Families in a time of catastrophe: Anna Gmeyner's Manja, 1920-33

Anna Gmeyner, an Austrian-Jewish refugee who fled to Britain in 1935, traces the lasting effects of the First World War and the rise of Nazi sympathies in a German town between 1920 and 1933 in her 1938 novel Manja. Drawing upon European literary traditions such as Thomas Mann's saga Buddenbrooks and the Grimm brothers' fairy tales, Gmeyner creates five German families and their children whose domestic, social, and economic conditions produce political responses to post-war destabilization. In turn, these responses form the novel's critical perspective. Manja's interweave of domestic and public spheres exposes the racialist ideology that infects the efforts of adult men and women to reclaim their subjectivity and self-determination, while the children's games perform political oppression and victimization. Intertwining tropes associated with fairy tales and contemporaneous events, the children's games transform fantasied fears into horrific realities as the only girl, who is also the only Jewish child character, is victimized. This chapter will examine the novel from a historicist perspective, arguing that the confluence of supremacist ideology and political and economic turmoil determine the stalled development of child characters, the breakdown of domestic life, and the betrayal of German democracy. A close textual reading will show how the novel's temporal switchbacks form its narrative structure and historical prescience. Of particular importance to scholars of mid-century British culture is the novel's relationship between its microcosmic portrait of an insular but diverse community and its analysis of the growth and acceptance of Nazi persecution. Writing in 1938, a year before Kristallnacht, Gmeyner foresees German society crumbling under the pressures to reclaim the nation's predominance by identifying with the political forces that would crush its others to achieve its glory.