to kill the escaped carnivores. Schell objects that he does not know
which are carnivores and which are not, so he ends up shooting every escaped
animal. Foer changes and adds quite a lot in this passage. He only borrows the
situation from Sailer-Jackson. Readers have objected to this “safari in Dresden”,
saying it is “flatly absurd” and “over-sensationalized”lxxxix. But Foer wants to
create a certain effect. By making Schell the killer of a cub and an ape with its
hands over its ears, and several other defenceless animals, he creates confusion
and disgust with his readers. Again, the victim becomes the perpetrator, nobody
is wholly good or evil. Secondly, this fragment creates the feeling of
endlessness. Is this never going to stop? After the first bombing and a full-page
description of all the human victims, the reader is served with a page of animal
after animal that gets killed by our narrator. This is only the first day of
bombings on the 13th of February, the 14th and the American gulf of attacks is
still to come...
-EDDA WEST
Another one of Foer’s sources is a text by Edda West. She writes her account
after September 11th, 2001, thinking “This is Dresden again!!” when seeing the
images of the Towers on television. She goes on: “I am witnessing this over
again – another time, another place, but the horror and destruction are the same,
differing only in a lesser death toll.” West makes the same link as Foer does.
But whereas Foer wants to stress that victims of different traumas should try to
50
understand each other and stick together, West wants to convey a political
agenda, focussing on the Allied perpetrators and the enormous number of
casualties.
West was not even two when the Allied Forces bombed Dresden. Her
account is told through the eyes of her grandmother who witnessed and later
told all about the bombings; and through the eyes of another survivor, Elisabeth,
whom she met after Dresden. Elisabeth is 20 in 1945. Although West cannot
consciously remember what happened, she relived the horror in nightmares until
she was twelve years old. Edda West was born in Estonia in 1943. Her mother
had fallen in love with a German doctor who had arranged for West, her mother
and grandmother to move to Dresden, because they feared another communist
invasion in Estonia. West’s account is much longer than the texts by Lothar
Metzger and Otto Sailer-Jackson. Apart from a detailed description of the
atrocities, West also adds a lengthy depiction of the political situation, and the
statistics of the bombings. She stresses that Dresden was full of refugees, mostly
women and children. And she claims there were no armaments factories, no
military installations, nor any heavy machinery. West talks about the “Dresden
Holocaust” and “several hundred thousand” killed; she harshly criticizes the
Allies’ motives for the attack: “the final blow to the German spirit”, a
demonstration of “the effectiveness of their new firebombs” and the bombings
“ensured the substantial reduction of a massive sea of unwanted humanity,
thereby greatly lessening the looming burden and problem of postwar
resettlement and restructuring.”xc
Foer completely leaves out this interpretation of the politics of the
Dresden firebombing; the reader gets to draw his own conclusions. Foer only
51
wants to depict the effects of tragedy on people. He literally borrows a few
sentences from the account of West’s grandmother:
the remains of masses of people who had tried to escape the firestorm by
jumping headfirst into the lakes and ponds, the parts of their bodies that
were submerged in the water were still intact, while the parts that
protruded above water were charred beyond recognition,xci
Once more, the novelist uses an eyewitness’s words in the most appalling
scenes, for the sake of accuracy and authenticity.
But Foer borrows a lot more from Elisabeth, who is not much older than
Thomas Schell during the bombings. She tells her personal experiences,
including her thoughts and fears. Foer takes over Elisabeth’s state of mind to
“Keep thinking. As long as I am thinking, I am alive.” Thomas Schell is given
her fear of dying and her will to survive. Foer also borrows her story; half of
page 214 of ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ is a word for word copy of
Elisabeth’s account. At one given moment Elisabeth falls and loses
consciousness. When she/Thomas Schell wakes up, he gets rescued by a
medical corps. When Schell and other victims are brought over to a hospital, by
truck through the burning city, they are attacked once more. They hide under the
truck and Schell survives this last endeavour. When he wakes up in hospital he
is, just like Elisabeth was, strapped to a bed, because he had tried to hurt
himself.
The accounts by Metzger, Sailer-Jackson and West are three historical
sources for the Dresden chapter. The last historical source that I will discuss, is
an eyewitness account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
52
- KINUE TOMOYASU
Kinue Tomoyasu was a Japanese woman who had lost her daughter in
Hiroshima in August 1945. This is only one of 100 eyewitness accounts of
survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were
shown in the documentary film Hiroshima Witness (1986). Kinue Tomoyasu
was 44 years old in 1945. Her husband had already passed away and her son
was a soldier at war. With her daughter she lived five kilometres away from the
hypocentre of the A-bomb. Tomoyasu was at home when the bomb was
dropped, but her daughter was working near the Hiroshima Station, situated
much closer from the hypocentre. In her account she explains how she went
looking for her daughter, but was not allowed to go near the station. She found
her daughter the next morning, and held her in her arms for nine hours before
she died. Kinue Tomoyasu later got ill as well, she lived in the Hiroshima
Atomic Bomb Victims Nursing Home for thirteen years before she died.
Foer uses Tomoyasu’s account in a chapter titled “Happiness, happiness”.
For an assignment for school, Oskar chooses to discuss this piece of footage of
the film Hiroshima Witness. After showing the video to his class, he goes on
with a technical explanation of the specificities of the atom bomb. The scene is
a nice illustration of Oskar’s difficult relationship with his peers. “The girls
were crying and the boys were making funny barfing noises.” Foer almost
literally copies three quarters of the transcript of the interview. He makes a few
minor adjustments to clarify the text and to make it more fluent; and he leaves
out some insignificant details. But he also makes some noteworthy changes.
Firstly, he gives the daughter a name: “Masako”, while in the original
Tomoyasu keeps referring to her as “my daughter”. I could not find out whether
53
Masako was the name of the girl, but it is a common Japanese name. I noticed
that one of the translators of the Hiroshima accounts is Masako Kubota, so
maybe this could have been Foer’s inspiration. A second meaningful adjustment
Foer makes, is stressing Tomoyasu’s unawareness of what is happening,
because she is so worried about her daughter. In the original, it is already
apparent that all Tomoyasu was thinking about, was to save her daughter. When
she comes across a girl with “melting skin” who is begging for water, she
ignores her and goes looking for her daughter. She even misses the mushroom
cloud. “I didn’t see the mushroom cloud”, Foer adds, “I was trying to find
Masako.” Foer also leaves out Tomoyasu’s answer to the interviewer’s question
“Can you describe the black rain?” while in the original she gives a short reply.
The third and most significant change Foer makes is changing the end of the
interview. He leaves out Tomoyasu’s account of what happened to her after the
bombings and replaces it with:
When I heard that your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I
had to come. She died in my arms, saying “I don’t want to die.” That is
what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are
wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if
everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war again.xcii
This is a very significant passage in the novel. It literally spells out one of
Foer’s messages to the reader. It illustrates the traumatic solidarity I discussed
in chapter six. In war, there are only victims. Motives for war and nationalities
are of no importance when people are being killed. Furthermore, Foer stresses
the need for testimony after a traumatic experience. On the one hand, Tomoyasu
got a chance to tell her story and move towards closure. On the other hand,
humankind got a chance to learn from this testimony. Tomoyasu’s testimony is
a part of a compilation of testimonies on the tragedies of Hiroshima and
54
Nagasaki. This sharing of traumatic experiences with others who have lived
through the same drama can help survivors on their search for closure. Famous
writer of trauma fiction Toni Morrison said about this: “The collective sharing
of that information heals the individual and the collective.”xciii
C. FICTIONAL SOURCES
Apart from his personal life and historical sources, Foer also refers to a fictional
source. I presume Foer must have read the screenplay of the film Dresden
before he created Grandma’s family. Dresden, directed by Roland Suso Richter,
was only released in 2006, while ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ was
published in 2005. But I have reason to believe that Jonathan Safran Foer
borrowed from Stefan Kolditz, the writer of the screenplay.
