Passing Acts of Resistance on Postwar Bodily Battlegrounds: Comparative Vulnerabilities in the Autobiographical Works of Hans Massaquoi, Ruth Klüger, and Anonymous/Marta Hillers

Abstract

Abstract:This essay chronicles the postwar survival tactics in the autobiographical writings of Hans Massaquoi, an Afro-German who lived during the British occupation of Hamburg; Ruth Klüger, an Austrian-born Jew who fled the death marches out of the concentration camps directly prior to the war's end; and Anonymous/Marta Hillers, a white German, non-Jewish woman who maneuvered Soviet-occupied Berlin. In this article I probe the comparative vulnerabilities of these three subjects vis-à-vis their lived experiences of performing resistance to racialized, sexualized, nationalized, and/or gendered violence, as each recounts them. These subjects narrate how they pass as, pass through, and pass among different postwar actors who inhabit the space of Germany. By attending to the intersections of embodied experience and relational performativity through the act of passing, my analysis renders a complex understanding of how power produces comparative vulnerabilities in violent wars waged on bodies.