Viola Roggenkamp

Viola Roggenkamp (2005) at the event Das Blaue Sofa

Viola Roggenkamp (born April 15, 1948 in Hamburg ) is a German writer and publicist .

life and work

Viola Roggenkamp grew up in Hamburg, where her parents had returned from a life of illegality in Poland after liberation from National Socialism in May 1945. After studying psychology, philosophy and music, she traveled extensively over several years through Asia and lived for a time in India and from 1989 to 1990 in Israel . At the same time, she became a freelance writer for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit , for which she wrote until 2013. In 1977 she was part of the founding team of the feminist magazine Emma , for which she worked as a freelance reporter until 1992. Until 2004 she was a columnist for the taz . She has been writing for the Jüdische Allgemeine since 1990, and for Cicero since 2016 . Her literary works include portraits, essays, and novels.

Roggenkamp's autobiographically inspired debut novel Familienleben , published in 2004, became a bestseller and has been translated into several languages. In it, the protagonist, 13-year-old Fania, describes the everyday life of her Jewish-German family in Hamburg in 1967. Jana Hensel wrote in Der Spiegel : “Viola Roggenkamp kept her novel project to herself for three decades. The result is an almost eerily perfect book. (...) All persons are led confidently, dramatically clear and yet psychologically contradicting. ”The relationship between Shoah survivors and their children in Germany is also the subject of her novels Die Frau im Turm (2009) and Daughter and Father (2011) as well as the In 2002 released the band Tu mir eine Liebe. My mom . In 26 encounters, Roggenkamp speaks to prominent people in Germany about their mothers who survived the Holocaust. The portraits were first published in the Jüdischen Allgemeine .

In her essay Erika Mann , published in 2005 . With a Jewish daughter, she focused on an aspect that is hardly mentioned in the research literature on the family of Thomas and Katia Mann and their children: the denied Jewish. The fact that Roggenkamp tells the story of denial is "certainly connected with the life-history influences that the author spread in her novel Familienleben ," said Roland Wiegenstein in the Berlin literary criticism . " Erika Mann is a figure of identification for Viola Roggenkamp (as Rahel Levin-Varnhagen was for the young Hannah Arendt ). She has a kind of ghost fight with her - admires her and would have wished otherwise. ” In his FAZ review, Tilmann Lahme found that Roggenkamp did not learn much about why Erika Mann, like her mother, did not know about her Jewish roots wanted, on the other hand, a lot about Roggenkamp's "grief over the loss of the Jewish in Germany and over their anger, although it remains unclear why this is mainly directed against Thomas Mann". According to the literary scholar Ruth Klüger in Die Welt , the book also draws its explosiveness from the wider context of the suppression of Jewish fate in the post-war period. "With her reflections on the German-Jewish relationship in the cultural elite, the author pierced a wasp's nest with no small courage."

Viola Roggenkamp belongs to the "second generation", as children of Holocaust survivors are called. In a conversation with Michael Wolffsohn she said: “I am a German Jew. I am the daughter of a Jewess; and in my opinion Judaism is not a question of faith. "

Publications

Portraits, interviews

• Should she have that from me? Seven portraits of mothers of lesbian daughters. Krug & Schadenberg , Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-930041-08-1 .
• Do me a love My mom. Jewish women and men in Germany speak of their mother. Mosse Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-935097-07-7 ( review, Die Zeit ).
• Woman without a child. A round table. Conversations and stories. Europa Verlag, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-203-81512-5 . ( Review, NZZ )
• My picture of him. Lesbian women talk about their fathers. Krug & Schadenberg, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-930041-41-3 .

Novels, narrative

• Family life. (Roman, Arche, Zurich-Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-7160-2325-6 ). As Fischer paperback, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16591-9 .
• Daughter and father. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-10-066067-1 (novel).
• I'm going through there! In: Julia Franck (ed.): Border crossings. Authors from East and West remember. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-10-022604-4 (short story).
• The woman in the tower. S. Fischer Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-10-066064-0 (novel).

Essays

• About Glikl bas Judah Leib and Bertha Pappenheim for the publication of Die Memoiren der Glückel von Hameln in the translation by Bertha Pappenheim, Beltz, Weinheim and Basel 2005, ISBN 978-3-407-22169-8 .
• Erika Mann . A Jewish daughter. About the exquisite and the denied in the Mann-Pringsheim family. Arche-Verlag, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-7160-2344-2
• Katia man. A Jew who did not want to be a Jew. In: Gisela Dachs (Ed.): Women . Jewish almanac of the Leo Baeck Institute. Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-633-54221-5 , pp. 62-69.
• "Tom, I'm a goose" Tony Buddenbrook - the devaluation of vital femininity . In: Ortrud Gutjahr (ed.): Buddenbrooks by and after Thomas Mann. Theater and University in Conversation, Volume 4. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-8260-3351-3 , pp. 121-138.
• German dementia. In: Jörg Bong (Ed.): Neue Rundschau , Issue 2/2013, S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013
• I want to be there when they talk about Jews. In: Berliner Zeitung , August 15, 2014

further reading

• Julia Herzberger: From omnipresent memory - Viola Roggenkamp: 'Family life' . In: this: Remembrance work of the Holocaust literature of the second generation , Verlag Optimus Mostafa, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-941274-22-8 , pp. 72-75
• Michael Dallapiazza: Viola Roggenkamp's novel "The woman in the tower". In: Edward Białek, Monika Wolting (eds.): Continuities, breaks, controversies, German literature after the fall of the wall. Neisse, Dresden 2012, ISBN 978-3-86276-072-5

Web links

• Literature by and about Viola Roggenkamp in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Roggenkamps website
• Short biography and reviews of works by Viola Roggenkamp at perlentaucher.de

Single receipts

1. ↑ Hans-Juergen Fink: Viola Roggenkamp. In search of one's own story , Hamburger Abendblatt, October 13, 2011
2. ^ Article by Viola Roggenkamp on Zeit Online
3. ↑ Viola Roggenkamp, ​​Munzinger Biografisches Archiv 11/2012 from March 13, 2012 (accessed on September 11, 2018)
4. ↑ LITERATURE: The world is over in the garden . In: Der Spiegel . tape April 16 , 2004 ( spiegel.de [accessed August 26, 2018]).
5. ↑ Der Spiegel 16/2004, pp. 174–177
6. ↑ Ruth Klüger: Historical novel: Viola Roggenkamp visits a woman in the tower . In: THE WORLD . July 18, 2009 ( welt.de [accessed August 26, 2018]).
7. ↑ Hans-Jürgen Schings: Viola Roggenkamp: Daughter and Father: A hero every day for eight years, literature . In: FAZ.NET . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed August 26, 2018]).
8. ↑ ZEIT ONLINE | News, background and debates . In: ZEIT ONLINE . ( zeit.de [accessed on August 26, 2018]).
9. ↑ Isabel Rohner: About the denied Jewish. Viola Roggenkamp enables a new look at the Mann-Pringsheim family (review), in: Comparative literature online, Justus-Liebig-Universität, Gießen 2006 (full text for download)
10. ↑ Rejected - and yet always present . In: Berlin literary criticism . ( berlinerliteraturkritik.de [accessed on August 26, 2018]).
11. ^ Tilmann Lahme: Wotan's Daughter , FAZ, November 9, 2005
12. ↑ Ruth Klüger: Denied Judaism . In: THE WORLD . December 30, 2005 ( welt.de [accessed August 26, 2018]).
13. ↑ Jews can also be criticized. Viola Roggenkamp and Michael Wolffsohn in conversation with Andreas Main, Deutschlandfunk, September 22, 2016