- DRESDEN (2006)
The leading role in Dresden is Anna Mauth, a nurse who works in her father’s
hospital in Dresden, and who is engaged to the head physician of the hospital,
Alexander Wenninger. When she meets a shot-down British pilot, Robert
Newman, who is hiding in the cellar of the hospital, she decides to help him.
The two fall in love. Dresden is a tragic story of doomed love in an impossible
situation.
A first connection between ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ and
Dresden is “Anna”. In both stories, she is a young, German woman, living on a
large plot of land in Dresden. In both stories she has a younger sister and no
other siblings. A second link is a Jewish intellectual by the name of “Simon
Goldberg”. In the film Simon Goldberg is one of the small number of Jews left
55
in Dresden in 1945, because he is married to an “Aryan” woman, a colleague
and friend of Anna’s. He and his wife manage to escape Dresden during the
confusion of the attacks on the city. The character of Goldberg in the film is
based on the historical Victor Klemperer, who had been a professor at the
Hochschule in Dresden until the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935.
Klemperer was also the writer of a famous war diary during his years in
Dresden: ‘I will bear witness: A diary of the Nazi Years. 1933-1941.’ In Foer’s
novel, Simon Goldberg is a friend of Anna’s family, “one of the great minds of
our age”xciv as Anna’s father calls him. He ends up in a transit camp in
Westerbork, Holland, but the reader never knows what becomes of him. A third
similarity is the love triangle between Anna, Thomas Schell and Grandma on
the one hand, and between Anna Mauth, Alexander Wenninger and Robert
Newman on the other hand. A fourth connection between the film and the novel
is a similar love scene. When Anna Mauth and Robert Newman make love for
the first time, they are surrounded by patients in the other hospital beds. When
Thomas Schell and Anna make love for the first time, they are only separated by
a wall of books from her father and Simon Goldberg, who are discussing war.
The actions in the scene are also very similar. A fifth link is burning ones hands
on a doorknob. In the film, Wenninger burns his hands on a searing handle
because of the heat of the burning city; in the novel the same thing happens to
the young Thomas Schell. A final connection, and the reason why I believe the
screenplay was written before the novel, is “Richter”. Mr. Richter is Thomas
Schell’s only friend in New York. And the director of Dresden is called Roland
Suso Richter.
56
This could of course be a coincidence, but I believe this is Foer’s way of
referring to one of his sources. And although Foer only borrows a few names
and ideas, by using this source he is incorporating a different voice in the novel,
a Europeans, a German’s voice.
D. THE WORLD WIDE WEB
Another element of the book I want to discuss in this chapter on sources is the
World Wide Web. The documentary film and all of the texts I have discussed in
this chapter can be found on the Internet. Also, a large part of Oskar’s
scrapbook “Stuff that happened to me” can be retraced to Internet sources.
Some of the images in the scrapbook are photographs taken by Oskar on his
quest; others are pictures that remind him of “the worst day”, which he finds in
newspapers and on the Internet. This scrapbook grounds the reader in reality, it
shows the reality of 9/11 how we ourselves have experienced it. A very
significant quote by Jonathan Safran Foer on this subject, which actually
summarizes this whole chapter, can be read in an interview about his first novel,
Everything is illuminated. The interview dates from 26 May, 2003, when he is
already working on ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’. In this quote Foer
wants to explain why he is from a different generation than writers like Jeffrey
Eugenides (°1960), Jonathan Franzen (°1959) and Rick Moody (°1961).
Jonathan Safran Foer was born in 1977.
I am from a generation that was raised with the Internet, which is quite
different. It makes a huge difference. And I was raised with a different
kind of television and music. Music for example that depends very much
on borrowing from different traditions, sampling pieces of other music
and overlaying different rhythms and melodies and I think that is reflected
in my writing. (...) I think that comes across in the typography and in the
style in the combination of voices. The world is more a collage everyday.
It seems like there is less unity of voice everyday.xcv
57
Foer borrows to represent the world as true-to-life as it can be. His book is a
collage of the different voices and traditions of the world today. I have restricted
my analysis to historical sources and one example of unusual intertextuality, but
of course Foer was also influenced by many literary predecessors. I have briefly
touched upon Günther Grass and Kurt Vonnegut, but a whole new dissertation
could be written about Foer’s literary influences.
A novel rarely has a list of references, nor are they required to most of the
time. However, some writers have been criticised of copying the work of
another author. Ian McEwan for example was accused of plagiarism in his
historical novel ‘Atonement’ (2001). In a reply to the claim he wrote:
The writer of a historical novel may resent his dependence on the written
record, on memoirs and eyewitness accounts, in other words on other
writers, but there is no escape: Dunkirk or a wartime hospital can be
novelistically realised, but they cannot be re-invented.xcvi
As I have shown, Foer’s “dependence on the written record” is in some cases
quite extreme. But exactly by copying his sources so literally, he is saluting
them. A reader can pick up what he likes from the book. It will not occur to
many readers that Foer is using someone else’s words, and that is not necessary
for the understanding or the reading experience of the book. So Foer does not
reveal his writing process, nor does he include a list of references; he says “that
kind of information doesn’t belong in a book”, a book is “an organic thing.
Everything should be in the service of making it just as forceful as it can be.”
xcvii
The images make it more powerful; revealing the real voices behind his
writings would not. But nor does he try to hide his sources for the reader who
wants to learn more.
58
In the introduction to this chapter I have already mentioned one of the
responsibilities the writer of a historical novel has: his responsibility to
authenticity, which Foer resolves by borrowing the “mantle of authenticity”
from eyewitnesses. Closely linked to this is the historical novel writer’s
responsibility to accuracy. It is crucial to depict the circumstances of the past as
accurate as possible to do justice to the severity of a past trauma. As shown in
the subchapter on “Historical Sources”, it is possible for Foer to present the
reader with an accurate representation of what happened during the Second
World War, by sometimes literally copying what eyewitnesses wrote. The
responsibilities to accuracy and to authenticity are pointed at the past: at the
traumatic event and at the survivors and victims of that event. A last
responsibility I want to bring up now is a writer’s responsibility to people who
have not experienced trauma, and to future generations. The writer of historical
fiction must find a way to make meaning out of the past, so that his novel might
be useful to the future. In an interview with Marsha Darling, Toni Morrison
mentions this responsibility:
There is a necessity for remembering the horror, but of course there’s a
necessity for remembering it in a manner in which it can be digested, in a
manner in which the memory is not destructive. The act of writing the
book, in a way, is a way of confronting it and making it possible to
remember.xcviii
Morrison is talking about the necessity of testimony for survivors in this case,
but the same is true for the novelist of historical fiction. Although he has not
experienced the tragedy he is writing about, he has the possibility to pass on his
knowledge of it to future generations. Foer’s depictions of Dresden and
Hiroshima present the reader of the present day with an understanding of
trauma, and can help Americans process their own trauma.
59
This is closely linked to a final point I want to make in this chapter: the
value of fiction in real life. Foer pays a great deal of attention to the effect his
writings have on readers. He is not at all times concerned with the realism of his
novel, but he does want his story to create a real effect. In an interview he says:
An analogy that I think fits is a rock that is thrown into a lake and then
causes all these ripples. There is a journalistic way of looking at that—
how big is the rock? How heavy is it? What is its mineral composition?
And for a novelist, you think about the ripples that it causes.xcix
The extreme critiques the book received, positive and negative, are proof
that the novel has accomplished its ambition to “cause ripples”. When the book
was published was published four years after September 11, 2001, New York
and America were not ready for ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’. Critics
articulated that many Americans were still figuring out what 9/11 meant.
Expressions I read time and again were: Foer’s novel is too chirpy, too playful,
it trivializes this tragedy, and it is needlessly whimsical and distasteful. In his
first novel, ‘Everything is Illuminated’ Foer’s experimental form and naïve
narrators never offended readers in the same way. In a review for New York
Magazine Laura Miller writes: “In a novel about the Holocaust [Everything is
Illuminated], this kind of oblique, even playful, strategy worked, partly because
the subject has already been so exhaustively and earnestly explored.”c It seems
that readers needed closure of their own traumatic experience before they could
read a highly fictional work about it.
