Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: The reader's first glimpse of Hermann Pollnow, whom author Tess Scholfield-Peters knew as 'Mutzi', her grandfather, is of a 10-year-old boy, head bowed over a notebook, solving a maths problems set for him by his father, Dr Max Pollnow (p.3).The author introduces Hermann Pollnow, who would later be known as 'Harry Peters', through the eyes of Herr Waltbund, 'a small-framed man with polished shoes and a neatly clipped moustache' who had arrived at the Pollnow's central Berlin apartment to cut the hair of Hermann's mother, Edith (p. 1).Readers learn Edith is ill with a 'tiredness that could not be cured by sleep or fresh air or food' and then watch as Hermann helps her move to the couch before he goes out with his friend Alfred to the zoo and the park, not returning: ' … until the sun lengthened their shadows and tinged the leaves with the glow of evening' (p. 6).Scholfield-Peters's writing is luminous, her evocative imagery transporting readers easily into a spring day in 1930 when 'the trees that lines the Tiergarten were full and fragrant' and the 'weather felt unseasonably warm' (p. 1).Except it never happened, at least not down to the details of the scene sketched for readers.Instead, the author reconstructed the scene from the fragments of a dream her grandfather shared with her.And yet, Scholfield-Peters writes: '… this picture of Edith is the most vivid I have of her' (p.8).She goes on to write a list of '… everything I know about the Pollnows', sharing how her search began with her family's collection of precious letters sent from Edith and Max in Berlin to their son, Hermann, living in Sydney, Australia.Edith and Max ensured their son's escape from nazi Germany only to perish in the Holocaust: Edith at Theresienstadt and Marx at Auschwitz-Birkenau.Scholfield-Peters takes readers with her on her journey to try to reconcile her grandfather's life in Berlin and his arrival in Australia as a teen with the man she and her family came to know.The key to the compelling nature of Scholfield-Peters's narrative is her position of authority as Mutzi's granddaughter.This very subjectivity also raises -and I contend, answers -some pertinent questions surrounding the ethical storytelling of another's trauma.In 2016, Australian journalist and writer David Marr declared '… while there are exceptions, glorious exceptions, biographers should leave their readers alone to read' (2016: 421).Marr argued that it was the biographer's ability to remain 'invisible' that allowed the author to create the 'compelling intimacy' readers craved when reading the form.But I argue Scholfield-Peters' Dear Mutzi, is an example of how an author can achieve that same 'compelling intimacy' with readers through an authoritative, honest declaration of their place in the telling of another's life-story, which includes being transparent about the challenges, ambiguities and limitations involved in that process.For example, Scholfield-Peters's decision to include the letters to her grandfather from his parents, raises ethical concerns around privacy.The replies to the letters have long been
Authors: Jennifer Martin, Richard Lance Keeble
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4409577722
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