Furthermore, Foer never describes the brutality of 9/11 in the same
detailed way he writes about Dresden and Hiroshima. Many Americans’
feelings must have been: shouldn’t America be the one crying? And Foer’s
choice to lay 9/11 side by side with precisely these two controversial and
60
sensitive facts of history is a bold one. Only in August 2010 have the U.S. for
the first time joined the Hiroshima anniversary.ci Many people all over the
world still wonder whether the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
necessary to end the war, as the U.S. claim. The fairly recent film about
Dresden, discussed earlier in this chapter, is evidence that Dresden too has not
been forgotten as a monstrosity of history. Foer’s novel became one of the
voices in the discussion about 9/11. Foer wants to put the (American) belief that
9/11 is the worst tragedy that ever happened, into perspective.
In the post-9/11 climate, it is safer to make this statement through the
words of a fictional child. The difference between historical sources and fiction
in this regard is that it opens up possibilities for the writer. The novelist can
leave out the political consequences of 9/11 and the statistics, and he can make
subjective links in history. It also allows Foer to tell a personal story, to show
the emotional response of one person to trauma, and at the same time to show
different perspectives. Foer says, “a lot of the time you have to tell insane lies in
order to express truth.”cii Fiction shows another kind of truth than journalism
and history books. It expresses truth of emotion. This novel can also help
Americans process and digest the trauma of September 11, 2001. This shared
experience can have a healing effect on surivors.
61
8. CONCLUSION________________________________________________
In this dissertation I have tried to unravel the bond between Jonathan Safran
Foer’s fictional novel ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ and reality. I have
searched for links on several levels. I have started with the characterization of
the novel’s three narrators. Protagonist Oskar Schell is not a realistic boy of
nine years old; he has characteristics of an adult and of a child. Foer creates a
character that combines the best of both worlds: his magnified precociousness
makes his journey an interesting one, and his being a child opens up
possibilities for Foer to make daring statements and comparisons. I have also
discussed one of Foer’s sources for Oskar: ‘The Tin Drum’ by Günter Grass.
Finally I have shown that Oskar and the two secondary narrators, Grandpa and
Grandma Schell, are realistic representations of trauma victims.
In the next chapter I have discussed genre. I have shown that ‘Extremely
Loud & Incredibly Close’ is a historical novel, but it is unconventional because
of the unreliable narrators, the experimental form and the improbability of the
story. I have also shown that Foer’s novel has moments of sharp realism,
combined with passages of magic realism. The bedtime story about “The Sixth
Borough” for example is a myth, but it serves a symbolical purpose in the story
about 9/11.
In the chapter “Comparing Facts”, I give a journalistic overview of the
three major facts of history Foer literarily adapts. I have concluded the chapter
with the concept of traumatic solidarity: Foer’s choice to incorporate these three
dramas is a way for him to show that trauma can be a unifying experience.
In the last chapter I have taken a closer look at the writing process of the
writer of historical fiction. As a historical novelist Foer has responsibilities
62
towards the survivors of trauma, and towards future generations. To live up to
his responsibilities of accuracy and authenticity, he has used eyewitness
accounts of survivors of the tragedies of Dresden and Hiroshima. The analysis
of these historical accounts and of a fictional reference, have shown Foer’s
considerable dependence on written and Internet sources. In a last paragraph I
have demonstrated the value of fiction in trauma narrative and the role of Foer’s
novel in a post-9/11 America.
Jonathan Safran Foer’s very contemporary and innovative writing and
point of view have produced a captivating novel. ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly
Close’ is stylistically dazzling, formally experimental, and deals with
fascinating subjects. For the attentive reader it is a complex and layered book,
but it is also enjoyable and understandable for larger audiences. Foer is a
Jewish-American New-Yorker. He is part of the Internet-generation, but also
has a magnified awareness of tradition and 20th century history. In his traumaoriented subject matter, he is concerned with telling the people’s emotional
journeys, stripped of politics. But without ever literally articulating it, he is
making a political comment on the myth of America as a lone victim, showing
historical examples of America as a perpetrator. Foer interweaves the real and
the surreal, mixes the inevitability of sources and intertextuality with drama and
the ruminations of dead-earnest characters. His historical fiction is both in its
methodology and its effect, wildly contemporary and a soothing tribute to the
past.
63
9. NOTES_____________________________________________________
Chapter 1: Introduction
O’Rourke, Meghan. “The First Significant 9/11 Novel.” Letter to Ruth
Franklin. Slate, March 29, 2005
i
ii
Margaronis, Maria, “The Anxiety of Authenticity: Writing Historical Fiction
at The End of the Twentieth Century”, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 65, No.
3, 2008, p. 138
Chapter 2: Plot
iii
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 36
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 258
iv
Chapter 4: Characterization
v
Franklin, Ruth. “Does a Wildly Imaginative Novel Have To Be Believable?”
Letter to Meghan O’Rourke. Slate, March 29, 2005
vi
Mason, Wyatt. “Like Beavers.” London review of Books, Vol. 27 No. 11,
June 2, 2005
vii
Myers, Brian Reynolds. “A bag of Tired Tricks.” Atlantic Monthly, May,
2005, Vol. 295, Issue 4, p. 118
viii
Mullins, Matthew. “Boroughs and Neighbours: Traumatic Solidarity in
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.” Papers on
Language and literature, Summer, 2009
ix
Uytterschout, Sien, and Kristiaan Versluys. “Melancholy and Mourning in
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.” Orbis Litterarum,
Vol. 63, No. 3, 2008, pp. 216-236
x
O’Rourke, Meghan. “In Defence of Oskar Schell.” Letter to Ruth Franklin.
Slate, March 30, 2005
Mullins, Matthew. “Boroughs and Neighbours: Traumatic Solidarity in
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.” Papers on
Language and literature, Summer, 2009
xi
Myers, Brian Reynolds. “A bag of Tired Tricks.” Atlantic Monthly, May,
2005, Vol. 295, Issue 4, p. 118
xii
64
xiii
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Interview. Robert Birnbaum. April 19, 2005
xiv
Updike, John. “Mixed messages. Extremely loud and incredibly close.” The
New Yorker, March 14, 2005
xv
O’Rourke, Meghan. “In Defence of Oskar Schell.” Letter to Ruth Franklin.
Slate, March 30, 2005
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 258
xvi
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 1
xvii
xviii
Ruth Franklin is talking about this passage: “Inner City and Outer City, Old
City, New City and Old New City, Lower City and Spice City — what had
taken seven hundred years to build burned down in three days.... It was
Russians, Poles, Germans, and Englishmen all at once who were burning the
city's Gothic bricks for the hundredth time. Hook Street, Long Street, and Broad
Street, Big Weaver Street and Little Weaver Street were in flames; Tobias
Street, Hound Street, Old City Ditch, Outer City Ditch, the ramparts and Long
Bridge, all were in flames. Built of wood, Crane Gate made a particularly fine
blaze. In Breeches-maker Street, the fire had itself measured for several pairs of
extra-loud breeches. The Church of St. Mary was burning inside and out, festive
light effects could be seen through its ogival windows. What bells had not been
evacuated from St. Catherine, St. John, St. Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elisabeth,
Peter, and Paul, from Trinity and Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and
dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled.
Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal Theater was
giving a premiere, a one-act play entitled The Firebug's Dream.... Holy Ghost
Street was burning in the name of the Holy Ghost. Joyously, the Franciscan
Monastery blazed in the name of St. Francis, who had loved fire and sung
hymns to it. Our Lady Street burned for Father and Son at once. Needless to say
that Lumber Market, Coal Market, and Haymarket burned to the ground. In
Baker Street the ovens burned and the bread and rolls with them. In Milk
Pitcher Street the milk boiled over.” (Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum, New York:
Vintage International, 1990, pp. 389-390)
xix
Franklin, Ruth. “Jonathan Safran Foer vs. Günter Grass.” Letter to Meghan
O’Rourke. Slate, March 30, 2005
Mullins, Matthew. “Boroughs and Neighbours: Traumatic Solidarity in
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.” Papers on
Language and literature, Summer, 2009
xx
xxi
Mullins, Matthew. “Boroughs and Neighbours: Traumatic Solidarity in
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.” Papers on
Language and literature, Summer, 2009
65
xxii
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 81
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 124
xxiii
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 177
xxiv
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 102
xxv
xxvi
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 105
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 70
xxvii
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, pp. 75-80
xxviii
xxix
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 109
xxx
Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: explorations in memory, Baltimore : Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995, p. 4
xxxi
Benjamin, Walter. “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften.” Rolf Tiederman und
Herman Scheppenhaüser. Frankfurst/Main: Suhrkamp, 1924/1925, pp. 123-201
xxxii
Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: explorations in memory, Baltimore : Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995, pp. 153-154
xxxiii
Janet, Pierre. La médecine psychologique, nouvelle édition, Paris:
Flammarion, 1980, p. 24
and Uytterschout, Sien, and Kristiaan Versluys. “Melancholy and Mourning in
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.” Orbis Litterarum,
Vol. 63, No. 3, 2008, p. 218
xxxiv
Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The
Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma," in Caruth, ed., Trauma, p.
172
xxxv
Codde, Philippe. “Philomela revisited: traumatic iconicity in Jonathan
Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.” Studies in American
Fiction. Autumn, 2007
66
xxxvi
O’Rourke, Meghan. “A Whimsical Novel About Immensely Serious
Things.” Letter to Ruth Franklin. Slate, March 31, 2005
xxxvii
Codde, Philippe. “Philomela revisited: traumatic iconicity in Jonathan
Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.” Studies in American
Fiction. Autumn, 2007
xxxviii
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 216
xxxix
Versluys, Kristiaan, ‘A rose is not a rose is not a rose. History and language
in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.’ Out of the blue:
September 11 and the novel, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, p. 89
xl
“I teach this novel, and my students were obsessed with translating the
number pages. Finally, I wrote to Foer’s editor and received this reply from the
author himself. I received his permission to post it at imdb, and I assume it will
be fine here as well: Oh. Well. You have to be a member of imdbPro to access
the comments now. But basically, he wrote that the number patterns were
meaningless. He tied that to the theme of people trying to communicate and
failing. He also hoped that we didn’t find the time spent trying to translate the
numbers as wasted, but he said it was time to move on. It was a gracious letter
in which he named each of students, and the generosity of spirit outweighed any
disappointment we felt that the numbers were random.” (anonymous post on
http://bakaitis.com/book-groups/extremely-loud-incredibly-close-discussiontopics/)
Uytterschout, Sien, and Kristiaan Versluys. “Melancholy and Mourning in
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.” Orbis Litterarum,
Vol. 63, No. 3, 2008, pp. 216-217
xli
xlii
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 135
xliii
Uytterschout, Sien, and Kristiaan Versluys. “Melancholy and Mourning in
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.” Orbis Litterarum,
Vol. 63, No. 3, 2008, pp. 224-228
xliv
Versluys, Kristiaan, ‘A rose is not a rose is not a rose. History and language
in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.’ Out of the blue:
September 11 and the novel, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, p. 98
xlv
Uytterschout, Sien, and Kristiaan Versluys. “Melancholy and Mourning in
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.” Orbis Litterarum,
Vol. 63, No. 3, 2008, p. 227
xlvi
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p.82
67
xlvii
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 104
Uytterschout, Sien, and Kristiaan Versluys. “Melancholy and Mourning in
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.” Orbis Litterarum,
Vol. 63, No. 3, 2008, p. 228
xlviii
xlix
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 35
Uytterschout, Sien, and Kristiaan Versluys. “Melancholy and Mourning in
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.” Orbis Litterarum,
Vol. 63, No. 3, 2008, p. 231
l
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 235
li
Chapter 5: Genre
lii
Oz, Amos. “Tussen feit en waarheid, of: Waaraan stierf mijn grootmoeder,
aan properheid, of aan een hartaanval?” in: De ware oorzaak van mijn
grootmoeders dood. Essays en artikelen 1967-1993, vert. Hilde Pach e.a.,
Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1994, pp. 189-208. This is the Dutch translation of a
lecture Oz gave in Tel Aviv in 1992.
liii
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin
Books, 2006, p. 321
liv
Amian, Katrin. “Chapter Four: Creativity and Consensus in Jonathan Safran
Foer’s Everything is illuminated.” in: Rethinking Postmodernim(s). Amsterdam
– New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2008, p. 156
lv
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 28-30
lvi
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, pp. 28-34
lvii
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, pp. 81-85
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 308
lviii
lix
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, pp. 308-309
68
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 215
lx
lxi
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 215
lxii
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, pp. 14-15
lxiii
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 301
lxiv
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 301
lxv
Abrams, M.H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A glossary of literary terms.
Ninth edition. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning. 2009, p. 232
lxvi
Franklin, Ruth. “Does a Wildly Imaginative Novel Have To Be Believable?”
Letter to Meghan O’Rourke. Slate, March 29, 2005
lxvii
Mullins, Matthew. “Boroughs and Neighbours: Traumatic Solidarity in
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.” Papers on
Language and literature, Summer, 2009
Chapter 6: Comparing Facts
lxviii
9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004
lxix
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 159
lxx
Ferguson, Bryan. “Dresden victims ‘farfewer than believed’” Scotsman,
October 2, 2008
lxxi
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey. The Effects of Atomic Bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Washington: United States Government Printing
Office: 1946
lxxii
Office of History and Heritage resources, The Atomic Bombing of
Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, The Manhattan Project
“Atoombommen op Hiroshima en Nagasaki”, Wikimedia K.U. Leuven, 2008
lxxiii
Office of History and Heritage resources, The Atomic Bombing of
Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, The Manhattan Project
69
lxxiv
lxxv
Stanton, Gregory H., on: http://01fe00c.netsolhost.com/
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Interview. Robert Birnbaum. April 19, 2005
Mullins, Matthew. “Boroughs and Neighbours: Traumatic Solidarity in
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close.” Papers on
Language and literature, Summer, 2009
lxxvi
Chapter 7: Authenticity, Sources, Fictionalization
lxxvii
Adorno, Theodor W. "An Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society," Prisms,
MIT Press, 1955, p. 34: "The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage
in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is
barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has
become impossible to write poetry today."
lxxviii
Adorno, Theodor W. “Commitment,” Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald
Taylor. New York: Verso, 1980, p. 188
lxxix
Margaronis, Maria, “The Anxiety of Authenticity: Writing Historical
Fiction at The End of the Twentieth Century”, History Workshop Journal, Vol.
65, No. 3, 2008, p. 140
lxxx
McEwan, Ian. “An inspiration, yes. Did I copy from another author? No”,
Guardian, November 27, 2006
lxxxi
Solomon, Deborah. “The Rescue Artist.” The New York Times, February
27, 2005
lxxxii
Page, Benedicte. “Throwing non-existent pebbles.” Bookseller, March 3,
2005, Issue 5169, p. 38
lxxxiii
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, pp. 208-216
lxxxiv
Margaronis, Maria, “The Anxiety of Authenticity: Writing Historical
Fiction at The End of the Twentieth Century”, History Workshop Journal, Vol.
65, No. 3, 2008, p. 143
lxxxv
McEwan, Ian. Atonement, London: 2002, p. 359
lxxxvi
McGillis, Roderick. “The Opportunity to Choose a Past: Remembering
History.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 1, Spring,
2000, p. 49
lxxxvii
p.2
Metzger, Lothar. ‘The Fire-bombing of Dresden. An eye-witness account,’
70
lxxxviii
Sialer-Jackson, Otto. Löwen, meine beste Freunde. Die Lebensdarstellung
eines Tierfängers und Tierlehrers. Leipzig: Paul List Verlag, 1965
English translation available at
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWdresden.htm
lxxxix
Found in a forum on ‘Disaster Fiction’ of the George Mason University.
Post by ‘Peirce’ on November 15, 2009, available at
http://www.samplereality.com/gmu/fall2009/459/archives/833
West, Edda, ‘The Dresden Bombing – An Eyewitness Account.’ Current
Concerns, No. 2, 2003, p. 5
xc
xci
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, pp. 211-213
xcii
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 189
xciii
Morrison, Toni. Telephone interview with Marsha Darling. “In the realm of
responsibilitty.” In: Morrison, Toni, and Danille Kathleen Taylor-Guthrie,
Conversations with Toni Morrison. Mississipi: University Press, 1994, p. 248
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely loud and incredibly close, New York:
Penguin Books, 2006, p. 126
xciv
xcv
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Interview. Robert Birnbaum. May 26, 2003
xcvi
McEwan, Ian. “An inspiration, yes. Did I copy from another author? No”,
Guardian, November 27, 2006
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Interview. Robert Birnbaum. April 19, 2005
xcvii
xcviii
Morrison, Toni. Telephone interview with Marsha Darling. “In the realm of
responsibilitty.” In: Morrison, Toni, and Danille Kathleen Taylor-Guthrie,
Conversations with Toni Morrison. Mississipi: University Press, 1994, pp. 247248
xcix
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Interview. Robert Birnbaum. April 19, 2005
Miller, Laura. “Terror comes to Tiny Town.” New York Magazine, May 21,
2005
c
Talmadge, Eric. “US, nuclear powers join Hiroshima memorial for first time,
on 65th anniversary”, The Associated Press, August 5, 2010
ci
Page, Benedicte. “Throwing non-existent pebbles.” Bookseller, March 3,
2005, Issue 5169, p. 38
cii
71
11. APPENDIX_____________________________________________________
CONTENTS:
1. The Dresden chapter. ‘Why I’m not where you are. 4/12/78’ in Extremely loud
& incredibly close by Jonathan Safran Foer, pp. 208-216
2. The Firebombing of Dresden. An eyewitness account by Lothar Metzger
3. Translated fragments out of “Löwen meine beste Freunde. Die
Lebensdarstellung eines Tierfängers und Tierlehrers” by Otto Sailer-Jackson
4. The Dresden Bombing – An Eyewitness Account. (by Edda West)
5. Testimony of Kinue Tomoyasu (transcript of an interview in ‘Hiroshima
Witness)
1. The Dresden chapter. ‘Why I’m not where you are. 4/12/78’ in Extremely
loud & incredibly close by Jonathan Safran Foer, pp. 208-216
____: borrowings from Lothar Metzger’s account
. . . . : borrowings from Otto Sailer-Jackson’s account
_ _ _: borrowings from Edda West’s account
(The circled words are part of the original text by Foer.)
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2. The Firebombing of Dresden. An eyewitness account by Lothar Metzger
It was February. 13th, 1945. I lived with my mother and sisters (13, 5 and 5 months
old twins) in Dresden and was looking forward to celebrating my 10th birthday
February l6th. My father, a carpenter, had been a soldier since 1939 and we got his
last letter in August 1944. My mother was very sad to receive her letters back with
the note: "Not to be found." We lived in a 3 room flat on the 4th floor in a working
class region of our town. I remember celebrating Shrove Tuesday (February 13th)
together with other children. The activities of the war in the east came nearer and
nearer. Lots of soldiers went east and lots of refugees went west through our town
or stayed there, also in the air raid night February13th/14th.
About 9:30 PM the alarm was given. We children knew that sound and got up and
dressed quickly, to hurry downstairs into our cellar which we used as an air raid
shelter. My older sister and I carried my baby twin sisters, my mother carried a
little suitcase and the bottles with milk for our babies. On the radio we heard with
great horror the news: "Attention, a great air raid will come over our town!" This
news I will never forget.
Some minutes later we heard a horrible noise — the bombers. There were nonstop
explosions. Our cellar was filled with fire and smoke and was damaged, the lights
went out and wounded people shouted dreadfully. In great fear we struggled to
leave this cellar. My mother and my older sister carried the big basket in which the
twins were lain. With one hand I grasped my younger sister and with the other I
grasped the coat of my mother.
We did not recognize our street any more. Fire, only fire wherever we looked. Our
4th floor did not exist anymore. The broken remains of our house were burning. On
the streets there were burning vehicles and carts with refugees, people, horses, all
of them screaming and shouting in fear of death. I saw hurt women, children, old
people searching a way through ruins and flames.
We fled into another cellar overcrowded with injured and distraught men women
and children shouting, crying and praying. No light except some electric torches.
And then suddenly the second raid began. This shelter was hit too, and so we fled
through cellar after cellar. Many, so many, desperate people came in from the
streets. It is not possible to describe! Explosion after explosion. It was beyond
belief, worse than the blackest nightmare. So many people were horribly burnt and
injured. It became more and more difficult to breathe. It was dark and all of us tried
to leave this cellar with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were trampled
upon, luggage was left or snatched up out of our hands by rescuers. The basket with
our twins covered with wet cloths was snatched up out of my mother’s hands and
we were pushed upstairs by the people behind us. We saw the burning street, the
falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and
coats she found in a water tub.
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We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces
of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to
and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers,
many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere,
everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back
into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.
I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them.
Now my mother possessed only a little bag with our identity papers. The basket
with the twins had disappeared and then suddenly my older sister vanished too.
Although my mother looked for her immediately it was in vain. The last hours of
this night we found shelter in the cellar of a hospital nearby surrounded by crying
and dying people. In the next morning we looked for our sister and the twins but
without success. The house where we lived was only a burning ruin. The house
where our twins were left we could not go in. Soldiers said everyone was burnt to
death and we never saw my two baby sisters again.
Totally exhausted, with burnt hair and badly burnt and wounded by the fire we
walked to the Loschwitz bridge where we found good people who allowed us to
wash, to eat and to sleep. But only a short time because suddenly the second air raid
began (February14th) and this house too was bombed and my mothers last identity
papers burnt. Completely exhausted we hurried over the bridge (river Elbe) with
many other homeless survivors and found another family ready to help us, because
somehow their home survived this horror.
In all this tragedy I had completely forgotten my l0th birthday. But the next day my
mother surprised me with a piece of sausage she begged from the "Red Cross". This
was my birthday present.
In the next days and weeks we looked for my older Sister but in vain. We wrote our
present address on the last walls of our damaged house. In the middle of March we
were evacuated to a little village near Oschatz and on March 3lst, we got a letter
from my sister. She was alive! In that disastrous night she lost us and with other
lost children she was taken to a nearby village. Later she found our address on the
wall of our house and at the beginning of April my mother brought her to our new
home.
You can be sure that the horrible experiences of this night in Dresden led to
confused dreams, sleepless nights and disturbed our souls, me and the rest of my
family. Years later I intensively thought the matter over, the causes, the political
contexts of this night. This became very important for my whole life and my further
decisions.
Lothar Metzger
Berlin, May 1999
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3. Translated fragments out of “Löwen meine beste Freunde. Die
Lebensdarstellung eines Tierfängers und Tierlehrers” by Otto Sailer-Jackson
"The elephants gave spine-chilling screams. Their house was still standing
but an explosive bomb of terrific force had landed behind it, lifted the dome of the
house, turned it round, and put it back on again. The baby cow elephant was lying
in the narrow barrier-moat on her back, her legs up to the sky. She had suffered
severe stomach injuries and could not move," he later stated. Three hippopotamuses
were drowned when iron debris pinned them to the bottom of their water basin. In
the ape house, he found a gibbon that, when it reached out to the trainer, had no
hands, only stumps.
Nearly forty rhesus monkeys escaped to the trees but were dead by the next
day from drinking water polluted by the incendiary chemicals. For those animals
that made it to the next day, the assault was far from over. A U.S. aircraft pilot
came in low, firing at anything he could see was still alive. "In this way," SailerJackson explained, "our last giraffe met her death. Many stags and others animals
which we had managed to save became victims of this hero.
(available at http://www.elephant.se/location2.php?location_id=33)
The elephants gave spine-chilling screams. The baby cow elephant was lying
in the narrow barrier-moat on her back, her legs up in the sky. She had suffered
severe stomach injuries and could not move. A 90 cwt. cow elephant had been
flung clear across the barrier moat and the fence by some terrific blast wave, and
stood there trembling. I had no choice but to leave these animals to their fate.
I had known for one hour now that the most difficult task could ever bring
was facing me. "Lehmann, we must get to the carnivores," I called. We did what we
had to do, but it broke my heart.
(available at http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWdresden.htm)
There were bizarre scenes near the Dersden Zoo, where bombs blew the doors
off cages, freeing dozens of exotic animals. A dead leopard was found handing in a
tree, perched above the bodies of a pair of naked women. Zookeeper Otto SailerJackson came across an ape that extended its arms to him. Both were bloody
stumps without hands. Mortified, he drew a revolver and put the poor beast out of
its misery.
(McCaffery, Dan. Battlefields in the Air: Canadians in the Allied Bomber
Command. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1995, p. 155)
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4. The Dresden Bombing – An Eyewitness Account. (by Edda West)
On September 11, 2001, as I watched the horror of the World Trade Center attack
and destruction, I started having flashbacks of where I had come from, what my
family had lived through, and the deep cellular memory I still hold as a survivor of
the Dresden firebombing in 1945. I could feel the desperation and terror of the poor
people trapped in those towers, the hideous realization that there was no escape and
that I was witnessing the collective death of thousands of people – an unimaginable
act of mass murder. My mind was screaming. This is Dresden!! This is Dresden
again!! I am witnessing this over again - another time, another place, but the horror
and destruction are the same, differing only in a lesser death toll, a few thousand
people compared to the several hundred thousand innocents that died in Dresden.
I was born early on the morning of September 7, 1943 in Tallinn, Estonia,
following an intense bombing of the city by the Soviets. When the air raid sirens
started, my mother, pregnant and in heavy labor fled to a friend’s house to take
shelter in the basement, not knowing from one minute to the next whether she
would live or die, or whether she would survive to give birth to the baby that was
about to be born.
Over the years, I have often wondered what karma, and strange fates brought me
into this world during that intense bombing raid, and the miracle that allowed us to
survive not only that night of terror, but many other episodes of near death as we
fled the oncoming soviet forces that engulfed Estonia for the next 50 years.
During the Second World War, Estonia had been occupied numerous times by both
the Soviets and the Germans. Historically, Estonia had suffered under the brutal
threats of invasion from the Russians to the east, had endured occupation and
violence against its people over the centuries, and had struggled to defend its
culture and language from the perpetual threat of annihilation.
And although Estonia had also been occupied by the Germans over the centuries,
there was a different feeling regarding the influence exerted by the Germans. There
was a sense of Estonian culture having evolved under German influence in terms of
the education, architecture, literature. And there was a sense of alignment with a
more gentile culture, versus the marauding hoards that would pour in from Russia
in terrorizing waves of plunder and murder.
During the latter point of 1944, it became clear that Germany was pulling back in
retreat and the army made preparations to leave Estonia for the last time. The
chilling realization settled in on the people that there would no longer be a buffer
against the Soviets and that the inevitability of a brutal and permanent occupation
by the Communist forces was imminent. Already my grandfather and many others
in our community had been sent to the Siberian gulags (slave labor camps) during
earlier Soviet occupation in 1939/40 where they had died of cold and starvation,
and most of the men in the country had been pressed into military service.
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My grandmother’s farm had been occupied by German troops for some time. It was
a large working farm which enabled her to feed many of those soldiers. There was a
sense of gratitude for the protection received against the Soviet forces. And my
mother fell in love with a German officer who was a doctor. When the German
army began it’s retreat in the autumn of 1944, and it was clear that the final
communist invasion was inevitable, the kind German doctor arranged for my
mother and I and grandmother to also leave the country.
We left by ship with the German evacuation, which traveled by the Baltic sea to
Germany. The ship ahead of us had been bombed and sunk and all lives lost. Life
was in the moment, and my mother’s motto was “live for today for tomorrow might
never come”. My mother and Grandmother had faith that whatever unknowns were
to be faced would be better than being sentenced to Soviet prison camps and sure
death had we stayed in Estonia. We never saw the German doctor again who was
called to serve his homeland. We joined the stream of thousands of refugees
looking for shelter and safe haven – every day wondering where to find food a roof
over our heads and where could we go to find safety?
Hunger and starvation were constant companions. My mother would crawl on her
hands and knees through farmers fields in the middle of the night, searching for any
little bit of food, digging with her hands in the hope of finding the odd bits of
potato that might have been left behind Even years after the war when we were
safely in Canada, tears would spring to my grandmother’s eyes if I started fussing
about food I didn’t particularly like, reminding me of the sacredness of food and
how she had saved every precious little crust of bread with which to feed me.
The stream of displaced humanity, the desperate, shell shocked homeless, starving
refugees all had one fervent prayer – that the war would soon end, that they would
survive this horror, that they could go home again to be reunited with their families,
and that for now, they might find a safe shelter where they could rest their war
weary souls.
And it came to pass that Dresden became that destination, the prayer come true, the
safe haven for hundreds of thousands of refugees, the majority being women and
children. Many fleeing from the soviet army encroaching from the east, they came
to Dresden, having heard this was a safe place to go and was not targeted for
bombing as there were no armaments factories, no military installations, no heavy
machinery that could feed the war machine. Even the Red Cross had been promised
that Dresden would not be bombed. It is estimated that over a half million refugees
flooded into the Dresden area for safety, more than doubling the city’s normal
population.
I am not exactly sure where our ship landed or the route by which we traveled to
Dresden. But it is likely that we landed near Danzig, and slowly made our way
inland towards Dresden. I remember the anxiety spoken so often by my mother and
grandmother of finding themselves repeatedly during this journey, once again
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behind Soviet lines as the Russian army advanced from the north and the east. They
walked for hundreds of kilometers carrying rucksacks on their backs and me as a
little child strapped to the wagon they pulled with their few belongings. For years,
my mother saved the old ski boots she had worn - a reminder of the long march and
bleeding feet. She would take them out of the closet when the war stories were told.
Those worn and blood soaked boots were like old reliable friends that had helped
her on that long journey.
How long we were in Dresden, I am not sure. My grandmother was able to get
work as a nurse at a hospital on the outskirts of the city, in exchange for a little food
and we had found a small attic room to live in nearby. But even though the safe
haven had finally been reached, both women knew instinctively that it would be
short lived as the Soviets were moving towards Dresden steadily and were getting
closer every day. Throughout their journey as refugees, their greatest fear was that
we would fall again into communist hands, and be sent back to Estonia and Soviet
prison camps.
My memory of the Dresden firebombing is through the eyes of my grandmother
who witnessed the horror of the devastation, and includes as well some pieces of
recorded history. As well, the experience of Elisabeth, the only other survivor of
the Dresden bombing I have met during my lifetime, brings a powerful personal
dimension to this story. Although I was too young to have a conscious memory, I
relived it through night terrors that replayed over and over the first 12 years of my
life, as my subconscious mind struggled to unload the collective terror imprinted on
my soul that tormented me with scenes of death and destruction - of terrible fires
bringing the end of the world, and the earth splitting wide open into crevasses of
hell that would swallow me up.
My grandmother would always begin the story of Dresden by describing the
clusters of red candle flares dropped by the first bombers, which like hundreds of
Christmas trees, lit up the night sky - a sure sign it would be a big air raid. Then
came the first wave of hundreds of British bombers that hit a little after 10 pm the
night of February 13-14, 1945, followed by two more intense bombing raids by the
British and Americans over the next 14 hours. History records it as the deadliest air
attack of all time, delivering a death toll that exceeded the atomic blasts on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In 20 minutes of intense bombing, the city became an inferno. The second bombing
raid came three hours after the first and was “intended to catch rescue workers,
firefighters and fleeing inhabitants at their fullest exposure”. Altogether, the British
dropped nearly 3,000 tons of explosives that shattered roofs, walls, windows, whole
buildings, and included hundreds of thousands of phosphorous incendiaries, which
were small firebombs that sprinkled unquenchable fire into every crevasse they
rolled into, igniting the inferno that turned Dresden into a “hurricane of flames”.
By the time the Americans flew in for the third and last air raid, smoke from the
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burning city nearly obliterated visibility. One American pilot recollects - “ We
bombed from 26,000 feet and could barely see the ground because of clouds and
long columns of black smoke. Not a single enemy gun was fired at either the
American or British bombers.” The Americans dropped 800 tons of explosives and
fire bombs in 11 minutes. Then, American P-51 fighter escorts dived to treetop
level and strafed the city’s fleeing refugees.
My grandmother described the horrific firestorm that raged like a hurricane and
consumed the city. It seemed as if the very air was on fire. Thousands were killed
by bomb blasts, but enormous, untold numbers were incinerated by the firestorm,
an artificial tornado with winds of more than 100 miles an hour that “sucked up its
victims and debris into its vortex and consumed oxygen with temperatures of 1,000
degrees centigrade.” Many days later, after the fires had died down, she walked
through the city. What she saw was indescribable in any human language. But the
suffering etched on her face and the depths of anguish reflecting in her eyes as she
told the story bore witness to the ultimate horror of man’s inhumanity to man and
the stark obscenity of war.
Dresden, the capital of Saxony, a centre of art, theatre, music, museums and
university life, resplendent with graceful architecture – a place of beauty with lakes
and gardens was now completely destroyed. The city burned for seven days and
smoldered for weeks. My grandmother saw the remains of masses of people who
had desperately tried to escape the incinerating firestorm by jumping head first into
the lakes and ponds. The parts of their bodies that were submerged in the water
were still intact, while the parts that protruded above water were charred beyond
human recognition. What she witnessed was a hell beyond human imagination, a
holocaust of destruction that defies description.
It took more than three months just to bury the dead, with scores of thousands
buried in mass graves. Irving wrote, “an air raid had wrecked a target so
disastrously that there were not enough able-bodied survivors left to bury the dead.”
Confusion and disorientation were so great from the mass deaths and the terror, that
it was months before the real degree of devastation was understood, and authorities
fearful of a typhus epidemic, cremated thousands of bodies in hastily erected pyres
fueled by straw and wood. German estimates of the dead ranged up to 220,000, but
the completion of identification of the dead was halted by the Russian occupation
of Dresden in May.
Elisabeth who was a young woman of around 20 at the time of the Dresden
bombing, has written memoirs for her children in which she describes what
happened to her in Dresden. Seeking shelter in the basement of the house she lived
in she writes, “Then the detonation of bombs started rocking the earth and in a great
panic, everybody came rushing down. The attack lasted about half an hour. Our
building and the immediate surrounding area had not been hit. Almost everybody
went upstairs, thinking it was over but it was not. The worst was yet to come and
when it did, it was pure hell. During the brief reprieve, the basement had filled with
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people seeking shelter, some of whom were wounded from bomb shrapnel.
“One soldier had a leg torn off. He was accompanied by a medic, who attended to
him but he was screaming in pain and there was a lot of blood,. There also was a
wounded woman, her arm severed just below her shoulder and hanging by a piece
of skin. A military medic was looking after her, but the bleeding was severe and the
screams very frightening.
“Then the bombing began again. This time there was no pause between detonations
and the rocking was so severe, we lost our balance, and were tossed around in the
basement like a bunch of ragdolls. At times the basement walls were separated and
lifted up. We could see the flashes of the fiery explosions outside. There were a lot
of fire bombs and canisters of phosphorous being dumped everywhere. The
phosphorus was a thick liquid that burned upon exposure to air and as it penetrated
cracks in buildings, it burned wherever it leaked through. The fumes from it were
poisonous. When it came leaking down the basement steps somebody yelled to grab
a beer (there was some stored where we were), soak a cloth, a piece of your
clothing, and press it over your mouth and nose. The panic was horrible. Everybody
pushed, shoved and clawed to get a bottle.
“I had pulled off my underwear and soaked the cloth with the beer and pressed it
over my nose and mouth. The heat in that basement was so severe it only took a
few minutes to make that cloth bone dry. I was like a wild animal, protecting my
supply of wetness. I don’t like to remember that.
“The bombing continued. I tried bracing myself against a wall. That took the skin
off my hands – the wall was so hot. The last I remember of that night is loosing my
balance, holding onto somebody but falling and taking them too, with them falling
on top of me. I felt something crack inside. While I lay there I had only one thought
– to keep thinking. As long as I know I’m thinking, I am alive, but at some point I
lost consciousness.
“The next thing I remember is feeling terribly cold. I then realized I was lying on
the ground, looking into the burning trees. It was daylight. There were animals
screeching in some of them. Monkeys from the burning zoo. I started moving my
legs and arms. It hurt a lot but I could move them. Feeling the pain told me that I
was alive. I guess my movements were noticed by a soldier from the rescue and
medical corps.
“The corps had been put into action all over the city and it was they who had
opened the basement door from the outside. Taking all the bodies out of the burning
building. Now they were looking for signs of life from any of us. I learned later that
there had been over a hundred and seventy bodies taken out of that basement and
twenty seven came back to life. I was one of them – miraculously!
“They then attempted to take us out of the burning city to a hospital. The attempt
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was a gruesome experience. Not only were the buildings and the trees burning but
so was the asphalt on the streets. For hours, the truck had to make a number of
detours before getting beyond the chaos. But before the rescue vehicles could get
the wounded to the hospitals, enemy planes bore down on us once more. We were
hurriedly pulled off the trucks and placed under them. The planes dived at us with
machine guns firing and dropped more fire bombs.
“The memory that has remained so vividly in my mind was seeing and hearing
humans trapped, standing in the molten, burning asphalt like living torches,
screaming for help which was impossible to give. At the time I was too numb to
fully realize the atrocity of this scene but after I was “safe” in the hospital, the
impact of this and everything else threw me into a complete nervous breakdown. I
had to be tied to my bed to prevent me from severely hurting myself physically.
There I screamed for hours and hours behind a closed door while a nurse stayed at
my bedside.
“I am amazed at how vivid all of this remains in my memory. (Elizabeth is in her
late 70’s at the time of this writing). It is like opening a floodgate. This horror
stayed with me in my dreams for many years. I am grateful that I no longer have a
feeling of fury and rage about any of these experiences any more – just great
compassion for everybody’s pain, including my own.”
“The Dresden experience has stayed with me very vividly through my entire life.
The media later released that the number of people who died during the bombing
was estimated in excess of two hundred and fifty thousand – over a quarter of a
million people. This was due to all the refugees who came fleeing from the
Russians, and Dresden’s reputation as a safe city . There were no air raid shelters
there because of the Red Cross agreement.
“What happened with all the dead bodies? Most were left buried in the rubble. I
think Dresden became one mass grave. It was not possible for the majority of these
bodies to be identified. And therefore next of kin were never notified. Countless
families were left with mothers, fathers, wives, children and siblings unaccounted
for to this day.”
According to some historians, the question of who ordered the attack and why, has
never been answered. To this day, no one has shed light on these two critical
questions. Some think the answers may lie in unpublished papers of Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Winston Churchill and perhaps others. History
reports that the British and American attack on Dresden left more than 2-1/2 times
as many civilians dead as Britain suffered in all of World War II, and that one in
every 5 Germans killed in the war died in the Dresden holocaust.
Some say the motive was to deliver the final blow to the German spirit – that the
psychological impact of the utter destruction of the heart centre of German history
and culture would bring Germany to its knees once and for all.
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Some say it was to test new weapons of mass destruction, the phosphorous
incendiary bomb technology. Undoubtedly the need for control and power was at
the root. The insatiable need of the dominators to exert control and power over a
captive and fearful humanity is what drives acts of mass murder like the Dresden
firebombing and Hiroshima.
I think there was also an additional hidden and cynical motive which may be why
full disclosure of the Dresden bombing has been suppressed. The Allies knew full
well that hundreds of thousands of refugees had migrated to Dresden in the belief
that this was a safe destination and the Red Cross had been assured Dresden was
not a target. The end of the war was clearly in sight at that point in time and an
enormous mass of displaced humanity would have to be dealt with. What to do with
all these people once the war ended? What better solution than the final solution?
Why not kill three birds with one stone? By incinerating the city, along with a large
percentage of its residents and refugees, the effectiveness of their new firebombs
was successfully demonstrated. Awe and terror was struck in the German people,
thereby accelerating the end of the war. And finally, the Dresden firebombing
ensured the substantial reduction of a massive sea of unwanted humanity, thereby
greatly lessening the looming burden and problem of postwar resettlement and
restructuring.
We may never know what was in the psyche of those in power or all the motives
that unleashed such horrific destruction of civilian life - the mass murder of a
defenseless humanity who constituted no military threat whatsoever and whose
only crime was to try to find relief and shelter from the ravages of war. Without the
existence of any military justification for such an onslaught on helpless people, the
Dresden firebombing can only be viewed as a hideous crime against humanity,
waiting silently and invisibly for justice, for resolution and for healing in the
collective psyches of the victims and the perpetrators.
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5. Testimony of Kinue Tomoyasu (transcript of an interview in ‘Hiroshima
Witness)
Ms. Kinue Tomoyasu was 44 years old at the time of the A-bomb attack. She was at
home, 5 kilometers from the hypocenter. She then entered Hiroshima City to search
for her daughter. Previously her husband had died of illness and her only son was
sent to a battle field. She was living with her only daughter. Ms. Tomoyasu was
admitted to the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Victims Nursing Home thirteen years ago.
TOMOYASU: That morning I left home with my daughter. She was working at the
industrial Research Institute. Then an air-raid warning was issued. I went back
home, but my daughter insisted, ``I'm going to the office.'' even though the air-raid
warning had been issued. She reached the train station. The trains were always late
in the morning, but they were on time that day. She took the train and when she got
off at the station, she was hit by the A-bomb. I went inside my home since the
warning was still on. I tucked myself in bed and waited for the warning to be lifted.
After the warning was lifted, I got up and folded the bedding, put it back into the
closet, and opened the window. As I opened the window, there came the flash. it
was so bright, a ten or hundred or thousand times brighter than a camera flash bulb.
The flash was piercing my eyes and my mind went blank. The glass from the
windows was shattered all over the floor. I was lying on the floor, too. When I
came to, I was anxious to know what happened to my daughter, Yatchan. I looked
outside the window and saw one of my neighbors. He was standing out there. I
called, ``Mr. Okamoto, what was that flash?'' He said, ``That was a killer beam.'' I
became more anxious. I thought, ``I must go, I must go and find her.'' I swept up
the pieces of glass, put my shoes on, and took my air-raid hood with me. I made my
way to a train station near Hiroshima. I saw a young girl coming my way. Her skin
was dangling all ever and she was naked. She was muttering, ``Mother,
water,mother,water.'' I took a look at her. I thought she might be my daughter, but
she wasn't. I didn't give her any water. I am sorry that I didn't. But my mind was
full, worrying about my daughter. I ran all the way to Hiroshima Station. Hiroshima
Station was full of people. Some of them were dead, and many of them were lying
on the ground, calling for their mothers and asking for water. I went to Tokiwa
Bridge. I had to cross the bridge to get to my daughter's office. But there was a rope
for tote across the bridge. And the people there told me, ``You can't go beyond here
today.'' I protested, ``My daughter's office is over there. Please let me go through.''
They told me, ``No.'' Some men were daring to make the way through, but I
couldn't go beyond it. I thought she might be on a way back home. I returned home,
but my daughter was not back yet.
INTERVIEWER: Did you see the large cloud?
TOMOYASU: No, I didn't see the cloud.
INTERVIEWER: You didn't see the mushroom cloud?
87
TOMOYASU: I didn't see the Mushroom cloud. I was trying to find my daughter.
They told me I couldn't go beyond the bridge. I thought she might be back home, so
I went back as far as Nikitsu Shrine. Then, the black rain started falling from the
sky. And I wondered what it was. And it was what's called the black rain.
INTERVIEWER: Can you tell us what was the black rain like?
TOMOYASU: It was like a heavy rain. And I had my air-raid hood on, so I didn't
get it on my head fortunately, but it fell on my hands. And I ran and ran. I waited
for her with the windows open. I stayed awake all night waiting and waiting for her,
but she didn't come back. About six thirty on the morning of the 7th, Mr. Ishido,
whose daughter was working at the same office with my daughter, came around. He
called out asking for the Tomoyasu's house. I went outside calling to him, ``It's
here, over here!'' Mr.Ishido came up to me and said, ``Quick! Get some clothes and
go for her. Your daughter is at the bank of the Ota River.'' I said, ``Thank you,
thank you very much. Is she still alive?'' He said, ``She is alive,'' and added, ``I'll
show you the way.'' I took a yukata with me. My neighbors offered me a stretcher.
And I started running at full speed. People followed me and said, ``Slow down! Be
careful not to hurt yourself!'' But still, I hurried as fast as I could. When I reached
the Tokiwa Bridge, there were soldiers lying on the ground. Around Hiroshima
Station, I saw more people lying dead, more on the morning of the 7th than on the
6th. When I reached the river bank, I couldn't tell who was who. I kept wondering
where my daughter was. But then, she cried for me, ``Mother!'' I recognized her
voice. I found her in a horrible condition. Her face looked terrible. And she still
appears in my dreams like that sometimes. When I met her, she said, ``There
shouldn't be any war.'' The first thing she said to me was ``Mother, it took you so I
couldn't do anything for her. My neighbors went back home. They had wounded
family members as well. I was all by myself, and I didn't know what to do. There
were maggots in her wounds and a sticky yellowish pus, a white watery liquid
coming out her wounds and a sticky yellowish liquid. I didn't know what was going
on.
INTERVIEWER: So you tried to remove the maggots from your daughter's body?
TOMOYASU: Yes. But her skin was just peeling right off. The maggots were
coming out all over. I couldn't wipe them off. I thought it would be too painful. I
picked off some maggots, though. She asked me what I was doing and I told her,
``Oh, it's nothing.'' She nodded at my words. And nine hours later, she died.
INTERVIEWER: You were holding her in your arms all that time?
TOMOYASU: Yes, on my lap. I had had bedding and folded on the floor, but I
held her in my arms. when I held her on my lap, she said, ``I don't want to die.'' I
told her, ``Hang on Hang on.'' She said, ``I won't die before my brother comes
home.'' But she was in pain and she kept crying, ``Brother. Mother.'' On August
15th, I held her funeral. And around early October, my hair started to come out. I
88
wondered what was happening to me, but all my hair was disappearing. In
November, I become bald. Then, purple spots started to appear around my neck, my
body and my arms, and on the inner parts of my thighs, a lot of them, all over, the
purple spots all over my body. I had a high fever of forty degrees. I was shivering
and I couldn't consult the doctor. I still had a fever when I was admitted here for a
while, but now I don't have a fever so often.
INTERVIEWER: After your son returned home from the war, what did he do?
TOMOYASU: He came back in February of 1946, and he took care of me. When
he heard how his sister died, he said he felt so sorry for her. He told me he hated
war. I understand. Many of his friends had died in the war. He told me he felt sorry
that he survived. He was just filled with regret. My son got malaria during the war,
also. He suffered a lot. I don't know why, but he became neurotic and killed
himself, finally, by jumping in front of a train in October. I was left alone. I had to
go through hardships, living alone. I have no family. I joined the white
chrysanthemum organization at Hiroshima University, pledging to donate my body
upon death for medical education and research. My registration number is number
1200 I'm ready. I'm ready now to be summoned by God at any moment. But God
doesn't allow me to come his side yet. If it were not for the war, my two children
would not have died. If it were not for the war, I wouldn't have to stay at an
institution like this. I suppose the three of us would have been living together in
happiness. Ah, it is so hard on me.
89
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